65 Years 6 hours and 47 minutes and who's counting? Me.

It is my 65th birthday and my 16th seems so close.  How did this happen?  Me 16 turned into me 65 overnight!  Who’s pulling off these hat tricks and would you please slow it down so I can see how you’re doing it?  I started 65 at 3 this morning when my lover woke up for some reason and whispered the happy birthday song in my ear.  I got up at 4:30 because no one called off school in the coming ice storm and I have an 8 o’clock class.  At 5:29 that same someone called off school.  It is now 6:39 and at 65 you know you will never go back to sleep.  I’ve been 65 for 6 hours and 40 minutes.  So far so good, everyone at Union took the day off just for me.  Welcome to my birthday parade of numbers.  65, 6 hours, and 43 minutes.  At this rate 16 is beginning to feel further away.    

The Long View of The Ancients

I can feel wanderlust tugging at me, a desire to tread ancient trails, old mountains, and long valleys.  My father was a rolling stone and moss rarely clings to my back.  Age has increased this longing and gratefully allied it with quiet long looks.  A good view is satisfying, my dim eyes resting longer to the horizon, what lies beyond dreamed of.  Wanderlust is truly only satisfying with a warm lover, warm in all ways, warm to my cold side, warm to my longing heart, warm to my need for Christ, warm to my old bones, get my legs under me, to give a few more strides around the bend…warm at the walks end. Wanderlust must be accompanied with a warm wanderlover.   

Tangled Up In Blue*

A birthday comment from my daughter-in-law brought me up close and personal to the packing up of my studio and making the funeral of an old friend began to connect my dots.  My daughter-in-law said “I had to disentangle myself from your Jackson home because so many wonderful memories were housed there.  I just needed time to let it go from my life.”  Betty and I attended a funeral of a friend who is immediately disentangled from life on earth.  I am packing up my studio and am disentangling myself from 27 years at Union.  It is a difficult path we are all walking, but the funeral really opened my eyes.  Eventually, we will all disentangle ourselves from this earth, from this life, from this existence.  Glory be to God to be tangled up in Him.  He “knows I have paid some dues getting through.”**

* ** Bob Dylan song.

 

Finding The Mind of Christ in an 18 Year Old

One of my greatest challenges of the last 32 years is training 18-year-old college students to comprehend the greatness of a college education and its possibility to change their life.  The challenge is acute because I could not when I was 18.  I was incapable of understanding the life-altering opportunity I was being offered, and after failing every class my first semester, I dropped out.  It took me 5 years to come to my senses.  College is never a path to money or a gateway to a career.  College is the place where you get the opportunity to learn how you are made.  Made perfectly suited to daily be about the task of loving God with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength and then being offered the chance to become that person.  For me, the answer was becoming an artist.  College taught me a lot about making art, however, the greatest thing it did was give me the opportunity to be an artist; it gave me a fighting chance.  The rest was up to me.  Everyone is made to love God with all they are.  Most people never learn how.  It is very difficult for an 18-year-old to understand this and even harder to teach them in such a way that they can learn it.  This is a great weight of glory I have carried into class every day for the last 32 years. 

          

For His Namesake

John 6: 26-40

Explain.  God my Father by faith in Jesus Christ your Son, my Lord, by the power of your Holy Spirit who dwells in me I am grateful.  Your Son’s body was more valuable than all there is in all the cosmos, but you asked him to give it violently away on my behalf and he did.  What more can I write that would not mar the truth.

Apply.  There to my heart was the blood applied.  Glory to his name.  

Respond.  Glory to his name.  To whom should I go?  Oh God, Christ, Holy Spirit keep me on the path of righteousness for your namesake.

 

Star Light Star Bright

I was knocked down in joy yesterday.  I walked in the dark and drove to school in the rain.  I spent all day working, my mind totally occupied with stuff.  Finally early afternoon I packed my case to go home.  I walked out of my office, down the hall, and turned the corner to another hall to take me out to the car.  At the other end, someone had propped open the outside door and the whole hall glowed with glorious sunlight.  I could see a doorway filled with blue skies.  You might as well multiply two fish to 5000 out of thin air to match my sense of delight.  Having not had a ray of sunlight all day this small doorway could have been proclaimed in one of the Gospels.  “Star light, star bright, first star I see…today! AMEN”   

Reminded me of another time having the same 
experience in Greece at the Parthenon. 

Pleading For Food and We Refuse

Everyone, at times, feels their soul and its worth.  No one can always and only know themselves to be only biological.  Love, ecstasy, the physical pain we sometimes feel when these occur, our staggering under the weight of beauty, our lover, or the touching of a brand newborn, mountains, sunrise, snow.  These are the signals of a greater us than our biology.  The validity, our belief in our meaning, that we are indeed meaningful outside and above our accomplishments, our biology, our wonderfully made-ness.  There is something to us, meaning, like the stars above.  Our fairy tales proclaim it, our songs reach out for it, our poems hint at it, our art tries to show it…we are meaningful, individual declarations of eternal meaning, us alone, kneeling under our weight of meaning.  And as assuredly as our biology cries, begs, and pleads, daily for sustenance, so our souls cry for Bread to live.  Shall we be so ruthlessly uncaring as to cage a truly wild thing and feed it not?  Oh, the poverty of cruelty of starving our soul; the greatest and last arrogance of our biological existence, refusing to know our souls' value…

and caring not a crumb or two tossed!!!   

   

 

The Ongoing Stand Up

The useful years of a man’s life will eventually be numbered by him.  The artist Damen Hirsch made a piece, the dead shark in a tank, and named it, “The Improbability of Death in the Mind of Someone Living”.  It remains one of the greatest titles of all time.  There is another truth that implies the same, no one, having a useful body for 64 years, looks forward to it becoming useless.  My body was once the fastest one I knew, which was certainly useful, but now, my muscles that use to ripple now trickle.    

The great sit-down is out there.  My mom is there.  At 65 one is gearing up for one last great adventure.  The mind and body are producing energy, chemicals, urges to help, to experience the last of it, the “it” before the sit-down.  I can see the sit-down.  When my body, mind, and spirit lay over for the last time.  Sitting in the sun, thinking the thoughts left for me; having only that energy left, the sit-down energy.  But for now, a new adventure awaits, I am leaving my current vocation of 32 years and know not what the future holds.  But the past gives me some clues, whatever it is, it’ll be all I can handle.  

      

Garlands for God

Art making is a childlike affair.  It is aided first and always by wonder, childlike wonder.  Wonder at the leaf’s color, the odd rock, the feel of surfaces, the found feather, fire, snow, and wild night sounds.  All great art is a reaction to these wonders.  It is altar-making.  It is the sense of the Ancient, knowing there is a behind the veil, the delight of seeing there, then sitting down and willing taking off our shoes.  It is an ever-increasing gratefulness, that is the making, our creations for our Father, our delicate and sincere garlands for his eternal kingdoms.   

Long Thoughts and Long Guns

I am filled with big thoughts and feelings these days.  Memories that make me cry.  Thoughts of long ago, long, and long ago.  Feelings for places in my deep past, those early lanes, fields, and mountains.  I think of songs I sang as a child, love lifting me back deep.  I feel the delight of bitter cold and whizzing across ice on hard shoes.  Long ago and far away I used to carry a long gun through the fields harvested.  I was a pioneer, armed, safe and so alive at twelve, alone and stalking prey; adventure.  I have long thoughts, 50 years easily tugged me to feel again.  I had no feeling of my body; it hummed without my notice like the long note at the end of a carol. I am having big dreams of first loves, first kisses, first dying dogs, first knowing God.  God was always and never was not.  I am filled with big…er than me…and He gifts me tears to water these great thoughts.     

   

A Batch of Cookies Never Hurts God

It is a kind gift to give one’s self, gratefulness.  I am once again listening to classical piano.  A tiny, padded wooden piece, striking a wire.  Classical music is the result.  Who puts that in wire?  Someone of ultimate kindness.  Someone I ought to thank.  It reminds me of my wife’s habit of baking cookies for people who are kind to us, plumbers, neighbors, and strangers.  I often feel I need to bake God a batch of cookies.  I know He asks for a broken and contrite spirit and, if I did it for the plumber, I would be doing it for him but I want to do it for him personally.  I have an ongoing need to give him a thank-you gift.  Such can be art.  David writes God poems, songs, and psalms, gifts of an overflowing grateful heart.  This is Art 101.  Art can be made for Him.  It can be made just for Him. 

       

 

The First Last

Dawn is coming.  It separates itself from the line of tree yon which moments ago were hidden in night.  Dawn makes up most of my view.  I am listening to soft classical piano as opening credits for this dawn.  Oh, I would worship dawn if its Maker was unknown to me.  This is a dawn like no other.  The first dawn of the last semester of my formal career.  32 years, 64 semesters gone as swiftly as that last note.  This is praying, writing facing the cosmos, knowing the words, sharper than light, arriving in the kingdoms of God and onto his mind and he's turning to me.  What is this prayer truly?  Truly. Thank You!!!    

How my treasured lover gave me the 
beginning of my first last.

  

 

The Troubling Absence of Color

I am exceedingly troubled.  I am continually confronted with wrongness.  I was at the store the other day and butter was $6.50 for 4 sticks.  My world now proposes what I believe to be true as false.  How can truth become untruth?  The earth is the most dangerous place we know of.  There are evil people controlling vast amounts of power, armies, weapons, and technology.  These people pit themselves against us in all manner of wicked ways.  We also face complex problems revolving around security, border, cyber, economics, and currency as well as the security globally, of countries less secure than ourselves.  Good world leaders must be exceedingly wise, creatively, always several steps ahead.  Their virtuous wisdom must be feared by those whose thoughts are evil.  By all accounts we have elected a leader who struggles with the very basics of wisdom, speaking clearly from a sharp mind.  We elevate silliness to the peak of societal importance and at every turn promote sex as our greatest constitutional need.  We are failing to raise working and sacrificing citizens who see America as worthy of their best efforts.  We have replaced honor with shamefulness, decency with vileness, and sincere devotion to the concept of freedom with the tyranny of destroying freedom.  But what troubles me the most is the tragic lostness of those in utter darkness…for utter black was once my choice of color, the actual absence of color, until, by grace, the Light of the World found me.   

Fool's Heart or Fool's Mouth

I was lying in bed early this morning unable to sleep.  I was thinking about all the wonders of God.  I began to think about how we have no oxygen industry.   How kind, our most basic need for survival is freely given to us by plants.  Almost all our foundational needs are provided for free.  Light, water, and oxygen.  “The fool has said in his heart there is no God.”  I wonder if greater foolishness is never thanking him.     

Oldlyweds Together Again

2023 is a momentous year for us.  I will turn 65, retire, move to Fair Haven and celebrate our 40th anniversary.  It will be a major shift in our lives.  The greatest change will be our proximity to one another.  We will find ourselves as newlyweds but actually “oldlyweds” with most of our time spent together.  Major married changes take compromise this will be no different.  I am early plotting, and she is late awakening peaceful.  I am planning and she is flittering.  I am constantly looking for meaning and she is naturally being meaningful.  I am physical and she is emotional.  I am often unstable, and she is always willingly a rock.  But we have, over the years, also grown more alike.  We are both highly affectionate.  We are sincerely, personally, and deeply religious; we are infatuated with God.  We are adventurous often living at the boundary.  We need very little, a beautiful view, a bite of bread and fruit, and our warm bodies.  We are committed to living, each of us drawing from the other’s strengths to be always alive.  We are sentimental of one another, our past, present, and future.  Now, more and more, we drive to the boundary where short ventures find us in the wilderness. We are, above all, wild creatures, wildly passionate being, rolling and settling stones, in our ancient years, together again.    

Altar repairing deep in Appalachia.

         

A North Star

A bruised reed and tender shoot?  The great awakening of her as my balm of Gilead, the way my soul is made better, the ointment on self-inflicted wounds, the anointing of myself for marching honestly over to Zion, my narrow way made wider for her, the gift she is always giving to me, to standing lovingly on Jordan’s Stormy banks, she is my Following Drinking Gourd, my ever brightening North Star.