Category: Free yourself

Call this a poem if you dare

Dance, words, dance! Pick a melody and a rhythm and fly across the page like a seagull so high all we register is the squawk and the rattle of the redwing’s challenge here below — Mine! Mine! All I survey belongs to me, it is mine and no other, and I share it with you from the goodness of my very special heart.

Fly, words, fly! All of space and time belong to you; even when the words aren’t sufficient to speak the beauty, there are words to describe when words fail, those awestruck moments when there’s nothing to say except there’s nothing to say.

A picture may show more than a thousand words can say, but the words can say what the picture cannot, the picture only shows what is, the words show what it feels like. The words say why they feel like dancing and flying.

I am frozen in time like that moment a half-century ago when I taught myself how to play someone else’s song and I made the music that came out of the radio using my own fingers — I am frozen in time like that moment I held a girl’s hand for the first time — I am frozen in time like that moment my lips touched another pair of lips and I knew why they say it’s electric because I felt the shock of recognition — another human touching me touching you and we are together literally and figuratively we fit together like we were designed to do this.

I am frozen in time, only my fingers moving slowly across the page scrawling words that are between my ears (some of them, anyway, the ones I remember long enough to write them down) and shouting across time to a moment when someone sees the words and hears my voice inside their head except it’s my words and their voice or their imperfect recollection of the timber of my voice approximating.

I am frozen in time and maybe in years to come I will remember the evergreen behind the naked branches behind the vehicles that passed on the highway behind the old highway behind the rocking chair on the porch on the other side of the window next to the stairs to the basement behind the bookcase with the dinosaur Mary gave me across the room behind the open door to the room where I am sitting frozen in time.

It is twelve minutes past three on Tuesday, April 14,2026, and I have frozen the moment here on this page to be transmitted across space and time to another soul in another moment somewhere else. Hello! And now it’s two minutes later, no, three, because that’s how long it took me to write this paragraph by hand.

Such a slow dance, now 20 minutes and more since I started scrawling, and yet the words hurry by as the reader reads. And how many images and sounds and aromas have I experienced that scrambled past so quickly I could never write them all down even if I remembered them all? So much to see and to say, and the words are inadequate, yet somehow suggest there was so much more in the moment. And that, I suppose, is for you to unravel.

Beyond the muddle

We make our plans, we set our goals, and then we muddle through, or at least we muddle along. But it does not have to be an aimless muddling if we can help it, and, darn it all, we can help it. We can make differences in our lives.

We are not watching a movie that does not change no matter how many times we watch it. We are living our lives, and while we can be assured God is at the controls, most of the day-to-day and moment-by-moment decisions are up to us.

By this time next year, I will weigh 40 pounds less, I will walk or perhaps even run with little effort or pain, I will get a proper night’s sleep, and my work will be known to a broader audience. (I love the two-dozen or so of you who read this every morning, but it is, after all, only about 25 readers no matter how much I love you.) More important, it will be work that aims to bring people together in a spirit of love and peace.

Those, at least, are my goals. They have actually been my stated goals for some time, but here I am, weighing only two pounds less than a year ago, limping along, getting up twice a night, appreciating the handful of people who come to see what madness I am spouting this morning, and moving through a wilderness where it seems sometimes love and peace may never settle among us.

A guy gets tired of muddling along, however, and eventually we realize that changing the world takes conscious decisions day to day, moment by moment. 

And so, peace on Earth, good will toward humans, no thanks I’ll pass on that doughnut, I’m turning off the TV now because I have to be up at 5, and by this time tomorrow I’ll be writing, if the good Lord wills.

And maybe I’ll even be encouraging you to buy one of my books and give it to a friend when you’re finished reading. 

Doxology

I found myself Sunday afternoon wondering about the origins of the familiar short hymn we sing at the end of worship service and the people who wrote it.

Praise God from whom all blessing flow;
Praise Him, all creatures here below;
Praise Him above, ye heavenly host;
Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.

My brief search at brittanica.com led me to the following.

The words come from Thomas Ken, who was Anglican Bishop of Bath and Wells from about 1685 to about 1691 and served as royal chaplain to King Charles II. He had a falling out with Charles’ successor, James II — long story short, over religious differences — that led to Ken spending some time in the Tower Of London and put on trial for sedition along with six other bishops. They were subsequently acquitted.

Despite that ordeal, Ken remained loyal to James and, when the king fled the country and William and Mary were crowned monarchs, Ken refused to swear allegiance to the new regime and was deprived of his office. “He spent the remaining 20 years of his life in retirement.”

The music is from the Genevan Psalter, a hymnal initiated by John Calvin in 1539 and published in a complete edition in 1562. The 150 Psalms were translated into French and set to music by Loys Bourgeois, Calude Goudimel and others. Bourgeois gets top billing because he’s responsible for about 85 of the melodies.

Bourgeois spent a day in jail, charged with the horrendous crime of tampering with the accepted Psalm tunes without authorization. Calvin got him out, and the alterations were eventually approved.

What struck me, besides the fact that the melody is more than 450 years old and the Doxology has been sung for more than 300 years, is that both of the men spent time behind bars for the manner in which they chose to praise God. It’s a reminder why the Founders of the new nation forbade Congress from prohibiting the free exercise of religion as the first tenet in the First Amendment to their Constitution.