The Monk + The Sparrow Bound
A post in which I share more creative writing than usual.
The month of June was filled with professional development. I wanted to keep myself in the circles of educators. (And: I didn’t want an empty calendar.) I learned lots and am thinking about how I’ll structure classes this upcoming school year. A lot is going to change. I’ve also written some vignettes that I’m quite proud of. Here’s one of them.
The Monk
He was a strange urban millennial monk who had made vows to live a life of monastic meandering. He would walk, attempting to do so aimlessly—which seems logically impossible...aiming to have no aim is in fact an aim. The length of his stride was determined solely by the average amount of peace people were feeling within the block he strode by. A longer stride meant a more peaceful block.
Naturally, his steps were very very small. A sort of scuffling shuffle. He was unable to linger in the most peaceful places, but he wouldn’t have it any other way. He felt most at home on the blocks where he was dragged to immobility, feet stationary. There he would stand, utter incantations, and exude a sort of calm. Fellow pedestrians just saw a man standing and felt no different as they continued on their way. Slowly, one of his feet would inch forward and he knew that somewhere deep in the tenement someone had, for a reason unknown to them, taken a deeper breath and let their long-held resentment go.
Reflections on Myself as a Reader/Writer
I think I look like more of a reader than I am. I’ve got bookcases. I’ve got stacks of magazines. But it takes a force of will to start reading. I also shop around. I’ve started so many books this year and finished few. I’m really good at doing that.
I think I need a system of accountability in order to finish books.
As far as the things that I like to read... I like magical realism. I like beautiful, vibrant language. I like prose that makes me think. I like wisdom. I like reading stuff about spirituality/religion in the 21st century context.
As far as writing goes, it’s also something that I have to will myself into doing. But I have written some things I like, and I think other people like those things, so that makes me happy. Makes me want to write more.
What pulls me into writing? Force. Someone telling me to. That and personal goals like publishing my newsletters. Boredom. That pulls me into it. The occasional curious combinations of words that I want to explore.
(Are we our desires, or are we what we do despite our desires?)
I toy with the idea of trying to get my work published, but I am scared of permanence. If it gets published, then it is there in all its gore and glory. I might think a piece is good now, but eventually I’ll look back and be embarrassed by it. Unless I’m more compassionate to my past-self.
A Revised Version of an Old Poem I Wrote
Forcing Hands
I lassoed a sparrow in flight;
cried into its ears
my fears and plight,
caressing its nape
so it would listen
and remember.
Instead of loosing it to
fly my message to heaven,
I, in a grand crescendo
of betrayal, left it bound and tied
held it over a ledge
at night, and yes:
I dropped it. A plot for God,
to prove his presence
and set me free.Photography
Window Washers 1; Window Washers 2; Underground Room of Stuff; Orchestra
Reading Notes
Water
I appreciate Philip’s noticing and distillation so that I too can pause and notice more.
“But what’s really traumatic about water is what it does to the body, how it traces its lineaments infinitely better than an eye does, how it shows the eye the speed at which it should look. And how painful to see, again, how the eye doesn’t learn, how it returns immediately to its extractive approach, mining form for content (too fast), or mining content for form (too slow).”
Beauty of Holiness
Beauty in the ordinary when the ordinary honors God.
“I am, ever so belatedly, beginning to understand that worshiping God in the beauty of holiness is a different thing than worshiping beauty, and that holiness is beautiful in both the poetry of the Psalms and in the homely prose of a dutiful life.”
What Faith Is
Faith isn’t intellectual labor to square what exists in the world with what you’ve been taught in church. Faith is living in a way where you consecrate what exists in your circumstance to bless those around you. It’s weaving the threads of your circumstance into a sweater so your neighbors can be warm in the cold times. Faith is doing our best to live as Jesus teaches.
“Faith, in other words, doesn’t look for an outside to the system; it creates an outside to the system. Trusting what she has heard of or from God, the person of faith looks at the world with an eye to dislodging things from their places in the network of the world and then seeing what use they can be for creating a community where people can and do live together in love. Faith doesn’t look especially like defensiveness, in the spirit of fear. It looks like creativity, rooted in a conviction that Christ has indeed overcome the world.”
Goodies
Dorothy’s Harp by Dorothy Ashby ☞ I know you didn’t know that you needed jazz harp in your life. That’s why I’m sharing this album with you.
Cosmographia ☞ Many good things to be found here.
Nothing to Do But Dream by Joey Pecoraro ☞ I love this stuff.
Cheers!
p.s. I bought this keyboard and I like typing on it very much.