The Great Overlooking Love

The great awareness that I mentioned yesterday has one fundamental result in our life; love.  There is no greater evidence than this growing care and burden for everyone and everything that springs up from you, a care I can only name love.  It is not love as I had had but a wholly different kind, one that was so different as to first and always make me aware that it is not of me, but it also is a gift, like that of breathing or the sun shining.  It is a love that first acknowledges Some One’s love for me as extravagant and secondly, makes me know that the gift shared with me must likewise be shared by me.  The kicker is that its extravagance demands my own extravagance, which is the rub.  It seems that I do not love to show love to my recipient but actually to thank The Some One for showing it to me.  It is like an “overlooking love” that doesn’t so much see the loved as much as it causes me to see me as undeserving of The Great Overlooking Love that loved me. 

“We love because He first loved us.”  1 John 4:19   

Cora as a toddler on Big Rock Mountain.

   

The Outlandish Kindness sharing the process

I must confess that I don’t really enjoy my body getting old—it can be a chore just to get my britches on.  However, our body aging is one of the easiest ways to know The Truth.  Age seems to have made me much more aware—no, no, no—much more sensitive to the Divine Nature of all.  The utter kindness in the relationship between my breath, trees and the sun is one example of thousands that demands first that I pay attention and secondly requires my grateful acknowledgment.  I cannot be thankful to the tree or photosynthesis or lungs because they are incapable of consciously accepting my gratitude.  There must be A One because the basis of all of these seems to be kindness, extravagant kindness toward me personally.  Who would you suggest is kind enough to think it up, create it and then lavishly share it?  Age seems to force me to see this Outlandish Kindness and demand gratefulness to either a process or Some One.  It always seems to make sense that gratefulness is offered to Some One.       

A Fair Haven In The Sea Of Aging

The home is clean, floor swept, dock scrubbed, laundry done and put away.  Summer draws to a close today for this old man.  It’s all neatly wrapped and packed away.  My lover sleeps as I sit and watch the river will end with the posting of this blog. I walked away yesterday, testing the waters I suppose, and turned and looked back at her and she was a sight; nestled in the hill surrounded by the forest laying up our mountain.  She’s not a home as much as a dream, a safe harbor for old bodies and old boats that need one, a fine port in the sea of aging; our  Fair Haven.   

The Lesser Light Show

I saw two moons this morning as the full moon admired herself in the river smooth.  It was still way dark but I was awake and thought I would secretly watch her.  I got up and went outside and sat and she dazzled as only those that think they preen in private can do. An ambulance cried away off and a truck jake braked down a hill somewhere to the west, a lone boat came by, he too unaware he was being watched and then as my eyes roamed, as peace allows, I spied a satellite overhead.  But the moon was the show.  I watched till she quietly set to the south never aware that she was the cause of praise, the “lesser light” had stolen the show she didn’t even know she was performing.

Bad picture of a great show.

Slow Enough To See The Course

I woke up sometime in the middle of the night hearing a long soft moan.  I got up and looked out the windows and a tug with barge was slowly moving down river engulfed in fog.  All that was visible were her running lights like a dot-to-dot puzzle of my childhood.  I love old boats in fog, plying away at their task, moving slow, wise to their plight; reminded me of my own plot; moving slower, aware of my station.  The older I get the greater the mystery, all seems somewhat hidden but I still seem drawn to The Great Solution.  Even this morning there is a spit of gold light where the sun is splintering through the fog to assure me it’s there but I had to get old enough to be slow enough to see it.  It is there—as surely as The Solution.