Tag: hope

Crossing Paths

briarcroft1 Comment

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back…
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence…
~Robert Frost (1916) from “The Road Not Taken”

Two lonely cross-roads that themselves cross each other I have walked several times this winter without meeting or overtaking so much as a single person on foot or on runners. The practically unbroken condition of both for several days after a snow or a blow proves that neither is much travelled. Judge then how surprised I was the other evening as I came down one to see a man, who to my own unfamiliar eyes and in the dusk looked for all the world like myself, coming down the other, his approach to the point where our paths must intersect being so timed that unless one of us pulled up we must inevitably collide. I felt as if I was going to meet my own image in a slanting mirror. Or say I felt as we slowly converged on the same point with the same noiseless yet laborious stride as if we were two images about to float together with the uncrossing of someone’s eyes. I verily expected to take up or absorb this other self and feel the stronger by the addition for the three-mile journey home. But I didn’t go forward to the touch. I stood still in wonderment and let him pass by; and that, too, with the fatal omission of not trying to find out by a comparison of lives and immediate and remote interests what could have brought us by crossing paths to the same point in a wilderness at the same moment of nightfall. Some purpose I doubt not, if we could but have made out. I like a coincidence almost as well as an incongruity.
~Robert Frost (1911) from “Selected Letters”

Way leads on to way:
I am far enough down the road that I don’t recall all the options I have faced over the years of my journey. I know there were times I ran into an impossible sticky thicket, so had to double back and try a different route. Maybe I have learned since to choose more carefully.

I don’t believe in coincidence and I don’t believe our choices are randomly made. I believe I am shepherded in the direction I am meant to go. The issue is whether I listen or whether I bolt the opposite way, come what may.

Some roads need to grow up in weeds.

Grace Disguised

briarcroftLeave a comment

If grace is so wonderful, why do we have such difficulty recognizing and accepting it?

Maybe it’s because grace is not gentle or made-to-order.

It often comes disguised as loss, or failure, or unwelcome change.
For grace to be grace, it must give us things we didn’t know we needed
and take us places where we didn’t know we didn’t want to go.
~Kathleen Norris from Acedia and Me

I’ve been salvaged when I didn’t even know I needed saving.
I’ve been given what I didn’t think I needed so never had asked.
I’ve been taken places I never planned to be when I was sure things were fine right where I was.

Grace is not about giving me what I think I want;
it is not a reward for good behavior. 

It is giving me exactly what I need when I deserve nothing.

It is the thorny landing that catches me when I fall.
It is the tiny drop that spares me in drought.
It is scars formed as proof that healing happens to the deepest wounds.
It is being scattered when I planned to remain whole.

I am grateful, so very grateful, for what I didn’t know.
I am grateful, so very grateful, for grace disguised.

Wither Me

briarcroftLeave a comment

Wither me to within me:
Welt me to weal me common again:
Withdraw to wear me weary:
Over me to hover and lover again:

Before me to form and perform me:
Round me to rill me liquid incisions:
Behind me to hunt and haunt me:
Down me to drown indecision:

Bury me to seed me: bloom me
In loam me: grind me to meal me
Knead me to rise: raise me to your mouth

Rive me to river me:
End me to unmend me:
Rend me to render me:
~Philip Metres “Prayer”

witherpeony1

witheriris1

 

The truth is:
though we prefer to gaze on fresh beauty,
to ponder smooth youthful perfection
rather than the pocked and wrinkled,
the used-up and weary,
our prayer desires His everlasting love
even when we fall in frailty.
We wither from the first day,
readying for fruit to burst forth
as we, torn and buried,
are sown to rise again.

 

witheriris

 

witherchestnut

 

The grass withers and the flowers fall, but the word of our God endures forever.”
Isaiah 40:8

So Bugged

briarcroft1 Comment

Sometimes I’d get mad
because things didn’t work out well,
I’d spoil a flapjack,
or slip in the snowfield while getting water,
or one time my shovel went sailing down into the gorge,
and I’d be so mad I’d want to bite the mountaintops
and would come in the shack
and kick the cupboard and hurt my toe.

But let the mind beware,
that though the flesh be bugged,
the circumstances of existence are pretty glorious.
~Jack Kerouac from The Dharma Bums

Little things can bug us.  In fact, like a thistle covered with aphids which entices ants,  we can be bugged on top of bugged.

Yet we still bloom. We are on notice there is joy to be found. What solace is this?  

Though bugs exult in irritating us, flaunting our flawed flesh, it is a reminder of our vulnerability during our short stay on this good earth, bugs and all.  

The rest is all glorious, right down to the thirsty roots that hold us fast. 

Ever Were or Ever Will Be

briarcroft2 Comments

Sunrise is an event that calls forth solemn music in the very depths of our nature, as if one’s whole being had to attune itself to the cosmos and praise God for the new day, praise him in the name of all the creatures that ever were or ever will be.

I look at the rising sun and feel that now upon me falls the responsibility of seeing what all my ancestors have seen, in the Stone Age and even before it, praising God before me. Whether or not they praised him then, for themselves, they must praise him now in me. When the sun rises each one of us is summoned by the living and the dead to praise God.
~Thomas Merton from Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander

I’m well aware not everyone greets the morning with praise; dawn signals the start of a new day of painful relationships, back-breaking work, and unending discouragement. I know people who keep themselves up until 3 AM just so they can sleep through the sunrise and somehow find a way to start their day at noon after all hint of morning has passed.

Instead I’m one of those barely tolerable “morning” persons, waking up without an alarm, ready to rise, a song in my heart and a smile on my lips. The gift of a new day and another try at life is a source of great joy and inspiration to me.

God keeps bringing the sun back to us, day in and day out. We, His creatures, are given yet another chance.

May His Name be praised evermore.

An Army of Tulips

briarcroftLeave a comment

Guarded within the old red wall’s embrace,
   Marshaled like soldiers in gay company,
   The tulips stand arrayed. Here infantry
Wheels out into the sunlight. What bold grace
Sets off their tunics, white with crimson lace!
   Here are platoons of gold-frocked cavalry
   With scarlet sabres tossing in the eye
Of purple batteries, every gun in place.
   Forward they come, with flaunting colors spread,
With torches burning, stepping out in time
   To some quick, unheard march. Our ears are dead,
We cannot catch the tune. In pantomime
   Parades that army. With our utmost powers
   We hear the wind stream through a bed of flowers.
~Amy Lowell – 1914 “A Tulip Garden”


April ignites an explosion:
Dazzling retinal hues
Singed, crying
Grateful tears for such as this
Array of floral arms-
A rainbow on Earth

Transient, incandescent
Brilliance hoped for.
Remembered in dreams,
Promises realized,
Housed in crystal before shattering.



A Bright Sadness: Taking Aim at all the Sky

briarcroftLeave a comment


I
Here something stubborn comes,
Dislodging the earth crumbs
And making crusty rubble.
It comes up bending double
And looks like a green staple.
It could be seedling maple,
Or artichoke, or bean;
That remains to be seen.

II
Forced to make choice of ends,
The stalk in time unbends,
Shakes off the seedcase, heaves
Aloft, and spreads two leaves
Which still display no sure
And special signature.
Toothless and fat, they keep
The oval form of sleep.

III
This plant would like to grow
And yet be embryo;
Increase, and yet escape
The doom of taking shape;
Be vaguely vast, and climb
To the tip end of time
With all of space to fill,
Like boundless Yggdrasill
That has the stars for fruit.
But something at the root
More urgent than that urge
Bids two true leaves emerge,
And now the plant, resigned
To being self-defined
Before it can commerce
With the great universe,
Takes aim at all the sky
And starts to ramify.
~Richard Wilbur “Seed Leaves”

Now the green blade rises from the buried grain,
Wheat that in the dark earth many years has lain;
Love lives again, that with the dead has been:
Love is come again, like wheat that springs up green.

When our hearts are saddened, grieving or in pain,
By Your touch You call us back to life again;
Fields of our hearts that dead and bare have been:
Love is come again, like wheat that springs up green.
~John Crum from The Oxford Book of Carols

Over the last several weeks, roots have become shoots and their green blades have risen chaotically, uneven and awkward like a bad haircut.  And like a bad haircut, a few days of further growth will make all the difference — renewal will cover all the bare earth, breaking through crusty rubble to reach up, heaving and healing, aiming for the sky.

There is nothing more hopeful than the barren made fruitful, the ugly made beautiful, the devastated restored, the dead made alive.

The fields of our broken hearts recover; love is come again.