Whenever I returned to Shariat Farm, I moved to simple-minded time, watching the sun rise and set and the stars wink out, following the herds and flocks crossing from Jesse's woods to the neighbor's, looking at the variation of petal, leaf, bark, and branch of dogwood, redbud, cedar, hickory, Southern pine, one magnolia, and whatever flowers and grasses wove the texture of the field.
Shariat Farm was sold in December 2015, following my last two weeks there that summer. Yet I knew in my heart that my love of these times and this place would live on.
RED BIRD SONG
Red bird singing in a black fig tree,
Looking out my window what do I see?
Morning sun in a tangerine sky,
Red bird to a hickory tree will fly.
My home, my home,
Here for awhile 'til I leave to roam.
My home, in the greening green—
Grazing at sundown, deer come here.
Red bird singing in a loquat tree,
I'm just sitting in the quiet air.
Chair a'tilt and my feet up high,
Star-gazer looking at the moon so near.
My home, my home,
Here for awhile 'til I leave to roam.
My home, in the greening green
Red bird sighing in the trembling sky.
Red bird singing my song unseen.
My sweetheart's letter in my hand today.
Words I read made my heart change tune;
Two months more and we're together in June.
My home, my home,
Here for a rest from a working world.
My home, in the greening green
Red bird above me in a twilight sky.
PJC 2003
My realization is, "When the heart feels clearly but the mind questions, allowing the feeling may bring a previously unimagined depth of love felt within and expressed without."
* All quotes in this post can be found in Prema Jasmine Camp's A Flower for God: A Memoir (Seattle, WA: Wilson Duke Press, 2021).
* Author's note: Several years after the sale of Shariat Farm, I was in the town and went to the farm property to look from the gate. The owners had a different vision for the land, but I knew that Shariat Farm, in its gentle harmony with nature, would live in my writing for years.
