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.

* * * *

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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Proclaiming the Unknown God

Photo by Judith's daughter on a trip to Athens

On one of his never-easy missionary journeys, Paul was left in Athens, waiting for his companions. He was not prone to "wait" placidly. Athens was a hub city, a volatile mix of the fortunes and misfortunes of humanity. A hub, also, of gossip. And Paul could be expected to comment on his perception of the spiritual pot luck—the "wealth" of gods available for the pickin,' and well-displayed at the Areopagus on Mars Hill. In the midst of the panoply, he noted an empty altar with a stark "non-identity": TO AN UNKNOWN GOD. Here was his opportunity to Name that unnamed God. And he did, to decidedly mixed reactions!

In this world despoiled by violence and hatred, wrenching poverty, shallowness, and rampant greed, we come face to face with this Unknown God—Whom we have come to know, and Whom we have chosen to serve: The eternal I AM …through Jesus, the Christ.

How do we faithfully serve a Savior whom we cannot “see,” who is hidden from the eyes of the world—this Eternal Being who straddles the universe even as He binds up our battered hearts?

How do we proclaim Him to a world “gone insane” with its various fratricides? It begins best with prayer. Always, with prayer, before we even open our mouths. Do we even know how to pray for (truly, against) such an unending tsunami of grief and horror as we see beyond and around us?

Like the disciples who gathered around Him, we can only say, “Lord, teach us….”

The Lord’s Prayer, the "Our Father..." is a good starting point. It is fairly radical. It leaves our own small perceptions and anticipations (or lack of them) behind and steps up to a new concept—a new conception, perhaps. It joins us with Him in seeing what we cannot fathom down here in the trenches. After all, HE prayed it to us, for us, from where He “stood!”

I call it, for lack of a better term, a Genesis Prayer. Prayer that creates “something out of nothing,” that separates Light from darkness, that can only begin where He begins (not in our own “mind-set”), and end where He “comes down.” Whether we’re praying for a person or a nation, a disaster or a blessing, we can only see the “tip of the iceberg” unless/until we have invaded the Kingdom for a larger vision. What we see, of course, has less to do with our spiritual giftedness than His yearning to bring us alongside to help Him do the heavy lifting. The yoke is fully weighted upon Him and rests lightly across our soul. We only have to listen.

When we pray this way, against the currents, so to speak, we are often on uncharted ground. But it is firm beneath us. We have only to follow the Spirit’s leading. Praying with Him, stumbling, perhaps, into prayer unformed before the very saying of it, our words teaching us, thought by thought, we learn as we go. We witness this only inwardly, at first, savoring the wonder of new comprehension. But soon or late, it begins to seep out through our spirit’s pores—like an invisible language—and becomes now an articulation, a quiet testimony to a Savior who reigns in the depths of chaos and the heights of Heaven. Our confidence lies in His “confiding in us.” We speak from this new understanding, and sometimes we speak words that whisper “Genesis!”

Like the words of Paul, who knew exactly what God had to say when he stood before those blank Athenian faces. From the unknown god to the suddenly knowable One, the I AM revealed. Out of darkness, Light.                                           

Harvesting Eden

Photo by Judith Deem Dupree

This post was originally published on the Ruminate Magazine Blog on 19 August 2015.

Today I stewed up a vat of plums gathered from the arching boughs of our two trees out back. Tomorrow is Jam Day, a sticky-messy sauna of stirring and puree-ing and sprinkling in the magic of sugar and pectin. Then . . . oh, tasting the fruit of my labor! On homemade bread, I insist. Only that will do. The bread has been waiting, frozen, for this first sweet moment.

We planted our small orchard―a plum, two apples, a pear, a cherry―nearly a quarter century ago. My original vision didn’t extend beyond the thought of these now-weighted branches. Of picking as if I were a child turned loose in a candy store, envisioning a sweet-wild taste in my mouth that no grocery purchase could touch. My teeth almost ached with lust for it all!

And after the first few years of their probing babyhood, my gawky, dusty-green adolescents began to blossom here and there between their shaggy knees and elbows. I recall with delight the first apple blossoms on our small “granny.” Eden!

Nothing less than Eden. My tree. It was my beloved green granny! It still is. My soul is entangled in its lattice of leaves. Last year over a thousand apples ripened through October, like a mis-seasoned Yule tree all decked by nature.

Along the years, by a miracle of nature or bird or critter, three more gift-trees showed up: Our plum gave us many babies each spring, popping up beneath its sweep of limbs. We dug up and gave away some―and kept one, as fertile as its mama. Out front, in an old wooden tub of soil, an apricot seed cracked open and unfurled, and soon enough fruited.

Today, long and firmly grounded, it perfectly shades our spare bedroom, dangling its small golden-orange globes in front of the window. And in the tangle of vinca beside our front porch, a “bush” thrust up one spring, filling a bald space nicely. Lo, in a couple of years its strangely familiar blossoms spoke for it: apple! Rosy, tangy-sweet fruit now replicates delicately, bobbing in the breeze.

A bit like Elijah in his cave, we are, in God’s quirky generosity, fed by ravens―yes, those hulking black shadows in the pine which nag incessantly, lest we forget that we owe them a dole a day from the seed bin. A fair trade indeed.

Now, upon this day, standing at the kitchen window, I see His current-timeless panorama. Our trees have aged along with us―creaky, a bit more brittle of limb. Weighted with fruit, or waiting―an inward thrust we cannot measure. Occasionally barren. Seasons of drought and of bounty . . . each of us, trees planted. Life as orchard.

Younger friends now come by in early summer and scale our ladders, with long-pole pruners in hand. They stretch to heights of our pear tree that we cannot, dare not reach―to trim dangerously bending branches. To cull what seems far too many immature pears. Ah, the timeless reluctance of letting go―of ladders, of fruit! Of whatever we cannot climb or carry. Weighing the promise of abundance against the poverties of broken. We have learned broken.

And now this new, sweet harvest―knowing this: These pears and grannies, et al, this varied fruit―“my” fruit―I have discovered, is not mine at all, beyond the tending. Its unprecedented largess, newly picked or processed―by me, by delighted others―is scattered around the village and sometimes far beyond. That is the wonderful way of His Kingdom. The trees I have pruned are part of my own essential life-pruning. That’s His way too. And so, I celebrate this today also: a fruit-of-life called friending.

I have years of canning, saucing, jamming, freezing, dehydrating behind me. Often done in tandem with friends both young and “almost-my-old” old. The fruit of His labor. The labor of His fruit. My kitchen and heart are full.

This small Eden truly runneth over, flourishing in unexpected soul-soil, bursting through hard shells, blossoming into new identity. Often, oh yes, rooting and blossoming despite the entropy that time imposes, shaping something indefinable . . . sweet and tangy, birthed with promise.

Finding Quiet: Silence as Presence

Originally posted on the Ruminate Magazine Blog, 18 June 2015

The world is speeding up, and I am slowing down. It was inevitable. It’s all right, of course… mostly. As I grow older, life enhances the quiet ways and shoves at the expediencies that used to shove at me.

It is good to quiet down, to make pause without breaking faith with my to-do list, or someone else’s. Good to miss a beat in my endless rumba with that great god Expectation. To laugh at my clumsiness. To slow dance with the Holy Ghost. To fall in love with all the neighbors I have never known, and marvel over the way yeast rises and makes miracles.

I begin to practice yearning, hungering―fingering the world for a larger scope of being, foraging for things that lean back in time and connect with the unknown known. For all the maybe’s I have spilt along the way, that maybe spilled into the eternal. Now, here, I begin to stop and listen to life more suddenly, and, oh, oh I hope more freely.

I think we get lost so easily in the great cacophony that pervades on planet earth. Does this sound overstated? Hyperbole? Of course; and yet, it happens every day, to all of us.

We vibrate to the whole of life, even in our essential partial-ness, our chosen partialities. What is out there pervades. Invades. We cannot help it; we are caught up and moved along by the great, lumbering sum of all the infinitesimal parts. An endless, sometimes relentless tide. We are, each, one of those small fractions, often rubbed raw, bruised by the enormities and the sum of all the smallnesses. It is as hard to put words to all this as it is to live with it. The world, indeed, is too much with us. And so silence, a certain kind of silence, truly is golden.

We so need a sense of it―of silence as a presence within a welter of external stimuli. This reality is dear to me―that silence hides within the bedlam. It is near-aberration in an age of “auditory graphics,” when all that engulfs the world is poured out upon us by every media, from every angle, for every purpose. As if there is no other way to live?

Of course. What we must treasure, what I am defining, is peace. What is notable is that it is imparted in such a way that it bides with us, resides within us. This is renascence! A revelation that becomes a revolution. There is a quiet, a storm shelter, built to the scale of the human heart.

HE says: My peace I give unto you.

Within these few words lie an inner world of rest.

This is peace which cannot long hide beneath our hide. It becomes unquenchable. It flings itself against the ramparts of our neuroses until they crack. It breaks through every Yes, but… that we have posited. The days both here and there and everywhere grow full, full, full of slow or sudden, timeless, ephemeral Graces. They swallow up the nervous jangle of urgencies that wrap us daily.

Be still and know that I am God! I will be exalted…

If His Kingdom is real, it must lie both beyond and within the cacophony. It simply must. And if we are to survive, and to thrive―to live well within our own skin and cope with whatever lies before us, beyond us, we will receive that Rest within the silence that lies beneath the noise.

The “noise” of life doesn’t own us. Finding that quiet “place” beneath―yes, within the existential clang―becomes our grounding, the birth-place of miracles. We carry the seeds wherever we go.

The Reason for the Light

Posted from The Ruminate Magazine blog, 9 June 2016

Photo by Judith Deem Dupree

We are artists, of one genre or another, at one stage or another. Our leanings and yearnings are all somehow touched by this reality—which may be a lodestar, or still a flicker on our horizon. But yes, something within us takes shape and form and word because it must. Because it cannot be denied without losing our balance in life.

But it comes with a certain caution, a yes-but that hinges on that word balance. Something has been nibbling at my overloaded psyche, and left me with serious thoughts about an arts-exclusivefocus: Life in the “real world”—the multiple issues that press upon us day by day, and the escalation of national and world problems.

Artists and writers, and all sorts of people who celebrate art and writing, are deeply concerned about the hard issues that life in today’s world imposes. There is an unending interplay between expressing creativity and handling the ordinary and inevitable hard realities of living. We cannot worship creativity at the expense of entering the fray. Art is not a retreat.

This leads us to a slight but obvious shift in focus. A way of stepping outside our normal boundaries and busy-ness, to join others who are affected (perhaps unconsciously) or afflicted (quite consciously) by the rigors of our national life—indeed, global life—and want to better understand and withstand and respond to it as creative people.

We often feel torn between our unmet need for creative expression and the rude facts of living in a sometimes “hostile” world. Admittedly, we may feel guilty at times for wanting to run away to a quiet place. (And yes, our artsy self needs tending!) Growing national and universal distress is the elephant in everyone’s living room. Climate change, global unrest, and societal upheaval confront us each morning. They shape everything by their looming presence before us.

How do we live in light of this encroaching darkness? How do we respond as writers and artists? How does it invade, inform, shape what we do? What do we bring to it that is redemptive?Where might it take us creatively? This may be an entry to new life for us. We would do well to bring our intuitive natures into a larger context—into a heart-full and mindful and authentic response to the problems of today’s very fragile world. We need to step out beyond our comfort zone if we are called to be comforters. I believe this is the prior and priority call upon us each—to gather up our Giftings and offer them as Gifts. No, not “freebies.” Bigger than that.

As people who believe in the value of arts, the practice and enjoyment of them, and their soul-necessity, we can move in small, incremental ways—as people who are not “consumed by consumerism,” or defeated by despair, or captivated by the masks of things simplistic. Or dumbfounded by the endless stream of dark chatter that invades us daily.

How do we “tend” each other and care for those beyond us, in a toughening world? How do we build or join in a supportive community? We can come into it all, become insiders—bearing Light, wearing Light, sharing it. Art in the trenches is a bridge to higher ground. Small steps toward inventive living in times of crisis, a buoy in the flood of crises. We can gather hope from our inner resources, from those around us, and from the wisdom of the past, to create hope for the future.

Does this sound like a healthy challenge? I believe it is. I hold onto this, daily. This is Fine Art.

Come join the adventure. Bring your viewpoint and ideas. Say it with passion and tenderness and hope that defies the shredding darkness. Listen to what our readers, your “neighbors,” have to say. Weave something sturdy, something plain-spoken and beautifully simple into the fabric of life around us all. This is redemptive art . . . the reason for the Light within us.

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.