A blessing-filled Friday to you and yours!

 

Anthony Brown/Blessings On Blessings (The B.O.B. Bounce) (Official Video)

 

JD Snell: I'm Drinking From My Saucer

 

Goodness of God-Cece Winans Lyrics

Just click on the box where it says "Youtube" and it will work just fine.

 

May God bless you with discomfort...

 

A Summer Solstice Blessing

It's the midsummer's evening, the shortest of night,

Where our planet is blessed with the greatest of light.

The sun at its power, sharing its wealth,

With the earth glowing in abundance and health.

The trees' leaves are green, the birds are in song.

The days are as warm as they are long.

We honor the animals, the plants and living things,

The sun and the water and for the life that it brings.

May you find well-being and may you find peace,

In days after solstice, as the light does decrease.

May the blessings of solstice be yours, I pray,

And the light warm your heart and soul every day.  

 

Random Notes To Believers & People Who Struggle To Believe

 

PJ Morton, Zacardi Cortez & Darrel Walls Sing "So In Love" & "All In His Plan" | Super Bowl Gospel

 

"Never lose an opportunity of seeing anything beautiful, for beauty is God's handwriting."---Part One

"Never lose an opportunity of seeing anything beautiful, for beauty is God's handwriting."---Ralph Waldo Emerson

This is Part One. Part Two is here.

I'm going to try to write about a few people---artists, really---in the most caring way that I can. I don’t know these people, and I’m not sure that I’m up to the task of writing clearly about them in the terms that I want to use, that come most naturally to me. And I don’t want to be sentimental here, but I do want to honor them and something of their lives, their parts of something much bigger than we are that runs through their lives.

The first people who I want to mention are the Joe Mullins and the Radio Ramblers band. I don’t know how I missed them for so many years. They’re a pretty well-known bluegrass band and they do lots of bluegrass gospel, but I just found out about them last week. Their “Readin’, Writin’, Route 23” tells a story held in the hearts of the hundreds of thousands of people who left Appalachia and the South between the 1930s and the early 1970s. Many of them took U.S. Route 23 north, but they also took it south on weekends and holidays. If that was all that the band had done I would still be a fan, but the instrumental work on their ”O-Hio” and the vocals they manage in “Will the Circle Be Unbroken” touch me. I think that they will touch you, too.

Now as we go a little deeper the writing gets a little more complicated.

J.R. Shuck is a painter living in West Virginia. All I know about J.R. is what is said on J.R.’s flickr page: their hometown is Weyanoke, West Virginia in Mercer County; J.R. is a retired artist who still paints; they attended Matoaka High School, and Bluefield State College in West Virginia; J.R. has a Master of Fine Arts degree from Syracuse University in New York; and, if you want J.R. to paint something or somebody you can get on a list and expect to wait.

This is his painting of Pageton, West Virginia. Pageton is in McDowell County not far from the West Virginia-Virginia state line, and you can get to North Carolina and Kentucky pretty easily from there. In fact, I think that you can get to U.S. Route 23 with a little time but not much trouble. I was surprised to find that Pageton has a Wikipedia entry and that it tells us that Pageton has less and 200 people. It’s poor, but it isn’t the poorest community in the region. 

I want to recommend that everyone visit J.R.’s flickrpage here and study what you’re looking at. Study and feel what you see there. Most of the paintings will give you insight into the lives of others and where they live. Ask yourself how you would be different if you lived in one of those places or if the people in those paintings were your kin or neighbors. What would you say to them if you ran into them at the store or at church? Can you worry a little bit about those soldiers or coal miners? Do those children make you smile, and do you worry for those old people?

I don’t know much about art. I barely know what I like in art. But I do think that good art invites you in and teaches you something about the bigger world while it also represents your lived experiences. It doesn’t so much tell you that you’re on the right track and that everything will be fine so much as it helps you see yourself and your experiences from a different point of view and helps you to make changes.

Now, there is a lot of discussion about what a “holler” is and the best place to sort this out is in the pages of The Mountain Eagle newspaper, published in Whitesburg, KY. and one of the better newspapers in the United States. According to an article that ran in the newspaper on May 23, 2018 a holler is between two mountains but “too narrow to be a valley.” And he goes on to say:

A holler has a head and a mouth. The head is as far as you can go, and the mouth is where the creek runs into a larger stream of water. 

A holler can have houses spaced out on both sides of the road. You can ‘holler’ from one house to the other to tell the latest news. It may have several branches of forks. 

A holler may have a small grocery store at its mouth, and if you see someone walking to the store, give them some money and your list and they will bring your groceries back with them. Or, let them check your mail… 

You knew everyone living in the holler. It may be a few hundred yards long, or more than a mile from the mouth to the head. 

If your girlfriend lived up in the holler, everyone knew what time you went in and what time you went out, because their dogs would bark at you as you passed their house. 

A holler is a place where you can sit on your front porch in the cool of a spring day and hear a whip-poorwill symphony. Then Old Uncle John would get out his fiddle (not to be confused with a violin) and play until he got tired, his music echoing all over the holler. 

A holler is a place where the sun comes up late and sets early. After the sun sets, it’s still a couple of hours before it gets dark. 

It’s a place where you can let your young’uns, dog, cat and chickens run loose in the yard. 

A holler is a place where the kids can build a dam in the creek and have a good place to cool off and play. 

A holler is a good place to live, raise your young’uns, and have fun. It’s a place where the mountains are your playground. 

I think that’s good poetry, and I think that you can see that and feel it in some of J.R.’s paintings. 

I never lived in a holler but I did spend lots of time in patches and patch towns. One of my great aunts lived in a coal patch and her brothers lived a short distance up the road from her. The house that my father was born in and that his grandparents both died in was across the road. Back in the 1930s there was a family fight that no one would talk about or could remember the reason for, but every day for the next 40 years or so my great-aunt and my great-uncles passed on another without speaking. And if you went to visit my great-uncles at night and stepped into their shack you just saw two glowing pipes in the dark because they didn’t have electricity. I didn’t know that my great-aunt had full indoor plumbing until after she died because everyone used the outhouse. The mine that my family worked in was there--the place where my great-aunt’s husband had been killed and where my great-grandfather became an invalid. This was where my grandmother and her brothers met hoboes while they walked the railroad tracks to school and where they got stories that they told me. 

The houses up there were split, with two families in one big house divided in the middle. The family that lived next to my great-aunt would fight a great deal and throw dishes. They would break the supposedly unbreakable Correlle dishes and get new ones from the company after they returned the pieces. The year I was born there were terrible storms and my great-uncles got out some feed corn for the deer and put it out on the road. People were so poor and hungry that they came out in the snow and picked up the corn to eat. Hollers and patches are full of stories and memories. 

My point to here is that J.R. Shuck and Joe Mullins and the Radio Ramblers are telling you stories in their different ways. I hope that we can all slow down a bit and listen to one another’s stories and tell stories of our own. You know, I don’t care if a story is true in an all of its details. What I do care about is that someone is trying to tell someone else a tale that is important to them, that has meaning to them. I put coon hunting aside a long time ago, and I would never do that again, but coon hunters had story-telling down to an art, and a good story from a coon hunter painted a picture in your mind.

Read Part Two here.

 

"Never lose an opportunity of seeing anything beautiful, for beauty is God's handwriting."---Part Two

This is the second of a two-part series. Read Part One Here.

Now I want to ramp things up a little.

I don’t know Ms. Virginia Lee or that wonderful-looking couple she took photographs of recently, but I do wish that I knew them and lived close by them. There are scores of stories in her photography. Virginia Lee is self-taught---you would not know this from looking at her work---and what comes across most to me as I look at her photography is that there are real people there, that she’s standing at a line between documenting people’s lives and giving them and their families something to hold on to. She’s documenting people’s lives even when they dress up and pose because that’s part of life and there is a story behind that photograph of how they got to that point and what it means to them.

And there is more. In these photographs you see a handsome mine worker after work, a loving couple, and a beautiful woman. You also see a contrast between work and something else---but what is that “something else” that holds your gaze? There is wisdom, hope, and faith in the unknown there. Virginia Lee is showing a kind of contradiction between two forces, but she’s resolving that contradiction by showing abiding love. I friended the woman in the photographs on Facebook and I see that she is a healthcare worker in West Virginia and that she’s full of commonsense, has strong ties to her family and her community, and will stand up for what she thinks is right. So, whatever the story of romance and love that we’re seeing is, we’re also seeing a story of modern-day Appalachia that contradicts every stereotype that is out there.

Where does this self-taught art of creatively bringing forward beauty and stories come from? Ms. Lee wrote me that she lives and works “in the coalfields in SouthWest Virginia.... Tazewell County, Richlands VA......right on the border of WV.” and that she “had many coal miners in my family and I'm originally from McDowell County, WV.”. So here again we have someone creating from what they know and evidently love, treating their place and people with respect and compassion and reminding the world of our shared humanity. You can visit with her at https://www.facebook.com/vleephoto and maybe arrange for her to do some work with you. I hope that you will.

I have a box full of photographs of family members and their friends that were taken 70-110 years ago, mostly all unsmiling people who were weighed down by work and daily struggles or who just weren’t used to having their photographs taken. They’re even wearing long dresses and suits on the beach. My grandmother, her father’s favorite of 7 children, stands with her hand on her father’s shoulder, the family stiff and formal except for the impish look in my great-uncle Max’s eyes in one family photograph. My great-aunt Celeste is almost gaunt, just a slip of a girl who looks hungry and needy. What saves this photograph from being just another slightly-out-of-focus photograph of a coalfield family is that the photograph was taken after a long strike that the mine workers mostly won and that everyone in the photograph except my grandmother would have nearly impossible and difficult lives and die way too young.

A few years back I went to another country knowing that I was stepping into a dangerous political situation. A friend of mine and I went to a professional photographer before I left because I wanted to record something in case I didn’t make it back. When we look at photographs of mine workers and healthcare workers, we need to remember the dangers of their jobs and we need to celebrate the joys they’re capturing on film. I wish that a Virginia Lee had been around 100 years ago. We need the Virginia Lees. They’re a blessing to us.

I want to say a good word before I close about the Reconnecting McDowell organization because we always need people helping people in the Appalachian regions, that area where all of the good people mentioned above live and work and call home. The official description of Reconnecting McDowell is that they are “a comprehensive, long-term effort to make educational improvement in McDowell County the route to a brighter economic future. Partners from business, foundations, government, nonprofit agencies, and labor have committed, in a signed covenant, to seeking solutions to McDowell’s complex problems—poverty, underperforming schools, drug and alcohol abuse, housing shortages, limited medical services, and inadequate access to technology and transportation.” 

They have lots of projects going on: 

·         GoGrowcery—a mobile farmers market that takes local produce to various stops in this 535-square-mile food desert

·         Broader Horizons—a mentorship and experiential learning program for high school juniors that helps them navigate the post-high school world and takes them on trips to Charleston and Washington DC

·         Make it Shine McDowell—our countywide litter cleanup program with a coalition membership including everyone from Wobblies to Mormons

·         Maier Scholarships—presented to selected high school graduates so they can attend higher ed in WV

·         Early reading initiatives—book giveaways, working in schools, working with other groups to provide reading materials, especially during the summer

·         Friends of the Tug Fork River—a watershed group we helped form to improve water and make the river available for recreation and economic development

·         Music programming—hosting events at the Caffrey Arts Center featuring a combination of local and regional talent

·         Wrap-around services in schools—including Smiles, a program for dental care, and work with the Communities in Schools Initiative

·         Renaissance Village—our new building, the first commercial structure in Welch in more than 50 years

I like all of that, and I’m feeling good that I sent Reconnecting McDowell a contribution today, but I also know a guy who works there who I think is just one-half-step this side of the angels. I know that Reconnecting McDowell recently organized a trash pick-up, and I know that that may not sound like a big deal. But try thinking about it this way: people throw trash out of their cars or dump garbage by the roadsides and in the hollers because they no longer feel ownership of their place or responsibility to their people and their environment. We call this “alienation.” So, when people do the opposite and do take responsibility for their communities and environment something good is happening. Something big is taking place. A spirit is moving in the land and in the people.

Think about those folks dumping trash with this in mind:

The history that Joe Mullins and the Radio Ramblers, J.R. Shuck, Ms. Virginia Lee, and that good-looking couple above show us isn’t half-done yet, although it took 300 million years for that beautiful black coal to form. Every day we have a choice to make about going forward or backward, and I believe that Reconnecting McDowell, Appalachian Voices, the Black Lung Association, the United Mine Workers of America, radio station WMMT, the Appalachian Citizens' Law Center, The Mountain Eagle, and other similar efforts are blessing us with their work and presence and shining their headlamps in the right direction.

She really is receiving a blessing...

 

"Just when things seem to be stuck in a downward spiral, a sudden updraft lifts us to a whole new direction. Just when it looks like hope has walked out the front door, in walks a fresh supply through the back door. "

 

"The Spirit is the master of the unexpected. Just when things seem to be stuck in a downward spiral, a sudden updraft lifts us to a whole new direction. Just when it looks like hope has walked out the front door, in walks a fresh supply through the back door. Change is the infinite number of small changes that takes us to different places, places we may not have found on our own. They give us renewed energy and fresh perspective. Love’s interventions are the timely blessings we have prayed for, but not expected until they surprise us with grace."---The Rt. Rev. Steven Charleston of the Native American/Indigenous Ministries of the Episcopal Church

An Apache Blessing

From the Ravenous Butterflies Facebook page:

“May the sun bring you new energy by day, may the moon softly restore you by night, may the rain wash away your worries, may the breeze blow new strength into your being, may you walk gently through the world and know it’s beauty all the days of your life.”

Apache Blessing

Interfaith Greetings this Holy Week

 

Blessings and thankfulness

 

Encouragement for Ramadan

Encouragement for Ramadan and Xadidja - "Allah Allahu"

 

Xadidja - Allah Allahu

For the animals who bless us with their presence in our lives...

 

I ceaselessly knock at Thy door

 

Ramadan Kareem!