How To Build a Home

We are building a home.  It is a difficult task because of the enormity of its meaning and our utter lack of knowledge, having never done it before.  I had the same experience when I started college at 18.  In grades 1-12, I went to school to see my friends and play sports.  I thought college would be the same.  I failed every subject and dropped out before the end of the first semester.   I was eventually taught how to go to college and earned three degrees with honors.  Now, I am building a home, and I want it to be honorable, but no one has ever taught me how to build a home.  It has made me accept or maybe realize that home is where my lover and I are, not the space we are in.  It has taken some of the load off of making up the space we will soon occupy.  I have spent 41 years making a home with her, and in that time, I have learned a lot.    

 

Have You Ever Blessed Someone?

*Blessing.  Have you ever been blessed by someone?  What was it they gave you?  The greater point is how you will be a blessing, what will you give to someone else that they will see as you blessing them?  If I am to be a blessing, I must consider a few things.

I must be conscious of the desire to bless and be determined to do it.

I must have something that is a blessing to give it to someone else.

I must be willing to share.

I must know what a blessing is by receiving it from someone else.

All these should create an overwhelming desire in me to know where or from “Whom all blessings flow.”  *Reading Jacob's blessings over his children.   

Mom blessing me by taking the Lord's Supper.

Wise Enough to Alone Live?

*Life is a puzzle, a great test of us mentally, spiritually, emotionally, and physically.  We face staggering difficulties, life and death situations, responsibilities, problems of every sort, private and physical challenges, and a body that is often not gifted enough to overcome them.  Our minds may not be sharp enough, our reactions quick enough, our wits too dull, and our education lacking.   For one to think they are ready, fit, and capable of navigating life with confidence and skill so that they achieve and succeed has not long examined themselves.  We are, at our best, simpletons in life living.  We each know very little of the infinite body of wisdom needed to live successfully.  What we need is a great counselor, a great physician, and a great sage who is personally committed to us.  Oh, but where on earth will you find such a being?  “I lift up my eyes to You, the One enthroned in heaven.”                                                            *On reading the story of Joseph.  

Betty and I were hiking and walked up on 
this graveyard buried in the woods.

 

Truth?

Truth?  No matter what is said, someone will say the opposite, or with today's technology, a million someones will say a million opposites.  It is no wonder we have become so skeptical many of us,  or maybe all of us, live in a semi-state of misinformation.  My dad once preached a sermon on truth and untruth.  In the sermon, he said that those trained to spot counterfeit money never studied the counterfeits because there could be an infinite variety. Still, instead, they studied the true bills so well that they would never mistake one for a counterfeit.  His point was we should study the Truth alone.  The Truth will always set us free, and today, knowing HisStory is sorely needed by, need I say, all of us.    

        

 

Krispy Kreme in Cheek

What if you could believe in a Fairy Tale?  Not any fairy tale but the best Fairy Tale.  One where there was no more fear, sickness, sadness, no more death?  A fairy tale where you got to be the best you could ever imagine.  Maybe riding horses over all the national parks on all the planets and every evening meeting up with all your loved ones, all of them, family and friends, for a good meal, beside a good fire, and know how much they loved you.  A fairy tale where all the beaches in the universe had an umbrella for your lover, and you and you spent a trillion years telling of your dreams, and it felt like a few minutes sipping a cool drink and listening to the surf sing.  A fairy tale where you skied perfectly and ran faster than your horse, and your hair was silky long with curls, and Krispy Kreme's was always available, always tasted heavenly, and never, never, never lost their appeal nor added an inch to your bronzed, herculean, physique.  Oh, but fairy tales would never be Fairy Tales unless...they eventually came true.  

A bit like this.

 

A Chosen People

*My father was not a wealthy man except in education.  He came from the worst childhood I can imagine, for he, on a rare occasion, would share a horror tale with me, many as we sat in his sauna during his last dying years.  My mom was the same but had little education.  She quit her schooling at 16 to marry him. She was raised wealthy by a drinking and gambling father who gambled it all away, charged once with murder, convicted of manslaughter, and timed his due at Brushy Mountain.  She will still and only say of him, “he was a good man, but he was a drunk.”  Both my grandfathers were dead at 41 with nothing to show for their life on earth save one daughter to one and one son to the other.  I would say my parents were beloved people, beloved by those that count, the poor, the needy, the widow, the down and outers, and those of color.  When I was a baby, my dad rode a train to Death Valley, California, to bring Jesus to the Native Americans.  When I was 12, he began to bring “coloreds” into his church, for which he was promptly voted out of the pulpit and onto the street.  People loved me because of my parents, and my love for them grows greater by the day now that I am old. and he dead some 20 years, and she now has lost all her memory save for a bit here and a name there.   But these two lost souls found each other as young teenagers, married, and began to remake their history.  We number 52 now, and one great-grandson on the way.  Neither lived or stayed conscious long enough to know how great their legacy, pastors, teachers, artists, warriors, and a few shared their grandfathers' propensity to addictions.  However, the grace found in my parents found us all cured.  I have never known true hardship, not the hardship of having nothing except what you might make yourself.  There was no dowery left for either of my parents, not even a good name, but they were saved, and in their salvation, they found a reason for being and doing, for meaning and purpose, to build a firm foundation upon which the other 52 of us now stand and build upon.  They had four, and we bred, birthed, or brought 48 more.  But the two of them did most of the hard work, the living without, the scrapping to get by, the time on their knees and with their Bibles ensuring that what they read, prayed, and lived for would bring forth a harvest  "For I have chosen him so that he will direct his children and his household after him to keep the way of the Lord by doing what is right and just."          *on reading Genesis 15-18

Do You Have Glory?

Do you ever give glory?  Do you have it to give away?  I don’t know the answer to the first, but I do the second, a resounding “Yes!!!” Oxygen, light, and love can begin your list.  But what is glory?  Glory is the feeling I get when I realize how great everything is that keeps me alive: healing, cell division, seeing, resonance, sun, touching, empathy, gravity, stars, rhyme, consciousness, DNA, lift, heat, and wind. An infinite list of overwhelming provisions for my existence which I do nothing to receive, and I end up with a lot of glory I need to give to something or someone.  It is an overwhelming feeling of needing to be and do something. It is a fact that without graces abundant, intricate, beautiful design of everything including me, there would be nothing, including me.  It gives grace a real meaning, and grace produces glory.  I have an abundance of glory, but it's not for me but for me to give away.  But to what?  To who?  This is the main reason we build Tabernacles, Temples, Cathedrals, steeples, St. Fillian’s hall, and make sculpture.  Those are the best hints to what or Who, I can give my glory to.  Having so much glory and never giving it away would be despairing.    

Betty and I stopped to pray in this small church in Mexico.  It reminded me of the same glory given in Giotto's chapel ceiling in Scrovegni Chapel in Italy

      

Spred'in Out, Chaa Ching

We are adding on, yesterday began our big spreading out, making more room, giving space for all those of us.  At last count, we are 20 and one on the way.  Twenty-one takes up a lot of room.     

“Enlarge the site of your tent, stretch out the curtains of your dwellings, do not hold back.  Lengthen your ropes and drive your stakes in deep.  For you will spread out to the right and left…”  Isaiah 54:2,3a

Tents cost a lot more today, a whole lot more!!!

 

Titles We Give Light

Black to ebony, and walaa, INDIGO.  This is the magical moment made by the slightest sliver of light.  It is the first promise of light, of dawn, a promise more hope than seen.  It is mostly in our hearts to see light where we know it will be.  The assurance light is coming, to hope upon hope that a new day is given, and in the thought, the reality of the grand gifted miracle of it all.  I keep raising my head to please myself that the ebony is there, it separating the land and mountains from the river and sky.  Oh yes, there it is now.  A distinct evaporation of ebony to indigo.  The words giving the light a title barely worthy of it.  Colors to name light; for there is no known thing as color, only titles we give varying amounts of light.       

A Known Wanderer of Wanderers

*I am a wanderer like my parents.  We wandered over the earth, over Tennessee, I went to sea, and now I am in the middle of the three places I was raised, born in Athens, moved to Jefferson City and then to Crab Orchard, and this is who I am.  I am a part of these people, my people.  I am like them, and they like me.  We are God fearing, country folk, opinionated, stubborn, hard-working, strong-willed, and passionate.  We have lots of preachers, teachers, and drunks.  Storytellers, clannish, people of the earth.  We are mountain folk, tied to the hollows, creeks, rocks and rivers, trees and mountains.  We’re common sensers, writers, dreamers, neighborly, givers, raise and bury, hunt, fish, gather, hoard, live sparsely and grandly on the land.  God, Christ Lord, the Holy Spirit are ours. They’re sewn in our ancestors, woven in our families, invited to our tables, funerals, gatherings.  They are the most honored guests in all our comings and goings.  We are what you call God’s people,  He, They are our guides, our tear gatherers, our hellfire and heaven bounders, we give our dead to Them, pledge our babies to Them, and eventually our souls go to Them to await our new bodies.  We think this is normal, see no odds in this, and call it faith.  We are wanderers, and by faith, we know we will eventually wander with Them around Glory.  They’re with us all our lives, like our ancient ones, who we know not now, but know we will know then, as we will be known; wanders.                                                                                                                                               *On reading Genesis 12-14

  

 

Moon Promises

The days have been grey of late, the river and the sky broken only by the thin line of mountains beyond.  Last evening, I sat and gazed out at eventide, cold, and slate rain.  There was no sun to give a hint of time passing, earth rotating, day ending.  This morning, I awoke and stood outside in the dark, and I could still feel it, the damp grey above.  I turned and came back in, filled my coffee cup, and sat with Him.  After a while, I was nudged to look up, and there the moon had nipped a hole in the grey to gently and faithfully remind me of what He had just told me;

“As long as the earth endures

seedtime and harvest,

cold and heat,

summer and winter, 

day and night,

will never cease.”

Amen

 

First Time Ever I Saw...The Earth

After reading Genesis 1 & 2, I thought, how could I ever be thankful enough?  So I wrote down all the songs I felt were grateful songs that I would write after creation. 

First Time Ever I Saw Your Face

How Great Thou Art

Let It Be

Amazing Grace

Poems, Prayers and Promises

Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain

Hallelujah

Abraham, Martin, and John

Hallelujah Chorus

The Old Rugged Cross

Free Bird

I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing

Thou, Oh Lord (by Brooklyn Tabernacle Choir)

The Doxsology

God, what would I give you besides these songs?  My heart, and after You accepted it, I would have put these songs in it.  You are so good.  Thank You.   

"Morning Has Broken" could easily have made 
my list.

Thing: Anything or How Do You Do Eternity

A long time ago, in a place far away, You Three conceived of all things: the animals, the ears, the hair, tails, fins, colors, shapes, and sizes.  The heavens and spheres abounded in glory, and colors, and lights, and spaces, and distances incomprehensible, and lights and light that never stops expanding since You Three said, “Let there be light!”  And plants, flowers, trees, grasses, fruits, nuts, cocoa bean, sugar cane, and on and on and food and fuel cover the earth.  Birds fly, the sky is made blue, we get a star, oceans have waves, Mount Everest and Brown (our mountain) are made, Betty, Aaron, Sissy, Zac, Sarah, and our new grandson are conceived, the Big Dipper, Ozone Falls, baby elephants, Fair Haven, The Tennessee River, the Mississippi, oranges…It becomes mind-expanding, heartwarming, soul-praising, knees bowing, good.  It never ends for us.  Once it begins, it is eternal.  We are eternal.  Of all thoughts, this is the one that must be reconciled.  How do we do eternity?  We can’t.  Only You Three can and coming into us by faith make us eternally alive, me, glorious as I was intended to be, eternal, one with You All, forever.

This Story, the Greatest Story ever told, must be applied to me every day.  I must apply “In the beginning God” to my story every day.  You Three are the only story I have to be me.  This Story is the only thing that makes all other people, places, and things make sense.  I just looked up “thing” in the dictionary,  “Anything.”  That is what I am trying to explain.  Genesis 1 and 2 are the You Three, telling me how I began, how all “things” began.  And it is the only “thing” that makes all things make sense (including sense).  That thing (including sense) made me happy.  Happy, another thing that makes me happy.  I could keep repeating here, but I will stop.  (stop: thing)  Happy again.  

On reading Genesis 1 & 2.

Yesterday, splitting fire for next winter.

Best Seen In Black and White

I am not prepared for how my mom is passing from earth to heaven.  I haven’t had a lot of practice, peripheral at best.  Most deaths of those close to me were sudden, unexpected, and, therefore, mostly missed.  My dad was different.  He died of cancer.  I never knew him not to have it, so when he finally succumbed to it, it was mostly like a normal part of his life and, therefore mine.  But my mom is slowly passing.  She is passing in stages, over years, unbecoming what she had become, a great, prolonged, unraveling.  Each stage takes time and toil, and each stage she and I live through.  First her body, next her mind, still in process, and heartbreakingly, now I am beginning to see her living faith fading away.  She is not losing the Christ of her faith but just the knowledge of it and Him.  We sing hymns with her; she still knows some of the words.  Jesus Love Me is her favorite, I’m sure, because it was imprinted in the youngest, deepest recess of her mind and heart.  She still knows a few words of her faith, pray, the strongest, but most others are lost to her too.  This is all bittersweet.  Bitter to watch, sweet to know it has no bearing on her coming eternity.  I have learned a lot of lessons through this, but the most important thing is that no one knows how they are going to die.  We must all prepare for doing something, having no idea how we will do it.    

Mom and me when she and I were becoming together.

   

158 Words to Try an Explain 10,000 Words

I have had lethal force applied to me twice, and nearly, twice more.  The first two were boiling water and a 150hp Evinrude boat motor.  These were violent and painful.   The second two were tornadoes, striking some 500 yards from me.   They were violent but not physically.  I am thinking about these because I am reading Revelation and the powerful and deadly forces that will be released on the earth and humans.  It is scary to me, but I am not fearful.  I am spared from these forces by Christ’s blood through faith, He has saved me.  So, the events in these passages are scary, but I am not fearful.  Nothing can separate me from Christ’s love, not even the end times.  As an artist, I can find no greater inspiration than the forces allied against me and those for me.  This is the story all art seeks to declare, a sculpture is worth ten thousand words.   

"Hurrican't Come Here No More," my sculpture 
that many years ago won Sculpture Key West.  It was 
inspired by the hurricane that had hit Flordia.

   

Meaning, Sadness, Sculpture

Sometimes, I am so filled with meaning I feel an overwhelming sense of sadness that I cannot express.  If I could sing, play the piano, throw a ball a million miles, or “fly like an eagle,” I would do it.  Making art is the only way I know how, but it is such a slow and achingly hard process that the instantaneousness of these moments of meaning is long gone by the time I consider going to my studio.  

 

Meaning prompt.  Sunrise in front of me.

Looking Forward to the Next 63 Years

I turned 67 yesterday.  I told my lover, “It sure doesn’t seem like it took me 67 years to get to be 67!”. 

She laughed and said, “How long does it seem, 10 years?”

“No,” I said, “more like…”  And I stopped to think.  How long did it seem like it took me to get 67 years old?  My first thought was maybe 20 years or so, but then, as I thought about it, I surprisingly realized it seemed more like a year or two.  It really felt that quick.   So I asked my lover the same question, and she said, “Well, since we had children, it just flew by, but growing up, it feels like it took a long time, so I’d say maybe 60 years!”  

I said, “ You really feel like it took you 60 years to get to be 72. I feel like it just took me a couple years, like one or two to get 67!”.

“Well maybe you have to wait till you get to be 70,” she said.  

I guess it took me 2 years to get to 67 and 63 years to get to be 70.  I look forward to these next 63 years.