Pastime Favorites

They stepped into the elevator and the Magdalene pushed the button for the lobby. “By the way, it was Hallowed,” she said.

“What was Hallowed?”
“The H. His middle name. It was Hallowed. It’s a family name, remember, ‘Our father, who art in Heaven, Hallowed be thy name.’’’

“Damn, I would have guessed Harvey,” Biff said.

– from Lamb by Christopher Moore

I return each night to my warm bed, and snuggle beside Janice, secure in the knowledge of three things that I know to be true, if only at this precise moment: Janice is healthy; Dylan and Tucker are happy, growing and safe; and I am buoyed with a soothing humility and longing – not sleepy, not tired – just a simple man trying to find his space under the covers, under the roof of his house, under stars twinkling bright then soft on a moonless night.

– Eric Teague speaking in One Hit Wonder, by Tony Lamb

No coward soul is mine,
No trembler in the world’s storm-troubled sphere!
I see Heaven’s glories shine,
And Faith shines equal, arming me from Fear.

– from No Coward Soul Is Mine, by Emily Bronte

[On his deep joy in his love for his wife, Lila] I might seem to be comparing something great and holy with a minor and ordinary thing, that is, love of God with mortal love. But I just don’t see them as separate things at all. If we can be divinely fed with a morsel and divinely blessed with a touch, then the terrible pleasure we find in a particular face can certainly instruct us in the nature of the very grandest love. I devoutly believe this to be true.

Wherever you turn your eyes the world can shine like transfiguration. You don’t have to bring a thing to it except a little willingness to see.

Theologians talk about a prevenient grace that precedes grace itself and allows us to accept it. I think there must also be a prevenient courage that allows us to be brave – that is, to acknowledge that there is more beauty than our eyes can bear, that precious things have been put into our hands and to do nothing to honor them is to do great harm. And, therefore, this courage allows us, as the old men said, to make ourselves useful. It allows us to be generous, which is another way of saying exactly the same thing.

[And the last lines of the book, directly to his son:] I’ll pray that you grow up a brave man in a brave country. I will pray you find a way to be useful. I’ll pray and then I’ll sleep.

- from Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson

Now nearly all those I loved and did not understand when I was young are dead, but I still reach out to them.

Of course now I am too old to be much of a fisherman, and now of course I usually fish the big waters alone, although some friends think I shouldn’t. Like many fly fishermen in western Montana where the summer days are almost Arctic in length, I often do not start fishing until the cool of the evening. Then, in the Arctic half-light of the canyon, all existence fades to a being with my soul and memories and the sounds of the Big Blackfoot River and a four-count rhythm and the hopes that a fish will rise.

Eventually all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world’s great flood, and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs.

I am haunted by waters.

– from A River Runs Through It, by Norman Maclean

Caryville Mountain

Up high in a sea of grass lies the secret
of how to be connected to something.
Up high, beneath the scrappy pine
into the dreams of a family.

Of course some leave
for deserts, factories, cities.
Some have even crossed the seas.
And I have seen places.
But this rough stripped mass of rock and mud and timber,
like no place else
knows my name.
It is thin skinned when it comes to time,
knowing my name long before
my great-great-grandmother skipped and
slipped down the worn deer trail
to sit on the edge of the spilt rail fence,
flirting with the boy from Round Rock.
Knowing me long before my grandfather dug deep into the heart
of his mountain home,
looking for the lumps that filled his lungs,
blackened his nails,
heated his home,
bettered his children’s lives
and shortened his own.

Grind up my bones.
They are the dust that makes the mud
beside the spring that never ends.
See my skin, stretched on the naked bluff
like the long drying hides on the smokehouse wall.
Long after the last miner has gone,
my blood is the trace of thin black coal vein that remains.

Laughing cousins in splashing water.
Stories of snakes and dogs.
Songs of rivers and crossings and sorrows like showers.
Cruelty beyond understanding and love beyond measure.
Tales of jeeps and mules and wagons – they are all the same.

This mountain is me,
and the round moon is my mother
who watches wherever I go
but is happiest when I find my way back
to the thin place.

- by Melanie Faithful

The Heights of Macchu Picchu

Then up the ladder of the earth I climbed
through the barbed jungle’s thickets
until I reached you Macchu Picchu.
Tall city of stepped stone,
home at long last of whatever earth
had never hidden in her sleeping clothes.
In you two lineages that had run parallel
met where the cradle both of man and light
rocked in a wind of thorns.

Mother of stone and sperm of condors.

High reef of the human dawn.

Spade buried in primordial sand.

This was the habitation, this is the site:
here the fat grains of maize grew high
to fall again like red hail.

The fleece of the vicuña was carded here
to clothe men’s loves in gold, their tombs and mothers,
the king, the prayers, the warriors.

Up here men’s feet found rest at night
near eagles’ talons in the high
meat-stuffed eyries. And in the dawn
with thunder steps they trod the thinning mists,
touching the earth and stones that they might recognize
that touch come night, come death.

I gaze at clothes and hands,
traces of water in the booming cistern,
a wall burnished by the touch of a face
that witnessed with my eyes the earth’s carpet of tapers,
oiled with my hands the vanished wood:
for everything, apparel, skin, pots, words,
wine, loaves, has disappeared,
fallen to earth.

And the air came in with lemon blossom fingers
to touch those sleeping faces:
a thousand years of air, months, weeks of air,
blue wind and iron cordilleras-
these came with gentle footstep hurricanes
cleansing the lonely precinct of the stone.

– by Pablo Neruda

Spring Pools

These pools that, though in forests, still reflect
The total sky almost without defect,
And like the flowers beside them, chill and shiver,
Will like the flowers beside them soon be gone,
And yet not out by any brook or river,
But up by roots to bring dark foliage on.
The trees that have it in their pent-up buds
To darken nature and be summer woods—
Let them think twice before they use their power
To blot out and drink up and sweep away
These flowery waters and watery flowers
From snow that melted only yesterday.

– by Robert Frost

Nothing Gold Can Stay

Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

– by Robert Frost

Come In

Too dark in the woods for a bird
By sleight of wing
To better its perch for the night,
Though it still could sing.
The last of the light of the sun
That had died in the west
Still lived for one song more
In a thrush’s breast.

– by Robert Frost

I hope Daddy is happy in heaven.
I hope he is in a happy place.

– Charles Lamb

Daddy was my best pal.

– Joshua Lamb

Tony Lamb was a man who loved his wife and his boys with his whole being.

– Eve Hutcherson