Quixotism

     After dinner with friends, I stood in the bathroom at the Asian Buffet and stared at this picture on the wall and giggled. For some reason, I thought about my tenth grade English teacher who asked me if I had  read the book after every report I turned in and the senior English teacher who knew EXACTLY what every poem meant--how boring, to know everything.

     I thought what a silly girl I was to be standing in the bathroom at a buffet laughing at butterfly wings and Don wanting to fight such soft things. I thought about how I always want to slip a butterfly wing in my mouth but don't because it'll ruin 'em and to lick a dead butterfly wing seems akin to necrophilia-pestophilia if I may, but I love pesto...insectophilia...yeah.

     So, I just imagine their wings feel like the skinniest part of the hibiscus petal on my tongue-cool and membraneous, and maybe the taste is papaya-ish if those are words, and even if they aren't. And then I think of all that color, like fireworks in my mouth, and wonder if fireworks have a taste other than gunpowder, and which one would taste the best. 

     I want to open my mouth and have a thousand butterflies rush out--an insect/firework geyser. I want to film it and see what it means.

Being

ordination |ˌôrdnˈā sh ən| - a ceremony in which someone is ordained
ordain |ôrˈdān| - appoint, anoint, consecrate, install, invest, induct

Today, today, today, i am speechless before God
know nothing and rely on Him for every thing
...

Leftover Snow

When our friend Martin was in pre-production for a film, everytime we went to his house for “spiritual guidance”, I’d see a new gadget or gizmo he designed and built so he could get certain shots. I was (and still am)  also in pre-production for a film and it kinda makes me nervous.

I do not have any gizmos or gadgets or fancy camera apparatuses, but I do have lots of time spent daydreaming, some fragments of a story pieced together in Celtx, and a friend who was hankering to do something “artsy, fartsy.” (Not to mention a husband, daughter, some cute cousins and friends who agreed to take part in this insanity.)

I also have some ideas of hanging upside down from a tree and a funeral pyre with imploding trinkets. Some ideas about a paddle-boat and saran wrapping a very expensive camera that doesn’t belong to me. I am not afraid to ask and I am not afraid to take no for an answer. I am not afraid to keep going until I get something close to want I want or learn to want something new.

I know wanting and have learned to make it my friend. Not like the wanting in Psalm 23, more like the desires in Psalm 37. When I am making something it is the ultimate kind of wanting and I like it and I can’t keep God out of it. He’s taught me to do my best with the least amount of materials provided.

With everyday living, the least amount of options the more inventive I am forced to be. The two skinny days before a pay-day, I can come up with a new spin on a quesadilla that peaks my kids interest. I can forage in the freezer to find clean (but toxic, I’m sure) leftover snow mixed with a cup of strawberry ice cream I bought at the 99 cent store and a bit of milk. So on a hot day, while we’re schooling outside we feast on cold slushes and fancy quesadillas and make it a kinda fat day instead.

So I remind myself, when I am feeling inadequate in the film department, that this can carry over. We have filmed a few scenes so far and so far I love them. The sparkly bird Zoe brought me in the middle of the shower scene-- I couldn’t write that more perfectly.

The pink, dime-store necklace I found in the parking lot at church that I stuck  around my neck for three days somehow made it into the film,--prominently. I re-wrote three scenes to incorporate it.  When I spotted a boxing ring in the middle of a field, 100 yards from a small white clap-board church, it got a scene, even though I haven’t asked permission and decide to guerrilla film-shhhh.

So when I see the fancy, stuff in Martin’s garage or go to festivals and see films that make me drool with admiration, I just remind myself most of the artists I know were wishing they had more money, time, equipment and talent, too.

What I got is what I got and I love it:

Hanging out with people I know and even love and telling them what I think hearing what they think and seeing how it fits together to make something more, better, real-er, truer . . .

Watching it grow, from snow, to ice cream, to a slushy dream just because it was lean times and we wanted more. 

God Likes It When I'm Humble

       I’ve used this quote from a poet, Cheyenne Gallion, quite a bit lately due to a series of unfortunate events, all of which I will not divulge here.

       We spent most of January scrambling to get our Honda fixed (hit and run in November) so we could get it inspected before the end of the month. Chris and Craig replaced a fender and light casing and also discovered our frame was bent. They used a wench to pull back into place and Voila’ inspect able car.

We felt blessed.

       Two days later, Chris borrowed his mom’s car, so I could use ours, and he received a ticket for no inspection on HER CAR. She had been so busy helping her mom care for her step-dad during an illness, she’d forgotten.

       A week later a hose disintegrated on our car so Chris pulled over to a gas station. He left the car, and rode his bus to the job, waited for me to come get him. We had a beer and hot dog in the parking lot and commenced to fixing the little booger.  Twenty bucks for a hose didn’t seem bad, but then we were able to help a nice stranded woman out, and she ended up giving us our twenty dollars back.

      We tried to refuse, but she insisted. Her husband had recently died and since then, she said  “It has been one thing after another. Please let me bless you.”  I like the supernatural-ness of mutual blessings.

      Later that night, after a party with friends, we headed to the store for some school supplies,--me in Chris’ mom’s car, Chris following in ours-- when I saw him get creamed by a huge truck, that never even slowed down, just kept driving like our Honda was a mayfly or something. 

      Chris, aka Crash Knievel, was fine. This made his fifteenth wreck, eleventh one that was NOT his fault, and third hit and run.

       We were upbeat that night, even though we felt weird.

      "What is God teaching us?" we asked aloud. “Are we missing something?”

       It has been our experience that just when we are on the precipice of major movement  in our lives we’ve been thwarted by distractions, some of our own making and some not.

       Many people look at these situations and say, “How unfortunate. How unlucky.” We used to say that, but not so much anymore.

       We’ve seen what the work of our hands can do--some impressive, fruitful stuff; some selfish, painful sin.  Either way, we’re trying hard-core to let our work be His doing.  Not everyone understands this, especially my dad.

       He wasn’t the happiest man, when we sold all our belongings and cashed out our savings to pay off what little bit of debt we had, quit our safe jobs and move HIS grandchildren into a school bus. How could the kid who had it all together, let it all go?

        Easy. God said so.

        But not everything is that easy. During a still quiet moment the next day, I asked God what I could do. How could I help my husband who was feeling a bit beat down? How could I keep from feeling the same way?

       "I have nothing to offer in this situation, God. What do I do?”

      “Call your dad and ask him to fix the bus.” God says to me.

      “Uhm, that has nothing to do with our car situation.”

      “You asked. I answered. Be humble.’”

      With fear and trepidation, I called my dad, who loves me to death and would do anything for me MOST of the time, but I hadn’t wanted to ask him. Did I mention my dad was a diesel mechanic and the bus hadn’t been running for two months? Did I mention my dad has a really bad temper and that I cringed as I dialed?  I called anyway and he came down that same weekend.

       We had coffee and lunch. He fixed the bus in thirty minutes and he genuinely enjoyed hanging out with us on Jubilee.  I think he might have even fell a little bit in love with her motor and more importantly, it felt like something else was fixed between us all.

       We still aren’t sure exactly what God is doing with us. The hardest part, besides repairing our marriage, has been figuring out what we do now.  And we know our family and friends are watching. They were nervous at first, afraid they wouldn’t see us very much or that we might fall into harm’s way.  They’ve seen us so much more now that we have more time and mental energy. They feel better about us going, even anticipating what might be ahead for us.

        And we are, too. Anticipating. Setbacks and blessings continue to remind us to ask as humbly as we can, without selfish ambition, ‘What are you showing us, God? We want to know the way.”

Going with The Flow

Going With The Flow

     I have the ability to make all machines, zoom and spin in my presence, pipes burst, water overflow, computers crash, printers go “offline” (Do they do that anymore?), cars sputter and die slow pathetic deaths, . . . etc. This is not me bragging about how cosmically electric I am. It only takes a short while hanging out with me before you come to believe I possess a strange hum, an odd aura, thousands of wonky    amoebas . . .

     So it should be no surprise when I describe a weekend in my life:

     The weekend before the unveiling of a book I helped edit for Longview ISD, I decided to let my sister-in law, who’s in beauty school, first bleach my bangs white then dye them a dark, almost unintelligible purple. I had wanted purple streaks for a while, and she had just successfully colored her own bangs two nights before, not to mention a three of her friends, so I let her.         

     My bangs looked like a bad tie die job. We had to settle for hot pink. Way more noticeable HOT PINK. Longview, never knew what hit’em. 

     The very next day a few hours before a performance, my kids and I gathered the ingredients for lemon bars to make for a youth group bake sale.

     We were out of powdered sugar, so I walked to the store. When I came back a heretofore unnamed child we’ll call, uh, mid-kid, used regular sugar instead, even though he’s made this recipe with me a bunch of times.

     Seeing the look on my face, he switched into angel child, an ability he gleaned from his father, and assured me it would be fine, just fine. I assured him he was about to get a chemistry lesson. We cooked the hardest lemon bars known to man.  The third little piggy could have built a lemon-scented house with those things.

     That night we performed at Swirl-A-Bout with Mad Swirl and various other artists. I had been asked to write a poem for the fire dancers’ finale. Chris and I had been struggling over the order of the show and he said what he always does when I crave the tiniest bit of structure: “Why can’t you just go with the flow?”

       My usual response: “You mean why can’t I go with your flow?” was replaced with: “There are six different acts going on tonight and I will go with all their flows if someone will just give me a hint as to what their flow might be before hand. This is not an open mic-It’s a paid event in an art gallery. . . blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.”

            “You don’t have to do it,” he assured me kindly, which in my mind sounded like, “We don’t need you.” In his mind, “No pressure if you want to bow out.”

            I rarely bow out of anything. When I do, it’s messy.

             Chris left to mingle with the artists. I stewed in the car where I watched the dancers and fire eaters and visual artists go in and out drinking wine, smoking American Spirits and chatting, the girls with their dark red lipsticks and black shocky bangs against their pale tattooed skin, when I realized the poem I carefully crafted for the fire dancers finale didn’t fit.

      I rewrote it in the parking lot, going with my flow of anger and abandonment while working in some carnivalesque images. The dancers loved it.

     That night, at two o’clock in the morning, two days before we were to sell our Honda so we could get a mini-van, the hood of the car flew open and folded in half as we entered the Mix Master. Chris had been in a hit and run (his third hit and run, fourteenth wreck (but that’s another blog altogether (btaba)) when He swears I said, “That’s what you get for not fixing it in the first place.”

I swear, I am not that stupid.

     I said, “That’s what WE get for not fixing it in the first place.”

Chris’ little sister, the same one who dyed my hair, can put her own Honda back together with her eyes closed. She’s like Michelle Rodriguez in the Fast and the Furious, only meanerJ She assured us we only needed a little wrench and the parts from Certa-fit.  But we procrastinated because, well, you read the first paragraph. These things usually don’t go well.

     I said WE!

     Nevertheless a frozen quiet spilled over the car as we realized we were not going to be able to sell anything and we would be stuffing our kids and their friends into this car for the next few months, hoping the front end didn’t shimmy off onto the highway.

    The next morning Chris and I lay in bed before church making jokes about the car, the lemon bars, my pink hair and making up for the tension from the night before. Later in church, I had that sick feeling I get between my rib cage, when I have thought or hoped or assumed my flow was in tune with God’s flow and He’s telling me it isn’t.

     I pray to always be in it, but half the time I think I’m taking off into the stars like a spaceship, when I am really just a spinning pinwheel, fooling myself with my own flow.

     He thumps me  . . . a few times, gently reminding me to, “Be still and know My Flow.” (No really, that’s what he said:)

The Supper of the Lamb

This might be cheating, but here's a link to some thoughts of mine on a book I read recently. Yes, it's a different blog altogether, but maybe this emphasizes the 'diaspora' aspect of this blog?

A nice touch or sophistry? Discuss.

http://theerstwhilephilistine.blogspot.com/2010/01/usque-ad-hilaritatem-part-1.html