A Thought That Became A Love Letter To My Lover

There is a startling reality that comes as one grows older, the fading away of yourself as a human.  It is hard to decern because it is so subtle, there are no true markers that it is actually occurring and I have never read anyone’s account of it but it is happening to me. Let me try to explain.  When I was a child I felt very important to my parents, as a teenager very important to my friends and sports teams.  As I grew into adulthood I was very important to my career and then to my children.  Still, later I was very important to the vocational department that I built and kept running.  All of those roles required a tremendous amount of me to be realized, by that I mean the vestment of me and others for and with me engaged so much of my being, physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually.  As I am moving into my later years I am meaningfully engaged with fewer and fewer people, tasks, and responsibilities.  It is not that I am not busy or that I have fewer relationships with other humans, it is that the meaningfulness of my contribution is less and less necessary.  It is also not a sad thing but more like a very slow passing of one's torch to those that will move it forward.  

Having said all of that there is the most silver of linings to my journey and that is my lover.  We are both going through this together but that does not adequately explain the silver.  What is happening is, what we both use to accomplish individually is now, more and more, taking the two of us to achieve.  The more we fade the more necessary we are to the other.  And here is the silver, most of the meaning of me is held only in her memory, she is the one that has experienced most of my life with me; the life that was so meaningful is now not so much lived as remembered being lived.  And the remembering is the necessity of still being, each to the other.  

A Most Amazing Beauty Grace

Several years ago my father died at the age of 68.  We knew it was coming, the doctors informing us he had but six months to live.  I wrote him a letter every day of those last months.  The morning I received word that he had died I drove the 4-hour trip to see him one last time.  When I arrived at the mortuary the lady at the desk was hesitant to let me back but I was grievously persistent.  She ushered me into a large room where he was laid out, naked, on the most beautiful slab of white marble, the hoses already connected to him draining away the dead fluids from his body.  It was him, his beautiful body still massive from the diseases that had caused his bones to grow so large.  His great chest, hands, and feet still holding the slight color of life.  I was stilled by how much I still loved his body that was no longer him.  I rubbed his head and talked to him unable to separate what God had already, him from his body.  It was a time of enormous clarity for me, of a love and awareness I had never had before nor since.  It was one of those moments of beauty that you carry with you, cherishing at the grace of God for sharing it with you.  

I made a work of art about it titled Amazing Grace that I have shown but once and then hid away in the woods in West Tennessee.  A week ago I loaded the work up and drove it to East Tennessee and with the help of my lover and two daughters, installed it in its final and appropriate place, Fair Haven, where it, my lover, and I will await the final, Great Reunion.

God is good.  God is great.  Let us thank Him.   

Amazing Grace

    

Knowing Rocky's Gideons Bible

A few weeks ago our son-in-law found a dead raccoon in the woods at Fair Haven.  A bobcat had taken it.   Several weeks later as my lover and I were walking in the cool of the evening we came upon its remains.  I always marvel at a skeleton, one of the greatest metaphors for the real reality.  A marking of passing away, an exact record of being and non-being.  The profoundness of the creative process in life, the structure giving underlayment as you will, the guideline for the artist in the studio as he develops the human's outline.  It also stirs in me something of Eden, of The Almighty, of the final tolling of my own bell, what will go on and what will be left here.  Bones tend to be as eternal as life here on earth can muster but even ours will eventually turn to dust.  Dust to dust.  Ashes to ashes.  But The King Eternal has provided for a way to be neither and it is my hope for you and for Rocky Raccoon found in his Gideon’s Bible.   

 

You Shoulda Been There is an Invitation

If a picture is worth a thousand words then being present is worth a library full.  Yesterday Betty and I took an evening hike into woods naming sacred spaces as we stopped in them, a meaningful habit we have taken up.  At twilight, we returned, and exiting the forest we sat beside the Tennessee with our feet in the river watching the night come on.  We both were leaning on one another, two old souls propping each other up.  This picture is where we were but what was really happening was The Ancient of Days was drawing another one to a close and allowing us to watch.  Half our walk with God is just showing up. 

God Knows The Difference Between a Tortoise and a Turtle

The other day Betty and I were walking beside our mountain when we came upon a full-grown tortoise, the kind we have all seen.  I commented to Betty that I wondered why you never saw a baby turtle?  Two days later walking along the road above our home I came upon a baby snapping turtle.  I was so overwhelmed with thanksgiving.  He was all snapper from his pointed snout and long tail to the jagged flange of the back of his shell.  I smiled at the Kindness and Wit of God.  Two days before He saw me see a tortoise but heard me say “baby turtle”.   So here was my first baby turtle.  The little runt was on the road, the lake being 500 yards south of him and he was still headed north.  I picked him up, took him back to the river, and setting him down next to it, I waited to see what he would do.  After lying still for a few seconds he dived into the shallow water and immediately buried himself in the mud—already brilliant in his instincts.  God is good.  I have since asked to see a baby tortoise.    

 

Breaking the Bronco (Leviathan) Worship Service

I had two difficult problems.  I needed to remove the two blades from my lawnmower to have them sharpened.  The first problem was how to raise the mower so I could get under it.  I used the fulcrum and lever action of a 2/4 and a block of wood to lift the front of the mower up and set it on two other blocks of wood.  There is great meaning in using ancient tools to increase the efficiency of a 63-year-old body.  Now I had the mower up and with a socket and ratchet, I pulled with all my power to break the nut loose.  Couldn’t do it.  I had a one-foot pipe and slide the rachet into it and tried and tried but still couldn’t do it.  I laid in the grass cursed with weakness.  I drove to the hardware store and bought a 3-foot steel pipe.  Returned and once again crawled under the mower, set my socket, slide the ratchet into the pipe, slide my hand to the end of the pipe, and pulled, pulled very hard; SNAP, the bolt loosened.  I was hopeful.  I slide in the other side, repeated the process—SNAP!  Off it came.  I removed the bolt and blade and rolled over on my back and looked up at heaven.  For several minutes I laid there in a sincere worship service.  With all the things God had to figure out, the sun's distance from the earth, how to get the watermelon taste into the watermelon, kissing, how did He ever think of the lever and fulcrum?  “Oh, how I love Jesus, oh how I love Jesus, oh how I love Jesus, because He first invented the lever and fulcrum.”  This is an absolutely true story. 

The mower is named Bronco

 

Rosalee

We have a neighbor at Fair Haven who has devoted a great deal of her life fostering beauty in the form of orchids.  She has a small greenhouse cluttered with ancient technologies that creates the best environment for her flowers along with hundreds of plants and all the paraphernalia that goes along with it.  It is a true artist’s studio, looks a lot like her.  She is a river dweller, been here all her life, weather-worn wrinkled bronze like the finest leather, slim and spry, strongly Christian, with dancing eyes that sparkle over her beloved orchids.  I find great meaning in her greenhouse and her, even though both are almost complete strangers to me.  She has invited us to visit her studio anytime and yesterday we did again.  She is almost never there but it is filled to overflowing with the most exquisite beauty.  Just a ramshackle little hut hidden in the corner cove of the river, a place for God to rest and enjoy His creations, Rosalee and her orchids.