Water to lower ground...

I talked with my friend, Jerry McCoy, today. I’ve missed him…as we met for quite a while earlier in the year. My ‘painting’ schedule freed up a bit, so I met with him again today. By the way, you really need to hear his ‘story’. Talk about being taken into the deep…you really need to hear it, a story of incredible loss and redemption. And, he gives to me…out of that experience. Today, he was particularly unrestrained in his challenge for me to take on a daily discipline of writing. He referenced ‘talent’ going to waste as one motivation, but I suspect it comes from an energy he is experiencing himself…he just published an 83-page photo essay on sanctuaries in Indiana. “Write one page every day”, he repeated. A tip from none other than John Grisham, but Jerry felt particularly energetic to pass that challenge along to me. I feel I should take his admonishment as more than from just him today; I can’t help but sense that this is a word from God. Particularly since I believe it was He who nudged me to do this several months ago on one long run I had with Him.

“Do it because you can’t not do it”, he said; “don’t do it because of the ‘potential’ marketability of doing so…you’ll stop too soon from the weight of all the reasons not to proceed.”

Coming from him, this seems like excellent advice, as I’ve watched from a bit of a distance as he has pursued professional photography to a very high level…without much ‘commercial success’, so far.

So besides documenting my encounters with life, in this way, I wonder what all is going on inside of me. Reporting, a bit, to him on how things are going, I mentioned that I feel like I am sliding into the stage of grief commonly referred to as acceptance. Acceptance of what, I even ask myself. As best I can tell, acceptance of the fact that life will likely not ‘return’ to a pattern of work that I have, from a career perspective, been comfortable with for 20 years. I have been trying to pry open the door of employment in fields of experience I have had for 18 months now, all to no apparent avail. While I still find my head submerged in one of the other stages of grief, ‘anger’, from time to time, by and large I feel a sense that life has changed…in terms of what I do in it, especially related to how I earn income. The shock of this, though still deafening at times, is slowly wearing off and I find more of a curiosity about the future than anxiety over the past. This seems like it would have to be no small movement, especially if I were noticing it in someone else. So, I’m guessing it must apply to me as well…though certainly in a still slightly less forgiving way.

When you can’t hold on to something, and then you can’t reach it, and then you can’t even see it very well, you seem to notice yourself looking around for something else to grab. The emotional connection with the familiar past can’t sustain energy in the present environment…as the present does its work to require a response to itself. And, with the finite amount of energy we have to begin with, there appears to something almost natural about its flow to what is around you now. Like water heading to lower ground…it just gets there one way or another, without complaining about the latest obstacle or the amount of time it takes to arrive.

Now there’s something to think about…

8th Grade Champions!

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Accept as good whatever happens to you or affects you, knowing that nothing happens without God.

-- The Didache

Indiana Snow - December 2007

Let it Snow

I’m sitting in the living room of friends and am looking out their picture window. A suburban neighborhood sets the scene. But the drama is in the magnificent snow that is falling outside. Inch upon inch, it keeps stacking up…in the street, on the car, and on every little angle on every little branch of every little tree in the neighborhood. A streetlight casts is gleam on nearby flurries as they float by to the ground below. The feeling of it all comes quite close to a life-size, Dickens-esque snowglobe. Everything quiet, everything white, everything stacking up around you…but this time not with the unspoken threat of keeping up in this world, but rather with the whisper of relaxation that might actually be affordable after all. The kind we all work so hard to get in position to achieve, when really on this night it can simply and only be received. Participated in only by watching and observing and being surrounded by such beauty and quiet that the reminiscent notion of peace on earth actually feels tasteable.

And, of course, being the end of 2007, the newest in flat-screen technology whirls its dervish of light and color in the same room yelping for attention to its world of technology. But all eyes are focused beyond its distraction to the wonders of winterland going on outside. A faint sense that the beckoning call from both voices is sourced in something deep, something that we want, something that feels bigger and better than ourselves keeps its pace…and we’re left to wonder in a private way about which is more real. I’m going with the outside world I’m seeing…though I have to acknowledge that its appeal is internal.

The two, side-by-side, force me to consider their odd juxtaposition, as I admit to myself that I actually like both. But, I also realize that part of what I like about the electronic one is the false sense of something that I can achieve by ‘buying’ it. It makes me think I am better than I am. It tells me to define myself by what I do, even more by what I can get. I am defined by the stuff I accumulate around me, it repeats. Even worse, it starts its insidious chant that I am who I am relative to what my friends and neighbors have, by the amount of stuff they have accumulated. And, I catch myself falling into its stream of pride or despair about who I am relative to whether or not I am better than they are.

Meanwhile, fantastically unique and homogenous snow maintains its silent descent to earth adding to its chorus that who I am has nothing to do with comparing myself to my neighbor, but rather in living with what I am given. After all, everything is given. The commodities god gets worried at such thinking, such realization. Because it feeds on consumption. But the world of gift releases my grip on such things and such neighbors and raises its voice to me and my neighbor to say, “Look outside…isn’t that amazing!” And we stop, for a moment, imaging who we are in light of what we see going on around us…imagining who we are in light of what we are given…imaging who we are by the Giver of such goodness to us. And we relax…and enter peace. Snow and peace kind of go together, don’t they?

Let it snow, let is snow, let it snow.