I’m not really a clown kind of guy, but years ago, back in the 80′s, I spent a memorable evening of theatre in the presence of one of the best.  Avner the Eccentric, he called himself, and I remember laughing as hard as I have ever laughed that night.  You know the kind of laugh I mean: eyes narrowed and tears flowing, you just can’t smile any bigger, your inner 10-year-old is clamoring to be let out, and your abs just hurt, and even as you laugh, you have the presence of mind to say, “I haven’t laughed this hard in a long, long time.”  That’s a “thank you” moment, and that night, I thanked God for Avner.

So now, after last night, it’s thank God for Lorenzo.

With Humor Abuse at The Seattle Rep, Lorenzo Pisoni (writer and actor) and Erica Schmidt (director) have crafted a quiet little masterpiece, a finished cabinet of a play.   By that I simply mean that it brings the kind of joy detailed finish work brings, as opposed to the overwhelming grandeur of a giant house.  With self-effacing humor, seeming incredulity, and frankness that never descends into meanness (how I cherish that spirit these days), Lorenzo lovingly critiques the world of his “clown dad” Larry, holding up the mirror to his old man (and himself) in such a way that by the end, we’ve all fallen for both father and son.  I say fallen…Lorenzo, as expected, does most of the falling himself.  Funny to say I could watch guys like him fall all day long.

Lorenzo apologizes up front for his lack of funniness, which of course, we laugh at.  I confess I get a bit worried, because I know what it’s like to not be funny.  But he’s lying, of course, as clowns are no doubt wont to do, the arts of deception and false perception being among their chief tools.   So now, safe with the knowledge that little comedy would be forthcoming, we get coaxed into a little boy’s circus world.  With stories of juggling and hat tricks and monkey suits,  Lorenzo teases us into chortle and chuckle and knee-slap and finally, with fins and ladders and stairs and balloons and a woman from the audience in a little black dress, we are, by the end of the evening, back in that fabulous place of teary, bent over howling breathlessness, again saying thank you.   And then…and then…a final moment, so beautifully crafted.  Our hearts, so open with all that laughter, receive a a bit of well-earned astonishment.  Even wisdom.

This is what honoring your story looks like.   My impression is that Lorenzo, in sharing the shadows of his father’s all-too-human navigation of somewhat remote and anonymous pain, has himself landed in a place we all recognize.  Upon examination, looking back, we stand flummoxed and astonished at our mysterious families, all at once sentimental and honest, both horrified and whimsically philosophical about it all.  There are so many secrets for all of us, aren’t there?  Our parents end up as regular, amazing folk, just like us, their lives full of injury and damages and running and finally, they break their backs (sometimes literally) chasing their ghosts and dreams.  And so we reflect and consider these people who raised us, spending a lifetime of energy putting our stories together in ways we can not only make sense of, but beauty of.   In the end, telling the truth the way Lorenzo does it, is an act of love.  So much love.

And to top it all off, Lorenzo is just really good at what he does.  Delightful…simple as that.

Go see this performance if you get the chance.  Oh, yeah, one more thing: a final”hat’s off” to all those in the design of the space.  Loved it.  The lighting was fabulous.

Thanks, Lorenzo, not so much for the laughs, but for the magic…

That football sailing through last-minute skies landing months down the road in the arms of a future worth far more than six points and a ring: a new personal favorite story moment that encapsulates so much of what I loved about Friday Night Lights.

I liked the first film, especially (spoilers ahead), the gritty ending.  You don’t always win; in fact, much of life is learning how to adjust to not winning.  But the pilot of the television series knocked me over…still does.  Maybe it’s the fact that Peter Berg and company got the West Texas culture so right.  It’s strange to watch a television show chronicling the world of your childhood, especially one that manages to get into the crevices and cracks of relationships and environment. The small town, the football fever, the lone BBQ joint, the tiny houses, the grandmother fading lovingly into dementia, the inarticulate back-up quarterback, the jock who drinks who turns out to have a deeper soul.   As I write that, it all seems cliched, but it’s just not.  Nor is it over-romanticized.  Sure, I’ll admit the FNL world is not a dark place, and it’s true that some folks get stuck in the heat, the dust, and the disappointment in such a fashion that small-town Texas becomes terrible and life-crushing.  One detractor I know (yes, there are some) went so far as to complain that people like Coach Taylor (and Tami) don’t exist.   Well, I know that’s not true–I’ve known more than one Coach Taylor through the years, each of them making just the kind of difference Coach Taylor makes.

Maybe it was the acting.   I recall seeing perhaps a handful of false notes over the five seasons, but so much of it was seamless.  Kyle Chandler and Connie Britton were spot-on, though it was Britton who regularly took my breath away, most often in scenes with her daughter, Aimee Teegarden’s character Julie.   Taylor Kitsch (Riggins), Zach Gilford (Matt), Jesse Plemons (Landry), Adrianne Palicki (Tyra), Matt Lauria (Luke), Michael B. Jordan (Vince)…the list is pretty stellar.  So many beautiful moments as these characters respond to the tests they’re given.   I’m remembering the gist of Coach Taylor’s voice over speech at the end of the pilot episode as Jason Street (played by Scott Porter) goes down with a crippling neck injury.  ”We will be tested.”

Perhaps that’s what rings both true and false about FNL.  These people are tested, and most of them fail along the way.  But what we get to see is that mistakes need not be forever, sins need not cripple a life, and the hammer blows of circumstance cannot destroy the fire-forged steel called faith.  Failed dreams, broken marriages, bone-head decisions, seedy lifestyles, prison terms–none of them are excuses to stop believing that the good in the world always has a chance to come back.  Moments of beauty stream towards us constantly.  And while such moments are not always fully redemptive (what will Vince’s Dad’s life be after the game for State is over), they are there.  They stand as evidence that in a world where everyday can seem like a war, there is always the chance that today will be the day that you make that touch or that move that will lead again to six points, and another win.

So at the end of the run, it’s the start of another season.   Love is in the air, possibility sits in the faces of all those young players looking at their new coach, and we just have a sense that these characters will move on in an honest and realistic hope, a hope that’s the result of that mysterious combination of effort and grace.  That hope will not disappoint them.   Somehow, FNL helped me get a glimpse of what the Apostle Paul meant when he talking of taking joy in his suffering.   He said “suffering produces perseverance, perseverance produces character, and character, hope.”

Clear eyes, full hearts, can’t lose.

Thanks, FNL…

In going through some old papers the other day, I came across a remarkable little article by Dennis B. Plies, a professor of music at Warner Pacific College, in which Professor Plies addresses improvisation.  The title of the article is a quote of Kierkegaard: To Will To Be Himself Is Man’s True Vocation.  (Click on the title for the full article.)

In brief, Professor Plies links an inner move from doing to being to the ever-present, crippling trio of pride, guilt, and fear.  His purpose is to theologically address the problem of essential human freedom, the source of both “our dignity and our misery,” an exercise prompted by his experience of teaching improvisation to jazz musicians.

Rather do a long summary of the article, let me just encourage you to go read it.  And below I have pulled out some of the salient quotes that Professor Plies uses to underscore his points.   Any one of them can be fuel enough to help me soar through the day, assisting in the ongoing battle to push back the Resistance.  (see Pressfield’s The War of Art for what “Resistance” refers to.)

• “Double-mindedness is an attitude of willing the good for external reasons: desire of reward; fear of punishment; approval of others. Only the man who wills the good unreservedly and for itself alone really draws near to God and makes it possible for God to draw near to him.  And only then, i.e., as God draws near to him, can a man, by God’s power, become single-minded and pure in heart.”  –Soren Kierkegaard

• “The more lucidly we think,the more we are cut off: the more deeply we enter into reality, the less we can think.  y ou cannot study pleasure in the moment of the nuptial embrace, nor repentance while repenting, nor analyze the nature of humour while roaring with laughter.” –C.S. Lewis

• “To exercise freedom is to determine what we want and then to give ourselves permission to do it.”  –Dennis B. Plies

• “Self-protection and love and opposites.  Since love is the ultimate virtue, self-protection is the ultimate problem.” –Larry Crabb

• “The grace of God means something like: Here is your life. You might never have been, but are because the party wouldn’t have been complete without you.  Here is the world.  Beautiful and terrible things will happen.  Don’t be afraid. I am with you.  Nothing can ever separate us.  It’s for you.  I created the universe.  I love you.”  –Frederick Buechner

• “For true guilt is precisely the failure to dare to be oneself.  It is the fear of other people’s judgment that prevents us form being ourselves, from showing ourselves as we really are, from showing our tastes, our desires, our convictions, from developing ourselves and from expanding freely according to our own nature.  It is the fear of other people’s judgment that makes us sterile, and prevents our bearing all the fruits that we are called to bear.”  –Paul Tournier

• “Perhaps there is no gift more precious than the gift of spontaneity, the ability of certain men and animals to act straight and fresh and self-forgettingly out of the living center of who they are without the paralyzing intervention of self-awareness.“  –Frederick Buechner

Makes me want to go sign up for an improv class…

Megan Cole as A, Alexandra Tavares as C, and Susanne Bouchard as B in Seattle Repertory Theatre's production of Edward Albee's Three Tall Women

At 7:15 p.m. on this Wednesday evening I was in a bit of a huff.  Mad, actually, because I couldn’t find a parking place.  I hate to pay for parking.  And usually there’s a spot lurking somewhere west of Seattle Center.  But not tonight.   I finally gave up, parked and payed, and headed across the street to the Seattle Rep to see Edward Albee’s play, Three Tall Women.

Three hours later, sitting back at my computer, knowing I’ve been changed by what I experienced tonight.  The second act did me in.

Megan Cole, Suzanne Bouchard, and Alexandra Tavares were not only tall, they were towering.  Lithe with words and moments, shifts of emotional tone lightning fast, the three of them played Albee’s rhythms like musicians, and after reading director Allison Narver’s notes, it was easy to see that as conductor, she gave a pretty tall performance herself.   In short (no pun intended), I haven’t been this impacted by a piece of work in a long, long time.

Three Tall Women (spoiler alert, but it’s not about plot anyway) is a play about three women at three distinctly different seasons of life, and then in Act Two–and the structure and writing is oh, so subtle, but works seamlessly–they become the same woman.   It reminded me of that book I love so much, The Time Traveler’s Wife, by Audrey Neffennegger, in which the protagonist time travels and meets himself coming and going.   The whole idea of the future and what waits for each of us, and would we want to know what’s coming if given the chance.   Albee’s older women say, “No way.”

This is not a review.  It’s more a report about an experience.   Act One belonged to Megan Cole.   As an old woman on her very last legs, she played Albee’s action as a verbal dance, full of runs and stops, turns and leaps, frets and furies, as well as the on and off warm memories sweeping into her in recurring  waves.  It was pain, bitterness, and courage on display, loss upon loss: her memory, her temper, her control of bodily function, her money, her son, and in the end, her life.   Act Two opened a window into the grand sweep of one particular life, into which Albee stuffs an awful lot of theatricality, courage, and bursting pain.   Suzanne Bouchard’s mid-act tirade, sparked by the arrival of someone she once threw out of her house, was nothing short of mesmerizing.   Stunning.   Rage, bravado, pride, fear, sexuality, disbelief, strength…all on display.  And she barely moved.

And all of this firmly set inside the soft-walled, hard edged-frame box of a design beautifully conceived by Matthew Smucker.   The program suggested the design made us voyeurs.  I never felt that way.  I felt I was in a gallery, watching lives rendered in a very focused, attention-holding strategy.  It was odd not to see their feet, but I loved the frame and clean lines of the soft, near transparent curtain that surrounded the space.   And the light was just beautiful, shifting simply to illuminate the moods at work in the various sections of the play.

The reasons I was impacted so deeply are personal, and I’ll speak of them another time.   But my mind was opened in a way that I can’t really imagine happening any other way.   The experience of these women was palpable to me, so imaginable, so compassion-inducing, so terrible in its content, but so thrilling in its form, its rhythm, its language, meter, and emotional scales.

Mss. Cole, Bouchard, and Tavares…thank you.    Thank you for the gift of all those years of preparation and work in the aesthetic mastery of your craft.    On this Wednesday night, you delivered big time.

And it mattered…

I’ve got to get out more.

Last night, I trekked downtown to small venue I’d never been to before, one of the performing spaces for Cornish School of the Arts (it may be the only one…I don’t know).   I went to see the opening of The American Clock, by Arthur Miller, directed by Carol Roscoe.   Having directed a few university plays myself, and having experienced a wide variety of final products in such venues,  I went in with few expectations, which, by the way, I find to be the most rewarding approach to seeing theatre these days.   As I settled into my seat in the large, square black box theatre, I couldn’t help but reflect on all the time I spent in such places over the years.   A low ceiling, batten grid above me, small audience, large, deep squarish playing space.  To my right, a piano and ambiguous wing space.  In front of me a raised platform and a piece of rolling scaffolding.  To the left, not much…another shadowy space for entrances and exits and waiting.   It felt good to be there, in this rough theatre where students hammer away at their craft.  I imagined the classes there, and the exercises, and the rehearsals, Carol challenging these students, calling out of them performances they didn’t know they were capable of.   The play itself must have been a daring thing when it was written, it’s vaudevillian structure an unusual form by which to take on the morality and ethics of the Great Depression.   I knew nothing of The American Clock before the curtain went up, and I don’t know much more now in terms of the larger context of the play, but I found it compelling given the economics of today.  In her “Director’s Notes”, Carol talks of the frightening nature of the play, and after seeing it, I see what she meant.   I’ve been fortunate in the present economic downturn, but many have not.  It is devastating to lose all you have, and again, I say that without having lived through it, so in the spirit of AA, I suppose I should just shut up.  But my point is that the play as delivered by these talented young actors is a helpful and challenging meditation on the times in which we live.  The rise of multinational corporations, corporate farming, the role of “assistance” and its delivery, the difficulties of small business, the size and role of the federal government, the rising rage of those hardest hit by the times…it’s all there.   And when the music dies and the piano is carted away, the frustration and anger rises to a fever pitch, and the performances of the mother and father of the family in those moments are gutsy and heartbreaking.   I imagined just such scenes taking place in living rooms around the country over and over in the past five years.

I thought of my grandfather and grandmother as I watched.  He was a sharecropper in the 30′s, and it was difficult.   He was a crusty old man, and our sensibilities didn’t match up very well.  But as I reflect on what he lived through, I again  think I should have been kinder to him.   It’s so easy to judge.

Hats off to Cornish for this production.   Thanks.

The show runs this weekend (except for Thursday night), with a Sunday matinee and a Monday night performance as well.

How can you lose a whole country?

“Dear Blogging Person,

How does a working artist deal with criticism?  I don’t mean mean-spirited people dishing out vindictive diatribes, but the simple, ongoing critique of one’s work that comes from all corners.  Evaluation is what I mean, I suppose.  (Public evaluation, especially.)   From family members to writers for the biggest media outlets in the land, everyone’s got an opinion.  (It’s all just opinion anyway, isn’t it?)  Given that I’m a typical artist, with my own inner nuttiness going crazy with insecurity and self-doubt, I find that I oscillate wildly between the ecstasy that follows one person’s rave and the debilitating depression that hits when someone in the paper or on the jury confirms what you always knew was true anyway, that your work was substandard to start with, and probably always will be.  I know about faith and believing and giving glory to God and all that, but come on…give me some practical advice here to keep me from just quitting what I’m doing, knowing there will always be people way, way better than me at what I do.  I used to have great fun doing what I do, but now not so much.   And one other thing: if I believe the good stuff and let it make me feel all rosy inside, don’t I have to take the bad stuff, too, even if it only soots up my soul?  (Soots isn’t a verb, but you get the idea.)  Thanks for your no doubt helpful answer.   Tom.  (as in ‘doubting.’)”

Before I get to answering poor Tom, how about you?  What do you tell him?   And yes, we are all talking to ourselves about this constantly, aren’t we?

And just to reveal one of my biases, I’ve always been a big fan of criticism, especially when its informed.

Thoughts?

And a few in the audience last night wondered if there was anyone in their lives who believed in them as Quixote believes in Aldonza.    “Is there anyone to see me,” perhaps the person in the third row, second seat, asks, “as someone other than the ugly fraud that I accuse myself of being every day?”

For me, the question is this:  do I see people as they might be, as they could be, or even, as they most truly are?  And do I treat them from that center, from that reality?  If what Cervantes suggests in this 500 year old story is at all true, then we have such power in our hands to be transforming agents of the realism our time is so in love with, so cynical about, so angry over.   And perhaps all is political, perhaps all is sheer and mere power play, but I believe we live in a world where the simply human transactions of respect, courtesy, kindness, belief, faith, and most powerfully, love as Christ lived it, have the power to change everything, one day at a time, one person at a time, one impossible dream at a time.

I see the mist in the eyes of the audience as what some call the shekinah glory.   The arrival of God’s presence and grace traveling on the windy voices of actors breathing in and out words and songs of the world not as it is, but as it ought to be.

Breathe, Jeff, breathe…

From the story of God forming humanity from the dust of the earth in Genesis 2, wherein he breathed into man “the breath of life”, to the outpouring of the Ruach (Spirit or breath) of God, to the notion that the scripture is literally, “God breathed”, breath holds a profound place in the story of us.   Breath keeps us alive, one cycle of inhale/exhale at a time.  To think of God breathing, each inhale/exhale birthing worlds, spirits, and truths, is to be reminded of Paul’s idea: “In Him we live and move and have our being.”

I struggle to breathe well when I’m performing.  Many people have said it to me over the years…I work too hard.   Knowing that breath provides the energy and structure needed for concentrated muscular effort in the performer’s major tools, speaking and singing, for years I have tried to figure out just how breath works.   And for years it has eluded me.    There is a simplicity to it, a trust that the body already knows how to do what it’s training to do.  As I sing and speak on stage, there is constant creative energy pouring through the body, and various body positions create pressure and tension that demands breath.

What’s on my mind is the relationship between muscular effort and breath.   The breath is what’s needed if life is to continue, and the muscular strength and direction provides mobility and physical action.  This relationship speaks to me of the tension between the Spirit of God (ruach in the Hebrew, pneuma in the Greek), and the exercise of our muscular (both physical and psychic) energy and will.   As followers of Christ, we constantly use the language of allowing the Spirit to work through us, or allowing Christ to work through us, knowing that we can’t do this or that that our walk of faith requires.  And yet, the muscularity can be applied by none other than ourselves, even as, in faith, we believe the Spirit of God to be providing “the strength” for muscular action we are taking.  And we speak of taking control, short-circuiting the work of the Spirit, which seems to me a lot like holding the breath instead of breathing.  Obviously, to hold breath is to cut yourself off from the very source of your life.  You turn red and pass out when you do it, and as a performer, it’s much the same.

In my current role in Man of La Mancha at Taproot Theatre, I walk a tightrope between the muscular energy I’ve chosen to apply to the character of Don Quixote, and the breath I need to sing the songs.  Last night’s performance was an experiment in moving deeper into a release of tension and depending more completely on breath and ease, and there were pluses and minuses as I moved through the play.  Again, it reminds me of the daily experiment we go through trying to find the balance of Spirit-life and human-life, which in my mind makes up what Dallas Willard and Richard Foster call “The With-God Life.”   My shortcoming as a performer echoes the shortcoming I have in my day-to-day world…I need more breath.

I know David is referring to the brevity of a man’s life when he says “each man’s life is but a breath.”  But as I was reading along in Psalm 39 this morning, it just hit me (or did the Living Word speak to me?), reminding me that the breath of life, on multiple levels of literal and metaphoric reality, belongs to God, and that our lives are given to us one breath at a time, each inhale/exhale a small life of its own.

Today, I will breathe…

"Man of La Mancha" at Taproot Theatre

So last week Taproot Theatre opened Man of La Mancha.   I get the privilege of singing “The Quest” or as it’s more popularly known, “The Impossible Dream.”   While thrilled to have the opportunity to take on the role of Don Quixote, there is also something daunting about singing such a classic song.   Fortunately, the song has a power all its own, and again, it’s an honor to get to ride inside that power for a bit.

But what about the truth of it?  The age old argument is this: how should we see life?  The character known as the Duke challenges Cervantes, declaring that men must come to terms with life–or to see it– “as it is.”  Cervantes makes the argument for the idealist perspective, that we are better off when we see life “as it ought to be.”

Realism vs. Idealism.  It is a classic face-off between rose-colored glasses and clear eyed trifocals.   Isn’t the very notion of “impossible” dreams enough to tell you it’s just not smart to chase them?   Doesn’t Proverbs 12:11 say “He who works his land will have abundant food, but he who chases fantasies lacks judgment?”

But if you look at the song a little more closely, one thing becomes apparent:  the impossible dream is not the American Dream.  Bigger houses, cars, and careers is not what Quixote is referring to.   In our culture, the dreams we chase are dreams for ourselves.  We dream of this achievement, that accomplishment, this lifestyle, that notoriety, most of them variations on a rags to riches story in which fame, power, and money are the unreachable stars we’re chasing.   But of course, this is not what Don Quixote has in mind at all.   For him, vanity, selfishness, self-protection, personal goal-setting…all of that is nothing.   For the mad knight, the unreachable star is a world where the great wrongs are righted, where unbeatable foes can be beaten, where love is not perverse, brutal, and self-serving, but honorable, chaste (one of the more un-American words), and pure.   The unreachable star is a way of being in the world, a way of serving and fighting evil, one that might even go “wherever the road may lead,”  even if it leads into “hell, for a heavenly cause.”

There are thousands of variations on the theme of these kinds of impossible dreams.  How many injustices can we name?  How many poverties of body and spirit?  How many distortions of God’s intent must be pushed back against, windmills or not?  What a temptation to ride blithely past each of them, saying they are too big, too much, too entrenched, too powerful.   But there is a strategic move that Quixote makes that makes a lot of sense; he simply takes on the next thing.   The injustice he sees, he confronts.   Reminds of me a bit of the day-to-day strategy of Jesus.   “The enchanter may confuse the outcome, but the effort remains sublime.”

To which a brutalized Aldonza, replies, understandably, “Lies, all lies.”

Are we dreaming these kinds of impossible dreams today?  Will we confront one before the day is over?  Or do we functionally exist as if to do such chasing is madness?   In a variation of one of my facebook friends status lines, do unbeatable foes and unrightable wrongs dread you waking up today?

The common, the epic…

Each night I stand backstage pacing back and forth, running a small ritual that has become important to me as a preparation for a coming night of emotional journeying.  The role of Eric Weiss in Brooklyn Boy is a challenging one, one that I relate to all too well.   And then, inevitably, my friend Carla comes to me and says the word, “Places.”

“Places” is the call to be ready.  It means that an important moment has arrived.  Time to make an entrance in full view of an audience, an audience with expectation, hope, demands, and a low tolerance for boredom and poor work.  Whatever I do, at the end of the night, they’ll applaud, but whether my work impacts or moves their collective heart is another question.  And that depends largely on my own preparation, skill, willingness, and presence.  Admittedly, some nights are better than others, and there are moments in a “Places” call where I wish I was anywhere but where I am.   Maybe its been a bad day, or someone’s critique has gotten into my head, or the general angst that’s been in my DNA since day one is just reminding me that though faith in God is mostly a fine idea, sometimes it seems more ludicrous than sane.

The bad days don’t come nearly as often as they used to, and the other night, after Carla gave her smiling “Places” call, I thought how wonderful it would be if someone would show up just before all the big moments in our lives, the life-changing ones, and say, “Places.”  In effect, they’d be saying, “This is one of the moments when you really need to show up.  All your days up to now have been rehearsals, and in the next five minutes, you are going into the bright lights.  Get your cues, keep the energy, stay alive, be present, and leave it all out there.  Oh, and have fun.”

My daughter Amy just got a places call that was both metaphor and fact, and she nailed it.

After four years of study at the University of Cincinnati College of Conservatory of Music Depart of Drama (that’s a mouthful), she graduates in June with a BFA in Acting.   Monday and Tuesday, her “Places” call was for a two and half minute scene in New York City, a small portion of an actor’s showcase featuring some 44 actors in 90 minutes.   Industry types come to these things–agents, managers, producers, etc.   They’re looking for new talent, and it goes by in a whiz.   And while no one moment is make or break (we talked about that a lot–there are multiple ways into getting work in the long haul), this felt like a big one.  You have to perform under pressure, and I was a bit nervous as I watched her first come on.

No need for nervousness, this girl knows what she’s doing.   In fact, hats off to the training at CCM-Drama.   Their entire class did strong work down the line…real, vital, intimate, and risky.   Kudos to them all. And though I don’t have many details yet, sounds like the industry response was strong, and they all have meetings lined up with various agencies interested in their work.

As a father, I could not be more proud of her work.   But I am far more proud of her response to the “Places” call that is coming into her life.   She is ready, and bold, and brave.  You can imagine my emotion as I type the words.   It’s a father’s love, a father who was there for her first “Places” call, when she first showed up in that spectacular entrance called birth.    The lights are never brighter than when we make entrances into relationship, into the heartbreak of the lives around us, into the spaces where God waits to watch and participate, which I suppose is always and everywhere.   When are we not at “Places”?

My time watching my kids at “Places” makes me think of our Father, and the way He must watch us, nervous, pulling for us, coming alongside however we will let Him, wanting nothing for us but the kind of performance that makes for full, generous, and vital worlds.

Sun’s up.

“Places, please.”

Way to go, girl…