Tag: Spring

Anishinaabek, beauty, Birds, Blessings, Creation, Creator, Forest, God, Hardiness, joy, Kindred Spirits, Losing yourself in nature, Nature, Peace, Praise, Silence, Spring, The forest and the dune, The sounds of nature, The squirrel and the rabbit, The white cedar, Trees

Losing Yourself

This Side of the River

We went exploring yesterday in neighboring Sleeping Bear National Lakeshore https://www.nps.gov/slbe/index.htm, and discovered an old cedar gnarled in grace at the edge of a small lake. It has the typical cedar’s look of a tree in skirts, the deer having browsed the lower vitamin C-laden branches years ago. Underneath a lush, loamy, fragrantly pungent blanket of woodsy compost harbored what I imagine is a million little insects awaking to the spring sun’s warm invitation. The whole scene was one of peace. Calm. Rightness.

An imperial tree rooted securely beside living water.

A stunning preservation of a tree so old I could not reach my arms around it (a white cedar can live to be 800 years old). Who was here in its youth? A young Anishinaabek family collecting nuts and berries, chipping Charlevoix chert for knives and spears, and drying salmon for the winter? An 1800’s logger who somehow missed this section of forest? What birds have taken refuge in its thick gown? How many fawns have bedded down with their mothers underneath its umbrella?

Any thought of the forest and its inhabitants awakens my imagination. Just today I watched a robin pair building a nest in the Frasier fir out back, using stuffed beakfuls of bluestem grass cut back in March and laid along the split rail fence for a bird salad bar. How pleasant to see the old grasses carpeting the fluff and cheep of new bird life. Still, the robins will have to be wary of the lazy cowbirds lurking nearby. We have heard and seen the trumpeting sandhill cranes flying over, gawky and loud like they’ve had too much to drink. An evening grosbeak came to the feeder two weeks ago for a two-day layover; he has an appointment further north. Then we were thrilled to see a pair of ruby crowned kinglets snipping in and out of the white pine. Now we await the hummingbirds and orioles and rose breasted grosbeaks, our very best friends of summer here at the bluff.

The other day a heavy, pregnant doe crossed my path down the lane. She wasn’t much bothered by me, so I talked with her a few minutes. I wanted to tell her to leave my red osier dogwoods alone, and she wanted to thank me for my hospitality in planting things she finds tasty.

In the end, I live in her world, not she in mine, and I must concede the right of way for browsing when there will be little ones to feed and fatten.

The squirrel and the rabbit have signed a truce under the bird feeder, where we often spill a little seed for the ground feeders. Those two, black and gray, sleek and fluffed, poke around in the sand for breakfast, sometimes surprised to come nose to nose. Yet no fight ensues. Neither chases the other away. They bow their heads and keep on feeding. Do I really own this land? I think not. It is theirs and always was. Their descendants will long outlive my own family line.

I am headed out to plant more lettuces, to transplant several balsam fir out of the little nursery where I have been babying them, and to soak my being in the sights and sounds of forest and dune. The newest catchphrase for getting out into nature is “outervention”-a sort of psycho-babble for letting God’s creation soothe your soul, and bring peace to your anxious heart.  My prayer for you this spring is that you too can get outside, lose yourself in watching the birds and flowers and trees and creeks and lakes in a way that nudges you to remember, always, to praise their Maker.

Thanks for reading along! Sorry it has taken so long to write something for you!! 

J.A.P. Walton

Email me with comments: jpraywalton.writing@gmail.com

beauty, Creation, Creator, Forest, joy, Nature, Spring, Uncategorized, wilderness

Herald of the North

This Side of the River

The trillium are in full bloom at Trout Creek,

wearing their white petals like a regal ermine stole.

They blossom early here in southern Michigan; their northern kin won’t be out for another few weeks.

When we first began living in Michigan in the summers, Memorial Day weekends were set aside for the work of opening up: raking, splitting wood, fixing potholes in the 2-track lane, and getting fresh linens on the beds. My clearest memories of those times, aside from the uncontainable thrill to be up north on the cusp of school letting out, was the deep green of the woods carpeted with hundreds of the pink-tinged white of the trilliums’ nodding heads. Like the first robin, and the April earthworm escaping a flooded tunnel, the sight of trillium throughout the forest was

a beauty almost too tender, too holy to behold.

Even today, it brings on a euphoria like few other experiences can.

Maybe that is because northern Michigan has always represented freedom (from the tedium and demands of school especially), and the beauty of lakes and dunes and deep, blue skies (suburban Chicago was a spidery, tentacled cage made of steel and cement and insipid cookie-cutter subdivisions). Even today, turning the car northward sparks a tiny flame of delight that fans itself into joy with each passing mile.

Trillium. A three-petaled lily. (Did you know that flowers with just 3 petals are rare?). Protected. Herald of the north.

A triune beauty that speaks to the nature of God. 

Keep your eyes peeled for the trillium, nodding to greet the longer days and welcome the wanderer, the seeker, the tired and worn.

Thanks for reading along! Enter your email to follow along!

~J.A.P. Walton

 

 

Affirmation, Birds, Blessings, Creation, Creator, Faithful Living, Forest, God, Lessons from the Wilderness, Nature, Peace, Pilgrimage, Prayer, Religion, Silence, Spring, Uncategorized, wilderness

Manifold Witness

This Side of the River

We are briefly back north at the bluff to open the house and plant the garden. It is always a “hard work” kind of week-clearing sand out of gutters, raking leaves, sweeping and dusting every horizontal surface, washing windows (a never-ending list really…when was spring cleaning ever easy?).  At the same time, it is curiously restful because we are surrounded by beauty in every direction.  The distractions are natural ones, instead of manmade. No highway or airport noise, no sirens, no teens driving by with thumping base, no door-to-door salesmen. Not even cell phone robo-calls, since the cell signal in the north woods is so weak. The Internet here is iffy too, and our monthly plan severely so limited datawise that we must, by necessity, trim the sails of online time.

Away from town, it’s easier to pay less attention to the news and its tendency to dampen the spirit. There is just something about finding yourself isolated from the noise of the world that is settling. Calming. Affirming. It layers on a balm of hours to get to work with grateful hands, despite the creaky knees and shoulders.  Here, the distractions are different- the screech owl and red-bellied woodpecker. The drumming of an amorous ruffed grouse, a deer prancing by, and the fog rolling in over the lake. Just like in town, we aren’t alone.

The manifold witness of all of nature* reminds us minute by minute of the love, creativity, faithfulness, and constancy of God, maker of heaven and earth.

The bird chorus at dawn, the pregnant bobcat, the mist heavy over the bog, and the waves pounding the foot of the bluff- these are God’s way of assuring us that he is here, ever-watchful, always waiting.

The good news is that you don’t have to go to the north woods to hear and see God’s goodness.

It is my prayer that you can find a space this week to let the beauty of creation enfold you right where you are.

There is glory in the daffodil, marvel in the work of the ant and wren, and a delight in the unfolding of tender new leaves. See if you can silence the distractions wrought by this worrying world long enough to go outside and enjoy what God gives to all so freely.

~J.A.P. Walton

* from the hymn, Great is Thy Faithfulness

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)