Only humans have birthdays

7:43 a.m. 0 degrees. Christmas Eve. The dogs are eating breakfast. I wait for Riley to finish his kibble; I could stand and watch him chew, or pull The Horse Owner's Veterinary Manual off the shelf and read a half page, or fold three sweaters from the laundry.

Or step outside (where it is beauty incarnate).

Later my father would ask why I went outside—me? Who is always cold? Out in my pajamas and stocking feet?—and I didn’t have a good answer, other than I needed to feel alive. A 60-degree temperature drop in three feet and two seconds is enough to drive your thoughts to God, as happens to me, now, when I feel most alive. Cold. Pain. Tears. Joy. Sitting next to a Christmas fire so long your face burns hot or breaking a paper-thin Christmas tree bulb you didn't mean to destroy, or pinching out the flame of a candle with your bare fingers or trying to tear open a present that refuses to give up its prize—this is life, pure life that rushes your heart like zero-degree air.

So I stand outside and frozen concrete pounds through my socks.

4:54 p.m. 12 degrees. Christmas Eve. I swing my black-suede boots out of my dad’s blue Corolla and cold air freezes my skirt, black beads on white satin—outlines of flowers and leaves in swirl and sparkle. My father and I are silent, thinking of what I’d just read out loud by moonlight:

The Voice was and is God…
His breath filled all things with a living, breathing light—
A light that thrives in the depths of darkness…
It cannot and will not be quenched…

The true Light, who shines upon the heart of everyone, was coming into the cosmos… The Voice took on flesh and became human and chose to live alongside us… Through this man we all receive gifts of grace beyond our imagination… God, unseen until now, is revealed in the Voice, God’s only Son.

We had been silent a moment, and drove past snowed-in pine trees.

“What should I read next?”

This is the revelation of Jesus the Anointed, the Liberating King: an account of visions and a heavenly journey. God granted this to Him so He would show His followers the realities that are already breaking into the world and soon will be fulfilled…

“This is not the time for fear; I am the First and the Last, and I am the living One. I entered the realm of the dead; but see, I am alive for now and for all the ages—even ages to come.”

It is a candlelight service tonight—heat of flame and cold of snow and voice of God.

7:32 a.m. –14 degrees. Christmas Day. The dogs are eating again. I wrest open the sliding door smudged by dog nose prints, step over Anya’s soggy blue ball, and walk into the backyard onto the one patch of concrete patio not covered with snow. Wrapping my arms around my waist does nothing against the glass wall of ice I just entered—wake up! good morning! merry Christmas!

Earlier, sitting by the fire and the lighted Christmas tree before my parents were awake, I had seen on Facebook a friend post a picture of a cake with “Happy Birthday, Jesus!” written in green icing across its face—a family tradition, as proclaimed in the comments.

Beyond the mesh yard fence lies unbroken snow to the treeline. Happy birthday. I rarely think of Christmas as Jesus’ birthday—perhaps this is sacrilegious?—but today the air-torn cold won’t let me forget one thing: I am alive. I am human. And only humans have birthdays.

Wildflowers don't cry

I once knew a girl who walked in the woods.

She would remind the sun to wake up; without her, it might not make it above the horizon. So winter Minnesota mornings she stepped through oak trees; frozen pond, frozen branches, frozen sun.

Frozen.

But also agonizingly alive, with sunlight glancing daggers off bitter snow, making eyes sting and cheeks burn hot by unmixed energy and light. (You know what this is; the purer life is, the more it can hurt; this is the great irony.) When she breathed in air breathed out by pine trees, she could feel the scent, like you feel music or light or a bleeding heart.

Her favorite wildflower was the bleeding heart; it always had been since it grew wild around the trees she walked among as a child. Her grandmother told her its name that afternoon gardening by the barn, and she never forgot bleeding hearts. Not others’. Not her own.

She gave her own spirit away, once, twice, more; to people, to dreams, but it was dropped and stepped on and now bled—was still bleeding—like the wildflowers. She asked Jesus about the pain, and He told her about her heart that was no longer hers. Take a breath, take it back, and don’t make the same mistake again.

Her eyes are dry, because wildflowers don’t cry.

Today unbroken snow rests, waiting for mice and leaves to draw on it, and she walks on the covered path and crushes ten trillion snowflakes, ten trillion marks of the holiness of the world. Once she made a snow angel, but it didn’t look much like an angel; untouched snow seemed more divine in the end, so she didn’t do it again. Destroying beauty hurts too much, especially if your heart already bleeds.

I knew a girl once who remembered a poem she heard a long time ago.

Blessed is the road that keeps us homeless.
Blessed is the mountain that blocks our way…

Blessed are the night and the darkness that blinds us.
Blessed is the cold that teaches us to feel…

Blessed is this shortest day that makes us long for light.
Blessed is the love that in losing we discover.

The sun is above the horizon now, has burned off dawn’s golden light, and underneath the snow are bleeding hearts waiting for spring.

A world where you could run

For now we see in obscurely in a mirror, but then it will be face to face. Now I know partly; then I will know fully, just as God has fully known me. 

~1 Corinthians 13:12

Mourning doves speak, and I don’t catch their words; I get so frustrated when I cannot understand, and sometimes I stop trying. The doves bounce on their birch branches, crying with frustration over my stupidity: “Why can’t she hear us?”

I feel like I live in one of those dreams I used to have when I was eight, when some awful man was trying to kidnap me—or a witch with wild hair to grab me—or a train rushing down on me—and I couldn’t run away.

I knew I could run—I remembered faintly that in some other world there was running, as there was sunlight and wild mountains and prairie grass at noon—and I knew, somehow, that in that impossible, forgotten otherworld that everyone around me did not believe existed—I could run. Though my mind was locked away from it, my heart was still raw to the touch of a half-remembered hope: It remembered the world where I could run.

I knew I was born to run. It’s the knowing that was the worst, because in your dream, there is no question that in that other world, you were able to run. You haven’t forgotten, and you never will; you just want to go home.

Or perhaps it is like when you cannot remember a word you know exists. You’re not stupid. You could use a different word, get by, move on, rush forward, not take the time to say what you really mean. But you can’t. There is that feeling behind your soul and your words aren’t saying what you mean. There is a deeper reality and it just crashed into your own, unable to stay out any longer; “the Lord knows what He is after.” It’s the reality behind your words, the place of true meaning.

And you try to reach for that word—that deeper place—the one that will let you finally be at rest—the word you were meant to say, or, perhaps, the world in which you were meant to live. You don’t know what that word—that world—is or how to find it or if you ever will. In fact, there is only one thing you do know: there is another world.

So I listen to the doves when they try to tell me of the hawk who disturbed their breakfast, and I watch a December sunrise and try desperately to think of in which other world I’ve seen it before, and I fly in a plane and wonder why the sunlight reflecting off the tops of the clouds seems so familiar—and why primroses pushing through matted oak leaves are supposed to make me cry—and why the princess in the stories was supposed to be me—and why music makes me homesick for a place I’ve never been.

It makes me think of what I did to forget, to forget home. What adventure I had—what mistake I made—to suffer such amnesia.? How did I get here, so far from my true world? And I can only conclude that this must be a sort of dream, a mirror land, in which my greatest calling is to go home.

“The Eagle is right,” said the Lord Digory. “Listen, Peter. When Aslan said you could never go back to Narnia, he meant the Narnia you were thinking of. But that was not the real Narnia. That had a beginning and an end. That was only a shadow or a copy of the real Narnia, which has always been here and always will be here… And of course it is different; as different as a real thing is from a shadow or as waking life is from a dream.” 

It was the Unicorn who summed up what everyone was feeling... "I have come home at last! This is my real country! I belong here. This is the land I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it till now. The reason why we loved the old Narnia is that it sometimes looked a little like this. Bree-hee-hee! Come further up, come further in!"

~The Last Battle 

How do you feel the sunrise?

And I wonder—when lights go down, and I hug my knees to my chest and fear who I am and my deepest desires—and I am a star who has left her constellation and cannot find her way home.

Home—where mocha sunrises are greeted by silence and prayer, where stress is seen as sin like we always wished it were, and you see your reflection in the pond—the reflection as in a mirror, your truer self—and you finally know who she is.

And in this life you walk down the street looking strangers in the eye, for you know who you are, while taking the greatest risk you ever have—to Live. For it is easier to live in painful rules that bind, for away from them is fearful freedom, the sort of life not dictated by another and so not safe.

Good, perhaps, but never safe.

And pain is easier than fear—because it is easier to seek for strength to merely endure than it is to risk being wrong about what it means to live alive, to risk losing everything you stayed up late nights for and prayed tears for.

And you wonder at a world that seems the antithesis of who you are—or know you are, somewhere, if you can find her and set her free—and question how it is you live so you feel the sunrise.

So you stay behind rules in the half-lived life, ordering yourself around everything but yourself, and you wonder why God is silent.

Saying goodbye to the stars

The quilt binds around my bare shoulders as I twist to face the window and see the stars. Midnight, and in five hours and twenty minutes my watch will beep, and I will get up and put on my backpack and leave Austria for home.

But that doesn’t matter when you’ve seen the stars.

The door to the balcony swings wordlessly—respecting those who dream while asleep, not while awake. No makeup, bare feet, hair loose, I greet the cow bells on the hills, and the mountains look up, brushing my gaze toward the crescent moon. In Paris, I watched it rise alongside the Eiffel Tower, full—now it steps back, making room for the stars.

Ten million stars, each a window God slit in the curtain of this world to allow the outside light of heaven through; now, He whispers, you can see home. If I spent ten minutes looking at God’s stars, heaven's stars, each night, I would love life more. In the city, we drown and build our own stars, flickering halogen that makes moths commit suicide, and humans too. A breeze blows off the mountain, and my face is cold to the touch.

Above me, an ivory rainbow. I haven’t seen the Milky Way for three years, since the farm, when my sister didn’t live on an island and there were four at the dinner table each night. On those evenings, Dad would bring us to the end of our driveway, a quarter-mile walk between fields of crickets, and teach us about Cassiopeia. I don’t see her now and don’t remember where to look.

Yet perhaps I’ve never seen the Milky Way, for even now when I look at her, she fades. But, then, of course she does; beauty doesn’t make sense and you can’t explain why it matters and it’s only on faith you see it at all. Beauty is the greatest builder of faith I know.

Above me, a shooting star, God’s prayer. And I wished on it, that I would always return to nights that are cold and skies full of stars, if not in this world, then in the next.

In praise of solid people

In Praise of Solid People

 ~C.S. Lewis, Spirits in Bondage

Thank God that there are solid folk
Who water flowers and roll the lawn,
And sit and sew and talk and smoke,
And snore all through the summer dawn.

Who pass untroubled nights and days
Full-fed and sleepily content,
Rejoicing in each other’s praise,
Respectable and innocent.

Who feel the things that all men feel,
And think in well-worn grooves of thought,
Whose honest spirits never reel
Before man’s mystery, overwrought.

Yet not unfaithful nor unkind,
With work-day virtues surely staid,
Theirs is the sane and humble mind,
And dull affections undismayed.

O happy people! I have seen
No verse yet written in your praise,
And, truth to tell, the time has been
I would have scorned your easy ways.

But now thro’ weariness and strife
I learn your worthiness indeed,
The world is better for such life
As stout suburban people lead.

Too often have I sat alone
When the wet night falls heavily,
And fretting winds around me moan,
And homeless longing vexes me

For lore that I shall never know,
And visions none can hope to see,
Till brooding works upon me so
A childish fear steals over me.

I look around the empty room,
The clock still ticking in its place,
And all else silent as the tomb,
Till suddenly, I think, a face

Grows from the darkness just beside.
I turn, and lo! it fades away,
And soon another phantom tide
Of shifting dreams begins to play,

And dusky galleys past me sail,
Full freighted on a faerie sea;
I hear the silken merchants hail
Across the ringing waves to me

—Then suddenly, again, the room,
Familiar books about me piled,
And I alone amid the gloom,
By one more mocking dream beguiled.

And still no nearer to the Light,
And still no further from myself,
Alone and lost in clinging night
—(The clock’s still ticking on the shelf).

Then do I envy solid folk
Who sit of evenings by the fire,
After their work and doze and smoke,
And are not fretted by desire.

In which I prepare to run away from an Austrian shopkeeper

They don't yell at you here.

Yesterday I was walking in the Old City in Innsbruck, Austria, shopping by myself, browsing through the dozens of tourist shops with their mini cow-bell keychains and Edelweiss jewelry. In Israel, that would have been a problem waiting to happen: the Old City. Narrow street. A young woman. By myself. Obviously a tourist. Going into a shop, of all the scandalous things.

The first store I walked into in Innsbruck, there was a man about my age at the counter, and all my Israel instincts went off -- as soon as he opened his mouth, I cringed and unconsciously prepared to fend him off and flee back out into the street while he shouted after me waving some scarf or souvenir asking whether I was single, if I wanted anything, how much could I afford, wasn't this scarf lovely, where was I from, how beautiful I was (and did I want some coffee?), how he had the best prices in town, and would I please come back.

As I mentally prepared for this, the Austrian shopkeeper looked at me calmly and said something that nearly made my jaw drop.

"Can I help you?"

I gaped. He wanted to help me?

I smiled and declined, then waited for more -- protests, exclamations about his skirts or scarves or silver jewelry -- but instead, he nodded and went back to his work behind the desk.

Amazing.

As I stepped back out into the sunny street, I realized I hadn't heard those words -- "Can I help you?" -- for weeks. I enjoyed the Israeli shops and culture -- I truly did -- but despite being only a few hours' flight from Austria, the mentality of each is worlds apart.

I am glad to experience both.

On singleness and souls: My first day in Jerusalem

I walked with my friend down a crowded Jerusalem street, vendors with glorious scarves, headbands, jewelry, sandals, bags, carvings -- overhead, underfoot, on all sides. >We laugh (clutch our purses like obedient tourists), I point out to her a purple scarf with dangling golden medallions, we take in the streets and shops and land. The shopkeepers sit outside their booths, want you to come in, want to bargain. One calls out to my friend. 

"Are you single today!?"

We both gasp and give an appropriately shocked look at the ground in front of us (did we just hear right?) -- refraining from staring at each other with mouths agape until out of earshot, where we burst out laughing. Single today? Why, certainly, glad you caught me now, as I wasn't single yesterday and may not be at 5 p.m. tomorrow. But today, yes, of course! We laugh until silenced again in the beauty of the city.

It's different here. But of course it is.

I'm in Jerusalem, I'm in the city of God.

Here I'm walking through a crowded Jerusalem street. Notice the two things you always see: beautiful scarves, and signs in three languages.

I didn't know what to expect arriving here, but what I am receiving is enough. There is endless stone, rubbed silky raw by millions of feet over hundreds of years; it's like walking on hot ice. Olive trees grow like weeds, and there are no flies; I thought there would be.

Always three languages --usually Hebrew on top, Arabic next, English on the bottom. Orthodox Jews dressed in black move by Muslims on their way to prayer while stepping to the side for a Christian coming out of church. People warn of tension here, of violence. What I am amazed by, humbled by, is not that there is sometimes violence, but there is not so much more. So many people so passionate about their faith, their very souls tied into the depth of this land, each person disagreeing with the next about so much critical to who they are, knowing that disagreement simply by the way the other is dressed, with centuries of violence behind them -- and yet, side by side, day after day, year after year, friends, coworkers, selling each other bread, bargaining over a skirt, and smiling at the laughter of the other's child.

The human soul is a remarkable thing.

the darkness prayer

Four braids. Three, actually, with one still undone. Maia’s tangled black mane reaches to her chest, my fingers run through it, and rainy wind breathes on eastern pasture.

It’s nearly supper, and I haven’t had lunch; a little dizzy, but I don’t notice; long ago I learned to keep myself from fainting. I stand and the world swims, can’t hear, can’t see, hand reaches silently for a wall. But I learn to hide, to sit and look in embroidered purse for something invisible, and no one knows the imminence of a fall. They go on with their lives, and in a few moments, my world returns, and I continue with mine.

Maia breathes free from halter or rope. Fourth braid almost finished, and horse dirt sticks to mane-greased fingers. Maia is not quite sleeping, standing with me in the field. She would be, except for the turkeys poking through violet clover on the far side of the hill. They need watching, suspicious things.

Maia never misses anything. I get dizzy, stop breathing, and she knows, but she also feels when I live the joy of my grandma’s purple-flowered trellis. She never asks me to be anyone I cannot be at this moment, but she does demand I live in all the beauty I can today. This is a good lesson, to live in the moment.

I crouch for the comb in the grass, stand, vision blurs, hand touches Maia’s shoulder, she stays still for me. When I stand and darkness closes in, I don’t think well, and sometimes all I can remember is the presence of God. Then I understand the meaning of prayer.

Asleep in my arms

Into the West

Lay down your sweet and weary head
Night is falling, you have come to journey's end.
Sleep now, and dream of the ones who came before.
They are calling from across the distant shore.

Why do you weep?
What are these tears upon your face?
Soon you will see
all of your fears will pass away,
safe in my arms
you're only sleeping.

What can you see on the horizon?
Why do the white gulls call?
Across the sea a pale moon rises—
The ships have come to carry you home.

Dawn will turn to silver glass
A light on the water
All souls pass.

Hope fades
into the world of night
through shadows falling
out of memory and time.

Don't say, "We have come now to the end."
White shores are calling
you and I will meet again.
And you'll be here in my arms
Just sleeping.

What can can you see on the horizon?
Why do the white gulls call?
Across the sea a pale moon rises—
The ships have come to carry you home.

And all will turn to silver glass
A light on the water
Grey ships pass
Into the west.

Good bye, old friend.

Waiting for a ship

The May spring water pulsed over my bare feet, and I curled my toes against the cold. I knew it wasn’t ocean water; it was Lake Michigan water; that didn’t sound as poetic. A half hour ago on this beach in Door County, Wisconsin, my friend and I had stood on the broken shells and looked out at the breathing mist.

Clouds as low as the lake. “Did you ever pretend, when you were a little girl on the beach,” I closed my eyes, “that if you looked long enough at the ocean—at the horizon—were careful not to blink—and just knew, and waited—a ship would come for you?”

My friend has mounted the hill to the house, but I am still in the sand and dawn. Down the beach a clatter of rocks migrates toward the wet horizon, and a seagull preens. When I reach it, my bare feet find their place in the water-washed stone: islands.

“When I am alone on the beach,” my friend told me, “I turn into the wind, turn into the water, and sing.”

But the sea is wide and I cannot swim over 
Neither have I the wings to fly… 
But I'll spend my days in endless roaming, 
Soft is the grass, my bed is free...
On that long road down to the sea. 

If a ship were ever to come for me, it would be now, on the water, in the morning, and perhaps while I sing.

The invisible girl

Be soft. Do not let the world make you hard. Do not let the pain make you hate. Do not let the bitterness steal your sweetness. Take pride that even though the rest of the world may disagree, you still believe it to be a beautiful place. 

~Author Unknown 

“You’re an incredibly intimidating person!”

I looked at him, dumbfounded. I’m intimidating? I walk out of the yellow-walled classroom with a friend—protesting that I try to be pleasant—and my friend bobs his head emphatically, insisting, oh yes, I am a terribly nice person. But maybe rather intimidating.

And I heard it again from a professor walking out on the sidewalk in the April sun, and again from a former roommate when reminiscing about our first meeting: I have it under control. I get things done. I’m on top of everything. Good for me.

What those people do not know is my inability to let myself even timidly approach anything close to weakness is itself one of my greatest weaknesses. The struggle for authenticity, transparency, and vulnerability fights bitterly against the deadly safe walls of a “perfect” exterior—and a false self. It is easier to be perfect than to be vulnerable, to give others the chance of hurting you, laughing at you. It is easier to be perfect than to let others down and cause them pain and risk them leaving you for your clumsy life.

Not allowing myself to be weak—to not be perfect—has affected me as a woman. I know I was not the only little girl to dream of being the great beauty rescued by the prince—I always secretly wanted to be dramatically kidnapped and  even more dramatically rescued (complete with epic battles and castles, swords, and dragons, preferably).

But as soon as I started dreaming up those adventures, I’d bite my lip and anxiously push back those stories, because, I knew, if I were silly enough or pathetic enough or dumb enough to get kidnapped and in trouble in the first place,  the prince would surely be annoyed he had to come rescue me—he’d think less of me—“Hell,” he’d gripe, “what an idiot, she got herself into a hell of a mess”—and I’d have only shame where I wanted love.

If only I’d been smarter, braver, or better, I could’ve earned the his love, I could’ve avoided getting in trouble in the first place or at least could have gotten myself out of it on my own and proven my worth. Ultimately, I would be rescued only because I had failed.

You are not enough, the world tells me, If you show your weakness, others will leave you. We are afraid of being the girl, who, when she finally summons up the courage to show her weakness, finds herself abandoned by her prince and by others at the very moment she needed their strength. It is in that moment she learns she was just not quite worth fighting for.

Why people rode west

When wondering
Why people rode West,
I ask horses.
For once I knew bright wanderlust,
Tears when sun wove down to flax—
But now I stay, as statues stay:
Sleepwalk.
Yet mustang herds in picture books
Choose godly mud, swim
Through oceaned fog as rivers
Under Utah stars—
So I mount my mare to rise
To fields of blistered sky,
Scale a cliff of glass or grass—
Let September sun trade places
With life in stirrups' muddy tread,
Nails pushed full of dirt and sand,
Living unasked.

Moonlight

We may want to love other people without holding back, to feel authentic, to breathe in the beauty around us, to dance and sing. Yet each day we listen to inner voices that keep our life small. 

~Tara Brach 

As a college freshman, desperate to loosen the choke of city’s fingers around my throat, I would walk carefully beside the sidewalk. With eyes focused on the ground, I’d see only grass, pretend I was home on our 30-acre prairie farm. Three years later, a senior at Northwestern College, I have learned to see the beauty of a Minneapolis skyline trading places with the stars. I still leave the paths, though no longer for fear.

My high heels clip the sidewalk and stick in cracks as I walk to my Corolla, classes over at three in the afternoon. The tulips are like the breathless aurora this April, and driving onto campus this morning, I most respected the white-tipped scarlet ones—“beauty is the secret sound of the deepest thereness of things.”

A hill rises to my left, Riley Hall seated on top, radiating spring heat thick from its roof like a dry riverbed. The sun drenches, dripping golden-hour light down redbrick walls into a watercolor of tulip rivers. Warm wind brushes aside my bangs and breathes gently on my forehead. I find myself with shoes deep in grassy surf, peasant skirt twisting around my knees, climbing up the hill to the flowered stream, searching for tulips already broken onto the lawn; I will not pick any. Three torn crimson petals and a damaged blossom offer themselves, and I cup them in my fingers to bring back with me—somewhere. I balance on hill’s crest.

Uplifted. Below me on concrete path, a football player who appears to have his summer home in the weight room. He watches, tight-lipped; I feel petal silk on my fingertips and know he sees only a torn-up tulip, though it isn’t his fault my world is lit by a different sun—Oscar Wilde said, “A dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight.” For a moment, I feel childish and wonder if someday I’ll know someone who treasures shattered flowers. The boy looks away; perhaps he thinks staring is rude. I stare at the rubies in my hands.

In the car, I place wilted tulip and three petals on my dashboard, and when I reach the freeway and 73 miles per hour, I roll fully open every window so my hair tangles and lips dry out and I can listen to silence. The fiery petals flicker and twirl under the wind; after minutes of straining, one slips out the window, a blink, or a breath.

I watch it leave and wonder if a little girl will find it on her doorstep and stare. She will see the dawn, Wilde says, before the rest of the world.

No one sees you cry when it rains

When I want to shut off
                          shut down
Love—
I step outside, for no one sees me cry
When it rains.

Black and white

On the north side of the barn, a large rock flattened by years of winters, with pitch night casting streaky shadows from flashlights. I set my leather church shoes on the rocky table, Minnesota April gusts ring my earrings like windchimes, and barn lights from seven stalls streak a lighthouse’s twenty-meter path from barn to car. The sandy ground pushes up between my bare toes; cold, though dry, no snow, I’m thankful for that. I pull on my boots.

From head to knees I remain in church—jeweled bobby pins, silver necklace, navy pea coat with four buttons and the long narrow belt that ties on the left. The feet are wrong, of course. I don’t suppose oversized untied mud boots go with my flared skirt. My thoughts drown in the smell of old hay.

The new hay is growing, its field stretching down from the barn for five acres before it joins to the woods like a seam on my skirt. The trees breathe life; I feel it from Maia’s saddle when I brush the fir branches from my face. We’ve heard the coyotes scrapping there some nights, and when we trot through the marsh, Maia always sniffs the air. Tomorrow perhaps I will ride among the birches and forget tonight.

It promises to be long, if I have to call the vet. I heard it said once that horses have a designated place to die, and they spend their entire lives looking for it. Phone lighting up in frantic silence during the Good Friday sermon—Chris never calls unless it’s serious. Perched on a stool, Scripture in front of me, I read my part of the evening service while visions of horses sprawled half-dead in muddy pastures emerge between descriptions of the manger and the cross.

And now, barn boots and church clothes.

And crouched in the dank stall with a blue nylon halter, and a hand on Laredo’s leg. Blood runs down his knee and onto my fingers, like the morning last summer when I cut proud flesh from Maia’s fetlock and stained hand and knife scarlet; I washed my blade and wondered why I didn’t feel queasy. But this cut wasn’t serious, just two horses impatient for supper and kicking each other for it—as if that helped somehow, one car passing another to be caught up with at the next red light.

When I leave my invalid’s stall, the horses are quieter, like tonight’s full moon crowded on the horizon, three inches wide. It is all of heaven I can see: stars are shy and only live in deeper country. When I was nine and knew only the farm, I read a children’s story that asked, what if the stars only came out once in a thousand years? At the time, I didn’t understand; it was like asking, what if you breathed only once in a lifetime? But now I stand outside the barn, thirty seconds’ drive from Fable Hill Development, and wonder if any of those children have stood at the end of their driveway and seen the Milky Way.

The boots are chafing my bare ankles. Leather lace-ups would have fit better—like those I wore last summer working weddings for Granville Carriage Company. White horse, black boots, white carriage, black skirt. White bride. I stood at Toby’s oversized Percheron head, grasping his bridle. No, flower girl, don’t pet him now, look at the bride, isn’t she pretty? I remained as footmen have for centuries, in the shadow of the horse, unseen, with all eyes on the lace-trimmed veil and low-cut dress and diamond on the left hand. I told myself that it was all right, that I was in black, and she was in white.

My rock is still there, twenty minutes later. I lean on it to kick off muddy boots.

Dairy barn love song

DAWN
Up by the rooftop flies the little silver owl on wings free and gliding like a rainbow’s.

MORNING
Although the hayloft here has room for all, bats dig clawed naked feet deeper into vintage rafters, struggling against bossy relatives. For hatred of what they eat, I say nothing when sweeping the unclean hay below on Saturdays. People get pest control, the bats survive richly; I think this is good.

MIDDAY
By noon the sun is a hand pushing down on my hair, and the concrete block wall with the year 1976 stands out unflinching as a barn swallow’s nest. Dandelion’s airless pollen makes my nose run, and the clover’s trinity leaves open their holy heart. Gravel fallen from the wall is the dirt and the dirt where walls sit. The barn is loud as a blowing weathervane; when you notice it, I don’t, not forgotten sounds of home.

AFTERNOON
Across the patio from mowed-down elephant ears, three-foot leaves spitting one-inch confetti, a robin pecks in the hay pile of brome and timothy. Though I’ve never hurt him, he hops two steps away. “I wish you’d stay,” I say, “You’d be a magical pet.” Mildly amused, he peers at me, and flies away.

SUNDOWN
When the wind coughs through the aisle, wooden gates rattle like fireplaces. Sunlight fleeing out the window, I knife open the bale, passing the bag of twine. Knitting, knotting, the twine breathes its bittersweet scent, green dye against green hay, holding the bales for the horses, where pawing hooves mark down impatience. Below me, spilled-bucket water swims in earth. That night I remember hay splinters, needled through gloves, bronzed, pinning dirt to skin, and try to forget by rubbing a silk pillow.

AFTERWARD
Something whispers, you can become more human here, if you want to. I have: watch the weathervane’s twirling in the prairie winds, barn swallows’ nests with four eggs in them. Alfalfa and dandelion, McCormick and Farmall, barn cat and farm dog. Also two black horses with muddy legs and wringing tails; I watch them bite their sides, kicking at bellies against golden deerflies. Those flies have settled, now, into the hayfield’s grass, a blemish in the thick-fringed carpet of someone’s room, and stayed when I have not. Look at what I still have, dull knives with dirty handles, respect for owls and bats at night, and sympathy for the smell of twine.

Purple clouds

They're always the same way, I thought as I opened the coffee shop door—passive and serious, like the home you just left but better somehow, because the music whispered there was nothing to do, just a place to be. The idea made me discreet, productive: it was like thinking of being a writer. I was not a writer when I stepped out of my rusted Toyota, but passing through the door—now I was.

They are the same way, all coffee shops I’ve been in, from the nameless one with the broken chair in central Ohio to here at Nesting Grounds in my hometown of Wyoming, Minnesota. At three in the afternoon, the March sun was fool’s gold promising warmth and masking chill, but inside, the fertile smells thawed the air and allowed it to be spring.

Today was too long. Up early for accounting homework, to the barn to ride, to class, to a meeting, to class again. Now when I could’ve gone home, I rejected the living room—tan leather couch and awkward fake fireplace—and came here to the plaid armchair by the photograph of a tree with the beige tag that said “$20.” Be a writer, start with this essay, or start with a coffee shop. The sun slanted in, amber light on mocha plates, and you knew when you sat down with your purchase, you could let yourself into your thoughts.

I waited in line to buy my coffee, so many choices, a way to feel productive. My mother has given me a coupon worthy of an adventure—buy one get one half off—so I run my finger down the small sign labeled “FLAVORS,” tasting hazelnut, almond, Irish crème (what’s that?). If I’m inspired now, I will be later: marshmallow white chocolate mocha it is. I judge people by their coffee sometimes. Why did he choose just vanilla? Does she care sugar-free flavorings cause cancer? I suppose others are judging me.

The deer are eating the daylilies this year. At the breakfast table yesterday, Dad ate his oatmeal, Mother said, “I don’t know what to do,” and the doe relished her meal. Mother recited the arsenal she’d employed: the rotten egg spray smelled bad and worked worse, but the wire-mesh fencing was ugly along our residential road, and the deer weren’t eating the neighbors’ flowers. I drank my juice.

The daylily sprouts are now a crushed running board along the wooded driveway, but that is all right, I like the crocuses better. There is only one patch of them this March, set back from the mailbox, touching the crowded trees. I like them for their bravery as well as for their color; purple was always my favorite, because in it you could see the clouds.

I take the proffered mocha, resting it on its blue-painted holder under the armchair’s window with the cold apple muffin nearby to keep it company. With laptop on my knees, I am here but also present, and I am a writer.

Coffee shops listen to something you didn’t know you were saying. Sitting in my chair, patterned purse bound around my feet, I thought I heard voices in the espresso machine’s grind. The blonde waitress asked if I needed anything else, and the mahogany wood tables held their ground.

Eternity under an oak tree

Lake Johanna before me, Nazareth Chapel behind. Oaks in front, so many, criss-crossed, a giant’s sideways version of pick-up-sticks. This is the seen, and the unseen is here too: now ahead, down the hill, to the right, by the shore, a small cave sleeps. In it is one awake and watching with sightless eyes—the Virgin Mary, hands upraised, blessing me, sanctifying the water. The sunlight does not reach there.

It does not reach me either. Wrapped in the oak tree’s stretching shadow, I am sitting in its lap, and it lets me be alone. The ground is dry here—drier than the manicured lawns I left minutes ago—maybe because it is happy, not crying, content to be where there are beaches and breezes and a view of the sea. My bare feet are pleased to be dirty, my hair not so pleased to be spitting out twigs onto my homework (I was rude to it when I lay in the dirt two minutes ago). Backpack, papers, Fundamentals of Finance, pens I keep losing, papers that keep blowing, shoes beached on their backs, I carried so much baggage with me when I came here a half hour ago. I should be doing homework. No, actually, I shouldn’t.

There is no one here. There are people, but there is no one here. We all came, this evening, to be alone with the hillside, to listen to the sun and hear the warmth and feel the silence, to believe it is June when it’s actually March, to pretend we are not prisoners in a dizzy anthill that won't let us go.

Beside me, a silent maiden descends the cold old hillside steps—awkward stone stairs too large for one step, too small for two—down toward the water, toward Mary’s shrine. And as she glides, the clouds open to allow glory-light to whisk out its rug ahead of her, making a royal path of heaven for her to walk on, the chosen one.

I am still in shadow. The light did not come for me.

A puffed-up chickadee, mottled black on swirly brown, flits on her song: up and down and down and around—“Hi! Hi! Hi! Hi!”—until an owl with a headache finally shouts, “Hell-oh!” and she stops. Shocked. Muddy bark runs down in rivulets, headwaters in the sky; a good place to be from. Leaves spin and skip, no longer leashed to trees or imprisoned by snow, bouncy now. Clover buds, threads of grass, moss coral, waft out of the ground as steam from winter’s last breath. Just before sunset, all seems sacred—colors more royal, leaves more hallowed, trees more divine. Evenings and mornings were given so we could touch the face of God.

The water was silver before, flat, but now it shatters under the setting sun to reveal a glittering opal center, like the quartz-filled rocks I used to find and line up on my bedroom shelf—the ordinary holy. There is something of forever here, in the psychedelic water and the mahogany trees. Seeing it is like grasping at something you thought you forgot; it is a dreamy reflection remembering vaguely that “beauty is eternity gazing at itself in a mirror” (Kahlil Gibran).

I know my eternity, now, my beauty, for the hillside told me so. Eternity sits under an oak tree with her twiggy hair and dirty feet, brushed by a scepter of light set with gold.

Approaching Christmas

I.

June. Sun. The first day for wearing grass-bale gloves.

The hay is flowing west, sad teary-eyed

Under forest’s farewell breath of blessing.

II.

I waltz with rakes, alfalfa does aerials.

Clover sways to the music, free, and swinging

Her violet skirts, while the mourning dove cries merrily.

III.

Sleeping bales are dreaming on their stubbled bed.

The perfect ones to be cut apart, a sacrifice, and broken

Bales I rattle, scatter, rip, and shake—back onto the queue, to be gift-wrapped.

IV.

Horses will gather, under the tree, and open an intertwined gift

With gratefulness, lifting out clover, letting her dance, sing one last time, an artist

Painting her sunflowers, like Picasso never could.

The nature-learners

My education may well be right; yet nothing I heard in school, nothing I’ve read, no lesson reached by logic has ever convinced me as utterly or stirred me as deeply as did that red-tailed hawk… I learned from the land itself.

Scott Russel Sanders, “Buckeye,” p. 8

It was fuming at me, the snow was. It didn’t, always. Sometimes it seemed to have woken up in a pleasant mood, presumably having had an uneventful trip down from Canada and arriving at our barn door in quite enough time for tea. But some days, the prank-playing prairie birds gave it poor directions and the snake snow fence of my father’s caused a traffic jam and the brash blaring winter winds gave it a headache and by the time it arrived at our red barn door’s stop sign, my shovel was just the last straw.

It was angry today. I couldn’t exactly feel the snow, what with my nuclear holocaust body armor on, and I couldn’t exactly hear it, what with the pack of rabid dogs shrieking inside the barn, but I sure had to deal with it. The barn door, I had to free it, it needed to be rescued. Punch through the crust, heave out a shovelful, toss it a foot away, get it blown back in your face. Whack out the ice, scrape along the concrete, breath-thaw the frozen handle, kick free the frost-frozen door. Don’t stop, it’s your job. Do it.

The child, the shovel, and the snow. And the barn door. Every morning, every day, every week, all month, month after month after month until Minnesota finally got sick of winter and made it go away. That year I had been tasked with shoveling out the barn door, and, unlike when I was Morning Chores Person, my assignment didn’t switch off every week. Every day, no matter how upset the snow was that morning, I had to shovel out that barn door, crusading valiantly against the worst drift on the farm during the worst winter we ever experienced.

I rescued the barn door that year, but what I didn’t know is that it also, in a way, had rescued me. It had been speaking to me all winter but, like a voice carried back to you on the forgotten wind, I didn’t hear its whisper until I had left it years behind. Instead of going to school in nature, I left it for education in the city. And my fellow classmates, they often puzzle me. The December walk to chapel—I hear bitter complaints of the “cold.” Cold? You think this is cold? The early morning talk with a friend—I listen to grumbles about waking up seven minutes before class. But you don’t have any chores, think of that! I feel I don’t fit in here, where I get my education; I went to a different preparatory school.

Nature is a teacher unique among men because it does not follow any rules and speaks with an unadulterated voice. The blessed who grow up in nature, in wide-open spaces and far-flung skies, they think differently, live differently. They work because they have to, because there is no choice, but they are rarely bitter. They are not bitter because nature always reveals the beauty in the pain; that is the way of God. The furious snapping snow bites only because it is made of a trillion sharp diamonds and the sun only burns because it is filling your life with a million bright lights.

I did not find many of nature’s students in my new school, but there are some. We always do seem to find each other, the nature-learners. It is good to be together, to share the experiences of the snowy barn doors and the dragonfly wings and the red-tailed hawks wheeling where earth and heaven meet.

love anything and--

Why love if losing hurts so much? We love to know that we are not alone...

To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. 

But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.

~C.S. Lewis 

love her more

I sat silent after reading this letter; silent soul, silent heart. I tried to write something to preface this letter, about love, about marriage, about God—tried and failed. This is what loving another is: to love her so much you love the greater things more.


July the 14th, 1861

Washington DC

My very dear Sarah:

The indications are very strong that we shall move in a few days—perhaps tomorrow. Lest I should not be able to write you again, I feel impelled to write lines that may fall under your eye when I shall be no more.

Our movement may be one of a few days duration and full of pleasure—and it may be one of severe conflict and death to me. Not my will, but thine O God, be done. If it is necessary that I should fall on the battlefield for my country, I am ready. I have no misgivings about, or lack of confidence in, the cause in which I am engaged, and my courage does not halt or falter. I know how strongly American Civilization now leans upon the triumph of the Government, and how great a debt we owe to those who went before us through the blood and suffering of the Revolution. And I am willing—perfectly willing—to lay down all my joys in this life, to help maintain this Government, and to pay that debt.

But, my dear wife, when I know that with my own joys I lay down nearly all of yours, and replace them in this life with cares and sorrows—when, after having eaten for long years the bitter fruit of orphanage myself, I must offer it as their only sustenance to my dear little children—is it weak or dishonorable, while the banner of my purpose floats calmly and proudly in the breeze, that my unbounded love for you, my darling wife and children, should struggle in fierce, though useless, contest with my love of country?

I cannot describe to you my feelings on this calm summer night, when two thousand men are sleeping around me, many of them enjoying the last, perhaps, before that of death—and I, suspicious that Death is creeping behind me with his fatal dart, am communing with God, my country, and thee.

I have sought most closely and diligently, and often in my breast, for a wrong motive in thus hazarding the happiness of those I loved and I could not find one. A pure love of my country and of the principles have often advocated before the people and "the name of honor that I love more than I fear death" have called upon me, and I have obeyed.

Sarah, my love for you is deathless, it seems to bind me to you with mighty cables that nothing but Omnipotence could break; and yet my love of Country comes over me like a strong wind and bears me irresistibly on with all these chains to the battlefield.

The memories of the blissful moments I have spent with you come creeping over me, and I feel most gratified to God and to you that I have enjoyed them so long. And hard it is for me to give them up and burn to ashes the hopes of future years, when God willing, we might still have lived and loved together and seen our sons grow up to honorable manhood around us. I have, I know, but few and small claims upon Divine Providence, but something whispers to me—perhaps it is the wafted prayer of my little Edgar—that I shall return to my loved ones unharmed. If I do not, my dear Sarah, never forget how much I love you, and when my last breath escapes me on the battlefield, it will whisper your name.

Forgive my many faults, and the many pains I have caused you. How thoughtless and foolish I have oftentimes been! How gladly would I wash out with my tears every little spot upon your happiness, and struggle with all the misfortune of this world, to shield you and my children from harm. But I cannot. I must watch you from the spirit land and hover near you, while you buffet the storms with your precious little freight, and wait with sad patience till we meet to part no more.

But, O Sarah! If the dead can come back to this earth and flit unseen around those they loved, I shall always be near you; in the garish day and in the darkest night—amidst your happiest scenes and gloomiest hours—always, always; and if there be a soft breeze upon your cheek, it shall be my breath; or the cool air fans your throbbing temple, it shall be my spirit passing by.

Sarah, do not mourn me dead; think I am gone and wait for thee, for we shall meet again.

As for my little boys, they will grow as I have done, and never know a father's love and care. Little Willie is too young to remember me long, and my blue eyed Edgar will keep my frolics with him among the dimmest memories of his childhood. Sarah, I have unlimited confidence in your maternal care and your development of their characters. Tell my two mothers his and hers I call God's blessing upon them. O Sarah, I wait for you there! Come to me, and lead thither my children.

Sullivan


Sullivan Ballou was killed one week later in the First Battle of Bull Run.

kindness breath

Oh, the comfort;

the inexpressible comfort

of feeling safe with another person.

Having neither to weigh thoughts

nor measure words,

but pouring them all right 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

Wildflowers

"Wildflowers"

By Tom Petty

You belong among the wildflowers

You belong in a boat out at sea

Sail away, kill off the hours

You belong somewhere you feel free.

Run away, find you a lover

Go away somewhere bright and new

I have seen no other

Who compares with you.

You belong among the wildflowers

You belong in a boat out at sea

You belong with your love on your arm

You belong somewhere you feel free.

Run away, go find a lover

Run away, let your heart be your guide

You deserve the deepest of cover

You belong in that home by and by.

You belong among the wildflowers

You belong somewhere close to me

Far away from your trouble and worry

You belong somewhere you feel free. 

Living in the mirror world

I have started to realize that so many elements of my life \ could be the stuff of books and movies. Not because they are terribly exciting, but because I see them as such. Isn’t that why we love movies and books? The stories thrill us and we long to be a part of them.

Yet ironically, often, those stories are so commonplace that if they happened to us in this life we wouldn’t even notice and would probably complain bitterly of our tedious existence. But when put in the screen of a movie or the pages of a book, suddenly to us they are transformed to fabulously epic tales, and we long to be a part of that world and live in those vast adventures. What changed? Not the story and not the world. Only our perspective of it.


Life is only as remarkable, enthralling, and exhilarating as your perspective.

It is rather like a mirror.

Have you ever stared into your bedroom mirror and looked at the reflection of your room within it? You know every dusty corner of that room; you see the rumpled bedspread and the old stuffed animal lying comatose on the shelf. And yet, when you look at that very commonplace, suffocatingly familiar room in the mirror, it seems so different, so exotic, somehow. It’s a world you long to be a part of, and you wonder what kind of adventures you might have if somehow you could simply step through that mirror into that other world, a world so like your own… and yet so different. Yet nothing changed in that world to make it a new and exciting land—nothing changed, that is, except your perspective.

I think life is a great deal like that. We can see it as the commonplace, everyday, rumpled-bedspread world that holds nothing and takes everything from us. Or, we can see it as the mirror-world, still with all of the same elements and all of the same details, but with an ethereal radiance that makes it the land of a storybook and a place of every adventure possible.

It’s all in your mirror.

The puzzle maker's tears

What does matter, if it is less the task and the place than you thought, if you forget them the moment they leave your sight? It is the soul-being that stays with you every moment, that is a part of you, that you cannot escape. It is your longing and desire to feed your inner fire, your soul fire, what makes you more alive than you thought living could be.

I love horses, but I love life just as much. I want to live in a dozen countries and walk on a hundred beaches. I want to go and move and be and see, always moving. I wonder if that is selfish. It seems like it, sometimes. All about me, what I want.

Is it selfish? Is it selfish to follow who you are to the ends of the earth? Or is it more selfish, more self-focused, to say, “Who is God to have made me this way?” Yet, it is hard to not ask that. It is hard when you feel like two, three, so many different people in one, each seeming to be so desperately, cruelly different from the other. Couldn't you just be one person? Isn't that enough for anyone? But not for you, of course not. No, you look at that, and you sit and you journal and you pray and you stare out the window at the cold, blowing snow and you argue with the universe day after day after day. And you never seem to get anywhere. And meanwhile, life keeps on stepping quietly forward, oblivious of your trying to hold it back.

But God knows. Somehow, he knows. And he will make it right.

What if a puzzle piece laid alone, flat, even in perspective with the other pieces on the marked, rough-wood table, seeing only the colorless gray edges of the pieces beside it, catching mere glimpses, and said, “I must not fit, I cannot be used the way I am.” It changed itself and cut off parts of itself to conform to its far-reaching omniscient knowledge of what the puzzle needed. It cried, it felt so ugly changing itself, but, it knew, it had to be done.

And then, when the puzzle was finished, there was a hole in its heart, where the puzzle piece in its original, beautiful, created state, was supposed to have gone.

And the tears of the Puzzle Maker fell.