Mumford & Sons - Winter Winds

Thank-you Tim (my friend who is about to walk the Camino in Spain) - you are super.

thirst and outpour

Rivers of Living Water (John 7.37-39)

On the last day of the feast, the great day, Jesus stood up and cried out, "If anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, 'Out of his heart will flow rivers of living water.'"

Now this he said about the Spirit, whom those who believed in him were to receive, for as yet the Spirit had not been given, because Jesus was not yet glorified.

Water Flowing from the Temple (Ezekiel 47.6-12)

Then he led me back to the bank of the river. As I went back, I saw on the bank of the river very many trees on the one side and on the other. And he said to me, "This water flows toward the eastern region and goes down into the Arabah, and enters the sea, the water will become fresh. And wherever the river goes, every living creature that swarms will live, and there will be very many fish. For this water goes there, that the waters of the sea may become fresh; so everything will live where the river goes. Fisherman will stand beside the sea. From Engedi to Eneglaim it will be a place for the spreading of nets. Its fish of the Great Sea. But its swamps and marshes will not become fresh; they are to be left for salt. And on the banks, on both sides of the river, there will grow all kinds of trees for food. Their leaves will not wither, nor their fruit fail, but they will bear fresh fruit every month, because the water for them flows from the sanctuary. Their fruit will be for food, and their leaves for healing."

Praise to be our Father who reveals himself to us as a Covenant keeping God. A God who is what we need him to be in our life situation. He is our righteousness, our holiness, our peace, our shepherd, our God who is here, our provider, the I AM.

How the Earth Loves You by David Waltner-Toews

How the Earth Loves You

David Waltner-Toews

From: The Fat Lady Struck Dumb. Brick Books, 2000.

One day, perhaps when you are
in your forties, he is at your door
with a spring of daffodils.
Another day he bears lilies,
or jack-in-the-pulpits,
every day a flutter of fresh petals
and another scent whispering
at the skirt of your hair.
He seems disconcertingly traditional.
He brings roses, for instance, red ones.
You are bemused.
You look past him, sheepishly,
to the shapes of clouds,
to the paling blue sky.
When your eyes return from flight
you see your hand is bleeding,
you are clutching a sprig of thorns,
and he is gone.

He returns with fat red tomatoes,
waxy green peppers, a peach pressed firmly,
gently, from his palm to yours.
You can still feel the scars
from his roses. Your hand retreats.
Your fingers brush.
Your breath like a wave curls under, tumbles,
pulls back. Your belly tenses.
You are surfing, barely skimming the sand,
an unspeakable fear swelling your tongue.

Do not speak it.
This is what you were made for,
the heat of his gaze on your fore-arm,
burning your cheek.
You feel the slack first in your knees,
then your back. Do not succumb.
The best is still to come.

In the fall, he leaves in a glorious swirl
of gold and rust, amid the chatty travel songs
of migrating birds. You ache in his absence,
raking at the unreachable pain
in your chest. When you think of him,
you balk at his easy certainty,
his knowledge of your desire.
You delight in the melting snow-flakes
that catch in his hair.
You sigh at how his breathing undulates
under the white quilt. It is enough to lie
in bed on a slow Saturday,
to know he will come, his cool palm
stroking your belly, your breasts,
unexpectedly clutching your breath
as if it were another bouquet.
Do not hasten his wooing.
He will come soon enough.
You must not speak his name.
Only when you slip life's pearls
through your fingers, like a rosary,
counting the day after day
of his unfailing courtship,
when you have ached for him
in all the little things - in how you walk,
how your fingers probe a place for seeds,
how your cheek presses to his hard belly,
how you touch the mound where new life stirs —
only then will you be ready,
the light will break through
and the darkness, together,
and you will understand, finally,
who it is who has loved you
all this time, so well.

Planet Earth - PK Page

In tribute to PK Page, an accomplished and inspiring Canadian poet.

Prophet in Kentucky

Before people can live in harmony with their communities, or their spouses, or their topsoil, they need to be at peace with themselves, and that is Berry’s main concern. We need to live in real places, not in the generalized lobbies that modern houses often are. We need to be at home in our bodies, too – not in the “useless, weak” husks that we drag daily to the flourescently cheerful “health club,” but a body that each day knows the “elemental pleasures of eating and drinking and resting, of being dry while it is raining, of getting dry after getting wet, of getting warm against after getting cold, of cooling off after getting hot.” Of being tired at sundown and at life’s end feeling “a great weariness... like the lesser weariness that comes with day’s end – a weariness that had been earned and was therefore accepted.”

The rigorous life, with some goal beside a higher “standard of living,” Berry implies, need come not only through farming. The same forces that distort and maim our agriculture – fear of dredgery, the endless demand for more, and faster – also cause many other problems, both environmental and social, that we face. We drive or take a taxi when we should walk or ride a bike – if we were on foot we would not only emit less carbon dioxide, we’d be in closer touch with our communities, the way a farmer on a horse-drawn plow knows his field better than the pilot of a huge combine. And we would use the muscles that we must have been born with for some better reason than bouncing in front of a video. We would be out in the weather, and at day’s end we’d be weary instead of tense.

There are a thousand other ways we could try to shift our lives to create a more sustainable world; but, as Berry makes clear, it would be foolish to underestimate how difficult this will be or how powerful are the habits and interests that must be overcome. As economic actors we, through our investments, require corporations to look ahead a quarter or a year at a time, to make for us as much money as possible, even if that means, to give the tiniest example from the most recent Exxon annual meeting, not building our oil tankers with double hulls. As consumers, even those of us who are well-to-do often demand the cheapest possible food, though this requires the most harmful farming, and the most comfortable cars and houses, though they may well be helping to create an uncomfortable planet.

As citizens we deamnd lower taxes, instead of devoting ourselves to figuring out how to share the world’s greatest concentration of wealth with an increasingly poor nation and world. Suspicious of real change, and of more work and less luxury, we place our faith in frequent incatations about unceasing economic growth and technological expansion, even though our logic tells us they are as unlikely as endless growth in the food supply and our scientific instruments tell us they are starting to harm our planet as surely as poor farming erodes our soils.

Wherever we live, however we do so, we desperately need a prophet of responsibility; and although they days of the prophets seem past to many of us, Berry may be the closest to one we have. But, fortunately, he is also a poet of responsibility. He makes one believe that the good life may be not only harder than what we’re used to but sweeter as well (McKibben 276-277)

McKibben, Bill. The Bill McKibben Reader: Pieces from an Active Life. New York:Henry Holt and Company, 2008.