“We were told that Nick said the two NFL players took their life jackets off and drifted out to sea,” said Bob Bleakley, whose son Will Bleakley, 25, is also still missing.
~ via FoxNews

Four friends, all athletes, all young and in good condition, all dumped into the same vast frigid water miles from land with only a vest/cushion to lift them up, all with the same odds of survival. Only one comes back. Why?

Doctors say it was not only his physical stamina, but his mental stamina that made the difference. I couldn’t tell from the article, but I would surmise that he determined that his best course lay in giving himself every edge he could by sticking to the boat. A white hull of a 21′ boat is easier to see than a single human in a life vest. He must have determined to stick it out through the pain of his icy muscles and exhaustion of battling the powerful waves, and more importantly, stick it out through the temptation to lose his resolve by giving in to animal fear and wild desperate urges and despair. 46 hours later, the rescuers found him, still clinging to the boat, 35 miles out to sea, alone.

What of his friends? One was certain, floating in the pitch cold black, that he’d seen a light from shore. He stripped himself of his last advantage – his life vest – and struck out swimming for what he thought he’d seen. Even more sobering are the actions of the other two friends who died first. At some point in the first night they must have made a decision that the game was unwinnable, hopeless. Deliberately (and, one would assume, ignoring the pleas of their friends), they removed their jackets, let go, and drifted away. And down.

I don’t know what I would have done their positions and I don’t presume to know why they all made the decisions they did. I do know that I’m pitifully out of shape – physically for sure, and probably mentally. I also know that when circumstances collapse, my instinctive desire is to assert some kind of final control by deciding to preemptively get out – whatever “out” is. In other words, I’m often a lot more like the first two friends who stopped fighting, who drifted into the dark and never got to see the lights of the Coast Guard choppers.

The lessons to be drawn from this tragedy are so obvious as to practically write themselves, so obvious that maybe they’re even clichéd. (Lifetime Movie Of The Week, anyone?) But that doesn’t mean the lessons aren’t worth drawing. Sometimes being cynical just makes you take off your life vest.

The obvious lesson: Sometimes it’s gonna hurt bad, sometimes you’re gonna get pounded until you’re beyond exhausted, sometimes you’re going to be distracted by the temptation to take what you think is an easier way out of the oppressive dark, sometimes you’ll be tempted to simply give up because you think you know better than the friends who are rooting for you, telling you not to stop. But don’t let go of the thing that helped you venture out.

Don’t let go of the boat.

I’m finally back from vacation in the “unpacked and ready” sense. We brought back an unwelcome visitor courtesy of the cousins – some kind of nasty flu bug that’s been kicking us all in the pants. We don’t get out much, so our contact with the outside world and its endless buffet of tasty viruses has been limited. I feel like one of the aliens from War Of The Worlds – limp, pale, disgusting, slimy, and half dead. I spent last night in a slow-motion haze of lying down on the couch, slipping into a fretful sleep, feeling my lungs fill with toxic waste grade phlegm, stumbling to the bathroom to cough it up as quietly as possible to not wake anyone, laying down on the couch again, rinse, repeat. Tonight looks to be no exception, sadly. I’ve fallen prey to … The Man Cold!!!!

A few obligatory end-of-year musings:

First, thanks to all of you for caring enough to visit and comment this last year. As I’ve said before, in a period of my life where I’ve felt very removed from the rest of life, you’ve been a great source of continued conversation and thought-provoking responses. I appreciate all of you, and I’m committed to continuing my endless sideline commentaries on stuff that smarter people have already commented on…

Second, we saw the Will Smith movie “The Pursuit Of Happyness” tonight. I won’t bore you with a rehash since you’ve probably seen it, but here’s a link to the movie site in case you haven’t. There were a couple of qualities that impressed me about Chris Gardner, the man whose biography inspired the movie. He was absolutely relentless in every step – holding on to his dreams, getting his foot in the door of where he wanted to be, not letting despair or defeat rob him of his energy and determination to try one more time. The other quality was his unwavering commitment to not let the circumstances or how he was feeling get in the way of his human connection with his son – not the poverty, not the homeless shelters and endless lines, not his internship or important study, not the responsibility of being a single dad.

I’ve got a lot of ground I can make up on both those accounts. I’ve never held any goal with that kind of single-minded determination, and it’s much easier than it should be for me to disengage with Amira and those I love simply because I don’t feel like it or am distracted (like today, when I was dragging my feet to play with her because I was irritable from being sick).

Tonight I’m feeling that an important word for me this year is “pursuit”. I don’t want to give up that energy, that sense of being unwilling to stay unhappy and in stasis when I see someplace else I want to be. This last year has been about withdrawal, being fallow, floating. I don’t regret it, but I’m feeling the momentum building under me again to forge ahead, make some new trails in the well-worn ground of my life.

More love, more justice, more growth, more connection. Happy 2009!

We were in the $.99 store a couple of days ago. Amira was running around being her usual enthusiastic self. (It’s all interjections right now along the lines of “That is the coolest [object] I ever seen before!”) She found a pink butterfly net on a bamboo pole that particularly caught her fancy. We found her gleefully trying to “catch” the butterflies on the wind chimes display before we had to ask her to back down.

I was monitoring her at the end of the toy aisle when a couple of sisters – one a year or two older than Amira and the other probably 9 or 10, both of them blond and kinda WASP-y – came up the aisle, out shopping with their equally tailored Grandma an aisle over. Amira ran up to them to introduce herself. She’s been on an introductions kick lately, asking the checkers at the grocery store and the college kids working the counter at Taco Del Mar and other shoppers their names and sharing her name and latest finds with them. She believes what the TV has told her – everyone is her friend and wants to be helpful and is interested in listening to her about things she finds interesting. We’re not around other little kids much right now, and she’s naturally extra interested in them. So she introduced herself to the sisters and showed them her net.

Nothing. Just a short stare, no response except maybe the slightest shrug, and the heel turn that left Amira staring at their backs. She smiled and re-tried her opening gambit about the cool butterfly net, a little more tentatively this time. Nothing. She looked at me quizzically with her “why don’t they want to talk to me?” face.

I looked at my daughters dark curly hair and eyes, her rumpled clothes mismatched with her purple splashing boots she loves so much, her beautiful wide open, unguarded face and got pissed.

I wanted to smack the little beeyotches for not even being polite enough to acknowledge that she was talking to them, much less showing some human decency by being friendly. Or maybe scare the bejeezus out of them with the “dark bearded and physically menacing stranger growling about giving his goddamn kid the time of day” routine.

‘Course, smacking or scaring someone else’s kids can get you arrested. Besides, it was more than likely just kids being kids – disinterested more than dismissive or cruel. I think the youngest one even ended up interacting a bit with Amira before rejoining Grandma.

But given my childhood experience of being either ignored, intentionally ostracized, or actively persecuted by kids my age, when I see Amira getting rebuffed I can get suddenly blindsided by a potent, involuntary emotional cocktail of cold fury, hot embarrassment and nauseating rejection. It only takes a second or two for my reasonable adult brain to kick in and referee, but in those seconds I feel a lifetime of shame and anger for being forced to be an unwilling outsider and a ferocious imperative to keep Amira’s wide open and lovely soul hidden away from the emotional catastrophe that is human beings.

Which is, of course, madness. To become fully human, innocence must turn to wisdom, plastic TV reality must give way to acceptance of complexity, surety must evolve to tolerance for ambiguity, shallow affinities must ripen with understanding into the deliberate choices of love. Not one of those things can happen without being wounded a little, or a lot. To hide Amira away would be to condemn her to being an emotional cripple.

So, I’m trying to stay out of it. I’m going to have to let her get smacked around a little bit by the beeyotches, and coach her how to smack back, or pity them for being the little less-than-human animals that they are when they do that, or rise above it all and be a queen.

And more than that, who said her childhood is gonna be like mine? The only thing I know how to teach her is how to deal with a pack of wolves. What if she’s the bully? Or ASB president? I’ve got no map for that.

Out of the two of us, I’m not always sure she’s the one that needs child protective services.

Curly headed monsters!

Our curly-headed monster came back today from her Camp Casey Adventure®. Both Janece and I noticed that she seemed a smidgen more grown up, like something about being away from her parents for a couple of days gave her a new lift of confidence in her own independence. She seemed pleased with herself that she was able to both have fun and miss us at the same time. She was really great for her Nana and Papa, too, and of course we’re proud as punch. And, a little sad, of course. Like I’ve written before, each new step for her out into the world is a little bit of tearing apart for us – all good and supposed to happen, but still melancholy.

Zombies!

I had another zombie dream last night, but with an interesting twist given my interesting realizations of late. I dreamed I was one of them, that I could feel their emotions and residual humanness because I was linked to them, even though I retained my own mind and self-will. The dream was still grotesque and disturbing as are my usual zombie dreams, but I woke up with an odd feeling – concern and protectiveness for the zombies, even though they were dangerous and destructive and I could sympathize with the humans trying to destroy them.

Which brings me to a bit of memorabilia I’d forgotten. When I was young – 6th grade or so – we left our cult-ish, fundamentalist church we’d grown up in all our lives. We were, of course, instantly ostracized and for a while my family drifted looking for a healthier church to replace our religious experience. It was pretty traumatic on us kids to have our insular world turned upside down, and we developed all kinds of coping behaviors.

One thing we did was come up with finger/hand puppets we called Kru’ms – a short derivative of “Christian Faither’s” (the Christian Faith Church was it’s name). The Kru’ms were ridiculously antagonistic and annoying, like Colonel Klink and the Nazis in Hogans Heroes. They could spawn infinite clones of themselves and we battled and bested them to great hilarity for so long as kids that the hand puppets became kind of a family institution – something we even passed on to other families who thought they were hilarious.

Our dear cousins, the Osbournes, were a part of the church that we were estranged from for a while (before they, too, ended up leaving). I had a dream one night that my cousin Nate and some of the other kids from the church were hunting me and wanted to kill me. Nate found and cornered me, and even though I begged him not to do it, he shot me in the belly.

I remember the impact in my dream, remember holding my stomach and looking down at the blood running out between my fingers. I distinctly remember feeling my life draining away. But I didn’t die. All the blood drained out and I felt a new bitter strength flow in. I got up and began chasing the now-horrified Nate who kept shooting me with no effect. I caught him and killed him by breaking his neck. When I was done with him, I went after the other kids. Mercifully, I woke up before I finished them off although I knew that their doom was also sealed. When I woke up, I didn’t feel scared or sad anymore about leaving the church.

OK, obviously I was dealing with a bit of trauma, and I clearly came up with a way emotionally to find closure, however disturbing. I think the most interesting part of the dream is that bitter strength I felt flow into me, that zombie power if you will. It was a force that felt deathly strong and powerful, but not filled with joy or completion or forgiveness – just a single-minded bitter will to avenge the injustice done to me. In the dream I felt no emotion/connection – just a dark delight that I was now powerful, that the tables were turned. I think in retrospect that poor Nate represented all of the kids in my school and neighborhood who had persecuted me/us for being the odd ones out. I think that in the middle of the emotional turbulence of my childhood church world breaking down, my destruction of him in the dream was the advent of one of many emotional gates that have come down between me and other people.

The funny thing is that when I had that dream, I’d never seen a zombie movie or read a zombie story of any kind. It was all pure id expression by a little 6th grade kid.

And now, after a disturbing romp through my childhood….

Otters!

We watched Emmett Otter’s Jugband Christmas tonight. We didn’t have TV growing up, but Janece said it was apparently a Christmas time favorite. Cute story, fun songs. “Bathing Suit” had Janece and I laughing:

And here’s the all-time H8R theme song (performed by the River Bottom Nightmare Band):

My favorite lyrics:

We know we’re a mess
But I does not like to be clean
We don’t brush our teeth
‘Cause our toothache can help us stay mean
We don’t wish to learn
But we hate what we don’t understand

Heh heh – spot on. Jim Henson rocks. We have The Dark Crystal in from NetFlix – I’m looking forward to seeing it again.

I was very moved tonight by the pictures coming from the rallies all over the nation today in support of gay marriage and against the harsh, vindictive bans passed in California, Florida and Arizona. It wasn’t just big cities like New York or San Fransisco or L.A. We’re talking Missoula, Peoria, Greensville, Grand Forks – hometowns in conservative areas. (Seattle held its own huge rallies, of course.)

What was moving was the spontenaity of the protests (organized within just this past week completely virally online), the diversity of the marchers (all ages, orientations, races), and the spirit of non-violent, optimisic inclusiveness. Even more was the general reports, even in the reddest of states, of good will and support coming from passing drivers and pedestrians. The public, still buzzing with the civic spirited victory of electing Obama last week, has turned its attention to another long-festering injustice in America – gay rights – with a mind to end it.

As Christians, Janece and I’s own awakening to gay rights came as it has for many others – through our friends and family. We could not, in good conscience, avoid reassessing the religion we’d been brought up in against the reality of the lives of those we loved. We couldn’t take refuge in the now obviously false assertions about homosexuality we grew up with. Tropes like “gays don’t have strong father figures” or “gays lead lives of unrestrained debauchery” or “gays are morally perverted” were revealed for the shoddy ignorance they were as we watched our friends struggle to assert their obvious normalcy to their families and church communities, sometimes despairing to the point of feeling suicidal or losing contact with those they loved all together.

This is about truth and freedom – for gays, for Christians, for society. Jesus said, “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free.”

Gays come to understand that there is something true and unassailable about their sexuality. To deny that truth is to deny their own personhood, their own self-worth, and to start down a path that inflicts the bitter fallout on their own mental health and their personal relationships. There are too many stories of gays who have cut their own bodies, put themselves and others at risk with dangerous sexual behavior, destroyed their most precious relationships and even committed suicide because they could not come out and embrace the truth.

As Christians, I feel it is ungodly to shun that truth that we all can see with our own God-given understanding and rationality in favor of a lie – a lie that not only diminishes our faith but that has inflicted so much needless suffering and loss on gays and their families. There is no difference between a good gay relationship and a good straight relationship, nor is there a difference between bad relationships in either orientation. It is our duty to adjust our religious and moral understanding to the real world. Why build something as precious as our faith on elaborately convoluted and demonstrably false theological contortions when the truth is as obvious and simple as “gay is normal”?

As a society, the long-standing lies about gays have cost us. There are hundreds of thousands of gay couples who would gladly adopt some of our many needy and willing children if only they had the same protections from the state as Janece and I do. There are countless gay couples who have been uprooted or seen their productive personal and civil lives disrupted by needless and punitive laws. Our military currently suffers from having to remove gay translators and service personnel when they are desperately needed in the theater. As with minority civil rights, we have been needlessly wounding our own national body and soul and we merely need to stop the madness to see a surge in contribution and participation in our local communities.

From a purely practical standpoint, gay marriage is no threat to anyone. The civil recognition of married gay couples does not affect a religious person’s theological understanding. Churches, private religious schools and institutions will not have their exclusionary behavior affected as long as they don’t take public monies or support. Our communities will gain, and the only losers will be those in the public square insisting on discrediting themselves by peddling obvious falsehood.

I salute the marchers today, especially the first-time participants, for their raw enthusiasm for change and their unwillingness to tolerate anyone’s lack of civil freedoms. I salute my gay friends and family for their courage and love and hope for all of us.

No more lies, no more division, no more suffering. The time for truth and freedom is now.

I got my absentee ballot today. It’s the most excited I’ve been to vote in a long time. Judging by the long lines and wait times at polling stations in the early-voting states around the country, I gather I’m not the only one. I need to check out the local candidates a bit more before I vote, but I’m raring to go.

Janece and I had a great conversation tonight about growing up. It’s weird to be still talking about that when you’re in your late 30s, but I guess it’s a process you go through your whole life, so…

We were both picking through some destructive stories about the world that we picked up along the way from our families or church or peers, stories that have persisted and had emotional, even physical, impacts on us.

I think my main story, at least the one that’s been floating to the surface, is that people are unpredictable and unsafe, and that they can’t be trusted. It’s a story that occasionally lines up with reality, of course, but that as a fundamental basis of how I live hasn’t been all that helpful or conducive to a full experience of life.

I guess the point is that growing up means taking responsibility for that childhood story, and any story from your past that arises, by understanding that you have all the power in the world to train yourself to live from a different point of view, one that is more powerful and that opens up more possibilities. That’s a process that can take time because when you’ve literally built your world on these stories – anything from what you chose to eat, where you live, who you married, your plans for your future – it can take a while to untangle all the fallout.

Anyway, I’ll dig more into this in a later post since I should be working and can’t right now.

In a graphic novel I was reading today, the main characters enter the world of Faerie – that is, the land of myth and legend – by walking through a specific gate at the end of a specific field at twilight. The one character explains to the other that the reason they have to take the journey at twilight is that it’s because it’s a time of day that is neither day nor night, dark nor light – an inbetween time that opens the way to an inbetween land.

That’s how this week has felt – surreal and unsettled. Levity’s sudden, violent death has left us all a little dazed and displaced. As Janece and I have written, the property feels different, our relationship with Ahmis feels different, and on top of it the weather has changed very suddenly to gray and rainy.

We had dinner with Ahmis tonight before she leaves on a week-long trip. With Levity now in the ground and the initial sharp shock of grief past, it struck me that we all seem to be waiting for something – waiting to stop feeling like Levity is just around the corner, waiting to feel the new normal set in. This morning as Janece was taking something out to the garage, Amira asked off-handedly, “Mama, are you going to get Levity from the kennel?” Through tears, Janece said “No honey, Levity is dead – remember?” It left Amira silent, pondering.

My brother Stephen has talked with me about his months of grief since his wife died. He mentioned how long the process took, and how displaced his space of mourning felt because of how relatively fast everyone moved on back into their own lives. He also talked about how grief isn’t linear – how it doubles back on itself and veers from feeling lighter back into darkness again with no discernible and straightforward path.

Tonight, it occurred to me that grieving is like a fenced field, laced with trails and bounded by the loss you’ve sustained. All of the the field must be covered – each criss-crossing trail followed – and your loss will be encountered again and again at the end of each trail until the ground is completely familiar and there are no more paths to follow. The ground must be walked and there are no shortcuts. The traveling comes to an end and the exit is made clear only when you’ve taken in the whole of it.

I don’t know how long it will take for all of us Loving/Moments to traverse Levity’s loss, but I’ve been very grateful the last few days that we are walking it together and creating a deeper friendship along the way.

We buried Levity this morning.

Ahmis made blueberry muffins from the blueberries she was picking just before Levity died and brought them up for us to have breakfast together. Then she called our neighbor, Joe, who graciously agreed to bring his tractor to dig Levity’s grave.

We brought Levity out, still in the wheelbarrow that Ken used last night to bring her down from the ridge. We eased her down into the hole, leaving her wrapped in her blanket, and put her favorite, saliva-saturated stuffed animal with her next to her head. I said a few inadequate words at Ahmis’ request. Before we had a chance to start burying Levity, Ahmis’ mom and partner arrived with flowers. There were more tears and comforting Mom hugs.

After a little bit of time, Ahmis put the few shovel fulls of dirt on Levity, and with a few more tears we started in on the work. It was a big hole and hot work as the sun broke through for a while.

It made me think of the countless beings that have been buried by hand – such hard, tiring work to make sure that the dead are properly honored and interred. Graves that are dug by hand wound and re-heal the earth in a way that never leaves it the same as it was before. It leaves a scar that marks the passing of something too important or precious to be left above-ground at the mercy of the elements. It was a good and fitting way to close Levity’s chapter in this world.

We positioned her under the cherry tree with her head pointed toward the pond so that she can keep watch over this property that she loved so much and felt so protective of, including a great view of the dock where her nemesis – the blue heron – would always come and sit and mock her.

Tova said his goodbyes. He’s been really subdued all day and not his usual smiling self. It’s clear he’s missing her and feeling that his beloved pack has been irretrievably altered.

Amira handled it so well. She watched intently every step, and kept saying “We’re going to miss Levity” (which she’s also repeated her and there throughout the day). She used a little scoop to help us cover Levity’s “outside body” and brought some dandelions of her own to lay on the grave with the flowers that Ahmis’ mom brought with her. I’m so glad we included her in everything and walked her through it. She was really tuned into our sadness and laughter, and seemed satisfied when it was all over that she knew where Levity was.

We’ve been feeling all day like we should see Levity moving in the reeds at the pond’s edge or peering in through the window in our door asking to come in and sniff around. She was such a presence here, always walking the property and poking in its nooks and crannies, possessively keeping its space clear for her pack. It’s strange how the property feels altered, empty, unfamiliar.

One final note. One of Ahmis’ girlfriends said that she wondered if Levity was killed by a stag. We’ve seen a young stag around here this summer, and Ahmis said she heard thrashing and a few strange barks from Levity before her final howl. When she walked the spot where Levity died this morning, she couldn’t find any broken branches or sticks that looked like they caused the wound to her throat. I don’t know if that was the cause or not, but it would also be fitting.

I’m happy to say that we and Sabu dodged a bullet today. Janece and I sat with him while he lay soaking up the sun and deliberated about what to do. We ran down the list of what we’d seen since yesterday — he’s been grooming, he’s eaten some, he’s kept hydrated, he’s able to negotiate stairs (going up) pretty well. Something about him gave us enough pause to decide to wait a bit.

I’m glad we did. Tonight, he’s doing much better. He’s still walking like a drunk sailor in a typhoon, but he’s mobile and able to get to some of his favorite places in the house. His eyes look way more focused and tonight he came over to me with his tail up – the first we’ve seen that in 48 hours.

I don’t think that he’ll be back to “normal’ in any sense of the word and there’s still a high risk of further strokes, but we’ll do what we can to get him strong again on our limited budget. In the meantime, it’s enough that he’s still around and we’re both glad that we were able to suss out that he wasn’t quite ready to go yet this morning. After my grim prognosis last night, it’s a relief to be wrong and to have him with us.

Natalie, Amy and all – thx so much for your support and solicitousness…

Speaking of back from the dead, it looks like the government had to rescue AIG to the tune of $85 billion dollars. Burns me up.

We watched “Maxed Out” tonight. It was heartbreaking how the predatory practices of these disgusting companies has torn apart people’s lives – leading literally to people’s deaths from despair at not being able to afford their bills. It’s astoundingly grotesque that the CEOs and other idiots that fomented and are responsible for these mortgage lending practices have walked away with enormous Enron-style payouts in their pockets and literally left our government (ie. US!) holding the bill. We, the taxpayers, are getting screwed on both ends.

McCain MUST NOT be allowed to take office. With his record and the pressure coming from his party to continue to de-regulate the financial activities of these hoods and pirates, we are going to be bled dry as a country beyond all repair. It’s still astounding to me how much damage unrestrained free-market capitalists have done to this country under Bush in the last eight years.

Life. It just doesn’t all fit together neatly.

We had a great great time tonight at Amira’s private birthday celebration. We’d thought we might take her to Chuck E. Cheese, but I had to slave away at a lame-o client problem that took me all day to fix and it got too late. Instead, we whipped up a last minute excursion to Central Market and it just so happened that our awesome friend-lord (that’s my new term since “landlord” sounds so impersonal) Ahmis was able to come with us. We had dinner, we lit candles, we sang (the birthday song happened to land just about the actual time she popped out!), we ate an insanely rich and delicious gluten-free torte, we opened presents, we looked at the huge full moon and stars on our way home. It was just perfect – couldn’t have been better. My heart is filled up with love and joy from my wonderful brand-new 4 year old who has given us so much more than it feels like we’ve given her.

And…

We’re going to be taking Sabu in today (Tues) to ease him into his final sleep. He just hasn’t gotten better. He’s laid around all day in an unfocused daze. Whenever he tries to walk, his body is so initially uncontrolled that he just spins around. A couple of times he’s completely flipped over just standing up. He’s clearly uncomfortable in any position but fully supported and resting. His breathing accelerates and his tail poofs up.

He doesn’t like this new state of affairs and it’s not looking like it will get better. We think he’s actually had multiple strokes and there’s a high possibility he’ll have more, and in his weakened state they’ll probably be more severe. He’s not eating or drinking much at all, although he’s still grooming. Not two days ago, he was bouncing around on top of the world and tonight I had to physically hold him upright in his box while he peed.

We sat with him tonight and petted him and cuddled him. He loves the attention and the body warmth and purred up a storm. I know he trusts us to do the right thing, and we both believe we’re doing the right thing for him by putting him to sleep even though it feels so abortive and fucked up. We just don’t see anything but a long, debilitating, disorienting decline for him ahead.

We’re taking him in at 4:30pm today. We both have to get through a full day’s work before we go. We’ll have to explain to Amira what’s going on, and then bury him here on the property. I’ll be pulling together our last photos of him tonight for my eulogy post. I’m not looking forward to any it.

It’s amazing that a heart can feel loaded with joy and gratitude and dread and sadness — all in seemingly equal measure. What a strange day.

Writing over 1400 words last night/this morning while deathly tired took it out of me. I need to get some sleep and get a lot done tomorrow, so I’m going to keep this one short and get back to my massive screeds tomorrow.

We finally let Amira in on the fact that she’ll be having a birthday a few days from now – the 15th – and she was appropriately overjoyed.  She got a cool card from her Aunt Anne and Uncle Chris today that she loved. We’ll probably do something fun that night for her – maybe a trip to Chuck E. Cheese, which I loathe but she will find pretty fun. A week from tomorrow (Sat Sept 20) we’re planning to host a potluck get-together to celebrate our 15th anniversary and her 4th birthday.

We haven’t celebrated any anniversaries or birthdays for several years now due to lack of money and some lame work crunch around those times, but she’s old enough and our 15th is enough of a milestone that we’re taking it on this year. I have this recurring fantasy about us being the super-celebrators — you know, those fun people that have a crap load of decorations that are hauled out for every holiday no matter how small and have many parties — but we’ve never made that happen. There’s always been some excuse to bag it when the time rolls around.

But I don’t want Amira growing up thinking that these holidays and special days are nothing and not worth celebrating. Having special days to look forward to, finding creative ways to create your own family rituals, celebrating milestones as punctuation points in lives worth living — those are all things I want to have in our family culture. A culture of celebration, I guess. That can’t be bad for you, right?

“Every moment and every event of every man’s life on earth plants something in his soul.”
~ Thomas Merton

Amira has been making more strides in her emotional IQ. She’s able to control her moods much more emphatically — not so much with the stormy tantrums of the early threes and more subversive acting up in its place (not sure if that’s an improvement, really), learning to frame her emotions with words instead of physical reactions. As with anything in life, this new understanding comes with it’s own bitter side.

There were two memorable moments this weekend with her.

On Sunday, Janece’s parents came to visit and they brought their Llasa Apso puppy, Kiki. We sat out in the lovely sunshine eating our picnic lunch on a grassy area near the Kingston ferry landing. Amira got to take Kiki’s leash and run around the grass with her. Kiki is still enough of a puppy that she’s not all that responsive to voice commands yet, so Amira’s instructions were specific: since we were near a parking lot, her job was to hold onto Kiki’s leash so that she would stay safe.

They had a grand old time sprinting full tilt around the grass — the little Ewok-looking bundle of fur and the curly-haired ball of thunder. Three or four times, the leash slipped out of Amira’s hands but with a dive onto the grass that would be the envy of a MLB player coming home from third, she managed to grab it.

But the last, time the leash got away, and Kiki went loping over to meet a group of people walking by. Amira’s distress was palpable. She knew she was responsible for getting the leash and she didn’t want to let her Nana, Papa, Mommy, Daddy and Uncle Stephen down, but she’s been feeling shy around strangers again and she was really nervous about getting too close. She chased Kiki as far as she dared toward the strangers, and then came running back to us, panic starting to turn into tears. “Papa, Papa, you take the leash! Kiki is not my dog!” she sobbed.

We consoled her, told her that it wasn’t her fault and she did the best she could, but she wouldn’t touch the leash again until it was time to go, and then she wanted reassurance all the way to the van that everything was OK.

(Corrections: Kiki is a Shih Tzu. And Janece gets this story way more right than me. So read her version here.)

Monday, we took Stephen back to the airport. As we said goodbye in the terminal, Amira was playing with a cluster of enormous balloons by the Delta/Sun Country counter: round rubber ballons with a few foil balloons mixed in. She was so absorbed with them that she forgot to be sad when Uncle Stephen left to get on the plane. The woman shepherding the ticket line was obviously really taken with her and asked her if she wanted to take one home. Gee, ya think?

We chose the silver balloon with the glossy blue ribbon. Amira was ecstatic. I tied the ribbon around her wrist, telling her that I was doing it so that the balloon wouldn’t blow away and reminding her to be careful so that the balloon didn’t pop against the low ceiling sprinklers on the way out to the parking garage. She was super solicitous all the way to lunch, and was getting a bit nervous about the funny sounds it made against the roof of the car because she didn’t want it to pop. She only relaxed when I bopped the balloon a few times to show her that the roof was soft and the balloon would be just fine.

After lunch, Neil dropped us off at the ferry where we waited by the beach and then boarded when the Spokane sailed in.

As the ferry prepared to sail, she ran around the deck, thrilled with the way the balloon bounced on the light breeze.

She took a short pause with me to look over the rail, talk to the water and the seagulls and the ferry boat (who all chatted with her using me as a translator, of course).

The ferry pulled out and Mr. Wind (as Amira dubbed the draft) started pushing his way pretty hard across the deck. She asked to go down into boat out of the wind, and we set out with a few stops to test out Mr. Wind’s abilities.

What we didn’t know was that the either foil tab the ribbon was tied onto or the knot itself was loose, and with one sharp gust, the big beautiful silver balloon tore away and sailed on the backdraft of the ferry and the breeze towards the shore.

Amira watched it sail away from her, flickering and glittering in the sun as it got smaller and smaller, and didn’t react – maybe thinking it was going to spin around and float back to us.

Then it sunk in. The silver balloon was dancing away, free of its satiny leash, never to return.

We all were subdued the rest of the trip home. Janece and I cuddled her, told her we were sorry, waved our sad goodbyes to the now invisible balloon, and sat a tearful vigil with Amira as she finished working her way through these big feelings, saying over and over “I miss my big star balloon”…

Amira got over the sadness, of course, about a half hour later as we looked for jellyfish off the Kingston docks. We told her that the star balloon had traveled up to be with the other star friends in the sky and that we’d find it and wave goodbye when it got dark — a promise we kept before we put her to bed.

But the feeling of melancholy stayed with Janece and I. We both teared up again looking at the pictures later, reliving those moments this weekend with her when the cold door to the empty place cracked open a little bit and she understood what we all come to understand: For us human beings, things don’t always work out and no sunny moment, no shiny star can stay forever.

A little dramatic? After all, it was just a little puppy on a leash and a silver balloon that got away.

But it felt like more to me after a weekend with my dear brother, sensing and appreciating the wisdom that comes from the new pain-smoothed edges of his heart, talking about grief and loss and our American inability to endure them, talking about our families and their imperfect and painful legacies, talking about our dear ones who have pulled away from their own silky tethers and have gone on — dancing and shining — beyond our view.

It felt like more because, dramatic or not, I live in the constant awareness that my delightful days of being with Amira are being buffeted and tugged at by time, and that one day, all too soon and after many longer and longer flights, she’ll pull away from my hand for good and make her way out into the open sky where she will begin her own constellation — a glittering thing of wonder but never as close to Janece and I as she is now.

It’s the way of things. And for this moment, her tears are our tears.

Stephen, Janece and I had a long talk tonight about love, loss, death, and the spiritual and metaphysical scaffolding that is built on and around those things. There is a lot to absorb, and (thank goodness!) a lot of future blog material. (It can feel a bit daunting to do one post a day.)

And after all that discussion, Janece dug up one of our favorite animation festival shorts of all time that just seems to wrap it all up elegantly in less than 10 minutes. I have no doubt that this one will be played at our funerals. Friends, I give you… The Big Snit.

Not really all that much left to say about Palin after the frenzy of the last 48 hours. The GOP base loves the pick (James Dobson’s voting for McCain now!), all of the Hillary women McCain wanted to try and attract hate the pick, and independants don’t think it’s a good idea either. There’s a good polling rundown here and a good article on the tone coming from all the major papers around the country here. Andrew Sullivan, one of my favorite conservative bloggers and the most widely read blog online (I think), thinks McCain just flipped a birdie to anything resembling a real campaign in a great post on “Putting Country Last“.

My sense is that the Obama camp isn’t going to touch this pick with a 10-foot pole for the next while, and will be content to let the press and surrogates kick Palin and the McCain campaign around for a while with stories of inexperience and scandals while they quietly do oppo research and craft their messaging. The Obama crew also know that they can’t come on too strong and bash Palin around seeing as a mother with a Down’s Syndrome child who is really and truly an ordinary American could elicit a lot of sympathy if she’s seen as being badgered. They are going to make this pick about McCain, not Palin, as they should. I’ll bet Palin turns out to be the noose in the “temperment” rope Obama’s campaign is intending to wrap around McCain since Obama declared it was an issue in his speech.

McCain has signaled that he’s going to make this campaign about theatrics. The Britney/Paris ads, picking a pretty face with no experience like Palin, signaling that he may speak to the convention from the post-Gustav devastation — these are all moves by a campaign that knows they have to win this campaign on distractions, head-fakes and raw made-for-TV moments. After this pick, the only card they have left is to tear down Obama enough and make the election about trivial enough issues that it becomes something like “American Idol” instead of the most important election we’ve had in a while. Obama has already made this point in his speech — “You make a big election about small things”. Again, my gut feel is that American’s don’t want risk and theatrics after eight years of being misled, and this point is only going to be reinforced by Gustav this week.

A quick word about persistence to follow up on my post from a few days back. Persistence, it turns out, is the key to a lot of things, including a successful political convention or building your own castle, brick by brick, weekend by weekend.

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.
What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing…
There is no shortage of good days. It is good lives that are hard to come by.
–Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

Janece posted this awesome passage from Annie Dillard a few days ago but it’s worth reviewing. What strikes me about it tonight is how counter-intuitive Dillard’s insight feels in a society that is oriented toward cathartic, over-the-top moments of drama or revelation. Whether it’s sex or losing weight or playing piano or building community or gaining spiritual insights, many people have the expectation that life’s big moments and accomplishments come to us all at once. We chase around after the “big break” and quick fixes, or we envy those who achieve by believing they “got lucky” or are “naturally talented”. We look wistfully over the fence at someone else’s greener grass and bemoan our own deferred dreams as though they are magically out of reach.

Reality check: Great writers throw away thousands of useless paragraphs to produce a memorable sentence. Great musicians grind away at monotonous scales for hours at a time until they become one with their instruments. Great athletes churn through grueling routines for years that push their bodies to the limit for those few glorious moments of unforgettable competition and the gold medal. Great spiritual leaders wander for days and weeks and years through demanding and sometimes dry spiritual disciplines and unremarkable acts of determined service to find one blindingly golden moment with God.

Any big accomplishment has behind it thousands of small successes. Any transcendent revelation has behind it many days of constant searching. Any fulfilling relationship is built on multitudes of small acts of selflessness, generosity, consistency, trust. If we want to find money, or fame, or love, or God, the most sure path is the profound power and simplicity of repetition.

No matter what we think or wish ourselves to be, it is what we do repeatedly that, for good or for ill, transforms us and the world around us.

For a lovely story of the power of simple devotion and repetition, take some time to watch “The Man Who Planted Trees” (download a printable PDF version of the story here):

(By the way, the animation in this is really lovely. It’s worth renting to see the gorgeous hand-drawn illustration style more clearly.)

Shoulda seen it coming – the human silly stuff.  Right after that conversation with Janece last night and on the heels of the life change decision, I went into TwistyLand — that wonderful place where human beings go when they’re second-guessing themselves and doing all those contortions to avoid wrapping their arms around their responsibilities.

I stayed up late for no real good reason, which is my way of avoiding the responsibility of keeping a schedule that works for me and the family.  So, I needed to apologize to Janece for that today.  Then, Janece woke me up with a request to help her handle Amira who’d taken it upon herself to “paint her toes” with Janece’s nail polish, with predictable 3-year-old results: paint all over her legs and fingers and all over the rental house carpet. I got all gloomy raincloud on Amira, making it a big deal that she shouldn’t be getting into Mama’s paints. The raincloud stuck around. Then Janece’s parents came over and I retreated mentally, being only minimally involved in conversation and being completely checked out of the group. And then I spent the rest of the evening avoiding starting a design that I need to complete before the weekend is over.  Which, not suprisingly, means I’m up all night again.  Wash, rinse, repeat.

That’s TwistyLand. No fun for anyone, and not anywhere near responsible. This is why it’s good to have a partner, someone to challenge you — even if it’s just by having a better day than you — so that you don’t wander too far off into silliness.

So, I start again today to tackle the reluctance and fear of failing on our new quest.  I think I’ve exorcised all of the twisty bits for now and I’m back in the game. I guess even butterflies have to take some time to let their new wings harden up when they first come out of the chrysalis, right?

I just got done with a conversation with Janece tonight – one that was birthed out of long standing frustrations in our relationship, and one that springs out of the conversation she and I had last night about change.

Y’all know and love Janece, and rightly so. She is many things – an artist, a writer, a photographer, an entrepreneur, a capable leader, a great supporter and encourager, a great mother, and much more. In high school and then college, I fell in love with who she was and the possibilities of who she could be before either of us really understood what she was capable of. Those qualities and capabilities in her shine too brightly to suppress, and some of those things are probably what drew you to her (if you know her). But try to suppress them, she has. And that’s where my frustrations have come in.

In ways that I don’t feel like detailing, she’s played to her fears about herself, played herself to be less than who she is, or not even played at all. And that’s caused problems in our relationship, some of which have contributed to this last decade feeling like the Lost Decade.

You know what? We all do that to some extent. I know I do – I did it all this last week. We all occasionally behave irresponsibly by giving up on ourselves and not stepping into the role of Being The One Who Makes The Difference like we should. And if we’re honest or take the time to look and ask those who know us best, we’d see the damage that causes.

People are depending on us to be great, to make the difference — our kids, our spouses, our friends, our coworkers. We are the linchpin on which our individual worlds turn, whether we feel like it or not, whether we believe it or not. We make the difference. If we don’t step up and make a difference by being who we are and being who others are depending on us to be, then things can fall apart: neglect that causes irritation, irritation that causes resentments, resentments that lead to distance and loss of relationship, and finally even total breakdown. If enough of that is going on, even a whole nation or the world can suffer as a result.

So, we had a conversation about it tonight, about some long-standing breakdowns that have plagued our momentum as a couple. I can’t spend the next ten years like I’ve spent the last ten. It’s not responsible to myself, or Janece or Amira. I need to remake my life. And I want to remake it in partnership with Janece because there’s no one better to do it with. But I can’t force her to make the changes that need to be made, to be the fierce, uncompromising Amazon Queen she needs to be in our daily lives. Only she can do that. I believe in her; I believe in that inner strength she has and that the lion in her will win out over the mouse in her.

This new life we’re gonna build has got to be built day by day, confrontation by confrontation, courageous choice by courageous choice. And I’m gonna need a partner (and need to BE a partner) that can see that process through.

Come gather ’round people wherever you roam
And admit that the waters around you have grown
And accept it that soon you’ll be drenched to the bone.
If your time to you is worth savin’
Then you better start swimmin’ or you’ll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin’.
~ Bob Dylan

I’ve never been a Bob Dylan fanatic, but these lyrics just grabbed my short hairs and yanked me around tonight.

Tonight was a Big Conversation – a fork in the road that’s going to set off our next leg of this journey and a coalescing of some life lessons that have been building for a while. Both Janece and I feel it.

It started today when I took Amira to the park. It’s a great little park called Salisbury Point Park, right on the Hood Canal near the bridge on the Kitsap side with a drop-dead gorgeous view. It has a little playground and some picnic areas attached to canal beachfront and a nice little dual boat launch. We had a good time for the first half – playing on the swings, walking down to the dock to watch people crabbing, walking the pebble beach and scooping sand. Then, without warning, my mood dropped like a rock over something stupid — Amira stomping on our sand mountain and throwing some sand and not obeying the first time when I asked her to stop. Stupid shit. I got pretty irritated, but did good at not taking it out on her. We moved on to start playing again, but I was pretty dark so I just sat on the sidelines and watched her play.

What floated immediately to the top of my mind was “I’m unhappy, and I’m not doing anything about it. I’m not doing anything meaningful with my life and I’m adrift. I need a goal, I need purpose. I can’t even be with Amira and enjoy this spot because this thing isn’t being handled, and I’m being irresponsible with my life and with my family by not handling it.”

Janece and Amira graciously surfed my mood for the rest of the evening, and after watching a couple of episodes of The Wire, season 4, I had enough mental clear space to start digging around in conversation with Janece. And here’s the result – as obvious as it may be to some of y’alls:

I’m going to do spiritual worship ministry, probably somewhere in Seattle, and I think that means that I’m going back to work for someone else as a day job.

After this post and the comments I got back, the conversation finally sunk in about ministry. Really, there’s nothing that is more meaningful to me work-wise than seeing people feel the full weight and measure of their lives, and seeing them lift those lives to God to be renewed or re-built. That’s what I want to do. But I want to do the parts that I’m built for — music, worship, art, community-building — and not mess with the parts that I’m not built to do. I’ve got some really definite ideas about how to do it, but I’m open to taking the journey and seeing where it leads.

I’ve fought this for a while now. The reasons I haven’t committed are largely these: Not wanting to leave behind the skill set I’ve built in design and technical strategy, not wanting to jeopardize my family’s future by not doing the logical work of building a business or residual income that could help secure the time of Janece and I’s inevitable old-ness, not wanting to work for someone else, not wanting to miss being around Janece and Amira any time of the day.

My reasoning was that I could, if I wanted, build something on my own that would accomodate those things. But tonight, I realized that I don’t want to. I’m all out of initiative and enthusiasm for the inevitable toil it will take to get over the hump into a business that is on it’s way to being self-maintaining. I just don’t have it in me to lose another decade sidelining the life I need to live solely for the purpose of financial security.

So, the most obvious and logical thing is to go back to work for someone else. My skill set is large and multi-faceted, and I’d be a good fit for all kinds of workplaces. I have a friend at Disney who’s loved working there and could be helpful in helping me locate something. Janece still has HR contacts at Microsoft. My friend Sky has some connections to the non-profit world. All I know is that I want to put in 40 hrs, get some health benefits so we can take care of our teeth and not be freaked out if we have to take Amira to the ER with a broken bone, and then have time — glorious time, night time, weekend time — that is free of all of the business concerns now clogging my mental arteries.

I may be slow to get the point, but once I get it, it’s got. The search starts after my work this weekend. This post will sink down the list over the next days, but I’m clear that our new intentions will not. I’m excited. I’m grateful for our time here in this place away from things, for the chance to let what has been hidden bubble up.

If you’re the praying type, pray for us that our instincts would be sure-footed, that the timing and opportunities coincide in serendipitous ways, and that wherever we land that we can be of maximum benefit to the world and the Kingdom.

There will be more on this for sure, but for now here’s the full lyrics to Dylan’s great song:

Come gather ’round people wherever you roam
And admit that the waters around you have grown
And accept it that soon you’ll be drenched to the bone.
If your time to you is worth savin’
Then you better start swimmin’ or you’ll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin’.

Come writers and critics who prophesize with your pen
And keep your eyes wide, the chance won’t come again
And don’t speak too soon for the wheel’s still in spin
And there’s no tellin’ who that it’s namin’.
For the loser now will be later to win
For the times they are a-changin’.

Come senators, congressmen please heed the call
Don’t stand in the doorway, don’t block up the hall
For he that gets hurt will be he who has stalled
There’s a battle outside and it is ragin’.
It’ll soon shake your windows and rattle your walls
For the times they are a-changin’.

Come mothers and fathers throughout the land
And don’t criticize what you can’t understand
Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command
Your old road is rapidly agin’.
Please get out of the new one if you can’t lend your hand
For the times they are a-changin’.

The line it is drawn, the curse it is cast
The slow one now will later be fast
As the present now will later be past
The order is rapidly fadin’.
And the first one now will later be last
For the times they are a-changin’.

~”The Times, They Are A-Changin’”, Bob Dylan

Yesterday evening was tough.

Janece’s cousin and his wife who are are a few years younger than us dropped by to spend an hour or two with us over dinner (Wild Horse BBQ, delicious, and they generously picked up the check!). They’d been out on a three-day weekend with their BMW driving club touring the Olympic Peninsula in their newly leased Z4 M coupe. (It’s a beautiful car, smooth and muscular, outfitted with all the goodies. The seat was a little small for my expansive ass, but I quibble. Anyway…) They had a great trip and it was good driving weather. They’d stayed at one of their timeshares, eaten with some friends at a place in Sequim (wish I could remember the name) that serves better steaks than the fancy places in downtown Seattle, and generally had a grand time. They were headed back to their custom-built home and two beautiful purebred beagles in order to be at work at their great jobs the next day. In a week or two, Doug’s company is flying him to New York for a company party, and they’re going to be taking the better part of a week to hang out there and have fun. You get the picture – they are hard workers with smarts and talent, great high-paying jobs and no kids. They are doing very well and enjoying the well-deserved fruits of their labors.

So, good (free!) food, good company, lovely evening. Why was it tough? Why did being with them and hearing their tales wear so hard on me?

It’s nothing they did. They share their advances and adventures without any hint of superiority. They are generous with their time and money in the best possible way — no strings, no weirdness. (I know this because they’ve been personally generous to us in our tough times.)

It’s not jealousy. I love that they’re doing things they love and are enjoying the things they have, but I don’t want what they have. It’s great for them, but my tastes lie in other directions.

I don’t think it’s pride, really. Financial access isn’t a way I measure my life, and I’m generally comfortable with the fact that you give when you can give and you open yourself to being helped when you need it.

I think the tough part was having my subliminal disappointment uncovered — disappointment in myself, in us as a couple. Janece’s cousin and his wife are steadily succeeding in the goals they’ve laid out for themselves (at least financially) in a linear, calm and undramatic way that has allowed them to experience and explore much more than we have. In contrast, I don’t feel that Janece and I are successful, even by our own definition, and in fact I think we’re worse off than we used to be.

Financially and in business, neglect, risk and choices over the last 10 years that have led to consequences and hardships that make those years feel like The Lost Decade. I really had no goal per se, and if there was one it was to make something of myself in business or make money. In that effort I’ve utterly failed. That failure in itself isn’t really anything to me, but it has meant failure in other more important areas.

My criteria for my worth in the world revolves in part around what I accomplish, what I know, and who I am and I feel like I’ve failed in all three. Not only have I not accomplished anything in business, but I’m worse off than when I started and in the meantime I’ve spent a horrendous amount of time working and robbing that time away from doing things that turn my crank — art, music, ministry. I’ve learned a lot about graphic design and programming and even business, but none of those things are meaningful to me. I’ve not grown much knowledge in areas I care about. I’ve become an overweight, burned out desk jockey who has grown isolated from all my communities because of work demands and financial strains.

Strangely, in a lot of ways the last decade has been very relationally meaningful and rich in the middle of all of that other stuff. I played in a fun band in San Diego, met a lot of great people through Janece’s women-in-tech network, got much closer with members of my family, was able to minister in a church for a while, have made new connections and friends, am currently living in paradise. On these kinds of days I wish I could emotionally elevate those experiences to the point of having them feel more real, more relevant than my disappointments, but that hasn’t happened yet.

I’m a Type A personality, so I can’t stand still on this. I’m thinking on it and starting to move things in another direction, however slowly due to our crapped out financial state. But, disappointment still roils underneath my determination. I don’t dwell on it or nurse it, but apparently it doesn’t take much to uncover this bubbling emotional lava underneath my life. I wish I could share some sage thoughts about how to turn lemons into lemonade, but I’m not there. I’m still picking my way through my mental fallout and trying to understand how to create something powerful out of the rubble.

Help me out. Share how you’ve wrestled failure into something mentally useful you could build on.

Real art reveals. Grace Jones’ new video for her single, Corporate Cannibal, is real art and what it reveals is gut-level disturbing — a visual stare into the soulless, self-feeding, unfeeling, self-justifying animus behind corporate greed and power. Her incredibly expressive face is smeared, melted, stretched and twisted into a sinister amorphous writhing blob, like a barrel of oil or a suffocating hole come to life. And that’s all it is — you are forced to stare at this thing staring back at you without any trace of humanity, humor or remorse and listen to it say things like:

pleased to meet you, pleased to have you on my plate
your meat is sweet to me
your destiny, your fate

you’re my life support, your life is my sport

i’ll consume my consumers, with no sense of humour
i’ll give you a uniform, chloroform
sanitize, homogenize, vaporize… you

C.S. Lewis, the Oxford scholar who was one of the better recent creative framers of the Christian worldview, said he saw hell not as the dramatic, fiery pit and demons not as leathery winged nightmares, but like a cold, featureless, fluorescent lit office building where pale, suffocated figures in tidy suits moved quickly and efficiently through the corridors with the sole aim to promote themselves and crush, demean, harass, oppress, torture and feed off the suffering they are able to inflict on anyone else around them. No friends, no companions, no passionate enemies – only mutual loathing and uncaring manipulation for all eternity.

I think this video comes close to visualizing the raw hunger behind this horrible scene – the need to feed oneself, no matter the expense to others. Charles Mudede at the Stranger’s blog — The Slog — says it well:

What’s most impressive about Grace Jones’ new video is its offers the viewer no passage to or flashes of enjoyment or thrills. The whole work is unpleasant to watch and hear—a grinding beat, a morphing monster. This is not a spectacle of corporate capital, corporate greed, corporate hunger. A spectacle seduces the thing it exploits and annihilates. With Jones as the corporate beast, there is no seduction, no sugar, no soft suffocation. Grace Jones makes every effort to fully represent the terrifying force of today’s global rich.

I’ve rarely heard a sermon tackling this form of evil and the complacent parts we sometimes play in how it spreads, how unthinking we are about this kind of evil and how we are bombarded with enticements and pressures to see it as normal, as the “American way of life”. In fact, even many churches and preachers blatantly promote this self-absorbed philosophy of wealth, status and consumption. And yet, this dark animus is THE main cause of our global crisis of human misery and ecological decay.

It’s an addiction, a willing acquiescence to a destructive lie. We give everything to live this kind of life, and it gives us nothing back. Like addicts, together we have to reach down through our numbed senses to feel that we’ve hit bottom, and begin the hard work of disentangling from the thing we desire that is eating us alive.

(Hat tip to Charles Mudede and the Slog for posting the video.)