Sing to the LORD a new song; sing to the LORD, all the earth…. Let the heavens rejoice, let the earth be glad; let the sea resound, and all that is in it; let the fields be jubilant, and everything in them. Then all the trees of the forest will sing for joy; they will sing before the LORD, for he comes, he comes to judge the earth. He will judge the world in righteousness and the peoples in his truth. (Psalm 96:1:11-13)

I’m looking forward to the end of this week: I head off on Friday for my annual retreat at Bluebell Springs, my brother and sister-in-law’s place on Orcas Island in the upper Puget Sound.  A special treat this year will be my taking part in the “Kindlings Fest,” a celebration of art and ideas where they intersect with the spiritual.

My emotional, spiritual, and intellectual batteries are badly in need of recharging.  And Bluebell Springs is the perfect charger, a sort of mini Butchart Gardens tucked in between the Sound and Moran State Park and surrounded by long established second-growth forest.

Bluebell Springs is a place where this song from the Psalms is not drowned out by the crush modern life—where the ”sea resounds” (softly here) and the forest “sings for joy.”  One can more easily imagine in this spot what the pristine creation might have looked like when, in the words of Wendell Berry, the Creator’s “pleasure was sole law.”

For all His creatures were His pleasures
And their whole pleasure was to be
What He made them; they sought no gain
Or growth beyond their proper measures,
Nor longed for change or novelty.
The only new thing could be pain.

(Wendell Berry, “The Sabbath Poems” #III 1979-1997,
A Timbered Choir)

And I’m looking forward to meeting Luci Shaw, the poet-in-residence for this year’s Kindlings Fest.  Luci’s poems have convinced me that we are kindred spirits: followers of Christ, the Divine Creator and Rescuer, and who both love the Pacific Northwest where Luci lives.  My soul longs for the spot in the forest I picked out last year where I can sit among the trees but see out above the oceanspray shrub over Barnes, Clark, and Lummi Islands to the Georgia Straight and beyond to Mt. Baker, the northernmost volcanic peak in the US portion of the Cascade Volcanic Arc. There too my soul can resonate with Luci’s as expressed in her poem “Forest Green.”

For centuries now the old-growth forest,
a victim, but also a devourer of the world,
has pulled into its slow boil of seasons,
into its emerald mouth beyond the hills, the sky’s
gold light, the elements of air, the sacred fluids—
creeks, rain, winter fogs—trapping clouds
of flying seeds, requiring the death of leaves
for a humus rich and dark as old leather,
rotting in small clumps the bones of birds,
translating all this fleshly language,
holding its secret meanings in a net
of vines and roots.
The forest keeps on writing
its own narrative in flourishes of green ink.

(Luci Shaw, “Forest Green,” from
The Green Earth: Poems of Creation)