This is the moment when you see again the red berries of the mountain ash and in the dark sky the birds’ night migrations.
It grieves me to think the dead won’t see them— these things we depend on, they disappear.
What will the soul do for solace then? I tell myself maybe it won’t need these pleasures anymore; maybe just not being is simply enough, hard as that is to imagine. ~Louise Glück “The Night Migrations”
(Louise Glück died yesterday at age 80; she was both a Nobel and Pulitzer Prize winner for poetry)
All through August and September thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of feathered creatures pass through this place and I almost never see a single one. The fall wood warbler migration goes by here every year, all of them, myriad species, all looking sort of like each other, yellow, brown, gray, all muted versions of their summer selves, almost indistinguishable from each other, at least to me, although definitely not to each other, all flying by, mostly at night, calling to each other as they go to keep the flock together, saying: chip, zeet, buzz, smack, zip, squeak— those sounds reassuring that we are all here together and heading south, all of us just passing through, just passing through, just passing through, just passing through. ~David Budbill “Invisible Visitors”from Tumbling Toward the End
Some feathered travelers slip past us unseen and unheard. They may stop for a drink in the pond or a bite to eat in the field and woods, but we never know they are there – simply passing through.
Others are compelled to announce their journey with great fanfare, usually heard before seen. The drama of migration becomes bantering conversation from bird to bird, bird to earth, bird to sun, moon and stars, with unseen magnetic forces pointing the way.
When not using voices, their wings sing the air with rhythmic beat and whoosh.
We’re all together here — altogether — even when our voices are raised sharply, our silences brooding, our hurts magnified, our sorrows deep. Our route and mode of travel become a matter of intense debate.
The ultimate destination is not in dispute however. It isn’t simply enough to just be, but to be heading to where we belong, to that which we depend upon. We are migrating souls finding a way back home where all is solace, all is meaning, all is grace, all is peace.
We’re just passing through, just passing through, just passing through.
And that is just the point… how the world, moist and beautiful, calls to each of us to make a new and serious response.
That’s the big question, the one the world throws at you every morning. “Here you are, alive. Would you like to make a comment?” ~Mary Oliver
The last few days, it has been impossible to stay a silent observer of the world when one awakes, still alive on a morning moist and beautiful, while on the other side of the earth, innocents have been brutally butchered in their beds, whole families murdered, bodies desecrated and dragged into the street.
It demands a response.
I cannot remain speechless in the face of evil. Such violence, fed by generations of hatred, begets more hatred and violence, on and on. It festers, blusters, rips apart, tortures, buries. And so it goes, an ongoing human history of wars and more wars.
And here I am, alive on a brilliant autumn morning, while others immeasurably suffer.
Called to make a new and serious response. Called to comment, as I do every day. Knowing my voice is only one in a vast wilderness of voices, crying out in lament over the dead and dying.
He loved to ask his mother questions. It was the pleasantest thing for him to ask a question and then to hear what answer his mother would give. Bambi was never surprised that question after question should come into his mind continually and without effort.
Sometimes he felt very sure that his mother was not giving him a complete answer, was intentionally not telling him all she knew. For then there would remain in him such a lively curiosity, such suspicion, mysteriously and joyously flashing through him, such anticipation, that he would become anxious and happy at the same time, and grow silent. ~Felix Salten from Bambi
A Wounded Deer—leaps highest— I’ve heard the Hunter tell— ‘Tis but the Ecstasy of death— And then the Brake is still! ~Emily Dickinson “165″
As the house of a person in age sometimes grows cluttered with what is too loved or too heavy to part with, the heart may grow cluttered. And still the house will be emptied, and still the heart.
Empty and filled, like the curling half-light of morning, in which everything is still possible and so why not.
Filled and empty, like the curling half-light of evening, in which everything now is finished and so why not.
Beloved, what can be, what was, will be taken from us. I have disappointed. I am sorry. I knew no better.
A root seeks water. Tenderness only breaks open the earth. This morning, out the window, the deer stood like a blessing, then vanished. ~Jane Hirschfield from “The Standing Deer”
My first time ever seated next to my mother in a movie theater, just a skinny four year old girl practically folded in half by a large padded chair whose seat won’t stay down, bursting with anticipation to see Disney’s Bambi.
Enthralled with so much color, motion, music, songs and fun characters, I am wholly lost in this new world of animated reality when suddenly Bambi’s mother looks up, alarmed, from eating a new clump of spring grass growing in the snow.
My heart leaps with worry. She tells him to run quickly for the thicket – find the safest place where she has always kept him warm next to her.
She follows behind, urges him to run faster, not to look back, don’t ever look back.
Then the gun shot hits my belly too.
My stomach twists as he cries out for his mother, pleading for her. I know in my heart she is lost forever, sacrificed to save him.
I sob as my mother reaches out to me, telling me not to look. I bury my face inside her hug, knowing Bambi is cold and alone with no mother any more.
My mama took me home before the end. I could not bear to watch the rest of the movie for years.
Those cries still echo in my ears any time someone hunts and shoots to kill the innocent.
Now, my own three children are grown, they have babies of their own, my mom is gone from this earth. I can even keep the seat from folding me in half in a movie theater.
I am nearing my eighth decade, and there are still places in this world where mothers and fathers sons and daughters grandmothers and grandfathers sisters and brothers and babies are hunted down despite the supposed safety of the thicket~ the sanctuary, the school, the grocery store, the home, places where we believe we are shielded from violence.
There can be no innocence when any of us may be hunted.
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The soul’s sap quivers. There is no earth smell Or smell of living thing. This is the spring time But not in time’s covenant. Now the hedgerow Is blanched for an hour with transitory blossom Of snow, a bloom more sudden Than that of summer, neither budding nor fading, Not in the scheme of generation. Where is the summer, the unimaginable Zero summer?
We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time. Through the unknown, unremembered gate When the last of earth left to discover Is that which was the beginning;
And all shall be well and All manner of thing shall be well When the tongues of flames are in-folded Into the crowned knot of fire And the fire and the rose are one. ~T.S. Eliot – from “Little Gidding”from the Four Quartets
To think that this meaningless thing was ever a rose, Scentless, colourless, this! Will it ever be thus (who knows?) Thus with our bliss, If we wait till the close?
Though we care not to wait for the end, there comes the end Sooner, later, at last, Which nothing can mar, nothing mend:
An end locked fast, Bent we cannot re-bend. ~Christina Rossetti “Summer is Ended”
As a 3rd grader in November 1963, I learned the import of the U.S. flag being lowered to half mast in response to the shocking and violent death of our President. The lowering of the flag was so rare when I was growing up, it had dramatic effect on all who passed by —
our soul’s sap quivers
— something very sad had happened to our country, something or someone had tragically ended, warranting our silence, our stillness, and our grief.
For the twenty-two years since 9/11/01, our flag has spent significant time at half mast, most often due to our own home-grown mass shooting terrorism. When I see it flying low, I’m befuddled instead of contemplative, puzzling over what the latest loss might be as there are so many, sometimes all happening in the same time frame. We no longer are silenced by this gesture of honor and respect; we certainly are not stilled when personally and corporately instigating and suffering the same mistakes against humanity over and over again.
We are so bent. Will we ever be mended again?
Eliot wrote these prescient words of the Four Quartets in the midst of the WWII German bombing raids that destroyed so many people and neighborhoods. Perhaps he sensed the destruction he witnessed would not be the last time in history that evil visits the innocent, leaving them in ashes. There would be so many more losses to come, not least being the horror of 9/11/01.
There remains so much more sadness to be borne, such abundance of grief. Our world has become overwhelmed and stricken. Yet Eliot was right: we have yet to live in a Zero summer of endless hope and fruitfulness, of spiritual awakening and understanding. Where is it indeed? When will the summer Rose of beauty and fragrance rise again?
We must return, as people of faith to Eliot’s still point to which we are called on a remembrance day such as today. We must be stilled; we must be silenced. We must grieve the losses of this turning world and pray for release from the suffering we cause and we endure. Only in the asking, only in the kneeling down and pleading, are we surrounded by God’s unbounded grace.
Only then will His Rose bloom, once again recognizable.
“Zero Summer” imagines the unimaginable horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and yet points to epiphanic awakening that transcend human imagination at the same time. T.S. Eliot, who coined this term in his “Four Quartets,” longed for that eternal summer, birthed out of the “still point,” where imagination is met with grace and truth. ~Makoto Fujimura
“There Are No Words” written on 9/11/2001 by Kitty Donohoe
there are no words there is no song is there a balm that can heal these wounds that will last a lifetime long and when the stars have burned to dust hand in hand we still will stand because we must
in one single hour in one single day we were changed forever something taken away and there is no fire that can melt this heavy stone that can bring back the voices and the spirits of our own
all the brothers, sisters and lovers all the friends that are gone all the chairs that will be empty in the lives that will go on can we ever forgive though we never will forget can we believe in the milk of human goodness yet
we were forged in freedom we were born in liberty we came here to stop the twisted arrows cast by tyranny and we won’t bow down we are strong of heart we are a chain together that won’t be pulled apart
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I saw a deer skeleton gracing the roadside and didn’t stop to wonder where the flesh had gone, why just a tuft of fur clung, a bit of tail. Didn’t pause to ponder its change from leaping-warmth to cold, clean bones. Didn’t stop but glimpsed crisp, dark lines against snow, rib cage, long legs, perfect spine— what we with mounded dirt, neat lawn, and flowered stones seek so hard to hide— I drove quickly by. ~Laura Foley, “Intuition” from It’s This
I drive a night-darkened country road, white lines sweeping past, aware of advancing frost in the evening haze, anxious to return home to fireplace light.
Nearing a familiar corner, a stop sign looms, to the right, a rural cemetery sits silently expectant.
Open iron gates and tenebrous headstones, in the middle path, incongruous, a car’s headlights beam bright. I slow, thinking: lovers or vandals might seek inky cover of night.
Instead, these lights illuminate a lone figure, kneeling graveside, one hand resting heavily on a stone, head bowed in prayer.
A stark moment of solitary sorrow, invisible grieving of the heart focused in twin beams, impossible to hide.
A benediction of mourning; light piercing the heart’s blackness, as gentle fingertips trace the engraved letters of a beloved name.
As an uneasy witness, I withdraw as if touched myself and drive on into the night, struggling to see through the thickening mist of my eyes and the road.
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When great trees fall, rocks on distant hills shudder, lions hunker down in tall grasses, and even elephants lumber after safety.
When great trees fall in forests, small things recoil into silence, their senses eroded beyond fear.
When great souls die, the air around us becomes light, rare, sterile. We breathe, briefly. Our eyes, briefly, see with a hurtful clarity. Our memory, suddenly sharpened, examines, gnaws on kind words unsaid, promised walks never taken.
Great souls die and our reality, bound to them, takes leave of us. Our souls, dependent upon their nurture, now shrink, wizened. Our minds, formed and informed by their radiance, fall away. We are not so much maddened as reduced to the unutterable ignorance of dark, cold caves.
And when great souls die, after a period peace blooms, slowly and always irregularly. Spaces fill with a kind of soothing electric vibration. Our senses, restored, never to be the same, whisper to us. They existed. They existed. We can be. Be and be better. For they existed. ~ Maya Angelou “When Great Trees Fall”
It sounded like July 4 fireworks lighting up the evening
a pop, then silence- a crack, then several more.
I look out the kitchen window – the old Spitzenburg tree had fallen, irrevocably split and splintered.
Neither wind, nor lightning-felled, simply toppled by old age and inner rot
It lies still, its hollowed trunk like a brittle bone broken
Given up and given in after decades of battering winter wind storms
Instead it fell in a fragile fruiting finale, pulled up by the roots
coming for to carry me home at twilight’s last gleaming.
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Though I know well enough To hunt the Lady’s Slipper now Is playing blindman’s-buff, For it was June She put it on And grey with mist the spider’s lace Swings in the autumn wind, Yet through this hill-wood, high and low, I peer in every place; Seeking for what I cannot find I do as I have often done And shall do while I stay beneath the sun. ~Andrew Young “Lady’s Slipper Orchid”
How strange to find you where I did along a path beside a road, your legs in graceful green dancing to music made by wind and woods.
Like ladies from a bygone age, you left your slippers there to air in dappled shade, while you, barefoot, relaxed your stays, let loose your hair.
The treasures of this world might be as simple as an orchid’s bloom; how sad that so much time is spent in filling coffers for the tomb.
If only life could be so fresh and free as you in serenade, we might learn we value most those things found lost in woodland shade. ~Mike Orlock “Lady Slipper Serenade (in 4/4 time)”
My grandmother’s house where my father was born had been torn down. She sold her property on Fidalgo Island near Anacortes, Washington to a lumber company – this was the house where all four of her babies were born, where she and my grandfather loved and fought and separated and finally loved again, and where we spent chaotic and memorable Thanksgiving and Christmas meals. After Grandpa died, Grandma took on boarders, trying to afford to remain there on the homesteaded wooded acreage on Similk Bay, fronted by meadows where her Scottish Highland cattle grazed. Her own health was suffering and she reached a point when it was no longer possible to make it work. A deal was struck with the lumber company and she moved to a small apartment for the few years left to her, remaining bruised by leaving her farm.
My father realized what her selling to a lumber company meant and it was a crushing thought. The old growth woods would soon be stumps on the rocky hill above the bay, opening a view to Mt. Baker to the east, to the San Juan Islands to the north, and presenting an opportunity for development into a subdivision. He woke my brother and me early one Saturday in May and told us we were driving the 120 miles to Anacortes. He was on a mission.
As a boy growing up on that land, he had wandered the woods, explored the hill, and helped his dad farm the rocky soil. There was only one thing he felt he needed from that farm and he had decided to take us with him, to trespass where he had been born and raised to bring home a most prized treasure–his beloved lady slippers (Calypso bulbosa) from the woods.
These dainty flowers enjoy a spring display known for its brevity–a week or two at the most–and they tend to bloom in small little clusters in the leafy duff mulch of the deep woods, preferring only a little indirect sunlight part of the day. They are not easy to find unless you know where to look.
My father remembered exactly where to look.
We hauled buckets up the hill along with spades, looking as if we were about to dig for clams at the ocean. Dad led us up a trail into the thickening foliage, until we had to bushwhack our way into the taller trees where the ground was less brush and more hospitable ground cover. He would stop occasionally to get his bearings as things were overgrown. We reached a small clearing and he knew we were near. He went straight to a copse of fir trees standing guard over a garden of lady slippers.
There were almost thirty of them blooming, scattered about in an area the size of my small bedroom. Each orchid-like pink and lavender blossom had a straight backed stem that held it with sturdy confidence. To me, they looked like they could be little shoes for fairies who may have hung them up while they danced about barefoot. To my father, they represented the last redeeming vestiges of his often traumatic childhood, and were about to be trammeled by bulldozers. We set to work gently digging them out of their soft bedding, carefully keeping their bulb-like corms from losing a protective covering of soil and leafy mulch. Carrying them in the buckets back to the car, we felt some vindication that even if the trees were to be lost to the saws, these precious flowers would survive.
When we got home, Dad set to work creating a spot where he felt they could thrive in our own woods. He found a place with the ideal amount of shade and light, with the protection of towering trees and the right depth of undisturbed leaf mulch. We carefully placed the lady slippers in their new home, scattered in a pattern similar to how we found them. Then Dad built a four foot split rail fence in an octagon around them, as a protection from our cattle and a horse who wandered the woods, and as a way to demarcate that something special was contained inside.
The next spring, only six lady slippers bloomed from the original thirty. Dad was disappointed but hoped another year might bring a resurgence as the flowers established themselves in their new home. The following year there were only three. A decade later, my father left our farm and family, not looking back.
Sometime after the divorce, when my mother had to sell the farm, I visited our lady slipper sanctuary in the woods for the last time in the middle of May, seeking what I hoped might still be there, but I knew was no longer. The split rail fence still stood, guarding nothing but old memories. No lady slippers bloomed. There was not a trace they had ever been there. They had given up and disappeared.
The new owners of the farm surely puzzled over the significance of the small fenced-in area in the middle of our woods. They probably thought it surrounded a graveyard of some sort.
And they would be right – it did.
An embroidery I made for my father after he replanted the lady slippers — on the back I wrote “The miracle of creation recurs each spring in the delicate beauty of the lady slipper – may we ourselves be recreated as well…”
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No, I will never know what you saw or what you felt, thrust into the maw of Eternity,
watching the mortars nightly greedily making their rounds, hearing the soft damp hiss
of men’s souls like helium escaping their collapsing torn bodies, or lying alone, feeling the great roar
of your own heart. But I know: there is a bitter knowledge
of death I have not achieved. Thus in thankful ignorance, and especially for my son
and for all who benefit so easily at so unthinkable a price, I thank you. ~Michael Burch “Privilege”
(for my father on Memorial Day)
It was only a part of what we knew about you- serving three long years in the South Pacific, spoken of obliquely only if asked about, but never really answered.
We knew you were a Marine battalion leader, knew you spent too many nights without sleep, unsure if you’d see the dawn only to dread what the next day would bring.
We knew you lost friends and your innocence; found unaccustomed strength inside a mama’s boy who once cried too easily and later almost never.
Somehow life had prepared you for this: pulling your daddy out of bars when you were ten watching him beat your mama until finally getting big enough to stand in the way.
Then Tarawa, Saipan, Tinian beaches bitterly bloodsoaked battles won, to be restored and renewed as vacation resorts.
We let you go without knowing your full story– even Mom didn’t ask. You could not share the depth of horror and fear you felt.
It was not shame that kept you silent; simply no need to revisit the pain of remembrance. It was done, finished, you had done your duty.
So as we again set flowers and flag on your grave, reunited with Mom after years apart, I regret so many questions unasked of a sacrifice beyond imagining, you having paid an unthinkable price.
Sleep well, Dad, with Mom now by your side. I rejoice you finally wakened to a renewed dawn.
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Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota, Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass. And the eyes of those two Indian ponies Darken with kindness. They have come gladly out of the willows To welcome my friend and me. We step over the barbed wire into the pasture Where they have been grazing all day, alone. They ripple tensely, they can hardly contain their happiness That we have come. They bow shyly as wet swans. They love each other. There is no loneliness like theirs. At home once more, They begin munching the young tufts of spring in the darkness. I would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms, For she has walked over to me And nuzzled my left hand. She is black and white, Her mane falls wild on her forehead, And the light breeze moves me to caress her long ear That is delicate as the skin over a girl’s wrist. Suddenly I realize That if I stepped out of my body I would break Into blossom. ~James Wright, “A Blessing” from Above the River: The Complete Poems
for James Wright
There are more like us. All over the world There are confused people, who can’t remember The name of their dog when they wake up, and people Who love God but can’t remember where
He was when they went to sleep. It’s All right. The world cleanses itself this way. A wrong number occurs to you in the middle Of the night, you dial it, it rings just in time
To save the house. And the second-story man Gets the wrong address, where the insomniac lives, And he’s lonely, and they talk, and the thief Goes back to college. Even in graduate school,
You can wander into the wrong classroom, And hear great poems lovingly spoken By the wrong professor. And you find your soul, And greatness has a defender, and even in death you’re safe. ~Robert Bly “People Like Us” from Stealing Sugar from the Castle
There are rare transcendent moments when I feel I could step outside my body, because something or someone moves me so profoundly, I no longer need to have my feet on the ground.
I’m thinking beyond myself. I’m thinking of another.
It is a sensation of floating while still connected; a circuit created as if electricity might flow, if only for an instant.
You too? Then think of me thinking of you. It brings us back again to the same music, the same poem, the same work of art, the same discovery that illuminates our souls.
Oh, think of me. And I of you.
And this is why we are safe in God’s hands, no matter what happens. We are meant to blossom together.
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…to break through earth and stone of the faithless world back to the cold sepulchre, tearstained stifling shroud; to break from them back into breath and heartbeat, and walk the world again, closed into days and weeks again, wounds of His anguish open, and Spirit streaming through every cell of flesh so that if mortal sight could bear to perceive it, it would be seen His mortal flesh was lit from within, now, and aching for home. He must return, first, In Divine patience, and know hunger again, and give to humble friends the joy of giving Him food – fish and a honeycomb. ~Denise Levertov “Ikon: The Harrowing of Hell” from A Door in the Hive
The Holy Saturday of our life must be the preparation for Easter, the persistent hope for the final glory of God. The virtue of our daily life is the hope which does what is possible and expects God to do the impossible. To express it somewhat paradoxically, but nevertheless seriously: the worst has actually already happened; we exist, and even death cannot deprive us of this. Now is the Holy Saturday of our ordinary life, but there will also be Easter, our true and eternal life. ~Karl Rahner “Holy Saturday” in The Great Church Year
This is the day in between when nothing makes sense: we are lost, hopeless, grieving,aching.
We are brought to our senses by this one Death, this premeditated killing, this senseless act that darkened the skies, shook the earth and tore down the curtained barriers to the Living Eternal God.
The worst has already happened, despite how horrific are the constant tragic events filling our headlines.
Today, this Holy Saturday we are in between, stumbling in the darkness but aware of hints of light, of buds, of life, of promised fruit to come.
The best has already happened; it happened even as we remained oblivious to its impossibility.
We move through this Saturday, doing what is possible even when it feels senseless, even as we feel split apart, torn and sundered.
Tomorrow it will all make sense: our hope brings us face to face with our God who is and was and does the impossible.
This year’s Lenten theme: So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal. 2 Corinthians 4: 18
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