Whence comes Solace?—Not from seeing What is doing, suffering, being, Not from noting Life’s conditions, Nor from heeding Time’s monitions; But in cleaving to the Dream, And in gazing at the gleam Whereby gray things golden seem.
II
Thus do I this heyday, holding Shadows but as lights unfolding, As no specious show this moment With its irised embowment; But as nothing other than Part of a benignant plan; Proof that earth was made for man. ~Thomas Hardy “On a Fine Morning”
Whence comes Solace? Cleaving to the dream, gazing at the gleam…
nothing other than Part of a benignant plan; Proof that earth was made for man.
I had to look up “benignant” – it is like being told a concerning tumor is “benign” – granting gracious kindness and beneficence in the midst of deep-seated worry.
A new lease on life.
We forget our original task of caring for the Garden. Having soiled our own nest, we can’t abandon earth for another greener, brighter, happier planet. Of all the planetary options in this infinite universe, we were placed right here for good reason, and here we remain.
Our solace: all that ordinarily seems gray gleams golden illuminated by the Light shining down on our shadowy selves.
Even when the news headlines are dismal, when our individual struggles are great, when human history seems to keep repeating itself, our Creation is purposeful, eternally preserved through divine sacrifice.
The solace of gray shadows melts to gold: as part of the overall “benignant plan” we have been given our life back.
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I spent seven hours yesterday at my daughter’s house helping her expand their garden by at least ten times. We dug up sod by the shovelful, shook off the dirt as best we could; sod into the wheelbarrow and off to the pile at the edge of the yard. Then all that over and over again. Five hours total work-time, with time out for lunch and supper. By the time I got home I knew all too well that seventy-two is not thirty-five; I could barely move.
I got to quit earlier than Nadine. She told me I’d done enough and that I should go get a beer and lie down on the chaise lounge and cheer her on, which is what I did.
All this made me remember my father forty years ago helping me with my garden. My father’s dead now, and has been dead for many years, which is how I’ll be one of these days too. And then Nadine will help her child, who is not yet here, with her garden. Old Nadine, aching and sore, will be in my empty shoes, cheering on her own.
So it goes. The wheel turns, generation after generation, around and around. We ride for a little while, get off and somebody else gets on. Over and over, again and again. ~David Budbill “Seventy-Two Is Not Thirty-Five” from Tumbling toward the End
The wheel turns, we cycle around again, get on and eventually get off. This is a week of July birthdays in our family, for both old and young.
This hit me when we celebrated our grandson’s third birthday a few days ago in a suburban backyard where my daughter has continued the Gibson/Polis gardening tradition, using the compost we hauled in our truck from our farm several hours away.
Her peas were full and ripe and juicy, her greens lush and tasty – simple perfection thanks to her careful tending.
Meanwhile, our son gardens with his three boys in a very small urban backyard in Denver, teaching them what is weed and what will become a future meal.
I couldn’t help but get weepy, enjoying that special birthday feast.
…and knowing someday, our grandsons will plant and weed and harvest from the soil just as we and their parents did, over and over, again and again.
And this is why my eyes are closed It’s just as well for all I’ve seen And so it goes, and so it goes And you’re the only one who knows ~Billy Joel
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Master, how serene Are all the hours We waste If, as we waste them, We place them in a vase Like flowers.
There are no sorrows In our lives Nor joys either. Let us learn then, Innocent sages, Not to live life,
But to pass through it, Tranquil, serene, Taking children As our teachers, Eyes full Of Nature . . .
Beside a river, Beside a road, Wherever we are, Living life With the same Light ease.
Let us gather flowers. Let us bathe our hands In the calm rivers, And from them Learn their calm.
[12 June, 1914] ~Fernando Pessoa from “Ode 1” translated from Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa & Patricio Ferrari
How fresh, oh Lord, how sweet and clean Are thy returns! even as the flowers in spring; To which, besides their own demean, The late-past frosts tributes of pleasure bring. Grief melts away Like snow in May, As if there were no such cold thing.
Who would have thought my shriveled heart Could have recovered greenness? It was gone Quite underground; as flowers depart To see their mother-root, when they have blown, Where they together All the hard weather Dead to the world, keep house unknown.
These are thy wonders, Lord of power, Killing and quickening, bringing down to hell And up to heaven in an hour; Making a chiming of a passing-bell. We say amiss This or that is: Thy word is all, if we could spell.
Oh that I once past changing were, Fast in thy Paradise, where no flower can wither! Many a spring I shoot up fair, Offering at heaven, growing and groaning thither; Nor doth my flower Want a spring shower, My sins and I joining together.
But while I grow in a straight line, Still upwards bent, as if heaven were mine own, Thy anger comes, and I decline: What frost to that? what pole is not the zone Where all things burn, When thou dost turn, And the least frown of thine is shown?
And now in age I bud again, After so many deaths I live and write; I once more smell the dew and rain, And relish versing. Oh, my only light, It cannot be That I am he On whom thy tempests fell all night.
These are thy wonders, Lord of love, To make us see we are but flowers that glide; Which when we once can find and prove, Thou hast a garden for us where to bide; Who would be more, Swelling through store, Forfeit their Paradise by their pride. ~George Herbert “The Flower”
There are days we live as if death were nowhere in the background; from joy to joy to joy, from wing to wing, from blossom to blossom to impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom. ~Li-Young Lee from “From Blossoms”
Our small church has a couple of gracious and kind gardeners who share the produce from their yards and fields each week to provide a fresh bouquet to sit on the table in front of our humble wooden pulpit.
It is a special treat to walk into church and see what they brought to the altar to share with us all on Sunday morning. I keep a photo album of these very unique Sunday “pulpit posies” our keepers of gardens share.
Why are these arrangements special? After all, almost every church displays a floral arrangement every Sunday.
These are special as many of these flowers are seeded, watered, fertilized and nurtured by one of our own, grown with love and caring, just as God cares for each of His children.
These are special as some are considered simple weeds, and are gleaned from ditches and hedges. They are part of God’s creation and have a wild beauty that can be as breathtaking as a hothouse orchid.
These are special because they often go home with a congregant or visitor who will enjoy their loveliness for many more days, as if they represent the manifestation of God’s Word itself.
Some of us are dahlias, zinnias and roses. Some of us are rare gardenias and orchids. Most of us are dandelions, sagebrush, Queen Anne’s lace, fireweed, burdock, and daisies thriving in the crevasses, ditches and hedgerows of life.
No matter which roots we sprout from, or where, we are the wonders of our loving gardening God. He created us to take care of His creation.
Each week, we bud afresh for Him.
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When I take the chilly tools from the shed’s darkness, I come out to a world made new by heat and light.
Like a mad red brain the involute rhubarb leaf thinks its way up through loam. ~Jane Kenyon from “April Chores” from Collected Poems
…a pruning knife’s hooked blade biting through the stalks with a flick of her wrist and a quick snap.
The one time I tried this I sliced deep into my thumb knuckle at first swipe. We were both red inside, me, the rhubarb. That’s the stuff I didn’t really think about at ten, how everything bleeds; how everything must die somehow— the stupid ones poisoned, the hard workers heart-worn and wrecked.
We ate the rhubarb raw, stripped of all its leaves. Dipped in sugar, it still lingered bitter on our tongues as some inoculation against the worst of what was yet to come. ~Matthew Burns from “Rhubarb”
Over the last two weeks, the garden is slowly reviving, and rhubarb “brains” have been among the first to appear from the garden soil, wrinkled and folded, opening full of potential, “thinking” their way into the April sunlight.
Here I am, wishing my own brain could similarly rise brand new and tender every spring from the dust rather than leathery and weather-toughened, harboring the same old thoughts and patterns. Indeed, more wrinkles accumulate on the outside of my skull rather than the inside.
Still, I’m encouraged by my rhubarb cousin’s return every April. Like me, it may be a little sour in need of some sweetening, but its blood courses bright red and it is very very much alive.
and just because this is fun but has nothing to do with rhubarb…
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It’s so easy to look and see what we pass through in this world, but we don’t. If you’re like me, you see so little. You see what you expect to see rather than what’s there. ~Frederick Buechner from The Remarkable Ordinary
Jesus said to them, “Come and have breakfast.” None of the disciples dared ask him, “Who are you?” They knew it was the Lord. John 21:12
It is too easy, by the next day, to let go of Easter — to slide back into the Monday routine, managing our best to get through each day, our jaws set, our teeth gritted, as we have before.
We are blinded by our grief, shivering in misery, thinking Him merely a Gardener as He passed by. We don’t pay attention to Who is right before us, Who is always tending us: the new Adam, caring for a world desperate for rescue.
God knows this about us. So He invites us to breakfast on Monday and every day thereafter.
He feeds us, a tangible and meaningful act of nourishing us in our most basic human needs though we’ve done nothing to deserve the gift. He cooks up fish on a beach at dawn and welcomes us to join Him, as if nothing extraordinary has just happened.
Just yesterday evening he reviewed His Word and broke bread in Emmaus, opening the eyes and hearts of those like us who failed to see Who this is walking beside them.
This is no ordinary Gardener – He is the one who created the original Garden, and as His image bearers, we humans were meant to maintain and grow it.
When He offers up a meal of His Word, His gift is nothing less than Himself.
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I alternate between thinking of the planet as home – dear and familiar stone hearth and garden – and as a hard land of exile in which we are all sojourners. ~Annie Dillard from Teaching a Stone To Talk
We all long for Eden, and we are constantly glimpsing it: our whole nature at its best and least corrupted, its gentlest and most human, is still soaked with the sense of exile. ~J.R.R. Tolkien, The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien
Wraiths of mist suddenly moving like serpents of the air would coil about them for a second. Grey damp would be around them, and the sun, a copper penny, would fade away. The wings next to their own wings would shade into vacancy, until each bird was a lonely sound in cold annihilation, a presence after uncertain. And there they would hang in chartless nothing, seemingly without speed or left or right or top or bottom, until as suddenly as ever the copper penny glowed and the serpents writhed. Then, in a moment of time, they would be in the jewelled world once more: a sea under them like turquoise and all the gorgeous palaces of heaven new created, with the dew of Eden not yet dry. ~T.H. White from The Once and Future King
The Lord your God is with you, the Mighty Warrior who saves. He will take great delight in you; in his love he will no longer rebuke you, but will rejoice over you with singing. I will rescue the lame; I will gather the exiles. I will give them praise and honor in every land where they have suffered shame. At that time I will gather you; at that time I will bring you home. Zephaniah 3: 17, 19-20
I, like everyone on this earth, am only a sojourner, seemingly settled, yet certainly not lasting. As a garden flourishes in the dew and then dies back, so will I.
This is exile in the wilderness until we are taken back home. He has sent His Son to fetch us.
Home. Really home. A place of no fading or withering.
Each of us etched on His heart, created in His image, held fast in His Hand, and led back home.
Lyrics:
The barren land around me lies My flame is burning low Cold and pale the winter skies And I am far from home. With my light that burns so dim, Am I visible to Him? Does He hear the fragile song of creatures here below?
He wakes the lark and bids her fly To greet the coming spring, Wakes our hearts and bids us rise Then gives our spirits wing. He speaks, and winter melts away, Hears us when we come to pray, Turns our nighttime into day – Our Light, our Life, our King.
Glorious joy of summer sun, The gentle healing rain, Banishing our tears and sighs, With beauty for our pain. Earth and sky, lay glory by- Christ the Lord is drawing nigh! All creation, bow to Him From whom all blessings flow!
Blows the wind, and soon will come The autumn of the year With its golden light of love Still shining ever clear. From the rising of the sun To the place where day is done, Peace on earth has now begun To cast away our fear. -Johanna Anderson, 2018
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Every morning I walk through folds of fields searching.
Slants of sun sink through triangled bones of leaves: bold cold refuted.
Sparrows flutter warm in given nests, ungriefed, caught, sustained by common grace.
Faith is the tenderness of banked coals in a grate, Braeburn apples on a windowsill, winding crisp with possibility. The steadiness of conversations embered over decades; a fire that has never left off crackling – on this my soul has warmed her hands. Divine ardor: too strong and sweet for the many years I’ve walked on earth.
Love without hesitation has swept my floorboards for seasons. Deep and longing in and out of time the soul reaches out – and He, grasps entire. Hold – and tender. Incandescent. ~Claire Hellar “A Search in Autumn”
Something about the relentless beauty of the dahlias this year makes me forget lists and calls and news and aches as I stand beside them in a splendor stupor, watching them bloom in real time, not wanting to miss a moment of the long stems rising, the red color deepening then fading from the petals as they age. I imagine a time lapse begins, and the world’s winter white, then greening again, and now a hundred years pass, now five hundred, a thousand, and the garden bed is gone and the fence is gone and the trees and the ditch and the home are gone, and there’s no way to know this was once a place where dahlias grew. Is it any wonder, then, I call to you, ask you to come stand here with me to watch the dahlias open themselves to the sun, each petal a hymn to the present, a history soon to be forgotten, a shimmer in time we might put in a vase and marvel as all around it the whole world spins. ~Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer “A Scrap in Time”
In my beginning is my end. Now the light falls Across the open field, leaving the deep lane Shuttered with branches, dark in the afternoon…
The dahlias sleep in the empty silence. Wait for the early owl.
Dawn points, and another day Prepares for heat and silence. Out at sea the dawn wind Wrinkles and slides. I am here Or there, or elsewhere. In my beginning.
Home is where one starts from.
Love is most nearly itself When here and now cease to matter. ~T. S. Eliot, verses from “East Coker” in Four Quartets
What a pity flowers can utter no sound! —A singing rose, a whispering violet, a murmuring honeysuckle… oh, what a rare and exquisite miracle would these be! ~Henry Ward Beecher
A flower garden is a place for prayer and hymns of praise.
When I meet a truly great gardener, like my friend Jean who has grown and hybridized dahlias, what I see growing in the soil is a choral composition of petals, leaves and roots.
Jean has passionately cared for these plants for many of her nine decades of life. They reflect that love in every spiral and swirl, hue and gradient of color, showing stark symmetry and delightful variegation.
Arising from the plainest of homely and knobby look-alike tubers grow these luxurious beauties of infinite variety. I am stunned by each one, captivated, realizing that same Creator ensures we too bloom from mere dust, becoming a hymn of praise arising from every fiber of our being.
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I’ve always wondered if there was a name for the small round globe, part of an aggregate berry like a thimbleberry, raspberry or blackberry – each so smooth and perfectly formed, each unique yet a homogenous part of the whole. Yet if separated all by itself, nearly invisible.
Each is called a small drupe, or more familiar and lovingly, a drupelet.
Despite such a plain name, a little drupelet has its own smooth shiny beauty, a drop of flavor to be savored, unforgotten, made sweeter by being part of the whole – even sweeter when redeemed and consumed.
Kind of like us – each of us a small part of the whole of life – each sacrificed for a taste of eternity.
Kind of like us…
photo by Nate Gibson
Lyrics: I am a small part of the world I have a small hand which to hold But if I stand by your side And you put your hand in mine Together we can be so strong and bold
I am a small part of the world I have a small dream in my eyes But if I tell you my dreams And you add your dreams to mine Together we can reach up to the skies
Hand in hand, dreams combine Voice with voice, together for all time Hand in hand, dreams combine Voice with voice, for all time
I am a small part of the world I have a small voice ringing clear But if I sing out for freedom And you add your voice to mine
Hand in hand, dreams combine Voice with voice for all time I am a small part of the world Take my hand
Writer(s): Jay Althouse, Sally Albrecht
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Let us go forward quietly, forever making for the light, and lifting up our hearts in the knowledge that we are as others are (and that others are as we are), and that it is right to love one another in the best possible way – believing all things, hoping for all things, and enduring all things. ~Vincent Van Gogh from a Letterto Theo Van Gogh – 3 April 1878
I have lived so long On the cold hills alone . . . I loved the rock And the lean pine trees, Hated the life in the turfy meadow, Hated the heavy, sensuous bees. I have lived so long Under the high monotony of starry skies, I am so cased about With the clean wind and the cold nights, People will not let me in To their warm gardens Full of bees. ~Janet Loxley Lewis “Austerity”
Everywhere transience is plunging into the depths of Being. It is our task to imprint this temporary, perishable earth into ourselves, so deeply, so painfully and passionately, that its essence can rise again, invisible, inside of us. We are the bees of the invisible. We wildly collect the honey of the visible, to store it in the great golden hive of the invisible. ~Rainier Maria Rilke in a letter to his friend Witold Hulewicz, 1925
I am convinced, reading the news, too many people are forced to survive in a world cold and cruel, without warmth or safety, too many empty stomachs, no healing hands for injury or disease.
Our country was trying to help up until the last few months when so much has been pulled away.
No longer are we, the helper bees, sent to the invisible, bringing tangible hope and light, food and meds, to those who have so little.
No longer do we bring collected honey to the suffering, the ill, the poor and invisible who share this planet.
Oh Lord, turn us away from such austerity. Let us not forget how to share the humming riches of Your warm garden.
AI image created for this post
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