Welcome To Looking For The Long Ride

How Time Flies When You Are Busy Living

Terry Henry — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 00:21:00 GMT

In talking with a friend the other day who asked me why I had not been blogging, I realized that it has been at least a couple of months since my last posting. The reasons why I would slack off that much after almost 3 years of being relatively consistent are as many and as varied as the pot holes in our Boone roads after what has been a long, cold, snowy winter.

No, I have not lost interest in expressing myself on the various thoughts that pass through what is left of my imagination. It is more like the desire to expound on my life and those around me has been in hibernation and waiting for the thawing rains of spring to bring forth new vegetation.

In the meantime, my daughter Lydia and my son Joseph have welcomed new baby girls into the world, making grandparents for the first time out of Sandi and me.

Lydia's baby, Kaydence Faith was born in the early hours of January 1st in Forsyth Medical Center in Winston Salem. Joseph's baby, Ayla Jade, was born to him and wife Amanda on February 10th. Both are doing well and the stories that will be told about both pregnancy's and labors would take several pages to describe. Each child is a miracle and a blessing and will forever change the way each family lives.

Several weeks ago, we all got together and celebrated a baby day. It is that kind of day where pictures are taken with each parent and grand parent and cousin and child from every conceivable angle and direction. Most of us guys can take about an hour or two of this before we start looking for a newspaper or magazine to read in the other room. Suffice it to say, it was a weekend to remember.

One of the joys (there are many) of parenthood is knowing that your children have grown up with the ability to find happiness, earn a living and in general, take care of themselves. Sandi and I are blessed with three adult children who are doing all this and more. In addition, we have Laura, a rising senior, still with us. They are all a blessing to us in their individual ways and as a family we have shared many special times.

Being a part of our kids special times is something that doesn't have a price tag. Sitting at your son's or daughter's table and breaking bread (having a meal) is a moment in time that makes all of the various times and seasons of raising children worthwhile.

It is a blessing beyond compare.

In other news I have been getting back into painting and am having a lot of fun playing my various tin whistles. I have been reading Mother Jones and Utne Reader and have been provoked and challenged by many of the articles I have read. Much of what they publish doesn't make it into the mainstream or else goes way beyond what we have been led to believe about current events and the world around us.

Did you know that a decision was made by corporate America/corporate world after one of the world wars to create a system of planned obsolescence in order to help our economy grow. We now have $29 DVD players that can't be fixed, etc. and have to be replaced every few years as a direct result of this decision. Conversely, there is a movement that would like to see more things manufactured that can be fixed and or repaired and that last a lot longer than a couple or years. And the bottom line is that most people probably don't care.

I guess you get my gist—life is going on all around us and we would do well to get in the boat and start paddling.

I think Jonatha Brooke said it best in a song called Crumbs off her 10 Cent Wings album:

And you say, that you have come as far as you are able
But you're not far from the tree

And you say, you're OK, but you live your life like it's over.

We really owe it to ourselves to keep connected with this miracle called life. Have a great ride today!

We Made It Through The Ice Storm of the Century

Terry Henry — Sun, 27 Dec 2009 17:21:00 GMT

Normally, living on top of the Blue Ridge Mountains in North Carolina is a pleasant adventure—we get all four seasons, mostly moderate winters, cool summer evenings and impressionist fall foliage. Spring on the other hand is always a little iffy—it sometimes doesn't like to let go of winter and what often happens is you wake up one day and its summer—without a lot of what is supposed to be in between.

Sandi and I sort of "homesteaded" in 1978 and have been here since.

This past fall was one of our very best with Indian summer lasting well into mid-November—some of my best bike rides were in October and November.

However, with all that is fantastic about living along the Appalachian Blue Ridge, there are definitely some occasional drawbacks.

Like this past Christmas weekend.

Our local weather wizard Ray (Rays Weather dot com) forecast freezing rain to begin about 9pm Thursday evening and last into Christmas day with temperatures then rising to about 41 degrees. Icy accumulations were supposed to be in the quarter inch range and we stored up some water and went to bed that evening with not a lot happening weather-wise. Forecasting weather in these hills is often very difficult and we have seen the "storm watch" come and go many times with nary a whimper. So, when bad weather is forecast we take solace in the fact that it often doesn't happen.

Such was not the case this time.

At about 3am we began to hear the snap, crackle and explosive pop of tree limbs breaking off under the weight of the freezing rain which seemed to come pouring all around at an even 32 degrees farenheit. As with strong winds, sleep is almost impossible at that point and after tumbling and turning for a couple of hours, both Sandi and I got up, made coffee, took showers and waited for our daughter Laura to get up for breakfast and Christmas morning.

Branches were breaking and falling out of our trees every few minutes or so and as Sandi and I watched the debris pile up, we wondered how long we had until our electricity went down. We would see a flicker every now and then and I ground a lot of coffee beans during this period, just in case. And I am glad that I did.

At about 9am, the lights flickered one last time and that was it for our power. I went downstairs and got the Aladdin lamps and prepared the Coleman stove and we waited until Laura awoke and had our present opening without electricity.

I did forget to tell you one thing—the previous Thursday and Friday, the high country had been the recipient of 14-20 inches of snow and I had been on a business trip that week leading into the weekend. I was able to fly into Greensboro airport just as the snow began and after visiting my daughter in the hospital in Winston-Salem, got a motel as the roads to my house and beyond had been closed due to heavy snow accumulations. All this to say, my Y2K generator was in the shed (now destroyed) and not where it should have been for it to be super useful when the power went off the following weekend.

Such is life! We had a pleasant Christmas day and got together with our neighbors for dinner they had prepared on their wood stove. Aladdin lamps produce a white light equal to a 60 watt bulb and Sandi and I read for a while after dinner and then went to bed early.

Then next morning, I got up to more broken branches and pulled the generator out of my busted shed and hooked up a couple of extension cords and we were then able to charge our phones. power the fridge and freezer and eventually watch a Netflix video that had come on the 24th. I heated water on the Coleman stove in the basement for coffee and we finally made it into town (the roads were clear except for lots of broken limbs) for more water, gas for the generator and a quick $15 shower at a local hotel.

The electric company told me that it might be Tuesday before we would have power and like it or not, we settled into having a good attitude about the whole thing.

Sunday morning, I got up, started the generator, heated water for coffee and dishes and was prepared to cook scrambled eggs on the Coleman when lo and behold, the lights came on and life slowly returned to what we now call normal. Just in case, we flushed the toilets and proceeded to get the house cleaned up and ready for another day—this day with power.

After breakfast, I fueled up the chainsaw and hit the front and side yards to cut away the tree limbs that littered our landscape.

At one point, the estimate was that 18 thousand people were without power and thanks to Blue Ridge Electric and all the other co-ops helping, that number is significantly smaller today.

It was an adventure and we made it through—and I might add with mostly good attitudes. I thought we had lots of damage but have heard of much more. It will take weeks to move all the debris out and I still have half a tree on part of my roof. I don't think it did a lot of damage because there was still 12 inches of snow to break the fall. Maybe I will be able to get my son in law to come over latter today and we can cut it up and get it off the roof without doing any damage to to roof. I have taken lots of good pictures for the insurance and hopefully that won't be a problem.

All in all, we are fortunate—we made it through and are ready for the next round of snow tonight and later in the week.

It has been an interesting ride and I am going to rest for awhile before doing any more.

Observations On A Cold Thanksgiving Day

Terry Henry — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 13:00:00 GMT

Late November
and the crows are being noisy
as they fly from tree to barren tree
in groups of two or three
making their Caw / Caw / Caw sounds
to no one in particular

In my neighborhood - it is otherwise quiet
with everyone warm indoors
waiting for dinner to be served.

I smoke a Mote Cristo and
feel the weather turn quickly
from a long Indian summer to
the first days of wintery gloom.

The clouds overhead are heavy and gray—
with small patches of blue scattered in between.

My creativity has been lost for months in a blur of busyness—yet
I feel a thread of sentences forming on top of
my consciousness as I search for a pen and some
white paper to jot down these errant impressions.

It feels good—but I am afraid this burst of energy is brief.

I've spent the morning catching up—cleaning the dirty bird-feeders
in hopes of bringing them back to feed.
They are fun to watch but require lots of dedication and money—the late
summer left them plenty to nibble.

Everything else around me is either dull green or shades of rusty iron.

A certain peace surrounds me in this moment of reflection— the crows
are still talking and dancing from bare limb to bare limb.

In The Beginning And After - Part Two

Terry Henry — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 12:19:00 GMT

In contemplating my most recent post, I am acutely aware of the fact that any conversation based on creativity can take us on many different paths—some direct and to the point—others crooked and winding and through the woods we go.

For instance, to create or be creative doesn't have to be something we do but can rather be something we are or strive to be.

Some people never produce anything that can be listened to or hung on the wall, but use their creativity to problem solve at their job or avocation.

I am reminded of the book "Practicing the Presence of God" by Brother Andrew. In it he talks about his connection with God and the fact that he felt closer (read "more alive") to God in the kitchen peeling potatoes than in his 8 by 10 room on his knees during the required daily devotional times at his monastery. Herein lies the rub: perhaps living out our faith in a moment by moment scenario is the most creative we can ever be. To be fully aware of the moment we are in and choosing to live in that supernatural realm with God, our lives a sacrifice to Him and to all those around us, is perhaps the greatest dance that will ever be seen on the earth.

And really, isn't this what we have always aspired to—something that transcends our very flesh and blood, seventy years on this earth, mortality. At least for those of us who have chosen the Christian path to walk.

In the recent Marhta Graham dance company performance I alluded to already, a single female dancer performed one of Martha's early dance/theatre pieces from the late thirty's. It was called Lamentation and the featured dancer was alone on the stage, sitting on a plain wooden bench, covered from head to toes in an elastic, tube like, body stocking. All we could see was the painted white face of the dancer and her feet and partially her toes and hands. Then, to the sounds of some minimalistic piano playing, the dancer moved to and fro within the stocking creating a sense of a caterpillar trying to figure out what he/she was doing inside of the cocoon.

Watching this "dance" take place gave me the feeling of being pushed and pulled through a life we barely understand. I also got the picture of a person trying to figure a way out of this mortal coil and all the bizarre movements we make throughout our lives in trying to figure things out. A picture was also painted for me mentally of a culture trying to move from primitive to modern—the birthing, in labor-like jerks and convolutions giving me a picture of us collectively straining to make something better of ourselves.

Having said all that, I must admit that I have never felt like I have lived up to my potential, Christian or otherwise. I still get angry at times and live a somewhat semi-disciplined life that always seems to be reaching for something just beyond my grasp. Living a life at its creative best is almost like never using a credit card and getting into a debt that has to be paid off in monthly increments. I can see the wisdom in not buying something before I can afford it, but the pull of the world to purchase is a very strong pull indeed. And in working to pay off the debt, we become a slave to a system that only seems to reward those who follow the rules, pay their bills on time and we end up losing the energy to be creative.

I have probably lost you at this point. What I am trying to convey is a thought—no, a state of being—wherein we always think the best of one another—where we exercise patience, and approach every situation that life brings to us with wisdom and humility—where we lend and never borrow and no matter what happens we can say like the apostle Paul, "I have learned to be content in all things".

This is not better living through chemistry or some sort of hyped up transcendental meditation or prosperity doctrine thing I am talking about. This is about a life that we learn to live in the center of a very creative father who only has plans to prosper us and not leave us as orphans.

Even though I haven't made it yet, I still believe that this creative state of being is possible—a place where if our cake doesn't take, we eat pudding we have made instead. The glass is always half-full instead of the other way around.

In The Beginning And After

Terry Henry — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 22:07:00 GMT

It is interesting to note those times in our lives when we are full of creative ideas and yet have no earthly idea of how to express any of them—or even being aware of what is floating around inside and yet knowing that it to will be forgotten as easily as an early morning dream.

One thing that this social networking thing has going for it is the proliferation of information of all kinds up to and including books people are reading and music they are listening to.

I was checking out my Facebook home page a month or so ago and saw the name Imogene Heap mentioned in one or two posts. With my interest peaked I logged into my I tunes account and sampled her music and was so taken by her creative freshness (at least to me), I purchased my first album online. (Ellipse)

This was a major step for me: I am decidedly a hands on type of guy—I love to wander bookstores and the thought of a physical CD of music to open and touch is still my preference. It's a social thing and what causes us/me to get out of our/my shells and participate in a real—not an imagined, virtual—life.

However I digress. Last night Sandi and I went to a dance performance featuring Martha Graham's company. It was kind of a retrospective show and not one of the best I have seen but never-the-less set my mind to thinking about all the creativity that is loosed on the earth at this present time.

Martha (if I may be so familiar) was an individual who pushed dance into a creative, emotive, theatre-like dimension in the early 20th century and whose path, once opened, was copied somewhat by most of the dance company's that were to follow. And in this creative stew she wasn't always embraced by the powers that be—anyone who dares to challenge or change the status quo has this hurdle to leap.

As I was driving home from work tonight I had this thought: In the beginning, God "created" the earth. In this instance, the Hebrew word "create" means to: to shape, or to fashion. Based on James 1:17 (Every good thing given and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights...) I believe that God gave Martha Graham the creative ideas (gifts) that she then turned into dance theatre and the rest, as they say, is history. Whether she was aware of this supernatural transaction, I have no idea—it works in spite of what we know or believe—somewhat like gravity itself.

Expressing ourselves creatively, then, gives God a glory and a substance in the earth and in our lives that He alone deserves.

Yet I am most aware of the fact that the busyness of life often steals our creative expression and we find ourselves passed out in front of the latest episode of Monk or NCIS—wanting to redeem the time but somehow powerless to the grinding effect each day has hidden underneath its' surface.

I am thrilled to find those people who have pressed through and found that place of freedom and release: Robert Burridge, Abigail Washburn, Sarah Jarosz, Mary Oliver, The Weepies, etc.

A common denominator among many of the artists that I gravitate towards is their acknowledgement of spiritual, godly things but also an awareness of the fact that as humans, we have a hard time making God our all in all—our beginning and our end. In other words, while we are looking to be fulfilled in the Creator, we are still earth bound and checking some things out. And in this attempt comes our music, our dance, our art and our poetry. The artistic urge seems to come from us not being completely comfortable in our skins and is formed/birthed in our desire to understand our purpose in the overall scheme of things.

So—maybe I have said a lot or a little—I have tried to express a thought that seems to keep forming in my mind.

And that too is a ride for another day.

365 Days Later

Terry Henry — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 13:30:00 GMT

It was one year ago today that my wife Sandi and I traveled into lower Manhattan via subway from Newark, New Jersey, where we were staying in a very nice Best Western Hotel. We had arrived the day before on the Amtrak train from Raleigh, North Carolina—we were well rested and more than ready to hit the city streets and have a wonderful few days of vacation adventure.

It was 9/11 and seven years after the twin towers had been attacked. The mood in Manhattan was a little less hectic than normal or so it seemed as we made our way out of the Path train tunnel underneath what used to be the Trade Center. People were already gathering for some of the day's memorial events and we hung around for a few minutes and soaked in the energy that was building before we took Church street north and began our busy day.

It is hard to believe that took place one year ago—that 365 days have gone by since that moment in time. And how would I evaluate my year—and how would you look at yours.

This morning as I was getting ready for work, I noticed that our dog Bessie was more animated than usual looking out the living room window at the driveway. I went over to the window and in the middle of the drive stood a medium sized doe, looking this way and that and acting like she didn't know which way to go. Sort of like I feel some days.

I guess the question I am dancing around is this: what do I have to show for this past year? Have i just lived out my days in quiet desperation like Eliot's Prufrock measured out his life with coffee spoons—I am very much into coffee but after the first cup I am on to other things.

Even things that might at first glance seem quantifiable are not that easy to assess. Am I a better father, husband, friend than I was a year ago. I would like to think so but I am not really the one to ask. Have I left behind all my bad habits—not quite but am allowing myself to be helped by that "still small voice" of the Lord to give me the strength to complete what was begun in me many, many years ago.

I still like a good cigar, even though I haven't had one in quite some time. It's like this: why pay six or seven dollars for something that will burn itself up in a half an hour and then be left with bad breath and a cotton tongue.

If anything I have learned this past year it would be balance and a bit more acceptance and or patience towards those things I have no control over. I have also worked on my ability to accept myself and not look to other people for my validity. I have finally realized that if we wait for acceptance from others to feel good about ourselves, we might well be waiting into the next century. And the fact is that we all have our issues, blind spots and personality quirks. If we can't be good to ourselves we can't give anything but our need to those around us. I want to be a giver most of all and not always a taker—a person who builds up others in order that they can reach the heights they were destined for.

Since it has taken me several days from 9/11 to finish this post I will add a bit today before I wrap this thing up.

Yesterday, I went to a birthday party for a guy who works part-time at our local health food store. His name is Ray and he is now 85 and still working part time in order to keep busy. He is like the Walmart greeter type person—he welcomes you into the store with your name and is genuinely glad to see you. Anyway, the store's owners set up the party to honor him and after looking at him, I can firmly say there is hope for all of us. Not that he hasn't had his health issues but as he stood there yesterday, he looked happy and healthy and is still able to drive himself to and from work, etc.

Another person at the party asked my how my life has been lately and I was almost hesitant to tell her that it has been really good. I am more aware of this the past few days and reflected on some of this while having a glass of Merlot with my wife the other evening. As parents we often judge our life's success on how well our kids do and while this line of reasoning has it's obvious shortcomings, it is often very solid and affirming. At this point our four kids are happy, healthy and doing well. The first three are married and two are expecting babies in February. I guess most of all, what pleases me about them is that they really seem to appreciate Sandi and I and all that we did as a family as they were growing up. The two oldest live about three hours away in Raleigh, NC and we really enjoy getting together and hanging out and doing dinner as a family. My son even bought a nice bed for their spare room so Sandi and I can enjoy our stays with them a little more.

In addition to what I have already mentioned, my relationship with my wife is as good as it ever has been and my job and friendships have been very fulfilling the past several months.

So I guess in general, this past year has been one of adventure and forward movement. I don't have anything less to say blog-wise, but the need to let it all hang out in cyberspace is not as acute as it once was. The time lag between posts has been almost comical but this too is a seasonal thing. Fall is coming to the mountains of North Carolina and we have some hardwood on the way. We are going to try growing wheat grass and juicing it and maybe in the late winter assemble a greenhouse and start some plants for sale and our garden. It is certainly an enjoyable ride and I am looking forward to what the new day brings.

The Long Ride

Terry Henry — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 12:39:00 GMT

When I began writing about my adventures and mental musings two and a half years ago, "Looking for the Long Ride" was really the only name that fit where I was at as a person or where I felt I fit in the overall scheme of things. Life to me at that point was more of a long wave type of thing—catch it way back and ride for awhile until you hit the beach.

This blog's title actually came from a moment in time during the late sixties as I hitch-hiked through western Europe. Frustrated by people who would stop and pick me up only to take me a couple of miles down the road and leave me in a much worse place to hitch a ride, I began asking potential rides how far up the road they were actually going. Taking only the longest rides (barring pouring rain), made life a lot easier and less frustrating to me and that is how the concept of looking for the long ride developed.

However, it has recently come to my attention that a point in time exists where we stop "looking" and begin "riding" as it were.

Looking to me implies a searching or a seeking—looking to make a connection rather than an awareness of how we are currently "connected". Living in a state of always looking almost implies a never finding what we are actually turning our attention to or seeking.

Sounds confusing—not really: it's a matter of perspective.

Not that continuing to "look" or "seek" or cast our view towards something is inherently a bad thing. I think we have to keep learning and looking forward to what each day has to bring. However if looking keeps us from enjoying the moment, then that is where we need to re-evaluate our life and make adjustment.

So, with that said, I must now say that I am no longer in a state of constantly "looking for the long ride" but at age 60 have finally realized that I am on and in the long ride. No longer looking but a part of that which I always, in the back reaches of my mind, aspired to. Not that I am complete—not that I have attained the place of perfection or total satisfaction and achievement—but what I am in process of is realizing that what I have in my hand or what is currently my life, is much more profound than I had here-to-for realized.

I believe that I am not alone in this—that many of us have lived our lives without fully committing to what each day has for us. In not fully committing, we really can't move forward and into that which the future holds for us.

I wish I could find the quote by John Maxwell that really speaks to what I am trying to evoke. What I remember about the quote is he said that at the moment that we commit to something a shift happens which opens up all kinds of possibilities that were there all along but not attainable until we committed.

That being said, I am now aware of the fact that I'm committed to where I am, at this very moment. This is where all of my actions and in-actions have led me. My life is as complete right this very minute as it ever has been—I don't need to keep looking for something to happen to me in order to feel as full as I am right now in this moment.

Not that I won't be tested in this, my new way of looking at life: I am sure there is one just around the corner. Nothing I think or feel fits within a nice convenient sized box that can be mailed anywhere in the world for one flat-rate price. I will have to refine and re-define what it is that I am reaching for or seeking.

However, at this very moment, I am more than blessed with a fantastic wife, great kids and a wonderful way to make a living. Even the garden is doing well—the beans are canned and waiting for a suitable dinner and the corn and tomatoes are just around the corner. My past has been interesting, to say the least, and I am sure that my future is one in which I am taking part in right this very moment.

Enjoy your ride today!

Coal Mining Memories

Terry Henry — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 22:07:00 GMT

Many of my most treasured memories from childhood revolve around summer vacations with my grandparents who lived in Terre Haute, Indiana, about 400 miles away from our home in Port Huron, Michigan. My dad's parents lived in our hometown and we would visit them on a more or less weekly basis, but my mother's parents lived in the far away (for the late 50"s and early 60"s) Indiana.

I remember the long rides on the two lane roads in the old "51 Studebaker or late-model, Buick V8 my dad owned at the time. This was before Ipods, in-car DVD systems and all the other entertainment features kids have available today. We counted state license plates, made words out of road signs and sang songs or read comic books to pass the time on a long ride. I vaguely remember my hand and arm playing airplane out the open window and the Burma Shave signs that had cropped up all over the two-laned landscape of those days.

These memories were brought back to me in an rather round about way last week as I listened to a Levon Helm song entitled, "The Mountain" off his 2007 "Dirt Farmer" album. The first verse goes like this:

I was born on this mountain a long, long time ago
Before they knocked down the timber and a strip-mined all the coal
When you rose up in a mornin' before it was daylight
To go down in that dark hole and come a back up at night

Helm was one of the members of "The Band" back in the day and has continued his plaintive, Americana-focused, story-telling since that group dissolved in the late 90's.

In the late 50's and early 60"s I often spent a couple of weeks by myself during summer vacations with my collective grandparents in Terre Haute, Indiana or briefly in Vandalia, Illinois. My mother's dad Harry, worked for the Pennsylvania Railroad and my natural grandmother Mary, (divorced and remarried) worked for the Packard Shirt Co. Harry was in charge of a line and signal group and Mary sewed collars on fancy shirts for a living. When she remarried it was to a coal-miner named Harvey Smith and the house I remember staying in the most was really a trailer that got so hot in the summer the Wonder Bread almost turned to dough in the cabinet above the sink.

What partial memory the Levon Helm song stirred in me was my grandmother Mary driving late at night to pick my grandfather up from work in a coal mine several miles north of Terre Haute proper. I would be in the back seat asleep and would awaken to the sight of grandpa Harvey coming out of the mine with his white owl eyes, light hat propped on his head and nickel plated round lunch bucket swinging at his side. Everything but the area around his eyes was coal black and the smell that he brought into the car was something that had attached to him a mile or two underground. Musky and mysterious is all that I can recall at this moment.

He was a real gentleman and as I remember, loved listening to the radio and loved my grandma. In later years they would move almost a half a block away to a real house by a church and I don't think it was as hot during my summertime stays. Most of my recollection is fairly fuzzy from that time but it seems that coal-miners worked long hours and he wasn't around as much as my other grandfather who lived in an upscale suburban subdivision on the other side of town.

Suffice it to say, Harvey died several years later from what we now know was "black lung". After his death, my grandmother visited us in Port Huron several times before finally moving in and taking care of us kids while my mother went back to work. She never remarried and the special bond that we had from those early years was never broken and never quite understood by me or my siblings. During my many rebellious phases, she would quietly remind me of my responsibilities and I would kick and scream and finally end up doing the "right" thing after I couldn't tell her to go away anymore.

There's a lot more I could write about those times and how special I felt in the midst of really being somewhat left alone and on my own. It is what it is as the saying goes. It was an interesting ride for that time and the memory of it certainly took me on a ride today—hope you enjoyed hanging on.

Berry Picking with Euell

Terry Henry — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 00:36:00 GMT

As i stomped my way through the briars and undergrowth today in order to get to the black raspberries beside the old homeplace, i wondered if they were glad to see me. I didn't feel Euell Gibbons spirit or anything like that but the sense that I had was that these plants do their best every year to produce good fruit and many times it withers on the cane because no one takes the time to search them out. There they sit in the full sun waiting for some fearless pioneer to pass by and take an interest in them. One almost has to wonder where are the deer or the bear who are constantly on the prowl for a free meal.

I can almost hear each berry say "thank you"..."thank you"..."thank you" each time I release one of its fruits and the tight little branch it is attached to snaps back back and forth before finally coming to rest as my hand reaches through to another single berry or better yet a cluster of ripe goodness.

I remember one time years ago Sandi and I walked past a house that had just been torn down in order to make way for a new highway. In the front of the house there had been a glorious dry-stacked stone wall that had been almost totally covered by years of neglect. Sandi was into stone walls and I was into helping her do her thing and we came back with a truck and began to load what was left of those stones for transport back to our house and another rock walkway, patio or assemblage. It was almost as if it was our duty to the person who had diligently found and placed those rocks years before, to gather them up and reuse them—to continue the tradition that had begun in some field twenty or thirty years before our little afternoon walk.

The idea of letting that anxious bulldozer plow them under as if they were somehow deserving of that fate was much too much to contemplate. We would save those flat worn stones and incorporate them into our living space and enjoy them for as long as we could before we to, go the way of all flesh.

It seems like only the right way to think—we have to preserve what is good and fitting of our heritage or it will be lost forever. Not that we cling to things out of some desperate motive to prolong our days or give meaning to our time here on earth—but that we enter into the stream of history that flows past us sometimes like a torrent and other times is like looking at a landscape that hasn't had rain in a while and all we see are the gaping cracks like veins running through our lives.

That such randomness can hold so much mystery amazes me. That a thirty minute piece of time picking berries can hold such interest and be filled with such poetry is a constant joy.

As the words and music inside our heads complete the soundtrack of our lives, let us rejoice in the peace that passes all understanding. That's a good ride any day.

Family Matters

Terry Henry — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 01:40:00 GMT

I was just about to get some ice cream out of the freezer when Sandi called me on my cellphone from the supermarket. Jessika, our oldest daughter, had been in a bad accident and had been taken to the trauma ward at the local hospital in Cary, North Carolina where she lives. It was our son, Joseph calling Sandi, and he didn't have any more information for us but was heading over to the hospital and would call us as soon as he found out anything. As I struggled with my feelings about how hurt my daughter might be, I do remember taking time to pray for her and wondering why this had happened.

There was a brief moment when I felt guilty about even enjoying the rest of what was becoming a beautiful evening in the mountains. I guess that is where the ice cream came in. Would God hear my prayer if I did something enjoyable when Jessika could be in bad shape because of the accident. Within the context of all that was going through my mind at the time, I had a sense that she was going to be alright and that we would be getting a good report from my son—yet, at the same time I fully felt the soberness of the moment and the hard reality that her ultimate condition was not in my hands but God's.

Anyway, an hour or so later, I was talking with my daughter, who though banged up a bruised pretty severely, was being released to go home. This after CAT Scans and x-rays and so forth to eliminate any broken bones or internal injuries.

All this happened on June 20th. We had already scheduled a trip to visit the kids for the following weekend and so kept in touch with Jessika throughout the week to see if she was feeling up to us coming. By mid-week the trip was a go and we looked forward to having the whole family together on Saturday evening. Lydia, second to the youngest, was also planning on being in Cary that weekend as well.

All in all, we had a wonderful time with our family and consider ourselves fortunate that we still have Jessika with us. Several thoughts came to mind during this whole process which in turn led to me writing this.

First of all my son and daughter live within a mile or two of each other and Joseph took really good care of letting us know about Jessika and keeping us informed as well as running errands for her, etc. That type of stuff really makes a parent happy—you can't manufacture closeness or caring and our kids have really come a long way in that respect.

Also, our family just seems to flow pretty well with one another when we are together. I am sure that would be tested if it was twenty-four-seven for an extended period of time—but overall, for a long weekend, we enjoy one another's company. They tell us they get together every couple of weeks for a collective dinner or cookout as well.

If you had to write a script for life, this is the type of scene an author would no doubt include. What we do today builds memories for tomorrow. Then there come days when those self-same memories help us navigate through life's sometimes choppy waters.

Family is important and Sandi and I look forward to our trips to see the kids. We are fortunate they are only 3-4 hours away. There is always a trip to Barnes and Noble and a few Starbuck's stops along the way to break things up and make the trips there and back more interesting. Or at least that is the way the ride seems to be—and for that I am grateful.

It Is Finished! Almost

Terry Henry — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 15:15:00 GMT

When a project I have started takes a lot longer to complete than I had anticipated, I am reminded of an old movie I once saw about the artist Michelangelo painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. The Pope or some high ranking member of the church comes into the picture after the artist had been working on the fresco for far to long and exclaims: "Michelangelo, when will you make an end!" to which the artist replies, "When I am finished!" or something to that effect.

The ceiling did get painted and the rest, as they say, is history.

I felt much the same this year as the wet mountainous spring kept me from first getting my potatoes planted when I wanted to and then postponing the planting of my corn and beans until the first weekend of June. The good news is that everything is in the ground and growing by leaps and bounds due to the favorable weather we have experienced the past several weeks. A little rain followed by some 70 degree days does a lot for those small seeds: they germinate quickly and then grow really fast, actually catching up to those planted weeks earlier while the ground was still a bit cooler.

At least that has been my experience.

Gardening is something that I look forward to each year but as I get older, calendar-wise, the job does seem to get a little harder every year. This year, after hauling off last years stems and stocks (to wet to burn fully) I mowed down the weeds, tilled and raked then tilled and raked again. Then, after church on one Sunday, I tilled again, set up the row stakes and string, made my furrows, sowed the seed and covered them with peat and composted manure. This 30 row planting was a marathon session that took me almost 6 1/2 hours and several days to regain the energy I spent that afternoon.

Don't get me wrong—I am glad to still have the energy to expend however it ends up getting spent. It is just that it takes longer to get back to normal than it did last year. In a perfect world I could have broken the six hours into several sessions but with our weather's irregularity I just needed to get it done while the ground was still dry enough to work in.

It has been two or three weeks since the above took place and we are now hoping for a little moisture since the soil is drying out because of all these beautiful days we have had.

I had this thought while driving home from work tonight: the weather doesn't really care what we care or what we wish for—it is what it is. It can't really hear our thoughts and prayers and give us that perfect day because we are getting married outside or having people over for a cook out. If you get the perfect day, be thankful—but if you don't, remember it is just the other side of the same coin. Sometimes you get heads and sometimes it is tails all the way.

I guess that is why they say: make hay while the sun shines.

Rainy or not—that's the end of another not so long ride.

Gardening in the Mountains

Terry Henry — Thu, 07 May 2009 13:13:00 GMT

This time of year is one of my favorites and also rates as one of the most frustrating as well. This is due in large part to the fact that the transition from winter to spring and spring into summer is never a process (in the mountains) which can be easily understood or delineated with a simple wall calendar which notes that spring begins on March 21st. Most people in North Carolina will fall into planting zone 6 or 7 but because we are so much higher we find ourselves in zone 5—which in essence reaches from the middle of Michigan down to the tip of the southern Appalachian range. Logistically, there are parts of Washington state that rest in zone 7 even though they are located just below Canada.

So, we always get a few nice days in late February or early March that begin the gardening fever process. It is at this point I unwrap the tiller and see if it will start without a new plug—if it does I move onto the next project which is to rake up all the stalks, stems and other organic debris from fall into big piles that I will eventually get around to burning—no easy task in the windy climate that surrounds us.

I then try and find the seeds from last year that might still be good and look through the garden catalogs that have been laying around since after Christmas. Every year i tell myself that I will order all my seeds early and every year I fall behind or get caught unawares as the ordering deadlines come and go.

This year, most seed catalogs offered a $25 discount on every order of $50 or more. That gives me an idea of the incredible markup that gardening stuff must have attached to it. But the ploy works and I ordered my deer fencing from two separate catalogs in order to take advantage of the free $25 offers.

From one catalog I not only got the deer netting but also received 25 free strawberry plants when ordering another 25. The other cataloger offered me an additional 10 asparagus plants when I purchased 10 at regular price. Plus I got some other stuff but still was not quite ready to order seeds.

It turns out that I had a lot from last year and I hit the local stores that sell seeds and picked up what I thought i might need for early and late planting as well.

Actually, one of the most frustrating aspects of gardening is the fact that the "mom and pop" supply store where I used to go to buy my seeds and plants and fertilizer, went out of business several years ago leaving only Lowes and Walmart and Southern States where purchases can be made. I don't think I have ever recovered from the loss of that old fashioned, super-customer friendly, garden supply shop—and this is why.

To Walmart and the other "big box" stores, gardening stuff is a commodity that is inventoried early, based on stores that are not even close to our growing season. Because this stuff is a profit center in and of itself, the goal is to sell it as fast as possible and then use the space this inventory took up to sell something else. What I am saying is this: if you don't buy the seeds and plants weeks before they are ready to plant, you run the risk of not being able to find any left by the time you are really ready and able to plant a garden.

Whereas the proprietor of the "local" feed and seed store always warned you about buying plants to early to survive in our mountain climate. Plus, when you ran out of lettuce seeds, etc. in the middle of the summer you could always count on them to have a supply left. Yes they did run out of stuff but it wasn't because they planned it that way. Also, they didn't sell packages with more seeds than you really needed—but only weighed them out according to what you told them "you" wanted.

When I asked them why they went out of business I was told that it was because they had gotten tired of making money only from March through July and then losing the rest of the year. And I guess I can understand their point of view even though I consider their passing a major event in my life and the lives of many others I know. They were a part of a culture that is dying off in America—customer-centric service and sales with a down home attitude and appreciation of each customer as they pass through the open doors of free enterprise.

Am I making more of this than it deserves—hardly I think. A book could be written about this trend and probably already has been. It is a loss that I live with every time I walk into a Lowe's or Walmart and see people frantically buying garden stuff way before it is time to plant because they know if they don't get it now it will be gone in a week or two. To these corporate centers I am just another statistic who may or may not show up on their profit and loss sheet at the end of the year. Once the inventory is gone, I am out of luck until the next year when the cycle starts all over again.

Anyway—I guess I have said enough. I have more than enough seeds to get me through this year and when the rains that have been pouring for the better part of two weeks stop, I will get into the garden and try to do in several days what I would have liked to do in several weeks—the potatoes and beans and zinnias still need to be planted.

Next year I plan on ordering my seeds from a catalog or two—I will see how that goes when the time comes.

In the meantime, enjoy your ride!

The Power and The Glory

Terry Henry — Sat, 02 May 2009 17:41:00 GMT

This is a story that to the best of my recollection begins about 44 years ago, just after I discovered a young folk singer named Bob Dylan. As many people no doubt found, getting hip to Dylan was just the beginning of what would become a journey into the roots of American music and beyond.

Once I found out that one of Dylan's influences was Woody Guthrie, I began to search in earnest for other musicians that were in the same genre and quickly ran into Cisco Houston, Leadbelly, Dave Van Ronk and of course, Pete Seeger. Most of these players are an acquired taste, but of them all (many more of course), Pete Seeger is by far the most accessible and one of my all time favorites.

I have collected many of his recorded works on CD and can clearly remember the times I would rock my youngest daughter to sleep listening to one of Seeger's many children's concerts. He was a master of the sing-a-long and rarely recorded an album in the studio.

One of the most magical times in my life was seeing Pete in concert in Detroit, Michigan, sometime in the mid-seventies. The seats I had were way up in the balcony but the moment Pete walked on the stage singing "John Henry" the whole auditorium came alive and you could almost touch the electricity in the air. It was "dream-come-true" time for the next couple of hours as the master and his banjo weaved a web of Americana that I can still feel today.

Pete Seeger's 90th birthday is Sunday, May 3rd, and his party will be held at 5:00 p.m. at Madison Square Garden in New York City. Lots of popular musicians will be there and tickets are in the $90 to $250 range. It would be great to be there but I guess I will stay in Boone and mow the yard or work in the garden.

A couple of days ago, I was thinking about Pete and burned a couple of his early albums onto my Ipod. One of them is entitled "God Bless the Grass" and features a song named "The Power and the Glory". As I was listening to it this morning, I was struck by the fact that even though I didn't always agree with his politics, Pete stayed true to his vision and that is as American as it gets.

In light of what is happening in the United States at this point in history (swine flu, toxic mortgages, bankrupt car companies, etc, etc.) I thought the text of this song is very apropos to where we are at. So, without further ado (and BIlly Shields too) here is "The Power and the Glory".

Come and take a walk with me
Through this green and growing land
Walk through the meadows and the mountains and the sand
Walk through the valleys and the rivers and the plains
Walk through the sun and walk through the rain

Here is a land full of power and glory
Beauty that words cannot recall
Oh, her power shall rest on the strength of her freedom
Her glory shall rest on us all
(On us all)

From Colorado, Kansas and the Carolinas too
Virginia and Alaska, from the old to the new
Texas and Ohio and the California shore
Tell me, who could ask for more?

Yet she's only as rich as the poorest of her poor
Only as free as the padlocked prison door
Only as strong as our love for this land
Only as tall as we stand

©BARRICADE MUSIC INC

Here's the downsampled mp3 version of the song The Power and the Glory

What Are You Hearing?

Terry Henry — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 19:51:00 GMT

Several weeks ago I wrote about the silence of God and what hearing God might look like and ended the story with an open-ended question about what we are hearing from God today.

As you can no doubt tell, I believe that the creator of the universe is still in process of interacting with His creation—much like the walks He took with Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden. And that statement alone can probably cause as much controversy as the act of speaking in tongues ever has.

Lots of people have done many horrendous things during our history out of the belief that they have heard God speak something to them—in this group we have the schizophrenic and psychopath and other wise disturbed peoples of the world.

In all of this bad stuff people have done in the name of God, none of it was found in the new covenant we have with Him through the sacrifice of Jesus as described in the New Testament. Jesus didn't kill those who didn't like Him and thought He was a misfit—he blessed them and prayed for them and even had dinner with those people who were culturally despised for their jobs and/or positions, etc.—taxpayers, politicians, women caught in adultery and the like.

Scripture is very clear on the subject of wrath: Judgment is mine says the Lord—I will repay (Romans 12:19).

Personally, what I am hearing is a mixture of things—some is God and some is what I think He is saying.

The first thing I am hearing is about thinking new. We all remember that old saying which says the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. I believe the church as we have known it is in the same place. It is my impression that many church leaders believe that God has created one painting and only one painting and that we need to paint it over and over again every time we meet. This with the knowledge that no DNA chain is the same as any other and that each and every snowflake is unique as it falls from the sky.

We have all been there at one time or another. As a praise and worship leader for many years, I knew what it took to get to certain places and often repeated myself in order to facilitate this experience again and again. Not that repetition is bad, but using a technique to simulate the presence of the Holy Spirit is something else again.

Thinking new also means thinking in biblical terms—I am reminded of the verse that says: as a man thinks, so he is (Prov. 23:7). It is also interesting to note that while listening to Earl Nightingale the other day, he said the very same thing about becoming successful. The way he put it was that what a man spends his time thinking about, he becomes—clearly another way of saying the same thing as Proverbs 23. His point being that the process of us becoming anything in life requires us to put some brain power to it—to interact with the Creator in a creative way in order that we become the "unique" person we are (my words added to his).

Indeed, the canvas of our faces has changed along with the shape of our bodies over the years we have sojourned on this planet.

Or to sum up this brief line of thought—If you want to be rich, spend time thinking about what it takes to achieve that goal. If your desire is to be "Christ like" the same is true—although it is more through a relationship dynamic that this end is realized rather than a purely cerebral methodology.

I am also "hearing" (my internal/eternal sense) that this is the year to really make our gardens productive. Along with that, through a multitude of witnesses, having 30 days of food supplies available, in case the distribution chain gets temporarily disrupted. It is not a Y2K mentality but rather a be prepared service mentality that drives this thought home to me. We all know that if times get rough for a period that those without preparation will be knocking on our doors—and we need to be ready to invite them in—trusting the rest of what we haven't prepared for to God—come what may.

Of course, keeping out of debt and paying down your existing debt is something that we have been hearing for awhile now. The only way to do this is to think new. Sandi, my wife, wants laminate wood floors to replace our linoleum and carpet which has seen better days. Her idea was to sell books on Amazon dot com. At first I was sceptical (as I often am) about this idea, but with a few books from my shelves added to hers, we have almost earned the floor money in just under two months—and the basement got a little less crowded in the process.

This is not all that we are hearing but is a start at beginning to understand what is happening around us during this point in our collective and individual histories.

Feel free to add what you are picking up on and in the meantime, enjoy the ride.

Gardens I have Known and Loved

Terry Henry — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 12:23:00 GMT

I have been gardening in one fashion or another for almost 32 years—mostly since I moved to North Carolina in 1978 with the intent of leaving Michigan's rust belt and becoming a "mountain man". Gardens are a lot of work but they are one of the most rewarding endeavors that I can think of—all I have to do is think of fresh, vine-ripened tomatoes or eating corn that has just been picked and all that work is quickly forgotten.

Gardens are also a lot like our lives—we have some successful years and some that are not as profitable. Sometimes we plant to early and that late freeze gets the seed and we have to plant again. Some years you might have more spinach than you can eat and others—even though you have seemingly planted in the same way—you might only get a salad or two from a whole patch.

Anyway, it is spring time in the southern Appalachian's and the urge to get outside and start playing in the dirt is almost overwhelming—a few days of sunshine and hope are followed by several days of rain and cold weather—but we keep getting ready for the big planting push in small starts and stops.

As I plan this year's garden I am acutely aware of the fact that for the past two years, all the beans I have painstakingly planted have been eaten by a roving band of deer—deer that until recently have been content to eat what nature has provided for them rather than raid my yearly garden.

So, it wasn't really all that much of a shock to me to see five deer in the lot next to my garden when I came home from work the other day. Since I had my camera in the car, I stopped for a moment and before they ran away, took this picture to show my wife Sandi.

And it is not just the beans that are on my mind.

Three years ago after planting my sweet corn the weather got warm and there was very little rain. I would go out to the garden every couple of days in order to see if the corn was germinating. It seemed to be taking a long time but I figured that since it was dry, it might take a little longer to begin to see those little green shoots coming out of the soil. Well, one early morning, I noticed a bunch of crows in the back and you guessed it—they were eating my corn for breakfast. I told my buddy Carter about this situation and he told me that I needed to stake each row and pull a string across the row about 3 or 4 inches off the ground—that crows would not go under something in order to eat. So, the next year I tried that technique and we now have corn again.

This year I ordered about 100 feet of "deer netting" that I plan to put around the beans, the corn and maybe the peas as well. It is a lot of work but in these economic times, not having canned beans or fresh corn isn't an option—so whatever I have to do I will.

While driving to work this morning I had these thoughts I have just written along with a memory of the first garden Sandi and I did upon finding an old home place to begin our lives in these now familiar mountains.

The house we lived in and in process of re-claiming, had not been occupied for many years. There was an overgrown garden space directly behind the house which we had plowed by one of the older locals we had met. If you have ever seen a freshly plowed field it looks something like rows of big overturned sod patches in between deep furrows of nothing but dirt. From a distance it appears as big welts of soil with the grass turned under and somewhat hidden from sight.

What we didn't know at the time was that this process was supposed to be followed by discing—a process by which the newly ploughed earth is broken up and made somewhat plantable. Whether or not our farmer friend forgot this process or was playing a joke on us "newbies" I will never know. What I do know is that Sandi and I began to hand separate the dirt from the grass and when we had some earth smoothed out, planted some seeds and waited for our "harvest".

What we failed to understand was that these little seeds needed nutrients to grow just like our bodies do. It is hilarious to look back on those 3 inch corn plants that failed to get any bigger no matter how much we watered them and checked up on them. It wasn't until the following year that we learned about discing, tilling and fertilizer and began to have harvests that we could eat and put away for the winter. Gardening, like life, is a learning process—that's the ride I am on and am looking forward to what this year brings.

How about you?

God Is Not Silent

Terry Henry — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 15:15:00 GMT

In the absence of any sound or noise, God is not "silent" as some would define it.

His creative voice still resonates through time and permeates all that He has ever imagined.

Some would say that silence is a lack of interaction or connection. Some would say that they haven't "heard" God speak to them in a long time—if ever. Yet scripture tells us that, "...all creation groans and travails waiting for the manifestation of the sons of God." and "... For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen."

What do these groanings and travailings sound like? Not like the mountain brook that sends its soft rumbling sound constantly to all who come near—more like the howling wind of a distant tropical storm.

What do these invisible things look like? A new-born baby bursting forth from its mother's womb! A late evening, full-moon, summertime-walk?

During lunch with a friend the other day, our conversation turned to family type stuff and some of the frustrations that come with parenthood. In the course of this more personal interchange, I asked my friend what God was speaking to him about some of the scenarios he was sharing with me. His comment was quick and seemingly practiced: God created the earth and then left us to fend for ourselves.

This reply from a person I know has felt the hand of God and by faith has heard His voice—heard his voice in terms of feeling to do this or that instead of something else.

At that point I didn't know what to say and since we were done eating, we left the restaurant and headed back to our respective jobs. Just before my friend dropped me off at my work place, I had this thought which I quickly shared: You may not think that God is speaking to you (that He is silent) but instead of hearing an audible voice on your own as in times past—perhaps God is speaking to you through your friends.

Therefore my conclusion: God is not silent as some would define silence.

In a book of poetry I just finished entitled "God's Silence" by Franz Wright, he says in one poem that, "...I have heard God's silence like the sun." I have really no idea of what he is trying to get me to see in this verse other than the fact that the sun is everywhere and without it we would not be alive. And oh yeah, the sun doesn't really have a vocabulary other than to say, "...don't stare directly into me and if you are going to be out in me for a long time, wear some SPF 50 so bad things don't happen to your skin."

So, in other words, I would have to believe that even a deaf person can "hear" God. That hearing is not about audibility but a knowing that transcends our very senses. Maybe the term would be sinisthesia or a blending our senses. I can say when I have seen something miraculous that I have heard God speak.

What comes to mind as I write these words is a picture of my wife and I having dinner in some fancy restaurant. Maybe we are celebrating our anniversary or a bonus check—nevertheless, the picture is the same. As we leisurely talk about our hopes and dreams over a glass of wine and a tasty meal, I have often had the feeling that what we are experiencing is somewhat unreal—a scene from a movie caught in time. That there are literally thousands of people all over the world enjoying the company of their mate and a good dinner along with us is somewhat overwhelming. That the supply system that brings the steak or shrimp to our table works as well as it does is almost deafening to me—I am aware of all the people that did their job in order to facilitate my good time with my wife. The bible even tells me that the enjoyment of the fruits of one's own labor is a gift from God. And I take it as such and wish that that moment could be enjoyed forever—of course the moment passes and we are right back to paying bills online and wondering why our boss doesn't understand us.

Yet, in all of this, I see the hand of God and feel His voice—it is a silence that almost permeates every fiber of my being—I am so full at that very moment that I could die and go to heaven and not even argue about the timing.

Does the voice of God transcend our senses? I would have to say YES!

I guess then the question remains—what are we hearing and are we paying attention.

And that is a "ride" that will take us down another path for another time.

NOTE: (added 4/8/09) Part two to this thought process is here.

Life On The Playground

Terry Henry — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 20:31:00 GMT

In the future
sometime between now and then
I will wonder—maybe—whatever happened to the time
I spent as a couch potato—watching TV shows I had taped
during the previous week.

Will I wonder if maybe I could have used the time differently—perhaps come up with a cure for cancer or the common cold?

Will I wonder what could have happened had I applied myself differently—put the time I didn't do much of anything into a time capsule—so that I could dig it up when I need it more—like when my time runs out or there is not much of it left.

You know, there never seems to be enough time to do everything I thought I wanted to do. In the end it won't be any different than it is right now—I will wish that I had done something different with my time—I don't know what for sure, but something other than what I did.

Cause it always seems I don't get done what I later wish that I would have—whatever it was that I didn't do.

It's like an epidemic—it's all over me—wondering where the time went even before it slowly slips away—washes under the bed—out the door—down the drain.

Time is like lost love—there can really never be enough of it—so we have to settle with what we get.

What we can imagine about time—what we could do if we had just a little more of it—is always more exciting than what we actually do with what time we get. There is always this tension between our dreams and what we do with our lives in the real world—as if one thought drives the other or vice-versa—only I don't know which one is in the lead today.

The sum of our lives will always be more than what we thought—when we had that thought—and less than what it could have been, had we done everything we ever imagined.

There will always be an imbalance in the teeter-totter of our lives—one side up while the other side hits the ground only to be pushed up until an imbalance occurs again and tries to correct itself. We push until our legs are tired and then we take a short breath and run to the swing set or the slide.

It's a day in the park—this thought life of mine—once lived and now remembered—take a picture and tape it into a scrapbook—someone will see it one day and smile—remembering their own days on the playground.

Where Has My Muse Hidden In Between The Chapters of My Life

Terry Henry — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 18:25:00 GMT

I have gone a long time (for me) thinking that I haven't had anything to say or write about—thinking that I am not a poet or an artist or that everything worth saying has already been said—and if I haven't heard it or read it I haven't looked in the right book yet.

Yet creativity or being creative is not about you finding me hidden somewhere on some shelf in some Barne's And Nobles in some off street strip-mall. It is about enjoying the process of thought or life itself—it is about being satisfied that my life has been worth something—not lost between the weeks and months and years of occupying this earthly space—this mortal coil.

Creativity is really about taking the time to wonder—taking the time to roll around in the tall spring grass of your mind. It is about arranging the moments of each day to include thoughtful wondering/wanderings of lets examine this or that for just a minute or two before it too is lost to memory. Lets recall our life before our recollection of it dims like print upon a yellowed newspaper page.

Lets not be pressured into escape thinking—that we will catch up on everything when there is a little less stress and a lot more time—because that time is like water poured onto a thirsty garden plot—it all but disappears within a few short moments and we are left staring at the face of some dried up soil. You can almost hear it sigh with partial relief when the last drop of water is sucked into God knows where.

Who will water the ground of my soul?

Thinking About Mother

Terry Henry — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 18:13:00 GMT

It is interesting to me how memories of people we have known seem to come and go of their own volition. I can be calmly reading the evening news when a person from my past pops up in my mind.

The other day I was looking at a CD that my sister had brought me during her Christmas time visit. It was a Nancy Wilson album that my mother had enjoyed. As I looked at the photograph of Nancy on the inside front cover, the attitude and the way she faced the camera reminded me of my mother and began to stir up recollections of who my mother was and the persona she took on during her life.

At this point in my journey I would say that we all have several personality types that we project onto the flesh of our existence. Most commonly, there is who we really are and who we would like to be—and it is the latter that we want those around us to see and believe that it is the "authentic" us.

Our "real" lives are lived out of the circumstances that our choices in life have created. Yet we carry with us the hopes and dreams of what "might have been" had everything in our lives gone the way we would have liked them to.

In my mother's case—she saw her mother and father divorced and re-married before she was 20 and then several years later left her hometown to have me "out of wedlock". From the pieces I was able to pick up on (we didn't talk about it much) she got pregnant and decided to visit a friend of hers in San Francisco until I was born—at which point she moved back to her hometown and began a life I am sure had its high points and low points. It couldn't have been easy for her even though I am convinced that I was just a big bundle of joy. I arrived on the scene in 1949 and now know that the late 40's and early 50's were still leading up to that period of time where cultural mores would be challenged and replaced with women's lib and planned parenthood.

Suffice it to say I never knew my biological father and didn't find out until ninth grade that I was adopted by the handsome sailor my mother was later to meet and marry.

I mention these details only to give the reader some sort of idea as to how my mother's life was shaped from an early age and perhaps a better understanding of her personality. During her final years I made sure to mention how thankful I was that she decided to keep me and the sacrifices that decision entailed.

Both my mother and father liked music, mostly lite jazz ala Stan Kenton, and I often saw my mother, during a semi-family evening, moving to the beat of the big band sounds that would float from the stereo speakers in the corner of our living room. There was something almost primal about the connection she had to the music as she snapped her fingers to the beat and seemingly for a moment lived out in her mind those other lives that had passed her by.

As a young girl my mother had played the piano some and had had an accordion but had to give both up during hard economic times. I have assumed that because of her choice to keep the baby, college was not an option and finding time to socialize was out of the question. I am somewhat foggy on these details—although I am almost positive that some of these memories are founded in talks we had around the dinning room table during my inquisitive years. As I write these words I wish that I had been more interested in these details when there was time to find out about them.

I really do think that my mother came to terms with the turns her life took—although she would often mention that she had missed out on some of the things that normal people got to do such as going to college or indulging their creative urge in painting and music.

She was an avid reader and as I remember, always had some sort of hobby project going. At some point, when us kids were old enough, she went back to work in a department store as a cosmetics salesperson and made a good income from that. I don't remember the pantry ever being bare or my mother sitting around watching soap operas.

As I have written this, I have tried to connect to the very thought that began this stream of remembrance in the first place.

My mother was, above everything, a very proud person. There were moments of lucidity where I am sure that she felt as if she belonged in her life—but in retrospect my sense is that she was always somewhat of a stranger in a strange land. She was a romantic and her choice of music fit the popular mold of singing about what should be rather than what is. That somewhere over the rainbow there is a perfect life and if we just wait long enough, it is bound to find us.

Within this existence, my mother displayed a certain dignity that only comes from love. In her own way, she loved us greatly and while she had her heath and a consistent income, birthdays and Christmases were always times of joyful over abundance. She loved to shop and would hit the sales all year in order to have stuff to pack into those gift boxes that would always show up ahead of time, rather than mine which always seemed to be late.

When the money began to disappear and her health slowly evaporated, she took to other ways of blessing us and also spending her time. It was at this point that she began to cut pictures out of magazines and filled up endless scrapbooks with all sorts of what she saved. When gift time came she would take pieces of wood and use the pictures to make collage plaques and then paste sayings or poetry or history on the backs of the wooden wall hangings. It was in this very creative way that she lived out her days and in turn blessed us with boxes of hand-made items that were carefully wrapped and sent to us with all the love that she knew how to gather.

Even as her dignity slipped away she found a way to be unique. This is not to say that she was perfect and was always full of cheer and self-respect—she had her areas of hardness and unforgiveness just as many of us do. She never quite came to terms with her own divorce and the way things finally panned out.

But what I choose to remember today are all the years that she kept reaching for something that was just beyond her grasp—something that she felt that if she could only hang onto for just a little while—everything else would somehow work out as well. She didn't let life defeat her although through the course of hers lots of rough edges were sanded off—which as we are aware are not all that easy to bear.

I could say more but I think the time has come to bookmark this chapter and perhaps so doing return to it another time. There are other thoughts to have and other books to read—it's been a short but pleasant ride today.

What We Now Know

Terry Henry — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 00:45:00 GMT

I don't remember how many times in my life I have reached the conclusion that the more it seems I know, the more I seem to realize how little I "know". It is as if knowledge is never ending and that we will never have a basket full of it—in this life at least.

And each time I have had that particular thought about knowing how little I really know, I have truly felt like I understood what I was thinking. Tonight, as I was reading a book by Carl Raschke entitled "GloboChrist" I was literally overwhelmed with the vast body of knowledge that surrounds our every waking moment like the air that envelops our very being.

Why, just the casual study of how our language has developed over the millenia could consume the next twenty five or thirty years of our waking moments. For instance, did you know that a noun names a person, place, thing, quality, action or idea according to the Perrin-Smith "Handbook of Current English"—itself a tome of over 590 pages of info about the words and sentences that we use everyday and no doubt have taken very much for granted since that 4th grade English class in 1958 (insert year here).

But that, in and of itself, is just a pleasant side trip when juxtaposed against the substance of the GLOBOCHRIST book and its' story of how the great commission is taking a postmodern turn.

But pomo or no pomo (postmodern), understanding the mystery of the gospel has got me in its' grip—I am beginning to see just how much of it there really is to see and how little I know in comparison to how much I realize there is to go. But I am not dismayed—rather intrigued by the journey itself and all the stops and starts it has taken over the past 25 years.

It is almost as if I am a man who has eaten vanilla ice cream for many years and then one day begins to really taste the fullness of the flavors that make it what it is—this very sensory revelation doesn't take away from what has been but instantly adds to what is and what very well will be.

Take the "Incarnation"—a noun which simply means, "...the embodiment of God in human form as Jesus". As Christians, we believe in the divinity of Christ and the doctrinal truths that surround this belief. Yet believing it and understanding what this means for the global church is another matter in and of itself.

Simply put, "Christ in us" is what will transform us and the world and not the buildings and programs we have built around this belief. These things (buildings and programs) are not inconsequential but are not the substance of "things hoped for".

What follows this thought for me is the fact that what we export must be trans-cultural and not an American idea of what the world needs.

I have been dismayed in the past, by how—when Americans take the gospel message (the good news) to other people groups—a very American idea of what the church should look like is usually is what transpires. Rather than focusing on the "indwelling" Christ and letting the culture shape that experience, it is often the other way around.

Now of course, I could be totally off base here simply because I have not actually been to all the nooks and crannies where the gospel message has been preached. But if what I have read (and experientially know about American culturalization) is true, we like to take our McDonalds with us rather than the other way around. I mean I thought the whole point of going to Europe was to experience the way other people live their lives. That means eating in their restaurants and using their transportation, etc.

One of my frustrations with even writing about this is, because of my free-flowing nature and lack of outlining discipline, I may not have totally made the point that I set out to make, which is—the power of the gospel and why it is still so very relevant today—is all about the incarnation plain and simple.

So at least I have a place to hang out and explore during these first few months of 2009. And hopefully you will come along for the ride as well.

Therefore I am

Terry Henry — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 19:34:00 GMT

While showering this morning I momentarily entertained this spontaneous, warm-water epiphany: I am a simple man with simple thoughts—some are "simply true" and some are "simply not".

And that my friends is a revelation to me. I think that for much of my life I have believed that my thoughts, in so much as they emanate from my brain, are always worth something—even if that something may not be understandable or even manageable.

Lately I have been reading a series of books that in the general scheme of things deal with the Christian church and its "postmodern" phase. This pursuit has naturally raised many questions in my mind and engendered many diverse thoughts.

It is a road mostly traveled by critical thinkers and theologians and is not the type of reading that warms the cockles of your heart—in other words these authors use thirty dollar words and string together church history and global phenomenon in sentences and paragraphs that you almost need a road map to maneuver.

So it is with stops and starts that I attempt to digest these books that I personally feel are worth the effort—if only in order to help me attain a vocabulary within which will help me navigate through to the next level in my semi-eternal quest to understand my faith.

One of the main problems facing me in explaining my recent thought process is that "post-modernism" is still being defined. I can tell you what I think it means to me, but what it really is becoming as it relates to our Christian journey, still remains slightly hidden and undeveloped.

In part, Christian post-modernism is, according to Brian McLaren, author and emergent church pastor: "The Christian faith is understood as a story by a postmodern generation that sees itself as part of the developing storyline. Instead of breaking down the Bible and analyzing it as in the modern era, postmodern believers see the Bible stories as part of a bigger picture and larger story. How we understand the faith as a story … is in some ways relatively new territory because we just haven’t practiced seeing our faith that way,” McLaren said.

“And then understanding how our story relates to other stories and figuring out the role that we all play in this story – because it’s not finished yet – that comes to me as a very motivating and exciting way to understand our faith.”

In this context, popular "Wild At Heart" author John Eldredge is a post-modern story teller. In his 2nd book, "Journey of Desire" Eldridge explains that we are all part of a bigger, God breathed story that is happening all around us. Finding our part and enjoying the intimacy with Jesus that follows, is paramount to a full-filled life and the only way to complete happiness (my interpretation).

Thus, post-modern thought and a process called "deconstruction" work hand in hand to help us understand how Christianity on a global level is being interpreted and subsequently propagated.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines deconstruction as "A strategy of critical analysis [...] directed towards exposing unquestioned metaphysical assumptions and internal contradictions in philosophical and literary language."

To me this means, in practical everyday terms, that our Christian faith is alive and when "de-constructed" might not look like what the American church is defining it as being. Up to several years ago, my church experience was more like unto an artist painting the same picture every week—each Sunday was designed to be as much like the Sunday before it as it could be. We were trained to perpetuate what seemed to work and avoid what didn't. Seeker friendly meets contemporary semi-prophetic prasie and worship and beyond.

Now in saying all of this, I have tenativly come to the conclusion that there is a lot more to this thing we call Christianity than I have here-to-fore imagined. And that certainly some deconstruction of what I have built up in my mind needs to take place before I can move into the next level of understanding and subsequent intimacy with the Creator of the universe as expressed through Jesus and Holy Spirit.

In other words—some of what I think I know has been built on a foundation that was never meant to hold all the "faith weight" I put on it. I firmly believe that it is past the time where we begin again to fully understand the hope that is in us and what we have believed as the gospel of Christ.

For instance: I believe that we can talk to God and that he is involved in our everyday lives and hears every prayer request that is made. I also believe that there is such a state of being called "walking in the spirit" or "being led" by God. Having said that, I began to consider what I really meant by this the other day while working out on one of the many treadmills at our local wellness center.

Does walking in the spirit and believing that God has a plan for our lives mean that there is a single road map created for us from the fourndations of the world and our job is to discover the plan and walk it out. Or, are there many ways that things can go and each step forward in obediance to what we believe God is directing leads the way to the next fork in the road and so on and so forth.

What I can say at this very moment in time is that I am begining to ask myself the hard questions that I thought were answered many, many years ago, but have laid around, half-formed in some box where we put these ideas and beliefs that are waiting for definition.

Not that we need to know and or understand everything—faith is the sustance of things hoped for, the eveidence of things not seen—but that we really owe it to ourselves and others to examine the foundations of our faith. Have we built upon that which someone else relayed to us in a sermon once upon a time or are we living a day-to-day experience with a living God that is more exciting that we had ever imagined. These choices are ours in a continuing journey to contextualize the message of freedom that was brought to us is the form of God becoming human all those many years ago.

May we have the daring and the strength to persue these and other story lines in the days, weeks and months to come.

Have a great ride in 2009.

Passion

Terry Henry — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 08:13:00 GMT

Is it any wonder why us bloggers sometimes go weeks between posts and then seem to hit a mother load of thoughtful stuff to ruminate about. Then it is hard to keep ones fingers off the keyboard and those "can't sleep through the night" moments seem less painful and more useful than not.

It is 3 am and I am thinking about the word "passion". I often think about words and am fascinated by their power to define an emotion, feeling or state of being. One of my favorite writers, the apostle Paul, wrote in 2 Corinthians that "...we have this treasure in earthen vessels" in part describing his personal knowledge of the power of the indwelling Christ.

From what I have read of Paul, I can say without hesitation that he was a "passionate" man. By this I mean that he was powerfully compelled to follow Christ to his eventual death during the reign of the Roman emperor Nero.

When I thought about the word passion this morning and how that word relates to my life, I was reminded of a book i was given by a friend several years ago. Even though I never finished the book, Marcia Sinetar's, "Do What You Love, The Money Will Follow" the concept of it was quite compelling. In a nutshell, she postulated that if a person followed their bliss (i might be extrapolating this with another book as well) they would eventually be rewarded with monetary success.

At that point I had to wonder how many of us are really following our bliss or what we are passionate about. How many of us are actually in jobs that we can't wait to get to in the morning—that the time seems to fly—and before we know it, it is time to go home and eat dinner.

Passion is partially defined as: 1 - any powerful or compelling emotion or feeling, as love or hate or 2 - a strong or extravagant fondness, enthusiasm, or desire for anything: a passion for music—the origin of which is 1125-75 Middle English and related to Christ's sufferings on the cross.

It is a complex word that has a long history and is not used as much in the cerebral sense as it is the sexual side of things.

When I think of a passionate person I envision one who is strongly motivated and has a good sense of where he or she is going in life. Along with this, a passionate person knows why he or she is on this earth and this knowledge has for them, become an anchor for their soul. They are following a path that is sometimes well defined—sometimes not—and that excites and motivates them through the daily trials ad tribulations of life in general.

And herein, for me, lies the question and contradiction of this word as it pertains to me in general. I like writing, but in and of itself, the act of putting words to paper or cyberspace, doesn't fulfill me to the degree that I could say that I am passionate about writing. That when all else fails, the sheer act of expressing myself through writing can get me through the hard spaces that life provides on a regular basis is not an anchor for me. Maybe I am just lazy and don't make the time to allow writing to take me to that place of passion.

The dream is of course to find joy and happiness in the journey of living daily—to know why you are on this earth and finding your passion—is another question entirely. Not mutually exclusive but part and parcel of the same idea.

It is getting late—I may be able to go back to sleep now having delved into one of my life's most interesting mysteries. Maybe today will indeed be the first day of the rest of my life!

Just Another Piano Type Day

Terry Henry — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 20:47:00 GMT

One of my most read posts is one I wrote last February entitled "A Bit Of The Past - From a Piano Perspective" in which I shared my fascination with and joy of pianos. The story recalled a memory from the late 60's which, as those of us who lived it remember, were times of extreme joy and also sadness and uncertainty—much like the place many of us still inhabit on a somewhat regular basis.

But that is another story for another time.

Of course much has happened in the years since the sixties but one thing has remained more or less constant: my love of pianos and certain types of piano music.

When I talk of "certain types" of piano music I mean mostly improvisational jazz of the kind played by Keith Jarrett, Thelonious Monk or George Winston, although I certainly enjoy J. S. Bach and Beethoven spliced in between my daily routine.

Fast forward to a week or so ago when I walked into the office of a co-worker and saw that she had her digital Roland piano propped up against the wall. Since it had been there for a week or so (maybe more) I asked her if she was thinking about selling it and was told that she hardly ever played it any and that I could take it home for a while and mess around with it. It is about 12 years old and has 77 weighted keys and features two grand piano "voices" along with harpsichord, organ, strings and choir sounds as well.

In technical/book learning terms I can't "play" the piano. If you asked me to play Amazing Grace from a song sheet I would not be able to. Yet, what I can do is, sit down at the keyboard and play notes that sometimes fit together and sound good enough to make you think that I can "really" play. Yes, there is a certain amount of logic and math that went into the construction of the piano and our western harmonic scale—and it is this same series of patterns that I see when I sit at the piano. They are sometimes fixed and sometimes very random patterns that get expressed—and then it is just a matter of training your fingers on both hands to do what your brain thinks that it wants them to do.

When I took up the violin several years ago, I asked my music store owner friend Stephen Rydell, why it seemed that kids seemed to learn to play instruments quicker than adults. He told me that learning to play an instrument and muscle memory go hand in hand and that the younger you are, the less "roadblocks" there are to getting your fingers to remember where to place themselves in making chords and so forth. In other words, adults have more "indirect" routes to learning something and therefore the training process, as it pertains to learning to play an instrument, comes to us in a more time consuming fashion. We have to go 20 miles to get to the same place that it only takes 5 for a youth to travel. Anyway, it made sense to me that day he explained it and it still does.

I have often thought about savants when approaching my piano playing. I am talking about those people who wake up one day and can play serious piano without any training what-so-ever. My theory is that all that I need to know about piano is locked up inside my mind and all that I have to do is get rid of the roadblocks and my fingers will flow over the piano keys like they have taken lessons for the past thirty years. And there are moments at the keyboard when this really seems like a possibility. In the midst of playing, a pattern or rhythm may occur that I begin to have an awareness of and can then repeat to begin to add to as one might begin another verse. When I become aware of this, the flow generally stops and I am back to repeating something that my fingers are already familiar with....so the possibility still exists but I have not inhabited that place for any length of time.

The bible tells me that as a man thinks, so he is. I remember that one day I was a cigarette smoker for twenty some years and in a matter of minutes, I was not. To me, at that point, it was a matter of how I saw myself and then living in that awareness. There are still some kinks to be worked out in my philosophy of life—I know that there is more freedom in being a Christian than I have yet to experience for any sustained length of time.

One day it may all be clear—I will wake up and notice that I have become that which I had only seen in the distance of some great vision. The work getting there will have already taken place and I will be the beneficiary of all that went before me—including all the practice that went into learning how to get there—if that makes any sense at all.

I the meantime, I am going to keep exploring the piano and all the other instruments I have surrounded myself with—remembering that the goal is to enjoy the journey and not keep looking for the end of the road. That's a ride I am sure we could all get into taking.

A moment in time: looking up while looking down.

Terry Henry — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 00:04:00 GMT

As I look back over the past 30 plus days in my life, my only totally concrete thought is "Where has the time gone?" I am sure that we have all shared that same thought—as if life is something that we collect pieces of along the way for display on our bookshelves or coffee tables.

I entered this period of time thinking that I had answers for some of the questions that have nagged me for some time only to realize that I now have more questions than ever before.

I thought I had a freshman grasp of economics only to find out all the theory books are being re-written even as I write this entry. Wall street is up one minute and down the next—bail-out is epidemic and doing the right thing doesn't really seem to make much difference anymore.

For those of us who did everything "right" and still saw our 401-K retirement plans vanish into thin air after years of saving—maybe the Obama government will bail us out right after the big three get theirs.

Once upon a time I seemed really ready to believe in a "big plan". The leaders of the church I attended for many years felt it would be good for the church to pay off its mortgage in order to free up funds for more "spiritual" things. For months following this great presentation we were encouraged as a group of people to give a little extra each week until our building was paid off. As we were filling the collection baskets with our cash, I often stopped to wonder if my mortgage would be the next one paid off and that that plan would proceed until all of us parishioners were "debt free".

They had the big plan (pay off the church mortgage) and I had the little plan (pay off my own). As far as I can remember that church has no mortgage and I still have eight or nine years left to pay on mine.

I know that this might seem like a little thing—maybe even approaching that state we call "whining" in North Carolina. But the point I am trying to make and the thought process I am still trying to work through is this: what can we know is real and what can we know is not. Was God behind the church in question becoming "debt free" and once that was done, left the rest of us to our own devices—some of which were more successful than others.

I really didn't see all of this coming. I truly thought that by this time in my life I would have had it all figured out and things would be sort of settled down. That I would have had the faith to move mountains and that friendships, marriages and mortgages would all have taken care of themselves—in other words "fallen into place in the grand scheme of things".

That they and a million other things haven't speaks directly to my lack of understanding and/or naivete.

Was McCain or Obama God's choice for our nation's troubled times. I can't answer that question—although at one point a few weeks ago I might have made an effort. I have listened to many on both sides proclaim their revelation about each and can't say that either side has the whole truth and nothing but.

I guess part of me just wants to get something out—as a creative person, not blogging or writing or reading much for the past month has been like an extended trip into the desert lands of sub saharan Africa for me. I was born to have a point of view and feel a bit dull at the moment and caught standing in line for something that I already have in my pocket. Yet I have no feeling that anything is in my pocket less alone my life at this present moment that is the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Like the big picture. Wherever that may be—whenever it may occur.

It is way past fall in the mountains and almost fully winter and getting colder everyday. I have a bit of wood that might last and might not. I am waiting for today to be over and for tomorrow to begin—I am waiting for a miracle in all of this: that I might finally understand today and let what is past rest in peace and move fully four steps forward without taking 3 steps back.

It is not the long ride—but a moment along the way.

NYC—The Past and the Present

Terry Henry — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 23:11:00 GMT

In light of recent postings about my anniversary trip to New York City several weeks ago—and because my mind is on vacation and I am in process of finding out where—I thought back to my initial introduction to the city in the late 60's.

I had just quit high school and was under the "teenage" impression that my life was going nowhere. Since I seemingly lacked the capacity to plan ahead like most high schoolers— I thought that the only way out of my dilemma was to introduce a change of scenery into my otherwise dull lower middle class life.

So, during that tumultuous time, I quit high school and hitch-hiked to New York in order to find that which I thought was missing from my small-town life.

And in some sense, what I found in the late sixties is not that much different from what Sandi and I experienced this past September. Yes, things have changed in New York—the subways are no longer covered with graffiti, the bums are not wrapped around the fire hydrants at night in the Bowery and the cardboard box city that lined 5th avenue in Central Park is no longer there. Times Square is also mostly devoted to upscale theater and shopping and entertainment rather than the sleazy triple x shops of the late 60's and early seventies. Take it from me— I saw all I ever wanted of that other New York and am very pleased with how far it has evolved.

But underneath all of that, the city is still the same place that it always has been—a place where people travel far distances by rail everyday to do a job that will put groceries on the table. Day in and day out, stores and deli's open their doors to the mass of people who work in the city in order to service the needs that this group of several million people create.

I would postulate that many of the sidewalks that I traveled in the late sixties and subsequent trips after that still remain—gum stained and smooth after the footfalls of each succeeding generation. That Sandi and I have walked many of the streets I traveled as a youth is no less a siren call today than it was two or three decades ago.

There are as many different levels of openness to the city are there are to one another. It is hard to explain, but the sheer act of walking up Broadway Avenue is not that far from what I experience through the function of tilling my garden in preparation of spring planting. Granted, it is not the same by far—but the experience in and of itself is stimulating and sensory to a high level of memory and response.

During my first trip to New York I lived in a 10th floor walk-up, cold-water flat on 11th street between avenues B and C. I mingled with the Puerto Ricans that sat on the summer-time steps in from of their buildings. For all practical purposes I was a New Yorker and therefore was not a threat to them and they were not a danger to me. I remember walking the streets of Harlem at night and being one of the only white boys in the historic Apollo Theater during a performance by B B King or somebody of that same stature.

One of the reasons Sandi is able to have a good time in the city is knowing that I can find my way around and hardly ever get lost. She tells me what she wants to do and I find out where it is and figure out how to best get us there. We are like two peas in a pod as we navigate through the mass of humanity that find themselves on the avenues and streets each and every day. Sometimes it is overwhelming and other times it is simply stimulating—but we plow through and in the midst of the storm find a calm that only a long married couple can claim.

Yet somehow, In saying all of this and remembering all of that, I have to admit that this past trip to the city was not one of my best in terms of relaxation and total enjoyment. Yes, I had a great time, but it was one of those trips where the memory of it is just a little better than the actual experience, if you get my drift. For some unknown reason, I was never fully able to settle into the "here's me and my wife in the big city" persona. I fully enjoyed my time with my wife but returned feeling that there could have been so much more but have not really figured out what it could be. It is like a part of me never arrived—or got there and never left the hotel room—or left the hotel room but spent the day looking inside and not at everything around him.

And maybe in that revelation you can relate—I certainly don't want to live forever in that place but do occasionally find that I am not allowing myself to fully feel the moment—as if I have somewhere else to be but haven't taken the time to find out where that might exist.

It is a melancholy moment for sure—knowing that even in the midst of the most vibrant city on earth and with the one that I love the most—there are still times when I don't fully connect with what is around me. I can only hope that I will be able to begin to enjoy each day's ride just a little bit more and that the weeks ahead will fall gracefully in front of two feet that can rejoice in them to their fullest.

That is the ride that I want and also wish for you as well.

Crepuscular, Poetry and the Declaration of Independence

Terry Henry — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 21:43:00 GMT

Last night—actually early this morning—I awoke with a poem in my head like I often awake from a dream. I was tired and all I really wanted to do was to go back to sleep. But the more the words ran themselves across the pages of my mind the more I realized that I would never remember the thought come morning and at that point slowly raised myself out of bed and into my chair in the living room.

The poem in mention is still in process and not quite ready for prime time—but here it is.

As I lie in bed this early morning
unable to sleep—I listen in the dark to the early autumn rain.

I think of the difference between the seasons
and how during the spring and summer, we invite the weather in
and the times we lie naked on top of the sheets
after making love.

Since we have invited the summer in, it is almost like we are lying outside
in the warm summer night.

And now, as the evenings grow cooler,
how nice it is to sleep underneath the sheets—the windows still open, but only slightly,
the weather outside not invited in as in summer,
but left to its separate season, alone and growing ever colder,
until the bedroom windows are tightly closed against the hand of winter
and all that frozen time.

After writing that in my journal, I read a new poet I discovered in New York during my recent trip to the city. The poets name is Lisel Mueller, a German-born American poet, essayist, and translator.

The word used by the reviewer on the back cover of her book "Alive Together" to describe one of her poems and the one that struck a chord in my mind is: crepuscular

—and is from the French and means, according to the Oxford English Dictionary I received for my anniversary:

1 Resembling the twilight of morning or evening; dim, indistinct; not yet fully enlightened. M17.

2 Of or pertaining to twilight. M18.

3 Zoology. Appearing or active by evening twilight. E19.

Right away you can ascertain that this is not a word that you or I would have used in the last several months in any conversation that we might have had. Yet it is a word that in and of itself penetrates the barrier between what we think on the surface of our everyday lives and who we are underneath all that we model to the world around us.

I often feel that I am not yet "fully enlightened" and that the world that surrounds me is sometimes "indistinct" and somewhat "dim". What a perfect word—although hard to pronounce and remember during those intense lunchtime conversations with co-workers.

Even 1 Cor. 13:12 tells us that... “For now we see through a glass, darkly…”

I suspect that is precisely why we need each other—no one has the full picture of the future or what is seemingly happening around us at this present moment in time. Obviously the current slate of politicians are at a loss as to how to fix any of the current crisis we find ourselves in as a nation.

They are not yet fully enlightened and I have it on good advice that wisdom comes from above—we are not going to fix things by simply adding a room to the foundation of what has already been built and seems to be rotting away as we speak. We need some new foundations—some new words to define and direct our paths into the future of you and me and yes—America.

We are in a twilight of sorts and need direction as to how to proceed. It is not a Republican or Democratic thing—but a challenge to every person and believer in this great nation.

In light of recent events and all the political garbage I see slathered across the pages of our papers, I had this thought: what is the truth in all of this that is happening around us—and can we know truth since it seems that everybody seems to have their own version of it. Then I thought of the Declaration of Independence and was reminded of a time when some very different people seemed to agree on the truth of a couple of very important things. The verse..."We hold these truths to be self-evident" rang out in my mind as an awareness seemed to build of a "truth" that was once held dear and agreed upon.

I know this has been a stretch, but in closing I will remind us of the first few sentences in that document that was signed on July 4th, 1776 and add that it is time we quit being the victims and start living the overcoming life we were no doubt designed to live.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

And this seems to be the polar opposite to the definition of crepuscular....it is not indistinct and not dim but very direct and to the point.

This is our heritage and this is our poem.

The "New" New Deal and the Mystery Revealed

Terry Henry — Sun, 21 Sep 2008 23:07:00 GMT

I know we have all had thoughts or ideas that when first "hatched" seemed like the perfect answer to whatever question we had that produced the thought in the first place. In my own life, often after the idea is birthed, I marvel at it for a moment or two and then let it slide into that place where these types of things seem to get stored or stuck—seldom will it ever see the light of day again.

I have wondered in times past if this is one of major differences between me and someone who is a millionaire—just having sold his little business idea to a bigger company—and that is the fact of taking further action on the thought or idea itself. I guess that is why I like blogging so much—I can develop an idea in a few short paragraphs and then move on to the next thought or idea—never having fully plumbed the depths of what I have opened up. Sounds a little familiar, doesn't it? Almost scary!

Yet I digress.

While on my recent train ride to New York City, I was witness to what I perceived to be the decay of what was once a vibrant industrial complex—a complex that during its time, touched every area of our lives. It was the train that opened up mass markets and rapid transit and in so doing allowed us to become a nation that every other nation in the world wanted to emulate—at least financially. I am not a history major—my high school class was taught by a football coach—and I may be off base, but I do believe that America, at one time, set the pace for everybody else to follow.

At the end of my last post, I posed this question: what do FDR, Lady Bird Johnson, the World Trade Center and global warming have in common? Carey and DED, friends and readers of LFTLR, took the challenge and offered up their best inventive guesses. And both get "A's" for effort and aplomb. After hearing their answers I had to admit that even the question itself was vague and that often I have no idea how thoughts seem to fit together in my mind and therefore should not have expected anyone to go where I wasn't even to sure I was going myself.

As I looked out the train window into an American landscape that was sometimes much less than lovely—I had this thought—and here is where I try an explain how it all fits.

America is in crisis and needs a vision that we can all take part in and benefit from. Just as FDR created the New Deal, which was—"...the name that United States President Franklin D. Roosevelt gave to a sequence of programs he initiated between 1933 and 1938 with the goal of giving work (relief) to the unemployed, reform of business and financial practices, and recovery of the economy during The Great Depression"—and Lady Bird Johnson created the Highway Beatification Act which: "...called for improving landscaping, removing billboards, and screening roadside junkyards"—so can we create a means of restoring America to its former beauty.

As a people and as a nation we are very short-sighted—we only buy fuel efficient cars when the cost of fuel rises above the comfort level. Our re-cycling efforts don't get much push and as for developing alternative energy sources, we are content to sit back and let the free market create them—and as we all know, until there is substantial acceptance and profit in so doing, not much will happen that will help us out of our current crisis.

And in light of our most recent financial flareups, I have to ask, as an aside, who is really looking out for you and me? Greed and avarice seem to prevail and our substantial sub-prime woes have just about brought his once great nation to its knees.

As I viewed the wasting of America I also thought about FDR's New Deal and the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), a work relief program for young men from unemployed families, established on March 21, 1933, by Roosevelt and designed to combat unemployment during the Great Depression. The CCC became one of the most popular New Deal programs among the general public and operated in every U.S. state.

In rapid-fire-fashion I thought about the tenacity with which the cleanup program progressed at the World Trade Center following the 9/11 attack. Granted, the quick cleanup had more to its method and scope than just getting rid of the debris (I can still not fully understand the utter devastation in building and life), yet the process that was used showed what an organized effort could produce in very short order.

So here we are: Houston, we have a problem. What do we do about it. And in this sense, it is much like global warming—scientists say we will face dire consequences unless we do something about it—yet the effects, like the prospect of high gas prices years ago—are so far away as to allow us to simply ignore them. Yes, if they are right, we will pay—yet not in our lifetimes. People knew the levies around New Orleans would fail—it was jut a matter of "when" nature would point out that building below sea level might not be such a good idea. Yet we will fight for their "right" to build there and then are expected to pick up the bill when it all goes berserk. And I am really not that political—yet a chord in my heart has seemingly been struck.

My proposal is this—and I know there are many obstacles to its fulfillment—create a new CCC and hire unemployed people to clean up America, tear down all those old buildings and plant trees, flowers and grass and create parks for people to gather together in to discuss our collective future. I can see neighborhood cookouts, music festivals, yard sales and small children learning to ride their two-wheelers.

And as Carey has commented, I will so end this thought:

"Good night, America, how are you?
Don't you know me, I'm your native son,
I'm the train they call The City of New Orleans,
I'll be gone five hundred miles when the day is done."

Thank you Arlo, Carey and Ded.

The Train Ride To NYC

Terry Henry — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 23:31:00 GMT

My wife Sandi and I have been to New York City several times during the past 10 or 12 years. Each time, except the first and last, we flew out of the Greensboro Airport and into New York's La Guardia airport. Our first visit to the city was on an overnight bus trip with a student group from Appalachian State, who the day before they left for NYC, told a friend of mine they had several seats on the bus left and that they were open to anyone with the forty dollars the trip cost.

Needless to say, Sandi and I quickly signed up and then scrambled to find a babysitter for however many kids it was that we had at the time.

I am happy to report that we had a great time even though we slept in bunk beds at a dumpy loft that ASU had on the lower west side at that time. I forget the exact date, but do remember that the World Trade Center was still standing and that we took the elevator to the top and sat outside/open air, in a little alcove and viewed the entire Manhattan profile from our lofty perch. It is a scene I vividly remember to this day.

But I digress. With energy prices the way they have been the past several months, as Sandi and I were considering a trip to the city to celebrate our 30th wedding anniversary, it became apparent, Travelocity style, that airline tickets were going to cost way too much and that other means of transportation would have to be investigated.

I had overheard someone mention Amtrak over lunch one day and later looked up the cost online from Raleigh to New York as a whim. I was surprised to find that the tickets were about half of what Delta or American airlines wanted and kept my eye on both for a week or two. After I had secured a hotel we could afford to stay at, I then began to actively persue our transportation. When it became apparent that flying would cost way too much, I booked us onto the train and in so doing budgeted an extra couple of days, vacation-wise, that it would take to accommodate the long train ride to NYC.

And in so doing, I much confess that there is a big back-story to this whole adventure.

Many, many years ago, as a youth, I had taken the "Cannonball Express" train one summer from Detroit, Michigan to Terre Haute, Indiana to visit my grandfather who also happened to work on the Pennsylvania Railroad his entire life. Maybe not entire but you know what I mean.

During my visits to my grandfather and mother, I would go to work on the railroad with him. He was sort of a big shot in charge of switches and signals and we often found ourselves in the middle of nowhere following the tracks in order to get to a signal box that needed to be fixed and or checked for functionality. He had a truck that had small railroad wheels that could be dropped down on the tracks enabling it to ride the rails from one crossing to the next. Talk about cool—that was the top of the line for me.

I guess you can begin to get the picture that I had forming in my head as I booked our Amtrak tickets—Sandi and I back on the tracks that I had symbolically traveled as a kid—not the same tracks but the same adventure through the same type of rural America that I had traveled, lo those many years ago. Expressway travel has reduced our sense of place and history and sterilized our lives to the degree we hardly know about the places that originally birthed the American Dream.

So, it was with much anticipation that I approached our trip north. And I will say this up front—I was not disappointed by what I experienced. Our travels took us through the abandoned warehouse wasteland of what was once the pride of a quickly expanding nation. In between lush open spaces and verdant farmland, I was witness to the decay of our industrial complex—large tracts of land consumed by huge gray buildings, broken-windowed and graffitied—left to rot by landlords who had long ago abandoned them.

It is my theory that when we depended on rail transport for our goods, complexes were built close to the tracks and towns developed around this plan. When rail transport began to give way to 18 wheelers, much of that original landscape became the other side of the tracks and the rest is what we have today—large landscapes of rotting track housing and slum cities that can only be viewed from inside the safety of a railroad coach car. My heart broke as I considered life and living inside these almost forgotten zones. Poverty perpetuates poverty and it is hard to rise above when all you see around you is abandonment and dead-end streets.

These are places that most of us will never see.

So, after having been in NYC for four days, and on train ride back I had this thought (and I will end this with this)—what do FDR, Lady Bird Johnson, the World Trade Center and global warming have in common?

It is certainly a long ride that I am on—with all its curves and subtleties. I hope you stay tuned for the next ride.

Back From The "City"

Terry Henry — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 20:32:00 GMT

What can I say about New York City that hasn't already been said by a thousand different people in a thousand different ways—and no doubt many much better than anything I could add to the legacy that is NYC.

It is big, it is loud, and it is filled with an energy that in my opinion can't be found anywhere else on earth. Of course I haven't been to Paris or Tokyo or Buenos Aires—places that come to mind when I think of excitement and sight/sensual allure. Maybe in another lifetime, as the saying goes.

Sandi and I went to the city this past week to celebrate our 30th anniversary and in our four days there were not disappointed. We walked at least a hundred miles, ate Mexican, Italian, Vietnamese and amazing thin crust pizza from a shop off of 6th Avenue. I had the customary hot dog with sauerkraut from a street vendor on the avenue that led us to the Cloisters in way upper Manhattan.

Sandi bargained her way along Canal Street, where Asians of every shape and size sell their wares from little closet sized shops that line both sides of the busy street adjacent to Little Italy and Chinatown. I plotted our course from Ground Zero to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and then through Times Square and back to Washington Square Park—and that was only part of one day.

On the train ride back (another interesting story), I thought of how hard it would be to describe to a New Yorker the kind of place where we spend most of our days—the lush forests of the Appalachian mountains and the narrow, windy roads that lead us to our country home of 23 years. To those who pound the pavement every day and catch the subway train in musty underground stations and rarely see the sun or moon (obscured by high-rise buildings), our life would only be understandable if found in a picture book especially designed for city dwellers.

Maybe I can take a few pictures of our rural life with my digital camera and get invited to do an art show at the Museum of Modern Art—that might help in the translation. Yet from what I surmise, the working people who populate and staff the deli's and bodega's on every city block, don't get to see much art—they are to busy getting from point "A" to point "B" and then home after a long day, to visit the galleries and other attractions that NYC offers—much of which is definitely tourist oriented and survives today in large part due to the strength of many foreign currencies.

What struck me this visit was the way many people seemed to "sleepwalk" through their ride on the subway. Most people carefully avoid eye contact and many are plugged into ipod's, newspapers, books or cellphones. Taking the train is something they have to do everyday and not an interesting part of an anniversary vacation. In my naivete I think that meeting new people on the train is an interesting way to pass the time—or that they even give a flip. Yet I wonder how long I would be able to hold out before I also signed off and entered my own personal world during my daily "train-time".

Of course I could go on and on about our four days in the city and all my "mountain man" observations—and no doubt I will in blogs to come. Suffice it to say at this time I am glad that we went and I am glad to be back—happy that our pushing sixty good health has allowed us the freedom to tackle such a daring feat—I am not going to say we won't visit again but for now I am satisfied and my mind is already beginning to process what is before me. Hopefully the adventure will continue for many more years and I can allow the bumps in the road to soften my perspective and bring my sometimes fretful attitude under divine adjustment.

And that's today's "long ride".

30 Years Strong and Still Counting!

Terry Henry — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 19:16:00 GMT

As the days, months and years of our lives pass by ever so quickly, I am once again reminded that there is nothing more "God Ordained" than the covenant of marriage. Having recently celebrated my 30th wedding anniversary with the wife of my youth, I am grateful for every day that we have had together and know resoundingly that it would not have been the same 30 years without her.

Sandi and I met in mid 1977 in East Lansing, Michigan, where she was a 3rd grade teacher and I a bookseller at a popular local bookstore and meeting place. To make a long story sort of short, I was more than a little tired with the dating scene and my place in it and had begun to look for what I still refer to as a "real" relationship.

Most of my friends parents had gone through divorces and my own parents had called it quits by this time—so I didn't hold out much hope for ever being a part of a lasting relationship. In spite of all of this, there was still something inside of me that held onto a hope for something more than what I had seen played out in front of me for most of my life.

Looking back, I actually remember meeting my wife to be twice. The first time was when she was waitressing in a local Chinese restaurant. I was alone in a booth eating lunch and complemented her on her shapely legs. It sounds crass at this point in life but at the time was sincere and not really intended to get me any place other than maybe a little more fried rice on my plate. To me the truth was the truth and I was just trying to be a little more than the guy who came for lunch a couple of times a week.

The second time we met was some time later after she had taken an after school job at a health food store and restaurant that I often frequented. She was wearing a green wool, a-line skirt and a light purple Danskin top with a hand-made dragonfly pin fastened just below her left collarbone.

I must say that I was instantly intrigued by her look and the great big smile that met me at the store's front counter. I remember telling her that I thought her outfit was exceptional (time has taken away the exact wording) and that she carried herself well or some other observation my free-association mind came up with. It was all true and from what she has said, that was really the beginning of our knowing one another. She remembered the leg thing but didn't hold it against me and for that I have been grateful.

In the months that followed we spent some more time together and often would walk the campus of Michigan State University and talk about the stuff that made us happy. I think by this time I was on the third of fourth revision of my life's philosophy and was also in the process of figuring out what I wanted to be when I "grew up". But more importantly, what was going on was I was finally coming into contact with someone who appreciated me for who I was and I believe that she felt the same way—at least that is what we have written down in our collective memory banks.

She was very real and I was putting up a good front (only a partial truth) and in process of learning what it meant to be me in every way.

As we ate dinner at the Storie Street Grill in Blowing Rock on our anniversary evening, I couldn't help but remember that it seemed like only yesterday (yes, I get to say that) when we met and that the past 30 years had been such a whirlwind of blessing. We have lived through four children with their attendant broken bones, broken hearts and minor car wrecks. We have sometimes struggled financially to make sure everyone had what they needed be it braces or partial college tuition. We ate dinner as a family almost every evening—Sandi was able to be a stay-at-home mother and we made it a priority to find a cheap beach house and go to the ocean for almost 13 straight years as a family.

And those are just a very few of the highlights that 30 years together bring to the table.

Sandi and I have had a couple of fights during this whole time—mostly around finances, kids or how birthdays or Christmases are spent. It has been a great ride with the boat being in the water most of the time and not much of the water being in the boat—if you get my drift.

We have had friends and family pass away, as most people have, but I can truly say that most of the time we were never down at the same time—usually one of us was strong when the other needed us to be.

And yes—I could go on and on and on—but I will end with this: What God has begun He will finish and I hope we have many more years to discover one another in. If this isn't the "long ride" I don't know what it is.