I let her garden go. let it go, let it go How can I watch the hummingbird Hover to sip With its beak’s tip The purple bee balm—whirring as we heard It years ago? The weeds rise rank and thick let it go, let it go Where annuals grew and burdock grows, Where standing she At once could see The peony, the lily, and the rose Rise over brick She’d laid in patterns. Moss let it go, let it go Turns the bricks green, softening them By the gray rocks Where hollyhocks That lofted while she lived, stem by tall stem, Blossom with loss. ~Donald Hall, “Her Garden” from White Apples and the Taste of Stone
As fall now brings gray mornings heavy with clouds and tear-streaked windows, I pause, melancholy at the passage of time.
Whether to grieve over another hour passed another breath exhaled another broken heart beat
Or to climb my way out of deepless dolor by starting the work of planting next spring’s garden
It takes sweat and dirty hands and yes, tears from heaven to make it flourish, but even so – just maybe – my memories so carefully planted like seeds might blossom fully from the soil of loss.
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When the wind turns and asks, in my father’s voice, Have you prayed?
I know three things. One: I’m never finished answering to the dead.
Two: A man is four winds and three fires. And the four winds are his father’s voice, his mother’s voice . . .
Or maybe he’s seven winds and ten fires. And the fires are seeing, hearing, touching, dreaming, thinking . . . Or is he the breath of God?
When the wind turns traveler and asks, in my father’s voice, Have you prayed? I remember three things.
One: A father’s love is milk and sugar, two-thirds worry, two-thirds grief, and what’s left over is trimmed and leavened to make the bread the dead and the living share.
And patience? That’s to endure the terrible leavening and kneading.
And wisdom? That’s my father’s face in sleep.
When the wind asks, Have you prayed? I know it’s only me reminding myself
a flower is one station between earth’s wish and earth’s rapture, and blood was fire, salt, and breath long before it quickened any wand or branch, any limb that woke speaking. It’s just me in the gowns of the wind,
or my father through me, asking, Have you found your refuge yet? asking, Are you happy?
Strange. A troubled father. A happy son. The wind with a voice. And me talking to no one. ~Li Young Lee “Have You Prayed?”
I pray because I can’t help myself. I pray because I’m helpless. I pray because the need flows out of me all the time — waking and sleeping. It doesn’t change God — it changes me. ~C.S. Lewis
I never did hear my father pray out loud except for saying grace together as a family before our dinner meal. Once he described a prayer he uttered while hunkering in a trench on the island of Tarawa during WWII: if God could see him safe through the three years of combat, he would turn his life to over to God and become a preacher of the Word.
He came home safe, his body still whole but he could see the harsh reality of his foxhole promise: agriculture teachers made better incomes than preachers. He had a family to support so he became a high school FFA teacher. I’m not sure he ever forgave himself for not keeping his word, even when God did. I figure the world needs good farmers as much as good preachers and he trained his share of farmers over the decades, including me.
I learned to pray out loud at our small church as we spend part of every evening service praying out loud for the needs of our church people, our community and our world. It still does not come easily or naturally to me, yet I hope our children, having heard their parents pray out loud, have learned they are not just talking to the wind when they speak to God aloud, when helpless, when weary, when joyful, when thankful.
Praying changes everything.
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She sees rain coming like a pillar of smoke, gliding across the west field, a cloud bursting full, the air already moist, pots of mint stirring in the window, finches tucked away under the porch eaves. Wind rushes through the open parlor door, knocks over the jar of tiger lilies without breaking glass. Water drips to pine floor planks. She pulls off her apron, stops at the prone lilies, hand raised recalls the reverend’s picture of the wife of Lot, the woman who looked back, then turned in to the salt that begins to seep from her own eyes. How could she not look back? ~Lonnie Hull DuPont “She Sees Rain Coming” from She Calls the Moon by Its Name
All morning with dry instruments The field repeats the sound Of rain From memory And in the wall The dead increase their invisible honey It is August The flocks are beginning to form I will take with me the emptiness of my hands What you do not have you find everywhere ~W.S. Merwin “Provision”
My mistakes can’t be hidden once I take the bite and realize what I have done. There is no going back, retrieving harsh words spoken, asking for a re-do, or wishing things had worked out differently.
When I’m wrong, I must admit it and not look back. I come with empty hands, realizing what I have to give is meager indeed. All I have is my regret and sorrow, and that is all God needs to take my hand so it is no longer empty.
What I do not have, what I do not know, what I cannot be on my own — I will find in Him, and He is suddenly everywhere I look.
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To go in the dark with a light is to know the light. To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight, and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings, and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings. ~Wendell Berry “To Know the Dark” from Soul Food – Nourishing Poems for Starved Minds
photo by Bob Tjoelker
(In my sleep I dreamed this poem)
Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness.
It took me years to understand that this, too, was a gift. ~Mary Oliver “The Uses of Sorrow”
When the canvas frays In the currach of thought And a stain of ocean Blackens beneath you, May there come across the waters A path of yellow moonlight To bring you safely home. ~John O’Donohue from “Beannacht”
Ask what the moon has witnessed. Ask what we, as fallen creatures, have witnessed. Darkness was not banished by God in the beginning, so we might search, blinded, for Him.
We are promised this in the Word: “and night will be no more. They will need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light… Revelation 22:5.
The Word in the beginning set a dark universe in motion. The Word is both flesh and Savior to a world dwelling in darkness. The Word as Spirit thrives eternally to enlighten our hearts, our minds and hands.
Darkness is not banished. But it is overcome. And so, we shall have a lit pathway leading us home.
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I saw a deer skeleton gracing the roadside and didn’t stop to wonder where the flesh had gone, why just a tuft of fur clung, a bit of tail. Didn’t pause to ponder its change from leaping-warmth to cold, clean bones. Didn’t stop but glimpsed crisp, dark lines against snow, rib cage, long legs, perfect spine— what we with mounded dirt, neat lawn, and flowered stones seek so hard to hide— I drove quickly by. ~Laura Foley, “Intuition” from It’s This
I drive a night-darkened country road, white lines sweeping past, aware of advancing frost in the evening haze, anxious to return home to fireplace light.
Nearing a familiar corner, a stop sign looms, to the right, a rural cemetery sits silently expectant.
Open iron gates and tenebrous headstones, in the middle path, incongruous, a car’s headlights beam bright. I slow, thinking: lovers or vandals might seek inky cover of night.
Instead, these lights illuminate a lone figure, kneeling graveside, one hand resting heavily on a stone, head bowed in prayer.
A stark moment of solitary sorrow, invisible grieving of the heart focused in twin beams, impossible to hide.
A benediction of mourning; light piercing the heart’s blackness, as gentle fingertips trace the engraved letters of a beloved name.
As an uneasy witness, I withdraw as if touched myself and drive on into the night, struggling to see through the thickening mist of my eyes and the road.
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The whole idea of it makes me feel like I’m coming down with something, something worse than any stomach ache or the headaches I get from reading in bad light- a kind of measles of the spirit, a mumps of the psyche, a disfiguring chicken pox of the soul.
You tell me it is too early to be looking back, but that is because you have forgotten the perfect simplicity of being one and the beautiful complexity introduced by two. But I can lie on my bed and remember every digit. At four I was an Arabian wizard. I could make myself invisible by drinking a glass of milk a certain way. At seven I was a soldier, at nine a prince.
But now I am mostly at the window watching the late afternoon light. Back then it never fell so solemnly against the side of my tree house, and my bicycle never leaned against the garage as it does today, all the dark blue speed drained out of it.
This is the beginning of sadness, I say to myself, as I walk through the universe in my sneakers. It is time to say good-bye to my imaginary friends, time to turn the first big number.
It seems only yesterday I used to believe there was nothing under my skin but light. If you cut me I could shine. But now when I fall upon the sidewalks of life, I skin my knees. I bleed. ~Billy Collins “On Turning Ten”
photo by Danyale Tamminga
No matter how hard you try to be what you once were, you can only be what you are here and now. Time hypnotizes. When you’re nine, you think you’ve always been nine years old and will always be. When you’re thirty, it seems you’ve always been balanced there on that bright rim of middle life. And then when you turn seventy, you are always and forever seventy. You’re in the present, you’re trapped in a young now or an old now, but there is no other now to be seen. ~ Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine
Some people turn sad awfully young. No special reason, it seems, but they seem almost to be born that way. They bruise easier, tire faster, cry quicker, remember longer and, as I say, get sadder younger than anyone else in the world. I know, for I’m one of them. ~Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine
Some reflections on moving from one decade of life to the next:
Turning ten is a big deal, no going back to single digits. Turning twenty is a bid goodbye to a fleeting childhood. Turning thirty is down to business of family, job and debt. Turning forty is a mid-life muddle, a surging forth into the second half. Turning fifty is settling in while finding the nest emptying. Turning sixty is grateful hope for a fruitful third life trimester. Turning seventy is just around the corner – there is no other now. Turning eighty, ninety or hundred would be pure gift of grace.
I hope once again, as when I was nine, I might only bleed out rays of light when cut – I pray these final decades shine bright with meaning and purpose.
I like to cry. After I cry hard it’s like it’s morning again and I’m starting the day over. ~Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine
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When great trees fall, rocks on distant hills shudder, lions hunker down in tall grasses, and even elephants lumber after safety.
When great trees fall in forests, small things recoil into silence, their senses eroded beyond fear.
When great souls die, the air around us becomes light, rare, sterile. We breathe, briefly. Our eyes, briefly, see with a hurtful clarity. Our memory, suddenly sharpened, examines, gnaws on kind words unsaid, promised walks never taken.
Great souls die and our reality, bound to them, takes leave of us. Our souls, dependent upon their nurture, now shrink, wizened. Our minds, formed and informed by their radiance, fall away. We are not so much maddened as reduced to the unutterable ignorance of dark, cold caves.
And when great souls die, after a period peace blooms, slowly and always irregularly. Spaces fill with a kind of soothing electric vibration. Our senses, restored, never to be the same, whisper to us. They existed. They existed. We can be. Be and be better. For they existed. ~ Maya Angelou “When Great Trees Fall”
It sounded like July 4 fireworks lighting up the evening
a pop, then silence- a crack, then several more.
I look out the kitchen window – the old Spitzenburg tree had fallen, irrevocably split and splintered.
Neither wind, nor lightning-felled, simply toppled by old age and inner rot
It lies still, its hollowed trunk like a brittle bone broken
Given up and given in after decades of battering winter wind storms
Instead it fell in a fragile fruiting finale, pulled up by the roots
coming for to carry me home at twilight’s last gleaming.
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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”
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 her 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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…to break through earth and stone of the faithless world back to the cold sepulchre, tearstained stifling shroud; to break from them back into breath and heartbeat, and walk the world again, closed into days and weeks again, wounds of His anguish open, and Spirit streaming through every cell of flesh so that if mortal sight could bear to perceive it, it would be seen His mortal flesh was lit from within, now, and aching for home. He must return, first, In Divine patience, and know hunger again, and give to humble friends the joy of giving Him food – fish and a honeycomb. ~Denise Levertov “Ikon: The Harrowing of Hell” from A Door in the Hive
The Holy Saturday of our life must be the preparation for Easter, the persistent hope for the final glory of God. The virtue of our daily life is the hope which does what is possible and expects God to do the impossible. To express it somewhat paradoxically, but nevertheless seriously: the worst has actually already happened; we exist, and even death cannot deprive us of this. Now is the Holy Saturday of our ordinary life, but there will also be Easter, our true and eternal life. ~Karl Rahner “Holy Saturday” in The Great Church Year
This is the day in between when nothing makes sense: we are lost, hopeless, grieving,aching.
We are brought to our senses by this one Death, this premeditated killing, this senseless act that darkened the skies, shook the earth and tore down the curtained barriers to the Living Eternal God.
The worst has already happened, despite how horrific are the constant tragic events filling our headlines.
Today, this Holy Saturday we are in between, stumbling in the darkness but aware of hints of light, of buds, of life, of promised fruit to come.
The best has already happened; it happened even as we remained oblivious to its impossibility.
We move through this Saturday, doing what is possible even when it feels senseless, even as we feel split apart, torn and sundered.
Tomorrow it will all make sense: our hope brings us face to face with our God who is and was and does the impossible.
This year’s Lenten theme: So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal. 2 Corinthians 4: 18
But when the melancholy fit shall fall Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud, That fosters the droop-headed flowers all, And hides the green hill in an April shroud; Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose, Or on the rainbow of the salt sand-wave, Or on the wealth of globed peonies; ~John Keats from “Ode on Melancholy”
I eat oatmeal for breakfast. I make it on the hot plate and put skimmed milk on it. I eat it alone. I am aware it is not good to eat oatmeal alone. Its consistency is such that is better for your mental health if somebody eats it with you. That is why I often think up an imaginary companion to have breakfast with. Possibly it is even worse to eat oatmeal with an imaginary companion. Nevertheless, yesterday morning, I ate my oatmeal porridge, as he called it, with John Keats. Keats said I was absolutely right to invite him: due to its glutinous texture, gluey lumpishness, hint of slime, and unusual willingness to disintegrate, oatmeal should not be eaten alone… ~Galway Kinnell from “Oatmeal”
Oatmeal porridge eaten in melancholy, among poets and emerging peonies, hail-crushed blooms and storm-crossed hills, while nations and individuals remain at war:
this is the week of walking through the suffering of our Redeemer.
Glutted with sadness among companions: I am not alone in feeling the sorrow is already too much to be borne on a holy Tuesday morning with more yet to come~~ nothing more need be said.
I do what I can to open my eyes and my heart to understand how and why Christ has done what He must to save us from ourselves.
This year’s Lenten theme: So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal. 2 Corinthians 4: 18
