A Christmas Poem

Photo courtesy of Pixabay

There is a star above us,

merely one of a million-million glories

that absorb our awed perception.

But it flowers on our soul’s horizon

like a new-made moon, or the

primal  dawn of Truth—a singularity 

we may abandon all to follow.

We may camp here, shivering at the

edge of our heart’s own minor galaxy—

huddled suddenly against a star-strewn

hillside, lambs curled silently around

our feet. We will be shepherded;

we will hear the unvoiced universe

burst open and regather, singing

out—a counterpoint, a psalming.

A compline. Oh, an ecstasy of angels!

Alive, Alive, Ohhh! An Excerpt from Sky Mesa Journal

Photo courtesy of Pixabay.com

This excerpt is reprinted from Sky Mesa Journal by Judith Deem Dupree, courtesy of Resource Publications, an imprint of Wipf and Stock

                                                   *  *  *  *  *

There are no funerals in Heaven. As a believer in the sacred History of faith, I accept death. It is the [often] hard shell we must break through to begin our flight into Life. It is moving from chrysalis to Chrisom, perhaps. Our ultimate birth.

To Christos. Truth is an upward spiral.

I despair of the despair that we wear so often as an arm band, the existential angst we endlessly proclaim, which leaves no room in the soul for resurgence, for resilience, for hope. And now I see that I also have done this! What a vast, a blind betrayal!

Those who cannot celebrate life destroy it―destroy others, who in turn destroy.

What they cannot celebrate, they desecrate.

And living must be, the soul insists, a celebration. To exult is to exalt. To proclaim the tender truth and rollicking affirmation of faith is to live beyond mere enduring. It unleashes the neurons that fire the thoughts that fuel the muscles that raise us up from indolence.

Such is the House that God built. Existential pleasure must bring a recognition, a small ecstasy of awareness―I am alive, alive, ohhh! And I am not a cockle, not a mussel. Living is surely meant to be an endless orbit of meaning-full, an upward cycle that siphons finally into that slender Passage which is not, oh no, a dark hole.

Entropy is a ravage only of the temporal and temporary and intemperate.

And so, today, I lay down this weight of timeless grief against the splendor of this day, against the altar of these rocks, this gravel I stand upon, with the incense of this morning still awaft like a certain holiness within my breathing.

I celebrate being. Despite the daily horrors, despite the anguish surging, despite the fire of grief that still looms, ever creeping, like the ghastly glow of holocaust beyond us. I celebrate because I must; because we must, because God hears and surely answers . . . or this maelstrom will consume us; it will be a prophecy fulfilled.

I celebrate what it is to be truly human, what it means to share the earth together, what it has been to us as home away from Home, what it must become within us and among us, and beyond us, for our children. What we must become, within us and among us and beyond us.

Celebrants. I celebrate the very fact of life, of seeing these shaggy carpets of green-and-ochre and the wild-painted skies that cover me, of hearing the chirrup and buzz and flutter of small life, of knowing earth-born labor and labors borne of the heart.

I celebrate the being of you who cross my path this day in thought or step, who share this swath of earth or one dissimilar, who grieve for its poverty and share its richness with me. Who enrich my poverty.

I thank God for my life, for giving breath to my halting aspirations. For your life and finest hopes. For His breath upon you, within you.

I thank you, oh God, who redeems me from myself in this small celebration! Who calls me to Rest. Who gives me today geraniums, and a new, eager flow of thought. For doughty ferns in pots, and doughty friends who force my rusty gates; for violet sage and stippled rocks to catch my eye, to catch my breath, my soul.

I praise the God who sprawls His name, and the signature of His Son, His Chronica Christos, across the bursting universe and weaves it deep within the spiral of our genes.

Who walks the waves still, always . . . stilling them, forever stilling them.

Truly the gates of hell shall not prevail.

Facing Toward the Light: An Excerpt from Sky Mesa Journal

Photo courtesy of Pixabay.com

Excerpt from Sky Mesa Journal by Judith Deem Dupree. Copyright 2016, published by Wipf and Stock. Copies may be purchased from Wipf and Stock and from Amazon.  

LOCAL NOTE: An Author Talk featuring Judith discussing the genesis and publication of Sky Mesa Journal is being hosted by the Alpine Library (1752 Alpine Blvd.) this week on Thursday, October 20 from 6:00-8:00 PM. Judith will have books for sale and will be happy to sign copies. Please come support a local San Diego author and her work.   

It was not much past dawn when I slipped out the door and faced the great iron gate out back. In the slant of first light it resembled somewhat the “gates of hell”―heavy and formidable. Ah, but beyond lay Paradise! In lieu of unlocking and unwinding the heavy chain and shoving against its grudging “joints,” I climbed over the old monster. I always do―depositing whatever baggage I tote over on the other side.

Today I toted only a weight of weariness. The “world was too much with me.”

I am not an up-with-the-roosters person. I felt quite uneasy leaving my comfort zone so early―regardless of the discomfort that routed me. Testing my legs and blood sugar and ignoring the grind of an empty belly seemed like a bad answer to a bad question. Or quest. The gnaw of guts was only a mimic of the churn of thought that woke me.

But I was brought up short by the exclamatory. Earth-life stretched around me, hummed and chirped, exhaled its varied aromatic breath, each its trace of pneuma. The land was filled with freshness. I breathed vastly, enfolded in the small celebration before me.

The early light is a peach-hued wash against the umber earth. An incredible palette! This is the morning’s work within me, this facing toward the light. Too often I see the world darkly, see only the umber without the wash of ruddy gold. There are times, even in this become-sacred place, when melancholy overwhelms any sense of the mystery of nature, a denial of the spare and eloquent mastery of God. Scales creep over the spiritual retina I peer through―opaque, filmy, all the drab distortions that we know.

Probably it is much like the blindness that the Lord peeled away from Saul-become-Paul. I recognize this more often now, this clumsy and yes, futile shield―my fascia, a veneer against the callousness before me . . . and within me.

And against grief. There is a sorrow, a Welt-Schmertz, weeping up through me, a deeper grief than I can carry. Either to live without grieving or grieve without recourse bequeaths fatalism, begets tragedy. It is a betrayal of the faith we first consent to.

It is balance I need, and a robust vision. I am just beginning to face this truth: I must neither fear the darkness, nor accept it, nor shrug it off. I cannot fight the battle for earth-life unless I have fought the battle for my vision.

As a frail and sometimes fatuous human being, I balk at death’s increasingly harsh preliminaries―at the way it visits us at every turn, the ways it comes ripping through humanity, Grim Reaper that it is. It is my own creeping entropy I battle, and lose within the entropy of a world I gather up and mourn. It is attending a funeral endlessly repeated, a cortege of the helpless and the homeless.

And the heartless. That eternal death . . . 

Life today is often seen as something of a wedge between two vast intangibles―our very entity caught in a grind between the beginning and end, those eternal mysteries of being.

Nature denies such hopelessness. Every new morning, new spring, each rebirth from fire or flood or wind proclaims life’s frailty and strength, unwraps the earth from its grave-cloth . . . .

Celebrates its endurance, its stubborn resurrection. 

Boulders and Rubble

Photo courtesy of Pixabay

There are rocks in the path ahead. Boulders and rubble. Literally, and yes, even more so, "figuratively." Lots going on today that we cannot get around, shove aside, ignore-and-it-will-go-away. Immovable objects and objectives, imbued with a dreadful lack of objectivity. Harsh, abrasive surfaces, adamantine interiors, often with a deep gash as ugly as sin.

Dark presence that blocks the light, a heaviness that dooms.

Jesus said, "Upon this rock I will build my church...."  But this is not the Rock of Our Foundation we're talking about. There are many worthy Rock Churches across our land, with steeples and pews and ardent worshipers. They know what I mean. Theirs is the "spiritual" Rock that Peter represented—the BedRock of faith we stand upon beyond the shifting sand.

No, the rocks I'm facing are implacable impediments embedded in the psyche of humanity. Rough, gnarly rock. A shapeless boulder that stands in our way—a formidable barrier, a deadly weapon even. This becomes church? Those dark schisms between them that has and them that wants? Or a gathering-up of the chunks of scorn that almost scarred the infamous woman of ill repute, that wretched soul who stood before Jesus? Or the hail of stones that robbed the disciple Steven of his very life? These are missiles from that quarry from which humanity has ever gathered lethal  weaponry. All shapes and sizes, formed of that magma of mankind's dark and dangerous hates and lusts. Rocks and boulders that burst or burrow from the caverns of hell. These, the blasphemies that settle deeper with the broken soul's every shudder.

And into this "mine field," this death trap of varied persuasions and aversions and perversions, comes the Son of God, in sandals. The One Who spoke the violence of wind and waves down to a whimper and a ripple. HE knows what each rock is, what seeded the silica and soil and sealed the ancient strata of violence and vengeance and vanities.

He is His Father's Son; He can speak to the rock. All the ages sealed within will hear. He can strike the rock. And bring forth Water.

We can only whisper the word, the fear, the dread, and point. He will follow our finger.  This too is the beginning of Church. Selah. 

A Marked People

Photo courtesy of Pixabay

The epoch we live in is the Time of God. A time like no other since time began on planet earth. An "overblown" statement? Well, in one sense, yes—these words may be said of any period in the long thread of history. Each era of earth and humanity has/has had its distinct season in the great mosaic of earthlife. Every "time" falls within those margins.

    

But . . . but there is something intangible, and crucially, overwhelmingly tangible about This Day we inhabit. The "what" of it is both simple—and overwhelmingly complex. Starkly put, dwelling on planet earth is becoming increasingly and alarmingly difficult and dangerous. And sad. The complexities—both diverse and similar—are an endless overlap of human and environmental crises. Our home in the universe is under attacks both "extraterrestrial" and people-driven.     

The Time of God? Again, there is no earth-moment that is not eternal in some indefinable sense. But it is becoming ever more obvious that something untamable and yes, largely unnamable is happening, in ways both inter-related and disparate. We are faced with crises that have sprung from uncommon roots—from nature . . . and our untamed nature

We are specifically here, deeply planted and often pruned and hoping to be "productive"—maybe not as much as we wish we were, in the ways we want to be, but in a way that prepares us to encounter and respond to life as it unfolds. We are called to live apace with the Son of God. We are ordained to persevere with Him today in a world that is in turmoil and spinning out of control.

We are inherently here simply because we have a Lodestar within, and if we know that—really, deep-down believe that—it draws us where He wants us to be at a given moment, for His purposes. The magi knew a Lodestar when they saw one, and it led them to a most unpretentious spot that kings and rabbis never knew of.

The Christ-within dwells in small places and enlarges them. He comes to us in our poverty and enriches us. He measures all things by His omnipotent seeing, and steps among us when and where we least expect it.

And so I believe we are indeed called people, and that if we choose, we can be called at any Given moment to step out of our cave, like Elijah (1 Kings 19:11-13), and hear that still, small Voice that called forth creation.

Yes—the world is indeed in turmoil. This is no time to mess around, to spin our wheels, to major in the minors, to waste our lives and our substance on things irrelevant or even peripheral. The very fact of our existing right now is a greater Gift than any of us is prepared for—or even wants. But it is ours, because we said YES to Him. We are here in this struggling world to offer a way through life as opposed to a way out of life.

I am not persuaded that everything I do and touch and want and dream of is eschatological and prophetic and ordained. But this week, a simple thought struck me, powerfully and with immediacy.

This is what I “heard:” “You are a marked people.”

Because we have “heard” and responded to His Call, we who live in this day, by the Grace and Call of God, are a “marked people.” His bloodstain is truly upon us. We are sealed by that stigmata for something quite immediate and pivotal. We are led into His green pastures in order to be prepared for the desert. We are led into the desert in order to discover, to recognize, to evoke the green pastures.

The desert is a step beyond our door. It may even have crept over our own doorsill. We are called to stand intact, broken and mended, in the midst of the world’s, and perhaps our own, rack and ruin, and to become more than solitary soldiers fending off the unseen enemy. We are, all of us, wherever we find ourselves—alone or crowded in or simply connected—called to become a Congregation.

Not a bless-me club, not a holier than thou society. A congregate of stalwart, pliable, tenderized, stubborn souls who have found Truth, and express it by the context of our lives—by the sum total, the momentum and minutia of our days and ways.

We may never see each other, never know each other upon this earth, but we are nonetheless a congregate of marked souls . . . a steady stream of pilgrims, magi, refugees from the dregs of life, following our Lodestar, finding the Rock-firm place where He dwells. If we have found it and lived it well, beyond the cave of our indifference, our fear, our endless distress and distractions, others will come seeking. And live  alongside us. 

~Judith Deem Dupree

Some Likeness Unforeseen: A Poem

This poem was published in living with what remains, a collection of poetry published in 2004 that is available on Amazon here: living with what remains.

Some Likeness Unforeseen

Nature listens--hearing  ever that cell-voice
which breathes its silent syllables
through each tiny universe,

and studies it covertly there, this hidden marrow--
studies its likeness and its endless variance,
with thought of molecule, of phylum
and of husk and fur, of stamen, semen, zygote--
thought coaxing life to rest, to build
and build again some likeness unforeseen.

The elm lifts its solemn face upward,
begging light, breaking light into prisms
with its slanted arms. Does it remember,
cell-bound, how the earth first broke its life
to shimmering replication
from a million broken faces of the sun?

And far beyond these shaggy fields
(these honest homilies of faith), the cougar crouches
low against a rock-bound peak
and paces where his tendons flex to tell him so;

and on beyond, at the stubborn jaw
of this great crouch of land--upon its lip,
between its jagged teeth,
the seaweed swirls and is spit back endlessly;
fish explore it with their great, globed eyes.

All these are likeness, and each, each,
is alone within that whisper which bequeaths them.

Beneath and above it all,
the earth swirls on its great, gray bath of mist,
on, on, and on--containing all--cell-bound
in the splendor and purity of light.

And you and I,
dependents in a breathless universe,
defendants of the heart's internal entropy,
of the way time sucks our cells dry
and draws the circling marrow from our bones . . .

We lay our weary head against our wary soul,
its hidden universe, and beg for rest there--
hearing but a syllable beyond our own,
finding there a Likeness long foreseen.


~Judith Deem Dupree

beneath His cool shadow: An Excerpt from Sky Mesa Journal

An Excerpt from Sky Mesa Journal now available from Wipf and Stock Publishers and on Amazon. Used with Permission of Wipf and Stock Publishers.

This excerpt has been previously published on the Blog of Ruminate Magazine on 12 August 2016.

* * * *

Afternoon shadows stretch from tree to tree, and I am sitting beneath their shelter. The radio thrums with the passion of Rachmaninov; my feet waggle automatically to my favorite passages.

Bliss . . . The concerto soars to its conclusion.

And then the news intrudes. From the sublime to the ridiculous? No, no―not ridiculous! Vicious. More and ever more, death is becoming a mordant and morbid exposition, an endless parade of phantasmagoria. From every quarter of the globe comes word of new atrocity, new frenzies of violence and hatred. From far-away, unpronounceable places, from our comfortable suburbs and, of course, at the bleakest cores of our communities, where despair so often spreads on a turbulent tide.

Anger spews from mouth to mouth, group to group to city to nation―and bursts like wildfire from the barrels of guns. Such pervasive violence, such undeclared, personal or group vendettas were virtually unheard of some decades ago, beyond the nation’s battlefields―and not or never on such a scale as this.

We humans are a haunted race . . . .

But it has always been there, been here. Within us all. Christ said as much when He walked alongside us. He saw through the thin veneer of our inherent goodness, our presumed civility―saw how humanity behaves when the heat is turned up, when the pressure is turned on, when the “spigot” is turned off.

It is, now, “the best of times―the worst of times.”

In a world of technological miracles and legislated manners, we still look in the mirror and see, shadowed as they are, the savages who dwell within us.

We die for each other; we lay down our lives for each other―when we believe in Life.

We kill each other―when our souls have died, when we are afraid of death.

We do either, daily, in small ways, with a quick, instinctive impetus that either creates or destroys. All that we carry, all we have nurtured within us will tell its tale.

Violence. The children . . .

The faces of children are the hardest part. We want to gather up the little ones―the innocents, the real victims―gather them in our arms, shelter them, kiss their cheeks, rock them until the fear leaves their eyes.

Oh, the children! When, or if they grow up, they may well kill each other.

Jeremiah wept over Jerusalem long before Christ came to invade it with His wash of tears:

“’Peace, peace,’ they say, when there is no peace. Are they ashamed of their loathsome conduct? No, they have no shame at all; they do not even know how to blush. So they will fall among the fallen; they will be brought down when I punish them,” says the Lord.

He went on talking to Jeremiah, to us: “Stand at the crossroads and look; ask for the ancient paths, ask where the good way is, and walk in it, and you will find rest for your souls.”

Only beneath His cool shadow do we find surcease from our heated hearts and ways. Here upon this small and Spartan ranch there is a peace that can only be called luxury. Often during the days I remind myself of this privilege. And when the guilt for being here, for having this, engulfs me―and it sometimes does, when so many have so little―I walk out upon the meadow, where I can see for a great distance. It helps. I stand silent, overwhelmed with the pain I see, yearning over life upon this heated earth, willing such a peace as this upon the world.

Willing a Sabbath rest upon the world.

“Peace, peace . . . .”  It will not come easily, such a Sabbath.

Above me the branches fidget lightly; their shadows dance easily, back and forth, across my outstretched legs. On the radio, the concerto rises and falls in its lessening and strengthening, like a turbulence of thunder . . . .

Like a fervent storm come down upon the airwaves.

Like a great and lovely storm, a cleansing.

The Journey to the Journal

Sky Mesa Journal by Judith Deem Dupree, published by Resource Publications, an imprint of Wipf and Stock

It began with an invitation to house-sit. A chance to get away, break loose from the "ordinary," the expected, and, let's be honest, the grief that had backed up inside. A time to shed some hard soul-grit that I'd carefully swept into the corners and closets of my life . . . lest anyone suspect I harbored such detritus. The unseemly and, I always hoped, unseen.

A proverbial "empty-nester" by now, I was lost. Not that I mourned for our three young ones all that much or often—they had left comfortably, in stages, by ages, for school and promising new lives, new livelihood—still near enough to show up when the dinner menu tugged. My husband was absorbed in a job that fit, that filled any empty spaces between us. It wasn't him I couldn't tote into any equation of tomorrow. I had simply lost tomorrow.

And so, yeah, I'd be glad to hang out a while on a funky old ranch. I grew up in the foothills of Colorado, and bunkhouses were no anomaly. It would be kind of like back-pedaling to a less mean and more lean time, when inevitable complications were manageable and I had the stamina to fix  whatever I thought needed righting. Yes, I realized that three months was a long commitment, but she'd agreed to only half of each week on site. I could see doing that. In fact, I could hardly wait . . . .

Sometimes adventure simply means a sidestep from despair.

And so I set myself up for a nice little trio of days into weeks into months. It sounded a tad scary, but shiver-scary, not trauma-scary.

Sometimes unknown is better than an endless known.

~*~*~*~*~

So I showed up, out there beyond the trappings of our busy world, where the brazen hills bulge up and down in anonymity. Sky Mesa Ranch: A bit or more down at the heels, redolent and raw with nature, left behind in a bright new age of tech. A paradigm and homely parable. I found there, to my surprise, an evolving link with the history of our lost beginnings—of my lost beginnings and unwieldy endings. And yes, our-my lost belonging, in this risky edge of life we have all begun to mourn. It was like stepping onto a bridge between Alice's rabbit hole and Gulliver's infamous Lilliput.

This journal is a strangeling, an unpremeditated tour into timeless Premises, both meanings. A book of hours. Time to learn and relearn reflection, to measure earth's shadows against the unexpected Light. Time to wander and to wonder. To tenderize—to begin at last to hear, with new-opened ears, the weary heartbeat of a struggling world.

The Journey is yours too, for the taking. Join me there. 

To purchase a copy of Sky Mesa Journal, please visit the Amazon link in the sidebar or click here: Sky Mesa Journal available now on Kindle and in paperback. 

We would be most grateful for Amazon and Goodreads reviews. Thank you.  

Proclaiming the Unknown God

Photo by Judith's daughter on a trip to Athens

On one of his never-easy missionary journeys, Paul was left in Athens, waiting for his companions. He was not prone to "wait" placidly. Athens was a hub city, a volatile mix of the fortunes and misfortunes of humanity. A hub, also, of gossip. And Paul could be expected to comment on his perception of the spiritual pot luck—the "wealth" of gods available for the pickin,' and well-displayed at the Areopagus on Mars Hill. In the midst of the panoply, he noted an empty altar with a stark "non-identity": TO AN UNKNOWN GOD. Here was his opportunity to Name that unnamed God. And he did, to decidedly mixed reactions!

In this world despoiled by violence and hatred, wrenching poverty, shallowness, and rampant greed, we come face to face with this Unknown God—Whom we have come to know, and Whom we have chosen to serve: The eternal I AM …through Jesus, the Christ.

How do we faithfully serve a Savior whom we cannot “see,” who is hidden from the eyes of the world—this Eternal Being who straddles the universe even as He binds up our battered hearts?

How do we proclaim Him to a world “gone insane” with its various fratricides? It begins best with prayer. Always, with prayer, before we even open our mouths. Do we even know how to pray for (truly, against) such an unending tsunami of grief and horror as we see beyond and around us?

Like the disciples who gathered around Him, we can only say, “Lord, teach us….”

The Lord’s Prayer, the "Our Father..." is a good starting point. It is fairly radical. It leaves our own small perceptions and anticipations (or lack of them) behind and steps up to a new concept—a new conception, perhaps. It joins us with Him in seeing what we cannot fathom down here in the trenches. After all, HE prayed it to us, for us, from where He “stood!”

I call it, for lack of a better term, a Genesis Prayer. Prayer that creates “something out of nothing,” that separates Light from darkness, that can only begin where He begins (not in our own “mind-set”), and end where He “comes down.” Whether we’re praying for a person or a nation, a disaster or a blessing, we can only see the “tip of the iceberg” unless/until we have invaded the Kingdom for a larger vision. What we see, of course, has less to do with our spiritual giftedness than His yearning to bring us alongside to help Him do the heavy lifting. The yoke is fully weighted upon Him and rests lightly across our soul. We only have to listen.

When we pray this way, against the currents, so to speak, we are often on uncharted ground. But it is firm beneath us. We have only to follow the Spirit’s leading. Praying with Him, stumbling, perhaps, into prayer unformed before the very saying of it, our words teaching us, thought by thought, we learn as we go. We witness this only inwardly, at first, savoring the wonder of new comprehension. But soon or late, it begins to seep out through our spirit’s pores—like an invisible language—and becomes now an articulation, a quiet testimony to a Savior who reigns in the depths of chaos and the heights of Heaven. Our confidence lies in His “confiding in us.” We speak from this new understanding, and sometimes we speak words that whisper “Genesis!”

Like the words of Paul, who knew exactly what God had to say when he stood before those blank Athenian faces. From the unknown god to the suddenly knowable One, the I AM revealed. Out of darkness, Light.                                           

Harvesting Eden

Photo by Judith Deem Dupree

This post was originally published on the Ruminate Magazine Blog on 19 August 2015.

Today I stewed up a vat of plums gathered from the arching boughs of our two trees out back. Tomorrow is Jam Day, a sticky-messy sauna of stirring and puree-ing and sprinkling in the magic of sugar and pectin. Then . . . oh, tasting the fruit of my labor! On homemade bread, I insist. Only that will do. The bread has been waiting, frozen, for this first sweet moment.

We planted our small orchard―a plum, two apples, a pear, a cherry―nearly a quarter century ago. My original vision didn’t extend beyond the thought of these now-weighted branches. Of picking as if I were a child turned loose in a candy store, envisioning a sweet-wild taste in my mouth that no grocery purchase could touch. My teeth almost ached with lust for it all!

And after the first few years of their probing babyhood, my gawky, dusty-green adolescents began to blossom here and there between their shaggy knees and elbows. I recall with delight the first apple blossoms on our small “granny.” Eden!

Nothing less than Eden. My tree. It was my beloved green granny! It still is. My soul is entangled in its lattice of leaves. Last year over a thousand apples ripened through October, like a mis-seasoned Yule tree all decked by nature.

Along the years, by a miracle of nature or bird or critter, three more gift-trees showed up: Our plum gave us many babies each spring, popping up beneath its sweep of limbs. We dug up and gave away some―and kept one, as fertile as its mama. Out front, in an old wooden tub of soil, an apricot seed cracked open and unfurled, and soon enough fruited.

Today, long and firmly grounded, it perfectly shades our spare bedroom, dangling its small golden-orange globes in front of the window. And in the tangle of vinca beside our front porch, a “bush” thrust up one spring, filling a bald space nicely. Lo, in a couple of years its strangely familiar blossoms spoke for it: apple! Rosy, tangy-sweet fruit now replicates delicately, bobbing in the breeze.

A bit like Elijah in his cave, we are, in God’s quirky generosity, fed by ravens―yes, those hulking black shadows in the pine which nag incessantly, lest we forget that we owe them a dole a day from the seed bin. A fair trade indeed.

Now, upon this day, standing at the kitchen window, I see His current-timeless panorama. Our trees have aged along with us―creaky, a bit more brittle of limb. Weighted with fruit, or waiting―an inward thrust we cannot measure. Occasionally barren. Seasons of drought and of bounty . . . each of us, trees planted. Life as orchard.

Younger friends now come by in early summer and scale our ladders, with long-pole pruners in hand. They stretch to heights of our pear tree that we cannot, dare not reach―to trim dangerously bending branches. To cull what seems far too many immature pears. Ah, the timeless reluctance of letting go―of ladders, of fruit! Of whatever we cannot climb or carry. Weighing the promise of abundance against the poverties of broken. We have learned broken.

And now this new, sweet harvest―knowing this: These pears and grannies, et al, this varied fruit―“my” fruit―I have discovered, is not mine at all, beyond the tending. Its unprecedented largess, newly picked or processed―by me, by delighted others―is scattered around the village and sometimes far beyond. That is the wonderful way of His Kingdom. The trees I have pruned are part of my own essential life-pruning. That’s His way too. And so, I celebrate this today also: a fruit-of-life called friending.

I have years of canning, saucing, jamming, freezing, dehydrating behind me. Often done in tandem with friends both young and “almost-my-old” old. The fruit of His labor. The labor of His fruit. My kitchen and heart are full.

This small Eden truly runneth over, flourishing in unexpected soul-soil, bursting through hard shells, blossoming into new identity. Often, oh yes, rooting and blossoming despite the entropy that time imposes, shaping something indefinable . . . sweet and tangy, birthed with promise.

Finding Quiet: Silence as Presence

Originally posted on the Ruminate Magazine Blog, 18 June 2015

The world is speeding up, and I am slowing down. It was inevitable. It’s all right, of course… mostly. As I grow older, life enhances the quiet ways and shoves at the expediencies that used to shove at me.

It is good to quiet down, to make pause without breaking faith with my to-do list, or someone else’s. Good to miss a beat in my endless rumba with that great god Expectation. To laugh at my clumsiness. To slow dance with the Holy Ghost. To fall in love with all the neighbors I have never known, and marvel over the way yeast rises and makes miracles.

I begin to practice yearning, hungering―fingering the world for a larger scope of being, foraging for things that lean back in time and connect with the unknown known. For all the maybe’s I have spilt along the way, that maybe spilled into the eternal. Now, here, I begin to stop and listen to life more suddenly, and, oh, oh I hope more freely.

I think we get lost so easily in the great cacophony that pervades on planet earth. Does this sound overstated? Hyperbole? Of course; and yet, it happens every day, to all of us.

We vibrate to the whole of life, even in our essential partial-ness, our chosen partialities. What is out there pervades. Invades. We cannot help it; we are caught up and moved along by the great, lumbering sum of all the infinitesimal parts. An endless, sometimes relentless tide. We are, each, one of those small fractions, often rubbed raw, bruised by the enormities and the sum of all the smallnesses. It is as hard to put words to all this as it is to live with it. The world, indeed, is too much with us. And so silence, a certain kind of silence, truly is golden.

We so need a sense of it―of silence as a presence within a welter of external stimuli. This reality is dear to me―that silence hides within the bedlam. It is near-aberration in an age of “auditory graphics,” when all that engulfs the world is poured out upon us by every media, from every angle, for every purpose. As if there is no other way to live?

Of course. What we must treasure, what I am defining, is peace. What is notable is that it is imparted in such a way that it bides with us, resides within us. This is renascence! A revelation that becomes a revolution. There is a quiet, a storm shelter, built to the scale of the human heart.

HE says: My peace I give unto you.

Within these few words lie an inner world of rest.

This is peace which cannot long hide beneath our hide. It becomes unquenchable. It flings itself against the ramparts of our neuroses until they crack. It breaks through every Yes, but… that we have posited. The days both here and there and everywhere grow full, full, full of slow or sudden, timeless, ephemeral Graces. They swallow up the nervous jangle of urgencies that wrap us daily.

Be still and know that I am God! I will be exalted…

If His Kingdom is real, it must lie both beyond and within the cacophony. It simply must. And if we are to survive, and to thrive―to live well within our own skin and cope with whatever lies before us, beyond us, we will receive that Rest within the silence that lies beneath the noise.

The “noise” of life doesn’t own us. Finding that quiet “place” beneath―yes, within the existential clang―becomes our grounding, the birth-place of miracles. We carry the seeds wherever we go.