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.  

 

The Kind Act Of Sharing The Infinitesimal

Years ago, God allowed me to know the deep and abiding kindness of rain. There are few things so kind, shared in such tiny portions by the infinitesimal. Each small drop is a miracle of worshipful, altar-building proportion, bearing a greatness entirely unrelated to its size. This is why I often sit and pray earnestly to the Conceptor and Creator of rain, for conception itself is far more difficult than creation, but creation means He owns every drop. Every one He shares with us is, in itself, an act of profound kindness.  Can you imagine the praise required to thank Him for the rain He is sharing with us this morning? It makes me smile.

 

The Marianas of Life

The pains of life are many.  We cannot live an abundant life without accepting the abundance of pain and sorrow, the deaths, the deep hurts, the tragedies, the senseless sorrows, the burdens, the dying off, and putting away.  The many lacks, the withouts, the starvings and bloodletting, the evil, the violence, the hatred, and apathy.  Oh, the sorrowful trenches of life.  But in all the trenches, the marianas’s of despair, Christ alone allows me to remember the mountain tops, to see them, to read his record of them, the abundance, the everlasting, the no more tears, the lion lying down with the lamb. This wholeness will be me and mine forever and evermore.  Death is the final injustice, the final tragedy, the ultimate bottomless trench, without Christ.  But in Christ, it is the final and ultimate victory doorway to complete and utter fulfillment of life.  It is life and life everlastingly abundant.   

My Chartres

We should each have a cathedral in our lives.  For years, I’ve been drawn to the great cathedrals of Europe, those sacred works of the Medieval and Renaissance periods, created by humans to meet with the Lord God Almighty. They were built by people who believed, truly believed. I’ve visited many of them, first with my family, and later with as many art students as I could take. Each visit deepened my belief that we all need such places in our lives. A space where we commit ourselves to meeting God, the great I AM, Maker of heaven and earth.   If we believed, really believed, what space would we create to meet with Him?  Here is a picture of mine.  I hope you will make yourself a cathedral.  It is part of living well. 

   

 

The Cure For Our World, A Daily Walk in the Woods

It is important to write, to record your life, when you lived and what was true on that day.  I went for a walk in the woods, now fully canopied in green as a grand Cathedral.  A slight rain had fallen, and the forest was wet and quiet.  Quiet is the best hymn to accompany being.  

I saw a tortoise sharing my trail.  I call them turtles.   A turtle is an ancient thing, akin to a diamond or a piece of coal.  It is a big event in my morning.  

I picked stones into piles to build our graveyard wall.  A sacred act.  Sacred acts are treasures I give myself.  I live in a treasure box, Fair Haven, with my Fairy Princess Lover.  

I saw two more turtles.  Three in a morning.  That is a first for my life; Three ancient of days, calling me to walk daily in the woods with The Only and Most Ancient of Days.