Tag: Grace

Emptying Like a Cloud

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God empties himself
into the earth like a cloud.
God takes the substance, contours
of a man, and keeps them,
dying, rising, walking,
and still walking
wherever there is motion.
Annie Dillard from “Feast Days” in Tickets for a Prayer Wheel

Soon we will enter the season of Advent, an opportunity to reflect on a God who “takes the substance, contours of a man”, as He “empties himself into the earth like a cloud.” 

Like drought-stricken parched ground, we prepare to respond to the drenching of the Spirit through the Son, and be ready to spring up with renewed growth.

He walked among us before His dying and subsequent rising up.
He walked among us again, appearing where least expected,
sharing a meal, causing our hearts to burn within us,
inviting us to touch and know Him.

His invitation remains open-ended,
His heart preparing us for our eternal home.

I think of that every time the clouds gather, open up, and empty.  
He freely falls to earth, soaking us completely,
through and through and through.

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The Inner Tree Revealed

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I am out with lanterns looking for myself…
~Emily Dickinson from “Letters”

And is it not enough that every year
A richly laden autumn should unfold
And shimmer into being leaf by leaf,
Its scattered ochres mirrored everywhere
In hints and glints of hidden red and gold
Threaded like memory through loss and grief,

When dusk descends, when branches are unveiled,
When roots reach deeper than our minds can feel
And ready us for winter with strange calm,
That I should see the inner tree revealed
And know its beauty as the bright leaves fall
And feel its truth within me as I am?

And is it not enough that I should walk
Through low November mist along the bank,
When scents of woodsmoke summon, in some long
And melancholy undertone, the talk
Of those old poets from whose works I drank
The heady wine of an autumnal song?

It is not yet enough. So I must try,
In my poor turn, to help you see it too,
As though these leaves could be as rich as those,
That red and gold might glimmer in your eye,
That autumn might unfold again in you,
Feeling with me what falling leaves disclose.
~Malcolm Guite “And Is It Not Enough?”

For over 15 years now, I have bared my soul here at Barnstorming, looking for others’ words to help me sort through the events of my life. I particularly look for words that resonate: I can say “I’ve felt like that as well,” with the hope that others reading along with me will recognize that familiar “yes, that is the way it is for me.”

Every day, I am out looking for myself with the help of Light provided by our Creator God. I carry lanterns hither and yon, exploring paths and hidden spaces and wondering what is around the next corner.

So I want to help you see where this journey is going.

Maybe it is finding your own “inner tree” as the leaves fall,
revealing the strength of bare bones.
Maybe it is noticing beauty in the ordinary.
Maybe it is the warmth of knowing someone else feels as you do.
Maybe it is discovering a connection, mysterious and wondrous.

Often I hear from you that the Light you carry helped lead you here.
Welcome, my friend — let’s walk together…

photo by Josh Scholten
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Feel Like a Leaf

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Walk around feeling like a leaf. Know you could tumble any second.
Then decide what to do with your time.
~ Naomi Shihab Nye from “The Art of Disappearing” from Words Under the Words: Selected Poems

I’ll tell a secret instead:
poems hide. In the bottoms of our shoes,
they are sleeping. They are the shadows
drifting across our ceilings the moment 
before we wake up. What we have to do
is live in a way that lets us find them.
~Naomi Shihab Nye from “Valentine for Ernest Mann” from The Red Suitcase

photo by Josh Scholten

Poems were hidden from me for decades. 

I was oblivious a hundred times a day to their secrets: dripping right over me in the shower,  rising over hills bright pink, tucked under a toadstool, breathing deeply as I auscultated a chest, unfolding with each blossom, folding with each piece of laundry, settling heavily on my eyelids at night.

The day I awoke to them was the day 23 years ago when thousands of innocents died in sudden cataclysm of airplanes and buildings and fire — people not knowing when they got up that day it would be their last.

And such tragic tumbling of life happens without cease – from wars, gun violence, suicide, pandemics and preventable diseases –
our world weeps and hearts continue to break.

Suddenly poems show themselves. I try to see, listen, touch, smell, taste as if each day would be my last. I try to feel like a leaf about to let go.

I have learned to live in a way that lets me see through the hiddenness and now it overwhelms me.  Poems – sad, insightful, clever, funny, and mysterious – are everywhere I look.

And I don’t know if I have enough time left to write them all down.

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A Rainy Dark Day

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Woke up this morning with
a terrific urge to lie in bed all day
and read. Fought against it for a minute.

Then looked out the window at the rain.
And gave over. Put myself entirely
in the keep of this rainy morning.

Would I live my life over again?
Make the same unforgivable mistakes?
Yes, given half a chance. Yes.
~Raymond Carver “Rain” from All of Us

I know what you planned, what you meant to do, teaching me
to love the world, making it impossible
to turn away completely, to shut it out completely over again–
it is everywhere; when I close my eyes,
birdsong, scent of lilac in early spring, scent of summer roses:
you mean to take it away, each flower, each connection with earth–
why would you wound me, why would you want me
desolate in the end, unless you wanted me so starved for hope
I would refuse to see that finally
nothing was left to me, and would believe instead
that you were left to me.
~Louise Glück “Vespers”

How swiftly the strained honey
of afternoon light
flows into darkness

and the closed bud shrugs off
its special mystery
in order to break into blossom

as if what exists, exists
so that it can be lost
and become precious
~Lisel Mueller “In Passing” from Alive Together: New and Selected Poems

By mid-November, we begin to lose daylight by 4PM. There is no wistful lingering with the descent of evening; the curtain is pulled closed and it is dark — just like that.

I’m having difficulty adjusting to the loss of daylight this year. This is perplexing as the change of seasons is no mystery to me. I sense a new deprivation beyond the fact that shorter days are simply a part of the annual autumnal routine.

As if –
something precious is being stolen away

as if –
I have any claim to the light to begin with

as if –
maybe I exist only to notice what ceases to exist.

So I am reminded:
I know there is more beyond feeling loss and lost.
I would do this all again, while feeling my way in the dark.
I will cling to the promise of what comes next.

I’m ready to break into blossom rather than hiding from the rain,
opening up to what light is left, instead of grumbling in the dark.

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The Welcome Grace of Air

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All winter
the blue heron
slept among the horses.
I do not know
the custom of herons,
do not know
if the solitary habit
is their way,
or if he listened for
some missing one—
not knowing even
that was what he did—
in the blowing
sounds in the dark,
I know that
hope is the hardest
love we carry.
He slept
with his long neck
folded, like a letter
put away.
~Jane Hirshfield “Hope and Love” from The Lives of the Heart

photo by Josh Scholten

Whenever we noticed her
standing in the stream, still
as a branch in dead air, we
would grab our binoculars,
watch her watching,
her eye fixed on the water
slowly making its own way
around stumps, over a boulder,
under some leaves matted against
a fallen log. She seemed
to appear, stand, peer, then
lift one leg, stretch it, let
a foot quietly settle into the mud
then pull up her other foot, settle
it, and stare again, each step
tendered, an ideogram at the end
of a calligrapher’s brush.
Every time she arrived, we watched
until, as if she had suddenly heard
a call in the sky, she would bend
her knees, raise her wide wings,
and lift into the welcome grace
of the air, her legs extending
back behind her, wings rising
and falling elegant under the clouds:
For more than a week now
we have not seen her. We watch
the sky, hoping to catch her great
feathered cross moving above the trees.
~Jack Ridl “The Heron” from Practicing to Walk like a Heron

photo by Josh Scholten

Things: simply lasting, then
failing to last: water, a blue heron’s
eye, and the light passing
between them: into light all things
must fall, glad at last to have fallen.
~Jane Kenyon, from “Things” in Collected Poems

photo by Josh Scholten

I know what it is like to feel out of step with those around me, an alien in my own land – like a heron among Haflinger horses.

At times I wonder if I belong at all as I watch the choices others make.

I grew up this way, missing a connection I found only rarely, never quite fitting in, a solitary kid becoming a solitary adult. The aloneness bothered me, but not in a “I’ve-got-to-become-like-them” kind of way.

I went my own way, never losing hope.

Somehow misfits find each other. Through the grace and acceptance of others, I found a soul mate and community. Even so, there are times when the old feeling of not-quite-belonging creeps in and I wonder whether I’ll be a misfit all the way to the cemetery, placed in the wrong plot in the wrong graveyard, forgotten altogether.

We disparate creatures are made to be connected, sometimes with those who look and think and act like us, or more often with those who are something completely different. I’ll keep on the lookout for my fellow misfits, just in case there are others out there looking for company along this journey of grace we’re on.

photo by Josh Scholten
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It’s Heavy Work

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From other
angles the
fibers look
fragile, but
not from the
spider’s, always
hauling coarse
ropes, hitching
lines to the
best posts
possible. It’s
heavy work
everyplace,
fighting sag,
winching up
give. It
isn’t ever
delicate
to live.
~Kay Ryan “Spiderweb”

A noiseless patient spider,
I mark’d where on a little promontory it stood isolated,
Mark’d how to explore the vacant vast surrounding,
It launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself,
Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.

And you O my soul where you stand,
Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space,
Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them,
Till the bridge you will need be form’d, till the ductile anchor hold,
Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.
~Walt Whitman “The Noiseless Patient Spider”

Silk-thin silver strings woven cleverly into a lair,
An intricate entwining of divinest thread…
Like strands of magic worked upon the air,
The spider spins his enchanted web –
His home so eerily, spiraling spreads.

His gossamer so rigid, yet lighter than mist,
And like an eight-legged sorcerer – a wizard blest,
His lace, like a spell, he conjures and knits;
I witnessed such wild ingenuity wrought and finessed,
Watching the spider weave a dream from his web.
~Jonathan Platt “A Spider’s Web”

I am stretched, trying to connect between post and branch and leaf and ground.

I leap between them, sometimes not sure where I’ll land or what I’ll leave behind. Connection is hard and heavy work, not knowing what stands firm in a world where wind and rain and storms or some unaware creature can tear things all asunder.

Sometimes what I weave is beautifully delicate and functional.

Sometimes it is blurry, full of holes, and ultimately useless. The center doesn’t always hold. The tethers loosen. The periphery frays and tears. It doesn’t last long.

But it was something I labored with purpose and intent to create.
And that effort makes it all worthwhile.

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The spider, dropping down from twig,
Unfolds a plan of her devising,
A thin premeditated rig
To use in rising.
And all that journey down through space,
In cool descent and loyal hearted,
She spins a ladder to the place
From where she started.
Thus I, gone forth as spiders do
In spider’s web a truth discerning,
Attach one silken thread to you
For my returning.
~E.B. White

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We Will Remember Them

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They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.
~Lawrence Binyon from “For the Fallen” (1914)

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie,
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who died
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
~John McCrae “In Flanders Fields”

When you go home tell them of us and say –
“For your tomorrow we gave our today”
~John Maxwell Edmonds from “The Kohima Epitaph” 

November pierces with its bleak remembrance
Of all the bitterness and waste of war.
Our silence tries but fails to make a semblance
Of that lost peace they thought worth fighting for.
Our silence seethes instead with wraiths and whispers,
And all the restless rumour of new wars,
The shells are falling all around our vespers,
No moment is unscarred, there is no pause,
In every instant bloodied innocence
Falls to the weary earth ,and whilst we stand
Quiescence ends again in acquiescence,
And Abel’s blood still cries in every land
One silence only might redeem that blood
Only the silence of a dying God.
~Malcolm Guite “Silence: a Sonnet for Remembrance Day”

To our military veterans here and abroad –
in deep appreciation and gratitude for the freedoms
you have defended on behalf of us all.

No one is left untouched and unscarred in the bitterness of war:
those of you who died in service,
those of you wounded in service,
those of you who bore visible and invisible scars all your lives.

You are heroes to the cause of freedom.

As G.K. Chesterton said,
“Courage is a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die.”

My father was one of the fortunate ones who came home, returning to a quiet life of farming and teaching after three years serving in the Pacific with the Marines Corp from 1942 to 1945. Hundreds of thousands of his colleagues didn’t come home, dying on beaches and battlefields. Tens of thousands more came home forever marked, through physical or psychological injury, by the experience of war and witness of death and mayhem all around them.

In my medical training in the 1970’s, I cared for veterans hospitalized for mental health care after serving in WWII, Korea and Vietnam. I witnessed for myself the sacrifices of these soldiers, and the limits of our therapies.

No matter how one views wars our nation has fought and may be obligated to fight in the future, we must support and care for the men and women who have made, on our behalf, the commitment to be on the front line for freedom’s sake.

Even our God died so we could stop fighting each other (and Him). What a waste we have not stopped to listen and understand His sacrifice enough to finally lay down our weapons against one another forever.

Support for wounded veterans:

Disabled Veterans National Foundation

Wounded Warrior Project

Worthy of a Hot Bath

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You can change the world with a hot bath,
if you sink into it from a place of knowing
you are worth profound care,
even when you are dirty and rattled.
Who knew?
~Anne Lamott from Small Victories: Spotting Improbable Moments of Grace

As a farmer, I spend at least a part of every day muddy and up to my knees and elbows in muck, especially now that the fall rains have arrived, turning beast and barnyard to mush. 

I call my barn life “the real stuff” as the rest of the hours of the day are spent dealing with “virtual stuff ” which nonetheless leaves me dirty and rattled.  Frankly, I prefer the real over virtual muck even though it smells worse, leaves my fingernails hopelessly grimy and is obvious to everyone where I’ve been.

The stains of the rest of my day are largely invisible to all but me and far harder to scrub away. But even virtual grime can become overwhelming.

It is so much easier for me to deal with what is produced in the barnyard over the mess of political lack of integrity and moral standing. What soils me can be washed off and I’m restored for another day of wallowing in my muck boots. There is true grace in drawing up clean warm water, soaping with the suds that truly cleanse by sinking down into a deep tub of renewal.

God knows how badly we all could use a good scrubbing right now.

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Richly Spiced Residue

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Another year gone, leaving everywhere
its rich spiced residues: vines, leaves,

the uneaten fruits crumbling damply
in the shadows…

I try to remember when time’s measure
painfully chafes, for instance when autumn

flares out at the last, boisterous and like us longing
to stay – how everything lives, shifting

from one bright vision to another, forever
in these momentary pastures.
~Mary Oliver from Fall Song

To let your body
love this world
that gave itself to your care
in all of its ripeness,
with ease,
and will take itself from you
in equal ripeness and ease,
is also harvest.
And however sharply
you are tested –
this sorrow, that great love –
it too will leave on that clean knife.
~Jane Hirshfield from “Ripeness” from “The October Palace”

What is left in the trees in November
is crumbling away:
bright while fading,
dimpling and softening,
composted in the rain.

Perhaps this describes me too.

More than just spicy residue dangling by a stem,
let me still feed whoever is hungry,
to thrive on what little I have left to offer.

Might I ripen a bit at harvest
before the inevitable drop,
to sleep enveloped by the ground.

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It Will Not Stay

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It will not stay.

But this morning we wake to pale muslin
stretched across the grass.
The pumpkins, still in the fields, are planets
shrouded by clouds.
The Weber wears a dunce cap
and sits in the corner by the garage
where asters wrap scarves
around their necks to warm their blooms.
The leaves, still soldered to their branches
by a frozen drop of dew, splash
apple and pear paint along the roadsides.
It seems we have glanced out a window
into the near future, mid-December, say,
the black and white photo of winter
carefully laid over the present autumn,
like a morning we pause at the mirror
inspecting the single strand of hair
that overnight has turned to snow.
~Robert Haight “Early October Snow”

No snow here in the northwest yet this fall, but when we visited family in Denver last year during the last week of October, heavy snow had fallen overnight, then gone within a day.

It did not stay. But it did return.

I can catch a glimpse of the future if I pay attention. Sometimes it is too painful to acknowledge, so I quickly look away. That one thick white hair discovered at age 28 is now a full head of thin white at 70.

I need to be courageous about looking straight ahead through the veil of snow at how change takes place, whether it is the melting piles on the pumpkins, or the mop of white in the mirror topping my wrinkles.

And so it goes and so it goes…

It is as it is meant to be. It is as it must be.
I wouldn’t have it any other way.

those white hairs…
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