Lula Jane's

"Auto racing, bull fighting, and mountain climbing are the only real sports ... all others are games."  -- Ernest Hemingway

I'm busy these days learning to climb mountains!

Hemingway also wrote, "There is nothing to writing.  All you do is sit down at the typewriter and bleed."

I sit down this morning and bleed on journal pages.

Like a child's picture book, one word per page, God reads aloud to me, (and I write), "Listen."  In the distance a train whistles through intersections, faint voices rise from adjacent tables, and wind chimes ring above.  A fly appears, all abuzz, to disrupt.  I begin to take it all in, to record what I hear.


On my way to Lula Jane's this morning, mowed medians caught my eye, wildflowers disappeared overnight into summer graves.  Crows foraged for seeds.  Many seeds escaped to safety, driven under by abundant rain.  Little life-containers, they rest now, to come forth in profuse bloom on another day.  Like roadside wildflowers, I come forth in season, bloom, produce, and sow my own seed to wind and ground.  Seeds scatter and burrow.  Meanwhile, I'm plowed under.  Yet do I live, in a thousand new places, in countless hearts, stirred even if only for seconds.  I more than exist.  By grace, I bear fruit and multiply in my living and in my dying.  I'm eternal and about His eternal business.  I die, yet I enlarge my territory.  I spread myself out to ripple round the world.


I look beyond the open fence enclosing the patio.  Each square frames its own view.  I study a portion of the flag, waving as in a little flip book.  I recall making these on the edges of textbook pages when bored in school.  Still images flickered alive, and motion pictures were born.  Then my adventures were lived on page corners and in foolish escapades.

Wire frames flowers on tall stalks bordering the garden.  Herbs give up their scent to persistent wind, and chimes, played by gusts, sing new songs.  I watch, and listen to Him, as a feathery seed blows across the brick floor, weathered and beautifully uneven.  Seeds, leaves, straw lay trapped in cracks.  True life and great adventure happens here, amid the uneven stones, where swept into dark crevices are seeds, barely visible carriers of lives innumerable. I love it from this vantage point, from my comfy chair with a cranberry orange scone and a steamy cup of Ethiopian goodness, chocolaty sweet.  Much of the week, however, I live down in crevices, blown there by shifting winds of change and constant problems, pecked at by hungry (needy) creatures, my own kind, and sometimes baked desert dry, thirsting for relief.  I lose sight of Him.  Yet, He still walks the earth, tends to His plantings, transforms water into wine, brings forth joy from crushed fruit of The One True Vine.  Buried once, He understands the suffering involved in giving up life, in offering it as resurrection seed, thereby multiplying it to many.  He continues to do so in and through me!!  Still, I come alongside the dying, and at times, resist with them the grave, knowing full well it is the doorway to life more abundant.

You don't just lay in cracks.  For at the same time there is a work to be done, a Lord and a people to serve.  Thankfully, Rest comes to rescue me from oh so much self-effort.  He, my Sabbath, says, "Come to Me, you who are weary and heavy burdened, and I will give you rest.  Come, receive from Me!"  I come this morning, pulled as I am by the day's possibilities -- the opportunities to produce something seen today, to work perhaps in creating my own garden spot.  Instead, I come.  I come to Lula Jane's for breakfast with My Savior.  And He communes with me in the surrounding life sounds, carried on vacation-like breezes, and I know He is here with me, again.  Funny how at times earth's sounds can drown out His songs of deliverance, and at others carry them sweetly to my yearning ears!  I hear now sirens, bells gonging, cranes raising beams to build, cars going about their routes -- I hear busyness.  Thankfully, my feet are up, and for a while I'm privileged to just

listen and watch, and breathe in the breath of life emanating always from His mouth.  He performs CPR, He touches me, He massages my heart, resurrects me for another week of life-bearing in the maze of cracks that is holy ground.

The strands of my silvering hair blow gentle, and here in His arms I'm okay with this dying life that generates life.  But when I'm out there, I sometimes forget, and ask, "Is this where/how/when I'm to spend myself?"  It's harder than I thought in my Mother Teresa wanna-be imagination.  I didn't picture living in the throes of another person's death over and over, composed and calm for their sake, dying a thousand deaths.  I've entered the ring in the final rounds, only to watch one person after another succumb.  That dreaded ring with it's gore, regrets, questions, desperation -- it's where I too have laid down my own life beside the dying.  I've grown older here, much older, and lost my girlish view of things.