Tag: trees

Lenten Grace — Some Vast, Incredible Gift

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photo by Josh Scholten
photo by Josh Scholten
photo by Nate Gibson
photo by Nate Gibson
photo by Emily Dieleman
photo by Emily Dieleman

In trees still dripping night some nameless birds
Woke, shook out their arrowy wings, and sang,
Slowly, like finches sifting through a dream.
The pink sun fell, like glass, into the fields.
Two chestnuts, and a dapple gray,
Their shoulders wet with light, their dark hair streaming,
Climbed the hill. The last mist fell away.

And under the trees, beyond time’s brittle drift,
I stood like Adam in his lonely garden
On that first morning, shaken out of sleep,
Rubbing his eyes, listening, parting the leaves,
Like tissue on some vast, incredible gift.

~ Mary Oliver – from “Morning In a New Land”

Solitude Melting

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photos of Dark Hedges, Ireland
photos of Dark Hedges, Ireland

The Cold

How exactly good it is
to know myself
in the solitude of winter,

my body containing its own
warmth, divided from all
by the cold; and to go

separate and sure
among the trees cleanly
divided, thinking of you

perfect too in your solitude,
your life withdrawn into
your own keeping

–to be clear, poised
in perfect self-suspension
toward you, as though frozen.

And having known fully the
goodness of that, it will be
good also to melt.
~Wendell Berry

photo by Josh Scholten
photo by Josh Scholten

Breathing Fog

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photo by Nate Gibson
photo by Nate Gibson

“An absolute
patience.
Trees stand
up to their knees in
fog. The fog
slowly flows
uphill.
White
cobwebs, the grass
leaning where deer
have looked for apples.
The woods
from brook to where
the top of the hill looks
over the fog, send up
not one bird.
So absolute, it is
no other than
happiness itself, a breathing
too quiet to hear.”
–  Denise Levertov, The Breathing

decsun

Edging Closer for Company

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The trees are coming into their winter bareness, the only green is the lichen on their branches. Against the hemlocks, the rain is falling in dim, straight lines… This is the time of year when all the houses have come out of the woods, edging closer to the roads as if for company.
Verlyn Klinkenborg “The Rain It Raineth”

The deciduous trees in our part of the country have all been stripped bare, having come through two rain and wind storms in the last week.  It forces typically leaf-hidden homes out of camouflage and I’m once again startled at the actual proximity of our neighbors.  It isn’t as obvious in the summer given the tree buffer everyone has carefully planted.  Now we’re reminded once again we are not alone and actually never have been.

Even the mountains that surround us from the northwest to the southeast seem closer when the trees are bare and new snow has settled on their steep shoulders.

We think we have autonomy all wrapped up but it takes the storms of autumn to remind us we are unwrapped and vulnerable, stark naked, in desperate need of company when darkness comes early, the snow flies and the lights flicker.

Transcendent Moments

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“Gratitude bestows reverence, allowing us to encounter everyday epiphanies, those transcendent moments of awe that change forever how we experience life and the world.”
~ John Milton

Our farm yard looked like it had a retro remodel update this past week by heavy winds and rain, the green sod now covered with a mottled yellow brown shag carpet of leaves.   This transformation is temporary as this new carpet will soon start to rot under the burden of endless days of wintry drizzle and freezing weather.

Today’s epiphany:  only 8 months ago, none of these leaves even existed.  They were mere potential in bud form, about to burst and grow in a silent awesome explosion of green and chlorophyll.   After their brief tenure as shade and protection and fuel factory for their tree, last week they rained to the ground in torrents, letting go of the only (and so transient) security they had known.

Now they become compost, returning their substance to the soil to feed the roots of the trees that gave them life to begin with.

Recycled by transcendent death,
so momentary,
so momentous.

BriarCroft in Autumn

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“November always seemed to me the Norway of the year.”
– Emily Dickinson

“Lo! sweeten’d with the summer light,
The full-juiced apple, waxing over-mellow,
Drops in a silent autumn night.”
Alfred Lord Tennyson

“Bare are the places where the sweet flowers dwelt.
What joy sufficient hath November felt?
What profit from the violet’s day of pain?
– Helen Hunt Jackson, Autumn Sonnet “O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn’s being.
Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead,
Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing.”
– Percy Bysshe Shelley

“How silently they tumble down
And come to rest upon the ground
To lay a carpet, rich and rare,
Beneath the trees without a care,
Content to sleep, their work well done,
Colors gleaming in the sun.
At other times, they wildly fly
Until they nearly reach the sky.
Till all the trees stand stark and bare.
Exhausted, drop to earth below
To wait, like children, for the snow.”
 –   Elsie N. Brady, Leaves

“I saw the lovely arch
Of rainbow span the sky,
The gold sun burning
As the rain swept by.”
– Elizabeth Coatsworth, November

“Pleasures lie thickest where no pleasures seem:
There’s not a leaf that falls upon the ground
But holds some joy of silence or of sound
Some spirits begotten of a summer dream.”
– Laman Blanchard

“The mountain air is fresh at the dusk of day;
The flying birds in flocks return.
In these things there lies a deep meaning;
I want to tell it, but have forgotten the words.”
– Tao Yuan Ming

“A fine rain was falling, and the landscape was that of autumn.  The sky was hung with various shades of gray, and mists hovered about the distant mountains – a melancholy nature.  The leaves were falling on all sides like the last illusions of youth under the tears of irremediable grief.  Every landscape is, as it were, a state of the soul, and whoever penetrates into both is astonished to find how much likeness there is in each detail.”
– Henri Frederic Amiel

“Even if something is left undone, everyone must take time to sit still and watch the leaves turn.”
– Elizabeth Lawrence

BriarCroft in Spring

BriarCroft in Summer

BriarCroft in Winter

BriarCroft at Year’s End

Letting It Go

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photo by Josh Scholten

Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars

of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,

the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders

of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is

nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned

in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side

photo by Josh Scholten

is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world

you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.
~Mary Oliver, “In Blackwater Woods”

photo by Josh Scholten

First Gray Hair

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photo by Josh Scholten

“The foliage has been losing its freshness through the month of August, and here and there a yellow leaf shows itself like the first gray hair amidst the locks of a beauty who has seen one season too many.”
~Oliver Wendell Holmes

I remember a day before I turned 30 when a barber pulled a gray hair from my head and handed it to me.  “Here you go, ” she said,  “this is only the beginning.”

Indeed.  My mother was totally gray by 32 and my hope was to hold onto my light brown hair until at least 50.

It didn’t seem possible I could be losing my “freshness” so young as 29, but double the years with an exponential increase in the number of gray hairs, and I must face facts.  Quite a few years ago on my 45th birthday, as I was walking down the sidewalk at work, a middle-aged woman stopped me mid-stride and asked me what brand hair coloring I used.  I was taken completely off-guard.  All I could respond was that I used no hair coloring other than what God Himself applied.  She laughed and said she would have to keep looking then, as she was hoping I could direct her to a hair color that would make her hair look like “champagne” just like mine.   I floated for three days on that thought alone.

Champagne.  So I wasn’t “one season too many” after all.  I was “well-aged.”

I sympathize with the not-so-fresh foliage on the farm in late summer. In anticipation of autumn, some of the yellow leaves simply give up and let go, flying in the wind to their final resting place, even in early September.  Others decide to hang on until the bitter end ~yellowing, goldening, reddening and browning in a shimmering kaleidoscope of exhausted pigment.

I am one of those hanging on, quaking at times in the breezes, bedraggled in the drizzle, tattered on the edges, with some age spots here and there.  I’m determined to make the best of the gray and am proud of every strand I’ve earned over the years and hope to earn a bunch more before I’m done.

After all…it isn’t really gray.  It is champagne, well aged, with bubbles sparkling in the sun.

Photos of the “gray hairs” showing up around the farm as of today

Summer Afternoon at BriarCroft

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Tony running in the lower field

“Summer afternoon—summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.”
― Henry James

fish pond
Front yard light and shadow under the walnut tree
the swing set my dad made when I was little, now perched on our farm

Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass under trees on a summer’s day, listening to the murmur of the water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is by no means a waste of time.
~John Lubbock

haybarn
2012 Hay Storage

It will not always be summer; build barns.
~Hesiod

tree house in the walnut tree

front porch
Jose, who owns the front porch
Old buddies Dylan Thomas and Bobbie
Samwise Gamgee at 18 weeks
Thistle making more thistle
Gravenstein windfalls
a few of a million blackberries on the farm
silver plum tree

Summer was our best season: it was sleeping on the back screened porch in cots, or trying to sleep in the treehouse; summer was everything good to eat; it was a thousand colors in a parched landscape; but most of all, summer was Dill.
~ Harper Lee in Too Kill a Mockingbird


‘Tis the last rose of summer
Left blooming alone;
All her lovely companions
Are faded and gone.
Thomas More

poplar row

in the filbert grove

Baldwin apple tree

Bartlett pear tree
heavy cone crop

And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.
~F. Scott Fitzgerald in The Great Gatsby

milking barn window
from the field
old milk barn
barn lane

Summer’s lease hath all too short a date.
~William Shakespeare

hydrangea

BriarCroft in Winter