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.

Finding and Losing The American Soul-A Tribute and a Tribulation

Recently, during a personal writing retreat in Colorado, I was involved in a group book reviews event. (To each his/her own choice.)  I presented a book that I am currently inching through fervently, riveted by the thesis, knowing it is a pivotal theme for any resolution of our national crisis. And yes, we are in a crisis.

The book: The American Soul: Rediscovering the Wisdom of the Founders by Jacob Needleman.  It has garnered increasing acceptance and acclaim since publication in 2002. At that pivotal moment, barely post-9/11, he saw, with extraordinary clarity,  the state of our disunion. Wiser minds than mine have churned through Needleman's tight and elastic  (both, paradoxically) explorations and summations, and said "YES!"

His theme? It could be multi-labeled, for all his applications and intimations, but Needleman basically assert s that our nation has  lost an incalculable gift of national and international particularity in a world that needed—and heeded—our unique and God-given/driven view of nationhood . . . and that we can only recover it by heading back to the creation of this great primal experiment in governing. For its primal wisdom. By revisiting our founding fathers—applying to the pursuit a soul-set we've never really attained before—we  identify who and what each had become as a person at that historical "moment."

We finally comprehend what they agonized over individually, thrashed out together and, finally, contracted, that created "the greatest nation in history." We are invited into a startling frame of reference on both character-building and nation-building. We are offered a "dynamic" that is historic in its integrity and diametrically alien to our present fragmenting life as a national and world entity.

Also intricately woven into Needleman's chain of premises—as equally indispensable, and perhaps even more stirring—is the compelling life witness of Abraham Lincoln. A breakthrough concept of our evolving history would be impoverished, incomplete, without this remarkable man at the helm during a pivot point in history.  In a meditation on this president, the author describes, with a depth that can only be called visionary, the impact upon him of the photos of Lincoln. And because Abe is the "continuity" that was requisite to our survival as a nation, he is shouldered firmly into the pantheon of heretofore  idealized non-idols who conceived the original "American dream."

The American Soul: Rediscovering the Wisdom of the Founders is a masterpiece of historical weaving, unraveling, reweaving. Ergo, my gratitude for a landing place for my constant, gnawing concern for this nation, and the stunning relief I experienced in finding a rationale for this concern. Here I found a practical and prophetic analysis of what we have lost . . . and what we must admit to—and grieve for. And yearn to discern in order to become once again, to survive and thrive as a people.

After Resurrection

Photo from the public domain

The morning after my mother died, a sparrow crashed into our large picture window. I rushed outside and stood looking down at it—a rumpled little female sparrow, her dangling head and convulsed feet and splayed wings telling the truth. One more small heartache.  I bent and picked her up, Dead. Except, when I folded her gently into my shaky hand, I felt a slow, frail  thump against my fingers. Her heart had not yet quit. I could not lay her down, could not give her up. For several hours I cradled this little body, stroked the twisted neck, untangled the  claws, folded the wings. Sang to her . . . and walked blindly through my chores, holding her close.

My mother's heart had beat slowly like this, a small, persistent thud-bump, a metronome, for days beyond the dying of her self. Now I had to wait it out, walk it through again, for reasons that I could not formulate.

At the end of a long morning, birdie suddenly stirred against my palm. Her eyes flicked open, shut, open, staring at me. No fear, simply "Who are you?" I talked to her softly, ran my finger lightly down her neck, and felt the sudden strength that straightened it. At that moment, Life was the sparrow and me, breaking through a barrier. There was nothing else. She wriggled suddenly, and I turned her over, stroking her disheveled back. Holding her just loosely enough to give her wiggle-room.

We walked around the yard thus while she squirmed, cocked her head, surveyed the landscape. I took her into the kitchen, slipped her gently onto the table.

At first she simply huddled there. And then, in a beautiful slow motion dance, she began to practice the patterns learned as a hatchling. Doing push-ups, getting the kinks out, maybe. Strengthening her matchstick legs—those springboards to a good takeoff, which every flying critter needs. Up and down, toenails gripping the tablecloth. She swiveled around now, perfectly content to use my table, my kitchen, for her pre-flight maneuvers—stretching her wings, nodding her head elaborately, like a dancer receiving Bravo's.

Slowly I reached, cupped her in my hand again without her protest, and carried her out on the deck. And then I heard it, for the first time: from a nearby pepper tree, a frantic bird call. A sparrow, of course, over and over, a small, shattering lament. I knew. Birdie knew.

I put her on the railing. She shook herself heartily, leaned ahead and cocked her head forward, one last time, like a runner at the chocks. Off she went, dipping a bit precariously . . . and then, and then she soared. A grand flutter of leaves high in the pepper, a raucous duet. Home.

Resurrection. A trail of tears that comes to an "impossible" end—Life renewed at the end of end. And yes, my frail little mama was Home, I knew.

A strange way to say miracle. But we always need new language, new framing for the housing of our hopes. For the phrasing of our falling and our rising. We too soon forget. That's what has happened, too often, too ubiquitously, to Resurrection. It's too often buried in the tomb, having died a thousand-thousand deaths by the hands and words . . . and yes, the hollowing of messengers who speak by rote, who have never fallen, broken by life . . . and soared.

Before we make that final plunge into the unKnown—that precarious, breathless, extravagant  dip and rise upon sudden wings—we are granted many a rehearsal, many an encore. Learning to live fully and die often. Little deaths: a sudden snap between the synapses—ZAP!—and eternity breaks loose in the sludgy soul, the bloated brain, the brittle heart, and something new comes forth. A small, bare death, and a delicate cell of Truth is born, unfolds, flowers. An "Aha!" A new perception out of the muck of our last thought. The act of Genesis again. And ever again. Unending. That possibility which proves the impossibility of impossible.

Where we are called to live . . . in all the small and untidy and heartbreaking places.

Prayers with Wings

Dove in Flight-public domain

Oaks and a few struggling pines snug down into this pocket valley, offering refuge from the mid-day heat. Above the aged line of treetops, a barren hillock lunges upward, step by jagged step. From where I sit, this shady dent in the earth is the palm of God’s great hand.

Beyond me lies “the world” and all its machinations, its splendors, its complexities, its uncounted woes

A simplistic scenario, of course. Woe and splendor are played out here as elsewhere. But for the moment, I can settle back beneath the branches of this gnarly old behemoth and pretend we are sequestered here together.

We see beyond us the long, tangled-scrub heights, a fairly formidable barrier, and beyond that the great unknown where “the rest of the world lives and dies.” It is, for now, beyond our seeing.

Now let's imagine sudden wings upon our backs. We are able to rise above these “formidable” heights and see beyond. The heights have shrunk beneath us, and now breadth is our barrier. So much of a muchness! Too much to take in, to compress into a soul-scape sized to our perceiving.

And once again we are instantly equipped for this great transposition. We have only to lock our eyes upon some small, distant point . . . and we are there. It lies before us, demystified.

Now we see with unaccustomed clarity, close up, what once was simply an unknown―or a vague perplexity, a perhaps dangerous complexity, with attributes that distance had distorted. Now we know what is, and our response is subject to our sudden fuller vision.

Back and forth we go, from one compelling spot or scene to another, taking in the new landscape, perceiving what is in the context of all that lies around it―all we never really knew before.

And then, back once again in our familiar “pocket,” we are changed; we are spoiled for the old margins and myopias that so long constricted us. We will go out beyond the barriers of height and breadth, on the wing of expanded thought…on the Wing of Prayer. We will see, or more aptly, perceive, and we will know. And we will listen for the Word that puts it all in focus.

Vision . . . the point of this small, homely metaphor. Vision creates the kind of prayer that leaps all barriers of land and mind and spirit. And of course, prayer creates the kind of Vision that knows no barriers. It is this sacred synergy that draws us to that God-filled dimension, “a little lower than the angels,” where the real work of the Kingdom is done.

A great leap of faith indeed.

Vision . . . that insight/hindsight/foresight Begotten within us when we aren't gnawing on the bones of earth. We often have wings when we least expect and most need them—and now we feel the push and rush of wind beneath our aspirations. This is an uncommon-common gift of God, this perception. It is meant to be ordinary—which is why it is extraordinary.

Humanity is, by nature, bred to think beyond our small world-set, but it is our own questing thoughts (and those of others) that guide us. When God moves upon us, He infiltrates; it is a beautiful Awakening. Our responses to ordinary become, if we choose, extraordinary. Seeing beyond sight. Knowing beyond our staid or heated opinion. Our conjectures and mental-emotional particularities are confirmed or amended or shredded—with sudden and often compelling clarity. For the smallest reasons, by our reckoning. It is, perhaps, the difference between begrudging and believing. The schism between pouting and praying. It is meant to become our ordinary, this Second Sight—for greater reasons than we can imagine, by the reckoning of God. And this is the ground laid for prayer.

When this wonderfully real Gift comes, it comes at the point of sacrifice—our willing escape from that prison-of-mind which long constrained us. When we are touched by this costly commonality—unity—this hidden treasure released in us and by us, we are free. We become real. More real than we ever pretended to before. And everything looks different.

In our stumble of living, there is refuge from our raw responses. We are, when we plead, held in the palm of God’s great hand, to learn and to tell back what we now see.

Our prayers will have wings.

What Nature Teaches: On Suffering and Steadiness

My "neck o' the woods" -- photo by Judith Deem Dupree

Originally posted on the Ruminate Magazine blog on May 8, 2015

You may view the original blog post HERE.

I live in the southwest, or, more particularly, the far southwest corner of this great, rugged-ragged hunk of earth―where it ends in an endless seascape. It―San Diego County―is an unordinary panorama, with its potpourri of terrains and neighborhoods and breathtaking shorelines.

Further inland, beyond the continuous clots of habitation, a long, slow rise unfolds―undulating hills and creviced valleys peppered with flocks of live oak and manzanita, strewn with sage, the “heather” of our terrain. And yes, this nearly-uni-season haven―daydream of many an east coast “survivor,” is also an ongoing, four-season lesson in durability and fragility…endurance and defenselessness.

Some days ago the wind lashed at us again: It comes as a thief, a wild beast racing free, pouncing, devouring, sucking the lifeblood from all things green, sucking the soul from life. Conjuror of fiery death. Santa Ana, they call it. Or devil wind, appropriately, breeder of fire. Oh, they are not frequent, but once a lifetime is many times too often.

We who live in the sprinkling of small villages that cling to the backcountry hills―savoring their timeless simplicity/eccentricity―have learned to live with our ears tuned for this telltale roar. The howling voice of nature gone insane.

In one of these fires, a friend lost everything but her life, and nearly that. She has written a book that takes us through the fear, the horror that she experienced―and deaths too grisly to describe, too near and known to forget. Ultimately she has come into abundant life. The transformation from victim to “victor” was not, of course, quick and easy. But today she celebrates the new radiance of living, and we feed upon the richness of her testimony! (You may check out her book, The Fire Outside My Window, at her website: sandramillersyounger.com.)

Twice through our years here I have been paralyzed with such fear, watching the great trees beside (and fringing) our house groan and teeter with their incessant whipping, felt the crescendo of crashing limbs upon our shattered deck, inches from our windows. I have seen the dark bloom of smoke on the near horizon, the way it flares to crimson and consumes the sky. I have coughed incessantly in the acrid air. (And yes, we have fled, wisely, when the wind turned its dark face toward us.)

And so I have become, gradually, both “tenacious and tentative.” I have forged something akin to strength, to endurance―qualities I never claimed, never fully understood.

Nature teaches us such stern lessons: Seek its beauty, solace, incomparable inspiration. Memorize and celebrate its great and small particularities―treasures beyond description, beyond the artist’s brush or camera lens . . . and carry them lightly. Holy sustenance. Let them “feed the stream” that feeds us, that balances us when all the smallness and dailyness, the shriveledness of life closes us in. That gives us breath when we are sour with despair.

That teaches us, over and over, to inhale and release. Love and let go.

Now each sunrise and sunset that my friend experiences upon that once fiery mountain is a radiance of a new sort. The gift of endurance and its wordless wonder is born from the ashes of utter defenselessness.

I have seen, and known, this life-taught gift again and again.

There are many heartbreaks, a slight or brutal chain of them draped upon us all. To live is to come to terms with suffering, to come to birth in a new landscape. Whether or when we are brutalized by the weather of nature or the nature of mankind, or the distorted nature of our own cells, we may search out a way to see beyond the rubble.

All losses are not finally, ultimately, losses. A house and its heritage, our history, is not our life. We cannot understand the heights of wholeness, the miracle of eternal Now, until we know this.

Daily we face the endless unraveling of life across this haunted earth, and across the street, and in our sometimes haunted homes, and our throats choke up. We have to mourn; it is a gift and a tithe and a demand that God lays upon us―and yet, soon or later, we turn/are turned once again to the delicacy and clumsiness of that dailyness we live in. Of course! It must be so; we are not meant to mourn our way through the days.

No, Christ mourned merely for a moment before the tomb of His friend Lazarus―wept with his grieving sisters. And then . . . He turned back to the tomb and called out: “Come forth.”

Another dear sister discovers that a fire is raging through her body. It is not benign. Her new Landscape is both uncertain and quite certain. I am mourning for one long moment with/for her. Her eyes crinkle with uncontained love for all the varied dear ones sharing time and bread and written-down words and pungent herbs. There is a Table spread before her. She is living to the uttermost, readying for the eternal Now.

The call to us each, I believe, is to come forth. To fully live―in but not for the things and ways and means that have necessarily engaged us, and yes, entombed us. We forbid them to define, to engulf, to drive us to fear the frenzies that drive the world. The gift is to learn to dwell with steadiness upon the desert of smallness, wade steadily through the swamp of misery. Without becoming small. Without allowing pain, loss, to devour the holiness of this-day-given.

We can live broken-mended on the raw edge of life―without edginess, knowing cell-deep that all,all of life, is both durable and endurable. Fraught with peril, seasoned with grief, and raucous with joy. Timeless . . . and so very fragile.

We are created to embrace and release, over and over. To find a way to face the roar of wind without collapsing. To rise from a fearful crouch. To stoke our wounded soul on sudden sunrise.

Finding Our Way in a Complex World: Blue upon Blue

Blue Sky photo in the public domain

A reprint from the Ruminate Magazine blog

See Original Post from January 27, 2015, HERE.

The day is brilliant―a wash of purity across the often-muddy sky, an opulent blue so intense it defies the concept of endless space. Surely it is a fascia that cups and covers the earth and floods our dowdy souls with its unnameable azure-cerulean-cobalt. 

In this moment’s proclaiming, even the word “blue” defies definition. It begs language we do not have for color we do not see with eyes alone. 

Once in a while, by our earth-heavy standards, we can see beyond vision. One blink, and suddenly our corneas are washed in that same purity, and world and sky and space shunt aside for a flicker of a moment. Long enough to know a hint―a tint―of Heaven, if we crave it so. We need it so―twice in a while. Once to convince us, once to remind us to imprint the unnameable upon our dull blue-seeing.

Of such is the Kingdom we sense just beyond the next rise. We need to head there, transplanted out of the blue that we know beneath a sudden altar above.

Yes, because earthbound we are!―tiptoeing or galumphing into a new year, dragging our baggage and bearing our gifts. Still trying to find a fit in this second millennium Anno Domini, here on this small outpost. Shaving everything down to a size we can handle, can tuck into the cerebellum―or perhaps, dump in the back bedroom where our unknowns and leftovers and last year’s wannabes often end up.

We are reluctant or we are determined . . . even hopeful: We are yearning for life as normal―a continuity, a grounding beyond our wanderlust.

Perhaps it is Wonderlust that will save us.

It becomes harder today, rowing into tomorrow. The “knowns” that we once lived by―or thought we did, paid heed to, woke up to every morning―are shifting rather suddenly, perhaps inexorably. Only a cosmic blink ago, we were huddled in caves and crannies at the brink of flickering campfires.

Today we homosapiens are sown across the face of earth, but oh, so precariously. Too often now we see, or become, victims of ravage―man’s worst nature or nature’s harsh rebellion. The “unknowns” have swept upon us, swept us off our souls’ narrow peninsulas like flotsam and jetsam. We are, we oh-so-modern pilgrms, drifting off on dinghies that have lost their mooring.

Physically, or not, we are adrift.

We circle the globe on silver wings beneath an endless sky, and see little more than the smog that blocks the busyness below. An apt metaphor for the way our civilization has evolved. We “see” what we have trained our eyes to witness. So it has always been, but never with so much of a muchness to flail and filter through.

Many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall increase. – Daniel 12:4      

The Word of God says it, and noted writer Alvin Toffler saw it coming:

Future Shock is a book written by the futurist Alvin Toffler in 1970. In the book, Toffler defines the term “future shock” as a certain psychological state of individuals and entire societies. His shortest definition for the term is a personal perception of ‘too much change in too short a period of time.’ Toffler argued that society is undergoing an enormous structural change, a revolution from an industrial society to a ‘super-industrial society’. This change overwhelms people, he believed, the accelerated rate of technological and social change leaving people disconnected and suffering from ‘shattering stress and disorientation’—future shocked. –Wikipedia    

Adrift beneath that sudden bluebeyondblue. Rowing through a sky full of our debris. Chasing something less than rainbows.

It was ever thus, both this propensity toward rushing forward and the heart’s innate resistance. We simply have tools in our hands and behind our brows that have taken us further, faster, from familiar shores.

We are “loster” than our grampas―intricately wrapped, engulfed in our strange new circuitries, mastering the invisible forces and illogical logics of an unseen universe. Twittering through the rocks and rills, through mountains, past ancient borders drawn by man to guard what now we know is never really, fully ours. Wanderlust.

“Hier stehe Ich! Ich kann nicht anders.” Martin Luther said it―said it well.

Here I stand. I can do no other.

There is a way to stand guard over what must not be lost, and finding it is a life-theme: Learning to grasp it when it suddenly takes shape “within.” Gripping what we discover cell-deep when we are tempted to equivocate or hunker. It is a bulwark―a hedge against the harshness or great moral laxity around us. When we “stand,” we row back against the tidal wave of all the atrocities and apostacies. It often comes to us, this new perception, when we are most down and dependent . . . lost in that sea of angst that has no shores.

Suddenly we have oars. And direction.

Today, the world stood still―right here before me―for an instant. For a lifetime. I offer you this gift of blue upon blue within blue beyond our ken . . . beyond our broken hearts, beyond our fixing. Look up. It is well; all is well with your soul.