barking reed

barkingreed is moving!

2010-11-23T14:21:00.000-08:00

The new url is http://joshbarkey.blogspot.com/. It is pretty much the same blog, except for the name, which for the time being is "josh barkey." I'm not sure if the change is to make it easier to find/remember, or because I'm an incurable vainglory.

Change is hard, I know. I've loved barkingreed like the weird, shape-shifting child that it is. But sometimes, even when you love something, you have to suck out its innards for sustenance, pupate, and move on.

I love you, too... but not in an innard-sucking way. Please come along - I'll miss you if you don't.

give thanks (and blame the nazis)

2010-11-23T05:50:00.000-08:00

The school where I teach does not have a cafeteria, so the students eat in the classrooms. Those who come to my room mostly ignore me, which allows me to eavesdrop on the bizarre world of the modern teenager. One day last quarter, Jon and Leo were sitting at the back of my classroom, eating pizza and having one of their outlandish discussions. I watched as Leo picked off slices of pepperoni and popped them in his mouth.

“You know what’s funny, Jon?” Leo said as he picked away at some cheese, looking for a faux-meat treasure, “I read recently about this law of internet discourse where every argument will always inevitably degenerate to the point where someone will compare somebody else to the Nazis.”

Jon laughed, “That’s totally true.”

My ears were perking up at that point, because Jon and Leo are exceptionally bright young men and I never knew where one of their discussions might go. On that day, however, they were more engrossed in their pizza and didn’t pursue it any further. It got me thinking about Nazis, though, and mulling over the role they have come to play in our culture as symbolic of the evil Other.

Weeks later, when a student in one of my art classes started complaining because he couldn’t find an eraser, I slammed a hand down on my desk and said, loudly and half-joking, “You’re right! It’s a complete travesty that you can’t find an eraser. I, for one, am completely appalled and chagrined at the dearth of erasers in this room and you know what!?! I blame the Nazis!”

This vocabulary-heavy outburst left the room silent save a few repressed giggles, until one brave girl in the front row said, “What the heck are you talking about, Mr. Barkey?”

I explained myself:

“It all started back after World War One, when this funny-mustached little dude named Hitler was wandering around Vienna getting kicked out of art school for incompetence.

"My grasp of history has always been a bit, er, sketchy,” I went on, "so I am not saying that sucking at art necessarily turns you into a despotic, genocidal tyrant—I would never say that—but let that be a lesson to you: pay attention in art class, kids.

"Anyways, Hitler went and became the leader of Nazi Germany and started World War II, which resulted in a whole lot of death, destruction, and the utter defeat of Germany. This all created a power vacuum in Europe, a vacuum which the United States was in a unique position to fill. As a latecomer to a war that was fought on foreign soil, the United States came out of it as the least-damaged emerging Industrial Economy, with the necessary infrastructure to meet the demands of a world newly-interconnected by the whole tragedy. It rose to the challenge with gusto and an often bombastic disregard for any considerations of values, morals, health and wisdom.

"What followed was a period of unchecked growth and economic expansion unparalleled in the history of the world, a mix of good and horrendous developments that pretty much blew the roof off of all previous conceptions of wealth and any sort of sane, holistic understanding of what “the pursuit of happiness” should really look like. As a result, the past thirty years have been a ludicrous orgy of selfish consumerism that has had our country riding the wave of leisure right down the backs of the world’s poor, a ride that (I hope, at least) seems to be coming to an end.

"This is where the erasers come in. You all are a generation three or four times removed from the horrors of the War and the Great Depression. You are therefore incapable of conceiving of a world in which an eraser that is ripped to bits, thrown at classmates, or surreptitiously taken from this classroom will not be immediately replaced by another (preferably better) eraser. In your world, there is always more and more interesting stuff, in ever-growing quantities. And although this is a fool’s paradise—a fact that will likely be brought crashing down on you as soon as you leave school and try to enter this new rat-bagged economy of ours—I can’t bring myself to blame you.

"Your parents have given you everything this culture has to offer and in turn have left you nothing for which to be grateful. Even if Immanuel Kant is wrong and ingratitude is not the essence of vileness, it is pretty clear from the number of y’all who are on mood-altering drugs that the world you’ve inherited has put you in a really bad place. And for all this, I say to you again, we must blame the Nazis.”

That, more or less, is what I said… probably more, though, because I prefer to survive the next parent-teacher night. I, for one, am extremely grateful to have a job I love—one that gives me the opportunity to help these young men and women challenge their cultural presuppositions.

It's a messed-up world they live in, and it is comforting to think we can blame the Nazis and congratulate ourselves that we are so superior and would never, ever sink to that level. But the truth is that we make our own ugly, selfish choices every day. The Nazis may have made it possible for us to become this ostentatiously wealthy, but they certainly didn't force the credit cards into our hands. They didn't make us slaves to the consumerism that binds us. Gratitude, I think, can show us how to be free.

the beatings will continue until morale improves

2010-11-22T18:31:00.000-08:00

And lo, I have written another piece for GOOD. This time, I have waxed verbose on a topic everyone loves: discipline. I highly recommend that you put down whatever nonviolent thing you are doing and go read it.

tyler ramsey

2010-11-21T18:55:00.000-08:00

I am an abominably lazy person. Anyone who has ever planted trees with me would probably deny that - burning the caloric equivalent of a half marathon day after day through hail, heat and hardships of every kind doesn't usually bring the word "lazy" to mind - but that's only if you are content with the status quo, which I am not. Hence, I see myself as lazy. I am lazy at work and at home. I write, but not enough. I play ukulele, but not enough. I keep up with friends, but not enough. Over and over again, I fail to do the work necessary to get me whatever it is that I truly, deeply desire.

I don't beat myself up about this, though (at least, not as much as I used to). I am aware that laziness is pretty much the status quo... especially in the good old USofA. But although I want MORE than that and tell myself that I am ready to allow my efforts to begin to exceed my excuses, I regularly find myself pulled back in front of the computer, where Hulu and all other manner of Evil Creatures from the Glowing Blue Abyss wait to suck me into the Vortex of Shoulda-Coulda-Woulda.

Last night, I somehow managed to ignore the Siren-song of an evening of non-relational self-indulgence and did something out of character - I drove the hour up to Charlotte to watch a show at a hip little joint called the Evening Muse. I'm glad I did. Tyler Ramsey played, and he was lovely. I hadn't been to a live club show for years - not since watching my beautiful musician-buddy Chris play at some hole-in-the-wall faux-parisian place in Vancouver.

I took my camera along and made a video so I could drag you out with me to an entrancing musical moment, and tried to upload the result directly into this post. Google seems to have decided, however, that today is a good day to start reneging on their informal "don't be evil" policy. So instead, here's a link on youtube. I know it's painfully backbreaking work to click on a link and that you are as lazy as I am, but I dare you to take the risk. It's worth it.

beat them until they love you

2010-11-19T09:02:00.000-08:00

There's this theology blog I follow by a Pschology professor in Arizona, and he recently wrote a really nice exploration of how a lot of that seemingly sexist, abusive, genderidiculous language in the Bible may actually be - when read in context - an exhortation to nonviolent protest in the face of a sexist, abusive environment. Interesting.

st. joshua of assissi

2010-11-17T08:24:00.000-08:00

St. Francis is dead, so I'm not sure it is quite correct to say that I am a big fan of his. I do think he's super-duper, though.

Like me, St. Francis was born to fabulous wealth - more so, actually, because while I am only fabulously wealthy relative to the average human in the history of the world, Francis was also wealthy locally. This means that his wealth was in constant, visible contrast to the poverty all around him, a fact that apparently bothered him from quite an early age. A story is told of how as a little boy he sneaked away from his father to give all the money he had in his pockets to a passing beggar, an act that earned him his father's anger and the scorn of friends.

He did not, however, immediately change his overall life. As a young man he partied hard, wore the finest clothes, and even went off and fought in a war. He was taken prisoner and lived as a captive for a year, but after his release, he gradually began to shuck off the accoutrements of wealth, eventually abandoning it all for an austere life of poverty. Austere - but not unhappy. He and his followers were known for wandering around with smiles on their faces and songs on their lips.

While I think this is highly commendable, it is not why I really love St. Francis. The truth is, I don't actually know all that much about him and actually cribbed that last bit from wikipedia. The real reason I have long loved St. Francis is that he is the patron saint of animals and of the environment, and it is said that wild animals came to him, hung out with him, and loved him.

I have a confession to make: in that regard, I wish to be St. Francis. Although I have had a great number of pets in my life, I am no longer interested in keeping them. Rather, I would like to gradually organize my life and my mindset so that I can begin to think of myself as a friend to animals. I want to live at a pace that shows the wild animals around me that I am not a threat so they will feel free to come near without fear. I doubt that I am anywhere near to achieving this goal, but this past Saturday I got a little closer by befriending the lizard pictured above.

There I was, tapping away at my keyboard, when I looked over and I saw this little guy (we'll call him Leonard) lounging comfortably on top of my computer speaker. Normally - because I don't particularly like cleaning up lizard poop - I would have quickly chased Leonard down, caught him, and chucked him outside... probably accidently pulling off his tail in the process.

This time, however, I just watched him. Then I got out my camera and took pictures of him until my proximity made him nervous, at which point I sat back, waited for a while, and then took more. Eventually, I started laying my hand near him on the shelf. When this made him skittish, I would pull my hand away and go back to typing. Eventually, he let me lightly tap him under the chin with my finger. And then, quick as a wink, he had crawled up onto my hand.

Leonard and I had a little talk, and I explained that he would have to go outside. I knew it was colder, I said, but there was more food out there and my house was no place for a lizard. So out we went. When I laid my hand on the ground Leonard tried to crawl up my wrist to stay with me; but when I explained the situation again, he hopped off into the grass and, with one final look, ran away.

all you need is shrimp

2010-11-12T06:35:00.000-08:00

This past year I have re-discovered a love of cooking - or perhaps I should say I've re-invented it. I have always sort of enjoyed cooking, and really loved it as a child. But the love I had for it back then probably had more to do with the fact that as a kid, everything is magic. There is something very adult, now, about the love I've learned for cooking: for the rhythms and organization of it; and the raw, sensuous pleasure of eating food shaped by my own hands from ingredients I chose and put in, one by one. It is healthier, slower, more labor-intensive and - best of all - tastier.

And yet, this past year it has often been missing some sacred element. Cooking is a pleasure in its own right, as is eating, but the consumption of food is not meant to be consummated alone. This year I have cooked and eaten many a meal alone at my table, and there is an empty echo to it. I am not entirely sure why, but when I cook for my son, this echo is still somewhat there.

Fortunately, I live fifty short steps from my parents; and although my mom insists on tipping the scales of shared meals in her favor, I still do get the occasional pleasure of a meal made and shared with love ones. I wonder, though, at the difference. Why would there be less pleasure in cooking for my son? Yes, feeding him is a more labor-intensive process and less relaxed, but there is no way I love him any less than I do my parents.

I wonder if, perhaps, the missing ingredient is gratitude. I can make him say "thank you" all I want, but that is never the same as an un-coerced, grateful heart - something he is too young to fully actualize. As I have mulled this over, I have begun to wonder if it points to a broader principle, which I will express as this: Gratitude is Love's fulfillment.

This makes sense to me, and gives me a handle to grab onto as I approach the often shapeless-seeming mass of all the things that make up Love. What does Love want? Why should/do I choose to love? I ask these questions, and the answer I recieve is, "for the hope of uncoerced gratitude, joyously and spontaneously expressed by the reciever of that love."

Does this make the act of love-giving any less wondrous, or profound? I don't think so. I think, rather, that it makes it more beautiful, and that this sort of understanding turns the lover from some grasping, selfish gremlin wanting a selfish love kick-back, to an entity who yearns for a unity of giving and recieving that grows and expands in reciprocity as it comes to life.

Sex, cooking - everything: all lived-out metaphors for this inflaming process of love-making. Let's make shrimp-kabobs. And eat them. Together.

dinner, last week, cooked slowly on a makeshift grill over a bed of coals in my newly-made fire-pit

trees (written during this morning's drive to work)

2010-11-12T04:43:00.000-08:00

I shout "Yes!" to autumn morning light on autumn leaves,
lit up in cascades of burning,
glowing,
falling,
dying to the ground.

I shout "Yes!" to half-lit, tufted infernos waking up,
shaking off a cloak of frost-diamonds,
glistening like fresh-seen debutantes
announcing their finest hour.

And I don't believe in winter,
and I don't believe in death
when I taste the fire of their turning
at the drawing of each breath.

labeled

2010-11-08T06:51:00.000-08:00

I've been monkeying around with barkingreed again, trying to make it a better place for you to hang out when you want to ignore your life, family and friends. If you look in the sidebar, you'll notice that I've added a list of labels, and I'm going back and making sure that I've labeled all the pieces. So if, for instance, you're seriously interested in sex, you can just click the sexy "sex" label and see what Josh Barkey has to say about it. N-choi.

why I didn't vote (again)

2010-11-07T13:57:00.000-08:00

I guess it comes down to this: if you told me that by running full-force, face-first into a brick wall I would save the lives of six orphans, I still wouldn't do it - not even if it was six hundred thousand. Not because I don't care about orphans, but rather because your proposition seems to me to be not only illogical, but quite probably malicious.

The same with voting. Here in America where I have the distinct privilege to live (and I mean that), we have a two-party system that it my mind is basically just a one-party system made of schizophrenic, sado-masochistic personalities who would throw battery acid on their grandmothers for a few more fistfuls of power.

And yes, I am talking about Barack Obama and Sarah Palin, and whomever else you happen to idolize. I'm sure they're all fabulously nice people who are each right about a lot of things and at one point weren't willing to sacrifice a little truth in the name of political expediency, but show me a candidate who never trash-talked an opponent, nor approved a slanted, truth-bending propagandistic smear ad and I will start listening and perhaps even voting.

Maybe I am wrong. In fact, I am sure I am wrong, because I am sure that on a local level there are plenty of politicians who are too well known by their constituency to hide behind a veneer of fancy rhetoric and doublespeak - and contrary to what the rest of the world thinks, most Americans aren't particularly stupid or malicious when it comes to judging what's right before their eyes. What they are is manipulable, and the bigger the stage, the easier it becomes to murky up the water, villify your opponents, and convince the confused masses to vote out of what's easiest - fear and economic self-interest.

Don't believe me? Just see how far you get running on a platform that emphasizes humility and self-sacrifice for the greater good of the broader human race. Just try to get yourself elected arguing that we ought to significantly decrease our wealth and "standard of living" in order to advance the economic interests of the world's powerless, disadvantaged majority. Just try it - I dare ya!

At that level - the level of fear and selfishness - there is no nuance: just loud, angry yelling and the insistence that anybody who disagrees is an idiot at best and a villain at worst. I mean, just look at the above-pictured recent photo of a whiteboard from the wall of a private school.

In case you have a slow-loading computer or a tiny screen, I'll describe it for you: basically, it says that worldview affects a bunch of different areas of life. As an example in the area of economics, it provides two alternatives. First, for the "Christian" alternative, it describes "hard work, little government intervention - no reward for laziness, etc." Then, as the only other option, it describes "Humanistic (socialism)" as being, "redistribution of wealth, giving to those who won't work."

Now, to anyone at all interested in thoughtful discourse, this is the sort of politically-loaded malarkey that absolutely precludes the very possibility of useful dialog. You cannot portray the question as being a choice between two such polar and (I think) inaccurate opposites and expect those who disagree with you to want to continue the discussion. This is nothing out of the ordinary, of course - people have been claiming that God is on their side of discussions of policy forever, and in America the bravura of those touting this particular nonsense while claiming that they and they alone are "Christians" is quite well-documented.

Again, I have to point out the incredible lack of nuance. I personally consider myself a follower of Christ and want nothing to do with these sentiments. I do not think these views are indicative of what Jesus was all about at all - only that certain people have hijacked the language of Christianity in order to give a large chunk of the American public a visible devil that they can feel good about throwing stones at. They've gotten these people worked to such a pitch and tenor, in fact, that they're drowning out more reasonable, humble voices and dragging a lot of otherwise sane people along with them.

The other large demographic that can generally be grouped on the other side of the debate doesn't use religious language, but it does do the same bleedin' thing - so broadly and with such vehemence that even I want to go smash expensive electronic equipment in American megachurches (well, actually, I already kinda wanted to do that).

This would be a mistake, I think, because while I firmly believe that the person who wrote that was profoundly misguided to do so, I also know that it was probably written out of a desire to see things come out best for the kids, On a smaller scale I can disagree with his words without attacking the person(which I wouldn't want to do), but in the political arena (think circuses and MMA) there is no time or room for such distinctions. The political world is a polarized madhouse where you're either with us, or a reprehensible ingrate with nothing to recommend you.

I have a friend in Nebraska who tries very hard to humbly consider opposing positions and to get others to do the same. He does it over and over again in web-based discussions and over and over again I see both sides of the argument totally ignoring his requests for dialog and instead regurgitating ugly partisan rhetoric all over him, and each other.

I wish him the best in his noble, doomed attempts; but even if good, clear information was available, I'm still not going to join him in his quest. Sometimes if you don't want to be lumped in with the swine, you just have to stay out of the pen.

the silence that speaks

2010-11-02T18:37:00.000-07:00

This past Sunday, Dan the Jungle Man picked me up in a canoe-topped Ford Ranger and together we drove down to Lancaster, South Carolina. After grabbing a rotisseried chicken at a megastore, we drove out of town a couple miles and then off down a short, graveled road to an unkempt boat-launch under a graffiti-splashed bridge that spanned the river Catawba, where we launched Dan's old, battered aluminum canoe.

He had only been able to find one paddle, and as it was the new one he'd hand-crafted from a piece of mahogany he'd brought back from the last trip he'd taken to Peru, Dan did all the paddling as I sat at the front and played with my new camera. I offered to take my turn at the stern, but for Dan (who routinely traveled by canoe for days without stopping) this little jaunt-for-a-few-hours was a leisurely chance to stretch and get a little blood flowing.

As we rounded the first bend, the noise of the road dropped completely away and a wild, rarely-broken stillness settled all around us. Except for the occasional hum of a distant airplane, for the most part the only noise came from the rhythmic pwopp-fwssss of the paddle and the indignant hollering of the odd territorial blue heron. It was quieter, even, than the Amazonian lake where we both were raised, and I remarked to Dan how strange it was to drop so quickly from the sound and fury of suburbia into the gentle folds of the countryside. Strange, wonderful... and strangely unsettling.

It had been five years since I had last floated out onto open water - far, far too long. I was practically raised on a lake in a dugout canoe, with a dinged, hand-cut wooden paddle in my hand. I missed the idyllic hours of my youth - the long, slow afternoons with nowhere to be and nothing to do but drift aimlessly on the warm, placid waters of Yarinacocha. More than that, though, I missed the sense of connection I had once felt to the elemental vigor of the earth, and this trip up and down the Catawba reminded me sharply of my growing disconnect from the place-sense I had once glimmered as a child.

After leaving the culture and climes of my youth, I had resolutely plugged myself into what I accepted was to be my new reality. But as I attempted to forge a replacement for the place-sense that I, like everyone, had breathed in with the air of childhood, I found myself creating a new one too strongly shaped by the concerns and commonalities of the paved-over world of suburbanite North America.

Dan and I talked of this as he paddled steadily up the river, lamenting the changes but enjoying the moment. Later, he and I sat on a rock in the river, eating our chicken and the towel-wrapped, still-hot potatoes Dan had boiled in the morning before heading out. Connected, in this way, to such moments from our shared past, I began to feel again the endless yearning that had once been my lot as a newly-uprooted jungle boy living for the first time in the endless drizzle of the Northwest.

Was it only me - a result of my unusual, fractured upbringing? Or could it be possible that a great many of the ills and ailments of the broader American culture could be traced to just this same yearning to reconnect to something slower, calmer, and more steeped in the life-roots growing deep into the soil? I wondered if perhaps alienation from the earth and the subsequent easily documentable destruction of the land that this lack of relationship engenders may very well point to its own solution.

What if we just stopped? What if we turned off the TV and walked, slowly, to a friend's house? What if we did not tell them we were coming, and what if as we went we breathed deeply of the unfiltered air, living slower and noticing, as we did, the damage that all our speed, convenience and efficiency has done - not just to the good earth that sustains us, but to our very souls? What if we were all to grab a paddle and a canoe, and work our way up the river into the silence that speaks?

it's GOOD to get a "D"!

2010-10-28T11:59:00.000-07:00

That's right. I've got another GOOD article out there on the interwebs, forever and ever, AMEN! You may now go look at it. And thumbs-up it. And hug it, and love it, and pet and play with it, and call it George.

a new blog

2010-10-28T09:18:00.000-07:00

Forsooth: noticing that the world is really short on blogs these days, I have added yet another, which will be used to chronicle the teeth-pullingly painful process of trying to sell my first book to people with the power to buy it and then sell it to other people. I most likely shant be updating all that often, as selling a book is a slooooooow process. Nonetheless, I invite you to suffer with me.

This new blog is linked in the sidebar. And here.

to kill a yuppie (or at least, her pride)

2010-10-25T09:12:00.000-07:00

I'd like to say I am writing in defense of mercy, but this piece probably has more to do with my desire to enact literary revenge all over a yuppie suburbanite named Rosillo. If this was a blog of a zillion readers I might feel worse about this, but since my readership consists mostly of my mom and a bunch of former students, I will disregard charity and blast away.

I don't know all that much about her, but my guess is that Rosillo is not a particularly bad woman. In fact, she is probably about ninety-seven degrees closer to the norm that I. She is a college graduate and probably works in a bank, or as a retail manager. Her slight accent and familiarity with our mutual acquaintance, Ulysses - the Mexican mechanic who fixed her bumper - leads me to believe that she most likely immigrated from that or another Latin country as a child and has worked hard to assimilate into this culture. I also know that she is thirty-one, because she commented on our shared age as she copied down information from my driver's license.

Rosillo drives a Maroon 2010 Kia sedan that for a couple of days, until I paid five-hundred-and-thirty-nine dollars to Wilburn Auto, had a three-inch by one-quarter-inch white mark in the middle of the back bumper, deposited there by the front license plate of the twenty year-old Oldsmobile sedan I happened to be driving when it decided it wanted a more intimate connection with Rosillo's jinxed Kia.

I know her Kia was jinxed because she told me that it was - that this was her third accident in the few months since she had bought the car. But I don't want to talk about Rosillo's spastic driving style. I want to talk, rather, about how mercy and neighborliness have all-but-evaporated in a culture of justice, Justice, JUSTICE.

The truth is that, ultimately, I tapped Rosillo's car with my own not because of her spastic driving but rather because she stopped unexpectedly at the exact moment when I let my attention slip from the road in front of me. According to the laws of this country (which, in this particular case, actually make sense) the accident was my fault, and Justice demanded that I pay the consequences. So pay them I did, and with gratitude both for the fact that I had the money available and for the fact that Rosillo hadn't insisted on calling the cops, an action which might have resulted in me being bent over the knee of the hegemonic insurance company in a Kafka-esque spanking that would have continued, most likely, until I was dead.

Still, insisting on making a guy in a twenty-year-old car and a ratty green sweatshirt pay five hundred and thirty-nine dollars to maintain your vanity about the paint job on a car you'll most likely smash into someone else's car within the month hardly seems neighborly. It's a bumper for the love of everything that is not yet perverse in this deranged society and... I mean, SERIOUSLY, ever hear of a bumper sticker?

Besides, Rosillo, you just gotta get over the ridiculous idea that a car is an "investment." It's not. It depreciates a few thousand dollars the second you drive it off the lot and continues to devaluifize every year after until one day, forty years down the road, some other yuppie is going to say, "Hey, look! There's one of those old Kia's from back before Google bought Korea and re-named it Wonder-Bread-Land! I think I'll sink six million dollars (ten grand, present-day USD) into restoring it and trade it to my local comptroller for a travel pass to visit my Aunt Maybeline over in the Kingdom of New Southern West Third Georgia! Shweeeet (unfortunately, they say 'shweet' a lot in the future)!"

So why oh why, Rosillo, are you stressing about a paint mark?!? It's frickin' paint on a frickin' bumper that will rust, decay, fall off and end up in a landfill right next to your frickin' overpriced, planned-obsolescence power suit and all that other garbage with which you fill your house and those two storage units you pay for. Get over it and stop taking pennies from the pocket of a guy who did not obsessively turn off all the lights in his house for the past two years just so he could take those savings and buy you a few more days vanity on your soon-to-disintegrate car.

Stops. Breathes Deeply. I'm all right. It's okay.

Like I said - I had the money. And it's only money. I don't blame you, Rosillo, for assimilating all too well into a culture as perversely un-neighborly and un-merciful as this one. Before I make my exit, however, I will leave you with a few choice words from our good pal, Willy. Take note:

"The quality of mercy is not strain'd,
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest:
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes."

- The Merchant of Venice. Act 4, Scene 1 (written by Willy)

*Sophia's Curse

2010-10-21T03:22:00.000-07:00

A week or so ago I wrote a blog post about online dating, which I said I was starting to check out in order to fulfill the mandate given to me by Austin the Actor and JJ the Chef to "learn how to be friends with women I find attractive." A little while later I deleted the post because, as my Californica friend Seth wisely remarked when I told him what I was up to, "yeah, right."

You don't going on a dating website where the context is always the possibility of romantic entanglement and then try to claim that all you want is friends - that's just ridiculous. I knew it, too, which is why I deleted the post. It seemed disingenuous, and an important attribute that grows symbiotically with a love of truth (to which I aspire... or at least to which I want to aspire... most of the time) is a hatred of lies and pretension.

The truth, of course, is that I am also often fabulously annoyed by my pesky dedication to the truth. It forces me to admit that on a subterranean level I got on a dating website because I wanted to drown out the anxieties and angsts I've got hovering over me by overwhelming them with the sort of electrical charge a fella like me can only get from a living, breathing woman.

I knew at that subterranean level that I was lying to myself, hoping to be able to disregard the facts of my life: like the fact that I am tied to a specific location and schedule by relationships with people whom I love fiercely; or the fact that I have a responsibility to give the kids I teach my utmost attention when I'm on the job; or perhaps even the reason that I sorta-kinda tacked onto that post about online dating - that I already have a lover, Art, who is jealous and demands my sweet, sassy ministrations on a regular, timely basis. I know these truths - feel them shaving off the seconds of my life and keeping them for themselves - but there are times when I don't want to know them.

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, and it is always only a little knowledge. No one ever knows much and the best they can hope for, I think, is to have a little bit of wisdom as well - enough to distinguish between actions that increase love and those that decrease it. That, I think, is what wisdom is - nothing particularly spectacular, just the occasional flash of insight into the relative love-producing value of any given course of action.

I may be wrong, but I tend to think of myself as being a somewhat wiser-than-average person. I don't know why this might be - whether it's because I wanted it more than most; or happened to read a few of the right books; or if, perhaps, God just decided to drop a couple of extra wisdom-anvils on my head. Because make no mistake - that's what it is. Wisdom is an anvil dropped on your head from a great height. Wisdom is pain. As far as I can tell, wisdom is a gift God gives to other people... you, the wise one, are just the heavy-laden pack horse.

That, I think, is why the Bible tells that story about Solomon, where God offered him anything and because he asked for wisdom, God honored him by giving him and power and wealth as well. Because let me tell you this, people: wisdom is as much a curse as it is a blessing, and the Bible is all about cheering for the guy who takes a curse on himself for someone else's benefit.

You're doubting me, aren't you? That's okay - it makes perfect sense to doubt a crazy person.

Let me try to explain it differently, though. If, as I have said, wisdom reveals to you which path will lead towards the most love, then as a creature for whom love is the highest pleasure, aim, and object of yearning (which, I am convinced, is a core human reality), it would seem that you would be thrilled to have greater insight into what that path is so you could take it. The problem arises, however, when you realize that Greater Love always includes in it Greater Love for Other People, and as much as you may want that love, there is another, strident yearning in your nature to just say, "Y'know what... screw wisdom and the horse it rode in on - I'm frickin' tired of looking out for what's good for other people in the big-picture-of-love sense. I wanna look out for me, right now! Big-picture love is a costly, time-consuming enterprise and I don't live in long time-stretches, I live in the right now. And in this instant, I want some frickin' mind-erasing pleasure!"

Back and forth it goes, these two elemental forces battling for dominance. The more you learn - the more wisdom you get - the greater the conflict. Selfish, right-now thinking is the oh-so-natural path of least resistance and only creates conflict when wisdom's love-o-scope blinks into operation. The presence of wisdom is not an inevitable precursor to wise choices. Although wisdom may reveal the way of love, it does jack-bo-diddly to actually move you towards it - all it really does is make it exquisitely painful to step in the opposite direction. Wisdom happens in the head, while the real battle rages on in the heart.

I find that no matter how much I might sometimes want to spend some non-thinking time with a woman, making myself feel better without a thought in my head for what it will take to increase the love in her life, the more time I spend getting to know her, the more wisdom reveals the more loving alternative.

Casual dating, then, becomes a painful proposition, as does casual sex, casual conversation, and casual emailing. I don't feel that every person I say "hello" to on the street has to become my best friend, but I do feel as though each human contact is an opportunity for real love and an opportunity to make another other-centric connection. Love is not satisfied with casual... it wants more, every single time.

And here's the kicker. Wisdom keeps insisting that women are all these amazing, wondrous, mysterious creations and demanding that I love them all. It has been suggesting to me that the best way to love them all is to make art. To write; to sing; to paint, and in so doing to throw my love out, un-exclusively, to them all.

Maybe, just maybe, there will come a day when my situation will shift and I will be able to afford the time to love all of them through my art and one of them in a more focused, interpersonal way as well. This does not, however, feel like that day. It feels, rather, that this is a day in a long continuum of days in which love will have to grow slowly, by inches, between me and a larger world. As much as I may want to live exclusively in the ever-selfish now, wisdom keeps insisting that I at least attempt to live a broader, more expansive love.

I am, as usual, only fumbling towards clarity. I may be horribly wrong and I it is just as likely that I will ignore the insight that I am giving, now, to you. Nonetheless, this is the way it seems to me to be. So curse you right back, Sophia... curse you right back. I'll do what you say but, dodge gambit, I don't have to like it!

---
* "Sophia" is Greek for "wisdom."

meet the jungle man

2010-10-17T06:13:00.000-07:00

This week's offering for GOOD magazine brings together my past and present worlds by talking about a man who has an important role in both of them, Mr. Daniel Fast. It doesn't have any anacondas in it, but I think you might enjoy the read.

in print

2010-10-11T16:10:00.000-07:00

When people ask me what it takes to be a writer - or rather, after I get my first book published and my publisher sends me on a book tour of small midwestern towns and some moon-eyed community college student asks me what it takes to be a writer - I think I will probably give the stock answer: read a lot of everything and write every day.

It sounds pretty straightforward, but it leaves out the part about rewriting. I spent this past week rewriting (for the quadrillianth time) my book and I have to say that it does not feel like writing. In fact, it feels a little bit like putting on nice clothes, hopping on a bicycle, and getting caught in a water-balloon rainshower. It's not that it is all that unpleasant - it's still writing and it's still fun - but it has more than enough of those, "I can't believe I'm doing this again!" moments.

Nonetheless, I think I have finally reached a point where my baby is almost-sorta-kinda starting to really show something without just telling it. Now where's that publisher?

blacklisted

2010-10-01T07:45:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, Austin the actor/director thought it necessary to post on my facebook wall that my writing has begun to "meander" and that I need to "tighten up." My first reaction, of course, was to tell him that his abdominals and glutes were starting to "meander" and that he ought to "tighten up." Then I remembered that yesterday morning I wrote a Buddha-Jesus dialog and ended up with six pages of unadulterated drivel, so I figured maybe Austin was right.

The antidote to meandering, in my experience, is a list. Lists don't meander, so for your reading pleasure I present my blacklist.

Barkingreed's Blackest of Blacklists:
1. Austin Herring
2. Unfocused, meandering writing
3. Antiperspirant
4. Styrofoam
5. Yellow # 5
6. Genetically modified salmon
7. Plastic
8. Excuses
9. Fashion
10. The wedding industry
11. War
12. Hegemonies
13. Extremely popular vampire romance books
14. Extremely popular "christian" end of the world books
15. Box stores
16. McMansions
17. Politics
18. Being trampled alive by goats
19. My own arrogance
20. Blacklists

Matt! Damon!

2010-09-29T06:07:00.000-07:00

I would like to add a note to an article I wrote about Matt Damon for GOOD magazine, an article that expresses the respect I have for this fellow "maker of stuff."

"I did not actually ask Matt Damon’s permission to use his name in this piece, so I think perhaps a small propitiatory act might be in order. The eighth of October is his fortieth birthday, and I think it would be swell if anybody who lives near one of his homes in Miami or Boston or LA were to go and chuck an apple over the fence into his back yard. He’ll know what it means."

So seriously. Go. Read the piece. Spread the word. Throw an apple.

please

2010-09-27T04:45:00.000-07:00

you woke me, again, with a kiss...
like this

did you feel that? yes that
that, that, that
was a knife, blunt, to the gut
did you feel how I felt when you kissed me?

GOOD

but

I don't mean it. I do. I don't. I do.
I love you.

I'm just having a hard time sleeping
with you creeping,
sleeping, slinking,
hap-hazarding my nights and

I love you.

but it's starting to wear so thin
so pretty (you're so pretty)
in my dreams
you're the girl in my dreams,
of my dreams
and i can't sleep
so pretty please stop

please do. don't. do.

I love you.

why I killed the electric car (that's right... it was ME)

2010-09-24T19:35:00.000-07:00

I am extremely suspicious of electric cars, and never more so than when I recently watched the commercial for the new Nissan Leaf. In it, a depressed polar bear migrated to suburbia to give a big thank-you hug to some yuppie. The implication being, I suppose, that all the wild things are just tickled silly about Nissan's Automotive Creation, a creation which--if only we buy enough of them--will stop the polar ice caps from melting.

The problems with this theory are multiplicitous. Even if I could ignore the offensiveness of the fact that some advertizing schmooze in Los Angeles thought I would be oblivious to the sad irony of splicing together National Geographic footage of wild bears with shots of a captive, “trained” polar bear being man-handled into unnatural settings to market yet another “eco-friendly” product, the metaphorical fur on my neck is still standing straight up.

I suppose it wouldn’t be so annoying if I really believed in the world-saving efficacy of the Nissan Leaf, but here is where my suspicion really kicks in: See, whenever anyone starts jumping up and down and screaming wild-eyed about how electric cars are the New Messiah because they use less gasoline, I start to wonder, “well, yeah… but where does the electricity come from?”

Not one to wonder for long when I have an abbreviated, probably-somewhat-inaccurate answer at my fingertips, I googled “sources of electricity in the US” and found that according to a 2009 study, 44.9% of the power in this country comes from coal.

This is fine if you like the idea of scraping the top layer off the earth and running it and all the living things on it through a garburetor and then vomiting it back out into a big, unattractive pile whilst creating tons and tons of noxious fumes and poisonous by-products. But me, I’m a little too fond of clean mountains with their tops on to go in for that sort of thing.

Our next main source of energy at 23.4% is Natural Gas; which, although it has “natural” in the title and is apparently less nasty than petroleum, is still pretty nasty stuff.

And how about nuclear? At 20.3% of our power generation, we are getting a lot of electron-juice by micro-slicing nature, and even though I’m not too fond of the idea that I live fairly close to another potential Chernobyl, nuclear power is pretty clean, right? Well, yeah… if you don’t care about your grandkids and all the still-toxic-for-another-bajillion-years radioactive waste that we’re forcing them to deal with, or the way the ecology of our waterways gets majorly disrupted by the massive amounts of water that nuclear power plants siphon off for cooling and then return to the ecosystem, super-heated and essentially dead.

That, of course, has nothing on the water-killing, ecosystem-destroying capacity of our next-most-prevalent power source (hydroelectric) – but who cares, right? It’s not like we need intact, living, healthy waterways to live. It’s not as though biodiversity is worthwhile for anything other than a little voyeuristic pleasure for a few hummer-driving yuppie kayakers, is it? I mean, geez, if we weren’t designed to find creative new ways to screw with the natural course of things, then what in God’s name are our brains for!?!

But even though I’m angry and cynical about how we have created almost all of our electric power with methods that seem expressly orchestrated to give a big middle finger to the health of the world I like to call home, it can still be argued fairly easily that the problem is not the electric car, but rather our methods of electricity production. If we simultaneously change those methods and develop the electric car, we’ll all come out better in the end, right?

Well, in a word: NO; because our problem goes much deeper than what type of car we drive or how we choose to power it. The problem, as always, lies right down in the core of things – deep down in the human heart. The problem is that we don’t care about the earth that sustains us. We don’t care about our grandchildren, or the people who live downstream. We are, in short, arrogant, selfish, narrow-minded and unloving people who are standing around peeing in the waterways, just because we like the sound it makes.

This makes NO sense, and nothing significant will change until we change our hearts - until we stop thinking that convenience is tantamount to survival. Until that happens, the electric car will be nothing more than another way to trick ourselves into a nice, warm, deluded sense of superiority.

Author’s Note: while mulling over the electric car, I came across a particularly apt quote by Wendell Berry:

“ The basic cause of the energy crisis is not scarcity: it is moral ignorance and weakness of character. We don’t know how to use energy or what to use if for. And we cannot restrain ourselves. Our time is characterized as much by the abuse and waste of human energy as it is by the abuse and waste of fossil fuel energy.”

daily quote:

2010-09-24T04:43:00.000-07:00

The arrogance of worldview insists on filling gaps in knowledge with preconceptions. Humility lets the gaps be, and wisdom goes even further and enjoys them.

echoes

2010-09-19T04:22:00.000-07:00

The racking sobs have gone, you know:

but in their place a dull, slow ache
takes me unawares when 'ere you find a way to slip into my dreams
and say hello.

And though it seems that this, too,
is bound to fade,
I think instead it's bound to grow more potent with the years.

For tears are a function of sweat, and eye, and blood;
but the dull, slow ache of love issues from
the very pores of the air:
an echo of all the words
I didn't care enough to say...

and now my dreams still speak them, anyway.

ahimsa

2010-09-17T05:28:00.000-07:00

I think perhaps I am becoming less of a violent stinkpot - or more of an utterly bonkers extremist (depending on your perspective).

I was just in the kitchen washing dishes and reached for a towel that happened to be the temporary home of a small wasp, which did not appreciate the interruption and showed its displeasure by stinging me on the finger. As I was reaching for something with which to smoosh its little exoskeleton to smithereens, it suddenly occurred to me to ask, why? Why do I feel justified in killing this tiny living creature, just for defending itself? I mean, it's not as if it was one of those vampiric little she-mosquitoes, going out of her way to steal some of my blood. If I was that wasp, I'd have stung me.

So instead of demanding retribution I got a jar, trapped the wasp, took it outside and let it go. Namaste, little hymenoptera apocrita.

A New Lover

2010-09-16T06:32:00.000-07:00

I have to confess that there are times when my bibliophilic tendencies push me to read (gasp!) textbooks. This is, of course, grossly embarrassing. Everyone knows education is just a gauntlet everybody's gotta run so they can get a job and so the government can feel it's done right by its citizenry.

Yeah, sure, you learn some random garbage along the way that theoretically expands you as a person and helps you sound smart at dinner parties - but you shouldn't want to actually read textbooks for fun, should you? I mean, that is ridiculous, right?

Nonetheless, I still end up reading textbooks from time to time. For example, I read some of my sister's business textbooks, most of my wife's University coursework, and a couple of months ago picked up a sociology book called "Uncoupling."

This, at least, makes a bit more sense, because although it is a collection of case studies compiled by a professional sociologist, those case studies are of people who have gone through the ending of long-term relationships - a process with which I am deeply (if not particularly willingly) involved. So when I found this "Uncoupling" book in a thrift store I was intrigued enough to shell out a quarter. As I began to read I decided it was totally worth the twenty-five cents, because in the stories of others I found endless commonalities with my own experience - similarities that helped me make sense of what has been such a senseless reality.

For example, the book said that the initiator of the breakup, struggling to construct an identity distinct from their partner, always finds some sort of transitional person. It can be a professional counselor, a buddy, or a lover - but pretty much every initiator finds a person who will affirm this decision and allow her to feel moored as she jumps out into the thrashing sea of identity-disturbance agitated by her decision to break her commitment and connection to her partner. Eventually, the book went on, the rejected partner - having resigned himself to the inevitability of his fate - likewise finds such a transitional person.

I might as well admit that the reason I am posting is that a couple of days ago I realized that I had done it. After a few false starts, I have taken a lover. Her name is Art, and she is the most seductive temptress I have ever met. Not only does she demand every spare second of my time (although I've got to admit I do sometimes resist her on this) but she is also absolutely insatiable. Even everything is not enough for her. It seems I'm always either playing her a song on my ukulele, writing her these endless letters, or drawing pictures for her.

I known, I know... it's stupid; but what can I do?!? I am deeply, head-over-heels in love, and even though the "Uncoupling" book said repeatedly that transitional people don't necessarily outlast the transition, this relationship is different. I just know it. I am aware that right now I am having to work really hard to please her and that later it won't be so effortless, but I get so much pleasure that I can't seem to help myself.

Words fail me, as words always fail to express the inscrutable exhortations of the soul. My lover, Art, is inexpressible. To talk about her is to dance about mathematics: perhaps my words can give a glimmer, but they have nothing on experience.

I think my feelings are perhaps better expressed with a video I discovered on the internets. Go. Watch. Experience. Now.

naked superpower

2010-09-12T11:47:00.000-07:00

If I was a superhero, I think I would be that kid in the movie "Mystery Men" who could make himself invisible... but only if he was naked and nobody was looking. This is partly because any superpower that requires nudity is just awesome, and partly because I seem to have an amazing ability to set impossible goals where it is impossible to determine if I have succeeded.

Like say, for example, this one: I want to live a life that is completely consistent with my values.

Now, I know you might say that we all live consistently within our values because actions reveal what our values truly are, but I think this is too simplistic an explanation of the often paradoxical, mysterious intersections of mind, body, spirit and will. Also, it implies that I value being a lazy, selfish, arrogant poop-head, which is just not true.

As I see it, the real problem with my goal of life/value consistency is a little more complicated. While my actions do reveal my values and (in a somewhat ironic twist) change those values into something else, the problem I have is that although I generally think I am doing things for noble reasons, I often discover after the fact that not only was I driven by an amalgamation of bizarre, misguided notions - but also the actions these notions inspired did not actually accomplish what they were meant to.

I realize that I'm getting off into esoteric Josh Barkingreed La-la land here, so let me bring it down to the practical land of yogurt. Or, to be less specific, my hap-hazard attempts to become the savior of the planet by walking a little more lightly over it.

I was talking to my Nova Scotian surfer-dude/social-worker friend Leland about this a couple of nights ago, and he brought up the matter of yogurt containers. Like me, Leland tries to buy food that is natural and organically-produced. He does this not only because he is trying to minimize the amount of chemicals accumulating in his fatty tissues, but also because he wants to do his part to stop strip-mining the soil of the nutrients of life. He was getting annoyed, however, that even eating health-conscious food didn't really seem to do the trick.

"It's so frustrating,' he said, "I've got like thirty of these stupid plastic yogurt containers under my sink. I know it's all about marketing and shipping and all that, but it's so frustrating that even the good yogurt is packaged this way - and recycling does not fix the problem."

There was a pause as he stewed on this.

"I know," I replied. "That's why I don't buy yogurt anymore. Don't get me wrong - I love me some good bacteria-infested milk - but I decided that I had to start considering not just the content of my food, but the packaging as well. Even my quasi-hippie friend JJ thinks I'm a bit nuts on this one. He says I can just use the containers as my tupperware; but I still can't seem to justify all that unnecessary plastic. I know, I know, I'm a crazy extremist... "

"No... No, I don't think so," Leland cut in, "I think that that is a radical form of protest... the sort we really need more of."

I gotta tell ya, it sure was good to hear something like that from an intellectual guy like Leland. I'm used to hiding these socially embarrassing behaviors of mine - like the fact that I won't wear antiperspirant because I don't want aluminum sulfate in my liver, or how I only ever buy other people's old clothes (and even that only after my old clothes are more hole than fabric). It is embarrassing to admit the way I turn off and unplug appliances, or how I don't have a cell phone because I can't really justify spending an extra bajillion dollars a month on another piece of landfill-bound plastic I absolutely do not need.

The problem, however, is again my understanding of the dubious value and effectiveness of my superhuman actions. As amazing as they obviously are, these tiny, itty-bitty, indistinguishable actions accomplish pretty much nothing at all; and as much as I try to live consistently with what I at least want my values to be, I inevitably fall just a little bit short. There is always a weensie bit more I could have done.

My friend Leland might say that I should not let it bother me - that guilt is a horrible motivator and that I cannot possibly bear the weight of the ecological sins of the world... and he would be right. I don't want to spend my life feeling guilty for things that are out of my control - but that still doesn't change my values or my failure-awareness.

Victor Frankl once said that people are like airplanes flying into a crosswind. To get where they want to go, he said, they have to fly off course, into the wind. Then and only then are they capable of arriving at their goal and achieving their potential. I will not clean up the oceans and I will not solve the drinking water crisis and I will not by the sweat of my brow become a messiah for the new generation. But I will attempt with every bucket of yogurt I do not eat to remember to live in greater and greater awareness of the fact that things are not all right and that I can make a difference, however small.

Therefore, I will say nuts to everybody who notices how nuts I am being and I will live on in my impossible dream... even if no one ever notices my billowing, invisible cape.

A Tale of Two Circles: Revisited

2010-09-09T06:19:00.000-07:00

I have a literary crush on Wendell Berry. I love the way he arranges words and the things he makes them say. Shortly after I first read his essay "Why I am Not Going to Buy a Computer" two summers ago, I decided to act on that crush. So I stalked him down on the computerwebs and wrote him a letter, asking if mayhaps when I was in his neck of the woods visiting a friend I could pop in for a visit. It didn't work out that summer, or the next, but his responses were always kind and grace-filled.

This inspired me, in a fit of expansive presumptuousness, to mail him the following bit of writing in hopes that he could spare me an opinion or two. He could and did, and although I will not violate his courtesy by quoting his response directly, I will say that he was characteristically kind and encouraging. What is more, he did me the favor of throwing in a word of constructive criticism, absolutely free.

When Wendell Berry gives advice, you follow it, so I sat down to re-write and have decided to post the results of this edit. The last time I slapped it on here, someone was kind enough to suggest that I was most likely on drugs when I wrote it. I offer it again, therefore, but with Wendell Berry's approval.

So there.

A Tale of Two Circles

The

First Circle

In the old days of The Land of Cowboys, things were simpler. There were only two types of hats: white and black. If you wore a white hat, you were a good guy. If you wore a black hat, you were a bad guy. If there were any questions, all you had to do was listen to the music.

Time kept on trudging, however, and black and white were left behind as the world gradually turned to color. The soundtrack faded and everyone began to notice they were living in a world where things were complicated. They became aware that there were cultures different than their own, whole groups of people who believed in things like, say, “modesty of dress,” just like they did, but who did not happen to believe that there was anything particularly evil about the female nipple. These people were not only refusing to wear the appropriate hats, they sometimes wore no hats at all - or anything else for that matter! Sometimes all they wore were gourds.

There was one group, in a place called “The Church,” that up until the color change had been totally in charge. They had created complex hierarchical structures that discouraged diversity and maintained strict definitions of right and wrong, good and bad—down to the tiniest details. But now that the world was becoming colorful, people began to have opinions of their own. They began to wonder if they, perhaps, could decide for themselves what was right or wrong. This produced the sort of results you would expect, but although The Church reacted strongly by attempting infiltrate the power structures that were gradually replacing their own, in time they lost the clout necessary to be able to lovingly convince folks of the error of their ways with pointed words and a well-placed, red-hot poker. This was absolutely terrifying for The Church. The truth was at stake, after all, and it was getting hard to tell who were the good guys.

At this point, someone had a wonderful idea:

“Let’s circle the wagons. We’ll make an encampment here and we’ll grab those red hot pokers they won’t let us use anymore and we’ll brand the words ‘Good Guys’ right across our own foreheads. We won’t have to worry about the fact that nobody is wearing their hats anymore—we’ll be able to tell by the brands!

“If anyone wants to add their wagon to the circle, we’ll gladly brand their faces and invite them into the club. It may get a bit cramped in here, yes, and we may have to ignore some pretty obvious things—like sanitation and the hunger pangs in our bellies—but that’s a small price to pay for certainty, so it’s worth it. Besides, if we get too short on food, we can just eat the children.

“We can sit here inside these wagons and throw rocks at anyone who rides by and refuses to join the club and take the brand. That way we’ll never get corrupted and we won’t have to notice our tattered clothes, stinking facilities, and the bone-strewn, grassless circle of land we are living in.”

They talked it over and decided it was a good plan. There really didn’t seem to be any other way to ensure that they would always know that there were good guys, and that they were them. If someone was going to be telling people what The Church was all about, they had better make darn tootin’ sure it was the good guys. So that is what they did.

They discovered, however, that the branding did not last. There seemed to be something in the air around their camp, a sort of insidious balm that, despite their best intentions, caused the marks they made to heal. As the pain of branding faded, so did the scars; and in only a few short days you could not tell at all that they had ever been there. The people in The Church were therefore forced to brand each other repeatedly, and so lived their lives in nearly constant pain. In time, though, they began to get used to it. They forgot what it was like to live without the branding.

The

Second Circle

A little ways off –within sight but out of throwing range—there was a second circle: a drum circle. Like all drum circles, this one had no outer boundary. Instead, it was a loose arrangement of people gathered around a blazing fire, having a wild and crazy party. All day long, they would sing and dance and enjoy themselves. They loved this, and were so grateful to be alive and to have a sense of the joy of life.

From time to time they had to go back to tend to their work in the surrounding countryside, but they always took that joy with them and always felt like they were still at the party. They had a tendency to smile, and to whistle while they worked. Because they were happy and having a good time, they liked pretty much everybody who came by their fields and gardens and were thrilled when new people passed their way. They smiled and waved and said howdy—which seemed a bit strange to these travelers, considering that the last people they had passed had just thrown rocks at them. Often this made them stop, and they would ask the gardeners why they were so happy.

The drum-circle gardeners were so joyful about their party (and so sure that the more dancers and revelers there were, the merrier it would be) that they would point towards the sound of the drums and say, “Just head towards the party. There is lots and lots to eat and drink and it’s so much fun! Do you drum? That’s fun, too, if you want, but you are welcome to just go and enjoy the company.”

Gradually, the drum circle got bigger. It grew and grew and grew, until it was hard to tell where it started or finished. It was still open on all sides, except for one area near the middle, where a large circle of beautiful, flowering trees had sprung up. When the children would ask why they were there, the adults would just laugh and say, “because.”

Circles Collide

The circle of trees annoyed the people of the first circle very much. They told their children (the ones they hadn’t eaten) that it only looked like it was made of flowering trees, but that they were actually big, pointy hate-machines that killed small children. They threw a lot of rocks at the trees and the trees were hurt by them, but they always grew more blooms. This seemed very suspicious and ugly and anti-Church to them, and only made them believe their hate-machine story all the more.

One day, a young man named Frank, who had just had his face branded, was sitting under the wagons, looking outwards and trying to catch a whiff of clean, blossomy breeze. He knew he shouldn’t, but his head hurt and he thought it might make him feel better. As he peered through the thick trees, he saw what looked like flickering lights. Because he was in more pain than usual and wasn’t thinking right, he got up and walked towards them. He walked right up under the big, pointy hate-machines and right through them and out into the middle of the circle, where someone promptly said “how-do” and handed him an enormous hamburger.

It was the juiciest, tastiest burger he’d ever eaten. He started to smile, and as he did he noticed that the pain in his forehead was almost entirely gone – had dissipated, in fact, as he had walked towards the second circle. Then the same person gave him a goblet of something cool and sweet and bubbly to drink, and he warmed right up inside as all the rest of the pain vanished without a trace. He found that for the first time in his life, he was genuinely happy.

Suddenly, a wave of guilt swept over him. He had forgotten all about The Church! He looked around and saw that there wasn’t a “good guy” burn mark in sight. The only person with anything similar looked to be the guy who had handed him the burger and the cool/warm drink –and all he had were some weird scars on his hands and feet and back, which were all bare naked. The man was only wearing a pair of flowered, knee-length Bermuda shorts. Frank knew that exposed skin was a terribly bad thing and that he ought to run back to the circle of the wagons as quickly as possible. But he was very scared and lonely and a little bit curious, so he asked the man what his name was.

“Joshua,” he replied, “you want to come join my party?”

“Oh,” Frank said, “Is this your party?”

“Well, mine and anyone’s who is willing to enjoy some good food, drink, dancing and drumming. Check this crazy beat!”

And with that, he grabbed a djembe and began to play such a dizzying, intoxicating rhythm that Frank could not help himself. He ripped off his shirt and started flailing it around in the air, dancing like a man possessed. Somewhere in the back of his mind this worried him—this sense of possession—but he was having so much fun that he soon forgot all about it, and he danced and ate and sang and danced and even drummed a little himself.

As time went on, he began to notice something strange: while this Joshua fellow seemed to be setting the rhythm for the whole, wide-ranging party, each of the partiers was adding to that rhythm his or her own little piece of music, and the end result was a glorious, throbbing aural environment. It filled the air and it filled the earth and it filled Frank so that he wondered how he had never heard it before.

During a restful pause in the music, he asked Joshua about this, and Joshua became very sad. “Well, he said... you could. It was always there, but the circled wagons were muffling the sound, and the pain from the constant brandings made a ringing in your ears, so that you could barely make out the slightest hint of my rhythm.”

Frank was very sad about this as well. He thought about all the fun he had been having the last while, and he began to wish that the people back in the circle of the wagons could experience it as well. He looked Joshua right in the eyes and he said, “Joshua, what do I need to do to make those people able to come enjoy the party.”

Joshua just smiled a sad smile and said, “There really isn’t anything you can do to make anyone enjoy the party. The only way a person can enjoy the party is to let the brand fade and disappear. Everybody is welcome at my party, but no ‘Good Person’ will ever come. They have to decide, as you did, to walk outside of the circle of wagons and eat and drink at the party. Then the brand will fade and they will be able to see that they are just like everybody else.”

Frank was very sad... and a little bit confused. “But, Joshua” he said, “I didn’t decide to come to the party. My head was just hurting really bad and I thought I saw something flickering through the trees.”

At this, Joshua laughed. He laughed and laughed and laughed. And then he picked up his djembe and started to drum with reckless abandon. Frank wasn’t sure why, but this made him very happy. It also showed him what he needed to do. He walked back towards the circle of trees and then through them, carrying a djembe of his own. As he went he sang. It was a joyous song, a song full of Joshua’s laughter, a song that rode the rhythm of the party. This time as he left the circle of the trees, he could hear the sounds of the party all around him, and he called out to the good people of The Church to come and join the drum circle with everybody else.

Even in their pain, they heard him. They came to the edge of the circle and they saw someone who looked like someone they had once known, hitting on something that made no noise. They called out to him, asking him to come and be branded, but he just kept singing and hitting and dancing. They tried and tried and tried, but nothing worked. He was off in his own little world, completely unable to hear the good news they were proclaiming to him. He seemed to be crying.

Pretending to be sad themselves (but glad, if the truth be told, of a little excitement), they took up their stones and, calling out blessings, stoned Frank to death.

a love story

2010-09-04T17:31:00.000-07:00

Once upon a time there was a man who had everything. He was tall, broad-shouldered, cleft-jawed, and really, really intelligent. He was talented at anything he tried and even stuff he didn't. His teeth were straight and so was his shooting, and although he was powerful and rough and could bake you a gourmet cake in the dream kitchen he built with his own hands, behind his granite exterior he was also very sensitive and felt that something, somehow, was missing.

Also once upon a time there was a woman who seemed to have everything. Her teeth were straight and her neck was lovely. She was strong, in her womanly way, but was also very soft and delicate. She had flawless skin and a body that only grew hair at the top - everywhere else was as hairless as one of those ridiculous Mexican dogs. Her waist, ankles and eyebrows were narrow, her legs were long, her perfectly-matched, fawn-like breasts were gravity-defying, and her eyes sparkled like there was starlight in them (or vizine) - but there wasn't any starlight or vizine, she was just that way. Despite how Mary-Poppins-Esque she was, however, she too was convinced that something was missing.

One day, the man and the woman who had everything met and realized that what they did not have was each other. They realized that they were perfectly suited in every possible way, and although they had their little tiffs (as lovers do), things were really, really great. Sex was effortless, wild, and always mutually fulfilling. They had to compromise on a lot of things, sure, but never had to make any major sacrifices because they mostly wanted all the same things. Neither of them ever, ever thought about what it would be like with anyone else. They fulfilled all their dreams, had the exact number of children that they each wanted, and lived happily ever after.

---

As you may have guessed, that was a fairy story. It is not real and did not happen, but is more or less the exact story that has been educated, pounded and bamboozled into the head of every man and woman in North America - even the heads that think they are too full of brains to be taken in by such drivel.

Let me tell you a different story - a true one. It goes like this:

Once upon a time there was a man who was first a boy, a mix of all that is good and evil about humanity. As he grew and his body changed, he looked at what the men around him were like and tried to copy them because he wanted to fit in and be loved. This man saw men who were violent and men who were gentle, so he stumbled around vacillating between the two. He acted tougher than he felt, and was embarrassed by this. He desired women, and in time came to believe that he ought to have a woman like the one in the fairy story - a "perfect" female who would fulfill all the ludicrous fantasies he had been taught to believe a woman existed to fulfill.

Somewhere else, a little girl grew up being told how to be desirable - how to get men to want her. The implication in this lesson was that men did not already want her and that she would have to learn how to earn that desire. So she learned. She watched closely and imitated all the bizarre, self-mutilating behaviors of older, more experienced women. She wanted to be loved by men and by the other women, who seemed most interested in being around the women that men wanted most - the ones who looked and acted most like fairy-tale women. As she grew older she liked to think that she knew better - that she did not need a man's approval to feel worthwhile. But still...

One day, the man and the woman met. Because everything about their meeting was just right and because they both believed in the fairy story, electricity and pheromones started to crackle and arc between them and it occurred to both of them that this was IT. The fairy story was happening at last! And to them!

The power of this story and (perhaps more importantly) their belief in the power of this story overwhelmed them and they rode for a while on the wave of it, as giddy as a couple of surfers who had just caught the perfect break.

Then something happened. Perhaps the wave went under a pier, or around some rocks, or over a reef that because of its shape shifted the flow of sub-currents. Whatever it was, one and eventually both of them got a sense that the narrative wave was about to crash and boil. In that moment, they understood the story for what it was - a fantasy and a lie.

The story was powerful, though, and jealous. It needed characters to live and would not go gently back into that broad sea from which it came. It kept right on tumbling the lovers, bouncing them off pier-pillars and rocks, scraping them across razor-sharp coral until one of them said, "You know what? Screw this! I know I wasn't promised a rose garden, but this is ridiculous. Nobody said anything about bloody cuts and plate-sized bruises - I'm out of here!"

This person left the story to try to find another narrative, one that would follow its proper course. And the abandoned person, seeing no other options, did the same.

On and on this process repeated for both of them until one day, one of them woke up and said, "Wait a minute... maybe the problem isn't my piss-poor ability at picking co-protagonists for my perfect story. Maybe, maybe, maybe... well, maybe the solution is just to recognize that the whole story is screwed top to bottom, and the only way to begin to heal it and to stitch the narrative strands back together is to stop believing in the frickin' lie and start loving another broken person just the way they are!"

And at that point - right then and absolutely no sooner - there began to be a love story.

It's GOOD to cut your face off!

2010-08-31T16:50:00.000-07:00

And it's extra specially GOOD to do it here.

steal this music! (or not)

2010-08-26T06:30:00.000-07:00

I try not to gush too effusively about musicians I like - mostly because I don't really know much of anything about music and am afraid to expose my ignorance to a more knowledgeable public. So I think, instead, I will endorse some music I like as a concept, a group known as Elisaray.

There a two reasons why, conceptually, I like this band. The first is that they are local. My little brother hangs out with the vocalist guy, who is the little brother of one of my friends. So I - who think that real, live music ought to be a part of the creation and experience of community - think that this band is groovaliggytastic.

The second reason is that they are letting you pay whatever you want to for their albums. This is, I think, one of the most intriguing and bizarre developments that has come about because of the knowledge explosion (implosion?) of the internet. The facility of web-based file-sharing has democratized music, rendering creative licensing laws impotent, if non-existent. This has wrenched the control of music out of the hands of Massive Corporations, who have discovered that they cannot legislate morality on the internet.

While I tend to think that stealing music is bad mojo, I am very much a fan of the response of many musicians to this challenge to their livelihood: they have posted their music online and have given the consumer the right to choose what they wish to pay for IT. This is, of course, ridiculous and un-American. It is also profoundly delightful and, for many of these artists, has actually worked. Apparently there are a lot of people out there who resent being treated like a cog in the consumer machine, but don't mind dishing out money to directly support musicians they like. Although there are no doubt many freeloaders, the practically negligible distribution costs of the internet allow many artists to actually make as much or more money than before.

So do me a favor: go to this website. Listen to the music. Click on the other album they have on bandcamp and listen to it, too. It's sort of a "Damien Rice meets Bob Dylan meets Sufjan Stevens" thing.

If you like it, listen to it it again. If you still like it, then BUY IT. Honor the trust they have given you and help real, live musicians continue to make real, live music.

cut your face off

2010-08-22T15:01:00.000-07:00

Americans throw away around two billion razors a year. Are you an American? Did you throw away a razor this year?

If you answered yes to both those questions, then I am sorry to say that you are being a stupid-head. Go out right now, buy yourself a straight-edged razor, and start practicing. Razor cuts are sexy.

If, however, you have an aversion to staining the necklines of your nice white shirts with your own blood, then I suggest you go online and get yourself a razor sharpener.

Or, if you don't feel like buying yet another plastic object destined for a landfill or the Pacific Ocean, then every time you shave, whet your arm and run the razor backwards with the grain of your hair about twenty times. My hippie-ish friend JJ told me about it. I was incredulous, too, but I've been doing it and my blade's gotten sharper.

If, however, you think that my rate of razor usage is one-disposable-razor-every-two-years too many, then chuck the razor completely and go au natural, like God made you. Don't you know that messing with God's design is an abomination? Let it grow, baby. Let it grow.

I'd join you, but my facial hair is stubbornly hap-hazard and apparently high school teachers aren't allowed to look like their patchwork-faced students. Dang.

Petering Hope

2010-08-21T10:14:00.000-07:00

A year ago I went to camp in the mountains with the students and faculty of my school. When I came back, my wife was gone. This was not a surprise, but it was a shock... a shock to walk in the door and deflate onto a hard, weathered wooden chair by the dining room table in the now-cavernous emptiness of our house - of my house.

It has been the worst of years; and it has been the best. Forced by another's choice to face my ugly brokenness, I was able to find some measure of freedom - to learn the love of self that would allow me to forget myself enough to notice and love other people. In this year of paradoxes I have rejoiced in the awesome loveability of others. I have seen the human beauty that has always surrounded me and have loved in new friends the wonder of their uniquely-reflecting facets of the Divine.

This year has been a good one. I have smiled and laughed more than I have cried and cursed the sky, but I have to admit that in the past few weeks the grey tide has risen and springs of hope I thought to be eternal have dissipated indistinguishably into the unrelenting, dismal sea. The lonely passage of my birthday and anniversary have reminded me of what would no longer be, and despite my belief that "love wins," at times I have felt myself to be endlessly sinking into a bottomless funk.

It was a bit easier three days ago, therefore, to retreat again to the mountains. This time there was no new emptiness to return to - only anticipation of the dull thud of the ax-blow as her legally-mandated year-of-waiting came to an end. Disjointed confusion was replaced by a hollowed acceptance as I prepared myself to recieve the papers I had always thought were impossible.

It was in that frame of mind that I entered the meeting hall of the retreat center on the second night of our stay to hear a concert by Andrew Peterson of Nashville, Tennessee. I have to admit that I was none too optimistic - as an artist there is very little explicitly "Christian" music that I do not find offensive for its saccharine dishonesty and poor craftsmanship, and I did not relish the thought of spending an hour and a half in a packed hall feeling sorry for the guy as hundreds of teenagers (who generally have better tastes than their elders) grew more and more restless and distracted.

I need not have worried.

Andrew is a masterful storyteller, a consummate performer, and a gifted artist. He held those kids in his thrall with anecdotes, humor, and musical wisdom. At the end they were begging for more and I... I just sat there, crying. I did not know for sure why that was, but perhaps it was because what he was singing about more than anything else was hope (more, even, than the evil mind-control conspiracy that is Peruvian-Mexican cheese dip). He told story after story of hope in a way that did not attempt to gloss over the often excruciating impossibility of it. He sang of brokenness, weakness and despair. He admitted failure. And as I sat there crying, wondering where my grace was and why the love-against-odds of his stories seemed so absent in my life, I remembered that I was surrounded by colleagues and students who had loved me through this most ugliest of years.

Between two of his songs, Peterson began talking about the Lord of the Rings and the determination of the impossibly outmatched Hobbits. He related how in one of his darkest moments, Samwise Gamgee looked up through a break in the dark clouds and drew hope from the untouchable beauty of a distant star. Peterson went on to add that despair is not just wrong - it is a mistake - because it presupposes that I, the sufferer, know the end of the story... that I somehow know for sure that there is no chance whatsoever for things to be made well.

My sorrow did not evaporate. My life was not fixed. But hope, for a while forgotten, peeked once again through a gap in the darkness and loaned me the courage to go on.

in which I introduce a new level of self-reflexivity (obsession?)

2010-08-17T18:28:00.000-07:00

Well, yes... since you asked: I did in fact write another little bit for GOOD. You may look at it here. Or here. Or even here. N-choi.

the dialectics of home-wrecking

2010-08-14T19:29:00.000-07:00

I sabotaged a friendship once, trying to save it.

One balmy summer night when I was in University I caught a ride over to a girl named Annie's* house with my friend Chris the Rock Star, and partway there he turned to me and said, "Josh, I have something to tell you before..." but before he could finish I cut in,

"Oh, that you have a mad crush on Annie and are thinking of hooking up with her when y'all are over in Lithuania?"

To which he, of course, said... "What the f...?!?"

because nobody really expects you to be able to read their mind. The fact is, though, that human minds always bend in a few very common directions, and if you pay attention and get to know a person, you can generally tell in which direction they seem to be leaning. I consider myself to be something of a student of human behavior and Chris was one of my very bestest human friends, so reading his intonation and body language wasn't all that hard.

"Yeah. I'm just super smart." I said.

"So... what do you think?"

And that's where I got stupid. Because even though I said I was smart and made a pretty concerted effort to convince people that I had it all together, the truth was that Chris was one of my only friends, and I was dead-scared to lose him. Annie had been a mutual acquaintance and fun enough to hang out with. I liked her, even; but her dukes-up attitude intimidated me and she wasn't at all the sort of person I would have designed for Chris to be with. The Josh-Barkey-Designed-For-Chris-Type-Girl was sort of a hippie: quiet and ethereally beautiful, with wavy, wispy blonde hair. She wrote poetry while sitting in meadows, valued her alone time, and went dumpster-diving just for kicks and giggles. Annie was not that girl. In fact, she was sort of the opposite of that girl and if you really got down to brass tacks, the truth is that I was a lot more like that girl than Annie.

It made sense to me, though, because Chris was my friend. I had him first and I was not about to just let him go for some girl. So I pretended to know better. I told Chris that Annie really did not seem like his type, and when they came back from their semester of study in Lithuania as a newly minted couple, I conveyed my displeasure in a thousand subtle and not-so-subtle ways.

Chris's heart, of course, did not care about my bizarre sense of friend-entitlement, so all I ended up doing was edging Chris a little further away and Annie a lot further away: it really hurts when one of the best friends of the man you love tries to convince him that you're bad news.

As it turned out, however, it was I who was bad news. In some strange way I could not understand, Annie was great for Chris. She was very different than him, but those differences forced him to change in what I can now see were positive ways. Because of her influence, for example, irresponsible, undependable Chris started to pause before making promises he was unlikely to keep. I began to be able to count on him for the follow-through, and it strengthened our own relationship. The path to healing was long and hard, though, and the stitching barely complete by the day, two years ago, that I emigrated from Canada for the last time. There were tears in Chris' eyes as he slipped me a CD of his un-released music (a serious demonstration of trust and love for a professional musician) and Annie's hug, too, bore an unmistakable and genuine sadness.

Now, I know that although there is little in my actions that is particularly surprising or altogether uncommon, I never cease to be amazed at the capability I have for not only making irrational life choices, but for repeating them ad nauseum.

Last night Austin the Actor/Director (one of my closest, dearest friends in this area) began a relationship with a girl named Timbits** - whom I, also, have been thinking is pretty incredible. She wears clothes she finds in trash cans, cuts her own hair, doesn't wear make-up, thinks holistic food is important, owns no car, draws better than I do, is smart and funny, and (as a bonus) is good-looking enough to turn a lot of guys into gibbering... well, gibbons.

Now, this is not exactly a problem. I am after all still legally married for, say, another month, and Austin (who also plays the role of my mom) has informed me that I have to wait a minimum of a year before I can even think about a relationship with a woman, so "kings to him" and no hard feelings. Except...

...except when Austin and I first started hanging out about a year ago when my marriage was going down the pooper fast, we discovered that despite our very different life paths we were sort of kindred spirits, and were consequently bound to be attracted to the exact same sort of girl - a very, very rare sort of girl who was pretty much exactly like, say, this girl Timbits. We concluded that we would tear each other to pieces over this sort of girl and it would inevitably be the end of our friendship. The best thing to do if we met such a girl, we figured, was to sit her down, tell her we were going to be competing for her affections, and ask her to outline a series of labors we'd have to complete - with spoils going to the victor.

It was a joke, of course, and doesn't really much matter because I'm still married and Austin is a glamorous actor/director with a rapier wit and a winning smile made of better teeth than mine. Nonetheless, it did make me pause. And by pause, I mean, "get sort of depressed." I mean, what the farfignoogan is so wrong with me, right!?! How come the ladies... and I'm not exactly the Hunchback of... and, well, you get the picture.

So tonight, Austin came over for my birthday gathering and as we hung out I got more and more depressed as he and Timbits texted each other back and forth every fifteen seconds and then it hit me... I thought:

"DANGit! I'm doing it all over again! The situation is different, but once again I am figuring I am going to lose a good friend to a girl. Instead of facing that fear, I am allowing my emotions to pile up, deflecting them into a bucket of sour-grapesology and creating the very sort of negative vibe that always leads prophecies to fulfill themselves."

So what do I do now? If I am going to continue to be friends with Austin, I am going to have to be friends with Timbits as well, and as much as I believe I need to learn to be friends with women, a big part of me is really used to thinking it isn't possible - not when they are the sort of women that Austin and I have agreed we would one day kill each other over.

I am, as they say, at a loss; so I do what I always do these days and try to regain my composure by sitting down and banging out a few thousand regenerative words. I take what's inside and vomit it out onto the internet (along with the personal lives of my friends and family) in the hopes that this indecent exposure will somehow set me free.

The truth is, I feel better. I do. Knowing that Austin's going to be pissed at me if/when he reads this and that Timbits - who barely knows me - is going to be massively awkward the next time we hang out, I do feel much, much better. There is nothing more effective for dissipating bad vibrations than to spin them off onto other people. Color me amused.

Besides, Austin and Timbits will make a marvelous couple. They will. I mean, just watch them texting... it's beautiful.***

.
---

*Yeah, I made that name up. I'm just like that.
**That one, too. Like, no duh.

***I know that was low. I'm venting. I love you both, Austimbits.

paying your philoso-fees

2010-08-12T18:11:00.000-07:00

School bells are once again ringing (or buzzing) in their belfries, so this week I found myself back at work, sitting through another Continuing Education Unit. Generally it is the uncomfortable chairs that keep me alert, but this time I found the speaker quite engaging, challenging, and somewhat philosophical.

At one point, he raised this ethical question, "A man is driving along in a two-seater car and he sees three people stranded by the side of the road: an old lady who is dying, a friend who had once saved his life, and the woman of his dreams - his absolute soul mate. He can only pick up one of them and the hospital is too far away to go and come back."

The speaker then asked what the man should do. For several seconds, the room was dead silent. He looked around the room and asked again, "does anyone know how to solve this man's conundrum?"

And I, being stupid, raised my hand.

"Josh knows," one of my co-workers yelped.

The speaker turned to me and nodded, so I said:

"I tend to feel that these sorts of ethical questions are pretty much all false dilemmas. They are really just word games thrown out there to make us feel as though we are being forced to choose between a number of evils: letting a woman die, neglecting a moral debt, or ignoring an important relationship. The truth, though, is that it's all hypothetical. There is no way the man could actually know that the woman was his soul mate just by looking at her. Neither could he know if taking the old lady or the man to whom he owed his life would actually be doing either of them any good. He could pick them up, drive fifty feet down the road and get hit by a rolling boulder - with his decision essentially killing the person he was trying to help. I know that it's supposed to raise questions about moral intent, but it seems to me that you can't separate questions of intent from questions of causality, and that ethical dilemmas always presuppose perfect knowledge of an inevitable causality - which is, of course, ludicrous."

(Or at least, that's how I would have said it, if I had been a lotta bit more eloquent; but you get the gist).

The speaker chuckled and said, "Looks like we've got a real philosopher on our hands," and all my co-workers laughed and grunted their agreement.

"Well, there is a solution," the speaker said, after a moment's pause. "The man handed the keys of his car over to the guy who'd saved his life so he could drive the old lady to the hospital, then he stayed there by the road and started a relationship with the woman of his dreams."

Gerk.

I guess it goes to show ya that philosophy, while an interesting way to pass time, is just another type of word game. Either that, or that the sages are right and "it is better to keep your mouth shut and be thought a fool than to open it and remove all doubt."

a little more behind-the-scenes

2010-08-12T13:58:00.001-07:00

'Unemployment' Slo Mo Set from Enid Valu on Vimeo.

behind the scenes of the film-in-progress

2010-08-08T07:56:00.001-07:00

Community Pool from Enid Valu on Vimeo.

a couple of snaps from the set

2010-08-08T07:49:00.000-07:00

Austin the Director threatens Cameron the Cameraman with a volleyball

at the unemployment office

couch surfing

2010-08-04T19:10:00.000-07:00

There are some things you never notice about yourself unless there's an outsider around to point them out. For example, I was at my brother's house last year and his wife happened to walk by the bathroom and burst out laughing when she saw me brushing my teeth. She said, "ha, hah! You and Jo-Ben both do that."

And I said, "whu... what?"

And then she said, "you both rinse the toothbrush, suck the last bit of water off it, spit it in the sink, and then put the toothbrush away."

At first, of course, I thought she was crazy. I mean, everybody does that, right? But then I started noticing that they didn't do that, and that my brother and I do, in fact, share a bizarre little peccadillo.

My point is that if you really want to know how weird you are, invite a stranger into your life... or even, a lot of strangers. All of them, in fact. That's what I did this past year when I signed up for couchsurfing, which is an awesome little social networking site that does just what it sounds like by allowing you to stick it to The Man (you know, the one who owns all those ridiculously-priced hotels) by opening your home and your couch to total strangers.

Don't get me wrong, it isn't as intimidating as it sounds. There are a variety of safeguards to make sure you are not going to wake up in the middle of the night missing your eyeballs or your cat or your favorite pair of underpants - but once those safeguards are out of the way, you are free to have a wild and ka-razy time with whatever random travelers happen to pop in.

Last weekend, I hosted my first couchsurfing guest. His name is Anders, he's a Swede from Switzerland, and by some freak shift in the molecular structure of the universe, I happened to get lucky and actually beat him in a game of chess. Over the two-and-a-half days he stayed with me, we had a great time doing a variety of North Carolina things and Anders - who was driving down the East Coast from New York to New Orleans to see, as he put it, "a non-Hollywood America" - drove away satisfied.

We went to a Peruvian restaurant, played Tennis, walked around the metropolis of Waxhaw, shared recipes and meals, and (irony of ironies) managed to get Anders a role as an extra in my friend Austin the Actor's latest short film. That's us, pictured below with the Assistant Director and one of the Production Assistants. Anders and I are the guys in the striped ties. Nifty, eh?

The best part, though, was sharing great talks on just about everything we could think of - from home ownership, to abortion, to swiss cheese. It was super-illuminating to hear one Swedish-Swiss guy's perspective on the world and my life, so I thought I would make sure I got on here to tell you to get up off your own couch and go make it available on couchsurfing.com.

That's right... right. this. minute.

hard things that suck

2010-08-02T17:50:00.000-07:00

In a recent interview People magazine asked Tom Cruise what the least favorite part of his workout was and he replied "All of it. It's brutal. I feel good when done, but not during. "

Ignore for the moment the fact that I am quoting Tom Frickin' Cruise (and in People magazine, nonetheless), and I think we can all agree that there might be something to what Mr. Chisel-Nose is saying.

See, I read that little tidbit because People magazine was just about the only reading material available on the set of a film I was working on today. Around mid-afternoon, I decided to drive home and when I got there, it was just about time for my own workout - which I, too, hate. As I sat there in my art room, pumping iron and getting... not huge, but a little less skinny... I thought to myself, "you know what? I really, really hate this. If it wasn't for those ten, rippling pounds I committed myself to trying to gain, I would not be doing this right now."

So I thought about hard things that suck. I thought about some of those hard, sucky things - things like working out - that I do because I have a goal - a goal that will not be realized unless I work to make it a reality.

I thought as well about how there are also hard things that suck and don't get me to a goal - things like trying not to break down crying when I am talking to my son over the phone because it makes me start thinking about how I cannot give him the stable, unbroken home of my dreams. Now that sucks, and I have no pithy answers. All I know is that when I read earlier today about Tom Cruise hating his workout, I thought, "yer dang skippy, Tom-Tom. And if you - who spend your whole life trying to look pretty - hate doing it... well, maybe it's okay if I struggle, too."

No pithy answers. Not today. Today, there is nothing but hope... hope, and the belief that by sharing my broken heart, you, too, will find a little more strength for another hard, sucky thing.

confessions of a weirdo

2010-07-28T20:32:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, Austin the Actor and I met with the sound guy for his upcoming film and then did some last-minute location scouting. When we were done we went back to Austin's place and when he sat down and started playing a video game it hit me: I do not play video games. I mean I have, but that was a long time ago and only for a little while. After this thought sunk in, I started to think about the other things that most everybody in this culture does for fun and I realized, I don't do any of those things. I am really, really weird. For example...

I do not watch professional sports - not at all, not ever. I am pretty much done with snowboarding, wakeboarding, or any other sport that requires me to set a whole lot of fossil fuel on fire. I do not enjoy talking about cars, or any other sort of machines. I have a motorcycle, but it is the most boring, wussy motorcycle you can buy and I ride it primarily for fuel economy. I am not into guns, or shopping malls, or fashion. Although I really like movies and sometimes watch TV on my computer, I do not actually own a television and that doesn't bother me one bit. Nor does it bother me that I do not own a cell phone or a credit card.

I do not smoke cigarettes, nor do I smoke drugs. In fact, I have never put any form of mind-altering drugs into my body (except prescription painkillers, and I always quit taking them before I'm supposed to). Although I will happily overindulge on home-baked sweets, I have very little sugar in my diet. I eat almost no comfort or junk food and generally make a lot of my food myself, at home. I can't remember the last time I drank a soda.

Although I tend to think about sex more than I feel is particularly healthy, I don't have sex with women. Or men. I do not enjoy parties with lots of people, and likewise do not enjoy bars. I do not generally like group dances, so I almost never go. I do not drink any alcohol - in fact, you could probably fit all the alcohol I've ever sipped in a shot glass.

I am not a member of any clubs, societies or cults. I am not affiliated with any major institutions of any kind, or any political party. I have no magazine subscriptions. I have never been in a fist fight, and in fact do my best to avoid angry arguments.

In short, I am a very, very boring person.

No wonder I feel lonely sometimes. No wonder I feel isolated, and walk around wondering why anyone would ever love me.

They do, though. They do - and not just the people who have a blood-reason for it. One of those non-blood lovers-of-me (JJ) suggested recently that I ought to write a list of things I love about myself, so I will remember to love myself; and a list of things I don't love about myself, so I'll remember what I am trying to change. I squished my finger today while working on my motorcycle and it is pulsating pain up my arm to my forehead, so I am not going to do the latter and make this painful funk I'm in worse with a public airing of the things I don't love about myself.

Instead, I think I will cheer myself up by listing the things about myself that I do love. Since we've already determined that I am a boring person, I might as well admit right up front that I love that I enjoy scrabble and chess, and am pretty decent at both of them. I think I have a fairly handsome, symmetrical, acne-free face - and as shallow as it is to admit, I love that about myself.

I love that I am a good father to my son. I love how I almost always catch myself before losing my temper with him, so that he knows me as a very gentle, attentive person. I love that I get to watch him discover life.

I love that I have weird, random skills picked up from my weird, random life - skills that are not particularly useful day-to-day: like tossing a hand net, climbing a tree, driving an oversized truck at high speeds through mud, tying cardboard boxes onto a four-wheeler, or capping the exhaust system for a high-end natural gas fireplace. I love walking around knowing that if someone was ever like, "Oh, my gosh! Is there a guy handy with an angle grinder in the house!?!" I would be able to jump right in.

I love that I am creative and get to make stuff that bears my mark and connects with other people. I love that I am a good writer and painter, and that I have written and painted things that have had deep, personal significance to friends and strangers. I love my singing voice, and I love that I have finally begun to get over my fear and am learning to play a musical instrument. I love that my creativity has allowed me to know and befriend an inordinate number of people whom I consider to be creative geniuses. I love that I, personally, bear the mark of a Creative Genius beyond my capacity to understand. I love that I don't have to understand it to enjoy it. I love that I am comfortable with silence. I also love that I am comfortable being alone, and that I have a rich inner life.

I love that I find intense pleasure in simple things - smells, sights, sounds... cleaning a toilet - and that I am surrounded by a natural world that perpetually blows my mind. I love that I can appreciate beauty, and that there is so much beauty to appreciate. I love the whole world, and all its sights and sounds. Boom-dee-ya-da!

I love that my friends can count on me to fill any need of theirs that I am able to fill, and that some of them ask me to do ridiculous favors for them because they know I'll say yes. I love that my friends can trust me with their darkest secrets, knowing that I will keep them secret and listen without judgement. I love that I learned to be hospitable from my parents, and that I take great pleasure in serving other people.
You know what? I may be weird and boring... but that just worked. How could anybody feel lonely, surrounded by all that love?

Do me a favor, will ya? Write your own list. Put it in the comments, even. I would love to hear about it. Even if you don't want to make it public, though, you should still write a list. It will be worth it. You're amazing! When was the last time you noticed?

why all cities should be drug into the street and shot

2010-07-26T11:18:00.000-07:00

It has been two days since "the incident," and I think my seething rage has dissipated enough that I can sit down and write about it without demolishing my keyboard with angry keystrokes.

This past Saturday was the Annual Caribbean Festival in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Waxhaw, the little town near which I live, has a Fourth of July parade every year, but this parade has degenerated into an overblown advertising campaign - a long succession of vehicles with company names and logos plastered all over the sides - so I thought I would take my son in to see if perhaps the Caribbean Festival Parade was any better.

Let me say up front, as a way of qualifying my rather extreme post title, that I do not hate cities. I just hate how they make me feel - which is a little bit ignorant and a lotta bit lost. I know I would feel different if I had spent more time in my life getting to know them, but I haven't - so this visit was no exception. I knew roughly where I wanted to be and found it without too much confusion, but the difficulty started when I tried to find a place to park the car.

First, I missed seeing a "valet parking only" sign and began to unload in front of what I later discovered was a hotel. The valet (bless his little white-boy heart) was nice about it and didn't try to make me feel stupid, so I loaded all my stuff and my son back into my air-condition-less car on this hundred-degree day and started to go around the block, looking for a spot. Nothing remotely free presented itself, so I pulled into one of the public parking lots by a sign that said, "Parking: Six Dollars" and drove up next to the ticket dispenser, which informed me that it only took cash, and that the cash it wanted to take was six dollars. I had five.

Back around the block I went, pulling at last into a multi-level parking garage past a sign that said "First Ten Minutes: Two Dollars. Two Dollars for Each Twenty Minutes that Follows." There was a booth there at the exit and the rate seemed tolerable, so I drove around and around up to the third floor of the mostly-empty garage (that should have been my first warning sign) to where there were finally some un-reserved spots. Parked again. Unloaded. Walked down the stairs and up the street in time to be really early for the parade, which was apparently running on a Caribbean timetable.

It was a good show. I highly recommend it. I also highly recommend taking public transit to get there.

An hour later, my son and I were back at the car. We didn't get to see the whole parade, because we were trying to make a lunch appointment with Austin the Actor - who starting next week will be Austin the Actor/Writer/Director on that short film I mentioned a while back. I didn't have a cell phone to call and tell him I was running late, so I was in a bit of a hurry.

At the gate, I discovered that there was no attendant on duty. After a whole lot of confusing dialog about blue and white tickets, the disembodied voice over the intercom informed me that my white ticket didn't matter and it would be ten dollars, which I would have to pay cash. I told the disembodied voice that I did not have ten dollars, and it informed me that there was an ATM machine up on the mall level. Around and around I went, back up to what looked like sort of a mallish level, sweating all the way. I parked, unstrapped my son, and went through the outer glass doors... to find that the automatic inner doors were refusing to open. After standing there for a few seconds feeling stupid, I put my fingers in the crack and pried the doors apart. The place seemed completely vacant, but a secretaryish-looking woman with frizzy hair materialized and directed me to an ATM machine, which informed me that it could only give me money in increments of twenty dollars.

I punched in my PIN, unhappily paid the two dollars and fifty cents banking fee, removed my twenty dollars, went back out to the car, strapped my son in, and drove sweating around and around and around - back to the unyielding barrier at the exit of this venus-fly-trap-of-a-parking-garage that I was beginning to hate.

This time, I noticed that the cash slot had a little sticker over it that said "exact change only." A "blue ticket" customer was walking by right then, having just parked his sports car right down by the gate. I asked him if he had change for a twenty, which he didn't. I thanked him and got back on the intercom with the disembodied voice, which said, "here's what you're gonna have to do. Go back up and park your car on the appropriate level. Then go down to the street and walk up to the store on the corner. They'll make change for you."

At this point, as you may imagine, I was more than a little bit frustrated. "Are you serious?!?" I said. "I just went all the way up to the mall level like you told me and now I am really, really late for an appointment and you want me to walk up the street and make change?"

"Hey, man," the disembodied voice shot back, "I'm just trying to help out here. That machine will take your twenty, but it ain't gonna give you no change."

At that point, I was too hot and frustrated to care. I muttered something under my breath, jammed my twenty dollar bill into the slot, and drove into the street; having just paid Twenty-Two Dollars and Fifty Cents for one hour of parking. I managed, somehow, to make it to the restaurant only fifteen minutes late. Austin wasn't there.

Utterly defeated, I strapped my sweaty little boy into his car seat, spritzed him a few times with water from a spray bottle, and handed him a Nalgene with a huge frozen chunk of ice in it. I pointed my car away from the city and drove South, back to the comfort of a land where all the parking is free.

unspoken

2010-07-25T09:51:00.000-07:00

When she told him boys were strong
I felt weak,
but went along and said that girls could be strong, too.
And she said, "true... but they don't have to."

I don't really know why
but when she caught my eye
and said those words in just that way
I tried to speak, to say...
but found my words had flown away.

And when she said that boys don't mean their words
I thought I heard them,
thought I felt them flying back to me.
I looked for her: to see, to say...
but found that she had flown away.

How to Stop Loving Someone

2010-07-24T12:32:00.000-07:00

A friend of mine recently expressed what many would call naive confusion at how a woman of whom she'd read could go from loving her man to hating him. I don't think it's naive of her to wonder at this, just that her comment reveals that she has not fully accepted the way love has been dramatically re-defined in our culture - which is, I think, a good thing (her lack of acceptance, that is).

So what is love, how has it been re-defined, and how do we lose it? If the Beatles are right and Love is all we need, how will we know if we have got it? If my mom is right and God is Love and I want God, then shouldn't I have some sort of an idea what this Love is that I am wanting? I would think that would be important, so I would be able to tell if I had somehow lost it.

In the movie "Playing by Heart," Angelina Jolie says that "talking about love is like dancing about architecture" and she is right, I think. It seems a bit silly to try to talk about love. But dancing about architecture never hurt anybody; so I will give it a try by deferring to someone a bit older (and a bit more dead) than me, Mr. Clive Staples Lewis, who once took a stab at it by describing four types of love that peoples can have for other peoples.

He called them storge (the affectionate love: most often associated with the love of a parent for a child), phileo (the "unnaturalest" of the four: known as friendship, which is more about choice than base instinct), eros, (that sort of love we think of when we think of 'being in love'), and finally agape, (also known as charity, which is the sort of love that Lewis believed that God exhibits: a love that is utterly unconditional and self-sacrificing).

The first three are marvelous types of love. We crave them, rely on them, and need them like we need honey-peanut-butter toast (mmm... toast). The last, for most people in America today, is a big ball of fru-fru nonsense. Completely unconditional? Self-sacrificing? I mean, it would be nice if someone gave me that kind of love, but c'mon... waaaay too risky. Who was Lewis kidding, right?

Well, not me, because I buy it. Completely. I think it is beautiful, mysterious, and the only kind of love that won't in the course of time turn slowly from love to hate. Fortunately, I also believe that these four loves are only distinct from each other when they are merely words on the pages of a book. In reality, they mish-mash together as the sustaining, enduring power of that agape love entangles with the others and helps them to persist in spite of all the stupid stuff we keep doing to try to destroy them. Parents keep loving their bratty little snot-nosed progeny, friends keep calling their absent-minded friends, and couples keep being all erotical, even though they are both just a couple of selfish, obnoxious weasel-monkeys.

If this annoys you -- if it bothers you to have some nosy Divinity infecting your life with a transcendent and sustaining love -- then all you have to do is re-define love. You can keep your storge, your phileo and your eros -- just systematically strip them of any traces of self-sacrifice and un-conditionality. Make them about you. Redefine them to be all about how you feel and what you want. Demand that they come with a whole lot of pre-existing conditions. Delude yourself into believing that really loving yourself means putting yourself before other people, other relationships and the community at large. If you can do that, then Presto-Bango my confused friend, you have got yourself a love-to-hate transition.

get some goodness

2010-07-21T12:09:00.000-07:00

And forsooth, I have written yet another piece of goodness for GOOD magazine. Here, then, is the link. Go, therefore, and read it; and, having read deeply of it, make for thyself an account, that thou might leave thereupon a good comment. Good day.

they tell me God hates puppies

2010-07-20T17:34:00.001-07:00

If you had asked me as a little kid for the most well-known verse in the Bible, I would have quoted John 11:35, which states, simply, that “Jesus wept.” It’s the shortest verse in the Bible and therefore the easiest to remember. I had to memorize verses in Sunday School and I can remember thinking that if they were all like John 11:35, perhaps I would have a few more gold stars by my name. The Bible + Me = Laziness.

It is tempting, therefore, when I come across a really whacked-out interpretation of a Bible verse, to think that it has been translated that way because of laziness. For example, I was thumbing through a couple of “paraphrased” Bible references at the front of a Bible storybook someone had been reading to my son and I came across this little gem: “Jesus said, ‘God loved the people of the world so much that he gave his only son’” [emphasis mine].

Correct me if I am an idiot, but that seems an odd way to interpret what is, in fact, the best known Bible verse in the world—John 3:16. Odd, but not unsurprising in an evangelical church culture that puts a premium on their proprietary formula for “how to get into heaven.” In his essay, “Christianity and the Survival of Creation,” Wendell Berry points out that “people who quote John 3:16 as an easy formula for getting into heaven neglect to see the great difficulty implied in the statement that the advent of Christ was made possible by God’s love for the world – not God’s love for heaven or for the world as it might be but for the world as it was and is.”

This interpretation is directly at odds with that of Sally Lloyd-Jones, writer of “The Jesus Storybook Bible” that annoyed me into writing this piece. They cannot both be right, and while Berry’s version jives more closely with my own way of thinking, it is certainly at odds with what my childhood church subculture taught me to believe is the implicit meaning of that verse—that it is about getting into heaven and nothing else.

I decided to do some more digging and found that Lloyd-Jones is not alone in making explicit this message that is usually conveyed only implicitly. Her paraphrase is actually nearly a word-for-word transcription of that verse in the Contemporary English Version of the Bible, which is published by The American Bible Society (go figure).

So who is right: Wendell Berry—who is by his own admission not a Bible scholar, or the seething masses of American evangelicals? When John 3:16 says “world,” does it only mean “people of the world”? To answer that question, I turned to Facebook and asked former Oxford scholar and current friend Micah Snell, who informed me that the word “world” in that verse comes from the Greek, “kosmon,” which can be directly translated “cosmos.”

“Cosmos,” as the Oxford Dictionary tells us, is either an ornamental plant of the daisy family or “the universe seen as a well-ordered whole.” So unless we are willing to argue that God is really, really into a very specific sort of flower, the evidence would seem to point towards siding with Berry and the British against the Americans and their quaint little paraphrases.

While it would be conceivable to argue that “cosmos” includes “people of the world” and therefore the Americans weren't exactly completely wrong, to downgrade it in that way without any real justification diminishes the power of the verse and spits in the face of the wonderful mystery of the Bible by totally ignoring what Berry has called “the great difficulty” of the text.

This takes me back to the start, where I mused that mis-interpretations like this seem to happen because of laziness. Why, you might ask, does a little laziness matter—it’s just one verse, right? Well… yes, but it is the best-known verse in the world and, as Berry goes on to point out in his essay, our “Christian” subculture’s narrow reading of that verse has had widespread, ugly consequences.

For example, if God only loves the people of the world (or, as is more widely believed, only their souls-whatever those are) then it stands to reason that God does not give a rat’s left earlobe about, say, a rat’s left earlobe. Or a rat, for that matter… or the river that the rat is living on… or the ocean towards which that river glides. If God does not care about the earth (the thinking goes), then why should we? We are free to abuse that rat and river and ocean in any way we please. In essence, these people are messing with what the Bible actually says in order to justify abuse and destruction of the very thing God loves.

This irks me. You may now color me irked, for I am irked beyond measure. Not only are these malevolent marmosets making up despicable stuff and sticking it into the Bible, but they are also trying to teach this garbage to my kid. Here I am walking around telling my boy that Jesus is way cool and the Source of Love, and all the while there are these weasels twisting Jesus’ words—no, lying about them—to justify hatred and destruction. It’s embarrassing, depressing and infuriating; and, given the amount of money our ostensibly “Christian” country has made by trashing this planet, I find it impossible to attribute their misinterpretation of the best known verse in the entire world to mere laziness.

That’s right… I call foul. While it is understandable that a great deal of our culture will be transposed onto any text as we translate it into our own language, this goes far beyond a little cultural re-imagining. This is an ugly, ugly lie.

I can think of only one thing to do to correct this (beyond never, ever buying a Contemporary English Version).

Let’s stop reading the Bible as though it’s some sort of step-by-step mechanical engineering manual—the whole "Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth" thingy—and start reading it as it was written: a beautiful work of art, full of wisdom and truth, created in love to teach us important principles and help us draw closer to God. If we can approach the Bible with the sort of humble wonder we adopt (or at least, should adopt) when we experience art, perhaps we’ll stop reading into it so many of the ugly preconceptions of our culture and instead start experiencing the love that it can show us how to make.

"i love you"

2010-07-19T07:07:00.000-07:00

In my dream this morning
your face flashed -
an open book.

You looked into my eyes
and said
"I love you"
like you used to
when you meant it...

before your face became a wall.

In that brief moment
before I awoke
I believed again;
and hope, long since extinguished,
phoenixed unbidden
from the ashes of all those times
you said, "I love you"
but didn't mean it,
and all those times
you merely faced me
and,

in silence,

turned away.

lights... camera... Austin!

2010-07-17T10:26:00.001-07:00

Whenever I refer to my friend Austin on here, I always call him "Austin the Actor," with a link to his imdb page - a page that basically just tells you that he looks a little homicidal in pale blue and that he played "Mr. Edwards" last year in the fairly regrettable Ben Stiller / Jason Schwartzman vehicle, "The Marc Pease Experience."

I feel an eensy-weensey bit bad about that. Austin is actually a talented chap, so I think I'll bolster his hyper-inflated ego a little further by throwing this link on here, which will direct you to a commercial he and his buddy Chris did for Ashley Furniture. It's part of a series of Ashley Furniture commercials featuring these two clowns that you can find on Youtube. Most of it is just ad-libbed nonsense, which Austin and Chris do quite well.

I tell you this because I have been working with Austin on a couple of short films, which we (that is, he) will start shooting at the beginning of next month. Extras will be needed (my son will probably be making his on-screen debut - woot! woot!), so if you live in the area and have some time free, give me a shout! And if you don't have the time to come to the shooting, consider this a heads-up for a possible rough-cut, talk-back screening sometime in late August/ September.

Hugs not drugs!

why I am (still) a (fairly confused) follower of Jesus

2010-07-13T11:14:00.000-07:00

There are a lot of stupid reasons to keep a blog – vanity, exhibitionism, insecurity, etc. – and at one time or another I have been guilty of them all. Fortunately, the truth does not necessarily require saints to be its vehicles – chumps with chips on their shoulders will do just fine, so long as they are willing to try to tell the truth… and I am nothing if not trying.

As a result, over the past six years I have had the privilege of hearing from a variety of very lovely people of all shapes and sizes; friends and strangers alike that my writing has in some way impacted. An eight-year-old girl responded to a blog I wrote about the dark history behind my antipathy towards mathematics to say that she, too, hated math. An elderly man who had just seen his daughter off to the Burning Man festival wrote to identify with the struggles and passions of my youth and to thank me for allowing him to live vicariously through them.

On and on the list goes… I have heard from college students, college professors and college dropouts; atheists, neo-pagans, agnostics, and even a few Christians. Gay, straight, or crooked, I have felt the weight and joy of the privilege of writing into so many different types of human hearts. As a result, I have tried to write with what humility and honesty I can muster, doing my best to avoid ever presenting myself as chief-potentate-and-owner of the sort of knowledge that is entirely the province of what I believe to be an inestimable God.

There have been times, however, that I have wondered if in my desire to avoid insulting others with arrogance I have perhaps erred too far in the other direction and have lied by omission – failing to admit clearly enough that, yes, despite all the stupidities I like to make fun of in the Christian Church, I am still attempting to live my life as a follower and student of Jesus who, let’s face it, kicks the llama’s patoot.

This Sunday I was at my church, which most people in mainstream Christendom would say is “just a small group.” Our leader had decided that we would spend the evening relating stories about times God had clearly communicated to us. I was trying hard to keep my mouth shut, because these days I tend to find the whole idea that I could have absolute certainty about God’s business to be ludicrous, if not reprehensible. But keeping my mouth shut during serious discussions is not one of my strengths, so I raised my hand and spewed out a bunch of words that ended up with me crying a little and everyone else getting pretty much dead silent.

As I rode home afterwards, swerving my motorcycle all over the road to avoid running over the endlessly re-populating road-frogs, I thought about this blog and all the good people who have expressed “concern” for me over the years – one of whom even wrote a letter implying that I “needed Jesus in my heart” and promising to pray for me. I thought about the many people who don’t agree with me about Jesus, but still have the decency to listen to my opinions without making assumptions about my eventual damnation, and I thought… I owe it to friends on all sides of the theological spectrum to try to tell the truth about why I am (still) a (fairly confused) follower of Jesus Christ.

The problem is, I doubt that I really can. It’s a faith position, see, and words seem inadequate – a little too inextricably linked to reason to properly explore something as mysterious as faith, which I believe includes and transcends reason. Words mislead and rabbit-trail, ending up violating and desecrating the very beautiful thing that faith is… a thing worth fighting to preserve.

I don’t want to do that, so I think the best way to approach the question is indirectly. Instead of telling you why I try to follow Christ, I will tell you what I told my “just-a-small-group” Sunday night about how I have heard God speak. Maybe as I do, you’ll get a sense of where I am coming from.

For the sake of clarity, I’ll edit out the tears and stuttering and make myself sound like I had actually planned what I was going to say.

- - -

We’re telling stories about how God has spoken to us, right? Well, I’m not all that comfortable being that clear about something I see as this insanely ginormous mystery. God speaking? Hmmm.

I guess the only times I feel absolutely justified in saying unequivocally that “God spoke to me” is when I have heard God's voice in this amazing natural world all around me. I spent ten summers doing forestry work in British Columbia and Alberta, some of what I think has got to be the most beautiful terrain on the planet. Out in those wilds I saw things that make all my descriptions fall apart – things so wonderful I don’t even want to try to describe them. And growing in the Amazon rainforest, I witnessed a whole lot of indescribable moments as well. One night I sat with my friend Ben and watched as two pillars of clouds built up high into the sky and began to light up inside with flashes of lightning. Then, as we watched, lightning bolts began to arc back and forth between those clouds and for some reason the whole thing lit up in an unrepeatable, multi-colored fireworks display that went on for an hour and a half. It is in those sorts of moments that I guess I would say that God is talking to me.

For everything else – all the little things that happen in my life… well, I just don’t know. I used to want to know, to fit everything into a neat little box so that if anything new that I could not understand happened I wouldn’t have to be scared. I could just reach into my pocket and pull out my little boxed God and say, “Look! See what I got here? That’s right… it’s GOD, baby, so back off!”

The fear kept coming, though, and I kept having to try to box more of life… which kept making and finding cracks to leak out of. It was a lot of work, being in charge of the universe, so usually I would just take the path of least resistance and then say, “Yep, lookee see… God made this happen.”

After I left Peru I went to the same college my brother was attending – where my cousins had gone in the town my parents were moving to, and I said, “Yep, God told me to go here.” I was an artistically gifted young man, but afraid of the big, bad world and afraid that I was not creative enough to make it – so I went the easy route to the easy school, where an Art major was not even an option.

After I got out of college and ended up here in North Carolina with a big, gaping hole in my life plans, I met the woman who was to be my wife and did the same thing all over again. I was young, confused, scared and getting more involved than I wanted to, faster than I had planned. So what did I do? I convinced myself that God had ordained it and had told me that we were meant to be together… heck, I even gave a little speech to that effect at our wedding.

I hear people all the time talking about how God spoke to them in this or that way and that God did this or that thing for them, and its always something positive: God fixed their car or found their wallet or healed a relationship. So what am I supposed to do with my relationship? What am I supposed to think about how sure I was, back then, that God was directing my path? Was I delusional, or just a little mistaken? I mean… the marriage broke. She left me. How could that be God?

Last summer I went to visit a friend in Kentucky and I ended up going with him to his AA meetings. I walked in and was like, “Dang… I’m in church: maybe the first real church I have ever been in.” The people were all just so broken and real, and it was great. My friend told me that a lot of the alcoholics who’d been coming to that meeting for a long time were actually grateful for their disease of alcoholism, because it was this that put them at dis-ease with their life and showed them how spiritually bankrupt they were – how bound up by fear and unable to love. If not for the alcohol, they reasoned, they would have lived out the rest of their lives enslaved by fear.

So this past week as I have been thinking about ways God has spoken to me, I have found myself thinking back to what I was like before I met my wife. I do not like what I see back there in my past. It makes me sad. As I reflect on that, I start to wonder if maybe God was telling me to get with her. This past year of my life has been the worst of times, but also the absolute best of times. I have been forced to face things about myself that without this personal cataclysm would most likely have remained hidden forever. I have been forced to acknowledge all the ways in which fear and guilt have driven me to do the things I have done: everything from the big life decisions down to the way I have gone about making art.

I swear… I only ever painted because it was something I was good at and because when I did it, people told me I was special. There was a little joy there, yes, but buried so deep under fear of failure that it barely ever saw the light. But now, as I live through the death of my marriage, my art has begun to come alive for me. I am enjoying it more than ever, and spending more time than ever on it.

Oh, and because my school offered no Art major, I ended up getting a Bachelor’s degree in English which, given the fact that I am mostly expressing myself creatively through writing these days, seems to have been the best choice. So I guess you could say I’ve come full circle. I now think that maybe God was guiding me to that school and into this marriage. Sure, it wasn’t ideal and I did it for broken reasons, but this is a broken world.

I have come to think that maybe I am always just taking things and breaking them over and over, and maybe God is forever picking up the pieces and placing them into an ever-increasingly complex mosaic that gets more and more beautiful all the time. I do not understand the logic behind this masterwork, but I do love it.

There is a verse in the Bible that says something like, “consider it pure joy, my brothers, when you endure trials of many kinds,” and I used to think that meant that you should be glad because God was going to use those struggles to give you all sorts of goodies – either now or in some pie-in-the-sky-when-you-die-by-and-bye afterlife. And there may or may not be some truth to that, but I am starting to think that it is an un-helpful perspective. I am starting to think that sometimes the goodies are in the trials (cosmic piñata, anyone?) and that God is this master artisan speaking all the time, in all ways, to all people. I am starting to think that maybe God is always talking to me, and I just have not really learned how to shut up and listen.

So I am thinking that maybe I am glad I met my wife. Because of it, I have some great memories and a beautiful son [commence tear-duct malfunction]. Because of it, I have begun to leave my fear and love people in a way that I think would otherwise not have happened. For the first time in my life, I am starting to actually really love being alive – to find the joy in that and in making my own little bits of art.

I am grateful, then, that I met her. I am grateful for all the things we’ve shared these past eight years – the good, the bad, and the ugly. I am grateful, even, that she left me… because as much as I hate it and as painful as it has been, I don’t know what worse things might have happened if she had stayed, or what wonderful things might happen now that she is gone. Before she left, she got in a wreck with our son in the car, for example, and told me that it would not have happened if she had not been so torn up about our relationship.

I like to think that I know what is best in our situation… but who am I to say? I think, but do not know, so I am glad that God has spoken and continues to speak and move through it all.

I am trying not to say anymore what, exactly, God is saying. I feel like I can see that something wonderful is happening, but I do not really know what. I am learning, I think, to be where I am and just enjoy the journey. It is good to be alive – to live, and love, and listen and maybe even hear, just a tiny bit, the voice of God.

- - -

That, generally speaking, is what I said. It doesn’t really answer the question, though, does it? Instead of explaining why, specifically, I follow Jesus, I have taken that question and added a few more. I am okay with that, though, because that is what faith is. As Anne Lamott says, “The opposite of faith is not doubt, it’s certainty.”

Do I try to follow Jesus just because my parents and grandparents and great-great-great grandparents were Christian and I was raised in a missionary community where pretty much every single adult I ever knew claimed to be following Christ? Maybe. Or maybe it was a combination of that, and logic. Perhaps I carefully examined every argument for and against and decided in the end that Jesus Christ best fit the evidence. Maybe I had some overwhelming personal experience that overrode any objection—perhaps Jesus cured me of my cocaine addiction and healed my crippled foot.

You know what? It’s impossible to say. I have never tried cocaine and have always had a fairly sound body, but other than that, it’s all fair game. I live within my own context, and it is impossible to know what I would be like if I had been raised somewhere else – like, say, sub-Saharan Africa – and had not had the exposure to Christ or the theological and philosophical education to which I have been privy. I have probably read and studied hundreds of books on the topic. I have argued about it, wrestled over it, contemplated and meditated on it, but I still don’t really know.

I am happy with that. I won’t fight you over it, but I will try to love you through it, because I have found that where Jesus is, there is love – amazing, upside-down, inexplicable love. While a lot of people try to hijack the power of that and use the name for their own nefarious purposes, Jesus is always in the love.

Follow the love.

shuuuuugah

2010-07-10T14:46:00.000-07:00

I used to really like that jolly-looking, chubby-cheeked Quaker Oats guy. Reminded me of Ben Franklin... and he invented electricity, right? Plus, there is that whole, "Quaker" connection. I am not really sure what exactly a Quaker is, but it sounds sort of Amish. So taken together, that must mean that friendly, intelligent, back-to-the-earth type people must have made this "Oatmeal Squares" cereal I like so much. The box says they have been at it for 130 years. I can just picture this guy... still out there in Pennsylvania somewhere, grinding away at those oats in his old, horse-powered mill.

For years I thought that way. Then last week I actually looked at the box and started to reckon. I surmised from the painted portrait that Mr. Quaker dude doesn't even exist - let alone have anything to do with this cereal. I saw how they made the "oatmeal helps reduce cholesterol" part really big to de-emphasize that it is actually the soluble fiber in the oats that, as a part of a healthy diet, can (as in, they might, if you exercise a lot, too) help reduce cholesterol. Finally, I noticed the phrase, "hint of brown sugar," which, let's face it, doesn't mean anything. So I looked at the ingredients, which as we all know are listed in order of percentage, from greatest to least. So let's see what we've got: "whole oat flour." Yup, looks about right. Next, "whole wheat flour." Still good... no complaints there. But next we have... what's this... "Brown Sugar" ?!? And then right after that, "sugar" again?!?

WHAT!?! I thought they said a "hint" of brown sugar. That doesn't make any sense... oh, no... wait... it does. See, the word "hint" is absolutely perfect. It sounds as though they are saying it only has a little sprinkle of sugar, while in reality the dictionary definition is "a covert suggestion or implication; an indirect allusion," which, as we can clearly see, has nothing whatsoever to do with quantity. So what we end up with is your typical nasty, sugar-saturated cereal loaded up with all sorts of preservatives and our dear old friend the ubiquitous and ridiculously toxic "yellow number five," packaged and presented as a health food cereal. I love it! Or rather, I did love it, until I started thinking again.

Thinking. Dangit, dangit, dangit! It's a curse, I tell you. Sometimes I just hate it, especially when it means that I now have to go to the store and actually buy raw oats and nuts and suchlike and start making my own granola, which not only makes me weird, but also a little shorter on time than I was yesterday.

Except... except for Barbara. Thank God for Barbara, who unlike that Quaker guy has got to be real and makes an almost-identical-looking food product that tastes just as good and is sweetened only with unsulphered molasses (poor little moles) and has only about half the ingredients, none of which are preservatives or yellow number five. Golly, this is great! Or... maybe not great, but at least better... because the sugars are still there, only in a different form.

Dangit... I don't wanna be a hippie! I like cutting all my hair off and taking a shower. Dangit, dangit, dangit.

Even More GOODer

2010-07-08T18:40:00.000-07:00

I'm at it again, this time talking about recycled brains. As usual, you are more than welcome to go to the GOOD website and leave a comment. Or, if that doesn't sufficiently express your gratitude for the fact that I arranged some words for you, you could just bring five dollars to my house... whereupon I will show my gratitude by frying you up an empanada.

you deserve this

2010-07-06T12:49:00.000-07:00

I would glance over at hungry little eyes peering through the windows of a restaurant where I was eating and I would not think, "oh, well... now isn't that just a tribute to the value of my home country's solid Protestant work ethic and a testament to the detrimental effects of a government mired with corruption and un-American policies?" Nope, I would not think anything of the sort. Instead, I just got confused. And when I followed our garbage truck out to the dump and watched children picking through my garbage looking for something they could use or sell, I got even more confused. In my naiveté, I thought it unjust that they should be starving and desperate while I had regular, balanced, nutritious meals and new presents every Christmas.

They had done nothing to deserve this, I thought, and it bothered me. Not, of course, to the degree that I would make a stink and insist that we buy our meals and take them directly out to these children, instead of just saving the scraps and bringing them out in a bag... you mustn't go overboard, after all. It did bother me, though. It was just not right.

Now I am thirty, though, and know better.

Last week the above-pictured flyer came in the mail, reminding me that I deserve to have a bathroom that is both functional and beautiful. I looked at it and was reminded that despite the fact that roughly 2.6 billion people in the world lack access to adequate sanitation - which leads to the transmission of diseases that cause a great many millions of them to die in pain - I, at least, deserve to have a beautiful bathroom conveniently installed in my home with a minimum of fuss.

Why, you ask, do I deserve this? Well... for being me, of course.

A long time ago -- long before I was a thirty-year-old man with everything figured out -- I was a little boy who was very confused. One of my greatest sources of confusion was the incredible wealth of my family, as compared to the abject poverty of some of my friends in the community that surrounded the missionary base I lived on in Peru, South America.

good

2010-06-29T17:31:00.000-07:00

Once again, that guy with the name just like mine has written an another article for GOOD magazine online. I approve of his words, so I think you should go read them and leave him positive feedback and an encouraging comment so he will keep writing (he seems like a creative guy, and those people usually have pretty fragile egos).

The Four C's of Seeing

2010-06-28T14:00:00.000-07:00

The following is the afterword I wrote for my memoir, "Anatomy of an Effup." In retrospect, it seems to break with the overall theme of the work and therefore I am giving it the old heave-ho. Still, it represents a fair bit of effort so I don't want to just stash it on some back shelf. Instead I am going to post it on here for your reading enjoyment.

It's ridiculously long and parts of it have been posted before, but I hope you get something from it.

Here goes...

---

The truth about visual art is that it's not about having a magical power or really good fingertip coordination. It is about seeing. That's it. The rest is just practice. It is amazing to me how little anyone really sees the world around them - how much energy and effort we all expend to box it, objectifying and categorizing and symbolizing everything that comes before our eyes. We do this, I think, because we are very, very small and the world is very, very big, and often ugly. Fear grips us, and so we do violence to the world in hope that it will then make sense. "She's just a welfare queen," we say, or "that's just a wombat," or "televangelists are the Great Satan," or "white people suck." This is how we are.

It is not, however, how our spirits yearn to be. When I learned to make visual art, I learned how to see. And thinking about this type of seeing has helped me to see, just a little clearer, the rest of my life. I hope it will help you, too.

"The Four 'Cs' of Seeing: Learning to See Contours, Contrast, Color, and Connections".

The first thing you must learn to see is CONTOURS. For the un-initiated, this just means the edges of things.

Here is what I want you to do. Go into a room where there is another human being and ask them to hold still. Grab a pencil and paper. Open your eyes. Try to look at that person.

I am sorry to tell you that you will fail. You cannot see them - not really - and so therefore you cannot draw them. Ever. This is very important, so I want you to remember it: when you look at someone you are not seeing them - you are only seeing an impression of what they seem to be from your perspective. At the beginning, when you are focusing on contours, all you are really doing is trying to look at imaginary lines between an object and the stuff that you see around it. These are called positive and negative spaces, respectively, and they are also not really there. You are not drawing reality, you are just drawing reality as it presents itself to you. Your eyes can see a lot, but they cannot see the capital "T" Truth.

So relax. Your main task is to communicate what you are seeing with only the power of suggestion. Try to see these imaginary edges of the larger masses of the person, and then try to mark them down. But remember: you are not capturing reality as it is - you are creating a new reality of your very own. The best way to get better at this is to practice. So as you walk around, try to see the world as you're actually seeing it, with humble eyes that acknowledge their own limitation.

Why is this important? Because the alternative is objectification, which quickly becomes a lust for power, which is the same as hatred. Objectification is probably impossible to avoid completely. What you want is a better informed, more humble objectification. I’ll explain that more in a moment, but let me first try to illustrate with the story of the erotic dancer and her four-testicle dog.

At the end of my first year as a planting foreman, I had been bumped from nine employees up to fourteen. I was stressed and fatigued out of my mind, which may be why I didn't jump immediately on the objectification bandwagon on the day I drove back into the campground where we were staying and a tired-looking brunette came up to me and said, "Hey, you wanna see my four-testicle dog?"

This was at a time in my life when it would normally have made me a little uncomfortable to hear a woman (any woman) say the word "testicle;" but like I said, I was too beat to bother. "Would I?" I enthusiastically replied, "who wouldn't?!?" So she called out to this big, shaggy hound of indeterminate lineage, leaned over him from behind, grabbed his front two legs, and picked his front end up off the ground. Sure enough - four testicles. It may have been the fatigue, but I just raved. I called the crew over and made them look at it. It's not so often you get to see a bona-fide-four-testes-fido.

The woman’s name, it turned out, was Deb. Deb the dancer. The erotic dancer. This, also, did not bother me. Instead, I was intrigued. She told me that she was waiting at the campsite for some friends, but that she was staying over at a motel and was on a tour of small towns in Northern British Columbia, working as a stripper and an erotic dancer and trying to put together some cash. This was really out of the ordinary for a guy like me, a little missionary jungle boy who'd never seen an in-the-flesh erotic dancer before – let alone one with a four-testicle dog. Somehow, though, I didn't try to put her in a box. I didn't objectify her as some "damned harlot of Babylon," nor did I picture her as an object of hidden lust, about whom I could fantasize later after publicly decrying her lifestyle. Instead, I was entranced. This was a world I knew nothing about, and I was seized by curiosity. I asked her question after question. Who was she? Where was she from? What was it like, traveling from town to town doing what she did? How did people treat her?

I think she sensed that I really wanted to know and wasn't just digging for dirt, because she proceeded to tell me all about her life. She told me of her strained relationship with her father, with whom she'd bounced from town to town growing up as a military brat. He was in Florida and she was saving up to go see him, to try to work things out. She told me how the ladies of the towns treated her with contempt, crossing to the other side of the street and angrily glaring at her in the grocery stores. She told me how the men from the clubs often followed her around after work, making her nervous.

I felt privileged that she was letting me into her world a bit, but just as we were starting to really talk, one of the guys from my throw-together crew who had been hanging around listening butted in. He was your basic Bible School Boy, nineteen years old and absolutely convinced that he had the truth cornered and was just milliseconds away from wrestling it to the floor in a hammerlock. He started to barrage this lonely, sad woman with really invasive comments. He wanted to know, he said, if she was aware of how badly her lifestyle was reflecting on her. The contempt in his voice was palpable, and I watched as Deb the Dancer visibly shrunk into herself, made an excuse, and walked away.

The Bible School Boy could not see Deb. If he had tried a little harder, he may have been able to make out her outline. But he didn’t, so she disappeared.

The second thing I want you to learn to see is CONTRAST.

Unlike a spray-painted stencil, the gradations of light and dark in the world of the eyes are both infinite and transient. They are always changing depending on time of day, location of the viewer, and the relative quality of the optical equipment being used. Those who like to name and control things in art call these gradations "values," and it is rather fitting, as the value we put on the various aspects of what we see reveals yet again the way we try to order, understand and control the world around us.

My last year of University the notable poet Luci Shaw came to a round-table discussion at a creative writing class I was taking. At the time my, writing was categorized more by fear of disclosure than anything else, but my visual art was often raw and honest, exposing some very dark aspects of who I was and how I was living in the world – so much so that as I have mentioned before, it made certain people very uncomfortable. I asked her about this – the supposition that some of my work was too dark, and signified a problem with my soul.

She paused for a moment, as wise old poets often do, and replied with the same basic point I have been making here - that both light and shadow are necessary to depict and reveal the world as it really is to us. To know whether or not I had focused too much on the dark, she said, one would have to look at a lifetime of my work. There are different seasons of life for all artists, she went on, but all good art will have elements of both light and dark worked into them. I found that to be both true and comforting - but not easy.

Light and dark are organic forces. Our perceptions of them constantly shift as we live and move. They are real to us, yes, but not like cubes of sugar that we can fidget with and feed to the monkeys. Most beginning artists are extremely timid about drawing in the darker areas, but denying the existence of the dark shows that we believe it to be an actual thing (it isn’t). This gives it a power it need not have as it feeds on our self-delusion and fear. It also blinds us to the fact that as scary as it can be, the darkness that we see in our art creates volume, in a sense bringing mass and form to our otherwise two-dimensional experiences.

So to grow as an artist, stop living in denial and the fear that it engenders, and instead accept and explore the wondrous complexities of light and shadow that play across the world around you. Open your eyes and your soul will open as well.

Wow.

We're really zipping along all tickety-boo here. You've blown past the fear of the blank page, of contours and contrast, and will be painting your own Sistine Chapel before you know it. And speaking of the Sistine Chapel, let's move on to the third thing you are going to have to learn how to see - COLOR.

This is your reward for all this work. This is where it gets really fun.

You may be a little afraid of all that color, but color itself is not the problem - it's being in charge that has you walking the knife's edge. You know what? Forget about it. New experiences are always a little overwhelming. When I was in high school I mostly just used colored pencils to copy pictures of supermodels for my friends. Then I went to university and they made me buy acrylic paint. For my first masterpiece, I chose to depict a shoe. I slaved over it for days and when it was all over, I thought it was so ugly that I cried. I had a fair bit of raw talent, but fear and a whole lot of emotional baggage almost made me throw away the brushes forever. That would have been a tragedy because of one thing: Joy.

Color is the music of the visual universe, and contrary to the cold calculations of materialists everywhere, I think that although color does have its utilitarian purposes, it transcends those and exists for one main reason: to bring joy to all of life, even the ugly bits.

Shortly after my wife had announced her intention to leave me - I was browsing the internet and that random moment in the Smallville hallway came to mind. I had been processing a lot of the unhealthy ways that I had dealt with people in my life, and suddenly I realized that I had been unkind to Allison Mack.

So I looked her up on the internet. I found out that she was born somewhere over in Germany and had come to America at the age of two. I learned that she was passionate about her craft, that she studies dancing, and that she learned to crochet from the actor who plays Clark Kent's mom. She is also about my same age. At the bottom of her bio on imdb.com they had a personal quote. She said,

"The most powerful way we can live our lives is if we stick within the community... when you come together as a community to achieve one specific goal, it's really just a beautiful thing."

That really grabbed me. At the time, I had been reading a book by Wendell Berry, who writes a lot about the value of community. It had been on my mind a lot and my curiosity was piqued, so I googled Allison and found that she had a website... a blog. I looked it up, and it was actually fairly interesting. It turns out that this Allison was not just some Five-in-a-Can TV Blond, and that she was actually passionate about a lot of the same things as I was. Hmm, I thought. Hmm. It is just possible that if I hadn't been such a dink on that set, we might have had a good and challenging conversation. I might have even learned something.

There are moments when it feels as though my life has been a long succession of these missed opportunities for real, human connection. This is obviously a more dramatic example, since it involves bright lights and a celebrity. But in many smaller, less-glamorous ways I have developed a habit of allowing my fears, anxieties and judgments to come between myself and other people.

I went on Allison Mack's website. I wrote her a note a note of apology. Then, when she posted an "art challenge" to anyone who reads her blog, I got involved. She said that she'd been been reading "A Writer's Book of Days", by Judy Reeves, a book which provides a daily writing exercise. She said she was going to do them, and posted the first. It didn't give a lot of detail. It just said you had to write a piece that had to begin: "__________ is the color I remember." I took up her challenge, did the exercise, and then posted it in the comments section.

Perhaps my whole life has been a running farce of missed opportunities to connect and converse with people in a way that creates something new. But in that instance, at least, I got a sort of a second chance. Color painted over sorrow. Here is what I wrote:

Light brown is the color I remember – the chocolatey brown of the amazonian waters where I learned to swim, to almost drown, to love… to lust.

There is a smell these waters carry with them, a glorious musk compiled of tiny particles dragged from snow-capped alpine peaks, tumbled off smooth-worn rocks and pulled from mossy cliffs. Every year the rains swell the rivers and they reach out – first in fingers, then with broad sweeps of arms, laying a blanket of themselves over the whole Amazon basin and then sucking downstream tiny bits and pieces, drawing with them the stink of life and death and decay.

By the time this water flowed through the oxbow Peruvian lake on which I lived, the dank waters were so choked with this history of a watery life that to an outsider they were nearly unswimmable.

For me, however, each time I immersed the warm waters wrapped me in their amniotic embrace and I emerged, at last, feeling new-born and alive. It was a Baptism of Being – and although I now live in North Carolina, swimming only very rarely in the sterility of chlorinated pools – every once in a while I smell something so earthy and primal that I am transported in an instant back… back to the light brown waters of my childhood.

Life is full of color, those wondrous little moments that give the madness of it all it’s meaning.

In the final weeks of my last year in Peru, my friend Benjamin and I walked the long, grassy airstrip down by the lake. This was the year that Benjamin learned of his mother's cancer, the illness that in a little over twelve months would claim her life. We walked as we had many times before, saying very little, and then sat on the sloped edge of the runway, staring off into the distance at one of those bizarre, localized storms that often happen in the Amazon. Two monolithic pillars of angry gray clouds were billowing and piling up side-by-each, probably about a mile up into the atmosphere and at least a few hundred feet apart. The moon glinted off the columns in shifting brushstrokes of silver as something brewed in the darkened center.

As we watched, lighting began to gurgle all up and down the insides of each of these pillars, illuminating them here and there with flashes of rich, glowing colors. There were swaths of green and gold, blue and crimson. There were pinks and oranges and yellows and all over little fingers of hot white fire danced and played, crackling and fizzling and sparking. Then long bolts began to flash intermittently across the space between the two clouds, searing bands that lit up the inner faces of those columns at intervals, to be echoed in the silences by the subtler hues being painted within.

Benjamin and I, who loved to talk and share and “explain” to each other the mysteries of the universe, were stunned and sat in wonder for this show, sharing nothing more than primal groans and shouts of wonder as it went on and on and on – for over an hour. We each wished, silently, that everyone else in the whole world could see this with us: our friends, families – Benjamin's mom. But it was the yearning joy at the impermanence of it all that burned this vision of the creative eye of God into my mind forever. This is the mystery and the music of color that plays on, largely ignored, as a perpetual soundtrack to our mostly blindered eyes.

For me, color connects to all the deeper, intangible yearnings of my glandular self - the things I want to know about but can't, so I just end up having to be satisfied with rolling around in joy. Color is a gift. Color is a feast of delights from the eyes to the soul. It is an orgasm without responsibility, an opportunity to find joy and meaning in the midst of ugliness. As an artist it is your job to show up, play, and smile. So do it.

Alrighty, then. Now that we're all having fun, let's learn how to see CONNECTIONS.

I started University full of turmoil and trauma, undisciplined personally but with an artist's eye and what many called an exceptional gift. There wasn't much of an art program at the school at that time – just two gifted female teachers in an old portable, actually – but the first thing they did was they went and wrecked drawing and painting for me, and then re-made it as something else... something much more interesting. "Why just copy something you see," they asked, "when a camera could do it so much better?"

These ladies didn't give a lick if I was a fabulous xerox-monkey, they wanted me to make something new, something filtered through the only unique thing I had to offer the world: me. It made all the difference in the world. I mattered. I had something no one else did – myself – and with that I could make something that no one else could. I could abandon my fear and self-loathing and rest in the hope that there was a creative God who made me this way, and it was all right.

So, too, can you. Open your eyes to the connections that only you can make. You are incredible - a uniquely placed compendium of influences that can uniquely love the world. Never let yourself believe that you have figured everything out.

It is a beautiful thing, this life, and more beautiful still when I can accept the humbling and painful truths that set me free to love, and be loved, without fear.

Quote of the Week:

2010-06-25T09:10:00.000-07:00

"Because fossil fuels, however abundant they once were, were nevertheless limited in quantity and not renewable, they obviously did not 'belong' to one generation more than another. We ignored the claims of posterity simply because we could, the living being stronger than the unborn, and so worked the 'miracle' of industrial progress by the theft of energy from (among others) our children. This is the real foundation of our progress and our affluence. The reason that we are a rich nation is not that we have earned so much wealth - you cannot, by any honest means, earn or deserve so much. The reason is simply that we have learned, and become willing, to market and use up in our own time the birthright and livelihood of posterity."

- Wendell Berry, from the Essay "Energy in Agriculture," written in 1979 (the year of my birth).

girl - friends

2010-06-23T12:35:00.000-07:00

When I was in the tyrannical Miss Fowler's first and second grade classroom, I knew exactly what girls were good for: rubber-nut burns. See, in addition to their milky white rubber-making sap, rubber trees put off these little brown-striped seed things, and if I rubbed them fast enough across the metal screens of the first and second grade classroom, they got blazing hot and perfect for touching to someone else's skin. I could burn boys, of course, but they tended to do it back or sometimes forgo all that and just punch me in the face. There were a few little girls in my class who would on occasion hit back (I'm talkin' to you, Peanut), but mostly they would just shriek and run away. Perfect, right?

As time went on, I learned that girls were good for other things: things like sword-fighting and volleyball and cookies and... well... other things. Somewhere in my ongoing education, however, I managed to miss out on the most important thing of all that girls were good for... friendship. As my experience of girls as burn-receptacles shifted to an understanding of them as mysterious, alluring and sensual creatures from some alternate reality, I somehow missed out on the fact that females were human. Humans are freakin' amazing, so when I ended up mostly only cultivating close friendships with other males, I missed out on a whole lot of freakin' amazingness.

This past weekend I was hanging out with my hippie-ish-organic-chef friend JJ and his little brother on their mom's porch in Wilmore, Kentucky. As the sun fell out of the sky, I started to explain to him all the fabulous reasons why I could not be friends with half the world's population; "You see," I said, "I just figure that one way or another, somebody's going to end up being attracted to somebody else - we're wired that way - so you either have to get together or push apart. If there's a girl who I think might be interested in me and I am not attracted to her, I have always thought it was just better to save us all a lot of trouble by avoiding her. And if I am the one attracted... well, I'm just gonna take that attraction to the bank."

JJ sat there, listening. Then, without really disagreeing, he started to tell me about all the girls he was friends with - how he loved them to crazies and was really attracted to them, even - yes - in a sexual sense (ominous thunderclap). He told me how he was also mightily attracted to the guys he was friends with, and how he figured all this attraction was a part of the dynamics of what it meant to be human. Why would you want to be friends with people you were not in some way attracted to, he asked? Then he said that as long as there were clear boundaries and it was all kept out in the open, he figured that it was actually good for him as a person and good for his relationship with his wife that he be attracted to all these people. It helped him not only by allowing him to be honest about how he experienced the world, but also by allowing him to have a wide variety of rich friendships with diverse people whom he deeply loved. I had heard all this before, but as I went on to tell JJ the story of my relationship with a young woman I befriended several months ago, it sunk in a bit deeper and made my experience seem even more pathetic.

In the beginning of our epistolary friendship, I had intended to simply enjoy the process of getting to know her through letters. My friend Austin the Actor had been bugging me about learning to be friends with women - even ones I was attracted to - and the girl in question seemed a likely candidate. As we wrote more and more emails, however, I started noticing that the inevitable was happening - I was discovering more and more proof that she was, indeed, a member of that wonderfully intriguing species called "humanity." Not only that, but she was a woman as well, and I felt myself growing more and more attracted to her. I have to admit (with a certain degree of embarrassment) that I sorta-kinda flipped out. My wife had moved out only seven months before I met this intriguing woman, after all. I was a bit emotionally topsy-turvy, and although my wife had assured me repeatedly with fists firmly clenched that it was over, over, OVER, she was still my wife and what was I doing talking to an attractive woman and ohmygosh I was fallingintoiniquity and either my head or the world was goingtoexplode and I was quickly running out of enamel to grind off of my teeth!

I could have just relaxed and enjoyed the friendship for what it was. Instead, I over-thought and tried to box and categorize my way to control of the relationship in the name of some sort of moral code I was obeying and constructing and absolutely throttling the life and meaning right out of. I kept talking more and more about what it all meant and trying to figure out what, exactly, it was. This, of course, freaked her right out. We were friends, after all. Friends don't tie their friendship to the fate of the universe. It seemed as though my old habits were dying harder than I would have liked.

"You know, Josh," JJ went on, "I don't generally try to tell people what they ought to do. And I certainly don't have a right to tell you what you need to do... but I'm going to go ahead anyways and tell you that you absolutely need to learn to be friends with women you're attracted to, or you will never have a healthy relationship of any kind with any woman, ever."

I let that one sink in. He was right, of course. I knew it, and had been trying to figure out a way to backpedal and earn a do-over with my letter-writing-girl-friend for quite a while. I opened JJ's laptop, got on facebook and saw that Austin the Actor was online.

"I've been talking with JJ here about how things went with [letter girl]," I said to him, "I think I maybe could have handled that differently."

"What you mean to say," Austin replied, "is that you really screwed the pooch on that one."

"Well, I guess so. But you know what I learned?" I asked.

"You learned that Austin is always right and you need to do everything he says," Austin answered.

"Shut up," I said, "I gotta go."

I turned to JJ. "I think I ought to write her a note, telling her that I want to be her friend. I mean, I'm always complaining that all the people I really connect with live an hour away in Charlotte or in other states and countries, but then I go and sabotage a relationship with a person I really do enjoy talking to - just because I'm afraid."

JJ thought a bit. "All right," he answered, "but don't be whiny and apologetic. You are who you are and that's okay. Write your note, but I am gonna have to read and approve it before you hit 'send'."

So as the fireflies blinked on and off in the slowly-cooling night air I wrote my note, got it approved, sent it, and resolved once more that after thirty long years, I was going to learn how to have girl-friends.

breaking away

2010-06-17T14:25:00.000-07:00

In high school I was an avid reader of Breakaway magazine. I mean, avid. I read every word at least twice. I even entered and lost a couple of their art contests.

In case you've not heard of it, Breakaway is/was Focus on the Family's teen magazine for boys. It is therefore none too surprising that I avidly read it, since my high school was spent on a missionary center in the Amazon Basin before the proliferation of the interwebs. That pretty much made it a Focus on the Family Hot Zone.

Breakaway had stories, dating advice (or rather, "not-dating" advice) and glossy pictures of professional adrenaline junkies doing insane sports "for Jesus." One of my favorite parts of the whole slickly-packaged deal, however, was the music reviews. Usually they focused on telling me how the latest over-exposed CCM sensation was super-awesome-cool, but every once in a while they would throw in a review of one of the more popular secular bands (insert ghostly howl), presumably to let me know when to put my fingers in my ears so I could avoid having green sin-fungus grow on my brain.

Usually the bands they chose to review "said some good stuff," perhaps even cautioning against "the hazards of promiscuous sex," but ultimately failed the litmus test because of, say, the "lamentable solitary profanity on track seven," or, "the instance where the line at the end of track nine seemed to indicate that the singer had done drugs (illegal ones) and had enjoyed them." This, I was instructed to believe, meant that I could not listen to their music, because art is powerful and music is art and therefore the power of that music would override all other influences in my life and have me blaspheming and drinking marijuana alcohol before you could say, "Nirvana" (Which, by the way, was obviously Buddhist Propaganda Music. Obviously).

I cannot say for certain if the writers intended the following to happen; but a long, steady diet of these reviews taught me one very important lesson: I absolutely must never, ever, EVER allow myself to be exposed to art produced by people who EVER said things that Breakaway magazine deemed evil, or I would become infected. Possibly forever.

This lesson was easy enough to apply. I lived, after all, in the middle of the amazon. On a missionary center. Cell phones with data plans had not even been invented yet, and all those evil-mongering musicians were just mythological beasts... out there somewhere, far over and beyond the lush green jungle canopy of my home.

And then high school ended.

I left my cocoon and went away to another, slightly bigger cocoon at a Christian University, where I could always shake my head and sanctimoniously shut the door of my room when Chris Mouw and Luke Favel started impromptu dance sessions with the Spice Girls in the dorm lounge. I was living in the world, as they say, but was not of it. And I was awesome. Except, of course, for the sanctimoniously evil way I closed my door, walked over to the computer, and fell deep into the cesspools of the internet. Because there is no one righteous... no, not one.

But then came the Root Beer Kegger. I met Chris and Jesse and the other guys of Stabilo and suddenly good music with potty words wasn't just something I could turn off... it was my friends, talking. They said things that Breakaway had taught me were wrong, and they said them really, really well. When that happened, I had two choices. I could do what I had been trained to do and stop being friends with these guys, or I could shut up and listen to their music. I could try to figure out why there seemed to be a discrepancy between their obviously wicked ways on the one hand and their kind, joyful friendship on the other.

I chose the latter and found in their music a deep spiritual yearning that connected to my own spiritual yearnings in away that the sanitized, Eighties-throwback CCM CDs (that's compact discs, kids) never did. When I went over one day to the Crack Shack where he lived, for example, and Chris threw some earphones on my head and made me listen to a song he had just laid down with a click-track, it made me cry. "Jesus I'm your friend I know you'll never leave me till the end of life," he sang, "I'm your Secret Son... don't worry I won't tarnish your name by telling anyone."

"What do you think?" he asked.

I got up, wiped a tear, and gave him a hug. What else could I do - tell him he was a terrible person for being ashamed of himself and therefore not wanting to associate with Jesus? For all my careful avoidance of potty words and drugs and fornication, deep down in my guts I felt exactly the same way. I knew I was not really a good person, and that all the good things I did weren't bringing me the spiritual satisfaction I craved. Yet in solidarity with Chris' yearning sadness I felt that everything was, indeed, okay - that Jesus was my friend, despite the poop I persisted in rolling around in. I learned that despite the Breakaway-not-approved stuff that Chris sometimes did and said and sang, he somehow lived and loved in a way I didn't know how to begin to approach.

I also learned from Chris and Jesse and the others that Grace cannot be captured and boxed and controlled with behaviors, but that it must be lived, honestly and fearfully, one faith-filled moment at a time. I looked back at my Bible again and saw a whole lot of stories about people who did and said screwed up things, people whom God loved and hung out with, even though they kept doing the same naughty things, over and over and over.

Because of this, I started to actually listen to the stories that the people around me were telling with their lives. If they were going to be honest enough to tell the truth about their garbage, I figured, then I could at least be honest enough to listen without the pretension of superiority. My eyes began to open - just a crack. I saw that the contempt that came with my pretension made me a little more contemptible and robbed me of the chance to experience the joy of shared struggle.

Where contempt is, love is not.

And so, gradually, I started to listen and love. I started to weep along with Jesse when he sang about his suicidal thoughts (thoughts that I, too, had entertained in high school) in If It Was Up To Me, and to rejoice in the love and concern that Chris expressed for Jesse on the same album with the song Coffee Spills.

I started to hear through all this music another track, laid down and in and through and between the cacophonous, bittersweet song of the world. This track told a story of love and grace and beauty. It was so soft and sweetly sung... unmistakably divine and the most beautiful melody in all the world. How had I missed it?

I still don't like Nirvana, or any other music that screams at me. I don't like listening to people glorify selfish, pointless sex (although I refuse to be in charge of defining what that is) and I think it is sad, as well, that artists who cannot hear The Song end up chasing after it in all sorts of self-destructive ways. I am more eager than ever to listen to honest stories, however, because I believe that it is the desperate attempt to define themselves as qualitatively superior that keeps that whole CCM crowd (or at least, most of it. what I've heard) making what sounds to me like tin-can, soulless music.

I am done with that. I want to yearn for God - not trap a parody of God in my pocket. I am breaking away.

stories

2010-06-14T09:05:00.000-07:00

I used to think that everybody was essentially the same. Sure, we looked different (thank God) and had all these odd little quirks; but at our core, I believed, we all wanted the same things and took a lot of the same stupid, counter-productive paths to try to get them. This belief helped me to empathize with people who acted very, very differently than I - I just assumed they were acting out, in different ways, the same sorts of insecurities and fears that I had.

With time, however, my opinion has sort of shifted. As I have grown up and become a little less afraid, I've had to conclude that not everyone is quite the wreck that I was. What's more, I really am an odd, quite different sort of a duck. I wash ziploc bags to re-use them, love guacamole while hating avocados, and say a lot of stupid things when I get anxious. I am also more creative than most people I know. I like to explore possibilities and to wonder about what might be. I easily construct alternate realities in my mind and just as easily (sometimes) destroy them if I lose interest.

I have always done this. If I see a woman in a frumpy dress dragging her screaming child between supermarket aisles I catch myself imagining her story - wondering about the things that led her to abandon her girlhood dream of sailing around the cayman islands catching swordfish, how she let that dream desperately slide into diapers and daytime television.

I do it to myself, too. For example, as a young child living in a terrorist-afflicted South American country, I would often imagine gruesome scenarios where guerrillas would blow up my house and kill off most of my friends. I envisioned myself barely escaping with my life and my BB gun, and then hiding in the trees where I would kill off the terrorists one-by-one by shooting them with deadly precision in the eyeballs, temples, or under the armpits into the heart. By the time I had finished telling myself these stories, I would be crying right along with "story Josh," imagining standing over the rough graves I'd dug for my family, a small child weeping at the horror of violence and his own lonely vengeance.

I did not ask to be this way, and for the longest time I disliked myself for it. There is a lot to be said for the value of living in the moment... of learning to BE. In difficult, anxious or painful moments, for example, it does NOT help to mentally escape into a story world where I can be the one doing the scripting. I do need to be who I am, and to take each day and each moment for what it actually is. This unhealthy tendency of mine often had me checking out of my marriage when it got tough, and more recently had me spending an inordinate amount of time worrying about an imaginary relational future with a person I barely knew. She's a pretty hep cat and you never know, but seriously - right now, I am pretty emotionally discombobulated by the whole "getting left by my wife" thing. Like I said... not helpful.

There is, however, another side to it. I have a friend who likes to say that "every mountain is climbed twice." It is impossible to create any significant reality without first dreaming it into being, and despite the fact that I do this mental storytelling to a sometimes unhealthy degree, there is a sense in which everyone plays these games. There is a sense in which I was in fact right about my essential similarity to everyone else. Humans have been called the storytelling animal, and I tend to believe that we are made that way, as image-bearers of an incomprehensible, story-telling God. Everyone tells stories as they attempt to understand and sometimes re-direct the essentially incomprehensible courses of their lives.

If I do this more than I ought - if this is who I am as a slightly more gifted (or at least, more experienced) storyteller, then so be it. I may in time learn to balance my mad storytelling impulse to a point where I will no longer confuse fact with fiction and inflict on others the consequences of my mental creations. In the meantime, however, I am going to cut myself some slack and hope that others will do the same. This creativity of mine may sometimes result in pain and confusion, but it also leads to paintings, poems, and (I hope) super-amazing film scripts. If my greatest strengths come with their own inherent weaknesses, then I will choose to accept myself, warts and all. I think it's worth it, even if it does drive me crazy. Viva la difference!

facebook

2010-06-14T07:52:00.000-07:00

I am nothing again, inside,
and so - finding myself no longer alive -
I enter the hive mind looking to find what I have lost.

But all I see is flashing lights,
as sight and all other senses are subsumed to the humming of millions of other nothings -
all of them seeking themselves in the hum
of the dumb, dumb, dumb -
of the blind, lame, deaf and alone -

connecting with nothing more than what they bring,
these mindless, humming drones who,
like me,
have forgotten how to sing.

Great Aunt Edie

2010-06-10T11:33:00.000-07:00

My grandfather was a thoughtful, literary man, and when my mom came home one day in late high school bouncing off the walls and talking about Jesus, he thought she was crazy. Not that he was completely unfamiliar with a more enthusiastic Christianity - his sister, Edie, had almost died of rheumatic fevers when she was a small girl and had always claimed that when it had happened she had gone to heaven, where she had seen Jesus - but it was a little different when his own daughter brought Jesus into the home. It was all well and good for his sister, but my mom was saying things like, "I wonder what God wants me to do today?" convincing him that she had gone completely bonkers and needed to see a shrink. Nonetheless, it may have been the quiet influence of my mother and my grandfather's close, enduring relationship with his sister that resulted in the eventual conversion of he and my grandmother to Christianity... which ended up being a part of why I have always thought of myself as having come from a long line of Christians on both sides (my dad's family were Anabaptists who came to this country a loooong time ago looking for religious freedom).

Fast-forward a few years to today, when at his behest my son and I went up to my parents' attic, one of his most favoritest adventure zones. I was sitting there on the ground by a pile of books as he tried to bounce a rubber ball off my face whilst yelling "Yo-Yo" and my eyes chanced to rest upon this small, green, fabric-bound notebook. I picked it up, opened it, and to my surprise it accordioned out between the covers. On the first page, it said "Thoughts... set apart... for my beloved niece Martha Lee Milligan on the day of her wedding to Ronald Norman Barkey, July 14, 1973. With love, Aunt Edie."

I never really knew my Great Aunt Edie - only ever visited her once, when I was very young - but my mother had always spoken fondly of her. I took the book downstairs and asked my mom if she would mind if I borrowed it and copied some of it out. She had forgotten the book existed, but said that it was all right. I began to read through and found in her words a poetic suffusion of love. My Aunt Edie would likely have rolled her eyes at many of the cockamamie ideas I throw around on here, but I sensed in her writing a loving, thoughtful woman who understood something of what it means to marvel at the wondrous mystery of this life. Mom seems to think that these are her original words, so I decided to copy out some of her words and let you make of them what you will - to show you a glimpse of the heritage of my mind. The only thing I've changed is a bit of punctuation... she was perhaps a little overly fond of the ellipses.

And if you think to judge her faith, I only ask you this: keep your mouth shut. Love transcends systems of belief, and faith is too precious a gift to allow it to be besmirched openly on the cesspool of the internet. One thing I believe in is the power of family - so please... respect my family, or I will hammer your face with pointy words.

Thoughts from Great Aunt Edie:

---

Death:

The parting of the Veil is not so difficult. I wonder why we fight it so... It's as natural as childbirth... only this time we move into a bigger realm. This time we move into an Eternal realm, where Life has no limits and Love is supreme.

---

Free Choice:

It seems I hear an echo
of a plaintive call afar.
Is this the call of yesteryears
when men fought wars before?

We've come so short a distance
in so very long a time.
How disappointing we must be
to the Father of Mankind.

I guess it's up to you and me
to wrestle with this weight,
to spread God's word of love
and stamp out man's hate.

5/5/69

---

Truth:

"And the Truth shall make you free." Truth... the foundation of Life... the frontier of faith... the ultimate in science, the pedestal for God.

11/21/66

---

Faith:

Faith is the life-blood to all belief... to all renewal of the soul. Faith is the forerunner of love and hope... without faith, love could not exist; they go hand in hand. Faith kindles the flame that stirs man's soul; Faith hears the knock and opens the door. It's given... by Grace.

---

A Helping Hand:

Oh, the love within our souls searches hungrily for God. We hear His great voice calling and go to answer Him. He beckons us to follow... we stumble as we go, not knowing quite the way. Then Christ gives us a hand and lifts us up to Him.

11/21/66

---

Encountering God:

The stillness is His breath, the winds are His voice. In like manner, the unfolding of a bud or leaf proclaims His word. He is here... He is NOW.

God is, and that alone is sufficient. And in our small way, we ARE, and in that simplicity, the IMAGE finds its MAKER.

1/5/72

---

Peace and quiet - gentleness and calm - waves lap gently upon the sands. God caresses... soothes... and satisfies.

---

A Long Road to Go:

Love... I know love. I cherish love, want love, give love... but it's always on my terms!
Real love is on His terms... compassion and action - keyed to include the unlovely.
Faith... I'm filled with faith, undaunted faith. Write about faith... teach faith... then fail to practice it!
Real faith permeates every act. I know I am not alone. I am His hand... his foot... NOW.

Not my will... but Thy will.

8/18/67

---

What is this thing called love... Like a river it flows bubbling and placid, then torrential and raging - a Force so powerful we both fear it and desire it. Yet Christ said, "Love casteth out fear!" What is this thing called Love?

---

"...they were of one accord" ... interesting thought ... how often are we "of one accord"?

Pentecost was the result!

---

Silence is essential to the well-being of the soul. We must touch the stillness of the Universe to understand ourselves.

---

Out to pasture... we're always putting people out to pasture. One of these days we'll get the right perspective on youth and age... and eternity?

---

God is within, Man is the superstructure! Life whittles away the rough edges until God claims His own.

---

There's a quality of beauteous joy when love aboundeth in the heart and hope abideth in the Soul!

---

What is it I want from Life - a bed to sleep in... a pillow beneath my head? Not really: a hand to clasp, a god to adore, a love that permeates and a life that radiates. That's what I want... food for the Soul!

---

Pores open
I cry within
God is real
And I'm alive!

---

Children:

Man's greatest humblers
Man's greatest heartaches
Man's greatest joy!
Loaned by God.

---

A Prayer:

Oh, Thou great and glorious Heavenly Father, Master of all that is - creator of the Universe and the Atom... forgive our petty ways.
We, who are images of Thee, and seek to be gods of the earth... forgive us.
Open our hearts and minds that thy voice may be heard, and may it touch and fill all the reaches of our total beings that all we do may be through Thee and for Thee to the glory of Thy name.

Amen.

---

That was it... all there was. I had thought to pick out a few and leave anything that seemed hokey out, but the whole thing ended up striking me as sweetly beautiful. I hope it brings you joy as well - the words of a woman who, it seems, walked only lightly on this earth.

questions

2010-06-08T10:35:00.000-07:00

I have a little book of questions that I bought for ninety-nine cents at the Salvation Army store on Highway 10 in Langley, British Columbia. It is titled, aptly enough, "The Little Book of Questions," and is basically just a catalyst for conversation or a superb way to cheat if you're engaging another human being in an ongoing intimacy-increasing email game of "question ping-pong." Each question is numbered, so you can also use the book by asking a group of people to take turns picking random numbers between one and two hundred and seventeen, with the understanding that they have to answer the question they have chosen as honestly as possible. This has the potential to be gloriously awkward (some of the questions are really, really personal), but I have found that if there is one thing people hate more than being embarrassed by an awkward answer, it's never getting asked a question in the first place. So sometimes I pick one of these questions out of my head to ask random groups of people - like I did the other day at my year-end faculty brunch. The question I asked is this: If you could invent a new form of transportation that would radically change the way people get around - like, say, teleportation - but knew that it would cause the deaths of around a hundred thousand people a year, would you do it?

One of my colleagues, whom we will call the "Empress of Maklistan," jumped right in and said "No... wait, I mean, yes. You're talking about the invention of the automobile, right? [bingo!] Well, I would still do it. Think of all the lives you could save. It would totally be worth it." There were nods and grunts of approval all around the table, but at that point Steven, the head of our English department, broke in to vehemently point out that you can never save a life, you can only take actions that will cause it to be prolonged for a while (gotta love us English majors), and then the conversation turned to other things. Too late, I thought of a follow up question: Would you still do it if you knew for a fact that your own children (or any similarly important people in your life) would be among the very first killed by the new technology? The answer to that question, I suspect, would reveal a lot about how you view the world.

Why is it so easy to be cavalier about the lives of a hundred thousand strangers when weighing them against some hypothetical advantage, but so immediately horrendous when the question is made personal? Are we really all that selfish? Is it really so difficult to care about what happens to people we don't know?

Maximum Posted Suggestion - Or: On the Evils of Speeding

2010-06-07T09:26:00.000-07:00

In early May, nineteen-ninety-eight, I drove my aging diesel Jetta at a blistering ninety kilometers an hour down the long hill into 100 Mile House, British Columbia. I had failed to see the sign at the top of the hill that halved the speed limit. With a flash of red and blue lights, a cop going the other direction flipped a U-turn and fell in behind me. I pulled my overstuffed car onto the broad, paved shoulder in front of the Ramada Inn, rolled my window down the rest of the way and sagged onto the steering wheel. It was the beginning of another summer of tree planting and as usual, tuition had left me broke. This was going to hurt.

A hand thwacked onto the peeling-green paint on the roof of my car and I jolted upright and turned to look straight into the sunglasses of a bulky officer of the law. He cleared his throat.

"Give me one reason why I shouldn't give you the biggest ticket you ever got," he said, with a smirk that I was too terrified to notice.

"Uh. Uh. Uh..."

I paused, collected my thoughts, and started over. "Officer, I am really, really sorry I didn't notice the sign. I've driven this road a lot of times, and you'd think I would know better by now. The truth is, I always obey the speed limit. I'm the most ridiculously ridiculous observer of traffic laws that you've ever pulled over. I've never had a speeding ticket before because I always follow the speed limit. I annoy the people behind me, and I annoy my friends in the car. Seriously... just ask them."

He looked at Ryan, who was nodding in the passenger seat, and then leaned over and glanced into the stuffed back seat, where from between piles of bags and planting gear my brother and the hulking Trevor Wallace were also vigorously nodding their heads. "Seriously... he's such a pain," my brother said.

The officer tapped a ballpoint on his pad of poverty.

"All right," he said at last, "Get out of here... and slow down in my town."

Still shaking, I put the car in first and lurched off down the road, once again scrupulously obeying the dictates of the government's conscience, annoying everyone. It was a sort of habit.

See, back in those days I was determined to show everyone that I was a good little Christian boy - and Christian boys obey the law of the land. They have to, because it's right there in the Bible. Jesus himself said in Mark 12:17 that I needed to render unto Ceasar what was Caesar's... by which he obviously meant that I ought to obey the traffic laws of 100 Mile House, British Columbia.

So I watched that speed dial like an accountant, uphill and down. I drove people mad and learned to drop down a gear and smoke out the tailgaters with billowing blue clouds from my rattling old diesel. I sanctimoniously looked down the hawkish bridge of my nose at those who angrily vroomed by whenever a passing lane opened up, and shook my head sadly at the state of the world as even police officers - police officers! - ripped by me on two-lane roads.

And I was right, dang you all. I was right. I obeyed the letter of that law until it was seared on my shiny-scrubbed little face. And I was right.

Except, of course, for the sanctimony. And the intentional use of diesel smoke to annoy people. Oh, and the obsessive, endless judgment of all those immoral God-haters who had driven their cars even one measly kilometer over the legally posted speed limit. I had the letter of the law down perfectly. It was easy to do - letters of laws always are - but I absolutely and completely missed the point and spirit of the thing. I missed out on the love.

The fact of the existence of a traffic law - or any law, for that matter - does not prove the justice of it. While I do think that it is worthwhile to obey the laws of the land unless there is a compelling moral reason to do otherwise, laws are determined as much by practice as by paper. Besides, laws change as society changes. You don't have to look too far to find laws that exist on paper but are never, ever enforced. What does a law mean when even the cops always break it?

For instance, it is illegal to ride an ugly horse down the street in Wilbur, Washington, and ninth-grade boys can't grow mustaches in Binghamton, New York. You can't carry an ice-cream cone in your pocket in Lexington, Kentucky, and goats can't legally wear trousers in Massachusetts. Oh, and don't mispronounce "Arkansas" when you're in that state... it's against the law.*

While traffic laws do not quite fit into the "weird law" category, the lesson learned from weird laws should still affect our understanding of their relative moral weight, and we shouldn't spend every moment living in fear that if we happen to break a law, it will mean that we're doomed reprobates. Laws change, but people and principles don't. Laws are always based on imperfect, generalized conceptions of what it is best, on average, for people to do. They do not account for individuals. Individuals make mistakes. They fail - sometimes on purpose, and often without even knowing it. Even in my hyper-vigilant speed-watching days, I still from time to time parked my car facing the wrong direction on residential streets and performed some dubious U-turns.

I was ignoring a very important truth - the fact that true character is not revealed by how well I perform relatively simple, straightforward tasks (like complying with speed limits); but rather, through the choices I make under pressure. The harder the choice, the deeper the revelation of true character and the more indicative of who I really am. It is easy, for example, to stay committed to a friend when they are treating me well and buying me cupcakes. It's much harder when they're going through a tough time and have taken to regularly calling me "Mr. Flop-Bott." But until they've fallen to such heinous name-calling, it is impossible to know for sure the depth and quality of my friendship.

In essence, I was using my careful observance of traffic laws as a way of deflecting attention (both mine and others') from things in my character that really were deep flaws - things that needed to be laid out in the open if I was ever to be healed of them. I was manifesting selfishness, pride and fear in a lot of subtle, hidden ways, and was too afraid to expose what I subconsciously believed to be my inherent worthlessness. I took care of the easy, visible stuff and ignored the things that really mattered.

This did not work out so well for me. I got tired of it, and then I gradually began to let it go. Believe it or not, now I sometimes even speed. I don't really mean to, but I just don't watch that dial nearly as closely as I used to. And you know what? I'm pretty happy about my newfound "immorality." It was too dang stressful trying to be perfect. I'm much happier living as if I really believed in grace. Now, don't get me wrong. I do think that laws are there for a reason and that it's important to try to obey them... and I still have yet to get a speeding ticket. Nonetheless, I have at last begun to learn to balance a desire to strive for moral purity with the awareness of my inability to be perfect.

As Viktor Frankl, brilliant thinker and author of "Man's Search for Meaning" (go. read it. right now) said, "If you take man as he really is, you make him worse. But if you seem to be idealists and you overestimate him, you know what happens? You promote him to what he really can be."

My idealistic hope is no longer found in believing that if I can just attain to perfect moral behavior, then I will have meaning and value and love in my life. Rather, it is found in the belief that I already have meaning and value and love (a gift, I believe), and can therefore strive humbly for moral excellence in the little things. I believe that if I can do this, then when the big things arrive - the really difficult, really important choices - I will have made a habit of standing strong for truth, revealing a character that has been shaped and molded by love.

This, I think, is what Jesus would have wanted me to give to Caesar.

---

*Wacky laws borrowed from Uncle John's Tenth Anniversary Bathroom Reader. That's right: I'm super highbrow.

war

2010-06-02T18:06:00.000-07:00

According to the Experimental Theology blogger guy:
Deaths on 9/11 = 2,995
US Deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan = 5,408
Estimated Iraqi civilian deaths = 90,000-100,000

Each death a tragedy.

---

A Prayer of Hope, Written in the Woods

God of dewdrops blinking in the morning light
and stars that nightly shimmer in the fullness of space;
God of the places no one sees, like fresh-green
grown through the boles of fallen trees
and what breathes in the depths of a turquoise lake:

When I awake, I hear you in the mountain stream
and in the love-songs of unforgotten sparrows.
In the narrows of a rock where water falls
I hear the calls of a world that yearns
and seethes between your hands.

God of stands of livid trees and all that lies beneath -
of shadows and sorrows
and the joy of no tomorrows...
these days, I walk alone
and moan for what's not there.

But when I start to scare,
I see again the endless sky
and fall to resting on a raft of grass.
I see it all pass in cotton shapes of bliss
and feel again the kiss of you.

Anew I wonder at the God of thunder
and of birth of softer things like sparrows' wings,
of God who brings laughter to a time of whelming pain:
who made the summer rain
and winter moons that shone on long gone men.

And when the shadows roll again
and it seems the dark has won -
when I see the storm clouds still -
I close my eyes and bend my will
and wait,

wait for the sun.

by Josh Barkey (1999)

ten rippling pounds

2010-06-02T11:38:00.000-07:00

As embarrassing as it is to admit it, I am gaining weight. I am doing it on purpose, too. But not like my friend Josh, when he decided to see how much he could gain in one day eating only Burger King Hamburgers (Twelve Pounds!). If I was doing that, I'd be bursting not only with burgers, but with pride. Because, c'mon... TWELVE POUNDS!?! That's flippin' amazing!

However, I'm not doing anything wonderful like that. Nope, I am gaining weight for selfish, vain, hypocritical reasons.

See, back in high school, when all my friends were hitting puberty and I was reading a lot of books and obsessing about how I was not hitting puberty, I decided that I needed to be happy with who I was. Everyone is different, after all, and someone has to pose for the "before" pictures in all those Atlas Weightlifting Ads in the middle of the Archie Comic Books. Besides, muscles shrink with age and bones become brittle, so it's foolish to look for identity and worth in something as stupid as a physical archetype, and blah blah blah and so on and so forth, and a whole bunch of other things that are very, very true.

And yet...

And yet I persisted in not liking my body and extrapolating that sentiment out into a nagging dislike of my whole Self.

Not always, mind you, and definitely not in every way. I did learn to like myself, somewhat, for who I was. I learned that I could do things that many muscle-bound dudes could not (such as, use words like "extrapolating" in a sentence); and in time I even began to accept that my ultimate value would never be found in what I did, or what I looked like, or who my friends were. I realized that my value was already there, because I was a unique individual, bearing a truly lovely Divine Stamp all over my God-Awesome self. It is one thing, however, to rationally accept a principle as true. It is quite another to feel it, consistently, on an everyday level.

The past year has taught me a lot about being fake. I have learned that I do it regularly, and that I don't have to. So instead of denying that I still think of myself as a little runt and pretending that I do not care when the big boys shove me around with their big boy muscles, I decided to do something about it. I decided to gain ten pounds. Not a big deal, really - ten pounds. But you gotta understand that I have weighed the same for the past ten years. It hasn't mattered if I ate like a horse or a sparrow, did manual labor or taught in a classroom... through some weird, freak-of-nature self-balancing metabolism, I have been Mister Buck-Forty forever.

So I decided to take responsibility. I decided that I should stop lying about my feelings and proactively work towards change. I began to do a few exercises at home (pushups, chinups, etc) wearing a weight vest that a student bought for me, and I began to eat more food and to drink protein shakes after exercising. I decided I would do this for six months, and if at that point my body still insisted I had no business getting any bigger, I would give up.

Ten pounds is nothing, I know. You can gain that in a day, eating burgers. But for me, ten pounds is significant in three ways. First, it is a way to acknowledge to myself that I have been lying about being all right with the way I look. Second, it is a symbol of choice - a realization that I am not the helpless victim of fate. I have been given the incredible gift of freedom, and I can use it. And Third, it is an admission that if I do not begin to be intentional about caring for my body at the age of thirty, I will regret it later on.

Not lying, making choices, and caring for your body are good things, right? So why, you might wonder, am I embarrassed to admit it?

I guess it is because in so doing, I have to admit imperfection. Although anyone can look at me and see that I am not a Greek god with the body of Adonis, it smarts to speak those words out loud in a culture that says that brawn is an essential part of what it means to be a man. I'm a bit smaller than average, and no matter how much reason and truth say otherwise, I still breathe the air of a society that believes that this makes me a bit less manly than average.

It is more than just masculine insecurity, though. As a human being, I am a study in contradiction and am as vain as the next guy. There are a great many wonderful things I see in myself - things that I often (foolishly) believe are the result of my own superb character. I got skills, baby, skills. So I don't think that is it, entirely.

Rather, the main reason I am embarrassed to admit that I am actively trying to gain ten pounds is that I am aware that this is a form of hypocrisy. I have essentially chosen to spend a significant amount of time and money on something that I firmly believe to be a vanity*. I am not a serious athlete, training for some event or contest. I'm just a guy with a complex who is trying to get over it - which strikes me as selfish and pathetic and also a wee bit stupid-dumb. Folks are starving out there, and here I am making strawberry banana protein shakes and sweating all over my kitchen floor.

As embarrassed as I am, though, I am still going to do it, and take it to be a good thing.

I know it won't actually work - ten pounds will still leave me smaller than average, and ten pounds will not fix my insecurity issues. You cannot resolve what is essentially a problem of the soul with what would seem to be a purely physical remedy. Still, body and soul are connected in a great many mysterious ways that I certainly can't comprehend, and it is just possible that I might be able to turn this work that I am doing and the food that I am eating into a sort of prayer and a sacrament - a way of regularly admitting my own hypocrisy and self-absorption. If I can make this a practice of confession, perhaps I will end up with a healthier sense of who I am as a unique facet of the reflected light of God.

And biceps. Rippling biceps.

---

*I would like to make it perfectly clear that I think that working out for the purposes of health and fitness is a fabulous idea. My motivation, however - to gain ten pounds - is ridiculous. It takes SO much food to make ten pounds of muscle.

memorial day, 2010

2010-05-31T09:24:00.000-07:00

Although I think it's legitimate to mourn the mis-uses of violence that have been perpetrated over the years by our extremely ginormous military, today is a good day to remember that America is in many ways much, much less war-like than many powerful nations of the past and present.

It is also good to pause and remember that this is a broken world, and that there are moments when we can be grateful for those who have fought to protect innocents in danger. I, for one, am grateful to live in a society where I can rely on a police force that is only mildly corrupt and can be mostly counted on in a crisis to protect my family from those who would do violence against it. There are places in the world (like the favelas of Brasil, for instance) where the innocent must fear violence from the police themselves. While it is very difficult even in retrospect to know whether governments have taken up the sword for justice or against it, the people on the ground who end up using that sword are often men and women of great courage, who willingly accept that they may in fact die by it.

My great-grandfather and both my grandparents on my mother's side fought in WWI and WWII, respectively. Although America's motivation for entry into those wars is perhaps suspect, them there Nazis had to be stopped. So here is me, thanking those who for a variety of reasons entered into an ugly thing and stopped a greater ugliness from spreading, often at the cost of their own lives.

more slacking

2010-05-30T03:33:00.000-07:00

Many are the times I have advocated the reading of the SLACKTIVIST on here, and while he doesn't really need my recommendation (he recently stated that his blog had passed six million totally unique visitors - pause for fit of jealous rage), I thought I would once again give him the big hoo-rah! by recommending strongly that you go read THIS POST.

Now, one of the annoying things that this slacktivist fellow does (his name is Fred) is make me uncomfortable. I don't always like or agree with where his crazy, hippie, pinko-commie ideas take him, and I don't like what I sometimes feel is his constantly annoyed tone.

Stillandbuthowever, THIS POST to which I have just referred and which you are about to go read has a really interesting perspective on how a thoughtful person might read the Bible, and a really, really, really interesting perspective on very specific ways in which a thoughtful person might go about investing his or her money.

a slightly more erudite explanation of why christians (in a very narrow sense) are sucky artists

2010-05-29T11:12:00.000-07:00

The following is stolen directly from the blog of a Dr. Richard Beck, professor of Psychology at Abilene Christian University. In the purloined essay, Dr. Beck is discussing James Davison Hunter's book "To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, & Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World."

The beauteous thing for me about thieving on the internet is that I don't have to read books with long titles (score!). The bonus for you is that you get me selecting manageable chunks from long blog posts about long books with long titles (double score!).

I like that, and I like the way this essay helps to explain why books like the "Left Behind" series and movies like "Fireproof" are so popular in the evangelical subculture despite being so, er, "not-good," and why in the absence of cultural clout, Christians have taken to betraying the ideals of Jesus (I would argue) and grubbing for political power. Enjoy.

---

"The point is, cultural change occurs via the work of cultural elites. A slowly rising flood of books, editorials, movies, and cable interviews that slowly change how we see the world. The settled consensus begins to be challenged intellectually and artistically and, eventually, the culture changes. Think about cultural changes in America. Abolitionism during the Civil War. The Civil Rights movement. The 60s. Thinks about how elites drove all those changes. The culture changed because sermons changed. Newspaper editorials changed. Books got published. Entertainers challenged the status quo.

And all this creates a bit of a problem for Christians, particularly evangelicals, who have (not illegitimate) problems with the existence of elites in their midst. And yet, this frustration simply recognizes the truth of the matter: There are so few of them and, yet, they have the cultural power to define reality.

In the face of this reality Christians have done something very curious. Rather than intentionally trying to produce cultured elites--as the Jewish and gay communities have produced--Christians have largely abandoned the institutions of cultural power (think about New York and Hollywood) to create their own subculture. Their own music, movies, books, and TV shows. And as Hunter notes, the output of this cultural production has been absolutely astounding. Because, like we said, there are a lot of Christians out there! Think of a book like The Shack. A publishing phenomenon. And yet, a Christian sensation like this leaves hardly a cultural ripple, being mainly consumed by the Christian subculture. Plus, a great deal of the Christian cultural output is kitsch. Christian writing, music and art is generally perceived to be of low quality. And if you've been in a Christian bookstore recently (I was yesterday) you understand this assessment.

In short, Christians do have a vibrant culture. It's just what Hunter calls a "weak culture." Christian cultural production is strongest where the leverage for cultural change is weakest. Hunter on this conclusion:

In terms of the cultural economy, however, Christians in America today have institutional strength and vitality exactly in the lower and peripheral areas of cultural production. Against the prevailing view, the main reason why Christian believers today (from various communities) have not had the influence in the culture to which they have aspired is not that they don't believe enough, or try hard enough, or care enough, or think Christianly enough, or have the right worldview, but rather because they have been absent from the areas in which the greatest influence in the culture is exerted. The culture-producing institutions of historical Christianity are largely marginalized in the economy of culture formation in North America. Its cultural capital is greatest where leverage in the larger culture is weakest.

Oddly, rather than working to enter the arenas of cultural power many, mostly evangelical, Christians actively foster and take pride in an anti-intellectualism. Rather than creating a richer Christian culture, the goal is to battle "the elites." Given this strategy, how could you possibly hope to win the culture war? If you foster anti-intellectualism and take pride in kitsch then how are you going to win this battle to "name reality"?

Well, you basically give up on trying to change culture and attempt to grab the only other power available to you: The government. Because while you don't have cultural capital (those damned elites have that!) you do have thenumbers and you can turn churches into voting collations.

And so Christianity goes political."

---

As a final note, I would add that despite what "Christians" have given their detractors reason to believe, Christianity is not inherently antithetical to good art (witness my own painting - hah, hah). It is just that they have consistently chosen agenda-based art-making, which by its very nature despises the excellence that is inherent in the process required to become an intellectual and a cultural elite.

Some might argue that this doesn't matter - that "Christians" should be allowed to fill their own little cesspool of bad art. But as Madeleine L'Engle said in "Walking on Water", "bad art is bad theology." If you make the pursuit of excellence secondary to the acceptance of a pre-determined "right" answer, you will end up betraying the truth, and Christ will come to be associated in the broader cultural context with bombastic, sucky, deceptive art. Excellence and Truth must be pursued with simultaneous passion - anything less is a betrayal of both. That is why, if someone asks me if I am a Christian artist, I pause and mutter something about the weather. And if they keep bugging me, I tell them I am a part of the "community of the broken."

Shop Like Jesus

2010-05-27T07:45:00.000-07:00

My smarmy and endlessly off-color treeplanting friend Jon used to gleefully say that Jesus was "the great shit disturber." I call it "gleefully" because, like me, Jon was raised in a highly conservative Christian missionary environment where putting the words "shit" and "Jesus" in the same sentence was anathema -- a gold-plated, first-class, one-way ticket to the darkest, most burningest regions of Hell. Having become disillusioned by this environment at an early age, Jon took great pleasure in disturbing my more delicate sensibilities at every available opportunity.

In the estimation of my childhood community, just quoting Jon probably has me licked by flames, but the truth is, I don't really care. First, because while I question the wisdom of savaging a cultural convention just to shock and annoy those of a more "delicate" moral constitution, the prohibition against the word "shit" is most definitely a cultural convention -- one which, while I adhere to it somewhat religiously (and hypocritically), I have heard violated of late by countless conservative Christians. Either the culture has changed, or these folks have gotten tired of the hypocrisy of acting all uppity about the word while playing fast-and-loose with its more socially acceptable cousins (crap, poop, turd).

My second reason for ignoring convention and risking the scorn of people I love is that if we can overlook his "earthy" terminology, the fact is that Jon is right. I've spent a fair bit of time reading about Jesus, and the fellow seemed to always have been jumping from one set of toes to the next -- almost like he thought it was just as important to disturb the comfortable as it was to comfort the disturbed.

One of the main ways Jesus did this toe-stepping was by talking about money, because the way a person uses money is usually a pretty good indicator of what they value in life. If you've spent too much time around average North Americans who claim to follow Jesus Christ you might find this hard to believe, but Jesus himself actually talked more about money than he did about sex. A lot more. So I think that in the spirit of Jesus I would like to try to disturb you by talking about how you're spending your money, and by questioning whether that lines up all that well with What Jesus Would Buy.

Chances are good that if you're reading this, you are fairly comfortable when it comes to money. Wealth is a relative term and relative to the population of the world, you are really, really rich. You've got a computer, leisure time, and a good education - hence, rich.

So, my rich friends, let's start big by asking if Jesus would buy a rocket ship to fly to the moon. On that one, I'm going to have to say a pretty firm, "no." First of all, because if Jesus wanted to go to the moon, he would just say, "KACHOW!" and beam himself over. But secondly, Jesus would not buy a rocket ship to fly to the moon because Jesus strikes me as both extremely intelligent and loving, and when it came time to lay the fifty billion dollars down on the table, Jesus would think about the fifty million starving children in the world and he just wouldn't do it. I am sure Jesus would be a huge fan of the curiosity and wonder inherent in the modern scientific mindset, but I'm also pretty sure he'd say, "let's take care of the kids first."

What about on a smaller scale... would Jesus buy a McMansion? I'm talking about those monstrous suburban houses with the postage stamp lawns, which are usually occupied by only two or three people. Would he buy one of those? Well, I'd have to say... maybe. Jesus would be living in this culture, and if he had a house he would undoubtedly be using it to host a constant stream of guests, so he would need a lot of room for all the the feasting and partying he'd be doing - not to mention at least one room dedicated exclusively to his unparalleled wine collection. Still, given that the modern McMansion is usually built with zero environmental consciousness (most of them will end up in landfills in sixty years) and that most of the people who own them never let homeless people stay in the spare rooms, I am guessing that if Jesus were a real estate adviser, he would probably counsel against it.

It is probably useful to pause here a moment and mention that I am fairly confident that Jesus would not be particularly swayed by our modern forms of advertising. He would probably laugh at all the commercials promising great sex, family satisfaction, happiness and so on. Or maybe he would cry... yeah, I have a feeling Jesus would cry a lot if he were watching the televisions of America. This is, I think, because he would have a flawless understanding of the distinction between "I need" and "I want," and he would clearly see the ways in which our confusion of the two leads us into slavery to our destructive economic machine.

If you want to shop like Jesus, then, I suggest you pause a moment and think about what you really need. An ipod? New Clothes? Huffy's Sweet New White Heat Bicycle (dang, I wanted one of those!)? Don't be ridiculous. What you need is enough food, water and shelter to stay alive, and enough good work and community to stay sane and healthy. That's it, and it is the reason why, when Jesus was telling people how they ought to talk to God, he didn't say to ask for a Hummer with laser beams, or a good grade on that test they didn't study for, or a perfect spouse, or a gift card for the Olive Garden, or excellent traffic conditions all the way to Poughkeepsie. Nope, he just said to ask for Daily Bread -- premium organic raspberry jam not included.

This is not to say that Jesus was all that into scarcity and asceticism. He wore a nice robe that some ladies gave him, enjoyed a good party, and thoroughly chewed out his friends for picking on a woman who "wasted" some expensive perfume by using it to wash his feet. Nonetheless, there is a big difference between the little extravagances that Jesus enjoyed and the endless procession of extravagances that we demand in our fated attempts to find satisfaction in stuff. You may have noticed, my fellow richies, that these attempts don't exactly work.

I would like to suggest that you try something a little different. I would like to suggest that you begin to grow in your awareness that every time you open your wallet, you are making a moral decision. Will you shop like Jesus, or will you allow the market forces of your economy and the constant pressure of the marketers to convince you that in all their unnecessary products you will find meaning, joy and, ultimately, life?

When you purchase food, will you buy the quickest, cheapest thing that takes the least amount of work and, because of its high sugar, caloric, and sodium content sends little eddies of endorphins rushing through your brain tissue? Or will you, rather, buy with a conscience - purchasing lovingly-grown food in a less processed state - food that requires more work to prepare but is infinitely more nourishing to the body with which you live?

What about entertainment? Will you seek with your purchases to get more and more intensely pleasurable entertainment experiences, or will you see the fated folly of this fool's errand and instead learn to take pleasure in more simple things, like the joy of working and playing alongside the people whom you love?

Will you constantly buy new clothes before the old ones are worn out in an effort to stay on top of the pure fabrication that is "style," or will you learn that you are lovely and loveable regardless of what you are wearing (or not wearing, tee-hee).

I could endlessly parse this out into smaller and smaller financial decisions, but I have discovered that it is just this parsing that was turning me into a slave of the very thing I was trying to escape; because it is just as possible to become enslaved by money by obsessing about trying not to spend it frivolously. It is, once again, a question of motivation - a question of love. I am not here to proscribe some sort of system for figuring out the difference between a financial decision made in love and one made in a fool's attempt to find meaning in stuff - that just isn't possible.

What I am hoping to suggest is that in our culture the balance is far more likely to swing towards the latter, and that any attempt to actually follow Jesus would require a constant, concerted effort in the opposite direction. Perhaps you don't care about all that "following Jesus" stuff. My intention in this particular essay is not to convince you that Jesus is the cat's meow and it's pajamas (as well as the bees' knees), or even to see if I can type the word "shit" five times and get away with it. Rather, I am writing in the hope that if more of us would get disturbed enough to begin to use our wallets to vote for love, then perhaps there would be more love -- and a little less hunger, thirst and pain.

good

2010-05-26T15:20:00.000-07:00

If you've never heard of it, please go check out http://www.good.is/

Not only is it a crazy-cool publication, but they also just published this article by a guy with my exact same name! And whilst you're there, make yourself a GOOD account and tell this marvelously-named fellow what you think of him.

weeding

2010-05-24T13:45:00.000-07:00

Have you ever smoked marijuana? Did you inhale?

There was a time when I would have gotten giggly just asking you that. But time and experience have jaded and faded my naive innocence to the point where I can unflinchingly ask how much weed you've been toking and where you get your supply. It's a weedy, weedy world. Back in college, however, when I was a fresh-off-the-boat missionary kid, this was all very new to me: the idea that I could actually know folks who would openly admit to (gasp) using illegal drugs. Legal and culturally condoned drugs like sugar, or caffeine, or shopping or dopamine or video games - that I could understand, but POT? This was something infinitely more mystical and fascinating.

One day, for the purpose of education, I started on my dorm white-board a list of marijuana-related words: "splif, doobie, joint, mary jane, ganja, hash, grass, roach, stoned, wasted, trashed, high, et cetera, et cetera." From time to time, dorm-mates or passers-by would add to the list until, about a week later, we had covered every inch of that board in a mish-mash of maui-wowie. Then one morning... GONE: wiped clean by my brother's bug-eyed roommate who insisted, loudly, that we were encouraging evil and had to be stopped.

This was the same guy who came into the dorm lounge furious one day because he had overheard the chapel band practicing. "You can't practice worship!" he ranted. "It's supposed to be spontaneous and from the heart! This is immoral and has to be stopped... I'm gonna file a complaint!"

Now, I can sort of see the point old bug-eyes was trying to make. I, too, dislike the tin-can, entertainment-aspect of most contemporary, protestant church music. I won't re-hash here why I have this opinion, but I will say that this protruding-peeper dormmate with his little one-man protests annoyed me more than crappy music ever could have, because he was trying to legislate morality and that, mes amigos, is a real problem.

I've been working through an online Harvard University course called "Justice", which among other things explores the foundations of the American judicial system. Although this course has refreshed my memory and taught me some new things, I still don't have more than a rudimentary understanding of how the law works. Still, as a justice-minded individual (it's one of the most pervasive themes of my faith tradition), it is something I have thought and argued about a fair bit. It just keeps popping up.

When I start writing about marijuana, for example, I am reminded of a conversation I had back in my college days with my friend Aren Roukema about the process of de-criminalization that was going on in our province (British Columbia) at the time. Neither of us smoked the stuff, so it was more of an intellectual exercise than anything else, but I was trying to convince Aren that this de-criminalization would lead to madness and mayhem and the deaths of countless helpless children. I had started to feed him the line that marijuana was just BAD and ought to be illegal when he stopped me, compellingly, with this point: you cannot legislate morality.

And I repeat: you cannot legislate morality.

The purpose of law is not to make good citizens. The purpose of law is to take the principle that "your right to swing your fist ends where my face begins" and enforce it. This is called the harm principle and was developed by people like John Stuart Mill and John Locke. It assumes that at times people will be bad citizens and will unjustly hurt others, and therefore seeks to protect the afflicted. It takes the extra step, however, of asserting that the government has no right to do anything beyond that. This is a good thing, I think, because it keeps the psychos in power from going out on a whim and making illegal any old behaviors that they happen not to like.

I knew this at the time of my argument with Aren, but I still found the idea of a split between law and morality odd. I had always thought of the law as this big THING - a massive, blockish machine that, while incomprehensible and sometimes manipulated unjustly by evil forces, was still a generally reliable indicator of what I should and should not do. I quickly realized, however, that it made sense that the relationship between law and morality - beyond that first moral principle of protecting innocent faces from unjust fists - was mostly incidental. Hmmm, I thought... and then I thought some more.

Morality is a strange force, with fairly universal moral principles being applied in a dizzyingly broad variety of ways by different cultures. It is possible, I believe, to attempt with a certain degree of success to judge the objective moral value of an action. But even if you were supremely wise and able to always distinguish the difference between what is universally true and what is merely cultural, the fact remains that it is a question, primarily, of the heart (or character, or whatever). Heart-education is not, I believe the province of the government, but rather of the family and community. Family and community may have degraded in our culture to the point where it would seem easier to hand this task over to the government (as many try to do) but this is one case where easier is definitely not better.

While you might, I think, make a fairly convincing argument that smoking a lot of pot hurts people (it certainly doesn't help the GPAs of those of my students who regularly light up), in order to argue for continued legislation against it you would have to prove conclusively that it hurts people other than those who smoke it. And let me remind you that it is not enough to show that it hurts other people in a broader, "culture is diminished by pot-smokers' increased stupidity" sense, or even to say that driving under the influence of pot is dangerous. Television has been proven to kill brain cells, and idiots are always getting drunk and hopping behind the wheels of cars - but we certainly don't take that to mean we should outlaw watching "The Office" with a good glass of wine.

Neither do we make it illegal to be a glutton, a gossip, a lust-monkey, a meany-pants, or a smoker of cigarettes (although the harm principle has been more widely applied, of late, to restrict the marketing and use of cigarettes). Furthermore, although the country where I happen to live is (I've been told) a nation founded on Christian principles you may, in fact, quite legally break all but the sixth, eighth, and ninth of the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20: 1-17), which are, theoretically, the foundation of the entire Judeo-Christian ethical system.

This is not to say that you should do any of those legal but arguably immoral things. In fact, let me suggest that I think it is much better if you don't. It has been my experience that all these things will lead to a diminishment of life, robbing you of joy and love and your community of the benefit of what you could be as your most healthy, creative self. In fact, I will go even further and say that although you are welcome to work to change a law, unless you have a compelling moral reason to break them you should always obey all the laws of your country to the best of your ability - no matter how stupid or ill-conceived they may be. As Mahatma Gandhi said, this will give you the moral right to disobey laws that are immoral, because you will have proven that you are not merely breaking laws out of selfish disrespect for the community in which you have chosen to live.

I want to get all worked up about this - to yell and shake my fist and erase the whiteboard of your mind so that I can cover it with more uplifting things - but then I remember: "let him who has never exceeded the posted legal speed limit cast the first stone," and I think again, briefly, of shutting up.

ad infinitum (latest 8"x10")

2010-05-21T09:55:00.000-07:00

joy unspeakable

2010-05-19T18:02:00.000-07:00

There are two reasons, I guess, why I keep secrets from you. The first is to protect people who did not necessarily ask to share their lives with a writer who uses his personal experiences as cannon fodder for the page. This means, also, that I cannot use my writing to fight lopsided battles and pay people back for the injustices I perceive them to have done me. As my friend Austin the Actor says, this is why we write films - so we can enact our revenge and feel that somewhere, out there, in the darkness of an unnamed theater, the villains of our lives are seeing, understanding, and feeling the cold weight of justice (eg: the opening credits for "500 days of summer").

The second reason to keep secrets is that some of life's experiences are too intimate, or precious, or sacred to defile by baring them indiscriminately to the world. As William Wordsworth famously said, "we murder to dissect." Sometimes life hands us delicate little moments that for this reason we wrestle with sharing - wanting to preserve their lives but bursting with anticipation for the joyous climax of the telling.

So I wrestle, now, with sharing about the significant event which capped off this day for me, moving me to tears. I wrestle, and lose, and begin:

I suppose to understand today, you'd have to go back to last weekend, when I had a conversation that convinced me, once and for all, that my marriage is irrevocably over. If you know me well or have followed my story, you may well be thinking "no duh, Josh... there's a light bulb that has been burning for quite a while now." But hope springs eternal in the heart of man, and it sometimes takes a stick of dynamite to do a job that, were it not for the boundless optimism of hope, could be accomplished with a well-placed poke-in-the-eye.

So anyways, the dynamite went off last weekend and after the dust settled I was left with a deeper sadness than I had ever felt before, made all the more remarkable by the unexplainable joy that seemed to spark at odd moments within it - because even down in the darkest valley, the light of life is still indescribably beautiful. Today was a day that seemed to be very much on the dim side. All day, I felt a disembodied heaviness - the sort of sensation that is hard to describe and very inadvisable on a motorcycle - so I ended up feeling on the ride home from work a sense of impending doom at the thought that I might at any moment float away from my body; leaving it to crash, un-aided, into a roadside tree.

I pulled with some relief onto the gravel driveway of home and stopped at the mailbox to grab my mail. Letter from the bank, letter from the bank, letter from... some unknown person with nearly-illegible handwriting in Montana. Hmmm. Don't know anyone in Montana, I thought, as I tucked it into my jacket and rode down the drive and up the dirt rut that leads to the shed where I live. Then, as I pulled under the porch awning and extracted the letter, I remembered the note I had sent a couple weeks ago to what I had hoped was the home of David James Duncan.

Mr. Duncan is the apparently somewhat reclusive author of a number of beautiful, beautiful books - two of which that I have read recently with laughter, joy and tears. The difficulty of this past year has left me nearly overwhelmed with gratitude, at times, for the moments of joy that I have been able to experience, so I decided to use a bizarrely serendipitous gift to take a stab at expressing that gratitude to Mr. Duncan. See, a few months back I bought a book on Amazon, and the woman who sold it to me was so sure I'd be thrilled with the purchase that she included a stamp, an envelope, and a blank "Thank You" card. Weird, right? I set it aside for when some un-defined, perfect moment would present itself.

After trying unsuccessfully for a while to find Mr. Duncan's address on the internet (which I took to mean that he didn't want it found), I decided to be weaselly and use my serendipitous card to fire off a missive to a place that I thought might work. I figured that it would be nothing risked, nothing lost, so I wrote him a carefully crafted "Thank You," popped it in the mailbox with a prayer, and promptly forgot about it.

Until today, when I opened the Montana letter and found a beautiful, perfect message from a stranger whose books had filled me with love. I had hardly begun to read when I started to cry. He thanked me for the letter and commiserated on the thoughts I had shared on his book. He expressed his sorrow over the loss of my wife, and his appreciation for the way my grief had opened doors within me to love. He said some other things, too, but having begun to write this I feel that I have already wounded a precious, perfect thing. So I will stop, and head off alone to cry out in gratitude once more for the joy that lives within all pain. I will say to you what he said to me, that "I'll meet you at The Truth."

I love you. Today, and every day... even when I forget.

your grace, II

2010-05-16T18:35:00.000-07:00

I saw it, you know...
that tear you almost didn't show -
that tear you somehow dried, from the inside
as you stood there
being brave.

But though I believe you might just be a saint --
that you are right in your restraint to know
you cannot be the one to take the place of God
and wipe the tears from my face --
as I watched you in that place, I have to say,
I wanted to be the one to reach a hand and wipe it all away.

And I may just be a fool, to write those words,
but sometimes
I don't care.
Sometimes, I think it's there that I'm most free -
when I can be a mirrored fool and see on another's face
the tears I will not bear to fall from mine.

And so I pray:

Ineffable FatherGod, who art in heaven and in tears,
hallowed be thy sorrow-spoken name.
On this day, I thank thee all the same for thy Grace,
which I imagine dripping down another person's face,
teaching me to cry my own tears, for me,
teaching me to BE.

judgement

2010-05-14T19:04:00.000-07:00

I would probably argue long and hard to convince you that bidets are better than toilet paper, but I still do not want to use one. Aside from not really knowing how to aim the thing, there is the fact that for thirty-plus years now, I have been taking care of "business" with perforated scraps of dry paper. It is a cultural preference not easily set aside, and although during my tree-planting years I was forced by necessity to learn the joys of hydrated "business"-cleaning with dew-wet fireweed plants, when it comes to the bum I still feel weird about water.

This weirdness is weird, because most all the other cleaning I do in my life involves some form of liquid. If, for example, my son were to leave a little pile of his "leftovers" in the middle of the living room floor, I hardly think I would be satisfied with a few perfunctory wipes with a paper towel. It just doesn't work like that. So why have I allowed my culture to convince me that I still do not want to use a bidet? Is there some sort of conspiracy by an American Compendium of Toilet-Paper Corporations? Does the lumber industry have its lumbering fingers in my bathroom business?

I am not sure, exactly. I have tried to fight my culture, but it hasn't worked. One of my more Euro-enlightened friends once told me that he dry-cleans for the first swath and then whets down the last bit of paper for that fresh feel, with perhaps one final drying swipe. I tried that, but eventually laziness and the weight of culture was just too much. I have learned that while the now near-universal value placed on cleanliness is very much a part of my culture, I am still part of a culture that did not consult the truth when deciding how to clean its many, many bums.

And yes, since you asked I am suggesting that the immensely varied ways we as humans apply universally agreed-upon moral principles are weirdly determined by cultural forces that none of us really understands. Why would I use such an admittedly gross example as the bidet to make a point about cultural determinism? Well, for the simple reason that when we forget where most of our habits and customs come from, things get poopy. Bidets are never the end of it, and the results are often (especially in my own "christian" subculture) laughable. The weird examples are practically endless - I know, because I've been writing about them for years and they never seem to run out. I have written about polygamy, potty words, arranged marriage, and cetera and cetera, on into the infinitum. It just. doesn't. stop.

Considering my position on bidets, it may seem odd when I say that I actually believe strongly in the existence of objective Truth, and even that we can know it. I may qualify that statement by adding that I think we'll never really know that we know it, but I still think there are things that are true and things that are not. I am quick to say that bidets are better than rolls of paper, modesty is superior to immodesty, and that it is far better to respect the things and people of this world than to profane them. I think abortion is a tragedy, people shouldn't smoke weed, divorce for the reasons that mine seems to be happening is wrong, and apples are, in fact, vastly inferior to oranges.

To claim that I view the world otherwise is to disingenuously defeat my own arguments. Where I really run into trouble, however, is when I begin to believe that I, with my puny little hormone-addled, culturally-defined ways of thinking, can absolutely Know what the truth is about anything, once and for absa-friggin-certain. If I think that, then I close my mind to the possibility that I am wrong and severely limit my capacity for love. Perhaps I am even wrong about bidets. Perhaps there are angelic spirits in the water that are seriously offended by the bum-cleaning use they are so disgustingly put to -- spirits that will one day rise up and drown us all in the brownish soup of our perpetual disrespect. I may know some things to be true, but I don't absolutely know that I know them.

I am by no means breaking new ground by arguing for the importance of epistemological humility (which means, basically, that I think I should not be an arrogant jerk about things I can't know for certain). With the exception of a few real whackos, most people aren't really dumb enough to attempt to don the mantle of godhood when it comes to their epistemology. And yet we are, all of us, immensely human. We want things to make sense and we want to be the ones making sense of them; so even as we nod our heads and give obeisance (whether we know it or not) to the accomplishments of sages who have taught us to doubt our own omniscience, yet still we think to ourselves, "ah yes, but this or that thing I really, truly do know." In so doing, we abandon our faith and move headlong towards a position that always ends up doing violence to beauty.

It is not particularly surprising that we would try, in this manner, to catch Truth and wrestle it into our grubby little pockets. To live as a human is to name, and to name is to try to tame the wild unknowable mystery of life - to cage the wonder in an attempt to keep the fear at bay. It is impossible to do otherwise.

Let me say that again: it is impossible to do otherwise. We are human, and it is our eternal joy and frustration to attempt to tell stories that will enable us to understand the unfathomable mysteries in which we live. Everyone does it... absolutely everyone. Even that super-edgy hipster you know who blends up grass and organic crickets with ice and soy milk and then pretends it's tasty - even that guy is still just making stuff up, attempting to define for himself a world in which he writes the rules. But it is very likely that unbeknownst to him, he too plays out a script written for him by a culture in which it is possible for impossibly privileged twenty-something Caucasian males to sit in yoga positions on hand-woven, free-trade bamboo rugs, sipping high-end organic tea as on their two-thousand-dollar Macbook Pros they hammer out blog posts about the necessity of identifying with the poor.

Believe it or not, even this little essay falls into the same ludicrous trap. By claiming to have insight into the inevitable inability of people to really know anything, I too am creating a ridiculous pretension and falling into the selfsame trap. What am I to do?

Well, since I asked, here's what I think; I think I should not be writing posts like this. I think that instead I should be out there making stuff that does not pretend to know, but rather proposes to love the world and all that is in it, all the time. That's right, I think I should be making love. To you, and you, and you and also you -- absolutely all the time. If I sit on the grass, I should make a song and in the melody make love. If I sit at this desk, I should make a story and twist into the passages a little love, or make a painting and stroke into it with my brush a little more love still. If I am with you, I should talk to you and listen to you and even touch you with love. I should do all this love-making because love never, ever wants control over anything. It just wants to be open to it, to embrace it, and to sink into it with joy. I want that. I am done with the folly of control.

So I should stop trying to figure out how things work. I should shut down my mind and my fingers and my mouth and I should learn, at last, to be still. From that stillness, I should begin to tell, very slowly, stories that do not trap wonder, but encourage it. I should live poetically, without pretense. I should, in short, be honest.

But I won't.

I won't because I am human. As much as I want to roll around making metaphorical and literal love to you (and you, and you, and YOU, oh unfathomable Source) every second of every day, sometimes all I can bring myself to create is little arrangements of words. Sometimes, all I can do is lie. This is me. This is who I am, and how on Friday nights and sometimes into Saturday mornings I manage to quell for a while the voices that tell me that I am an idiot, and that all my faith and hope and love are the baubles of a fool. In this act, in this small protest I raise against the dying of the light, it could be that I do make a little love.

But I am not ready to be judged on that. Not yet.

moms

2010-05-09T08:13:00.000-07:00

I just looked at a book on Amazon called, "Fifty Dangerous Things You Should Let Your Children Do," which was written by a guy who runs "tinkering schools" where kids get to play with power tools and make stuff - real stuff that works. I had watched a video clip of the guy and it intrigued me, so I looked up his book. Here's the funny thing, though: as I perused the table of contents to see what sort of dangerous things I ought to be letting my son do, I found to my surprise that I had done almost every single one of those things in my childhood - and more. I mean, lick a battery? Throw a spear? Stand on the roof? Please... BOooooRING! How about eat a monkey, construct a crossbow, and run pell-mell down the branches of a tree to jump, screaming, into snake-and-spider-infested patches of floating water plants?

I always thought my mom was a bit of a panic-storm, but I'm learning that most mothers don't let their four-year-olds have their own machetes, their five-year-olds wander around in the jungle without adult supervision, or their six-year-olds operate a band-saw.

Thanks, Mom. Happy Mother's Day.

On the Evils of "Patriotism"

2010-05-07T20:09:00.000-07:00

My friend Paul is an extremely straight shooter, so it's no wonder that the oldest of his many children would have told me, at the sagacious age of five, one of the wisest bits of wiseness that I ever did hear.

Paul, my brother and I were in the basement of his house in Hamilton, Ontario, discussing what was to be a fun-filled work week planting fourteen thousand trees on the estate of one David Wildenstein, heir to the mighty Wildenstein Art Empire. None of us was particularly experienced at managing ourselves in the company of people who could easily afford to have us killed and made into compost for their very sizable orchards, so a certain amount of pre-ponderation seemed a good idea.

"You know what, Paul," I said, thinking to wax eloquent on the subject of bottomless pits of money, "the most important thing in this situation is to remember that, deep down, he's a guy like us. You see..."

I meant to go on, but was interrupted by Marcus-the-five-year-old, who firmly said, "No, no, no. That's not the most important thing, is it daddy?"

"No it isn't," Paul answered with a knowing smile, "Marcus, why don't you tell Uncle Josh what the most important thing is?"

"It's love, Uncle Josh. The most important thing is love."

For a brief second I wasn't really sure how to feel about being absolutely schooled by a five year old who obviously spent waaaay too little time watching television, but after that second I broke into a big old smile, followed by a guffaw. Because there you had it - that was just about all you needed, right there. Well that, a good sharp hatchet, and some people to practice on (With the Love, that is... I'd prefer you practice with the hatchet on a rotting stump. Just remember: eyes on the target and when you release, your index finger should be pointing straight at old stumpy).

The Marcus story came to mind this week, right after I'd antagonized some of my students by informing them that I thought "patriotism" and "nationalism" were evil, un-Christian concepts. I was skating on a thin layer of grits when I said that because - as one of my students was quick to inform me - that's the sort of thing that can get you hurt down here in the South. I had to ask myself, would Marcus have approved? Is it all right to annoy people just to make a point?

I'm going to have to say... I think so. One of the definitions that the interwebs gives for patriotism is "devotion to the welfare of one's country," and our good buddy Webster tells us that nationalism is, "advocacy of the utmost political advancement of one's nation or people." Those descriptions are, perhaps, a bit too ambiguous, so when faced with the possibility of an angry mob of southern boys who wanted to know just what, exactly, I meant, I told them that patriotism and nationalism were just tools used by the powerful to manipulate the average person into doing things that they would otherwise have had the good sense not to do. Because, you see, at this point I was most definitely trying to annoy them.

"Oh, come on," One of them shot back, "that's like saying that commitment to your friends is unchristian."

I just grinned.

First of all, because I knew better than to argue with these young men when there were stars and stripes coming out their ears, and second because, yes, commitment to your friends is unchristian... if by "commitment to your friends" you mean that you stand aggressively for whatever you think your friends are standing for, regardless of whether or not they are remembering Marcus's "most important thing."

Christ was a disturber of poop. He bore no allegiance to king or country or even democratically-crafted Constitution (blasphemy!). Instead, he advocated an entirely different kingdom in which last are made first and strength is found not in might of arms, but in humility, service, and self-sacrifice. This is the sort of kingdom that belongs to the losers, the weak, the children, the poor, the marginalized and the disaffected. If you want to be a part of this kingdom, Jesus very clearly said, you have to give up power and wealth and spend your life giving food to the hungry, water to the thirsty, and companionship to the lonely and beaten-down. But absolutely most importantly of all, you need to give love to everyone, even and especially your enemies and the people who aren't fortunate enough to live in what is, of course, the bestest country ever (obviously... right?).

This, of course, looks nothing like the supposed Jesus-followers cruising in their luxury vehicles around the streets of America today, demanding the political overthrow of those who disagree with them and above all else the re-creation of an economic system that will allow them to forget that they were ever threatened by this pesky, inconvenient recession. Self-sacrifice? Hah! Self-sacrifice is for wimps and commies, they say, and it's MY COUNTRY, RIGHT OR WRONG. So Jesus said to treat foreigners with compassion? Well, screw that... those Mexicans aren't foreigners, they're criminals. So Jesus said that if we ignored the hungry we were ignoring him? Well, screw that, too. Back in Jesus' day they didn't have television and the internet, and there's no way he was talking to us in a time when we can very easily see the sunken cheeks and worm-bloated stomachs of the millions and millions of under-nourished people worldwide. It's just not practical.

After all, when Jesus said to love my neighbor, surely he had to mean the people who live in the little ticky-tacky houses next to mine... I mean, that's what a neighbor is by definition, right? So looking out for my fellow middle-and-upper-middle class Americans, well that's practically Christian, isn't it? And if that's the case, then dedication to the political interests of those most powerful of Americans on a larger scale, well... I can't think of anything that would make Jesus more happy. And making Jesus happy has got to be what we're here for - our most important thing. Nice. Well, I'm glad we got that sorted. Hey, you wanna go to Panera? They've got wi-fi and I've been dying to show you all the cool stuff I can do with my new i-pad.

Okay. Breathe, Josh, breathe. Count to ten.

I know, I know. I do tend to get a little heated up and to go over the top of a mountain that some people will say I've fabricated out of a molehill. While nationalism is, I think, always evil, "patriotism" can also be defined as love of the place where you happen to live, or love of the good things about the culture where you happen to live. Love is the most important thing, after all, so loving the land that sustains you (without trashing it) and the culture that grounds you (without idolizing it) can only be a good thing.

But this is not what most people mean when they talk about patriotism. While most people do have nuanced and often deeply compassionate positions on a variety of issues within their culture, when it comes to the word "patriotism," it seems that these nuances go flying out the window. Slow, wise deliberation becomes tantamount to treason as pride and power become the throbbing mantra drowning out the still, small voice of Jesus.

Over the past month, I have been reading and commenting on the Book of Matthew to my first period art class, and what has struck me again and again as I have tried wrestle honestly with who that Jesus guy it describes seems to have actually been is that he tended to talk about two different types of things.

First of all there were the Weird Things - mysterious and wondrous stuff like Grace and Truth and Justice and Mercy. Jesus tended to speak about these things cryptically, and he used a lot of stories and sometimes even jokes in order to explore them in a way that allowed his listeners to enter into the questions and emerge with even greater wonder than before. Almost without fail, these are the things upon which the contemporary "christian" church seems to focus the majority of its energy, exerting monumental efforts to take them and strip-mine them of their wonder, so that they can trash-compact parodies of them into tiny-little boxes that can be easily stacked into something called "doctrinal statements."

The second type of things that Jesus talked about were the Straightforward Things the likes of which I mentioned earlier, stuff like "not judging other people" and "taking care of the poor." It is these things, conversely, that the contemporary "christian" church goes to phenomenal lengths to avoid talking about. It skips over them, lies about them, and re-invents them... but most of all it just ignores them. This is, I think, because if we were to take Jesus at all seriously, we would have to begin to be very, very ashamed of ourselves.

So let me pause and say that I am, indeed, very, very ashamed of myself. And let me pause a little longer and say that I am also okay with that, because I don't try to fit concepts like Grace and Truth and Justice and Mercy into tiny little boxes and you know what... they blow my freakin' mind! I may be a selfish, proud, idiotic nincompoop, but in the elegant, gorgeous mystery of Christ I find the freedom to look past that and see the absolutely breathtakingly beautiful person I am as well.

It is this mystery that makes me think that perhaps I don't have to listen to the throbbing of the war drums. Perhaps I don't have to believe that the only way to get anything done is to rally, screaming, under a flag as I demand the best for me and mine, others be durned. Maybe, just maybe, Marcus is right.

I'm thirty... can I be a man now?

2010-05-03T19:15:00.000-07:00

Usually when I mention my friend Austin the Actor on here, it is either to disagree with something he has said, or to make fun of him. That's a good thing, I think, because if there is one thing Austin needs in his life it's a barrier against the tidal wave of self esteem that I have come to believe he might not, after all, be faking. Nonetheless, despite the usual "friend-service" he provides of calling me an idiot when I'm being an idiot and punching me in the stomach when I do inadvisable things because of my current (emotionally vulnerable) state, he does also help me out from time to time with a word of wisdom. Like, for example, what he said to me yesterday at lunch.

In the late morning I had met up with Austin at his church, Renovatus. As usual when we get together, I was early and he was late, so I spent my wait time reviewing the eligible-looking young ladies who were arriving for the purpose of identifying potential candidates for the position of future-wife for my tardy friend, who was one of the primary motivating factors behind my previous post on arranged marriage. For a lot of the same reasons as me, he's into the idea right now.

When Austin finally showed up and we'd settled into a couple of seats towards the back of the old movie theater in which Renovatus meets, I told him what I'd been up to and he asked me if I'd had any luck. "Well," I muttered, pointing to a beautiful brunette sitting across the aisle and a row ahead of us, "there's that nice-looking single mom over there."

"How do you know she's a single mom?" Austin asked.

"Well, I saw her drop off a kid at the nursery, and she's not wearing a wedding ring."

"Hmm," he said, probably mulling over his stance on single moms. A little while later, he elbowed me and said, "Either singlemom is looking for someone, or she is seriously checking you out."

I looked. She was very, very seriously checking me out. Repeatedly.

"You know what happens next, right?" Austin asked, grinning wickedly.

"No."

"Next, the pastor tells everybody to stand up and spread the love around."

He was right, too, and as the beautiful singlemom made an expectant half-step towards me, Austin pushed me out of the row, towards the back of the theater, and around the back row of seats to the other side, because I don't need that kind of trouble and it's Austin's job, after all, to protect me in my current (emotionally vulnerable) state.

Later at lunch, we were re-hashing the moment and I was saying how weird her being attracted to me was because Austin, after all, is the one who is the tall and broad-shouldered hunk of man-meat-woman-bait.

"I've never really thought of myself as being physically attractive to women," I said to Austin, "and that hasn't really happened to me before - I mean, where a beautiful woman who didn't know me at all made it blatantly obvious that she'd like to. Maybe it has something to do with confidence... I've gotten a lot more confident in the past year as I've shucked off a lot of my fears, and people are attracted to confidence. I mean, I had a girlfriend in college and I got married, so I know that those two women, at least, were attracted to me at the outset. Usually, however, when someone acted as though they were interested, I just ignored it or didn't believe it was real until it became way too obvious to interpret in any other way. And then I just thought..."

I paused, and Austin finished my sentence,

"...that there was something wrong with them."

"Yeah, whatever," I said, and continued babbling, ignoring his comment, until a few seconds later it hit me... he was right. "What did you say?" I asked.

"I said that you wondered what was wrong with them."

BAM. The skies opened and a shaft of light hit the oily sheen on the garlic knot I was about to stuff into my mouth. It was just so true. No matter how well I knew that men and women are freakin' designed to be drawn to each other like moths to - well, to other moths - I always kind of doubted if this principle applied to me and the women I found attractive. Because just look at me, right? Sure, I had the symmetrical features that our culture calls "boyish good looks," but what was more important was that I was this skinny, decidedly unmanly chap with knees that knocked and a weird torso-to-legs ratio that made it look like I shrunk about six inches every time I sat down (Seriously, ask me to sit down for you sometime - it will blow your mind. I'm way taller than you, we sit down, and boo-yah-ka-shah, we're the same height!). Plus, I was always such a baby face. There was no way anyone could think of me as a man at all... let alone an attractive one... Right?!? I certainly didn't.

Austin's comment made me realize how weirdly out-of-touch with reality I had been, because it illuminated for me the great lengths I'd gone to to ignore the perfect Aristotelian Logic of the situation:

Premise One, Peoples are at odd intervals attracted to other Peoples.
Premise Two, I am a People, and am at odd intervals attracted to other Peoples.
Ergo, we come to the Conclusion that it stands to reason that other Peoples are also sometimes attracted to me.

But long before I took Philosophy 101 at University, I had come to the very fear-driven conclusion that this wasn't possible. So when people - and not just women, but men as well - acted as though I was an interesting person they might want to get to know, I usually just concluded that there was something wrong with them. Or that they were faking it, out of pity. Or that I had performed some trick (like painting really well or something) that had momentarily caught their fancy.

I then proceeded, on a subconscious level, to try to root out what it was that was wrong with them. I suppose I did this because I wanted to discover that it wasn't a character flaw that made them interested in me. The problem with the whole thing, however, was that when you go looking for flaws in people, you're going to find them. Human beings are absolutely amazing, but they are also profoundly problematic.

In the big, weird, mysterious mess that is human motivation, my desperation to get people to love me drove me to consistently undermine pretty much every relationship I ever had - friend or lover or whatever. People don't particularly like it when you constantly hone in on their mistakes and weaknesses.

I guess you could say that I'm done with this.

I have begun to learn to face my own problems. In open admission of failure (Hey! Lookey here at me! I screwed up my life!) I have found freedom and grace. I have learned to laugh at my foibles and even, in some small ways, to begin to love them as a part of the glorious mish-mash of attributes that is me. This, in turn, has freed me to love the foibles in others, and to overlook these flaws as I begin to be overwhelmed by the fact that people are all absolutely, mind-blowingly amazing. Without the constant, paralyzing fear that if others really knew me, they wouldn't love me, I have begun to learn that I can open myself, honestly, to love them. Instead of being a Grand Inquisitor, rooting out whatever flaws I suspect must have led them to love me, I can appreciate their love - and their lovableness as well. I can begin, in short, to live.

I have not been fixed. I still have regular weak moments where I think, "hmm... random beautiful person I don't know wants to talk to me. I should talk to them - just a tiny bit - to dig out a little more proof that I'm lovable." But these are not the moments that I dwell in, because they are not necessary. I already have wonderful people in my life whom I love - with whom I have shared beautiful letters, laughter, tears and fleeting glimpses of wonder.

Although I still feel sometimes that I am waiting, now, to sink into a dismal sea, far more often I live with joy in my moments, believing that whether I see it or not, the sun shines brightly above the damp, gray fog. It may be that in this "living in my moments," I am finding what it means to be a man.