Dawns Early Light

With years and years of sitting, meditating and watching night become day, I cannot remember the last dawn I missed. One startling fact is that dawn always came, as today, but it doesn’t have to.  The truth is that we can never live as if dawn was a guarantee, that we have some pact with the sun to keep burning and with the earth to keep turning.   Repetition breeds a numbing unconsciousness that is terrifying when a note is missed.  It is best to live with a certain sense of weary anticipation which breeds an ever-present attitude of gratefulness when the normal actually does occur because normal, when considered, is often unrecognized miracles.

Wolfgang Laib's hazelnut pollen work at the MoMA

Hightest

I have once again seen dawn happen.  I can smell the pungent hickory wood stacked behind me for the fire.  My coffee, Starbucks French Roast, tastes rich like rich sounds. I can feel the dampness of this morning held at bay by cotton terry cloth and the morning birds sing like children let loose from the classroom.  Who am I to thank for all this glory directed to me by my senses? 

Thank You!

Thomas Cole's The Oxbow

The Altar Coffee Coruscations

What is life if it is not given a reason for praise? What good is it to praise the cosmos when it cannot acknowledge it?  Should I stand this morning in front of the sun and praise it for shining as if it could choose not to shine if I didn’t?

Or should I uphold any man for praise who might at any minute prove unworthy of it?

Or an institution, which is soulless just as the tax adjustment it seems to always make in its favor?

Or the narcissistic confusion I would have if I were to begin to praise myself?

The fact that I can smell my coffee and that my mind is able to construct a reality of joy for the offering of it to my mouth and body and to the enhancement of my morning is proof enough that Whoever thought smell up and connected it to my mind and heart is worthy of all manner of praise.  He is worthy.

St. Nicholas Cathedral In St. Petersburg

The New Opiate

The new opiate of the people is not bread and wine nor opium wrapped propaganda, but cells phones, food stamps and unemployment pay.  What ever the gift offered, whether by Rome, Japan or America, let us not deceive one another, it is a drug parading as a gift, a counterfeit, a fake that seeks to deceive.  It is “the man's” final great grasp for power.  Freedom is the greatest gift, but also the hardest to keep. Freedom means you are not only responsible for yourself, but also for anyone less fortunate than yourself.  Governments will always have a tendency to try and limit the freedoms of the individual.  It is the free individual's responsibility to resist the government’s tendency.  The greatest way to resist is to care for your neighbor as you would care for yourself.

Van Gogh's The Good Samaritan After Delacroix

From A Tired Old Sheep

There is no great need to try and understand God for we can no more understand Him than we can understand why gravity exists, not as a force but at all.  However the great joy comes in the chase after His understanding, the great discoveries of wonder and magic.  That is the reason to study gravity, not to discover its how but to marvel in the magic of why.  It is one great feat to glue everything to the earth it is quite another to make my old callous, self loving heart to love my neighbor but even more the desire to haul this broken down old body across the street to sit with him.  That is a trick, knowing me, that is worthy of worship of the Magician who can pull that rabbit out of His hat. 

Gold Leafed Over Weariness

I am wearied of the gay issue.  It seems that the American press has decided that it is the preeminent matter we face.  The press who has now so capitulated to the government that they are more communist in act than a fair and free press also wearies me.  They have given the government what it could have never, even by force, gained by itself; they are now the voice of the government. 

What I am not wearied of is to what lengths Jesus will go to save me from myself, even my weariness.  I look across the frozen forest this morning and the trees are divided cleanly, below dark grey green of night, above the golden gift of dawn.  Who can make wood alive with gold leaf whose karat cannot be numbered at 24 but purer still, cast in the crucible of heaven?  Jesus; who never wearies of my own issues or capitulations. 

my work Man With Healed Heart