not the moon we walked on

A while ago I was reading an interview with Buzz Aldrin and the reporter asked him, when you look at the moon, do you see it differently now because you've been up there? Aldrin's response was "it's the moon we went to, but not the moon we walked on." That's exactly how I feel sitting here in my parents' house, a place I haven't set foot in in four years. I get along great with my parents, and we've seen each other a lot in the past years, I just haven't been this far east.

I have to admit I was a little apprehensive about being in this house. As you can imagine, a lot has happened in four years, and I wondered if I was going to find the ghost of the person I used to be walking around this house. Fortunately, like Buzz Aldrin I find that you can revisit a place, but you cannot go back to it in the time you knew before. My four years ago self is not here. There are parts of her that I carry around in my heart -- both scars and treasured memories. There are parts of her that have grown up with me, there are parts of her that I've out grown. But she is not here, I am here.

The house is familiar enough to "feel like coming home" but different enough that I don't feel like I've just done the Time Warp (it's just a jump to the left :) The very best parts are still here -- my parents laughing, music from the piano wafting through the rooms like the best kind of baking smells. The kettle is in almost perpetual motion. There are cats. They say that things get smaller with age, but the cats have definitely gotten larger. I think they may be mutant dogs, or small elephants. They have just assumed that I'm part of the furniture. As I type one of them is sprawled across my lap, chin lazily resting on arm.

What hasn't changed at all it that I still belong here. And that is the very best part of coming home.

Merry Christmas. My the ones you love best be close to your heart tonight, even if you don't have them in your arms.

we interupt this democracy for a message from our sponsors

One more reason I'm happy to live in Canda -- sounds like the boys down south have a new bill that would Wired News: Senate May Ram Copyright Bill: "make it illegal to skip commercials." As we say at the House of Mirth Excusey-what?? The Man gets to decide that I have to cash in valueable brain cells so that I can learn more about the life-changing world of diet pills, refinanced mortgages and fast food? Wow I could have sworn this was a democracy. My mistake. TV might not be worth the effort after all. I'm saying right now, if they ever try to print commercials every 20 pages or so in my books I'm going native.

being quiet

I love this time of year. I am fortunate enough to live close to the ocean and this time of year all of the townies go home and I get the beach all to myself. I drink it up like water. This past Saturday I woke up really, really wanting to go for a nice long walk on the beach. When I looked out the window I saw that it was raining. Pouring really. This is the west coast so to notice that it's raining, maybe even raining so much that you need to stay inside requires a serious amount of water. I decided to go anyway.

I had a new pair of Saloman hiking shoes (yay for 50% off sales) and a Goretex jacket. It wasn't raining in my world.

I was just about the only person down on the beach and it was the kind of experience that literally stops you in your tracks and begs you to pay attention. At one point I stopped down by the water and took off my hood so I could hear better. It was incredible -- if I listened carefully I could actually hear the difference between the sound of the rain hitting the ocean and the sound of the rain hitting the rocks on the beach. I could hear the gulls calling out to each other and the lapping sound of the tide making its pilgrimage back to dry land. I remember just standing there and thinking "it's so quiet" and then laughing, because really, it wasn't quiet at all, there were sounds everywhere.

I stood there, just standing, just breathing, just listening and just loving it. And I thought "I need this". Thinking about it now it almost as if the silence and the sounds together and the peace of the place were like soul manna -- falling just when I needed it. Nourishing like food, replenishing like water.

I kept my hood off as I walked back to my car, smiling at the few others who dared not miss so lovely a day. I chuckled at the old man who smiled at me and said "I hope you don't catch a cold". I didn't realize what he was laughing at until I got in my car and saw how thoroughly soaked I was.

I hadn't even noticed I was wet.

dreams for our problems

Walter Mills is a writer of uncommon, quiet wisdom. He writes a column for the Center Daily News that also appears on Saturdays in an email list I subscribe to. Last week he was talking about what it was like to be alive, to be an American dreamer in the days when man first walked on the moon. He describes the wonder of it writing:

I cannot forget the awe we felt as the first man walked on the moon. Or how quickly we lost interest and abandoned the lunar missions. Instead we turned our attention to Vietnam and Watergate, the oil embargo - we gave up our dreams for our problems. ~ Walt Mills

Can't you picture the innocent joy of that moment, of literally walking "where no man had gone before"? How quickly it became common. And I think we do that in our own lives, how quickly well let wonder tarnish into ordinary. I love how Walt put it "we gave up our dreams for our problems". There is such truth in that. It's as if our dreams are something that we carry in our arms, cradled at first. But in time we lay them aside, we put them down, we trade them in for the problems of our day. That is what we carry with us to sleep at night and what we turn to in the morning. We give them up for "important things".

We willingly take on problems because they are common and predicatble and can be discussed over water coolers. Everyone understands a car that breaks down or a bill that is late. No everyone can understand a desire to ride your bike across the province or write a children's story or giving up your day job to run a drop in center. Maybe we give up our dreams because deep down we want to be ordinary, we want to fit in, we don't want to be extraordinary. So often we spend our days staring at the ground and get angry at God because we cannot see the sky.

I want to hold on to my dreams. I want to write that book. I want to give up my problems for my dreams.

You can read all of Walt's column here

vision and fingerprints

What would the world look like if I truly saw God in everything? A line from my all time favourite hymn asks "Be thou my vision, O Lord of my heart." I wonder what it would be like if even just for a day I could see my life the way God sees it. If everywhere I turned all I could see was Him, His fingerprints all over every moment of my day? Wouldn't it be interesting if I could see God's fingerprints on the box of cereal in the morning and think "God put that cereal in my cupboard". I think it would be harder to look at the bruised places in my life and see His fingerprints there. Although I don't doubt that they are. Not the fingerprints of the hand that inflicted pain, but prints of the hands that comforted, that protected, that kept me from dangers I'm not even aware of.

Be thou my vision, O Lord of my heart.

I wish I could wear God's perspective like Virtual Reality glasses, only in this case they would be True Reality glasses, Hyper-Reality glasses. If I could see what He sees, I wonder if my perspective couldd even handle it. If the shock of the state the world is really in would be too much and I would shatter. Maybe it would be like Moses on the mountian when God told him not to try and look in His face because he wouldn't be able to live through the experience.
"You can't handle the truth."

There is a grace and beauty to our limitations. Maybe for now I just need to learn how to see that.

would he really do that?

I came across a joke this morning that reflected something I've been thinking for a while now about the whole WWJD thing. (As an aside let me say upfront that I am not in favour of mass market Christianity, and for the record do not wear a WWJD or PUSH bracelet.) Anyway, the joke goes like this:

A man walked into a gift shop that sold religious items. Near the cash register he saw a display of baseball caps with "WWJD" printed on them. Puzzled by what the letters meant, he asked the clerk. The clerk replied that the letters stood for "What Would Jesus Do," and that the question was meant to inspire people to not make rash decisions, but rather to imagine what Jesus would do in the same situation.

The man thought a moment and then replied, "Well, I'm sure Jesus wouldn't pay $17.95 for one of these baseball caps!"

A wise friend of mine read the joke and sent me this response:

Ah, so true!

You gotta love our current evangelical culture though: we've convinced ourselves that we're come so far from the Catholic church of Martin Luther's age of needed reformation (a la selling indulgences and handing the papacy hereditarily--even though the pope was supposed to be celibate) yet here we are marketing Jesus for all we're worth, as though reading a Christian novel or listening to a Christian CD or wearing a WWJD hat will somehow secure OUR holiness or salvation.

I couldn't have said it better myself and decided not to try. Thanks RuthAnn. Wise words as always.

midnight and brian wilson

As I was driving into work today Brian Wilson, a classic Barenaked Ladies song from the 90s was playing on the radio. I was immediately transported back to highschool days and playing pool in my parent's basement. I remembered how my older brother and I used to play pool late into the night when he was home from University. I couldn't tell you how the tradition started, but somehow that was our time. Between midnight and two in the morning with the clack of billiard balls beating out a rythmn, Mark and I would talk and he would listen to his little sister and dispense advice. It was one of the rare times when we talked as equals, when I had his full attention. And he gave great advice. I made two of the biggest decisions of my life over those late nate games, often with Brian Wilson playing in the background.

What had me laughing today though, was that years later I still know ALL the words to Brian Wilson. I haven't heard that song in years. I haven't poured over the liner notes for half a lifetime. But there they were. I turned the radio on somewhere in the middle and barely missed a beat

Drove downtown in the rain,
9.30 on a Tuesday night
Just to check out the late night
record shop.
Call impuslive, call it convulsive
you can call it insane.
But when I'm surrounded I just can't
st---op.

How is it that all of the information in the world, these are the words that are stuck in my head? What is it about song lyrics that makes them so enduring? I have this theory that if some scientist could find a way to delete all of the old song lyrics out of everyone's head that we would have enough brain power to cure cancer. Or at least figure out a solution to world hunger or global warming. Think about it -- how many hundreds -- thousands? -- of songs do you know all the words to? I wonder what percentage of the human brain is used up remembering the words to songs we'd just as soon forget.

I don't want to forget the memories that go along with these songs. I don't want to forget the late night basement pool sessions that literally changed my life, changed which province I am currently living in. But do I really need to know all the words to the Tiffany version of I Think We're Alone Now? I'm pretty sure I could live without that.

metaphor

I've just finished reading Blue Like Jazz and I can tell already that I'm going to need to read it again. I think I'll need to read it slower the second time around. One thing that I've been thinking about is a chapter where Don talks about the power of metaphor.

In the book he talks about a speaker he heard at an alumni event. The speaker was talking about metaphor and how the words we use to describe something affect the way we think about it. He gave the example of cancer and how we tend to speak about cancer in war terms. People fight cancer, they battle it. No one recovers from cancer, they beat it. The speaker went on to say that there is sometimes unnecessary stress and guilt brought on for cancer sufferers because of the war metaphor. He said that sometimes people fear that they have been pushed into an evil battle that they might not be strong enough to fight.

He went on to talk about how we tend to describe relationships in economic terms and how that changes our thinking about what love is like. And all the while I was reading it I kept thinking:

what metaphor do I use to describe myself?

A metaphor is simply a comparrision, a figure of language used to help us wrap our heads around a new idea or help us imagine a place we have never seen. We use metaphor to teach, to describe, to label. I'm not sure what metaphor I use for me. What do I think about when I think about myself? An interesting question -- and not in terms of Satre and Kiekergaard and why am I here? But in a literary sense, how do I write about myself? What metaphor do I use to pen the poetry of my own life? I'm not sure. But it's a question I think I should know the answer to, a question that deep down I think I DO know the answer to. I just need to take the time to think about it. I'm going to do that.

food stamps from heaven

I've been reading Don Miller's Blue Like Jazz lately and it is, in the truest sense of the word, interesting. It has me thinking, and for that, Don Miller, thank you. I don't know if I agree with everything he's saying (frankly I don't expect, or even to be really honest, intend, to agree with everything he's saying) but I'm thinking about it. So for me, he has succeeded as an author. One of the chapters I was reading last night talks about a lady Don saw using food stamps in a grocery store and how the thought hit him that he is not above God's charity.

That stopped me in my tracks. I am not above God's charity.

There is never a day or even a moment when I can truly say "it's okay God, I've got this one". It's all, this whole life, so completely beyond my capabilities that it is ridiculous. But I wonder how often are we, am I, tempted to think "this one's on me"? Morally, intellectually, emotionally, and most of all spiritually I am an urchin in the street crying out for bread crumbs. But God does more than give me food stamps from heaven, he gathers me in his arms, he gives me a name, he brings me home and he lets me call him Daddy.

homesick for floating

I was reading this article on Wired about commercial zero gravity flights and the author talks about the experience of floating feeling so natural and at the same time so much like a dream. I've always wanted to be able to fly. I can remember as a Kindergartener spending my afternoons running down the slight slope in our front yard, leaping into the air and flapping my arms like crazy. I flew. It didn't last as long as I'd like, but I flew and all the cut and paste and stories of mornings at school just couldn't compare with it. In the article the author quotes Buzz Aldrin as saying that he Scuba dives a lot because he found he got "homeseick for floating". I can relate.

every little sign

I've been listening to a lot of Martyn Joseph lately. It's pretty classic "guy with a guitar" stuff -- well worth a trip to the folk section of your favourite music vendor. There's a line in one of his songs that just keeps working its way around in my brain:

there are days when I don't see you
I miss every little sign

It is an interesting line for the middle of what is, essentially a love song. It is an addmission, an apology, a confession. I've been thinking about it a lot lately. Who are the people that are moving around in my world that I simply do not see? Are there days when I take the people that I love for granted, days when I don't see them for who and what they are? Confession. Apology. There are.

How do people become invisible? It's easy to make excuses, to say that the world is a busy and speedy place, but that's not enough. It's not possible to be constantly aware of everyone around at all times without going insane. But we only say "I love you" to a select group of people, and to them we owe, I owe it, not to miss the signs. There are days when I don't see you, I need to open up my eyes.

white ribbons on the breeze

My brother is getting married on Saturday. We're rallying the clan such as it is to go and stand in an orchard and watch him change his life forever. He's making the right choice and I am so happy to be able to stand with him as he does it.

It's easy to be pretty cynical about marriage these days. To think that there are cases where matrimony that is supposed to last a lifetime is clocked, almost literally, with an egg timer -- it's ridiculous. I wonder sometimes if anyone actually listens to the words they are saying. My brother is young. But he and his almost-wife and solid on the essentials and everything else is, quite simply, not essential.

I do not doubt that the two we will celebrate this week-end are very aware of what they are promising. They are each handing their life over to the other in the knowledge that it will be very well taken care of. This is the stuff of fairy tales -- not the fairy lights and ribbons in the trees, but the ever after. Even in the knowledge that you cannot guarentee that all the days will be happy, I know that this is their ever after.

I'll be smiling as I watch as the promises are made, a proud banner waving like white ribbons on the breeze.

everything and nothing

Do you ever have one of those days when you're busy all day only to find at the end of it that everything that was on your to-do list in the morning is still there? It's times like this when I almost wish I had a webcam mounted on top of my screen so I could answer the question "what did I do all day?" Sure I have notes and phonecalls and meetings and documents to prove that I really did show up this morning and didn't spend the day watching Strongbad go another round with his emails. It's not quite the same though; especially when the things on the list were important things, they still are important things and the deadlines are now just a little closer.

Where did the time go?

It's a question that gets asked a lot. In Einstein's Dreams author Alan Lightman writes stories of time. What would it be like if time went backwards? What if we knew when time would stop? What if time were a fixed point and the farther away you got from it the slower time moved? Good questions all. But time, for all that it seems to speed up and slow down, is in truth a constant rhythm. It is a heartbeat sounding quietly (or not so quietly) in the background of our lives. On days like today I wish that time had colour or substance -- something that I could point to and say "oh look, there goes the time". Maybe we could colour code it so I could track where my time was going and you could track yours.

Even so, I'm sure I'd still be sitting here at the end of a day when I've done everything and nothing shaking my head at the thought that something as personal as my own day is so often outside of my own control.

killing me softy

I'm still chewing on this whole idea of sending laughter out into the world.  I think that some people change the world by curing diseases or stopping wars or inventing lightbulbs, and others change it simply by making a stranger smile for no reason at all.  Ghandi said that we must be the change we want to see in the world.  What would this little planet look like if we all set out to make one person we don't know smile each day? Little children do it all the time -- pulling faces in the line-up at the grocery store or swinging on the metal baracades at the bank.  They seem to be able to find play in any situation.  Is this one more skill we learn to forget with age?

As I was thinking about this I was reminded of a book I was force-marched through in elementary school -- Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury.  I hated that book.  Sorry Ray, but I did and still do.  It seriously freaked me out.  But there's this one scene, one quote that I still remember all these years later.  The Really Good Character was locked in an epic battle with the seemigly impervious Really Evil Character (and as a sidenote, in this book there is a ton of evil, so the Really Evil one is saying something).  Anyway, just as you're sure the good guy is about to bite it he takes a wax bullet and carves a little shape into it before loading the gun.  He turns to Evil guy and says, "Did you see what I did?  What I carved in the bullet? It's not a crescent moon, it's a smile.  I'm going to shoot you with my smile."  At which point the gun fires, the Good Guy wins, the music swells, the screen fades to black. 

Thinking about this now, it's an interesting concept -- shooting someone with your smile.  Not in the sense of destroying them, but "killing" their mood if they're in a bad one, changing the direction of their day.   Zapping the negative kharma if you're so inclined.  I was told awhile ago that each of us has a much greater impact on those around us than we realize.  If we work or live or wait in line together, my mood has the ability to affect yours.  My actions can change what you do or even how you see the situation that you are in.  My smile could kill you softly. 

What is your gun loaded with today? Do I need to duck?

the missing link

The blog that inspired me to finally show up was John Kim's Xanga .  Scroll down to July 22 and read the post about his Mom and a little driving adventure involving a deer.  (Don't worry, no deers were injured in the making of this post.)  For anyone who's ever had parents, it's funny stuff.

it's a big wide world out there with a lot of white space

After reading a fair few blogs I was starting to feel like a dinner guest who nevers brings desert.  Everyone was giving me really great things to think about and while I had spent considerable time chewing on them I had refused to share the results. 

It was time to pony up.  

I read a blog this morning (when I remember the URL I'll post it) and I laughed so hard I had tears in my eyes.  I could barely speak.  It was wonderful.  As my breathing recovered I thought, how great is this? I have never met this person, I wouldn't know him from Adam but he made me laugh.  Really laugh.  I really needed that today.  There are people all over the place throwing hate and anger and frustration out into the white space of the world and here this guy throws out laughter.  He doesn't know me, it certainly wasn't written for me, but I got to participate in his moment because he was willing to share.  I knew I had to get me some of that.  So here I am.  Sorry I'm late.  I brought desert.