Even at noon the house is dark. In my room under the eaves I hear the steady benevolence of water washing dust raised by the haying from porch and car and garden and purified, as if tonsured.
The grass resolves to grow again, receiving the rain to that end, but my disordered soul thirsts after something it cannot name. ~Jane Kenyon from “August Rain, After Haying”
A long-awaited string of rainy days have arrived and like the ground and plants, I look skyward letting the clouds drip on me and I am washed of dust.
Will I restore like the brown and dying blade of grass, turning green and lush in a matter of days?
Is there enough benevolence from the sky to cleanse and settle the grime, and still yield more harvest of food and fodder? Will this replenish my soul enough that I can resolve to grow again?
I thirst for what I cannot name. The mystery is, I’m filled, left dripping and ready.
There is one spectacle grander than the sea, that is the sky; there is one spectacle grander than the sky, that is the interior of the soul.
~Victor Hugo
What possibly can be grander than the depths and wildness of the ocean or the expanse of clouds and stars above us? Our breath is taken away by the sea and the sky — always and every time.
Yet that breath was given to us, breathed into our very soul by the living God in His desire to create us in His image.
That is grand beyond imagining. His breath within us, filling the interior of our souls.
And when he got into the boat, his disciples followed him. A gale arose on the lake, so great that the boat was being swamped by the waves; but he was asleep. And they went and woke him up, saying, ‘Lord, save us! We are perishing!’ And he said to them, ‘Why are you afraid, you of little faith?’ Then he got up and rebuked the winds and the sea; and there was a dead calm. They were amazed, saying, ‘What sort of man is this, that even the winds and the sea obey him?’
Matthew 8:23-27
Sweet Jesus, talking his melancholy madness, stood up in the boat and the sea lay down,
silky and sorry. So everybody was saved that night… Nobody knows what the soul is.
It comes and goes like the wind over the water — sometimes, for days, you don’t think of it.
Maybe, after the sermon, after the multitude was fed, one or two of them felt the soul slip forth
like a tremor of pure sunlight before exhaustion, that wants to swallow everything, gripped their bones and left them
miserable and sleepy, as they are now, forgetting how the wind tore at the sails before he rose and talked to it —
tender and luminous and demanding as he always was — a thousand times more frightening than the killer storm.
~Mary Oliver from “Maybe”
I sleep through my diminishing days even more than I sleep through the nights, not nearly focused enough on each passing moment that never is to come again. Those moments crash to shore and then pull back to be lost forever.
There is a blindness in us all about what is inevitably coming, how we are tumbled over the years like waves, overcome by their passage.
He is tender and luminous and demanding and He talks to us, not just the relentless stormy destructive sea.
Peace be still!
And so I obey, forgiven, and am saved by grace,
so silky and sorry.
I talk to you as I talk to my own soul,” he said, turning me to face him. “And …” he whispered, “your face is my heart.”
~Diana Gabaldon from Dragonfly in Amber
Today, Dan celebrates his retirement from public service as an attorney – over 37 years working for county government. He will pack up his books and pictures from his office in boxes and bring them home.
This man, by my side for nearly forty years since meeting while in graduate school, and my husband for 37 years, leaves behind a legacy of well-considered and sound legal advice, maintaining integrity as a trusted resource for colleagues and the public while managing to remain above the inevitable politics. He has an archival brain which the county will mightily miss, as not all knowledge resides in file folders and hard drives and cloud servers.
His family, the farm and I are the beneficiaries of this retirement from professional life, as well as the several boards he serves and the church we attend. This is not a man who will retreat to a quiet life: he has many plans, much work that calls him and more education to pursue. It is the start of his next life of service.
This face is my heart and it is my privilege to wake up next to my kindred soul every morning.
This fall I picked up windfall apples to haul down to the barn for a special treat each night for the Haflingers. These are apples that we humans wouldn’t take a second glance at in all our satiety and fussiness, but the Haflingers certainly don’t mind a bruise, or a worm hole or slug trails over apple skin.
I’ve found over the years that our horses must be taught to eat apples–if they have no experience with them, they will bypass them lying in the field and not give them a second look. There simply is not enough odor to make them interesting or appealing–until they are cut in slices that is. Then they become irresistible and no apple is left alone from that point forward.
When I offer a whole apple to a young Haflinger who has never tasted one before, they will sniff it, perhaps roll it on my hand a bit with their lips, but I’ve yet to have one simply bite in and try. If I take the time to cut the apple up, they’ll pick up a section very gingerly, kind of hold it on their tongue and nod their head up and down trying to decide as they taste and test it if they should drop it or chew it, and finally, as they really bite in and the sweetness pours over their tongue, they get this look in their eye that is at once surprised and supremely pleased. The only parallel experience I’ve seen in humans is when you offer a five month old baby his first taste of ice cream on a spoon and at first he tightens his lips against its coldness, but once you slip a little into his mouth, his face screws up a bit and then his eyes get big and sparkly and his mouth rolls the taste around his tongue, savoring that sweet cold creaminess. His mouth immediately pops open for more.
It is the same with apples and horses. Once they have that first taste, they are our slaves forever in search of the next apple.
The Haflinger veteran apple eaters can see me coming with my sweat shirt front pocket stuffed with apples, a “pregnant” belly of fruit, as it were. They offer low nickers when I come up to their stalls and each horse has a different approach to their apple offering.
There is the “bite a little bit at a time” approach, which makes the apple last longer, and tends to be less messy in the long run. There is the “bite it in half” technique which leaves half the apple in your hand as they navigate the other half around their teeth, dripping and frothing sweet apple slobber. Lastly there is the greedy “take the whole thing at once” horse, which is the most challenging way to eat an apple, as it has to be moved back to the molars, and crunched, and then moved around the mouth to chew up the large pieces, and usually half the apple ends up falling to the ground, with all the foam that the juice and saliva create. No matter the technique used, the smell of an apple as it is being chewed by a horse is one of the best smells in the world. I can almost taste the sweetness too when I smell that smell.
What do we do when offered such a sublime gift from Someone’s hand? If it is something we have never experienced before, we possibly walk right by, not recognizing that it is a gift at all, missing the whole point and joy of experiencing what is being offered. How many wonderful opportunities are right under our noses, but we fail to notice, and bypass them because they are unfamiliar?
Perhaps if the Giver really cares enough to “teach” us to accept this gift of sweetness, by preparing it and making it irresistible to us, then we are overwhelmed with the magnitude of the generosity and are transformed by the simple act of receiving.
We must learn to take little bites, savoring each piece one at a time, making it last rather than greedily grab hold of the whole thing, struggling to control it, thereby losing some in the process. Either way, it is a gracious gift, and how we receive it makes all the difference.
1. The tree of life my soul hath seen, Laden with fruit and always green: The trees of nature fruitless be Compared with Christ the apple tree.
2. His beauty doth all things excel: By faith I know, but ne’er can tell The glory which I now can see In Jesus Christ the apple tree.
3. For happiness I long have sought, And pleasure dearly I have bought: I missed of all; but now I see ‘Tis found in Christ the apple tree.
4. I’m weary with my former toil, Here I will sit and rest awhile: Under the shadow I will be, Of Jesus Christ the apple tree.
5. This fruit doth make my soul to thrive, It keeps my dying faith alive; Which makes my soul in haste to be With Jesus Christ the apple tree. ~Elizabeth Poston From Divine Hymns or Spiritual Songs, compiled by Joshua Smith, New Hampshire, 1784
A fine rain was falling, and the landscape was that of autumn. The sky was hung with various shades of gray, and mists hovered about the distant mountains – a melancholy nature. Every landscape is, as it were, a state of the soul, and whoever penetrates into both is astonished to find how much likeness there is in each detail. ~Henri Frederic Amiel
What is melancholy
at first glance
glistens bejeweled
when studied up close
in the right light.
It can’t be all sadness~
there is solace in knowing
the landscape and I share ~a state of the soul~
an inner world of tears
nevertheless forever illuminated.
We know when we are following our vocation
when our soul is set free from preoccupation with itself
and is able to seek God and even to find Him,
even though it may not appear to find Him.
Gratitude and confidence and freedom from ourselves:
these are signs that we have found our vocation
and are living up to it
even though everything else
may seem to have gone wrong.
They give us peace in any suffering.
They teach us to laugh at despair.
And we may have to. — Thomas Merton from No Man is an Island
For three decades I have worked in a public setting,
my faith checked at the threshold as I walk in the door.
Preoccupied with the needs of the day,
my prayers for patients and co-workers
stay silent but not unheard
as God knows how to find His way in
through the cracks, under the door.
Even where He is deemed unnecessary
He is present, incognito.
I’ll turn a corner and find Him there,
in streaming rays through the window
illuminating a polished tile floor.
He’s streaming down the face of a patient,
or behind the smile of a co-worker.
He will not be turned away
even when we bar the door to keep Him out.
Knowing this helps me laugh
when I need it most.
Knowing this sets my soul free
from worries;
Knowing this, I shall look to find Him
wherever He may be,
even where He is unwelcome.
Even when the softness of sunset lingers long
with residual stains of dappled cobbler clouds
lasting long to the sweetness of next day’s dawn,
I’m reminded to “remember this, this moment, this feeling”~
I realize that it will be lost, slipping away from me
in mere moments, a sacramental fading with time.
I can barely remember the sweetness of its taste,
so what’s left is the mere stain of its loss.
Walking this life’s cobbled path,
only guessing where it leads,
I ponder the messy sweetness
of today’s helping of soulful shortcake,
treasure it up, stains and all,
knowing I could never miss it
if I didn’t taste and savor it to begin with.
The object of a new year is not that we should have a new year.
It is that we should have a new soul. – G.K. Chesterton
Mt. Baker in December
We have had considerable winter already in the northwest with a white Christmas that soon melted away and then snowfall again on New Year’s Eve. It has been beautiful – a welcome change from our typical winter rain and mud-fest. It is natural to desire an overnight transformation of the old and dirty to something new and beautiful: an all clean pristine white cottony sheet covering thrown over everything making it look completely different than before.
Similarly, at the tick of the clock past midnight on New Years’ Eve, we hope for just such an inner transformation as well, a fresh start, a leaving behind of the not-so-good from the past and moving ahead to the surely-it’ll-be-better in the future.
But it usually doesn’t stick, despite a flurry of good intentions and a skiff of newness plopped down here and there. Even if we find ourselves in the midst of blizzard conditions, unable to see six inches ahead and immobilized by the furious storms of life, that accumulation eventually will melt, leaving behind even more mud and raw mess.
It isn’t how flawless, how clean, or how new this year will be, but rather how to ensure our soul transformation stays whole and pure, unmelting from within, even when the heat is turned up and the sweat drips. This is not about a covering thrown over the old and dirty but a full blown overhaul in order to never to be the same mess again.
I lift my eyes to the hills where the snow stays year round: sometimes more, with a few hundred new inches over several weeks, or sometimes less, on the hottest days of summer. Our new souls this new year must be built of that same resiliency, withstanding what each day may bring, cold or hot.
Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow…transformation that sticks within my soul.
Whiter than snow, yes, whiter than snow. Now wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.
~James Nicholson (hymn chorus)
Our local fair feels much like I remember when I was a child in the 60’s, accompanying my father to the Lynden fairgrounds during those summers of political and social turmoil. His job was to supervise the teachers of FFA kids (Future Farmers of America) so he did the rounds of the regional and county fairs and my brother and I tagged along to explore the exhibits and go on rides.
The heart beat of a country fair pulses deep for me: I fell in love with my future husband at a fair, and we spent twenty years from 1992-2012 at the local Lynden fair exhibiting our Haflinger horses together as family and friends. Once our children grew and flew away four years ago, my husband and I were relegated to mere fair-goers, exploring exhibits without the need to show up to muck out stalls at 6 AM.
As we walked through this year’s home made quilt exhibit (see my photos and post tomorrow), I marveled, as always, at the multifaceted and intricate designs, with a distinctly planned out mix and match of colors in each quiltmaker’s entry.
Only a short stroll away is the chicken exhibit building, one of the same buildings I wandered through as a child over fifty years ago. As we entered, it struck me that here too I was admiring designs and color schemes, layered with nuance and texture, just like the quilts — the feathers are God’s threads put to exquisite use to blanket a mere chicken.
So much design, so much detail, so much hope covers something as mere as me.
barn owl and woodpecker feathers found on our farm this week
