Where Soft Hands are Essential

I am visiting my mom this weekend.  She is slowly passing.  Her memory and body slipping away.  She knows it but generally accepts her lot in life with goodness.  We have reached the stage where I try and tell her my truest truths; she was a great mom, she did a great job, her parenting regrets are not a part of my heart or mind, she often saved me, and assuredly her prayers did, her faith was always an inspiration for me to aspire to.  I have also started to look at her closely, to see her probably for the first time last, to really examine how she looks.  She is much smaller than she was, still gentle and quick to smile but now a member of those Ancient Ones, those we know last before we are those.  Yesterday I took a picture of her hands; I found them beautiful in their shared history with me.  They are good hands, servant hands, working and holding hands, hands that have lived.  For the first time, I really looked at them and saw for once, her hands as love.  I examined them, touching them and really feeling them as she sat kindly by not alarmed or seeing this as odd, (only a very old person will do this). Her hands are remarkably soft, much softer than mine.  I imagine as she has become an Ancient One her working hands have transformed into still hands and in the process have become amazingly soft.  Work has long since been laid aside as she now waits;  waits for her last journey to heaven, where I am sure; soft hands are essential.   

  

My Tennessee

Before me lies what has become a great force upon me, The Tennessee River, a liquid shimmering expanse that makes up most of my view of earth from Fair Haven.  Water, unlike land, is a moving thing, one you can see alive, an ever-present, moving, massive life.  But her physical weight is never burdened upon me nor the great force of her that is oft born by me.  It is her spiritual energy, her being, the ancient nature of her that gently pierces my heart softly awake; like a good thought that awakens you and nudges you deeper in the quilt and closer to your lover.  The earth and the mountains beyond have always been here but my Tennessee is always passing by; like a dear friend on a train, waving hello or goodbye as they pass my way.    

   

Piddlin'

It is raining.  All the trees are cloaked with ice.  A bitter cold day meant for soft house shoes, hot coffee, good books, warm lovers and piddlin’.  I have a Chinese student in my freshman 3-D class who used that word in response to my question, “what is your studio good for?”  In four weeks she has learned one of the great southern words for being. 

A piddlin' line of ryegrass 
I have been admiring for weeks.

 

A Song In E's Major

I have a student who is with her first child.  It happened as she is in her last semester of school preparing for her senior art show.  The event has suddenly dulled her previous art to irrelevance as she is now confronted with one of the truest meanings of life, the life of another being created inside one's own body.  Nothing outside of God in us can measure up to this one singular event reserved for women humans.  As I talked with her yesterday I was reminded joyfully again; this is how great art is made…life defy language through exquisite being; human beings being the most sincerely human.  Oh the joy of the burden of making work worthy of her new human being...becoming inside of her.    

A picture's worth a thousand blogs.

 

What's Behind That Light?

Every morning I sit in front of a window.  It is dark when I arrive and becomes light over the time I am there.  Almost directly in front of me, across the field, the other side of the road, buried in the forest beyond is a bright light.  All alone in my dark before dawn, this light always shines.  Sometimes I wonder if that light is much like God, that all my world is mostly dark but just behind that light is all light of forever, the single light is just my hole, my doorway, my glimpse into eternity.  There is hope in that one light across in the woods. 

   

Staring out the window

I am attending a ceramics workshop.  One where for two days you sit and watch a professional potter, in this case, two, make the work they are known for making.  If you’ve never watched a great potter throw pots on a wheel you have missed a significant gift of life.  It is like watching a campfire.  It is why we stare out a window.  It is God working and sowing Himself into our lives in ways we can’t explain; through our eyes, to our soul.  It is His courting us to Himself, an invitation to an eternity of this.  

 

 

You Learn A Lot by 64

I just turned 64.  It physically hurts to be 64.  However to be gifted with 64 years means you are old enough to begin to see some profoundness in life, earth, and eternity.  Love makes all things ok.  The body is best taken care of early.  The cosmos is exceedingly kind from the vantage point of earth.  Conscious awareness is not hard, is hugely beneficial, and is mostly untried.  Acknowledging God is as easy as breathing because breathing is free.  Being awake is better than being asleep but a good sleep makes being awake better.  A good wife is a lover, is 98.6°, and smiling is her natural facial expression.  These are the forward to the volumes of 64.   

The Starved Soul On The Ash Heap

I turned 64 two days ago and yesterday returned to my routine of meeting with 18-year old’s to urge them toward life.  There is a parable there.  One of my favorite stories is that of the Prodigal Son.  Although not the best line in the story I often teach on the line, “and when he came to his senses.”  In many ways this is the cause of so much of the unbelief that enslaves so many today; the None’s as they have come to be known.  That title itself is telling.  We all are prodigals in one sense or another and some of us, myself included, do walk ourselves into the proverbial pig stye.  In large part, it is because we have starved our senses to gorge our appetites.  The greatest role of our senses is to open us to the beauty of life’s experiences, the smells of chocolate chip cookies baking, the sight of blue skies just peeking out behind the grey skies that spread to the horizon, the warmth of your lover as you lay your cold hand upon her in the middle of the night, the sound of birds in the dark of dawn or the faint sound of Three Dog Night as you return to your studio, the taste of really good coffee when you awake to a long day.  We each have hundreds of thousands of senses received glories each day.  We are drowning in the glories of sights and sounds, smells and feelings as they wash over us like warm water on sore souls—

Souls we have now tossed on the ash heap of humanity, traded in for appetites gorged on sweets and giggles served up on numbing devices that leave us wonderless, the last clinging of the soul we tossed away.