A Happy Thanksgiving Tightening Binds

There are many, 54 at last count.  We are Bensons and those that marry us.  We all came from two only children, Wayne Lee Benson and Mary Nell Gentry Benson.  Both their fathers died at 41.  No two people could have come from greater tragedy and dysfunction.   If we had known them as children, we would have given them little chance to survive.  But both found Christ and found each other.  They were “old-timey" Christians,” mostly visiting, feeding, caring, loving, and welcoming others.  I have yet to know better examples of Christ.  And because of them, we all found someone we wished to be like and eventually found Christ in them to be the Christ we wanted in us.   And we are the rest of the story.  We are slightly less dysfunctional than them, but because of them, our dysfunctions are covered over by Blood.  We gather regularly and are loud, opinionated, big storytellers and bigger laughers.  We give each other no quarter and will abide no one outside us to quarter one of ours.  We are blood, family, exceedingly including, loving, forgiving (we’ve all been forgiven so much), and have a single tie that binds, Christ.  Yesterday, He tightened the bind.  Bless be the Tie that binds, our hearts in Christian love… 

2/3rds of us.  Mom, in the middle, is the only one of hers left.  She mostly
dwells in heaven now, little of her left here with us.
I only know one greater woman. 

   

OUR BRAIN SEEKS CLARITY

Happy Thanksgiving.  403 years ago, our Pilgrims, along with a host of Native Americans, had a celebration to give thanks to the Christian God for providing for them in the New World.  Stories vary in detail but not in celebration.  It was a three-day thanks giving for a good harvest.  They had prepared the soil, planted, and, as all farmers know, God brought fruit to their labors that they harvested and put up.  Today, most of us neither prepare, plant, or harvest but will enjoy the good fruits God has provided.  Do not allow yourself to be dull, the harvest is vast and plentiful for which we did little.  A good heart, open mind, and attentive senses will always lead to thanksgiving.  Thanksgiving is us giving thanks.  To Whom will you give your thanks today?

Freedom From Want, by Norman Rockwell

I Will Not Know I Have Forgotten

There is beginning a forgetting.  I noticed it yesterday.  I used to listen to crows call, and it would immediately take me back to falls past, tramping over great fields of harvested corn, of football games to play, church socials, girlfriends, and the freedom to just hang around.  But yesterday, they were mostly just crows calling across Swan Pond, where my lover and I rode bikes.  As I rode along, I tried to remember the feelings those cries used to call up in me, the meaning of being, the memory of such wonderful days long ago.  I could not.   Now, only the forgotten dearness of my past.  My past, as I guess all past, is mainly the sweet joy of those days, tied to sounds, crows calling, smells, falls drying sweetness, and the longing to be young again.  Growing old is profound, filled with overwhelming meaning that can make you weep, and one, the forgetting of the knowing of meaning.  It truly turns me on to think of growing old and the poems, prayers, and promises I will not know I have forgotten.   

 

Seeing Is Believing

It is first light.  I try to always notice it; the moment darkness is first dispelled, I joyously, seek to recognize it.  First light fills me with hope, forces me to praise Him for His great grace and mercy, and sets my soul aright, heart steadfast, and mind at peace.  First light demands a verdict, I either do or don’t believe!!!  First light, by its very name, declares its eminence; first light.  First light is the moment we know we can see again, and seeing is believing.  

You never know what first light will reveal at Fair Haven.

  

The Hymns of Earth

It is raining, grey morning, clouds lowered to half mountain, the air filled with wet mist.  The earth lays still and quiet.  It is refusing to get up, taking a day off, a few much-needed hours of lingering quietly over rivers, hills, and dales.  It has earned a rest from its labors.  God commands a fallow year for Earth every seven years.  It is to lay up on its laurels, a year of repose to enjoy itself, to testify to God’s goodness even to its valleys, trees, rivers, and mountainsides.  This God is here for everyone and everything, to bring us all joy.  How desperately dull we are to pass by the daily life of the earth and never listen to the hymns it sings.  A man is so much more the man when he is deliberate in his notice of the earth; “That they should develop keen perceptive faculties is no more remarkable than that a carpenter should hit a nail instead of the thumb that steadies it.”*  Go man with God. 

*Horace Kephart, The Book of Camping and Woodcraft, pg 206

Aware-ingly Looking

I walk around and look at her, examining her for any joys or wounds she might have experienced in my absence.  This is my habit concerning Fair Haven.  After days of being away, I walk over her, up and down her hills and valleys, down her length and breadth, through her and around her.  I am reacquainting myself with her.  It is a great joy to have a bit of the earth and a little of her to call mine while I am here.  For she does not belong to me.  No part of the earth belongs to us.  It is loaned, by a great kindness of grace, of its Maker.  Its loan is also with the expectation of care and betterment.  I am to help the earth, keeping it clean and guarded against any and everything that might reduce its productivity and limit its possibilities.  I am also to add to it, plant, grow, feed, and nourish it with new growth and new growing things.  So I walk over her, lovingly looking at her, giving my attention to her, and in this, she gives me the satisfaction of showing herself to me, for I see her only as I aware-ingly look.  It is akin to seeing my lover…but I move to a higher elation there, so I will end here, with Fair Haven.    

 

Be It Ever So Humble

Nothing so endears one to home than tramping around the earth.  It is good to be home.  Being in the wilderness urges you to make it a part of your daily life, to place yourself under its testimonies and quiet assurances of goodness, beauty, and His care.  Home and hearth should always be abundant in the grace and goodness of His provisions, His creative abundance, and ways of liturgy nature has so displayed for you as you walked her hills and valleys, back woods, and canyon streams.  God should be as welcome in our homes as He is in the open spaces He created.  A mountain and a stream are as humbly welcoming as a warm and welcoming home…and be it ever so humble,  in your making, there is no place like home.  

 

 

An Expert Witness

Back in that same hotel, waiting to fly home later this afternoon.  I will wake up in Fair Haven tomorrow.  I can’t think of any place I’d rather be!  God has gifted me with a sliver of His world, and it is kind.  I am listening to Nat King Cole, my lover lounges on the bed reading The Ancient Text.  I have been with Him.  Everyone should go camping once a year.  It realigns you and gives you insight into your smallness and the earth's bigness.  Every moment it confronts you with your limits and limitedness.  You can’t do anything about the earth, it just is, but in its “isness,” it also testifies it does not run itself, its masterfulness, exactness, enormity, overwhelming craftedness, creativity, and beauty testified to its needfulness for a Maker.  And therein lies our need for it, its testimonies are true, it is an expert witness, all He needs to win His already stated verdict; I AM!

Betty, on our last hike in Abilene, SP, in a grove of Texas Live Oaks
giving us their expert testimony.

 

Never Saw Willie

Rode hard and put up wet

That old cowboy saying about their horse aptly describes my lover and me.  We are road-weary and long for home.  We are camped just outside Austin and turn our RV in at 11a.m.  These last few days have been a long haul across most of Texas to get us back to Austin, where we fly out tomorrow evening.  We have loved our time here, but the panhandle is broken up between oil fields, refineries, miles of open cropland, and long stretches of empty which they fill with wind turbines.  These things are so intrusive, overwhelming everything else.  But ending on a high note.  We were headed to our campsite on this backroad and came across Luckenbach, Texas, as in “with Waylon, Willie and the boys…”  What a treat.  Had a band of old men playing on and outside stage.  Never saw Willie. 

    

 

Overwhelmed With Events

America is still here, awake, going about our work of the day.  Many are in turmoil, seem forsaken and lost for what to do, and overwhelmed with events.  Many are elated, over the moon, victory-lapping, and overwhelmed with events.  Such is life.  Life goes on, and no matter what side you are on most of life is lost to our understanding.  Good people die, laughter is good medicine, cancer happens, grandbabies are born, North Carolina is flooded, planes fly, everyone can’t sing, roses, bad people make out, dogs are nice, and we get old and broken.  Life more often than not, does not make sense.  What are we to do.  I am a follower of Christ, and if He has taught me one thing, it is this, I will not understand most of life.  It is what He came to help me with.  It is called faith, faith that He loves me, that He has a plan for me, America, the earth, and the cosmos.  That His plan will be fulfilled…PERIOD.  It is a plan for good, good wins, love wins, He wins.  My role in life is to go about doing as good a job as I can today.  To love others.  To serve.  To pick up the errant piece of trash.  To smile at everyone and wave.  To be kind.  To be nice.  To try as best as I can to do the right thing every moment, every glorious moment He gives me to be alive today.  He is the only way I have hope.  He has a plan and He will work it all out.  For Good.  For His Good, and it will be forever and evermore, GOOD.  

 

We Interupt this program to bring you this special annocement

6-8-2024 AD

(Government regulations have forced me to withhold this blog written five months ago until they (the government) would stamp their approval on what God approved on the above date)

I have never experienced adoption.  Our youngest son and his wife have been in the process for three years.  It has not been easy.  This is life at its most meaningful, being repeatedly and tragically snatched away.  Added to this, many of these situations come with tragic circumstances forcing our hearts to face unbearable realities.  We go through these things as a family.  More than once, we have laid upon the mountaintop altar with no baby in the bush.  But yesterday, June the seventh, two thousand and twenty-four AD, Joshua James Benson was born.   Today he lies in the arms of his mother, “skin to skin” as our son puts it.  I have moved the stakes out, widening our tent, and know, of all truths, this is the truest.  He was worth it all.  He is now ours!!!

Our littles Inca grandson, Joshua James Benson!!!

 

Daylight Savings Court

The times they are changing; daylight is being saved, and instead of dark this early morning, someone has saved some morning for me to enjoy.  Clear skies break the butte we are camped under deep in Palo Dura Canyon in NW, Texas.  Yesterday was our longest journey as we drove from Marfa in the far SW to here, near Amarillo, in the NW panhandle, a 9-hour journey.  It is the Sabbath, and we will partake.  Sabbath rest is one of the kindest commands of Almighty Who needs no rest but knows, boy, howdy we do.  It rained yesterday, and as we arrived, the stream lying at the bottom of the canyon ran rust red, a liquid mark of beauty unrivaled by all the art we had just seen.  Creation is seconded only by Christ in their testimony of Your loving mercy, grace, and care for us.  If we don’t accept Christ’s testimony, creation will be the star witness against us.  As Paul Harvey used to say, “You better settle outta court”.  Creation is an expert witness.  

  

 

 

Rightly Overwhelmed Art

We are leaving early this a.m., our longest one-day journey ahead of us.  Seven hours from here to Palo Duro Canyon State Park near Amarillo.  We are going there to see another iconic land artwork, Cadillac Ranch.  We toured all of Donald Judd’s complex yesterday.  Powerful.  However, this is the truth of it.  The compound is a WW I and II army base and prisoner-of-war camp.  Many of the old signs painted in German still remain.  The history here, still very much in evidence, the location in the vastness of SW Texas, and the architecture overwhelm the art and place it rightfully in one's heart, mind, and soul.   

 

 

Marfa Texas, Art, Fashion, and Truth

Marfa Texas

We came to Marfa because it is the location of two great art experiences I have long heard of but never gotten to experience, Prada Marfa and Donald Judd’s compounds, where he established his art and art practice.   Prada Marfa is a land art piece.  It is a small adobe shop built to mimic a Prada boutique in the middle of the Texas desert, surrounded by hundreds of square miles of barrenness.  You cannot enter it but it has two large windows where you can look in at the Prada brand women's shoes and purses.  It is stunning in its implications, international fashion juxtaposed against the vastness of the earth.  I have never been a big fan of Judd’s work but greatly admire his great visual attempt to find meaning and purpose in the fundamentals of Art, form, and his dependence upon the idea that creating is the highest form of meaning for humans.  This is the power of Art for me.  It, like no other, shows us our human desire for meaning, for purpose in life.  Although many great artists never find the Ultimate Meaning Giver, I admire their all-out abandonment toward the search.  It gives me an example of how I am to follow Christ, not only in my faith and religious life but in all of my life, including my vocation.  Creating Art is one of the sincerest ways to love God, serve Him, and live to love Him with all my heart, soul, mind, and strength.  

 

Choosing to Warm The Old Out of Me

We are on the move again.  The delightful trail always calls us on somewhere beautiful.  It has turned cooler, 56° this morning.  Sun is just outlining the Davis Mountains. Good Text, good coffee, and good morning.  It is a slow morning.  Nothing to do but rest and be present.  I am trying to read all of Zane Grey’s and Louis L’Amour’s westerns and this country underscores their brilliant writing.  Reading Grey’s Stranger From the Tonto.  It will fill much of today.  I may ease back in bed beside my lover to warm the oldness out of me.  Choices, Choices, Choices.  

In Mexico.  We boated across the Rio Grande and had 
lunch and visit in Boquillas.