A Deep River Year
December 31,  2014

There is nothing special about this day, really.  In the life of the planet, it is just another turn, one which completes a single orbit around our small star.  The life here goes on as it did yesterday.   The sparrows chattering in the forsythia bush along the edge of the yard know nothing about a new year.  They will not be making resolutions or wondering what news will shatter their peace.   They will scuttle around under the feeders for stray seed and huddle together in the cold night and wait for dawn, as they did yesterday.

But we are different.   We mark time on calendars, remember the numbered years of our lives.  We come to this night hoping to a find a doorway to something new, different.  No matter that the earth is getting warmer, or that human creatures still seem to try to solve their problems with violence, or that the shadows of death hang over everything we love.   We hold our breath, and in the pause, believe in goodness. 

Today I arise before dawn and take two dogs out for their morning walk.     Our feet crunch through the fallen leaves as we climb a hill behind the cemetery; and then in a grassy meadow I stop while the dogs go sniffing in the bushes.   I am suddenly aware of the silence all around me.   There is not the breath of a wind, and the world seems to stand stock-still.   But I listen closely and hear a barely discernible distant sound.   It is a hum--perhaps the drone of cars speeding past on a highway, I think.  Or is it inside me, the throb and pulse of blood pushing through my arteries, the thing giving me life?   Or the primal thrum of the universe, the music of the spheres?    A dog barks down the street, and overhead somewhere a hawk cries, hungry for morning, and the quiet returns.   It is a sweet silence, this.   The world, my world, holding its breath, as something new waits just over the hill.

The End of the Year
 
Sparrows chatter
to greet this cold morning,
and I fling a handful of seed
across the barren ground.
Months from now
I will kneel here,
lay seeds in fallow earth
so that something green might grow.
But now the seed is gift,
a tender offering to the feathered ones,
tossed into the doorway of the year
as hope and promise
that we will make it through
this looming winter together.
Somewhere fireworks splash across the sky,
and lovers kiss away their fears,
a road curves off into a new year
as infants sleep beneath wishful stars.
But I will walk on frozen earth
and pause to listen to my heartbeat,
which is today a song of gratitude
that I am here
in this wonder of a life
where birds still sing,
where  sunrise turns the sky
into a rose.

--Timothy Haut, December 31, 2014

A Deep River Year
December 24, 2014

Today is Christmas Eve. In anticipation of the family being together to celebrate this wonderful holiday, I was in the kitchen last night amid a flurry of flour and sugar and lots and lots of butter. The cookies are done, and the next round of baking will be in the wee hours tomorrow morning when I make the Swedish tea ring in honor of my grandfather and fry up the Ferden (sugared German doughnuts) in memory of my father, whose cast iron aebleskiver pan is hauled out once a year for this purpose.

But tonight we will go to the old white church where a host of costumed children will put on the annual Christmas Pageant. One of the tinsel-haloed cherubs sitting by the manger will fall asleep, and another will make faces in the spotlight. One of the Wise Men will forget the words to his verse of "We Three Kings," and a shepherd will be caught with his finger up his nose. The Baby Jesus will cry his lungs out in spite of his parents' efforts to render him groggy with milk an hour before the play. All of this is as it should be. Around midnight we will gather in the church again to light candles and sing "Silent Night." As we sing I will be thinking of the father whom I held in my arms a few days ago. He had just lost his son in a terrible car accident and was inconsolable. There will be no silent night for him, no "calm and bright," no heavenly peace.

The mystery of Christmas, though, is that we perform these ancient rites in spite of heartbreak and loss, in the midst of a world that is fractured by violence and hatred, because we need to believe that something bigger--perhaps Love itself--holds us. Sometimes it feels like a dream. Last Sunday during the carol sing in our church we all joined in a chorus of "White Christmas." The snow was falling gently outside the tall, clear glass windows in the old building, and it just seemed right, even though it is certainly not a religious song. But it stirs something deep in us--this dream of a world bright and shining and full of love. It is one of the most spiritual yearnings of all, the thing that can make us good. In the end, it is really not something bigger that holds us, but something very small. It is the crying baby in the straw, the sleeping angel, the dream I wish for every weeping father--that even the smallest love is stronger than all the darkness, all the hurt.

Somewhere a Star

Somewhere a star
 gleams in the darkest night,
 pure as the promise
 that once glittered
 in a Bethlehem sky.
 It is for us who journey
 on a lonely road,
 or who have forgotten
 where we are going.
 It shines where no other beauty
 can be seen,
 a mystery and a wonder,
 a cosmic explosion that to us
 is just a point of light
 in our tiny, shadowed world,
 a little thing to follow
 when our sun has set.
 Sometimes that star
 is all we have,
 the thing on a dark and holy night
 that kindles a spark of hope in us--
 unlikely as it may seem--
 reminds us that love invades the world,
 shines a light that leads us home.

 --Timothy Haut, December 24, 2014

A Deep River Year
December 17, 2014

The Christmas season is full of old traditions and folklore. Their origins may be lost or forgotten, but we continue to savor them as a rich connection with those who once shared their Christmases with us. At Christmas, my family would go to the home of my Aunt Anna and Uncle Daniel, who was Swedish by background. Aunt Anna would always make rice pudding, a Swedish tradition, and she would stir an almond in it. She assured us that the person fortunate enough to get the almond in their bowl of pudding would be the next one in the family to get married. This was not necessarily a pleasing prospect for a young boy, and fortunately, I never got the almond. I'm not sure, but my wonderful Aunt Anna may have also been the one to tell us how the animals in the forest would kneel down at midnight on Christmas Eve, and assure us that the bees who had gone into hibernation would awaken, no matter the weather, and hum the 100th Psalm. It seemed far-fetched even then, but I dreamed of sneaking out into the woods to see if any part of this tale could be true. Our world should be filled with such dreams.

And where I love to dream best is by the fire. We have a fireplace in our living room. The house was built in 1834, and at that time the living room was the kitchen, and the hearth was the place where meals were prepared. The chimney crane bearing an iron pot still extends over the fire, unused for many years, and a beehive oven next to the hearth could be filled with hot coals to heat up the bricks inside for baking. Over the years, my three little boys all hid in there, and I smile still when I walk past. But although there is no more cooking in the fireplace, I still light fires on autumn and winter nights and feel comforted by its warmth and hypnotized by its firelight. Perhaps it is a primal thing that has united human beings from the dawn of time--the attraction of a fire. It is the place of human gatherings, of feasts and family, the place we go to find respite from the terrors of the night. It is the thing, strangely, that both symbolizes our passions and brings us peace.

For years it has been my tradition to start each year's Christmas fire with the cut up trunk of last year's Christmas tree. By the hearth on Christmas morning, I feel connected to all that has gone before in my life--the rice pudding and the almond, the hands held around the table, the carols sung in the snow by the front door, the stockings hung from the mantel. I see faces smiling at me from the flickering flames, would rather not move from the place where I may read and dream and fall asleep.

Hearth Fire

Old Hestia, the ancient god of hearth,
 missed all the festal gatherings
 of the great divinities,
 shunned lofty Olympus
 just to stay at home
 for duty's sake, tending to the fire.
 She was perhaps the wisest,
 humblest of the gods,
 this keeper of the hearth
 where weary sojourners could come
 to warm themselves
 with food and flame.
 And still to fire and hearth we come
 to be where we may see
 some spirit dancing in the flames
 calling us from fear to faith,
 or yet more simply,
 to teach us constancy,
 to give us some small peace
 where we may join the cat curled up,
 the dog stretched out,
 here where love's best gift
 is just to stir the embers.

 --Timothy Haut, December 17, 2014

A Deep River Year
December 10, 2014
December for us is a season of rituals involving food, decorations, and the keeping of time.   In this dark season around the winter Solstice, these rituals serve as a reminder that life not only endures the dark and cold seasons, but gives us joy.   This weekend we headed out to get our Christmas tree, something we have come to do on the first weekend in December since our children were young.   There is nothing universal about this particular timing, of course.   As a child, my family acquired a Christmas tree from a lot in the city, chosen from an assortment of trees that were probably cut down in September.  And we always put our tree up on my sister's birthday, Dec. 18.   My wife's family religiously did their tree on Christmas Eve, to the accompaniment of a turkey dinner and Christmas carols on the stereo. 

But we have come to like having the tree up a little longer, enjoying its magic even as the needles begin to grow brittle and fall to the floor.   We have not yet succumbed to the temptation of purchasing an artificial tree, whose needles will never fall.  I  cherish the fresh, pungent scent of a balsam.  And we go out to find one every year, even when it requires tromping through the meadow in search of the perfectly-shaped tree in the middle of a monsoon.   Such was the case on Saturday.   But we had already planned the outing, and the grandchildren were eager to get their tree.   This annual attraction is sweeter because at Joe's Christmas Tree Farm, they always have a bonfire going so that kids can cook a hot dog or roast a marshmallow before tying the tree to the top of the car and heading home.  Saturday the hot dog buns were soggy, and the marshmallows were covered with ashes  because in the rain, there wasn't much of a blaze for cooking.   But a good time was had by all, and finally we located just the prettiest tree we've ever had.  And  I, with my saw, knelt on the saturated earth and cut it down.   Shortly afterward, my wife spotted an even prettier tree, but that one will have to wait until next year.

Our Puritan ancestors had no use for Christmas trees.   They denounced them as pagan, a stain on the holiness of their religious holiday.   They banned them in New England for a while.  I prefer Martin Luther's take on things.  It is said that he was walking in the woods at night and saw stars shining through the branches of a fir.   Such beauty, he thought, should be in every home.   And it still is, in ours.

Christmas Tree

Hands sticky with sap,
fresh from the cutting wound,
I  set the tall fir inside the window,
where its lights will be seen
by those standing outside in the cold.
And here, inside, near a glowing hearth,
where we sit in the darkness
of a December night,
some magic will shine on us, too.
We hang the ornaments of our history
on these fragrant branches,
the glow of memory reflected
in glitter and glass.
But perhaps it would be enough
to do as my father did,
in the last of his Christmases,
forgoing the balls and garlands,
and hanging just a few lights
to illuminate his quiet celebration.
There in the darkness of that year
he fell asleep to something like stars
shining in these tender boughs,
a promise in winter
of something evergreen.

--Timothy Haut, December 10, 2014

A Deep River Year
December 3, 2014

Last week the town crew was out all day, attaching evergreens and great red bows to the hundreds of lampposts lining Main Street.    It was an expensive project, to be sure, considering the cost of all the materials as well as the paid hours necessary to do the job.   But it looks beautiful to have the town decked out for the season, and most of us deem it worth the cost.  This Saturday night is the annual holiday stroll, with all the shops open, a horse drawn wagon for the kids, a tree-lighting ceremony and a gingerbread house contest.

But I am struck by all those red bows fluttering in the December breeze.  In these dim, gray days, they proclaim a joy that captures us, lifts us out of the year’s doldrums.     December, this colorless month, is edged with red as a gift, calling us to celebrate even in the dark times.  We see it out the kitchen window as a pair of cardinals wing their way to our bird feeder, a glory in feathers.   By the front door, the winterberry bushes are covered with red berries the size of marbles, and over across the yard the holly seems to be singing the old medieval carol:  “The holly bears a berry as red as any blood!”  

Maybe that is why red makes the heart leap.    It is the color of our blood, the essential substance that pulses in and out of our hearts, giving us life.   Often when we see blood’s red it is a sign of danger.   There has been an accident, an injury, a wound that must be tended.  Our blood best does its work unseen.  But the red around us in the world reminds us of that hidden source of life, the primal red that is within all human beings.    It is a call to embrace life, to wonder at this secret that hides within us.     It is the force that turns winter away, that reminds us that we are all family.  It makes us want to sing.   

Red

In the wakening light
of earliest morning
a flash of red outside the window
promises something beautiful
in these grim days.
It is just a  bird seeking food,
but also something to stir the heart.
It is rose and berry and blood,
a wild and feathered miracle
that flies like joy.
We shall hang scarlet bows
on wreath and mantel,
deck our tables with holly,
its red berries winking a secret
to us in our passing.
This red is in us,
the life of life,
the thing that will help us to endure
the darkest winters,
the brightness that binds us
to friend and stranger,
the color of miracles in a gray time
that make us fly like joy.

--Timothy Haut, December 3, 2014

A Deep River Year
 November 26, 2014

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving, and I am glad for it. We will gather family members—and maybe some others—around the table and reflect on this gift, which is life. Thanksgiving is a wonderful holiday—perhaps more than any other—because it is just about being together. It is also a time to feel the tender spirits around us of those who have shared their lives with us. As we pause to say grace, they linger at the edges of the room, their voices whispering through our silence, saying things like “Did you put sausage in the stuffing?” and “Look how big your granddaughter is already!” and “I love you.”

When I was a little boy I would awaken on Thanksgiving morning to the aroma of roasting turkey wafting through the house, because my mother and father had risen before dawn to stuff the bird and lace it up for the oven. This was a ritual of love. So we will rise on Thursday—though not quite so early—and repeat that ritual for another year, and my mother and father will be there, and not. Yesterday we planted daffodil and tulip bulbs in the cold earth, perhaps the last mild day before a winter storm arrives today. This, too, is a ritual bound to our Thanksgiving feast--of planting and harvest, of making a pact with those who have been and those who are yet to come. We live in memory and hope. For that, we are grateful.

A Song to Slip from the Heart

Go there
 in the sullen days,
 when the heart is dark as November
 and there is no respite from the cold.
 Go there,
 and find some little thing
 to hold in your shaking hand,
 one last red leaf,
 or a blue feather from a morning bird,
 or an acorn with some life in it.
 Lift it up to the sky,
 which may be silent and heavy with clouds,
 but it is high, and worth seeing,
 for you must look up if you would be a priest
 who bears this offering.
 And then you will wait for the song
 to slip from your heart,
 where you have locked it up,
 a song that remembers
 what it is to be a child running in grass,
 a song of seasons and snow and rain,
 a song of laughter and tender voices.
 Suddenly it will be there,
 and if you have ever known love,
 known some sweet kiss or felt arms around,
 or felt the stronger, stranger love
 like a flame tearing at the darkness,
 or a wounded forgiveness,
 then this song will be a worthy anthem,
 and true as leaf or feather or seed.
 And then light will settle around you,
 and in you a joy will take its root,
 and you will be saved by this one,
 truest, deepest prayer,
 lifted up, like a wild and holy incantation:
 Thank you. Thank you.

--Timothy Haut, November 26, 2014

A Deep River Year
 November 19, 2014

It is a cold and quiet morning. In the southern sky a sliver of a moon hangs motionless as a line of geese make their hemline on the horizon. But this quiet morning belies the great speed of things. We are already in the fading days of November and the trees are mostly bare now. Wasn’t it just summer? There is still an air conditioner in the window, needing to be stored in the attic. And yesterday Phyllis had to take a hair dryer to remove the hose frozen to the outdoor faucet on the north side of the house. Where has the time gone?

But the speed of our lives is nothing compared to the actual speed of our world. I've read that earth is rotating at about 1,000 miles per hour. For earth to circle the sun in a year, our planet must travel about 66,000 miles an hour. And the sun and our solar system itself is moving through our galaxy at a breakneck speed as well. One estimate is that the sun is dragging us all through the Milky Way galaxy at 483,000 miles per hour. And our galaxy itself is speeding outward from that initial bang at 1.3 million miles per hour, moving toward some mysterious concentration of matter in the faraway depths of the universe--something called "The Great Attractor."

At these enormous speeds, we should be flinging ourselves onto the earth and holding on for dear life. But gravity helps us out, and instead we walk peacefully through our quiet morning, forgetting altogether that we are infinitesimal specks in the vastness of a wildly expanding cosmos. But our specks, to us, our precious. This week my wife, Phyllis, has a major birthday, a celebration of her appearance on this planet. It feels like we have travelled too quickly to this milestone, but today I stop to marvel at a sliver of moon and a thread of singing geese and the wonder of this one, good life. What a ride!

Birthday

We ride through time and space
 breathless from birth
 at the speed of it all,
 at the lives around us
 which flicker for a moment
 and fade away,
 the echoes of billions of heartbeats
 lost in the wake of our little years.
 But we are here,
 the glow of candles on a cake
 reflecting in our eyes
 to remind us that the this one life
 has been, for us, a shining light.
 Though the world may sail into the darkness,
 though stars may burn and die,
 though this speck of cosmic dust may seem
 as nothing in the great vastness,
 She has lived with flowers in her heart,
 rocked a baby in her arms
 and nestled a squirrel in her hair,
 flung herself into the sea
 and dipped her fingers into earth
 as if she could find there some timeless joy,
 and laughed so wondrously
 that for a moment the universe stood still
 grateful that such a thing as Phyllis
 could ever be.

--Timothy Haut, November 19, 2014

A Deep River Year
 November 12, 2014

The year is coming round full circle. These past days have been mild and soft, but the forecast promises that much colder air is on the way. I have been out by the woodpile, splitting some big logs into smaller pieces that will make our hearth fires on the coming cold nights. I do this with some care, as my wife discourages me from using any tools that have the potential of causing injury. This is because I have a reputation for being a somewhat clumsy handyman.

However, I actually have some experience with an axe. As a teenager, there was a huge elm tree in our back yard that fell victim to the plague of Dutch Elm Disease. My father thought it would be a good thing for a young man to get some exercise by chopping it up, providing us firewood at the same time. I learned then that elm is almost impossible to chop; its grain is twisted and stringy and when it grabs the blade of the ax, it won’t let go. And it’s not a great firewood anyway; it burns with a peculiar smell. But we had plenty of it, and it took me the better part of a summer before I gave up and let my father have it hauled away. Now I enjoy chopping wood, especially the satisfaction of feeling the axe head hit home so that the log falls cleanly apart. These are the pieces—oak and maple-- that will burn red in our hearth in the winter days ahead.

We have a fire in us, too—the thing that burns in us with warmth and light in those cold, dark days. Hidden in us is a life that has grown through the green seasons--all those memories hidden inside, sometimes even unrecognized until something splits them open, reveals them to the light. They are both sweet and terrible, joys and sorrows, fueling in us some deep happiness or abiding anger. This week I unexpectedly remembered a football game in a neighbor’s yard many, many years ago, where I, at the bottom of a pile, fell on a fumbled ball and felt my wrist crack under the weight of all those people on top of me. I rode home alone on a bicycle, tried to wish the pain away, was taken to the emergency room, fearing death. I remember little else, except waking up in my bed, arm bound in a cast, with my father sitting on a chair beside me, hand on my shoulder. It is in me, this wood for my fire.

Wood, Split

A flurry of leaves
 and a west wind sings a winter song
 as the ax is raised,
 then arcs through the shining air
 and thunks into the wood’s heart.
 The log cries out, falls apart,
 split open, white, in the November sun.
 Here is the secret center,
 hidden for years while giving life
 to a once-tall oak,
 now revealed, seen, kept.
 So we grow, too,
 our memories stored
 in the dark center of us,
 every wound and wonder,
 each sweet joy and buried sorrow,
 the hallowed mornings and the night dreams,
 the unspent wishes and the silent regrets,
 the first kiss and the tendered hand,
 the shared meal and the lonely walk in rain,
 all there, all there,
 deep at the wood’s heart,
 ready to be flame.

 --Timothy Haut, November 12, 2014

A Deep River Year
November 5, 2014

The small creatures of the world know that a great change is happening as we swing into a New England November.   There is less daylight to do the work of foraging and stockpiling for winter.   The chipmunks scurry back and forth from the feeders, their cheeks swollen from the load of sunflower seeds they are carrying back to their underground caches.    And the songbirds flit from bare branch to the residue of the summer garden in search of whatever may be left for them to eat.   Around the edges of the yard, there is still plenty.   The rose bushes are loaded with bright orange rosehips, and the winterberry bushes in front of the house are heavy with rows of red fruit.  And everywhere, the woods are decorated with bittersweet vines.

Most of the bittersweet in our region is an invasive plant which arrived in this country in the mid 1800s.   It spirals around fence posts and climbs the highest trees in the forest to gather sunlight, and through the summer its green  berries swell until they turn golden in autumn’s cooler days.   Then, one morning after a frost, those golden berries will explode and reveal, inside their yellow husks, deep crimson  berries.     This is nature’s autumn décor, the color reserved for the gray days after the last leaves have fallen to the earth.   We cut the vines and weave them into wreaths for the doors.  And in our dining room, they circle our ceiling chandelier and surround the table centerpiece, a colorful celebration of the dwindling year.

Those door wreaths are enjoyed by the birds, too, who eat the berries and scatter the seeds in places where we don’t want the plants to grow.   Underground their stringy orange roots begin to spread.   Beware of digging them up or pulling them out, because even just a piece of root left in the ground can generate a new plant.   And don’t eat the berries by mistake.  They are toxic to humans, even  fatal.   However, Native Americans used the plant for a variety of ailments, including reducing fever and pain in childbirth, causing vomiting, and as a skin ointment.  They knew how to do it, and I don’t.    So this bitter-tasting plant I leave to the birds and chipmunks to eat, and for us to bring just a little color into these darkening days.

 
Bittersweet

Like golden pearls,
these little fruits bejewel
their woody vines
climbing, twisting upward,
along  fence and forest trees,
growing strong in summer’s light.
And now, in these  sullen days,
through the fallowing of our land,
they claim an even brighter presence.
We admire their persistence,
curse it too,
for taking root where we would plant
some other thing more tame, less wild.
But it is noble to persevere,
to stay the course in wintry days
that we may flower again another spring.
So we gather these branches, and remember
to find sweetness in the bitter times,
to be beautiful in our dying down,
to spread our roots in deeper soil.
We remember  to be glad that
In the  time of dark and cold,
the reddest berries show.

--Timothy Haut, November 5, 2014