Archive for the ‘What is remarkable?’ Category
To My Friends Who Have Abandoned Faith
Kathleen Norris: Acedia and Me
If you’ve been turned off by the excesses of evangelicalism or the big-business, industrial mindset of a megachurch, or if you’ve become weary of a clergy-centric approach to faith, or if you are tired of trite, pat answer to life’s really thorny questions, consider reading Kathleen Norris’ Acedia and Me: A Marriage, Monks, and a Writer’s Life (NY: Riverhead books, 2008).
If you’ve turned your back on faith entirely and see no point in going back to the social club that seemed to promise transcendence, especially then, read Acedia and Me. If you’ve become weary of the automatic linkage between Republicanism and Christianity, well Kathleen Norris does not speak to that sorrow. But, patience: within a generation that unfortunate concatenation will be far less automatic.
Kathleen Norris is an engaging writer who addresses the life of one’s spirit wholly without the overweening sentimentality that usually comes with such discussions. Ms. Norris sought answers from an unlikely set of conversation partners: old dead guys who wrote when people could count the centuries on two hands or even one. Many of these old desert monks had abandoned the newly popular, powerful, and politically-connected church. Instead they sought the quiet of the desert to confront their demons.
Acedia, which is perhaps the heart of Ms. Norris’ book, is not easily translated. Some read it as depression. Some read it as sloth or boredom or torpor. Ms. Norris traces the word through the ups and downs of her own life as a writer. Her own marriage is a key player in the story and she seems to hold little back in illustrating her struggle.
I was particularly taken with her definition of sin, which had less to do with breaking a set of rules and more to do with recognizing that people are made in the image of God and there is something hopeful and fetching about aligning one’s direction to recognize that.
In the end, she has a fresh take on one’s faith. You may agree. You may disagree. But you’ll be engaged. And better yet, you may even hold off from tossing everything over.
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Image credit: Kirk Livingston
“Nothing Cheers Me…Like a Great Pair of Ears”
I like reading blogs because…detail
In regular life you might never hear the word combinations that people reveal in blogs. Bloggers can answer questions you’d never dream to ask—and suddenly you are enriched by some comment outta nowhere.
Like this quote (above) from Roz Wound Up.
I recently started following Roz Wound Up, a Minneapolis artist/sketcher/writer (designer/illustrator/teacher at the Minnesota Center for Book Arts) because of the detail she includes about how she practices her craft. A few days back she wrote a fascinating post about the ethics of sketching people in public. Hint: wear a large duck-billed hat so people cannot see your eyes. Today’s delightful post fixates on ears:
I’ve been watching tattoo shows again—Best Ink is the one that’s on right now. It was late, the day had been a complete wash up. Then this kid was standing there being judged on the show and I simple fell in love with his ears.
Read any of her posts and you’ll find in yourself a growing affection for pens and paper and seeing. Specifically:
- Pentel Pocket Brush Pen
- Fabriano Tiziano (8.5 x 11 inch sheet of cream)
- And this: the way the pen feels going across the paper. Especially that.
I once thought a pen was a pen and paper was just something you grabbed from the drawer on the copier (and money’s just something you throw off the back of a train—thanks for sticking that in my brain, Tom Waits).
No longer. Sketching is a sensual art. Maybe seeing is too. The focus of Roz Wound Up has piqued my interest. And with the little sketching I’ve done I’ve started to have a sense of the way my pencil graphite feels across the fine tooth surface of my sketch pad. Now seeing has a sensual element—it’s something I do with a pencil and paper in hand.
Seeing rocks. I hope to do more of it.
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Image credit: Roz Wound Up, Kirk Livingston
Technology is remarkable when it leads us to people
We forget this.
There are irresistible bits all over the world wide web, naturally. We stumble on these irresistible bits and do what any human does: tell someone else. Our “Like” and “Forward to” capitalizes on this innate human desire to share. And, naturally, some have been able to monetize this compulsion.
I like how in Groundswell, Li and Bernoff put people ahead of technology. They like to ask, “Who do you want to make contact with and what do you want to accomplish with them?” as a starting point. Then sort out the technology later. That seems right.
One way that technology leads us to people is in microbursts of information—very specific and very narrow information—about each other. I just stumbled on From the desk of…, a project by Kate Donnelly that shows, well, people’s desks.
Grant Snider’s work I see all the time. His easily-accessible takes on say ambition, or escape from digital life or rules for freelancers (pasted below) are themselves irresistible thought-pieces. I hesitate to call them comics. Even more remarkable is to see how his imagination flowers in such a tight, confined space.
Seeing someone’s desk is a bit like opening the door of their medicine cabinet or searching through a found wallet. The stuff we surround ourselves with has a way of telling on us. And especially the place we work says something about how our minds work. I like how technology (in this case social media) lets us tell fuller stories about each other—for those who want to hear. I also notice that the work I do for clients—even very technology-focused clients—opens up when there is a people-story to tell.
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Inception Horn. Signal Today’s Significant Moments.
How Many Times Will You Press It?
[The button works using Flash. It doesn’t work on my mobile. http://inception.davepedu.com/ ]
I’ve used it three times already–and it’s not even 7am.
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Creator: @dpedu via Kottke.org
Click Farms Vs. Philip Glass
The Glass problem: Prolific production of something no one wants.
I’ve heard rumblings of sweatshops where thumbs and fingers are put to use liking various social media status updates. An AP story running in the Startribune a couple days ago identified even our own State department as buying clicks, possibly from a click farm in Dhaka, Bangladesh. If not exactly illegal, the practice certainly carries the sense of fraud in the false “Like” economy Facebook introduced us to and to which all social media fall prey.
The desire to be liked is so compelling. I’m hoping you’ll like this story (as if you needed to read such a disclosure). But I’m also trying to wean my myself off this desire for constant attention and this eagerness to let a click tell me how successful I am in life. There’s good reason to investigate the internal compass of gifting and bent and pairing those with the hope of connecting solidly with a few rather than seeking the transient adoration that “like” seems to represent.
Then again, the money is in the Likes.
A more balanced and possibly more productive approach to doing our best work is to dive ever-deeper into the well of “What am I here for?” When we ask that question and look to see what fascinates us and what (some, few) others react to or what seems to help those few, then we are on to something. That is a very different process than scanning keywords and offering click bait.
Consider Philip Glass. Maybe you like his music. Maybe you despise his “repetitive structures.” I find his music soothing and at times invigorating and always terrific for writing. But when he started playing and composing, it sounded very different thing from everyone else. He had very few “likes.” In fact many just said to him,
But he persisted and found something new.
That’s what I’m expecting from many: to find passion and service flowing together, even if others don’t understand it. It takes courage to keep walking forward in this way. But that’s the kind of courage we need.
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Image credit: un-gif-dans-ta-gueule via 2headedsnake
Puddles Pity Party Covers Lorde’s “Royals.” I Can’t Look Away.
The Scary-Tall Clown with the Remarkable Voice
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Wing Young Huie On Seeing
When is a photo more real than what you saw?
My photos make me question “real.” The eye is tricky and perception is problematic: what I believe I saw was different from the photo I took and the photo I (clumsily) retouched. Which of the photos was real—or was real something entirely different?
That’s why I’m happy to find people who let me see things in a new way. Wing Young Huie is one of those people. His The University Avenue Project is remarkable in that he successfully reframed this long, rather desolate (at times) urban street in a way that helps me see individuals and their hopes. People pictures—sort of honest and gritty pictures. But pictures of real people.
I like photographs that are real, a curious concept in the Photoshop era. Almost all of the images we see on a daily basis have little authenticity. They most serve to reinforce that status quo, driven by marketing and entertainment forces that fundamentally form our perceptions of each other, and ourselves. (Wing Young Huie, The University Avenue Project, p. 125 )
Wing Young Huie clearly has a lot to say about the persuasion industries. And what he has to say is good to hear (at least for this copywriter). But his work also cuts deeply into how we see the people around us. Wing Young Huie’s photos allow me to see afresh something so ordinary as to be invisible. 
The way he puts people and situations into the frame is almost exhilarating at times. The individuals, the mix, the chalkboard questions answered with raw honesty—the photos peel away all sorts of misconceptions and stereotypes. Even Wing Young Huie’s process feels real.
And that feels to me like a good work.
Learn about Wing Young Huie’s process here.
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Image credit: Wing Young Huie
Wendell Berry Wrote Death Right
The Memory of Old Jack: Is it passion or habit that overtakes us at the end?
Now he feels ahead of him a quietness that he hastens toward. It seems to him that if he does not hasten, his weight will bear him down before he gets there. He reaches the door of his room and opens it….
He goes slowly across the room to his chair, an old high-backed wooden rocker that sits squarely facing the window. This is his outpost, his lookout. Here he has sat in the dark of the early mornings, waiting for light, and again in the long evenings of midsummer, waiting for darkness. He backs up to the chair, leans, takes hold of the arms, and lets himself slowly down onto the seat. “Ah!” He leans back, letting his shoulders and then his head come to rest.
For some time he sits there, getting his breath, grateful to be still after his effort. And then he rises up in his mind as he was when he was strong. He is walking down from the top of his ridge toward a gate in the rock fence. It is the twilight of a day in the height of summer. The day has been hot and long and hard, and he is tired; his shirt and the band of his hat are still wet with sweat….
He does not know why he is there, or where he is going, but he does not question; it is right. Under the slowly darkening sky the countryside has begun to expand into that sense of surrounding distance that it has only at night….
Slowly the glow fades from the valley, the sky darkens, the stars appear, and at last the world is so dark that he can no longer see his legs stretched out in front of him on the ground or his hands lying in his lap; he has come to be vision alone, and the sky over him is filled and glittering with stars. Now he is aware of his fields, the richness of growth in them, their careful patterns and boundaries. In the dark they drowse around him, intimate and expectant.
And now, even among them, he feels his mind coming to rest. A cool breath of air drifts down up on him out of the woods, and he hears a stirring of leaves. He no longer sees the stars. His fields drowse and stir like sleepers, borne toward morning.
Now they break free of his demanding and his praise. He feels them loosen from him and go on.
(Wendell Berry, The Memory of Old Jack, excerpted from Chapter 9)
This is the only way Jack’s story could end. Though, of course, this is not where Jack’s story ends. Pick any story by Wendell Berry and you’ll find the dead very much alive in the memory of the living—just like in real life.
The Memory of Old Jack is another immersive reading experience from Wendell Berry. I’ve never been to Port William (no one has, as far as I understand fiction), but I feel like I grew up not far from there. Mr. Berry presents a way of life that lies just on memory’s periphery for many of us—toward the far end of what we once knew. For others, there will be no memory of such a way of life. It will seem like pure fiction.
One wonders whether memory does not come flooding back in just this way, more real than our many screens today, until in the end it simply overtakes us. I think something like that was behind Dallas Willard’s comment on death.
I hope someone told him.
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Image credit: Mark Peter Drolet
When you lose your job you step into the space between
Movement toward “What next?”
A batch of colleagues lost their jobs in a fit of corporate downsizing. Smart, talented, loyal people who invested years are now asking “What next?”
Same old story for my generation. Happens all the time. Rarely pleasant.
I believe standing on the corner scratching your head and saying “Now what?” is a great place to be. Granted: few of us ever choose to go there. Most of us prefer what we’ve been doing. Even if we hate what we had been doing, it beats not knowing what’s next.
Over at Coracle Journeys, Judith Hougen has a lovely, timeless essay on liminal space—that place we move through when we leave the concrete and known and venture forward. Her entire essay is exceptional, short and worth the read:
Catholic priest and author Richard Rohr explains liminal space: “It is when you have left the tried and true, but have not yet been able to replace it with anything else. It is when you are finally out of the way. It is when you are between your old comfort zone and any possible new answer….These thresholds of waiting and not knowing our ‘next’ are everywhere in life and they are inevitable. If you are not trained in how to hold anxiety, how to live with ambiguity, how to entrust and wait, you will run…anything to flee this terrible cloud of unknowing.”
Job loss is one step toward liminal space. It turns out there are many, many routes to the corner and “What now?” Graduating, moving to a new city, loss of relationship, aging. It’s a long list that parallels anyone’s list of top ten most stressful life events.
This “terrible cloud of unknowing” is only a distant, rumored threat when you are 19 and invincible. But each decade is a corner that provides more and closer glimpses of the cloud. It’s all part of the package deal that is the human condition.
Read the full essay at Coracle Journeys.
It will encourage you.
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Image credit: Alex Prager via 2headedsnake
conversation is an engine 