trouble

"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.

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?

"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

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

He

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

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.

drawings of old people.

drawn on trash.

an indictment.

by Danica Russell.

oil paint takes ages to dry

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

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.

I am a culprit of skimming.

scowering books, words, feeds, crowds...

collecting information. storing it

in a vast vault

of

half understo-

thoug-

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

"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?

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

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.

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

in

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

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.

"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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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