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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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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It was dragging my hands along its belly, loosing the bit and wiping the spit from its mouth that made me a snatch of grass in the thing’s maw, a fly tasting its ear. It was touching my nose to his that made me know the clover’s bloom, my wet eye to his that made me know the long field’s secrets. But it was putting my heart to the horse’s that made me know the sorrow of horses. Made me forsake my thumbs for the sheen of unshod hooves. And in this way drop my torches. And in this way drop my knives. Feel the small song in my chest swell and my coat glisten and twitch. And my face grow long. And these words cast off, at last, for the slow honest tongue of horses. ~Ross Gay “Becoming A Horse”
photo by Emily Vander Haak
Living the dream of nearly every young girl, I grew up with a horse in our back field. The first was a raw-boned old paint who allowed my older sister and toddler me to sit atop him, walk around the barnyard and on the driveway at no more than a walk. He was arthritic and sore, but patient and tolerant to the attention of little girls. When we moved away to another part of the state, he didn’t come with us and I was too young to fully understand where he had been sent.
The horse on our new farm was my sister’s 4H project who was a spiffy chestnut mare with a penchant for a choppy trot and speedy canter. My sister would go miles with friends on horseback down back-country roads. Sadly, my sister soon became allergic (hives and swelling) to any contact with horses. I was barely old enough to start riding by myself in our fields.The little mare missed her adventures with my sister but seemed to adapt to my inexperience and took care of me as best she could – I never fell off. One night, she broke through a fence and ate her fill in a field of growing oat grass. The next day she was euthanized due to terrible colic. I was inconsolable, crying for days when visiting her burial spot on our property.
These first two horses tolerated the inexperience of their handlers and tried to compensate for it. I’ve since owned a few horses who knew exactly how to take advantage of such inexperience. Horses size up people quickly as our feelings and fear can be so transparent; it takes much longer for us to understand the complexity of their equine mind. Many diverse training techniques are marketed as testimony to that mystery.
I have learned that horses appreciate a patient and quiet approach, reflecting their consistency and honesty. They like to be looked in the eye and appreciate a soft breath blown over their whiskers. They want us to find their itchy spots rather than act the part of a pseudo-predator with intent to harm.
That’s not asking too much of us.
In return, we learn how best to communicate what we need from them. They are remarkably willing to work when they understand the job and feel appreciated. In return, we are given a chance to experience the world through their eyes and ears, to comprehend the remarkable sensitivity of a skin able to shiver a fly away.
I’ve spent much of my life learning with horses and hope there are a few years still left to learn more. Whatever sorrow they feel in their hearts is when I’ve failed to be who they need me to be. Their gift to me is an honest willingness to forgive, again and yet again.
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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
He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away. And he who was seated on the throne said, “Behold, I am making all things new.” Also he said, “Write this down, for these words are trustworthy and true. Revelation 21: 4-5
“Gandalf! I thought you were dead! But then I thought I was dead! Is everything sad going to come untrue?” ~J.R.R. Tolkien as Samwise Gamgee wakes to find his friends all around him in The Lord of the Rings
“The answer is yes. And the answer of the Bible is yes. If the resurrection is true, then the answer is yes. Everything sad is going to come untrue.” ~Pastor Tim Keller’s response in a sermon given in an ecumenical prayer service memorial in Lower Manhattan on the fifth anniversary of Sept. 11.
photo by Joel De Waard
In our minds, we want to rewind and replay the sad events of this week in a way that would prevent them from happening in the first place.
We want those in a broken relationship to come back together, hug and forgive. The devastating diagnosis would be proven an error and, in reality, only a transient illness. When a terrible tragedy happens, we want the dead and injured to rise up again. The destructive earthquake becomes a mere tremor, the flooding tsunami is only one foot, not over thirty feet tall, the hijackers are prevented from ever boarding a plane, the shooter changes her mind at the last minute and lays down her arms, the terrorist disables his suicide bombs and walks away from his training and misguided mission.
We want so badly for it all to be untrue. The bitter reality of horrendous suffering and sadness daily all over the earth is too much for us to absorb. We plead for relief and beg for a better day.
Our minds may play mental tricks like this, but God does not play tricks. He knows and feels what we do. He too wants to see it rewound and replayed differently. He has known grief and sadness, He has wept, He has suffered, He too has died in terrible humiliating and painful circumstances.
And because of this, because of a God who came to dwell with us, was broken, died and then rose again whole and holy, we are assured, in His time, everything sad is going to come untrue.
Our tears will be dried, our grief turned to joy, our pain nonexistent, not even a memory. It will be a new day, a better day–as it is written, trustworthy and true.
May it come.
Quickly.
photo by Nate Gibson
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
“I wish it need not have happened in my time,” said Frodo. “So do I,” said Gandalf, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”
The world is indeed full of peril, and in it there are many dark places; but still there is much that is fair, and though in all lands love is now mingled with grief, it grows perhaps the greater. ― J.R.R. Tolkien, from The Fellowship of the Ring
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.
How is faith to endure, O God, when you allow all this scraping and tearing on us? You have allowed rivers of blood to flow, mountains of suffering to pile up, sobs to become humanity’s song–all without lifting a finger that we could see. You have allowed bonds of love beyond number to be painfully snapped. If you have not abandoned us, explain yourself.
We strain to hear. But instead of hearing an answer we catch sight of God himself scraped and torn. Through our tears we see the tears of God. ~Nicholas Wolterstorffin Lament for a Son
“My God, My God,” goes the 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”
Scratch the surface of a human being and the demons of hate and revenge … and sheer destructiveness break forth.
Again and again we read the stories of violence in our daily papers, of the mass murders and ethnic wars still occurring in numerous parts of our world. But how often do we say to ourselves: “What seizes people like that, even young people, to make them forget family and friends, and suddenly kill other human beings?” We don’t always ask the question in that manner. Sometimes we are likely to think, almost smugly: “How different those horrible creatures are from the rest of us. How fortunate I am that I could never kill or hurt other people like they did.”
I do not like to stop and, in the silence, look within, but when I do I hear a pounding on the floor of my soul. When I open the trap door into the deep darkness I see the monsters emerge for me to deal with. How painful it is to bear all this, but it is there to bear in all of us. Freud called it the death wish, Jung the demonic darkness. If I do not deal with it, it deals with me. The cross reminds me of all this.
This inhumanity of human to human is tamed most of the time by law and order in most of our communities, but there are not laws strong enough to make men and women simply cease their cruelty and bitterness. This destructiveness within us can seldom be transformed until we squarely face it in ourselves. This confrontation often leads us into the pit. The empty cross is planted there to remind us that suffering is real but not the end, that victory still is possible… ~Morton Kelsey from “The Cross and the Cellar”
I’m depending on others’ words right now. The maelstrom of emotions following this week’s latest school shooting silences everything but my tears.
Have mercy, Holy God, on your people.
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
Now wind torments the field, turning the white surface back on itself, back and back on itself, like an animal licking a wound.
Nothing but white–the air, the light; only one brown milkweed pod bobbing in the gully, smallest brown boat on the immense tide.
A single green sprouting thing would restore me . . .
Then think of the tall delphinium, swaying, or the bee when it comes to the tongue of the burgundy lily. ~Jane Kenyon “February: Thinking of Flowers”
Turning the page on the calendar last week or watching for groundhog predictions didn’t magically bring spring. We’ve had more arctic wind and southerly blows as well. The sun has kept its face hidden behind its gray veil.
By this time of winter, I’m like a dog tormented by my own open and raw flesh, trying my best to lick it healed, unable to think of anything or anyone else, going over it again and again – how weary I feel, how bruised I am by the wind, how uprooted I feel, how impossibly long it will be until I feel warm again.
Then I see the photos from Turkey and Syria after the recent devastating series of building-shattering earthquakes leaving many dead, injured and homeless in mid-winter. I realize I truly have no idea how deep wounds can be…
Despite it all, green sprouts are trying to push up even while frozen by snow and ice. Soon fresh blooms will once again grace the barnyard and with that renewal of life and hope, I just might be distracted from my own wound-licking.
photo by Nate Gibson
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