When All You Have Left Is the Dark Night Sky...

A wise young woman once said,

"When all you have left is the dark night sky...

...you begin separating the men from the monsters...

...and the pogo sticks from the puppy dogs."

Quiet Giants

I was just thinking of Alan Jacobs yesterday. Today, Image Journal brought this to my facebook feed. Allow me to suggest finding a quiet half hour, preparing your beverage of choice, and slowly flipping through the Gospel of the Trees. I think you'll come away refreshed.

Here's a peak at what you'll find:

Photo (yes, photo) by Franz Lanting

Trees

To be a giant and keep quiet about it,

To stay in one’s own place;

To stand for the constant presence of process

And always to seem the same;

To be steady as a rock and always trembling,

Having the hard appearance of death

With the soft, fluent nature of growth,

One’s Being deceptively armored,

One’s Becoming deceptively vulnerable,

To be so tough, and take the light so well,

Freely providing forbidden knowledge

Of so many things about heaven and earth

For which we should otherwise have no word—

Poems or people are rarely so lovely,

And even when they have great qualities

They tend to tell you rather then exemplify

What they believe themselves to be about,

While from the moving silence of trees,

Whether in storm or calm, in leaf and naked,

Night or day, we draw conclusions of our own,

Sustaining and unnoticed as our breath,

And perilous also—though there has never been

A critical tree—about the nature of things.

— Howard Nemerov

There's A Place

I've been drawn to this song these past few days as I consider the tremendous energy my daughter Olivia musters to work through all that is encompassed in what we call "1st grade." But beyond that, it seems it might offer a timely word for so many-- right now. Ladies and gentlemen, Peter Gabriel.

(I debated whether to post this live version with Paula Cole or the video with Kate Bush. As you see, the live version won, as I just can't seem to receive the message while watching an awkward 6 minute hug).

Do NOT eat at the Upstairs Cafe

Brett was already seated when I came in, but even as I approached our table, I read his nonverbal cues that I should run out while I still could. Unfortunately, my curiosity made me sit down. Where to begin...
-- the music was way too loud
-- all the food was hard, like plastic, even Brett's spaghetti-- how do you mess up spaghetti?
-- when Brett asked for a fresher order, they brought him sliced pickles covered in cheese-- without a plate
-- I did receive the corn I ordered, but it was in an unopened can, plopped down in front of me
-- when I ordered a doughnut, the chef told me to get my own doughnut
-- the waitress took our order sitting on our table while the chef crawled under our table to retrieve some dropped food
-- the chef squirted mustard all over our utensils, and then when we asked for new ones, the chef and waitress proceeded to lick them clean and then give them back to us

BUT, they do offer free flu shots and storytime at the end of each meal, so I suppose that counts for something. Actually, we'll probably go back again, and again, and again.

Farm

I grew up in a beautiful, suburban neighborhood of ranch houses just south of downtown Nashville. Before it had been such a neighborhood, it had been rolling fields, pastures, and farmland. The area's past still tells its story through the tree lines that once served as property lines. I just missed this landscape by a few decades.

As a child I experienced echoes of the farm life when I'd go to my grandparents' house in west Tennessee. I played in barn lofts and gathered a few eggs, I named a farm cat or two, but I was too young to pick up on all the intricacies of the farming schedule, and most of my grandparents' farming days were in the past. My education to this "way" of life was done through the retelling of stories more than it was through actually witnessing the day to day routine of a farm.

Unknowingly, I grew up assuming working farms were pretty much a thing of the past and were only still happening in tiny pockets of our country. I wrongly assumed most of America was urban or suburban, even though I'm sure I correctly answered a question or two from a map on a standardized test telling me otherwise.

Now we live in a small Ohio town, and I'm never more than a mile or two from a contemporary, working farm. I can buy all our meat and chicken and dairy from any number of these farms (though, financially, I'm still trying to figure out how to swing this), and from May to October I'm less than a 5-block walk to a farmer's market any given Saturday morning. To get to the nearest urban center, I spend 30 minutes on highways surrounded by working farms. My education continues.

In our little backyard, I'm trying to reclaim some of the practices of my grandparents, and frequently, as I'm thinning out the vegetables or wondering what's wrong with my squash, I regret that this wasn't a regular part of my own upbringing, that so much skill and knowledge was lost in the span of just one generation. I hope my girls grow up with an internal awareness of the seasons in a way I didn't. I hope they recognize that their outdoor chores are determined by the patterns of nature, that the changing of seasons doesn't just affect their clothing options. I want them to recognize this cycle as valuable and worth their notice, not oppressive and backwards.

When I first saw the cover of Elisha Cooper's Farm, I was pretty sure this would be a good text to supplement our family's everyday experiences. I'm always happy to find books to enrich our family's story with the stories of others, and this one looked like it might give a bigger picture to the one we're trying to create in our home. Farm follows a year in the life of a family farm, from sowing to harvesting. It goes beyond naming the animals and their sounds to explaining the everyday workings of a farm in a very poetic and intriguing manner.

The tiller turns the soil, "and the fields change from the color of milk chocolate to the color of dark chocolate."

The combine harvester eats the corn: "It bites stalks, pulls them into its mouth, separates kernel from cob in the the thresher inside its belly, burps out husks."

The children return to school and a rooster goes missing: "Did a fox get it? September shows that some things are not forever."

And the pictures are spot on. I'm grateful that these scenes aren't as foreign to my girls as they would have been to me.


My grandparents' farm is still standing, but barely. The animals are long gone, as are most of the family members. There is very little about the farm that I would call "working," but when my 98 year old grandmother looks out the window of her house, the same house in which she was born, I imagine her mind sees moments like the ones Cooper captures in his book. Fortunately, these scenes and the realities they represent are more prevalent in America than my younger self had thought.

Happy Easter

I thank You God for most this amazing

i thank You God for most this amazing
day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun's birthday;this is the birth
day of life and love and wings:and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any-lifted from the no
of all nothing-human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

e.e. cummings

Happy Epiphany

I am not concerned with gifts given in spite or fear, nor those gifts we accept out of servility or obligation; my concern is the gift we long for, the gift that, when it comes, speaks commandingly to the soul and irresistibly moves us."
- Lewis Hyde, “The Gift”

Dear Family and Friends,

This year’s letter is being written on the twelfth day of Christmas, The Feast of the Epiphany. Lots of wonderful busyness kept us from getting to it earlier, but, as we’re enjoying a heightened awareness of the church calendar, this seemed a perfect day for some reflection, a day to celebrate Christ’s divinity made manifest and acknowledged here on Earth. A number of these revelatory moments occurred in his early life, but the one I hear referenced most frequently is the visit of the magi, coming with gifts.

Beyond our recent Christmas morning, birthdays, and other celebratory occasions, the language of gifts, both tangible and intangible, has very much been a part of our home this year. We’ve received many, given some, discovered even more, and our hope is to be always moving through the day with an awareness of the gifts in motion around us, most often made manifest through each other in small, unforseen moments--epiphanies, if you will.

Brett’s work continues to be a gift for him. He’s engaging in rich conversations, creating new courses, and writing on topics of interest. This June, he’ll take a group of students to NYC for a summer course on the literature and culture of New York City. I enjoyed teaching two courses this past fall, one methods course and one writing. Watching my students discover their own gifts for writing was extremely rewarding, as was delving into the details of the craft with them. Now I’m directing a children’s after-school art program at our church, and I look forward to receiving the gift of art with the children of our community.

Olivia and Mae’s gifts are daily revelations for us. Olivia’s life-long fascination with books has now evolved into her reading them. Watching her crack that code has been sheer magic for us, and I’m humbled as I think about how she will use this gift of literacy. She’s also taken a great interest in the piano, regularly asking me to write out a particular song so she can add it to her repertoire.

Mae’s verbal development amazes us. Her ability to communicate has come so rapidly that it seems I’m regularly mistaking a comment from her as one from Olivia. And as has been the case since her beginnings two years ago, her general delight with life picks us all up several times a day. Her big sister has passed on to her the gift of song and dance, and now Mae can turn almost any item into a microphone and the slightest slip into a pirouette.

It’s been an exciting year. A lot has happened. Many opportunities have come our way. But at the end of this day, I recognize our most revelatory moments have happened not in the out of the ordinary, unusual moments, but in the most likely of occurances, when the common is transformed into something saturated with significance, and once again Christ is revealed.

Epiphany is a gift. It is the gift we long for, and when it’s received, really received, as Lewis Hyde explains, “it speaks commandingly to the soul and irresistably moves us.” We hope you will note your own epiphanies as well and treat them as James Joyce would have you treat them--“with extreme care, seeing that they themselves are the most delicate and evanescent of moments."

Happy Epiphany and Happy New Year.

Brett, Elizabeth, Olivia, and Mae Wiley