Tag: wounds

How We Heal

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Some people see scars, and it is wounding they remember. To me they are proof of the fact that there is healing.
~ Linda Hogan from Solar Storms

Wet stones from the middle path.
A shard of green heartwood
ripped by the big storm
from the oak’s broken, heavy limb.

And we all have scar stories.

Which say more than wound stories.
Wound stories tell how we were injured.
Scar stories tell how we heal.
~Liza Hyatt,”What I Carry Home With Me” from Wayfaring

between the rosebuds
and the thorns
the pine tree branches
with their needles
and kitty claws

my hands are
always bleeding

and turning up
scars that cry, “I’m alive,
I feel it. I feel it all”
and then falling
back into whispers
while my body
heals itself
one more time
~Juniper Klatt, I was raised in a house of water

…see how the flesh grows back across a wound, with a great vehemence, more strong than the simple, untested surface before.

There’s a name for it on horses, when it comes back darker and raised: proud flesh, as all flesh is proud of its wounds,
wears them as honors given out after battle,
small triumphs pinned to the chest –

And when two people have loved each other,
see how it is like a scar between their bodies,
stronger, darker, and proud;
how the black cord makes of them a single fabric
that nothing can tear or mend.
~Jane Hirshfield from  “For What Binds Us”

I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape — the loneliness of it, the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it, the whole story doesn’t show.
~Andrew Wyeth, artist

photo by Nate Gibson

In winter, we are stripped naked as the bare trees right now; our skin and bones reveal the scars, broken branches, and healed fractures of previous winter windstorms. We no longer have anything to hide behind or among, as our defects are plain to see.  

Our whole story is a mystery untold, impossible to conceal.

Scars come in various sizes and shapes, some hidden, some quite obvious to all. How they are inflicted also varies–some accidental, others therapeutic, and too many intentional. 

The most insidious are the ones so internal, no one can see or know they are there. Sometimes we aren’t aware of them ourselves – only something unreachable is still hurting at times.

Most often, they are simply the scars of living in a hazardous world – on farm animals, healing into a tough scar of leathery “proud flesh”.

Yet, none of them are as deep and wide as scars accepted on our behalf, nor as wondrous as the Love that oozed from them, nor as amazing as the Grace that abounds to this day because of the promise they represent. These are scars from the Word made Flesh, a proud flesh that won’t give way, lasting forever.

Though I am abundantly flawed with pocks and scars, I am reminded each winter of my renewal. There are hints of new growth to come when the frost abates and the sap thaws.  

Indeed, I am prepared to wait an eternity, if necessary, to understand the rest of the story.

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Not Just a Leaf

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holyleaf2

It’s just a leaf. A damaged leaf at that,
clinging to a filbert tree ravaged by blight.
The leaf turns partially back upon itself,
riddled with holes, the traumatic result
of voracious insect appetites.

Damaged does not accurately describe
this leaf, the color of rich burgundy wine,
deep purple veins that branch to the tips
of its serrated edge. The holes open the leaf
to light and air, forming a filigree of nature,
an exquisite fragile beauty.

It makes me think of our own traumas,
how they open us, raw and hurting, humble us,
soften and expand us to the pain of others
and when we are most vulnerable we hold on,
weakened, but not necessarily damaged.

Perhaps it is then our scars become beautiful
and an inner loveliness shines through.
~Lois Parker Edstrom “Fragile Beauty” (an ephrastic poem written about the picture below) from Almanac of Quiet Days

holyleaf1

Nature doth thus kindly heal every wound.
By the mediation of a thousand little mosses and fungi,
the most unsightly objects become radiant of beauty.
There seem to be two sides of this world,
presented us at different times,
as we see things in growth or dissolution, in life or death.
And seen with the eye of the poet,
as God sees them,
all things are alive and beautiful.
~Henry David Thoreau (journal)

holyleaf1-1

…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

As I stepped under a dripping birch tree on our farm on this rainy summer day, I ran head-long into a branch of leaves that appeared more lace than leaf.

They were filagreed nearly to invisibility, presumably by a leaf miner of some sort who chewed intricate designs as its leavings. The residual was left hanging, trying to make the best of things in the drizzle.

Though they are mostly eaten away, these leaves have nearly fulfilled their full season of growth in support of their home base tree. Instead of an ordinary summer of drying and coloring and dropping as a birch leaf must in another month or two, they instead manifest the creativity of our God who designed his creatures to interact in such a way that beauty could be found in the most unlikely places, slapping us full in the face.

God sees such intricate wounds in the leaf as beautiful.
God knows our visible and invisible scars are the way His Light illuminates our darkness.
I feel the deep urge to share this glimpse of such “holiness” with you.

Lyrics:
No star is o’er the lake,
Its pale watch keeping,
The moon is half awake,
Through grey mist creeping,
The last red leaves fall round
The porch of roses,
The clock hath ceased to sound,
The long day closes.
Sit by the silent hearth
In calm endeavour,
To count the sounds of mirth,
Now dumb for ever.
Heed not how hope believes
And fate disposes:
Shadow is round the eaves,
The long day closes.
The lighted windows dim
Are fading slowly.
The fire that was so trim
Now quivers lowly.
Go to the dreamless bed
Where grief reposes;
Thy book of toil is read,
The long day closes

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A World Where Much is Missing

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Leave a door open long enough,
a cat will enter.
Leave food, it will stay.
Soon, on cold nights,
you’ll be saying “Excuse me”
if you want to get out of your chair.
But one thing you’ll never hear from a cat
is “Excuse me.”
Nor Einstein’s famous theorem.
Nor “The quality of mercy is not strained.”
In the dictionary of Cat, mercy is missing.
In this world where much is missing,
a cat fills only a cat-sized hole.
Yet your whole body turns toward it
again and again because it is there.
~Jane Hirshfield “A Small-Sized Mystery” from Come, Thief.

The first time I saw him, it was just a flash of gray ringed tail
disappearing into autumn night mist as I opened the back door
to pour kibble into the empty cat dish on the porch:
just another stray cat among many who visit the farm.

A few linger and stay.

So he did, keeping a distance in the shadows under the trees,
a gray tabby with white nose and bib, serious yet skittish,
watching me as I moved about feeding dogs, cats, birds, horses,
creeping to the cat dish only when the others drifted away.

There was something in the way he held his head,
an oddly forward ear; a stilted swivel of the neck.
I startled him one day as he ate his fill at the dish.

He ran, the back of his head flashing red, scalp completely gone.

Not oozing, nor something new, but recent. A nearly mortal scar
from an encounter with coyote, or eagle or bobcat.
This cat thrived despite trauma and pain, tissue still raw, trying to heal.

He had chosen to live; life had chosen him.

My first thought was to trap him, to put him humanely to sleep
to end his suffering mercifully, in truth to end my distress at seeing him every day,
envisioning florid flesh even as he hunkered invisible
in the shadowlands of the barnyard.

Yet the scar did not keep him from eating well or licking clean his pristine fur.

As much as I wanted to look away, to avoid confronting his mutilation,
I always greeted him from a distance, a nod to his maimed courage,
through wintry icy blasts and four foot snow,
through spring rains and summer heat with flies.

His wounds remained always visible,
a reminder of his inevitable fate.

I never did stroke that silky fur,
or feel his burly purr, assuming he still knew how,
but still fed his daily fill,
as he fed my need to know:
the value of a life so broken,
each breath taken is filled with sacred air.

The depth of his wounds show how much he bleeds.

my wounded friend, as close as he would allow

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Fixing Eyes on the Unseen – Leave the Rest to God

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I think there is no suffering greater than
what is caused by the doubts of those who want to believe. 
I know what torment this is, but I can only see it, 
in myself anyway, as the process by which faith is deepened. 
What people don’t realize is how much religion costs. 
They think faith is a big electric blanket, 
when of course it is the cross. 

It is much harder to believe than not to believe. 
If you feel you can’t believe, you must at least do this: 
keep an open mind. 
Keep it open toward faith, 
keep wanting it, 
keep asking for it, 
and leave the rest to God.
~Flannery O’Connor from The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O’Connor

And those are called blessed who make the effort to remain open-hearted. 

Nothing that comes from God,
even the greatest miracle, can be proven like 2 x 2 = 4.
It touches one;
it is only seen and grasped when the heart is open and the spirit purged of self.
Then it awakens faith. 

… the heart is not overcome by faith,
there is no force or violence there, compelling belief by rigid certitudes. 
What comes from God
touches gently,
comes quietly;
does not disturb freedom;
leads to quiet, profound, peaceful resolve within the heart.
~Romano Guardini from The Living God

On my doubting days, when my faith is weak,
I remember the risen Christ reaching out
to place Thomas’s hand in His very real wounds,
guiding the doubter to believe
His painful sacrifice is reality.

His open wounds call out to my mind and heart-
Christ’s flesh and blood fortifies my faith
by such a gentle guiding touch.

This year’s Lenten theme:
So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.
2 Corinthians 4: 18

What will be left when I’ve drawn my last breath
Besides the folks I’ve met and the folks who know me
Will I discover a soul saving love or
Just the dirt above and below me?

I’m a doubting Thomas
I took a promise
I do not feel safe
O’ me of little faith

Sometimes I pray for a slap in the face
Then I beg to be spared cause I’m a coward
If there’s a master of death I bet he’s holding his breath
Cause I show the blind and tell the deaf
About his power

I’m a doubting Thomas
I can’t keep my promises
Cause I don’t know what’s safe
O’ me of little faith

Can I be used to help others find truth
When I’m scared that I’ll find proof that it’s a lie
Can I be led down a trail dropping bread crumbs
To prove I’m not ready to die

Please give me time to decipher the signs
Please forgive me for time that I’ve wasted

I’m a doubting Thomas
I’ll take your promise
Though I know nothing’s safe
O’ me of little faith
O’ me of little faith
~Chris Thile

Fixing Eyes on the Unseen – An Exaltation of Purple

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Here in purgatory bare ground
is visible, except in shady places
where snow prevails.

Still, each day sees
the restoration of another animal:
a sparrow, just now a sleepy wasp;
and, at twilight, the skunk
pokes out of the den,
anxious for mates and meals. . . .

On the floor of the woodshed
the coldest imaginable ooze,
and soon the first shoots
of asparagus will rise,
the fingers of Lazarus. . . .

Earth’s open wounds — where the plow
gouged the ground last November —
must be smoothed; some sown
with seed, and all forgotten.

Now the nuthatch spurns the suet,
resuming its diet of flies, and the mesh
bag limp and greasy, might be taken
down.

Beside the porch step
the crocus prepares an exaltation
of purple, but for the moment
holds its tongue. . . .
~Jane Kenyon, “Mud Season” from Collected Poems.

photo by http://www.positivebloom.com

Walking, I drew my hand over the lumpy
bloom of a spray of purple; I stripped away
my fingers, stained purple; put it to my nose,

the minty honey, a perfume so aggressively
pleasant—I gave it to you to smell,
my daughter, and you pulled away as if

I was giving you a palm full of wasps,
deceptions: “Smell the way the air
changes because of purple and green.”

This is the promise I make to you:
I will never give you a fist full of wasps,
just the surprise of purple and the scent of rain.
~Kwame Dawes “Purple”

I have always identified more with the bland plainness of mud season as squishy brown ground is underfoot. I tend to dress myself in browns and never in elegant purples. It’s not that I don’t like purple – I do. I just have never felt worthy to be adorned in it like the sky and flowers and fruit.

Perhaps my reluctance to wear purple is that it represents the those who are regal and royal … yet also those who are bruised and battered … all at once.

I know One who was both, who took a beating for me in my place.

This year’s Lenten theme:
So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.
2 Corinthians 4: 18

Fixing Eyes on the Unseen – Wounds to be Healed

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The earth invalid, dropsied, bruised, wheeled
Out in the sun,
After frightful operation.
She lies back, wounds undressed to the sun,
To be healed,
Sheltered from the sneapy chill creeping North wind,
Leans back, eyes closed, exhausted, smiling
Into the sun. Perhaps dozing a little.
While we sit, and smile, and wait, and know
She is not going to die. 
~Ted Hughes from ” A March Morning Unlike Others” from Ted Hughes. Collected Poems

March. I am beginning
to anticipate a thaw. Early mornings
the earth, old unbeliever, is still crusted with frost
where the moles have nosed up their
cold castings, and the ground cover
in shadow under the cedars hasn’t softened
for months, fogs layering their slow, complicated ice
around foliage and stem
night by night,

but as the light lengthens, preacher
of good news, evangelizing leaves and branches,
his large gestures beckon green
out of gray. Pinpricks of coral bursting
from the cotoneasters. A single bee
finding the white heather. Eager lemon-yellow
aconites glowing, low to the ground like
little uplifted faces. A crocus shooting up
a purple hand here, there, as I stand
on my doorstep, my own face drinking in heat
and light like a bud welcoming resurrection,
and my hand up, too, ready to sign on
for conversion.
~Luci Shaw “Revival” from What the Light Was Like.

Spring is emerging slowly this year from an exceptionally haggard and droopy winter. All growing things are a month behind the usual budding blooming schedule when, like the old “Wizard of Oz” movie, the landscape will suddenly turn from monochrome to technicolor, the soundtrack from forlorn to glorious birdsong.

Yearning for spring to commence, I tap my foot impatiently as if owed a timely seasonal transformation from dormant to verdant.  We all have been waiting for the Physician’s announcement that this patient survived some intricate life-changing procedure: “I’m happy to say the Earth is alive after all and restored, wounded but healing, breathing on her own but too sedated for a visit just yet.”

I wait impatiently to celebrate her healing, yet I know Creation is very much alive- this temporary home of ours. No invalid this patient.
She lives, she breathes, she thrives,
she will bloom and sing with everything she’s got
and soon, so will I.

This year’s Lenten theme:
So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.
2 Corinthians 4: 18

My Secret Place

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It’s in the perilous boughs of the tree
out of blue sky    the wind
sings loudest surrounding me.

And solitude,   a wild solitude
’s reveald,  fearfully,  high   I’d climb
into the shaking uncertainties,

part out of longing,  part   daring my self,
part to see that
widening of the world, part

to find my own, my secret
hiding sense and place, where from afar
all voices and scenes come back

—the barking of a dog, autumnal burnings,
far calls,  close calls—the boy I was
calls out to me
here the man where I am “Look!

I’ve been where you

most fear to be.”
~Robert Duncan “Childhood’s Retreat”

Behind the house in a field
there’s a metal box I buried
full of childhood treasure, a map
of my secret place, a few lead pennies
from 1943.
The rest I’ve forgotten,
forgotten even the exact spot
I covered with moss and loam.
 
Now I’m back and twenty years
have made so little difference
I suspect they never happened,
this face in the mirror
aged with pencil and putty.
I suspect even
the box has moved as a mole would move
to a new place long ago.
~Dan Gerber “The Cache” from Particles

I came upon an oak where once when I was twelve
I had climbed up and screamed for Skip to get me down.
It was a thousand miles to earth. I shut my eyes and yelled.
My brother, richly compelled to mirth, gave shouts of laughter
And scaled up to rescue me.
“What were you doing there?” he said.
I did not tell. Rather drop me dead.
But I was there to place a note within a squirrel nest
On which I’d written some old secret thing now long forgot.

{Now} I lay upon the limb a long while, thinking.
I drank in all the leaves and clouds and weathers
Going by as mindless
As the days.
What, what, what if? I thought. But no. Some forty years beyond!

I brought forth:
The note.

I opened it. For now I had to know.
I opened it, and wept. I clung then to the tree
And let the tears flow out and down my chin.
Dear boy, strange child, who must have known the years
And reckoned time and smelled sweet death from flowers
In the far churchyard.
It was a message to the future, to myself.
Knowing one day I must arrive, come, seek, return.
From the young one to the old. From the me that was small
And fresh to the me that was large and no longer new.
What did it say that made me weep?

I remember you.
I remember you.
~Ray Bradbury from “Remembrance”

As a child, I left secret notes to my future self,
in hidden crevices of old barns,
and attic lofts up rickety stairs,
and yes, even in trees,
but never went back to retrieve them
except in my rare dreams of growing up
on Friendly Grove Road.

Back then my ten year old heart
tried to imagine me sixty some years hence
(counting out how old I would be in 2020 something)
as I squirreled away in some secret place.

What fears and joys would pass through like pumping blood,
what wounds would I bear and cause to bleed,
what smiles and tears would trace my face?

I have not forgotten who I was then.

No, I have never forgotten that girl who kept secrets,
who dreamed of a someday gray-haired grandma
who now looks back to my secret places,
and remembers being remembered.

A book of Barnstorming photos and poems by Lois Edstrom is available for order here:

It is a Lichen Day

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It is a lichen day.
Not a bit of rotten wood lies on the dead leaves,
but it is covered with fresh, green cup lichens…
All the world seems a great lichen and to grow like one.

Nature doth thus kindly heal every wound.
By the mediation of a thousand little mosses and fungi,
the most unsightly objects become radiant of beauty.
There seem to be two sides of this world, presented us at different times,
as we see things in growth or dissolution, in life or death.

And seen with the eye of the poet,
as God sees them,
all things are alive and beautiful
~Henry David Thoreau from his journal

The truth is-
I’m somewhat of a lichen myself –
not easily defined,
a bit of an opportunist,
thriving in gray drizzle,
sometimes colorful but most often not,
attempting to cover and heal unseen wounds.

Mostly I hang on,
persevering,
at times obnoxiously tenacious
and not always appreciated,
yet…unique in an other worldly way.

A dreamer of fairy tale kingdoms
while living simply a peasant’s life
in plain sight.

A Hammer and a Nail

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I’d rather be a hammer than a nail
Yes, I would, if I could, I surely would…
~Simon and Garfunkel from “El Condor Pasa”

If I had a hammer,
I’d hammer in the morning,
I’d hammer in the evening,
All over this land,
I’d hammer out danger,
I’d hammer out a warning,
I’d hammer out love between,
My brothers and my sisters,
All over this land.
~Lee Hays, Pete Seeger

Strangely enough~
it is the pointed and piercing nail,
rather than our blunt hammer,
that binds together,
forming the strength,
the safety,
the permanence
of corners, foundation,
walls and roof
until the battering winds
threaten to pull them apart.

Yet the nail is useless
without the hammer.

The hammer
pounds the nail in
where it is most needed
where it won’t be forgotten
where, if ever removed,
the hole it leaves behind
is a forever reminder
of what our hammers have wrought
and how we are forgiven.

abandoned schoolhouse near Rapalje, Montana

Kitten Who Lost Her Way

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I sometimes think the PussyWillows grey
Are Angel Kittens who have lost their way,
And every Bulrush on the river bank
A Cat-Tail from some lovely Cat astray.
~Oliver Herford, from The Rubaiyat of a Persian Kitten

Our little calico Nala has the bravado of a cat many times her size and age. She climbs the tallest trees, dangles over the house roof eaves to stare eyeball-to-eyeball with the birds picking at seeds in the feeders. She takes no guff from the dogs or from her bigger brother Simba.

One day last summer, a visitor to our farm knocked early in the morning on our front door to say our kitty was struggling to walk, dragging her hind legs behind her. I hurriedly dressed to go find her, thinking I needed to somehow gather her up in a blanket to take to the vet, but she was no where to be found. I looked everywhere in the bushes and the hidden-away spots I knew she enjoyed, but she had vanished. I put out bowls of food to entice her but no luck – after three days, I figured she had crawled away to die alone, as cats are wont to do. Even her brother didn’t seem to know where she had gone as I followed him on his farm excursions.

I tried to theorize what might had happened – had she fallen from a roof or tree and become paralyzed? Surely she could not survive such a devastating injury.

Nine days later, long after I assumed she had died of her injuries or starvation, she appeared on the front porch when I opened the door. She was thin, weak, with her hind legs moving and holding up her weight. She was hungry and extremely vocal and not just a little perturbed that there was an empty cat food bowl on the porch.

On closer inspection, she had healing wounds along either side of her spine, matching closely with what I assume were eagle talon marks that had grasped her, if only briefly, as a raptor tried to carry her away. I suspect, feisty as she was, she fought her predator so fiercely that she was dropped from a bit of a height, bruising her spine. For an eagle, in this land of plenty of prey, dining on a calico is never worth such aggravation and hassle.

What a cat – now minus at least one, if not more lives. Only eight to go.

She is indeed resurrected; completely healed up, her spine is working fine and the only marks left on her back are white patches of new hair growth over her former wounds.

We thought she was lost forever, but she had not lost her way back to us, only way-laid for a bit. Our angel kitten is now resident on the front porch and back to her farm life climbing trees and torturing little birds.

Beware any big raptor who tries to take her on.