We were never given all the details for a reason...

2013-06-03T10:28:00.002-05:00

A lovely Frederick Buechner quote I came across on a friend's summer internship blog:

“Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery it is. In the boredom and pain of it, no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it, because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.”

Mr Bean Christmas: Nativity

2012-12-25T10:04:00.001-06:00

world weariness

2012-12-19T11:17:00.000-06:00

‎
"The winding roads, they led me here,
burn like coals and dry like tears.
So here's my hope,
my tired soul.
So here's my ticket,
I want to go home."

Parents Eat all their Kids Halloween Candy, or a least pretend to:S

2012-10-31T10:18:00.000-05:00

2012-10-14T20:40:00.003-05:00

Reading and Philosophy: HERE

Philosophical Reasoning: HERE

2012-10-02T11:43:00.000-05:00

Love Brainstorm's prints (so I got one!)

Love

2012-10-02T10:11:00.001-05:00

I really love James Lipton's Inside the Actors Studio

Homemade Deoderant

2012-05-29T20:34:00.000-05:00

Here and here.

2012-05-29T07:55:00.002-05:00

Great publication to follow, Dumbo Feather, a magazine all about the extraordinary people behind extraordinary ideas.

Dumbo feather has been described as a 'mook' (half mag, half book). In each issue, 5 remarkable individuals tell you their stories. They're creative, courageous folk who've taken the road-less-trampled without compromise.

Incarnational Life

2012-05-21T12:47:00.000-05:00

Opening reading for Wendell Berry's talk, "It All Turns on Affection"

O saints, if I am even eligible for this prayer,
though less than worthy of this dear desire,
and if your prayers have influence in Heaven,
let my place there be lower than your own.
I know how you longed, here where you lived
as exiles, for the presence of the essential
Being and Maker and Knower of all things.
But because of my unruliness, or some erring
virtue in me never rightly schooled,
some error clear and dear, my life
has not taught me your desire for flight:
dismattered, pure, and free. I long
instead for the Heaven of creatures, of seasons,
of day and night. Heaven enough for me
would be this world as I know it, but redeemed
of our abuse of it and one another. It would be
the Heaven of knowing again. There is no marrying
in Heaven, and I submit; even so, I would like
to know my wife again, both of us young again,
and I remembering always how I loved her
when she was old. I would like to know
my children again, all my family, all my dear ones,
to see, to hear, to hold, more carefully
than before, to study them lingeringly as one
studies old verses, committing them to heart
forever. I would like again to know my friends,
my old companions, men and women, horses
and dogs, in all the ages of our lives, here
in this place that I have watched over all my life
in all its moods and seasons, never enough.
I will be leaving how many beauties overlooked?
A painful Heaven this would be, for I would know
by it how far I have fallen short. I have not
paid enough attention, I have not been grateful
enough. And yet this pain would be the measure
of my love. In eternity’s once and now, pain would
place me surely in the Heaven of my earthly love.

Wendell Berry, Leavings, Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2010, pp. 72-73.

Prayer

2012-05-21T12:36:00.002-05:00

To pray is to take notice of the wonder, to regain a sense of the mystery that animates all beings, the divine margin in all attainments. Prayer is our humble answer to the inconceivable surprise of living. It is all we can offer in return for the mystery by which we live. Who is worthy to be present at the constant unfolding of time? Amidst the meditation of mountains, the humility of flowers wiser than all alphabets---clouds that die constantly for the sake of god's glory, we are hating, hunting, hurting. Suddenly we feel ashamed of our clashes and complaints in the face of the tacit glory in nature. It is so embarrassing to live! How strange we are in the world, and how presumptuous our doings! Only one response can maintain us: gratefulness for witnessing the wonder, for the gift of our unearned rights to serve, to adore, and to fulfill. It is gratefulness which makes the soul great.

Abraham Heschel

The Sacredness of Life

2012-05-21T12:11:00.002-05:00

The Summer Day, Mary Oliver

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.

Albert Einstein

2012-04-27T13:53:00.001-05:00

Unresting, unhasting, slient as light -the morning comes in silent and we barely notice it

have you factored downtime into your life?

2012-04-17T22:56:00.001-05:00

b/c "Creativity is the residue of time wasted." Albert Einstein.

smoothies are taking over!

2012-03-22T21:16:00.000-05:00

1 banana, 2 fresh or soaked dates, 2 cups cold water, 1/4 cup almonds, 1 TBSP ground flaxseed, 1 TBSP hemp protein, 1 TBSP carob powder or cacao nibs. blend!

Kefir Soda

2012-03-22T20:19:00.003-05:00

Here are my two sources. This is going to be a fabulous project!

Cheese Slave
Kelly the Kitchen Kop

2012-03-16T21:14:00.005-05:00

Dollar Store Crafts
Women's Lifestyle Magazine
Examiner.com
Catapult
Rapidian - photo essay
Burnside Coll.

Art in Flanders

2012-03-15T17:17:00.001-05:00

Visual Arts Flanders 2012

Tree Climbing as a Calling

2012-03-10T12:44:00.000-06:00

My Own Hands from Land and Sky Media on Vimeo.

Take this Bread

2012-03-05T13:10:00.006-06:00

'There's a hunger beyond food that's expressed in food, and that's why feeding is always a kind of miracle.' (23)

My first year at St. Gregory's would begin, and end, with questions. Now I understand that questions are at the heart of faith, and that certainties about God can flicker on and off, no matter what you think you know. But back then, I thought 'believers' were people who know exactly what they believed and had nailed all the answers. (65)

'When you told me to pray,' Jose would remember later, 'it was incredibly earnest. You said prayer was like having this intense, profound longing that you just had to be with. That you put the longing in the hands of God, in a certain way. That it was important to be receptive to the unfulfilled, and not fill it or deny it.' (70)

All that grounded me were those pieces of bread, I was feeling my way toward a theology, beginning with what I had taken in my mouth and working out from there...the promise that words and flesh were deeply, deeply connected. (70-71)

...but mostly I liked that he said he was bread and told his friends to eat him. (92)

That love meant giving yourself away, embracing outsiders as family, emptying yourself to feed and live for others. (93)

Did not our Lord share his table with tax collectors and harlots? So do not distinguish between worthy and unworthy. All must be equal for you to love and serve. (7th century mystic Isaac of Nineveh)

I was signing up, after all, for a religion with a tortured man at its center. (123)

I knew, in my heart, that baptism wasn't about purity or the washing away of sins. It wasn't going to protect me from anything. Like carrying a child, baptism would require going deeper into mystery and darkness, into eating and living, eating and suffering, eating and dying. It would mean being baptized into the the crucifixion of the world, as St. Paul wrote, 'into Christ's death...into the tomb with him.' (123)

They were all people who, like me, took that bread and got changed. We were all converting: turning into new people as we rubbed up against one another. The transformation amazed me. I'd think about it as I unpacked the food: blushing red potatoes and curly spinach and ripe peaches that grocers had discarded, and that instead of being trash were feeding people. Once I picked up a huge grapefruit and showed it to a volunteer from St. Gregory's. 'That's the stone the builders rejected,' I said, quoting Scripture aloud with only a twinge of embarrassment. I could see, now, how we were like that, too: the volunteers, and the families who came for groceries. Each of us, at some point, might have been rejected for being too young, too poor, too queer, too old, too crazy or difficult or sick; in one way or another, cracked, broken, not right. But gathered around the Table in this work, we were becoming right together, converted into the cornerstone of something God was building. (139)

Scripture reading for Lent

2012-02-29T09:31:00.000-06:00

Isaiah 58

True Fasting
¹ “Shout it aloud, do not hold back.
Raise your voice like a trumpet.
Declare to my people their rebellion
and to the descendants of Jacob their sins.
² For day after day they seek me out;
they seem eager to know my ways,
as if they were a nation that does what is right
and has not forsaken the commands of its God.
They ask me for just decisions
and seem eager for God to come near them.
³ ‘Why have we fasted,’ they say,
‘and you have not seen it?
Why have we humbled ourselves,
and you have not noticed?’
“Yet on the day of your fasting, you do as you please
and exploit all your workers.
⁴ Your fasting ends in quarreling and strife,
and in striking each other with wicked fists.
You cannot fast as you do today
and expect your voice to be heard on high.
⁵ Is this the kind of fast I have chosen,
only a day for people to humble themselves?
Is it only for bowing one’s head like a reed
and for lying in sackcloth and ashes?
Is that what you call a fast,
a day acceptable to the LORD?
⁶ “Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen:
to loose the chains of injustice
and untie the cords of the yoke,
to set the oppressed free
and break every yoke?
⁷ Is it not to share your food with the hungry
and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter—
when you see the naked, to clothe them,
and not to turn away from your own flesh and blood?
⁸ Then your light will break forth like the dawn,
and your healing will quickly appear;
then your righteousness^[a] will go before you,
and the glory of the LORD will be your rear guard.
⁹ Then you will call, and the LORD will answer;
you will cry for help, and he will say: Here am I.
“If you do away with the yoke of oppression,
with the pointing finger and malicious talk,
¹⁰ and if you spend yourselves in behalf of the hungry
and satisfy the needs of the oppressed,
then your light will rise in the darkness,
and your night will become like the noonday.
¹¹ The LORD will guide you always;
he will satisfy your needs in a sun-scorched land
and will strengthen your frame.
You will be like a well-watered garden,
like a spring whose waters never fail.
¹² Your people will rebuild the ancient ruins
and will raise up the age-old foundations;
you will be called Repairer of Broken Walls,
Restorer of Streets with Dwellings.
¹³ “If you keep your feet from breaking the Sabbath
and from doing as you please on my holy day,
if you call the Sabbath a delight
and the LORD’s holy day honorable,
and if you honor it by not going your own way
and not doing as you please or speaking idle words,
¹⁴ then you will find your joy in the LORD,
and I will cause you to ride in triumph on the heights of the land
and to feast on the inheritance of your father Jacob.”
For the mouth of the LORD has spoken.

Do you know where your "pork" comes from?

2012-02-28T14:49:00.009-06:00

The maternal qualities of sows can be quite striking. This is a great example of animals and humans sharing similar qualities to one another.

It's a sweet picture of the lives of a few pigs flourishing in our world, however, it's all the sweeter given the context in which their story exists.

Unfortunately the majority of sows brought up in the meat industry today are kept in confinement without access to soil or grass to walk and play upon with other pigs*, mud to bathe in, fresh air to breath, or sunlight for nourishment.

The real story is that they are deprived of being with their young shortly after giving birth.

According to a March 2004 article in the Des Moines Register, 'A pregnant sow's biological need to build a nest before having her litter is so great that some sows confined in modern hog buildings will rub their snouts raw on the concrete floor while trying to satisfy the drive. The deprived environment produces neurotic coping behaviors such as repetitive bar biting, sham chewing (chewing nothing), and obsessively pressing on water bottles.

What their babies experience is far worse and they are helpless to do anything to protect or comfort them. Baby pigs are separated from their mothers within a few days of being born, they cry out while their tails are clipped without anesthesia and while they are castrated without anesthesia. I would chalk that up to a torturous first few days of life in compare with what I was most likely privileged to as a newborn. What comes next? Months of confinement, in small cages that they can't even turn around in, until slaughter.

How these beautiful creatures are put to death is even more disturbing.

Although, unnecessary information given what I've just written, it may be helpful to know that research studies have proven these animals experience pain. Each animal has a personality, has preferences, and experiences pleasure too (remember your cat here).

Would you let this happen to your cat or your dog? Would you let your children watch? If you think about it there is no difference between the two with the exception that one is domesticated and given a name by a human and the other is not.

I think it's unimaginable to live in a society that so easily, through a hugely unregulated industrial system, interrupts and degrades the normative practices that these species were created to exist doing and living. I believe they were created to live in the world for so much more and were not created to be killed.

A pig's natural life expectancy is 15 years, and I think this is tough to learn knowing that they are killed for "pork" at 6 months of age. They are so much more than tasty food for a meal; they are animals that breathe, creatures birthed into a world, they have personalities, they communicate with one another, they have preferences, they have sex and experience pleasure, they give birth to babies, and work very hard at loving and caring for their young. They enjoy rolling in mud, and being with other pigs...

The workers in these industries are typically immigrants, who speak very little English, and are desperate for work as they need to support their families. Again, this is an example of the privileged standing by while the poorest and the least advantaged are made to kill our animals for us.

This is all for the sake of satisfied palates. The profit off of this abuse is abhorrent and if I had children would never want them to inherit this as a legacy of my generation. I would also never want them to find out that I stood by and did nothing for these creatures, those we were given to care for and ensure just treatment and lives of dignity.

I have very few memories from my childhood, however, one in particular has stayed with me all these years (it's hard to believe!). As a child, my parents took us kids to visit a pig farm. Already prone to loving all kinds of creatures, it's not difficult to learn that I immediately fell in love with all the little baby piglets surrounding me - they were pink, and magical, and beautiful. I recall returning home and wishing, many times, that I could be back at the farm with them, to love them, and play with them, and be alive with them. It's a fond memory for me even though as an adult I know now that they were all destined, most likely, for a short life ending in slaughter.

I used to think I was so much more enlightened than vegetarians and vegans and that I was tougher because I could stand by and let all this happen and eat it (now it makes me think of being in a brainwashed culture in Nazis Germany). I thought animal advocates were sentimental and even effeminate.

And then I started looking around. I saw all the masculine stereotypes connected with eating meat, at the college I work at, in commercials, and on labels at the store. I thought of all the popular restaurants that once loved going to that boasted filet mignon and foie gras, their most expensive and coveted dishes. I thought of that sweet handbag and those stylish leather boots I've been saving up for. I thought of the down in my comforter and in my vest. The fox fur lining the hoods of winter coats I like. The creams and perfumes tested on animals in my bathroom. The jello in my cupboard....it's everywhere. I'm complicit in animal cruelty and death in all areas of my life and it's tough knowing where to go after waking up to this as something real that I am actively (and now knowingly) participating in.

Our culture is built around meat use and consumption and all these things are normal, this is the way it's always been. But somewhere along the way we have to admit that we don't really know what is happening to the lives that feed these industries.

Since reading books and articles, watching movies, talking with people in the industry on both sides, and reading up on the industry practices allowed by our governments, I can no longer ignore what is going on. And definitely cannot participate in it any longer.

I think the writing's on the wall and most of us are just too culturally bound to see it (I hear myself whispering this is they way the world is). Really, it's not tough to see what's going on if you start looking. It not tough to see what's going on and know it's wrong. It is, however, tough to do anything about it and become sort of paralyzed because we're so far removed from the industry and our culture is built upon it staying strong. Think of all the jobs after all!

I'm ready to admit the truth of these realities, and to stand up for what is right. It's a part of a mandate I've been given as a human being imaging a God who loves and calls me to advocate for peace across all lines (even those lines, of different species than my own, that I don't fully understand). I have been given privilege and cannot lord it over the lives of other creatures just because they don't look like me or act like me.

Let's start waking up to how animals are being treated, start telling the truth about what we know, and align how we live each day with what we believe is right. I invite you to join me in raising your consciousness on these issues!

*

Pigs "have the cognitive ability to be quite sophisticated. Even more so than dogs and certainly [more so than] three-year-olds," says Dr. Donald Broom, Cambridge University professor and former scientific advisor to the Council of Europe. One study found that they can even learn to play simple video games.
Pigs naturally live and spend their time in groups. They express friendships with each other through vocalizations and body language. Like human children, piglets are particularly fond of play and chase one another, play-fight, tumble down hills, and generally engage in a wide variety of enjoyable activities. Pigs are very active, traveling up to 30 miles a day at a quick pace. Noted ethologist, Dr. Alex Stolba, observed that pigs living in a natural environment also spend much of their day grazing and rooting. Pigs raised on factory farms are denied all of these behaviors.

Every time you purchase something, you're telling that company "Whatever you did, do it again". Do you know what they are doing to animals?

2012-02-28T09:35:00.002-06:00

Humans who enslave, castrate, experiment on, and fillet other animals have had an understandable penchant for pretending animals do not feel pain. A sharp distinction between humans and 'animals' is essential if we are to bend them to our will, make them work for us, wear them, eat them without any disquieting tinges of guilt or regret. It is unseemly of us, who often behave so unfeelingly toward other animals, to contend that only humans can suffer. The behavior of other animals renders such pretensions specious. They are just too much like us.

Carl Sagan

Bechdel Test for Movies

2012-02-23T13:13:00.002-06:00

/bech·del test/ n.

1. It has to have at least two [named] women in it
2. Who talk to each other
3. About something besides a man

"Why I Read" by Elisha Stam

2012-02-23T13:01:00.002-06:00

As I age, certain fears I had are less encompassing. As a result, the beliefs I built my existence on are refining. I am left to wonder what holds me to this world I live in. What sort of person am I when the things I’ve built my life around settle down and become as see-through as the apparitions in the deep Sawgamet woods?

A review of Alexi Zentner's book Touch