It's The Most Wonderful Time of the Year

It's the hap-happiest season of all...   (Just a good thought on beginning Luke this morning.)

A maple tree on a hike in Canada.  For those who
need a little good news.  "And hearts will be glowing..."

Be It Ever So Humble

Back home.  Warm and sunny.  Back to labors of joy.  Our children had all come during our trip and worked, moving firewood down from the mountain, mowing, cleaning, and vacationing.  Kept Fair Haven company while we were gone.  It is good to be home.  

Be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home.  Home again, home again, jiggity jig.  Take me home, country roads.  Home is where the heart is.  Keep the home fires burning.  Tennessee, Tennessee, there’s no place I’d rather be.     

 

Fair Haven Cathedral

Wake up in a hotel room next to an airport.  How many times have done this?  Far from home, around the bend, all my worldly goods packed into a bag, my lover, headed home.  A cup of coffee, the Ancient Text, The Ancient of Days, a few lines in my journal, a moment to meditate, think, and set my heart, my life, my day in order…in a strange room, next to the airport.  I listen to good clarinet music. My lover stirs.  

We dropped off the RV yesterday.  She was a great old girl, kept us high and dry through some hard rains, more than one blow, and across New England and Eastern Canada.  She was in many ways a sanctuary.  But tonight we will lay our heads down in a greater sanctuary, a basilica, Fair Haven Cathedral.  We are headed home.  My lover is up.  Let the day begin.   

 

Turning Home

We turn home today, one of the great events of life.  It is always good to be in a foreign land, in the wilderness, among the forests and trees.  It puts all things in perspective.  How wonderful America and our people are.  American southerners are especially good because they look at you and often say a hearty, “Good morning,” welcome to the neighborhood, where we are friendly.  It is hard to get people in Canada to look at you, much less speak.  But when they hear us say, “Good morning,” they awaken to a relationship being offered and reply; not heartily, but sincerely.  

We should all experience a turning toward our land, toward our people, our roots.  It places all the tomfoolery going on around America into the buffoonery category.  I digress.  Turning south from Prince Edward Island.  It is good to be going home!   

Betty standing in the Bay of Fundy as the tide is out.
Largest tide fluctuation in the world. 

Happy Thanksgiving for Steeples

The PEIslanders are a neat and hardy people.  The potato harvest is being brought in, the fields are tidied and ready for a harsh winter, the dairy cows are being milked, and all the tourist shops are shuttered or will be on Saturday.  Monday is their official Thanksgiving, and so this is a long holiday weekend for most of them, a time for getting one's island in order and gathering to give thanks for all His Blessings.  

As is our habit and our good blessings, we found a church, St. Dunstan’s Cathedral Basilica, in Charlottetown.  It was easy to find, the steeple rising above all other things.  A steeple is such a kind act.  It was first created to be a beacon of hope to all those who were struggling in the Dark Ages of Europe.  Under it you could find help, food, lodging, safety, and unburden yourself.  It was truly the example of Christ’s teaching, ‘Whatever you did to the least of these, you did it unto me.’  I just happened to read this parable in my time with the Ancient of Days this morning.  

The steeple still serves that for me and mine.  We have been drawn into its hope-filled interior all over the world as we seek always to draw “Nearer my God to Thee” to revive our souls, worn thin on the good trails of this earth.  My lover and I lit a candle, knelt, and prayed our heart’s desire; she wept.  We rose and quietly left as pilgrims have been doing for all the ages: “There is a place of quiet rest.  Near to the heart of God.”   

      

 

Googolplex And More

Sitting in deep color, a wooded campsite on Prince Edward Island, dressed in fall’s fancy.  Colors have held true our whole visit.  You must not read this as some line off the cuff, some sentence that will do.  When I say color, I mean a divine thing, a most sacred event.  So many single leaves put to shame, and placed in context, all of the color field, abstractists, and even the impressionists' paintings of the last 150 years.  No human creative effort can compare, can match the colors that are true color, not those added to a canvas.  Color so extravagant, so exuberant, underscored by the fact that it will be tossed away, infinitely fluttering to earth to decay and nourish the same sacred act next year.  Try not to miss the sacredly divine as it waves past you by the googolplex.

A leaf I picked up on a hike the second day we were here.
The cup is by Megan Peden, a former student of 
mine.  I always travel with her cup.  

   

Tumbling Along

We will move toward home today even though we won’t turn directly south for three more days.  It was a long haul up here and a long one back, ending in a mad dash for the border to get us to our plane on time.  Canada has in many ways caught us off guard and made us pay.  I had closely followed the weather to make sure we packed appropriately, but I did not take into account the wind and “feels like.”  For instance, this morning when I got up, the temperature was 43°, but with the wind, which is strong, it “feels like” 27°.  That is a significant difference in how one might dress.  

However, we are both tumbleweeds, just easily go with the flow, and so we are now layering 4 and 5 layers to go out and have learned a good lesson.  

Had a good hike up Salmon Ponds Trail yesterday; it rained most of the late evening and night, and we are facing a six-hour trip to Prince Edward Island today.  We have a three-day camp there, setting us up for the two-day mad dash. Tumbling along.  Happy Trails.   

 

 

Shine On Kind Star, Shine On

We are neck-deep in Canada, and there’s no one here.  It seems all the Canadians have moved somewhere else, leaving behind rolling hills forested with stunted, brilliantly colored trees, a vastness of uninterrupted creation with no one to tend it.  We are tending to it, paying attention to Him who made it, acknowledging Him, thinking the world of Him for making it all. It has turned cold, 44° in our camp this morning. Nothing says comfort better than a rated 20° LL Bean sleeping cover and a warm lover beside me.  

We are in this kind of climate now: when the sun is out, you are warm, but when it goes behind a cloud, you are immediately cold.  Everyone should often be in this predicament to put our star in its rightful place.  A relatively small star in a particularly small arm of a very small galaxy, yet all our hopes, dreams, and lives depend on it.  If I didn’t know its Maker, I would be worshipping it this morning and begin to build a temple to it.  And I NEED worship, somewhere to place all this thanksgiving I have as this star shines on my body right now. Thank goodness for my Three God who makes the seemingly insignificant truly significant!!! Shine on, kind star, shine on.     

We are on the Cabot Trail, a beautiful
byway there in the background.

 

Tender and Mild

2 Days Ago,

I lay around in the morning; the RV is all quiet. I sit by the window drinking coffee, reading the Ancient Text, today leaving Malichai and joining the glad tidings of Christ’s ancestry in Matthew. Listening to good clarinet music in a forest of quiet color, a breeze rustling my world awake. We sit at the border of Canada; we are lazy; we have no reason to get going: “All is calm, all is bright, round yon virgin mother and child, holy infant so tender and mild.”

Backroading Through Life

In a silent camp of old folks, long gone, homes abandoned for warmer climates.  Alone, 300 miles north of “Welcome to Maine.”  In a forest of color, a lake, a tranquil dose of peace, a hard won seven hour trip through a corridor of color named a New England fall.  One unmentioned, old-world village, after another, nuzzled between a one-lane road across the mountains of Maine.  Backroading through life. 

Sunset in our campsite.

  

Roaming Away from paradise

I am a roamer.  By this, I mean I have never stayed long in one place, been a rolling stone since birth.  My dad was a roamer; my mom always said, “He has itchy feet.  Can’t seem to find a home anywhere.”  I lived in Jackson for 27 years, and in all those 9855 days I never spent one of them thinking of Jackson as home.  But I was born to roam.  By the time I graduated from High School, I had been in 11 different schools.  I married a woman who said she wouldn’t date me but would go hiking with me, and we have been tramping around the world ever since.  We are explorers, down roads with no names; trails marked only by our compass; wilderness and byways, lonely plains, windy cliffs, mountain passes and hidden meadows are all places we seem to end up. But now something has claimed our hearts, a home like no other, Fair Haven, the end of a gravel road, a cleared acre, a river, big blue sky, full moons, and warm fires has now claimed our hearts and wondering off has lost a bit of its call.  We are off again, but I confess, I leave sadly.  Will we find a garden and vista more sincere than we leave?  No!  For once in my life I have found a home, have been loaned it till we will be called home, an honest piece of earth worthy of prepping us for Paradise with God.   

         

Sitting With The Moon

I sit just to the right of the full moon, its company a light for my heart, a daily gift of romance.  Romance is a word we make up to describe something indescribable.  Much like the words love or art, romance falls short.  Full moons give us a better descriptor because the moon, full over the river, is worth ten thousand words of romance whispered to my heart.  

 

I Don't Know!

I am reading a book that asked me the question, “What do you want to be remembered for?”  I thought about that question and tried to think of an answer.  As I was thinking about that question, it kept leading me to another question that seemed to occupy more of my thoughts than the first question.  The new question that came to mind is, “Who do I want to remember me?”  I haven't answered either.  

 

The Sacred People of Ancestry

They are family, distant maybe in miles but not in blood, that connection which is redder, richer, old blood, the sincere blood of the ages running deep into the earth's past.  I think of this as the nourishing blood that grows great families.  Such was the case this last weekend as the remnant of my paternal family came to call.  They are few, a true remnant, three quilt squares that make up a dear blanket of family warmth.  They come from Detroit, where their fathers fled the difficult poverty of southern life, worn thinner by a world war, to the north's promise of work, building cars and commerce that fueled much of the abundance of the late 20th century.  They are the connection to the old black-and-white photos saved in our parents' scrapbooks, old boxes, and hallway picture frames.  People we never knew but whose good blood now runs through me and mine.  It is always good to see these few three.  To renew the ties that bind, to sit in the shade and piddle over the long past, to eat, drink and be merry, to hold hands and pray and know as we are known.  We worshiped together in the church of our ancestors, visited the haunting homes that housed our struggling elders in an America that is much longed for today.  Oh the blood of land people, those that lived on what his good earth provided, so kind in their rich abundance of children, able to pass on and on and on the family that now spreads out because of their calloused hands, bent backs, and determined spirit.  To say my heart was renewed this weekend would be an understatement…my soul, heart, and mind sing with the blood of ages…even that sacred Blood of the Cross;  

“Blest be the tie that binds

our hearts in Christian love;

the fellowship of kindred minds

is like to that above.

When we are called to part,

it gives us inward pain;

but we shall still be joined in heart,

and hope to meet again.” 

The blood gathers at Fair Haven.

 

The home my dad's mom, Mamaw
lived in as a child.

Passing the Torch

We finished installing Zac’s sculpture, and it was such a pleasure to work alongside our son, the sculptor.  Benson Sculpture is now safely and creatively in our children's hands.  God is faithful.  The unveiling is next week, and I will post an image of the piece then.   

 

Binding Celestial Life

The little things that make life, life.  None is more important than the warmth of another person being shared with you.  The warmth of their body soaking into yours.  Combine this with love, and you have a symbiotic relationship of the divine.  As the nights grow colder, I am reminded of this little thing of life, the two becoming one, the 98.6° of binding, celestial life.  

   

On The Road Again

For the past 35 years, my lover and I have spent a considerable amount of time with our family creating Benson Sculpture and traveling around the country and the world creating sculptures. Today we begin again.  Sissy and Oliver join us as we drive to Zac and Britt’s to install Benson Sculpture's newest work.  Zac won a large commission, and we are all working the install this weekend. “On the road again, just can’t wait to get on the road again, making sculpture with my family and my friends, and I can’t wait to get on the road again.”  Thanks, Zac, and you to Willie.  Images to follow. 

Our last major work, Seven Pillars.

 

Drop Stones In The Sea Somewhere Beyond the Ordinary

The infinitesimal nature of my own being, when set against the vastness of the night sky, draws me toward an inclusion in Someone ultimately powerful, even omnipotent. It touches the soul in me and awakens an ever-increasing longing. I have always been a gazer, a long-looker. I was the kid in school who stared out the window, imagining all the places there were to go and all the things there were to see. A window has always been my favorite form of indoor entertainment, a kind of portal transporting me to the heart of God.                                                                                                                                                          When I was in the Navy, just before we would leave port, I would fill my pocket with rocks. Once we were finally in blue water, I would stand beside the bulkhead and drop them, one by one, overboard and marvel at the experience they were having. I wanted to live that kind of meaning myself.                              I did not understand any of this when I was young. I only knew that my imagination seemed to carry me somewhere beyond the ordinary. Now I know better. It was God all along, wooing me to life and “life more abundantly.”   

Some of those who helped me drop stones in the sea.

   

 

An All Out War...Always

Life is an all-out war to find meaning.  Most people give up after a few dynamic searches in their youth and life itself, the life they have becomes the meaning they try to make of it.  But my life is not that meaningful in bringing me meaning.  It eventually drops into entertaining me and my appetites, and that becomes a downward spiral of ever-decreasing returns as your body becomes less and less able to live up to what entertains you.  I need something that can bring meaning to me at 28 and me at 68 but, more importantly, ever-increasing meaning and purpose in a body that can be it or, better yet, a body that can DO it.  How?  To completely and wholeheartedly commit to being with God, in Christ, through the Holy Spirit every morning, as with an oxygen tank a thousand leagues under the sea.  He will give you lifelong meaning and purpose, but more importantly, he will give it to you one day at a time.  The here's only purpose is to prepare you for the hereafter, and the hereafter for you being there.   

The Three God and others; Thank You

Sometimes being is so overwhelming that I have to bow my head and talk to God.  The very gift of being, the ecstasy of it, the profound nature of it, undoes me.  And often, in these moments of still, silent, exquisite meaning, I am reminded of the Three God and all the people who have helped me to get to know being in this profound way.  

The full moon fell in the river.

Baby, That Ain't Me

I am trying to hold a half acre of twelve at bay.  It is a job, an all-out struggle.  Nature is relentless, a literal growing force that never takes a break, exuberant in summer, pushing out everywhere and stockpiling roots underground all winter.  I have tried to learn how to work with it, to let it help me, but it is not a great partner.  It likes to go it alone.  And every time I plant something as an offering of inclusion, she sends a deer or rabbit over to eat it.  You would think that my wanting to have dominion over ½ acre and leaving her 11½ would be more than generous on my part, but deep down I know that she will never be happy until she takes it all back and lets it be totally overgrown, wild and free,  as her natural state of being.       

On top of our mountain, Mount Brown, where 
she is totally free to be herself.

 

The Sweet Joy of Graceful

I used to be graceful!  Could run like flying, could leap boulder to boulder, swim like a wave, hike the high places, catch the long ball.  No longer.  My gracefulness was cut out by a 150 hp Evinrude.  But my great blessing is I married graceful.  My lover is at home beside the mountain stream, on the ballroom dance floor, tent traveling, or walking the halls of Versailles.  Her body turned 74 yesterday, and a gift she gave us both was to slalom as we both did when young and unbound by the ages of the old.  Her body of grace graced my soul with joy as joy only comes to the sweet kindness of long togetherness.  Our lives together have been tragic and ecstatic but idyllic all along.  We sat as lovers in the evening watching the sun roll down behind the Crab Orchard Mountains far to our west, held hands, each meditating on her turning 74 as an angel of gracefulness, and in our oneness, I was graceful(filled) too.    

    

 

A Whispered Blessing

Stop!  Can you hear it?  The earth is beginning to groan under the scorching heat of long summer.  It is dropping a few yellowed leaves of burden, turning brown at the edges, a droop here, a fading flower there, and a whisper, “Please, Good God, a little rest!”  Can you hear her?  She is slowing, stilling before her Lord, “I have served You well; I multiplied Your treasure, greened and brightened every corner of Your earth; I have been faithful; again!”  

And this is the whisper to lean in and hear: “Well done, My good and faithful servant.”

A good and faithful leaf.

 

Stardust

I sit in my hot tub in the dark of night looking at the stars as they move across the same heavens Adam gazed at.  I follow the many satellites, wonder what they are doing in the planes that move silently over me, and listen to Willie’s Stardust album, waiting on September Song to play.  It is the life theme of my time left on earth.  I am in the fall of life, and fall is my time of year.  I reflect and plan what has been put by and what I need to plant.  I think of coming warm fires, a new year, and what a 68-year-old body is capable of doing and what it might need; to do it. My body is a marvel of engineering Holiness, made special just for me to be just the me I was made to be at 68.  It now reminds me quietly, and viciously, that life, all life, is a gift made to wonder “In my heart there always will remain, My stardust melody, The memory of love’s refrain.”   

A Reunion, "On A Slow Train Bound for Nowhere"

I graduated from high school 50 years ago this year.  It was 1976, our country's bicentennial.  It made us feel special, unique, as only an 18-year-old can feel, like the world was made for us.  I came to high school as I did for almost all grades, from another town, in the middle of my freshman year, my dad taking another church.  I felt like an outsider, didn’t belong, and didn't want to.  I was good at sports, which had always served me well, like a cloak that made me someone when I was no one.  It was a time of greats, great angst, great loves, great meaning, great losses, when your total memory was 18 years, and all experiences were exquisitely profound, and you would die for a small band of brothers and sisters.  It was 3 1⁄2 years, a little less than a quarter of my life then, but now at 68, it makes up half the memories I remember.  I left that town “and took off for the sky” and never came back except when I think about “The Way We Were.”  Oh, to find myself “on a warm summer’s evening on a train bound for nowhere” with a few of those who make up many of the memories of my heart.  

 

The Long Missing

I was so fortunate that when I was born, I was born to two people who had been saved by Christ, not primarily saved from sin, or saved from hell, or saved from moral transgressions, but Christ had saved them from the most hellish and dysfunctional of family life.  Both their fathers, our first image of God, were terrible alcoholics, and both died at the age of 41. Drunk.  

So my parents raised me as someone who would actually die if they didn’t have Christ to save them from the life they were raised in.  Two young people who knew only two ways of life: hell or saved by Christ.  It made for me an immersive experience in Christ in the church by two people who had been truly saved in salvation and saved from their lives on earth.  My early life was in many ways idyllic. Were there problems?  Yes, tremendous problems, hurtful, exceedingly difficult, but I lived through them with two parents who never wavered from a total commitment to Christ, home, and church.  They had limited resources, no family to fall back on, scarce opportunities, but they had all of Christ because they gave up all of themselves to have all of Him.  

As a child, this was my bedrock.  As a young man, they remained my bedrock for understanding Christ even though I was racing down the highway to hell, seemingly bent to get there.  But they never wavered.  Love, admiration, and acceptance were all the bedrock of my young man years.  Did they become exasperated by my life?  Yes!  My mom once told me she would walk the backyard at night and pray, “Lord, take him home or me one!”  But she never backed down or walked away.

In my mid-life, they were my silent Big Rock Mountain.  Always there.  Always strong.  Always the ever-present help in seeing faith lived out in their greying years.  My constant and greatest example of what it meant to live a prolonged and consistent walk of salvation.  

Now they are gone.  And all they have been for me is all they are to me.  They are in me as much as the forest soil is in the tree.  I am my Mother and Father’s son.  I was not saved from them but by them.  They were the ones who brought me to Christ, and the memory of them still demands I go to him and him alone.  Only he can save me and mine.    

Mom and me.

Flamboyant Speed of Grace

These are two true things. 

The strength I have to live any given day has significantly decreased.

I am gifted with the ability and the quietness of slowness to be hyper-focused on small things, which bring much greater meaning, thoughtful consideration, and exquisite insights.

Solomon was mistaken.  Life is very meaningful, especially when experienced at the flamboyant speed of the floating grace of the aged.  

P.S.  On reading Ecclesiastes. 

Evening picnic on the river.

God's Glorious Gifts of Baptisms

Summer is hard on me; its heat and the extended daylight give me time to task meaningful work, but this in turn depletes me of energy that is no longer readily available or replenished as rapidly or fully as my body needs.  Summer is a sprinting marathon of activity.  The rewards are lots of blues and greens, colors, sunsets, and flowers, long hours freeing some up for resting, and a time for the balm of expectations of fall and the glorious warming fires of winter.  

One great gift of my now knowing meaning of summer is a regular baptism in the waters of our mighty Tennessee.  After a hard day of meaningful work, it is glorious to sink my body down in her cooling waters of gilead gently washing the pain and sweat away–a cleansing like no other, equal to the need of the hardness of summer on my poor, old soul.     

 

Blackberries, The Heavens, and The Fermi Paradox

My wife and I bike every day, and at the end of our route is a half-mile section of a wonderfully abundant blackberry patch.  We stop every time, picking handfuls to replenish our depleted energy.  For some unknown reason, I have begun to stare up into the heavens, into the blueness, into the clouds floating above, into the starry night sky, indigo and deep.  It also replenishes me in the same way the blackberries do.  I don’t know why, but both are deeply sacred experiences.  And another.  I have discovered the Fermi Paradox and have studied it in depth, and marvel at the simplicity of the answer to this “crisis of expectation over observation.”  This too is a sacred study for me and replenishes my faith, love, and worship of the Holy Trinity.  Oh, the joy of the nourishing of my soul.   

The blackberry patch that started it all.

      

 

An Exquisite Element

There is no greater element of art than line.  It seems so humble, hidden always from our consciousness, but think, all the wisdom of the western world is recorded with 26 letter lines and 9 number lines.  The first thing God did to tell me He Is, was write a line, I AM!  All works of art begin with lines defining the edge, and the best, all love letters are a long line of love telling.

Here is a picture of an exquisite line because of what it represents to me.  Every morning as I begin to pray, I light a stick of incense to acknowledge the Psalm, “Accept my prayer as incense offered to You.”  

 

To My Dad

I miss you.  The great void in my sky that your falling like a mighty oak left is still just as void and just as blue. Your presence with me was so great, like breath that I often breathed deeply…but without notice.  You molded and made me, always the example of right, and how to live right, that was both a blessing and a goad.  Now my old self even looks just like you, walks with your gait, thinks on life like you lived, Your God has become my God, and your home with him will eventually be mine.  Those soft and real memories made when my mind, heart, and soul were so sincerely absorbent are still so real to me, you living in front of me, like a best seller of the one thing I still have, the Christ in you you sowed into me.  Thanks, Dad. I miss you.  Until we meet again!!!

Dad on top of Big Rock Mountain, where he taught 
me to see God in everything.

Who We All See If We Have Eyes To See

My wife exclaimed, “Oh, I don’t look good in that picture!”  

I said, “There is never a time you don’t look good!  A picture is a fraction of a nanosecond, and we all see in high definition, 5-G, Technicolor, three-dimensional, blockbuster movie of life every waking moment of our lives.  In that you are always the star and Academy Award-winning best actress because that is who we all see!"

That is true, but the Star is really God, who made me write this blog to Him about how glorious our eyes and minds give us a constant movie of wonder.  That’s quite a parlor trick.   

 

Where The Wild Things Grow...WILDER

FAMILY REUNION 2026

We are a wild bunch!  We hike and bike, push and shove, hold, kiss, and love.  We bury our dead among us, we Doxology at every turn, we catch frogs to marvel at God, slalom at 73, pray fervently, dance with abandon, challenge each other, testify, cry bottles of tears, eat heartily, swim constantly, conquer our fears, cruise under Saturn and Venus, hold and kiss, wrestle and argue.  Where do the wild things grow…wilder?  Under the exuberant and physical joy of family reunions, all under the  Lordship of Christ! 

 

The Gift of Utter Failure

I became an artist out of sheer desire for meaning in life.  I had no clue how it and I were going to survive, but I knew it was my best bet to self being and I just gambled on it.  Looking back, it was evangelizing me.  It is that simple.  It was God in Christ in art and beauty that was bringing me to my senses to lead me out of the sty I had made my home.  They did all the rest and gave me a life I did not even have the vocabulary to give imagination to my mind and heart to what was happening to my life.  The life they gave me was abundant, easy, and hard-free, it was as if I was born with the animation to be an artist and all I had to do was continue to step into me.  It is a great mystery to be gifted yourself after such utter failure of trying your hardest to be yourself.    

Found this in the woods yesterday.  One of the gifts is 
getting my blind eyes to see. 

 

 

A Grey Hallelujah

Sometimes in the greyness of days, one after another, life becomes as clear as it can be.  It seems to be still enough to think about seeing, to say, “Did you see what you see?”.  As if the grey of the world gives me time to see the color of my own life.  I am gifted with stillness and quietness, the last home at a long, dead-end, nicked out in the forest, a small plot, bound by a mountain behind and the river in front.  Life is a grand experience, truly, “a stage.”  Oh, but what a stage.  I guess this is what I see, the most profound seeing I am constantly seeing, the natural world “stage.” And what does the stage cause me to perform, what does it prompt me to be, to say, to believe? 

“Oh what a Savior.”  

 “Once I was straying in sin’s dark valley

No hope within could I see

They searched through heaven 

And they found a Saviour

To save a poor lost soul like me

Oh, what a Saviour! Oh, hallelujah.  

 

The Exquisite Palace of Suffering

I place myself in quiet solitude in the morning and several times throughout the day,  mostly seeking the Ancient of Days. In the quiet times of life, I experience sincere thoughts on life, my life, and the lives of loved ones.  Experience is the right word; these times are often powerful, meaningful, and deeply experienced.  This morning, in the quiet of dawn, I was given this title about my body’s suffering from becoming old.  I have known and experienced all my body's exquisite feats of living, and now I am experiencing its suffering of living.  The biggest surprise of my life, the painfulness of my exquisite palace as it gets old.  

My daughter is in Italy and sends up pictures of Palaces 
around the lake where they are staying.

 

Thanks For Our Freedom and a Bar of Soap

I was inch deep in a layer of suds when it dawned on me how fortunate I was to have a bar of soap.  I have been to places where soap was not available, not a single bar to be had, and no way to get one.  No soldier fought and died to give me a bar of soap, but soap is one of the small results of just such sacrifice.  Freedom means freedom to make and sell soap.  Freedom also means people have to die to obtain and keep it.  Many Americans have forgotten how unbelievably fortunate we are.  God bless America.  God bless those men and women who pick up arms every day to keep us free.  And God bless the families of those who gave the ultimate sacrifice for our freedom.  Happy Memorial Day, from someone who is blessed enough to have a bar of soap.

P.S. 1.7 - 3 billion people worldwide do not have a bar of soap.  

We just got Betty's father's gravestone from the VA. 
His ashes will be buried in our family graveyard 
atop Brown Mt., named in his honor, behind our home.  He served 
in the South Pacific, ending up in Hiroshima, Japan.   

   

 

The Abundance of Pledging One's Troth

Getting old is the greatest challenge of my life. It is a life-and-death grudge match, a winner-take-all fight to the finish, an all-out war to the very end. It is intense. Every day brings another battle, will I press on, or will I surrender? Will I stand and move forward, or sit and wait for the inevitable?  Challenge follows challenge because pain is now the price of overcoming. I can choose to sit still, or I can continue on with this partnership of pain and living. Getting old, for me, has become that simple: accept the pain, shove it aside, and keep living.  I live outdoors, in the woods, under the sky, in the work of seeing, building, tending, holding on, and experiencing life fully. Yet all of it now comes with pain: some nagging, some sharp, some downright darnable. That, for me, is life now.  And that is the final offer, live or merely exist; create or withdraw; experience the present or live only in memories of my past, engagement, or divorce.  Really, it comes down to choosing the joy of living, even when that joy includes pain. My body has racked up the miles, 68 years.  Every joint, tendon, muscle, limb, the whole, has accumulated miles from living life full-on.  And still, oh, the joy of living. The daily invitation of life itself. The abundance of pledging one’s troth anew to the Holy One, who still whispers to my worn and aging body: “I have come to give you life, and life to the full.”  

We bike in the woods every morning.  Living is so much 
better with a partner who also chooses to live.

 

Smile Now

I spend a lot of time thinking these days on the compression of life.  It seems that 68 years in a 68-year-old mind is but a moment, a brief whisper of faintness in the reality of the moment you consider it.  How could 68 years pass so suddenly?  It is wholesome to think this, a great incentive to live these moments with purpose because years or but moments in our “mind's life.”  

I was looking at my eye this morning, examining it because it's somewhat ornery.  It suddenly dawned on me that my eye was examining itself, seeing it seeing.  

These two thoughts are somehow related, at least in my “mind's eye!”  Smile now. 

My warm footprint on our cold tile floor.

 

This Is All A Gift

There is great joy in knowing you can make nothing.  I was sitting beside the river yesterday, allowing the balm of natural beauty to do its kind work upon my soul and me.  It suddenly dawned on me that there was nothing here that I could make.  Then, like a twinkling of lightning in me, I was lit up with the joy of this thought; in all the glorious beauty of the universe, there was nothing I could make, no single part of it.  What great joy of knowing that all this beauty was made, every leaf, star, and cloud.   It was created with no help, not a single moment of thinking or doing by a single human in all the worlds, added a single, tiny, itty bitty part of it.  It is just here.  I sat by the river, slowly moving in front of the mountains, below a lapis sky as green grass cooled my feet, and birds fluttered everywhere, and was filled with wisdom.  This is all a gift.  

 

The Kind Act Of Sharing The Infinitesimal

Years ago, God allowed me to know the deep and abiding kindness of rain. There are few things so kind, shared in such tiny portions by the infinitesimal. Each small drop is a miracle of worshipful, altar-building proportion, bearing a greatness entirely unrelated to its size. This is why I often sit and pray earnestly to the Conceptor and Creator of rain, for conception itself is far more difficult than creation, but creation means He owns every drop. Every one He shares with us is, in itself, an act of profound kindness.  Can you imagine the praise required to thank Him for the rain He is sharing with us this morning? It makes me smile.

 

The Marianas of Life

The pains of life are many.  We cannot live an abundant life without accepting the abundance of pain and sorrow, the deaths, the deep hurts, the tragedies, the senseless sorrows, the burdens, the dying off, and putting away.  The many lacks, the withouts, the starvings and bloodletting, the evil, the violence, the hatred, and apathy.  Oh, the sorrowful trenches of life.  But in all the trenches, the marianas’s of despair, Christ alone allows me to remember the mountain tops, to see them, to read his record of them, the abundance, the everlasting, the no more tears, the lion lying down with the lamb. This wholeness will be me and mine forever and evermore.  Death is the final injustice, the final tragedy, the ultimate bottomless trench, without Christ.  But in Christ, it is the final and ultimate victory doorway to complete and utter fulfillment of life.  It is life and life everlastingly abundant.   

My Chartres

We should each have a cathedral in our lives.  For years, I’ve been drawn to the great cathedrals of Europe, those sacred works of the Medieval and Renaissance periods, created by humans to meet with the Lord God Almighty. They were built by people who believed, truly believed. I’ve visited many of them, first with my family, and later with as many art students as I could take. Each visit deepened my belief that we all need such places in our lives. A space where we commit ourselves to meeting God, the great I AM, Maker of heaven and earth.   If we believed, really believed, what space would we create to meet with Him?  Here is a picture of mine.  I hope you will make yourself a cathedral.  It is part of living well. 

   

 

The Cure For Our World, A Daily Walk in the Woods

It is important to write, to record your life, when you lived and what was true on that day.  I went for a walk in the woods, now fully canopied in green as a grand Cathedral.  A slight rain had fallen, and the forest was wet and quiet.  Quiet is the best hymn to accompany being.  

I saw a tortoise sharing my trail.  I call them turtles.   A turtle is an ancient thing, akin to a diamond or a piece of coal.  It is a big event in my morning.  

I picked stones into piles to build our graveyard wall.  A sacred act.  Sacred acts are treasures I give myself.  I live in a treasure box, Fair Haven, with my Fairy Princess Lover.  

I saw two more turtles.  Three in a morning.  That is a first for my life; Three ancient of days, calling me to walk daily in the woods with The Only and Most Ancient of Days.  

 

Praise Thinking at 837 Feet

Life experienced 837 feet above ground is life.  We are on the 62nd floor and saw our star come up in our darkness.  

Thoughts:  God names all the stars.  I wonder what his name is for ours?  

       If I didn’t know God through Christ Jesus, I would be compelled to 

        to worship the sun.  Imagine how much better worship is if you

        believed, by faith, he made the sun; “The greater light to rule the

        day.”        

        AMEN

This flower had just come to bloom at Fair Haven,
so we brought it with us.