Tag: renewal

Bones of the Landscape

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I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape — the loneliness of it, the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it, the whole story doesn’t show.
~Andrew Wyeth, artist

How endlessly beautiful is woodland in winter!  Today there is a thin mist; just enough to make a background of tender blue mystery three hundred yards away, and to show any defect in the grouping of the near trees.
~ Gertrude Jekyll, British horticulturalist

There is a stumbling reluctance transitioning from a month of advent expectancy to three months of winter dormancy.  Inevitably there is let-down: the watching and waiting is not over after all.  There is profound loneliness knowing the story continues, hidden from view.

We have been stripped naked as the bare trees right now; our bones, like the trees of the landscape, raising up broken branches and healed fractures of previous winter windstorms.  We no longer have anything to hide behind or among,  our defects are plain to see,  our whole story a mystery as yet untold but impossible to conceal.

Here I am, abundantly flawed with pocks and scars, yet renewed once again.  There are hints of new growth to come when the frost abates and the sap thaws.   I am  prepared to wait an eternity if necessary, for the rest of the story.

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Best Behavior

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Find a quiet rain.  Then a green spruce tree.  You will notice that nearly every needle has been decorated with a tiny raindrop ornament.  Look closely inside the drop and there you are. In color. Upside down. Raindrops have been collecting snapshots since objects and people were placed, to their surprise, here and there on earth.

…even if we are only on display for a moment in a water drop as it clings to a pine needle, it is expected that we be on our best behavior, hair combed, jacket buttoned, no vulgar language.  Smiling is not necessary, but a pleasant attitude is helpful, and would be, I think, appreciated.
~Tom Hennen from “Outdoor Photos”

 

Some days I choose to trudge along dry and cranky — each step an effort, each thought a burden, each moment an opportunity to grump.  It is good to be reminded I am preserved, as is, for an instant, in the camera eye of the raindrops I pass, each snapping a photo of my attitude.

It wouldn’t hurt me to smile, even if the events of the day may not call for it.  At least those smiles, reflected in the lens of each raindrop, will soak the soil when let go to fall earthward. There is no better place for them to bloom and grow, ready for a new day.

 

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Making the Cosmos New

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Grace does not remain outside
or above
or beside nature
but rather permeates
and wholly renews it.
And thus nature,
reborn by grace,
will be brought to its highest revelation.
That situation will again return in which
we serve God freely and happily,
without compulsion or fear,
simply out of love,
and in harmony with our true nature.
Christianity does not introduce
a single substantial foreign element
into the creation.
It creates no new cosmos
but rather makes the cosmos new.
It restores what was corrupted by sin.
It atones the guilty
and cures what is sick;
the wounded it heals.
~Herman Bavinck from “Common Grace”
As we wither, our colors changing
as we die,
we are cured,
our nature reborn
by transforming amazing grace.
Renewed,
we respond
in love.
Let it be with me
as You have said.
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The Philosophic Flower

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There are philosophies as varied as the flowers of the field,
and some of them weeds and a few of them poisonous weeds.
But they none of them create the psychological conditions
in which I first saw,
or desired to see,
the flower.
~G.K.Chesterton

 

The news is filled with poisonous weeds,
disguised as something palatable,
but one taste, one look
and I am toast.

I seek a beauty that is more than petal thin,
weed or not,
where roots reach deep
and colors so vibrant
it renews my heart
and fills my retinas full.

 

 

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The Old Self Shed

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Cast off on a sunny day
onto a warm manure pile,
a wriggled-free fresh snakeskin,
almost covered by my fresh load~
lay blended with old hay, horse hair, shavings,
tucked among what is already digested,
dumped and discarded.
This, an intact hollowed shadow
of a still living creature
who has moved on:
I too need to leave my old self
shrugged off onto the manure pile,
shed when it no longer fits
the ways I’ve grown hallowed,
a fitting remembrance of
who I once was,
yet left behind.
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Go Forward Stumbling

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taken yesterday: what's left of last year's hydrangea
what’s left of last year’s hydrangea blooms in the midst of new spring growth

 

We try to live gracefully
and at peace with our imagined deaths but in truth we go forward
stumbling, afraid of the dark,
of the cold, and of the great overwhelming
loneliness of being last.
~Maxine Kumin from “Death, Etc.”
she passed away at age 88 in February 2014

Solace

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photo by Josh Scholten
photo by Josh Scholten

Don’t say, don’t say there is no water
to solace the dryness at our hearts…

Don’t say, don’t say there is no water.

That fountain is there among its scalloped
green and gray stones,
 
it is still there and always there
with its quiet song and strange power
to spring in us,
 
up and out through the rock.
~Denise Levertov from “The Fountain”
Spring is a time of solace, a rehydration of our dry hearts.  We are sprung from an internal desert by a fountain cascading up and over and through the impenetrable yet smoothed rock of our souls, a perpetual hymn of watery song strengthened by each obstacle, emboldened by every impeding obstruction.
Still there and always there, for when we are most thirsty, for when we hear over and over there is no water.
We know better.

Inner Renewal

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dragonfly wings photo by Josh Scholten

…God’s attention is indeed fixed on the little things. But this is not because God is a great cosmic cop, eager to catch us in minor transgressions, but simply because God loves us–loves us so much that the divine presence is revealed even in the meaningless workings of daily life. It is in the ordinary, the here-and-now, that God asks us to recognize that the creation is indeed refreshed like dew-laden grass that is “renewed in the morning” or to put it in more personal and also theological terms, “our inner nature is being renewed everyday”.
~Kathleen Norris

It is easy to be ground to a pulp by the little things: waiting in line too long, an insistent alarm clock, a mouse (or more) in the house, a third head cold in less than a year.  The small things tend to add up to irritable annoyance and total inability to feel gratitude.

God is in the details, from the dew drop to tear drop and even to nose snot.  It is tempting instead to look past His ubiquitous presence in all things, to seek only the elegant grandeur of creation.   It isn’t all elegance from our limited perspective, but still, it is worthy of His divine attention.

The time has come to be refreshed and renewed in our inner being.
His care is revealed in the tiniest ways.
He has my attention.

photo by Josh Scholten