An All Out War...Always

Life is an all-out war to find meaning.  Most people give up after a few dynamic searches in their youth and life itself, the life they have becomes the meaning they try to make of it.  But my life is not that meaningful in bringing me meaning.  It eventually drops into entertaining me and my appetites, and that becomes a downward spiral of ever-decreasing returns as your body becomes less and less able to live up to what entertains you.  I need something that can bring meaning to me at 28 and me at 68 but, more importantly, ever-increasing meaning and purpose in a body that can be it or, better yet, a body that can DO it.  How?  To completely and wholeheartedly commit to being with God, in Christ, through the Holy Spirit every morning, as with an oxygen tank a thousand leagues under the sea.  He will give you lifelong meaning and purpose, but more importantly, he will give it to you one day at a time.  The here's only purpose is to prepare you for the hereafter, and the hereafter for you being there.   

The Three God and others; Thank You

Sometimes being is so overwhelming that I have to bow my head and talk to God.  The very gift of being, the ecstasy of it, the profound nature of it, undoes me.  And often, in these moments of still, silent, exquisite meaning, I am reminded of the Three God and all the people who have helped me to get to know being in this profound way.  

The full moon fell in the river.

Baby, That Ain't Me

I am trying to hold a half acre of twelve at bay.  It is a job, an all-out struggle.  Nature is relentless, a literal growing force that never takes a break, exuberant in summer, pushing out everywhere and stockpiling roots underground all winter.  I have tried to learn how to work with it, to let it help me, but it is not a great partner.  It likes to go it alone.  And every time I plant something as an offering of inclusion, she sends a deer or rabbit over to eat it.  You would think that my wanting to have dominion over ½ acre and leaving her 11½ would be more than generous on my part, but deep down I know that she will never be happy until she takes it all back and lets it be totally overgrown, wild and free,  as her natural state of being.       

On top of our mountain, Mount Brown, where 
she is totally free to be herself.

 

The Sweet Joy of Graceful

I used to be graceful!  Could run like flying, could leap boulder to boulder, swim like a wave, hike the high places, catch the long ball.  No longer.  My gracefulness was cut out by a 150 hp Evinrude.  But my great blessing is I married graceful.  My lover is at home beside the mountain stream, on the ballroom dance floor, tent traveling, or walking the halls of Versailles.  Her body turned 74 yesterday, and a gift she gave us both was to slalom as we both did when young and unbound by the ages of the old.  Her body of grace graced my soul with joy as joy only comes to the sweet kindness of long togetherness.  Our lives together have been tragic and ecstatic but idyllic all along.  We sat as lovers in the evening watching the sun roll down behind the Crab Orchard Mountains far to our west, held hands, each meditating on her turning 74 as an angel of gracefulness, and in our oneness, I was graceful(filled) too.    

    

 

A Whispered Blessing

Stop!  Can you hear it?  The earth is beginning to groan under the scorching heat of long summer.  It is dropping a few yellowed leaves of burden, turning brown at the edges, a droop here, a fading flower there, and a whisper, “Please, Good God, a little rest!”  Can you hear her?  She is slowing, stilling before her Lord, “I have served You well; I multiplied Your treasure, greened and brightened every corner of Your earth; I have been faithful; again!”  

And this is the whisper to lean in and hear: “Well done, My good and faithful servant.”

A good and faithful leaf.

 

Stardust

I sit in my hot tub in the dark of night looking at the stars as they move across the same heavens Adam gazed at.  I follow the many satellites, wonder what they are doing in the planes that move silently over me, and listen to Willie’s Stardust album, waiting on September Song to play.  It is the life theme of my time left on earth.  I am in the fall of life, and fall is my time of year.  I reflect and plan what has been put by and what I need to plant.  I think of coming warm fires, a new year, and what a 68-year-old body is capable of doing and what it might need; to do it. My body is a marvel of engineering Holiness, made special just for me to be just the me I was made to be at 68.  It now reminds me quietly, and viciously, that life, all life, is a gift made to wonder “In my heart there always will remain, My stardust melody, The memory of love’s refrain.”   

A Reunion, "On A Slow Train Bound for Nowhere"

I graduated from high school 50 years ago this year.  It was 1976, our country's bicentennial.  It made us feel special, unique, as only an 18-year-old can feel, like the world was made for us.  I came to high school as I did for almost all grades, from another town, in the middle of my freshman year, my dad taking another church.  I felt like an outsider, didn’t belong, and didn't want to.  I was good at sports, which had always served me well, like a cloak that made me someone when I was no one.  It was a time of greats, great angst, great loves, great meaning, great losses, when your total memory was 18 years, and all experiences were exquisitely profound, and you would die for a small band of brothers and sisters.  It was 3 1⁄2 years, a little less than a quarter of my life then, but now at 68, it makes up half the memories I remember.  I left that town “and took off for the sky” and never came back except when I think about “The Way We Were.”  Oh, to find myself “on a warm summer’s evening on a train bound for nowhere” with a few of those who make up many of the memories of my heart.