Tag: stars

The Scent of Work

barnstormingblog2 Comments

Fireflies are daughters to the stars
And go in the countryside to catch the scent of hay
Which is the scent of God
Because it smells of work–Giovanni Cerri

Our horses are now officially pulled off the pastures for winter, relegated to smaller dirt paddocks until the fields have rested, recovered and dried sufficiently in April to bear their hooves and teeth again.

So I climb the ladder to the hay loft daily to toss down carefully stacked bales of hay placed there by our hay crew four months ago.   I release the dried stems from their bondage by twine.  The scent of July work hits me full force; I’m transported back to the sweaty days of hay mowing, tedding, raking and baling.   It was just yesterday, so it seems, that my children and their friends were picking up these heavy bales and tossing them onto the trailer, and then bringing them into the barn.

The scent of work on the earth, like fireflies to the stars, is the perfume of heaven.

We are Fields

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photo by Josh Scholten
How is it they live for eons in such harmony – the billions of stars –
when most men can barely go a minute without declaring war in their mind against someone they know.
There are wars where no one marches with a flag, though that does not keep casualties from mounting.

Our hearts irrigate this earth.  We are fields before each other.

How can we live in harmony?
First we need to know
 we are all madly in love
with the same
God.
~Thomas Acquinas
I look at headline news through my fingers, cringing.   In the posturing between countries and factions, only the names and faces have changed, not the hatred, not the threats.
We’ve seen this all before, over and over.  Not quite 150 years ago it was in the Gettysburg fields that blood of rival armies intermingled and irrigated the soil.  Even as we now stand side by side with Germany and Japan, our bitter enemies a mere seventy years ago, we have fallen on new killing fields in the Middle East.
We can barely go a minute without declaring war in our minds against our neighbor, especially in a presidential election year.  The casualties mount from our bitterness toward one another here on this soil, not only those so different from us on distant shores.
How can there ever be harmony?  How can we overcome our rancorous hearts?
It is not love for each other that comes first.   We are too flawed,  incapable of love or being loveable.

First we need to know and love the only God who loves the unloveable so much He became one with us, overcoming our hatred with sacrifice.

We are dying fields desperate in drought.
We need His bleeding heart irrigating our thirsting soil.