How swiftly the strained honey of afternoon light flows into darkness
and the closed bud shrugs off its special mystery in order to break into blossom
as if what exists, exists so that it can be lost and become precious ~Lisel Mueller “In Passing”
Each one of us is like a swelling bud hanging heavy and waiting on the stem — already but not quite yet.
Such is the late afternoon light of a mid-spring day. There is an air of mystery in a honeyed moment of illumination knowing something more is coming.
Not just the inevitable darkness when we all must give up the light to sleep. Not just opening wide to what we cannot yet understand. Not just peering through a glass darkly.
Breaking into blossom means opening fully, into the glow of full ripeness, to become part of the light itself.
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My mother, Elna Schmitz Polis, was born 103 years ago today in the lonely isolation of a Palouse wheat and lentil farm in eastern Washington. She drew her first breath in a two story white house located down a long poplar-lined lane and nestled in a draw between the undulating hills.
She attended a one room school house until 8th grade, located a mile away in the rural countryside, then moved in with her grandmother “in town” in Rosalia to attend high school, seeing her parents only a couple times a month.
It was a childhood which accustomed her to solitude and creative play inside her mind and heart – her only sibling, an older brother, was busy helping their father on the farm. All her life and especially in her later years, she would prefer the quiet of her own thoughts over the bustle of a room full of activities and conversation.
Her childhood was filled with exploration of the rolling hills, the barns and buildings where her father built and repaired farm equipment, and the chilly cellar where the fresh eggs were stored after she reached under cranky hens to gather them. She sat in the cool breeze of the picketed yard, watching the huge windmill turn and creak next to the house. She helped her weary mother feed farm crews who came for harvest time and then settled in the screened porch listening to the adults talk about lentil prices and bushel production. She woke to the mourning dove call in the mornings and heard the coyote yips and howls at night.
She nearly died at the age of 13 from a ruptured appendix, before antibiotics were an option. That near-miss seemed to haunt her life-long, filling her with worry that it was a mistake that she survived that episode at all. Yet she thrived despite the anxiety, and ended up, much to her surprise, living a long life full of family and faith, letting go at age 88 after fracturing a femur, breaking her will to continue to live.
As a young woman, she was ready to leave the wheat farm behind for college, devoting herself to the skills of speech, and the creativity of acting and directing in drama, later teaching rural high school students, including a future Pulitzer Prize winning poet, Carolyn Kizer. She loved words and the power and beauty they wielded.
Marrying my father was a brave and impulsive act, traveling by train to the east coast only a week before he shipped out for almost 3 years to the South Pacific to fight as a Marine in WWII. She must have wondered about the man who returned from war changed and undoubtedly scarred in ways she could not see or touch. They worked it out mostly in silence, as rocky as it must have been at times. Her episode of Graves’ disease, before I was born, must have been agonizing, as her storm of thyroid overactivity resulted in months of sleepless full time panic. Only thyroid removal saved her, but even radical surgeries take their toll. Their marriage never fully recovered.
In their reconciliation after a painful divorce years later, I finally could see the devotion and mutual respect between life companions who had found shared purpose and love.
As a wife and mother, she rediscovered her calling as a steward of the land and a tireless steward of her family, gardening and harvesting fruits, vegetables and us children. When I think of my mother, I most often think of her tending us children in the middle of the night whenever we were ill; her over-vigilance was undoubtedly due to her worry we might die in childhood as she almost did.
She never did stop worrying until the last few months. As she became more dependent on others in her physical decline, she gave up the control she thought she had to maintain through her “worry energy” and became much more accepting about the control the Lord maintains over all we are and will become.
I know from where my shyness comes, my preference for birdsongs rather than radio music, my love of naps, and my tendency to be serious and straight-laced with a twinkle in my eye. This is my German Palouse side–immersing in the quietness of solitude, thrilling to the sight of the spring wheat flowing like a green ocean wave in the breeze and appreciating the warmth of rich soil held in my hands. From that heritage came my mother and it is the legacy she left with me. I am forever grateful for her unconditional love and her willingness to share the sunshine and warmth of her nest whenever we felt the need to fly back home and shelter, overprotected but safe nonetheless, under her wings.
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If ever there were a spring day so perfect, so uplifted by a warm intermittent breeze that it made you want to throw open all the windows in the house and unlatch the door to the canary’s cage, indeed, rip the little door from its jamb, a day when the cool brick paths and the garden bursting with peonies seemed so etched in sunlight that you felt like taking a hammer to the glass paperweight on the living room end table, releasing the inhabitants from their snow-covered cottage so they could walk out, holding hands and squinting into this larger dome of blue and white, well, today is just that kind of day. ~Billy Collins “Today”
This is the kind of morning that begs to be admired from dawn’s first moment: everything emerges from the fog so sharp, vividly bathed in golden light.
It takes my breath away at the same time as it delivers it deep within me.
How might I spring others free as I now have been sprung?
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Sometimes when you start to ramble or rather when you feel you are starting to ramble you will say Well, now I’m rambling though I don’t think you ever are. And if you ever are I don’t really care. And not just because I and everyone really at times falls into our own unspooling —which really I think is a beautiful softness of being human, trying to show someone else the color of all our threads, wanting another to know everything in us we are trying to show them— but in the specific, in the specific of you here in this car that you are driving and in which I am sitting beside you with regards to you and your specific mouth parting to give way to the specific sweetness that is the water of your voice tumbling forth—like I said I don’t ever really mind how much more you might keep speaking as it simply means I get to hear you speak for longer. What was a stream now a river. ~Anis Mojgani “To the Sea”
I always thought softness was weakness that by letting my body relax or gentleness live on my fingertips that I was somehow letting go somehow sacrificing my bravery
I’ve always wanted to be tougher than I am. So soft, I’m ready to burst into tears too much of the time, whether from sadness, worry, or joy. I wish I could be less transparent with my big feelings.
Yet I wouldn’t change my softness for you. I want to always be unspooling myself, to finally reveal what is underneath all the woven threads.
So much of this life is about having the courage to trust even when things are rocky, to follow the flow of things rather than creating obstruction, to lead when everyone else hangs back, to be gentle when the world needs kindness.
May I always be soft enough if you need a cushion to land upon and a pillow to rest your thoughts.
The sun went down and the moon came out On the day that you were born The stars were more than we could count On the day that you were born On a morning that was old and new On the day that you were born The world opened up to welcome you On the day that you were born
It’s all mystery and motion How the wheels of this world open There were gentle rains and summer storms On the day that you were born
The winds blew patterns through the trees On the day that you were born The waters wandered toward the sea On the day that you were born
The redbuds fade and bloom again On the day that you were born The birds knew where and they knew when On the day that you were born
In the clouds and vapor and the quiet lakes On the day that you were born In the deepest currents and waves that break On the day that you were born
In the prayers and psalms that whisper through the trees In the secret places only God can see In the things we feel but cannot be said We all hold hands and bow our heads
Seasons pass and seasons grow On the day that you were born There were things we’ll never know On the day that you were born But love is all and love is true On the day that you were born And love will always welcome you On the day that you were born ~Carrie Newcomer
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Sometimes I like to hide in the word foxgloves – in the middle of foxgloves. The xgl is hard to say, out of the England of its harbouring word. Alone it becomes a small tangle, a witch’s thimble, hard-to-toll bell, elvish door to a door. Xgl a place with a locked beginning then a snag, a gl like the little Englands of my grief, a knotted dark that locks light in glisten, glow, glint, gleam and Oberon’s banks of eglantine which closes in on the opening of Gulliver whose shrunken gul says ‘rose’ in my fatherland. Meanwhile, in the motherland, the xg is almost the thumb of a lost mitten, an impossible interior, deeper than forests and further in. And deeper inland is the gulp, the gulf, the gap, the grip that goes before love. ~Zaffar Kunial“Foxglove Country” from England’s Green
I can get lost in a word when considering its origins. Sometimes it is how it looks on the page or screen that sucks me in, other times it is how it rolls off the tongue, or how it fits amid other words, like a musical note in a symphony. At times a word can seem an argle-bargle of nonsensical sounds, as if I’m listening to a foreign language.
This poem dissects an ordinary word like foxglove into letters and sounds in a way I have never considered, so that the flowers growing wild in our yard contain unexpected depth and width. Even eglantine is an elegant way to describe wild rose blossoms.
I love looking deep into the pinkish speckled innards of foxglove, lined up just-so in bell-like columns on a stem. I love the thought they were named as if they were little mittens a fox might happen to step into for a trot down the road. I love the thought of foxgloves being part of a glowing glistening fairy world that I only imagine in my dreams. I love that I have written prescriptions of foxglove derivatives for decades for patients who needed the rhythm-controlling properties of digitalis.
So here’s to nonsense, to words that are hard to say, and words that contain mysteries and fairytales within their letters, especially this particular word that actually spells out Love.
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There were a few dozen who occupied the field across the road from where we lived, stepping all day from tuft to tuft, their big heads down in the soft grass, though I would sometimes pass a window and look out to see the field suddenly empty as if they had taken wing, flown off to another country.
Then later, I would open the blue front door, and again the field would be full of their munching or they would be lying down on the black-and-white maps of their sides, facing in all directions, waiting for rain. How mysterious, how patient and dumbfounded they appear in the long quiet of the afternoon.
But every once in a while, one of them would let out a sound so phenomenal that I would put down the paper or the knife I was cutting an apple with and walk across the road to the stone wall to see which one of them was being torched or pierced through the side with a long spear.
Yes, it sounded like pain until I could see the noisy one, anchored there on all fours, her neck outstretched, her bellowing head laboring upward as she gave voice to the rising, full-bodied cry that began in the darkness of her belly and echoed up through her bowed ribs into her gaping mouth.
Then I knew that she was only announcing the large, unadulterated cowness of herself, pouring out the ancient apologia of her kind to all the green fields and the gray clouds, to the limestone hills and the inlet of the blue bay, while she regarded my head and shoulders above the wall with one wild, shocking eye. ~Billy Collins “Afternoon with Irish Cows”
Most of my life I have lived surrounded by cows. I have great appreciation for their pastoral presence, and know well their nosiness and their noisiness.
There isn’t anything else that sounds like a cow in heat. Nothing. Especially in the middle of the night.
There is the fascination of following a meandering cow path through a field –where there is no such thing as a straight line.
And there isn’t anything quite as riveting to a cow than a human approaching the gate.
During our farm stays in Ireland and Scotland a few years back, we made a point to get to know the local bovines, just for comparison’s sake. At home we raised Scottish Highland cattle, so we felt we could speak their language, even if they were Belted Galloways rather than Highlanders. Sure enough, we were just as riveting to them as they were to us.
We have talked about getting a couple of furry cows again for the farm. It’s been awhile since we hosted some here. I’m nostalgic for their reassuring cud chewing, their soft flap of ear, their round transparent eyes, but most of all watching the acrobatics of a tongue that wraps itself around a clump of grass while grazing and can reach up and clean out a moist nose.
A wondrous creature — the bovine – true magnificence and mystery in their cowishness.
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Once I am sure there’s nothing going on I step inside, letting the door thud shut. Another church: matting, seats, and stone, And little books; sprawlings of flowers, cut For Sunday, brownish now; some brass and stuff Up at the holy end; the small neat organ; And a tense, musty, unignorable silence, Brewed God knows how long. Hatless, I take off My cycle-clips in awkward reverence,
Move forward, run my hand around the font. From where I stand, the roof looks almost new- Cleaned or restored? Someone would know: I don’t. Mounting the lectern, I peruse a few Hectoring large-scale verses, and pronounce “Here endeth” much more loudly than I’d meant. The echoes snigger briefly. Back at the door I sign the book, donate an Irish sixpence, Reflect the place was not worth stopping for.
Yet stop I did: in fact I often do, And always end much at a loss like this, Wondering what to look for; wondering, too, When churches fall completely out of use What we shall turn them into, if we shall keep A few cathedrals chronically on show, Their parchment, plate, and pyx in locked cases, And let the rest rent-free to rain and sheep. Shall we avoid them as unlucky places?
Bored, uninformed, knowing the ghostly silt Dispersed, yet tending to this cross of ground Through suburb scrub because it held unspilt So long and equably what since is found Only in separation – marriage, and birth, And death, and thoughts of these – for whom was built This special shell? For, though I’ve no idea What this accoutred frowsty barn is worth, It pleases me to stand in silence here;
A serious house on serious earth it is, In whose blent air all our compulsions meet, Are recognised, and robed as destinies. And that much never can be obsolete, Since someone will forever be surprising A hunger in himself to be more serious, And gravitating with it to this ground, Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in, If only that so many dead lie round. ~Philip Larkin from “Church-going”
Even an empty shell of a church invites in silent witness- even those of us who struggle with unbelief, who stop only to rest a moment, to mock or sigh, breathe in the musty history of such a place.
Over the centuries, there has been much wrong with churches, comprised as they are of fallen people with broken wings and fractured faith. They seem anachronistic, from another time and place, echoing of baptisms and eucharist, weddings and funerals.
Yet we still return, fragmented souls that we are, acknowledging the flaws in one another as we crack open to spill our own.
What is right with the church goes beyond silence: Who we pray to, why we sing and feast together on the grace and generosity of His Word. We are restless noisy people joined together as a body bloodied, bruised, redeemed.
Dear Lord of Heaven and Earth, look out for us in our motley messiness, rain down Your restless love upon our heads, no matter how frowsty a building we worship in, or how we look or feel today.
Be unignorable, so we might come back, again and again.
We stand, stirred, in silence, simply grateful to be alive, to raise our hands together, then sing and kneel and bow in such an odd and humble house, indeed a home God might call His own.
pulpit peonies
The old church leans nearby a well-worn road, Upon a hill that has no grass or tree, The winds from off the prairie now unload The dust they bring around it fitfully.
The path that leads up to the open door Is worn and grayed by many toiling feet Of us who listen to the Bible lore And once again the old-time hymns repeat.
And ev’ry Sabbath morning we are still Returning to the altar waiting there. A hush, a prayer, a pause, and voices fill The Master’s House with a triumphant air.
The old church leans awry and looks quite odd, But it is beautiful to us and God. ~Stephen Paulus
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One day, something very old happened again. The green came back to the branches, settling like leafy birds on the highest twigs; the ground broke open as dark as coffee beans.
The clouds took up their positions in the deep stadium of the sky, gloving the bright orb of the sun before they pitched it over the horizon.
It was as good as ever: the air was filled with the scent of lilacs and cherry blossoms sounded their long whistle down the track
Standing outside a non-descript door in a long dark windowless hallway of offices at the Stanford Medical Center, I took a deep breath and swallowed several times to clear my dry throat. I hoped I had found the correct office, as there was only a number– no nameplate to confirm who was inside.
I was about to meet a childhood hero, someone whose every book I’d read and every TV documentary I had watched. I knocked with what I hoped was the right combination of assertiveness (“I want to be here to talk with you and prove my interest”) and humility (“I hope this is convenient for you as I don’t want to intrude”). I heard a soft voice on the other side say “Come in” so I slowly opened the door.
It was a bit like going through the wardrobe to enter Narnia. Bright sunlight streamed into the dark hallway as I stepped over the threshold. Squinting, I stepped inside and quickly shut the door behind me as I realized there were at least four birds flying about the room. They were taking off and landing, hopping about feeding on bird seed on the office floor and on the window sill. The windows were flung wide open with a spring breeze rustling papers on the desk. The birds were very happy occupying the sparsely furnished room, which contained only one desk, two chairs and Dr. Jane Goodall.
She stood up and extended her hand to me, saying, quite unnecessarily, “Hello, I’m Jane” and offered me the other chair when I told her my name. She was slighter than she appeared when speaking up at a lectern, or on film. Sitting back down at her desk, she busied herself reading and marking her papers, seemingly occupied and not to be disturbed. It was as if I was not there at all.
It was disorienting. In the middle of a bustling urban office complex containing nothing resembling plants or a natural environment, I had unexpectedly stepped into a bird sanctuary instead of sitting down for a job interview. I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do or say. Jane didn’t really ever look directly at me, yet I was clearly being observed. So I waited, watching the birds making themselves at home in her office, and slowly feeling at home myself. I felt my tight muscles start to relax and I loosened my grip on the arms of the chair.
There was silence except for the twittering of the finches as they flew about our heads.
After awhile she spoke, her eyes still perusing papers: “It is the only way I can tolerate being here for any length of time. They keep me company. But don’t tell anyone; the people here would think this is rather unsanitary.”
I said the only thing I could think of: “I think it is magical. It reminds me of home.”
Only then did she look at me. “Now tell me why you’d like to come work at Gombe…”
The next day I received a note from her letting me know I was accepted for the research assistantship to begin a year later. I had proven I could sit silently and expectantly, waiting for something, or perhaps nothing at all, to happen. For a farm girl who never before traveled outside the United States, I was about to embark on an adventure far beyond the barnyard.
(This essay was published in The Jane Effect in 2015 in honor of Jane’s 80th birthday)
I had no idea when I applied for this position in 1974 that a little more than a year later, on May 19, 1975, I would be hiding in a Tanzanian jungle alongside Jane and her eight year old son Grub – that story is found here.
photo of Jane Goodall, smiling at me as I came up to give her a hug, courtesy of WWU University Communicationsgiving Jane a hug, courtesy of WWU Communications45 years since we met in her Stanford office full of wild birds
True to Jane’s tradition of impeccable graciousness, she sent me a hand-written note after her last visit in 2018 when she came to speak at Western Washington University in Bellingham.
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Stretching Himself as if again, through downpress of dust upward, soul giving way to thread of white, that reaches for daylight, to open as green leaf that it is… Can Ascension not have been arduous, almost, as the return from Sheol, and back through the tomb into breath? Matter reanimate now must relinquish itself, its human cells, molecules, five senses, linear vision endured as Man – the sole all-encompassing gaze resumed now, Eye of Eternity. Relinquished, earth’s broken Eden. Expulsion, liberation, last self-enjoined task of Incarnation. He again Fathering Himself. Seed-case splitting. He again Mothering His birth: torture and bliss. ~Denise Levertov “Ascension”
For as a cloud received Him from their sight, So with a cloud will He return ere long: Therefore they stand on guard by day, by night, Strenuous and strong.
They do, they dare, they beyond seven times seven Forgive, they cry God’s mighty word aloud: Yet sometimes haply lift tired eyes to Heaven– “Is that His cloud?” ~Christina Rossetti from “Ascension Day”
We saw his light break through the cloud of glory Whilst we were rooted still in time and place As earth became a part of Heaven’s story And heaven opened to his human face. We saw him go and yet we were not parted He took us with him to the heart of things The heart that broke for all the broken-hearted Is whole and Heaven-centred now, and sings, Sings in the strength that rises out of weakness, Sings through the clouds that veil him from our sight, Whilst we our selves become his clouds of witness And sing the waning darkness into light, His light in us, and ours in him concealed, Which all creation waits to see revealed . ~Malcolm Guite “Ascension”
I wait for the Lord, my soul waits, and in his word I put my hope. My soul waits for the Lord more than watchmen wait for the morning, more than watchmen wait for the morning. Psalm 130: 5-6 from a Song of Ascents
Waiting is essential to the spiritual life. But waiting as a disciple of Jesus is not an empty waiting. It is a waiting with a promise in our hearts that makes already present what we are waiting for. We wait during Advent for the birth of Jesus. We wait after Easter for the coming of the Spirit, and after the ascension of Jesus we wait for his coming again in glory. We are always waiting, but it is a waiting in the conviction that we have already seen God’s footsteps. — Henri Nouwen from Bread For The Journey: A Daybook of Wisdom and Faith
Ascension Day observance reminds me that waiting is a hard sweet paradox in the Christian life. It is hard not yet having what I know is coming.
But it is sweet to have certainty it is coming because of the footprints left behind: He has been here among us and, in His ascension, carried our dust to heaven.
The waiting won’t be easy; it will often be painful to be patient, staying alert to possibility and hope when all seems exhausted. Others won’t understand why we wait, nor do they comprehend what we could possibly be waiting for.
So we persevere together, with patience, watching and hoping; we are a community groaning together in sweet expectation of the morning.
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