Every morning I walk through folds of fields searching.
Slants of sun sink through triangled bones of leaves: bold cold refuted.
Sparrows flutter warm in given nests, ungriefed, caught, sustained by common grace.
Faith is the tenderness of banked coals in a grate, Braeburn apples on a windowsill, winding crisp with possibility. The steadiness of conversations embered over decades; a fire that has never left off crackling – on this my soul has warmed her hands. Divine ardor: too strong and sweet for the many years I’ve walked on earth.
Love without hesitation has swept my floorboards for seasons. Deep and longing in and out of time the soul reaches out – and He, grasps entire. Hold – and tender. Incandescent. ~Claire Hellar “A Search in Autumn”
From whence arrived the praying mantis? From outer space, or lost Atlantis? glimpse the grin, green metal mug at masks the pseudo-saintly bug, Orthopterous, also carnivorous, And faintly whisper, Lord deliver us. ~Ogden Nash “The Praying Mantis”
Crouching on a cabbage leaf, there’s a mantis, praying. Sneak up very quietly – You will hear him saying:
Bless the cricket, Bless the slug. Bless the fly and ladybug. Bless the aphid. Bless the bee. Bless the spider and the flea. Bless the lacewing. Bless the gnat. Make them healthy. Make them fat. Guide them over. Light their way. That’s all I ask – these things I prey. ~B.J. Lee “A Garden Prayer”
When I spot a praying mantis in our garden, or crawling up the opening to our century-old hay barn, I say a prayer myself:
thank you that I’m not a random bug about to become a meal.
The mantis, like few other predators, disarms its potential prey by cleverly blending in with its surroundings, innocently folding its arms together in an attitude of prayer, but actually readying to make the fatal grab.
So a word to the wise: those with multiple legs, buggy eyes, wings or a hairy thorax,
or those of us who scan the news headlines every day worrying what might happen next:
it could be worse…
if someone invites you to a meal, it is possible you are the tasty morsel to be consumed, so consider carefully who appears to be praying (preying?) next to you and why…
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is taken by surprise as it speaks, are you sure this is the right street? for example—or just
cowpath—no more: a blurb, a bleep, really, out of the imagination, and then once again everything is
perfectly still, save, perhaps, a cow or two on the horizon,—
and the sound of cowbirds in sudden excellence, where
formerly there were none. ~Jane Mead“Sometimes the Mind” From The Usable Field
photo by Bette Vander Haakphoto by Bette Vander Haak
photo by Bette Vander Haak
Many current roads started out as cowpaths decades ago. These meandering trails made sense to cows at the time. Subsequently, because people lack imagination, we tend to also follow those original twist and turns as we navigate life’s byways. Now paved with asphalt and good intentions, our roads accommodate more than a herd of cows giving hitchhiking cowbirds a free meal.
Cowbirds don’t lack imagination though; they are ready-made opportunists. They occupy any furry back that happens to attract tasty insects. The (horse?)birds happily set sail on a dinner cruise while doing their host a favor by gobbling irritating flies.
Imagine meandering through countryside pastures all day, unconcerned where the next meal will come from because it always comes to you.
Its easy if you try. You can say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one. I hope someday you’ll join us and the world (horses, cows, birds) will live as one…
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Morning without you is a dwindled dawn. ~Emily Dickinsonin a letter to a friend April 1885
Over the years, the most common search term bringing new readers to my Barnstorming blog is “dwindled dawn.”
I have written about Emily Dickinson’s “dwindles” on a number of occasions before when I miss having a house full of our three children, now spread far with families of their own. Even so, I had not really been diagnosed with a serious case myself until the last two years of COVID-time.
I am clearly not the only one. “Dwindles” have spread across the globe during the COVID pandemic more quickly than the virus.
There really isn’t a pill or other therapy that works well for dwindling. One of the most effective treatments is breaking bread with friends and family all in the same room, at the same table, lingering over conversation or singing together in harmony, because there really is nothing more vital for us to do.
Just being together is the ultimate cure.
Maybe experiencing friend and family deficiency will help us understand how crucial we are to one another. Sadly, due to the pandemic, too many are now gone forever, lost to further gatherings together. It is high time to replenish the reservoir before we all dwindle away to nothing.
So if you are visiting these words for the first time because you too searched for “dwindled dawn” — welcome to Barnstorming. We can stave off the dwindles by joining together in our shared isolation.
Because mornings without you all diminishes me. I just want you to know.
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There was an entire aspect to my life that I had been blind to — the small, good things that came in abundance. ~Mary Karr from The Art of Memoir
We can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasures. ~Thornton Wilder, quotes from “Our Town”
The words from “Our Town” written over 80 years ago still ring true: at that time our country was crushed under the Great Depression, and now out country is staggering under a Great Depression of the spirit~ despite more connected electronically, we are, due to politics and pandemic, more isolated from family, friends, faith.
Thought more economically secure, we are emotionally bankrupt.
May we always be conscious of our many treasures and abundance, while taking care of others in need.
God, in His everlasting recognition of our perpetual need of Him, cares for us, even while we turn our faces away from Him.
I search the soil of this life, this farm, this faith to find what yearns to grow, to bloom, to fruit, in order to be harvested to share with others.
My deep gratitude goes to you who visit here and to those who let me know the small and the good I share with you makes a difference in your day
I’m right alongside you in joint Thanksgiving to our Creator and Preserver.
On this first day of November it is cold as a cave, the sky the color of neutral third parties. I am cutting carrots for the chicken soup. Knife against carrot again and again sends a plop of pennies into the pan. These cents, when held to the gray light, hold no noble president, only stills of some kaleidoscope caught being pensive… and beautiful, in the eye of this beholder, who did not expect this moment of marvel while making an early supper for the hungry children. ~Cindy Gregg, “Monday” from Suddenly Autumn.
I wasn’t prepared for November to begin on this chilly Monday morning.
Throwing on my barn coat and boots, I pulled up some of the last carrots from the garden, cut them up, added some already harvested beans, peas and corn from the freezer, threw in some baby potatoes to make a crockpot of beef bone soup.
When we return home hungry from our community work tonight, we will be tired but well fed.
There is a moment of marvel in preparing a meal from one’s own garden bounty, remembering the small seeds put in the ground 6 months ago, and now washed and cut and simmering in a pot in our kitchen.
The start of November isn’t so chilly after all. We are warmed by the work done through the spring and summer, the sun and rain that grew these vegetables, and the Creator God who provides, even in the cold and dark months of the year.
We’ll make it through this first Monday of November, anticipating the marvels to come.
A book of beauty in words and photography, available to order here:
Silk-thin silver strings woven cleverly into a lair, An intricate entwining of divinest thread… Like strands of magic worked upon the air, The spider spins his enchanted web – His home so eerily, spiraling spreads.
His gossamer so rigid, yet lighter than mist, And like an eight-legged sorcerer – a wizard blest, His lace, like a spell, he conjures and knits; I witnessed such wild ingenuity wrought and finessed, Watching the spider weave a dream from his web. ~Jonathan Platt“A Spider’s Web”
Not everyone is taking a holiday today on Labor Day. Some are busier than ever, creating a masterpiece nightly, then waiting in hope for that labor to be rewarded.
I too spin elaborate dreams at night: some remembered, some bare fragments, some shattered, some potentially yield a meal.
We work because we are hungry. We work because someone we love is hungry and needs feeding.
Yet the best work is the work of weaving dreams ~out of thin air and gossamer strands~ where nothing existed before, not as a trap or lure or lair but as a work of beauty- a gift as welcome as a breath of fresh air.
…It’s true it can make you weep to peel them, to unfurl and to tease from the taut ball first the brittle, caramel-colored and decrepit papery outside layer, the least
recent the reticent onion wrapped around its growing body, for there’s nothing to an onion but skin, and it’s true you can go on weeping as you go on in, through the moist middle skins, the sweetest
and thickest, and you can go on in to the core, to the bud-like, acrid, fibrous skins densely clustered there, stalky and in- complete, and these are the most pungent… ~William Matthews from “Onions”
…I would never scold the onion for causing tears. It is right that tears fall for something small and forgotten. How at meal, we sit to eat, commenting on texture of meat or herbal aroma but never on the translucence of onion, now limp, now divided, or its traditionally honorable career: For the sake of others, disappear. ~Naomi Shihab Nye, from “The Traveling Onion” from Words Under the Words: Selected Poems.
Onion, luminous flask, your beauty formed petal by petal, crystal scales expanded you and in the secrecy of the dark earth your belly grew round with dew. Under the earth the miracle happened and when your clumsy green stem appeared, and your leaves were born like swords in the garden, the earth heaped up her power showing your naked transparency…
…You make us cry without hurting us. I have praised everything that exists, but to me, onion, you are more beautiful than a bird of dazzling feathers, heavenly globe, platinum goblet, unmoving dance of the snowy anemone
and the fragrance of the earth lives in your crystalline nature. ~Pablo Neruda from “Ode to the Onion”
Everything smells of “eau de onion” here in the kitchen as the onions are brought in from our late summer garden to be stored or dehydrated and frozen for winter soups and stews.
This is weepy business, but these are good tears like I spill over the whistled Greensleeves theme from the old “Lassie” TV show, or during any childrens’ choir song, or by simply watching videos of our grandchildren who are quarantined so far away from our arms.
It takes almost nothing these days to make me weep, so onions are a handy excuse, allowing my tears to flow without explanation:
I weep over the headlines. I weep over how changed life is and for the sadness of the stricken. I weep over how messy things can get between people who don’t listen to one another or who misinterpret what they think they hear. I weep knowing we all have layers and layers of skin that appear tough on the outside, but as you peel gently or even ruthlessly cut them away, the layers get more and more tender until you reach the throbbing heart of us.
We tend to hide our hearts out of fear of being hurt, crying out in pain.
Like an onion, each one of us exists to make the day a bit better, the meal more savory, to enhance the flavors of all who are mixed into this melting pot together. We aren’t meant to stand alone, but to disappear into the stew, and be sorely missed if we are absent.
So very dish needs an onion, and for the sake of the dish, every onion vanishes in the process.
No, I don’t mean to make you cry as you peel my layers away, gently, one by one, each more tender until you reach my heart. Chop away at me if you must but weep the good tears, the ones that mean we weep for the sake of our meal together: you eating and drinking, and me – consumed.
It was like a church to me. I entered it on soft foot, Breath held like a cap in the hand. It was quiet. What God there was made himself felt, Not listened to, in clean colours That brought a moistening of the eye, In a movement of the wind over grass.
There were no prayers said. But stillness Of the heart’s passions – that was praise Enough; and the mind’s cession Of its kingdom. I walked on, Simple and poor, while the air crumbled And broke on me generously as bread. ~R.S. Thomas “The Moor” Collected Poems: R. S. Thomas
This is a Sabbath morning when I’m surrounded by His stilling presence~ when God is felt, neither seen or heard, overtaking me within each breath taken, following the path of each glistening tear, feeding me manna from sky and body, becoming the ground reaching to meet my foot with each step I take.
At lunchtime I bought a huge orange— The size of it made us all laugh. I peeled it and shared it with Robert and Dave— They got quarters and I had a half.
And that orange, it made me so happy, As ordinary things often do Just lately. The shopping. A walk in the park. This is peace and contentment. It’s new.
The rest of the day was quite easy. I did all the jobs on my list And enjoyed them and had some time over. I love you. I’m glad I exist. ~Wendy Cope “The Orange”
I close my eyes, savor a wafer of sacred cake on my tongue and try to taste my mother, to discern the message she baked in these loaves when she was too ill to eat them:
I love you. It will end. Leave something of sweetness and substance in the mouth of the world. ~Anna Belle Kaufman “Cold Solace”
Each day brings something special to my life, so I peel it carefully to find what hides inside, all the while inhaling its fragrance then carefully, slowly, gently lifting it to my mouth to savor it, knowing only love, only loving, could taste this sweet.
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