The air is like a butterfly
With frail blue wings.
The happy earth looks
at the sky and sings.
~Joyce Kilmer
I will exalt you, my God the King; I will praise your name for ever and ever. Every day I will praise you and extol your name for ever and ever. Great is the Lord and most worthy of praise; His greatness no one can fathom. ~Psalm 145:1-3 ✝
It was one of those March days
when the sun shines hot
and the wind blows cold:
when it is summer in the light,
and winter in the shade.
~Charles Dickens
The vernal equinox, official start of spring, is still 7 days away, but there are signs of its coming. And with each new green shoot Creation’s heart beats stronger, God’s ancient utterances grow louder, and the potential for lifting humankind’s spirits increases. As the sanctuary of earth and sky throws open its doors, doors once “frozen” in wintry bondage, the introit to the full ceremonial form of springtime’s metaphorical “high mass” is beginning. Presiding over the opening ceremonies are their highnesses, the avian cardinals. With the arrival of the equinox on the 20th, other “clergy” donning different vestments will appear, and they too will perform their holy sacraments upon earth’s hallowed altars. Currently only chants can be heard echoing close to the ground or reverberating near branch and cane. However the rest of spring’s holy voices will soon join in, and their loud arias will climb garden walls and charge over hedgerows. As ever increasing waves of spring’s sweet sounds cross the land, they will be discernible to some extent even in the mighty cement jungles of commerce. Despite clouds of spiritual pollution, the light that was in the beginning will break forth anew, and sounds of the eternal will be able to be heard above the cacophonous noises of humanity’s hectic busyness. Earth’s quiet, eternal rhythms still proffer wholeness, harmony, and healing in the maelstrom of madness within today’s “cultural currents.”
God’s voice thunders in marvelous ways; He does great things beyond our understanding. ~Job 37:5 ✝
**Image via Pinterest
In the corner of his garden, there’s a patch he used to keep
All to himself, to allow nature to creep
There are no trimmed edges
or prim, proper hedges
He left his earth still and alone
Allowed the forces of nature to roam
He said that you don’t always have to be tidy and neat
Just watch the beauty of opportunity grow at your feet
He said just watch the earth produce its own glory
And I watched…and held on to his story
My granddad was right
Add water and light
Behold the sight
There are poppies and flowering weeds
Buttercups and oat coloured reeds
Daisies gingerly lift their heads
Dandelions roar from muddy beds
Purple thistles and strange grasses
Colours that alight and ignite masses
Dark ferns and heathers
Dandelion clock feathers
Birds foot trefoil, a four leafed clover
My granddad’s story is not over
He may have gone, I may have cried
But the beauty he predicted never died
~Melanie Waters
Be exalted, O God, above the heavens; let your glory be over all the earth. ~Psalm 57:5 ✝
**photos via Pinterest
I know a garden with a loveliness
Deeper than eye can see or indrawn breath
Can measure rightly. Ancient centuries press
Against its walls till time is gone and death
Is lost in fragrance of the lavender
That grows serenely by a lichened stile.
Basil, rosemary, marjoram are there,
And savory, whose blossoms lift a smile
Beside a dripping pool. There silver sage
And lads-love, that all our mothers knew
And pressed for us in many a yellow-page.
Woodruff is there, mint, caraway, and rue.
Old flowers are lovely, lovelier still are these
Sweet scented herbs near box and cedar trees.
~Catherine Coblentz
Awake, O north wind, and come, O south wind! Blow upon my garden that is fragrances may be wafted abroad. Let my beloved come to his garden, and eat its choicest fruits. ~Song of Solomon 4:16 ✝
**photos via Pinterest
Who loves a garden
Finds within his soul
Life’s whole,
He hears the anthem of the soil
While ingrates toil;
And sees beyond his little sphere
The waving fronds of heaven, clear.
~Louise Seymour Jones
I’ve been trying to figure out today what it is about a garden that is so seductive and irresistible for me, but I’m still no closer to an answer than when I’ve pondered it before. I just know that something in nature calls to me and touches me on a deep level, brings glad music to my heart, and feeds “life’s whole” within my soul. That’s why the losses due to last weekend’s dirty “trick” have struck a grievous blow to my heart which in turn has sent me sinking down, down, down into what one writer has called winter’s “vale of grief.” Normally I can shake things off pretty quickly, but in addition to that casualty the arthritis in my left knee and left foot have me hobbling around on a cane, unable to get outside and do things that need to be done in the garden, and that’s creating a bluer than blue, bluish “funk.” Now after spending way too much time inside, stationary and feeling a bit sorry for myself, I’m STARVED!!! Like a junkie, I need my “fix.” I need to hear the “anthem of the soil.” Moreover, I need to touch the earth and dig in the dirt. I need to feel Eden’s beating heart, her rhythms. I need to hear the birds singing over my head. I need color. I need to see things growing and to look upon flowery faces, even a wretched dandelion would do. I need to feel the sun’s warmth on my back. And as much as anything else I need to feel God’s palpable presence in my tiny corner of His sanctum sanctorum.
Alas, sadly, I’m afraid it will be sometime before all those needs are met. So I dug around on Pinterest board’s trying to find the kinds of images that typically draw me into a garden’s web of magic and glory. Since I have no way of knowing when Old Man Winter will return to his arctic cave nor when my body will stop betraying me, they and a a little garden poetry will have to suffice.
From there you will seek the Lord your God, and you will find him if you search after him with all your heart and soul. ~Deuteronomy 4:29 ✝
No child but must remember laying his head in the grass,
staring into the infinitesimal forest
and seeing it grow populous with fairy armies.
~Robert Louis Stevenson, Scottish poet
Digitalis, from the Latin Digitabulum, a thimble, derives its common name from the shape of its flowers that resemble the finger of a glove. It’s a flower we call Foxglove, which delights to grow in deep hollows and woody dells. However, it was originally called Folksglove because that’s where they, fairies or “good folk,” were thought to live. Folksglove is one of the oldest names for Digitalis (Foxglove) and is mentioned in a list of plants as old as the time of Edward III. The earliest known form of the word is the Anglo-Saxon foxes glofa (the glove of the fox, and the Norwegian name Revbielde that translates to Foxbell alludes to the Fox. It is a name which may have come about from a northern legend about bad fairies who supposedly gave the blossoms of Digitalis to foxes to be put upon their toes so as to soften their tread when prowling amongst the roosts.
I adore Foxglove and believe no other flower in the garden lends itself better to stories of fairies and elves than it does. Its dangling thimbles or gloves or bells or fingers or whatever one might call them look like enchanted, magical places where children would naturally look for the “wee folk” to lurk. Nor is it surprising that there have been suppositions claiming the mottling in the flowers mark, like the spots on butterfly wings and on the tails of peacocks and pheasants, where elves have placed their fingers. Though no longer a child, I have to agree in part with the writer Charles de Lint who penned, “We call them faerie. We don’t believe in them. Our loss.” Sometimes, it does one a world of good to remember what it was like to be an imaginative child, full of awe and wonder and given to flights of fantasy.
Happy is he who still loves
something he loved in the nursery:
He has not been broken in two by time;
he is not two men, but one,
and he has saved not only his soul but his life.
~G. K. Chesterton, English writer, poet,
and lay theologian
If we opened our mind with enjoyment, we might
find tranquil pleasures spread about us on every side.
We might live with the angels that visit us on every sunbeam,
and sit with the fairies who wait on every flower.
~Samuel Smiles, Scottish author
May the Lord give you increase, both you and your children. May you be blessed by the Lord, who made heaven and earth. ~Psalm 115:14-15 ✝
Let there never be forgot,
that once there was a spot,
for one brief, shining moment
that was known as Camelot.
~Lerner and Lowe, 1960
The line above from the Broadway musical makes a statement that in fact there was a Camelot, and many people, including President John F. Kennedy, seemed to believe that it was a real time and place in history. Real or not so real, it was the legendary, marvelously magical time and place of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. For me it’s magical moments in time when things ever so extraordinary and good are happening in the awakening landscape. Then sadly when they get nipped in the bud by a bitter, cold snap, it’s a betrayal of sorts not unlike what brought an end to the glory of Camelot. Such is what happened night before last to the pretty babies in the photographs. But I shall not curse late February for telling the traitorous lies that led to their demise; instead I rejoice that they came at all. Even if only for a few days their “brief, shining moment” in the garden’s “kingdom of Camelot” was stunningly beautiful.
By the breath of God ice is given, and the broad waters are frozen fast. ~Job 37:10 ✝
The flowers of late winter and spring
occupy places in our hearts
well out of proportion to their size.
~Gertrude S. Wister
Small for sure on earth’s vast stage are the first flowers of late winter and early spring, but large is their scope. They, like the day’s first sunlight fractures darkness in the physical world, shatter darkness int the spiritual world. And when any light breaks spiritual darkness, joy and hope can be sparked and subsequently release from any imposed bondage the light of God which is at the heart of all He created. Thus I believe it is by Divine intent and for sacred purposes that these flowers occupy places of disproportionate size in the human heart. Humanity lives with dreadful darknesses in this fallen world, and it could be that the Lord purposely built into Creation’s fabric the repetition of such sparks to keep igniting anew the glow of His Light. J. Philip Newell proclaims that the light of God “dapples through the whole of creation.” He declares that it can be seen “within the brilliance of the morning sun and the whiteness of the moon at night and that it issues forth in all that grows from the ground and the life that shines from the eyes of any living creature.” Thus like cracks in a dam weaken the structure so that flood waters at some point may no longer be able to be contained, crack after crack in spiritual darkness eventually lets in more and more of God’s holy light. Hence when the fullness of His Light breaks through into the world and the human heart, there is the potential for amazing floods of grace and healing as well as salvation.
You, O LORD, keep my lamp burning; my God turns my darkness into light. Psalm 18:28 ✝
the loveliness is everywhere
even
in the ugliest
and most hostile environment
the loveliness is everywhere
at the turning of a corner
in the eyes
and on the lips
of a stranger
in the emptiest areas
where is no place for lope
and only death
invites the heart
the loveliness is there
it emerges
incomprehensible
inexplicable
it rises in its own reality
and what we must learn is
how to receive it
into ours
~Kenneth White
The Lord will guide you continually, and satisfy your needs in parched places, and make your bones strong; and you shall be like a well watered garden, like a spring of water, whose waters never fail. ~Isaiah 58:11 ✝
He knows no winter, he who loves the soil,
For, stormy days, when he is free from toil,
He plans his summer crops, selects his seeds
From bright-paged catalogues for garden needs.
When looking out upon frost-silvered fields,
He visualizes autumn’s golden yields;
He sees in snow and sleet and icy rain
Precious moisture for his early grain;
He hears spring heralds in the storm’s turmoil.
He knows no winter, he who loves the soil.
~Sudie Stuart Hager
…and the Lord your God will make you abundantly prosperous in all your undertakings, in the fruit of your body, in the fruit of your livestock, and in the fruit of your soil. For the Lord will again take delight in prospering you, just as He delighted in prospering your ancestors… ~Deuteronomy 30:9 ✝
Sacred Touches 