The sunlight now lay over the valley perfectly still. I went over to the graveyard beside the church and found them under the old cedars… I am finding it a little hard to say that I felt them resting there, but I did…
I saw that, for me, this country would always be populated with presences and absences, presences of absences, the living and the dead. The world as it is would always be a reminder of the world that was, and of the world that is to come. ~Wendell Berry in Jayber Crow
In great deeds, something abides. On great fields, something stays. Forms change and pass; bodies disappear; but spirits linger, to consecrate ground for the vision-place of souls. And reverent men and women from afar, and generations that know us not and that we know not of, heart-drawn to see where and by whom great things were suffered and done for them, shall come to this deathless field, to ponder and dream; and lo! the shadow of a mighty presence shall wrap them in its bosom, and the power of the vision pass into their souls. This is the great reward of service. To live, far out and on, in the life of others; this is the mystery of the Christ, –to give life’s best for such high sake that it shall be found again unto life eternal. ~Major-General Joshua Chamberlain, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania 1889
A box of over 700 letters, exchanged between my parents from late 1941 to mid-1945, sat unopened for six decades.
I started reading. I felt them resting in those inked words.
My parents barely knew each other before marrying quickly on Christmas Eve 1942 – the haste due to the uncertain future for a newly trained Second Lieutenant in the Marine Corps. They only had a few weeks together before she returned home to her rural teaching position and he readied himself to be shipped out for the island battles to come.
They had no idea they would not see each other for another 30+ months or even see each other again at all. They had no idea their marriage would fall apart 35 years later and they would reunite a decade after the divorce for five more years together before Dad died of cancer at age 73.
A presence of absence: the letters do contain the long-gone but still-familiar voices of my parents, but they are the words and worries of youngsters of 20 and 21, barely prepared for the horrors to come from war and interminable waiting. When he was fighting battles on Tarawa, Saipan, and Tinian, no letters or news would be received for a month or more, otherwise they tried to write each other daily, though with minimal news to share due to military censorship. They speak mostly of their desire for a normal life together rather than a routine centered on mailbox, pen and paper and waiting – lots and lots of waiting.
I’m not sure what I hoped to find in these letters. Perhaps I hoped for flowery romantic whisperings and the poetry of longing and loneliness. Instead I am reading plain spoken words from two people who somehow made it through those awful years to make my sister and brother and myself possible.
Our inheritance is contained in this musty box of words bereft of poetry. But decades later my heart is moved by these letters – I carefully refold them back into their envelopes and replace them gently back in order. A six cent airmail stamp – in fact hundreds and hundreds of them – was a worthwhile investment in the future, not only for themselves and their family to come, but for generations of U.S. citizens who tend to take their freedom for granted.
Thank you, Dad and Mom, for the early years together you gave up to make today possible for us and the generations to follow.
I hear the mountain birds The sound of rivers singing A song I’ve often heard It flows through me now So clear and so loud I stand where I am And forever I’m dreaming of home I feel so alone, I’m dreaming of home
It’s carried in the air The breeze of early morning I see the land so fair My heart opens wide There’s sadness inside I stand where I am And forever I’m dreaming of home I feel so alone, I’m dreaming of home
This is no foreign sky I see no foreign light But far away am I From some peaceful land I’m longing to stand A hand in my hand …forever I’m dreaming of home I feel so alone, I’m dreaming of home ~Lori Barth and Philippe Rombi “I’m Dreaming of Home”
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Four ducks on a pond, A grass-bank beyond, A blue sky of spring, White clouds on the wing; What a little thing To remember for years To remember with tears! ~William Allingham “A Memory”
Tell no one of the wonders of the Mallard duck’s green head, how it glistens in the sun against the gentle red of the Willow branches budding in the golden spring sun, as they paddle through the waters where the creek has come undone.
Tell no one of the beauty of the butterflies that flit through the flowers not yet budding on the little sandy spit, how their wings will keep them searching for the hope that blooms in Spring as they hover over what will be a very lovely thing.
Tell no one of the glory or the warmth of young spring’s sun, of the joy that comes from watching the smallest creatures run, of the life that is teeming in the wake of newborn day, of the power that hope holds over all we do and say.
Tell no one of the miracle that is this daily life, that cuts you to the quick as if with sharpest knife. Tell no one what you notice, into which your wonder delves. Tell no one of these things — let them know it for themselves. ~Elizabeth Wickland“Tell No One”
so much depends upon
a red wheel barrow
glazed with rain water
beside the white chickens
~William Carlos Williams, “The Red Wheelbarrow” from The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams, Volume I, 1909-1939
so much depends upon me riding a red trike chased by my little brother
The moon drops one or two feathers into the field. The dark wheat listens. Be still. Now. There they are, the moon’s young, trying Their wings.
I stand alone by an elder tree, I do not dare breathe Or move. I listen. The wheat leans back toward its own darkness, And I lean toward mine. ~James Wright from “Beginning”
photo by Bob Tjoelker
Wherever it was I was supposed to be this morning— whatever it was I said I would be doing— I was standing at the edge of the field— I was hurrying through my own soul, opening its dark doors— I was leaning out; I was listening. — Mary Oliver from “Mockingbirds” from New and Selected Poems, Volume 2
“Hope” is the thing with feathers – That perches in the soul – And sings the tune without the words – And never stops – at all – ~Emily Dickinson
Some days warrant stillness. Today is one.
As I walked our farm driveway, I found this barn owl feather, dropped from a passing wing overnight –
The past months have echoed loudly with ruckus and noise — much too overwhelming and almost deafening.
Today I seek to be quiet as this feather, lying silently in place, not saying a word.
I might actually begin to listen and hear again.
A funny thing about feathers: alone, each one is mere fluff. Together — feathers create lift and power, the strength and will to soar beyond the tether of gravity and the pull of our inevitable mortality.
Joined and united, we can rise above and fly away as far as our life and breath can take us.
May peace be still.
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As we walk into words that have waited for us to enter them, so the meadow, muddy with dreams, is gathering itself together
and trying, with difficulty, to remember how to make wildflowers. Imperceptibly heaving with the old impatience, it knows
for certain that two horses walk upon it, weary of hay. The horses, sway-backed and self important, cannot design
how the small white pony mysteriously escapes the fence everyday. This is the miracle just beyond their heavy-headed grasp,
and they turn from his nuzzling with irritation. Everything is crying out. Two crows, rising from the hill, fight
and caw-cry in mid-flight, then fall and light on the meadow grass bewildered by their weight. A dozen wasps drone, tiny prop planes,
sputtering into a field the farmer has not yet plowed, and what I thought was a phone, turned down and ringing,
is the knock of a woodpecker for food or warning, I can’t say. I want to add my cry to those who would speak for the sound alone.
But in this world, where something is always listening, even murmuring has meaning, as in the next room you moan
in your sleep, turning into late morning. My love, this might be all we know of forgiveness, this small time when you can forget
what you are. There will come a day when the meadow will think suddenly, water, root, blossom, through no fault of its own, and the horses will lie down in daisies and clover. Bedeviled, human, your plight, in waking, is to choose from the words
that even now sleep on your tongue, and to know that tangled among them and terribly new is the sentence that could change your life. ~Marie Howe “The Meadow”from The Good Thief
I am constantly looking for the sentence that will change my life.
I search high and low: in books, on tape, in sermons, and in everyday conversation.
I listen.
I realize it will not be a brand new revelation. Instead, it is a very very old sentence:
“I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.” John 8:12
I look for the Light in the most unexpected places, and if I find it, I always try to share it here…
What is a sentence that has changed your life?
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Nobody can keep on being angry if she looks into the heart of a pansy for a little while. ~L.M. Montgomery
One has to wonder where they got their reputation for pansiness. Purple and proud, or any color you might imagine, they grow where they want to grow, despite the cold, so much unlike their flashy cousins, impatiens, petunias, scarlet sage, petals falling off at first frost, hardly hearty at all. Keep your prima donna blossoms, loud and boastful annuals, brief and seedless. I’ll take the pansies of the world, unassuming, resilient, quietly doing what they know to do ~Scott Owen “Pansies”
As a seed, I was shot out the back end of a blue jay when, heedless, she flew over the meadow. She had swallowed me in my homeland when she spied me lying easy under the sun—briefly, I called her Mother before I passed through her gullet like a ghost. In a blink of God’s eye I was an orphan. I trembled where I fell, alone in the dirt. That first night was a long night, early May and chilly, and I remember rain filled my furrow. I called out for mercy— only a wolverine wandered by. I cursed my luck, I cursed the happenstance of this world, I smelled his hot stink, but he nosed me deep into the mud— this was the gift of obscurity. I germinated, hidden from the giants of earth, the jostling stalks, the various, boisterous bloomers, and this was my salvation. After seven days and nights I pushed through— yes. Here I am, kissable: your tiny, purple profusion. ~Lisa Bellamy “Wild Pansy”
The world is in sore need of a cure for the grumbles.
Fortunately, it exists right outside in our back yards, along sidewalks and in gravelly vacant lots.
A cheerful face is irresistible to all but the crabbiest among us, guaranteed to bring a smile every time.
Beyond the obvious charm exists a depth of heart — roots able to thrive in the thinnest of soil, at home among rocks and weeds, resilient even when tromped on.
We carry its seeds on the tread of our boots despite our grumbling and help spread the good news: anger left unfed will dry up and blow away.
Yet the constant loyal heart of the pansy will last. It keeps smiling back – simply a twinkle in God’s eye.
For pansies are, I think, the little gleams Of children’s visions from a world of dreams, Jewels of innocence and joy and mirth, Alight with laughter as they fall to earth.
So tread not rashly, children, lest you crush A part of childhood in a thoughtless rush. Would you not treat them gently if you knew Pansies are little bits of children too? ~R.X. Lehmann from “Pansies”
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The second before the sun went out we saw a wall of dark shadow come speeding at us. We no sooner saw it than it was upon us, like thunder. It roared up the valley. It slammed our hill and knocked us out. It was the monstrous swift shadow cone of the moon. I have since read that this wave of shadow moves 1,800 miles an hour. Language can give no sense of this sort of speed—1,800 miles an hour. It was 195 miles wide. No end was in sight—you saw only the edge. It rolled at you across the land at 1,800 miles an hour, hauling darkness like plague behind it. Seeing it, and knowing it was coming straight for you, was like feeling a slug of anesthetic shoot up your arm. If you think very fast, you may have time to think, “Soon it will hit my brain.” You can feel the deadness race up your arm; you can feel the appalling, inhuman speed of your own blood. We saw the wall of shadow coming, and screamed before it hit.
This was the universe about which we have read so much and never before felt: the universe as a clockwork of loose spheres flung at stupefying, unauthorized speeds. How could anything moving so fast not crash, not veer from its orbit amok like a car out of control on a turn?
Less than two minutes later, when the sun emerged, the trailing edge of the shadow cone sped away. It coursed down our hill and raced eastward over the plain, faster than the eye could believe; it swept over the plain and dropped over the planet’s rim in a twinkling. It had clobbered us, and now it roared away. We blinked in the light. It was as though an enormous, loping god in the sky had reached down and slapped the Earth’s face.
When the sun appeared as a blinding bead on the ring’s side, the eclipse was over. The black lens cover appeared again, back-lighted, and slid away. At once the yellow light made the sky blue again; the black lid dissolved and vanished. The real world began there. I remember now: We all hurried away.
We never looked back. It was a general vamoose … but enough is enough. One turns at last even from glory itself with a sigh of relief. From the depths of mystery, and even from the heights of splendor, we bounce back and hurry for the latitudes of home. ~Annie Dillard from her essay “Total Eclipse” in The Atlantic about the February 1979 eclipse in Washington State
From my six week psychiatric inpatient rotation at a Veteran’s Hospital—late winter 1979
Sixty eight year old male catatonic with depression
He lies still, so very still under the sheet, eyes closed; the only clue that he is living is the slight rise and fall of his chest. His face is skull- like framing his sunken eyes, his facial bones standing out like shelves above the hollows of his cheeks, his hands lie skeletal next to an emaciated body. He looks as if he is dying of cancer but without the smell of decay. He rouses a little when touched, not at all when spoken to. His eyes open only when it is demanded of him, and he focuses with difficulty. His tongue is thick and dry, his whispered words mostly indecipherable, heard best by bending down low to the bed, holding an ear almost to his cracked lips.
He has stopped feeding himself, not caring about hunger pangs, not salivating at enticing aromas or enjoying the taste of beloved coffee. His meals are fed through a beige rubber tube running through a hole in his abdominal wall emptying into his stomach, dripping a yeasty smelling concoction of thick white fluid full of calories. He ‘eats’ without tasting and without caring. His sedating antidepressant pills are crushed, pushed through the tube, oozing into him, deepening his sleep, but are designed to eventually wake him from his deep debilitating melancholy.
After two weeks of treatment and nutrition, his cheeks start to fill in, and his eyes are closed less often. He watches people as they move around the room and he responds a little faster to questions and starts to look us in the eye. He asks for coffee, then pudding and eventually he asks for steak. By the third week he is sitting up in a chair, reading the paper.
After a month, he walks out of the hospital, 15 pounds heavier than when he was wheeled in. His lips, no longer dried and cracking, have begun to smile again.
Thirty two year old male rescued by the Coast Guard at 3 AM in the middle of the bay
As he shouts, his eyes dart, his voice breaks, his head tosses back and forth, his back arches and then collapses as he lies tethered to the gurney with leather restraints. He writhes constantly, his arm and leg muscles flexing against the wrist and ankle bracelets.
“The angels are waiting!! They’re calling me to come!! Can’t you hear them? What’s wrong with you? I’m Jesus Christ, King of Kings!! Lord of Lords!! If you don’t let me return to them, I can’t stop the destruction!”
He finally falls asleep by mid-morning after being given enough antipsychotic medication to kill a horse. He sleeps uninterrupted for nine hours. Then suddenly his eyes fly open, and he looks startled.
He glares at me. “Where am I? How did I get here?”
“You are hospitalized in the VA psych ward after being picked up by the Coast Guard after swimming out into the bay in the middle of the night. You said you were trying to reach the angels.”
He turns his head away, his fists relaxing in the restraints, and begins to weep uncontrollably, the tears streaming down his face.
“Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do.”
Twenty two year old male with auditory and visual hallucinations
He seems serene, much more comfortable in his own skin when compared to the others on the ward. Walking up and down the long hallways alone, he is always in deep conversation. He takes turns talking, but more often is listening, nodding, almost conspiratorial.
During a one-on-one session, he looks at me briefly, but his attention continues to be diverted, first watching an invisible something or someone enter the room, move from the door to the middle of the room, until finally, his eyes lock on an empty chair to my left. I ask him what he sees next to me.
“Jesus wants you to know He loves you.”
It takes all my will power not to turn and look at the empty chair.
Fifty four year old male with chronic paranoid schizophrenia
He has been disabled with psychiatric illness for thirty years, having his first psychotic break while serving in World War II. His only time living outside of institutions has been spent sharing a home with his mother who is now in her eighties. This hospitalization was precipitated by his increasing delusion that his mother is the devil and the voices in his head commanded that he kill her. He had become increasingly agitated and angry, had threatened her with a knife, so she called the police, pleading with them not to arrest him, but to bring him to the hospital for medication adjustment.
His eyes have taken on the glassy staring look of the overmedicated psychotic, and he sits in the day room much of the day sleeping in a chair, drool dripping off his lower lip. When awake he answers questions calmly and appropriately with no indication of the delusions or agitation that led to his hospitalization. His mother visits him almost daily, bringing him his favorite foods from home which he gratefully accepts and eats with enthusiasm. By the second week, he is able to take short passes to go home with her, spending a lunch time together and then returning to the ward for dinner and overnight. By the third week, he is ready for discharge, his mother gratefully thanking the doctors for the improvement she sees in her son. I watch them walk down the long hallway together to be let through the locked doors to freedom.
Two days later, a headline in the local paper:
“Veteran Beheads Elderly Mother”
Forty five year old male — bipolar disorder with psychotic features
He has been on the ward for almost a year, his unique high pitched laughter heard easily from behind closed doors, his eyes intense in his effort to conceal his struggles. Trying to follow his line of thinking is challenging, as he talks quickly, with frequent brilliant off topic tangents, and at times he lapses into a “word salad” of almost nonsensical sentences. Every day as I meet with him I become more confused about what is going on with him, and am unclear what is expected of me in my interactions with him. He senses my discomfort and tries to ease my concern.
“Listen, this is not your problem to fix but I’m bipolar and regularly hear command voices and have intrusive thoughts. My medication keeps me under good control. But just tell me if you think I’m not making sense because I don’t always recognize it in myself.”
During my rotation, his tenuous tether to sanity is close to breaking. He starts to listen more intently to the voices in his head, becoming frightened and anxious, often mumbling and murmuring under his breath as he goes about his day.
On a particular morning, all the patients are more anxious than usual, pacing and wringing their hands as the light outdoors slowly fades, with noon being transformed to an oddly shadowy dusk. The street lights turn on automatically and cars are driving with headlights shining. We stand at the windows in the hospital, watching the city become dark as night in the middle of the day. The unstable patients are sure the world is ending and extra doses of medication are dispensed as needed while the light slowly returns to the streets outside. Within an hour the sunlight is back, and all the patients are napping soundly.
The psychiatrist locks himself in his office and doesn’t respond to knocks on the door or calls on his desk phone.
Stressed by the recent homicide by one of his discharged patients, and identifying with his patients due to his own mental illness, he is overwhelmed by the eclipse. The nurses call the hospital administrator who comes to the ward with two security guards. They unlock the door and lead the psychiatrist off the ward. We watch him leave, knowing he won’t be back.
It is as if the light had left and only his shadow remains.
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Lyrics: Measure me, sky! Tell me I reach by a song Nearer the stars; I have been little so long.
Weigh me, high wind! What will your wild scales record? Profit of pain, Joy by the weight of a word.
Horizon, reach out! Catch at my hands, stretch me taut, Rim of the world: Widen my eyes by a thought.
Sky, be my depth, Wind, be my width and my height, World, my heart’s span; Loveliness, wings for my flight. ~Leonora Speyer
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I know what you planned, what you meant to do, teaching me to love the world, making it impossible to turn away completely, to shut it out completely ever again – it is everywhere; when I close my eyes, birdsong, scent of lilac in early spring, scent of summer roses: you mean to take it away, each flower, each connection with earth – why would you wound me, why would you want me desolate in the end, unless you wanted me so starved for hope I would refuse to see that finally nothing was left to me, and would believe instead in the end you were left to me. ~Louise Glück “Vespers”(one of ten Vespers poems)
I wait for the Lord, my soul waits, and in his word I hope; ~Psalm 130:5
Mid-spring days like this: bright, so promising with potential, birdsong constantly in the air, scent of orchard blossoms, lilacs, early roses and a flush of color everywhere…
how can we not love the world so much we never want to leave it?
Yet we must hold this loosely.
It is but a tiny show of the glories to come, of what You have waiting for us next.
I am wounded knowing I must eventually let this go.
I am hungry for hope that isn’t found in all this beauty and lushness, the fulfilling hope that is only You as my Father and Creator.
You provide only a taste here. I know what I starve for, so starved with hope for what You have in store.
I will wait for you I will wait for you in the end You were left for me.
Amen and Amen.
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After all, I don’t see why I am always asking for private, individual, selfish miracles when every year there are miracles like … dogwood. ~Anne Morrow Lindbergh
It began last week. The tree right next to our front porch, having looked dormant for the past six months, started to bud out in subtle pink-petalled blossoms.
Through the winter, there had been nothing remarkable whatsoever about this tree. Now it is a feast for the eyes, almost blinding in its brilliance.
Each year the dogwood startles me awake. From dead to brilliant in a mere two weeks. And not only our tree, but every other pink dogwood within a twenty mile radius has answered the same late April/early May siren call: bloom! bloom your heart out! dazzle every retina in sight!
And it is done simultaneously on every tree, all the same day, without a sound, without an obvious signal, as if an invisible conductor had swooped a baton up and in the downbeat everything turned pink.
Or perhaps the baton is really a wand, shooting out pink stars to paint these otherwise plain and humble trees, so inconspicuous the rest of the year.
Ordinarily I don’t dress up in finery like these trees do. I prefer inconspicuous earth tones for myself. But I love the celebratory joy of those trees in full blossom and enjoy looking for them in yards and parks and along roadways.
Maybe there is something pink in my closet I can wear. Maybe conspicuously miraculous every once in awhile is exactly what is needed.
Then again, it is best to leave the miracles to the trees…
If you stand in an orchard In the middle of Spring and you don’t make a sound you can hear pink sing, a darling, whispery song of a thing. ~Mary O’Neill from Hailstones and Halibut Bones “Pink”
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Ten more miles, it is South Dakota. Somehow, the roads there turn blue, When no one walks down them. One more night of walking, and I could have become A horse, a blue horse, dancing Down a road, alone.
I have got this far. It is almost noon. But never mind time: That is all over. It is still Minnesota. Among a few dead cornstalks, the starving shadow Of a crow leaps to his death. At least, it is green here, Although between my body and the elder trees A savage hornet strains at the wire screen. He can’t get in yet.
It is so still now, I hear the horse Clear his nostrils. He has crept out of the green places behind me. Patient and affectionate, he reads over my shoulder These words I have written. He has lived a long time, and he loves to pretend No one can see him. Last night I paused at the edge of darkness, And slept with green dew, alone. I have come a long way, to surrender my shadow To the shadow of a horse. ~James Wright “Sitting in a small screenhouse on a summer morning”
I have a sense of someone reading over my shoulder as I write.
It keeps me honest to feel that warm breath on my hair, its green smell reminding me where I am and who I am. It is encouraging to know what I do matters to someone.
I do not try to be anyone else.
When my words don’t say exactly what I hope, I feel forgiveness from the shadow beside me.
It’s all softness and warm breath. It’s all okay even when it’s not.
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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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