And if you think I'm being blasphemous, then feel free to click away. I'm not... but working on 46 hours without sleep, this Christian grrl is not in the mood for itty bitty minds. This Sabbath blog is all about the transformative strength of human prowess, the sacrament that is bearing a child, and the real reason why 954 miles is way too far away.
In truth, I suppose that all these blogs are about transformation. “You Move Me,” (Susan Ashton) right, Abbie? There is something about CCM singers... and I'm not even a country fan, honey. Because without Christ telling us to get up and *change,* without:
“...Frozen solid with fear.
Like a rock in the ground.
But you move me.
You give me courage I didn't
Know I had.
I can't go with you
And stay where I am...”
It is *all* about the transformative everything, the event, the sour grapes, the cherry pits, and lemonade-making that threatens us when we least except it. The getting *stuck*... the getting *unstuck,* the moving on, the moving up, the life and death and growing and dying, those things we can't change that we wind up being changed by and so we do change them because we change how we see them and the world around us.
Every moment we draw breath is about being ready for transformation. You've seen the t-shirts, right? “Got Christ?” Are you ready? And you once said to me, “Of course. I've been waiting all my life.” Stop waiting. Find it. Seize it. Not the day, sweetheart, the change. Unfold it like a note from a high school friend or a birthday gift or an origami crane that wants to lay its secrets bare in the palm of your hand. Take this moment *now* because it's yours from Christ.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bgQLEfSi9ys
So I got the heads up from a buddy in Washington who used to be my sparring partner. CBS. Saturday. 10 o'clock. EliteXC MMA. That's league-style mixed martial arts, three matches (women's, middleweight, heavyweight). I don't own a tv (stop laughing, Alyson) because the only one who ever turned it on was Mom and after she went a'wandering I found it a better use of space to hang a 4' x 3' painting there and pawn the flat screen for exactly what she bought it for on sale.
So that meant there was me (danger addict) and there was a tv show that I wanted to watch... and there was the biker bar six blocks away that had a flat screen (maybe from the pawn shop?) mounted above the old school jukebox.
Fire her up, baby. Time to take the Kawi into no-grrl's land LOL ... Okay, I'm not an idiot. I walked. You don't take a half-nude sports bike to a hardbody bar. I just threw on my jacket, buckled up my boots and *pretended* I rode... I imagined a fiery red Harley, of course. The bike everyone and their brother (and their sister) assumes I ride when I say, “Yeah, I'm a biker chick.” For the record: It's a hot green Kawasaki Z1000.
To say I was the only woman in the bar that night would be too dramatic. So let's continue to make believe, Trolley, and say the place was crawling (*snort*) with chicks, all hanging on their bearded daddy figures (but goodness, Jenn, do you really love mountain men?). Yep. Let's just click our ruby engineer boots together and pretend that.
For the first time in two months I was acutely aware of the fact that I weighed the same as a Labrador Retriever. I pledge to eat more pasta as I order my Coke with Cream (eyebrows are raised... tiny smirks hide behind great big beards (*seriously,* Jenn?).
The show starts. During preamble I remember talking to you once about bikes. No, not BMX, the “crotch rockets,” as Tricia (and Google) calls them. Super sport and other tricked, cowled bikes that rock my world. It seemed strangely illicit to explain to you the difference between nude and half-nude, between dumping, laying her down, and rolling her over. It was almost a relief when the conversation shifted to hardbodied babies because then I was detached and removed and could stop imagining you on my Z1000 saying something breathy like, “That was really... *fun.*”
If you don't like watching boxing because it's bloody, aggressive and you get a testosterone high off your tv set, than MMA is not for you. If you don't like boxing because you find yourself screaming, “Oh, just *kick* him!” then you have found your sport. Smoosh boxing, karate, wrestling and jujitsu all together and you've got MMA. Smoosh combatants against the mat, against each other, or against the chainlink that wraps around the cage and you've got MMA.
Back when I first came to LA, there was a club all in blue (you know which one I mean) where I loved to dance. I was on the floor at least three times a week. It was my release from the day, from life, from reality... I thought it was enough. Then a fellow dancer (name not important, never knew it) said, “You like to fight?” And the rest was history so much sweeter than that movie with Brad What's His Name and so much more release than dancing, sex or anything else under God's blue sky. It was the second night, when I pulled my red mesh top over my head to step into the chalk circle drawn on the cold concrete floor in just my boots, jeans and sports bra that someone in the gathered fighters saw the wings tattooed across my lower back... and someone else called out, “Who wants to lay odds against Angel?” All these years later, it appears the name stuck and every time I hear it I remember that night and walking out with a broken finger, a black eye and two grand. Because back then, *everybody* bet against the grrl.
I was in college when I first read Camille Paglia. Her ideas were transformative for me in that my beliefs in some things were changed and in others were moved further forward. Whatever her take on sexuality or women's responsibility, I will never forget her simple statement: We don't want our men effeminate and flaccid. We want our men, *men*... fully aggressive, fully engaged, erect and alive. Anything else is neutered. Anything else is not a man.
The MMA announcer drones during the second match: “Look how they touch each other's gloves like that again and again. Even in the heat of the match like this, they are showing their sportsmanship, their warriors companionship.” The next morning my old sparring partner deadpans to me in email: “Spare me. They touch gloves to spot check their opponent, to place where he in space so he can kill him.” And I laugh so hard that the cat runs out of the room.
I have never met a male boxer, pro martial artist, or a soldier who didn't exude a certain masculinity. A fully-realized male *adulthood.* Which isn't to say that all these men were burly, brawny, bawdy men. Far from. But they were self-possessed. They carried a certainty that I have never seen in other men. It was as though these men had not just lived their lives but embraced, however briefly, a primal danger, a side of themselves that God gave men and men alone. The alpha warrior. Protect. Serve. Survive. They have a *calm* that I don't see elsewhere.
The same is true for women. There is a fully-realized adulthood that seems to settle around women who have borne children. Yes, my friends who have *raised* children but not carried them also have a sense about them, a certain wisdom and way of being different in the world, but there is something deep and still about the women I have known and seen change over the course of those nine months and into their first year:
“And I was
forever changed
from woman
to mother.”
These women have tapped into that same thing as male fighters. That primal base of excellence that God granted to women and women alone.
Mother. Fighter. These demand unyielding conviction. This is the unwillingness to walk away from any situation and simply “let it be.” This is proving that nothing is impossible and nothing is outside our influence. This is the creation of life... this is the creation of power... which, of course, is the same thing. This is when mettle is tested. This is when life falls into perspective. This is when the sacrament is received.
Now I understand that what I'm saying here could be construed as disgustingly anti-feminist and down-right primeval. But take a step back and just consider before you bombard me with PC-laden emails of picket sign slogans. I am not saying that men who don't fight are less than, just different. I am not saying that women who don't bear children are less than, just different. And I am certainly not saying that all fighters and all mothers have captured this calm. I am simply saying: God gave us a genetic blueprint. Our bodies carry it. When we embrace it, when we live it, we experience a growth, a change, a transformation. We receive a sacrament that we can absolutely live without... but that by partaking of we reach a new place.
It also deserves to be shared that I am not a mother and I am a fighter. My desire to be a mother is a palpable thing inside me and has been since I was a little grrl, but it isn't something that will ever be a reality. Maybe I find myself positioned in the world as a fighter because I don't have a cycle. I never have. Sorry for the over-share, there, buddies, but I say that like someone else might say they get headaches or are prone to hives when they read about campaign reform. I nannied for three years and I surround myself with my friends' little ones... but it isn't the same. Nor is fighting the same for me as I feel it might be for a man. But this are the closest I can come to these transformative moments and I embrace what I can reach with great joy. I embrace these truths in my life:
My physical strength and skill, my ability to control my body, my bike, my mood, is a thing of pride for me.
My willingness to take the next step into a dark place, to listen to the faint whispers of Christ, to loudly say, “No. You are wrong.” when faced with man making pretzels of the holy word, my utter belief that I am never alone (and that I am always with you), is the core of who I am.
I may never be as fully realized as my beloved friends Jess and Jenn, who I watched transform before my eyes over those nine months, but I strive daily to be the fully realized *me* that Christ intended.
And that includes having a great upper cut.
EJ
A personal P.S.: When you told me you had watched the bouts – a casual aside – I have to admit I was shocked. I know you as fine and articulate, beautiful and introspective... most certainly not impressed with a solid left hook, fluid form or blood sport. Most absolutely not aroused by the base prowess of the fight. ... I really should have known better. All the best signs were there. Your digital grin when a mutual friend informed you of the brawl on set (on camera!)... or your delighted “mean streak” when the security monitor displayed a certain “Pipi” slam a double against the side of a Tahoe because she jabbed my chest with one pointy finger. Fight club? “Hmm. You're quite a grrl, Angel.” Looking for a new sport? “Gee, street fighting looks fun.” Now, when I replay that last featured match in my mind, the brutal left jab, right hook that sprayed Jimmy's ear all over his face, the mat, and Kimbo Slice, I can see you grimace even as you mutter, “What a combo!” Suddenly... I have a burning desire to be with you next Saturday night ;) God bless CBS.
Sunday, June 01, 2008
Sunday, May 25, 2008
Returning to You with Every New Dawn
It is raining where you are. Where both of you are. Where all three of you are. My goodness. Tonight... this silent night... there are *eight* of you there in that house. Nestled in the woods, in the most beautiful temperate rain forest in the world. Under a roof I helped shingle. Surrounded by trees I have pruned. Bordered by roses I have cupped in my hands.
I am a world away; Los Angeles is practically another dimension, my friends, my love. I am dreaming. In bed alone with my hand on your pillow, with my ole one-eyed cat snoring loudly. I’m dreaming:
Bare feet against golden white sand. The pale blue-green waves around my ankles are like something carbonated, tiny warm bubbles in clean, popping foam. There are occasional stones in the sand but they are flat and smooth and completely clear. Skip them, angel, and they’ll vanish into the depths like cosmic fish. But they’ll also grant your every wish; Let me instead?
You are walking beside me. You hold my hand. Your hair falls to your waist. The white ties of your shirt are undone. Your white skirt is brushed cotton. You whisper into the wind, “I love you like moonlight, your heart like the tide.”
A gentle wave washes red rose petals around our feet and I wake to find you beside me.
“EJ,” said Jessica on the phone, her new-mom voice exhausted with joy. “Tell me again, Angel. Tell me again.”
Jess? Here, again:
At the end of my days I walk the shore of eternity with my Lord. And He has all the time in the world for me and all the time in forever. He is never rushed. He is never distracted. He is my own and I am His. I want for nothing and no one because everything I have ever loved is in His eyes. I looked all my life for a man to complete me... and only one could.
I look back over my shoulder. I see our footprints in the sand. I see where we ran hard. I see where we sank to our knees together. I see where we stumbled, fell, stood back up – oh, Jess... Brianne... Tricia... Cris... *stood back up!* -- and marched on. I see those places where there is only one set of footprints.
Shyly I look up at Him. I smile. I whisper, “I like it when you carried me.”
It's raining in Port Orchard, Washington. You are sleeping somewhere where you can hear it. It sounds like words from God against the roof. The thrumming carries His words down to you. Listen very carefully and His voice blooms in your mind and heart, no longer hidden away by the filter of the world. He is always insistent. He is always fair. And He always knows us far better than we know ourselves. His rain says:
“Oh, my soul, sometimes we don't know what to do.
We work so hard being tough on our own
But now it's me and you.
Let's give it up, these sad bones
'Cause we are following hard times.
But you don't have to stand up all alone
Just put your hand in mine.”
Climb on a back that’s strong. We are never alone. I am with you... Christ said that, too, you know. And:
I want to help you with everything. I want to comfort you when you're scared. Come to you, hold you when you are lonely. I want to make you laugh when you want to cry, to make you shout praises to God when you want to scream in despair. I want to be what you need. Do what you need. I want this like I've never wanted anything else. I feel it in my heart -- my immortal heart! -- like a physical ache. I want to be your everything. Because you are my everything. I love you this much.
Sweet Lord...
You whisper to me like this and I unravel into stardust and ribbons. I sink forward, my
brow in my hands, my fingers in my hair, my eyes closed, and I am praying without even thinking about it. I am so passionately in love. So completely in love. So willing to walk this path, your path, Lord. If this is the definition of enraptured, then, Christ? I am *so* there. I believe your every word. I follow you anywhere. I trust you. I believe you. I accept you into my heart like light, into my lungs like air.
“How can you love like that, EJ? How can you... *give it up* like that?”
Because it feels so good to give it up. It feels so right. I respond to the whispers of divinity. I embrace the silver moonlight. Drown me, Lord. You are all that I want... not to mention all that I need. My everything.
Divinely inspired? Hm. The blush across my cheeks says, “Yes... and hallelujah.”
I would give up anything for you. I would do anything for you. I would carry the world. I would let it fall at my feet. Crumbled or conquered, I willingly turn to you as my guiding light, my eternal love. Christ, break my heart. I can take it. Break my heart and remake it into the shape you want. Teach me a lesson. Make me feel it. I will learn like never before. Hand me this love, silver in the hours of the night, and I swear to you, I will stand so strong – apart or together, forever – you will see in me a soldier of divinity.
“You have saved me a place in heaven
With a clean well-lighted room.
So I muscle up to Armageddon
And wave, ‘Come on, love, we’ll be home soon!’”
I am more yours in this moment than I was yesterday, though not yet quite as much as I will be tomorrow when I wake.
We never stand alone. We always stand with Him. Whether or not we choose to see Him is our choice. But He walks with us nonetheless. His hand is not always in ours... because sometimes, yes, He carries us.
E.J.
I am so proud of all of you. Bless you for enriching my life like rain fall.
I am a world away; Los Angeles is practically another dimension, my friends, my love. I am dreaming. In bed alone with my hand on your pillow, with my ole one-eyed cat snoring loudly. I’m dreaming:
Bare feet against golden white sand. The pale blue-green waves around my ankles are like something carbonated, tiny warm bubbles in clean, popping foam. There are occasional stones in the sand but they are flat and smooth and completely clear. Skip them, angel, and they’ll vanish into the depths like cosmic fish. But they’ll also grant your every wish; Let me instead?
You are walking beside me. You hold my hand. Your hair falls to your waist. The white ties of your shirt are undone. Your white skirt is brushed cotton. You whisper into the wind, “I love you like moonlight, your heart like the tide.”
A gentle wave washes red rose petals around our feet and I wake to find you beside me.
“EJ,” said Jessica on the phone, her new-mom voice exhausted with joy. “Tell me again, Angel. Tell me again.”
Jess? Here, again:
At the end of my days I walk the shore of eternity with my Lord. And He has all the time in the world for me and all the time in forever. He is never rushed. He is never distracted. He is my own and I am His. I want for nothing and no one because everything I have ever loved is in His eyes. I looked all my life for a man to complete me... and only one could.
I look back over my shoulder. I see our footprints in the sand. I see where we ran hard. I see where we sank to our knees together. I see where we stumbled, fell, stood back up – oh, Jess... Brianne... Tricia... Cris... *stood back up!* -- and marched on. I see those places where there is only one set of footprints.
Shyly I look up at Him. I smile. I whisper, “I like it when you carried me.”
It's raining in Port Orchard, Washington. You are sleeping somewhere where you can hear it. It sounds like words from God against the roof. The thrumming carries His words down to you. Listen very carefully and His voice blooms in your mind and heart, no longer hidden away by the filter of the world. He is always insistent. He is always fair. And He always knows us far better than we know ourselves. His rain says:
“Oh, my soul, sometimes we don't know what to do.
We work so hard being tough on our own
But now it's me and you.
Let's give it up, these sad bones
'Cause we are following hard times.
But you don't have to stand up all alone
Just put your hand in mine.”
Climb on a back that’s strong. We are never alone. I am with you... Christ said that, too, you know. And:
I want to help you with everything. I want to comfort you when you're scared. Come to you, hold you when you are lonely. I want to make you laugh when you want to cry, to make you shout praises to God when you want to scream in despair. I want to be what you need. Do what you need. I want this like I've never wanted anything else. I feel it in my heart -- my immortal heart! -- like a physical ache. I want to be your everything. Because you are my everything. I love you this much.
Sweet Lord...
You whisper to me like this and I unravel into stardust and ribbons. I sink forward, my
brow in my hands, my fingers in my hair, my eyes closed, and I am praying without even thinking about it. I am so passionately in love. So completely in love. So willing to walk this path, your path, Lord. If this is the definition of enraptured, then, Christ? I am *so* there. I believe your every word. I follow you anywhere. I trust you. I believe you. I accept you into my heart like light, into my lungs like air.
“How can you love like that, EJ? How can you... *give it up* like that?”
Because it feels so good to give it up. It feels so right. I respond to the whispers of divinity. I embrace the silver moonlight. Drown me, Lord. You are all that I want... not to mention all that I need. My everything.
Divinely inspired? Hm. The blush across my cheeks says, “Yes... and hallelujah.”
I would give up anything for you. I would do anything for you. I would carry the world. I would let it fall at my feet. Crumbled or conquered, I willingly turn to you as my guiding light, my eternal love. Christ, break my heart. I can take it. Break my heart and remake it into the shape you want. Teach me a lesson. Make me feel it. I will learn like never before. Hand me this love, silver in the hours of the night, and I swear to you, I will stand so strong – apart or together, forever – you will see in me a soldier of divinity.
“You have saved me a place in heaven
With a clean well-lighted room.
So I muscle up to Armageddon
And wave, ‘Come on, love, we’ll be home soon!’”
I am more yours in this moment than I was yesterday, though not yet quite as much as I will be tomorrow when I wake.
We never stand alone. We always stand with Him. Whether or not we choose to see Him is our choice. But He walks with us nonetheless. His hand is not always in ours... because sometimes, yes, He carries us.
E.J.
I am so proud of all of you. Bless you for enriching my life like rain fall.
Sunday, May 18, 2008
The Transcendent Power of Art
...or The Transformation from Art to Divinity:
The Other “Sweet Science”
I woke up this morning and had already lived the day. I knew exactly what to do. A certainty that has everything to do with you in my life and with the breath of the Sabbath when dawn comes.
My blog, of course, is personal revelations and realizations and musings and so on. But it is also far more private thoughts (despite being in the public arena) than I have ever shared with anyone before, let own with several thousand subscribers. Is this the comfortable anonymity of the Internet? Of course it is. But it is also the decades-long metamorphosis of the human condition, of ministering, and of the art of communication.
Welcome to the new day. Same as the old day. Nothing like the old day at all. Welcome to the beginning of the End (of) Times when everything will emerge and adapt. It is no longer the time for go-along-to-get-along, coasting by with the comfortable traditions of church and community. Now is the time for change. Organized religion likes to think that it corners the market on divinity. But there are too many yet to step into the living light. Too many to reach with the passive (-aggressive) modes of yesteryear. Now is the time for action.
How do we do it? Here’s how we do it:
You be where it is. You wade in. You go to the people. You learn the language, immersive study, without personal compromise. “Until you are of one man’s doctrine, you will never know it.” And you know exactly where I’m at, don’t you?
I am a visual thinker. I believe in the power of the written word. I do not believe that it takes a physical touch to fall in love. I do not believe that salvation comes from a pulpit. I believe in baptism by rain.
A friend writes to me: “Lovers, admirers, imitators, wanna-bes, will all come and go over the course of our lives, but the one relationship that remains constant is our relationship to our own art.”
Because our art lives inside us. It is the seed planted by God’s own hand and left to grow in that place where Christ resides. It is a place that can feel empty until we open our eyes to His living light but, in truth, it is never empty. He is always there and so is our art. Writing black words on paper or a white screen. Touching brush to wet paint to canvas. Holding you in the wee hours that mark the start of a new day with young bird song and poetry. Oh, snap ;) That’s the place where art has breath. That’s when we realize that art is the universal language.
Because art is transcendent and transformative. Art is what lifts us above the animals. Art is you walking across the room to stand in my arms, to gaze intently, to whisper hello and say nothing else for five minutes or ten until you know I’m breathing again, having climbed out onto the fire escape to stand in the cold midnight beneath the celestial eyes of Christ. Because if He can see the flush across my cheeks and chest, if He can hear my pounding heart, if He can experience the joyous tears that spill down my face... than I know that you can too.
Two dozen strangers in my inbox:
“I read your blog. I had to write to you because you’re the first to understand my:
passion
sadness
earning
desire
searching
wanting
life
The first to be like me, speak to me, walk with me, tell me I have never walked alone... and for the first time, I believe it.”
To be a New Testament Christian is to be without the stain glass windows that inspire and awe. Without the intelligent pastors that guide and shape. Without the help of concrete, tangible, undeniables. It is called “organized religion” for a reason. God is chaos theory and fractal geometry, limitless, nonlinear, noncorporeal, and immortal. We are limited, linear, corporeal and mortal! It isn’t easy to grasp God. The lesson taught by forty-two pages of churches in the Yellow Pages is that it takes at least thirty-eight pews of people to grasp God. I like to grasp God by *letting go.* By letting Him speak to me. Direct. One-on-one. He’s got my number on speed dial. Got every number on speed dial. Just let go, and let God. Just do it!
Another friend sips coffee while chatting with me online. She talks about the first time she ever sat in an art class. The first time she ever worked with a nude model. She remembers looking at him. He had a textbook perfect body. A gentle demeanor. A quiet presence. She remembers thinking, “If I saw him on the street -- fully clothed, of course -- he would turn my head. If I had him in my bed, he would turn me on. Yet, there in that class, staring at him for three hours, I felt only respect for him. Absolute respect.” Because art is transcendent.
And what is transcendent is transformative.
I’m talking about ministry by way of painting, dancing, music, writing. I’m talking about ministry by way of comment box poetry and VR environments that bring disparate people together. I’m talking about falling in love to prove that anything is possible. Because with Him the impossible becomes commonplace. And if you don’t truly believe that, without conditions, without justifications, without applying man’s filter... then I suggest you ditch your pocket scripture and go sit on a mountaintop for a while because God needs to have words with you. Don’t be surprised if shrubbery bursts into flames.
“While general culture contains a great deal of material that demeans the human body, you may wish to help your student understand that since before the time of ancient Greece and Rome, many outstanding artists have tried, in a variety of works, both secular and religious, to show the beauty, strength, and dignity of the unclothed human form.”
Art is the human heart laid bare. When I paint you, I am speaking to you, and to everyone else who sees that canvas. Cherry blossoms (did you get the connection?) fall from slim new branches. You are looking up and out. You are, of course, gazing at angels.
Anyone who dislikes the arguably overexposed “La Gioconda” (The Mona Lisa) has never heard the story of Leonardo in love with the composed Lisa Gherardini that he took sixteen years to paint. The one painting he carried with him from Italy to France and never sold. His love was endless, nonphysical, transcendent and divine. He loved her like endless summer skies. Full of possibilities.
Rock ‘n’ roll is dangerous. The Internet is dangerous. Sexuality? *Really* dangerous. The living force of human desire as it fuels art...? Oh, that’s the worst. That’s like super duper dangerous! Anything that they can’t wrap their minds around, is devious, deceptive and, oh yes, very dangerous. But you know what? So is a spork.
In the right hands – in the hands of someone who is no one who is only what Christ demands – the medium of art becomes that thing that can travel anywhere. That judges no one. That brings people to Christ.
Go back with me to that street corner in Seattle and ask again:
How many lives have you saved today?
Comic books, genre novels, websites, flash fiction, forums, 3D environs... how many lives have you saved, baby? Dozens. How many hearts have you opened? Far more. How many times do you reach out, reach up, and reach a breaking point? Every day. How many times must someone repeat, “You have value. You have worth. You will *not* call yourself an idiot.” The world is full of idiots who strip away the self-esteem of young people on mission. Who tear away our assurance in Christ with their abject inability to comprehend what is outside their tunnel vision. Who will not accept that their means are ineffectual.
(And it took me forty minutes to take your name out of that paragraph.)
I called a third friend today. I was feeling a blue sadness in my heart. She answered (I’d prayed she would) and I said without preamble: “Lift my spirits.” She silently put the telephone on the window sill.
Music is an art. Fine harp plays from my iPod today. It is flawed and original music made on Mother’s Day. It is mesmerizing and personal as all art is personal. It makes me cry with memories. It makes me feel something. It brings me closer to God.
You said, “Stop giving me so many outs. Stop saying anything is okay. Stop telling me that tomorrow I may change everything and that’s fine with you. Start making it hard for me to leave.”
The sound of birds and frogs and three children playing, drift up and over that window sill and fill the receiver with a beautiful spring day in the Pacific Northwest. There is something, I think that weird flowering holly thing, brushing against the window screen with a scritch-scritch sound and so I know there must be breeze.
There is the voice of a man and a woman, and someone I know. There is the sound of tension, of worlds colliding. There is the sound of angels. There is the sound of joy. There is the sound of your voice which breaks my heart and lifts it up simultaneously.
And that symphony of sound was art. Because it closed my eyes and touched my heart and filled that space where my seed of creation and Christ reside. It was real. It was meaningful.
Because art is always meaningful.
Take everything else, Lord. In times of cold terror, in panic and depression, in an age of unknowns and things unknowable, the two things that never leave us are Christ and art. And, in the end of our moments and at the beginning of this love for you, those two things are all that matter.
Ever forward. Despite the odds. Past the barriers. This ministry is shared.
E.J.
The Other “Sweet Science”
I woke up this morning and had already lived the day. I knew exactly what to do. A certainty that has everything to do with you in my life and with the breath of the Sabbath when dawn comes.
My blog, of course, is personal revelations and realizations and musings and so on. But it is also far more private thoughts (despite being in the public arena) than I have ever shared with anyone before, let own with several thousand subscribers. Is this the comfortable anonymity of the Internet? Of course it is. But it is also the decades-long metamorphosis of the human condition, of ministering, and of the art of communication.
Welcome to the new day. Same as the old day. Nothing like the old day at all. Welcome to the beginning of the End (of) Times when everything will emerge and adapt. It is no longer the time for go-along-to-get-along, coasting by with the comfortable traditions of church and community. Now is the time for change. Organized religion likes to think that it corners the market on divinity. But there are too many yet to step into the living light. Too many to reach with the passive (-aggressive) modes of yesteryear. Now is the time for action.
How do we do it? Here’s how we do it:
You be where it is. You wade in. You go to the people. You learn the language, immersive study, without personal compromise. “Until you are of one man’s doctrine, you will never know it.” And you know exactly where I’m at, don’t you?
I am a visual thinker. I believe in the power of the written word. I do not believe that it takes a physical touch to fall in love. I do not believe that salvation comes from a pulpit. I believe in baptism by rain.
A friend writes to me: “Lovers, admirers, imitators, wanna-bes, will all come and go over the course of our lives, but the one relationship that remains constant is our relationship to our own art.”
Because our art lives inside us. It is the seed planted by God’s own hand and left to grow in that place where Christ resides. It is a place that can feel empty until we open our eyes to His living light but, in truth, it is never empty. He is always there and so is our art. Writing black words on paper or a white screen. Touching brush to wet paint to canvas. Holding you in the wee hours that mark the start of a new day with young bird song and poetry. Oh, snap ;) That’s the place where art has breath. That’s when we realize that art is the universal language.
Because art is transcendent and transformative. Art is what lifts us above the animals. Art is you walking across the room to stand in my arms, to gaze intently, to whisper hello and say nothing else for five minutes or ten until you know I’m breathing again, having climbed out onto the fire escape to stand in the cold midnight beneath the celestial eyes of Christ. Because if He can see the flush across my cheeks and chest, if He can hear my pounding heart, if He can experience the joyous tears that spill down my face... than I know that you can too.
Two dozen strangers in my inbox:
“I read your blog. I had to write to you because you’re the first to understand my:
passion
sadness
earning
desire
searching
wanting
life
The first to be like me, speak to me, walk with me, tell me I have never walked alone... and for the first time, I believe it.”
To be a New Testament Christian is to be without the stain glass windows that inspire and awe. Without the intelligent pastors that guide and shape. Without the help of concrete, tangible, undeniables. It is called “organized religion” for a reason. God is chaos theory and fractal geometry, limitless, nonlinear, noncorporeal, and immortal. We are limited, linear, corporeal and mortal! It isn’t easy to grasp God. The lesson taught by forty-two pages of churches in the Yellow Pages is that it takes at least thirty-eight pews of people to grasp God. I like to grasp God by *letting go.* By letting Him speak to me. Direct. One-on-one. He’s got my number on speed dial. Got every number on speed dial. Just let go, and let God. Just do it!
Another friend sips coffee while chatting with me online. She talks about the first time she ever sat in an art class. The first time she ever worked with a nude model. She remembers looking at him. He had a textbook perfect body. A gentle demeanor. A quiet presence. She remembers thinking, “If I saw him on the street -- fully clothed, of course -- he would turn my head. If I had him in my bed, he would turn me on. Yet, there in that class, staring at him for three hours, I felt only respect for him. Absolute respect.” Because art is transcendent.
And what is transcendent is transformative.
I’m talking about ministry by way of painting, dancing, music, writing. I’m talking about ministry by way of comment box poetry and VR environments that bring disparate people together. I’m talking about falling in love to prove that anything is possible. Because with Him the impossible becomes commonplace. And if you don’t truly believe that, without conditions, without justifications, without applying man’s filter... then I suggest you ditch your pocket scripture and go sit on a mountaintop for a while because God needs to have words with you. Don’t be surprised if shrubbery bursts into flames.
“While general culture contains a great deal of material that demeans the human body, you may wish to help your student understand that since before the time of ancient Greece and Rome, many outstanding artists have tried, in a variety of works, both secular and religious, to show the beauty, strength, and dignity of the unclothed human form.”
Art is the human heart laid bare. When I paint you, I am speaking to you, and to everyone else who sees that canvas. Cherry blossoms (did you get the connection?) fall from slim new branches. You are looking up and out. You are, of course, gazing at angels.
Anyone who dislikes the arguably overexposed “La Gioconda” (The Mona Lisa) has never heard the story of Leonardo in love with the composed Lisa Gherardini that he took sixteen years to paint. The one painting he carried with him from Italy to France and never sold. His love was endless, nonphysical, transcendent and divine. He loved her like endless summer skies. Full of possibilities.
Rock ‘n’ roll is dangerous. The Internet is dangerous. Sexuality? *Really* dangerous. The living force of human desire as it fuels art...? Oh, that’s the worst. That’s like super duper dangerous! Anything that they can’t wrap their minds around, is devious, deceptive and, oh yes, very dangerous. But you know what? So is a spork.
In the right hands – in the hands of someone who is no one who is only what Christ demands – the medium of art becomes that thing that can travel anywhere. That judges no one. That brings people to Christ.
Go back with me to that street corner in Seattle and ask again:
How many lives have you saved today?
Comic books, genre novels, websites, flash fiction, forums, 3D environs... how many lives have you saved, baby? Dozens. How many hearts have you opened? Far more. How many times do you reach out, reach up, and reach a breaking point? Every day. How many times must someone repeat, “You have value. You have worth. You will *not* call yourself an idiot.” The world is full of idiots who strip away the self-esteem of young people on mission. Who tear away our assurance in Christ with their abject inability to comprehend what is outside their tunnel vision. Who will not accept that their means are ineffectual.
(And it took me forty minutes to take your name out of that paragraph.)
I called a third friend today. I was feeling a blue sadness in my heart. She answered (I’d prayed she would) and I said without preamble: “Lift my spirits.” She silently put the telephone on the window sill.
Music is an art. Fine harp plays from my iPod today. It is flawed and original music made on Mother’s Day. It is mesmerizing and personal as all art is personal. It makes me cry with memories. It makes me feel something. It brings me closer to God.
You said, “Stop giving me so many outs. Stop saying anything is okay. Stop telling me that tomorrow I may change everything and that’s fine with you. Start making it hard for me to leave.”
The sound of birds and frogs and three children playing, drift up and over that window sill and fill the receiver with a beautiful spring day in the Pacific Northwest. There is something, I think that weird flowering holly thing, brushing against the window screen with a scritch-scritch sound and so I know there must be breeze.
There is the voice of a man and a woman, and someone I know. There is the sound of tension, of worlds colliding. There is the sound of angels. There is the sound of joy. There is the sound of your voice which breaks my heart and lifts it up simultaneously.
And that symphony of sound was art. Because it closed my eyes and touched my heart and filled that space where my seed of creation and Christ reside. It was real. It was meaningful.
Because art is always meaningful.
Take everything else, Lord. In times of cold terror, in panic and depression, in an age of unknowns and things unknowable, the two things that never leave us are Christ and art. And, in the end of our moments and at the beginning of this love for you, those two things are all that matter.
Ever forward. Despite the odds. Past the barriers. This ministry is shared.
E.J.
Friday, May 16, 2008
This Passion for You
The air is filthy. I watch it shimmer on the horizon. I see text messages scroll across the distant haze. “You might be a thirteen year old boy” ...blending into... “Cut! @!#$%, E.J., what's wrong with you today? Can’t you even *look* aroused? You’re supposed to *want* him!” ...turning inside out... “I want you; I don’t know what that means.” ...the LED display blinks across God’s own sky. Christ is bouncing messages off satellites. I need an intervention. Direct revelation. Baby... lift me up, life my spirits. Take me down in your arms. Make me forget those golden gates at work that are nothing like heaven and everything about check-point, take my badge, you’re ours now, lock and key. Oh, what did I sign? Where was the dotted line that pointed my way to hell?
Every day, speed delivers me the way only three words from you can.
“How can you see into my eyes like open doors
leading you down into my core.
My spirit sleeping somewhere cold
until you find it there and lead it back home.”
The music rips through my skull loud enough to hear outside my helmet. The Cali dude next to me at the last red light before the ocean is all pose and bravado in his swank convertible. He is looking at me. I’m looking (not quite) straight ahead. A blue Honda Civic and a white Impala collide in the intersection. No one is hurt but there is glass everywhere. It shines in the pale, dirty light. We turn off our engines. I take off my helmet. Dude smiles at me. My eyes are on the wreck. My boots crunch. Everyone is okay.
I am not okay.
“Wake me up inside.
Call my name and save me from the dark.
Bid my blood to run
before I come undone...”
Two hours spent in the middle of the street. Strangers who stare at my riding chaps and my street jewelry cross and one, Jimmy, who finally asks if I’m a Unitarian minister. Asks me to pray for him... he has no money for repairs. He’s going to lose his job for being late. The world is crashing down around him. He sinks down before me. There is shame and failure on his face and he is crying loudly, unable to stop it, wanting on so many levels to be heard. There is a buzz in my ears. There is a low, roiling anger in my chest. There is this need everywhere I go.
Above us the sky is darkening with flash-rain clouds. I want it so bad. That rain. I want it to drench me. Christ’s natural baptism. Bring the second Great Flood, Lord. Wash this away. Remake this world in your image, Lord. ... I want to feel you in my arms. I want the quiet night around us. I want you standing beside me right now. Seeing the difference we can make. Feeling that difference. Because it is a *difference.* Other people don’t find themselves here so often. It is different, not traditional, not rote and mundane. I want to see the moment in your eyes when you arrive with me, when you stand in this place that I stand and feel the way I feel for you. I want us as one person, one path, one passion, God take the rest of it!
Mr. Convertible is staring at me as I sink to my knees in the glass with the boy who can’t be much out of his teens. And I’m taking his hands which are cold and stiff, rough like his work jeans covered in plaster. And you know what I say:
“I don’t need to pray for you, Jimmy. He’s waiting to hear from *you.*”
And he breaks. He breaks to be found. The shell that this world casts around its young men, shaping them into hard things that can’t tremble in the new rain. And I’m holding him without thinking about it and he cries something about his sister or a lover or a mom. I’m not sure exactly because I realize that my headphones are still in.
“Now that I know what I’m without
you can't just leave me.
Breathe into me and make me real.
Bring me to life...”
My heart is a wreck in the middle of the road. Strangers are crying in my inbox. Bobbing on tears I am buoyed back to you time and time again. Washed up on your shore, exhausted and wanting. I am the child gazing up at you with eyes of hope and trust, and you are the manifestation of that love that Christ promised me when I wanted nothing else but to die. Do you wonder how I can survive a thousand miles away? Watch how patient I can be with this miracle. It has been eternity (and back again) that I’ve waited for you.
“Frozen inside without your love, darling.
Only you are the life among the dead.
...Bring me to life.”
There is a rumbling of the coming tow trucks. There is a rumbling across the muddied sky. There is a rumbling in my chest, a thrumming realization that the struggle has just begun. I crush the lanky boy and glare at the officer who suggests we get out of the road.
“He can’t move right now,” I snarl. “Make them go around.”
Make them all go around! Make the twisted filter of man’s own doctrine – the church, the corporate line, the politicos and saints – make it change for us, for once. For twice. For now on! I am so angry! And the anger is pure and clean and lifts me up above the smog and into the clear stratosphere. Shine on me, celestial light. Remind me of divinity the way you whispering my name reminds me, transports me. There. Christ is standing right there.
5:42: What is he telling you, EJ?
5:43: *He
5:44: That God gave us these bodies as vessels of celebration. As sacred things that we share only with the one person who completes us. So take your time. And choose carefully. Because forever means forever.
He is saying: Why are you wasting your precious mortal time, the second greatest gift I have given you, not laughing? Not shouting for joy? Why are you – alone and together -- buying into man’s filter that I have given you the intelligence and the strength and the *courage* to see through? Rip away the veil! There is no veil in living Christianity.
“All this time I can't believe I couldn't see.
Kept in the dark but you were there in front of me.
I’ve been sleeping a thousand years it seems.
Got to open my eyes to everything.”
And finally the rain stops and the cars are dragging away the sounds of metal and ruin. Mr. Convertible got bored and left. He has his story to tell the guys. The story to take home to his girl. He will be the hero in his retelling even though all he did was cruise my skinny ***. Jimmy is standing on the street corner, looking up at the sky, then looking at me. He squints his eyes and raises his chin. There are tears and rain on his face. He looks all of sixteen. He is probably twenty-one. “You look familiar to me. Do I know you?”
I smile at him. The song continues on repeat. The sky has cleared. My anger has washed off my leather jacket and run down the gutter to swirl away. My faith remains as does my desire for you.
“Yeah,” I tell him, my eyes drifting to some point in the distance, around the corner of the buildings and the palm trees. “You know us Christian biker chicks. We all look the same.”
And I get on my bike and I turn her around. I return to the city and away from the ocean. No need to travel to that rocky shore today. Christ met me half way.
At home, I reach into my pocket and take out the fist full of broken glass. I let it fall through my fingers, scattering like frozen rain in the blue glass candy dish on the table. Usually I bring home a pocket full of sand and pebbles. Today is so much more apropos.
Break it open, baby. We will make our own way.
E.J.
Every day, speed delivers me the way only three words from you can.
“How can you see into my eyes like open doors
leading you down into my core.
My spirit sleeping somewhere cold
until you find it there and lead it back home.”
The music rips through my skull loud enough to hear outside my helmet. The Cali dude next to me at the last red light before the ocean is all pose and bravado in his swank convertible. He is looking at me. I’m looking (not quite) straight ahead. A blue Honda Civic and a white Impala collide in the intersection. No one is hurt but there is glass everywhere. It shines in the pale, dirty light. We turn off our engines. I take off my helmet. Dude smiles at me. My eyes are on the wreck. My boots crunch. Everyone is okay.
I am not okay.
“Wake me up inside.
Call my name and save me from the dark.
Bid my blood to run
before I come undone...”
Two hours spent in the middle of the street. Strangers who stare at my riding chaps and my street jewelry cross and one, Jimmy, who finally asks if I’m a Unitarian minister. Asks me to pray for him... he has no money for repairs. He’s going to lose his job for being late. The world is crashing down around him. He sinks down before me. There is shame and failure on his face and he is crying loudly, unable to stop it, wanting on so many levels to be heard. There is a buzz in my ears. There is a low, roiling anger in my chest. There is this need everywhere I go.
Above us the sky is darkening with flash-rain clouds. I want it so bad. That rain. I want it to drench me. Christ’s natural baptism. Bring the second Great Flood, Lord. Wash this away. Remake this world in your image, Lord. ... I want to feel you in my arms. I want the quiet night around us. I want you standing beside me right now. Seeing the difference we can make. Feeling that difference. Because it is a *difference.* Other people don’t find themselves here so often. It is different, not traditional, not rote and mundane. I want to see the moment in your eyes when you arrive with me, when you stand in this place that I stand and feel the way I feel for you. I want us as one person, one path, one passion, God take the rest of it!
Mr. Convertible is staring at me as I sink to my knees in the glass with the boy who can’t be much out of his teens. And I’m taking his hands which are cold and stiff, rough like his work jeans covered in plaster. And you know what I say:
“I don’t need to pray for you, Jimmy. He’s waiting to hear from *you.*”
And he breaks. He breaks to be found. The shell that this world casts around its young men, shaping them into hard things that can’t tremble in the new rain. And I’m holding him without thinking about it and he cries something about his sister or a lover or a mom. I’m not sure exactly because I realize that my headphones are still in.
“Now that I know what I’m without
you can't just leave me.
Breathe into me and make me real.
Bring me to life...”
My heart is a wreck in the middle of the road. Strangers are crying in my inbox. Bobbing on tears I am buoyed back to you time and time again. Washed up on your shore, exhausted and wanting. I am the child gazing up at you with eyes of hope and trust, and you are the manifestation of that love that Christ promised me when I wanted nothing else but to die. Do you wonder how I can survive a thousand miles away? Watch how patient I can be with this miracle. It has been eternity (and back again) that I’ve waited for you.
“Frozen inside without your love, darling.
Only you are the life among the dead.
...Bring me to life.”
There is a rumbling of the coming tow trucks. There is a rumbling across the muddied sky. There is a rumbling in my chest, a thrumming realization that the struggle has just begun. I crush the lanky boy and glare at the officer who suggests we get out of the road.
“He can’t move right now,” I snarl. “Make them go around.”
Make them all go around! Make the twisted filter of man’s own doctrine – the church, the corporate line, the politicos and saints – make it change for us, for once. For twice. For now on! I am so angry! And the anger is pure and clean and lifts me up above the smog and into the clear stratosphere. Shine on me, celestial light. Remind me of divinity the way you whispering my name reminds me, transports me. There. Christ is standing right there.
5:42: What is he telling you, EJ?
5:43: *He
5:44: That God gave us these bodies as vessels of celebration. As sacred things that we share only with the one person who completes us. So take your time. And choose carefully. Because forever means forever.
He is saying: Why are you wasting your precious mortal time, the second greatest gift I have given you, not laughing? Not shouting for joy? Why are you – alone and together -- buying into man’s filter that I have given you the intelligence and the strength and the *courage* to see through? Rip away the veil! There is no veil in living Christianity.
“All this time I can't believe I couldn't see.
Kept in the dark but you were there in front of me.
I’ve been sleeping a thousand years it seems.
Got to open my eyes to everything.”
And finally the rain stops and the cars are dragging away the sounds of metal and ruin. Mr. Convertible got bored and left. He has his story to tell the guys. The story to take home to his girl. He will be the hero in his retelling even though all he did was cruise my skinny ***. Jimmy is standing on the street corner, looking up at the sky, then looking at me. He squints his eyes and raises his chin. There are tears and rain on his face. He looks all of sixteen. He is probably twenty-one. “You look familiar to me. Do I know you?”
I smile at him. The song continues on repeat. The sky has cleared. My anger has washed off my leather jacket and run down the gutter to swirl away. My faith remains as does my desire for you.
“Yeah,” I tell him, my eyes drifting to some point in the distance, around the corner of the buildings and the palm trees. “You know us Christian biker chicks. We all look the same.”
And I get on my bike and I turn her around. I return to the city and away from the ocean. No need to travel to that rocky shore today. Christ met me half way.
At home, I reach into my pocket and take out the fist full of broken glass. I let it fall through my fingers, scattering like frozen rain in the blue glass candy dish on the table. Usually I bring home a pocket full of sand and pebbles. Today is so much more apropos.
Break it open, baby. We will make our own way.
E.J.
Sunday, May 11, 2008
She Drives Me Crazy
...a Mother’s Day Blog
In 1994, I was fourteen years old and my mother had pretty much given up on rock ‘n’ roll. That’s not to say that once a month she didn’t disappear for the weekend into the midnight, all-night, wee-morning clubs of NYC, taking the train from Boston without a word, just an unspoken desire in her bottomless brown-gold eyes, to be lifted (or was it a lateral move?) from her life as mother and wife and dropped into the anonymity of the rave scene (before it was called raving). She was tall and lean, with long legs and full lips, a former model with an “exotic Mediterranean look” (because apparently geography is a dying art) who could play tomboy as easily as high femme. And she hated ’90s rock.
“...Love is like a bomb, baby, c'mon get it on
Livin' like a lover with a radar phone
Lookin' like a tramp, like a video vamp
Demolition woman, can I be your man?
Razzle 'n' a dazzle 'n' a flash a little light
Television lover, baby, go all night
Sometime, anytime, sugar me sweet
Little miss innocent sugar me, yeah!”
They talk in parenting magazines about the dangers of nicotine, alcohol, caffeine, and rhubarb on unborn babies. My mama, I’m afraid, passed her wild on to me in utero. Her love of clubbing to dance. Her desire for music in her blood. Her late-night eyes watching a crowd while she owns a room. There is something so fine... something that closes my eyes just to think about it. That deep warmth that starts in the pit of my stomach, that radiates out through my limbs, that stomps through my boots and raises my hands above my head. Who’s watching? Who cares, baby?! This is about movement in the darkness. This is about beat I can taste. This is about the crush of strobes and making love with that sacred thing called music. Mix it. Turn it on. Kick it up. I’m there. Right there. Realizing that there’s this power that God gave women. And with great power...
"You don’t have to read my mind,
to know what I have in mind.
Honey, you oughta know...
Now you move so fine,
let me lay it on the line.
...I wanna know, what you're doin’ after the show.
Come on, baby, do you do more than dance?"
I may not abide much with written scripture, with chapters of begot and begetted, when God is willing to whisper/shout/converse with us today and now about nuclear disarmament and green energy if we just ask Him, but you can’t argue that verse for verse we’re told that our children are our responsibility. It’s not man’s place to raise our children. It's not society’s place to educate, illuminate and elevate our off-spring. Public school may work for creating the perfect socialized, socialist community of pseudo-capitalist competitors (isn’t alliteration fun?) but it sure don’t teach our white grrls how to dance.
What my mama taught me, with her weekends away, was a lesson that stayed with me undeniably -- the way my parents stayed together, to the day my father died, and foreseeably beyond that. Her lesson, of course, was that being a mother didn’t make her not a woman. Being a wife didn’t make her not a person. She was forever alive with a spirit all her own -- all Christ’s own! She was fully realized. First thing in the morning or sick with the flu, agonizing over bills or devastated by the death of her parents, nothing – nothing! – stole away her presence... her *Presence.* Life did not pass by her kitchen window sill draped in herbs and aloe vera. Life was tucked in her pocket.
“If it feels all right,
maybe you should stay all night.
Shall I leave you my key?
But you’ve got to give me a sign,
Come on, girl!
Some kind of sign.
Are you old enough?
Will you be ready when I call you bluff?”
I wrote to two friends recently, to paraphrase/combine: “Is he all about you, babe? Do you believe that you deserve poetry, and roses and all-night conversations? Where’s the romance? Where’s the courting?! It ain’t all over just because there’s a license from the State. Your man needs to be *all* about you. Trust me, sweetheart, my mother is the most aggravating woman on the planet but my father was always – always! -- about her. No excuses. Always the sugar. Even when it got hard. Now. Tomorrow. Forever.”
Because, come those weekends when Mama went away, my father always got that little smile on his face. And he tied his hair back, and we’d put power tools on the dining room table, and eat tv dinners and way too much ice cream, and he’d kick his feet up with a sweet sigh. Because Dad knew... Mama *always* brought it home. She was out exercising that wild, exerting her force in the world, but she never crossed that line, and come Sunday night, she was tucking me in, checking the messages, planning for PTA... and quietly closing the door down the hall. Come Sunday night, there were always roses in the master bedroom.
"I can't stop
The way I feel
Things you do
Just seem unreal.
I can't get any rest.
People say I'm obsessed
Everything that's serious lasts
What we have, I knew was true.
Tell you what I got in mind...
She drives me crazy.
Like no one else.
She drives me crazy.
And I can't help myself."
Globe-trotting Mama, that’s my mother today. It has been some time since my father’s death. She stands alone like a willow, always drinking deeply from life, bending, dancing, but never falling. She is the epitome of elegance and ferocity. She is like fire and ice in the same body – still tall, still lean, still tomboy/femme... and still, of course, a mother, and a person and a woman. I asked her: “What should I write about for Mother’s Day?” She made that sound of impatience that I know so well – that hmph sound from the back of her throat, then, always accented, always black velvet smooth, “Well, most certainly don’t write about me, darling. I’ve already been saved. Don’t waste a blog.”
“She drives me crazy... ooh, ooh! Like no one else... ooh, ooh!” Oh, Roland, you have no idea. But she also gave me the strength and fortitude to demand the best from everyone and everything around me, including myself. She gave me the courage to look at myself in the mirror. To ask myself the hard questions... the *really* hard ones. Not the “Should I take this job?” or “Do these chaps make me look fat?” but the “Is this love?” and “Do I deserve more?” The questions that we can only ask ourselves and Christ in the quiet midnights of our discontent. In the still silence when we are alone.... Because of her, because of all that she is and isn’t, was and wasn’t, I can know that in those moments that stretch into hours, I am pleased with -- no, I am *proud* of -- who I am, what I am, and the life I keep in my pocket.
Yeah, Mom. This blog is for you and about you and all because of you. I believe in Mother’s Day because I believed in Mother’s Weekend. I believe in dancing until I can barely drive home. I believe in leather and silk. I believe in weight-lifting and motorcycling and grrls that box. I believe in Christ. I believe in pure love. I believe in angels. I believe in beat-pounding, head-banging raves peppered with tall, cold glasses of Coke and cream. I believe in ’70s and ’80s rock. And yes, I believe in you.
Now... where’s that mix tape?
E.J.
“Now it’s up to you,
can we make a secret rendezvous?
I’m a little bit high,
and you’re a little bit shy.”
Def Leppard, Pour Some Sugar On Me, 1987
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8QWHSWPgi90
Fine Young Cannibals, She Drives Me Crazy, 1988
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q7jG8EWr63k
Foreigner, Hot Blooded, 1978
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=byKdSVYEjj4
In 1994, I was fourteen years old and my mother had pretty much given up on rock ‘n’ roll. That’s not to say that once a month she didn’t disappear for the weekend into the midnight, all-night, wee-morning clubs of NYC, taking the train from Boston without a word, just an unspoken desire in her bottomless brown-gold eyes, to be lifted (or was it a lateral move?) from her life as mother and wife and dropped into the anonymity of the rave scene (before it was called raving). She was tall and lean, with long legs and full lips, a former model with an “exotic Mediterranean look” (because apparently geography is a dying art) who could play tomboy as easily as high femme. And she hated ’90s rock.
“...Love is like a bomb, baby, c'mon get it on
Livin' like a lover with a radar phone
Lookin' like a tramp, like a video vamp
Demolition woman, can I be your man?
Razzle 'n' a dazzle 'n' a flash a little light
Television lover, baby, go all night
Sometime, anytime, sugar me sweet
Little miss innocent sugar me, yeah!”
They talk in parenting magazines about the dangers of nicotine, alcohol, caffeine, and rhubarb on unborn babies. My mama, I’m afraid, passed her wild on to me in utero. Her love of clubbing to dance. Her desire for music in her blood. Her late-night eyes watching a crowd while she owns a room. There is something so fine... something that closes my eyes just to think about it. That deep warmth that starts in the pit of my stomach, that radiates out through my limbs, that stomps through my boots and raises my hands above my head. Who’s watching? Who cares, baby?! This is about movement in the darkness. This is about beat I can taste. This is about the crush of strobes and making love with that sacred thing called music. Mix it. Turn it on. Kick it up. I’m there. Right there. Realizing that there’s this power that God gave women. And with great power...
"You don’t have to read my mind,
to know what I have in mind.
Honey, you oughta know...
Now you move so fine,
let me lay it on the line.
...I wanna know, what you're doin’ after the show.
Come on, baby, do you do more than dance?"
I may not abide much with written scripture, with chapters of begot and begetted, when God is willing to whisper/shout/converse with us today and now about nuclear disarmament and green energy if we just ask Him, but you can’t argue that verse for verse we’re told that our children are our responsibility. It’s not man’s place to raise our children. It's not society’s place to educate, illuminate and elevate our off-spring. Public school may work for creating the perfect socialized, socialist community of pseudo-capitalist competitors (isn’t alliteration fun?) but it sure don’t teach our white grrls how to dance.
What my mama taught me, with her weekends away, was a lesson that stayed with me undeniably -- the way my parents stayed together, to the day my father died, and foreseeably beyond that. Her lesson, of course, was that being a mother didn’t make her not a woman. Being a wife didn’t make her not a person. She was forever alive with a spirit all her own -- all Christ’s own! She was fully realized. First thing in the morning or sick with the flu, agonizing over bills or devastated by the death of her parents, nothing – nothing! – stole away her presence... her *Presence.* Life did not pass by her kitchen window sill draped in herbs and aloe vera. Life was tucked in her pocket.
“If it feels all right,
maybe you should stay all night.
Shall I leave you my key?
But you’ve got to give me a sign,
Come on, girl!
Some kind of sign.
Are you old enough?
Will you be ready when I call you bluff?”
I wrote to two friends recently, to paraphrase/combine: “Is he all about you, babe? Do you believe that you deserve poetry, and roses and all-night conversations? Where’s the romance? Where’s the courting?! It ain’t all over just because there’s a license from the State. Your man needs to be *all* about you. Trust me, sweetheart, my mother is the most aggravating woman on the planet but my father was always – always! -- about her. No excuses. Always the sugar. Even when it got hard. Now. Tomorrow. Forever.”
Because, come those weekends when Mama went away, my father always got that little smile on his face. And he tied his hair back, and we’d put power tools on the dining room table, and eat tv dinners and way too much ice cream, and he’d kick his feet up with a sweet sigh. Because Dad knew... Mama *always* brought it home. She was out exercising that wild, exerting her force in the world, but she never crossed that line, and come Sunday night, she was tucking me in, checking the messages, planning for PTA... and quietly closing the door down the hall. Come Sunday night, there were always roses in the master bedroom.
"I can't stop
The way I feel
Things you do
Just seem unreal.
I can't get any rest.
People say I'm obsessed
Everything that's serious lasts
What we have, I knew was true.
Tell you what I got in mind...
She drives me crazy.
Like no one else.
She drives me crazy.
And I can't help myself."
Globe-trotting Mama, that’s my mother today. It has been some time since my father’s death. She stands alone like a willow, always drinking deeply from life, bending, dancing, but never falling. She is the epitome of elegance and ferocity. She is like fire and ice in the same body – still tall, still lean, still tomboy/femme... and still, of course, a mother, and a person and a woman. I asked her: “What should I write about for Mother’s Day?” She made that sound of impatience that I know so well – that hmph sound from the back of her throat, then, always accented, always black velvet smooth, “Well, most certainly don’t write about me, darling. I’ve already been saved. Don’t waste a blog.”
“She drives me crazy... ooh, ooh! Like no one else... ooh, ooh!” Oh, Roland, you have no idea. But she also gave me the strength and fortitude to demand the best from everyone and everything around me, including myself. She gave me the courage to look at myself in the mirror. To ask myself the hard questions... the *really* hard ones. Not the “Should I take this job?” or “Do these chaps make me look fat?” but the “Is this love?” and “Do I deserve more?” The questions that we can only ask ourselves and Christ in the quiet midnights of our discontent. In the still silence when we are alone.... Because of her, because of all that she is and isn’t, was and wasn’t, I can know that in those moments that stretch into hours, I am pleased with -- no, I am *proud* of -- who I am, what I am, and the life I keep in my pocket.
Yeah, Mom. This blog is for you and about you and all because of you. I believe in Mother’s Day because I believed in Mother’s Weekend. I believe in dancing until I can barely drive home. I believe in leather and silk. I believe in weight-lifting and motorcycling and grrls that box. I believe in Christ. I believe in pure love. I believe in angels. I believe in beat-pounding, head-banging raves peppered with tall, cold glasses of Coke and cream. I believe in ’70s and ’80s rock. And yes, I believe in you.
Now... where’s that mix tape?
E.J.
“Now it’s up to you,
can we make a secret rendezvous?
I’m a little bit high,
and you’re a little bit shy.”
Def Leppard, Pour Some Sugar On Me, 1987
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8QWHSWPgi90
Fine Young Cannibals, She Drives Me Crazy, 1988
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q7jG8EWr63k
Foreigner, Hot Blooded, 1978
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=byKdSVYEjj4
Sunday, May 04, 2008
A Whole Lot of Nothing
“Think you can't pray in VR? Try again. Christ in everything – in rain, in wind, in kisses and sighs, in harp music and children's gazes – means in pixels too. Catch up, baby. It's the post-modern, post-high tech revolution. Forget milk. Got quad processors?”
It was the summer I was eighteen but let's say I was twenty-two because that's better for my demographic. I had completed my first year in a fine institute of higher learning and had traded Boston night clubs for NYC's (as well as the fake ID that got me in – never to drink but always to dance and often to woo a handsome raver home for a little acrylic... or henna tat... practice) with an amused shrug, my first bike, and a murmur of, “Yeah, I'm game.”
Yeah. Sure was. The zero-sum playa.
Much to my parents' chagrin, my grandmother – ex-military, so not American, short-haired, and globe-trotting – requested/required/demanded I accompany her for the summer instead of going home. It would become the only summer I didn't take courses and the last summer I would ever have with her. But I didn't know that then and neither did she. She was ripped and dashing, carded at sixty-two (perhaps a pick up line used by our waiter? perhaps not), a no nonsense, no bluster kind of woman who rarely raised her voice unless she had already won the argument. She would survive front lines, a dangerous penchant for photographing militarized zones, and an uncanny sense of where trouble was going to happen, only to prove mortality a force with a red light that a London stranger claimed he “never saw” at 80 miles an hour.
Special circle, Keith. Christ forgives. The granddaughter? Not so much.
We seemed to go everywhere those ten weeks. It wasn't my first time aboard with her but my first time with just the two of us. I saw a side of her that was lyrical and joyous. Flirtatious and glowing. The sharp, wily, brilliant woman I had known all my life – who seemed to go out of her way to clash with my sharp, opinionated, brilliant mother – took a back seat to the woman who wanted to show me the midnight side of dancing in Spain with a man twice my age, and reading books of scripture on crackling parchment while she murmured in whispers with monks who called her still by her military rank. I was entranced with the world. With a world I had never seen before even as we revisited by favorite locales.
Grandma had always been the holder of my passport. My proud parents struggled with bills and property tax. They refused help. So Grandma would let herself in and make sirloin and brussel sprouts, and red potatoes with dill and garlic. They couldn't argue when dinner was already on the table. Car broke down? Simple replacement appeared. She co-signed on my first loan for a bike... and helped pull strings and pull together patrons for scholarships and loans for school. Canvas? Brushes? I worked for those. I paid her in originals... many of which she resold to galleries and fine hotels just so she could take me to lunch and there it would be on the wall. “Fancy that, my angel,” she would say, and raise one sculpted eyebrow in mock surprise while she sipped her dark espresso and thrummed her short nails on the mahogany table.
“This is unreal, Grandma!” I laughed one night, the streets full of dancing and masks and the scent of perfume and heat and spices.
She straightened the clasp that held my hair then decided against it and took it out, throwing it to a passing boy wrapped in green silk and stain leafs, his body almost bare. He called something to her but my French wouldn't be good enough for four more years to understand him or her husky response.
“What is real, my angel?” she asked me, so seriously. “What is unreal? If you feel it,” and she tapped my heart, the ribbons across my chest almost all undone from dancing. “Then it is real.” Ten years before I first found VR.
And then someone, small, wiry, with flashing eyes, a sly smile, and small hands, caught her wrist and danced away with her, laughing into the crowd. Leaving me to think, for a moment, that she was a celestial body, surrounded by a swirl of white and gold silk and lace and taffeta.
You wrote to me tonight, my friend, “Make my faith stronger.”
I wrote to you yesterday, “I am no one. I am best invisible.”
When I was four I was terrified of death. It would be better for my demographic to say when I was fourteen but I was four. So there. I would have these panic attacks... they came out of no where and nothing. Daytime, night time, lunchtime at school. I'd see shadows on sunny days and was certain they were death, tangible and hungry.
One night I panicked and locked my bedroom door and crawled under my bed and screamed. And screamed. And kept screaming. And the doctor on the phone said, “Let her scream herself to sleep.” But after an hour my parents called my Grandma instead.
The door knob opened in her hands. Of course. She closed it behind her with a click. She walked across the wood floor and I remember the feeling of her boots. Then she reached under the bed with one strong hand and my little bunny pj top bunched in her fist and she slide me out in one smooth motion like someone might drag a cat out from under the couch. She gathered me in her arms, there on the floor, me still screaming no word nonsense in unexplainable fear.
She had been speaking, the same prayer, over and over and over again, for quite some time by the recitation that I heard... but I did finally hear her:
“Imagine stepping on shore
and finding it Heaven...
Taking hold of a hand
and finding it God's hand.
Imagine breathing new air
and finding it celestial air...
Feeling invigorated
and finding it immortality.
Imagine passing from tempest and pain
into unbroken calm...
Waking up
and finding yourself home.”
Shadows became shadows. Panic didn't occur. Not in daytime or night time or even in the lunch line. I was never afraid again. (Not even at 100 mph along the California shore.)
I told Grandma years later, “You made my faith stronger.”
She said with a smile, “I am no one. I did nothing.”
We ended the summer, our summer together, on shores draped in fog and emerald earth, on silver-green seas so cold it took my breath from my lungs but still I came and swam. That sea turned this brown grrl blue so many times I think tears froze on my cheeks and fell among the round pebbles that made the shore.
And one morning there you stood. I had seen you once before, I think, when we hiked an hour for fresh meat and eggs. I think Grandma knew your name and you spoke English with an accent that I could have listened to for hours... okay, weeks. You invited us to service on Sunday, talking to her while you looked at me, while I looked at a deep barrel of pickled something (beets? potatoes?) that I seemed to have dropped my bravado in.
One morning there you stood. “You swim?” you asked. I was certain you weren't real. We were leaving in two days. No one had been here for fourteen. I was starting to believe that the universe was me, Grandma, and Christ. I walked past you without speaking because you were obviously a hallucination.
“Did you see any selkie, E.J.?” But you didn't say E.J., which everyone calls me, you said my birth name which no one does.
I turn around and look at you. Really look for the first time. I realize that I had mistaken your gender in town. I realize that you are breath-taking. I realize I never want to leave Ireland. “Did any selkie see me?”
Duh. Wow. My way with words came late, didn't it, babygrrl?
I am 98% frozen to death by this point. And let's not talk about what I'm (not) wearing. You gave me your coat. It was brown. It was soft leather. It was not made of seal skin. We walked back to the house. Grandma had two hot cups of coffee and two hot plates of breakfast sitting on the table for us. She took her Bible, hand-written, and left us.
Across the table from each other I realized that your eyes were two different colors.
You whispered to me, “Make my faith stronger.”
I shook my head, “I'm no one. I'm just her granddaughter.”
And it wasn't until ten more years that I realized:
The paths of our lives are lined with trees of no ones, are laid with cobblestones of no ones. Our personal revelations, that unfold (or fold?) like origami boxes, other dimensions with each step we choose to take along our impassioned way, are lit internal and eternal with no ones. There are no “I am someone!” along the impassioned path. There are no “I am the one!” that truly help you. Because, He said to us, quietly, with His deep brown eyes and deep brown skin, “I am the one. I am the only one. And I am with you. Always.”
So everyone else is no one.
And I feel so blessed to be of them.
With all my love, on this sweet Sabbath,
E.J.
It was the summer I was eighteen but let's say I was twenty-two because that's better for my demographic. I had completed my first year in a fine institute of higher learning and had traded Boston night clubs for NYC's (as well as the fake ID that got me in – never to drink but always to dance and often to woo a handsome raver home for a little acrylic... or henna tat... practice) with an amused shrug, my first bike, and a murmur of, “Yeah, I'm game.”
Yeah. Sure was. The zero-sum playa.
Much to my parents' chagrin, my grandmother – ex-military, so not American, short-haired, and globe-trotting – requested/required/demanded I accompany her for the summer instead of going home. It would become the only summer I didn't take courses and the last summer I would ever have with her. But I didn't know that then and neither did she. She was ripped and dashing, carded at sixty-two (perhaps a pick up line used by our waiter? perhaps not), a no nonsense, no bluster kind of woman who rarely raised her voice unless she had already won the argument. She would survive front lines, a dangerous penchant for photographing militarized zones, and an uncanny sense of where trouble was going to happen, only to prove mortality a force with a red light that a London stranger claimed he “never saw” at 80 miles an hour.
Special circle, Keith. Christ forgives. The granddaughter? Not so much.
We seemed to go everywhere those ten weeks. It wasn't my first time aboard with her but my first time with just the two of us. I saw a side of her that was lyrical and joyous. Flirtatious and glowing. The sharp, wily, brilliant woman I had known all my life – who seemed to go out of her way to clash with my sharp, opinionated, brilliant mother – took a back seat to the woman who wanted to show me the midnight side of dancing in Spain with a man twice my age, and reading books of scripture on crackling parchment while she murmured in whispers with monks who called her still by her military rank. I was entranced with the world. With a world I had never seen before even as we revisited by favorite locales.
Grandma had always been the holder of my passport. My proud parents struggled with bills and property tax. They refused help. So Grandma would let herself in and make sirloin and brussel sprouts, and red potatoes with dill and garlic. They couldn't argue when dinner was already on the table. Car broke down? Simple replacement appeared. She co-signed on my first loan for a bike... and helped pull strings and pull together patrons for scholarships and loans for school. Canvas? Brushes? I worked for those. I paid her in originals... many of which she resold to galleries and fine hotels just so she could take me to lunch and there it would be on the wall. “Fancy that, my angel,” she would say, and raise one sculpted eyebrow in mock surprise while she sipped her dark espresso and thrummed her short nails on the mahogany table.
“This is unreal, Grandma!” I laughed one night, the streets full of dancing and masks and the scent of perfume and heat and spices.
She straightened the clasp that held my hair then decided against it and took it out, throwing it to a passing boy wrapped in green silk and stain leafs, his body almost bare. He called something to her but my French wouldn't be good enough for four more years to understand him or her husky response.
“What is real, my angel?” she asked me, so seriously. “What is unreal? If you feel it,” and she tapped my heart, the ribbons across my chest almost all undone from dancing. “Then it is real.” Ten years before I first found VR.
And then someone, small, wiry, with flashing eyes, a sly smile, and small hands, caught her wrist and danced away with her, laughing into the crowd. Leaving me to think, for a moment, that she was a celestial body, surrounded by a swirl of white and gold silk and lace and taffeta.
You wrote to me tonight, my friend, “Make my faith stronger.”
I wrote to you yesterday, “I am no one. I am best invisible.”
When I was four I was terrified of death. It would be better for my demographic to say when I was fourteen but I was four. So there. I would have these panic attacks... they came out of no where and nothing. Daytime, night time, lunchtime at school. I'd see shadows on sunny days and was certain they were death, tangible and hungry.
One night I panicked and locked my bedroom door and crawled under my bed and screamed. And screamed. And kept screaming. And the doctor on the phone said, “Let her scream herself to sleep.” But after an hour my parents called my Grandma instead.
The door knob opened in her hands. Of course. She closed it behind her with a click. She walked across the wood floor and I remember the feeling of her boots. Then she reached under the bed with one strong hand and my little bunny pj top bunched in her fist and she slide me out in one smooth motion like someone might drag a cat out from under the couch. She gathered me in her arms, there on the floor, me still screaming no word nonsense in unexplainable fear.
She had been speaking, the same prayer, over and over and over again, for quite some time by the recitation that I heard... but I did finally hear her:
“Imagine stepping on shore
and finding it Heaven...
Taking hold of a hand
and finding it God's hand.
Imagine breathing new air
and finding it celestial air...
Feeling invigorated
and finding it immortality.
Imagine passing from tempest and pain
into unbroken calm...
Waking up
and finding yourself home.”
Shadows became shadows. Panic didn't occur. Not in daytime or night time or even in the lunch line. I was never afraid again. (Not even at 100 mph along the California shore.)
I told Grandma years later, “You made my faith stronger.”
She said with a smile, “I am no one. I did nothing.”
We ended the summer, our summer together, on shores draped in fog and emerald earth, on silver-green seas so cold it took my breath from my lungs but still I came and swam. That sea turned this brown grrl blue so many times I think tears froze on my cheeks and fell among the round pebbles that made the shore.
And one morning there you stood. I had seen you once before, I think, when we hiked an hour for fresh meat and eggs. I think Grandma knew your name and you spoke English with an accent that I could have listened to for hours... okay, weeks. You invited us to service on Sunday, talking to her while you looked at me, while I looked at a deep barrel of pickled something (beets? potatoes?) that I seemed to have dropped my bravado in.
One morning there you stood. “You swim?” you asked. I was certain you weren't real. We were leaving in two days. No one had been here for fourteen. I was starting to believe that the universe was me, Grandma, and Christ. I walked past you without speaking because you were obviously a hallucination.
“Did you see any selkie, E.J.?” But you didn't say E.J., which everyone calls me, you said my birth name which no one does.
I turn around and look at you. Really look for the first time. I realize that I had mistaken your gender in town. I realize that you are breath-taking. I realize I never want to leave Ireland. “Did any selkie see me?”
Duh. Wow. My way with words came late, didn't it, babygrrl?
I am 98% frozen to death by this point. And let's not talk about what I'm (not) wearing. You gave me your coat. It was brown. It was soft leather. It was not made of seal skin. We walked back to the house. Grandma had two hot cups of coffee and two hot plates of breakfast sitting on the table for us. She took her Bible, hand-written, and left us.
Across the table from each other I realized that your eyes were two different colors.
You whispered to me, “Make my faith stronger.”
I shook my head, “I'm no one. I'm just her granddaughter.”
And it wasn't until ten more years that I realized:
The paths of our lives are lined with trees of no ones, are laid with cobblestones of no ones. Our personal revelations, that unfold (or fold?) like origami boxes, other dimensions with each step we choose to take along our impassioned way, are lit internal and eternal with no ones. There are no “I am someone!” along the impassioned path. There are no “I am the one!” that truly help you. Because, He said to us, quietly, with His deep brown eyes and deep brown skin, “I am the one. I am the only one. And I am with you. Always.”
So everyone else is no one.
And I feel so blessed to be of them.
With all my love, on this sweet Sabbath,
E.J.
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
10,000 Ways
I wake up and the sun has set. I dreamt of touching you. My fingertips across your cheekbones that I have sketched a hundred thousand times, that I have painted once (or twice). Your eyes were closed. You were so still and I was breathless, lips parted, but unable to speak. No part of us was touching except for fingertips to face, soft, slow, careful... like touching the first flower petals of spring. And not the flowers in the stores or potted for table tops. Like the petals I cannot stop myself from stroking in the fine arboretums. The orchids. The lilies. The colors of passion beneath my hands that always remind me of you.
Day has given way to night and though we joke that you are allied with the sun, it is now – as shadows congregate into their own denomination, as they rally toward their crusade of midnight – that is our time. The phone has stopped ringing. The ambient noise of my neighbors is gone. Even LA traffic seems less by the time the clock reads ours. The world is hushed by our silent laughter. My focus narrows until everything else falls away... dissolves into less-than the reality we have together. I’ll distract you, tell you to place your palm over my heart, to feel how it pounds, a vibration like battle through your bones. I’ll distract you so you don’t sense the deep hot blush that spreads over my cheeks. Only speed -- the sheer power of riding, taming, controlling a machine too big for my frame – only speed makes me feel the way you do, and lately it has paled in comparison. (Hm. And the rest of this analogy isn’t PG 13, so I’ll skip it, baby. But you know what I mean.)
Call me melodramatic. Call me silly. Call me anything, baby, as long as the sun has set, sunk down on gossamer wings, washing the sky in yellow, purple and pink along the big city horizon. Make my substantial, fulfilling, hard-working, rewarding, hard-playing day and strip it away. Wipe it from my memory as insignificant and base, mundane and without meaning. Lift it off me, peal it back. Find me. Just me. Then open your eyes and look at me. Now I see you.
Somewhere in the apartment, a clock is ticking. With my head turned, resting on the arm of the couch, it seems like it could be a wrist watch. But I wear the same leather cuffs I don in pixels, plus a fine gold bracelet from Solin, long ago. No watch. No time holds me here. New days come with dawn, not the slender hands of a clock. My only time piece is a skeleton face pocket watch and it’s laying on the bathroom floor with my chaps and jeans and boots. I’m just passing tick-tocks, chillin’ in Pokemon boxers and my “Biker Chick” tee. Wondering where the clock is. Wondering if it’s a Celestial clock, ticking toward some nonlinear event that will rock my world the way you do.
I stare at the ceiling. I imagine I see angels. I turn on my back and lace my fingers behind my head. I think about chocolate. Then about tropical fish. I wonder if I should trade Mom’s Prius and my Z1000 for something bigger/faster/redder. I wonder if anyone can be calm without Christ.
I realize that fonts are very seductive. Or words. How language can become a touch. How poetry and prose can redeem us. I like fonts because they are the smexy clothes wrapped around words. The flashy, evocative, first impressions. Before I know what you’re saying, I know how it looks. And I love how the web defaults so much text to Georgia and Times and Arial... forcing us to get better, get real, get smart, because, goodness knows, those fonts say nothing. They lay words nude. They reveal everything without candy coating. They demand the poetic and the absurd, the intelligent and provocative, to be laid bare in the text itself. A living testament to how a mind works.
“Abide with me; 'tis eventide.
The day is past and gone;
The shadows of the evening fall;
The night is coming on.
Within my heart a welcome guest,
Within my home abide.
O Savior, stay this night with me;
Behold, 'tis eventide.
“Abide with me; 'tis eventide,
And lone will be the night
If I cannot commune with thee,
Nor find in thee my light.
The darkness of the world, I fear,
Would in my home abide.
O Savior, stay this night with me;
Behold, 'tis eventide.
“Abide with me; 'tis eventide.
Thy walk today with me
Has made my heart within me burn,
As I communed with thee.
Thy earnest words have filled my soul
And kept me near thy side.
O Savior, stay this night with me;
Behold, 'tis eventide.”
When you write to me, in your refusal to shorthand, txtspk, I am lost in you. No, *found* in you, with you, by your words. I am showered in beautiful strokes of phrase and subtlety of meaning. What you share with me is never washed away by anything else. It is multilayered... *dimensions* of definition. Your full messages become single glyphs, writ across my mask. Let the world see them! What can the world comprehend, after all?
In five words or less, how many different ways do you make me blush, speed my heart, turn me on, give me chills, inspire me to know only you? In five words or less, how many different ways do you make me laugh, capture my attention, engage my mind, tug at my spirit, demand that I am yours alone? How many are scripture? How many are in French? How many are time-stamped? How many ways? A dozen... a hundred... how long is a novel? 50,000 words. Divided by five: 10,000 ways. Hm. Sounds right. It has to be. You know my intolerance of the inarticulate is legendary ;)
E.J.
Day has given way to night and though we joke that you are allied with the sun, it is now – as shadows congregate into their own denomination, as they rally toward their crusade of midnight – that is our time. The phone has stopped ringing. The ambient noise of my neighbors is gone. Even LA traffic seems less by the time the clock reads ours. The world is hushed by our silent laughter. My focus narrows until everything else falls away... dissolves into less-than the reality we have together. I’ll distract you, tell you to place your palm over my heart, to feel how it pounds, a vibration like battle through your bones. I’ll distract you so you don’t sense the deep hot blush that spreads over my cheeks. Only speed -- the sheer power of riding, taming, controlling a machine too big for my frame – only speed makes me feel the way you do, and lately it has paled in comparison. (Hm. And the rest of this analogy isn’t PG 13, so I’ll skip it, baby. But you know what I mean.)
Call me melodramatic. Call me silly. Call me anything, baby, as long as the sun has set, sunk down on gossamer wings, washing the sky in yellow, purple and pink along the big city horizon. Make my substantial, fulfilling, hard-working, rewarding, hard-playing day and strip it away. Wipe it from my memory as insignificant and base, mundane and without meaning. Lift it off me, peal it back. Find me. Just me. Then open your eyes and look at me. Now I see you.
Somewhere in the apartment, a clock is ticking. With my head turned, resting on the arm of the couch, it seems like it could be a wrist watch. But I wear the same leather cuffs I don in pixels, plus a fine gold bracelet from Solin, long ago. No watch. No time holds me here. New days come with dawn, not the slender hands of a clock. My only time piece is a skeleton face pocket watch and it’s laying on the bathroom floor with my chaps and jeans and boots. I’m just passing tick-tocks, chillin’ in Pokemon boxers and my “Biker Chick” tee. Wondering where the clock is. Wondering if it’s a Celestial clock, ticking toward some nonlinear event that will rock my world the way you do.
I stare at the ceiling. I imagine I see angels. I turn on my back and lace my fingers behind my head. I think about chocolate. Then about tropical fish. I wonder if I should trade Mom’s Prius and my Z1000 for something bigger/faster/redder. I wonder if anyone can be calm without Christ.
I realize that fonts are very seductive. Or words. How language can become a touch. How poetry and prose can redeem us. I like fonts because they are the smexy clothes wrapped around words. The flashy, evocative, first impressions. Before I know what you’re saying, I know how it looks. And I love how the web defaults so much text to Georgia and Times and Arial... forcing us to get better, get real, get smart, because, goodness knows, those fonts say nothing. They lay words nude. They reveal everything without candy coating. They demand the poetic and the absurd, the intelligent and provocative, to be laid bare in the text itself. A living testament to how a mind works.
“Abide with me; 'tis eventide.
The day is past and gone;
The shadows of the evening fall;
The night is coming on.
Within my heart a welcome guest,
Within my home abide.
O Savior, stay this night with me;
Behold, 'tis eventide.
“Abide with me; 'tis eventide,
And lone will be the night
If I cannot commune with thee,
Nor find in thee my light.
The darkness of the world, I fear,
Would in my home abide.
O Savior, stay this night with me;
Behold, 'tis eventide.
“Abide with me; 'tis eventide.
Thy walk today with me
Has made my heart within me burn,
As I communed with thee.
Thy earnest words have filled my soul
And kept me near thy side.
O Savior, stay this night with me;
Behold, 'tis eventide.”
When you write to me, in your refusal to shorthand, txtspk, I am lost in you. No, *found* in you, with you, by your words. I am showered in beautiful strokes of phrase and subtlety of meaning. What you share with me is never washed away by anything else. It is multilayered... *dimensions* of definition. Your full messages become single glyphs, writ across my mask. Let the world see them! What can the world comprehend, after all?
In five words or less, how many different ways do you make me blush, speed my heart, turn me on, give me chills, inspire me to know only you? In five words or less, how many different ways do you make me laugh, capture my attention, engage my mind, tug at my spirit, demand that I am yours alone? How many are scripture? How many are in French? How many are time-stamped? How many ways? A dozen... a hundred... how long is a novel? 50,000 words. Divided by five: 10,000 ways. Hm. Sounds right. It has to be. You know my intolerance of the inarticulate is legendary ;)
E.J.
Tuesday, April 29, 2008
My Prayer for The Church
...or The Interchangeable Nature of "You"
I cannot sleep. You are again, still and forever, my everything, my alpha and omega, my lion, my lamb, my soul. I want only to rejoice in the knowledge of that. To shout from mountain tops that the word was made flesh, that He walked among us, that He still walks with us, right now, right here, a step before us, guiding the way on this, our combined path. You and I. We three.
Sleeping, I am oblivious to everything except the ardent whisper of Christ. But I do not need to sleep for this. My mind buzzes with things I want to say to you. My body hums, a low resonance that stays with me when everything goes... just... right. When you answer my prayers, when you walk that line... and then erase it from the sand. When you hold me. When you carry me. When you told me you loved me. Now nothing can surprise me.
Christ laughs gently, "What did you *expect* me to tell you?"
You tell me, "I'm not alarmist but these are obviously the end times. All is NOT well in Zion..." ...and a lot of people will not be pleased with the knowledge that Christ's divinity is commonplace. He is speaking to me, and you, and the green grocer on the corner, and the Buddhist monk in the mountains, and the tween with neon hair and a Doberman. He is everywhere, in everything, and cannot be categorized, labeled and limited, into the neat, crisp and clean file folder of denomination.
I want to know the real you. That has nothing to do with plane tickets and eye shade or visits to the Holy Land. I don't need the flesh and bone, Lord, I already believe. My faith carries me. She always has and I always hold her hand when it gets dark or when we have to cross the street. I wrote a whole blog entry just to say: reality only occurs when you *get real.* You must never apologize for real. Or did you think, my beginning and end, that your truths were unknown to me? Or strange? Or forbidden? I know how to use Google and how to visit a local church (1919 Huntington, after Milan but if you hit Fletcher, you've gone too far)... and another and a third. Do I impress you as the type of grrl who skips her research? J'ai besoin de pouvoir vous défendre!
Perhaps you think I would run away? When you lay before me the truth, dear Lord, do you think I will run? Or crumble? Or attack? Do you think I will be disappointed? I am exalted! I praise all that you are and all that you are made of. The smallest boson, the most complex equation. The simple sentence, devoid of metaphor, free from lies, in light not shadow. You never have to impress me because you are part of me. How wonderfully has He made you!
Q: Do your people truly believe that Christ's blood alone will not save someone? (Youth Director of Denomination P, California)
A: We do not deny the divine act of Christ, but we have to accept it, believe in Him, receive the Holy Spirit to lead us into all truth, and live faithfully. Only then will the blood of Christ be enough. (Pastor of Denomination M, Venice)
Did you think I would disagree with this? This great big problem that others like to cast like a stone? Or is there something else -- something truly *surprising* in your doctrine (doc~trine, noun, 1. a particular principle, position, or policy taught or advocated) that you're saving for after dinner? And, btw, will there be chai?
The pastor in Venice wrote it and I'll rephrase it: "You will never know one man's doctrine, until you yourself are of that doctrine." (Did you catch the keyword? The one that always kills the buzz for us pokey NTCs?) It's all very straight forward for me:
I am of Christ's doctrine.
And you are of Christ's doctrine. And Jess. And Jenn. And Sha, and Abbie, and all the rest of us who pump their fists in the air and shout: "Yay, God!" Every single one of us are welcome to their principles and guidelines and popes and prophets and hymns and parables. We must each find the path that leads us to personal revelation.
You could argue that, yes, we disagree. The smile that spreads across my face attests to that. The last time we disagreed it was so much messier, wasn't it? This time? Not so much ;) My path is His path is your path. I choose to walk with you, take a stand with you and that fills my heart with joy.
I tried "safe" on for size once, you know? I tried to take my marching orders from the pulpit. I said, "If I could be only what they want, nothing that they don't, how would I be? How would I speak? Gosh... what would I wear?!" I tried. It took a lot of spiritual yoga. You know what? "Safe" doesn't fit me too well. What I feel for you... in my heart... *in my bones*... is so far removed from "safe" I don't even know what to call it. I do believe in scripture it's called salvation.
Dear Lord, lift this joy that shines in my heart to the still-dark sky of these wee hours and gift me with a false dawn (more true than the dawn of science) that is the realization of a companion discovered, of a smile that plays across my lips while you read over my shoulder. While you wrap a strong arm around me and murmur, "You see? I told you, you would not be alone."
Sweet Christ, right now, only you (and NASA satellites) can see me. Dressed for work. In chaps and jeans and riding boots. In my deep red silk blouse and open leather jacket. In my brown skin and brown hair and brown eyes. In my mortal shell that I celebrate. In my mortal mind that dreams divine for you. Laying on the roof top, cold tar long since surrendered its collected heat. You see me, as I am, all that I am, and I surrender myself to you. Fully. Completely. I am your own. I am in your belonging. Come what may. Bring rain or angels. Whispers or shouts. Just to walk this path with you. With both of you. We three.
"I make no demands of anyone who does not believe my history. If I hadn't experienced myself what I have experienced, I wouldn't believe it myself."
Amen.
E.J.
...Because what has no place on the forum *always* belongs in my blog :)
I cannot sleep. You are again, still and forever, my everything, my alpha and omega, my lion, my lamb, my soul. I want only to rejoice in the knowledge of that. To shout from mountain tops that the word was made flesh, that He walked among us, that He still walks with us, right now, right here, a step before us, guiding the way on this, our combined path. You and I. We three.
Sleeping, I am oblivious to everything except the ardent whisper of Christ. But I do not need to sleep for this. My mind buzzes with things I want to say to you. My body hums, a low resonance that stays with me when everything goes... just... right. When you answer my prayers, when you walk that line... and then erase it from the sand. When you hold me. When you carry me. When you told me you loved me. Now nothing can surprise me.
Christ laughs gently, "What did you *expect* me to tell you?"
You tell me, "I'm not alarmist but these are obviously the end times. All is NOT well in Zion..." ...and a lot of people will not be pleased with the knowledge that Christ's divinity is commonplace. He is speaking to me, and you, and the green grocer on the corner, and the Buddhist monk in the mountains, and the tween with neon hair and a Doberman. He is everywhere, in everything, and cannot be categorized, labeled and limited, into the neat, crisp and clean file folder of denomination.
I want to know the real you. That has nothing to do with plane tickets and eye shade or visits to the Holy Land. I don't need the flesh and bone, Lord, I already believe. My faith carries me. She always has and I always hold her hand when it gets dark or when we have to cross the street. I wrote a whole blog entry just to say: reality only occurs when you *get real.* You must never apologize for real. Or did you think, my beginning and end, that your truths were unknown to me? Or strange? Or forbidden? I know how to use Google and how to visit a local church (1919 Huntington, after Milan but if you hit Fletcher, you've gone too far)... and another and a third. Do I impress you as the type of grrl who skips her research? J'ai besoin de pouvoir vous défendre!
Perhaps you think I would run away? When you lay before me the truth, dear Lord, do you think I will run? Or crumble? Or attack? Do you think I will be disappointed? I am exalted! I praise all that you are and all that you are made of. The smallest boson, the most complex equation. The simple sentence, devoid of metaphor, free from lies, in light not shadow. You never have to impress me because you are part of me. How wonderfully has He made you!
Q: Do your people truly believe that Christ's blood alone will not save someone? (Youth Director of Denomination P, California)
A: We do not deny the divine act of Christ, but we have to accept it, believe in Him, receive the Holy Spirit to lead us into all truth, and live faithfully. Only then will the blood of Christ be enough. (Pastor of Denomination M, Venice)
Did you think I would disagree with this? This great big problem that others like to cast like a stone? Or is there something else -- something truly *surprising* in your doctrine (doc~trine, noun, 1. a particular principle, position, or policy taught or advocated) that you're saving for after dinner? And, btw, will there be chai?
The pastor in Venice wrote it and I'll rephrase it: "You will never know one man's doctrine, until you yourself are of that doctrine." (Did you catch the keyword? The one that always kills the buzz for us pokey NTCs?) It's all very straight forward for me:
I am of Christ's doctrine.
And you are of Christ's doctrine. And Jess. And Jenn. And Sha, and Abbie, and all the rest of us who pump their fists in the air and shout: "Yay, God!" Every single one of us are welcome to their principles and guidelines and popes and prophets and hymns and parables. We must each find the path that leads us to personal revelation.
You could argue that, yes, we disagree. The smile that spreads across my face attests to that. The last time we disagreed it was so much messier, wasn't it? This time? Not so much ;) My path is His path is your path. I choose to walk with you, take a stand with you and that fills my heart with joy.
I tried "safe" on for size once, you know? I tried to take my marching orders from the pulpit. I said, "If I could be only what they want, nothing that they don't, how would I be? How would I speak? Gosh... what would I wear?!" I tried. It took a lot of spiritual yoga. You know what? "Safe" doesn't fit me too well. What I feel for you... in my heart... *in my bones*... is so far removed from "safe" I don't even know what to call it. I do believe in scripture it's called salvation.
Dear Lord, lift this joy that shines in my heart to the still-dark sky of these wee hours and gift me with a false dawn (more true than the dawn of science) that is the realization of a companion discovered, of a smile that plays across my lips while you read over my shoulder. While you wrap a strong arm around me and murmur, "You see? I told you, you would not be alone."
Sweet Christ, right now, only you (and NASA satellites) can see me. Dressed for work. In chaps and jeans and riding boots. In my deep red silk blouse and open leather jacket. In my brown skin and brown hair and brown eyes. In my mortal shell that I celebrate. In my mortal mind that dreams divine for you. Laying on the roof top, cold tar long since surrendered its collected heat. You see me, as I am, all that I am, and I surrender myself to you. Fully. Completely. I am your own. I am in your belonging. Come what may. Bring rain or angels. Whispers or shouts. Just to walk this path with you. With both of you. We three.
"I make no demands of anyone who does not believe my history. If I hadn't experienced myself what I have experienced, I wouldn't believe it myself."
Amen.
E.J.
...Because what has no place on the forum *always* belongs in my blog :)
Sunday, April 27, 2008
Depotentializing Bubblegum
...or Why Intelligence Amplification is Sweet
You all know that I gotta be honest. I try hard to lay down the words for you every Sunday -- those sometimes teary, sometimes silly, always just-for-you-baby blogs that bring me to my keyboard, laptop on lap, butt on the fire escape iron, rain or shine, all day to night, to share something, mull something with you. To remind all of us readers (because I come to read these entries too) that we are together, not so dissimilar, despite how we vote, who we love, or why we open our eyes each morning to the light of Christ’s own salvation.
Now... be honest right back. How many of you were about to click away? Did those last three words kill your buzz? Are you thinking, suddenly, “Oh man... this chick is some kinda Bible thumper freakazoid trying to sound all hip and happening to reach the masses and convert en mass.” Cha! You’re smarter than that, right? You won’t fall for no tough love, leather jacket youth pastor with a sly grin and a flyer about new virginity. Heck no. ... Oh baby... trust me, go down and click on JessKieghan, LaunaSorensen, CrisKier, or JenDiMarco in the buddy panel of my IMVU hp... they’ll tell you I ain’t no youth pastor. Ask Jennifer why she once darted me in the butt.
Stats show me that roughly fifty new IPs visit my blog every week. I get about a dozen new subscribers. I always wonder what would happen if I turned on the comment feature. Would it be like it was in the very start? When nobody knew what to do with me and so every anti-phobic-nothing-better-to-do seemed to find fault and beat their hairy chest all over my bandwidth? Or would it be more like DasMark who found a way to comment and posted:
“I was just homepage cruising and got stuck butt-deep in your incredibly awesome blog. Not only is it hilarious, but you also talk about the God particles and use big words that are so rarely seen on IMVU. That said, my true point with this post should be obvious: I love you. Kidding. Seriously though, awesome blog, awesome page, stay awesome, etc.”
I popped over to Mark’s hp and read his long list of emo bands, followed by his adamant request: “Would you all just die?!” And I laughed so hard I still had the hiccups when I fell asleep that night.
Hm. What an aside, huh? Back to the importance of being earnest... or the earnestness of honesty... can’t remember now :)
The simple truth: This is my 100th blog.
The pressure I usually feel writing on Sunday is certainly here, and one might think it would be greater with the milestone being what it is. But the strange thing is, I feel free today. Under a low silver sky of clouds and a light misting of rain, a red umbrella dangling like a roof from the fire escape platform above me, I feel light-hearted, relaxed, almost laughing. I feel *certain.*
“She always knows exactly what she’s thinking, feeling. She’s always so *maddenly* certain of herself.”
;) Yeah, those gosh darn short, articulate sentences, right, Brianne? ;) Some chicks just drive everyone nuts with their crazy confidence. But I do sometimes wind up shaken. I can be surprised. And when that happens... uh... okay, I become even more articulate. LOL! But then, when the unsettle settles in, seeps through my bones, that’s when I snap and suddenly, on three days and no sleep, I’m slamming down the screen, stomping down the stairs, kicking awake my Kawi, and when she starts to shake at 112 the only thing I think is: Gotta get a new bike.
I’ve spent all week (maybe all of the last five years) thinking about what Christ would have done with the Internet. Don’t laugh. And stop imagining Him as this buttoned down holy man, with little sandals and a sad, sad face. First of all, buttons weren’t invented until 1201 AD and, second, He turned religion on its ear, darlings. He was a rebel with a cause and anybody who presents Him as a great big conformer is ill-informed and uneducated, IMnotsomuchHO. There’s a sticker on my IMVU hp that reads: Question Authority. I’ve rarely seen a more Christian sticker ;)
You see, there’s this thing called Google. You may even have used it once or twice. You might love it or hate it (it is polarizing, I have found) but for me, it’s a digital library card. It literally lets me check out pretty much anything and everything if I’m patient enough to click past page 10.
I wanted to solve a digital resolution problem that had nothing to do with Christ... but... oh okay, it had everything to do with ministering to you. And I clickity-clicked through Google over to the blog of one Micki Pacific (http://mickispinkdiamondfields.blogspot.com) who had not only solved my problem (a few months back) but posted the irrefutable proof along with this:
Virtual reality and the multitude of virtual worlds (the multiverse) is "...just a more recent evolutionary extension of ourselves into our technology..." and from Micki elsewhere, “so now we walk into VR life and the internet is a symbol for the unconscious (it used to be the sea). It's this vast undefined space of potential.”
Oh yes, baby. I was won over. Here was the sign post pointing to some possible answers and you all know I was gonna sideline on that path. The www does this for all of us. Provides answers (and more questions). After all, this is why the Chinese invented gun power and moveable type and paper money while everyone else was busy flinging rocks at castle walls. Great minds think alike... and a great number of minds come up with great ideas. This is also why I feel that “Mardi Gras 3000” has been so successful. I couldn’t have created a universe so complex and engaging without the input of the dozen or so passionate collaborators that have contributed to the mythology. Be it Mikey in Cali who threw down some weapon and armor ideas, or Emin who supplied pics of the RL biodomes in Europe, every forum member, casual or obsessed, has built that world.
And now that very world – that fictional place that we all talk about as seeming so real – is washing over into our reality. That idea of the Living Scripture that transcends man’s law, man’s books, and holds us all in one light, one place, while Christ whispers: Listen, you are much different and you are much the same.... That idea is spreading.
I am a strong believer in where we have influence we have a presence. I can’t count how many times a friend has said to me: “You talk online just like you talk in real life. You always sounds like you. When we go clubbing in VR 3D public rooms, awash with strangers, and you bust out your specialized, animated moves... LOL! I forget that we were at imvu://room/GamerAngel/neon instead of the Elevate in LA.”
I talk one way because I am one person. I paid my pro buddy CrisKier to create me a 3D avatar that looked like the real world me. I don’t want to be someone else. I like exactly how Christ made me: One blind eye, narrow hips, dark skin, penchant for leather and motorcycles, drawn to articulate speakers and deep thinkers... I like me. (And you know what? That’s because I’m darn certain that Christ likes me... which is a heck of a good confidence builder.)
I lay it down in VR the way I lay it down in RL because I don’t go fishing, I don’t do mind games, and I love to mistranslate my French from “love” to “like” because it makes for the most high-brow comedy of errors that the written word has ever seen. I like to send digital flowers... because they last longer than the real ones... but I most certainly send real ones too.
I believe that a prayer circle can be a MySpace bulletin. (Because, Harry, against the odds, your grandpa got into the right hospital. And I love you, hon.) I believe that psychology can be shared in comment boxes. That poetry doesn’t have to rhyme. And that intelligence amplification exists to prove that all of us are connected. I can think and say 6/10th of what I mean... and you’ll fill in the last 4/10th to create something better than I could ever have imagined. Because the IQ of the audience, when they watch a movie, together in the dark, is 40% amplified... and 60% if we’re all the ’net.
And did you know, baby, that if you include statistics and percentages, that 94% more people will believe what you’re saying? Hm. That’s the power of math ;)
Christ showed up and said: No more eye for an eye. Now... turn the other check.
Christ showed up and said: I will take your sins. No need for blood sacrifice. I am your sacrifice eternal.
Polar opposites. Inside out.
What would He say today? How would He preach? Would He have His own reality show? (I hope not.) Would He cut a rock CD? (Hm.) Would His apostles spread the word through every medium, to every corner, in every way?
Micki Pacific writes:
“Think about the alienation that occurred at the Garden. It happened on three levels and those three levels are about relationships -- alienation between God and us, alienation between each other, and alienation with ourselves. We walk out of the Garden in a fragmented, polarized state (i.e. the knowledge of good and evil). Wisdom? Umm... that is the sales pitch from the serpent, sure, but we are left with all this fragmentation to resolve on all sorts of levels. From this perspective we then are in a state that we have to live out our lives under this "Shadow of the Fall."”
Take it backward with me. Are you alienated with yourself? Do you even know what that means? Let’s all sing the song: Love thyself before you can love another. Know thyself before you can know another. Embrace thyself... and the whole world opens up. Because everybody thinks confidence is smexy.
Strip away the arrogance (you’re hiding!), the superiority complex (still hidden!), and all the other cultural trappings and basic garbage that stop you from seeing yourself, and me, and everyone else as human. Accept that we are all flesh-and-bone, heart-and-soul... and you won’t have to reach that far to see how pixels and binary are just as real. Just another extension of who and what we are. A reflection of ourselves, like a photograph... a living photograph.
And I roll the d6 to find an even number. My sense of humor puts a smile on my virtual face when 10 out of 10 rolls gives me an odd. And every time I hit a 3 (which times two is six) I fall in love all over again and thank Christ for random changes of subject like this one.
“With technology advancing so quickly humanity hasn't had a chance to develop the mythology, or treasure map of the psychological terrain that needs to be covered, and outline the pitfalls for us to use to navigate this brave new frontier with style and gracefulness. So we find what symbolism we can from the collective and hold it up as a mirror as best we can in hopes of being a part of the solution to a complex equation.”
That’s Micki again. In her blog she mentions an IQ of 171. But it might be 70 or 190. It doesn’t matter to me. And it probably matters little to Micki; she was making a point and with humor, too. The point is, that society likes to label and classify. To limit and compartmentalize. The Internet is for geeks, nerds, skinny, scrawny, fat, shy... whatever. But I’m what then? College educated. Athletic. Height and weight where Hollywood wants them. T and A as required. So what’s my problem? Maybe I don’t got one ;)
I have friends all over the spectrum of clinical intelligence but the little autistic boy being raised in the forest by his two moms and his little sister is the one who says:
“I like being me. I want to be me wherever I go. I will not be someone else because someone else is never me.”
The Internet as a library, gives us almost limitless resources. Virtual reality, as an extension of ourselves, give us almost limitless expression and possible exploration. The potential is there. But if we allow ourselves to present candy coated... instead of real, depotentialized with our typos and flat jokes, with our long silences and boring moods, with our emotional outbreaks and breakdowns... then we have to accept that, that is only play time. A play date with pixels. Only when we get real do we get real.
What would Christ do with the Internet? Something as polar opposite as what He did with sacrifice and human behavior. Something as unexpected as whispering to His apostles: Create a *game* that will bring gay bois and Baptist mothers to the same space, to laugh together, to know each other, and to understand that a PM and a haiku aren’t all that different.
...
Comment Box Poetry #1
I thought of you today
all day and into my evening
of dance club music
and boys and grrls... and always
the bass beat strum.
There was something missing:
your wry sense of humor
your love of Christ
your blush for me.
Baby... my Kawi may purr
but only you hmm
E.J.
You all know that I gotta be honest. I try hard to lay down the words for you every Sunday -- those sometimes teary, sometimes silly, always just-for-you-baby blogs that bring me to my keyboard, laptop on lap, butt on the fire escape iron, rain or shine, all day to night, to share something, mull something with you. To remind all of us readers (because I come to read these entries too) that we are together, not so dissimilar, despite how we vote, who we love, or why we open our eyes each morning to the light of Christ’s own salvation.
Now... be honest right back. How many of you were about to click away? Did those last three words kill your buzz? Are you thinking, suddenly, “Oh man... this chick is some kinda Bible thumper freakazoid trying to sound all hip and happening to reach the masses and convert en mass.” Cha! You’re smarter than that, right? You won’t fall for no tough love, leather jacket youth pastor with a sly grin and a flyer about new virginity. Heck no. ... Oh baby... trust me, go down and click on JessKieghan, LaunaSorensen, CrisKier, or JenDiMarco in the buddy panel of my IMVU hp... they’ll tell you I ain’t no youth pastor. Ask Jennifer why she once darted me in the butt.
Stats show me that roughly fifty new IPs visit my blog every week. I get about a dozen new subscribers. I always wonder what would happen if I turned on the comment feature. Would it be like it was in the very start? When nobody knew what to do with me and so every anti-phobic-nothing-better-to-do seemed to find fault and beat their hairy chest all over my bandwidth? Or would it be more like DasMark who found a way to comment and posted:
“I was just homepage cruising and got stuck butt-deep in your incredibly awesome blog. Not only is it hilarious, but you also talk about the God particles and use big words that are so rarely seen on IMVU. That said, my true point with this post should be obvious: I love you. Kidding. Seriously though, awesome blog, awesome page, stay awesome, etc.”
I popped over to Mark’s hp and read his long list of emo bands, followed by his adamant request: “Would you all just die?!” And I laughed so hard I still had the hiccups when I fell asleep that night.
Hm. What an aside, huh? Back to the importance of being earnest... or the earnestness of honesty... can’t remember now :)
The simple truth: This is my 100th blog.
The pressure I usually feel writing on Sunday is certainly here, and one might think it would be greater with the milestone being what it is. But the strange thing is, I feel free today. Under a low silver sky of clouds and a light misting of rain, a red umbrella dangling like a roof from the fire escape platform above me, I feel light-hearted, relaxed, almost laughing. I feel *certain.*
“She always knows exactly what she’s thinking, feeling. She’s always so *maddenly* certain of herself.”
;) Yeah, those gosh darn short, articulate sentences, right, Brianne? ;) Some chicks just drive everyone nuts with their crazy confidence. But I do sometimes wind up shaken. I can be surprised. And when that happens... uh... okay, I become even more articulate. LOL! But then, when the unsettle settles in, seeps through my bones, that’s when I snap and suddenly, on three days and no sleep, I’m slamming down the screen, stomping down the stairs, kicking awake my Kawi, and when she starts to shake at 112 the only thing I think is: Gotta get a new bike.
I’ve spent all week (maybe all of the last five years) thinking about what Christ would have done with the Internet. Don’t laugh. And stop imagining Him as this buttoned down holy man, with little sandals and a sad, sad face. First of all, buttons weren’t invented until 1201 AD and, second, He turned religion on its ear, darlings. He was a rebel with a cause and anybody who presents Him as a great big conformer is ill-informed and uneducated, IMnotsomuchHO. There’s a sticker on my IMVU hp that reads: Question Authority. I’ve rarely seen a more Christian sticker ;)
You see, there’s this thing called Google. You may even have used it once or twice. You might love it or hate it (it is polarizing, I have found) but for me, it’s a digital library card. It literally lets me check out pretty much anything and everything if I’m patient enough to click past page 10.
I wanted to solve a digital resolution problem that had nothing to do with Christ... but... oh okay, it had everything to do with ministering to you. And I clickity-clicked through Google over to the blog of one Micki Pacific (http://mickispinkdiamondfields.blogspot.com) who had not only solved my problem (a few months back) but posted the irrefutable proof along with this:
Virtual reality and the multitude of virtual worlds (the multiverse) is "...just a more recent evolutionary extension of ourselves into our technology..." and from Micki elsewhere, “so now we walk into VR life and the internet is a symbol for the unconscious (it used to be the sea). It's this vast undefined space of potential.”
Oh yes, baby. I was won over. Here was the sign post pointing to some possible answers and you all know I was gonna sideline on that path. The www does this for all of us. Provides answers (and more questions). After all, this is why the Chinese invented gun power and moveable type and paper money while everyone else was busy flinging rocks at castle walls. Great minds think alike... and a great number of minds come up with great ideas. This is also why I feel that “Mardi Gras 3000” has been so successful. I couldn’t have created a universe so complex and engaging without the input of the dozen or so passionate collaborators that have contributed to the mythology. Be it Mikey in Cali who threw down some weapon and armor ideas, or Emin who supplied pics of the RL biodomes in Europe, every forum member, casual or obsessed, has built that world.
And now that very world – that fictional place that we all talk about as seeming so real – is washing over into our reality. That idea of the Living Scripture that transcends man’s law, man’s books, and holds us all in one light, one place, while Christ whispers: Listen, you are much different and you are much the same.... That idea is spreading.
I am a strong believer in where we have influence we have a presence. I can’t count how many times a friend has said to me: “You talk online just like you talk in real life. You always sounds like you. When we go clubbing in VR 3D public rooms, awash with strangers, and you bust out your specialized, animated moves... LOL! I forget that we were at imvu://room/GamerAngel/neon instead of the Elevate in LA.”
I talk one way because I am one person. I paid my pro buddy CrisKier to create me a 3D avatar that looked like the real world me. I don’t want to be someone else. I like exactly how Christ made me: One blind eye, narrow hips, dark skin, penchant for leather and motorcycles, drawn to articulate speakers and deep thinkers... I like me. (And you know what? That’s because I’m darn certain that Christ likes me... which is a heck of a good confidence builder.)
I lay it down in VR the way I lay it down in RL because I don’t go fishing, I don’t do mind games, and I love to mistranslate my French from “love” to “like” because it makes for the most high-brow comedy of errors that the written word has ever seen. I like to send digital flowers... because they last longer than the real ones... but I most certainly send real ones too.
I believe that a prayer circle can be a MySpace bulletin. (Because, Harry, against the odds, your grandpa got into the right hospital. And I love you, hon.) I believe that psychology can be shared in comment boxes. That poetry doesn’t have to rhyme. And that intelligence amplification exists to prove that all of us are connected. I can think and say 6/10th of what I mean... and you’ll fill in the last 4/10th to create something better than I could ever have imagined. Because the IQ of the audience, when they watch a movie, together in the dark, is 40% amplified... and 60% if we’re all the ’net.
And did you know, baby, that if you include statistics and percentages, that 94% more people will believe what you’re saying? Hm. That’s the power of math ;)
Christ showed up and said: No more eye for an eye. Now... turn the other check.
Christ showed up and said: I will take your sins. No need for blood sacrifice. I am your sacrifice eternal.
Polar opposites. Inside out.
What would He say today? How would He preach? Would He have His own reality show? (I hope not.) Would He cut a rock CD? (Hm.) Would His apostles spread the word through every medium, to every corner, in every way?
Micki Pacific writes:
“Think about the alienation that occurred at the Garden. It happened on three levels and those three levels are about relationships -- alienation between God and us, alienation between each other, and alienation with ourselves. We walk out of the Garden in a fragmented, polarized state (i.e. the knowledge of good and evil). Wisdom? Umm... that is the sales pitch from the serpent, sure, but we are left with all this fragmentation to resolve on all sorts of levels. From this perspective we then are in a state that we have to live out our lives under this "Shadow of the Fall."”
Take it backward with me. Are you alienated with yourself? Do you even know what that means? Let’s all sing the song: Love thyself before you can love another. Know thyself before you can know another. Embrace thyself... and the whole world opens up. Because everybody thinks confidence is smexy.
Strip away the arrogance (you’re hiding!), the superiority complex (still hidden!), and all the other cultural trappings and basic garbage that stop you from seeing yourself, and me, and everyone else as human. Accept that we are all flesh-and-bone, heart-and-soul... and you won’t have to reach that far to see how pixels and binary are just as real. Just another extension of who and what we are. A reflection of ourselves, like a photograph... a living photograph.
And I roll the d6 to find an even number. My sense of humor puts a smile on my virtual face when 10 out of 10 rolls gives me an odd. And every time I hit a 3 (which times two is six) I fall in love all over again and thank Christ for random changes of subject like this one.
“With technology advancing so quickly humanity hasn't had a chance to develop the mythology, or treasure map of the psychological terrain that needs to be covered, and outline the pitfalls for us to use to navigate this brave new frontier with style and gracefulness. So we find what symbolism we can from the collective and hold it up as a mirror as best we can in hopes of being a part of the solution to a complex equation.”
That’s Micki again. In her blog she mentions an IQ of 171. But it might be 70 or 190. It doesn’t matter to me. And it probably matters little to Micki; she was making a point and with humor, too. The point is, that society likes to label and classify. To limit and compartmentalize. The Internet is for geeks, nerds, skinny, scrawny, fat, shy... whatever. But I’m what then? College educated. Athletic. Height and weight where Hollywood wants them. T and A as required. So what’s my problem? Maybe I don’t got one ;)
I have friends all over the spectrum of clinical intelligence but the little autistic boy being raised in the forest by his two moms and his little sister is the one who says:
“I like being me. I want to be me wherever I go. I will not be someone else because someone else is never me.”
The Internet as a library, gives us almost limitless resources. Virtual reality, as an extension of ourselves, give us almost limitless expression and possible exploration. The potential is there. But if we allow ourselves to present candy coated... instead of real, depotentialized with our typos and flat jokes, with our long silences and boring moods, with our emotional outbreaks and breakdowns... then we have to accept that, that is only play time. A play date with pixels. Only when we get real do we get real.
What would Christ do with the Internet? Something as polar opposite as what He did with sacrifice and human behavior. Something as unexpected as whispering to His apostles: Create a *game* that will bring gay bois and Baptist mothers to the same space, to laugh together, to know each other, and to understand that a PM and a haiku aren’t all that different.
...
Comment Box Poetry #1
I thought of you today
all day and into my evening
of dance club music
and boys and grrls... and always
the bass beat strum.
There was something missing:
your wry sense of humor
your love of Christ
your blush for me.
Baby... my Kawi may purr
but only you hmm
E.J.
Sunday, April 20, 2008
A State of Zen
...percipated by 1001 fonts and a dream of your hand on my thigh.
For seven years (those delightfully formative years -- 17 to 23 -- when everything was just so squeaky new, lemon fresh, and first blush perfect) I studied toward my MFA (performance) while sidelining toward the same in painting. The performance work had been steady since I was a wee one and the allure was addictive (despite the fact that I wasn't “the type”) because the paychecks were enormous compared to my (lower) working class upbringing. It just seemed so... easy... and we all know (from previous blogs) that “easy” is never the path.
For performance classes I embedded my own trigger word (“paycheck”) to activate my persona (Actor) that would, in turn, wrap herself in a persona (Character). I could play Actor for hours on end. It was the best type of cosplay. Like classic Julie Andrews (my first crush) in “Victor/Victoria,” I was a person playing a person playing a person. At the end the day, I would walk out of the classroom, remove the Actor accessory and meet eyes with another student... or teacher... or visiting parent... in the hall. Linger a second too long. Hold out one hand, palm up, cock my head. Little itty bitty smile that was west of a grin, closer south to a whisper. “Can I paint you?”
When I say I miss New York City, I mean those nights. The dorm window open. The city sounds wafting in. Night like a lover filling my sacred space called Creation. I remember first connecting passion and rain, the midnight that a thunderstorm soaked me, my model, and my freaking canvas, too, and I never stopped. My hair, rain, paint, ripped white tee, blue jeans... all of me... all my subject, dark olive skin, black leather jacket, open white jeans... seemed to become one image, burning in my mind, traveling like serum through my chest and my body. Eyes together, always together, it was the best sex I ever had... without ever touching another person.
Interaction. Sensation. Response. Catharsis. The physical labor of art. Painting is more alive than performance. I guess I'd just rather be working class. I want it to be difficult. Don't want it over in two-point-three minutes (on average). Want it all night, muscles bunched, trembling, hours on end, with half a dozen techniques and a whole lot of colors exploding across the canvas, my body, the room.
And now I see you, baby, in everything that I do, the art and you are all mixed up. Every move against canvas, every time the brush and me are just right, right there. I want to know it’s good and mine. The texture, tooth, grain of the canvas, the paper, the wall. I want to feel the force up through my shoulder, shuddering up my arm, across my back, with every stroke, every thrust, every careful hue. I fell in love so hard. It was so perfect – size, shape, your smile – the late nights, all nights, my body finally striped down to jeans and tank, streaked with sweet sweat, and bluegreenredyellowpurpleblack from a canvas taller than I am. I couldn’t let it go any more than I can let you go now. I wanted it so bad. All the time. Every night. Singing hallelujahs into pale dawn skies because God gave us these bodies, these brushes, this time.
And it got better. Is that possible? I didn't care about skills getting better (though that happened too). Just cared about the intensity. I wanted everything heightened. Everything alive, flashing passion and power through the room like heat lightning. I would cram, memorizing lines... then walk the halls looking for my fix. It was an addiction so demanding, so specific. “Hey. I'm E.J. Can I paint you?” I don't remember ever getting a “no”... maybe because the school was geared strictly toward performance (with my art classes on another campus) so everyone I was approaching were actors, pianists, other musicians. There's something inherent in these types that make them say “yes” to any attention that immortalizes them. Though, it has been said, that secretly everyone wants their portrait done.
In my second year, I stopped having to ask for models. I was still a year away from my first public show but word was spreading like wild fire in that closed community. There would be a soft knock just after eleven... or (in that adorable way that grrls have... and boys, too, apparently...) a note would scoot under my door. “Do you have a model this week?” Sometimes in flowering script, other times in sloppy block letters. Sometimes as a shy whisper, other times as a shout across the study hall.
I felt that life was complete.
After school was done, I followed that easy performance path for a while. Made my trek to the hellmouth (LA not Sunnydale) and paid my dues. My paintings were all purchased. Hanging in strangers’ homes. A few with my parents and grandparents. One with a close friend. I left my passion behind because I was all grown up now. I was being responsible. I doodled but I didn’t own an easel. Don’t make me print an analogy for doodling compared to painting. You know where I’d go with that one.
Time passed, years passed. I started to feel... lost. I started to feel... empty. I started to feel like life was lucrative and pretty much without meaning. Then, as all of you know, I happened to be at the convention... I happened to meet back up with that writer... I happened upon game design by way of mathematics. She handed me that perfect O.S., all graph-paper-charts-probabilities. She pointed me down the bramble thorny path and said, “Why aren’t you over there?”
I learned that mathematics was as seductive as painting. I learned that the perfection of binary is, of course, a product of the mortal mind carrying the immortal seeds of the cosmos. Like straight lines and steel, silicon chips and Twinkies, in nature, zero doesn’t exist. And if you think that space is vacuum... well, honey, go back to the blog about the Higgs and then let’s vacation at the LHC. Or heck, let’s take a daytrip to Menlo Park and watch the also-ran SLAC bust open uncuttables like I pop a pomegranate and watch the rubies bounce and dance against a white China bowl. There is no nothing. The ancient Olmec with their first appearance of zero six hundred years before Christ, were our first mathematicians. And me, breaking down the numbers to build a TCG, found my way back to painting, back to creation, and all the way back around to that impassable but always impassioned path that had waited for me, patiently, all those years.
You bust open an atom and you’ve got a handful of treasure. Protons, neutrons, electrons. Go further for quarks, antiquarks and gluons. They all work together, itty bitty noms hanging with the family. Running their own little empire that runs the matter that makes the world. You bust open that atom that’s me and you’ve got math and paint and games and God. You’ll find scripture and motorcycles, puns and passion. And it all works together, running that empire that runs me ragged. Keeping me on my impassioned path that leads me to Him... to you... to all of you... and back again. Like that endless circle that is the Large Hadron Collider, all those particles wanted nothing more than to just shoot straight ahead – the easy path! – but instead wind up coaxed, bent, guided around and around in their own circle game.
The impassioned path is hard but it will be paved with things He knows complete you. And the completion of you has nothing to do with man’s filter, man’s law, or cultural diction. I walked away from the money, in short, to minister. To hip hop, pop culture, leather and cycle my way into the lives of people who need something. Need a Him they don’t know exists because society has shoved that other Him down their throats. I walked away from man’s money, and He gave me back my brush, He stretched my canvas, and He nudged my shoulder and said, “Hey, E.J., ask if you can paint her.”
What’s inside your atom?
E.J.
For seven years (those delightfully formative years -- 17 to 23 -- when everything was just so squeaky new, lemon fresh, and first blush perfect) I studied toward my MFA (performance) while sidelining toward the same in painting. The performance work had been steady since I was a wee one and the allure was addictive (despite the fact that I wasn't “the type”) because the paychecks were enormous compared to my (lower) working class upbringing. It just seemed so... easy... and we all know (from previous blogs) that “easy” is never the path.
For performance classes I embedded my own trigger word (“paycheck”) to activate my persona (Actor) that would, in turn, wrap herself in a persona (Character). I could play Actor for hours on end. It was the best type of cosplay. Like classic Julie Andrews (my first crush) in “Victor/Victoria,” I was a person playing a person playing a person. At the end the day, I would walk out of the classroom, remove the Actor accessory and meet eyes with another student... or teacher... or visiting parent... in the hall. Linger a second too long. Hold out one hand, palm up, cock my head. Little itty bitty smile that was west of a grin, closer south to a whisper. “Can I paint you?”
When I say I miss New York City, I mean those nights. The dorm window open. The city sounds wafting in. Night like a lover filling my sacred space called Creation. I remember first connecting passion and rain, the midnight that a thunderstorm soaked me, my model, and my freaking canvas, too, and I never stopped. My hair, rain, paint, ripped white tee, blue jeans... all of me... all my subject, dark olive skin, black leather jacket, open white jeans... seemed to become one image, burning in my mind, traveling like serum through my chest and my body. Eyes together, always together, it was the best sex I ever had... without ever touching another person.
Interaction. Sensation. Response. Catharsis. The physical labor of art. Painting is more alive than performance. I guess I'd just rather be working class. I want it to be difficult. Don't want it over in two-point-three minutes (on average). Want it all night, muscles bunched, trembling, hours on end, with half a dozen techniques and a whole lot of colors exploding across the canvas, my body, the room.
And now I see you, baby, in everything that I do, the art and you are all mixed up. Every move against canvas, every time the brush and me are just right, right there. I want to know it’s good and mine. The texture, tooth, grain of the canvas, the paper, the wall. I want to feel the force up through my shoulder, shuddering up my arm, across my back, with every stroke, every thrust, every careful hue. I fell in love so hard. It was so perfect – size, shape, your smile – the late nights, all nights, my body finally striped down to jeans and tank, streaked with sweet sweat, and bluegreenredyellowpurpleblack from a canvas taller than I am. I couldn’t let it go any more than I can let you go now. I wanted it so bad. All the time. Every night. Singing hallelujahs into pale dawn skies because God gave us these bodies, these brushes, this time.
And it got better. Is that possible? I didn't care about skills getting better (though that happened too). Just cared about the intensity. I wanted everything heightened. Everything alive, flashing passion and power through the room like heat lightning. I would cram, memorizing lines... then walk the halls looking for my fix. It was an addiction so demanding, so specific. “Hey. I'm E.J. Can I paint you?” I don't remember ever getting a “no”... maybe because the school was geared strictly toward performance (with my art classes on another campus) so everyone I was approaching were actors, pianists, other musicians. There's something inherent in these types that make them say “yes” to any attention that immortalizes them. Though, it has been said, that secretly everyone wants their portrait done.
In my second year, I stopped having to ask for models. I was still a year away from my first public show but word was spreading like wild fire in that closed community. There would be a soft knock just after eleven... or (in that adorable way that grrls have... and boys, too, apparently...) a note would scoot under my door. “Do you have a model this week?” Sometimes in flowering script, other times in sloppy block letters. Sometimes as a shy whisper, other times as a shout across the study hall.
I felt that life was complete.
After school was done, I followed that easy performance path for a while. Made my trek to the hellmouth (LA not Sunnydale) and paid my dues. My paintings were all purchased. Hanging in strangers’ homes. A few with my parents and grandparents. One with a close friend. I left my passion behind because I was all grown up now. I was being responsible. I doodled but I didn’t own an easel. Don’t make me print an analogy for doodling compared to painting. You know where I’d go with that one.
Time passed, years passed. I started to feel... lost. I started to feel... empty. I started to feel like life was lucrative and pretty much without meaning. Then, as all of you know, I happened to be at the convention... I happened to meet back up with that writer... I happened upon game design by way of mathematics. She handed me that perfect O.S., all graph-paper-charts-probabilities. She pointed me down the bramble thorny path and said, “Why aren’t you over there?”
I learned that mathematics was as seductive as painting. I learned that the perfection of binary is, of course, a product of the mortal mind carrying the immortal seeds of the cosmos. Like straight lines and steel, silicon chips and Twinkies, in nature, zero doesn’t exist. And if you think that space is vacuum... well, honey, go back to the blog about the Higgs and then let’s vacation at the LHC. Or heck, let’s take a daytrip to Menlo Park and watch the also-ran SLAC bust open uncuttables like I pop a pomegranate and watch the rubies bounce and dance against a white China bowl. There is no nothing. The ancient Olmec with their first appearance of zero six hundred years before Christ, were our first mathematicians. And me, breaking down the numbers to build a TCG, found my way back to painting, back to creation, and all the way back around to that impassable but always impassioned path that had waited for me, patiently, all those years.
You bust open an atom and you’ve got a handful of treasure. Protons, neutrons, electrons. Go further for quarks, antiquarks and gluons. They all work together, itty bitty noms hanging with the family. Running their own little empire that runs the matter that makes the world. You bust open that atom that’s me and you’ve got math and paint and games and God. You’ll find scripture and motorcycles, puns and passion. And it all works together, running that empire that runs me ragged. Keeping me on my impassioned path that leads me to Him... to you... to all of you... and back again. Like that endless circle that is the Large Hadron Collider, all those particles wanted nothing more than to just shoot straight ahead – the easy path! – but instead wind up coaxed, bent, guided around and around in their own circle game.
The impassioned path is hard but it will be paved with things He knows complete you. And the completion of you has nothing to do with man’s filter, man’s law, or cultural diction. I walked away from the money, in short, to minister. To hip hop, pop culture, leather and cycle my way into the lives of people who need something. Need a Him they don’t know exists because society has shoved that other Him down their throats. I walked away from man’s money, and He gave me back my brush, He stretched my canvas, and He nudged my shoulder and said, “Hey, E.J., ask if you can paint her.”
What’s inside your atom?
E.J.
Thursday, April 17, 2008
Four Days After the God Particle...
...I get all smooshy with the physics
of metaphor and the poetic license
of public admission.
Sifting through your letters.
Reading between your lines.
Wondering if I translated
into any of four other languages
that you might be saying something
else, something like...
Yeah. That's the one.
Right there. Found you.
Oh baby, you turn me inside out
and upside down
'til I don't know quite why
you're there
and I'm here.
When you... punctuate... a glance
and it slides over me like hot
shower spray
or the first spring sunshine
heating my cheeks after months
of crisp cold.
I'm blushing.
But you didn't mean it.
LOL OMGosh, baby, right? ;)
I just squint my eyes and
grin a little bit
tell myself with a whisper
that's it's my imagination.
I mean, don't worry, honey:
I got the memo.
So it must just be... you know...
not *that*...
Or maybe I'm just seeing outside
of time and space
to another person and place
someone standing in my arms
gazing into my eyes, saying:
"I feel sorry for Kitehead..."
Yeah.
Head in the clouds.
Dreaming VR dreams.
"Must just be lonely."
Yeah. That's it. Lonely.
How 'bout we test that theory, darling?
How 'bout we do the math
together.
I don't think it adds up
cuz when you divide it down
unwrapping these layers
I'm still in love with you.
I think the simple truth is
It just comes in handy...
being paranormal and all.
of metaphor and the poetic license
of public admission.
Sifting through your letters.
Reading between your lines.
Wondering if I translated
into any of four other languages
that you might be saying something
else, something like...
Yeah. That's the one.
Right there. Found you.
Oh baby, you turn me inside out
and upside down
'til I don't know quite why
you're there
and I'm here.
When you... punctuate... a glance
and it slides over me like hot
shower spray
or the first spring sunshine
heating my cheeks after months
of crisp cold.
I'm blushing.
But you didn't mean it.
LOL OMGosh, baby, right? ;)
I just squint my eyes and
grin a little bit
tell myself with a whisper
that's it's my imagination.
I mean, don't worry, honey:
I got the memo.
So it must just be... you know...
not *that*...
Or maybe I'm just seeing outside
of time and space
to another person and place
someone standing in my arms
gazing into my eyes, saying:
"I feel sorry for Kitehead..."
Yeah.
Head in the clouds.
Dreaming VR dreams.
"Must just be lonely."
Yeah. That's it. Lonely.
How 'bout we test that theory, darling?
How 'bout we do the math
together.
I don't think it adds up
cuz when you divide it down
unwrapping these layers
I'm still in love with you.
I think the simple truth is
It just comes in handy...
being paranormal and all.
Wednesday, April 16, 2008
Eyes on the Blinking Banner
An ad on My(Wasteof)Space announces:
"Physics elevated to an art form."
Seems that the Okaley boys
are designing athletic goggles
that sell for $155 a piece
trying to make themselves more than
using dem big ole words like hydrophobic
which they trademarked and registered.
But the craziness that gets me hot
(but not quite bothered)
is that physics, baby, was an art form
way before it was turned out
for athletic goggles
before it started selling itself
for geeks and cleats who wanna
feel oh so smexy smart.
"Physics elevated to an art form."
Seems that the Okaley boys
are designing athletic goggles
that sell for $155 a piece
trying to make themselves more than
using dem big ole words like hydrophobic
which they trademarked and registered.
But the craziness that gets me hot
(but not quite bothered)
is that physics, baby, was an art form
way before it was turned out
for athletic goggles
before it started selling itself
for geeks and cleats who wanna
feel oh so smexy smart.
Tuesday, April 15, 2008
Not a Sunday Blog
When I feel lost
When my resolve slides toward doubt
When I think *I* know what's best
and stand alone in defiance of my heart
When I decide not to call
When I close my message unsent
When I self-edit until nothing of me
but only surface scratches remain
This is when you blush for me
and I wake up again in your arms
whispering a million morning,
late night, and rainy noon endearments
When I am warm and bare against you
When I am vulnerable and your own
your blush alone transports me back
on angel's wings at night
E.J.
Voyez-vous comment vous m'affectez? Que vous faites-il à mon coeur? Je n'ai jamais su. Jusqu'à ce que vous. Je n'ai jamais senti cette façon.
When my resolve slides toward doubt
When I think *I* know what's best
and stand alone in defiance of my heart
When I decide not to call
When I close my message unsent
When I self-edit until nothing of me
but only surface scratches remain
This is when you blush for me
and I wake up again in your arms
whispering a million morning,
late night, and rainy noon endearments
When I am warm and bare against you
When I am vulnerable and your own
your blush alone transports me back
on angel's wings at night
E.J.
Voyez-vous comment vous m'affectez? Que vous faites-il à mon coeur? Je n'ai jamais su. Jusqu'à ce que vous. Je n'ai jamais senti cette façon.
Sunday, April 13, 2008
Friend Request
I had an eight hour lay over. So minus hailing a taxi and general transit and ferry times, we had two hours but it was enough. I got out at the street and walked in the darkness down the gravel easement. There are potholes and wild rabbits, by the way. No lights were on. Kitsap County back roads apparently aren’t on the grid for luxuries like street lights. Your black iron gate was latched but not locked.
My boots made a solid sound down your driveway. It was either that or the sound of my heart—my blood in my ears. I’m not sure which one. I zipped up my leather jacket then unzipped it. Then nervously zipped it up again. Coming to see you is like coming to see an ex-lover or older sister or parent... something in there somewhere... even though you aren’t any of those things. My feelings get all jumbled. They tumble around in my gut. I shove my hands in my jeans pockets. I look at my feet and lift a hand to knock carefully. Dawn hasn’t come yet.
The door opens before I make a sound and without a sound. You are dressed in worn blue jeans distressed at the knees. Nowadays people pay for jeans that look this way. Yours are twenty years old. But Levis are always in style. You're wearing a white bottom down shirt, long sleeved, and a black leather vest, zipped up. Your gold cross is a shadow at your collar. Your bangs have grown and hang in your eyes. In this light you could be any age. I prefer to think of you as timeless.
As we walk, I avoid your gaze. I still find your eyes unnerving. Saw them first when I was thirteen, though I suspect, you didn’t really see me. You claim not to remember me at all, standing in that long line for autographs. But you were nineteen so it’s probably better that way. I think, subconsciously, I haven’t dated anyone blue-eyed simply because I might call them by your name. You’d find that humorous. You have a very dry sense of humor.
I wrote once that I've always liked the metaphor of friendship as a puzzle. My father used to describe it as a Japanese puzzle box. That as we live and make lasting friends, we build a puzzle box that is our self. At the center of the box is our heart and that is where Christ resides. To me, you are a puzzle box. Complex and hidden, layered and full of surprises. I think this is why I come to you with all the Big Issues. You are a small, mortal, living metaphor. You mirror life the way I see it.
You walk quickly. I remember this now. You are always more fit than you attest and your constitution belies the fact that you work on a computer all day. I don’t ask where we’re going. I know you have limited time and I have a plane to catch. But you barely speak and walk with clear purpose.
A mile from your house, deeper still into the woods, we walk under the aging, rusted arch: The Fraola Cemetery. Dawn’s light is starting to color the sky. Your sense of humor doesn’t seem present today.
There is an maple tree, twenty-five or thirty years old. We sit side by side, twenty feet off the ground, watching the sky through the gnarled bare limbs. Peach, rose and pale orange creep through indigo. The day is stealing away the frozen night.
“This is where I want to be buried,” you mention nonchalantly. “Or cremated and sprinkled in the pet cemetery at home in the back yard.” You don’t laugh. I put my arm around your waist. There seems something unspoken today. Something quiet like fate.
We talk about particle physics. You tell me about the Large Hadron Collider that crosses the France/Switzerland border like you just vacationed there. You punctuate your descriptions of experimental physics with in-jokes like “And to think that *atom* means ‘uncuttable’” followed by a snort. Silly Greeks. What were they thinking? The universe without quarks is like a cemetery without a gnarled maple tree!
Costing five or ten billion dollars, the LHC is the largest particle accelerator in the world. It’s sole purpose (if you aren’t sure what a particle accelerator is) is to speed up particles (that’s itty bitty noms of matter) to near the speed of light and them crash them together and see what comes out. Sound costly and experimental? It is but take into account that while NASA brought us global uses for Velcro, particle physics has brought us microprocessors (if you’re reading this online, you’re using one) and magnetized hard disks (inside your iPod). Without figuring out how the stuff *inside* those itty bitty noms works, we wouldn’t have any of the itty bitty toys us grown ups all love and rely on.
But you don’t want to talk about the politics of science with me today. Today you want to talk about the Higgs particle, or, as the media likes to herald it (as dubbed by physicist Leon Lederman) the God particle. Unlike other subatomic particles, the Higgs boson has mass and lots of it. As a matter of fact, the Higgs may be what fills up space—proving nonexistence of true vacuum by zipping in with its own smexy boson self. But better yet, the Higgs may be that generous particle that allows otherwise zero-mass itty bitty noms to acquire mass. Get it? The Higgs makes mass and matter where there was none. The God particle.
After I first met my friend, listened to an hour-long speech about the politics of science fiction and sexuality in a neo-puritanical society grasping for relevance (yeah, nineteen), I fantasized for months afterward of growing up, marrying and making babies with that incredible brain. LOL! Now there’s science fiction for ya, right? Just proof positive that geeky grrls leap (the fence?) for brilliant thinkers. Maybe I should design a shirt for brainy folks: “E=MC2: I Recruit” Or maybe a muscle shirt that reads: “God gave me this brain. It’s a sin to play stupid.”
Still sitting on the tree limb, dawn fully upon us, my friend says, “When you think about the science behind the universe... When I think about the science inside our bodies. About the inside of atoms and quarks and bosons.... When I think about the unknowable, unproven, and unseen... Written scripture seems so insignificant. If you can’t comprehend basic particle behavior and form your own opinions on theoretical physics... then don’t tell me how to live my life. You’ve got nothing on God.”
I blink my eyes. “You know I want you, right?”
And my dead-pan delivery rewards me with laughter so loud and perfect and full and honest that I think it breaks the stillness of the cemetery and collides hypothetical massive scalar elementary particles all over the darn place. It wakes the dead to riotous guffaws. It defies the laws and makes new ones. You live your every moment by God’s law, handed down directly to the heart. You open your eyes every morning to His day. You find strength and courage writ large between the lines of man’s scripture. I am inspired by your queit certainity.
You turn and climb, then jump down. Your leather sneakers crunch on the dry leaves. You nail the landing, of course. I stay behind for a moment. Sitting high atop our perch. Knowing it may be a year or more before I have a stolen hour with you again. Knowing how your responsibilities drag you away from everyone, really. You give so much to everyone that there is no time for “you” at the end of the day. I close my eyes for a moment and pray that in that moment when you close your eyes for the last time, that you will not only know peace but know how much you have meant to everyone. That not all of us overlook you.
In the crooks of the tree, leaves have gathered and have lain, still and curled, since fall. They are nested in clusters. I reach out and take a handful. They are like paper or shells. I crush them slowly. Rub my palms together to wear them away to dust. The pieces fall like ash on the gathering breeze.
I think about how another friend, so dear to my heart, asked me for a blog that explored the assignment of gender to God. Not to Christ, who obviously walked as a mortal man, but to God, that limitless, mighty creator who may or may not have fingerprints made of Higgs particles. We do it, of course, across many cultures, because of socio politics and the nature of dominance. I could wax not-so-poetic for a dozen blogs on the topic. But instead, I find myself laughing. Tension and quiet flowing off me like city grime after a long day at work. How random and ridiculous it all seems. Gender? What biological parts our bodies boast. Seriously now? How... how in Heaven and Earth and the great cosmos itself does a *stupid,* base and juvenile element like *gender* get assigned to the genesis of everything?
I never realized before how ludicrous it is. But in that moment, the new day resting on my shoulders, the sky pastels and magic, in that moment I laughed so bright and clear, and dared to leap those twenty feet only to tumble into the leaves and roll over grass and stones, still laughing.
I always say “He” and “Him” when I refer to God or Christ. Because “he” and “him” are reserved for mortal men. But language is small. Language is insignificant in the grander painting of everything we are and everything God is. Language exists only as a way for us to touch each other. Not as a way for us to touch God. Arguing why we call God this or that way, this or that word, is just filling space. It shouldn’t matter. It doesn’t matter. He knows when we call His name. He understands it in a hundred million ways. I may as well call God “boson” or “quark” or “lepton.” I may as well call Him by any of the flavors of elementary particles that fill our existence like angels dancing on the head of a pin.
It isn’t what we call Him. It’s only that we call.
E.J.
My boots made a solid sound down your driveway. It was either that or the sound of my heart—my blood in my ears. I’m not sure which one. I zipped up my leather jacket then unzipped it. Then nervously zipped it up again. Coming to see you is like coming to see an ex-lover or older sister or parent... something in there somewhere... even though you aren’t any of those things. My feelings get all jumbled. They tumble around in my gut. I shove my hands in my jeans pockets. I look at my feet and lift a hand to knock carefully. Dawn hasn’t come yet.
The door opens before I make a sound and without a sound. You are dressed in worn blue jeans distressed at the knees. Nowadays people pay for jeans that look this way. Yours are twenty years old. But Levis are always in style. You're wearing a white bottom down shirt, long sleeved, and a black leather vest, zipped up. Your gold cross is a shadow at your collar. Your bangs have grown and hang in your eyes. In this light you could be any age. I prefer to think of you as timeless.
As we walk, I avoid your gaze. I still find your eyes unnerving. Saw them first when I was thirteen, though I suspect, you didn’t really see me. You claim not to remember me at all, standing in that long line for autographs. But you were nineteen so it’s probably better that way. I think, subconsciously, I haven’t dated anyone blue-eyed simply because I might call them by your name. You’d find that humorous. You have a very dry sense of humor.
I wrote once that I've always liked the metaphor of friendship as a puzzle. My father used to describe it as a Japanese puzzle box. That as we live and make lasting friends, we build a puzzle box that is our self. At the center of the box is our heart and that is where Christ resides. To me, you are a puzzle box. Complex and hidden, layered and full of surprises. I think this is why I come to you with all the Big Issues. You are a small, mortal, living metaphor. You mirror life the way I see it.
You walk quickly. I remember this now. You are always more fit than you attest and your constitution belies the fact that you work on a computer all day. I don’t ask where we’re going. I know you have limited time and I have a plane to catch. But you barely speak and walk with clear purpose.
A mile from your house, deeper still into the woods, we walk under the aging, rusted arch: The Fraola Cemetery. Dawn’s light is starting to color the sky. Your sense of humor doesn’t seem present today.
There is an maple tree, twenty-five or thirty years old. We sit side by side, twenty feet off the ground, watching the sky through the gnarled bare limbs. Peach, rose and pale orange creep through indigo. The day is stealing away the frozen night.
“This is where I want to be buried,” you mention nonchalantly. “Or cremated and sprinkled in the pet cemetery at home in the back yard.” You don’t laugh. I put my arm around your waist. There seems something unspoken today. Something quiet like fate.
We talk about particle physics. You tell me about the Large Hadron Collider that crosses the France/Switzerland border like you just vacationed there. You punctuate your descriptions of experimental physics with in-jokes like “And to think that *atom* means ‘uncuttable’” followed by a snort. Silly Greeks. What were they thinking? The universe without quarks is like a cemetery without a gnarled maple tree!
Costing five or ten billion dollars, the LHC is the largest particle accelerator in the world. It’s sole purpose (if you aren’t sure what a particle accelerator is) is to speed up particles (that’s itty bitty noms of matter) to near the speed of light and them crash them together and see what comes out. Sound costly and experimental? It is but take into account that while NASA brought us global uses for Velcro, particle physics has brought us microprocessors (if you’re reading this online, you’re using one) and magnetized hard disks (inside your iPod). Without figuring out how the stuff *inside* those itty bitty noms works, we wouldn’t have any of the itty bitty toys us grown ups all love and rely on.
But you don’t want to talk about the politics of science with me today. Today you want to talk about the Higgs particle, or, as the media likes to herald it (as dubbed by physicist Leon Lederman) the God particle. Unlike other subatomic particles, the Higgs boson has mass and lots of it. As a matter of fact, the Higgs may be what fills up space—proving nonexistence of true vacuum by zipping in with its own smexy boson self. But better yet, the Higgs may be that generous particle that allows otherwise zero-mass itty bitty noms to acquire mass. Get it? The Higgs makes mass and matter where there was none. The God particle.
After I first met my friend, listened to an hour-long speech about the politics of science fiction and sexuality in a neo-puritanical society grasping for relevance (yeah, nineteen), I fantasized for months afterward of growing up, marrying and making babies with that incredible brain. LOL! Now there’s science fiction for ya, right? Just proof positive that geeky grrls leap (the fence?) for brilliant thinkers. Maybe I should design a shirt for brainy folks: “E=MC2: I Recruit” Or maybe a muscle shirt that reads: “God gave me this brain. It’s a sin to play stupid.”
Still sitting on the tree limb, dawn fully upon us, my friend says, “When you think about the science behind the universe... When I think about the science inside our bodies. About the inside of atoms and quarks and bosons.... When I think about the unknowable, unproven, and unseen... Written scripture seems so insignificant. If you can’t comprehend basic particle behavior and form your own opinions on theoretical physics... then don’t tell me how to live my life. You’ve got nothing on God.”
I blink my eyes. “You know I want you, right?”
And my dead-pan delivery rewards me with laughter so loud and perfect and full and honest that I think it breaks the stillness of the cemetery and collides hypothetical massive scalar elementary particles all over the darn place. It wakes the dead to riotous guffaws. It defies the laws and makes new ones. You live your every moment by God’s law, handed down directly to the heart. You open your eyes every morning to His day. You find strength and courage writ large between the lines of man’s scripture. I am inspired by your queit certainity.
You turn and climb, then jump down. Your leather sneakers crunch on the dry leaves. You nail the landing, of course. I stay behind for a moment. Sitting high atop our perch. Knowing it may be a year or more before I have a stolen hour with you again. Knowing how your responsibilities drag you away from everyone, really. You give so much to everyone that there is no time for “you” at the end of the day. I close my eyes for a moment and pray that in that moment when you close your eyes for the last time, that you will not only know peace but know how much you have meant to everyone. That not all of us overlook you.
In the crooks of the tree, leaves have gathered and have lain, still and curled, since fall. They are nested in clusters. I reach out and take a handful. They are like paper or shells. I crush them slowly. Rub my palms together to wear them away to dust. The pieces fall like ash on the gathering breeze.
I think about how another friend, so dear to my heart, asked me for a blog that explored the assignment of gender to God. Not to Christ, who obviously walked as a mortal man, but to God, that limitless, mighty creator who may or may not have fingerprints made of Higgs particles. We do it, of course, across many cultures, because of socio politics and the nature of dominance. I could wax not-so-poetic for a dozen blogs on the topic. But instead, I find myself laughing. Tension and quiet flowing off me like city grime after a long day at work. How random and ridiculous it all seems. Gender? What biological parts our bodies boast. Seriously now? How... how in Heaven and Earth and the great cosmos itself does a *stupid,* base and juvenile element like *gender* get assigned to the genesis of everything?
I never realized before how ludicrous it is. But in that moment, the new day resting on my shoulders, the sky pastels and magic, in that moment I laughed so bright and clear, and dared to leap those twenty feet only to tumble into the leaves and roll over grass and stones, still laughing.
I always say “He” and “Him” when I refer to God or Christ. Because “he” and “him” are reserved for mortal men. But language is small. Language is insignificant in the grander painting of everything we are and everything God is. Language exists only as a way for us to touch each other. Not as a way for us to touch God. Arguing why we call God this or that way, this or that word, is just filling space. It shouldn’t matter. It doesn’t matter. He knows when we call His name. He understands it in a hundred million ways. I may as well call God “boson” or “quark” or “lepton.” I may as well call Him by any of the flavors of elementary particles that fill our existence like angels dancing on the head of a pin.
It isn’t what we call Him. It’s only that we call.
E.J.
Sunday, April 06, 2008
Sex & Superiority
I have this peep who may or may not be named Abigail (which is a beautiful name) who likes to write to me and chat about hot pink storage bins and the nature of sexual politics in the Catholic church as represented in South America. This is the thing I like about her the most: She is never boring. She is also delightfully willing to disagree (without having to get the last word in), and very respectful of my time and privacy.
Which is much more than I can say of my anti-peep (LOL!) who may or may not be named Torrance (which is an in-joke) who likes to call my cell and leave long, breathy messages that always end in “Thinking of you, Angel.” Which is scary because Torrance doesn’t know me by that name and doesn’t know about this blog.
Which is why, after several weeks of serious sermons, I have a slightly more light-hearted one for ya’all ;)
Torrance called on Saturday night. Just had to take me to dinner on Sunday. Had decided that gender or sexuality or race (!!!) had kept us apart (I guess we’re soulmates according to a widget on MySpace) and so Torrance had found me a better match and I just had to meet him... or post a comment on 149 YouTubes in the next twenty minutes of die in three days.
VULGAR ASIDE (skip this paragraph, babygrrl): For real, there is a special circle of Hell for viral pranksters. No joke. They prey on the insincerities of young, naïve kids and feed their superstitions... perhaps driving the sales of tiny little horoscope scrolls, and driving kids to claim that “the voices made me do it.” This circle is right beside the circles for rapists, the inventor of artificial banana flavoring, drug lords, and sixteen year old phobics who post “I’m going to hunt down and kill you, faggot!!!” on the YouTubes of young gay men dancing to Janet Jackson songs. Jenn and I have decided that an eternity of nut shots await all of these charming individuals.
Back to my reality:
So after spending an hour or so writing to Abigail about sex and human superiority and how our two (delightfully different) religions view these issues, I had a lot on my mind as I wove my humming Kawi (that means Kawasaki, Erik) through LA Sunday traffic. I’d driven a long way to be amused. And as it turned out, it was worth it.
I got to the restaurant and was met by the million gigawatt smile of Torrance and the trillion gigawatt golden silk shirt of “He Who Must Be Met.” Over Sprite (I couldn’t help myself), Torrance regaled us both with all the things we had in common. These included religion, race, and the fact that we’re both homo sapiens. Then, PTL (I’m not joking), Torrance spotted a director more important than dinner and we were left alone.
“Hello,” he said.
“Hello,” I answered.
“I’m gay,” he said.
“No kidding.” I answered.
“Why did Torrance set this up?” he asked.
I smiled. “Because Torrance has team spirit.”
We both laughed and from that laughter grew a conversation about sex and superiority, and an evening so enjoyable we exchanged emails and handles, and admitted to being disappointed that we were on opposite sides of the fence... or the same side... or whatever :D
Now, my readers – across a dozen or more religions – we may disagree on lots of stuff this week but, like Abigail (who may really be named Francine), we’re just gonna be cool with that because trust me, honeys, I don’t agree with 80% of what you say to me ;) It takes all kinds to float this boat called Earth; A homogenized glass of milk might be safer but is doesn’t taste nearly as good as a cup of fresh-on-the-farm cream.
“I’m not a vegetarian because I love animals. I’m a vegetarian because I hate plants.” And I spew Sprite into my napkin, experiencing the sensation of carbonated nostrils not for the first time in my life. I have a fleeting thought of my publisher quoting my blog as an example of beautiful, powerful writing... and I wonder if she’ll ever forgive me for this week. I make a note to send flowers Monday morning.
The Bible says that man is the ruler of the beasts. That man is made in God’s image and likeness. This is widely accepted among various denominations as fact. We rule! Yay us! Humans first! Everything else is just tasty! (Support P.E.T.A.: People Eating Tasty Animals) But among New Testament Christians we don’t really jibe with this. We rule “over” animals as God rules over us. We are meant to be guardian, savior and friend. We are meant to pass judgment (because we’re kinda the species in charge... see later in the blog for why and how) and make wise decisions.
Just as a little bit of an artist – eyes, nose, jaw line -- works its way into her portraits of others, a little bit of God is in everything around us. Our existence is trees and shells and star clusters, and genomes, and rocks and pigs, and cosmic strings with names that may or may not be George. The cosmos is one enormous fractal – from a drop of blood to a galaxy – and God is one big ole Mandelbrot set.
So, you see, we’re all made in His image. As a Mormon might look to their living Prophet, or a Catholic might look to their Pope, a New Testament Christian will look to nature to guide us. Because, as I have said time and time again, the Bible (with the exception of those nifty and very-relevant ten juicy commandments) was written by the hand of man, filtered through the mind of man, and translated over lots and lots of time. But nature is made by God’s hand and all things – from ants to event horizons – are “Living Scripture” (to borrow from the Terrapyres) left behind by God for us to understand Him. Sure, sure, when we didn’t get it, He sent Christ, but still, the whole darn cosmos is made in His image and aren’t we lucky to have Him all around us!
Like, check it out:
Human beings share 98% of their gene sequence with chimpanzees. Yep. Think that’s amazing? Not really (more later). But for now, let’s pretend it’s mind-blowing incredible. I mean, OMGosh! 98%?! No way! What, then, sets us apart from the furry little tree swingers?
When I asked nineteen random chatters on IMVU (“Someone wants to chat!”) what sets us apart from chimps, they rattle off:
Humans are empathic to one another.
Humans play.
Humans make deals.
Humans oppress.
Humans have language.
Humans have culture and society.
Humans make and use tools.
But not a single one of these is a true difference! Chimps match Humans point for point on this list. Ask any primatologist -- especially lately with Jill Pruetz’ spear-making, bush baby hunting chimparoonies – and they’ll tell you, you’re an idiot. Chimps have empathy. They play. They make deals (like meat for sex... PTL for Oscar Meyer). They oppress and have complex language (even take to ours, if taught). They have cultural and societal rules. They make tools to hunt.
Does that mean that chimps are moving up some kind of golden evolutionary ladder? No... it just means we share a heck of a lot of genes. That we come from the same source code, baby. We share a programmer.
One of the best answers I got was from a friend of mine who is married to a woman who is a closeted conceptual mathematician. These are the type of people who think in numbers and equations and whose journals look like a cross between accounting tape and football strategy. My friend (who admits to not be able to balance a check book) is very brave to have committed to this union LOL!
“What sets us apart from the chimps?” I asked my friend.
“Mathematics,” was the instant reply.
Hm. *shivers* Can’t really argue that, now can we? Theoretical mathematics especially. Because from there we can leap to the other differences: make fire; track time; make permanent records of art; gather knowledge. Observe the natural world and make leaps both large and small – cockburrs have hooked ends... invention of Velcro; light bends... space bends.
But here’s the kicker: We may be in charge. With that 2% of difference that God gave us, that exciting place where the ability to comprehend mathematics resides and turns us into a ruling class (and, to be frank, turns some of us on), we may rule. But we’re not that darn unique. Because we share 80% of a gene sequence with *mice* and maybe 30% with... wait for it... lettuce.
:)
No, that’s not a joke. Let me say it again: Lettuce.
So God made us, and lettuce, in His image. But, admittedly, we “look” a little more like Him than Romaine and a lot more than Iceberg. But when you’re next ready to slap down the glue trap in the corner of the pantry you might want to pick up a pen and paper first and jot down that list of why mouseykins is so less “human.”
You might be wondering right about now when the “sex” part of the title comes into play. I mean, if you arrived here via Google, you’re 50% more likely to be making a click-through for sex than for, say, “God as a great big fractal.”
Well, wait no longer, because as dessert of chocolate cream pie arrived and we both dissolved into moans of ecstasy, the conversation did indeed turn to sex even though the only seed I was thinking of was a Theobrama cacao seed ;P
I pitched an idea from my friend Abigail (or Francine but not George), who wrote to me this week: “Oh, sex was definitely intended for pleasure. I think that it's a myth (a very, very dangerous one), that sex should only be used to create children. I think God created sex for the pleasure of enjoyment, and that he added it to the idea of procreation as a bonus, so that when Adam and Eve (in particular) were fulfilling his commandment to be fruitful and multiply, they would be able to intensely enjoy the relationship God had given them.” My sweet conservative friend went one to say, “I think so many ideas about family life, homes, sex, marriage, and most of all love have been distorted by peoples' view of those things, instead of realizing the way they were intended to be from the beginning.”
My dinner buddy blinked his eyes and said, “If she’s your conservative friend, what are your liberal friends like?”
Score! You see? Breaking stereotypes needs to happen all over the place! Breaking stereotypes isn’t just about showing the world that a chick can love motorcycles, or a boy can cry, or that a gamer grrl can write an entire blog based on messages at MySpace and a ill-fated blind date.
Because, you know, there are some things, like I’ve mentioned before, that Abigail and I disagree on. But when we break it down, baby, when we shake it down to these basic truths, we don’t disagree on a thing.
When two people -- who are joined together forever by their hearts and in the eyes of God -- make love, they are in fact reflecting the passion, openness and freedom of the spiritual relationship we all ought to have with Him. Sexual desire is a physical manifestation of our intense spiritual connection with God, our maker, the Great Programmer. The source code of all us binary bits and pieces. The connective tissue, the cosmic solar sail, darling, that moves us together -- here, now and into a future we can barely comprehend (and only remember in nonlinear dreams) no matter how much Charles Stross we read or how many classes in Hebrew and Greek we take.
We can’t really disagree all too much, Abigail, Erik, Launa, Cris... Buddy, Alyson... even Torrance. We can’t disagree too deeply because once we get past that first 2%, we’re all pretty much the same.
Shall we trade our superiority for unity? Too hokey-pokey? But that’s exactly what we’ve done with “Mardi Gras 3000,” right? ;)
E.J. <--- taking her cues from Christ
Which is much more than I can say of my anti-peep (LOL!) who may or may not be named Torrance (which is an in-joke) who likes to call my cell and leave long, breathy messages that always end in “Thinking of you, Angel.” Which is scary because Torrance doesn’t know me by that name and doesn’t know about this blog.
Which is why, after several weeks of serious sermons, I have a slightly more light-hearted one for ya’all ;)
Torrance called on Saturday night. Just had to take me to dinner on Sunday. Had decided that gender or sexuality or race (!!!) had kept us apart (I guess we’re soulmates according to a widget on MySpace) and so Torrance had found me a better match and I just had to meet him... or post a comment on 149 YouTubes in the next twenty minutes of die in three days.
VULGAR ASIDE (skip this paragraph, babygrrl): For real, there is a special circle of Hell for viral pranksters. No joke. They prey on the insincerities of young, naïve kids and feed their superstitions... perhaps driving the sales of tiny little horoscope scrolls, and driving kids to claim that “the voices made me do it.” This circle is right beside the circles for rapists, the inventor of artificial banana flavoring, drug lords, and sixteen year old phobics who post “I’m going to hunt down and kill you, faggot!!!” on the YouTubes of young gay men dancing to Janet Jackson songs. Jenn and I have decided that an eternity of nut shots await all of these charming individuals.
Back to my reality:
So after spending an hour or so writing to Abigail about sex and human superiority and how our two (delightfully different) religions view these issues, I had a lot on my mind as I wove my humming Kawi (that means Kawasaki, Erik) through LA Sunday traffic. I’d driven a long way to be amused. And as it turned out, it was worth it.
I got to the restaurant and was met by the million gigawatt smile of Torrance and the trillion gigawatt golden silk shirt of “He Who Must Be Met.” Over Sprite (I couldn’t help myself), Torrance regaled us both with all the things we had in common. These included religion, race, and the fact that we’re both homo sapiens. Then, PTL (I’m not joking), Torrance spotted a director more important than dinner and we were left alone.
“Hello,” he said.
“Hello,” I answered.
“I’m gay,” he said.
“No kidding.” I answered.
“Why did Torrance set this up?” he asked.
I smiled. “Because Torrance has team spirit.”
We both laughed and from that laughter grew a conversation about sex and superiority, and an evening so enjoyable we exchanged emails and handles, and admitted to being disappointed that we were on opposite sides of the fence... or the same side... or whatever :D
Now, my readers – across a dozen or more religions – we may disagree on lots of stuff this week but, like Abigail (who may really be named Francine), we’re just gonna be cool with that because trust me, honeys, I don’t agree with 80% of what you say to me ;) It takes all kinds to float this boat called Earth; A homogenized glass of milk might be safer but is doesn’t taste nearly as good as a cup of fresh-on-the-farm cream.
“I’m not a vegetarian because I love animals. I’m a vegetarian because I hate plants.” And I spew Sprite into my napkin, experiencing the sensation of carbonated nostrils not for the first time in my life. I have a fleeting thought of my publisher quoting my blog as an example of beautiful, powerful writing... and I wonder if she’ll ever forgive me for this week. I make a note to send flowers Monday morning.
The Bible says that man is the ruler of the beasts. That man is made in God’s image and likeness. This is widely accepted among various denominations as fact. We rule! Yay us! Humans first! Everything else is just tasty! (Support P.E.T.A.: People Eating Tasty Animals) But among New Testament Christians we don’t really jibe with this. We rule “over” animals as God rules over us. We are meant to be guardian, savior and friend. We are meant to pass judgment (because we’re kinda the species in charge... see later in the blog for why and how) and make wise decisions.
Just as a little bit of an artist – eyes, nose, jaw line -- works its way into her portraits of others, a little bit of God is in everything around us. Our existence is trees and shells and star clusters, and genomes, and rocks and pigs, and cosmic strings with names that may or may not be George. The cosmos is one enormous fractal – from a drop of blood to a galaxy – and God is one big ole Mandelbrot set.
So, you see, we’re all made in His image. As a Mormon might look to their living Prophet, or a Catholic might look to their Pope, a New Testament Christian will look to nature to guide us. Because, as I have said time and time again, the Bible (with the exception of those nifty and very-relevant ten juicy commandments) was written by the hand of man, filtered through the mind of man, and translated over lots and lots of time. But nature is made by God’s hand and all things – from ants to event horizons – are “Living Scripture” (to borrow from the Terrapyres) left behind by God for us to understand Him. Sure, sure, when we didn’t get it, He sent Christ, but still, the whole darn cosmos is made in His image and aren’t we lucky to have Him all around us!
Like, check it out:
Human beings share 98% of their gene sequence with chimpanzees. Yep. Think that’s amazing? Not really (more later). But for now, let’s pretend it’s mind-blowing incredible. I mean, OMGosh! 98%?! No way! What, then, sets us apart from the furry little tree swingers?
When I asked nineteen random chatters on IMVU (“Someone wants to chat!”) what sets us apart from chimps, they rattle off:
Humans are empathic to one another.
Humans play.
Humans make deals.
Humans oppress.
Humans have language.
Humans have culture and society.
Humans make and use tools.
But not a single one of these is a true difference! Chimps match Humans point for point on this list. Ask any primatologist -- especially lately with Jill Pruetz’ spear-making, bush baby hunting chimparoonies – and they’ll tell you, you’re an idiot. Chimps have empathy. They play. They make deals (like meat for sex... PTL for Oscar Meyer). They oppress and have complex language (even take to ours, if taught). They have cultural and societal rules. They make tools to hunt.
Does that mean that chimps are moving up some kind of golden evolutionary ladder? No... it just means we share a heck of a lot of genes. That we come from the same source code, baby. We share a programmer.
One of the best answers I got was from a friend of mine who is married to a woman who is a closeted conceptual mathematician. These are the type of people who think in numbers and equations and whose journals look like a cross between accounting tape and football strategy. My friend (who admits to not be able to balance a check book) is very brave to have committed to this union LOL!
“What sets us apart from the chimps?” I asked my friend.
“Mathematics,” was the instant reply.
Hm. *shivers* Can’t really argue that, now can we? Theoretical mathematics especially. Because from there we can leap to the other differences: make fire; track time; make permanent records of art; gather knowledge. Observe the natural world and make leaps both large and small – cockburrs have hooked ends... invention of Velcro; light bends... space bends.
But here’s the kicker: We may be in charge. With that 2% of difference that God gave us, that exciting place where the ability to comprehend mathematics resides and turns us into a ruling class (and, to be frank, turns some of us on), we may rule. But we’re not that darn unique. Because we share 80% of a gene sequence with *mice* and maybe 30% with... wait for it... lettuce.
:)
No, that’s not a joke. Let me say it again: Lettuce.
So God made us, and lettuce, in His image. But, admittedly, we “look” a little more like Him than Romaine and a lot more than Iceberg. But when you’re next ready to slap down the glue trap in the corner of the pantry you might want to pick up a pen and paper first and jot down that list of why mouseykins is so less “human.”
You might be wondering right about now when the “sex” part of the title comes into play. I mean, if you arrived here via Google, you’re 50% more likely to be making a click-through for sex than for, say, “God as a great big fractal.”
Well, wait no longer, because as dessert of chocolate cream pie arrived and we both dissolved into moans of ecstasy, the conversation did indeed turn to sex even though the only seed I was thinking of was a Theobrama cacao seed ;P
I pitched an idea from my friend Abigail (or Francine but not George), who wrote to me this week: “Oh, sex was definitely intended for pleasure. I think that it's a myth (a very, very dangerous one), that sex should only be used to create children. I think God created sex for the pleasure of enjoyment, and that he added it to the idea of procreation as a bonus, so that when Adam and Eve (in particular) were fulfilling his commandment to be fruitful and multiply, they would be able to intensely enjoy the relationship God had given them.” My sweet conservative friend went one to say, “I think so many ideas about family life, homes, sex, marriage, and most of all love have been distorted by peoples' view of those things, instead of realizing the way they were intended to be from the beginning.”
My dinner buddy blinked his eyes and said, “If she’s your conservative friend, what are your liberal friends like?”
Score! You see? Breaking stereotypes needs to happen all over the place! Breaking stereotypes isn’t just about showing the world that a chick can love motorcycles, or a boy can cry, or that a gamer grrl can write an entire blog based on messages at MySpace and a ill-fated blind date.
Because, you know, there are some things, like I’ve mentioned before, that Abigail and I disagree on. But when we break it down, baby, when we shake it down to these basic truths, we don’t disagree on a thing.
When two people -- who are joined together forever by their hearts and in the eyes of God -- make love, they are in fact reflecting the passion, openness and freedom of the spiritual relationship we all ought to have with Him. Sexual desire is a physical manifestation of our intense spiritual connection with God, our maker, the Great Programmer. The source code of all us binary bits and pieces. The connective tissue, the cosmic solar sail, darling, that moves us together -- here, now and into a future we can barely comprehend (and only remember in nonlinear dreams) no matter how much Charles Stross we read or how many classes in Hebrew and Greek we take.
We can’t really disagree all too much, Abigail, Erik, Launa, Cris... Buddy, Alyson... even Torrance. We can’t disagree too deeply because once we get past that first 2%, we’re all pretty much the same.
Shall we trade our superiority for unity? Too hokey-pokey? But that’s exactly what we’ve done with “Mardi Gras 3000,” right? ;)
E.J. <--- taking her cues from Christ
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