Tag: noticing

Our Foot in the Door

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Overnight, very
Whitely, discreetly
Very quietly

Our toes, our noses
Take hold on the loam
Acquire the air

Nobody sees us
Stops us, betrays us
The small grains make room

Soft fists insist on
Heaving the needles
The leafy bedding

Even the paving.
Our hammers, our rams,
Earless and eyeless,

Perfectly voiceless,
Widen the crannies,
Shoulder through holes. We

Diet on water,
On crumbs of shadow,
Bland-mannered, asking

Little or nothing.
So many of us!
So many of us!

We are shelves, we are
Tables, we are meek,
We are edible,

Nudgers and shovers
In spite of ourselves
Our kind multiplies

We shall by morning
Inherit the earth. 
Our foot’s in the door.
~Sylvia Plath from “Mushroom”

This overnight overture into the light,
the birthing of toadstools after a shower.
As if seed had been sprinkled on the compost pile,
they sprout three inch stalks
as they stretch up at dawn,
topped by dew-catching caps and umbrellas.

Some translucent as glass,
already curling at the edges in the morning light,
by noon melting into ooze
by evening, a complete deliquescence,
withered and curling back
into the humus
which birthed them hours before.

It shall be repeated
again and again,
this birth from unworthy soil,
this brief and shining life in the sun,
this folding, curling and collapse
to die back to dust and dung.

Most inedible and dangerous,
yet they rise beautiful
and worthy,
as is the way of things
that never give up
once a foot’s in the door.

Each Thing Noticed

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The Old Testament book of Micah answers the question
of why we are here with another:
“What doth the Lord require of thee but to do justly,
and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?”
We are here to abet creation and to witness it,
to notice each thing so each thing gets noticed.
Together we notice not only each mountain shadow
and each stone on the beach
but we notice each other’s beautiful face
and complex nature so that creation need not play
to an empty house.
~Annie Dillard from Life Magazine’s “The Meaning of Life”

I started out a noticer,
a child who crawled on the ground
to follow winding ant trails from their hills,
then watched nests bloom with birds,
sitting still as a lizard sunning himself on a rock.

Next I was a student researcher of great apes,
following wild chimpanzees deep into an exotic forest
to observe their life in a community so much like our own.

Then came a profession and parenting and daughtering,
with mounting responsibilities and worries and cares,
and I stopped noticing any more,
too much inside the drama
to witness it from outside.

Creation played to an empty house
and the empty house was me.

Slowly now,
I’ve returned to noticing again~
buying my ticket, finding my seat,
smiling and nodding
applauding
hooting and hollering
begging for an encore.

It’s a non-stop show of the miraculous
where I’m an appreciative audience
preparing to write a great review.

Something Changed in the Night

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You wake wanting the dream
you left behind in sleep,
water washing through everything,
clearing away sediment
of years, uncovering the lost
and forgotten. You hear the sun
breaking on cold grass,
on eaves, on stone steps
outside. You see light
igniting sparks of dust
in the air. You feel for the first
time in years the world
electrified with morning.

You know something has changed
in the night, something you thought
gone from the world has come back:
shooting stars in the pasture,
sleeping beneath a field
of daisies, wisteria climbing
over fences, houses, trees.

This is a place that smells
like childhood and old age.
It is a limb you swung from,
a field you go back to.
It is a part of whatever you do.
~Scott Owen “Arrival of the Past”

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean –
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up
and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and
complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly
washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
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 “A Summer Day”

Because something changed in the night,
so have I ~

I come to kneel in the field,
look at the world from the point of view of the grasshopper,
uncover what I may have lost or forgotten
in the midst of years of striving:

a chance to witness what I missed.

Holding Your Heart

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The main thing is this–
when you get up in the morning
you must take your heart in your two hands.
You must do this every morning.
Then talk softly to your heart, don’t yell.
Say anything but be respectful.
Say–maybe say, Heart, little heart,
beat softly but never forget your job, the blood.
You can whisper also, Remember, remember.
~Grace Paley from “The Art of Growing Older” in  Just As I Thought

Approaching seventy, she learns to live,
at last. She realizes she has not
accomplished half of what she struggled for,
that she surrendered too many battles
and seldom celebrated those she won.
Approaching seventy, she learns to live
without ambition: a calm lake face, not
a train bound for success and glory. For
the first time, she relaxes her hands on the
controls, leans back to watch the coming end.
Asked, she’d tell you her life is made out of
the things she didn’t do, as much as the
things she did do. Did she sing a love song?
Approaching seventy, she learns to live
without wanting much more than the light in
the catbird window seat where, watching the
voracious fist-sized tweets, she hums along.
~Marilyn Nelson “Bird Feeder”

I’m learning to let go by relaxing my grip on the controls on the runaway train of ambition. This is a change for someone driven for decades to succeed in various professional and personal roles.

I’m aware who I am is defined by what I haven’t gotten done and what I managed to do. And now, nearing seventy, I have some time to explore some of those things I left undone.

Reflecting the calm I feel.
Holding my heart gently.
Humming as I go.
Just sitting when I wish to.
Watching out the window.
Loving up those around me.

It’s sweet to remember why I’m here.

Why Not Stop and Do Nothing For A While

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You see them on porches and on lawns
down by the lakeside,
usually arranged in pairs implying a couple

who might sit there and look out
at the water or the big shade trees.
The trouble is you never see anyone

sitting in these forlorn chairs
though at one time it must have seemed
a good place to stop and do nothing for a while.

Sometimes there is a little table
between the chairs where no one
is resting a glass or placing a book facedown.

It may not be any of my business,
but let us suppose one day
that everyone who placed those vacant chairs

on a veranda or a dock sat down in them
if only for the sake of remembering
what it was they thought deserved

to be viewed from two chairs,
side by side with a table in between.
The clouds are high and massive on that day.

The woman looks up from her book.
The man takes a sip of his drink.
Then there is only the sound of their looking,

the lapping of lake water, and a call of one bird
then another, cries of joy or warning—
it passes the time to wonder which.
~Billy Collins “The Chairs That No One Sits In”  from Aimless Love

I don’t take enough time
to do nothing.

I think about doing nothing all the time
but then I do nothing about it.

Too many lonely benches on porches
so many empty chairs
too many vistas unnoticed
so many birds singing with no one listening

all deserve an appreciative audience,
someone who is simply there to see and hear and be.

Perhaps today.
Possibly today.
Maybe, just maybe,
today.

The Secret of Life

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Two girls discover   
the secret of life   
in a sudden line of   
poetry.

I who don’t know the   
secret wrote   
the line. They   
told me

(through a third person)   
they had found it
but not what it was   
not even

what line it was. No doubt   
by now, more than a week   
later, they have forgotten   
the secret,

the line, the name of   
the poem. I love them   
for finding what   
I can’t find,

and for loving me   
for the line I wrote,   
and for forgetting it   
so that

a thousand times, till death   
finds them, they may   
discover it again, in other   
lines

in other   
happenings. And for   
wanting to know it,   
for

assuming there is   
such a secret, yes,   
for that   
most of all.
~Denise Levertov “The Secret”

The secret of seeing is, then the pearl of great price.
If I thought he could teach me to find it and keep it forever
I would stagger barefoot across a hundred deserts after any lunatic at all.
But although the pearl may be found, it may not be sought.

The literature of illumination reveals this above all:
although it comes to those who wait for it,
it is always, even to the most practiced and adept,
a gift and a total surprise.

I return from one walk
knowing where the killdeer nests in the field by the creek and the hour the laurel blooms.
I return from the same walk a day later scarcely knowing my own name.

Litanies hum in my ears;
my tongue flaps in my mouth.
Ailinon, alleluia!
~Annie Dillard from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Is a lamp brought in to be put under a basket, or under a bed, and not on a stand?  
For nothing is hidden except to be made manifest;
nor is anything secret except to come to light…
Mark 4: 21-22

We all want to know it: learning the elusive secret that would resolve the mystery of our existence. Why are we here at all and for what purpose do we live and breathe?

Some are untroubled by not knowing. They live out each day one step at a time, not looking back and not too worried about what is coming up around the bend while others are always looking for meaning, evaluating the significance of each moment.

Some of us seek middle ground. I am eager to have life’s mysteries cleared up, but content to give the unknown the time it demands. Each day I search for something that asks for my complete attention, whether a line of poetry or a slant of light in the sky, or my grandchild’s arms around my neck. That is enough for me to settle in with gratitude for simply being here. And it feels right to share what I see and read and hear and experience.

So here is one person’s secret of life: don’t give up the search and share what you find along the way…

Fixing Eyes on the Unseen: A Most Important Day

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“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”

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

He has made everything beautiful in its time. Also, he has put eternity into man’s heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end. 12 I perceived that there is nothing better for them than to be joyful and to do good as long as they live; 13 also that everyone should eat and drink and take pleasure in all his toil—this is God’s gift to man. 14 I perceived that whatever God does endures forever; nothing can be added to it, nor anything taken from it.
Ecclesiastes 3: 11-14


One of our very special friends from church got married today to a high school classmate she knew over sixty-some years ago. Both had recently lost spouses and found their way to each other to join together for the rest of their days. Today became a most important day in their lives, a day they could not have imagined as teenagers so long ago.

The post-ceremony reception was joyous, full of other high school classmates who recognized how extraordinary it was for two lives to come full circle after all the ordinary “least important” days of high school. Observing this tight-knit community celebrating together reminds me of Grover’s Corners of Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town” where even those in the cemetery under the ground continue to engage in conversation and commentary about their family and friends, sometimes wistful, sometimes full of regrets.

There is so much we miss while we are living out our ordinary days because our capacity for seeing what is truly important is so limited – if we paid attention to it all, we would be overwhelmed and exhausted.

Yet God’s unlimited vision has a plan for each of us, even if we cannot see it in the moment – His divine gift to us, right from our very beginning, until the moment we take our last breath.

This year’s Barnstorming Lenten theme is taken from 2 Corinthians 4: 18:
So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.

An Unexpected January Light

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Today is one of those excellent January partly cloudies
in which light chooses an unexpected part of the landscape
to trick out in gilt, and then the shadow sweeps it away.
You know you’re alive.
You take huge steps,
trying to feel the planet’s roundness arc between your feet.
~Annie Dillard from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

It was like a church to me.
I entered it on soft foot,
Breath held like a cap in the hand.
It was quiet.
What God there was made himself felt,
Not listened to, in clean colours
That brought a moistening of the eye,
In a movement of the wind over grass.

There were no prayers said. But stillness
Of the heart’s passions – that was praise
Enough; and the mind’s cession
Of its kingdom. I walked on,
Simple and poor, while the air crumbled
And broke on me generously as bread.
~R.S. Thomas “The Moor”

After years of rarely paying attention,
too busy with whatever household,
work-place, or barnyard task needed doing,
I realized there are only a finite number
of sunrises and sunsets left to me.

Now I stop, take a deep breath,
sense the earth’s roundness
and feel lucky to be alive,
a witness to a moment of manna
falling from the sky.

Sometimes it is as plain and gray
as I am, but at times,
a fire is lit from above and beneath,
igniting the sky, overwhelming me.

I am swept away by light and shadow,
transfixed and transformed,
forever grateful to be fed
by heavenly bread broken over my head.

An Eternal Ultimate Eye

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Silence and darkness grow apace, broken only by the crack of a hunter’s gun in the woods.  Songbirds abandon us so gradually that, until the day when we hear no birdsong at all but the scolding of the jay, we haven’t fully realized that we are bereft — as after a death.  Even the sun has gone off somewhere…

Now we all come in, having put the garden to bed, and we wait for winter to pull a chilly sheet over its head.  
~Jane Kenyon from “Season of Change and Loss” in Winter: A Spiritual Biography

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”

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 stayed in the marshes through the winter, or possibly a Canadian goose or a deer to bring home for the freezer.   The usual day-long serenade of birdsong is replaced by shotguns popping, hawks and eagle screams and chittering from the treetops, the occasional dog barking, woodpeckers hammering at tree bark with the bluejays 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. Our horses, confined to their stalls in the barns, snort and blow as they bury their noses in flakes of summer-bound hay.

But there are no longer birdsong arias; I’m left bereft of their blending musical tapestry that wakes me at 4 AM in the spring.

And no peeper orchestra tuning up in the swamps in the evenings, rising and falling on the breeze.

It is way too quiet – clearly a time of bereavement. The chilly silence of the 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 of spring — the return of birds and frogs tuning their throats, preparing their symphony.

Oh, give me the grace to see and hear the Bird in the Tree with an eternal ultimate eye and ear.

Like a bird on a tree
I’m just sitting here
I get time
It’s clear to see
From up here
The world seems small
We can seat together
It’s so beautiful
You and me
We meant to be
In the great outdoors
Forever free
Sometimes you need to go
And take a step back
To see the truth around you
From a distance you can tell
You and me
We meant to be
In the great outdoors
Forever free
~Eldar Kedem

Between the March and April line—
That magical frontier
Beyond which summer hesitates,
Almost too heavenly near.
The saddest noise, the sweetest noise,
The maddest noise that grows and grows,—
The birds, they make it in the spring,
At night’s delicious close.
The saddest noise I know.
It makes us think of all the dead
That sauntered with us here,
By separation’s sorcery
Made cruelly more dear.
It makes us think of what we had,
And what we now deplore.
We almost wish those siren throats
Would go and sing no more.
An ear can break a human heart
As quickly as a spear,
We wish the ear had not a heart
So dangerously near.
~Lyrics adapted from an Emily Dickinson poem

Something to Behold

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Sometimes I just sit like this at the window and watch
the darkness come. If I’m smart, I’ll put on Bach.

I’m thinking now of how far it always seems there is to go.
Maybe it is too easy that I speak so often

of late last light on a December day,
of that stubborn grass that somehow still remains green

behind the broken chain link fence on the corner.
But the need is so great for the way light looks

as it takes its leave of us. We say
what we can to each other of these things,

we who are such thieves, stealing first
one breath and then the next. Bach, keep going

just this slowly, show me the way to believe
that what matters in this world has already happened

and will go on happening forever.
The way light falls on the last

of the stricken leaves of the copper beech
at the end of the block is something to behold.
~Jim Moore “The Need Is So Great”

No matter
No matter what happens between the sunrise and the sunset
No matter what happens between the sunset and the sunrise
It is something to behold.

To witness the return of light:
the rise and the set
the set and the rise

it keeps coming and going
through troubles
and sickness
joy and heartbreak
birth and death
loss and gain
it keeps coming and going
something to behold

the earth continues
to turn
to grant
a new start
a new day
something to behold

then settles
serenely
a quiet night
a respite from light

which matters so much
more than anything in between
so much more to behold
so much
so