Imperfect prose

prayer for a friend

Two hands crack open the morning with beauty

Splitting the darkness into a thousand shards of light

And there, in that place

of broken shimmering

you stand

bare and exposed

You've come, just like everyday prior

with the desire to receive the goodness, the abundance, the gifts

but there is a hesitancy

then the moment when you become aware of your nakedness

your vulnerability

and you pause

conflicted

Staying and going and standing and falling

Questions born in a rabbit hole

pulling you in closer as you spiral

round

and

round

It's not as clear as those mornings when you woke

groggy with newborn dust and warm joy bundles rode the waves of your chest

when hours melted into days and weeks and all was full, yet light

There is a heaviness now that hinders

that makes moving rote rather than rhythmic

You can't help but think of that time you hiked for miles

pounds and pounds upon your back

all the provisions one person could possibly need, tucked safely away

And you took that offer for a ride

jumping into the bed of that pickup, feeling the wind piercing your cheeks

watching the world whiz by in a blur of color and sound

Not until you stopped in the next town did you realize that you had never bothered to take off your pack

As if the ride wasn't enough

When does it all equal out?

the good and the bad

the light and the darkness

the yes and the no?

When?

And what ever shall you do in the inbetween time

When you've got feet on either sides of the great divide

straddling all that you want and all that you have?

Where will you land?

And then you feel two hands cracking you open with beauty

splitting darkness into a thousand shards of light

and there

in that place of broken shimmering

you

stand.

The Simple Woman's Daybook

Outside my window... there is that late August haze that hangs heavy and low.  And despite the heat and the hypnotizing singing of the cicadas, there is still something that hints of Fall...

I am thinking... of a million things at once...of fixing dinner and tonight's meeting, of whether I can get by another day without doing laundry, of new chapter books that will capitivate and inspire, what the future holds...

I am thankful for... slow days and boys who need (and want!) hugs and a new "school year" and of all the possibilities that lie within...

From the learning rooms... is a little brother who is forging ahead with his reading lessons so that he can read along with (or maybe one day, ahead of) his older brother...

From the kitchen... are the attempts to pickle, preserve, pack up, and put away the excess from our garden that, despite its embarrassingly late start, is now kicking it into high gear...

I am wearing... shorts and a white shirt (why do I even try?), Tevas and my favorite blue beaded necklace (present from my boys)...

I am going... to planning meetings and friends' houses and...

I am reading... re-reading, that is... Jane Eyre and loving every minute of it.  Now I remember why I loved it so, years ago.

I am hoping... that the answers to my prayers for wisdom and discernment in several situations will settle on me gently, like a slow, healing rain...

I am hearing... the droning white noise of window a/c units--ones that haven't stopped whirring in weeks upon weeks.  I try, earnestly, to live in the moment but, ever so often, I indulge my weakness for crisp mornings and the smell of woodsmoke and I imagine the Autumn that is forthcoming...

Around the house... are piles of books, Nerf darts, grass clippings, lists...

One of my favorite things... is that first sip of coffee each morning.  Sometimes, I will just hold the mug right below my nostrils, taking in the aroma, reveling in that sweet, anticipatory moment of suspended revery right before I sip...

A few plans for the rest of the week... the gentle easing into some more formal learning routines (not exactly sure what that means around here but...) in order to push through some places in which we have been lingering too long...baking something just because I want to...planning meals for a friend...

A picture for a thought I am sharing...

a visual for what I want to create around here...


The Simple Woman's Daybook

The Real Value of Food

It's difficult to think anything but pleasant thoughts while eating a homegrown tomato. ~Lewis Grizzard



I've been spending a lot of time thinking about food lately.  Not in a gluttonous way, mind you.  Rather, as a kind of spiritual practice, really.  The famine in the horn of Africa has been haunting my quiet places ever since I first saw these pictures and I can't shake the feeling I get, deep in my non-starving gut.  The never ending questions have frothed up from somewhere beyond deep within me and I've struggled to know how to move forward.  The most paralyzing question is the one that I always end up landing on and getting stuck in: "How can I continue to go on living my life of abundance here when I know that so many are suffering there?"

I mean that with all seriousness.  How can/shall/do I go on?

How do I, as a follower of Jesus, reconcile my entitled existence with the suffering of others?

What am I supposed to do?

As much as I know nothing, I do believe this... the Spirit of the Living God, the One who breathed me into existence, is breathing something else into my deepest places.  His whisper tells me that what I can do

nay,
what I must do
is this:

share what I have.

Although there are many voices within that want to say, "go there! be among them"

I know I am here, for now, and this is what I must do.  share.


We grow some of our own food.  We also had big dreams of being more self-sufficient when we first bought this place.  Those ideals have been greatly humbled by the sheer magnitude of that task, even though that is the very thing we expect those who are starving half-way around the world to do.  Be self-sufficient. 

But we lean on.  We learn more each year and we do what we can.  I know, though, that we could do more and I am living into that understanding.  To grow your own food and to divine all the multitudes of ways to store and preserve that bounty is a process.  And we are such novices.   
But then we have met others who share this desire.  Those who grow children and food and hope.  Those who knead life and prayers into their daily bread.  Those who love their animals and respect and honor the gift those animals share with the farm.  Because isn't that what all of these are, really?  Gifts.
 
So we enter into relationship with folks and animals and life and wonder.  We try, as much as we can, to choose the gift, rather than the trinkets offered everywhere else and as a result, we enter into a sacred place.
 

"You mustn’t wish for another life. You mustn’t want to be somebody else. What you must do is this:
'Rejoice evermore.

Pray without ceasing.

In everything give thanks.'

I am not all the way capable of so much, but those are the right instructions."

--Wendell Berry

We are trying to learn the real value of our food, to better understand what all went into the very food we put in our mouths. 

Understand, though...we are but novices.  We are still, very much, Americans...the majority of whom rarely think about their food, much less sit down to enjoy it.  We don't always make the virtuous choice, the humble choice, the sacred choice.  We still sometimes eat to satiate some other hunger rather than to celebrate the gift.  But we stumble on...reaching...hoping.

We strive for the relationship, the connection.  Because that's when you can't help but share.

(bread by Renee's Breads and milk fresh from a cow named Chocolate at Full Plate Farm)

 

And so I continue to count the gifts:

--a weekend full of being together, listening, laughing

--so many colors in the garden right now and a surprise vegetable, courtesy of that beloved compost (maybe something a chicken ate and passed on as a gift?!)

--a string of ruby peppers hanging in our kitchen, drying, waiting to add needed warmth to winter stews

--sharing the gift with our chickens...oh how they love our offerings of rinds and peels and seeds

--how the chickens give us gifts in return...beautiful eggs in varying shades of brown

--swirls of cinnamon that make the kitchen smell like home

--milk with full on cream that is living and breathing and "tastes like grass", according to August

--the hard lessons learned through chores that bend and shape and make little boys stronger

--sitting around the fire circle on a Sunday night, listening to owls and figuring out where North is and talking about what will become of the Earth

--falling asleep with a book in hand

 

 

Imperfect Prose on Thursdays

i wake to find the world wrapped in fog
cocooned

amazing how
like snow
it absorbs
all sound
holding everything
in its embrace

i marvel at how it reveals
mysteries and secrets
unknown
like the wizard boy hidden beneath his invisibility cloak
i walk
and
see

there are trails
vestiges of nocturnal meanderings
swirling in the grass like figure eights
and I can now see
the mystery
that my dog smells
every morning
in her frenetic way
she's not crazy
after all

but the greatest magic
falls
and
lands
on the spider webs
their beauty and exquisite choreography
now bejewelled with drops of
dew
heavy and swooning

all of this
it is always there

i
just
don't
see

amazing
to once be blind
but now
to
See

grace
falling
dripping
gilding
bedazzling

always

This Organic Life

I've been thinking a lot lately about organic living and how, for me, it is so much more than just the foods that I choose to eat or the chemicals that I choose to avoid. It's inevitable, really, this organic life.

I couldn't get away from it when I witnessed the arrival of the cicadas earlier this summer. When they covered the grass beneath my feet, emerging from some deep hole within which they've remained hidden for year upon year and I fell asleep to and woke to the endless wooshing of their wings, rubbing together endlessly, as they sought out their mates.

But then, almost as quickly as they arrived, they left.  In spirit, that is, because all around they left reminders of their presence.  A mini foreshadowing of a rapturous exit from this world.  One day they were here, the next, no more.



And then, there is the garden.  We got started much later than is reasonable this year.  Delayed by the seemingly endless Spring rains that made tilling and cultivating impossible to do well,
we waited. 
And waited. 

When others were already starting to harvest their first yellow squash or zucchini, we were just beginning. 

But we were armed with something different this year. 

Chicken manure. 

Like a slow, magical brew, it has been cooking for over a year.  Chicken waste is too strong to use straight from the coop.  It must be tempered by time and patience.   As it sits in its pile, quiet and unassuming, a mysterious thing is happening deep inside.  What was once waste begins to cure.  Temperature and moisture and air dance together in a mystical trinity, working together for good.  What it becomes is like gold.

 Into this pile of what, in another setting, would be considered trash, waste, crap, we boldly place our seeds.  We do this because we believe that good will come of it.  We do this because our experience has shown us that there is promise in the pile.

Even though every year that we work this soil, more rocks make their way to the surface, as do other remnants of life gone by, the fact that we have this pile of gold dust to mix in makes all the difference.
It doesn't matter that ugly things have been hidden here.  It doesn't matter that others didn't care for it like we would have if given the opportunity.  It doesn't matter that this dirt didn't produce anything for years.  We are allowed access to a miracle. 

A miracle that testifies to an impossibility:  from death comes life.

"...where God is making new life, not a day goes by without his unfolding grace..." {2 Corinthians 4:16, The Message}

I couldn't help but smile when I traced my finger through the soil to make safe havens for my seeds and I came across cicada shells in the dirt.

...from death comes life.

So now, our seeds have transformed into plants.  The tomatoes reach upwards, guided skyward by strings that assist them towards the sun. 

Now there is fruit.

Thanks be to God.

"For if you go poking about the world, intent on keeping the candle of consciousness blazing, you must be ready to give thanks at all times.  Discrimination is not allowed.  The flame cannot gutter and fail when a cold wind whistles through the house.

Thanksgiving, thanksgiving.  All must be thanksgiving.

It took thirty-eight thousand Levites to give thanks to God in David's day; every morning and every evening the shifts changed.  Four thousand were needed just to carry the hacked carcasses of cattle, and another four thousand were needed to sing about it.  The place reeked of blood, was soaked in blood.  The priests stood around gnawing and chewing and giving thanks.  They did not cross-stitch their gratitude on samplers to frame and hang on the wall.  They wrote their thanks in blood on the doorposts every day.

Thanksgiving is not a task to be underaken lightly.  It is not for dilettantes or aesthetes.  One does not dabble in praise for one's own amusement, nor train the intellect and develop perceptual skills to add to his repertoire.  We're not talking about the world as a free course in art appreciation.  No.  Thanksgiving is not a result of perception; thanksgiving is the access to perception."

--From And the Trees Clap Their Hands, by Virginia Stem Owens

And so I continue to count...

--breezes that cut the blazing heat

--the rumble of thunder that tells me that it is raining somewhere

--boys that turn 9 and still want me close

--friends that own cows (named Chocolate!) and share their abundance with us

--discovering like-minded souls and bearing mine to them

--the wonder of imagination and the capturing of such in amazing stories and books

--an impending anniversary that sweetens the week

--conversations around the dinner table that create laughter and good feelings

--the promise of new learning opportunities and wonderful people with whom to share such gifts

--today

Chaff and Grain, together

It's early evening, midsummer, and I'm sitting in a big box bookstore because the town I live in is big enough for a mall but not big enough for an independent coffee shop that stays open past dinnertime.  I wanted a coffeehouse vibe, with creaky floors, old salvaged furniture and jazz music playing in the background but this was the closest thing going.  Anyway, who doesn't feel better surrounded by millions of books?

I'm here because I've been called here.  Called to a meeting of hearts and minds that have gradually become entwined with my own. And now there is a new face to meet and embrace and love because, if the one who has called us together loves her dearly, it will inevitably follow that we will love her, too. 

We've pulled two teeny tables together, needing them only for a place to keep our drinks accessible and for the occasional elbow to rest.  Most of the time, however, we are pulled inward, like drawstrings, closer towards each other ...
the better to hear you, my dear. 

And so we begin the delicate dance of receiving someone new into our fold.  A fold of individuals "bound together by common beliefs", rather than by a fence that confines us.  I look around the table, taking it all in, silently and stealthily tracing my fingers along the faces that shimmer with the evening sun.

One smiles broadly, long brown ringlets framing her face and her joy.  Her hands are clasped together, not from nerves but, rather, from a need to complete the circle that she is ...open arms, open mind, open heart.  To find oneself surrounded by that circle is a gift, received again and again.  Who could have possibly known of the pain that she carries almost daily, pressing in upon her brilliant mind, determined to wreak havoc but finding, instead, a fortress of choices, also made daily, that are able to push away that which seeks to destroy and chooses, instead, to embrace the gifts?

Another breathes hope.  She has taken up arms against an evil that is hell bent on destroying bodies and spirits.  Her heart is both heavy and light, weary from the dance of responsibility but also mightier from the challenge of a foe that doesn't kill her, only makes her stronger.  Mercy leads her every muscle, leaving grace in its wake.  She sighs.

And the newest among us sits quietly, taking it all in.  A self-avowed city-girl-turned-country-mama because of a die-hard love for a man that is her partner on the journey.  But I can see the honesty of her desire, burning through her skin, and the smell of earth is palpable.  She was not destined to breathe smog forever.  Instead, she breathes us in, receiving us with grace and openness.  There is so much to know about her and not enough time in the moment.

The store's loud speaker informs us of closing time...we don't have to go home but we can't stay there.  So we move outside and for two more hours, we stand, oblivious to the hard pavement beneath our feet...only aware of that drawstring, pulling us closer.

These are the nights that help to make me who I am. 

Alone, I'm easily overwhelmed, burdened by all that has to be done or completed or checked off...
But here...here I learn that I don't have to do it all. 
Together,
that is how we are supposed do it. 
Alone, it is too much to take on
but     together    we are more. 
One's extravagance of mercy will carry me through the darkness to another's eye for goodness. 
And another's heart for courage becomes my buoy, preventing me from sinking into the abyss.

Oh, the comfort, the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person, having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words, but pouring them all out, just as they are, chaff and grain together, certain that a faithful hand will take and sift them, keep what is worth keeping, and with a breath of kindness blow the rest away.

~Dinah Craik

We finally disperse, walking to our cars with a fullness we didn't have before.  We begin to realize the lateness of the hour but still, somehow, we move with a renewed sense of energy.

The orange moon hangs low, it too, with a fullness that belies its crescent shape.  It hangs, ripe with the evening, not wanting to move from its place in the sky.  I want to fling a rope around its slope and hang over the wide expanse of creation in order to take it all in.

A Lake of our Own



"Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake."

-Wallace Stevens

I thought that it was about time I shared with you some of what we've been doing with our time lately.  Walking around the lake is pretty much a daily event around here seeing as it is the perfect outlet for our dog's boundless energy and curiosity.  Kind of a neat equation that looks a little like this:

 She needs lots of exercise + so do we + might as well make it as pleasant an experience as possible = daily walk around the lake. 

One of the added benefits to this daily constitution is that we've been privy to how this stretch of Earth changes with the seasons.  It's remarkable how varied the landscape can be depending on what season it happens to be.  We have experienced some of our most magical moments during quiet winter snow showers.  Every day presents a new gift.

But now with Spring finally upon us, for good (?), we've been drawn to the lake anew.  The first part of our walk takes us down and up and down and up and down and up on the part of the lake road that winds through a beautiful forest with a towering canopy and trickling streams.  This is where we first came upon this:

I love how mushrooms just pop up, completely unexpectedly and without warning or declaration.  That's why finding them is such a joy!  Like nature's very own rendition of a Jack-in-the-box.

And then there is the lovely May Apple (which we also learned are also known as Mandrakes.  You can only imagine how excited these Harry Potter fans were to discover this little fact and to relish in the fact that we are literally surrounded by these magical plants!!!).  One of my favorite Spring experiences is to watch the unfolding of the May Apples.  They pop up, much like the mushrooms do, in magnificient groupings of no less than 15-20.  At first, they look like crumpled old men with wrinkled coats of green, emerging from a very long winter's sleep.  But then, as their leaves reach for the dappled sunlight that reaches them through the trees, they look like miniature patio umbrellas.  I've always referred to them as Fairy umbrellas, even before I knew their proper name, because that is exactly what they look like.  When you stumble upon a grouping of them, you feel as if you have stepped into hallowed ground that belongs to the woodland sprites and that you should tread lightly and reverently.  And then, as if they weren't perfect enough, round about the first of May, they bloom.  Beautifully.

 "And will any poet sing of a lusher, richer thing,

Than a ripe May apple, rolled like a pulpy lump of gold

Under thumb and finger tips; and poured molten through the lips?"

James Whitcomb Riley

And then, we come around the bend to find this view:



It is right along this bank, lined with cattails and duck weed, that we have found some wonderful treasures.
Like this frightening snapping turtle:

Or the evidence of a ringed bandit's midnight snack along the shore:

“I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore. . . .

I hear it in the deep heart's core.” 

-William Butler Yeats

 So we soon realized this Spring that were just going to have to spend more time out here.  It was just too much of a treasure to take for granted.  We decided that we wanted to know this lake like the back of our hand.  To explore it and study it and learn all we could from its quiet yet immeasurable beauty.

We decided to take to the paddle boat (thank you to our wonderful neighbors for sharing it with us!!!).  Call it "boat school" or "outdoor education", whatever...  All I know is that it is enchanting and delightful.  The lake is our teacher and we are her pupils.

Here is August consulting our Birds of Missouri book, trying to determine exactly what type of heron we had spotted.  You can see the year's new cattails emerging behind him--great places for the giant bullfrogs to hide.



As we maneuvered around the banks of the lake we decided to investigate a site that we thought might house a Canadian Goose nest.  We had observed the parents lurking around this particular area quite often and we believed there was a very good reason for that.
We were absolutely right and found this evidence:

We were very dismayed to see broken egg shells and even one lone, uncracked egg (where's Templeton when you need him?).  You see, we hadn't seen the parents around here in the most recent days and so we assumed that something had raided their nest.  We quietly contemplated the risks and dangers that come with trying to raise your young in the wild and we meekly mourned the loss to these goose parents.  We then spotted them, the parents, sitting on an opposite bank, staring at us as we surrounded their, since abandoned, nest.  They looked at us stoically and with a deep resignation.  My heart broke for them. 
We decided to move the paddle boat in their direction, wanting to pay them our respects and respectfully acknowledge their efforts.

Imagine our surprise when, as we got closer, they jumped up from their sunny spot to reveal a half dozen goslings hidden between the two of them!!  They quickly moved into the water, knowing that the lake was their domain and their safety net.  Our hearts swelled with relief and admiration.

And so it has been for us, these last few days and weeks.  The first thing August asked me this morning was whether or not we could, again, go out on the water.  And how can I say "no"?  It calls to me as much as it does to them.  The challenge is taking care of the other things we also need to do today.  As usual, I'm torn.