Writing Retreat

Last week I spent two days over on the "east side" as Washingtonians call the other side of the Cascade Mountains.  I had signed up for a writing retreat after receiving a serendipitous invitation from Dave Bell who is one of the pastors at the mission where the Richmond Beach UCC youth are going this summer.  Dave is a Disciples of Christ pastor, and runs, along with his wife Belinda, a 40 acre farm where they hosted the retreat. 

My time there fit seamlessly with my new dedication to Wendell Berry, with the loss I feel in this lush, green, mountainous landscape, and with my rural upbringing.  Out there near White Swan, in the Yakima Valley, fields are everywhere: fruit trees, vineyards, hops, alfalfa, hay.  The protected hills are barren of trees, and only the extensive system of irrigation ditches allows the valley to be as fruitful as it is.  During the retreat itself, we considered some of these themes, in conversations and in our intentional writing on "place."  I felt entirely home with the few other pastor-types who were there, who also had stories of displacement and love of rural places, who know that this city may never be truly home.  Here is the most cohesive piece I wrote while retreating to the farm:

Thinking of place reminds me of home, which reminds me of the sky.

What day was it that God made the sky?  I can never remember these things - something about a dome, something poetic and holy.  Something worthy of our praise, and I can see why God made it after all, and who else could pull off something like this? 

Growing up the sky was our source for all things.  The sky brought our weather, the rain that nourished the winter wheat and quenched the spring corn, giving it enough moisture to make it through the three weeks of consecutive triple digit days in July.  The sky withheld the rain too, in the drought of 2002 and others every few years since before my time or anyone else's.  The sky giveth and the sky taketh away.  Blessed be the name.

In 1990, the sky brought its usual green to compliment the bright vibrant blue.  The year was particularly one for tornadoes, especially the Kansas part of tornado alley, and the same wind storm that knocked down branches in Whitewater produced a funnel cloud that knocked down one barn and several grain bins on the Klaassen farm.  It blew out the screened-in porch, Dad's study, and a whole bunch of glass right before taking a couple of cows for a wild and fatal ride.

By the time the county sheriff showed up that evening, the sky was gray and innocent, and by the time the church folk arrived later that week to pick up dime-sized fragments of glass the sky was back to its vibrant blue self.  The rubble from a tornado is nasty - twisted and shredded and splintered into thousands of pieces, any of which could carry tetanus or other infections.  Clean-up takes many hands and many hours.  Praise God that the sky provides a dome to work under. 

When I was twenty-three, not so long ago really, I took a trip to a pastor's cluster meeting out in Western Kansas.  The two pastors who invited me out were full of good humor, but the thing I'll always remember from that trip was an off-handed comment with serious connotations for my future.  We'd stopped near a wind farm to check out the roadside informational marker there on U.S. Highway 50.  When we stepped out of the car and looked around, Lou Gomez said this: "The sky is bigger in Dodge."  Dodge City, Kansas, along the path of many Old Western cattle drives and current home of slaughterhouses.  The sky is bigger in Dodge, 180 degrees in fact, horizon to horizon, uninterrupted by hills or mountains. 

Some people say it makes them dizzy or that it frightens them or makes them anxious.  For me it just feels like home, opening the spirit and body and abruptly placing back into perspective the stresses of those places that are not so broad nor so immanent nor so imminent as the sky.

Now I live in Seattle and the sky still gives life.  It makes things green - everything green, it seems like.  They sky gives and gives in consistent but small portions.  No downpours and none of that tense, life-giving violence from thunder and lightning.  In the summers it is vibrant blue and in the summers it is settled and gray but almost nothing in between.  I miss the contrast of the cloud shadows scattered across the land.  Here the sky takes from me something more than my house or a few cattle.  It takes my freedom and my openness.  It shoves me into the ground, cowering in that ever smaller place between mountain and clouds. 

I wish I could see it differently, but then again I don't, because for me so far, there's only one home. 

Just Living Farm

White Swan, WA