Category Archives: Christian Life

Giving Back

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 In the area of East Texas where I grew up, lavish blooms of a vigorous climbing vine grew not only in back yards and trailing over porches, but also in the woods, where it draped over tree branches, adding clouds of light purple clusters of fragrant flower clusters to the late Spring landscapes. When I go back there even now I watch for the extravagant (if invasive) Wisteria that is loved by many.

A number of years ago I began to admire another vine that grows in our part of Southeast Texas that is also called Wisteria.  It is named Evergreen Wisteria because of its hardiness and its ability to bloom summer through fall.  Its smaller clusters of  deep, rich purple make it a spectacular garden plant.For support, ours shares a small gazebo with a Peggy Martin rose.  As much as I like these lovely purple blossoms, I recently learned something about the plant that makes me admire it even more. It doesn’t just soak up soil nutrients and water – it gives back!

This vine is not in the same family as our Wisteria in the woods, which some call Chinese Wisteria.  This plant is a legume, and much like other legumes, evergreen wisteria fixes nitrogen in the soil, which enhances the amount of nitrogen available for other plants growing nearby, It is a good companion plant for others which are heavy nitrogen feeders.

IMG_0737Along with the many other lessons learned in the garden, my lovely Evergreen Wisteria reminds me of the value in perserverance, the joy of sharing beauty, the need for being trained on a Trellis that does not fail, and – that as I have been given, so I must give so that those who share my garden space can thrive.

“Beauty, youth, and strength are flowers, but fading seen.

Duty, faith, and love are roots and evergreen,”

~fom the Old Knight,by George Peele

 

Silence

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IMG_0585One of the disciplines that is hard to achieve in our bustling, hurrying, sound filled lives is that of silence. But if we do not know how to practice silence, if we do not make space for it, we may miss the time we are offered the chance to give that gift to one who needs us to listen. I love the silence of early morning – sitting with my cup of coffee as darkness opens to soft light. It is as if I am stilled in the lap of God, resting in the dawn of a new day’s hope.

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Talking always comes much easier than listening, but it is in silence that I can tune my ears and learn what it means to really hear. In my recent reading, I found the words from Rachel Naomi Remen as well as the poetry by John Fox. Both speak to the value of learning silence and deeply listening.

“Perhaps the most important thing we bring to another person is the silence in us, not the sort of silence that is filled with unspoken criticism or hard withdrawal. The sort of silence that is a place of refuge, of rest, of acceptance of someone as they are. We are all hungry for this other silence. It is hard to find. In its presence we can remember something beyond the moment, a strength on which to build a life. Silence is a place of great power and healing.”

~ Rachel Naomi Remen,

 

When someone deeply listens to you
it is like holding out a dented cup
you’ve had since childhood
and watching it fill up with
cold, fresh water.WWhen someone deeply listens to you
ithen it balances on top of the brim,
you are understood.
When it overflows and touches your skin,
you are loved.

When someone deeply listens to you
the room where you stay
starts a new life
and the place where you wrote
your first poem
begins to glow in your mind’s eye.
It is as if gold has been discovered.

When someone deeply listens to you
your barefeet are on the earth
and a beloved land that seemed distant
is now at home within you.

~ John Fox

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This Morning…

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IMG_0399dear familiar line and color

velvet spread of leaf

magenta and vermilion petal

held in the sweet curve

of glazed garden pot

one brief glimpse

telling me

this is home

“The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing — to reach the Mountain, to find the place where all the beauty came from — my country, the place where I ought to have been born. Do you think it all meant nothing, all the longing? The longing for home? For indeed it now feels not like going, but like going back.”

~ C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces

Adventure of Grace and Joy

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Days which lead up to Mother’s Day are a time of reflection and remembering..  I savor the model of mothering provided to me by my mother and grandmothers, express gratitude for their lives, and remember the simple tradition which marked Mother’s Day for me as a child:  picking a red rose to wear to church in honor of Mother.  Those whose mothers were no longer with them wore a white rose. It was a sweet gesture, and I miss it.

I cherish the images and thoughts of my sons as babies and little boys, and bask in the light of their lives as strong men of faith and integrity who have become faithful husbands and loving fathers. They love me and tell me so in word and actions. From the beginning, being a mother has been an adventure of faith and grace and joy.  I have often spoken of the fact that parenting has shown me more about God’s love and care for me than any other element of my life.  On Mother’s Day, our church’s order of service included a statement that affirmed this.

“It has been the amazing, often painful, often ecstatic adventure of being a parent that has most formed me. It is parenting that has made, unmade, and remade me into someone who comes up hard against the great religious questions that have always been part of the human quest:

Who in fact am I?.

What is a life well led?

What is most essential, permanent, and foundational?

What responsibility do I have to others?

How do I deal with evil and fear?

What is “the good?”

How do I love well?

How do I move in this wild and worrisome world with some grace and joy?

Wendy Wright,   Seasons of a Family’s Life: Cultivating the Contemplative Spirit at Home 

 

                            

Home Again

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Returning Home Again

And the world cannot be discovered by a journey of miles,
no matter how long,
but only by a spiritual journey,
a journey of one inch,
very arduous and humbling and joyful,
by which we arrive at the ground at our feet,
and learn to be at home.

—Wendell Berry

BrokenPotFairyGarden

Remembering

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IMG_1704It is Good Friday.  I go into our garden, remembering another garden that became a place of prayer, entreaty, yearning, betrayal, and choosing a path that cost life to give life.  A rosemary bush at the end of our stone wall has wintered, died back, and now demonstrates life beginning again. .Both  the garden I  am remembering and the garden where I walk are places of revelation.

a garden is a place of revelation

seeds that survive to grow

are containers that must open and change,

releasing all that they are

in order to become what they can be.

 

a garden is a place of repair

a wildflower stubbornly pushes through

a crack in the wall, filling that broken place

with green growing hope

 

a garden is a place pointing to resurrection

though whipped by winds and dried from drought,

shattered stalks lift up and flower

beginning again

 

a garden is a place of revelation

but not a place I can stay.

I cross its threshold

and remember.

 

 

 

Green Alleluias

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I cannot count how many different greens appear in Springtime.

There is a blush of green on the trees covered with tiny buds trying to open

The changing green as leaves unfurl and fill branches of oak and elm

Sprouting snap peas, lettuces, and fledgling tomatoes are not the same color

Herbs have a whole palette of green of their own: sage, parsley, oregano, chives

Feathery dill and fennel, each uniquely green

All beginning again

All fresh and new

Every green an alleluia,

Singing Easter.

Rooted

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“To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.”                        ~ Simone Weil

Recently when family gathered to help us celebrate our 50 years of being married, we were given a small white pot which contained a plastic bag filled with potting soil and a dried, brown ball with papery layers peeling back about the size  of a small onion. It was an Amaryllis bulb.  As long as I let the pot, the soil, and the bulb wait on my counter, nothing much happened.  There was one place where a spot of green wanted to push through its crackly wrapping, but seemed to have grown weary and quit trying.  But as soon as opened the soil packet and poured it into the pot, pushed the bulb down, set it in a window, and added water, I could almost hear the dry dirt begin to breathe a lullaby to hungry roots as they began to channel new life into stalk and leaf. Two sturdy stems soon grew heavy with swelling buds.  Above, the first scarlet flower opens wide, stamens heavy with pollen.

026Then there were three, so large it seemed they would topple. And just as the first bloom began to fade, the second stalk of buds began to open.  In all, 6 magnificent delights have graced the plain white pot in my kitchen window. Without roots, this blooming would have stayed inside the brown bulb.  The roots were a potential, but not a possibility until nourished with soil and light and water.

What nourishes my soul to satisfy this need for rooting?  Do I choose that which roots and grows?  These are questions I ask again in a soul’s wintering.