Pride On A Platform

The decaying of the news business and the sophomoric pettiness of its practitioners is difficult to watch and the fact that most of it is televised means we are all eyewitnesses.  How can such a disaster occur?  Because humans have a natural tendency toward believing we are the center; a TV camera is like speed to that tendency and a show is cocaine.  No greater drug exists than that of self-righteous pride on a platform.  

  

The Ultimate Resolution For The Artist

The greatest goal of the artist is to declare something sacred or religious.  We are all in search of the truth behind the reality of scientific materiality.  Humans often hide from it through entertainment, vocation or addictions—pride—but when a being finds themselves alone with the cosmos the haunt of the spiritual rises to our conscience in the form of the rightness of things juxtaposed against our being.  Rightness, the idea that there is pure good, pure right is always there claiming its right to hold us to the bar of justice, not in offenses and punishment but in understanding and grace.  For if Rightness is Anything, its most thing is Love/Grace, the enveloping of our true self in ITS protective understanding.  And “benevolence”, by its very nature as a human idea, cannot encompass the IT that we all long to assume.  So we have prophets, shaman, pastors, priests and artists, those brave enough to regular bear up under the weight of aloneness, one alone with only themselves and all that IT IS, the COMPLETE and in that Relationship, the ultimate existence of our being with IT, comes the true knowledge of being.  Then we come out of the aloneness that is really the Ultimate Togetherness and proclaim the truth shared with us.  But here is the razored division of reality—some, by faith, know the IT as The I AM, which makes togetherness personal, which is the final jeopardy.  If the togetherness is personal, not evolutionary, then resolution becomes the entire goal of human life, Pascal’s Wager.  To me that is the ultimate resolution of the artist’s need to declare, they can declare nothing else for nothing else matters. 

The Reminder of Exuberance

Old artists sit around sadly considering the physical toll art has taken on their body while planning ways in which their body can continue to bear up under the art left unmade in their souls.  The artist soul is much more ambitious than the body it inhabits.  For every piece we attempt, the aged body strips away all material not critical to the concept paring down to only what needs to be said with the material needed to say it and in a way their body can accomplish it.  One glorifying result of this is the artist is continually reminded at the ongoing exuberance of God’s creative power that evidences a Being that never grows, old, weary or unable. 

Indebtedness Of Thanksgiving

No artist every moves far from the emotional puzzlement of his compulsion to create and no true artist has ever consider it anything other than an obligation.  Why is a freely chosen, random vocation, to the artist a compulsory way he must live?  No one starts out to be an artist.  One simply loves to draw.  Then by chance, it offers itself as a vocation and then one wakes one day and finds himself inside a divine plan, an indebtedness of thanksgiving.  If by pure Grace, one accepts the God behind the veil we long to explore, then art becomes a means by which we can continue to release the ongoing flood of Living Water that aches our hearts and burns our souls.

Like What Angels Will Sound Like

For 33 years I have daily sat in the quiet of the world I was in.  This morning, like many, I sit beside the great Tennessee River, smooth and quiet, a mirror for the heavens above the earth beside.  Everything is alive, the hills, the trees, green is the uniform of the day.  What I mostly see and hear in these quiet times are birds, birds of every shape, sound, size, and color.  I like the fact that birds are plentiful, makes for good measure of things, birds fly and that is one of the greatest magic tricks of all time.  They always fly in ways that proclaim their magic, that they can, not proudly, but happy that they are special in this way.  They glide, and flitter; they swoop, dart and soar, their cool about it, self-assured, confident, but kind.  At times a flock of waterfowl will fly just overhead and I can hear the sound of their wings pushing the air aside, like what angels will sound like.  Just now a helicopter flew over and I smiled because it sounded like what a cow would sound like if it could fly.  I like flying, was writing about it this morning but that helicopter just reminded me, we aren’t cool at it.   

   

Back Porch Small Talkin'

God thank You for day, and for lots of days that have quickly become 61 years.  Thank You for life, that which lets me be living and, the life that You provided me to live, the lover and our kind, and our grand kind and those great grand kinds who are coming to live for.  All the loving and kissing and holding on cold beaches and warm beds, and the rivers and oceans and trees, and the butterflies and long straight roads in the west and Amiens and Gimmelwald—all that living that You gifted me to live in.  Thank You for every dawn that You woke me for and every blue sky and green earth that dawn made.  Thank You for letting me be young so I have great memories of a great body that was strong and fast and made me listen to Bob Seger’s, Like A Rock and thank You for letting me smile at how old young became.  Thank You for songs like Free Bird, Poems, Prayers and Promises, Waiting On June and Amazing Grace and that You let my ears hear and that You make string and vocal cords vibrate and that Elvis sounded like Elvis. Thank you for Tennessee and Switzerland and Italy and for conceiving of Fall, Winter, Spring and Summer in that order and that Fall and Winter combined are longer than summer.  Thank You that babies and lover always look their best in nude and that hot water was once on Your to-do list along with shade, the smell of cut grass and that all minks go to heaven because I have known the feel of a great mink coat.  Thank You for tears that are needed more with age and that I have seen humans born five times, delivered one and knew a dear loved one who was 99 and for letting me catch a big fish.  God this list could go on and on so I’ll close with this, thank You for forgiving this old, worn out scoundrel, wasted and well worn out on the road, washed up and cold and for giving me a new heart whose greatest pleasure is being grateful to You and knowing even that’s on— YOU!!!