Tag: ordinary

A World Upside Down

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Obscurely yet most surely called to praise,
As sometimes summer calls us all, I said
The hills are heavens full of branching ways
Where star-nosed moles fly overhead the dead;
I said the trees are mines in air, I said
See how the sparrow burrows in the sky!
And then I wondered why this mad instead
Perverts our praise to uncreation, why
Such savour’s in this wrenching things awry.
Does sense so stale that it must needs derange
The world to know it? To a praiseful eye
Should it not be enough of fresh and strange
That trees grow green, and moles can course
in clay,
And sparrows sweep the ceiling of our day?
~Richard Wilbur “Praise in Summer”

It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun; and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we. 
~G.K.Chesterton from Orthodoxy

I need no help to imagine this world feels upside down much of the time. When I read the headlines, I have difficulty understanding how anything makes any sense anymore.

Creation inversed: the birds somehow soar through the earth beneath us and the moles and mushrooms are populating the clouds. Instead of stars in the sky, there are innumerable molehills gracing the hillside. We are all mixed up in our perspective, turning creation on its head.

Thank goodness and thank God that everything is put back where it belongs when we are in sore need of reorientation. When we forget our purpose in creation, He reminds us by restoring predictable order and rhythms. When we destroy, He heals and protects. When we get bored with how things are – desperate for innovation and excitement in our attempt to turn the world upside down – He demonstrates contentment with how things were created, and turns it back to right again.

There is enough to keep us busy in this world: crazy weather, global pandemics, volcanic eruptions and quaking ground. We don’t need to complicate an already complicated creation with our designed messes.

We’re meant to admire the birds’ soaring in the skies and appreciate that grubs and gophers course through the soil beneath us. We can praise the sun as it rises each morning and the moon’s varied journey at night – so predictable and reliable and meant to be that way from the very beginning.

Keep it going, God. Do it again.

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Transfiguring the Trivial

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A sudden light transfigures a trivial thing,
a weather-vane, a wind-mill, a winnowing flail,
the dust in the barn door; a moment,- –
and the thing has vanished, because it was pure effect;
but it leaves a relish behind it,
a longing that the accident may happen again.
~Walter Pater from “The Renaissance”

Man Scything Hay by Todd Reifers
dust motes and insects in the barn

Summer ends now; now, barbarous in beauty, the stooks rise
Around; up above, what wind-walks! what lovely behaviour
Of silk-sack clouds! has wilder, wilful-wavier
Meal-drift moulded ever and melted across skies?

I walk, I lift up, I lift up heart, eyes,
Down all that glory in the heavens to glean our Saviour;
And eyes, heart, what looks, what lips yet give you a
Rapturous love’s greeting of realer, of rounder replies?

And the azurous hung hills are his world-wielding shoulder
Majestic – as a stallion stalwart, very-violet-sweet! –
These things, these things were here and but the beholder
Wanting; which two when they once meet,
The heart rears wings bold and bolder
And hurls for him, O half hurls earth for him off under his feet.
~Gerard Manley Hopkins “Hurrahing in Harvest”

The accident of light does happen,
again and again,
but when I least expect it. 

I need to be ready for it; in a blink, it can be gone. 

Yet in that moment,
everything is changed and transformed forever. 

The thing itself,
trivial and transient becomes something other, 
merely because of how it is illuminated. 

And so am I, trivial and transient,
lit from outside myself, winnowed and
transfigured by a love and sacrifice
that I can never deserve.

It was and is no accident.

My heart is readies for earth to be hurled to heaven’s Light.

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I Love Color

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I love color.
I love flaming reds,
And vivid greens,
And royal flaunting purples.
I love the startled rose of the sun at dawning,
And the blazing orange of it at twilight.

I love color.
I love the drowsy blue of the fringed gentian,
And the yellow of the goldenrod,
And the rich russet of the leaves
That turn at autumn-time….
I love rainbows,
And prisms,
And the tinsel glitter
Of every shop-window.

I love color.
And yet today,
I saw a brown little bird
Perched on the dull-gray fence
Of a weed-filled city yard.
And as I watched him
The little bird
Threw back his head
Defiantly, almost,
And sang a song
That was full of gay ripples,
And poignant sweetness,
And half-hidden melody.

I love color….
I love crimson, and azure,
And the glowing purity of white.
And yet today,
I saw a living bit of brown,
A vague oasis on a streak of gray,
That brought heaven
Very near to me.
~Margaret E. Sangster “Colors”

photo by Harry Rodenberger

My eye always seeks out color
because there is so much gray as background and foreground.

My ear listens for the singing of sweet melodies
in the midst of mourning and sorrow.

My heart longs for hints of heaven in the daily ordinary
because this sad world wants to believe in the promises.

photo by Harry Rodenberger
Andrew Wyeth – Wind from the Sea, 1947
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To God and to the Lamb: We Would See Him

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The sacred moments,
the moments of miracle,
are often the everyday moments,
the moments which,
if we do not look with more than our eyes or listen with more than our ears reveal only…
a gardener,
a stranger coming down the road behind us,
a meal like any other meal.
But if we look with our hearts,
if we listen with all our being and imagination..
what we may see is Jesus himself.
~Frederick Buechner from The Magnificent Defeat

Farmer with a pitchfork by Winslow Homer

We can be blinded by the everyday-ness of it:
A simple loaf of bread is a meal we take for granted.
A gardener looks up and smiles as he hoes a row of weeds,
trying to restore order in chaos.
A wanderer along the road catches up to engage in conversation.

Every day contains millions of everyday moments lost and forgotten, seemingly meaningless.

Perhaps we would see Jesus if only we opened our eyes
and listened with our ears.
At the table, on the road, in the garden at sunrise.

With the new vision we have been given, we discover:
there is nothing everyday about the miracle of Him abiding with us –
always in plain sight.

“Sir,” they said, “we would like to see Jesus.”
John 12: 21

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

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What I’m Looking For

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For some reason we like to see days pass,
even though most of us claim we don’t want to reach our last one for a long time.

We examine each day before us with barely a glance and say,
no, this isn’t one I’ve been looking for,
and wait in a bored sort of way for the next,
when we are convinced,
our lives will start for real.

Meanwhile, this day is going by perfectly well-adjusted,
as some days are,
with the right amounts of sunlight and shade,
and a light breeze scented with a perfume made
from the mixture of fallen apples,
corn stubble, dry oak leaves,
and the faint odor of last night’s meandering skunk.
~Tom Hennen from “The Life of a Day”

I am ashamed to admit I squander time shamelessly,
waiting for that particularly special day I always dreamed of,
tossing off these mundane but precious hours
as somehow not measuring up nor exciting enough.

The shock is:
there have been over thirty-five years
of such days on this farm,
one passing by after another,
emerging fresh each morning from the duff and stuff of life,
and wouldn’t you know…
every single one has ended up being exactly what I’m looking for.


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Lapsed Ordinary

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Had I not been awake I would have missed it,
A wind that rose and whirled until the roof
Pattered with quick leaves off the sycamore

And got me up, the whole of me a-patter,
Alive and ticking like an electric fence:
Had I not been awake I would have missed it

It came and went too unexpectedly
And almost it seemed dangerously,
Hurtling like an animal at the house,

A courier blast that there and then
Lapsed ordinary. But not ever
Afterwards. And not now.
~Seamus Heaney  “Had I Not Been Awake”

October is the month of the sudden warm wind-blow, usually arriving from the south, intent on scattering leaves and slamming doors on its way past to head north to Canada. Our wind chimes outside clang a cacophony rather than the usual gentle harmonic tones. The window shades become percussion instruments over our still-open windows. Anything not fastened down goes airborne.

The air blows in a rush from somewhere else, bringing new smells and sensations, surging with an electric energy even as it tries to pull power lines down to render us powerless.

Nothing feels ordinary in a windstorm; there is no easy sleep.

And just as suddenly, the autumn storm passes and is gone. The trees have been stripped, embarrassed at their sudden nakedness. Branches litter the yard and driveway like so many toothpicks. My illusion of comfort and control has been undone by such a show of force and power.

I face my own frailty in the wake of life’s storms.
Had I not been awake, I might have missed that altogether.

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An Ordinary Night

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What scene would I want to be enveloped in
more than this one,
an ordinary night at the kitchen table,
floral wallpaper pressing in,
white cabinets full of glass,
the telephone silent,
a pen tilted back in my hand?

It gives me time to think
about all that is going on outside–
leaves gathering in corners,
lichen greening the high grey rocks,
while over the dunes the world sails on,
huge, ocean-going, history bubbling in its wake.

But beyond this table
there is nothing that I need,
not even a job that would allow me to row to work,
or a coffee-colored Aston Martin DB4
with cracked green leather seats.

No, it’s all here,
the clear ovals of a glass of water,
a small crate of oranges, a book on Stalin,
not to mention the odd snarling fish
in a frame on the wall,
and the way these three candles–
each a different height–
are singing in perfect harmony.

So forgive me
if I lower my head now and listen
to the short bass candle as he takes a solo
while my heart
thrums under my shirt–
frog at the edge of a pond–
and my thoughts fly off to a province
made of one enormous sky
and about a million empty branches.
~Billy Collins “I Ask You”

I want to make poems while thinking of
the bread of heaven and the
cup of astonishment; let them be
songs in which nothing is neglected…
~Mary Oliver  from “Everything”

Some days, my search for new words and images runs dry, especially in mid-winter when a chill wind is blowing and inhospitable. I seek indoor comfort more than inspiration. I am content sitting in a warm kitchen with other’s words running through my ears and over my tongue.

I feel kinship with the amaryllis bulb that has been on my kitchen table for the past month, as it enjoys the warmth in its soil pot and occasional drink of water. It started out as such a plain-looking bulb, so dry, so underwhelming in every respect. Once the stem started emerging from its plain-jane cocoon, I watched it grow taller each day. Last week it burst open, wearing its heart on its sleeve, comically cheerful at this drab time of year. I appreciate its effort at bringing summer right into my kitchen and my heart; I get a bit drab and cranky myself without the reminder that winter is not forever.

So I allow myself to drink deeply from a cup of astonishment, even on an ordinary night in an ordinary kitchen on an ordinary very cold end-of-January evening.

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Dawn on our Darkness: It Might Have Been Otherwise

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I got out of bed
on two strong legs.
It might have been
otherwise. I ate
cereal, sweet
milk, ripe, flawless
peach. It might
have been otherwise.
I took the dog uphill
to the birch wood.
All morning I did
the work I love.
At noon I lay down
with my mate. It might
have been otherwise.
We ate dinner together
at a table with silver
candlesticks. It might
have been otherwise.
I slept in a bed
in a room with paintings
on the walls, and
planned another day
just like this day.
But one day, I know,
it will be otherwise.
~Jane Kenyon “Otherwise”

I watched her cooking, from my chair.
She pressed her lips
Together, reached for kitchenware,
And tasted sauce from her fingertips.

“It’s ready now. Come on,” she said.
“You light the candle.”
We ate, and talked, and went to bed,
And slept. It was a miracle.
~Donald Hall from “Summer Kitchen” in The Selected Poems of Donald Hall.

I tend to get complacent in my daily routines, confident in the knowledge that tomorrow will be very much like yesterday. The distinct blessings of an ordinary day are lost in the rush of moving forward to whatever comes next so that I lose touch with what miracles are happening in the here and now.

The reality is there is nothing ordinary about the events of this day or any other –
it might have been otherwise and some day it will be otherwise.

Advent is an opportunity to stop the rushing, take a look around and actually revel in the quiet moments of daily work, chats, walks, meals, and sleep. Even the current constant of someone in the family being sick with one or more viruses, interrupting plans and schedules, can’t interrupt how remarkable it is to just be here together.

We are granted peace despite the stress of illness.

Jane Kenyon wrote much of her best poetry with the knowledge she was dying of leukemia. Her work reminds me that I don’t need a terminal diagnosis to appreciate the blessings of each ordinary moment. Her poet husband, Donald Hall, wrote verse from his perspective of cherishing the time he had left with his wife, living as if each day were his last day with her.

Like Jane’s “paintings on the walls,” on foggy gray days like today, I can gaze at our landscape paintings by local artist Randy Van Beek depicting an idealized serenity that I only sometimes feel. They depict the blessings just outside my windows.

I simply need to pay attention.

Christ came to earth to remind us to dwell richly in the experience of these moments, those sweet peaches and cream of daily life, while they are happening. God knows, the little miracles are a foretaste of the heaven which is to come.

This year’s Advent theme “Dawn on our Darkness” is taken from this 19th century Christmas hymn:

Brightest and best of the sons of the morning,
dawn on our darkness and lend us your aid.
Star of the east, the horizon adorning,
guide where our infant Redeemer is laid.
~Reginald Heber -from “Brightest and Best”

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Dawn on our Darkness: Heaven in Ordinary

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Prayer the church’s banquet, angel’s age,
God’s breath in man returning to his birth,
The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage,
The Christian plummet sounding heav’n and earth
Engine against th’ Almighty, sinner’s tow’r,
Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear,
The six-days world transposing in an hour,
A kind of tune, which all things hear and fear;
Softness, and peace, and joy, and love, and bliss,
Exalted manna, gladness of the best,
Heaven in ordinary, man well drest,
The milky way, the bird of Paradise,
Church-bells beyond the stars heard, the soul’s blood,
The land of spices; something understood.
~George Herbert “Prayer”

A kind of tune, a music everywhere
And nowhere. Love’s long lovely undersong,
A trace in time, a grace-note in the air,
Borne to us from the place where we belong
On every passing breeze and in the breath
Of every creature. All things hear and fear,
For faintly, through our fall, we too may hear
The strong song of the Son that undoes death.

And one day we will hear it unimpaired:
The joy of all the sorrowful, the song
Of all the saints who cry “how long,”
The hidden hope of all who have despaired.
He sang it to his mother in the womb
And now it echoes from his empty tomb.
~Malcolm Guite “A Kind of Tune”

When the sky is painted in pastels and the air is brisk with breath and movement, I sense a kind of tune leading me back to thankfulness and wonder rather than worry and fretfulness.

Even in ordinary times of stress – yet especially when we are drowning in sadness reaching for any rescue at hand, the song Christ sings to us is the prayer He taught us to pray – Thy will be done.

“How long, O Lord, how long,” will be answered in the fullness of time – in a manger, in a tomb, in the skies of heaven. Heaven is found in the ordinary but with God and His gift of His son, nothing, but nothing will be ordinary.

For Thine is the glory forever…

This year’s Advent theme “Dawn on our Darkness” is taken from this 19th century Christmas hymn:

Brightest and best of the sons of the morning,
dawn on our darkness and lend us your aid.
Star of the east, the horizon adorning,
guide where our infant Redeemer is laid.
~Reginald Heber -from “Brightest and Best”

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Tenderness for Ordinary Things

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Last evening,
As I drove into this small valley,
I saw a low-hanging cloud
Wandering through the trees.
It circled like a school of fish
Around the dun-colored hay bales.
Reaching out its foggy hands
To stroke the legs of a perfect doe
Quietly grazing in a neighbor’s mule pasture
I stopped the car
And stepping out into the blue twilight,
A wet mist brushed my face,
And then it was gone.
It was not unfriendly,
But it was not inclined to tell its secrets.
I am in love with the untamed things,
The cloud, the doe,
Water, air and light.
I am filled with such tenderness
For ordinary things:
The practical mule, the pasture,
A perfect spiral of gathered hay.
And although I should not be,
Consistent as it is,
I am always surprised
By the way my heart will open
So completely and unexpectedly,
With a rush and an ache,
Like a sip of cold water
On a tender tooth.
~Carrie Newcomer “In the Hayfield”

I realize that nothing in this life is actually ordinary – at times I could weep over the unordinariness that is around me.

The light falls a certain way, the colors astound, the animals grace the fields with their contentment, the birds become overture, the air is perfumed with rain or blossom.

How can I not ache with this knowledge? How can I not feel the tenderness of my heart feeling so full, it could burst at any moment?

Truly extraordinary to be able to give myself over to this.

Light pools like spilled water on the floor
Cold air slips like silk beneath the door
The sky feels like a grey wool cap
Pulled down round my ears that near

All the ridge is lined with stands of beech
At the tops they’re swaying quietly
So elegant and raw without their leaves
All of these I see

I catch a memory a scent another short glimpse
Like someone leaned over and gave my forehead a kiss
I give myself to this

There’s a hidden spring back where it’s hard to find
Someone used it years ago to make moonshine
This forest has a different sense of time
Than yours or mine

I catch a memory a scent another short glimpse
Like someone leaned over and gave my forehead a kiss
I give myself to this

There’s a soil horizon
Layers beneath the trees
A sign of outward grace
Unraveling

One bird sits and sings an aching song
One turning leaf, ten circles on the pond
Two careful does wait silently beyond
Then they’re gone they’re gone

I catch a memory a scent another short glimpse
Like someone leaned over and gave my forehead a kiss
I give myself to this
~Carrie Newcomer

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