Memory's Grace Notes

The Blue Boat, Killarney, Ireland © A.Rutherford

Sometimes just a simple note of color can brighten a day or provoke a meaningful thought if you attend to it.  Only by being present to it can it become a grace note in your life.      (See Being Present in the Moment) 

attend

verb

1  be present at, take part in; present oneself at, turn up at;

     informal:  show up at

 ANTONYMS  miss.

2  pay attention to, pay heed to, be attentive to; take note of,  take into   

     consideration. 

ANTONYMS  disregard, ignore.

grace note

1: a musical note added as an ornament

2: a small addition or embellishment

From one of my earliest solo trips to Ireland, there is this image which I have carried in my head for a long time. In Connemara in the west of Ireland, out away from anywhere, I came upon this isolated, reedy lake with a single blue boat pulled up on the shore. No houses or other signs of life were anywhere around.  There was also no sign of the boatman or clue as to where he could be.   I have never forgotten the allure of this scene, but could not figure out why it had seemed to speak to me and remain in my consciousness in the way that it did.  But it has long been a memory that I have feasted upon in my mind's eye at times when I needed peace.

Then the scene repeated itself on my latest visit to Ireland, this time in Killarney.  The day was a brilliant one, but there was, as can happen only in Ireland, a slight mist in the air which made everything shimmer and seem a little dreamlike. 

Again a single boat, seemingly abandoned, caught my imagination and again provoked an inexplicable emotion in me.   But I remember being grateful for the serendipity of finding such a scene again.  I spent some time just sitting and attending to the scene.  It was important to be present to it in the moment.  I wanted the memory to be more real than a photograph.   I knew from experience that although I might record the scene with my camera, the lens could not capture how I responded to the scene. 

Not long ago, when using my memory of the blue boats for peaceful reflection, finally I was able to describe how those scenes of the abandoned boats made me feel.   Then the discipline of putting my thoughts together in poetic form crystallized it all for me, and their message became clear.  They were grace notes for me, spots of beauty in my life.  But for the owners of the boats they were merely the everyday objects of their lives.  I wondered did these fishermen pay attention to how beautiful the setting of their daily work was.  Were the blue boats amongst the grassy reeds grace notes for them too?  Did they attend to their special quality the same way that I, a tourist in their environs, did?

So I was inspired to make sure that I see my daily life for what it is, a gift with grace notes of color and messages of affirmation, if I pay attention.

The first blue boat can be seen in the short video below, which contains the reading of my poem:

The Blue Boat 

The blue boat is lightly tied 

Among the reeds along the grassy shore. 

The silence of the scene calls out, 

Disturbing, leaving me desiring more. 

O Boatman, what drew you away? 

What lured you is not clear. 

Where could you go to seek a place 

More peaceful, lovelier than here? 

Some urge deep within my heart, 

Unbidden, rises as a question 

Which surprises, even startles me, 

Forcing an admission, a confession. 

I long to discard too the barque 

Which has carried me along thus far, 

And climb ashore in some mystic place 

And wander off in search of some strange star. 

I’ll leave it tied up should I come again 

To need it to return where I belong, 

But something will be different, this I know, 

I will be more sure, I will be strong.

                                                                © Ardoth Rutherford
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The Beauty of Memory

The Old Spring House, watercolor ©A. Rutherford

"Pioneers looked for a spring and built their homes near it. It kept their thirst (and that of their animals) satisfied and their food from spoiling. It was the only refrigeration known for years. Usually a house or building was built over the spring out of rock and a tree was planted near the door. A stone trough was built in the spring house. Through it ran cold, slow flowing spring water. Earthenware crocks of milk were placed, neck deep, in the water. It was always cool in the spring house, even in the warmest of days. A gourd dipper hung in the spring house so men coming in from the hot field could stop for a draft of cold water. The dog quenched his thirst from the overflow at the back of the spring house and a flock of ducks noisily investigated the trickling stream for tidbits. Watercress grew in the shallows.   (Taken from The Good Old Days, The Spring House, R.J. McGinnis, F. & W. Publishing Company, Cincinnati, Ohio, page 76 

In painting this scene with an old spring house this weekend, I was set to reflecting on the old spring house on my grandparents’ farm.  What a comforting place it was for me, but also just a bit mysterious with its cool, shadowy corners and the spring that seemed to flow up out of nowhere.  As a very young child that spring seemed magical to me.

In our fast-paced society, what are the memories that will last?  Which of their experiences are shaping our children into men and women of character, sensitivity, and strength?  

Perhaps one way to ensure that our children will indeed have those life-shaping memories is to take the time to remember what kind of our own past experiences contributed to who we are today.   Or look back at your own parents and grandparents.   What were their lives like?    What were the events that contributed to all the characteristics you value in the people they were and the contributions they made to your own life or the communal life?    What kind of music did they listen to?    What books did they read?    What chores were they responsible for that gave them the work ethic that successful adults need?    How did they spend their leisure time?    What was the balance between leisure or productive activity for them?    What adversities did they face or mountains they had to climb that carved those lines of character that you see in their faces?    What did they love, and how did they love?  

What were the simple joys that nurtured them?    I know in my own family, there was not the incessant need to be entertained or amused.    My memories are of warm family times of story-telling or playing games, gathering around a dinner table filled with home-cooked food, helping out with whatever needed done in the house or outside.    There was time to play, but not to be idle.   Time to explore our environs, but not to waste before the TV.   Time to read or be read to, and the books were ones that inspired our imaginations or connected us to the past or nurtured our character.   And music that delighted and entertained us but that didn’t fill us with angst or wrong-thinking or over-sexualize us.

What are our children experiencing that will feed their souls and will not fade away, but remain a comfort and an inspiration throughout their lives?   What are the memories we are making with them that will stand them in good stead when the rough places in their own lives occur?    What will act for them as reminders that they must take their place in the flow of the river of time and serve with honor and courage?

How will the memories of fast food and ready-made meals linger lovingly in their minds?   What will endless hours spent on the internet or lounging in the malls contribute to their strength of character or their resourcefulness?   Or will all the structured sports activities or “enrichment” activities only contribute to their being driven adults with the incessant need to be “on the go”?

Below is a poem by Seamus Heaney, the Irish poet who received among many, many honors the Nobel Prize for Literature.  Although he was born on a farm to working class people, he became a professor at both Oxford and Harvard.

The material of his poetry was the material of his own life.  Speaking of his early life and education, he commented, "I learned that my local County Derry experience, which I had considered archaic and irrelevant to 'the modern world' was to be trusted. They taught me that trust and helped me to articulate it." 

When Heaney was awarded the Nobel Prize, the Nobel committee described his poetry as "works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past."

From his lecture upon receiving the Prize: 

When I first encountered the name of the city of Stockholm, I little thought that I would ever visit it, never mind end up being welcomed to it as a guest of the Swedish Academy and the Nobel Foundation.  At the time I am thinking of, such an outcome was not just beyond expectation: it was simply beyond conception.  In the nineteen forties, when I was the eldest child of an ever-growing family in rural Co. Derry, we crowded together in the three rooms of a traditional thatched farmstead and lived a kind of den-life which was more or less emotionally and intellectually proofed against the outside world.  It was an intimate, physical, creaturely existence in which the night sounds of the horse in the stable beyond one bedroom wall mingled with the sounds of adult conversation from the kitchen beyond the other.  We took in everything that was going on, of course - rain in the trees, mice on the ceiling, a steam train rumbling along the railway line one field back from the house - but we took it in as if we were in the doze of hibernation.  Ahistorical, pre-sexual, in suspension between the archaic and the modern, we were as susceptible and impressionable as the drinking water that stood in a bucket in our scullery: every time a passing train made the earth shake, the surface of that water used to ripple delicately, concentrically, and in utter silence.

Click HERE to listen to his poem about exploring the wells of his childhood,  "Personal Helicon," Helicon being a river from Greek mythology.

No, how could he have dreamed as a child of the man he would become, but his early experiences molded his character and gave him the stuff of his later life’s work.

Continuity . . . staying connected to the past, carrying those valuable things of the past into the future . . . remembering what made us wise and strong and and loving and then passing it on.  That’s important!

Train up a child in the way he should go,
      And when he is old he will not depart from it.

                                          -Proverbs 22:6 (NKJV)

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The Mission of Art

The Creation of Adam, Michelangelo, 1510

There seems to be a general recognition that something is amiss in modern culture, a dehumanization, a lack of unity or community, a repressed longing for something, anything, that can fill a void that most people cannot name.  The attempts to fill this void take a myriad of forms, from toys to technology, from the incessant need to be entertained to the use of drugs to kill the pain of meaninglessness resulting from lack of a higher purpose.  We shop, we party, we vacation, we increase our speed although the roads we are traveling on are often going nowhere in particular.

Philosopher Jacques Maritain offers this insight on what might lie at the root of our trouble:

          “We do not need a truth to serve us, 

                                            we need a truth that we can serve.”

Many consider that we as a society are poised on the brink of a precipice.  My purpose in this blog is to offer reflections concerning a Truth that we can serve, a Truth that offers a way back from this precipice.  I am not a mover.  I am not a shaker.  I am just an ordinary person who has life experience that seems to validate what I offer in these reflections.  And I am a person who has worked with young people all my life and who has watched time and time again the transformative effect on these young people when they have been introduced to Truth, Beauty, the great moral and spiritual Virtues, and what are generally recognized as the Great Ideas of Western Civilization.  When they have been shown a way to attach their lives to a transcendent purpose, they are then free to soar.  

My first approach in working with young people is to introduce them to forms of Beauty with which they have not yet been acquainted, the golden nuggets of beauty found in great literature, philosophy, art, music, Nature, etc., and then, released from the bonds of their own subjectivity and the tyranny of the culture, they begin to fall in love with Truth, which leads to the desire to attach their lives to Goodness and to some larger, unifying purpose for their lives.

As one student quoted in a good-bye “thank you” note she wrote to me:  “Teaching is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.” -W.B. Yeats  

I believe that Beauty lights the fire on the altar of Truth.

However, Beauty as a virtue has been generally dismissed in modern society, especially in the arts, with its antipathy to anything that has standards of measurement, and the requirement to “measure up” to those standards.

Maritain, writing in Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry, argues that the loss of Beauty as a standard is a contributing factor to this dehumanizing, even if most people are unaware of the effects this loss creates.   The solution he offers for many of the ills that plague us as individuals and as a society is a return to the recognition and acknowledgement of the power of Beauty as a unifying force and an avenue of spiritual healing.

According to Maritain, “The dehumanizing process . . . can be overcome.  Art in this connection has an outstanding mission.  It is the most natural power of healing and agent of spiritualization needed by the human community. . . .  Art, as long as it remains art, cannot help being intent on beauty.” 

Therein lies the rub—”as long as it remains art” . . . All the modern “isms” have separated Art “from beauty, and from any transcendental end.  The final end and center, then, can only be man,”  which leaves us no way to get ourselves off our hands, so to speak.

This Beauty can take a myriad of forms, approaches, and modes of expression, enough diversity to satisfy anyone, yet there are common criteria or principles that must be recognized or else, to use an analogy, the powerful and life-giving river loses its banks and becomes a swamp.  The real “rub” for the modern culture is that these principles derive from the true source of the transcendent nature of Beauty, or its Divine source.   As stated by Thomas Aquinas, the "beauty of anything created is nothing else than a similarity of divine beauty participated in by things," . . . "the existence of all things derives from divine beauty."

Dostoevski said, “Beauty is the battlefield where God and the Devil contend with one another for the heart of man.” (The Brothers Karamazov)

the Lady's Slipper Orchid, a wild Beauty found in Nature
photo © Greg Ferrell
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Signs and Symbols

Shamrocks, watercolor © A.Rutherford

Last week as we celebrated St. Patrick’s Day, I was reminded of a powerful icon or symbol in Celtic Christianity, the Shamrock, the “green flower” of Ireland.

In order to make the people understand the doctrine of the Trinity—that there are three beings who make up one divine God: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit—St. Patrick drew an analogy by picking a shamrock and showing that its three leaves were on only one stem.   The shamrock’s presence then served as a lovely reminder of the Presence of the Divine amongst the people. 

Goethe's quote under the header of my blog is providing a general theme as I write and reflect here on the nature and purpose of Beauty in our lives.  I include the second half of his quote below—

A man should hear a little music, read a little poetry, and see a fine picture every day of his life, in order that worldly cares may not obliterate the sense of the beautiful which God has implanted in the human soul.

In times of tragedy, either personal or global such as the tsunami that has wreaked havoc in Japan and threatens to have far-reaching effects, human beings can be overwhelmed or even tempted to despair.  In those times it may be easy to forget the sacred nature of the human spirit, created as we are in the image of God.  Life may appear bleak and we begin to feel victims either of our circumstances or of the fragile nature of life in general.  But tragedy is not the final word of our existence.

Kathleen Raine, writing in Defending Ancient Springs, explains it thus:

Strangest of all is the ease with which the vision is lost, consciousness contracts, we forget over and over again, until recollection is stirred by some icon of that beauty. Then we remember and wonder why we ever forgot.

The "vision" Raine is writing about is that certain Truth about who we are and Whose we are in the final analysis.   Or to borrow a couple of lines from the poet John Keats,

                    'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all

         Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.'

Raine reminds us that our recollection of the Truth we know and may have forgotten in our circumstances can be stirred by an icon of that Beauty, which is the wellspring of all life.  We are not to be given over to anxiety or despair.   

A psalm of joy and hope, a piece of beautiful music or art, a bit of poetry, the first daffodil coming up in our garden, and many other such icons can remind us that Beauty is an attribute of God and a sign of His presence in our situation.   Beauty can serve as reminders to us of the richness that is inherent in who we are as created beings and also of the transcendent nature of our lives.

When I was a very young girl, I remember reading a poem about a single blue flower blooming in a rather remote, dreary bog.  It bloomed for the most part unseen and unappreciated, but it was there, and it was blooming in spite of its environs.   It served as a symbol of hope for the persona of the poem, and it has served all my life too, vividly in my memory, as a sort of icon of the ability to transcend my circumstances through paying to attention to the God-gifts of Beauty offered around me.

Later in college I learned that the English Romantic poets used the blue flower as the symbol of the unfolding of the soul, and as an emblem of the desire of the human spirit for the Infinite.  C.S. Lewis, in his autobiography Surprised by Joy, also used the blue flower as a symbol for his longing for Beauty, which he later came to understand was in reality his longing for God.

But as I came to adulthood, I began to understand that it was my responsibility to tend that fire and keep it burning.   I must take the time and make the effort to look for the blue flowers God graciously places along my path not only for my enjoyment, but also for my spiritual enrichment and as signs of the Hope there is in our Faith.  I must not neglect this significant aspect of what God is and who I am created to be.  In this way, Joy is a discipline and is to be practiced in our daily lives.

An early Joy-note from my garden . . .

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Pilgrimage to Croagh Patrick

Statue of St. Patrick on the Pilgrim Way up Croagh Patrick  ©A. Rutherford

Croagh Patrick (Irish: Cruach Phádraig) is a 764 metres (2,510 ft) mountain in the west of Ireland and an important site of pilgrimage. 

Every year more than a million visit Croagh Patrick. On "Reek Sunday," the last Sunday in July every year, over 15,000 pilgrims climb the mountain.

Croagh Patrick has been a site of pilgrimage, especially at the summer solstice, since before the arrival of Celtic Christianity.   

Saint Patrick reputedly fasted on the summit of Croagh Patrick for forty days in the fifth century and built a church there because it was the site of pagan worship of the she-demon Corra.   He is credited with the act of destroying that pagan religion and banishing all the snakes from Ireland.

In actual fact, the early Celts worshipped a stone god in the form of a serpent, so when all the pagan altars to this god were destroyed all over Ireland, Patrick in effect "drove the snakes from Ireland."   In truth, there were never any actual snakes there, and "banishing the snakes from Ireland" is understood as a metaphor.

A seam of gold was discovered in the mountain in the 1980s: overall grades of 14 grams (0.5 oz) of gold per tonne in at least 12 quartz veins, which could produce 700,000 t (770,000 short tons) of ore.   Mayo County Council elected not to allow mining, deciding that the gold was "fine where it was."   So now you know where the leprechuan has hidden the gold.   *grin* 

In modern times, a small chapel was built on the summit, and dedicated on 20 July 1905.

Magnificent views of Clew Bay and the surrounding south Mayo countryside are to be had from all stages of the ascent of the mountain.

Yours truly only attempted the climb once in April 2007 and only went part way up the climb, but enough to have had a wonderful "pilgrimage" for sure. 

Click HERE to view photos of my “pilgrimage” and the beautiful Irish landscape.

Old Irish Prayer

Alone with none but thee, my God,
I journey on my way.
What need I fear,
when Thou art near
O King of night and day?
More safe am I within Thy hand
Than if a host did round me stand.
                                                        -St. Columba

An old Celtic hymn

The Spirit of Place

Plein air watercolor ©A. Rutherford

The spirit of place is strong in the Celtic nature.  In a land of such sublime natural beauty how could it not be?  When Christianity was introduced to the Celts, they took quite naturally to the idea of the earth as full of the sacred creative power of God.  Or as poet Gerard Manley Hopkins describes it:  

“The earth is charged with the grandeur of God . . .”

For a plein air artist, the Irish countryside is indeed heaven on earth.

One of my favorite places to paint out in the open air is the Burren region of County Clare in the west of Ireland.   On one such occasion, I was sitting alone on these rocks looking at the scene which you see in the photo below (which I also took that day) in County Clare,  with my small backpack which contained a 11x14 block of my favorite watercolor paper, a plastic palette, a margarine container to hold my water, and a bottle of water and a sack lunch.  Seasoned travelers travel light!

Click on photo to enlarge

The whole point of working from nature for me is the freedom not to be bound by “studio rules,”  to allow myself to breathe in the spirit of the place where I am working and let it speak to me.   In this instance, I might have indicated with a  few light pencil lines where I wanted the horizon to be and some diagonal lines where I wanted to roughly position the rocks.  After a minimal block-in, I just start painting, first the sky, then working my way down and across the page.   I do the first layer of everything generally/lightly in shapes or areas of local color, then with almost calligraphic brush work I add the details, like the rock fissures, the small branches of the tree, the grasses, and maybe strengthen the darks, if they need it.

Click on sketch to enlarge  ©A. Rutherford

Obviously, if I take the time to draw the scene out carefully or make a value sketch, the composition perhaps will be better, the painting stronger.  BUT the sheer exhilarating joy and excitement of “communicating” with nature for me would be lost in the laboriousness of the careful drawing . . . the immediacy of experiencing the place lost as well.   

Let me see if I can explain it better . . . For me, painting nature immediately and intuitively like this would be the same as if I were taking my hands and tracing them caressingly over a loved one’s face to explore it.

When I paint like this, I am caressing Nature’s face.  Nature is whispering back to me in nuance.  It’s like I am saying to the scene, I want to know you intimately, and it reveals itself to my spirit through my eyes and hands.

I am in the environ of the painting, and it is in me.

For me, there is great freedom and joy in painting this way.

Now it hangs matted and framed over the fireplace in my bedroom, where I can lie in my bed, look at it, and be instantly transported to that place, that day, when there was no one for as far as I could see in any direction except me and the spirit of the place.

Irish Compensation 

To make up for the lack of mosquitos, 

snakes and the song of lively insects, 

He filled this land near to groaning with faeries, 

great winged dragons and saints. 

For the leaden low-hung skies, 

He gave vast sage seas rising to meet them 

And low, lambent hills 

adrift with fainéant, cumulus clouds of sheep. 

For the fog that slept low over the land 

He seasoned the air with peat-smoke, rotted loam, salt, 

Cast it with tireless gulls, lonesome hawks 

and the throated melody of thrushes. 

So they would not be wanting for trees, 

He mantled the land with primrose, sloe, gorse and heather, 

Partitioned it with moss-stone fences, 

And jewelled it with low thickets, cairned meadows and ancient bogs, 

For the wanting of grapes, currants, cherries 

and all the fruit of wine, 

He provided gentle. honey-ambered hills 

Thick with oats, grain and barley. 

For respite from the abiding sound of wind, 

and the hissing heave of the sea 

He blessed the people with music, voice, song and poetry 

And inspired them with lyrical places: Ballymurphy, Cork, Tralee 

And to ensure the enduring, endearing solitude. 

Of this stone strewn, virid place 

He hedged it with lonely, castle garrisoned cliffs. 

There to sit and say sonnets to the sea. 

©Christopher Earle

How the Irish Saved Civilization

photo of Ross Castle, County Kerry, ©A.Rutherford

Of course, this week is “Holy Week” for the Irish so I will have to be indulged for a bit of Irish history and lore.

We know that heroes come in all sizes, and that surely applies to nations too.   Otherwise, how could a small, isolated island that even the Romans weren’t interested in, in their quest to conquer the known world, have earned the reputation of having saved Western civilization during a dark period of history when the lights of learning were going out all over that world.  When the Roman empire began collapsing, great hordes of barbarians who did not value all that classical civilization had achieved for human history began to roam freely pillaging and destroying what they did not understand.  Much of what was important for the further flowering of civilization was at risk of being lost.

However, the Romans had brought Christianity to Britain, and the great Christian monasteries became centers of learning because the monks valued knowledge and truth.  In his best selling book How the Irish Saved Civilization, Thomas Cahill tells us the engaging story of how Ireland became one of the last bastions of civilization because it was a tiny outpost on the edge of the world of that day, difficult to get to and viewed as not worth the trip.   

In adverse circumstances, the Irish monks, because they considered it their sacred duty to preserve Truth, diligently and sacrificially worked to copy the great literature of the Western world and preserve it for all time.    Moreover, not only did they protect it from destruction, they redeemed the monotonous work of tediously hand-copying the texts by hand by creating works of Art through their beautifully illuminated manuscripts.  They valued the work that they were doing, and so they took the time and made the effort to do that work lovingly and well.  Cahill makes the case that who knows what might have happened in subsequent human history had the Irish not been faithful to their task?

Read about illuminated manuscripts at the Minneapolis Institute of the Arts






From the author Thomas Cahill:

We normally think of history as one catastrophe after another, war followed by war, outrage by outrage--almost as if history were nothing more than all the narratives of human pain, assembled in sequence.   And surely this is, often enough, an adequate description. But history is also the narratives of grace, the recountings of those blessed and inexplicable moments when someone did something for someone else, saved a life, bestowed a gift, gave something beyond what was required by circumstance. In this series, The Hinges of History, I mean to retell the story of the Western world as the story of the great gift-givers, those who entrusted to our keeping one or another of the singular treasures that make up the patrimony of the West. This is also the story of the evolution of Western sensibility, a narration of how we became the people that we are and why we think and feel the way we do. And it is, finally, a recounting of those essential moments when everything was at stake, when the mighty stream that became Western history was in ultimate danger and might have divided into a hundred useless tributaries or frozen in death or evaporated altogether. But the great gift-givers, arriving in the moment of crisis, provided for transition, for transformation, and even for transfiguration, leaving us a world more varied and complex, more awesome and delightful, more beautiful and strong than the one they had found.

This quote by Niebuhr is placed at the beginning of How the Irish Saved Civilization as a thematic epigram.

“Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope.  Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith.  Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we must be saved by love.

                                                             -Reinhold Niebuhr

(click)

How the Irish Saved Civilization:
The Untold Story of Ireland's Heroic Role 
from the Fall of Rome to the Rise of Medieval Europe

"Without the mission of the Irish monks . . . the world that came after them would have been an entirely different one-

a world without books."  (page 4) 

I highly recommend all the books in the series 

The Hinges of History, by Thomas Cahill, a rich and

engaging way to refresh your understanding of history.

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A Note from the Garden

Lenten roses from my garden ©A.Rutherford

Yesterday I spent three hours in the garden in the cool sunshine clearing away the debris in the flower beds from a rather tough winter.  When I began my work, things looked rather bleak, but I worked away remembering how quickly the garden “climate” had turned for the better in Springs past.  And of course, I looked for one of my favorite early Spring signs of hope, the Lenten rose, Helleborus orientalis, which is not a rose at all but only resembles the wild rose.

Although this plant has been known since antiquity, it is not commonly grown in modern gardens.  The Roman historian Pliny wrote about its medicinal purposes, and also suggested that it had magical properties.  Medieval and Renaissance herbalists wrote about it as well, recommending it especially for veterinary purposes.   

But I enjoy it for its quiet Beauty in the winter garden.  The plants are hardy and evergreen.  The petals, or actually sepals, remain on the plant for sometimes many months.  

I think perhaps Lenten roses are not grown more popularly because we are more given to bright, colorful Spring gardens and flamboyant Summer borders.  Most of us don’t venture out into the Winter garden, and so the lovely Lenten roses would bloom unseen and unappreciated.   But with their dusky rose petals, their unique coloration, and their handsome spots, it lifts the heart to see them blooming in the snow.   They are rather shy, drooping their exquisite faces, but breathtaking when you lift a blossom to peer into its heart.

Of course, I think everyone should have a grouping tucked away in a corner of the garden  to provide a rare treat on a day that might otherwise be discouraging.  The Lenten roses are a sign of survival in sometimes brutal circumstances.  

“And why do you worry about adornment? See how the flowers of the field grow. They do not labor or spin.   Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these.”           - Matthew 6:28-29

And here’s a bit of poetry which features the Lenten rose from a book of poetry called The Chinese Poet Awakens.   The much honored Appalachian poet Jeff Daniel Marion, former poet-in-residence and professor at Carson Newman College, is not Chinese at all, but uses this persona of a Chinese poet to look at life in his native Tennessee and distill some wisdom from his daily life and locale.

The poem has an amusing title which sets up the scenario—the Chinese poet has not gotten the worldly honor he has expected.  Will he allow this to cause him to become despondent?  Will he consider that his ordinary life is without consequence and pleasure, now that his existence has not been validated by those with wealth and power?  Will he allow the culture to define him or blind him to what’s really significant in this life?

AFTER FAILING TO RECEIVE HIS APPOINTMENT FROM THE EMPEROR THE CHINESE POET RECONSIDERS THE WORLD

Beside my doorway this morning
the Lenten rose nods,
its bloom a blush of color
on yesterday's pale cheeks of snow.

Last night the faithful stars
appeared, steady travelers swinging their lanterns
through millions of dutiful rounds.
Who am I to them,
my day's but a flintspark?

Now the old dog nuzzles my palm.
To her I am no title, not even a name,
just a friendly hand to scratch her belly,
to deliver her daily lump
of meat in a blue granite bowl.
She sniffs my leg, loving the scent
of all the dusty trails I've wandered
to come home.

By the river the blue heron stands
and waits, poised in the long patience.
Here the world offers itself, wave after wave
of mountains washing across the miles.
Here the sparrow sings from the sycamore.
I lift my voice
and come down to earth
here.  

The poem makes us smile, but it makes us pause to ponder as well.   I think we can easily get the Chinese poet’s point, but having the courage to resist the siren call of the materialistic culture is more difficult.

I tried to give them a little "Medieval" context *smile*

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