PEACE

(When times of transition or crisis occur many resort to a familiar place of refuge where they can go to get their thoughts together and regain perspective in life. For me this place was a tree overhanging a creek and curved in such a way as to form a moss-covered ‘lazyboy chair’ above the water on the Abbotsford acreage we were selling. Big changes were ahead for us. On the last Sunday afternoon of our residence there, I resorted to that tree one more time and wrote most of the following.)

It’s quiet here couched in the crook of this overhanging tree.

The creek beneath me gurgles its charm

while the sun filters through the leaves.

Birds ripple the stillness with their warble.

It’s so peaceful.

Why can’t it stay like this?

Why does it have to change?

Sometimes the storm rages, tearing clods from the bank or

gouging furrows with splintered trees.

Sometimes a hawk claws the life out of a rodent,

it’s my life or yours.

Sometimes a fish gasps its last,

mercilessly plucked from its home.

Sometimes the wind slices the air with sleet,

stripping the trees, gaunt ghosts of a fruitful past.

Sometimes it’s the dry season,

child of the same rays that warmed my mossy couch

now leach the last life out of the dry creek bed.

How much like life!

The virtuous and the violent,

the life-giving and the life-taking,

the warmth and the cold,

the pleasant and the harsh,

all wrapped in one bundle.

How much like death!

The bright and the beautiful so easily snatched away,

so quickly reversed,

so overwhelmingly harsh.

Why is there pleasure and pain? God has ordained both.

Out of adversity and struggle are born the delights of peace.

But now it’s quiet here,

couched in the crook of this overhanging tree.

The creek still gurgles its charm,

the birds still warble their delight,

and I am at peace.

 

 

 

Written by Henry Wiebe, May,1992

Let’s keep on the sunny side.