Perspective

It’s all a matter of perspective. In another world, I believe a me with 10% less resolve might have fallen greatly into a devastating quantity of temptation. So many times I’ve skirted the edges of failure, lack of motivation, and deceit with begrudging kindness, patience, and morality. And yet, a 10% better me might avoid countless obstacles I’ve struggled over, and pass temptations and trials I’ve so foolishly leapt into headlong.

I pray I’m learning as I go, that I might eventually be the better me.

But really everything is a matter of perspective. You can be angry, or pensive, realizing how little anger solves. You can be impatient and cruel, but kind words and love in adversity effect far more substantial good.

Even a little tweak on perspective changes a good deal. Water, for instance, is necessary for survival. It hydrates us, floats our necessary vitals along lifelines throughout our bodies, gets nourishment and resources into organs and cells and out. It keeps the temperature of the earth within reasonable averages. The advantages of water are endless. Without water’s extraordinary properties, we couldn’t exist. And yet, water is devastating. Water floods, pours down and carries vehicles and houses away, seeps through cracks in the roof and decays wood, erodes stone, pools through our apparel and chills us to the bone. Water is as devious as it is necessary, crawling into every nook and applying a natural entropy.

Oxygen is the same. Without oxygen, our cells suffocate and die. Without oxygen, most living creatures on this earth cannot exist. And yet, oxygen rusts metal, and increases the rate of entropy in a great many things. Injected straight into our bloodstreams, it’s murder.  Too much oxygen and not a reasonable balance can overwhelm our systems. Liquid oxygen is an explosion waiting to happen.

It’s all a matter of perspective. Existence is tentative. Why be angry? Why be cruel? Is not nature and the rest of humanity cruel enough? Where has that brought us? Countless innocents are dying or refugees or are abused by other humans – what have we ever gained with hate?

Listening to Christmas

Listen. The sky-sluice unleashes its floodgates and the waters rivulet over the eaves and down the drains. It's all the same as those plastic chutes, racing marbles as children do, tiny marble-droplets of rain rolling down my windowpanes, Is the world different or just the same, with off-hued glasses removed, revealing the world in plain light? The birds warble and dive between the stormy night trees and the bats weave and dart among the leaves, and the weather is just right - a bit cool, I believe.
And nothing special, nothing wise, nothing crazy outside our lives rears its groundhog head, nor casts a shadow over this pre-wintry twilight light, whose full moon hides behind scraggly clouds. It's a bat night, if ever there was, and the hazelnuts pay no mind. But Christmas time, sing the homes, covered in uncharacteristic light and humming with sounds of chords and words of snow, though none shows (not here - we've green instead of white).
It's give and go says every Christmas show, but I've a mind to share and stay, and I've already given everything anyway, so here's my soul, my heart, my life. I, too, can give like Christ, at least in my own way. Gentle, gentle, hold me now, the evening begins its sway. Let me let you let us sleep and tomorrow we'll engage the day.

Pensive with Mark Strand

It's a reflective night, a pensive one, and as nano's left in its tiny coffin of tags, margin, and punctual bounds. I'm mulling over poetry, and the nutmeg and cinnamon sticks of my mentality perfume the dreamy air. I am Mark Strand in these stanzas, tonight:

In a field
I am the absence
of field.
This is
always the case.
Wherever I am
I am what is missing.

When I walk
I part the air
and always
the air moves in
to fill the spaces
where my body's been.

We all have reasons
for moving.
I move
to keep things whole.
(Mark Strand - Keeping Things Whole - Reasons for Moving)


We are all scattered pieces of a shattered whole. None of us, as yet, perfect, I'm fairly sure. Wherever I am, I am what is missing. I feel this, sometimes. Stronger in the retrospective melancholy of hindsight, where I am here and there and now and not. Nano is finished, but my story is undone. And in the void, spilled treasures of fae gold are left ashen. How I remembered these memories differently. A puzzle, once vibrant, stained in salty water that no longer matches its master - how will I ever arrange these cardboard cutouts again? If your life is remodeled, you cannot walk through the same doors, slide over the laminate in your socks, or ride the banister into the grand hall.



And if it happens that you cannot
go on or turn back
and you find yourself
where you will be at the end,
tell yourself
in that final flowing of cold through your limbs
that you love what you are.
Mark Strand - Lines for Winter

Stories

Well, ladies and gentlemen: I'm near finished. I haven't written nearly so much this month as previous attempts at NaNo, but I'm glad to have gotten as far as I did, and I think that writing this story has taught me a lot of things about character driven story writing that I hadn't considered before. What's actually strange is that as I'm writing this story about knacks and magicks, I find myself mentally balancing the characters as if they were heroes in an online game. "Hmmm, that chararacter is tad overpowered. I'll have to balance that out with some great weakness" as though each character pulled from a limited pool of resource points, and tallied these into their character.
And this is an odd nanowrimo in another way in that I won't finish the story. Every other attempt at the novel writing event concluded with a finished product. The first year, it was a fairy-tale mythos that was the lousiest thing I've ever written ever. The second year, I attempted a Lloyd Alexander-esque piece, and met with some limited success. This is my favorite thus far, for obvious reasons: the first sucked, the third was a split piece that ended up being a bit of a mess (sorry Matthew), and this one is unfinished, and doesn't count yet. The third year, I co-wrote a mystery-dystopian with Matthew, and... well... I like the plot!
It needs a lot of work. They all do.
But it's interesting to look back over each year's renditions and compare the stories with my life experiences at those times, looking at my journal entries and such. It's interesting what you write based on what you've read, what you experience, and how you feel at different stages of existence. It explains a lot, seeing some of the characters that have written novels over the centuries: Poe, Dostoevsky, Hemingway, Donne, Keats, Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, and so on. Authors, and artists in general, are often peculiar personality. Perhaps we all are, and we merely shift the lens of scrutiny upon these individuals like historian peepers scouring the tabloid wikipedia for tidbits of juicy non sequitur from these artist's lives.
Writing is an adventure. I find out more about myself each time. It's a foray into wisdom, if you'll allow your external inspection become introspection. And motif, metaphor, themes, and beliefs all surf the rocky waves of the ocean we brave to create, whether we skim the tips of the salty surf in schooners, or flounder like a hound treading water. This is how I examine my life

Every season is love

It's not been a month for blogging, or journaling on many days. It's difficult to find time for extra writing when novel writing is already the struggle of the month. After writing 1700 words, sometimes I don't want to immediately rush into writing for myself, and even when I do, I often don't have the time to do so. And because of this, journal time gets tossed out the window, blogging gets flush down the toilet, and novel writing takes the fore.
It's a beautiful time of year. The cold of winter has arrived and it's no longer the portion of fall with brilliant colors. Fall is so short, sometimes. It comes back for a few days of Thanksgiving and for Halloween, but the interim is all winter's edge and the hunger of darkness.
Every season provides room for complaining. In winter it is too cold, too dark, or too rainy for far too long a time; in spring, the colors only arrive at the end, and really spring is winter in disguise. Spring, too, is rainy, and the snow hasn't melted off the mountains for hiking, and the allergens flourish. Summer is beautiful, but sleeping is often difficult when the sun refuses to set and the warmth lingers after dark, and the wetness of the air, and the constant sweating, cloying weather. Fall brings lovely colors, but dies too swiftly, entering eagerly into winter's deathly embrace. Fall suffers the same pains of winter, and worse knowing it has only begun and you've many months left to go.
If you want to complain, there are always points worthy of complaint in each month. And yet, you can also celebrate the differences, and there is ample opportunity for such blessings and thanksgiving. Fall is beautiful in its colors, and resplendent in its holidays: chanukah of the lights, thanksgiving with its cornucopia of colors, family, thanks, foods, and the warmth of togetherness; halloween with its candy, and the entire season full of pumpkin, apples, harvest, corn, turkey, fireplaces, cider, chai, and maple.
Winter arrives with the advent of Christmas, and what better holiday is there than that? Shortly after, you celebrate the new year, and the greens and the reds of christmas join Janus' two-faced nervousness about the impending days. There is valentine's day, the day of love and single-angst, stuck in the center of the northern-hemispheres cold, and st. patricks day celebrating green in a season of white and gray. Winter is full of snow, rain, lovely mountain peaks and early morning fogs. It is the best time for snuggling by a fireplace and reading a book, and drinking warm tea and lighting candles.
Spring is a blessing of verdancy, as the first snowdrops peak their heads out from the frost, and the deciduous trees tentatively turn out leaves, and the evergreens shake their white-fur coats from their sleeves. The animals emerge and the birds begin to return, and the fogs and lakes lie in cold beauty as the world remembers colors and light. Wildflowers come to life on the mountainsides, and the butterflies and bees remember life.
Summer is the time of life, the blooming of full flowers: lilac and lavender and rose, and the sunflower season and time where everyone is outdoors enjoying each other and the world.

The Other Side

There aren't always a multitude of paths, but often. And at these crossroads, an easier road and the harder options. The easier road isn't always better, nor the harder always worthy of the journey. But there the easy sits, parallel to the spiky pit, and the rivers are bluer, the sky clearer, the grass greener on that rise, while through these ruts I claw.
And it's beautiful for the summit, splendid for the crawl, but what does the other side look like?  In those twinning times, where I dream I stole to the other side, I wonder if I was strong enough, or was there joy enough like this life?
What if I'd picked the harder trails? I could have chosen any life, and this I took in stride.

And even happier than can be, I'm stuck with wondering who else I could have been. How much better can I be?

Wayside Writing

There's always a sacrifice with priorities, it seems. Writing elsewhere consistently means this forum for release gets neglected, and journal time often takes second-string to novel writing, which fits into the corners and cracks of daily life. The same is true of anything. I've been strung thin with sleep since daylight savings, and I'm struggling to recover some semblance of rhythm (mostly the circadian sort). The weather gets chill, and foggy mornings and nights issue forth from over the hills, seeping into the valley like a tidal pool for the receding surf of clouds.
I was contemplating slowness the other day. I often believe everyone's definition of slow is quicker than mine. People who consider their molasses lives are slugging along, and I see these racing by - even snails on airplanes are moving fast, indeed. Living in a small town or country does not necessitate slow, but only suggests it. You can bring the city anywhere you please, if you spurn nature-living.
I once believed in this, the pen-ink dream, and cleverly devised brilliant lines schemed in gold and green. Brilliant, by-the-by, with diction not unlike effigy, clairvoyant, melancholy, where clear voyage into future sight was a crude and morose mimicry of gentility and aristocratic flair.
Now I pray those same breaths don't suffocate me, for some while. When these beliefs do not drown, they fly so elegantly, fluttering with vestigial wings.

Write til' you drop

A name can be an identity, or the barrier between you and one. Your name is the sohl-reason for your being. But it is not your being. It's a fly tied to the fishing line, and even forgetting, you've not lost everything. 
Sometimes, I think I enjoy sentences without knowing, or caring, how they connect. I often relish writing the words, feeling the taste and texture of them, with an appalling apathy with regards to overarching structure. I love words; I love sentences; sometimes I don't desire any greater tapestry than simply marveling at the few strands of thread I'm twirling in my fingers. 
http://www.nytimes.com/books/99/03/28/specials/dillard-drop.html
Annie Dillard has a remarkable essay on writing, and I've read it often to remind myself why I continue writing. I don't expect to sell my sanity and soul into this, but I do have some small passion for it. 
I often glance at my works and see only the skeleton of artistry, the meatless bones, and I wonder if I'll ever have time to clothe them. I've swirled up the dust of creation, but Adam looks like a halloween dry-bones or those crab shells left by sea gulls on the stones by the ocean. 
I jump from topic to topic, considering a new sentence that inspires me, even if its connection to the last is tenuous, or non-existent. I'm sewing non-sequiturs in patch after patch on a dirty rag, and hoping it will hold together if the patches are pretty enough. And the patches are beautiful, but the motif is all spontaneous confusion.

The River Why and Why

Ems asked me what my ideal schedule would be like, and I've been considering that, with regards to the coming month and time in general. In the book I'm currently reading, The River Why by David James Duncan (a re-read), Gus, the main character, moves out of home after high school into a cabin on the river and writes up "The Ideal Schedule" for his life. He even calls it that.

His ideal schedule is: fish for 16 hours, sleep for 6, eat and do what needs to be done in the extra time. After living thusly for a short while, he realizes how despondent he’s become – and why? Why is the question of the book. He realizes that his ideal schedule is lonely and purposeless.

One of the reasons I have difficulty articulating ideal schedules is that I tend to tackle personal obstacles as they arrive. I don’t consider myself a spontaneous person; it’s more like I plan to eradicate any despondency as it arrives, immediately, and then move on to what I want or need to get done. I also struggle with the concept of ideal. I’m not an idealist, and I think that my post on perfection explains a little of my confusion over what “perfection” even is. What is a perfect day? I have no idea, and no inclination to rigorously discover that quality. It’s too ephemeral.  I just live, love the best I can, work the best I can, and try to maintain a healthy, happy self when I’m melting in the crucible.

So I’m still trying to find balance between self and others in this newness of life. Mostly, self gets stuffed into an over-full closet of to-do, but that’s part of the discovery of the “other” the quality of loving and being loved in addition to understanding being an entity, of itself, in relationship. It’s a learning process, and I always feel way behind. I’ll need more journal time to find my soul.

Perfection

Therefore you are to be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.

there is none righteous, not even one;

there is none who understands,

there is none who seeks for god;

all have turned aside, together they have become useless;

there is none who does good -

for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God

for by grace… and not of yourselves…

Everyone who practices sin also practices lawlessness; and sin is lawlessness.

I think, growing up, I grappled with the idea of perfection all the time. I was, and am, something of a perfectionist when it comes to my being. If I sacrifice time and effort into an activity meaningful to me, I expect nothing short of excellence, of perfection. My competitive spirit always found comparison with those performing better, or those persons who were smarter, faster, stronger, more able.

Be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.

My perfection was an odd one. If an activity meant little to me, perfection was (is) unnecessary. With homework assignments, or games that I disliked, I rarely tried harder than what was necessary to do “well” or “above average”. But how does one spiritually acquire perfection? We’re constantly showing our efficiency at failure, myself in particular.

I remember once having an argument with myself about what perfection even meant. It means a life without sin, no? And sin means “falling short”, and its original use was in archery when the draw fell shy of the target. Sinning isn’t overshooting, or hitting the target and just failing to hit the bullseye – sinning is knowing that your arms simply aren’t broad enough to reach the target; the distance is behind your ken.

My argument was, could I simply lock myself into a room, and quarantine my iniquity from the world, and live a perfect life in seclusion? But I always came around to the idea that sin, and lack of perfection, wasn’t simply *not failing* but also striking the target. You cannot live perfectly by refusing to draw the bow in the first place.  “But I never even shot an arrow – how could I have fallen short?” It was an argument that always left me a bit miffed; a “damned if I do, damned if I don’t” sort of frustration. It was a catch-22 (thanks Heller), no doubt, and I felt the fall like a cancer within me.

Grace is a miracle. But it doesn’t make me perfect. I’m feeling particular imperfect lately, having been sick, and looking at my writing and wishing it better, and noticing all those places in my life where I feel like a spectacle of imperfection. We all are, perhaps, but that doesn’t relieve the feeling that we’re in glass houses, and everyone is witness to our weakness.

Finally Fever Free for Fall

This month has not been kind to me in terms of writing. That may seem sort of calm-before-the-storm, as next month will challenge my commitment and time constraints to their limits, but really there's no correlation. I got sick; I've been busy with plenty of people; la-ti-da. Not that my month has been poor; not by any stretch is this so (although, on second thought, the sickness hasn't been ideal). Mostly, life threw writing out the window, and in-flew-enza (okay, I didn't really get the flu - but the old joke poem opportunity was too convenient)
So Matthew asked today what my NaNo was even going to be about. Well... I have no clue. I had a stable beginning to a story, but nowhere for it to go. I've considered a couple of options thus far: make stuff up - I mean, this is what writing, and NaNo specifically, is all about anyway, right? Option #2: pick a story I've already invested more time into, and built a plot or setting on. The problem with this strategy is, I don't want to waste any good stories on the junk that will appear over this following month. Option #3: invest a day or two, sneaky-like, and really really prepare for this new story. Do I have time for this option? It goes well with option 1 if I fail to find the time. This is the most likely candidate at the moment. Option #4: take it a lot easier and hold less high standards. I've considered lowering the 50k lower limit on the story, and simply writing for the heck of it. Sure, it wouldn't be a novel perhaps, but a novella still fits the acronym fine, and I'd be doing the writing that I enjoy. I've also considered, as option #5: not doing nano. This option makes me sad. I could just read a book a day for 30 days, each of 50k words or more. I could write a poem each day for 30 days. I could try to learn something completely new, perhaps even something *ahem* novel, during the month of november, and simply use the month as a means of motivation.
But really, nothing entices me as much as the original intent of a completed novel. I'm going to have to figure this out.
In other news, I'm almost better! It's been about a week, so... about freaking time. The fall has been a little slow in coming, but the colors are filling up, and we're adding golds, browns, yellows, crimson, and scarlet colors to the countryside palette. I'm enjoying it, when I get out of bed and out of doors. Please send this cough and feverishness away for good.

Pacific Tree Octopus Me

Sometimes, I'm fairly certain my body dislikes me. I remember studying the immune system in late middle school, and thinking to myself: "wow, I'm invincible. My defenses are exacting and efficient with little superheroes patrolling the little roadways of my self."  This confidence lasted only a short while until we finished that chapter and began discussing pathophysiology. Then, I began thinking: "dear Lord, how am I still alive? My superheroes are more dated every season!"
So that's where I'm at right now.
I did not sleep last night - I have not slept well for several nights now. Yesterday, I read most of "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn" and continued on "The Sparrow" between longer bouts of aimless computer browsing and lots of congested misery. I need some time to get NaNo sorted out, and I already expect this year's will be a disaster. But we'll see.
Right now, I feel ill. In my misery, I imagined I was a tree-stranded octopus. When the sun trickles between the branches, I'm scorched, and the breeze leaves me shivering. And everything, sun, rain, wind, leaves me high and dry and wondering just what happened to the sea. Or maybe I've had too many sleepless nights in a row.

Laconic Lunacy

Until you stand in a dark field, devoid of street lights and car eyes, of candle wicks tickling the night and fluorescence, on a midnight full of moon the field is a silver fox of rolling fur and its tails are the trees swaying in the twilight breeze - can you comprehend the being-divine? I hear no melodies, Lord, not one running through my mind tonight. I know they shiver and shift on the edges of my consciousness, but they've stagnated or silenced, like gnats in molasses - drowned, perhaps. An inelegance predominates, a hyperbolic nil, and I can't clear it out, for every other "it" is out, and this sticky residue, this vapid ectoplasm alone remains, home of fruit flies and ravens. A great Nothing populates this ghost town, with vacancy on every neon sign, dusty dens, and only tumbleweed duels at noon, though nothing moves, not even this moon as the sun since fled the sky.

vivisect to scrutinize,
I'm an insect on a slide -
careful with my psyche, loves,
where the spear enters my side
bleeds everything that's making me
alive? whispers the night
the bullet moon,
my bull's brown eyes
collide in a horoscope horror
blinding bright

Autumn Lethargy

The week begins and ends with an evanescence as shortly lived as morning mists, plaintive in passing; a nascent newness crescendos from silence. Just as things once soared towards sunlight, now petals seep, fall, and petioles close their little doors, and what was once tall huddles near the womb of earth and warmth. A patient subliminal mythos lingers, I suspect, brooding with the foreign fog that seeps over the ridge.

The haste of summer still simmers, and while the harlequin autumn stumbles its way in, its lethargy struggles to settle. The begrudging retreat of sunlight and conquistador clouds battle, and the brown grass greens once more, while mosses surge to life in gutters and corners. Only winter suffers no whimsy.

I’m too calculated, slow in discovering the progression of life. I want to allow the proofs, quantities, and sums to seep over me, slow as the waters grow cold and the leaves turn gold to die. I never loved the fast life, the hunger for now and instantly – it’s the patience of winter gnawing at the skeletons of trees and the flowers’ too-lipid realization that goodbye arrived without why and how, and the whale’s taciturn turning about south.

The hummingbird and butterfly are too busy for me. It’s the bumbling bear not the bee, I adore, the lumbering moose and not the chittering squirrel. All are welcome by the fireplace with me, sipping tea, cider, chai, and freeing world’s trapped in prisons of paper bound.

Echo

The most mind-bogglingly obvious features of anything are the flaws, when viewed from a critical vantage. Our soul selves harbor needs, wants, and our minute foibles like baubles and broaches of indefinable value. Every time I write, I cringe at the glaring weaknesses of the English language with regards to relational linguistics: love, needs, wants, hopes, dreams - the words falter beneath the scope of what I crave to mean.
Needs. Wants. I wish there was a stratus of grey between these saturated extremes. I'm trying to navigate desires with a shoddy sextant beneath a sky of foreign stars. At least I feel like that's so, though feelings, too, are foreign features in this enigmatic landscape of the soul. Needs I categorize too closely to actual body requirements: food, sleep, water. If asked what I need, I usually reply "nothing." I'm not dying, am I? Sure there are psychological, physiological, emotional, psychosocial, biological imperatives, but are these moment-by-moment needs? Can I survive a day in no-space without these being met?
The next difficulty is "wants". Without the capacity for transforming those crude "scientific" terms into meaningful terms (a hug, a debriefing, a held hand), wants start feeling selfish, rude, and narcissistic. I'm staring into a pond, delighted at the beauty of my reflected face, wanting only to touch up the rippling water and clarify my own existence - how boorish and egocentric. But because these words: "needs" and "wants" are equivocated within my understanding, I cannot dissect my desires, necessities, hopes, dreams, passions, angsts, fears, failures, ennui, listlessness, pain, and tensions into queries and actions aimed at balancing out the terrible into the tolerable.
Christendom has instilled in me a refusal to accept empathy as selfishness, and a nervousness about help, and this bitter misunderstanding has transformed loving-kindness into a farcical facade of pity. Not in hindsight, but at the casual inquiry - I never need, I shall not want. If I'm lying down in green pastures and led beside still waters, either my wants must be illusory or faithless, or out of line with belief.

Story Writing Time Approaches

Everything, unwittingly, is old.

this time especially so,

and I don’t know if it understands

what the grass is, young man,

or comprehends spring things just yet.

it weeps without tears to shed;

sleeps without dreams or rest;

it wants with nothing to expect,

and exhales without air

or even breath.

It burns, loves, without anything

inspiring such regrets,

and it moves, with nowhere to go,

and nowhere it has ever been.

The time of stories approaches, and I’m still uncertain where this one is pulling me. At first, I began with a pretty standard fantasy tale, and then realized I wanted something a tad more dramatic. I wasn’t even sure what this meant, but just that I wanted a story that might not bore me initially. Even if the end result isn’t satisfactory, that can always be fixed up. But if the concept is lacking, only so much can be done without a complete rehaul.

But what? That is always the question, no?

So I decided to scrap the original concept of a medieval “tolkein-lewis” mash that perpetuates throughout our simplistic “fantasy fiction” and twist the setting. One of the things I enjoy about Brent Week’s writing is that he doesn’t fear treading on new territory with old themes. He can maintain the semblance of an epic fantasy, but set in Mediterranean Renaissance or pre-industrial revolution era. When western society catches up with the middle east in discovering gunpowder, and warfare gets a strange boost with the discovery that no skill is needed in warfare, only a factory-produced weaponry, a swift lesson on loading, and a bunch of boys with guns.

I don’t particularly plan on joining in on this era, but I think a little branching out, or even inventing of time periods, can certainly spice up an aging genre. I am not trendsetting, mostly because I don’t plan on selling any of this writing, but it will be a bit of a stretch for me doing some of the research required to produce a reasonable and believable setting. The ease of the tolkein-esque world is that it’s been done and overdone, so now we expect every traveler to find an inn, eat some stew, drink a frothy beer in a pub, catch up on the scuttlebutt, roll some dice and head off into the wild unknown after some great reptilian beast that has stolen our gold, burninated the countryside, and needs defeat. I think there is value in these stories, as Gaiman said (after Chesterton said something similar, I believe):

Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten

I believe in the merit of fairy tales, but I also believe that if the writing is done right, you can place them anywhere you like.

I’m not exactly writing a fable or fairy tale this November, but a little mythos never hurt anyone.

Brief Autumnal Haiku

summer itches on,
die slowly, dear, or linger
autumn saunters in

barn owls hooting
pines bristling like hedgehogs -
leaves gold transform

the sun-browned grasses
crimson moon o'er city lights
red the fall anon



Haiku is not my specialty, turns out. But they are fun to try anyway.

Moon and Mythos

a la olwen

the fabular moon, unequivocal,

argentine in tiding time,

tugs the waves of my heart

fro and to phantasmal dreams

witness the boreal sky-shivers

boring into my deep being

where black, shadow, light

are born in a breath-bright

moment, it passes, and forever

bliss scars my sea-deep soul

scalding love, blanket violence

together we're never far from home

lunar lunacy, hanging bloody by,

a heavenly sacrifice, only why?

All too often, we flatten our colors into the simplest pictures of black and white. Knowing what we know now, what ill-prepared, naïve decisions might we make? There is little merit to making colorful decisions from black and white knowledge; we are not myths. How often, in our daily lives, do we find characters of unequivocal evil, or unblemished good? The knight in shining, undusty, unnotched armor must be fighting inside a mythos quarantine, for the moment he steps outside his sterilized story, dust settles into the corners, and branches snap at his suit, and swords will seek chinks in his defenses.

Sandburg Autumn - Crying over beautiful things

I'm working, already, on a story for nano. Though I'm uncertain about that actual plot line (generic, poor at the moment), it is character driven, which is something I've not done for a longer story yet - though perhaps the thriller was just a really lousy execution of something intended to be character driven. And perhaps I'm a bit bummed about the plot currently because I've only just started working on character, and it seems I'm stuck as to where the story will take these people. But I'm still working on a pattern to spice things up.




I cried over beautiful things knowing no beautiful thing lasts. 

The field of cornflower yellow is a scarf at the neck of the copper
   sunburned woman, the mother of the year, the taker of seeds. 

The northwest wind comes and the yellow is torn full of holes, 
   new beautiful things come in the first spit of snow on the northwest wind, 
   and the old things go, not one lasts. 
- Carl Sandburg

I think it is near enough that we can pretend fall has arrived. The weather is confused about the switch, but nighttime recovers from daytime's misled summer heat. I'll miss the sun, I'll cry over its absence, but I know the fall will be wonderful as well, in its own way.

Crux of the Morning

I and Lord
stumble into the coffee pot, the bus stop,
the close-mind gourd -
complacently divine, you'll find us
sitting, not dead,
relishing finger corn still hot
with Yeshua hoping I'll hold his cup,
though my chai is steaming full
in whose depths Rorschach wrestles
with murky devils new and old -
I swallow the last kernel my body represents
and the Lord looks betrayed
that nothing was saved.
ambling on down towards pumpkin morn,
chimney stubble, and ashen cheeks,
window smudges herald a bloody third dawn
whose sacrifice our morning greets
as I fork over thirty suspicious cents
for a glum and dismal paper
with naught save hellish news
of a father-forsaken earth,
and a cuckoo crows thrice on the hour
and I am not alone


I haven't written anything worth reading for almost a month. That's really rather embarrassing, and something I hope to rectify. When it comes down to a more full experience, life is a priority queue. I wrote in my journal a few things worth considering, including a passage on balance that is woefully incomplete, but has such silly, over-breathy sentences such as: "our foolish culture screams at us to fill only ourselves, and our childish comprehension of religion demands we only fill others, leaving us as useful as a broken see-saw."
Even though the sentence is a bit wonky, I appreciate the topic, and hope I have time to continue that train of thought.

Heliotrope

If I allow myself, the kaleidoscope of life might easily carry a negative image, a half-empty glass symbology. When I am thankful, I might feel guilty over those suffering, and when I cry out for help, I could feel shame at not considering all God’s providence. 

heliotrope

charioteer of gold

a solar snail solipsizing

over a cold and needy world:

shell out some warmth

along your sticky way -

rah the phoenix fire,

flimsy green necks turn

purple faces at your arcing egg -

boil us over easy

Heliotrope is my new favorite, though that may change in the next ten seconds. The sun turner, like a tiny sun-saint anchored and devoted: deep green your spades, digging through beams of light and sweetening the air.  But it’s the purple petals, the golden anther to the sun like an offering, an obsequious mirror, though you are none so shy or coy. 

Summer's Close

It’s amazing the different forms writing takes simply based upon what I’m reading at the moment, or what fascinates me, or how my days progress. As I encounter different stimulus, I find myself enamoured of certain facets of life, like angles on a beautiful gemstone or vantages on a ridge over a magnificent vista. A fleeting infatuation that my aesthetic teen dictates as love, for how can it be anything less?

Right now I’m reading an assortment of books: Gilead (Ems), The Sparrow (barely started), Fragile Things short stories by Gaiman (JG), and fluttering around with the attention of a fish for flowers over poetry. I’m probably not getting enough sleep, but summer is the season of love, not hibernation, and I’m more bear than marsupial – I’ve no tendency for estivation. I sleep poorly in toasty weather, and ever since my high fevers of this past Christmas, I’ve found myself waking up more and more drenched in sweat when using fewer and fewer blankets, or in chills when using more. I occasionally believe my sleeplessness is having an existential crisis, and inventing reasons for dragging me from the ocean depths of dream.

My journal lately is so hodgepodge, it’s certainly a testament to summer, sleeplessness, the wired and antsy reading regimen I’ve developed, relationship, and the ambiguous and divergent passions kindled by spreading myself thin over so many breads. Even now, I feel so tentatively tied to this topic, I almost wrote, as my next sentence: I haven’t even seen any waterfalls this summer; I do so want to see waterfalls afore the summer’s end. But what has that to do with the rest of this? Little, I expect.

There are many things to pray for this month, as it’s been bountiful in love and grace, but also hardship and pain. Matthew’s mother-in-law’s death, little brother’s going to college, P  getting a promotion and losing weekends, Ems starting school and the frustrations and angsts that attend that dramatic switch of lifestyle and scheduling, the continued changes of being a homeowner, friends moving from Bend to the valley, friends getting jobs and starting school, friends just continuing on in the norm and growing frustrated with the status quo or debating whether it’s worth a change in life to upset the balance of normalcy. Really, there are a lot of prayer requests, and as many joys if you remember to look for those, equally. There are always a lot of joys.

a people pauper, indigent of joy

holds a slim stack of papers

whose columns claw at the sky

and grunts, cold beneath the smoky night

without friend blankets or family fires

a lacrimae factory shivering and tired

he sneezes, allergic to life

until a cup, half full of empty wine

passed over from whoever

bears the stigmata tonight

saves some time for a fleeting life

ah ophelia, I loved you so

believe me well this time, and give up not

Problem of Pain Musings - Part 1

The problem of pain, of evil, is a difficult one. It's been grappled with for some time now, and we reach no easy solution. Hypothetically, you can argue that God and evil aren't incompatible existences, and that evil can exist with God in the same universe, but how do you explain that to a refugee from a war zone? A mother who loses a child, a trauma victim, a torture victim, or to someone whose child suffers from cancer or agonizing affliction? 

It's hardest with the children. What have they done, the toddlers, the pre-births, the adolescents stricken with pain from the moment of consciousness until whatever ensues - how is this rectified with a perfectly good, all-powerful God?

I have no answers.

Why do we have a problem with evil and pain, anyway? Biblically, we know sin entered the world through Adam, and with sin, death. Romans 5:12 tells us: Therefore, just as through one man sin entered into the world, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men, because all sinned. This doesn’t console unbelievers and, frankly, doesn’t console suffering believers in the slightest, either. Why? Shouldn’t we know that sin, death, pain, and the horrible entered the world through our rebellion against God? Why do we suffer such angst over intolerable pains, knowing the fault originates in our ancestral transgression? Do we feel blameless for such a distant past?

Partly, it’s the disparity, the randomness, the unFAIRness of who suffers – and who doesn’t - that conceives a self-righteous entitlement and anger. Is it a valid displeasure? Who knows. We live all our lives admitting and hearing that life is unfair, and expect it should be anyway. It’s never our fault that it isn’t fair, like a twisted, alternate, Dunning-Kruger syndrome. But it still should be, right? Equality, in opportunity and person, seems like a righteous aim for a religion of love and impartiality.

Since life is unfair, God must be either malicious and cruel or missing-in-action in deistic fashion – this is our conclusion. Are we right, and are those the only two options? Really, it’s such a difficult and pervasive problem, and even if you theoretically arrive at an understanding, the instant your child suffers from endless pain without surcease, the invectives loosen from the lips.

I’ve been reading Job, and I’m no expert in Job theology (JG – that’s you), but it’s clear right from the beginning that Job is considered a blameless individual as per the story. He’s not a child, and a bit of the powerful symbolism inherent in child-metaphor is removed, but the story is important. God allows, even suggests, the absolute destruction of a faithful follower.

Right from the start, God himself (in the story) says that Job is blameless, and allows (even encourages) Satan to destroy Job as proof of Job’s faith. With Abraham, God tested his faith by asking him to sacrifice his only son; with Job, his entire prosperity: children, home, health, wealth. David as punishment for a sin was chased around the world by armies and lost a son as well; Eli’s entire family was doomed by the sins of a father.

God does not take sin lightly, but we cannot fully comprehend the punishment of sin – how is a baby’s death punishment of sin? Who sinned? Why was this baby punished with death or this child with torture, and not that one, whose parents swindle and steal and murder with a capitalistic vengeance? We have tunnel vision, but why-why-why must the innocent suffer? Are they truly suffering the sins of their parents? Why does it always seem so arbitrary?

I think following this path easily leads to bitterness. When a baby or child suffers, the parent suffers immensely. So perhaps that could be some twisted form of justice over the iniquity of a parent, but even though we see that happening in the Old Testament and we can somehow make ourselves understand it, when the faces of our children and the people we love endure these pains, it’s an injustice, an atrocity. There is a difference, yes, but still none of these answers why, or whether we are right, or what sort of God we believe in that allows these sorts of things.

There are a lot of troubling aspects about the story of Job, but one that has been running through my head is the punishment of others to prove the faith of Job. All Job’s children die, all his servants – and even when Job’s wealth is restored, and he regains children, the originals are not returned. How do you recompense a life?

Personally, this is something I’ve been contemplating a bit over the course of my life. I lost a little brother at birth, as my mother suffered from pneumonia and was forced into labor too soon.  My brother, Jonathan, was not developed enough, and the medical technology at that time was insufficient to support his underdeveloped lungs and heart. He would have survived if the same occurred today.

In momentary evaluation, this is a tragedy, and I think it was, and perhaps still is, though one far removed and numbed for my family over time. The hidden blessing, one only seen four years later, was my little brother Sam. My parents only wanted three children, and if Jonathan had been born, my parents would have been content with those three, but his death meant another try, and the hardship of years without child. It took four years, and when they had a child finally, they named him Samuel because they asked long of God, and a child was delivered.

It would be heartless of me to say that every evil is justified by subsequent goods, and not honest. But in this case, I cannot diminish Samuel’s person by wishing Jonathan had survived, nor can I forget that Jonathan did die, and how difficult that was. When referring to life, saying: the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away feels cruel, terrible, and unjust. But Samuel has been a great blessing to our family and to countless people, and though Jonathan would undoubtedly have been as well, we have Samuel, and not he.

This is a tangent, of course, and one specific to a case of mine. It does not answer the problem of pain, but only shows one of my experiences with seeing the other side. There is often grace and mercy to follow when the hurt is great, but not always for the one who suffers. This is another facet to the problem of pain which hurts like stones in the gut.

To Be Continued

Selflessness

Selflessness. Our culture spends years cultivating an indifference to other, an intrinsic individualism that shuns all external influence and tells us we may rely upon only ourselves. Yet, without selflessness, there is no understanding love, no understanding marriage and how Christ gave himself up, or Abraham’s sacrifice with Isaac – without selflessness, you imagine he made none but the ram that day - and the selflessness of being a lover, a friend, or a parent who must give up everything to foster life. That’s what selflessness is: fostering life.

I’m a novice to this, a remora on the under-fins of a great, deadly shark. How do we coexist when this beast might snatch me up for a tiny feast? Is this love or even living, this fear?

I paid my dues to selfishness, and now I must let go the coals I’m clasping so tight between my fingertips. I’m no authority, no heroic image or paragon mythic having attained a buddhistic peace and zen relief from hungering to steal for myself. I’m a novice, a shell-less hermit crab seeking new identity, and scuttling along the bottom of a very muddy sea and wondering whether I’ll be et or find a place to be. I’m a fledgling with broken wings, a newborn fawn or foal with flopsy legs.

It’s freeing, this release of selfish identity. A proud, narcissistic king can trust nobody, for if clouds form on the horizon instead of sun, or if food is scarce or the battles no longer won, who will serve him then? And that was me. I’m David running from the Saul of my soul; the Balaam’s ass of my body refuses to go any further with me, for the angel of destiny blocks my path of selfishness with a mighty sword.

I’m learning, please bear with me. The road is long, but not empty, and I expect everyone will be with me, coming and going. I was contemplating on my favorite portions of love, as per 1 Corinthians 13: It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love always perseveres, friends. Always. And it always protects, and it is not self-seeking. Love is not selfish – but am I?

I feel like the sea, bashing up against a coast and getting nowhere. Even if the stones retreat, over time and infinite time, what am I gaining, really? So much purchase in the battle against stone? Love is the gentle retreat of waves on the beach, the mist in the mornings, the opening of the bulbs to receive the dawn dew and light, and the dance of fingertips across the strings of violin as an old woman and an old man hold hands in a garden where no eyes exist.

Binding of Laughter

Full of sacrifices, life is, and I am not complaining. Over and over again, my faith is tested, walking up the mountain with my money in tow, with responsibilities or love holding my hand, with other facets of my spirituality tested on similar slopes: patience, kindness, love, grace, mercy, hope. Moriah grass is lonely, bristly, and the wind always blows into your face abrasively, and there is no thoughtless path. I’ve tread this many times, and will continue to do so, and the place of sacrifice always looms before me, on the third day.

Behold, the fire and the wood, my heart says, but where is the lamb for the sacrifice?

God himself will provide the lamb, and the lie is bitter in my throat, though a thousand times I’ve lived this story, a hundred thousand times, God has shown faithful. The binding of Isaac is heavy: lead in my footsteps, burdens on my back, scorching muscles and a tortured heart, self-inflicted and mythical, for I carry only a knife and a light for the wood that laughter carries. Laughter, joy, why do you mock me with your faith?

Up and up we go, his innocent hand so small and mine so bloody, and who is my son, this time? Do I know? Patience and you’ll always understand, my son scratches his legs and arm on a thicket, not far from a pile of stones, and I bind it, for he bleeds too soon.

How do you build an altar for your heart and joy? But you must, and bind your only son with the wood he’s carried so faithfully (oh, where is mine now? Oh, father, where art thou? He cries so plaintively). I stretch forward my hand, raising it to the heavens – it’s between me and the divine, my hand, blotting out the sky, my murderous hands – and I ignore the bleating cries of Isaac, the lamb for the slaughter.

But Christ always stays my hand, and the clouds part and a dove alights on my shoulder, sheltering my face in spiritual wing. But I’ve brought no sacrifice, ah!

Do not fear, for a ram is caught in the thicket, and my patience, faith, grace has suffered another gauntlet.

All stories are part of the Story. I am caught in the hands of grace. I am the ram, I am Isaac, I am the stones beneath which my son lies, I am Abraham and the mountain, and Adonai-Jirah is real to me now, always, and never until the right time. That is the mystery, and grace. There is always a passing over, always blood over the threshold, and always God, even in the shadow of the mountain, the trails over the brambles and briars along the way, the stiff, ragged climb, the precipitous paths, and even as I stack the stones at the solemn summit – nowhere is it my clear that the sacrifice must always be made, in good faith, before the parting of the waves of the heavens makes clear what will be gained.

There is a heavy burden on this world’s heart, forever and always now. A man has been shot; children are dying and suffering from significant trauma as rockets sound and airstrikes shriek overhead and mortars crash into the streets; and starvation, dehydration, and displacement are the monster nipping at the heels of children who, before their teens, have already felt a handful of wars. Too much retribution and not enough reconciliation, in homes, villages, cities, nations, and across the world – how can we engender justice, and walk an extra mile when our knees are so weak, and the miles keep coming.

Simply at Peace

In some sense, the future is always uncertain. Get too entrenched into your dreams, and if they must change, it’s a great pain. I am a tree who wished but to be, but the storm uprooted me, the man carved and fashioned and set thee out to sea, until my roots become but memory and what’s left? Only to be drifting now to dream.

I’m locked and loaded into a cannon, and I can plan my trip into the sea, but what if I land on the moon? There’s joy there, too, just of a different sort, and one I didn’t see coming. Part of contentedness is knowing of the uncertainty of the future, and seeing the difficulty of the past, and still being joyful in the present. It’s in the passage in Matthew 6, regarding the sparrow, and not simply a dreamy naiveté of “don’t worry, be happy”, but a conscious effort of joy and peace.

I’m often good at this, and still must remind myself of it.

Tricky Linguistics

English is tricky. Many times we have attempted to teach computers human language, and it has failed. I remember my father telling me at a young age about a computer they were working with that spewed every time with the sentence “time flies like the wind, fruit flies like bananas.” The twisted, clever, manipulative means of the English language are seemingly boundless, and this may work as both boon and barrier to understanding. In the hands of the skilled writer, it can be as much a sword as a scythe as a plowshare. 

I’ve seen this. A writer plays at the edges of things, manipulating the frills on the fringe of the garment and deftly contorting the webs of weaving. But this obfuscation, this vague toying with greys and hues can confuse the audience, and invites in duplicitous meaning. Intentions are skewed by the bemused, and in the uncertainty – worse, the confident misunderstanding – of the creative work.

I’ve seen this, and I struggle with it myself. Dancing on the borders is attractive; it lends a dangerous, capricious, playful, attractive tension to a piece, though delusion seeps through the cracks and seams. 

It’s a tricky language, and it can be hurtful if not careful used, or inadvertently cruel. 

I was contemplating this capacity for misunderstanding, wondering how often my own words are misleading. I don’t have a lot of works, none of which are particularly important or well-read, but I love the fringes and crave the double meanings, and I wouldn’t change my writing style to accommodate simplicity.

This same truth holds true for speaking, or actions. The more investment a person has in a situation, the more likely, it seems, they are to make hasty assumptions on intuitive leaps. I was reading an article that made a few bold statements, and they were quickly misconstrued into very hurtful replies. The problem being that topics such as depression, anxiety, hurt, psychological disorder, and the like are dangerous topics for any writer to make bold claims upon, as everyone has some connection to these things, and strong opinions abound. Whether or not each person has suffered from depression personally, it is quite likely that each reader has encountered someone dear to them who does struggle, and maybe continues to struggle. I think the writer should have framed the topic as a discussion rather than a dictatorial claim to knowledge and truth.

Conflict, and so on.

I’m learning how much of a mess it is trudging through media representations to find the truth of anything. It’s like walking through molasses-thick mud dragging behind a great carriage harnessed to your waist – often enough, simply no progress is made.

I have something of a knack for odd discernment, though that may be the incorrect word. I’m like Luke Skywalker in Star Wars, capable of finding the nugget of good in a dark knight; though this monster may have murdered many of my friends, and may try to destroy me as well, there is good in him. I don’t shy away from the negative, but when people are hurting, bothersome, anxious, annoying, angry, disturbed, stressed, or uncomfortable, I usually find myself slipping into their shoes and walking with their heart cradled in my arms. It isn’t difficult, I think most people just don’t bother.

People are hurt and angry over some slight, but there is often a burr behind an incessant itch, or a poison. I’m good at making excuses for other people’s distresses, pains, and petulance, and better at imagining how much worse I’d be given their situation. But the more obfuscated the topic, the more convoluted the webs of relationships and pains, the less I’m able to grapple and pull back to earth, and the less I understand.

When it comes to larger conflict, I’m swimming through a muddy sea, trying to find a smoky pearl that has sunk far beneath my flailing feet. It’s as silly and foolish as politics, with every side lying, betraying, and claiming self-righteousness. Governments are large, affluent, powerful children with violence in their palms, and the sufferers often have little to say about the decisions over their lives, homes, families, and victimization. A wounded child is a media marvel more than a face for each opposing side, and personhood is suffocated in grotesquerie.

Both sides are wrong, don’t you know? And both sides cling to a vestigial truth and a spark of quality that they brandish before every naysaying malcontent. And who is fooled but the jester? Only those hungry for what they already crave to hear. If you offer an alcohol addict a free round, why wouldn’t they snatch at that opportunity?

A thousand tiny hands are scraping up through the earth beneath a funereal bed of shrapnel, and “how much worse it might have been” they say. A hundred thousand cannot sleep at night for fear of loud noises, anxiety, ulcers, trauma, and one and a half million have no reliable food, water, resting place, or electricity. Who do I support, and who is to blame? Perhaps the question isn’t who, but what do I support? Is there any reasonable solution? How quintessentially masculine of me, skipping straight into seeking a solution, but I’m grasping at straws, and I think everyone wishes an easy solution was present.

Of the serpent

http://benjaminwblog.com/2014/08/slithering-dreams/ ‎

I dreamt last night of a large group, a crowd, meandering around a plaza, waiting for something. That something was a speaker, or a leader of some sort, though really the ambling was aimless and random. Around the plaza was a garden, filled with large raised beds of strawberries, squash, peas, beans, tomatoes, and other assorted shoots and vines. I traipsed about the mob a while, entertaining the notion that I might fit into any number of cliques or groupings, but found no easy inlet, and settled for joining a group of friends near the garden.  As I approached, hundreds of snakes, garters and blue racers, wiggled their way through the grass away from me, as though fleeing a giant. As I neared my group of friends, they nodded and told me to mind where I sat, to avoid sitting on snakes.  Just before I sat, I brushed the grass, and several small snakes skittered away, and I sunk into the soft green of the lawn, squishing several small snakes and sending others sliding away.  We watched the plaza like a stage for a while, but nothing was said amongst these friends I’d found, and I soon grew weary of their silence and sought my own in the garden. In the center of the garden between the raised beds was a fountain, and beside the fountain, a large fluffy couch. I ambled along the edge of the raised beds towards the fountain, and the number of snakes seemed to increase with every footfall. Now they were slithering up my legs and onto my arms, falling off as I lumbered onward, and I was uncomfortable with them, though they were not biting.  I kept brushing them off, and the vines of the nearby plants transformed into serpents that snagged onto my clothes and climbed my limbs. I raced onwards, hoping to sit down on the couch and be safe, away from the gardens, but as I set down, I sat into a pile of snakes thick as spaghetti, and they began twisting around my arms and constricting me – thousands of tiny snakes no longer than my pinky, or some a cubit in length, twisting around my arms. Then they began biting. Countless pinpricks and little stabbing needles up and down my body, but the sheer weight of the snakes prevented me from standing up or escaping from the cushions of the couch. They were in my hair and around each finger, on my legs and in my shirt and pants and latching onto my forehead.

What’s strange about this dream is that it didn’t feel like a nightmare. There are a lot of different opinions on the topic of dream interpretation, but many of them cycle around topics of: surprise (it’s surprising being bitten); phallic (general serpent shape, I suppose); opportunity and being overwhelmed (especially with hoards of serpents – a lot of snakes can mean opportunity but also being overwhelmed); and anxiety. Having a lot of people in a dream, especially nameless, faceless individuals, is often interpreted as reflections of yourself. (Even with named, faced people, many interpretations often conclude those are patterns of yourself)

I took it to mean some different things, but mostly that it was an odd dream, and an odder interaction with it on waking.  There has been plenty enough going on in life to keep me overwhelmed. That’s certainly not a negative, yet I’m still exhausted and ready for a rest on a couch without snakes.

What is the grass?

What, in the earth world,

is there not to be amazed by

and to be steadied by

and to cherish?

Oh, my dear heart,

my own dear heart,

full of hesitations,

questions, choice of directions,

look at the world.

Behold the morning glory,

the meanest flower, the ragweed, the thistle.

Look at the grass.

-          Mary Oliver

There simply isn’t enough time in life. Add a few hours, and still they’d be filled before sufficient purchase was gained. Choices must be made at the expense of others. And occasionally there is no choice, or no foreseeable alternative. This poem reminds me of part of the Walt Whitman poem:

A child said, What is the grass? fetching it to me with full

                hands;

How could I answer the child?. . .I do not know what it

                is any more than he.

This week has been full of prayers, passions, and incessant motion. I’m the boulder Sisyphus rolls interminably up that hill, and I’m scraping, bouncing, bounding, tearing down, expecting I’ll reach a rest shortly before I’m clawing up again. And what is the grass I’m trampling beneath my stony toes? I just don’t know, sometimes. But it’s soft and reminds me of my dreams. What a wonderful world.

Vineyard Picnic

http://benjaminwblog.com/2014/08/vineyard-picnic/

Can we just remember this is a beautiful world? For a moment? Tonight, we went to a Shakespeare production in a park, beautifully backdropped by the harvest vineyard, rolling hills of green and golden earth, and the ridges of chehalem mountain and bald peak at our backs. The oaks hovering over our heads were sparse, but offered the perfect shade for an evening show, and the clean country air: perfect – pluperfect, perhaps. Metaperfect, superperfect, extraperfect.

Just because man sinned does not mean God’s creation invariably became un-good. I witnessed a piece of its marvel today. And Shakespeare was an exquisite accent on the bountiful blessings of our landscape, showcasing the creativity of the creation itself. Who spins words as that, since?

It can feel wrong to revel in such things when, around the world, people endure, and are contemporaneously enduring, agony, pain, sickness, angst, suffering. As my best friend and his wife attend to her mother who, even now, lies on what may be her deathbed; as malnutrition drags children to their knees, and injustice psychologically scars thousands and is not punished, remedied, or healed; as people die at the whims of country leaders sitting in comfortable chairs – how can I be so insensitive and admire this world, sighing at its grace, form, color, and clever creativity? This world that has, too, inspired a million poems, countless plays, dances, celebrations, relationships, love, painting, music, sports, books, and a thousand thanksgivings – can I cherish so simple a thing as a sunset over a vineyard, tonight? Can I feel the Spirit moving over the hills, and smell the heady wines in the air and the sugar grapes at their vines, and can I wait on the Lord, and be still in the wooded grove, listening to the whispering world sing praise?

If not I, then who? And so I must, and though I remember (or try) all their pains, the glory is here, also. I am thankful for that. God is not gone, and never was. But sometimes, I’m hard of seeing, poor of hearing, and dumb of speech, and the country is the perfect remedy for this disease. Lord, oh let me just be at peace with this beautiful sky full of stars for a little while, and the poplars brushing with the breeze, and the orchards thick with the redolence of green, and the apples collecting on the sidewalks and thick in the branches, and the plums plump in the leaves, and the blackberries bulbous on the vines, and the comfort of friends forever close, and the patience of a picnic in the crook of the hill – I’m a lamb in the pasture, forever by still waters and thick grasses lead, and let me follow, please.

Ostriches

I’m duped, baffled. I feel as effective as a tree holding back the sea breeze from the mainland. Perhaps, if someone hides directly behind me, I might provide a modicum of shelter, but even so my tree is scarce, boney and bare. The sea breeze isn’t always terrible; on summer days it cools the world, and at nights pulls the heat out over the waters. But storms rise from its mystical depths, and its ferocious rains batter the mountainsides. Against these I, too, am battered.

Life can be hard, joyful, beautiful, and cruel. Everything is like an Escher painting, and my words follow a non-Euclidean progression, a backwards-sideways mumbo-jumbo whose incomprehensibility offers no solace for the wounded. Is there solace for the wounded?

But this is me. Some people can form massive, thin sheets that block much of the stinging storm, or towers that blot out the sky and shift weather patterns, or vast hillsides that form a rain-shadow against the mightiest of winds, but I am made for one small frame at a time, and even then I do little to stop the rain and the cold from getting in.

Ostriches don’t bury their heads in the sand from fear, but swallow sand and pebbles to help them digest. I keep telling myself that, but who am I fooling?

http://benjaminwblog.com/2014/08/ostriches/ ‎

Buried Treasure

http://benjaminwblog.com/2014/07/buried-treasure/

in the staggering steps of night

a trite, yet honest, man, speaks:

standing upright means less than once.

brushing back the cobwebs of summer

as a brawl laced with liqueur -

ah, he stutters, whittling at a stone

he clasps tight between his fingers,

war is a brutish adze we claim carves

figurines, or a hammer for sewing doilies -

he sips his soup carefully, balancing

each broth drop on his sharpened blade.

true marble sculpture, he tells me,

requires just the right sort of scythe;

and then he dies laughing, and night goes on.

I live in a world where everything that merits nothing demands my attention, and those things that deserve my notice are drowned in the clamor. Today, I received five piece of mail that all said: “urgent, please reply as soon as possible”, and each soon found a new home in the recycling bin. And there are those tiny advertisements from charities, demure, tentative, knowing that each cent must be well spent and spread thin over a vast territory. But these are the silent questions, the dumb mendicants and lepers who shame us with their neediness.

Anyone can laud the fashionable, the showy, but it takes a great deal of courage, heart, and patience to love the derelict and the wretched. But everything, almost without fail, asks for some semblance of notice. It may be an obscure misdirect, or an embarrassed request, or a gaudy sign that leaves no doubt of intent, but we’re not eternally solitary, aloof creatures.

There’s a lot of life, yet, to live; I see this in myself. But I must also engage in vying for that life in others, so that their joy, too, may be complete. Often I set that precedence so blithely, and blindly glance over the wounded ones, the lepers, the untouchables – those who need more than anyone else in the world the touch of divinity. Can I be love’s hands and feet?

Introvert Sabbath

http://benjaminwblog.com/2014/07/introvert-sabbath/

Life has a way of sneaking up on you. You can either be a predator, or the prey, and you are not locked into the food chain of being. I think I’m woolgathering much, of late. I feel as though I’m one of those tribesmen mentioned in the Golden Compass who drill holes in the roofs of their skulls to collect dust. The magic-manna is falling from the heavens, and I’m gathering it where I must. It’s all very surreal, where I am. The skies are so elegant blueblueblue, and as I drove up Rex Hill, I marveled at the magnificent range of greens supplied by all the different trees. The darker pines and firs, the spring-bright verdancy of the maples and poplars, the darker edge of the oaks, the almost yellow hint on the aspens, the silver underbellies or the leaves on the bushes at the base of the mighty trees – greens arrayed all before me, side-by-side all reaching for the sky-lights.

But I’m woolgathering, as the world is beautiful and bright, and I’m spinning in circles as life shark-swims around me, preparing its strike, though I believe that I am the predator here. And in this time of new relationship, house, people, places, busyness, summer, Oregon, sunshine, earth, friends, books, thoughts, I’m discovering so many difficult and beautiful things.

I’m learning that relationships have a seemingly selfish component. That is, that relationship means I have to share my feelings, opinions, and desires, instead of merely seeking to fulfill the wishes of those I love. Not that that is a lousy tendency, and it is one that relationships in general tend to enjoy, but that a healthy relationship requires a certain reciprocity of giving and reception. You cannot simply give, but must receive and share also.

Because of this, I’m learning what it means to explain, carry, and examine feelings. I’m such an individualistic person that I’m quite capable of hiding these things so deeply inside of me that I only ever bless others, and never expect anything in return. I grew up lying so that I didn’t have to share these feelings, and though I stopped doing so in college, understanding that lies are not a firm foundation for honest friendships, I’m still playing my cards so close to my chest that it’s difficult to remember what showing them is like.

I’ve learned, again, how little things can be important, and even if I don’t value them, others might. Isn’t that the nature of reality? One man’s trash is another’s treasure?

Life is sneaking up on me, but I think I see it coming. It’s none so stealthy as it believes, and it never leaves, truly, only schemes another angle of assault. And I’m learning, living, loving, and laughing through life, and every day the Spirit intercedes for me in my weakness (with groanings too deep to utter).

But that’s enough babbling for one evening. I’m exhausted, but pleased. Sabbath Sunday: success. Even if much of it was cleaning, it was still sufficiently introverted in all the necessary ways.

Summer 2

http://benjaminwblog.com/2014/07/summer-2/ ‎

far away and all too near,

my thoughts dress a thousand shipwrecks -

shattered stained-glass windows

collected into a graveyard

of a colored cathedral smashed in our laps;

and through this pastel mass

I dance on magic toes that float

above every little death the sea holds.

an apology to the wind, I deny

its grasp on me, no one my master be,

I'm over the clouds the ocean breathes.

how silver and august the marine waves -

don't chastise me for flying defiantly

through a beautiful world whose spirit

comforts me, and carries me ever home

Summer’s ever so busy. People bustling like bees, believing this to be the season of flowers, nectar, and dreams. And I’m behind where I thought I’d be, and ahead. Every day breathes so carefully, like a child behind a late-night couch where their parent watches tv, knowing they should be in bed, but needing, feeding on the closeness and love of unknown proximity. Life is tilting, and every time I shift my feet, everything else shifts. But I’m thankful.

Everything is a balancing act, and I’m trying to decide how to best navigate the things in life I need, want, and provide. And which should be first? I always consider my giftings as the most important, but that should not always be so. Perhaps never so, over my own needs. But what do I actually need? Most things are just wants. Other than food, water, sleep, warmth, and hope, what do I actually require for survival? My hope is in Christ, I’m well fed, sleep is iffy lately, but I’m certainly getting almost a REM cycle a day (maybe), and summer keeps me very warm. Everything after that is wants, cravings, and it feels greedy and selfish to ever expect those over provision for other’s wants. But perhaps this, too, is even not always so.

There is too little that is black and white that we try conforming into that dualistic picture. When we see greys and colors, we mentally try to collect them into black and white boxes for easier compartmentalization. Ems and I discussed this for a moment after watching Les Mis, when contemplating the suicide of Javert. When black and white justice acquires some semblance of grey, when Jean Valjean displays kindness, mercy, and humanity, Javert loses his pedestal of righteous judgment. His divine purpose is twisted, and his entire life’s compartmentalization is unboxed, and like the Greek story of Pandora, all his fears and nightmares are released.

Little is actually black or white, but that’s still what we pretend to see. I, in particular, want a simple trigger clause for activity and love, though such things cannot be applied. If so-and-so situation is this, follow this list of directions; if so-and-so does this, reply with these exact words. I don’t want to be a machine, but I sometimes internally fancy a set of machine instructions. What a silly world I’ve constructed for myself.

And summer is ever so busy with the musings on such topics, and the movements of life. Life is dancing, running away, and flirting with my consciousness in such a way that I’m ever confused, bemused, and craving more. 

Fences I never before found

http://benjaminwblog.com/2014/07/fences-i-never-before-found/

It’s difficult for me to sleep, fighting. My hands jitter, my heart drops, my head enters into a sky-vision, where everything is so distant and immense, so colossally on the horizon, that I’m nauseated by that grandiosity. If nothing else, I am at least that.

And then everything settles into an uncomfortable silence, an eerie, graveyard calm. I’m tired, and I’m exhausted, but I’m blessed, and my heart is stronger than it was once before. It is the same as callouses on the fingertips after working with wood and stone, as the hard-packed earth after the storm brushes away the loose earth, as a fire burns away the impurities of coinage metals, for though the process is blood, and sand-blasting, and scorching heat, the result is a rugged, noteworthy one. Not always beautiful, not always kind, but dashing, and poignant. You grow a respect for the hardiness of the desert flower and the cliff-side brush and the Amazonian trees deep-rooted on the banks of the floodplain.

And the world is full, too, fuller than you know.

I’ve discovered a whole different life, and how many bridges I never saw. Life is a city a million miles wide, and I won’t finish exploring my own side, the bazaar, the esplanade, the city-scape. And you Wendell-Berry-come, full of life from the forest I never knew resides over the hilltop I never crossed.

I measure life boundaries in blocks: a poetic, tired skyscraper, a cracked sidewalk, a roadblock and all the construction no one ever found in a run-down port of a town with only an alley-cat or two, some garbage, and a confusing cottage whose smokestack coughs like a tiny factory.

Do you know what all my fingers are letting go? How I’m dropping rubies for diamonds for gold? Life is a simple transaction of beauty to beauty, mud for mud, and your hands are only so large for what you must hold – and I’ve got small hands.

Paradox (only maybe two cents)

http://benjaminwblog.com/2014/07/paradox-only-maybe-2-cents/ 

There is a lot of paradox in life, or seeming-paradox. Immediately, you wonder how can God be good, and the world so rife with war, agony, injustice; how can non-time create time from particles that exist pre-particles, and when do such particles start moving if there is no time? Why not (what is) before? To become the greatest, we must be the least; to see, we must be blind; to truly live, we must die – we love and hate these dichotomous paradoxes, and we claim to understand them, but they are hard questions, hard callings.

And even as we are called to faith, we are called to press our doubt, to seek out furtherance of our understanding of a God who is beyond knowing. No one has seen the invisible God, yet we are called to seek and to find God. Religion was made for the boundless, but I am a creature of chains, fences, and guarded borders. I can’t always tell when I’m called to move beyond the containment and into glory, or to stop, kneel, and lay beside the stillness of the waters, resting in the lushest of grasses.

These questions are hard, no? I had one troubled person tell me once about his own interaction with the question of divine intervention and a perfectly good God. He said, if every time an accident was about to occur, God reached out a hand and prevented it, a semblance of free will would be revoked every time an atrocity was occurring. The problem with this is, why does God fix some things and not others, and this is also a frightening pathway into a very deistic view of God, a view incredibly commonplace in American religious culture: God exists, but he’s sleeping, or distant. And this is not the God I believe in.

Another viewpoint is that God works through the hands of his followers, which means that every time I witness a terrible situation, more of the guilt lands in my hands. That’s not particularly a comforting picture, but perhaps it’s closer to the uncomfortable truth.

Yet we often claim God for the good things, as though God had his fingers in every blessing pie, but ask why God isn’t around for the bad things. It’s easy to see God in the valleys, the wildflowers, the rivers, the dance and the music of the world, the beautiful – how do you see God in the hospital room in the gaunt face of the afflicted, in the suffering, in the malnourished? How do we bring God’s love there?

Diagrammed Life

http://benjaminwblog.com/2014/07/diagrammed-life/

You plot out your dreams, and layer schemes until every possible point is mapped, webbed, diagrammed into a sunset-reality with wildflower hills rolling into a swooping valley and a whispering stream, and the evergreens and weeping willows glow in the aging sunlight and the quaking aspens have burst into an autumn gold – and then the sky falls, and lightning cracks like a whip. The storm canter-claps across the heavens and hail hammers into the country-side like the hoofs of a great and dreadful beast.

But the sun dawns again, and the flattened flowers rise and bloom, and the grasses hold up their heads and answer Whitman’s question so sagely and wise that the stream is almost silent, pensive over the stones. Time is just this, no? Where the raging stream widens and slows, then stumbles into a slope and races and falls and flies into a waiting pool, where it sits patiently, and ambles towards the ocean as a drunken bloke, speeding up and slowing as the earth leads.

I’ve lost track of time. I came into this past month realizing my intentionality, my process, and knowing the sequence of my life as surely as a machine. My instructions were already lined up in the processor, awaiting the machine to stamp each tape deck, nod at the instructions, and calculate the function. But now what?

Providence, divine, has sewn wings onto my arms while I sleep, and the wind now carries me aloft, and I’ve no control, little control, over the breeze that sails my over the trees. A first house, a first girlfriend, a first time for many responsibilities, and life is overwhelmingly beautiful, but overwhelming. These are not, I’ve discovered, exclusive in the slightest. I think they resonate so intricately that they cascade, rebound, and reverberate until the echoes resound loudly in the ears of time.