Happy Birthday Dad - I Miss You

I have posted this picture before. It is my favorite photo of my dad, taken at the Gator Bowl, December 1977.  Clemson got stomped by Pitt but it was still a lot of fun. Dad would have been 79 today. My sister Mary just found a great batch of old photos of Dad - I can't wait to scan them.

More pictures of Curtis Claunch Gillespie, Jr., April 30, 1930 to June 26, 1989.

Today's Picture: The Face of Evil

Here Kitty kitty, here kitty kitty. More cats.

Today's Quote: Nose in the Wind (for Fec)

"Which way you headed, Jeremiah?"
"Canada, maybe. I hear there is land there a man has never seen."
"Well, keep your nose in the wind, and your eyes along the skyline."
"I will do that, Del Gue."

Today's Lyric: Road/Sky

"When we come to place where the road and the sky collide...Throw me over the edge and let my spirit glide" Jackson Browne, Road and the Sky, Late for the Sky

Today's Quote: from Crotch to Eyeball

"You turn down this gift, and they'll slit you, me, Caleb and the horses from crotch to eyeball with a dull deer antler" Del Gue, to Jeremiah Johnson, from Jeremiah Johnson

Today's Lyric: Beauty and Pain

"Behind every beautiful thing there's been some kind of pain." Bob Dylan, Not Dark Yet, Time Out of Mind

Today's Picture: Why I Like Weeds

Ajuga reptans. Why would anyone want a "perfect" lawn when you can have this?

Today's Lyric: Beauty and Power

"Some of them were angry
At the way the earth was abused
By the men who learned how to forge her beauty into power."

Jackson Browne, Before the Deluge

Today's Picture: Clancey in Woods

Animals on my mind today. I miss you big guy! More Clancey Pictures.

Today's Quote: Truth

"I don't want to dismay anyone, but Truth harasses me this morning..." Vicki Hearnes, Animal Happiness

Today's Lyric: Blue

"Blue is the color of night 

When the red sun 

Disappears from the sky 

Raven feathers shiny and black 

A touch of blue glistening down her back 

Blue "

Lucinda Williams, "Blue"

Male Birch Catkins in Azalea Glow

My Backyard, Easter Sunday, 2009 - I love catkins of all kinds - and cats too.

See more Sping pictures

Corduroy in Grass on Easter Sunday

The camera spooked him but he hung in there for this shot! Corduroy is my bud.

Today's Lyrics: A Living Prayer

"Take my life and let me be
A living prayer, my God to Thee"

Alison Kraus, "A Living Prayer," written by Don Block

Today's Quote - about Clouds

From GM Hopkins, “Hurrahing in Harvest”

"…up above, what wind-walks! what lovely
behavior
Of silk-sack clouds! has wilder, wilful-wavier
Meal-drift moulded ever and melted across skies?"


Today in Greensboro it is windy and cool with bright white clouds skimming across the skies from west to east all with the same “floor” or altitude.

Although it was Autumn, Hopkins was noticing a similar thing. The excerpt above is from Hopkins’ great poem, “Hurrahing in Harvest,” this part being about clouds skimming across the sky.

Hopkins liked coining words that fit his need for meaning and meter, and such is wind-walk. The idea, I think, is that of the wind moving the clouds in rank or formation, as soldiers might march across a field. Kind of like outside my window right now.

The clouds seem to be both soft and delicate (like silk), and rough and ready (like sack cloth), at the same time – hence “silk-sack.” These “silk-sack” clouds, “wind-walking” through the skies are "wild and" “wilful,” as in headstrong and unpredictable.

I am reminded of lying on my back with my daughter, back when such things interested her, and watching the clouds, making out the shapes with her. How fast they would change! The dog's head would last just a moment before dissipating or crashing into another shape. There is an exciting unpredictable quality to clouds.

These clouds remind Hopkins of white flour or “meal” as they drift across the sky, ever changing – molding and melting (coming together, coming apart) – as they go (again, like the clouds outside my window).

As to how Hopkins responds to this – next time.

Dark Saturday

Today on this Easter Saturday we as Christians find ourselves caught between Good Friday, which we now celebrate as that great and glorious day when our redemption was secured in and by the death of Messiah Jesus, and Easter Sunday, which we celebrate as that great and glorious day when death itself was defeated in the resurrection of Jesus.

But the disciples on their Saturday before the first Easter looked back to Friday as the day their world came crashing to an end, and ahead to Sunday as only another day to adjust to life with Jesus gone.

Easter Saturday was a very dark and lonely and hopeless day almost 2000 years ago for the disciples. They were shaken with grief, scared for their own lives, humiliated, bearing the burden and excruciating disappointment of dashed hopes. It seemed they had been wrong about Jesus. They thought he would bring in the kingdom. They thought he would restore Israel’s fortunes. OK, Jesus had said that he would be taken, that he would suffer, that he would die as a ransom for many, but these words had never sunk in, had never quite broken through the wrong assumptions of the disciples. And now it was a dark Saturday. Jesus was gone.

Given this state of mind, and despite all Jesus had said, when the news broke on the morning of the first day of the week that Jesus was alive, it couldn’t have been more unexpected. Or electrifying…Or transforming...

But, back to Dark Saturday...

Sometimes we feel a little like the disciples on that Dark Saturday. Our most cherished hopes are crushed, and the detritus of our dreams are strewn around us as inescapable reminders of our frailty and failure. Living in the present we cannot yet see through to tomorrow or the day after that, and when we try to project forward we may only be able to imagine a cruel extension of the present darkness.

It is hard for us, 2000 years after the first Easter, to imagine just how dark that Dark Saturday was for the disciples and many other friends and followers of Jesus.

And thus, not having walked through these dark places with the disciples, it is also very hard for us to wrap our minds around the earth shattering nature of what came about the following morning, when hopelessness was replaced by hope, sadness by joy, darkness by light, confusion by clarity.

Sometimes we have to sit in the darkness to appreciate the light, or know hopelessness in order to understand hope, or feel utter gloom before we can know real joy.

We are taught as Christians to identify with the sufferings of Jesus. On this Dark Saturday I am inclined to remember the sufferings of the disciples. Remembering that, and relating to it, it makes the events of Easter morning more unexpectedly wonderful.

Today's Quote: Peace

"And when Peace here does house...
He comes with work to do, he does not come to coo,
He comes to brood and sit."

from "Peace" Gerard Manley Hopkins

Today's Lyric: Come to Me

"Come to me like when the rain falls,
like the arrow from the archer,
let the wind behind the stars call me from
points of my departure"

from Points of My Departure, The Vigilantes of Love, off Slow Dark Train,

Downtown Columbia: What's Wrong with This Picture

Downtown Columbia, from State House grounds

Look closely...What's wrong with this picture...

Todays Lyric: from Bill Mallonee

In these days of toil and trouble 

How much of this is failing flesh 

How much a course of retribution

My, my, how loudly we plead our innocence 

Long after we made our contribution 

Bill Mallonee and The Vigilantes of Love, from "Resplendent," on Audible Sigh

Todays Quote: Steve Turner

"One of the great hindrances to the development of biblically informed mainstream art has been the perception that Christians should make “Christian art” and that “Christian art” is always explicitly religious." Steve Turner, from “Imagine: a Vision for Christians in the Arts.”

My Two Grandmothers

My brother Mike and my two grandmothers. I LOVE this picture - check out that suit. Dude!

Adeline Sanders (my mom's mom)

Michael Curtis Gillespie (my brother)

Mary Sue Gillespie (my dad's mom)

At Bobby's Wedding I think, late 70's 

Today's Lyric

"I can't even remember what it was I came here to get away from."

Bob Dylan, Not Dark Yet, from Time Out of Mind

Today's Quote

"But Francis (of Assisi) held neither to transmigration of souls nor to pantheism. His view of nature and of man rested on a unique sort of pan-psychism of all things animate and inanimate, designed for the glorification of their transcendent Creator, who, in the ultimate gesture of cosmic humility, assumed flesh, lay helpless in a manger, and hung dying on a scaffold."

Francis Schaeffer, Pollution and the Death of Man.

Days Gone By

My 'lil sis Mary, in Nanny's yard, Columbia, SC., app 1961, Holding Camelia, Pink Perfection I think.

I like the dreamy quality of this picture, enhanced somewhat by being a little out of focus. And those eyes!

See my photostream

Today's Lyric

"So excuse me forgetting but these things I do

You see I've forgotten if they're green or they're blue 

Anyway the thing is what I really mean

Yours are the sweetest eyes I've ever seen"

Elton John, Your Song 

Today's Quote

"Our generation is hungry- hungry for love, for beauty, for meaning. The "dust of death" covers all. And as in Jeremiah's day, there is with us the unsatisfied longing for a sufficient comforter." 

Francis Schaeffer, Death in the City.

Yellow Jasmine

Gelsemium sempervirens

Jasmine also spelled "Jessamine"

This beautiful evergreen vine and floral array also known as Carolina Jasmine

The state flower of South Carolina

My photostream

Lavender on My Mind

Wisteria, from below

Today's Lyric

"But words and music can never touch the beauty that I've seen looking into you - and thats true."

from "Looking into You," Jackson Browne

Today's Quote

"Mine, O thou Lord of life, send my roots rain."

from "Thou Art Ineed Just," GM Hopkins

It Worked! Hello Beau!

A few weeks back I published a list of ten people that I had lost track of in life, a piece called Does Anybody Know These Friends of Mine?" One of the folks listed was Beau Coxe (incorrectly spelled "Bo Cox"). Well, lo and behold, Beau called me last night from his home near Atlanta. Apparently his sister had done a search and stumbled across my pictures of Beau from our SC bicycle trip in May 1977. She called Beau and he called me. We talked a long time, and will talk again soon. Sometimes the internet is just plain cool.

The picture above with the story below is one of the great memories of that trip - crazy kids in their youth!

"We were riding over a very long bridge between Beaufort and Hilton Head, across a very large river inlet, and we stopped to look. We debated about jumping. There was a pole running up an abuttment and we thought we could climb up that. Beau said he would go first to show us the way. We were maybe 20 feet above the water. Anyway, Beau went under and popped up about 50 feet upriver as the tide was coming in hard. It took all his strength to swim back to the abuttment. On the way up the pole the pole broke and he fell back into the water with no way to get up and about a mile from land. A fishing boat came up, cursed us out for being stupid fools, and threw us a rope. We pulled Beau up by the rope."

Today's Lyric

"Wish I didn't know now what I didn't know then"
Bob Segar, "Against the Wind," from the album Against the Wind
(a great song about life - I like Segar more and more as I get older)

Today's Quote

"What is all this juice and all this joy?
A strain of the earth's sweet being in the beginning
In Eden garden."

GM Hopkins

"Spring"

Today's Lyric: "No matter how fast I run
I can never seem to get away from me." Jackson Browne, Your Bright Baby Blues, from The Pretender

Todays Quote: "Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about." GK Chesterton, Orthodoxy

Today's quote: "There is only one reason to be a Christian: because it's true" Francis Schaeffer (for real, think about that...)