photo by Collyn Ware, Griffin age 2

How do you like to go up in a swing,
   Up in the air so blue?
Oh, I do think it the pleasantest thing
   Ever a child can do!  --Robert Louis Stevenson, "The Swing"

These were the first lines of poetry I ever memorized. Poem #33 from Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses was my favorite. From the time I opened my book–a birthday or Christmas gift, I forget which–I loved everything about “The Swing”: the illustration, the rhythm and glorious rhyme, the way it lifted me from the page into the reverie of flying through the air. There is real magic in a swing. When the world drags me to the mat, give me a good swing where I can pump my legs until I’m “Up in the air and over the wall,/ Till I can see so wide/ Rivers and trees and cattle and all/Over the countryside–” Everything is better from the seat of a swing.

In poet Robert Frost’s “Birches,” he writes of a boy who rides birch trees. He laments “when life is too much like a pathless wood” that he’d “like to get away from earth awhile”:

I'd like to go by climbing a birch tree,
And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk
Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,
But dipped its top and set me down again.

He concedes, however, that “earth is the right place for love” and cautions that he doesn’t want some fate to misunderstand him, whisking him away forever. As child, I understood this as I swung for sky on the swingset in my backyard. I liked to go “toward heaven” but was happy to return to earth again. While some children had imaginary friends, I had Ginny and Susie, my red swings. I told them secrets and sung them made-up songs. I loved them, and earth was the right place for this love.

There are no more swings at my house. My husband recently removed the swingset we’d erected for my grandchildren who’ve outgrown the small yellow rubber seats that hung a few child-safe inches from the ground. And the two bigger swings that hung from the glorious oak in their yard are gone, too. A summer storm took the old oak and left a sunny spot where, for years, we’d taken refuge to swing in the shade. The absence of these swings haunts me. I can still see my grandchildren, heads thrown back, legs kicking out, shoes flung off. I can feel the rush of wind, hear the creak of the chains as we work them hard. And I remember their cries, “Do it again, Grandma!” as I push with all my might to give them an under-doggy.

Children grow up, and the heaven of childhood may live in memories on a swingless earth. This is the way of things. And though “earth is the right place for love,” some of us may find ourselves saying, “But not this earth. Not this place where the sweet days of swinging and singing and opening new boxes of Crayola crayons have left us. Not these days when we sit alone in a house once littered with toys and smeared with the remnants of sticky fingers. Not this life of repurposing ourselves as ones who look on from the sidelines. Certainly, not this.”

And yet, it is this. Swinging takes us up and away, only to return us to where we began. The absolute rush of reaching the peak of a swing’s arc is shortlived. We gasp, we feel the bottom of our stomachs drop, and then it’s over. We can make it happen again, as we pump our legs to keep up the momentum. But we can’t make this one incredible moment last for more than a second or two. This moment is a brief but wonderful gift.

Gifts such as these give us glimpses of heaven on earth. Whether we’re transported by swings, by experiences or memories, we escape momentarily from the world. And, thankfully, from ourselves–that is, from selves that are too often burdened with fear, insecurity, anger, and despair. These moments may open our eyes and hearts in surprising ways. And when they do, we pray the words from the Lord’s Prayer, “Your kingdom come, Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven” and really mean them. For we begin to understand how heaven visits earth in childhood, in hillsides of autumn colors, in final visits with loved ones, and in all those moments that delight and bless us. We begin to understand that even as these moments transform us, we, in turn, have the power to transform the earth in small, yet heavenly ways.

Of course, from time to time, we can expect to be grounded. Herein lies the magic in a swing, though. In the midst of the world’s brokenness, we’ve only to pump our legs again, pushing up towards that sweet spot at the end of the chain, and believing as Robert Frost claimed: “one could do worse than be a swinger of birches.”