Monthly Archives: January 2010

January 30, 2010 · 10:38 pm

Late Night Writing


My skin temperature seems a little high, just a bit hotter than usual.   My microwaved coffee may be the cause.   Since my espresso machine died, I’ve been going through regular pots.   Regular coffee affects me differently than espresso shots.   Maybe that’s why I’m sweating a bit.  Or maybe it’s hot in my office because the heater may be on.   I don’t remember, and I can’t see the dial from here.  Or I could be sick, but I doubt it.

Perception.  I’ve been thinking about it a lot in recent days.   Sensory perception, then the filters of various parts of the brain involved in the deciphering of the raw visual, auditory, olfactory, tactile, and gustative information, then cognition, then story-telling.  Or something like that.

I had a counselor ask me once why I thought thoughts were so much more trustworthy than feelings.   He wasn’t arguing that feelings should be trusted–he was challenging why I gave reason a pass when it came to trust.   As if reason were, by definition, trustworthy.   I explained that more than once I’d followed my “gut”, listened to my “intuition”, and I’d gotten burned, in fact, nearly thrown my life away.   “Emotion can’t be trusted” I told him.   Undeterred, he wondered something that went like this:  what if reason was just as likely to lead us astray, especially if we build the foundations of reason on wrong assumptions and incoherent processes?   What if highly attuned emotional intelligence could be just as trustworthy as reasoned thought?  Or better yet, what if reasoned thought might be just as likely to be misleading as emotional flooding?

Perception.   Yesterday morning, I drove east across the bridge and met a friend at Belle Pastry in Old Bellevue.   Easily the best pastry I’ve had in years, the croissant was light, flaky, buttery, and the conversation was just as good.   I was going on about my interest in the notion that we all have to make sense of things, that we each are stuck with making up a story of some kind, a narrative tale that can get us through the decades in one piece.  My friend, animated and lively, said that yes, this was exactly what we had to do.  It was our God-given responsibility to do just that, to make a story of how the world is, and live and tell that story.

A big truck is idling outside.  It drops into gear, and heads on.  I infer the light must have turned green at the intersection.   Now it’s gone.

I got some news a few minutes that could have a major impact on my bank account.

Tomorrow is my last day of full-time employment, and it’s by choice, and not by layoff.  Perhaps I’ve lost my mind.

Last night, I saw a play that reminded me again that the great unknown is coming, headed our way.   None of us will escape.

I asked the following question this afternoon:  “What parent would make a world for their child in which the rules were this: if anything good happened in the child’s life, the parent would always get the credit.   And if anything bad happened in the child’s life, the child would get the blame.”

Tomorrow, house guests arrive.   We welcome them even though we’ve never met them.

Even now, you’re wondering about the last five or six sentences.   They seem a bit random, and you’re trying to make sense of them.   Trying to put together a narrative, using the title of blog post, and perhaps the word “perception” to lace together the story, the meaning, the point.   And if you fail to make the connections that create that narrative, it’s me that’s failed.

As I often say, the burden of communication is on the communicator.    May not be fair, but…

Perception, process, imagination, cognition, narrative, meaning…

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January 23, 2010 · 3:59 pm

Regret Over Missed Colleagues

I was thinking about Arthur Koestler’s work today, The Act of Creation.   The Act of Creation was the major text in my Directing Seminar 681 (I think that was the number) back in graduate school.   Then I thought of my very smart postmodern professor from back then, and googled his name.   Then another name came up alongside his, a former professor who was thoughtful, tough, challenging, and ultimately, one of the more encouraging people in the program.   I did a search of her name, wondering what she was up to, and I discovered that she’s gone to a distinguished career in both professional and academic worlds, and then I laughed a bit, because I noticed that she is the associate artistic director for a theatre to which my daughter recently sent her headshot.   A tiny part of me thought “connection.” But I let that go, choosing instead to simply think how cool it would be for this distinguished former mentor of mine to meet my fine and courageous daughter.

And then I felt the old regret.

I’m not sure why, but I didn’t carry any of my relationships from those years forward.   They were hard years for me, years of fear and discovery of who I was and who I was going to be.  My faith was under constant pressure intellectually and personally, and though I managed to get through it (I was the only person to graduate from the directing program over the three years I was there), I was often fearful and afraid that someone would finally discover I did not belong in this very talented world and show me the door. I’ve since discovered that we all pretty much feel that way.  (About six months after I left grad school, I showed myself the door as far as theatre went, but that’s another story.)  I was young, naïve, and foolish.  Little did I know how much I would someday miss many of these good people, regret the fact that today, I have none of them in my life.

Why did I turn away from them?  Maybe I didn’t turn away as much as never turned toward.  Never sent a thank you, never called them up to just say hi, how are you doing, or even, could you help me find a job?   Classmates I cared about I let slip away.    People I’m sure that had interesting, challenging lives, with whom it would be fun to just chat, laugh—maybe even argue.   I’ve watched the careers of some.   I was thrilled to see the young man who played the lead in my thesis show in first in an issue of American Theatre playing George in Our Town at the Arena Stage in Washington, DC, and then later in the TV version of The Music Man with Matthew Broderick.   Then another fine actor I worked with there has done well in film and television and theatre, and this next summer will be playing a leading role at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.   The man I would call my best friend during those few years left UT and went to another program, and though we talked once or twice after that (we spent a couple of days together at the 1984 Arts Olympics in Los Angeles, and then spent another day in Vancouver B.C. later that year), we lost track of each other.   A couple of years ago, I found him online, and sent him an email.   He wondered what happened to me, and frankly, remained somewhat offended that I’d never bothered to keep up the relationship.

I didn’t blame him.

Today, thankfully, I’m not as neglectful as I used to be.   I have more friends and colleagues than I deserve.  Friends I keep up with and pour myself into, friends who I pray will be near for the rest of my life.  But sometimes, I feel the old restlessness, and I know that I still have the distorted ability to walk into the future alone with my family.  That same old distance I sometimes put between myself and others hovers.   God knows I’ve been thinking about friendships and what it means to cultivate and nurture them, and maybe He brings me these thoughts today just to remind me of how precious friends truly are.

I sent the former professor from the Shakespeare Festival an email, just to say thank you.  She was good to me, encouraged me, even let me do crazy projects that courageous actors took part in.   I should have said “I really appreciate you” a long time ago.

Let 2010 be a year of friendship…

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January 21, 2010 · 8:19 am

Meaning: Find It? Make It?

Eric Maisel, in his book Coaching the Artist Within, declares that one of the primary skills in living successfully is to “passionately make meaning.”   I’ve read a couple of Maisel’s books.  Maisel’s a family therapist and creativity coach, with a Phd in psychology.  He may not believe in God, but he’s a good writer, and a helpful one, atheist or not.   I’ve gotten inspiration from several of his ideas over the years (all you have to do to get the inner “I suck” voices to shut up is tell them to “hush!” and mean it…it works pretty well) and I’ll take inspiration wherever I can get it.  (Well, maybe not wherever…you know what I mean.)

In reading the chapter of Coaching the Artist Within about making meaning, Maisel says you have to decide to make meaning, that your life is yours to decide about, and no one’s is going to decide it for you.  In fact, there will be many who will try to derail you from whatever it is you decide is the work and meaning of your life.

So do we find meaning or do we make it?   This morning, as I was driving into the church office, I was mulling this, and I remembered that I used to tell students that they could stop looking for meaning, because meaning had already been given.  What did I mean?  It had to do with God, of course, and ideas of origin, identity, and destiny, and being loved.   However, it makes total sense to me that if there is no God, no personal source of origin, identity, and destiny, then of course, as Maisel declares, we have to make it up.   We have to decide, and yes, passion will be needed to bring any meaning into the world, especially when there’s really not any fundamentally other than the processes of natural selection, reproduction, and survival.

But then, a metaphor came to me.   It made me smile.   What if meaning were like a material?   And what if we didn’t have to find it, because it is all around us, like water is all around the world of fish.   What if meaning is like air, and we move through it constantly, but really forget it’s there?   And what if, as a material, it’s malleable, and can take various shapes and forms, and it’s not that we have to make it so much as we get to shape it, form it, make beauty with it, discover what’s possible with it?   What if we’re not making meaning, we’re making life, and meaning is one of the materials by which we make it?

The Christian faith makes the straightforward claim that meaning has already been given.   Worth, value, purpose, meaning, love…these are gifts of God that are there from the get-go.    We forget, true enough, and have to figure it all out again, remind each other, help each other, shore each other up.  And yes, I can even say I agree with Maisel, that there is a sense in which we must make our meaning, and make it with passion.  But for me, making meaning is closer to painting a canvas than it is to making paint or color from scratch.

I’m not sure I know what I mean, exactly.   Far too abstract.   Maybe what I mean is buried in this:  Children are far too busy playing to wonder about the meaning of playing.   When they begin to wonder about the meaning of their play, they’ve stopped playing.

Playing is good…

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January 20, 2010 · 7:33 am

Making Worlds

We encounter the world through our senses.   Light hits the eye’s photoreceptors and the optical information starts its split-second journey toward the visual cortex in the occipital lobe, then on to the frontal cortex, and perception begins.   Same with sound, smell, taste, and touch; the various systems involved in each leap into action as stimuli enter our field of experience.

What in the world do we do with all that information?

We “make” a world.

I have questions.   Anyone who knows me knows that I am constantly in a state of questioning, and because of that, am also constantly hovering near crisis.   That’s overstating the discomfort I cause myself with all these questions, but questions are, without a doubt, bothersome.   While they may be doorways to new understanding, opening all manner of new possibilities, they may also be uncomfortable because new answers, or even the suggestion of new answers, can lead to a re-telling of the stories on which we base our lives.   And new tellings of stories call the old tellings into question, and what in the world do we do if the story we thought we were in isn’t the story after all?

What if we’ve been telling it wrong?  Or maybe not wrongly, but poorly?

For over 25 years, I’ve been thinking about Christian faith and the odd activity we call art making.  My thoughts began with experiences in theatre and music, moved on to include painting, sculpture, and other plastic arts, then expanded to include all craft-making, and finally, expanded by implication to the making of anything at all.   The fact that we are “making” creatures (beings that constantly reshape material and spiritual reality to meet ongoing desire and need) is, in my mind, profound.   The expression of the self, the flow of market economies, the connecting of cultures through the study of artifact, the theoretical (as in, built on hypothesis and testing) chase for knowledge in science—all of these are the result of the “making” function of the human.

At least, that’s the story I tell.

We encounter life through experience and perception, and we must make something of it.   Hence we replay the move of Genesis 1, discovering the chaos of this onslaught of information that comes at us each day, and we hover over it, and work with all our heart and mind and body and spirit to might sense of it all, to bring it to light, in some way that causes us to finally exhale and say, “It is good.”

In recent years, “beauty” has risen to the surface of this conversation, catching my attention like a late blooming flower.  I have a vague notion of what I mean when I say the word, but “beauty” too is a confusion, an invitation to all kinds of misunderstanding, perhaps even destruction, depending on who’s calling what beautiful.   But still, the word keeps after me, and I think it’s time to begin to chase it down with more clarity, more heart, and more commitment.   But not just “beauty” but the whole conversation.

I often tell people this is the book I have to write before I die, so I’d better get started.

Maybe I should open-source the whole thing.

Here’s a question:  if you were to pick up a book about Christian faith, art, beauty, cosmos, and any number of other words you can supply here, what would that book have to contain?  I have my own ideas and biases, but I’m sure I’m missing some things. Fields of study that have to be explored, ideas that I ignore to my own peril, and non-negotiable disciplines that must be given their due.  If you’d like to weigh in, please do so.

I’ve got a pretty extensive bibliography (I’m really thankful for all the work that’s gone on over the past 25 years), but I’m sure there are books out there I don’t know about.  If you’ve read a good one, one that maybe even changed everything you thought about this stuff, let me know.

I’ll be blogging about all of this off and on all year, and we’ll see what comes of it.

We’ll see what we “make” of it.   What story will be told.

I like the phrase “original glory”…

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January 19, 2010 · 6:14 pm

Vacation Adventures

So there I am, standing at the railing of a catamaran, bobbing up and down in the Pacific Ocean at the base of the great, plunging cliffs of the NaPali Coast on the north shores of Kauai.  The morning sun has just crested over the top of these mountains, and the sea mists have caught the light, scattering shafts of light down through the impressive gorges into the sea.   Waves hurl white foam onto the rocks, which then fingers its way back down to the water.   Behind us, a humpback whale roles over a few times, and even breaches to the delighted shouts of the passengers.   I raise my head to see the magnificent view and take it in.   I know I will never forget this moment.

Sick as a dog, I’m throwing up over the railing even as creation in its majesty offers me the best view in the house.

Actually, I did pretty well the first couple of hours of the tour.  This was Friday of our week in Kauai, and both Anjie and I were excited to be out in the water, circling the island in search of whales, dolphins, turtles, and perhaps even a bit of snorkeling.   The waves were in the ten-foot range, said the captain, and I even got out on the very tip of one of the hulls.   When my feet started leaving the deck as the boat shot up and down, Anjie and I figured we’d better head for the back, where the ride might be a little easier.

Too late.  Not long after that, the world tilted, my stomach freaked out, and I wondered how in the world I was going to get through the next four to five hours of sailing.

This will be a funny, funny story for a long time.

Obviously, that’s really not my greatest or most memorable moment of our trip to Hawaii, but it just seems like an appropriate metaphor that I’ll leave for you to unpack.  As you think about it, don’t forget the grandeur and the throwing up, and don’t forget the laughing at the end.

Hanging on for dear life…

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