Tag: nature

The Tree With Lights

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Sometimes there is nothing
absolutely nothing
to do but watch
and wait
and let the clock which breaks our days
let go its grasp
until the mind is able
to trust the storm
to bear up the weight of flesh and bone
to take on the time of breath
a rhythm of blood
a rhythm held
between two breaths
a bright cry
a last rasp
~Moya Cannon “Attention”

When her doctor took her bandages off and led her into the garden, the girl who was no longer blind saw “the tree with the lights in it.” It was for this tree I searched through the peach orchards of summer, in the forests of fall and down winter and spring for years. Then one day I was walking along Tinker Creek thinking of nothing at all and I saw the tree with the lights in it. I saw the backyard cedar where the mourning doves roost charged and transfigured, each cell buzzing with flame. I stood on the grass with the lights in it, grass that was wholly fire, utterly focused and utterly dreamed. It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance. The flood of fire abated, but I’m still spending the power. Gradually the lights went out in the cedar, the colors died, the cells unflamed and disappeared. I was still ringing. I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck. I have since only very rarely seen the tree with the lights in it. The vision comes and goes, mostly goes, but I live for it, for the moment when the mountains open and a new light roars in spate through the cracks, and the mountains slam.
~Annie Dillard, from “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek”

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 down 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?
~Mary Oliver from “The Summer Day”

I don’t know why, of all the trees that peppered this hill over 150 years ago, this one was spared.  Perhaps she was the tallest at the time, or the straightest, or just didn’t yield to the ax as the others did.

She has become the sentinel on our farm, a focal point:
the marker by which all else is measured.

She is aging – now some bare branches, though still heavy with cones – the constantly changing backdrop of clouds, color and light shift and swirl around her. Some days she knocks me breathless; I’m struck like Annie Dillard’s bell.

Visitors climb the hill to her first before seeing anything else on the farm, to witness for themselves the expanse that she surveys.  Her limbs oversee gatherings of early Easter morning worship, summer evening church services, winter sledding parties, and Fourth of July celebrations.

This one special fir tree stands alone, apart from the others, but is never lonely – not really.  She shares her top with the eagles and hawks and her shade with humans and other critters.

This is her home that she shares with us.
This is her one wild and precious life.

Even
After
All this time
The sun never says to the earth,

“You owe
Me.”

Look
What happens
With a love like that,
It lights the
Whole
Sky.
~Daniel Ladinsky, from “The Gift”

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A Joy To Simply Be…

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Each year, on the same date, the summer solstice comes.
Consummate light: we plan for it,
the day we tell ourselves
that time is very long indeed, nearly infinite.
And in our reading and writing, preference is given
to the celebratory, the ecstatic.

What follows the light is what precedes it:
the moment of balance, of dark equivalence.

But tonight we sit in the garden in our canvas chairs
so late into the evening –
why should we look either forward or backwards?
Why should we be forced to remember:
it is in our blood, this knowledge.
Shortness of the days; darkness, coldness of winter.
It is in our blood and bones; it is in our history.
It takes a genius to forget these things.
~Louise Glück from “Solstice”

When summer time has come, and all
The world is in the magic thrall
Of perfumed airs that lull each sense
To fits of drowsy indolence;

Just for the joy of being there
And drinking in the summer air,
The summer sounds, and summer sights,
That set a restless mind to rights
When grief and pain and raging doubt
Of men and creeds have worn it out;

O time of rapture! time of song!
How swiftly glide thy days along
Adown the current of the years,
Above the rocks of grief and tears!
‘Tis wealth enough of joy for me
In summer time to simply be.
~Paul Laurence Dunbar from “Summertime”

Any patch of sunlight in a wood will show you something about the sun which you could never get from reading books on astronomy.
These pure and spontaneous pleasures are ‘patches of Godlight’ in the woods of our experience.
~C.S. Lewis from Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer

On this solstice day, I am wavering in a balance
of light and shadow~
this knowledge of what’s to come next
rests deep in my bones.

I’ve been here before,
so grateful for the sun’s return.

I will not forget this gift of Light,
as darkness begins to claim the days again.

I remember,
He promised to never let darkness
overwhelm the world again.

I believe Him,
on this longest day,
and even more so,
in the midst of the longest night.

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A Speechless Receptacle

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I can write down words, like these, softly...
Give me a little time…
It doesn’t happen all of a sudden, you know.

…my heart panics not to be,
as I long to be,
the empty, waiting, pure, speechless receptacle.
~Mary Oliver from the title poem from “Blue Iris”

To plunge headlong into
the heart of a blossom, its amber eyes
inscrutably focusing on your own,
magnified by a lens of dew.
Whose scent, invisible,
drowns you in opulence, and for which
you can find nothing adequate to say.

You sense that you are loved wholly,
yet are quite unable to understand why.
But then, you lift your face,
creased with the ordinary, to a heaven
that is breaking into blue,
and find your contentment utterly beyond
telling, unspeakable, uncontained.
~Luci Shaw from “Speechless” from  Sea Glass

There are days we live
as if death were nowhere
in the background; from joy
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.
~Li-Young Lee, last stanza of “From Blossoms” from Rose.

To live as if
death were nowhere in the future,
instead, to bud, emerge, and blossom,
even when thirsting in the desert of discouragement –
Christ is here, waiting.
 
We are not dying,
but become alive in Him:
an amazing impossible flowering.

I peer inside each bloom as it opens,
needing a flotation device
and depth finder
as I’m likely to get lost,
sweeping and swooning
through the inner space
of life’s deep tunnels,
canyons and corners,
coming up for air before diving in again
to journey into exotic locales
draped in silken hues
~this heaven on a stem~
to immerse and emerge
in the possibilities
of God’s impossible blossom.

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A Yearning for Solace

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At once whatever happened starts receding.
—Philip Larkin

Last night I walked the woods
lit by the final moon of the month.

Days don’t count here
beneath the centuries-old pines

where my grandmother took her solace
on hard farm days, passing up

the washboard or jam-making
for the eternal whooshing

of the forest as much serenity
as yearning.
~Dave Malone “Walk in the Woods” from Tornado Drill

Over my seventy years, I’ve had the opportunity to walk through woods in different parts of the world –
from my childhood home near Puget Sound,
to the Bay Area in California,
from central Africa above Lake Tanganyika
to the forests of Northern Ireland
and the coastline of Vancouver Island.

Here on the farm, we have some dense woods that our grandson has designated “the haunted forest” because of its many downed trees from windstorms. He is convinced BigFoot lives somewhere in the dense underbrush, and he may well be right.

During a walk in the woods, no matter where it may be, I find solace in a world where there is teeming life thriving under the ground, at eye level, and overhead. I feel a palpable vibrance with each step I take, while experiencing sounds and smells I find nowhere else.

So, I too leave behind the work of the day – the laundry, the cleaning and cooking – if only for an hour or so. And once again, I sync my own heartbeat to the pulse of the mysterious life I find, ongoing and eternal, in the woods.

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Saved, Once Again

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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”

My first close encounter with a bumblebee was when I was five.
I was wearing my swimsuit, playing in the sprinkler in our backyard.
After running and leaping in the spray, I sat down on our porch step for a moment, unaware that is precisely where a wet bumblebee chose to dry off in the sun.

Both the bumblebee and my bum had a bit of a rumble.

I jumped up, tumbled off the step crying hard, while the bumblebee buzzed off, miffed.

I mumbled and grumbled sore for several days, my feelings about bees jumbled and my confidence crumbled.

Even now, decades later, whenever I see a bumblebee, I wonder if it is a distant descendant of my bumbling stumble. I am reminded of the consequences of not paying enough attention to what I say, where I stand, and particularly where I sit in this world that is easily offended and stings hard when squished and mad.

Some painful things are best never forgotten. I’m humbled by the memory of an indignant bumblebee, who, in a teachable moment over and over, saves my fumbling bum once again.

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Warmness of Clover Breath

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To enrich the earth I have sowed clover and grass
to grow and die. I have plowed in the seeds
of winter grains and of various legumes,
their growth to be plowed in to enrich the earth.
I have stirred into the ground the offal
and the decay of the growth of past seasons
and so mended the earth and made its yield increase.
All this serves the dark. I am slowly falling
into the fund of things. And yet to serve the earth,
not knowing what I serve, gives a wideness
and a delight to the air, and my days
do not wholly pass. It is the mind’s service,
for when the will fails so do the hands
and one lives at the expense of life.
After death, willing or not, the body serves,
entering the earth. And so what was heaviest
and most mute is at last raised up into song.
~Wendell Berry “Enriching the Earth” from Collected Poems

It was the face of spring, it was the face of summer,
it was the warmness of clover breath.
Pomegranate glowed in her lips, and the noon sky in her eyes.
And all of this, this breath-warmness and plum-tenderness
was held forever…
~Ray Bradbury from Dandelion Wine

To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,
One clover, and a bee,
And revery.
The revery alone will do,
If bees are few.
Emily Dickinson

Every autumn my father, an agriculture teacher by training, brought home gunny sacks of grass seed from the feed and seed store.  He would start up his 1954 Farmall Cub tractor, proceed to disc and harrow an acre of bare ground in our field, and then fill the seeder, distributing seed on the soil for his annual agronomy cover crop over winter growing experiment.  The little sprouts would wait to appear in the warming spring weather, an initial green haziness spread over the brown dirt, almost like damp green mold.  Within days they would form a plush and inviting velveteen green cushion, substantial enough for a little wiggle of blades in the breezes.  A few weeks later the cover would be a full fledged head of waving green hair, the wind blowing it wantonly, bending the stems to its will.  It was botanical pasture magic, renewable and marvelous,  only to be mowed and stubble turned over with the plow back into the soil as nutrition for the summer planting to come.  It was the sacrificial nature of cover crops to be briefly beautiful on top of the ground, but the foundational nurture once underground.

One spring the expected grassy carpet growth didn’t look quite the same after germination–the sprouts were little round leaves, not sharp edged blades.  Instead of identical uniform upright stems, the field was producing curly chaotic ovoid and spherical shapes and sizes. Clover didn’t abide by the same rules as grasses.  It had a mind of its own with a burgeoning and bumpy napped surface that didn’t bend with breezes, all its effort invested instead in producing blossoms.

A hint of pink one morning was so subtle it was almost hallucinatory.  Within a day it was unmistakeably reddening and real.  Within a week the green sea flowed with bobbing crimson heads. We had never seen such vibrancy spring from our soil before.  It exuded scented clover breath, the fragrance calling honey bees far and near.  True reverie.

The field of crimson dreams and sated honey bees lasted several weeks before my father headed back out on the Farmall to turn it under with the plow, burying the fading blossoms into the ground.  Their sacrifice bled red into the soil, their fragrant breath halted, their memory barely recognizable in the next summer crop germination.   Yet the crimson heads were there, feeding the growth of the next generation, deepening the green as it reached to the sun.

Such a sweet thing, alive a thousand summers hence in the soil.

What a beautiful feeling.

Crimson and clover, over and over.

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Now I Know…

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We don’t have time to look at one another.
I didn’t realize.
All that was going on in life and we never noticed.
Oh, earth, you’re too wonderful for anybody to realize you. 
Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?
– every, every minute? 
~Thornton Wilder, from Emily’s monologue in Our Town

An awful lot of sorrow has sort of quieted down up here.
People just wild with grief have brought their relatives up this hill. We all know how it is.
And then time…and rainy days…and sunny days..n’ snow…
We’re all glad they’re in a beautiful place
and we are coming up here ourselves when our fit’s over.
~Thornton Wilder from “Our Town”

“Choose the least important day in your life. It will be important enough.”   —  Mrs. Gibbs to Emily in Our Town
We are ages away
from our high school class
where first we walked
the streets of Grover’s Corners
and have lived decades and
decades of important days
writing our own scenes
along the way. In this theater
we meet again the lives of people
as ordinary and extraordinary
as we are and find ourselves
smiling and weeping watching
a play we first encountered as teens.
In our 70’s Our Town brings us joy
and also breaks our hearts.
Now we know.
~Edwin Romond “Seeing “Our Town” in Our 70’s”

Last night, we watched the play “Our Town” by Thornton Wilder acted out by high schoolers under our son Nate’s direction. As it always does, this play hits me in my core: my mother also directed Our Town as a speech and drama teacher in a small town high school in Eastern Washington during WWII, while my dad was fighting in the South Pacific. Mom loved the play so much, she named me after one of the main characters. Nate didn’t know about that family connection when he chose it for his American Literature class production.

Watching “Our Town” at the beginning of my eighth decade is different than when I was in high school reciting Emily’s monologue in the graveyard. It is especially poignant this week after the 80th anniversary of D-Day, with only a few surviving liberators in attendance.

When our time gets short, we must realize life while we live it, every every minute, ordinary as they seem.

Wilder’s Pulitizer Prize winning words from “Our Town” still ring as true now as in 1938:
then, our country was crushed under the Great Depression,
now, our country staggers under a Great Depression of the spirit.
Though more economically secure, we are emotionally and morally bankrupt.

Even living through the most routine and unimportant days, may we always be conscious of our many treasures and abundance, striving to care for others in need.

So I search the soil of my life, this farm, this faith
to find what yearns to grow, to bloom, to fruit, in order
to be harvested to share with others.

I my so grateful for the tie that binds me to each of you who visit here, hoping what I share makes a difference in your ordinary, but precious, day.

Now I know…

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Licked Clean of Fog

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At first she sees the fog as a shroud
settling over the fields of beans, but
she does not wish to start this day
with such a word. She could say the fog
is like muslin stretched over the mouth
of a jelly jar, or it could be like
the birth caul covering a newborn calf
before its mother licks it clean.
It could be like the clouds
in the calico’s old eyes—
no, not that. Let it be the caul.
The bean fields, like a baby calf,
are born again this morning,
and the sun will lick them clean.
~Lonnie Hull DuPont, “At first she sees the fog…” from She Calls the Moon by Its Name

This is an interesting comparison of the “bags” we find ourselves in at the very beginning and ending of life.

Evening fog often acts like a shroud, cloudy, murky and blinding. It muffles sound and stifles light and feels like walking in a gray sponge that sucks our breath and life.

On the other hand, morning fog appears on the wane, fading away while torn apart by the rising sun’s rays and warmth. It is discarded as it dissipates. The world emerges fresh, its surface clean and drying.

I would rather strive to break free of a covering caul than immobilized in a smothering shroud. Each morning, I am born into a fresh start with new and clearer vision.

I too have been licked clean.

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Despite the Mess

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More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out
of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor’s
almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving
their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate
sky of Spring rains, it’s the greening of the trees
that really gets to me. When all the shock of white
and taffy, the world’s baubles and trinkets, leave
the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath,
the leaves come. Patient, plodding, a green skin
growing over whatever winter did to us, a return
to the strange idea of continuous living despite
the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then,
I’ll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf
unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I’ll take it all.
~Ada Limón “Instructions on Not Giving Up”

It wasn’t until I paused under the huge silver maple tree in front of our house that I began to notice not the blossoms, but the way the leaves were unfurling. How suddenly a tree transformed back into a tree, with all its good green leaves. It felt like a lesson in resilience. The tree wasn’t giving up. The tree was just going to keep doing its tree thing. Noticing those leaves felt like the first moment of breath I’d had all winter. Under that tree, the line “it’s the greening of the trees that really gets to me” came to me.
~Ada Limón writing about how “Instructions on Not Giving Up” came to her

I watch daily as our farm’s trees reawaken in the spring. Some, like the maples and chestnuts turn green in April. The walnuts stay naked well into May, quite bohemian compared to their glossy green neighbors.

New growth is always an encouragement to me, especially after a brutally cold winter when branches have broken off in the snows or a tree has toppled over in exhaustion from resisting the winter wind.

As leaves swell and begin to unwrap in the spring sun, trees are feeling what I feel: the need for fresh air and renewal, absorbing the warmth of the sun while new nutrients surge in my sap.

Most trees find it is easy being green, as that is who they are and that is who I am. Some are colorful show-offs, putting me to shame for my plainness. They bloom their hearts out with the joy of living yet another spring, exuberant and wild, and oh so messy.

The trees’ resilience captures my heart. Dogwood and crabapple petals follow us inside the house stuck to our shoes, left scattered here and there on the floor. Perhaps they think they can remain bright and beautiful inside a different wooden home. I sweep them up to put them back outside on the ground where they, like I will someday, become part of the soil once again.

Exuberant in my messy plainness.

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There is a tree beyond this world
In it’s ancient roots this song is curled
I am the fool whose life’s been spent
Between what’s said and what is meant
~Carrie Newcomer

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A Delicious Drizzle

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I was enjoying everything: the rain, the path
wherever it was taking me, the earth roots
beginning to stir.
I didn’t intend to start thinking about God,
it just happened.
How God, or the gods, are invisible,
quite understandable
But holiness is visible, entirely.
It’s wonderful to walk along like that,
thought not the usual intention to reach an
answer
but merely drifting.
Like clouds that only seem weightless.
but of course are not.
Are really important.
I mean, terribly important.
Not decoration by any means.
By next week the violets will be blooming.

Anyway, this was my delicious walk in the rain.
What was it actually about?

Think about what it is that music is trying to say.
It was something like that.
~Mary Oliver “Drifting” from Blue Horses

Wet things smell stronger,
and I suppose his main regret is that
he can sniff just one at a time.
In a frenzy of delight
he runs way up the sandy road—
scored by freshets after five days
of rain. Every pebble gleams, every leaf.

When I whistle he halts abruptly
and steps in a circle,
swings his extravagant tail.
Then he rolls and rubs his muzzle
in a particular place, while the drizzle
falls without cease, and Queen Anne’s lace
and Goldenrod bend low.

The top of the logging road stands open
and light. Another day, before
hunting starts, we’ll see how far it goes,
leaving word first at home.
The footing is ambiguous.

Soaked and muddy, the dog drops,
panting, and looks up with what amounts
to a grin. It’s so good to be uphill with him,
nicely winded, and looking down on the pond.

A sound commences in my left ear
like the sound of the sea in a shell;
a downward, vertiginous drag comes with it.
Time to head home. I wait
until we’re nearly out to the main road
to put him back on the leash, and he
—the designated optimist—
imagines to the end that he is free.
~Jane Kenyon “After an Illness, Walking the Dog”

This morning’s drizzly walk
and every surface is baptized
with gentle, loving sprinkles from God.
It reminds us how visible is our holiness;
His covering grace makes us free.

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