Tag: Morning

Waking with the Light

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Light wakes us – there’s the sun
climbing the mountains’ rim, spilling across the valley,
finding our faces.
It is July,
between the hay and harvest,
a time at arm’s length from all other time,
the roads ragged with meadowsweet and mallow,
with splays of seedheads, slubbed and coarse, rough linen.
The fields above the house, clotted with sheep all spring,
are empty now and froth with flowering grasses,
still in the morning light. Birds move around
the leafy fields, the leafy garden.

It is the time
to set aside all vigil, good or ill,
to loosen the fixed gaze of our attention
as dandelions let seedlings to the wind.
Wake with the light.
Get up and go about the day and watch
its surfaces that brighten with the sun.

And later, when the light is drowsed and heavy
go find the burdened fruit trees where the shade
lies splashed and opened-out across the ground.
Spread over it a quilt worn soft by other bodies,
then curl and fall down into sleep at light.

Awaken to a world of long, loose grass-stems,
and leaves above,
and birds, breaking out of the leaves.
~Kerry Hardie from “Sleep in Summer”

Saying good-bye to July last week
meant admitting summer is already half-baked
and so are we–

we who are still doughy,
not nearly done enough.

The rush to autumn is breathless.
We want to hold on tight
to our longish days,
fall asleep in the grasses,
endure sweaty nights
for just a little while longer…

Please, oh please
grant us unending light
and steady us for the task
of getting ready for letting go.

A new series of summer photo notecards from our farm is now available as a thank you gift to you for your financial support of Barnstorming — details here

A Witness to Dawn

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My heart is like a little bird
That sits and sings for very gladness.
Sorrow is some forgotten word,
And so, except in rhyme, is sadness.

The world is very fair to me—
Such azure skies, such golden weather,
I’m like a long caged bird set free,
My heart is lighter than a feather.

I rise rejoicing in my life;
I live with love for God and neighbor;
My days flow on unmarred by strife,
And sweetened by my pleasant labor.

Oh youth! oh spring! oh happy days,
Ye are so passing sweet, and tender,
And while the fleeting season stays,
I’ll revel care-free, in its splendor.
~Ella Wheeler Wilcox “Joy”

Veil after veil of thin dusky gauze is lifted,
and by degrees the forms
and colours of things are restored to them,
and we watch the dawn
remaking the world in its antique pattern.
~Oscar Wilde from The Picture of Dorian Gray

I believe in Christianity
as I believe that the sun has risen:
not only because I see it,
but because by it I see everything else.
~C.S. Lewis from “Is Theology Poetry?” in The Weight of Glory

Tomorrow we’ll discover
What our God in Heaven has in store
One more dawn
One more day
One day more…
~from Les Miserable

I wasn’t the only one watching the light emerging over the foothills this morning. A bird sitting atop our barn’s weathervane greeted this morning’s dawn, a silent witness, along with me.

I thought we might face the new day together, both preparing ourselves for whatever might come our way.

Yet he flew away, leaving me behind to face it on my own.

Morning without you is a dwindled dawn.
~Emily Dickinson in a letter to a friend April 1885

Great Day in the Morning

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All this he saw,
for one moment breathless and intense,
vivid on the morning sky;
and still, as he looked, he lived;
and still, as he lived, he wondered.
~Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows

Beyond Mágdalen and by the Bridge,
on a place called there the Plain,
In Summer, in a burst of summertime
Following falls and falls of rain,
When the air was sweet-and-sour of the flown fineflower of
Those goldnails and their gaylinks that hang along a lime;
. . . . . . . .
The motion of that man’s heart is fine
Whom want could not make píne, píne
That struggling should not sear him, a gift should cheer him
Like that poor pocket of pence, poor pence of mine.
. . . . . . . .
~Gerard Manley Hopkins “Cheery Beggar”

Busy old fool, unruly sun,
Why dost thou thus,
Through windows, and through curtains call on us?

Thy beams, so reverend and strong
Why shouldst thou think?
I could eclipse and cloud them with a wink,
But that I would not lose her sight so long;
If her eyes have not blinded thine,
Look, and tomorrow late…

Thou, sun, art half as happy as we,
In that the world’s contracted thus.
Thine age asks ease, and since thy duties be
To warm the world, that’s done in warming us.
Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere;
This bed thy center is, these walls, thy sphere.
~John Donne from “The Sun Rising”

My father, when he was surprised
or suddenly impressed, would blurt
“Great day in the morning,” as though
a revelation had struck him.
The figure of his speech would seem
to claim some large event appeared
at hand, if not already here;
a mighty day or luminous age
was flinging wide its doors as world
on world revealed their wonders in
the rapturous morning, always new,
beginning as the now took hold.
~Robert Morgan “Great Day in the Morning” from Terroir

Every time I open my eyes
as dawn streams through the window,
as I listen for the voice of yet another morning
while the sun rises to warm the world –

I am reminded how precious is this moment
~this “great day in the morning” ~
how intensely grateful I am
for each breath and each heartbeat
gifted to me, a cheery beggar

We are created to experience this realization:
we are, everyone of us, beloved.

We are meant to wonder breathless at this burst of summer,
to keep watch for each new dawn,
waiting to see what will happen next.

Just a Little Breathless

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ferndaisies
sunset611162

it is a serious thing
just to be alive
on this fresh morning
in this broken world

I beg of you,
do not walk by
        without pausing…

You must change your life.
~Mary Oliver from “Invitation” from Red Bird

Listen, are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?

While the soul, after all, is only a window,

and the opening of the window no more difficult
than the wakening from a little sleep.
~Mary Oliver from Have You Ever Tried to Enter the Long Black Branches? from West Wind: Poems and Prose Poems

In the darkness something was happening at last.

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

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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”

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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

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All this he saw, for one moment breathless and intense, vivid on the morning sky; and still, as he looked, he lived; and still, as he lived, he wondered.
~Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows

Every time I open my eyes
and listen for the voices of the morning,
I am reminded how precious is this moment,
how intense is each breath and each heartbeat.

We are created for this.
We are, everyone of us, beloved.
We are meant to wonder breathless at this,
without ceasing.

Bring to Light the Mystery: No Before or After

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Your dead shall live; their bodies shall rise.
You who dwell in the dust, awake and sing for joy!
For your dew is a dew of light…
Isaiah 26:19

Now in the blessed days of more and less
when the news about time is that each day
there is less of it I know none of that
as I walk out through the early garden
only the day and I are here with no
before or after and the dew looks up
without a number or a present age
~W. S. Merwin “Dew Light” from The Moon Before Morning

Dear March—Come in—
How glad I am—
I hoped for you before—
Put down your Hat—
You must have walked—
How out of Breath you are—
~Emily Dickinson

It seems I measure time by calendar page turns.

A “before” is turned under, covered up by what comes “after.”
Day follows day, week follows week, month follows month, for now…

What I am aware of is how diminishing time is, how I live more and more in the “after.”

Each new month seems to arrive “out of breath.”

So I look to the sky to watch the sun come and go,
as the moon rises and sets, knowing it will always be so.

The morning dew light blesses me now, no before or after.
It is sent by the Lord; I feel breathless as witness.

How can this not always be the way of things?

This year’s Barnstorming Lenten theme is Ephesians 3:9:

…to bring to light for everyone what is the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God, who created all things…

A Lingering Pain

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I have left my wife at the airport,
flying out to help our daughter
whose baby will not eat.
And I am driving on to Kent
to hear some poets read tonight.

I don’t know what to do with myself
when she leaves me like this.
An old friend has decided to
end our friendship. Another
is breaking it off with his wife.

I don’t know what to say
to any of this-Life’s hard.
And I say it aloud to myself,
Living is hard, and drive further
into the darkness, my headlights
only going so far.

I sense my own tense breath, this fear
we call stress, making it something else,
hiding from all that is real.

As I glide past Twin Lakes,
flat bodies of water under stars,
I hold the wheel gently, slowing my
body to the road, and know again that
this is just living, not a trauma
nor dying, but a lingering pain
reminding us that we are alive.
~Larry Smith “Following the Road” from A River Remains

The grace of God means something like:
Here is your life.
You might never have been, but you are because
the party wouldn’t have been complete without you.
Here is the world.
Beautiful and terrible things will happen.
Don’t be afraid. I am with you.
Nothing can ever separate us.
It’s for you I created the universe.
I love you. 
There’s only one catch.
Like any other gift, the gift of grace can be yours
only if you’ll reach out and take it. 
Maybe being able to reach out and take it is a gift too. 
~Frederich Buechner from Wishful Thinking 

You get out of bed, wash and dress;
eat breakfast, say goodbye and go away
never maybe, to return for all you know,
to work, talk, lust, pray, dawdle and do,
and at the end of the day, if your luck holds,
you come home again, home again.
Then night again. Bed. The little death of sleep, sleep of death. Morning, afternoon, evening—
the hours of the day, of any day, of your day and my day.
The alphabet of grace.
If there is a God who speaks anywhere, surely he speaks here:
through waking up and working,
through going away and coming back again,
through people you read and books you meet,
through falling asleep in the dark.
Life is grace. Sleep is forgiveness. The night absolves.
Darkness wipes the slate clean, not spotless to be sure,
but clean enough for another day’s chalking.
~Frederich Buechner from “The Alphabet of Grace

Our six year old grandson, hoping to calm his older sister’s melt-down:
“Life is life – it’ll be okay tomorrow…“

So tomorrow –
move forward to leave a mark on a new day
after tonight’s erasing rest.

No matter what took place this day,
no matter the misgivings,
no matter what should have been left unsaid,
no matter how hard the heart,
no matter the lingering pain,
there is another day to make it right.

Forgiveness finds a foothold in the dark,
when eyelids close,
thoughts quietly open,
voices hush in prayers
of praise, petition and gratitude.

And so now
simply sleep on it
knowing his grace
abounds in blameless dreams.

Morning will come
awash in new light,
another chance
freely given.

Get Up, All of You

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Little girl. Old girl. Old boy.
Old boys and girls with high blood pressure and arthritis,
and young boys and girls with tattoos and body piercing.
You who believe, and you who sometimes believe
and sometimes don’t believe much of anything,
and you who would give almost anything to believe
if only you could.
You happy ones and you who can hardly remember
what it was like once to be happy.
You who know where you’re going and how to get there
and you who much of the time aren’t sure you’re getting anywhere. “Get up,” he says, all of you – all of you! –
and the power that is in him is the power to give life
not just to the dead like the child,
but to those who are only partly alive,
which is to say to people like you and me
who much of the time live with our lives closed
to the wild beauty and miracle of things,
including the wild beauty and miracle of every day we live
and even of ourselves.
~Frederick Buechner -from Secrets in the Dark

He took her by the hand and said to her, “Talitha koum!” (which means “Little girl, I say to you, get up!”).
Mark 5:41

I usually awake each morning before 5:30 without an alarm, just as I did in high school, through college and medical school, during my work years and having-babies years.

Now, in my retirement years, for no reason at all, I still wake up early.

I just can’t help it. I trained myself to be able to get up early, to do chores, make kids’ breakfasts and lunches for school, commute to work, be ready for what I needed to do and be that day.

Even now that I don’t have to, my body still gets up.

But my brain and my soul are slow to wake, and some days they prefer to stay under the covers, closed off to all that wild beauty within and beyond me.

I have no time to waste being only partly alive.
I need to listen to the summons: “Get up!”
And right now, I need to get up,
– all of me –
especially that full of miracle and wild beauty.

Morning Has Come Again

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when the sun peeks over the horizon to greet
the day and spread golden honey warmth
to the dark, sleepy earth

when the birds begin to stir and twitter
and tune their songs to one another

when the trees rustle as the morning breeze
opens her eyes from slumber, and the dew is heavy
on the blades of grass

when I know morning has come once again
and we are not lost to the night, even as we
are not lost to the day

light dawns, and I can move again
breathing in streams of fresh morning air
lighting a candle for rejuvenation
and praying the day in with ginger and
salt and clay

oh how lovely it feels to be alive
how magical to wake with the light
and live
~Juniper Klatt “when the sun” from I was raised in a house of water.

Each morning is a fresh try at life,
a new chance to get things right
when our yesterdays are broken.

So I drink deeply of the golden dawn,
take a full breath of cool air and dive in head first
into luminous light and bushels of blossoms,
hoping I too might float on the morning magic.

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The Miracle of Each Morning

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The staccato rain on the roof
The sudden parting of clouds

The silent worship of morning
The kettle’s steamy clicking on the stove

The stellar jay defending the nest
The gang of crows flying off

The 100 bones of feet
The climbing of mountains

The slenderness of throat
The fullness of hymns on Sunday

The meeting of you
The knowing of me

I tell you, it’s a miracle
~Peg Edera, “It’s a Miracle, I Tell You” from Love is Deeper than Distance

bluejay photo by Josh Scholten

How many times each day do I wonder at the miracle that is each breath, each step, each meal, each good night’s sleep, each wakening, each song, each hug?

That it happens at all is a miracle, I tell you.

And why do we notice it most when it is no longer a given – when we have suddenly lost the daily gifts we take for granted.

So we who wake on an ordinary Sunday today,
our home and church and family not in the path of a fire,
our communities not in danger,
we thank God for His daily miracles
and pray that His people will help
comfort and care for those who weep.

Spoonful By Spoonful

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Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.
For I have known them all already, known them all:
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons…
~T.S. Eliot from The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

Tokyo Starbucks
photo of Edinburgh street, taken from Starbucks

I read recently that Starbucks’ business has suffered a loss of customers because of longer waits for service, and price increases for custom-ordered drinks that take more barista time to create.

I have been a pretty loyal coffee customer since Starbucks opened their first shop at Pike Street Market in Seattle over 50 years ago. I have visited countless Starbucks, including one in the bustling Narita Airport in Tokyo and an upstairs shop on a drizzly corner in Edinburgh, Scotland.

Over that time, I’ve graduated from brewed coffee from dark roast beans to dark roast decaf beans. There is a difference between 20 year old me and 70 year old me; caffeine is no longer my friend.

Over a decade ago, I was buying my usual twice a month supply of decaf coffee beans from my local Starbucks shop. The barista looked at me apologetically and said “have you heard?”. She said my favorite blend was being phased out and soon would no longer be available. 

This completely disturbed my decaffeinated equilibrium.

I immediately wrote to the “Starbucks Customer Care” website to see if they really do care about their customers.

How could it be that I became so attached to a particular brand, a specific taste, a daily routine that something so insignificant in the scheme of things should become so significant to me? 

I was upset at myself for being perturbed by this.

So what if I’m in a minority of coffee drinkers who can only handle decaf because caffeine now makes my pulse race and my hands jittery.

So what if I’m part of an aging cohort who may not be all that important to the corporate world bent on marketing the newest taste trend to the young and fashionable. 

So what if I’m ridiculously dependent on that 5:30 AM home brewed cup of coffee, not because of needing a drug to wake me up, but because it is something I have done happily for years,
measuring out my days spoonful by spoonful.

I am indeed grateful for routine, and in my own grudging way, I can learn to be grateful for change. I suppose I’ll could get used to another blend if I have to (please, not too “herbal” or “flowery”). 

But life will not be the same – the evenings, mornings, afternoons I know so well.

It’s just tough to adapt when each morning has been defined by “Decaffinated, yet rich and well-balanced with a dark cocoa texture and a roasty sweetness, like the flavor of a fire-roasted marshmallow after you pull off the darkened cap. To be enjoyed with chocolate truffles and dinner guests who stay late.”  

Wow, they pay people to write stuff like that.  

I guess it isn’t as appealing to say “to be cherished with morning oatmeal by farmer physician poets who can’t handle caffeine.”

Too bad. We’re actually a pretty nice bunch. 
All one of us.

Postscript: My favorite decaf blend was phased out but later reintroduced and became one of their best sellers. I guess we’re all getting older…

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