From My Nature Journal: A Bloom for the Season

It's called a pasqueflower, a lovely of the high plains, mountain states and north.

Among the very first wildflowers of spring when we lived in the foothills of Colorado, pasqueflowers sometimes even pushed up through snowcover. I took this photo in very early spring some time back. As a cold weather flower, they tend to stay close to the ground, about six inches tall, and often can be found as in this photo in drier, rocky areas that hold the warmth of the late winter sun.

Sometimes confused with tulips, it’s also called the Prairie Crocus, May Day Flower, and appropriately, Easter Flower: those of you who perceive the etymology of words might have guessed the latter. Pasque comes from paschal: ‘of, or relating to, Easter or Passover.’ Picking up on the symbolism within the Jewish celebration of Passover, where a lamb’s blood protected the Hebrew people from the ravages of death (see Exodus 12), Jesus, in 1 Corinthians 5:7, is referred to as our Passover, or paschal, lamb. Though there are other flowers also associated with the blood of Christ (the Rose and Bleeding Heart among them), the Pasqueflower is associated with Easter by the timing of the season.

And so, with those redeemed of Christ throughout nearly two millennia, we pray: 

O Lamb of God, Who takes away the sins of the world, have mercy upon us.

O Lamb of God, Who takes away the sins of the world, have mercy upon us.

O Lamb of God, Who takes away the sins of the world, grant us Your peace.

Interestingly, though the plant is full of toxins, its derivatives can be used medicinally for birthing/labor issues and certain vision impairments. These uses offer all kinds of possibilities for further spiritual symbolisms, connecting Easter life to our circumstances, if we wanted to go that route.

Finally, kudos to the State of South Dakota and the Canadian Province of Manitoba, both of which had the creative presence of mind to name the Pasqueflower their state/provincial bloom, though known there by different names.

~~ RGM, March 31 2021

From My Nature Journal: The Kill Site

There’s a fresh kill site in the field behind the house, just beyond the backyard fence. I’m not yet sure what the remains are, seeing it here from the bedroom window, possibly a flicker taken by a hawk or a mourning dove by an owl. The killer might even have been a coyote, but likely not, as there are too many feathers spread about, and a coyote would have simply wolfed it all down (a curious cross-species morphism).

It’s always a bit humbling to come upon a kill site. Whether a bird near a trail or a mammal in the woods, it arrests my attention and sobers me. Almost always I pause and muse what the struggle must have been like, and in subsequent hikes I often remember the spot, a shrine, as if hallowed by virtue of what took place there.

It was something momentous, something of great drama. But a kill site only? It may seem a one-way loss looking at the carnage left behind, yet in the grand scheme of things there is something equally significant about it for the perpetuation of life. It’s as much a life site as a

kill site. A sacrifice was made, one for the benefit of the other. One surrenders, the other gains. One becomes the sustenance, the other is sustained. One submits, capitulates, loses, gives up, is emptied; the other prevails, triumphs, profits, is built up, filled. One is blessed, the other becomes the blessing.

Death begets life. Sacrifice cedes to vitality.

Oh, sweet Golgotha, the kill site…

But God showed his great love for us by sending Christ to die for us while we were still sinners. And since we have been made right in God’s sight by the blood of Christ, he will certainly save us from God’s condemnation. (Romans 5:8-9, NLT)

~~ RGM, From an Old

Post in my Journal

From My Nature Journal: A Tribute. And a Tribute

I had a new old friend who died recently, and this post is a tribute to him and to something in the natural world he loved unlike anyone else I ever knew.

Walter was a colorful character with an interesting history, to say the least, and was full of stories. I dare not go into them here or I won’t get to my second tribute, which was actually his, but suffice it to say that I’ve not met many others who flew planes on ‘the other side’ in war against the United States. He and his dear wife Ingrid became good friends during a brief time I was their pastor a couple years ago. Oh, I did call him a new old friend, didn’t I? The recent nature of our friendship is the ‘new’ part. And the ‘old?’ Well, Walter was over ninety years of age. And he was dying.

The tenuous state of both his and his wife’s health was the thing that first brought Gail and me to meet him, but it was his honest and vulnerable questions about life and death, faith and doubt that caused me to quickly love the man. And I count it a great privilege to have been his friend as he struggled with his mortality.

His interests were vast. Like me, he was a naturalist and a man of strong Christian faith. Unlike me, he was also a very accomplished yet retired Boeing engineer, and, as already inferred, a pilot. Whether it was this thing of flight, which was his passion, that drew him to the husbandry of bees, I do not know. But a skilled beekeeper he also was, in spite of the fact that his greater Seattle home was surrounded by others for many miles around. At our first visit, I took little notice of the napkins he and his wife had set before us with our afternoon coffee – black, yellow, and covered with bees. Yet in subsequent visits not only would we tour his apiary, but our conversations somehow often became interlaced with lessons he had learned from his apiculture hobby; and I’d also find he and Ingrid had other bee-themed napkins with which to grace a table.

What stunned me was the

depth of Walter’s love…

Wow, did Walter know bees. He knew how they lived and died, how they behaved, how both the social and physical realities of their colony worked. And I came to find through listening to his stories that he also delighted in knowing his bees. When I took more than a casual interest in his accounts of queens he had known, in fact, had known well enough to recognize and name, he took a risk and shared with me a poem he had written when one of his colonies had died mysteriously and abruptly.  When he set the paper in my hands, he said, “Here it is. Some people might think I’m crazy.”

So, along with my tribute to my new old friend Walter, I share his tribute to his lost colony, a poem he named, “Bee Requiem.”

In painful sorrow, sad and mourning I see the ravages of death

Unnumbered little bodies, now just shells awaiting their return to a new cycle

In mother earth’s deep wonder wells

Maya, Mahrah and the others who circled in exploring paths

And walked on cheeks and head and ears, and sometimes down my neck

Into my bosom to feel the warmth and listen to my heart

As one brave creature entered my ear to see what’s in there

I, deeply touched, produced a tear, only to have another see fit to drink it,

Thereby translating me to yonder wonderland so dear

And so, the present seemed to vanish, relieving me from troubled thoughts and fears

Oh, blessed beings, how I miss you and wish you would be here to drink my tears

But, praise the Lord, the souls of all creation remain existing in His heart

And when my time has come I will again be with you

In perfect love and recognition, never ever to depart

                                                ~~ WEB, August 2008, Colony #4

I was stunned as I finished reading. It wasn’t so much about new insights I’d gained into bees and beekeeping, something about which as a naturalist I had known embarrassingly little. It wasn’t the quality of the poetry, of which I certainly could never be judge anyway. It wasn’t about some flashy spiritual sound byte that might look good on a cheesy nature calendar. And it wasn’t that I found Walter crazy, far from it. What stunned me was the depth of Walter’s simple love. In his beautiful tribute, I saw a man who deeply loved life, who achingly loved the natural world, even intimately loved creatures that had once caused me an anaphylactic reaction. And I also saw the answer to Walter’s doubt, in words he himself had written years before, words that contained all the seeds of assurance he might ever one day need. I came to tears through the reading. As did he, by the way.

So there are my two tributes, one to Walter, one to his bees.

Walter, I’ll miss you. Thanks for inspiring me with your love of God’s creation. And do you know what I’d like very much? Perhaps one day, in perfect love and recognition, we can meet again for coffee in yonder wonderland over bee-themed napkins.

~~ RGM, November 28, 2018

From My Nature Journal: A Seed and Me

Gail and I are currently serving a transitional ministry call among the good people of Trinity Covenant Church in Salem, Oregon. The state capitol, Salem nestles in the arms of the Willamette River Valley, the destination of several hundred thousand pioneers who undertook in the mid-1800’s the rigors of the Oregon Trail across the vast and little-known central expanse that would become Kansas, Nebraska, Wyoming, Idaho and Oregon. It’s a fecund and fertile wonderland here in the valley, among the richest farmlands on the face of the earth, predominating these days in the cultivation of grains, grass seed and grapes. Beside the crops, though, every square centimeter of uncultivated soil seems to sprout up with something or the other, so it has me thinking today about seeds.

I’ve heard it said that there are three possible futures for, let’s say, a grain of wheat: it can be left on the stalk or placed in a sack as feed for God’s beasts, ground into flour or otherwise transformed in a myriad of ways as food for God’s humans, or planted back in the ground and, under the proper conditions, allowed to produce the miracle we call a crop.

If I were that seed grain, my first inclination would be to prefer the last of the three. It sounds regenerative, even heroic. As surely as multiplication beats subtraction, so surely would I find this preferable to being eaten by cattle or crushed under the weight of a millstone.But what of that planted seed? Only on second thought do I consider the trauma necessary to accomplish its predestined regenerative glory. First I must be buried in the cold ground, concealed in the oxygen-less depths for the required time. Buried! It was writer Norman McLean who quipped something along the line, “There are certain things I am meant to do, and, as long as I am on the oxygen side of the earth’s crust, I had best be going about them.” But not the seed. It is covered, sealed, suppressed, hidden away, closed over by what the songwriter calls ‘the ‘whelming flood.’ Held fast by life’s perplexities, I lie immobilized, seized up, stock-still as death. Is it the stillness of the grave, separation from God? Or is it more rightly the gestation and constriction of a womb, secure within the bosom of God?

Thus abandoned beneath the earth, I wait in the dark. It may be the darkness of my despair or ignorance, the darkness of my sin or failure, the darkness of my isolation or loneliness. But when all around me seems pitch black and unintelligible, something, even within that dusky dungeon, quickens within me. Whatever it is, it, in concert with the moisture around me (my tears? the dampness of the divine breath? both?), breaks me open. As I simply submit to the regenerative power of God, my shell is cracked and something profound happens within my brokenness.

From my landlocked space in God’s grip, warmth and light begin to attract a strange and tiny marvel upward from within me, while light-repelling roots spread below to seek a footing, and my transformation proceeds -- sprout, blade, ear -- a metamorphosis. From the place where God bade me trust him in the darkness, I’m enlivened by the freshing of the Spirit, softened to a breaking point, and grow upward into the warmth, light and fruitfulness of a vital relationship with my Creator.

Jesus: “A sower went out to sow his seed… and some fell onto good soil (Luke 8:5,8).”

Again Jesus: “Most assuredly I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it produces much… (John 12:24).”

~~ RGM, June 19 2018

From My Nature Journal: Faith Sees

Eyes see the January-barren tree.

Faith sees spring’s leaf buds and blossoms, tastes autumn’s fruit.

Eyes see the storm.

Faith sees life-enhancing rain that refreshes and supples the land.

Eyes see the small, inert-looking speck.

Faith sees all of that tiny seed’s fertile potential.

Eyes see the trail’s steep grade, effort and toil.

Faith sees the panoramic view at trail’s end.

Eyes see flames consuming, ravaging.

Faith sees warmth, light, nutrients and purification.

Eyes see wilderness’s danger and foreboding.

Faith sees its ability to produce recollection, thoughtfulness and intention.

Eyes see glitz, neon lights, goods, attractions, and amusements.

Faith sees their prospective power to damage the spirit.

Eyes see geese in chevron flight moving south for the long winter.

Faith sees a spring return on pacific breeze.

Eyes see little, scanning quickly over natural beauty.

Faith sees the good pleasure of the Creator, and lingers.

Eyes see death, stark and brutal.

Faith sees resurrection, hope springing eternal.

Eyes fail.

Only faith sees.

Marvelous redemption.

Blessed Easter Tomorrow, 
RGM, March 31 2018

From My Nature Journal: Hope Waits

This is our first spring in the state of Washington, and it is an understatement to say that our Pacific Northwest habitat has changed just a bit compared to our former Colorado digs. Here in Cascade land, green is ubiquitous year-round. Back in the Centennial State, winter brown will prevail into April.

So today, in Lenten reverie, I was thinking back to a memorable saunter this time of year. Gail was out of town visiting her folks. I had the day off and was out wandering the newly opened Ridgeline Trail system. It was a weekday morning on a not so nice day, so the paths were empty, the air chilly and the sky gray. At one point I left the trail and wandered back into a draw to see what I could see. In a quiet and secluded spot I crawled back under a scrub oak, lay down on my back and fell asleep. When I awoke, a very light rain had begun to fall, but I was sheltered enough to simply lie there for some time and think about spring and life and death and Lent and resurrection. After a few moments I pulled out a notepad and scribbled a few lines, which came together further later that evening in this:

hope waits

i lie beneath an overwintered scrub oak

            staring up through stark branches

            dead, brittle brown leaves

            clinging, gripping

            beneath leaden sky

death has held tight rein through

            storms and winds of winter

            how? death is strong, tenacious

yet below each stiff leaf stem is life

            life that will soon push out

            push death down, each leaf to earth

            where tree will nourish itself

            nourish its own growth by God’s grace

death is an illusion, mocked

            life triumphs, green

            hope waits

So, that’s where my thoughts have taken me this third week of Lent, and I thought I’d share this little piece with you for your blessing. I pray you might anticipate the life that God is yet to course through whatever dormancy you may be experiencing.

Hope waits!

And, oh, while I’ve got you, let me tell you about the humble Scrub Oak, since I always enjoy sharing a little nature lesson along the way. It’s also called Gambel Oak, Winter Oak, Oak Brush and White Oak, though it’s not the same as the majestic Eastern White Oak. It’s an unpretentious tree of the interior southwest, common to all the ‘Four Corners’ states, and tends to be rather slight, normally 10-30 feet. The Scrub Oak is ubiquitous in arid foothills at 3500-6500 feet elevation, and carries a stunted, gnarly look. Unlike most deciduous trees, it holds most of its dead leaves through the winter, thus the name Winter Oak; spring’s new axillary bud development below each brittle leaf stem finally push the previous year’s leaf right out of its sheath. Though small, the tree is still an important and accessible winter deer browse in any kind of snow, and can produce a prolific mast of acorns each year, a rich and welcome treat for squirrels and bears as well as the deer.

Get outside!

~~ RGM, March 24, 2017