It’s not quite a cardinal, but
still this leaf sings. It cannot
cock its head so I do and
hear its hymn sideways.
She lauds the coming cold.
She portends a hard frost
and snow so soft it lulls you
into steep sleep that
awaits a choir of
hunger pangs to sing
you awake.
This leaf-come-cardinal
sneaks into my heart and
starts me thinking about how
fall has blessed me.
She sings of a
harvest of faith, of the
hallowing of love, of
hope in the shape of
votive candles.
This cardinal sings me.
Yesterday I made my way
to the back of our yard,
stopping to breath in fall and
to breath out fatigue.
I touched our blazing maple
and noticed that it has
outgrown its
spring wardrobe, leaves
dropping like fires.
Our yard is crazy in spades,
cardinal hiding in red burning bush
woodpecker checking out brick pointing
squirrel deep in garden ground found bare
and Chip, our industrious animal monk,
prayerfully spiriting away goods for winter.
I got to the back of the yard
and found a winter’s worth of
cones cornered behind our shed
neatly arranged on a hanging ladder
with a mount now a tombstone atop
our animal cemetery.
Winter is not yet here,
but this harvesting is a harbinger.
The light coming through
this tree reddens me:
it’s not shame, but
there is that, too. I’m
not blushing although that
would be apropos before
a beauty that weakens my knees,
that softens my cynicism.
The sky is overcast but this
maple illumines the street.
This tree is on fire.
This tree icons.
As I walk down the street,
alight from its glow
I know that here is a meeting of
the holy, the heavens, the humus,
and now the human.
The sky has kissed the earth and
the earth enfolds the sky under its mantel.
As I bear witness to this I become
one with the end of time, one
with the chancel of space.
Is this leaf – lost and alone – strewn across
concrete – seemingly satiny – bleeding or blushing?
Its stem is nearly straight, lightly bent to my
left and its right. This leaf is a sight for dogged
eyes, with a blot of blight to my right and its left.
I was walking to a Powwow
when it called out to
me and now it’s my duty
to divine what it said.
It might have been:
“beauty is below you,” or
“a sidewalk will talk when it takes leaf,” or”
“there’s no shadow that cannot soften what’s hard,” or
“the simplest of things are cosmos, are my relation.”
Maybe it says all of these, and more, for
those with ears to hear, for
those with eyes to see
the cross in creation and
creation in the cross.
The leaves are all to curb,
a mountain of glorious
orange and red, purple and yellow –
channeling the Rockies, or Alps, perhaps.
But a strong November wind
on an unusually warm day
erodes these peaks even
while the base holds
firm, wet
and, so, set.
In the backyard chairs and pots
and the sundial have made their
way to the shed. The
snowblower is nicely on
its mark: ready and set
to go at first white.
Tonight the clock turns back
an hour and in this gap
in time You slip into
my mind and remind me
that life itself is a turning:
back to You, always.
Yesterday was a quintessential autumn day, and a reminder of why I love this season so much. It started out a little odd, though with my reading a newspaper article around the topic of death, and our seeming disavowal of this reality that marks the terminus ad quem of our lives.
I was thinking about our final leave taking as I began raking the leaves in our front yard. I did so with gratitude to the huge Norwegian Maple that graces us in so many ways. I quite enjoyed the aesthetic of the varied colours and the kinesthetic rhythm of raking. As I gathered leaves, they continued to float softly down from the towering tree, as if tapping my shoulder reminding me to be attentive to the gift of the day. I thought of how autumn alerts me to the passing of time and is a kind of memento mori in its own way.
After I had managed to get the leaves from the front and back of our yard to the curb, I changed to attend the funeral of a dear member of our church. I recall so well Jim’s kindness to me when our family first began attending St. Matthews, and our many marvelous conversations over coffee. The last little while has been hard for him but Jim’s family so artfully shared how he had overcome the adversities of being a survivor of the residential school system in order to shepherd students first as a teacher then as a principal. I was struck by how his death was a revelatory moment for many of us, a time when we finally saw the gift that his life was with clarity.
After the funeral our eldest and her husband joined us for smørrebrød and an afternoon of visiting. It is such a gift to catch up, remember shared histories, and talk about future plans. Family is dear to us, and having spent many years far from our extended family, we deeply cherish every moment with our daughters and son-in-law. Shortly after they made their way to their own home, Gwenanne and I had some left-overs followed by a fire in our backyard. There is, indeed, something intoxicating about a fire and doubly so when the smell of fall is in the air. The heart is sated by the sight of tongues of flame licking the wood, slowly consuming it in a manner akin to the slow erasure of ice cream by our own tongues. Some days we might imagine that we are ourselves a piece of wood or an ice cream cone slowly being consumed by life until finally we are ashes or perhaps energy fueling this entire mystery in which we find ourselves.
At the end of the day, I thought about the journey it was: beginning with the invitation to think about death and as I did so, throughout the day, I found life just a little more precious and rewarding. Each day, is in its own way, a journey from cradle to grave; each day is an instance of the arc of history, or a map of the mark of time, which slowly consumes itself until finally it finds itself in the heart of the author, or artist, or engineer of this wonder – none other than the sacred and abiding mystery. Each day is a gift when it is reminder that we begin and end in the holy, and each step along the way is revelation of what it means to be hallowed.
Our sails are stretched across
our lawn, where they catch
no wind, boast no knots, not
able to fill as they are wont to do.
Everything comes to an end:
some things for good,
some for a time,
sometimes you just can’t know.
I know that Santa Maria will
not race by the grace of the wind
while her sails lay still. But soon
she will fly by the miracle of
technology, and I will lapse into
a time of silent watching, waiting
out autumn’s doldrums.
I settle into a time of quiet, not
quite still, not yet settled.
Spring is far, fall is here while
winter bridges the two like
death – astride hope and despair.
I harvested Sister Bean Friday –
with the threat of frost Saturday.
She is mottled, purple on green.
Her seeds are shiny black with white eye.
Her smell is fecund.
~
Sister Bean speaks to as well as
feeds me saying
Let each breath be death and life.
Let each heartbeat unseat the thought that your blood is blue.
Let tears dilute your sweat and soften your glare.
~
I hold Sister Bean in my hand and
find that she weighs more than she does
because this bean preaches. I set her down
again, and then she calls to me at the last:
“You and I are not so very different.
We both begin and end in dirt.”
My usual Saturday run yesterday involved an unexpected detour. I generally run along the Iron Horse Trail, aptly named because it follows the route of a former train track. At the point at which the trail crosses a local creek, a barrier was up. A former rail bridge is now removed, and a new bridge is not yet in place. So, a detour was in the offing.
Fortunately, there is a “Y” in the road at that point, and by following to the right I was able to enter Victoria Park, complete with a larger than life statue of its namesake. The park is replete with paths, some encircling a little lake that the local swans call home for the summer.
Yesterday, however, I didn’t see many swans but I did see a park full of people walking about with their faces in their devices. This, of course, is normal at the university where I work, but the number of people doing this on Saturday was astronomically high. Since this is Thanksgiving Weekend in Canada, and we are right in the middle of Oktoberfest in Kitchener-Waterloo, I surmise that what I saw was some sort of virtual scavenger hunt.
Running in the midst of this was a bit tenuous. I generally find that people walk without much thought to what, or who, is behind them. I suppose I do the same myself. But when you’re running – especially on a narrow path – a walker’s casual swerve to one side or the other can be a bit of a disaster to a runner trying to negotiate a safe path for a pass. This problem was simply racheted up by the fact that these walkers were deeply invested in their devices. I avoided crashes by giving them wide berth, which is reasonably easy in a park.
As I made my way out of the park I thought a bit about our walking patterns in particular and thought about how travel becomes a metaphor for our journey from cradle to gravel. John Malloy, one of our professors spoke a bit to that theme in chapel this last Wednesday. As we travel, he invited us to make gratitude a pattern for our journey from cradle to grave, noting its especially important place for Canadians in the midst of a national election. He noted that gratitude is a firm tonic against cynicism. It is no accident that one of the foci of Christian worship is the Eucharist, coming from the Greek word for “thanks,” which itself contains the Greek word for grace in its root. Cynicism is countered by gratitude, which is grounded in grace.
I was very grateful for my run today; to be able to enjoy the fresh air, the beautiful colouring of trees, the joy of movement and the surprise of detours. When the journey is the destination, however, it seems a bit odd to speak of detours. Perhaps my journey in the park wasn’t so much a detour as small, and so remarkable kind of adventure reminding me that a certain capacity to be fleet of foot is beneficial when you set out on a journey.
I wish such a journey for each of you, no matter your mode of transportation and regardless of your destination. Let yourself be carried away by gratitude, and I can assure you that you will travel far, wide, and deeply.
Saturday was leaf day at our house. It wasn’t really planned that way, although we did know that it was soon time to wrestle the trees’ labours to the curb, where the city will collect them in early November. We are fortunate in our neighbourhood to have this service, which occurs because we have an inordinate number of older trees that tower over our streets and homes. This time of year is so very gorgeous; as the leaves come down we find ourselves swimming in a sea of orange, and red, and yellow and a coral-like pink too.
My eldest and her boyfriend popped by Friday night, and in the morning Anelise exclaimed that she wanted to rake some leaves. I was quite glad for this intervention, and so the plan was that after brunch – we all had a handful of jobs to do – we would return to turn the yard from its fire-hued palette to green again. I went for a run, an especially lovely thing to do in autumn, and came back to find everyone hard at work. I gladly joined in, as we visited, and joked, and amassed the leaves at the curb, where they will be collected sometime in early November.
I do so much work that generates such little concrete results that I find a rich pleasure in things like raking leaves. A deep satisfaction attends my settling them curbside. I’m not sure if it is the rush of colour on the blue-black pavement, slick with rain from earlier in the day, or the return of the lawn to a contented fall green, but there is a kind of aesthetic pleasure in the process. Or perhaps it is the rhythm of moving a rake. I think at some deep level, it is because we were created to be moving and so many jobs these days are at desks, and the closest thing to activity that we manage is moving a mouse, or making our way to the coffee pot, and such.
Certainly, part of the attraction of this is the way it ritualizes our immersion in the cycles of the season. It seems many of us have lost our sense of identity with the earth. We live in a market driven world with an unrelenting concern with progress that drenches our days and drowns our souls. We are forever wondering about how our portfolios grow, how our careers advance, and how our communities compare with others. We feel like failure without progress. Nature doesn’t progress. It adapts. And deep down, I think, we know that we need to have this truth drench our very being, and bless us with contentment.
And so, we grinned today as we rallied our rakes in recollection of the cycle of life. Blood pushed around our body, and air cycled in and out of our lungs until we worked up an appetite for lunch. As we gathered around the board, and reminisced about this and that, it struck me that what goes around comes around: the “round” matters as much as most everything else.
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