Other Pieces is a collection of works by different writers, poets, pastors, theologians, and imaginative thinkers who've helped shape my attitude toward God, his presence in my life, and his activity in the world. I encourage you to follow the profile links to all these amazing authors. Besides this, a few great places to find recent work is Poetry Northwest | https://www.poetrynw.org/ and The Poetry Foundation | https://https://www.poetryfoundation.org/
One Less Fall by Ed Harkness
From here you can smell the age of the year in the air, its odor of decay, the river sheen a slurry of cottonwood and pine, hill and sky.
Grass has gone tan on Clemens Ridge, that slope we always meant to climb to take in the wider view. Kingfisher, you say,
your favorite, chittering upstream, then down, like we do on our walks, together and alone. It gets harder, though, to see the end
of earth tones, to face the empty face of what’s to come, where now we’re borne on the river’s clatter at this low water time.
You say the boulders look like bones in the current. Only this late do they emerge exposed like black eggs, hidden
more often than not, as some thoughts are, the ones that lie in the deeper channels. All the summer warblers have moved on:
grosbeak, tanager, siskin—gone. The land prepares for hard freezes, then snow, then a season of pallid light.
One less fall. Now, though, afternoon sun reveals more of what we love. A gust of wind scatters the last papery
aspen leaves in a swirl of joy. Some sail all the way across to Old River Road. Those that light on the river will travel far.
I’m crossing a cow pasture, texting a friend photos of a calf whose black and white pansy-patterned face alternates between tugging his mother’s udders and gazing up at me, motionless with curiosity, even as the herd quivers, alarmed. I once read a case study about a young boy in trauma therapy who, at the close of each session, would hide under the therapist’s chair, cling to familiar toys, despite reassurance that the therapist, the room, the chair, the toys would be at the next session. To reestablish object permanence, the boy wrote his name on a piece of paper, asked the therapist to do the same, then tore the paper in half, giving his name to the therapist, keeping the therapist’s name for himself. Psychologists claim we experience the world we infer, not the world as it is. But what is the world? My shadow extends into goldenrod and aster. I slip behind a large oak. The cows regain their drowsiness. Leaves susurrate an octave lower than yesterday when the weather still passed for summer. I close my eyes—the world as it is— then open them again to text my friend. “Farm animals” autocorrects to “harm animals.” I follow up with: “FARM ANIMALS.” My friend: “Lol harm animals—but that’s exactly what we are.”
It all begins with knowing nothing lasts forever, so you might as well start packing now. In the meantime, practice being alive.
There will be a party where you’ll feel like nobody’s paying you attention. And there will be a party where attention’s all you’ll get. What you need to do is to remember to talk to yourself between these parties.
And, again, there will be a day, ─a decade─ where you won’t fit in with your body even though you’re in the only body you’re in.
You need to control your habit of forgetting to breathe.
Remember when you were younger and you practiced kissing on your arm? You were on to something then. Sometimes harm knows its own healing Comfort knows its own intelligence. Kindness too. It needs no reason.
There is a you telling you another story of you. Listen to her.
Where do you feel anxiety in your body? The chest? The fist? The dream before waking? The head that feels like it’s at the top of the swing or the clutch of gut like falling & falling & falling & falling It knows something: you’re dying. Try to stay alive.
For now, touch yourself. I’m serious.
Touch your self. Take your hand and place your hand some place upon your body. And listen to the community of madness that you are. You are such an interesting conversation.
The summer after your death our trees which most years were frosted and fruitless bear loads I have to unburden.
Each room in the house is booby-trapped with memories of half-lost joys. So much fruit impossible to thin.
An imposed simplicity takes on the feeling of an exile. Abandoned in an empty Eden, I pick raspberries, blackcaps, blackberries
and freeze them on cookie sheets. Bags and bags of fruit arranged like prisoners, each guilty of untimely bounty.
Yet the yellow-striped garter snake coiled in the leaves of the raspberry canes, waiting for grasshoppers, seems right, and the thin-waisted wasps I flick
off the ripe fruit. Trying to blend in, I too wait in the green and yellow leaves, wound inside a fading abundance, arbiter of thorns, guardian of sweetness.
"Because salvation is by grace through faith, I believe that among the countless number of people standing in front of the throne and in front of the Lamb, dressed in white robes and holding palms in their hands (see Revelation 7:9), I shall see the prostitute from the Kit-Kat Ranch in Carson City, Nevada, who tearfully told me that she could find no other employment to support her two-year-old son. I shall see the woman who had an abortion and is haunted by guilt and remorse but did the best she could faced with grueling alternatives; the businessman besieged with debt who sold his integrity in a series of desperate transactions; the insecure clergyman addicted to being liked, who never challenged his people from the pulpit, and longed for unconditional love; the sexually abused teen molested by his father and now selling his body on the street, who, as he falls asleep each night, whispers the name of the unknown God he learned about in Sunday school.
'But how?' we ask. Then the voice says, 'They have washed their robes and have made them white in the blood of the Lamb.'
There they are. There we are, that is─the multitude who so wanted to be faithful, who at times got defeated, soiled by life, and bested by trials, wearing the bloodied garments of life's tribulations, but through it all clung to faith. My friends, if this is not good news to you, you have never understood the gospel of grace."
"We want to get behind beauty, but it is only a surface. It is like a mirror that reflects to us our own desire for good. It is a sphinx, an enigma, a sorrowfully irritating mystery. We want to feed on it, but it is only an object we can look on; it appears to us from a certain distance. The great sorrow of human life is knowing that to look and to eat are two different operations. Only on the other side of heaven, where God lives, are they one and the same operation. Children already experience this sorrow when they look at a cake for a long time and nearly regret eating it, but are powerless to help themselves. Maybe the vices, depravities and crimes are nearly always or even always in their essence attempts to eat beauty, to eat what one can only look at. Eve initiated this. If she lost our humanity by eating a fruit, the reverse attitude—looking at a fruit without eating it—must be what saves."
"God created through love and for love. God did not create anything except love itself, and the means to love. He created love in all its forms. He created beings capable of love from all possible distances. Because no other could do it, he himself went to the greatest possible distance, the infinite distance. This infinite distance between God and God, this supreme tearing apart, this agony beyond all others, this marvel of love, is the crucifixion. Nothing can be further from God than that which has been made accursed."
"It may be possible for each to think too much of his own potential glory hereafter; it is hardly possible for him to think too often or too deeply about that of his neighbor. The load, or weight, or burden of my neighbor’s glory should be laid daily on my back, a load so heavy that only humility can carry it, and the backs of the proud will be broken. It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilization—these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit—immortal horrors or everlasting splendors. This does not mean that we are to be perpetually solemn. We must play. But our merriment must be of that kind (and it is, in fact, the merriest kind) which exists between people who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously—no flippancy, no superiority, no presumption. And our charity must be a real and costly love, with deep feeling for the sins in spite of which we love the sinner—no mere tolerance or indulgence which parodies love as flippancy parodies merriment. Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbor is the holiest object presented to your senses. If he is your Christian neighbor he is holy in almost the same way, for in him also Christ vere latitat—the glorifier and the glorified, Glory Himself, is truly hidden."
"Our first sketch of the human story begins in a cave; the cave which popular science associates with the cave-man and in which practical discovery has really found archaic drawings of animals. The second half of human history, which is like a new creation of the world, also begins in a cave. There is even a shadow of such a fancy in the fact that animals were again present; for it was a cave used as a stable by the mountaineers of the uplands about Bethlehem; who still drive their cattle into such holes and caverns at night. It was here that a homeless couple had crept underground with the cattle when the doors of the crowded caravanserai had been shut in their faces; and it was here beneath the very feet of the passers-by, in a cellar under the very floor of the world, that Jesus Christ was born. But in that second creation there was indeed something symbolic in the roots of the primeval rock or the horns of the prehistoric herd. God also was a cave-man, and had also traced strange shapes of creatures, curiously coloured, upon the wall of the world; but the pictures that he made had come to life.
A mass of legend and literature, which increases and will never end, has repeated and rung the changes on that single paradox; that the hands that had made the sun and stars were yet too small to reach the huge heads of the cattle. And upon this paradox, we might almost say upon this jest, all the literature of our faith is founded."
7Beloved, let us love one another, because love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. 8Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.
9Now this is how God’s love was revealed among us: God sent His one and only Son into the world, so that we might live through Him. 10And love consists in this: not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son as the atoning sacrificed for our sins.
11Beloved, if God so loved us, then we also ought to love one another. 12No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God remains in us, and His love is perfected in us.
13By this we know that we remain in Him, and He in us: God the Father has given us of His Spirit. 14And we have seen and testify that the Father has sent His Son to be the Savior of the world.
15If anyone confesses that Jesus is the Son of God, God abides in him, and he in God. 16This is how we come to know and believe the love that God has for us: God is love! Whoever abides in love abides in God, and God in him. 17In this way, love has been perfected among us, so that we may have confidence on the day of judgment; for in this world we are just like Him.
18There is no fear in love, but perfect love drives out all fear, because fear involves punishment. The one who fears God has not been perfected in love. Again, we love because He first loved us.
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