Tag: nature

Be Quiet as a Feather

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Today I’m flying low and I’m
not saying a word.
I’m letting all the voodoos of ambition sleep.

The world goes on as it must,
the bees in the garden rumbling a little,
the fish leaping, the gnats getting eaten.
And so forth.

But I’m taking the day off.
Quiet as a feather.
I hardly move though really I’m traveling
a terrific distance.

Stillness. One of the doors
into the temple.
~Mary Oliver “Today” from A Thousand Mornings

The moon drops one or two feathers into the field.   
The dark wheat listens.
Be still.
Now.
There they are, the moon’s young, trying
Their wings.

I stand alone by an elder tree, I do not dare breathe
Or move.
I listen.
The wheat leans back toward its own darkness,
And I lean toward mine.
~James Wright from “Beginning”

photo by Bob Tjoelker

Wherever it was
I was supposed to be
this morning—
whatever it was I said
I would be doing—
I was standing
at the edge of the field—
I was hurrying
through my own soul,
opening its dark doors—
I was leaning out;
I was listening.
— Mary Oliver from “Mockingbirds” from New and Selected Poems, Volume 2

“Hope” is the thing with feathers –
That perches in the soul –
And sings the tune without the words –
And never stops – at all –
~Emily Dickinson

Some days warrant stillness. Today is one.

As I walked our farm driveway,
I found this barn owl feather,
dropped from a passing wing overnight –

The past months have echoed loudly with ruckus and noise —
much too overwhelming and almost deafening.

Today I seek to be quiet as this feather,
lying silently in place, not saying a word.

I might actually begin to listen and hear again.  

A funny thing about feathers:
alone, each one is mere fluff.
Together — feathers create lift and power,
the strength and will to soar beyond the tether of gravity
and the pull of our inevitable mortality.

Joined and united,
we can rise above and fly away
as far as our life and breath can take us.

May peace be still.

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Seeking a Close Encounter of Awful Quiet

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A dark mist lay over the Black Hills, and the land was like iron.
At the top of ridge I caught sight of Devil’s Tower upthrust against the gray sky as if in the birth of time the core of the earth had broken through its crust and the motion of the world was begun.

There are things in nature
that engender an awful quiet in the heart of man;
Devil’s Tower is one of them.
~N.Scott Momaday in The Way to Rainy Mountain

We didn’t have a close encounter with Devil’s Tower on this particular trip yesterday through Wyoming. Over the years we have made many cross-country road trips like this one, passing by the turn-off to Devil’s Tower because there was urgency to get where we needed to go. Occasionally we would see it hazy in the far distance, so I could say I had “seen it” but I really had not seen it … according to my Stanford professor N. Scott Momaday.

Scott was from the Kiowa tribe. In his language, this rock formation is named Tso-i-e or “standing on a rock.” For him and his people, it is sacred ground. The Cheyenne, Crow, Lakota, Shoshone, and Arapahoe all revere this rock monolith, although most tribal members did not live near enough to see it themselves, but the legends traveled many miles through the generations through oral tradition.

I took Scott’s unforgettable class “Native American Mythology and Lore” in 1973, as a 19 year old sophomore. He had a commanding presence, a booming resonant voice for story telling, a predilection for the poetry of Emily Dickinson and a hankering since childhood to be a character in the stories of Billy the Kid. The first day of class, he introduced us to Tso-i-e first and foremost. He told us his grandmother’s story passed to her from her grandparents:

“Eight children were there at play, seven sisters and their brother. Suddenly the boy was struck dumb; he trembled and began to run upon his hands and feet. His fingers became claws, and his body was covered with fur. Directly there was a bear where the boy had been. The sisters were terrified.; they ran and the bear after them. They came to the stump of a great tree, and the tree spoke to them. It bade them climb upon it, and as they did so it began to rise into the air. The bear came to kill them, but they were just beyond its reach. It reared against the tree and scored the bark all around with its claws. The seven sisters were borne into the sky, and they became the stars of the Big Dipper.”

My family finally made time to see the Tower up close. For me, this “close encounter” was meant to connect the dots from my class and to understand more fully the spiritual background of the Plains people as our son, Ben, had lived and taught on the Pine Ridge Lakota Sioux Reservation in South Dakota for two years.

The Tower surely is awe-filled holy ground for us all – we are diminished in its presence. It disquiets the heart with its awful grandeur and sheer other-worldliness. In its own way, it is as resonant as Scott’s captivating stories about its origins, yet remains a reminder of the ever-changing impermanence of geologic formations.

We need more holy places in our lives even as they (and we) change with the sands and winds of time. We need to seek more “awful quiet” in our hearts, to continue to tell our sacred stories, generation to generation, never forgetting Who it is who set the world in motion.

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A Blink of God’s Eye…

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Nobody can keep on being angry if she looks into the heart of a pansy for a little while.
~L.M. Montgomery

One has to wonder where they got
their reputation for pansiness.
Purple and proud, or any color
you might imagine, they grow
where they want to grow, despite the cold,
so much unlike their flashy cousins,
impatiens, petunias, scarlet sage,
petals falling off at first frost,
hardly hearty at all.
Keep your prima donna blossoms,
loud and boastful annuals, brief
and seedless. I’ll take the pansies
of the world, unassuming, resilient,
quietly doing what they know to do
~Scott Owen “Pansies”

As a seed, I was shot out the back end of a blue jay
when, heedless, she flew over the meadow.
She had swallowed me in my homeland when she spied me
lying easy under the sun—briefly, I called her Mother
before I passed through her gullet like a ghost.
In a blink of God’s eye I was an orphan. I trembled
where I fell, alone in the dirt. That first night
was a long night, early May and chilly, and I remember
rain filled my furrow. I called out for mercy—
only a wolverine wandered by. I cursed my luck,
I cursed the happenstance of this world, I smelled
his hot stink, but he nosed me deep into the mud—
this was the gift of obscurity. I germinated, hidden
from the giants of earth, the jostling stalks,
the various, boisterous bloomers, and this was my salvation.
After seven days and nights I pushed through—
yes. Here I am, kissable: your tiny, purple profusion.
~Lisa Bellamy “Wild Pansy”

The world is in sore need of a cure for the grumbles.

Fortunately, it exists right outside in our back yards, along sidewalks and in gravelly vacant lots.

A cheerful face is irresistible to all but the crabbiest among us, guaranteed to bring a smile every time.

Beyond the obvious charm exists a depth of heart — roots able to thrive in the thinnest of soil, at home among rocks and weeds,  resilient even when tromped on.

We carry its seeds on the tread of our boots despite our grumbling and help spread the good news: anger left unfed will dry up and blow away.

Yet the constant loyal heart of the pansy will last. 
It keeps smiling back – simply a twinkle in God’s eye.

For pansies are, I think, the little gleams
Of children’s visions from a world of dreams,
Jewels of innocence and joy and mirth,
Alight with laughter as they fall to earth.

So tread not rashly, children, lest you crush
A part of childhood in a thoughtless rush.
Would you not treat them gently if you knew
Pansies are little bits of children too?
~R.X. Lehmann from “Pansies”

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Burned Up With Beauty

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i was talking to a moth
the other evening
he was trying to break into
an electric light bulb
and fry himself on the wires

why do you fellows
pull this stunt i asked him
because it is the conventional
thing for moths or why
if that had been an uncovered
candle instead of an electric
light bulb you would
now be a small unsightly cinder
have you no sense

plenty of it he answered
but at times we get tired
of using it
we get bored with the routine
and crave beauty
and excitement
fire is beautiful
and we know that if we get
too close it will kill us
but what does that matter
it is better to be happy
for a moment
and be burned up with beauty
than to live a long time
and be bored all the while
so we wad all our life up
into one little roll
and then we shoot the roll
that is what life is for
it is better to be a part of beauty
for one instant and then cease to
exist than to exist forever
and never be a part of beauty
our attitude toward life
is come easy go easy
we are like human beings
used to be before they became
too civilized to enjoy themselves

and before i could argue him
out of his philosophy
he went and immolated himself
on a patent cigar lighter
i do not agree with him
myself i would rather have
half the happiness and twice
the longevity
but at the same time i wish
there was something i wanted
as badly as he wanted to fry himself

archy (the cockroach)

~Don Marquis “The Lesson of the Moth”

One night a moth flew into the candle, was caught, burned dry, and held. I must have been staring at the candle, or maybe I looked up when a shadow crossed my page; at any rate, I saw it all…

Her moving wings ignited like tissue paper…

And then this moth essence, this spectacular skeleton, began to act as a wick. She kept burning. The wax rose in the moth’s body from her soaking abdomen to her thorax to the jagged hole where her head should be, and widened into flame, a saffron-yellow flame that robed her to the ground like any immolating monk. That candle had two wicks, two flames of identical height, side by side. The moth’s head was fire. She burned for two hours, until I blew her out.
~Annie Dillard from “The Death of the Moth” from Holy the Firm

The struggle was over.

The insignificant little creature now knew death. As I looked at the dead moth, this minute wayside triumph of so great a force over so mean an antagonist filled me with wonder. Just as life had been strange a few minutes before, so death was now as strange.

The moth having righted himself now lay most decently and uncomplainingly composed. O yes, he seemed to say, death is stronger than I am.
~Virginia Woolf from “The Death of a Moth”

I too would take half the happiness and twice the longevity over one moment of ecstasy.

But I admire the blind passion of a tiny creature who will beat itself senseless on a light bulb, or fly into a flame to become cinders, or struggle so hard to live upright rather than upside down, that it dies in the struggle.

Why are famous poets and essayists fascinated by the tiny deaths they witness on their front porches, in their kitchens or at their writing desk?

Death is never tiny at all.
Nevertheless, death is ceasing to be,
after a unique and intentional creation,
whether a moth, a mother, or ourselves.

We live today. Look for a moment of beauty to enjoy.
Let’s be sensible about what we want so badly.
As one tiny part of matter, we matter.
And when we die, it is never a tiny death.

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Lyrics:
A day may come that asks of us all we have to give:
a day we never would have sought and yet we have to live.
If it should be our destiny to live in such a day,
let our faith and love be worthy of the ones who showed the way.
The ones we now call heroes
The ones we say their memory will not die –
they were no different in their day than you or I.
They were no different in their day. than you or I.
~Grahame Davies

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So Starved for Hope

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I know what you planned, what you meant to do, teaching me
to love the world, making it impossible
to turn away completely, to shut it out completely ever again –
it is everywhere; when I close my eyes,
birdsong, scent of lilac in early spring, scent of summer roses:
you mean to take it away, each flower, each connection with earth –
why would you wound me, why would you want me
desolate in the end, unless you wanted me so starved for hope
I would refuse to see that finally
nothing was left to me, and would believe instead
in the end you were left to me.
~Louise Glück “Vespers” (one of ten Vespers poems)

I wait for the Lord, my soul waits,
    and in his word I hope;
~Psalm 130:5

Mid-spring days like this:
bright, so promising with potential,
birdsong constantly in the air,
scent of orchard blossoms, lilacs,
early roses and a flush of color everywhere…

how can we not love the world so much we never want to leave it?

Yet we must hold this loosely.

It is but a tiny show of the glories to come,
of what You have waiting for us next.

I am wounded knowing I must eventually let this go.

I am hungry for hope that isn’t found
in all this beauty and lushness,
the fulfilling hope that is only
You as my Father and Creator.

You provide only a taste here.
I know what I starve for,
so starved with hope for what You have in store.

I will wait for you
I will wait for you
in the end You were left for me.

Amen and Amen.

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The Annual Dogwood Miracle

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dogwood20184

After all, I don’t see why I am always asking
for private, individual, selfish miracles
when every year there are miracles like … dogwood.
~Anne Morrow Lindbergh

foldeddogwood

It began last week. The tree right next to our front porch, having looked dormant for the past six months, started to bud out in subtle pink-petalled blossoms.

Through the winter, there had been nothing remarkable whatsoever about this tree. Now it is a feast for the eyes, almost blinding in its brilliance.

Each year the dogwood startles me awake. From dead to brilliant in a mere two weeks. And not only our tree, but every other pink dogwood within a twenty mile radius has answered the same late April/early May siren call:
bloom!
bloom your heart out!
dazzle every retina in sight!

And it is done simultaneously on every tree, all the same day, without a sound, without an obvious signal, as if an invisible conductor had swooped a baton up and in the downbeat everything turned pink.

Or perhaps the baton is really a wand, shooting out pink stars to paint these otherwise plain and humble trees, so inconspicuous the rest of the year.

Ordinarily I don’t dress up in finery like these trees do.  I prefer inconspicuous earth tones for myself. But I love the celebratory joy of those trees in full blossom and enjoy looking for them in yards and parks and along roadways.

Maybe there is something pink in my closet I can wear. Maybe conspicuously miraculous every once in awhile is exactly what is needed.

Then again, it is best to leave the miracles to the trees…

dogwood42816
dogwoodweb
dogwoodsunset2
pinkdogbloom

If you stand in an orchard
In the middle of Spring
and you don’t make a sound
you can hear pink sing,
a darling, whispery song of a thing.
~Mary O’Neill from Hailstones and Halibut Bones “Pink”

dogwood517
sunsetdogwood
pinkdogbloom2

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The Way I See the World

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walnutshoot
dawn7250

Old friend now there is no one alive
who remembers when you were young
it was high summer when I first saw you
in the blaze of day most of my life ago
with the dry grass whispering in your shade
and already you had lived through wars
and echoes of wars around your silence
through days of parting and seasons of absence
with the house emptying as the years went their way
until it was home to bats and swallows
and still when spring climbed toward summer
you opened once more the curled sleeping fingers
of newborn leaves as though nothing had happened
you and the seasons spoke the same language
and all these years I have looked through your limbs
to the river below and the roofs and the night
and you were the way I saw the world
~W.S. Merwin “Elegy for a Walnut” from The Moon Before Morning

Today I stood under the kitchen
archway and stepped into
my new body. Pasta was on the stove,
a cold Tupperware of string beans
on the counter. But I knew.
I knew I would never be the same—
the way I’m certain the magnolia
down the block has lost
all its petals. I haven’t checked
in days, but I’m convinced
tomorrow when I take my son
to the bus stop, I’ll see them
splashed on the sidewalk.
What I’m trying to say is
sometimes your old skin
falls breathlessly off your body
in late April, as you slice
a cucumber into half moons
for your child,
and you just stand there
and let it.
~Wendy Wisner “Shedding” from The New Life: Poems

dawn7254

This grand old tree defines the seasons for me
while it parallels my own aging.

This past winter’s storms took its branches down in the night
with deafening cracks so loud
I feared to see what remnant
remained in the morning.

Yet it still stands, intrepid,
ready for another round of seasons–
though tired, sagging, broken at the edges,
it’s always reaching to the sky.

aprilwalnut
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Where You Go, I Will Go: The Last to Leave

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When the bird feeders lie barren
for a few days, as I have forgotten
to buy seeds or your mom wants to rid

the yard of the cowbirds and starlings,
and they begin to sway without rhythm
in the summer winds, the mourning doves

come, bound by what they pursue,
uninterrupted, picking the lost seeds
among the shells—these gleaners

profiting on the sporadic eating
habits of the finches. Forgive me
for not acknowledging the finches

as kind benefactors, the Boaz
of backyard birds. They are not.
They are messy and wasteful,

but we love their colors. Nervously
pecking, like Tolstoy’s Vasily
Andreevich, the master in crisis,

the fat man with two coats, groping
for warmth and the horse’s reins
in the growing cold and darkness,

the doves don’t rest or notice the family
of squirrels running circles or the robin
who lands on the shepherd’s hook, surveying

the yard, or the hopeful finches, one or two,
back now, who perch for a moment
and peck at emptiness. These doves

are usually the last to leave
when the cat comes, when I open
the back door, when the leftover

seeds are gone. Is the constant searching
for food a part of their essence?
Should we pity the one who is made

to search? To be always in want?
Is this mourning? Or is it hope?
Waiting and expecting that seeds

will reappear from above by means
they cannot know, and also below
by a grace that is provisional?
~Jacob Stratman “A Poem for my sons on their first Eucharist”

When I lived in the foothills
birds flocked to the feeder:

house finches, goldfinches,
skyblue lazuli buntings,

impeccably dressed chickadees,
sparrows in work clothes, even

hummingbirds fastforwarding
through the trees. Some of them

disappeared after a week, headed
north, I thought, with the sun.

But the first cool day
they were back, then gone,

then back, more reliable
than weathermen, and I realized

they hadn’t gone north at all,
but up the mountain, as invisible

to me as if they had flown
a thousand miles, yet in reality

just out of sight, out of reach—
maybe at the end of our lives

the world lifts that slightly
away from us, and returns once

or twice to see if we’ve refilled
the feeder, if we still remember it,

or if we’ve taken leave
of our senses altogether.
~Sharon Bryan, “The Underworld” from Sharp Stars

I wasn’t paying enough attention when my bird feeders ran out of suet and seed this week. My little feathered buddies fly up to the feeders by our kitchen window and poke around the empty trays, glance disparagingly in my direction, then fly away disheartened.

Although there is no free lunch today, knowing me as they do, they trust it will replenish. They will keep an eye out from a distance, will return to feast, especially the doves who have chosen to nest nearby, so are constantly cleaning up what the other birds leave behind.

I am no birder; I don’t go out looking for birds like the serious people of the birding community who keep a careful list of all they see or hear. I don’t even track every species visiting my humble offerings here on the farm nor do I recognize the frequent visitors as individuals. I just enjoy watching so many diverse sizes, colors and types coming together in one place to feast in relative peace and cooperation.

So unlike my own kind.

I’m happy to host such grateful creatures — even the innovative, voracious and athletic squirrel thieves.

This is my visual and tangible reminder that the good Lord provides, and I, in my own little way, can help.

This year’s Lenten theme:

…where you go I will go…
Ruth 1:16

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Where You Go, I Will Go: A Place of Retreat

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… Maybe they have
no place to return or are lost,
having gone too far from the nest.

Female bees will also burrow
deep inside the shade of a squash
flower: the closer to the source
of nectar, the warmer and more
quilt-like the air. In the cool
hours of morning, look closely
for the slight but tell-tale
trembling in each flower cup:
there, a body dropped mid-flight,
mid-thought. How we all retreat
behind some folded screen as work
or the world presses in too
soon, too close, too much.
~Luisa Igloria from “Ode to Tired Bumblebees Who Fall Asleep Inside Flowers With Pollen on Their Butts”

How can I love this spring
when it’s pulling me
through my life faster
than any time before it?
When five separate dooms
are promised this decade
and here I am, just trying
to watch a bumblebee cling
to its first purple flower.
I cannot save this world.
But look how it’s trying,
once again, to save me.
~James Pearson “This Spring”

It isn’t unusual to find a bumblebee clinging to a spring blossom, all covered in morning dew, having overstayed its welcome as the evening chill hit the night before.

The bumble is too cold to fly, or think, or navigate. Instead it just clings through the night until the sun rises and the air once again warms its wings.

Maybe it got lost.
Maybe it is simply weary from flying with such tiny wings.
Maybe it has no home to retreat to in the darkness.
Maybe it only wants to cling tight to beauty in a dangerous world.

I’ve known what this feels like, dear plump fluffy bumble.
I think I know how you feel,
patiently waiting for the descent of Love to revive my spirit
and warm my wings…

This year’s Lenten theme:

…where you go I will go…
Ruth 1:16

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Where You Go, I Will Go: Even in the Wilderness

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To be commanded to love God at all, let alone in the wilderness ,
is like being commanded to be well when we are sick,
to sing for joy when we are dying of thirst,
to run when our legs are broken.
But this is the first and great commandment nonetheless.
Even in the wilderness-
especially in the wilderness –
you shall love him.   
~Frederick Buechner from A Room Called Remember

The wilderness might be a distant peak far removed from anything or anyone, where there is bleak darkness.

The wilderness might be the darkest corner of the human heart we keep far away from anything and anyone. 

From my kitchen window on a clear day, I sometimes see a distant mountain wilderness, when the cloud cover moves away. 

During decades of perching on a round stool in clinic exam rooms,  I was given access to hearts lost in the wilderness many times every day.

Sometimes the commandment to love God seems impossible. We are too self-sufficient, too broken, too frightened, too wary to trust God with our love and devotion. 

Recognizing a diagnosis of wilderness of the heart is straight forward: despair, discouragement,disappointment, lack of gratitude, lack of hope. 

The treatment is to allow the healing power of the Father who sent His own Son to navigate the wilderness in our place.

He reaches for our bitter, wary, and broken hearts that beat within our bodies, to bring us home from the dark wilderness of our souls.

This year’s Lenten theme:

…where you go I will go…
Ruth 1:16

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