Sittin' on the Dock of the Bay

I am settling into the time in my life when things are just fun.  I really don't think I need to rush through this.  I tend to think if I'm not stressed, then something is wrong, I must not be devoting myself to enough meaningful tasks, but that is fine, the time for stress will come.  Ever since I graduated, I have been totally living it up.  Look through my pictures, and there have been a lot of pictures, look through them and you will see.  I can't wait to make my "Top moments of 2009" list, it is gonna be dynamite.  All I have time for in my life right now are the things I love.  nothing else.  And I am not even talking about selfish things, not necessarily.  I have had time to do some lovely charitable things too, and the money to do them, if charitable is the word.  I would rather say "meaningful," but isn't everything meaningful?

It's just good times.  It is the "why not?" days.  Why not build a fort in the living room and keep it up for 4 days?  Why not take a walk down to the lake?  Why not spend $50 to see a band I've never heard before, and have my face rocked off?  Why not sit and read with Bump in my lap all day?  For most of my life, I've thought life ended after college.  You buckle down, you become responsible and bland.  But really, I am several big life changes away from that happening from necessity (if it ever even happens by necessity).  And life will get harder, there will be obligations, and people to tend to and work that is harder, and I will cherish that, I will love it, but here is now, and it is great.

That's all I wanted to say. Mary Oliver said something like "If you have not been enchanted by this adventure, your life, then what would do for you?"  I am enchanted by this adventure.  Once, and I have no idea why we did this, but once, Craig and I devoted a whole evening to discussing "the romance of travel," and how we used to want so much to be somewhere else, how we thought this would make our lives, how we envied the people who actually go out and do it, how exotic we thought those people must be, and how little we feel this way anymore.  We both still love to travel.  By the end of the talk, I was dying for Poland.  BUT.  Somewhere along the line, I learned to love everything, all the things in front of me, the land, the landscape, the people, the sites, the knowing over time, and I can't remember anymore that restlessness with the ordinary.  Maybe this makes me boring, but it makes my life 12 shades brighter and fuller.

A book and a holiday

It is time for me to GUSH about this book, All Over But the Shoutin'.  Ole Critter recommended it to me almost a year ago, I do believe, and I finally got to reading it in the past month.  I take Critter's book recommendations VERY seriously.  At least one of them has changed my life.  This book, of course, was dynamite.

Rick Bragg is a journalist for the New York Times who grew up dirt poor in a part of rural Alabama that I couldn't live further from, but still, he makes me proud to be from the south.   This book is his memoir.  He says in it over and over again that he isn't lending dignity to those he writes about, he is just uncovering the dignity that is already there, but even this is a sort of tooting-one's-own-horn, yes?  Even so, by the end of the thing, I have to agree with him.  Somehow, he manages to glorify the people and places he writes about without aggrandizing them.  I found myself beaming with pride as he described the Krispy Kreme on Ponce de Leon and the Milo's double cheeseburger.  It is a careful balance, writing with love without skewing the facts a little, but the result is lovably scruffy characters and delightful similes as far as the eye can see.  I just can't recommend it enough.

Yesterday was just what a Thanksgiving should be.  In the morning, as I read on the couch and Dad sipped his coffee in the kitchen, he invited me to come meet his new pet, which was a tiny chameleon, eyes closed, sunbathing in the windowsill.  He said there's been a slew of them lately, that they must be sneaking in through the basement.  I snatched him by the tail and felt him between my fingers and escorted him out onto the back porch.  I was thankful.  The rest was business as usual, casseroles and dumplings, tugging on all the old aunts for good forgotten family stories, high school reunions at the bar.  Most times I think I could never live here again, but days like yesterday, I wonder.

Dad cleared the "weeds" around the driveway.  This means the honeysuckles.  I tried not to be devastated.  I will miss their sweetness when spring comes around again.

Salvation is Created

I don't really write anymore, I just wander through my head and transcribe the trip.  Ramble ramble.

 I really want to find a way to articulate how I feel about religion now, particularly Christianity, and what about me is spiritual?  When I say I am spiritual, what does that mean?

It does mean that when I listen to Salvation is Created, I feel deep and full and worshipful of something, it stirs me, how can you not worship something listening to this music?  Maybe this isn't the best soundtrack for this post, it is sweeping me away, and I need to be here, with my brain, to think for a bit.  What do I mean when I say I'm spiritual?  What is my relationship to Christianity?  Is it fair for me to be moved by things like this song, when I have no commitment to the faith community or their authority or anything that they represent?  It doesn't matter what is fair, it moves me, it would move anyone with half a heart.


I am a friend of faith, I am not put off by it.  When we went to see the Lee University Music EXTRAVAGANZA, I think Sam was a little confused, and Ann was polite, but Becca was downright pissed, she feels nothing but bitterness and jealousy for that kind of Christians.  Man, when I heard Campus Choir singing, I remembered it all, and I knew they meant what they were singing, which was nothing at all but "Praise praise praise," which is a song I can appreciate lately, and even though I don't mean it in the same way they do, I can sit and listen and love it, love every second of it, feel myself moved.  You've got to recognize that there is something moving in their music.  Maybe it's not the Holy Spirit, maybe it is just the power of music, of three part harmonies and anxious kids, but isn't that the Holy Spirit anyway?  What is this big separation, what are you looking to prove?  There it is, feel your heart moving!  That is the Holy Spirit, and I'm not talking about some lofty theological concept, I am talking about your heart moving, that's the ticket.

The spiritual is right in front of us.  Now I can't be sure, but I think someone who is truly religious would find what I am saying repulsive.  They would say I'm mistaking the effect for the cause, or something like that, they would say I'm taking the kick drum over the Spirit, but I think they are wrong, I think the kick drum is the Spirit.  Once, Cody Case said "I used to worry so much about whether I believe in God, and eventually, the question just didn't make any sense to me."  That is how I feel.  The question doesn't make sense to me.  I do not take Christian doctrine and penal substitutionary atonement and the trinity and biblical authority and the evil of gayness and the importance of prayer, I don't take those things for granted, no no no, but!  Everything is spiritual.  Duh.  Of course I can learn from a tree, of course it has some kind of spiritual authority to teach me, as does the singing bird as does the grass as does Bump as does Jesus of course, everything lives so beautifully or so uglily, and it says "Here, this is our song, would you like to join?" and I say "Oh yes!  Oh please, can I?" or I say "Blech, goodness no, thank you."  It is usually reality television and Sunday morning services that I am saying no to.  It is usually falling leaves that I am saying yes to.   And of course everything is holy, and divine, of course.  I wouldn't call it transcendence, that doesn't quite make sense, for everything to be transcendent, because then what is it transcending?  But everything is more than we think, everything is holy.  God is not in one place or one way of life, she is absolutely everywhere, yes even in the murderer and rapist, and that is what is so filthy about rape, is that you've got something holy ravishing something that is holy, because if we are just nothing, then who cares about rape?  Oh, how everything is holy.  Now, is killing holy?  I am asking, so as to test the limits of this idea that everything is holy, because killing is an easy, obvious thing that seems wrong.  Is it holy?  It is sacred, because it is the way of things.  I am not talking about war.  War is filthy.  But the act of killing is necessary, ask the cheetah, ask the bird, for heavens sakes, even the bird must take the life of the worm, this is the truest thing in the world, that life eats life, and that means killing, extinguishing, except for plants, in their leafy paradise, the plants who need nothing but sweet sunlight to carry on, the rest of us though, the rest of us just can't survive without killing, and we can't think it's ugly if it brings us life.  We have to approach it with humility and as a solemn act, we must thank the life that gives itself, not because it will curse us if we don't, but because otherwise we will forget that death begets life, that our lives are made of death, that this is the way of things, and that one day, we will be folded into the whole thing, we will beget life through our dying, something will feast on us, it is just true.

I have trouble talking about how I am spiritual, because I think ordinary things are spiritual.  These lessons I learn from trees and poetry are the same ones some people are learning from Jesus, but they think mine are not spiritual, because they came from a tree, instead of Jesus.  But I think the lesson is what is spiritual.

So far, I have said nothing significant.  None of this will help.  The problem is that I don't know exactly where I fit, and neither does anyone else, and I think that is a little confusing for all of us.  I don't want Ricky Gervais to think I am an idiot.  I don't really care if you think I'm a heretic or crazy, but I also don't want Amanda Rodriguez to doubt my genuine appreciation of her life of faith.  I once told her that demons are real, in a metaphorical sense, that it's all just a matter of language, that it's all true, and she said "Yes, but I don't believe it is true in a metaphorical sense, I believe it is true."  And I know just what she means, and I think there is a real distinction there. or maybe there isn't at all.
 

When I see someone behaving awfully, I could say "A demon's gotten a holt of 'im," and I could mean it, anger is a sort of demon, people act in ways they don't actually want to act, people are possessed by their emotions, they are blinded by their anger, and one way to talk about this would be demons. But when Amanda sees this happening, she doesn't think the anger is the demon, she thinks the demon is causing the anger, so that's a difference, yes?  But I'm wanting to know, what is a demon?  Does it have horns and a windy red tail and a pitchfork?  Because if not, if it's just a spirit to you, then what is a demon besides a ball of anger?  If we're just talking about the way evil gets accomplished in the world, then anything that causes people to behave in ways that aren't good or that aren't in accord with what they actually want to do, that is a demon, that is how a demon works.  like the Screwtape Letters.  That book is very apt at describing how evil is perpetuated, or more importantly, how good is thwarted.  I guess the difference is whether there is a mind with a will moving these things around, or whether they are just forces.  But I don't know, maybe there is a will behind it.  I guess for me, that is not the relevant question.  I think what is relevant is-there are things causing you to behave in ways you are not wanting to behave, and becoming conscious of these things and their workings can help you to become more of the person you are wanting to become, and also, when other people do awful things, remember that maybe this is not who they want to be.

This has been useless, but very interesting.  What I like about this is that there is so much to talk about, I love going through everything religious and saying "Yes, but is this still true?  If you strip away the nonsense, is it still true?  Let's see, let's play."  Now some may think I am an idiot for wanting any part in the conversation, but I am just having a good time, and I think I am getting closer to truth.  Fuck the naysayers cuz they don't mean a thing, this is what style we bring.

On the Weekends

This weekend could not have been better. Today we carved pumpkins, and I love carving pumpkins, I love gutting them, squishing all their slimy guts and seeds through my fingers, scooping into their sides like ice cream til they're nice and smooth, and then drawing pictures on their skin. It feels like 5th grade, like falls on Frisco Street, and then David cooked up our seeds and made a tasty Sunday snack. David always knows how to make everything more fun. And earlier, we played Triple Yahtzee and drank hot chocolate, and then we saw Where the Wild Things Are, a real triumph, and watched football and baseball and all the right teams were winning, and then, in the long in between, I read books, I sat and read forever, I read some soul-expanding poetry and some of that awful writing that you just can't put down and some Native American memoirs and some stories from Lake Wobegon. I have been starving for books these days, and I won't say I got my fill, but I got a good helping, that is for sure. And the days were wide open enough that I could wander, I could stop to sing a song or dance with Bump or fold the laundry or write letters that I will never send.

And just now, I got to see 3 fellas whose music I used to love, long about the 10th grade, and they were just as funny and honest and beautiful and harmonizing as ever. I wore my new beret. I was a little self-conscious but maybe a little proud too. I can't believe they are still making music, 10 years later, it makes me feel like I am a true fan, that I have loved them for a full 10 years, but really, there were 4 or 5 years in there somewhere when I wasn't so much concerned with them. That's ok, though.

"I ain't cutting my hair til the good Lord comes." - Joshua James

And for once, though I let out a long sigh at the thought of Monday morning, back at the grindstone, I feel like the weekend has been medicine instead of a whirlwind, I feel a little more like myself, or a lot, and everything is not paralyzing, and I don't even know that I realized I was paralyzed before. But it is nice, it is nice.

Some Things, Say the Wise Ones

Some things, say the wise ones who know everything,
are not living. I say,
you live your life your way and leave me alone.

I have talked with the faint clouds in the sky when they
are afraid of being left behind; I have said, Hurry, hurry!
and they have said: Thank you, we are hurrying.

About cows, and starfish, and roses, there is no
argument. They die, after all.

But water is a question, so many living things in it,
but what is it, itself, living or not? Oh, gleaming

generosity, how can they write you out?

As I think this I am sitting on the sand beside
the harbor. I am holding in my hand
small pieces of granite, pyrite, schist.
Each one, just now, so thoroughly asleep.

-Mary Oliver, Why I Wake Early

When no one is around,

this is what my heart says.

from my journal, untranslated, just because:

Inside of me, I feel big and open and so satisfied. Outside, my toe is tapping to no rhythm, antsy, achy butt, crouched, not quite here. I want to shed it all, and I want to be chapped-chested. sandy and red. tree bark on my hands, tough from climbing. I want to crouch. You know? I want to make my own path. I am so bored by trails. The woods is for making your own way, for discovery.

Do you know what just came upon me? Happiness. Thank you, sweet Universe. Oh you.

I am so numerous. I am a thousand songs, but half of them are just impersonations.

There is a scene out the window that I want to eat. yellow leaves and iron bars in the sexiest curves. I am drunk on them, I want to stare, googly-eyed. It is like a Tim Burton cartoon, dancing up to heaven. There is a white umbrella. I would pull out my camera, but it would look like a nothing squished in a square.

Feel the music pulling up you soul. Feel your heart lifting in the hands of the song. so physical.

We are all wrong about everything. meaning, everything is right, we are all wrong in our wrong-naming, it makes me shiver, not shiver, it makes me tremor in wonder, why won't this song go on forever, why? I am sick thinking of it ending. It is a vision. Goodbye, mystical rising.

The others mute my delight, they have rules, they call it weird, and they want words, normal words, about the weather and television, which I love even, but not the way they discuss them. Everything must be stripped of its transcendence when in public. But that is only for those like me, like me and young Black Elk, who fear judgment. The brave will leave it glistening on their tongues, and it shines into our hearts, a connection, a joy. Damnit, I love everything. Everything is lovely. I will say it, and you will say "Unh uh," and I will say "Damnit! Yes!" and then I will convince you, you will see it through my eyes, and if you won't, to the trash heap with ya.

Can I be incommunicable for a few years? Won't it help me grow, to withdraw for a bit? and then I will come out singing. I don't want to withdraw forever, or do I? If I withdraw, my skin will get skinnier, and then how will I ever speak? without fear of being torn to pieces? I do want to speak, I want something spoken, not for them so much, for myself. They say that is odd too, they say "Of course you speak to be heard," but do I? Some days. Mostly, though, I want to create so that I will be a creator, what power. Most people need a them to say "Yes we approve, yes you are a star," but I know how wrong thems can be, or how fickle, how much it can ache to place your value in a them, how big the fear of changing grows once you have gotten their yes. I love the space I give myself to be, to discover, to say yes to what I will say yes to.

It's such a pleasure
to touch your face.
-Jo La Tengo

They say "I want this for you, everyone deserves a this," and that makes me pine. They want it for everyone because it is their joy, but I have joys of my own, and I let myself believe it when they tell me "Yes but those joys are nothing compared to-" Maybe you have never dug your fingernails into my joys, Mrs. But I have more joys at my fingertips than you could dream up, here in my snowy cabin of fireplace firing of solitary.

You see, the treasure is not in the treasure. The treasure is in you, in your eyes. It's in your treasuring.

This is a secret. Keep it safe.

Oh, in 6 days, I will be washed up a frigid shore with shrimps and Spanish moss and lesbians and ice cream cones. windows windows and marshes and gardens, clear air. cool sheets, flat screen football. It is not even the windows or the overstuffed furniture. It's, there is this smell. I love the smell of that place.

My only worry, to be honest, is that I take and take and treasure, but never give. I cannot help but think that this must lead to a certain spiritual obesity, but. But then you have to fight and finagle just to get them to want what you give, they will call your song a cheese river or hopelessly naive, selfish and indulgent, nails on a chalkboard, boring, or, or absolutely most devastating of all, they will call it: unremarkable. Is giving worth being rejected? Do I want so much to give? I will only give when my gift is a gift, I will not beg to give.

This tabletop is a wonder, so colorful, it splatters all over me, I splatter back. splatter.

Yes, only give when it is a gift. Of course, you cannot give in this way with 100% accuracy. Sometimes I love carrying others as burdens, I love the weight. That is not true, but it is a thing that deserves striving. Sometimes friends are burdens, we knock up against each other and step on toes because we are so close to one another and I love it, I love being bunched up in a bundle with others. And if I love to carry, I must let myself be carried now and again, not just when I'm sopping in sorrows, but when I am crazy and careless, when I am so loud and annoying, I must let myself be carried, I am not so heavy. figuratively speaking.

Can I say it again? Can I be a broken record? I am so happy to be living, to be just living, to be normally living, with a job no bigger than the money. I think of Grandma Edna, what an average life she lived, she played cards, she laughed all sweet and dainty, she raised the children in an apron, she burned the beans, and I think, could there be anything more grand? anything more desirable? than playing cards on Wednesday nights? than leaning on your 55 year old alcoholic daughter as she leans right back? than making pink lemonade for the grandkids and painting easter eggs? Can there be anything more beautiful? There was not a dry eye at her funeral, a tunnel full of people, touched by her life, so grateful to have known her, feeling a scoop of themselves missing with Edna Whitson gone from this world, can there be anything greater? See, and this is how I know I want to be known. The solitary is sweet, but it is not it all.

"Please. Call me Edweena."

Something like this:

"Not long since, a strolling Indian went to sell baskets at the house of a well-known lawyer in my neighborhood. 'Do you wish to buy any baskets?' he asked. 'No, we do not want any,' was the reply. 'What!' exclaimed the Indian as he went out the gate, 'do you mean to starve us?' Having seen his industrious white neighbors so well off, - that the lawyer had only to weave arguments, and, by some magic, wealth and standing followed, - he had said to himself: I will go into business; I will weave baskets; it is a thing which I can do. Thinking that when he had made the baskets he would have done his part, and then it would be the white man's to buy them. He had not discovered that it was necessary for him to make it worth the other's while to buy them, or at least make him think that it was so, or to make something else which it would be worth his while to buy. I too had woven a kind of basket of a delicate texture, but I had not made it worth anyone's while to buy them. Yet not the less in my case, did I think it worth my while to weave them, and instead of studying how to make it worth men's while to buy my baskets, I studied rather how to avoid the necessity of selling them. The life which men praise and regard as successful is but one kind. Why should we exaggerate any one kind at the expense of the others?"

-Thoreau, Walden

I just want to read Rilke forever.

As one puts a handkerchief before pent-in breath -
no: as one presses it against a wound
out of which the whole of life, in a single gush,
wants to stream, I held you to me: I saw
you turn red from me. How could anyone express
what took place between us? We made up for everything
there was never time for. I matured strangely
in every impulse of unperformed youth,
and you, love, somehow had
wildest childhood over my heart.

Memory won't suffice here: from those moments
there must be layers of pure existence
on my being's floor, a precipitate
from that immensely overfilled solution.
For I don't think back; all that I am
stirs me because of you. I don't invent you
at sadly cooled-off places from which
you've gone away; even your not being there
is warm with you and more real and more
than a privation. Longing leads out too often
into vagueness. Why should I cast myself,
when, for all I know, your influence falls on me,
gently, like moonlight on a window seat.

-from Rilke's Uncollected Poems

Dweeb. Music.

Derek Webb linked to this article on his Twitter, and I am starting to think it is 100% right about what he is doing with his new album. I think all of this hype leading up to the album's release, all the options to get 3 tiers worth of packages, t-shirts and videos and so on, all of it was just a ploy to show us how enslaved we are by consumerism and such. He is, and this is too grandiose of a statement, but he is emerging as a genius. He has been going on for several years about Christians making good art, leading cultural trends instead of pathetically following them, and I think he is actually learning to do it, he is doing things that no one else is doing, clever things, sexy things, and he is also using the internet to do things that no one else is doing. To be sure, he is also having a ton of fun doing it, and when musicians start to have fun, instead of trying so hard to impress and to zing, that is when they really start creating beautiful things. I hope he doesn't think he is a genius, I hope he doesn't think he is ROCKING OUR FACES OFF WITH HIS BRILLIANCE, it would be embarrassingly self-important, but I do, I think he is a genius, and that he is having fun. My only concern with this Stockholm Syndrome business is that he seems to be mocking my devotion to him, it makes me feel like an idiot for buying those extras I did buy. I think mostly it is a conundrum.
Here is a song that I love. Abra Moore is probably the weirdest woman I have ever seen, and her studio albums are a bore, but her live performances are enchanting if you ask me, almost uncomfortably vulnerable but enchanting instead. Also lovely is this video of her song, After All These Years, if you have some time. Apparently, she is huge in Texas. I first heard her long about 4 years ago touring with a fellow called Teitur on the "Modern Troubadours" tour, but have had a hard time keeping up my fandom, as a result of her horrendous studio arrangements. It was a week or two ago that I remembered the internet and its vast array of live video performances, and was happy to have my appreciation for little Abra revived. Here she is.

Happiness

Did you know that last month, Regan was the NUMBER 1 salesperson WORLDWIDE for Borders? World class, we're talking. Since she obviously has some clout in the organization, I have asked her to procure a job for me. Fingers crossed.
Here is my favorite line from the new Derek Webb album:

"Baby when I put my hands on you
Feel like I'm touching the earth"

The cheap classical guitar sitting in my corner called out to me the other night and said "Give me a whirl," and so I obliged. I gave her a whirl, right there in front of my computer, and this is what came out. It is sloppy and thoughtless as can be, but I am convinced if you listen to anything enough times, it will sound rehearsed and justright.

There is a song called Happiness on the Dark Was the Night compilation by some band called Riceboy Sleeps, and it is precisely that, it is happiness, which is strange, because parts of it actually sound incredibly sad, weepy. It is nothing at all if you actually listen to it. I have not been able to listen to it even one time all the way through, it beckons distractions, and you start thinking about the weather and what you will do with your Sunday and what sort of tea you will be drinking today and suddenly you find yourself thinking of all the sweet friends you've ever had and how appreciative you are for life and sunshine and you smile reflectively, and all the while it is building building, and finally you notice it again, in a moment of starry gratitude, welling up around you in happiness, you want to cry for happiness. I don't know how they do it. Obviously, I am listening to it now.

I believe I will go finish my Native American book.