Tag: Winter

An Eternal Ultimate Eye

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Silence and darkness grow apace, broken only by the crack of a hunter’s gun in the woods.  Songbirds abandon us so gradually that, until the day when we hear no birdsong at all but the scolding of the jay, we haven’t fully realized that we are bereft — as after a death.  Even the sun has gone off somewhere…

Now we all come in, having put the garden to bed, and we wait for winter to pull a chilly sheet over its head.  
~Jane Kenyon from “Season of Change and Loss” in Winter: A Spiritual Biography

The tree, and its haunting bird,
Are the loves of my heart;
But where is the word, the word,
Oh where is the art,

To say, or even to see,
For a moment of time,
What the Tree and the Bird must be
In the true sublime?

They shine, listening to the soul,
And the soul replies;
But the inner love is not whole,
and the moment dies.

Oh give me before I die
The grace to see
With eternal, ultimate eye,
The Bird and the Tree.

The song in the living Green,
The Tree and the Bird –
Oh have they ever been seen,
Ever been heard?
~Ruth Pitter “The Bird in the Tree”

Every day now we hear hunters firing in the woods and the wetlands around our farm, most likely aiming for the few ducks that have stayed in the marshes through the winter, or possibly a Canadian goose or a deer to bring home for the freezer.   The usual day-long serenade of birdsong is replaced by shotguns popping, hawks and eagle screams and chittering from the treetops, the occasional dog barking, woodpeckers hammering at tree bark with the bluejays and squirrels arguing over the last of the filbert nuts.

In the clear cold evenings, when coyotes aren’t howling in the moonlight, the owls hoot to each other across the fields from one patch of woods to another, their gentle resonant conversation echoing back and forth. Our horses, confined to their stalls in the barns, snort and blow as they bury their noses in flakes of summer-bound hay.

But there are no longer birdsong arias; I’m left bereft of their blending musical tapestry that wakes me at 4 AM in the spring.

And no peeper orchestra tuning up in the swamps in the evenings, rising and falling on the breeze.

It is way too quiet – clearly a time of bereavement. The chilly silence of the darkened days, interrupted by gunshot percussion, is like a baton raised in anticipation after rapping the podium to bring us all to attention. I wait and listen for the downbeat of spring — the return of birds and frogs tuning their throats, preparing their symphony.

Oh, give me the grace to see and hear the Bird in the Tree with an eternal ultimate eye and ear.

Like a bird on a tree
I’m just sitting here
I get time
It’s clear to see
From up here
The world seems small
We can seat together
It’s so beautiful
You and me
We meant to be
In the great outdoors
Forever free
Sometimes you need to go
And take a step back
To see the truth around you
From a distance you can tell
You and me
We meant to be
In the great outdoors
Forever free
~Eldar Kedem

Between the March and April line—
That magical frontier
Beyond which summer hesitates,
Almost too heavenly near.
The saddest noise, the sweetest noise,
The maddest noise that grows and grows,—
The birds, they make it in the spring,
At night’s delicious close.
The saddest noise I know.
It makes us think of all the dead
That sauntered with us here,
By separation’s sorcery
Made cruelly more dear.
It makes us think of what we had,
And what we now deplore.
We almost wish those siren throats
Would go and sing no more.
An ear can break a human heart
As quickly as a spear,
We wish the ear had not a heart
So dangerously near.
~Lyrics adapted from an Emily Dickinson poem

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Make Me Like You

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Make me like one of your leaves
  Thirsty for light

Make me like one of your rocks
   Quiet to the core

Make me like one of your raindrops
      Joining the river

Make me like one of your feathers
      Floating in uncertainty

Make me like one of your stars
      Shining through darkness

Make me like You
     Able to love.
~Spence Pfleiderer “A Simple Morning Prayer”

Tonight at sunset walking on the snowy road,
my shoes crunching on the frozen gravel, first

through the woods, then out into the open fields
past a couple of trailers and some pickup trucks, I stop

and look at the sky. Suddenly: orange, red, pink, blue,
green, purple, yellow, gray, all at once and everywhere.

I pause in this moment at the beginning of my old age
and I say a prayer of gratitude for getting to this evening

a prayer for being here, today, now, alive
in this life, in this evening, under this sky.
~David Budbill “Winter: Tonight: Sunset” from While We’ve Still Got Feet

I thank you God for most this amazing day
For the leaping greenly spirits of trees
And a blue true dream of sky
And for everything that is natural, which is infinite, which is yes
I who have died am alive again today
And this is the sun’s birthday
This is the birth day of life and of love and wings
And of the gay great happening illimitably earth
How should tasting, touching, hearing, seeing, breathing any
Lifted from the no of all nothing
Human merely being doubt unimaginable You?
Now the ears of my ears awake
And now the eyes of my eyes are opened
~E. E. Cummings~

Each day,
no matter how things feel,
no matter how tired or distracted I am,
no matter how empty or discouraged,
no matter how worried, or fearful or heartsick:

it is up to me to distill my very existence down
to this moment of beauty that will never come again;
I’m given the unimaginable opportunity to be loving
with every cell of my being.

One breath, one blink, one pause, one whispered word again and again:
thanks, thanks, thanks be to God.

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An End-of-the-Year Wintry Soul

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Whatever harm I may have done
In all my life in all your wide creation
If I cannot repair it
I beg you to repair it,

And then there are all the wounded
The poor the deaf the lonely and the old
Whom I have roughly dismissed
As if I were not one of them.
Where I have wronged them by it
And cannot make amends
I ask you
To comfort them to overflowing,

And where there are lives I may have withered around me,
Or lives of strangers far or near
That I’ve destroyed in blind complicity,
And if I cannot find them
Or have no way to serve them,

Remember them. I beg you to remember them

When winter is over
And all your unimaginable promises
Burst into song on death’s bare branches.
~Anne Porter “A Short Testament” from Living Things.

While this end of the year’s darkness lingers,
beginning too early and lasting too late,
I find myself hiding in my own wintry soul,
knowing I have too often failed to do
what is needed
when it is needed.

I tend to look inward
when I need to focus outside myself.
I muffle my ears
to unhear supplicating voices.
I turn away
rather than meet a stranger’s gaze.

I appeal to God
who knows my darkness needs His Light,
who unimaginably promises
buds of hope and warmth
and color and fruit
will arise from my barest branches.

He brings me forth out of hiding,
to be impossibly transformed.

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Dawn on our Darkness: Snowbound Snowblind Longing

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The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit.
John 3:8

To look at the last great self-portraits of Rembrandt or to read Pascal or hear Bach’s B-minor Mass is to know beyond the need for further evidence that if God is anywhere, he is with them, as he is also with the man behind the meat counter, the woman who scrubs floors at Roosevelt Memorial, the high-school math teacher who explains fractions to the bewildered child. And the step from “God with them” to Emmanuel, “God with us,” may not be as great as it seems.

What keeps the wild hope of Christmas alive year after year in a world notorious for dashing all hopes is the haunting dream that the child who was born that day may yet be born again even in us and our own snowbound, snowblind longing for him.
~Frederick Buechner from A Room Called Remember

God gave us all a garden once
and walked with us at eve
that we might know him face to face
with no need to believe.

But we denied and hid from Him,
concealing our own shame,
yet still He came and looked for us,
and called us each by name.

He found us when we hid from Him,
He clothed us with His grace.
But still we turned our backs on Him
and would not see His face.

So now, He comes to us again,
not as a Lord most high,
but weak and helpless as we are,
that we might hear Him cry.

And He who clothed us in our need,
lies naked in the straw,
that we might wrap Him in our rags
when once we fled in awe.

The strongest comes in weakness now,
a stranger to our door,
the King forsakes His palaces
and dwells among the poor.

And where we hurt, He hurts with us,
and when we weep, He cries.
He knows the heart of all our hurts,
the inside of our sighs.

He does not look down from up above,
but gazes up at us,
that we might take Him in our arms,
He always cradles us.

And if we welcome Him again,
with open hands and heart,
He’ll plant His garden deep in us,
the end from which we start.

And in that garden, there’s a tomb,
whose stone is rolled away,
where we and everything we’ve loved
are lowered in the clay.

But lo! the tomb is empty now,
and clothed in living light,
His ransomed people walk with One
who came on Christmas night.

So come, Lord Jesus, find in me
the child you came to save,
stoop tenderly with wounded hands
and lift me from my grave.

Be with us all, Emmanuel,
and keep us close and true,
be with us till that kingdom comes
where we will be with You.
~Malcolm Guite — “A Tale of Two Gardens”

Heaven could not hold God. 

Even though He is worshiped by angels, it is enough for Him to be held in His mother’s arms, His face kissed, His tummy full, to be bedded in a manger in lantern light.

It is enough for Him, as He is enough for us — even born as one of us, poor as we are — snowbound and ice-locked in our longing for something – anything – more. Our empty hearts fill with Him who came down when heaven could not hold Him any longer.

Imagine that. It is enough to melt us to readiness.

This year’s Advent theme “Dawn on our Darkness” is taken from this 19th century Christmas hymn:

Brightest and best of the sons of the morning,
dawn on our darkness and lend us your aid.
Star of the east, the horizon adorning,
guide where our infant Redeemer is laid.
~Reginald Heber -from “Brightest and Best”

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Dawn on our Darkness: Summer in Winter

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when
this blessing comes,
take its hand.
Get up.
Set out on the road
you cannot see.

This is the night
when you can trust
that any direction
you go,
you will be walking
toward the dawn.
— Jan Richardson (author of Circle of Grace)

I have felt the heaviness of endings this year.  The quiet wordless weight of this year’s winter solstice has rested upon me in the way a deep wet snow blankets the wide stoic shoulders of bare trees.  But today, there on the edge of awareness, the promise remains. The apex of the solstice has already passed and the journey to balance has begun.  The spring is foretold.  The light returns.
~Carrie Newcomer

…Christmas will come once again.
The great transformation will once again happen.
God would have it so.
Out of the waiting, hoping, longing world,
a world will come in which the promise is given.
All crying will be stilled.
No tears shall flow.
No lonely sorrow shall afflict us anymore, or threaten.
~Dietrich Bonhoeffer in a sermon to a church in Havana, Cuba December 21, 1930

Gloomy night embraced the place
Where the Noble Infant lay;
The Babe looked up and showed his face,
In spite of darkness, it was day.
It was thy day, Sweet! and did rise
Not from the east, but from thine eyes.

Welcome, all wonders in one sight!
Eternity shut in a span;
Summer in winter; day in night;
Heaven in earth, and God in man.
Great little one, whose all-embracing birth
Lifts earth to heaven, stoops heaven to earth.
~Richard Crashaw from “In the Holy Nativity of Our Lord” (17th century poet)

On this day of longest darkness, I look out the window eagerly anticipating a post-solstice reprieve from interminable night. I seek that promise of being led back into the light, even if it will take months to get there. It is a promise that keeps me going even if I can barely perceive the few minutes of extra daylight tomorrow – the simple knowledge that things are changing, getting lighter and brighter. I harvest hope from this.

God made light through His Word, not once but twice.  In the beginning, He created the sun and the moon to penetrate and illuminate the creation of our hearts and our souls.  In the stable He came to light the world from below as well as from above so our hearts and souls could be saved from self-destruction.

I am showered with His light even on the longest night of the year and forever more, lit from the glory of God reflected in the many faces of Jesus: as newborn, refugee seeking sanctuary, child teacher, working carpenter, healer, itinerant preacher, unjustly condemned, dying and dead, raised and ascended Son of God.

Let the dark days come as they certainly will. They cannot overwhelm me now that I’m lit from within, no matter how deeply the darkness oppresses.

I know His promise.
I know His face.
He knows I know.

For God, who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.
2 Corinthians 4: 6

from John McCutcheon’s album “Winter Solstice”
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Doing This Hard Thing

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I finished loading the woodshed today. Every year
I tell myself, This is it, the last time. It’s just too
much work, too painful, and I’m too old.
And then, the next year, when fall rolls
around, the air gets cold, and the geese go south, I
load the woodshed again.

How long will this go on? I’m seventy-two.
Every year it takes me longer to recover,
yet every year I keep doing it.

It’s just, now that I’m done, I can go out into
the woodshed, sit in a chair, and look at all those
neatly stacked rows, six and a half feet high, six feet
long and sixteen inches deep, two sets of rows like that,
left and right, four full cord — not much by some standards —
but enough to keep us warm all winter.

When I go out and look at what I’ve done, I get such a deep
sense of satisfaction from this backaching labor that I can’t
imagine a year without going through all that pain again.
~David Budbill, “Loading the Woodshed” from Tumbling toward the End.

Long-johns top and bottom, heavy socks, flannel shirt, overalls,
steel-toed work boots, sweater, canvas coat, toque, mittens: on.

Out past grape arbor and garden shed, into the woods.
Sun just coming through the trees. There really is such a thing

as Homer’s rosy-fingered dawn. And here it is, this morning.
Down hill, across brook, up hill, and into the stand of white pine

and red maple where I’m cutting firewood. Open up workbox,
take out chain saw, gas, bar oil, kneel down, gas up saw, add

bar oil to the reservoir, stand up, mittens off, strap on and buckle
chaps from waist to toe, hard hat helmet: on. Ear protectors: down,

face screen: down, push in compression release, pull out choke,
pull on starter cord, once, twice, go. Stall. Pull out choke, pull on

starter cord, once, twice, go. Push in choke. Mittens: back on.
Cloud of two-cycle exhaust smoke wafting into the morning air

and I, looking like a medieval Japanese warrior, wade through
blue smoke, knee-deep snow, revving the chain saw as I go,

headed for that doomed, unknowing maple tree.
~David Budbill”Into the Winter Woods”, from Happy Life

The other day, I was visiting with a recently widowed neighbor who is now well into her 70’s. She said she had finished loading her woodshed and was now ready for winter, dependent on wood stove heat over the next 6 months or so. She is someone who takes her independence seriously after her husband died, having lived in the same house for over fifty years – not at all ready to move into town to an apartment or condo, much less assisted living. She assists herself, thank you very much, even if it means climbing a step ladder to overhead-toss the firewood chunks onto the top row, and later to pull them down again to haul into the house to the stove.

I asked her why she continued to do such hard physical work when she has sons who live nearby as well as the means to hire help if she needed it. She also could choose to install a furnace, making it easier to stay warm.

She told me she likes to look at the stack every day when she does her farmyard chores, which include bringing in her day’s worth of wood. It gives her a deep sense of satisfaction to know that she was able to neatly stack several cords of wood under cover for yet another year, just as she has done year after year after year. It is a reminder of what she is capable of doing on her own, now that she is alone.

It makes her feel good to look at the fruit of her labor.

And that, of course, is reason enough to keep doing a hard thing. We each work at living out our days the best we can despite how painful they can be. We are blessed to be able to do it.

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Summer’s Parting Sighs

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From hill and cloud and heaven,
The hues of evening died
Night welled through lane and hollow
And hushed the countryside

So here’s an end of roaming
On eves when autumn nighs:
The ear too fondly listens
For summer’s parting sighs
~A. E. Housman from “When Summer’s End is Nighing”

Whatever season we’re in, I’m content only for a few weeks, then want to move on to the next.

Rather than swelter in stifling summer heat, I yearn for cool autumn breezes and bright colors.

Rather than watch trees stripped bare by those breezes, I dream of white landscapes and cozy evenings spent indoors.

Rather than my fingers aching with cold during chores, my heart aches for fragrant swelling buds and the growing grasses of spring when I no longer need to carry hay bales to the horses.

Then, as spring becomes too fulsome to the point of overwhelm (and my allergies kick in), I circle back to longing for lingering summer sunrises and sunsets with days that seem to last forever.

I’m hopeless, it is true – never quite content with where I am in the here and now, always itching for whatever is coming on the horizon.

Maybe by the time I reach such happily-ever-aftering, I will realize every day, every month, every season was all gift, all grace, all grand and all so very generous. Good things don’t have to end for another to begin; they are to be cherished year round.

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Best of Barnstorming Photos – Winter/Spring 2022

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Summer/Fall 2021

Winter/Spring 2021

Summer/Fall 2020

Winter/Spring 2020

Summer/Fall 2019

Winter/Spring 2019

Summer/Fall 2018

Winter/Spring 2018

Summer/Fall 2017

Winter/Spring 2017

Summer/Fall 2016

Winter/Spring 2016

Summer/Fall 2015

Winter/Spring 2015

Summer/Fall 2014

Winter/Spring 2014

Best of 2013

Seasons on the Farm:

BriarCroft in Summer, in Autumn, in Winter, 
at Year’s End

More Barnstorming photos in this book of Lois Edstrom poetry, available to order here:

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The Stones Themselves Will Start to Sing: We Can Only Wonder

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O God beyond all praising, we worship you today
and sing the love amazing that songs cannot repay;
for we can only wonder at every gift you send…
~Michael Perry

This is why I believe that God really has dived down into the bottom of creation, and has come up bringing the whole redeemed nature on His shoulders. The miracles that have already happened are, of course, as Scripture so often says, the first fruits of that cosmic summer which is presently coming on. Christ has risen, and so we shall rise.

…To be sure, it feels wintry enough still: but often in the very early spring it feels like that.  Two thousand years are only a day or two by this scale.  A man really ought to say, ‘The Resurrection happened two thousand years ago’  in the same spirit in which he says ‘I saw a crocus yesterday.’

Because we know what is coming behind the crocus.

The spring comes slowly down the way, but the great thing is that the corner has been turned.  There is, of course, this difference that in the natural spring the crocus cannot choose whether it will respond or not.

We can. 

We have the power either of withstanding the spring, and sinking back into the cosmic winter, or of going on…to which He is calling us.

It remains with us whether to follow or not, to die in this winter, or to go on into that spring and that summer.
~C. S. Lewis from “God in the Dock”

You, who are beyond our understanding,
have made yourself understandable to us in Jesus Christ.
You, who are the uncreated God,
have made yourself a creature for us.
You, who are the untouchable One,
have made yourself touchable to us.
You, who are most high,
make us capable of understanding your amazing love
and the wonderful things you have done for us.
Make us able to understand the mystery of your incarnation,
the mystery of your life, example and doctrine,
the mystery of your cross and passion,
the mystery of your resurrection and ascension.
~Angela of Foligno (1248-1309)– prayer

My husband, with help from our neighbor kids and our son who was visiting for Christmas several years ago, prepared soil beds on our farm and planted hundreds of spring bulbs, including over two hundred crocus.  We were called to this action, especially in the midst of winter – to plan for, to anticipate, to long for spring, year after year.

We, God’s children, become part of the promise that winter is not forever.

The larger bulbs – the tulips, the daffodils – have no choice but to respond to spring – the expanding light calls to them as the soil begins to warm.  But the crocus are a mystery, sprouting earlier when there is not yet reason to surface.  Snow is still on the ground.  Frost still crisps everything at night.  Yet they come forth from the soil even when everything is still weeping winter.

What wondrous love comes behind the crocus?

We are called to rise up from the dark to enter the light.
We are called to become part of the mystery.

This year’s Lenten theme for Barnstorming is a daily selection from songs and hymns about Christ’s profound sacrifice on our behalf.

If we remain silent about Him, the stones themselves will shout out and start to sing (Luke 19:40).

In His name, may we sing…

1 O God beyond all praising, we worship you today
and sing the love amazing that songs cannot repay;
for we can only wonder at every gift you send,
at blessings without number and mercies without end:
we lift our hearts before you and wait upon your word,
we honour and adore you, our great and mighty Lord.

2 Then hear, O gracious Saviour, accept the love we bring,
that we who know your favour may serve you as our king;
and whether our tomorrows be filled with good or ill,
we’ll triumph through our sorrows and rise to bless you still:
to marvel at your beauty and glory in your ways,
and make a joyful duty our sacrifice of praise.

Forgive Me For Forgetting

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Please forgive me for forgetting.
I wanted to go outside and look for you.
I was told this was impossible.
 
I was instructed to stay indoors.
But my words for you need sun.
My heart needs air.
 
I love you Spring.
I miss your warmth.
Come unlock my door.
~Ethelbert Miller “Beloved”

I love you, Spring.
But where are you? Nearly a week of chill winds and freezing temperatures put me back inside the house wanting to hide under the covers. Water buckets in the barn were frozen again, walkways were slick with ice, once friendly breezes threatened to knock me over with their force. This is not the Spring promised.

Come unlock my door, Spring.
When our old apple tree toppled over in the northeast blow earlier this week, I identified a bit too much. The wind took advantage of a hollowed out rotten core the tree had been hiding for years. What might I be hiding inside that makes me just as vulnerable to forces knocking on me, even though I bear fruit as usual?

Please forgive me for forgetting:
this world is at war with evil – families hiding in basements, subways filling with refugees, apartment buildings bombed. Now is when we are most fragile, exposed and wounded. Our lumpy exteriors are on full display waiting for spring to renew and cover us up.

I wanted to go look for you:
Our farm cat decided the old apple tree lying on its side was a new perfect perch to keep surveillance for curious (and irritating) farm dogs without having to climb up high. There he sat on the fallen trunk, far enough above a corgi dog’s head to be essentially invisible although Homer could absolutely smell there was a cat with threatening claws nearby … somewhere. Just where that cat could be remained a mystery to a dog who is distinctly height-challenged.

Like my cat, I wait now in late winter — seeking the sun for my words and fresh air for my heart. And like my dog, I sense something potentially threatening is near, but because of my own limitations of perception, I have no idea just how close.

I was told this was impossible:
may we weather the storms together
may there be peace and warmth for all people
may we find harmony as winter melts into spring.

cat hiding in plain sight, Homer too short to figure it out

This is my song, O God of all the nations,
A song of peace for lands afar and mine.
This is my home, the country where my heart is,
Here are my hopes, my dreams, my holy shrine.
But other hearts in other lands are beating,
With hopes and dreams as true and high as mine.
My country’s skies are bluer than the ocean,
And sunlight beams on cloverleaf and pine.
But other lands have sunlight too, and clover,
And skies are everywhere as blue as mine.
This is my song, O God of all the nations,
A song of peace for their land and for mine.
So let us raise this melody together,
Beneath the stars that guide us through the night;
If we choose love, each storm we’ll learn to weather,
Until true peace and harmony we find,
This is our song, a hymn we raise together;
A dream of peace, uniting humankind.
~Lloyd Stone and Blake Morgan

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