Tag: instinct

To Become Light

barnstormingblog4 Comments

baker84184

 

qal84184

 

We humans contribute to the world’s gloom,
like dark shadows on a dark landscape.…
But now this man from Nazareth comes to us
and invites us to mirror God’s image,
and shows us how.

He says:
you too can become light, as God is light.
What is all around you is not hell,
but rather a world waiting to be filled with hope and faith.
This world is your home as surely as the God who created and wrought it is love.
You may not believe it, but you can love this world.

It is a place of God.
It has a purpose.
Its beauty is not a delusion.
You can lead a meaningful life in it.
~Jörg Zink “Doors to the Feast”

 

 

IMG_0368

 

In this dark world we search for inspiration and a sense of purpose in the most unlikely places:

this past week, we were awestruck by the devotion of a mother killer whale in nearby Puget Sound who has carried her dead baby on her nose for over a week,  unwilling to abandon the lifeless body to the sea.

There is tragic beauty in such demonstration of profound love, a recognition of our own losses and helplessness in the face of death.

We too are carried by our Savior through His relentless devotion and love for us, never to abandon us.

Even in the face of loss and consumed by the darkness of the world, we love as we are loved, body of His body.

 

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photo from the Center for Whale Research

 

HOW TO SWIM AN ELEGY

Lo, let that night be desolate;
let no joyful voice come therein.
Let them curse it that curse the day,
who are ready to rouse up leviathan.
—Job 3:7-8

This is a job
for your barnacle-wrecked body.
Grief, it turns out, is too much
for the mind. It enervates
the yellowed enamel of your
ground-down molars; chafes at
the skin sack separating your water
from the world’s water. Keep
your chin up. Not because
the sympathy cards tell you to,
but because the horizon’s gone,
replaced by a blubberless body
you must dive for again and again,
as it slips and sinks—body of your body
that you must propel to the surface
over and over, each time discovering
for the first time the lie of perfect form.
Three days and three nights,
across the Sound, afterbirth
trailing behind, swim
until your forehead becomes
an open tomb. You must balance
the weight of your old life on your nose
until the sky disappears and you become
a spectacle for pleasure-boaters.
Engines throbbing, they will point
as if the calf’s a rubber ball
you can’t put down.
The captain will turn on his mic:
No-one knows why. Instinct? Spirit?
It’s almost human. This will be
your signal. Swim closer, closer
until the binoculars come down
and they flee the railing,
recognizing in your dead
their own.

~Craig Van Rooyen—from Poets Respond

 

That Rank Odor of Passing Springtime

barnstormingblog5 Comments

homerroller

 

homerroll

 

homerroll2

 

With what deep thirst
we quicken our desires
to that rank odor of a passing springtime!

Must you taste everything? Must you know everything?
Must you have a part in everything?
~William Carlos Williams from “Smell”

 

notadeaddog

 

I realize I am not so different than my dogs rolling happily in the stinkiest thing they can find  – I want to taste and know and be part of everything whether it is good or not:

I tend to douse myself with whatever I wish to carry with me through the rest of my days, even if smelling like something just died repels others.

Maybe, like my dogs, it is to conceal who I really am.

Maybe, like my dogs, I would rather fit in with the barnyard than a palace.

Or maybe, just like my dogs, I simply like getting down and dirty and too proud of it.

Human nature being what it is — the desire to blend in with the world’s sordid and sin-ridden surroundings — this is why I, like my dogs, am in constant need of a good bathing.
It would be best to smell like that rank odor of too-swiftly passing springtimes – we all need a renewal and reminder of our rebirth rather than immersion in the stench of death.

May I, like my dogs,
recognize I must be cleansed –
again and again and again.

 

meetingofminds

 

damppups

 

 

homer2018

 

A Muffled Whuff

barnstormingblog6 Comments

starlingmurmur3

 

murmur3

 

Out of the dimming sky a speck appeared,
then another, and another.
It was the starlings going to roost. 
They gathered deep in the distance,  flock sifting into flock,
and strayed towards me, transparent and whirling, like smoke.
They seemed to unravel as they flew,
lengthening in curves, like a loosened skein. 
I didn’t move;
they flew directly over my head for half an hour. 

Each individual bird bobbed and knitted up and down
in the flight at apparent random, for no known reason except
that that’s how starlings fly, yet all remained perfectly spaced.
The flocks each tapered at either end from a rounded middle, like an eye.
Overhead I heard a sound of beaten air, like a million shook rugs, a muffled whuff.
Into the woods they sifted without shifting a twig,
right through the crowns of trees, intricate and rushing, like wind.

Could tiny birds be sifting through me right now,
birds winging through the gaps between my cells,
touching nothing, but quickening in my tissues, fleet?
~Annie Dillard from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

 

 

starlingmurmur2

 

Watching the starlings’ murmuration is a visceral experience – my heart leaps to see it happen above me.  I feel queasy following its looping amoebic folding and unfolding path.

Thousands of individual birds move in sync with one another to form one massive organism existing solely because each tiny component anticipates and cooperates to avoid mid-air collisions.  It could explode into chaos but it doesn’t.  It could result in massive casualties but it doesn’t.  They could avoid each other altogether but they don’t – they come together with a purpose and reasoning beyond our imagining. Even the silence of their movement has a discernible sound.

We humans are made up of just such cooperating component parts, that which is deep in our tissues, programmed in our DNA.  Yet we don’t learn from our designed and carefully constructed building blocks.  We have become frighteningly disparate and independent creatures, going our own way bumping and crashing without care.

We have lost our internal moral compass.

We shoot each other in the backs, even during school lessons or listening to music or engaging in acts of worship.  We watch each other bleed and die.

And do nothing yet again.

The sound of silence is muffled weeping.

 

starlingmurmur

Igniting the Wild Side

barnstormingblog1 Comment
snow1220138
photo by Josh Scholten
photo by Josh Scholten
Dog sees white. Arctic
light, the bright buzz in the brain
of pure crystal adrenaline. In a flash
he is out the door and across the street
looking for snowshoe hares, caribou, cats.
His wild ancestry ignited, Dog plunges
his nose into snow up to his eyes. He sees
his dreams. Master yells from the front porch
but Dog can’t hear him. Dog hears nothing
except the roar of the wind across the tundra, the ancient
existential cry of wolves, pure, devastating, hungry.
Time for crunchies. Taking many detours, Dog
returns to the porch. Let master think what he
wants. Freedom comes at a price.
~Paul Piper “Dog and Snow”
 Unlike many other parts of the country, we’ve had no snow this winter (yet).  We have been sadly deprived of that moment of  “YES!!” when awakening to that lighter glow through the curtains that suggests a snowy landscape, that blast of fresh chill when heading out the back door to step off the porch into all that clean whiteness, surrounded by pristine silence.   There is something about the complete transformation of the familiar that ignites and warms us back to the wild child inside each of us.
Ever-present mud, our current ubiquitous winter landscape, tends to have an opposite effect on the spirit.   It douses rather than ignites, weighs down rather than lightens up.  It squishes and soils and depresses.   “This too shall pass” I think, as I pull on my mud and muck boots, and then “this sucks” and force myself off the porch into the mire. It is the price to be paid for the freedom in the call of the wild:  into every life a little mud will cling.  Thankfully we are washable.
photo by Josh Scholten
photo by Josh Scholten

 

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photo by Josh Scholten

 

coyote3
snowy coyote

 

needabath