Nothing But Mystery Below It

Filamentous strands are thickening near the spillway, and the round dot colonies, nitella, are spreading across the shallows...

Turning Over

Some clarity only comes after everything gets stirred up first. Before it can settle, it has to churn. That's simply what happens every year around this time in a pond, and apparently in a life. St. John's Pond has gone through its turnover, right on schedule.

Neither Stopped to Explain

The finches never asked permission. They arrived on the porch in Dublin in June, built a nest over the one door we never use, and raised their young in full view of our living room window without so much as a nod in our direction. We did not invite them.

So Many Minnows

Dublin, NH Stand still in the shallows at Dublin long enough and they find your feet. Minnows, a dozen, then more, nosing at your ankles and toes in what my family has come to call, with more affection than accuracy, a pedicure. Pescatory pedicures. And this year they were more

The One Smoke

I do not know which kind of sky this is, and I will not pretend to. .. And this sky, whatever else it is, has not stopped speaking. It is still asking something of us.

The Coyote Was Never Real

Dublin, NH We made it through the heat wave here in Dublin, and the morning air finally has that washed, blessed feeling to it. Cooler, quieter, though a persistent rain has been dampening both plans and spirits since yesterday. Nobody minds saying so out loud. After days that pressed down

Between Sermons IV:

Part Four: The Work That Remains The snapping turtles come out of the pond in early summer. They come out with mud still caked on their backs. Prehistoric, unhurried, unbothered by the churchyard they are crossing. They have been crossing ground like this since before there were mammals to disturb

Between Sermons III

What the Water Carries We have been saying this longer than we knew. At every font, every Ash Wednesday, every altar, every graveside: the church has been enacting a theology it has not always been able to name. The practice has been more honest than the explanation that accompanied it.

Between Sermons II

The Assembly We tend to think of worship as something humans do. We gather. We sing. We pray. We listen. The building holds us, the liturgy shapes us, and what happens in that hour on Sunday morning is, we assume, the point. The rest of the week is what we

Dublin Lake: The Eagle's Ordinary Majesty

I stood on the beach yesterday at Dublin Lake with the kind of perfect summer light you don't get to keep for long. The breeze was coming off the water, warm and steady, the sky that particular shade of blue that only New England seems to know how

Sunday Reflections & BlueGreen Theology

Is the eagle is still majestic, or are we over it? A refelction on ordinary majesty

Between Sermons

Between sermons, I have been working on something.

She Found Us

I noticed her sometime last week — a mud cup pressed against the beam just above the lintel, and inside it, perfectly still, a swallow. Blending in. I stood there reverently, thankfully still. Meeting a new colleague.

What the Forest Knows

Vestry Dinner Reflection Those four sycamores — two at the rectory, two at the church — have been standing on this ground longer than anyone gathered here tonight has been alive. They have watched rectors come and go, vestries form and dissolve, building campaigns succeed and fail. They host countless nests, in

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They Remembered

These fish return to the same shallows each spring. They fan circular nests in sand. One settles at the center of each, guards eggs. The whole edge becomes a nursery. I worried we had closed that bottom forever.

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The Secret

Behind my office, four serviceberry trees hang heavy with fruit. Small berries, dark purple-black, sweet enough to draw blood. For four days, the trees become the center of everything. 

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A Rescue

The bird was disoriented. Turns out he'd hit his head, we'd learn later. And from where he sat in the Pachysandra, two large mammals descending on him with barbecue gloves and towels probably did not read as rescue. He waddled away from us as quickly as a waterbird can on land.

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Divided

There were too many iris at the farmhouse in Virginia. And too few here. So Sarah got out the shovel.

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Site Fidelity

A sound from somewhere in the pines. That liquid, emphatic whistle that Baltimore Orioles make, too bright for early May. Then a movement. Then that color: orange so saturated it looks wrong against the needles.

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Ten Out of Three Hundred

Last October, my youngest daughter, Byrd, and I planted three hundred tulip bulbs in the ground. Three hundred. We were on our knees in the dirt for the better part of a weekend The final count, I can now confirm, is ten. Ten out of three hundred.

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Wild Geese

The matter at hand, specifically, is one goose. He appeared about ten days ago and claimed the path between the rectory and the church. Not the pond. Not the grass. The pathway. He is large, he is certain, and he has made his position on foot traffic abundantly clear

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Abundance

The pond didn't break the weir board. The abundance did. All that water, pressing outward the way water does, following the only instruction it has ever been given.

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Who Are Your Waters?

I am on vacation in Virginia as I record this, on the shores of the Pamunkey River. And I am not at the pond. But I am at one of my waters.

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Already Rising (Easter Day)

The pond didn't wait for Easter morning to begin its resurrection. It started without us.