The world is charged with the grandeur of God. It will flame out, like shining from shook foil; It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod? Generations have trod, have trod, have trod; And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil; And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
And for all this, nature is never spent; There lives the dearest freshness deep down things; And though the last lights off the black West went Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs Because the Holy Ghost over the bent World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings. ~Gerard Manley Hopkins “God’s Grandeur”
Whom thou conceivst, conceived; yea thou art now Thy Maker’s maker, and thy Father’s mother; Thou hast light in dark, and shutst in little room, Immensity cloistered in thy dear womb. ~John Donne from “Annunciation”
I know this sound, first birds of morning. As a child, I waited for hours for the drape of night to roll up again. Leaning into the first hint of the fresh day, the fragile lace of hesitant light, the receding darkness dappled with bird song, able at last to close my eyes. I know this sound, some kind of redemption, waking me from scattered sleep, a healing fragment even as the work of the previous day marks my bones in notches. Night leaves its small fur as the dawn pushes, as the birds persist, and morning unfurls like a promise you hoped someone would keep. ~Susan Moorhead “First Light” from Carry Darkness, Carry Light
Our February farm sunrises have always been full of promise over the three decades we’ve been here. The birds are waking earlier each day and when mornings are soaked, dripping with light and color, the air itself is alive.
Nothing though quite matches the phenomenon in February 2015 (top photo) when a fall streak hole or “key hole” cloud formed over nearby foothills.
It looked to me as if angels were bursting through an unfurling break in heaven’s moving veil. Though it didn’t last long, it was seen for miles around us.
When morning breaks the night, it is like the first morning which came into being with His Words:
“Let there be light” — and there continues to be the most amazing light…
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This saying good-by on the edge of the dark And the cold to an orchard so young in the bark Reminds me of all that can happen to harm An orchard away at the end of the farm All winter, cut off by a hill from the house. I don’t want it girdled by rabbit and mouse, I don’t want it dreamily nibbled for browse By deer, and I don’t want it budded by grouse.
I don’t want it stirred by the heat of the sun. (We made it secure against being, I hope, By setting it out on a northerly slope.) No orchard’s the worse for the wintriest storm; But one thing about it, it mustn’t get warm. “How often already you’ve had to be told, Keep cold, young orchard. Good-by and keep cold. Dread fifty above more than fifty below.”
I have to be gone for a season or so. My business awhile is with different trees, Less carefully nourished, less fruitful than these, And such as is done to their wood with an ax— Maples and birches and tamaracks.
I wish I could promise to lie in the night And think of an orchard’s arboreal plight When slowly (and nobody comes with a light) Its heart sinks lower under the sod. But something has to be left to God. ~Robert Frost from “Good-by and Keep Cold”
Silence and darkness grow apace, broken only by the crack of a hunter’s gun in the woods. Songbirds abandon us so gradually that, until the day when we hear no birdsong at all but the scolding of the jay, we haven’t fully realized that we are bereft — as after a death. Even the sun has gone off somewhere… Now we all come in, having put the garden to bed, and we wait for winter to pull a chilly sheet over its head. ~Jane Kenyon from her essay “Good-by and Keep Cold”found in A Hundred White Daffodils
For two months now, we’ve heard hunters firing in the woods and the wetlands around our farm, most likely aiming for the ducks and geese that have stayed in the marshes through the winter.
The usual day-long symphony of birdsong is replaced by shotguns popping, in addition to hawks and eagle chittering, the occasional dog barking, while the bluejays and squirrels argue over the last of the filbert nuts.
In the clear cold evenings, when coyotes aren’t howling in the moonlight, the owls hoot to each other across the fields from one patch of woods to another, their gentle resonant conversation echoing back and forth.
The horses confined to their stalls in the barns snort and blow as they bury their noses in flakes of last summer’s bound hay.
Yet today felt different – today, with unseasonably spring-like temperatures in early February, things feel about to change.
As yet, there have been no birdsong arias. I am bereft, listening for their blending musical tapestry waking me at 4 AM in the spring. And soon, the peeper orchestra from the swamps will rise and fall on the evening breeze.
It has been too, too quiet. I long for the music to return, not just the surround-sound of gunshot percussion, which is no melody at all.
I listen intently for early morning and evening serenades to return. It won’t be long.
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With Cats, some say, one rule is true: Don’t speak till you are spoken to. Myself, I do not hold with that – ~T.S. Eliot from “The Ad-Dressing of Cats”
A true story I wrote 15 years ago…
Considering myself a Dr. Doolittle of sorts, always talking to the animals, I reach out to pet a stray cat sitting quietly outside our barn one evening while doing barn chores. This is a grayish fluffy cat I see around the barns every few months or so–he doesn’t put in frequent appearances and reminds me of a kitten we raised on this farm a few years back, though his markings are a bit different, so I know it is not our cat.
We have 6 cats to pet here who claim “us” as their home and family, so there is no lack of fur balls to love. There are probably that many more who hang out, now and then, considering our farm fair game and looking for an occasional free meal. This cat just seemed to need a reassuring pat at that moment – or maybe I needed the reassurance.
Wrong.
I found myself with a cat attached to my wrist by teeth and claws. It took a bit of an effort to shake him off and he escaped into the night. I then surveyed the damage he inflicted and immediately went to wash my wounds. They were deep punctures near my wrist joint–not good. Lucky for me I was up to date on my tetanus booster.
By the next day the wounds were getting inflamed and quite sore. I know all too well the propensity of cat bites to get badly infected with Pasteurella multocida, a “bad actor” bacteria that can penetrate deep tissues and bone if not treated with aggressive antibiotics. After getting 6 opinions from my colleagues at clinic, all of whom stood solemnly shaking their heads at my 12 hour delay in getting medical attention, I surrendered and called my doctor’s office. I pleaded for a “no visit” prescription as I was up to my eyeballs in my own patients, and he obliged me. I picked up the antibiotic prescription during a break, sat in the car ready to swallow the first one and then decided to wait a little longer before starting them, knowing they wallop the gut bacteria and cause pretty nasty side effects. I wanted to see if my own immune system might just be sufficient.
So the bacterial infection risk was significant and real but I was prepared to deal with it. For some reason I didn’t really think about the risk of rabies until the middle of the night when all dark and depressing thoughts seem to come real to me.
I don’t know this cat. I doubt he has an owner and it is highly unlikely he is rabies vaccinated. My own cats aren’t rabies vaccinated (and neither am I) though if I was a conscientious owner, they would be. Yes, we have bats in our barns and woods and no, there has not been a rabid bat reported in our area in some time.
But what if this cat were potentially infected with the rabies virus but not yet showing symptoms? Now my mind started to work overtime as any good neurotic will do. Last summer a rabid kitten in North Carolina potentially exposed 10 people when it was passed around a softball tournament, no one aware it was ill until it died and was tested. Lots of people had to have rabies shots as a result.
This cat who had bitten me was long gone–there was no finding him in the vast woods and farmland surrounding us. He couldn’t be kept in observation for 10 days and watched for symptoms, nor could he be sacrificed to examine his neural tissue for signs of the virus.
I called the health department to ask what their recommendation was in a case like this. Do they recommend rabies immune globulin injection which should have been done as soon as possible after the bite? I talked with a nurse who read from a prepared script for worried people like me.
Feral cats in our area have not been reported to have rabies nor have skunks or raccoons. Only local bats have been reported to have rabies but not recently. This cat would have had to have been bitten by a rabid bat to be rabid. This was considered a “provoked” attack as I had reached out to pet the cat. This was not a cat acting unusually other than having wrapped itself around my arm. No, the Health Dept would not recommend rabies immune globulin in this situation but I was free to contact my own doctor to have it done at my own expense if I wished to have the series of 5 vaccination shots over the next month at a cost of about $3000. Yes, there would be a degree of uncertainty about this and I’d have to live with that uncertainty but she reassured me this was considered a very low risk incident.
I knew this was exactly what I would be told and I would have counseled any patient with the same words. Somehow it is always more personal when the risk of being wrong has such dire consequences.
I could see the headlines “Local Doctor Dies From Rabid Cat Bite”.
This is not how I want to be remembered.
Rabies is one of the worst possible ways to die. The cases I’ve read about are among the most frightening I’ve ever seen in the medical literature. Not only is it painful and horrific but it puts family and care providers at risk as well. It also has an unpredictable incubation period of a up to a month or two, even being reported as long as a year after an exposure. What a long time to wait in uncertainty. It also has a prodrome of several days of very nonspecific symptoms of headache, fever and general malaise, like any other viral infection before the encephalitis and other bad stuff hits. I was going to think about it any time I had a little headache or chill. This was assuredly going to be a real test of my dubious ability to stifle my tendency for 4-dimensional worries.
I decided to live with the low risk uncertainty and forego the vaccination series. It was a pragmatic decision based on the odds. My wounds slowly healed without needing antibiotics. For ten days I watched for my attacker cat whenever I went to the barn, but he didn’t put in an appearance. I put out extra food and hoped to lure him in. It would have been just be so nice to see his healthy face and not have to think about this gray cloud hanging over me for the next few months, as I wondered about every stray symptom.
No gray kitty to be seen.
Almost a month has gone by now and he finally showed up last night. I could have grabbed him and hugged him but I know better now. No more Dr. Doolittle.
He is perfectly fine and now so am I, cured of a terminal case of worry and hypochondria which is not nearly as deadly as rabies but can be debilitating and life shortening none the less.
From now on, I’ll be contented to just “talk to the animals” like any good Dr. Doolittle. I don’t need to cuddle them.
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…and there was once, oh wonderful, a new horse in the pasture, a tall, slim being–a neighbor was keeping her there– and she put her face against my face, put her muzzle, her nostrils, soft as violets, against my mouth and my nose, and breathed me, to see who I was, a long quiet minute–minutes– then she stamped her feet and whisked tail and danced deliciously into the grass away, and came back. She was saying, so plainly, that I was good, or good enough. ~Mary Oliver from “The Poet Goes to Indiana”
photo by Lea Gibson
photo by Emily Vander Haak
Our farm has had many nuzzling muzzles here over the years–
Pink noses, gray noses, nondescript not-sure-what-color noses, noses that have white stripes, diamonds, hearts, triangles, or absolutely no marks at all.
Hot breath that exudes warm grassy fragrance better than any pricey perfume, lips softer than the most elegant velvet.
Noses that reach out in greeting to: blow, sniff, caress, push, search, breathe me in and breathe for me, to see who I am, or who I will become,
smudge my face and shower snot.
I guess I’m just good enough to be blessed by a nuzzling baptism of grace.
How can I feel so warm Here in the dead center of January? I can Scarcely believe it, and yet I have to, this is The only life I have. ~James Wright from “A Winter Daybreak above Vence”
to the northwestto the north
To-day I shall be strong, No more shall yield to wrong, Shall squander life no more; Days lost, I know not how, I shall retrieve them now; Now I shall keep the vow I never kept before. Ensanguining the skies How heavily it dies Into the west away; Past touch and sight and sound Not further to be found, How hopeless under ground Falls the remorseful day. ~A.E. Houseman from “How Clear, How Lovely Bright”
to the northeastto the eastto the southeast
It was like a church to me. I entered it on soft foot, Breath held like a cap in the hand. It was quiet. What God there was made himself felt, Not listened to, in clean colours That brought a moistening of the eye, In a movement of the wind over grass. There were no prayers said. But stillness Of the heart’s passions — that was praise Enough; and the mind’s cession Of its kingdom. I walked on, Simple and poor, while the air crumbled And broke on me generously as bread. ~R.S. Thomas “The Moor”
to the southto the southwest
So welcome in the dead center of January: a surround-sunset experience on our farm – 360 degrees of evolving color and patterns, streaks and swirls, gradation and gradual decline.
All is silent. No bird song, no wind, no spoken prayer. Yet communion takes place with the air breaking and feeding me like manna from heaven.
Witnessing the light bleeding out all around me:
I will squander my days no more, treasuring each as sheer gift. I will seek to serve my God, church, family, friends, and community. I will be warmed on this chilly winter day even as it descends to darkness, knowing light and hope will return.
to the westto the westto the west
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The house had gone to bring again To the midnight sky a sunset glow. Now the chimney was all of the house that stood, Like a pistil after the petals go.
The barn opposed across the way, That would have joined the house in flame Had it been the will of the wind, was left To bear forsaken the place’s name.
No more it opened with all one end For teams that came by the stony road To drum on the floor with scurrying hoofs And brush the mow with the summer load.
The birds that came to it through the air At broken windows flew out and in, Their murmur more like the sigh we sigh From too much dwelling on what has been.
Yet for them the lilac renewed its leaf, And the aged elm, though touched with fire; And the dry pump flung up an awkward arm: And the fence post carried a strand of wire.
For them there was really nothing sad. But though they rejoiced in the nest they kept, One had to be versed in country things Not to believe the phoebes wept. ~Robert Frost “The Need of Being Versed in Country Things”
Photo of Aaron Janicki haying with his Oberlander team in Skagit County – courtesy of Tayler RaeThe field of my childhood farm (1954-59) with the red barn visible on the right. The house was destroyed by fire in the mid-60s but the barn was sparedphoto by Harry Rodenberger
My family sold our first farm in East Stanwood, Washington, when my father took a job working for the state in Olympia, moving to supervising high school agriculture teachers rather than being an ag teacher himself.
It was a difficult transition for us all: we moved to a smaller home and a few acres, selling the large two story house, a huge hay barn and chicken coop as well as fields and a woods where our dairy cows had grazed.
Only a few years later, that old farmhouse burned down but the rest of the buildings were spared. It passed through a few hands and when we had occasion to drive by, we were dismayed to see how nature was taking over the place. The barn still stood but unused it was weathering and withering. Windows were broken, birds flew in and out, the former flower garden had grown wild and unruly.
This was the place I was conceived, where I learned to walk and talk, developing a love for wandering in the fields among the farm animals we depended upon. I remember as a child of four sitting at the kitchen table looking out the window at the sunrise rising over the woods and making the misty fields turn golden.
This land returned to its essence before the ground was ever plowed or buildings were constructed. It no longer belonged to our family (as if it ever did) but it forever belongs to our memories.
I am overly prone to nostalgia, dwelling more on what has been than what is now or what I hope is to come. It is easy to weep over the losses when time and circumstances reap something unrecognizable.
I may weep, but nature does not. The sun continues to rise over the fields, the birds continue to build nests, the lilacs grow taller with outrageous blooms, and each day ends with a promise of another to come.
So I must dwell on what lies ahead, not what has perished in the ashes.
photo by Harry Rodenberger
Tell me, where is the road I can call my own That I left, that I lost So long ago? All these years I have wandered Oh, when will I know There’s a way, there’s a road That will lead me home After wind, after rain When the dark is done As I wake from a dream In the gold of day Through the air there’s a calling From far away There’s a voice I can hear That will lead me home Rise up, follow me Come away, is the call With the love in your heart As the only song There is no such beauty As where you belong Rise up, follow me I will lead you home
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Twenty years ago My generation learned To be afraid of mud. We watched its vileness grow, Deeper and deeper churned From earth, spirit, and blood.
From earth, sweet-smelling enough As moorland, field, and coast; Firm beneath the corn, Noble to the plough; Purified by frost Every winter morn.
From blood, the invisible river Pulsing from the hearts Of patient man and beast: The healer and life-giver; The union of parts; The meaning of the feast.
From spirit, which is man In triumphant mood, Conquerer of fears, Alchemist of pain Changing bad to good; Master of the spheres.
Earth, the king of space, Blood, the king of time, Spirit, their lord and god, All tumbled from their place, All trodden into slime, All mingled into mud. ~Richard Thomas Church “Mud” written in the 1930s
The world is mud-luscious and puddle-wonderful. ~E. E. Cummings from “In Just”
The work of the world is common as mud. Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust. But the thing worth doing well done has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident. ~Marge Piercy from “To Be of Use” from Circles on the Water: Selected Poems of Marge Piercy
Several weeks of rain along with dismal headlines can take its toll in a variety of ways on the human psyche; the bleakness seeps into my brain, making my gray matter much grayer than usual. Everything slows down to a crawl and climbing out of bed to another dark day requires commitment and effort.
Managing barn chores and horses on days like these is a challenge. Despite years of effort to create well drained paddocks with great footing, there is no such thing when the ground is super saturated from unrelenting inches of rain, and when the barn and paddocks are unfortunately placed on the downside of a hill.
Every bare inch of ground has become mud soup with more water pouring off the hill every moment.
Mud in all its glory rivals ice for navigation hazard. Yesterday it was a boot magnet as I tried carefully to make my way with a load of hay to a bit drier area in a paddock, and found with one step that my boot had decided to remain mired in the muck and my foot was waving bootless in the air trying to decide whether to land in the squishy stuff or go back to the relative safety of the stuck boot. Standing there on one foot, with a load of hay in my arms, I’m sure I looked even more absurd than I felt at the moment, and at least I gave comic relief to people driving by.
I won’t say how I figured my way out, but it did require doing laundry later.
I remember years ago when my daughter was about 5 years old, I was busy with chores as she was exploring a similar muddy paddock and I realized I hadn’t seen her for a few minutes and I went looking. There she stood, wailing, with one stocking foot in the mud, an empty boot stuck up to its top, and her other boot so mired, she couldn’t move without abandoning it too. By the time I got her extracted, we were both laughing muddy messes.
More laundry.
The Haflinger horses are not averse to the mud if they are hungry enough. They’ll hesitate momentarily before they dive in to reach their meal but dive in they do. Those clean blonde legs and white tails are only a memory from last summer. Even their bellies are flecked with brown now. Later, back in the barn, as the mud dries, it curries off in chunks and I start to see my golden horses revealed again, but it seems they and I will never be truly clean again.
What lures me into the mud, enticing me deeper in muck that covers and coats me so thoroughly that it feels I’ll never be clean again? Whatever I want so badly that I’m willing to get hopelessly dirty to reach it, once there, it has become tainted by the mud as well, and is never as good as I had hoped.
I become hopelessly mired and stuck, sinking deeper by the minute. Reading the daily headlines only makes it worse.
Rescue comes from an outreached hand with strength greater than my own. Cleansing may be merely skin deep, only to last until my next dive into the mud, or it can be thorough and lasting–a sort of future “mud protective coating” so to speak. I can choose how dirty to get and how dirty to stay and how clean I want to be.
I think the whole world needs to do laundry daily.
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May the wind always be in her hair May the sky always be wide with hope above her And may all the hills be an exhilaration the trials but a trail, all the stones but stairs to God. May she be bread and feed many with her life and her laughter May she be thread and mend brokenness and knit hearts… ~Ann Voskamp from “A Prayer for a Daughter”
Nate and Ben and brand new baby LeaDaddy and Lea
Mommy and Lea
“I have noticed,” she said slowly, “that time does not really exist for mothers, with regard to their children. It does not matter greatly how old the child is – in the blink of an eye, the mother can see the child again as she was when she was born, when she learned to walk, as she was at any age — at any time, even when the child is fully grown….” ~Diana Gabaldon from Voyager
Just checking to see if she is real…
Your rolling and stretching had grown quieter that stormy winter night thirty-three years ago, but still no labor came as it should.
Already a week overdue post-Christmas, you clung to amnion and womb, not yet ready. Then as the wind blew more wicked and snow flew sideways, landing in piling drifts, the roads became more impassable, nearly impossible to traverse.
So your dad and I tried to drive to the hospital, concerned about your stillness and my advanced age, worried about being stranded on the farm far from town. When a neighbor came by tractor to stay with your brothers overnight, we headed down the road and our car got stuck in a snowpile in the deep darkness, our tires spinning, whining against the snow.
Another neighbor’s earth mover dug us out to freedom.
You floated silent and still, knowing your time was not yet.
Creeping slowly through the dark night blizzard, we arrived to the warm glow of the hospital, your heartbeat checked out steady, all seemed fine.
I slept not at all.
The morning’s sun glistened off sculptured snow as your heart ominously slowed. You and I were jostled, turned, oxygenated, but nothing changed. Your heart beat even more slowly, threatening to let go your tenuous grip on life.
The nurses’ eyes told me we had trouble. The doctor, grim faced, announced delivery must happen quickly, taking you now, hoping we were not too late. I was rolled, numbed, stunned, clasping your father’s hand, closing my eyes, not wanting to see the bustle around me, trying not to hear the shouted orders, the tension in the voices, the quiet at the moment of opening when it was unknown what would be found.
And then you cried. A hearty healthy husky cry, a welcomed song of life uninterrupted. Perturbed and disturbed from the warmth of womb, to the cold shock of a bright lit operating room, your first vocal solo brought applause from the surrounding audience who admired your purplish pink skin, your shock of damp red hair, your blue eyes squeezed tight, then blinking open, wondering and wondrous, emerging and saved from a storm within and without.
You were brought wrapped for me to see and touch before you were whisked away to be checked over thoroughly, your father trailing behind the parade to the nursery. I closed my eyes, swirling in a brain blizzard of what-ifs.
If no snow storm had come, you would have fallen asleep forever within my womb, no longer nurtured by my failing placenta, cut off from what you needed to stay alive. There would have been only our soft weeping, knowing what could have been if we had only known, if only God had provided a sign to go for help.
So you were saved by a providential storm sent from God and we were dug out from a drift: I celebrate whenever I hear your voice – your students love you as their teacher and mentor, you are a thread born to knit and mend hearts, all because of the night God sent drifting snow.
My annual retelling of a most remarkable day:: Thirty-three years ago today, our daughter Lea Gibson was born in an emergency C-section, hale and hearty because the good Lord sent a wind and snow storm to blow us into the hospital in time to save her.
Thanks to that blizzard, Lea is a school teacher, serves the youth ministry in her church, and will soon receive her Masters in School Counseling.
She is married to her true love Brian– he also is a blessing sent from the Lord. Together they have their own miracle child, happily born in the middle of the summer rather than snow-drift season.
The Lord wanted her in this world: May she be bread and feed many with her life and her laughter May she be thread and mend brokenness and knit hearts…
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The birds do not sing in these mornings. The skies are white all day. The Canadian geese fly over high up in the moonlight with the lonely sound of their discontent. Going south. Now the rains and soon the snow. The black trees are leafless, the flowers gone. Only cabbages are left in the bedraggled garden. Truth becomes visible, the architecture of the soul begins to show through. God has put off his panoply and is at home with us. We are returned to what lay beneath the beauty. We have resumed our lives. There is no hurry now. We make love without rushing and find ourselves afterward with someone we know well. Time to be what we are getting ready to be next. This loving, this relishing, our gladness, this being puts down roots and comes back again year after year. ~Jack Gilbert “Half the Truth” from Collected Poems.
In the shape of this night, in the still fall of snow, Father In all that is cold and tiny, these little birds and children… Before the bells ring, before this little point in time has rushed us on Before this clean moment has gone, before this night turns to face tomorrow, Father There is this high singing in the air Forever this sorrowful human face in eternity’s window And there are other bells that we would ring, Father Other bells that we would ring. ~Kenneth Patchen from “At the New Year”
The object of a New Year is not that we should have a new year. It is that we should have a new soul… ~G.K.Chesterton from A Chesterton Calendar
Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky, The flying cloud, the frosty light: The year is dying in the night; Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.
Ring out the old, ring in the new, Ring, happy bells, across the snow: The year is going, let him go; Ring out the false, ring in the true.
Ring in the valiant man and free, The larger heart, the kindlier hand; Ring out the darkness of the land, Ring in the Christ that is to be. ~Lord Alfred Tennyson from “In Memoriam”
Often when something is ending we discover within it the spore of new beginning, and a whole new train of possibility is in motion before we even realize it. When the heart is ready for a fresh beginning, unforeseen things can emerge. And in a sense, this is exactly what a beginning does. It is an opening for surprises. ~John O’Donohue from “To Bless the Space Between Us”
No heralding trumpets – Just softening shadows, Timed and tracked.
Fingers of light flaring amber Over the eastern ridge of foothills, Caress the slopes of snow capped peaks. So I bid this past year farewell.
Each earthly thing bathed in gold Glimpsed and grasped without fanfare Yet wholly miraculous. Too soon this day, this year, becomes ordinary again Although it is truth: we can be born anew, year after year.
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