Tag: nature

When I Was Sinking Down: Treading Water

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Measure the walls. Count the ribs. Notch the long days.
Look up for blue sky through the spout. Make small fires
with the broken hulls of fishing boats. Practice smoke signals.
Call old friends, and listen for echoes of distant voices.
Organize your calendar. Dream of the beach. Look each way
for the dim glow of light. Work on your reports. Review
each of your life’s ten million choices. Endure moments
of self-loathing. Find the evidence of those before you.
Destroy it. Try to be very quiet, and listen for the sound
of gears and moving water. Listen for the sound of your heart.
Be thankful that you are here, swallowed with all hope,
where you can rest and wait. Be nostalgic. Think of all
the things you did and could have done. Remember
treading water in the center of the still night sea, your toes
pointing again and again down, down into the black depths.
~Dan Albergotti “Things to Do in the Belly of the Whale” from The Boatloads.

Down into the icy depths you plunge,
The cold dark undertow of your depression,
Even your memories of light made strange,
As you fall further from all comprehension.
You feel as though they’ve thrown you overboard,
Your fellow Christians on the sunlit deck,
A stone-cold Jonah on whom scorn is poured,
A sacrifice to save them from the wreck.

But someone has their hands on your long line,
You sound for them the depths they sail above,
One who takes Jonah as his only sign
Sinks lower still to hold you in his love,
And though, you cannot see, or speak, or breathe,
The everlasting arms are underneath.
~Malcolm Guite “Christian Plummet”

But the Lord replied, “Is it right for you to be angry?
…should I not have concern for the great city of Nineveh, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand people who cannot tell their right hand from their left—and also many animals?”
Jonah 4:4 and 4:11

Maybe you too feel as though you have been swallowed into the belly of the whale, treading water in the dark, disoriented and not just a little angry about the undeserving state of the world. All you can see of the outside is a bit of blue sky through a tiny hole above your head.

If you are like me, this makes you plenty grumpy. How did we end up in this mess?

Yet the belly of the whale is not forever. Surprisingly, it is a time of contemplation with little distraction other than our own conflicted feelings. We’ll soon be regurgitated back onto the shore of our trivial pursuits and busyness where suddenly life once again will feel too noisy with too many demands.

This quiet time is meant to teach something to you and me, even if it is just to count the mighty ribs protecting us, gaze into our own darkness and contemplate how we were trying to avoid what God asked of us.

I have a long list of things I could have done when the Lord prompted me, but instead stayed stubbornly resistant – treading water through life.

It’s time to stop being angry after being burped out to do what I should have done before sinking down, sinking down, sinking down…

This Lenten season I reflect on the words of the 19th century southern spiritual hymn “What Wondrous Love is This”

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From Death We’re Free: Opening Wide to the Light

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I saw that a yellow crocus bud had pierced
a dead oak leaf, then opened wide. How strong
its appetite for the luxury of the sun!
~Jane Kenyon from Otherwise: New and Selected Poems

Beyond my window in the night
Is but a drab inglorious street,
Yet there the frost and clean starlight
As over Warwick woods are sweet.

Under the grey drift of the town
The crocus works among the mould
As eagerly as those that crown
The Warwick spring in flame and gold.

And when the tramway down the hill
Across the cobbles moans and rings,
There is about my window-sill
The tumult of a thousand wings.
~John Drinkwater “A Town Window”

This is why I believe that God really has dived down into the bottom of creation, and has come up bringing the whole redeemed nature on His shoulders. The miracles that have already happened are, of course, as Scripture so often says, the first fruits of that cosmic summer which is presently coming on.

Christ has risen, and so we shall rise.

…To be sure, it feels wintry enough still: but often in the very early spring it feels like that.  Two thousand years are only a day or two by this scale.  A man really ought to say, ‘The Resurrection happened two thousand years ago’  in the same spirit in which he says ‘I saw a crocus yesterday.’

Because we know what is coming behind the crocus.

The spring comes slowly down the way, but the great thing is that the corner has been turned.  There is, of course, this difference that in the natural spring the crocus cannot choose whether it will respond or not.

We can. 

We have the power either of withstanding the spring, and sinking back into the cosmic winter, or of going on…to which He is calling us.

It remains with us whether to follow or not, to die in this winter, or to go on into that spring and that summer.
~C. S. Lewis from “God in the Dock”

Our appetite is strong for light and warmth, leaving winter behind.
Our desire is to defeat death, piercing through the decay
and flourishing among the living, opening wide our faces
to the luxury of luminous grace freely given.

We have turned the corner and have the power to choose Light.
We need only follow the pathway out of darkness. 
We need only follow the Son as he leads the way.

The desert and the parched land will be glad;
    the wilderness will rejoice and blossom.
Like the crocus,  it will burst into bloom;
    it will rejoice greatly and shout for joy.
Isaiah 35: 1-2

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A Feather on the Bright Sky

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N.Scott Momaday passed into eternity last week at age 89.

On the first day I took his class on Native American Mythology and Lore in 1974 at Stanford, a tall, young N.Scott Momaday strolled to the front, wrote the 60 words of an Emily Dickinson poem “Further in Summer”on the blackboard. He told us we would spend at least a week working out the meaning of what he considered the greatest poem written — this in a class devoted to Native American writing and oral tradition. In his resonant bass, he read the poem to us many times, rolling the words around his mouth as if to extract their sweetness. This man of the plains, a member of the Kiowa tribe, loved this poem put together by a New England recluse poet — someone as culturally distant from him and his people as possible.

But grace works to unite us, no matter our differences, and Scott knew this as he led us, mostly white students, through the poem. What on the surface appears a paean to late summer insect droning – doomed to extinction by the desolation of oncoming winter – is a statement of the transcendence of man beyond our understanding of nature and the world in which we, its creatures, find ourselves. As summer begins its descent into the dark death of winter, we, unlike cicadas and crickets, become all too aware we too are descending. There is no one as lonely as an individual facing their mortality and no one as lonely as a poet facing the empty page, in search of words to describe the sacrament of sacrifice and perishing.

Yet the written Word is not silent; the Word brings Grace unlike any other, even when the summer, pathetic and transient as it is, is gone. The Word brings Grace, like no other, to pathetic and transient man who will emerge transformed.

There is no furrow on the glow. There is no need to plow and seed our salvaged souls, already lovingly planted by our Creator God, yielding a fruited plain.

Scott was one of my most remarkable and influential teachers, teaching me to trust memories, to use the best words, and to describe beauty as best I can. I know his words will forever live on.

…<Dickinson’s Further in Summer is> one of the great poems of American literature. The statement of the poem is profound; it remarks the absolute separation between man and nature at a precise moment in time.  The poet looks as far as she can into the natural world, but what she sees at last is her isolation from that world.  She perceives, that is, the limits of her own perception. But that, we reason, is enough. This poem of just more than sixty words comprehends the human condition in relation to the universe:

“So gradual the Grace
A pensive Custom it becomes
Enlarging Loneliness.“

But this is a divine loneliness, the loneliness of a species evolved far beyond all others. The poem bespeaks a state of grace. In its precision, perception and eloquence it establishes the place of words within that state.  Words are indivisible with the highest realization of human being.
~N.Scott Momaday from The Man Made of Words

The Whole Dream

My Heart in Hiding Stirred…

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To Christ Our Lord

I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-
dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird, – the achieve of, the mastery of the thing.

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.
~Gerard Manley Hopkins “The Windhover”

photos of kestrel falcons by Kate Steensma of Steensma Dairy
photo by Kate Steensma of Steensma Dairy
photo by Kate Steensma of Steensma Dairy
photo by Kate Steensma of Steensma Dairy

Did you too see it, drifting, all night, on the black river?
Did you see it in the morning, rising into the silvery air –
An armful of white blossoms,
A perfect commotion of silk and linen as it leaned
into the bondage of its wings; a snowbank, a bank of lilies,
Biting the air with its black beak?
Did you hear it, fluting and whistling
A shrill dark music – like the rain pelting the trees – like a waterfall
Knifing down the black ledges?
And did you see it, finally, just under the clouds –
A white cross
Streaming across the sky, its feet
Like black leaves, its wings Like the stretching light of the river?And did you feel it, in your heart, how it pertained to everything?
And have you too finally figured out what beauty is for?
And have you changed your life?
~Mary Oliver from “The Swan”

I hold my heart in hiding, trying to protect that tender core of who I am from being pierced and shredded by the slings and arrows of every day life. It can be a bruising and bumpy ride.

Yet to live fully, as I am created to live, I must fling myself into the open, wimpling wings spread, the wind holding me up, hovering and ready to soar. 

To stay aloft, I must change as the wind changes around me.

I take my chances, knowing the fall will come. My wounds shall be healed, even as they bleed.

There is no lack of wonder. 
So stirred.
So much beauty to behold.
So much heart to take out of hiding and share freely,
no matter the buffeting.

Ah…  Ah, my dear.

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For a Moment of Time

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The tree, and its haunting bird,
Are the loves of my heart;
But where is the word, the word,
Oh where is the art,
To say, or even to see,
For a moment of time,
What the Tree and the Bird must be
In the true sublime?

They shine, listening to the soul,
And the soul replies;
But the inner love is not whole, 
and the moment dies.

Oh give me before I die
The grace to see
With eternal, ultimate eye,
The Bird and the Tree.
The song in the living Green,
The Tree and the Bird –
Oh have they ever been seen,
Ever been heard?
~Ruth Pitter “The Bird in the Tree”

Then came a sound even more delicious than the sound of water. Close beside the path they were following a bird suddenly chirped from the branch of a tree. It was answered by the chuckle of another bird a little further off.

And then, as if that had been signal, there was chattering and chirruping in every direction, and then a moment of full song, and within five minutes the whole wood was ringing with birds’ music, and wherever Edmund’s eyes turned he saw birds alighting on branches, or sailing overhead or chasing one another or having their little quarrels or tidying up their feathers with their beaks.
~C.S. Lewis from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

Every day now we hear hunters firing in the woods and the wetlands around our farm, most likely aiming for the few ducks that have decided to stay in the marshes through the winter, or possibly a Canadian goose or a deer to bring home for the freezer. Our usual day-long serenade of birdsong from the forest is replaced by shotguns popping, hawks and eagles chittering from the treetops, with Stellar jays and squirrels arguing over the last of the filbert nuts.

In the clear cold evenings, when coyotes aren’t howling in the moonlight, the owls hoot to each other across the fields from one patch of woods to another, their gentle resonant conversation echoing back and forth. 

During these chilly months, there are no longer birdsong arias in the trees;  I’m left bereft of the musical tapestry of chirps and trills and twitters.

So it is too quiet, a time of bereavement. The frosty silence of darkened days, interrupted by gunshot percussion, is like a baton raised in anticipation after rapping the podium to bring us all to attention. I wait and listen for the downbeat to come — the return of birds and peeper frogs tuning their throats, rehearsing their spring symphony.

May their eternal and ultimate concert never end.

I hope you love birds too. It is economical. It saves going to heaven.
~Emily Dickinson in an 1885 letter to Miss Eugenia Hall

Bird in a tree, bird in a tree
What you doin’ way up there?
Why do you sing, why do you sing?
Are you looking for your lady fair?
Did she fly away to another tree?
Do you know not where she hides?
All day you sing the same old song
She must be hard to find

[Verse 2]
Bird in a tree, bird in a tree
What’s it like to be able to fly?
I figure if I had wings like you
Not a wasted day’d go by
I’d fly above the mountaintops
I’d do barrel-rolls and dives
I’d snack upon the wiggly worms
And be happy all my life

[Verse 3]
Bird in a tree, bird in a tree
What you doin’ way up there?
Why do you sing, why do you sing?
Are you looking for your lady fair?
Did she leave you late in the summertime
After such a lovely spring?
Are afraid that come the winter
You’ll be left in the cold and lonely?

[Verse 4]
Bird in a tree, bird in a tree
Who taught you to sing so well?
Do you know that I am listening?
Brother bird, can you even tell?
And though your love might be far away
Even another town
You sing your song all through the day
In case she comes around

[Verse 5]
Bird in a tree, bird in a tree
Oh, the sun is getting wide
Soon the night will come
And the morning won’t be for a while
So fare thee well, dear friend of mine
What a pleasure, I must say
We both should prob’ly get some sleep
Tomorrow’s another day

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The Sunrise Shall Visit Us: All Things Fall Apart

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The pines look black in the half-
light of dawn.  Stillness…

While we slept an inch of new snow
simplified the field.  Today of all days
the sun will shine no more
than is strictly necessary.

At the village church last night
the boys – shepherds and wisemen –
pressed close ot the manger in obedience,
wishing only for time to pass;
but the girl dressed as Mary trembled
as she leaned over the pungent hay,
and like the mother of Christ
wondered why she had been chosen.

After the pageant, a ruckus of cards,
presents, and homemade Christmas sweets.
A few of us stayed to clear the bright
scraps and ribbons from the pews,
and lift the pulpit back in place.

When I opened the hundred-year-old Bible
to Luke’s account of the Epiphany
black dust from the binding rubbed off
on my hands, and on the altar cloth.
~Jane Kenyon “At the Winter Solstice”

Today is the winter solstice. The planet tilts just so to its star, lists and holds circling in a fixed tension between veering and longing, spins helpless, exalted, in and out of that fleet blazing touch…

There is not a guarantee in the world. Oh your needs are guaranteed; your needs are absolutely guaranteed by the most stringent of warranties, in the plainest, truest words: knock; seek; ask. But you must read the fine print. “Not as the world giveth, give I unto you.” That’s the catch. 

I think that the dying pray at the last not “please,” but “thank you,” as a guest thanks his host at the door… The universe was not made in jest but in solemn, incomprehensible earnest. By a power that is unfathomably secret, and holy, and fleet. There is nothing to be done about it, but ignore it, or see.
~Annie Dillard “Winter Solstice” from The Abundance

It was a time like this,
War & tumult of war,
a horror in the air.
Hungry yawned the abyss-
and yet there came the star
and the child most wonderfully there.

It was time like this
of fear & lust for power,
license & greed and blight-
and yet the Prince of bliss
came into the darkest hour
in quiet & silent light.

And in a time like this
how celebrate his birth
when all things fall apart?
Ah! Wonderful it is
with no room on the earth
the stable is our heart.
~Madeleine L’Engle “Into the Darkest Hour”

On this winter solstice, my prayer is to remember this day turns the world away from its descent into darkness and back toward the Light.

Even when everything is falling apart, the Light will guide our way into the path of peace.

And may the Word of the Lord spill onto my hands and into the opened stable of my heart.

Advent 2023 theme
…because of the tender mercy of our God,
whereby the sunrise shall visit us from on high 
to give light to those who sit in darkness
and in the shadow of death,
to guide our feet into the way of peace.
Luke 1: 78-79 from Zechariah’s Song

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Flawless Grace

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The woods is shining this morning.
Red, gold and green, the leaves
lie on the ground, or fall,
or hang full of light in the air still.
Perfect in its rise and in its fall, it takes
the place it has been coming to forever.
It has not hastened here, or lagged.
See how surely it has sought itself,
its roots passing lordly through the earth.
See how without confusion it is
all that it is, and how flawless
its grace is. Running or walking, the way
is the same. Be still. Be still.
“He moves your bones, and the way is clear.”
~Wendell Berry “Grace”

If I’m confused (as I often am)
about where I’ve been,
where I am, where I’m going,
I look to the cycles of the seasons to be reminded
all things (and I) come round

what is barren will warm to the sun and bud,
what buds will open up in blossom,
what blossoms will grow lush and fruit,
what flourishes will feed, fade and fall,
come to rest and be still.

All things come round,
making the way clear.
Grace forges a path
my bones must follow.

To shine in His stillness.
How flawless His grace.

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The Dew Looks Up

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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

A walk around our farm in October is
more or less, before or after, now and then,
a timelessness of shifting seasons and fading days.

A prayer becomes like dew from above,
me looking up to the God
who was, is and ever will be,
who already knows what I am about to say.
He knows I don’t tend to say anything new.

He blesses me with the light of His dew.

I write every day to explain myself to people I will never meet. Perhaps, every day, I am trying to explain myself to God.

God is,
(if I stop to look and listen),
yesterday, today, tomorrow –
more or less, before or after, now and then,
but most especially
forever and ever.

Amen.

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These Things We Depend On

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This is the moment when you see again
the red berries of the mountain ash
and in the dark sky
the birds’ night migrations.

It grieves me to think
the dead won’t see them—
these things we depend on,
they disappear.

What will the soul do for solace then?
I tell myself maybe it won’t need
these pleasures anymore;
maybe just not being is simply enough,
hard as that is to imagine.
~Louise Glück “The Night Migrations”

(Louise Glück died yesterday at age 80; she was both a Nobel and Pulitzer Prize winner for poetry)

All through August and September
            thousands, maybe
tens of thousands, of feathered
            creatures pass through
this place and I almost never see
            a single one. The fall
wood warbler migration goes by here
            every year, all of them,
myriad species, all looking sort of like
            each other, yellow, brown, gray,
all muted versions of their summer selves,
            almost indistinguishable
from each other, at least to me, although
            definitely not to each other,
all flying by, mostly at night, calling to each
            other as they go to keep
the flock together, saying: chip, zeet,
            buzz, smack, zip, squeak—
            those
sounds reassuring that we are
            all here together and
heading south, all of us just passing
            through, just passing
through, just passing through, just
            passing through.
~David Budbill “Invisible Visitors” from Tumbling Toward the End

Some feathered travelers slip past us unseen and unheard. 
They may stop for a drink in the pond
or a bite to eat in the field and woods,
but we never know they are there – simply passing through.

Others are compelled to announce their journey
with great fanfare, usually heard before seen. 
The drama of migration becomes bantering conversation
from bird to bird, bird to earth, bird to sun, moon and stars,
with unseen magnetic forces pointing the way.

When not using voices, their wings sing the air
with rhythmic beat and whoosh.

We’re all together here — altogether —
even when our voices are raised sharply,
our silences brooding, our hurts magnified, our sorrows deep.
Our route and mode of travel become a matter of intense debate.

The ultimate destination is not in dispute however. 
It isn’t simply enough to just be,
but to be heading to where we belong,
to that which we depend upon.
We are migrating souls finding a way back home
where all is solace, all is meaning,
all is grace, all is peace.

We’re just passing through,
just passing through, just passing through.

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Choosing to Protect Unseen Nests

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I go to the mountain side
of the house to cut saplings,
and clear a view to snow
on the mountain. But when I look up,
saw in hand, I see a nest clutched in
the uppermost branches.
I don’t cut that one.
I don’t cut the others either.
Suddenly, in every tree,
an unseen nest
where a mountain
would be.
~Tess Gallagher “Choices” from Midnight Lantern: New and Selected Poems

Might I be capable of such tenderness?
Might I consider the needs of others,
by saving not just one nest,
but all future nests,
rather than exercise my right
to an unimpeded view,
wanting the world to be exactly
how I want it?

I must not forget:
my right to choose
demands that I
choose to do right by those
who have no choice.

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