So many things I’ve wanted to write, to trace their connections, to somehow combine the bits of thought together into some useful whole.  But the thoughts fall and scatter and lie in disarray like the pine needles outside my window: some layered atop one another, some sticking straight up out of the grass.  We raked the needles up a few weeks ago, and spread them again in flower beds.  It took time, many stoppings to clean the rake of a tangle of needles; I acquired blisters at the bases of my thumbs; my back ached … Oh, writing is not for the lazy one, and I have been lazy of late.  The grass of my mind is blanketed with fallen thoughts and I hardly know where to begin raking them up and moving them elsewhere, let alone burning them, as we did to the leaves we also raked from the yard.

Tonight I have neither time nor wakefulness for such a work, and so shall content myself with sharing autumnal poetry.  This is the first Hopkins poem I ever read; it was printed — unlikely thing! — on the back of a Sunday school handout.  I loved it, and it later became the topic of one of my first college essays.  I’ll spare you — and myself — the essay, but here is the poem:

Spring and Fall:
to a Young Child

Márgarét, áre you gríeving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leáves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Áh! ás the heart grows older,
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you will weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sórrow’s spríngs áre the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed.
It ís the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

-Gerard Manley Hopkins, Poems, 1918

“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?