Anniversaries, as such

Particularly appropriate today:

Wedding dress for sale (but the model leaves something to be desired).

("Please only bid if you are serious. Or really, really hot." If I ever sell anything on eBay, I'm stealing this quote.)

Still in a poetic mood

If you're interested, you might want to check out the poems by Fred Allen in Communique Journal.

I'm particularly fond of this:

Undone

shatter me, God,
fracture mind's stale, provincial
orders,
stagger soul's calibrated vanity,
bruise heart's numb meat,
snap bones

no,
break me like the dawn breaks
dark's vacancies:

so gently
the night is glad to die

Billy Collins

Tonight, I share with you a poem:

Cliché

My life is an open book. It lies here
on a glass tabletop, its pages shamelessly exposed,
outspread like a bird with hundreds of thin paper wings.

It is a biography, needless to say,
and I am reading and writing it simultaneously
in a language troublesome and private.
Every reader must be a translator with a thick lexicon.

No one has read the whole thing but me.
Most dip into the middle for a few paragraphs,
then move on to other shelves, other libraries.
Some have time only for the illustrations.

I love to feel the daily turning of the pages,
the sentences unwinding like a string,
and when something really important happens,
I walk out to the edge of the page
and, always the student,
make an asterisk, a little star, in the margin.

...quoted from Questions About Angels

Chasing and being chased

(yep, rapid fire posts. I've been writing in my head. I just never want to type it when I'm at my computer.)

The imagery of God chasing us is often used. I often use it. God chasing me, me chasing God.

I believe that it's true, God pursues us and our hearts are naturally inclined to pursue God (even if that natural inclination is latent and easily overwhelmed).

I believe this.

I just don't feel it.

I don't feel chased by God. God feels quiet to me right now. The ocean is calm. The tide is out.

I don't know that this is a bad thing.

But I used these words in prayer before my church Sunday morning. I'm saying them out of habit but in the back of my mind I'm questioning myself. Little whispers of "are you praying truth? Are you speaking out of your own life right now?"

I don't feel chased by God.

Perhaps this means that for once I'm not running. Perhaps I'm safe in close communion.

But I'm not sure that's how I feel, either?

(Does how I "feel" have much to do with anything? Perhaps not...)

This God and me....I think we're in a "live and let live" phase right now. It's wait and see.

I'll keep you posted.

Rites of Spring

I love this time of year...I love the rhythms that allow me to repeat so many behaviors. Spring brings:

The seemingly annual spring Over the Rhine show at Canal Street....
Making plans for my summer travel to Wisconsin, and this year also to Colorado...
My perennial war against ants (who this year have chosen my bathroom and bedroom, avoiding their usual theater of war, the kitchen)...
Seeing the Reds within a game or two of first place (isn't April great?)...
Driving through a cool, crystal night with the sunroof open and the heater on...

Strangers and love

Can you miss someone that you only barely met?

Can you love and appreciate a total stranger?

I think yes to both counts.

I've been frequenting a Starbuck's on the way home from work. It beats sitting around my house all night. I get to read, drink whatever the coffee of the day is, and watch people.

Mostly watch people.

There is an employee there who intrigues me. He's young and pierced and dreadlocked and bandanna wrapped. Let's just say that at first glance you wouldn't think that he and I would be very simpatico.

And we're probably not.

But he's so fun to watch. He actually looks at his customers. And talks to them. And there is something in his smile that is genuine.

He's a total stranger...and yet...

It's fun watching customers, too. Most bark their order and never really look around. It's as if they treat the help as just that--automated help.

But this girl who came in tonight caught my attention. She made the other barista laugh as they chatted. They too were engaged in one another, albeit only briefly.

Another total stranger, and yet I feel as if I know her in some small way. She's a frappacino drinking pediatrics nurse (the animal print nurses smock gives that away) who makes teenaged coffee-shop employees smile in the midst of their toil.

That says a lot, doesn't it?

And then there's the missing:

There are some people who I miss that I feel I have no business missing. People I met in faraway places. Individuals to whom I've only been briefly introduced. Can you miss people that you hardly know?

I think so. I think I miss the potential, the possibility. Sometimes you can just tell when that dynamic is in place--enough shared personality and interest to generate relationship, enough difference to bring you back for more.

No sooner have you identified the catalyst and it's gone. Will you cross paths again? Only God knows. Would it be the same? Again, only God...

Reading in sunshine

For some reason spring and summer draw me to classic American Literature. I don't yet understand the connection. I annually succumb to it before I recognize it.

My first foray this year is more Steinbeck. How can you not love this?


The Salinas was only a part-time river. The summer sun drove it underground. It was not a fine river at all, but it was the only one we had and so we boasted about it -- how dangerous it was in a wet winter and how dry it was in a dry summer. You can boast about anything if it's all you have. Maybe the less you have the more you are required to boast.


"You can boast about anything if it's all you have." That's going on my mirror.

A few pages later the narrator is describing his Irish grandparents:


I don't know what directed his steps toward the Salinas Valley. It was an unlikely place for a man from a green country to come to, but he came about thirty years before the turn of the century and he brought with him his tiny Irish wife, a tight hard little woman humorless as a chicken. She had a dour Presbyterian mind and a code of morals that pinned down and beat the brains out of nearly everything that was pleasant to do."


Beautiful...

(quotations from East of Eden)

argh

while driving to indy on saturday my car was acting weird. it wouldn't shift quite right, no acceleration, etc.

if i drive it real gently then it's fine. but if i step on it the car does nothing.

(and not being able to drive like a maniac is simply unacceptable. i actually couldn't pass someone on the freeway. how humiliating.)

i was thinking "transmission rebuild."

and then i was thinking "$2000."

and then i was thinking "hmmmm, new saab..."

so my car is in the shop. i've rented a car to drive in the interim. i was all excited about renting a car--cool, i'll rent something fun. my choices for last minute rental yesterday afternoon: monte carlo or buick lesabre.

well, i won't drive a buick on principle. so i'm stuck with the monte carlo. so much for something cool and unusual for me.

the good news / bad news problem is this: apparently my first problem isn't transmission related. it's my catalytic converter. apparently the baffling inside it is corroded and disintegrated, which blocks exhaust airflow. quite simply, my car is choking. it can't exhale. and thus it can't inhale properly. and that screws everything else up too.

so they're fixing that. parts aren't available 'til late today, done tomorrow afternoon.

only then will they be able to diagnose my transmission.

it's good news if it's just the exhaust system...i'll get off (relatively) cheap. if it's the exhaust and transmission problems...well, that new car option is looking better and better...

discipline, brian, discipline.

Don't just do something, stand there

(or sit, as the case may be.)

Sometimes life just doesn't seem fair.

And I'm so glad of it.

I had a plane reserved this afternoon. I had no plans. I'd bump around the pattern, maybe fly over my house. It really didn't matter--anything to escape the surface, to escape this world for a few minutes and focus on something that is truly refreshing to me.

It was a blustery spring day today though. At least most of the day. I held out as long as I could. About 4:00 I got the weather at Hamilton. Overcast at 2400. Wind at 12 knots, gusting to 18.

No thanks. Flying is supposed to be fun. Gusting winds and a glorified tin can don't equate to fun in my mind. Not today, anyway.

It was supposed to clear, but it hadn't been trending that way yet. So I cancelled.

I was desperate for other plans. I called several friends for dinner or just distraction. Nope. It was just me and my house.

No thanks to that either.

So I left work and headed to Starbuck's for two of my favorite things. Reading and people watching.

I watched a woman leave her huge beast of a black dog out on the sidewalk, just laying the leash on the ground. He sat there for ten minutes patiently waiting for his owner to return to their walk. Unbelievable.

A girl walked in wearing a "Jesus for President" t-shirt. I laughed out loud.

A man in his fifties was sitting there reading Atlas Shrugged.

An hour or so later when I left skies were clearing and the wind was calm. Drat.

So I headed home. More reading. A little writing. A letter to a friend. A couple quick email messages. Notes in the margin of a book I'm reading (lately every book I read calls out to be given as a gift to someone).

One of the books I'm in the midst of is L'Engle's Two-Part Inventions.

She describes simply being with her husband as he fought cancer. There was nothing for her to do but offer her faithful, loving presence.

Sometimes that's all that is required, isn't it? Oftentimes for others all that is required is sitting holding hands, staving off the fear by pooling the energies of two.

Sometimes that's all that should be done for ourselves.

I ran across this quote earlier in the year: "It is an old and ironic habit of human beings to run faster when we have lost our way" (Rollo May).

Don't just do something. Stand there.

Or sit on the couch, immerse yourself in music and words and enjoy rest. It really is allowed on a random Thursday evening.

Most holy God, the source of all good desires, all right judgments, and all just works: Give to us, your servants, that peace which the world cannot give, so that our minds may be fixed on the doing of your will, and that we, being delivered from the fear of all enemies, may live in peace and quietness; through the mercies of Christ Jesus our Savior.

A Collect for Peace

Sitting on the rock bottom of faith

I love truth derived from narrative...

There is no good life promised to us, nothing is guaranteed, and our lives will be undoubtedly visited by sadness, betrayal, and often evil. We cannot guard ourselves against this. The world, though, is not so hopeless. We sense something we cannot touch and the mystery of what awaits us out there keeps us moving forward. Some will claim that there is nothing out there, that there is no beyond. Nonetheless, I have sat alone in dark rooms, away from my own faculties of sensation, and still something remains, speaking in a voice that's clear and separate from my own thoughts.

more>>