Snowmelt in rock channels

Jagged boulders, rounded smooth

Ages of Seasons’ wear

Hundred families

Two hundred years.

*

Hills of forest
stone faces                      grass meadows
Snow               on the              ridgeline
Spring hay in the fields
Evergreen among the                      budding trees
Wood barn, red
home to sheep, lives.

*

Steep slopes
Small homes among woods
Church steeples, town centers
Rain on tin roofs, cows on green hills
Life in its place.

*

Miles through haze to skyline

Trees cover waves,

Towns float on swells,

Histories in pictures.

Tell stories                     of

Our family,             coal mines, weddings,

Funerals, hoe-downs.

Tell how     life was,

Mostly still is even now.

Old life-music spans seven decades and more.

*

Five generations over several states,

All have roots

Back down here.

Without this one man, the chain would be broken and

I would not be.

Back-woods folk sings of where I am from,

Where am I going?

Beauty shines a ray
Of sunlight and it breaks
On glass and shatters fine
Between the folds in time
The edges of each shard
Leave soft and weathered scars
Laughs and worries traced
In wrinkles on Earth’s face

II.

Life approaches soon
As dawn melt into noon
Pass towards dusk and fade
Promise fails again
What once began a song
Now toneless carries on
Till night lies in its stead
And rest is found in death

III.

Hope fills what was void
Muffled empty joy
Turn slowly with the day
Steady all the way
Moments as they pass
Leave shadows that they cast
Photographs can’t hold
The feelings which grow cold

IV.

Beauty begins to fade
Erosion undelayed
wrinkles betray age
life in later stage
Laughs and worries’ place
Etched on every face
Passing years away
Beauty lasts a day

Feet deeper in lakes,    flooding cities
     At high tide       twenty more in oceans
     More land         and more water

Not a week later,    sunshine and cloudless sky
       Beating on my back,  no coat
       Is needed now. Summer.
              February.

Between poles    twilight
                       colors of glowing coals
                       streaks of freezing, empty
                 Light
           Flows above heat, cold shades fall
                 Is there is new.

Sunrise in silver and the wind

Aches and repetition

Of labored motions

Tables on pavement, in snowdrifts

Signs of a history

Purity surrounded by particles

Of living death.

*

Ice flows down burning throats

Branches are heavy legs too

Illuminated lines of white on white

Some live on others

in land

*

Voices call, no

One answers late, Selfs

Done quickly, in to

Warmth and satisfaction

Fate                has let me down.

Fears become real, I think What have

I done. The gate has been locked,

I flee the trail, come to another, take

It for a ways, seems good, further, back

fast, resolved, trapped, walls by trail

Cliffs to right, rocks to left, stop.

Look around, maybe this is not

So bad after all.

*

Foot by foot to stone to stone, up and

Down to the end on the path

Walk or run or skip or crawl,

Move. Onward. Whichever path I

May be on.

In the air, melodies call and respond from

Tree to tree as life returns to field and

Flower. Creation holds its breath, waiting

*

For its Sabbath to restore the harmony

Composed when man and beast and land

And God sing the same sacred song. This day

A fermata which allows all instruments

*

To once more find their places on the

Director’s score, and dancers to step and spin

The way most free and natural. The rhythm

Set in seasons, days, years, life,

*

Is good and steady, full of hope that

Loss brings life, and death- relief.

Water flows, stream to pond to cloud then rains

Through storms on grass and tree, homes

*

Where families live and the cycle turns

And returns, healthy. Week of work and toil

For life and joy, ends with Sabbath; the year

With winter, and reprieve makes work delightful.

*

Before man puts his hands to till

And plant for food and humanity

The earth has begun to grow its own

Food and sustain itself. Why fight the peaceful

*World we love and home we’ve had,

Will have for all eternity,

If instead we can live in harmony,

Bringing life and health to our place-

*

To ourselves? Restore the convivality to all

That is around us. The work of

The week is to make things right, as best

We can, Sabbath brings God’s blessing

*

To all we’ve done in His name,

Through divine power with His gentle hand

He directs this symphony so that each part

When played when played in tune becomes aligned

*

And resounds on earth, as it must

In Heaven. Sabbath is the vision of

Rightness and restoring love

Which makes things good, makes all

*

New.

Before me and it remains for me

To walk through it and DOWN

The path that leads BEYOND.

I have not entered or begun

But I may yet

See other gates open

To me and I have

To CLOSE them so that

They never open again.

*

I walk to the gate, along the wall

Which I will not go through

And close it. Raise my hand

With force and pressure.

It gives and closes and it locks so now I am

Committed to the one, if I want

To move forward through

This wall.

*

My path leads on and to the

Otherside of this pile of placed rocks which

Runs right and left for miles.

So I will. I WILL!

Go. FORWARD. I must.

Now! This is my order.

*

To close other doors so that

One may be opened

Is no sadness but joy.

Now I run through this

Gate, down the path,

It was the one

I should have chosen.

No doubting that anymore.

Close other gates. Open this

One.

*

I walk through and turn

Back. Glad, gently close my gate, lock it,

No one can follow.

This is my path. This path

Is my destiny. This journey

My destination.

Beautiful surroundings. I love

Where I am.

I am not even going to try to describe the appearance of the sky. The colors ranged from gold to green, and from violet to orange. It was one of those sunsets you see about once a year.

After a few moments of just staring and trying to absorb some of the glory that was painted on the sky, it became apparent that the clouds were moving as the wind blew them, and the sunset was changing. Some of the clouds that had been pink were now orange. Some of the gold was now red.

It reminded me of a couple essays I read recently by Jonathan Edwards, in which the philosopher discusses the nature of color and its essence and being. As we know now through physics, color is not in an object but is rather the mind’s interpretation of the light that the object reflects. Color is not a thing in itself, at least not physically. If it is to be likened to anything, it must be likened to an idea.

Beauty is a concept that I wrestled with intensely for a few hours last semester, before I came up with some sort of acceptable understanding of it. They say that Beauty Is In The Eye Of The Beholder. Every person sees different things as beautiful, and every culture has it’s own ideal for physical beauty. There is one thing that everyone sees though: Beauty itself. Beauty is a universal idea.

So what makes something beautiful then, I asked. What makes beauty a characteristic of an object? If something can be beautiful to one person and ugly to another, then what decides if that thing is beautiful?

It must be that, for a thing to be beautiful, it must make one think of Beauty the Idea. It must create a thought of Beauty, or reflect the perfection of Beauty. I know now  that this sounds very much like the idea that Plato taught nearly 3000 years ago. (I have, since coming to this conclusion, read The Republic.) While I disagree with Plato on many issues, I think he was onto something, though I do not agree completely.

My understanding of Beauty is more like Edwards idea of color. It not only is a reflection of the Light, it is an understanding of the Light. Without being able to comprehend beauty it is as good as ugly.

Also, I think the idea that color only is shown when some light rays are absorbed and others bounce off has deep implications for the essence of color, and it corresponds with an understanding of Beauty. Color would not exist if not for Light, the characteristic “beautiful” would not exist but for Beauty.

In reflection an object receives a quality of another, without diminishing that quality in the source. The object which reflects takes on a characteristic which is not its own. Color is bestowed. Beauty must be like that as well. (This is where I would be most different from Plato, if I understand things correctly. This is pretty postmodern.) A thing becomes beautiful when it is called beautiful. The fact that a thing has been given the label Beautiful means that that thing is indeed a thing of beauty.

When something is decided to be beautiful, whether by an individual or by a culture, then it becomes beautiful to the person who has deemed it so. Something becomes colorful when light hits it and bounces off it and it is interpreted as colorful by the eye and the mind.

It reminds me of a Sabbath poem by Wendell Berry that says:

… Creation’s seventh sunrise,

Time when the Maker’s radiant sight

Made radiant every thing He saw,

And every thing He saw was filled

With perfect joy and life and light.

The creation account in the Bible says that on the seventh day God looked upon everything He had made and said that it was Very Good. Berry’s poem goes on to talk about how everything was complete and found its pleasure in God, and He got glory from His creation reveling in Him and that any change would be for the worse.

It is an interesting thought, that God looked upon everything and said that it was good. I think that it must have been like turning on a light switch, the first time God looked at His creations– they instantly had color and light and life, because they had been touched by Perfect Divinity. That must be how different things can appear beautiful to different people, because all things were at one point declared to be beautiful by the source of Beauty.

When light hits an object, our eyes see the object as the color of the light which the object reflects, while the rest of the spectrum is absorbed by the object. So everything with a color reflects light, but it also absorbs light. Black and white, the absence of color, respectively absorb and reflect the entire spectrum of red, orange, green, blue, and violet. An object that reflects perfectly would be white, all light would reflect and it would take on the characteristic brightness of the light.

The Hebrew King David prayed in Psalm 51 that God would wash him and make him “whiter than snow.” The prophetic book that comes last in the Christian cannon, which recounts the Revelation to John the Apostle speaks of the saints being given white robes. Matthew’s narrative of the Gospel says that before Jesus ascended into heaven, “His appearance was as lightening, and His robe was whiter than snow.” If snow reflects up to 90% of the light which hits it, then Jesus must have physically been a perfect reflection of Light, and God has promised to wash us and clothe us in the same way.

God is the source of Beauty. Anything that is beautiful is only so to the degree that it reflects and reminds of God’s perfection. Beauty is a universal idea, and everything in someway can be called beautiful- because God has called creation beautiful and made it radiant with His gaze. God is called light in the Bible, and so in that way, He gives everything color.

When I put on my hat, gloves, boots, and jacket, I walked down the hall in my dormitory and out the front doors. I had no plan but to get off the road, and I had nothing with me but a journal, nondescript pen, and a pocketknife. (One should never go into the wild, any degree of wild, without a simple knife. That is just how it is done.)

Within the first two steps out of the building and into the parking lot I found myself going a completely different direction than I had expected to go. Saying this I do not mean to sound like I am attempting to imitate Thoreau, I did not feel any magnetic pull towards any direction—there is little room in a city such as Grand Rapids for Nature to exercise any such force upon a human. If a person wishes to find a semblance of the natural in a city they must search it out and then they must ignore much of what is around them, even after immersing themselves in the setting they have found. Even the most natural of what is within miles of civilization has been marred and degraded by negative human contact. In the cities themselves it is simply more obvious than it is in ,say, a nature preserve. My direction changed because I realized that even if I made it to the few acres between the campus of my school, the road the campus is on, and the highway, that it would be only a few moments that I could spend walking on that more free land before I would reach its boundaries. So I left the pavement by the time I was two hundred feet from the door. I walked through what in the summer is a meadow-like field—one of the more beautiful places on the campus—and I walked into the woods, going in the direction of those few acres of relative freedom across the road.

In the Spring, Summer, and Autumn seasons, the trees at the edge of the meadow serve to hide the campus services headquarters behind their veil of leaves. But now it is winter, and as I plunged into the field and then into the woods, I knew that I would have to walk by that building and onto the road for a few hundred yards before reaching the unkempt wedge-shaped lot that the city had deemed unnuseful to their purposes because of its awkward position between a highway, college, and main road lined with houses. After walking through knee-deep snow and climbing up a bank that had been built to give campus services a level lot around their barns and garages, I did emerge into the C.S. bastion.

The main building is commonly known as, ironically, The Plant, and as I walk by its metal walls and the machinery parked outside, I can’t help but think that there are few things that look less organic. It seems that such a mass of metal and gears and fuel containers should have a name that is opposite to Nature, rather than assuming one of Nature’s names. Then again, in the city people seem to think that this is the natural course of things, that this is the new face of nature; that this is good and somehow brings life or holds Life. Something entirely man-made, which consumes Nature in order to control her and in the end destroys her, has little in common with that which lives by and for the Life around it, giving back in proportion to what it takes, taking waste and converting it into something useful, and adding beauty to its surroundings in the process. I think that we are to be more like plants than we are to be like The Plant; that the natural is what we are to strive for and aspire to, and that what we put our creative energies to use to build speaks a lot about who we are as humans. In part of his poem The Farm, Wendell Berry says, live like a tree:

That does not grow beyond

The power of its place.

It rises by the strength

Of local soil and light,

Aspiring to no height

That it has not attained.

More time, more light, more rain

Will make it grow again

Till it has realized

All that it can become,

And then it dies into

More life, deserving more

By not desiring more.

There is an ideology that is expressed in calling an industrial building a “plant,” and it has to do with what is thought to be the goal and meaning of life; is life about growth and money, or is it about health and fulfillment; is life best found in harmony or in driving rhythm. Do we find satisfaction in being content and happy with the simple things that can be universally had, or do we find it in fighting to be the one who eventually acquires at a rate in which boredom is impossible and therefore emptiness can be overlooked? What is the more noble virtue: Contentment with less, or aspiring for more?

After walking a few hundred feet on the back road which The Plant’s driveway is on, I finally reached the edge of the Less-Recently-Clearcut-and-Less-Fiscally-Important-to-the-City-Therefore-Less-Adulterated-Than-Most place that I had been aiming for since I saw an aerial photo of this part of the city a couple days ago. The snow had been plowed off the roads and into drifts alongside them so that I had to climb over a drift to get to where I was going to start ‘sauntering’ as Thoreau called it. Obviously the first acre or so of the area had been cleared not long ago because there are only a scattering of sumac and a few young red pines; no real trees, mostly brush.

Where I entered there were no tracks of any kind in the snow. It was about the perfect winter day today, the sun was bright and only a few clouds in the sky, and the temperature was just below freezing so only the direct sun was melting any ice and there was little slush even on the parking lot of my dorm. As I walked through the former field now turned to brush and buried in snow, it struck me that some people actually dislike winter, even on these days. When the weather is bad for a long time I can understand the weariness, but this day was about as perfect as it could be, even with my pants soaked to the knees when the snow I was walking in melted from my body’s heat and my ankles became cold. The thought has stayed with me, and as I moved towards the tree line to look for a spot to break through the undergrowth and into the woods, I realized that the four colors in sight, brown, gray, and white, the colors of winter, made every other color more vibrant. The sky never looks bluer than on a sunny winter day. The last clump of red on a sumac bush stands out, as do the cardinals and holly berries. The evergreens, so often overlooked during the summer because of the shade and luster of deciduous leaves, break the scenery and offer hope and Life. A day like this is almost twice as bright as any summer day, because snow reflects almost ninety percent of the light that hits it. Winter also makes the summer brighter. Warmth is loved when Spring carries it back to us from the south. The trees are more appreciated for their fruits and shade. The color of the greater landscape is again a splendor which is obvious after months of dazzling white.

Before reaching the woods there was what appeared to be a stream, and it ran through the field and was buried like the field, under the snow. Crossing the stream would be necessary in order to continue towards the trees, and so I looked for a narrow place on the bank. Often streams are covered only by a little ice and a dusting of snow and the water runs freely just below what is visible. There was no way to know, especially on a day like today when things were beginning to melt. I didn’t want to get my feet wet so early on my trek, but despite that decided that I would step to where it appeared to be the halfway point between both banks, and thereby test if this was indeed a stream or just a scar that might run with water in the spring or after a summer storm. And so I stepped into the middle. And I did not break through any ice. I still do not know if that was a stream or not.

When I found a way to get past the initial thicket that guards the interior of most forests, it was by following the paths that deer had made. Deer. In the city of Grand Rapids. The fact that there are still wild animals living where man has so vehemently attempted to exterminate them is a marvel to me. How resilient and persistent is God’s world. I ended up following the deer sign for most of my walk, because maybe, just maybe, these creatures had found some escape from the fetters of roads and cars and man-made reality.

For a moment I paused and listened. That moment turned into five, and then ten and fifteen, minutes. In my sight there were no real evidences of humans, other than that this was obviously no virgin forest. But the soundtrack for such a scene was not as it should be; no birds or melting snow, but cars and airplanes and noise. Connecting with the Divine might just be easier in my dorm room with the doors closed in the middle of the day, because I can close my eyes and be away from there, whereas here my eyes tell me that this is where I should be and my ears tell me that it is where I have tried to run from, and I cannot close my ears. My walk last week was from my school to downtown G.R., I was gone about four hours that night. At one place on that walk, on a sidewalk, I happened to pause, and I witnessed a miracle: the place where I stopped was exactly the place where the buildings around me cooperated with the snow on the ground to deaden any noise, and there were no cars on the road for that split second. It was more silent in the city at that moment than it was in the woods this afternoon.

It makes me ask myself what the point is. Why not just walk to the city. In the city I am as unknown as I am in the woods. In the city I am seen by people, but I am invisible to them, as they often are to me. In the woods I am unique. There is no creature like me in sight. I am different. I don’t blend in, I stand out. My identity is my own. Where do I belong though, I wonder. Do I belong with the half a million people around me and their world of houses and cars and restaurants? Or do I belong among the trees and in the snow?

If harmony is the point, then I must say that Nature is my home. In Nature I find myself a life surrounded by lives. Equal life—giving and taking for the better of each other. In a city it is about fighting for survival. In a city a person must live in a certain amount of deference to others in order to stay alive one’s self. The environment in a city is one constructed of steel and concrete and accessed through the vapors of combustion. I am more like a tree than I am a signpost. I am more like a squirrel than I am like a car. I am alive.

That I followed the deer’s path for the rest of my walk does not mean much, really— sounds of the roads were closing in on both sides within a quarter mile of entering the trees and I could see the snow covered roofs of houses through the trees on my right, and on my left I could see cars screaming by on the highway. It felt like I was being led into a trap, like every step I took moved me closer to the focal point of the triangle where the pavement of the roads comes together and Nature ends. I turned around. I do not know where the deer path goes, but I noticed at that moment that the path only goes one way—in. There are no tracks returning. I wonder if the deer really have an escape, or not.

As I started back the way I came, I thought about a question that the environmentalist Bill McKibben asked himself in a book of his I recently read. After walking up the hill behind his house he looked down and sees his Home. Then wonders whether or not he, who loves the woods, if it ever became better for them, would “love them enough to leave them behind?” and move to a town for the sake of energy efficiency and sustainability.  I wonder about it now. Would that be better for the forests? If we just left them behind? Or is not the reason we love them because they bestow a level of humanity upon us that is unattainable by our own manufacturing and government? Would moving to cities to save the woods render the woods unreal? I don’t know if a tree falling in the woods makes a sound if nothing hears it. I don’t think it does.

On the way out I noticed again some rusted steel drums sitting in the woods. Why are they there. Are they full of contaminants. How long before this evidence of man’s domination instead of dominion dissolves into the earth. How many centuries.

On the way in I was nearly upon a rusted barbed wire fence before I could see it. One of the wires remained intact, the others rusted out, and I stepped on it. I hoped to break the rusted strand, and maybe somehow set free the life that it held in literal chains. It did not break. On my way out I tried again. Again, that last binding held fast against even me, Man, attempting to undo it.

When I emerged again from the woods and could see the road again, I diverged from the path which had brought me here. Looking back into the underbrush I was struck by the homeostasis of the woods, and reminded of the lines from Berry’s poem about how in dying trees give life. The trees which had died were rotting away and enriching the soil for the saplings whose bark is still smooth. There is some sort of cycle that God has granted since the Fall, some sort of grace and normality which has been given that causes life to have order in spite of our sin. And death, which is the way that we are brought face to face with Jesus, is a kind of mercy, given so that we do not have to live eternally away from Him. Even as I was thinking about this I came to a place where some cat or raccoon, or maybe even coyote had killed or eaten a squirrel or rabbit. The blood was brilliantly red on the snow. Nature gave life so that life of another might continue.

It is a very beautiful picture, the idea that If we are washed in His blood, we will be whiter than snow. How pure. The life that blood represents stands out much more brightly on snow than dirt. The gentle Lamb loses its life that the greedy, violent wolf might not starve. The one who gains Life kills to get it.

In the field there was a moment that I could count four bird’s nests in my range of vision and in the snow, the dark masses were obvious as ink blots on paper. There were probably a dozen or more nests that I saw this afternoon, but I didn’t take specific notice until that moment. One of the branches of a shrub along the trajectory I was on held one of the nests and I pulled the limb down to examine the bird’s home more closely. The nest was a work of art, the grass which it was composed of seemed to almost be a part of the tree itself and the hollow inside would have been perfectly shaped to fit a mother bird protecting her offspring from the elements. But now the nest was full of snow, for of course most birds have migrated, and the even the chickadees, cardinals, and American ravens which remain in the North for the winter need more insulation from the wind than this light nest can afford. Whenever weather permits though, birds live contentedly in these small cups of tinder and find their food daily from what is available within a thousand or so foot radius of that home.

Once more I climbed through the plowed drift at the edge of the road, this time in order to get to the road. After spending nearly an hour literally “off the beaten path,” the dry, snow free roads were glaringly obvious. Along the road ran a stream of water that melted from snow when the sun’s heat was absorbed by the black of the pavement. The road was streaked with the gray lines of salt where the moisture had evaporated and left it. Even if Global Warming were a myth, it would be an interesting study that could be done to find the amount of energy that is trapped by the roads themselves and then released into the snow, melting it. Think of all the roads that we have. On the coldest sunny day, they are many degrees hotter than anything else around. Before recent decades, the bare roads were fewer and probably, therefore, they were not a major factor in snow melt. But now most roads are plowed and salted, and surface area that used to reflect most of the light’s energy, now absorbs it. Even if that is not the case, it intrigues me that in ancient times conquering nations used to salt the fields of enemies so that they were rendered unusable and infertile. That is what we are doing, if only to the few feet of shoulder along every road.

If the passages in the Bible about the “end times” can be read in a way which indicates that this physical planet will not pass away, that it might endure, then it seems that we as Christians have not only a sober call to stewardship, but also a personal and social responsibility because not only will this earth eventually be our eternal home, we may never leave at all. If it is possible to read the Bible that way, in a way that cohesively argues that God might grace us, in our divinely perfected and glorified eternal state, to be His physical agents of restoration to the planet, then should we not now start following what would be His eternal plan? Certainly we will not accomplish it before we enter eternity, but are we not to strive live as we one day, by His Grace, will?

I stayed on the road from the time that I climbed the drift until I got back to my dormitory. On the way back I walked past an apple tree on a hill across the parking lot from my dorm. Under that tree is my favorite place to sit and read or play guitar in the Fall or in the Spring, when the humming of hundreds of bees working in the blossoms just above my head drowns out most of man’s noise. It looks dead now, in the middle of February, but in a couple of months I will be able to be out there again. I’m glad that the school has neglected to prune and care for it so that I can find refuge in its shade.

At the end of my walk I had left only my footprints in the snow to tell the story of where I have been. They will melt, or soon be filled with snow and forgotten. I took only a stick which I picked up, the ends of which I shaped with my knife so that I could use it for a staff, for support.

Writing all this down means that in some way this walk has changed, and is now permanent, that the experience is no longer temporal, and now it will last, though the written walk is essentially different from the walk itself. Some of the reading that I have been doing lately has had me thinking about what makes reality, what authors or makes things real, about how text and language in some way are reality, and about how almost everything can in some way be reduced to numbers. Before I walked through the door of my building those thoughts came up again. But there was a peace about it this time, that numbers and letters must simply be an expression of reality, because there is much here that could never be written, and that the order of text must have come from Somewhere. The Faith that had, at moments, been forced and desperately held to was again tranquil and strong. It seemed that all reality was again in its place, at least philosophically and theologically.

The Kabalistic author was right, for Sabbath to be rest and complete, one must desire completely to encounter God. Fulfilling that desire requires releasing man-made constraints that we have put on our mind’s understanding of God. We cannot understand Him, but, we can know Him. It is a mystery. According to His character, it seems that there must be a cohesive reality revealed by His Text. If true Nature is the harmonious existence which was created by God, Things As They Should Be, things in their pure essence, then how must we act and live in order to again take part in that created realm? Sanctification is our task in this life. That includes not only our relationship to ourselves and others, but to creation.

As I write this I look out my window and it has grown dark where just hours ago I had to squint to see anything for the glare. Everything outside is as it was. But nothing is the same. For this moment, I have again taken my part in this man-made reality, but I have belonged in the God-made one.

-February, 2011