Trending Warm and Quiet

It is raining when we get here, no sun and dark threatening.  We unload and the dogs are happy.  Everything is sluffing off.  There is no stress here.  The sky is just above us, grey and sad but the river is slick as ice and reflects all the grey which makes for meaning.  My lover begins to unpack, shirts, jeans, beautiful things and praise God she remembered my house shoes.  And on thanking God, I am grateful I have filled the wood box.  Our home is cold.  Been abandoned for three weeks and it's obvious, cold in every nook and cranny.  I begin the fire, coaxing, pushing, and then it is up and running.  Our home begins to warm.  I take a walk in the wet wood and when I return dinner is drifting its promise around.  We are here.  All else drains away and only quiet is here and it is fine.  Quiet is fine.  And so I rest and know rest is on the docket tomorrow—it is just my lover, two dogs, my latest art project, quiet and a fire that warms. I must tend the warm now but the quiet takes care of itself—it's trending warm and quiet. 

 

The Kiln God

As I have hundreds of times before I am sitting in front of a roaring kiln, dark early morn, reading the most Treasured Ancient Living Text, being present with God, drinking coffee, being quiet.  This is such living, being, alive.  When I was a young student I remember watching the grad students mold a small clay figure and place it at the top of the kiln and call it a “Kiln God” to ensure a good firing.  I never believed they believed it but I always did.  I was inwardly troubled by what I considered dangerous spiritual territory; Jim Croce knew you don’t “spit into the wind or pull the mask off the old Lone Ranger…”, and I knew you didn’t mess around with God.  As I sit here this morning I was talking to God and thanking Him that he was present even inside the kiln.  Not like I am present in the pots I make or the coffee I made and am drinking now.  No, He is present in that all things that are, in all that there is, are only because He continually wills them to be.  It is one of those profound mysteries that makes kiln gods a shot in the right direction, there is A Kiln God as there is One God Almighty, Owner of All—which clarifies WHO.  That is why sitting here watching a kiln is one of the most meaningful ways to spend time with Him who is truly The Kiln God.  

 

I Wish The New Model Me Came Equipped With A New Suspension

At some point in the last few years, my aging body got traded in for a newer model.   Many of the options my old me had, stamina and agility this new model isn’t equipped with.  The speed of action and reaction aided by flexibility, strength, and sharp senses of the former; again not part of the new.  Those add-ons made it possible to live fast and experience much but finally wore me out.  You know, I don’t actually remember trading that old rattletrap in for this new hybrid but it’s pretty decked out; slower but doesn’t need as much energy.  The base model Lee, which is what I got, comes with a much more tuned awareness of what is important for life.  Warmth, love, touch, smiling, pausing to see, prolonged alone quietness, being present, being quiet, doing quality acts and works, listening to people, animals, and the earth, meditating and reading quality literature about meaningful people, waving, and cruising back roads all standard on the new Lee.  This new model is something to live, its suspension causes me to feel a lot more of the pain of the road but the slower pace allows me to enjoy more of what is important on the road of life.   

       

America The Beautiful, An Absolute Truth

When all reason is lost.  America is the greatest country ever established on earth.  Let me begin by saying, yes we have problems.  Having acknowledged that I will cite just a few examples.  First our people.  For decades I have traveled extensively all across America and everywhere I go I only find kind people willing to help; people of every race, color, and ethnic background.  Secondly, America has the infrastructure that not only allows us easy access to every corner of America but every corner of the planet.  Thirdly our country is beautiful, with millions (3.797) of square miles of unspeakable beauty.  A bonus, most of it is empty, with the powerful potential of productivity, massive natural resources, and big, I mean really big.  Fourth, we have access to cheap abundance.  It has been below freezing here with six inches of snow on the ground for a week.  I walked into Kroger’s yesterday and the produce section was overflowing with every colorful fruit and vegetable from all over the world.  It is one of the marvels of my travels, going into any town and finding inexpensive food and produce in abundance.  Fifth, our healthcare is the envy of the world and on every street corner.  I took someone to the hospital yesterday to have a heart procedure and picked them up a few hours later and took them home.  I have had first-hand experience of the massive numbers of super-intelligent doctors laser-focused on using cutting-edge medicine to save one of my most treasured ones.  I could go on and on but I will end with these two thoughts.  It is 7° outside and I am warm, well-fed, cheap gas in my car, devices connecting me to a world of information and entertainment and above all else, safe, free to express myself, and free to worship tomorrow.  And my last thought is this.  There are a few of us that hold microphones that are constantly screeching how bad we are to the point many of the simplest are lining up behind them.  They produce hate.  One road trip, one trip to the doctor, to the market, or to their neighbor would prove them all wrong but they have eyes that can’t see, ears that can’t hear, and hearts of stone where their love has long since grown cold.  America the beautiful is an absolute truth, I’ve been there.  And if anyone is saying otherwise, they are lying.   

Our family over our head in one corner of America the Beautiful.

Collecting Exquisite Data

Can you imagine thinking up your senses, seeing, hearing, tasting, touching (wow I love that one), and smelling?  Imagine being in a vacuum of nothing except a senseless human and thinking, “how will I outfit this being?”  Unfortunately, I doubt anything would come to mind, even if we had 4.5 billion years and we were all in the vacuum together.  Our senses are such a kind concept and perfectly matched to where we find ourselves.  One more thing, our senses are not automatically nuanced nor fine-tuned.  An astonishing fact of my life; as my faith has grown and my walk with God longer, my senses, evening though dulling in their physical receptiveness, have astronomically heightened in their spiritual awareness.  By this I mean my senses bring me much more exquisite data as if the data is colored by the Divine or being tuned to recognize more and more of the Divine, a living with an exquisite understanding of more and more of the things I see, hear, taste, touch, and smell. 

New work with yeast, blue, honey, dirt, and light.

    

Listening To His Quiet

How quickly we forget the stilled silence snow brings, the silence that comes in no other way.  I stand upon my porch and listen to it, in the morning, evening, and night reveling in the sincere act of listening to silence.  I am in a season of my life when God is quiet.  I hear him only in His Word or in others writing about him and in that my faith is pushed forward.  Blind Chance is such a heinous idol because we can believe, utterly believe, staking our life and eternity on him without ever having to think of belief.  It is like listening to quiet but not hearing it.  Blind Chance is not hopeful, kind, or powerful it is just eternal quiet—no sound.  But in the quiet brought by snow, I can hear the Still Small Voice of Almighty God in my life when I  cannot hear him in most other ways.  That is why I stand on the porch throughout the day and listen—I can hear Him, Eternally Being Present with me in a way He can only be when His snow amplifies His Quiet. 

His Quiet from my porch.

   

To Also See

One of the sincerest gifts received in a life of faith is a keen awareness or, as the Bible puts it, “eyes to see”.  I do not know if this gift is specific to artists or universal but I do know my eyes continue to awaken me, to nudge me into consciousness of beauty.  And this awakened noticing creates a quiet awe for God.  Awe disconnected from awesome, an utter sense of worshipful gratefulness, a momentary realization of God as Lord Gardener, as Exuberant Creator.  And in that stillness one realizes that all the Earth and Cosmos actually do proclaim Him, uttering ecstasy of the fact that they exist and sharing with us a moment of gratefulness that we can see them and know, as they know, God made them.  It is a moment here, a twinkling there, a momentary sharpened vision when we know we are saved by The Great I AM—to also see.    

Betty and I were up late last night.  At one point I looked out the window
and saw the gentle curves of the snow and the stark lines of our
tree's shadows.  Over the course of the evening, I went back several times to 
look again.  Around midnight I ventured out to take images.  Another great
thing about having eyes that see is how obvious an image does not.  Those
are fox tracks along our front yard.  He's a regular that I feed. 

 

Reporting From Fort Warm

I have lost all control.  There is an iron blanket of bitter cold laying atop my world and I can’t move it.  It also brought its ravishingly beautiful daughter Snow, to aesthetically soften the blow, but the bitter keeps me admiring her from inside my window panes.  I am up against them and want to tap out but these two ain’t having it.  They have me in a cold half nelson and keep whispering they ain’t letting go for several more days. The good news is my solitary confinement comes with my lover, paid heat bill, plenty of food, art supplies to keep going, and my dog.  Reporting from Fort Warm, I have lost all control, but maintaining.   

1°

My weather App says it feels like 1° outside.  I don’t know that I’ve ever felt one degree so I went outside in the dark in my pajamas to experience it.  It is bitter!  Didn’t want to experience it too long.  Came back in and it struck me that it’s Valentine’s Day which means my lover and I will warm each other with our 98.6° hearts.  God is good.  God is great.  Let us thank Him.   

What 98.6° looks like.

Victor McKheen

2-6-2021

We got the word yesterday that my Mamaw’s last surviving sibling had died.  He was 94.  They were a big family, my Mamaw the oldest and only girl, with 8 brothers.  They were salt Americans, hard workers, quiet, kept to their business and out of others.  Several went north during hard times to find work and never came back.  He was one of them.  They are all gone now.  All the members of our family that belonged to that greatest generation have now passed into history.  It is a strong, and prosperous history, perhaps America’s greatest; only time and the rest of us left will tell.  There is a wife of one brother still living but of that one family, that great family, they are all gone.  But I guess they will never be gone really, because they were those that helped build a country, to put us on the world stage, saved us all from tyranny, built the factories, roads, and bridges, ironed it out, smoothed the way, and left it far better than they found it; our America was built by The(se) American’s The Beautiful. 

Lost and Found At The Super Bowl

I was lost yesterday.  I have never missed a Super Bowl and spend the whole day watching the pre-game but yesterday I seemed to have fallen down a rabbit hole.  I am from the generation of the NFL and AFL, Joe Namath, Ali, Hey Jude, and House of the Rising Sun.  Billy Graham, Abraham, Martin and John, and American Women carried our torches.  It was peace, love, and understanding, no war, and blacks in my dad’s Southern Baptist Church.  It was The Way We Were.  I finally started to understand when the game started.  I know football.  And then Bruce Springsteen did the best thing of the entire 7- or 8-hour program, the Re-United States of America and I felt like I was back on my home turf.    

  

No More Flaming Sword at the East Gate

Betty and I worked all day yesterday making a trail up our mountain.  We’ve been working on it for a while and have a couple hundred feet complete but it’s just a start; haven’t even begun to go up, still meandering around the shoreline.  I love working on it.  It is hopeful labor, hard work that makes it all the more hope-filled.  As we quietly work in the woods I often stop and sit on a log or a hump on the shore and look out on the earth.  God must take great pleasure in his creation, earth, but I am certain there is a certain amount of nostalgia, His longing for the re-creation, the new earth.  I know the trail we are making is for us and after us may return to the wild, the briars and thorns evilly at work again entangling earth into their dying desires.  But not for now.  Betty and I are sons and daughters of King Gardner and as he will make all things new one day, we are laboring at subduing today.  We are deeply drawn to remake the garden, it’s been in us since we were banished from it, the labor, the sweat to regain that which we lost.  It is God’s gift to us, the nostalgia for a true Fair Haven or Eden as it were; a longing to make a trail to the East Gate where the flaming sword will be no more, and finally, ever finally we are welcomed Home.   

Resting on a hump of the shore.

   

Why you don't have a third eye in your cheek.

Yesterday morning I was talking to my daughter on the phone and she exclaimed, “Oh dad you should see the sky.  It’s so beautiful.”  “Take a picture and send it to me,” I said.  She did and then said, “Oh it is nothing like the real thing; I sure am glad I’m not in charge of eyes.”  I laughed and said I understood.  I take pictures all the time and it never looks anything as good as what I see.  I told her I was going to write down what she said and share it with my class.  She laughed and said, “Dad it is just because I’ve heard you say it so often, like “boy I sure am glad I’m not in charge of rain!””  I laughed and thinking of our newest, hottest gadget, the iPhone 12, I said, “yes, if we were in charge of eyes we would have a third one in our cheek.”  God is good.  God is great.  Let us thank him…” as we chuckle.  

 

A Preaching Plant

I never tire of the wisdom of creation.  Yesterday as I walked down our hall I glanced at the plant in our foyer.  It’s a love plant that Betty’s mom gave her.  It has been in our foyer for years, been cut back to a nub several times but keeps growing.  What startled me yesterday is how it had so aligned itself with the sunlight that came through the window it sets in front of.  The window is tall and thin, a frame for our front door, and the plant has grown perfectly aligned with it so that its whole body enjoys the light available to it.  There is a sermon there, a glorious sermon of kindness and wise obedience.  Preach on plant.   

Two Days Ago, Knowing, Meaning, Being

I am 63 today.  I know nothing of the day I was born 63 years ago.  I may already be 63 or it may be some other specific time today but I am 63 today.  I can remember when my youthful arrogance would have thought 63 years old was finished, what good could you possibly be at 63?  The real good is, at 63, I am so much more aware of the good.  My star is burning, my lover sleeps safely, we have loved our way to a kingdom of 19 Benson’s, our home is warm, and God through Christ is my Father.  He is responsible for this ongoing and ever-increasing awareness of the beautiful meaning of being.  His awakening of me through salvation is as dramatic as He proclaimed it to be, “You must be born again.”  Nothing had prepared me for the meaning that would accompany that; an intensity of knowing of meaning of purposeful being.    

My virtual party.