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
Our faith,
refreshed in the light of morning,
can evaporate in the dry stress of the day.
May we turn our faces up
each night, asking to be washed
in the mist of God’s dew,
our anxiety settled like dust.
Someone spoke to me last night,
told me the truth. Just a few words,
but I recognized it.
I knew I should make myself get up,
write it down, but it was late,
and I was exhausted from working
all day in the garden, moving rocks.
Now I remember only the flavor –
not like food, sweet or sharp.
More like a fine powder, like dust.
And I wasn’t elated or frightened,
but simply rapt, aware.
That’s how it is sometimes –
God comes to your window,
all bright light and black wings,
and you’re just too tired to open it.
~Dorianne Laux “Dust”
…I only know that a rook
Ordering its black feathers can so shine
As to seize my senses, haul
My eyelids up, and grant
A brief respite from fear
Of total neutrality. With luck,
Trekking stubborn through this season
Of fatigue, I shall
Patch together a content
Of sorts. Miracles occur,
If you care to call those spasmodic
Tricks of radiance miracles. The wait’s begun again,
The long wait for the angel.
For that rare, random descent.
~Sylvia Plath from “Black Rook in Rainy Weather”
…it is no trick of radiance
nor is it random.
This descent to us,
planned and very real:
He seizes us and does not let go
even when we are too tired
to open to Him.
He makes it impossible to be neutral.
We wait,
this long wait of moving rocks;
tired of waiting,
seeking contentment while waiting
rapt,
aware,
weary,
awake.
Only six months ago
on a winter morning
waking dark to part
From your warm side,
leaving behind my soft imprint,
I wrapped up in robe
to walk the gravel drive
for the newspaper.
Our hilltop farm
lies silent amid fallow fields
moon shadows
broad across my path
star sparks overhead
tree lined yard shields
the house from road.
In ink of early morning
I walk noiseless;
step out to the mailbox
then turn~ startled~
a flashlight approaching on the road-
an early walker and his dog
illuminate me in dawn disarray
like a deer in headlights:
my ruffled hair, my sleep-lined face
uncovered in the darkness:
exposed.
Today this summer morning
wakes me early to streaming light
poured out on quilt and blankets.
I part from your warmth again
readied for this ritual walk.
Dew sparkling below
rich foliage above
road stretches empty
for miles east and west
Crossing the road
I reach for the paper
suddenly surrounded by
a bovine audience
appreciative and nodding
riveted by my bold approach
in broad daylight.
They abruptly scatter, tails in the air
when in rumpled robe and woolen slippers
I dance and twirl, illuminated
in hilltop celebration of such
an ordinary life
and extraordinary love
exposed.
“A devout but highly imaginative Jesuit,”
Untermeyer says in my yellowed
college omnibus of modern poets,
perhaps intending an oxymoron, but is it?
Shook foil, sharp rivers start to flow.
Landscape plotted and pieced, gray-blue, snow-pocked
begins to show its margins. Speeding back
down the interstate into my own hills
I see them fickle, freckled, mounded fully
and softened by millennia into pillows.
The priest’s sprung metronome tick-tocks,
repeating how old winter is. It asks
each mile, snow fog battening the valleys,
what is all this juice and all this joy?
~Maxine Kumin “Almost Spring, Driving Home, Reciting Hopkins”
These summer mornings I awake in a Hopkins landscape~
the priest who died too young at 44
would have created even more beauty
if he had lived twice as long,
combining words in suspended rhythm,
recreating the world outside our windows
entirely in our minds.
What is this joy I feel when witnessing
what must have moved him to write?
What could be more powerful
than words that awaken in us dawn’s redeeming light?
We find by losing.
We hold fast by letting go.
We become something new by ceasing to be something old.
This seems to be close to the heart of that mystery.
I know no more now than I ever did about the far side of death as the last letting-go of all,
but I begin to know that I do not need to know and that I do not need to be afraid of not knowing.
God knows.
That is all that matters.
Out of Nothing he creates Something.
Out of the End he creates the Beginning.
Out of selfness we grow, by his grace, toward selflessness,
and out of that final selflessness,
which is the loss of self altogether,
“eye hath not seen nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man”
what new marvels he will bring to pass next.
All’s lost.
All’s found.
And if such words sound childish, so be it.
Out of each old self that dies
some precious essence is preserved for the new self that is born;
and with in the child-self that is part of us all,
there is perhaps nothing more precious than the fathomless capacity to trust.
~Frederick Buechner – Originally published in A Room Called Remember
With a blue line of mountains north of the wall,
And east of the city a white curve of water,
Here you must leave me and drift away
Like a loosened water-plant hundreds of miles….
I shall think of you in a floating cloud;
So in the sunset think of me.
…We wave our hands to say good-bye,
And my horse is neighing again and again.
~Li Po “A Farewell to a Friend”
The last six months of documenting frozen to budding to blossoming to fruiting:
so may it be from the soil and from the heart.
For more “Best of Barnstorming” photos:
Seasons on the Farm:
BriarCroft in Summer, in Autumn, in Winter,
at Year’s End
It’s a hard time to be human. We know too much
and too little. Does the breeze need us?
The cliffs? The gulls?
If you’ve managed to do one good thing,
the ocean doesn’t care.
But when Newton’s apple fell toward the earth,
the earth, ever so slightly, fell
toward the apple as well.
~Ellen Bass from “The World Has Need of You”
God speaks to each of us as he makes us,
then walks with us silently out of the night.
These are the words we dimly hear:
You, sent out beyond your recall,
go to the limits of your longing.
Embody me.
Flare up like a flame
and make big shadows I can move in.
Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Don’t let yourself lose me.
Nearby is the country they call life.
You will know it by its seriousness.
Give me your hand.
~Rainer Maria Rilke from “Book of Hours”
For too much of my life I have focused on the future, bypassing the present. There is always a goal to achieve, a conclusion becoming commencement of the next phase, a sunset turning right around in a few hours to become sunrise.
When the present is so hard, so overwhelming, so riveting, so tenderly full of life or achingly full of death, I grab hold with all my strength to try and secret it away and keep it forever. Even if it slips away from me, elusive and evasive, torn to bits by the unrelenting and devastating movement of time, I have felt the earth move, ever so slightly, toward me.
So, whether out of joy or pain, I must write to harvest those times to make them last a little bit longer. Maybe not forever; they will be lost downstream into the ether of unread words.
Even if unread, I am learning that words, which had the power in the beginning to create all life, can bring tenderness and meaning back to my life. I embody Him.
How blessed to live the gift twice: not just in the moment itself but in writing words that preserve and treasure it all up.
It is easy enough to write and talk about God
while remaining comfortable
within the contemporary intellectual climate.
Even people who would call themselves unbelievers
often use the word gesturally,
as a ready-made synonym for mystery.
But if nature abhors a vacuum,
Christ abhors a vagueness.
If God is love,
Christ is love
for this one person,
this one place,
this one time-bound and
time-ravaged self.
~Christian Wiman from My Bright Abyss
Well aware of all I am not,
my shortcomings and failings,
my temptation to deny self-denial,
my inability to see beyond my own troubles,
forgetting this life is not all about me:
~neglecting to witness first hand
all that God through Christ is:
the beauty in His becoming man,
the joy of His joining up with us,
the love in His gracious sacrifice,
the full promise of His Word that breathes
life back into my dying soul~
and so it becomes all about me
not because of
what I’ve done,
or who I am,
but because of
who He is and was and will be:
He loves me,
this time-bound and time-ravaged me,
no matter what.
Here is the mystery, the secret, one might almost say the cunning, of the deep love of God: that it is bound to draw on to itself the hatred and pain and shame and anger and bitterness and rejection of the world, but to draw all those things on to itself is precisely the means, chosen from all eternity by the generous, loving God, by which to rid his world of the evils which have resulted from human abuse of God-given freedom.
~N.T. Wright
God has paid us the intolerable compliment of loving us, in the deepest, most tragic, most inexorable sense.
C.S. Lewis
Life is grace.
Sleep is forgiveness.
The night absolves.
Darkness wipes the slate clean,
not spotless to be sure,
but clean enough for another day’s chalking.
~Frederick Buechner
Today
is the tomorrow
hoped for last night,
a clean slate on which to
leave a mark on a new day
after night’s erasing rest.
No matter what took place the day before,
no matter the misgivings,
no matter what should have been left unsaid,
no matter how hard the heart,
there is another day to make it right.
Forgiveness finds a foothold in the dark,
when eyelids close and leak,
thoughts quietly crack open,
voices hush in prayers
of praise, petition and gratitude.
And so now
sleep on it
knowing his grace
abounds in blameless dreams.
Morning will come
awash in new light,
another chance
freely given.
Our memories are, at best, so limited, so finite, that it is impossible for us to envisage an unlimited, infinite memory, the memory of God. It is something I want to believe in: that no atom of creation is ever forgotten by him; always is; cared for; developing; loved.
~Madeleine L’Engle from The Summer of the Great-Grandmother
He of strength and hope
loves and knows us down to our atoms ~~
the weak, the broken, the undeserving.
His infinite memory causes us to burst into bloom.
Barnstorming 