She wasn’t looking when they took this picture: sitting on the grass in her bare feet wearing a cotton dress, she stares off to the side watching something on the lawn the camera didn’t catch. What was it? A ladybug? A flower? Judging from her expression, possibly nothing at all, or else the lawn was like a mirror, and she sat watching herself, wondering who she was and how she came to be there sitting in this backyard, wearing a cheap, white dress, imagining that tomorrow would be like all her yesterdays, while her parents chatted and watched, as I do years later, too distantly to interfere. ~Dana Gioia, “Photograph of My Mother as a Young Girl” from Daily Horoscope
Seeing photos of ancestors a century past
is like looking at your own fingerprints—
circles and lines you can’t recognize
until someone else with a stranger’s eye looks close and says that’s you. ~Joseph Bruchac, “Prints” from Sing: Poetry from the Indigenous Americas.
Growing up, it was never obvious to me that I looked like either one of my parents. Once, as a naughty kid, I told them I thought I was adopted as there wasn’t a single photo to be found of my mother looking pregnant (never mind that few women in the 50’s allowed themselves to be photographed pregnant).
Searching the faces of extended family in old photographs, others would comment on the facial similarities between my young mother and me.
And indeed, the older I have become, the more I see my mother looking back at me in the mirror.
The characteristics I inherited from my father aren’t as obvious in the mirror: his persistence and problem-solving, his inability to ever fully relax, his drive to get things done and not give up.
So, yes, that is me in the photos of my mother taken nearly a century ago, as well as those taken not so long ago.
I now recognize me in those photos, grateful to resemble such a loving and lovely mom.
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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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Needing them still, I come when I can, this time to the sea where we share a room: their double bed, my single. Morning fog paints the pale scene even paler. Lace curtains breathing, the chenille spread folded back, my father’s feet white sails furled at the edge of blue pajamas. Every child’s dream, a parent in each hand, though this child is fifty. Their bodies fit easily, with room to spare. When did they grow so small? Grow so small— as if it were possible to swell backwards into an earlier self.
“Her Room” by Andrew Wyeth in the Farnsworth Art Museum
My parents have been gone now for some time, my father 30 years, my mother, nearly 17 years. Their dying was a long process of counted breaths and pauses. I witnessed their bodies curling into themselves, shrinking smaller, worn down by illness and age.
I still miss them as I’m reminded of them by the events of my own life, still wanting them to take me by the hand as I navigate my own daily path.
After mom’s death, those possessions not distributed to family members have remained packed up and stored in our barn buildings. I know it is well past time to deal with their stuff as I become keenly aware of my own graying and aging.
In the house, next to where I write, is a box of over 500 letters written by my mother and father between 1941 and 1945. The letters began as they were getting to know each other at college, going from “pinned” to “engaged” and continue for three and a half more years after a hurried wedding Christmas Eve 1942. By mid-January 1943, my newly minted Marine officer father shipped out to spend the next three years of his life fighting on the battlefields of Saipan, Tinian and Tarawa in the Pacific Ocean, not to return again to the states until late summer of 1945.
My mother wrote her letters from the small rural eastern Washington community of Colville, living in a “teachers’ cottage” with other war wives who taught school while waiting for their husbands to return home – or not.
It took me a decade to find the courage and time to devote to reading these letters they treasured and never threw away. I sorted them unopened by postmark date into some semblance of order and sat down to start at the very beginning, which, of course, is my beginning as well. I opened each one with some trepidation and a lump in my throat about what I might find written there. I worried I may find things I didn’t want to know. I hoped I would find things that I desperately needed to know.
Most of all I wanted to understand the two people who became my parents within the coiled shell of their forty years together, though broken by a painful divorce which lasted a decade. Having lived through that awful time with them, I want to understand the origin of a love which eventually mended their cracked shell of companionship, gluing them back together for five more years before my father died.
As I ponder their words, I too cross a bridge back to them both, my ear pressed to the coiled shell of those fading voices, as if I might still hear the sea, at times bringing them closer, then pulling them farther away.
AI image created for this post
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A voice had begun to sing. It was very far away and…. hard to decide from what direction it was coming. Sometimes it seemed to come from all directions at once. Sometimes he almost thought it was coming out of the earth beneath them. Its lower notes were deep enough to be the voice of the earth herself.
There were no words. There was hardly even a tune. But it was, beyond comparison, the most beautiful noise he had ever heard. It was so beautiful he could hardly bear it.
The earth was of many colors: they were fresh, hot, and vivid. They made you feel excited; until you saw the Singer himself, and then you forgot everything else. ~C.S. Lewis from The Magician’s Nephew
And did you get what you wanted from this life, even so? I did. And what did you want? To call myself beloved, to feel myself beloved on the earth. ~Raymond Carver “Late Fragment”
Beautiful things and varied shapes appeal to [the eyes], vivid and well-matched colors attract; but let not these captivate my soul. Rather let God ravish it; he made these things exceedingly good, to be sure, but he is my good, not they. ~St. Augustine
Every time I open my eyes and listen for the voice of the morning, I am reminded how precious is this moment, how welcome is each breath and each heartbeat.
We are created for this. We are, everyone of us, beloved by our Creator. We are meant to wonder breathless at this, without ceasing, through the long day.
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We lie back to back. Curtains lift and fall, like the chest of someone sleeping. Wind moves the leaves of the box elder; they show their light undersides, turning all at once like a school of fish. Suddenly I understand that I am happy. For months this feeling has been coming closer, stopping for short visits, like a timid suitor. ~Jane Kenyon “The Suitor”
Andrew Wyeth – Wind from the Sea, 1947
Happiness can be an elusive suitor and is altogether undependable.
I too have had glimpses of it throughout my life – a fleeting “this is it.” Then the clouds roll in and the ecstasy of the realization fades to mist.
I tend to trust the old reliable friends who show up regularly – like “hopeful” and “contented” and “being at peace” – plus moments when the sweetness of each breath brings tears of overwhelming joy.
Instead of pursuing happiness, (always a pursuit rather than a destination), I thrive on knowing I love deeply and am loved. That knowledge is what gets me through the really tough times when happiness doesn’t always put in an appearance.
Love shows up. Love has my back when I’m afraid and full of doubt. Love persists through sadness. Love doesn’t give up when everything hurts. Love is sufficient.
Love is enough to bring those happy tears to my eyes…
Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud.It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth.It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.
Love never fails. 1 Corinthians 13: 4-8a
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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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Without realizing it, we fill important places in each others’ lives. It’s that way with the guy at the corner grocery, the mechanic at the local garage, the family doctor, teachers, neighbors, coworkers.
Good people who are always “there,” who can be relied upon in small,important ways. People who teach us, bless us, encourage us, support us, uplift us in the dailiness of life.
We never tell them. I don’t know why, but we don’t.
And, of course, we fill that role ourselves. There are those who depend on us,watch us, learn from us, take from us. And we never know.
You may never have proof of your importance, but you are more important than you think. There are always those who couldn’t do without you. The rub is that you don’t always know who. ~Robert Fulghumfrom All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten
If there is one thing living through the pandemic taught me, it’s noticing the people in my life who may have not been as obvious to me before. I hadn’t realized how many folks truly are front-line serving others day-in and day-out.
It’s not only health care workers, grocery store clerks and school teachers but the list of essential workers is large, including law enforcement, plumbers and electricians, child care workers, water, sanitation and sewer maintenance, pastors, postal clerks, technicians who fix our cars and appliances and the farmers who tend the crops and livestock we need to live, as well as scores of others.
We are remarkably interdependent and need each other.
I realized how oblivious I had been before not taking the time to acknowledge the daily services I received from so many varied people. In fact, it has become more urgent for me to tell my family members and friends – some thousands of miles away from me – how much they mean to me.
Now, in non-pandemic times, I try to tell others – the grocery cashier, the medical assistant, the office receptionist – as simply and clearly as I can, whenever possible, that I appreciate what they have done and what they continue to do, how they make life better for us all.
I also need to continue to nurture relationships with family and friends crucial to my own well-being. I need them all.
I need you all.
And it is important to me that you know.
Well over a thousand of you receive these daily Barnstorming emails and posts – a handful of you communicate with me regularly. I treasure those messages, thank you!
We all need encouragement that we are making a positive difference in others’ lives and you all make a difference to me.
A butterfly dancing in the sunlight, A bird singing to his mate, The whispering pines, The restless sea, The gigantic mountains, A stately tree, The rain upon the roof, The sun at early dawn, A boy with rod and hook, The babble of a shady brook, A woman with her smiling babe, A man whose eyes are kind and wise, Youth that is eager and unafraid— When all is said, I do love best A little home where love abides, And where there’s kindness, peace, and rest. ~Scottie McKenzie Frasier “The Things I Love”
When all is said and done, I love best the people who bring kindness, peace and rest to the little house we call home.
It is enough and everything.
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Instructions for living a life: Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it. ~Mary Oliver “Sometimes” from Red Bird
Getting older:
The first surprise: I like it. Whatever happens now, some things that used to terrify have not:
I didn’t die young, for instance. Or lose my only love. My three children never had to run away from anyone. Don’t tell me this gratitude is complacent. We all approach the edge of the same blackness which for me is silent.
Knowing as much sharpens my delight in January freesia, hot coffee, winter sunlight. So we say
as we lie close on some gentle occasion: every day won from such darkness is a celebration. ~ Elaine Feinstein, “Getting Older” from The Clinic, Memory
Maybe it’s time for me to practice growing old… I only borrowed this dust. ~Stanley Kunitz from “Passing Through”from Collected Poems
To do the useful thing, to say the courageous thing, to contemplate the beautiful thing: that is enough for one man’s life. ― T.S. Eliot, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism
I am astonished at living over seven decades, despite my faltering dust.
Amazed by joys and sometimes by sorrows, I hope to see much more before I’m done, trying in my own way to tell about it.
I am grateful, so very grateful to still be here, living out the time left to me learning: how love can heal, how tears are dried, and most astonishing of all, how God came here to loan us His dust – until the day He carries us, all dusty, back home.
photo by Tomomi Gibson
Lyrics from Carrie Newcomer: I’ve been looking for beauty In these broken times By making some beauty In the world that I find Some say it′s too late It′s too much to brave But I believe there’s so much Worth being saved
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