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Wednesday, 16 December 2009

E - "It's just time for me to come home."
M - "And why is that?"
E - "I found what I was looking for out here."
M - "What were you looking for."
E - "A life without the tyranny of Love."
M - "No wonder you've had a sucky year."

I read one time (and I sincerely wish I remembered where) that "Change happens when the pain of now outweighs the fear of the unknown." It's true, I think. At least it has seemed to be true in my life on previous occasions and again now. After many months of toilsom resistence, I'm moving back to Alberta in hopes that the above mentioned "unknown" will be an opportunity for the recollection of Love.

Thursday, 27 November 2008

Currently
Jagged Little Pill
By Alanis Morissette
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could you hand me that blue one?

someone i love once told me that life isnt a puzzle like we tend to think it is. no, life is lego...
rather than being given the pieces and the challenge of figuring out how they fit together, we are given the chance to choose the pieces that look most appealing or useful and assemble them the way we like. the former challenge has a definite right and wrong outcome. if you find the edge pieces, the bits of the sky and finally that last piece of the tree trunk that makes all the other pieces fall into place, you've won. you have succeeded and your success is visible to not only you, the completer of the puzzle, but to all those who look at it. they gaze upon the completed picture that was once fragments on the table and they recognize that you did it right. you have found victory, you are legitimate. a fantasy... life isnt like that. life is lego. picture the little boy that lights up when under his bed behind the skateboard and the slinky he finds the piece he has been looking for for weeks. he knew he had it, so he looked and looked... it was the exact piece he wanted and no other would do. it is the piece that would make his dream legoland come alive with possibility. because, after much hard work and persistence, he had found the very piece he had been looking for, he could now progress with his fantastic structure referencing constantly the blueprints in his head that noone could see but him. he chose every piece and assembled it meticulously. no other person could have created that legoland like he did. he chose, he built, he would continue to build until the day he ran out of pieces... or became content with the structure as it was. it was he that would decide, not the side of a box that read "1200 pieces."
if life were a puzzle, we would know immediately, with every step, whether or not we were doing it right. but it doesn't work that way. life is lego and the only way to do lego is to decide, to own your decision and then to keep building and making decisions based on the ones that came before. sometimes you can deconstruct, sometimes big kids come an knock over your tower, sometimes you have to change your mental blueprints for reasons you didn't anticipate but the emphasis remains on choice. in the end, you are the one who decides how high, wide, strong and beautiful your structure will be. the trick is to not let yourself get so overwhelmed by the possibilities of what you could build that you find yourself for years and years doing nothing but staring at the box that holds all the pieces.

Monday, 15 September 2008

Currently Listening
Till the Sun Turns Black
By Ray LaMontagne
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yesterday whilst pointing my finger at the world and blaming it for my seemingly perpetual state of existential angst, i was confronted with the cruel irony of blaming something (or someONE) else for my refusal to assume agency. to blame is to refuse to respond directly and thus to blame is to surrender ones own opportunity for individual reaction (which will trigger the action/reaction of another thus giving them the opportunity to exercise agency) and ironically to excuse one's self briefly from selfhood. being a self means not being another and not being a nobody and not being that sort of static presence that never really participates in the bullets being fired but rather only deflects them. once it deflects it is forgotten about by the other parties involved because the bullet and where it goes and of course, what it ends up hitting are what counts, not the thing it bounces off of. forfeiting the opportunity to engage as a self, to choose, to leap, is to blot out one's own face like a censored photograph. we might as well be walking around talking to one another in that distorted voice dubbed into recorded testimonials from protected witnesses of heinous crimes. that way the information will still be passed from one "person" to another - the objective, but the thing that makes people people, the mystery of identity through individual voice is stripped away - the subjective. the irony i think is that it is less a task of becoming subjective and more a task of accepting that we are. i am subject. i am responsible agent. i am person. i am individual. i am neighbor. when i realize that i AM these things, that they are preexisting states of being for me, blaming someone else for my inability to be a subject may perhaps show itself to be as ironic as thanking God that i am not that other person that could do something so unloving to me.

sorry for those who got to read this here as well as on my facebook... well, sorry-ish.

Wednesday, 16 July 2008

Currently Reading
Tickets for a Prayer Wheel (Wesleyan Poetry Series)
By Annie Dillard
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old is the new new

routine, pattern, monotony... the mundane goings on of a repetitious life. the same people, the same places, the same smells and sounds and sitcoms. the same alarm clock, the same stove clock, the same clock in the hall that is always five minutes fast. the same bookshelf, the same bathroom, the same "top forty count-down" on the same radio station. the same truck rolls in the same time every week to pick up the yard-waste the same as it always does. the same stairs creak, the same gate doesn't latch, the same dog barks at the same god-forsaken time of the morning. the same phone number, the same tupperware drawer, the same coffee from the same coffee shop. the same pair of jeans that i wash in the same washing machine with the familiar scent of the same fabric softener. the same gas station with the same friendly cashier, the same price for the same yogurt at the same grocery store. the same as always, day after day... what a novelty.
novelty is exactly the problem. i am realizing that for years now i have lived my life as though leaping across a stream from rock to rock trying desperately not to get my socks wet for fear of the discomfort and inconvenience of the inevitable slowing down and change of pace that doing so would cause. the rocks are the next adventure, the "new," the "exciting,"the "novel." The stream is every thing else... every thing that is the same... everything that to be genuinely experienced demands that i "take off my coat and stay a while."
living from novelty to novelty has become an ironic monotony that has begun to grate on the part of my person that needs others and needs them in a real way. iron sharpens iron and the monotonous grating of novelty has made my iron so dull one could use it to buff a classic car.
in a month i am going home, going back to the mundane normalcy of a quiet suburban life and staying there long enough to not only get my socks wet but to take them off and stand still, giggling at the tingly sensation of crystal clear glacier melt surprising and opening every pore. the thought of staying there long enough to really love and be loved is perhaps the most exciting thing i could imagine.

Sunday, 29 June 2008

Currently Reading
Concluding Unscientific Postscript 2 : Kierkegaard's Writings, Vol 12.2
By Soren Kierkegaard
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Saint Olaf College

Saint Olaf College (located in Northfield, Minnesota) is home to the Kierkegaard Library where I am spending my summer as a "visiting scholar." I have promised pictures of the campus I keep raving about so here they are, finally. I am enjoying my time here immensely, learning a lot, being challenged to think about grace in a new way and confronting more of life's questions every day. I don't have a lot to "blog" about as I think I am still trying to recover from the sensory overload of arriving at such and extravagant campus and being involved in such an exceptional academic arena. Thanks for checking in and looking at my pictures. I love it here.