Capitol Hill this morning

I carry my skillfully rosetted soy latte outside, resting cup and saucer on a small wrought iron table. Truckers puff their compression brakes and incrementally ascend Olive Way. Diesel smells like 5-dollar bills bursting into flame. A reptilian tattoo coils neckward from under a cotton tank. An English Bulldog saunters beside a similarly jowled septuagenarian. My eyes rise along locust trees and higher to tiny verandas; one is completely filled by an unfinished Adirondack chair. I return to my coffee. Colors on salvaged barn-siding slowly coalesce into the faded shape of a girl. Swirled calligraphy sorts into sense. "I will always love the false image I had of you.”

Barry Lopez on *relational beauty*

"We cannot save things. Things pass away. We can only attend to relationships, to the relationships between things. It is here that we see the most beautiful images we are capable of apprehending or imagining—the relationship between a mother and a child, the racket of sunlight on pooling water, a bird alighting on a limb."

Barry Lopez

Barry Lopez "Eden is a conversation."

"Eden is a conversation. It is the conversation of the human with the Divine. And it is the reverberations of that conversation that create a sense of place. It is not a thing, Eden, but a pattern of relationships, made visible in conversation. To live in Eden is to live in the midst of good relations, of just relations scrupulously attended to, imaginatively maintained through time. Altogether we call this beauty."

Barry Lopez

Stick-No-Stick

I walk with a friend along the left edge of America. We’re wandering a wedge of sand bordered to the west by the Pacific Ocean, and to the north by the town of Yachats, Oregon. We’re separated from the town by a little river that flattens across the beach, and then surrenders to the pull of waves. We talk about the unique habitat created by the confluence of freshwater and saltwater, and the specialized ecosystem thriving there.

He and I are recovering fundamentalists. Our conversation turns to the allure of legalism – the delicious illusion that life’s choices can be neatly parsed into two simple categories: right and wrong. And we wonder together how we might distinguish between legitimate personal convictions on one hand, and brittle dogmatism on the other.

Into the middle of our ruminations bounds a shaggy Shepherd-Lab mix, black with white-tipped ears, feet, and tail. In his teeth he grips the charred nub of someone’s marshmallow stick, plucked from the cold remains of a beach fire. His expectant eyes and wagging tail leave no doubt about his wish. My friend obliges and tosses the spindly fetch-toy. With undiluted delight the dog retrieves the stick and deposits it at my feet. I fling it Frisbee-style, then scrub off the saliva with a handful of sand. This time, instead of bringing it to us, he swerves south toward the wave-muted sound of his name.

In a few minutes he’s back, along with two dachshunds and two humans. The dachshunds appear sophisticated and reserved, and slightly embarrassed by their large companion’s exuberance. The humans look like seasoned veterans of the counterculture, perhaps teachers or writers or potters. They smile toward the mongrel and apologize for his attenuated cognitive faculties. The woman says, “He has a very limited view of the world.” “Yes,” the man adds, “he sees all things in terms of stick-no-stick.”

We laugh with them, and I note the parallel to binary code. My friend says, “Right! It’s all about zeroes and ones…”

We walk silently for a while. I’m not satisfied with our assessment of the dog’s fetching obsession. Could it be that he isn’t really stuck in a recursive loop of dimwittedness? But rather that he’s endlessly compelled to give up the stick in order to feel the joy of having it again? Maybe he’s intuited the balance of possession and generosity, paired together in a spirit of playfulness.

I glance toward my soul. Sadly, it has the look of a haughty dachshund. Embarrassed by possession, afraid of generosity, distracted from the play at hand… I lift my eyes to the beauty of the beachscape and pray for the wisdom of stick-no-stick.

Zeroing

Two lava lamps rehearse their unhurried ballet on either end of the big console’s monitor shelf. Studio A is dark beyond the heavy, slanted glass wall that separates it from the control room. I can just make out the shadowed contours of the grand piano. Chrome hardware and brass cymbals glint faintly from the drum booth at the far end of the room.

It’s noiseless out there tonight because this is a mixing session. Basic tracks were recorded a month ago, and overdubbing finished up last week. Now the separate pieces – drums, vocals, guitars, more guitars, piano, strings, finger snaps – wait on parallel strips of two-inch 24-track tape for the engineer and I to shape them into four minutes of integrated beauty.

Each track will want some degree of doctoring, ranging from merely adjusting its relative level, to patching it through a pitch-fixing box. One track might trigger a digital sample of a different sound altogether. Mixing is an intuitive interplay of science and art.

Just as we’re about to get going, the engineer pushes his chair back from the mixing board and shakes his head. He mutters something about interns. The patch bay hasn’t been cleared, and the knobs and faders haven’t been returned to unity. This was the intern’s job following the previous session.

“Zeroing the board” is standard protocol in good recording studios. It’s achingly tedious to undo someone else’s settings, and it’s a momentum killer. An engineer assumes each session will begin with a clean slate.

This offers an analogy pertinent to spiritual health. It’s possible for the fragmented bits of a soul to be shaped into a life of integrated beauty. Periodically zeroing one’s interior is what’s called for. That’s when the Engineer loves to get to work.