a view of the lake

I walked around the lake and picked a sprig of honeysuckle.  I saw twelve snakes, several frogs of various dimensions, tadpoles, minnows, one fish, and three turtles.  

My favorite was the baby turtle swimming out all alone into the middle of the lake, his feet almost too small to move the water.  I wanted him to come back to the edge where I could catch him.  I wanted to give him a name. 

There were generous portions of green slime, but the shiny blue dragonflies perching on its surface redeemed it from its nastiness.  Banded water snakes slithered in and around the slime, and swam in the clear water dragging rippled V’s behind them. 

Frogs sat all around the edges.  Some crouched on the sun-lit bottom while their tailed progeny swam above them.  Some soaked in the slime with their goggle-eyed heads above water.

I wanted to take off my shoes and wade in, to feel the pond scum between my toes and scoop up tadpoles in a net, to put them in a cup full of silty water and gaze at their circular swimmings.  

But I didn’t.  Doing my own laundry dissuades me from splashing that water on a white shirt.  I walked sedately along, sniffing my honeysuckle, feeling the sunshine, and being startled by the leaps and splashes of the startled frogs.  And then I came back to write it all down.  And if writing it down has a point, that point is this: it’s a good world to be alive in, and I am glad to be alive in it.

remembering summers

Hot today.  Walking into Helen White Hall smells like walking into Salem Church: cool, dry, old painted wood-work and old carpet kept clean though much walked-on.  Helen White’s stairs don’t squeak like Salem’s, but their kitchens are similar with cream-painted cabinents and old linoleum.  They are buildings gracious in their old age: though we who inhabit them now did not see the trees when they were small, we are allowed to stay and to leave our pin-marks in the walls for others to trace.

And so Helen White smells like patience, like being very tired and yet continuing to continue, hoping for the things that don’t happen, and treasuring up all of the things that do.   It smells like meeting a smile on the squeaky stairs early in the morning and catching a glance over the top of red-cushioned pews … or like imagining those things.   It smells like spending hours on a playground with little children who name their stuffed animals after you, when all the while you are very attentive to the parking lot where the people your age are not having stuffed animals named after them.  It smells like sitting in a wooden Sunday school chair, listening to talk of the doings you didn’t do, the people you don’t know, and the jokes that happened somewhere else. 

It smells like being home: home where you are told that “We were all born here.  And you – “  You weren’t.   But even so, home is where you like to be.  And on a hot day, when it seems the world is about to be other than it is, you like to realize that you haven’t changed so very much.

something happy from a depressing poem

W. H. Auden wrote in a poem – “In Memory of W. B. Yeats” -  that “poetry makes nothing happen.”  On one hand, that is tremendously depressing.  But, somehow, it also makes me glad.  That statement isn’t entirely true, but, in so far as it is true, it is very freeing.  Rather than making things happen, Auden said that poetry is “A way of happening.”

I think of myself as a poem, as merely a way of happening.  I am assured by scripture that of myself I can do nothing, make nothing happen.  And that, somehow, is freeing. I am free to happen and happen and happen.  As T. S. Eliot said, in “East Coker”: ” For us, there is only the trying.  The rest is not our business.”  Glad I am to have it so, glad to be unable, glad that the large world of making things happen is not mine to bother over.  Thus I may deal quite contentedly in my small ways of happening: sentences scribbled on a page, chains of sweet-scented clover, an hour of repeated phrases on the piano, a cup of tea, notes to friends, a smile, and a pile of clean laundry folded.   The rest is not my business?  I am glad.

when the days are too many for me …

Pensive, doubting, fearful heart,
Hear what Christ the Savior says;
Every word should joy impart,
Change thy mourning into praise.
Yes, He speaks, and speaks to thee,
May He help thee to believe;
Then thou presently will see
Thou hast little cause to grieve.

Fear thou not, nor be ashamed;
All thy sorrows soon shall end,
I, who heaven and earth have framed,
Am thy Husband and thy Friend;
I, the High and Holy One,
Israel’s God, by all adored,
As thy Savior will be known,
Thy Redeemer and thy Lord.

For a moment I withdrew,
And thy heart was filled with pain;
But my mercies I’ll renew;
Thou shall soon rejoice again;
Though I seem to hide my face,
Very soon my wrath shall cease;
‘Tis but for a moment’s space,
Ending in eternal peace.

Though afflicted, tempest-tossed,
Comfortless awhile thou art,
Do not think thou can be lost,
Thou art graven on my heart;
All thy wastes I will repair;
Thou shalt be rebuilt anew;
And in thee it shall appear
What the God of love can do.
-John Newton

“There are some clouds that make the sky look small; others that make the sky look huge,” my friend remarked the other night, as we looked up at an enormous sky.

This evening, the clouds were again of the enlarging variety — another friend of mine once described this sort as “shingled” — and they were vivid pink trailing away into gray.  Lovely.  But I was driving, and had to keep looking away to stay on the road, and soon it was only the gray trailing away into black.  And, though I love such skies, they always make me lonely, somehow, when I am alone under them and the pink fades out and the clouds become invisible in the general darkness. 

And I drove, and the gray road trailed away behind me and strung out ahead of me, and I could only see to the limit of my own headlights until I reached the city and my headlights disappeared in a general yellow glow and the clouds reappeared — an orange haze that makes the sky seem very near the tops of the lightpoles — and the endless road resolved into a parking lot, and there was an end of things. 

Large skies usually make me want to write, so now I’ve done it, and am done.

For lack of time to sit and compose thoughts specifically for the readership Between the Blue Rocks, I shall again import thoughts composed for other things.  I think they are not irrelevant here:

            I do not like the ends of things.  But, since things must end, I have always felt that ends should be made well and drawn with clear lines.  I like people to tell me they are leaving before they walk away from me.  News writing frustrates me because too often the articles intentionally dwindle away into less and less important facts until, without warning, they cease.  The endings of classical music performances, however, please me better: there is a pause of finality, a stillness, before the audience applauds.  I like books that end with “happily ever after.”  I used to be frustrated at friends’ houses when my parents would call me from play to say goodbye, only to linger for twenty minutes more before getting into the car.  If my fun had to end, I wished it to end clearly.

            Perhaps all this is tied to the human longing for completion.  Or, perhaps it is part of bearing the image of God.  The God who “prescribed limits for the sea” saying “Thus far shall you come, and no farther, and here shall your proud waves be stayed” (Job 38:10, 11).  He is “God, and there is none like [Him], declaring the end from the beginning, and from ancient times things not yet done” (Isaiah 46:9, 10).  There is none like Him; yet, still, we try.  If ends there must be, I want to declare them

            The problem is that it usually is not that clear-cut.  Ends and beginning and middles all muddle together, and, often, I am so wrapped up in petty details that I do not recognize the end until it is gone.  Sometime the ends I plan are prevented.  It snowed the day before I moved from Tennessee; church was cancelled; I didn’t get to say goodbye to my friends.  Other times, the ends come unexpectedly.  Katie decided during the summer that she wouldn’t come back to school; I had only said “See you later.” 

These things are difficult, but perhaps the known, the expected, unpreventable ends are worst.  I don’t know how to do things for the last time.  I have the feeling that lasts ought to be set apart somehow and bear an “It is finished” stamp, but that is not a stamp I own.

            And there is this other thought: often our own perceptions of finished-ness are utterly wrong.  For me, there is usually a sorrow involved in ending things.  I am sure sorrow was what the disciples felt when Christ proclaimed that it was finished.  This, they felt, was the end; here was the conclusion of all their wanderings over all Judea and Samaria; this was the consummation of all of the healings and feedings.  Three years of incredible hopes, finished in blood and water pouring from a corpse’s side.

            The disciples had too small a picture.  They saw a small struggle with local authorities in which those authorities won.  But it was larger struggle with a cosmic foe, and death itself had been finished.  On the other side of their darkness was a larger light than they could ever have dreamed.

            So what am I saying?  I’m not sure, exactly.  Perhaps, that the most painful ends sometimes disguise the most glorious beginnings; that my picture may also be too small; that completion, in the way that I want it, is not mine to create.  I have no reason to suppose that the God whose goodness has continued through all of my tumultuous endings will cease, in this end, to be good.  Indeed, I have every reason to believe otherwise.  There is a promised “happily ever after” at the end of my story.  Until I reach it, I have not reached the end.

“Now it was a cool night with that mysterious excitement in it that comes at the two changes of the year.”  -F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby

When I tried to think of how to describe the evening, this is what came to mind.  I wrote down the first time I read Fitzgerald’s novel.  So, after looking through three of my journals, I found it to put here.  

God is good in creating the changes of the year, and bestowing friends with whom I may share them.