Simple Pleasures

Well, I got to Malette's, Dogsitting Central, only to find that Percy had messed his kennel - and did a pretty danged thorough job of it, too. So I got to muck it out. Praise the Lord for removeable floor trays. (By the way, this was not a simple pleasure. I'll get to that.) Then, I spent about two hours experimenting with various odor-removal techniques, since the kennel sits right in front of the air conditioner. Meanwhile, I did the Weather-Anticipation tango, trying to get the dogs walked and watered between afternoon showers and evening thunderstorms. I forgot to eat until around 10pm. But by the time I went to bed to read at around 11, I was pleasantly tuckered.

I normally sleep on my side, legs bent at a slight angle, and occasionally wake halfway and roll over to the other side for a few hours. This morning at around 1:30, I had a rollover impulse and found myself coming fully awake, unable to move my lower body. Not knowing where I was, I freaked out for a moment. I looked down and found Hudson lying along my front side, cozied up against my kneecaps. Percy was curled into a perfect oblong in the angle formed by my thighs and calves. Both of them sensed my movement, lifting heads with perked ears and turning their amber eyes on me curiously. I got a bit teary with that flood of warmth that only comes from a dog. I stretched to alleviate the soreness in my hip, but pretty much stayed where I was. Sometimes love is worth a little discomfort.

This morning, I came home and finally yanked the weed whacker out of my trunk to tackle those "boundary areas" of the lawn. I thought a bit (Jan-style) about threshholds, the places where wall meets ground, where pieces of land come together, where the organic chaos of grass meets the smooth order of sidewalk. No great revelations came. I mostly just enjoyed watching the weeds fall, the tension in my arms as I maneuvered the spinning plastic string, the way the lawn's beauty got kicked up a notch like the difference between a remade bed and one that features fresh, crisp sheets, starched a little and folded at the corners so you could bounce a quarter off it.

I'm reminded of Matt's new song, Labor et Orans. The title is latin for "work and pray." It's an intsrumental track, one where Matt used loops running at different lengths and speeds and frequencies, and is ordered but somehow chaotic at the same time. I love it. It's like life. I think work and prayer are more often than not the same thing - or at least they ought to be. A simple task done simply can be very full of God.

And now, I'd better get back to the dogs before they do something unlovely.

A couple of quick notes

Note One: For those who care -- the blue worked out just fine. I actually think it may be my favorite. Not so bright, but unusual and fun. A pic is now available on the JeffSite.

Note Two: I'm off to dogsit for the mischievous partnership of Hudson & Percy, Canines-at-large. I'm not certain what the internet access situation is so all them crazy blogs may be a bit slower in coming than I promised.

Note Three: The old software I used, iBlog, has updated itself to allow comments and all kinds of other funky features. I'm going to play with it a bit and may be moving back to that blog. I'll post a definite announcement here if/when that happens. Either way, it will still be linkable via "The Original JeffSite" link to the right.

Onwards and upwards!

~~j~~

Hair Anxiety

Well, I'm in the process of color change again. Bleach? Check. Condition? Check. Let dry? Check. Apply dye? Check. I was shooting for something between baby blue and periwinkle, since I mixed the white toner with what was left of the Bad Boy Blue. Unfortunately, at the moment it's looking like I'll be a match to my grandmother's hair 10 minutes after leaving the salon. Ah, well, it'll be fun to be geriatric before my time... Even though I've never seen a dignified older man -- or any older man, for that matter -- who blues his hair.

Waiting with anticipation.

"I think that I shall never see.."

The neighbors across the street are having a tree removed. I'm sitting here blogging on my front steps, sipping my green caffienated 7up that matches my hair color du jour and watching four guys tackle one tree. I had no idea how intricate the work was -- one guy up in the tree, tying the anchor line into place, then making his cut and carefully lowering the errant branch to his colleagues below who rapidly convert it to wood chips. Eventually he gets down to the bare trunk, which they lower and cut into manageable chunks of wood indistinguishable from the ones I used to spend hours hauling as a child to keep the fireplace stocked and provide heat for our family.

The workmen have obviously done this many times before. Each man knows just where to be when, how to move, what needs to be done next. It's like a dance, choreographed through daily practice to the point where everyone moves smoothly in time with each other. It's actually quite beautiful.

The tree comes down. The neighbors' yard takes on a different character -- a stump the only remnant of the shade that used to be the norm. But the buzz of chainsaw and wood chipper has absolutely zero impact on the birdsong that twitters in my ears as it always has. Life as we know it goes on, sans shade, sans tree.

I have a lot of blogs coming. My whiteboard is getting messy with the list of topics I've been ruminating on that should manifest here in the next week or so. I hope you're all being blessed by the moments of your lives, the endings and beginnings and goings on that flow in and out and around each of us as we journey together. It's been quiet here in blogland lately, but I've been looking in on you all -- thinking about you and praying for you. I'll try and make this a quiet spot to pause and rest and read. Over the Rhine, one of my favorite bands, calls their discussion board "the imaginary apple orchard." I like that. So, while I don't want to be derivative, I'll try and plant some pear trees here and let them grow. Enjoy the shade and sweetness.

Such Great Lengths...

OK, for those of you who don't know, I work with Down Syndrome guys at a group home. Sleep overnights -- the perfect college job. I get to wake up three cranky eight-year-olds in adult bodies in the morning and get them off to work. It's almost like trial parenting in some ways... Ah, well... enough exposition.

This morning, after almost two years working there, I ran into something new. My boss left a note asking staff to be sure that Tom (name changed) leaves his underwear in the trash. Apparently, he has an entire drawer full of spotless white boxer-briefs, but chooses to sporadically rotate the same 3 pairs of 12-year old briefs. When we (the staff) tried to throw all three pairs away at the same time, Tom went dumpster-diving to alleviate his separation anxiety. So, we're going to slowly whittle them away one pair at a time. What scares me about this job is that - sometimes - I can almost wrap my head around the behavior. I can see how it would be tough for Tom, who's worn tighty-whities for all of his thirty-seven years in a child's brain, to feel right and normal in these strange new short-y things. I can also see that the house budget is equally tight, and we're not going to throw away about twenty-five pairs of brand new underwear. This is how I found myself in the utterly bizarre position of noticing only paper towels in Tom's trash and having to stand outside his room arguing with him until he changes out of his rescued briefs into the new undies and thrown the old ones away again. I brought the trash out as soon as he left.

Yes, yes, I know. This is a totally too-much-info kind of topic for a blog, and you have NO IDEA how I've struggled to avoid the kind of sensory language that's just begging to get out. The point is that I realized in the midst of this surreal situation that there are some things in my life that have long since outworn their usefulness and are now just plain nasty. This all-too-visceral living allegory managed to cut through all the romanticizing rationalizations I've built to justify hanging onto my mess. I need to do some serious emotional and spiritual housecleaning. Now. Thanks to Tom's undies of all things, I can joyfully and wholeheartedly say "bring it on!" As I drove home from work, I did a little confession. I had the strange sense that God and I were both choking back laughter at the lengths He had to go to to shatter my illusions.

And, apparently, God is already putting fences around the potholes of navel-gazing introspection. When I got home, I turned on the TV to quietly zone and make plans for eliminating my psychic deadweight. Sitting on my bed, wielding my spiritual shovel and wondering if there's such a thing as a spiritual backhoe, a Fruit-of-the-Loom commercial caught my attention. The dam that held back the laughter burst, and I nearly passed out laughing. Their new slogan?

"You can't overlove your underwear."

I beg to differ.

I Can't Imagine.

Literally. I feel like my brain has some form of osteoporosis, best described by words like "gnarled" and "wizened." This is not good for a creative writing major. Judy's lovely blog about the story she read hit me in an unexpected way. I noted when I finished reading it that I didn't have the slightest impulse to rush out to Barnes & Noble and get me a copy, which is so uncharacteristic of me that I had to stop and figure out why.

The timing for this whole thing is strange. I just finished my research writing class, and I feel like I rocked it. I'm pleased, but I feel like I should be celebrating - being free and having fun and reading and writing and doing summer and stuff. Part of my paper actually dealt with the issue of beauty. I'm so FOR beauty. Judy's noticings connect; they hit me right between the eyes.

Yet, I can't read. I have dozens of books that sit there and call to me. The dust jacket blurbs alone were so compelling, I had to give the books a spot on my shelves. I try to start one, and it's nothing more than black marks on a page. No life whatsoever. I try to write, and it's the same deal. I have note cards and voice memos and computer files with story ideas that sound really good - that have major potential to me. Should I sit down to type, though, I'm all thumbs.

Am I just tired, or am I afraid? I've identified a couple things that I'm in the middle of grieving - the natural separations and losses and loneliness that come with having a pulse. The crazy thing is, I feel like I'm entering some sort of Jeremiah phase - it's confusing because I feel like all that grief I mentioned in past posts is still waiting for me; that it's going to be so hard and it's going to last forever. But at the same time, the grief tastes like a strange form of love. That in order to love the world, I have to grieve for it -- not just that someone has to grieve for it, but that I have to. That makes no sense, but that's where I'm at. Every time I unfurl the sails of my imagination, I find myself weeping. Not curled up in the fetal position and gnawing on my pillow or anything, not sobbing uncontrollably, but just sitting silent as hours go unnoticed with tears streaming down my face. It freaks me out. It makes me question my mental health. And it's so big, I'm afraid I'll lose myself.

So what's a guy to do? This is not entirely a rhetorical question. While I'm not really looking to be diagnosed or anything (Mandie...), I feel a need for some language around what I'm sensing - or unable to sense. Either that or some psychic crutches...

No Small Transformations

OK, so I'm at worship rehearsal tonight. Communion weekend = mellower tunes. In the set is the song "You Alone."

I must be honest. I'm sick of this song. I realize I may be angering my beloved friends who totally adore this tune, but there it is. We've been doing it since the first Passion CD came out in '98, and it is a very VERY rare song at our church that has a seven-year shelf life. The song seems to have lost its vitality for me and faded into the realm of the happy, Christianese elevator worship stacked with repetitive platitudes that seem to slap a nice, pretty, Jesus-y bandaid on the gaping wounds of the world.

Then Matt commented that he'd played this song fast and slow, rocky and mellow -- he'd even played it in the minor key. I remembered that. I thought about it for a sec, and tears started to well up and I said something like "Oh, could we?" So we are. And I am blessed. What's the difference, you ask? Good question. Most people won't even notice the difference, but here's what it does for me.

It sets me up in a different place. The guitar intro in the minor key cuts right to my spiritual poverty -- my utter begging dependence on God for anything resembling joy or meaning. Instead of tromping around in the major-key musical boots of the hyper-spiritual, oblivious Jesus-freak, I finally get to be barefoot and broken -- a child of God who needs to hear and say and mean these words in order to stay in the countless, often gratuitous battles of life:

"You are the only one I need. I bow all of me at your feet. I worship You alone. You have given me more than I could ever have wanted, and I want to give You my heart and my soul. You alone are Father, and You alone are good. You alone are Saviour, and You alone are God."

YOU are God. Not me. Not any of the voices that shout into my life from my peers or my empty checkbook or the blasted idiot-box TV I should've thrown out months ago. The minor key (a really small change) seems to throw the lyrics into sharp relief, as if to say:"Yes, life is hard. Yes, it's OK to be tired and wounded and worn. BUT... These words are -- this GOD is -- still true anyway." Where singing these words in the major key feels like work -- like I need to actively beat down the tiny little gods that have huge voices -- in the minor key, the lyrics flow out of me like truth, like rest, like a desperately needed and clung-to lifeline. Repeats feel like clinging. Like this is all I need to know and God will accomplish the rest. And that tastes like hope.

So by the time we switch to the major key for the "I'm alive" section, I've remembered why so many of the beloveds' hands go up at that point. The verses have convinced me again that life is gift and joy and freedom when it's all about God -- hard, frustrating, often painful, but gift nonetheless.

Of course I realize (Jan, Judy, Lisa...) that these reflections say far more about me than they do about the relative merits of any particular key signature. But I'm OK with that. I just pray that the changes -- the minor adjustments -- God is making in my own life and heart have equal or greater significance.

"God's business is putting things right;
he loves getting the lines straight,
Setting us straight. Once we're standing tall,
we can look him straight in the eye."
--Psalm 11:7, msg.

There are no small transformations.