nature

June 4, 2021

Idle and Blessed

I played hooky from work yesterday. It was one of those late-spring mornings that beckoned, all blue skies and sweet lilac air. The boys were crabby and craving attention, and I wasn’t making much headway on my deadlines anyway. So we grabbed hats and sunscreen and headed out for a hike on a trail near our home.

Our destination: a modest cave that doesn’t even warrant a name. At its entrance is a faded sign that reads simply, “Cave.” But for a three-year-old, it was magic.

Graham packed his little blue backpack with a flashlight and a snack. “Mama, do you think bears like fruit snacks?”

We explored the cave, barely big enough for a grown-up person to stand up in. To Graham’s simultaneous disappointment and relief, we didn’t find any bears. But along the way, we did see butterflies and bugs, ducks and dandelions, sticks and squirrels.

As we headed home, I thought about Mary Oliver’s poem “The Summer Day”:

I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel in the grass
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
With your one wild and precious life?
Mary Oliver

As I looked in the rearview mirror at the boys nodding off in their car seats, it occurred to me:

Who better than a toddler to help me relearn how to pay attention?
Who better than a person under three feet to show me how to fall down into the grass?
Who better than a baby with leg rolls and a solitary cheek dimple to show me what it looks like to be idle and blessed?

Parenthood has revealed to me that everything does indeed die at last, and too soon—the baby’s propensity to giggle uproariously before the tickle even lands, the look of milk-drunk bliss on his face after he eats, the way he rests his right hand under his head when he sleeps. The toddler’s ability to create a world where Toy Story characters pretend to be lions who also happen to be fighting a fire; the way he tells Milo daily, “I love you so much, little bwother. I’m going to keep you.”

And it hits me: We will never have a summer when they’re three-and-a-half and six-months-old again. We have this one wild and precious summer. What is it we plan to do with it?

If there’s a common refrain to the parenting advice I hear, it’s this: Enjoy it, because it goes fast. I’m always left a little stymied by these words. Because when you have little people in your life, the momentum is always pulsing forward. There’s no pausing, no slowing down, no going back. How do you stop a speeding locomotive whose brakes have been disabled? How do you hold back a cascading waterfall with your bare hands?

I don’t know how to slow time down. I only know how to slow myself down.

And so this summer we will go on hikes in the woods. We will shine our flashlights into caves like the mighty bear hunters we are. We will flagrantly disregard our phones, our deadlines, our dirty toilets, our drive for productivity, our tyrannical to-do lists. We will kneel in the grass. We will collect sticks. We will look for butterflies. We will fail. And we will find the grace to try again.

So if you are looking for me on a summer day, you just may find me strolling through a field, a child in each arm.

Won’t you join me?

***

Work is not always required. . . . There is such a thing as sacred idleness, the cultivation of which is now fearfully neglected.
George MacDonald

November 25, 2014

Teach Me to Savor

I went on my final bike ride of the season a couple weeks ago—one of those sun-kissed days when the light bounces off the red maples and the golden poplars, the sky is an impossible shade of blue, and the air is rich with the smell of earth and bonfires. Every time the breeze blew, the sky rained leaves, the yellow and red confetti falling in fistfuls as I rode.

Of course, at the time I didn’t know it would be the last ride of the year. But here in the Midwest, November is notoriously fickle, and winter has a way of sneak-attacking you.

My husband and I have ongoing discussions about the merits and demerits of fall. He is Mr. Summer, relishing the long, hot days so he can ride his bicycle to his heart’s content. I tell him the things I love about fall, but he shakes his head, unconvinced. As I tick off the highlights of the season—apple crisp, walks in the woods, s’mores over an open fire—he logically points out that you can do all those things in the summer, but with warmer weather and longer days. “Fall is just the warning that winter is coming,” he says.

It wasn’t until I was riding my bike that day that it finally hit me that that’s precisely its appeal.

The particular beauty of fall comes because you know it won’t last.

Summer, with its endless days and languorous nights, its extravagant greens and lush flowers, seems to stretch on without end. But in the fall, reminders are everywhere that this beauty is fleeting. The trees chameleon overnight. Branches shed their leaves in a single storm. The nip in the air arrives out of nowhere one morning. Without warning, it’s time to pull the sweaters out of hibernation.

Here’s what I think: Autumn is God’s reminder to savor.

It’s a wake-up call that no season, no matter how wonderful, no matter how painful, will last forever. Fall is God’s way of saying, “Each day is a gift. Don’t take it for granted—but don’t hoard it either. Just see the beauty of today and soak it in.”

If you find yourself in a season of bliss right now, don’t fear the changing seasons ahead. Savor the gifts of the right-now. And if you are going through a painful season, look for beauty amid the dying. Savor this—yes, even this.

Autumn . . . the year’s last, loveliest smile.
William Cullen Bryant

August 27, 2013

The Summer Day

Last weekend my husband and I escaped to a charming bed and breakfast along the Mississippi River to celebrate our anniversary. The town itself isn’t much to speak of—it has seen better economies, better days, better centuries even. But Ed and Sandy, the owners of the B&B, have created a little sanctuary right there in the heart of the town—a place of respite amid the busyness of life.

After a breakfast of pancakes loaded with plump blueberries, hot coffee with real cream, and fresh sweet strawberries, Daniel and I sat on the huge wrap-around front porch, serenaded by the songbirds and gurgling fountains that grace the property. Butterflies flitted from flower to flower, apparently as enticed by the aroma of the purple phlox as we were.

Then Daniel pulled out his guitar started playing right there on the front porch, and as the morning sun filtered through the trees onto my neck, I wished I could bottle the moment and keep it all year. Summer in a jar.

At one point Daniel looked over at me and noticed that my book was uncharacteristically closed on my lap. I was just sitting there, silent, taking it all in.

“What are you thinking about?” he asked, no doubt concerned I’d slipped into a food coma after all those pancakes.

I couldn’t quite put it into words. But Mary Oliver captures the moment in her poem “The Summer Day.”

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean—
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down—
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
—Mary Oliver

Sometimes prayer is about structure and discipline and articulate words. But sometimes it’s simply learning “how to be idle and blessed.” Sometimes prayer is sitting on the front porch soaking in this wild and wonderful world God has made.

Sometimes prayer is just paying attention.

So as summer slips into September and kids don backpacks and the days start taking shortcuts toward dusk, I want to take time to seize these final summer days. I don’t want life to slip by as I rush through my busy to-do list.

This summer day, this gift from God—what will I do with it? What will I do with this one wild and precious life?

July 30, 2013

Fireflies of the Soul

At first glance, it may seem that God sprinkled the Midwest with the leftovers when he was distributing nature’s gifts. We can’t see the purple mountains’ majesty from here, and our shorelines boast no waving palm trees. We don’t waken to the sound of crashing ocean waves or plunging waterfalls, and our rest stops don’t sell postcards of stately lighthouses.

But over the years I’ve come to suspect that God had a few secrets up his sleeve when he made the heartland, a few gifts to compensate for an otherwise lackluster showing. These gifts aren’t big or loud or dramatic, and only those with a discerning eye notice them. But once you discover them, like so many clues on a treasure hunt, you just may find yourself settling in and calling the place home.

There are the sunny daffodils that peek sleepy heads out of the ground after a long, cold winter. There’s the never-ending canvas of sky, alternately dotted with cotton-ball clouds and painted with fiery oranges and pinks as the sun dips below the horizon. There’s the beautiful dying of the trees as they explode in a final display of color before hunkering down for the winter.

And then there are the fireflies that make their appearance on hot summer evenings. Maybe most of all, the fireflies.

My friend and I were walking along the trail at dusk the other night, and it was one of those evenings that succumbed to nightfall in a whisper of a second. One moment we could see the path beneath our feet, and the next we were treading into darkness.

Maybe the cover of evening makes it easier for truth to leak out, but it was in that sacred moment of dusk-to-darkness that my friend’s secret spilled over the edges. Her happy, surprising news that just couldn’t stay bottled up inside her anymore.

The words were barely off her lips when the fireflies ignited in a symphony of lights, illuminating the sky with their pulsing. Just one moment earlier they were nowhere to be found, yet with the single flip of a switch, we were surrounded by thousands of tiny flashlights, small enough to fit in the palm of our hands.

And I wondered: Had they appeared out of nowhere, on cue somehow? Or had they been there all along, and I just couldn’t see them without the curtain of darkness?

Most of the time I fear the darkness, shrink away from it, attempt to push it back. But what if some of those secret bursts of light God has hidden in my heart can only show up against the backdrop of darkness?

I don’t want to miss anything in this ordinary, glorious landscape of my Midwestern soul. So if the darkness needs to come as a backdrop to those little divine beacons, then let it come. Let it come, so I can see the flickering light, so I can hold it in the palm of my hand. I don’t want to miss a single firefly of the soul.

“We do not truly see light, we only see slower things lit by it, so that for us light is on the edge—the last thing we know before things become too swift for us.”

—C. S. Lewis

April 17, 2012

The Everlasting Arms

Early in our relationship, my now-husband and I bonded over a common enemy: the red-winged blackbird. (Clearly, we were meant to be.)

We were walking and chatting together on the bike path when we discovered that in recent months both of us had been dive-bombed by said birds (without any provocation our part, I might add). Daniel had been riding his bicycle and I was out for a jog, and apparently both of us got a little too close to Mama Blackbird’s nest. That’s when militant squawking ensued and there was some talon-to-head contact.

Daniel handled things with his trademark unflappable calm, proceeding to simply ride faster and outpace the bird. I wish I could say the same for myself, but all the rush-hour commuters who witnessed my full-body flailing at the corner of Route 25 might tell you otherwise.

Perhaps my bad experience with birds has tainted my view, but I have to admit I was a little surprised to find God compared to a bird several times in the book of Deuteronomy. God as a lion? No problem. A lamb? I can work with that. But a bird?

In Deuteronomy 32:11 we see God described as carrying us on his wings:

Like an eagle that rouses her chicks
and hovers over her young,
so he spread his wings to take them up
and carried them safely on his pinions.

The next chapter paints a similar image of God soaring across the skies as we fly tandem with him. All the while he’s driving out the enemy that’s out to get us:

There is no one like the God of Israel.
He rides across the heavens to help you,
across the skies in majestic splendor.
The eternal God is your refuge,
and his everlasting arms are under you.
He drives out the enemy before you;
he cries out, “Destroy them!”
—Deuteronomy 33:26-27

And suddenly I see the red-winged blackbird scenario from another angle. What if, instead of the one being dive-bombed, I were one of the babies in the nest?

I have to admit that, personal biases aside, birds must be some of the most graceful animals—soaring, as they do, almost effortlessly through the sky. But when their little ones are in danger, watch out, because nothing is going to get in their way.

Gratefully our God has both these sides to his own character. He rides across the heavens in majestic splendor, but at the same time, when his children are in trouble, he doesn’t hesitate to drive out the enemy before them.

Every time I see a bird soaring through the sky, may it remind me of those everlasting arms that are under me. Those arms that are both graceful and protective.

But in the meantime, I’m not taking any chances: you’ll find me on a different jogging trail from now on.

I’ve taken the challenge of reading the Bible chronologically this year and tracing the thread of grace through it. These musings are prompted by my reading. I’d love to have you join me: One Year Bible reading plan.

March 31, 2012

God’s Underground Work

When I was living in my first place after college, I made the rather impulsive decision one Sunday afternoon to buy a package of daffodil bulbs. It was only after I arrived home that I realized I didn’t have anything even closely resembling a shovel. But by that point I was determined to make the bulb-planting happen. Today.

So I pulled out an old knife and thought, How hard can this be? As it turned out, digging 12 inches into the dirt might as well have been muscling to the center of the earth when you’re using a dull kitchen blade. By the time I was ready to drop the final bulb in the ground, my arms were aching and my knees and hands were caked with dirt, but I was feeling pretty satisfied.

Then I took my first real look at the brown, dead-looking thing in my palm. I’d seen plenty of daffodils in the past, and presumably they’d all started out this way, but suddenly I was assailed by doubts. How could something that looked like a rotting turnip be transformed into a sunny, yellow flower? But with a shrug I put the last bulb in the dirt and went inside to retire the now-worthless knife.

I promptly forgot about my little gardening experiment…until the next April. One day I looked out my back window, and to my surprise, a small but tenacious sprout was trying to poke its head out of the cold, unforgiving earth.

Isn’t that a picture of what God does with our lives too? To a casual observer, we look dead, ugly, hopeless. But God doesn’t give up on us. During those seasons when we’re all but buried, when it looks like Satan has won after all—that’s precisely when God does his best redemptive work. He uses those months under the cover of soil to build us up, make us strong, prepare us for who he wants us to be.

And when the first hint of spring arrives, we will stick out our heads, tentatively at first, and then with increasing boldness. As our faces open to the Son, he will transform us. From despair to hope. From death to new life.

And we, turnipy-looking things that we are, will be a tangible display of his glorious grace.

February 21, 2012

Cinematic Grace

Before we started watching The Tree of Life, our friend warned the group, “This isn’t your typical movie. It’s more like a poem in visual form.” We looked at him rather skeptically—even more so when he mentioned the twenty-minute segment with no words. Okaaay…this was clearly not going to be your traditional Hollywood “boy meets girl” flick or your “bad guy tries to blow up the world” movie.

I was surprised to see that the opening quote came from the book of Job: “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?” (38:4). The story traces a boy’s growing-up years as he wrestles with the tension between grace and nature. His mother, the personification of grace, swirls him around in the backyard, playfully squirts him with the garden hose, and showers his life with laughter. His father is nature—embodying the idea that you get what you earn in life, that if you work hard enough, you’ll end up on top.

The movie poses this unspoken question: What happens when life isn’t fair, when you get what you don’t deserve? Is it possible to keeping clinging to grace, despite all seeming evidence to the contrary?

This is, when it comes down to it, the underlying question posed in the book of Job as well. Yes, Job’s technical question is Why? But there seems to be a deeper layer to his queries. The truth is, no answer would have satisfied him. There is no reason, no explanation that from Job’s human perspective would have justified the devastating losses, the crushing defeats, the deaths of the people he loved.

So God, in his mercy, responds to a different question.

He reminds Job of his credentials—essentially that he holds nature, in all its mystery and splendor, in the palm of his hand—but also that he treats his children with compassion and gentleness (Job 38-39).

For all those chapters of back-and-forth between Job and God, the book pretty much boils down to one simple exchange.

Job asks God, “Why?”

And to Job’s amazement, God responds with another question altogether: “Who?”

Who determined the earth’s dimensions?
Who kept the sea inside its boundaries?
Who created a channel for the torrents of rain?
Who laid out the path for the lightning?
Who sends rain to satisfy the parched ground?
Who gives intuition to the heart and instinct to the mind?
Who is wise enough to count all the clouds?
Who provides food for the ravens?
—from Job 38

In my quest for grace, it just may that I’m sometimes asking the wrong question. Maybe when God seems silent, it’s not that he’s not answering. It’s that he’s answering a different question.

January 25, 2012

The Art of Pruning

My husband and I joke that he only moved in three things when we got married: his bike collection, his guitar collection, and his plant collection. I benefit from all three, but I’m specifically loving the plants.

Daniel is a master green thumb, especially when it comes to violets (which I have a pretty storied history of killing myself). The trick, he says, is in the pruning. At first it struck me as unnecessarily brutal to take a pair of scissors to those innocent little leaves that don’t seem to be hurting a soul. But if his flowering pots are any indication, this method seems to be working.

Yesterday I had one of those pruning conversations myself. Someone I love gently held up the mirror to me on one of those habitual sins I wasn’t even aware I’d been guilty of. And for me, those deeply entrenched lifestyle sins are way more painful to prune away than the one-time doozies. It feels more like digging up a root than trimming an errant leaf.

As much as it hurts to feel the shears, though, it’s what I want. It’s only when I let someone close enough to show me who I really am that they can help trim away the places that are quite literally sucking the life out of me.

Grace, I am learning, sometimes comes in the form of pruning shears.

He cuts off every branch of mine that doesn’t produce fruit, and he prunes the branches that do bear fruit so they will produce even more.
—John 15:2