Shaker Chairs & Rustling Leaves

A Sunday Reflection - memories magic

I’m traveling in Ireland this week, which is such a beautiful and magical place. Heres a story about my daughter, wonder and magic.

When my daughter was about 5 years old, we went for a walk at a local nature preserve.  We hiked up a switch back trail that led to the top of a ridge that looked out over a green valley.  It was autumn and the air was dry.  The leaves had changed colors and were just beginning to let go and drift to the ground like love letters that someone had written on a warm spring day.  I remember I was a bit preoccupied that day, my little girl was chattering away in a brilliant running commentary about the trail, a shiny bug, the importance of tying her shoes and what she’d had for breakfast. Suddenly she stopped in her tracks and with great knowing she said “Mommie listen.” We stood there together in the autumn light, listening to the sounds a forest makes whether we are listening or not.  She said in truest, wide-eyed wonder, “Listen, there are angels whispering in the branches.”  I quieted my preoccupied mind and listened to the creek of shifting trees, the rustle of the leaves above and around me, heard the trilling of birds and crickets. She looked at me with awe and utter earnestness, “Do you hear them?”  I nodded and said, “Yes honey, I do.” We stood there for a very long time (oceans of time a five-year-old anyway) listening and holding hands. 

That was a keeper moment. I remember it often.

Years later while visiting a historic Shaker settlement in Kentucky, a guide there showed us a beautiful chair that had been created over a century ago in the simple, elegant shaker style.   She described how the maker of the chair would have assumed an attitude of reverence while in the act of creation. They were building something that was meant to be simple and useful, and yet would have crafted the chair with an assumption that at any moment a passing or ever present angel might decide to stop, sit and rest its winged shoulders next to the chair’s smooth and sturdy back. The chair was built to be a place of repose for the sacred spirit of each person in the community, but it was also build for the unseen and mysterious presence that visits and lives among us.

I love the historian’s description of how something as simple as a shaker chair might be the resting place of some wondrous or luminous thing that might come and visit when we least expect. I loved how my daughter at five-years-old, knew and senses the overlapping of the marvelous seen and mysterious unseen world.

There is things we experience in our daily lives that are solid as a chair. There are also we experience each day (if we are paying attention) that are just as real – like love, like hope, like kindness, like mystery which travels on its own wings and in its own eternal time. Stop, right now as you are reading this post. Breathe, can you can hear the sound of something eternal rustling in the branches of the daily? 

These days I ….have a straight backed shaker chair tucked in a corner of my living room.  Often when I walk by it, I give the chair a little smile and nod – a nod to the daily and useful, and a smile in the direction of what might just be visiting resting its wings for a quiet moment in the afternoon light.

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Poem from my time in the Dingle Peninsula of Ireland

Dingle, Co. Kerry

Everything is closer here
Rain, wool, 
Low hanging clouds, 
Sea water, the color green, 
Time
Dry stack stone fences
Divide the upper and lower pastures,  
Dotted with quizzical donkeys, 
Shaggy ponies, Soggy sheep.
Every curve in the road
Has a story to tell you
But never directly, 
Always in a round about 
Way, never really reaching an
End, just resting for a 
Bit, a pause between 
Small moments 
For a sip of tea, before
Continuing.

He said, “No one visits Ireland for the weather”
And yet the weather is an actual presence
Dramatic, in the manner 
Of untamable wind and water
Rolling forward like a run on sentence
Or spilling down like a choir of sunlight
Through thick grey sky.
An always welcome, though unexpected  guest

It is no wonder to me that the Irish people
Created the kind of melodies
That can make you want to 
Clasp your hands together in joy
While they absolutely and utterly 
Break your heart,
As longing and living 
Exist side by side here
Overlapping it seems
A good portion of the ages.
Comedy and all the sad bits
As sure and lasting
As a circle of stones.

Carrie Newcomer - 3/4/2023

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Question

What does this story bring up for you? Have you ever felt the presence of something expansive in a moment that was seemingly ordinary.

Practice

Pick out something you use daily (a skillet, a shoe, a chair, a pantry or coat). write a short reflection from the viewpoint of that item. If that shoe could speak, what is the story it would tell? it doesn’t have to be a long story, it could be a few words or a haiku, just honor the humble and ordinary by giving it a voice.

This is a little watercolor I did of the shaker chair in my house….at the moment i painted it…it had yarn in it.…angels might be knitters.

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To get your tickets visit my website tour page! Here’s the Link

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One Inch Photos from the magical world….I love how the veins of the leaf echo the trunk and branches of a tree. Repeating patterns in nature are so amazing to me.