I found you in the winter brush of a Virginia field tending my sheep.
The strange thing is, it felt like I've known you my whole life.
What a wild internal journey this has been, to which you are not solely responsible, but are a very unexpected and integral guide (inviter/ host?).
Being a first generation, steep learning curve, regenerative farmer, I'm well acquainted to the picking, picking, picking, staying calm, attending to the work, routine of the faithful seemingly mundane. Finding the abundance there.
You have a gift to entice the attentive onto sailed ships launching out onto the ocean to the Unknown, with the unexpected wind and catalyst of the mundane.
I was a little coy to write a comment, but as I was contentedly sleeping my 1 year old son thought it a good idea to be awake for your 4 am (our time) post and introduce myself. So I listened.
What better time than with the cold moonlight outside?
I often struggled with the mundane, farming, but I now see its my biggest blessing, daily connection point, the prod to get me out there, no matter the weather, the resistance I need, the dirt on my hands, I get too antsy in a comfy chair, I need that reality flowing over my face, although I wouldnt mind more time for writing.
But one thing I noticed is, out there magnifies what ever is going on inside, or makes clearer, it truly is like a mirror.
Jacob could feel it, see it, out in the bush didn't get him away from it, the skin stayed with him, the stars, rabbits, and watering holes shouting back.
The earth does indeed speak in myth. Thank you Martin for helping me have the eyes and ears to see and hear that.
I've known since I was a child, sitting under a tree touching moss for hours, Jesus was nearer, but you helped me have clarity with that now as an adult.
Digging deeper where I am in this dirty glorious grace filled mess.
I look forward to hopefully meeting you someday, I have to say, sometimes out on the farm and in the mountains, I have fully expected to see you walking around a creek bend with a walking stick and flask in hand. Sometimes I really do think I see you, but it usually ends up being a gnarly old tree in my periphery. But the Appalachian Mountains do connect us in a way, so who knows.
I still lean down often to cup my hand over the rounded cushions of moss in the woods/ something to lay my hand on, a connection to something immense and unseen but palpable.
Not writing about political matters feels like a wise call when the ‘news’ is shot through with every conceivable form of lie and omission, and individual and collective scapegoats grow ever fatter. I have just listened to Malcolm Guite on the Church Times podcast talking about how he handled the events in Galahad and the Grail where good flows from proscribed acts, in this case Galahad. And it seems like these bible stories keep presenting us with the same issue.
How many perspectives might there be on any one event? What information do I not have? Delete, delete, delete! This is what Richard Rudd has to say about our evolution:
“Falcons are hooded because their eyes are a great marvel of creation. They can see a tiny ‘O’ on a packet of Marlborough cigarettes from a mile up in the sky while moving at speeds of up to 200mph. So with the hood on, the falcon is docile, almost in a trance; all it’s primary awareness systems are on standby. But the moment the hood is removed, the system that comes on line . . . those eyes are connected directly into the bird’s central nervous system. So what the eye sees is instantly translated into action without any additional cognition: when the falcon is released into the air to hunt it becomes this all-seeing eye connected to a 200mph killing machine. It’s no wonder the falcon became the royal bird because it is an awesome creature. There’s no time delay between seeing and acting. I give you this image because our future awareness is like that, but instead of being predatory, it’s revelatory.”
Please, please carry on labouring happily Martin - I am looking forward to welcoming a Hexworthy reveller to Winchester. “Inch by inch, hour by hour, releasing its stiffened limbs from its freezing metal cords” - such a powerful image: there is a beautiful integrity in the service you did that vixen by Moriarty’s cow byre. Good cheer to you.
Unbinding the Vixen. Under cover by night. Handmade, hand-dug keep for Her rest. Vernacular prayers out of earshot but against the tide of wire and violence. All under the gaze of the Messiah, in whatever form we meet on that road. That, to my ear, remains the only theology at world's end I can imagine rowing into.
That sense of separation from God - often when I don’t feel ‘good enough’. A reminder from Master Ryokan: “I don’t regard my life as insufficient. Inside the brushwood gate there is a moon. There are flowers”. Bless you Martin.
Please continue to write only of the true the good and the beautiful, not of the political. I sense external and perhaps internal pressures to divert, so I am casting a vote for you to continue to steer your skinboat toward the stars.
“Don’t go out God - like the candle - please don’t go out.”
Creation is a Good, but the world can snuff its taper.
We all were given Jesus in our lifetimes, but those fortunate to have received the undeserved Grace of a personal encounter in the “real” world now have work to keep the memory alive. It is a haptic memory against which the world fights to obscure and question. Did it really happen? Your work shows that if we keep these stories true and the real will be kept at bay.
Selfishly speaking, my reading rule is no politics, so my subscribtion list is small. You and even your active-voice friend PK have stayed within those parameters- even pre conversion). Reading limits like this keep a few sins off my confessional list.
‘Don’t go out God’….I can echo that. Sometimes prayer feels so difficult and we do feel like we’re under the goat fur and a natural reaction is to bow our heads to hide rather than pray and face God but those snippets of prayer we utter when in those places…..perhaps they touch God because in spite of everything we are still choosing Him…it’s a cry from the heart. He knows what He’s doing with us. Focusing on small things sounds good. But He does send His floods. I always like the poem by C S Lewis ‘As the ruin falls’. The way I read it is that we can never tend to ourselves spiritually because we are too wrapped in ourself but God will come with the bulldozer and knock us for six but only so something new can emerge.
Living in the Black these days, and your voice has been weaved into my marrow. There is room to breathe in your words. I am glad for it. This:
“My daily work feels similarly overwhelming, but I don’t know what else we are meant to be doing with our time. Pick, pick, pick. Stay calm, and attend to the work. Be light with it if you can. You can risk abundance. “
And the permission to say things like, “Don’t go out God”.
Martin, thank you for this most beautiful and timely penitential prayer offering. So many good questions that I need to ask now. How can I stop myself from stealing a blessing and instead trust in its arrival? When I feel unblessed, I get cranky and fearful. How do I truly believe and remember that God's ears hear even the cheep of a baby Raven?
I have never asked God to give me a sign. I've always thought that was presumptuous. But maybe it's just a sensible way of praying for some sort of concrete help to continue trusting. But when I'm worn and torn, Old scratch relentlessly visits and I open the door to him, though I'm limping afterwards. God, please speak to me in my derangement. And it's probably about time to start shouting to all of us, everywhere, in our derangement.
Over the past week, like you Martin, I have also been able to choose joyful labors. Pulling weeds and trimming roses, planting seeds in small pots and watching them germinate. Nothing makes me feel more alive than watching things grow and helping to nurture that process.
I have also started to memorize a Blessing For Light by John O'Donahue. It goes like this:
Light cannot see inside things.
That is what the dark is for,
Minding the interior,
Nurturing the draw of growth,
Through places where death in its own way turns into life.
Like the early morning moon sinking and silhouetting oak branches , whatever the Holy One is doing with my field daisy of a life seems , at times, to be just out of the reach of my understanding. It’s puzzling ,and a little disorienting, that yesterday I joined family and friends to grieve and bless my mother’s joyful dance to the other side where her long time pastor gave a message centered around , you guessed it, Jacob and Esau . He pointed to the slickster inheritance grab , the desert winds , the limp causing wrestle with God’s human relations representative ,and to the fact that the Holy One then begins to self identify as the God of Jacob . He reminded us as well that for most of her life my mother walked with a limp caused by a car accident injury when I was a lad . She was one of the most ardent followers of Yeshua I’ve known .All this to say thank you, Martin, for your weekly missive which helps me to look up from hoeing the small garden I’ve been given and see the small whirlwinds across the fields tossing up leaves .
You sitting outside, deep into the night with a dead fox on your lap is quite a touching image. And the story of Fox Woman is one of my favorites that you tell. My Sundays now consist in working the garden. Today, as I turned the soil that has been resting all winter, I listened to you tell Fox Woman again. I never tire of hearing that story.
This all made me think about a story from where I work. I’m part of the grounds crew at a local University. Of course we do a lot of landscaping and gardening but there are other less glamorous things we also do, like picking up dead animals. Mostly it’s squirrels and small birds. Because of the abundance of squirrels, we have some really healthy and well fed hawks on campus. Sometimes they swoop down low and fly between unexpecting students. It’s quite a lovely sight to behold.
One day I got call about a dead bird. It turned out to be a massive red tailed hawk. It had flown head first into a large window of one of the buildings on campus. It was such a magnificent bird and so heart wrenching to see.
The next day members from our grounds crew and from the campus birding club gathered together to bury the hawk. They had been advocating to put reflective tape on windows to prevent this very thing from happening. The professor sponsoring the club gave a eulogy and a large stone with a perfectly round hole drilled in the center, which had been discarded behind the art building, was put on top of the hawk’s burial place.
Wow, thank you Matt. I was once at a conference in the backwoods of Minnesota and the exact same thing happened. Glad to know a little of your daily labours. Good to think of you in all that fresh air.
I told Bearskin with a small gathering at my church last night. After reading this, I get the sense there's a kind of Jacobian spirit in the Old Man of the woods in that story, the goat-footed fellow who summons the wrestling match and gives you the fur you need to put on in your grief.
Thank you, Martin, for giving the vixen your respectful attention and burial. They are indeed creatures that carry messages from the gods. Once I walked into a store in Anchorage, Alaska - basement room full of furs, pelts of foxes- silver, red, grey- and so suddenly it felt so wrong I thought I would vomit- foxes as commerce. And once after seeing a fox unexpectedly, briefly, I tried to write a poem about it- Mercury, Loki-like, magician, shapeshifter, sharp senses, wild intelligence, eyes that were an invitation- who turned and changed in an instant into ferns, and found I was writing about a man who had appeared suddenly in my life- invitation in the eyes, same wild intelligence, who knew my weakness for poetry- stole heart, breath, away…..and disappeared. The parting gift was a renewed love of poetry. We need our gods to stay wild.
I found you in the winter brush of a Virginia field tending my sheep.
The strange thing is, it felt like I've known you my whole life.
What a wild internal journey this has been, to which you are not solely responsible, but are a very unexpected and integral guide (inviter/ host?).
Being a first generation, steep learning curve, regenerative farmer, I'm well acquainted to the picking, picking, picking, staying calm, attending to the work, routine of the faithful seemingly mundane. Finding the abundance there.
You have a gift to entice the attentive onto sailed ships launching out onto the ocean to the Unknown, with the unexpected wind and catalyst of the mundane.
I was a little coy to write a comment, but as I was contentedly sleeping my 1 year old son thought it a good idea to be awake for your 4 am (our time) post and introduce myself. So I listened.
What better time than with the cold moonlight outside?
I often struggled with the mundane, farming, but I now see its my biggest blessing, daily connection point, the prod to get me out there, no matter the weather, the resistance I need, the dirt on my hands, I get too antsy in a comfy chair, I need that reality flowing over my face, although I wouldnt mind more time for writing.
But one thing I noticed is, out there magnifies what ever is going on inside, or makes clearer, it truly is like a mirror.
Jacob could feel it, see it, out in the bush didn't get him away from it, the skin stayed with him, the stars, rabbits, and watering holes shouting back.
The earth does indeed speak in myth. Thank you Martin for helping me have the eyes and ears to see and hear that.
I've known since I was a child, sitting under a tree touching moss for hours, Jesus was nearer, but you helped me have clarity with that now as an adult.
Digging deeper where I am in this dirty glorious grace filled mess.
I look forward to hopefully meeting you someday, I have to say, sometimes out on the farm and in the mountains, I have fully expected to see you walking around a creek bend with a walking stick and flask in hand. Sometimes I really do think I see you, but it usually ends up being a gnarly old tree in my periphery. But the Appalachian Mountains do connect us in a way, so who knows.
I still lean down often to cup my hand over the rounded cushions of moss in the woods/ something to lay my hand on, a connection to something immense and unseen but palpable.
✨well said
Not writing about political matters feels like a wise call when the ‘news’ is shot through with every conceivable form of lie and omission, and individual and collective scapegoats grow ever fatter. I have just listened to Malcolm Guite on the Church Times podcast talking about how he handled the events in Galahad and the Grail where good flows from proscribed acts, in this case Galahad. And it seems like these bible stories keep presenting us with the same issue.
How many perspectives might there be on any one event? What information do I not have? Delete, delete, delete! This is what Richard Rudd has to say about our evolution:
“Falcons are hooded because their eyes are a great marvel of creation. They can see a tiny ‘O’ on a packet of Marlborough cigarettes from a mile up in the sky while moving at speeds of up to 200mph. So with the hood on, the falcon is docile, almost in a trance; all it’s primary awareness systems are on standby. But the moment the hood is removed, the system that comes on line . . . those eyes are connected directly into the bird’s central nervous system. So what the eye sees is instantly translated into action without any additional cognition: when the falcon is released into the air to hunt it becomes this all-seeing eye connected to a 200mph killing machine. It’s no wonder the falcon became the royal bird because it is an awesome creature. There’s no time delay between seeing and acting. I give you this image because our future awareness is like that, but instead of being predatory, it’s revelatory.”
Please, please carry on labouring happily Martin - I am looking forward to welcoming a Hexworthy reveller to Winchester. “Inch by inch, hour by hour, releasing its stiffened limbs from its freezing metal cords” - such a powerful image: there is a beautiful integrity in the service you did that vixen by Moriarty’s cow byre. Good cheer to you.
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.--William Butler Yeats
Unbinding the Vixen. Under cover by night. Handmade, hand-dug keep for Her rest. Vernacular prayers out of earshot but against the tide of wire and violence. All under the gaze of the Messiah, in whatever form we meet on that road. That, to my ear, remains the only theology at world's end I can imagine rowing into.
That sense of separation from God - often when I don’t feel ‘good enough’. A reminder from Master Ryokan: “I don’t regard my life as insufficient. Inside the brushwood gate there is a moon. There are flowers”. Bless you Martin.
Please continue to write only of the true the good and the beautiful, not of the political. I sense external and perhaps internal pressures to divert, so I am casting a vote for you to continue to steer your skinboat toward the stars.
“Don’t go out God - like the candle - please don’t go out.”
Creation is a Good, but the world can snuff its taper.
We all were given Jesus in our lifetimes, but those fortunate to have received the undeserved Grace of a personal encounter in the “real” world now have work to keep the memory alive. It is a haptic memory against which the world fights to obscure and question. Did it really happen? Your work shows that if we keep these stories true and the real will be kept at bay.
Selfishly speaking, my reading rule is no politics, so my subscribtion list is small. You and even your active-voice friend PK have stayed within those parameters- even pre conversion). Reading limits like this keep a few sins off my confessional list.
Stay heroic. Stay with us! Keep the flame.
Thanks for that Clark.
Thank you Martin. I weep.
Create in me a clean heart, oh God! Do not take your spirit from me!
Àṣẹ
‘Don’t go out God’….I can echo that. Sometimes prayer feels so difficult and we do feel like we’re under the goat fur and a natural reaction is to bow our heads to hide rather than pray and face God but those snippets of prayer we utter when in those places…..perhaps they touch God because in spite of everything we are still choosing Him…it’s a cry from the heart. He knows what He’s doing with us. Focusing on small things sounds good. But He does send His floods. I always like the poem by C S Lewis ‘As the ruin falls’. The way I read it is that we can never tend to ourselves spiritually because we are too wrapped in ourself but God will come with the bulldozer and knock us for six but only so something new can emerge.
The bulldozer has been busy round here this Lent!
Hope you have a peaceful run up to Easter.
Living in the Black these days, and your voice has been weaved into my marrow. There is room to breathe in your words. I am glad for it. This:
“My daily work feels similarly overwhelming, but I don’t know what else we are meant to be doing with our time. Pick, pick, pick. Stay calm, and attend to the work. Be light with it if you can. You can risk abundance. “
And the permission to say things like, “Don’t go out God”.
Thank you for those gifts.
Thanks for being unpolished and dusty, and for honoring the vixen.
Amen!
Martin, thank you for this most beautiful and timely penitential prayer offering. So many good questions that I need to ask now. How can I stop myself from stealing a blessing and instead trust in its arrival? When I feel unblessed, I get cranky and fearful. How do I truly believe and remember that God's ears hear even the cheep of a baby Raven?
I have never asked God to give me a sign. I've always thought that was presumptuous. But maybe it's just a sensible way of praying for some sort of concrete help to continue trusting. But when I'm worn and torn, Old scratch relentlessly visits and I open the door to him, though I'm limping afterwards. God, please speak to me in my derangement. And it's probably about time to start shouting to all of us, everywhere, in our derangement.
Over the past week, like you Martin, I have also been able to choose joyful labors. Pulling weeds and trimming roses, planting seeds in small pots and watching them germinate. Nothing makes me feel more alive than watching things grow and helping to nurture that process.
I have also started to memorize a Blessing For Light by John O'Donahue. It goes like this:
Light cannot see inside things.
That is what the dark is for,
Minding the interior,
Nurturing the draw of growth,
Through places where death in its own way turns into life.
In the glare of neon times,
Let our eyes not be worn
By surfaces that shine
With hunger made attractive.
That our thoughts may be true light,
Finding their way into words
Which have the weight of shadow
To hold the layers of truth.
Like the early morning moon sinking and silhouetting oak branches , whatever the Holy One is doing with my field daisy of a life seems , at times, to be just out of the reach of my understanding. It’s puzzling ,and a little disorienting, that yesterday I joined family and friends to grieve and bless my mother’s joyful dance to the other side where her long time pastor gave a message centered around , you guessed it, Jacob and Esau . He pointed to the slickster inheritance grab , the desert winds , the limp causing wrestle with God’s human relations representative ,and to the fact that the Holy One then begins to self identify as the God of Jacob . He reminded us as well that for most of her life my mother walked with a limp caused by a car accident injury when I was a lad . She was one of the most ardent followers of Yeshua I’ve known .All this to say thank you, Martin, for your weekly missive which helps me to look up from hoeing the small garden I’ve been given and see the small whirlwinds across the fields tossing up leaves .
Bless your mum Gerard. A wave from me.
You sitting outside, deep into the night with a dead fox on your lap is quite a touching image. And the story of Fox Woman is one of my favorites that you tell. My Sundays now consist in working the garden. Today, as I turned the soil that has been resting all winter, I listened to you tell Fox Woman again. I never tire of hearing that story.
This all made me think about a story from where I work. I’m part of the grounds crew at a local University. Of course we do a lot of landscaping and gardening but there are other less glamorous things we also do, like picking up dead animals. Mostly it’s squirrels and small birds. Because of the abundance of squirrels, we have some really healthy and well fed hawks on campus. Sometimes they swoop down low and fly between unexpecting students. It’s quite a lovely sight to behold.
One day I got call about a dead bird. It turned out to be a massive red tailed hawk. It had flown head first into a large window of one of the buildings on campus. It was such a magnificent bird and so heart wrenching to see.
The next day members from our grounds crew and from the campus birding club gathered together to bury the hawk. They had been advocating to put reflective tape on windows to prevent this very thing from happening. The professor sponsoring the club gave a eulogy and a large stone with a perfectly round hole drilled in the center, which had been discarded behind the art building, was put on top of the hawk’s burial place.
It seemed like the least that we could do.
Wow, thank you Matt. I was once at a conference in the backwoods of Minnesota and the exact same thing happened. Glad to know a little of your daily labours. Good to think of you in all that fresh air.
You’re words continue to inspire Martin, thank you
I told Bearskin with a small gathering at my church last night. After reading this, I get the sense there's a kind of Jacobian spirit in the Old Man of the woods in that story, the goat-footed fellow who summons the wrestling match and gives you the fur you need to put on in your grief.
Hooray to your storytelling!
Thank you, Martin, for giving the vixen your respectful attention and burial. They are indeed creatures that carry messages from the gods. Once I walked into a store in Anchorage, Alaska - basement room full of furs, pelts of foxes- silver, red, grey- and so suddenly it felt so wrong I thought I would vomit- foxes as commerce. And once after seeing a fox unexpectedly, briefly, I tried to write a poem about it- Mercury, Loki-like, magician, shapeshifter, sharp senses, wild intelligence, eyes that were an invitation- who turned and changed in an instant into ferns, and found I was writing about a man who had appeared suddenly in my life- invitation in the eyes, same wild intelligence, who knew my weakness for poetry- stole heart, breath, away…..and disappeared. The parting gift was a renewed love of poetry. We need our gods to stay wild.