Whence comes Solace?—Not from seeing What is doing, suffering, being, Not from noting Life’s conditions, Nor from heeding Time’s monitions; But in cleaving to the Dream, And in gazing at the gleam Whereby gray things golden seem.
II
Thus do I this heyday, holding Shadows but as lights unfolding, As no specious show this moment With its irised embowment; But as nothing other than Part of a benignant plan; Proof that earth was made for man. ~Thomas Hardy “On a Fine Morning”
Whence comes Solace? Cleaving to the dream, gazing at the gleam…
nothing other than Part of a benignant plan; Proof that earth was made for man.
I had to look up “benignant” – it is like being told a concerning tumor is “benign” – granting gracious kindness and beneficence in the midst of deep-seated worry.
A new lease on life.
We forget our original task of caring for the Garden. Having soiled our own nest, we can’t abandon earth for another greener, brighter, happier planet. Of all the planetary options in this infinite universe, we were placed right here for good reason, and here we remain.
Our solace: all that ordinarily seems gray gleams golden illuminated by the Light shining down on our shadowy selves.
Even when the news headlines are dismal, when our individual struggles are great, when human history seems to keep repeating itself, our Creation is purposeful, eternally preserved through divine sacrifice.
The solace of gray shadows melts to gold: as part of the overall “benignant plan” we have been given our life back.
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Master, how serene Are all the hours We waste If, as we waste them, We place them in a vase Like flowers.
There are no sorrows In our lives Nor joys either. Let us learn then, Innocent sages, Not to live life,
But to pass through it, Tranquil, serene, Taking children As our teachers, Eyes full Of Nature . . .
Beside a river, Beside a road, Wherever we are, Living life With the same Light ease.
Let us gather flowers. Let us bathe our hands In the calm rivers, And from them Learn their calm.
[12 June, 1914] ~Fernando Pessoa from “Ode 1” translated from Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa & Patricio Ferrari
How fresh, oh Lord, how sweet and clean Are thy returns! even as the flowers in spring; To which, besides their own demean, The late-past frosts tributes of pleasure bring. Grief melts away Like snow in May, As if there were no such cold thing.
Who would have thought my shriveled heart Could have recovered greenness? It was gone Quite underground; as flowers depart To see their mother-root, when they have blown, Where they together All the hard weather Dead to the world, keep house unknown.
These are thy wonders, Lord of power, Killing and quickening, bringing down to hell And up to heaven in an hour; Making a chiming of a passing-bell. We say amiss This or that is: Thy word is all, if we could spell.
Oh that I once past changing were, Fast in thy Paradise, where no flower can wither! Many a spring I shoot up fair, Offering at heaven, growing and groaning thither; Nor doth my flower Want a spring shower, My sins and I joining together.
But while I grow in a straight line, Still upwards bent, as if heaven were mine own, Thy anger comes, and I decline: What frost to that? what pole is not the zone Where all things burn, When thou dost turn, And the least frown of thine is shown?
And now in age I bud again, After so many deaths I live and write; I once more smell the dew and rain, And relish versing. Oh, my only light, It cannot be That I am he On whom thy tempests fell all night.
These are thy wonders, Lord of love, To make us see we are but flowers that glide; Which when we once can find and prove, Thou hast a garden for us where to bide; Who would be more, Swelling through store, Forfeit their Paradise by their pride. ~George Herbert “The Flower”
There are days we live as if death were nowhere in the background; from joy to joy to joy, from wing to wing, from blossom to blossom to impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom. ~Li-Young Lee from “From Blossoms”
Our small church has a couple of gracious and kind gardeners who share the produce from their yards and fields each week to provide a fresh bouquet to sit on the table in front of our humble wooden pulpit.
It is a special treat to walk into church and see what they brought to the altar to share with us all on Sunday morning. I keep a photo album of these very unique Sunday “pulpit posies” our keepers of gardens share.
Why are these arrangements special? After all, almost every church displays a floral arrangement every Sunday.
These are special as many of these flowers are seeded, watered, fertilized and nurtured by one of our own, grown with love and caring, just as God cares for each of His children.
These are special as some are considered simple weeds, and are gleaned from ditches and hedges. They are part of God’s creation and have a wild beauty that can be as breathtaking as a hothouse orchid.
These are special because they often go home with a congregant or visitor who will enjoy their loveliness for many more days, as if they represent the manifestation of God’s Word itself.
Some of us are dahlias, zinnias and roses. Some of us are rare gardenias and orchids. Most of us are dandelions, sagebrush, Queen Anne’s lace, fireweed, burdock, and daisies thriving in the crevasses, ditches and hedgerows of life.
No matter which roots we sprout from, or where, we are the wonders of our loving gardening God. He created us to take care of His creation.
Each week, we bud afresh for Him.
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The great affair, the love affair with life, is to live as variously as possible, to groom one’s curiosity like a high-spirited thoroughbred, climb aboard, and gallop over the thick, sun-struck hills every day.
Where there is no risk, the emotional terrain is flat and unyielding, and, despite all its dimensions, valleys, pinnacles, and detours, life will seem to have none of its magnificent geography, only a length. It began in mystery, and it will end in mystery, but what a savage and beautiful country lies in between. ~Diane Ackerman from A Natural History of the Senses
…once more the quiet mystery is present to me, the throng’s clamor recedes: the mystery that there is anything, anything at all, let alone cosmos, joy, memory, everything, rather than void: and that, O Lord, Creator, Hallowed One, You still, hour by hour sustain it. ~Denise Levertov “Primary Wonder” from Selected Poems
It’s strange to be here. The mystery never leaves you. ~John O’Donohue from Anam Cara
We must learn to acknowledge that the creation is full of mystery; we will never entirely understand it. We must abandon arrogance and stand in awe. We must recover the sense of the majesty of creation, and the ability to be worshipful in its presence. ~Wendell Berry from The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays
…being a living mystery: means to live in such a way that one’s life would not make sense if God did not exist. ~ Emmanuel Cardinal Suhard of Parisquoted in Walking on Water
It is our love affair with each day: even when the going is rough and the way is unknown territory.
The road I walk makes no sense without the knowledge God’s Hand created me, His breath becoming mine.
He forms the bridge over the chasm, so I may safely cross.
It’s astonishing, to be truthful. I want to point out the mystery to anyone who will listen so we can bow down together, amazed and awed.
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I am struck by the otherness of things rather than their same- ness. The way a tiny pile of snow perches in the crook of a branch in the tall pine, away by itself, high enough not to be noticed by people, out of reach of stray dogs. It leans against the scaly pine bark, busy at some existence that does not need me.
It is the differences of objects that I love, that lift me toward the rest of the universe, that amaze me. That each thing on earth has its own soul, its own life, that each tree, each clod is filled with the mud of its own star. I watch where I step and see that the fallen leaf, old broken grass, an icy stone are placed in exactly the right spot on the earth, carefully, royalty in their own country. ~Tom Hennen “Looking for the Differences” from Darkness Sticks to Everything.
We dwell so much on our differences rather than our similarities, especially during intense political times.
There is nothing wrong with “otherness” if each “other” is seen as God sees us.
We each are one of His precious and specially-made creations, worthy of existence even in our muddy, rocky, fragile state.
These days, although a “snowflake” is disparaged in the political banter of the day as weak and overly sensitive, there is nothing more uniquely “other” than an individual crystalline creation falling from heaven to the exact spot where it is intended to land. Something so unique becomes part of something far greater than it could be on its own, blending in, infinitely stronger, but never lost.
I am placed here, weak as I am, in the exact right spot, for reasons I continue to uncover and discover. I try every day, as best as I can, to not get lost and, of course, to manage to stay out of the mud.
This year’s Barnstorming Lenten theme is Ephesians 3:9:
…to bring to light for everyone what is the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God, who created all things…
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I miss the friendship with the pine tree and the birds that I had when I was ten. And it has been forever since I pushed my head under the wild silk skirt of the waterfall.
The big rock on the shore was the skull of a dead king whose name we could almost remember. Under the rooty bank you could dimly see the bunk beds of the turtles.
Nobody I know mentions these things anymore. It’s as if their memories have been seized, erased, and relocated among flowcharts and complex dinner-party calendars.
Now I want to turn and run back the other way, barefoot into the underbrush, getting raked by thorns, being slapped in the face by branches.
Down to the muddy bed of the little stream where my cupped hands make a house, and
I grew up on a small farm with several acres of woodland. It was my retreat until I left for college; I walked among twittering birds, skittering wild bunnies, squirrels and chipmunks, busy ant hills and trails, blowing leaves, swimming tadpoles, falling nuts, waving wildflowers, large firs, pines, cottonwoods, maples and alder trees.
I had a favorite “secret” spot sitting perched on a stump where a large rock provided a favorite sunning spot for salamanders. They and I would make eye contact, pondering our common Creator.
At college I longed for a place as private, as serene, but nothing could match the woods and creatures of my childhood home. After living a decade in the city, I nearly forgot what a familiar woods felt like.
On this farm we’ve stewarded for nearly forty years, I’ve longed for a similar sanctuary, yet my distractions are so much greater than when I was a child. Filled with greater worries, I can’t empty my head and heart as completely to receive the varied gifts to be found around me.
In my ever-shortening timeline to accomplish what I’ve been placed here to do, I need to study the faces of creation, knowing those eyes reflect the face of God.
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I wonder if, in the dark night of the sea, the octopus dreams of me. ~N. Scott Momaday
photo by Nate Gibson
If I am brutally honest with myself after my recent cardiac brush with my mortality, one of my worst fears is to have lived on this earth for a handful of decades and then pass away forgotten, inconsequential, having left behind no legacy of significance whatsoever.
I’m well aware it is self-absorbed to feel the need to leave a mark, but a search for purpose and meaning lasting beyond my time here provides new momentum for each day. The forgetting can happen so fast.
Most people know little about their great-great-grandparents, if they even know their names. A mere four generations, a century, renders us dust, not just in flesh, but in memory as well. There may be a yellowed photograph in a box somewhere, perhaps a tattered postcard or letter written in elegant script, but the essence of this person is long lost and forgotten.
We owe it to our descendants to write down the stories about who we were while we lived on this earth. We need to share why we lived, for whom we lived, for what we lived.
I suspect, although I try every day to record some part of who I am, it will be no different with me and those who come after me. Whether or not we are remembered by great-great grandchildren or become part of the dreams of creatures in the depths of the seas:
we are just dust here and there is no changing that.
Good thing this is not our only home. Good thing we are more than mere memory and dreams. Good thing the river of life flows into an eternity that transcends good works or long memories or legacies left behind. Good thing we are loved that much and always will be. You see, we are alive, we are alive, forever and ever, Amen.
I remember your lectures, Professor Scott Momaday, now nearly two years after you passed from this earth at age 89 – your voice, your stories and your poetry live on.
You are alive. You are alive…
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People are just as wonderful as sunsets if you let them be. When I look at a sunset, I don’t find myself saying, “Soften the orange a bit on the right hand corner.” I don’t try to control a sunset. I watch with awe as it unfolds. ~Carl Rogersfrom A Way of Being
Once I saw a chimpanzee gaze at a particularly beautiful sunset for a full 15 minutes, watching the changing colors [and then] retire to the forest without picking a pawpaw for supper. ~Adriaan Krotlandt, Dutch ethologist in Scientific American (1962)
There is much about this life we cannot control. We like to think we can. We even try.
We are mere witness to changes wrought by the Creator, how He reaches deep in a person or how He paints in the skies.
Watch in awe.
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The world does not need words. It articulates itself in sunlight, leaves, and shadows. The stones on the path are no less real for lying uncatalogued and uncounted. The fluent leaves speak only the dialect of pure being…
The sunlight needs no praise piercing the rainclouds, painting the rocks and leaves with light, then dissolving each lucent droplet back into the clouds that engendered it. The daylight needs no praise, and so we praise it always– greater than ourselves and all the airy words we summon. ~Dana Giola from “Words”
The words the world needs is only the Word itself; we exist because He breathed breath into us, saying it was good.
Whatever we have to say about His Creation pales compared to His it is good
But we try over and over again to use words of wonder and praise to express our awe and gratitude and amazement while painted golden by His breath of Light.
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It happens in an instant. My grandma used to say someone is walking on your grave.
It’s that moment when your life is suddenly strange to you as someone else’s coat
you have slipped on at a party by accident, and it is far too big or too tight for you.
Your life feels awkward, ill fitting. You remember why you came into this kitchen, but you
feel you don’t belong here. It scares you in a remote numb way. You fear that you—
whatever you means, this mind, this entity stuck into a name like mercury dropped into water—
have lost the ability to enter your self, a key that no longer works. Perhaps you will be locked
out here forever peering in at your body, if that self is really what you are. If you are at all. ~Marge Piercy “Dislocation” from The Crooked Inheritance
This Self—Hispanic, Latin, blond, black, olive-skinned, native and immigrant— dispersed far and wide was here with everyone, yesterday and again today;
I am large, I contain multitudes. They will not manage to deny me or ignore me or declare me undocumented: I am written in you, in all, as all are in me… ~Luis Alberto Ambroggio from We Are All Whitman: #2:Song of/to/My/Your/Self
Each of us a work of art, heaven-sent, called to reflect on our own creation, placed in this world to feel grace when we stumble, unsure where we are to go, who we are meant to be, as if we don’t really belong here, a feeling of jamais vu when the familiar becomes strange.
This is who we are: called to act out that grace – to praise goodness, to protest evil, to grapple with reality, to respond to injustice, to change the direction we’re heading fearing who we become if we don’t .
A traditional Catalan Song from Pablo Casals, a symbol of peace and freedom worldwide
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