Iron Mountain ski jump

Iron Mountain ski jump

Tuesday, July 1, 2014

DANCING DAISIES

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith from a Place of Winter for the Years of Winter… ©


            The daisies are dancing wildly. They should, since they are wild daisies, even though they are in our yard.
            The wind is helping them to dance. Our yard is surrounded by thickets of low bushes and tall trees—oaks and birches and especially pines. In the thickets live squirrels and birds and chipmunks and rabbits and skunks. So we have owls and foxes and an occasional coyote.
And deer. They have paths through the thickets and into our yard. I have tried to teach them to help me maintain the yard by eating dandelions. These are not Carhartt deer, however. They are Waldorf-Astoria deer. Nieman-Marcus deer. They eat only expensive, cultivated flowers—roses and hostas and such. But at least they leave the wild daisies.
The wind comes in from the top, over the trees, from every direction at once, so the dance of the wild daisies is a constant swirl. In their wild dance they mock the manicured and poisoned lawns they see lying limp around them.
            It’s a little more difficult to mow our yard each year, because we have a few more daisies each year, and they patch in different spots. Sometimes Helen gathers a vase of daisies for our table. Mostly, though, they just hang around in the yard. I mow around them. In the wind, our yard is a daisy dance hall.
            As I watch them, I remember times when I danced like that—at the weddings of our daughters, with our granddaughter after she scored the winning basket in a fifth grade game, when Keith Smart hit the shot that won the 1987 NCAA basketball tourney, when the doctor declared there was no cancer left in our grandson.
            It is said that we should dance like no one is watching. The daisies don’t care if anyone is watching; they just dance. I say: Dance like a daisy.

John Robert McFarland

The “place of winter” mentioned in the title line is Iron Mountain, in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, where people are Yoopers, a word in the new Merriam-Webster dictionary, and life is defined by winter even in the summer! [This phrase is explained in the post for March 20, 2014.]

You don’t have to bookmark or favorite the CIW URL to return here. Just Google Christ In Winter and it will show up at the top of the page.

I have also started an author blog, about writing, in preparation for the publication, by Black Opal Books, of my novel, VETS, in late 2014 or early 2015. http://johnrobertmcfarland-author.blogspot.com/

I tweet as yooper1721.


1 comment:

  1. Thanks John! May you continue to dance for many more days.

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