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Things of Small Value That Matter
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Sunday, May 4, 2008
11:38:00 AM EDT
Feeling Happy
Hearing Amr Diab Neoul Eah
The pasture is recovering from the extra horses as is Movie, finally getting over her "snootiness" and realizing where her attention and feed come from, is becoming more civil to me. Purposely ignoring her while I went about my business seems to have brought her more to me than when I was so intent on "chasing" her. Maybe there is a lesson in that for me about all females. As difficult as it feels to me as she stands sad eyed at the gate, her hay ration needs to be cut even more, her efficient mustang genes converting even the smallest amount of grass and hay in to a big belly. Before the grass came in, her half rations had allowed her to begin to trim down. George Bush's tax bonus will go toward a new saddle, an Australian stock saddle, light in weight, 24 lbs, and a nice balance between my heavy western stock saddle (50 lbs) and the postage stamp dressage saddle I tried last year.
It is still a bit cool today and the water in the lower Tansill, the second and smaller lake in town made by damming the Pecos River, is sure to be cold but last week Cody was introduced to swimming and we need a follow up lesson today. I will don my waders and we will go into the pool just below the dam where there is a local flock of geese. Cody has some adolescent moments now, obedient mostly but pushing to assert himself in the pack. In the last week I have not had as much focus on his training as I would like. We are beginning to work on doubles and blind retrieves.
I picked up my mail yesterday. I have a bad habit of leaving it in the mail box until Saturday. Most of it was junk. My daughter sent a nice card announcing that they were having an adoption party, that was definitely not junk. I cherish her rare communications in any form.
Also there was a brochure from a travel company. The brochure offered a variety of international tours: Peru, New Zealand, China, just to name a few. I can see Chile for about 2000 dollars on a guided tour. I have in the past been disinclined to take tours but this packs a lot into eleven days, a stop in Buenos Aries, a cruse in Cape Horn, stopping near the town which is right now being buried by its own volcano (bet they change the itinerary) then on to Santiago. Each stop has guided tours. It seems a good introduction and preparation to a follow up trip to take on my own later to fly fish. I found it interesting that as I focused more on believing that I will go the Lord saw fit to get this in my mail box. I no longer believe in coincidence. He read my heart and sent me a message, now it is up to me.
Life and what we do in life is about attitude and belief. It is about what we value and focus upon. Most of us put our focus believing that we can't do things not realizing that if we make our minds up we can do anything we want, not everything we want, but anything we want. It is in believing and understanding that God knows our hearts and wants to fulfill our good desires. All to often he places the feast before us and then, we ignore it looking for a feast of our own preparation.
Being away, so far away from family has also taught me that,
"We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone-we find it with another. Love seeks one thing only: the good of the one loved. It leaves all the other secondary effects to take care of themselves. Love, therefore, is its own reward."
Thomas Merton
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11:38:00 AM EDT
Feeling Happy
Hearing Amr Diab Neoul Eah
Things of Small Value That Matter
Things of Small Value that Matter
"The things I thought were so important - because of the effort I put into them - have turned out to be of small value. And the things I never thought about, the things I was never able to either to measure or to expect, were the things that mattered."
Thomas Merton
Thomas Merton
The peach tree is a "fooler" this year, in spite of the drought and few blooms it is "peaching." I had given up on the peaches thinking that we were past the season, they are "early rubies," but actually they are right on time. The dry winter and the early heat create the impression that summer is already here when in fact even in this desert it is still just spring.
The pasture is recovering from the extra horses as is Movie, finally getting over her "snootiness" and realizing where her attention and feed come from, is becoming more civil to me. Purposely ignoring her while I went about my business seems to have brought her more to me than when I was so intent on "chasing" her. Maybe there is a lesson in that for me about all females. As difficult as it feels to me as she stands sad eyed at the gate, her hay ration needs to be cut even more, her efficient mustang genes converting even the smallest amount of grass and hay in to a big belly. Before the grass came in, her half rations had allowed her to begin to trim down. George Bush's tax bonus will go toward a new saddle, an Australian stock saddle, light in weight, 24 lbs, and a nice balance between my heavy western stock saddle (50 lbs) and the postage stamp dressage saddle I tried last year.
It is still a bit cool today and the water in the lower Tansill, the second and smaller lake in town made by damming the Pecos River, is sure to be cold but last week Cody was introduced to swimming and we need a follow up lesson today. I will don my waders and we will go into the pool just below the dam where there is a local flock of geese. Cody has some adolescent moments now, obedient mostly but pushing to assert himself in the pack. In the last week I have not had as much focus on his training as I would like. We are beginning to work on doubles and blind retrieves.
Jake just seems to take it all in stride. From the window I can watch him encourage Cody to do things in the yard that Jake knows he is not allowed to do and which will get Cody in trouble, like digging. He is also making a point to keep Cody in place. Jake roams the property as the king of the roost and has gotten more self important in his demeanor since I told him his job was to guard the property not to go to work with me like Cody does. I swear he understood what I said and he took it seriously, now he is more assertive toward those walking past the property and his barking has become a minor nuisance.
I picked up my mail yesterday. I have a bad habit of leaving it in the mail box until Saturday. Most of it was junk. My daughter sent a nice card announcing that they were having an adoption party, that was definitely not junk. I cherish her rare communications in any form.
Emma is official now, so I now have three grandchildren. I had already thought of her that way but at least now only the Lord can take her. I have mixed feelings for the birth family, having been on the other end of that conversation for many years, knowing how they feel. In this case the out of control drug addiction of the parents would have destroyed Emma and I know that this is best. My daughter is a good mother and works hard at it. I am happy for Emma, my daughter and her whole family. I was flying back to Florida this summer for a visit anyway and look forward to seeing all of them, this is simply a bonus.
Also there was a brochure from a travel company. The brochure offered a variety of international tours: Peru, New Zealand, China, just to name a few. I can see Chile for about 2000 dollars on a guided tour. I have in the past been disinclined to take tours but this packs a lot into eleven days, a stop in Buenos Aries, a cruse in Cape Horn, stopping near the town which is right now being buried by its own volcano (bet they change the itinerary) then on to Santiago. Each stop has guided tours. It seems a good introduction and preparation to a follow up trip to take on my own later to fly fish. I found it interesting that as I focused more on believing that I will go the Lord saw fit to get this in my mail box. I no longer believe in coincidence. He read my heart and sent me a message, now it is up to me.
Life and what we do in life is about attitude and belief. It is about what we value and focus upon. Most of us put our focus believing that we can't do things not realizing that if we make our minds up we can do anything we want, not everything we want, but anything we want. It is in believing and understanding that God knows our hearts and wants to fulfill our good desires. All to often he places the feast before us and then, we ignore it looking for a feast of our own preparation.
Jesus is quoted in the Gospel of Mark saying it this way,
Mar 11:22 "Have faith in God. Truly, I say to you, whoever says to this mountain, 'Be taken up and thrown into the sea,' and does not doubt in his heart, but believes that what he says will come to pass, it will be done for him. Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours. And whenever you stand praying, forgive, if you have anything against anyone, so that your Father also who is in heaven may forgive you your trespasses."
Believe you have received it, and it will be yours. I guess we have to figure out what really matters, what we value and what matters to Him and what He values and once we do that we must begin to believe in our heart that it "is" so, the blessings already are, "baruch bashan." We have to come to understand that our happiness is a matter of the small things in our lives being in balance, not a matter of the intensity we have, that God wants us to have joy and, though joy is sometimes found in the quiet of a church, God means us to live a life each moment, a life of balance, peace and harmony.
There is an old saying, "God is in the small things." This farm is full of small things all in balance everyday, it is only my own lack of balance and harmony which will make those small things invisible to me, much as God is only invisible to me when I am out of harmony and balance with His presence.
Working with damaged adolescents, I see the effort they create to have "intensity" thinking that when they feel that "intensity" they are then only truly alive. All too often they later complain because of that intensity and the chaos they create to have the intensity, draining them. Yet, they are unwilling to look at their desire for "intensity" as a part of the problem. Adults are however not much different than adolescents in this. I cannot tell how many times I have heard women say to me in my office that they want a man who can "dance" with them intensely, it is symbolic to them of "fun," "excitement" and "danger, " their words not mine. Yet they later complain that these same intense men are abusive to them as these same men cast around elsewhere for more and newer intense experiences because "she" is not enough. Intensity does wear off pretty quickly.
Intensity is not where peace is found and peace, though seemingly boring, really isn't. In fact it is the most valuable thing we have, the thing we in the end desire the most. It is where we find in our selves and the presence of God.
I have found on this small farm, this "finca" as the Spanish here call it, that so many of the things I thought were important are not and are of little value and small things which I never expected or respected really matter. Like the “peaching” of my tree, or the flash of green of a hummingbird in my honeysuckle, like the joy of a pup running circles chasing his tail or the pride of an old dog as he establishes his place in life.
Being away, so far away from family has also taught me that,
"We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone-we find it with another. Love seeks one thing only: the good of the one loved. It leaves all the other secondary effects to take care of themselves. Love, therefore, is its own reward."
Thomas Merton
My daughter and her husband adopting Emma is an good illustration of that, Emma's biological parent's drug addictions illustrate it as well.
I find it interesting that, like Merton, who realized this living in a monastery and later a hermitage, I too had to come to a place alone to find true perspective on the real value of relationship. I gained that by valuing the "first and primary relationship," that which when one is without no other relationship makes sense, a relationship with the living God. Only now can I truly understand that it is in loving Him that I really know how to love others, passionately as He loves me, not frenetically, not intensely, not excitedly but in balance and in harmony with the simple rhythms and pleasures of life.
In His Service.
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