The days this week have been exquisite, especially as the sun set, with enough clouds to focus the light, to make the barn, the trees, the grass radiant. One day with predicted rain, possibly severe, the air felt like pressure like there was thunder rolling in the background or a jet readying for take off. The big machines were working the fields. Every few years they get bigger, the finishers they drag, wider, more awkward in the tight corners of the big fields. Planters are just as imposing all folded up as they’re pulled down our little road. Then they unfold and roll down giant fields. Late model pick-ups haul seeds in totes that are augered into the bins at the back of the planter. No longer do these big farmers climb out of their machines to fill individual seed bins, one after another, depending on how many rows they plant at once.
The tractors have treads wrapped around three wheels, rolling triangles, a three-point sermon of power. It’s so dry that it looked like they were planting dust instead of seeds. Once I even saw a dust devil swirl up on the neighbor’s field, a whirling dervish dancing across the bottom where his field meets ours.
We smelled chemical for several days, so much so we tasted it.
There’s change coming after Mr P died. Both he and his wife lived a good many years there, a kind of anchor to the neighborhood, not always easy. I miss their side by side coming up our driveway to talk, despite not quite being done with chores. The farm has been divided between the co-owners though the farming will continue as it has been. The house, barns and dooryard will eventually be sold. There will be an auction for the house-hold goods. Since I walk up to the house to hear the wind in the pines, it’s a good walk with the sun in my face, and a view of fields and distant woods when I turn back I wonder if there will be dogs loose in the yard, if this won’t be a way I can come.
This week the Daily Office took us to the story Jesus told about planting seeds—how seeds sown on the path will be snatched up by birds, seeds sown on rocky ground bloom quickly but burn up, seeds sown among thorns are choked, and seeds sown on good soil produce a great yield. The seeds are scattered abundantly, how they grow is a picture of how people receive the good news. But what struck me was Jesus quoting Isaiah:
You will indeed hear but never understand, and you will indeed see but never perceive. For this people’s heart has grown dull, and with their ears they can barely hear and their eyes have been closed lest they should see with their eyes and hear with their ears and understand with their heart and turn, and I would heal them. 1
What does it mean to have a heart grown dull? To have eyes but not be able to see? To hear this story about seeds strewn everywhere and not understand it? (Here the seeds are laid down by GPS. Bruce remarked the farmer wasn’t even driving the machine  himself. The seeds are genetically modified to get along with herbicide and short growing seasons, even cold ground. They are patented.) But less than a week after planting, I noticed ugly weeds, “frankenweeds”, growing along edge of the field. I hope they aren’t thistle as we eradicated it from our fields by Bruce’s  patient  spraying by hand.Â
My physical therapist is teaching me how to walk. While he’s showing me how young people walk with arms swinging and how frail old people walk, hunched over,  I think walk, walk with the Lord. Shoes as the gospel of peace. Walk up the road. Be still.
I guess you’re not supposed to walk slowly with your hands stuck in your hoodie and your head down, though when I’m on the road, my head’s up looking at the clouds and birds and fields stretching away. I guess you’re supposed to let your hands swing, left hand stepping out with your right foot. (I’m so uncoordinated I will clap opposite the crowd when the pop singer riles the crowd to clap in time.)
He’s given me exercises to loosen by lower back and loosen my shoulders. They are simple, painless, but a challenge to fit into my day. I’m learning if I relax and let my shoulders shift, my arms will swing in line with the opposite leg. But I must choose to relax. It’s not comfortable to let them swing, I like to keep me arms tucked in, to keep them from being whacked by branches streaming by as if I were in a car with an open window speeding down a narrow road.
I have to remind myself to drop my arms and let them loose. It’s not unlike when I learned to relax while riding a horse, to let my body follow the horse’s movement and not be stiff. It took years and pulling stirrups and reins off for me to learn this back in college, when I spent a day cleaning a barn in exchange for private lessons. “There remaineth rest to the people of God.”2 This is what rest means, relaxing, letting loose of control and that old cliché, “going with the flow.”
Walk. Walk with the Lord. Your shoes are the gospel of peace. Walk up the road. Be still. Walking like this. Like walking in good shoes. I feel like I’m walking into an authority that I’m not comfortable with. Michael wondered if I ever walked like a regular person. Probably not. Probably mostly drawn in, quiet. But this walk, this walk, I feel free with more authority. Like people I walk up to would respect me without my saying a word.
Walk. Walk with the Lord. Your shoes are the gospel of peace. Your shield is faith.
What does it mean to have a heart grown dull? To have eyes but not be able to see?
Last week I came across a Substack, Serapex. where Philipp says:
Your real competition is the version of you that is still trying to be liked. The version of you that wants to be safe. The version of you that is tempted to turn your life’s struggle into a sales funnel before you have even healed.
Win that internal battle, and the external metrics stop feeling like judgement.3
One of the stories I’ve told, that make my eyes blind, my ears deaf, is this story, the repeating words about not being liked, the ache of four horsewomen deciding I didn’t make the cut after my mare died.  The lie in my head: “nobody wants what I have to offer.” “I’ve been rejected so much I’m not sure I know how to make friends.”
The problem with this kind of blindness is we can set people up to not even try to be friends because that’s what we expect. If we expect people to treat us badly, that’s what we will see whether or not that was their intent or even their action.Â
These lines have closed my eyes and ears so I don’t recognize the friends who have stayed with me, including Mr Bruce, forty years long, Mrs. Horse, Mrs. Dog, Mr Dog and four cats. In fact something broke loose this week. It’s been one of my prayers that I’d know the following:
For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named, that according to the riches of his glory he may grant you to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, that you being rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.4
Just a little bit I felt, in my heart the love of these beings for me. For me! Mrs. Horse wants my company. Oma is delighted to sit, stay, walk when I turn my eyes to hear. Aiden crawls in my lap because he needs me. And Bruce, well I’d prefer to keep how he shows his love private. I’ve known I’ve been blocked but this week I felt it. The earth is full of God’s love so that includes The Tree and the redwing blackbirds who watch, and the bobolink who flies up from the grass and the Barn swallows who wheel and swoop and around the fields
Philipp also wrote about writing on Substack:
But your Substack is not a content machine. It is a garden.
A garden requires periods of fallow. It requires rain, which looks like a gloomy day but is actually nourishment. It requires the courage to trust that something is happening underground even when we cannot see a sprout….5
You Substack is a garden not a machine. I think I’m needing to change things up with these essays.  The weather is too beautiful and Mrs Horse waits at the gate for Bruce and I to harness her up and let her take her for a drive. Both dogs need training. And I have this essay collection: “Baptisms…” needing to be worked into a draft. Parts of it have risen in my head, that I’ve not been able to play with. There are some contests where it might be appropriate to enter. I can’t seem to manage working on both. 
I don’t know how long a break I will take or even if I will take one. I may stop posting weekly. I may post more than that if I have something to share. I will likely post at odd times.
Gosh I appreciate your reading my work, especially those of you who are financially supporting me. But I need to go down in the earth and let things take root, let the well fill up, find the fun again.
References
1 Matthew 13: 14 – 15
2 Hebrews 4: 9, KJV
3 Philipp, Serapex, Stop Creating Content. https://open.substack.com/pub/serapex/p/stop-creating-content?r=2jx39&utm_medium=ios
4 Ephesians 1:15 – 23
5 Philipp, Serapex, Stop Creating Content
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