UpfromtheStump - Archive 57

31 May 2010 3:11pm

I am relapsing to a kitchen far away. Coming to cook are Thomas and Vincent, my flatmates. We aim to make ugali and boiled chicken with greens. The power has failed just as the sun went down, so the blue burners are all what light the room. I look for candles, walking on that red painted concrete, smooth in the blackness, and enter my oh-familiar room. Blindly I am feeling at nooks between books on my shelves for anything waxy. My hand touches a mangrove leaf from the Gambia. I go to the next shelf down. I pass a water jug between more books, a necklace and a flashlight without batteries. Then the kitchen is emanates a soft glow, so I leave and celebrate with Tom since he has found a worn candle. He dribbles hot wax and sticks the lit stub firm to the countertop. The cooking begins. Of course, its only half about the food.

We are venting about our professors by doing raucously bad impressions as the greens simmer and spit in their oil. Tom is commenting on things as he is fighting the ugali with a wooden spoon, shaking slight amounts of Unga into the boiling pot until it has the right thickness. The burner rattles, always in the same way.

We are fetching a few plastic plates out of the cupboard, and Tom places the steaming maize in the table's center. He cuts it into slices. We sit on wooden chairs and he gives thanks. The word 'thank' it is given such gusto. Such gust. "We thank you Lord..." he always goes. The gratitude jars me, as usual. The room is pungent with God's provision.

We are tearing at the steaming maize meal, hand-kneading it bite size. As we go on, Vincent grins and tells about his children in Malawi. He tells about their neediness when he just wants a rest. "Not now!" he says to them. "Your father is tired!" Tom pipes up, asking if maybe the children picked up this neediness by watching their father talk to their mother. Vincent breaks into laughter, Tom's close behind. I'm a heavy laugher too, so we are shaking the room. (Who arranges such company?) Suddenly the compressor to the fridge clatters, which means the power is back. I reach out and snap on the overhead bulb. We do dishes, still going on. Finally, Tom takes the candle with him. I am in my room, leveled by the commonality, full of the food we share, soaking.

I returned to that kitchen last month after two years had passed. It was full daylight though, and somebody had left it dirty. I stood in the doorway, pensive, and the memories of our magnificent dinners, those steaming blocks of ugali, those brothers of mine, came all at once.

I live in Washington State with a bunch of new folks now. Yesterday evening, as that soothing Seattle daylight fell down and away, we grilled cobs of sweetcorn on our back deck. There were bottles of wine and nachos on the table. But, of course, it was not really about the food.

20 May 2010 9:56am

Throughout their existence, humans declared that things they did not understand were the work of the divine. The blazing sun, without fail, appeared and disappeared by an unseen eternal locomotion. Rain fell from heaven. Unbelievably, for most of human history there was not much correlation between intercourse and childbirth. Many thought pregnancy was inspired by a woman bathing in a lake or river, susceptible to the supernatural forces held within. I think of all the times as a child when I was on a boat, fishing with my father or canoeing at camp. I would brace my chest against the aluminum ridge of the vessel's edge and stare down into the murk with transfixed fascination. Mysterious things were lying latent in those depths, evidenced by the slick, gasping, hook-jawed creatures we drew forth by patient baiting. What else? A sunken boat? A boot? A gargantuan sturgeon who might swallow my boy-body whole? Better not lean so far forward, I would tell myself. And then my arm would draw my hand forward and quietly drift it over lip of the boat. I would gingerly push the tip of my forefinger into the surface of the dark liquid. Taut nerved and enchanted, I spent an hour provoking any lurking monster below to try and nip my digit.

Then, as our race began to understand complexity, we began to declare we had found the reasons for these things. The sun, who previously could humble and blind us by its own power, was reduced to a dumb mechanical looping ball of hot stone. Our methods invented good vaccinations and movable type, yet bleached the world of its color. A thing's value suddenly was established by its utility. Wordsworth saw this, lowered his eyes and muttered, "We murder to dissect."

I remember studying RNA replication in college. I watched awestruck as these strands, spiraled like pasta (why?), unzipped and matched themselves to proteins, spinning shut once the orders were delivered. I realized that a kaleidoscope of microscopic ribbons were spinning open and shut inside me, truly spinning open and shut towards their proteined partners. I am alive, able to sing songs and have friends, because of their dance.

We have not ended the place of wonder but pushed it. The boundary where we are delighted by what we do not understand has been relegated by our scientific arrogance away from life's center. Yet it can appear if we take enough time to stare with an open heart. This is because, thankfully, there is no end to anything. Small things are made of smaller things, tiny weaved of the tinier. Down and down the composition goes. Try and find the edge of any table. Peer down to find that edge and you will zoom in forever. Or ask a scientist "What is reality really?" He will request a shot of whiskey, and his wandering postulations will begin to sound like a child explaining where babies come from. Last I heard, our smartest scientists theorize that all of the world is composed of minute strings which order the world (here a cliff, here an olive) through their trembling music.

I want to pull the place of wonder back to where it was, back to the exhilaration of dipping my finger in the lake, back to stories of aflame angels appearing over flocks at night, back until it collapses over everything. We were right all along. The world is steeped in unknowns, and by extension is thick with miracles. This roiling race of hominids may seek to find stability by exhuming the world's mechanism, but when will they learn that peace is found in wonder? When will we see that love of creation and Creator, the path to the planet's health, is less a math equation than a romance? How desperately do we need folks, in this overwrought age, to fill the world with such meaning?

I chide myself to remember Annie Dillard's realization that nothing shines brighter than what it reflects. All this beauty is the canvas of an even more beautiful God. And I am bursting.

13 May 2010 8:56pm

And without warning, a good thing of God appears and falls into place, graceful as a waxing moon, undeserved, soundless and right as rain. Oh give thanks for good things, like a package waiting on the welcome mat, its handwritten address and scissored sections of tape. What can one do on the way up the step but halt and become stilled by its arrival? What option but to bend (or bow), to cup it by its foundation and bring it inside? What option but to melt, and then to believe in purity again?

Oh the rightness of good things, how I would be rended useless without you, hamstrung, cancerous with cynicism. Instead, I believe in a better world like one led to a kitchen by the smell of cooking, submitted to the odor, breathless from the debut.

26 April 2010 9:14am

And so the sound of that tremble is still ringing in our ears to this very day. A quiet lull may have settled again upon our land, and we may be working these days with diligent unexpectant normalcy, but the memory remains and a remnant of that time still hangs quiet and heavy as a morning fog in the pocked places of the ground.

When that tremendous time of impetus quietly snuck its way out the door, it left something behind. For reasons unknown, getting up most mornings has come with a new ease. And we seem to argue less these days. We spoke about it last week, how the power and music of the spirit of God took us all by surprise and threw us by the collar out the door and onto the stony ground, how it sobered us to the right things of this world, and breathed the most meaningful peace into our hearts that we had ever felt. We spoke about how deeply we long for its return, how we wish we could summon it like a newborn or invite it over like a relative. Of course, it doesn't work that way. If it could be summoned then it would be misused, and there's no way it would ever allow itself to be taken advantage of like that.

No all we can do is turn our minds to the memory of that tumultuous time where God came into our grasp and remember what it was like. We must craft songs, we agreed on this, because poetry is all what could even get close to describing the way we were shaking alive. We have to tell the coming generation about this, make the story potent and laden with power so that it can have a similar coloring on their lives as well.

Oh, but something has stayed behind. Just this morning I was doing the usual preparations and something caught me softly by the chin and turned my head to a memory of my father talking brightly about nothing in particular, and I realized it hasn't left at all. Its only sunk below the surface, stirring us from the underground, guiding our oblivious and fractured attention from vanity to importance, moving us to emulate its love and valiance, lessoning us without a single spoken word.

23 April 2010 10:04pm

When my good friend laughs, he laughs with all that he is. His body pulls back and his face tilts up. His shoulders drop and his eyes close. And, with this table laid, his mouth opens and he laughs skyward beyond the boundaries of what is known as human. The sound reverberates through his person and bleeds into the world around him. The colors of his surrounding context burn on their surfaces and the sunlight turns to wind. People turn to look, even distances away, and catch themselves smiling on their return, plagued as with a virus, powerless against such a force. Even the neighborhood loosens. Hardened dysfunction in nearby marriages cracks a sudden fracture. Children forget their fever. Any rain is imbued with silver and any night is threaded with safety. You see, this is because when my friend laughs, he becomes a priest of the most high God. The whole world notices and is reminded of right and wrong.

Shake and wail, you forces committed to oppression and chaos, for he will soon stand in your vicinity. He will arrive with the fanfare of a missioned knighted rider and will cast the net of his joy wide enough to destroy you all.

21 April 2010 1:23pm

Hello. A tremble of something grandiose is sent into the heart of our tall gaunt land still troubled by its own conclusions. The tremble shimmers down from deep and beyond, echoes off the banister and through the hallways, unhindered by our strongest of walls, and (impossible) takes rest in the ear of the exhausted. Strained is heard the whisper again (myth no more): talitha koum. And suddenly the lifeless hills are alive and pealing with a swift and roaring and lovely proclamation.

"Toss loose your responsible isolation and be set free. Push over your bags, my children, and rise from your hovels. Life was meant to be had standing, garnering blisters and toning calves, the flute lilting in the distance as you are walking through the planted rows on the way to a wedding feast. The old among you know this already: tender eyes are dried by the motion of a grabbed wrist and a certain solid pull upwards. Off the floor! Live! Stand and loose your breath! You will rattle on your weakened knees, tilt back your neck, and you will shout, 'Oh my God'. Tired man form a circle with that newly-walking girl, and in her first steps and in your last, let the house ring with beating time. The world outside will turn its curious ear to your open door, will remember the image of God in humanity, and my nighted earth will resonate in return with an equally furious joy." (selah)

12 March 2010 12:18pm

For the difficult life, there is no departure. The now healed blind man struggles with his new vanity. The nation of freed slaves finds its taxes due. The goal is reached, an award received, an audience is gained, and yet the person returns to a bedroom, a bathroom, a mattress in the dark somewhere. They lay down. In the silence of that place, a creeping slick of heavy sobriety eases its way into the heart. The shining goal they struggled to reach has revealed itself to be a false summit. Cresting the ridge, pregnant with celebration, they halt startled, staring wordless and unbelieving because the mountaintop is still beyond them. So off they climb, convincing themselves that the next ridge is the true summit, that life will arrive if they simply give it enough sweat. How many people live troubled by this lie?

Please, remember me

And how it lost me all I wanted.

When Jesus came across a man named Lazarus who had died, there were people at the tomb full of lament. In beautiful poignancy, the author of the gospel simply writes two words in Greek: Jesus wept. The shape of the verb 'wept' is aorist, which means the listener (two thousand years ago) would have seen Jesus take a moment to cry and then regain himself. And not for Lazarus but for the mourners, not for the dead but the living.

So he calls Lazarus out from his grave, and people are amazed. Of course Lazarus just dies sometime later. Why bring Lazarus back from the dead only to die again? The only thing I can imagine is that Lazarus' resurrection, the miracle, brings people to see that there is a God, and that this God cares about them.

Thomas Merton once said that those who are filled with the love of God hear news about the end of the world and laugh. While I do hurt for the world's poor, isolated, and chaotic, I feel with Merton's statement. The only summit I know is what Jesus showed them when he pulled Lazarus out: there is a God bigger than this and he is good. Life is still difficult, this is the theme of the earth. But filled with his goodness, nothing seems too unnerving anymore. A difficult day only brings me closer, hardship becomes an activator for my heart to turn God's way instead of leverage for despair.

And people wonder how those living in poverty can have such hard lives and still contain such song.

   

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Archive 57

           31 May 2010 3:11pm                                                   

I am relapsing to a kitchen far away. Coming to cook are Thomas and Vincent, my flatmates. We aim to make ugali and boiled chicken with greens. The power has failed just as the sun went down, so the blue burners are all what light the room. I look for candles, walking on that red painted concrete, smooth in the blackness, and enter my oh-familiar room. Blindly I am feeling at nooks between books on my shelves for anything waxy. My hand touches a mangrove leaf from the Gambia. I go to the next shelf down. I pass a water jug between more books, a necklace and a flashlight without batteries. Then the kitchen is emanates a soft glow, so I leave and celebrate with Tom since he has found a worn candle. He dribbles hot wax and sticks the lit stub firm to the countertop. The cooking begins. Of course, its only half about the food.

We are venting about our professors by doing raucously bad impressions as the greens simmer and spit in their oil. Tom is commenting on things as he is fighting the ugali with a wooden spoon, shaking slight amounts of Unga into the boiling pot until it has the right thickness. The burner rattles, always in the same way.

We are fetching a few plastic plates out of the cupboard, and Tom places the steaming maize in the table's center. He cuts it into slices. We sit on wooden chairs and he gives thanks. The word 'thank' it is given such gusto. Such gust. "We thank you Lord..." he always goes. The gratitude jars me, as usual. The room is pungent with God's provision.

We are tearing at the steaming maize meal, hand-kneading it bite size. As we go on, Vincent grins and tells about his children in Malawi. He tells about their neediness when he just wants a rest. "Not now!" he says to them. "Your father is tired!" Tom pipes up, asking if maybe the children picked up this neediness by watching their father talk to their mother. Vincent breaks into laughter, Tom's close behind. I'm a heavy laugher too, so we are shaking the room. (Who arranges such company?) Suddenly the compressor to the fridge clatters, which means the power is back. I reach out and snap on the overhead bulb. We do dishes, still going on. Finally, Tom takes the candle with him. I am in my room, leveled by the commonality, full of the food we share, soaking.

I returned to that kitchen last month after two years had passed. It was full daylight though, and somebody had left it dirty. I stood in the doorway, pensive, and the memories of our magnificent dinners, those steaming blocks of ugali, those brothers of mine, came all at once.

I live in Washington State with a bunch of new folks now. Yesterday evening, as that soothing Seattle daylight fell down and away, we grilled cobs of sweetcorn on our back deck. There were bottles of wine and nachos on the table. But, of course, it was not really about the food.

           20 May 2010 9:56am                                                   

Throughout their existence, humans declared that things they did not understand were the work of the divine. The blazing sun, without fail, appeared and disappeared by an unseen eternal locomotion. Rain fell from heaven. Unbelievably, for most of human history there was not much correlation between intercourse and childbirth. Many thought pregnancy was inspired by a woman bathing in a lake or river, susceptible to the supernatural forces held within. I think of all the times as a child when I was on a boat, fishing with my father or canoeing at camp. I would brace my chest against the aluminum ridge of the vessel's edge and stare down into the murk with transfixed fascination. Mysterious things were lying latent in those depths, evidenced by the slick, gasping, hook-jawed creatures we drew forth by patient baiting. What else? A sunken boat? A boot? A gargantuan sturgeon who might swallow my boy-body whole? Better not lean so far forward, I would tell myself. And then my arm would draw my hand forward and quietly drift it over lip of the boat. I would gingerly push the tip of my forefinger into the surface of the dark liquid. Taut nerved and enchanted, I spent an hour provoking any lurking monster below to try and nip my digit.

Then, as our race began to understand complexity, we began to declare we had found the reasons for these things. The sun, who previously could humble and blind us by its own power, was reduced to a dumb mechanical looping ball of hot stone. Our methods invented good vaccinations and movable type, yet bleached the world of its color. A thing's value suddenly was established by its utility. Wordsworth saw this, lowered his eyes and muttered, "We murder to dissect."

I remember studying RNA replication in college. I watched awestruck as these strands, spiraled like pasta (why?), unzipped and matched themselves to proteins, spinning shut once the orders were delivered. I realized that a kaleidoscope of microscopic ribbons were spinning open and shut inside me, truly spinning open and shut towards their proteined partners. I am alive, able to sing songs and have friends, because of their dance.

We have not ended the place of wonder but pushed it. The boundary where we are delighted by what we do not understand has been relegated by our scientific arrogance away from life's center. Yet it can appear if we take enough time to stare with an open heart. This is because, thankfully, there is no end to anything. Small things are made of smaller things, tiny weaved of the tinier. Down and down the composition goes. Try and find the edge of any table. Peer down to find that edge and you will zoom in forever. Or ask a scientist "What is reality really?" He will request a shot of whiskey, and his wandering postulations will begin to sound like a child explaining where babies come from. Last I heard, our smartest scientists theorize that all of the world is composed of minute strings which order the world (here a cliff, here an olive) through their trembling music.

I want to pull the place of wonder back to where it was, back to the exhilaration of dipping my finger in the lake, back to stories of aflame angels appearing over flocks at night, back until it collapses over everything. We were right all along. The world is steeped in unknowns, and by extension is thick with miracles. This roiling race of hominids may seek to find stability by exhuming the world's mechanism, but when will they learn that peace is found in wonder? When will we see that love of creation and Creator, the path to the planet's health, is less a math equation than a romance? How desperately do we need folks, in this overwrought age, to fill the world with such meaning?

I chide myself to remember Annie Dillard's realization that nothing shines brighter than what it reflects. All this beauty is the canvas of an even more beautiful God. And I am bursting.

           13 May 2010 8:56pm                                                   

And without warning, a good thing of God appears and falls into place, graceful as a waxing moon, undeserved, soundless and right as rain. Oh give thanks for good things, like a package waiting on the welcome mat, its handwritten address and scissored sections of tape. What can one do on the way up the step but halt and become stilled by its arrival? What option but to bend (or bow), to cup it by its foundation and bring it inside? What option but to melt, and then to believe in purity again?

Oh the rightness of good things, how I would be rended useless without you, hamstrung, cancerous with cynicism. Instead, I believe in a better world like one led to a kitchen by the smell of cooking, submitted to the odor, breathless from the debut.

           26 April 2010 9:14am                                                   

And so the sound of that tremble is still ringing in our ears to this very day. A quiet lull may have settled again upon our land, and we may be working these days with diligent unexpectant normalcy, but the memory remains and a remnant of that time still hangs quiet and heavy as a morning fog in the pocked places of the ground.

When that tremendous time of impetus quietly snuck its way out the door, it left something behind. For reasons unknown, getting up most mornings has come with a new ease. And we seem to argue less these days. We spoke about it last week, how the power and music of the spirit of God took us all by surprise and threw us by the collar out the door and onto the stony ground, how it sobered us to the right things of this world, and breathed the most meaningful peace into our hearts that we had ever felt. We spoke about how deeply we long for its return, how we wish we could summon it like a newborn or invite it over like a relative. Of course, it doesn't work that way. If it could be summoned then it would be misused, and there's no way it would ever allow itself to be taken advantage of like that.

No all we can do is turn our minds to the memory of that tumultuous time where God came into our grasp and remember what it was like. We must craft songs, we agreed on this, because poetry is all what could even get close to describing the way we were shaking alive. We have to tell the coming generation about this, make the story potent and laden with power so that it can have a similar coloring on their lives as well.

Oh, but something has stayed behind. Just this morning I was doing the usual preparations and something caught me softly by the chin and turned my head to a memory of my father talking brightly about nothing in particular, and I realized it hasn't left at all. Its only sunk below the surface, stirring us from the underground, guiding our oblivious and fractured attention from vanity to importance, moving us to emulate its love and valiance, lessoning us without a single spoken word.

           23 April 2010 10:04pm                                                   

When my good friend laughs, he laughs with all that he is. His body pulls back and his face tilts up. His shoulders drop and his eyes close. And, with this table laid, his mouth opens and he laughs skyward beyond the boundaries of what is known as human. The sound reverberates through his person and bleeds into the world around him. The colors of his surrounding context burn on their surfaces and the sunlight turns to wind. People turn to look, even distances away, and catch themselves smiling on their return, plagued as with a virus, powerless against such a force. Even the neighborhood loosens. Hardened dysfunction in nearby marriages cracks a sudden fracture. Children forget their fever. Any rain is imbued with silver and any night is threaded with safety. You see, this is because when my friend laughs, he becomes a priest of the most high God. The whole world notices and is reminded of right and wrong.

Shake and wail, you forces committed to oppression and chaos, for he will soon stand in your vicinity. He will arrive with the fanfare of a missioned knighted rider and will cast the net of his joy wide enough to destroy you all.

           21 April 2010 1:23pm                                                   

Hello. A tremble of something grandiose is sent into the heart of our tall gaunt land still troubled by its own conclusions. The tremble shimmers down from deep and beyond, echoes off the banister and through the hallways, unhindered by our strongest of walls, and (impossible) takes rest in the ear of the exhausted. Strained is heard the whisper again (myth no more): talitha koum. And suddenly the lifeless hills are alive and pealing with a swift and roaring and lovely proclamation.

"Toss loose your responsible isolation and be set free. Push over your bags, my children, and rise from your hovels. Life was meant to be had standing, garnering blisters and toning calves, the flute lilting in the distance as you are walking through the planted rows on the way to a wedding feast. The old among you know this already: tender eyes are dried by the motion of a grabbed wrist and a certain solid pull upwards. Off the floor! Live! Stand and loose your breath! You will rattle on your weakened knees, tilt back your neck, and you will shout, 'Oh my God'. Tired man form a circle with that newly-walking girl, and in her first steps and in your last, let the house ring with beating time. The world outside will turn its curious ear to your open door, will remember the image of God in humanity, and my nighted earth will resonate in return with an equally furious joy." (selah)

           12 March 2010 12:18pm                                                   

For the difficult life, there is no departure. The now healed blind man struggles with his new vanity. The nation of freed slaves finds its taxes due. The goal is reached, an award received, an audience is gained, and yet the person returns to a bedroom, a bathroom, a mattress in the dark somewhere. They lay down. In the silence of that place, a creeping slick of heavy sobriety eases its way into the heart. The shining goal they struggled to reach has revealed itself to be a false summit. Cresting the ridge, pregnant with celebration, they halt startled, staring wordless and unbelieving because the mountaintop is still beyond them. So off they climb, convincing themselves that the next ridge is the true summit, that life will arrive if they simply give it enough sweat. How many people live troubled by this lie?

Please, remember me
My misery
And how it lost me all I wanted.
-Sam Beam

When Jesus came across a man named Lazarus who had died, there were people at the tomb full of lament. In beautiful poignancy, the author of the gospel simply writes two words in Greek: Jesus wept. The shape of the verb 'wept' is aorist, which means the listener (two thousand years ago) would have seen Jesus take a moment to cry and then regain himself. And not for Lazarus but for the mourners, not for the dead but the living.

So he calls Lazarus out from his grave, and people are amazed. Of course Lazarus just dies sometime later. Why bring Lazarus back from the dead only to die again? The only thing I can imagine is that Lazarus' resurrection, the miracle, brings people to see that there is a God, and that this God cares about them.

Thomas Merton once said that those who are filled with the love of God hear news about the end of the world and laugh. While I do hurt for the world's poor, isolated, and chaotic, I feel with Merton's statement. The only summit I know is what Jesus showed them when he pulled Lazarus out: there is a God bigger than this and he is good. Life is still difficult, this is the theme of the earth. But filled with his goodness, nothing seems too unnerving anymore. A difficult day only brings me closer, hardship becomes an activator for my heart to turn God's way instead of leverage for despair.

And people wonder how those living in poverty can have such hard lives and still contain such song.

 

          

Year 5
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