The Birth of an Artist

The world defines an artist as someone who practices the creative arts.  But an artist is more than simply a practitioner. An artist is a person whose art lives deep inside them, whose soul is their art; and everything in their life, everything they see and do and everyone they know is affected by their art, which is their very life.  An artist may work in an ordinary job, as a salesperson, a cashier, or as an engineer or as an architect, or as a designer, but, he or she will always see things through an artist's eyes; seeing things not as they are but what they can become.

When my son was born and I held him for the first time, I wondered who he was and who he would become.  Watching him as he grew those questions grew inside me as he learned to crawl, then walk and talk.  I wondered where life would lead him.  Where would he go?  What would he do?  Who would he be with?

And the answers did not come gradually, but they came when I least expected them, taking me by surprise, showing me the future in quick bursts.

When he was three or four I was setting up the pool pump, in the process of getting the pool ready for spring; connecting the pool to the pump, the pump to the filter, and the filter to the pool.  Jeremy was with me, watching everything I did with intent interest.  After I finished, Jeremy said, "I know how this works." And he described the water being pulled from the pool into the pump, pushed into the filter and back into the pool.  He watched as I cleaned the pool and told me how the pool vacuum worked.

And I asked myself, who is he?  What would he become?

My wife and I bought him a Lego building kit when he was five or six. He immediately opened the box and began building the most complicated structure in the kit.  He worked for hours non-stop, not even taking a break for dinner.  And when he was finished we were amazed.  A structure about 4 feet tall stood in our den in front of the fire place.  "What is it?" I asked.  So, Jeremy began to turn a handle and four balls began to rise from the bottom of the structure to the top, and when they reached the top they began a zig zag descent to the bottom.

And those same questions nagged at me.

Years passed.  Jeremy and I were putting in a new kitchen floor.  I took a break, but Jeremy continued to work.  And as I stood watching him, the answers to my questions seemed clear to me.  Jeremy was not a carpenter, or a handy man , or a mechanic or an engineer or an architect.  He was something more.  It was the way he approached a project with such vision; able to see it in its completed form before beginning it. It was the intensity with which he worked; not wanting to.. or even able to.. stop before he saw his vision realized.  It was the way he worked, with such passion, as if the work had taken possession of his soul.

And so I knew.  Jeremy was an artist, able to look past the present into the future; to see beauty in the ugly; able to create order from chaos; and willing to sacrifice himself for his art and his vision of what things can become.

The Peaceful Place

Everyone needs a peaceful place; a spot for reflection and retreat.  Although we are social animals, we also have the need to be alone; to escape the demands that society makes on us and to be wholly with ourselves, alone.  Henry David Thoreau wrote, "You think that I am impoverishing myself withdrawing from men, but in may solitude I...shall ere long burst forth a more perfect creature, fitted for a higher society (Journal, 8 February 1857).

My peaceful place is the backyard.  It is in the backyard that I spend my free time tending to my summer garden (tomatoes, squash, cucumbers, beans, peppers, etc.,); caring for the soil, pulling weeds, giving them water and nutrients, nurturing them and helping them grow into the plants they are supposed to be (eventually providing me with vegetables for my table).  Sometimes this is hot, hard work.  But at the end of the day, although I am sweaty, dirty and tired, I look over the garden and I hear the voice of God; not an audible voice, but an inward voice; not a voice of words, but a voice of assurance.  And the silent voice of God fills me.  And the peace of God overwhelms me.

When I need rest from my labors or just a quiet place to reflect, I retreat to my patio, a place that my wife and I have filled with flowering plants (roses, mandevillas, gladiollas, dahlias) ferns, and green shrubs.  We have hung hummingbird feeders on the pergola and bird feeders among the plants and on a window of our house.  My son built a fountain that bubbles not far away.  I can sit at a table there and prepare my sermon notes or reflect on things I have read, or just sit and watch the birds feeding.

Psychologists have long recognized that humans need solitude.  Solitude gives us the chance to shut down, to reconnect ourselves with that silent voice, to focus our thoughts or to clear our minds, to rediscover our own voice that has been lost among the many voices, and to recharge our batteries.

You can find your peaceful place in your backyard, or by simply getting up early and going into a room and shutting the door.  And when you do, don't turn on the T.V.  Don't listen to music.  Listen to the silence.  Listen to the silent voice, the whisper of God.

And if you do, you will "burst forth a more perfect creature."

The Rules of the Park

I was running in the park near my home several years ago when I heard a father yelling at his son.  The father was across the park and apparently wanted to leave, and leave now.

"Get over here and let's go!" he yelled.

The son began to run around the track to get to his father, but he father yelled, "cut across the fields," meaning the two soccer fields between him and his son.

"But, Dad, the signs say the fields are closed," cried the son.

"Cut across the fields," demanded the father.

"The fields are closed, Dad,"

"I said cut across the fields and I mean now!" yelled the father.

The boy reluctantly cut across the soccer fields which had been closed for reseeding and maintenance.

I could not get this interaction between this father and his son out of my head for the rest of my run. I obviously still haven't.  As I ran around the soccer fields on the track, I counted the signs that had been posted saying "Field closed.  Stay off the grass."  There were 8 of them.  None of them said, " Stay off the grass, unless you are the father in the gray shirt in a hurry to get home, then it is OK."

This man was forcing his son to disobey the rules of the park.  What was he teaching his son?  How had this affected his son?  How would this affect his son in the years ahead?  I am sure none of these questions entered the father's head.  He was in a hurry.  The rules did not matter to him.  The means justified the end.

And we might say that this one child, running across the grass, did not harm the grass.  And this may be true.  But what if every father who visited the park with his children made them run across the newly sown grass.  The grass would never grow.  The soccer fields would be nothing but weeds.  Soon, there would be no more soccer or soccer teams visiting the park.

The same can be said of the lady that roams the park with a small shovel and a bag.  She digs up interesting plants that she sees and loads them in her car.  I assume that she is taking them to her home where she plants them in her plant beds.  What if everyone who came to the park brought their shovel and a bag and dug up all of the plants they were interested in and transplanted them to their home garden?  The park would soon be devoid of plants.

There is a book that I read years ago entitled, "All I Ever Needed to Know I Learned in Kindergarten" by Robert Fulghum.  In it he tells how Kindergarten taught him how to get along with other people and how he still applies these rules to his life today; simple rules like don't yell, don't hit other people,  respect the property of others, keep off the grass.  But, I guess some people never went to Kindergarten.

Thinking With the Mind of God

I took a long walk this morning for the first time since my foot surgery.  Along the way I saw a male and a female bluebird sitting on a tree limb.  Suddenly a mockingbird flew in and hovered above them, chasing them away.  The mocking bird settled on the same limb.  Then, the male blue bird swooped down and chased the mocking bird away and the blue birds perched again on the limb. This war for perching rights on the limb continued for several minutes until I lost interest and walked on.

Further up the street two cats walked cautiously around each other, making strange cat noises, warning each other not to get too close because an attack was imminent.  Two houses up, dogs behind fences barked at the cats.

As I walked I remembered one morning last summer sitting on my patio as humming birds put on a  master class of acrobatic flying while attacking one another for the feeding rights at the feeders in my backyard.

Then I thought of the huge, two inch black and yellow female cicada killer wasp that I had seen in my yard dragging a paralyzed cicada down into its underground lair, where the female would lay eggs inside the cicada.  When the eggs hatched, the larva would use the cicada for food.

A red-tailed hawk hunts its prey frequently in my neighborhood, gliding silently high overhead, then with its powerful eyesight that is eight times sharper than the sharpest human eye, it spots a mouse or a bird or a squirrel or a kitten and swoops down, diving at speeds that can reach 120 miles per hour.

These animal and insect wars go on each day, every day, unseen or unnoticed by us.

And much like the rest of the animal kingdom, we humans have our wars too.  But unlike the birds, the dogs, the cats, or the wasps in my neighborhood, we humans have no excuses.  And this makes our wars much more terrible, and much more senseless.

Christianity, Judaism, and Islam teach that God gave human beings dominion over God's creation; the world and everything in it.  Can we honestly look at the world and say that we are managing it the way God would manage it?

I have to believe that God gave humans dominion over creation because God made us in such a way that we have the ability to rise above our pride, our greed, our lust, our envy, our anger, our laziness, and our gluttony.

The question that we are all asking, is when will we rise above?  When will we stop chasing other birds from the limbs of trees over and over again?  When will we stop barking at cats?  When will we start thinking with the mind of God?

The Unfamiliar Drive

Over the last two years, my wife and I have noticed a brown car driving through our neighborhood several times a day.  A man drives the car slowly, ever so slowly, through the entire length and width of the neighborhood, looking at houses, stopping occasionally, then continuing his casual drive.

Of course, my first thought was that the driver was casing the neighborhood and I considered calling the police.  But before I could do so my wife, Melanie, told me she knew the identity of the mystery driver.

"He used to live in the neighborhood," she said.  "His wife left him, remember."

I remembered.  He had lived just up the street for a short time after his divorce, then moved away.  I wondered why he would drive so regularly through a place that had given him so much pain.

Several weeks later, I knew the answer.  Melanie was walking through the neighborhood, saw the brown car and waved at the driver.  He stopped and they talked.

She told me that he did not remember her and when she asked about his mother, he pulled a sticky note from the dashboard and told her that his mother had died.  "I'm not able to remember things any more,"he said with a smile.

So, now when I see him driving through our neighborhood, or driving through the streets of our small town,  I see him in a different light.

He is not a thief.  He is the victim of a thief; a disease that is robbing him of his memories.  His endless driving is an attempt to look for places that are familiar; to reclaim the people and the places and events that were once his but are now slowly fading away.

One day, maybe one day soon, we will not see him any more. He will have forgotten his old neighborhood.   The brown car will be forever parked.  The robbery will be complete and he will stare blankly at the people in front of him and he will not remember to look at his sticky notes.

The Desk and the Key

Years ago, I was wandering through an antique store in an old house on Central Avenue in Charlotte, NC.    I had been searching for an antique desk for my bedroom for a long time and had never quite found the one that was in my mind.  I walked from room to room, browsing and as I entered a new room, I saw the very desk that I had been searching for for so long.

It was delivered to my home that same night.  But there was a slight problem.  My bedroom is upstairs.  The desk is solid oak and heavy.  The two people who delivered it stood staring at the desk and at the stairs.  I never thought the stairs would be an issue. But the deliverers told me they were usually informed about stairs.  So I offered to help them. 

And so, the three of us pushed and shoved and lifted the desk to the top of the stairs.  As we approached the top, I heard one of the delivery men groan.  I thought he had hurt his back, but as we sat the desk down he motioned to me.  "We will never be able to get this desk into your bedroom.  The turn from this hallway into your bedroom is too sharp.  The desk is too large."

Looking at the desk, I had to agree.  I had always imagined the desk in my bedroom and now I was faced with the prospect of having to put it in another place.  But there was not another place in my home that I wanted that particular desk.  It had to go into my bedroom.  So I looked closer at the desk and found that the top could be removed.  By removing the top, we were able to slide the frame (without the drawers) into my bedroom.

As we stood the frame of the desk in place, I noticed something attached to the underside.  It was a magnet.  And on the magnet was a key.  I assumed that the key was used to lock and unlock the drawers.

We reattached the top of the desk to the frame, and I promptly forgot about the hidden key, until several years later, when I was running my hand underneath the frame, and I rediscovered it.  I put the key in the lock in the way it seemed to fit and turned it; first one way then the other.  But the lock did not move.  So I put the key in the lock the way it did not seem to fit.  I turned it the way most locks turn, and the lock did not move. I turned the key in the opposite direction and the lock did not move.  So I put the key back on its magnet and assumed it was a key for another purpose that the former owner had hidden on his desk.

A few more years went by and I rediscovered the key again.  I tried it again, with the same result.  I put the key back in its place and there it stayed until a few weeks ago when I found it again.

I decided to give it one more try.  And I found that if I put the key in the lock in the way it does not seem to fit, pull it out just a hair before turning it, and turn it anti-clockwise, the key locks the drawer.

All this time, I thought of this key as a secret key; or that the key held some secret.  But the secret that I discovered was that I had stopped trying before I had exhausted all methods of inserting and turning the key.

In the middle of my desk sits a rock with an quote inscribed on it.  It says, "In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity."  The quote is from Albert Einstein.  He is saying that the key to life is to continue our search; to continue our struggle; to be willing to think beyond our boundaries; and to never give up.  Because just around the corner is a most marvelous discovery.

The New Journey

I recently saw the movie, "The 100 Foot Journey,". It is a story about two restaurant owners and staff who are located across the street from one another (100 feet) in very different restaurants (one French, the other Indian).   In the beginning the competition was fierce resulting in hard feelings on each side.  But when the characters learn that all they have to do to end the ever worsening feud is cross the road, the competition ends, friendships blossom and some very positive things begin to happen.

Many times we have to take a step back from our old habits and our old ways of doing things in order to realize that there are other ways, better ways of accomplishing our objectives besides our own tried and true ways.  This point has been driven home to me because of the movie and because I had surgery on my foot this past Thursday.  I am on crutches and unable to put any weight on my left foot.  Thanks to the weather, my wife has been able to be with me for the previous 5 days. She has been a very good nurse, remembering every detail of the post op instructions.  And I am sure my foot will heal properly because of these first five days.

But she had to return to work today. The snow has melted.  And this is my first day alone.  Every journey I take is a new journey; going across the room presents itself with obstacles I had not noticed before; sitting down in a chair requires planning and positioning that I had never considered; bathing in the sink requires new stances and movements that I have never made; Preparing meals while standing on one leg makes the food seem like it was earned; going up and down the stairs...well...it is an entirely new experience, one I find exciting and fun (it is also a very good total body workout).

Sometimes we have to take a new journey to appreciate where we have come from.  The new journey  is built from the stones of the old. And from the old and the new something beautiful blooms.