uncovering the story.

Step with me into this issue for a minute. Where did "third world" countries come from? Why are they "third world?" Do we think about this much?

The following bits are from David Christian’s crazycomprehensive (not perfect) book Maps of Time (pp.434-437). Come into the story for a moment.
You see, Britain was at the center of a powerful network of interchange, and so its Industrial Revolution caused a global chain-reaction…:

*****************************
“Germany and the United States had also pioneered two new, multicellular forms of industrial organization: the national corporation, which vertically integrated tasks previously shared by many separate enterprises, from the production of raw materials to manufacture, wholesaling, and retailing; and the multidivisional corporation, which horizontally integrated what had previously been different sectors of production.
… As productivity rose in the industrialized hub region and the prices of goods such as British machine-made textiles fell, producers in other regions found their livelihood undermined by European imports. In entering global markets, small producers found themselves competing with large corporations using the most up-to-date technologies, and in the long run there was no doubt as to who would lose that competition. Wherever they had the power to do so, as in India and Pakistan, European powers accelerated such processes by juggling with tariff barriers or by forcing weaker powers and colonies to accept European exports…Even China’s once self-sufficient economy buckled as the pull of the Atlantic economies warped the topology of international trade…
The transformations of the late nineteenth century created a world divided between those that did and those that did not have industrial economies. The same processes that enriched the societies of the Atlantic seaboard ruined much of the rest of the world; and the gradients of inequality within nations, which had widened so spectacularly with the decline of the traditional peasantry, now became gradients between regions and nations. . . The twentieth-century term the third world could have made no sense in 1750, when today’s third world countries accounted for almost 75 percent of global industrial production. By the late twentieth century, they counted for less than 15 percent.
…As traditional rulers outside the industrializing core became aware of their vulnerability, they began to wonder if they would have to industrialize the lands they ruled. But how? …Matching the rates of innovation of the North Atlantic hub region meant changing political systems and cultural attitudes as well as economic structures in order to create well-integrated capitalist societies.” In other words, cultures to whom individualist, competitive economies were not necessarily indigenous or natural were squeezed into the race for 'first world'-ness.

*****************************

I don’t want to forget that all these developments affected many Westerners badly, too!... those pulled into long, monotonous lives of factory and mining work, those who were more victims than instigators of all this change. And the structure continues to adversely affect many Westerners; we aren’t all directly responsible for the system. I think of all the small producers-- though today, I think the Internet and other communication tools are putting more power back in those hands, which is great…

Nor do I think that all innovation and invention is bad, or that we should have all stayed on subsistence level, not developed vaccines, not tried to make new things, discover new things, etc. But you can see the ugly vein of greed running unmistakably through what happened, though people hid their greed behind words like ‘progress’ and ‘innovation’ and ‘rights’ to buy and sell, etc. … This is humankind, lording things over one another, stepping on one another for power… and, I hasten to add, making unintended mistakes, running into unforeseen consequences.

So. The love of money is the root of all evil. Not money, but the love of it. And the love does not make up all of evil by itself, but is the root of it all. What a world we’ve come to.
And now we use the term “third world” to look down on and pity those whom our own massive economies have essentially used and held down. ‘What’s the matter with them?’ the assumption behind the term runs. ‘Why couldn’t they keep up? Poor things. Guess we better give them our pocket change.’

I think, I really think, that the Internet can be a huge part of getting power to live and market and work humanely back in the hands of the ‘unincorporated.’ As well as a huge part of the networking process, the way that the West comes to realize what we are and to see the spot others are in—and so this connecting tool can enable us to see and reach out to one another in cool new ways. Lord willing. Lord willing. Oh, Lord, this time let us use the tools for Your glory by using them in love. This time let us not charge ahead for our own gain and luxury without thought for the ripples that tsunami into the rest of the world. We may not all have been directly responsible for how things came to be as they are. But we are responsible for now and for tomorrow. ( Is this so much to ask? )

"Frankly, Mister Shankly" just started playing. Oh Western society. Speaking of the bizarre fruits of Western society, I've got to post on Industrial musicals soon. Amaaaazing stuff.

On a different but related note, I've been convicted about making people into abstractions and theories lately. There is real lostness in the world. And it's person-by-person; it's in each face. And I know, I am reminded by every real encounter with a real person, that it is impossible for me to change even one of these millions of hearts in my own power. Thank God, thank God, He is the God of impossibilities.
Would you like to see faces instead of grand theories? Oh, please, go read these stories and rejoice in Word Made Flesh.

are you out there? dialogue with me. what do you think?

so faithful.

His faithfulness
is shown in glorious color
to a self-centered, self-seeking and self-promoting ninny.
Harsh though it may be to see the grime and gunk and filth in me,
It is real,
and to see it makes His saving work,
His faithful love,
His unspeakable grace clearer and more beautiful to me.


I wish I were hiking today,
I must admit.


I spent my Easter in Tucson, Arizona, a bit of a leap away from the original plan of Texas' Guadalupe Mountains. Such an unexpected present
;I do love a dash of spontaneity.
you see, we woke up Saturday in a tent covered in snow, my two friends and I,
and so with numb fingers we clumsily packed it up
And we drove till the weather map turned from blue to yellow.


One foot in front of the other,
One foot in front of the other,
One foot in front of the other.
Sunday after a church service attended in a 'happy hiker' tshirt and dusty running shoes,
we headed up the mountain to Douglas Springs.



I feel
cleaned up
cleaned out.
Five days with two people who are not impressed by what the world tries to impress with.
Five days of quiet, simple conversation,
Not so much profound
As clear--
like a stream you can see the bottom of,
no hidden motives clouding the water.
And the days were peppered with simple prayers.





Pressing into a desert landscape, surrounded by saguaro, I find once again,
as I can only learn in this way,
that there is Beauty in simply pressing on.



Seeing the web of streets and houses and stocked superstores from the mountains,
it looked like a toy town, where Playskool people
buzz back and forth,
round and round
and round.


There is something about a sweaty t-shirt
and a sun- and wind-burnished face
and the pleasant, unavoidable prospect of simple tasks -
finding water,
making dinner,
washing dishes.
I think I would be a more beautiful person if I lived in a tent all the time.
I'm looking into it.


This weekend,
God showed me again what Grace is:
knowing I am n o t h i n g but what He lets me be,
what He empowers me to be;
it is all by His gifting.
This is Easter. This is grace:
as I am beaten with the fact, over and over, simply by observing my own thoughts, that I am low, humiliatingly shallow, selfish, petty, undedicated, clumsy, ...
even as this is happening, at the same time-- the same time --
I am being showered with good and special
-- and detailed --
gifts,
coming purely of love.


One foot in front of the other,
One foot in front of the other...
The simplicity is like good food for my spirit.


The journey is simple, really,
Because He provides it all--
We just walk in Him.
Grace, grace, increasing grace--
Stir up my song of Hallelujah! , all my life.

Pare me down however You will,
however You want to.
Anything You have to do
to get me back to "Thank You"
and a quiet spirit.
He's always been faithful to me. He's always been faithful--to me!

birdwatching soft and sweet and sunny

"For the Lord's word is plain and binding:
"Do not worry about your life."

Fretful anxiety is forbidden for the believer, and it is needless.

If you have a Father in heaven to care for you,

are you not put to shame by every little bird

that sits upon the bough and sings,

though it has not two grains of barley in all the world?"

--Charles Spurgeon.
(beautiful art by Liz Vile; Ididn'taskandhopeit'sokaytowhiskaway)

how alien and how fetterless they are,

and traveling always traveling

; an invisible community whose chirps we get used to

when all the while they've something to teach.

(p.s. look at this nice picture by nikki mcclure, who I don't know.)

LET NO ONE DECEIVE YOU WITH EMPTY WORDS.

Jeremiah tell me about the fire
That burns up in your bones
I want to know
I want to know more now (1)

Lord, obssess me with You.


“ ‘…Now Wilhelm, I’m trying to do you some good. I want to tell you, don’t marry suffering. Some people do. They get married to it, and sleep and eat together, just as husband and wife. If they go with joy they think it’s adultery.’

When Wilhelm heard this he had, in spite of himself, to admit that there was a great deal in Tamkin’s words. Yes, thought Wilhelm, suffering is the only kind of life they are sure they can have, and if they quit suffering they’re afraid they’ll have nothing. He knows it. This time the faker knows what he’s talking about. ” (2)




I was looking to myself
And I forgot the power of God
I was standing with a sparkler in my hand
While I stood so proud and profound You went and burned the whole place down
Now that’s a fire
...I was dwelling on my hopelessness and doubt
With the slightest invitation You came with total detonation
Now that’s a fire (1)




(3)

“It is for us Christians, then…to do these two things: first, to learn to be receptive of life before plunging into activity, to learn to be possessed of life, of truth, of love, to be possessed by God; then secondly, to learn to face the squalors of life as they come to us—and we do not grow into the light by trying to escape the darkness but by meeting it—with courage and tranquility, as we shall then be enabled to do…” (4)

( "If we don't start in the face of impossibilities, when do we start?" (5) )

I was warming my hands by this little light of mine
but now I know it’s time
time to come in from the cold
Fight fire with fire, come fan the flame
come stir up these coals in my soul, in my soul (1)

'No amount of falls will really undo us if we keep on picking ourselves up each time. We shall of course be very muddy & tattered children by the time we reach home. But the baths are all ready, the towels put out, & the clean clothes in the airing cupboard. The only fatal thing is to lose one's temper & give it up. It is when we notice the dirt that God is most present in us: it is the very sign of his presence.' -C.S. Lewis

"YOU WERE TAUGHT TO PUT AWAY YOUR FORMER WAY OF LIFE, YOUR OLD SELF, CORRUPT AND DELUDED BY ITS LUSTS, AND TO BE RENEWED IN THE SPIRIT OF YOUR MINDS... LET NO ONE DECEIVE YOU WITH EMPTY WORDS..."
letter to the Ephesians, 4:22a, 5:6a

Lord, obssess me with You.

(1) 'Jeremiah' on the Sara Groves album The Other Side of Something.
(2) From Seize the Day, by Saul Bellow
(3) Andy Goldsworthy's work Rowan Leaves with Hole
(4) From an article by British Dominican priest Father Gerald Vann, written in the 1950s and printed in Image Magazine No. 52, Winter 2007 issue.
(5) from Ken Pike, pioneering linguist and Bible translator.

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.