Heart, I implore you, it’s time to come back from the dark, it’s morning, the hills are pink and the roses whatever they felt
in the valley of night are opening now their soft dresses, their leaves
are shining. Why are you laggard? Sure you have seen this a thousand times,
which isn’t half enough. Let the world have its way with you, luminous as it is
with mystery and pain– graced as it is with the ordinary. ~Mary Oliver “Summer Morning”
I love to stay in bed All morning, Covers thrown off, naked, Eyes closed, listening.
There’s a smell of damp hay, Of horses, laziness, Summer sky and eternal life.
I know all the dark places Where the sun hasn’t reached yet, Where the last cricket Has just hushed; anthills Where it sounds like it’s raining, Slumbering spiders spinning wedding dresses.
The good tree with its voice Of a mountain stream Knows my steps. It, too, hushes.
I stop and listen: Somewhere close by A stone cracks a knuckle, Another turns over in its sleep.
I hear a butterfly stirring Inside a caterpillar. I hear the dust talking Of last night’s storm.
Farther ahead, someone Even more silent Passes over the grass Without bending it.
And all of a sudden In the midst of that quiet, It seems possible To live simply on this earth. ~Charles Simic from “Summer Morning”
Reading headlines about yet more unimaginable losses and grieving people is extraordinarily painful on a summer morning when all should be luminous and lighthearted. My heart isn’t feeling the light at all; I struggle to leave behind those dark places where the sun hasn’t reached yet.
Yet if I’m still and quiet, I can hear life going on all around me. My sadness doesn’t change the mystery of a world God created in beauty and peace, now overshadowed by our fall into darkness, yet redeemed by a sacrificial Love we cannot possibly comprehend.
What a summer morning revelation. It’s as extraordinarily ordinary and simple as that.
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The mare roamed soft about the slope, Her rump was like a dancing girl’s. Gentle beneath the apple trees She pulled the grass and shook the flies, Her forelocks hung in tawny curls, She had a woman’s limpid eyes, A woman’s patient stare that grieves. And when she moved among the trees, The dappled trees, her look was shy, She hid her nakedness in leaves. A delicate though weighted dance She stepped while flocks of finches flew From tree to tree and shot the leaves With songs of golden twittering; How admirable her tender stance. And then the apple trees were new, And she was new, and we were new, And in the barns the stallions stamped And shook the hills with trumpeting. ~Ruth Stone, “The Orchard” from What Love Comes To
Our retired mares are aging, the oldest now thirty and the others only a few years younger. Born on this land, they have served us well over the decades, birthing us their foals and working when asked. They deserve this easy life on pasture for as long as their legs and feet will carry them up and down the slopes of our hilly farm – they are more and more resembling our ancient crooked crippled orchard trees, some of which have already toppled in the winter winds..
I’m thinking we are close to the end of these loyal mares’ long lives; hard decisions must be made at some point and I don’t feel quite prepared to determine when they are no longer enjoying their time under the sun but I don’t want them to topple over like an old hollow tree in the wind. I listen for their nickers as I come into the barn each morning and still see their eagerness to be set free to the fields. I look in their eyes when they come in at night to discern what they have to say about how their day went out on the grass.
Perhaps I too identify a bit much with the stiffness as they move and their need for frequent napping times in the field, swishing at flies while they dream of younger days of flirting with stallions, nursing babies, having suppler joints and a wild gallop at twilight.
I’ve been singing a sad lullaby to myself and them as I work about the barn with slow deliberation, knowing there is somber sorrow when life eventually must come to its inevitable end.
Ah, all the pretty little horses…
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We will grieve not, rather find Strength in what remains behind; In the primal sympathy Which having been must ever be;
Thanks to the human heart by which we live, Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears, To me the meanest flower that blows can give Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears. ~William Wordsworth from “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood”
Pouring the sidewalk by handGrouting the tile perimeterIn the very bottom, installing a drain
The best dive ever…
Nearly twenty-seven years ago we watched at your bedside as you labored, readying yourself to die and we could not help except to be there while we watched you move farther away from us.
This dying, the hardest work you had ever done:
harder than handling the plow behind a team of draft horses, harder than confronting a broken, alcoholic and abusive father, harder than slashing brambles and branches to clear the woods, harder than digging out stumps, cementing foundations, building roofs, harder than shipping out, leaving behind a new wife after only a week of marriage, harder than leading a battalion of men to battle on Saipan, Tinian and Tarawa, harder than returning home so changed there were no words, harder than returning to school, working long hours to support family, harder than running a farm with only muscle and will power, harder than coping with an ill wife, infertility, job conflict, discontent, harder than building your own pool, your own garage, your own house, harder than your marriage ending, a second wife dying of cancer, and returning home asking for forgiveness.
Dying was the hardest of all as no amount of muscle or smarts or determination could stop it crushing you, taking away the strength you relied on for 73 years.
So as you lay helpless, moaning, struggling to breathe, we knew your hard work was complete and what you left undone was up to us to finish for you.
Ben packaged in a paper bag by Grandpa Hank
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How strange this fear of death is! We are never frightened at a sunset. ~George MacDonald
In our modern world that never seems to rest, a sunrise can feel more daunting than a sunset. We are unprepared for the day to start: the ready-set-go of a sunrise can be overwhelming to a tired soul.
There are mornings when the new light of dawn penetrates right through our closed eyelids, enough to wake the dead, if not the sleeping. It cannot be ignored in its urgency to rouse us to action.
In contrast, the end of the day requires little preparation. Sunsets signal a slowing-down and unraveling of tension, a deep cleansing breath, a letting-go of the light for another night. We hope twilight will ease over us, covering us like a comfortable quilt, tucking us in for the night with a kiss and hug and promise of sweet dreams.
The reason we do not need to fear the sunset is that we know it isn’t all there is. The black nothingness of night would be petrifying if we didn’t understand and trust that the light will return, as startling as it may be in its brightness. It is the rerunning cycle of the light and dark that reassures. It is as it was created to be, over and over.
Let the sunset tuck us in. Let the sunrise prepare us for a new day.
Now the day is over night is drawing nigh, shadows of the evening steal across the sky. Jesus, give the weary calm and sweet repose; with they tend’rest blessing, may our eyelids close.
Approach the night with caution It’s the best that you can do Move quickly though the darkness ‘Til the daylight is renewed Approach the night with caution You will know it’s for the best Once tomorrow’s morning Quells the thumping in your chest For evening is when all things dark can Slide around with ease And good things all get shoved in the shadows By a wicked breeze Approach the night with caution No longer shall you roam When darkness stains the eastern sky Be sure that you are home For night is the dividing line that Blends the right and wrong Spirits crossing freely over Can hold you there too long
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I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It’s when you know you’re licked before you begin, but you begin anyway and see it through no matter what. ~Harper Lee from To Kill A Mockingbird
I know. It’s all wrong. By rights we shouldn’t even be here. But we are.
It’s like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger they were. And sometimes you didn’t want to know the end.
Because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? But in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow.
Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something, even if you were too small to understand why.
But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back, only they didn’t. They kept going, because they were holding on to something. That there is some good in this world, and it’s worth fighting for. ~J.R.R. Tolkien – Samwise Gamgee to Frodo in The Two Towers
Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die. ~ G.K. Chesterton from “The Paradoxes of Christianity” in Orthodoxy
This is another day, O Lord… If I am to stand up, help me to stand bravely. If I am to sit still, help me to sit quietly. If I am to lie low, help me to do it patiently. And if I am to do nothing, let me do it gallantly. — Kathleen Norris citing the Book of Common Prayer
What courage it takes to step out one’s front door these days.
I never know where I might be swept off to or what I might be swept into.
When I feel overwhelmed and discouraged, when it seems the world is cast in nothing but shadow, I am reminded I too am part of a great story and the plot progression is, by necessity, a mystery.
While the darkness seems to never end, I will pass through shadows and feel great fear, I will be asked to do things that threaten my well-being because it is the right thing to do for another.
Yet we are promised Light and Joy at the end of this epic story. There is still good in the world and it is worth fighting for.
It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out of your door. You step into the Road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there is no knowing where you might be swept off too. ~J.R.R. Tolkien – Bilbo to Frodo in Fellowship of the Rings
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The sunlight now lay over the valley perfectly still. I went over to the graveyard beside the church and found them under the old cedars… I am finding it a little hard to say that I felt them resting there, but I did… I saw that, for me, this country would always be populated with presences and absences, presences of absences, the living and the dead. The world as it is would always be a reminder of the world that was, and of the world that is to come. Wendell Berry in Jayber Crow
When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder if I have made of my life something particular, and real. I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened or full of argument.
I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world. ~Mary Oliver from “When Death Comes”
Today, as always over the last weekend of May, we have a family reunion where most turn up missing. A handful of the living come together for lunch and then a slew of the no-longer-living, some of whom have been caught napping for a century or more, are no-shows.
It is always on this day of cemetery visiting that I feel keenly the presence of their absence: the great greats I never knew, a great aunt who kept so many secrets, an alcoholic grandfather I barely remember, my grandmother whose inherent messiness I inherited, an aunt who died of lymphoma as a young child, my parents who separated and divorced for ten years late in life, yet reunited long enough for their ashes to rest together for eternity.
It is good, as one of the still-for-now living, to approach these plots of grass with a wary weariness of the aging. But for the grace of God, there will I be sooner than I wish to be. There, thanks to the grace of God, will I one day be an absent presence for my children and grandchildren to ponder.
The world as it is remembers the world that was. The world to come calls us home in its time, where we all will be present and accounted for — our reunion celebration.
All in good time.
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She wasn’t looking when they took this picture: sitting on the grass in her bare feet wearing a cotton dress, she stares off to the side watching something on the lawn the camera didn’t catch. What was it? A ladybug? A flower? Judging from her expression, possibly nothing at all, or else the lawn was like a mirror, and she sat watching herself, wondering who she was and how she came to be there sitting in this backyard, wearing a cheap, white dress, imagining that tomorrow would be like all her yesterdays, while her parents chatted and watched, as I do years later, too distantly to interfere. ~Dana Gioia, “Photograph of My Mother as a Young Girl” from Daily Horoscope
Yesterday was my mother Elna Schmitz Polis’ 102nd birthday though she left us behind nearly 14 years ago. I wrote the poem below while she was fading from this life.
Vigil at my mother’s bedside
Lying still, your mouth gapes open as I wonder if you breathe your last. Your hair a white cloud Your skin baby soft No washing, digging, planting gardens Or raising children Anymore.
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: Travel safely Get a good night’s sleep Take time to eat Call me when you get there
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 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 for death Waiting for heaven Waiting
And I tell you: Travel safely Eat, please eat Sleep well Call me when you get there.
Dad and Mom in their early thirties
Mom’s favorite song to sing
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…mourning and great weeping, weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted, because they are no more. from Matthew 2:18 and Jeremiah 31:15
Newtown, CT December 2012 There are the fields we’ll walk across In the snow lightly falling. In the snow lightly falling, There are the fields we’ll walk across.
There are the houses we’ll walk toward In the snow lightly falling. In the snow lightly falling, There are the houses we’ll walk toward.
There are the faces we once kissed In the snow lightly falling. In the snow lightly falling, There are the faces we once kissed.
Incredible how we laughed and cried In the snow lightly falling. In the snow lightly falling, Incredible how we laughed and cried.
Incredible how we’ll meet again In the snow lightly falling. In the snow lightly falling, Incredible how we’ll meet again.
No small hand will go unheld In the snow lightly falling. In the snow lightly falling, No small hand will go unheld.
No voice once heard is ever lost In the snow lightly falling. In the snow lightly falling, No voice once heard is ever lost. ~Dick Allen “Solace”
In mourning for the families of Uvalde, Texas
There is no comfort for these families. Their arms ache with emptiness, their childrens’ beds and pillows cold tonight, dolls and stuffed animals awaiting all night hugs that will never come again.
There is no earthly consolation; only mourning and great weeping, sobbing that wrings dry every human cell, leaving only dust behind, which is our beginning and our end.
Christ came to us for times such as this, born of the dust of woman and the breath of Spirit. God bent down to be cradled in barn dust, walk on roads of dust, die and be laid to rest as dust to conquer such evil as this – the slaughter and massacre of innocents.
He became dust to be like us He began a mere speck in a womb like us His heart beat like ours breathing each breath like ours until a fearful fallen world took His and our breath away.
He shines His Light through the darkness of tragic deaths to guide our stumbling uncertain feet. His tender mercies flow freely when there is no consolation, when there is no comfort.
He hears our cries as He cried too. He knows our tears as He wept too. He knows our mourning as He mourned too. He knows our dying as He died too.
God wept as this happened yesterday. Evil comes not from God yet humankind embraces it. Sin is our ongoing choice, a decision made from our beginning, but we can choose to end it now.
Only God can glue together what evil has shattered. He asks us to hand Him the pieces of our broken hearts, abandon our evil ways and sin no more.
We will know His peace when He comes to bring us home, our tears finally dried, our cells no longer just dust, as we are glued together by the word and breath and voice of God forevermore.
the tender mercy of our God, by which the rising sun will come to us from heaven to shine on those living in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the path of peace. Luke 1: 78-79
Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on; you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. But presently He starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make any sense. What on earth is He up to? The explanation is that He is building quite a different house from the one you thought of – throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were being made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it Himself. ~C.S. Lewis from Mere Christianity
Whether bunker or cottage or palace, when I seek shelter, safety or simplicity, it is not enough. I am not a dwelling for God until His remodel project is finished~
He puts down His chisel, hammer and saw, sees what He has salvaged from the junk heap, looks me over and declares it good.
My father’s treehouse is twenty seven years old this summer, lonesome and empty high up in the black walnut tree in our front yard. It remains a constant reminder of my father’s own abandoned Swiss Family Robinson dreams.
Over the years, it has been the setting for a local children’s TV show, laser tag wars, sleep overs and tea parties, even my writer’s retreat with a deck side view of the Cascades to the east, the Canadian Coastal Range to the north and Puget Sound to the west. Now it is a sad shell no longer considered safe to visit, as the support branches in its century-old tree are weakening with age and time. It is on our list of farm restoration projects, but other falling down buildings must be prioritized first.
My father’s dream began in February 1995 when our sons were 8 and 6 years old and our daughter just 2. We had plenty of recycled lumber on our old farm and an idea about what to build. My dad, retired from his desk job and having recently survived a lymphoma diagnosis and treatment, had many previous daunting building projects to his credit, and a few in his mind that he was yet to get to. He was eager to see what he could construct for his grandkids by spring time. He doodled out some sketches of what might work in the tree, and contemplated the physics of a 73 year old man scaling a tree vs. building it on the ground and hoisting it up mostly completed. I got more nervous the more I thought about it and hoped we could consider a project less risky, and praying the weather wouldn’t clear enough for construction to start any time soon.
The weather did clear just as my father’s health faded. His cancer relapsed and he was sidelined with a series of doctor’s appointments, hospitalizations and treatment courses. He hung on to that hope of getting the treehouse going by summer, still thinking it through in his mind, still evaluating what he would need to buy to supplement the materials already gathered and piled beneath the tree. In the mean time he lost physical strength day by day.
I decided his dream needed to proceed as he fought his battle, so I borrowed library books on treehouses, and hired two college age brothers who lived down the road to get things started. I figured if my dad got well enough to build again, at least the risky stuff could be already done by the young guys. These brothers took their job very seriously. They pored over the books, took my dad’s plans, worked through the details and started in. They shinnied up the tree, put up pulleys on the high branches and placed the beams, hoisting them by pulling on the ropes with their car bumper. It was working great until the car bumper came off.
I kept my dad updated with photos and stories. It was a diversion for him, but the far off look in his eye told me he wasn’t going to be building anything in this world ever again. He was gone by July. The treehouse was completed a month later. It was everything my dad had dreamed of, and more. It had a deck surrounded by a protective railing, a trap door, and staircase up the trunk. We had an open tree celebration and had 15 friends and neighbors up there at once. I’m sure dad was sipping lemonade with us as well, enjoying the view.
Now all these years later, the treehouse is tilting on its foundation as the main weight-bearing branch is weakening with age. We’ve declared it condemned, not wanting to risk an accident. As I look out my front window, it remains a daily reminder of past dreams fulfilled and those yet unfulfilled. Much like my father’s body, the old walnut tree is weakening, hanging on by the roots, but its muscle strength is failing. It will, inevitably come down in one of our frequent fierce windstorms, just as its nearby partner did a few years ago.
The treehouse dream branched out in another way. One of the construction team brothers decided to try building his own as a place to live in his woods, using a Douglas Fir tree as the center support and creating an octagon, two stories, 30 feet off the ground. He worked on it for two years and moved in, later marrying someone who decided a treehouse was just fine with her, and for 20+ years, they’ve been raising five children there. The treehouse kids are old enough to come work for me on our farm, a full circle feeling for me. This next generation is carrying on a Swiss Family Robinson dream that began in my father’s mind and our front yard.
I still have a whole list full of dreams myself, some realized and some deferred by time, resources and the limits of my imagination. I feel the clock ticking too, knowing that the years and the seasons slip by me faster and faster as I near the age my father was when he first learned he had cancer. It would be a blessing to me to see others live out the dreams I have held so close.
Like my father, I will some day teeter in the wind like our old tree, barely hanging on. When ready to fall to the ground, I’ll reach out with my branches and hand off my dreams too. The time will have come to let them go. Thank you, Dad, for handing me yours.
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The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for. ~Vladimir Nabokov from Speak Memory
I think Nabokov had it wrong. This is the abyss. That’s why babies howl at birth, and why the dying so often reach for something only they can apprehend.
At the end they don’t want their hands to be under the covers, and if you should put your hand on theirs in a tentative gesture of solidarity, they’ll pull the hand free; and you must honor that desire, and let them pull it free. ~Jane Kenyon from “Reading Aloud to My Father”
Great Grandma Emma, granddaughter Andrea, great-grandson Zealand – photo by Andrea NipgesGreat Grandpa Harry holding baby Emerson, photo by mama Abby Mobley
Great-Grandma Elna and Noah
And once, for no special reason, I rode in the back of the pickup, leaning against the cab. Everything familiar was receding fast…
Whatever I saw I had already passed… (This must be what life is like at the moment of leaving it.) ~Jane Kenyon from “What It’s Like”
The farther I am down the road, everything familiar seems to be receding fast. What I see on my journey, I have already passed by as I watch it disappear into the horizon.
I too often mistake this world, this existence, as the only light there is, a mere beam of illumination in the surrounding night of eternity, the only relief from overwhelming darkness. If we stand looking up from the bottom, we might erroneously assume we are the source of the light, we are all there is.
Yet looking at this world from a different perspective, gazing down into the abyss from above, it is clear the light does not come from below –it is from beyond us.
The newborn and the dying know this. They signal their transition into and out of this world with their hands. An infant holds tightly to whatever their fist finds, grasping and clinging to not be lost to this darkness they have entered. The dying instead loosen their grip on this world, reaching up and picking the air on their climb back to heaven.
We hold babies tightly so they won’t lose their way in the dark. We loosen our grip on the dying to honor their outreach to the light that leads to something greater.
In the intervening years, we struggle in our blindness to climb out of the abyss to see vistas of great beauty and grace as we pass through the shadows of our lives. Only then we acknowledge, with great calm and serenity, where we are headed.
Ben packaged in a paper bag by Grandpa Hank
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