Your Ears Need Adjusting

There is a heavy rain on this morning and the quiet is so meaningful that I feel as if I can hear every drop.  Listening to rain is a great gift you can give yourself, much like listening to leaves hit the ground, night sounds, birds wings pushing air aside, your lover breathing, and breezes in the deep woods.  Ears are to hear sounds that are becoming harder to hear and the second hardest is quiet.  The world has grown increasingly noisy and the ability to hear quiet leads to the ability to hear the hardest sound to hear, the Still, Small Voice of God.  The world is in a frightful free fall in large part because of noise, the constant screeching of current culture has prompted us to adjust our hearing so that we are now unable to hear what our ears were made to hear.  Placing your body with its senses in places/positions where their ability to help you to be a fully realized human being is one of the greatest gifts they and you will ever give yourself.  

And a great P.S. joy—you have four more!!!  

Last night at Fair Haven.  We were outside
listening to Doris Day's Christmas Album.

    

 

My Ground Hog Day Life

This morning, 38 years ago, I was sick to the point my brother took me to the emergency room in Knoxville.  The doctor examined me, gave me a vitamin B12 shot, and said there was nothing wrong except I was getting married at 2:00 that afternoon.  I have to admit I was very nervous.  My biggest fear was not making the right choice.  I had witnessed first-hand two divorces in my family and they had a severe impact on me.  But there was a significant, other side of the story; who I was marrying.  I knew I already loved her with all the love I had at age 24.  She was drop-dead gorgeous.  She was kind, brave, adventurous, and had a way of making me feel that I never wanted to let her down.  But more important than everything else I had never met a human like her who seemed so positively happy and naive because she actually was.  It was the direct opposite of me and I wanted that/her to be a part of my life forever.  For 38 years that has never changed.  She is still drop-dead gorgeous.  She is still the kindest, bravest, and the most adventurous woman I know, and I still never want to let her down.  And above all else, she is still the most intriguing human I know, positively happy and sincerely naively un-self-aware.  My marriage testimony remains the same today as always; I would give everything I own (which is a lot) to go back and live it all over again, only because…I would get to live it with her.   

Encouraging Winter Seeks Warm Lover

The cold barrenness of winter always encourages me.  The trees shed their leaves and open the earth up for closer examination.  Beauty hidden in the abundant greenery of summer is exposed, the silver sliver of mountain streamlets, small waterfalls, boulders, and trails are winters feast.  Winter also bears up against me forcing me to seek warmth and shelter and find renewed interest in my lover's warm body.  Winter quietens the earth and me and allows the natural sounds of life to filter in, the crows, the wind, and the sincere sound of quiet itself.  Winter is self-reflective, giving me time to think about sleeping lovers, to stare as a child at our Christmas tree, and to write with the ease of those silver slivers, bouncing too and fro on every rock of my unhurried mind. 

My lover sleeps in the early morning dawn.  I put our bed on rollers
so we can roll it up to the windows every night and go to sleep 
looking out at the stars above our Great Tennessee River.

Peace oh, Peace on Earth, God please!

12-11-21

Storms coming.  Whistling winds awoke me at 5 and have the river swirling as the prelude to the event.  The power of natural forces enhances my relationship with God, the awe of His power and need of His protection over all those I love, are juxtaposed against those times I have experienced His silence, seemingly being part of the audience of my life rather than the Conductor.  Faith by its name and nature is Faith.  However, beauty in its natural exuberance and most, almost entirely hidden from us, always bolsters a faith that storms might seek to blow away.  I am privy to an infinitesimal fraction of all the beauty of our earth and cosmos but when by the grace of scientific advancement I am given a view of works of sculpture staggering in their scale, color and power my faith becomes a rampart in the storm.  Such is the new image of The Pillars of Creation, done in new infrared light by the Hubble telescope and part of NASA’s Hubble Advent last night.  “Creation” being the faith part.    

(Next day) God, I plead for Your comfort over all those who now face a dying and damaged Christmas life.  Oh God, the tragedy of life on earth—as you so well know!  

The Great Awareness

The act of art-making as liturgical seems to hinge on humbleness;  personal humility, humble materials, the humble loss of your self-image as an artist, humbly forgetting you are making art, humble mark-making as intuitive instead of deliberate. Deliberate precision is harmful but hovering just above unconscious movement of hand on materials, there is a sincere humble precision, your mind, heart, and soul are deeply somewhere else, lead there by the act of precise mark-making—this is genuine studio practice.  In that state of unconscious making, you are the most aware of the Devine gift of Image-making.  It is that carried away state that each artist longs to create in, the unconscious awareness of The Great Awareness.  

 

Window Worship

I often raise my eyes to view the natural world that lies outside my window.  I am a great fan of windows and find their history a telling understanding of my own Christian worldview.  No group worked harder at bringing the outside inside than the church.  And once they achieved that ability they immediately filled it with color by staining the widows.  Their ability to bring the outside inside was one of the greatest achievements of humans.  Not only do windows give us a tremendous number of visual cues that help us successfully navigate life, give us light by which we can enhance our productivity and personal meaning they also provide us with a greater world of positive creative energy.  Seeing the natural world without always having to experience its physical reality is a gift of kindness almost never considered when thinking of your local church.

P.S.  The long and difficult struggle by the church to bring light inside is often overlooked by that very group, the Church.  It saddens me that in so many modern sanctuaries the first thing to be abandoned is widows followed close behind by light.  My own churches’ first act of Sunday morning worship is to turn off the lights; in our sanctuary without a single window.    

  

A Platform of Peace Gift to Give You and Your Loved Ones

It can be difficult to begin the Christmas season in a world that is continually screeching at us through our infinite device sources  with pain, violence, and hopelessness.  I am old enough to remember life without media, the quietness of a world that consisted of our home, our church and our small town.  With these realities in mind my lover and I began a habit several years ago to observe Advent as not only a preparation for Christmas but also as a rampart against the overwhelming tide of culture.  It has worked.  I want to share three sources of Advent that we practice in hopes that those of you who have a Christmas Faith and those who have a Christmas Holiday can both disembark this maddening coaster for a platform of peace.  

We close every day sitting together with our dog Hounder, soaking up each other’s body warmth and listen to John Piper, look at NASA’s Hubble images of majestic beauty and then my lover and I, in our old broken voices that are out of tune, sing a Christmas song.

The sites are posted below.  Happy Advent and a Merry beginning to Christmas.   

https://www.desiringgod.org/articles/prepare-the-way

https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2021/12/2021-hubble-space-telescope-advent-calendar/620865/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iO7ySn-Swwc