Reflect.

Like a pool or a lawyer and his degree from a school

or the carpenter and his tool

or a junky and his fuel

Expect

nothing you can't hold with your own mind

or can't do on your own time

or is not one of a kind

Reflect

Self, others, cultures, pockets, purposes, exchange

Change, the words, the silence, the strange

Or a forgotten shooting range.

- O.P.

3 things.

Take more risks. 

Reflect more. 

Do more things that live on after life is over. 

It is the things we leave undone that haunt us,

far more than the mistakes we've made.  

Interesting how our moral culture attacks the fall

before it focuses on activating the ready waiting.  

I've been thinking about these three things ever since Orion told me of them.  

Specifically the first two.  

THE JOYS OF THE ROAD

Carman, Bliss, (1861-1929)

(My friend Molly showed me this poem, and there are a few verses that she said reminded her of me, starting with 'a lover of books', and my heart took it as a true, deep compliment.)

Now the joys of the road are chiefly these

A crimson touch on the hard-wood trees;

A vagrant's morning wide and blue,

In early fall, when the wind walks, too;

A shadowy highway cool and brown,

Alluring up and enticing down

The outward eye, the quiet will,

And the striding heart from hill to hill;

Asking nothing, revealing naught,

But minting his words from a fund of thought,

A keeper of silence eloquent,

Needy, yet royally well content,

A lover of books, but a reader of man,

No cynic and no charlatan,

Who never defers and never demands,

But, smiling, takes the world in his hands,--

Seeing it good as when God first saw

And gave it the weight of his will for law.

And O the joy that is never won,

But follows and follows the journeying sun,

The racy smell of the forest loam,

When the stealthy, sad-heart leaves go home;

(O leaves, O leaves, I am one with you,

Of the mould and the sun and the wind and the dew!)

The broad gold wake of the afternoon;

The silent fleck of the cold new moon;

With only another league to wend;

And two brown arms at the journey's end!

These are the joys of the open road--

For him who travels without a load.

Desire.

It can contaminate poetry

by changing the flavor of every taste

A pointed desire will change your 

every thought

into a slave

i do not like

how it reminds me

that I am made of animal. 

Pacifism.

I am reading Lewis' essay 'Why I am not a Pacifist' 

I have not digested it yet, but am really coming to a place 

where I want to have a well articulated stance on 

man's role in exercising judgment or justice on earth,

and what the cost of abstaining really is.  And if there is a 

difference between helping your brother's oppression through

the use of force

and letting him suffer through your moral separation and 

physical avoidance.  

I do not yet know.   

Bonfire.

I have seen the spirit of hunger of wonder tonight.  Sitting around the beach fire with Folco, Roko, Tom Shadyac, Gael, Gretchen, Jaya..   Kenny and I the youngest of the group by years.   Yet we sat with our faces lit by the noon-day moon and the shared excitement of fellow callings.  I felt so touched by sincerity, and their boldness to hope in the generations.  They kept telling Kenny and me that we were their inspiration, that we were what they had dreamed of, a generation of new minded world citizens.  that shed the formulas of success for purpose.  

The most humbling experience. 

Community is not meant to be the college-isolation of same-aged piers.  Community is engaging with the minds of those at every stage of life, and building each other outrageously high when those minds are of the same cloth.  When the young man grows close to the old, every stage of life is robbed of its unknown shadow, and given the trust of navigated waters, and adventures.  And life becomes exciting, rather than a dreadful sand slipping through young hands, afraid of every passing through.  

Everyone around the fire tonight was of the same quilt, a quilt God is weaving and showed me his pattern, even just a glimpse.  Those moments when you step out from the fire light and see yourself in front of you, and are aware that you are alive and being fed.  And that will feed my faith for some time.

God is in control.

My taste and choice 

to hunt the hill with water carves

and chose to pursue 

the cherished friend

My day is my quilt

of cleaned teeth and 

accomplished this and this

it is all I own

And I can be told that

every thread is woven 

by a Loom I did not own

and I can sit beside the darkness

and know that my tastes were 

not my chosen, but instead

a choice made long ago

before even my parents were. 

And I was deported.

and found kindred callings

on rocks and pillow talks.  

And I will still call it mine. 

and the Loom will wait.  

Prov. 16:9, In his heart a man plans his course, but the LORD determines his steps.

Prov. 16:33, “The lot is cast into the lap, but its every decision is from the Lord.”

James 4:13-15, “Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow, we shall go to such and such a city, and spend a year there and engage in business and make a profit.” ¹⁴Yet you do not know what your life will be like tomorrow. You are just a vapor that appears for a little while and then vanishes away. ¹⁵Instead, you ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we shall live and also do this or that.”

Jer. 17:9, "The heart is more deceitful than all else and is desperately sick; who can understand it?"

Rom. 11:33-36 :

33 Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways!

34 “For who has known the mind of the Lord,
or who has been his counselor?”
35 “Or who has given a gift to him
that he might be repaid?”

36 For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory forever. Amen.

heaven

take away the desire

through achievement or rejection

and you destroy the forward. 

if I make the summit

I must quick to find the next

or I will sink and die

like the hunters in the ocean. 

when I grasp the girl

whose shape I have dwelled on

her shape will remain

for a while, and I will grow comfortable

in my ownership, and lust again

for other mountains.  

It must be so. 

We are built for heaven, 

and meant to feel discontent here.

There is a peak beyond our lives, 

that can always be leaned on in the greatest humiliation.

Although I wonder if we can exist content.

The lack of desiring what we do not have

chokes time of its air and halts.  It cannot walk. 

It makes me frightened of heaven. 

"I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you
Which shall be the darkness of God. As in a theatre,
The lights are extinguished, for the scene is changed
With a hollow rumble of wings, with a movement of darkness on darkness, 
And we know that the hills and trees, the distant panorama
And the bold imposing facade are all being rolled away-
Or as, when an underground train, in the tube, stops too long between stations
and the conversation rises and slowly fades into silence
And you see behind every face the mental emptiness deepen
Leaving only the growing terror of nothing to talk about;
Or when, under ether, the mind is conscious but conscious of nothing-
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would hope for the the wrong thing; wait without love
For love would be love of the wrong thing; Yet there is faith
But the faith and the hope and the love are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
so the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
Whisper of running streams, and winter lightning.
The wild thyme unseen and the wild strawberry, 
The laughter in the garden, echoed ecstasy
Not lost, but requiring, pointing to the agony
Of death and birth"

-           TS Elliot, "Four Quartets"

Beside.

the way I see the face of friends

is if you have a face at all

and greater still the garden tends

if kindred turns at kindreds call.

as a secret shared before we heard

or knew we heard but woven in 

we bend our brows at spoken words

the unsaid eye caught secret men

and we find our feet beside the same mountain,

'for if they fall, one will life up the other.' 

Stone

I pray that this song is more ambiguous than it is...  but I guess hiding has never been a way to live, except that is the only way anyone lives.   

The summer rain has come and gone
I can see on the road the dust is gone
I’m surrounded by right and shaped by love
I’m covered and warm and still left cold.
I’m afraid of a decade to pass
I’m afraid of a 40 year fast
Can the water shape me like a stone
When the water is not my home

I am not going to say that I’m alone
I’m a country road in a hungry roam
I’m a gray bird in a chicken’s pen,
And I’m afraid to pray the gray is sin.
But as broken and overgrown as I become
He will not stop a promise done.
I’m just afraid of choosing gray
And a shaking head hung to say.
Shame shame shame

Can the water shape me like a stone
If the water is a home I’ve never known

I am worth

what if I don't create anything

no words, or laughter, or prowess.

I surround myself with creators

who are excellent

and consider myself part of them,

or I surround myself with people who create nothing

and then I create something small, and feel better than them

I am not excellent

but I am better than at least one at something

and that combined with many intangibles makes me better

than at least one

and I of course am not as good as that one

and that gives me grounds for feeling humble

though I quickly pull forth a startlingly complex equation

of many intangibles to make myself better than that one at

other things

this passes quietly inside me

comforts me without my spirit catching wind

and I move forward, feeling good about my place in the world

until someone else creates something excellent, and

I have to start adding it all up again.

The obsession with comparing ourselves to one another is 

possibly our deepest curse.  It is a richest poison.

my friend Orion showed me this. 

A sloop of amber slips away
Upon an ether sea,
And wrecks in peace a purple tar,
The son of ecstasy.

-emily dickinson-

I wonder why I love sad songs so much. 

I would say it's because I enjoy life, 

and delight on most everything. 

and because of that, I have an insecurity that my experience is two

dimensional.  

not that I never have dark days, or troubled waters,

but that my default seems to be joy. 

and I'm thankful for that. 

but I love to love to love sad songs.  

Songs about loneliness.  

and longing for home. 

and broken relationships that remain broken. 

the truth in those songs,

I mean the rusted memories of Patty Griffin

and the lamenting histories of Ray LaMontagne

the righteous hunger in Derek Webb

and the American quiet dispair of Sufjan,

I just love to live inside them, 

set their pain beside mine,

and revel in it.

Maybe they lend me a third dimension.

- JJ.

"Natural gifts carry with them a ... danger.  If you have sound nerves
and intelligence and health and popularity and a good upbringing, you
are likely to be quite satisfied with your character as it is.  "Why
drag God into it?" you may ask ... Often people who have all these
natural kinds of goodness cannot be brought to recognise their need
for Christ at all until, one day, the natural goodness lets them down
and their self-satisfaction is shattered.  In other words, it is hard
for those who are "rich" in this sense to enter the Kingdom.
"It is very different for the nasty people - the little, low, timid,
warped, thin-blooded, lonely people, or the passionate, sensual,
unbalanced people.  If they make any attempt at goodness at all, they
learn, in double quick time, that they need help.  It is Christ or
nothing for them....
"There is either a warning or an encouragement here for every one of
us.  If you are a nice person - if virtue comes easily to you -
beware! Much is expected from those to whom much is given.  If you
mistake for your own merits what are really God's gifts to you through
nature, and if you are contented with simply being nice, you are still
a rebel: and all those gifts will only make your fall more terrible
... The Devil was an archangel once; his natural gifts were as far
above yours as yours are above those of a chimpanzee.
"But if you are a poor creature - poisoned by a wretched up-bringing
in some house full of vulgar jealousies and senseless quarrels -
saddled, by no choice of your own, with some loathsome sexual
perversion - nagged day in and day out by an inferiority comple that
makes you snap at your best friends - do not dispair.  He knows all
about it.  You are one of the poor whom He blessed.  He knows what a
wetched machine you are trying to drive.  Keep on.  Do what you can.
One day (perhaps in another world, perhaps far sooner than that) he
will fling it on the scrapheap and give you a new one."      -  CS
Lewis.

"As I read and contemplated the subject, behold! that very discontentment which Master Hugh had predicted would follow my learning to read had already come, to torment and sting my soul to an unutterable anguish. As I writhed under it, I would at times feel that learning to read had been a curse rather than a blessing. It had given me a view of my wretched condition, without the remedy. It opened my eyes to the horrible pit, but to no ladder upon which to get out. In moments of agony, I envied my fellow-slaves for their stupidity. I have often wished myself a beast. I preferred the condition of the meanest reptile to my own. Any thing, no matter what, to get rid of thinking! It was this everlasting thinking of my condition that tormented me. There was no getting rid of it. It was pressed upon my by every object within sight or hearing, animate or inanimate. The silver trump of freedom had roused my soul to eternal wakefulness. Freedom now appeared, to disappear no more forever. It was heard in every sound, and seen in every thing. It was ever present to torment me with a sense of my wretched condition. I saw nothing without seeing it, I heard nothing without hearing it, and felt nothing without feeling it. It looked from every star, it smiled in every calm, breathed in every wind, and moved in every storm." -Frederick Douglass

Contrast.

Whether it's good and evil,
or woman and man.
Myself and other, anger and pleasure.
I am thinking about the balance between the extremes,
and how one may not exist without the other.
Can God be good if there is no bad?
Can I enjoy heaven if there was no alternative?
A product brings pride when it is the fruit of great labor.
A lover trembles in the arms of a long hungered touch.
And the inverse confirms me.
An easy capture is no game at all.
A glutton for anything, food, sex, or sarcasm, will quickly find that more is needed,
until all of moments are spent in it... and there can be no more.
And he must resort to a deeper dispair.
It is in the wanting that a thing is given value.
It is in the tension of love and love lost,
of touch and lonely skin,
of exhausted sleep and more work to be done,
for I can faintly recall days where too much sleep made me bored and crazy,
of best friends and time apart,
of leisure and labor
the tension of a mother's desire to nest and rear to set free,
of a lovers call to consume and remain herself,
and of a re-born soul,
for loving your neighbor as yourself requires a deep self-love,
for sacrificing yourself requires something to sacrifice,
and dying to yourself will only bring yourself into existence.
It is in the tension that God has made Himself known.
I don't know what this means,
but I guess Romans 11 told me so.
Who has ever given to God that he should counsel Him?
Who can know the ways of the Lord.
I love that I can lean on that, and the hints He has placed
in every tension.
that this is not home, or maybe that home is in an impossibility.
- JJ.

Imagery.

When I look at the years of tossed together poems... I realize that I love the imagery of the ocean.  It's cliche because it is true to human experience, and readily available to tell it.    I should probably try to be more creative.  

Dark Water.

I wrote this for a friend who was an Engineering Major, and not understanding how God could be part of that. 

Dark Water:

Begging for something
More than crumbs,
And tired of the bruised shoulders,
from I life I did not choose,

I walk to the shore,
In the middle of the night…

Told of life and life
More abundant,
And told that my comfort is shame
I sometimes stand in my parent's house,
And ponder persecution.

I am at the shore,
My clothes behind me,
And my feet in the foam…

What is this song,
A serenade,
With celebration and
Wine?
A cleverly disguised
Funeral hymn.

I am waste deep,
In dark water.
My arms are raised,
In fear of cold and
Commitment…

Two years spent in
Books and numbers,
Another on the slab.
For what?  My
Blood, drunk with bewilderment, stares at
The faces of people
whose names I have never spoken
and whose faces I know well.

"I do not accept the authority of popes and councils,
For they have contradicted each other."

I lower my arms and
My teeth chatter in November waters…

I've begged enough to know
That a corpse strung up
Is born again
And a broken back
Is the force of armies.
Perhaps confusion is confidence,
And fragile faith
Is face to face.

"Here I stand.  I cannot do otherwise."

I press my head
Into a swollen wave,
and disappear…

I will not go back,
I will not dance or mourn,
Until You reveal Yourself.
You promised.
I do not ask for Moses,
Just a whisper.

I say a crumb will do.

"God help me.  Amen."

…into dark water. 

If I Am Alone.

I wrote this when I was in law school... feeling pretty distant from relationship and burdened by work, I cherished so much those connecting moments I would have with best friends.

If I am alone,

Perhaps by the sea,

And I see the sun,

Falling to the dark

not without a brilliant fight

of violet strokes and gold,

The water that pets the sand stone,

Will slow with shadowed time,

And the day pauses.
And ache.

With inadequacy to convey

a swelling in my spirit.
I make a note to tell you,

Or find my camera.
So it is,

With a true book,

a shared glimpse,

Or a crooked tree hungry for company,
If I am alone,

I hold for you,

To share my deepest,

Because what cannot be said

You understand,

And we stand by the sea in silence.

And beside the sea we ache.

Feb '06

Wedding Dress

If you could love me as a wife

and for my wedding gift, your life

Should that be all I'd ever need

or is there more I'm looking for

and should I read between the lines

and look for blessings in disguise

To make me handsome, rich, and wise

Is that really what you want

I am a whore I do confess

But I put you on just like a wedding dress

and I run down the aisle

and I run down the aisle

I?m a prodigal with no way home

but I put you on just like a ring of gold

and I run down the aisle to you

So could you love this bastard child

Though I don't trust you to provide

With one hand in a pot of gold

and with the other in your side

I am so easily satisfied

by the call of lovers so less wild

That I would take a little cash

Over your very flesh and blood

Because money cannot buy

a husband's jealous eye

When you have knowingly deceived his wife

- Derek Webb

This song was one of the first that gave Christian music the chance to be the true artistic expression of a Christian. It still hits me.

Jolene

Cocaine flame in my bloodstream
Sold my coat when I hit Spokane
Bought myself a hard pack
of cigarettes in the early
morning rain
Lately my hands they
don't feel like mine
My eyes been stung with dust, I'm blind
Held you in my arms one time
Lost you just the same
Jolene
I ain't about to go straight
It's too late
I found myself face down in the ditch
Booze on my hair
Blood on my lips
A picture of you,
holding a picture of me
in the pocket of my blue jeans
Still don't know what love means
Still don't know what love means
Jolene

Been so long since I seen your face
or felt a part of this human race
I've been living out of
this here suitcase for way
too long
A man needs something he can hold onto
A nine pound hammer or a woman like you
Either one of them things will do
Jolene
I ain't about to go straight
It's too late
I found myself face down in the ditch
Booze in my hair
Blood on my lips
A picture of you,
holding a picture of me
In the pocket of my blue jeans
Still don't know what love means
Still don't know what love means
Jolene

- Ray Lamontagne

american young.

to swallow a sword takes practice

boiled slowly,

every stage

of youth, crowded

and underpaid wisdom

quilting with fabric gathered

from fields where mistaken seeds

were sown before books were kept,

but oh, they were written,

about

rearers desparately rearing

success,

learn either

charging, dislocating for reach, or

hunkered in the

saddle,

savoring or starving for a crib

and comfort in a feeble latch

I've forgotten,

the shouts of living novelty

to calloused whispers.

even still they do not cease,

"it s a ie.. t is a li.. is a lie."

Jan. 31, '05

That's a gnarly one I wrote when I was having my life rocked by a pastor in Gardena. He turned my world upside down, and made me see all sin as rooted in Man's desire to rule his own life. That foundational truth seemed to spider vein out to every aspect of society.

Stolen Car

I met a little girl and I settled down
In a little house on out on the edge of town
We got married, swore we'd never part
Then little by little we drifted from eachother's hearts
At first I thought it was just restlessness
That it'd fade as time went by, and our love would heal
In the end it was something more, I guess
Tore us apart and made us real

I'm driving a stolen car
Down on Eldridge Avenue
Each night I wait to get caught
But I never do

She asked if I remembered the letters I wrote
When our love was young and bold
She said last night she read those letters
And they made her feel one hundred years old

I'm driving a stolen car
On a pitch black night
And I'm telling myself
It's gonna be all right
I drive by night
And I travel in fear
That in this darkness
I will disappear

- Patty Griffin (covering Bruce Springsteen)

The way she sings this song, it is my official saddest song I've ever heard. It makes me want to fade to black.

January 31, everyday

I set myself up

on beams eaten with rot.

and tilt my head

in young dog eyes

listen to

the snapping What

can I become?

My comfort my home

my future accrued

sprawls on every

empty hillside.

Listen, as

I toss my dreams

to the Kingdom,

tied with fishing line,

invisible from a distance. 

Jan. 31 '05