Memory Jelly

One gift of long vistas and ample time for meditation is the tranquility of long looks that turn deep.  I often find myself looking out over the river and mountains and seeing sweet memories of my youth that have long been folded away.  It creates a longing for something I seemed to have gotten close to but never actually experienced, a sense of Eden I guess…or maybe just before. 

Memories always seem to condense to good, the jam from all the labor of living. 

New York Mountain CO with Aaron at the peak.

     

It's Alive, Can Fly And Have Babies, A Sunday Morning Sermon

Artists, especially those that take themselves and their work seriously, must regularly immerse themselves in the solitude of the wild.  To observe the earth and sky, the elements as they are attuned to each other, the intricate and perfectly beautiful miracles of the natural order. This forces the artist to consider every aspect of their studio practice as a novice observing a master.  Case in point.  Yesterday as I was sitting beside The Tennessee a small butterfly lit upon my shirt pocket.  It was no larger than my thumbnail, a deep golden bronze.  There was the tiniest disk, black and vertical protruding out is mouth.  Odd I thought as I looked at it.  All of a sudden the disk became like the tiniest intricate spring coiled perfectly around, equally spaced between each curl of the like that no watch maker could have made.  Then with silent grace the butterfly uncurled the spring in an arching loop twice the length of its body and began to taste my shirt with what I now knew as its unbelievably living and purposeful tongue.  And just as sincerely it coiled it up and slid it back inside its tiny head.  I thought, “How could anyone not believe in God!” because in my greatest studio attempt I could not make that and add to that, oh it was alive, could fly and by the way lets have it make babies as well.   Thus the reason for the LAW I stated first.

A Brief Spell In A Waiting Room

I recently traveled across the  Atlantic to a distant land.  It has since often stuck me that I had really no awareness of being “far away” or that I was actually on a different side of the earth than I am now sitting on.  It is a very much terrible feeling.  If one is to travel long upon the earth, to travel as to actually move along the curve of its sphere, then one should have a really true sense of it.  But I do and did not.   Why?  Because my sense of travel was not experienced as travel at all but more like going to the movies or watching a television show.  I traveled by jet plane.  I entered a very long and narrow living room, was wined and dined by very polite strangers, watched a movie or two, walked around to stretch my legs and at end bumped along, someone opened the door and I walked out into the same land I had left, same sky, same sun, same green grass and trees, same cars and roads and commerce much more like I had been in a six hour movie than a very fast vehicle.  And in all that I had really no sense of travel.  Travel should take time especially if you are traveling somewhere quite far away.  There should be mountains to trek and bodies of water to sail over, you should count longitude by the rising and setting of the sun and the “x”ing out of days on a calendar or //// on the wagon boards.  Life should always be about the journey but jets erase the journey and make it brief spell in a waiting room.  I had once set a goal to sail around the world by the time I was 50.  I am 60 and have only sailed a sunfish on a man made lake in Tennessee.  However to be honest I think I traveled more on that sunfish than I did going to Ireland.   

We had a full moon going over.  The first time I can
recall looking down at the full moon.

Brotherhood Of Boyhood

Friendship of the kind you find in the locker rooms of childhood sports is lost in the aged.  I use to experience an overwhelming care for the brotherhood of warriors, a group of youngsters daily dressed out in pads to protect.  There was a common enemy, showed up every Friday night, a common purpose, to defeat them, and a common dependency, all for one and one for all.  These were not opponents in our young hearts but enemies of our brotherhood.  A battle of strength, speed, endurance and will, a clashing of your body against theirs, a physical brawl on the earth where someone was going to win and someone was going to loose.  There is nothing like it in the life of the older man who, on occasion, sits and longs for admittance back to that brotherhood of boyhood.   

Vocational Joy

I am currently reading several books, two of which are C. S. Lewis’ Surprised by Joy and Hunter Baker’s The End of Secularism.  Both authors have similar religious experiences and each experience develops their book’s underlying theme.  They both were surprised by the fact that God cares about everything and were fulfilled by the fact He cares about everything they care about.  This forces both authors to see their vocational interests as sacred enterprises, which requires an ongoing and prolonged personal relationship with The Author of everything.   When He talks about knowing the number of hairs on your head, naming every star and being fully conscious of the life of every bird, you become overwhelmed by the implication that has for everything, including literature, religious liberty and art.

When You Lock The Door For The Last Time

“You leave home, you move one, and you do the best you can.  I got lost in this old world and forgot who I am.”

Miranda Lambert, The House That Built Me. 

Sometimes I am so lost in this ancient world, eons old, that I can’t figure out who I am.   Mom’s home sold yesterday, closed, signed, paid for and I turned the key in the lock for the last time, locking it forever from me.  There are old homes in my life, mostly parsonages that built me.  A housing project home at Carson Newman College, a small home in Taylorsville KY, a ancient old ruin in the middle of Athens TN and the one that built me most, a little home looking out over Big Rock Mountain in Crab Orchard TN.  But this home yesterday was the last place I saw my dad alive and was filled with all the things collected in all those other homes and yesterday all I have left is the memory.