Memorial Day

If America has given anything to the world it is our blood.  It encircles the earth, girds its latitudes and longitudes.  *God bless our fallen ones!

*Joe Zitnik, Betty’s uncle, shot down over, Belgium, WW II.

Lee's Parable or A Sharp Two Edged Sword

*God, Father, your son enters Jerusalem to the singing of Hosanna.  Hosanna means to urge you for deliverance.  That was surely what they needed and we as well; all day every day.  He then cleaned house.  That would be a good start to anyone’s day; clean our room and put everything in order.  He then left and spent the night with friends.  Another good idea, spend time with friends.  Then he returned to his work the next day and on the way, he was hungry for breakfast, saw a fig tree, went to get a fig and it didn’t have any so he cursed it and it immediately died.  This is so aligned with Your/His teaching of bearing fruit.  But it did seem sorta radical.  But as I thought on this I thought about how the Bible teaches that You know every star by name.  I imagine there are a lot more stars than trees.  It wouldn’t be beyond the realm of imagination to think Jesus knew this tree well and it had always been a slacker, a non-believing tree, a tree that took all of Christ’s goodness, soil, rain, and sunshine but never produced a crop.  So Christ did what the tree asked for, it can go its own way.  And the parable is that our own way leads only to death.  

His disciples then said, “wow how did that tree die so quick?”  This story is like a fairy tale but then all of the Bible, everything we know about You is a great, the greatest Fairy Tale; because it is true.  

I had better be bearing fruit!

Hosanna, please deliver me to a fruit-bearing life!

*Thoughts on Matthew 20-22

Hubble image of stars Teddy, Freddy, Eddie, Betty...wouldn't it be 
great if God named them all in rhyming verse.

Poor Pixar

I am sitting inches from a downpour.  Been raining for days.  We needed it.  Been a dry spring.  I like sitting near rain.  It is like sitting next to the Burning Bush.  Something so miraculous, so thoughtful, so creative, one of the greatest of kind acts.  A concept of fairy tales, fantasy yes, but in no way reality to our advanced post-modernist reality.  No, we do Goggle, Tesla, and Twitter, but rain, that’s a cartoon fantasy best developed by Pixar.  Too big!   And anyway God already did it.  It would be a remake for Pixar.   

  

Shaggy Bohemian-ness

We have arrived at Fair Haven.  If my senses didn’t tell me my sleep would; blissful and long.  We will summer here.  It is quiet, peaceful, and filled with ancient nature and wild things.  It is away, off-grid, at the end of a dead-end and we and wild things are all there are.  Now nature does fight us, its wild growing needs constant taming but is never really tamed but mostly held at bay.  It requires work to be even mildly hospitable but its hospitality is a welcome to its wildness not acquiescing to our civilized softness.  It requires a bohemian-ness of us, live and let live, accepting a tad of dirt, a might less tidiness, shagginess is mandated.  But above all else God is present; He is the garden God, time and stillness, quiet and solitude are our every day, where walks with him are more part of living instead of a set-aside.  He is our every day, every evening, every putting to rest…He is our Fair Haven, us with He.

evening cruise

Altar named To The Uttermost

On occasion, life, your own very living life is threatened.  It is startling.  The idea of not living, of the ending of your earthly days, grips your heart and mind in a heinous vise of managed fear, like walking a trail beside a thousand-foot cliff, complete awareness, fatality is so close.  And then you are pardoned.  You get the call.  The reprieve.  And you are transported from the cliff's edge to a beautiful mountain meadow, sunlit, full of wildflowers below a cerulean sky.  Birds sing, breezes blow and you are laying warmly beside your lover.  God does these things.  Death is evil.  God is good.  How does one respond to this God, God life-giving?  I have found it helps to build an altar; stones stacked upon earth, a marker, mine Ebenezer.  

  

 

Difficult Platform to Teach From

I am finding it harder to be in educational relationships with my students.  The greatest challenge is to lay aside most of my life's meaning as a means of understanding theirs.  A great hindrance is that so much of my youth experiences are vastly different than theirs.  The most significant difference is when I was young it was all together a physical experience, in every way I came to know and understand my world through physical acts.  I won or lost physically, my relationships were mainly physical interactions, my recreation was physical and my day-to-day was primarily physical.  Today young people are virtually engaged, most of their knowledge, time, and energy are spent on devices.  Their wisdom, entertainment, recreation, and social interactions occur on their devices.  I have found it necessary to work hard to understand how they then learn, are motivated, and, most importantly, lead them to a life of passion.  As I have tried to discover common ground one question always troubles me; how does the physical act of making art gets done when launching from a world viewing platform of technological devices.  

Annual end of the year student prank.

 

The Passing of a Thousand Ships

A central meaning in all of life is, “No man is an island entire to itself..*.”  All of life is spent in a great sea filled with many ships, each ship unique in itself.  I have spent the better part of my life in education.  From the age of 5 until today I have been afloat in the sea of education.  This metaphor is meaningful since the one period of my life where I was adrift from formal education, ages 19-24, the single most meaningful event was my short stint in the Navy.  So for 50 years, I have been in formal education.  I am working on my last show at Union which tries to wrap up those 50 years in a single statement.  I am still trying to define that statement but the gist of it is, “Thanks be to God for all those ships (students, teachers, mentors) who have at one point or another sailed alongside me offloading some of their precious cargo onto my now ladened deck.” 

*John Donne’s poem, No Man is an Island

A few of thousands, Elania, Sara, Lydia, Sara.

Dancing Around The Burning Bush

We spent a part of this Mother’s Day with three of our children and their families playing and picnicking in the middle of Shiloh, one of our nation’s National Military Parks responsible for holding the sacred site of the loss of so many as we once rose up against one another.  We were a family between The Peach Orchard and Bloody Pond, sites of such spring beauty promising sweet harvest and utter horror as we maimed and slaughtered one another.  Shiloh has always been a favorite spot of our family, many a beautiful day spent there biking, hiking, picnicking almost always on a Sunday afternoon.  There is great meaning here but I struggle to bring it forth in words; something akin to dancing barefoot around the Burning Bush knowing God holds all souls including those who play on top of those who died for them.