Category Archives: Awe and wonder

Awe and wonder, Creation, Grief and loss, hope, inspiration, Poetry

To the Three Ducks Flying Beneath the Dog Star, by Kathryn Winograd

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So little you know, wild-winged
and unshaken beneath a dog star,
half-grazing the pines, the bare winter
aspen I stand in the dark wash of
waiting for the tip of a yellow moon.
In Ohio, girlhood, these April stars
circled a pond bull-dozed
by my father, a raft of cattail
where the red-wings spun their nests
above the scrim of caught water.
Tonight, in this near dark, so close
my hand could circle it,
Sirius hovers above the red
factory lights of Pueblo
and the Sangre de Cristo blue-
washed in this hour.
I am cold in this wind,
in this spine of the Milky Way,
these blue white stars named
for a bear or a lyre or a woman
weeping her dead into a river.
I think I was still half-sleeping
in a field of grass, in a haze
of stars, in a far and nameless
country you care nothing
about, burying and unburying
those I love. Such quiet,
the mining trucks to the north
stalled and the little generator
of a shed where no one lives
in winter shut down.
And then, your wings, almost
against the moon. Why
must I always be alone,
searching for something beautiful?

—Kathryn Winograd, a poet and essayist, divides her time between Littleton, Colorado, and a “pie in the sky” cabin her husband and she dreamed of for twenty years before stumbling across forty acres of high meadow ranch land near Phantom Canyon. She is the author of six books, including her most recent collection of essays, Slow Arrow: Unearthing the Frail Children, which received the Bronze Medal in Essay for the 2020 Independent Publisher Book Awards. Her first collection, Phantom Canyon: Essays of Reclamation, was a finalist in the Foreword Reviews 2014 INDIEFAB Book of the Year Awards.  Her poetry collection, Air Into Breath, an alternate for the Yale Series for Younger Poets, won the Colorado Book Award in Poetry. She currently teaches for Regis University’s Mile High MFA. She wrote “To Three Ducks Flying Beneath the Dog Star” during the first months of the pandemic.

Awe and wonder, gratitude, inspiration

Surrender’s Blessings

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Though we’d just met when hospital orderlies called us each from waiting room to preop,  she and I agreed: We didn’t want to go. Trained by a culture that prioritizes control over surrender, I asked my orderly, “What if I don’t go?” My new friend concurred: “We’re going on strike.”

Yet off we went to surrender our markers of control: wallets , rings, watches, glasses, clothes. Control was reduced to fumbling with a hospital gown to preserve dignity–barely.

Control had worked during the 40 years cardiologists reported, “Maybe someday you’ll need your aortic valve replaced, but probably not until your 60s, and maybe never.” Now an echocardiogram had shifted “maybe” to consulting a surgeon.

Still I pursued control. I doubled exercise, enhanced nutrition, lost more weight. Maybe I could still strengthen my heart enough to  skip surgery. I felt ever better; a painful challenge if forced into surgery would be relinquishing pre-surgery well-being.

Then another echocardiogram. The valve was leaking badly, its shrinking surface area raising pressures that would eventually destroy my heart. Mortality odds were soaring; maintaining control by resisting surgery would do me in. Any vestige of control now meant choosing surrender.

I grieved this into the final hours. Still, due less to strength of character than to bleak alternatives and a hospital system that sucked me into its inexorable protocols, surrender I did.

I most strongly felt the surrender as not just forced but ultimately embraced after tearful goodbyes to spouse, daughters, siblings gave way to the anesthesiology fellow pushing my stretcher with wheels as balky as some shopping carts down lonely halls. I apologized for her having to explain “He had a lot of good-byes” when an operating room phone call asked why we were late. Gently she told me, “It was moving to see the love.” It’s time to yield to care like this, I thought.

Such kindness was underscored as we reached the operating room, an efficient team inserted IVs, lines, whatnots, and that syringe slowly pushing in to take consciousness. All team members used my name and gave their names. They honored me as person with feelings and fears.

What a gift when offered to one on the cusp of being chilled 10 degrees below normal, chest sawed open, heart stopped, blood and breath circulated by machine, the symbolic and in many ways literal seat of being to be held in a surgeon’s hands as aorta is clamped off,  diseased valve removed, new valve sewed in. Would a clot break loose? Warmth ever return? Heart restart?

Then puzzling light and shadows. I remembered the man born blind reporting, after Jesus healed him, seeing men like trees walking. Through ICU windows I was glimpsing midday sun on hospital buildings.

Though pain and recovery lay ahead, I had awakened to so many gifts: discovering that the feared breathing tube had already been removed, that my incision had been minimally invasive, that I was . . . alive! My mind seemed still mine. The stuffed narwhal my granddaughter had given me, matching her own so we could together be comforted, was tucked in beside me. Love filled the room—first as compassionate staff cared for me, then as loved ones arrived.

Many of the effects of surrender in this context were so intense as to be almost mystical beyond words, but truth-telling does require reporting that not all was peaches and cream. After catheter was first removed a combination of anesthesia aftereffects and my reaction to lost privacy completely froze my bladder. This continued for so many hours that if I had not surrendered to some, shall we say, very direct interventions, what I had always anxiously assured my spouse could happen on too long a plane flight would have happened: something would have burst.

But let me ask you, if you had trouble managing some of your affairs in public and you were told somebody always had to be with you, what would  you do?

Or suppose you at last negotiated that you would be allowed to try by yourself so long as you stayed near the call button. By now even the most rules-affirming staff–who were, after all, just trying to obey the rules to keep the patient safe–realized creative alternatives must be sought. Then suppose every time you started to unfreeze you could hear your heart monitor, wi-fi carrying it out to main hall and nurses’ station for all to enjoy with you, beeping and cavorting with every move while you waited for someone to race in and code  you. What would you do?

Well, what I did was this: I yielded to catheterization whenever the freezing had gone on too long to remain unaddressed. And I turned to my post-partum daughters, who had in total delivered six babies and had learned, I now began to grasp in fuller ways by far than before, what it means to give up all privacy and bodily control. Minute by minute and hour by hour–thank you dear children–they coached me through.

Frozen body functions remained, however, far outweighed by learning like never before the power of being cared for in body and spirit. One nurse, sensing the exhaustion Joan and I were feeling due not only to recovery intensities but also constant night interruptions and noises, proactively conceptualized the entire night so she could structure it to give us the longest periods of unbroken sleep.

Another night, Eun-Hui and Bryna needed to take extra care of the endless array of wires and tubes attached to me and into me, into my chest, arms, carotid artery, and even, I was intimidated to learn, the very core of my heart. There at 3:00 a.m. they stood on either side of me, Eun-Hui supervising as each took turns checking bandages, adding ointments, in a few wonderful cases taking this or that out for good.

Off to my left,  an utterly worn-out alien slept on a fold-out chair. It was my poor spouse, ears muffled in noise-canceling headphones, each eye looking like a magnified fly’s eye under a black mask. A nurse herself who had once cared for people in my situation, knew the dangers, and had endured months of worry long before the traumas of supporting me through surgery, now she could rest into the gift of other nurses taking over. She particularly deserved that after the first night, when with no place in to stretch out while I was in intensive care she had slept sitting straight up except with head bent onto my bed.

So now on both sides of me for over half an hour Eun-Hui and Bryna painstakingly worked. Carefully, gently, skillfully, they created what came to seem to me a holy time, a period of understanding as well or better than I ever had in worship the healing effects of the laying on of hands. When they were done, Eun-Hui asked how I was doing then as they turned to leave of all things thanked me, adding with a smile, “You were a very patient patient.”

I realize, with sorrow, that millions who deserve it don’t get such care, including as overseen in this case by a surgeon whose colleagues kept volunteering that I was in world-class hands. I realize as well, after starting to see the enormity of the claims my bills are making on Medicare, that anyone who thinks the challenge of health-care costs is solved simply with hard work and personal responsibility has not tried having a heart valve replaced in the U.S. health system.

So I am profoundly thankful as I remember those hospital days, just three but with effects that shaped not only my body but also my spirit for the rest of however many days I still have. I feel grief for a culture that shapes me and us to learn so  much more about control than surrender. And I feel sheer gratitude at having been invited to learn that surrender offers not only curses but also mystic blessings.

—Michael A. King is publisher and president, Cascadia Publishing House LLC. He writes “Unseen Hands” for Mennonite World Review, which published an earlier version of this column.

Awe and wonder, grace, hope, Mennonite poet, Poetry

Be Not Afraid and other Poems, by Julie Cadwallader Staub

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Be Not Afraid

I am converted and every day:

when the clouds dream
a new dream
and fill the air
with snow

when the pines and hemlocks
lift their needles
and welcome
what sun there is

when the creek,
hard frozen,
listens as the fox
trots along its side.

This world of enchantment
waits for you
like the milkweed
standing in this snowy field

its pod open wide
like angel wings outstretched
ready to catch
the rising wind.

Moth

When Jesus said, “Suffer the little ones to come unto me”

I know he included this inch-long moth
marooned on the bike path
gray wings delicately trimmed in white
a neon orange head
an iridescent blue body.

When I put my fingers down in front of it,
it climbs right into my hand,
happily, I think,

and when I crouch at the edge of the path
to let it go
there is a young apple tree growing there,
sensitive and wood ferns,
buttercups,
a spray of little white asters

for such is the kingdom of heaven.

Slow by Slow

“Secret work has been done in us of which we’ve had no inkling.” —John O’Donohue

It’s like yeast, they say
or a mustard seed

but I submit
it is also like carpenter ants

the way they work, hidden,
unbidden, unnoticed,

deep within the foundation, the walls,
the very structure of the house

so that one day
light filters through
where a thick wall stood

one day
you see a patch of open sky
where the hardest ceiling had been

one day a door
stands ajar that has been
locked for a lifetime.

Slow by slow
grace finds a way.

Slow by slow
still the gift comes.

—Julie Cadwallader Staub’s poems have been published in various journals, featured on “The Writer’s Almanac,” and included in such anthologies as Poetry of Presence (Grayson Books) and Roads Taken: Contemporary Vermont Poetry (Green Writers Press). Her poem “Milk” won Hunger Mountain Review’s 2015 Ruth Stone Poetry Prize. Her first collection of poems, Face to Face, was published by Cascadia Publishing House in 2010, and her second collection, Wing Over Wing, will be published by Paraclete Press in 2019 and will include all three poems posted here.

Awe and wonder, Poetry

Along the Shining Sea and other poems, by Clarissa Jakobsons

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Along the Shining Sea

Cumulus pockets of abandon hover

over waves. High tide churns seaweed tufts

close to my chair and feet. I sit on stones

b

listen to the ocean breathe, watching a seal

drift past. Low flying, double-breasted

cormorants head toward the dilapidated

b

pier where several posts remain.

My Canadian friends left this morning, packed

their van by 8 am, kids strapped to back seats

b

with stuffed sharks and 120 plastic critters in a box.

Four-cormorants drift, open mouths anticipating

a free meal. I miss my new little friends,

b

6-year-old Clare and 8-year-old Eliza.

Last night, free hugs and kisses filled old bodies

with warmth. Clare called me the pretty one,

b

Grandma watched, thankful for her first embrace.

Live well, my lovelies. Catch the sails and check-out

the horseshoe crabs on shore. Sleep safe

b

tucked in clouds. Listen to the waves at your feet.

You don’t have to touch bottom when you swim,

just kick,

kick, and kick.

b

Listen to the Great Emptiness

Can you hear the tide turn its head at Sippewissett

Two ocean sunsets lost

forever chased by Hurricane Earl.

The geese are not crying.

b

Falmouth shoppers scurry shopping carts

instead of the sea. I flee Buzzards Bay, Bourne.

Along Route 86 and 17, the Southern Tier Expressway

past Albany, Binghamton, Corning, New York.

b

In a far field, cows and horses cast shade

and Angus nestle like crows.

Evening Primrose opens a window,

a promise. Water

b

lilies tighten under darkening sky

cold rains dampen feet.

Curled hay, bundled and tied,

full streams ahead.

b

Suddenly, Lake Erie appears

as an ocean cradling its own light.

My fingers loosen grip, a seashell falls—

Home.

Originally published in The Tower Magazine, UK

b

Somewhere Between Heaven and the Heron 

The call of the running tide is clear,
a wild call that cannot be denied
—John Mansfield

There’s something to be said

about the wind waving in the ocean

rinsing shells that nag the traveler

upset by cell phones wailing,

sea gulls screeching, or men

shearing leaves at dawn.

b

Quartz sand blows across his face,

the slight sting reminds of breath

where sea salt drips to nourish sand,

black-eyed Susans, sea oats,

and a few Palmetto palms.

b

Somewhere between heaven

and the heron there is a song.

b

Eternity Meets the World’s Beginning

He departs as swift as his arrival, our minutes a fond memory. A gift. Return tomorrow, egret, I’ll serve a fresh plate of beef Wellington next to the shells. We’ll speak of the past, herald desires to the sky and wink with a smile.

Like a poem, his plumage flows in wind, spiral tufts crowning head. Toes stretch into still-wings. I wrestle the urge to stroke his down, hunted years past almost to extinction for feathery hats. Today, we share this space, this air. This pure-white charmer preens like a tightrope walker balancing on a toothpick. Bright yellow-basket feet, one tucks suspended from sight. His head nestles into the soft pillow of his back, ever-present, watching every move.

I sneak Mother-May-I steps into hotel room for a Canon camera. He inches toward the door concentric eyes zoom onto a plate of empty shells cleansed of salt drying in never-fading brilliance. Quickly, I close the door and snap 100 snowy egret photos.

Within a wink the white moon perches on the rail overlooking beach gulf sand where eternity meets the world’s beginning.

I am.

The Gulf Between Us

His plumage wades through black seas:
tufted crown still wings, toothpick legs
glaze mordant red. His beak stabs my gut.

I turn off the news.

Creatures great and small
covered in the doom and sludge
of sleep. He swallows
tar balls thinking food.

—Clarissa Jakobsons, Aurora, Ohio, teaches art and writing courses at a local community college. Her art has been exhibited widely. Recently she enjoyed a Fine Arts Work Center artist residency and is working on a book of poems. Visiting Cape Cod during her college years instilled in Jakobsons a love for the ocean though without her quite knowing why it felt like home. When her daughters visited Lithuania of her childhood and sent photos of the Baltic dunes, she immediately understood the connection—the sea harbors a special place in her DNA; it is why she curls toes in the sand.

Awe and wonder, holiness, inspiration

Shot Through with Holiness

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HolinessKCPost-MAKAs I headed for retreat in Arizona’s Verde Valley, words of Eastern Mennonite Seminary colleague Linda Alley, insights honed as spiritual director, still rang: “I imagine it as a pilgrimage—the journey itself will teach you and not necessarily the destination. And . . . as every pilgrim comes back changed and brings gifts . . . , you will also. . . . I wish for you many holy moments.”

What happened? Three factors stand out:

First, during retreat, around when the Washington Post (Paul Schwartzman, March 6, 2016) said psychologists and massage therapists report client panic over apocalyptic election scenarios, a loved one called to process such anxiety. What, we pondered, is our hope if this really happens?

Montezuma Well provided one complex response. A spring has long fed this near-lake. Its waters probably originally fell on the Mogollon Ridge far above and miles away 10,000 years ago. Eventually the Well drew people, their cliff houses dating back a thousand years still visible in the rim. The water exits into a channel built perhaps by the Hohokam, who irrigated 60 acres of crops. The National Forest Service says that “For many cultures, Montezuma Well is . . . sacred. . . . a place of power, not to be visited lightly. . . .”

Almost forever, as known human history goes, that spring has fed that well. Now there I was, drawing hope from being alive in this moment, grateful to learn from prior journeyers. Complicating hope was that the cliff houses are empty. The Europeans who eventually arrived didn’t totally destroy the beauty and bounty, but local mesquite trees adapted to almost no rain are threatened as humans lower the water table.

Any hope for our own future will need to thread through the possibility that our culture is already shaping the ruins future civilizations will visit.

From Arizona I traveled into a second factor, politics juxtaposed with the convention of the National Council for Behavioral Health, Joan’s employer. I attended awards evening just as primary election results arrived. Often winning: being biggest, baddest, boldest; urging torture, war crimes, racism, xenophobia.

Although Christian language wasn’t explicit, awards in contrast celebrated serving, in effect, “the least of these,” those facing mental and behavioral challenges.

The climactic award went to a sheriff who talked down from suicide persons preparing to leap from the bridge he monitored. Though that was heroic enough, a standing ovation supported his naming his own depression and his walk with a suicide-tempted son.

Then in a few final Verde Valley hours, I showed Joan my places of pilgrimage. At Sycamore Community Park, she reacted as I had. Through a sometimes worn and dusty town (near tourist-ridden Sedona but entirely different) runs Beaver Creek, lined by ordinary houses, running under an ordinary bridge. Yet it carries the outflow of Montezuma Well. So in its ordinariness Beaver Creek bears millennia of hopes dashed and raised, cultures vanishing and rising.

Sycamore Creek Park
Beaver Creek, Arizona

“But it’s like the Branch,” Joan said.

Branch Creek, Pennsylvania
Branch Creek, Pennsylvania

Precisely. Creeks transposed and viewed from certain angles, only details would have told us which was which. Two-fold holiness: first, this site offered our souls a path into the holy. Second, it reminded that in our own ordinary lives there is, a quick walk from home, holiness as well.

The world does seem to teeter near apocalypse. We don’t know how much will die before resurrection. But I’m grateful for what Linda helped me see along the way.

—Michael A. King is dean at Eastern Mennonite Seminary and a vice-president at Eastern Mennonite University; columnist, “Unseen Hands,” for Mennonite World Review which first published this post;  blogger and editor, Kingsview & Co; and publisher, Cascadia Publishing House LLC.

 

Awe and wonder, hope, inspiration

PawPaw, Rockets Whoosh

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“PawPaw,” he excitedly reported, “rockets go up in the air, whoosh!”

The image took me back, instantly, to when I was 14 and for six months lived for almost nothing but waiting for Apollo 11 to take off and turn the type of whooshing-rockets science fiction I loved into reality. If Apollo 11 managed to make it to the moon, who knew, maybe someday we’d arrive on Mars and learn that the haunting stories Ray Bradbury told in The Martian Chronicles were more history than fiction.

“Did you know, Kadyn,” I asked, “that a long long time ago rockets took off and landed on the moon?”

His eyes widened. “They went up, whoosh, to the MOON?”

“Yes, can you believe it? You know what? There are videos of it. Do you want to see one? We could Google it.”

“Yes, yes! Mom, Mom, PawPaw and I are going to watch videos of rockets going to the moon.”

So we Googled Apollo 11 blast-off videos. Of course there they were, link after link. We clicked. YouTube came up. A rocket was sitting there on the screen in the blue day, wisps of smoke puffing out every now and then.

Kadyn was transfixed. “Is it going to go up?”

He had just been singing a nursery song the day before that included “5-4-3-2-1 blastoff.”

“Yes,” I reported, “see those numbers on the screen? They’re counting down to blastoff, and when you hear them get to 5-4-3-2-1, up it will go.”

5-4-3-2-1 goes the count. A great cloud of fire, burning yellow and white and orange and who knows how many colors, surges around the rocket. For a while it just sits there, fire raging and raging.

Apollo11LiftoffCloseUp

Then slowly slowly, startlingly slowly given the fury of the flames, story upon story of that Saturn V rocket crawl up past the holding arms.

Apollo11ClearingTowerCropped

We watch  until the rocket is too far up to see except for the faint contrail.

Then the YouTube screen switches. We’re circling the moon. “Is that the moon, PawPaw? Did the rocket go all the way to the moon?”

We watch and watch. We see the moon lander detach from the moon orbiter. We see Neal Armstrong’s eyes, startlingly steady as they gaze at his flight instruments. We watch the moon’s surface grow closer and closer as Mission Control, down on Earth, monitors the countdown. We watch as the camera steadies. The Eagle has landed.

I found it hard not to shed tears, which I didn’t want to do, given that it would trigger “PawPaw, why are you crying?” and what in the world would I say to that?

I’m still not fully sure why the urge. Maybe because just like that I felt 14 again, before all that was to come, wonders and terrors, had befallen me and the planet. Maybe because it still stuns me that when I was a boy science fiction always primed us to expect more and then yet more. In 1969 we could only imagine what unbelievable things would be happening by 2016. Maybe not spaceships to the stars yet, but surely a colony on the moon? Some people on Mars at least long enough to lay a copy of The Martian Chronicles on the red sand like Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin left earth equipment on the moon as Michael Collins waited above for them?

But no. When Kadyn and I watched the Eagle pop back up from the moon to return to Collins, it felt almost more like science fiction than when it first happened. So did it as the cameras panned over people of all races and nations and colors, all over the planet, gazing spellbound at TV screens. How did we do that? How did we manage to be unable now to do it again?

So maybe the tears were about the fading of some dreams. But maybe also about a few more things.

For one, even as Apollo 11 blasted off, people understandably wondered if this was the right way to spend the countless dollars and energies it had taken in a world so awash with deprivation and misery for so many. Barely more than months before, Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had been killed. Race riots blazed across U.S. cities and napalm burned the flesh off those we considered our enemies in Vietnam.

Maybe the tears were partly awe that, so many decades later, the world could still produce grandchildren.

Above all, I suspect they were caused by the gift of being able to witness the fresh wonder of a child gazing at images that thrilled his budding mind and spirit. As so much unravels today, his face fixed spellbound on the screen made me pray that, though I’ll be long gone, half a century from now he’ll be in my role. He too, I dream, will share with a grandchild what happened, oh so amazingly, back when he was a boy and the world was in such trouble yet look, yes, here we still are—and can you believe it, this really did happen. Let’s watch!

—Michael A. King is dean at Eastern Mennonite Seminary and a vice-president at Eastern Mennonite University; Mennonite World Review “Unseen Hands” columnist; blogger and editor, Kingsview & Co; and publisher, Cascadia Publishing House LLC.