Like Shining From Shook Foil.

Tonight the moon is a feather floating over the Haitian sea. The chatter round the dinner table has long since ceased, only a conversation in Creole from the shadows of the courtyard remains. And of course the waves, the ever rolling, soul soothing tidal wash. I am nursing a cup of Haitian coffee, dark and black and strong. I am letting each sip linger a little longer than the last. My thoughts are far away, in my childhood. A country whose borders I seldom cross. But instead of going home I feel like a museum patron, wandering halls and scrutinizing strange objects that seem to me should seem familiar. 

For no reason at all I do remember clearly that when I was fourteen I got glasses. It was like someone opened a window. A wind worn, rain weary, dirt blurred window. I could see! The colors, the lines, the sharpness and the contrast. It felt as though my mind had been re-booted or at the very least re-tuned. Smells were more pungent, tastes more distinct. My other senses rose to the occasion. Or so it seemed to me, at fourteen. Around that time I started writing too, perhaps in part a result of my newly resurrected faculties. It was this escape into that incredible possible world of the imagination that was the perfect antidote to the droll and drivel of Jr. high. I would lay awake at night and write entire novels in my mind. The bookshelves of which were filled with lifetimes of adventures, no deed was too chivalrous, heroes after all are as self-sacrificing as they are fearless. And the wayward world was never short of damsels in distress.


Then there was music!


Several friends got guitars and my passion became lyrics. I would write every night, sometimes all night. And when I wasn't writing I was reading every CD sleeve for lyrics to inspire me (still do). My weeks went this way: Thursday nights were always an all-nighter because Friday was kinda a throw away day at school and the adrenalin from the excitement of the coming weekend would get me through. I would write about every sort of thing that a fourteen year old had never experienced. Love lost or at least love unrequited, those were my default setting (and I suppose still are). High school came and all my dreams were rock and roll and notebooks full of restless railings and angst-infused phrases begging to be sung, or screamed as it were. Then one Christmas break, far from my rock and roll friends, cloistered away for a week at my grandparents in small-town Alabama, surrounded by farmland and open sky I wrote a poem. Oh the wonder of it! The autonomy mingled with ecstasy. I felt a discharge of my soul that gave me such a buzz, one I still crave daily. 


That first poem was about Father Jeremiah, a wizard bearded Greek Orthodox priest and his moon-eyed dog. A clunky poem I later cannibalized and re-incarnated into an earlier post. My second poem was a rather unflattering depiction of a certain high school English teacher with an obsessive and clinical infatuation with grammar...

Her neck ejaculated her face into conversation

All nouns and no verbs

Her eyes are things a cat can do to a fence

Prepositionally speaking of course

Her ears, parenthesis, close parenthesis

Around an independent thought of a nose interjected

Her mouth, list; thirty-two teeth, two lips, one tongue, 

And a voice arbitrary as grammar ever was

And dangling twice as participle boring comma

Oh dear. But I was hooked! My senior year my textbooks never left my locker, instead, everyday, all day, I carried around one rather voluptuous volume of poetry, the complete works of e.e. cummings, terminally and perpetually truant from the Hattiesburg public library. 

I read and re-read every poem in that collection a hundred times. His masterful precision mixed with a sacrosanct anarchy. Love poems that took love so seriously and yet remained playful and unapologetically romantic. And an anti-establishment undercurrent that gave every institution from science to government a good tongue lashing while all the while elevating those rebukes to high art. Lines that tied my stomachs in knots with beauty, lines to fall in love to, lines like:

here is the deepest secret nobody knows

(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud

and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows

higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)

and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)

and...

somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond

any experience,your eyes have their silence:

in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,

or which i cannot touch because they are too near

and one of my very favorite poems from him...

i am a beggar always

who begs in your mind

(slightly smiling, patient, unspeaking

with a sign on his

chest

BLIND)yes i

am this person of whom somehow

you are never wholly rid(and who

does not ask for more than

just enough dreams to

live on)

after all, kid

you might as well

toss him a few thoughts

a little love preferably,

anything which you can't

pass off on other people: for

instance a

plugged promise-

the he will maybe (hearing something

fall into his hat)go wandering

after it with fingers;till having

found

what was thrown away

himself

taptaptaps out of your brain, hopes, life

to(carefully turning a

corner)never bother you any more

I never got over my love for Mr. cummings. I probably fashioned most of my romantic notions about relationships while contemplating his poetry instead of say, Algebra II. But something else happened to me when I was fourteen. While I was fumbling toward first kisses and tripping rather than falling in love, the eyes of my soul were opened too. I had always believed the good news of Jesus, always loved God the best I could, even in my youngest years tried to do what my conscience told me was right. But then came fourteen and struggling with fitting in or whether to fit in at all. Then came fourteen and dabbling into the little rebellions that dirty the heart and hands. Then came fourteen and feeling out of sorts, at odds with both heaven and earth, it was then that God proved to me that He loved me. And so I had a new lens, those brand new eyes to see myself and to see the world through. And once again all my other spiritual senses were enlivened too, rescued from the futility of self doubt and empowered by His unconditional, unfaltering, unbelievable! completely undeserved love for me!! 


As I got older I have at times, as much as I desired to, struggled somewhat with writing "sacred" poetry. My lyrics and subsequently my poems failing miserably to express my faith, and in particular the greatness of God. It seemed to me anyway, that at least in part, any art (or loose approximation there of) should, for the Christian be sacred, be worship or praise. That is our art should at times be about Him, the lover of our soul, the Perfect priceless One. But how to use human words, finite sentiments to describe the eternal, boundless, mind-blowing God? Like describing the ocean as wet, so my words for God are artlessly obvious, deconstructed and restrained by the reality that even language gets all of its significance from the maker of tongues, the giver of breath, the progenitor of reason.


But tonight, staring at the moon, listening to the lullaby of the Caribbean and drinking in the salty sweet cocktail of sea spray I realized that all beauty points to the One who created it. The moon, the sea just being the moon and the sea, are graced with the brushstrokes of God. And that for us the act of creating alone may be one of the best most sacred homages we can offer the Creator. If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery then just as He poured the light of the Word into the formless void, into this often cruel, callous, and ugly world we should pour beauty through our words. Or try our very darndest to do so. 


Art is sacred then, not because it captures the infinite (for to capture it is to cage it and to cage it is to try and tame it), but because when finite creatures bend toward infinity, when they mimic their God, they too point to Who made them. It follows then I think, that a heart immersed in His love, stammering out its bravest poetry, its sincerest prose is one of the closest things we may ever get on this side of eternity's veil to a wholly sacred proclamation. So then, until death rends that veil forever, let's keep scribbling down our biggest most beautiful thoughts. About the moon, or the ocean, of love lost and especially love longed for. 


One more poem before I go. My very favorite of Gerard Manley Hopkins, who himself struggled to describe God and wrote mostly about the glory of His fingerprint in Nature. 

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

  It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;

  It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil

Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;        

  And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;

  And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil

Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;

  There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;        

And though the last lights off the black West went

  Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent

  World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

Hope.

Growing frustrated with my infantile Creole, Donell searches for the words in English. Finally, voice cracking he says "I am just f--king tired. Something must change."

We are standing in City Soleil, the largest, densest slum in the western hemisphere and by far the most dangerous. I put my hand on his shoulder. There is nothing to say, not in any language. He pulls a worn New Testament out of his pocket. A picture of his best girl and his baby sister tucked safely into the gospel of John. On the page facing Jesus tells His disciples "don't let your hearts be troubled". I want to tell Donell the same but again language fails. 

We are covered in mud. His tent city has flooded due to early rains and a very clogged drainage canal. It has taken us three days but the water flows freely now and the muddy slum begins to dry out. 

Marciell, Evonne and Donell working so hard. The drainage canal was full to six inches below the rim with  tires, tarps, cables and every sort of garbage and plant mass. 3 days of intense work with our bodies shoulder deep in sludge and the canal is clean! 

On our lunch break Donell takes me to his 'house'. It is no bigger than a closet, it is tarps and dirt and a cinder block platform covered in cardboard that is his bed. The water was six inches above the cardboard which is still wet. He doesn't ask me to take a picture. He is a singer. This place does not define him. He will make it out one day. He has to. 

But Donell is the exception, everyone else it seems wants me to chronicle the flood, their squalor, the disintegrating tarps and canvas. The mud. 150+ tents, 1,500+ people, covered.

The next tent is worse than the last and the deeper into the camp you go the deeper the mud, the frustration. These people are refugees in their own city. The are desperate to be heard but feel like no one listens. The camera listens, if only for a second, and so they each tell their stories into its unblinking eye.

But soon they forget the camera. Soon they begin speaking to me as if I understand. The elderly especially, holding nothing back. Their eyes betray their fear, their hopelessness.

The couple above wave their arms wildly, both simultaneously telling their story. The man motions where the water from the downpour came in through the holes in their tent while his wife tells how the flood waters ruined all they had, went two feet up the tent walls. She seems like she is going to breakdown but then draws from some inner strength, perhaps the sobering responsibility of taking care of her blind husband. 

But where the elderly are wrecked with worry, the children, as children do, remain carefree and defiantly joyful.

The reality is that April starts the rainy season and with it malaria and the dreadful horror of cholera. With no latrines or fresh water, feces mixes with mud and enters open sores especially on bare feet. Enters little mouths by way of sucked thumbs and soiled playthings. Cholera is easily treated if caught immediately but with little education and the incessant reality of diarrhea due to any number of dietary and health factors many times people wait too long for treatment.  

What struck me with the deepest sense of awe, maybe even more than the indefatigable joy of the kids, was the dignity of these amazing people. Their resilience, their grace, their unconquered beauty. In a slum of half a million with rampant gang violence and a suffocating quality that is palpable even to outsiders, they soldier on. They love their children, they work so very hard, and they share with each other. Given the smallest chance I know they would thrive. 

  

There is a Haitian proverb that goes: Deye mon, gen mon. Beyond the mountains, more mountains. It captures the fatalism and tragedy of the Haitian life so perfectly, that even if the Haitian people overcome one struggle there is another struggle waiting to sucker-punch them. And they have come to accept it. Several times this week Haitians have said without a hint of irony or self-pity, "Ain't nothing easy."  But yet they don't give up. They hold on to something. Perhaps like Donell, a dream.

I ask him what kind of music he sings. It would have been quicker to ask him which kinds he doesn't sing. Donell's smile widens as the list goes on. He only smiles when he talks of singing. He reminds me President Martelly was a singer. As if to say, "See? Anything's possible." The Haitian leader smiles down in agreement from a billboard that marks the entrance to City Soleil. 

Donell

Dreams are powerful because they tap into that invisible reservoir of hope. But dreams usually don't come true. Dreams disintegrate, are ground to grit by the daily grind and with them the heart too is crushed. So what then can sustain a desperate soul? What can resurrect a heart killed by sorrow and then heal it forever? From where comes everlasting hope?

I believe it is in Christ alone. That it is in Him we can have "the hope of eternal life, which God, who does not lie, promised before time began." It will not come from money, nor politicians. Neither will stem the tide of suffering and despair. It will not be found in the rote of religion or the prestige of power. Neither will break chains or unlock cages. Peter wrote "For it wasn't with perishable things such as silver or gold that you were redeemed from the empty way of life handed down to you from your forefathers, but with the precious blood of Christ....through Him you believe in God, who raised Him from the dead, and so your faith and hope are in God."

This is my prayer tonight for City Soleil, for Donell. That the God of all hope floods them with all joy and all peace as they trust in Jesus, so that they may overflow with that precious hope by the power of the Holy Spirit. Oh Lord please let it be so. 

New Year's Eve 2011, And the Year 2012.

Hamilton Wright Mabie made this poetic statement, "New Year's eve is like every other night; there is no pause in the march of the universe, no breathless moment of silence among created things that the passage of another twelve months may be noted; and yet no man has quite the same thoughts this evening that come with the coming of darkness on other nights."


I have always felt this, the last page of a calender year falling as anonymously as every other page, softly floating to the floor. But New Year's eve does have a somber quality, being on the invisible cusp of a new year, with all it heady aspirations and/or anxious inhibitions....New Year's eve is, as the hippies say....heavy.  


This year the heaviness is of a different sort, and though my stomach is in knots like every year, the butterflies are almost all great things. Romance, destiny and colossal change all in a glorious collision in my soul. Of course there is much else on my heart also that makes this much like those other years, many prayers still unanswered, so much exploitation pandemic in this fallen world. But this year, the heaviness is a burden I have longed to carry, a labor of love.


So I will skip the rants this year, you can read the ones from last year, I bet they still painfully apply. This year I want to look back on 2011, on what I am so thankful for, and ahead to 2012, a year of new beginnings. Here goes:


I am thankful for another year full of Grace and Mercy and the Love of a Heavenly Father.


I am thankful for a woman named Narges K. Ashtari and for her beloved Prishan Foundation. 

Narges and the angelic child that inspired her to start Prishan Foundation!

I am thankful for River Moses, my incredible son.

River...ever pensive, ever speaking his mind! Exploring the base of several pillars at the Windsor Ruins  near Vicksburg, Mississippi.

I am thankful for the 34 permanent residents of Assist Orphange, for those 34 precious orphan girls, for Abraham and Jainy their caretakers and their two biological sons Abbi and Appu.

The girls of Assist home in Rayagada, Orissa India, along with Abbi and Appu!

I am thankful for my Ekklessia family, the community of believers there that have proven their love through humble service.


I am thankful for all of you, the Conspiracy Of Hope, who speak out on behalf of the exploited and give generously of your time and love and resources.


And I am sooooo very thankful for Jan. 11th....the day I leave for India!!!!


So this year, to break with the tradition of all my years, I want to make a New Year's resolution. And if I might be so bold, to ask you to make it with me. Thank you.

This year I resolve to keep the cause of the orphan child daily dearer to my heart. I resolve to be a louder voice for the voiceless children trapped in slavery. I resolve to be recklessly abandoned to their freedom. To give all that I can, all that I am, to that end. I resolve to love the orphan as my own child, to never stop until they are out of harm's way, until they are finally resting in the tender love of their new family.

I'll leave you with this. One of my very favorite authors, G. K. Chesterton proposed that “The object of a new year is not that we should have a new year. It is that we should have a new soul”. 


So this year rejoice in the opportunity to start again. Receive the mercy and grace to do just that. And like Ghandi exhorted us "Be the change in the world you want to see."

Until Next Year!! I love you all so much!!

X-mas 2011.

Americans will spend around 200 billion dollars this year on Christmas. The holiday that celebrates the birth of the Christian savior, the one born in a pig's trough in a 1st century shanty. And of course they will spend it on every sort of nonsense. Just over 50% of the pets in the US of A will receive gifts. At a conservative 40 dollars a pet, with 80 million pets getting gifts, that's a meager 3 billion and change. A far cry from the 41 billion annually that is spent on pets including 900+ dollar testicle implants (240k sold so far) so that your castrated pet will "retain their natural look and self esteem"..... 


There's the throngs of rabid consumers who didn't sleep on November 24. The day meant for giving thanks, a day set aside as a remembrance of the blessings that we already have in great abundance was punctuated with a night (or a week) of anxious waiting in the parking lots of giant retail meccas. Then at some ungodly hour, the veil of sliding glass was rent, the many mouths of strip malls opened wide, and the crowds pushed themselves frenzied and wild eyed into the belly of the beast. They trampled the slow and the timid, they wrenched product from the weak and the amateurish. 





I am so embarrassed to be human. I believe the article of the maniacal obsession was a $2 waffle maker. You'd of thought it was the cure for AIDS or the last cup of water on earth. If that video whets the appetite, here is a collection of some of the most egregious black Friday deaths and injuries ever. Yes. I said deaths. And all as a preamble to a day celebrating the baby Jesus. The one who had no earthly possessions. Who had no home. Who lived a life in humble servitude to the poor and the hurting. 


Yesterday, to prove that people are the worst type of brand-whores and celebrity worshipers, shoppers in North Carolina came to blows over the New Air Jordan tennis shoes. At 180 dollars a pair, a mob ran through the store's doors to be able to say that they have the new Jordans. 

Dear shoppers. Michael Jordan doesn't even play anymore. He's a 48 year old scratch golfer who cannot dunk from the free throw line anymore, not even at Chuck E. Cheeses. He doesn't know you are wearing his shoes. He doesn't even care. Well let's be honest he does care, about 180 dollar's worth, that you buy them. But he will never see you wear them, he will never stop you on the street and say, nice kicks my friend. He never will. Nope. 





How bout 200 billion on orphan relief? Even the 41 billion we spend on pets? Hell even the 3 billion we spend on gifts for our pets? How bout lining up outside of brothels and brick kilns, waiting all night to snatch kids out of the ruthless grips of traffickers and slave masters? How bout the same kinda determination that we use to acquire a 2 dollar waffle maker or even 180 dollar shoes, that kind of passion and resolve??!! If nothing else. Let's just drop the pretense. Take the name of Christ off of it all. Quit trying to add credibility to this season of product lust and tinsel worship. 


This is how I imagine hell. The smell of gingerbread and eggnog and the whole place is decked out in greens and reds and silvers and the tree is lit and there are new presents every morning and all you have to do is think it and there it is, waiting under the tree the next day. And your belly is always full and the music always soothes and the fire roars and crackles the most delightful little hisses and pops and this day repeats every day forever. And you don't have to think about the poor and the enslaved because they are not here in your perpetual X-mas. 


But then neither is Christ.

Politics Schmolitics!

Still a year from the elections and I am already green at the gills running to the hills sick of the rhetoric, the divisiveness and the look at me I am the savior of the status quo while simultaneously the fulfiller of dreams speeches spewing from the mouths of the would be rulers of america. I honestly can't stomach much more of this. Politics for me is love God with all your heart and love your neighbor as yourself. Easy as pie. 


Mmmmmm pie.....


I was driving back this morning from Jackson, MS, our state capitol and therefore the mecca for all thing tax and title related. I had to get a duplicate title for my jeep because I am selling everything I own and moving to India. But that is a story for another day...

I was lost in a daydream (give you a guess who that might have been about) when a bumper sticker on a truck got my attention. Mostly because of it's sheer size. The megalithic banner proclaimed. "I Miss Reagan". 


Now I am thinking to myself, does this guy really miss Reagan???  Were they like BFF back in primary? Did they share a foxhole in 'Nam?? And I realized what he means is he misses the life he had when Reagan had the wheel of the Executive Branchmobile. Politics has descended far from the days of "Ask not what your country can do for you...." Where is the personal sacrifice, not for the once great future State, but where is the humble service to the poor?? 


So in the spirit of all things political...puke....I asked my friend Michael "Cool Hand-3years in the book of-Luke" Dixon, who is also a fellow blogger and minister of the small community church where I attend, to tell me "theologically speaking" what a country might look like with Jesus at the helm. I have touched on this before here. Be sure to note Mike's sublime sarcasm. He has the gift. But don't let it fool you, he actually believes this stuff. I have heard him in as many words describe this upside down kingdom of Christ in greater detail several times in front of a crowded chapel. Here's his take....


"In a land where Jesus is president. Ironically election is no longer a divisive term politically or theologically. He is in office because he campaigned by giving everything he has away. There are no more citizens. Just sons and daughters. His cabinet is made up entirely of children. There are two laws and it is up to you to obey. 1) Give every part of yourself to God (yes even the gross parts) and 2) Love everyone on earth like they are the God in whose image they are made.


The tax code is simple: If you have more manna than you need give it away to those who are hungry before it stinks up your tent. Foreign relations take place around a large table. Everyone brings their best food and wine, and we tell stories. (I, that is Mike, will be eating with the Thai members of the family, and telling stories with the American southerners). The army trains by running wide armed at stuffed dummy replicas of the "enemy", and then practices throwing themselves at their mannequin feet with a towel and basin. This will take some practice before they can really get between the toes. All zoos have no fences because the snakes don't bite and the lambs use lions as pillows. Oh and we all get to talk face to face with the President anytime and anywhere we want, His schedule is surprisingly open."

I asked Mike to write this mainly to add a bit of spiritual authority and academic credibility to this post which seems only to highlight my increasingly cynical view of the three-ring circus of politics. Let me say I am not immune to how charged certain issues are, how important certain laws can be, but what I am saying, what I am hoping, is that we will all examine our motives for how we vote and ask ourselves, do the most fragile among us end up more broken? Do the weakest among us have their loads lightened? Do the orphans and widows have any representation, any voice at all? 

I will leave you with these two things: The wisest words on practical politics I ever got, 

"Get off your ass and serve somebody!"

......and a short poem I wrote for my son when he was 5 or 6. 

I'm tired of talkin' politics

Let's talk polliwogs instead

Or lollipops or poppycocks

Or the shape of someone's head

We can talk on any subject

From mumbley-pegs to bumble bees

But since were talking politics

I'll vote for you if you vote for me

Meet My Son...

My son came into this world screaming, purple and pissing on the kindly nurse who just wanted to have the umbilical cord cut and get on with her very long shift. He is 13 now, brilliant as his mum, and not nearly as hard headed as his old man. The moment he came into the world, my life was no longer my own. My life was to protect him, to round the sharp corners of the planet. The day we left the hospital I had such a relentless white-knuckled grip on his baby seat, I swear to you, a regiment of soldiers would have torn my arm straightaway from its socket before i could have let go of my son. What follows is for posterity sake, to quote the venerable mr. cummings "miracles are to come, with you I leave the remembrance of miracles".

e.e. cummings. 

These are the lessons my son taught me. This is the wisdom of childhood, unpolluted by the world-weary cynicism of the adult world, still teeming with a boundless imagination, tireless and sublime. This is the lens he sees the world through, these are the new eyes that he gave me. This is the miracle of being a father, this is the miracle of children.


The first lesson was stark and simple and unutterably profound, I realized the moment he was born that I no longer owned my own heart, it now beat outside my chest, now rested in the infinitely fragile frame of an infant child. As he grows that realization grows with him. As he hurts I hurt more, as he triumphs I am ever rejoicing. And the love I feel for him, transcendent and deeply visceral, was the very thing that broke my heart and compelled me to join the anti-child trafficking movement.


The second lesson was I am a selfish ________. Fill in the blank, you're prolly pretty close. Ask his mum if you need some more colorful words. Nothing like a child's total dependence on you to make you realize you still think of your life as your own. A child's world is as big as his belly. If he is hungry he opens his mouth and there is a very discreet amount of time allotted for it to be filled with food before it is filled with screams. Don't get me wrong, I LOVED feeding him, changing him, but seriously, I mean how much can a child eat??! And does he not realize where it all goes?!! And what is with the not sleeping, the multiple middle of the night feedings??!?? Really?!? But now, oh how I miss those moments, those first everythings, those tiny little hands grasping everything for recognition, those little legs peddling in the air prophesying running, bike rides, and long hot summer swims. Maybe the second lesson should be re-titled to: Don't be a selfish ________, you'll miss some of the best moments of your life. 

The third lesson was never underestimate a child, never give them a pat answer, never, ever ever ever think you are smarter then them. You. Are. Not. From the time my son was 18 months he was dedicated to consuming all knowledge known to man. He was intuitive, uninhibited, relentless in his desire to understand the workings of the world. He would say, "How does a car work?" To which I would answer. "Well son, it has an engine, that runs on gas, a bunch of little explosions of that gas create the energy that moves the car forward." Ignoring my insult to his superior intellect my son would again say "tell me how a car works". Slower this time and with maybe just a hint of condescension. So I would start with decaying plant matter in the ground, the heat and the pressure that turned it to crude, the drilling, the refining, the shipping, the pumping, the internal combustion, the pistons, rods, rocker arms, the tranny, the drive train, the rear differential..... And then when I was done my son would say. Tell me again. So I would, with the help of his corrections if I attempted to give an abbreviated version. After a few run throughs he wouldn't ask again. He had it. 18 months old. By 24 months he had his mind around the applied Physics of fulcrums and levers and pivot points. Now at 13 he speaks freely on every subject from sub-atomic particles to the dark matter hidden in the universe. I no longer require the use of Google. I have my son. 


There are of course a thousand other lessons my son taught me but none hit me with the blunt force of a thousand freight chains like this one: I was not prepared for the love I would feel for him. And then in that single most incredible moment when my heart was exploding I realized I was only feeling one single drop in the ocean of the affection God has for His children. I have never been so humbled, so speechless, so deeply affected by anything else in my life. So many misconceptions about the heavenly Father melted away in that instant when I held my son. So many times since then when my aching for my kid became a revelation of God's infinite love for me, for us, his silly, skint-kneed, snot-sniffing, broken, beautiful children.


I am not the father I had hoped to be, I am still so selfish, still consumed by so many things that probably don't amount to anything. But every time I am with my little man I want to be a better father, and patiently my son teaches me, each time anew, that the most important thing is just to give a child your time and affection. The rest kinda takes care of itself. This post is especially hard for me because I will be away from him for an extended time soon and because I am very private person, and oh so very protective of him. And because he reads my blog I want to say I love you Mosie. I am so proud of you. You are the best thing I ever did. This is the remembrance of the miracle you are to me, the miracle that you are to this world, and the many, many miracles to come.

Meet my son, River Moses.

Spoils of the climb. Riv finds a crocodile skull duck-taped shut at the bottom of Red Bluff.

At the Windsor Ruins in North Mississippi. River, never one to be so very meticulous in minding unnecessary rules, ignores the "Keep Out" warnings and explores the site.

Above, River sends unsuspecting seagulls squawking at the beach in Gulfport, MS. Below, my handsome, incredible, brilliant young man.

The Night Hides A World, But Reveals A Universe.

I love to read the proverbs of other cultures. I love how it reminds us we are all so much alike. To me there is something very compelling, very salt of the earth about the oral tradition of a phrase that has stood the test of so many generations, that has survived the revisionists and the post modernists and the younger generations chaffing under the disciplines of their elders, throwing off the shackles of tradition. It speaks of course to a proverb's practical wisdom that so many lips for so long have uttered the phrases and felt completely justified if not obligated to do so. Today I have been reading Iranian proverbs and poetry.

The main text of poster is an Iranian proverb means: "Our cow doesn't milk, but pisses plenty", that describing a person who tends to make mess of things, rather than making them right.

These Iranian proverbs range from the practical:

Habits are first cobwebs, then cables.

You can’t push on a rope.

The joy of finding something is often worth more than what is found.

The larger a man's roof the more snow it collects. 

Standard fare really, similar sentiments found in every language, every culture under the sun. A testament to their universal truth. Then the slightly more abstracted, at least if nothing else by the translations:

A drowning man is not troubled by rain.

Every man is the king of his own beard.

He who has been bitten by a snake fears a piece of string.

The lion (and the lioness fellas) is most handsome when looking for food.

But there are also the romantic ones. I like these best:

The loveliest of faces are to be seen by moonlight, when one sees half with the eye and half with the fancy. 

Only a heart can find the way to another heart.

A kiss is a lovely trick designed by nature to stop speech when words become superfluous. 

A woman knows the face of the man she loves like a sailor knows the open sea. 

Then there are those that bridge the gap between proverb and poetry, where the best of Persian culture begins to bleed through:

This is love: to fly toward a secret sky... Finally, to take a step without feet.

Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.

The minute I heard my first love story I started looking for you..

But it is the Persian poets that I believe really capture the essence of the heart of the Iranian people. Such passion and such reckless abandon to it. Hafiz has always been my favorite. He was a master of love poetry:

...Your love 

Should never be offered to the mouth of a 

Stranger, 

Only to someone 

Who has the valor and daring 

To cut pieces of their soul off with a knife 

Then weave them into a blanket 

To protect you...

and...

...One regret, dear, 

That I am determined not to have 

When I am lying on my deathbed 

Is that 

I did not kiss you enough.... 

and the sensuous and heady..

Lean your sweet neck and mouth 

Out of that dark nest where you hide, 

I will pour effulgence into your mind. 

Artist's rendering of the most famous Persian poet Hafiz.

Hafiz also wrote about our relationship to God with such unapologetic romance and passion. The way that relationship should be. Intoxicated by the Spirit:


I am a hole in a flute that the Christ's breath moves through.....listen to this music.

I am happy even before I have reason. I am full of light even before the sky can greet the sun or moon. Dear companions, we have been in love with God for so very, very long; what can we now do but forever dance?

This place where you are right now

God circled on a map for you

Wherever your eyes and arms and heart can move 

Against the earth and sky,

The Beloved has bowed there – 

Our Beloved has bowed there knowing 

You were coming

But my all time favorite has always been this one. To me it speaks about the surpassing joy that comes from knowing God, of resting in the finished work of Grace, of letting go and surrendering to the mysterious wonder of His sacrificial, unconditional, never ending love.

What is the difference between your experience of existence and that of a saint? The saint knows that the spiritual path is a sublime chess game with God and that the Beloved has just made such a fantastic move that the saint is now continually tripping over joy and bursting out in laughter and saying, I surrender! Whereas, my dear, I am afraid you still think you have a thousand serious moves.


I do not agree with some of Hafiz's philosophy, and he has certainly been mistranslated as have all poets. But he consistently touched this truth. That the heart of man and the heart of God have a gravity, a convergent trajectory. That we are made for this collision, and that we should stop resisting the pull. As Hafiz would say..

Just sit there 

Just sit there right now

Don't do a thing

Just rest

For your separation from God 

Is the hardest work in this world

For NKA...