Guitar Cases and Dirty Clothes

This one is pretty old, but it’s a favorite.

CANCER IS A BITCH

When she was here the cancer was…well…cancer
Like your car going underwater and knowing you will drown
Like opening a bag of chips and realizing it’s half full of air
LIke a mute quadriplegic playing bingo
She was the ticking clock on the face of a microwave counting down and freaking you out with that annoying little ding.

Now she’s gone.
It’s like getting picked last, except this is not dodgeball, it’s life
Like being the only one who survives a car crash
Like having an elephant tied around my neck
It is a constant why
Why her?
Why me?
Cancer is a bitch. 

WISDOM DISCOVERED

I remember the lake. The lake in my first neighborhood. It was a small lake, but at the age of nine a small lake appears to be a big lake. I would ride my bike to the lake like I was on an adventure, like I was out on my own, a quest for something greater than myself, like something from The Goonies.

I remember the autumn days of sitting on the wooden swing by the lake, looking at the trees shedding their leaves for the coming winter and thinking, as much as a nine year old thinks introspectively, about how good or bad life was. The silence speaking so clearly.

I remember the way the lake curved, a mystery as to where it led, unless you explored the uncharted waters by canoe or kayak. Where the water led I never knew.

I remember scraped knees from colliding with the gravel path that led to that wise old water. The brazen wounds that screamed pain out of the thin cold air, but never stopped me from visiting.

I remember seeing the lake through the bare trees in the winter as we drove up to the entrance of the neighborhood. The water always beckoned me to come and spend time with it.

I remember how the streets of the neighborhood were united as one by a mere reservoir. How life was lived in the presence of others. Comforting.

I remember the joy, pain, and change that sprang out of that water and into my early life.

But most of all I remember leaving the lake behind. 

CAUGHT UP

I’m caught up in the ocean these days
Like the tide pulls the breakers away
Returning them to where they ran from

Like a rebellion

I’m caught up in the ocean these days
Like being in incomprehensible darkness
With creatures lurking
Like shadows

I’m caught up in the ocean these days
Like a flashlight illuminating
Only a few feet in front
Leaving much

Undiscovered

I’m caught up in the ocean these days
Because…

I’m afraid. 

THIS TOWN

This town knows nothing.
Holes in floors of minds, dust on cerebral blinds
Ready to give up because mommy and daddy did
And nothing will change the product, the kid.

Especially if mommy or daddy is gone
Or never was there at all, never able to call
Just an accidental on-purpose mistake
A result of a choice poorly made

Though never planned
The kid’s not a waste, NEVER a blank face

The sins of the father
Or the mother, or each other
Should never be a reason
To commit progressive treason

I don’t hold it against them
It’s not their fault, that progress stalls
Ten years behind all that surrounds
Like being okay with gold never found

But what if change
Wasn’t as painful, or disdainful
As if is feared to be
Just try it and see

Seriously… 

I started writing some poems. Here is one called On Purpose.

When my eyes could barely see
And my mouth could barely speak
I would stand in the sand and watch my tiny toes sink
Into that dark, gray, sinkhole, sometimes up to the ankle
Knowing that the role I play at this very moment
Is no blank in the universe, no missing plank in the bridge,
But a role that takes stage after stage after stage after stage
And goes on like a rage after an alcoholic’s final straw.

A moment so innocent, filled with wonderment, a moment purified
From genocide, pesticide, and things like Sesame Street,
Baby food, and running to your mother are
Glorified, magnified, and solidified, by the fact that I am on a beach
With the sand in my toes, something like four years old
Playing a role,
Given a second chance
To happen upon circumstance that would make me the way I am.

Snatched from a cancer that begins with an L
Ends in eukemia, and pushed on towards academia
To fulfill and spill into the minds of others
Not to mention the hearts
That like jars are filled with moments like mine,
Ready to burst forth like a bomb whose time is up. 

Melodies and lines that rise and sink like my toes deep,
Into hearts that beat with pressures, stresses, tests, and quests,
I create because I am made to do just that, tap, slap, and trap.
The colloquial and the formal just so I can ease this troubled
Cranial gray matter that sometimes can be unexplainable yet so concrete to me.

Reasons can be unattainable at best, but I rest
Knowing I know whose I am, and who’s behind the wheel,
Or who’s under that sand
Pulling it slowly
Downward
With my feet in tow.

So when I say that my toes are slowly sinking
My ankles soon to be deep in salty liquid

I am no accident. No predicament. I am

On purpose. 

“If the Holy Spirit is not only a preacher that convicts people of sin and grace (John 16:8–11; 1 Thess. 1:5) but also a gardener, an artist, and an investor in creation who renews the material world, it cannot be more spiritual and God-honoring to be a preacher than to be a farmer, artist, or banker. To give just one example, evangelism is temporary work, while musicianship is permanent work. In the new heavens and new earth, preachers will be out of a job! Ultimately the purpose of evangelism is to bring about a world in which musicians will be able to do their work perfectly.”

-Tim Keller

So I’m reading The Hunger Games trilogy right now, and I can’t put it down. Now that the casting is out for the first movie, I’ve got some opinions. Ha ha. I have no idea how the actors of the tributes are going to do because I’ve never seen most of them before. Jennifer Lawrence is cast as Katniss, and after seeing her in X-Men: First Class as Mystique I think she’s going to do a stellar job. She definitely looks the part. However, there are few casting choices I think I would have done differently.

I would have cast Michael Sheen as Haymitch, and Colm Feore as President Snow. We’ll see how Woody Harrelson and Donald Sutherland will hold up to the book’s reputation, but in Haymitch, I want to see the hopeless drunkard, but also ruthless/genius Games winner and not some stupid campy character only in the film for comic relief. Also, I want to see President Snow be as ruthless and creepy as possible. I’m pretty sure Donald Sutherland can pull this off, but I think Colm Feore would have been a better choice. 

I guess we’ll find out in March of next year. 

Who would your casting choices be?

May the odds ever be in your favor!

Here are some really good things to chew on that I’m finding in Thomas Merton’s The Inner Experience. These might take a little bit to sit in.

“The great practitioners of contemplation who were the Desert Fathers of Egypt and the Near East did their best to dispel the illusion. [Of contemplation being merely based in aesthetics and intellect and social trendiness] They went into the desert not to seek pure spiritual beauty or an intellectual light, but to see the Face of God. And they knew before they could see His face, they would have to struggle, instead with His adversary. They would have to cast out the devil subtly lodged in their exterior self. They went in the desert not to study speculative truth, but to wrestle with practical evil; not to perfect their analytical intelligence, but to purify their hearts. They went into solitude not to get something, but in order to give themselves, for ‘He that would save his life must lose it, and he that will lose his life, for the sake of Christ, shall save it.’ By their renunciation of passion and attachment, their crucifixion of the exterior self, they liberated the inner man, the new man ‘in Christ.’”

“The important thing in contemplation is not just enjoyment, not pleasure, not happiness, not peace, but the transcendent experience of reality and truth in the act of a supreme and liberated spiritual love…It is not just the sleepy, suave, restful embrace of ‘being’ in a dark, generalized contentment: it is a flash of the lightning of divinity piercing the darkness of nothingness and sin. Not something general and abstract, but something, on the contrary, as concrete, particular, and ‘existential’ as it can possibly be. It is the awakening of Christ within us, the establishment fo the Kingdom of God in our own soul, the triumph of the Truth and of Divine Freedom in the inmost ‘I’ in which the Father becomes one with the Son in the Spirit who is given to the believer.”

Oh man. Good stuff. Comments welcome.

So I’m reading The Inner Experience by Thomas Merton, and my brain is exploding. It’s the kind of book where I could spend a month digesting a single chapter. I thought I’d share some thought provoking quotations from the first couple of chapters. Feel free to post comments, thoughts, agreements, disagreements, and let’s have a healthy discussion about this stuff. It’s amazing how much we can learn from other ways of thinking.

“…the contemplative and spiritual self, the dormant, mysterious, and hidden self that is always effaced by the activity of our exterior self does not seek fulfillment. It is content to be, and in its being it is fulfilled, because its being is rooted in God.”

“Man is the image of God, and his inner self is a kind of mirror in which God not only sees Himself, but reveals Himself to the ‘mirror’ in which He is reflected.”

“….our being somehow communicates directly with the Being of God, Who is ‘in us.’ If we enter into ourselves, find our true self, and then pass ‘beyond’ the inner ‘I,’ we sail forth into the immense darkness in which we confront the ‘I AM’ of the Almighty.”

“Faith…is like the feet where with the soul journeys to God, and love is the guide that directs it…” (St. John of the Cross)