I think I grow tensions like flowers in a wood where nobody goes. Each wound is perfect, encloses itself in a tiny imperceptible blossom, making pain. Pain is a flower like that one, like this one, like that one, like this one. ~Robert Creeley “The Flower”
…forests giving way to open meadow where deep snow lingers and finally relents, uncovering acres of lily — glacier yellow, avalanche white — daylight restaking its earthly claim. Every season swallows someone — ~Kevin Craft from “For the Climbers”
To see a World in a Grain of Sand And a Heaven in a Wild Flower, Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand And Eternity in an hour. ~William Blake from Auguries of Innocence
In early July, up in the alpine meadows of the Cascade mountains grow delicate avalanche lilies pushing through icy crust as the snow melt completes. Though brief in their blooming, they are harbingers of long summer daylight, a reminder the painful darkness of winter is behind us, as well as bound to come again too soon.
I am swallowed by each season.
The lilies, bursting through waning snow, become a bit of heaven on earth. Despite the bleak chill of winter, they fight to rise triumphant each year, an eternal promise of a some-day never-ending summer.
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The night of the Perseid shower, thick fog descended but I would not be denied. I had put the children to bed, knelt with them, and later in the quiet kitchen as tall red candles burned on the table between us, I’d listened to my wife’s sweet imprecations, her entreaties to see a physician. But at the peak hour— after she had gone to bed, and neighboring houses stood solemn and dark— I felt no human obligation and went without hope into the yard. In the white mist beneath the soaked and dripping trees, I lifted my eyes into a blind nothingness of sky and shivered in a white robe. I couldn’t see the outline of the neighbor’s willows, much less the host of streaking meteorites no bigger than grains of sand blazing across the sky. I questioned the mind, my troubled thinking, and chided myself to go in, but looking up, I thought of the earth on which I stood, my own scanty plot of ground, and as the lights passed unseen I imagined glory beyond all measure. Then I turned to the lights in the windows— the children’s nightlights, and my wife’s reading lamp, still burning. ~Richard Jones “The Manifestation”
Perhaps as a child you had the chicken pox and your mother, to soothe you in your fever or to help you fall asleep, came into your room and read to you from some favorite book, Charlotte’s Web or Little House on the Prairie, a long story that she quietly took you through until your eyes became magnets for your shuttering lids and she saw your breathing go slow. And then she read on, this time silently and to herself, not because she didn’t know the story, it seemed to her that there had never been a time when she didn’t know this story—the young girl and her benevolence, the young girl in her sod house— but because she did not yet want to leave your side though she knew there was nothing more she could do for you. And you, not asleep but simply weak, listened to her turn the pages, still feeling the lamp warm against one cheek, knowing the shape of the rocking chair’s shadow as it slid across your chest. So that now, these many years later, when you are clenched in the damp fist of a hospital bed, or signing the papers that say you won’t love him anymore, when you are bent at your son’s gravesite or haunted by a war that makes you wake with the gun cocked in your hand, you would like to believe that such generosity comes from God, too, who now, when you have the strength to ask, might begin the story again, just as your mother would, from the place where you have both left off. ~Keetje Kuipers“Prayer”
Flung is too harsh a word for the rush of the world. Blown is more like it, but blown by a generous, unending breath. ~Annie Dillardfrom Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
How could it be possible?
The five year old me had a sudden terrifying revelation that I would some day cease to walk this earth.
The much older me is more afraid of the faster and faster rush of the days than of their end.
The world hurtles through space and time at a pace that leaves me breathless. Throughout my seventy-plus years, I have felt flung all too frequently, bruised and weary from hurry and hubbub.
I have need of Someone to stop me for a moment, sit down and begin the Story again with me, starting right where we left off.
Now, with retirement from daily work obligations: breathing space. I’m lifted lighter, drifting where I’m blown, less weighted down by the next thing to do and the next place to be.
Instead I can just be… part of the story to be told, part of the wonder. Blown by breath that loves, fills and nurtures, a generous promise hopeful and fulfilled.
I’m grateful for the opportunity to see, even in the dark, a manifestation of glory and love just beyond my vision, praying that one day I will see and know it clearly.
The old me ~ Blown upon.
If only the five year old me could have known.
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These still December mornings… Outside everything’s tinted rose, grape, turquoise, silver–the stones by the path, the skin of the sun
on the pond ice, at the night the aureola of a pregnant moon, like me, iridescent, almost full term with light. ~Luci Shaw from “Advent Visitation“in Accompanied by Angels
Writer Luci Shaw passed into eternity on December 1, just four weeks from her 97th birthday.
A life-long poet and essayist, in addition to being a wife, mother, publisher, gardener and outdoor enthusiast, Luci was a child of God who continually lived out and articulated the questions of faith, grace, and belief.
It is my privilege to have known her as a neighbor in nearby Bellingham. Her books grace my shelves and I cherish her many personal words of encouragement and mentoring.
Luci has gifted the world for decades with beauty and honesty, composing enriching poetic observations with heavenly anticipation. She was nearly full term, iridescent with light which glowed on those around her.
Below is only a small sample of her work. She was still writing and publishing poetry this year. More of her writing and many books can be found at www.lucishaw.com.
Luci Shaw -virtual presentation for Calvin Festival of Faith and Writing 2022
Last night I lay awake and practiced getting old. Not difficult,
but I needed to teach myself to love my destination before I arrive.
I feel the earth shifting under me. My writing hand shakes—its rubbery nudges clumsy,
my mind going slack, the way a day will lose its light and give itself to darkness,
and that long, nocturnal pause of inquiry— What next? And how long before light
reopens her blue eye? And will I need to learn a new language to converse with my Creator?
So, I am a questioner, one who waits, still, to arrive somewhere, some bright nest where
a new language breeds that I can learn to speak, unhindered, into heaven’s air,
somewhere I can live a long time, and never have to look back. ~Luci Shaw “December the 95th Year”
Luci Shaw at a Bellingham reading at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church -2017
In time of drought, let us be thankful for this very gentle rain, a gift not to be disdained though it is little and brief, reaching no great depth, barely kissing the leaves’ lips. Think of it as mercy. Other minor blessings may show up—tweezers for splinters, change for the parking meter, a green light at the intersection, a cool wind that lifts away summer’s suffocating heat. An apology after a harsh comment. A word that opens an unfinished poem like a key in a lock. ~Luci Shaw “Signs” from Eye of the Beholder.
Luci at a Bellingham reading of her poetry at Village Books in 2016
Today, in Bellingham, even the sidewalks gleam. Small change glints from the creases in the lady’s mantle and the hostas after the rain that falls, like grace, unmerited. My pockets are full, spilling over. ~Luci Shaw from “Small Change”
Out of the shame of spittle, the scratch of dirt, he made an anointing.
Oh, it was an agony-the gravel in the eye, the rude slime, the brittle clay caked on the lid.
But with the hurt light came leaping; in the shock and shine, abstracts took flesh and flew;
winged words like view and space, shape and shade and green and sky, bird and horizon and sun,
What next, she wonders, with the angel disappearing, and her room suddenly gone dark.
The loneliness of her news possesses her. She ponders how to tell her mother.
Still, the secret at her heart burns like a sun rising. How to hold it in— that which cannot be contained.
She nestles into herself, half-convinced it was some kind of good dream, she its visionary.
But then, part dazzled, part prescient— she hugs her body, a pod with a seed that will split her. ~Luci Shaw “Mary Considers Her Situation”
When, in the cavern darkness, the child first opened his mouth (even before his eyes widened to see the supple world his lungs had breathed into being), could he have known that breathing trumps seeing? Did he love the way air sighs as it brushes in and out through flesh to sustain the tiny heart’s iambic beating, tramping the crossroads of the brain like donkey tracks, the blood dazzling and invisible, the corpuscles skittering to the earlobes and toenails? Did he have any idea it would take all his breath to speak in stories that would change the world? ~Luci Shaw “Breath” from Accompanied By Angels: Poems of the Incarnation
because we are all betrayers, taking silver and eating body and blood and asking (guilty) is it I and hearing him say yes it would be simple for us all to rush out and hang ourselves but if we find grace to weep and wait after the voice of morning has crowed in our ears clearly enough to break our hearts he will be there to ask us each again do you love me ~Luci Shaw “Judas, Peter” from Polishing the Petoskey Stone
Down he came from up, and in from out, and here from there. A long leap, an incandescent fall from magnificent to naked, frail, small, through space, between stars, into our chill night air, shrunk, in infant grace, to our damp, cramped earthy place among all the shivering sheep.
And now, after all, there he lies, fast asleep. ~Luci Shaw “Descent” from Accompanied By Angels
Blue homespun and the bend of my breast keep warm this small hot naked star fallen to my arms. (Rest … you who have had so far to come.) Now nearness satisfies the body of God sweetly. Quiet he lies whose vigor hurled a universe. He sleeps whose eyelids have not closed before. His breath (so slight it seems no breath at all) once ruffled the dark deeps to sprout a world. Charmed by doves’ voices, the whisper of straw, he dreams, hearing no music from his other spheres. Breath, mouth, ears, eyes he is curtailed who overflowed all skies, all years. Older than eternity, now he is new. Now native to earth as I am, nailed to my poor planet, caught that I might be free, blind in my womb to know my darkness ended, brought to this birth for me to be new-born, and for him to see me mended I must see him torn. ~Luci Shaw “Mary’s Song”
My 2025 Advent theme: On the threshold between day and night
On that day there will be neither sunlight nor cold, frosty darkness. It will be a unique day—a day known only to the Lord— with no distinction between day and night. When evening comes, there will be light. Zechariah 14:6-7
So once in Israel love came to us incarnate, stood in the doorway between two worlds, and we were all afraid. ~Annie Dillard in Teaching a Stone to Talk
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We all know that something is eternal. And it ain’t houses and it ain’t names, and it ain’t earth, and it ain’t even the stars . . . everybody knows in their bones that something is eternal, and that something has to do with human beings. All the greatest people ever lived have been telling us that for five thousand years and yet you’d be surprised how people are always losing hold of it. There’s something way down deep that’s eternal about every human being. We can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasures. Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it – every, every minute? ~Thornton Wilder, quotes from “Our Town”
The words from the stage play “Our Town”, written nearly 90 years ago still ring true: at that time our country was crushed under the Great Depression. Though now most people are more economically secure than the 1930’s, many of us are emotionally bankrupt.
Our country staggers under a Great Depression of the spirit~ despite greater connection electronically (often too much…), many of us are more isolated from community, family, and faith.
We need reminding to be conscious of our many treasures and abundance, never forgetting to care of others in greater need.
God, in His everlasting recognition of our eternal need of Him, cares for us, even as we turn our faces away from Him.
We all feel His Love, deep in our bones.
So I search the soil of this life, this farm, this faith to find what yearns to grow, to bloom, to fruit, to be harvested to share with others.
My deep gratitude goes to you who visit here and to those who let me know the small and the good I share with you makes a difference in your day. I am beyond thankful you are here, listening.
Many blessings in your own thanksgiving this week, Emily
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I wonder if, in the dark night of the sea, the octopus dreams of me. ~N. Scott Momaday
photo by Nate Gibson
If I am brutally honest with myself after my recent cardiac brush with my mortality, one of my worst fears is to have lived on this earth for a handful of decades and then pass away forgotten, inconsequential, having left behind no legacy of significance whatsoever.
I’m well aware it is self-absorbed to feel the need to leave a mark, but a search for purpose and meaning lasting beyond my time here provides new momentum for each day. The forgetting can happen so fast.
Most people know little about their great-great-grandparents, if they even know their names. A mere four generations, a century, renders us dust, not just in flesh, but in memory as well. There may be a yellowed photograph in a box somewhere, perhaps a tattered postcard or letter written in elegant script, but the essence of this person is long lost and forgotten.
We owe it to our descendants to write down the stories about who we were while we lived on this earth. We need to share why we lived, for whom we lived, for what we lived.
I suspect, although I try every day to record some part of who I am, it will be no different with me and those who come after me. Whether or not we are remembered by great-great grandchildren or become part of the dreams of creatures in the depths of the seas:
we are just dust here and there is no changing that.
Good thing this is not our only home. Good thing we are more than mere memory and dreams. Good thing the river of life flows into an eternity that transcends good works or long memories or legacies left behind. Good thing we are loved that much and always will be. You see, we are alive, we are alive, forever and ever, Amen.
I remember your lectures, Professor Scott Momaday, now nearly two years after you passed from this earth at age 89 – your voice, your stories and your poetry live on.
You are alive. You are alive…
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Side by side, their faces blurred, The earl and countess lie in stone, Their proper habits vaguely shown As jointed armour, stiffened pleat, And that faint hint of the absurd— The little dogs under their feet.
Such plainness of the pre-baroque Hardly involves the eye, until It meets his left-hand gauntlet, still Clasped empty in the other; and One sees, with a sharp tender shock, His hand withdrawn, holding her hand.
They would not think to lie so long. Such faithfulness in effigy Was just a detail friends would see: A sculptor’s sweet commissioned grace Thrown off in helping to prolong The Latin names around the base.
They would not guess how early in Their supine stationary voyage The air would change to soundless damage, Turn the old tenantry away; How soon succeeding eyes begin To look, not read. Rigidly they
Persisted, linked, through lengths and breadths Of time. Snow fell, undated. Light Each summer thronged the glass. A bright Litter of birdcalls strewed the same Bone-riddled ground. And up the paths The endless altered people came,
Washing at their identity. Now, helpless in the hollow of An unarmorial age, a trough Of smoke in slow suspended skeins Above their scrap of history, Only an attitude remains:
Time has transfigured them into Untruth. The stone fidelity They hardly meant has come to be Their final blazon, and to prove Our almost-instinct almost true: What will survive of us is love. ~Philip Larkin “An Arundel Tomb”
You can’t tell when strange things with meaning will happen. I’m [still] here writing it down just the way it was.
“You don’t have to prove anything,” my mother said. “Just be ready for what God sends.” I listened and put my hand out in the sun again.
We wake each morning, not knowing what to expect of the day. So much sadness, the news of suffering, of unimaginable tragedies.
How do we ready ourselves for what is sent for us to endure?
This is how: right now, there is morning, there is noon, there is evening. And there will always be Love as we sleep and as we wake. God holds our hand to keep us from getting lost.
Lyrics by Arthur Sullivan: No star is o’er the lake, its pale watch keeping, The moon is half awake, through grey mist creeping. The last red leaves fall round the porch of roses, The clock has ceased to sound. The long day closes.
Sit by the silent hearth in calm endeavour, To count the sound of mirth, now dumb forever. Heed not how hope believes and fate disposes: Shadow is round the eaves. The long day closes.
The lighted windows dim are fading slowly. The fire that was so trim now quivers lowly. Go to the dreamless bed where grief reposes. Thy book of toil is read. The long day closes.
As long as that woman from the Rijksmuseum in painted quiet and concentration keeps pouring milk day after day from the pitcher to the bowl the World hasn’t earned the world’s end. ~Wislawa Szymborska “Vermeer” tr. by Claire Cavanagh and Stanislaw Baranczak from Here
Vermeer’s “The Milkmaid” from the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
As ever, the sun rises and the sun sets, day after day. God continues to pour out His colors across the skies.
God loves us enough to plant each of us here with a plan for our redemption.
We don’t know how much longer.
Today we wave flags, some in a show of power, some in a show of gratitude, some in a show of discontent.
Instead, I pour milk as a daily sacrament: quietly, with great concentration and appreciation, as that is the work I must do, day after day.
To milk the cows and raise wheat for bread and conceive children and raise them up to pour and bake.
This is God’s created world, after all. We must do our best to restore and preserve all that He has made.
So keep milking and keep pouring.
AI image created for this post
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It was beautiful as God must be beautiful: glacial eyes that had looked on violence and come to terms with it; a body too huge and majestic for the cage in which it had been put; up and down in the shadow of its own bulk it went lifting, as it turned, the crumpled flower of its face to look into my own face without seeing me. It was the colour of the moonlight on snow and as quiet as moonlight, but breathing as you can imagine that God breaths within the confines of our definition of him, agonizing over immensities that will not return. ~R.S. Thomas “The White Tiger”
There are nights that are so still that I can hear the small owl calling far off and a fox barking miles away. It is then that I lie in the lean hours awake listening to the swell born somewhere in the Atlantic rising and falling, rising and falling wave on wave on the long shore by the village that is without light and companionless. And the thought comes of that other being who is awake, too, letting our prayers break on him, not like this for a few hours, but for days, years, for eternity. ~R.S.Thomas “The Other”
Angels, where you soar Up to God’s own light, Take my own lost bird On your hearts tonight; And as grief once more Mounts to heaven and sings, Let my love be heard Whispering in your wings. ~Alfred Noyes “A Prayer”
We confine and cage our concept of God, trying to understand His power and beauty within our limited world. He tells us what He is capable of, yet we diminish His immensity to only what we are able to fathom.
He is an eternal mystery, allowing our beseeching prayers to break over Him again and again and again.
Our grief is carried on wings to God, our prayers desperate for His breath and comfort.
Let our love be heard, let our love be heard, let our love be heard –always and forever.
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Rain. An excuse to stand at the window And listen, watch, wait. Listen: to the hush Of the house as still as a dark burrow Where an animal hides. Listen: the rush Of occasional gusts, then the stillness.
Watch: the wrens hopping from stem to wet stem Their happy bearing in contrast to titmice Who always seem afraid. Watch: the mayhem That strikes when the grumpy bluejay, twice As big as the rest, frumps onto a branch.
Wait: for what? For the steady rain to cease. Wait: for the fair sunlight to avalanche Down from space and remake the world again. Then let my steps be fearless, like the wren. ~Andrew Peterson “Lenten Sonnet”
I’m the child of rainy Sundays. I watched time crawl Like an injured fly Over the wet windowpane. Or waited for a branch On a tree to stop shaking, While Grandmother knitted Making a ball of yarn Roll over like a kitten at her feet. I knew every clock in the house Had stopped ticking And that this day will last forever. ~Charles Simic “To Boredom”
I’m never bored on a quiet rainy Sunday.
My list of to-do’s and want-to-do’s and hope-to-do’s and someday-maybe-if-I’m-lucky-to-do’s is longer than the days still left to me.
I cherish these Sabbaths when the clock stops, and “to-do’s” will wait. Time suspends itself above me, ~dangling~ and the day lasts forever.
Sunday evening scaries in anticipation of Monday are prayed away.
On a drizzly day of rest and gratitude, the world is remade, eternity moves a little closer, my steps become more fearless and the new week is yet another part of the journey.
Does the rain have a father? Who fathers the drops of dew? Job 38:28
This Lenten season I reflect on the words of the 19th century southern spiritual hymn “What Wondrous Love is This”
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We all know that something is eternal. And it ain’t houses and it ain’t names, and it ain’t earth, and it ain’t even the stars . . . everybody knows in their bones that something is eternal, and that something has to do with human beings. All the greatest people ever lived have been telling us that for five thousand years and yet you’d be surprised how people are always losing hold of it. There’s something way down deep that’s eternal about every human being. ~Thornton Wilder, from “Our Town”
Love bade me welcome. Yet my soul drew back Guilty of dust and sin. But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack From my first entrance in, Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning, If I lacked any thing.
A guest, I answered, worthy to be here: Love said, You shall be he. I the unkind, ungrateful? Ah my dear, I cannot look on thee. Love took my hand, and smiling did reply, Who made the eyes but I?
Truth Lord, but I have marred them: let my shame Go where it doth deserve. And know you not, says Love, who bore the blame? My dear, then I will serve. You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat: So I did sit and eat. ~George Herbert “Love III”
Write as if you were dying. At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. That is, after all, the case. ~Annie Dillard from “Write Till You Drop”
I began to write regularly after September 11, 2001 because more than on any previous day, it became obvious to me I was dying, though more slowly than the thousands who vanished that day in fire and ash, their voices obliterated with their bodies into eternity.
Nearly each day since, while I still have voice and a new dawn to greet, I speak through my fingers to others dying with and around me.
We are, after all, terminal patients — some of us more prepared than others to move on — as if our readiness had anything to do with the timing.
Each day I get a little closer to the eternal, but I write in order to feel a little more ready. Each day I want to detach just a little bit, leaving a trace of my voice behind. Eventually, through unmerited grace, so much of me will be left on the page there won’t be anything or anyone left to do the typing.
There is no time or word to waste.
Listen, I tell you a mystery: We will not all sleep, but we will all be changed—in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. 1 Corinthians 15: 51-52
This Lenten season I reflect on the words of the 19th century southern spiritual hymn “What Wondrous Love is This”
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