THE NEWS FROM LAKE WOBEGON

Don't you think it's time I blogged?  It has been ages.  I am going to put my brain on shuffle:

1) I am listening to the new Great Book of John album at this moment.  Holy God.  It has been blowing me away all day.  I can't believe I know these people.  You can listen to it for free this week right here.  The big songs are so big and the little ones are so sweet and dreamy and all the words are grand.  It fills me with HOMETOWN PRIDE and general awe.  Once, when asked what he was doing with his life, Taylor told me "You know, just trying to be Leonard Cohen."  It's a lofty goal, but I love the ambition of it, I think he is living into it and this album is proof.  It is always a risk to do something big, to believe you are capable of it, but look what happens when you take it.  Is that too cheesy?  I have been thinking it all day, so I thought I would write it down.  It is a forever struggle with creating anything, I teeter back and forth between creating for the deep down delight of it and then mocking myself for thinking I could ever make something big and beautiful, and then I hear something like this and I think Hey dummy, Just go for it, Self-doubt is for nerds.

2) I spent this entire evening playing around on pinterest, and I love it.  You can just create a pretty space to visit whenever you need a shot of happy. Thanks to LIZ for introducing me to it through your blog.

3) Out of left field, I was wondering why so many religions are so resistant to things that change.  One time, Rumi said

Anything that comes and goes,
rises and sets, is not
what I love.

And he said it in a really pretty way, but I love things that rise and set, live and die, bloom and wither, don't you?  Doesn't that make the blooming all the more special?  It seems like a thing we need to think about a lot, really understand, really come to love, because it is the way of things.  Why does something need to last forever to be meaningful or true?  And why would constancy be the thing you reach for when you reach for God?  This is confusing to me because people live their whole lives embedded in relationships that change and grow and wither and die and then spring up again, and of course know how beautiful it is to know a changing thing over time.  Alfred North Whitehead, that old sweetheart, says that everyone observes change and changelessness, and religions tend to concentrate on the changeless, but the real trick is to find the way that the two coexist.  The problem is that if the change is slow enough, we mistake it for changelessness, but very few things are actually eternal.  I feel like if I focus in on the change, study it deep, then the big eternal patterns will start to emerge.  I think that is better than trying to start with the eternals and then crying big ole tears when life throws them into question.

4) Look at my new house.

I likey.

5)  Do lists make things more interesting or less?  Does it feel tedious to read the things I think when I enumerate them?

6) In my new house, my room has a door directly onto the back porch.  A back porch!  Thank God!  Everything is close by, so I walk a lot more, but I also drink a lot more and smoke more, so there is give and take.  I miss my boys and I love my girls.  The dog is bony and doesn't fit well in laps, but she is a snuggler and a happy face, a trusty friend.

7) Oh.  Dad and I saw ALISON KRAUSS & UNION STATION this weekend.  She is a siren, I think she may be perpetually drunk, but she sings like an angel, she has hair that flows.  They have been playing together since they were 19.  They are 40 now.  SHE has been recording music since she was 13!  Can you imagine, just playing music every night for nearly 30 years, you would be a god.  I want to throw myself at something with that much velocity.  I always think she is not much of a fiddler, because her general presence is so subdued and doesn't seem conducive to fiery fiddling, but then, maybe once or twice a show, she will pull out the big guns and knock your socks off.

...yep.  We will leave it at 7.