Tag: Dogwood

The Annual Dogwood Miracle

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dogwood20184

After all, I don’t see why I am always asking
for private, individual, selfish miracles
when every year there are miracles like … dogwood.
~Anne Morrow Lindbergh

foldeddogwood

It began last week. The tree right next to our front porch, having looked dormant for the past six months, started to bud out in subtle pink-petalled blossoms.

Through the winter, there had been nothing remarkable whatsoever about this tree. Now it is a feast for the eyes, almost blinding in its brilliance.

Each year the dogwood startles me awake. From dead to brilliant in a mere two weeks. And not only our tree, but every other pink dogwood within a twenty mile radius has answered the same late April/early May siren call:
bloom!
bloom your heart out!
dazzle every retina in sight!

And it is done simultaneously on every tree, all the same day, without a sound, without an obvious signal, as if an invisible conductor had swooped a baton up and in the downbeat everything turned pink.

Or perhaps the baton is really a wand, shooting out pink stars to paint these otherwise plain and humble trees, so inconspicuous the rest of the year.

Ordinarily I don’t dress up in finery like these trees do.  I prefer inconspicuous earth tones for myself. But I love the celebratory joy of those trees in full blossom and enjoy looking for them in yards and parks and along roadways.

Maybe there is something pink in my closet I can wear. Maybe conspicuously miraculous every once in awhile is exactly what is needed.

Then again, it is best to leave the miracles to the trees…

dogwood42816
dogwoodweb
dogwoodsunset2
pinkdogbloom

If you stand in an orchard
In the middle of Spring
and you don’t make a sound
you can hear pink sing,
a darling, whispery song of a thing.
~Mary O’Neill from Hailstones and Halibut Bones “Pink”

dogwood517
sunsetdogwood
pinkdogbloom2

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The Sunrise Shall Visit Us: Draw Light From Shadow

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As once a Child was planted in a womb
(and later, erected on a hill, a wooden cross)
one year we dug a hole to plant a tree.
Our choice, a Cornus Kousa with its fine,
pink, four-petaled bracts, each curving lip
touched with a red as deep as human blood.
It rooted well, and every year it grows
more glorious, bursting free in Spring—bud
into full flower, flame-colored, flushed as wine.
Even the slim sapling’s roughened bark
speaks of that tree, nail-pierced and dark.
Now, each new year, fresh blossoms shine
radiant, and each cross-blessed,
as if all love and loveliness has been compressed
into a flower’s face, fresh as the Son’s
new-born presence, a life only just begun.

The dogwood leaves turn iron red in Fall,
their centers fully ripening—into small seeded balls,
each one a fruit vivid as Mary’s love, and edible.
The sciontree, once sprung from Jesse’s root,
speaks pain and life and love compressed
and taken in, eye, mouth, heart. Incredible
that now all Eucharists in our year suggest
the living Jesus is our Christmas guest.
~Luci Shaw “Dogwood Tree” from Eye of the Beholder

Tree, we take leave of you; you’re on your own.
Put down your taproot with its probing hairs
that sluice the darkness and create unseen
the tree that mirrors you below the ground.
For when we plant a tree, two trees take root:
the one that lifts its leaves into the air,
and the inverted one that cleaves the soil
to find the runnel’s sweet, dull silver trace
and spreads not up but down, each drop a leaf
in the eternal blackness of that sky.
The leaves you show uncurl like tiny fists
and bear small button blossoms, greenish white,
that quicken you. Now put your roots down deep;
draw light from shadow, break in on earth’s sleep.
~Roy Scheele “Planting a Dogwood”

For every leaf and blossom unfolding to the Light above, there is a root with tendrils surging deep to conquer the underground darkness.

Christ is born as our deep root of salvation.

He nourishes so we might flourish;
we bloom because of Light drawn from shadow.

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

Light beyond shadow,
Joy beyond tears,
Love that is greater when darkest our fears;
deeper the Peace when the storm is around,
nearer the Hope to the lost who is found.

Light of the world, ever shining, shining!
Hope in our pain and our dying.
in our darkness, there is Light,
in our crying, there is Love,
in the noise of life imparting
Peace
that passes understanding.

Light beyond shadow,
Joy beyond tears,
Love that is greater when darkest our fears;
deeper the Peace when the storm is around,
nearer the Hope to the lost who is found.
-Paul Wigmore

My love and tender one are you
My sweet and lovely son are you
You are my love and darling you
Unworthy, I of you

Haleluia, haleluia, haleluia, haleluia.

Your mild and gentle eyes proclaim
The loving heart with which you came
A tiny tender hapless bairn
With boundless grace of face

Haleluia, haleluia, haleluia, haleluia.

King of Kings, most holy one
Gone the sun eternal one
You are my god and helpless son
High ruler of mankind

Haleluia, haleluia, haleluia, haleluia.

My love and tender one are you
My sweet and lovely son are you
You are my love and darling you
Unworthy, I of you

Haleluia, haleluia, haleluia, haleluia.
~Traditional Gaelic carol Taladh Chriosda (Christ Child Lullaby) from the Hebrides

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Undivided Wonders

barnstormingblog1 Comment

One grief, all evening—: I’ve stumbled
upon another animal merely being
             itself and still cuffing me to grace.

             This time a bumblebee, black and staggered
above some wet sidewalk litter. When I stop
             at what I think is dying

             to deny loneliness one more triumph,
I see instead a thing drunk
           with discovery—the bee entangled

            with blossom after pale, rain-dropped blossom
gathered beneath a dogwood. And suddenly
             I receive the cold curves and severe angles

             from this morning’s difficult dreams
about faith:—certain as light, arriving; certain
            as light, dimming to another shadowed wait.

            How many strokes of undivided wonder
will have me cross the next border,
            my hands emptied of questions?
~Geffrey Davis “West Virginia Nocturne”

Faith steals upon you like dew:
some days you wake and it is there.
And like dew, it gets burned off 
in the rising sun of anxieties,
ambitions, distractions.
~Christian Wiman from My Bright Abyss

My faith,
refreshed in the light, through the moisture of morning,
evaporates in the drying stress of the day.
May I turn my face to the heavens
each night, ask to be washed
in the mist of God’s renewing dew,
my worries settling like dust,
my wrestle with questions soothed,
my wonder expansive as the skies.

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Where the Joy Came In

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Incurable and unbelieving
in any truth but the truth of grieving,
I saw a tree inside a tree
rise kaleidoscopically
as if the leaves had livelier ghosts.

I pressed my face as close
to the pane as I could get
to watch that fitful, fluent spirit
that seemed a single being undefined
or countless beings of one mind
haul its strange cohesion
beyond the limits of my vision
over the house heavenwards.

Of course I knew those leaves were birds.

Of course that old tree stood
exactly as it had and would
(but why should it seem fuller now?)
and though a man’s mind might endow
even a tree with some excess
of life to which a man seems witness,
that life is not the life of men.
And that is where the joy came in.
~Christian Wiman, “From a Window” from Every Riven Thing. 

Coming to Christianity is like color slowly aching into things, the world becoming brilliantly, abradingly alive. “Joy is the overflowing consciousness of reality,” Simone Weil writes, and that’s what I had, a joy that was at once so overflowing that it enlarged existence, and yet so rooted in actual things that, again for the first time, that’s what I began to feel: rootedness.
~Christian Wiman “Gazing Into the Abyss”

Nothing is to be taken for granted.  Nothing remains as it was.

Like this old pink dogwood tree, I now lean over more,
I have a few bare branches with no leaves,
I have my share of broken limbs,
I have my share of blight and curl.

Yet each stage and transition of life has its own beauty: 
bursting forth with leaves and blooms
after a long winter of nakedness adorned
only by feathered friends destined to fly away.

Color has literally seeped in overnight,
resulting in a riot of joy.

Yet what matters most is what grows unseen,
underground, in a network that feeds and thrives
no matter what happens above ground,
steadfast roots of faith remain a reason to believe.

Nothing is to be taken for granted.  Nothing remains as it was.
Especially me. Oh, and especially me.

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A Life Only Just Begun

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As once a Child was planted in a womb
(and later, erected on a hill, a wooden cross)
one year we dug a hole to plant a tree.
Our choice, a Cornus Kousa with its fine,
pink, four-petaled bracts, each curving lip
touched with a red as deep as human blood.
It rooted well, and every year it grows
more glorious, bursting free in Spring—bud
into full flower, flame-colored, flushed as wine.
Even the slim sapling’s roughened bark
speaks of that tree, nail-pierced and dark.
Now, each new year, fresh blossoms shine
radiant, and each cross-blessed,
as if all love and loveliness has been compressed
into a flower’s face, fresh as the Son’s
new-born presence, a life only just begun.

The dogwood leaves turn iron red in Fall,
their centers fully ripening—into small seeded balls,
each one a fruit vivid as Mary’s love, and edible.
The sciontree, once sprung from Jesse’s root,
speaks pain and life and love compressed
and taken in, eye, mouth, heart. Incredible
that now all Eucharists in our year suggest
the living Jesus is our Christmas guest.
~Luci Shaw “Dogwood Tree” from Eye of the Beholder

God is in the manger, wealth in poverty,
light in darkness, succor in abandonment.
No evil can befall us;
whatever men may do to us,
they cannot but serve the God
who is secretly revealed as love
and rules the world and our lives.
— Dietrich Bonhoeffer from God Is in the Manger

I ponder the paradox of Christ, the Son of God,
coming to the world through the womb of a woman,
born homeless in order to bring us home with Him.

The uncontainable contained
the infinite made finite
the Deliverer delivered
the Eternal dwelling here and now
already but not yet.

As only one child of many of the
Very God of Very God,
(He is and was and always will be)
I am cross-blessed to realize
my life feels fresh-born – only just begun –
yet we all have been known to the Creator
from the start of time.

(If you are interested in hearing an old old story about the dogwood tree in song, and you don’t mind old-timey honky-tonk music, there is this….)

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Remaining As I Was

barnstormingblog1 Comment

Our final dogwood leans
over the forest floor

offering berries
to the birds, the squirrels.

It’s a relic
of the days when dogwoods

flourished—creamy lace in April,
spilled milk in May—

their beauty delicate
but commonplace.

When I took for granted
that the world would remain

as it was, and I
would remain with it.
~Linda Pastan “Elegy”

The inevitable change of the seasons, as portrayed by the branches of our aging pink dogwood tree, is a reminder nothing stays the same.

Like this old tree, I lean over more, I have a few bare branches with no leaves, I have my share of broken limbs, I have my share of blight and curl.

Yet each stage and transition has its own beauty: 
a breathtaking depth of color flourishes on what once was bare.

Nothing is to be taken for granted.  Nothing remains as it was.

Especially me. Oh, especially me.

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The Fragility of the Flower Unbruised

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It is at the edge of a petal that love waits.

The fragility of the flower 
unbruised 
penetrates space
~William Carlos Williams from Spring and All (1923)

It is common to look for love only inside the heart of things, pulsing front and center as both showpiece and show off.    We think of love reverberating from deep within, loud enough for all the world to hear and know it is so.

But as I advance on life’s road, I have found the love that matters lies quietly waiting at the periphery of our hearts, so fragile and easily torn as a petal, often drenched in tears –  clinging to the edges of our lives and barely holding on through storms and trials.

This love remains ever-present , both protects and cherishes, fed by fine little veins which branch out from the center of the universe to the tender margins of infinity.

It is on that delicate edge of forever we dwell, our thirst waiting to be slaked and we stand ready, trembling with anticipation.

A Christmas Paradox: Fresh Born and Cross-Blessed

barnstormingblog3 Comments

foldeddogwood

 

 

pinkdogwoodbudding

 

 

pinkdogwood517

 

babydogwood

 

As once a Child was planted in a womb
(and later, erected on a hill, a wooden cross)
one year we dug a hole to plant a tree.
Our choice, a Cornus Kousa with its fine,
pink, four-petaled bracts, each curving lip
touched with a red as deep as human blood.
It rooted well, and every year it grows
more glorious, bursting free in Spring—bud
into full flower, flame-colored, flushed as wine.
Even the slim sapling’s roughened bark
speaks of that tree, nail-pierced and dark.
Now, each new year, fresh blossoms shine
radiant, and each cross-blessed,
as if all love and loveliness has been compressed
into a flower’s face, fresh as the Son’s
new-born presence, a life only just begun.

The dogwood leaves turn iron red in Fall,
their centers fully ripening—into small seeded balls,
each one a fruit vivid as Mary’s love, and edible.
The sciontree, once sprung from Jesse’s root,
speaks pain and life and love compressed
and taken in, eye, mouth, heart. Incredible
that now all Eucharists in our year suggest
the living Jesus is our Christmas guest.
~Luci Shaw “Dogwood Tree” from Eye of the Beholder

 

pinkdogwood20188

 

dogwood42315

 

God is in the manger, wealth in poverty, light in darkness, succor in abandonment.
No evil can befall us; whatever men may do to us, they cannot but serve the God who is secretly revealed as love and rules the world and our lives.
— Dietrich Bonhoeffer from God Is in the Manger

 

 

dogwoodrain17

 

Today we celebrate the paradox of Christ, the Son of God, coming to the world through the womb of a woman, born homeless in order to bring us home with Him.

The uncontainable contained
the infinite made finite
the Deliverer delivered
the Eternal dwelling here and now,
already here but not yet.

We, the children of the Very God of Very God,
are cross-blessed to know He is found, fresh-born, beside us.
We have only to look, listen and taste.

 

iceddogwood

 

octoberdogwood

 

dogwoodnovember2

 

dogwoodsunset2

 

dogwoodsept

 

silverthawdogwood

 

tireddogwood

Remain As We Are

barnstormingblog4 Comments

dogwood16
autumn

 

 

pinkdogwood20188
spring

 

 

dogwoodsept
summer

 

 

 

silverthawdogwood
winter

 

 

Our final dogwood leans
over the forest floor

offering berries
to the birds, the squirrels.

It’s a relic
of the days when dogwoods

flourished—creamy lace in April,
spilled milk in May—

their beauty delicate
but commonplace.

When I took for granted
that the world would remain

as it was, and I
would remain with it.
~Linda Pastan “Elegy”

 

 

dogwood20184

 

 

pinkdogwood517

 

dogwood3_

 

 

babydogwood

 

 

The inevitable change of the seasons, as portrayed by the branches of our aging pink dogwood tree, is a reminder nothing stays the same.

Like this old tree, I lean over more, I have a few bare branches with no leaves, I have my share of broken limbs, I have my share of blight and curl.

Yet each stage and transition has its own beauty:  a breathtaking depth of color flourishes on what once was bare.

Nothing is to be taken for granted.  Nothing remains as it was.

Especially me.  Oh, especially me.

 

 

foldeddogwood

 

 

dogwoodoct4

 

 

drencheddogwood

 

 

decdogwood

Pink Synchrony

barnstormingblog2 Comments

dogwood3_

pinkfrombelow

After all, I don’t see why I am always asking for private, individual, selfish miracles when every year there are miracles like <white> dogwood.   (I insert pink here)
~Anne Morrow Lindbergh

It started this weekend.  The dogwood tree right in front of our porch, having looked pretty much dead to the world since October, started to bud out in subtle pink petaled blossoms. Last week there had been nothing remarkable whatsoever about the tree.

Suddenly it is a feast for the eyes, almost blinding in its brilliance.

Each year the old dogwood startles me.  From dead to brilliant in a mere two weeks.  And not only our tree, but every other pink dogwood within a twenty mile radius has answered the same April siren call: bloom!  bloom your heart out!  dazzle every retina in sight!

And it is done simultaneously on every tree, all the same day, without a sound, without an obvious signal, as if an invisible conductor had swooped a baton up and in the downbeat everything turned pink.  Or perhaps the baton is really a wand, shooting out pink stars to paint these otherwise plain and humble trees, so inconspicuous the rest of the year.

Ordinarily I don’t dress up in finery like these trees do.  I prefer inconspicuous myself.  But I love the celebratory joy of those trees in full blossom and enjoy looking for them in yards and parks and along sidewalks.

Maybe there is something pink in my closet I can wear.  Maybe conspicuous every once in awhile is exactly what is needed.

 

dogwoodsunset2