February 4, 2026
Last night the contrails looked like pick up sticks tossed out on the floor. And then there’s the challenge to pick them up without disturbing them.
Then Orion clear and high in the sky. Finally got a picture of him towering over our house, the pine tree and arrow pointed straight at him. (I didn’t know if anything would show because the phone showed only black. I barely held both dogs still but the image appeared.)
Joshua Sturgill in the Symbolic World Course, The Art of Imitating Heaven, says,
“If you study the stars you will become like them. And that come back to an idea I think is very important, and that’s that you are what you observe. So if we observe the heavens which is the greatest and most majestic thing presented to our senses, then we will become like the heavens. There’s a benefit in just seeing, just gazing, just observing without any knowledge.”1
February 22
My brain has gone blank from hard cleaning the house and listening to podcasts that kept me focused on swiping weeks’ old dust, bits of hay and wood shavings. By the time Bruce and I sat down to pray I couldn’t think of people I’d promised to pray for. I had no capacity to carry on an intellectual conversation with someone on Messenger. Even as a young woman those voices in my ears erased thought.
Omalola needed a walk, and Bruce deserved a break from graciously offering to walk the dogs, so I walked out on a bitter cold night. It seems I always walk out and there’s a train coming, the headlamp off in the distance.
As far as the east is from the west, so far has he put your transgressions from you. My dad used to quote that. I can be bathed in sin—how I benefit from the unjust use of coal, natural gas, solar and wind, that hurt the earth.
As Martin Shaw says in Snowy Tower:
The taking of the earth’s virginity is the first spilling of blood on soil from malice, and the movement away from the Frail accord between animals, earth, heavens. Those terrible lists of what is required to keep the king from dying from his wounds is every oil dig, every deforestation every column of black smoke in a blue sky. A grotesque processional of damage.” 2 (173).
Every time I pick up my phone, I pick up slave labor that assembled it. I pick up a data center that is sucking power from a community and sucking its water. I drive a car.
And then there are my own sins—taking forever to write my Compassion kids3, not helping Bruce clean up after supper, complaining about a business, not getting back in touch with a very old and very good friend. I could go on and on and on.
But here it is: As far as the east is from the west, so far does He remove our transgressions from us. My sins are hurled past the line of trees, the fields where the headlamp of the locomotive has appeared. Hurled past the sunset and sun rise. Moon rise and moon set. The headlamp moving closer, the train louder. I watch that light pass the warning lights in the ditch and push light against the trees, the train hidden but the light bathed the trees, moved at the speed of train towards the other crossing, another horn bellowing.
I carry the transgression of the tankers full of ethanol hauled towards Chicago, how me and mine use that energy to power our cars, the gorgeous tractors and combines working the earth to make the corn to feed refineries and livestock.
“For as high as the heavens are above the earth, so great is his steadfast love toward those who fear hm; as far as the east is from the west; so far does he remove our transgressions from us.”4
Snow was barely falling. When I turned the corner behind the shed, I saw light bars aimed at heaven from two local towns. Sure, they’re light from main streets flying up, catching the just barely snow fall. But maybe they are fabric worn thin between earth and heaven. Maybe they are angels standing tall, watching over the countryside.
February 23, 2026
I walked out. The half-moon was bright enough to throw shadows. I looked up in the sky and thought I saw an aurora because the clouds were sheer like curtains in a spring breeze. I walked back to the house to retrieve my phone for pictures. When I got back out, I stood on the leash and asked Aiden to stand still long enough for the camera to capture the image, which is an ask for him. Those clouds swept up, bent over like a chorus of angels that anointed Jesus’ birth two millennia ago. An ear worm of a hymn ran through my mind, but I don’t remember which one.
The times this week I’ve walked out, as painful as the cold is, I’ve seen things.
Bruce has been walking the dog, but he’s been taking my steps, steps I need for my soft body and aching legs. He sees me sitting, watching a storyline on TV or reading one in a book. But Aiden is making signs like he needs to go outside. So Bruce gets up and puts on his boots and coveralls and walks out.
He’s taking my steps. And pointing to my guilt though he doesn’t know it. He’s taking my steps and taking away my call to deny myself, deny that place in my book, that climax in the TV drama, deny my staying warm and cozy when the wind is bitter, my hands get cold giving treats to the dogs.
I’m not sure I want to track my shame, but here—as a little girl being potty trained begging my mother to get off the phone to help me with the toilet, as a young woman who demanded my Rottweiler wait all damn day and evening so I could go skiing with some boy, boarding him for two weeks so I could go on vacation, leaving him for two days a week at the vet so I could go to work. Oh Cane dog, dog of my grief, holding me through my parents’ deaths, my brother’s death and meeting Bruce, loved by him.
As far as the east is from the west so far has He removed our transgressions from us. As far as the east, past the airlines hovering over O’Hare like a swarm of bees, past where those jets mount up to swing over the curve of the earth, my transgressions thrown way past Chicago and Lake Michigan, so far gone I don’t have to carry them.
And now, these days, Bruce often walks the dogs, and they are becoming his friends as well as mine. A very good thing. Aiden minds him better than me. He checks the cat’s food and water dishes last thing. And my heart leaps up.Â
And so this shows up in my letting Bruce take my steps, when there are wonders in the night. And I have always been a woman who walks out into the night.
The clouds, mere clouds, looked like a chorus of angels rejoicing over the earth, just before they were going to appear to human eyes.
February 24, 2026
I walk out, early the wind bitter and the sky dark and lowering. A shelf heavy over a distant town we drive through to get to the bigger town, the city lights, lighting clouds underneath. I turn the corner behind the shed and look up at the moon, the clouds around it moving, so it looked like an eye watching, that didn’t stop watching, through the clouds.
Bruce went to bed after the State of the Union, so it was up to me to walk the dogs the last time. I walked out to a sky that startled me no longer cloud covered but clear as a bell. The moon bright enough to throw shadows. The train to the south blew a distant horn. The stars pierced like well-cut diamonds. Did you know that the ancients thought each person had their own stars and that stars were not just balls of gas but living beings?
The ancients have said we can make ourselves better people by looking at the heavens, even just the clouds. Even in the city we can recognize Orion, Venus, the moon and sun. We can watch clouds, that can be cloaked in all kinds of colors not just at sun set or sun rise. They can buck and cavort. They can bubble up like temples and shoot lightning. And whirl like a dervish, catching wind, catching spirit.
We can lift up our eyes to heavens that are more ordered than earth, so ordered NASA was able to put people on the moon. The sun and moon, the planets moved in ordered sequences so predictable that the ancients were able to construct calendars and work out when they should plant and harvest by looking at the sky. They could navigate by the stars.
Joshua Sturgill, on a Symbolic World Podcast says,
“Why is it that writers, philosophers, and prophets from many times and places have all told us that contemplating the night sky makes our own souls similarly more beautiful and more ordered?
Hebrew and Hindu, Greek and Chinese, they’ve all told us that looking up is the same as looking in, and that we are as much citizens of the sky as we are of Earth.”5
What a wonder, that we need to know we belong to the heavens as much as we belong to the earth, that we become what we look to, and if we look to the heavens we might capture some of the order and beauty we see when we look up. I am reminded of Jesus words, after warning his disciples that trouble was coming, and I fear trouble is barreling down on us, “When these things begin to take place, stand up and lift up your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.”6
Aiden and Omalola are soft on the leash. Both take their potty break. I was going to walk behind the garden, behind the shed, but stopped by the front of the house. The coyotes, a whole pack of them were yipping to the north. Both dogs stood on point. I did not have my light, that lets me look for eyes. We turned back. Our little black cat came to sleep on the corner of our bed, watching over Bruce and I.
References
- Joshua Sturgill, The Art of Imitating Heaven. Circle Feb.
- Martin Shaw. Snowy Tower. Cista Mystica Press. p. 173
- Compassion International encourages people sponsoring children around the world to frequently write letters to encourage them.
- Psalm 103: 11 – 12, ESV
- From The Symbolic World: 434 – Immigration and Tolerance: Christians Are Not Called to Be “Nice”, Feb 12, 2026
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/434-immigration-and-tolerance-christians-are-not/id1386867488?i=1000749448313&r=162.265
   6.Luke 21:28
