The true harvest of my daily life is somewhat as intangible and indescribable as the tints of morning or evening. It is a little star-dust caught, a segment of the rainbow which I have clutched.
~Henry David Thoreau
Painting the indescribable with words necessitates subtlety, sound and rhythm on a page. The best word color portraits I know are by Gerard Manley Hopkins who created through startling combinations: “crimson-cresseted”, “couple-colour”, “rose-moles”, “fresh-firecoal”, “adazzle, dim”, “dapple-dawn-drawn”, “blue-bleak embers”, “gash gold-vermillion”.
I understand, as Thoreau does, how difficult it is to harvest a day using ordinary words. Like grasping ephemeral star trails or the transient rainbow that moves away as I approach, what I hold on the page is intangible yet very real.
I will keep reaching for the rainbow, searching for the best words to preserve my days and nights forever, for my someday greatgrandchildren, or whoever might have the patience to read.
After all, in the beginning was the Word, and there is no better place to start.
How strange this fear of death is! We are never frightened at a sunset.
George McDonald
In our modern world that never seems to rest, a sunrise can seem more daunting than a sunset. We are unprepared for the day to start–the ready-set-go of a sunrise can be overwhelming to a tired soul. There are mornings when the new light of dawn penetrates right through our closed eyelids, enough to wake the dead, if not the sleeping. It cannot be ignored in its urgency to rouse us to action.
In contrast, the end of the day requires little preparation. Sunsets signal a slow-down unraveling of tension, a deep cleansing breath, a letting-go of the light for another night. It eases over us, covering us like a comfortable quilt, tucking us in for the night with a kiss and hug and promise of sweet dreams.
The reason we do not fear the sunset is that we know it isn’t all there is. The black nothingness of night would be petrifying if we didn’t understand and trust that the light will return, as startling as it may be in its brightness. It is the rerunning cycle of the light and dark that reassures. It is as it was created to be, over and over.
Let the sunset tuck us in. Let the sunrise ready us for a new day. Let it end, then let it begin again.
I’m a bit confused here.
While more states, including my own, grant the legal right to marry to same sex couples, more and more heterosexual couples are rejecting official marriage that includes a signed “piece of paper”, preferring to bear their children out of wedlock. What one minority segment of U.S. society has fought hard for over several decades, now granted through society’s expanding acceptance and tolerance of diverse lifestyles, the heterosexual majority increasingly deems marriage worthless and to be avoided.
Can someone shed some light on what is going on here?
I’m all for celebrating legal sanctioning of personal commitment. I have seen what happens when there is no commitment to commitment. Without steadfast loyalty, dependability, predictability, and honoring of promises made, relationships flounder and fizzle, descending into selfish silos of an “every person for themselves” approach to life. I watched it happen late in my parents’ marriage as their focus became less on the inherent value of the union of two people who made vows before God to stay together through thick and thin, and more on what’s best for the individual when needs go unmet. Any divorce is heartbreaking and painful, but the implosion of a 35 year marriage is truly tragic and unnecessary. Ironically, their original commitment reignited ten years later as they married again for the last few years of my father’s life.
There are now too many scarred and scared young people unwilling to take the step of marriage, having grown up inside the back and forth visitation homes of divorce or in a home offering no significant modeling of long term emotional commitment. Even monogamous devotion to a new sexual partner is seen as unnecessarily restrictive, while an unplanned new life conceived within that relationship becomes too easily postponed until it is “convenient” for the unprepared parents. We have forgotten what promises mean, what stability represents to a relationship and children, how trusting obedience to the longevity of the union should trump short term individual desires.
My clinic day increasingly is filled with the detritus of failed and failing relationships. Too many of my young adult patients who describe symptoms of depression and anxiety struggle with whether they want to continue to live at all, sometimes expressing their misery in escalating self harming behaviors or anesthetizing with alcohol or recreational drugs. They describe the chaos of parents living sequentially with multiple partners, of no certain “home” outside their school dorm or apartment, unsolvable complications with half- and step- sibling relationships, and all too frequently financial uncertainty. Many grew up supervised by TV and computer games rather than being held accountable to (mostly absent) parental expectations. They are more comfortable with on-line communication than risk being truthful about who they really are with flesh and blood people they see every day. They fear failure as they have seldom been allowed to make mistakes and subsequently experience forgiveness and grace from those who love them. They are emotional orphans.
In short, they know little about how love manifests through self-sacrifice and faithfulness.
Keeping commitment becomes the light that illuminates our lives, as reliable as the fact the sun rises every morning.
At least on that we can depend.
No matter
No matter what happens between the sunrise and the sunset
No matter what happens between the sunset and the sunrise
It doesn’t matter.
What matters:
the rise and the set
the set and the rise
keep coming
through troubles
and sickness
through loss
and sadness
earth
turns
to grant
a new start
a new day
settles
serenely
to offer
a peaceful sleep
a quiet night
matters so much
more than me
so much more
so much
so
Arise, shine, for your light has come,
and the glory of the LORD rises upon you.
Isaiah 60:1
We’ve not known major natural catastrophe here in the northwest for many generations–our crises are mercifully small scale compared to a Japan or New Orleans or Haiti. Blustery windstorms, flooding, the occasional drifting blizzard, spouting volcanoes, the rare minor earthquake.
Awaking to a glowing sunrise is encouragement after such an event. Clouds become a canvas backdrop on which a vivid palette is able to be painted–the same clouds that had created havoc, floods, power outages.
Then this.
Startling, wondrous magnificence beyond imagination. Grace that brings us to our knees, especially when we are mired in trouble.
Drink deeply of this.
Hold it, savor it and know that to witness any sunrise is to see the face of God.
2012 Easter Sunrise Service at BriarCroft — April 8, 2012 at 7 AM
(formerly Walnut Hill Farm)
sunrise view from our hill–see more at our website at http://www.briarcroft.com/easter.htm
When we purchased Walnut Hill Farm from the Morton Lawrence family in 1990, part of the tradition of this farm was a hilltop non-denominational Easter sunrise service held here for the previous 10+ years. We have continued that tradition, with an open invitation to families from our surrounding rural neighborhood and communities, as well as our church family from Wiser Lake Chapel, to start Easter morning on our hill with a worship service of celebration of the resurrection of Jesus Christ.
At our annual Easter Sunrise Service in Whatcom County, we develop a different Easter theme each year through use of scripture readings and songs, led by Dan Gibson. We sit on hay bales on the hill for the worship service, followed by breakfast of cinnamon rolls, hot chocolate and coffee in our barn. As many of the people who attend come from some distance from all over the county, we try to conclude by 8 AM so they may have time to get to morning church services.
We invite all to come to our farm to participate in this traditional service of celebration. Please dress warmly with sturdy shoes as you will be walking through wet grass to reach the hilltop. Bring heavy blankets or sleeping bags to wrap up in if it is a chilly morning. In case of rain, we meet in the big red hay barn on the farm, so we never cancel this service.
If you would like more information and directions to our farm at 1613 Central Road, between Hannegan and Noon Road, please email us at emily@briarcroft.com
Dan and Emily Gibson
No heralding trumpets
Just softening shadows
Timed and tracked
Anticipated
Fingers of light
Flaring orange
Over the eastern ridge of foothills
Caress the slopes of snow capped peaks
Bidding night farewell.
Horizon’s gentle glowing palette
Of pink and coral
Climbing higher, wider, deeper
Painting clouds beyond reach.
Every earthly thing bathed in gold
For a moment, glimpsed and grasped
Devoid of fanfare yet still miraculous
Too soon ordinary again
Although born anew.
It never fails to surprise and amaze: the sunrise seems to come from nowhere. There is bleak dark, then a hint of light over the foothills in a long thin line, and the appearance of subtle dawn shadows as if the night needs to cling to the ground a little while longer, not wanting to relent and let us go. Color appears, erasing all doubt: the hills begin to glow orange along their crest, as if a flame is ignited and is spreading down a wick. Ultimately the explosion occurs, spreading the orange pink palette unto the clouds, climbing high to bathe the glaciers of Mount Baker and onto the peaks of the Twin Sisters.
Dayspring. From dark to light, ordinary to extraordinary. This gift is from the tender mercy of our God, now glowing in the light of the new Day, guiding our feet on the pathway of peace. We no longer must stumble in the shadows.
Luke 1:78-79
Barnstorming 