moving over...

...to: http://ahandfulofquiet.wordpress.com

Where there'll be writing,
hopefully images, and
tellings of what God is giving me and letting me watch Him do
here in the Bronx.
See you there.

Sea chanty. To be sung in Bloggers' Harbor.

Sea Chanty , 2011.
(Inspired in part by a recent, very-decent, read, Against the Machine, by Lee Siegel.)

Travelers in the blogosphere,
Oh, tell me what we're doing here...
Are we treading seas of introspection,
Or sailing strong in some direction ?
Does your being blogborne turn a profit?
Are you as worthwhile if you're off it?

Do you find yourself disoriented
By tides of 'thought' that we've invented ?
Wave on wave on chattering wave,
We call our self-expression 'brave,'
And sail on link to link to go where
Everyone has been – it's nowhere.

Round and round past slightest switches
Of the same old themes and pitches;
What we think's a glorious ocean
Is just a whirlpool set in motion;
And we the rubber duckies swelling
On the waves of what they're selling.

Jump in quick and make your name in
The 'uniqueness' game we're all the same in.
Publicize your style and choice
In hopes a name may buy your voice.
If you hoist a flag that's hip,
And reference every other ship...

Did you start out to share what's true
And find the hearers shaping you?

Though all the world be sponsored, hosted,
Please know: you're more than what you've posted.
You're called to journey farther, longer
You're called to oceans wider, stronger

...Than “today's most read” could ever reach,
...Than “new for you” will ever teach.
The depths of minds and thoughts that haunt them
Can't be turned on just when you want them.
To sail to realms of tested treasure
Takes time, takes patience, wind and weather.

And in the waiting, courage forms
And perseverance in the storms;

A sailor's wisdom built with time,
May sing the world a mariner's rime.
....Or may find his joy in sailing so
'The world' may never need to know.

February 17 in new York.

whispers of summer in the 60degree breeze.
I remember you! I remember you, Bronx of July, of June.
You left
but you return.
You return!

I, new to changing seasons (whole seasons, longer stories than I ever knew,
each
so separate from the others),
I marvel that the place of last year's story
ever comes back.

The blue, blue sky,
the echo of laughter of source and cause unknown
rebounding off apartment buildings --
we're outside again! ..
the stifling snowhush lifted,
and the kids call out again.

It is, today,
a February's temporary reprieve,
a warning that this setting we've complained about
for months,
this grim gray cave we ride the subway through,
that wets our boots and buries cars and holds us all inside,
it's heard the knell,
has numbered days.

drip
drop
drip drop,
if you listen, you will hear the passings of a dying world;
if you have anything to do
before it falls,
best get it done -- a new world waits,
is peeking in from stage's wings
while snow dissolves.

Prepare the new!
We shall reset and start again
on a new scene.

This says the breeze today on the platform
over 183rd and Jerome.

Blessed, blessed, blessed and so blessed.

“Never allow your heart to deceive you, saying: ‘the Word of God cannot be done on earth as it is in heaven.’ … Don’t pray anything less than the Word of God. Don’t pray anything that is less than the size of God Himself.” ...thus, slowly, thoughtfully said Dr. Pravin Moudgill. (Or, as he asks that we call him, Pravin Uncle.) And he meant it. I do not know quite how to convey to you how much I saw the Word of God treasured, used, reflected on, revered and BELIEVED in word and in deed over the past week.

being the wordsmith, and not the photographer, I haven't visual snippets to share with you yet. But I can tell you that the Spirit of God is alive and well and has many very good homes inside the believers of India. True devotion is whole-life devotion; true belief in the Word of God is complete and unconditional belief.

I praise God for the men and women I have met this week who have shown me the heart of Jesus. In the time they have taken to speak to my heart, in the hospitality they have shown and the stories they have shared, they have been Family, in the truest, the eternal, sense.
My thanks to Wycliffe India. My thanks to our Father.

smallworld.

wondering.

" This is how we know what love is:
Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. "

"We love because he first loved us."


so we give ourselves away, in emulation of Him.
so we seek to love those who do not love us back, to be lights of grace against darkness,
to go the extra mile, to turn the other cheek.
driven and empowered by His Spirit only, we endure and we keep loving. His love is more than enough to show us how.

May I ask you , how low are our expectations to be
of being loved and graced and cared for in return? By human beings?
It's easier on the heart to have low ones.
what is your will on this, oh Lord?

is it possible to have no expectations? Neither here nor there, neither high nor low? To just never think or feel about people's love
at all?

I don't know.

yet : ...How deep the Father's love for us ... will be my song and focus. Because it is eternally and infinitely true, unplombable, enough to drink and bathe and believe in and learn for
all my life. ( and evermore. )))))))

trash-o-pology, the profane and the sacred, the clean and the dirty.

The words in quotes below are from an interview with the NYC Department of Sanitation's Anthropologist in Residence. (They have one! This amazes me.)
They gave me a ticket once. For putting the wrong kind of container in one of my recycling bags. I must say, I did not think this conducive to encouraging recycling among the public. Easier to throw the recyclables all in a concealing black garbage bag with the rest of the trash than to be caught recycling wrongly in the required clear bags.
(I still recycle. But I get help. And look at the very in-depth explanatory poster frequently.)


" The anthropologist Mary Douglas is famous for writing about dirt as a shifting category for everything that is out of place: shoes on the floor aren’t dirty, but shoes on the dinner table are; it isn’t dirty to have cooking utensils in the kitchen, but it is to have them in your bedsheets. She sees what counts as dirt as a gateway to the bigger systems that judgments like this are caught up in, and a way to figure out how commonsense judgments become that way.

RN: Well, her argument is partly that you can understand the entire cosmos of a culture by looking at its definitions of dirty and clean, and acceptable versus unacceptable, the profane and the sacred. You can start with something as humble as dirt and read it out to an entire worldview.

As a scholar, you can start anywhere. And that’s the beauty and the challenge, the frustration and the terror and the lifetime obsession of a scholarly bent. I start with this set of questions because I just can’t figure it out.

The goal of a scholar is to reveal things that otherwise might never be seen or studied or considered or understood or debated. But that’s an infinite list! It’s also in many ways the job of an artist, to show us things about ourselves. The scholarship of anthropology sometimes gets trapped in its own lofty language…. If I can help illuminate some facet of us as a species that makes culture, as a species that tells stories, as a species that plays in ways that connect us to each other, then I’ve done my job. My entry point is through things we decide are no longer worth keeping. ... "

The world recognizes that sacred-profane is a division we humans see and name. The world thinks this is subjective, that we make it up. And so many societies have made up so many rules about this. About what is holy and what is not.
Interesting. Because there is a real holy and not.
And it is not subjective. HE is not subjective.
This makes me want to go back and read all of God's words on holiness in the Pentateuch again.
And to ask questions about what is considered holy and what is considered profane, and why,
in the cultures I encounter.

photo from artist Nicole Fournier, here.