Never Enough

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Just as a painter needs light
in order to put the finishing touches to his picture, 

so I need an inner light, 
which I feel I never have enough of in the autumn.
~Leo Tolstoy

 

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Let’s go I said.
I need to find some light, but not just any light I said — now.
Sure he said.
He loves to drive winding roads to breathe chill alpine air.

We headed east an hour before sunset to try to make it in time.
The highway so empty going up.
Gas tank nearing empty with no time to fill up.
Only tripod photographers still there, waiting for a full moon rise.

What we see from our backyard forty miles away overwhelms
when standing awestruck in its front yard.
My tank nearing empty slowly filled part-way.
This intentional overdose of light should last me until next autumn.
I am overcome even when it is never enough.

 

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A Special Mention

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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

Only the Good Stuff: Multivitamins for Your Weekend [10.15.16]

 

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Visions of Mountains

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He found himself wondering at times, especially in the Autumn, about the wild lands, and strange visions of mountains that he had never seen came into his dreams. He began to say to himself ‘Perhaps I shall cross the river myself one day.’ To which the other half of his mind always replied ‘Not yet.’

~J.R.R. Tolkien — Frodo in Fellowship of the Rings

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When you live in Whatcom County, as we do, it is possible to cross the river (several times) over 90 minutes of two lane highway switchbacks to arrive in these wild lands, breathless and overcome by majesty.

Visions of mountains from our dreams become an overwhelming 360 degree reality.

God touches every square inch of earth as if He owns the place, and He does, but these square inches are particularly marked by His artistry.  It is a place to feel awed by His magnificence.

As we crossed the river to return home last night, I was left to wonder, much like Tolkien’s Frodo pondering of wild land dreams, what bridges God is building to bring us back home to Him.

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(these are photos I took yesterday of Mt. Shuksan from Heather Meadows and Picture Lake, as well as Mt. Baker and Table Mountain from Artist Point)

To See the Field and the Grass Blade

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How often do we miss the fainter note
Or fail to see the more exquisite hue,
Blind to the tiny streamlet at our feet,
Eyes fixed upon some other, further view.
What chimes of harmonies escape our ears,
How many rainbows must elude our sight,
We see a field but do not see the grass,
Each blade a miracle of shade and light.
How then to keep the greater end in eye
And watch the sunlight on the distant peak,
And yet not tread on any leaf of love,
Nor miss a word the eager children speak?
Ah, what demand upon the narrow heart,
To seek the whole, yet not ignore the part.
~Philip Britts “Sonnet 1”

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О Greater Light, we praise Thee for the less;
The eastern light our spires touch at morning,
The light that slants upon our western doors at evening.
The twilight over stagnant pools at batflight,
Moon light and star light, owl and moth light,
Glow-worm glowlight on a grassblade.
О Light Invisible, we worship Thee!
~T.S. Eliot from “O Light Invisible”

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photo by Nate Gibson

We are given the eyes to see the part in the whole
or not
We are given the ears to hear the note within the chord
or not
We are given voice to rejoice alone or in a chorus
or not
We are given a rain-bowed promise to witness it all
or not.

So why ever not?

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A Reason None of Us Knows

 

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…I have been younger in October
than in all the months of spring
walnut and may leaves the color
of shoulders at the end of summer
a month that has been to the mountain
and become light there
the long grass lies pointing uphill
even in death for a reason
that none of us knows…

my love is for lightness
of touch foot feather
the day is yet one more yellow leaf
and without turning I kiss the light
by an old well on the last of the month
gathering wild rose hips
in the sun
~W. S. Merwin from “The Love of October” from Migration

 

This warm wind gusts through shedding branches
stripping them bare
and carrying the leaves yards
far away, to a diverse gathering
they have never known:
chestnut, cherry, birch, walnut, apple,
maple, parrotia, pear, oak, poplar
suddenly sharing the same fate and grave,
each wearing a color of its own,
soon to blend with the others
as all slowly melt to brown.

There is lightness in the letting go,
for reasons none of us knows.

 

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The Wild Lands

Mt. Shuksan yesterday, photo by Emily Gibson
                                                  Mt. Shuksan yesterday, photo by Emily Gibson

 

He found himself wondering at times,
especially in the autumn,
about the wild lands,
and strange visions of mountains that he had never seen came into his dreams.
~J.R.R. Tolkien Fellowship of the Rings

 

Mt. Baker from the north yesterday
                                                            Mt. Baker from Artist Point yesterday

 

Thank God who seasons thus the year,
And sometimes kindly slants his rays;
For in his winter he’s most near
And plainest seen upon the shortest days.

I scent my med’cine from afar,
Where the rude simpler of the year
October leads the rustling war,
And strews his honors on the summer’s bier.

The evening of the year draws on,
The fields a later aspect wear;
Since Summer’s garishness is gone,
Some grains of night tincture the noontide air.
~Henry David Thoreau, selected stanzas from “The Fall of the Leaf”

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Wandering in a wild land of beauty,
especially in the coolness of autumn,
with the dry hot melting “garishness” of summer past,
God is most plain in these places,
His slanting rays touching
everything and all.

shuksan6Mt. Shuksan yesterday, from Artist Point

The Light of Old October

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In Heaven, it is always Autumn
~John Donne

 

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He found himself wondering at times,
especially in the autumn,
about the wild lands,
and strange visions of mountains that he had never seen came into his dreams.
~J.R.R. Tolkien Fellowship of the Rings

 

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Is not this a true autumn day?
Just the still melancholy that I love –
that makes life and nature harmonise.
The birds are consulting about their migrations,
the trees are putting on the hectic or the pallid hues of decay,
and begin to strew the ground,
that one’s very footsteps may not disturb the repose of earth and air,
while they give us a scent that is a perfect anodyne to the restless spirit.
Delicious autumn!
My very soul is wedded to it,
and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth
seeking the successive autumns.
~George Eliot

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Such days of autumnal decline hold a strange mystery which adds to the gravity of all our moods.
~Charles Nodier

 

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I’m so glad I live in a world where there are Octobers.
~L.M. Montgomery Anne of Green Gables

 

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I was drinking in the surroundings:
air so crisp you could snap it with your fingers
and greens in every lush shade imaginable
offset by autumnal flashes of red and yellow.
~Wendy Delsol

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Just as a painter needs light in order to put the finishing touches to his picture,
so I need an inner light, which I feel I never have enough of in the autumn.
~Leo Tolstoy

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After the keen still days of September,
the October sun filled the world with mellow warmth…
The maple tree in front of the doorstep burned like a gigantic red torch.
The oaks along the roadway glowed yellow and bronze.
The fields stretched like a carpet of jewels,
emerald and topaz and garnet.
Everywhere she walked the color shouted and sang around her…
In October any wonderful unexpected thing might be possible.
~Elizabeth George Speare  The Witch of Blackbird Pond

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It was one of those sumptuous days
when the world is full of autumn muskiness
and tangy, crisp perfection:
vivid blue sky, deep green fields,
leaves in a thousand luminous hues.
It is a truly astounding sight
when every tree in a landscape becomes individual,
when each winding back highway
and plump hillside is suddenly and infinitely splashed
with every sharp shade that nature can bestow
– flaming scarlet, lustrous gold, throbbing vermilion, fiery orange.
~Bill Bryson

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The ripe, the golden month has come again…
Frost sharps the middle music of the seasons,
and all things living on the earth turn home again…
the fields are cut, the granaries are full,
the bins are loaded to the brim with fatness,
and from the cider-press the rich brown oozings of the York Imperials run.
The bee bores to the belly of the grape,
the fly gets old and fat and blue,
he buzzes loud, crawls slow,
creeps heavily to death on sill and ceiling,
the sun goes down in blood and pollen
across the bronzed and mown fields of the old October.
~Thomas Wolfe

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Hammered Dome

 

photo of the Nooksack Cirque by Josh Scholten
photo of the Nooksack Cirque by Josh Scholten
photo of the ice melt, the origins of the Nooksack River at the Nooksack Cirque by Josh Scholten
photo of the ice melt, the origins of the Nooksack River at the Nooksack Cirque by Josh Scholten

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”

the "hammered dome" by Josh Scholten
the “hammered dome” by Josh Scholten
photo by Josh Scholten
photo by Josh Scholten

 

The Edge of the World

photo by Nate Gibson
photo by Nate Gibson

I came here to study hard things – rock mountain and salt sea – and to temper my spirit on their edges.  “Teach me thy ways, O Lord” is, like all prayers, a rash one, and one I cannot but recommend.  These mountains — Mount Baker and the Sisters and Shuksan, the Canadian Coastal Range and the Olympics on the peninsula — are surely the edge of the known and comprehended world….  That they bear their own unimaginable masses and weathers aloft, holding them up in the sky for anyone to see plain, makes them, as Chesterton said of the Eucharist, only the more mysterious by their very visibility and absence of secrecy.
~Annie Dillard from Holy the Firm

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photo by Nate Gibson
photo by Nate Gibson

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