Blowin' in the Wind: Psalms and Calms in the Storm

("Blowin’ in the Wind" is a regular feature on my blog consisting of an assortment of nature writings – hymns, songs, excerpts, prayers, Bible readings, poems or other things – pieces I may not have written but that inspire me or give me joy. I trust they’ll do the same for you.)

Give to the Lord, you creatures of heaven,

give to the Lord all glory and power.

Give to the Lord a glorious name;

bow down to the Lord in holy splendor.

The voice of the Lord sounds over the oceans –

crashing thunder above the deep seas.

The voice of the Lord is power;

the voice of the Lord is splendor.

The voice of the Lord splits the cedars;

God splinters the cedars of Lebanon.

God makes Lebanon skip like a calf,

Mount Hermon skip like a wild young ox.

Slashing the sky with lightning-swords,

the Lord’s voice makes the desert writhe;

The desert of Kadesh quakes.

In terror, the deer flee God’s thunder,

that snaps the limbs from the trees;

in the temple, God’s glory appears.

The throne of the Lord is above sky and sea;

the Lord will rule forever.

Lord, give strength to your people;

Lord, bless your people with peace.

Psalm 29, The Psalms: A Translation for Prayer and Worship,

by Gary Chamberlain, The Upper Room

With no intent to make an illusion to the image of my “Blowin’ in the Wind” feature title, out of almost nowhere a heck of a storm just came through this afternoon. For two hours, through a dead calm, I could hear intense thunder growling from a distance, then the rain and wind pounced on us like a cat. After fifteen minutes and a half inch of rain, it was gone and quiet again.

I don’t know if storms are burlier here in this part of the Northwoods than other places where we’ve lived, or if the 100-foot hemlocks that surround our little cabin in the woods just make it seem so, dancing madly in the tempest as they do. During the mayhem I love to sit on the three-season porch and watch, almost makes me feel like Captain Dan lashed to the mast in Forrest Gump. Actually, I confess it also allows me to quickly get pans under the roof leaks that spring up out there during squalls when the wind direction is just right, leaks I can never seem to locate up top to repair. Of course, if from the roof I climbed one of our ‘cedars of Lebanon’ and weathered the gale from that vantage point, I‘d not only be one up on Captain Dan, but I’d do a nature trick John Muir pulled off from a Sequoia in the high Sierras…

Add some hail to the mix of these storms and it’s just crazy -- the trees give some shelter to the cabin, but the lake looks like it’s shaking right out of its basin, little six to twelve inch splash pillars skipping above it as far as the eye can see, which usually isn’t far in the downpour.

Perhaps peace in the storm is the image

the psalmist intended all along…

But back to Psalm 29, its metaphors and similes arrest me each time I read them. They come from the heart of someone who knew both the outdoors and his God. Wild. Unpredictable. Powerful. But Glorious! As awesome in bedlam as serenity. And that’s one of the things I love most about the Psalm, the way it ends. We’ve just been given a birds-eye view (at least a bird in a tree) of a stormy uproar showcasing the strength of God, and the psalmist is bold enough to ask not only that God would also give such strength to his people, but that God would additionally bless them with peace, a grace seemingly opposite that presented in the previous words.

Perhaps peace in the storm is the image he intended all along.

Jesus awoke and rebuked the wind, and said to the sea, “Peace! Be still!” The wind ceased, and there was a great calm. (Mark 4:39)

~~ RGM, July 9, 2016

P.S. I wrote a couple years ago on storms and their effect in producing strength and resilience in trees, and some surprised scientists who had made some hasty assumptions about weather’s influence on plants. A lesson for a different day, you might want to check it out. Click here to be taken back to that July 2014 post.

From My Nature Journal: Thoughts on Communication and the Handling of a Knife…

A certain safety precaution was practiced years ago by many who spent time together in the woods, either hunting or traveling, and making camp in the dark. When a hunting knife was being shared, as was often the case, it is obvious that its use needed careful attention, but especially so when light was low.

Oh, I remember the part I learned in Cub Scouts, that the person offering the knife held it carefully in his fingertips by the blade, so the person receiving it could take it by the handle. But there was more, as there usually is from what one learns in Cub Scouts.

If a knife was to be exchanged in low light, here is how the safeguard worked. The person with the knife, holding the blade, said, “Get it.” The person fumbling for the handle took hold but didn’t yet pull, for obvious reasons, and then said, “Got it.” Finally, the person holding the blade would say, “Good,” and, only then, let go. In this way, as can be imagined, all digits on the fingers and toes of each person could be better accounted for when the transfer was complete!

If two people can learn to handle and exchange a knife so responsibly, what I wonder is…

            …why God’s good truth is not routinely handled as conscientiously...

            …why so many have become so careless with words…

            …why we Christ followers can be so dispassionate in communicating the beauty

                        and attractiveness of our good God…

            …why our present culture has become so rude in both its private and public

                        discourse…

Proverbs says, ”The words of the reckless pierce like swords, but the tongue of the wise brings healing.” (Prov. 12:18) In other words, words are like a knife: they can cut, bad for bad and virtuous for virtuous.

Got it? Get it! Good.

~~ RGM, July 1, 2016

From My Nature Journal: Consider the Lilies

(This is a piece from my old nature journal. It goes nearly ten years back to a June afternoon when the Ridgeline Trail near our Castle Rock home was brand new, an area we had begun exploring well before the trails had been cut.)

~~~

Ridgeline Trail

We never anticipated so many.

Gail and I hit Ridgeline Trail today outfitted with gear we had not hiked with there before: a spiral notepad and pen. In the days prior we had noticed an incredible profusion of spring wildflowers in bloom, observing ones newly-opened almost daily. Finally, yesterday, we mused that we should bring paper and pen sometime soon and record how many we see. “There must be twenty-five or thirty,” one of us said. So today we gave ourselves extra time for our regular three-mile loop, and started recording from the moment we left the trailhead. Astonishingly, we had not even gotten off the feeder path before we had already surpassed our imagined number.

Prairie Smoke, one of our favorites

It was quite stunning, a magnificent diversity. In that small distance we counted eighty-four different blooming wildflowers! Eighty-four! And this was a conservative count, especially because we had not the patience this time around to differentiate all the varieties of vetches (at least four) and the plethora of penstemons (at least six); no doubt there were more of these ubiquitous species. Additionally, this count included only those plants near the trail, and only those in bloom – it omitted those more than several yards off the path, as well as tiny groundcovers we may not have seen and those in leaf or bud but not bloom. All told, there would have been far more.

Thirty of the eighty-four blooming species were

shades of yellow, with nineteen purple and

eighteen white; those remaining were various

hues of pink, orange, blue and coral…

Hummingbird moth sipping Thistle

Gail is the wildflower expert between us. (I’m more the tree, rock and sky guy.) She has an uncanny knack for name recall of plants she even rarely sees. “Don’t you remember when we saw this one once several years ago at blobbity-wherezit?” So she ends up having to school me each year even in some common ones I always seem to need to relearn. Even still, many of the names escaped us both (an effort for another day), so those we could not ID we recorded by color, character and leaf shape, so as not to duplicate. Some were so odd as to almost defy description – fern-like, butterfly-shaped, spidery, fringed-clusters,

Paintbrush, Penstemon and Pikes Peak

asparagus-leaved. And yet others were so common-looking or plain-seeming that we have very likely overlooked them typically – dandelion-like, dandelion-like B, and dandelion-like C. Thirty of the eighty-four blooming species were shades of yellow, interestingly, with nineteen purple and eighteen white; those remaining were various tints of pink, orange, blue and coral. Many species there were that have also been cultivated: wild roses, geraniums, orchids, yarrows, asters, alyssums, clovers, forget-me-nots, daisies, alfalfas, lupines, sunflowers, spiderwort, potentillas, yuccas, sweet peas, larkspurs, wallflowers, paintbrushes, flaxes and phloxes. There were even wild onions, plums, currants and cherries. But those undomesticated, at least to our knowledge, were also well-represented: arnicas, mallows, other worts, harebells, fairy trumpets, dogbanes, thistles, prairie smoke, holly, knapweeds, prickly poppy, banner flower, cacti, and who-knows-what-else. Yet there they all were, every one of them in their created glory.

Mariposa Lily, another favorite

Hmmm… Glory... That’s what it was, inestimable beauty, even regal, exceeding the splendor of a king.

Jesus said, “Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these. If God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you, you of so little faith?” (Matthew 6:28-30)

Oh, the depth of the riches… of God! How… unfathomable are His ways!  (Romans 11:33)

The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God stands forever. (Isaiah 40:7)

~~ RGM, from an early journal entry,

Adapted for my blog May 22, 2016

From My Nature Journal: Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing

Purity of heart is to will one thing.

These were words of Danish philosopher and social critic Søren Kierkegaard (in fact, they were a book title of his), speaking of the singularity of purpose and will with which the mature follower of Christ pursued the life of faith. Off the top of one’s head it might be challenging to describe that ‘one thing’ in a single sentence, and would be interesting to raise that subject among a group of friends sometime soon. But it no doubt relates to the same ‘one thing’ about which Jesus exhorted Martha in Luke 10:41-42, “Martha, Martha, you are anxious and troubled about so many things. But only one thing is needed…”

Singularity of will… Sometimes, by contrast, my seeming multiplicity of wills is an annoyance, and that not only to me.

Singularity of will… Sometimes, by

contrast, my seeming multiplicity of wills

is an annoyance, and that not only to me.

Over the last several springs there has been a bass nest in a couple feet of water about twenty feet south of our dock. A fish nest? Yes, they’re different from most other animal nests – in the wide open with little cover, and in the case of bass and many other fish, are simply a roughly circular clearing where the male has driven away the sand and silt with his tail and left a slight, gravelly depression. Nose anchored in a fixed position, he pivots to create a bed approximately twice his length. (‘Our’ nest is twenty-four to thirty inches in diameter.) He’ll then coax a ready female over it and woo her; mama releases her eggs, papa gives them a spray of sperm (called ‘milt’), and the fertilized eggs settle into the sparse cover of cracks and crevices below. She swims away, often to spawn again

A bass nest

elsewhere, and the male may entice another female to spawn with him, assuring good diversity of offspring. The male then guards the nest for several days, not exactly settling on but hovering over it or patrolling nearby; when the fry hatch (I always thought ‘fry’ was an ironic name for juvenile fish, given their potential future…), papa will guard it for another day or two and then be gone. Many of these nests are visible in shallow water, as the gravel tends to be lighter in color than the silt and sand that has been blown aside. And if the lake is calm, it is usually quite easy to spot a nice-sized fish perched over it.

During spawning season, fishermen work these beds with various techniques to catch them. (I won’t reveal here what I think is the most effective method, as that would be to disclose trade secrets.) Most fisherpeople I know have long since progressed to catch-and-release when it comes to bass, especially in pristine natural settings where better food fish like sunnies, walleye and trout are more available. It takes a pretty large bass to be a legal keeper in the northwoods anyway, in excess of fifteen inches here in Michigan. Up north, that’s a big fish; individuals that reach this size do not do so because they’re dumber than average.

But bass are just plain fun to catch. Even small ones give an amazing thrill, and they are just so beautiful to see up close. Only very rarely is one wounded in the catch-and-release process, if it is done right. A few seconds out of the water, liberation from the hook, maybe a photo, and finally a gentle release and they’re back in the water in a few flashes, more quickly gone in a flash of their own.

And this is if a spawning fish can even be caught. Getting back to the idea with which I started, they are pretty intent on their purpose. Typically a nesting fish will ignore the distraction of nearby food, including bait or lure; in fact, it is not unusual for a nested fish to pick up the edge of a lure ever so gently, too smoothly and lightly for the fisherman to even feel it, then move to the edge of the nest and just spit it out. I’ve seen them do this. Can’t you picture it? “Oh, there’s that annoying little thing again… (Lift.) Puhtooey!” In fact, if a fisherman has the ability to actually see his lure move slowly left or right, defying physics, a quick tug might capture him right then and there.

This past Memorial weekend my dear son-in-law could not resist seeing if he could raise the old boy in our swimming area and take a look. I watched for a short while from the three-season porch as he worked the bed, and, immediately after I looked away, he was clambering quickly up the steps with his catch held carefully in both hands. We hastily shared the joy of this little natural beauty, and Beej was off quickly for the release.

Here’s the thing, though… Later that morning, out of curiosity I asked him if he could tell if the fish had returned to its nest at all while he was down there continuing to fish. “Oh, within seconds it was back on it,” he replied. “Really? Within seconds?” “Yes, maybe ten.” We both shook our heads in amazed delight. It had just gone through what was likely a first-in-its-life experience, fought a fight that would mean life or death, was forcefully yanked from its familiar environment and was finally introduced to as foreign a setting as underwater would be to us. Once back in the water, wouldn’t you think it’d take off for the most distant cover it could find, in sheer fear? Nope, within a brief moment he was back at it as before.

That is singularity of purpose. That is willing one thing.

Forgive my anthropomorphism, but, as always, natural realities constantly remind me of spiritual realities. I wish I could possess that kind of singularity of will. My mind at times wanders, my commitment at times wavers. If purity of heart is to will one thing, my heart must be pretty adulterated. Will it be Jeremiah’s description that wins out, who said, The heart is deceitful above all things, and is exceedingly corrupt…? Or Paul’s description – This one thing I do. Forgetting what lies behind… I press on toward the goal for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus…? One clever commentator asked the question, “Do we say, with Paul, ‘This one thing I do,’ or do we rather say, ‘These twenty things I dabble in?’”

God knows me and knows my heart, and I draw great consolation from that. As Thomas Merton prayed, “…I believe that the desire to please You does, in fact, please You.” God knows your heart, too. In the midst of life’s distractions, however annoying, or its traumas, however shocking, there is a place of purpose to which we may return and find again the possibility of life renewed and hope restored.

~~ RGM, June 1 2016