Grace Knows No Season

Things I Loved This Week & Music Always Music

“One day when I was a boy I heard the song of a bird I had never heard before. It was not coming from a tree, but from the ground somewhere in the high grass. I followed the song into the prairie near our house. It took me some time to find it, and as I crawled on my hands and knees, I was barely breathing lest the bird fly away. At last I parted the grass in front of me and found a light brown bird sitting on a nest looking at me with quiet, unmoving eyes, her breast speckled with large dots and puffed up to protect her eggs. She did not seem agitated or threatened; she simply returned my quiet gaze. I cannot remember how long we looked at one another, unmoving and silent, but I finally backed out alone the same little lane of bent grass and stood quietly, though sadly, at the edge of the field. I have been standing there ever since. The most I know of life is that there is a sanctum and there is a song. I suspect that, too, that everything since that spring day has been a labyrinth bound round and round in the high grass. Fifty years later I seem to be hearing the song more and more, and I find myself kneeling in the grass over and over, perhaps to come face to face with whatever it is that can never be told, yet always felt. Spring is not merely the time between an equinox and a solstice, it is any time when we struggle out of our night and dreams to walk, however unsure, in the light. In the course of a lifetime it can come at anytime. Grace knows no season. We can be born when we are old. Perhaps most of us are. Ultimately everything is metaphor, a seduction toward an open field and its hidden song.” The Journal of Samuel Martin From “The Almanac of the Soul” by Marvin and Nancy Hiles (Samuel Martin is the pen name of Marvin Hiles)

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I begin this post with a somewhat long passage from The Journal of Samuel Martin, I thought about posting just an excerpt, but I couldn’t find a place to cut it into a smaller quotable quotes without losing the deep beauty of the piece. In a world that is increasingly tuned to bytes and bits and short scrollable content I’m finding it important to listen longer and more deeply, and that sometimes we need to hear the full story and not just the soundbite. Lately I’ve been making it a point to intentionally sit with a poem or essay or text a little longer, to read the poem or story slowly, to then speak it aloud, let the words wash over me and settle into my heart. Sometimes I follow this with a few deep breaths or meditation or journaling. It is a practice I’ve done for years and I find it is a centering way to start my day. In a busy life it is easy to skim over what matters, to power ski over the deep water instead of diving in and really looking around.

So this morning I read this piece by Samuel Martin, read it aloud, meditated upon a few of the phrases that particularly moved me. “Grace knows no season” and “ to come face to face with whatever it is that can never be told, yet always felt” and “The most I know of life is that there is always a sanctum and there is always a song.”

There are phrases, lyrics, bits of text that I carry around with me, they come to me when I need them, or when I’m just moving through my day. Maybe this is because I love language, love how words can shape a story, cast a spell, invoke what cannot be said but only felt. I love how words and music can become completely entwined, become not one or the other but something else. Perhaps it is because I know that I have always always written myself into my next becoming. Anyway, I’ve been thinking about Samuel Martin’s mystical phrases and rolling them in my mind and heart all through the day.

So what this practice has always encouraged me to do is to expand this way of reading into an expanded way of living— to “be” more deeply with the moment I am living, to listen to others speaking without racing ahead in my mind to how I’ll respond or help or tell my own related story, to just walk in the woods without putting in my earbuds and turning on a podcast. My friend Suzanne, who is a gifted weaver, told me once that “we can only do one thing well at a time.” A beautiful woven fabric is created one thread at a time, one pass of the shuttle and then the next. I know that if I am always checking my iphone I might miss the way the rain makes everything appear to be in soft focus. If I am lost in my next task I might miss the chance to fall in love with the heron silently gliding over the pond. If I skim the surface, I might not reach the depths. But if I slow my steps just a little bit, if I listen with a bit more attention, if I sit for awhile at the edge of the pond I might just get a glimpse of the holy, sense that ever present sanctum and sing the song I was born to hear, and born to sing.

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Practice

Practice reading in the manner I described above. Read a poem, a text or story. Then read it aloud.

Now write down on a slip of paper a phrase that moved you or intrigued you. Fold up that bit of paper and slip it into a coat pocket, your wallet, or just some place you will bump into it in the next few days.

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Question

What does the phrase “Grace knows no season” evoke in you?

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Things I Loved This Week

Poetry: I’ve fallen in love with the poetry of Andrea Gibson. Her newest collection is called “You Better Be Lightening” and I highly recommend. She also has a really powerful Substack offering called Things That Don’t Suck.

Here’s a video of her powerful poem “Homesick”.

Music - I’m With Her (Sarah Jarosz, Sara Watkins & Aoife O’Donovan) has a wonderful new album called “Wild and Clear and Blue”. Each member of the band is amazing and has their own solo & band albums. I loved what happened with this extraordinary combination for I’m With Her’s first recording. This second one is beautiful.

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Music Always Music

This is “I Give Myself to This” from the album Until Now. The song all about catching glimpses of the holy.

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One Inch Photos

After a rain, walking to my mailbox, the world was all spring green and a puddle shining in the evening light- it looked like a glowing oil painting.