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.

Casualties of Perception

Playing with modeling clay was one of my favorite childhood pastimes. I could spend hours at a little table in my room, creating, deconstructing, and reinventing story-worlds. My friend, Bill Sass, was usually across the table from me. We had various riffs we’d cycle through. More than one involved tiny human figures at war, either with one another or aliens or mythical monsters.

I came home from school one day to find that all of our little men had been squashed; carefully pressed flat by a large thumb. Needless to say, I was furious: it was okay for us to mutilate our creations, but not someone else!

I registered a high-pitched complaint with my mother, seeking some sort of justice from her. But she had no idea what could have happened to the little warriors. The only person who had been in my room that day was Mary.

Mary was my grandparents’ Haitian maid, or “cleaning lady” in my grandmother’s parlance. My grandparents had arranged for her to clean our house while they were away on vacation. This was supposed to be a special luxury for my mother, but I think it just stressed her out. She felt she had to have everything perfect before Mary arrived.

My room must’ve been fantastically clean that afternoon, having gotten double coverage, but it was wasted on me. All I could see were the smudged remains of my people. I couldn’t fathom what would possess a person - especially a grownup - to do such a thing!

When we told my grandmother about it, she was also puzzled at first. But then an idea occurred to her. “Mary is very superstitious” she said, “in fact, sometimes she talks about Voodoo...” My eyes got very wide because everything I knew about Voodoo came from cartoons and movies: Nobody really believed in it, did they?

It made sense, though, the more we thought about it. Here was a tableful of miniature human figures, along with our clayworking tools - including a bent-open safety pin. The sight of it must’ve given Mary quite a shiver!

The experience taught me something at the soul level that didn’t coalesce into cognition for a long time. Perception molds the meaning of things.

What was for me an intersection of artwork, role-play, and rainy-day recreation was for Mary evidence of malevolent spiritual practices. I wish I could say I’ve never jumped to similar conclusions.

surface noise

an industrial diamond
extracts Villa-Lobos
from spirals lathed into black vinyl

thirty-three and a third
revolutions per minute

surface noise and Segovia

five junior composers
trade hometown stories
over Peak Freens and Red Zinger

Got Around

[DEAD END] meant nothing

when sneakers & bikes

were how I got around

Flashlight Tag

Puberty had just begun insinuating its fascinations
Sparking daring acts of bravery
Like holding hands with one of my sister’s friends
Under the contrived cover of flashlight tag
As awkward as it was secret
And sweet as breakfast cereal
Better than television

Tiny Sirens

On hands and knees I enter the loft
Drawn into the slow motion
Of floating dust and bale debris
Leveraging breaths like rubber
Stretched between shoulders and ribs

The price of my admission is asthma
Which is psychosomatic
According to my grandfather

My wheezing is a descant
To the tiny sirens that guide me
Deeper into the straw world
I’m creeping through ochre shadows
To find a crèche of infant kittens