Looking For The Long Ride

How many times have you wondered whether or not other people see the same things in life as you wind your way through your day. It could be a normal day or one that is out of the ordinary—you may be on vacation and taking a daytrip to a town or city near you that you have wanted to visit or have especially good memories about.

I don’t know about you but when I travel or do anything out of the ordinary I become keenly aware of what might be called the “service community” that surrounds my every stop and every move. These are people in a sub-culture of their own who serve us behind the counters in gas stations, restaurants and the little shops we visit in mall-stores and on mainstreets of anytown-we-visit USA.

I guess the mindset that facilitates this is being off work and feeling that you are peeking into the lives of people that you would not normally meet in your daily routine.

On Wednesday we took a trip to Asheville, a medium sized community about an hour and a half’s drive from the small town where we live. It is an eclectic community to say the very least—very artsy and bookish with lots of ethnic restaurants and creative people at every turn. It is feminist and liberal and a magnet for people who like to live life in a flamboyant type of way. In other words—it is a long way from the farm and all that that implies.

It has bookstores and head shops and antique clothing places—there is the smell of incense burning in every other store and people with ear-rings and nose-rings and lip-rings and brightly colored hair—people who seem to have taken leave from their other lives to enter the daily work force in order to make some money so that they can continue to live out the drama of their real lives until something else comes along. It is a place where people are openly interacting with the stage and the audience that parades before them on a daily basis.

Maybe I am making too much of this place and these people but as I sat and ate at an outdoor restaurant or drank coffee in a local bookstore I seemed to see beyond what was there and into the reality of what lies behind the curtains of their work-a-day-world.

The young girl who was our waitress for lunch seemed to be pregnant and was always just a moment away from what was really important to her—not that she didn’t give us good service and all that but there was another side of her—like a mulit-faced painting by Picasso—just out of sight but one that I caught glimspes of from time to time when she would pause and talk with a fellow employee.

It almost makes one wonder what people think about us when they come into contact with our work-a-day selves. What kind of vibe are we sending out—joy in the journey or I am so bored with this trip I could almost die right here and now. And all those one act plays into between the two extremes.

It is like being in New York and understanding that nothing really stops—there may be no one on the streets at 3 am but in little bakeries and shops all around town bread and bagels are being baked in those early morning hours in order that all those delis and little sandwich shops can have fresh bread when you and I arrive at 7:30 in the morning. That these people who we can’t see have families and dental bills and all that other stuff is almost more than my limited mind can take in and understand. How has the price of gas impacted them and what are their hopes and aspirations—one can only imagine.

All I can say at this point is that I wish them all well—that their children will be healthy and that they can have half the marriage that my wife and I have. I hope they find what they are looking for and that the tip I left was a little more than they expected and that our family looked happy to them and that their picture-drama of who we are leads them to an understanding that God loves them and that there is a large cloud of witnesses cheering them on.

You can’t ask for a better ride than that.

During all the years I have been employed in the Boone, North Carolina area I have never taken a vacation at home. A few days off here and there but an entended period of time called vacation time—never. Until this year. Some friends of ours from Michigan were planning to come to our sons wedding this past weekend and spend the rest of the week with us so I had budgeted the week off and we were going to be the tourists in our own backyard. But due to many circumstances, the plans we had didn’t work out and since I had set the time aside, I figured I would take it anyway and see what happened.

On Monday I goofed off most of the morning, read a bit and then went to the Wellness Center and swan laps for the first time in a couple of weeks. It felt good to get in the pool and exercise. After that I grabbed some lunch, came home and sat in the sun for a while and was reminded by a phone call that some friends of mine were gatahering some hay that afternnoon. Now my idea of fun is not really throwing 40 plus pounds of baled grass up into a waiting truck but since they are friends and the field was only a mile or two away I thought I would check it out.

Talk about an upper body workout. They had already started so I took my place behind the truck they had rented for the ocassion and helped fill that truck and another small trailer with freshly baled hay. Having baled hay before I knew to wear a long sleve shirt and a hat but forgot my little white mask—you know the one that keeps you from inhaling all that pollen and stuff. But my friend had brought a few for us to use and as it really does work you forget what it must look like and just put it on.

When we finished that load I said goodbye and went home knowing that they would be trying to get some more hay before it rained. I sat in the backyard and read the paper and an hour later called them and asked if they needed some more help. They had rounded up a young fellow from our church to help and so we toted and baled about 99 more of those little 40 pound treasures before calling it quits and heading home. That’s what I call a good workout.

We then got a call from some friends who were going to walk the greenway and we met them and walked and talked and by the time we were fiinished I felt like I had participated in the local version of an ironman marathon. I was walking around on a few fumes of energy I had left from somewhere.

As you can well imagine the next day was a little sore and iffy due to the workout the day before. I even think that it rained most of the day so I read and hung out some more and cleaned up the bookshelves and threw away all the junk mail that seems to pile up over the course of a week or two of neglect. Sandi and I even took a walk and talked for a while as well.

Then it was up early on Wednesday for a trip to Asheville to celebrate my daughter Laura’s 14th birthday. Asheville is an interesting town where author Thomas Wolfe was born. It is an entire blog entry on it’s own and I will probably comment on it later in the week.

Asheville has a lot of “hippy” type stores and a very big bead shop and Laura was able to find a few things that she needed and after walking around and shopping for a couple of hours, it started to rain and we headed home after a successful trip.

Our local weatherman has downgraded the day to three golfballs with mostly cloudy conditions and some thundershowers later in the day. So I will hang out some more—maybe take a walk and a swim before joining a friend for lunch at the local burrito place. I might get a bike ride in or I might not—but I am going to enjoy the next couple of days and not worry about to much. Until next time, you do the same.

If you consider June, July and August to be the months of summer, we are now almost 2/3’s of the way through the year 2007 version of this annual event. And it certainly has been a most interesting one from several different angles.

Not the least of which has been the lack of rain in this part of the country as well as other places across the nation. I read just the other day that Asheville, North Carolina, a town close to us has only had 17 inches of rain since January and that is about half of what it normally gets during that same period. What this means is that there is a lot of beef cattle looking for food and not finding a whole lot. The hay crop is only producing about a third of what is normal and farmers are having to go out of state to purchase what they normally grow on their own.

I have also noticed as I cycle along one of my favorite roads which runs alongside a the New River that the water has been low almost all year. We will get a big rain from time to time but the streams that feed the river don’t have as much in reserve as normal. I have seen a lot of people tubing during my rides but very few people in canoes due to the low water table. However, the lack of rain hasn’t slowed the tourist’s from coming to the mountains as any trip outside on the county’s roads will afirm.

The past couple of months have been spent—mostly by my wife—in preparation for my son’s wedding which took place this past weekend. Sandi was in charge of the flowers and so we had planted a lot more than usual in our garden spaces and trusting mother nature to hold up her end of the deal is a little testy at times. In addtion to this, we had the entire wedding party over to our house for the rehearsal dinner and you know what that means—weeks spent getting the house clean and in order along with food planning and so forth. A good time was had by all and we—my son and several of his buddies—finished the evening off in our outdoor living room with cigars and lots of stories about him growing up.

The day of the wedding was warm and slightly overcast—an almost perfect setting for an outdoor wedding. His bride was radiant and we have never seen our son so happy in his life as his wife to be walked down a long flight of outdoor steps with her father. It was a very nice simple wedding and we had the reception dinner on the large patio next to the conference facility where the wedding took place. The next day they were on their way to the beach and a week long honeymoon.

Somewhere in the mix of all this taking place fits my sister and her husband visiting us to attend the wedding and to have a memorial service for my mother who passed away recently. As we did for our grandmother several years ago, we met on a mountainside and spread my mother’s ashes at the same place and made our peace with her passing.

As you can well imagine, it was a weekend filled with all sorts of emotions—of highs and lows and somewhere’s in between. Familes gathering to celebrate a couple’s new life together and a family unit gathering to say goodbye to a very special person. In all of this we made it through and are the better for all that we experienced.

Yesterday, I went swiming for the first time in several weeks, took a long walk with my wife, helped some friends put up a couple of hundred bales of hay and then took another long walk with my wife and our friends Carter and Jeannie. Suffice it to say, bedtime couldn’t come soon enough and I awoke this morning to a light rain that had been coming down most of the night.

This morning I took care of all the old mail that had been hiding in several places and this afternoon I might even tackle organizing some of my books which seem to be laying everywhere but where they should be. It is overcast outside and not raining for the present and whether or not the sun breaks throught the clouds today is up in the air. Tomorrow we take a day trip to Asheville and what the rest of the week holds has really not been revealed yet. I am just glad to still be riding. Enjoy yours.

You know that you have lived a good life when you are around long enough to see people—who were once awkward youngsters uncomfortable in their very own bodies—grow into the men and women those bodies were created to be. Not quite like the ugly duckling story but the drift is almost the same.

I had occasion this past week to be around several young men and women from my past who have grown up and were fitting very comfortably into the people they were destined to be—people they were only shadows of before. You could see the seeds of who they could become but really couldn’t say what kind of plants the seeds—all loose and jumbled up in side them—would grow into.

It is exciting to see the formation of a person from that point of early development unto the real thing—from being unsure and slightly unstable to being confident and assured—from being dependent to being a blessing—from always being served to becoming one who serves.

It is interesting as well to think of being on the other side of all of that youthful stuff—yet still be fully alive and growing and enjoying all that life has to offer—but ever the viewer—always looking at life as if through plate glass—you on one side and I on the other. Not that we don’t talk and interact but there is a distance—a distinctness about things and people that marks the line between who you are and I am.

We reflect on the past and we contemplate the future.

My only son is getting married this weekend and it is hard to get my head around all the years in between this major event and helping him learn to ride a bike and playing catch in the front yard. All those little league games and hamburgers after them and the summers at the beach and bouncing in the waves. In a couple of days it will be the rehearsal dinner, the wedding, the honeymoon and then the rest of their lives together. He has been out of the home for several years now but getting married seems to say—in its own something borrowed and something blue way—that his life is really his own now.

He has a good foundation from which to build a life—a good work ethic and a loyalty that I think comes from a more or less stable family life. I remember when he and I built the swingset which still stands solid and useful in our backyard. There were plans to follow and pieces of wood to cut and holes to drill and metal things that needed to be bolted to the wood and how he stuck right in there with me until the job was finished even though it took most of the day. As opposed to me trying to get out of every project my dad tried to get me to participate in.

As I type I am wondering what kind of cigars to get to celebrate with and what I am going to wear to the wedding and where the shoe polish is and the little jobs I have to do for Sandi to prepare for our guests and on and on.

Congratulations in advance Joseph and Amanda. Enjoy the ride—it’s about to get a lot more interesting.

Thoughts come and thoughts go—an almost continuous stream of consciousness and semi-lucidity.

I think of what I would tell someone who wanted to plant a vegetable garden—prepare to weed and then weed some more because there will be weeds. One day they will be small as you check your garden’s progress but then it rains and you get busy with something else in your life and before you know it the weeds are bigger than the beans and as you begin to pull them up—thinking all along about the end result: the harvest—the weeds come out of the ground with big hunks of soil attached and you shake the dirt off into the row and continue to pull the weeds between the beans knowing full well that there won’t be any to eat this winter if you don’t make it to the end.

Gardening is a young peoples job but seems to be done mostly by older people—persons of dedication and worldly insight and tough hands and stiff backs.

What would I tell a person who wanted to start a garden—prepare the soil well and plan to weed—the earlier the better—even before it seems like it needs it because weeds are trickly—almost like they have a mind of their own. They wait until you are busy and not paying much attention to your garden and then they sprout for all they are worth in a mad dash attempt to overtake everything that you had planned or should I say planted. Weeds are a part of the life of a garden—if you can’t deal with the weeds you won’t enjoy gardening at all.

If you are planning on planting a garden you better like to bend over because you will be doing a lot of that. You will bend over to put in the stakes that hold the string to keep the rows straight—because straight rows make it easier to see where the seeds need to go and later on where the little plants will fight with the weeds for a life of their own. You will bend over to rake and to hoe and scatter lime and fertilizer into the soil where the rows have been marked with the twine tied to the stakes.

But the end result of all that bending and weeding and watering when the rain doesn’t come on its own is to taste the almost other-worldly like freshness of the peas and corn and tomatoes and potatoes.

So remember to keep the tarp on the tiller because it will rain when you least expect it to and keep your tools handy because it takes a lot of tools to have a good garden—the rake and the fork and the hoe just to name a few.

To be a gardener you have to like tools and what they can do for you—without them it is just you and your bare hands and clumps of soil that don’t want to do anything at all except stay right where they are.

That’s what I would begin to tell someone who told me they wanted to have a garden: it is something you start but rarely ever finish—a garden does that all on its own.

In a telephone conversation with my farmer friend Alan the other day we talked about several things that I have recently given some thought to and would like to explore just a little more.

One of our running conversations centers around how complex church has become.

Alan is a dairy farmer, a publisher and all around get-to-the-heart-of-the-problem-quickly kind of guy. He is hard to fool and is not shocked by anything that comes out of my mouth. He is not afraid of other religions—having told me on more than one occasion that if what he believes can not stand up against these other religions and philosophies—he doesn’t want to have that belief. He is not concerned so much as to whether I am right or wrong—only that I am truthful—and in so being the rest will work itself out eventually.

Alan doesn’t answer every time I call and I have come to appreciate that part of who he is. Sometimes I am to quick to want to discuss something that needs a little more time to develop anyway.

In other words—we are comfortable with each other and appreciate what God is doing in us and through us and around us.

I met Alan during a period of time when he had been invited into a situation where the leadership of the church I was a part of was having some problems in transitioning from one leadership model to another. After his initial input into the situation—as it seemed to be somewhat resolved—he backed off and I didn’t see him much until that same leadership had reached another, more significant, impasse.

With the finesse of a farmer and the insight of a prophet, he was able to help us identify some root problems and even began a process of helping us work through them until a full breakdown occured and we finally left that church.

All this goes to say that Alan knows my stuff and is always up for the questions I bring to the table everytime we talk.

He is a firm believer that if a preacher can’t say something in 20 minutes time then he or she doesn’t know what they are talking about well enough and need to learn more of what it is they really want to communicate. Sure, there are times that you may go a little longer and if “God shows up” there is no telling what might take place and the time thing becomes irrelevant—nobody will be looking at their watches in that case.

Alan always makes me see something that is right in my face. One of his favorite sayings is that “…it’s not what you know that will get you to where you need to go but what you don’t know that will get you there.”

He was bold enough to tell me the other day that many of us are looking outward, toward the church for something that can only be found inside of us. A simple sentence from a prophetic farmer that describes the last two years of my life.

Christ is not an organization or denomination but lives in us in and through an organism called the body of Christ—parts of which still meet in churches on Sundays and other places during the week. We can all quit looking for Him to be someplace else and start seeing Him right here wherever we happen to find ourselves at this very moment.

What I have felt for some time is that the very church which was designed to bring us closer to a relationship with Christ is actually a participant in putting a wedge between us. What I mean by this is that we have focused on so many other things (what is leadership; the role of pastors and elders, deacons; children’s programs, music styles, etc.) that the simple gospel message sometimes takes a back seat—maybe not in your experience but certainly in mine. Let me say I don’t believe that this has been done intentionally but is certainly what happens when mankind gets ahold of something simple and then turns it into a product that can be manufactured and distributed in the most efficent manner. If it can be packaged it will be.

The most nutrition you will ever receive is from a vegetable picked ripe from the garden and eaten fresh—it doesn’t get any better. A week in a processing center and 3 or 4 days in a truck and a couple more to your table doesn’t do much for the flavor of the food we eat either. Not that something packaged can’t feed the body—just not in the same way and to the same extent that something fresh can and does.

I guess the question we must ask ourselves is about the simple gospel message and how much of the conversation surrounding the emergent church and so on and so forth we want to involve ourselves in. There really must be a balance between living a faith filled simple life and engaging in coversations about church structure and the postmodern society that we live in.

Or at least that is where I find myself today having ridden 20 miles on my bike yesterday, with a hope of sunny skies and a longer ride tomorrow.

The image was as I awoke of a lake where a sitck of diynamite had been thrown in several minutes before. Floating on top of the lake were the fish that had been caught in the concussion of energy released by the blast.

Your mind can take it from there—water is like that—a safe place to live until an explosion changes things forever.

We could think about the fish for a minute—floating lifeless and belly-up on top of the water—eyes wide open but no longer seeing anything. We could gather them all up and eat them for food but this is the end of a dream and we are not really there.

I am also thinking about the energy released by a mind that is turned on and going seventy-five miles an hour. When you are in the same room with a mind like that you can’t help but feel the vibration—though silent—of all those synapses firing in the brain. Don’t let anyone tell you that science cannot be poetic or at least scientific definitions. A synapse is:
The junction across which a nerve impulse passes from an axon terminal to a neuron, muscle cell, or gland cell.

I have lived my whole life not knowing that deep within my brain there were such things as axon terminals. And wouldn’t you know it but that all of this is surrounded by a salty water solution.

At this point in the early morning as I attempt to slow my mind back into sleep I am also struck by the thought of rigidity and how muscles will atrophy when they are not used. That delicate balance of life as we feed the cells that in turn enable us to wash our cars, mow our lawns and water our gardens—the three things that came to mind at 4:14 in the morning.

So from all of this can I assume that in those times when sleep evades us it is really because the brain is firing off dynamite charges and our thoughts are like those fish floating on top of the lake after a big blast and looking from above we see them as floating things belly-up with eyes wide open asking all the questions that have no easy answers.

Each generation must make peace with its’ own thoughts and ways of doing things. We are really just painting over a canvas that has had several layers of paint already applied to its’ thin surface. Underneath our picture is another and another and another—we can’t see them but they still exist and meant something to someone who lived and loved before us.

It is interesting also the things you learn if you continue to ask the questions that need to be asked in order to clarify where it is you have been or where it is you are going. Having read the book of Ruth in the bible, I thought that the principle of gleaning—allowing those less fortunate to gather grain around the edges of a field being harvested—was something that was world wide. I was reminded by a friend just the other day that this principle was only practiced by the Jewish people or at least as far as he knew was birthed within the self-same culture from which we received the bible.

Not that this little revelation is that profound but just shows me how much I have taken for granted all these years. No wonder it is so hard to communicate with one another when each of us has read about our origins from our own unique perspectives. We understand our world through the books we have read, the movies we have seen, the prople we have known and the places we have visited.

As we continue our pilgrim’s journey we must remember to take time to talk with each other about our common history and how our lives have been shaped by the events of the past and not be afraid to continue in the process of allowing the clay of who we are be shaped and re-shaped on the potter’s wheel of life.

What follows is a narrative fragment found in the bottom of suitcase once used by a circus performer who later in life became a cinematographer.

His name was Christian and he learned a lot that first summer away from
home on his own. He had taken that name at some point during his
travels because he had never felt his given name fit his tall and akward
frame. It was a plain name and during his early elemenatary school
years the kids had made up all sorts of rhymes and jokes about it.

Christian didn’t even feel comfortable living inside his own
skin and bones. He loved to walk and those same kids even made fun of the way
he bounced a bit with each and every forward step—when much older he would walk every night along the beach until the buzzing inside his head would ease off a bit and he could return home and exhausted—sleep through the night.

He didn’t reralize he was a pilgrim until much later in life when all the other titles seemed too vague or somehow wouldn’t fit no matter how much he tried to make them conform to his bodies profile.

Christian had become a hippy with long hair and bell-bottomed blue jeans he had sewn and patched together himself. It had been a month or two since he had worn shoes and he could now snuff out a cigarette butt on the sidewalk and not feel it since the soles of his feet had developed thick callouses.

Did I mention that the summer Christian decided to leave his hometown and find himself happened to be what was to become known as the summer of love. Well it was. It was also the summer he learned a lot of lesssons—one of them being how great if felt to share something.

The summer of love was loaded with many outdoor concerts where lots of hippys would gather and do what groups of people do, hippy or not, when they gather—talk about life, play and make plans. Christian was shy but one day visited a candy store before heading off to the park and an outdoor concert and picnic. He puchased a couple of dollars of penny candy and when he arrived at the park overcame his shyness by asking people if they wanted some candy. It was really a kinder and gentler time—long before razor blades in halloween sacks—and of course he made a lot of friends that day. Since there is a kid inside of every hippy the candy was gone before long but not before he had received lots of invitations to crash at people’s houses and other offers as well.

During the day Christian would sometimes sell alternative (underground) newspapers and even scored a baby sitting job for two kids whose mother was going through a hard time.

People around Christian were listening to the Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead and reading the hobbit books by Tolkien. On off days he would hang out in parks and draw pictures of things that were floating around in his head—mostly abstract or surreal type stuff that was fun to draw and look at but at the time didn’t make much sense. That is until a psychology professor took an interest in them and asked if he could take few of them to his class at the local university. When he returned them he looked really interested and talked about them using big words which Christian took as a sign that they were ok.

Later in life—after Christian had lived a little longer with his given name again—he would look at those drawings and be frightened by their peek into the depths of his psyche—and in that moment of exposure throw them into a dumpster down the road from where he lived. Many years later he wished he hadn’t done that but what is done is done.

As I began to read a long prose poem/essay by Anne Carson entitled “The Anthropology of Water” I was struck by the fact—while caught in the net of her prose—that I am a pilgrim on a pilgrimage.

As defined a pilgrimage is:

   1. A long journey or search, especially one of exalted purpose or moral significance.

As a metaphor for this we can compare our lives to a river flowing with water that can never really be captured—it can indeed be dammed up for a while but even if put in a bucket—in an attempt to store it—it will slowly evaporate back to form the clouds from whence it came.

Anne Carson says that water is something you cannot hold. Like men.

Life is like that—as it passes we try and make it stop only to find that—like the river—it just created another stream around us and is still flowing on—doing what rivers and streams do.

I find that my life is like this river in the respect that after a big rain, the river is muddy and flows especially fast and you can’t see the bottom anymore. This lasts for a few days and then the river clears up and waits for the next rain.

Sometimes people swin in the river and canoeists float with the current and a farmer pumps water out to irrigate his crops.

This is kind of like having a Bar-B-Que and inviting people over to sit around in your back yard and talk about things that are important to them. The food is laid on the picnic table and a blessing is said and everybody eats on paper plates with plastic forks and all the dishes taste realy good.

Pilgrims like to eat and go to people’s houses and have glasses of wine and eat chesse and crackers and talk about things that are important to them as well.

If you are on a pilgrimage you don’t have a lot of time to hang around since you really feel the need to keep your focus in order to get to the next place you need to be on your journey. Kinda like the river keeps on moving towards the ocean and then is absorbed by the ocean.

Anne Carson says that “…It is an open secret among pilgrims  and other theoreticians of this traveling life that you become addicted to the horizon….there is a momentum of walking, hunger and roads….”

Sometimes I feel the fish and other water creatures moving around inside me and I have to wonder what they are doing. I think it is this movement we feel in our dreams and then make up stories and songs to fit the movement. What else could it be at this point but the movement of our river inside of us—always reaching out for the ocean and never knowing when that moment of fullfillment will take place.

I read someplace the other day that psychologists believe that we are what we felt accepted as in the third grade—that those people who felt good about themselves then achieved more in life and had happier times overall. I don’t know about you but third grade is a blur to me—I can say I never really felt I fit in but is that an older me painting a picture of a younger me that I never knew.

(For those of you who make it to this point—I will provide a website address where you can get a de-coder ring with which to make all the above and below flow smoothly into very neat iambic pentameter verse) LOL

Actually life is aslo a lot like bike riding—there are many straight and flat places to pedal but you really don’t feel like you have done much until you tackle that hill that begins slow but increases into a 15% grade which—depending on how long it lasts—can leave you feeling like you are not going even fast enough to maintain your balance. It is one of those hills that needs to be in your life—once you make it to the top, the rest of the ride seems so much easier.

Back to pilgrims and journeys: pilgrims are people on a quest to find something sacred. In that very sense, Abraham was a pilgrim wandering in the wilderness until given a divine unction as to the direction he was to take.

Pilgrims are people who listen real hard in order to hear the coordinates for their next destination point.

Sometimes pilgrims have friends like farmers who help them to see things that they woud never be able to see on their own. Farmers are people who look for water in times of drought in order that their crops may be fed so that the sheep and the goats and the milk cows can be raised to produce whatever it is that sheep and goats and milk cows produce. It takes a cash crop to feed a cash crop and so on down the line. Farmers are pilgrims in the sense that they are on a journey looking for the end of the story that began the moment they became farmers.

Sometimes farmers fish in the river and take long walks up hills that bike riders would never be able to climb. When they  return they always have good stories to tell which makes everybody who listens want to be a farmer. But the world only has room anymore for just so many farmers. People that work in restuarants and malls have taken their places and I don’t think anybody has really noticed yet that there are not to many farmers left.

Pilgrims are people who travel to big museums in New York City in order to look at VanGogh’s and O’Keefe’s up close and personal. They will tell you that the guards don’t like it when you get to close to a painting that has VanGogh’s name in the corner of it. But it is only then that you notice that what you thought was just sloppy brush strokes is really very fine paint lines built upon very fine paint lines which are in turn built upon very fine paint lines. VanGogh was a pilgrim who didn’t finish the race but got to the end of his line long before it was his time.

Sometimes I think my life is really just one e-mail away from people finding out who I really am. And then I have another hill to climb in order to get to that place where the road is a little more ordered and straight.

Do the fish have any idea that the river runs all the way to the ocean or that my life is bound up with the road. When I was younger, the only time I felt like myself was when I was walking.

I don’t know why it is but the saying is true that the older you get the more time flies. It is already past the halfway mark for 2007 and I have to wonder where the time went.

Of course as we all know, Independence day celebrates the adoption of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, declaring independence from Great Britain. We celebrate it mostly by taking the day off work (it’s a Federal holiday), having picnics and going to see some fireworks.

I am celebrating Independence day by staying in the bed until 8:30 and maybe taking a bike ride a little later in the day. Also, my tomatoes are getting to independent and I am going to have to tie them up a bit if I want to have something to eat a little later on in the season. My wife is at the local farmer’s market selling bundles of red, white, and blue flower bouquets. She loves to pick them and people love to have them on their tables—and that’s a good thing for all of us.

I can’t help thinking that from the day we are born we are all working towards our own independence—first from parents and then from peers and then from social convention. I expressed mine by quitting school with only 3 or 4 months left to graduation and living in New York, San Francisco and Seattle before flying to Europe and hitch-hiking around for a couple of months.

Of course it was 1967 and what was latter to become known as the summer of love with the Human-Be-In in San Francisco on January 14th and the subsequent Central Park Be-In in New York on Easter Sunday, March 26th, 1967. My memories are rather selective now but I was in Central Park on that Easter Sunday with the other 10,000 people who showed up in the Sheeps Meadow (how’s that for a metaphor) that day. You will have to take my word for it that I ended up sitting with Allen Ginsberg and watched while he played his finger symbols and harmonium and chanted whatever it was he was into at the time.

To me he was the king of the beatniks but I remember thinking—as I soaked up everything that was happening around me—that he was really just a rather small man who wrote poetry and lived on the lower east side of Manhattan, just a few streets over from where I was staying. Granted, he was a force to be contended with but was a mortal man and not the almost immortal icon he had been turned into. I was so young and naive I have to admit that I didn’t even know he was a homosexual until someone told me about that part of his life later on in the week. He had invited me over and I guess that piece of information (at that time in my life) confused me enough I never ended up visiting him.

As summer approached in New York, a group of us flew to San Francisco to check out the scene there. Haight-Asbury was in full bloom by the time we arriived and of course we fit right in. There were concerts in Golden Gate Park and free clinics and food in Panhandle Park. There were hipppy shops all up and down the streets and I can remember sitting on the sidewalk and watching the tour buses pass by with people looking out the windows at the long-haired, barefoot revolution that was supposed to be taking place. By the middle of June we had moved to Seattle with people who were heading north into Canada and from there, I worked my way back to New York and then on to Europe, where I stayed until working my way back on a ship bound to America.

As I write I am aware—in whatever expanded or somewhat vague sense—that I am a part of that generation that is being called back to God during The Call Nashville, an event that will take place on the 40 year anniversary of the summer of love. This event will take place this Saturday, 07.07.07, and seeks to fullfill the call of Joel to declare a holy fast, return to the Lord and He will once again pour out His Spirit on the land and its people.

I am not attending the event although I know many people who are going. I was in Washington DC on October 4th, 1997 during a Promise Keepers event when a 100,000 or more men stood in the gap for their friends and familes. I guess big crowds are not as exciting anymore as they were way back then.

The call will be a lot of young people praying for a nation that has forgotten a lot of its spiritual heritage or relegated it to a very narrow view of what it is supposed to look like. I guess in a way they are praying for me forty years after having been a part of a major shift in the American belief structure.

In many ways, that path led me to the one I am on today and I am by no means ashamed of it or going to minimize it. God causes all things to work together for good to those who love Him and are called according to His purpose.

I will have my eyes and ears open on Saturday and hopefully be alert to hearing and receiving whatever the Lord has for me on that day. If something needs to be broken off, I am ready—if something is waiting to be released, I am ready as I would hope we will all be.

It is a new day and a new ride—enjoy yours.