Tag: creation

It’s Heavy Work

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From other
angles the
fibers look
fragile, but
not from the
spider’s, always
hauling coarse
ropes, hitching
lines to the
best posts
possible. It’s
heavy work
everyplace,
fighting sag,
winching up
give. It
isn’t ever
delicate
to live.
~Kay Ryan “Spiderweb”

A noiseless patient spider,
I mark’d where on a little promontory it stood isolated,
Mark’d how to explore the vacant vast surrounding,
It launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself,
Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.

And you O my soul where you stand,
Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space,
Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them,
Till the bridge you will need be form’d, till the ductile anchor hold,
Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.
~Walt Whitman “The Noiseless Patient Spider”

Silk-thin silver strings woven cleverly into a lair,
An intricate entwining of divinest thread…
Like strands of magic worked upon the air,
The spider spins his enchanted web –
His home so eerily, spiraling spreads.

His gossamer so rigid, yet lighter than mist,
And like an eight-legged sorcerer – a wizard blest,
His lace, like a spell, he conjures and knits;
I witnessed such wild ingenuity wrought and finessed,
Watching the spider weave a dream from his web.
~Jonathan Platt “A Spider’s Web”

I am stretched, trying to connect between post and branch and leaf and ground.

I leap between them, sometimes not sure where I’ll land or what I’ll leave behind. Connection is hard and heavy work, not knowing what stands firm in a world where wind and rain and storms or some unaware creature can tear things all asunder.

Sometimes what I weave is beautifully delicate and functional.

Sometimes it is blurry, full of holes, and ultimately useless. The center doesn’t always hold. The tethers loosen. The periphery frays and tears. It doesn’t last long.

But it was something I labored with purpose and intent to create.
And that effort makes it all worthwhile.

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The spider, dropping down from twig,
Unfolds a plan of her devising,
A thin premeditated rig
To use in rising.
And all that journey down through space,
In cool descent and loyal hearted,
She spins a ladder to the place
From where she started.
Thus I, gone forth as spiders do
In spider’s web a truth discerning,
Attach one silken thread to you
For my returning.
~E.B. White

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Beauty Lives Again

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On a rim-ledge of Bryce Canyon
Beauty lives again
Far from cries cacophonous
And the woes of men.

Color in a sweep of sound and 
Inarticulate,
Raises spired against mankind
A rocky parapet

~Norman MacLeod “Bryce Canyon: Utah”

Maybe, just like us, God was stupefied; 
He rarely knew how any day would end,

had to see things finished to call them good.
Here, He might even have done without
the bric-a-brac of the days that followed

except the fourth day’s (bodies of light)
essential for the colors of the stone,
the greater light especially adroit.

Just watch it nurse a puny flame at dawn
—purple with an edging of vermillion—
by sunrise to a full-fledged conflagration

then temper it to golden-rose by noon,
darker still as day begins to fail.
The oranges go bronze, the reds, maroon…

~Jacqueline Osherow from “Inspiration Point, Bryce Canyon, Utah”

Seeing this place for the first time today, I think God must thoroughly enjoy playing in this gigantic sandbox. He experiments with shapes and sizes, He changes color and texture, He stacks layers and piles up rubble.

It feels like I could be visiting another planet but this one is His masterpiece.

I am stupefied at the Creative Mind behind this.

At a time when the world’s cacophony is louder than ever, I needed this quiet assurance that God is still at work as sculptor and painter, shaping more than mere rock.

He is still at work shaping us, so that beauty lives above, below, all around and within us.

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Now in Age I Bud Again

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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”

Our small church has several gracious and kind gardeners who share the produce from their yards each week to provide a fresh bouquet to sit on the table in front of our humble wooden pulpit.

It is a treat to walk into church and see what has been brought to the altar on Sunday morning. I have started to keep a photo album of these very special Sunday “pulpit posies.”

Why are these special? After all, almost every church displays a floral arrangement every Sunday.

These are special as most 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 picked from ditches and hedges. They are still 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, fireweed, burdock, and daisies populating the ditches.

No matter which roots we sprout from, or where, we are the wonders of this gardening God of love.

As we age, we bud afresh for Him.

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An Ache Nothing Can Satisfy

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At the alder-darkened brink
Where the stream slows to a lucid jet
I lean to the water, dinting its top with sweat,
And see, before I can drink,

A startled inchling trout
Of spotted near-transparency,
Trawling a shadow solider than he.
He swerves now, darting out

To where, in a flicked slew
Of sparks and glittering silt, he weaves
Through stream-bed rocks, disturbing foundered leaves,
And butts then out of view

Beneath a sliding glass
Crazed by the skimming of a brace
Of burnished dragon-flies across its face,
In which deep cloudlets pass

And a white precipice
Of mirrored birch-trees plunges down
Toward where the azures of the zenith drown.
How shall I drink all this?

Joy’s trick is to supply
Dry lips with what can cool and slake,
Leaving them dumbstruck also with an ache
Nothing can satisfy.
~Richard Wilbur “Hamlen Brook”

photo by Josh Scholten
photo by Josh Scholten

How can I take it all in?

Like so many others right now, I’m thirsty for honest, respectful discussion and debate about the state of the world. Instead, I’m left dry and wanting, ready to blow away with the next gust.

So I ache to witness fading colors, fallen leaves, swift winds and pouring rain, as all creatures great and small prepare for winter’s chill. There is stark honesty among all soon to fall asleep.

I yearn to hear God’s Truth spoken out loud.
How amazing it would be — to be dumbstruck with joy.

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My Attention on the Fly

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In Sleeping Beauty’s castle
the clock strikes one hundred years
and the girl in the tower returns to the world.
So do the servants in the kitchen,
who don’t even rub their eyes.
The cook’s right hand, lifted
an exact century ago,
completes its downward arc
to the kitchen boy’s left ear;
the boy’s tensed vocal cords
finally let go
the trapped, enduring whimper,
and the fly, arrested mid-plunge
above the strawberry pie,
fulfills its abiding mission
and dives into the sweet, red glaze.

As a child I had a book
with a picture of that scene.
I was too young to notice
how fear persists, and how
the anger that causes fear persists,
that its trajectory can’t be changed
or broken, only interrupted.
My attention was on the fly;
that this slight body
with its transparent wings
and lifespan of one human day
still craved its particular share
of sweetness, a century later.
~Lisel Mueller “Immortality” from Alive Together

Time’s fun when you’re having flies.
~Kermit the Frog

Time flies like the wind; fruit flies like a banana.
~attributed to Groucho Marx

…the tiny haunting eyes of the fruit flies, and the swooping melody of their Latin name: Drosophila melanogaster, which translates poetically as “dark-bellied dew sipper.”
~Diane Ackerman from “Fruit Flies and Love”

from New York Times article 10/8/24

It’s not easy being green unless you also have a dorsal brown stripe and live in a box of ripe pears on the porch that has become a metropolis of Drosophila melanogaster (fruit flies). 

Then you are in frog heaven with breakfast, lunch and dinner within reach of your tongue any time.

And Drosophila happily move in to the kitchen in the fall when pears, tomatoes, and apples are brought inside for preserving. Clouds of Drosophila are just part of my kitchen ambiance this time of year. Visitors are used to this; it’s like having a hundred little dark floaters in your vision.

At least these can be waved away.

The apple cider vinegar killing fields I’ve set up on the kitchen counter are capturing hundreds daily, but their robust reproducing (which I carefully studied in undergraduate biology lab) outstrips the effectiveness of my coffee filter funnel death trap lures.

Fruit fly season too shall pass. The New York Times had an amazing article today entitled “After a Decade, Scientists Unveil Fruit Fly Brain in Stunning Detail.” My goodness! Inside that little head with the big eyes is a brain of sheer beauty. I still don’t adore my bountiful greedy little Drosophila interlopers, but I can appreciate their Maker’s design. They are most effective little creatures with a sipping proboscis.

Time’s fun when you’re having flies. It must have been even more fun making the brains of flies like Drosophila.

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Intended for Joy

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There is not one blade of grass, there is no color in this world that is not intended to make us rejoice.
~John Calvin as quoted in  John Calvin: A Sixteenth Century Portrait (Oxford, 1988) by William J. Bouwsma

It is too easy to become blinded to the glory surrounding us if we allow it to seem routine and commonplace. 

I can’t remember the last time I celebrated a blade of grass, given how focused I am in mowing it into conformity and submission. 

During the summer months, I’m seldom up early enough to witness the pink sunrise. In the winter, I’m too busy making dinner to take time to watch the sun paint the sky red as it sets.

I miss opportunities to stop and notice what surrounds me innumerable times a day. It takes only a moment of recognition and appreciation to feel the joy, and for that moment time stands still.  So life stretches a little longer when I stop to acknowledge the intention of creation as an endless reservoir of rejoicing.  

If a blade of grass, if a palette of color,
if all this is made for joy,
then perhaps, so am I.
Even colorless, commonplace, sometimes stormy me.
Indeed, so am I.

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A World Upside Down

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Obscurely yet most surely called to praise,
As sometimes summer calls us all, I said
The hills are heavens full of branching ways
Where star-nosed moles fly overhead the dead;
I said the trees are mines in air, I said
See how the sparrow burrows in the sky!
And then I wondered why this mad instead
Perverts our praise to uncreation, why
Such savour’s in this wrenching things awry.
Does sense so stale that it must needs derange
The world to know it? To a praiseful eye
Should it not be enough of fresh and strange
That trees grow green, and moles can course
in clay,
And sparrows sweep the ceiling of our day?
~Richard Wilbur “Praise in Summer”

It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun; and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we. 
~G.K.Chesterton from Orthodoxy

I need no help to imagine this world feels upside down much of the time. When I read the headlines, I have difficulty understanding how anything makes any sense anymore.

Creation inversed: the birds somehow soar through the earth beneath us and the moles and mushrooms are populating the clouds. Instead of stars in the sky, there are innumerable molehills gracing the hillside. We are all mixed up in our perspective, turning creation on its head.

Thank goodness and thank God that everything is put back where it belongs when we are in sore need of reorientation. When we forget our purpose in creation, He reminds us by restoring predictable order and rhythms. When we destroy, He heals and protects. When we get bored with how things are – desperate for innovation and excitement in our attempt to turn the world upside down – He demonstrates contentment with how things were created, and turns it back to right again.

There is enough to keep us busy in this world: crazy weather, global pandemics, volcanic eruptions and quaking ground. We don’t need to complicate an already complicated creation with our designed messes.

We’re meant to admire the birds’ soaring in the skies and appreciate that grubs and gophers course through the soil beneath us. We can praise the sun as it rises each morning and the moon’s varied journey at night – so predictable and reliable and meant to be that way from the very beginning.

Keep it going, God. Do it again.

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Incandescence

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There are white birches outside my building. On a clear afternoon, 
     the west sides of the slender trunks blaze with sunlight; the east
     sides glow with soft light reflected from the building windows. 
     There is no darkness around these trees. Moss will never grow on  them.

I hold up a sheet of paper, and it kindles bright on both sides.

I hold up a poem, and one side is lit by reflection from the faces of 
     listeners. The other side is brilliant with divine radiance. In this 
     transaction I illuminate nothing. My fingerprint on the paper is 
     only a shadow. The poem is incandescent. The poem is a white 
     birch.
~Tiel Aisha Ansari “Paper Birches” from Dervish Lions

So was I once myself a swinger of birches.
And so I dream of going back to be.
It’s when I’m weary of considerations,
And life is too much like a pathless wood
Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs
Broken across it, and one eye is weeping
From a twig’s having lashed across it open.

I’d like to get away from earth awhile
And then come back to it and begin over.
May no fate willfully misunderstand me
And half grant what I wish and snatch me away
Not to return. Earth’s the right place for love:
I don’t know where it’s likely to go better.

I’d like to go by climbing a birch tree,
And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk
Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,
But dipped its top and set me down again.
That would be good both going and coming back.
One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.
~Robert Frost from “Birches”

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide
or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,
or walk inside the poem’s room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author’s name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.
They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.
~Billy Collins “Introduction to Poetry”

I’ve considered writing a poem down on the peeling birch paper still attached to the tree.

Although it tends to peel off the trunk in scroll-like rolls, I would leave it in place on the tree to see what eventually happens to my words. They may simply bleach out in the sun, melt in the rains, or blow away with the winter winds to eventually randomly land in someone’s field or in a nearby stream.

Or the words may hang tight to the trunk, waiting in place for a new bark skin to grow wrinkly over it, creating a new surface to compose something anew.

The reality is anything I write here on this blog, or on a notebook page, or on the paper of a birch tree, is faint shadow compared to the Words spoken and written by the Author of us all – birch trees and humans.

Incandescent
divine
radiant
eternal
Words of Love.

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And Something Happened…

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There was only the dark infinity in which nothing was.
And something happened.
At the distance of a star something happened,
and everything began.
The Word did not come into being, but it was.
It did not break upon the silence,
but it was older than the silence
and the silence was made of it.
~N. Scott Momaday in House Made of Dawn

photo by Josh Scholten
photo by Josh Scholten
photo by Josh Scholten
photo by Nate Gibson

Something happened.

Something happened, lighting the darkness and overcoming nothingness.

Something happened and the story of the Beginning
is breathed within us.

Something happened when God spoke out of the silence.

His Word was in the Beginning,
and always has been,
and always will be.

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Broken Stitched to Broken

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“I make them warm to keep my family from freezing;
I make them beautiful to keep my heart from breaking.”
–From the journal of a prairie woman, 1870



To keep a husband and five children warm,
she quilts them covers thick as drifts against
the door. Through every fleshy square white threads
needle their almost invisible tracks; her hours
count each small suture that holds together
the raw-cut, uncolored edges of her life.
She pieces each one beautiful, and summer bright
to thaw her frozen soul. Under her fingers
the scraps grow to green birds and purple
improbable leaves; deeper than calico, her mid-winter
mind bursts into flowers. She watches them unfold
between the double stars, the wedding rings.
~Luci Shaw “Quiltmaker”

Perhaps God made the world this way:
piecemeal, parts fitting together exactly
as if meant for one another~
the unique, disparate and separate
joined together in glorious harmony.

The point of creation is
forever functional, yet full of love –
a blanket of warmth and security
for generations to come.

Our legacy is to preserve this
beauty arising from various scraps,
this broken stitched to broken
in a tapestry holy and whole.

AI image created for this post

~~click each quilt to enlarge and admire the handiwork~~

thank you again to the talented quilters displaying their art at the NW Washington Fair in Lynden
(see previous years’ work 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2021, 2022 and 2023 )

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