further up

In the yard, the daffodils are blooming, and in the basket on top of the refrigerator, an onion reached up its own slender greenery. I marvel at this universal urge to grow: how bulbs and seeds and roots gather and force themselves upward, compelled to fruitfulness by a command dating from the fifth day of history,…

Five Minute Friday: wait

In the front yard, daffodils prepare to bloom. It feels like a long preparation, though it's only weeks, really, since they first started appearing, the green pushing up through matted leaves and around fallen twigs, pushing up through frosted ground which seems much too hard for the tender stalks. But now the stems stand above…

Noticing, Day 30: colors

Today I noticed how the morning came: splendid in salmon and gold with gauzy purple trimmings. And I wondered if people would consider purple and gold the colors of royalty if the sun had come and gone in shades of forest green and mud-brown from time immemorial. Think about it. ©2014 by Stacy Nott

Look.

When April's sweet showers have pierced to the root March's drought, bathing each vein in a liquor whose potency makes flowers spring forth and little birds sing -- ah, Chaucer, my frenemy! -- then, when I'm not longing to go on pilgrimage, as Chaucer says spring makes people long, or longing to be in love,…

eyelashes; duckbills

"Also," the young man had stopped to ask directions, and now he hesitated before leaning toward me to ask with hushed intensity, "are you aware that  your eyelashes are two different colors?" Under the blue sky, the duck-billed platypus shares this earth with us. Ice, though harder, is less dense than water. We live on…

Concerning ToEs

One week ago, a team of American physicists working on a project called BICEP2, with a telescope at the South Pole, announced that they had made what they call a "grand slam" discovery: a signal allegedly left in the universe from the very first moments of the Big Bang. I'm no physicist, but the gist,…

making pretty things

"It's better to make pretty things, I find, than just useful ones." --Joy Davidman Lewis, quoted in Lyle Dorsett, And God Came In I roam the pages of my journal for suitably pithy quotes to launch my writing here, and find this one, from a 1983 biography of C. S. Lewis' wife. I can't help…

Five Minute Friday: Rhythm

Joining Lisa-Jo and her flash mob of writers again, not so much on the five-minutes, but certainly on the free-write. The word is "rhythm." It's important to be able to feel it when you see it: an unfamiliar hymn chosen topically, with a weird meter, and everyone listening for the piano to guide them. If…

of mysteries, again

Luci Shaw again, because that's what I'm reading: "Many . . . have a stunted view of art as something nonessential, an option, but not an important one. In so doing they ignore the gratuitous beauty (which means a gift of pure Grace, quite undeserved) which the Creator included in Creation, and the senses he…

worlds out of words

“People make worlds out of words.”* They do. I know it. I have lived in those worlds, often and often, and they have taught me to make sense out of my own world, which is also, as it happens, made out of words, by the Word, beginning when God said, “Let there be light,” and…