Tag: reflection

Longing to Reach the Mountain

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Mountains are giant, restful, absorbent.
You can heave your spirit into a mountain
and the mountain will keep it, folded,
and not throw it back as some creeks will.
The creeks are the world with all its stimulus and beauty;
I live there. But the mountains are home.
~Annie Dillard from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

He found himself wondering at times, especially in the autumn, about the wild lands, and strange visions of mountains that he had never seen came into his dreams.

He loved mountains, or he has loved the thought of them marching on the edge of stories brought from far away; but now he was borne down by the insupportable weight of Middle-earth. He longed to shut out the immensity in a quiet room by a fire.
~J.R.R. Tolkien from The Lord of the Rings

This time of year, we feel a call to drive up the highway an hour or so to witness grander things than our own worries or the chaos of yet another election season.

There is always that moment as we turn the bend into Heather Meadows when Mount Shuksan suddenly appears, overwhelming the landscape and everything and everyone else.

There is simply nothing else to look at so I stand there gawking, forgetting to breathe.

Then I realize that I become more self-conscious rather than less: here I am at the foot of this incredible creation, wondering at how blessed I am to be there; that moment becomes all about me. Yet the mountain has been here for eons and will continue to be here for eons. Just a mere blip in that continuum, I feel summoned.

We leave behind all the political divisiveness and drama and talking heads: up in the mountains there is such sheer stillness all around us – nary a breeze or a bird call or even a bug making ripples on the lakes to spoil the perfect reflection.

I bring these images back with me to remember that moment of awestruck witness. The photographic image isn’t the real mountain or the pristine perfect reflection. Yet it means I was privileged to watch this mountain watching me back, welcoming me home.

The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing — to reach the Mountain, to find the place where all the beauty came from — my country, the place where I ought to have been born. Do you think it all meant nothing, all the longing? The longing for home? For indeed it now feels not like going, but like going back.
~ C. S. Lewis from Till We Have Faces

The Eyes Have It

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To look into the eye of a horse
is to see a reflection of yourself
that you might’ve forgotten.
No grief was big enough
not to be washed clean in your horse’s eye.
~Gillian Mears from Foal’s Bread

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens; only something in me understands

the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
~e.e.cummings from “somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond”

…whenever you mark a horse, or a dog,
with a peculiarly mild, calm, deep-seated eye,
be sure he is an Aristotle or a Kant,
tranquilly speculating upon the mysteries in man. 
No philosophers so thoroughly comprehend us as dogs and horses.
They see through us at a glance.
But there is a touch of divinity ….
and a special halo about a horse…
~Herman Melville from Redburn: His First Voyage

Two whistles, one for each,
and familiar sounds draw close in darkness—
cadence of hoof on hardened bottomland,
twinned blowing of air through nostrils curious, flared.
They come deepened and muscular movements
conjured out of sleep: each small noise and scent
heavy with earth, simple beyond communion…

…and in the night, their mares’ eyes shine, reflecting stars,
the entire, outer light of the world here. 
~Jane Hirschfield from “After Work”

There is a moment after you move your eye away
when you forget where you are
because you’ve been living, it seems,
somewhere else, in the silence of the night sky.

You’ve stopped being here in the world.
You’re in a different place,
a place where human life has no meaning.

You’re not a creature in a body.
You exist as the stars exist,
participating in their stillness, their immensity.
~Louise Glück from “Telescope” in Averno

It’s tempting to fall headfirst into each eye’s fathomless well –
These eyes rivet me as they search my own:
a retinal magnet drawing me into
such incalculable depths.

Yet I am merely reflected like starlight;
only dancing on this shining mirrored surface
when I long to dive deep
to understand what they see in me:
so lost I long to be found.

Springing Right Out of the Frame

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I have never been fishing on the Susquehanna
or on any river for that matter
to be perfectly honest.

Not in July or any month
have I had the pleasure — if it is a pleasure —
of fishing on the Susquehanna.

I am more likely to be found
in a quiet room like this one —
a painting of a woman on the wall,

a bowl of tangerines on the table —
trying to manufacture the sensation
of fishing on the Susquehanna.

There is little doubt
that others have been fishing
on the Susquehanna,

rowing upstream in a wooden boat,
sliding the oars under the water
then raising them to drip in the light.

But the nearest I have ever come to
fishing on the Susquehanna
was one afternoon in a museum in Philadelphia,

when I balanced a little egg of time
in front of a painting
in which that river curled around a bend

under a blue cloud-ruffled sky,
dense trees along the banks,
and a fellow with a red bandana

sitting in a small, green
flat-bottom boat
holding the thin whip of a pole.

That is something I am unlikely
ever to do, I remember
saying to myself and the person next to me.

Then I blinked and moved on
to other American scenes
of haystacks, water whitening over rocks,

even one of a brown hare
who seemed so wired with alertness
I imagined him springing right out of the frame. 
~Billy Collins Fishing On The Susquehanna In July

Susquehanna by Jasper Francis Cropsey
On the Susquehanna by Jasper Frances Cropsey
Agnes Wallace by Robert Sivell
Hayfield–oil painting by Scott Prior http://www.scottpriorart.com
Shoshone Falls on the Snake River by Thomas Moran

The difficulty to think at the end of day,
When the shapeless shadow covers the sun
And nothing is left except light on your fur—

….and August the most peaceful month.

To be, in the grass, in the peacefullest time,
And to feel that the light is a rabbit-light
In which everything is meant for you
And nothing need be explained;

You become a self that fills the four corners of
night.
~Wallace Stevens, from “A Rabbit As King of the Ghosts”

Hare by David Stribbling
Young Hare painting by Albrecht Durer

I live a quiet life in a quiet place.
There are many experiences not on my bucket list
that I’m simply content to just imagine others doing.

I’m not a rock climber or a zip liner
nor willing to jump out of an airplane.
I won’t ride a horse over a four foot jump
nor race one around a track.
Not for me waterskis or unicycles or motorcycles.

I’m grateful there are adventurers
who seek out the extremes of life
so the rest of us can admire their courage
and applaud their explorations.

My imagination is powerful enough,
thanks to the words and pictures of others –
sometimes too vivid.

I contentedly explore the corners
of my quiet places, both inside and outside,
to see what I can build from what’s here.

When the light is just right,
what I see in my mind
seems ready to spring right out of the frame.

Come and See: The Seal of Approval

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When they found him on the other side of the lake, they asked him, “Rabbi, when did you get here?”

Jesus answered, “Very truly I tell you, you are looking for me, not because you saw the signs I performed but because you ate the loaves and had your fill.  Do not work for food that spoils, but for food that endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you. For on him God the Father has placed his seal of approval.”

Then they asked him, “What must we do to do the works God requires?”

Jesus answered, “The work of God is this: to believe in the one he has sent.”

So they asked him, “What sign then will you give that we may see it and believe you? What will you do? Our ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness; as it is written: ‘He gave them bread from heaven to eat.’”

Jesus said to them, “Very truly I tell you, it is not Moses who has given you the bread from heaven, but it is my Father who gives you the true bread from heaven. For the bread of God is the bread that comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.”

“Sir,” they said, “always give us this bread.”
John 6: 22-34

The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them;
it was not in them, it only came through them,
and what came through them was longing.
These things — the beauty, the memory of our own past —
are good images of what we really desire;
but if they are mistaken for the thing itself
they turn into dumb idols,
breaking the hearts of their worshipers.
For they are not the thing itself;
they are only the scent of a flower we have not found,
the echo of a tune we have not heard,
news from a country we have never visited.
~C.S. Lewis from “Reflections”

At present we are on the outside of the world,
the wrong side of the door.
We discern the freshness and purity of morning,
but they do not make us fresh and pure.
We cannot mingle with the splendours we see.
But all the leaves of the New Testament are rustling
with the rumour that it will not always be so.
Some day, God willing, we shall get in.
When human souls have become as perfect
in voluntary obedience as the inanimate creation is
in its lifeless obedience, then they will put on its
or rather that greater glory of which Nature is only the first sketch.
~C.S. Lewis from The Weight of Glory

I know this hunger the disciples express…
Even when I am fully sated,
still I ask for more.

By loving and longing for more,
I am looking for what is always there,
but settle for a reflection
rather than the thing itself.
Lord, help me wait at your door.

The beauty of anticipation,
confident of fulfillment to come
my thirstiness
slaked
my hunger
satisfied.

I am reading slowly through the words in the Book of John over the next year alongside my church family. Once a week, I will invite you to “come and see” what those words might mean as we explore His promises together.

Bring to Light the Mystery: Sustained Hour By Hour

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Days pass when I forget the mystery.
Problems insoluble and problems offering
their own ignored solutions
jostle for my attention…
            And then
once more the quiet mystery
is present to me, the throng’s clamor
recedes: the mystery
that there is anything, anything at all,
let alone cosmos, joy, memory, everything,
rather than void: and that, O Lord,
Creator, Hallowed one, You still,
hour by hour sustain it.
~Denise Levertov from “Primary Wonder” from Sands of the Well

Here is the mystery, the secret,
one might almost say the cunning,
of the deep love of God:
that it is bound to draw upon itself
the hatred and pain and shame
and anger and bitterness and rejection of the world,
but to draw all those things on to itself
is precisely the means chosen from all eternity
by the generous, loving God,
by which to rid his world of the evils
which have resulted from
human abuse of God-given freedom.
~N.T. Wright from The Crown and The Fire

Inundated by the inevitable bad news of the world,
I must cling to the mystery of His magnetism
for my own weaknesses, flaws and bitterness.

I am frozen in the ice of sin, waiting to be thawed.

He willingly pulls evil onto Himself, out of me.
Hatred and pain and shame and anger disappear
into the vortex of His love and beauty,
the mucky corners of my heart vacuumed spotless.

We are let in on a secret:
He is not sullied by absorbing the dirty messes of our lives.

Created in His image, sustained and loved,
thus a reflection of Him,
it is no mystery
we are washed forever clean.

photo of Mt. Baker reflected in Wiser Lake by Joel DeWaard

This year’s Barnstorming Lenten theme is Ephesians 3:9:

…to bring to light for everyone what is the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God, who created all things…

Come and See: Something More of the Depths

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Now when Jesus learned that the Pharisees had heard that Jesus was making and baptizing more disciples than John (although Jesus himself did not baptize, but only his disciples), he left Judea and departed again for Galilee. 

And he had to pass through Samaria. So he came to a town of Samaria called Sychar, near the field that Jacob had given to his son Joseph. Jacob’s well was there; so Jesus, wearied as he was from his journey, was sitting beside the well. It was about the sixth hour.

A woman from Samaria came to draw water. Jesus said to her, “Give me a drink.” (For his disciples had gone away into the city to buy food.) The Samaritan woman said to him, “How is it that you, a Jew, ask for a drink from me, a woman of Samaria?” (For Jews have no dealings with Samaritans.) 

Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.”  The woman said to him, “Sir, you have nothing to draw water with, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water? Are you greater than our father Jacob? He gave us the well and drank from it himself, as did his sons and his livestock.” 

Jesus said to her, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again. The water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.” The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water, so that I will not be thirsty or have to come here to draw water.”

 Jesus said to her, “Go, call your husband, and come here.” The woman answered him, “I have no husband.” Jesus said to her, “You are right in saying, ‘I have no husband’; for you have had five husbands, and the one you now have is not your husband. What you have said is true.” The woman said to him, “Sir, I perceive that you are a prophet. 20 Our fathers worshiped on this mountain, but you say that in Jerusalem is the place where people ought to worship.” 

Jesus said to her, “Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father. You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews. But the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father is seeking such people to worship him. God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.” 

The woman said to him, “I know that Messiah is coming (he who is called Christ). When he comes, he will tell us all things.” 

Jesus said to her, “I who speak to you am he.”
John 4: 1-26

Others taunt me with having knelt at well-curbs
Always wrong to the light, so never seeing
Deeper down in the well than where the water
Gives me back in a shining surface picture
Me myself in the summer heaven godlike
Looking out of a wreath of fern and cloud puffs.
Once, when trying with chin against a well-curb,
I discerned, as I thought, beyond the picture,
Through the picture, a something white, uncertain,
Something more of the depths—and then I lost it.
Water came to rebuke the too clear water.
One drop fell from a fern, and lo, a ripple
Shook whatever it was lay there at bottom,
Blurred it, blotted it out. What was that whiteness?
Truth? A pebble of quartz? For once, then, something.
~Robert Frost “For Once Then Something”

Recently, we tried having a new well dug on our farm after our well water became discolored and undrinkable after a week of very heavy rains.

It is a very deep decades-old well with a protective casing that was failing. The well diggers tried to hit water in the same aquifer only a few yards from the original well – yet, despite drilling even deeper, the hole remained dry. Our effort at fresh water was futile. Instead, with no other affordable options, we did what we could to repair the original well, hoping to give it new life, along with a robust filtration system so we would have fresh water.

We are a worshiping people who peer into a well hole, expecting it to deliver what we need, when we need it. We end up worshiping our own distorted reflection, rather than what is needed to sustain life.
We are lost, only looking deep into the depths of the ground, rather than seeking the depths of spirit and truth.

When we admit our own blindness and need for rescue, we are promised living water to quench our never-ending thirst.

Instead of “for once then something,” we are given
“forever, now, salvation.”

I am reading slowly through the words in the Book of John over the next year. Once a week, I will invite you to “come and see” what those words might mean as we explore His promises together.

Renewed Pulse

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The cold remote islands
And the blue estuaries
Where what breathes, breathes
The restless wind of the inlets,
And what drinks, drinks
The incoming tide;

Where shell and weed
Wait upon the salt wash of the sea,
And the clear nights of stars
Swing their lights westward
To set behind the land;

Where the pulse clinging to the rocks
Renews itself forever;
Where, again on cloudless nights,
The water reflects
The firmament’s partial setting;

—O remember
In your narrowing dark hours
That more things move
Than blood in the heart.
Louise Bogan “Night” from The Blue Estuaries

 I know what my heart is like
Since your love died:
It is like a hollow ledge
Holding a little pool
Left there by the tide,
A little tepid pool,
Drying inward from the edge.
~Edna St. Vincent Millay “Ebb”

My mother was 58 when my father left her for a younger woman. 

For months, she withered,
her heart broken, her pulse erratic,
crying until there were no more tears left.

She began drying inward from her edges
despite the ebbing and flowing
of her heartbeat.

It took ten years,
but he came back like an overdue high tide.  

She was sure her love had died
but that tepid pool refilled
with water cool to the touch,
yet overflowing.

AI image created for this post

Hiding in a Snail’s Eye

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May the poems be
the little snail’s trail.

Everywhere I go,
every inch: quiet record

of the foot’s silver prayer.
              I lived once.
              Thank you.
              It was here.
~Aracelis Girmay “Ars Poetica”  

Little snail,
Dreaming you go.
Weather and rose
Is all you know.
Weather and rose
Is all you see,
Drinking
The dewdrop’s
Mystery.
~Langston Hughes “Snail”

James was a very small snail…
and gave the huffle of a snail in danger.
And nobody heard him at all.
~A.A.Milne from The Four Friends from  “When We Were Very Young”

…who has a controlled sense of wonder
before the universal mystery,
whether it hides in a snail’s eye
or within the light that impinges on that delicate organ?
~Loren Eiseley from The Star Thrower

The snail pushes through a green
night, for the grass is heavy
with water and meets over
the bright path he makes, where rain
has darkened the earth’s dark. He
moves in a wood of desire,

pale antlers barely stirring
as he hunts. I cannot tell
what power is at work, drenched there
with purpose, knowing nothing.
What is a snail’s fury? All
I think is that if later

I parted the blades above
the tunnel and saw the thin
trail of broken white across
litter, I would never have
imagined the slow passion
to that deliberate progress.
~Thom Gunn “Considering the Snail”

What do we leave behind as we pass through this life, following the light?

It might be as slick and silvery and random as a snail trail —
hardly and barely there, easily erased, only a transient residual.

We might leave behind the solid hollow of an empty shell, its spirals leading to infinity, curling to nothing and everything.

As for my trail:
I pray for a legacy of words and images reflecting the Light I seek,
to notice and share the wonder I journey through.

Yes, I was once here.
And so were you.

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Through the years, the sorrow
The joy that we borrow
The tears that we share with the rain
Oh today, tomorrow
Forever I’ll follow your trail
Just call my name
~Sean Rowe

An Enormous Love

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Be silent.
Be still.
Alone.
Empty
Before your God.
Say nothing.
Ask nothing.
Be silent.
Be still.
Let your God look upon you.
That is all.
God knows.
God understands.
God loves you
With an enormous love,
And only wants
To look upon you
With that love.
Quiet.
Still.
Be.

Let your God—
Love you.
~Edwina Gately “Let Your God Love You”

Now I am still
And plain:
No more words….

And deep in the darkness is God.
~Rainer Maria Rilke from The Inner Sky: Poems, Notes, Dreams

I know this happiness
is provisional:

the looming presences –
great suffering, great fear –

withdraw only
into peripheral vision:

but ineluctable this shimmering
of wind in the blue leaves:

this flood of stillness
widening the lake of sky:

this need to dance,
this need to kneel:

this mystery:
~Denise Levertov “Of Being” from The Stream and the Sapphire

On a Sabbath day, I try to be still and silent
but fail miserably in my attempts to rest.
So much to do, so much to fix, so much to say.

I have forgotten the original reason for the seventh day.

God simply wanted to look down at what He made,
declare it good
and love it.

The least I can do is stop what I’m doing, look up, hold still and listen…

1 O love of God, how strong and true,
eternal and yet ever new,
uncomprehended and unbought,
beyond all knowledge and all thought!
O love of God, how deep and great,
far deeper than man’s deepest hate;
self-fed, self-kindled like the light,
changeless, eternal, infinite.

2 O heav’nly love, how precious still,
in days of weariness and ill,
in nights of pain and helplessness,
to heal, to comfort, and to bless!
O wide-embracing, wondrous love!
We read you in the sky above,
we read you in the earth below,
in seas that swell and streams that flow.

3 We read you best in him who came
bearing for us the cross of shame;
sent by the Father from on high,
our life to live, our death to die.
We read your pow’r to bless and save,
e’en in the darkness of the grave;
still more in resurrection light
we read the fullness of your might.

4 O love of God, our shield and stay
through all the perils of our way!
Eternal love, in you we rest,
forever safe, forever blest.
We will exalt you, God and King,
and we will ever praise your name;
we will extol you ev’ry day,
and evermore your praise proclaim.
~Horatius Bonar

Laid Aside His Crown: The Quiet Mystery

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Days pass when I forget the mystery.
Problems insoluble and problems offering
their own ignored solutions
jostle for my attention…
            And then
once more the quiet mystery
is present to me, the throng’s clamor
recedes: the mystery
that there is anything, anything at all,
let alone cosmos, joy, memory, everything,
rather than void: and that, O Lord,
Creator, Hallowed one, You still,
hour by hour sustain it.
~Denise Levertov from “Primary Wonder” from Sands of the Well

Here is the mystery, the secret,
one might almost say the cunning,
of the deep love of God:
that it is bound to draw upon itself
the hatred and pain and shame
and anger and bitterness and rejection of the world,
but to draw all those things on to itself
is precisely the means chosen from all eternity
by the generous, loving God,
by which to rid his world of the evils
which have resulted from
human abuse of God-given freedom.
~N.T. Wright from The Crown and The Fire

Inundated by constant bad news of the world,
I must cling to the mystery of His magnetism
for my own weaknesses, flaws and bitterness.
He willingly pulls evil onto Himself, out of us.
Hatred and pain and shame and anger disappear
into the vortex of His love and beauty,
the mucky corners of my heart vacuumed spotless.

We are let in on a secret:
He is not sullied by absorbing the dirty messes of our lives.

Created in His image, sustained and loved,
thus reflecting Him,
it is no mystery
we are washed forever clean.

…to bring to light for everyone what is the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God, who created all things…
Ephesians 3:9

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