For more “Best of Barnstorming” photos:
Seasons on the Farm:
BriarCroft in Summer, in Autumn, in Winter,
at Year’s End
Tag: landscape photography
Best of Barnstorming Winter/Spring 2017
Instructions for living a life:
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.
~Mary Oliver
For more “Best of Barnstorming” photos:
Seasons on the Farm:
BriarCroft in Summer, in Autumn, in Winter,
at Year’s End
A Special Mention
Thank you, Ann Voskamp, for linking to this Barnstorming blog over the past two years, sharing my photographs of our farm and the surrounding scenery of Whatcom County with thousands of your readers around the world. Just this past weekend over 2000 of your special people came to visit Barnstorming in our little corner of the web, and many of them have stayed on to chat on our farm porch as well as yours.
If you have not visited Ann’s blog before, you must. Look for “Only the Good Stuff: Multivitamins for your Weekend” every Saturday on “A Holy Experience” and look for her stories during the week, along with news about her upcoming book.
Ann has transformed many lives through her open-hearted witness of her own transformation. As one of those broken people aching for gospel glue to pull my pieces together, I am indebted to her remarkable wisdom and grace.
Blessed by all who visit here and by Ann who led you here,
Emily from Barnstorming
A Message to the Future
And this is where we went, I thought,
Now here, now there, upon the grass
Some forty years ago.
The days being short now, simply I had come
To gaze and look and stare upon
The thought of that once endless maze of afternoons.
But most of all I wished to find the places where I ran
What’s happened to our boys that they no longer race
And stand them still to contemplate Christ’s handiwork:
His clear blood bled in syrups from the lovely wounded trees?
Why only bees and blackbird winds and bending grass?
No matter. Walk. Walk, look, and sweet recall.
I came upon an oak where once when I was twelve
I had climbed up and screamed for Skip to get me down.
It was a thousand miles to earth. I shut my eyes and yelled.
My brother, richly compelled to mirth, gave shouts of laughter
And scaled up to rescue me.
“What were you doing there?” he said.
I did not tell. Rather drop me dead.
But I was there to place a note within a squirrel nest
On which I’d written some old secret thing now long forgot.
{Now} I lay upon the limb a long while, thinking.
I drank in all the leaves and clouds and weathers
Going by as mindless
As the days.
What, what, what if? I thought. But no. Some forty years beyond!
I brought forth:
The note.
I opened it. For now I had to know.
I opened it, and wept. I clung then to the tree
And let the tears flow out and down my chin.
Dear boy, strange child, who must have known the years
And reckoned time and smelled sweet death from flowers
In the far churchyard.
It was a message to the future, to myself.
Knowing one day I must arrive, come, seek, return.
From the young one to the old. From the me that was small
And fresh to the me that was large and no longer new.
What did it say that made me weep?
I remember you.
I remember you.
~Ray Bradbury from “Remembrance”
I too left notes to my future self, in old barns, and lofts,
and yes, in trees,
but have never gone back to retrieve them.
My ten year old heart tried to imagine itself fifty years hence,
what fears and joys would pass through like pumping blood,
what love and tears would trace my face?
I have not forgotten.
I am remembered.
Poised
Just before the green begins there is the hint of green
a blush of color, and the red buds thicken
the ends of the maple’s branches and everything
is poised before the start of a new world,
which is really the same world
just moving forward from bud
to flower to blossom to fruit
to harvest to sweet sleep, and the roots
await the next signal, every signal
every call a miracle and the switchboard
is lighting up and the operators are
standing by in the pledge drive we’ve
all been listening to: Go make the call.
~Stuart Kestenbaum “April Prayer”
The buds have been poised for weeks
and then, as if responding to the conductor’s downstroke,
let go of all their pent up potential~
exploding with energy
enough to carry them to autumn
when again they let go
and are gone.
Irreducible Clarity
If that’s what he means,’ says the student to the poetry teacher, ‘why doesn’t he just say it?’
‘If God is real,’ says the parishioner to the preacher, ‘why doesn’t he simply storm into our lives and convince us?’
The questions are vastly different in scale and relative importance,
but their answers are similar.
A poem, if it’s a real one, in some fundamental sense
means no more and no less than the moment of its singular music and lightning insight;
it is its own code to its own absolute and irreducible clarity.
A god, if it’s a living one, is not outside of reality but in it, of it,
though in ways it takes patience and imagination to perceive.
Thus the uses and necessities of metaphor,
which can flash us past our plodding resistance and habits into strange new truths.
Thus the very practical effects of music, myth, and image,
which tease us not out of reality, but deeper and more completely into it.
~Christian Wiman, My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer
Swift Autumn
Down to the Puritan marrow of my bones
There’s something in this richness that I hate.
I love the look, austere, immaculate,
Of landscapes drawn in pearly monotones.
There’s something in my very blood that owns
Bare hills, cold silver on a sky of slate,
A thread of water, churned to milky spate
Streaming through slanted pastures fenced with stones.
I love those skies, thin blue or snowy gray,
Those fields sparse-planted, rendering meagre sheaves;
That spring, briefer than apple-blossom’s breath,
Summer, so much too beautiful to stay,
Swift autumn, like a bonfire of leaves,
And sleepy winter, like the sleep of death.
~Elinor Wylie from “Wild Peaches”
~Elinor Wylie from “Wild Peaches”
Go Light
The rising hills, the slopes,
of statistics
lie before us,
the steep climb
of everything, going up,
up, as we all
go down.
In the next century
or the one beyond that,
they say,
are valleys, pastures,
we can meet there in peace
if we make it.
To climb these coming crests
one word to you, to
you and your children:
stay together
learn the flowers
go light
~Gary Snyder “For the Children”
Summer Will Come True
I heard in Addison’s Walk a bird sing clear:
This year the summer will come true. This year. This year.
Winds will not strip the blossom from the apple trees
This year nor want of rain destroy the peas.
This year time’s nature will no more defeat you.
Nor all the promised moments in their passing cheat you.
This time they will not lead you round and back
To Autumn, one year older, by the well worn track.
This year, this year, as all these flowers foretell,
We shall escape the circle and undo the spell.
Often deceived, yet open once again your heart,
Quick, quick, quick, quick! – the gates are drawn apart.
~C.S. Lewis
If I Might…
If I might see another Spring
I’d laugh to-day, to-day is brief;
I would not wait for anything;
I’d use to-day that cannot last,
Be glad to-day and sing.
~Christina Georgina Rossetti from “Another Spring”
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