Tag: sorrow

Wondering Where Life Has Gone

barnstormingblog2 Comments

For to come upon warblers in early May was to forget time and death.—Theodore Roethke

Every poem of death        
should start
with my mother’s love        
for birds.
Finches and waxwings        
her favorites,
though she wasn’t        
one to quibble;
an eagle dragging a carp        
across the sky
would do.

There are worse things        
than being dead.
You might be swallowed   
by the daily minutia
of the great mundane,        
to be spit up
years later        
wondering where
your life has gone.

But loving something        
can save you:
the way finches        
stack a feeder,
meddle in each other’s        
business until
a woodpecker crashes in,       
littering surrounding
shrubs with wings.

Last summer my wife        
found a hummingbird
on Mount Pisgah.        
Its emerald wings trembled
as its feet tried to grasp        
her fingers.
A ranger said        
that their lives
are so short anyway.        
What a curious reply,
I thought, but later        
reconsidered.
Perhaps any time       
 being a hummingbird
is enough.
~Bill Brown “With the Help of Birds”

photo by Josh Scholten
photo by Josh Scholten

That long-ago morning at Ruth’s farm
when I hid in the wisteria
and watched hummingbirds. I thought
the ruby or gold that gleamed on their throats
was the honeyed blood of flowers.
They would stick their piercing beaks
into a crown of petals until their heads
disappeared. The blossoms blurred into wings,
and the breathing I heard
was the thin, moving stems of wisteria.
That night, my face pressed against the window,
I looked out into the dark
where the moon drowned in the willows
by the pond. My heart, bloodstone,
turned. That long night, the farm,
those jeweled birds, all these gone years.
The horses standing quiet and huge
in the moon-crossing blackness.
~Joseph Stroud “First Song”

Birds are everywhere this time of year – I keep my phone handy with the Merlin App open from Cornell Lab, so I know who I’m hearing.
From the robins and sparrows, to warblers and thrushes, along with the chittering bald eagles nesting by the pond across the road, it is quite a symphony to witness in the early morning and at sunset.

The app even tries to identify a woodpecker’s rapping and a hummingbird’s buzz.

There was a time not long ago when I was too busy with daily details to pay much attention to the awesome variety of creatures around me.

Once it hit me what I was missing, I started watching, listening and being part of all this life rather than wondering too late where life had gone.

How sobering one day to find a hummingbird dead in the dirt,
once a dear little bird of motor and constant motion,
lying stilled and silenced
as if simply dropped from the sky,
a wee bit of fluff and stardust.

Then a friend pointed out a hummingbird nest high in a tree.
And so it is the way of things…

We are here and gone.
Beauty hatched, grown and flown, then grounded.
…but not forgotten.

AI image created for this post
One-Time
Monthly
Yearly

Make a one-time or recurring donation to support daily Barnstorming posts

Make a monthly donation

Make a yearly donation

Choose an amount

$10.00
$25.00
$50.00
$5.00
$15.00
$100.00
$5.00
$15.00
$100.00

Or enter a custom amount

$

Your contribution is deeply appreciated.

Your contribution is appreciated.

Your contribution is appreciated.

DonateDonate monthlyDonate yearly

Trying Not to Cry

barnstormingblog1 Comment

People have said, “Don’t cry” to other people for years and years, and all it has ever meant is, “I’m too uncomfortable when you show your feelings.  Don’t cry.”  I’d rather have them say, “Go ahead and cry.  I’m here to be with you.”

~Mister Fred Rogers

I cry easily, always have. Certain songs and hymns will trigger tears, and of course, any rituals surrounding baptisms, funerals, weddings, and graduations.

Tears don’t bother me, whether they are my own or someone else’s. My medical office and exam rooms were always well- stocked with boxes of tissues as a safe place to cry it out.

One of my routine mental health history questions was “what will bring tears to your eyes – dicing onions doesn’t count?”  

Some patients would look at me blankly, not sure they ever remember crying, and others will weep at the mere suggestion.

No matter what the reason for someone’s tears, it is a powerful outward expression of human feeling, like a laugh or a grimace of pain. I watch for those cues and sometimes feel their emotion as surely as if it were my own.

Even tears can bring peace – like a river.

I am with you.  And always intend to be.

One-Time
Monthly
Yearly

Make a one-time donation to support daily Barnstorming posts

Make a monthly donation

Make a yearly donation

Choose an amount

$10.00
$25.00
$50.00
$5.00
$15.00
$100.00
$5.00
$15.00
$100.00

Or enter a custom amount

$

Your contribution is deeply appreciated.

Your contribution is appreciated.

Your contribution is appreciated.

DonateDonate monthlyDonate yearly

Where You Go, I Will Go: The In-Between

barnstormingblog1 Comment

Here at the centre everything is still
Before the stir and movement of our grief
Which bears it’s pain with rhythm, ritual,
Beautiful useless gestures of relief.
So they anoint the skin that cannot feel
Soothing his ruined flesh with tender care,
Kissing the wounds they know they cannot heal,
With incense scenting only empty air.
He blesses every love that weeps and grieves
And makes our grief the pangs of a new birth.
The love that’s poured in silence at old graves
Renewing flowers, tending the bare earth,
Is never lost. In him all love is found
And sown with him, a seed in the rich ground.
~Malcolm Guite “Station XIV of the Cross”

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

I said to my mind, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love
For love would be love of the wrong thing; yet there is faith
But the faith and the hope and the love are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be light, and the stillness the dancing.
~T. S. Eliot, from “East Coker”  The Four Quartets

The happy ending has never been easy to believe in.
After the Crucifixion the defeated little band of disciples
had no hope, no expectation of Resurrection.
Everything they believed in had died on the cross with Jesus.
The world was right, and they had been wrong.
Even when the women told the disciples
that Jesus had left the stone-sealed tomb,
the disciples found it nearly impossible to believe
that it was not all over.
The truth was, it was just beginning.
Madeleine L’Engle from “Waiting for Judas” in Plough Magazine

This in-between day
after all had gone so wrong:
the rejection, the denials,
the trumped-up charges,
the beatings, the burden,
the jeering, the thorns,
the nails, the thirst,
the despair of being forsaken.

This in-between day
before all will go so right:
the forgiveness and compassion,
the grace and sacrifice,
the debt paid in full,
the immovable stone rolled away,
our name on His lips,
our hearts burning
to hear His words.

What does it take to move the stone?
When it is an effort to till the untillable,
creating a place where simple seed
can drop, be covered and sprout and thrive,
it takes muscle and sweat and blisters and tears.

What does it take to move the stone?
When it is a day when no one will speak out of fear,
the silent will be moved to cry out
the truth, heard and known and never forgotten.

What does it take to move the stone?
When it is a day when all had given up,
gone behind locked doors in grief.

When two came to tend the dead,
there would be no dead to tend.

Only a gaping hole left
Only an empty tomb
Only a weeping weary silence
broken by Love calling our name
and we turn to greet Him
as if hearing it for the first time.

We cannot imagine what is to come
in the dawn tomorrow as
the stone lifted and rolled,
giving way so our separation is bridged,
darkness overwhelmed by light,
the crushed and broken rising to dance,
and inexplicably,
from the waiting stillness He stirs
and we, finding death emptied,
greet Him with trembling
and are forever moved,
just like the stone.

This year’s Lenten theme:

…where you go I will go…
Ruth 1:16

One-Time
Monthly
Yearly

Make a one-time or recurring donation to support daily Barnstorming posts

Make a monthly donation

Make a yearly donation

Choose an amount

$10.00
$25.00
$50.00
$5.00
$15.00
$100.00
$5.00
$15.00
$100.00

Or enter a custom amount

$

Your contribution is deeply appreciated.

Your contribution is appreciated.

Your contribution is appreciated.

DonateDonate monthlyDonate yearly

Where You Go, I Will Go: Beaten to Death by the Whole World

barnstormingblog2 Comments
frost125143

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
    Why are you so far from saving me,
    so far from my cries of anguish?
2 My God, I cry out by day, but you do not answer,
    by night, but I find no rest.

I am poured out like water,
    and all my bones are out of joint.
My heart has turned to wax;
    it has melted within me.
15 My mouth is dried up like a potsherd,
    and my tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth;
    you lay me in the dust of death.

16 Dogs surround me,
    a pack of villains encircles me;
    they pierce my hands and my feet.
17 All my bones are on display;
    people stare and gloat over me.
18 They divide my clothes among them
    and cast lots for my garment.

19 But you, Lord, do not be far from me.
    You are my strength; come quickly to help me.
~Psalm 22: 1-2, 14-19


  his appearance was so disfigured beyond that of any human being
    and his form marred beyond human likeness—
 so he will sprinkle many nations,
    and kings will shut their mouths because of him.
For what they were not told, they will see,
    and what they have not heard, they will understand.
Isaiah 52: 13-15

When I was wounded
whether by God, the devil, or myself
—I don’t know yet which—
it was seeing the sparrows again
and clumps of clover, after three days,
that told me I hadn’t died.
When I was young,
all it took were those sparrows,
those lush little leaves,
for me to sing praises,
dedicate operas to the Lord.
But a dog who’s been beaten
is slow to go back to barking
and making a fuss over his owner
—an animal, not a person
like me who can ask:
Why do you beat me?
Which is why, despite the sparrows and the clover,
a subtle shadow still hovers over my spirit.
May whoever hurt me, forgive me.
~Adelia Prado “Divine Wrath” translated from Brazilian Portuguese by Ellen Doré Watson

*************************************

“My God, My God,” goes Psalm 22, “hear me, why have you forsaken me?”  

This is the anguish all we of Godforsaken heart know well. But hear the revelation to which Christ directs us, further in the same psalm:

For He has not despised nor scorned the beggar’s supplication,
Nor has He turned away His face from me;
And when I cried out to Him, He heard me.

He hears us, and he knows, because he has suffered as one Godforsaken. Which means that you and I, even in our darkest hours, are not forsaken. Though we may hear nothing, feel nothing, believe nothing, we are not forsaken, and so we need not despair.

And that is everything.

That is Good Friday and it is hope, it is life in this darkened age, and it is the life of the world to come.
~Tony Woodlief from “We are Not Forsaken”

*******************************

Emmett Till’s mother
speaking over the radio

She tells in a comforting voice
what it was like to touch her dead boy’s face,

how she’d lingered and traced
the broken jaw, the crushed eyes–

the face that badly beaten, disfigured—
before confirming his identity.

And then she compares his face to
the face of Jesus, dying on the cross.

This mother says no, she’d not recognize
her Lord, for he was beaten far, far worse

than the son she loved with all her heart.
For, she said, she could still discern her son’s curved earlobe,

but the face of Christ
was beaten to death by the whole world.
~Richard Jones “The Face” from Between Midnight and Dawn

******************************

In a daring and beautiful creative reversal,
God takes the worse we can do to Him
and turns it into the very best He can do for us.
~Malcolm Guite from The Word in the Wilderness

IMG_6229

Strangely enough~
it is the nail,
not the hammer,
that fastens us together~
becoming the glue,
the security,
the permanence of
solid foundation
and strong supports,
or protecting roof.

The hammer is only a tool
to pound in the nail
to where it binds so tightly;
the nail can’t blend in or be forgotten,
where the hole it leaves behind
is a forever wounded reminder
of what the hammer has done,
yet, how thoroughly
the hammer, and we, are forgiven.

nailhole

This year’s Lenten theme:

…where you go I will go…
Ruth 1:16

One-Time
Monthly
Yearly

Make a one-time or recurring donation to support daily Barnstorming posts

Make a monthly donation

Make a yearly donation

Choose an amount

$10.00
$25.00
$50.00
$5.00
$15.00
$100.00
$5.00
$15.00
$100.00

Or enter a custom amount

$

Your contribution is deeply appreciated.

Your contribution is appreciated.

Your contribution is appreciated.

DonateDonate monthlyDonate yearly

Where You Go, I Will Go: The Lost Are Like This

barnstormingblog2 Comments

I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.
What hours, O what black hours we have spent
This night! what sights you, heart, saw; ways you went!
And more must, in yet longer light’s delay.

With witness I speak this. But where I say
Hours I mean years, mean life. And my lament
Is cries countless, cries like dead letters sent
To dearest him that lives alas! away.

 I am gall, I am heartburn. God’s most deep decree
Bitter would have me taste: my taste was me;
Bones built in me, flesh filled, blood brimmed the curse.

Selfyeast of spirit a dull dough sours. I see
The lost are like this, and their scourge to be
As I am mine, their sweating selves; but worse.
~Gerard Manley Hopkins “I wake and feel the fell of dark”

Surfacing to the street from a thirty two hour hospital shift usually means my eyes blink mole-like, adjusting to searing daylight after being too long in darkened windowless halls.  This particular January day is different.   As the doors open, I am immersed in a subdued gray Seattle afternoon, with horizontal rain soaking my scrubs.

Finally remembering where I had parked my car in pre-dawn dark the day before, I start the ignition, putting the windshield wipers on full speed.  I merge onto the freeway, pinching myself to stay awake long enough to reach my apartment and my pillow.

The freeway is a flowing river current of head and tail lights.  Semitrucks toss up tsunami waves cleared briefly by my wipers frantically whacking back and forth.

Just ahead in the lane to my right, a car catches my eye — it looks just like my Dad’s new Buick.  I blink to clear my eyes and my mind, switching lanes to get behind.  The license plate confirms it is indeed my Dad, oddly 100 miles from home in the middle of the week.  I smiled, realizing he and Mom have probably planned to surprise me by taking me out for dinner.

I decide to surprise them first, switching lanes to their left and accelerating up alongside.  As our cars travel side by side in the downpour,  I glance over to my right to see if I can catch my Dad’s eye through streaming side windows.  He is looking away to the right at that moment, obviously in conversation.  It is then I realize something is amiss.  When my Dad looks back at the road, he is smiling in a way I have never seen before.  There are arms wrapped around his neck and shoulder, and a woman’s auburn head is snuggled into his chest.

My mother’s hair is gray.

My initial confusion turns instantly to fury.  Despite the rivers of rain obscuring their view, I desperately want them to see me.  I think about honking,  I think about pulling in front of them so my father would know I have seen and I know.  I think about ramming them with my car so that we’d perish all, unrecognizable, in an explosive storm-soaked mangle.

At that moment, my father glances over at me and our eyes meet across the lanes.  His face is a mask of betrayal, bewilderment and then shock, and as he tenses, she straightens up and looks at me quizzically.

I can’t bear to look any longer.

I leave them behind, speeding beyond, splashing them with my wake.  Every breath burns my lungs and pierces my heart.  I can not distinguish whether the rivers obscuring my view are from my eyes or my windshield.

Somehow I made it home to my apartment, my heart still pounding in my ears.  The phone rings and remains unanswered.

I throw myself on my bed, bury my wet face in my pillow and pray for sleep without dreams,
without secrets,
without lies,
without the burden of knowing a truth
I alone now knew
and wished I didn’t..

Postscript:
I didn’t tell anyone what I saw that day. My father never asked.
He divorced my mother, and was remarried quickly,
my mother and two families shattered as a result.
Ten years later, his second wife died due to a relentless cancer, and he returned to my mother, asking her forgiveness and wanting to remarry. Within months, he too was diagnosed with cancer and Mom nursed him through his treatment, remission, recurrence and then hospice.

We became a family again, not the same as before,
yet put back together for good reason – forgiving and forgiven.

This year’s Lenten theme:

…where you go I will go…
Ruth 1:16

AI image created for this post
One-Time
Monthly
Yearly

Make a one-time or recurring donation to support daily Barnstorming posts

Make a monthly donation

Make a yearly donation

Choose an amount

$10.00
$25.00
$50.00
$5.00
$15.00
$100.00
$5.00
$15.00
$100.00

Or enter a custom amount

$

Your contribution is deeply appreciated.

Your contribution is appreciated.

Your contribution is appreciated.

DonateDonate monthlyDonate yearly

Where You Go, I Will Go: The Mourning Bench

barnstormingblog1 Comment

…we all suffer.
For we all prize and love;
and in this present existence of ours,
prizing and loving yield suffering.
Love in our world is suffering love.

Some do not suffer much, though,
for they do not love much.
Suffering is for the loving.
This, said Jesus, is the command of the Holy One:
“You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”
In commanding us to love, God invites us to suffer.

Over there, you are of no help.
What I need to hear from you is that you recognize how painful it is.
I need to hear from you that you are with me in my desperation.

To comfort me, you have to come close.
Come sit beside me on my mourning bench.
~Nicholas Wolterstorff from Lament for a Son

I wondered if 7:30 AM was too early to call her. As a sleep-deprived fourth year medical student finishing a long night admitting patients in the hospital, I selfishly needed to hear her voice.

I wanted to know how Margy was doing with the latest round of chemotherapy for breast cancer; I knew she was not sleeping well these days. She was wearing a new halo brace—a metal contraption that wrapped around her head like a scaffolding to secure her degenerating cervical spine from collapsing from metastatic tumor growths in her bones.

She knew, we all knew, she was trying to buy more time from a life of rapidly diminishing days.

Each patient I had seen the previous 24 hours while working in the Emergency Room benefited from the interviewing skills Margy had taught each medical student in our class. She reminded us that each patient had an important story to tell, and no matter how pressured our time, we needed to ask questions that gave permission for that story to be told. As a former nun now married with two teenage children, Margy had become our de facto therapist at a time no medical school hired supportive counselors.

She insisted physicians-in-training remember the suffering soul thriving inside the broken body.

“Just let the patient know with certainty, through your eyes, your body language, your words, that you want to hear what they have to say. You can heal so much hurt simply by sitting beside them and caring enough to listen…”

After her diagnosis with stage 4 cancer, Margy herself became the broken vessel who needed the glue of a good listener. She continued to teach, often from her bed at home. I planned to visit her that day, maybe help out by cleaning her house, or take her for a drive as a diversion.

Her phone rang only once after I dialed her number. There was a long pause; I could hear a clearing of her throat. A deep dam of tears welled behind a muffled “Hello?”

“Margy?”

“Yes? Emily? ”

“Margy? What is it? What’s wrong?”

Her voice shattered like glass into fragments, strangling on words that struggled to form.

“Gordy’s gone, Emily. He’s gone. He’s gone forever…”

“What? What are you saying?”

“A policeman just left. He told us our boy is dead.”

I sat in stunned silence, listening to her sobs, completely unequipped to know how to respond.

None of this made sense. I knew her son was on college spring break, heading to Mexico for a missions trip.

“I’m here, what’s happened?”

“The doorbell rang about an hour ago. Larry got up to answer it. I heard him talking to someone downstairs, so I decided to try to get up and go see what was going on. There was a policeman sitting with Larry on the couch. I knew it had to be about Gordy.”

She paused and took in a shuddering breath.

“The group was driving through the night in California. He was asleep in the back of the camper. They think he was sleepwalking and walked right out of the back of the moving camper and was hit by another car.”

Silence.  A strangling choking silence.

“They’ll bring him home to me, won’t they? I need to know I can see my boy again. I need to tell him how much I love him.”

“They’ll bring him home to you, Margy.
I’m on my way to help you get ready…“

God is not only the God of the sufferers
but the God who suffers. …
It is said of God that no one can behold his face and live.
I always thought this meant
that no one could see his splendor and live.
A friend said perhaps it meant
that no one could see his sorrow and live.
Or perhaps his sorrow is splendor. …
Instead of explaining our suffering, God shares it.
~Nicholas Wolterstorff from Lament for a Son

This year’s Lenten theme:

…where you go I will go…
Ruth 1:16

One-Time
Monthly
Yearly

Make a one-time or recurring donation to support daily Barnstorming posts

Make a monthly donation

Make a yearly donation

Choose an amount

$10.00
$25.00
$50.00
$5.00
$15.00
$100.00
$5.00
$15.00
$100.00

Or enter a custom amount

$

Your contribution is deeply appreciated.

Your contribution is appreciated.

Your contribution is appreciated.

DonateDonate monthlyDonate yearly

Breaking Through

barnstormingblog2 Comments

Walking in February
A warm day after a long freeze
On an old logging road
Below Sumas Mountain
Cut a walking stick of alder,
Looked down through clouds
On wet fields of the Nooksack—
And stepped on the ice
Of a frozen pool across the road.
It creaked
The white air under
Sprang away, long cracks
Shot out in the black,
My cleated mountain boots
Slipped on the hard slick
—like thin ice—the sudden
Feel of an old phrase made real—
Instant of frozen leaf,
Icewater, and staff in hand.
“Like walking on thin ice—”
I yelled back to a friend,
It broke and I dropped
Eight inches in
~Gary Snyder “Thin Ice” from No Nature

Everyone is treading on thin ice right now, unsure where to go next.

The trouble with overheated action and rhetoric in the middle of winter is that we all end up at risk of breaking through, no matter where we try to tread.

When we allow ourselves to be put in such peril, when we hear the creak with each step as a warning, we deserve to be doused by the chilly waters beneath our feet.

Lord, have mercy on us as we call your name in our fear and distress.
Help us recognize the cracks forming with each step we take.

Put us on our knees before you and lead us to safety.
Only you know where we need to be rather than where we are.
You’ll be there to pull us out of the mess we’re in.

AI image created for this post
One-Time
Monthly
Yearly

Make a one-time or recurring donation to support daily Barnstorming posts

Make a monthly donation

Make a yearly donation

Choose an amount

$10.00
$25.00
$50.00
$5.00
$15.00
$100.00
$5.00
$15.00
$100.00

Or enter a custom amount

$

Your contribution is deeply appreciated.

Your contribution is appreciated.

Your contribution is appreciated.

DonateDonate monthlyDonate yearly

A Steady Center Holds

barnstormingblogLeave a comment

Sometimes from sorrow, for no reason,
you sing. For no reason, you accept
the way of being lost, cutting loose
from all else and electing a world
where you go where you want to.

Arbitrary, a sound comes, a reminder
that a steady center is holding
all else. If you listen, that sound
will tell you where it is and you
can slide your way past trouble.

Certain twisted monsters
always bar the path—but that’s when
you get going best, glad to be lost,
learning how real it is
here on earth, again and again.
~William Stafford “Cutting Loose” from Dancing with Joy: 99 Poems

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere   
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst   
Are full of passionate intensity.
~William Butler Yeats from The Second Coming

Life is a hard battle anyway. If we laugh and sing a little as we fight the good fight of freedom, it makes it all go easier. I will not allow my life’s light to be determined by the darkness around me.
~Sojourner Truth

There are so many twists and turns in this life, we lose sight of the Center of all things. We don’t always know what is around the next corner. It can feel like things are falling apart, and we could be swallowed up.

Getting lost, tripping on rocks and falling into holes is part of reality. Bruises and scrapes remind us where we have been and what we have been through, yet we keep going.

We do not honor the arbitrary whims of bullies,
nor dim ourselves within the darkness where they dwell.

So we sing:

We shall overcome.
We’ll walk hand in hand.
We are not alone.
We are not afraid.
We shall all be free.
We shall live in peace.
Someday.

God will see us through.

Thank you to Parker Palmer and Carrie Newcomer who spoke about the Stafford poem “Cutting Loose” here

AI image created for this post

Oh, deep in my heart
I do believe
We shall overcome some day

One-Time
Monthly
Yearly

Make a one-time or recurring donation to support daily Barnstorming posts

Make a monthly donation

Make a yearly donation

Choose an amount

$10.00
$25.00
$50.00
$5.00
$15.00
$100.00
$5.00
$15.00
$100.00

Or enter a custom amount

$

Your contribution is deeply appreciated.

Your contribution is appreciated.

Your contribution is appreciated.

DonateDonate monthlyDonate yearly

Peace Rising in the Dark

barnstormingblog3 Comments

In winter, the earth remembers its hidden life;
a silence deepens that is not emptiness but preparation.
~Rowan Williams

When, in the middle of the night,
you wake with the certainty you’ve
done it all wrong, when you wake
and see clearly all the places you’ve failed,
in that moment, when dreams will not return,
this is the chance for your most gentle voice—
the one you reserve for those you love most—
to say to you quietly, oh sweetheart,
this is not yet the end of the story.
Sleep will not come, but somehow,
in that wide-awake moment there is peace—
the kind that does not need
everything to be right before it arrives.
The kind that comes from not fighting
what is real. The peace that rises
in the dark on its sure dark wings
and flies true with no moon, no stars.
~Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer “With Astonishing Tenderness” from The Unfolding

Peaceful sleep has been elusive over the last 10 nights.

I realize a significant number of people are resting more easily. They celebrate an overwhelming number of rapid changes instituted by a new government administration over a few days.

I’m not among them.

Sweetheart, this is not yet the end of the story.
It never is.

AI image created for this post
One-Time
Monthly
Yearly

Make a one-time or recurring donation to support daily Barnstorming posts

Make a monthly donation

Make a yearly donation

Choose an amount

$10.00
$25.00
$50.00
$5.00
$15.00
$100.00
$5.00
$15.00
$100.00

Or enter a custom amount

$

Your contribution is deeply appreciated.

Your contribution is appreciated.

Your contribution is appreciated.

DonateDonate monthlyDonate yearly

Your Ragged Hopes

barnstormingblog1 Comment

How granular they feel—grief and regret, arriving, as they do,
in the sharp particularities of distress. Inserting themselves—
cunning, intricate, subversive—into our discourse.

In the long night, grievances seem to multiply. Old dreams
mingling with new. Disappointment and regret bludgeon
the soul, your best imaginings bruised, your hopes ragged.

Yet wait, watch. From the skylight the room is filling with
soft early sun, slowly sifting its light on the bed, on your head,
a shower of fine particles. How welcome. And how reliable.
~Luci Shaw “Sorrow”

(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” from Thirst

We are given a box full of darkness
by someone who loves us,
and we can’t help but open it,
weeping.

It takes a lifetime to understand,
if we ever do,
we will inevitably hand off
this gift to others we love.

Opening the box
allows the Light in
where none existed before.

Light pours into our brokenness.

Sorrow ends up shining through our tears:
we reach out from a deep well of need.
Because we are loved so thoroughly,
we too love deeply beyond ourselves.

AI image created for this post
One-Time
Monthly
Yearly

Make a one-time or recurring donation to support daily Barnstorming posts

Make a monthly donation

Make a yearly donation

Choose an amount

$10.00
$25.00
$50.00
$5.00
$15.00
$100.00
$5.00
$15.00
$100.00

Or enter a custom amount

$

Your contribution is deeply appreciated to help offset the costs of maintaining an ad-free website.

Your contribution is appreciated.

Your contribution is appreciated.

DonateDonate monthlyDonate yearly