OUR COMMON HOURS

Kelli Ann Wilson April 12, 2018

welcoming (imploring! beseeching!) spring

Measure your health by your sympathy with morning and spring.
If there is no response in you to the awakening of nature,
if the prospect of an early morning walk does not banish sleep,
if the warble of the first bluebird does not thrill you,
know that the morning and spring of your life are past.
Thus may you feel your pulse.

—from the journal of Henry David Thoreau (1859)

Harsh words from Mr. Thoreau, but I will tell you this: I could not have more sympathy with morning and spring if I tried! But, my sympathy is cloaked with impatience—when will spring truly arrive? Even the plants are anxious, I can feel that. The iris and lily sprouts have popped their heads up out of the soil, but they’re unsure whether or not the time of growth has come. Most mornings they seem to huddle together in an attempt to keep warm. Even the chives are plodding.

I’ve been doing what I can during this protracted gloom, raking up the detritus of winter storms, pruning (hopefully correctly) our pear trees, checking on this, that, and the other thing in the yard. But, still, mother nature makes me wait. Perhaps the ‘early’ Easter is to blame for the dissonance I feel—the Resurrection has come but the world slumbers on, oblivious to the miracle that has transpired.

Kelli Ann Wilson March 30, 2018

Mandatum Novum

Mandatum novum do vobis ut diligatis invicem sicut dilexi vos ut et vos diligatis invicem.
A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another; even as I have loved you, that you also love one another.
—John 13:34

It is Good Friday, and the weather is enticingly warm. From underneath their shrinking blanket of snow, I can hear the plants calling to me. Without boots I trace the narrow strips of snowless earth, and find myself at the edge of the bed of winter wheat we planted in September. “Can these dry bones live?” I ask myself. I ruffle the half-grown sprouts with my hand and they feel alive, despite their worse for wear appearance. Fragile, but alive nonetheless.

Before I know it, I am fluffing up more patches of wheat, pulling out dead and decaying leaves that fell in the fall. I run and dig my rake out of a pile of bits and bobs in the garage, and scrape it gently across the surface until the whole bed shines from within with the green light of life. With each passing moment, I feel more alive myself.

In the distance I hear geese, and as they get closer I look up to watch them pass. Suddenly I am overwhelmed. I feel my throat tighten—sometimes spring does this to me. The geese are so beautiful, and seeing them return reassures me that renewal is possible in this world where it sometimes feels like everything is passing away. I feel warmth and light pouring out from me toward the geese, toward the spring, toward the plants slowly greening beneath the snow. It is laughably, joyously easy to love all of these things.

It is not so easy to love humankind—I have been painfully aware of that this week. As I prune the raspberries and claw the dead leaves from around their canes, I think about the Lord’s new commandment: Love one another as I have loved you. “But,” I protest, “I am not You. I do not know how.” I sit with that thought for awhile and then, in the stillness, the small voice says, “Love them like you love the geese.” Perhaps that is a good place to start.

Kelli Ann Wilson February 20, 2018

in the woods // quadragesima

There are things you can’t reach. But you can reach out to them, and all day long.
Looking I mean not just standing around, but standing around as though with your arms open.
And thinking: maybe something will come, some shining coil of wind, or a few leaves from any old tree—
And now I will tell you the truth. Everything in the world comes. At least, closer.

—from “Where Does the Temple Begin, Where Does It End?” by Mary Oliver

It is February. It is Lent. We walk through the white woods, and the winter does not bite. The snow sags and melts, forming clear pools ringed with ice. A vole, running low, slips between two worlds and descends. Remnants of beech leaves curl inward and turn slightly in the breeze, resembling tiny wings when they meet. The bones of the world are heaped around us. The skeleton trees stretch up and out, hatching the gray sky with their dark branches as their roots tangle and sink deeper . . . into the dust from whence all creatures come.

And, yet, a voice on the wind is singing: Behold, I make all things new.

Kelli Ann Wilson December 9, 2017

the mystery of seeds

Another year gone, leaving everywhere its rich spiced residues:
Vines, leaves, the uneaten fruits crumbling damply in the shadows . . .
moldering in that black subterranean castle of unobservable mysteries –
roots and sealed seeds and the wanderings of water.

—from “Fall Song” by Mary Oliver

Even as this summer’s growing season was winding down, and despite putting up almost more beans than the freezer could hold, our bean plants continued to flower and produce pods. Given that our vegetable gardens are quite humble in size and scope, I had never attempted to save the seeds from anything we grew, but something had to be done with those beans. So, I pulled up the plants, tied them together with twine, and left them to hang in the garage for awhile. When the pods were satisfactorily dry, and the hard beans rattled around inside, we brought the lot into the house and carefully extracted the smooth, hard little seeds. Now they will sleep through the cold, dark winter and perhaps—if we are lucky—they will bring forth next summer’s harvest.

Kelli Ann Wilson December 5, 2017

the advent wreath

Dank fens of cedar; hemlock-branches gray
With trees and trail of mosses, wringing-wet;
Beds of the black pitchpine in dead leaves set
Whose wasted red has wasted to white away;

Why hold ye so my heart, nor dimly let
Through your deep leaves the light of yesterday . . .
Is it that in your darkness, shut from strife,
The bread of tears becomes the bread of life?

—from Sonnets, First Series (Sonnet VI) by Frederick Goddard Tuckerman

Northern white-cedar, eastern hemlock, soft white pine . . . I gather them in the quiet afternoon hours of the first Sunday in Advent. In early December the sun rests low in the sky, mostly hidden behind the leaves and needles of the conifers that half-ring our yard. Not one of these trees belongs to me—they sit just outside what I might call my own—but I do not think these stolid natives of the eastern lands much mind the quick snips of my shears, or my pilfering just a few sprigs from their still-lush beauty. The trees are who they have always been and I do what we have always done, as the wheel of the year turns and the darkness descends. The evergreens bear on, and we fragile creatures of the earth gather their boughs and wait for the Light.