Oirgins: Morning Thanks: Looking for Beauty iii

Our neighbor died in her nineties. None of her kids lived close by, so after the funeral there was a general purge of the house she and her husband (who died a dozen years earlier) lived in for most of fifty years. She was not a hoarder, not by any stretch of the imagination, but for those who don't know, the truth of the matter is that our affluence as a society and a people means we accumulate a lot of "stuff" in our lifetimes, as did she. 

So one summer morning, I sat downstairs in our basement with the window open, a beautiful summer day, and listened all morning long as her children together marched in and out of their mother's house with their arms full of "stuff," then tossed it, armful after armful, into a garbage bin the locals set up for them right behind the back door. I heard the percussion of all of that. I didn't watch, but I heard every crash, and couldn't help think of my own children doing the same thing, should I outlive my wife and not have to leave home for the Home. 

I'm 72 years old, and, by late afternoon today, my body will speak to me quite audibly if I've done anything in the acre out back. I had a little stroke eight years ago now, and I've always had a chaotic heart, something I've learned to live with and take some kind of medicine to monitor. What I mean is, I won't live forever. Reading obits these days make it clear I'm somewhere close to my fourscore and ten. Even if I tried, I couldn't avoid "counting my days" as Moses's sole contribution to the book of Psalms enjoins us. 

So what happens not when but if the ticker runs out? Could happen. What happens if another stroke lays me out, vegetable-like. I'd like to think I'm not in the least afraid of dying or obsessed with death. I'd just as soon live on; I've got a new granddaughter I've only seen on-line, for pity sake. Yesterday, we were visited by four different colorful friends, including one we've never before seen outside our windows, a madcap lunatic American Redstart, a goofy little thing you'd swear spent too much time drinking cider. Nutty little thing. Some may think it small, but life still has incredible joys. 

But if suddenly I am gone, years of essays will be too. Some child or grandchild would have to sift through the hard drive, where they'd find so much writing they would inevitably despair, throw in the towel, and dump the old desktop. I don't blame them. Here he is again. Look at that tail!

What I'm saying, life is a great gift.

So I started to think that I really should go through the close to 5000 blog posts I'd written through the years and create a sort of greatest hits thing, then convert it to hard copy. I'd never, ever find a publisher for such a thing--I self-published my last novel; so I figured I'd do it myself. I'm retired, right? Got all kinds of time.

So I started, backwards, earliest posts, back when we lived in our old house--another town, another time, another place, a time when, once a week at least, I'd say something about teaching. Soon enough it became clear that those 5000 greatest hits (I tossed hundreds, by the way) wouldn't fit between the covers of a single volume. 

I started dumping individual posts into different files, labeling them almost by genre: 1) memoir--posts that talk about my heritage, grandparents, parents, even my own life; 2) faith and religion--it's stunning how often what I wrote about was "matters of faith"; 3) Native America--my foray into understanding what I could about Native culture and history began with the Ghost Dance, something Ian Frazier calls "the first American religion"; 4) photography, thousands of pictures; 5) a gratitude journal; 6) reading--lots of books and poems and no particular theme; 7) teaching--not many in the last seven years, but oodles of them before that; and 8) Small Wonders--vignettes from local history for radio station KWIT in Sioux City.

It's a painstaking process, and I'm still five years from being finished with the sorting, so I thought I'd try to break tedium a bit and design a book--why not the photography thing? Often, people have said I really should make a book, so I took a shot at it. 

What these last three days of blog posts have been aiming at is that particular book: Morning Thanks--what I used to title the original gratitude journal and hundreds of posts since then--and, subtitled, Looking for Beauty, because that's what I've learned through a hundred trips with a camera (well, four or five different ones in all those years). 

Photography, Dad, is a calling, despite what you thought and said. For me at least, it was never a profession, and that's fine--we all need something we practice just because we come to love it. Yet today, on Saturday, I have to scold myself, Calvinist that I am, when I get too concerned with whether or not I'm doing things right and thereby missing the dawn. 

It a calling because there's real joy in chasing the dawn, just to be out there in the inspiration of yet another new day. That's a joy that fishermen, hunters, and trappers--I've been all of those--know darn well, its own blessed form of worship of the Almighty because out here at least, with a spacious sky for a pulpit, the heavens declare the glory of the Creator.

What you see here is that book--Morning Thanks: Looking for Beauty, a hundred pages of pictures and text gathered from a dozen years of blog posts. If the Lord of Heaven and Earth is pleased to give me a bunch more time, there will be more books. Morning Thanks: A Gratitude Journal is, in fact, in production. 

I'm retired. I'm keeping busy. If I could get control of the dandelions, the acre out back would be more welcoming. This morning I'll try once more to subdue 'em. I've got more projects here on a desk that really needs better organization. I'm not looking for things to do. And yesterday just outside my window, in addition to that American Redstart, an indigo bunting showed up too, and a handsome pair of brown thrush, and more orioles than we've ever had. 

None of them will stay. Nothing does. That doesn't mean that what we see or experience isn't worth or time and attention, or praise and thanksgiving. It's a calling, Dad. Life is. You know that.

If you'd like to see a copy of this first one, just ask. Arrangements can be made. :). Just let me know.