UGH!!! Taking A 200 Pound Load On A Road Trip

We are in Chesterfield MO preparing to move on south and be home by evening.  We are both somewhat weary, not from any great effort other than the effort of moving ourselves around the earth.  Moving 200lbs, my current weight, requires a lot of effort, especially when I do it all day.  Another startling revelation of growing old is how much your weight bears on you.  Understand it this way; if you were in a car and carrying a large 100 lb. sack in your lap imagine how sore you would be after six hours.  That is what my 200 lb. body has become, a burden I bear.  Old age is a constant awakening to the vast effort of being alive.   

Demoing throwing while sharing my faith testimony at Hope Farm School.

A Coming to One's Senses

We made it.  We are at the Hope Farm School in Stockholm WI or truthfully, in a deep mountain valley, forest ringed, in a hope filled communion reminiscent of the communes of the 1960s & ’70s, peace, love, and understanding with God in Christ.  I guess this is as close to Eden’s Church as it gets; believers helping youngsters by growing crops, harvesting livestock, teaching, playing and trying to live in harmony with God, His earth, His love.  My lover and I are here to learn, to see if there is a way to tie our life to their life; to tie our people with their people, our talents with their talents to harvest in the white fields.  God is like a great silent cosmos moving through the cells of all declaring, I AM—Good.  That is where I am, Hope Farm School learning from my cells being aware, HE IS; a coming again to my senses.       

God Blessed America

My lover and I are crossing America again, south to north following the Forever Mississippi currently in Hannibal MO.  We haven’t trekked the country in several years.  Nothing has changed; mostly beautiful, empty, natural, spaces filled with growing abundance.  America the Beautiful is such an apt description.  Now however instead of hiking the land to see, we bask in the glow of our devices to pseudo see; their white light growing discord instead of abundance; eyes burned blind that cannot see.  I am a very simple person, my needs mostly met every day with God, His Most Ancient Living Word, a cup of good coffee, my lover always near, and a long view.  America has always offered me that but required me to go.  Go far in America, long quiet roads through a mostly isolated wilderness that seem to go on and on, and still, I am in America.  The wealth is overwhelming, growing, towering, flowing, it is always unimaginable, even in your memory, unless you witness it again and again.  The song God Bless America is better understood God Blessed America but you must go see to understand.  When He made this expanse of earth, He was having a Red-Letter Day.  

      

Dog Days Will Eventually Always Be Puppy Days

The dog days of summer have come slinking down our lane, more a cur than a dog.  It is hot, humid, and still this morning as dawn seems dulled by the heat of the night.  These are good studio days spent creating behind closed doors with the air conditioner making conditions right.  Currently, I am being hounded not only by late summer but by a long labor that comes with my latest project.  I began with earnest and a five-year plan but have readjusted my time frame to double that.  Ten years on a single project will hound anyone.  Surrounding that project is another which is dependent upon a small little angle child away off who must fund its realization.  That project is not art so much as it is Holy work.  Under the fall our visions far outshine our productions but we are encouraged by the coming labors in eternity where vision and reality will be the same. 

A peek at the vision in my studio.

     

Human Advancement

After church one day when I was five years old, my dad took me by the hand and hiked me up Big Rock Mountain in Crab Orchard Tennessee.  I never got over that experience.  All of my life seems to be tied to God and mountains.  In a world where most individuals seemed to be realized by the world on their devices, my greatest earthly advance occurred when some great person took me by the hand and led me on a great adventure in the wild.   

Advancing my family up the Brooks Range above the Arctic Circle.

A Thought That Became A Love Letter To My Lover

There is a startling reality that comes as one grows older, the fading away of yourself as a human.  It is hard to decern because it is so subtle, there are no true markers that it is actually occurring and I have never read anyone’s account of it but it is happening to me. Let me try to explain.  When I was a child I felt very important to my parents, as a teenager very important to my friends and sports teams.  As I grew into adulthood I was very important to my career and then to my children.  Still, later I was very important to the vocational department that I built and kept running.  All of those roles required a tremendous amount of me to be realized, by that I mean the vestment of me and others for and with me engaged so much of my being, physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually.  As I am moving into my later years I am meaningfully engaged with fewer and fewer people, tasks, and responsibilities.  It is not that I am not busy or that I have fewer relationships with other humans, it is that the meaningfulness of my contribution is less and less necessary.  It is also not a sad thing but more like a very slow passing of one's torch to those that will move it forward.  

Having said all of that there is the most silver of linings to my journey and that is my lover.  We are both going through this together but that does not adequately explain the silver.  What is happening is, what we both use to accomplish individually is now, more and more, taking the two of us to achieve.  The more we fade the more necessary we are to the other.  And here is the silver, most of the meaning of me is held only in her memory, she is the one that has experienced most of my life with me; the life that was so meaningful is now not so much lived as remembered being lived.  And the remembering is the necessity of still being, each to the other.  

A Most Amazing Beauty Grace

Several years ago my father died at the age of 68.  We knew it was coming, the doctors informing us he had but six months to live.  I wrote him a letter every day of those last months.  The morning I received word that he had died I drove the 4-hour trip to see him one last time.  When I arrived at the mortuary the lady at the desk was hesitant to let me back but I was grievously persistent.  She ushered me into a large room where he was laid out, naked, on the most beautiful slab of white marble, the hoses already connected to him draining away the dead fluids from his body.  It was him, his beautiful body still massive from the diseases that had caused his bones to grow so large.  His great chest, hands, and feet still holding the slight color of life.  I was stilled by how much I still loved his body that was no longer him.  I rubbed his head and talked to him unable to separate what God had already, him from his body.  It was a time of enormous clarity for me, of a love and awareness I had never had before nor since.  It was one of those moments of beauty that you carry with you, cherishing at the grace of God for sharing it with you.  

I made a work of art about it titled Amazing Grace that I have shown but once and then hid away in the woods in West Tennessee.  A week ago I loaded the work up and drove it to East Tennessee and with the help of my lover and two daughters, installed it in its final and appropriate place, Fair Haven, where it, my lover, and I will await the final, Great Reunion.

God is good.  God is great.  Let us thank Him.   

Amazing Grace