“Don’t be led away by those howls about realism.   Remember, pine woods are just as real as pigsties, and a darn sight pleasanter to be in.” 
–L.M. Montgomery, Emily’s Quest

Thank you, Maud Montgomery!

“‘ The time will come — the time will come,’ said Cousin Jimmy encouragingly.  ‘Wait a while — just wait a while.  If we don’t chase things — sometimes the things following us can catch up.’”
–L.M. Montgomery, Emily Climbs

In case you have questions about my mental context for this, here’s what I had in mind:

“Yet when I surveyed all that my hands had done and what I had toiled to achieve, everything was meaningless, a chasing after the wind; nothing was gained under the sun.”  –Ecclesiastes 2:11 (NIV)

“Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me
all the days of my life,
and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord
forever.”
–Psalm 23:6 (ESV)

looking

Today I drove past the road-reflector-sticking crew: a truck with flashing lights pulling a very ordinary trailer on the corner of which crouched two men, one with a tar gun and one with reflectors.  The truck drove very slowly, stopping every so often for the tar-gun man to squirt a spot of tar and the reflector man to put a reflector on it.   Imagine doing that for miles and miles of road!  Ah, but tonight there were the reflectors, like a string of stars winding with the road, and if any of the reflector crew happened to see it, I’m sure they were glad.

After the reflector crew was left behind this morning, I drove past an old man in a blue plaid shirt and straw hat, who seemed to be hunting treasure in the highway median.   As I came along he bent and picked up some small something and put it in his pocket, and then straightened himself and walked placidly on, just as if he were in a field on his own farm instead of in a median.  Under his hat, the sun reflected off his glasses.

The medians and ditches are striped with the brown remains of last week’s mowing.  On a kudzu-covered hill, I saw a little mowed green path climbing up and disappearing into the trees, and I wanted to follow it.  Where trees overhang the narrower roads, leaves come spinning down and down with the smallest wind.  They lie on the road, enticing feet to come and crunch them.

Everything is picturesque in the fall.  Faded things fit with the tone of the landscape; even a declining strip mall matched the mood today and seemed neither ugly nor dismal.   Yellow cautionary signs and the center lines on the roads no longer stick out as man’s impositions on the scenery, but instead seem to have grown out of nature’s color palette.   It is a world wherein tips of tree-branches are tinged with rust and the moon is a large yellow gibbous in the blackness above blacker trees.  I am glad.

“Nothing ever seems as big or as terrible — oh, nor as beautiful and grand either, alas!  — when it is written out, as it does when you are thinking or feeling about it.  It seems to shrink directly you put it into words.”  — L. M. Montgomery, Emily Climbs

Sitting, cat-like, in a sunny spot on the paved portion of our driveway, when I read this passage, I wanted to write it down.  And somewhere during the process of copying it into my journal, I had taken it out of context entirely and begun tracing its implications in places quite beyond the fictional musings of Emily Byrd Starr.   So here’s a portion of the resultant journalings, all from the sunny spot on the driveway:

Is this, I wonder, part of the power of the Word who was in the beginning with God, why the Word is so apt a name for Him?  No word can ever fully capture the thing it is meant to signify, but apart from words we could signify very little.  Words provide a tidy packaging for a feeling, idea, or image so that it can be shared – though never entirely shared, never fully communicated.  Is this not what the Word does: providing a sort of “packaging” so that some small part of the God of the universe would be intelligible to us?  How, apart from that Word incarnate dwelling among us, could we have come anywhere near to beholding His glory as we do?  Not to say that Christ is some shrunken version of God — by no means!  But, in a way I can’t quite comprehend, much less put into words, He is God made small, humbled to become obedient to the point of death.  While a glimpse of the face of the Almighty would have killed Moses, this Word who is God meets us in our frailty and is neither so big or terrible nor so beautiful and grand as a full view of His full self would be.   Is He not good?

PATIENCE, hard thing! The hard thing but to pray,
But bid for, Patience is!  Patience who asks
Wants war, wants wounds; weary his times, his tasks;
To do without, take tosses, and obey.
Rare patience roots in these, and, these away,
Nowhere.  Natural heart’s ivy, Patience masks
Our ruins of wrecked past purpose.  There she basks
Purple eyes and seas of liquid leaves all day.

We hear our hearts grate on themselves: it kills
To bruise them dearer.  Yet the rebellious wills
Of us we do bid God bend to him even so.
And where is he who more and more distills
Delicious kindness? — He is patient.  Patience fills
His crisp combs, and that comes those ways we know.
–Gerard Manley Hopkins, Poems. 46.

for a smile

The three-year-old with whom I spent today did not want the carrot from my salad that I offered him at lunch.  So I ate it.  He then turned his large brown eyes to me and said, in a persuasive tone, ”If you eat that other carrot too, you can have dessert.”

Nice of him to give me permission, wasn’t it?

As it happens, we did not have dessert, because he did not eat his chicken.  But, even before I tried the dessert bribe on him, he passionately declared, “I don’t want dessert!”  

And so my second carrot was eaten in vain.

good things

*Gingerbread with lemon sauce and lemon-ginger tea with the perfect mixture of sun, shadow and breeze.

*The swirling, golden shadow of wood-smoke on the afternoon grass; the scent of wood-smoke coming in the afternoon windows.

*A sunset that faded into a moonrise.

*Sausages blackened above quivering orange flames.

*Smoke  in the silver slant of moonbeams through the trees.

*Wading through moon-lit shadows toward glowing windows.

*Being under a warm, red blanket while chilly air and cricket-song drift in from the out-of-doors where a fire winks itself into a mound of coals.

accidental stones

        What greater happiness could anyone know
        than collecting accidental stones to place
        end to end to end?

Luci Shaw asks this in her poem “Found this morning”  (Water Lines, 2003).  Reading her question, I am delighted.  Our house is full of stones, baskets and jars of them, picked up everywhere, from shorelines and driveways and mountain lookouts, they come tumbling out of pockets to rattle in the dryer,  are caught in the cracks between couch cushions, lie on the kitchen counter to be absently rubbed by whomever might sit there.   Shaw describes spreading her stones “onto paper, a fresh, white beach,” to play with them:

With what deliberate care I array them,
end to end to end, aligning the chalky stripes
so that what looks like a white string
connects them all together! Placed
so that the bright lines join, the stones
snake an arc across this wave-less shore. 

It seems to me that this collecting and arranging of stones is an apt metaphor for much of life.  It certainly captures a great deal of what I do.   So much of writing is the collecting of “accidental stones” — phrases, images, events — and arranging them so that they form a coherent whole.   It is my task to spread them on paper, to show how their “bright lines join.”   Shaw calls it “Intention / connecting the inadvertent.”  Look, I want say, here is order.  Things fit together.   On the white page the things that seemed chaotic when “scattered across / our pebbled beach” become clearer; it is easier to see the “white string” connecting things when they are spread out before you. 

In college, one of my professors taught us that “Everything is connected” — not in any mystical way, but simply that facts and events lead to facts and events, and no matter how divergent two things may at first seem, they can be brought together, though sometimes by very circuitous paths.  (I have good memories of games and activities designed to do this.)   And are these connections not what everyone — not merely writers — hopes to find?  We want to see that things mean something, that the stones are not accidental, but have been carefully placed by an intentional Hand.   In her novel Housekeeping (1980), Marilynne Robinson asks, “What are all these fragments for, if not to be knit up finally?” 

And, surely, there is a Hand ordering our scattered stones.  One day, we shall see the bright lines joining them all.  Even now, in small ways, we are allowed to see them, to place the “accidental stones / end to end to end.”   Great happiness, indeed.

for encouragement …

       For my second birthday, I received a lovely little book called God Is with Me.   It features simple watercolors of children, accompanied by simple, yet large, truths about God.   Though many books given to two-year-olds are grown out of, this book has grown up with me.  Rereading it takes me back to the very secure feeling of being two years old: back to lamplight, and my footie pajamas, a sippy cup of chocolate milk around which I looked at the pictures, and my mother’s warm side and her voice reading the book to me.  And this I know: however unsteady things may feel, I am as secure, and even more secure, than that child knew herself to be; I am kept in the care of the Almighty, Who is with me.  
       I can’t reproduce the pictures here, but I thought I’d share the words; they have helped me, again and again.   They look so bland, and almost harsh, typed out onto the page.  Try to take the statements one at a time, as they come in the book.  Try to put yourself into situations where these are specifically applicable, as the illustrations so aptly do: the little girl alone in the woods, reflecting that God is with her; the sad child sitting on a fence and thinking; the boy and girl refreshed by watermelon slices; the boy, among whose many cares is the haircut he is about to receive … I love the way the book brings the truths down to a child’s level and reminds us that the Lord is just as close to the boy brokenhearted over a lost baseball game as He is to the woman who has lost her husband; His love is sufficient for small needs as well as great.  His name is Immanuel — God with us.  Without more explanation, then, my book:

GOD IS ALWAYS WITH ME.  HE WATCHES OVER ALL HE MADE.

“Give thanks to the Lord … who gives food to every creature.” Psalm 136:1, 25

“The Lord is good to all; and His tender mercies are over all His works.”  Psalm 145:9

GOD IS WITH ME WHEN I’M SAD.

“My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart.” Psalm 73:26

“The Lord is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit.” Psalm 34:18

GOD SHOWS HIS LOVE TO ME THROUGH FRIENDS.

“He who refreshes others will himself be refreshed.”  Proverbs 11:25

“A cheerful look brings joy to the heart, and good news gives health to the bones.”  Proverbs 15:30

GOD IS WITH ME IN NEW PLACES.

“When the cares of my heart are many, thy consolations cheer my soul.”  Psalm 94:19

“The Lord is with me; I will not be afraid.  He is my helper.”  Psalm 118:6a, 7b

GOD IS WITH ME NOW …
AND HE ALWAYS WILL BE.

My Shepherd will supply my need:
Jehovah is His Name;
In pastures fresh He makes me feed,
Beside the living stream.
He brings my wandering spirit back
When I forsake His ways,
And leads me, for His mercy’s sake,
In paths of truth and grace.

When I walk through the shades of death
Thy presence is my stay;
One word of Thy supporting breath
Drives all my fears away.
Thy hand, in sight of all my foes,
Doth still my table spread;
My cup with blessings overflows,
Thine oil anoints my head.

The sure provisions of my God
Attend me all my days;
O may Thy house be my abode,
And all my work be praise.
There would I find a settled rest,
While others go and come;
No more a stranger, nor a guest,
But like a child at home.
–Isaac Watts, 1719