happy Christmas, one and all.

Around me the trees stir in their leaves
and call out, "Stay awhile."
The light flows from their branches.

And they call again, "It's simple," they say,
"and you too have come
into the world to do this, to go easy, to be filled
with light, and to shine."

('When I am Among the Trees' written by Mary Oliver. and sent to me by liz-dear.)

May God bless you with peace, rest, refreshment, assurance of His love, and the joy of sharing it.

The New World

I just saw an amazing film.
The New World, directed by Terrence Malick.
It is a masterpiece and a moving poem. And I am very glad I've seen it.

shall we go for a ramble?

this image stops me and makes me look:

A wanderer is man from his birth
He was born in a ship
On the breast of the river of Time.

-Matthew Arnold (1822-1888) from ‘The Future’ (I found it in ‘Off the Beaten Path,’ an anthology illustrated by Laura Stoddart)

Yesterday while studying I took note of the songs that came randomly upon my mp3-er, and thought, You know, a playlist, randomly generated, can speak. how? I think sometimes it is God using the mechanism. And sometimes it is one's own mind, drawing a common thread of conversation out of all the intentions poured into each work by each artist.

Yesterday I got Keith Green ("You"), as I was reading about Acts and the early ekklesia, God's assembly, God's body of people on the run sharing the Story, the happy news. And I bubbled up with joy at the thought of joining them, of getting out there...and it's all right outside my front door.
Then there was Lauryn Hill...Just Like Water
and I read this quote in some class reading: "he here glimpsed a life which had found the inward victory and peace to which he was a stranger." It was about Saul-who-became-Paul. . .
"cleaning me, He's purging me, and moving me around."
He is, He is.
Recently I have been gracefully yanked back to the center of the world, back to the cross and the resurrection, back to the core of what makes a 'Christ-ian'. What a joy to be a baby Christian over and over, in the sense of rediscovering the Most Important. Am I living in such a way that really demonstrates that I believe I am forgiven, ingrafted, loved, free, rescued?
this is the voyage.
I can't tell you how HAPPY it made me to recover a Simplicity, a single focus to direct my life on. Thank you, Lord. I like it when things are simple.

so then there was "Somewhere," an instrumental version, from West Side Story.

I keep hearing car doors close and thinking it's family members. One of these times it will be.

The Blue Danube Waltz. I fell in deeplike with Straussmusic while watching treetops dance to it in the wind, out the top half of a shuttered window on California Street in Huntington Beach, California.

Azure Ray came on. 'How You Remember.' Followed by Bing Crosby with 'Any Bonds Today?' Noooot so connected.

'One of the Fairest Portions of the Globe' from the soundtrack of a Lewis and Clark documentary. A voice says, "It seemed as if these scenes of visionary enchantment would never come to an end."

I'm going to L'Arche in January. This is good. I will be happy to live, to have community, to serve and learn. I don't know a lot of specifics; they don't interest me right now, the logistical things people ask me about. I keep saying we'll jump and we'll see. that's from a movie, and not an art-y one. but a goodun.

I believe I like Mindy Smith's music. Do you? She has a new album out. I haven't had time to listen to it intentionally yet, but there is a ridiculously catchy song on it that says "What if the world stopped turning, what if the sun stopped burning..." oh, do listen to it. I think you'll like it.

The song "the beautiful briny sea" from Bedknobs and Broomsticks came on. That song is full of the most delightful words. "serene...through the bubbly blue and green...Far from the frenzy of the frantic world above, two beneath the blue...could even fall in love." Shimmery, shiny, bobbing, bubbly.

Do you like the look of a dark room with a lit closet? I like to turn all the lights out at dusk time except for the one in the closet. It makes it seem like a secret warm fort. Isn't there a poem--is it by Emily Dickinson, or Robert Frost? I'm a little ashamed not to know off the top of the head--about looking into a lighted window or door from a dark street. Catching a glimpse of the life inside.

"I Just Want to Praise You," a recording of Melanie and me singing it in the old Stable at Capernwray, came on. How grateful I am for this girl. Mel, listen to that track if you have it handy. It made me think back on our friendness and say thank You, thank You, thank You.

well, now I shall tell you what I'm reading, because I did some of that this morning and wanted to share so much of what I took.
-Saul Bellow’s Seize the Day ...have you read anything by him? This is my first, sort of an accidental purchase, and his writing thus far (just started the book) is so insightful. I keep bracketing and underlining things because they just have to be responded to.
-John Piper’s The Passion of Jesus Christ, 50 reasons why Jesus came to die. This has been on my shelf for years; got it for free at a church. And it was for this time. I am very thankful for it right now.
-Laura Stoddart’s anthology of travel quotes, Off the Beaten Path. Her drawings make me smile.
-Too slowly, I am reading Jean Vanier’s Our Journey Home. Why am I taking it in such small chunks? Not sure.
-In pieces, as part of my course, I'm reading Mission in Acts and the Perspectives Reader ...I highly, highly, highly (does it make sense to repeat that three times. Really high) recommend them both.

I'm volatile these days. Pits suck me in quickly and easily. And then I'm extra grateful for sudden upsweeps that renew my perspective and remind me what joy is. (That seems to be the easiest thing for me to forget.)

Delighted in: rarebird and the many pretty rabbit trails down which it takes one. Tell me what you find.
Thinking about... forts and childhood.
Today I want to: break from school till tomorrow… make shirts, tidy my room, go for a walk, write.
How kind He is. Wonder where we’ll go.

goodmorning

God is love, but it is obedience that forges, focuses, and incarnates that love into a mission.
-Samuel H. Moffett

so many ways to love
in so many cultures
from so many points of view
and what is loving here
may not be loving there.

so what is love?

["This is love: not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His son in an atoning sacrifice for our sins."]

don't know where I'm going;
the world is big and I am small,
and there are so many who need to hear.
Am I equipped to tell them?
I don't feel that way. So often I feel that I've lost the story, that the message and the motivation
have slipped through my fingers--my mind loses its grip so quickly and so easily.

But there is a Spirit,
a Great Interpreter, so I can come, little child that I am, and offer my self for His use.
and there is a Great Message
made for all the peoples of the world--
those who see the world so very, very differently than I do
and those who share some of my little perspectives.

Lord, help me to see through their eyes,
Help me to understand your story.

But more than that, help me to invite people into your reign.
To invite them home. And that home is now, that reign is now.

God loved; Jesus obeyed. So love poured out onto this ball, onto these strange and beautiful beings with eyes and ears and smiles and hands...

From Moffett again:
"He loves the world, but he goes to the cross because he obeys: "Not my will, but thine, be done" (Luke 22:42)."

"Answers we learn before making the questions our own are easily forgotten."
-Bernard Adeney, Strange Virtues.

wandering in the hazy
land
of questions,
where everything is blurry,

and all I know is that the land is carried in Holy Hands.

sunrise

here comes the sun...
the light is peeking ... or maybe I'm peeking at the light.
Life is now,
life is alive
and I am in it.
thank you, Mel.
you're right...eternity is forever. sounds obvious, right?
and He knows it all. those two facts are enough for me tonight.

Hello, again, Jesus.

oh what a dollar bought today.

“Agatha, hand me the clothes…. We’ll send them up to be washed by the clouds and dried by the wind.”

While helping at a friend’s garage sale this morning, I discovered in the $1 box an old videotape of something my family is always on the hunt for: The Electric Grandmother. We scan thrift stores, we check ebay, it’s just sort of a vague constant awareness, this hunt.
So this morning, there was rejoicing in the Van Wynen collective consciousness.

Tonight we watched it, my parents and I. And I can’t really put in words what it did to me. I haven’t cried so much at a movie for years. The Electric Grandmother, folks.
I had no specific memory of the movie that I could call up independently; we looked for it, but I didn’t remember what it was. It was buried deep in my memory, in the part I can’t reach anymore. The furthest, darkest corner of the trunk.

When the first strains of the song came up, and the silhouette of the grandmother rocking behind the translucent colored screen, and the old man’s voice calling “Grandma…”
I gasped. My heart held its breath. “I remember this,” I kept whispering. “I remember.”
The pieces of the heart falling from the sky; the eerie chorus of grandma voices, repeating “Tom, Timothy, Agathaaaaa…”… the grandmother factory, with its floating shadows, eye-color selection kaleidoscope, voice-receiving gramophone….then, “Ask me no questions, I’ll tell you no lies, but some morning you’ll wake up and get a surprise…” and there she was—the sarcophagus dropped by the helicopter, so incredibly vivid and creepy and tender in my memory. Every outfit on the children, every look on their faces, was stored somewhere deep in the part of my child’s brain where I stored up information about how people work and what faces mean. It’s all still in me, I just didn’t know it.

Laundry on a kite string, lullabies, that deeply disturbing scene of grandma all plugged in in the basement, the muffin with ‘Holy Toledo, it’s flying!’ on a slip of paper baked inside. The car accident scene—“Not like mommy, please not like mommy…” and then the children suddenly growing up as they ran toward grandma. This is when I started to cry. The storage room full of grandmothers all reminiscing and pondering, decades later—“Sometimes I forget the difference between loving people and paying attention to people. There is a difference, isn’t there?” … and finally, her return to the house and the elderly children. “Grandma, brush my hair!” (At this point, I can’t stop crying.) And so it ends.

My childhood is deep inside me, buried and unreachable; we just kept moving and I have almost no touchstones. My family has grown up and changed, and I with it, and the scenery has changed and on we have gone. This movie tonight…it touched a place inside me that is never, ever touched. I was suddenly six years old, sitting on a wood floor in an apartment in Brazil with my brother, staring up at the electric grandmother. The whole world changed around me and I was a child again—really a child, fully a child. I haven’t felt that since it ended. It was a wonderful time, a happy time—I had forgotten how happy—and it has been a lost time.

Last week I heard my father reading something aloud, and a shiver washed over me—I saw myself sitting on the carpet at his feet as he read the Chronicles of Narnia aloud to my brother and me before bed. The memory lasted a split second, but I wanted to hold onto it. These piercing tastes of my childhood are so rare, so very, very rare. Such a goldfish I am, with a long-term memory like a sieve…the present is good, the past of more than 6 or 7 years ago is vanished…. But no… it’s there, it’s in there somewhere. It just takes an electric grandmother to bring it up, up, up to the surface.

Thank you, Jesus, for my childhood. Thank you so much for my childhood.


How deep, lasting, often subliminal, are the impressions and lessons of childhood. This is why I feel the weight, the importance of time spent with children, whether they will remember me or not. My words and actions, the environment they are in, the things they see and hear and touch, are more vivid and tremendous to them than we can possibly imagine with our adultness. So BIG is the room, so sharp the details. So deep the memory.

Go to a garage sale, see if it changes your life.

nothing less. offline for awhile.

"God, of Your goodness give me Yourself,
for You are enough for me,
and I can ask for nothing which is less
which can pay you full worship.
And if I ask anything which is less,
always I am in want,
but only in You do I have everything."

Julian of Norwich.

...time to go again...

see you in six weeks.
after the work of love,
a wedding,
and a road trip.

how i love movement. oh dear. i may never stop.

something sort of grandish.

"On the day I was born, said my father, said he,
'I've an elegant legacy waitin' for ye...
Tis a rhyme for your lips
And a song for your heart
To sing it whenever the world falls apart..."

the land of this movie, Finian's Rainbow, has been my dreamworld for a long time. Oh, please see it... and if you don't like it, don't tell me. It's too much a part of my fabric.

It weaves a profound and lasting magic; its earthy-commune-train riding-field frolicking, dusty-colored beauty has made it a picture of Home for me since I was only leprechaun-height.

thank you, Lord, for filmed happinesses that remind us what happiness is.

Here, you can borrow it...

currently reading, and want other people to enjoy...

Following Jesus in the Hindu Context: The Intriguing Implications of N.V. Tilak's Life and Thought

by H.L. Richard

Show Me the Way: Readings for each day of Lent

by Henri J.M. Nouwen






also thinking about the prophets, what a "prophet" is/was; and about what needs to be tossed out of my life and way of thinking and grasping for fulfillment. I don't want to waste my life chasing empty, 'harmless' hankerings.
Hosea is right for this moment.

Hinduism is on my mind. Have been doing some good reading on it for my degreeprogram. I'm surprised at how much this subject interests and compels me. Not that it's only one thing... Anyone want to go to India with me?

guess who just rode into town?

yes folks,
Danielle is in Texas.
This is a blessing.

Christy, we want you to email me your phone number so we can call you. Same with you other folks that want to chat with Dani while she's in the States...drop me a line or a comment and we'll call y'up.

possibilities

"'...must I hold that what is not communicated to consciousness does not exist? I think in a line--but there is the potentiality of the plane.' This perhaps was what great art was--a momentary apprehension of the plane at a point in the line."
(from Many Dimensions, by Charles Williams)

endless paperwriting

I can't seem to mesh with writing this paper...
and I'm typing truths that I would rather live out than write about
ah, but writing and living are pretty inextricably intertwined for me.
when i write it, i understand it...at least a little better
I am slow to be deep these days.
when will i start really living these things out?
when i finally believe in grace.

think they'd accept a term paper written in the form of abstract poetry and disconnected sentences?
ah, wait, that would be a blog, not a term paper. sigh.

"When I pray, I pour my nebulous self into the concrete forms of words, and it begins to make me real.
And so humankind has poured themselves into words since the beginning; and since the beginning God has met us there, in the middle ground, the land of words, pouring Himself into them so that we can catch some semblance of who He is. This is prayer: meeting God, communicating ourselves to Him, and above all, being overwhelmed by His communicating Himself to us, putting us in our beautiful place."

this is my favorite part of what i've hammered out so far
because it's the only part that wasn't hammered out--just flowed naturally.
Do you think it's true? Is this how you see prayer?

the paper's on prayer in the earliest Old Testament Scriptures--the Pentateuch and Job...
why is my mind half asleep, unable to leap in?
guilt? farness from prayer?

undeniably, constant distraction is a big part of the problem. you know, folks, it may be time for a media fast. no more blogreading or websurfing or rhapsody-surfing-and-listening. Do I really need to discover yet another band I like? Not as much as I need to be in a room empty of everything but my soul and the living God.
not at all, in fact.
God help me to kick the addictions; Godhelpme wake up to the comfortless motions i go through out of habit, turning to knothole-mailboxes long abandoned, still thinking I will find delight there. how long can I be so stupid?
Oh, a long, long time.
a lifetime if it weren't for Jesus...Jesus, take my hand. pull me up.

go here, go here!

http://www.wartoft.nu/software/seterra/

Download this program. It's what you've always dreamed of!
Okay, maybe it's just what I've always dreamed of.
I can finally be as geographically intelligent as I ought to be.
This was probably invented ten years ago. But we're together now, and that's all that matters.

okay, that was the whole reason for this post. It was a reflex to the joy of Seterra. Now I feel I must justify it with further content. I'm running on bookstore and geography adrenaline, have no depths to share at this particular moment.

music. Try Derek Webb, particularly "New Law" on the cd Mockingbird.

when I close my eyes I see...

I can't help it.
I have to post about The Weather Project.
I found out about it via other, wiser blogs (Spiro's, Kristina's)
and it swept me away. I saw one picture and dreamed about it that night. In the dream the installation was in Moscow and I was desperate to find it.

It is one of those things that makes me lose my breath because I didn't know these things were really possible and really going on, these constructions of otherworldly Experiences, glimpses of the wonder. Things I dream and look for even the palest facsimiles of, and suddenly...wham. There it is, a full-blown dreamworld. I can't help but ask why more of these things are not in existence, and why they are confined to the label of Contemporary Art when they do; can't they just be Wonders? I suppose to get the money to create such a thing, you have to be part of a Set of some kind....

why, oh why, oh why, are millions of dollars put up for hideous, standard-issue skyscrapers
instead of for more and more breathtaking Surprises? Oh, human race, where are our priorities??

Look at these... http://www.olafureliasson.net/exhib_proj.html
I am particularly drawn to "Mediated Motion."...
does anyone know of more people making experiencespheres?
Any simple poorfolk out there dreaming these into existence?
I had a dream of one once, to be lovingly planted in a dark shack on the side of a country highway in the south.

I think it's the Incarnational beauty that appeals to me-- like God in flesh, Jesus in hay, and like Christ in me, like the Holy Spirit Himself stooping to live in this shabby person. You enter the molding shanty and suddenly, unexpectedly, you find the closest thing to Home you've ever known.

And a p.s.: Thank you to Philadelphia's finest residents for a weekend that reminded me that God is a Person, Alive and now. Just by being people. I've been dissolving away; God used you to tell me I could materialize again.

Sun's gettin' shinery, to spotlight the finery...

spring, spring, spring.



when you walk the same roads every day for several months
you see the world turn.
you see the story of Seasons unfold,
and it amazes you how quickly it cycles.

suddenly that tree whose bare and curlicued silhouette I have admired since November
is dropping sweet-smelling pinkish petals.

today I think
that God invented this storycycle to show us something magical:
the remembering of what we thought was obvious.

"Oh!
The grass is green!"

"Oh!
The sky is blue!"

"Oh! The trees have leaves!"

Statements that are taken as classic examples of the ridiculously obvious...
become new emotional realizations,
and I am forced to laugh at myself
and to remember that the obvious
is not.
Obvious, that is.

The sensation is delicious, the warmth in the air and the suddenly-green patches of ground, and the purple-flowered trees.

So many "obvious" things He has to remind me of all the time
All the time.
And so the globe keeps turning
and I trip along
walking to work on the same two roads.

Four

1. (click on the pictures)





(found a precious, precious gem of a site .)

"An ocean voyage...a real journey ...Very exciting. As a luggage problem."

deep-sourced wonder floods my surface again when I enter this world. I remember now...


2. Put an old banjo in your room; lean it against the wall. Wooden floors help, too. Every time you blow your nose or sneeze, ethereal chord-echoes will resonate through your space.

3. Half-handed Cloud, I think you are wise and special.

4. This is not my absolute favorite piece of hers, perhaps because it is sad and not celebratory, but it is trueandgood and it is a message I need to whisper and whisper to myself today. From the collection "Why I Wake Early: New Poems by Mary Oliver"(thanks to liz for sharing Mary with me. I think hers is the most Homeish poemwriting I have ever read.):

What Was Once the Largest Shopping Center in Northern Ohio Was Built Where There Had Been a Pond I Used to Visit Every Summer Afternoon

Loving the earth, seeing what has been done to it,
I grow sharp, I grow cold.

Where will the trilliums go, and the coltsfoot?
Where will the pond lilies go to continue living
their simple, penniless lives, lifting
their faces of gold?

Impossible to believe we need so much
as the world wants us to buy.
I have more clothes, lamps, dishes, paper clips
than I could possibly use before I die.

Oh, I would like to live in an empty house,
with vines for walls, and a carpet of grass.
No planks, no plastic, no fiberglass.

And I suppose sometime I will.
Old and cold I will lie apart
from all this buying and selling, with only
the beautiful earth in my heart.

(Mary Oliver, c.2004)

do you understand that I love you

From Mark Haddon's the curious incident of the dog in the night-time, p.87:

" And Father said, “Christopher, do you understand that I love you?”

And I said “Yes,” because loving someone is helping them when they get into trouble, and looking after them, and telling them the truth, and Father looks after me when I get into trouble, like coming to the police station, and he looks after me by cooking meals for me, and he always tells me the truth, which means that he loves me.

And then he held up his right hand and spread his fingers out in a fan, and I held up my left and spread my fingers out in a fan and we made our fingers and thumbs touch each other. "

maybe the hardest thing about pouring your life and time into the life of an autistic child is that they may never love you back in a way that matches what you know as love. they may never love you back in a self-conscious or recognizable way. They may never love you back, period.
loving them teaches us something by experience that we could maybe never learn just by word-age:
It must hurt Jesus when He pours His love on me.

the autistic and "borderline autistic" boys I get to spend time with each day are different from fictional-Christopher in many ways. but they help me understand some of the manifestations of Christopher's mind and heart--and he helps me understand some of their inner logic.

And logic it is. Every child and every person with disabilities (which is every human being) has an inner world that makes sense; everyone takes part of what they see in the world and magnifies it to be the guiding principle of their world. We just all take different parts. And some people's piece is less commonly chosen than others. Like the "Facts" piece that autistic people choose to the exclusion of most other pieces.

Some days i want to take a radio and hold the white noise up to my ear and rock back and forth for hours and hours and hours.
Noises everywhere, the magic of movement and patterns and the madness of people, the number of things to explore and understand, the myriad of different perspectives and the wordswordswords swirling...Every day the world is so overwhelming that if I didn't know I had a YHWH who loves me and understand it all, I think my head and heart would explode.

this is one way I know that I have stopped looking at YHWH Jesus--I get very overwhelmed and frightened. The world is huge and hollow and I am completely useless within it. This is how I felt last night during the second half of a symphony concert because my mind began asking what I'm doing because I'm getting old...and I looked around at so many heads, so many minds facing Beethoven's 2nd, so many lives, so many people scraping their niche into the world, and I am alone...
and then I realized that that is a lie; I am not alone. I know I have been drifting from a deep connection to my Abba Father lately. So my thoughts were beginning to grow in a climate of coldness, aloneness.

And this made me remember that it is the love of Jesus that gives me the hope to exist and the courage to continue and it is the only thing that gives me any joy about living or the future at all. And the difference it makes is not small. The joy I have about living when I remember I live in that cocoon of Love...is HUGE.

my love compared to His is almost no love at all, certainly barely recognizable as Love.
He holds me in a safewarmcocoon of perfect Love
I rarely see it.
And what I do see is just a strand, just the Face, just the Facts, and the depth is so much more, something I don't even have a language for.
I barely see it.
I am overwhelmed by what fills my limited field of vision
I groan
I rock.
He sees the whole, mindblowing, magnificent, infinite Picture
He sings over me.
This is how we know what Love is. . .








do read mark haddon's book.
and do listen to copland's appalachian spring today. it's a magical moment, that moment of total silence in the performance hall just after the last strains have slipped away...

riding the rails

Cold Water (Tom Waits)

Well I woke up this morning
With the cold water...With the cold water...With the cold water
Woke up this morning
With the cold water...With the cold water...With the cold

Police at the station
And they don't look friendly...Well they don't look friendly...Well they don't look friendly
Police at the station
And they don't look friendly...They don't look friendly...well they don't

Blind or crippled
Sharp or dull
I'm reading the Bible
By a 40 watt bulb
What price freedom
Dirt is my rug
Well I sleep like a baby
With the snakes and the bugs

Well the stores are open
But I ain't got no money...I ain't got no money
Stores are open
but I ain't got no money...Ain't got no money...Well I ain't

Found an old dog
And he seems to like me...Seems to like me...Well he seems to like me
Found an old dog
And he seems to like me...Seems to like me...Well he seems

Seen them fellows with the card board signs
Scrapin up a little $
To buy a bottle of wine
Pregnant women and
The Vietnam vets I say
Beggin on the freeway Bout as hard as it gets

Well I slept in the graveyard
It was cool and still...Cool and still...It was cool and still
Slept in the graveyard
It was cool and still...Cool and still...and it was cool

Slept all night in the Cedar grove
I was born to ramble...Born to rove
Some men are searchin for the Holy Grail
But there ain't nothin sweeter than ridin the rails

I love 47 but I'm 24
Well they shooed me away
From here the time before
Turned there their backs
And they locked their doors
I'm watching T.V. in the window of a furniture store

Well I woke up this morning
With the cold water...With the cold water...With the cold water
Woke up this morning
With the cold water...With the cold water...With the cold

in my head today, and the ridin' the rails line has cycled through my whole bloodstream. Ever have days of study and abstract thought that weighs you down to the point where your gratitude for the gift of study and philosoph-ication turns into a general feeling that you wish hadn't been blessed with all of it?...because now you can never really just turn your back on it or pretend you don't have it.
Never really be able to live a directly emotive, experiential life because you are a half-wise, half-"learned," analytical half-scholar, with bits and pieces of understanding about worldview and theology and the history of mankind.
the grass is always greener
again.

found an old dog and he seems to like me...
ironic because as usual a random dog came running out at me on the walk to work. and back from work. different dog each time. they don't seem to like me.

Cat had five kittens. miraculous.
Had a little pretend-market-day with my class today. They were hilarious and wonderful and they so enjoyed the farce of commerce... they gave me $20 change for $20 and went through all the stages of discovering the joys of selling and buying, with none of the actual gain, greed or monetary awareness. We wore straw hats and sold apples, instruments, and candy. What more do you need?

badly drawn boy. and such.

it's two years old, but i didn't catch it back then. the album 'one plus one is one' by Badly Drawn Boy. Excellent stuff and it just spoke my heart this morning as I was listening...I couldn't believe it...

the song "This is THAT new song" and its stream-swimming image and its evocation of something my heart is missing and wishing for. ...

the song "summertime in wintertime" was so crazy right-on where my mind was on my walk home yesterday, when I looked at the beautiful bare treetops and thought "January" and realized that I may have been permanently programmed by my school years to live for summertime and Christmas, and everything inbetween just feels like waiting...and how ridiculous it is to live that way, to live looking ahead at all the "events" of the coming months, waiting for those, instead of stepping fully into NOW, TODAY, completely awake and alive and taking advantage of my time with Jesus on this earth... why would I drift through days and weeks, waiting for something to wake me....

I saw a thing on PBS tonight full of old photographs that made me mourn for the long-gone days when the US was a "real place." i probably need to explain that. A place where we let there be dirt and poverty and hard work and personal contact and DIFFICULTY in surviving and... I know some of these things still exist in this country, especially among immigrant populations, inner cities. but why is it that so many of us are cut off from those worlds? did tv do this to us? did it all change when the architects stopped putting front porches on houses?
why is it that I feel like this country is a collection of concrete buildings with closed doors that sometimes squeeze open to let you in or out, but "don't let any dirt in or any strangers in..." and don't let the rest of the world in; don't let us see that we're just one small part of it. People buzz from place to place in climate-controlled motor vehicles, and I don't know what they're doing and they don't know what I'm doing, we just pass each other at Target. and it's near to impossible to BREAK IN anywhere...
maybe everyone feels this way about their home country. Maybe I just like wearing "foreigner glasses"; maybe I just feel more able to blunder about and meet people and maybe the grass is just always greener on the other side...
maybe it's me.

flights tonight

today I've been listening on and off to the album "Blue Trees" by the band Gorky's Zygotic Mynci, some songs from "From the Lion's Mouth" by Nedelle, some Raffi and some Brazilian music. I think sharing this stuff is a strange way of trying to get other people to enter my head without having to actually explain what's going on in it. Which, of course, will not work.

This week studies have been focused on the beginning of Time, the Creation event, the appearance of life. Amazing, amazing, amazing. So much we don't know. So much that God did in ways that we have never conceived of. Not as simple as we are often led to believe... and yet I think the greatest scientific law He set in motion was Love. And that element was most important to Him, too, even though He is the mathematical genius who set up all that thermodynamics, cosmology and geology discover about the universe. Otherwise Jesus wouldn't have lived the life, and died the death, that He did. Remind me to write something on here about the ten pre-Creation dimensions and how they relate to the presence of God. Very amazing stuff.

Longing for a beautiful place, for mountains, oceans, beach, sky, magnificence.
Made a t-shirt today.
Wondering why I don't really fit into the church as I continue to encounter it in the States;
knowing that much of it is my fault but not sure how to change myself.
Saw Polanski's Oliver Twist last night. Not bad.
Finished Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles. Enjoyable. Especially the chapter "December 2001: The Green Morning." Perhaps just because I am a treelover.
Quote from delightful little girl at daycare on Friday as we talked about the many countries in the world... "Why do they call them crunchies? Maybe because there's so many people and they get all crrrrunched."

drifting, dreaming, in an azure mood...

I'm learning over time what my heart-language is... it's the poetry of little things.

last night playing rummikub with my mom, wittily insulting each other as we have made our rummikub tradition (I took the cheese-approach, e.g. "Cheeseface". She took the leech angle, e.g. "leechlips.") ... and suddenly Billy Joel's "The Longest Time" came on and we inevitably broke into muppet-dancing. You know, arms outstretched, puppet-style, head back and mouth wide open, whole body bouncing. Man, that's a great song.
So these are the moments that sparkle. And they hurt a little in their magicalness, because everything passes...

Well, I think it’s time for another Voyage through Musical Space, courtesy of ye olde Archos Jukebox and its random mp3 selection capabilities.
Today it seems to be in a very relaxed and magical mood… let’s see what it comes up with.

1. Rufus Wainwright – I Don’t Know What it is
I must start with this one today…and as I listen, the reasons reveal themselves like happy surprise fireworks (that sounds like a Japanese product – happy surprise fireworks) .
This song captures perfectly the feeling of the last dream I had this morning…my friend Bonniemunchkin was in a wheelchair, and was leading a parade (at Disney World, Bonnie! :-) )… and a group of evil people were trying to find her and claim her. I had to reach the end of the street and get to her first…flinging myself through buildings and under railings, with the help and support of some guy whose face I never saw…I did get to her first, and all was well. I woke up with a sense of adrenaline, purpose, companionship. Strange.
My favorite line…”is there anyone else who has slightly mysterious…bruises…”
And then there’s the line that I hear dear, wise Melissa in… “Is there anyone else who is through with complaining about what’s done unto us…”
And then it makes me smile to hear Rufus sing “chugging along”…because my dear brother has recently used that phrase to refer to himself, and it makes me laugh because it’s such a stolid, proletarian phrase for philosophical Popo to use…
And of course, I will always, always hear you, my Melanie, in this song. It’s one of our songs…that line "you gotta be there"...that's about you.

2. Claude Debussy – Nuages
Beautiful. I should read more about Debussy. I think I’ve read about him before but probably have blocked it all out of long-term memory in favor of my imaginary vision of someone who could write such delicate, breathtaking stuff as this cloudmusic.

3.Mary Poppins soundtrack – Stay Awake
Though the world is fast asleep…though your pillow’s soft and deep...

4. Cliar – The Para Handy set
This is a group I heard live in Edinburgh, Scotland. They sing in Gaelic and they are quite magical. Like elfincreatures singing, but after a draught of ale in a warm pub. Maybe. Or maybe just like really talented Scottish people.

5. Carousel soundtrack – What’s the Use of Wonderin’
What’s the use of wondering if the ending will be sad…

6. ‘Wonders of China’ narration from the Circlevision360 movie at Epcot, Disney World.
I love these things!! They are the experiences that first made me believe that the real world could be magical, and though they make the world of travel look like a comfortable dreamworld, still, still, they are right in some way—maybe it’s what travel should be. “The Li River winds like a silver snake/through scattered dragon’s teeth/Whoever looks on this loses himself in eternity.”

7. Lawrence Welk orchestra – South Rampart Street Parade
Enjoyable as ever, Mister Welk and his strange, cultish little happy family of pleasant singers and dancers clad in bright orange gowns in flammable fabrics.

8. Styx – Fooling Yourself (the Angry Young Man)
Don't you feel kind of embarrassed for the Styxguys when you hear this song? it’s so naïve and innocent and...sweet. Did they intend it to be tough and rock-ish? “How can you be such an angry young man…when your future looks quite bright to me…”

9. Beach Boys – Don’t Talk (Put Your Head on My Shoulder)
Oh Jukebox. You are in such a charmed mood today. :-)

10. Gustav Holst – The Planets: Saturn
I love this suite.

11. Bert and Ernie – Upside Down World
I hope you’ve seen “Follow that Bird.” I think it’s really cheap on dvd. Go buy it. Now!
“It all looks so funny that I’ve got to frown…’cause a frown is a smile when you turn upside down…”

12. Gone With the Wind theme
13. snippets of Satie and Stravinsky (Rite of Spring), respectively. Short ones.

14.Willy Wonka (the original one) soundtrack -- Wonkavator (End Title)
I think this is pretty much the most happifying track on my whole jukebox. “Hold on, everybody…here it comes!” CRASH… and they’re soaring over Charlie’s village. Perfect.

15. Jim Croce – Time in a Bottle
“I’ve looked around enough to know/That you’re the one I want to go through time with…”

16. Lauryn Hill – Oh Jerusalem
Good, good songs on the Unplugged album. This album is such a unity, I don’t like listening to the songs when they come up on random. But for today I’ll make an exception.

17. Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong – They Can’t Take That Away From Me
I think this song is pretty much permanently etched on my musical memory, in every detail.

18. Allison Krauss – Jewels

19. Audra McDonald – Come Down From the Tree
The songs she chooses for her albums are lovely meldings of lyric and melody. And her honest singing makes them even better.

20. 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea Submarine Voyage full ride audio, from Disneyland… man, this is good stuff. That all-knowing Captain Nemo voice speaking to you through the speakers as you press your kid-nose up to the cold, foggy round window, fully believing that you’re about to be submerged miles below the surface…“Dive! Dive! All ahead full, steady as she goes…on our voyage through liquid space.”

21. Tangerine Dream – Fairies
22. Cat Stevens – The Wind
23. Ella and Louis – A Foggy Day
The Archos is sort of limited in its selections today, but I don’t mind…the last time I sang this song, I sang it with an Icelandic girl, bumping along a dirt road in Ghana in the dark, with a 7-year-old Ghanaian girl with a German name on my lap. Oh, world. And oh, the little ways God reaches into strange places with bits of Home that he knows we need.

And on that note, we’ll shut down for now. No, wait, there’s a certain song we have to end with…
24. The Jam – A Town Called Malice
Go, Billy!
And Mel, I love you forever.
Always be yourself.

Every burden shall be lifted...

So I'm not sure how to communicate what God gave me by taking me to Ghana, at least not on a blog. But I can't imagine just skipping over that here, odd and inconsistent outlet for random thoughts though this has been... so I am just going to go ahead and post a copy of the letter I just wrote to thank the people who have blessed me with support and prayer to make the trip happen and flourish... it says what I want to say.

I am listening to the Innocence Mission album "Befriended." Do give it a listen. Especially the song "Look for Me As You Go By." All of it, though... this music speaks peace into a confused and tired mind tonight.

Anyway...Here's the letter. Some of you may get it in the mail, too. :-)

"Of all the commandments, which is the most important?"
"The most important one," answered Jesus, "is this: 'Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.' The second is this: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.' There is no commandment greater than these." (Mark 12:28b-31)

Red dust coating my sandaled feet; the feel of a child’s hand in mine; bright-heat days and cool-breeze evenings. The musical sound of a laugh from the throat of an otherwise silent little girl. The whispers of fifty people praying at once merging into a wave of God-focused sound. The rustle of sleeves as a deaf woman leads a signed song of worship with graceful hands, her eyes closed, her smile radiant. . . These moments will never leave me. And as I thank God with all my heart for them, I also have you to thank, dear family in Christ.

Thank you for your financial and prayer support of my trip to Ghana with Handi*Vangelism Ministries International (HVMI). God has blessed me immeasurably by taking me to Ghana and letting me see Him in His people there. He multiplied the blessing by ten thousand by sending Melissa McDevitt with me; I wish you all knew her, and I hope you, too, have the blessing of such a steady, patient, inspiring, funny, wise and God-loving friend in your life!

Over the past four weeks, things have not always been easy—are they ever? J But through all the challenges of interacting cross-culturally, through our frequent confusion about what was going on and what our role should be, through every low and high moment, Melissa and I felt the love and presence of God. I know that your prayers were being constantly answered. He carried us through by infusing us with simple, inexpressible peace—and He gave us one another to lean on.

The first ten days of our time in Ghana were spent at Handi*Vangelism Ghana’s annual Deaf Camp Meeting, held this year in the rural Volta Region, at the Volta School for the Deaf. The camp included daily Bible studies, teaching and discussions, as well as local outings, sports and lots of dancing (the deaf campers and staff were amazing dancers! It was so beautiful to watch them express the rhythms and joys God has put within them, as they participated in Ghana’s very musical culture regardless of their “disability.”)!

After camp, we returned to the H*V Ghana ‘Rehabilitation Center’ in Accra. Over the next 11 days there, we were introduced to the various key areas of H*V Ghana’s ministry. We participated in services at Hope Community Chapel, the church H*V Ghana has established in the Center to serve as a beacon of Christ’s love in the community. We played with the children who are living at the Center (all children of parents who live on the street, usually children of people with disabilities) as they wait to be placed in foster families or reunited with estranged family members. We went to the streets and met some of their family members and many of the people who participate in H*V’s weekly street fellowship service. We saw H*V’s new land, where they plan to build a newer, larger ministry Center, with space for on-site vocational training and disability training for churches and individuals from all over West Africa.

At a gathering of H*V Ghana staff in Accra, I shared the verses that appear at the top of this letter. These words of Jesus are my favorite verses because of the hope they give me: hope about who God is—He is love. And hope about my life on this earth—when the busy, title-focused world overwhelms me with its to-do and should-be lists, I cling to the words and example of Jesus: to love is enough. These verses have come alive to me over the past year as God has proven to me His unconditional love for even me. As I began to believe in that love, He began to fill my life with opportunities to learn to love others as He does. This trip to Ghana has been for me a culmination of so many lessons and so many dreams. To love is the greatest thing. It is what Jesus did—and does. And it is how I will spend my life.

In the ministry of the men and women of H*V Ghana, and the staff (composed of both deaf and hearing people) of the Deaf Camp, I saw the same heart that God has given me. I saw people ministering with their whole lives, in the everyday, not just through official jobs and scheduled events. I saw a place that people are drawn to because there they find truth, acceptance and unconditional love.

How can I put in words for you how happy God has made me in and through this trip? I can tell you that I am praying to return to Ghana and the ministry of HVMI, if it is His plan for me. A big part of my heart is there; maybe it always has been there, waiting for me to come find it. There is such a clear need—children who have no one reaching lovingly into their crucial growing-up years; this is work for the Body of Christ. I don’t know what God has in mind for me; but as I’ve seen His plan so far, just a step’s worth at a time, He has proven over and over that He knows and loves me better than I ever could. So my eyes are on Him…not on me.

For now, as I go back to work and studying in the States, I want so much to thank you for your love, your support, your encouragement. God has used you to answer my prayers in ways better and deeper than had ever asked or imagined. I pray that each of you will experience the blessing of loving others more and more this year—and that you will know what a blessing you have been to me.

In Jesus,
Kate.

dreaming of Africa...

Just wanted to let folks know I've arrived safe and sound. Back in the States yesterday, back to Texas this afternoon. It may be awhile before I get caught up on email...
Thank you a million times over for your prayers and encouragement. My time in Ghana was deeply wonderful, a colossal gift from God. I can truly say that I love it there-- as Keith Green would say, "you put this love in my heart"... and I am praying to go back.
More to come, either here or in emails.
love to you all.