People collect things. This can happen with intention or sheer accumulation. My mother collected tea cups and had them displayed all around her house. It always made for an easy Christmas or birthday gift. Her friend collected thimbles which I always carried back from a trip to add to her the display case she had needed to purchase to house these tiny treasures. I admit to collecting stones and shells…inexpensive reminders of places that have etched themselves on my heart. At one point I had started collecting small pitchers and have still purchased one or two even after I decided that I was heading down the road of needing to buy a piece of furniture to display them and wanted to nip that prospect in the bud.

Last week I was searching for some materials I need for an upcoming retreat I have agreed to help lead. That’s when I realized that I, too, have a collection. I collect poems. In files. Between the pages of books. Inside my calendar and those of years past. In small stacks that can be found inside a desk drawer. Tiny pieces of paper with the poet’s words stashed into places where I will find them again. Just when I need them. And this says nothing about the actual books of poetry that line my bookshelves and sit on available table tops. Poems that have been read or written for a particular event or worship service or within a facebook post or in a magazine. I have held onto them with a collector’s mind and heart…and grip.

Looking through one file marked simply, “Poems”, I became lost in the wash of words. I could no longer remember from where the particular poems had come. I only know that I had decided that I simply could not live without these words…and those…and especially these very specific ones. Tucked among them all was this poem by Catherine Barnett:

Mostly I’d like to feel a little less, know a little more.
Knots are on the top of my list of what I want to know.
Who was it who taught me to burn the end of the cord 
to keep it from fraying?
Not the man who called my life a debacle, 
a word whose sound I love.
In a debacle things are unleashed.
Roots of words are like knots I think when I read the dictionary.
I read other books, sure. Recently I learned how trees communicate, 
the way they send sugar through their roots to the trees that are ailing. 
They don’t use words, but they can be said to love. 
They might lean in one direction to leave a little extra light for another tree.
And I admire the way they grow right through fences, nothing
stops them, it’s called inosculation: to unite by openings, to connect 
or join so as to become or make continuous, from osculare, 
to provide with a mouth, from osculum, little mouth.
Sometimes when I’m alone I go outside with my big little mouth
and speak to the trees as if I were a birch among birches.

I am not sure how this poem came to me or what was going through my mind…or my life…that caused me to add these words to my collection. It could have been the word ‘debacle’. If nothing else it is one of those words that just feels good in your mouth to say regardless of its meaning. It could have been because its title, “Epistemology” took me back to my seminary days when, like the word suggests, I was in the pursuit of all kinds of knowledge. 

These days dedicated to living my retirement with some manner of intention, I find I have more questions that answers and am more fascinated by words than ever before. This is a strange surprise of age. Yet I find I love the questions and the words that connect and the learning that results. (Life’s debacle…things are unleashed.) 

But if I allow myself to unravel the reason for the poem’s presence in my collection file, I am sure it had to do mostly with the trees and their communication and the notion of their loving. The ways in which they send sweetness to the root of suffering like a mother bakes cookies or adds sugar to milk to soothe the illness of her children. And the ways in which they stubbornly grow through obstacles and will not be deterred by wire or stone in an effort to connect and speak that love into the world. 

“Sometimes when I’m alone I go outside with my big little mouth and speak to the trees as if I were a birch among birches.” I am grateful to the poet for affirming my conversations with trees, birch or otherwise. My heart is particularly full these days with love for the trees that are showing such devotion to beauty and letting go and waking us all up. Over the weekend I was witness to humans standing, simply standing, in awe at the color and the majesty of what autumn speaks through these grounded oracles. 

My big little mouth wanted to shout praise and joy at being alive and connected to these great teachers. Me, a birch among birches, a black walnut among others, a maples among them all.

“I’m so glad to live in a world where there are Octobers.”
Lucy Maud Montgomery, Ann of Green Gables.

October. Last week it dawned on me that October is kind of the Wednesday of the seasons. Even though it is the tenth month, it feels like the middle of the week…hump day. The glow of summer is moving into memory. Much like a weekend that has not yet been fully planned, the fullness of winter lives only in the imagination. For those of us who live in the northern hemisphere and in the midwest, October is the month that can feel like we are suspended. Some days are warm enough for short sleeves. Others require gloves and sometimes a hat. And of course there are those who live in the before and the not-yet, wearing shorts and a warm, fleece jacket. 

All seasons, all months, bring a definitive kind of light. October brings its own special golden glow that bathes trees full of surprising color which spills onto our floors inviting us to think about embracing a feline nature. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to crawl into the sunlight moving slowly, ever so slowly, through the window and across the floor? That action would also help stifle the message of wonderment about how dirty the windows have become and the urging to wash them before the snow flies. 

For those of us who rise early, there is also the darkness that has crept into the morning hours. No longer is there the greeting of pink-tinged morning light and the sound of birds trumpeting a wake up call. With windows closed and darkness lingering longer and longer, we are reminded that a shift is happening and we are wise to stay awake to its invitation. As the author A. A. Milne writes: “Yet, I can face the winter with calm. I suppose I had forgotten what it was really like. I had been thinking of the winter as a horrid wet, dreary time fit only for professional football. Now I can see other things—crisp and sparkling days, long pleasant evenings, cheery fires. Good work shall be done this winter. Life shall be lived well. The end of the summer is not the end of the world. Here’s to October…”

Yes. Here’s to October. There are places in our world where it seems like ‘the end of the world’. Their world as they know it. In these days bathed in changing light and leaves that show themselves as the artist of limb and trunk, we can hold those places and those people in our hearts and, if we are praying people, our prayers. And we can toast October with the hope that it sends us gently into a winter that might offer a calm. For all the people. For all the places.

Three generations back
my family had only

to light a candle
and the world parted.

Today, Friday afternoon,
I disconnect clocks and phones.

When night fills my house
with passages,

I begin saving
my life.
~Marcia Falk

Last Sunday I began my morning as I usually do. After reading the paper, I sat down to watch CBS Sunday morning. I have come to think of this as my pre-church tailgating…coffee made, breakfast on a tray, settled into my comfy chair, I fill the 90 minutes before heading out for worship with this show filled with mostly feel good, inspiring stories. People doing good things for other people. Artists making art. Musicians making music. Kind words and some beautiful, colorful images of mandalas that offer an ‘amen’ at the end of every story. 

At some point of the show, my refreshments consumed, I picked up the needlework I had been working on the night before and began stitching. “You’ll have to pick those stitches out with your nose on Judgment Day.”, my Mother’s voice echoed in my head. This was something she would say if I began to sew on a Sunday. Sundays were not for sewing, or working in the yard, or going to the movies, or any other task that could be done on the other six days of the week. It was a message that came through loud and clear and while said with a certain tongue-in-cheek tone, it was not to be argued with.

That much-loved voice in my head, the voice that I don’t have the privilege to hear in real time anymore has stayed with me all week. I am sure my Mom did not literally believe this. And certainly, I don’t think the Creator of the Universe is much concerned with whether or not I move a needle through fabric on Sunday or any other day. But the intention behind her reprimand carries truth and wisdom: The importance of setting aside time for sabbath, for rest, renewal and honoring the Sacred keeps us in a balance that can move the world along in a gentler, more thoughtful way. In the pace of the world, when not only days but light and darkness gets blurred into one long opportunity for working harder and longer hours, the practice of sabbath…stopping, slowing down… calls to us from nearly all faith traditions and from a simple understanding of how to remain healthy. Even in retirement, I find myself packing days fuller than need be and to what end?

This all led me back to a gem of a book I have returned to over and over. Sabbath: Finding Rest, Renewal and Delight in Our Busy Lives by Wayne Muller. It is a classic and yet, as most classics do, it finds ways to offer new insights given the passage of time and all that has happened in life since it was last perused. I thumbed through looking at the places I had underlined(a character flaw I refuse to give up) and wondered what I had been living, thinking when those words grazed my mind. As I flipped through I came upon the chapter that discussed the lamentation of many as to the decline of morality and values. Muller argues that this all needs to be seen as both individual and communal. It is in our valuation of time and how we live it that the answer can be found: “All these ‘lost’ values are human qualities that require time. Honesty, courage, kindness, civility, wisdom, compassion-these can only be nourished in the soil of time and attention, and need experience and practice to come to harvest.” 

I like to believe that my Mother’s attention to setting aside the kind of time we did on Sundays was meant to sow the seeds of these ways of walking in the world…honesty, courage, kindness, civility, wisdom, compassion. And certainly as we look around our country and our world, these all seem to be on rocky ground, don’t they? I wonder what might happen if we gave more of any day to nurturing the soil of those seeds. What kind of harvest might we reap?

My Mother was full of all kinds of sayings that she sprinkled through the conversation of the day. Some were funny and have become the kinds of quips grandkids remember and we all cherish. Others were meant to shape my brothers and me and remind us of the stock from which we sprang. An all time favorite when one of us was upset or anxious about something we had little control over was “A hundred years from now you’ll never know the difference.” 

We may not, Mom. But if we can slow down and create time to nourish the best within us, we just might save not only ourselves but pave a path of peace and goodness for the generations to come.