Envisioning Wisdom

I don't want these eyes, anymore. Why can't I see the earth as Mary Oliver: a gentle mother scooping me up in her skirts, revealing her pocketed lichens and seeds, flowers and trees, and cradling me to sleep. Or Walt Whitman, when a child asks, what is the grass, and he sees a flag, the uncut hair of graves, and knows the identity of grass may be beyond understanding. Give me the surrealist mind of Van Gogh (maybe not the sight. He probably had enough chemical poisoning he actually saw the sky like he painted), that I might see the heavens in surrealist splendor. Open my eyes, so even a cut like Sylvia Plath hath had, might reveal a pilgrim, redcoats, a turkey, or a Plath-ian macabre element.
I don't see the world like Martin Luther King Jr, Gandhi, Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglas, or Mother Teresa, but I want my sight opened unto that world, tragic and devastating though it may be, for all I see sometimes is fog hovering over the little pond of my world, and a few concerned frogs croaking on lilypads. I want to see people's souls like orchestral movements - the violin is hurting and a bit bitter, playing a sharp minor movement in cut time; or joyous, dancing between dam-bursting crescendo and frenzied, whispering mezzo-piano, allegro allegro! I can't tell if a river is a dance, or a mountain a ballroom dress, or if the world might make less sense with ever metaphorical pass-around.

Wisdom?
Words aren't working, anymore, and perhaps never again
I forget, friends, what breathing is and isn't,
though a mist rises in my gorge, is this it?
a statue sits in the courtyard of a city street,
eyes scrunched shut, hands pressed tight, kneeling
he never opens his eyes, never sees,
but even he knows
visions exist so beautiful that, if truth hides
another more resplendent sight, I may be made blind -
shush, I shush, and shush again the silence
it bellows in my mind and a fearful fire rages
in appalling quiet
is this, Elijah, what the wind-passing-God -
oh God, she's so divine - is like?
My heart begs the mendicants for spiritual alms
and mother God plays the accordion
while urchin Jesus tugs at her drab dress and smiles
where is she -
there is something here so imperfectly clear,
you must let the mud in the water settle,
if you want to see your reflection -
(I want to see the sky)
I don't want these eyes anymore, I want yours

Superpowers

Eager. The word slides across my tongue with a bite, a bitter edge. Eee-ger. Am I so? Give me a choice and after a thousand days, an endless age, I will still prefer you speak, and I listen and harbor deep my sibylline dreams. I'm a ladybug on a leaf, all dainty, red fragility, and a whimsical wind might tear my spots from me. Meager, is me plus eager, and I'm a cradle in the tops of trees, rocking in the briskest of breezes. There are stories everywhere, and even the word silence has a sound, so listen. Eagerly.

Today, I became enthralled with superpowers. Those almost spiritual giftings the people around me possess that strike awe in me at every revelation: A's intuitive observation, M's memory of people, J's absurd recollection of stories read throughout life, and so on. I was listening to AH discuss his life's up and downs over these past few months, and afterwards I realized that if you patiently pay attention long enough, you can see the super in those you love. AH has a superpower as much as any of the rest of my friends, and the longer I engage with his words, wisdom and wit, the closer I draw to discovering how that gifting interacts with my life.
And then I got to thinking, what is my superpower? I don't have remarkable reading comprehension (J), hospitality, graciousness, and patience for people (S), memory magic (M), intuitive and observational prowess (A) - what do I have? I think I know, but as I've digested what I know over the past few days, I still can't help but believe my superpower seems, under the light I've exposed it, a wee bit sinister. But then, I'm partially left-handed, hmm?


Two fun little conversations today about birthdays:
1. (Ben-Matthew) - paraphrased:
B: "Will you agree to my birthday terms?
M: "Yes, of course. If you will agree to mine."
B: "As long as they don't contradict mine, sure. What are yours?"
M: "That I may get you some non-birthday gifts."
...

2. (Ben-AH) - paraphrased
B: *birthday explanation*
AH: "Ah, that's clever. I see what you did there."
B: "So do you understand?"
...after dinner....
AH: "So if I made you something, what sort of thing would you like?"
B:    :-( sewiouswy?

Birthday Requests

For those of you who enjoy purchasing gifts for events and celebrating people, I want to make it perfectly clear that I want nothing (read: AbSoLuTeLy NoThInG kthxbye) for my birthday. I've asked each of my friends if, for my birthday, I should be able to do what I wanted instead of what everyone else deemed appropriate for my birthday. Every single one of them agreed with the concept until I told them what I considered the ideal birthday, and then every single one of them told me no, I could not have the birthday I wanted. So thanks for that, friends.

For those of you curious folks, here is the birthday I wanted: a nice get-together with all of my dearest of friends where, instead of receiving gifts and getting treated to dinner or dessert or whatever, I treat each of my friends to such. I buy a nice group dinner and perhaps have cards or gifts for everyone as a thank-you for loving me and granting me the grace of kindness and love that got me here. It’s my celebration of life, and why should I not celebrate it by rejoicing in those pieces of my heart that keep me beating through life?

I already decided that I’m going to (craftily) follow through with a portion of this, but I doubt that I’ll be granted all of it. Birthday mischief.

So, first and foremost: I want to receive nothing for my birthday. Yes, you heard me – nothing. A group of people read this and think to themselves, that’s impossible. Everyone wants to receive something. These are the gift givers: C, Matthew, S?, A, errr… (are most of my best friends gift givers? What have I done to deserve this… and how are they still friends with me?)

If you are still considering buying me a gift, please don’t. Settle for a card, or a heartfelt letter. I can’t tell you how much I prefer your words, stories, time, lives, and smiles over your gifts. Whew, now no one is still considering gifts, right? (Please, pretty please?)

So what DO I want? I want to see as many of my dearest of friends as possible. The whole of February is birthday month, and I know you are busy. Me, too. So, text me and let's get coffee or tea, or let's play bananagrams, or we could grab dinner, or kick around a soccer ball, or go on a light, freezing hike, or we could go to powells - I don't even care, I want to see everyone. These are my birthday wishes (pleas).

stitches and stones

I cannot envision the elegance for you
a story fastening, cinching, and drawing through,
until its stitched closed like an eerie set of teeth
clenched until no space to breathe remains between
each tightly sewn up page -
a farce of sunlight aims its spotlight upon sparkling earth
gotcha, it beams, but no sun I know is so cold -
shivering, my mind stalks endless questions
with all the predatory excitement
of a lion amidst gazelle, an endless sea of queries,
sinking my teeth into each, I'm alarmed at my savagery -
but the book is closed, resting on my palms it's a potential energy
like a pendulum at its height, or a stone in the hand
this book is me, I'm just that stone
I fly, bounce over tense waters, sink and am borne
out to sea, I rise with the volcano, sculpt me into david
and the weeping pieta, I'm richer and poorer than I'll ever be,
I believe, and that sets me free from the stones on streets
ground into gravel for an eternity
- a nice sediment, don't you think? - do you?

dreams

In my dream, a headstone lies on a barrow hill, gently matted with the greenest of grasses. No rocks or stones or city-bones litter this land, before where I stand (beside the headstone). It's simple, not ornate, with a rounded top and squared-off sides, and the epitaph simply reads: here lies he who had not the bravery to believe, the heart to succeed, the courage to live or love or die, or the grace to give his life.
The ground was lightly tilled before the stone, and my favorite flowers grew there: snowdrops, bluebells, trilliums, and the purple button flowers whose name is lost to me. I bled, pained at this stark scene - is it my blood? whose blood is on my hands? why is there so much?
It is my dream, and I glance absently at my hands for days, wishing and wondering, but the sun stands still for me, and the flowers bloom most expectantly. Stooping down over the stone, I stroke lightly with my index finger the bottom of the stone. Standing back, the snowdrops seem to smile, and a few crimson roses bloom:
but he tried anyway.
Then I lay beside the bluebells and watched the stars rise, mine. Do I remember these?
My hands are clean.

rhetorical ramble saturday - the best sort of saturday

Sometimes, philosophy, theology, and rhetoric arguments remind me of conceptual physics. When in ninth grade, our school started the students with a novice physics course teaching bare-bones physics - enough to discover that: falling from high places will hurt; light occasionally behaves strangely; levers, pulleys, fulcrums, are magic devices capable of lifting gargantuan loads with a scarce a suggestion of effort (or, done poorly, can make it quite difficult to lift normal loads); and other trivial physics phenomena, . The trick to early physics is very clearly explained using a joke regarding physicists (a variation appeared in Big Bang Theory):

Milk production at a dairy farm was low, so the farmer wrote to the local university, asking for help from academia. A multidisciplinary team of professors was assembled, headed by a theoretical physicist, and two weeks of intensive on-site investigation took place. The scholars then returned to the university, notebooks crammed with data, where the task of writing the report was left to the team leader. Shortly thereafter the physicist returned to the farm, saying to the farmer "I have the solution, but it only works in the case of spherical cows in a vacuum."

Many concepts in physics are simply too advanced for introductory mathematics and learners. You receive an equation regarding gravity, but because of a need to simplify the calculations for simpler understanding and reproduction, you remove so many variables that the equation loses its comparison to reality. Sure, I can calculate how fast a ball will roll down a slope, barring friction, air resistance, changes in slope, temperature, with a perfectly round ball, and a drop that adds or subtracts no acceleration. 
But physics gets so much more complicated when trying to adhere to real rules or attempting to match reality. I believe sometimes the same is true of philosophical discussions, rhetorical arguments, and theology. It's a semantic battle where we argue without contemplating the relevance of so many factors: media influence on us and the material; cultural differences between past authors or philosophers and now, and/or a distance factor; context of passages temporally or literarily; the oblique, complicated, indefinite dilemma of engaging with the works of mankind and possible error; our own bias or a historical bias and so on. The list really could go on for quite some time, as these topics are more like plasma than a sword to grasp and swing at our rhetorical foes.
Really, it's rather impressive how many different interpretations of theology have produced divisions within our own body of Christ. And Christianity isn't alone in its denominational divisiveness, and neither is theology. This, in and of itself, is not a problem. The searching itself is necessary and asking questions is one of the great boons of sentience.  The problem arises when our belief systems harass or wound others, or the adherents of other opinions: when our beliefs dehumanize other individuals, or belittle their accomplishments or the fantastic truth of being created in the image of God (male and female). Whether you are a fundamentalist, calvinist, lutheran, catholic, eastern orthodox, baptist, nondenominational, quaker, agnostic, atheist, muslim, buddhist, jew, or just angsty, your belief system does not, and will never, grant you infallibility of character or knowledge.
So many times we misinterpret scripture, philosophical books, or simply things people say, and internalize those clumsy perceptions as axiomatic. With these fallacious perceptions we proceed to dehumanize women, those with different colors of skin, people based on their sexual tendencies, or even people based on their living locations.
I remember in american history class back in high school realizing something monstrous as we studied the civil war: both sides were praying to the same God for victory and moral justice. Each side was convinced in their morality and principles. But both sides prayed the same God would save them, delivering them from their foes, the believers on the other half of an imaginary line.
How could they not realize they were both so wrong? Or is that just my own bias shining through? Is that the only lens I can evaluate the world through, and how does my own lens obfuscate truth and detrimentally affect my outlook on people, places, philosophy, and the physics of belief?
But again and again I've been noticing how people pick out verses and wield them as rhetorical bludgeons of belief against their mighty foes and the obstacles of (their) truth. But how often are these "foes" and "obstacles" people, or are our brothers and sisters wounded in the "pursuit of theology and justice"? Real live, flesh-and-blood people for whom Christ paid the ultimate sacrifice?
What does it take to acquire intellectual humility, but still have the backbone for standing up for your beliefs?
Still, I believe it's not only silly, but detrimental to state our opinions and beliefs as objective truth, and attempt to brand them onto our fellows in the name of morality. We've discovered how far the ball will fly in a frictionless, vacuum without and resistances or temperature, but there are so many things unaccounted for. And you know, you may be correct - who knows? But without intellectual humility, compassion, love, and gentleness, the truth is a bludgeon, and a person backed into the corner of belief will fight or flee rather than believe.

Books and Things and Thoughts and Trees

I fear only fear. The whistling, wolfish winds of night; monsters steeped in shadows beneath beds; the many unknowns, shrouded beyond the veil and betwixt destiny's many folds; judgment and pain; breaking; distance and love; apathy and angst; failure and loss - the many catalysts of fear, pumping at the bellows of fright for a spark of fearful fire, with a malicious grin, do I fear these or what these bring?
Sometimes what appears inevitable branched from a stem of choice. You may choose boredom or adventure, though perhaps not always the adventures that arrive. You may choose good or evil, though not always the consequences of your actions. You may choose truth or deceit, love or hate, kindness or cruelty, hope or doubt. But sometimes, sometimes these are chosen for you, without you, over you, and your will gets trampled when you simply arrived at the wrong place during a stampede.
There are many doors, and the world isn't as dualistic as we'd like to believe. Pick one, pick some, and see where they lead.

I finished my last of four original Agatha Christie mysteries today (original meaning the first four I found). I bought another four, but first I think I'll be reading some novels that I've been meaning to read for a long while: "The Da Vinci Code" and "History of Love" and the rest of "The Story of Art" which I have not read since influenza ate my life. I think this is the year of Agatha Christie. There are roughly 80 novels that she has written, and my mother has notified me that she owns everything Agatha Christie has written. Easy game, easy life. They take roughly two or three hours to read each, so about 240 hours of reading. I also was told to read a couple of other books, so I probably won't get to Agatha Christie binge.
I also bought a Sue Grafton and am looking everywhere for a Josephine Tey (The Daughter of Time) and if you find it, I want to borrow it.