Ready to Listen

Every morning I sit across from you
at the same small table,
the sun all over the breakfast things—
curve of a blue-and-white pitcher,
a dish of berries—
me in a sweatshirt or robe,
you invisible.

Most days, we are suspended
over a deep pool of silence.
I stare straight through you
or look out the window at the garden,
the powerful sky,
a cloud passing behind a tree.

There is no need to pass the toast,
the pot of jam,
or pour you a cup of tea,
and I can hide behind the paper,
rotate in its drum of calamitous news.

But some days I may notice
a little door swinging open
in the morning air,
and maybe the tea leaves
of some dream will be stuck
to the china slope of the hour—
then I will lean forward,
elbows on the table,
with something to tell you,
and you look up, as always,
your spoon dripping milk, ready to listen.
~Billy Collins “A Portrait of the Reader With a Bowl of Cereal”
from Picnic, Lightning

The smell of that buttered toast simply spoke to Toad,
and with no uncertain voice;
talked of warm kitchens,
of breakfasts on bright frosty mornings,
of cozy parlour firesides on winter evenings,
when one’s ramble was over
and slippered feet were propped on the fender;
of the purring of contented cats,
and the twitter of sleepy canaries.
~Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows

Some of what we do, we do
to make things happen,
the alarm to wake us up, the coffee to perc,
the car to start.


The rest of what we do, we do
trying to keep something from doing something
the skin from aging, the hoe from rusting,
the truth from getting out.


With yes and no like the poles of a battery
powering our passage through the days,
we move, as we call it, forward,
wanting to be wanted,
wanting not to lose the rain forest,
wanting the water to boil,
wanting not to have cancer,
wanting to be home by dark,
wanting not to run out of gas,


as each of us wants the other
watching at the end,
as both want not to leave the other alone,
as wanting to love beyond this meat and bone,
we gaze across breakfast and pretend.

~Miller Williams “Love Poem with Toast” from Some Jazz a While: Collected Poems

“Do you remember the Shire, Mr. Frodo? It’ll be spring soon. And the orchards will be in blossom. And the birds will be nesting in the hazel thicket. And they’ll be sowing the summer barley in the lower fields… and eating the first of the strawberries with cream. Do you remember the taste of strawberries?”
―  J.R.R. Tolkien
from Lord of the Rings

In our despairing moments,
we hold on to memories most precious to us,
recalling what makes each moment,
indeed life itself, special and worthwhile.

It can be something so seemingly simple
becoming cherished and retrievable–
the aroma of cinnamon in a warm kitchen,
the splash of colors in a carefully tended garden spot,
the cooing of mourning doves as light begins to dawn,
the velvety soft of a newborn foal’s fur,
the embrace of welcoming arms.

This morning, dear reader,
I lean forward,
elbows on the table,
with something to tell you,
and you look up, as always,
in the middle of whatever you are doing,
ready to listen.

That is no small thing. Thank you.

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Lost in Woodland Shade

photo of Calypso Bulbosa by Kate Steensma

Though I know well enough
To hunt the Lady’s Slipper now
Is playing blindman’s-buff,
For it was June She put it on
And grey with mist the spider’s lace
Swings in the autumn wind,
Yet through this hill-wood, high and low,
I peer in every place;
Seeking for what I cannot find
I do as I have often done
And shall do while I stay beneath the sun.
~Andrew Young “Lady’s Slipper Orchid”

photo from USNPS

Everything is beautiful and I am so sad.
This is how the heart makes a duet of
wonder and grief. The light spraying
through the lace of the fern is as delicate
as the fibers of memory forming their web
around the knot in my throat. The breeze
makes the birds move from branch to branch
as this ache makes me look for those I’ve lost
in the next room, in the next song, in the laugh
of the next stranger. In the very center, under
it all, what we have that no one can take
away and all that we’ve lost face each other.
It is there that I’m adrift, feeling punctured
by a holiness that exists inside everything.
I am so sad and everything is beautiful.
~Mark Nepo “Adrift” from Inside the Miracle: Enduring Suffering, Approaching Wholeness

Under the pines, near the murmuring brook,
I know the wild orchids grow,
Fair and pure in their shady nook,
A page in God’s own wonderful book
With a message for me to know.

Come in the Spring to that beautiful bower
And pause by the moss and the fern
To study. And know from the little flower
God’s promise of hope is ready to shower
On those who will trust and learn.

Over the land, with colors so bright,
Leaves whirl in the chill, fitful breeze.
The gurgling brook, ice-coated and white;
Ferns, mosses and orchids have vanished from sight,
Dead and lost in the Winter’s first freeze.

In weakening faith and hopeless despair,
Black winters of woe hold my soul.
For death is the end; and each mortal must share
The fate of the orchids that once blossomed there.
Oblivion marketh the goal.

Hold thy hope, faithless soul, for again in the Spring
Neath the pines, the wild orchids will bloom.
Struggle upward toward God, thy Creator and King.
The Saviour is risen and Nature doth sing,
Christ overcomes death and the tomb!

~Joseph Pullman Porter “Wild Orchids”

How strange to find you where I did
along a path beside a road,
your legs in graceful green dancing
to music made by wind and woods.

Like ladies from a bygone age,
you left your slippers there to air
in dappled shade, while you, barefoot,
relaxed your stays, let loose your hair.

The treasures of this world might be
as simple as an orchid’s bloom;
how sad that so much time is spent
in filling coffers for the tomb.

If only life could be so fresh
and free as you in serenade,
we might learn we value most those
things found lost in woodland shade.

~Mike Orlock “Lady Slipper Serenade (in 4/4 time)”

My grandmother’s house where my father was born had been torn down. She sold her property on Fidalgo Island near Anacortes, Washington to a lumber company – this was the house where all four of her babies were born, where she and my grandfather loved and fought and separated and finally loved again, and where we spent chaotic and memorable Thanksgiving and Christmas meals. After Grandpa died, Grandma took on boarders, trying to afford to remain there on the homesteaded wooded acreage on Similk Bay, fronted by meadows where her Scottish Highland cattle grazed. Her own health was suffering and she reached a point when it was no longer possible to make it work. A deal was struck with the lumber company and she moved to a small apartment for the few years left to her, remaining bruised by leaving her farm.

My father realized what selling to a lumber company meant and it was a crushing thought. The old growth woods would soon be stumps on the rocky hill above the bay, opening a view to Mt. Baker to the east, to the San Juan Islands to the north, and presenting an opportunity for development into a subdivision. He woke my brother and me early one Saturday in May and told us we were driving the 120 miles to Anacortes.

He was on a mission.

As a boy growing up on that land, he had wandered the woods, explored the hill, and helped his dad farm the rocky soil. There was only one thing he felt he needed from that farm and he had decided to take us with him, to trespass where he had been born and raised to bring home a most prized treasure–his beloved lady slippers (Calypso bulbosa) from the woods.

These dainty flowers enjoy a spring display known for its brevity–a week or two at the most–and they tend to bloom in small little clusters in the leafy duff mulch of the deep woods, preferring only a little indirect sunlight part of the day.  They are not easy to find unless you know where to look. 

My father remembered exactly where to look.

We hauled buckets up the hill along with spades, looking as if we were about to dig for clams at the ocean. Dad led us up a trail into the thickening foliage, until we had to bushwhack our way into the taller trees where the ground was less brush and more hospitable ground cover. He would stop occasionally to get his bearings as things were overgrown.  We reached a small clearing and he knew we were near.  He went straight to a copse of fir trees standing guard over a garden of lady slippers.

There were almost thirty of them blooming, scattered about in an area the size of my small bedroom.  Each orchid-like pink and lavender blossom had a straight backed stem that held it with sturdy confidence. To me, they looked like they could be little shoes for fairies who may have hung them up while they danced about barefoot.  To my father, they represented the last redeeming vestiges of his often traumatic childhood, and were about to be trammeled by bulldozers.  We set to work gently digging them out of their soft bedding, carefully keeping their bulb-like corms from losing a protective covering of soil and leafy mulch. Carrying them in the buckets back to the car, we felt some vindication that even if the trees were to be lost to the saws, these precious flowers would survive.

When we got home, Dad set to work creating a spot where he felt they could thrive in our own woods. He found a place with the ideal amount of shade and light, with the protection of towering trees and the right depth of undisturbed leaf mulch. We carefully placed the lady slippers in their new home, scattered in a pattern similar to how we found them. Then Dad built a four foot split rail fence in an octagon around them, as a protection from our cattle and a horse who wandered the woods, and as a way to demarcate that something special was contained inside.

The next spring, only six lady slippers bloomed from the original thirty.  Dad was disappointed but hoped another year might bring a resurgence as the flowers established themselves in their new home.  The following year there were only three. A decade later, my father left our farm and family, not looking back.

Sometime after the divorce, when my mother had to sell the farm, I visited our lady slipper sanctuary in the woods for the last time in the middle of May, seeking what I hoped might still be there, but I knew was no longer. 

The split rail fence still stood, guarding nothing but old memories. No lady slippers bloomed. There was not a trace they had ever been there. They had given up and disappeared.

The new owners of the farm surely puzzled over the significance of the small fenced-in area in the middle of our woods. They probably thought it surrounded a graveyard of some sort.

And they would be right – it did.


An embroidery I made for my father after he replanted the lady slippers — on the back I wrote “The miracle of creation recurs each spring in the delicate beauty of the lady slipper – may we ourselves be recreated as well…”
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Bring to Light the Mystery: That Patch of Sunlight

It appears now that there is only one
age and it knows
nothing of age as the flying birds know
nothing of the air they are flying through
or of the day that bears them up
through themselves
and I am a child before there are words
arms are holding me up in a shadow
voices murmur in a shadow
as I watch one patch of sunlight moving
across the green carpet
in a building
gone long ago and all the voices
silent and each word they said in that time
silent now
while I go on seeing that patch of sunlight

~W.S. Merwin, “Still Morning” from The Shadow of Sirius

photo by Barbara Hoelle

Our memories can play tricks.

Just a whiff of a fragrance can trigger an experience of another time and place, a song can transport us to a decade long ago, a momentary sensation will remind us of a past experience long forgotten.

We dwell inside a different age as the years go by, in a body that no longer looks or feels exactly the same, yet our memories take us powerfully back to a special moment that happened before.

For those who struggle with post-trauma recollections, this is a curse to be overcome. For those whose memories bring joy and comfort, they seek to nurture and cherish what has been as if it is still here and now.

Let us remember the Light, just as the poet W.S. Merwin in this poem “Still Morning” remembers the moment of his baptism in a church long gone and whose voices are long since stilled. The Light of that day remains, as fresh today as it was when it moved toward him.

Our memories aren’t tricks, and neither is the Light that shone on us. They sustain us in the here and now.

Our Savior: an ever-moving patch of Light in our lives –
forever radiant.

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…

TEXT
O nata lux de lumine,
Jesu redemptor saeculi,
Dignare clemens supplicum
Laudes precesque sumere.

Qui carne quondam contegi
Dignatus es pro perditis,
Nos membra confer effici
Tui beati corporis.

TRANSLATION
O Light born of Light,
Jesus, redeemer of the world,
Mercifully deign to accept
The praises and prayers of your suppliants.

O you who once deigned to be hidden in flesh
For the sake of the lost,
Grant us to be made members
Of your blessed body.

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No Trifling Matter

For the bark, dulled argent, roundly wrapped
And pigeon-collared.

 
For the splitter-splatter, guttering
Rain-flirt leaves.

 
For the snub and clot of the first green cones,
Smelted emerald, chlorophyll.

 
For the scut and scat of cones in winter,
So rattle-skinned, so fossil-brittle.

 
For the alder-wood, flame-red when torn
Branch from branch.

 
But mostly for the swinging locks
Of yellow catkins.

 
Plant it, plant it,
Streel-head in the rain.

~Seamus Heaney “Planting the Alder” with an explanation of some of the poet’s poetic words here

Alder catkin,
weightless as down,
only blow it away
and all changes utterly,
and life, it appears,
is not such a trifling matter,
when nothing about it
seems merely a trifle.

…an alder catkin
lies in my palm,
and quivers, as if living..

~Yevgeny Yevtushenko from “Alder Catkin” translated by Arthur Boyars and Simon Franklin

The alder tree branches are still winter-naked as their catkins start to emerge, other-worldly in appearance.

The swinging catkins search out every breeze to spread pollen as far as possible, engaging in serious alder-production business. It’s effective, as annually our pastures fill with baby alder trees, eager to form their own dense community in the wet ground of our lowlands.

In its desire to dominate the woodlands and allergies here in the northwest, the alder catkin is nothing to trifle with. Though we don’t want a field full of them, I can’t help but admire them this time of year for their bold color and knobby texture, reminiscent of the upholstery of my family’s well-loved 1950’s davenport sofa which converted to a bed for sick kids or visiting cousins.

Another world, another life-time full of dreams…

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A Thousand Thoughts

Yes, I know my mind is a fickle little bee
doting on a thousand thoughts, but I’m getting
better at chasing my mind back to the moment

so I can see the spiderwebs making hammocks
the color of the moon. My son tries to photograph
a rainbow outside the car window. It’s impossible,

of course, this wonder, the trying to hold it.
But I do what I can. I’ve stopped waiting to enjoy
the cinnamon tea. I take deeper breaths and listen

to the flutter of strings floating down from café
speakers. I don’t want to be a pilgrim of memory
anymore. I want to pop the champagne and salute

this now, and this one with soft brie, dried apricots,
and the sunset celebration another anniversary
of light while I eat fists of grapes the same shade

and sweetness of night. Congratulations, Time. Look
at you and your gorgeous minutes full of everything.
Three cheers for the temp agency that hired this

particular day, these particular clouds, this set
of honking geese migrating through it. I want to be
better at being alive, so I’ve been picturing my heart

as a fox—which means wild and nocturnal, not
terrorizing the neighbor’s chickens. My love says
most equations in quantum field theory give infinity

as an answer, which is not meaningful because all
infinities are the same. In that case, let’s stop reaching
so hard for it. I’ll take this infinity’s morning where

my son and I confused falling leaves for monarchs.
Every time we thought we saw a butterfly, it was
just a leaf with the gentlest falling. We laughed at

every mistake, and he said, That was a beautiful
confusion. 
Sometimes when the moment doesn’t offer
a praying mantis on the porch or a charismatic sky,

I imagine my heart is my son’s face, and I am back
in love with the day, its astonishments like hot-air
balloons, and the daily present of power lines strung

with starlings like dozens of music notes. Let me
be more bound to my living in each moment, be held
by this hum, that cloud, this breath, that shroud.
~Traci Brimhall “This Beautiful Confusion” from Love Prodigal

Some Monday mornings, my mind is going in a thousand different directions. So I follow, knowing there will never be another Monday morning quite like this one. I hope there will be a few hundred more Monday mornings to come.

I want to be better at being alive,
noticing, remembering, connecting,
and grateful to be breathing.

Perhaps you are here because — you do too…

our sons – 1990
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Clinging to the Present Out of Wariness of the Past

I wondered if that was how forgiveness budded;
not with the fanfare of epiphany,
but with pain gathering its things, packing up,
and slipping away unannounced in the middle of the night.

— Khaled Hosseini from 
The Kite Runner

The time is ripe for looking back over the day, the week, the year, and trying to figure out where we have come from and where we are going to, for sifting through the things we have done and the things we have left undone for a clue to who we are and who, for better or worse, we are becoming.

We cling to the present out of wariness of the past.

But there is a deeper need yet, I think, and that is the need—not all the time, surely, but from time to time—to enter that still room within us all where the past lives on as a part of the present, where the dead are alive again, where we are most alive ourselves to turnings and to where our journeys have brought us.

The name of the room is Remember—the room where with patience, with charity, with quietness of heart, we remember consciously to remember the lives we have lived.
~Frederick Buechner from A Room Called Remember

age nine
age 14
age 15

Something went wrong, says the empty house
in the weed-choked yard. Stones in the fields
say he was not a farmer; the still-sealed jars
in the cellar say she left in a nervous haste.
And the child? Its toys are strewn in the yard
like branches after a storm—a rubber cow,
a rusty tractor with a broken plow,
a doll in overalls. Something went wrong, they say.

~Ted Kooser, from “Abandoned Farmhouse” from Sure Signs: New and Selected Poems. 

In 1959, when I was five years old, my father took a new job so our family moved from a large 3 story farm house in a rural community to a 1950’s newer rambler-style home just outside the city limits of the state capitol.

It was a big adjustment to move to a much smaller house without a basement or upper story, no garage, and no large haybarn nor chicken coop. It meant most things we owned didn’t make the move with us.

The rambler had two side-by-side mirror image rooms as the primary central living space between the kitchen/dining area on one side and the hallway to the bedrooms on the other. The living room could only be entered through the front door and the family room was accessed through the back door with a shared sandstone hearth in the center, containing a fireplace in each room. The only opening between the rooms had a folding door shut most of the year. In December, the door was opened to accommodate a Christmas tree, so it sat partially in the living room and depending on its generous width, spilled over into the family room.  That way it was visible from both rooms, and didn’t take up too much floor space.

The living room, because it contained the only carpeting in the house, and our “best” furniture, was strictly off-limits. In order to keep our two matching sectional knobby gray fabric sofas,  a green upholstered chair and gold crushed velvet covered love seat in pristine condition, the room was to be avoided unless we had company. The carpet was never to develop a traffic pattern, there would be no food, beverage, or pet ever allowed in that room, and the front door was not to be used unless a visitor arrived. The hearth never saw a fire lit on that side because of the potential of messy ashes or smoke smell.

This was not a room for toys or games. The chiming clock next to the hearth, wound with weighted cones on the end of chains, called out the hours without an audience.

One week before Christmas, a tree was chosen to fit in the space where it could overflow into the family room. I particularly enjoyed decorating the “family room” side of the tree, using all my favorite ornaments that were less likely to break if they fell on the linoleum floor on that side of the door.

It was almost as if the Christmas tree itself became divided, with a “formal” side in the living room and a “real life” face on the other side where the living (and hurting) was actually taking place.

The tree straddled more than just two rooms. Every year that tree’s branches reached out to shelter a family that was slowly, almost imperceptibly, falling apart, like the fir needles dropping to the floor to be swept away.

Something was going wrong, only I didn’t see it at the time.

Each year since, our Christmas tree, bearing those old ornaments from my childhood, reminds me of that still room of memories. 

No longer am I wary of the past. As I sweep up the fir needles that inevitably drop, I no longer weep.

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You See, I Am Alive

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
~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

photo by Nate Gibson

If I am brutally honest with myself after my recent cardiac brush with my mortality, one of my worst fears is to have lived on this earth for a handful of decades and then pass away forgotten, inconsequential, having left behind no legacy of significance whatsoever. 

I’m well aware it is self-absorbed to feel the need to leave a mark, but a 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 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 this person is long lost and forgotten.

We owe it to our descendants to write down 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, although 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 are just dust here and there is no changing that.

Good thing this is not our only home.  
Good thing we are more than mere memory and dreams. 
Good thing the river of life flows into
an eternity that transcends good works
or long memories or legacies left behind. 
Good thing we are loved that much and always will be.
You see, we are alive, we are alive,
forever and ever, Amen.

I remember your lectures, Professor Scott Momaday, now nearly two years after you passed from this earth at age 89 – your voice, your stories and your poetry live on.

You are alive. You are alive…

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Strung on the Necklace of Days

It is a dark fall day.
The earth is slightly damp with rain.
I hear a jay.
The cry is blue.
I have found you in the story again.
Is there another word for “divine”?
I need a song that will keep sky open in my mind.
If I think behind me, I might break.
If I think forward, I lose now. 
Forever will be a day like this
Strung perfectly on the necklace of days.
Slightly overcast
Yellow leaves
Your jacket hanging in the hallway
Next to mine.

~Joy Harjo “Fall Song”

bluejay photo by Josh Scholten

November 22 always has a sadness about it for those of us who listened to the tragic news reports and experienced the aftermath of that day…

In the seemingly endless,
sometimes bleak string of fall days,
each one differing little from the one before
and the one that comes after,
there is linkage to winter on its way,
inescapable and unrelenting.

If I were to try to stop time now,
hold tight to a particular moment,
this necklace of days would break and scatter,
as a sustaining connection depends
on preserving what was before,
breathing deeply of what is now,
and praying for what is to come.

Each moment
never in isolation from those surrounding it.

(this article about JFK’s granddaughter’s terminal diagnosis was particularly poignant for me this morning)

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A Bleak and Bitter Remembrance

When you go home tell them of us and say –
“For your tomorrow we gave our today”
~John Maxwell Edmonds from “The Kohima Epitaph” 

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.
~Lawrence Binyon from “For the Fallen” (1914)

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.
~LtCol (Dr.) John McCrae from “In Flanders Fields”

We who are left, how shall we look again
Happily on the sun, or feel the rain,
Without remembering how they who went
Ungrudgingly, and spent
Their all for us, loved, too, the sun and rain?

A bird upon the rain-wet lilac sings —
But we, how shall we turn to little things
And listen to the birds and winds and streams
Made holy by their dreams,
Nor feel the heartbreak in the heart of things?

~Wilfred Wilson Gibson “A Lament”

November pierces with its bleak remembrance
Of all the bitterness and waste of war.
Our silence tries but fails to make a semblance
Of that lost peace they thought worth fighting for.
Our silence seethes instead with wraiths and whispers,
And all the restless rumour of new wars,
The shells are falling all around our vespers,
No moment is unscarred, there is no pause,
In every instant bloodied innocence
Falls to the weary earth ,and whilst we stand
Quiescence ends again in acquiescence,
And Abel’s blood still cries in every land
One silence only might redeem that blood
Only the silence of a dying God.
~Malcolm Guite “Silence: a Sonnet for Remembrance Day”

To our military veterans here and abroad –
in deep appreciation and gratitude–
for the freedoms you have defended on behalf of us all:

No one is left untouched and unscarred in the bitterness of war.

My father was one of the fortunate ones who came home, returning to a quiet farm life after three years serving in the Pacific with the Marines Corp from 1942 to 1945.  Hundreds of thousands of his colleagues didn’t come home, dying on beaches and battlefields.  Tens of thousands more came home forever marked, through physical or psychological injury, by the experience of war and witness of death and mayhem all around them.

No matter how one views wars our nation has fought and may be obligated to fight in the future, we must support and care for the men and women who have made, on our behalf, the commitment and sacrifice to be on the front line for freedom’s sake.

Even our God died so we could stop fighting each other (and Him). What a waste we have not stopped to listen and understand His sacrifice enough to finally lay down our weapons against one another forever.

AI image created for this post

Support for wounded veterans:

Disabled American Veterans

Disabled Veterans National Foundation

Wounded Warrior Project

To Be Remembered…

My grandfather stands on the front porch
watching the dogs come back, reassembled

from hair and grit and eyeteeth. Now
the twin mares browse by the fence

in their coats of dust. Nobody asks
what they mean, appearing so suddenly

when nobody needed them, or called.
In the back yard, the buried people —

great-grandmothers in spectator pumps,
the great-grandfather who died of sneezing,

the first baby, never named —
stay buried. It’s not their overshoes

lost in the grass behind the smokehouse,
not their faces alive in anyone’s

memory. But my mother waits
in the pecan tree’s fingered shadow,

holding a broken milk jug full
of daylilies, waiting as if

she wanted someone to tell her again
it’s all right to be born now,

now is as good a time as any.
In a month we’ll find my grandfather’s glasses

in their case under the front seat
of his car. “Oh goodness,” my aunt will say,

as if it were a matter of his
forgetting them. As if we could

give them back. We’re all convinced
we’ve missed the moment. We forget

that pause while a soul undoes
its buttons, the world falls away,

and one by one we step out
into this death, to be remembered.

~Sally Thomas “Reunion”

The sunlight now lay over the valley perfectly still.
I went over to the graveyard beside the church and found them under the old cedars…
I am finding it a little hard to say that I felt them resting there,
but I did…
I saw that, for me, this country would always be populated with presences and absences,
presences of absences,
the living and the dead.
The world as it is would always be a reminder of the world that was, and of the world that is to come.
Wendell Berry in Jayber Crow

When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened
or full of argument.

I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.
~Mary Oliver from “When Death Comes”

God is at home.
It is we who have gone out for a walk.
~Meister Eckhart

And He awaits for our return.
He keeps the light on,
so we can find our way back,
when we are weary, or fearful or hungry
or simply longing for reunion,
to be remembered.

I think of those who wait for me on the other side,
including our baby lost before birth over 42 years ago.

I know God watches over all these reunions;
He knows the moment when our fractured hearts
heal whole once again.

I will see you soon enough, sweet ones. Soon enough.

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