Blowin’ in the Wind: “Seasons of Nature” -- by Ilana

("Blowin’ in the Wind" is a periodic feature on my blog containing an assortment of nature writings – songs, excerpts, poems, prayers, Bible readings or other things – pieces written by others but that inspire me or give me joy. I trust they’ll do the same for you.)

I know I just did a “BitW” feature last month, and I cannot recall if I’ve ever shared a work by a family member, but I cannot resist avoiding either of these this month. My wife Gail and I just received a special gift from our eight-year-old granddaughter Ilana, and it tickled us so that I thought you might appreciate it as well. 

Each of our eleven grandchildren has their own special personality, and we love every one of them more than life itself. Ilana? She is a beautiful child full of the wonder of life, and of the love both of people and of God’s creation. She is also a ton of fun to be around in spite of the fact that she sometimes tells me I have been demoted to ‘the second-funniest person in the family’ behind our son, her Uncle Jarrett. But that never lasts long, and she typically and appropriately restores me to the throne quite quickly. (Sorry, Jarrett...)

And the girl DOES love God’s creation! It is always a pleasure to hike with her because she notices things, a key characteristic of nature lovers and all of us who find in nature an important spiritual pathway to God. She also calls herself Grandpa’s ‘nature companion’ whenever she and I hop on our ATV and pick up trash along the county road near our Michigan cabin. In other words, she is already concerned about Earth care. It’s therefore fitting that her name is even natural: ‘ilana’ is one of several Hebrew words for ‘tree,’ most often associated with oaks. That was not surprising when we first heard her name after her birth, as her father is a horticulturist, though I don’t know if that had anything to do with it at the time!

Upon our arrival for a visit last month, Ilana told Gail and me she had something for us, then with a shy smile gave us the hand-printed original of a poem she had written a few days before during a rest time she and her sibs take after lunch. We thought it precious, and so I present to you here Ilana’s “Seasons of Nature,” with her spellings and punctuation intact. Enjoy!

When the first snowflakes fall

When one by one they start then thousands shimer in the sky

When fluffy snow covers everything

When sparkling white they glisten megestic do they look

When few sounds nor animals are there only robins or none

Then do you know that Winter is here.

When the drifts are small yet get smaller each day

When the flowers peek from the wet soil

When the air is warm and damp

When animals wake up and continue their lives

When the areas are colerful 

Then do you know that spring is here

When the leaves on the trees turn green

When the air is schorching

When water is the want for outside fun

When ice cream and cold treats turn from a cream to a liquid faster than a hummingbird

When animals are everywhere trees, grass, sky

Then do you know that summer is here

When the air becomes colder and jackets required

When the leaves turn vibrant colers of yellow, orange and, bloodred

When nuts fall to the ground

When animals scurry to get food and store it for winter

When people start getting snow shovels and hot chochlate

Then do you know that Autum is here

I want to live nowhere else for

Seasons Make a year a year.

And, oh, I can’t forget her dedication from the back of the page: 

Dedicated

To

Papa and

Grandma

Whom love

Me and Nature

Very much

With Love

Isn’t that delightful? The simple, fresh and wondering thoughts of a child… amazingly compelling. 

I don’t know if you’ve paid attention to a malady that is oft-touted by psychologists over the last two decades, but the dysfunction has to do with nature deprivation. Exposure to the natural world has been proven to improve mental, social and emotional health in profound ways, to say nothing of the spiritual dimension of celebrating the beauty of the Lord’s sanctuary. Nature outings are being prescribed as treatment for both adults and kids. We’d all do our children and grandchildren an enormous service by getting them outdoors regularly, establishing natural rhythms and opportunity for healing while they are young, whether they are super eager to go or not. 

Please excuse my diversion into preaching -- it’s an occupational hazard! So skip that paragraph, take a deep breath, let it out slowly, and go back and read Ilana’s poem again. Then getcha self outdoors at the next possible opportunity.

~~ From a Grandpa ‘whom’ loves his grand-

children and nature very, VERY much, 

RGM, March 19 2024

From My Nature Journal: The Hard Work Yet to be Done

Life is physical.

Speaking personally and vulnerably, this has seemed especially so to me with arthritis recently flaring up in practically every joint of my body these last couple of months!

But as a nature observer, one of the times that the physicality of life seems most pronounced to
me is at the change of seasons, and, though there are four changes annually in northern climes, it’s the change from summer to fall that astounds me the most. Whether it’s the eye-popping delight of green trees turning red, gold and purple here in the northwoods of Michigan, the taste of a good crisp caramel apple with peanuts, the smell of smoked fish or burning leaves (which have some similarities!), the honking of chevron after chevron of Canada geese heading south, or the tingle of early morning air already in the 30’s, the five senses alone declare the physicality of life. And this is to say nothing of that sixth sense: something in us actually sometimes senses the very physicality of change. 

And yet life is also spiritual. 

I wouldn’t blog these thoughts over these nearly nine years past if I did not believe this was so. Most of you who share these musings with me also find in nature a simple and beautiful pathway to God, though some of you might not describe it in quite that same way. God has created a lovely universe. The ancient Psalmist said it very well: “Your works, God, are wonderful, and my soul knows that very well (Psalm 139:14).” Yet, while holding precious God’s creation and committing to its care as its responsible ‘keepers,’ or stewards, it is of course not creation that we revere but the Creator. 

To me, these two simple declarations are to state the obvious. Life is physical. Life is spiritual. I typically write of elemental things. 

It is, however, as these two realities converge – the physicality of life and the spirituality of life – that deeper learnings and yearnings present themselves. Just as there is something in the physicality of creation’s beauty, awe and majesty that leads me to contemplation of spiritual realities, there is also somehow something in my arthritis for me to contemplate spiritually. Where is God when we are in pain? Is there anything possibly redemptive when one suffers? These are questions that have vexed many through the eons, and the answer that God is right there with us in our pain, while true, is not always that satisfying. 

Covid-19 has ravaged the world these past eighteen months, and the flourishing of variants present anew the prospect that we are not quite beating this thing as we had anticipated. The work that is still before us in our country to address racial conciliation and righteousness is as daunting as it is necessary. Our hyper-charged political climate and its absence of civil discourse has become such that the commonweal is neither common nor well. Each of these will require tremendous physical and emotional sacrifices and effort to overcome. And yet none of that can begin to be accomplished without the work of the spirit, both the God-given human spirit and the Holy Spirit, calling upon the mercy of God to empower our most creative spiritual resources. The physical beauty of God’s creation can belie the ugliness of the challenges we face, can play a part in its healing.

But we need the holy. And we need to remember, as Anne Lamott said in a recent National Geographic article, “The holy is not a spectacle… It is more often felt in small graces and blessings, although you do have to be paying attention to catch the momentousness. It’s around us, above us, below us and inside us all the time. It’s here, but often we’re not. Life wants to keep reminding us of its sacred self, but we have to open our eyes and hearts.”

Let’s put all of our resources to work, both physical and spiritual, to meet the challenges before us. 

~~ RGM, September 28, 2021 

From My Nature Journal: Restless

[Another year has turned. Many reflect on the passing of time in these first few days of a New Year. I recently ran across this piece in my nature writings, reflecting on such a time some years ago. My prayer is that it will be a blessing to any who are experiencing a season of restlessness.]

In light of a wind of change that has been blowing over me, I have been thinking lately of seasons: I seem to be coming off a long season of unrest, the exact nature of which has not been clear. Depression? No… Anxiety? No, not quite that either. But restlessness? Disquiet? I think for now, those seem to describe it best.

When actual climatic seasons begin to change, it could be said that a restlessness settles in. In mid-season the weather seemed to have normed into an ‘at-restness,’ but within a short time after that, something happens – one may first notice it as a faint whiff, a color, a sound, a sighting – and a harbinger of change presents itself. It may be a September snow flurry or a faint peal of March thunder. Perhaps it’s a towhee at the February feeder or an early fall sundog. From then on, one notices more and more the cues and clues that change is in the offing. Even these become the norm after awhile, until finally the mid-April snow dump or the late fall Indian Summer provide the last vestiges, the death throes, of a season dying, and a new norm ascends reign.

Seasons of course are not known to be static, not always predictable or black and white, at least climate seasons, that is, unless you live nearer the Equator. Winter, spring, summer and fall progress and fade in turn, with their capricious timings and geographic variations. Our years in Minnesota convinced us that winter there seemed to rob a month from each of the most pleasant seasons -- spring and fall -- producing a five-month deep freeze that just went on interminably. That variation is all the more pronounced where my daughter lives in Alaska.

But then there are seasons that are exact, fixed: annual solar seasons of 365¼ days; daily solar seasons of 24 hours, give or take the occasionally added leap minute; lunar seasons of 28¼ days; celestial seasons of other planets that share our solar system, or other extra-terrestrial rotations within our expanding universe, calculable but too vast for most to notice. Are any of earth’s short weather seasons not tied to some of these?

But this is not all. We speak of seasons of life and death, epochs that affect every animal, vegetable and mineral. There are seasons of biological gestation, thirty-nine weeks or whatever. There’s apple blossom season, or morel mushroom season, ‘when the oak leaves are the size of squirrel paws,’ according to my dear hunter-gatherer brother Greg. There’s sugarbush time when the maples are running with early spring sap, or ‘those years the cherry tree grew by the garage.’ Then there are recognizable seasons of human time. ‘My high school years’ is an example of that, or ‘while he was in the military,’ ‘while I had that job,’ or ‘all that time Dad was sick.’ There are tectonic seasons of colliding plates, of mountain formation, volcanism, erosion. There are seasons of a friendship, seasons of childhood and adulthood, puberty, child-bearing years, empty-nestedness, old age. Ownership has its seasons: ‘those years we had the Ford conversion van,’ or ‘the time our cat Spencer lived with us (for certainly, does anyone ever really ‘own’ a cat? Actually, I think the cat looked at it as ‘the season he let us live in his house.’)’ Then there are seasons of place: ‘those years we went to the farm every summer’ or ‘our time at 1540.’ Of course, the longer a season the less it may be spoken of as such; for example, my family does not say ‘while we were on Rockwell Street’ the same way my wife’s says ‘our time on Hemlock,’ for our Rockwell season in Chicago was so long, fifty years, the only home some of us ever knew. In the same way, one does not say ‘my time in the solar system.’ Seasons tend to have duration. Not all their endings and beginnings can be pointed to, but some can.

Joni Mitchell had it:

And the seasons, they go ‘round and ‘round

And the painted ponies go up and down:

We’re captured on the carousel of time.

We can’t return, we can only look behind from where we came

And go ‘round and ‘round and ‘round in the circle game.

Still, I’m thinking these days that seasons sometimes define us, as it seems this season of unrest has defined me, at least from my perspective. I long for it to be over, glad the harbingers of its passing are becoming more frequent. Just the same, how I need again and again to be led to my immutable God -- “…Whose compassions fail not, Whose mercies never cease…,” and of Whom it is said possesses not a single “shadow of turning” (Lamentations 3:22-23 and James 1:17) -- while on and on, from my vantage-point, cycles on the music of the spheres. 

~~RGM

From My Nature Journal: When I Get to Heaven

When I get to heaven, tell me there will still be woods,

          Where a sauntered pace

          May be had without needing to keep

          One’s bearings of time or space,

          Forests with birds and creatures

          And bits of splendor that take breath away:

          Spring Beauties and Forget-Me-Nots,

          Summer’s ferns and fungus,

          Autumn leaves that crackle afoot

          Belying midwinter’s absurd stillness;

          And, yes, one with whom to walk who enjoys it as I, or as You.

I do love the woods.

When I get to heaven, tell me there will still be canoes,

          That skim cold, pristine lakes,

          Leaving wakes

          That last not long,

          By quiet stroke and firm hand

          Easing gently over mirror calm,

          Or bobbing swell and wave

          Into bright, hidden bays

          Where eagles nest and loons dive,

          Or sliding into dark, night water

          Silver by moonshine all the way to rocky shore.

I do love canoes.

When I get to heaven, tell me there will still be seasons,

          When color palates fly -- 

          January’s blazing whites,

          Lupine’s spring, a rainbow’s July,

          Aspen’s or maple’s fall,

          Living greens, waning yellows, dying reds,

          Late summer suns whose early setting

          Have always made me sad

          These things have to end,

          Like winter hearth-fires that blaze like those suns

          But then look so cold when the morning comes.

I do love seasons.

And if there be foolishness in me

For laying such earthly hope upon heaven’s landscape,

Have mercy on me, Lord:

I love this world you made.

It’s what I know.

(Endnote: I saw the rough idea for this poem many years ago, anonymously cited, so it’s not completely original to me. But at that time, I added significantly to it and adapted it so extensively that I cannot now recall what was original and what is mine. To this day, though, I am still unable to come up with a source, so if any part of it sounds familiar to you and you can set me straight, I’d appreciate you letting me know so I may give credit appropriately. Thanks.)

~~ RGM, October 31 2015

From My Nature Journal: I-Thou

I do not often try my hand at poetry, perhaps once in a blue moon. OK, OK, perhaps once in several blue moons. (Permit me to digress. Do you know what a blue moon actually is? Some call the monthly new moon a blue moon; though it may seem ‘blue’ as the night sky to us at that time, new moon is simply the time our natural satellite lies roughly between the earth and sun in its twenty-nine day earth orbit, and from our vantage point does not reflect sunlight. But a blue moon? Other common thought is that a blue moon is the second full moon in the same calendar month, an errant definition given by a popular science magazine in the mid-20^th Century. But it gets much more interesting than that: the historic definition of blue moon is actually the third moon in a single season that contained four full moons. At a time when people counted agricultural and animal migration seasons by lunar cycles, it stands to reason that a moon cycle of twenty-nine days did not neatly fit into the actual 365-day, twelve-month calendar year; keeping an annual calendar by twelve lunar cycles would throw seasonal anticipations significantly off in a very short time. Simple people had to make allowances for this. The annual clock could more easily be reset by solar time; but occasionally there had to be a ‘betrayer’ moon in a season that needed to be disregarded in order to get critical timing correct upon which life provision would depend. An early word for betrayer was ‘belewe.’ Whichever of these last two definitions we use, with a moon’s twenty-nine day cycle compared to thirty and thirty-one day calendar months, ‘belewe moons’ happen on average once every 2¾ years.)

So, as I was saying before my short attention span took control, writing poetry is not my forte (and maybe that's why poetry is not my forte...). But I once read in an old spiritual classic the line -- I the brook, thou the spring -- and determined at some point to give greater thought to that idea. Was it a Rainer Maria Rilke line? I cannot recall. But here is what resulted, not all nature images to be sure, but enough to be appropriate to my nature blog.

I the brook, Thou the Spring

I the journey, Thou the Path

I the known, Thou the Mystery

I the warmed, Thou the Fire

I the spoken, Thou the Word

I the seen, Thou the Seer

I the leaf, Thou the Root

I the breath, Thou the Life

I the sound, Thou the Source

I the beam, Thou the Light

I the borne, Thou the Bearer

I the grateful, Thou the praised

I the sail, Thou the Wind

I the vessel, Thou the Filling

I the thought, Thou the Mind

I the clay, Thou the Hand

I the wing, Thou the Lift

I the moment, Thou the Ever

I the lantern, Thou the Oil

I the deed, Thou the Will

I the image, Thou the Artist

I the breaker, Thou the Tide

I the held, Thou the Holder

I the mite, Thou the Expanse

I the fruit, Thou the Vine

I the cherished, Thou the Love

I the act, Thou the Force

I the gleam, Thou the Gem

I the protected, Thou the Shelter

I the eye, Thou the Vision

I the sustained, Thou the Food

I the chased, Thou the Pursuer

I the object, Thou the Subject

I the void, Thou the Fullness

I the faint, Thou the Strength

I the question, Thou the Answer

~RGM, from an earlier entry

in my nature journal