On Beauty

 In the seat of beauty, the central human core of our greatest effort to know and create beauty, Athens Greece. We have walked and biked around its monument, atop the Acropolis set its crowning glory, the Parthenon. And it does not disappoint. Since 447 BC it has declared beauty and even now it’s Harold still rings. It’s form, lines, rhythm and balance even in runs still rings for the glory of  mankind. Man is a little lower than the angels and his place is set atop this ancient hill. But what of man when we can also see the stars and forest!!!  Oh yes, but what is man? Father thank You for eyes to see and hearts to praise him who is mindful of us.

From our pool last night. 

Our Balloon

Tomorrow we embark on a great adventure.  It is as it is always, wondering if the more excellent adventure isn’t here before me, in the river and the hills, in my lover sleeping soundly, in the sky and green grass, the trees, the very presence of You.  “The earth is the Lords and the fullness thereof.”  His fullness awaits for us to explore.  So we go.  I am fortunate, I married an adventurer, at home on the mountain top, under the waterfall, or the middle of the ballroom; so we adventure as part of our love affair.  This adventure is her 70th birthday gift.  What a meaningful milestone; it should be like celebrated. 

We travel light, our needs are few, the Ancient Text, a soft outfit, good shoes, a bite of nourishment, and eyes, heart, and soul wide open.  A daypack will keep us good for 15 days.  We, as all humans, are resilient, drop us on the earth and we’ll make merry.  We will tidy a few ends here, button down and tighten up, review the lists, take a few more things out of our packs, lock the doors and leave on a jet plane.  I will keep you updated.  Happy Birthday, Baby, we are off to Greece in our Beautiful Balloon.

The Beauty of Pro-Life

There is no reason not to align ourselves with the noticing of and acknowledging of beauty.  Beauty is as present as oxygen, it's immersive, and it is foundational to exisistance.  Where there is life there is beauty, humans, all humans are exquisite in our beauty, craftsmanship, our delicacy, and power.  And it ripples out from us in all directions further than even James Webb can attest.  Life in all forms from stone to Mother Teresa, from Giant Sequoias to ocean waves, leaves, music, and gravity are all so utterly beautiful to be greater than miracles, even that word pales in comparison to reality.  That is why I am pro-life, no one has the right to destroy beauty because it is a deadly rejection of beauty, as well as truth and goodness.  Our souls are designed with a garden in mind, a living harmonious home, a setting of ever-increasing and abundance of kindness; beauty—the earth is just your test run. 

I found this leaf while walking yesterday, one of millions surrounding
me.  I picked it up and showed it to my lover; I said, "no artist
could paint this, it is beyond our ability, it's very intricacy 
is past us, around the bend of our talent."

It Ain't Kingda Ka

What is truth?  That’s easy; ask google?  I asked her what the greatest Roller Coaster in the world was and she came right back, “Kingda Ka @ Six Flags.”  That is not really true.  I was sitting by the river the other day gazing at the sky and clouds when it dawned on me that even though I was having a very restful gaze I was actually on the cosmos’ greatest roller coaster.   Currently, we are all flying around in a circle at 67,000 mph and rotating at 1000 mph.  It’s not Kingda Ka it's SUPER DUPER GOLLY WOOLY CLUTCH YOUR PEARLS GRAB YOUR HAT KINGDA KA @ MILKY WAY.  Leave it to God to make the best all-time roller coaster, never charge to ride and you get to ride it over and over again.  And this is only earth—Heaven’s going to be ONE AMUSEMENT PARK.  

 

Mike Tyson's Soul Weight

In a rather comical twist of life, I have been preaching this summer in a small church in the mountains of East Tennessee.  No one would imagine me in such an appointment; it shocks even me.  I teach Sunday School, I have performed a few weddings and officiated a funeral or two but nothing prepared me for pastoring over several weeks.  The thing most worrisome is the burden I suddenly feel of their souls and mine.  It is one thing to bear the weight of one's own soul, its condition as it relates to eternity matters, but it is quite the other to pack a few more in the task of pastoring.  Heavy matters when one is frail, and frailty is a constant condition of humanity.   In regards to God, Mike Tyson is a puny weight but his soul still weighs in the heavyweight category.   

The Glee Club

I live on the edge of wilderness.  There are 6 homes nearby but ours sees none of them and you can draw a straight line from us for hundreds of miles and cross mostly wildness.  There is a great wonder I only consciously realized a few days ago, the noises of the day and night.  In the morning the wild is filled with the sounds of birds.  All kinds of birds from the screeching blue heron to trilling tiny ones that could join in choir.  It is a constant background of living song.  At night the dark is filled with chirps, the air and forest are rhythmically beating to thousands of insects, frogs and I know not what.  Night sounds are ancient, like grade school orchestras filled with triangles, wood blocks, and ribbed sticks all keeping time to some primitive musical score.  Mornings are rhythm sections of strings, beautiful notes, clear and advanced, vibrating cords of enlightenment.  That is the key, morning sounds are awakening of our spirits, night ones the ending, beating march into slumber.  It is a great kindness that the earth, wilderness is filled with sounding accompaniment, a declaring of the livingness of all things that we live within—a surrounding choir, a background glee to wonder, The Living Chorus.   

Hide and Seek is God's Great Game for us

I have thought often of what to write about the photo that surely shatters all our current knowledge of space, time, and ourselves; the new photo taken by the James Webb Telescope.  It is a photo of a part of space the size of a grain of sand held at arm's length.  The photo shows what is 5.12 billion light years away, 13 billion years ago—thousands of galaxies, their light just reached me, Lee Benson, via a photograph.  What is shattered is what is continually shattered, how creation reveals how little we are.  Whether we look out toward the heavens or in toward the atoms all we keep finding is enormously more space.  It seems we humans are fleas playing with our navel.  But we are not, we are “fearfully and wonderfully made” to know God to “Lift up your eyes and look to the heavens: Who created all these?  He who brings out the starry host one by one and calls forth each of them by name.  Because of his great power and mighty strength, not one of them is missing.”  It just took us 13 billion years to find a few.  

    

Diamond Bloomed Roses

I sit in a paradise.  It is always here.  It is a loaner, Gods really.  Paradise is where great art is made from a heart that has lived in the opposite;  the great irony of art.  The greatest aid to resolving this irony is The Word, The Ancient Text by The Ancient of Days.  His guidance is like the daily sparkling diamond blooms, like scented roses of greatest value; the hardness of delicacy. 

   

A Tell Tale Trail

My lover and I were walking this morning, along the trail in the woods that leads to our home.  It is our daily routine.  Along one section I noticed several beautifully colored leaves.  How odd this time of year.  On our way back I noticed it again.  Wondering from where these beautiful colored praisers came from I looked up in the forest canopy to see.  There was one lone branch in the shelter of green dazzling in orange, yellows, and red.  A small branch.  I thought the first heralder of fall has been sent forth from the kingdom of trees to announce fall is soon to be.  I am a fall lover, the draining heat and humidity of summer wear me down and I soon long for the cooler days of fall.  This little branch was such an encourager, a message of hope to a heat-worn old man—your relief draweth nigh.  God is so very, very good, never without His heralds. Hark the Herald Angels sing, Glory to the newborn fall.   

The Herald

 

 

A Falling Leaf Eulogy

I saw a leaf fall to the earth this morning.  It prompted my imagination.  What made it let go?  Weary perhaps of the daily grind of making oxygen; the exposure to the elements harsh; or born weaker than most and mid-summer just lost its grip.  Its passing was noticed by me and now I am writing its eulogy.  I do not know this single leaf, its history is a mystery, its future is the same.  Did it live a good, satisfying life and find meaning in its existence?  I do not know.  But I do know of one thing it did, a wonderful thing, a purpose of the highest order; it made me imagine.  Imagination is one of the greatest gifts of kindness ever conceived.  God is good.  God is great.  Let us thank Him…for a falling leaf.   

  

Art's No Trouble

I am a troubled soul.  I don’t know why.  I often feel it is the violence of two accidents I had ten years apart when I was young.  But I was troubled long before that.  I remember in the 4th grade being unable to eat breakfast for fear I might miss the bus.  Everyone has a certain personality that they war with.  Mine is trouble.  But by mercy and great grace, I have been given a new soul that is sincere and peaceful. It needs much nourishment and the same grace that gave me the new soul has also guided me to the nourishment of it.  Jesus. Period.  Betty.  Hiking.  Art.  Art for me is a way in which I interpret most of my world experiences using beauty.  Beauty of all sorts.  Beauty of form.  I often say if you can conceive of a form as beautiful as the sphere do it—but you can’t.  Beauty of material; gold, wood, stone, dirt.  Dirt is one of the kindest, most beautiful, and most sincere materials of all time—it can grow trees.  Beauty of conceptual meaning in ways that are sincere—sugar; what a kind idea.  Thinking about Art, and making Art, turns a very anxious and hurtful world into an idea of the serenity of created beauty.  One of the great joys of life with a new soul is the daily knowing and being known by God as an artist.  

Here's to Zero

We reached the great zero today.  Zero is not a great number, position, or state of our being.  No one wants to be zero.  Even the word zero is zero, who wants that, worse than 2nd.  But we have a great zero today, the best, the over the top, the doxology as my daughter-in-law put it.  1826 days ago our beloved Mary Elizabeth (Sissy) Benson Carbonell was declared cancer-free.  1826 days make 5 years.  And today is her and our ZERO DAY.  I have been numbering them on my hand every day as a reminder of God’s faithfulness and my responsibility to pray.  So here is to zero, here’s to Sissy.  Here is to God… Praise God to whom all blessings flow.  Praise Him all creatures here below.  Praise Him above ye heavenly host.  Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.  Amen 

This is the fifth picture I took when I had 
begun to write the # on my hand.  The first 4 
are too personal.

To Be and then--Not to be!

I was/am woefully unprepared for my mom’s greying years to be lived under the curse of dementia.  Oh, I surely knew about it, many of my friends and acquaintances having dealt with it with their own loved ones.  I heard all the stories but now know they fell on unopened ears.   It is the absurdity of it, the meaningless nothingness of the understanding of it.  There is no way to know the human I will meet today, who she will be, how she will act, her moods,  her fears; the utter sorrow of not being able to help her with reason or scripture.  However, my presence is still a balm for her troubled spirit, heart, and mind.  Me being there; she knows.  Somehow the love of a loved one breaks through.  It doesn't fix her but it does make her momentarily peaceful, and the terrified look in her eyes disappears.  I think she feels safe most of all.  Safe that if death comes knocking she will die in the presence and embrace of a loved one.  Sadly this too is a rational thought by a rational loving human being about a human who is almost completely without her hard-earned right to rationality.  The one thing I know is that this is not the mom I have always known but it is my mom I have left.  

Nothing To Do

I am watching my mom grow into an ancient human, 86 and counting.  She suffers and I suffer from her suffering.  At her age and condition, one would say she is in the process of dying.  The process of living through the process of dying means our bodies become more and more vibrantly beautiful under the process.  All stages of life dictate a bodily response and I am now seeing the delicate beauty of my ancient mom.  The skin is where the beauty is most manifest.  Living ancient skin is mostly unused as the body shrinks and draws back, no longer needing the mass it once required.  Ancients are not kinetic but have found life to be more of quietly waiting and waiting requires very little activity, their skin is left with mostly nothing to do.