Tag: Spring

Lenten Grace — He is Laboring

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photo by Josh Scholten
photo by Josh Scholten

All creatures are doing their best
to help God in His birth
of Himself.

Enough talk for the night.
He is laboring in me;

I need to be silent
for a while,

worlds are forming
in my heart.    
~Meister Eckhart from “Expands His Being”

The first day of spring is a traditional celebration of the rebirth of nature’s seasonal rhythms, and God’s inner renewal of our hearts.
Instead today is pitch black with blustering winds and rain, looking and feeling like the bleakest of October mornings about to plunge into the death spiral of deep autumn and winter all over again.

No self-respecting God would birth Himself into something like this: a dawn as dark as night.

But this God would.

He labors in our darkest of hearts for good reason.  We are unformed and unready to meet Him in the light, clinging as we do to our dark ways and thoughts.  Though we are called to celebrate the renewal of springtime, it is just so much talk until we accept the change of being transformed ourselves.

We are silenced as He prepares us, as He prepares Himself for birth within us.   The labor pains are His, not ours;  we become awed witnesses to His first and last breath when He makes all things, including us, new again.

The world is reborn — even where dark reigned before, even where it is bleakest, especially inside our broken hearts now healing.

photo by Josh Scholten
photo by Josh Scholten

Lenten Grace — Love Lives Again

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photo by Josh Scholten
photo by Josh Scholten

Now the green blade rises from the buried grain,
Wheat that in the dark earth many years has lain;
Love lives again, that with the dead has been:
Love is come again, like wheat that springs up green.

When our hearts are saddened, grieving or in pain,
By Your touch You call us back to life again;
Fields of our hearts that dead and bare have been:
Love is come again, like wheat that springs up green.
~John Crum from The Oxford Book of Carols

Over the last several weeks, roots have become shoots and their green blades are rising chaotically, uneven and awkward like a bad haircut.  And like a bad haircut, another two weeks will make all the difference — sprouts will cover all the bare earth, breaking through crusted mud to create a smooth carpet of green.

There is nothing more hopeful than the barren made fruitful, the ugly made beautiful, the dead made alive.

The fields of our broken hearts recover; love is come again.

photo by Josh Scholten
photo by Josh Scholten

Lenten Grace — Appetite for Sun

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photo by Josh Scholten
photo by Josh Scholten

I saw that a yellow crocus bud had pierced
a dead oak leaf, then opened wide. How strong
its appetite for the luxury of the sun!
~Jane Kenyon from Otherwise: New and Selected Poems

Our appetite is strong for light and warmth.  Our desire is to defeat death, to pierce through the decay and flourish among the living, opening wide our face to the luxury of grace freely given.

We need only follow the pathway out of darkness.  We need only follow the Son as he leads the way.

photo by Josh Scholten
photo by Josh Scholten
photo by Josh Scholten
photo by Josh Scholten

Late February Days

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photo by Josh Scholten
photo by Josh Scholten

Late February days; and now, at last,
Might you have thought that
Winter’s woe was past;
So fair the sky was and so soft the air.
The happy birds were hurrying here and there,
as something soon would happen…
–  William Morris from Earthly Paradise

We’ve had a pair of bald eagles who return every winter to our hilltop farm.  They like the high perches offered by our tall Douglas fir trees providing them a 360 degree view of the surrounding countryside and fields.  I suspect their nest is nearby, if not in our woods.  They were back today, full of conversation and gossip, chittering back and forth like a couple of sparrows, only much louder and much much bigger/grander.  The regular inhabitants of our fir trees — crows and red-tailed hawks — are quite put out at the encroachment of eagles on their territory.  They fly about the trees angrily, with scolding and harassing calls.

But the eagles reign wherever they set down talons.  There is simply nothing to argue about.  My only worry about having them in the yard is how vulnerable our cats might be when the wild bunny pickings get thin.   Otherwise I appreciate the eagles for the good neighbors they are.  They keep the rodent population under control, they are polite and don’t throw raucous parties at night, and they have a stable long term marriage, something I deeply respect.

So when their chirpy dialogue quiets down for the night and the hoot owls start in, I think about how much I always miss all this conversation during the silent nights of deep winter.  Happy birds are back, a truly hopeful sign that we are passing into spring, and something soon will happen…

Wild Harbinger of Spring

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croci13

Welcome, wild harbinger of spring!
  To this small nook of earth;
Feeling and fancy fondly cling
  Round thoughts which owe their birth
To thee, and to the humble spot
Where chance has fixed thy lowly lot.
        ~Bernard Barton—To a Crocus.

crocus13

Hail to the King of Bethlehem,
Who weareth in his diadem
The yellow crocus for the gem
    Of his authority!
        Longfellow—Christus. Pt. II. The Golden Legend. IX.

Seeds of the Heart

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photo by Josh Scholten
photo by Josh Scholten

If seeds in the black earth can turn into such beautiful roses, what might not the heart of man become in its long journey toward the stars?
—G.K. Chesterton

We are mere seeds lying dormant, plain and simple, with nothing to distinguish us one from the other until the murmurs of spring begin, so soft, so subtle.  The soil shakes loose frosty crust as the thawing warmth begins.   Sunlight makes life stir and swell, no longer frozen but animate and intimate.

We will soon wake from our quiescence to sprout, bloom and fruit.  We will reach as far as our tethered roots will allow, beyond earthly bounds to touch the light and be touched.
There is renewed hope seeded in the heart of man, ready and waiting to unfurl, with a precious fragrance that lingers, long after the petal has dried, loosened, and fallen to freedom.

photo by Josh Scholten
photo by Josh Scholten

Tint and Swell

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photo by Josh Scholten
photo by Josh Scholten
photo by Josh Scholten
photo by Josh Scholten

The February sunshine steeps your boughs and tints the buds and swells the leaves within.
–  William C. Bryant

The sun is everywhere today, thawing the frost layer on the metal roof of the barn to the point of seeping through the cracks, dripping and splattering inside like an indoor spring shower during our chores.  The sun rays are trying to burst through our layers to activate Vitamin D thirsty skin, and there is actual warmth on our cheeks as we look up, squinting at the unaccustomed brightness.

At last, oh at last — after months of gray misty drizzle.  It may be only a tease and not the real thing but even the soil is feeling seduced.  The snowdrop sprouts have thrust through the frozen ground and crocus shoots are peeking out hopefully on our side of the crust rather than staying tentative and hidden down under.

Today’s glimpse of spring was worth waiting for, even if winter breaks loose again for a few weeks and plunges us back into doldrums and gloom.  If only a peek, it is still promise of a coming renewal and rebirth.

We won’t always dwell in darkness.  Let us be luminous.

photo by Josh Scholten
photo by Josh Scholten

A Single Green Sprout

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photo by Josh Scholten
photo by Josh Scholten

Now wind torments the field,
turning the white surface back
on itself, back and back on itself,
like an animal licking a wound.

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 from “February: Thinking of Flowers”

photo by Josh Scholten
photo by Josh Scholten

Beside the Fire

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photo by Josh Scholten
photo by Josh Scholten

I sit beside the fire and think
Of all that I have seen
Of meadow flowers and butterflies
In summers that have been

Of yellow leaves and gossamer
In autumns that there were
With morning mist and silver sun
And wind upon my hair

I sit beside the fire and think
Of how the world will be
When winter comes without a spring
That I shall ever see

For still there are so many things
That I have never seen
In every wood in every spring
There is a different green

I sit beside the fire and think
Of people long ago
And people that will see a world
That I shall never know

But all the while I sit and think
Of times there were before
I listen for returning feet
And voices at the door
— J.R.R. Tolkien

 

Bereft of Birdsong

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newyearbaker

Silence and darkness grow apace, broken only by the crack of a hunter’s gun in the woods.  Songbirds abandon us so gradually that, until the day when we hear no birdsong at all but the scolding of the jay, we haven’t fully realized that we are bereft — as after a death.  Even the sun has gone off somewhere… Now we all come in, having put the garden to bed, and we wait for winter to pull a chilly sheet over its head.  
~Jane Kenyon from “Good-by and Keep Cold”

Every day now we hear hunters firing in the woods and the wetlands around our farm, most likely aiming for the few ducks that have stayed in the marshes through the winter, or possibly a Canadian goose or a deer to bring home for the freezer.   The usual day-long symphony of birdsong is replaced by shotguns popping, hawks and eagle screams and chittering, the occasional dog barking, with the bluejays and squirrels arguing over the last of the filbert nuts.

In the clear cold evenings, when coyotes aren’t howling in the moonlight, the owls hoot to each other across the fields from one patch of woods to another, their gentle resonant conversation echoing back and forth.    The horses confined to their stalls in the barns snort and blow as they bury their noses in flakes of summer-bound hay.

But there is no birdsong arias,  leaving me bereft of their blending musical tapestry that wake me at 4 AM in the spring.   No peeper orchestra from the swamps in the evenings, rising and falling on the breeze.
It is too too quiet.

The chilly silence of the darkened days is now interrupted by all percussion, no melody at all.   I listen intently for early morning and evening serenades returning.
It won’t be long.
jansunset