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I’d like a pony and a plastic rocket and a book deal.
*This is a reference to the Serenity captain, Mal, who, having no idea what to do while kneeling at a Buddhist shrine, decides to pray the only way he knows how—by praying like a little kid.
in spite of car problems, physical therapy healing everything but my wallet, and feeling way beaten up by life lately…
will post more soon. been driving back and forth to front royal every day this week, and i know that’s why I’m so tired…
Anyhow, I’m on the Episcopal Cafe’s Daily feed, with an essay on a topic that is very meaningful to me. Here’s the link: “The Face of the Poor Is My Face, Too”
Very sleepy now. Good night!
So, tonight I won a Bronze SNAP Excel Award, which is pretty prestigious in Association Publications world, for this story, published last May.
You can read it here.
I got tagged by Quaker Pastor, so here goes.
First, the rules. Then, the meme.1. Each player starts with eight random facts/habits about themselves.
2. People who are tagged need to write their own blog about their eight things and post these rules.
3.At the end of your blog, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names.
4. Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’re tagged, and to read your blog.
1. Back in ‘89-90, I used to be keyboardist in a band with Sean Michael Dargan and Wil Gravatt. Before we formed that band, Sean was playing in a band with future Pop-Up Video writer Chris Bonner.
2. I have really strong fingernails, and I can grow them significantly long without doing a thing to them. However, when I cut them shorter, the tips of my fingers are unusually sensitive and I have more trouble typing.
3. I *really* want to learn how to play the banjo. I’ll probably have to cut my nails, though.
4. As of this evening, I will be an award-winning writer.
5. I share my name with a b-movie horror actress whose most famous appearance was in the 1976 one-star cult hit, Blood-sucking Freaks: The Incredible Torture Show.
6. The best typo I ever caught was when a colleague nearly went to print talking about the important work of the Temple University’s Center for Public Policy. Except, “public” was missing a key letter. My favorite recent catch was when we had transposed some letters in an email address so that it was going to “Mafia Linda.”
7. If I have a celebrity crush, it’s on Nicole Kidman.
8. According to the wear pattern on my shoes, I’m bow-legged.
I have another meme coming up (an interview meme from Abuela Marty) that I’ll probably post tonight or tomorrow. In the meantime, I have to tag some people!
So I tag: Susan, Mike, Towanda, Jennifer, Mary Beth, Dean, Dani, Mom-Me and Sara.
There’s a song by a Scandinavian band called Covenant called “Like Tears in Rain.” It’s named after a line in Blade Runner. But the song itself, with lyrics that read like a post-apocalyptic Good Friday, always makes me want to write stories where passion beats down vicissitude, where determination conquers despair, where a flower blooms amid the grime and soot of industrial waste and rot.
The book I’m writing, which doesn’t have a title yet, is about a woman who has to unite the powers of good because there is a darker flood coming. And the powers of good don’t want to be united. They’d rather scowl across the aisle at one another and point their fingers at the black and white that each side sees.
Cept, it’s not black and white for these two groups. It’s blue and red. (I swear, when I dreamt this, I wasn’t thinking about politics. The colors are magic, and black magic and white magic implied good and evil, and both alignments are good.)
The book is becoming bigger than me, and every time i sit down to it when there’s no one around and a new wave soundtrack pulsing little gothy synthy beats at me, it gets a little more real.
I’m finally writing what I want to write.
(Okay, maybe the Skinny Puppy is a little too much.)
We loves our threes, especially in science fiction world.
Arm bothering me today, so I’ll keep this short.
Rector at the new church out this week, so retired-priest-in-residence (RPIR) today. commented that many people dread this day because it’s a “doctrine” day rather than an adventure story day.
laughter.
before he moved on to talking about dancing, which my friend Will also does, he drew an interesting picture for us of a friend who loved collecting butterflies in his younger days. his experience with them pretty much included chloroforming them and pinning them to a board. later, he had a chance to see a butterfly exhibit–and wasn’t prepared for what he found, because it was a living butterfly exhibit.He realized how much he had missed, how much more there was to butterflies when they’re alive.
And that’s what happens to many people who try to study God chloroformed and pinned to a board.
Of important note: There’s a scene in my novel (yes, I’m writing one) of an angel pretty much chloroformed and pinned to a board. I think that’s why the image struck me so brutally. I have only the faintest memory of having found among my uncles’ stuff at my grandmother’s a shadowbox type thing with butterflies pinned against the back.
Another important note: I am a butterfly watcher. From top: Red-spotted purple, tiger swallowtail, common buckeye. You’ll see a couple of these guys in the top header of the Lounge, too.
How weird is it that almost exactly 2 years ago I posted that bit about open communion (after my opening the discussion on it over at Episcopal Cafe) and tacked on a little bit about how my son perceives the spirit (see two posts previous)?
well garsh, while I wasn’t looking, they finally brought the EFM home page into the 21st Century!
So now you know what I’m talking about when I talk about EFM.
Speaking of which, looks like I’ll be joining the Calvary group, more than likely. Hoping to meet up with the mentor tomorrow.
Of late, I’ve been fascinated with the way people transform ritual to suit what they think they believe. I explained the Eucharist to someone with a heavy metaphysical bent recently with “Confession is where you pour out your negative energy, and communion is where you gather in positive energy.” I guess spending a lot of time outside the church gives you the tools to explain it to people who are outside the church.
Anyhow. I spent a lot of years favoring Buddhist spirituality, and still believe that chi is present in our lives. Clutter in our homes and our hearts blocks its flow, and many of our health issues can be traced to bad chi flow.
So. The May sermons for the Cathedral are up, and The Very Rev. Samuel T. Lloyd III preached on Pentecost. This caught my eye:
Just for today let’s try a new word for the Spirit, a word I learned from the Czech psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in his book, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience
Experiencing the Spirit is like experiencing Flow.
Do you know what it is like to experience moments when you have really come alive, when whatever you are doing is clicking, when everything seems to be working just the way it should? When that happens, you’re in the flow.
You know those days, when the tennis balls are landing inside the lines for a change. Or those moments I’ve heard sailors describe when, after drifting awkwardly in their boat for what seem like hours, positioning themselves, adjusting the mast and sails endlessly, all of a sudden a strong, steady breeze picks up, and they are off. In the flow. Or in families and other close relationships that are filled with day to day dealings and tensions and worries, every once in a while an easy intimacy just happens, and for awhile nothing needs to be explained. Flow. It can happen at work too—when you’re firing on all cylinders, giving your best, and your best seems to be just what is needed.
Flow isn’t something you make happen. You don’t do it. It does you. You don’t find it. It finds you and carries you.
And when you find yourself in the flow it feels like it has always been there, always available to you, but now it is finally happening. Now you are in it. And you know then and there that this is the way things were meant to be, though there are a thousand and one reasons why it often doesn’t happen that way.
In the same way there is a flow to the universe. We are part of a great, emerging life, the vast movement of the universe as it flows on, developing new forms of life, and moving our spirits, drawing us toward love and connection. That is the Spirit at work. The Spirit, the inner power of the whole creation, is at work everywhere, drawing us into communion with God, with the world, and with each other. That’s what happened at the time of the first Pentecost. All of a sudden, people from every corner of the world found themselves able to understand what the disciples were saying. There was communion and communication across divisions of nationality, race, and language.
The Spirit, the inner power of the whole creation, is at work everywhere, drawing us into communion with God, with the world, and with each other. That’s what happened at the time of the first Pentecost. All of a sudden, people from every corner of the world of that time found themselves able to understand what the disciples were saying.
That Spirit is always at work, creating connection, communion, belonging. Whenever we have been stunned by the beauty of a late spring day in Washington, so that we can’t believe how good it is to be alive, we have been caught up in the flow of the Spirit. Whenever someone stands up for truth or justice, they are moving with the flow of the Holy Spirit. Whenever a nation finds itself swept up in long-delayed social change, as happened in the civil rights movement, it is being caught up in the flow of the universe toward justice for everyone, and that is the work of the Spirit of God. And whenever a movement emerges to create a safer world for every living creature, such as the struggle now to slow global climate change, you can sense the flow of the Spirit of God moving across the entire globe.
The whole thing is here.
I don’t really remember what I was taught about the Holy Spirit. Lloyd notes that when he asked a youth group to illustrate the Spirit to them that they came up with Caspar-like apparitions or amorphous blobs (oh, how I love the word “amorphous”—I usually apply it to “thoughtsinks”). But at some point during EFM I became aware that the Holy Spirit was Chi.
Flow.
I like that.