The Gift of Utter Failure

I became an artist out of sheer desire for meaning in life.  I had no clue how it and I were going to survive, but I knew it was my best bet to self being and I just gambled on it.  Looking back, it was evangelizing me.  It is that simple.  It was God in Christ in art and beauty that was bringing me to my senses to lead me out of the sty I had made my home.  They did all the rest and gave me a life I did not even have the vocabulary to give imagination to my mind and heart to what was happening to my life.  The life they gave me was abundant, easy, and hard-free, it was as if I was born with the animation to be an artist and all I had to do was continue to step into me.  It is a great mystery to be gifted yourself after such utter failure of trying your hardest to be yourself.    

Found this in the woods yesterday.  One of the gifts is 
getting my blind eyes to see. 

 

 

A Grey Hallelujah

Sometimes in the greyness of days, one after another, life becomes as clear as it can be.  It seems to be still enough to think about seeing, to say, “Did you see what you see?”.  As if the grey of the world gives me time to see the color of my own life.  I am gifted with stillness and quietness, the last home at a long, dead-end, nicked out in the forest, a small plot, bound by a mountain behind and the river in front.  Life is a grand experience, truly, “a stage.”  Oh, but what a stage.  I guess this is what I see, the most profound seeing I am constantly seeing, the natural world “stage.” And what does the stage cause me to perform, what does it prompt me to be, to say, to believe? 

“Oh what a Savior.”  

 “Once I was straying in sin’s dark valley

No hope within could I see

They searched through heaven 

And they found a Saviour

To save a poor lost soul like me

Oh, what a Saviour! Oh, hallelujah.  

 

The Exquisite Palace of Suffering

I place myself in quiet solitude in the morning and several times throughout the day,  mostly seeking the Ancient of Days. In the quiet times of life, I experience sincere thoughts on life, my life, and the lives of loved ones.  Experience is the right word; these times are often powerful, meaningful, and deeply experienced.  This morning, in the quiet of dawn, I was given this title about my body’s suffering from becoming old.  I have known and experienced all my body's exquisite feats of living, and now I am experiencing its suffering of living.  The biggest surprise of my life, the painfulness of my exquisite palace as it gets old.  

My daughter is in Italy and sends up pictures of Palaces 
around the lake where they are staying.

 

Thanks For Our Freedom and a Bar of Soap

I was inch deep in a layer of suds when it dawned on me how fortunate I was to have a bar of soap.  I have been to places where soap was not available, not a single bar to be had, and no way to get one.  No soldier fought and died to give me a bar of soap, but soap is one of the small results of just such sacrifice.  Freedom means freedom to make and sell soap.  Freedom also means people have to die to obtain and keep it.  Many Americans have forgotten how unbelievably fortunate we are.  God bless America.  God bless those men and women who pick up arms every day to keep us free.  And God bless the families of those who gave the ultimate sacrifice for our freedom.  Happy Memorial Day, from someone who is blessed enough to have a bar of soap.

P.S. 1.7 - 3 billion people worldwide do not have a bar of soap.  

We just got Betty's father's gravestone from the VA. 
His ashes will be buried in our family graveyard 
atop Brown Mt., named in his honor, behind our home.  He served 
in the South Pacific, ending up in Hiroshima, Japan.   

   

 

The Abundance of Pledging One's Troth

Getting old is the greatest challenge of my life. It is a life-and-death grudge match, a winner-take-all fight to the finish, an all-out war to the very end. It is intense. Every day brings another battle, will I press on, or will I surrender? Will I stand and move forward, or sit and wait for the inevitable?  Challenge follows challenge because pain is now the price of overcoming. I can choose to sit still, or I can continue on with this partnership of pain and living. Getting old, for me, has become that simple: accept the pain, shove it aside, and keep living.  I live outdoors, in the woods, under the sky, in the work of seeing, building, tending, holding on, and experiencing life fully. Yet all of it now comes with pain: some nagging, some sharp, some downright darnable. That, for me, is life now.  And that is the final offer, live or merely exist; create or withdraw; experience the present or live only in memories of my past, engagement, or divorce.  Really, it comes down to choosing the joy of living, even when that joy includes pain. My body has racked up the miles, 68 years.  Every joint, tendon, muscle, limb, the whole, has accumulated miles from living life full-on.  And still, oh, the joy of living. The daily invitation of life itself. The abundance of pledging one’s troth anew to the Holy One, who still whispers to my worn and aging body: “I have come to give you life, and life to the full.”  

We bike in the woods every morning.  Living is so much 
better with a partner who also chooses to live.

 

Smile Now

I spend a lot of time thinking these days on the compression of life.  It seems that 68 years in a 68-year-old mind is but a moment, a brief whisper of faintness in the reality of the moment you consider it.  How could 68 years pass so suddenly?  It is wholesome to think this, a great incentive to live these moments with purpose because years or but moments in our “mind's life.”  

I was looking at my eye this morning, examining it because it's somewhat ornery.  It suddenly dawned on me that my eye was examining itself, seeing it seeing.  

These two thoughts are somehow related, at least in my “mind's eye!”  Smile now. 

My warm footprint on our cold tile floor.

 

This Is All A Gift

There is great joy in knowing you can make nothing.  I was sitting beside the river yesterday, allowing the balm of natural beauty to do its kind work upon my soul and me.  It suddenly dawned on me that there was nothing here that I could make.  Then, like a twinkling of lightning in me, I was lit up with the joy of this thought; in all the glorious beauty of the universe, there was nothing I could make, no single part of it.  What great joy of knowing that all this beauty was made, every leaf, star, and cloud.   It was created with no help, not a single moment of thinking or doing by a single human in all the worlds, added a single, tiny, itty bitty part of it.  It is just here.  I sat by the river, slowly moving in front of the mountains, below a lapis sky as green grass cooled my feet, and birds fluttered everywhere, and was filled with wisdom.  This is all a gift.