The Water is Black

2011-12-26T08:22:00.001-08:00

Susan Sontag's In America.

Growth

2011-12-26T07:25:00.000-08:00

It makes me feel nasty and conflicted to wish I'd bought more things just to prolong the opening of presents on Christmas morning. Things no one needs, like DVDs of movies that were just decent.

It is this casual desire for an overflowing pile under the Christ-mas tree, like the plume of a rocket that blinds you in its brightness, noise, and atomic bomb shaped cloud spreading in slow-motion, that fuels the economy of growth.

The more they can have us think that way, of perceived-manufactured/in/a/board/room needs, the more presents we buy, the more things are created, the more jobs created, the more americans we can have employed, the happier the president is, the happier america is with the president, the more kids we can afford to have, the more taxes we can ingest, the more farms we can subsidize, the more dominion over creation just like God promised.

Conflicted, because it is such a joy to see your mother feel loved with presents and the thoughtfulness of her children.

and it seems to me that growth is terrifying, and obviously terrifying, and yet every smart economist speaks only of growth. Maybe they must mean smart growth, that starts to exchange breadth for depth... growth in quality of life for the individual, not just the population of the suburbs and the strength of track-housing-development. Maybe.

that said, the spirit of Christmas is a beautiful thing. I love beautiful things. I relish it. but I think of Tolstoy,

'What a strange illusion it is to suppose that beauty is goodness.'

The world as it is, all beautiful things on this planet have a shadow. The ocean is a killer. The rose is red with blood. The shadow we are called to fight and shake, if at least perceive.

Family, today

2011-12-25T10:13:00.000-08:00

I come from remarkable people,

or said the same, ordinary people

who have pushed beyond the human-family tradition of awkward

shoving and turning stomachs of things said and unsaid, the jamming of imperfection into the too-tight baby clothes of expectation.

I opened presents yesterday in one warm room with my former step-mom of 18 years,

now without legal status in my life, but still referred to as a 'mom', in spite of the

truth of her being the impetus of my parents split, my single dad, my brother and his 20 year old wife, myself with a never-spoken-of-in-front-of-me difference from the rest,

my half-sister and her newish boyfriend, my former step-sister and her three sons

of three different fathers, her ex-husband wearing a large jersey and looking tired but

friendly and cautious, my former step-brother and his wife and child and three

children of an undisclosed father,

and the house was alive with laughter and Christmas and prayer before the meals

and cigarettes on the front porch and scripture before the opening of humble presents

from grafted-in family that hardly knows me but proudly calls me 'brother' and brags about my life of traveling and Africa.

and now today, my single father sits with my single mother, the woman he left for another woman 25 years ago, and we watch A Christmas Story together, and we are a family. Laughing in full volume. (this comfort was a long time coming, through much thickness in the air, but it came)

And this generosity of community is not all-forgiving, or all-endorsing. It is not so heady as that. It is the survival of the heart. It is generous, and less patient for change than understanding of this condition of frailty and hunger and tiredness of vice.

It feels modern, but I doubt it is, as the human tenderness that overlooks what 'should be' for 'what is',

that loves and welcomes and is kind,

is as old as humanity

and the child born of this day.

Stories

2011-12-25T09:56:00.001-08:00

There is nothing we’ve imagined

that is not just a reordering of what we’ve seen.

No place or creature is original to the mind of man.

But the mind of man is an original of the place it woke up to.

Your thoughts are the mechanics of the arrangement of your

memories of senses,

in play with the longings inborn, waiting to haunt a body of thoughts.

And so, we get our stories.

The sun is telling us the truth.

2011-12-20T15:51:00.000-08:00

The truth of God is being told at every moment, by everything.
If it seems a lie, it is not a lie, but a half told truth not yet realized. (sometimes I think our fear of lies is fertile ground for lying)

A rich man happy in his riches is a half told truth:

the honest story of man's search for meaning, his temporary belief in
his present comfort, his many beautiful things,
the certain and coming erosion of that joy, and
his necessary movement to find new happiness, or certain misery.
Sometimes that movement is jumping deeper into the half told story:
more things, more riches will appease the relative boredom of purpose
that comes with achievement...
but again, it is the first half of the story, the repetition of an exposition already told.

It is God sewing into us an insatiable desire for meaning, for true mingling-belonging in the universe that cannot be owned, but only belonged to. And the hunger to own is just the bastardized craving of being one-with. How the rancher, when he owns the land, feels it a part of him, and extension of his arms.

I see man, made in the image of God, bastardizing his making with lies. Speaking half truth or poison in an attempt to create reality in the mind of another. But even if a man is doing so, squandering his birthright of creation... the Lord of truth is righting his wrong with nothing less than the Universe and its ever-present working.

I see God telling the truth in everything.
Each day dies at dark and mourns until it is reborn again in blinding sharp white glory sunrise.
Everyday we must die to our self and believe the night lasts only so long as to reflect
on our death, and then believe in the coming sun.

The seasons also tell us of this true cycle of spirit.
The tides tell us.
The stages of human life and aging tell us.

And the sun, what a story of God:

It is the source of all life,
It is the marker of day and the opposite of night.
If you abuse it, if you get too close it will kill you.
If you stare at it too long, without reverence or bowing your head,
you will go blind.

How obvious it must have been to ancient people to worship the sun.

And the truth continues: if you try to find energy from other sources,
like oil and your own toil, you will some day run out...
and you will surely destroy the planet and the place you call home. Maybe not today,
but this is a half told story.

to say something plain

2011-10-20T15:33:00.000-07:00

to requote a hero of mine:
We have too many high-sounding words, and too few actions that correspond with them

i am a piece of a focused machine that has deployed US troops
to help pursue a warlord, a mass murderer, a leader of a rape-cult,
a child destroyer, and potentially kill him and his commanders

i believe Joseph Kony is a human being with a childhood and a soul

our call is to arrest him. But we understand that in forceful arrests, he may resist,
and in that situation, he will be killed

i accept that I may be, in a way, killing a piece of a man
or many men

i accept that i could be instrumental in the death
of an american soldier fighting for congolese victims he has
no national interest in protecting

and that that exemplifies a selfless hero
and that we don't see those very often

i believe in action

and i believe in monsters

and that all human beings have the potential to be monsters

i believe in the chance of redemption, and a trial and life in prison is what we demand

and i believe in peaceful resistance to the detriment and even death of myself,
from regimes that are mistaken and capable of hearing the overwhelming voice of the people

but i also believe in sociopaths who use human beings as fleshy-holsters for their machetes. for a dark dark dark that can move into the mind of a man and turn him into a force of nature

i believe in human beings no longer capable of persuasion. or said differently, the patience it would take to continue discussion would enable them to kill another, and another, and another, and another, and another, and another, and another as I wade in blood with a megaphone saying 'please'

if a brain injury can render a man incapable of speech and motor function, could not a spiritual injury render a man beyond the reach of words and reason? resolute to destroy other human beings and amused by their begging tears? by spiritual injury i may mean brain injury. just that more important part of the brain

at that point, his prolonged days on this earth are a hindrance to his redemptive crash with the Lord.

this dark line can only be manifest in his actions and the exhaustion of diplomacy

i am crass because war is crass and to kill a man even a monster is crass

i am uncomfortable with the purity of fundamentalist pacifism

as i am uncomfortable with any fundamentalism

because it denies the fact that nothing exists in a vacuum and

the assumption that it does empowers a lie that empowers its opposite

but let me be plain with you, i want this man arrested. for arrest saves me the weight of holy decision. if we let the man live his days robbed of the lust and drunk stupor of his jungle power, the fragrance of redemption may just find him.

i am not the first to struggle. much greater men, Bonheiffer. Lewis. taught me these things. as did the victims.

and i believe we cling too desperately to life
like nasty bundles afraid to die

and the people most noble understand this
and the people most powerful understand this, and that power can be used for evil
and sinister spirituality and magic and murder and the LRA

and G-d understands this better than i. that when our flesh falls
He has something to do with it

that every knee shall bow

but if i am the wall, or the builder of the wall, that blocks the wave from the town
then so be it.

i would rather save the town
and stand before G-d honestly mistaken

than sit beneath the tree and write of the shame of it all
as i keep my legs pulled tight so as not to touch the blood

for we are too afraid to die, yes

but we cannot be afraid to live

and a monster makes the world afraid to live.
and a monster invites the world to produce heroes that will sacrifice their comfort
and maybe even their lives to define nobility, equality, virtue, and sacrifice

i believe the physical life matters,
but
i think the spiritual life matters more

but i don't know how that ties in to all of this.

but i am acting on lofty words, and have been, and believe there is virtue there.

may G-d have mercy.

The laws were wrong

2011-10-06T11:01:00.000-07:00

In light of the recent discovery that the speed of light is no longer the speed limit of the universe. and the other incredible discovery this year that the universe is expanding at an ever-increasing rate, meaning that some force is pushing it to move fast and faster... because physics tells us that an object will remain at a constant speed unless acted upon by a force... therefore some invisible and absolutely unknown force is at work... my framework of scientific wonder has been expanded. and wrapped up in that, my sense of spiritual wonder is again ignited as if new. The things we believe to be laws are not laws. but shadows of laws. and a few hundred years ago, it was a sin-punishable-by-death to presume that the sun did not orbit the earth... I am silenced by the beauty of discovery, and the humility of wonder, and the admonition to the Fear of G-d. It makes wonderful sense.

2011-09-18T11:16:00.000-07:00

i love that tiny shutter window frozen moment that i’ve always wanted to see without knowing it

The many layers of a picture and the people frozen in the space behind the subjects

Unless the layers are the subjects and perhaps every picture is a painting of the insane

history of the universe that brought those souls to be standing behind those eternal souls

‘there are no ordinary people, only eternal souls becoming gods and monsters’ or somethinglikethat cs lewis said

i think about that a lot as i ignore a jabbering homeless woman that looks at me with distant eyes dehumanizing me as a pocket-book-preppy-asshole-with-spoiling-parents

as i dehumanize her as the result of a long string of short-sighted-self-serving-corroded-willpower-weakness-decisions

and she tells me some weak and tired lie that once probably sounded real about a bus ticket to see her children and i might buy her something at 7/11 although

i probably wont because i’m rushing somewhere far less important than the state of her life

and as with everything I am, so enter the mitigating factors of: my belief that a free society must give people the right to suffer from their decisions, and my spread-too-thin lifestyle of care can destroy me and more importantly them as they see in me a promise i cannot fulfill… blah blah

there are no ordinary people.

freedom is a shaking off in a culture of choice

2011-09-05T12:01:00.000-07:00

My skin is thinner and my jaw is set,
My bones have set and my muscles grow long and thin,
And I am a man now with the whimsy of a boy
and a fox and a canyon.

How pleasant that I sink into this body
and the wisdom of time, with wonder and whimsy intact.

I want to take off the garments made by shaky rotten wooden legs
that creak and sway.
shake them off as when you throw your arms back and fling the sleeves back and
thrust your chest to the sky

and walk up stream with some few souls.

and make a promise to my cold creek skin
to never grow tired and bitter
at a world that will not bend.

Not sure who reads this...

2011-09-05T11:43:00.000-07:00

but I appreciate it. It's a place to hold my thoughts to find later.
When I don't pour them into something, they mist away.
and your comments (especially those kindreds that find this a place
to connect with me) mean a lot to me.

But if anyone prefers, I'm gonna start doing this on tumblr too...
maybe even switch completely over to tumblr bc I like the aesthetic more
and I found a widget that sucks all your blogspot posts into a tumblr automatically.
(http://jonnytran.tumblr.com/post/221876842/import-blogger-posts-to-your-tumblr)

http://thewaterisblack.tumblr.com/

just saying. just staying. just swaying.

jedidiah.

Back to (the wrong) school

2011-09-05T11:26:00.000-07:00

From Seth Godin:

A hundred and fifty years ago, adults were incensed about child labor. Low-wage kids were taking jobs away from hard-working adults.

Sure, there was some moral outrage at seven-year olds losing fingers and being abused at work, but the economic rationale was paramount. Factory owners insisted that losing child workers would be catastrophic to their industries and fought hard to keep the kids at work--they said they couldn't afford to hire adults. It wasn't until 1918 that nationwide compulsory education was in place.

Part of the rationale to sell this major transformation to industrialists was that educated kids would actually become more compliant and productive workers. Our current system of teaching kids to sit in straight rows and obey instructions isn't a coincidence--it was an investment in our economic future. The plan: trade short-term child labor wages for longer-term productivity by giving kids a head start in doing what they're told.

Large-scale education was never about teaching kids or creating scholars. It was invented to churn out adults who worked well within the system.

Of course, it worked. Several generations of productive, fully employed workers followed. But now?

Nobel-prize winning economist Michael Spence makes this really clear: there are tradable jobs (making things that could be made somewhere else, like building cars, designing chairs and answering the phone) and non-tradable jobs (like mowing the lawn or cooking burgers). Is there any question that the first kind of job is worth keeping in our economy?

Alas, Spence reports that from 1990 to 2008, the US economy added only 600,000 tradable jobs.

If you do a job where someone tells you exactly what to do, they will find someone cheaper than you to do it. And yet our schools are churning out kids who are stuck looking for jobs where the boss tells them exactly what to do.

Do you see the disconnect here? Every year, we churn out millions of of worker who are trained to do 1925 labor.

The bargain (take kids out of work so we can teach them to become better factory workers) has set us on a race to the bottom. Some argue we ought to become the cheaper, easier country for sourcing cheap, compliant workers who do what they're told. We will lose that race whether we win it or not. The bottom is not a good place to be, even if you're capable of getting there.

As we get ready for the 93rd year of universal public education, here’s the question every parent and taxpayer needs to wrestle with: Are we going to applaud, push or even permit our schools (including most of the private ones) to continue the safe but ultimately doomed strategy of churning out predictable, testable and mediocre factory-workers?

As long as we embrace (or even accept) standardized testing, fear of science, little attempt at teaching leadership and most of all, the bureaucratic imperative to turn education into a factory itself, we’re in big trouble.

The post-industrial revolution is here. Do you care enough to teach your kids to take advantage of it?

sister island

2011-09-03T11:16:00.000-07:00

I sit beside my sister today, she is fresh home,
and grasp a gift of adulthood.
When you see the woman as you see the stranger,
studied for what she is, her face a unique mystery
of shape and familiar structure. I see my face in hers,
and I see a face that is new to me.

and so I put on the shelf of nostalgia
the bundle of inconveniences,
as children see their siblings, as only in relation to them.

And I see her for what she is, or at least partly.
What a wonderful gift of age and distance.

Promise to wake me up

2011-09-02T17:38:00.000-07:00

If you catch me with blood on my hands,
when I am forty,
with a cul-de-sac comforter
and plenty of soft and malleable money in the bank,

If you catch me with blood on my hands,
because my heart has hardened to the softness of empathy,
and my cage is not the earth and the handiwork of G-d
but rather the ends
of my real.estate.

If you catch me with blood on my hands,
please come to my gilded door,
and throw red paint on it.

but first knock,
so that if I'm home
and if I can pull myself up off the leather couch,
you may paint me as well.

friendship vs duty of kindness

2011-09-01T16:21:00.001-07:00

Mark this well, you proud men of action!

2011-08-30T08:42:00.000-07:00

"Mark this well, you proud men of action! you are, after all, nothing but unconscious instruments of the men of thought." - Hebbel

I am reading the biography of John Adams, and feel somehow kindred. Perhaps that is bold and silly to say, but we grow only as we believe we grow, and we are fashioned by our heroes.

Yesterday Jason, Ben, Laren, Chris, Zach, Kimmy and I sat around a lunch table by the ocean for 5 hours discussing the world we want to see in 100 years. And how that hundred year vision could be wrought in some small way in the spring of 2012.

"Intention is everything" as Jason has become fond of saying. And he is right. We must unscale our eyes from the lies of what is, and see what could be. And not wait, but build such a nation now. As Gandhi took to the sea to make his own salt. As Adams and Washington and Hamilton and Jefferson sparred over old and new ideas become one.

All this talk of principles and vision makes my eyes glaze over. I start to lose the forest for the thickness of the brush. But then, as Steinbeck says, the black reasoning comes to me in the morning.

I am utterly convinced that in 100 years, the current use of free market capitalism and the abuse of natural resources in the worship of growth will be looked upon with the same disgust as we now see the economy of slavery.

Not because capitalism is wrong, but because it's lordship is endowed by a fiction: namely that growth is success.

But despair is not my motif. One thing I love about capitalism is that it is mindless, and therefore will not be offended when it is replaced with a sustainable and downstream logical framework. Even the most hardcore of free market lovers knows that when resources become scarce to a degree of danger, we will adapt. And perhaps this is still Capitalism... for when it changes to the will of the people, it will have done what it always promised: to blindly reflect the freedom of individual choice.

I only mourn the smallness of the massive mind to count the cost of what is lost as the dumb fat worm chews the stalk that holds it up. Jeremy Rifkin believes we may already be too late. God stands above us and winces, though he wrote this play. Take heart.

I am fired up because I read this > http://www.organicconsumers.org/btc/berry.cfm

Talk is sound

2011-08-24T13:49:00.000-07:00

Political theory and the summersault acrobatics of language make me tired. It seems to me the human mind can hardly hold on to complicated ideas, and so it clings to simple ones uncluttered with inconvenient facts or circumstances. It can with athletic ease disregard information that challenges assumptions and cling with blood-ties to fragments of truth that support a pre-conceived universe.

Like 'the free market is the answer. If you take away people's money, they won't have incentive to work hard, and besides, if the government can't spend money responsibly, why would we give it to them.'

'the rich are poisonous vacuums that hoard and support a wealth gap that suffocates the poor in an endless cycle.. until the gap is so severe that the poor rise up, overthrow the aristocracy, and redistribute by force.'

and so we get the endless unconstructive cycle of debate that gives shape to partisanship and stagnation.

This same calcification of thought, i.e. the exchange of holistic understanding for informative cherry picking, is not just seen in politics. It is seen in religion. It is seen in family history and the disappointments of family. It is why we stay angry at a sibling for years, or our mother, or a friend. It is why we stop asking questions in our twenties and hang like weak handed children to a few facts that sound right in a dinner argument.

What if we clung to the first and second commandments of Jesus? That alone is a life's work. Instead we cling to Ayn Rand or John Piper.

I'm speaking out of both sides of my mouth.

Because I believe people cling to two types of simple things.

1. Simple fragments of truth that make men fools. These are used as weapons to maintain a status as 'right.'

2. Simple foundations of truth that make men great. These are used as quiet humble fuel for action and example.

All this talk engages me, challenges me to take part in the constructive dialogue (if it exists) of building a better future... because the founding fathers of America believed that ideas could change the system, and they did.

I also believe this to be true:

“Mark this well, you proud men of action! You are, after all, nothing but unconscious instruments of the men of thought.” – Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.

And so I think.

But I get tired...

and see great merit in leaving my hat on a hook at the front door, stepping out of my living room, and living amongst the real problems of real people.

Thoughts on the Fourth Estate and my time in an RV that followed.

2011-08-19T08:00:00.001-07:00

How do you digest a hurricane? How do you swallow the moon and the earth lit up by the moon? Some things are too big, too inextricably bound up in the world to be consumed. I want to know The Fourth Estate. A conference designed to spark an ideological movement: a commitment to global citizenship and responsibility to justice. I want to analyze and categorize it. But it cannot be held in my hands because there were too many miracles in the orchestra to hold.

Each individual experience, the unique events of every life and the wash of one video on one pair of eyes and a speaker’s words on another. I will never know the stories, the ruffles of the heart that were the very moment of a life change, or the seed falling in the crack of stone, invisible for years, only to grow into a mighty tree in years I will not know.

I held the face of new loves, cried with them as we said goodbye, I hugged a million works of art and wrote my name in books that will hold the words of great men and women not yet written.

I spoke with my heroes, listened to them address and articulate a future and a present and the human condition.

I heard great minds give credit to science for life, to God, to something more but not quite God. Each man, each woman bringing her motivation, the deeper hunger, to the stage, inviting each member of The Fourth Estate to take the wild wonderous magic of living seriously, the profound duty to examine the phenomenon of existence and behave with intention. Intention is everything.

If these members walked out a bit dizzy, stumbling over thoughts too big for the brain, we have done our job. If these members walked out convinced of nothing except the dignity of human beings and a desire to protect that dignity, then we have done our job.

If these members exchange self-serving profit for life-serving purpose, if they see their lives as part of a living body, and not an ignorant cancer, we have done our job.

If we prioritize worthy things, and marginalize unworthy things. If we celebrate beauty and mystery and belonging, and if we critique abuse, the rape of the human soul and the natural world, the fragmented fiction that my choices are separate from yours… then we have done our job.

If we stop blaming injustice on laziness, culture, and history, and start solving injustice with love and focused attention, then we have done our world a service.

And if there is a God, He will be well pleased.

As I traveled the east coast in an RV, celebrating Brady’s bar exam, exploring the Carolina’s and sitting at Lincoln’s feet in DC and walking the streets of New York with Orion (a fresh poet’s eyes seeing the temple of man for the first time), I carried with me the glory of The Fourth Estate. The sense of purpose, the crater of impact scarring my face and shoulders with value. It was a haunted drive, my thoughts present in the Charleston rain and above the clouds in the lingering ghosts of the prior week. It was the perfect meal: swallowing the moon with brothers of chosen blood and adventure, digesting the hurricane that circles inside me, wrecks the islands of doubt and rests its quiet eye over my heart.

If there is one thing

2011-07-21T01:05:00.000-07:00

If there is one thing that keeps a human being alive

it is belief.

or said differently: hope.

it is hardly evidence. hardly even experience.

Belief is why we wake up everyday, the hope of some good outcome, prolonged or immediate,

it is why we enjoy meeting new attractive people, if we are single or not single,

it is why we so easily remember their names and forget the names of plane looking people,

that some unsaid unimagined unthought connection will grow into something unthought

but always imagined,

or it is why we make status updates: the hope of being noticed and affirmed

it is why we blog: the hope of being read, and someone finding the

tiny personal single life we live to be, in some small way, important,

which of course to us is hugely important,

even if no one ever ever reads it, or we get the rare affirmation,

that one affirmation gives birth, sets free, our lustful imagination

for all that could be reading it.

or even our journals, those secret things that shall never be read,

how few of us would burn those books,

how few of us write to write,

without the hope that someone in the future might stumble across it

and find that we said something,

or even the sexy thought that someone has found us interesting

and tip-toed into our room, glanced over their shoulder,

and read without us knowing.

and in so hoping, we bait hope for hope,

if we win, and someone does affirm us or notice we are breathing,

they too are hoping, they are attracted to us and want to understand,

to consume and be better,

or to know us, study us, grasp us, and win us. It is an exchange, and when even

it is perhaps what Love is, a type of Love, but it is

not always even... and so we find unrequited hope, which is heartbreak, which

is defeated belief.

I believe humans hope for such things, because we are unfulfilled

and therefore hungry. We hope for dinner and hope for a spouse and

hope for children and hope to retire and hope our children love us and hope

to make them love us right and hope to be healthy and hope for heaven so that

we have something else to hope for when what we hoped for wasn't what we wanted

and then we grow tired, and the desire starts to be tired, and we stop laughing,

and so many lose their faces.

I sound like I'm critiquing. But the alternative is nirvana, freedom from desire,

which of course is death. Hope is what living is.

Hope can sound an empty common word,

but it seems so much more real than most things I hear of Love.

This is what I'm writing for work. It is the manifesto for an ideological movement of citizenship and global identity.

2011-07-20T16:13:00.000-07:00

Every generation is invited to endow its share of history with a name. It begins with recognition. If the events of the day are marked by a growing contrast: the comfort of some is removed by a widening chasm from the tragedy of many, and the voices of the dying are hushed by the hands of the wicked, such a day is set to end.

This recognition is followed by response. First, by bold symbolic action, usually by the young.

Then, in the audience of the effected, a proper articulation of the problem emerges. Then a movement of change, often sweeping so quickly the Establishment fumbles to trace it.

We are at such a time.

The Fourth Estate is a recognition of human identity in the face of global connectivity and the responsibility that flows from it. It is a blueprint of the future founded in humanity's bold endeavor to seek a more perfect peace, a more perfect unity, and a more honest expression of success.

We have always experienced empathy for our neighbor, our family. In a novel age such as this where the stories and faces of humanity writ large are brought to our living rooms, our eyes and our ears, and what's more: our products and consumption touch the globe as a whole: this empathic responsibility has outgrown its ancient limits of proximity.

It is a coalition of minds that believe there are no national boundaries, no laws, no man made rules that trump the law of common humanity written on the heart. It is not something new, it is the proper expansion of something old, truths that are self evident, God-breathed, and manifest in the history of discontent:

We believe all men are created equal, and that justice for some is not justice for all. We believe that human evil is the responsibility of all men. When we turn our face from horror, we bless it to continue. We believe our task is to live the simple and true things, and work them out no matter how hard: that men and women, no matter where they live, are equal. and loved. and worthy. and that we are all connected, not just in a complicated global exchange of goods and commodities, which is undeniable, but in a human web of innate value.

And these things define us: We are not the intellectual elite. We are not the bored idealists in the lounge chairs of comfort. We are the young people on the sidewalk. We will sleep where we fall and work until our hands are raw, connected like never before to the central nervous system of mankind.

In the face of a modern world that is inextricably connected in a web of exchange, we accept the responsibility to protect those that are victimized by extreme cases of injustice. It is not 'their' problem. It is a humanity problem.

We believe in starting with the specific to prove the universal. We are starting with Joseph Kony, the rebel leader of the Lord's Resistance Army that has systematically abducted children to fight as soldiers in his rebellion.

We will not ignore his murderous campaign simply because his escapades do not impact us economically or threaten us militarily. We will respond because he destroys human life.

And our responsibility to protect does not invalidate our national identity. We believe in the pride of cultural expression and society. But we do not believe in the fiction of self-interest in isolation. Our choices echo to every single corner of this globe, and we should respond with reason and temperance.

To the degree in which society denies the affect of its choices on its own citizens and those of its neighbors, is the degree it will fall victim to history as a failure. As a decaying monster.

It is about rejecting the concept of the 'other,' the belief that 'they' are the problem and 'they' are out to get us. We understand that 'they' are us, and we are 'them.'

When we acknowledge the mystery of value in every human life, and witness to such, we thrive, and succeed, and protect one another.

We choose to stand up for that belief. We will fight for it, expand our talent, exhaust our bodies in its pursuit, and define a generation of human belonging.

We are The Fourth Estate.

Truth is truth is truth

2011-07-20T15:30:00.000-07:00

Playboy: Much of the controversy surrounding 2001 deals with the meaning of the metaphysical symbols that abound in the film — the polished black monoliths, the orbital conjunction of Earth, Moon and sun at each stage of the monoliths’ intervention in human destiny, the stunning final kaleidoscopic maelstrom of time and space that engulfs the surviving astronaut and sets the stage for his rebirth as a “star-child” drifting toward Earth in a translucent placenta. One critic even called 2001 “the first Nietzschean film,” contending that its essential theme is Nietzsche’s concept of man’s evolution from ape to human to superman. What was the metaphysical message of 2001?

Kubrick: It’s not a message that I ever intend to convey in words. 2001 is a nonverbal experience; out of two hours and 19 minutes of film, there are only a little less than 40 minutes of dialog. I tried to create a visual experience, one that bypasses verbalized pigeonholing and directly penetrates the subconscious with an emotional and philosophic content. To convolute McLuhan, in 2001 the message is the medium. I intended the film to be an intensely subjective experience that reaches the viewer at an inner level of consciousness, just as music does; to “explain” a Beethoven symphony would be to emasculate it by erecting an artificial barrier between conception and appreciation. You’re free to speculate as you wish about the philosophical and allegorical meaning of the film — and such speculation is one indication that it has succeeded in gripping the audience at a deep level — but I don’t want to spell out a verbal road map for 2001 that every viewer will feel obligated to pursue or else fear he’s missed the point. I think that if 2001 succeeds at all, it is in reaching a wide spectrum of people who would not often give a thought to man’s destiny, his role in the cosmos and his relationship to higher forms of life. But even in the case of someone who is highly intelligent, certain ideas found in 2001 would, if presented as abstractions, fall rather lifelessly and be automatically assigned to pat intellectual categories; experienced in a moving visual and emotional context, however, they can resonate within the deepest fibers of one’s being.

—Playboy’s interview with Stanley Kubrick in its entirety (1968)

Wisdom from a sometimes hated man

2011-07-16T12:03:00.000-07:00

"When people spend their own money on themselves, they are careful about how much they spend and about what they spend it on. If people spend their own money on others, they are careful about how much they spend, but not as careful about what they spend it on. If people spend other people’s money on themselves, they are not careful about how much they spend, but they are careful about what they spend it on. If people spend other people’s money on other people, they are not careful about the amount of money they spend, nor are they careful about what they spend it on. That is government.” - Donald Rumsfeld. Written in his private notes while Secretary of Defense.

This not only summarizes the psychology of government, it also describes man's general self-preservation and self-attention superseding all other understanding. We can only truly know our own needs. That is why we are commanded to 'love one another as we love ourselves.' There is no deeper love.

And if we find ourselves in such a state where our insecurities and self-hate act as the foundation of our identity, I'd argue that such a person is incapable of free and true love.

mingle with the truth. our feet know more than books. but books know more than self-promotion.

2011-07-01T07:33:00.000-07:00

don't know about the hedonism of self discovery.

but know there is a truth to rejecting the path of least resistance.

resistance is the only reason man has muscle.

"Never go to art school. Never go to New York. Never rent a loft. Dump your font folder. Forget symmetry and colour coordination. Stop taking text from editorial you don't read and packaging it in eye catching ways. Walk away from your computer. Then take off, go to India, rural China, Rio, Caracas, and Belize. Mingle with the filthy rich and the dirt poor. Dig up all the roots of terror. Make hunger, disease, cruelty, lust, greed, self preservation and genocide your roommates. Then when your run out of money and can't take it anymore, fly back home. Look in the mirror. Face your fears, your weaknesses, strengths, your imminent demise. Then when all of this begins to gel into a master narrative in front of your eyes, go get a job."

- Kalle Lasn

We’re giving away husbands on a game show.

2011-06-26T15:00:00.000-07:00

“I know many people are concerned about the destruction of the sanctity of marriage, as well, and they view this as a threat. But let me ask you something, ladies and gentlemen, what are we really protecting when you look at the divorce rate in our society? Turn on the television. We have a wedding channel on cable TV devoted to the behavior of people on their way to the altar. They spend billions of dollars, behave in the most appalling way, all in an effort to be princess for a day. You don’t have cable television? Put on network TV. We’re giving away husbands on a game show. You can watch “The Bachelor,” where 30 desperate women will compete to marry a 40-year-old man who has never been able to maintain a decent relationship in his life. We have “The Bacholorette,” in reverse. And my favorite show, which thank God only ran one season because it was truly distasteful, was “The Littlest Groom,” where 30 desperate women competed to marry a dwarf. That’s what we’ve done to marriage in America, where young women are socialized from the time they’re five years old to think of being nothing but a bride. They plan every day what they’ll wear, how they’ll look, the invitations, the whole bit. They don’t spend five minutes thinking about what it means to be a wife. People stand up there before God and man — even in Senator Diaz’s church — they swear to love, honor, and obey; they don’t mean a word of it. So if there’s anything wrong, any threat to the sanctity of marriage in America, it comes from those of us who have the privilege and the right, and we have abused it for decades.”

NY Senator Diane Savino

A post. a window.

2011-06-23T11:12:00.000-07:00

I wanted to post two pages from my journal. one of the pages, because it was part of my shaken response to the death of my grandmother last summer and is honest. someone may find themself less alone in reading it. that is worth the exposure. and one, because it is what I want to be known if I died soon.

Reminds me of my friend Eric.

2011-06-22T16:43:00.001-07:00

Who has not forgotten the sunset.

Have you ever seen
anything
in your life
more wonderful than the way the sun,
every evening,
relaxed and easy,
floats toward the horizon and into the clouds or the hills,
or the rumpled sea,
and is gone—
and how it slides again out of the blackness,
every morning,
on the other side of the world,
like a red flower streaming upward on its heavenly oils,
say, on a morning in early summer,
at its perfect imperial distance—
and have you ever felt for anything
such wild love—
do you think there is anywhere, in any language,
a word billowing enough
for the pleasure that fills you,
as the sun
reaches out,
as it warms you as you stand there,
empty-handed—
or have you too
turned from this world— or have you too
gone crazy
for power,
for things?

~ Mary Oliver

What does my life say?

2011-06-22T16:24:00.000-07:00

From NPR:

To reclaim their “honor,” families in Syria have been known to kill raped female members. Even if families allow such women to live, they are not eligible to marry.

“We sat and discussed that we want to change this. We don’t want to change just the regime in Syria, but also this kind of stuff. So we will marry them in front of everyone,” said Ibrahim Kayyis, a 32-year-old baker from Jisr al-Shugour.

To do what is right at the expense of what is easy or socially acceptable is to the Glory of God.

They gave it a name.

2011-06-14T17:49:00.000-07:00

how many floating clouds of feeling

are given words

by different cultures with different tongues

that value different things?

I've been looking for this word.

You start.

2011-06-09T15:48:00.001-07:00

"The chief Raoni cries when he learns that brazilian president Dilma released the beginning of construction of the hydroelectric plant of Belo Monte, even after tens of thousands of letters and emails addressed to her and which were ignored as the more than 600 000 signatures. That is, the death sentence of the peoples of Great Bend of the Xingu river is enacted. Belo Monte will inundate at least 400,000 hectares of forest, an area bigger than the Panama Canal, thus expelling 40,000 indigenous and local populations and destroying habitat valuable for many species - all to produce electricity at a high social, economic and environmental cost, which could easily be generated with greater investments in energy efficiency."

I am torn. By my life, the power to be one man, and the current of influence I may be a part of... for change, for fire, for busting down walls and ripping out the pillars of hungry made-up gods. I want to destroy factories, I want to sew something, I want to tell one person, look them in the eye, and say 'stop consuming so much. you are cancer.' And see the look on their face that says, 'you start.'

I believe in such cartography.

2011-06-09T15:16:00.000-07:00

“We die containing a richness of lovers and tribes, tastes we have swallowed, bodies we have plunged into and swum up as if rivers of wisdom, characters we have climbed into as if trees, fears we have hidden in as if caves. I wish for all this to be marked on by body when I am dead. I believe in such cartography - to be marked by nature, not just to label ourselves on a map like the names of rich men and women on buildings. We are communal histories, communal books. We are not owned or monogamous in our taste or experience.”

—Michael Ondaatje | The English Patient

Being alone is first in being in love

2011-06-09T15:13:00.000-07:00

““The capacity to be alone is the capacity to love. It may look paradoxical to you, but it is not. It is an existential truth: only those people who are capable of being alone are capable of love, of sharing, of going into the deepest core of the other person - without possessing the other, without becoming dependent on the other, without reducing the other to a thing, and without becoming addicted to the other. They allow the other absolute freedom, because they know that if the other leaves, they will be as happy as they are now. Their happiness cannot be taken by the other, because it is not given by the other.””

- Osho, Being In Love

Consciousness is

2011-06-08T17:16:00.000-07:00

Thinking

2011-06-07T22:00:00.001-07:00

Thinking is hard. I've heard is said that

genius is nothing more than continued attention,

I think that may be true.

I am possessed by desire to know and be known and feel and be felt

and if I am not seeking, I am sinking.

I am like a shark in that way.

But I know great men and women that are not like sharks at all,

to the naked eye, they seem much more like lonely bears

that forage and eat berries (somehow supporting their mass) and sleep

and are formidable in their own way.

But maybe we are all sharks, or maybe I am a bear,

I get excited when I think I may have it all wrong, because that is fresh and I am a learner.

Here is something I think I know: We want what we are not, because at the root, we want to control all of creation, and control comes from ownership and understanding.

I believe that is why we are attracted to opposites: to grasp them, understand them, own them and control them.

We do not fear what we understand.

I am a student of movements of the heart

2011-06-07T21:28:00.000-07:00

I am a student of movements of the heart

when the clouds like milk in water billow and spill

down the low places of the mountains

and the late sun light is too smooth to believe,

I am a student of movements of the heart.

when I am bestowed a life of co-toil in worthy soil

with kin closer than blood by choice and not by choice,

and wake every day springing from my floor

ready to do what I was built to do,

as a pelican must feel when it sees its wings work on the lift of wind by the crest of waves at the shore, I am a student,

when a best friend is committed to raise too much money

for too high a mountain and kids too burdened with chains they did not fasten,

and a best friend shares a cigarette with me to confess his sins and

make me feel less alone,

I am a student of movements of the heart,

for they are neither joy nor sorrow,

but one part longing, one part hunger, another thirst,

and a space in my chest and fingers and knees,

that makes me wish to be barefoot,

to burst into mist and mingle there

where I have no body but all of it at once.

Critics as creators

2011-06-06T16:49:00.000-07:00

There are critics,

and there are creators,

and so often, I am a critic of critics and a fan of creators,

but there are critics who are creators, because they see the world around them, assimilate it, and hold it up as something that can be grasped. I like them.

“Many films diminish us. They cheapen us, masturbate our senses, hammer us with shabby thrills, diminish the value of life. Some few films evoke the wonderment of life’s experience, and those I consider a form of prayer. Not prayer “to” anyone or anything, but prayer “about” everyone and everything. I believe prayer that makes requests is pointless. What will be, will be. But I value the kind of prayer when you stand at the edge of the sea, or beneath a tree, or smell a flower, or love someone, or do a good thing. Those prayers validate existence and snatch it away from meaningless routine.”

- Roger Ebert

Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front

2011-05-17T14:18:00.001-07:00

by Wendell Berry

From The Country of Marriage (Harcourt, 1975)

Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.
And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.
When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.

So, friends, every day do something
that won’t compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.
Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.

Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millenium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.

Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.
Listen to carrion – put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
So long as women do not go cheap
for power, please women more than men.
Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?

Go with your love to the fields.
Lie down in the shade. Rest your head
in her lap. Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.
As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn’t go. Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.

2011-05-07T23:20:00.001-07:00

When we get out of the glass bottles of our ego,

and when we escape like squirrels turning in the
cages of our personality
and get into the forests again,

we shall shiver with cold and fright
but things will happen to us
so that we don’t know ourselves.

Cool, unlying life will rush in,
and passion will make our bodies taut with power,

we shall stamp our feet with new power
and old things will fall down,

we shall laugh, and institutions will curl up like
burnt paper.

~D. H. Lawrence

I can hardly wait

for the day that all this contrast

comes in to focus,

and I see it from above.

but oh how I love the pitch and peak of the story, the flashlight

at God's chin as he reads me

my next turn.

We all agree. Yes we do. Yes.

2011-05-07T22:22:00.001-07:00

If I am being honest,

and not the kind of honest that asks for the

permission to say hurtful things under the mask

of honesty,

but honest in the sense that I share something that

may be unpopular:

I'd say 95% of the time

I fear exploring my culture-enforced beliefs,

I fear questioning the doctrinal authority of Paul,

and the salvation story

and the implications on sin and judgment if choice is an illusion,

because of social discomfort and alienation,

rather than upsetting or frustrating or disgracing God.

I wonder what that says about my true allegiance,

and if I am unique,

and the Christian quest for truth over the establishment of a comfortable culture

and the fiction of communal accord.

2011-04-15T17:57:00.001-07:00

I do not know the seasons

2011-04-15T17:24:00.000-07:00

“There are no miracles beyond the seasons, yet you and I do not know the seasons. And what if a season shall be made manifest in the shape of a man? In a field I have watched an acorn, a thing so still and seemingly useless. And in the spring I have seen that acorn take roots and rise, the beginning of an oak tree, towards the sun. Surely you would deem this a miracle, yet that miracle is wrought a thousand thousand times in the drowsiness of every winter and the passion of every spring. Why shall it not be wrought in the heart of man? Shall not the seasons meet in the hand or upon the lips of a Man Anointed? If our God has given to earth the art to nestle seed whilst the seed is seemingly dead, why shall He not give it to the heart of man to breathe life into another heart, even a heart seemingly dead?”

- “Jesus the Son of Man” Kahlil Gibran

One world, under Man.

2011-03-27T15:20:00.000-07:00

secular Humanism: the belief in finding the right through reason and philosophy:

a good theology for modern government, I'd say.

Christ-centered historicism, pre or post evangelicalism, universalism in the prism of Jesus, post-emergent realism, Zionism: isms looking for the right. some truths are focused on heaven. some truths are focused on the sexy idea of truth.

some truths are grounded and fed by fear and the loneliness of the soul. no, they all are.

And the mysterious clues get picked up, like bones in the badlands, of a brontosaurus,

and legends of dragons are written,

and the Cretaceous period is mapped out day-by-day as if we were there, by men who write backwards...

and reverence for the way it is is lost.

and worship for what it must have been is a golden calf.

I love the assembly line and hate the responsibility of one life under God.

and I worship what it must have been and drink and laugh.

April 26

2011-01-16T13:15:00.003-08:00

"The inner wagings of biology and heart, reason and instinct. I detest my attraction to beautiful faces and bodies... how they can pull out of me more attention, laughter, focus... and tell me that beauty does not fade. ha. We are all promised by our lust that the taste of beautiful skin will satisfy our lonely bodies. It does not matter how many books, parables, films and songs I hear and see and read about the fleeting dangers of choice by physical attraction... we will still war with its silver tongue. I sometimes wish to be blind and content as an island and straight as an arrow and married. strikingly handsome. or fit. or fat and jolly. or a cow in another pasture, mocking me by paying no attention across the fence. I say sometimes, some more than others, some not really at all. I just hope to be good. A good boy with the talents in this box clutched in my arms."

Something I wrote

2011-01-16T13:08:00.000-08:00

Something I wrote while in love with an impossible love and reading Rumi:

covered mystic poetry from a desert man

that removes the shape of

the soul, dissolving

self into The Friend,

I am possessed

marching possessed

in the mirror I hold

to set side by side

self and other and

skin - bone - breadth - hair

skill - speech - heat - hunger

pull and ignore and conquer

slave slave slave

slave slave and

not a bond-servant to

this

dip into mystic river,

free me. freedom. or

give me, and let it be dry.

or teach me how to

love, or what to love, or

break me, Spirit, in the Texas soil

like my sister

and sew me again and kill

me and wait, in white snow cover

for spring. or something else.

there is man and there is woman and

2010-12-15T22:19:00.001-08:00

i have come to believe that gender is a layered thing

in every child of God.

It is a load-baring block in the wall,

but it is not a kind or a label or the wall itself.

masculine notes. feminine crescendos.

these things matter,

but in a world of education for all

and unity for love equal to function,

there is a wife who leads the family in her firm choices.

there is a man who shows tenderness for the quiet sheep.

there is a woman who seeks first the counsel of her husband.

and there is a husband who has never known why he feels.

and this is not an abomination.

this is the varied faces of God lived out in a union,

in the complexity of this human experiment.

and this I believe:

one day, the fractured identity of mankind will be made perfect,

but I do not believe the current mingling is without it's timely perfection,

and I do not believe that redemption will produce

a cold man who leads and makes no mistakes

and a sweet woman who quietly waits for instruction.

our Lord is not so boring. and not so poor an author.

God bless us

2010-12-14T08:44:00.000-08:00

to the exclusion of lesser borders,

we have been given favor

because our Constitution was formed in His truth,

He gave unto us a ripe and virgin land

barely spoiled by the animal-men here before,

a stain easily under-rug swept to make way for providence.

"A man can be a Christian or a patriot, but he can't legally be a Christian and a patriot - except in the usual way: one of the two with the mouth, the other with the heart. The spirit of Christianity proclaims the brotherhood of the race and the meaning of that strong word has not been left to guesswork, but made tremendously definite - the Christian must forgive his brother man all crimes he can imagine and commit, and all insults he can conceive and utter - forgive these injuries how many times? Seventy times seven - another way of saying there shall be no limit to this forgiveness. That is the spirit and the law of Christianity. Well - Patriotism has its laws. And it is also a perfectly definite one; there are not vagueness's about it. It commands that the brother over the border shall be sharply watched and brought to book every time he does us a hurt or offends us with an insult. Word it as softly as you please; the spirit of patriotism is the spirit of dog and wolf. The moment there is a misunderstanding about a boundary line, or a hamper of fish, or some other squalid matter, see patriotism rise, and hear it split the universe with its war-whoop. The spirit of patriotism being in its nature jealous and selfish is just in man's line, it comes natural to him - he can live up to all its requirements to the letter; but the spirit of Christianity is not in its entirety possible to him.

The prayers concealed in what I have been saying is, not that patriotism should cease, and not that the talk about universal brotherhood should cease, but that the incongrous firm be dissolved and each limb of it be required to transact business by itself, for the future."

-Mark Twain's Notebook

a spider web is stronger than a stone

2010-12-07T15:43:00.001-08:00

these few things

they are related one to another:

pornography is an abuse of intimacy through removed observation.

defiling the sacred through exaggeration and inflation.

and from it, comes mutant expectation and fantasy.

what then, is the Notebook? Atonement? Love Actually? Titanic?

We, all of us, want to feel valued and loved

not for what we do, but for who we are.

But such a 'who' is elusive, because of course,

we are what we do.

I have never loved a stone for who it is.

modern masculinity is vacuous.

it highlights the strength and not the character.

and from it comes a kind of death.

it teaches the man to compete, rise, tower,

isolate and dominate,

all the while his right-man self is weighing the cost

in the shadow of silence

in the shadow of almighty humor

and the razor lies of comparison

and for it, a man's self is retarded as without water in the sun

until it is first uncovered by a girl.

but oh, oh, to uncover yourself

commingled with the drunkenness

of a woman.

the chemistry, attraction, and desire for a woman

is like a shaky mirror held before you

on a roller coaster freefall. you see something of yourself,

but for the gasping collapse of lungs

you may mistake that shaky falling face

for your true self. because apart from her eyes locked to yours, and asking you pointed questions for the first time, you've never been considered. studied. and so studied yourself.

she asks so that she might understand and own.

a brother asks so that he might delight and share.

that quoted, 'you too?! I thought I was the only one.'

this is why male friendship is a cornerstone

of the man complete.

and the liberation of a man to love his wife completely.

unrequited love is beautiful

because the pain makes you feel important, betrayed by the order of things,

and the love remains unsung eternal. and therefore perfect. unburdened by the decay

of infatuation.

remove desire, and we die.

this is why contentment is not true peace. it is death.

be content to sip your coffee and read a book for a weekend.

and a day, no, a week will pass, and you will kill the moth

in the window just to watch it die.

this is why old age so often becomes sadness:

when we become irrelevant, no longer depended on,

when our life is reflection not ignition, we can feel the wicking death

creep up our pant leg.

and why heaven must be something different than we think.

If the sin of Adam bestowed death unto the world,

and before the leopard lay with the lamb,

then why does the spider have venom,

why does the lion have claws and the eagle talons,

why would the Maker sew a shark for peace when it was so

meticulously pieced for death,

why is the decay of canyons the mark of their beauty?

perhaps his gift was the death of man alone.

and if heaven is eternal life in heavenly body,

it must carry with it some disappointment.

because eternal youth for the saved

would rob me of my memory of my grandmother,

her perfect crooked hands and white hair, the softness

of her face is only as it can be with the badges of time,

i do not know Betty Jo at 20 years old.

and the vivacity of youth and quick movements are not what I miss,

the slow simple gentle hands, those I miss.

but even so, how selfish of me.

a man has in him two possible foundations:

'I am worthy.'

'I am unworthy.'

and these two things will dominate his social posture.

they will fuel him in the thrusting of a new exchange.

when he is in a room of people, he will feel either

'I am energized to explore these new people and they are energized to explore me'

or he will feel

'I am a vacuum of non-contribution, and everyone else is aware of this.'

and the one cannot understand the other.

Music is science

2010-12-07T12:40:00.000-08:00

In science we have been reading only the notes to a poem; in Christianity we find the poem itself. - CSL

I wrote this to a friend, or something like it

2010-12-05T19:10:00.000-08:00

every wooden man

has a galley full of slaves

rowing to the shores of their

future freedom

but not before their present bondage.

and here I spill out the sides

from the wicked man's perch

he hears

the negro spirituals condemning

him with their guttural harmony

flavored by the gasp of a woman

dead in child birth.

I am a wooden man

looking at Canaan on the horizon

propelled by my shackled brothers

and hatred of my port and bow

but a believer in their freedom

the death of my way of living

and the resurrection of other dead.

don't tell me what to do, tell me who to be

2010-11-22T23:00:00.001-08:00

i have been living under the law.

the law is good and perfect

and the measure of

impossibility

by which we discover the impossibility

of human godship, that nature we carry like oxen,

the original sin: belief that man is his own destiny,

the author and perfecter of his living,

and not the written page or the pen

or the tree that was cut and stripped to paper

and therefore, it is the roadmap to the truth: we are created.

but what is the gospel?

is it a human exchange: an impossible law for a possible one?

if so, we believe the lie the first was built to expose.

that we can. do. it. ourselves.

no. not a new law.

(like a simple shaking free from the impossible law of

crazy jews in the desert)

(like a choosing instead a new law that is easier

to obey, to earn your spot in a heaven that probably

doesn't exist as you think it does)

I do not want to trade impossibility for impossibility and call it 'life'.

I want to call it death as it was first called.

this is our current history, our zombie song:

"don’t teach me about politics and government

just tell me who to vote for

don’t teach me about truth and beauty

just label my music

don’t teach me how to live like a free man

just give me a new law

(pre-chorus)

i don’t wanna know if the answers aren’t easy

so just bring it down from the mountain to me

i want a new law

don’t teach me about moderation and liberty

i prefer a shot of grape juice

don’t teach me about loving my enemies

don’t teach me how to listen to the Spirit

just give me a new law"

doesn't truth come in packages

delivered in puzzles

taught to you your whole life in pieces

so that when it finally rings true, it is assembled

from the familiar bones you've carried.

it is the gospel of grace,

the spirit written on your heart

that obeys the law

it has been said,

the man trying to be original never is,

the man telling the truth is almost always original

the man trying to make a good impression never does,

the man being himself and taking interest in another makes a good impression.

jed, stop pretending that you are living by the gospel

by shackling on a list of self-accomplishment by obedience,

by loving out of obedience

instead of loving out of who you are and who they are and who you are together

no one feels loved when they discover they are being loved by reason of looking lonely, sad, isolated, poor, or meek.

a man feels loved when who he is

is delighted in by another being who they are.

just remember your first love

and seek to know nothing but what Paul sought to seek to know nothing but

do not love the deeds of Christ

but Him

and His deeds will flow from right purpose through my fingers

and indeed I will not say it was me.

a mosaic suddenly makes a face.

i will certainly edit this in the coming days, as I find more clay fractures in the sand and place them rearrange them to fit.

what thoughts you have entertained you have done

2010-10-25T21:41:00.000-07:00

Jesus teaches liquid thoughts

that can be molded to mean almost anything:

is rendering to Caesar what is Caesar's an invitation to

accept established government

or a sarcasm, as clearly in a world made by God, what is really Caesar's?

Is turning the other cheek an unmitigated command

or to be turned only when it doesn't jeopardize national security or

the sanctity of the sovereign state, or our duty to protect our family

on our safe school-district street?

Is the narrow path narrow

or open to those with good conscience and good excuses

don't we all have good excuses? a childhood broken

an absent mother

a chemical disposition to rage, then too stern a punishment, a feeling of betrayal,

and a response,

the pendulum of experience, nature, and a fragile analysis of personal justice?

and as for the broader path, where exactly does it lead?

Because Hell is Gehenna and

Gehenna is actually a place, the valley of Hinnom,

outside of Jerusalem, where children were burned.

Is that where we go? An ancient Detroit?

or the sins celebrated in church: sexual addiction, pornography,

homosexuality, those easily vilified because they are secret.

and the sins never discussed: comfort, greed, creation abuse, gossip,

family worship, national worship, idolatry, church growth as a

building not a body,

salvation without discipleship, those never vilified because they are public and co-sponsored.

and for this, I have trouble trusting

all but my subjective reason

and the Spirit's movement over my soul when I read

..of course, the Spirit's movements over my soul are subjective

but they sound objective when they ring truest to my subjective reason,

and so we get an email chain from our parents

that condemns the hunger of Islam, the bloodfeeding Koran passages,

a book I have never read, and shouldn't because i was born

into the truth

and the Christian scriptures that predict a very real deception

and an anti-christ

and a season of unrest

and violence

and a worldly kingdom ruled by Jesus

and my subjective does not want to believe that those scriptures become objective

in history

because my spirituality lives outside of space

somewhere in my fatalism to believe in a Watchmaker who loves me.

it does not want to believe because every generation since Peter has been

certain that those scriptures were for their own time

and so,

my mind is quick to spot patterns,

and I jump to disbelief.

and I am not a conservative, because i don't know what to conserve

I am unconvinced that older values are valuable

outside of a commitment to quest

for the truth.

which values to keep? purity? I've tested and believe it. mostly.

national allegiance? still testing.

national pride? for some few noble things. thanks for that one Zinn.

about my desire for intimacy

an understanding of sexuality

and hunger, purpose, forward movement

the Buddha's quest to quiet it

and Christ's desire to complete it

and my sojourner path to something that honors the Truth of Christ

and perhaps a lonely life befriended to the truth

surrounded by people.

how arrogant.

all this to say it keeps me young. wide eyed. and not tired.

a short thunder clap of current rivers

2010-10-02T16:16:00.000-07:00

1. great films are a targeted lure that pull out of life a thousand fragments of experience

into understanding

and great poems, or prose,

or Meryl's face and pause,

2. San Diego is aswarm with culture. like no place I've lived and noticed.

3. I have a sense of guilt for my community. that i have too many A+'s and not enough D's. then I wonder if charity friendship is friendship at all, as opposed to friendship built on shared delight, interest, and journey. then I wonder what love looks like. seflessness. is it active dips into someone's life in a time of need, or a long term discipleship, or a long term tolerance of insanity in the hopes that steadfast love would... it's a... well...

4. I take people to Africa and show them things, without understanding them myself. Africa or the things or the people I'm taking. how humbling. and then we have the white house expecting us to be the experts. maybe, because we care, we are the experts. because experts care about things. and no one else really cares. really. and the things that need experts. but the experts.

5. Do people ever work out to be simply fit. only fit. in shape. capable. strong. without the quilted-in desire to be attractive. or better than.

6. A commitment to truth above a commitment to tradition or what I've been taught produces a renewed sense of adventure in scripture, understanding G-d, theology, the Christianity of Paul, Jesus, Aquinas, and America, Gibran, Emerson, Lewis, Merton.

7. Jack of many trades master of one. I have intentions. But what does it mean to be a master? Public recognition? The recognition of those inner thrones of proximity and intimacy that I respect?

8. Does anyone actually believe in Christ as the evangelicals teach here in America? Actually live like plain-read-American-understood scripture? Does anyone actually believe that the bible is God's word? His one and truest revelation to our species? If we did, would we not feverishly read it?? does anyone actually believe that those who do not profess Christ in their hearts will spend eternity in hell? Everlasting fire. Eternal damnation for 70 years of selfish understandable mistakes? If they did, would we not crawl across burning coals every day for just one to be saved? ...or are we so selfish that we do believe, and still do so little. what if what if what if what if what if what if...

9. What does it mean to be holy? to be righteous? what does that look like? and does it include humor?

10. i think alot about questions. fewer answers.

11. i think i like visiting more than being visited. but barely.

12. i find myself to be beautiful and ugly at the same time. what a wonderful tension. it has more power over me than i realize.

Maybe the world breaks on purpose

2010-07-21T16:18:00.000-07:00

""A long time ago, things got broken here. People got sad and left. Maybe the world breaks on purpose so we can have work to do."

trouble

2010-06-29T13:47:00.000-07:00

"Here is a revolutionary practice everyone should try: Take a bill from your wallet, think of all the things you could buy and then calmly set it on fire. Smell the burning paper, pay attention to your emotions and meditate on where money goes when it is destroyed."

After Telluride, it was said better than I could. but later I will try.

2010-06-02T10:45:00.000-07:00

The moment when, after many years
of hard work and a long voyage
you stand in the centre of your room,
house, half-acre, square mile, island, country,
knowing at last how you got there,
and say, I own this,

is the same moment when the trees unloose
their soft arms from around you,
the birds take back their language,
the cliffs fissure and collapse,
the air moves back from you like a wave
and you can’t breathe.

No, they whisper. You own nothing.
You were a visitor, time after time
climbing the hill, planting the flag, proclaiming.
We never belonged to you.
You never found us.
It was always the other way round.

— Margaret Atwood

How am I different than the picket fence beside me?

2010-04-21T17:33:00.000-07:00

"Christianity stands or falls with its revolutionary protest against violence, arbitrariness and pride of power and with its plea for the weak. Christians are doing too little to make these points clear rather than too much. Christendom adjusts itself far too easily to the worship of power. Christians should give more offense, shock the world far more, than they are doing now. Christians should take a stronger stand in favour of the weak rather than considering first the possible right of the strong." - D. Bonhoeffer

how can i savor? what i am now

2010-04-13T11:52:00.000-07:00

A Brief for the Defense

Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies

are not starving someplace, they are starving

somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils.

But we enjoy our lives because that's what God wants.

Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn would not

be made so fine. The Bengal tiger would not

be fashioned so miraculously well. The poor women

at the fountain are laughing together between

the suffering they have known and the awfulness

in their future, smiling and laughing while somebody

in the village is very sick. There is laughter

every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta,

and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay.

If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,

we lessen the importance of their deprivation.

We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,

but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have

the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless

furnace of this world. To make injustice the only

measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.

If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down,

we should give thanks that the end had magnitude.

We must admit there will be music despite everything.

We stand at the prow again of a small ship

anchored late at night in the tiny port

looking over to the sleeping island: the waterfront

is three shuttered cafés and one naked light burning.

To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat

comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth

all the years of sorrow that are to come.

- Jack Gilbert

“One final paragraph of advice: do not burn yourselves out. Be as I am — a reluctant enthusiast… a part-time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic. Save the other half of yourselves and your lives for pleasure and adventure. It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While it’s still here. So get out there and hunt and fish and mess around with your friends, ramble out yonder and explore the forests, climb the mountains, bag the peaks, run the rivers, breathe deep of that yet sweet and lucid air, sit quietly for a while and contemplate the precious stillness, the lovely, mysterious, and awesome space. Enjoy yourselves, keep your brain in your head and your head firmly attached to the body, the body active and alive, and I promise you this much; I promise you this one sweet victory over our enemies, over those desk-bound men and women with their hearts in a safe deposit box, and their eyes hypnotized by desk calculators. I promise you this; You will outlive the bastards.

— From a speech to environmentalists in Missoula, Montana in 1978 and in Colorado, which was published in High Country News in the 1970s or early 1980s under the title “Joy, Shipmates, Joy.”, as quoted in Saving Nature’s Legacy : Protecting and Restoring Biodiversity (1994) by Reed F. Noss

“The small man

Builds cages for everyone

Knows.

While the sage,

Who has to duck his head

When the moon is low,

Keeps dropping keys all night long

For the

Beautiful

Rowdy

Prisoners

— Hafiz

the tension, of electric joy at beauty, the scandal of delight

and the contrast of sun-day and midnight,

how can I soak my face in light if I know the sunset comes,

and the murdering moon is reigning on the other side?

because I know the morning is rising on one horizon, coming to mine. it promised.

and dispair is the deepest indictment of day.

and when the darkness comes,

I, as a bearer of the promise, must flame up my torch and light the softer crooked dirt path

to heal the feet of the panicked.

with a promise. and broken feet.

thank you mariana and jerry for exposing me to the above.

just as I cannot raise the sun

2010-03-30T12:59:00.000-07:00

I would like to start with what art is,

but it is easier to say what art is not.

art is not asthetic

art is not recreating what is created,

art is not a photograph, in so much as you do not have a vision too,

but art is something:

a tear in the tarp that being born blocks the sky,

art is found fabric (with its own history) and you sew in your purpose,

the few crumble lessons you've picked up

on the trail to a witch's house

or the father's house

and let the twitches turn the path.

let the boulders block the rushing

white topped water as it makes its way home,

(and lift the soil as you go)

knowing only that home is true

and taking with it some few small truths:

that gravity gives and liquid property gives,

but having no clue to the vastness of

the ocean or even that it may be vast

but only that it is true. so it is with art,

you may not know what you are scratching

with your led into that dead-ironed tree,

but put into it what is true and

lay it on the alter of what is true,

knowing not what is wholly true

but perhaps the feeling of gravity's old bone pull

and liquid's cool shape-shifting window song,

and the soil you carried as you tumbled down

will feed the life of the ocean,

a place you never knew had life at all.

the discarded and inconvenient, the bi-product and un-productive.

2010-03-26T16:54:00.001-07:00

drawings of old people.

drawn on trash.

an indictment.

by Danica Russell.

oil paint takes ages to dry

2010-03-12T14:53:00.000-08:00

what is a man?

or a Man?

Is it a broad shoulder

long gate and crashing trails

or deep bearded voices that show no delight

or providing for something or someone?

is sewing the community for the feminine light footed ones?

is it facing our vices, our self service customer lust to

climb the ladder to the smoking attic,

sheeping the herd up the hill to be called a shepherd

and paid as a shepherd

more than caring for the flock?

Is it to face our vices?

Is it what 'If' tells me? I think so.

Is it coming to terms with the coming flood that

is now up to your knees and stumbling your forging step

that doesn't paint in the bold colors, someone promised, but

in gray painting water color, light pastels and earth tones,

saying I will not paint for you. Take your brush little boy

and make honest mistakes.

the eskimos have no word for war

2010-02-27T12:49:00.000-08:00

Trying to explain it to them

Leaves one feeling ridiculous and obscene.

Their houses, like white bowls,

Sit on a prairie of ancient snowfalls

Caught beyond thaw or the swift changes

Of night and day.

They listen politely, and stride away.

With spears and sleds and barking dogs

To hunt for food. The women wait

Chewing on skins or singing songs,

Knowing that they have hours to spend,

That the luck of the hunter is often late.

Later, by fires and boiling bones

In streaming kettles, they welcome me,

Far kin, pale brother,

To share what they have in a hungry time

In a difficult land. While I talk on

Of the southern kingdoms, cannon, armies,

Shifting alliances, airplanes, power,

They chew their bones, and smile at one another.

- Mary Oliver

to have no word for a thing that is real

does not mean it is not real

but it shows your order of things

your personal communal order of what is real

between the men you eat with, know,

and share with.

you have no word for war.

perhaps that means you have no communities

within earshot that deeply richly believe different

things, and therefore fear the difference

or desire your river and land and coast

I do not know, but there are things I wish were

still a mystery to me. though..

i am a culprit.

2010-02-24T19:18:00.000-08:00

I am a culprit of skimming.

scowering books, words, feeds, crowds...

collecting information. storing it

in a vast vault

half understo-

thoug-

To simplify the truth for children requires a deep understanding of truth. C.S. Lewis understood this.

2010-02-16T20:31:00.000-08:00

"Your intelligence, your capacity for hard work, the education you have earned and received, give you unique status, and unique responsibilities. Even your nationality sets you apart. The great majority of you belong to the world’s only remaining superpower. The way you vote, the way you live, the way you protest, the pressure you bring to bear on your government, has an impact way beyond your borders. That is your privilege, and your burden.

If you choose to use your status and influence to raise your voice on behalf of those who have no voice; if you choose to identify not only with the powerful, but with the powerless; if you retain the ability to imagine yourself into the lives of those who do not have your advantages, then it will not only be your proud families who celebrate your existence, but thousands and millions of people whose reality you have helped change. We do not need magic to change the world, we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better."

"Choosing to live in narrow spaces leads to a form of mental agoraphobia, and that brings its own terrors. I think the willfully unimaginative see more monsters. They are often more afraid. What is more, those who choose not to empathise enable real monsters. For without ever committing an act of outright evil ourselves, we collude with it, through our own apathy."

- J.K. Rowling

What if I give an answer to the problem of the world?

2010-02-15T13:48:00.001-08:00

OP: Mountains: where the world seems out of reach. But maybe thats where the preacher learns to teach. Twitter can't grow on trees, technology alone is a disease. But maybe hopes of the individual being able to harness this new electronic breeze will allow us to live out what the beauracracy buries. The purity of believing in the importance and power of our own words, our own blogs, our own tweets... but as your friend, honest and open, I think youth gains wisdom, and transforms... but I like the past just as much as the future I think.

justification vs. the reality that 95% of people don't live within a community such as IC... our youth will grow different. I believe that. prophecy brother. only time will tell, and were a thousand conversations from that day. exchange. exchange.

JJ: The electric change coursing through youth, the 1001010101 in our skin, is not an enemy, any more than the written word, the shaping tongue of speech. It is a tool that self and gluttony indulge, and shallow conquering poison... But the change is being woven in, strewn seed on fertile soil of men longing for a different world, and some communities engaging the world the different worlds will see the retreating water before the wave. To call it as it may be, to prophesy, is to open yourself up to fail. But why live if not to see and try and claim and fail or win and change the living to what it has always wanted to be. Exchange is why I long for Chicago streets.

I longwantneed to hear your thoughts, your unpacked ponderings, on the explosion of words I gave you the other day. This philosophical endeavor, the daring suicide of actually positing an answer to the worlds problems, is my suicide calling. Walk with me brother, if not to your own death, to inform mine.

...I do not know what is next. but to take life seriously, that is why we wake.

is it a period or an ellipsis

2010-02-08T09:38:00.000-08:00

I was impeded by a problem I never knew I had: my hidden but stubbornly entrenched skepticism about the existence of the spiritual realm. Like most postmodern Westerners, I grew up in a culture permeated with empiricist notions about reality. Philosopher Charles Taylor writes that often we consciously hold one set of values and assumptions but unconsciously live by another. . . . My hidden skepticism provided me with a hundred handy doubts right when I most needed them. Maybe all this disruption could be blamed on menopause after all. Maybe it was strictly a psychological event—the ego overcompensating for an inferiority complex? People delude themselves all the time, don’t they?

- Paula Huston

i find a strong cornerstone lean in the direction of purpose. meaning in living, sovereignty and plan. that reality does not trouble me. I do not fight to believe it. depend on omnipotence and scoff at the feeble manmind. i see no problem with the temporality of man, his belief that his choices echo in eternity, and in believing they do they do, his responsibility to Love, His whisper woo out of the world's machine. i see all of this in comfort and credit my nature.

but i plead forgive me in my unbelief, not my mental ascent, but my living daily unbelief that a shadow just-over-my-shoulder battle of spirit is waging, evil devil hook horned battle for my soul with silver wielding angels, the spirit waging.
i struggle for this. reach for it. and it rots the urgency of my prayer.

Deliberate time together.

2010-02-04T18:33:00.000-08:00

Last night, an impromptu society was created.

to be deliberate

and write together and write

4 of us.

we gave ourselves an assignment. 30 minutes to write about personal revolution. Then we have to read our brainflowspilling to one another. Here is what we wrote:

FIRST:

change

a cup filled not just with quarters

but ideas

the chip-toothed smile and unkempt beard

of the forgotten romanticism found in

the death-breath words of a scot-stained

street corner half-drunk half-prophet

the opposite of your binary bile:

ones and zeroes that murder tangible tangibility

destroy rebuild repeat

the mantra of a society solely concerned with cautionary procession

"cash, coin & modernization" give way to the following

for the past 6 months

I've toyed with the concept of

packing my bags

and moving to mid-nineteenth century

America

digital give way to analog

show me the hand-filled soil of your soul

not some god-dammed "about me" section

[and let me say that I hate that last line

because lately all I've been referring to in my writings is pop-culture]

but give me the hearts found

the squeaky floor of a church

collapsing because

there is weight in

love

touch

and wanting to be immersed in the sights smells sounds and textures

involved in the creation of the book

i just saw, smelled, heard and felt

in the used book store

there's revolution in regression

my heart is an acetate

with one or two good plays

before it turns to shit

and side A

is almost over...

SECOND:

4 years now, and i won't go back.

not because I can't.

but because i'm afraid it's true.

that if i saw it for what it really is

i would be just as afraid as she is daily,

wondering "why am i here?"

And today, i can't admit that fear.

well...i could, but I wont.

Because every choice, decision, step I have made

has countered the hysteria that is always sitting safely

between my spleen and my dreams

I work against that fear

on paper.

Ending wars, raising up revolutionaries

(what happens when revolutions get tired of themselves? Hysteria_

and sometimes that's what it feels like.

My voice taught itself to stop equipping

but that doesn't mean it doesn't when no one is listening

And that's the worst part of all.

What happens when we stop listening?

Nothing happens & no one moves.

[most days i wish for Rocking chairs and farmland & solitude what does that make me?]

THIRD:

By the day I stand from crawling novelty, I welcome the suited-salesmen into my crib.

By my dropping voice, I have amassed an empire of plastic, wires, and miniature idols of the future sale: tiny trucks, tiny guns, tiny women in felt clothes.

By my 16th year, I am the pin-up dream, the drooling banquet of consumption hunger in cunning control of the father figure mother told her mortgage holder, an added chain to the already imprisoned aging children thrown into a bag of wrinkles, running river liars, and comfort high-hedge whisperers.

By my waking years

the run-slows-to-walk-stop-and-look at my feet for the first time. I have already bought my weight in blood, the gentle stream slow sloping guided tour to lethal leisure mockingbird murder I gasp at the first light, the hinted ache 'this is not right' and find in my hand a hammer made of flesh and culture jammer and gas and fire and fear and ancient warnings hard to hear and climb the temple stairs to turn over tables and chairs

gas the drapes and light the base and promise promise make a promise to something.

FOURTH:

Song bird sing Aubade

Change searching

you say different

with what army? warning. through

a great unbalance

song bird sing . . .

for what the eyes have seen

divided

a place in displacement

song bird sing

lost looking for place

to get lost

song bird sing

for now the cries.

Me against the machine

2010-02-02T09:24:00.000-08:00

The purpose is the marble block

to chip and blow and bend the joints

and waste and waste the flesh in crash

against the stone to change its cash

to bartered bone and worthy points.

the black stone square is old as man

with Babel once and twice and more

to build and burn the forest floor

the black stone square is old as man

from choice and current up stream crawl

we scrape or drill the

blast the base and cut the

stop me before I name the thing

that is in me

that is this society

this alter of eyes

I will claw until my fingers go

and keep it simple as I go.

as I go up the river

to the stream.

More than adventure.

2010-01-20T15:17:00.000-08:00

"A child free from the guilt of ownership and the burden of economic competition will grow up with the will to do what needs doing and the capacity for joy in doing it. It is useless work that darkens the heart. The delight of the nursing mother, of the scholar, of the successful hunter, of the good cook, of the skillful maker, of anyone doing needed work and doing it well - this durable joy is perhaps the deepest source of human affection, and of sociality as a whole."

"But as surely as the future becomes the past, the past becomes the future. To deny is not to achieve. The explorer who will not come back or send back his ships to tell his tale is not an explorer, only an adventurer; and his sons are born in exile."

- Ursula K. LeGuin, The Dispossessed

Leonard Cohen on the state of Christianity

2010-01-07T17:06:00.000-08:00

Seth: You have such vivid Christian imagery in many of your songs,
and much of it is contrasted with the selfishness of the "modern"
individual. I was wondering what's your take on the state of
Christianity today?

Leonard Cohen: Dear Seth, I don't really have a 'take on the state
of Christianity.' But when I read your question, this answer came to
mind: As I understand it, into the heart of every Christian, Christ
comes, and Christ goes. When, by his Grace, the landscape of the heart becomes vast and deep and limitless, then Christ makes His abode in that graceful heart, and His Will prevails. The experience is recognized as Peace. In the absence of this experience much activity arises, divisions of every sort. Outside of the organizational enterprise, which some applaud and some mistrust, stands the figure of Jesus, nailed to a human predicament, summoning the heart to comprehend its own suffering by dissolving itself in a radical confession of hospitality.

Black friday is black friday

2009-11-26T21:51:00.000-08:00

When I hear the stock market has fallen,
I say, "Long live gravity! Long live
stupidity, error and greed in the palaces
of fantasy capitalism!" I think
an economy should be based on thrift,
on taking care of things, not on theft,
usury, seduction, waste, and ruin.
My purpose is a language that can make us whole,
Though mortal, ignorant, and small.
The world is whole beyond human knowing.

- WB

finally.

2009-11-25T16:13:00.001-08:00

have had some honest conversations this week,

where things I thought were held with open hands,

were "tied with fishing line

invisible from a distance"

tied down to my comfortable confusion

now I am less afraid to walk

in either direction.

i now know.

2009-11-19T19:54:00.000-08:00

it is one thing.

to know you aught to esteem yourself low

to know you aught, and obey

out of obedience,

it is another thing

to know shame.

and know feeling worthless

not the sunday morning fire breath that says you should feel so

but to feel so

and feel quartered by horses

and fear.

it is amazing how life, moving strongly,

in a moment, will change who you are.

or maybe reveal who you are.

and what you must do to become who you want to be.

or how you must choose, reach into an unlit box and grab

when you don't know what to grab at but faith.

The mirror is two dimensional.

2009-11-10T20:37:00.000-08:00

I am twenty something.

my friend in Uganda doesn't know her age.

I have a few fears,

but don't discuss them. I believe in the power of giving things power by speaking them.

I like drawing, but don't enough.

I enjoy writing songs, but don't enough.

A professor once told me: a system is perfectly designed to produce what it is now producing.

I guess that is me. But what am I now producing?

You think you know yourself.

without context.

2009-10-17T10:02:00.000-07:00

If you choose to focus on 'other than money'

you will be accused of hating money.

a friend was. 'why do you hate money?'

'i don't, i am just not comfortable focusing on it, aiming for it'

What is the evil?

1 Timothy says it is the Love of money.

That friend asked me to put thought into this, after a discussion he had with the founder of Success Magazine, and how Ayn Rand believes that money is just a way to place value in a civilized society, for goods and services, and is not only not evil, but a gift of reason.

"To trade by means of money is the code of the men of good will.

Money rests on the axiom that every man is the owner of his mind and his effort. Money allows no power to prescribe the value of your effort except the voluntary choice of the man who is willing to trade you his effort in return."

I'd say

money is not evil, any more than capitalism is evil, or a gun is evil.

Giving value, in common with man, and trade in agreed value...

this is civilization. And money and capitalism are tools of function.

Systems, weapons designed to build or wield power. The power of will, action, chosen purposed kinetic movement. Power in itself is not evil.

A blade is just metal. shaved fine, and only equips

the hand that wields it. Gives power and effect to the stroke of the arm. In an evil hand, to damage more than it could without. In the right hand, it can carve a tool for survival, or defend the defenseless, or set free that which is tied.

A man may be a coward with his fists, but a tyrant given a knife.

Power in the created is a danger.

Because it lets the created flirt with creation, with enacting his will upon others, and watching them move at his call. And our god-like flirtations remind our spirits that we all wish to be god. the only sin. all other sins descend from this.

Though I believe this stems from an evolutionary need for survival.

We are drunk on the idea of controlling our surroundings, environment, because that better guarantees our survival.

But the tension there is this: for the spiritual man, the spiritual survival may demand death. and to sell your spirit for fleshly longevity is the test, the poison fruit.

Money, perhaps more than any other tool, is a generalization of power. It is tangible, tradable power and most importantly, a shape shifter. It can make a man dance, build a tower, dig a ditch, harvest food that he will not eat, or sell his body. Money in a man's hand will turn his will into another's behavior.

It needs no context, no explaination. It needs no empire built on fear or respect or birthright. It needs only to exist. And the whole world will act, move, build, or destroy at its whisper.

Even the man who wishes to do good, the shape shifter lets him feel his righteous benevolence, showering gifts and goodwill with his paper magic. His flirtations here are given another layer of deception, self-approval in his god-like commands. The pang of conceit will allude him as he grins at his worshipping grateful kingdom.

It is the purest wine. It is power than can be found on the sidewalk. and imagine, two strangers see thousands of dollars scattered about in public, make eye contact, and lose themselves in sprinting to get it first. or money on the freeway, risking life, to grab fist fulls.

watch: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3b9izXiQdo

The fear of money in the pious is not the fear of the tool,

but the fear of man.

A man should have a healthy fear of genius, unparalleled skill, intoxicating beauty. These things are power in a context, and can corrupt the fragile will of a man. Without a history of broken pride, or an understanding of human smallness, power in a man will rot him. Now, remove context, accountability, and any learned skill or necessary understanding, and you find money. And you have acid. corrosive to the wood of man, save the insulation of humility.

A young fool will crave money because it is his will alive, without responsibility. If only he can get the paper. through trickery. or treasure chests. or inheritance. or outsourcing labor at the expense of community. or pillaging the forests and mines and lesser people near the equator. or the blessed and miraculous lottery.

it is the closest man has come to magic,

wizardry, and blind power.

I am getting closer to the idea I was digging for.

legacy

2009-09-30T14:35:00.000-07:00

I am him

and my mother

and something new never before seen

I carry his weight and my mother's

and my own never before seen

but the same story of every man before me and every man after

My burden is light for sure

but it is the only burden I know

and havent I said that it is poison to compare

but compared to the beaten neglected too soon touched

but it is the only burden I know

and therefore dangling down millstone strong

to pull me off the cedar bridge

and I lead a charmed life

the cellar is only dark without the torch light

and who would chose to walk in unending twilight

babel or temple

2009-09-29T16:46:00.001-07:00

i want to be great because

i want to be worthy of creation i want

to show that this kit can build a tower

and be ravished upstream and grizzly eaten

i want that tower to be appreciated, first by the tool giver

but evidenced by my community is that the praise of men?

i cannot quite see the selfless life realized

in the pursuit of greatness

maybe selflessness is not self-diminishing

but right opinion, the positioning of self

as created, gifted, and fragile, a sum of

circumstance and features

selflessness is reaching for the magnificent as an

expression of obligation to an artist-teacher God

no, not obligation, but obedience, chosen from understanding

proportion and mountains and tired muscles and good sleep and

a days good work

diminishing is perhaps a great offense.

2009-09-03T15:33:00.000-07:00

look fat queen, immovable queen,

we have carried the dirt and built a palace,

let us be your chamber maid, give me your white eggs,

we will clean the carcass and the wooded floor

and multiply and clean the wooded floor

we will do as you wish fat queen

not knowing that our order plays a part,

in order and meaning,

i am just carrying your white egg.

Untitled.

2009-09-03T13:18:00.001-07:00

Joel P. West (Untitled) from Gobias Media on Vimeo.

youth.

2009-08-25T20:24:00.000-07:00

- Walt Whitman.

from eric.

2009-08-23T10:46:00.000-07:00

“I am a frayed and nibbled survivor in a fallen world, and I am getting along. I am aging and eaten and have done my share of eating too. I am not washed and beautiful, in control of a shining world in which everything fits, ...but instead am wondering awed about on a splintered wreck I've come to care for, whose gnawed trees breathe a delicate air, whose bloodied and scarred creatures are my dearest companions, and whose beauty bats and shines not in its imperfections but overwhelmingly in spite of them...” annie dillard

life through verse and language comes into a focus that experience alone can let slip away. the savoring and the reflecting moment gives each breath its due.

Joe Pug.

2009-08-15T11:19:00.001-07:00

Joe Pug - "Hymn 101" from This is What We Imagine on Vimeo.

A Forest Hymn by William Cullen Bryant

2009-08-15T11:06:00.000-07:00

The groves were God's first temples. Ere man learned

My heart is awed within me when I think
Of the great miracle that still goes on,
In silence, round me---the perpetual work
Of thy creation, finished, yet renewed
Forever. Written on thy works I read
The lesson of thy own eternity.
Lo! all grow old and die---but see again,
How on the faltering footsteps of decay
Youth presses----ever gay and beautiful youth
In all its beautiful forms. These lofty trees
Wave not less proudly that their ancestors
Moulder beneath them. Oh, there is not lost
One of earth's charms: upon her bosom yet,
After the flight of untold centuries,
The freshness of her far beginning lies
And yet shall lie. Life mocks the idle hate
Of his arch enemy Death---yea, seats himself
Upon the tyrant's throne---the sepulchre,
And of the triumphs of his ghastly foe
Makes his own nourishment. For he came forth
From thine own bosom, and shall have no end.

There have been holy men who hid themselves
Deep in the woody wilderness, and gave
Their lives to thought and prayer, till they outlived
The generation born with them, nor seemed
Less aged than the hoary trees and rocks
Around them;---and there have been holy men
Who deemed it were not well to pass life thus.
But let me often to these solitudes
Retire, and in thy presence reassure
My feeble virtue. Here its enemies,
The passions, at thy plainer footsteps shrink
And tremble and are still. Oh, God! when thou
Dost scare the world with falling thunderbolts, or fill,
With all the waters of the firmament,
The swift dark whirlwind that uproots the woods
And drowns the village; when, at thy call,
Uprises the great deep and throws himself
Upon the continent, and overwhelms
Its cities---who forgets not, at the sight
Of these tremendous tokens of thy power,
His pride, and lays his strifes and follies by?
Oh, from these sterner aspects of thy face
Spare me and mine, nor let us need the wrath
Of the mad unchained elements to teach
Who rules them. Be it ours to meditate,
In these calm shades, thy milder majesty,
And to the beautiful order of the works
Learn to conform the order of our lives.

wind.

2009-08-14T15:02:00.001-07:00

even the breeze,

light as a hello kiss,

comes to a halt. and the air is still.

no sound.

and suddenly we hear our own heartbeat in our ears

and notice our breathing.

I have grown weary of myself.

2009-08-14T14:27:00.000-07:00

i love my sister.

2009-08-13T18:48:00.000-07:00

from an email today, after I sent her a link to the Library of Congress' flickr account, with hundreds of color photos from the 30's and 40's:

"thanks for the lead. interesting photo collection thanks to the library of congress - after looking at these photos i find that regardless of place, style, shoe or shirt, body movement or pose, human expression is profoundly found around the eyes. the wrinkles and the youth always tell us the same thing - we despair, joy, and stare - our eye is ultimately in search and longing for that which is real. everyone's looking for god.

which is why we must be careful where we stare.

rj."

Circumnavigate Intentionality.

2009-08-09T09:46:00.001-07:00

Today, we met a man who lives in a van.

Owns his own business, surfing lessons, for 20 years.

a white van, clean and large, deliberate so as not to attract attention.

He counts money three times a year.

He looks 33 but said he is 43.

And reminded us that, while 33 is the universal age of enlightenment,

he is hoping 44 is the new 33.

Though he seemed pretty enlightened to me.

"Exchange profit for Intentionality as highest purpose," he said.

"And you will be living, not waiting to live."

How many people in this world are toiling. dirt on their hands that they hate.

not for love of hard work or purpose, but for love of a dream that is not a dream.

love of the Jones' life that is not real. love of a degree that does not nourish.

man's love of formula, pattern, and machine. we do it to ourselves.

Though I do not think that love is wrong,

I am certain that the machine is there to be overcome. We must have her,

so that in her shadow, we can find our own movement. moving away.

Not rejection, but enlightenment. Not a cop out, run out, fleeing, but inspiration, education, and character.

I learned a lot from my conversation with this man.

He invited my family to his 40 foot sail boat in Costa Rica.

He starts sailing around the world in September, and wants us to join him

for a month, any month.

With his 22 year old skipper. Learn to sail. Work. Jib. Mast.

Rebekah will go.

I just might.

Franklin Road Academy

2009-08-02T10:10:00.000-07:00

There was no coming to it

or a moment in 7th grade

when something shifted

and the eyes began to turn

the expectation.

the everyone waiting, leaning in to hear what I said next

did next, chose next

that you are brighter. noticed. watched.

that is never welcomed with words

or clear thought, (no.. repelled),

but only that blood feeling of worth

of course I did not notice right away.

i just felt part of something. a community of good friends.

until the disparity was pointed out,

by those who knew nothing of attention or artificial light.

in teenage years where we discover

the length of our arms and the pitch

the strange village of school decides and you decide

who you are to be.

a man. behind the microphone.

mine, the house that fills

the phone that rings,

the after prom

those young hearts fire even then, that fight without words to be seen,

and then there are words,

and confuse friendship with an answer to their lonely pink hearts,

and offense is egg shell path,

and manipulate, just to have your attention,

and hurt you, just to have your attention,

and hurt themselves,

and all is carried in the fingers-crossed promise of youth

that this young kingship will not be the end...

but you, the one,

you did not ask,

but they will decide you did,

must live the stage and shape the vision they dream for them.

or else be a comforting conversation

in the years to come

to mediocrity,

'see, even he settled down, after all.'

If I am.

2009-08-02T09:23:00.000-07:00

If I were more attractive,

the smiles I attract and

the exchanges she engaged would be

colored by, 'why?'

and my boldness in openness

and open arms long held hugs

would confuse the loneliness in her, or him

instead of a moments repose and a deep healing breath

in arms that just want to hold for love's sake

or a sharing of the true heart, not

flooded by the hunger of animals.

If I were smarter,

I would be lonely.

If I were stronger,

I'd like to be stronger,

but I fear the too-welcome shadow that waits to tell

'who cares about your best?'

'tell me... no one.'

'be better than him, or him, be better than'

'and take care he sees'

there is a gift in the unfantastic.

one less fight.

If I were funnier,

I'd trade the moments where

soil was prime to turn and till

for applause and rich laughter

that grows nothing except

more invitations to dinner.

If I had a girl friend,

I do not know.

Both miracles and chaos.

I say impossible. how weak.

If I was married,

my history could not

have been what it was

and I would not be what I am

and what I am may prove to be important

or not

but I am not married.

though whoever that person is, listen:

I do not know.

If my family was perfect,

I have not met one.

And the pain I have experienced is not unlike others,

the fracture of form is clear,

but the love and honesty is rich and budding,

and my pain is the same as your pain.

If I were more determined,

If I saw the truth clearer,

If I saw without these frames,

I would love more,

draw more,

write more,

seek more,

talk less,

talk more,

hold more,

carry less,

think less,

reflect more,

and gasp, and die, and

dust is dust

and rest.

but i fit right in.

2009-07-30T21:50:00.000-07:00

I hold behind my back

like playground fingers crossed

a secret.

this is not my degree

this is not my family

my child

she is not mine

not raised in the sun

without sweat or fear,

this is not my pavement

and this bank I do not visit.

i know the stories

that built the railroad

the sadness loss and swept

i know the switch back snake

of this economy, dusting away footprints.

i do not belong,

but I am here

dressed in plain clothes,

a spy for a society of one

an audience

that applauds my secret dance

that approves my conformity.

2009-07-16T08:52:00.001-07:00

Our culture has truckled to the times — to the senses. It is not manworthy. If the vast and the spiritual are omitted, so are the practical and the moral. It does not make us brave or free. We teach boys to be such men as we are. We do not teach them to aspire to be all they can. We do not give them a training as if we believed in their noble nature. We scarce educate their bodies. We do not train the eye and the hand. We exercise their understandings to the apprehension and comparison of some facts, to a skill in numbers, in words; we aim to make accountants, attorneys, engineers; but not to make able, earnest, great-hearted men. The great object of Education should be commensurate with the object of life. It should be a moral one; to teach self-trust: to inspire the youthful man with an interest in himself; with a curiosity touching his own nature; to acquaint him with the resources of his mind, and to teach him that there is all his strength, and to inflame him with a piety towards the Grand Mind in which he lives. Thus would education conspire with the Divine Providence. A man is a little thing whilst he works by and for himself, but, when he gives voice to the rules of love and justice, is godlike, his word is current in all countries; and all men, though his enemies, are made is friends and obey it as their own.

— R.W. Emerson

capacity.

2009-07-15T08:23:00.001-07:00

i have too many friends.

or at least, i know too many people that, taken in isolation, excite my heart with friendship, interest, commonality, adventure, etc.

i don't know how to celebrate the individual, every one of these islands of intrigue.

i don't know how to love the light in each ambition, each discovery, the

little or great skirmishes between self and purpose,

the insecurity of each identity, and the brilliant shine of infrequent revelation

and not be overwhelmed.

or mocked for the volume.

Shy letters.

2009-06-15T21:08:00.000-07:00

Chapter 4 of East of Eden speaks of Charles' letters to Adam. Charles, a strong, perfectly athletic man of few words, broken by his father's love of Adam, writes to his brother off in the military. Steinbeck writes, "As with many people, Charles, who could not talk, wrote with fullness. He set down his loneliness and his perplexities, and he put on paper many things he did not know about himself."

I am drawn to people who home inside their heads. It is my hunger to understand maybe. Or my love of what is different and mystery. I hope I never fully understand them. I wonder if they understand me.
But I have seen this truth of Steinbeck's words before.

Chapter 3.

2009-06-14T22:43:00.000-07:00

The final moments of Chapter 3, of East of Eden... wrench my heart.

Adam's mother, not his real mother, cleaning his wounds. Inflicted by his brother Charles in a rage that his father loved Adam more. And his mother speaks of Adam's never ending love for his brother. The brother that beat him. The brother that pitied him with love in his superior strength. And yet their father loved Adam more. More than the strong perfect son. And the ache of the mother, believing that she 'knows' Charles because of his secret gifts. And she stares at Charles' face for a betrayal of those gifts. The ache.

I only retell because it spills from my fingers, I cannot get enough.

Intro to Virginibus Puerisque:

2009-06-13T18:21:00.000-07:00

My dear William Ernest Henley:

We are all busy in this world building Towers of Babel; and the child of our imaginations is always a changeling when it comes from nurse. This is not only true in the greatest, as of wars and folios, but in the least also, like the trifling volume in your hand.

Thus I began to write these papers with a definite end... I was to state temperately the beliefs of youth as opposed to the contentions of age; to go over all the field where the two differ, and produce at last a little volume of special pleadings which I might call, without misnomer, "Life at Twenty-five." But times kept changing, and I shared in the change. I clung hard to that entrancing age; but, with the best will, no man can be twenty-five forever. The old ruddy convictions deserted me, and, along with them, the style that fits their presentation and defense. I saw, and indeed my friends informed me, that the game was up. A good part of the volume would answer to the long-projected title; but the shadows of the prison-house are on the rest.

It is good to have been young in youth, and, as years go on, to grow older. Many are already old before they are through their teens; but to travel deliberately through one's ages is to get the heart out of a liberal education. Times change, opinions vary to their opposite, and still this world appears a brave gymnasium, full of sea-bathing, and horse exercise, and bracing, many virtues; and what can be more encouraging than to find the friend who was welcome at one age, still welcome to another? Our affections and beliefs are wiser than we; the best that is in us is better than we can understand; for it is grounded beyond experience, and guides us, blindfold but safe, from one age on to another.

These papers are like milestones on the way-side of my life; and, as I look back in memory, there is hardly a stage of that distance but I see you present with advice, reproof, or praise. Meanwhile, many things have changed, you and I among the rest; but I hope that our sympathy, founded on the love of our art, and nourished by mutual assistance, shall survive these little revolutions undiminished, and, with God's help, unite us to the end.

R.L.Stevenson.

______

I am so grateful that, even at 26, I feel that I have friends for the journey. - JJ

don't know who said it, wish it was me.

2009-06-13T12:37:00.000-07:00

"If you just look at all that already exists in your life, all that you already have: unlimited air to breathe, ample lighting to see, music to hear, books to read, stars to dream by, trees to gaze at, floors to dance on, friends to laugh with, enemies to befriend, strangers to meet, woods to walk through, beaches to comb, rocks to scale, rains to cleanse you, rivers to float you, animals to comfort you, you do have to admit, there's more of it than you could ever, ever, ever spend, but try anyway."

For Annie. by Edgar Allen Poe

2009-06-11T23:40:00.000-07:00

My friend Margie put this on a present for our dear friend Geoff. I just can't stop reading it.

All that we see or seem

Is but a dream within a dream.
I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand —
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,

While I weep — while I weep!
Oh, God! can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
Oh, God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that I see or seem
But a dream within a dream?

When You Are Old.

2009-05-29T17:30:00.000-07:00

this poem is about love... maybe love that wasn't received. a love that Yeats thought was richer than the love she did receive, and forever held that against her. I'm not sure. But the ache of time and loss resound from it, and therefore, Jed loves it.

WHEN you are old and gray and full of sleep
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,	5
And loved your beauty with love false or true;
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face.

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how love fled	10
And paced upon the mountains overhead,
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars. w.b.yeats

Purpose Capital.

2009-05-11T19:40:00.000-07:00

This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap; the being a force of nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.

GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

to wear my body out, to ravish my mind into mush, completely devoted to sacrificial and heavenminded love. i want to i want to i want to.

let's see if i can quiet the puppeteer that turns my glance to weaker lovers, to cheaper meals and bad wine for the hasty lust to be drunk.

To Unlearn.

2009-05-10T21:55:00.000-07:00

The layers of living/loving life are coming through to me as a peeling away, an unlearning.

Unlearning the American Dream.

Unlearning the formulas of family security in suburban quarantine.

Unlearning the reasons why people are given value.

And what excites me, is that this revealed wisdom of living and seeing through the veil

is confirmed in the Gospel.

What is the Gospel but an Unlearning of our desires, haunts, and secret motives? What is the Gospel but an ancient recording of what my heart is screaming all around me.

The Wind, The City, and The Forest.

2009-05-10T21:54:00.000-07:00

i am a two faced man

the hand built home down dirt road lost

and the color can in hand down alleys angeles los

the drive or canopied walk to Talk with no phone

but the nervous quake at being alone

the challenge to throw the keyboard and paper green

but wait in line for the five second new touch screen

the heaven is home and mystery hold for purity's promise

yet hunger in shadows for immediate fill and long doubting thomas.

the books that I read and verse that I pen

is for my own joy or the eyes of men.

I am a two faced man.

And the one informs the other

and tempers the shrill sounds of a

commitment neither is willing to make.

and each longs to be free of the other

or to be overcome.

Sent this to OP the day before The Rescue.

2009-05-05T12:15:00.000-07:00

Building a statue of dreams and youth,
with bone and muscle, film and tooth,
to breathe a chance of changing glaciers,
driving the river to a new ocean,
to turn the timid boy to face her
and drink the dreamer danger potion.

Your aching joints are trembling past
the crested ridge of wind-torn mast,
and pride is swelling as mourning dawns,
the passing spring of first born voice,
that dared to shout for throats ripped gone,
and threat a victory rejoiced,

a lasting ache to hold it close
for self was pinned and but a ghost,
forget it not the purposed road,
that moved you through a sunset load,
and fear will creep that self's return,
will wake the dark you did unlearn,

but hold the ache as close as bone,
and seek the wonder in his tone,
and see as badges tired legs,
and see as honor nesting eggs,
that long to crack and cry and leap
from high above and touch the sheep,

for God is bold and lavish more,
for writing this into his score:
with names inscribed with roars of Lion,
a silly dreamer and Orion.

November & June.

2009-05-05T11:56:00.001-07:00

It is after The Rescue... one of the most incredible weeks/experiences of my life. I have yet to really reflect on it. That will come.

For now, here is a poem I wrote in the van driving back to SD.. staring at wild canyons and friends that humble me... and i was just day dreaming about longing, and the purity of unrequited or separated love...

______

November and June can never meet
This side of eternity.
They are wholly in love,
I think, but they do not know
the other exists except by rumor.
Time is the murder of their
Flirtatious meeting.
But he does not know how
They pass poetry addressed to the other
they hope is there,
Written on the leaves and
carved in the seeds beneath the sleeping soil.