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.