April showers, continuing now into May, have made the pastures flourish with a kind of rich green the digital camera has trouble capturing. This doesn't stop our sheep flock from deciding the grass in the yard has to be better than what is on their side of the fence. Every evening when I get home, I find lambs arrayed on the front yard like living lawn ornaments. I tried to get them to stand still for a group picture, but they had grass to eat and places to go, so left me walking behind as they cruised the fence line.

At midnight the congregation walks slowly around the darkened Church, candles in hand, singing softly. Outside the doors of the sanctuary, the Gospel is read. Father knocks loudly on the closed doors; "Lift up your gates that the King of Glory may come in!" The doors open to a flood of light, flowers, and candles, as we proclaim, "Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death, and on those in the tombs bestowing life!" We stand shoulder to shoulder as the choir and chanter sing, proclaiming the joyful paradoxes of the feast. At the end of matins, before the start of the liturgy that will take us past two in the morning, we hear the words of St. John Chrysostom, John the Golden-tongued, inviting all to join in the joy of the day:

If any man be devout and loveth God,
Let him enjoy this fair and radiant triumphal feast!
If any man be a wise servant,
Let him rejoicing enter into the joy of his Lord.

If any have laboured long in fasting,
Let him now receive his recompense.
If any have wrought from the first hour,
Let him today receive his just reward.
If any have come at the third hour,
Let him with thankfulness keep the feast.
If any have arrived at the sixth hour,
Let him have no misgivings;
Because he shall in nowise be deprived therefore.
If any have delayed until the ninth hour,
Let him draw near, fearing nothing.
And if any have tarried even until the eleventh hour,
Let him, also, be not alarmed at his tardiness.

For the Lord, who is jealous of his honour,
Will accept the last even as the first.
He giveth rest unto him who cometh at the eleventh hour,
Even as unto him who hath wrought from the first hour.
And He showeth mercy upon the last,
And careth for the first;
And to the one He giveth,
And upon the other He bestoweth gifts.
And He both accepteth the deeds,
And welcometh the intention,
And honoureth the acts and praises the offering.

Wherefore, enter ye all into the joy of your Lord;
Receive your reward,
Both the first, and likewise the second.
You rich and poor together, hold high festival!
You sober and you heedless, honour the day!
Rejoice today, both you who have fasted
And you who have disregarded the fast.
The table is full-laden; feast ye all sumptuously.
The calf is fatted; let no one go hungry away.
Enjoy ye all the feast of faith:
Receive ye all the riches of loving-kindness.

Let no one bewail his poverty,
For the universal Kingdom has been revealed.
Let no one weep for his iniquities,
For pardon has shown forth from the grave.
Let no one fear death,
For the Saviour's death has set us free.
He that was held prisoner of it has annihilated it.

By descending into Hell, He made Hell captive.
He embittered it when it tasted of His flesh.
And Isaiah, foretelling this, did cry:
Hell, said he, was embittered
When it encountered Thee in the lower regions.

It was embittered, for it was abolished.
It was embittered, for it was mocked.
It was embittered, for it was slain.
It was embittered, for it was overthrown.
It was embittered, for it was fettered in chains.
It took a body, and met God face to face.
It took earth, and encountered Heaven.
It took that which was seen, and fell upon the unseen.

O Death, where is thy sting?
O Hell, where is thy victory?

Christ is risen, and thou art overthrown!
Christ is risen, and the demons are fallen!
Christ is risen, and the angels rejoice!
Christ is risen, and life reigns!
Christ is risen, and not one dead remains in the grave.
For Christ, being risen from the dead,
Is become the first-fruits of those who have fallen asleep.

To Him be glory and dominion
Unto ages of ages.

Amen.

We Orthodox will celebrate Pascha, the great feast of the resurrection, a week later than our western brethren this year due to differences in calendar calculations. The Lenten fast continues for a few more days, but even now preparations and foreshadowings of the joy of the coming feast appear. This past Saturday was the commemoration of the raising of Lazarus, and, as if to join in the foretaste of the Resurrection, the redbuds and dogwoods burst into blossom at the foot of the mountain. Here is a photo from this Sunday of three of our guard llamas, keeping watch in the midst of it all.

I had not intended to take a twelve day break from the weblog, but time passes quickly in Spring. Every day the scene outside changes, green where there was brown, leaves where there were skeletal branches. Too fast to capture in a daily slice of words. I can understand why the haiku poets loved this season. Things will not stop in their rush to sit for a full portrait, but a quick seventeen syllable sketch is just barely possible.

Last week it rained. Not just for one day. The whole week it rained, cold and continuos showers. Down at the sheep barn there was mud above the ankles, sometimes up to the boot top, grabbing and holding on like an insistent drunk at a party -- "Have you heard the one about . . .?" The joke, it seems, was a good one, as the Lenten grey and gloom of the rain has given way to this week's riot of sunlit green.

Morning 4-02-03



Our detour back into winter is over. Temperatures yesterday reached into the 70's, with the same expected today. The pines, green all winter, are now getting company, as gray branches start to bud and leaf on the lower hills. This morning, the sound of birds.

First it sends a gentle breeze
to announce the news;
next it orders twittering birds
to explain the reason.

Po Chu-i (Trans. Jonathan Chaves)

As the saying goes, what a difference a day makes. A sudden cold front, moisture in the air, and we have snow again. The first flakes fell just after sunrise, precursors of those still falling outside my window as evening approaches. It is a wet snow, falling on to ground warmed by a week's worth of spring weather. The gravel road is mostly clear, but the pastures and trees are covered, the snowflakes temporarily winning the see-saw battle between freeze and thaw by sheer force of numbers. In sheltered spots, the new grass still shows through, looking almost emerald green by contrast. On the lower hills, the dogwoods are in bloom, white flowers bending under white snow, springtime delayed until the storm passes.

Here is today's view of Buck Mountain:

Fenceline and Clouds, 3-29-03

Sunset, 3-26-03

I have had a request for an update on our Houdini lamb. Susan finally caught him yesterday and succeeded in getting his tail docked. She and a helper went through the flock three times before they found him. She had seen him earlier outside, but he managed to vanish for over half an hour inside the barn itself. It is just not that big of a barn, and being the only big lamb with a tail, he should have stood out, well, like the only big lamb with a tail. The third try was the charm, and she grabbed him. This time she was ready for him and he went straight into a pre-prepared "high security" pen. When I came down, he was still there, trying to wriggle through the bars. He is now back out with the rest of the flock, no doubt plotting further mischief.

I think he has been talking to Tippy the llama. Tippy is one of our four guard llamas, and is, frankly, not very good at his work. Sheep bore him. He thinks he was intended for grander things than life on the farm, and heads out to see the sights at the first opportunity. When the mood is on him, he jumps like a deer and dances across cattleguards like Baryshnikov. Not being sympathetic to his urge to travel, we have been keeping him in the one part of the pasture where the fencing is too high to jump. We were going to open that field yesterday to move some sheep around, so I tracked Tippy down and put a lead and halter on him so we could tie him up until the shifting was done. I secured his lead to one of the rails on the yard fence using my best Boy Scout clove hitch and stepped inside for a quick lunch. When I came back outside, not only was Tippy missing, so was the middle rail of the fence. I found him fifty yards away, down by the barn, the fence rail still tied to the end of his lead. I think he may have gotten farther still, all eight feet of rail in tow, if he hadn't gotten his foot tangled in the lead. My older son and I got him loose and put him back in his pasture, not, I'm afraid, any wiser for the experience. If anyone wants a halter-broke but free-spirited llama, give me a call. I've got one for sale.

You can tell
from the outline of the hills,
the way it's hazed over --
from this morning on
we'll have springtime dawns

Saigyo
(trans. Burton Watson)

Looking towards the Sheep barn, 3-22-03



March 20th marked the beginning of Spring here in the Northern hemisphere, day and night balanced almost exactly for the first time since autumn. The snows earlier in the month left an abundance of water for the pastures, which, together with the lengthening days, has given us green grass again. We let the rams out of their winter lot onto pasture today, and they jumped and ran like lambs.

Last Saturday we rounded up this year's lambs to date for vaccinations and tail docking. We thought we had them all until Sunday evening when I discovered a stray lamb over the fence on a neighbor's property. My younger son caught him in a thorn bush, and I returned him, slung across my shoulders, to the rest of the flock. This Saturday we put up some temporary fencing to block the more obvious escape routes. When we went to catch the stray for the treatment he missed last week, he was nowhere to be found. Being the only lamb still having a tail, he shouldn't have been hard to pick out from the crowd, so we gave him up for lost. This morning, Susan found him in the crew that came in for feeding. Relieved, if a little baffled, she put him in a pen for safe-keeping. When I walked over to look at him, he was gone again. This afternoon, we looked out and discovered the gate out of the fenced off part of the pasture by the barn was open, and ewes and lambs had scattered over the larger field outside. It is a pleasant day, so we will let them stay until the evening feeding. I can't help wondering though, if the Houdini lamb is behind it all.

Here is the view from home, Sunday, March 16, 2003:

The first hints of spring arrived this weekend. We walked outside Saturday morning like prisoners out of jail, feeling unacustomed warmth on our faces, worried that it may all be a fraud, and winter is waiting for us to let our guard down and break our hearts.

Irina Ratushinskaya was, for a brief time, fashionable in the west; a bold young woman, sentenced in 1984 at age 28 to seven years hard labor by the Soviet state for the crime of writing poetry ("anti-Soviet agitation"). Her case drew the attention of Amnesty International, International P.E.N., and other institutions of the educated and well-meaning. She spent four years in a "strict regime" forced labor camp until international pressure, together with the early beginnings of Glasnost, resulted in her release and forced exile to the west. Her citizenship finally restored by Yeltsin in 1998, she now lives in Russia with her family.

Several volumes of her poems were published in English translation, but, with nothing being so unfashionable as last year's cause, most are now out of print. There are also two volumes of memoirs, Grey is the Color of Hope, and In the Beginning, as well as a novel for the interested reader to explore. Cornerstone Press, a small Christian publisher, has put out a new volume of her poetry. You can read selections at their web-site by following the link. More excerpts can be found, along with a short article, at the Books and Culture magazine website.

Ratushinskaya is a believer. Some of her poems are explicit about her faith. In others, it is a quiet background, the horizon behind the observations and word plays in even her more seemingly secular work. Here are two shorter poems. The first, uncharacteristically direct, was written the day after her release. The "Small Zone" of the second poem is Zone 4 of corrective labor colony number 3, where Ratushinskaya was imprisoned.

Believe me, it was often thus:
In solitary cells, on winter nights
A sudden sense of joy and warmth
And a resounding note of love.
And then, unsleeping, I would know
A-huddle by an icy wall:
Someone is thinking of me now,
Petitioning the Lord for me.
My dear ones, thank you all
Who did not falter, who believed in us!
In the most fearful prison hour
We probably would not have passed
Through everything - from end to end,
Our heads held high, unbowed -
Without your valiant hearts
To light our path.
Kiev, 10 October 1986


So tomorrow, our little ship, Small Zone,
What will come true for us?
According to what law --
Like an eggshell over dead waves?
Covered in patches and scars,
On the word - the honest word - alone -
By whose hand is our ship preserved,
Our little home?
Those of us who sail to the end, row, live to the end --
Let them tell for the others:
We knew
The touch of this hand.
Small Zone, 18 September 1983

If you can find her poems, whether in a library, used book store, or in one of the volumes still in print, I recommend her as a companion through Lent. Here are a few more lines from the Cornerstone Press collection, Wind of the Journey, as food for the journey:

In our hearts we're not waiting
For April but growing toward it.
Oh, 'tis joyful and hard
Like all journeys we make for Your glory.

Over the next few days, I will post my own idiosyncratic suggestions for Lenten reading. To start with, I like to draw your attention to three writers whose work came out of the experience of the long Lent of the Russian Church in the twentieth century. While we all know intellectually that the Church was persecuted under the Communist regime, it is hard to grasp what this really meant. Bishops died in the hundreds; priests in the thousands, executed or condemned to a lingering death in the camps. Ordinary believers had their churches closed, and faced loss of jobs, housing, even their lives for a simple profession of faith. Some survived by compromise with the State, some suffered in silence, some kept the faith in heroic fashion. After the worst of the persecution, the Church was allowed a kind of shadow existence, like a child chained in a closet. The threat of imprisonment was always there for those who grew too vocal. I venerate those who spoke out and suffered. I do not judge those who compromised or remained silent, having only the slightest idea what they faced. The Soviet system of prisons and forced labor camps, most familiar to Westerners from Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago, swallowed generations of believers. The first two writers, Sergei Fudel, and Irina Ratushinskaya, are both survivors of the camps. Fudel (1901-1977) lived through the beginning of the darkness. Ratushinskaya, from a younger generation, lived through to the end of it, surviving prison and exile to return to Russia in the 90's, where she lives today.

There is only one work by Sergei Fudel available in English, a sampling of meditations, anecdotes, memoirs and short essays collected under the title Light in the Darkness. I first read the book in a sitting. I re-read it a little at a time now, skimming to find a story or a word that catches me, and then ponder it, seeing what I missed at first reading. Here are two passages selected almost at random, both in their own way appropriate for the Lenten season:

Everything in Christianity is determined and checked out by love. We should know some of the definitions of fasting given by saints:
Saint Isaac of Syria says: "Your spirit will not submit to the cross unless your body submits too" (This means effort, fasting).
Saint Paul writes: "You were called to freedom, bretheren, only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for flesh" (Ga 5:13)
An elder said to his disciple whose fasting lacked love: "Eat everything, but do not eat people."


I do not understand the suffering of the world. I only understand that the Creator of the world became part of the world's suffering and let His beloved Son share in it. Christianity speaks to us of God who suffers, suffers not because of His guilt, but because of his compassion, because of love. If this is so, then suffering is not to be feared, because it cannot be separated from love, or from God. "God suffers in His flesh . . ." That is why we dare to say "Of Thy sufferings make a participant" (Stikhera on "Lord, I call upon Thee," Tuesday, 2nd week of Great Lent).

To come; excerpts from Irina Ratushinskaya and an introduction to Mother Maria Skobstova.

Here is the view from the barnyard Saturday morning as the thaw began; snow disappearing on the southern and eastern slopes, hanging on to the hills looking north:

This past weekend saw a rise in temperatures into the fifties. The snow piled in the barnyard Saturday morning vanished by Sunday afternoon, seeping into the once frozen soil and leaving a kind of brown soup in its place. There is still snow visible on a few north facing slopes and on the mountain sides, but it is increasingly becoming a memory instead of a present obstacle. Looking around the barnyard, it comes as a surprise to see the odd pocket of white hidden here and there by an overhang or bit of shade. I thought of quoting Robert Frost's "A Hillside Thaw" in honor of the occasion. Instead, the following Frost poem seemed more appropriate:

A Patch of Old Snow

There's a patch of old snow in a corner
That I should have guessed
Was a blow-away paper the rain
Had brought to rest.

It is speckled with grime as if
Small print overspread it,
The news of a day I've forgotten--
If I ever read it

It is rightly said that Orthodoxy is a Church that celebrates the resurrection like no other. What is often overlooked is that the great outpouring of joy in the Paschal services is built upon weeks of struggle and preparation during the Great Fast of Lent. It is a season set aside for repentance, for facing down all that hinders us as we journey to meet the Risen Lord. Accordingly, the services for Lent contain some of the richest treasures of Orthodox theology and spirituality. The webmaster at Monachos.net has put together a page of Resources for Great Lent which is an excellent place to start. He provides a calendar, selected texts and links to useful commentary on the major commemorations throughout the season. There are several places on-line with selections from the rich liturgical material in the Lenten Triodian (the service book that carries us through to Pascha.) The nuns at Holy Myrrhbearers Monastery post a daily selection from the Lenten Triodian at their website. Archmandrite Ephraim of the Monastery of Saint Andrew in England has translated some of the services and provided them on his website here. As always, David Melling's Arimathea website provides thoughtful material and links for the season.

Today is Forgiveness Sunday, the last day of preparation for Orthodox Lent. In the words of the Vespers service for this evening:

Let us set out with joy upon the season of the Fast, and prepare ourselves for spiritual combat. Let us purify our soul and cleanse our flesh; and as we fast from food, let us abstain also from every passion. Rejoicing in the virtues of the Spirit may we persevere with love, and so be counted worthy to see the solemn Passion of Christ our God, and with great spiritual gladness to behold His holy Passover.

It is Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent on the Western church calendar. We Orthodox enter the season a little more gradually. The liturgical book for the Lenten season, the Triodion, begins two Sundays before the start of the Great Fast with a commemoration of the Gospel story of the Publican and the Pharisee. The following Sunday is devoted to the parable of the Prodigal Son. We begin preparing for the full fast with Meatfare Sunday (March 2nd this year), which is devoted to the theme of the Last Judgement. It is called "Meatfare Sunday" because observant Orthodox will give up all meat products until the celebration of Pascha (Easter) some eight weeks from now. This coming Sunday is Forgiveness Sunday, the final preparation before the start of Lent. It also called Cheesefare Sunday, because we now add dairy products to the list of foods set aside until Easter.

This may seem excessive to folks used to giving up chocolate for Lent or going meatless on Fridays, but it used to be a universal custom in the Church, both East and West. To this day you can find "Shrove Tuesday" pancake suppers in Catholic and Episcopal parishes. The original purpose of these was to use up the last of your butter, eggs and milk before the start of the fast. There is of course more to the purpose of the Great Fast than simply doing without. Fortunately there are a number of resources on-line to help explore the deeper meaning of the Lenten observance. In the coming weeks I will try and list a few of them here, as well as suggesting some other materials to aid in the journey.

Behind in the news as usual, I was saddened to hear of the recent death of Fred Rogers. In a time when most children's programs are like fingernails scraping down the blackboard of one's soul, his gentle approach seems better than ever in retrospect. An ordained Presbyterian minister, Mr. Rogers is now beyond questions of ratings or cultural decline. We can pray that he is in that Presence where there is no shadow of turning and it is, always, a beautiful day in the neighborhood.

Susan arrived home Saturday from ten days visiting my parents in Florida. I think she is still numb from climate shock. Going from semi-tropical sun to slush over the top of your boots in a matter of hours is a rude assault on the system. While I am glad she had a break from the weather here, and glad she could spend time with my folks, I missed her more than I can say. The evening before she left, we walked back from the barn, both tired from the day's chores. We worked our way down to the driveway in the double path made in the snow by a neighbor's tractor tires, I in the right groove, she in the left, stepping gingerly, our fingers linked for balance; each supporting the other as we went hand in hand up to the house. When we went down to the barn together this morning, I walked a little lighter, and stood a little straighter, still tired from the week's labor, but back in balance again.

We Virginians usually have mild Winters, Winters that would be mistaken for late Fall or early Spring anyplace north of Philadelphia. Even here in the mountains, deep snow is a rarity. If Winter is a country, we speed through on a tourist visa. This month I feel like I have, unasked, been given a green card and am now a resident alien in the Republic of Frozen Water. I find my vocabulary strangely inadequate, and wish, like in those mythical Eskimo languages, that there were sufficient words for the infinite varieties of snow. There is the powdery snow you can sweep off the porch; wet snow that clings to clothing and bends tree branches down as if gravity itself had grown momentarily intense; snow that falls straight like little pellets of ice: snow that floats down in impossible dandelion clumps; snow which flows over the top of boots like fine, sifted flour, and then melts in icy prickles on skin; snow plowed and piled in megalithic masses; snow windblown and frozen in shapes like carvings from some lost cult of madmen; snow which ripples like waves spreading across open fields; snow brilliant under sunlight; snow fading into somber monochrome under gray skies . . . You see the difficulty. It is a beautiful country, but I don't know the language. I don't know the customs. I want to go home.

There is an inch of new powder settling on top of the foot of snow remaining from the last storm. The old snow has melted and refrozen over the last week, until its icy crust is hard enough to walk on if you step lightly. As ungainly as I am in Carhart coveralls and insulated boots, for a moment I felt like Legolas in the Fellowship of the Ring film, walking over the drifts without leaving tracks.

This evening I had one of Susan's cousins bring in a round bale for the barnyard to tide the ewes over through this next snowstorm. Getting food and water down to the barn in all this is turning each morning and evening into a struggle with the animals, the elements and my own aching body. I really have had about enough of winter. This morning as I opened the kitchen door and listened to the quiet hiss of new snow blowing over the frozen fields, I thought, "this is the sound the last straw makes, as it floats gently down on the camel's back." But, this too will pass. In a few days comes Meatfare Sunday, and the week after that begins the Great Fast of Orthodox Lent. Perhaps all this physical struggle will even do some good for the slothful soul and spirit in the weeks ahead as we begin the journey to Pascha.

It's snowing again, and the National Weather Service is telling us to expect another six to eight inches before it is through. When did the Shenandoah Valley turn into Baja Minnesota?

The view from home between snowstorms:

It has been a rough week. Snow still piled everywhere, the driveway only partly passable, and more lambs on the way. I fed the last bale of hay in the barn to the girls on Saturday morning. The neighbor we buy it from brought fifteen bales Saturday night, but had to leave it some sixty yards from the barn. Sunday, the oldest son and I carried the bales by hand and by wheelbarrow through the snow to the corner in the barn where it is now stacked. The sheep were glad to see it, but my forty-eight year old lawyer's body is murmuring in revolt. The barn is packed to overflowing with sixty ewes and their lambs, sheltering from the weather outside. Feeding is a mob scene. My non-rural friends laughed a while back at the news service story of a woman in England killed while feeding sheep. What could be more harmless than sheep? Imagining it was like imagining a man done in by wiener dogs, or by a pack of ravaging teacup poodles. Real sheep are not small and fluffy. A good half of our ewes are purebred Hampshires, weighing about as much as your typical NFL running back. Like the running back, they are mostly muscle. The sheep, however, add two more legs and a lower center of gravity to the equation. They take eating very seriously. It is one of the things they enjoy. They are good at it. Picture yourself in the barn standing by a trough. Picture the sheep pressing in, the big Hamps up front, the smaller sheep, just the right size to take your knees out, squeezing in from behind. I hand you the feed bucket. Several thousand pounds of single-minded mutton charges forward on two hundred forty hooves. Pandemonium ensues. Afterwards you check to see if the limbs you went in with are still attached to the rest of your body. Sheep; cute? Cuddly? Not quite. There are moments though where you forget the hassles. Here is one such; a mother and daughter caught in a quiet moment at the barn.

Drifts are now waist high in spots. The neighbor hired to clear the driveway this afternoon reports two feet of snow on Browntown Road, and his tractor wallowing, even with chains. Susan has a flight out of Dulles Airport tonight. We are crossing our fingers hoping for a cancellation, dreading the seventy mile drive. If Browntown Road isn't plowed, the problem will be solved for us. It is a day best spent inside anyhow, warming up after chores are done. Here is a voice from twelfth century Japan, speaking from the depths of Winter:

Winter Deepens in a Mountain Home

At the first snowfall, yes,

some visitors pushed their way through,

but now all trails

are cut off

to this village deep in the mountains

Saigyo, trans. Burton Watson

Buck Mountain visible, the bottom fence rail vanished; still snowing . . .

Unwarmed by any sunset light
The gray day darkened into night,
A night made hoary with the swarm
And whirl-dance of the blinding storm,
As zigzag, wavering to and fro,
Crossed and recrossed the wingëd snow:
And ere the early bedtime came
The white drift piled the window-frame,
And through the glass the clothes-line posts
Looked in like tall and sheeted ghosts.
The old familiar sights of ours
Took marvellous shapes; strange domes and towers
Rose up where sty or corn-crib stood,
Or garden-wall, or belt of wood;
A smooth white mound the brush-pile showed,
A fenceless drift what once was road;
The bridle-post an old man sat
With loose-flung coat and high cocked hat;
The well-curb had a Chinese roof;
And even the long sweep, high aloof,
In its slant spendor, seemed to tell
Of Pisa's leaning miracle.

from Snowbound, John Greenleaf Whittier

Snow today, six inches and counting. We made room for the ewes, lambs and all four llamas in the barn, or at least under the eaves, sheltered from what could be two feet of snow by Monday. When I went to feed this evening, the barn was filled with small birds. Finches, chickadees, some flitting too fast to see who they were; all drawn in by dry roosts on the rafters, and the memory of summer in the hay stacked in the barn. Here are some pictures of our hillside farm on a cold, snowy day.

Fenceline in February Snow


Morning Snowfall at the Barn

Morning Landscape with Pickup

It's official; it is now warmer in the Aleutian Islands than it is in Front Royal, Virginia. This news comes from the wonderful Stonewall Place weblog, chronicling one couple's eight month stay as caretakers in False Pass, Alaska. Go for wonderful pictures and daily news from an ever changing landscape.

While reading tonight in a volume on Chinese painting, I found the following comment by T'ang dynasty painter-critic Chu Ching-hsuan which captures perfectly my philosphy of blogging:

I only make records of the things I have seen, but when I know a thing I do not hesitate to express my stupid opinion about it.

From the preface to his biographical sketches of T'ang dynasty painters.

I have not been blogging much lately. Too much work at the office, busy times on the farm, and a quick trip to Florida to spend time with my parents have made it hard to find enough time to sit and reflect. Or at least enough time to sit, reflect and then type. Back home now since Thursday, I am still recovering from climate shock. When I left last week for the Gulf Coast, it was in the twenties here. Changing planes in Charlotte, the temperature was in the fifties. I called Susan while driving through Sarasota with the windows rolled down. I did not have much time for playing tourist, but I did take a few moments to get to Casperson Beach, just south of Venice Florida, Susan's favorite place in the world. Here is a picture I took for her Tuesday morning. (Compare with this morning's picture and you will understand what I mean about climate shock.)


Boardwalk, Casperson Beach

Saturday Morning on Glenrose Farm 2-08-03

My father-in-law keeps a flock of peacocks on the farm. They mostly stay over near his house about forty acres south of us, roosting in the Chinese chestnuts and stealing food from the cats. At the end of the summer, the males drop the tail feathers they have spent a year growing, leaving a kind of iridescent trail as they walk around the farm. Some blow away, some we pick up and pass on as gifts to friends and visitors. A few end up in odd corners around the in-laws' house and ours, forgotten until you run across them in the dead of winter while searching for some lost item. Living with peacocks is not always easy. They will eat almost anything, and the presence of one-eyed cats at the in-laws' house gives credence to the speculation that birds are the final descendants of the more aggressive small dinosaurs. No one who has lived through their calls at evening during nesting season will forget the experience. Flannery O'Connor wrote a magazine piece about the flock at her family's place in Milledgeville Georgia titled King of the Birds, anthologized in the Collected Works from the Library of America and in Mystery and Manners, an earlier collection by Sally Fitzgerald. She writes of the peafowl's evening voice:

The peacock perhaps has violent dreams. Often he wakes and screams "Help! Help!" and then from the pond and the barn and the trees around the house a chorus of adjuration begins:
Lee-yon lee-yon,
Mee-yon mee-yon!
Eee-e-yoy eee-e-yoy,
Eee-e-yoy eee-e-yoy!
The restless sleeper may wonder if he wakes or dreams.

I have always, less poetically, described the sound as rather like a cat being crushed under a giant rusty hinge. Nonetheless, they are glorious creatures in their season, and finding one of those forgotten feathers in the dead of winter is like finding a flash of summer sunlight, preserved and radiant. What brought on these reflections was discovering the following poem in The Poetry Anthology, 1912-2002: Ninety Years of America's Most Distinguished Verse Magazine, newly arrived at the local library. The poem is by George Scarbrough, a Tennessee poet born in 1915, and still writing today. I had not heard of him before, and the loss was mine.

HAN-SHAN FASHIONS A MYTH

The old poet loves peacock feathers
And gathers them as they fall, one
By one, from perches in the trees
Near his house.

First, he caressed
Them with a dry writing brush, oh, so
Carefully, lest he separate the delicate
Spines, knowing the colors are interlocked.

Then, he looks for a place to stand them
In his cramped little house. Proper
Location, he says, is half of any art.
Near his bed he keeps a jarful of
These planetary pertubations.

In the egg-yolk light of his lamp,
He sees universes scintillating in blue
and gold like his beloved Saturn,
And hears from close by roosts, the dry
Clattering of galaxies being re-arranged.

And then the cry of damnation comes:
He sleeps and reams of starfalls
And all the rumpus of dragons.

The link above on Scarbrough's name will take you to a small press keeping some of his work in print. They have a sampling of his poems on-line together with a short biography. The Poetry Anthology is also well worth a look; a hundred years of poems, all workmanlike in their various fashions, some simply splendid. In addition to the names you find in any anthololgy, there are some wonderful discoveries waiting for the dedicated reader.

...Wind chill advisory tonight...
Overnight low temperatures will fall to between 5 and 10 degrees
above Zero in the Shenandoah valley overnight. While winds this
evening will be light...By morning...Winds are expected to Increase
to around 10 mph. This will produce wind chill values between Zero
and 10 degrees below Zero.

The ewes with lambs are in the barn; the newest in pens, the most fragile with heat lamps hung overhead. When Susan got home from teaching this afternoon, she went over to my in-laws to pick up a lamb born out in the cold today and rescued by a neighbor bringing hay. She is warming in a box in the basement before returning to her mother in the barn. Her sibling was no so lucky, and froze in the afternoon wind before the neighbor came by. If last year went by without a real winter, this year we are making up for it. The snow of the past few weeks has been in its way a blessing. The bitter cold of this week has not. We fill every trough to the brim when we can, unscrew the hoses from the faucets, and hope they drain down the hillside before the remaining water turns solid. We keep a hammer handy in the barn to smash the ice on the water troughs so the sheep can drink. We watch the ewes carefully, and try to get them in the barn when they look like lambing. Susan keeps the intensive care box ready and waiting in the basement. We watch the news, waiting for warmer weather.

These temperatures are nothing for folks in New England, or anywhere within shouting distance of the Canadian border. For us in the Shenandoah, they are a cruel surprise. Not that we don't get one or two truly frigid evenings each winter. The shock is having one or two weeks where forty degrees seems like a tropical dream.

The melting snow brought a little green back to the pasture. The cold has turned that back to monochrome. Here is a different sort of weather report from the Japanese poet Saigyo, written a little over 800 years ago:

Fields we saw
blooming with
so many different flowers,
frost-withered now
to a single hue

(Trans. Burton Watson)

I have had a request for more lamb pictures. That is harder than it might sound, as the little beggars are perpetual motion machines. The only time you can get one to stand still is when it is sleeping or eating. The one pictured below was still a little shaky on its legs, being only fifteen or twenty minutes old. Susan found mother and daughter in the field just before the evening feeding, the lamb still warm from birth, moisture steaming off her wool in the cold.

Two brief snowstorms have swept through since Sunday. The second is melting this afternoon after leaving two inches of dry powder. Earlier, a stiff wind was blowing loose snow over the pasture, a soft hiss in the background during the morning walk with the dog. The weather gave Susan and the kids a day off from school, and since the Courthouse is closed for Virginia's Lee-Jackson holiday, the whole family was down at the barn this morning. I took along the digital cameral and offer you three photos from this morning;

Apres Ski at the Haybale


Pushme-Pullyu


Waiting for his share

Our see-saw weather left snow on the ground the morning of the Feast of Theophany. By Wednesday, it had melted, leaving marshy places and running water. We have been living under drought conditions the last few years here in Virginia, and this is most welcome. There is a small spring south of the house on the other side of the little run that cuts through the farm that has been dry for some time. To tell the truth, I had forgotten it was there until I found myself stepping over inches of water on my morning walk with the dog. It is flowing again, out from under a large rock as if struck by Moses himself.

On a farm, it is impossible to ignore the fact of water. We pump our household water from a well drilled when the house was built. Some of house water gets shared with the sheep in the barn. Out in the pasture, they drink from the run that bisects the property, flowing down into Gooney Run, which itself flows into the Shenandoah River. We know where our water comes from, how it is used and where it goes. I find that, in this area at least, knowledge only increases mystery. No amount of learning about the hydrological cycle can erase the basic wonder, that rains grow grass, and grass, through a kind of biochemical alchemy, turns into the lambs that play outside over the fence. During the worst of our drought, the grass stopped growing. The grass feeds our sheep, and rainfall brings the grass. No rain, and not just our lawn, but our life dries up and blows away. It makes it harder to take for granted this most basic of blessings. When we pray in the Liturgy "For favorable weather, an abundance of the fruits of the earth, and temperate seasons," I may perhaps pray a little harder than some of my fellow parishioners, and have a little different idea of what constitutes "favorable weather."

A key moment in the celebration of the Feast of the Theophany, the commemoration of the baptism of Jesus, is the blessing of the waters. As he blesses, the priest plunges the cross into the water, making water, which gives natural life, an icon of the living water which gives eternal life. As Dumitru Staniloae put it, "all things found in the middle between God and the human person call out for the cross." The presence of the cross in the midst of the waters reminds us of both of the fragility of our natural life, and the hope that our "natural" life will be taken up and transformed into something greater. It is customary for Orthodox homes to be blessed by the same water consecrated at Theophany. I reprint here one of the prayers said at that blessing, with the hope that each of you find salvation in your own house, and that you may have an abundance of the water of life:

0 God our Savior, the True Light, Who was baptized in the Jordan by the Prophet John, and Who did deign to enter under the roof‑tree of Zacchaeus, bringing salvation unto him and unto his house: do You, the same Lord, keep safe also from harm those who dwell herein; grant to them Your blessing, purification and bodily health, and all their petitions that are unto salvation and Life everlasting; for blessed are You, as also Your Father Who is from everlasting, and Your All‑Holy, Good and Life‑creating Spirit, both now and ever, and to the ages of ages. Amen.

The new year has brought a full display of all the weather options for January in these parts. In the space of a week, we have gone from a foretaste of Spring back to Winter's ice and snow. The kids were delighted to have an extra day tacked on to Christmas vacation, as local schools thought twice about sending the buses out. Through all the changes, lambs have continued to arrive. I think I lost count somewhere around the twenty fifth. We lost two this week, killed by pneumonia as the weather cycled from balmy to frigid. When I walked up the driveway this evening after parking the truck at the bottom of the luge run that parts of the driveway have become, I could see Susan and one of the boys still in the barn, later than the usual evening feeding. Stopping in to see what kept them, I found that two of the Hampshires had lambed, the first from that part of the flock. Ebony, my black Hampshire Ewe, had two fine big lambs. Number twelve, herself a big ewe, had twins from our new stud ram, Prejudice. The buck lamb did them both proud, but his sister looks weak, and may not make it. Susan gave her a little extra from a bottle and from there we wait and hope for the best.

I tried to capture a little of the transformations brought by light, cloud and snow this last week with the digital camera. Here, as they might put it in the East, are three views of Hogback Mountain:

We are in the middle of an unexpected bout of warm weather. Fifty degree temperatures followed by steady rains today have banished the last bit of December's ice and snow. Here on the farm, this is not an unmixed blessing. Temperatures heading towards single digits present their own challenges, but they have the advantage of giving you a firm surface to work on. If you have ever walked across a well-used barnyard in a thaw, you know what I mean. My sister-in-law gave me a new pair of tall, insulated rubber work boots for Christmas. This morning, trudging through the mud and manure Slurpee that until twenty four hours ago was a hard frozen surface, it dawns on me; I love those boots. It may seem petty, but getting through the morning chores with warm, dry feet can be a thing of wonder in and of itself. I have noticed over the years that having the right tool for the job makes all the difference. The proper size screwdriver, a sharpened set of blades for the sheep shears, a good pair of boots; all can be in their own way a foretaste of grace. What was difficult suddenly becomes possible, perhaps even easy. The right tool opens new possibilities for good work. Good work, that is, work done to sustain life, provide for yourself and your neighbor, and to heal the damage around you, is a chief part of our vocation as humans. The late Romanian theologian, Dumitru Staniloae, teaches us that malleability of nature to human action is part of the gift of God in Creation, and that men and women do not work out their salvation apart from their stewardship and transformation of nature. The second volume of his systematic theology, recently published in English, has a sustained meditation on this theme, which I would commend to the interested reader. All this rapidly gets above my head. Back in the barnyard, away from the heights of theology, I am content to find small traces of grace in a new pair of boots.

Bishop Seraphim in his wonderfully eclectic fashion, posts on Woodchucks, topology, and emblematic animals within, finishing with Adam's naming of the beasts. This last brought to mind a poem by John Bennett. I know his work only by a few selections published in the Anglican Theological Review in the 70's and by a small volume of verse based on themes from Moby Dick I ran across in a local library. I have mislaid the xerox copies I made of his poems, but still have this one, calligraphed for me by a friend back in 1976, a gift which I treasure still. I offer it by way of a New Year's greeting:

Old Adam, father, poet, priest, you stood
in human splendor once in Eden wood
and dreamed the holy names; your dreaming spoke
the beasts alive with that first poetry.

So now, Old Father, stranger to an age
when poems are thin knives or bitter smoke,
stand softly at the center of my skull
and chant your early metaphors of love
and set their joy against the bent world's rage.

Buck Mountain, Christmas Morning 2002

Dear Friends,
After a long hard day traveling back from a visit with my parents, I find myself too tired to write anything new, so I offer you this by way of a Christmas greeting, written several years ago, on another Christmas eve here on our hillside farm:

It is a cold, clear night here in the Valley. Orion is rising in the
southwest over the new barn, bright in a moonless sky. The sheep flock is
quiet inside. I was tempted, briefly, to walk down at midnight to see if any
of the animals would talk, as the old tale says they do on Christmas eve. It
is very cold though, and the house is warm and quiet. It is lambing time for
part of the flock. There are now at least two dozen newborns in the barn,
small high cries mixing with the deeper voices of their mothers when we go
down to feed. A newcomer myself to this rural life, I am surprised to
realize that a manger is no longer something in a Nativity scene on a lawn
or found in miniature on a table, but a fixture I toss hay into daily. As we
fed today I recalled an Orthodox hymn, sung in preparation for the feast of
the Nativity, that compares Mary to a ewe lamb, like those we have in our
own barn: "Make ready, O cave for the Ewe Lamb comes, bearing Christ in her
womb. And do thou, O manger, accept Him who by his word has loosed us
dwellers on the earth from acts that are against reason. Ye shepherds
abiding in the fields, bear witness to the fearful wonder. And ye, Magi from
Persia, offer to the King gold, frankincense and myrrh: for the Lord has
appeared from a Virgin Mother." I look over the barnyard and, with the words
of the hymn in my mind, see our own nativity scene. There are some
differences though. If I were to go to the barn now, there would be no Magi.
My two sons, though they grow smarter by the day, are not yet wise men and
their father would be a poor third if they were. If there have been angels,
we have entertained them unaware, as the apostle says in Hebrews, in their
guise as strangers and guests. So, our home-grown nativity scene is
incomplete. We do, though, have a camel of sorts, for color, who can double
as the census taker in Luke's Gospel. Caesar, on our farm, is the name of a
guardian llama who sticks his head through the barn door at night and looks
over the new lambs. He appears to be counting, or at least conducting an
imperial inspection. Thinking of all this reminds me of a poem by Wendell
Berry, which, now that I look at it again, says it all better than I could.
Here is part of it:

Remembering that it happened once,
We cannot turn away the thought,
As we go out, cold, to our barns
Toward the long night's end, that we
Ourselves are living in the world
It happened in when it first happened,
That we ourselves, opening a stall
(A latch thrown open countless times
Before), might find them breathing there,
Foreknown: the Child bedded in straw,
The mother kneeling over Him,
The husband standing in belief
He scarcely can believe, in light
That lights them from no source we see,
An April morning's light, the air
around them joyful as a choir.
(From: A Timbered Choir; The Sabbath Poems 1979-1997)

Since I can put it no better than that, I will only add, Merry Christmas.
Christ is born, Glorify Him!

Orthodox Churches that follow the revised Julian calendar are celebrating the Forefeast of the Nativity in preparation for Christmas. Here is Archimandrite Ephrem's translation of one of the hymns for Matins on the Sunday before the Feast of the Nativity:

Strange, wonderful and dread mysteries! The Lord of glory came to earth, and as a beggar in a cave he put on flesh, seeking to call back Adam, and to deliver Eve from her pains.

By your swaddling bands you loose the cords of offences, while by your poverty, O Compassionate, you make all rich. Laid in manger for unreasoning beasts, you free mortals from irrational wickedness, O Word of God ever without beginning.

I would encourage anyone who is interested in exploring the strange and wonderful mystery of the incarnation, which is the real "reason behind the season" to spend some time at Archimandrite Ephrem's page with his translations of the varied services for the Feast.

Small Matters of Life and Death

With the nighttime temperature below freezing, we try and get the ewes close to lambing into the barn at night. Monday night two stayed away. Susan was in Winchester doing some last minute Christmas shopping. I was caught late at the office making a last ditch effort to salvage a case that was doomed from the start. (Me: "You mean your only evidence against this guy is the testimony of a juvenile who himself is a thief as well as being a lying sack of [insert rude term for organic fertilizer] and who will plead the 5th if I put him on the stand?" Officer: "Yep, that's about right." Me: [insert colorful barnyard metaphors] ) What with one thing and another, I did not get home until well after dark. I called the ewes from the lower field in and thought I had them all. Just after sunrise Tuesday, I saw two ewes standing by the barn with something small walking between them. After putting the dog in the house, I went back to let them in and found the lamb I had seen before, plus two more I hadn't. One was frozen, laying lifeless where he was born. The second was still breathing, stretched shivering on the frozen mud, her skin covered with a delicate layer of frost. After alerting the rest of the family, I brought the survivor up to the house where a box with a heat lamp was ready. Last night Susan took her down to the barn and put her in a pen with her mother. The past two nights we have been careful about counting heads. They are so fragile, yet sometimes unexpectedly resilient. Why did one live and one die? I don't know, but here is a picture of mother and daughter, reunited, warm and sheltered.

I tend to write far less about my work as a prosecutor than I do about life on the farm. Most of the good stories from work are told over meals, or after dinner, to friends curious about the oddities and tragedies seen in the practice of criminal law. A lot of what I do I simply don't talk much about. Some material is confidential, some of it is simply too sad for this forum. Some involves people who's right to privacy or anonymity I feel bound to respect. Nonetheless, there are a few tales that I have told and retold over the years. Perhaps I will tell them here in the coming months. In the meantime, here is a photo of the site of the other half of my life, taken the day of our recent snowstorm.

Bishop Seraphim has been writing about Mother Maria Skobstova in his LiveJournal. At various times in her life a student, a poet, a revolutionary, a wife, a mother, a social worker, and a professed Orthodox nun, she worked among the destitute and mentally ill in Paris between the wars. Mother Maria died in the Ravensbruck concentration camp, sentenced for the "crime" of protecting Jews in Nazi occupied France. It is perhaps too early to tell whether her life is a precursor of new kind of sanctity in the Orthodox Church, or simply a unique and glorious aberration. There is a growing movement of devotion to her life and memory, as witnessed by this web site, which (somewhat prematurely) contains material for veneration of her as a canonized saint. There is a fine biography of Mother Maria, Pearl of Great Price by Sergei Hackel, which appears to be out of print (temporarily one can hope.)

In a second post on Mother Maria, Bishop Seraphim includes a sketch of her with Fr Dimitrii Klepenin. Fr Dimitrii worked alongside Mother Maria, and died in Ravensbruck as well. He has been a hero of mine since I read the following exchange with Hofmann, his Gestapo interrogator, recounted in Hackel's book:

Fr Dimitrii was interrogated for four hours. He made no attempt to exculpate himself. Later, at Lourmel, Hofmann was to describe how he was offered his freedom on the condition that he helped no more Jews. Fr Dimitrii had raised his pectoral cross, shown the figure on it and asked, "But do you know this Jew?" He was answered with a blow to the face. "Your priest did himself in", stated Hofmann. "He insists that if he were to be freed he would act exactly as before."

Wednesday's ice is turning to slush and mud. A slight rise in temperature, a round of rain mixed with sleet, and the remaining snow is suddenly looking threadbare and moth-eaten. The dampness puts a chill in the bones worse than the single digit cold did. I shouldn't complain. This would probably qualify as a mild spring day in Vladivostok or Baffin Bay. Siberians would be shedding layers and complaining about the unseasonable heat. Even here in Virginia, I can think back to a blizzard a few years ago to remember what real winter weather is like. We were stuck on the farm for days, drifts blowing too deep even for the four wheel drive. Winds so cold that my sweat-soaked pants froze into knife edges, cutting into my legs as we walked back from hauling hay bales to stranded cattle. The days of snow were interrupted by a fast moving front of warm air, raising the temperature by 40 degrees in a matter of hours. Frozen water reverted to its liquid state almost instantaneously. Water filled the storm drains and shot out of the manhole covers in town, giving each street its own miniature fountains. Streams overflowed. The piles of snow remaining in the pasture vanished, leaving puddles and temporary marshes. A day later, the temperature dropped, and we were hit by an ice storm. One cow, confused beyond bearing, simply dropped dead in the field. The rest of us survived just fine, a few pictures of man-high drifts on the porch the only permanent record of the experience.

Yesterday morning there was a small break in the clouds at sunrise, illuminating the ridges to the south. Here is my attempt to capture the result:

TWO VIEWS OF HOGBACK MOUNTAIN

This morning brought a steady fall of freezing rain. The drive into work was tricky, the drive home worse. Trees encased in ice bowed, and in some cases broke over Browntown Road. Some branches were so low that it was like driving in a crystal tunnel. Halfway home, a tree fallen across both lanes of the road send me back the way I came. A thirty minute detour, and I was home in time to help with the evening feeding down at the barn. Sheep have an unerring instinct for bad weather, and one ewe marked the occasion by having twins in the barn. Susan had locked the more pregnant sheep up last night expecting just this. Susan hung a heat lamp to take the chill off the new arrivals, and then had to wait five hours for the power company to get fallen limbs off the lines. Nonetheless, mother, son and daughter did well, and are now resting in a warm pen. By sunset, the falling ice had turned to drizzle, with low clouds and fog rolling in off the mountains. The temperature is predicted to rise tomorrow, and none too soon. As I was walking the dog tonight, I could hear branches breaking under the weight of ice. Some would groan, creak, then snap. Others would go at once, with a sound like a shotgun blast, followed by the oddly musical cascade hiss of ice down the hillside.

Here is the view at home after the ice just before dusk:

I accumulate books the way a ship accumulates barnacles. They just seem to attach themselves as I go about my daily life. Where do they come from? Chain stores, independents, used book stores, discounters, library sales; who knows. I look on my shelves these days and wonder in surprise, when did I get that? I've been trying to work the backlog of odd books acquired and then shelved unread. This weekend I pulled out a paperback edition of the Selected Poems of the late Australian poet, Gwen Harwood. I had never encountered her work before the book showed up on the library discard shelf. A quick check of Amazon.com shows that her work is out of print, or of "limited availability." This is a shame. She has a unique voice; erudite, passionate, cynical, sentimental and wise. She is also a master of form. Born in 1920, it is hard to think of many other poets of her generation who are as unselfconsciously at home with the stresses and rhythms of traditional verse. Yet, she is unmistakably modern. Let me bend fair use by typing out a poem from one of her later volumes. It is probably not one of her best, but it does capture some of what appeals about her work.

A VALEDICTION

As always after partings, I
get from its place the Oxford Donne,
inked in with aches from adolescence.

Who needs drugs if she has enough
uppers and downers in her head?
Though names are not engraved herein,

who can be literally dead
if he leaps from an underlining
into my flesh at The Sunne Rising?

Lou Salome in her old age: "Whether
I kissed Nietzsche on Monte Sacro
I find I do not now remember."

Young Saint Therese of Lisieux, writing
"When I love, it is forever."
One mistress of half Europe, one

enclosed with a transcendent lover.
Dear ladies, shall we meet halfway
between sanctity and liberation?

Today I leave the book unopened.
Strangely, this farewell's left me joyful.
Can ghosts die? Yes, old ghosts are summoned

back to their shades of ink. My lover
will come again to me, my body
to its true end will give him joy.

Now in his absence let me walk
at peaceful sunset in the pasture
feeding my geese, my latter children,

and when the afterglow is gone
Lou's ravishing forgetfulness
will rock my soul with saving laughter,

and the singlehearted saint will braid
all loves into one everlasting.
Then, if I need a lullaby,

good Doctor Donne, will you attend?

A few housekeeping changes on the blog today. Since the ratio of photo to text has gotten closer to fifty-fifty, the load time on the page has become a problem. The long term solution is to start writing more, and more frequently. For the short run, I have reduced the number of posts on the main page to what is, I hope, a manageable size for folks with dial-up connections. It means bumping some of my own favorite posts and pictures to the archives, but I suppose they have been out front long enough.

Greetings to St. Stephen's Musings, the new Orthodox weblog on the block, added to the list on the left. I have pruned two sites that have, in one case, vanished after months of inactivity, and in another, been inactive since August.

I am always amazed that anyone not related to me by blood or marriage reads the site, and am particularly amazed that people actually put a link on their own site. In that vein, I have added a few more folks who have linked this site to the list on the left. I wish I could come up with a better name for the cross-links part of the blog, as the folks there are well worth reading in their own right and I check in on all of them frequently. Perhaps it should be called "People I would read even if they hadn't linked me"?

For those who do come for the pictures, here is the view from home this morning:

The first snow storm of the season arrived last night and stayed around until early afternoon. Remember the old song that went, "So if you've no place to go, let it snow, let it snow, let it snow!"? On a farm, you always have some place to go and something to do. It doesn't make the scenery any less beautiful, but it does place the whole enterprise in a different light. We were out shortly after sunrise feeding the sheep in the barn who are close to lambing, and bringing in the Hampshire ewes from the field for some grain now that the grass is under eight inches of dry white powder. In addition to the grain, Susan had round bales delivered to have hay on hand for forage during the day. While the sheep may look cold in the following picture, they actually do pretty well in inclement weather. After all, they grow their own wool sweaters. Nonetheless, they were glad to come in for a little extra nourishment



This evening we brought in the commercial ewes from the front field for a grain ration. They had not discovered the hay bale put out for their part of the flock, so after they had eaten in the barnyard, we led them to it. Susan captured the scene below of your author playing Pied Piper with a bucket of grain:

A NARROW VIEW OF THE WORLD

Changes in Latitudes

It is hard to believe that this time last week I was walking bare footed in warm beach sand. The sun is still not quite up this morning and the temperature is barely out of single digits. Yesterday I had to use a hammer to break up the ice on the outside water trough. Snow is predicted for tonight, but last night's sky was clear and star-filled. It is the time of the new moon, leaving the stars as the only light outside not made by man. By 10:30 p.m. when I walked the dog for the last time, the ground was already frozen, bits of frost on the grass scattering light from the house, winking back in echoes of the stars overhead. The tropical sunrise was a thing of wonder, but there is beauty here too in the colder latitudes. Stars above, frost glinting below. Night's lantern/ Pointed with pierced lights, and breaks of rays/ Discover'd everywhere. Or so says Gerard Manley Hopkins in a fragment preserved in his collected works. Despite, or perhaps because of, the cold air, the stars were particularly bright. Perhaps the fragment from Hopkins was a warm-up for this great shout at the night sky:

Look at the stars! look, look up at the skies!
O look at all the fire-folk sitting in the air!
The bright boroughs, the circle-citadels there!
Down in dim woods the diamond delves! the elves'-eyes!
The grey lawns cold where gold, where quickgold lies!
Wind-beat whitebeam! air abeles set on a flare!
Flake-doves sent floating forth at a farmyard scare!--
Ah well! it is all a purchase, all is a prize.

The sun is up now, and time for morning chores. The sunrise here does not have an ocean view, but the light and shadow on the mountains have their own beauties; a little comfort in the cold.

Susan whisked me away for a surprise trip last week with the little extra money she made coaching this fall. She lined up neighbors to care for the sheep, sent the boys to the other side of the farm to stay with the in-laws, and put us on a plane heading south. So, instead of the usual morning picture of Hogback Mountain, here is the view just before sunrise from Fortune Beach, Grand Bahama Island, 11/29/02. (I promise, no more vacation pictures after this one!)

New Arrival


Here is the first lamb of the season, doing her best to have a meal in spite of the silly man with the camera.

I blithely (and somewhat flippantly) said in my last post that "there is always a 'better' if you know where, or how, to look." For what that means in depth, go to this cry of joy and gratitude from the Soviet Gulag, a place that, like the Nazi death camps, was as close as we humans have come to a scale model of hell. This is faith without false sentiment, paid for at great price. Thanks to Bishop Seraphim for posting it.

Committing to life on a farm is not unlike committing to a marriage, you take it "for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish," till death (or your banker) do you part. These last few weeks have brought us a little of everything. Last season's lambs brought better prices at the sale earlier this month than we had hoped for, even if the older ewes and bucks we sold to cull the flock did not. It was hard to see some of them go, but, looking at the newly reduced flock, I admire the quality I see, and admire Susan's good judgement in deciding who to keep.

The "worse" this week has been the sudden illness of Leroy, one of our llamas. He was laying down in the field this morning, too sick to rise. Susan covered him to provide some protection from the weather and I made an emergency run to the vet after getting out of Court at lunchtime. Leroy has a bad temper, even for a gelded guard llama, but did not even have the energy to spit on me as I shot paste down his throat, pushed pills down him, and injected him with an array of needles. When I checked this evening at sundown, he was no better, but also no worse. As I left, he was still unable to stand, but was eating the grain I had put out with a good appetite. We will keep fighting and, we hope, so will he.

The "better" (and there is always a "better" if you know where, or how, to look) this week was the arrival of the first lamb of the new season. A little early, but very welcome. Susan found her in the field next to her mother, still wet from birth. With a cold rain in the forecast, she brought them into the barn and set up a pen. Both mother and daughter are doing well, and I will post a picture as soon as blogger and my internet provider settle down and play nice again.

Fellow Appalachian blogger Fred1st was out himself this morning watching the Leonids. His reflections are here.

I was up early this morning, out on the lawn with the boys to watch the Leonid Meteor Shower. We live in a small valley surrounded by mountains; a bowl of mountain below, hiding the lights of town, the bowl of the sky above, filled with stars and moonlight. Too much sky to take in at a single glance. We stood, back to back, facing outward and looking up, crying out as another piece of comet dust streaked burning across the sky.

Robert Brady offers a haiku on his Notes From Pure Land Mountain site that includes crows, persimmons, and an entirely awful but appropriate pun. My own introduction to persimmons came as a boy living in Japan. Wonderful fruit, but my first bite into an unripe one taught me the invaluable lesson that, sometimes, timing is everything.

While you are visiting his site, page down here for an essay about an encounter with a handmade chair. If you ever have encountered old quality, hand-crafted furniture, you know of what he speaks. It is a great loss that this experience is not more readily available. The problem is that good craftsmanship depends on the presence of a good craftsman. They were perhaps more common in earlier days than now, but they were never just dropping off trees. If your local furniture maker (or you yourself) did not have the gift, then you sat on furniture that was ugly, uncomfortable and expensive to obtain. The same with cooking. However much we decry fast food, it is hot, filling and reliably edible. Many households in an earlier age were not so blessed in their diet. One of my great-grandfathers was an Episcopal minister in southern Virginia at the turn of the century. In his memoirs he recalls shocking a diocesan meeting by holding up a biscuit, actually green in color, and saying that what his people needed more than anything else were missionary cooks. An inadequate diet, and poor handling of what foodstuffs were available were as much a feature of the rural landscape as the classic vision of the farmhouse kitchen, tables overflowing with fresh, well cooked food.

Our mass production techniques have one great virtue, which should not be underestimated. They provide adequate goods and services for people for whom the alternative was not hand made goods, but no goods at all. The great vice of mass production is evident in Brady's essay. There is a quality about the best hand work that goes beyond computation. As Brady puts it: "This was a chair that had been made by transforming the beauty of trees through the beauty of hands into the beauty of chairs." There is evidence in the best work of something that can only be called grace. As an Orthodox Christian, I would say that it bears witness to the uncreated energies of God, that fill and uphold all things. A Calvinist might prefer the term "Common Grace" to get at the same point. The virtue of our mass-production economy is that we can fill the bellies and furnish the houses of people who in previous ages went hungry and lived in destitution. The vice is that in the quest for the adequate, we have ruled out in advance the possibility of grace in the work of human hands.

Here is a page I've been meaning to link to for a while, the online record of Hieromonk Alexander Golitzin's interdisciplinary seminar on the Jewish Roots of Eastern Christian Mysticism. Some of the work here is meant for the specialist, other parts can be read profitably by anyone. Father Alexander's two part essay, Liturgy and Mysticism: The Experience of God in Eastern Orthodox Christianity is a good place to start. (Requires the Adobe Acrobat reader.)

In China and Japan, almost to the present century, an educated man could both paint and write poetry, as the occasion called for. It was a custom to show a new painting to a friend, who would compose a poem in reaction, and inscribe it in the margin of the work. Being no painter, I compensate with a digital camera. Being no poet, I blog. Fortunately, there are some folks who are keeping the tradition alive. I thank Huw at Doxos for the fine haiku, written in response to today's view of Hogback Mountain. They should be inscribed on the picture itself, but I will settle for linking them here.

Last week was a slow one for blogging. Lots of work and family commitments. By way of apology, here is the morning view of Hogback Mountain. Yes, that is snow, our first of the season for the higher altitudes. Down here where I sit, it is crisp and cool, with just the barest remnant of frost on the ground.



Autumn's third month-snow on the banks, the flowers
first blossom white;
a whole night of frost in the forest--
the leaves have all turned red.
WEN T'ING-YUN (Trans. Jonathan Chaves)

Another View of Hogback Mountain, Morning Fog and Cloud



I read somewhere that the Appalachian mountains are cousins to the peaks of eastern China, separated with the drift of continents. I can believe it on a morning like this. Where is a Chinese watercolorist when you need one?

Some months back I linked to Michael McClellan's pictures of monks and monasteries. Here is an equally luminous gallery of black and white photographs from a monk-photographer at the ancient Valaam Monastery in Russia. The monastery, vacant from 1944 until the fall of the Soviet state, is now being restored and repopulated by Orthodox monks. The monastery's web page is here.

Morning Light and Shadows, A View of Hogback Mountain



Today was one of those rare days where you cannot turn your head without seeing something beautiful. A warm breeze better suited to September than November, leaves past their peak, but still a riot of color to be seen.

Seated in fallen leaves
watching mountains from the
bank -- Indian summer
Kodojin (1898) (Trans. Stephen Addis)

Buck Mountain 11/09/02

Llama Update

Tippy and McKenzie did it again. The morning after I blogged about their last adventure, they found their way back to Browntown Road. They were snoozing on the lawn when I woke up on Wednesday. Later that morning, as I was walking the dog, I looked for them and they were nowhere in sight. Immediately heading for the road, I heard to my horror a long, steady honking car horn. As I got to the end of the driveway, they were leaping back across the cattleguard, ahead of a kind soul who was herding them back with his pickup truck. The pair are now banished to a field with no road access, behind the barn. Their replacements in the front field are Avery and Leroy, both white with brown spots. At night, they look like ghosts walking in the moonlight. So far, they have shown no signs of itchy feet, or an urge to see foreign parts.

I was out walking Skid, our border collie, last night after the moon had gone down behind Buck Mountain. After a week of much needed rain, the skies were clear, the band of the milky way shining in an arc over my rooftop. To the east, the constellation Orion was just sliding up over Skyline Drive, tilted sideways. The sight brought to mind a favorite poem by Robert Frost, The Star-Splitter, which begins;

You know Orion always comes up sideways.
Throwing a leg up over our fence of mountains,
And rising on his hands, he looks in on me
Busy outdoors by lantern-light with something
I should have done by daylight, and indeed,
After the ground is frozen, I should have done
Before it froze, and a gust flings a handful
Of waste leaves at my smoky lantern chimney
To make fun of my way of doing things,
Or else fun of Orion's having caught me.

Being a part-time farmer, too much of my work gets done at dusk, or after dark. Sometimes the warm house is so much more inviting than the cold barn that daylight escapes while I linger, changing from coat and tie into mud-spattered denim. Today was blessedly, unseasonably warm and, being a Saturday, chores were done in time to enjoy, rather than race, the setting sun.

Looking the the archives of my weblog, I ran across this entry about a cold, but clear night this April where Frost's poem made another appearance. If you are interested, you can click here and scroll down to Sunday, April 7.

Southern expatriate Huw at Doxos has some fine verse in haiku and tanka form inspired by photos of our Appalachian mountains in fall color.

Leapin llamas! Tippy and McKenzie's Big Adventure


The gentlemen staring back at you from our driveway are Tippy and McKenzie. Tippy is on the left, Mckenzie is the dark faced fellow on the right. They are llamas, a South American animal, that looks, as you can see, like a camel crossed with a deer, and then dressed up in a thick wooly coat. They are supposed to be working for their living, guarding sheep from dogs, coyotes and other neighborhood ne'er do wells. Instead, they have discovered how to jump the cattleguard into our yard, where the grass is tastier, and there are rose leaves for dessert. You can find them on a sunny afternoon stretched out full length on the lawn, idly chewing, looking for all the world like sunbathing Eurotrash waiting for the cabana boy with the next round of drinks.

This morning they discovered they could use their jumping skills on the cattleguard at the end of the driveway on Browntown Road. I was moments from getting in the shower when a neighbor showed up to tell us that we had llamas on the loose. The pair had made it down the road to the house of another neighbor on Gooney Run and were munching on his grass. This was not satisfactory to us, the neighbor, nor to the morning commuter traffic nearby on Browntown Road. If you live off a two lane stretch of asphalt like we do, you soon realize their are only two types of drivers; old folks plodding down the road no faster than twenty-five, and younger types making an attempt on the sound barrier. The thought of two llamas in the road as a Ford F-150 rounds the turn at sub-orbital velocity was too grim to contemplate. One son and I chased them up out of the yard and across the road while Susan played crossing guard. I followed them down the in-law's driveway in my own truck until we could route them through a gate in the fence, some 50 acres away from where they started. After going through the gate, they began to recognize their own field, and looked at us like we had performed some kind of magic trick. Since they were in the same pasture as the sheep they were supposed to be guarding, we figured it was a job well done. This evening they were waiting for us, back in the front yard.

Bishop Seraphim describes his drive through a "New England festival of color . . . One could do worse than to imagine Heaven in terms of a New England, or Hudson Valley village in the Fall". Here further south in the Appalachians, we have our own, smaller, festival; in my eyes no less beautiful. It is customarily greeted by lines of cars from the D.C. suburbs backed up waiting for their turn on Skyline Drive. I don't mind. As the Chinese Poet, Po Chu-I put it;

"Beautiful places basically have no established owners;
in general, mountains belong to people who love mountains."



Oh to have a home
In such a quiet leafy spot,
Yearns the city man;
Yet he never builds a hut in mountain country.
Okuma Kotomichi from Donald Keene's Anthology of Japanese Literature

Two blogs I read, Orthopraxis (a.k.a. 1453.org) and Xavier+ have recently mentioned the victory of Constantine (Saint Constantine for us Easterners) at Milvian Bridge in 312 A.D.. The victory followed a vision (or so the story goes) where Constantine saw a vision of the Cross, together with the words, IN HOC SIGNO VINCES, "In this sign you shall conquer." The legalization of the Church that followed changed everything. In some protestant circles it is customary to think of Constantine's embrace of Christianity as the beginning of the end of the real church and its replacement by an official, imperially endorsed counterfeit. Many writers speak of our age as "Post-Constantinian," and this is almost always regarded as a good thing. There is a truth to that. Secular power's embrace of Christianity often results in a too intimate embrace of secular power by Christians. But there is also another truth, that trying to embody Gospel truths in law and culture is itself a not unworthy goal. Let me give an example. When an ambulance comes up behind traffic with lights flashing and siren wailing, the cars in front give way or pull over. The passenger in the ambulance might be a drunk, fallen in a gutter, it might be a thief, injured while committing a crime. It might be a person of no importance, with no claim on any worldly power, nonetheless, cars pull over to let him pass. The only requirement for this special treatment is that the passenger be a person in pain and in need. If the Chairman of General Motors is ahead of an ambulance, his car pulls over. The same for a Senator. Your family name doesn't exempt you. Your religion or your ethnicity doesn't privilege you. It doesn't matter, rich or poor, famous or unknown, if you are in that ambulance, by law and by custom, all give way to let you pass. We give the sick and suffering a prerogative and privilege reserved in cultures untouched by the Gospel solely for the powerful. This is what "Constantinian" Christianity at its best is about. This is also why I have mixed feelings when I hear the phrase "Post-Constantinian."

In an entry on the LiveJournal for Orthodox Christianity, Bishop Seraphim Sigrist asks about what icon touches you. By way of an answer to that question I present the clumsily photographed image on the left, an icon made by a friend of a friend. Before becoming Orthodox, I met a Russian couple, Mark and Lena Khaisman, then living in Front Royal. Mark was working as a stained glass designer for a local studio, but had trained in Russia as an iconographer. I had seen icons before, under glass from a distance at museums, or as prints in books. When I saw his works for the first time, held them, really looked at them, there was a quality I had never before imagined. It is a cliche these days to call icons "windows to heaven." I did not see heaven, but when I looked through these "windows", there were depths that looked back, judging, and comforting. It was the kind of encounter with the Spirit I thought possible only in prayer and reading the Scriptures. This was unexpected to say the least. In my mind icons were simply another form of religious art, instructive when used properly, idolatrous when abused, but totally understandable within my Anglican/evangelical world view. Standing before Mark's icons I felt like a wading pool swimmer shown the ocean for the first time. To my regret, I never purchased one of his before he and Lena left Front Royal for Philadelphia. My wife Susan did buy me as an unexpected present the icon displayed here. It had been carved by a friend of Mark's back in Moscow, blessed, and sent to America in hopes that it would send back some hard currency to help his family survive in the worst days following the Soviet collapse. I had admired it at Mark and Lena's home, and it took my breath away again when I unwrapped it in mine. It would be overstating the case to say that I became Orthodox to make a proper place for this icon in my life, but it would not be a lie either. For the curious, the icon is a bas-relief, carved in wood and lightly lacquered, of the "Vladimir Mother of God." The Orthodox Church in America web pages have a history of the place of the "Vladimir" icon in Russian piety here.

This one is for Gerard, who missed the peak of fall color on his visit.



How the dew and the autumn rains
Have dripped through,
Even to the lowest branches on Moru Mountain,
Coloring them for autumn.

Ki No Tsurayuki (Trans. J. Thomas Rimer)

Robert Brady of Notes from Pure Land Mountain gives news of the shiitake mushroom harvest at home in Japan. Here in Front Royal we have our own celebration of the flavorful fungi every May. It is now a major tourist draw, officially known as the "Virginia Wine & Mushroom Festival," bringing in as many as 15,000 people to Main Street, but it had much humbler beginnings.

Like many great ideas, this one started with a few guys sitting around drinking beer, or so I am told. The major spring celebration in our area has always been Winchester's Shenandoah Apple Blossom Festival, which is truly a big deal, shutting down the entire city for the weekend and attended by upwards of a quarter million people. Front Royal, about 25 miles south of Winchester, had nothing to compare. Smaller, more blue collar, and until a dozen years ago, blessed with a rayon fiber factory that featured all the best odors of a chemical plant and a paper mill combined, we have always been the unwanted step-child of the Northern Shenandoah in comparison to Winchester. In the 1800's we used to be known as "Hell Town," a name which no longer applies except on a particularly bad Saturday night. The gentlemen who were drinking beer, community leaders all, decided that what was needed was a good way to thumb our collective noses at our presumed betters in Winchester and their precious festival. Someone noted that a number of folks had started growing shiitake mushrooms for the D.C. restaurant market. They decided that if Winchester could celebrate apple blossoms, we could honor the humble mushroom. They planned a parade featuring a man in a mushroom costume, called a few vendors, talked to some mushroom growers and got the thing going. It was, frankly, a joke that got out of hand. When people began showing up in larger groups, and mushroom growers became scarcer, it turned into what is now essentially a wine festival and street craft fair. It is a good time, and good business for the community and the many fine local wineries. Nonetheless I miss the anarchic ad hoc days of the earlier festivals and hold on to my Shiitake Madness! t-shirt in their memory.

Rain past, fall colors coming; the view from home.



Buck Mountain; morning light and shadow.

Joel Garver at Sacra Doctrina has a useful summary and review of an essay by Lutheran theologian Robert Jenson in the volume The Strange New Word of the Gospel: Re-Evangelizing in the Postmodern World. Jenson is one of our more acute theological observers of the modern (or post-modern, if you will) circus. His essay in First Things, "How the World Lost Its Story" published back in 1993, has become a minor classic among orthodox (both small and large "o") Christians interested in the forging a response to the post-Christian environment in which we now live. Jenson has a long list of publications, including a two volume systematic theology. His work can be difficult at times, but it is always fruitful. He is one of those thinkers that, even when wrong, is instructive. Read the two essays linked above or go here for his essay "What If It Were True?" a fine short introduction to Jenson's "method" and some of his favorite themes.

Poet and critic Dana Gioia will be the nominee for next head of the National Endowment for the Arts. Gioia created a tempest in the literary teapot back in 1991 with his essay in the Atlantic Monthly, "Can Poetry Matter?" arguing that poets need to break out of the increasingly inbred and sterile subculture of writing programs, grants and little magazines. A larger sampling of his criticism and his own work as a poet can be found here. I have to agree with the author of the Wall Street Journal piece linked at the top, that this is a felicitous choice.