Tag: seeds

A Swirling of Seeds

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I am here to modestly report
seeing in an orchard
in my town
a goldfinch kissing
a sunflower
again and again
dangling upside down
by its tiny claws
steadying itself by snapping open
like an old-timey fan
its wings
again and again,
until, swooning, it tumbled off
and swooped back to the very same perch,
where the sunflower curled its giant
swirling of seeds
around the bird and leaned back
to admire the soft wind
nudging the bird’s plumage,
and friends I could see
the points on the flower’s stately crown
soften and curl inward
as it almost indiscernibly lifted
the food of its body
to the bird’s nuzzling mouth
whose fervor
I could hear from
oh 20 or 30 feet away
and see from the tiny hulls
that sailed from their
good racket,
which good racket, I have to say
was making me blush,
and rock up on my tippy-toes,
and just barely purse my lips
with what I realize now
was being, simply, glad,
which such love,
if we let it,
makes us feel.
~Ross Gay “Wedding Poem” from Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude

For the last several days
I’ve heard an insistent tapping
at my kitchen window bird feeder.

A flash of yellow feathers makes the racket
drawing my attention;
I figure he wants the feeder refilled.

Yet it is full.

This goldfinch is wanting my attention,
not more sunflower seeds.

When I approach the window,
he wings off,
returning only if I retreat to the shadows.

Then his tapping resumes.

He can see me in the shadows,
watching him watching me.

I think he is simply enjoying making noise,
as his thanks for the feast of seeds
in a world of desperate hunger and despair.

So much like the good racket
we make when we sing in church,
thanking God when His swirling seeds
of love and care are bestowed upon us.

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The Mystery of Anything At All

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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

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

…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

Despite the bad news of the world,
I cling to the mystery of God’s sustaining us
through weaknesses, flaws and bitterness.
He pulls us out of the dark, to His Light.

Hatred and pain and shame and anger disappear
into the vortex of His bright love and beauty,
the mucky corners of our lives wiped 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,
we emerge, hopeful, from the soil
and washed forever clean.

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Stat Sua cuique dies (To each his day is given)
Stat Sua cuique dies (To each his day is given) – Latin, The Aeneid Maél is mé tó féran(‘Tis time that I fare from you)– Old English
Aleto men moi nostos (Lost is my homecoming) -Greek, The Illiad C’est pour cela que je suis née(I was born for this)–French, Joan of Arc Kono michi ya(On this road)Yuki hito nishi ni (Goes no one)– Japanese C’est pour cela que je suis née (I was born for this) – French
Ne me plaignez pas (Do not pity me) – French, Joan of Arc

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Keep Reaching Out

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Under a sky the color of pea soup
she is looking at her work growing away there
actively, thickly like grapevines or pole beans
as things grow in the real world, slowly enough.
If you tend them properly, if you mulch, if you water,
if you provide birds that eat insects a home and winter food,
if the sun shines and you pick off caterpillars,
if the praying mantis comes and the ladybugs and the bees,
then the plants flourish, but at their own internal clock.

Connections are made slowly, sometimes they grow underground.
You cannot tell always by looking what is happening.
More than half the tree is spread out in the soil under your feet.
Penetrate quietly as the earthworm that blows no trumpet.
Fight persistently as the creeper that brings down the tree.
Spread like the squash plant that overruns the garden.
Gnaw in the dark and use the sun to make sugar.

Weave real connections, create real nodes, build real houses.
Live a life you can endure: Make love that is loving.
Keep tangling and interweaving and taking more in,
a thicket and bramble wilderness to the outside but to us
interconnected with rabbit runs and burrows and lairs.

Live as if you liked yourself, and it may happen:
reach out, keep reaching out, keep bringing in.
This is how we are going to live for a long time: not always,
for every gardener knows that after the digging, after the planting,
after the long season of tending and growth, the harvest comes.
~Marge Piercy “The Seven of Pentacles”

Our garden teaches us all kinds of life lessons, thanks to my husband’s hours of hard work preparing the soil, planting carefully and nurturing the emerging seedlings.

No garden tends itself – the growing plants reach out for connection to one another, for stability and companionship. The gardener nurtures, defends and harvests with an eye to preparing for the next growing season.

We who have been planted here need one another, interwoven and linked, both visibly and invisibly. I am woven around you and you around me; together we grow and thrive when tended, and as intended.

But more than anything else, we need our Gardener…

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A Seed of Belief

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When the time’s toxins
have seeped into every cell

and like a salted plot
from which all rain, all green, are gone

I and life are leached
of meaning

somehow a seed
of belief

sprouts the instant
I acknowledge it:

little weedy hardy would-be
greenness

tugged upward
by light

while deep within
roots like talons

are taking hold again
of this our only earth.
~Christian Wiman “When the Time’s Toxins”

True gardeners cannot bear a glove
Between the sure touch and the tender root,
Must let their hands grow knotted as they move
With a rough sensitivity about
Under the earth, between the rock and shoot,
Never to bruise or wound the hidden fruit.
And so I watched my mother’s hands grow scarred,
She who could heal the wounded plant or friend
With the same vulnerable yet rigorous love;
I minded once to see her beauty gnarled,
But now her truth is given me to live,
As I learn for myself we must be hard
To move among the tender with an open hand,
And to stay sensitive up to the end
Pay with some toughness for a gentle world.
~May Sarton “An Observation”

I’m reminded every spring, as my husband’s hands prepare the soil in the garden for that season’s planting, how challenging is the job of the gardener. His hands must fight the chaos of weeds and rocks to prepare a gentle bed for each seed.

A seed is a plain, unadorned and ordinary thing, a little boring even, practically forgotten once it is placed in the ground. Yet the ordinariness is only the outer dress; the extraordinary is contained inside, and within days a tender shoot braves all to come to the surface, bowed and humble. It establishes a tenacious root that ensures survival, grabbing hold in even the most inhospitable ground.

So it is with Jesus whose ordinary origins belied his holiness and majesty. Both hardy root and tender shoot, he reaches up to the heavens while his feet tread the soil,  both at once. His toughness paid for our chance at a more gentle world.

And thanks to Him, we are fed.

For he grew up before him like a young plant,
and like a root out of dry ground;
Isaiah 53:2a

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Blossoming with Loss

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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

photo by Josh Scholten

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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Clouds Gathering Around My Feet

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Like animals moving daily
through the same open field,
it should be easier to distinguish
light from dark, fabrications

from memory, rain on a sliver
of grass from dew appearing
overnight. In these moments
of desperation, a sentence

serves as a halo, the moon
hidden so the stars eclipse
our daily becoming. You think
it should be easier to define

one’s path, but with the clouds
gathering around our feet,
there’s no sense in retracing
where we’ve been or where

your tired body will carry you.
Eventually the birds become
confused and inevitable. Even our
infinite knowledge of the forecast

might make us more vulnerable
than we would be in drawn-out
ignorance. To the sun
all weeds eventually rise up.
~Adam Clay “Our Daily Becoming”

I stroll among clouds surrounding my feet,
tiny puff balls that shatter and fall.

Watching the seeds scatter is a reminder
of the inevitable march of time,
for what will be no more, for what is sure to come

I’m given another day to get it right before I too blow away:
to be fruitful by rising up, my face to the sun, even in my weediness.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ip-fgsXCWd4
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Sunburst Petals

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When I pray I go in, and close the door,
But what, really, do we mean by prayer?
Isn’t it anything done with full attention
Whether sinking into silent depths, or
Relishing a sun-ripe peach, or gazing
At the zinnias freshly picked this early
Morning, these multi-petaled shouts of joy,
Lemon yellow, orange, reds, a carnival of
Flame-filled light, the sweet green scent
Summer flowers.
~Sarah Rossiter “Zinnias”

My father’s mother grew a garden of zinnias
to divide the house from the woods:

pop art tops in every color—cream,
peach, royal purple, and even envy

—the sunburst petals…

the heads little suns you watch die
on the stem if you want the bloom back.
~Tyler Mills “Zinnias”

As an eight year old, I grew zinnias
from a tiny package of seeds tucked inside
a Christmas card by my third grade teacher
whose rapt attention turned to her backyard garden
when school doors closed in the summer.

She nurtured each of us students
like one of her cream-colored zinnia buds
arising boldly on a single sturdy stem,
growing tall almost before her eyes, yet still undefined.

Watered and fed, her warm light shining on our bright faces,
we opened expectantly under her steady gaze,
each one a sunburst bloom smiling back at her,
which kept her coming back, year after year,
to sow a few more celebratory seeds with her sprinkling of wisdom.

Thank you to Chris and Jan Lovegren for sharing their zinnias!

Consider a gift of this new Barnstorming book to someone who loves beautiful pictures and words – available to order here:

The Redeemed World

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You get down on your knees in the dark earth—alone
for hours in hot sun, yanking weed roots, staking trellises,
burning your shoulders, swatting gnats; you strain your muscled
midwestern neck and back, callous your pianist’s hands.

You cut roses back so they won’t fruit, rip out and replace
spent annuals. You fill your garden dense with roots and vines.
And when a humble sprout climbs like a worm up out of death,
you are there to bless it, in your green patch, all spring and summer long,

hose like a scepter, a reliquary vessel; you hum
through the dreamy wilderness—no one to judge, absolve,
or be absolved—purified by labor, confessed by its whisperings, connected to its innocence.

So when you heft a woody, brushy tangle, or stumble
inside grimy, spent by earth, I see all the sacraments in place—
and the redeemed world never smelled so sweet.
~Ken Weisner, “The Gardener” from Anything on Earth.

We are in full-garden produce preservation mode right now on the farm – these are the days when we pick the fruits of Dan’s labors – all the hours he spent this spring preparing the soil with rich compost, meticulously pulling out weeds by the roots, rototilling and cultivating, then staking/stringing/sowing the rows, then standing back to watch the sun and rain coax the seeds from the dark.

All this happens in a mere few weeks – we never tire of this illustration of redemption and renewal we’re shown year after year – how a mess of weeds and dirt can be cleared, refined and cleansed to once again become productive and fruitful, feeding those who hunger – both now and deep into winter and next spring.

It gives me hope; even when I myself am feeling full of weeds and despairingly dirty and overwhelmed, I can be renewed. It takes a persistent Gardener who is willing and eager to prune away what is useless, and sow anew what is needed for me to thrive and produce – His hands and knees are covered with my grime.

And the fruit that results! – so very sweet…

If you enjoy Barnstorming posts like this, you’ll enjoy this new book from Barnstorming, available to order here:

An Ordinary Sunday

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Sometimes I have loved the peacefulness of an ordinary Sunday.
It is like standing in a newly planted garden after a warm rain.
You can feel the silent and invisible life.
~Marilynne Robinson from Gilead

It is ordinary time,
in the church calendar and in my life…

As I am covered with Sabbath rest
quiet and deep
as if planted in soil finally
warming from a too long winter~

I realize there is nothing ordinary
about what is happening
in the church, in the world,
or in me.

We are called by the Light
to push away from darkness,
to reach to the sky,
to grasp and bloom and fruit.

We begin as mere and ordinary seed.

Therefore, nothing is more extraordinary
than an ordinary Sunday.

A new book available from Barnstorming can be ordered here:

The Power of Fluff

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As the days warm and lengthen, the grass
is getting happy almost overnight.
Under my window the first star of spring
opens its eye on the front lawn. Yellow
as butter, it is only one. But it is one,
and in the nature of things, and like
the multiple asterisks seeding the night sky,
it will flourish and take over every
grassy bank in town. I long to be prolific
as the dandelion, spinning pale parachutes
of words, claiming new territory by
the power of fluff. The stars in their courses
have bloomed an unending glory
across the heavens, but here in my yard
a local constellation prepares to launch
multiple, short-lived, radiant coronas
to proclaim the new-sprung season.
~Luci Shaw “Dandelion”

How I loved those spiky suns,   
rooted stubborn as childhood   
in the grass, tough as the farmer’s   
big-headed children—the mats   
of yellow hair, the bowl-cut fringe.   
How sturdy they were and how   
slowly they turned themselves   
into galaxies, domes of ghost stars   
barely visible by day, pale   
cerebrums clinging to life   
on tough green stems.   
Like you.   
Like you, in the end.   
If you were here,   
I’d pluck this trembling globe to show   
how beautiful a thing can be   
a breath will tear away.  
~Jean Nordhaus “A Dandelion for My Mother”

We harbor a dandelion sanctuary,
a safe haven from herbicides and trowels.

The lawn is filled with them now
yellow spots in carpeted green
which close tight at night,
then open each morning
as miniature reflections
of the real dawn.

As a kid, I was paid a nickel
to dig up each long dandelion root,
restoring the blemished green yard
to pristine perfection;
no more yellow splotches,
unruly stems,
trembling transparent globes
releasing scores of
seedy offspring.

But it didn’t last.

The perfect lawn,
like the perfect life
~unbesmirched~
is a myth.

A host of opportunistic seeds
float innocently on the breeze
or lie hidden deep in our soil
ready to spring up again overnight.

Those spunky spiky suns
and ghostly stars of fluff
overwhelm my heart with joy:
they take my breath away
as my breath, in turn,
blows them away.