Sometimes I wake, and, lo! I have forgot,
And drifted out upon an ebbing sea!
My soul that was at rest now resteth not,
For I am with myself and not with thee;
Truth seems a blind moon in a glaring morn,
Where nothing is but sick-heart vanity:
Oh, thou who knowest! save thy child forlorn.
-George MacDonald
Right now the wind is blowing up a noisy gale outside.
It was just getting going this afternoon when Mr. Glad and I were taking a walk in an old neighborhood in a nearby town. We like to look at the gardens and the houses, like this one that seems to have been a church at one time.
When we left the restaurant where we’d eaten a lunch of doner kebab and Turkish coffee, we crunched through leaves on the sidewalk, and took pictures of a tree we didn’t know.
Its graceful branches and smooth bark, holding up bright yellow leaves and pink flowers, put on a multi-layered show for us.
Mr. G. especially liked the door of this little white house…
…and I liked the way the tall green hedge in front of a large brick house had been trimmed so neatly as to frame the entrance like a picture. So I took a picture.
And that purple plant bordering the sidewalk…I think we have that at church, but I can’t remember its name. It’s the perfect complementing color.
Leaves began loosening from branches overhead and falling down on us, as the wind lifted my hair and stirred it into the mix. I had to watch my steps as we picked our way over frequent humps in the sidewalk caused by roots of trees with giant trunks, maybe older than the old houses.
On the drive back to our town the thermometer in the car told us it was 71°! My husband stopped by a store for a few minutes and I stayed in the car. I pulled out an old Bible that I keep stuck between the seats for times like this, and opened randomly in the Psalms, where I read,
Tremble, thou earth, at the presence of the Lord, at the presence of the God of Jacob;
Which turned the rock into a standing water, the flint into a fountain of waters.Return unto thy rest, O my soul: for the Lord hath dealt bountifully with thee.
For Thou hast delivered my soul from death, mine eyes from tears, and my feet from falling.
And it seemed that God was speaking from His written Word to elaborate on the exuberance of His presence in the wind and the trees, to remind me that the same Mover of winds is the keeper and Lover of my soul.
At least four poems, songs, and passages from books crowded all together in my mind, all about blowy days, leaves “falling down and down and down and down and down,” and Wind as a playmate.
That wasn’t the end of my windy mental explorations, but before I write any more on the subject I’ll make an effort to gather my thoughts from the corners of my mind and bookshelves and the winter skies.
Homeschooling Beach Babies enjoy playing in the mud. The sight of these darlings and the memory of my own children in similar settings brought to mind the song I used to sing to them. Nowadays it’s easy to find such things on YouTube, which I did.
It turns out what I had gleaned from who-knows-where was only the chorus of a long song titled “The Hippopotamus,” by Flanders and Swann, which tune and words form the soundtrack of a suitably watery video.
One can find the words of the verses online, but they aren’t really for children. The chorus alone was sufficient to spark up our family’s muddy excursions, and it goes like this:
Mud, mud, glorious mud,
Nothing quite like it for cooling the blood.
So follow me, follow,
Down to the hollow,
And there let us wallow
In glorious mud!
Have fun!
I never think of spiders as devils, at least not the garden spiders that are so busy all over the place this fall. This one is between the cherry tomatoes and the bottlebrush. I went with my camera into the yard before the sun was very high, hoping that some of the critters had mended their nets after the rains, and I did get good shots of a few.
Then I read George MacDonald’s verse for the day, from A Book of Strife in the Form of The Diary of an Old Soul. He wrote a section of this long poem for every day of the year; the lines for October 10th use the metaphor of a spider to warn about how the devil works at entrapping us every morning. We do need to continually pray for the Holy Spirit to break our selfish crust, I know that. O Heavenly King, blow into us and fill us and make us a refreshment to everyone around.
With every morn my life afresh must break
The crust of self, gathered about me fresh;
That thy wind-spirit may rush in and shake
The darkness out of me, and rend the mesh
The spider-devils spin out of the flesh—
Eager to net the soul before it wake,
That it may slumberous lie, and listen to the snake.
-George MacDonald
I consider no other labor as difficult as prayer. When we are ready to pray, our spiritual enemies interfere. They understand it is only by making it difficult for us to pray that they can harm us. Other things will meet with success if we keep at it, but laboring at prayer is a war that will continue until we die.
–Abba Agathon
