No matter what else today,
there was this…
a glowing, gilt-edged dawn
of promises.
The Gilt Edge of Dawn
Tag: Mt. Baker
A Luminous Blessing
sunrise blessing on January 27, 2014 from the farm — a photo progression
At sunrise everything is luminous but not clear.
~Norman McLean from “A River Runs Through It”
The Sky Flames
“…the sky flames, more intense.
I didn’t see it coming.”
~Patricia Hooper, from “Equinox”
…the autumn is deep.
Its pitch is only beginning, and will brighten
before the end. Brighten
into darkness,
or into spring.
~Pamela Steed Hill from “September Pitch”
How to Pay Attention
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
With your one wild and precious life?
–Â Mary Oliver, “The Summer Day”
Sometimes it is enough to kneel in the grass to capture the right light at the precise moment it is sent from above. It is prayer to be blessed so, prayer to pay attention, prayer to be grateful for that moment. I find myself on my knees often these days because it all will be gone too soon, much too soon.
Hammered Dome
At the foot of the cirque,
where the ice of ages melts down into
the forked river called Nooksack, we are held
in the palm of a great hand. Through the tent flap
the stars overhead radiate from
the “hammered dome,” what the ancients
called the firmament, but so pliant we want
to finger it, to pull it on, dusky, like a cap
against frost.
~Luci Shaw from “Singing Bowl”
Watching the Mountain Do Its Tricks
This is it, I think, this is it, right now, the present, this empty gas station, here, this western wind, this tang of coffee on the tongue, and I am patting the puppy, I am watching the mountain. And the second I verbalize this awareness in my brain, I cease to see the mountain or feel the puppy. I am opaque, so much black asphalt. But at the same second, the second I know I’ve lost it, I also realize that the puppy is still squirming on his back under my hand. Nothing has changed for him. He draws his legs down to stretch the skin taut so he feels every fingertip’s stroke along his furred and arching side, his flank, his flung-back throat.
I sip my coffee. I look at the mountain, which is still doing its tricks, as you look at a still-beautiful face belonging to a person who was once your lover in another country years ago: with fond nostalgia, and recognition, but no real feeling save a secret astonishment that you are now strangers. Thanks. For the memories. It is ironic that the one thing that all religions recognize as separating us from our creator — our very self-consciousness — is also the one thing that divides us from our fellow creatures. It was a bitter birthday present from evolution, cutting us off at both ends. I get in the car and drive home.
~Annie Dillard from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
BriarCroft in Spring
What is all this juice and all this joy?
  A strain of the earth’s sweet being in the beginning
~Gerard Manley Hopkins from “Spring”
~Gerard Manley Hopkins from “Spring”
Awake! Awake! for the earliest gleam
Of golden sunlight shines
On the rippling waves, that brightly flow
Beneath the flowering vines.
Awake! Awake! for the low, sweet chant
Of the wild-birds’ morning hymn
Comes floating by on the fragrant air,
Through the forest cool and dim;
Then spread each wing,
And work, and sing,
Through the long, bright sunny hours;
O’er the pleasant earth
We journey forth,
For a day among the flowers.
~Louisa May Alcott Lily-Bell and Thistledown Song I
It was such a spring day as breathes into a man an ineffable yearning, a painful sweetness, a longing that makes him stand motionless, looking at the leaves or grass, and fling out his arms to embrace he knows not what.
~John Galsworthy
At morn when light mine eyes unsealed
I gazed upon the open field;
The rain had fallen in the night —
The landscape in the new day’s light
A countenance of grace revealed
Upon the meadow, wood and height.
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The sun’s light was a smile of gold,
Ere shut by sudden fold on fold
Of surging, showering clouds from view;
No sooner hid than it broke through
A tearful smile upon the wold
Where earth reflected heaven’s blue.
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The sky was as a canvas spun
To paint the new spring’s nocturns on;
A blended melody of tints —
The sea’s hue, and the myriad hints
Of garden-closes, when the sun
Hath stamped the work of nature’s mints.
 ~William Stanley Braithwaite
Flesh and fleece, fur and feather,
Grass and green world all together,
Star-eyed strawberry breasted
Throstle above Her nested
Cluster of bugle blue eggs thin
Forms and warms the life within,
And bird and blossom swell
In sod or sheath or shell.”
–Â Gerard Manley Hopkins, The May Magnificat
“A delicate fabric of bird songÂ
Floats in the air,Â
The smell of wet wild earthÂ
Is everywhere.Â
Oh I must pass nothing byÂ
Without loving it much,Â
The raindrop try with my lips,Â
The grass with my touch;Â
For how can I be sureÂ
I shall see againÂ
The world on the first of MayÂ
Shining after the rain?”Â
–Â Sara Teasdale, May Day
“Every spring is the only spring – a perpetual astonishment.”
–Â Ellis Peters
“Some will tell you crocuses are heralds true of springÂ
Others say that tulips showing buds are just the thingÂ
Point to peonies, say when magnolia blossoms showÂ
I look forward to the sight of other flowers thoughÂ
Cultivate your roses, grow your orchids in the darkÂ
Plant your posies row on row and stink up the whole parkÂ
The flower that’s my favourite kind is found throughout the landÂ
A wilting, yellow dandelion, clutched in a grubby hand.”
–Â Larry Tilander, Springtime of My SoulÂ
“Oh, give us pleasure in the flowers to-day;
And give us not to think so far away
As the uncertain harvest; keep us here
All simply in the springing of the year.
Oh, give us pleasure in the orchard white,
Like nothing else by day, like ghosts by night;
And make us happy in the happy bees,
The swarm dilating round the perfect trees.”
–Â Robert Frost, A Prayer in Spring
“Poetry is the silence and speech between a wet struggling root of a flower and a sunlit blossom of that flower.”Â
–Â Carl SandburgÂ
“With the coming of spring, I am calm again. “
–Â Gustav Mahler
The wealthy man is not he who has money, but he who has the means to live in the luxurious state of early spring.
~Anton Chekhov
“This spring as it comes bursts up in bonfires green,
Wild puffing of emerald trees, and flame-filled bushes,
Thorn-blossom lifting in wreaths of smoke between
Where the wood fumes up and the watery, flickering rushes.
I am amazed at this spring, this conflagration
Of green fires lit on the soil of the earth, this blaze
Of growing, and sparks that puff in wild gyration,
Faces of people streaming across my gaze.”
–Â D. H. Lawrence, The Enkindled SpringÂ
“The sun was warm but the wind was chill.
You know how it is with an April day.
When the sun is out and the wind is still,
You’re one month on in the middle of May.
But if you so much as dare to speak,
a cloud come over the sunlit arch,
And wind comes off a frozen peak,
And you’re two months back in the middle of March.”
–Â Robert FrostÂ
“Hark, I hear a robin calling!
List, the wind is from the south!
And the orchard-bloom is falling
Sweet as kisses on the mouth.
Come and let us seek together
Springtime lore of daffodils,
Giving to the golden weather
Greeting on the sun-warm hills.”
–Â Lucy Maud Montgomery, Spring Song
“If you’ve never been thrilled to the very edges of your soul by a flower in spring bloom, maybe your soul has never been in bloom.”Â
–Â Audra FoveoÂ
“It’s spring fever. That is what the name of it is. And when you’ve got it, you want – oh, you don’t quite know what it is you do want, but it just fairly makes your heart ache, you want it so!”
–Â Mark Twain
“Every year, back comes Spring, with nasty little birds yapping their fool heads off and the ground all mucked up with plants.”
– Dorothy Parker  😉
See BriarCroft in Summer, in Autumn, in Winter,
at Year’s End
Hidden in Veils
Sometimes the mountain
is hidden from me in veils
of cloud, sometimes
I am hidden from the mountain
in veils of inattention, apathy, fatigue,
when I forget or refuse to go
down to the shore or a few yards
up the road, on a clear day,
to reconfirm
that witnessing presence.
~Denise Levertov “Witness”
Even on the days like today when the mountain is hidden behind a veil of clouds, I have every confidence it is there. It has not moved in the night, gone to another county, blown up or melted down. My vision isn’t penetrating enough to see it through cloud cover today, but it will return to my line of sight, if not tomorrow, perhaps the next day. I know this and have faith it is true.
On the days when I am not bothering to look for it, too preoccupied so walk right past its obvious grandeur and presence, then it is reaching out to me and calling me back. There are times when I turn a corner on the farm and glance up, and there it is, a silent and overwhelming witness to beauty and steadfastness. I literally gasp at not noticing before, at not remembering how I’m blessed by it being there even at the times I can’t be bothered.
It witnesses my lack of witness and still stays put to hold me fast yet another day. And so I keep coming back to gaze, sometimes just at clouds, yearning to lift the veil just one more time.
The Beauty of Longing
Are we to look at cherry blossoms only in full bloom,
the moon only when it is cloudless?Â
To long for the moon while looking on the rain,
to lower the blinds and be unaware
of the passing of the spring –
these are even more deeply moving.Â
Branches about to blossom
or gardens strewn with flowers
are worthier of our admiration.
~Yoshida Kenko
I know this longing as I know my own back yard~
waiting for a view of the mountain from my kitchen window
There are more days its snowy peak is hidden
than days it is blossom-stark floating cloud-like above the horizon of our barn roof
Visitors to the farm are too often told “the mountain is right there”
as I point to a bank of nondescript gray clouds
My loving and longing for it, my knowing it is always there, in hiding,
moves me more than the days it is simply given to me.
The beauty of anticipation,
confident of fulfillment to come
my thirstiness
to be slaked
my hunger to be
satisfied.
Lenten Grace — He Got Up
So what do I believe actually happened that morning on the third day after he died?
…I speak very plainly here…
He got up. He said, “Don’t be afraid.”
Love is the victor. Death is not the end. The end is life. His life and our lives through him, in him. Existence has greater depths of beauty, mystery, and benediction than the wildest visionary has ever dared to dream. Christ our Lord has risen.
~Frederick Buechner
Since this moment (the resurrection), the universe is no longer what it was;Â nature has received another meaning; history is transformed and you and I are no more, and should not be anymore, what we were before.
~Paul Tillich
Barnstorming 