Category Archives: beautiful
Wrath, Costco and Fireflies
When I was eight years old, I kicked a rock down a road in anguish that I was going straight and very fast to hell. I saw myself as a muscle car on a straight road with the gas pedal stomped – tires burning and screaming, hood rising, trunk hunkering down, speedometer needle swinging hard to the right, the road blurring on either side, the focus narrowing down to a small, tiny bit of hard hot asphalt ahead that was going to rip me apart when I flipped at 130 miles per hour.
Someone’s life was going to end in a gruesome crash of punishment because someone was pressing foolishly on an evil gas pedal — me. Anxiety was among my earliest theologically inspired emotions. When I thought of a force in the world greater than myself, I had a decidedly ancient Greco-Southern-Baptist response. God judged failures; large fire bolts were aimed at me.
It’s odd, my fear of the divine wrath, because in actuality my early life was filed with the small and the safe. When my brothers and I were little, we liked to play outside at night in the summer in the large field in front of the house. On warm night, in the field, I remember tiny fire flies blinked on and off. Their tiny yellow lights flashed here and there, like Christmas lights moving in the air. In between one soft blink and another there was their flight, but we only saw the pulse and in that was the beauty of the thing. There was something there, alive, magically small, miniature light houses that could fly. It was astonishing to me. This was no thunderbolt; it was safe fire. There were also other things which I remember from the field that were small and fun, and we took charge of some of those.
In the summer the cow were allowed into the field to graze on the grass, and there were tiny flies that buzzed around the cow paddies. And on their soft, steamy piles, the flies landed, which provided great sport for us. Out we came with our B-B guns, and the fun began. Each shot made a splash and left a gashing crater. If the shiny copper B-B’s were on the mark, then the fly disappeared into the goop, with perhaps a wing left flopping on the surface to signal the kill. “Hit” said the softly waving wing. There was no tragedy in this, only the hunt and the hit and the yell of victory over our small combatants. I remember one fly hit and seemingly sunk in the muck who rose and flew again, and in that moment I celebrated his escape and told his heroic story to my brothers. “He was down, in the B-B tunnel, and he crawled out, and he flew off!” We loved the bold, triumphal comeback of the other side.
Small boys love to wage war on small things, and live happily in the diminutive world of small victories and small defeats and they do so without fear. Small boys, even ones who fear punishments, take dominion over fields and flies and wild strawberries and such . My brothers and I loved the tiny, wild strawberries as we did the flies and gamed for them too. They hid from us in low leaves and grass, but we found them everywhere.
I still remember the spots where they grew, the field were we played baseball out behind the grade school and the ditch along the highway, right in front of the shop where we painted my first car. They were different than store-bought strawberries in that they were much smaller, about the size of a little finger nail, but they were the same in that they were bright red with little brown seed dots and green leaf hats and tasty. The fun was in the hunt, and in the find, and the reward was immediate because we ate them unwashed, on the spot. The ripe ones were ambrosia, juicy and sweet, the ones with a bit of white or green on them were tart and tangy in the mouth. We learned quickly which to pick and which to not. Sometimes we piled the bright red ones high in discarded tin cans or in paper cups and carried them home with us, an attempt to save the manna for another day. But God wasn’t angry in the ditches; there was always more manna.
And when we went to school, there too, life was experienced small, and safe and approachable. One page in the encyclopedia housed a tree full of birds and another a field full of flowers, and the book told their names. The terrible “Tyrannosaurus” took up only a part of a page and was so small and smooth that I never remember being afraid of his open mouth. The saber toothed tiger with long teeth and sharp claws was glossy and flat. The vast ocean that looked so wet and wild was dry and calm, and the fearsome war heroes and their horrific battles were silent.
School books made life small, fly-like, quiet, safe — one dimensional. Life was presented to us flat, of course, for our safety and for the preservation of our teachers. No physical harm could come to us, even from our powerful teachers, because they were, by law, unarmed. Jonathan Swift pointed out, while on another educational errand, that we were delicious children, and so care had been taken. And we never took field trips to Jurassic Park, but we were taught that the terrible lizards were real, or that they had been somewhere at some time. Just because we only saw them in books, that didn’t make us doubt the fundamentally dangerous reality in any way, but the danger hadn’t come close to us.
In school, the hunt and the find and the shot and the hit were all confined to the quiet of the page and so even international conflicts ended not in blood baths but in tiny back dots at the end of paragraphs. It was there on the page and at the desk and under the press of the pen that the huge and dangerous universals became the small and safe particulars. The small became the safe-large by virtue of repetition and the large became the small again by the example at hand. In short, we discovered the knowledge of the largest things in the knowledge of the smallest things. We found math in two plus two. We found art in Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers.” And we found war in George Washington crossing the Delaware at night. And this was our way of life, as we discovered it, and though such a childhood full of just this kind of page turning I gradually came to change my metaphysics.
Today, I ate at piece of toast with my strong coffee. I put milk in the coffee to bring it to just the right light brown and smooth flavor that I like. I smeared homemade strawberry jam on my bread, covering my toast, my small field of wheat in bright fruit, my childhood on a plate. The strawberries were tamed a bit by all the added sugar, but they came through for me as they always have. The rosy sweetness kissed the buds on my tongue awake. In just moments, I could feel the sugar and caffeine hit my brain, that familiar ready-for-more, bring-on-whatever-is-next feeling. It is so fine. Small things have such powerful effects, suggesting the larger things of life to us with nod and hint and a semiotic gesture.
The bread of life has so little harm in it. It is eloquent of the love and patience and safety that surrounds me. Every bite is communion, and every day I eat it. My life is bludgeoned with soft bread. I crunched Special K for breakfast today. I had some frosted mini-wheats for a snack. In the evening, I tore small pieces of French bread off a loaf and dipped them in a creamy spinach dip. The evidence is overwhelming.
Before lunch today I went to Costco. I shopped, then before leaving, I picked up a Hebrew National hot dog and diet Coke. I covered the inside of the bun with relish, mustard, catsup and fresh onions. Then I found a seat on the strawberry red and white picnic tables and looked out over the store. Costco, like the bread I eat everyday is the absence of scarcity. It is a fragile shell around a substantial pile of food. If a tornado hit a Costco, the big, thin box of wall and roof and ducts and pipes would fly away, but the food would remain, on the medal shelves, stacked four pallets high. It is the food that makes the store. It is head-high everywhere, and in most places it towers twenty feet above the shoppers. It comes in such large quantities that the issue in choosing things comes down to, “Can we eat that much before we die?” I considered the lemon juice recently, but the deal was two huge bottles linked together by a plastic strip. I passed it up. It was an excellent price, but only for a younger person with more time. I don’t want my children to go through my stuff after I die and say things like, “Wow, Dad was weirder that we thought. Look at all this lemon juice. What was he thinking?”
Not everyone can shop at Costco. I know that. It’s painful for me. Not everyone has enough. I read recently that an estimated 800 million people don’t have enough to eat each day. The information was flat on the page, but there is a terrible reality to this and it is one to grieve. There is enough land to produce the needed food, the amount of food, an abundance of food. And there is enough muscle and money to produce the food. But, what we do with this is our business and our responsibility, and what we have not done about this is to our shame, but the facts still stand. The world has been well-stocked. We have done each other wrong, but what we need has been provided. The gods are not simply angry. The smallest bits and pieces of good that we receive each day point eloquently to a profound compassion. The good just keeps showing up, even in the tragic, and my theology is leaning hard in a different direction now than when I was eight.
It comes to a basic bit of logic, really. There is so much that is good and beautiful in life – the varieties of bread, the glowing fire flies, the red strawberries, the dark brown caffeine, the familiar people we forage besides, the potential to provide for everyone. And if there is an original source that all these fine and excellent things come from, a divine and amazingly creative source, and I have come to believe that there is, then all the good things come to my hands and my mouth and my mind from that source, and as a result, I just can‘t stop thinking lately that I am loved, not punished, and that I will not be punished in the future. And I just can’t stop noticing that I am safe today, for the moment, and that all around me things signal, good. Despite the mess the world is in, it is massive really, the evidence of good.
This evening my wife and I lay on the bed in our room as the sun set, debriefing the day. I noticed a warm block of yellow light on the northwest facing wall. Odd, how did the sun get on this surface considering it was setting almost directly behind it? We looked around. I got up and walked over to the southwest facing window and put my hand in front of the glass to see where the sun was entering. My hand shadowed the bright sun patch on the wall, and then I noticed the mirror on the southeast wall. The sun was passing through the window, hitting the mirror and reflecting onto the northwest wall. The evidence of a loving warmth, at the close of day, was present, cleverly cast into our room, in the form of light. Something in me wanted to clap and not stop.
Fireflies, glitter paths, candles, light bulbs, lightening, computer screens, headlights, stop lights glittering on the pavement in the rain, luminescent fish and every other small patch or spot or gleam of light in the universe shouts, “Life, illuminated, good, safe, more!” Small lights gesture toward the presence of large lights. Radiance is a gift and it reminds us that we are loved. I no longer fear that the future will be lightning bolts frying me; I now feel it will be an evening sky warming me and charming me and seducing me to more starry light still.
I am thinking more and more this way now. This matters greatly, and it helps me move forward in the best way possible. This is no mere dabbling in metaphysics for temporary reassurance. This is no intellectual dilettantism, no spiritual reductionism, no oversimplification, no facile claim that the divine universal is only spoken in the trivial positive. No, it’s bigger than that; everything implies the divine, the whole of life, the horror too.
Take war. Boyhood battles with flies pass, and boys turn into men and this turns into hitting in high school’s hallways, shouting in family living spaces and ego thrashing in glass windowed offices. And young men go to war and send smart bombs rushing to do collateral damage, which is a euphemism for brain damage, which ends with unending weeping because the destruction can’t be fixed by any means that we know of once the mission is accomplished. Conflict may be flat history on a thin page for young school children, but it in reality it is three-dimensional, scary and bloody ugly. We contend, and we will contend, with each other, seemingly forever. Nothing is more certain than the changes that will come from the battles we will wage against nature and against each other and against the source. There will be more B-B guns fired at flies and there will be more concussive explosions on the human battle fields and more arms will fly off and more heads will spin across the dirt and family will rise up against family and nation against nation and more hearts will be broken and minds twisted into fear and unending hate before this is all done.
And more children will starve to death. They did today. And some of us will be drowned in the excrement of others, and it couldn’t be uglier than it is and than it will be. Before it is over, too many of us will flop a wing in the excreta of hate and revenge, and we will grimace with mouths full of filth and pain and we will again be so broken and fouled that we won’t want bread, and we will put our heads in our arms and close our eyes so that we won’t see the yellow patch of fading light on the wall of the bedroom.
Do we understand this? We must. Everything communicates something. In the small dose of violence that it has been our lot to witness comes to us the larger, more universal issues of systemic violence and racial hate and recurring wars. It is the same as the good. The small speaks of the large, both in the good and the evil. But the evil is from us, not from above, and this I have come to be sure of. This much is true. And this is where we too have some measure of comfort and hope. I believe that what is above is working to turn evil to good.
I have seen something bad turn out for some good. I have felt like pain wouldn’t end, but it did. Yes. I now know something I knew so much less at eight years old. In what is worse, I have a chance to see some of what is best. Just because my world is stupidly violent, doesn’t mean that the source of all that is good and right is so. That source is not. Instead the source of life is steeped in the politics of redemption and the passion for renewal.
I have come to believe that evil things can be recovered from, and to believe that the small good can defeat the large bad. Good has a way of leaking back in when one is open to it and the end doesn’t have to be dark. I have come to believe in redemption. We can be down, hit, mucking about in the goop with only one wing free, and yet fly again. Once, one who was strong kneeled close to one who was weak, and lifted up what was broken and carried it to a place where it became strong again.
This happened, and it has happened to me; it has happened to me again and again. I remember my junior year in college so well. All the loneliness of growing up and living apart from my family and studying nihilistic philosophies and fuzzy-edged literatures and not having safe friends and family that I could disclose myself too and looking for refuge in stupid-brain experiences with immature friends, it caught up with me, and I was so hungry for soft bread and warm light and something tender and good and loving to believe in and to believe in me. I wrote in my journal too much that year. Writing in journals is sometimes eloquent of missing relationships, ones that offer safe places for transparency and truth.
And it culminated in me standing in a park in the city at cool night on a hill looking at the sky and shouting, “If you are there, do something!”
“Do something,” which means something like, “Don’t hate me, don’t condemn me, don’t make war on me, do not, not understand me, don’t leave me alone like this, don’t not pursue me, don’t not make right what I have made wrong, don’t be a distant and judgmental father, and don’t above all things, don’t leave me unchanged.”
I remember reading something in that time that tasted like good bread and shone like yellow light winging through the dark and felt like holy war on untruth. It was from the prophet Isaiah. “In returning and rest shall you be saved and in quietness and confidence will be your strength.”
These words weren’t frozen in print as I read them, they weren’t dead on the page, but instead they were as alive and real as they came off the flat, thin page and they formulated into something three-dimensional and sharp that entered me square between the eyes and proceeded into my frontal lobe at high speed. These words pierced my thoughts like an arrow fired from a bow pulled all the way back at close range, and they knocked back something that I hated and wanted to be rid of – scary religious noise. The words struck me quiet, and they created a space inside for silent confidence to begin again.
The specialists of the heart call this redemption. It means that something lost is retrieved, something sold is bought back and something ruined is restored. And this is that way that redemption happens, like it happened to me, in a shout into the night and bit of truth on a page. It came to me as one bite of soft bread, one small light flashing in a field and one small line of truth struck deep.
What is it? It is God.
The religious sing, “Great is our God.” I have no quarrel with that. But I found him first and I find him most in what is small and safe.
I found him that way yesterday as my wife and I lay on the bed together and talked over our day, as we always do. And as I held my wife’s hand I knew that her small hand in mine was from him, from his Costco-style plenty for me and that it was such a perfect picture of his larger safe grip on me.
I found him today as my daughter Rosalind and I drove away from the house. She is learning disabled, and this has been hard for her and for me, but in the car, we talked about how many times we had ridden together in the morning, her off to school, me off to work, buddies shoving off together, from kindergarten to college, holding hands in the car, starting the day connected, and then going our own ways, knowing we would see each other again at night to sit, safe again, and watch TV and eat and talk and go to bed at peace with each other and life. This ride, this shared ride, slow not furious and fast, ending in safety, speaks books to me of the compassion of God that I have come to hold on to.
I have found the largest thing in the smallest things. And these things have been made small for me out of compassion for me. A loving maker is suggested, hinted at, gestured to and present in, the smooth, slow ride to school, in the small tasty bite at noon, in the warm rectangular glow on the wall as he day closes, in the next page turned and in the tender hand in my hand on each one of the very particular days of my life.
More Beautiful Than Previously Imagined
What is really beautiful?
It is an old woman, in hospice, waiting to die, as she is remembering.
I know.
I saw her yesterday.
She is there in a dying place, seeing again those moments when she was young and agile. She is a young girl again, and her hands are moving now like the leaves in the wind-blown trees outside of her room.
You’d look at her, if you didn’t know her and not see anything of that, and only perhaps see age and disease –unless you looked closely into her eyes and then, if you wanted to, you could see the young girl in the old woman. To see that kind of thing, it helps to know the person, and even then you have to look closely, and not blink at the dry, thin film of agedness and the unloveliness of the dying. You have to look past the things you tend to turn your eyes away from.
Sometimes I want everything to be beautiful, to live in a perfectly beautiful community of people, in a beautiful city, in a beautiful world set in a beautiful universe. I want everyone to have all the beauty they need, but they don’t, and I don’t and it isn’t all perfect and it isn’t easy to see the beauty through the aging and the dying and the brokennes and the stains.
Today I saw a man who has more than enough money not to have to work, work. He worked; he put up new lights in an old church. And when he was done with the electrical part of the work, his specialty, he stayed to do the non-specialist part of the work, the clean up, the patching of a damaged ceiling, the covering up of the scars where the old lights had come down. Beautiful!
It is beautiful to see a person work who is not incentivized by money, to see care, work, love — gratis. My friend, the electrician, is motivated by his love for God, his desire to be useful and his care for his friends who asked. He earned nothing, but he did everything needed.
It is a kind of dancing, I think, to care for a person who is dying or to restore a building that needs to live again.
We are quick to praise beauty when we see it, the full moon rising in the early evening sky, the lovely girl strolling past us along the way, the sheen of a new car rolling smoothly down the city street.
These are beauty clichés.
But twice lately, I’ve seen the real thing. I ‘ve seen deep beauty peeping from the wrinkles of an old face, and I’ve seen warm, alabaster light glow from the old ceiling of a sacred space.
There is more to this world than youth and glitz and everything up and to the right on the graph.
I’m looking forward to tomorrow.
I am looking forward to seeing the beauty hidden in the seam and crack of life.
I am looking forward to something more beautiful than previously imagined.
Being Content
“Content makes poor men rich; discontent makes rich men poor.”
Ben Franklin
It’s hard to get the contentment thing right, but we want to, for being content is at the heart of being happy. Being content is the highest form of being rich.
So how can we be more content?
To move forward in contentment, first we must come to understand the moment, each moment. If the moment asks for someone to be helped, then it is not the time to be content with the status quo, and we won’t really be content until we do something.
I helped a friend obtain a trusted counselor last week. Looking back, I am content. I saw that she absolutely needed someone to unburden her soul too. It was unacceptable for me to do nothing. I am content, having done something.
Each moment asks for something. If the moment begs for art, then it is unacceptable to be content with utility. I put up several new, beautiful lights in my home this week. They glow with a warm, soft beauty in the dinning room and kitchen nook. I am content with them. Nothing more is needed there.
Recently I met with a friend to discuss money. We determined needs, we explored sources of income, we made plans to prosper. We applied knowledge to problems and found solutions.
If the moment begs for knowledge, it is unacceptable to be content with ignorance. But what then? After addressing need, we are ourselve in need. The moment then requests, rest.
And if the moment asks for rest, then it is unacceptable to push anymore. Driven isn’t wise when our bodies are tired. Driven isn’t called for after we have just enjoyed a success. Hungry for more, at some point, should be laid aside when we have had enough.
What is called for after success is contentment, the contentment found in celebration and rest. “Just one more thing” after “one more thing” is a fast and furious route to too many crazy things ad nauseum, but contentment is it’s own reward.
And so we need to learn to exercise contentment everyday.
Content is what we need to be at night, when all that can be done has been done.
Content is what we need to be at the end of the day, when what has been given is all that will be given.
“Godliness with contentment is great gain.” That is to say, the content have learned to accept what God has allowed.
Being content is what makes poor men rich and rich men richer.
She’s Double: He’s Triple
I know no one who is self-sustaining. Someone I don’t even know roasted and ground the coffee my wife had for breakfast today.
An army of people made the car I will drive to work.
An army of farmers, clothiers, cooks, teachers, doctors, technicians and janitors and waiters prop up our everyday lives. We are pampered by chefs, mechanics and IT experts.
We say, “She lives alone,” but she or he doesn’t. We all live in clans.
And we always have. We come from people: spouses, parents, grandparents, siblings, uncles, cousins, nephews, pet dogs and cats innumerable. We inhabit the thundering herd of family, are run over by it and run over it repeatedly.
We say, “She’s single.” She’s not and he’s not. She’s double; he’s triple. People surround her, in her apartment. People surround him, at work, on the street, on the TV.
Tonight I lie on my bed in my own private bedroom blogging, creating ideas for my people, all around me on the internet, my readers. I’m not alone, even when I am alone. I live in a house in a community, in a family, a member of a tribe. Recently I borrowed a wheel barrow, from my neighbor Ted. Last night, I called my mom to chat. I dissolved into the safe, familiar niche of my own people. My people work hard; our unincorporated family concern is to care for hurting people with broken lives and we have too much stuff.
No one I know lives alone at Walden Pond. I ran into a teenager at Starbucks last week who had just moved back home. He was sick of stealing food from Ralphs and sleeping in an abandon Henry’s store. He had a moment of clarity, otherwise known as malnutrition, and he moved home. He is a social being with social needs and a social dysfunction.
We try to fix social dysfunction. We create schools and churches and counseling centers. We labor passionately to enrich each other, but our work too often treats the member of the tribe as a solitary individual. The caregivers in our schools and churches are often blind to the social network students deeply inhabit. We see a student, before us, and think them autonomous. They are not. They have come to us from people, and they will go back to people and they come needy for love and they come in conflict with parents and in flight from them and in a mad rush toward them all at once.
The drug addicted father who I know has a family he buys drugs from down by the beach. The recovering drug addicted has a family group he attends to help him not return to smoke and drop and swirl with his fellow users.
The woman who didn’t make it to work sane last week had a reason. She was emotionally beaten up in the car on the way to work by her mother. She turned the car and took her mom home and came back to work crying. She didn’t know what to do with this. Another older mom found her and cried with her in a side room. Mom to mom, they sat together with tears, trying to shore up the broken relational bridge back at home.
This is the deal. They come to us, to us who are teachers and counselors and pastors pre-conflicted, mid-conflicted and post-traumatic conflicted, and we march them through math, reading, science, theology and therapy as if they are solitary brains, thinking. They are not. They are conflicted brains thinking, conflicted with the thinking of ten to five hundred other voices. They are communities of thought. They think like their parents did. They think like their friends do. They think in systematic, conventional, group-minded patterns.
Take the church, as a helping institution. At the church, valuing the individual as we do, we rush into its practice of pedagogy in the darkest of unenlightened ways. We set up conventional structures — women’s ministry, children’s ministry, youth ministry, men’s ministry, young married ministry, singles ministry. And by these artificial constructs, we divide and disassociate. Each woman or man or child is treated only as a woman or man or child, not a husband or wife or girl friend or boyfriend or daughter or son or member of a work force or community. People live in teams, but we treat them like they are individuated sports heroes or like solo movie villains with no accomplices. People are best understood as plural yet we keep trying to teach and heal them as solitary individuals.
Put plainly, the shocking thing about helping institutions is this: the people we serve live socially integrated, intergenerational lives and yet we keep putting them in age-graded, gender-specific, discipline-generated cells where they get no help at all on how to go out and live in community.
The young mother needs the folkloric truths of the old mother and father.
The good, safe father needs to be the mentor to the young girl who doesn’t have a father.
The old man needs the comfort of a child.
The child struggling to read needs to be adopted by a new grandma who will read with her.
The young woman needs the young man to be her friend before he is her lover.
Our counsleors, pastors and teachers need the care of each other to understand how they are so similar to the people they are trying to help.
We live life mixed together, intergenerational not aged-graded, more human than genderized, social not individuated, tribal and interdependent and integrated.
And so we need to be instructed, therapized and healed in social, collective and collaborative ways.
unharboring from the familiar
So many thoughts; so many ideas to chew on and maybe swallow.
As I ambled through the Museo de Artes de Puerto Rico today, I came across the following one. Puerto Rican’s artists remained sheltered, provincial and traditional through the first half of the 20th Century, artists like Campeche, Pou y Becerra and Oller, then changed.
In the 1970′s Puerto Rico artist began to struggled for independence from the aesthetic paradigm of social realism and representational painting.
I like the struggle: sheltered in familiarity or open to new movements.
Campeche was traditional, old European; Ángel Botello modern.
Both are good; I like the Botellos.
I like being taught, I value many traditions, but I jump up and down over change when change is needed, especially in art and everything else in the world, and I like to see in a fresh way.
Consider the two paintings to the right. The Campeche woman is classical, in robes, European, religious, idealized yet muted. Campeche painted a world he loved, but in somebody else’s style.
The Botello is Carribean, everyday, personal, ordinary, vibrant. He painted his own everyday world, a world he loved, his family and he painted it his own way.
Botello developed his own style; Campeche borrowed his from Alcazar, a Spanish court painter banished to Puerto Rico.
Being taught is good; so is being creative, original, inventive, new. We need both, but I think a real danger is to get stuck in tradition, and many people
I know, including my own dear and unoriginal self, are stuck with familiarity. What to do?
I think some of ous are being called, by all that is aestheic and good and holy to unharbor more and sail into the sparkling waters of our own visions.
And once we have come nearly to the surface of those, to work them, jump on them, to dive into the center of our sparkling confabulations, to fearlessly throw ourselves into the original, originality of the original us. This will require something, that we be wild and crazy and confident and risky.
But if not, then how will we ever write that uniquely needed song of love and beauty or paint that new and fresh vision of that bright red girl on her little tricycle and paint too, her not-watching mother.
Some of us have been stupidly and persistently and patently safe and it must stop.
Life needs more red paint, and bright yellow too.
a new and more fully texturized spiritual reality
We missed the gorgeous streak of jalousied light on the texturized white wall in the front room, just above the couch, blazing with glory from the roiling, radiant sun because we were thinking about how he had “umhed” and “rrrhed” two years ago, backstabbing us in full daylight with people watching apathetically.
And so right there, in full sight of the devine, we dispossessed the present with the raging despotism of the past. If not that, something else is always getting in, between us and beauty.
We are, and I do not hesitate to say this anymore, aesthetically marginalized by our own myopic distortions of present tense reality, lost in the gap that exists between our pathetic squints and blinks and the blazing, glancing, whipping spiritualized light of shockingly full-tint, full-throttle reality.
We are tyrannized by our habitual, paranoic, self-limiting, psychic-poor, observationless ways. We gunk and sputter to a stop, short of it and late, epistemic hat in hand stuttering excuses.
Enough has been wasted. Enough reality has been squandered. It is time to slow time, to dawdle with the second-hand and to fiddle and twiddle and muddle with duration and intensity and lengthification.
Today I sat out in the backyard with two young friends and talked about their upcoming marriage. Beautiful! They, the approaching night, the cool ocean breeze, the nasturtiums lurking slyly along the sidelines – all breath-stopping gorgeous. Then the evening tiptoed in on our words, drop-dead, wow-you-down, baptized in splendor gorgeous. The water fall in the pond fell glancing behind our thoughts and danced into the lovely idea of a more focused future.
We sipped strawberry lemonade on ice, sucking the sugary red nectar inside our mouths, sucking up the symbiotic ambrosia of the together-now.
We poked and prodded several and various globes of seeing and imagining and believing.
I enjoyed it, the ambience of my friends; I relaxed into it, the extruded presence of my spiritual children — our fully mutualized sentience, the rise and fall of our texturized voices, the splashing water, the yellow flowers beyond her hair, the shade tree arching above his dark eyebrows, the possibility of a different future flowing into the air and swirling in the breeze around our cheeks.
The question is more obvious to me lately. What does it mean to live wisely, fully, meaningfully?
I always feel a little cheated, a little out of it, a bit of a distance between myself and what is, and what is beautiful and what is perfect and pure and falling down softly day-to-day on the walls and heads and minds of the righteous and the evil ones too.
I haven’t got it, but I am beginning to grab a few broken bits and pieces of it.
I want to fully embrace the now. I need to acutely and astutely and even savagely engage the present, activate the awareness of the flow of life that is immediate to the moment, to the space close and at hand and nearer than even that, the only spaces that actually exist and that I can touch with my heat-prints in the ever and now, the water and flowers and air and presence of my people.
I’m telling you and myself now, that I need and want to look into people’s eyes longer than I am accustomed to. To look, to see, to love, to love again because I haven’t looked, and we haven’t and we don’t really see each other, but we can and must and can again as we age and become a million years old in the seeing experience by the power of him who made the blind eyes to see and the seeing eyes to see again.
I confess it; I desperately need to savor my food and drink longer in my mouth than I have before. It is good! It is better than I have given it credit for. It is the gift, of life, the bread of life, and I love it, stawberry life, lemon life, hazelnut life waterfalling down my tongue and into my throat.
And I need so much, and may I be so bold as to say to you too that you need so much to pick up the child reaching up to us for a hug. I need that child and that child needs me and I need to carry her and take him by the hand and pat his head and affirm the reality and value of the presence person, of that little, fragile, precious being.
I must and do and want to reel up that thought again, each thought again, each and every brilliantly-faced thought, and hold it like a diamond and stare at it and ruminate over it, and polish itwith my mind, like a stone tumbling across the fast flowing stream of my hypothalamic electrifications.
And I need, need, need God, and I now know that I want, want, want the divine, more than anything. I must get clear on this, everything is from him and to him and for him forever, and I will, to thrive, wrap everything up in the him of the him of him.
And I need my dear ones, my family and my friends, and I must pull them around me and have that time and that talk and that presence in the room even when there is no talk. I cannot and will not, I absolutely refuse, to be alone for very long, because this is wise and there is no wise away from my precious ones that have been given to me.
Listen, I don’t have it, but I’m crudely gesturing toward it; I’m psycholingustically guessing about it; I am sociolinguistically posturing it its direction. I’m spirituologically sponsoring, for you and for me, its very essence.
I command you now, in the name of all that is good and holy, run after ontological joy that looks something like what I have tried to show you here.
This is what the proverb makers and the psalm mongers have always meant by being the wisdom-sage scholar.
see
I went to San Francisco last week to see as much as I could see.
I had that crazy good feeling, that so many of us feel, that makes us want to get up and go out and see it! So I did.
Standing in a narrow alley in Chinatown by the ”Delicious Dim Sum” restaurant, I heard the noisy Mahjong tiles in the apartment above.
It was a moment of awareness, just as I had experienced shortly before, when I had seen the Chinese men in the park, talking over the newspaper together, gesturing and commenting and laughing. I saw them, and they seemed so perfectly typical to me, old men hanging out together in the morning, but I didn’t know what they were saying, or thinking or reading.
And standing in the alley, I couldn’t see the Mahjong game above, the players, the stories of the players, their lives and loves and their wins and losses, but I saw the alley, and the underware drying just outside of one window, and I heard the slap of the tiles on the table above.
I saw it, and I didn’t. It’s always this way, for all of us, but the thing is to keep on looking, and to take a second look.
Earlier, we had riden up Hyde Street in a cable car, clanking and vibrating along up the hill. It felt good. The view of the street and bay out of the back of the old wood and metal was a perfect San Francisco scene, bright, and watery and sloped and lovely and charming. But when we rode the Powell line down to Market Street, and I stopped a moment and talked to the operator as I got off, the view changed.
“They’re screwing us!” he said. “We get no respect from the people who own the company. The police and firemen are treated better than us. But they just keep cutting us. We’re probably going to go on strike. It isn’t right.”
He was angry, frustrated, embittered. His losses surfaced, and I saw them. The view from his car was different from the view from mine.
Interesting, reality, changes, according to the point of view.
One day in the city, we rode the ferry out to Alcatraz island. Everyone says to do this, so we did. They were right. Interesting, again. Here we saw another reality – prison life. I was particularly engaged by men that we met from the peeks we got between the bars.
The men’s stories, on the audio tour, brought the prison back to life. We heard from the prisoners themselves, how dark the cell block was at night, but also how the sun would come in one end of the cell block in the early evening, and light the place with life and warmth and beauty in an ugly place, and how at Christmas, the children of the guards would come sing Christmas carols to the prisoners that they never saw, and how on a summer evening, the prisoners could hear the sounds drifting across the bay from the city, a woman’s laugh, a snatch of music.
The life they had before, for them, was out of reach here, but it was so very close. This is a feeling that I too have known, close but so far too.
I was particularly struck by one snatch of story we heard on the audio tour of Alcatraz, how one prisoner was released from the prison, but free and on the street, he said he was lost because, ”the world was moving differently than I was used to, and I didn’t know how to move with it, and everyone had some place to go, but I didn’t have any place to go.”
He saw a different San Francisco that a tourist with a map and a friend and a destination and a place to go home to when the sites had been seen and enjoyed and marked off the must-see list. He had no map, and no list and no home to go to.
In the San Francisco Museum of Modern art, we stood and stared at Matisse’s Woman with a Hat. It is wildly colored picture, although we were told that the model, his wife, was dressed in black when she posed for the painting. Matisse saw it differently. When Woman with a Hat was exhibited at the 1905 Salon d’Automne in Paris, it caused and uproar and gave rise to the avant-garde movement Fauvism, from the French fauves or “wild beasts.”
Matisse saw it differently, than he had before, life, wildly splashed and staring right at you with emotions bared.
I want to see, like Matisse, like the prisoners, like the cable car operators, like the Chinese families, see it all, know it all, the stories within the stories, to really see and understand the world.
On Sunday, after we had returned from San Francisco to San Diego, I got to pray with Ishmael. He had never prayed before, never. He wasn’t sure if he wanted to, because he didn’t know how, but then he said he did want to. I prayed a short prayer, to help him, and he repeated it after me. He wanted to do this, to know this, to have this experience, of God, of life, of all of life.
When we looked up, I asked Ishmael, who’s name means, “God hears,” how he felt. He said he felt good. Just an hour later, he was baptized. His choice, ten years old, his choice and no one elses, to stand up in front of the church and admit to being a God follower.
Stepping up half way out of the baptistery, he paused, and then he flipped his head down under the water again, one more time, a second look around, I guess.
He was learning, how to move, with the movements around and within him, and to pause, and to see, and to make the choice to take a second look around.
And this, I think, is how it is done, and how one begins to begin to see more.
details
“Have you even lived on your own?” I asked.
“Not really,” she replied. “Even last year, when I moved out, I kept going back over to his house, even though I knew he didn’t really love me. He said he did, but I know he didn’t.”
I turned her words over in my mind, like stones, looking at each side of each of them.”
“Perhaps it would be good,” I suggested, “for you to figure out your core, to become a strong independent woman, with known boundaries,” before you go back into any close relationships.”
“I think it would,” she said.
*****
I pushed the camera down in tall grass, pointed it up into the sunlit blades, and snapped a shot, blind.
Then I extracted the camera from the grassy mess, flipped on the LCD screen and peered into the shiny glass.
Thatched, crossed, beautifully sunlit blades — captured in detail was a pure ribbed and vaulted glory.
*****
I pulled off the cover and glanced down at the tops of the valves, damp and webby and spidery. The manifold linked the valves together and then sent three-quarter inch pipes plunging into the ground. It didn’t make complete sence. I sat down on the low wall and looked harder. The one inch pipe was the supply line, the three-quarter inch pipes fed each zone. Looking more closely, I could see that some of the pipes on the manifold were threaded. Then I knew. This beast could be screwed apart and another valve easily added. By means of a few intricacies, I could yet turn my backyard into Eden.
******
I’ve noticed of late that both the beauty and the way forward are often found right in front of us, within the peculiarity of the details.
