This In-Between Month, Day 3: The World-Wide Whisper

River and I walked around the French quarter today. He entertained me, effortlessly shifting between Monty Python and C.S. Lewis, H.P. Lovecraft and Dr. Who. Riffing about pop culture and the nature of evil. All in a cast of voices from the somber to the insane. He is older, looks older, changed in subtle ways. I want to lament what I have missed but instead try to only celebrate the man he is becoming. 

Later as the shadows of the afternoon gave contrast to the neon signs River sang "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues" then "Norwegian Wood". And somehow "Hotel California became "American Pie" which then was Tennyson.

"For I dipped into the future, far as human eye could see,

Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be;

Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails,

Pilots of the purple twilight, dropping down with costly bales;

Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there rained a ghastly dew

From the nations' airy navies grappling in the central blue;

Far along the world-wide whisper of the south-wind rushing warm,

With the standards of the peoples plunging through the

thunder-storm."

My son's deepening voice and passion for song lyrics and all things guitar was a soundtrack to my thoughts. I tried to be right there with him, and most of me was, but the images of Kiev on fire...well it looks like hell's flames have come to earth.

Pictures from the Guardian UK.

It seems there is no "world-wide whisper" but instead a scream. All creation groans for all things to be made new but the daughters of Eve, the sons of Adam wail. The forgotten tragedies Central African Republic where religions devour each other. Boots on the throats of their brothers.

The caption above read "Christian's winning". Now how is that even possible? How can you reconcile laying down your life for your brother with a boot on his throat. What part of hacking him to death with a machete communicates the love of Jesus. None.

Syria with 9 million refugees. With a bloody conflict dismissed by the west as "someone else's civil war" as "baddie vs. baddie". But when civilians are targeted, when children are blown to bits because father's speak out...it is all of our problem. Below families flee across deserts and borders into the makeshift camps. Leaving behind death for living misery. 

 


I'ts all so much to feel. Too much to understand how one of us can or should respond. I am at a loss, feeling so far from the reality of it all. Today all I can do is pray. Pray for the children's lives destroyed by these tragedies. I just want to do something. But what?? 

I gotta go, River is ready to ramble on. I have a friend Nat in the Central African Republic, he and his wife work with Tearfund (who are also working in Syria). If you can, help them try and protect the innocent there. Mesi Anpil.

This In-Between Month, Day 2: Magazine Street, New Orleans

As I walked down Magazine Street today this thought turned over and over in me.

"Humility is not thinking less of your self but thinking of your self less." 

C.S. Lewis.

The last two weeks there has been a lonely lilted melody playing in the back rooms of my mind. Faint as a whisper, and real thin, like an echo of an echo. This week past someone turned the volume up and I found myself humming along, but still no words, no recollection of the tune. Until today, sitting in a little coffee dive on Magazine St., distracted making little mosaics of all the photos I'd taken, a few words twisted by memory and then a sudden jolt of recognition and a whole phrase coming back to me.

"Your fire burns me like a favorite song

A song I should have know all along

I feel you move like smoke in my eyes

And that is why..." 

"Bothered" Over The Rhine

Which is beautiful, and made me long for someone but wasn't the spiritual epiphany I had hoped for (yet) but it did lead me to revisit this album:

Which led me somewhat amused to the song "Jesus in New Orleans" where I read these  lyrics:

"But when I least expect it

Here and there I see my savior’s face

He’s still my favorite loser

Falling for the entire human race"

Which brought me back to selflessness. Jesus, in sweat became blood dripping agony, prayed this prayer to His Father. "Not my will but Yours be done." That is where it starts, thinking of our selves less and Him all the more. This is the first step on the path of selflessness. Surrender of our will to His and then we can really begin to live for others. What this will look like may be different for all of us, but it will have the same results, magnifying God in the eyes of His creation, and elevating those created in His image to intimacy with Him. 

50 cent paper backs at a thrift store. My first purchase in these here United States. 

I am reading Anne Lamott's " Bird by Bird, Some Instructions on Writing and Life". (Which I love and want to stop all else and finish, thanks Em.) And one of the things she tells young writers and old writers (and dead writers and those not born), is to write. Write everyday, write short things. Silly little throw away things. Just write, write, write. Get the fuel to the engine of the thing. Prime it, choke it, flood it sometimes, but keep trying to crank that engine. It is the same, in some ways, this business of being selfless. Just do it. Listen longer to a strangers rambling story. Listen with a wide heart and kind or concerned eyes. Tip better. Smile more. Tell people what you like about them, really mean it. Give your spare cash, and maybe a little that's not so spare to those that need it more. Make your days more about others, which doesn't mean you are forgotten. NO! God will take care of you! Seek first the kingdom and whatever you need for life and Godliness will be yours! Seek the "upside down kingdom" as it's been called, the one where the King came to be a servant and traded royal chariots for donkeys. The Kingdom where it's not about me.

Please excuse me, for coffee and Miss Lamott await. And in an hour I will see my son! 

This In-Between Month, Day 1

I have always been fascinated by the in-betweens. Dawn and dusk and their strange grays, horizons, borders and shorelines- that no-man's land. There is a tension in the in-betweens, a solitary confinement too. And what is art without those visceral forces, that isolation?

Yesterday morning, after the chaos of an airport run, the smells of burning trash and dirty diesel exhaust, and all the craziness of a normal Haitian Monday, I sat alone in the terminal at Port-au-Prince's Toussaint Louverture International Airport. I scrolled through photos of the day before, an impromptu beach outing. These two precious baby sisters, reclining in a wheel barrow. The Haiti that I was leaving behind for a month. 

It is hard to separate the feelings I get, the leaving a country I love and the going to a country where my son is. These in-betweens, they get more and more intense, more and more convoluted with each border passing. I feel like part of me stays, sojourns in that no-man's land, a little lost, never settling. My mind was on these thoughts and always the stark contrast of the poverty I was leaving, the luxury I would soon be in. I stared at my little cup of espresso, the last taste of Haiti for a month.

Later, as I sat waiting for my flight to New Orleans. A gentlemen, an entomologist by profession, sat across from me tearing pages from a magazine. Finally, bettered by my curiosity, I asked him what he was doing. He said simply, "It's too heavy." He was ripping out all the adds, another magazine's worth, and setting them on the seat beside him, making the very large magazine less unwieldy for his flight to South America. I jokingly asked him if he had paid for the magazine. He said, "yes, dearly." I laughed and remarked how the publishers were double dipping grossly, selling so many ads, and still taking their pound of flesh from their readership. He chuckled. I wondered aloud maybe most people buy it for the ads. Maybe they want to be told what to wear, and what to watch, and what to smell like. With the tone of a man who prefers the studies of bugs and not people he humored me, "Maybe." He continued to make his magazine lighter, the stack beside him grew to the height of another normal magazine, and I sat quietly. Finally I said, "Maybe people should do that with their lives? Rip out all the ads, all the pinned pages, all the critical analysis of the consumer at large. Maybe all those voices telling them who to be should be silenced as such." He looked at me, as if I were a rare species of cockroach, and as he stood he said. "You're way too young to be talking that way." And then he handed me the pile of pages and walked away. 

I found a sunny spot, near the sky train, and spread the pages on the floor. A drunk British tourist, worried about my sanity, said, "Hey Jesus, don't let them tell you how to be, don't let them get to you." Indeed. To which his sober country mate said, "Leave him alone, it's probably just art or something that he's doing." Only when he said "art", it was like a curse word. I made the little mosaic below in honor of those concerned Londoners while bored and waiting to board.

The flight to New Orleans was easy and uneventful. Sleep tugged at me but the flying mostly west at that hour always means flying into the sunset. The strangest of in-betweens, you literally watch the sun setting in slow motion, and oh the oranges, the yellows, the reds glowing the clouds. And then on descent, between the layers of clouds, like the sun exploded and irradiated everything with color. By the time I got to the hotel in New Orleans I was too tired to write, too tired to make sense of what it all meant if anything. I took a miraculous hot shower, I laid down in a bed too soft, too fresh for words. I thought of Haiti, my little wood shack by the sea. I thought for a few moments I'd never sleep here, not without the rolling waves...but then I was gone. Into the in-between of dreams.

The word for 2013 was "selfie". The most watched youtube video, with over 600 million views in the 2013 calender year is a song called "Gentleman" which depicts a man being anything but that, instead it is a crude celebration of the heights of selfishness even if it's meant to be somewhat ironic. (Please, spare yourself the agony.) Is this the way we see ourselves, and others? The way we want to be seen? I am no pile of ads and neither are you I suspect. A photo taken of ourselves is mostly harmless, and a crappy song doesn't necessarily become ones life governing philosophy. But who are we to be? 

Tomorrow I see my son for the first time in three months. I am always painfully aware that I am to set an example for him. And so the word that's been in my spirit, the one the ads can't sell you, the way they won't tell you to be, the one that flies in the face of all culture, the one that I am really bad at, is "selfless".

For me I want that word to mark my new year. To be the legacy for my son. And I find it impossible. And only with Jesus, only with His example and the sacrifice and power of the cross can I start to even begin to be selfless, which by any other name would be "Christ-likeness". Even as I type that word I know what it means and my soul shudders a bit and shrinks back from it. But I must. When I look at the state of my heart, my mind. When I take stock of my desires. When I look at the great needs in this weary world... Well it's time for change. 

So will you join with me and swear off selfies for a year? Haha. Just kidding. (But that is a thought..) Let us make 2014 a year where we are selfless. Where we change our spending habits, our consumption levels. (And besides, it's "too heavy" to carry all that weight around.) Use less and purchase slave-free. Give more to those doing the urgent things. May the way people describe us become the word selfless. Hard as it will be, with Christ all things are possible.

Gonna try and journal this in-between month. Love it if you stop by once and a while.