I miss the red house
porch all around
slave quarters in back
ivy on iron gates
arches for ladies
to gossip beneath.
That house promised
yesterday had value
ancestors wisdom.
Now I know.
Old things
lovely things
pieces of identity
testimonies of heritage
have not so much worth
as parking lots.
I diverge from my writings on depth psychology today and revisit a concept I found in my notes from some years ago. It comes on the heels of a post I made on my artist blog concerning one of my paintings. I look in the mirror and I see gray hair beginning to peep out of my dark strands and yet, I’m okay with it. I may dye it, eventually, if I don’t like the way it looks later on. But if I do, it’ll be my choice and not something that I feel pressured to do. However, like with many things, the voices in our world scream that we need to “fix” that gray hair, and instill fear that if our hair is gray, we are less attractive and if we are less attractive, then we are less valuable.
We are daily bombarded with messages that we need to be slimmer, taller, prettier, smarter, richer, younger-looking; that we need newer gadgets, smart cars, smart phones, smart homes, and I-everthings. The internet tells us what to wear, what to eat, and where to go. We get the message that we need to have these things or do these things in order to have a better life, to be happier. I actually know women who will not walk out their front door without make-up, because they’re afraid someone might see them and reject them. I want to tell them that make-up can’t make them beautiful or more acceptable. Beauty first has to come from inside.
It kind of reminds me of the story of Adam and Eve when the serpent told Eve she needed to bite the fruit because then she would be better. She would have something she didn’t already have, know something she didn’t already know. She would ‘move up in the world.’ Yet, Eve was already at the top and she already had all the knowledge she needed inside herself. All she had to do was trust the voice she already knew was true. But I don’t fault Eve. The liar was probably persistent, showing up day after day, looking good, charming, appealing, promising high rewards. The same thing happens to us all on a daily basis. The same lie, the lie that we “need” to obtain something to be worthy or better or just good enough, is being pitched to us all every single day and like Eve, we bite into it, and then offer the same critical lie to someone else. I believe happiness is found when we know our own worth and live according to our own values. In other words, we have to assert that we are ENOUGH and don’t need to bite into anything else.
Somewhere in our pasts someone criticized us out of their own insecurities or thoughtlessness or ignorance; but the criticisms stick, the lie continues, the lie that says, “You’re not _______ enough.” The lie says that you need to do something, obtain something, to be better, to have more knowledge.
At the very least it is a lie that causes a woman to look in the mirror and turn away with a knot in her stomach, feeling that she isn’t–enough. I hear women make negative statements about themselves all of the time. They look at some woman in a magazine and compare themselves. The kind of beauty we see on television and in magazines is what some money hungry cooperation has designed to get more in their bank accounts. That’s why fashion is always changing. They want things to consistently be hard to obtain so that people will pay more to get it…and that includes everything from beautiful hair to buns of steel…anything to make money.
Now, I’m not advocating letting yourself go. I believe in being responsible for the house I live in and not just letting it fall apart. Yes, we should try to eat right and get adequate sleep. We should exercise, but the belief that our value is tied up in our physical appearance or the things that we own, etc., is a lie. If that were so, beautiful young celebrities who “have it all” would not be overdosing or committing suicide.
Real beauty is found with the inward adorning of the heart. It’s okay to look our best, to want to be pretty, but the mistake comes when we began to believe that our value is tied to our appearance or that anyone in this this world actually knows what true beauty looks like. Who gives “them” the right to define what is beautiful? Is not beauty in the eye of the beholder as the old saying goes? When we allow anyone to determine our value based on…anything…or when we believe that our value is determined by what we look like, what we have or what we can do…we believe the lie that we are not____enough. It all comes down to who and what are we believe and our beliefs determine the quality of our lives, not our looks, not our bank accounts, not our popularity, but our beliefs. So, that is where beauty lies.
Lisa was 97 years old when I worked at the center for the elderly. She always sat in the chair by the door with a romance novel in her lap. I commented on her love of romance one day and she said, “I’m old, but I’m still human.”
I squatted beside her chair; her eyes sparkled. “When you grow old,” she said, “you don’t stop being human. You don’t stop having feelings or having dreams.” She shrugged, “I’m nearly a hundred, but as long as I am in this world, I have hopes.”
She then spoke of what it was like to have people look at her as if she weren’t in her right mind, because she was elderly and what it was like to have others think she needed someone to make decisions for her. She told me of how it wounded her pride to be treated like she was senile when she wasn’t, of how people just assumed that because she was old, she had somehow stopped having any pride or emotions or feelings of self-worth or that she deserved pretty things. Then spoke of how she had served as a nurse in WWII and how she had paid her dues for her country. She was a veteran. She told me of how she had come from the Choctaw Nation and she was an American of all Americans.
She asked me for hot cocoa and told me the special way she liked it. I went in the kitchen to make it and the young worker in there said, “You making chocolate for Lisa? She won’t like it. She’ll send you back. That old bitty can’t be satisfied.”
But I made it exactly as Lisa had told me to make it and if she had asked me to redo it, I would have done so. I sat beside her and listened to more stories until I had to go attend to another matter. Daily, I listened to Lisa’s stories and I read manuscripts from 80 year olds with dreams of becoming writers and I discovered something that I hope every 30 year-old will soon discover, age is nothing. Our spirits, the real us, are ageless, eternal.
Lisa at 97 was the same Lisa who had done all of those amazing things in her 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, and 60s. Lisa, at 97, was more mentally clear and intelligent than that 30 year-old who called her an old bitty. It is a foolish person who writes someone off because of age or appearance. She wasn’t any more demanding than I would have been in her shoes. Who wants to eat tasteless food and drink watered down hot cocoa? She wasn’t hard to please, she just wanted to be treated with dignity and respect. I don’t know what ever happened to Lisa. I’m sure she’s gone by now or else she is 115 years old, which isn’t impossible, but I doubt she’s still with us. Still, at 97, she taught me a thing or two about life and I am forever grateful for the two summers I spent working at the center and the insights I gained into human nature.
Photo by Markus Spiske temporausch.com on Pexels.com
Sometimes
flute sounds
lift me out
of mud
days on end
with rain
too many hours
under gray skies.
* Robert Mullinax Flute Player. May his music lift your spirits as it does mine.
When I was a kid, my mom and I spent hours putting together jigsaw puzzles. I got pretty good at it. This week I put a puzzle together and as I did, I had a Forrest Gump’s Momma kind of moment, but instead of thinking that life is like a box of chocolates, I thought, “Life is like a jigsaw puzzle.”
WE PUT IT TOGETHER WITHOUT A BOX LID TO GUIDE US
Except we don’t get to look at the picture on the the box, because we left it somewhere. And we can’t remember where. We are aware that it had an image on it, but we can’t remember exactly what it looked like. The nuances escape us. We may have some idea that it was a garden or a yellow cat or whatever, but we don’t have the exact image to go by, just some vague memory.
So, we look at the pieces in front of us and try to fit them together. Sometimes, the colors, shapes and patterns match up perfectly and sometimes, they don’t. Often, we’re like nine-year-old children, trying to cram pieces together that don’t really go together and then we get mad because our picture isn’t unfolding in a way that makes sense to us.
It’s not impossible to put the puzzle together without the complete picture to guide us. I have done that a time or two. It just takes quite a bit of slowing down the mind and allowing intuition to come into play, paying attention to those subtle variations in colors, sizes, patterns, and shapes of the pieces. I mean you must analyze every piece in relation to the last piece you put down and the surrounding pieces. When we do this, without trying to force the pieces together to create the immediate results that we want, we soon see a true picture unfolding and each time we fit one piece with another that naturally goes with it, we feel a small sense of exhilaration and triumph.
WE HAVE AMNESIA AND LEFT IT SOMEWHERE.
We sort of come into this world with spiritual amnesia and the older we get, the longer we go without a view of the “box lid,” the less we remember. We start listening to other people tell us how we’re supposed to be and what the pictures of our lives are supposed to look like. We start trying to fit the pieces into place according to what others say, but here’s the thing. They lost their box lids, too, and most don’t even know what their own puzzles are supposed to look like, let alone yours! So, they try to tell you how to put your puzzle together based on what they think theirs are maybe, possibly, supposed to be. It doesn’t work. It leads to frustration and to anger. Some people get so mad that you’re not putting your puzzle together like they think it ought to be that they try to force you, even hurt you. Some go so far in their need to control as to destroy another person’s puzzle. They may try to control you, trick you, manipulate you, intimidate you, threaten you—all because it unnerves them that they might not actually be the master puzzle solvers they have believed themselves to be. They might get so fearful that somehow it is going to hurt them if they allow you to put your own puzzle together. They might also get afraid someone else is going to damage their puzzles or steal their pieces, so they set up a guard and vehemently guard their puzzles, not allowing anyone in who doesn’t follow their prescribed rules for solving puzzles. Others scream at you and tell you how bad you are because your picture isn’t looking the way they think it’s supposed to look.
Sometimes, we feel horrible about ourselves, and we think that somehow, we’re just not good at putting our puzzles together and that there is something wrong with our brains or our hearts or that we are just not “good people.” We walk around feeling guilty and unworthy because we aren’t putting our puzzles together to please others, or we compared our puzzles to theirs and ours looks smaller or duller or more jumbled. We go to the puzzle “experts”, and they tell us how to put our puzzles together. But guess what? They don’t have the box lid to our puzzles either!
So, what do we do?
WE CALL THE PUZZLE-MAKER
Imagine that you know that the original creator of your puzzle and that this creator knows exactly where each piece goes. This puzzle-maker comes and whispers in your ear as you put your puzzle together and tells you which piece to pick up and how to turn it and points to the exact place where it goes. There is no stress on you. Your struggle ceases. The only way you can go back to feeling stressed, guilty, fearful, chaotic, etc. is to resist the help being offered to you, if you ignore the puzzle-maker’s instructions.
I will interject here that sometimes well-meaning people will come along and point out to you that you are in error, because the instructions you’re receiving from the puzzle-maker aren’t the same as what they think is right, so they want to remind you that there’s something wrong with your hearing and they offer their services to translate for you and tell you that you should follow their instructions as they are clearly more qualified to talk to Puzzle-Maker than you, but they’re not, because Puzzle-Maker talks to them about their puzzles and to you about yours.
So, if we trust the puzzle-maker and stop listening to everyone else, we find that we are not only putting our puzzle together almost effortlessly, without relentlessly struggling to jam together pieces that don’t belong together, we’re also having a wonderful time trusting and getting to know the puzzle-maker.
Each person’s life is a unique puzzle that is only finished when we leave our earth bodies. It doesn’t matter if anyone else in the world can see that our picture is unfolding as it should or if they can see the complete picture when we’re done. It’s not their job to see it. It’s not even ours. It’s simply our job to put our puzzle together and we can either do it without guidance, guessing our way through or we can listen to the soft guiding voice of the puzzle-maker.
TRUST THAT THE PIECES WILL COME TOGETHER
I believe that everything in my life is working out for my good, for my highest benefit, so long as I don’t get impatient and try to force the pieces together before the Puzzle-Master tells me where to put them. People can say whatever they want, do whatever they want but as for me, I will follow my internal spiritual guidance system. I paraphrase what King David of Israel once said of his puzzle-maker, “What you say, your word, is a lamp that lights my path.” There are times when I don’t know exactly what I should wish for or ask for or which way to go, but if I wait, the answer comes. The indwelling I Am in me helps me with this weakness, asking for things so wonderful and deep that my natural mind hasn’t caught up just yet and it’s not even possible for me to speak or write those deepest desires with ordinary speech. Still, they are there and if I only follow the gentle guiding of my puzzle-maker, the whole picture unfolds, a piece at a time.
So, each of us has our own life path to walk, our own puzzle to complete. The puzzle-maker is constantly whispering to us “This piece goes here,” or “no, not there. Not yet.” It’s up to us to choose whether to listen and trust enough to follow the puzzle-maker’s guidance or not. There is never any force involved. If there is force, it’s not the puzzle-maker doing the forcing, it’s another person without a box lid, another person who can’t see the big, eternal picture. If we listen to those Spirit whispers and obey them, our life-puzzles go together so much easier.
As for me, I will live my life trusting the puzzle-maker to guide me in putting every piece into its proper place. If that brings people into my life, great. If that causes some people to walk out, it doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate them, or love them, it just means that my highest call is not to complete their puzzles, it’s to complete mine.
I COULD GIVE YOU a long list of my publications and bore you with a recount of my humble, meager awards and accolades, but you can go to my author page on amazon or on any one of the publishing house sites where my books are listed and learn those things. I think I would rather talk to you about the really important things, the things that qualify me to write about the things I write about. I’d rather talk to you about what my parents taught me about living.
I was born in the Appalachian foothills, one among seven children. We were so poor that we had no indoor plumbing, no phone and no central air or heat. I remember when eating wild game was our main source of meat. Then we got a cow, but she ran over a bluff and killed herself. After that, we took to raising hogs and leasing tobacco crops. My daddy also worked at a sawmill where he sawed hickory baseball bats. He did everything he could to feed us and Momma raised a big garden every year. We raised anything that would grow, even our own peanuts. I say we were poor but I never felt poor, not until someone told me that I was poor. I was like Dolly Parton in her song, “Coat of Many Colors’. “I felt rich as I could be.”
There were times when all my family had was each other and somehow, that was always enough. My parents taught us that love is the only thing of true value in this entire world and whatever is not of love, well, it’s not eternal. I have lived my mortal life in the light of immortality. We never believed in final good-byes, only “see you laters.” I recall a memory of one summer night when my parents were lying on a quilt on the hillside behind our house. We had no TV at the time and so we would play outside until dark and sometimes our parents would come outside and watch us from the hillside. This particular night I was talking about all the stuff that some of the kids at school had.
I can still hear my daddy’s voice saying, “If you ain’t got love, you ain’t got nothin’ in this life.”
Then Momma chimed in and said, “Money can buy you a lot of things, but money can’t buy real love. If you have love and family you have everything.”
Daddy said, “Remember that, Sis.”
My daddy was a storyteller and every night he’d gather us around the old aluminum kitchen table and spin his tales for us. He couldn’t read but he could remember and he had an imagination. He told stories that had been handed down from his grandfather and his childhood and he told stories that he made up. Each night I would be the last kid listening, begging for just one more story. My parents would have to make me go to bed. We had very few books, but we did have stories and then there was Momma’s sacred book, a high school literature book of poems by Edgar Allen Poe and short stories by O’Henry. I read those poems and I knew…knew with everything in me… that I was a poet, too. I started writing poetry on every thing that had a surface to write on, even my grandmother’s giant squash. I checked books out from the school library and read like there was no tomorrow. I fell in love with far away places and adventures. I loved stories written ones, spoken ones, sung ones…I just loved stories.
In the fifth grade the Gideons came to school and passed out little red New Testaments. It was the most special thing to me, my very own book full of stories. And in the back? Blank pages. I was certain that God himself had left those pages blank so that I could add my story to them. I took an ink pen and wrote an imagined story about my Great-great-grandpa crossing the Rio Grande and coming to the U.S. It was, of course, completely fabricated from Daddy’s tales and my imagination, but it didn’t matter. It was MY story. I think I was 9 years old at the time. But with the gift of a New Testament, a writer’s dream was born.
Momma believed in my dream. That Christmas we were so broke that it looked like we would get no presents at all. A charity group came to our house and brought gifts and fruit. I’ll always be grateful for that group, but Momma and Daddy wanted so much to get us something that they went to a loan company and borrowed a little money and that year when my siblings got toys, I got a college dictionary for Christmas. It was the greatest gift anyone has ever given me, because I knew that it had come with sacrifice and with hope. Momma said, “One day you’re going to go to college and make something out of yourself and you’re going to need to know all of these big words. I felt bad not getting you a toy, but I felt like that you would like this better.” I hugged that dictionary and thanked her for it.
A Bible and a dictionary in the same year. My future had been set in motion. Little did I realize that one day I truly would write my story and Daddy’s story and Momma’s story and maybe the story of a million other 9 year-old dreamers.
In the years to follow I held onto the dictionary. I still have it today. The cover wore off and I recovered it in discarded wallpaper. Eventually, even that wore off. If you were to visit my home and see that old book with no cover, you’d think maybe it was a piece of junk but it’s not. It’s a symbol of my mother’s hopes for me.
My mom left this world at 38, one month before I graduated high school. She never got to see me go to college and use the dictionary that she gave me to help me through my classes. She never got to see me win the Art scholarship that made it possible for me to go, never got to hear me play guitar or got to see her grandchildren. But she did see. She saw it when I was 9 and she used her today to plan for my tomorrow. Thank you, Momma. Your dreams carried me through until I could see my own dreams and your dauntless, unselfish love, made me want to impact the life of everyone I meet.
September,
my dear friend,
keeper of balance,
you always move faster
than other moons
or so it seems to me.
Maybe it is because
I am attached to you
and wish you to visit longer
each year. You share your beauty
goldenrods, iron weeds, black-eyed susans,
you who are of the nut gathering moon
I feel your anxiousness in the wind
and I know you are not one to sit
for long, so you must run,
swift like the deer.
My kitchen table doesn’t set level. It never has. Daddy made it with a chain saw and he couldn’t quite get the legs right. The nail heads are visible, not tiny furniture nails, but carpenter nails, the kind you would use to build a porch. Daddy couldn’t afford new nails, but he had some left over from an outbuilding he had built years ago. And he had a chain saw, an old one with a chain that often jumped, but he was thankful to have it. He had heard me say that I wished I had an old-fashioned table, so he made me one.
He presented it to me with a great sense of accomplishment one hot, dry day in the fall a few years ago. “It’s genuine cedar,” he said. I ran my hands over the pink and tan wood, feeling the marks left by his chain saw. “It’s a little wobbly,” he said. “I couldn’t get them legs right.”
“I love it,” I said. It was small and rugged, but it was also warm and rich and unique. I knew there would never be another table like it on this planet. It was individual as the man who had made it.
I discarded my store bought table, gave it away, and moved the one my daddy made into my kitchen. Through the years I’ve visited many nice homes, seen many exquisite tables, some marble top, others with satin finishes, some soft maple, others heavy oak. I have even thought about what it would be like to have such finery in my home, but those whimsical desires do not last. I have thought about moving my table to the basement or to a porch or some other less conspicuous corner of my home, but my heart immediately convicts me of my vanity. Daddy made that table with all the love a human can hold in his heart. No factory-made piece of furniture could ever stand in the most beloved room of my home, the center piece of so many family memories.
The table , with a chunk of wood under one leg and folded newspaper under another, has held Christmas pies and Thanksgiving turkeys. It has been the gathering place of Saturday morning french-banana pancake frenzies, held in my daughter’s honor, and the pedestal for Friday night pizzas. It’s where my husband and I share our coffee every day after work, where we speak of our trials and triumphs.
It has often served as our family alter and counseling center. It’s where my daughter’s wedding cake was decorated and where her dress was sewn. It’s where we annihilated each other in Trivia Pursuit and where many of my books, poems and songs have been written. Pictures have been painted on that table and stories have been told around it. It’s the source so of a hundred journal entries and the place where I meet my Creator every morning before my hectic day begins for quite time and coffee.
Sometimes I just run my hands over that table and think of the love that Daddy must have had to make it especially for me. The corners aren’t even. The cracks between the planks may be a little wide. There are knot holes and just plain holes, but that table testifies to me each day, reminding me that there has never been a time in my life when I haven’t known what it is liked to be loved, and it challenges me every day to go and live out my father’s legacy, to love someone the way I want to be loved.
It’s one a.m. and I’m still up. I should have gone to bed a few hours ago, but my best brain activity seems to kick in long after sunset, long after phones have stopped ringing and no one is apt to come to the door. In the wee hours of darkness there is a tremendous long stretch of solitude that lends itself to writing. I can’t say what I look like the next day or what time I’ll want to roll out of bed, and I know that in about three weeks, I’ll have to stop all of this staying up until the roosters crow. I’ll be back at my day job, but in the meantime, I write at night, just because….
When Senor Cortez cried
beneath the tree, wept
for greedy soldiers
whose stolen gold sank
into brackish waters;
what destiny brought
him back upon us
to kill with disease,
with hunger and canons
except the fate that brought
Mexico to these far hills
where she learned to sing
Irish ballads.
I did something the other day that shocks me as I look back on it. I tried to convince a co-worker through my speech, dress and actions, that I was just ordinary and average. I went out of my way with my words to assure her that there was nothing “weird” about me, that I was as “down to earth” and “average” as anyone could ever be. Well, in one sense of the word I suppose that was true. I mean I do wear clothes, eat food, sleep and do other normal things, but in another sense of the word, I lied, to her and to myself. I’m not average and I’ve never been ordinary. I have always marched slightly off-beat and been rather individualistic, but not necessarily on purpose. I just grew up a little sheltered, a child of nature, communing more easily with bugs and trees and rocks than with people. So, there are a good many social cues and rules that I have been oblivious to for most of my life. And even now, as I learn them, they feel fake and somehow wrong to me, like wearing plastic underwear might feel. That evening when I got home, I pondered our conversation and felt a sudden wave of nausea. I went out of my way to convince her that I was not “weird”. Why? I don’t know. But I was disappointed in myself because of it.
However, as I pondered it, I realized that unless some of us run the risk of being weird, of doing things differently, no new discoveries will take flight, inventions will be stifled, societal wrongs will remain unquestioned and all that is beautiful and unique will be lost in the status quo, in the rising tide of mediocrity. I don’t want to be mediocre. I want to be excellent, not rich, not famous. Just excellent. I want to look in the mirror each morning with a clear conscience that I lived not for fame, acceptance or materialistic gain, but I lived by what I perceived to be right according to the laws of the spirit world, that I was guided my entire life by a code of honor. It doesn’t matter if the rest of the world recognizes my code of ethics, accepts them or honors them. It only matters that I am true to them, because otherwise my life would be fake and I would have impacted no one to make a choice. What kind of a choice? A choice to either aspire to greatness or settle for mediocrity. I don’t want to be mediocre, not in my life, not in my choices, not in my heart. I don’t want to believe every thing the voices of this world tell me are true. Voices lie. Humans lie. Religions lie. I want an immovable standard that cannot lie. I want an eternal code of spiritual conduct that does not cease to exist.
So, I will not always be politically correct. I may not be philosophically correct, theologically accurate or idealistically compatible with every person who comes across my blog. I may loose readership, I may gain readership. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that I will have been true to my heart and spoken of what I know. If in the future I discover I am wrong, then I will change, but so long as no proof can sway me, then I shall remain steadfast. I remember the old Latin saying, “Tibi ipsi esto fidelis”, loosely translated, “To thine ownself be true.”
Sometimes, after a day of correcting, of disciplining and instructing, of guiding and showing, this hawk’s wings are laden with mud from too
many days of rain, from too much time on the ground.
I become still. I listen
to Sarah’s songs, to Susan’s melodies, to violins and mountain ballads, to Native flutes, wind in the grass, birds in the trees, to water and penny whistles.
The sludge looses its power, slips from my wings and I feel the breeze, the lift. Always, it is the music
that gives me wings.
A post to honor a special person, Jeanne Penn Lane of Gravel Switch, Kentucky.
Last year I was invited by a friend to ride out to Penn’s Store in Gravel Switch, Kentucky, to meet with Jeanne Penn Lane, owner and operator of what is possibly the oldest, still operational country store in the U.S. 
A family of Labradors met me as I stepped up on the same planks that the talented Chet Atkins had once stepped upon as if he were visiting a cousin. Inside, dry goods lined shelves, t-shirts hung on the walls, an old cooler full of ‘cold drinks’ sat near the door and Jeanne Penn Lane came from behind the tall wooden counter to greet me as if I were somebody special.
That’s just Jeanne’s way. She makes everybody feel special. She has stood on the stage with greats in country music and bluegrass. She has hugged renowned artists, poets and novelists. Still, Jeanne has a humility and grace that baffles the mind and makes you love her right off the bat. And, I suppose it’s the thing that causes me to feel indebted to Jeanne, she believes in Kentucky’s artists, writers and musicians. She believes in us so much that each year she hosts a marvelous event called Kentucky Writer’s Day where we all take turns sharing the poems we’ve written, singing the songs we’ve composed or reading from that novel we’re working on. I have met some of the most wonderful people at Kentucky Writer’s Day, people who remain my friends via facebook and email, all through the year and not just in April when the annual event is held, kind people, good people, like Sarah Elizabeth Burkey, whose music is more haunting that mist filled knobs surrounding Penn Store. I could mention so many fabulous songwriters who attend, like Dawn Osborne. Her voice is powerful and amazing.
And then there are notables and greats such as Ed McClanahan and Dr. H.R. Stoneback who always hails from New York with the Elizabeth Maddox Roberts Society of Poets.
Last year, May 2010, Penn Store suffered severe damage from a flood. We all despaired that the end of Penn Store and Kentucky Writer’s Day might be at hand, but Dr. Stoneback and his society of poets joined forces with writers from around the country and around the world. They compiled a book of poetry about Penn’s Store. All proceeds from this book go to the restoration of Penn’s Store.
If you ever happen to be passing through Danville, Kentucky or Lebanon or Liberty, stop and ask someone how to get to Old Penn Store in Gravel Switch. And while you’re there, drop a few coins in the jar to support Jeanne’s ongoing efforts to give creative Kentuckians a platform to share their works and their hearts. And if you happen to be passing through in April, maybe you’ll just join us, sit on the porch and pick a tune with us, or maybe read that poem you’ve been hiding for the past ten years.
I heard this song performed this weekend and I was so touched by it. I know it’s been around awhile, but it’s message is still as clear today as ever. This earth is our RESPONSIBILITY and has been since the first time Adam stuck his big toe in the mud:)
To Listen, click the title 🙂
PARADISE by John Prine
C F C
When I was a child my family would travel
C G C
Down to Western Kentucky where my parents were born
C F C
And there’s a backwards old town that’s often remembered
C G C
So many times that my memories are worn.
C F C
And daddy won’t you take me back to Muhlenberg County
C G C
Down by the Green River where Paradise lay
C F C
Well, I’m sorry my son, but you’re too late in asking
C G C
Mister Peabody’s coal train has hauled it away
Well sometimes we’d travel right down the Green River
To the abandoned old prison down by Adrie Hill
Where the air smelled like snakes and we’d shoot with our pistols
But empty pop bottles was all we would kill.
And daddy won’t you take me back to Muhlenberg County
Down by the Green River where Paradise lay
Well, I’m sorry my son, but you’re too late in asking
Mister Peabody’s coal train has hauled it away
Then the coal company came with the world’s largest shovel
And they tortured the timber and stripped all the land
Well, they dug for their coal till the land was forsaken
Then they wrote it all down as the progress of man.
And daddy won’t you take me back to Muhlenberg County
Down by the Green River where Paradise lay
Well, I’m sorry my son, but you’re too late in asking
Mister Peabody’s coal train has hauled it away
When I die let my ashes float down the Green River
Let my soul roll on up to the Rochester dam
I’ll be halfway to Heaven with Paradise waiting
Just five miles away from wherever I am.
And daddy won’t you take me back to Muhlenberg County
Down by the Green River where Paradise lay
Well, I’m sorry my son, but you’re too late in asking
Mister Peabody’s coal train has hauled it away
Just one more, in honor of my dad. He could play this like nobody else. It was his favorite “non-gospel” song, reserved for family get-togethers and other kinds of shindigs.
For Daddy:
For over a year my daddy has battled lung cancer and liver cancer. He has been brave and forgiving and kind throughout the whole ordeal. Thursday morning he departed from this world. I had the blessing of being with him during his final moments, as did my brothers and sisters. I have so many thing I want to say about him, that I want the world to know. So, I post this in honor of my dad and I hope that everyone who reads will identify and remember someone who loved you and made a difference in your life.
Quotes from my dad.
“It don’t matter if you got money or things. What matters is that you got family and that you stick together. That you love each other. Without love, the rest is a big fat zero.”
— William Henry Franklin
“I’m gonna tell you something. People say a lot of things. It don’t matter what people say. It just matters what God says.”
—William Henry Franklin
A Verse He Loved:
1 John 5:13 (King James Version)
13These things have I written unto you that believe on the name of the Son of God; that ye may know that ye have eternal life, and that ye may believe on the name of the Son of God.
My dad and I read and discussed this Bible verses many times over the past year. It was probably his favorite verse, proving that his favorite story, that of the Prodigal Son, was a reality. John also says in another place, “He that hath the Son hath life…” my daddy knew this and it was his desire that everyone else know it, too.
My dad took me on my first fishing trip. He took me to the doctor when I had the measles and Momma had to stay home with the other kids, because there were so many of us. He sat with me for over an hour in the doctor’s office and held my hair when I vomited on the waiting room floor. I was five.
My dad took me to school on my first day of first grade. He walked me to the gym and told me everything would be okay. He held my hand, and I didn’t want to let go of him. I didn’t want to enter that strange new world.
My dad came and rescued me from a 4-H meeting when I was ten. He found me sitting in the corner, a poor little outcast, while the other kids who were members of a “click” totally ignored me. He said, “Sis, you’re not coming back. They’re not treating you right. You’re too good for that.” He believed in me, more than my peers, more than my teachers. And I wanted to throw my arms around him and tell him that he was my hero, but he was driving us home, so I couldn’t.
My dad taught me that the only safe place in the face of a tornado was in the arms of Jesus. I remember watching him pray when the weather forecast said a storm was coming and our basement was full of water. He prayed and I knew God heard him.
My dad taught me that family sticks up for each other when he confronted the school bus driver who refused to come all the way up to the house and get us in the midst of winter due to ‘legalities’. When my dad was done with the bus driver, those legalities were negotiable.
My dad taught me that you can’t get to heaven holding a grudge when he forgave someone who had clearly wronged and hurt him.
You may have known my dad for his humor, of which he had plenty, but I knew him as an embodiment of honor and integrity. If he made you a promise, there was no contract needed. He would perform what he had said. He believed in family and said some bonds are forever. He knew he loved my momma from the moment he saw her. He was willing to go to the ends of life itself to prove it. His greatest wish was that all of his children and grandchildren, brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, cousins, aunts and uncles would come to know Jesus and his last words before he left this temporal realm were, “Love God”.
My father taught me that life isn’t about what you get, but rather what you give. Success isn’t a number in your bank account, but rather it’s the number of lives you’ve blessed, souls you’ve touched. He told me countless times that hearses are not accompanied by u-halls and that the only thing a man takes out of this world is what he brings into it. He brought love and light into it. He brought forgiveness and compassion. He found a reason to see the good in people no one else could see the good in. He believed that Jesus meant it when he said that God is love and we should love one another.
When I told him that I wanted to give away all the money from the sales of my book to fighting cancer and that I wanted to do it in his name, he said that he was honored. There are a lot of people who live their lives worried over the amount of land, houses and money they can acquire, but I say that a life not measured int he things given away, is a life of loneliness and bitterness. My dad was the most successful man I know and he left this world richer than all the kings of this world throughtout all of the ages combined.
He said to me when I was just a little girl, “Sis, money and things don’t mean nothing if you ain’t got love. Love and family. That’s what counts.”
Skip the ad Carpe Diem
Note to self: THIS DAY, FOLLOW YOUR HEART AND BE TRUE TO YOUR CALL.
Carolyn Arends is a very talented and soulful artist. This video is of one of my favorite songs.
Since childhood, I have had the overwhelming sensation that the physical world is not the real world, but more like a stop at a tourist center along the journey to someplace far more wonderful. I used to sit in my swing as a little girl and look up into the clouds. I had never been to church at the time, nor had I received any spiritual teaching, per se. Yet, I knew, was convinced at my very core, that there was more to life than I could see or hear. It was like I had amnesia and had forgotten something important that I once knew. I tried to draw this other place, but I could never quite get it right. Once as a child I did a painting a cemetery with spiritual [they looked kind of like angels] beings above a cloud barrier. I was trying to show that other place which haunted me in my dreams, that stayed in my mind. My mother told me that my painting was morbid, yet that picture comforted me.
As an adult I came to the conclusion that I had been right all along. I became convinced that we are truly spiritual beings, but are momentarily in a physical vehicle, that allows us to travel about while we are on visitation to this physical realm. I think of an old gospel song I heard as a teenager, “This world is not my home, I’m just a passing through. My treasures are laid up somewhere beyond the blue.” So, true. That is exactly how I feel, how I have felt my entire life. I am a foreigner in this temporal reality. I’m from some place else. One of these days I will go home again, but in the meantime, I’m on a mission here. I have to leave my drop in the ocean, follow my bliss, be true to my calling. Define it with whatever terms you like, but I know that my life has a purpose and I must be true to that purpose and part of that purpose is to encourage others to be still, hear their hearts, seek God and live according to their purpose.
Everything in nature has a purpose and teaches us that all things have a purpose, so why not us? So, today I encourage you, if there is music in your heart, set it free. If there is a dance in your soul, give it legs. If there are words in you spirit, write them down. If you long to heal, set out on a course to become a doctor or a nurse. If you have the gift to lead and inspire, consider teaching. There is a purpose for your natural bent. Your desire may be the confirmation of the destination. Do not compare yourself to those the world declares successful. I do not have a best seller, but I am a successful writer, because I write what is in my heart and I give the money from my work to the causes I believe in. Success does not always equal fame and fortune. In the world where I’m from success means you have followed your heart and heard from spirit.