Monthly Archives: October 2010

October 27, 2010 · 7:44 am

The CyberSea

The preacher said a couple of weeks ago that the sea has always been a symbol of chaos.

Last night, I went surfing.

 

Not just for the fun of it.  It’s time for the annual ramp up toward my January class, that audacious thing having to do with a “Christian Aesthetic”, whatever that might be.   The title vaguely refers to a notion that how we encounter aesthetic reality might have something to do with the big Reality, and our experience of Its (His) Presence.  The mediating work of the imagination (mediating between simple, naive reception of sensory stimuli and its meaning as put together in the brain and mind) has always been central to this discussion, and I find that roaming the online world tells us much about what is churning underneath the surface of our collective mind.

The sheer volume of interaction is staggering.  Looking at videos that have had nine hundred thousand hits bends my perceptive lenses nearly out of whack.   Nine hundred thousand? That’s a lot of churning.   Lady Gaga (a billion YouTube views–she calls the watchers “little monsters”), Kanye West (rebuilding his damaged brand with the help of a bird/angel/alien/feathered wonder?), iamamiwhoami (now here’s an interesting approach), Willow Smith (really whipping her hair around…really?) TED, The Inspiration Room, Internet Vibes, Wimp.com, commercials for days from all around the world.   Truth is, I hardly know how to make sense of it all.  The stuff people are doing with flash in design is pretty staggering–beautiful stuff, most of it built to both delight and entice…mostly the latter.   Everyone has something to sell: lifestyle, happiness, heaven, sex, feeling better about yourself through feeding the poor or caring for the orphans, political solutions to the great ills of mankind.   And behind it all, so much white noise, there’s the constant whirr of what’s on everybody’s mind as reported on facebook pages (including mine), as if there are so many people interested in the small and mundane events that make up a typical human day.

I always think…to what end?  What is it we’re searching for in what I call the human enterprise?  Moments and days and years present themselves, drips of time that will not leave us alone.  We have to move, don’t we?  We can’t be still.  To be still is to atrophy and die.  And I’m not referring to the stillness of the God-seekers and the mystics, but the stillness of the lost and uninspired, the depressed and defeated.  Somehow an idea has to come to us of how to live, a “why” to live, a means and reason for action, if for nothing more than survival.   Ah, but it’s not about doing, you say, it’s about being, a “being” that is always in motion, moving forward through time, away from before, toward what comes after, and always in tandem with scores of folks around them.   Relationship, love, connection, companioned shelter, a voice to hear so that we can know, or at least tell ourselves, that we’re not alone.

To what end is all this creativity?  All this making of worlds?  All this dancing, singing, building, programming, clicking, YouTubing, filming, reading, skimming, surfing?

The world is both older and newer than its ever been.  Technology and opportunity do not guarantee any new answers to the old questions of origin, destiny, and meaning.    The sea is nice to float on, but without the right vessel and proper supplies and sustenance, the chaos will eventually crush you.   Is there the equivalent of a life-vest that we should slip on before we venture out on the water of CyberSea?

Sounds like a fantasy country, doesn’t it?  The setting for some underwater kingdom.

But, there’s really no fantasy to it.  It is upon us.

…staying afloat…

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October 26, 2010 · 6:11 am

On Contentment

We churn.

Yesterday, fueled by a morning conversation about commitment (or lack thereof), challenged by an evening swimming with foolish old thoughts of might-have-beens, I churned.  Possible pasts rose up and whacked me in that misty, far-too guilty place, the old smirking internal attorney offering lots of proof of dumb faithlessness and that sorry bug-a-boo of the early-on gifted…unfulfilled potential.   Even as I sat among friends, I hollowed out a place to hide, smiles notwithstanding.  I see the idiocy of such bent-shoulder thinking, but there it is, and God is perfectly happy to sit with me in it, knowing that I will come around because it is His presence I wed myself to so long ago, even with all my faulty meanderings.

I often list, in systematic fashion, my world of unbelievable blessing.   I could bore and annoy with baskets and years of grace.    My mountain of discontent on evenings like last night frankly embarrasses me by light of day.   And then, to top it off, I woke this morning with a pre-cognitive prayer in my mind.   Pre-cognitive meaning as I woke the prayer was simply present, my pre-waking self leaning toward God already, the Spirit knowing I needed an extra ounce of presence in the pre-dawn dark.   Shower, coffee, warm socks, Psalm 139, and the quiet.

In my reading this morning, a quote from Evelyn Underhill caught my attention.   We spend our lives, she said, conjugating three verbs: to want, to have, and to do.   Rings true, doesn’t it?  Human behavior driven by these wantings and doings, the feverish clutching after these desires of ours, we often walk in puddles of unhappiness, comparing our stuff, comparing our selves to the stuff and self of others, and coming up constantly short.  It’s a story we tell ourselves.  Being designed for faith, the stories we tell ourselves shape everything.   Of this I am convinced.

Underhill says the verb “to be” is the important one.  And given that the Psalmist write that God creates my inmost being, and that it precedes, predates any wanting, having, or doing, perhaps she is right.  I have always had a hard separating all these verbs, given that I see things holistically, at least in theory.

Then I open the collected poems of Milosz again, and in much the same way that people report flinging the Bible and finding just what they need to hear in a randomly picked verse, the volume of poetry opens to page 169, and the title gets me immediately.  “A Frivolous Conversation.”

–My past is a stupid butterfly’s overseas voyage.
My future is a garden where a cook cuts the throat of a rooster.
What do I have, with all my pain and rebellion?

–Take a moment, just one, and when its fine shell,
Two joined palms, slowly opens
What do you see?

–A pearl, a second.

–Inside a second, a pearl, in that star saved from time,
What do you see when the wind of mutability ceases?

–The earth, the sky, and the sea, richly cargoed ships,
Spring mornings full of dew and faraway princedoms.
At marvels displayed in tranquil glory
I look and do not desire for I am content.

Milosz wrote this in 1944, and 66 years later, the words land in my lap like long-hidden gifts.    And for a moment, all churning ceases, and I do not hope to be content…I am content.

“…do not let your hands hang limp…”

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October 25, 2010 · 6:12 am

Words Like Leaves

Three hours of color.

I left the house about 11:00, restless, with no appointments for the day until 7:00 p.m., at which time I’d head up to UW to shoot a couple of short scenes for a film being produced by a friend of a friend.   I get nervous about such things, so I needed something to smooth out my pre-performance anxiety.  These days I usually grab my camera and go in search of some new thing.   Bluster was in the air, and I figured a bracing walk might be nice.  Wandering the neighborhoods just northeast of Greenlake, I soon found myself neck deep in color, giant, sculptural leaves resting fresh on the ground, not yet curled into that rich dead brown, but still pulsing with gradient reds and yellows, many of them conspiring to lay themselves in compositions artists struggle to discover.

As I wandered, I kept thinking of the Psalmist’s words: “As for man, his days are like grass, he flourishes like a flower of the field; the wind blows it over and it is gone, and its place remembers it no more.”   Except on this day, we were like leaves dropping from trees drifting into winter sleep, needlessly shouting crimson as they descend, as if holding their greatest praise until the very end.  No one will pay attention to the particular leaves I noticed that afternoon.   They have no doubt been blown away by now, flattened by rain and feet and time.   And soon, they will be dust, if that.   The Psalmist says God knows that about us, that we too are dust, and that He has compassion on us as He remembers that.

No two leaves are alike.   Some are like hearts, some are like countries.   But they share so much in common, and I would not likely mistake a leaf for a tree or a sidewalk.  We people, no two of us are the same.  But we are so alike.  Restless, ambitious creatures, wanting to climb higher in the tree, not be cast from it to land curbside in a ditch and drain, spectacular color notwithstanding.

Perhaps we turn color as we age, inside.   But now I read that the whole process of color-change for the leaves is because trees start to shut down from lack of light as the days grow shorter.  If that’s the case, I suppose my beautiful color analogy breaks down, because I don’t want less light, but more.  Perhaps when we enter the forever light, there will be colors yet unknown to change to, and perhaps we will not fall from the tree life, but be grafted into it.   As I said, the analogy doesn’t hold up, but the fallen capture my imagination anyway.   How can we not be grateful for what autumn brings us, a simple, near after-thought of a blessing.

I breathed a bit easier after my walk.    How can we not be glad walking in God’s beautiful thought?

Another thought in this world of falling leaves:  I must begin to let words fly, in quantities like the trees in autumn, piling them up everywhere I go.   That’s the work…

Seeing and writing and making, with textures and colors of forests and trees…

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October 21, 2010 · 7:11 am

Everything’s A Photo Waiting To Be Taken…

So I got an invitation from my daughter to do a “365″ project.   What’s that, I said?  Well, it’s an online project where you post a photograph a day, joining a community of pretty talented (make that “really, amazingly talented”) photographers just practicing the craft, having a great time blowing each others’ minds with these images.   I love seeing what’s on people’s minds and how they go about recording the world.

The result for me is that I’m almost a month into it and I’ve gone stupid about taking photographs.  Maybe it’s a stress reliever of some kind but my goodness, it’s fun.   Learning a lot, too.   What in the world to do with these shots, though?   Lots of interesting things.  But there’s a shift in focus that starts to happen as I lug my camera around.  I begin to see light constantly, framing the world in compositions that speak of balance and beauty and structure and rhythm.    The metaphors of training the eye to see, focus, depth of field, looking for light and shadow…they could go on and on.

There is a lens through which the Christ calls us to see the world.  We need to be taking lots of shots to train our eyes to see.

Hope you see something amazing today…

 

 

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October 19, 2010 · 7:10 am

Thoughtful Creatives, Resonance, and Hospitality

This past weekend was a game-changer.

At the end of a pretty bumpy road just outside of Cle Elum sits a place called Chalet Talley, and there I spent a couple of days in the company of dear friends I’d never met before.    It began with a ninety minute ride from Seattle with a beautiful poet of a man.  We talked of Milosz, Rilke, metaphor, Christ, translation, language, and the surprising ease of the conversation.   We eased into Chalet Talley, not sure what the weekend would bring, but heartened by the blessing already given, and by the beauty of the setting.

Host Jack, a falstaffian sort of man exuding hospitality, wit, and quiet wisdom, greeted us from an open window, shouting, “I’m the cook!”    Soon we found ourselves amidst a near-dozen band of artists, mystics, and fools, all of us gathered for a weekend of long, thoughtful conversation about the life and work of faith in Christ as it relates to the processes of making beauty, making art, and making life.   There was no agenda, no set of exercises to work through, no pre-conceived notion of what might happen.  We had not been informed of who else would be there; we’d simply been invited to come to the conversation.   And to top it off, Chalet Talley’s beauty was not only in the charming architecture of a Swiss chalet in the Cascade mountains, but inside there were relief carvings commissioned by the owner, deeply cut renderings of biblical scenes, and they hovered over us, and as we talked, we were constantly reminded of the cloud of witnesses watching.

So we talked.

How do you describe the healing power of being in the presence of those who understand?  Shared experience and thought-life created quick connection, and the burdens of living with the inescapable ambiguities that we artists try to hold up and honor in a religious world that largely demands clarity and easy answers…lifted.    Musicians, writers, photographers, actors, directors…we read poetry, spoke of the Incarnation and sat in quiet wonder about the entry of God into the world, and what it meant for us as we try to emulate that coming.   We wondered how to tease depth out of this swift, shallow culture, wondering about our role in the marketplace.   We marveled together at God’s work in the world, at His refusal to wait for His church to speak truth into the culture, using whatever artist or clown He could find to get the word of His love out there.  We shared our work, spoke of next projects, wept at failures and disappointment, collectively pushing back against the darkness that always threatens to steal into us.

We ate together, shared wine and bread and laughter, and the bounty was more than any of us deserved, a felt reality, a picture of grace and joy, a picture of the great banquet of God that awaits those who love and follow Him.   With eleven men ranging in age from early 20′s to mid 60′s gathered around an absolutely gorgeous table, simply decorated with fall foliage, some of it gathered from a neighbor’s tree (with the neighbor’s permission, of course…spectacular yellow), the conversation was by turns quiet, raucous, funny, intense…even sad.   Resonance abounded.

A community of love is one thing.    A community of love where people resonate with each other is another.

I learned a lot about what it means to create space for such conversation and relationship.   Yes, I’ve been around the block enough to know the dynamic of the mountaintop retreat and the  subsequent fade of luster as post-retreat life begins again.   But I couldn’t help but walk away thinking about how to replicate such space for folks like me more often.  So many of my friends struggle to find companionship that resonates.   Resonant space, resonate hospitality, resonant beauty.

The other big message I got was simply this:  stop whining, be a professional, do the work, show up, push back the dark, get into the marketplace, let my voice be heard, be obedient, trust God, serve the work, tell the truth, let the work heal as God uses it.   Results are not up to me, but the effort of creation belongs to us, animated by God and the One who made all things, and who energizes our making as well.

Thanks to Dick Staub, Nigel Goodwin, and Jeff Johnson for Kindling’s Hearth.    As far as I’m concerned, mission accomplished.   Re-kindled, flame on.

Nothing but grateful, and ready to work…

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