…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.
I do try to stopper time.
I try every day on this page, not to suspend time or render it frozen, but like flowers and fruit that wither, I want to preserve these moments – a few harvested words and pictures to sample some chilly day.
I offer it up to you now, a bit of fragrance, to sip of its sweetness as it glows, luminous in the bottle.
Let’s share. Leave it unstoppered. The passage of time is meant to be preserved this way.
Again I resume the long lesson: how small a thing can be pleasing, how little in this hard world it takes to satisfy the mind and bring it to its rest.
Within the ongoing havoc the woods this morning is almost unnaturally still. Through stalled air, unshadowed light, a few leaves fall of their own weight.
The sky is gray. It begins in mist almost at the ground and rises forever. The trees rise in silence almost natural, but not quite, almost eternal, but not quite.
What more did I think I wanted? Here is what has always been. Here is what will always be. Even in me, the Maker of all this returns in rest, even to the slightest of His works, a yellow leaf slowly falling, and is pleased. ~Wendell Berry “VII” from This Day
What more did I think I wanted?
What always has been and always will be:
Until I’m not able to hold on in the wind and rain, may I be a slight spot of light in this dark and bleak world.
As I let go, when the time to finish comes, I know my Maker’s smile means it was all worthwhile…
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Fall, leaves, fall; die, flowers, away; Lengthen night and shorten day; Every leaf speaks bliss to me Fluttering from the autumn tree. I shall smile when wreaths of snow Blossom where the rose should grow; I shall sing when night’s decay Ushers in a drearier day. ~Emily Brontë “Fall, Leaves, Fall”
It was not the thorn bending to the honeysuckles, but the honeysuckles embracing the thorn. ~Emily Brontë from Wuthering Heights
The loudest crows cawing over the tops of the oaks call me to autumn already, and though my back is to the window,
I know the sky must be a gray wuthering, and the curlews are crying. The wind must be moaning as it goes sweeping across heath and moors and the spikes of purple heather thousands of miles away from where my body sits; yet
I avoid watching sad movies and will close a book that is clearly heading for a weepy ending.
I don’t need to wrap myself around things that hurt when there is enough sadness and pain in the world already. Deep emotion sticks to me like velcro, even when I know the tragedy is not my own. I take it on as if it is.
As a result, the Brontë novel Wuthering Heights is not my cup of tea. I suffered through the book as well as the movie versions. It is grim with wild, destructive passions that only lead to more sorrow. I become immersed in those desperately gray “wuthering” scenes feeling the sharp thorns of the words I read that end up drawing blood from me.
But most suffering is not at all fictional. When I become aware of tragedy happening far away, when the hurricane leaves behind terrible devastation or bombs and bullets rip communities to shreds, even though there is little I can physically do to help, I can’t turn away and not look. I can’t close the book that makes me sad and uncomfortable.
I too must feel the hurt, embracing the thorns rather than avoiding them.
Jesus did just that, taking it all upon Himself. He never turned away and still, now, today, He is pierced, bloodied for our sake.
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There is not one blade of grass, there is no color in this world that is not intended to make us rejoice. ~John Calvinas quoted in John Calvin: A Sixteenth Century Portrait (Oxford, 1988)byWilliam J. Bouwsma
It is too easy to become blinded to the glory surrounding us if we allow it to seem routine and commonplace.
I can’t remember the last time I celebrated a blade of grass, given how focused I am in mowing it into conformity and submission.
During the summer months, I’m seldom up early enough to witness the pink sunrise. In the winter, I’m too busy making dinner to take time to watch the sun paint the sky red as it sets.
I miss opportunities to stop and notice what surrounds me innumerable times a day. It takes only a moment of recognition and appreciation to feel the joy, and for that moment time stands still. So life stretches a little longer when I stop to acknowledge the intention of creation as an endless reservoir of rejoicing.
If a blade of grass, if a palette of color, if all this is made for joy, then perhaps, so am I. Even colorless, commonplace, sometimes stormy me. Indeed, so am I.
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The old church leans awry and looks quite odd, But it is beautiful to us, and God. ~Stephen Paulus “The Old Church”
A little aside from the main road, becalmed in a last-century greyness, there is the chapel, ugly, without the appeal to the tourist to stop his car and visit it. The traffic goes by, and the river goes by, and quick shadows of clouds, too, and the chapel settles a little deeper into the grass.
But here once on an evening like this, in the darkness that was about his hearers, a preacher caught fire and burned steadily before them with a strange light, so that they saw the splendour of the barren mountains about them and sang their amens fiercely, narrow but saved in a way that men are not now. ~R.S. Thomas “The Chapel”
It’s just a boarded-up shack with a tower Under the blazing summer sky On a back road seldom traveled Where the shadows of tall trees Graze peacefully like a row of gallows…
The congregation may still be at prayer. Farm folk from flyspecked photos Standing in rows with their heads bowed As if listening to your approaching steps. So slow they are, you must be asking yourself How come we are here one minute And in the very next gone forever? Try the locked door, then knock once.
High above you, there is the leaning spire Still feeling the blow of the last storm. And then the silence of the afternoon . . . Even the unbeliever must feel its force. ~Charles Simic, from “Wooden Church” from The Voice at 3:00 A.M.
The church knelt heavy above us as we attended Sunday School, circled by age group and hunkered on little wood folding chairs where we gave our nickels, said our verses, heard the stories, sang the solid, swinging songs.
It could have been God above in the pews, His restless love sifting with dust from the joists. We little seeds swelled in the stone cellar, bursting to grow toward the light.
Maybe it was that I liked how, upstairs, outside, an avid sun stormed down, burning the sharp- edged shadows back to their buildings, or how the winter air knifed after the dreamy basement.
Maybe the day we learned whatever would have kept me believing I was just watching light poke from the high, small window and tilt to the floor where I could make it a gold strap on my shoe, wrap my ankle, embrace any part of me. ~Maureen Ash “Church Basement”
Mom, You raised your hands while we sang this morning like I’ve never known you to, but I guess until recently I’ve never really known you in a church that let you feel alive.
There is so much wrong with churches overall, comprised as they are of fallen people with broken wings and fractured faith. We who look odd and lean awry, so keen to find flaws in one another when we are already cracked open and spilling with our own.
Yet what is right with the church is Who we pray to, why we sing and absorb the Word- we are visible people joined together as a body so bloodied, so bruised, yet being healed despite our thoroughly motley messiness.
Our Lord of Heaven and Earth rains down His restless love upon our heads no matter how humble a building we worship in, or how we look or feel today.
We are simply grateful to be alive, eating a meal together, mourning those we have lost, coming together to raise our hands, to kneel and bow in a humble house God calls His very own.
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The old church leans nearby a well-worn road, Upon a hill that has no grass or tree, The winds from off the prairie now unload The dust they bring around it fitfully.
The path that leads up to the open door Is worn and grayed by many toiling feet Of us who listen to the Bible lore And once again the old-time hymns repeat.
And ev’ry Sabbath morning we are still Returning to the altar waiting there. A hush, a prayer, a pause, and voices fill The Master’s House with a triumphant air.
The old church leans awry and looks quite odd, But it is beautiful to us and God. ~Stephen Paulus
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A sudden light transfigures a trivial thing, a weather-vane, a wind-mill, a winnowing flail, the dust in the barn door; a moment,- – and the thing has vanished, because it was pure effect; but it leaves a relish behind it, a longing that the accident may happen again. ~Walter Pater from “The Renaissance”
Man Scything Hay by Todd Reifers
dust motes and insects in the barn
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 eyes, heart, what looks, what lips yet give 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 in Harvest”
The accident of light does happen, again and again, but when I least expect it.
I need to be ready for it; in a blink, it can be gone.
Yet in that moment, everything is changed and transformed forever.
The thing itself, trivial and transient becomes something other, merely because of how it is illuminated.
And so am I, trivial and transient, lit from outside myself, winnowed and transfigured by a love and sacrifice that I can never deserve.
It was and is no accident.
My heart is readies for earth to be hurled to heaven’s Light.
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Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love. And then, for the second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire. ~Teilhard de Chardin from “The Evolution of Chastity,” in Toward the Future, 1936
May I not forget~ the energy of love is harnessed through the One who was born Man:
Yet was God
come down to our side to help us master (not the wind or waves or tides or gravity) but instead forgive our (unruly, wild, stubborn) selves in His Name.
And we are energized by the power of His Love…
Once the fire of His Spirit is within us, it can never be extinguished.
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In my beginning is my end. Now the light falls Across the open field, leaving the deep lane Shuttered with branches, dark in the afternoon…
The dahlias sleep in the empty silence. Wait for the early owl.
Dawn points, and another day Prepares for heat and silence. Out at sea the dawn wind Wrinkles and slides. I am here Or there, or elsewhere. In my beginning.
Home is where one starts from. As we grow older the world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated Of dead and living. Not the intense moment Isolated, with no before and after, But a lifetime burning in every moment And not the lifetime of one man only But of old stones that cannot be deciphered. There is a time for the evening under starlight, A time for the evening under lamplight
Love is most nearly itself When here and now cease to matter. ~T. S. Eliot, verses from “East Coker” in Four Quartets
I’m reminded daily of my limited point of view; I can scarcely peer past the end of my nose. It takes a special kind of vision to see the young barn owl, still covered with downy blonde feathers, sitting among the stones outside its big barn home.
How can I possibly begin to understand the increasing complexity of the world around me as I try to look beyond, behind and through the here and now right in front of me?
I’m not alone. For uncounted generations, people have sought answers when confronted with the indecipherable mysteries of existence. We create massive monuments to the living and the dead to honor, appease and somehow maintain access to them.
We make up our own stories to explain the inexplicable rather than seeing and listening to what has been handed to us.
The Word as given is all the story we need.
All shall be revealed – still, we wait and wait as our lifetime burns through every moment, watching the Light illuminate our darkness as Love is laid down as never before.
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I thought of happiness, how it is woven Out of the silence in the empty house each day And how it is not sudden and it is not given But is creation itself like the growth of a tree. No one has seen it happen, but inside the bark Another circle is growing in the expanding ring. No one has heard the root go deeper in the dark, But the tree is lifted by this inward work And its plumes shine, and its leaves are glittering.
For what is happiness but growth in peace, And as the air moves, so the old dreams stir The shining leaves of present happiness? No one has heard thought or listened to a mind, But where people have lived in inwardness The air is charged with blessing and does bless; Windows look out on mountains and the walls are kind. ~ May Sarton, from “The Work of Happiness” in Collected Poems, 1930-1993
The settled happiness and security which we all desire, God withholds from us by the very nature of the world: but joy, pleasure, and merriment, he has scattered broadcast. We are never safe, but we have plenty of fun, and some ecstasy. It is not hard to see why.
The security we crave would teach us to rest our hearts in this world and oppose an obstacle to our return to God: a few moments of happy love, a landscape, a symphony, a merry meeting with our friends, a bath or a football match, have no such tendency.
Our Father refreshes us on the journey with some pleasant inns, but will not encourage us to mistake them for home. ~C.S. Lewis from The Problem of Pain
I am reminded every day, as headlines proclaim bad news: this is not our home. I am only a wayfarer, not a settler.
Just like the distress of my four year old grandson, staying overnight and waking with a bad dream, appearing at my bedside at 3 AM, saying simply “I need a hug!”
We need reassurance that all this scary stuff is not forever.
Sometimes I lose focus on the “why” of my journey on this troubled earth: so much of my time and energy is understandably spent seeking safety and security, striving on a journey I hope will be filled with happiness, joy and contentment, as if that is my ultimate destination and purpose.
Yet the nature of a fallen world filled with faltering souls such as myself leads me down boulder-strewn paths filled with potholes and sheer cliffs and yes, bad dreams.
At times nowhere feels safe or secure and I overthink my next step.
God hears my fear of the unknown destination, as only He can know what lies ahead on my or anyone’s journey. God in His mercy does not leave us homeless, without hope and unable to wake from the bad dream.
We breathe air charged with His blessing. He gifts Himself; I can breathe because of Him.
I need a hug…
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When I was with the green hummingbird, it became the company I didn’t know I needed. We spent our mornings together, and after it went its way, I read and wrote.
…a hummingbird, essential company in the endless journey through dead-ends, restarts, and new beginnings – as well as a reminder of the beauty of the world, the power of the sun, the rain, love, and life, all packed inside the body of a creature that weighs less than an ounce. A sign that within the smallest detail, the whole world is present, and just as the gravity and magnificence of life is present in the mountains, oceans, stars, and everything larger than life, it is also brilliantly present in its smallest bird. ~Zito Madu from “Hummingbirds are Wondrous” in Plough
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