Throwing It All Away

I'm trying to find the floor of my office beneath the piles of paper and files and old projects and possible futures housed in file folders.

And so in order to have enough room in my life, I'm trying to throw everything away.

I have such a hard time throwing things away though. Really, really - truly, everything seems like a link to a world of possibilities...the exit point to the road less taken.

And if I throw it away, it's like a guarantee that I'll be wandering back down the path looking for that little trail that I've since found out is the only way to get anywhere.

And that the trails I've kept are all dead ends that lead into bramble and waist high ferns.

How about a sci fi universe where people got banished somehow to the world populated solely by things they've thrown away...

Flannery O'Connor Speaks from Beyond

I think I've said to many of you that I think that Flannery O'Connor's book Mystery & Manners on faith and the role of the artist is still my favorite book on the subject...

Jeffrey Overstreet posts a hypothetical interview that captures several of my favorite quotes from Flannery...

would you support local stories?

no really, its a serious question.

one of the things that I loved at the university film & video assoc. conference -- was seeing so many films. several of them had been submitted and shown on public television -- a program called Philadelphia Stories.

Cliff's film was shown in the tennesee Film Night at the Nashville Film Festival --

it just seems like there should be more such outlets. That on some level we should have some local voices reverberating in our heads as well as the sort of mainstreamed / hegemonic / normative voices that issue from the coasts inward. From the mythmakers into our daily world.

I loved about American Splendour that it was a story about a guy who was in a place having a life. And his life was what had the possibility of splendour inside of it. Unfortunately there's a Hollywood Subtext in that the third act of that film shows him getting "famous" in the *other* way. In *that* way....

Couldn't we find some ways to develop voices and stories in smaller ways? Would you drive to downtown Canton three or four times a year to see a night of films that were about being Stark Countian? Would you break your firm rule against flipping into the Cable Access Channel if it meant the opportunity for local artists to tell some stories? Even if the quality were uneven and not up to the production standards issueing out forth from the digital streaming of satellites and cable wires?

A Vanilla Shake Afterwards

During Babysitting Co-op, Noah fell off of a swing, four feet in the air, landed on his head, and bled more than I've ever seen any human I knew bleed.

He's fine.

But it. was. awful.

maybe-probably the worst thing I've seen with my own eyes (not, of course, represented by television or movies).

One moment we had been playing and having fun: running the obstacle course, making a little movie, eating chicken nuggets, wearing ridiculous costumes, eating peanuts and learning how to play croquet...Jeff pushed him, I pushed him, and then....

he just let go.

.

I'm not sure if this time of year means the same kind of re-acquaintance rituals for everyone in academe, but i'd been noticing that each face to face encounter prompts the same sort of mundane inquiries:

"hows it going?"
"what's happening?"
"how was your summer?"
"what's new?"

And while:

"Good. Fine."

Is a totally appropriate answer in such moments (which maybe are less about inquiry than finding an interpersonal rhythm?), it always makes me reflect upon the quotidian dimension of my life.

I usually give a totally rambly inappropriate answer to these questions when prompted...and i've been thinking how much this summer, this season of life, this last month, has been....

"business as usual"

or:

"normal"

i've been thinking that in that exchange of answers, we gloss over the world of questions and possibility and value and hope and disappointment that have been swirling in our heads or our everyday talk, to offer the requisite "fine" because we know that when our lives feel:

"normal,"

that's not always a bad thing, because something or another will erupt and upend that normality.

.

When Noah was falling off the swing, it happened so fast that it, too, seemed normal. It seemed completely in keeping with the upward sweep of the swing that there would be a downward sweep of his little three year old body. Because at the front peak of swinging, children are rendered upside down, it was completely normal that his upside down body would fall gracefully four feet toward the railroad tie at the edge of the play area.

.

So within the day, this has been normal:

a student / friend disclosed some heavy, difficult questions that are affecting his life and his development and his relationships over late night coffee.

a friend / alum-student, just embarking on his Ph.D. in Cambridge went into a six hour heart surgery and emerged 20 hours later -- brain dead.

Noah bled and bled all over Jeff and my shirts while the other kids shrieked and cried as we soaked our ugly floral dishtowels that used to match our kitchen ten years ago with blood, stopping the flow of blood.

A parasocial blogging friend wrote about the shape of her life in an honest, horrifying way that charted just how cruel relationships and intimacy and commitment can be.

.

Noah just turned three. He has a delightful way of saying "Androo!" Whenever he sees Addison they exchange shouted greetings of each other's names (most poignantly across the church sanctuary after the liturgy has already began:

"Noah!"

"Add-son!"

He loves vanilla shakes, and has huge brown eyes, and a funny eager run, and papery white skin.

.

He was laughing before we got the minivan past Cinema Four. By the time we arrived at the hospital and Linda slid the door open and gathered him in her arms, he was smiley and delightful and most of the blood had been transfered to seven crumbled up diaper wipes.

And he's fine. He's really doing good.

Jeff and Linda and Noah and I all had shakes at the McDonald's in Mercy Hospital Lobby afterwards

But the tense feeling in my body and the adreniline in my stomach felt like they strung me through the day on a highwire.

.

The balance between delight and horror is too close to our skin. We're all too frail and regular to survive the depths of meaning and emotion that shoot through our littlest tasks and conversations and habits.

Every keystroke feels precarious, every post-it-note seems a hyper-link to a world of hurt or possibility, every telephone jingle a harbinger of all-that-we-never-thought-to-speak-of.

No wonder we need comfort. No wonder we seek:

peace~

Project: Take Back Eden: Day Two Hundred And Fifty Six

Is it clear that I’m using FEELINGS to measure time in this project? Feelings seem like as viable an alternative for measuring time as the capricious and tyrannical institutional handcuffs called “watches” by most. Oh, and when I say feelings, I’m not talking about EMOTIONS, I’m talking about muscle soreness and limb abrasions.

So anyway – so far all we’ve gotten done is bush-hacking. Five scraggly cedar bushes had far outgrown their intended height and demanded hacking, pulling, digging, sawing, and lots more hacking to come loose. Jaelyn and Addison both used croquet mallets to join in and help. Katie Sams brought us an entire croquet set from her Grandmother’s multiple-year-garage-sale from (insert your opinion of garage sales here and strengthen to either “heaven/hell”); she said when she unveiled the gift at the end of the summer, just before we moved out that it seemed like the sort of game my family would like.

I assured her that we would indeed LOVE croquet, privately imagining a day when we would hire a string quartet play Handel’s Water Music while we batted the ball through the gates wearing our most formal clothes.

I can’t say that I could foreknew the fury / vigor / delight that my children would have in wielding those mallets like wild animals against a fierce enemy. Complete with roars and grunts and snarly faces.

My friend Greg Snell, whose disappeared in Korea lately, his voice paused mid-epic like some haunting mystery, had always projected a master mural project in which he would balance an entire croquet set, bats and balls in heavy whirling splendour.

The outcome of our artistic ambitions? A circle of barren looking hedges, crater-sized pock marks, and a pile of foliage 6 feet tall and 30 feet in circumference. (note: said calculations are not legal tender. said author was kicked out of geometry class for an unfortunate incident involving chalk, whispering, and laughing, and has, since that day struggled to employ the formulas related to circumference or diameter.)

Today, peace comes in the relief from PROJECT: EDEN -- from the most unlikely (?) of sources -- the Full Babysitting Coop. We're having a puppet show & an obstacle course today. Good Times.

Hope you find your:

peace~