Tag: golden

Gray Things Made Golden

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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”

“Earth was made for man”

We tend to forget our original task of caring for the Garden we were placed within. Soiling our own nest, we can’t abandon this place for another greener, brighter, happier planet. Of all the planetary options in this infinite universe, we were placed right here and here we remain.

Our solace is that all that ordinarily seems gray gleams golden in the Light that shines down on our shadows. Even when the news is dismal, and the pain is great, and history seems to keep repeating itself despite our best efforts, our Creation is purposeful and preserved through divine sacrifice.

The solace of gray shadows turns to gold.

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Raise Your Hands in Wonder

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Here, where this present
darkness presses in, pushes
down, imprisons you in
ice and stone to wall you up
alive or crush you into dust,
even here, the gold glimmers
through a crack in the rock, splits
the stones as it flames up
in the ruby hue of a tulip
bursting into bloom, droops
down in the blushing pink
of a cherry blossom fluttering
in the breeze, sings in the
trilling call of a finch,
shines in dewdrops sparkling
on a spider’s web. Oh the gold
pulsing in graced moments
of camaraderie and laughter,
in the warmth of gentle hands
caressing a cold brow, in quiet
words of love that brim
the hearer’s eyes with tears.
And the gold that rises up
like incense when you raise your
eyes, your heart, your hands
in wonder, thanks, and praise.
All this golden glory! Light
and love. And life. And life. And life!
~E.M. MacDonald “The Double Strand”

It feels as if everything is emerging from the darkness:
birdsong is earlier and louder,
grass squeaks with growth,
buds unfurling with vigor,
light glowing with promise.

There is much momentum
running pellmell into longer days;
so much glory bursting all at once.

As showers blow in
from clouds gray and thick with menace,
we are stilled and quieted in the drenching,
waiting, arms raised, for a shaft of light
to break through again,
turning everything from gray to golden.

photo by Natalia Burke

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The Glowing of Such Fire

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That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.

In me thou see’st the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest.

In me thou see’st the glowing of such fire
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed whereon it must expire,
Consum’d with that which it was nourish’d by.

This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.
~William Shakespeare Sonnet 73

I may think youth has it all
– strength, beauty, energy-
but now I know better.

There is treasure in slowing down,
this leisurely leave-taking;
the finite becoming infinite
and a limitlessness loving.

Without our aging
we’d never change up
who we are
to become so much more:

enriched, vibrant,
shining passionately
until the very last moment.

To love well
To love strong
To love as if
nothing else matters.

This book of beauty in words and photography, available to order here:

The Live-Long Light

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Some of the most powerful memories of summer
come out of our childhood when we wake up on a June morning and suddenly remember that school is out
and that summer stretches in front of us
as endlessly as the infinities of space.

Everything is different.
The old routines are gone.
The relentless school bus isn’t coming.
The bells will be silent in silent hallways.

And all the world is leafy green,
and will be green,
forever and ever.
~Ray Bradbury from Summer: A Spiritual Biography of the Season

The sun is rich
And gladly pays
In golden hours,
Silver days,

And long green weeks
That never end.
School’s out. The time
Is ours to spend.

There’s Little League,
Hopscotch, the creek,
And, after supper,
Hide-and-seek.

The live-long light
Is like a dream,
and freckles come
Like flies to cream.

~John Updike “June” from A Child’s Calendar

photo by Harry Rodenberger
Photo by Harry Rodenberger

Time lurches ahead in imprecisely measured chunks. 

Sometimes the beginning and ending of seasons are the yardstick,  or the celebration of a holiday or a birthday.  Memories tend to be stickiest surrounding a milestone event: a graduation, a move, a wedding, a birth, a road trip, a funeral.

But Summer needs nothing so remarkable to be memorable. It simply stands on its own in all its extravagant abundance of light and warmth and growth and color stretching deep within the rising and setting horizons.  Each long day can feel like it must last forever, never ending.

Yet summer does eventually wind down, spin itself out, darkening gradually into the shadow dusk of autumn and the night of winter. 

I always let go of summer with reluctance, feeling as if no summer like it will ever come again.

Yet another will, somehow, somewhere, someday.  Surely a never-ending summer is what heaven itself will be.

Perfectly delightful and delightfully perfect. 

We’ve already had a taste.

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Shafts of Golden Light

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Again the woods are odorous, the lark 
Lifts on upsoaring wings the heaven gray
That hung above the tree-tops, veiled and dark, 
Where branches bare disclosed the empty day. 

After long rainy afternoons an hour 
Comes with its shafts of golden light and flings 
Them at the windows in a radiant shower, 
And rain drops beat the panes like timorous wings. Then all is still. The stones are crooned to sleep
By the soft sound of rain that slowly dies; 
And cradled in the branches, hidden deep
In each bright bud, a slumbering silence lies.
~ Rainer Maria Rilke [trans. Jessie Lemont], from Poems

It seems in May everything explodes with energy:
the birdsong earlier and louder
the grass nearly squeaks with growth
the buds unfurling before our eyes.

There is much momentum
running pellmell into longer days;
I need to catch my breath.

As showers blow in from
clouds gray and thick with menace, dumping their load,
everything stills from the drenching,
waiting for a shaft of light to break through again,
turning everything to gold.

As the Light is Just Right

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The ripe, the golden month has come again…
Frost sharps the middle music of the seasons,
and all things living on the earth turn home again…
the fields are cut, the granaries are full,
the bins are loaded to the brim with fatness,
and from the cider-press the rich brown oozings of the York Imperials run.
The bee bores to the belly of the grape,
the fly gets old and fat and blue,
he buzzes loud, crawls slow,
creeps heavily to death on sill and ceiling,
the sun goes down in blood and pollen
across the bronzed and mown fields of the old October.
~Thomas Wolfe

 

Mid-October
dreary
cloud-covered
rain and wind.

An instant at dusk,
the sun broke through,
peeling away the grey,
infusing amber onto
fields and foliage,
ponies and puddles.
The shower spun
raindrops threading
a gold tapestry
through the evening air,
casting sparkles,

casting sparkles,
a sunray sweep of
fairy godmother’s wand
across the landscape.

One more blink,
and the sun shrouded,
the color drained away
the glimmer mulled
into mere weeping
once more,
streaming over
our farm’s fallen face.

Now I know to gently
wipe the teardrops away,
having seen the
hidden magic within,
when the light is just so.

Savoring the tears
of gold that glisten
when the light
is just right.

But Nothing Can Stopper Time

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…the golden hour of the clock of the year. Everything that can run
to fruit has already done so: round apples, oval plums, bottom-heavy
pears, black walnuts and hickory nuts annealed in their shells,
the woodchuck with his overcoat of fat. Flowers that were once bright
as a box of crayons are now seed heads and thistle down. All the feathery grasses shine in the slanted light. It’s time to bring in the lawn chairs and wind chimes, time to draw the drapes against the wind, time to hunker down. Summer’s fruits are preserved in syrup, but nothing can stopper time. No way to seal it in wax or amber; it slides though our hands like a rope of silk. At night, the moon’s restless searchlight sweeps across the sky.
~Barbara Crooker “And Now it’s October” from Small Rain.

…but I do try to stopper time.
I try every day
not to suspend it or render it frozen,
but like summer flower and fruit that withers,
to preserve any sweet moment for sampling
through stored words
or pictures
in the midst of my days of winter.
I roll it around on my tongue,
its heady fragrance
becoming today’s lyrical shared moment,
unstoppered,
perpetual
and always intoxicating.

Sepia September Light

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Wheat Field with Sheaves -Vincent Van Gogh

This far north, the harvest happens late.
Rooks go clattering over the sycamores
whose shadows yawn after them, down to the river.
Uncut wheat staggers under its own weight.

Summer is leaving too, exchanging its gold
for brass and copper. It is not so strange
to feel nostalgia for the present; already
this September evening is as old

as a photograph of itself. The light, the shadows
on the field, are sepia, as if this were
some other evening in September, some other
harvest that went ungathered years ago.
~Dorothy Lawrenson “September” from Painted, spoken, 22

Sheaves of Wheat in a Field –Vincent Van Gogh

September/remember naturally go together in every rhyming autumnal poem and song.

For me, the nostalgia of this season is for the look and feel of the landscape as it browns out with aging – gilded, burnt and rusted, almost glistening in its dying.

I gather up and store these images, like sheaves of wheat stacked in the field. I’ll need them again someday, when I’m hungry, starving for the memory of what once was, and, when the light is just right, how it could be again someday.

Summer ends now; now, barbarous in beauty, the stooks rise
⁠Around; up above, what wind-walks! what lovely behaviour
⁠Of silk-sack clouds! has wilder, wilful-wavier
Meal-drift moulded ever and melted across skies?

I walk, I lift up, I lift up heart, eyes,
⁠Down all that glory in the heavens to glean our Saviour;
⁠And, éyes, heárt, what looks, what lips yet gave you a
Rapturous love’s greeting of realer, of rounder replies?

And the azurous hung hills are his world-wielding shoulder
⁠Majestic—as a stallion stalwart, very-violet-sweet!—
These things, these things were here and but the beholder
⁠Wanting; which two when they once meet,
The heart rears wings bold and bolder
⁠And hurls for him, O half hurls earth for him off under his feet.
~Gerard Manley Hopkins “Hurrahing for Harvest”

Hayfield–oil painting by Scott Prior http://www.scottpriorart.com

A Diffusion of Sunlight

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There is a gold light in certain old paintings
That represents a diffusion of sunlight.
It is like happiness, when we are happy.
It comes from everywhere and from nowhere at once, this light…
~Donald Justice from Collected Poems

The Beeches, painting by Asher Brown Durand at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Living in a place where golden light is scarce amidst the universal gray, I find myself watching out for it to capture it. Like happiness, I am grateful for its unexpected appearance, no matter how brief.

Having witnessed gilded light and known happiness, I know they will come again. It takes getting up early and being opened to joy coming from everywhere and nowhere at once.

Blessings abound when I ready myself for them.

Golden Coloratura

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All night the crickets chirp,   
Like little stars of twinkling sound  
In the dark silence.    

They sparkle through the summer stillness
With a crisp rhythm:
They lift the shadows on their tiny voices.

But at the shining note of birds that wake,
Flashing from tree to tree till all the wood is lit—
O golden coloratura of dawn!—
The cricket-stars fade slowly,
One by one.
~Leonora Speyer, “Crickets at Dawn” from A Canopic Jar

Most mornings here tend to be gray — primarily unassuming and humble. Sunrise usually happens without much visual fanfare – blink and I miss it.

Instead I listen for morning rather than watch for it.

As summer night sounds fade out, the dawn songs begin. Birds become the harbingers where frogs and crickets let off.

There are a few special days when the light ascends gilded and decides to linger while the whole atmosphere is transformed. The air itself is burnished and shining, and all that is touched turns to gold. Like a stage production about to begin, the curtain rises to the sounds of an overture while a resplendent backdrop is illuminated.

So I wait, a transfixed audience, for the day’s aria to begin.