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.

I'll love you always

How can you say, “I’ll love you always,” without crying? What instance of life must such words be used, with what persuasion, that tears are not implied? And the floodwaters rise, tonight, as I whisper these goodbyes. I’ll love you always.

Is someone dying, or leaving for a distant place, or hurting in unfathomable ways? I’ll love you always.

Is someone furious and threatening departure, or foreign to such words and ways, or depressed? I’ll love you always.

These are the words of Christ, dying for us, the words of Stephen as he’s stoned, the words of the father stolen away from his son, or the boy going to war, or friends setting sail for the new world, or two friends estranged by the beliefs of their fathers, or the tragic tale of two lovers in warring factions – I’ll love you always.

And these are the words on my life, as friends never forgotten set their weary feet upon far-reaching trails and step away, into the horizon, into the rising sun, into the wandering deserts and a promised land – I’ll love you always.

http://benjaminwblog.com/2014/07/ill-love-you-always/

La la lune

http://benjaminwblog.com/2014/07/la-la-lune/

Of what does the other moon dream?

That half whom we never might see

Does it face the stars complacently?

Knowing the sun its other side feels?

it pulls at tides on a world unknown

oh, olwen, I’m following the heart of thee

as a doe lightly leaping over still waters

my heart quickens – I loved the darker half last

la la lune, la la lune, what do the shadows see?

You can spend every moment of every day studying the facets of spiritual love, and be completely baffled at its prisms on a twist. “You can learn all that there is to know about their [love’s] ways in a month, and yet after a hundred years they [love] can still surprise you at a pinch. –Tolkien (with Ben interpretations and additions).

I wonder if the snow loves the trees and fields, that it kisses them so gently? And then it covers them up snug, you know, with a white quilt; and perhaps it says "Go to sleep, darlings, till the summer comes again.”

― Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass

What is it, Olwen? It is the quilt of snow over the trees and fields, the cirrus clouds on summer days that look like cracked ice drifting over a tropical sea, it is in the sunflowers and snowdrops in their seasons, the tulips in the moment, and the cold snarl of the mother bear; it is the dance of sun and moon, the clasp of a warm hand when yours is chilled to the bone, and it is being tucked under a mighty wing, wide as the heavens and closer than your own heart. 

When I can't

http://benjaminwblog.com/2014/07/when-i-cant/

when I can't

the holy spirit ties my shoes

double knot, just so, snug

and my hair loose, arms out wide

whispers catch the cat of nine

the trees slap at my knees;

turning aside the burning nib

that pens in hateful words

onto my parched and parchment soul -

muse and music, wine and time

for lying by Elijah dining

on the gifts of ravens,

where the world is an empty

deserted place without any water

I am lifted on the wings of eagles

sipping holy water and unraveling

the spiritual knots so I might

wander heaven's pastures, bare of foot

On difficult days, more than other days, the second string steps up to play. I’m falling on useless legs like a world-cup stumbler, praying for a foul, a little grace from a biased referee. And when my knees break, shins crack, and I curl into a little helpless quaver on the thin green grass, the stretchers come to carry me into the wings for a rest. There is nothing wrong with the bench, nothing I couldn’t anticipate. Oh, and how those who wait want to run. How could you not, sitting on heaven’s shores, waiting for a little chance to soar?

Agrarian Things

http://benjaminwblog.com/2014/07/agrarian/

All around me, sinking ships

shipwrecked into sidewalks, streets,

jettison your hold, you are driftwood

swimming down like a sinking stone -

how many have lost their way from the sky

now swallowed by the earthen bones,

the mighty maw of urban night -

the gravestones windowed and tall

house a thousand, million souls,

with bent backs, ambling, they pretend

they are not yet dead

and only here are they,

for passing over the waters into the breeze

the green, gold, and red will resurrect

those who leave their steps behind

set sail on this dingy life into eternity

holding hands and barely breathing

I feel like our culture is consistently trying to be convincing. Through advertisements, arguments, doctrine and indoctrination of the media, politics and picture portrayal, we're stamping our persuasive arguments at every passerby. Who are we trying to convince of our rightness? I think, often, it's more ourselves than others. Convinced we've chosen the correct, the healthiest path; convinced God will respect our decisions, or forgive us for them even though we persist in faulting; convinced that each step is valid, sound, and permissible in the eyes of ourselves, our audience.

Is it possible to miss that which you never had? I, too, try to be convincing to myself. Sometimes I'm convinced I miss the times of community, in humanity's youth: the pastoralists, the nomads, the tribes, the polis, the smaller feudal towns. More, I miss the concept of the Amish, where community, tradition, and holding tight to values is captured perfectly in intentional love and family. I miss the wildness of the world, the time where warriors fought for theology, not money, and the whimsy of birds on the wind free.

Everything and everyone attempts to convince me otherwise, but I’m holding onto these things, the countryside and the wildflowers. Don’t swallow the arguments whole or you’ll find yourself spit on a hook and dragged to where your gills can’t breathe.