Pay Attention: Be Astonished

The first sunrise of 2023 - 7:34 AM, January 1, 2023

Instructions for living a life: 

Pay attention.

Be astonished.

Tell about it.

Poet Mary Oliver

 

Mary Oliver likely didn't have a lot in common with me. During her life, she won a Pulitzer Prize for poetry. I sometimes write in verse for my granddaughters, but I'm well aware I won't be collecting prestigious awards for those rhyming verses - or for anything else I write, for that matter. No National Book Award for me either.

Even though she died at the age of 83 in 2019, her poems and observations about life keep getting shared in memes and other social media posts. She grew up in a suburb of Cleveland, Ohio, not on the plains of Kansas. 

But as we begin the new year, I am still drawn to her observations about life and how to live it. The city girl loved nature like this country girl. Her "Instructions for living a life" came up on Facebook as we turned the calendar page from 2022 to 2023.

For several years, I've taken photos of the last sunset of a year and then the first sunrise of the new year.  Sometimes, the skies are spectacular. Sometimes, they are not. This year was a little bit of both. 

December 31st's sunrise had pretty colors, but not a lot of drama. Because of the sun's position in the winter sky, I decided to use the Zenith branch of the Kanza Co-op for my farewell to 2022 sunset shot. It's as much a part of my "commuting" life as the Brooklyn Bridge is to New Yorkers.

At first, my "chauffeur" drove down the co-op's driveway, trying to get me in a position that the sun was setting between our version of city skyscrapers. That didn't work, so I settled for it landing underneath an auger.

Then we went back to the Zenith Road for a wider angle.

I've taken more dynamic and dramatic photos of the Zenith elevator through the years. But there's a simple beauty in the quiet colors of the setting sun, too. As the sun set on 2022, the co-op seemed a fitting place to say goodbye to a year when we retired from active farming. 

On the way home, we stopped for a snapshot of one of the many deer we have to avoid at dusk and dawn on our Zenith Road journeys.

The next morning, we drove down to my sunrise tree, just a half mile south of our house. With a little more cloud cover, 2023 dawned with a little more drama than the exit of 2022.

With the road illumined by our headlights as we first arrived.

I don't think I'd ever tried a panorama of the view from my sunrise tree. I'm sure it won't be the last time.

In other writings, Mary Oliver said that “Attention is the beginning of devotion.” In her essay "Teach The Children," she reminded us that contemplation of nature’s small wonders and life's simplest things have the power to change us in the deepest ways. In paying attention to our surroundings, we can invite joy to our lives and avoid letting our negative thoughts spiral. She reminds us we have a choice: We can let the world delight us, rather than let it beat us down.

It's a good reminder for me as a new year begins. It may not seem likely to combine quotes from a Pulitzer Prize winning poet with a zany actor. But I also liked a quote from comedian Jim Carrey that ended up in the email in box earlier this week.

I feel that we're all lighthouses, and my job is to shine my light as brightly as I can in the darkness.

Jim Carrey

 

Do you ever feel like God is trying to get your attention? My email devotional from The Upper Room continued the theme:

  

A Time to Think

I believe God embedded the miraculous in the ordinary, and it is our task to discover it and celebrate it.

Kent Nerburn

That's a good goal for 2023, don't you think?

***

On New Year's Eve, we also discovered this message on our dirt road from an unknown correspondent. I posted it to Facebook. So far, no one has claimed authorship, though everyone I've asked wished it had been their idea.

 

 

May it be true for you, too!

 

 

The Song That Nature Sings

On Palm Sunday, a foreign exchange student who's attending school at Stafford High School sang a song at a community worship service. Even though I accompanied soloists at the middle school for many years, it wasn't a song I'd heard before. But I loved it and have listened to several versions on YouTube since that night. Here is "The Song That Nature Sings," with photos I've taken this spring around The County Line.

"The Song That Nature Sings"

Words and music by Ruth Elaine Schram

Copyright 1997 BriLee Music Publishing Co.

In everything there is beauty

A hint of love

A form of grace

Though it may be hard to see

Even harder to believe

Everything in nature has its place.

And in everything, there is wonder

A mystery to be undone

New discoveries to find

Simple pleasures redesigned

All things old and new beneath the sun.

 

Have you ever chased the wind

Can you tell where it will go or where it's been?

 

If you could see the earth through its eyes

Do you think that it would come as a surprise

That in everything there is music

A melody, a bit of song

Though it may not meet your ear

If you tune your heart to hear

You will recognize and sing along

The song that nature sings.

The song that nature sings.

Here's one version of the song. There are others on YouTube.

A Path Less Traveled

This quote is found in the Dillon Nature Center educational area. I added it to one of the images I took on our recent walk on the nature trails there.

Sometimes I go nowhere on the treadmill. Sometimes I kick up dust on our dirt road. And, once in awhile, I travel the road less traveled.

Randy and I had a little extra time between appointments in Hutchinson last week. So we went to Dillon Nature Center and walked the trails there for a change of pace - pun intended.

The birds sang. (No, I couldn't capture them in my camera viewfinder as they darted quickly from tree to tree. But I did catch glimpses of red and brown among the branches of trees as they flitted from perch to perch.)

The overhead branches formed a canopy of light and shadow over the nature trail. And I couldn't help but think of the very first song I sang for a music festival in junior high.

I know a green cathedral

A shadowed forest shrine

Where leaves in love join hands above

And arch your prayer and mine.

It's a lesson in irony to remember lyrics from a long-ago solo and not be able to remember why I came into a room. But it's my reality, it seems.

Some of the annual flowers brightened our way. My favorite was this beautiful columbine.

Flowering shrubs provided fragrance and beauty, too.

The sun created bursts of light through red buds and green leaves.

 

It was almost as if these cypress roots are like little people enjoying the view from the shoreline of the pond.

We enjoyed the view, too.

Snap, Crackle, Pop: Wordless Wednesday

I caught a couple of droplets falling from the icicles in this shot.

The icicles looked like those old-fashioned Christmas lights, adding a holiday ambiance to a wintry scene.

We had modern art after we put a letter in the mailbox.

But those icicles became missiles yesterday morning, when the sun shone and the temperature climbed. It sounded like a war zone as ice hit the roof and the awnings. But it was better than the branches themselves.

On Monday, the berries on the shrub mimicked the lights on the Christmas tree through the window.

Inside the house, it looked like Christmas. Outside, a Thanksgiving pumpkin entrapped in ice still celebrated autumn, and the fall flag still rustled in the wind.

Online, I saw beautiful photos of the season's last roses and daises cloaked in ice. I had to settle for the subtle yellow of a shrub's leaves and a stalwart weed that didn't bend to the weight of the ice.

Walking across the ice-covered ground reminded me of the snap, crackle and pop of a certain well-advertised breakfast cereal.

Thankfully, the cattle stayed in their pastures. Even those kept in place by electric fence didn't venture from their appointed settings.

Just like a little makeup enhances our features, a little sun would have made these photos shine. But the melting started before the sun arrived. Timing is everything.

(None of the photos I tried yesterday morning while dodging falling ice were worth sharing. Some days are like that!)

Winterscape at Eagle Lake

Eagle Lake, Morehead, KY, January 2013, on the campus of Morehead State University

Bare branches of each tree

on this chilly January morn

look so cold, so forlorn.

Gray skies dip ever so low

left from yesterday's dusting of snow.

Yet in the heart of each tree

waiting for each who wait to see

new life as warm sun and breeze will blow,

like magic, unlock springs sap to flow,

buds, new leaves, then blooms will grow.

-  Nelda Hartmann, January Morn

Eagle Lake, Morehead, KY, September 2012, on the campus of Morehead State University

Whether it's bathed in the humidity of a late summer day or the brisk, catch-your-breath bite of winter, Eagle Lake is a place to savor nature in all its glory. 

 

Pull up a bench to the beauty ... to the tranquility ... to the silence.

The geese on my Kansas walks are noisy commas in the sky, honking to one another to stay in formation. These quiet cousins hunkered down on a bed of ice and snow, tucking into themselves in an effort to find a modicum of warmth. 

I hope to someday see this lake in autumn splendor, dressed in red, orange and gold. The beauty is there in all seasons - whether in monochromatic winter or electric-blue summer skies.

I love to think of nature as an unlimited broadcasting station, 

 through which God speaks to us every hour, 

if we only will tune in.

George Washington Carver

Early Morning Symphony

I rarely use my ipod when set off on an early morning walk. Instead, I listen to a different kind of music all around me.

Birds trill a morning greeting.
Cows call to their calves.
Dogs wake up their masters.
The coyotes answer back.

A tractor's drone lends a steady bass rhythm.

My tennis shoes crunch gravel with the cadence of a brush on a snare drum.

The Amtrak train rumbles through Zenith, 4 1/2 miles away, the hum of the train tracks punctuated by the whistle at dirt-road intersections.

Water sloshes in my right-hand. 

Squirrels clamor for cover and make the leaves sing as I near the old cottonwood tree at our driveway.

Turkeys scramble away from feasting on the yard's grubs and dart through underbrush, softly talking to one another in their hurry to get away from this human interloper.

Soon the migrating geese will add their own music to the mix.

I love music, and it often plays a soundtrack in my mind. But this is a symphony all its own.

"Fishing" for Abundance

A drought of thankfulness can leave a soul as dry as the prairie grasses in our pastures. Like the curled, brown leaves on the drought-stricken milo stalks, ungratefulness leaves us brittle and used up, not much good for anything other than complaining.

When I was in high school, I was in a play. I honestly don't remember the name of it. What I do remember is a line I delivered:

"Oh woe is me! Oh lack-a-day!"

I certainly wasn't competing with Meryl Streep for an Academy Award, though I did fool my Grandpa Neelly who didn't know me behind the stage makeup and the gray hair.

Wouldn't it be great if another reason he didn't recognize me was because the "woe-is-me" attitude was so foreign to my nature?

We all face droughts. It may be a literal drought like we've experienced on the farm these past two summers. It may be a drought caused by worry, loss, death, heartache, a family situation, illness or another curveball from just living life. It's easy to get caught up in the lack instead of the abundance.

“The real voyage of discovery consists of not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.”

Norman Vincent Peale

After we rode the 4-wheeler across the dry pastures, my ever-optimistic husband said, "Let's go fishing!" It's good to live with a glass-half-full kind of guy. It was a cooler day, one where the thermometer wasn't racing its way upwards past the 100-degree mark.

As I sat by the river with my feet up and the fishing pole dangled in the water, a few hymns drifted through my mind, like the clouds that floated across the sky giving a few moments of relief.

When I opened my church bulletin the next morning, the very first song was one that provided my afternoon mental soundtrack, All Things Bright and Beautiful.

All things bright and beautiful

All creatures great and small

All things wise and wonderful

The Lord God made them all.

 Each little flower that opens

Each little bird that sings

God made their glowing colors

And made their tiny wings

 The purple-headed mountains,

The river running by,

The sunset and the morning 

That brightens up the sky.

 The cold wind in the winter,

The pleasant summer sun,

The ripe fruits in the garden

God made them every one.

 God gave us eyes to see them,

And lips that we might tell.

How great is God Almighty

Who has made all things well.

 

Wishing you a day when you see the abundance and not the drought!

***

I'm linked today to Iowa farm wife and blogger Jennifer's God-Bumps and God-Incidences at Getting Down with Jesus.