If you’re a regular reader on this blog (you know who you are — all five of you! ), you may be consumed with questions about Paul — what brand of shampoo do I use, why do I always rub my finger across my eyebrows in social situations, what’s the most dangerous thing I’ve ever done, when did I last cry, etc etc. Or you may not. But, whatever…

I’m opening up the floor to requests for posts. What would you like me to expound upon, answer, critique or plagarize? Feel free to leave your requests in the comment section and I’ll answer each one in the order I recieve them. Sky, I’ll start with your request about church as my first outing, although I may not be able to get to it right away due to work load…

I left this post on The Villagers site tonight:

One of the core prayers in the lexicon of the Orthodox Church is the Jesus prayer. It simply and profoundly echoes the call of the blind man to Christ as he passed by:

“Lord Jesus Christ, son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.”

There’s a lot of levels to that prayer that seem to apply here. Like the blind man, we reach out blindly and desperately to Christ in the middle of our darkness. Like the blind man, we are in need. Like the blind man, we recognize that need and our inability to extricate ourselves. And like the blind man, we sense that there just may be mercy to be had for us if we take the risk of calling out for it.

To me, that raw cry at the core of all faith and justification. Before there were creeds and codices, before there was the genius of St. Paul and the many many theologians that have come since, there was that cry. The Reformation, and many modern churches, run aground on the idolatrous worship of the intellect — that somehow to attempt to frame a thing with language is the thing itself. I think I’ve heard somewhere that belief without guidance from reason is merely superstition, but reason without the raw act of faith is bone-dead and seriously in danger of falling into an exercise of power.

Faith is, by it’s nature, humble and without pride or self-preservation. Scripture says that even the demons believe, and tremble. But they will not surrender. And faith is that surrender, that trust that if we ask for a line to be thrown to us in the middle of our downhill slide, that it will actually be thrown to us. To believe that there is love and righteousness is one thing, but to surrender to it (once, and then over and over as a practice) is another thing entirely.

I think when we are connected to that practice of surrender to Christ, the world around us literally takes on a new shape as our crooked spots are straightened out (justification). We are free to mature and grow in knowledge, but all of the wisest saints in the history of the Church have understood that knowledge only remains powerful when it leads you ultimately to what connected us to Christ in the first place:

“Lord Jesus Christ, son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.”

Surrender, trust and faith are difficult for me most of the time. I don’t like the loss of control that those actions imply. I have strong opinions about my own destiny and desires. I don’t like the idea of my way being chosen for me, of being open and exposed to whatever comes next without a say-so. I’m cautious, usually requiring validation, proof, credentials, guidelines, protections, bargains: some kind of backdoor exit or a way to get a handle on the situation if I don’t like where it’s going. It’s a good instinct, in a certain sense, and feels natural. It’s been a good way to minimize my risk and exposure to harm. And yet…

“Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.” ~ Helen Keller

My marriage is, has been, and will be, a complete and utter leap of faith – literally. When I said “I do” I felt like that scene in Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade where he steps off the edge of the cliff into what looks like a bottomless ravine. I can no more make my wife love me than I could tilt the earth on it’s axis, and yet I’ve opened myself up to her more than any other human being with no guarantees of how she’ll use what I’ve given her. My little daughter is a complete wild card — in my care and guidance, but in the end, completely out of my control in the direction she chooses for her life. My creative and artistic pursuits, my relationships with others, my belief in God — all hinge on nothing but my choice to simply follow an undefined path into a completely blank and unformed future that is created as I go. All massive leaps of faith, and all of them without exception where I receive the most joy and love and transcendence in my life.

I know all this intellectually, and sometimes with my heart, but my first instinct is still to protect — even when I know, again intellectually, that my protection is ultimately inadequate to bring me the love/joy/transcendance that I have tasted and desire. I also wrote this on the Villagers site tonight:

Have mercy on us and forgive us for the mistrust we have learned from the wounds that we’ve been given, or that we idolatrously and selfishly hold on to out of fear. Teach us to surrender to joy and love. Teach us to surrender to You.

I can only commit myself to trust and choose to step off the edge again. And again. And again.

My beautiful baby girl Amira just turned 5 months old yesterday. There’s a whole section of my heart that I didn’t know was there before she came, and not only that — it’s filled up with delight and love.

As usual, Amira got some time on her ExerSaucer today. Among the round table of play things, there’s a little plastic bubble that turns in the center on a rod and it’s filled with little plastic balls that rattle when you spin the bubble. This is apparently her current toy of choice when she gets saucer time. I sat and watched today as she started deliberately, with as much control as her little baby reflexes would allow, to try and make the bubble spin as long as she could. Maybe it was the little furrowed baby brow or the way she dove in and attacked the bubble over and over to make it do what she wanted, but I was in awe. She has now mastered the art of rolling from her stomach to her back. She is learning how to rip apart a napkin at the dinner table (just like her old man!). She likes the crinkly paper tray liners at Qdoba better than the napkins because it’s more of a challenge to futz with.

In short, my little girl has (suddenly, in my mind) started working on the world to learn from it and to make it do her bidding. She is leaving the stage of complete helplessness and is beginning to understand that she has a say in the way of things. She is on the beginning road to steering her body into new adventures and learning the way that things in her environment responds. Somewhat poignantly, (and somewhat thankfully) we can now leave her to her own devices for a while — she does not need us every single moment: just most moments. As this whole journey has been, it is exciting and breathtaking to watch her individuality unfurl in starts and bursts right in front my eyes.

When we twirl her in the air or get her laughing, she will immediately jam her fist into her mouth and giggle over a gummy mouthful of knuckles. The other day I had her sitting on my chest with her little bare feet in my face. I was making a silly laughing sound as I zoomed in to kiss her cheek, and each time she responded with a little squeal giggle, fist firmly jammed in her mouth. A welcome winter sun break was shining through the window and sparkling off her little hazel brown eyes. Janece was on the couch next to us laughing, too. It was a golden moment, filled with three humans just happy to be with each other making each other laugh.

The Gospel of Luke says that Mary watched her son Jesus grow up, watched the glimpses of who he would become broke through, and “treasured all these things in her heart”. I have no idea what the future will hold for the three of us Moments. But in whatever comes, I will be able to go to my treasure chest and open the drawer with the sunny winter afternoon, the giggling baby with the bare feet and my beautiful laughing wife and savor the golden glimmers that my beautiful daughter has brought us.

Happy 5 months and a day, baby girl. I can hardly wait to see where you go next.

So….bright…. So….beautiful…. My…Precious!

So, granted this Wacom Cintiq 21UX tablet costs as much as a big-screen TV, but man! What a treat to be able to do digital illustration and manipulation on a tablet screen that big. I have a fairly large 18″ Wacom serial tablet that’s about 5 yrs old or so. Works great — never had any complaints. But I’ve only used it about 10 times total. I’m a pretty visual person, and a pretty busy person, and consequently I’ve never really taken the time to coordinate myself enough to use it. I never really got the hang of how to move the onscreen tools using the pen while looking someplace else entirely — it always felt strange, and not very precise. And the type of work I’ve been doing over the last years has been very adequately served by using a mouse.

But I’ve had a growing desire to do illustration for a while now, and having something like this in front of me would definitely help smooth the way and give me more of a visceral connection with the art because I could directly see it taking shape under my pen. If any of you, my dear loyal readers, felt suddenly inspired to burst out and buy me one, I’m not going to say no. (You may also accompany your tablet gift with a Painter software package from Corel. That would be lovely.)

Like gadgets? A friend sent me the link to the tablet via Gizmodo — a blog that’s all about the toys.

I got my official sayonara letter full of thank-you blather from Terry McAuliffe. So long, man – don’t let the door hit you on the way out. With your long overdue departure, Howard Dean — the Northeast Scream — takes the lead in the DNC. I’ve heard that this is cause for much celebration from the Republicans, and much handwringing from the DLC/Clinton camp about the whole affair, even though they’ve all rallied around Dean in public. Here’s my take:

(Read the rest of this entry…)

Ah, the lowly oboe – that nasal woodwind that still manages to be eerie enough to raise the small hairs on my neck when I hear it. I’d always assumed that there was a certain equilibrium of oboe players out there in the big wide world — that, like in the Lion King, when an old oboist would die that magically another would rise up to take their place in the great circle of orchestral life. But, no! The intrepid New York Times is reporting that there is in fact a dearth of oboe players out there.

As John Mack, the dean of American oboists, put it, “People are running around like headless chickens saying, ‘Where are we going to find people?’ ”

Wow. Sounds pretty serious. Especially when you consider this:

“They are the principal fiddle of the wind section,” said Paavo Jarvi, the music director of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra. “There is a musical and moral authority that comes with the position.”

Yikes, people! Unless we’re prepared to deal with the consequences of leaderless woodwind sections collapsing into moral decay across America, we need to get little Junior into lessons right away! If our orchestras are oboeless, then the terrorists have already won.

First global warming, and then North Korea with nukes, and now this. I hope I can get some sleep tonight.

…that is illustrator KEITH THOMPSON, an illustrator I found (once again) via Sky’s blog by way of DeviantArt.

I was perusing my friend Sky’s blog a little closer than usual, and came across this link he has to images of work by Andrew Goldsworthy, one of my favorite artists.

Now, even though I graduated with a fine art degree in sculpture, I’m not a big fan of “artsy-fartsy”, whether it comes as an excessive effluvia of adjectives about the philosophy/critique of art that requires a link to dictionary.com just to be barely understandable, or excessive wearing of black, or that nasty little tinge of “cooler-than-thou” that emanates from those who use art mostly as a way to keep them distinguished from the unwashed masses. And the reason I love Andrew Goldsworthy’s art and personal style so much is partially because it’s a million miles from the sterile circle-jerks that plague the art world.

If you haven’t already, you really need to see Rivers And Tides, a gorgeous documentary about Andy’s work. (Hope he doesn’t mind if I call him Andy….) The film does an amazing job of capturing the visceral power of his art in the setting he creates it in. For those Andy newbies out there, here’s the skinny:

Andy is a extremely low-key Brit living in Scotland who creates mostly installation art pieces out in natural settings, using only local natural found objects to create the work. On occasion, he’ll create a planned piece using materials gathered elsewhere, but the majority of his work involves spending some time in the environment — a Scottish meadow, a desolate northland snow plain, a stream — until he has “read” the landscape to where he feels like he understands it. And then he literally gets his hands dirty melting icicles together into impossible structures, using thorns to weave leaves together into gorgeous streamers of motion and texture, stacking and piling and weaving twigs together into mysterious frames through which to view the landscape, sculpting holes into snow and trees and earth, cracking or crushing or stacking stones, and in his larger works, erecting mysterious barriers and mounds that weave through the landscape.

His genius takes place on a couple of levels. Most obviously, he is a master of the materials he works with. His themes of holes/entrances/exits, serpentine “energy lines”, rock towers, spirals and other ancient and mysterious shapes are endlessly and inventively reinterpreted in ice, snow, branches, leaves, mud, stone, and other mundane materials. On another level, he is a transformer — arranging the mundane, pushing it and wrestling with it (literally – it’s almost maddening to watch him patiently stacking stones), until it suddenly all at once becomes effortlessly transcendant and unearthly beautiful. His method embodies the creative pursuit. On yet another level, his art is deeply poignant because it taps into the inability of those same mundane materials, and the best of human endeavor as well, to retain their beauty permanently. The ice melts, the leaves pull apart and blow away, the sticks and stone towers collapse, and the materials return to the earth to be used again. The only record of the beauty that sliced into the world for a few minutes is the photographs or video (incredibly artful in their own right) that he takes of the work. And on a deeper level, the landscape actually works on him, and us. He is a example for how to listen to the world, find our way into the channels of meaning and movement that lie under the buzz of everyday surface perceptions, call them out with hard work and perserverance and craftiness, and in turn be shaped and molded by them.

The raw passion, doggedness, obsession (serpentines, holes, and spirals – oh my!), and visceral power of his work put him way outside the “cocktails and canapes” crowd in my book. His art makes me feel refreshed, connected, stilled, and, dare I say, strangely healed. Any way, go netflix Rivers And Tides. You won’t be sorry.

“I want to get under the surface. When I work with a leaf, rock, stick, it is not just that material in itself, it is an opening into the processes of life within and around it. When I leave it, these processes continue.. .” ~ Andy Goldsworthy

P.S. It’s actually completely coincidental (but probably subconscious) that my blog header graphic looks a lot like a Goldworthy art project. It’s a photo I took at night in my back yard, and then just kinda carved a hole in it with the graphic. I’m so easily influenced…

That’s what I would call them, but the band is actually called Matsonbelle. Very smooth production — very listenable — and the female singer’s voice reminds of someone I can’t put my finger on right now, but it’s that kind of unique little-girl-voice-meets-world-weary-songstress vibe. The song that caught my ear while listening to Radio Paradise was called “Float” and you can hear a version in their handy Flash MP3 player. From their bio:

Matson Belle is an award-winning pop/electronic collaboration with world beat, Middle Eastern and classical string influences who also have strong fan bases in Japan, Belgium, Germany, South Africa, Italy, Greece, Canada, Switzerland, India and the United Kingdom, has a fiction novel named after one of their songs, have won 6 major music awards, have been placed in 3 feature film soundtracks, and had a rock star offer to buy their song “Float” (he was denied) – all through word-of-mouth and a dynamic, international musical palette that doesn’t pigeonhole them into one specific genre.

If it’s tough-ass estrogen ballads you want, then you’ll be wanting to hear Martina Topley-Bird’s album “Anything”.

Gotta head full of to-dos, so I’m clearing out the mental attic with a yard sale of random thoughts and half-penny musings:

• $2.50 ~ STUCK:
  My friend Joel is stuck in Tibet right now, unable to get out because the King dissolved the government and declared a state of emergency. His wife is pretty worried about him. The thing is, they both run ServLife which has done a lot of work in developing countries and they’ve been in sticky situations before. I don’t know if she’s extra worried because she’s pregnant and currently with their other young son without him there, or if there really is more danger in the Tibet situation than I’m aware of right now. I prayed for them today, and will continue to do so. And what’s up with other countries, anyway? The thought of not only having a leader than can dissolve a govt and declare martial law, but living in a country/culture where that could be possible, just doesn’t make sense. Whatever else you can say about America (and you can say a lot), we live in a country where our personal freedoms and mobility are protected to an unprecendented degree – so much so that even having that be an issue is completely foreign to me. I’m grateful.

  UPDATE: It was actually Nepal. Silly me. And Joel made it out.

• $.75 (clearance) ~ ZOMBIE SURVIVAL TECHNIQUES:
  Why don’t zombies fully degrade? In every zombie movie/story, zombies either resurrect or become zombies by getting bitten. If they’re bitten, they turn into disgusting walking corpses that are rotting while on the lookout for human flesh to devour. But, say you’re a survivor battling the zombie hordes. Wouldn’t it make the most sense to just get out of Dodge for a year or two and wait for nature to take it’s course? Presumably the zombies would keep rotting until even the most mobile of them would start to lose limbs and such and be unable to move enough to be a threat. Then you could just round up the bone piles into a nice safe landfill and the whole thing would blow over.
• $1.00 ~ THE VIOLENT BEAR IT AWAY:
  I was talking with Janece about the movie Clear And Present Danger. Movie’s just OK, but it made me wonder about something that’s popped up for me a few times about Christianity and people who deal with violence on a regular basis as part of their work — CIA interrogators, special ops military personnel, spies, prison guards, undercover cops, etc. etc. This society we enjoy is preserved in a number of ways by people willing to engage in violence for the sake of protecting us. They provide a certain kind of safeguard for normal and nice people to enjoy their neighborly lives. I wonder how people in those professions manage to retain their connection with their Christianity. Is it possible to follow closely in the footsteps of Christ, be told in church that “if you’ve done it to one of the least of these, you’ve done it to me” and still work over a suspect until they talk or assasinate a target? Having to deal violence out to other people, as well as live in an atmosphere of potential violence and evil intent must put a special kind of strain on their faith. Can you in fact be a Christian and still have violence as a part of your job description? (By the way, that caption is from a great story by Flannery O’Connor, one of my favorite writers.)
• $.25 ~ THE al Qaeda OF ROCK-N-ROLL:
  My friend Sky just sent me a site for a band called Kasabian. Not sure what I think of their music yet, but the site’s pretty cool. I like the progression that happens when you click the red stuff. Are these guys the “al Qaeda of rock and roll”? Kinda funny — the email he sent me said “freakin kick arse new bank”. I thought he was getting all pumped about a new credit union or something, which is mass wierd and pretty funny if you know him at all…
• Free with purchase! ~ FAT SUIT:
  I don’t know if it’s the same for other overweight people, but I just looked in the mirror before taking my shower and it looked like I was wearing one of those Hollywood fat suits. I can see my body structure under the poundage, but the extra weight looks like a bad prop. Hopefully my re-energized consistency with exercise will help. And I’ve been eating at home more, which I’m sure helps with calorie/nutrition control.
• One penny (for your thoughts) ~ COLDFUSION & INERTIA:
  I just spent 24+ hours working devilishly hard on updates for a client site. It’s a real estate site, and I added a mortgage calculator, a bunch of new listing search functionality, a Flash weather center, and some other cool stuff. The mortgage calculator was a piece of crap script I found on a free Javascript site, and it was only after 4 hours of trying to integrate it into the listings search that I realized that it was outputting all the wrong amortization amounts — wierd numbers with no basis in reality. So, I decided to rebuild it in ColdFusion, which is what the site is coded in. It now works great and looks hot, but taught me all kinds of new pain about CF code. And then, I decided that I wanted to try manipulating a Flash file for the weather center by taking an XML feed and having info manipulate the weather center — nothing fancy, just showing the current temp, conditions, humidity and selecting the correct icon for the weather. And the new search functionality is pretty cool, too — also taking an XML feed from a listing service and formatting it to fit the site design. All great stuff, all challenging technically and a great tutorial for coding in ColdFusion. But I probably only made $3/hour on it, and lost a lot of sleep staying up late to finish it, even though I have buckets of work to do on other projects.

  What I was left with was, “What in the world is up with me that I’m not spending this kind of focus and time and resources and fervor on projects that matter to me? Why do I give my design work the best of what I have instead of doing what I’m more passionate about?” The answer: Inertia. I’m good at design, and I’m good technically. I get a certain kind of bang out of it when I kick ass. But at the end of the day, my life is no farther along the path of what I love than it was when I started.

• $.75 ~ SWITCH:
  Speaking of the web, I’ve switched. Firefox, to put it simply, rocks. It’s so very friendly to web developers who long for some kind of adherence to browser/coding standards so that we don’t have to rip our hair out trying to make our layouts play nice with every piece of crap software out there. (I’ve personally taken to only supporting IE5.5+, NN7+, and Opera 7+, along with FF and the Mac browsers, although we still have to deal with IE5 on Mac.) It’s also fast, uncluttered and supports cool add-ins like the free open-source Sage RSS reader. It imports favorites from your old lame browser so you don’t lose them, and, best of all…. tabbed browsing. Being able to simply open a new tab in the same window without cluttering my workspace with a million windows is a huge unexpected leap forward in my ability to get work done online. My new way of working is to open a new Firefox window for each project I’m working on. So, one window will have a bunch of tabs open for that project — the local dev version, the site on the live server, help files, internet resources, coding tips, etc. All I have to do is jump to a new window, and I have all of the resources I need open for that project in one window without the hell of having to Alt+Tab around trying to find where that one with the coding tip was located. Firefox. Make the switch.
• Priceless ~ GROWING LIKE A WEED:
  Janece is putting together an activity center for Amira. She says that Amira seems bored just being held or even played with, so we’re taking our first venture into activity center land. It has a whole bunch of dangly, squeaky, rattley, talking bits, and a seat that will allow Amira to swivel around 360 for whatever catches her fancy. She’s had the low-tech entertainment so far — just hands and playing around — so we’ll see how she takes to this. I’m just still a bit breathless from how fast she’s developed. She’s kind of like those dandelions that pop up in the yard. You look out one day and there’s nothing, and the next day there’s little yellow flowers everywhere. Amazing.
• $1.00 Closeout Special ~ THICKER THAN WATER:
  I need to see some of my family soon. I miss them. We live all over the west coast in such a way that it’s massively time-consuming to drive or even fly to see each other. It’s pretty rare that we all are able to get together. I wonder what it would take to get us all within driving distance, especially when we’re all invested heavily in the areas we’re in?

That is all. I’m closing up the folding tables and taking down the yard sale signs. Time for another sprint at my mountain of work.