A pretty flower out-side of the new place

I can't do much with my phone/camera but software can.

To Quote

Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.

G. K. Chesterton
English author & mystery novelist (1874 - 1936)

Day 17

I never got to try Martin Henry coffee. They flipped to Forza. And I bet that you didn't know that lent is the time to pick up a new vice, like pipe smoking. See Dead Man's Pipes or Alt Smokers Pipes.

Day 1, 2007

Spending my afternoon in a new place, closer to the homestead. The steamer is 15 cents more than at Forza! I don't know about the coffee because I have 40+ days until I am going back on the bean. No caffeine or soda pop for now.

Thoughts in red from three inches

Taken at the Kickstand cafe in Tacoma WA

This just makes sense

"Mother Night" by Jim Harrison from Saving Daylight.

When you wake at three AM you don't think
of your age or sex and rarely your name
or the plot of your life which has never
broken itself down into logical pieces.
At three AM you have the gift of incomprehension
wherein the galaxies make more sense
than your job or the government. Jesus at the well
with Mary Magdalene is much more vivid
than your car. You can clearly see the bear
climb to heaven on a golden rope in the children's
story no one ever wrote. Your childhood horse
named June still stomps the ground for an apple.
What is morning and what if it doesn't arrive?
One morning Mother dropped an egg and asked
me if God was the same species as we are?
Smear of light at five AM. Sound of Webber's
sheep flock and sandhill cranes across the road,
burble of irrigation ditch beneath my window.
She said, "Only lunatics save newspapers
and magazines," fried me two eggs, then said,
"If you want to understand mortality look at birds."
Blue moon, two full moons this month,
which I conclude are two full moons. In what
direction do the dead fly off the earth?
Rising sun. A thousand blackbirds pronounce day.

Ribbon for Type

I have been keeping a low profile as we are moving to the outskirts of LKWD. I don't think PKLD (Parkland) will be the new address for the photo site, but more thoughts from east county will happen.

Open Up and Say...Ahh!

Don't need nothin' but a good time
How can I resist
Ain't lookin' for nothin' but a good time
And it don't get better than this

I am sick. I have just finished a conversation with a former student. He was sharing his life with me since we last saw each other. During the conversation I learned that while I was trying to recruit him to be a camp counselor, he was sleeping with his girlfriend. Driving away I started to chew on this piece of information flipping through the radio dial and my ear stopped on the above song. I sang along at the top of my lungs. Then it hit me. I really don't have much room to judge.

Dark and shadowed corners

Lighting the first candle is scary and exciting. So little light leads to so many questions and so many bad conclusions.

My Den

I am not afraid of declaring goals, desires, or aims for the New Year. Here are a few that I might like to get done.

I would like to add to my collection some more PKD books. Last night I got a taste of square dancing, and I liked it. This next year I would like to try it some more. Learning to play chess, read music and get some basics of cooking down are also on the "list".

In all I have a few things that I would like to occupy some of my less structured moments.

I have missed the it, just like the Romans.

Safeway is open Christmas day. Standing in line the, it occurred to me that 20 yrs ago, December 25th was a dead day for shopping. Today had more of a "light Tuesday morning" feel. When "new atheist" don't worry about Christmas as a threat to their movement because it is just a secular holiday, and I am standing in line to get Coke for the party, I think maybe I have moved beyond the holy days and into a Roman empire like attitude. I have missed the Event of Time for a grab at the gimmes.

Generosity

Reach out your hand if your cup be empty
If your cup is full may it be again
Let it be known there is a fountain
That was not made by the hands of man

Down the throat

It is a special kind of trust that causes a person to take the word of someone else who is encouraging you to sign papers that will cause a dept that takes decades to pay off. With that, there is a special terror as well. It is a short trip from mortgage owner to homeless. And the following gives me cause to pause, death vow, really!


Word History: The great jurist Sir Edward Coke, who lived from 1552 to 1634, has explained why the term mortgage comes from the Old French words mort, "dead," and gage, "pledge." It seemed to him that it had to do with the doubtfulness of whether or not the mortgagor will pay the debt. If the mortgagor does not, then the land pledged to the mortgagee as security for the debt "is taken from him for ever, and so dead to him upon condition, &c. And if he doth pay the money, then the pledge is dead as to the [mortgagee]." This etymology, as understood by 17th-century attorneys, of the Old French term morgage, which we adopted, may well be correct. The term has been in English much longer than the 17th century, being first recorded in Middle English with the form morgage and the figurative sense "pledge" in a work written before 1393. (from http://www.thefreedictionary.com/mortgage)

To the five of you who read this...

I present a reading list. Some I have read, others, I have not. That doesn't stop me from asking for it as a gift (those will be starred) and talking about them in sudden conversations in the toy section of Target.

1. *How (Not) to Speak to God- Marks of the Emerging Church, Peter Rollins*
2. *First Fruits of Prayer: A Forty Day Journey through the Ancient Great Canon, Fredrica Mathews-Green*
3. The Once and Future King, T.H. White
4. Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, Susanna Clarke
5. Naming the Elephant: World View as a Concept, James Sire
6. The Spirit of the Disciplines, Dallas Willard
7. Exiles: Living Missionally in a Post-Christian Culture, Michael Frost

Service

Service to others in the spirit of Jesus allows us the freedom of a humility that carries no burdens of "appearance." It lets us be what we are-simply a particularly lively piece of clay who,as servant of God, happens to be here now with the ability to do this good and needful thing for that other bit of clay there. The experience of active love freed up and flowing by faith through us on such occasions will safe guard us from innumerable pitfalls of the spiritual life.

Dallas Willard

Vanity, vanity, all is vanity, says the Teacher.

4 a.m.

All my problems seem much worse.

Long silence

Joyeux Noel is a worthy Christmas movie.

The Idea , an extended quote:

One of my first journalistic adventures, or misadventures, concerned a comment on Grant Allen, who had written a book about the Evolution of the Idea of God. I happened to remark that it would be much more interesting if God wrote a book about the evolution of the idea of Grant Allen. And I remember that the editor objected to my remark on the ground that it was blasphemous; which naturally amused me not a little. For the joke of it was, of course, that it never occurred to him to notice the title of the book itself, which really was blasphemous; for it was, when translated into English, 'I will show you how this nonsensical notion that there is a God grew up among men.' My remark was strictly pious and proper; confessing the divine purpose even in its most seemingly dark or meaningless manifestations. In that hour I learned many things, including the fact that there is something purely acoustic in much of that agnostic sort of reverence. The editor had not seen the point, because in the title of the book the long word came at the beginning and the short word at the end; whereas in my comment the short word came at the beginning and gave him a sort of shock. I have noticed that if you put a word like God into the same sentence with a word like dog, these abrupt and angular words affect people like pistol-shots. Whether you say that God made the dog or the dog made God does not seem to matter; that is only one of the sterile disputations of the too subtle theologians. But so long as you begin with a long word like evolution the rest will roll harmlessly past; very probably the editor had not read the whole of the title, for it is rather a long title and he was rather a busy man.

Leathal Faith

No coward soul is mine,
No trembler in the world's storm-troubled sphere:
I see Heaven's glories shine,
And faith shines equal, arming me from fear.
E.Bronte

Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see. This is what the ancients were commended for.