Another New You

I got up early this morning, went outside and set in the dark listening to the earth and watching the stars in a cloudless night.  Slowly the earth turned to the sun until each star was blown out and the night sounds where hushed by the morning sounds.  The sky is now deep grey-blue, the most hopeful color, not night, not day, just promising, hope-filled.  Color is beginning to emerge, as enough light is present to make color and Faith—and love and gratitude possible.  Mornings are such strong faith builders; I mean the whole of the morning, the hour or two it takes to make a morning.  Mornings start your old body off with “Ready—Get Set—GO!!!” and promises you enough time to really give life a GO.  The night will come soon enough and your old self will be ample glad but for right now morning has birthed another new you that can do a day.   

*If I Could Save Time In A Bottle

I passed yesterday evening at Fair Haven knee deep in melancholia thinking back over our lives from marriage until today.  I had just been with all my children and their families at our family reunion and was longing for those days when it was just Betty, our children and me.  I was standing at the door looking out over the river and said to Betty, “I would give everything I own including the clothes on my back and start all over with nothing if I could just go back and relive those years!”  Two things startle me; how valuable time is and how quickly our lives pass through it.

*A line from an old Jim Croche song, Time In A Bottle (If I could save time in a bottle, the first thing that I'd like to do, is save every day until eternity passes away and then I'd spend them with you.)

Lee and Betty Benson family.

Who Is Holding Your Needles?

Storms rolled through last night, powers out, children scrambling to parents beds, and this morning the floor below me is filled with laughing chatter, pattering feet and loving conversation.  Good families are like crocheted comforters of wild wool, slowly hooked and gently pulled, tying each soft new human into the thick and warm family blanket.  Our family is as loose and free as they come, each one a complete mess of sincerity and good wool easily fitting but always needing to give a little.  I think the key is knowing that none of us holds the needles and being grateful for The One Who Does.  

Every morning starts with family devotions.

Blest Be The Tie That Binds

The Lee and Betty Benson family reunion has commenced at a rambling old home in Sale Creek Tennessee on the main channel of The Great Tennessee River.  What started out as two adventures in love has now grown to 19, 7 under 9 years of age.  That’s a lot of knees, elbows and empty stomachs.  It takes a day or two for all these bodies to settle into where our hearts are always, into family, one big family, all for one and one for all and all such stuff.  It’s a madhouse; dogs, children, and adults in a loud tumbling together again.   But there is that Fragrance, that Great Mystery, wafting through the home, binding all back into what we really are, a family.  It’s that Sweet Aroma, that Ancient of Days, that Great Conceiver that we have all accepted that “binds. Our hearts in Christian love.” that make us what we are, what we will always be, The Benson—Family.

Breakfast has started.

A Beetles Pace

Age is a marvel in many ways, as your body grows older your heart grows younger.  When I was young my body was so fine that I blew past so much that would bring meaning to my heart.  Now that my body can no longer fly my pace is sufficient to experience all the meaning that makes up “along the way.”  All of life is a moment by moment proposition, each moment filled to the brim with meaning, beauty, purpose, offers to experience love, to share, to serve, to do good.  We don’t have to go to be but actually are offered an ecstasy of being in every moment.  It’s only when our muscles can only move at a beetles pace that we are slow enough to fully live all the life our bodies are passing through. 

Sunset at Fair Haven 

Witnessing The Gold Stake Driven Into The Cosmos

We are keeping grandbabies.  It is a great reminder of the intense understanding of meaning that we had when our children were young.  New humans are a marvel.  In every way, they declare us as preeminent life.  But it is the miraculousness that is so evident in their processes of becoming realized as a human that so entertains; and family, caring, loving, kind family is the broth of this flourishing.  All of my family is in some way involved in the lives of the young and nowhere is the infinitesimal importance of family more evident than in the young.  A family, in the truest meaning of the word, is where humans become human in the truest meaning of the word.  Grandchildren are a great reminder of that gold stake being driven into the cosmos!!!