A Bright Sadness: All Creatures Doing Their Best

All creatures are doing their best
to help God in His birth
of Himself.

Enough talk for the night.
He is laboring in me;

I need to be silent 
for a while,

worlds are forming
in my heart.    
~Meister Eckhart from “Expands His Being”

These last few days of winter are a reawakening of nature’s rebirthing rhythms, with increased activity of all the wild creatures and birds around us, and most importantly, God’s renewal of our weary wintery hearts.

Some late winter and early spring mornings still are pitch black with blustering winds and rain, looking and feeling like the bleakest of December mornings about to plunge into the death spiral of winter all over again.

No self-respecting God would birth Himself into a dawn as dark as night.

But this God would.

He labors in our bleakest of hearts for good reason.  We are unformed and unready to meet Him in the light, clinging as we do to our dark ways and thoughts.  Though we soon celebrate the rebirth of springtime, it is just so much talk until we accept the change of being transformed ourselves.

Though soon the birds will be singing their hearts out and the frogs chorusing in the warming ponds, we, His people, are silenced as He prepares us and prepares Himself for birth within us.   The labor pains are His, not ours;  we become awed witnesses to His first and last breath when He makes all things, including us, new again.

The world and its creatures, including us, is reborn — even where dark reigned before, even where it is bleakest, especially inside our healing wintery hearts.

Time’s Fun When You’re Having Flies

 

 

Time’s fun when you’re having flies.
~Kermit the Frog

 

 

Time flies like the wind; fruit flies like a banana.
~attributed to Groucho Marx

 

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It’s not easy being green unless you also have a dorsal brown stripe and live in a box of ripe Asian pears on the front porch that has become a metropolis of Drosophila (fruit flies).  Then you are in frog heaven with breakfast, lunch and dinner within reach of your tongue any time.

And the Drosophila happily move in to the kitchen any time some pears are brought in.  The apple cider vinegar killing fields I’ve set up on the kitchen counter are capturing dozens daily, but their robust reproducing (which I carefully studied in undergraduate biology lab) outstrips the effectiveness of my coffee filter funnel death trap lures.

Fruit fly season too shall pass.  Time flies and time’s fun when you’re having frogs.

 

 

 

It Sings in Me

 

 

 

The roofs are shining from the rain,
The sparrows twitter as they fly,
And with a windy April grace
The little clouds go by.

Yet the back yards are bare and brown
With only one unchanging tree–
I could not be so sure of Spring
Save that it sings in me.
–  Sara Teasdale, “April”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Frogs plutter and squdge-and frogs beat the air with a recurring thin steel sliver of melody.
Crows go in fives and tens; they march their black feathers past a blue pool; they celebrate an old festival.
A spider is trying his webs, a pink bug sits on my hand washing his forelegs.
I might ask: Who are these people? 
~Carl Sandburg from “Just Before April Came”

 

 

 

And so spring asks:

Who are these people?

Here we are, closing in on mid-April and it has been a week of heavily drifting snowstorms in the Great Lakes and northeast, tornado weather in the south, and blustering wind and rain in the northwest.  I am not so sure of Spring nor is anyone else.

Yet it sings in me.  Yes it sings.

The calendar does not lie, nor does my nose.  The pollen counts are rising despite the rains and as I step outside in early dawn, I can catch the slightest fragrance of just-opening cherry and apple blossoms in the orchard.  Within a week there will be sweet perfume in the air everywhere and the fruit trees become clothed in white puffy clouds of blossom before bursting full into green.

In defiance of the calendar, our oak trees cling stubbornly to their brown bedraggled fall leaves as if ashamed to ever appear naked, even for a week.  In May they will go straight from brown to green without a moment of bare knobby branches.

Even so, it sings in me.  Yes it sings.

A morning bird symphony tunes up ever earlier including the “scree” and chatter from bald eagles high up in the fir trees surrounding our house.  Nesting has begun despite the wet and cold and wind because their nest is the secure home that calls them back, again and again, year after year.

Like them, it sings in me.  Yes it sings.

I rise opening like a bud, I dress my nakedness to cover up my knobbiness, I wander about outside exulting in the free concert, I manage to do chores despite the distractions — this routine of mine which is so unchanging through the calendar days becomes glorious gift and privilege.

Hopefulness sings in me in Spring.  Yes it sings.

 

 

 

Ease Into the Conversation

 

 

My bird, my darling,
Calling through the cold of afternoon—
Those round, bright notes,
Each one so perfect
Shaken from the other and yet
Hanging together in flashing clusters!
The small soft flowers and the ripe fruit
All are gathered.
It is the season now of nuts and berries
And round, bright, flashing drops
In the frozen grass.
~Katherine Mansfield “Winter Bird”

 

 

 

 

 

Your great mistake is to act the drama
as if you were alone…

Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into
the conversation. The kettle is singing
even as it pours you a drink, the cooking pots
have left their arrogant aloofness and
seen the good in you at last. All the birds
and creatures of the world are unutterably
themselves. Everything is waiting for you.
~David Whyte from “Everything is Waiting for You”

 

 

 

 

 

This time of year we sit in silence, waiting for the conversation to resume.

There are 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 typical day-long serenade of birdsong is now replaced by shotguns popping, hawks and eagle’s mating chitters from the treetops, with the bluejays arguing over the last of the filbert nuts.

The song birds have ceased their usual constant conversation.  They swoop in and out to the feeders, intent on survival, less worried about mating rituals and territorial establishment.

On the clear cold evenings, when coyotes aren’t howling in the moonlight, owls hoot to each other across the fields from one patch of woods to another, their gentle resonant dialogue echoing back and forth.

But no birdsong arias;  I’m left bereft of their blending musical tapestry that wakes me at 4 AM in the spring and summer. And the rising and falling of the annual evening peeper orchestra tuning up in the swamps is still two months away.

It is much too quiet now, this time of winter bereavement, this feeling of being alone in a cold and hostile world. The chilly silence of the darkened days, interrupted by gunshot percussion, feels like a baton raised in anticipation after rapping the podium to bring us all to attention. I wait and listen for the downbeat — the return of birds and frogs tuning their throats, preparing their symphony to ease themselves back into the conversation, to express joy and wonder and exuberance at the return of spring.

I want to stick around for the whole concert, hoping always for an encore.

 

 

 

 

Leaping into Nothingness

toad picture by Josh Scholten

Toads are smarter than frogs. Like all of us who are not good-
looking they have to rely on their wits. A woman around the
beginning of the last century who was in love with frogs wrote
a wonderful book on frogs and toads. In it she says if you place
a frog and a toad on a table they will both hop. The toad will
stop just at the table’s edge, but the frog with its smooth skin
and pretty eyes will leap with all its beauty out into nothing-
ness. I tried it out on my kitchen table and it is true. That may
explain why toads live twice as long as frogs. Frogs are better at
romance though. A pair of spring peepers were once observed
whispering sweet nothings for thirty-four hours. Not by me.
The toad and I have not moved.
~Tom Hennen  “Plains Spadefoot Toad”

 

I too am like a toad.
Plain, immobile,
risk-averse, contemplative,
tending to plop or splat
rather than a graceful carefree
leaping into nothingness.

Someone has to hold down the swamp,
peering over the edge of the abyss
belching out an occasional thoughtful croak
while dainty peepers sing their hearts out
like so many sleighbells jingling gaily
throughout the endless night.

 

Between Midnight and Dawn: No Flower Can Wither

 

For you have been born again, not of perishable seed, but of imperishable, through the living and enduring word of God.  For,

“All people are like grass,
    and all their glory is like the flowers of the field;
the grass withers and the flowers fall,
    but the word of the Lord endures forever.”

And this is the word that was preached to you.
1 Peter 1:23-25

 

How fresh, oh Lord, how sweet and clean

Are thy returns! even as the flowers in spring;

         To which, besides their own demean,

The late-past frosts tributes of pleasure bring.

                      Grief melts away

                      Like snow in May,

         As if there were no such cold thing.

         Who would have thought my shriveled heart

Could have recovered greenness? It was gone

         Quite underground; as flowers depart

To see their mother-root, when they have blown,

                      Where they together

                      All the hard weather,

         Dead to the world, keep house unknown.

         These are thy wonders, Lord of power,

Killing and quickening, bringing down to hell

         And up to heaven in an hour;

Making a chiming of a passing-bell.

                      We say amiss

                      This or that is:

         Thy word is all, if we could spell.

         Oh that I once past changing were,

Fast in thy Paradise, where no flower can wither!

         Many a spring I shoot up fair,

Offering at heaven, growing and groaning thither;

         And now in age I bud again,

After so many deaths I live and write;

         I once more smell the dew and rain,

And relish versing. Oh, my only light,

                      It cannot be

                      That I am he

         On whom thy tempests fell all night.

         These are thy wonders, Lord of love,

To make us see we are but flowers that glide;

         Which when we once can find and prove,

Thou hast a garden for us where to bide;

                      Who would be more,

                      Swelling through store,

         Forfeit their Paradise by their pride.
~George Herbert “The Flower”

 

As they are meant to do,
the crocuses creep skyward,
snowdrops flourish,
the orchard tree buds swell
daffodil bulbs awaken bright from their autumn burial.

Bird song is plentiful again in the gray and frozen mornings
and frogs’ chorus rejoices again in the evenings.

There will be spring again in only a few short weeks,
despite how dark things feel now.
Exhaustion will be replaced by renewal
and fresh air filled with the sweetness of cherry and apple blossoms.

Our fields will grow lush and soft
with the sun warm on our horses’ withers.

It isn’t enough to celebrate the defeat of winter
by blooming where we are planted;
may we be forever past changing
by never withering again.

During this Lenten season, I will be drawing inspiration from the new devotional collection edited by Sarah Arthur —Between Midnight and Dawn

Best of Barnstorming Photos Summer/Fall 2014

photo by Tomomi Gibson