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.”

love the questions

"...be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and... try to love the questions themselves..."

Rainer Maria Rilke

Pastor Miller

I remember Pastor Miller preaching at Barclay Heights Community Church. We met in the lodge of an old YMCA camp on Esopus Creek near Glenerie Falls. When the lodge became our permanent home, we changed the name of the church to Glenerie Chapel.

I remember Pastor Miller praying; his opening prayers were nearly the equal of his sermons. These were not pithy, punchy, sound-bited perfunctories; his prayers were ten minutes of engagement with God on matters of the day, from local to global.

I remember Pastor Miller’s velvet singing voice. It reminded me of a baritone Andy Williams with a bit of Mel Torme. From where I sat, singing seemed to be pure pleasure for him.

I remember Pastor Miller telling us about Christ’s Passion during a springtime Sunday night service thirty-some years ago. One of the other teens ran out of the lodge, weeping – overtaken by the description of what Jesus had endured for him. I ran after him and listened to his story.

I remember Pastor Miller’s Christianity including humanness. He didn’t try to portray himself as saintly; he wasn’t aloof from his congregation. He wasn’t afraid to laugh.

I don’t remember when Pastor Miller invited me to call him “Bob”. The truth is I never really got used to it. He was simply “Pastor” to me.

I remember Pastor Miller saying he thought I’d become a pastor someday. I didn’t like that, and I fought it for a long time. But over the years, his was among a small number of voices through which God conferred that calling to me. I don’t wear it as comfortably as he did but I try to be true to my legacy.

Today, I’m remembering to remember because it’s the day of Pastor’s memorial service. I wish I could be present. He and his family are very much on my mind. I’m praying they feel the support of their communities as they find their way forward. I’m praying they know they’re not carrying his memory alone. And I’m praying they find grace today to celebrate him with all their might.

suburbia re-animated

Yanking trail shoes over socks is enough. Indy hears from three rooms away; I may as well have said walk in his ear. He muzzles me and sings his petition. I rev him, Where’s your leash? Now his croon is resolute.

Indiana Jones is a Yakima Farmdog, a blend of Red Heeler, Husky, and Shepherd. These are guesses, of course, since he bears no pedigree. We rescued him from a vagabond lifestyle that wasn’t working out well.

Deep-chested and athletic, Indy’s the sort of dog that looks good in a bandanna, racing the surf’s curled edge. His medium-length hair is colored caramel, white, and black from tapered snout to crescent tail. Our house is snowed with fur whenever his undercoat blows.

It’s January, dark and clear; a near-full moon makes the chill visible. We push uphill out of our neighborhood and find walking rhythm. I coax my breath to cooperate. Last-minute, I divert onto a side trail; Indy is pleasantly surprised. Trees consume the moonlight and leave us none. It’s easy to picture nocturnal predators, biding, strung for violence. I switch on my Coleman flashlight and script implausible scenarios for Indy and me, repelling a cougar with cinematic panache.

We emerge onto the Tolt Pipeline Trail. The eastern sky is starry, silverscreen-indigo; the flashlight is unneeded under a big moon. Walking westward, an unlikely shade of teal tints the gloaming horizon. This kind of blueness is pilfered from summer and captivatingly out of place – like a full-throated baritone holding one last note.

Indy is suddenly on alert, ears up, white chest flaring. He fixes silently on a shadowed shape barely moonlit. Rabbit? (Good thing I kept him leashed.) I aim, slide the light on. The Coleman’s tight circle tags a figure: untamed, adaptive, gorgeous coyote. I hold my beam on him and he holds his eyes on me, exiting... more like a bird than a dog, ground-flying… more like a ghost than me, vanishing.

I’m a strip of celluloid pulled from the cutting room floor, spliced into someone else’s movie. I look over my shoulder. He wouldn’t follow, would he? He’d keep to the shadows anyway. Indy knows he’s gone and relaxes. Another glance back: two planes fly oppositely, miming stars. Orion bows low to Luna. Cold clearness, so beautiful; suburbia re-animated.

Telling Time

Telling time with watches
Telling time with clocks
Telling time with fossils
And the carbon in the rocks

Telling time to slow down
Telling time to wait
Telling time I’m right behind
But telling time too late



© 1983, 2007 Scott Burnett

The Dispatcher

Five days a week he got home at 7:30 in the morning. He was a dispatcher for the town police department. After a night of disrespect from younger coworkers it was good to get back within the familiar dirty walls of home. He’d been a U.S. Marine, a Justice of the Peace, and a “gentleman farmer” but now he took minimum wage.

The dented door of his Wagoneer creaked open and then reluctantly clunked shut with a shove. Dew on unmowed grass wet his cuffs as he walked to the door.

He didn’t glance toward the Lincoln. It’d been brand new such a short pair of decades ago. Now it seemed to be trying to sink into the thinly graveled driveway. Unrepaired after a minor wreck a few years back, it had faded from luxury to junk.

In the house she had coffee ready for him. She handed him a cup, kissed him goodbye and left for work. She was a longtime teller at the bank. It wasn’t much fun anymore. These days it seemed like there was always a new system being implemented and a learning curve to go with it.

He was so tired. The October sunshine was too loud for sleeping. All he could think about was how tired he was. He had a couple of hours before he had to be at his other job. He was also a part-time security guard. Leaves needed to be raked. Not today. He picked up the newspaper and wondered if he could justify mixing himself a highball at this time of day.

more about crayon scribbles

It’s easy enough to slip into the faulty logic that if we haven’t gotten it all right then we’ve gotten it all wrong. The crayon-scribble metaphor helps me a lot. When a child creates a portrait of a parent, accuracy is not the point. The stirring thing is the impulse to symbolically depict a seeing/knowing event. The parent might not be universally recognizable in the child’s crayon scribbles but that diminishes neither the presence of the parent nor the perception of the child, nor the relationship between them.

Furthermore, the parent delights in these imperfect portraits and posts them proudly on the refrigerator.

theology

I scribble in crayon

According to me
Your head is oversized
And oddly shaped

I scribble in crayon

Jesus at the Tension Point

Near the end of his book about Jesus, John the Apostle includes a story about transitions. It happened after Jesus had been raised again to life. John and a few of the other fishermen had been working the sea all night long.

The narrative is rich with symbolism though it doesn’t read as the fanciful sort; it reads as real-life that’s saturated with meaning.

Jesus is standing in the sand between sea and land. He is slowly becoming visible as night dissolves into dawn. He is shouting lightheartedness into frustration and fatigue. He is acknowledging futility and offering a surprise of fruitfulness.

This sort of disruptive goodness – this sense-making presence at the tension point of change and uncertainty – is what makes Jesus recognizable to his friends.

Barry Lopez on *good relations*

"Conversations are efforts toward good relations. They are an elementary form of reciprocity. They are the exercise of our love for each other. They are the enemies of our loneliness, our doubt, our anxiety, our tendencies to abdicate."

Barry Lopez

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

December Blast...

This time it wasn’t funny. We were hit last week by the worst windstorm I’ve ever seen. My little town of Woodinville was blasted. We slept downstairs that night, listening to the cracking and booming. Trees fell onto – and into – numerous houses in my neighborhood. One neighbor’s truck was smashed.

I have to drive over a dozen downed power lines to get home. They’re dead though; there’s no electricity in my neck of the woods. We lost power at around 10:00 Thursday night and it’s still out with no sign of returning. Puget Sound Energy is telling us now that we’ll probably be dark until after Christmas.

The power in my parents’ area was restored last Friday so we’ve slept there the past two nights. It is great to have a warm and hospitable haven. Today I went back to our very-cold abode and built a fire in the fireplace. I just wanted to be there. One of the many things this interruption has revealed to me is how much my house and property are connected to my soul, and vice versa. It is viscerally troubling for me to drive away from my house while it is in a sort of coma. It seems so fragile, vulnerable, lonely… it looks vacant.

So I’m not snickering up my sleeve this time; I’m not making fun of anyone. As strange as it is to say, this is an actual disaster. And I was not very well-prepared for it.

visible invisible

Humans are called to attend to both the visible and the invisible. By nature, the visible pieces carry expectations and urgency. Invisible things have not yet emerged into the world; they can be seen only by the person to whom they are given. Because of this, gravity tends to pull them to the bottom of the priority list.

But it’s imperative that we resist such forces. Anybody can be replaced when it comes to managing visible actions, whereas the invisibles animate our personal contributions with true uniqueness. This transcends job-security and reaches into the realm of spiritual responsibility.

November Blast!

Winter Storm 2006 has come and gone. Life slowed nearly to a stop for a few days, but we’re off to the races again this morning.

Up here in the Pacific Northwest we prefer not to shovel, per se. Snowplows are rare and road-salt simply isn’t done (it’s just so “red-state”…). These things would be too disruptive to the ecosphere, so we allow nature to take her course. Normally, that means waiting for every scrap of snow and ice to melt away; a process that can take as long as two or even three hours.

Occasionally, though, Alaska exerts its chill and the whole place freezes over. This is the signal for every idiot with access to a motor vehicle to hit the streets and go berserk. It’s a time-honored tradition around these parts to take a couple of inches of snow and turn it into a state of emergency. It is, after all, one of our few ways of making the national news.

Confucius on governance and wealth

In a country well governed, poverty is something to be ashamed of.
In a country badly governed, wealth is something to be ashamed of.

Confucius

Freight Elevator

I used to produce music in a third floor office space, tucked behind the freight elevator of an old brick warehouse in Seattle. It was south of Pioneer Square, kitty-corner to the Kingdome.

Since I routinely schlepped my gear out to studios and editing suites, it was the freight elevator that made the third floor space feasible for me. It opened on both sides: into the main hallway and into my office.

The seasoned elevator had another fine virtue in addition to saving my back. The west wall of my office was exposed brick, which was perfect for funky urban chic. But there was nothing but the Alaska Way Viaduct between those bricks and the afternoon sun. Clear summer days were brutal...

The only remedy was to slide open the heavy door and send the elevator all the way down past the loading dock to the basement. The shaft fell through unremembered histories into the sediment of blue collar workdays. It was a well of hardworking ghosts and cool air. Both helped me meet more than one deadline.

Beach Trees

The trees along the beach bend eastward
like brown and green waves

The wind has gotten into their makeup

Even when the salted air is dead calm
these trees lunge inland
as though pressed by a gale

Movement playing stillness

Feedback

On Thursday afternoons I do power yoga. To be more exact, I approximate it. You might say that I re-imagine power yoga with my own angular and brittle je ne sais quoi.

So far, most of the feedback is negative. My body hates it and lets me know. There’s the sheer physiological pain, of course, but there is also the soul-pain of ineptitude and frustration. My ego would prefer that I cut my losses and escape to a guitar shop or bookstore or artsy cafe.

I try to stick to things that I’m good at as much as possible. It’s really not fun to wander outside my sphere of competence.

Did I mention that I’m no natural at yoga? My form doesn’t elicit admiration; the flow of my line fails to inspire other yoginis and yogis.

But I’ve been a resident of the planet long enough to know that feedback can’t always be taken at face value. There’s often a quieter voice with something healthy to say, and it speaks with the homey drawl of commonsense. It encourages me to reinterpret the pain and humiliation.

The pain in my muscles and joints is the voice of future flexibility. An expanding range of motion will make aging a little easier to handle.

And the humiliation of sweating against impossible poses is humility in seed form. When full grown it will counterweight my self-assurance and sense of importance.

Balance. It’s good to inhabit my clumsiness, to be present to my awkward and inflexible self, and to accept the comedy of it all.

Departure & Return

~~

The journey of faith is a conscious, perpetual departure from cynicism and return to wonder.