On The Road Again

For the past 35 years, my lover and I have spent a considerable amount of time with our family creating Benson Sculpture and traveling around the country and the world creating sculptures. Today we begin again.  Sissy and Oliver join us as we drive to Zac and Britt’s to install Benson Sculpture's newest work.  Zac won a large commission, and we are all working the install this weekend. “On the road again, just can’t wait to get on the road again, making sculpture with my family and my friends, and I can’t wait to get on the road again.”  Thanks, Zac, and you to Willie.  Images to follow. 

Our last major work, Seven Pillars.

 

Drop Stones In The Sea Somewhere Beyond the Ordinary

The infinitesimal nature of my own being, when set against the vastness of the night sky, draws me toward an inclusion in Someone ultimately powerful, even omnipotent. It touches the soul in me and awakens an ever-increasing longing. I have always been a gazer, a long-looker. I was the kid in school who stared out the window, imagining all the places there were to go and all the things there were to see. A window has always been my favorite form of indoor entertainment, a kind of portal transporting me to the heart of God.                                                                                                                                                          When I was in the Navy, just before we would leave port, I would fill my pocket with rocks. Once we were finally in blue water, I would stand beside the bulkhead and drop them, one by one, overboard and marvel at the experience they were having. I wanted to live that kind of meaning myself.                              I did not understand any of this when I was young. I only knew that my imagination seemed to carry me somewhere beyond the ordinary. Now I know better. It was God all along, wooing me to life and “life more abundantly.”   

Some of those who helped me drop stones in the sea.

   

 

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.