Thoughts on the Journey together into God's future. Ecclesiastes 4:9-12 "Two are better than one, because they have a good return for their work: If one falls down, his friend can help him up. But pity the man who falls and has no one to help him up! Also, if two lie down together, they will keep warm. But how can one keep warm alone? Though one may be overpowered, two can defend themselves. A cord of three strands is not quickly broken."
Saturday, April 30, 2011
Whole Wheat
The X-Garden: The First Fruits
Wednesday, April 27, 2011
Grampaws Rule!
Monday, April 18, 2011
Previously on the X-Garden . . .
Sunday, April 17, 2011
Ava & Jonas at the Farm
I was planning a longer trip to the farm this weekend, Thursday-Monday, but plans changed. Melinda’s assistance was needed in taking care of Jonas while his mom and big sister shared in a friend’s wedding – Amber as a bridesmaid and Ava as flower girl. That meant leaving late on Friday rather than early on Thursday. So on Thursday (Diadeloso -- the Day of the Bear -- at Baylor), I graded papers until I could not see straight and completely emptied my inbox. (Who assigned all these papers? I’d like to get my hands on him.) On Friday afternoon we made the trip down I-35 with our usual stop to see our favorite daughter in Austin at Quack’s, our favorite bakery/coffee shop. Then back on the road.
We got to Floresville with some daylight remaining. I attached some nifty ramp ends to my 2x8 homemade equipment ramp to make it easier to help Juan down out of the back of the truck. Melinda was inside. I got into the bed of the truck, released the lawn tractor’s parking brake, and carefully pushed and steered him from over his hood while I backed him toward the ramps. I successfully lined up his wheels over the 2x8’s and prepared to ease him down the incline. I was not paying so much attention to myself, however. I stepped off the end of the tailgate and tumbled on the ground ungracefully while Juan simple eased down the ramp. I jumped up and looked around. No one had witnessed the event. Good. I cranked him up and mowed a bit of the field in front that I had not been able to take care of last visit.
Amber arrived with Ava and Jonas a while later. We stayed up late playing and talking and getting better acquainted with Jonas, whom we’d last seen at age six weeks. Now he’s five months and quite entertaining.
Most of Saturday was spent playing with Ava. We went on walks and explored around the farm. She’d not been here since she was a baby, so this was new territory for her. I pushed her down the long rock driveway on a tricycle we’d gotten at a garage sale several years ago. She hunted rocks and chased a lizard.
Sometime in the afternoon she began “cooking” on the front porch. She gathered all kinds of items from the yard, mixing them into her soups and stews, and serving them to me in pink plastic dishes.
She found red sandstone that Mimi showed her could be used to write on the concrete and that would make war paint on your face as well, so she used it on me.
A report on the progress of the X-Garden will follow soon.
Monday, April 11, 2011
Lawn Tractors, Death and Resurrection: Murray & John
If I take death into my life, acknowledge it, and face it squarely, I will free myself from the anxiety of death and the pettiness of life - and only then will I be free to become myself.
Grandfathering Kingdom
Sunday, April 03, 2011
Far as the Curse is Found
So you know the story of our ancestors Adam and Eve who made such a rotten decision in the produce section of The Garden of Eden. Rebellion, pride, arrogance, unbelief, and a long list of others motives mingled to introduce sin in to human experience and alienation from God, each other, and creation into the human condition.
“Cursed is the ground because of you;
through painful toil
you will eat food from it
all the days of your life.
It will produce thorns and thistles for you,
and you will eat the plants of the field.
By the sweat of your brow
you will eat your food.”
Donning our fig leaves we went about the next stage of our work on the X-Garden. As planned, we added the straw mulch to three of the beds. We returned to Cooper’s to pick up some additional plants – tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, and watermelon – and another pound or two of encouragement, which Mr. Cooper offers freely. When the new plants were in place, we added mulch around them. This morning we planted some morning glories along the back garden fence and along the barbed wire fence by the road.
We raised two cattle panels in an A-frame construction to support the tomatoes and cucumbers when they begin to grow. All this work is an act of hope (James 4:7).
Melinda’s been taking seminars in Milton and Augustine this semester. Milton’s had her reading Paradise Lost and the Augustine seminar focuses on the Bishop of Hippo’s reading of Genesis. So all this gardening experience we have been working on at the farm has a theological and literary context.
She found a serpent in the garden (a Texas Spiny Lizard), whom she named "Satan." We also had a sighting of our Texas Rat Snake, my close encounters with which have been earlier recounted. He poked his head out of a drain pipe next to the house. I hope he's tired of eating dust and has developed an appetite for the many field mice around the place.
If my previous blog seemed a bit melancholy, reflecting on mortality, then perhaps it is appropriately so. Wrapped up in the curse that we are reminded of every time we grab a handful of Bermuda grass and pull it or decimate a thistle with a Weedeater is this word about our dustiness. Every time sweat runs down our face and mingles with the red earth we recall our dusty nature. Between Milton, Augustine, Genesis 3, the X-Garden, and the serpents, we have had plenty of reminders. (Oh, yeah, and there was also the expected, inevitable death of Murray, our lawn tractor who has served so faithfully for nearly 14 years. With great effort he finally started and cut his last field. When I turned him off to take a break, it was the last time he would breathe. His starter would not work. I know the feeling. Having spent more than his original cost of $1200 keeping him going these past four years, it is time to let him go.)
“Cursed is the ground because of you;
through painful toil
you will eat food from it
all the days of your life.
It will produce thorns and thistles for you,
and you will eat the plants of the field.
By the sweat of your brow
you will eat your food
until you return to the ground,
since from it you were taken;
for dust you are
and to dust you will return.”
I am reminded that planting is an act of hope and that the story ends in a Garden, even as it began in one, and that a promise remains:
Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, as clear as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb down the middle of the great street of the city. On each side of the river stood the tree of life, bearing twelve crops of fruit, yielding its fruit every month. And the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations. No longer will there be any curse. (Revelation 22)
Tending Garden, Setting Sun
Nanci Griffith has been one of our family’s favorite musicians since our boys were small. All three of our kids have been reared listening to her Texas folk sung with a thick twang. She’s our mainstay on long drives across Texas when we are in a “Lone Star State of Mind.” What we like about her is that her poetry is serious – not a C&W genre. We have heard her in concert in Austin, Ft. Worth, and Houston. Once, in Houston, we got to go backstage to the green room and meet her because Rex Waldheim, one of our astronaut friends, the guy who introduced us to her music long ago when there were only cassettes and vinyls, had recently flown a CD of hers on a shuttle flight, and was delivering it to her after the concert in Jones Hall. She was funny and gracious, holding her glass of white wine and posing for photos.
One of Nanci’s early pieces is called “Gulf Coast Highway.”
She sings of a couple who have lived a hard, but ordinary life, along the Texas coast. He’s found work where he could -- the railroad, in the rice fields and on the oilrigs in the Gulf of Mexico. They lived in a little house off U.S. 90, the old coastal highway that was supplanted by Interstate 10. They describe their home as “the only place on earth bluebonnets grow; once a year they come and go at this old house here by the road.” Even when they are young, they anticipate the day that, “when we die we say we’ll catch some blackbird’s wing, and we will fly away together come some sweet bluebonnet spring.” As they grow old together, the jobs are gone. They spend their days simply: “we tend our garden; we set the sun” still hoping for that “sweet bluebonnet spring,” when they will “fly away to heaven.”
Those words echoed in my mind frequently yesterday as Melinda and I continued to work on the garden project at the farm. (Details in a following post.) Having pulled weeds, cultivated, mulched, and cleared leaves from under the old live oak while Melinda added a dozen plants to what was already in place, we sat on bales of hay and watched the sun go down over the blue-green wheat that has now developed heads of grain. We tended our garden. We set the sun.
We’re really not ready to fly away yet. The jobs aren’t gone and there is much to do in life. It did make me think of mortality, though, something I manage to skillfully avoid most of the time. A friend half my age lost his life a month ago. While crossing the street on campus yesterday, a close brush with a careless driver reinforced the uncertainty of my own life.
The psalmist encouraged that kind of thinking –
Our days may come to seventy years,
or eighty if our strength endures;
yet the best of them are but trouble and sorrow,
for they quickly pass, and we fly away.
teach us to number our days,
that we may gain a heart of wisdom. (Psalm 90)
These days do quickly pass. I remember last spring here like yesterday. These Texas springs are a finite resource. I have a limited number left – twenty-five or thirty perhaps if “my strength endures.” That knowledge heightens my senses to the beauty of the dandelions scattered across the field and the occasional bluebonnet that has found a home at this old house here by the road.
A voice says, “Cry out.”
And I said, “What shall I cry?”
“All people are like grass,
and all their faithfulness is like the flowers of the field.
The grass withers and the flowers fall,
because the breath of the Lord blows on them.
Surely the people are grass.
The grass withers and the flowers fall,
but the word of our God endures forever.”