It's Not About Me

Spring Cleaning

Not spring yet, but no snow to play in here, so I freshened up the book and music lists. Look left!

Best o' Twenty-Eleven

Ah, the "best of lists", for a blogger it's like popping ducks on a pond...  As usual, some of this stuff has been around for years, but it's new to me!

BEST NEW MUSIC:

Our new house band - Elephant Revival. Have been enjoying this Nederland, Colorado based group most of the year. Their genre? Try on "psychedelic country" or "transcendental folk" for a starter. I'm thinking maybe "grassgrass". We enjoyed them live just last night along with lots of old and young space-dancing hippies as we groooved to a 3-hour, end-of-the-year concert. You can get a little flavor on this YouTube, "Remembering A Beginning".

 

 

Continuing the alt/grass theme, I've also fallen for the Swedish group, Väsen. Got to see them this past spring touring with Mike Marshall & Darol Anger. This band features national champion fiddle and guitar players plus Olov Johansson on the nyckelharpa which looks like a cross between a fiddle, lap dulcimer and accordion. You'll pick up a decidedly Swedish flavor on this piece, Eklunda Polska #3.

  

 

FAVORITE QUOTES:

"History may not repeat itself, but it rhymes."   - Mark Tain

"Everywhere the human race goes, it drags a bell curve around with it."   - Doug Wilson

"Ignore the environment. It will go away."   - bumpersticker

"If God does nothing random, there must always be something to learn."   - John Calvin

"They lived outside. They lived with horses and cattle and dust and snow and moved all around a country they somehow could not learn to love because another geography was already inside them."  - Mark Jenkins, "Off The Map"

"If you're tired of parties, you go to the wrong church."   - Matt Barley

"When suffering restores us, burns away the empty shallowness,
And softening the heart, to be broken break and poured out wine...
When it rains it pours, turns life into a chalice,
There to nourish every soul, one at a time."

                                           - Phil Keaggy,  "Chalice" 

 

FAVORITE READS:

 

Patrick O'Brian continues to weave a spectacular tale. How can one man know so much sea faring history? How can one man write so many incredible sentences?

 

 

 

An absorbing adventure of a trek across Siberia by bicycle. I learned a new Russian word: "balota" болото (for "swamp"). I also got a peek inside of late 20th century Russia. Not many smiles there.

 

 

 

 

What a perfect storm of men and women that came together in late 18th-century America. Oh that a few stray bands of such weather would blow over us today.

 

 

 

 

RC Sproul walks you through the book of "Romans". A book that has literally changed the world (and more than once).

 

 

 

 

 

SCREEN FAVORITES: I did find Sherlock and Capt. Jack Sparrow to be entertaining. ("You walk like a girl." "You should know!") But really not much to be excited about on the big screen. There were however some jewels you can find in DVD sets such as "John Adams" for starters. Even better is the HBO adaptation of "The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency" and the BBC's "Foyle's War". 

                                     

Thoreau on "Walking"

Henry David and I don’t quite share the same worldview. He wears the lens of a humanist. My spectacles are Calvinistic- the kind with no lines on them. (Aren’t they called “progressives”?) We do however see eye-to-eye on the extravagant beauty of nature and its renewing quality for the human spirit - especially when experienced on two feet.

Recently I finished Thoreau’s essay titled “Walking”. It may best be known for its oft-used quote, “In wildness is the preservation of the world.” Again, not sure I’d sign off on that one, but at least he wasn’t wishy-washy. Thoreau’s pen makes strong work thru the first third of the essay, but then Henry wanders off the path and starts to blather. I had to work to finish the piece, but was rewarded with this jewel at the end. Thoreau describes a particular light that I did not have the pleasure of experiencing until I moved west in to big sky country. Every once in a while the sun will peek out just after sunrise or just before sunset in a space between the horizon and a blanket of vapor. These long rays dance off the cloud ceiling and the earth below creating a magical golden light that sets everything aglow. Photographers call it “gap light”. Much of the diffusely diffracted white light is eliminated, frequently leaving a yellow color cast and a more polarized light that brings out relief in objects and makes colors pop. Not surprisingly, Thoreau describes it better than I just did:

“We had a remarkable sunset one day last November. I was walking in a meadow, the source of a small brook, when the sun at last, just before setting, after a cold, gray day, reached a clear stratum in the horizon, and the softest, brightest evening sunlight fell on the dry grass and on the stems of the trees in the opposite horizon and on the leaves of the shrub oaks on the hillside, while our shadows stretched long over the meadow eastward, as if we were the only motes in its beams. It was such a light as we could not have imagined a moment before, and the air also was so warm and serene that nothing was wanting to make a paradise of that meadow. When we reflected that this was not a solitary
phenomenon, never to happen again, but that it would happen
forever and ever, an infinite number of evenings, and cheer and
reassure the latest child that walked there, it was more glorious 
still.

The sun sets on some retired meadow, where no house is visible, with all the glory and splendor that it lavishes on cities, and perchance as it has never set before — where there is but a solitary marsh hawk to have his wings gilded by it, or only a musquash
looks out from his cabin, and there is some little black-veined brook in the midst of the marsh, just beginning to meander, winding slowly round a decaying stump. We walked in so pure and bright a light, gilding the withered grass and leaves, so softly and serenely bright, I thought I had never bathed in such a golden flood, without a ripple or a murmur to it. The west side of every wood and rising ground gleamed like the boundary of Elysium, and the sun on our backs seemed like a gentle herdsman driving us home at evening.”

Hell's Bottom, Colorado

Loops of orange baling twine, tobacco cans of rusted nails and a jar of aging veterinary salve, all in an unkempt shop – this is my first recollection of cowboy country. The cowboys come second.  They come wandering into my emergency room, legs caked with mud and manure, frequently decorated with dried blood on torn denim. Supine on a gurney, the ubiquitous belt buckle points to the ceiling. The older the cowboy the more brass you can see through the worn, silver plating. The cowboys were always quiet, in fact too quiet, never whining or fussing. How do you quickly identify broken bones and busted spleens if there are no complaints? It always turned out OK though. If they made it to the ER, they made it home.

My time in ranch country was insulated from that hard life by air conditioning and the reasonable income of a country doctor.  Quite appropriately I was never fully admitted to the ranching fraternity, but our family did receive their hospitality. We were privileged to get a taste of western life.  That’s why I found such pleasure entering Laura Pritchett’s world of “Hell’s Bottom, Colorado”.  It was a chance to feast on the sights, sounds and smells enjoyed by those wrestling a living from the land - those attempting the alchemy of translating short-grass to protein to dollar bills.

Two stories are told in “Hell’s Bottom...” – one the story of high plains, the other an extended family, three generations, some marginally successful, some less. Just as in the old Nature vs. Nurture argument, I frequently wonder if it is the hard life of ranching that produces hard people or whether it just attracts them. Despite its beauty, the adversity of this Colorado landscape, this weather and these cows provide the trial that demonstrates what the characters of Pritchett’s world are made of.  In their world, just as I in my own western sojourn, redemption is typically earned thru toil and only occasionally grace. This ratio needs to be turned up side down. No one can out-work the West. 

     

    “Carolyn rubs her hand across the middle of her chest and then raises it to wave as they turn their horses back around. They wave back before heading towards Del, whom she can barely see if she squints. He’s fixing fence along the road that runs through their place. All day he’ll be working – walking for miles, tightening the barbed wire here, replacing a strand there."

    "What she tells people when she speaks of her love for him is this: That she fell in love with him because he can fix fence and because he plays the piano. That she met him in a classical music class in college, that he tilts his head toward particular pieces of music, even if he’s in a restaurant, even if he’s in the old truck – that he does this and still knows how to break a horse, snap a chicken’s neck, fix a fence. That when his hands rest on the piano keyboard, they are scraped, callused, dirty.”

 

In Hell’s Bottom, grace and toil, beauty and brokenness tangle together, just like the baling twine on the shelf. The author tells her story in freestanding, yet connected chapters, recounted by different characters. I delighted in the perspective of a young person’s voice used to narrate an adult’s book.  Their relative innocence and dependency on their dysfunctional parents lends an added tenor of apprehension to the tale. Here, Jess pours her heart out to her mother after the latest boyfriend makes her brother retrieve just-shot ducks from a bitterly cold, November pond.

     

    “’He had to swim with all seven ducks, and Mom, he needs a new pair of tennis shoes.’ All of a sudden, even though I don’t mean to, I’m crying hard and leaning into her shoulder and I can feel her surprise, and I just keep gulping in air and the words keep coming out when there’s enough air to form them. ‘His shoes are so old, and I need a new coat and it’s so cold, and he shouldn’t have to be swimming, he’s not a dog.’ I’m just pouring out everything, but I manage to keep quiet about the main thing I’m thinking, which is, ‘How come you never notice any of this?’”

 

Yet another child, Leanne, a young teen in the only intact family understands the blessing of her parent’s vocation as she helps out pregging cows at an early, autumn roundup.

    

    "Years layer up and weave together; bundles of images swirl together in my mind. I remember how turquoise the sky can be, how the cottonwoods drop golden leaves, how a calf being born slides from its mother and falls into spring snow. From today I will remember Dad on the chestnut horse rounding up the calves, memorize Mom’s slap on Billy’s shoulder, capture Jess’s singsong chatter to no one, absorb the heat and the sky and the smells. I will remember this warm fall day and the summer that came before and the winter that is about to come. Someday, when I leave here, I will close my eyes and remember, and I hope it will be enough to hold my heart together.”

 

These are pleasant memories that anyone who's grown up in a rural life will resonate with, yet the lives of “Hell’s Bottom’s” characters play out choices that make a hard life harder. If you love the West, you’ll love the splendor with which Laura Pritchett paints her Colorado world. You’ll love the intrigue of this family, but often you'll be thankful they're not kin.

Namaste

"A luminous mountain morning. Mist and fire smoke, sun-shafts and dark ravines, a peak of Annapurna poises on soft clouds. In fresh light, to the peeping of baby chickens, we take breakfast in the village tea house, and are under way well before seven. A child dragging bent, useless legs is crawling up the hill outside of the village. Nose to the stones, goat dung and muddy trickles, she pulls herself along like a broken cricket. We falter, ashamed of our strong step, and noticing this she gazes up, clear-eyed, without resntment - it seems much worse that she is pretty. In Bengal, GS says stiffly, beggars will break their children's knees to achieve this pitiable effect for business purposes. This is his way of expressing his distress, but the child who lies at our boots is not a beggar, she is merely a child, staring in curiosity at tall, white strangers. I long to give her something- a new life? - yet am afraid to tamper with such dignity. And so I smile as best I can and say 'Namaste!' 'Good morning!' How absurd! And her voice follows as we go away, a small, clear, smiling voice - 'Namas-te!' - a Sanskrit word for greeting and parting that means, 'I salute you.'"     

                                                                  - Peter Matthiesen, "The Snow Leopard"

Boys, Time To Get In Touch With Your Inner Grownup

My college friends will claim this post to be a case of the pot taunting the kettle. Be that as it may, last week the WSJ poked a well-deserved stick into a hornet's nest when it published an essay by Kay Hymowitz asking, "Where Have All The Good Men Gone?" The problem is all too apparent - plenty of high quality, marriageable women and scads of 20-something guys too busy playing video games and farting to notice.

Like so many generalizations there are plenty of exceptions. I have met an astonishing number of young men whose spiritual and vocational maturity makes hash of where I was at a similar age. (Most of these the product of very intentional parenting.) Still, the ratio of worthy guys to worthy gals mimics that of a floating iceberg.

The author came up with plenty of reasons for this modern phenomenon of prolonged male adolescence. I can give you a dozen more, but you'll have to email me for that extended rant. I'll leave you with a couple of quotes:

"Single men have never been civilizations most responsible actors; they continue to be more troubled and less successful than men who deliberately choose to become husbands and fathers. So we can be disgusted if some of them continue to live in rooms decorated with "Star Wars" posters and crushed beer cans and to treat women like disposable estrogen toys, but we shouldn't be surprised."

"The guys we find, are more like the kids we baby sat than the dads who drove us home."

Goodnight Amazon!

Currently I'm reading on my Kindle - Jules Verne's "Twenty-Thousand Leagues Under The Sea", David McCullough's "John Adams", and RC Sproul's "Commentary on John". I love my Kindle. I love the ability to having an electronic library at my fingertips, ain't this the truth, however:

"Maybe I'm a Luddite because I feel sorry for children who read "Goodnight Moon" on a phone."

              - Dan Newman, from WSJ op-ed

The Prodigal Daughter (A Christmas Story) Part I

I read this story years ago. It's by Phillip Yancey, from "What's So Amazing About Grace?" A bit longer than the average post and more than worth your while.

A young girl grows up on a cherry orchard just above Traverse City, Michigan. Her parents, a bit old fashioned, tend to overreact to her nose ring, the music she listens to, and the length of her skirts. They ground her a few times, and she seethes inside. "I hate you!" she screams at her father when he knocks on the door of her room after an argument, and that night she acts on a plan she has mentally rehearsed scores of times. She runs away.

She has visited Detroit only once before, on a bus trip with her church youth group to watch the Tigers play. Because newspapers in Traverse City report in lurid detail the gangs, drugs, and violence in downtown Detroit, she concludes that is probably the last place her parents will look for her. California, maybe Florida, but not Detroit. 

Her second day there she meets a man who drives the biggest car she's ever seen. He offers her a ride, buys her lunch, arranges a place for her to stay. He gives her some pills that make her feel better than she's ever felt before. She was right all along, she decides: her parents were keeping her from all the fun. 

The good life continues for a month, two months, a year. The man with the big car — she calls him "Boss" — teaches her a few things that men like. Since she's underage, men pay a premium for her. She lives in a penthouse and orders room service whenever she wants. Occasionally she thinks about the folks back home, but their lives now seem so boring and provincial that she can hardly believe she grew up there. She has a brief scare when she sees her picture printed on the back of a milk carton with the headline, "Have you seen this child?" But by now she has blond hair, and with all the makeup and bodypiercing jewelry she wears, nobody would mistake  her for a child. Besides, most of her friends are runaways, and nobody squeals in Detroit. 

After a year, the first sallow signs of illness appear, and it amazes her how fast the boss turns mean. "These days, we can't mess around," he growls, and before she knows it she's out on the street without a penny to her name. She still turns a couple of tricks a night, but they don't pay   much, and all the money goes to support her habit. When winter blows in she finds her self sleeping on metal grates outside the big department stores. "Sleeping" is the wrong word — a teenage girl at night in downtown Detroit can never relax her guard. Dark bands circle her eyes. Her cough worsens. One night, as she lies awake listening for footsteps, all of a sudden everything about her life looks different. She no longer feels like a woman of the world.  She feels like a little girl, lost in a cold and frightening city. She begins to whimper. Her pockets are empty and she's hungry. She needs a fix.  She pulls her legs tight underneath her and shivers under the newspapers she's piled atop her coat. Something jolts a synapse of memory and a single image fills  her mind: of May in Traverse City, with her golden retriever dashing through millions of cherry trees, all in flower at once.

"God, why did I leave," she says to herself, and pain stabs at her heart. My dog back home eats better than I do now. She's sobbing, and she knows in a flash that more than anything else in the  world she wants to go home. 

Three straight phone calls, three straight connections with the answering machine. She hangs up without leaving a message the first two times, but the third time she says, "Dad, Mom, it's me. I was wondering about maybe coming home. I'm catching a bus up your way, and it'll get there about midnight tomorrow. If you're not there, well, I guess I'll just stay on the bus until it hits Canada." 

To Be Continued...

So Many Books, So Little Time

Book list recreated as well. Look left!

Kindle Talk

I've had my Kindle now for about a year and a half. I still love the feel of a book in my hand, but I also use my Kindle a lot. The feel, weight and contrast of the device is as good if not better than the printed page. Not only is it an elegant little machine, it adds searchability, easy underlining, note-taking and dog-earring, only the latter of which you can do with paper. If you want access to your notes and highlighting you have your own private Kindle web page where they're waiting for you. There is even now a 3rd-generation Kindle - smaller, lighter, even better contrast and supposedly a month of battery life.

Find a free book on line? Say from John Piper's website? Just send the PDF to Amazon and they wire it back to your Kindle for a dime.

I thought all the Kindle needed is color and a good web browser, so the Apple iPad launch had me pretty jazzed. (Although were there any women on the committee who named that thing?) It only took a minute of having the iPad in hand to know it was no match for the Kindle when it comes to an e-book - too heavy, too wide and underlining was way too awkward. Then you watch people trying to use it. They can't figure out whether they should hold it in their hands, lay it flat on the table (terrible angle) or use a stand to prop it up (like a laptop).  Hmmm. Why not just keep your laptop. I hear there's rumors of smaller iPad in the works. Let me know - I'm sure someone will make a better ebook than the Kindle. They just haven't yet.

Here's Jeffrey Bezos on his baby.

"Over some time horizon, books will be read on electronic devices. Physical books won't completely go away, just as horses haven't completely gone away.

If you think about books, it's astonishing. It's very hard to find a technology that has remained in mostly the same form for 500 years. And anything that has stubbornly resisted improvement for 500 years is going to be hard to improve. To do that, you have to capture the essential element of a book, which is that it disappears when you get into the flow of the story. None of us when we're reading a book think about the ink and glue and the stitching. All that fades away and you get into the author's universe."  - Jeffrey Bezos, Amazon CEO