Today as the news from Selma and Saigon poisons the air like fallout, I come again to see the serene great picture that I love.
Here space and time exist in light the eye like the eye of faith believes. The seen, the known dissolve in iridescence, become illusive flesh of light that was not, was, forever is.
O light beheld as through refracting tears. Here is the aura of that world each of us has lost. Here is the shadow of its joy. ~Robert Hayden “Monet’s Waterlilies”
…The world is flux, and light becomes what it touches, becomes water, lilies on water, above and below water, becomes lilac and mauve and yellow and white and cerulean lamps, small fists passing sunlight so quickly to one another that it would take long, streaming hair inside my brush to catch it. To paint the speed of light! Our weighted shapes, these verticals, burn to mix with air and change our bones, skin, clothes to gases. Doctor, if only you could see how heaven pulls earth into its arms and how infinitely the heart expands to claim this world, blue vapor without end. ~Lisel Mueller, “Monet Refuses the Operation” from Second Language
We see things differently, don’t we? What seems ordinary to one person is extraordinary to another.
How might I learn to adjust my focus to see things as you do? How might I help others to see the world as I do?
The world is flux; my delight and dismay flows from moment to moment, from object to absence, from light to darkness, from color to gray. Perhaps the blur from the figurative (or real) cataract impeding my vision creates a deeper understanding, as I use my imagination to fill in what I can’t discern.
My heart and mind expands to claim this world and all that beauty has to offer, while heaven – all this while – is pulling me into its arms.
In heaven, my focus will be clear. It will all be extraordinarily holy.
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O hushed October morning mild, Thy leaves have ripened to the fall; Tomorrow’s wind, if it be wild, Should waste them all. The crows above the forest call; Tomorrow they may form and go. O hushed October morning mild, Begin the hours of this day slow. Make the day seem to us less brief. Hearts not averse to being beguiled, Beguile us in the way you know. Release one leaf at break of day; At noon release another leaf; One from our trees, one far away. Retard the sun with gentle mist; Enchant the land with amethyst. Slow, slow! ~Robert Frost from “October”
After yesterday’s travel through curtains of heavy rainfall, we abandoned plans to meet with family across state for today’s memorial service, so returned home, defeated, weary with sadness.
October is enough reminder of mortality, with winds stripping trees to bare bones, birds flocking and vacating, bright leaves reduced to rusting dust.
This morning, the rain suspended, its gray curtain pulled back briefly to view what awaits beyond the haze: this luminous brilliance, radiance, promise.
Slow down to look. Slow down to live. Slow.
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The rain falls and falls cool, bottomless, and prehistoric falls like night — not an ablution not a baptism just a small reason to remember all we know of Heaven to remember we are still here with our love songs and our wars…
Here too in the wet grass half a shell of a robin’s egg shimmers blue as a newborn star fragile as a world. ~Maria Popova from “Spell Against Indifference”
…I had sat down to rest with my back against a stump. Through accident I was concealed from the glade, although I could see into it perfectly.
The sun was warm there, and the murmurs of forest life blurred softly away into my sleep. When I awoke, dimly aware of some commotion and outcry in the clearing, the light was slanting down through the pines in such a way that the glade was lit like some vast cathedral. I could see the dust motes of wood pollen in the long shaft of light, and there on the extended branch sat an enormous raven with a red and squirming nestling in his beak.
The sound that awoke me was the outraged cries of the nestling’s parents, who flew helplessly in circles about the clearing. The sleek black monster was indifferent to them. He gulped, whetted his beak on the dead branch a moment, and sat still. Up to that point the little tragedy had followed the usual pattern.
But suddenly, out of all that area of woodland, a soft sound of complaint began to rise. Into the glade fluttered small birds of half a dozen varieties drawn by the anguished outcries of the tiny parents.
No one dared to attack the raven. But they cried there in some instinctive common misery, the bereaved and the unbereaved. The glade filled with their soft rustling and their cries. They fluttered as though to point their wings at the murderer. There was a dim intangible ethic he had violated, that they knew. He was a bird of death.
And he, the murderer, the black bird at the heart of life, sat on there, glistening in the common light, formidable, unmoving, unperturbed, untouchable.
The sighing died. It was then I saw the judgment. It was the judgment of life against death. I will never see it again so forcefully presented. I will never hear it again in notes so tragically prolonged.
For in the midst of protest, they forgot the violence.
There, in that clearing, the crystal note of a song sparrow lifted hesitantly in the hush. And finally, after painful fluttering, another took the song, and then another, the song passing from one bird to another, doubtfully at first, as though some evil thing were being slowly forgotten. Till suddenly they took heart and sang from many throats joyously together as birds are known to sing.
They sang because life is sweet and sunlight beautiful. They sang under the brooding shadow of the raven. In simple truth they had forgotten the raven, for they were the singers of life, and not of death. ~Loren Eiseley from The Star Thrower
Each of us at times are as vulnerable as a nestling, just hatched. The world is full of those who would eat us for lunch and do.
The world is also full of those who grieve and lament the violence that surrounds us, the tragedy of lives lost, the unending wars, the bullies and the bullied.
But the bird of death does not have the final word. He will soon be forgotten, forever sidelined as we reject what he and others like him represent.
Our cries of lament, our protests of violence transform into a celebration of life – we do not abandon all we have lost, but no longer allow any more to be stolen from us.
Only then may grief’s shadow be overwhelmed by joy.
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To see a World in a Grain of Sand And a Heaven in a Wild Flower, Hold Infinity in the Palm of your Hand, and Eternity in an Hour.
When the Soul Slept in Beams of Light God Appears & God is Light To those poor Souls who dwell in Night But does a Human Form Display To those who Dwell in Realms of day ~William Blake from “Auguries of Innocence”
Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths, Enwrought with golden and silver light, The blue and the dim and the dark cloths Of night and light and the half light, I would spread the cloths under your feet: But I, being poor, have only my dreams; I have spread my dreams under your feet; Tread softly because you tread on my dreams. ~William Butler Yeats “Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven”
If I look closely enough underfoot, I might find the extraordinary in the commonplace things of life.
So I keep my eyes alert; my heart open to infinite possibilities and try to tread softly.
Sometimes what I see is so beautiful, it is uncovering heaven come to earth, when the cosmos is contained within the commonplace.
The God of Light and Living Water is no further away than my back yard.
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The thing is to love life, to love it even when you have no stomach for it and everything you’ve held dear crumbles like burnt paper in your hands, your throat filled with the silt of it. When grief sits with you, its tropical heat thickening the air, heavy as water more fit for gills than lungs; when grief weights you like your own flesh only more of it, an obesity of grief, you think, How can a body withstand this? Then you hold life like a face between your palms, a plain face, no charming smile, no violet eyes, and you say, yes, I will take you I will love you, again. ~Ellen Bass, “The Thing Is” from Mules of Love
...everything here seems to need us —Rainer Maria Rilke
It’s a hard time to be human. We know too much and too little. Does the breeze need us? 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. ~Ellen Bass from “The World Has Need of You” from Like a Beggar
Fallen leaves will climb back into trees. Shards of the shattered vase will rise and reassemble on the table. Plastic raincoats will refold into their flat envelopes. The egg, bald yolk and its transparent halo, slide back in the thin, calcium shell. Curses will pour back into mouths, letters un-write themselves, words siphoned up into the pen. My gray hair will darken and become the feathers of a black swan. Bullets will snap back into their chambers, the powder tamped tight in brass casings. Borders will disappear from maps. Rust revert to oxygen and time. The fire return to the log, the log to the tree, the white root curled up in the un-split seed. Birdsong will fly into the lark’s lungs, answers become questions again. When you return, sweaters will unravel and wool grow on the sheep. Rock will go home to mountain, gold to vein. Wine crushed into the grape, oil pressed into the olive. Silk reeled in to the spider’s belly. Night moths tucked close into cocoons, ink drained from the indigo tattoo. Diamonds will be returned to coal, coal to rotting ferns, rain to clouds, light to stars sucked back and back into one timeless point, the way it was before the world was born, that fresh, that whole, nothing broken, nothing torn apart. ~Ellen Bass “When You Return” from Like a Beggar
There is so much grief these days so much anger, so much loss of life, so much weeping.
How can we withstand this? How can we know, now, when we are barely able to breathe that we might know – at some point – we might have the stomach to love life again?
This time of year, no matter which way I turn, autumn’s kaleidoscope displays new patterns, new colors, new empty spaces as I watch the world die into itself once again.
Some dying is flashy, brilliant, blazing – a calling out for attention. Then there is the hidden dying that happens without anyone taking notice: just a plain, tired, rusting away letting go.
I spent this morning adjusting to the change in season by occupying myself with the familiar task of moving manure. Cleaning barn is a comforting chore, allowing me to transform tangible benefit from something objectionable and just plain stinky to the nurturing fertilizer of the future.
It feels like I’ve actually accomplished something.
As I scoop and push the wheelbarrow, I recalled another barn cleaning 24 years ago, just days before the world changed on 9/11/01.
I was one of three or four friends left cleaning over ninety stalls after a Haflinger horse event that I had organized at our local fairgrounds. Some people had brought their horses from over 1000 miles away to participate for several days, including a Haflinger parade through our town on a quiet Sunday morning.
There had been personality clashes and harsh words among some participants along with criticism directed at me as the organizer that I had taken very personally. As I struggled with the umpteenth wheelbarrow load of manure, tears stung my eyes and my heart.
I was miserable with regret, feeling my work had been futile and unappreciated.
One friend had stayed behind with her young family to help clean up the large facility and she could see I was struggling to keep my composure. Jenny put herself right in front of my wheelbarrow and looked me in the eye, insisting I stop for a moment and listen:
“You know, none of these troubles and conflicts will amount to a hill of beans years from now. People will remember a fun event in a beautiful part of the country, a wonderful time with their Haflingers, their friends and family, and they’ll be all nostalgic about it, not giving a thought to the infighting or the sour attitudes or who said what to whom. So don’t make this about you and whether you did or didn’t make everyone happy. You loved us all enough to make it possible to meet here and the rest was up to us. So quit being upset about what you can’t change. There’s too much you can still do for us.”
Jenny had no idea how wise her words were, even two days later, on 9/11.
During tough times since (and there have been plenty), Jenny’s advice replays, reminding me to cease seeking appreciation from others or feeling hurt when harsh words come my way.
She was right about the balm found in the tincture of time. She was right about giving up the upset in order to die to self and self absorption, and instead to focus outward.
I have remembered.
Jenny herself did not know that day she would subsequently spend six years dying while still loving life every day, fighting a relentless cancer that was only slowed in the face of her faith and intense drive to live.
She became a rusting leaf gone holy, fading imperceptibly over time, crumbling at the edges until she finally had to let go. Her dying did not flash brilliance, nor draw attention at the end. Her intense focus during the years of her illness had always been outward to others, to her family and friends, to the healers she spent so much time with in medical offices, to her firm belief in the plan God had written for her and those who loved her.
So Jenny let go her hold on life here. And we reluctantly let her go. Brilliance cloaks her as her focus is now on things eternal.
You were so right, Jenny. The hard feelings from a quarter century ago don’t amount to a hill of beans now. The words you spoke to me that day taught me to love life even when I have no stomach for it.
All of us did have a great time together a few days before the world changed. And manure transforms over time to rich, nurturing compost.
I promise I am no longer upset that I can’t change what is past nor the fact that you and so many others have now left us.
But we’ll catch up later.
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Once only when the summer was nearly over and my own hair had been white as the day’s clouds for more years than I was counting I looked across the garden at evening Paula was still weeding around flowers that open after dark and I looked up to the clear sky and saw the new moon and at that moment from behind me a band of dark birds and then another after it flying in silence long curving wings hardly moving the plovers just in from the sea and the flight clear from Alaska half their weight gone to get them home but home now arriving without a sound as it rose to meet them ~W.S. Merwin “Homecoming” from The Moon Before Morning
In late summer, the movement of birds above me has begun, like a prayer of promise among the clouds.
There are the noisy ones: geese, ducks, swans who can’t seem to travel without announcing it everywhere, like the booming basses from teenage vehicles speeding by.
Then there are the starlings and others who murmurate with wing wooshes, forming and unforming as a choreographed larger organism.
The quietest and most earnest are the gulls and plovers, some traveling only a few miles from shore to cornfields, and others traveling half a continent without resting. They direct their energy to their wings to silently carry them home.
Some of our prayers for a safe return home are bold and loud. Others are expressed through feathered wings and forward progress. Most are prayed without a sound being made, becoming a constant through the rhythms of the heart, a quiet recognition that our true home will rise to meet us when we arrive.
I will have nothing to do with a God who cares only occasionally. I need a God who is with us always, everywhere, in the deepest depths as well as the highest heights. It is when things go wrong, when good things do not happen, when our prayers seem to have been lost, that God is most present. We do not need the sheltering wings when things go smoothly. We are closest to God in the darkness, stumbling along blindly. ~Madeleine L’Engle
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My father would lift me to the ceiling in his big hands and ask, How’s the weather up there? And it was good, the weather of being in his hands, his breath of scotch and cigarettes, his face smiling from the world below. O daddy, was the lullaby I sang back down to him as he stood on earth, my great, white-shirted father, home from work, his gold wristwatch and wedding band gleaming as he held me above him for as long as he could, before his strength failed down there in the world I find myself standing in tonight, my little boy looking down from his flight below the ceiling, cradled in my hands, his eyes wide and already staring into the distance beyond the man asking him again and again, How’s the weather up there? ~George Bilgere “Weather”.
It was hard work, dying, harder than anything he’d ever done.
Whatever brutal, bruising, back- breaking chore he’d forced himself
to endure—it was nothing compared to this. And it took
so long. When would the job be over? Who would call him
home for supper? And it was hard for us (his children)—
all of our lives we’d heard my mother telling us to go out,
help your father, but this was work we could not do.
He was way out beyond us, in a field we could not reach. ~Joyce Sutphen “My Father, Dying”
Deep in one of our closets is an old film reel of me about 16 months old sitting securely held by my father on his shoulders. I am bursting out with giggles as he repeatedly bends forward, dipping his head and shoulders down. I tip forward, looking like I am about to fall off, and when he stands back up straight, my mouth becomes a large O and I can almost remember the tummy tickle I feel. I want him to do it again and again, taking me to the edge of falling off and then bringing me back from the brink.
My father was a tall man, so being swept up onto his shoulders felt a bit like I was touching heaven.
It was as he lay dying 30 years ago this summer that I realized again how tall he was — his feet kept hitting the foot panel of the hospital bed my mother had requested for their home. We cushioned his feet with padding so he wouldn’t get abrasions even though he would never stand on them again, no longer towering over us.
His helplessness in dying was startling – this man who could build anything and accomplish whatever he set his mind to was unable to subdue his cancer. Our father, who was so self-sufficient he rarely asked for help, did not know how to ask for help now.
So we did what we could when we could tell he was uncomfortable, which wasn’t often. He didn’t say much, even though there was much we could have been saying. We didn’t reminisce. We didn’t laugh and joke together. We just were there, taking shifts catching naps on the couch so we could be available if he called out, which he never did.
This man: who had grown up dirt poor, fought hard with his alcoholic father left abruptly to go to college – the first in his family – then called to war for three years in the South Pacific.
This man: who had raised a family on a small farm while he was a teacher, then a supervisor, then a desk worker.
This man: who left our family to marry another woman but returned after a decade to ask forgiveness.
This man: who died in a house he had built completely himself, without assistance, from the ground up.
He didn’t need our help – he who had held tightly to us and brought us back from the brink when we went too far – he had been on the brink himself and was rescued, coming back humbled.
No question the weather is fine for him up there. I have no doubt.
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Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths, Enwrought with golden and silver light, The blue and the dim and the dark cloths Of night and light and the half light, I would spread the cloths under your feet: But I, being poor, have only my dreams; I have spread my dreams under your feet; Tread softly because you tread on my dreams. ~William Butler Yeats from “Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven“
I know for a while again, the health of self-forgetfulness, looking out at the sky through a notch in the valley side, the black woods wintry on the hills, small clouds at sunset passing across. And I know that this is one of the thresholds between Earth and Heaven, from which I may even step forth from myself and be free. ~ Wendell Berry, Sabbaths 2000
John O’Donohue gave voice to the connection between beauty and those edges of life — thresholds was the word he loved— where the fullness of reality becomes more stark and more clear.
If you go back to the etymology of the word “threshold,” it comes from “threshing,” which is to separate the grain from the husk. So the threshold, in a way, is a place where you move into more critical and challenging and worthy fullness.
There are huge thresholds in every life.
You know that, for instance, if you are in the middle of your life in a busy evening, fifty things to do and you get a phone call that somebody you love is suddenly dying, it takes ten seconds to communicate that information.
But when you put the phone down, you are already standing in a different world. Suddenly everything that seems so important before is all gone and now you are thinking of this.So the given world that we think is there and the solid ground we are on is so tentative. And a threshold is a line which separates two territories of spirit, and very often how we cross is the key thing.
Over a decade ago, someone told me that my writing reflected a “sacramental” life — touching and tasting the holiness of everyday moments, as if they are the cup and bread of God’s eternal grace and gift.
I allow those words to sit warmly beside me during the hours I struggle to know what to share here.
It is all too tempting to focus on sacrament over the sacrifice it represents. As much as I love the world and the beauty in the moments I share here, we should explore the “thin places” between heaven and earth, through forgetting self, stepping forth through a holy threshold into something far greater.
I feel so unworthy — in fact, threshed to pieces most days, incapable of thinking of anything but how I feel reduced to fragments. Perhaps those fragments are like the droplets coming from a farm sprinkler at sunset, sparkling and golden despite waning light, bringing something essential to someone feeling dry, parched and dusty.
I may even step forth from myself and be free.
Then we can walk each other home.
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The serene philosophy of the pink rose is steadying. Its fragrant, delicate petals open fully and are ready to fall, without regret or disillusion, after only a day in the sun. It is so every summer. One can almost hear their pink, fragrant murmur as they settle down upon the grass: ‘Summer, summer, it will always be summer.’ ~Rachel Peden
It will always be summer if we let go in the midst of the brief brightness, when all is glorious.
No cold winds, no unending days of rain, no mildew, no iced walkways, no 18 hours of darkness, no turning brown with mold and rot.
Let us be strong and serene through all seasons rather than letting go at the height of summer.
Let us thrive steady through the hard times rather than withering at the peak of beauty.
Let us age, let us turn gray, let us wrinkle, and go bald.
It may always be summer — someday — but not yet.
Not here. Not now.
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In the home of God, there is a never-ending festival… ~St. Augustine in Exposition on Psalm 42
Some small bone in your foot is longing for heaven —Robert Bly
This twinge at first stir too modest for throb, more diffident than tug, not an itch, not the most
incurious twitch of a hook, not a jerk, but the tease of brustle of the fine, stiff pinions of every curtained saint and cherub. ~Hailey Leithauser “Some Small Bone,”
Even the smallest part of us ~each cell, each skin pore, each little bone~ longs to know what to believe about what comes next.
~perhaps heaven is as light and gentle as a touch of a feather.
~maybe heaven is as rich as the glow of a full blood moon.
~or heaven is like the ever-changing colors of the northern lights illuminating the skies.
~certainly heaven is eternal felicity, where we join an everlasting party.
yet despite the discomfort of our questions, quandaries and doubts, or perhaps, because of them…
it is the Lord in heaven who longs for, and believes in, us.
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