hm, i feel like i've posted this before.

William Carlos Williams (1883-1963)

so much depends

XXII

1 so much depends

2 upon

3 a red wheel

4 barrow

5 glazed with rain

6 water

7 beside the white

8 chickens

more notes

choose adulthood,
honor your commitments.


and i wish more women would vocalize this:

I for one am not interested in being a man's buddy. I'm tired of being the "sister" - I want to be someone's wife.

note to self

listen with both ears, but hold your ground also...

The Great Zucchini!

plus later discussion.

he looks like the janitor on scrubs, btw.
:D

Do the math, if you can handle the results. This unmarried, 35-year-old
community college dropout makes more than $100,000 a year, with a two-day
workweek. Not bad for a complete idiot.

If you want to understand why the Great Zucchini has this kind of success, you need look no further than the stresses of suburban Washington parenting. The attendant brew of love, guilt and toddler-set social pressures puts an arguably unrealistic value on someone with the skills, and the willingness, to control and delight a roistering roomful of preschoolers for a blessed half-hour.

Even before they respond to a tickle, most babies will laugh at peekaboo. It's their first "joke." They are reacting to a sequence of events that begins with the presence of a familiar, comforting face. Then, suddenly, the face disappears, and you can read in the baby's expression momentary puzzlement and alarm. When the face suddenly reappears, everything is orderly in the baby's world again. Anxiety is banished, and the baby reacts with her very first laugh.

At its heart, laughter is a tool to triumph over fear. As we grow older, our senses of humor become more demanding and refined, but that basic, hard-wired reflex remains. We need it, because life is scary. Nature is heartless, people can be cruel, and death and suffering are inevitable and arbitrary. We learn to tame our terror by laughing at the absurdity of it all.

By laughing at that recognition, you are rising above it, and blunting its power to disturb.

later comments:

Arlington, Va.: Dear Gene --

It is Saturday morning, and I have just finished reading your article for the third time. My son just asked me why I am crying.

Thank you

Gene Weingarten: Thank you.

Now, continuing the theme we have been developing -- ask yourself why you were crying. Ernest Becker would say it was because you came face to face, heart to heart, with the central fact of the pain of human existence and our continuing fight to transcend it.

You either have to laugh, or cry.

now my problem is not being able to stop!!

i will probably spend my whole life trying to answer this question

(aptly put in sandra mccracken's "rock of ages"...)


who am i that you have died to make me free?

still gets me every time.

Reason

words and music by Caleb Carruth (c)2002

You are the reason that i love

You are the reason that i am

and You are Love and You are I AM

You have no variation

You have no shifting shadow

and You are Love, and You are I AM

and You'll come like a thief in the night

will i be waiting or found wanting

when You come in Your power and might

will i be watching when the trumpet sounds

You are the Father of Heavenly Lights

with gifts from above

giving death to Him giving birth to us

You have no variation

You have no shifting shadow

and you are Love, and you are I AM

Give me reason for my life

tell me secrets of Your bride

mystery which you delight in keeping

cause I delight in finding

as always, here's a better summary of grace that i wasn't able to find for the weekend:


2 Corinthians 3:4-6

Such is the confidence that we have through Christ toward God. Not that we are sufficient in ourselves to claim anything as coming from us, but our sufficiency is from God, who has made us competent to be ministers of a new covenant, not of the letter but of the Spirit. For the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.

JJ Heller
"Make Believe"

You said you couldn’t keep me when you were seventeen
Too young to be a father
You kissed my hand and took your leave
And you taught me how to make believe

Make believe I was a gift to you from heaven
Make believe that you would take me as your own
Make believe that you would set the mark of what a man should be
You taught me how to make believe

And now that I’ve grown older
I long for us to meet
I have a million questions
But most of all I want to see
If all of it was make believe

Another year has come and gone
I am living with your family
And I feel right at home
In the place where I always wanted to be

I’m going out this evening
I check the mirror twice
You stop me on the staircase
You kiss my hand and say that I look beautiful tonight

And I believe I was a gift to you from heaven
And I believe that you would take me as your own
I believe that you set the mark of what a man should be
Now I don’t have to make believe


at first i thought it was a love song for her husband.
but the birth father reunion makes more sense.
it's beautiful.

hmm so true.

"It was one thing for me to get to know Billy, learn to tutor him reasonably well, and learn also that he was himself and not a stand-in for me and my assumptions and aspirations; thereafter, I learned to relax with him, share with him the kind of person-to-person talk that resulted in his finding out about my sweet tooth and my discovering that he, too, had an insistent sweet tooth..."
-- robert coles, a call to service, p. 179

i love this. so freeing - teaching need not be intimidating, and he's so true in this chapter about how i learn much more from discipleship times than i "should." :D

Some glad morning when this life is o'er
I'll fly away
To a home on God's celestial shore,
I'll fly away (I'll fly away)


epic women's retreat 2007 :)

stuff to think about today...

a truly divine response to something off-putting: http://www.shaungroves.com/shlog/comments/recovering/


and a lincoln brewster song:

"For These Reasons"

For Your endless love (For Your endless love)
For the life You gave (For the life You gave)
For the second chance (For the second chance)
For Your priceless grace (For Your priceless grace)
For Your healing hands (For Your healing hands)
For the gift of peace (For the gift of peace)
For the blessed hope (For the blessed hope)
For the faith to believe (For the faith to believe)


Chorus:
For these reasons I praise You
For these reasons I worship You
(1st ending)
For these reasons I live to tell
of Your love to all the world
(2nd ending)
For these reasons I live to tell
of Your love to all the world

more to ponder...

“No doubt some will reply that God is not a God of disorder, incoherence, or arbitrariness, but a God of order. Of course he is. Unfortunately the whole of the Old Testament shows us that God’s order is not that which we conceive and desire. God’s order is not organization and institution (cf. the difference between judges and kings). It is not the same in every time and place. It is not a matter of repetition and habit. On the contrary, it resides in the fact that it constantly posits something new, a new beginning. Our God is a God of beginnings. There is in him no redundancy or circularity. Thus, if his church wants to be faithful to his revelation, it will be completely mobile, fluid, renascent, bubbling, creative, inventive, adventurous, and imaginative. It will never be perennial, and can never be organized or institutionalized. If the gates of death are not going to prevail against it, this is not because it is a good, solid, well organized fortress, but because it is alive; it is Life that is, as mobile, changing, and surprising as life. If it becomes a powerful fortified organization, it is because death has prevailed.”

— Jacques Ellul, The Subversion of Christianity

"A miracle is when the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. A miracle is where one plus one equals a thousand.”

--Frederick Buechner

jenna fischer interview...

"I don't know if Jim and Pam are ultimately meant to be together. I say this to producers all the time: ‘Sometimes that person helps you become the person that you're supposed to be to meet the person you're supposed to marry.’ Maybe that's our story. And if that's our story, that's still a beautiful story to tell. So if we're still on the air in 10 years and you're just not feeling Jim and Pam anymore, that's all right. I think we're open to letting it be that way. We're not committed to end this series as a wedding between Jim and Pam and a baby, you know? It's more of like a real life story."

catchy song... 22 yearold asian american artist from orange county

charlie chang
charlie chang ep
"savana"

chasing shadows and following ghosts
i'm running from an angel
just try and be while she smokes
yeah yeah

and i can feel the pain subside
but only for a moment
i didn't know that beauty cried

she said, "i wanna hear your song in my ear"
and as i drift off to sleep, savana sing to me

fading clockwork with no more hands
i'm countin' on disaster
for birth and life to debt a romance

i thought i saw the rain subside
but only for a moment
i didnt know that beauty cried

she said, "i wanna hear your song in my ear"
and as i drift off to sleep, savana sing to me
savana sing to me

we only need each other
she pulled me up from under
we only need each other
hold nothing back, hold nothing back

she said, "i wanna hear your song in my ear"
and as i drift off to sleep, savana sing to me
savana sing to me
savana sing to me
x2

savana sing...

hmm dont know if these are exact. but they are lovely. check it out if you can.