Tag: creative-writing

Harboring Joy

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You recall how winter
colored your love, left it

overly delicate, like a flower
skimmed of all fragrance.

You hear in the long last notes
of the nightingale’s song

how to harbor what’s left
of joy, how spring clutches

the green shoot of life and holds
on and on through summer, prepares

for no end that is sure in coming,
the fall ever endlessly repeating.
~Maureen Doallas “Recounting Seasons”, from Neruda’s Memoirs 

Like in old cans of paint the last green hue,
these leaves are sere and rough and dull-complected
behind the blossom clusters in which blue
is not so much displayed as it’s reflected;

They do reflect it imprecise and teary,
as though they’d rather have it go away,
and just like faded, once blue stationery,
they’re tinged with yellow, violet and gray;

As in an often laundered children’s smock,
cast off, its usefulness now all but over,
one senses running down a small life’s clock.

Yet suddenly the blue revives, it seems,
and in among these clusters one discovers
a tender blue rejoicing in the green.
~Rainer Maria Rilke “Blue Hydrangea” Translation by Bernhard Frank

One of my greatest joys is watching our farm’s plants as days become weeks, then months, and as years flow by, the seasons’ palettes repeat endlessly.

In the “olden” days, many farmers kept daily hand-written diaries to track the events of the seasons: when the soil was warm enough to sow, when the harvest was ready, the highs and lows of temperature fluctuations, how many inches in the rain gauge, how deep the snow.

Now we follow the years with a swift scroll in our photo collection in our phones: the tulips bloomed two weeks later this year, or the tomatoes ripened early or the pears were larger two years ago.

I am comforted things tend to repeat predictably year after year, yet I can spot subtle differences. Our hydrangea bushes are a harbinger of soil conditions and seasonal change: they bloomed a darker burgundy color this year, with fewer blue tones. Their blooms always fade eventually into blended earth tones, then blanche, finally losing color altogether and becoming skeletal.

And so it is with me. I collect joy by noticing each change, knowing the repetition of the seasons and the cycle of blooming will continue as I too fade.

I am only a recorder of fact, documenting as long as I’m able.

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Alone Together

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Think of this – that the writer wrote alone, and the reader read alone, and they were alone with each other.
~A.S. Byatt from Possession

If librarians were honest,
they would say, No one
spends time here without being
changed. Maybe you should
go home. While you still can.
~Joseph Mills from “If Librarians Were Honest”

Why are we reading, if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened and its deepest mystery probed?

Can the writer isolate and vivify all in experience that most deeply engages our intellects and our hearts?

Why are we reading, if not in hope that the writer will magnify and dramatize our days, will illuminate and inspire us with wisdom, courage and the hope of meaningfulness, and press upon our minds the deepest mysteries, so we may feel again their majesty and power?
~Annie Dillard from “Write Till You Drop”

…for people who love books and need
To touch them, open them, browse for a while,
And find some common good––that’s why we read.
Readers and writers are two sides of the same gold coin.
You write and I read and in that moment I find
A union more perfect than any club I could join:
The simple intimacy of being one mind.
     Here in a book-filled sun-lit room below the street,
     Strangers––some living, some dead––are hoping to meet.
~Garrison Keillor 

The mere brute pleasure of reading–the sort of pleasure a cow has in grazing.
~G.K. Chesterton

photo by Kate Steensma

Each day as I decide what to share here, I think of each of you who might open my email, or click on a link to see what I have to say.

We are alone together, you and I, for only a few minutes. I consider that precious time you are entrusting to me and want to make it worthwhile.

When you read this, you may be eating breakfast, or in the middle of your workday at the computer, or on your phone during a commute, or sitting in a waiting room wondering when your name will be called.

Or maybe you are sitting in the bathroom, or past ready to fall asleep in bed.

I am honored and humbled to hear from you after our alone time together each day.

I too spend reading time alone every day, grateful for what writers write while alone. I don’t tell them often enough how they change my day for the better.

Some are long gone from this world, so I’ll never have the chance.

Like infinite blades of grass in a pasture, I find far too many words to read — so much to consume, so little time. I nibble away, blade by blade, page by page, word by word, but the greatest pleasure of all is to settle down into a good long cud-chewing session, redigesting and mulling over what all I’ve taken in.

It is brute pleasure to take in words that grow roots so deep they never go away, words that sustain and make me grow and keep me alive.   Words to illuminate from without and within.

That is something to chew on.

So from me to you, tell me how I’m doing…

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Let the Evening Come

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Let the light of late afternoon
shine through chinks in the barn, moving   
up the bales as the sun moves down.

Let the cricket take up chafing   
as a woman takes up her needles   
and her yarn. Let evening come.

Let dew collect on the hoe abandoned   
in long grass. Let the stars appear
and the moon disclose her silver horn.

Let the fox go back to its sandy den.   
Let the wind die down. Let the shed   
go black inside. Let evening come.

To the bottle in the ditch, to the scoop   
in the oats, to air in the lung   
let evening come.

Let it come, as it will, and don’t   
be afraid. God does not leave us 
comfortless, so let evening come.
~Jane Kenyon “Let Evening Come”

photo by Josh Scholten

We resist nightfall in our lives. We fear the dark.

I wish I could remain forever sunshiny, vital and irreplaceable, living each moment with the energy I feel with the dawn. But I know that the forward momentum of time inevitably will wind me down to twilight.

I thought of this poem today as many of us struggle with newly elected leadership, uncertain what it means for us short-term and long-term.

We are not alone in our need to catch our breath and be still.
Each of us is created in the image of God, no matter how we disagree. 

So let evening come, as it will – there is no stopping it –
our lungs filled with the breath of God, our Creator.

We will not be left comfortless.

Now let the night be dark for all of me.
Let the night be too dark for me to see
Into the future. Let what will be be.
~Robert Frost from “Acceptance”

AI image created for this post
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Pure State of Light

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How hard it is to take September
straight—not as a harbinger
of something harder.

Merely like suds in the air, cool scent
scrubbed clean of meaning—or innocent
of the cold thing coldly meant.

How hard the heart tugs at the end
of summer, and longs to haul it in
when it flies out of hand

at the prompting of the first mild breeze.
It leaves us by degrees
only, but for one who sees

summer as an absolute,
Pure State of Light and Heat, the height
to which one cannot raise a doubt,

as soon as one leaf’s off the tree
no day following can fall free
of the drift of melancholy.
~Mary Jo Salter “Absolute September”

Only nine days left of summer –
I search the skies for what might be left of it.

The mornings lighten later,
evenings darken sooner.

How can I not sadden at the change?

Yet this is where I am in life,
this time of bringing inside the garden and orchard
to savor and salvage before the rains come.

The light leaves behind ripened fruit of foraged memories;
in the darkening, its purity sweetens over time.

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The Sunrise Shall Visit Us: Wake Ready for Tomorrow

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The night after she returned from the hospital 
the uneven rumbly liquid breathing of one soon  

to go under kept me at the surface of thoughts 
I couldn’t escape. Clonazepam, Lorazepam, 

not even Ambien could pull or sink me. And in the morning, 
sure enough, we couldn’t coax or shake her awake  

except for a few seconds when someone or thing  
wrenched her eyes open and let her answer no

to every question in a scornful voice we’d never heard before 
before pulling her down to that rocky undertow. 

Through the morning and afternoon every breath, 
a grunt, a rattling that soaked the bedclothes and pillows in sweat. 

Then at 3 pm, she returned—recognizing her two daughters 
speaking her own name and the name of the president. 

The hospice nurse put a line through the word “Comatose” 
scrawled at the top of her chart and for the next few hours 

a light or absence seemed to emanate from her almost 
emptied irises. No sentences. No speech as the white  

nimbus of hair, thick and lively around her head 
nodded yes to sitting up and getting dressed— 

to sweet potatoes and Jeopardy! as though part of her  
remained in that rheumy underwater place 

that took her breath away and wiped out the syntax  
of explanation and inquiry, leaving only 

no I won’t and certainly not and don’t ever wake me up again. 
~Lisa Sewell “The Land of Nod”

Vigil at my mother’s bedside

Where do your dreams take you?
At times you wake in your childhood home of
Rolling wheat fields, boundless days of freedom.
Other naps take you to your student and teaching days
Grammar and drama, speech and essays.
Yesterday you were a young mother again
Juggling babies, farm and your wistful dreams.

Today you looked about your empty nest
Disguised as hospital bed,
Wondering aloud about
Children grown, flown.
You still control through worry
and tell me:
It’s foggy out there
Travel safe through the dark
Call me when you get there
Take time to eat
Sleep sound, ready to wake fresh tomorrow

I dress you as you dressed me
I clean you as you cleaned me
I love you as you loved me
You try my patience as I tried yours.
I wonder if I have the strength to
Mother my mother
For as long as she needs.

When I tell you the truth of where you are
Your brow furrows as it used to do
When I disappointed you~
This cannot be
A bed in a room in a sterile place
Waiting
Waiting for death,
Waiting for heaven,
Waiting for the light

And I tell you:
It’s foggy
Travel safe through the darkness
Eat something, please eat
Sleep sound, ready to wake fresh tomorrow
Call me when you get there.

Advent 2023 theme
…because of the tender mercy of our God,
whereby the sunrise shall visit us from on high 
to give light to those who sit in darkness
and in the shadow of death,
to guide our feet into the way of peace.
Luke 1: 78-79 from Zechariah’s Song


Wake, Awake for Night is Flying
Let the shadows be forsaken,
The time has come for us to waken,
And to the Day our lives entrust.
Search the sky for heaven’s portal:
The clouds shall rain the Light Immortal,
And earth will soon bud forth the Just.

Of one pearl each shining portal,
where, dwelling with the choir immortal,
we gather ’round Your dazzling light.
No eye has seen, no ear
has yet been trained to hear
what joy is ours!
~Philipp Nicolai
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The Sunrise Shall Visit Us: An Inward Light

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…yea, thou art now
Thy Maker’s maker, and thy Father’s mother,
Thou hast light in dark, and shutt’st in little room
Immensity, cloister’d in thy dear womb.
~John Donne from “Annunciation”

Christ, whose glory fills the skies,
Christ, the true, the only Light,
Sun of Righteousness, arise,
Triumph o’er the shades of night;
Dayspring from on high, be near;
Day-star, in my heart appear.

Dark and cheerless is the morn
Unaccompanied by Thee;
Joyless is the day’s return
Till Thy mercy’s beams I see;
Till they inward light impart,
Glad my eyes, and warm my heart.

Visit then this soul of mine,
Pierce the gloom of sin and grief;
Fill me, Radiancy divine,
Scatter all my unbelief;
More and more Thyself display,
Shining to the perfect day.
~Charles Wesley “Christ, whose glory fills the skies”

It seems impossible that God could be contained within a womb. The Creator, who made the heavens, went inward into His vast universe of atoms and sub-atomic particles. He hosted tiny cellular nuclei within His body, instead of the heaven-flung massive nebulae in distant galaxies.

And He chose to do this. Out of His love and goodness, He became Light in the darkest space of the human body, to be birthed to illuminate a world bent on destruction.

From radiance to ribosomes,
from cosmos to cytoplasm,
from galaxies to Golgi apparatus,
from moons to mitochondria,
from utter darkness to “let there be light.”

And there is Light.
God is there, coming from above and coming from within.

NASA photo of a nebula

Advent 2023 theme
…because of the tender mercy of our God,
whereby the sunrise shall visit us from on high 
to give light to those who sit in darkness
and in the shadow of death,
to guide our feet into the way of peace.
Luke 1: 78-79 from Zechariah’s Song

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Advent 2023 theme
…because of the tender mercy of our God,
whereby the sunrise shall visit us from on high 
to give light to those who sit in darkness
and in the shadow of death,
to guide our feet into the way of peace.
Luke 1: 78-79 from Zechariah’s Song