Wings and a Prayer

This great river has been put back to right. The human celebration of every summer holiday stirs it up into a heaving boil but it always mends itself back to natural. It’s right now, quiet, smooth and even the littles among the world, like the sweat bee on my computer with its iridescent wing, can enjoy its garden again.  A wedded bluebird is feeding his bride, the herons glide by, the deer feed in the shallows, and somewhere across toward the islands a goose is trumpeting. It is quiet as the earth can be filled with harmony and sweet peace.  Lying beside me is The Ancient Text, a soothing primer to it all, the Garden Almanac by God.  There’s a woodpecker’s rhythm, a fish breaks free of his water bonds and overhead a tiny plane; “a safe journey” I pray.  In the garden we have time for gratefulness of all kinds, even wings, those of the sweat bee and the Piper Cub. 

Paying My Debt To Remember

It’s breaking like a beautiful Memorial Day even as we somberly consider those whose days ended giving for us their last great measure.  I have my flag up, Old Glory went up at the break of dawn.  I would consider myself a patriot, I certainly love American and Tennessee and have tried to raise my children appropriately.   Betty’s parent’s family served honorable in WW II, her father shipped out from San Francisco to fight in the Pacific Theater across all the islands ending in Hiroshima Japan.  Her mom’s brothers all fought in the European Theater, her Uncle Joe Zitnick, a fighter pilot, was shot down and killed over Belgium.  My sister’s husband, Jan Jaggers, was an artilleryman in Vietnam, and my beloved neighbor, Mr. Lanny Edwards was a door gunner in a Huey in that same war.  God has granted this old red neck enough grace that even now I strain to keep the tears behind my eyes as I consider how many have given so much for me and mine.  I raise my heart to all of you!  I and my family will never forget you for what you did for all of us.  May your Memorial Days always be a remembering of us of you.  Thank You!!!    

Betty's Father

My Meaning Was A Gift to Me.

“Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me!”  That is my story, the only one I have.  I have never gotten over it nor moved far from it as the central theme of my life.  It is all true, always, every moment of every day, Amazing Grace, wretched me.  His lovingkindness is paramount in my understanding of him and me, I bring nothing, He provides it all.  This was true when I was six, it was true on November 10, 1986 and it is true this Sunday.  It is my greatest longing that everyone will come to know His Amazing Grace and themselves as the recipient of it.  Your value to Him is demonstrated in what He gave to save you, His son, crucified.  Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like _______________.  If you ever want to talk you can message me. 

I never knew the meaning of being Lee Benson until He gave it to me.   

  

Gray Snooze Alarm

Only gray on this morning, front yard, and then grey.  Gray is like the great peek-a-boo, never much of a color on its own but likes playing hide and seek with all the others.  Gray is soft, blending all the earth in stillness allowing time to slow down, the snooze soft alarm on morning, canceling early for “in a little while.”  Gray is friendly, saying “have another cup of coffee, I have this, the earth and all its glory are still here but lets all lounge around awhile before getting started.”  Gray on is like the day beginning when you say so, a long slow stretch atop flannel sheets, settling back in, reschedule to mid-morning, your alarm not going off.  Gray, a wonderful concept for mornings and for you.  

One side of our shore stabilization.

A Peanut Butter Jar Guy In A Terabyte World

I am beginning to wonder about all this information I’m accumulating.  For 40 years I lived without any information and now I have more information than I know what to do with.  I have to keep getting bigger “space” which sounds like some new class of demon, terabyte, in order to store all my information.  Every time IT gives me a bigger demon it stores my information in pits of hell I can’t find and am almost scared to look for.  Here is the problem.  I was raised in a time when you saved things like screws, washers, and wire because you might need them later.  I have old peanut butter jars filled with all this saved stuff.  That is my level of technology comfort.  So, I am a peanut butter jar guy in a terabyte world.

        

The Vice of Love and Care or That Cauldron is a Hoax

The greatest evolutionary riddle, where does love come from?  The common assertion that it is the adaptation to ensure survival rings so clinical, like proving light with a light bulb.  Now that I have grandchildren the matter is a paramount part of my life, a new love that physically places by heart in a vise of exquisite pain.  Only one thing ever prepped me for the experience; my mom and mamaw use to each began to weep when they would talk about certain of their grand and great-grandsons.  At the time I thought it peculiar like their emotions were unwarranted, strange because the individuals were generationally removed from them.  Now I know it myself and the old axiom, blood is thicker than water really means it grows thicker over the years until it is often the steel in the vice of love and care, the tie that binds—love; as if we conjured it up ourselves.  Even in 4.5 billion years, that cauldron is a hoax.  God is good.  All the time.  God is good.

Homesteaders In 2020

Fair Haven has awakened a sincerity in me that I never knew nor dreamed existed, the love and longing I have for 79 Countrywood Dr., Jackson, TN.  Fair Haven is yet untamed, the halter on but not much more.  The Tennessee rises out of its banks twice a year, the soil is shallow and not yet able to provide for much more than was already here and what does survive the deer eat.  Our small studio stands like a blunt glass-faced stone to the many storms that roll in from the west and the sun is intensified off the river.  We are off the grid and our driveway dead-ends at the end of the forest and the beginning of the river.  We put in all the utilities and amenities including the road that allow us to survive and bring in supplies.  We work continually making a homestead to which someday we hope to add a home.  Her wilderness never lays down and surrenders and great wisdom is required to know what needs to be tamed and what just needs to be kept at bay.  Countrywood Drive, however, is an oasis in the woods, 27 mature trees surrounding a solid brick home old enough to be completed married to her setting and connected to all the conveniences of modernity.  It’s a comfortable home needing only the love of an occasional remodel to continue to serve as our home.  The most meaningful is the ease by which we care for one another, she long since tamed to the wagon, we aging to mostly need the lift.  Fair Haven is a mustang, never bridled, and will need both of us to break her.   The key, like parenting, is to break her will but not her spirit, and hope to have the backs still strong enough to pull it off.  

              

Faded Memories

One of the greatest gifts of youth is its memory.  By the time you age enough to want to remember it you have mostly forgotten all but the good times.  The many indiscretions have long since faded—all memories seem to be blessed with the forgiveness of forgetfulness.  I only remember an idyllic youth, filled with friends, sports, and adventures.  I am no fool though, my youth was also filled with want, with deep wounds inflicted by the church and clearer still the many ways in which I was sorrowful toward others.  This walk down memory lane just got crossways with briars and gnarled rhododendron.  The trails of the prodigal always lead through the sty but in my case, my earthly father awaited on the porch beside my heavenly Father.  One of the greatest memories of my youth is that I always felt my parents to be proud of me or at least proud of who they knew I could be.  I guess my great memories are more due to my great parents than my great living.  Like I said, one of the greatest gifts of youth is its memory.  

       

Good Morning, Good Night, The Weekend Days

I love when the river has yet been discovered by the lotioned masses, all atop water toys that carve the river into a heaving jumble of moving humps all marching to a different drummer. The mornings are so still, the deer wade along the far shore while every bird awakes in flight.  Around noon the quiet will be put away, players will begin to play, lovers romp and teenagers’ race by immortal at mortal making speeds.  It will be the rush hours and will carry on till late afternoon.  Then just as soon as they came, all the speed and spirographs will die away.  They will haul off their machines, tuck them in garages, the TVs, iPhones, iMacs, video games and Netflix will be tuned in and life will return to normal.  Then once again the river and I will begin to stretch ourselves out, the sun will seep into the waning hour, the stars will awaken in the east and all the glory of every day will bow worshipfully before our Maker in a whisper, “good night.”

PS: One of the great rewards of Fair Haven is that the above only happens maybe 20 or 30 days of any year.  There is a mass flurry that opens the summer but fades quickly.  Mostly it is just quiet here.  

Presenting Ralph Lauren’s Assisted Living Collection

I have old person issues.  My doctor put me on baby aspirin about 3 years ago and now I bruise like my Mamaw did when was 90.  It's embarrassing.  I continually wear purple polka dots like they’re the latest thing off the rack on 5^th Avenue.  The other day I changed the belt on my riding lawn mower and two days later I could have walked the runway at Ralph Lauren’s opening summer collection.   

My designer.

Tennessee Waltz

I will drive across my beloved Tennessee today, every mile a devotion.  I will cling to the byways, the ridges and the many boarded up towns and hulking factories long since emptied.  It will continually remind me of my youth, my elders and the many days filed to my years and how many times I was washed up on her shores and welcomed home.  Tennessee is in me, sown ancestrally, like some ancient relic, sacred and deep down.  Most all my family was born on her and are buried in her as are and will me and mine.  I don’t know of any land that is so beloved cept maybe Texas which actually nicknamed us.  Even her name is like your lovers, when you say it out loud in the most intimate or desperate times, or like Jesus when all is lost but Him and saying his name is completely enough—Jesus—Betty—Tennessee.  I will traverse her again today and like a beloved we will court, quietly but surely, as we once again spend a day together. 

An artifact on a byway in East Tennessee built
by a master artisan bricklayer.

The Warmth of a Cold Mother's Day

Fog is sweeping up the Tennessee scattering cold everywhere.  34° out this morning and you can subtract 2 more beside the river but patches of gold fillings promise a beautiful Mother’s Day.  My mom is still healthy and well even though she has been quarantined for several weeks, she has taken it quite well.  Mom has lived a deeply scared but all together meaningful life.  She served the Lord most of it, the wife of a pastor, an often-sorrowful job but always with purpose which she sowed mostly to the poor and needy. She raised four fine humans all of which, through their younger years sowed a wide row of rebellion in her heart, have lived years of obedient balm to heal her wounds of their youthful indiscretions.  My mom's greatest testimony is that though she was raised in the most pitiful of alcoholic dysfunction she lived a life of functional obedience, never once have I seen her waver even though God only knows how often she had cause too.  To witness someone live a life of prolonged and consistent faith and to be fortunate enough to have that person as your mom makes one fortunate indeed.  The four siblings with their spouses will socially distance gather around her today and each will gratefully rise up and call her blessed, because of all people, we are the most blessed because of her.    

Visiting with mom two weeks ago.

   

Bluebirds and Quasars

A stony grey has been pulled over the land shoving spring back with cold clarity.  It lies softly over the Tennessee offering its quiet to the harried soul.  Days made for books, for writing, for laying with one’s lover sharing our warmth.  A breeze from the north promises cold rain and one’s thoughts turn to our new bluebirds bundled in our box.  It is barely a day, dawn just on, the sun also buried in the grey but its light brightens the cosmos of which rain clouds play no part.  Nature has its ways, from new birds and buds to quasars and galaxies and stony grey days for humans to be beings.   

We think there are 4 or 5 new bluebirds bundled
up there in our box.

Take The Roundabout To The Art of Praise

I have a trade secret that I often use in teaching art; “If all else fails make a circle.”  It sounds simple and often naive minds are unable to accept it but think of it this way.  Look at all the great things that have been accomplished by a circle, the wheel for example.  What about the progress made my cogs and gears all circles.  Longitude and latitude—all circles, and imagine all the math, science, and technological advances made because we learned to put a circle before 1 and after 1.  And one of my favorites, the halo.  One of the greatest concepts ever conceived in the heart of God, the circle, and then He was kind enough to share.  When all else fails you can always find a roundabout way to stop stopping and start praising.       

Another circle that has given me so much.

One Cries When One Has Been Saved

Yesterday afternoon Betty, Sarah, and I were returning from hiking the Bluffs of the Tennessee River.  We were driving west just the other side of Lexington when the sky in front of us and across the horizon to the north began rapidly to turn a deep black blue.  Almost at the same time the radio and all our cellphones erupted in the screeching alarm that proceeds a weather alert and the announcement that we were driving into a tornado warning.  I commented on it being dead calm, Sarah chimed in, “That’s the way it is before a tornado”, and Betty, who was driving, began to say we needed to turn around.  We topped a small rise and Sarah exclaimed “its windy ahead of us!” as we could see debris becoming airborne way ahead.  Simultaneously electric wires maybe a quarter a mile ahead exploded showering the four-lane with sparks.  We were now in a debris field and Betty was beginning to pray out loud.  I saw a crossover in the four-lane and said to turn around there.  As soon as Betty turned around Sarah said, “Mom if I were you I would floor it.”  We took off flying now fully engulfed in flying debris.  Our van was being shaken violently and often rose as if it was going to be separated from the pavement.  Betty was praying out loud and desperately asking me to find a turn off toward the south that looked clearer.  If we turned the van perpendicular to the wind it would put us broad face to the storm.  By now I was holding the wheel to help Betty keep us straight and both of us were praying out loud.  I told Betty to slow down to not assist the wind in getting us airborne.  We topped a small rise and there to the right was a school.  I told Betty to pull in there but we couldn’t find a cross over.  We passed the school and about 100 yards further on there was a cross over in the four-lane and we turned around briefly broadside to the wind and now driving right into the brunt of it.  Debris was flying everywhere as Betty drove into the parking lot.  There was a perfect little space in the corner of the school that was just big enough for the van and would put us into the lee of the storm.  I guided betty into it and we could immediately feel some relief from the driving wind.  I told Betty to quickly change seats with me as we crawled over each other and I told everyone to put on their shoes.  The wind continued to howl around us and we were engulfed in horizontal white rain but our tiny corner was shielding us from much of it.  We continued to pray our arms upheld now as we pleaded with God the Blood of Jesus and rebuked the storm.  It began to hail and the rain was being blown off the roof of the school and flooding our car with water as just inches to our left debris and continued to fly by.  I told Sarah to text our family and ask them to pray for us.  She said, “I already have!”  Our phones began to ping and she continually relayed messages to us from Sissy who had the storm on radar.  She was telling us to stay put that we were right in the teeth of it.  I had prayed myself out and as I stopped Betty began to pray.  Seconds passed and the storm continued to strengthen and then suddenly the hail stopped and a few seconds later the trees in front of the school stood upright again.  It was still raining but the wind was now gone.  Sissy called.  Her and Bo relaying us news from their radar.  The tornado warning was in effect for 10 more minutes but it had passed us.  We waited a few more minutes and then all held hands and thanked God for His protection.  As we pulled out giddy with our salvation Sarah said, “I think there was a time there when we all thought we were going to die!”  I said, “I believe someday God is gonna show us how many times our prayers to Him saved us.”  Betty, who had driven us through it, her voice trembling, began to cry; no words came.  One cries when one has been saved!

Our Holy Sanctuary in the storm.

The Kaleidoscope of the Quarantine

One fine result of the quarantine has been a renewed awareness of the day to day, the noticing of much of what we use to rush past.  And it also seems that God is in on it, providing us with one of the better springs in memory, more color, more songbirds, more caring.  If I have learned one thing in life it is the speed by which it passes, yesterday I was a carefree 16-year-old and the next day I am 62.  Life has a way of passing away and most of it is done passing.  Every life is a great epic, most of it written with fading ink but for some reason, it seems that this spring our ink well is filled with new and vibrantly meaningful colors.    

Yesterday at the Mississippi

Am I Living Worthy of the Ring?

I found three words today that are heart treasures—Mercy, felicity, epitome.  All were in different mines but belong in the same setting, the ring of the believer.  My mom has a birthstone ring, a desire of many women in the “old timey” days.  It’s a ring that has the birthstones of all her family.  The above three jewels are the birthstones of all followers, who, of no achievement of their own, are now heirs to the treasure chest of heaven.