Tag: time

A Stone Where the Crust of Time is Thin

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I went by the Druid stone 
   That stands in the garden white and lone,   
And I stopped and looked at the shifting shadows   
   That at some moments there are thrown
   From the tree hard by with a rhythmic swing,   
   And they shaped in my imagining
To the shade that a well-known head and shoulders   
   Threw there when she was gardening.

      I thought her behind my back,
   Yea, her I long had learned to lack,
And I said: “I am sure you are standing behind me,   
   Though how do you get into this old track?”
   And there was no sound but the fall of a leaf   
   As a sad response; and to keep down grief
I would not turn my head to discover
   That there was nothing in my belief.

      Yet I wanted to look and see
   That nobody stood at the back of me;
But I thought once more: “Nay, I’ll not unvision   
   A shape which, somehow, there may be.”
   So I went on softly from the glade,
   And left her behind me throwing her shade,   
As she were indeed an apparition—
   My head unturned lest my dream should fade.
~Thomas Hardy “The Shadow on the Stone”

Scarce images of life,
one here, one there,
Lay vast and edgeways;
like a dismal cirque
Of Druid stones,
upon a forlorn moor…
~John Keats from “Hyperion”

As living stones around a font today,
Rejoice with those who roll the stone away.
~Malcolm Guite from “Baptism”

hole

When Dan discovered this mighty boulder completely underground, near our family’s swing set, he decided it was to be unearthed to create our own standing stone garden close by.

Pulling out the stone took much digging and a strong tractor-pulled chain around its girth, but now here it sits, a Whatcom County sitting stone, where the crust of time is thin…

Big Rock Garden, Bellingham, WA
This dolmen is above the Irish Sea in Northern Ireland
Legananny Dolmen, Northern Ireland

Just as a signpost warns of rockfalls near a cliff-edge,
the standing stones were meant to mark a spot of danger.
A spot where … what?
Where the crust of time was thin?
Where a gate of some sort stood ajar?
~Diana Gabaldon from Outlander

Castlerigg Stone Circle in Cumbria, UK

A Labyrinth of Wrinkles

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Like Time’s insidious wrinkle
On a beloved Face
We clutch the Grace the tighter
Though we resent the crease
~Emily Dickinson

Let the labyrinth of wrinkles be furrowed in my brow with the red-hot iron of my own life, let my hair whiten and my step become vacillating, on condition that I can save the intelligence of my soul – let me learn just everything that others cannot teach me, what only life would be capable of marking deeply in my skin!
~Salvador Dali

kale

People are more than just the way they look.
~Madeleine L’Engle from A Wrinkle in Time

1966
1971
1976
1980
1993
2022
2025

Just a glance in the mirror tells me all I need to know:

my increasing folds and creases remind me
each wrinkle is grace in action,
so tangible, so telling, so mobile –
multiplying when I smile
so I try to smile often.

I don’t hide them under a mask
nor surgically tighten them away
or inject them smooth.

Instead I grin at the wrinkle of time passing,
knowing each line gained
is a grace clutched tightly
in an otherwise loosening grasp.

2023
2 days ago on a windy day at the Space Needle

Bring to Light the Mystery: No Before or After

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Your dead shall live; their bodies shall rise.
You who dwell in the dust, awake and sing for joy!
For your dew is a dew of light…
Isaiah 26:19

Now in the blessed days of more and less
when the news about time is that each day
there is less of it I know none of that
as I walk out through the early garden
only the day and I are here with no
before or after and the dew looks up
without a number or a present age
~W. S. Merwin “Dew Light” from The Moon Before Morning

Dear March—Come in—
How glad I am—
I hoped for you before—
Put down your Hat—
You must have walked—
How out of Breath you are—
~Emily Dickinson

It seems I measure time by calendar page turns.

A “before” is turned under, covered up by what comes “after.”
Day follows day, week follows week, month follows month, for now…

What I am aware of is how diminishing time is, how I live more and more in the “after.”

Each new month seems to arrive “out of breath.”

So I look to the sky to watch the sun come and go,
as the moon rises and sets, knowing it will always be so.

The morning dew light blesses me now, no before or after.
It is sent by the Lord; I feel breathless as witness.

How can this not always be the way of things?

This year’s Barnstorming Lenten theme is Ephesians 3:9:

…to bring to light for everyone what is the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God, who created all things…

A Thousand Thoughts

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Yes, I know my mind is a fickle little bee
doting on a thousand thoughts, but I’m getting
better at chasing my mind back to the moment

so I can see the spiderwebs making hammocks
the color of the moon. My son tries to photograph
a rainbow outside the car window. It’s impossible,

of course, this wonder, the trying to hold it.
But I do what I can. I’ve stopped waiting to enjoy
the cinnamon tea. I take deeper breaths and listen

to the flutter of strings floating down from café
speakers. I don’t want to be a pilgrim of memory
anymore. I want to pop the champagne and salute

this now, and this one with soft brie, dried apricots,
and the sunset celebration another anniversary
of light while I eat fists of grapes the same shade

and sweetness of night. Congratulations, Time. Look
at you and your gorgeous minutes full of everything.
Three cheers for the temp agency that hired this

particular day, these particular clouds, this set
of honking geese migrating through it. I want to be
better at being alive, so I’ve been picturing my heart

as a fox—which means wild and nocturnal, not
terrorizing the neighbor’s chickens. My love says
most equations in quantum field theory give infinity

as an answer, which is not meaningful because all
infinities are the same. In that case, let’s stop reaching
so hard for it. I’ll take this infinity’s morning where

my son and I confused falling leaves for monarchs.
Every time we thought we saw a butterfly, it was
just a leaf with the gentlest falling. We laughed at

every mistake, and he said, That was a beautiful
confusion. Sometimes when the moment doesn’t offer
a praying mantis on the porch or a charismatic sky,

I imagine my heart is my son’s face, and I am back
in love with the day, its astonishments like hot-air
balloons, and the daily present of power lines strung

with starlings like dozens of music notes. Let me
be more bound to my living in each moment, be held
by this hum, that cloud, this breath, that shroud.
~Traci Brimhall “This Beautiful Confusion” from Love Prodigal

Some Monday mornings, my mind is going in a thousand different directions. So I follow, knowing there will never be another Monday morning quite like this one. I hope there will be a few hundred more Monday mornings to come.

I want to be better at being alive,
noticing, remembering, connecting,
and grateful to be breathing.

Perhaps you are here because — you do too…

our sons – 1990

Rather Than Taking Time, Time Takes You…

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And so you have a life that you are living only now,
now and now and now,
gone before you can speak of it,
and you must be thankful for living day by day,
moment by moment …
a life in the breath and pulse
and living light of the present…
~Wendell Berry from Hannah Coulter

Astonishing material and revelation appear in our lives all the time.
Let it be.
Unto us, so much is given.
We just have to be open for business.
~Anne Lamott from Help Thanks Wow: Three Essential Prayers

…writing was one way to let something of lasting value emerge
from the pains and fears of my little, quickly passing life.
Each time life required me to take a new step
into unknown spiritual territory,
I felt a deep, inner urge to tell my story to others–
Perhaps as a need for companionship but maybe, too,
out of an awareness that my deepest vocation
is to be a witness to the glimpses of God
I have been allowed to catch.
~Henri Nouwen from Reaching Out

…there is something illicit, it seems, about wasted time,
the empty hours of contemplation when a thought unfurls,
figures of speech budding and blossoming,
articulation drifting like spent petals
onto the dark table we all once gathered around to talk and talk,
letting time get the better of us.
_Just taking our time_, as we say.
That is, letting time take us.
~Patricia Hampl from Blue Arabesque: A Search for the Sublime 

I would recognize myself in my patients, one after another after another. They sat at the edge of their seat, struggling to hold back a flood from brimming eyes, fingers gripping the arms of the chair, legs jiggling. Each moment, each breath, each rapid heart beat overwhelmed by panic-filled questions: will there be another breath?  must there be another breath? Must this life go on like this in fear of what the next moment will bring?

The only thing more frightening than the unknown is the fear that the next moment could be worse than the last. Sadly, this is a tragic waste of precious time, a lack of recognition of a moment just passed that will never be retrieved and relived.  

There is only fear of the next and the next so that the now and now and now is lost forever.

Worry and angst is more contagious than the flu.
I washed my hands of it throughout the clinic day.
I wished a simple vaccination could protect us all from unnamed fears.

I wanted to say to them as well as myself:
Stop to rest within this moment in time.
Stop and stop and stop.
Stop fearing the gift of each breath.

Simply be.

I wanted to say:
this moment in time is yours alone.
Don’t let time take it from you;
instead, take time for
weeping and sharing
and breath and pulse and light.
Shout for joy in it.
Celebrate it.
Be thankful for tears that flow
and stop holding them back.

Just be, as uncomfortable as it is –
and be blessed–
in the now and now and now.

Be swept along on the current of time;
now winter bare-branched, to be soon
unfurling, budding,
eventually blossoming.

Time takes us there. So let’s take time.

Coming and Going

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Then we shall be where we would be,
Then we shall be what we should be,
Things that are not now, nor could be,
Soon shall be our own.
~Thomas Kelly from his hymn “Praise the Savior, Ye Who Know Him”

Because I was not marked.
Because I had neither fame
nor beauty nor inquisitiveness.
Because I did not ask.
Because I used my hands.
Because I finished my term on earth
and had no knowledge of either
fear nor care, no morning knowledge,
no knowledge of evening,
and those who came before
and those following after
had no more knowledge of me
than I had of them.
~Mary Ruefle from “Marked”

Whether we are coming or going,
beginning or ending,
leading or following,
rising or setting,
north or south,
east or west ~
one day we shall be
where or what we should be,
without fear nor care nor knowledge.

We’ll journey the continuum of grace and comfort,
part of our Creator’s purpose and design.

So even if not now in our comings and goings,
we will never be lost nor adrift.

We are forever found.

A Fresh Beginning

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No one ever regarded the first of January with indifference.
It is that from which all date their time, and count upon what is left.
It is the nativity of our common Adam.
~Charles Lamb, 1897

Every morn is the world made new.
You who are weary of sorrow and sinning,
Here is a beautiful hope for you,—
A hope for me and a hope for you.

All the past things are past and over;
The tasks are done and the tears are shed.
Yesterday’s errors let yesterday cover;
Yesterday’s wounds, which smarted and bled,
Are healed with the healing which night has shed.

Yesterday now is a part of forever,
Bound up in a sheaf, which God holds tight,
With glad days, and sad days, and bad days, which never
Shall visit us more with their bloom and their blight,
Their fulness of sunshine or sorrowful night.

Let them go, since we cannot re-live them,
Cannot undo and cannot atone;
God in his mercy receive, forgive them!
Only the new days are our own;
To-day is ours, and to-day alone.

Here are the skies all burnished brightly,
Here is the spent earth all re-born,
Here are the tired limbs springing lightly
To face the sun and to share with the morn
In the chrism of dew and the cool of dawn.

Every day is a fresh beginning;
Listen, my soul, to the glad refrain,
And, spite of old sorrow and older sinning,
And puzzles forecasted and possible pain,
Take heart with the day, and begin again.
~Susan Coolidge “New Every Morning”

Each morn is New Year’s morn come true,
Morn of a festival to keep.
All nights are sacred nights to make
Confession and resolve and prayer;
All days are sacred days to wake
New gladness in the sunny air.
Only a night from old to new;
Only a sleep from night to morn.
The new is but the old come true;
Each sunrise sees a new year born.
~Helen Hunt Jackson from “New Year’s Morning”

The year’s at the spring,
And day’s at the morn;
Morning’s at seven;
The hill-side’s dew-pearled;
The lark’s on the wing;
The snail’s on the thorn;
God’s in his Heaven—
All’s right with the world!
~Robert Browning “The Year’s at the Spring”

We each celebrate a birthday on New Year’s Day,
a bright beginning after so much darkness,
a still life nativity born in a winter garden –
He who was and is and is to come:
He who gives us another chance to make it right.

Attempting to Stopper Time

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…the golden hour of the clock of the year.
Everything that can run to fruit has already done so:
round apples, oval plums, bottom-heavy pears,
black walnuts and hickory nuts annealed in their shells,
the woodchuck with his overcoat of fat.
Flowers that were once bright as a box of crayons
are now seed heads and thistle down.
All the feathery grasses shine in the slanted light.
It’s time to bring in the lawn chairs and wind chimes,
time to draw the drapes against the wind,
time to hunker down.
Summer’s fruits are preserved in syrup,
but nothing can stopper time.
No way to seal it in wax or amber;
it slides though our hands like a rope of silk.
At night, the moon’s restless searchlight sweeps across the sky.
~Barbara Crooker “And Now it’s October” from Small Rain.

I do try to stopper time.

I try every day on this page,
not to suspend time or render it frozen,
but like flowers and fruit that wither,
I want to preserve these moments –
a few harvested words and pictures
to sample some chilly day.

I offer it up to you now,
a bit of fragrance,
to sip of its sweetness
as it glows, luminous in the bottle.

Let’s share.
Leave it unstoppered.
The passage of time
is meant to be preserved this way.

photo by Josh Scholten

These Precious Days

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Perhaps as a child you had the chicken pox
and your mother, to soothe you in your fever
or to help you fall asleep, came into your room
and read to you from some favorite book,
Charlotte’s Web or Little House on the Prairie,
a long story that she quietly took you through
until your eyes became magnets for your shuttering
lids and she saw your breathing go slow. And then
she read on, this time silently and to herself,
not because she didn’t know the story,
it seemed to her that there had never been a time
when she didn’t know this story—the young girl
and her benevolence, the young girl in her sod house—
but because she did not yet want to leave your side
though she knew there was nothing more
she could do for you. And you, not asleep but simply weak,
listened to her turn the pages, still feeling
the lamp warm against one cheek, knowing the shape
of the rocking chair’s shadow as it slid across
your chest. So that now, these many years later,
when you are clenched in the damp fist of a hospital bed,
or signing the papers that say you won’t love him anymore,
when you are bent at your son’s gravesite or haunted
by a war that makes you wake with the gun
cocked in your hand, you would like to believe
that such generosity comes from God, too,
who now, when you have the strength to ask, might begin
the story again, just as your mother would,
from the place where you have both left off.
~Keetje Kuipers “Prayer” from Rattle #28, Winter 2007

These autumn days will shorten and grow cold.
The leaves will shake loose from the trees and fall.
Christmas will come, then the snows of winter.
You will live to enjoy the beauty of the frozen world,
for you mean a great deal to Zuckerman
and he will not harm you, ever.
Winter will pass, the days will lengthen,
the ice will melt in the pasture pond.
The song sparrow will return and sing,
the frogs will awake, the warm wind will blow again.
All these sights and sounds and smells will be yours to enjoy,Wilbur — this lovely world, these precious days …
~E.B. White (Charlotte talking to Wilbur) from Charlotte’s Web

Each passing moment is precious, as time flows relentlessly.

We, on a linear trajectory from birth to death, bear witness to the cycling of the seasons while earth spins and orbits through space.

The story of me, and the story of you, is not yet finished. While our heads nod, our eyelids become heavy, the Author is turning the pages, reading resonant Words that define our days.

We pick up where we left off, wanting to hear the next unknowable chapter. We try to stay awake, eager to see what comes next.

We aren’t quite ready to fall asleep, not yet.
Not yet…

Something of Lasting Value

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And with sighs soaring, soaring síghs deliver
Them; beauty-in-the-ghost, deliver it, early now, long before
death
Give beauty back, beauty, beauty, beauty, back to God, beauty’s
self and beauty’s giver.
See; not a hair is, not an eyelash, not the least lash lost; every hair
Is, hair of the head, numbered.
~Gerard Manley Hopkins from “The Golden Echo”

…writing was one way to let something of lasting value emerge
from the pains and fears of my little, quickly passing life.
Each time life required me to take a new step into unknown spiritual territory, I felt a deep, inner urge to tell my story to others–
Perhaps as a need for companionship but maybe, too,
out of an awareness that my deepest vocation is to be a witness to the glimpses of God I have been allowed to catch.
~Henri Nouwen from Reaching Out: The Three Movements of the Spiritual Life

“Last forever!” Who hasn’t prayed that prayer? You were lucky to get it in the first place. The present is a freely given canvas. That it is constantly being ripped apart and washed downstream goes without saying.
~Annie Dillard from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

For too much of my life I have focused on my foreshortening future, bypassing the present in my headlong rush to what lies ahead. There is always a goal to achieve, a conclusion becoming commencement of the next phase, a sunset turning right around in a few hours to become sunrise.

Yet the most precious times occur when the present is so over-whelming, so riveting, so tenderly full of beauty that I believe I can see a brief glimpse of God. I must grab hold with all my strength to try and secret it away and keep it forever. Of course the present still slips away from me, elusive and evasive, torn to bits by the unrelenting movement of time.

Even when I’m able to take a photo to lock it to a page or screen, it is not enough. No matter how I choose to preserve the essence of this moment, it is already passed, ebbing away, never to return.

So I write to harvest those times to make them last a little bit longer although they will inevitably be lost downstream into the ether of unread words.

Where have all the words, all the flowers, all those moments gone?

Even if unread, I am learning that words, which had power in the Beginning to create life itself, still can bring tenderness and meaning back to my life. How blessed to live the gift twice: not just in the moment itself but in recording in words that preserve and treasure it all up, if only for that ephemeral blooming moment.