Tag: purpose

Dropping Leaves on Time

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Late in November, on a single night
Not even near to freezing, the ginkgo trees
That stand along the walk drop all their leaves
In one consent, and neither to rain nor to wind
But as though to time alone: the golden and green
Leaves litter the lawn today, that yesterday
Had spread aloft their fluttering fans of light.

What signal from the stars? What senses took it in?
What in those wooden motives so decided
To strike their leaves, to down their leaves,
Rebellion or surrender? and if this
Can happen thus, what race shall be exempt?
What use to learn the lessons taught by time,
If a star at any time may tell us: Now.
~Howard Nemerov “The Consent” from The Collected Poems of Howard Nemerov

So many reasons these days to awake in the night,
eyes wide open, searching the dark seas of trouble
for some sign of hope,
for calm and peace in this stormy world.

When asleep again, I float among abundant
golden gingko leaves, each waving like a sail in the breeze,
before they tumble, swirling, to the ground, forming
deeply cushioned and comforting pools of yellow.

Navigating these brutal times, I am meant to be
anchored within some safer harbor – I treasure
the old ginkgo as it reaches over each cherished child
with its golden cloak of love and protection.

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The Work of Your Hand

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Yet you, Lord, are our Father.
We are the clay, you are the potter;
we are all the work of your hand.
Isaiah 64:8

From dust to purpose,
beauty spins as planned.
Love is crafted by surrender
when clay trusts the Potter’s hands.
~Jamie Trunnel from “The Potter’s Hands”

For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.
Ephesians 2:10

The best pottery is never completely perfect, becoming an original, unique piece. It is infused with the potter’s eye and energy, the expert pressure of fingers and palm, with a design and vision coming from the heart and imagination of the potter.

Last night, during our evening church worship, two artists in our congregation, one using words of scripture and the other at a pottery wheel, demonstrated how creating and sculpting a work of pottery is key to understanding how God shapes each one of us, from our beginnings, preparing us in advance for the work we are to do.

Each one is a unique and original individual, formed by the hands of the Artist to become something with a purpose and plan. Even with imperfections, we are created as both beautiful and functional.

His Hands remain around us, holding and molding us to His plan.

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You Can Have an Abundant August

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But you can have the fig tree and its fat leaves like clown hands
gloved with green. You can have the touch of a single eleven-year-old finger on your cheek, waking you at one a.m. to say the hamster is back.

You can have the purr of the cat and the soulful look
of the black dog, the look that says, If I could I would bite
every sorrow until it fled, and when it is August,
you can have August and abundantly so. You can have love,
though often it will be mysterious, like the white foam
that bubbles up at the top of the bean pot over the red kidneys
until you realize foam’s twin is blood.

You can speak a foreign language, sometimes,
and it can mean something. You can visit the marker on the grave
where your father wept openly. You can’t bring back the dead,
but you can have the words forgive and forget hold hands
as if they meant to spend a lifetime together.

You can have your grandfather sitting on the side of your bed,
at least for a while, you can have clouds and letters, the leaping
of distances, and Indian food with yellow sauce like sunrise.

You can’t count on grace to pick you out of a crowd
but here is your friend to teach you how to high jump,
how to throw yourself over the bar, backwards,
until you learn about love, about sweet surrender,
and here are periwinkles, buses that kneel, farms in the mind
as real as Africa.

And when adulthood fails you,
you can still summon the memory of the black swan on the pond
of your childhood, the rye bread with peanut butter and bananas
your grandmother gave you while the rest of the family slept.
There is the voice you can still summon at will, like your mother’s,
it will always whisper, you can’t have it all,
but there is this.
~Barbara Ras from “You Can’t Have It All” from Bite Every Sorrow

My pragmatic mother gave up her teaching career for marriage and family so would remind me regularly that I couldn’t have it all:
there was no way a woman can have a husband and children and a farm and a garden and animals and a profession and write and travel and volunteer in the community and not make a mess of it all and herself.

My father would listen to her and say to me softly under his breath: “you do whatever you put your mind to…you know what you are here for.”

They were both right.

The alluring abundance of this life has invited me to want to touch and feel and taste it all, not unlike another woman who was placed with purpose in the Garden to be a side-by-side companion and co-worker. Yet she demonstrated what happens when you want more than you are given and yes, she indeed made a mess of things.

Yet there is this:
despite wanting it all and working hard for it all
and believing I could do it all,
I missed the point altogether.

Life is all gift, never earned.
Life is all grace, not deserved.
It is all August abundance,
it is right now,
sustaining us through the year’s
droughts and floods and storms and drab gray weather.

And there is this:
I know what I am here for.

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I’ve Come A Long Way

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Ten more miles, it is South Dakota.
Somehow, the roads there turn blue,
When no one walks down them.
One more night of walking, and I could have become
A horse, a blue horse, dancing
Down a road, alone.

I have got this far. It is almost noon. But never mind time:
That is all over.
It is still Minnesota.
Among a few dead cornstalks, the starving shadow
Of a crow leaps to his death.
At least, it is green here,
Although between my body and the elder trees
A savage hornet strains at the wire screen.
He can’t get in yet.

It is so still now, I hear the horse
Clear his nostrils.
He has crept out of the green places behind me.
Patient and affectionate, he reads over my shoulder
These words I have written.
He has lived a long time, and he loves to pretend
No one can see him.
Last night I paused at the edge of darkness,
And slept with green dew, alone.
I have come a long way, to surrender my shadow
To the shadow of a horse.
~James Wright “Sitting in a small screenhouse on a summer morning”

I have a sense of someone reading over my shoulder as I write.

It keeps me honest to feel that warm breath on my hair,
its green smell reminding me where I am and who I am.
It is encouraging to know what I do matters to someone.

I do not try to be anyone else.

When my words don’t say exactly what I hope,
I feel forgiveness from the shadow beside me.

It’s all softness and warm breath.
It’s all okay even when it’s not.

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Things to Be Done

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There are many things to be done today
and it’s a lovely day to do them in

Each thing a joy to do
and a joy to have done

I can tell because of the calm I feel
when I think about doing them

I can almost hear them say to me
Thank you for doing us

And when evening comes
I’ll remove my shoes and place them on the floor

And think how good they look
sitting?… standing?… there

Not doing anything
~ Ron Padgett “Inaction of Shoes” from Collected Poems.

Every day after work he’d sit in his armchair
with its antimacassar and its plush burgundy velour
and she’d kneel on the floor to unfasten the laces,
loosen the tongues, and lift out his feet.
When I was ten I stayed for a week
and did it for her. He thought I did it 
for him.
~Andrea Hollander Budy “My Grandmother Taking Off My Grandfather’s Shoes” from When She Named Fire

I did not grow up in a household that took time off.  Time was redeemed by work, and work was noble and honorable and proved we had a right to exist.

Vacation road trips were rare and almost always associated with my father’s work.  When he came home from his desk job in town, he would immediately change into his farm clothes and put in several hours of work outside, summer or winter, rain or shine, light or dark.

My mother did not work in town while we were children, but worked throughout her day inside and outside the house doing what farm wives and mothers need to do: growing, hoeing, harvesting, preserving, washing, cleaning, sewing, and most of all, being there for us.

As kids, we had our share of chores that were simply part of our day as our work was never done on a farm. When we turned ten, we began working for others: babysitting, weeding, barn and house cleaning, berry picking.  I figure I put in over 60 years of gainful employment – there were times I worked four part-time jobs at once because that was what I could put together to keep things together.

I know I’ve missed out on much of life being a “nose to the grindstone” person.

Now retired, I try a different way to redeem my time: to notice, to record, to observe, to appreciate beauty that still exists in the midst of chaos and cataclysm..

Life isn’t all about non-stop labor, yet we get on with our work because work is about showing up when and where we are needed.

And we are always needed, by someone, somewhere, somehow. That’s the reason why we’re here.

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Retell Its Loveliness

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The bud
stands for all things,
even for those things that don’t flower,
for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;   
though sometimes it is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness,
to put a hand on its brow
of the flower
and retell it in words and in touch
it is lovely
until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing;   
as Saint Francis
put his hand on the creased forehead
of the sow, and told her in words and in touch   
blessings of earth on the sow, and the sow   
began remembering all down her thick length,   
from the earthen snout all the way
through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl of the tail,   
from the hard spininess spiked out from the spine   
down through the great broken heart
to the sheer blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering   
from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths sucking and blowing
beneath them:
the long, perfect loveliness of sow.
~Galway Kinnell “Saint Francis and the Sow”

None of us trust our own loveliness;
we who are concerned with a blemish
or an unusual shape of toe or nose.

Yet we are made as we are
as an image of our Maker.

If we consider the purpose for which we’re created,
then we are just as we should be –
blessed with exact shape and size and spirit
with which we serve and bring joy to others.

Our loveliness must be retold
so we believe it thoroughly –
as a bud is all about blossoming,
a mother pours her love into the empty,
a father leads and guides the lost.

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It’s Heavy Work

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From other
angles the
fibers look
fragile, but
not from the
spider’s, always
hauling coarse
ropes, hitching
lines to the
best posts
possible. It’s
heavy work
everyplace,
fighting sag,
winching up
give. It
isn’t ever
delicate
to live.
~Kay Ryan “Spiderweb”

A noiseless patient spider,
I mark’d where on a little promontory it stood isolated,
Mark’d how to explore the vacant vast surrounding,
It launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself,
Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.

And you O my soul where you stand,
Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space,
Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them,
Till the bridge you will need be form’d, till the ductile anchor hold,
Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.
~Walt Whitman “The Noiseless Patient Spider”

Silk-thin silver strings woven cleverly into a lair,
An intricate entwining of divinest thread…
Like strands of magic worked upon the air,
The spider spins his enchanted web –
His home so eerily, spiraling spreads.

His gossamer so rigid, yet lighter than mist,
And like an eight-legged sorcerer – a wizard blest,
His lace, like a spell, he conjures and knits;
I witnessed such wild ingenuity wrought and finessed,
Watching the spider weave a dream from his web.
~Jonathan Platt “A Spider’s Web”

I am stretched, trying to connect between post and branch and leaf and ground.

I leap between them, sometimes not sure where I’ll land or what I’ll leave behind. Connection is hard and heavy work, not knowing what stands firm in a world where wind and rain and storms or some unaware creature can tear things all asunder.

Sometimes what I weave is beautifully delicate and functional.

Sometimes it is blurry, full of holes, and ultimately useless. The center doesn’t always hold. The tethers loosen. The periphery frays and tears. It doesn’t last long.

But it was something I labored with purpose and intent to create.
And that effort makes it all worthwhile.

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The spider, dropping down from twig,
Unfolds a plan of her devising,
A thin premeditated rig
To use in rising.
And all that journey down through space,
In cool descent and loyal hearted,
She spins a ladder to the place
From where she started.
Thus I, gone forth as spiders do
In spider’s web a truth discerning,
Attach one silken thread to you
For my returning.
~E.B. White

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This Muffle and Hush

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If day after day I was caught inside
this muffle and hush

I would notice how birches
move with a lovely hum of spirits,

how falling snow is a privacy
warm as the space for sleeping,

how radiant snow is a dream
like leaving behind the body

and rising into that luminous place
where sometimes you meet

the people you’ve lost. How
silver branches scrawl their names

in tangled script against the white.
How the curves and cheekbones

of all my loved ones appear
in the polished marble of drifts.
~Kirsten Dierking “Shoveling Snow” from Northern Oracle.

These sub-zero January nights linger long,
beginning early and lasting late.
I find myself stuck in an insistent winter,
pushing through the snowdrifts.

A wintry soul
can be a cold and empty place.

I appeal to my Creator
who knows my struggle.
He asks me to keep my promises
because He keeps His promises.
His buds of hope and light and warmth
still grace my bare branches.

He brings me out of the dark,
into the freshness of a snowy dawn,
to finish what He brought me here to do.

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The Whole Dream

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I am a feather on the bright sky

I am the blue horse that runs in the plain

I am the fish that rolls, shining, in the water

I am the shadow that follows a child

I am the evening light, the lustre of meadows

I am an eagle playing with the wind

I am a cluster of bright beads

I am the farthest star

I am the cold of dawn

I am the roaring of the rain

I am the glitter on the crust of the snow

I am the long track of the moon in a lake

I am a flame of four colors

I am a deer standing away in the dusk

I am a field of sumac and the pomme blanche

I am an angle of geese in the winter sky

I am the hunger of a young wolf

I am the whole dream of these things
You see, I am alive, I am alive

I stand in good relation to all that is beautiful
You see, I am alive, I am alive
~N.Scott Momaday from “The Delight Song of Tsoai-talee” from In the Presence of the Sun: Stories and Poems

I wonder if, in the dark night of the sea, the octopus dreams of me.
~N. Scott Momaday

If I am brutally honest with myself, one of my worst fears is to have lived on this earth for a few decades and then pass away forgotten, inconsequential, having left behind no legacy of significance whatsoever. I know it is self-absorbed to feel the need to leave a mark, but my search for purpose and meaning lasting beyond my time here provides new momentum for each day.

The forgetting can happen so fast. Most people know very little about their great great grandparents, if they even know their names. A mere four generations, a century, renders us dust, not just in flesh, but in memory as well. There may be a yellowed photograph in a box somewhere, perhaps a tattered postcard or letter written in elegant script, but the essence of who this person was is long lost and forgotten. We owe it to our descendants to write down or record the stories about who we were while we lived on this earth. We need to share why we lived, for whom we lived, for what we lived.

I suspect however, unless I try every day to record some part of who I am, it will be no different with me and those who come after me.  Whether or not we are remembered by great great grandchildren or become part of the dreams of creatures in the depths of the seas:
we came from dust and will return to dust-
there is no changing that.

Good thing this is not our only home.  
Good thing we are created to be more than memory and dreams. 
Good thing there is an eternity that transcends good works
or long memories or legacies left behind. 
Good thing we are loved that much and always will be,
Forever and ever, Amen.

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If I Choose to Fly…

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If I had a yellow breast, I would perch in high shadows.
And in my dreams, if I had to fly, I would fly quickly

because if I shone, the tabby on the ground would
not be fooled. He knows these trees do not flower.

Above me, bark rains down. And as his lifting paw
reaches me I sense Don’t move. And I don’t. 
~Lola Haskins “Goldfinch” from Homelight

The bird flying up at the windowpane
aspired to the blue sky reflected in it
but learned the hard truth and flew off again.
Was it a finch, a blue tit or a linnet?
I couldn’t quite identify the strain.

Checking a pocket guide to get it right
(The Birds of lreland, illustrated text)
I note the precise graphic work and definite
descriptions there, and yet I’m still perplexed.
I only glimpsed the bird in busy flight:

a bit like a goldfinch, like the captive one
perched on a rail, by Rembrandt’s young disciple,
except for the colouring, blue, yellow and green.
A tit so, one of those from the bird table
who whirr at hanging nuts and grain.

Off he flew. Now there’s a mist out there
and a mist in here that wouldn’t interest him
since what he wants is sky and open air.
He’s in the trees; I’m trying one more time
to find an opening in the stratosphere.
~Derek Mahon “At the Window”

In this world full of predators and prey,
even perching high on a tree branch,
motionless as a leaf or a bird-like blossom,
is risking a sharp-eyed hunter’s detection.

Or flying, oblivious, head-long into an enticing
reflection of blue sky might take me down

– any move I make could be my last –

So perhaps the moves I make,
whether subtle or grand,
must mean more than simply avoiding
being eaten by the eater.

Instead, I move with grace and purpose
to forage to feed my young,
to offer a bit of flashing gold to a gray landscape,
or fly with abandon because it is exactly
what my wings are created to do –

even when I’m aware hungry whiskers twitch below…

“handkerchief” tree in Northern Ireland
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