Tag: tree

Come and See: Make Straight the Way

barnstormingblog1 Comment

And this is the testimony of John, when the Jews sent priests and Levites from Jerusalem to ask him, “Who are you?”  He confessed, and did not deny, but confessed, “I am not the Christ.” 

And they asked him, “What then? Are you Elijah?”
He said, “I am not.” “Are you the Prophet?”
And he answered, “No.” 
 So they said to him, “Who are you? We need to give an answer to those who sent us. What do you say about yourself?” 
 He said, “I am the voice of one crying out in the wilderness, ‘Make straight the way of the Lord,’ as the prophet Isaiah said.”

(Now they had been sent from the Pharisees.) They asked him, “Then why are you baptizing, if you are neither the Christ, nor Elijah, nor the Prophet?” 

John answered them, “I baptize with water, but among you stands one you do not know, even he who comes after me, the strap of whose sandal I am not worthy to untie.” These things took place in Bethany across the Jordan, where John was baptizing.
John 1:19-28

We grow accustomed to the Dark —
When Light is put away —
As when the Neighbor holds the Lamp
To witness her Good bye —

A Moment — We Uncertain step
For newness of the night —
Then — fit our Vision to the Dark —
And meet the Road — erect —

And so of larger — Darknesses —
Those Evenings of the Brain —
When not a Moon disclose a sign —
Or Star — come out — within —

The Bravest — grope a little —
And sometimes hit a Tree
Directly in the Forehead —
But as they learn to see —

Either the Darkness alters —
Or something in the sight
Adjusts itself to Midnight —
And Life steps almost straight.
~Emily Dickinson

I admit that I’ve been stumbling about in the dark,
bearing the bruises and scrapes of
random collisions with objects hidden in the night.

My eyes must slowly adjust to such bare illumination,
as the Lamp sometimes is carried away.
I must feel my way along the road of life.

I know there are fellow darkness travelers
who also have lost their way and their Light,
giving what they can and sometimes more.

And so, blinded as we each are,
we run forehead-first into the Tree
which has always been there and always will be.

Because of who we are and Who loves us,
we, now free and forgiven,
follow a darkened road guaranteed straight, all the way Home.

I am reading slowly through the words in the Book of John over the next year. Each week, I will invite you to “come and see” what those words might mean as we explore His promises together.

One-Time
Monthly
Yearly

Make a one-time or recurring donation to support daily Barnstorming posts

Make a monthly donation

Make a yearly donation

Choose an amount

$10.00
$25.00
$50.00
$5.00
$15.00
$100.00
$5.00
$15.00
$100.00

Or enter a custom amount

$

Your contribution is deeply appreciated.

Your contribution is appreciated.

Your contribution is appreciated.

DonateDonate monthlyDonate yearly

Another Year of Leaping Winds

barnstormingblogLeave a comment
walnutoctober2017
walnuthull5
frontyard2915

My mother and I debate:
we could sell
the black walnut tree
to the lumberman,
and pay off the mortgage.
Likely some storm anyway
will churn down its dark boughs,
smashing the house. We talk
slowly, two women trying
in a difficult time to be wise.
Roots in the cellar drains,
I say, and she replies
that the leaves are getting heavier
every year, and the fruit
harder to gather away.
But something brighter than money
moves in our blood – an edge
sharp and quick as a trowel
that wants us to dig and sow.
So we talk, but we don’t do
anything.

What my mother and I both know
is that we’d crawl with shame
in the emptiness we’d made
in our own and our fathers’ backyard.
So the black walnut tree
swings through another year
of sun and leaping winds,
of leaves and bounding fruit,
and, month after month, the whip-
crack of the mortgage.
~Mary Oliver from “The Black Walnut Tree” from Twelve Moons

frontyard1
april2frontyard
photo by Dan Gibson
walnuthulls2

We bought this old farm thirty-five years ago:
the Lawrence family’s “Walnut Hill Farm” –
a front yard lined with several tall black walnut trees
brought as seedlings in a grandfather’s suitcase from Ohio
in the ought-1900’s.

These trees thrived for nearly a century on this hilltop farm
overlooking the Canadian mountains to the north,
the Nooksack River valley to the west,
the Cascade peaks to the east,
each prolific in leaves
and prodigious in fruit.

The first year we were here,
a windstorm took one tree down.
A neighbor offered
to mill the twisted trunk for shares.
The fallen tree became planks
of fine grained chocolate-hued lumber.

This old tree is the back facing of our oak door cupboards,
a daily reminder of a legacy left behind~
sturdy even if imperfect,
still beautiful to the eye and the heart.

treehouse5
novtreehouse
blackwalnut

One-Time
Monthly
Yearly

Make a one-time or recurring donation to support daily Barnstorming posts

Make a monthly donation

Make a yearly donation

Choose an amount

$10.00
$25.00
$50.00
$5.00
$15.00
$100.00
$5.00
$15.00
$100.00

Or enter a custom amount

$

Your contribution is deeply appreciated.

Your contribution is appreciated.

Your contribution is appreciated.

DonateDonate monthlyDonate yearly

When All Is Said…

barnstormingblog2 Comments

A butterfly dancing in the sunlight,
A bird singing to his mate,
The whispering pines,
The restless sea,
The gigantic mountains,
A stately tree,
The rain upon the roof,
The sun at early dawn,
A boy with rod and hook,
The babble of a shady brook,
A woman with her smiling babe,
A man whose eyes are kind and wise,
Youth that is eager and unafraid—
When all is said, I do love best
A little home where love abides,
And where there’s kindness, peace, and rest.
~Scottie McKenzie Frasier “The Things I Love”

When all is said and done,
I love best the people
who bring kindness, peace and rest
to the little house
we call home.

It is enough
and everything.

One-Time
Monthly
Yearly

Make a one-time or recurring donation to support daily Barnstorming posts

Make a monthly donation

Make a yearly donation

Choose an amount

$10.00
$25.00
$50.00
$5.00
$15.00
$100.00
$5.00
$15.00
$100.00

Or enter a custom amount

$

Your contribution is deeply appreciated.

Your contribution is appreciated.

Your contribution is appreciated.

DonateDonate monthlyDonate yearly

Standing Still

barnstormingblog1 Comment

In my beginning is my end. Now the light falls…
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope.
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
~T.S. Eliot from “East Coker”

Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you
Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here,
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,
Must ask permission to know it and be known.
The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,
I have made this place around you.
If you leave it, you may come back again, saying Here.
No two trees are the same to Raven.
No two branches are the same to Wren.
If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,
You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows
Where you are. You must let it find you.
~David Wagoner “Lost”

Come listen in the silence of the moment before rain comes down.
There’s a deep sigh in the quiet of the forest and the tall tree’s crown.

Now hold me.
Will you take the time to hold me and embrace the chill?
Or miss me,
will you take the time to miss me when the earth stands still?

Cause there’s no use running
cause the storm’s still coming
and you’ve been running for too many years.

Come listen in the silence of the moment before shadows fall.
Feel the tremor of your heartbeat matching heartbeat as we both dissolve.

Now hold me….

Cause there’s no use running
cause the storm’s still coming
and you’ve been running for too many years.

So stay with me, held in my arms
Like branches of a tree
They’ll shelter you for many years.
~Don MacDonald “When The Earth Stands Still”

If I’m feeling lost in the figurative forest of my days on this earth, unsure where I’m heading and struggling to figure out where I’ve been, I just look up at our lone fir on the hill of our farm.

This fir has stood still through years of change around it, buffeted by windstorms and frozen rain and heavy snow, thirsted through dry summers, and rooted solid during the occasional earthquake.

I tend to follow whatever path appears before me, keeping my head down to make sure I don’t trip over a root or stumble on a rock. Yet around and above me are the clues to where I am and where I’m going.

So standing still beneath this tree, with a changing sky around me, God always reminds me where I am.
He knows when my focus is distracted and floundering.

I once was lost, and now am found.

One-Time
Monthly
Yearly

Make a one-time or recurring donation to support daily Barnstorming posts

Make a monthly donation

Make a yearly donation

Choose an amount

$10.00
$25.00
$50.00
$5.00
$15.00
$100.00
$5.00
$15.00
$100.00

Or enter a custom amount

$

Your contribution is deeply appreciated.

Your contribution is appreciated.

Your contribution is appreciated.

DonateDonate monthlyDonate yearly

Rung Like a Bell

barnstormingblog6 Comments

Faith is not the clinging to a shrine
but an endless pilgrimage of the heart. 
Audacious longings,
burning songs,
daring thoughts,
an impulse overwhelming the heart,
usurping the mind-
these are all a drive towards serving Him
who rings our hearts like a bell.
It is as if He were waiting to enter
our empty, perishing lives.
~Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel from Man Is Not Alone: A Philosophy of Religion

In the end,
coming to faith remains for all a sense of homecoming,
of picking up the threads of a lost life,
of responding to a bell that had long been ringing,
of taking a place at a table that had long been vacant.
~Malcolm Muggeridge

I saw the tree with lights in it. I saw the backyard cedar where the mourning doves roost charged and transfigured, each cell buzzing with flame. I stood on the grass with the lights in it, grass that was wholly fire, utterly focused and utterly dreamed.

It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance.

I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck.
~Annie Dillard from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Too much of the time
I fixate on what I think I can control in life~
what I see, hear, taste, feel

Instead I should consider
how might I appear to my Maker
as I begin each day?
-my utter astonishment at waking up,
-my pure gratitude for each breathless moment,
-my pealing resonance
as like a bell, I’m struck senseless by life.

One-Time
Monthly
Yearly

Make a one-time or recurring donation to support daily Barnstorming posts

Make a monthly donation

Make a yearly donation

Choose an amount

$10.00
$25.00
$50.00
$5.00
$15.00
$100.00
$5.00
$15.00
$100.00

Or enter a custom amount

$

Your contribution is deeply appreciated.

Your contribution is appreciated.

Your contribution is appreciated.

DonateDonate monthlyDonate yearly

The Way I See the World

barnstormingblogLeave a comment
walnutshoot
dawn7250

Old friend now there is no one alive
who remembers when you were young
it was high summer when I first saw you
in the blaze of day most of my life ago
with the dry grass whispering in your shade
and already you had lived through wars
and echoes of wars around your silence
through days of parting and seasons of absence
with the house emptying as the years went their way
until it was home to bats and swallows
and still when spring climbed toward summer
you opened once more the curled sleeping fingers
of newborn leaves as though nothing had happened
you and the seasons spoke the same language
and all these years I have looked through your limbs
to the river below and the roofs and the night
and you were the way I saw the world
~W.S. Merwin “Elegy for a Walnut” from The Moon Before Morning

Today I stood under the kitchen
archway and stepped into
my new body. Pasta was on the stove,
a cold Tupperware of string beans
on the counter. But I knew.
I knew I would never be the same—
the way I’m certain the magnolia
down the block has lost
all its petals. I haven’t checked
in days, but I’m convinced
tomorrow when I take my son
to the bus stop, I’ll see them
splashed on the sidewalk.
What I’m trying to say is
sometimes your old skin
falls breathlessly off your body
in late April, as you slice
a cucumber into half moons
for your child,
and you just stand there
and let it.
~Wendy Wisner “Shedding” from The New Life: Poems

dawn7254

This grand old tree defines the seasons for me
while it parallels my own aging.

This past winter’s storms took its branches down in the night
with deafening cracks so loud
I feared to see what remnant
remained in the morning.

Yet it still stands, intrepid,
ready for another round of seasons–
though tired, sagging, broken at the edges,
it’s always reaching to the sky.

aprilwalnut
AI image created for this post
One-Time
Monthly
Yearly

Make a one-time or recurring donation to support daily Barnstorming posts

Make a monthly donation

Make a yearly donation

Choose an amount

$10.00
$25.00
$50.00
$5.00
$15.00
$100.00
$5.00
$15.00
$100.00

Or enter a custom amount

$

Your contribution is deeply appreciated.

Your contribution is appreciated.

Your contribution is appreciated.

DonateDonate monthlyDonate yearly

Soon Enough

barnstormingblogLeave a comment

When I was young, I cut the bigger, older trees for firewood, the ones with heart rot, dead and broken branches, the crippled and deformed ones,

because, I reasoned, they were going to fall soon anyway, and therefore, I should give the younger trees more light and room to grow.

Now I’m older and I cut the younger, strong and sturdy, solid
and beautiful trees, and I let the older ones have a few more years

of light and water and leaf in the forest they have known so long.
Soon enough they will be prostrate on the ground.
~David Budbill “The Woodcutter Changes His Mind” from While We’ve Still Got Feet

…we are fallen like the trees, our peace
Broken, and so we must
Love where we cannot trust,
Trust where we cannot know,
And must await the wayward-coming grace
That joins living and dead,
Taking us where we would not go–
Into the boundless dark.
When what was made has been unmade
The Maker comes to His work.
~Wendell Berry from  “Sabbaths, II”

Things: simply lasting, then
failing to last:
into light all things
must fall, glad at last to have fallen.
~Jane Kenyon, from “Things” in Collected Poems

I know I am brief and finite,
leaning more and more from the prevailing winds,
wobbly through each storm that comes.

Things I wish would last
don’t, so I hold them lightly in love.

I must trust God’s Light passes
through the darkness,
an illuminated pathway
I follow,
even when falling,
even when finite and failing
until I am part of the Light myself.

AI image created for this post
One-Time
Monthly
Yearly

Make a one-time or recurring donation to support daily Barnstorming posts

Make a monthly donation

Make a yearly donation

Choose an amount

$10.00
$25.00
$50.00
$5.00
$15.00
$100.00
$5.00
$15.00
$100.00

Or enter a custom amount

$

Your contribution is deeply appreciated.

Your contribution is appreciated.

Your contribution is appreciated.

DonateDonate monthlyDonate yearly

The Edge of Dark and Cold

barnstormingblog1 Comment

This saying good-by on the edge of the dark
And the cold to an orchard so young in the bark
Reminds me of all that can happen to harm
An orchard away at the end of the farm
All winter, cut off by a hill from the house.

I wish I could promise to lie in the night
And think of an orchard’s arboreal plight
When slowly (and nobody comes with a light)
Its heart sinks lower under the sod.
But something has to be left to God.
~Robert Frost from “Good-bye and Keep Cold”

The winter orchard looks cold and silent yet I know plenty is happening beneath the sod.

There isn’t much to be done this time of year until the pruning hook comes out. Ideally, now is the time the trees should be shaped and shorn.

Pruning is one of those tasks that is immensely satisfying–after it’s done – way after. Several years after in some cases. In the case of our fruit trees, which all have an average age of 90 years or more, it is a matter of prune or lose them forever. We set to work, trying to gently retrain wild and chaotic apple, cherry, plum, and pear trees, but our consistency was lacking. The trees remained on the wild side, defying us, and several have toppled over in windstorms due to their weakened frame.

We hired additional help, hoping to get ahead of the new growth, but our helper had the “chain saw” approach to pruning and literally scalped several trees into dormancy before we saw what was happening and stopped the savaging.

Instead, the process of retraining a wild tree is slow, meticulous, thoughtful, and expectant. We must study the tree, the setting, know the fruit it is supposed to bear, and begin making decisions before making cuts. The dead stuff goes first–that’s easy. It’s not useful, it’s taking up space, it’s outta here. It’s the removal of viable branches that takes courage. Like thinning healthy vegetable plants in a garden, I can almost hear the plant utter a little scream as we choose it to be the next one to go. Gardening is not for the faint of heart. So ideally, we choose to trim about a third of the superfluous branches, rather than taking them all at once. In three years, we have the hoped-for tree, bearing fruit that is larger, healthier and hardier.

Then we’re in maintenance mode. That takes patience, vision, dedication, and love. That’s the ideal world.

The reality is we skip years of pruning work, sometimes several years in a row. Or we make a really dumb error and prune in a way that is counter productive, and it takes several years for the tree to recover. Or, in the case of the scalping, those trees took years to ever bear fruit again–standing embarrassed and naked among their peers.

Then there is the clean up process after pruning–if it was just lopping off stuff, I’d be out there doing it right now, but the process of picking up all those discarded branches off the ground, carrying them to a brush pile and burning them takes much more time and effort. That’s where kids come in very handy.

Our three children tolerated our shaping, trimming and pruning for years, grew tall and strong and ready to meet the world, to give it all they’ve got. In our hopes and dreams for them, there were times we  probably pruned a bit in haste, or sometimes neglected to prune enough, but even so, they’re all bearing great fruit, now grown up with few “scars” to show for our mistakes. 

I’m still pruned regularly by the Master Gardener, often painfully. Sometimes I see the pruning hook coming, knowing the dead branches that I’ve needlessly hung onto must go, and sometimes it comes as a complete surprise, cutting me at my most vulnerable spots. Some years I bear better fruit than other years. Some years, it seems, hardly any at all. I can be cold and dormant, unfruitful and at times desolate.

Yet, I’m still rooted, still fed when hungry and watered when thirsty, and still, amazingly enough, loved. I’ll continue to hang on to the root that chose to feed me and hold me fast through the windstorms of life. Even when my trunk is leaning, my branches broken, my fruit withered, I will know that God’s love sustains me, no matter what.

I am the true vine, and my Father is the gardener.  He cuts off every branch in me that bears no fruit, while every branch that does bear fruit he prunes so that it will be even more fruitful. 
John 15: 1-2

AI image created for this post
One-Time
Monthly
Yearly

Make a one-time or recurring donation to support daily Barnstorming posts

Make a monthly donation

Make a yearly donation

Choose an amount

$10.00
$25.00
$50.00
$5.00
$15.00
$100.00
$5.00
$15.00
$100.00

Or enter a custom amount

$

Your contribution is deeply appreciated to help offset the costs of maintaining an ad-free website.

Your contribution is appreciated.

Your contribution is appreciated.

DonateDonate monthlyDonate yearly

We Are No Longer Alone: The Light Stays On

barnstormingblogLeave a comment

When everyone had gone
I sat in the library
With the small silent tree,
She and I alone.
How softly she shone!

And for the first time then
For the first time this year,
I felt reborn again,
I knew love’s presence near.

Love distant, love detached
And strangely without weight,
Was with me in the night
When everyone had gone
And the garland of pure light
Stayed on, stayed on.
~ May Sarton “Christmas Light” from Collected Poems

That afternoon, the air’s large hand
took hold of their backyard
apricot tree, the one that
had fruited, bountifully, a lush yield
in late summer, caught it in a downdraft
of chill, shook it lightly, again, again,
loosening each leaf from its
thumb of stem.
For two days I watched
the leaves’ pale, ground-ward drift,
each leaf singly, in its
gentle shedding, among all
the glints of gold,
each crumpled flick of fiber
from its stem’s thumb
a departure, a declaration.
An announcement, God saying,
gently, Thank You for
a lovely job. Now,
time to let go.
~Luci Shaw “Loewy’s Apricot Tree, Fall 2022”

The child wonders at the Christmas Tree:
Let him continue in the spirit of wonder…

The accumulated memories of annual emotion
May be concentrated into a great joy
Which shall be also a great fear, as on the occasion
When fear came upon every soul:
Because the beginning shall remind us of the end
And the first coming of the second coming.
~T.S. Eliot from “The Cultivation of Christmas Trees”

…the Lord will be your everlasting light,
    and your God will be your glory
Isaiah 60:19

I watch the eastern sky from the moment I get up each day. This time of year, most mornings remain dark, rainy and gray but there are some dawns that start with a low simmer around the base of the Cascade peaks. The light crawls up the slopes and climbs to illuminate the summits, then explodes into the skies.

Christ started small and lowly, then slowly crawled, then He walked beside us. He climbed up willingly to sacrifice Himself – to let go for our sake.

Once risen, He returned to the brilliance of the heavens.

Look east, good people,
Love is on its way again,
and again
and again.

This year’s Advent theme is from Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s sermon on the First Sunday in Advent, December 2, 1928:

The celebration of Advent is possible only to those who are troubled in soul, who know themselves to be poor and imperfect, and who look forward to something greater to come. For these, it is enough to wait in humble fear until the Holy One himself comes down to us, God in the child in the manager.

God comes.

He is, and always will be now, with us in our sin, in our suffering, and at our death. We are no longer alone. God is with us and we are no longer homeless.
~Dietrich Bonhoeffer – from Christmas Sermons

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.
This 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.
The tree of life . . .
For happiness I long have sought,
And pleasure dearly I have bought;
I missed for all, but now I see
’Tis found in Christ the apple tree.
2
I’m wearied with my former toil,
Here I shall sit and rest awhile;
Under the shadow I will be
Of Jesus Christ the apple tree.
The tree of life . . .
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.
The tree of life . . .
(from the collection of Joshua Smith,
New Hampshire, 1784)

AI image created for this post
One-Time
Monthly
Yearly

Make a one-time or recurring donation to support daily Barnstorming posts

Make a monthly donation

Make a yearly donation

Choose an amount

$10.00
$25.00
$50.00
$5.00
$15.00
$100.00
$5.00
$15.00
$100.00

Or enter a custom amount

$

Your contribution is deeply appreciated.

Your contribution is appreciated.

Your contribution is appreciated.

DonateDonate monthlyDonate yearly

This Tree…

barnstormingblogLeave a comment

What words or harder gift
does the light require of me
carving from the dark
this difficult tree?

What place or farther peace
do I almost see
emerging from the night
and heart of me?

The sky whitens, goes on and on.
Fields wrinkle into rows
of cotton, go on and on.
Night like a fling of crows
disperses and is gone.

What song, what home,
what calm or one clarity
can I not quite come to,
never quite see:
this field, this sky, this tree.
~Christian Wiman “Hard Night”

photo by Bob Tjoelker

Even the darkest night has a sliver of light left,
if only in our memories of home.
We remember how it was and how it can be —
the promise of better to come.

While the ever-changing sky swirls as a backdrop,
a tree on a hill becomes the focal point, as it must,
like a black hole swallowing up all pain, all suffering,
all evil threatening to consume our world.

What clarity, what calm,
what peace can be found at the foot of that tree,
where our hearts can rest in this knowledge:
our sin died there, once and for all
and our names carved in its roots for eternity.