Kamuli Road

  It is Sunday morning. We are making the hour long drive up to our children’s home near Kamuli. It’s become a “village” of 230 children. I’m in the company of three companions and a driver. We want to join the Sunday service especially today because the kids will be given the reigns to lead it. The road that takes us there is rough, The irony is while it leads there, it’s so damaged it seems equally to stand between us and them.

  It’s a fresh morning. Fresh meaning, the smoke haze that has permeated the dry season has given permission for some sky blue hope to translucently bode optimism. An optimism amplified by three young girls treading the edges of the road, resplendent in clean yellow jumpers against black skin greeting the morning. It’s all dew and puppy fur and the first box of crayons in grammar school.

  Life along the road is flied with small mundane stories and the occasional drama. While turning into a station to get petrol, we notice a small crowd of young men chasing down and beating a hapless thief. Passers by just join in for some mob justice. James, our sports director says, ”Gang justice will kill him.” There’s flying Kung Fu kicks now. I shout “Hey!” with my ailing bullfrog voice, hoping it conveys enough authority to put a semicolon in the midst of this torturous sentence. The words fall to the bottom of the pond.  Two men finally take charge and haul the disheveled, torn shirt fellow away. They mercifully fend off the Kung Fu guys with Chuck Norris stares. There is a particular communal hatred for a thief caught (the thief getting away with it cleverly may evoke a different set of thoughts as anyone who has tried to do business or projects in this part of the world). To yell “Stop thief” may abate a life.

  We fill with petrol and settle in for the crumbling tarmac. As I said, the road is poor. The road edges are jagged and drop of onto red soil shoulders where pedestrian traffic predominates. The tarmac when barely intact along it’s breath, hardly supports the passing of two vehicles. If you hold your breath, the passing goes easier. Trucks, transport vehicles and private cars dominate over boda boda motorcycles, then comes bicyclists laden with people, long bundles of firewood or the yellow plastic jugs of water

and finally the walking and waiting masses. The pecking order of the road is rigid and failure to give way to the larger would result in injury or death. The concept of rights of pedestrians would be laughable here.

  Moving along, the red dust has settled in on this inland artery of heart and the beat of thousands of feet and tires jarring along. You want to wash the green foliage along the edges to be free of this dust, to blend it somehow with the bluing sky. You pray again for rain knowing that January is not the season. Inside a deeper force is working, I am too aware of our own soiling injustices going on at our children’s village. Why so much dust cast on our children at risk, especially when we have determined our village to be a safe place, far off the tarmac’s beatings? So the rain prayer stands. “What can we do without God in this nation or any other nation?” I hear the discussion yesterday with Kateh, Ugandan born, our teacher and friend, her seer gifting peers through the sifting particles to a hope and future.

  Beyond the twenty foot dust band is greenery, locally fired brick and cement daubed homes, a cow is loose in a piece of passing forest, the yellow water jugs parade by on bikes and balanced heads and young banana plants promise matoke on some plastic plates in some future evening. I think of having to pass through this dust barrier to the other side and don’t want to imagine the soiling of my clean clothes. It’s Sunday and I want to stay in sunlight and stay somehow innocent a while longer like the yellow dressed girls. The dust is too much like the street boys who accost you in town, or men with red eyes in filthy, torn shirts drunk on cheap waragi or the occasional mad man who walks in the middle of roads unwashed, mumbling and alone.

  I am sick with an upper respiratory something and my lower digestional tract flows better than these tires that bear us. Sleep in the vehicle is impossible with bang of tires against pothole, speed bumps and road edge. In and out of focus, I half record mentally the goings on outside with drifting prayer. “Build the highway. Make the way plain...send your rain.”

  We finally reach the children’s village. James was brought along with us to restore him to village life. He was “chased off “ by a bad break in the tarmac, the results of jealousy.

Confusion and every evil work that the apostle James said would happen, did. The children pour out of the church to greet him. They love James. He’s the sports organizer. Bigger than that, he’s a father in a vacuum of guileless fathers. They are rare like a smooth stretch of tar into the future.

  We enjoy the show as James gets his mob welcome. A teenage girl in crisp white blouse hurls herself airborne into his arms. This is why we care for children at risk.

  I like the other whites have our own coterie of children lining up for hugs. Make straight the highway. “Good to see you...I love you...You look so good...Bless you so much”, and the dust slowly washes.

  An older “mama” – a caregiver grips me in a tearful embrace. She’s buried in my chest praying. I’m never quite sure of this woman’s motives but I know I am a father. I fill holes in hearts and try to lessen the transition of rough edges until the pavement becomes whole. I know she lost a husband to war and he never returned. Presumed dead but the years passed and no resolution. Meanwhile she had a baby growing in the belly and he eventually was birthed onto this rough tarmac of life. No dad. No husband. I opt to catch like James.

  The mama is here to be safe, to be loved to life and to be a road to others. I hold her longer than I am normally comfortable in my natural self, offering my strength, filling holes and I can’t caress her kinky hair enough. I want to smooth all the roads in one moment like innocence in yellow dresses.

             

Unexploded Ordnance

The bright young Acholi woman at the hotel registration desk sends us off with a cherry “Come back in one piece!” We look at her quizzically. “I don’t wish you to come back in many pieces.”

It’s a perennial question: How to explain Africa to the uninitiated? We are traveling down a dusty unpaved road in the half light of dusk. The headlights shining on the pockmarked ersatz surface called “road” here give that high contrast look like satellite transmissions from Mars. Added to the ethereal atmosphere is the orange nodding sun at nadir and that at this time of year the people are burning old grass wholesale. Smoke and a resultant red glow predominate. In another place, old people and asthmatics would be confined to sealed window indoor environs. Not here, the tribe meets the burning of fields with communal burning eyes and no one complains.

The aggregate of view has an extraterrestrial feel. Close encounters of some other kind materialize out of the half light and haze. Shadows turn into women with huge lateral extensions to their heads and they gasp their way homeward with bundles of firewood upon their head. A dog materializes, sleeping in the road. He must be low on survival instincts. How to explain it all? Indeed..

Earlier, we pass a place that was a town of sorts. It’s a remnant of an old displacement camp. This is northern Uganda and most of the former residents have gone back to their home to reclaim what is heirs from the jaws of war. The rebel attacks have abated some half dozen years or so ago. The fear is slow to erode from this clay soil. It manages to hold out claws lying in wait for skitterish ankles trying to walk upright as humans again.

“There are many mines in the fields around here.” our driver Nathan offers. Unexploded ordnance that keep some from planting, erecting buildings or moving on with a dream or tires or strong feet on solid promises. The land calls to be occupied in optimism that echoes heaven’s dictates.

The Lord’s Resistance Army was here carrying their gospel of fear. They attempted to permanently transform this into a Martian landscape, red running and cold as if the tropics had a polar cap. They tore children from families in the night. Taught eleven year old boys to kill and use farm implements to amputate. Little girls found their own hell as ‘wives”. The cries of “Where is God?” peppered the night sky with pin holes until dawn came.

Men who consorted with dark powers are gone now. They are fighting for waning power in the jungles of the Congo. Mine fields and orphans are what remains. They hide off roads less traveled.

We (Uganda Orphans Fund) have a school in the midst of this area. Broadcast and cell towers sprout around this prominent point of real estate. It’s a spiritual high place. We bought ourselves a portal. Used by local witch doctors for the hidden, the secret and the dark for many years. A certain multinational communication company recently eyed this land. We had a raging battle of sniper fire with local officials in a court when the previous owner who sold it to us then, resold it to the communications company. We called in God as our judge. The plans against us were unearthed, exploded and the land came safely into our possession.

We now have cell towers. We broadcast in harmony with the land’s original intent now. Depending on how many (mostly) children are in our school, they number 20 to fifty in number and they stand very tall. They look like street boys, children at risk, ex-prostitutes, former Moslems and the odd adventure hungry looking to redeem a landscape.

They are the transmitters of the region. They connect earth with heaven. they fast, they pray, sing and play, transforming this well of most times simply by presence. When light occupies even the time and times are cleansed by these Kingdom mysteries of principle.

The children have also become our ordinance hidden. Cloaked as it were, waiting for the touch of God or the footfall of the innocent. An explosion into life like those slow motion movies of plants that explode seed pods at the brush of passing. We heard the testimony of the maimed on a recent Sunday afternoon. Our tears too became the rain of cleansing, cleansing the rivulets of blood in the of road secret places. Prayers and tears healing loss and a redemption of this God ordained prophetic land. Red becomes green. The green of life.

“Is it my imagination or is Gulu (the main city of the region an hour from here) prospering even more than a year ago?” Kateh, our school’s spiritual director smiles; “Could be”.

Our minesweepers lack the crisp uniform of the military. They are the cadres of the broken, world forsaken in torn, sometimes tattered second hand clothes. The Eagle has stirred up His nest and no foreign god was with him. His wings carried them us above this high place. Come and eat the produce of the fields (Deuteronomy 32:3).

There is life on Mars.

In Motion

...The house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume. John 12:3

Katie and I celebrated out 29th anniversary on July 16 in Bozeman, Montana area underneath it's blue sky cradled mountains. I'm a blessed man to share a life and love with with an extraordinary woman.

Tim and Pam Dolan hosted a Day at the River - actually the confluence of the three rivers that make up the Missouri. We spent the morning session recounting the history of this sacred spot - the good, the bad and the prophetic for the Gallatin Valley encompassing Bozeman.Montana. We broke into prayer and declaration, remitting sins and speaking Father's plan over the expanse of the Gallatin Valley. The afternoon was spent on exploring individual design of those there and how we fit into a synergy of a body in this new season. Communion with one another and the land sealed the sun kissed day.

Having some time to hike and fish, I was so struck by the air. I couldn't breathe enough of the atmosphere. An unusual experience. Finding God in every breath I took. Refreshing is a moot description for what I savored.

It was a nice confirmation of speaking of this season on God's calendar as fragrance, both corporate and individual.

Spending the night in Gallatin Canyon, I got up to look at the stars. Far from the lights of towns, the stars as in Psalm 19 radiate the kingly glory of God. I pulled them to earth with praise and tethered them there. Just two nights ago in Vantage, WA, I had a similar experience camping on the dry ridge line overlooking the town and the deep flow of Columbia below. "Peg the stars to the earth", a phrase I heard while traveling there made me mouth the declarations of Jesus as King - God's glory reflected in the stars - over the land and flow below.

Thursday, Katie and I are off to Wiconi's living Waters Family Camp, a Native People's oriented gathering in Turner, OR. We will join our friends the Mosleys and perhaps do some dream interpreting as our gift to the gathering.

We leave the camp after the pow wow on Sunday the 31st, drive home and hop on a plane for Scotland on the next day. Yikes.

We will be in Scotland from August 2 - 16. In Inverness, we will join host and team leader Charity Bowman in an outreach to Belladrum Festival www.tartanheartfestival.com. on August 5-7. Charity has been with us at Burning Man for a couple of years. She's taken some of our SpiritDream creative influences and mixed them with a Scottish fire and ignited them underneath the "thin" skies of Scotland. Her infectious heart for intimacy with God evidenced by creative fruit has squeezed it's juice over the UK and northern Europe. We can reach the new age with new tools and ripened love. Please pray that Katie and my teaching times would find good soil. Pray the outreach (a team of 60...the Scots are not small thinkers!) would touch seekers to the core with this team of those that desire to turn the hearts of the "children".

Week two, we will try to bag a few mountaintops for pleasure and prayer. We are interested in a few ancient stone circles, the Island of Iona and whatever else the Spirit leads. We are blessed to have a man offer to lead us on some of this prayer journey. He leads intercession for the Highlands for Pray Scotland. We are always looking for a history and a prophetic lesson.

Breathe the atmosphere,

Rob Mazza

The Strong One

I had an acquaintance call me out the blue last week. “Rob, are you ready for what God has for you?” I occasionally get these open ended quasi-mystical statements coming my way. I want to stammer “Probably not” in answer to something that could get me in trouble if I take too definitive a step on either fork of this unknown road. Yes, I also had a weird upbringing that causes me to knee jerk respond as such.

I recognized his voice and stalled his wanting to “Elijah” me in dire or ecstatic predictions by saying “How are you Dan?” I tried a bit of small talk because I’ve been to Africa too many times and I know that they do the honoring of the small before they get to the subject of the big. I’m an American African for today because I know that God sometimes sits down to a meal with friends before He’s going to destroy Sodom. It’s the oriental way and I have often preferred to take my prophecies warmed up over a familial fire. I don’t always get my way.

Dan composed himself. He had a dream with me in it and assumed it was about me. “He fell victim to one of the classic blunders – the first of which is never get involved in a land war in Asia.” Quotes from The Princess Bride pop up serendipitously for me especially when I get scared. The second blunder is most but not all dreams are about you not me.

It however turned out to be a God dream for the church. Prophetic in its implications and for prayer in it’s immediate application. The dream was about me, Dan and in fact all of us.

In the dream, Dan is sitting in the front pew of a generic church. He is watching an internationally known minister and me. We are standing and conversing at the front of the church.

Suddenly, the presence of God comes into the building. It’s quite perceived by Dan to be the fear of the Lord. He falls to the floor and remains there unable to move for some time. He is aware that the whole congregation, including the international minister and myself are under the same power. Dan finally struggles to get up and is immediately knocked down by a brooding weight. It was even stronger this time. This presence of God is really upon him. Dan said while viewing me, I just laid there “flat as a pancake” unable to get up.

While rendered inoperable in the prone position, Dan hears the words “Who told you, you were naked?” and “A wave of fear is going to penetrate My church.” The dream ends.

The book of John in the New Testament is where I like to spend a lot of time in. In my opinion, it contains a lot of “get started” revelation about God the Father and His relationship with His son Jesus. The outflow of that relationship is shown in Jesus’ varied, loving and revelatory driven interactions with a cross section of people in first century cultures in Israel. John the mercy gift serves up a rich stew of revealing Jesus doing what the Father does and saying what Father says.

There’s even a transparent glimpse of John’s transition from “call fire” lacking mercy attitude on the ignorant and religiously hated Samaritans and a reoccurring diatribe that pops up about who sits in authority with Jesus on his throne. You sense John’s angling for position. It’s implied in his probably well earned “Son of Thunder” moniker. Process, proximity and a tender heart get him to a place in authority eventually. It looks different than first love destiny perceived with all that aggressiveness garnishing it. He leans on Jesus breast. Rechristens himself “the disciple that loved Jesus”. Post resurrection, he recognizes Jesus’ Spirit in a new skin while Jesus calls the disciples from the shoreline. “It’s the Lord” he says. The disciples are slow on the uptake. John learned about the wind and the Spirit he later wrote about.

The breaking process results in a man who realizes he is loved so much, he loves many. God’s ways love him to the point of exile from all he loves to on a lonely island so God can love him more in revelatory conversation. This great conversation is delivered to a man who clearly can no longer stand on his own feet (really) anymore, the book we call Revelation. Holy, holy, holy. It’s marinated with the awe of God. Love brought him to the “unapproachable” glorious weight of his Master. He has found the Tree of Life.

The first chapter of John reads a bit in the Spirit like the Genesis of the New Testament. “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” John the mercy gift writes with poetry and mystery. It’s here we touch on the beginnings of study on how this great Father heart of God contains in his makeup and names the essential God “is” statements. God is Light. God is Life. God is Love. Later, in John’s Gospel we stumble into the forth-essential name “God is Spirit.”

I have spent a lot of time on both myself and others trying to apprehend this Father heart of God to heal and rewire me in that he wanted to me to learn to receive from Him and nurture me before I could go on to become a son. I’ve also spent much time thinking about Jesus words that we are the light of the world. Like Father, like sons. The same inheritance of names is involved with the other attributes of life, love and spirit.

While training teams to go out and engage the culture we have found that our gifted tools of revelatory words, healing the afflicted or slightly more esoteric dream interpretations go better with a team that’s intentional about believing they are the light. This takes some routine and intentionality of soul to practice thinking what your spirit already knows. The rewards are that people in the seeking spiritual cultures like new age or pagan or just downtown folks will often comment on our light. At Burning Man, they have described our camp as having light, a rainbow or aura over it. Fire by day as God’s advertising. We have studied properties of light (along with overlapping implications of life, spirit and love - but I can’t detail that here). We know that scripturally is that light dispels, confounds darkness (before a word is uttered), it attracts the seeking, light heals, exposes and covers things and makes things clear. Clear. Things like truth - an endangered commodity these days.

Several years into events like Burning Man we discovered the comments were changing. From a seemingly Godless culture came comments like “It’s pure here. This is a sacred place. What you guys do is clean. It’s holy here”

Being under a ministry that values character over gifting, we’ve tried hard to stay spiritually in the moment with God’s voice and what we do no matter how odd it looked. It the same time we realize the living water from a throne had boundaries. Pride or rebellion would “clean your clock’ in a Christian hostile environment. While seeing the protection of maintaining character, we were not prepared for the above-mentioned comments to be so lavished on us. Just maybe His awe and fear was with us. I worship in my own inner places at this remembrance and also realize there is much more we haven’t known.

A minister I know mentioned that the description of God as hovering over or moving over the face of the earth in Genesis 1 was weak in describing who and what was really going on. He hinted that God, the trinity, was dominating, overwhelming with almighty splendor over a situation of chaos. The word for God here is Elohim. It is the most used word in the Old Testament referring to God. Elohim means “The Strong One”. That alone to me, would have caused wave and particles and all sorts of quantum disarray to begin to vibrate at a strong sympathetic readiness for lack of better words to describe awe on an uncreated state. Elohim moved, hovered, brooded and fluttered like some cosmic eagle with fierce eyes of intentionality and spoke “Let there be light”

And there was light. And what light! Man and all the created universe contain and respond to that presence, voice and greater light.

I think if we were eye witnesses to the scene (ah, but we can see what children

see, by faith, clear back to the beginning). We would have agreed to the awesome power and fear from the presence of Elohim revealed. We would have viewed this prone while our own light separated from any darkness!

These are troubling times. Sin abounds on so many levels. That’s just an observance about our own churches (I’m not casting stones here. I sit where they sit too). Add the world’s condition to these “worst of times” and life looks pretty bleak. I have heard dire prophesies from a number of sources that are fairly hidden about what’s to come on the earth in the next nine years and there’s no comfort in sight. The flip side is that some gatherings of God’s people will be light houses. Places of refuge, salvation and healing will stand out, well, like lights on a hill. Like the Statue of Liberty: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free”. This will take some divine process to equal the image of a church projecting purity to counter the darkness.

I’m rethinking that Elohim, God’s first name so to speak, will take precedence again. I’m feeling again he’s hovering, domineering over the chaos and the missing of the mark of so much of who He is and in turn missing who we were meant to be. The Strong one is about to speak again. Light will separate from darkness and no one can escape what first (there’s that word again) must begin in His “house”.

He established the foundations of the earth by wisdom. The fear of the Lord is the genesis of wisdom and will be again. Light will flow out of that.

In the church of the last age is Laodicea. In the Book she is naked. Nakedness and the realization of this is a throwback to Genesis 3:11. Our condition harkens back to our eating and processing from The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Too much has the false and counterfeit guidelines of that tree become a standard for how we, the church understand God and how He works. If the foundations (wisdom and life) be removed what shall the righteous do? We stand naked and with crumbling footing.

At that moment of eating that tree of the soul, our light covering was removed. “Who told you, you were naked?” A valid question indeed or in Elohim’s parlance, it is more of a statement begging a deep meditation on our part. The meditation that leads to repentance or change of thought process to be consort again with the other tree in the garden. God has way out of this present darkness.

The Strong One is again brooding over the face of the deep.

Gulu Sounds

I am alone in Gulu, Uganda, a white guy bobbing in a sea of majority Acholi life rhythm. I am trying to sleep in the home of my friend Kateh. The bed is a reasonable comfortable. I feel like I’ve been cling wrapped in plastic in this heat. The dampness of pillow and sheets tell me the liter of mango juice I drank earlier will not suffice the night. I too am clung about by sounds and many voices in the night. My mind, ever active, wants to know the interpretation behind each one. I try to lie still and listen and sort.

Soft voices of women speaking in the Acholi tongue are outside my grated window. The sounds waft delicate like fine loam through the filter of the netting placed asymmetrically over the windows opening. No straight lines or perfect angles here. I am reposed in a world of nonlinear understanding. And the loam drifts and clings to sweat and my body.

It filters down fine and poetic and filled with mystery of unknown tongue. I judge the spirit and receive the dusting for the moment.

Soft chatter. Perhaps it is talk of daily tasks like the walk to the market and the cost of posho (corn meal) or the small gossip of close community or of children and all the tomorrows. Maybe it is a conspired lullaby to the night in soft sing song tones where in pause of reflection angels come to comfort troubled souls. While I am not feeling troubled, I open the jar in my heart and reservoir these sounds for a future place when wounds are lanced and grown men lose purpose.

There are other sounds competing in the background. Music blaring from big black speakers in bars trying to commingle with the darkness like large shadowy busses converging on a nocturnal roundabout, jockeying for aural position. It’s 11:30 PM and my instincts tell me this traffic jam of sound will not cease until well after 2 PM.

I think of prostitutes working at the bar in the wandering of furniture and of loud men’s voices. I remember earlier Kateh’s kind hello to one of them who was poured into the skin of a short red dress. The din softened for a moment.

I was reminded to pray for them.

To be kind.

So see them enveloped with God’s earlier song.

To arrest the sound of plunder.

To attempt to reverse the droning white noise of ambivalence and death that has barred the whisper of bird wing consciousness.

“Come here. There is softness cloaked n lullabies.”

The air is so full here in what should be a night’s rest. Many voices and none are without significance.

Trucks rumble and bang in response to road neglect, to metal, to air and the drum reverberates the nocturnal. An occasional horn knifes the air like the whistle that the Acholi blow while dancing (and where does the breath come from in the passion of dance?). No one flinches at the blade but pedestrians who turn aside to darker shadows to avoid collision. Most people here bear with the assaults of horns with grace and sleep on. I and the strangers lie awake and wonder what the horns in Africa communicate. They are a language unto themselves. Where am I in this night? Where am I inserted in this moment of time?

I eventually take a pill to kick down my adrenalin and locate the ear plugs that have laid dormant in my pack. I remember to thank God for the miracles I have witnessed today.

I have been a part of waiting for a painful process to be resolved. Today the symphony was released. An order came into some major connections among people, ministries and what seems to be a bigger plan of God. Like a dull roar of a wall of water that those who have quieted soul can hear. The wall is passing over large landscapes here to water concealed seed. The seed will sprout to other sounds of prayer and to birds at dawn.

I am embraced as I am being lured to sleep by meditating on the sounds that nurture:

Birds at dawn.

And soft spoken Acholi women who speak mysteries.

In the morning, Kateh asks if the Muslim prayer guy woke me up at five. I say no. I slept.

I have contained, plugged in, the birds, the Acholi women and the faithfulness of God and none has escaped my ears.

Rock for a Pillow

The Pinnacle Mountain in New Hampshire is a ninety acre place of prayer and contemplation. After much prayer and diligence to occupy it, it was wrested out of perhaps hundred years or more of occult use. Now it’s a place that if you stretch your arms out just so and leave your hands open, heaven or earth might answer with a gift. A revelation rolled in silver foil or a key for a forgotten lock upon an abandoned door or just plain rain when you need it. Perhaps you’re just trying to cleanse a wound before bandaging. The initial sting on flesh turns to balm if you keep your hands open long enough.

I have climbed to the summit to watch the sun set on this October day. The peak is paved in massive worn round stone slabs set in an earthen mortar and grass. It is designed by to accommodate the fairly ambulatory among us, taking only small effort to crest this patchwork of stones to gain a one eighty plus view of the hills that orbit this spiritual Palomar. Northern hardwoods, mostly oaks are sprouting out of the gapes in masonry, with occasional large roots caressing a boulder like Madonna and child or with a more sinister death grip like an anaconda around a bush pig.

I have a small camera phone. I snap small wonders of root doing life and death dances with ancient boulders and try to catch the drama. “Can you keep it quiet up there?” The slabs rumble, “We’re trying to think” Bush pigs do not go quietly.

I record patterns in lichen on tree trunks that seem like aboriginal circle paintings repeated in patterns. They are all green grey with a luminescence that transcends our earthly spectrum. They too have a tenacious grip upon their canvas but less so that the roots below. More like a decoration made in passing, a stick daubed in mystery paint , to mark a footnote made on a journey. Less than the bold stand made in rock they none-the- less commemorate the circles in life like egg, pupa, butterfly and egg again and winter, bud, leaf and all fall down goes the sun only to have the earth spin around to reassure the eastern view that it’s hope and morning again. Affirm the many circles like our generations of men and reaping and sowing and reaping again. Choose well what and how you mark this creation with or… is it Who?

I’m looking for leaves in change. The color shift hasn’t quite made it’s premier appearance yet except for a few loud red and orange Prima Donna maples on the lower reaches of this mountain. The lofty sentries here maintain a stoic hold on more Puritan colors of faded green and dull mustard yellow.

My camera shifts position to frame acorns in a cluster against grey rock like small birds clustered against a rumor of a winter’s onslaught. Maybe they know something about circles too deep inside their coded DNA. There’s more patterns to see at this vantage point. Contrasting veins of milky quartz make runes of an unknown tongue. If you traveled but a short distance skyward, you could maybe read the aggregate, perhaps you’d find a crafted lyric for God’s heart for this place. A hot air balloon would a be nice vehicle to view and validate such a wonder; then blow away and settle this verse on the darkening valley below.

There’s man made walls here also. Some enclose more civilized flora with circles of stacked stone order. In an earlier time in life, I would have baulked at the attempt to define, improve upon or generally monkey with the natural order. Maybe it’s old age and the trading of sleeping bags on rooted floors of woods for more comfort of mattress and Discovery Channel on TV that’s softened my critique. Perhaps it’s life’s accumulation of books, boxes and files marked dreams and prophesies that make me sympathetic to the attempt to corral and organize. I know that in this entire intentional attempt at beauty and order: there will still remain the massive stone monoliths below and endless sky circling, circling. Above this too is an eternal heaven layered and playing footsie with the ethers of time. There is still the unknown and more hiddenness to be discovered beyond our books and rock wall attempts to explain or contain. We of course try as we are bound to. We tame plots, build more bookshelves and label another file. We are people making our marks on trees and paper and art flaming in the desert. We still stumble into mysteries burning before us on sacred ground. Even the sandals we’ve made to cope with chaos are a hindrance between flesh and the holy.

The sun is taking its sweet time to complete its cycle drama and slip behind western hills. Facing this stage on the Pinnacle is a gently sloping rock outcrop. It’s smooth and slightly sinuous, made for a body in repose. This reminds me of a friend of a friend I knew who had a habit of hiking to high mountain destinations in the Spanish Peak range in Montana. He would reach his day hike goal on some nine thousand or ten thousand plus footer and lie down and take a nap. He did this many times over I was told. I like to think he was absorbing enough majesty for a few weeks of life down below. He’d wake up and silently move on like a Sandberg human version of fog and cat feet.

I find a comfortable position face up. To the left of my head is a fig shape hole cut into the rock about the size of a man’s hand. It’s partially occupied with acorns, pine needles, a loose stone and a couple of leaves swept in by some careless broom. Like a cigar box of nature magic some child of bygone era might collect and hid under his bed. I lie there for some time waiting for the feature film. The previews happen in the wind and the branches of leaves overhead. I get fascinated enough to film the movement on video for a few minutes. This is only good cinema if you wished to enter the best foreign film category “Best Pre-Sleep Award” I would add subtitles for the wind in some forgotten language like the Abenakis tribe in New Hampshire. I could view it when sleep ambled slow or when I’d forget that my Savior was the Creator first.

David before he was King of Israel was told to listen to the wind in the mulberry trees. When he heard it, he was to go to battle with his troops. You never know, a fight could break out any minute here.

Eventually I decide moving leaves is better left a poetry niche in my memory. I file it for the times when life goes concrete and cold and the wipers refuse to respond to rain.

I slowly drift off to sleep. An odd random metronome of wind keeps time over my head.

I don’t think I slept long when the volume of leaf movement seems loud and insistent by my left ear. I hone in. Has the wind increased? I turn my head slowly. One must be careful; an armed Philistine band may have crept up on me.

I once slept in a field on Durnam’s homestead up in the Gallatin Range

I’m snoozing in this field and I wake up to a semi-circle of angus cattle gathered around me. No doubt they were counseling as to what to do about this odd find in their grass and alfalfa. Perhaps they decided I was without a mattress in life and needed protection. I like that: friends in high places.

Come to think of it, I would have been sleeping across from the guy in the Spanish Peaks range. We could have joined company for coffee at Karst Ranch later and swapped tales of majesty or just talked cattle like cowboys.

Ah yes, I honed in to the wind sound upon awakening and no Philistines in sight but a chipmunk eighteen inches away rummaging around the treasure hole in the rock. Head popping in and out, all fidget and rodent intentionality. The usher around here had apparently come to check for tickets. We make eye contact, say hi. He goes to busy; then eye contact with my smile added. His black eyes fix my gaze like the unblinking hold of baby’s pupils. Primal innocence pulls a spirit primal urge in me to somehow span the centuries between this creature’s naming in the Garden to now. What has been lost in the translation to connect? Where are the Abenakis when I need their input? Spiritually, I grasp for the tendril a forearms distance from a whole branch of understanding. I’m all thumbs in an emerging world full of eyes.

My bigger questions have been: “What is this branch, this stewardship of creation? How can you steward what you cannot connect adequately with?” These thoughts are my homework when I get the craved time to go home – to mountains, rivers and stones that talk. Today I get chipmunk eyes, black and unblinking like pools that hold great fish and secrets.

I reach into my right pants pocket, pull the camera and click off a dozen pictures to show my wife. I barely catch the show. The sun bows and moves with its slow gait down behind the western hills. So many times the greater light has been one upped by the actors and activity around it. And yet the show is nothing without a greater illumination of light.

I do a sort of roll and stand to my feet. I walk off this holy ground and thank the owner for a great show.

Back down the mountain, I’m asked “Did you get something up there?” Perhaps it’s directed toward me as a person that has some sort of seer abilities or possesses some prophetic insight on spiritual geology. Maybe I’m being tested for sanity in case I’ve slipped into an unforeseen spiritual dimension and need an emergency extraction. I don’t have anything to say I think would satisfy and it has noting at all to do with the validity of the question.

A slight smile finds its way and creeps across my face and secretly follows the course of a hidden sun, storing up mystery as it goes.

My hand plays with an acorn in my jacket pocket.

Chatter

Somewhere east of Butte Montana on Interstate 90, the Clark Fork River comes into view. The lazy waterway at this flat ingress begins a long stitching process, weaving a watery thread connecting a dark grey band of highway to landscape. The ribbon is woven in until the Clark Fork takes an abrupt compass heading north at the town of St. Regis. Then a finer needle is thread with the waters of the St Regis River playing tag with the interstate until getting lost in arboreal riot at the base of Lookout Pass near the Idaho boarder.

I make this trip often as I travel from my home in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho to Bozeman, Montana where I used to live. It’s business, it’s old friends, it’s teaching and speaking stuff that makes me roll on this 365 mile ribbon of highway. It is not just any highway, it’s alive with 30 plus years of memory. In the last few years it’s been traveled at least six times a year and become kind of an aboriginal, vehicle driven “walkabout”.

It’s a travel through 21^st century dreamtime where somewhere between purpose and daydream and weariness and worry and wonder meet. It’s where I encountered a Native on horseback in a vision at the boarder of two states. There’s more over these three years I cannot tell yet. It’s become a stretch of road to receive revelation.

It’s the depths of this watery thread I’m looking into now. West of Missoula and headed home to Idaho.

I peer down beyond glare and reflection to fish. Moving to the hypnotic whirr of uneven tires that need replacement, I imagine generations of trout witness to flow and riffle, deep slow pools and branch shrouded banks. Grandfather fish have seen the mystery of cloud traces, seen an elk tongue lick water surface, otters play and anticipate a largesse of feast at spring salmon fly emergence.

The Book of Job states, “Ask the fish of the sea and they will explain to you…” I assume their landlocked cousins have the same powers to recount events. Was godly Job delusional? How much we have lost to flood stage and left to rot on neglected banks. Our theological fishing guides were so good they left the natives who lived here and went on to manifest destiny. A destiny with a one dimensional Creator who wanted desparately to explain his hobby -mother earth - for some sons to come.

What’s that below? “They ate our fish bodies but left no thanks.”

I’m of European origin. I’m white. I grew up with people who knew more than God. I too had to stand and hear “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?” I listen better than I used to- I like to think. I went through a lot of pain to hear the sun going down. I listen less to theology without scars and brambles underfoot. I worship with Indians in their way and mine. I have a gifted drum and medicine bag. I attend Burning Man because it makes me live the life allotted to me by Jesus and like Jesus, I have been washed by their tears. I have fallen in love more and attend religious institutions less. I talk to trees and birds on occasion. Today, I strain to hear their fish tales rising above the white lined stitches of man made highway.

Softy:

“The Lord God made this: all the mountains, the watersheds, witness of rock and transient cloud. In all your grey highway thoughts – give Him praise.”

I think their telling sometimes rises in song. Like raconteurs in hydrologic harmony not fully perceived by these damaged ears. A song originated by a greater Hand to add bassoons and oboes to the strings of wind against taunt fir and pine. Sometimes the way to perceive is to sing with them in other tongues and ancient voice. If I could have but one day in the original garden, could I have comprehended the symphony swirling there? Would I have responded by falling to the earth screaming “IT’S all too much!”?

My wife once did an experimental worship project for eight months. She had encouraged the collected band of friends and musicians to use vocalizations not in any known language (Think a little Bobby McFerrin here) for many weeks. On one particular night, it clicked, the sounds came primal and jungle and praise. No one forgot that night.

I find myself on this return trip all to often consumed in the greys of this highway especially when tired and thinking thoughts that are better left to decay like detritus on forest floor. This is a vigilant time. A time not to miss the subtle interludes of soft lyrical passage. There are times altogether where the noisy overture of praise passes my notice. The explanation too slips behind a logjam of thoughts.

On a focus day, grace seems more grasped like the sure grip on the steering wheel. I participate with ease in the revelry of sound, of story and of song. On occasion, I pull off the road and cut the engine. Straining, I listen and take the baton and lead. I knew the song in my spirit all along. I discover again and again, it is as ancient as the seven days of creation and as fresh as Romans 8. I must remember this. I offer too my verses to this writers convocation. My hands touch water to by way of blessing and to feel the medium of response.

Ask the fish and they will explain to you.

Somewhere below Lookout Pass the chatter ceases. I crest the pass and think about the Indian warrior again. I’m on a down hill flow to a place of lakes, a loving wife, an ongoing narrative in my own God given place called home.