Things are pretty much the same here:

always changing. But oh, there is nothing new under the sun!

Ellie and I dug, tilled, mixed, smoothed, and planted a garden at the new house. Thus far, baby tomato, pepper and cauliflower transplants thrive with many brothers and sisters soon to join them.

I retreat to the swing on the farm today reading from Wendell Berry's Sabbath Poems. The beloved cottonwood above me now blocks out most of my view of the sky with her recent spring plumage-- green buds ripen to bring a shower of feathery cotton in attempt to continue her kind after her death.

The ewes crowd to the mangers;
Their bellies widen, sag;
their udders tighten. Now
The little voices cry
In morning cold. And now
the garden must be worked,
Laid off in rows, the seed
Of life to come brought down
Into the dark to rest,
Abide a while alone,
And rise. Soon, soon again
the cropland must be plowed,
For the year's promise now
Answers the year's desire,
Its hunger and its hope.
This goes against the time
When food is bought, not grown.

When I am still and quiet enough, the patterns of life emerge. Continuous cyclical change characterizes the course of all created things. What is new will be old, what is born will die and take its Sabbath rest in the earth. Where there is death and decay, even destruction at the hand of us beasts, new life will come. All things die in ways large and small, actual and metaphoric. All things pass. This is sure and trustworthy. Am I to fear this inevitable passing? Surely the answer is no! This is great reason to rejoice and hope! All things come to pass, and all things pass to come.

Don't you see? Here we glimpse the future. That of which we have read, of which we hope, long, and for which we know we were made-- the anticipated, impending, glorious future, the Kingdom which is just beyond the horizon, is also at hand. At hand in these metaphors of God’s creation. All for which we wait is coming, is certain... is here.

Bring it to life- live it into existence.

The bud swells,
Opens, makes seed, falls, is well,
Being becoming what it is:
Miracle and parable
Exceeding thought, because it is

Immeasurable; the understander
Encloses the understanding, thus
Darkens the light. We can stand under
No ray that is not diminished by us.

The mind that comes to rest is tended
In ways that it cannot intend:
Is borne, preserved, and comprehended
By what it cannot comprehend.

Your Sabbath, Lord, thus keeps us by
Your will, not ours. And it is fit
Our only choice should be to die
Into that rest, or out of it.

Shabbat Shalom