Christ walks;
there are bear-prints
in the mud
and the pond is swollen
with winter rain
pregnant;
testaments,
old and new
printed
tree-bark thin
and heartwood deep
rings of seasons
circling
returning;
and Christ walks
in the fresh morning,
raindrops on His shoulders
and willow leaves in His hair;
He is crowned.
the ravens know Him
the deer follow His scent
the coyotes sing His hymns
and above
the squirrel drops her fir cones
to land softly on the forest floor.
Christ looks up,
the Word on His lips:
what is it?
what is it?
what is it?
Artist’s Statement
The day I learned that God was hiding in plain sight was the day I became a Christian, and every day since has been a long series of tiny testimonies every time I spot Him out of the corner of my eye.
I was born and raised in the Protestant church, but a Celtic sensibility seeped into my faith very early. Like so many children, I chatted with trees, sang with the birds, and collected flowers and rocks and mussel shells; magic and faith joined in an uncomplicated marriage. The God of the Bible and the God I met by the creekside were the same. They simply had to be.
As I grew older, that sense only grew more pronounced. This God I had known since childhood was the same One filling every corner of this wild Pacific landscape with green and good, moss and saltwater sweetness. The sacrifice of this God’s Son for me was only the tip of an enormous iceberg of love and beauty. Grace abounds in the tides, the wetlands, the woods, the flick of a towhee’s tail and the tartness of a late summer huckleberry. Every day I am reborn in the dew and freshness of this place, and of this place’s Maker.
As for poetry? It found me, not the other way around.
Though writing has been my calling since childhood, I struggled for years to find a way to communicate the way God meets me, the promise of His love in created things. Poetry became the only language I could find to describe the things I was seeing. And my hope and prayer in all of my writings—poetry and prose—is always the same: that those who read my words would discover a different face of God than they might have ever seen before. To see His extended hand, an invitation.
I believe that the journey to draw nearer to God and to grow in knowledge of Him is the only journey that truly matters. That journey informs all of the others we embark upon in our lives.
In art, in poetry, and in the tenderness of craft and creation, we take our tiny, holy steps on the path to His heart.
Photo credit: Johannes Plenio
