A cool and wet Sabbath...

After torrential rains yesterday - and throughout the night - the hills are a little barer this morning with leaves aplenty all over the deck and yard. Mary Oliver speaks of the trees like this:

Do you think of them as decoration?

Think again.

Here are maples, flashing.
And here are the oaks, holding on all winter
to their dry leaves.
And here are the pines, that will never fail,
until death, the instruction to be green.
And here are the willows, the first
to pronounce a new year.

May I invite you to revise your thoughts about them?
Oh, Lord, how we are all for invention and
advancement!
But I think
it would do us good if we would think about
these brothers and sisters, quietly and deeply.

The trees, the trees, just holding on
to the old, holy ways.

There are errands to run now that the rain has stopped - and the electricity returned - and preparations to be made for this weekend's retreat. What's more, I'll be leading Taize worship again on Sunday afternoon at church as we begin a year of quiet contemplation in addition to our rock and folk sounds. (We're even doing a Gregorian chant on Sunday that is stunning with four male voices.) And then on Monday I will fly out to see my dad in Maryland (it has already been over a year since my last visit.)

Calls to mind another poet - Robert Frost - who adds perspective with his thoughts about trees:

The tree the tempest with a crash of wood
Throws down in front of us is not to bar
Our passage to our journey's end for good,
But just to ask us who we think we are

Insisting always on our own way so.
She likes to halt us in our runner tracks,
And make us get down in a foot of snow
Debating what to do without an axe.

And yet she knows obstruction is in vain:
We will not be put off the final goal
We have it hidden in us to attain,
Not though we have to seize earth by the pole

And, tired of aimless circling in one place,
Steer straight off after something into space.

Another poet of autumn just came to me with these sounds, too...