Gratitude in the Ordinary

It is easy to give thanks on feast days, like the beautiful bright and sunny Thanksgiving holiday we had a couple of days ago. Today, however, it is cold and damp, rainy and dark and, in the same spirit, I am celebrating, in my ordinary daily life, that for which I am thankful. Such an exercise is not always my mindset, lest any be misled, but I am praying about and working towards developing a grateful spirit, no matter what the externals might be. I will not always manage it, I am well aware, but, at the moment, I am enjoying the ease in which so many daily blessings spring to mind. 

In no particular order, I am grateful for:

The bright red of winterberry and deep red of oak-leaf hydrangea on this colorless day in late November
The joy of oiling a more-than-a-century old chestnut table and butter bowl and more recently handmade wooden utensils
The intense, deep purple layers of a red onion, as shiny as any eggplant
A delicate, blue pottery cup my daughter once gave me, that makes me feel like a queen when I drink from it
Beavers working in the marsh, who seem to pay no heed to the day's humanly inhospitable conditions
A dawn chorus of birds that, while diminished in variety, still greets each day with enthusiasm
The few remaining herbs in my garden that spice up salads of mostly arugula and kale
Foraged greens for creating Christmas wreaths of cedar, pine and holly
The chattering of an eagle overhead and chittering of a nearby red-headed woodpecker
The two black, formerly-neutered feral, cats who have made our back porch their home
A dear husband who loves me as I am
Grown children and their children who continue to delight and encourage
The opportunity to help a neighbor in need this afternoon
A heart that still is able to love, despite the awareness of having hurt and been hurt by others
The abiding presence of the Spirit of the living God

May your own hearts be filled with gratitude, even in the midst of struggle, as you head into this blessed Advent season.

Where is Home?

Today, a new friend asked me, "Where is home, Ann?"  An easy enough question but I did not know what to say.  What she really meant was,"Where do you feel at home?" and that is what gave me pause.  A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to spend hours walking a northeast Pennsylvania woodland whose oaks, hickories, maples, black gums,  various viburnums and fall blooming asters and goldenrods glowed with the colors of fall. I felt a deep sense of "rightness", being in that space, one that overshadowed the awareness that I would soon be leaving to return to southern Maryland. I felt "at home" there, but those mountains were not where I live.

I lived in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania for almost thirty years before moving to start life anew in Accokeek five and a half years ago. And many times over, in the course of these last five years, I have returned to visit my children and their children, good friends and familiar places in central Pennsylvania and I have longed to stay. There are memories everywhere I look... memories that span thirty years of my life. When I am there, central PA feels like home, but we do not live there either.

We have lived in southern Maryland for more than five years now,and lately I sense this place beginning to have a "homeness" to it that I have not experienced here before. Such an awareness is an unpredictable and transient realization these days, but at least it I recognize it when it comes, however briefly. As I always do, I am working on new gardens at this new/old place where we live now and recently I counted the number of gardens I have tended and then left in the last going-on-six years of moving around. I was startled that this is my fifth garden in almost as many years. I have read about gardeners who love to move and begin new gardens, but I am not one of them. 

As I thought of my friend's question this afternoon, I looked around at the woodlands that surround our home and questioned whether it was living in the midst of this splendor that is allowing that sense of "homeness" to come creeping in. But no, I have appreciated and enjoyed many beautiful natural settings without feeling connected to them with any sense of permanence, and so that isn't it. And then I realized what I have been doing the last couple of weeks, what I do every fall when the leaves begin their glorious transformation...I have been planting the landscape, once again, for color and for wildlife. I have planted dogwoods and crabapples for birds, more salvias for next years's hummingbirds, asters, goldenrods, thorougworts and a host of other natives for next years pollinators. As has been and will be for as long as I am able, it is the planting of habitat that links me to where I live, the partnering with the Creator in sustaining the life that lives around me. 

This afternoon, I wondered more about why this is so..why does creating homes for wildlife mean so much to me, other than that I value their presence? And then I realized...I grew up without a sense of home. My family moved twelve times in my first thirteen years and I attended four colleges before finally managing to finish. After graduating, I lived in nine different houses within eight communities in two countries over the course of the next eleven years, finally living at and coming to love the last house for twenty one years before moving to Maryland and beginning all over again, several times. Creating homes for wild creatures who need them is the only way I know to root myself into where I live. The transient life I have lived accounts, at least in part, for the deep longing and sense of vulnerability I sometimes feel...the tendency towards feeling lost and lonely, without moorings and the connection of place. Creating  spaces for creatures to live their lives in relative safety and stability affords me the opportunity to do the same. I am humbly grateful for their companionship and for that of our Creator God who lives among us.

Winter Gardening and Life with God

What follows is a reworked piece that I originally wrote a few Decembers ago. On such a sunny, balmy February day, I thought it bore a revisit.

I have just come back from what I like to call the vegetable garden area. Many years ago, I created some raised bed in a back corner of our yard and they started out as a butterfly habitat area, when there wasn't yet any other habitat in the yard to speak of. Over the years, as the yard plantings have expanded, the beds have served as an herb garden and a vegetable garden, though last year, I am sorry to say, my dachshunds managed to eat more of the produce than the humans did. Fencing the area will be a priority this spring.

Most years I have taken better care in putting the garden to bed, and I was feeling considerable remorse for ignoring the soil that should have been protected during the winter. Since the weather wasn't too cold or too wet, this became the morning to take care of the long-neglected chore of gathering my neighbor’s piled up leaves and grass clippings and mulching the garden beds. The wheelbarrow and I made trip after trip, gathering and dumping, and, though I took a break for a while, I knew better than to hope that I would finish it another day if I tarried for very long. Finally, after a couple of hours in the wind, I was satisfied with my work and called it a morning. Now when I venture out to the winter garden, I’ll picture the soil microorganisms feeding on the plant material I put down and the beds being enriched by their efforts.

Somewhere along the line, while pushing the wheelbarrow filled with yet another load of dried grass and leaves, I thought about how life with God is similar to the garden task I had undertaken. I wasn't caring for the garden on this winter day because it was in crisis or because there was some extraordinary need. It was just a task that should have been done, a rather routine task, really, particularly if it had been done at the proper time, rather than waiting until just after Christmas. I was just doing what was necessary to ensure the health and fertility of the soil, so that the garden will be as productive as possible during the upcoming growing season.

I think of cultivating my spiritual life in the same manner. It is in my sometimes unremarkable, daily interactions with God that we build the relationship that sustains me and from which I draw when I find myself in need. Lately I have been praying that the Spirit will conform me more to the image of God, that I may represent Him well in the world in which I live. I imagine the process is going to take even longer than than the time needed to build and enrich the soil in my garden. But, just as in soil building, I do not see myself as the one who does the work. In soil building, I bring in the organic matter, but it is the microbes who do the work of enrichment. Similarly, as I bring myself to God, it is He who can do the work of transformation in my heart and spirit. That work isn't something I can ever hope to accomplish myself.

Within the natural world, there are signposts pointing to God almost everywhere I look. The trick is remembering to stop and pay attention, to notice and to ponder, even to wrestle, with their meaning. Embracing what He reveals is the challenge but, even more, the blessing, of learning to know Him and His ways more fully. 

Starting Over Again

Next month, it will be five years since we moved to Accokeek. We started out in this house, moved to the farm for three years, and now are back to where we began our life in Maryland. Now and again, I experience a fleeting remembrance of that initial wonder at living in this local landscape of woodlands, wetlands and fields all around us; of bald eagles, osprey, hermit thrushes, pileated and red-headed woodpeckers as common daily experience. It was about this time in February when my husband and I first explored the nearby boardwalk running between the almost-sleeping marsh and the Potomac River, and I realized that a long-held, but almost forgotten, hope to someday live near a wetland was soon to be fulfilled.

The last year has been one of the most challenging of my life, as we faced the need to move from the farm I had hoped would be our home for as long as we lived in Maryland. Lately, I have been more closely examining just why the prospect of starting over, yet again, has been so traumatic and, recently, was led to an article that finally brought clarity, and with the clarity, an understanding that allows me to move forward. The author of the article had been raised in a military family, as had I, and, like me, she moved every two or three years of her life, never putting down roots or thinking of any place as home. When she was faced with moving from the first little house she ever owned, it caused the same aching anguish that I experienced when we moved from Pennsylvania, and again, when we moved from the farm back to this house. It wasn't that the places we were moving toward were not filled with possibility and promise, but that, for the first time in our lives, we belonged to a place and a place belonged to us... a place that held and nourished us, that vibrated with memories lived and made, that was ours. 

Sometimes, just affirming our emotions and the origins from which they spring is enough to grant us the freedom to move on. I am tentatively working towards believing that home doesn't need to promise permanence in order to be a place of belonging in the now. Come spring, the house in the picture will be alive with the native plants I have tucked into the landscape, even in the depths of winter, and the creatures who will come to visit them. That some of the plants and shrubs I planted here three years ago have survived, and even thrived, is a most welcome gift and a reminder that nothing we do is ever lost. We may no longer be able to see the effects of our labors, or of our loving, but surely the good that we do will surely continue to ripple out, blessing the world, its creatures and its people in one way or another. 

On Holding On and Letting Go

It is finally spring again...almost summer, really. It has been just over 7 months since I wrote the post entitled Holding on and Letting Go and almost as long since I have written anything at all. The winter was a dark time, beginning with the day before Thanksgiving, when I was told that we would soon have to move from the farm where I work and we have made our home. We do not own this house or the land I tend, and are here at the whim of the organization that does. The organization's financial state is primary and that this place has captured my affections and that I work diligently to help take care of the farm, matters little in the grand scheme of its runnings.

I have come to terms with the prospect of moving on through long months of wrestling with grief and with hope in an alternating, exhausting rhythm. All who have faced impending, unwanted changes know of the inner turbulence experienced when life is suddenly wrenched away from their supposed control. But those who, in their fearful yet faithful hearts, determine to trust God (as seemingly impossible as that might feel at the time) also come to find that relinquishing their grasping hold on the course of their lives brings the freedom to surrender to the care of the Good Shepherd. It brings a new realization of His nearness. Or such has been the case with me and with my journey of these last months.

I haven't wanted to write for months and wondered whether I ever would again, really. I questioned whether there was any point and whether I had anything to say that was worth reading...in other words, "Why bother?" And then yesterday a friend encouraged me to begin again and this morning I awoke to the conviction that writing is for the writer, really, and if others enjoy reading the words set forth...well that is a secondary reward. 

Heading into summer and its steamy, hot, abundant fruitfulness I am grateful, again, that I am surrounded by the blessings of my life as it is now...by fragrant woodlands, by a large, demanding, productive garden, by butterflies, bees, songbirds and very loud domestic fowl, and by the new awareness that I can enjoy and appreciate all these gifts for today, not knowing for how long they will be bestowed. And, best of all, I recognize that am ever in the presence of the always patient, always loving, always beckoning Good Shepherd who guards my heart and guides my life. 

November Woods

Every November, beginning in 1979, this poem floats back into my mind, bringing with it a brief but poignant sharpness of long past grief and regret.  My husband and I were in Botswana for a three year term with Mennonite Central Committee, and my mother was newly widowed a few months before we left, back in Virginia. I left for Botswana confused and steeped in guilt, caught between a husband who wanted to go and a mother, alone, who desperately wished we would stay.

From a world away, I put together a scrapbook, of sorts, filled with poems and pictures I cut from South African magazines and mailed it to her in time for the first anniversary of my father's death. Even to me at the time, it seemed a pitiful offering, but it was the best I could do, so far removed from her day to day struggles.  This poem isn't a great one, not of literary excellence or note, but it does convey the essence of November and the memories I carried of the season, in a land where there was no time of year that remotely resembled autumn in the east.

November Woods

Lovely are the silent woods, on grey November days.

When the leaves fall red and gold, upon the quiet ways.

From massive beech, majestic oak and birches white and slim,

Like the pillared aisles of a cathedral, vast and dim.

Drifting mist, like smoking incense, hangs upon the air.

Along the paths where birds once sang, the trees stand stripped and bare.

Making Gothic arches with their branches interlaced,

And window-framing vistas, richly wrought and finely traced.

It is good to be in such a place, on such a day.

Problems vanish from the mind and sorrow steals away.

In the woods of grey November, silent and austere, 

Nature gives her benediction to the passing year.

                                                      Patience Strong

Autumn Brilliance

The exuberance of autumn is already winding down and we are moving into a more subdued season. But even as we watch the last of the leaves swirl down and pull our sweaters more tightly around us against the November chill, this is a good time to think about next year's autumn landscape and what it might offer to us and to migrating birds and butterflies. What follows is a piece I wrote a few weeks ago for a native plant landscaping newsletter. Just as the bulb catalogs arrive in early spring so that we may gaze upon our landscapes and muse, "what if?" now is the time to consider what we might want to add to our autumn landscapes.

If you were asked what you treasure most about autumn, 

what would you answer? Would it be the magnificent color of the mid-Atlantic landscape, or the cool crisp days that call you to spend as much time as possible outdoors?  How about the sights and sounds of migrating warblers, thrushes and sparrows, foraging in the underbrush or perhaps the dwindling song of the season’s crickets and katydids on warm sunny days or chilly evenings?

Each year, as fall approaches I am restless to become a part 

of its story, to be a participant in its grandeur, and to add 

whatever I am able to the glory and abundance of the season. PIanting for autumn has become an integral component of my landscape planning, and as I work to meet the needs of birds and insects, I also revel in the seemingly endless palette of color possibilities. Surrounded by hues of reds, yellows, purples and oranges, I delight in the presence of grey catbirds, bluebirds and cedar waxwings picking berries from the Virginia Creeper and native viburnums that grow in the hedgerow, and thrushes, towhees and brown creepers busily scratching though the leaf litter below. Every autumn the yard is filled with migrating ruby-throated hummingbirds stopping by to nectar at the garden phlox, white turtlehead, obedient plant and jewelweed on their way south. Sparrows, indigo buntings, goldfinches, and chickadees perch unsteadily on seed heads of goldenrods, asters, black-eyed Susans, green-headed coneflowers and native grasses swaying in the breezes and eating their fill.

Planting for beauty and wildlife’s needs in autumn can be one

of the most rewarding aspects of the season. This autumn, take a look around your landscape and notice where you would like to have more color. Our native shrubs and trees take on tones of reds, purples, oranges and yellows and many have colorful berries that will be appreciated by birds needing nourishment as they migrate or prepare for winter. Herbaceous plants for shade that flower well into fall include: zig-zag goldenrod, blue stem goldenrod, white wood aster and blue wood aster. Herbaceous fall flowering plants for sun include: garden phlox, white and pink turtlehead, smooth aster, New York aster, and several beautiful goldenrod species. Of particular note for late fall color in sunny spots is the duo of the bright yellow late black-eyed Susan and the lovely fragrant, light purple aromatic aster .

What better way to enjoy the glorious season of autumn than being outdoors in your own yard, surrounded by birds and bees and butterflies, crickets and katydids, a participant in the natural world and immersed in the beauty and vibrancy of the season.