Why Seeing Things?

Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.

- Jesus

Seeing is not just believing. For me, seeing is loving. I firmly believe that if I could watch someone every moment of his life, from conception to death, I would come to care deeply about that person, no matter how deplorably he lived, no matter how dull or unpleasant his personality. The simple act of seeing a person's life unfolding would kindle caring in my heart: seeing a little embryonic heart gather strength and begin to beat in the darkness of the womb, seeing that same heart flutter with the excitements of childhood, ache with the first pangs of love, break under the weight of grief, grow cold, grow warm again, and, finally, beat its last... if I could see all that, merely watch a person's journey from beginning to end, the beauty would overwhelm me. Vision is the pathway to love.

Deeper vision is an art, and it is one that I long to master. After all, there is so much beauty in this universe. I seek not only the long-range vision that takes in the panorama of all existence, but that gift of noticing the little things: pebbles on the footpath, wildflowers growing in the gutter, the first frost of winter, the last star of morning. I don't want to stumble through life with my head down and my eyes veiled, ignoring everything except the necessities for survival. I want to experience all that exists to be experienced - not only in the realm of rocks and rivers and rain, but in the emotional realm as well.

Let me not hide from feelings. Wherever they are, send them to me. If life sends me grief, let me grieve. If life sends me joy, let me rejoice. If a feeling comes to me, it must have a work to do in my heart. Please, let the doors to my soul fly open to the winds of grace, and let me trust that every good and perfect gift is from above, and comes down from the Father of lights.

Lord, let me see what you see. Don't let me close my eyes to the pain of the world and become hardened to the suffering around me. Don't let me hide my face from the sun of happiness, either, from the beauty and wonder of creation. I don't want to spend my days in denial. I want to spend my life seeing things.

My Unplugged Life

I sometimes take for granted what an unplugged life I live, compared to many of the people I know. I grew up without television or the internet in my home - and, amazingly, I still have managed to keep both out of my house, with the exception of the internet access I do have on my smartphone. During my college years, of course, I was on the internet daily at school, but my summers became much more technology free, as I would spend many of my days at home or with friends, often enjoying the big outdoors and seldom looking down at my phone for updates from the technological world.

These days, having recently graduated from college, I find myself faced with the prospect of "eternal summer," you could say, in the sense that I am no longer required to spend the bulk of my time in front of the computers in the school library. Therefore, I find myself online much less than ever before. This may be bad news for my blogs, unfortunately... although I do have high-minded goals about writing posts on Word documents at home and then bringing them in town to upload them once a week or something like that. I am really hoping I will not completely neglect my blogging, as it's been a great creative and reflective outlet for me this past semester.

But if you hear less from me, it's probably because I am busy seeing things in "the real world." Let me encourage you to do the same this summer. It's a perfect season to live life unplugged.

Ciao.

I'm Nobody! Who Are You?

I'm Nobody! Who Are You?

By Emily Dickinson

I'm Nobody! Who are you?
Are you - Nobody - too?
Then there's a pair of us!
Don't tell! they'd advertise - you know!

How dreary - to be - Somebody!
How public - like a Frog -
To tell one's name - the livelong June -
To an admiring Bog!

Society says, get out there and make a name for yourself. Dress to impress, to stand out, and that includes your personal website. Post your best selfie and wait for the likes to roll in. Make sure you tweet at least three times a day, so people don't forget you exist. Because they will. You know they will.

They will anyway. Within thirty seconds, they'll scroll down, and your face will be history. Which is why Emily Dickinson stands in the shadows in her long white dress and says, I'm Nobody! Who are you?

You don't have to be somebody, she says. That's boring; banal. Hide with me, says Emily, the ghost, the recluse. Work by moonlight in your own dark garden. You know who you are. Don't ask them to tell you; they'll just get it wrong.

God's Grandeur

God's Grandeur

By Gerard Manley Hopkins

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man's smudge & shares man's smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs --
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast & with ah! bright wings. 

The other day I took the long way home, my little car winding through rolling hills, budding woodlands, fields of dewy green. I looked up and saw a deer springing off through the grasses, full of energy and of life, and it came over me:

In the realm of nature, little has changed since time began. To the deer, this could be any century. Only human beings have bent time into a thing of fashion, mapping out the hours, the weeks, the towns and cities, the toll roads plowing through the forests, the togas in that millennium, the business-casual khaki slacks in this one.

And sometimes nature suffers from our brusque ownership, but more often, nature astonishes us by conquering our temporal constructions with its eternal anonymity. And the grandeur of God shines.

A Dream Within A Dream

 A Dream Within A Dream

By Edgar Allan Poe

Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow --
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.

I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand --
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep -- while I weep!
O God! can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?

I, too, have said goodbye and wondered: was any of this real? I can't feel you anymore. Where are you? Have I lost you forever? Were you ever mine?

The lover bids farewell to his beloved, calm, composed; a kiss on the forehead and he is gone, his words laden with quiet grief. In a flash, he is standing by the sea. There is nothing for him now but wind and waves, and in his fingers, the remnants of the unkeepable.

The Day We Walked Around With A Banjo And Everyone Stared At Us

Angsty hipster band, a.k.a. Ray Secondo and me on a normal Monday afternoon.

Springtime is for walks, yes? Ideally, aimless walks on the back streets of a small town.... with a banjo.

If you and your heavily bearded, banjo-playing pal also happen to have dressed like trashy hipsters that day, well, so much the better. That way you can take an angsty selfie with some old office buildings and street signs in the background, and everyone you pass will stare at you and think, What? Also you can make an artsy blog post about it later, because that's what we do here in the counterculture.


My friend Ray Secondo has a beard. Like, a real beard. And I have long, messily braided hair. And I was wearing black skinny jeans and a Michael Jackson Thriller T-shirt and Chuck Taylor shoes and off-red lipstick, and he was wearing a shirt with a football and the words STILL UNDEFEATED on it and a weird throwback '90s five-panel hat with a funky pattern and blue shorts and gray shoes.

Ray plays multiple instruments, so many that I've lost track. Today he kinda wanted to play his banjo, and I kinda wanted to go for a walk, which is how we ended up going for a walk while Ray played his banjo.

We set out from the university and walked several blocks south, wading in among the quiet, sun-beaten town houses with their cute little flowerbeds and lawn ornaments. Along the path, Ray was twanging away at banjo licks, switching back and forth between Scruggs and clawhammer styles. The quiet, happy music filled the air. I never thought of myself as a banjo person in the past, but hearing it played in person has converted me. The sound! It evokes a complete atmosphere, the essence of folk America.


Despite the beautiful sunny weather, at first we saw almost no one out in their yards or traversing the sidewalks. But then the encounters started happening.

Our first human (and canine) audience came in the form of a young couple out walking their dog. The dude had a beard, although not quite as epic as Ray's. I could feel his eyes on the banjo as we approached. In no time, his face broke into a brilliant grin. "Yeah, man!" he said, and I grinned back.

A few houses down, an elderly couple was out on their porch, and at the sound of the banjo, the gentleman got up and walked a few paces out onto his front lawn in our direction. "All right! Got a little country gospel," he exclaimed. We laughed and nodded. "There's a bluegrass festival over to Kendalville in a couple weeks," he added.

"Have a nice day!" his wife called from the porch as we continued down the street. We wished her the same happy fate.

And the faces kept staring. In car windows. Over garden walls. Everyone wanted to see the crazy college kids with the banjo. And we obliged them. No matter how awkward it got, Ray kept playing, and I kept enjoying it.


As our epic (and odd) journey neared its end, and campus was almost visible through the rows of trees and clapboard estates, I looked up and noticed a purple house with a lovely garden.

"Hey, I bet this is my creative writing teacher's house," I said suddenly.

Then I saw the little library box chock full of books and I knew I was right.

Ray stopped playing. "Any good books?"

We opened the box. Pride and Prejudice. A Boxcar Kids book. A biography of Rosa Parks. I picked that one up and leafed through it. Definitely a lot of good books. But I left them for another day.

Another day when the spirit moves me to stroll out into the sunshine and wander off the beaten path. Another day when I get the urge to take the ordinary world in front of me, and do something out of the ordinary with it. Because you have to take these opportunities where you can get them. Next time you have the chance to do something weird and wonderful, do it.

Although, admittedly, you may not have a weird and wonderful friend with a banjo to make things that much more bizarre and amazing.

Eternal Light

Lux aeterna, by György Ligeti

The first time I heard this music, I was in my junior year of college. Junior year was difficult for me. I remember the constant knot of suspense in my chest, twisting tighter and tighter, then loosening, then tightening again. I don't know why, but my stress levels were high, and every day felt like a possible prelude to a breakdown. In my heart there was an ever-present, piercing desire; I just wanted to get away from it all, to run and run and run until I couldn't run anymore, to lie down in the middle of an open field where there was nothing but sweet cold and healing silence.

I'm a music major, and one of the required courses for my degree is called music literature. For me, that class consisted of reading background information related to music history and music theory, then listening critically to the important masterpieces of art music throughout the centuries, and afterward being prepared to comment on what I had heard. One day in my junior year I sat down in class, my bones still buzzing with anxiety and fatigue, and the instructor turned on "Lux aeterna" by György Ligeti. 

And time froze.

From somewhere beyond the furthest reaches of reality, light breathes a cool eternal fragrance into the waking soul.

That is what I later wrote to describe what I had heard. Music came over me gently, like a delicate spray of mist; then it flooded the room, fog. I closed my eyes so I could see the voices. In my mind's eye, they moved like stars, an almost imperceptible drift across echoless chasms of space. I was transfixed, electrified. And, for nearly a sixth of an hour, I could feel the first filaments of healing beginning to whisper and to stir within my soul.

This music is strange, eerie, even somewhat troubling. For some people, it might only provide a headache, or might even create a knot of stress in the chest. But for me in those moments, it truly was healing... a haunting call from some altar across the universe: come forward and be saved. Come away, away, to the other side of the cosmos, and lie down in the open field. Let it soak through your body, seep into all the pinched twinges of pain and soften them into floating silken dreams.

Lie here forever for a moment, inside this silver song where there is nothing but sweet cold and healing silence.

Ways to pray:

Pray with your hands clasped together and your head down.
Pray with your feet on the cold marble floor.
Pray using words you've heard a thousand times.
Pray as one of many, a face in the crowd.

Pray with book in hand and follow the lines with your finger.
Pray with your knees on the velvet rug.
Pray with your arms outstretched, then folded.
Pray like you know what you're doing.

Pray like you have no idea what prayer even is.
Pray with your chin in your hand, thinking.
Pray with your hands on the wheel, driving.
Pray in a whisper.

Pray with the music cranked all the way up.
Pray in an empty building with the lights turned off.
Pray in dance moves when you can't think of words.
Pray by laughing uncontrollably.

Pray writing in your journal.
Pray lying in your bed.
Pray sitting up all night wondering if anything is real.
Pray with your face to the floor.

Pray screaming.
Pray when you're so mad you feel like your lungs are on fire.
Pray using language you wouldn't use in church.
Pray sobbing your heart out.

Pray when the sun comes up.
Pray by saying nothing at all.
Pray by breathing.
Pray by being alive.

There's So Much More

It’s hard to stay mad, when there’s so much beauty in the world. 
Sometimes I feel like I’m seeing it all at once, and it’s too much; 
my heart fills up like a balloon that’s about to burst, 
and then I remember to relax, and stop trying to hold onto it, 
and then it flows through me like rain and I can’t feel anything but gratitude 
for every single moment of my stupid little life.

- Lester Burnham, American Beauty

Before long, the anger burns out. It flares for a moment, white hot, then smoulders in orange for a while, but after that it is gone, a drifting haze that clears in the presence of the crystal light.

I try to hang on to it, but I can't. My hands weary of that limiting constriction, those knuckles and fists. I can't. My fingers burst from their shackles and tremble in the open air, spreading wide to freedom, to joy. There is so much more to life. My heart tries to treasure the smugness, the tightness, the implosion, the poison, but then there is no room for the beauty, the love. My heart denies me the pleasure of holding onto hatred. My heart screams, let me go, you tyrant. Let me be free.

And so I let it go, and it blasts through the barbed wire fences and flies out into the mountains, the meadows, the sea and the sky. I can't stay in that self-made captivity. I have to run out into the wind that breaks umbrellas; I have to dance in the rain.

Creation is calling:

Please don't stay inside. There is so much more for you, and you are so loved, so beautiful. Come and dance with us. Come and sing your song in our chorus of a million voices. Stop putting a cheap and easy end to what has only just begun. You can't see what we see. Get out here and look. You will be amazed.

Hope

At the end of the day, my heart will sing,

         and the song will swell to a symphony,

                  and the symphony rise till it fills the skies,

                           and the skies will shout, and the clouds take wing,

And heaven will blaze forth in healing streams,

         and the healing streams will wash over me,

                  and the hope I feel will at last be real,

                           as the dawn reawakens my childhood dreams.

 

I Should Be Sick Of This Song

Easy Way Out by Gotye

I once wrote a paper about this song. To be specific, it was a rhetorical analysis. I was taking a class called Rhetoric and Persuasion that semester, and our last major assignment before the final exam was to analyze something from popular culture.

During the writing process, I listened to the song over and over. I put the track on repeat and played it on loop in my headphones for hours straight while I typed. I like the song, but obviously, at the time I had some vague worries that I might be completely destroying it for myself by overplaying it.

This didn't turn out to be the case. Even after all that mindless repetition, I still get a kick out of listening to "Easy Way Out," and the video, which I also viewed multiple times, is still compelling to me. Perhaps it's because Gotye's message remains relevant to my experience. I doubt that's going to change any time soon.

This music video exposes something that I absolutely dread: the idea of life as a monotonous cycle, going nowhere, meaning nothing, an empty, dull, miserable excuse for an existence that never allows you a moment to breathe, to think, to feel. There is never time to reflect on what is happening, or whether any of it even matters. There is constant pressure to perform, but no one ever offers you a reason for this endless merry-go-round of madness. You just have to keep going, even if it costs you your health, your happiness, your sanity. In the end, it may cost you your life, but no one really cares, do they? If you can't keep up, very well, you'll just be left behind.

But of course, I already wrote the paper on this. If you want to hear some more dismal exposition, here's a link to that infamous rhetorical analysis, which placed in the academic division of my university writing contest:

The Dangerous Daily Grind

Just To Spice Things Up

Today I happened to be writing the word behavior. At the last minute, I made the conscious decision to spell the word the British way: behaviour. Here on my U.S. computer, that word appears with a red zigzag underneath it, but in the U.K., that's the standard spelling. I like British spellings, so I just thought, why not, you know?

I was writing that word as an answer to a test question. At the end of the same test, the professor included some bonus questions, including his standard fun one: "How do you spell my last name?" He has an unusual surname; a significant number of people have missed this question on the last few tests. I'm pretty confident of the spelling by now, so I decided to take the time to add some calligraphic flourishes to my inscription of his name, including a quick design sketch beneath it, just for fun. When people handed in their tests he immediately flipped to the back to see how many got his name right, and when he saw my little work of art, he laughed in enjoyment. I smiled. I was glad I'd taken the extra time to do something special.

There are so many opportunities to spice things up in life. When I took English composition at college, there was a question on the final exam about form in writing, and a random inspiration hit me: I could write my answer as a poem. So I did. I put the content of my answer into rhyming verse. It gave me a reason to laugh to myself, and man, you've got to take those opportunities where you can get them.

If I'm walking down the sidewalk and there are roses blooming beside the path, I'll pick one and put it behind my ear. If I'm trudging through the parking lot and notice there's a dog in the car next to mine, I'll take a moment and smile at its furry face. If I'm in some boring adult setting and suddenly there's a child wandering through our midst, I'll be sure to look into her eyes and share a split second of quiet connection. Honestly, the world is full of reasons to smile, but do we? Do we take advantage of the chance to make ourselves happy in all the little ways available to us?

It's easy to get weighed down by the stress, pain, and exhaustion of daily living. But I find that if I keep my eyes open, I discover a lot of simple pleasures along the way, and they renew my strength. Next time you're having a day that is miserable, or just monotonous, take a moment to step outside the box and look around at life with fresh eyes. You just might see a dance you can do, a joke you can tell, a rose you can stop and smell... just to spice things up.

Instinct

Sometimes I know things and I don't know why.

I can walk into a room and get an instant sense of the social dynamic and what is happening under the surface.

I can see a person around, and without ever talking to them, have an eerie awareness of who they are and what they are going through.

I can be friends with a person who seems to be genuinely happy, friendly, and sweet, but find it hard to look them in the eye when we talk, because I can't shake the feeling that they are actually not happy, not doing well; that there is a part of their heart that they have done their best to bury and leave for dead, but I can still feel it beating, like the tremors of a distant earthquake beneath my feet.

I always try to take such instincts with a grain of salt. There is often little to no concrete data to back them up, and I want to be careful not to make unfair assumptions about people or situations. So I wait, and keep those observations on file in my head.

Sometimes the only outward sign of my instincts comes in the form of decisions I make - decisions that may look odd or incomprehensible to other people, but to me, they make sense, because they jive with my gut feelings. I acknowledge my gut by making room for its observations in the realm of my lifestyle choices. That way, if the landmine I am sensing is real, if it blows, I am out of the way.

Yeah, I do my best not to rely too much on random instincts that come to me out of nowhere. But you know, it's getting increasingly harder to just ignore them point blank, because now I  have the benefit of hindsight on a lot of these experiences.

And so far, more or less, my instincts have been spot on.

Why I Call Myself A Christian Mystic

On several of my social media platforms, I describe myself as a Christian mystic. People sometimes ask me what this means. I always direct them to the nearest dictionary.

  

Christian 

noun 

1. A person who believes in Jesus Christ; adherent of Christianity. 

2. A person who exemplifies in his or her life the teachings of Christ.

Mystic

noun

1. A person who claims to attain, or believes in the possibility of attaining, insight into mysteries transcending ordinary human knowledge, as by direct communication with the divine or immediate intuition in a state of spiritual ecstasy.

2. A person initiated into religious mysteries.

So that's what the actual words Christian and mystic mean, but of course, I still haven't properly explained what I mean when I refer to myself as a Christian mystic. Here goes.

First of all, yes, I am a Christian, and when I say Christian, I mean simply that. I don't identify with one branch of Christianity over another; I feel like I am holistically Christian, rooted in the essence of the faith, but drawing inspiration from its many variations. Basically, at the end of the day, Jesus is important to me: his story, his power, his love. I honestly don’t know where I would be without him.

And secondly, yes, I do feel like mystic is a decent word to describe me, by the above definition. My experience of my faith tends to be marked by mystery, wonder, emotion, and a sense of direct connection to spiritual realities. This makes sense because it is, after all, the way I experience life in general. Of course, I also go through periods of dryness wherein I feel distant from these things. On the whole, though, I think I have an unusually high incidence of what could be termed "mystical experiences," moments where the unseen world seems to suddenly unfold before my eyes, or an intense, surreal feeling of love falls on me out of nowhere, or I hear a quiet, gentle, piercing voice deep within my heart telling me exactly what I needed to hear in that moment.

My spiritual life is very important to me; I consider it the central aspect of my existence. It defines everything else I am, everything else I do. I draw tremendous energy from it. My prayer is that I will be able to share this faith of mine with the world, sometimes in words, and sometimes merely by my presence. I want the deep love and vibrant joy I have from Jesus, to spread to those around me, like an atmosphere of healing, peace, and power.

People who listen

I'll remember the eyes that looked at me in light,
those gentle eyes that took in the dimensions of my mind without remodeling its space,
the eyes that simply
saw
me.

I'll remember the arms that welcomed me in peace,
those open arms that wrapped me up in wordlessness and helped me breathe,
the arms that simply
held
me.

I'll remember the hearts that listened to my own,
those loving hearts that didn't bother with the imposition of another rhythm or pace,
the hearts that simply
heard
me.

I'll remember the people who listen. Everyone else will fade out,
their noise turning out to be silence,
while silence turns out to be song.

My Philosophy

Be soft. Do not let the world make you hard.
Do not let pain make you hate.
Do not let the bitterness steal your sweetness.

Take pride that even though the rest of the world may disagree,

you still believe it to be a beautiful place.

- Kurt Vonnegut

When people ask me if I'm a pessimist or an optimist, I always hesitate. Frankly, I don't identify with either label. I like to say that more than focusing on either positives or negatives, I aim for something I call emotional honesty. I very much value being aware of life in all its nuances, both happy and sad, good and bad, beautiful and frightening. I don't think of myself as an optimist because I feel like being cheerful about everything all the time is avoiding the reality of all the pain and suffering that exists in the world. In the same way, though, I can't be a pessimist, because if I am paying any attention at all, the world is also ridiculously chock full of beauty and joy. Ignoring either side of the spectrum would be like going half-blind. I'm not into that option.

At the end of the day, though, if someone put a gun to my head and required me to choose either pessimism or optimism as my personal philosophy (a freak occurrence which I am not expecting, but you never know), I would have to side with optimism. This is because, in my heart, I truly believe that the good of life outweighs the bad, that good is the dominant force in the world, and evil's attempts to corrupt that good will ultimately fail. So even at ground zero, with thousands of innocent people reduced to ashes, I see the beauty of life outweighing the ugliness. I see in those ashes a heartbreaking reality, but also an undeniable truth that these beautiful people did exist, and each one of their lives was an epic story all its own, and none of them were necessary, none of them even had to be born. But they were born, they were here among us, and their presence on this planet made infinite amounts of difference to all of us, whether we know it or not. And the glory of those lives, although cut tragically short, vastly outshines the ugliness of death that tried to extinguish their power.

I don't like the label, but in the last analysis, maybe I am an optimist. Because, in spite of all the pain, all the bitterness, all the world's clamoring attempts to convince me otherwise... I still believe it to be a beautiful place. Life, light, and love will triumph; in fact, they already have.

One Person's Yawn Is Another's Excited Squeal

INFJ and INFP Empathy by Scott Morgan

Here is something extremely boring that I find extremely interesting.

This past year, I've become really interested in a famous personality assessment called the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. This assessment decides whether a person tends toward: 

extraversion or introversion (E or I),

sensing or intuition (S or N),

thinking or feeling (T or F),

and judging or perceiving (J or P).

I, for example, tend toward introversion (I), intuition (N), feeling (F), and perceiving (P), so my Myers-Briggs type is designated by those letters: I am an INFP. For the mathematically disinclined among us, I'll just tell you right now that there are sixteen different possible combinations of these letters, and, consequently, sixteen different possible personality types, according to this system.

Now, to a lot of people, this may already sound hopelessly boring. If you're one of those people, you may not want to hang around my brain on a quiet Friday evening when I am lying facedown on my bed, chin in hands, lost in a world of super theoretical Myers-Briggs madness. Sorry, general populace, but for some reason, I cannot join you in your (perfectly understandable) boredom with this topic. I am low-key obsessed with it. I can literally think about it for hours on end and never grow weary of it. There are so many interesting applications of this theory, especially if you take the time to travel deep into its labyrinthine underbelly - which I have. I can tell you right now that there is a lot more to it than those four pairs of letters. It gets infinitely complicated... and, for me, infinitely fascinating.

Just as an example of the extent of my insanity: here is an incredibly dull video that I find incredibly anything but dull, on the topic of the types of empathy employed by two of the sixteen Myers-Briggs types: the INFJ and the INFP. I love this video, which is funny, because all that happens is a man with a rather monotonous voice sits in front of the camera and talks a bunch of uninteresting rubbish. But I am not kidding you - I get excited about this. Why? Because the gentleman describes me in this video. To a T. When he talks about the type of empathy employed by the INFP personality type, he is speaking the language of my soul, and it excites me. 

And I squeal. Excitedly. Over the most boring video on earth. But maybe you have some "boring" interests as well, things that excite you that would have someone else snoring within seconds. Which just goes to show you. [The title of this post.]

Music for the Triduum

 Miserere by Gregorio Allegri and Vladimir Ivanoff

The Triduum is what we call the three days before Easter Sunday: Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday. In traditional Christianity, these three days are meant to be a time of quiet reflection on the meaning of Easter, and are often marked by special church services commemorating the events of the last few days of the life of Jesus.

For me, the Triduum is very special. I always appreciate its dark, meditative mood, and the chance to focus on the sacrificial love of Jesus. To help me get in the right mindset, I like to listen to this album of sacred choral music by Gregorio Allegri and Vladimir Ivanoff. I find that the ethereal harmonies evoke the deep sense of mystery that pervades this season of the church calendar.

May this Easter weekend bring peace, joy, and hope to our hearts.

Secret Rooms

I don't know why people are so keen to put the details of their private life in public;

they forget that invisibility is a super power.

- Banksy

One of my all-time favorite books is The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank, which tells the true story of Jews going into hiding from the Nazis in 1940s Amsterdam - all from the perspective of a highly normal teenage girl. I've read Anne's diary over and over. For some reason, I am obsessed with it. In fact, I am also in the process of collecting any and all related books and films about Anne's life.

When people ask me what I like about The Diary of a Young Girl, I tend to list Anne's personality first. Yes, she is one of those famous people, like Michael Jackson, who took a step toward me out of the annals of time and now feels like a friend. Secondly, I'll explain that I find myself attracted to the idea of ordinary people living under extraordinary circumstances. Stories like Anne's offer some semblance of an answer to the question, "What would I do if I had to face the unthinkable?"

Not much lower on the list of my personal pros for this book, though, is quite simply this: I love secret rooms. Anne herself, perhaps more than anyone else in the group in hiding, caught a glimpse of the mystery and magic of living in a secret annex. She was still young and romantic enough to see the fun in it, at least in the beginning, when the experience of going into hiding still seemed like a novel adventure.

Those rooms in the back of that Amsterdam office building, hidden behind a swinging bookcase, will forever hold a special place in the hearts of millions who cherish Anne's story. In my case, they also speak to a lifelong fascination with secret rooms. As a child I had recurring dreams about discovering secret rooms in the houses of family and friends. I'd open a special door and there it was, an ordinary space, full of ordinary things, and yet it was special because it was hidden. You could feel the mystery in the air.

Jews in 1940s Europe were hiding from a predator that sought nothing less than their lives. For them, hiding was about literal physical survival. But there are other reasons to hide, too. There are noble and beautiful reasons to want to go where no one can see you, to be hidden, to be alone. And there are other kinds of survival to be concerned about as well.

To me, it has always been important to keep some things in life a secret. There are parts of my heart that can be damaged by too much exposure to the outside world. Of course, openness and honesty are important, but there are times when flinging wide the doors to my soul is actually the opposite of honesty, because I have failed to be honest with myself. I know which things are too sacred, too painful, too beautiful to be shared. For a while, at least, they need to stay inside the secret rooms of my psyche, safe from the ceaseless pressure of being viewed and reviewed, judged and evaluated. Sometimes I find that I need to go into hiding, to be nourished and protected in the shadows of obscurity, that special space that only God and I can see. 

Things That Make Me Cry

The body of a seagull, wing splayed across the yellow line, blood splattered in its wake.
I tap the brakes, swerve around the carcass, and remember what seagulls look like when they walk, scuttling across parking lots for French fries. And I cry.

A crumpled scrap of paper I find on the library floor, scribbled with pencil: "I love you :) you can borrow my headphones and watch Netflix if you want."
I smile and think about people loving each other, in their imperfect, quirky little ways, and how they really do want to make each other happy, but sometimes they can't. And I cry.

A courtyard in the middle of a nursing home, a square plot of grass and cement, flanked by walls and windows and dying men watching game shows on television.
I discover the door and stare out at the sky, high heaven swirling in ice blue splendor, the almost imperceptible drift of the sun. And I cry.

Time passes. I see friends beside me, hear them laughing, hear myself laughing with them, and yet I know about calendars and clocks, and roads leading nowhere, and I know about space between, and cities fading in and out of focus along the freeway. And I know about cards in the mail, Christmas and birthdays and all that, fewer every year, and I know about ceremonies and certificates and everything that comes with it.

I know. Everyone knows. And most people laugh and turn up the radio. But I cry.

Teenage Dreams

I'm starting to get old, I think to myself, sitting at one of the tall tables by the window. Below me dwell the teenagers, my size yet somehow so much smaller. I can see their little limbs growing out of their little outfits - such nice little outfits, some of them, and some of the girls are wearing eyeliner now, and it looks nice too, they applied it so well, with the little wings on the sides...

I spy a couple, a girl curled up in the arms of a boy, and I wonder: thirteen? fourteen? Their faces are small; their eyes, eyelids, noses, nostrils, lips, lip piercings, all small. I think back to fourteen: the years whirl by like a merry-go-round. Children, I think; just children, just kids. Kids holding hands on the couch, thumbs stroking idly. I sincerely hope it lasts, kids, I say to myself, and even as the words enter my mind, I imagine how it will end.

Everybody's Against Me! (And I'm Loving It, But... Shhh)

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, just pretend you don’t love being the social outcast, the one everyone’s trying to martyr. I know better. I know because I do the same thing.

I look around at the world and I oversimplify what I see. If I sense any resistance to what I’m doing in life, any opposition at all to who I’m trying to be and what I want to achieve, then you know what comes next. I make a drama out of this. I assign teams and put the majority of society on the side of the opposition. And then I stand on my little mole hill and scream across the valley at the mountains I’ve just made. You all hate me, but I will rise up and defeat you!

It’s so unfair, I cry. Look at the numbers. You’re so big. I’m so small. You’re such a bully, I whimper self-righteously, wiping my tears. But no matter. In the end, I will win, because I’m right.

Just try to convince me you’re not having fun out there. No, you feel strangely empowered when the world is against you, don’t you? But you’re wrong. In reality, there is no such thing as The World. There’s just a bunch of little groups of people like you and me, huddled together for shelter from Everybody Else, convinced that the world is against them. Well, I hate to be a killjoy, baby, but it’s not that simple.

Did You Ever Stop To Notice?

Earth Song by Michael Jackson

Some people speak to me. Out of the masses, out of the ages, certain souls take a step toward me and gaze into my soul, and suddenly I realize I recognize them, I know them. I don't choose these people. They just come to me, and once they do, there is no looking back.

Michael Jackson is one of these people for me. And now for the laundry list of disclaimers: I know he was weird, I know about the plastic surgery, I know about the allegations, I know his career peaked in the mid-1980s and never really returned, I know, I know, I know. I'm fully aware that he led a strange life, a broken life, but none of this changes the fact that when I encountered him on the path of my life, I froze in my tracks and stared, because I knew him. I just did. When I watch his interviews, read his writings, listen to his music, his voice slips in among my heart strings and tangles them, tugging gently. I understand Michael Jackson.

One of the things I understand most is his ability to feel the pain of the world. If you have open eyes, and an open heart, the sad truth is, you are destined to know pain. If you ever stop to notice, you will see that the universe itself is broken. Some nights it just swoops down on me and holds me, this raw, empathic awareness. I can feel it, the crying, the screaming, the trees falling, the guns firing. The world is so beautiful, but so broken. And I just want the beauty to return. I just want everything to be whole again.

This song, and the music video, speak to this desire. I honestly can't hear the chorus without getting chills. I used to walk around my land, on windy days when the clouds were racing across heaven in the high golden light, and let this music reverberate through my headphones, filling my consciousness.
 

This song explores painful territory, to be sure, but in the end, it is a song of hope. I believe, as Michael did, in the ultimate triumph of good over evil. I do believe that healing and restoration will come. I believe it will sweep the globe like a lightning storm, and the healing rain will fail, and the dreams we've abandoned since childhood will come shuddering out of the depths of the earth and splash over us like floodwaters.

To someone I love

I see worlds in you. Dark landscapes shifting, evolving over aeons. Vast wastelands of unexplored terrain.

I see it. The night sky above you, the labyrinth of paths to nowhere. The loneliness, the inner scream.

I see. Silver songs of wolves, swimming upward through the dark. Galaxies piercing the soft muted blackness, swirling, ice.

Inexpressible

Evening Falls by Enya

Floating around the internet is a list of cryptic-looking words, meant to describe indescribable feelings. I've seen it several times now, in several variations, and yet whenever I come across it, I always click, coming in for a closer look, hoping to find what I am searching for.

There is so much inside me that I cannot express. I am haunted by surreal emotions that come over me out of nowhere. I ache to express what I feel, but there are some experiences that not even the most colorful, obscure foreign word can capture. These feelings must be felt to be understood; and even then, you will not understand them, although you will yearn to, craning your neck to see over the horizon of your soul.

I Don't Want to Hurt You

I literally hate hurting other people.

Yes, we may disagree on many things. Yes, our personalities, values, and interests may clash. Yes, I may wish you would stop doing what you are doing, wish you would go away, wish you would leave me alone.

But I do not want to hurt you.

I go to lengths. Great lengths. To avoid hurting other people. Sometimes unhealthy lengths. I tell white lies. I dodge confrontation. I skirt around the point. All because I do not want to do it. I don't want to risk driving a lance through another heart. I can't stand it. I hate it.

And you know why, because it hurts me. Any kind of conflict, even the most trivial, hurts. It's almost a literal physical pain. It feels like toxins are injected into my system. My blood starts buzzing and burning and I want to scream. I don't know why this happens to me, but maybe I am ultimately selfish for avoiding conflict, because I know full well, it hurts me as much as anyone else when I enter the fray and lash out against someone.

I have convictions and beliefs and values and I know them well, I know myself. But I don't want to impose myself on others. I live in constant consciousness of the very different experiences others may have had with the selfsame things that I love and cherish. Sometimes I am afraid to open my mouth, because I know I always run the risk of releasing pain into someone else's heart. I don't want to do that. I know what pain feels like.

I don't want to hurt you, but there is always a margin of error, isn't there? Nobody's perfect, and circumstances arise by accident, flinging accidental hurts into surrounding minds unintended. But my goal is to never inflict grief on purpose. There is too much agony in the world as it stands.

Through me flows the eternal light...

With my hands on the shoulders of the universe, I inhale God and exhale dawn.

Eternal love bleeds through my fingers, flooding the chambers of reality's soul.

This is my destiny, dealing in love.

Love is the source of my being and the essence of my sojourn.

I speak one healing word into the sunken, shattered chasms and a million voices echo back to me...
voices of dreams devoured before daylight.

I sing patiently until the voices remember the Song.

After I pray,

I want to take the shoulders of everyone I see
and ask their faces: Can you see it on me?
Can you see it on my face, all over me?
Can you tell me what's different or new about me?
Can you smell it on my breath? Can you hear it in my talk?
Can you see it in my eyes, and the way I walk?
What do I look like? Can you answer me?
Because man, I can feel it, I can feel it on me!

I can feel it on me, that liquid fire,
that white-hot, ice-cold, healing light;
yes, light like fireflies, light like rain,
light like galaxies whirling in space,
and I want to know, can you see it on my face,
rippling through me like immortal power,
resurrection power, revelation power?

Power, power! We all want power.
Power is beauty, power is strength,
power is being above and beyond,
power is freedom to sing and to shout,
power is freedom to laugh and to cry,
power is having nothing to prove.
Power is being fully alive.

We want it, we want it - God, yes, we do!
We spend our lives in search of it, don't we?
We seek it in stories, in songs, on stage.
We spray a touch of it behind each ear.
We carry it in our pockets, string it around our necks;
these talismans, these trappings of power.
We addict ourselves to it, we drown in it, don't we,
we'll shoot it up our arms and through our skulls, won't we?

But today. Today. I have it. I have it!
And it's not what you think, it's not what I thought.
It's everything, everything I've ever wanted,
but more, more; ever so much more.
It's love, love come alive in every fiber of my being,
love on fire in my every cell,
love, giving itself to me over and over,
a wellspring of everything springing and well;

and oh, when I pray, I sing,
and oh, when I pray, I shout,
and oh, when I pray, I laugh,
and oh, when I pray, I cry,
and after I pray, I have nothing to prove.
I am fully alive! I am living in love!

4'33"

4'33" by John Cage

When I first heard about John Cage's 4'33", I must admit, I was not impressed. Cage (1912 – 1992) was a famous American composer of the twentieth century who was interested in exploring things like musical indeterminacy, electroacoustic music, and non-standard use of musical instruments. This piece, one of his most renowned and (perhaps) most notorious, was originally composed for solo piano, and has three movements, which are a total of four minutes and thirty-three seconds in duration. The catch: during each of the three movements, the piano is not played. The movements are marked only by an opening and closing of the piano lid. In other words, the pianist sits at the keys and does practically nothing for four minutes and thirty-three seconds. And then the audience applauds. In theory. I think some audiences might throw tomatoes instead.

I myself might have considered throwing tomatoes at first, except I believe in nonviolent resistance. Rather than arm myself with rotten fruit and sit in some elite concert hall to watch a pretentious intellectual snob sit there and not play the piano for four minutes and thirty-three seconds, I decided I would give John Cage a chance and listen through a complete recording of the piece just once without judgment. It couldn't hurt. Afterward, I would have a good laugh at the whole enterprise and go on my way.

I was wrong.

When I actually made myself sit through a recording of this piece for the first time... something unexpected happened. I got it. A light went on inside my head, and suddenly, I knew why Cage might have composed this piece. There could be other reasons, of course, but this is the one that came to me.

Cage wants us to experience silence. And within that silence, we encounter a different level of sound.

Listening to 4'33" all the way through is hard. Most people get bored and give up within thirty seconds. But if you require yourself to stick it out, you may experience what I experienced: a heightened awareness of ambient sound. After all, nothing is truly silence. All silence is sound. But there are so many sounds that we completely filter out, because we have made certain sounds important and others of no account.

I love music, meaning in this case traditional music that actually has a discernible structure and tune and so on. But after experiencing John Cage's 4'33", I think about it differently. I can't help but feel a little sad when I see people running out of a meeting, their hands already scrambling to wrap headphones around their skulls. We all need a music boost sometimes, and I'm one hundred percent for it, but is there a chance we have become so addicted to the music in our headphones that we can no longer hear the music of the world around us?

Everything is music. Everything is art. And that is what John Cage's 4'33" forces us to acknowledge. When a concert hall full of people is made to sit in silence, we are faced with the reality of our addiction to specialized noise, our inability to appreciate the mere act of being.

True North

I have this innate awareness of the points of the compass. Often I can determine the placement of north, south, east and west even when I am in an unfamiliar location and the sun is in the middle of the sky, just because to me, each direction has a different "feel" to it. Each of the four strikes a different chord in my psyche, inviting me to respond in a certain way.

The west always looks to me like a dead end. I know it's not; I've traveled west several thousand miles and seen the wild and beautiful country beyond that horizon. But just looking at the western sky, I always think, "backdrop." A permeable backdrop, but a backdrop. The west is the ends of the earth.

The east, by contrast, looks like an invitation. It speaks to me of getting up and going, heading toward the sun, heading toward the edge of the continent to look out over the sea. And beyond the sea, there is still more to be seen. The east, in my subconscious, represents beginnings, possibilities.

The south, I confess, tends to look flat to me. I don't know why. To my eyes, it always shines with a sort of dull light, resembling an illuminated floor, something you would find at the bottom of the rabbit hole. The south means a place to put your shoes, a springboard from which to fly upward.

Which brings us to the north.

The north gives me the strongest feeling of all. I can always recognize a northern sky because it makes me want to run toward it. This has nothing to do with the scenery, by the way. There might be a forest on the southern horizon and a steel mill on the northern horizon, but I will still feel an inexplicable pull to the north, whereas the south seems more like a wall to lean my back against.

The north truly calls me, and I have no idea why. All I know is, I understand the term "true north." If I were the needle of a compass, it wouldn't matter how many times you spun me around: in the end, I would always swing toward the north pole.