Comma Dot Comma

First, there hasn’t been a pic up here in awhile. I strongly believe that the first time you put a picture of yourself up on the web, it should be extremely flattering. You don’t get a second chance to make a first impression! That’s why I picked this one of me and my youngest brother at the beach on Christmas Eve.

Second, I have been alerted to the presence of a new online journal related to Christianity and Culture: This Land. The only thing I’ve read so far is this cool retelling of the story of Raven stealing light from where it is kept in a box: Tradition, Intuition, Epiphany. It was written by my friend Nate, who posits that this myth prefigures the coming of Jesus. It’s interesting to think about. More on this later.

There are a lot of things to like today. I like:

• The way oreo cookie crumbs get stuck in my teeth after I eat a cookie so it feels like a secret chocolate treasure in my mouth for awhile afterwards. (Nope, I don’t get cavities. I attribute it to the Ph of my saliva. Neener neener.)
• The billows of white steam from the heating system that go lumbering past the windows like polar bears.
• The extra-long cord on my headphones. I can scoot my chair several feet away from the desk before I feel a tug. I don’t care if people say that headphones are full of bacteria, they are a good invention.
• The interesting mix of light in the office. My office mate and I each have desk lamps that emit heavy yellow waves of light; there is some crisp, baldish winter light coming in through the windows; and glittery flourescents weaseling in from the hallway. Coolio. They battle it out.
• My lip balm. Neutrogena Lip Nutrition. It’s a slick rose-red in the jar and I’m supposed to put it on with my finger but it’s too sticky so I just pooch my bottom lip out and dip it in. Then some lick smacking to get it on my top lip. Repeat five times a day.
• My hair barrette, which is the only one I’ve ever found that is big enough for all of my hair at once.
• Having a stack of five poetry books on the desk next to me. It makes me feel high-culture. And it’s nice to catch their titles out of the side of my eye as I work: “the life and the dark,” “the insistence of beauty” and so on.
• Leonard Cohen. “Hallelujah.” Live.
• Orange Spice tea.
• Scissors. They make such an nice sound going through paper. Schhllliip!

What do you like?

The latest issue of Salt is out– Christian commentary and creative writing, edited by a friend of mine in Chicago. This month’s theme is “Beginnings.” I like it because a) they let me write stuff for them and b) they always have survey quizzes.

Also, the latest issue of Larknews, whose lead headline is “Warren to Buy Saints, Build Purpose-Driven Field.” Ha ha ha!

1. It looks like it was invented by somebody on drugs
2. Its leaves are magenta, light green, and dark green
3. Its leaves are all jaggedy
4. Its leaves grow in spirals around their stems, bigger and bigger!
5. Its stems are spiky and magenta
6. Its stems are more fuzzy than spiky
7. Its stems are juicy and succulent
8. If you go away for ten days and nobody waters it all the leaves collapse around the side of the pot like muppet hair.
9. If you come back after ten days and gasp at its sorry state and give it a bunch of water, its leaves perk right up like medusa hair and aim for the window, in ten minutes or less.
10. It is an optimist; it has a can-do attitude
11. It is nearly impossible to kill.

Yay Rex! Hero of the desk plant world.

Pied Beauty

More on Rexes

Happy New Year! I wish each of you new and improved grace antennae: the better to recognnize and accept moments of grace, the better to recognize moments when you are called to be an agent of grace. May you get all of God’s signals.

I wish that for myself too. I’m trying to figure out a way to weave that wish in with my resolutions. Last year I had three resolutions:

1. Don’t try to get anywhere
2. Don’t try to prove anything to anyone
3. Don’t try to save anybody

They worked out pretty well. So well, in fact, that I am considering keeping them again this year. I did try to get somewhere at my work (so far no progress) and with my poetry (some progress, perhaps not visible to the external world). But that resolution helped me to keep the emotional stakes low in both cases.

It seems disingenuous to have only negations in my list, but I had to invent some way to thwart unhealthy ambition. I may need to spend many years deliberately NOT striving, in order to overcome the soul-shriveling effects of my many years of scrabbling and scraping. I’m trying to learn how to live joyfully and responsibly in the world –without idealism. Ten of my last 12 years or so were fueled almost entirely by ambition and idealism, with corrosive effects. I wanted to be a crusader for God! I wanted to save the world! Time after time, I found my works bearing very little fruit. My family and friends would say, “Wow, I could NEVER do that! More power to you!” Which I interpreted as “You are crazy. You’re on your own.” Nor did God seem interested in backing my up in my efforts to bring sustenance and repair. Where were the miracles, the insights, the breakthroughs, the provision?

With each passing year I felt more and more like I had been cast adrift in a boat with just a canteen and a loaf of bread. Alone and far away from everything and everyone that could help me. My response was to just get angrier and try harder. You know how sometimes in a relationship, one person will do something selfless, not out of love, but out of a desire to prove he or she is a better person? A sort of moral nose-thumbing? Well, that was me in the boat. I decided to take the little bread I had and feed it to the gulls. “Ha, ha, God! Take that! Even if You won’t feed these gulls, I will! Who’s got the high ground now, huh?!”

I was so mad. And here’s the part where I’m supposed to say how I had some kind of realization and now I am on a much better path, etc, etc. All I can say for sure is that everything needs to get knocked down before Jesus can build up something strong and true. I’ve been through the knocking down part, I think. Most of the anger is gone. Most of the expectations are gone. Now me and the Holy Spirit are just raking the terrain flat for awhile.

Yeah, I’m going to stick with those resolutions for another year. Hang out with my canteen in this little boat and see what happens. That sounds pretty good.