Alive, Alive, Ohhh! An Excerpt from Sky Mesa Journal

Photo courtesy of Pixabay.com

This excerpt is reprinted from Sky Mesa Journal by Judith Deem Dupree, courtesy of Resource Publications, an imprint of Wipf and Stock

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There are no funerals in Heaven. As a believer in the sacred History of faith, I accept death. It is the [often] hard shell we must break through to begin our flight into Life. It is moving from chrysalis to Chrisom, perhaps. Our ultimate birth.

To Christos. Truth is an upward spiral.

I despair of the despair that we wear so often as an arm band, the existential angst we endlessly proclaim, which leaves no room in the soul for resurgence, for resilience, for hope. And now I see that I also have done this! What a vast, a blind betrayal!

Those who cannot celebrate life destroy it―destroy others, who in turn destroy.

What they cannot celebrate, they desecrate.

And living must be, the soul insists, a celebration. To exult is to exalt. To proclaim the tender truth and rollicking affirmation of faith is to live beyond mere enduring. It unleashes the neurons that fire the thoughts that fuel the muscles that raise us up from indolence.

Such is the House that God built. Existential pleasure must bring a recognition, a small ecstasy of awareness―I am alive, alive, ohhh! And I am not a cockle, not a mussel. Living is surely meant to be an endless orbit of meaning-full, an upward cycle that siphons finally into that slender Passage which is not, oh no, a dark hole.

Entropy is a ravage only of the temporal and temporary and intemperate.

And so, today, I lay down this weight of timeless grief against the splendor of this day, against the altar of these rocks, this gravel I stand upon, with the incense of this morning still awaft like a certain holiness within my breathing.

I celebrate being. Despite the daily horrors, despite the anguish surging, despite the fire of grief that still looms, ever creeping, like the ghastly glow of holocaust beyond us. I celebrate because I must; because we must, because God hears and surely answers . . . or this maelstrom will consume us; it will be a prophecy fulfilled.

I celebrate what it is to be truly human, what it means to share the earth together, what it has been to us as home away from Home, what it must become within us and among us, and beyond us, for our children. What we must become, within us and among us and beyond us.

Celebrants. I celebrate the very fact of life, of seeing these shaggy carpets of green-and-ochre and the wild-painted skies that cover me, of hearing the chirrup and buzz and flutter of small life, of knowing earth-born labor and labors borne of the heart.

I celebrate the being of you who cross my path this day in thought or step, who share this swath of earth or one dissimilar, who grieve for its poverty and share its richness with me. Who enrich my poverty.

I thank God for my life, for giving breath to my halting aspirations. For your life and finest hopes. For His breath upon you, within you.

I thank you, oh God, who redeems me from myself in this small celebration! Who calls me to Rest. Who gives me today geraniums, and a new, eager flow of thought. For doughty ferns in pots, and doughty friends who force my rusty gates; for violet sage and stippled rocks to catch my eye, to catch my breath, my soul.

I praise the God who sprawls His name, and the signature of His Son, His Chronica Christos, across the bursting universe and weaves it deep within the spiral of our genes.

Who walks the waves still, always . . . stilling them, forever stilling them.

Truly the gates of hell shall not prevail.

Facing Toward the Light: An Excerpt from Sky Mesa Journal

Photo courtesy of Pixabay.com

Excerpt from Sky Mesa Journal by Judith Deem Dupree. Copyright 2016, published by Wipf and Stock. Copies may be purchased from Wipf and Stock and from Amazon.  

LOCAL NOTE: An Author Talk featuring Judith discussing the genesis and publication of Sky Mesa Journal is being hosted by the Alpine Library (1752 Alpine Blvd.) this week on Thursday, October 20 from 6:00-8:00 PM. Judith will have books for sale and will be happy to sign copies. Please come support a local San Diego author and her work.   

It was not much past dawn when I slipped out the door and faced the great iron gate out back. In the slant of first light it resembled somewhat the “gates of hell”―heavy and formidable. Ah, but beyond lay Paradise! In lieu of unlocking and unwinding the heavy chain and shoving against its grudging “joints,” I climbed over the old monster. I always do―depositing whatever baggage I tote over on the other side.

Today I toted only a weight of weariness. The “world was too much with me.”

I am not an up-with-the-roosters person. I felt quite uneasy leaving my comfort zone so early―regardless of the discomfort that routed me. Testing my legs and blood sugar and ignoring the grind of an empty belly seemed like a bad answer to a bad question. Or quest. The gnaw of guts was only a mimic of the churn of thought that woke me.

But I was brought up short by the exclamatory. Earth-life stretched around me, hummed and chirped, exhaled its varied aromatic breath, each its trace of pneuma. The land was filled with freshness. I breathed vastly, enfolded in the small celebration before me.

The early light is a peach-hued wash against the umber earth. An incredible palette! This is the morning’s work within me, this facing toward the light. Too often I see the world darkly, see only the umber without the wash of ruddy gold. There are times, even in this become-sacred place, when melancholy overwhelms any sense of the mystery of nature, a denial of the spare and eloquent mastery of God. Scales creep over the spiritual retina I peer through―opaque, filmy, all the drab distortions that we know.

Probably it is much like the blindness that the Lord peeled away from Saul-become-Paul. I recognize this more often now, this clumsy and yes, futile shield―my fascia, a veneer against the callousness before me . . . and within me.

And against grief. There is a sorrow, a Welt-Schmertz, weeping up through me, a deeper grief than I can carry. Either to live without grieving or grieve without recourse bequeaths fatalism, begets tragedy. It is a betrayal of the faith we first consent to.

It is balance I need, and a robust vision. I am just beginning to face this truth: I must neither fear the darkness, nor accept it, nor shrug it off. I cannot fight the battle for earth-life unless I have fought the battle for my vision.

As a frail and sometimes fatuous human being, I balk at death’s increasingly harsh preliminaries―at the way it visits us at every turn, the ways it comes ripping through humanity, Grim Reaper that it is. It is my own creeping entropy I battle, and lose within the entropy of a world I gather up and mourn. It is attending a funeral endlessly repeated, a cortege of the helpless and the homeless.

And the heartless. That eternal death . . . 

Life today is often seen as something of a wedge between two vast intangibles―our very entity caught in a grind between the beginning and end, those eternal mysteries of being.

Nature denies such hopelessness. Every new morning, new spring, each rebirth from fire or flood or wind proclaims life’s frailty and strength, unwraps the earth from its grave-cloth . . . .

Celebrates its endurance, its stubborn resurrection. 

beneath His cool shadow: An Excerpt from Sky Mesa Journal

An Excerpt from Sky Mesa Journal now available from Wipf and Stock Publishers and on Amazon. Used with Permission of Wipf and Stock Publishers.

This excerpt has been previously published on the Blog of Ruminate Magazine on 12 August 2016.

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Afternoon shadows stretch from tree to tree, and I am sitting beneath their shelter. The radio thrums with the passion of Rachmaninov; my feet waggle automatically to my favorite passages.

Bliss . . . The concerto soars to its conclusion.

And then the news intrudes. From the sublime to the ridiculous? No, no―not ridiculous! Vicious. More and ever more, death is becoming a mordant and morbid exposition, an endless parade of phantasmagoria. From every quarter of the globe comes word of new atrocity, new frenzies of violence and hatred. From far-away, unpronounceable places, from our comfortable suburbs and, of course, at the bleakest cores of our communities, where despair so often spreads on a turbulent tide.

Anger spews from mouth to mouth, group to group to city to nation―and bursts like wildfire from the barrels of guns. Such pervasive violence, such undeclared, personal or group vendettas were virtually unheard of some decades ago, beyond the nation’s battlefields―and not or never on such a scale as this.

We humans are a haunted race . . . .

But it has always been there, been here. Within us all. Christ said as much when He walked alongside us. He saw through the thin veneer of our inherent goodness, our presumed civility―saw how humanity behaves when the heat is turned up, when the pressure is turned on, when the “spigot” is turned off.

It is, now, “the best of times―the worst of times.”

In a world of technological miracles and legislated manners, we still look in the mirror and see, shadowed as they are, the savages who dwell within us.

We die for each other; we lay down our lives for each other―when we believe in Life.

We kill each other―when our souls have died, when we are afraid of death.

We do either, daily, in small ways, with a quick, instinctive impetus that either creates or destroys. All that we carry, all we have nurtured within us will tell its tale.

Violence. The children . . .

The faces of children are the hardest part. We want to gather up the little ones―the innocents, the real victims―gather them in our arms, shelter them, kiss their cheeks, rock them until the fear leaves their eyes.

Oh, the children! When, or if they grow up, they may well kill each other.

Jeremiah wept over Jerusalem long before Christ came to invade it with His wash of tears:

“’Peace, peace,’ they say, when there is no peace. Are they ashamed of their loathsome conduct? No, they have no shame at all; they do not even know how to blush. So they will fall among the fallen; they will be brought down when I punish them,” says the Lord.

He went on talking to Jeremiah, to us: “Stand at the crossroads and look; ask for the ancient paths, ask where the good way is, and walk in it, and you will find rest for your souls.”

Only beneath His cool shadow do we find surcease from our heated hearts and ways. Here upon this small and Spartan ranch there is a peace that can only be called luxury. Often during the days I remind myself of this privilege. And when the guilt for being here, for having this, engulfs me―and it sometimes does, when so many have so little―I walk out upon the meadow, where I can see for a great distance. It helps. I stand silent, overwhelmed with the pain I see, yearning over life upon this heated earth, willing such a peace as this upon the world.

Willing a Sabbath rest upon the world.

“Peace, peace . . . .”  It will not come easily, such a Sabbath.

Above me the branches fidget lightly; their shadows dance easily, back and forth, across my outstretched legs. On the radio, the concerto rises and falls in its lessening and strengthening, like a turbulence of thunder . . . .

Like a fervent storm come down upon the airwaves.

Like a great and lovely storm, a cleansing.

The Journey to the Journal

Sky Mesa Journal by Judith Deem Dupree, published by Resource Publications, an imprint of Wipf and Stock

It began with an invitation to house-sit. A chance to get away, break loose from the "ordinary," the expected, and, let's be honest, the grief that had backed up inside. A time to shed some hard soul-grit that I'd carefully swept into the corners and closets of my life . . . lest anyone suspect I harbored such detritus. The unseemly and, I always hoped, unseen.

A proverbial "empty-nester" by now, I was lost. Not that I mourned for our three young ones all that much or often—they had left comfortably, in stages, by ages, for school and promising new lives, new livelihood—still near enough to show up when the dinner menu tugged. My husband was absorbed in a job that fit, that filled any empty spaces between us. It wasn't him I couldn't tote into any equation of tomorrow. I had simply lost tomorrow.

And so, yeah, I'd be glad to hang out a while on a funky old ranch. I grew up in the foothills of Colorado, and bunkhouses were no anomaly. It would be kind of like back-pedaling to a less mean and more lean time, when inevitable complications were manageable and I had the stamina to fix  whatever I thought needed righting. Yes, I realized that three months was a long commitment, but she'd agreed to only half of each week on site. I could see doing that. In fact, I could hardly wait . . . .

Sometimes adventure simply means a sidestep from despair.

And so I set myself up for a nice little trio of days into weeks into months. It sounded a tad scary, but shiver-scary, not trauma-scary.

Sometimes unknown is better than an endless known.

~*~*~*~*~

So I showed up, out there beyond the trappings of our busy world, where the brazen hills bulge up and down in anonymity. Sky Mesa Ranch: A bit or more down at the heels, redolent and raw with nature, left behind in a bright new age of tech. A paradigm and homely parable. I found there, to my surprise, an evolving link with the history of our lost beginnings—of my lost beginnings and unwieldy endings. And yes, our-my lost belonging, in this risky edge of life we have all begun to mourn. It was like stepping onto a bridge between Alice's rabbit hole and Gulliver's infamous Lilliput.

This journal is a strangeling, an unpremeditated tour into timeless Premises, both meanings. A book of hours. Time to learn and relearn reflection, to measure earth's shadows against the unexpected Light. Time to wander and to wonder. To tenderize—to begin at last to hear, with new-opened ears, the weary heartbeat of a struggling world.

The Journey is yours too, for the taking. Join me there. 

To purchase a copy of Sky Mesa Journal, please visit the Amazon link in the sidebar or click here: Sky Mesa Journal available now on Kindle and in paperback. 

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the incarnate, here: excerpt from Sky Mesa Journal

Photo from the public domain

I want to share a part of my past that has become an integral part of my today and tomorrow. A quarter-century ago, I was privileged to have been granted a summer (half of each week for over three months) lodged on an old ranch in southern California. A time of healing and rethinking . . . and life-sustaining revelation. It all happened that long ago, and still "happens," in a sense, every day. Every new day.

During my weekly sojourn there, I journaled daily. And left the pages in my files―until now. My book, Sky Mesa Journal, will be out in a few months (Wipf and Stock Publishers). I have lifted a favorite sketch from this work. I'd like you to meet a "beast" who spoke Life to me: Used with Permission of Wipf and Stock Publishers.

the incarnate, here

A donkey lives here. Linda is a sag of bones and ripple of tired muscle and thatch of unkempt pelt. Linda is a belly that looks ready to burst with foal; she is as old in donkey-years as Sarai was to Abraham, and her womb is long empty. Linda is two rheumy eyes that beg for something she cannot name and I cannot give. Linda leans with a sigh against the uncertain fence, or against my unfamiliar hand, and my heart aches. It is, perhaps, foolish to love a donkey so——and so quickly. But I am often foolish.

When I watch Linda, I am always struck by her patience. Donkeys are traditionally “temperamental.” Not so, not here! Linda lost her mate last winter. Surely the beasts of the field know grief and loneliness; I see it in her eyes. Perhaps it is this that gives her an air of quiet grace. That’s an unusual statement to make of a donkey——especially one with as broken-down a chassis as this one.

Somehow this gives me consolation——sharing this time and place with her. There is such a separation between human lives, the processes of getting along, getting ahead, getting by——and the natural world, that which we call wild, which struggles on, much too tangential to our own.

We see a flash or so of the other “order” in our passages between our life experiences, or perhaps more likely, when these experiences wane. We may dote upon the pets around our feet (and they are often vital, life-enriching―and sometimes, perhaps, our stead, our alter egos). But for most of us the breadth of the animal world exists mainly behind bars and barriers of place and purpose.

We cannot, by our minimal exposure, know the great heart of an elephant. Learn patience from the patterning of a covey of quail. Explain the explicit cosmos of the bee. We see too little value in the furry and feathery denizens of this planet, other than admiring their occasional beauty or oddity. Or granting our continual and anonymous picking clean of the bones of the edible.

But I see the incarnate, here―in this old gray lady-beast. An embodiment laid firmly, consciously, upon the earth-life all around me. In Linda’s gaunt dignity I am reminded of the promised Child who was carried lightly upon her once, the fullness in His mother’s womb.

I see the sorrow of the man-Christ, the weight of His burden for Jerusalem, for humanity . . . and how the weight of us all has bowed the back of this beast of burden.

It is not unkind to ride a donkey. But mankind has ridden too far, too long, on the back of nature, and has never reached Jerusalem.

Linda is “only” a beast, a domesticated animal rummaging at the fence-edge, at the far edge of a long and well-lived life.

When she leans her frowzy head against me, Christ weeps with us both.


And I would give life back to her, if it were my gift to give.