A dishwater sky mutes sun’s rays to gray, the hills leading to the pass forested in haze, drained of green. Though a steady bluster, the wind musters nothing but silence. The plodding sound of melt drip, drip, drips from the askew rusted rain gutter outside my purview. Perhaps, I have all my life been too much in love with sadness. ~Lana Hectman Ayers from “Window in Late January” from Autobiography of Rain
A silence slipping around like death, Yet chased by a whisper, a sigh, a breath, One group of trees, lean, naked and cold, Inking their crest ‘gainst a sky green-gold, One path that knows where the corn flowers were; Lonely, apart, unyielding, one fir; And over it softly leaning down, One star that I loved ere the fields went brown. ~Angelina Weld Grimke “A Winter Twilight”
I am astonished by my thirst for clinging to sadness when a gray day asks so little of me.
Good thing I’m shaken from my melancholy by such simple moments as a twilight shimmering gold, a burst of unexpected evening birdsong, a steadfast fir standing unyielding on our hilltop, where it glimpses the edge of tomorrow as today’s dusky horizon fades away.
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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.
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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
photo by Dan Gibson
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.
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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.
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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.
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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 Dillardfrom 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.
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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
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.
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…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.
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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
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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)
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