Pangs Remembered

photo by Josh Scholten

Gratitude changes the pangs of memory into a tranquil joy.
~Dietrich Bonhoeffer

photo by Josh Scholten

Out for a Walk

God is at home, it’s we who have gone out for a walk.
~Meister Eckhart

Sometimes an excursion from home is more like a sprint, as far and as fast as possible.
Sometimes it is a spontaneous trek into the unknown, just to prove it can be done.
Sometimes it is a climb into the dark, with precipices and crumbling ledges under our feet.
Sometimes it is a tentative journey of curiosity to see what may be around the corner.

No matter why or where or how far we wander,
the path home shines just bright enough
to show us the way back
when we are ready.
He is there, waiting.
He keeps the light on for us.

Sweet and Sour Air

photo of Mt. Rainier sunrise by Kathy Yates

In Summer, in a burst of summertime
Following falls and falls of rain,
When the air was sweet-and-sour of the flown fineflower of
Those goldnails and their gaylinks that hang along a lime;
~Gerard Manley Hopkins from “Cheery Beggar”

Sweet and sour extends far beyond a Chinese menu; it is the daily air I breathe.  Dichotomy is so much of my life and times,  more distinct than the bittersweet of simple pleasures laced with twinges and tears.

I am but a cheery beggar in this world, desiring to hang tight to the overwhelming sweetness of each glorious moment — the startling sunrise, the lush green and golden blooms following spring showers, the warm hug of a compassionate word, the house filled with love and laughter.  But as beggars aren’t choosers, I can’t only have sweet alone;  I must endure the sour that comes as part of the package — the deepening dark of a sleepless night, the muddy muck of endless rain, the sting of a biting critique, the loneliness of an home emptying and much too quiet.

So I slog through sour to revel some day, even more so, in sweet.  Months of manure-permeated air is overcome one miraculous morning by the unexpected and undeserved fragrance of apple blossoms, so sweet, so pure, so full of promise of the fruit to come.  The manure makes the sweet sweeter.

And I breathe in deeply, content and grateful for a moment of grace and bliss, wanting to hold it in the depths of my lungs forever.

photo by Kathy Yates

angel trumpet plant courtesy of HGTV

apple blossoms

The Love of Farming

Farmers farm for the love of farming. They love to watch and nurture the growth of plants. They love to live in the presence of animals. They love to work outdoors. They love the weather, maybe even when it is making them miserable. They love to live where they work and to work where they live. If the scale of their farming is small enough, they like to work in the company of their children and with the help of their children.
~Wendell Berry from Bringing it to the Table: Writings on Farming and Food

and I may I add to Wendell’s truths:

Farmers love what they do even when a *certain* horse manages to find a way for the second time in his life to tear his lower lip playing with a simple water bucket in a simple stall,  then gets it repaired by a gracious vet on Mother’s Day, and then finds a way five days later while out innocently eating grass in the pasture to rip open all his stitches again which will require a far more complicated plastic surgery type repair in ten days after plenty of antibiotics and prayer.

We love our horses, oh yes we farmers do, even the accident-prone, self-injuring ones.  We love our vet even more.

And the vets do love their farmers who need them.

(no, sorry, no graphic pictures will be posted of a very gruesome lip wound — I need a little serenity today)

Call for the Soil

Dundas, Prince Edward Island plowing match by http://www.ninalintonphotography.com

“When the April wind wakes the call for the soil,
I hold the plough as my only hold upon the earth,
and, as I follow through the fresh and fragrant furrow,
I am planted with every foot-step,
growing, budding, blooming into a spirit of spring.”
-  Dallas Lore Sharp, 1870-1929

To watch the soil turn over in the spring, whether by horse power with mane and tail or horse power with tires and engine, is to know my own inner soil needs turning upside down as well.  A grip on the handles of the plow connects the dirt and the soul.

The fresh earth ploughed, its face once hidden, surfaces, teeming with life.  There is the glisten of moist dirt, the wiggle of worms slithering quickly back into the depths, the roots of the old giving way to the nurture of new planting.

The spirit buds and blossoms once the soil is turned and smoothed into its new position, ready for seeds that will be fed from the heavens.  As the worm forgives the plow,  so we are forgiven for turning things upside down.  We must start over to bloom.  We are ready to get our hands and feet dirty in order to be fruitful.

The Moment of Leaving

back of the pickup 1994 — only yesterday but another lifetime ago

And once, for no special reason,
I rode in the back of the pickup,leaning against the cab.
Everything familiar was receding fast…

Whatever I saw
I had already passed…
(This must be what life is like
at the moment of leaving it.)
~Jane Kenyon from “What It’s Like”

Moving forward, looking back at what is already passed.

Our children begin coming home today for their summer visits….

Beyond Me

pear bark

core of a tulip by Josh Scholten

So strange, life is. 
Why people do not go around
in a continual state of surprise
is beyond me.
~William Maxwell

If I stop and really look at something I usually pass by with only a cursory glance, I am astonished at what I didn’t see before.
Inside and up close is an unfamiliar richness and strangeness, as if of a foreign world, that I might miss altogether if I didn’t find the time to be surprised by life.

It is beyond me how much is beyond me.
It is all beyond me.

pink dogwood at sunset

campfire by Josh Scholten

 

 

How Much Better

How much better it is
to carry wood to the fire
than to moan about your life.
How much better
to throw the garbage
onto the compost, or to pin the clean
sheet on the line,
With a gray-brown wooden clothes pin.
~Jane Kenyon “The Clothespin”

I get easily overwhelmed with everything that needs to get done on the farm in addition to all the usual household tasks, especially on a weekend–grass to mow, flower beds to weed, garden to plant, fences to fix, manure to haul, animals to brush out — the list is endless and there are never enough hours in the day.   I moan and whine about it.

Or I can set to work, tackling one thing at a time.  A simple task is accomplished, and then another, like hanging clothes on the line: this one is done, and now this one, pinned and hanging to freshen, renewed,  in the spring breezes.

At the end of the day (or the end of the weekend), I pull them down, bury my face in them and breathe deeply, knowing how much better I am than before I began.

So much better.

BriarCroft in Spring

the old pink dogwood revives every spring

What is all this juice and all this joy?

   A strain of the earth’s sweet being in the beginning
~Gerard Manley Hopkins from “Spring”

poplar row behind the apple orchard

Awake! Awake! for the earliest gleam
Of golden sunlight shines
On the rippling waves, that brightly flow
Beneath the flowering vines.
Awake! Awake! for the low, sweet chant
Of the wild-birds’ morning hymn
Comes floating by on the fragrant air,
Through the forest cool and dim;
Then spread each wing,
And work, and sing,
Through the long, bright sunny hours;
O’er the pleasant earth
We journey forth,
For a day among the flowers.
~Louisa May Alcott Lily-Bell and Thistledown Song I

a favorite rhododendron

It was such a spring day as breathes into a man an ineffable yearning, a painful sweetness, a longing that makes him stand motionless, looking at the leaves or grass, and fling out his arms to embrace he knows not what.
~John Galsworthy

a happy day put out to pasture

At morn when light mine eyes unsealed

I gazed upon the open field;

The rain had fallen in the night –

The landscape in the new day’s light

A countenance of grace revealed

Upon the meadow, wood and height.

 

The sun’s light was a smile of gold,

Ere shut by sudden fold on fold

Of surging, showering clouds from view;

No sooner hid than it broke through

A tearful smile upon the wold

Where earth reflected heaven’s blue.

 

The sky was as a canvas spun

To paint the new spring’s nocturns on;

A blended melody of tints –

The sea’s hue, and the myriad hints

Of garden-closes, when the sun

Hath stamped the work of nature’s mints.

 ~William Stanley Braithwaite

a happy day put out to blue skies in the breeze

rosemary

Flesh and fleece, fur and feather,
Grass and green world all together,
Star-eyed strawberry breasted
Throstle above Her nested

Cluster of bugle blue eggs thin
Forms and warms the life within,
And bird and blossom swell
In sod or sheath or shell.”
-  Gerard Manley Hopkins, The May Magnificat

Kale going to seed

“A delicate fabric of bird song 
Floats in the air, 
The smell of wet wild earth 
Is everywhere. 
Oh I must pass nothing by 
Without loving it much, 
The raindrop try with my lips, 
The grass with my touch; 
For how can I be sure 
I shall see again 
The world on the first of May 
Shining after the rain?” 
-  Sara Teasdale, May Day

grape hyacinth and tulips

“Every spring is the only spring – a perpetual astonishment.”
-  Ellis Peters

“Some will tell you crocuses are heralds true of spring 
Others say that tulips showing buds are just the thing 
Point to peonies, say when magnolia blossoms show 
I look forward to the sight of other flowers though 
Cultivate your roses, grow your orchids in the dark 
Plant your posies row on row and stink up the whole park 
The flower that’s my favourite kind is found throughout the land 
A wilting, yellow dandelion, clutched in a grubby hand.”
-  Larry Tilander, Springtime of My Soul 

“Oh, give us pleasure in the flowers to-day;
And give us not to think so far away
As the uncertain harvest; keep us here
All simply in the springing of the year.

Oh, give us pleasure in the orchard white,
Like nothing else by day, like ghosts by night;
And make us happy in the happy bees,
The swarm dilating round the perfect trees.”
-  Robert Frost, A Prayer in Spring

skimmia

“Poetry is the silence and speech between a wet struggling root of a flower and a sunlit blossom of that flower.” 
-  Carl Sandburg 

yew pollen

“With the coming of spring, I am calm again. “
-  Gustav Mahler

the first of dozens of peonies

The wealthy man is not he who has money, but he who has the means to live in the luxurious state of early spring.
~Anton Chekhov

Virginia Creeper starting to do its creeper thing

Canadian mountains to the north

“This spring as it comes bursts up in bonfires green,
Wild puffing of emerald trees, and flame-filled bushes,
Thorn-blossom lifting in wreaths of smoke between
Where the wood fumes up and the watery, flickering rushes.
I am amazed at this spring, this conflagration
Of green fires lit on the soil of the earth, this blaze
Of growing, and sparks that puff in wild gyration,
Faces of people streaming across my gaze.”
-  D. H. Lawrence, The Enkindled Spring 

“The sun was warm but the wind was chill.
You know how it is with an April day.
When the sun is out and the wind is still,
You’re one month on in the middle of May.
But if you so much as dare to speak,
a cloud come over the sunlit arch,
And wind comes off a frozen peak,
And you’re two months back in the middle of March.”
-  Robert Frost 

spring sunrise over Mt Baker

“Hark, I hear a robin calling!
List, the wind is from the south!
And the orchard-bloom is falling
Sweet as kisses on the mouth.

Come and let us seek together
Springtime lore of daffodils,
Giving to the golden weather
Greeting on the sun-warm hills.”
-  Lucy Maud Montgomery, Spring Song

“If you’ve never been thrilled to the very edges of your soul by a flower in spring bloom, maybe your soul has never been in bloom.” 
-  Audra Foveo 

Sam stops to smell the tulips

“It’s spring fever.  That is what the name of it is.  And when you’ve got it, you want – oh, you don’t quite know what it is you do want, but it just fairly makes your heart ache, you want it so!”
-  Mark Twain

someone is looking his age….it was a rough winter

“Every year, back comes Spring, with nasty little birds yapping their fool heads off and the ground all mucked up with plants.”
-  Dorothy Parker  

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

Brooding Over a Bent World

Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
~Gerard Manley Hopkins from “God’s Grandeur”

This morning springs in beauty, in hope for a new day and I am grateful again for another chance.

That could be me bent and broken on the hard ground, as defenseless as the baby swallows tumbling helpless out of their crowded and soiled nests in our barn rafters, left to die cold and featherless and alone.

Thank God for His brooding breast keeping me safe.   Thank God I am still in the nest waiting to test my wings.

photo by Josh Scholten

photo by Josh Scholten