Tag: Love

Accomodation, Affirmation, Camping, Close Quarters, Uncategorized

The Buck Snorts of Life

This Side of the River

One intent of this blog is to challenge us to live life fully… grace-fully, wonder-fully, hope-fully.  Because being around the Walton brothers is such a hoot, I hope to experiment with using humor to face our challenges with this grace, wonder, and hope.  Here’s to first attempts!

My husband Mark and his younger brother Hugh have been paddling their sea canoes in the wilds of the north for over 25 years. For most of those years the brothers always shared a small tent. Mark will readily tell you that his brother snores. Not the little snips and snorts of a sleepy tongue relaxing at the back of the mouth, but the giant, gaping, mawing croaks that sound like an angry and randy buck. If you have spent much time around deer, you know about the buck snort. It’s a cross between a loud grunt, a sneeze, and a bawl.  Earplugs don’t begin to help Mark with Hugh’s buck-snorting antics. The noise keeps him awake through the watches of the night, as he lies there rigidly, imagining the tent looking like a flimsy lung inhaling through his brother’s open mouth, followed by a cracking and whiffling forced expulsion of air out his face. Snuffle in. Snort out. All the blessed night long.

Mark has tried pushing Hugh over. Turns out a true buck-snorter can snort as well on his stomach as his back. Each morning he awakes refreshed and looking forward to his coffee, while Mark groggily assess how much sleep he did, or did not actually get. Why it took over twenty years for Mark to start bringing his own tent-pitched as far from his brother’s as the campsite will allow-is something for the psychologists to study. In the end, Hugh’s snoring is likely why they’ve had so little trouble in camp with bears.

We who live intimately with other people know firsthand the little, but many annoyances that intrude on day-to-day life. The power of love in such relationships is to learn to accommodate with grace.

It is the most basic premise of hospitality to accommodate. And it is always your choice: you can either affirm or infirm those you love with your gestures and words (and the tone you use). You can be grandly grace-filled, or you can belittle. One builds, the other tears down.

Take a look at your closest relationships. Can you accommodate the little annoyances without taking offense? Without self-importance? It means to make room for somebody, to be obliging, to tolerate with sacrificial humility. I am not saying you must become a doormat- sometimes the solution is to get another tent! But for most of us, it is just like being in your sleeping bag; it may be time to roll over and cherish the one you’re with, no matter how loud the snorting.

~J.A.P. Walton

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Cancer, Creation, Darkness, death, Faithful Living, God, Hope, John Muir, Lessons from the Wilderness, Life's Storms, Prayer, River, Sierra Nevada, Spring, Trees, Uncategorized, wilderness, wisdom

The Geese, the Floods, and John Muir

This Side of the River

Geese flew over the house this morning, with a honking so hauntingly welcome that it stopped me breathless with the happy assurance that winter is losing its grip. This has truly been a winter of discontent, to borrow from John Steinbeck (my favorite author of fiction). We lost a loved one. Another continues to decline. We are sending up prayers for too much cancer, too many bullets, the sword-rattling of our enemies, and the deaths of two great men of prayer and faith, R.C. Sproul and Billy Graham. This week we had days and days of rain atop melting snow, sending our creeks and rivers out of their banks.

To dwell on all this too long leaves us as drab and lifeless as the snow-matted flood-stained grass. We defend ourselves with intentional numbness. Yet the geese remind us that goodness abounds, that life is not snuffed out entirely, and that there is work to be done. This week, as Trout Creek rose higher and faster, swelling and bullying itself downstream, I thought about the nature of things-water most especially. How it gathers to itself, seeks out the lowest places, dwells and swells with an abandoned playfulness that lurks with deadly innocence too. Water has a voice and a rhythm. It sings and swings down its course, sweeping everything unrooted away with raw power. What other than our faith can anchor us amid the flood of evil tides?  But water is also life-giving.

I have spent this winter reading the selected works of John Muir because his writing is extraordinarily uplifting (winter is long in the north, so I strategically choose reading that will edify and encourage me). Muir’s prose is divinely poetic, and his love for God and Creation oozes from every page. He often wrote about the waters that fall from the peaks of the Sierra Nevada in California, carving out passes and canyons-

“The happy stream sets forth again, warbling and trilling like an ouzel, ever delightfully confiding, no matter how dark the way; leaping, gliding, hither, thither, clear or foaming: manifesting the beauty of its wildness in every sound and gesture.” 1

Muir shows us that part of the water’s power is in the way it glories to be on its way, hailing any who would heed. Spring is coming friends. Won’t it be glorious to be on our way, doing the work God has given us to do, righting wrongs with energy, and pointing others to the same hope we have in God? May you “set forth again” and rise up out of your banks with a renewed vigor, confiding in one another no matter how dark the way. Look up. The geese will show you the way.

~J.A.P. Walton

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  1.  John Muir Selected Writings, A.Knopf, New York. 2017,p.178.  This excerpt is from Muir’s first book, The Mountains of California published in 1894. (an ouzel is a bird)
Darkness, death, Faithful Living, Hope, Lessons from the Wilderness, Light, Uncategorized, Winter

The Light Across the Creek

This Side of the River

Last week, after a full and happy Christmas Day with her family, my mother-in-law went to bed and fell asleep forever. We were not surprised-her light had been dimming over time, and, in these last days, it was as translucent as the papery skin on the back of her hands. After all, life is bounded by breath, pulse, and light. Without these, we are gray and cold and lifeless. And I think that, on this side of the river, the God who breathes life into us, who drums a thrumming pulse into our veins, and who IS the light of our living, also snuffs out our light in His good timing.

Here, at Trout Creek, the woods and running waters meld into the cold and dark of our short winter days. And even though we live just outside the city, without a clear sky and a near-full moon it is deeply dark here, a playground for the owl and deer, but a mask of drear, even dread for the rest of us. But, high up on the hill across the creek, the neighboring house leaves a back porch light on all night long. It is a beacon of hope for me, that this moldering darkness can be split apart, that there is a Light that welcomes us from across the wilderness of this life. Mom’s earthly light went out last week. But the light upon the hill shining through the dark from the other side of the creek reminds me that mom is not really gone, but joined to the great Light that is our Father.

To celebrate mom’s life, we made a pilgrimage to her home up north, and built a giant bonfire on the beach on New Year’s Eve. Hot cocoa, open-fire grilled kabobs, and happy memories of her faithful and cheerful life warmed us in the 10-degree evening full of the light of millions of stars. What a warm comfort it is to know that her light will live on in all of us.

~J.A.P. Walton

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Faithful Living, Hope, Lessons from the Wilderness, Life's Storms, Outdoor Adventures, Prayer, Uncategorized, Winter

Lessons from Trout Creek in Winter

This Side of the River

A winter storm is blowing in from Lake Michigan, and we will be out on snowshoes later even though we are in town for the season. The cold, wind, and snow bear down on us, snarling traffic, calling on us to shovel the drive, creating in us an inner anticipation-a breath-holding hope really, that activities will be cancelled so we can all hole up with soup, hot cocoa, a fire in the fireplace, and a good book. The silence of the snow beckons us to hush our busy holiday “gottas”, a brake on our hectic lives that we might have the time to sit and think about being blanketed by and made white in God’s love.

Out back, along Trout Creek I can see the squirrels from my desk. They are busy snuffling through the snow, and scrabbling under the bird feeder. The chickadees are bursting with energy, and the wild turkeys’ tracks from yesterday are now just a memory. The deer will be here by afternoon on their daily rounds, hoping for an offering of apples. It seems irrelevant that it is cold-life goes on. In this very snow is stored the spring roots’ draught, underneath it the field mouse can travel unseen from the eyes of the hungry hawk.

Such big flakes now! What if each one were a prayer? For God to redouble his restraint on evil. For our many friends with cancer. For a woman at church burying her only daughter this weekend. For warm shelter and food for the homeless. For homes for the thousands of innocent children orphaned by the opioid crisis. For parents of special needs children. For our own aging parents and all those once-stalwart church elders who can no longer come to church. For people beleaguered by bills, addictions, depression, loneliness, and anxiety. For the oppressed who are trapped between war and inhospitable nations. My God, how can these prayers make any difference? I must trust that you hear my voice crying in this wide wilderness.

Oh how deeply I want to drink of wisdom and patience and mercy, for the snow to hide me from the predatory world, to sit wrapped, and silent, as flakes fall like grace from heaven. And after awhile, to bundle myself against white wilderness and go out and embrace it. To discover the beauty that veils the rot. Yes, the world is cold. It is counterfeit too- just sweep aside the snow to discover the season’s decay under the surface. But, remember too that you are loved, held, and comforted by the same God who assures us that spring is also under there, just waiting to shoot through with abundance and mercy and life. After all, he hasn’t missed a spring yet.

~ God’s deep peace be upon you,

J.A.P. Walton