To Thee, O Lord, I fly,
And on Thy help depend;
Thou art my Lord and King most high;
Do Thou my soul defend.
A heritage for me
Jehovah will remain;
My portion rich and full is He;
My right He will maintain.

The lot to me that fell
Is beautiful and fair;
The heritage in which I dwell
Is good beyond compare.
I praise the Lord above,
Whose counsel guides aright;
My heart instructs me in His love
In seasons of the night.

I keep before me still
The Lord whom I have proved;
At my right hand He guards from ill,
And I shall not be moved.
Life’s pathway Thou wilt show,
To Thy right hand wilt guide,
Where streams of pleasure ever flow,
And boundless joys abide.
-The Psalter, 1912

It is true on the days when I am a storm inside, and I sing it through tears and play it fiercely on the piano, as though my intensity can somehow make me feel its truth.  But it is equally true on clear days like today, when I walk down the long driveway smelling new-mown grass and being reminded, in all of my senses, that “the lines have fallen to me in pleasant places” (Psalm 16:6).

Thou wilt make known to me the path of life;
In Thy presence is fullness of joy;
In Thy right hand there are pleasures forever.
Psalm 16:11

When you take a tiny black dog out to walk on a damp morning, she is transformed from a creature of small account sniffing things of smaller account on the porch to a vastly important entity charging back and forth proclaiming dog-ness “at the wide earth’s imagined corners.”  Like an army with banners is she, running hither and yon in the wet world, and coming back to prance beside your feet, her tail a small plume. 

You are the magnanimous one, the conferrer of dignity.  Your presence gives her authority.  Safe within range of your voice, she is free to startle woodpeckers and challenge cattle.   And yet, you cannot shield her from all hurt, nor, in dire straits, does she yield absolute loyalty for your magnanimity.  When you are near the house, and it begins to rain, she is gone from your side to the shelter of the porch, transformed again into somewhat moistened creature of small account.

if all the world were paper …

Today I made shortbread cookies.  Lovely, buttery, crumbling things, brown around the edges, with plenty of pecans.  And, as I stood with my hands in soapy water cleaning butter from the mixing bowl, I reflected with satisfaction that I had produced five pages of cookies.  Not cookie sheets, not dozens, but pages.  Well, if I needed confirmation, it is now confirmed:  words are my medium.  And I laugh.

(Incidentally, a page — er, cookie sheet — contains something nearer two dozen cookies … my above statements did not, perhaps, make that clear.)

Last summer I acquired a fraying, yellow book of poetry.  I forget the book’s title; it contained an indifferent assortment of poetical scraps, and at least one poem which I liked very well and copied into my journal.  I type that poem here as something which I rediscovered and re-enjoyed yesterday.

Sophistication
by Vassar Miller

When I was a child
I thought that it rained
all over the whole wide world at once,
but now, having grown much wiser,

I know that my neighbor
can receive a deluge,
and my scrap of earth lie here gasping
like a fish tossed onto land,

or that when it pours
it is no monsoon
with the trees before long dripping in sunlight
all in a sweat about nothing.

tracing

I went this morning to sit in the screen house beside our pond, went in sunshine through moist, green woods with a tiny, black dog at my heels.  The pond was a sedate brown, solemnly holding the images of trees at depths greater than itself.  Around the edges, occasional water drops fell from overhanging trees and slow ripples spread out and out and out.  And I was silent, with thoughts rippling out and out and out.

And then, although the sun still shone, it rained.  Rained hard, and the pond sparkled, rough with bubbles and colliding ripples.  There was something free and glad about that rain in the sunshine: contradictory ideas combined and proved not contradictory at all.  Beautiful.  (Like the God who is at once perfectly loving and perfectly just?  At once fully God and fully man? )

I sat, listening to the rain on the tin roof of the screen house, and to the birds, and to the frogs, chilly in the sudden wet air.  And under the trees, mixing with the lowest branches, I saw a rainbow.  (Now that I think of it, another reconciliation of rain and sun.)  It hung there, colors suspended against the damp browns and greens of the woods … I will look upon it, to remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature (Genesis 9:16) … and I was glad.

God is not a man, that He should lie,
Nor a son of man, that He should repent;
Has He said, and will He not do it?
Or has He spoken, and will He not make it good?
-Numbers 23:19

Well, here I am at home, a college graduate.  Green and gold tassel swinging from the rear-view mirror in my Honda, honors cords and mortar board stowed in the chest at the foot of my bed, various important certificates stacked on a shelf in my closet.   So much for college, eh?  Easily closed and put away, like the anthologies of literature on my book shelves?  But I didn’t put the literature away when I closed the anthologies.  And that tassel now goes where I go, and maybe obstructs my view of the road sometimes.   Never mind, I’m not over-eager for the road just now …

I tried on several different metaphors of my own, but Reuben Land, Leif Enger’s narrator for his novel Peace Like a River, says it pretty well:
Just like us, the Israelites hadn’t any idea where they’d end up! Just like us, they were travelling by faith!  Indeed, it did impart a thrill, yet the trip thus far, in the frigid and torpid Plymouth, had reminded me what a hard time the chosen people actually had of it.  Once travelling, it’s remarkable how quickly faith erodes.  It starts to look like something else – ignorance, for example.   Same thing happened to the Israelites.  Sure it’s weak, but sometimes you’d rather just have a map.

And yet, foolish little one, the Lord is your Shepherd.  It is not the task of a sheep to study maps.  Be still.

“… and he wondered if being a Faithful Knight meant that you just went on being faithful without being told things.”
-A. A. Milne, The House at Pooh Corner

Christopher Robin is going.
At least I think he is.
Where?
Nobody knows.
But he is going –
I mean he goes
(To rhyme with “knows”)
Do we care?
(To rhyme with “where”)
We do
Very much.
(I haven’t got a rhyme for that
      “is” in the second line yet.
      Bother.)
(Now I haven’t got a rhyme for
      bother. Bother.)
Those two bothers will have
      to rhyme with each other
      Buther.
The fact is this is more difficult
      than I thought,
I ought –
(Very good indeed)
I ought
To begin again,
But it is easier
To stop.
Christopher Robin, good-bye,
I
(Good)
I
And all your friends
Sends –
I mean all your friend
Send –
(Very awkward this, it keeps
      going wrong)
Well, anyhow, we send
      Our love
END.
-A.A. Milne, The House at Pooh Corner

Find a copy of The House at Pooh Corner and read “Chapter Ten: In which Christopher Robin and Pooh Come to an Enchanted Place, and We Leave Them There.”  I prefer that you find an oldish copy of the book, with a hard cover, and not very large.  I prefer that the illustrations be black and white and that the pages not be glossy.  If you are at Belhaven, the Warren A. Hood Library is not the place to find said book.  First, because they have no such old, small copy; second, because the large, glossy, colorful copy in The Complete Tales and Poems of the Winnie the Pooh is currently in my possession.  In any case, when you find the book take it somewhere where you can “sit down carelessly, without getting up again almost at once and looking for somewhere else” (Milne again, same book, same chapter).  And, unless you are a Very Young Person or a Very Stoic Person, have a tissue handy — I, unfortunately, did not.