Archives for August 2020

Love is the River and the Bridge

August 30, 2020 by Denise Brake Leave a Comment

One of the satisfying aspects of growing older is looking back at the line of your life and noticing how you have changed. I don’t mean only in physical appearances, though certainly they are the most apparent changes. Gray highlights, added pounds, lines that accentuate the movement of your face over the years. How has your spiritual life changed? Your politics? Your ability to handle your emotions? How has your thinking matured? Your wants and needs? How have the things you deem ‘important’ changed from when you were younger? My guess is, that like me, the path of your life has changed and moved and morphed.

On the high prairies of Buffalo River State Park, one can see a line of trees that runs alongside the winding Buffalo River. Before reaching the river from the prairie, there is a huge drop-off, then a wide flood plain where the trees have grown. Chris and I wondered if they named the river from the fact that buffalo ran or were chased through the prairie grasses off the cliff to their death.

We walked from the prairie down a path by a draw that opened up to the flood plain. Shrubs were changing to fall colors, and Wild Plums were ripening.

The cliff from prairie to flood plain is called a ‘cutbank,’ a steep bank where a river runs against the side of a hill, undercutting and eroding it. It produces a wide plain of underlying sediments. It also illustrates that over time, the path of the Buffalo River has changed—first cutting away from the north bank, then the south bank (or east and west depending on where the winding river is flowing.) We walked on the floodplain, looking up on the steep cutbank that has been populated by trees.

The River was high, swift, and muddy from the strong storms that had pushed through Minnesota and brought tornado warnings and those fabulous mammatus clouds to our doorstep two days before.

The mosquitoes we were hoping to foil on the prairie found us as we walked along the River through the trees. One particular dead tree was riddled with woodpecker holes—one even went all the way through it. We could see from one side to the other through something that normally would not allow such a thing.

Speaking of one side to the other, eventually we came to a bridge where we could cross the River to explore the uplands of prairie on the other side.

The muddy water flowed around a large rock in the middle of the River, depositing sediment in the wake of it. The resistance caused the build-up.

Up river, fallen trees dammed up the flow of the water, piling up debris as the River flowed on.

The prairie resumed on the other side of the River—grasses waving, flowers blooming, butterflies lighting, and seeds dispersing.

One could not distinguish one side of the prairie from the other—each has a myriad of grasses and colorful flowers. Both have cutbanks, trees, and mosquitoes. Both have butterflies, seeds, and seedlings. The Buffalo River runs through it. And the Buffalo River has moved and changed over time.

The long view of life changes and evolves. This place used to be a glacier, then a sea, then a prairie with glacier-deposited erratic boulders with a River that runs through it. Even the River has changed course in the relatively near past. We do the same. Civilizations change. Societies change, and each one of us changes in the course of our lives. So how have you changed? And more importantly, what happened to you that led to those changes? Our development from infant to elder includes changes to our physical selves imprinted in our DNA, the expression of which is influenced by our environment. Our personalities and experiences influence our thinking, our emotional responses, and our actions. The River of Life runs through us. What rocks of resistance are impeding the flow? What kind of debris is getting in the way? I think for most of us we want to be better than we once were. That desire is the cornerstone of failure and forgiveness. It is the challenge of our physical, social, political, emotional selves. What allows us to see from one side to the other? What allows us to walk to the other side? What reminds us that we are grasses and colorful flowers with seeds and seedlings that all live together in this world? Love, and I mean that with a capital L, is the river and the bridge. Let it flow through you and allow you to walk to the other side.

Here in All Their Beauty–Then Gone

August 23, 2020 by Denise Brake 2 Comments

Death has imbued my mind over the last week. It was the one year anniversary of Chris’ brother’s death, and I wonder how it can be so long already. It still feels unreal, like it didn’t happen, that maybe when we go back to Kansas City, he will be there. Then a dream of walking with my cousin through a garden adorned with art sculptures of cars, then realizing it was a cemetery for people who had died in car accidents. A dream of talking to my Dad at a party, and he died almost five years ago now. Then a brother of a friend of my daughter died in his mid-30’s—so, so young. And that makes me remember with a heavy heart the death of one of my greatest friends who died at the age of 34. We worked together at church camp on the prairies of South Dakota, and we took an epic horseback ride across the state from the North Dakota border to the Nebraska border. We both loved the prairie.

We come and go, but the land will always be here. Those people who love and understand it are the only ones who really own it—for a while. –Willa Cather

Last weekend Chris and I went to Buffalo River State Park, one of the largest and best of Minnesota’s prairie preserves. Our main idea was to foil the mosquitoes who have been swarming us in the woods and go to the sunny, wind-swept prairie where mosquitoes are less likely to bother us. And then there’s the thing that happens to my soul when I face an expanse of grass and sky—I am filled with goodness and calm.

Side by side we walked the mowed path through the prairie. Occasionally there would be an erratic boulder lying amidst the grass, boulders that were deposited there by the glacier eons ago. And they are literally called ‘erratics.’

I thought it looked like a prairie gravestone.

There’s no great loss without some small gain. –Laura Ingalls Wilder

The park was actually a combination of the State Park prairie, the Bluestem Prairie Scientific and Natural Area, and Minnesota State University, Moorehead Regional Science Center Land, and through the middle of it all flowed the winding, tree-lined Buffalo River. A vast expanse of blooming Indian grass with a sweep of Little Bluestem stretched from the path to the Science Center.

Sunflowers and Liatris sprinkled the prairie with bright summer color, and Painted Lady Butterflies were everywhere!

They are here in all their beauty…

…then gone.

The ones we lose eventually fade into the background of our lives, yet they are with us always.

At times, with anniversaries, or dreams, or renewed memories, they feel much closer to us again—thus the nature of erratic, unpredictable grief.

Death is not far from anybody’s mind these days as the death count from Covid-19 ticks into the hundreds of thousands—if you are not one who is personally impacted by that, thank your lucky stars and kindly say a prayer for all those who are. Please don’t quibble about the Covid count being ‘wrong.’ A beautiful person was here, and then they were gone, and many people are mourning.

We have the people, things, and land we love only for a while—until their demise, or ours. It will soon be thirty years since my friend died. Many things remind me of him—Appaloosa horses, polka-dot hats, strumming wildly on the guitar and singing silly songs, and so many more. But being on the prairie always brings him closer to me again. I have shared this poem about the prairie within the last year—what I didn’t say before was that it was my friend Joe’s favorite. The land will always be here. May it bring you goodness and calm.

The prairie, these plains….It was as if nature had taken solitude and fashioned it into something visible, carved out the silences into distances, into short grass forever flowing and curving, a vast sky forever pressing down, nothing changing, nothing but sameness, day after day after day, as far as you could see, as far as you could go. It was like the solitude of God…as awesome, and as beautiful. –Janice Holt Giles

The Storm is Blowing Down the Tent

August 16, 2020 by Denise Brake 2 Comments

I pass my life in preventing the storm from blowing down the tent, and I drive in the pegs as fast as they are pulled up. –Abraham Lincoln

I’m a calm-the-storm kind of person. Actually, if I can avoid it, it’s even better. Is it middle child, peacemaker personality? Is it stoicism? Is it ‘my body is nervous enough I don’t need anymore ruckus’? Probably all three. If you have been impacted by trauma, particularly in childhood, you may know what I mean by ‘my body is nervous.’ It’s the activation of the sympathetic nervous system—the fight, flight, or freeze response. I’m good at the run and hide-you-don’t-see-me method…. But there are people who react to the same sympathetic nervous system activation by fighting. Fighting with words, fighting with fists, fighting with sticks and guns, fighting with orders. If they feel threatened in any way—and that’s what the sympathetic nervous system response is for: dealing with a threat to our lives—then they will ‘punch back harder.’ Most of the time that reaction happens not when our lives are literally threatened, but when we are emotionally threatened, when the belief system we have built up for our protection is questioned or menaced. We will fight, run, or hide. The fight people run headlong into the storm or just as likely, they create the storm. Their ‘nervousness,’ the sympathetic energy, is ‘controlled’ by fighting and jabbing and blaming, just as mine is by running away from the storm or hiding from it. There is storm damage by all three kinds of coping, but the damage done by the fighters can leave a wide path of destruction and wreckage.

Friday was hot and humid. A storm in the morning dropped over three inches of rain in a short amount of time. The heat boiled up during the day, the humidity saturated the air. By late afternoon, there was unrest—the wind was snappy and full of discontent, the birds seemed nervous, and the clouds were spitting drops of rain as we rode our bikes to the end of the road and back. A bit later, the weather man interrupted the national news of gloom with a tornado warning for an area south and west of us, then another area along the long line of red radar marching across Minnesota. As he spoke, five different areas of concern for tornadic activity boxed in the towns of central Minnesota, including us. As the storm got closer, stormwatcher Chris went outside. I went outside to see when I would have to insist that it was time to go to the basement. The clouds were dark and light and all shades in between, roiling in motion—the cold front was slamming into the hot, moisture-laden air of the day—and the fight was on.

The rain started pelting us, so we gathered our things and went down the stairs to the quiet basement. Radio warnings told all listeners to take cover. The threat was real, and our bodies responded as they should. Take cover, run and hide, stay safe in the storm.

It was a fast-moving storm. Soon it was over. No storm damage for us, just a few more inches of rain. Supper and more news of the threat to other people as the storm front bullied its way across the state. Then I noticed that everything looked yellowish outside, and when I saw the sky, I was drawn outside by the unusual clouds. Cottonball pouches filled the sky with an eerie yellow-greenish-orange as the sky cleared to the west and the setting sun cast its colors on the clouds. I couldn’t take my eyes off of them.

These clouds are called Mammatus clouds, from the Latin word ‘mamma’ meaning ‘udder’ or ‘breast.’ They usually indicate a particularly strong storm. They are composed mainly of ice and formed by sinking air, unlike most clouds that are formed by rising air. The dark storm clouds were Cumulonimbus, meaning ‘heaped rainstorm.’ They form along a cold front and are capable of producing lightning, hail, and tornadoes.

Five minutes after I went back inside, Chris called me out again to see the color change to pink and blue. For hours after the storm, our world recovered with the colorful Mammatus clouds.

To the fighters, the runners, and the hiders out there, there is a better way to deal with the emotional threats that feel life-threatening but in truth are not. Our bodies are just stuck in the response that we learned from a threat that was real. The challenge is to re-teach our bodies how to respond more appropriately. We need to activate our parasympathetic nervous system—our rest, digest, and recover system. We need to take control by learning how to relax. Meditation, yoga, qigong, and walking in nature all move our body towards activating the parasympathetic system.

We are living in a chaotic world right now—a perfect storm of the threat to our health by Covid-19, of financial uncertainty and unemployment for millions and millions of people, of racial and human justice issues, of how we are going to vote. Our democracy is in disorder. This perfect storm is trying to blow down our tent; the pegs are dislodging from the ground. Grab a peg and drive it back into the ground. Drive it with science. Drive it with reason. Drive it with compassion. With the milk of human kindness, we can recover ourselves and our world.

Changes in the Light on Any Given Day

August 9, 2020 by Denise Brake 2 Comments

It’s on the strength of observation and reflection that one finds a way. So we must dig and delve unceasingly. –Claude Monet

What influence painter Claude Monet has had on public gardening that up in the Northwoods of Minnesota in the little city of Brainerd is a Monet garden! Last weekend Chris and I went to Northland Arboretum, 500 acres on the outskirts of Brainerd. A beautiful log visitor’s center sits on the hillside with a little waterfall garden situated on the other side of the parking lot.

We were invited to discover the Monet garden on the way to the hiking trails. We crossed the curved Japanese-inspired bridge like the one that Monet originally built on his Giverny garden and pond. As we circled the pond, we passed by Arrowheads, Cardinal flowers, showy red Monarda, and of course, the famous White Water Lily!

It was the wildest looking garden I have ever seen—literally wild, as opposed to manicured, following Monet’s idea of not liking organized or constrained gardens. And from the other side of the pond, we viewed the Northwood’s reproduction of Monet’s most famous scene from his Giverny garden.

We hiked on and soon found ourselves in a Jack Pine savanna. The soil was sandy, the terrain rolling, and Jack Pines and Bur Oak trees grew side by side. Prairie grasses like Big Bluestem and Indian grass lined the trail and were in full bloom along with other late summer flowers.

We noticed Wild Blueberries growing on the sandy hillsides and lots and lots of Hazelnut shrubs, most of which were already void of their husk-protected nuts. I commented to Chris that this would be a good place for bears to live with all this food!

The terrain changed again as we continued north—there were more Maple trees, more undergrowth, more ferns—and then the mosquitoes started finding us. We hiked on a ridge between two wetlands, ferngullies on either side of us. The trail was definitely less traveled and no longer mowed. We had yet to see another person since leaving the Monet garden.

We swatted mosquitoes as we persisted to the Red Pine forest and an old homestead site, which turned out to be only an open area of the woods with a patch of raspberries bushes.

The mosquitoes persisted and called their friends, so we turned around before making the complete loop. It will be a great place to see in the fall or winter!

We returned to the visitor center area for our picnic and were greeted by a family with three young children who asked if we had seen the bear. The mom explained that the naturalist at the center had told them a mother bear and her cubs had been seen in the park! It is a good place for bears to live!

The arboretum map showed other gardens that we hadn’t seen yet—the Gazebo Garden where weddings have been held, the Secret Garden started by the Girl Scouts, and the Memory Garden—so after lunch we hiked to find them. It was a sobering scene. The once-beautiful gardens were neglected—granted, early August is tough on any garden—but shrubs were overgrown, the ground was dry, the grass and plants were browned, the weeds too prolific. Nobody would want to get married here at this time. Our disappointment was tempered by the reality that both of us, particularly Chris, knew: It’s hard work to keep a garden looking good. It takes many man-hours to keep ahead of the weeding, watering, trimming, planting, thinning, and replanting that is required for any public garden. It’s hard work, and it takes money. We did not see any gardeners and wondered if they relied wholly on volunteers, which of course has many challenges baked into that. We saw and appreciated the original ‘bones’ of the gardens—a beautiful terraced rock wall, a little pond, some wonderful plant specimens, and the enclosed walls of the Secret Garden, and at the same time we knew how much work it would take to get the gardens back to their original glory.

The only picture I took at the neglected gardens.

And now, back to Monet’s garden at Giverny. Claude Monet built his gardens in the late 1800’s—as he became more famous as a painter, he was able to spend more money on his plant material and help. At one point he hired seven gardeners to carry out his vision. In essence, he created his art over and over again—once with the creation of the garden and then with his method of painting where he painted the same scene many times in order to capture the changes in the light on any given day and the myriad changes that occur with the seasons. But after Monet died in 1926, things changed. His step daughter tried to keep the place going, but after WWII, the house and gardens fell into neglect and ruin. The bombings had shattered all the windows in the main house and the greenhouses. The floors and ceiling beams rotted away. The gardens were overgrown and wild. Restoration of Monet’s gardens began in 1977 with the help of many generous donors. The house and greenhouses were restored. The pond was re-dug, the gardens replanted, the famous bridge re-built. It took ten years to do so.

We found our way around the Northland Arboretum, from the newer, more cared-for buildings and gardens at the entrance to the wild Monet Garden to the even wilder trails into the deep woods and back to the neglected, older gardens. Life is like that. We have those beautiful shiny places that find their way to a post on social media, we have those shaggy places that show up in our everyday life routines, we have those often untraveled aspects of our lives that are bothersome and beautiful at the same time, and we have those once-beautiful but neglected places that need attention and care. And sometimes a bear shows up. “So we must dig and delve unceasingly.” Restoration is possible, no matter how overwhelming it seems. Each one of us can find a way to create our lives over and over again.

Failures and Gibbous Moons

August 2, 2020 by Denise Brake 10 Comments

My failures have fallen like bread crumbs behind me over the years and decades, and I can trace my steps back to those times at rapid speed. The past is never far away. Some of the failures are not merely crumbs, but lumpy, massive loaves that cannot be overlooked, that trip me up with each return, that mark my defeat for all to see. Those massive loaves of failure were life-changers, and I have yet to see ‘the good’ that supposedly comes from the path not taken. (And that is not a good feeling for an optimist.) In a ‘winner’ world, my failures plainly show that I am not one of those—no accolades, no trophies, no cheers, and no prize money. Sorry, you lose. Go to the back of the line. Laughter, whispers, and talk behind my back. The failures are bright, they glow in the dark, and when I walk—forwards or backwards in time—they pull my attention towards them. In a big six decades of life, my failures are phosphorescent.

There are times each month when we step out into the night and our eyes are instantly drawn to the bright orb of the gibbous moon. Gibbous comes from a root word that means hump-backed or something that protrudes or creates an obvious bulge. Gibbous moons are the waxing and waning phases where the moon is more than half illuminated. When there is a gibbous or full moon, the sky is so lit up by the moonlight that it is harder to see the stars.

The bright glow makes a walk in the night possible without a flashlight or headlamp—we become like nocturnal animals—we can ‘see’ in the dark. But my favorite thing about those radiant nights is the moon shadows, especially of the bare trees on snow during the winter.

Oh, I’m being followed by a moon shadow, moon shadow, moon shadow, Leapin’ and hoppin’ on a moon shadow, moon shadow, moon shadow….Did it take long to find me? I asked the faithful light. Did it take long to find me? And are you gonna stay the night? — Cat Stevens

Failures are big and bright in my head—and not in a good way. They garner my attention, hold my chin, and tell me not to look away, even as I try to avert my eyes in shame.

But something has been happening with my bread crumbs (and loaves) of failure. I have been going back on that long trail of moon shadows and picking up my failure crumbs one by one—I look at them carefully and lovingly. Who was I when this happened? What were the circumstances surrounding me? Were there people around who understood the impact on me? Were they able to help me process what happened? That time I tried out for the chorus at school and didn’t make it? Humiliating and disappointing. But look, I went on to lead songs every day at church camp for three summers. I like to sing! I put that crumb in my backpack, and I now carry it with me. Each failure that blinded me with its big-ness is now in my bulging backpack—behind me, tamped down, lovingly contained. It is a part of me now. I am able to see more things and even appreciate how the brightness of those failures add to the picture of who I am. The faithful light took a long time to find me—or rather, it took me a long time to find it.

Every once in a while, my backpack spills open, and my failures morph into their previous monstrous selves, overwhelming me to tears and inaction. A reminder of where I’ve come from, yet a reminder of what I have over-come. Humbling and confirming all at the same time. I can swiftly and easily pack those crumbs back into my backpack and continue my journey. Looking up, I can see the stars more clearly now. I see the Big Dipper. The outer two stars of the bowl of the Big Dipper point to Polaris—the North Star—the tip of the handle of the even dimmer Little Dipper constellation. I adjust my gibbous backpack, turn towards my true north, and sing out as I walk on…”Oh, I’m being followed by a moon shadow, moon shadow, moon shadow…”

Archives for August 2020

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