Sketches: From the Ocean

I scribbled this out in my notebook while getting toasted on New Smyrna Beach, Saturday, August 11. It's mostly practicing the art of noticing details and creating a sense of place in my writing. Like it as is. Don't know what to do with it. Posting here, with minimal editing for coherence.

There are some places we feel most alive. The ocean is mine.

I don't know why even the most noisy, crowded, touristy beach can feel like home. Maybe it really is all the people that help it come awake, at least today.

Tall women bronzed by the sun to the color of caramelized sugar. 

A middle-aged couple, tanned and fit, speeding their bicycles along the waves. 

Children defending sandcastles in colorful swimwear like armor, one even in full Batman gear -- boots, cape, and all.

An older couple under an umbrella, hand in hand. How many sunsets have they watched together here?

Young kids with boogie boards and surfer girls riding waves back to solid earth, accepting the risk that comes with the adventure.

I smell salt, sand, and coconut lotion. The surf never ends her song.

She's a siren, this ocean, like the ones in those ancient legends. She beckons us in, further, deeper. She pushes us back, because our fragile bones can't handle the weight.

I want to stay here forever, splashing clumsy in the waves, letting her defy gravity for me. Maybe we weren't made to always walk on solid ground. Maybe we were made to float as well, and this is God's gift to remind us.

I thought there would be a storm today, but instead, only wispy strokes of gray and white on endless blue upon blue mark the sky, and the edge of foam draws the line between sand and churning surf. I am mostly glad, though I would love to see a storm at sea someday.

For now, only sun, sweat, and my best SPF 50 efforts against sunburn are here to stain my notebook and blur the ink.

My beach read? N. T. Wright, Surprised by Hope. Fitting to read about renewal and recreation and hope here, in the face of one of God's most beautiful created gifts. Wild, ancient, and so unsafe, yet constantly being made new.

I wonder if it's time to return home, back to solid ground yet. The green sea beckons me to stay, but real life beckons me home.

High tide.

The water pushes closer to our camps and claims. The sea still reigns.

The Rhythmic Universe

"In The Spell of the Sensuous, the writer David Abram describes two friends meeting again after a long time. If we should chance to overhear them, he says, we might well notice 'a tonal, melodic layer of communication beneath the explicit meaning of the words, a rippling rise and fall of the voices in a sort of musical duet, rather like two birds singing to each other.'

"Each voice mimics a portion of the other's melody, at the same time adding its own inflection, which is then echoed by the original speaker, 'the two singing bodies tuning and attuning to one another, rediscovering a common register, remembering each other." This tuning and retuning, this remembering, is what is called 'entrainment'

"It is hardly surprising that human beings should attune to one another in this way. After all, we live in a rhythmic universe, in which the earth revolves around the sun and the moon around the earth. Our bodies are rhythmic organisms, containing breath and pulse and heart beat. If you put two grandfather clocks in the same room, their pendulums with fall into unison within a couple of days. In the same way, when people talk or sing or move together, we tend to 'entrain,' or synchronize our pace with one another. This is one of the delights of good conversation: not just the stated theme, the surface content, but the underlying pleasure of entrainment, the half-conscious pas de deux with someone else's mind."

~ Christian McEwen, World Enough & Time

***

I've always been fascinated by rhythm and resonance, so this was a really beautiful idea to me.

Making Readers Work + Not So Subtle Plug

The hardest writing class I ever took wasn't creative writing, or literary theory, or argument. It didn't involve writing instruction manuals or legal things. It wasn't even in the English department.

Nope. That hard class, the bane of my college writing existence, was Writing for Mass Media.

The journalism bit wasn't too bad. We wrote stories for the campus paper about important things, like student road construction angst or the drama department's upcoming Shakespeare production. But TV news... well, there's the thing. Take that news story I wrote for the campus paper and cut it down to two lines? Brevity, clarity, and just enough to give a sound byte for a distracted culture?

It should be easy. It's not.

I've gotten better at brevity since then, honing my skills on Twitter, learning to boil a thought down to the essence, quick and simple to digest. But, as most of my blog posts can attest, given unlimited space I can go way too long and convoluted; I even use semicolons now and then. (see?) And this is the writing I'm drawn to most. The experts say short and punchy, fast-paced, bullet points and don't you dare go past 400 words lest the masses fall asleep and/or riot.

That's why I was a bit intrigued by this article my friend Aj sent me: How Hard Should We Make Our Readers Work? He discusses the difference between literary and popular novels, and I kind of had a big "Yes!" moment reading it.

It’s interesting that “the more classical model” of reading, the one that requires “work,” has become “unfashionable.” As Ms. Smith suggests, nowadays we tend to approach books as we do movies — we want to be acted upon, rather than act. Among other things, the electronic age has heightened our expectations of a given media and lowered the requirements of participation. Rather than having to sit down and “work at a text,” we approach reading as a “spectator sport.”

So puzzling out a difficult text, engaging an author's mind scribbling notes in the margins, is old-fashioned, too hard. What do we gain, and what do we lose? I love words, and style. I want my breath stolen by a beautifully crafted sentence. I want lines that sparkle, make me gasp, send me reaching for a pen to write them down with wonder. And I want to relearn how to have long, thoughtful discussions with fellow readers. I suppose I'm not the only nerd with hopelessly unbeachy books, and I'm okay with that.

Not so subtle plug!

If you're done with reading just for entertainment and want to have a deeper experience with words, Greener Trees is at it again. We just completed a wonderful six weeks reading The Mind of the Maker together, and next week we're starting Refractions by Makoto Fujimura. I promise, it won't be quite as heady, but it will be rewarding. Plus, this is a great group of people to read along with.

Go here for an overview and please consider joining us on August 20!

Friday Music!

I keep listening to this over and over and over because I'm so giddy that there is finally a new Mumford & Sons record coming out.

AND I'll be in Nashville on release day. (also giddy about that.) Which means a trip to Grimey's may be necessary before the flight home.

Also getting multiple repeats: Derek Webb's new album Ctrl. I love his wildly creative approach to music as art. This is trippy and wonderful and, of course, so very different from anything else he's done so far. You can buy it now on his website, or you can grab a 3 song sampler on Noisetrade for free. Be sure to pick up his side project Sola-Mi while you're there too. Also trippy, in a more Radiohead electronic meets haunting female voice meets sci-fi way. They just go together.

 

On vacation, yoga, and being made

Karin said I should write about my first yoga experience. So I did. Sort of. Then I had to get philosophical and stuff at the end.

I'm on vacation this week. An open-ended vacation, as I've now decided to call it, the kind where there are no plans other than the plan to not wake up early and never, ever go to work. This could either be the worst or best kind, but since I am horrible at planning exciting adventures for myself, this is usually the best I can do with those magical days I get paid to stay home.

For me, the funny thing about a week off with no plans is the disorienting effect of reclaiming 11 lost hours a day. Those hours of commuting and lunch breaking and working are suddenly free, open, empty mugs. My natural inclination is to fill them up! Do exciting things. Travel somewhere. Or in the very least, work like mad doing things at home.

But for the sake of that ongoing pursuit of stillness I talked about months ago, I suppose the greatest way to use them up is to take them as they come, find ways to insert a little meaning into them, get reacquainted with my hometown, and try things that I otherwise never have time or energy to do.

Hence, I took a community yoga class.

If you know me, then you know why this is hilarious and potentially embarrassing. Unflexible, uncoordinated, ungraceful me, contorting my body in odd positions is bound to be an interesting event. But, with a borrowed mat and the realization that the older I get, the more comfortable I am with making a public fool of myself, I decided to give it a shot.


"I don't want you to look at your left or your right," the instructor warned. "Go your own pace, and don't worry if you can't do all the poses. This is for you."

Good advice, considering we were eight women, already self-conscious enough in messy hair and workout clothes, standing in a downtown Mt. Dora cobblestone courtyard and about to perform for anyone who happened to walk or drive by. What would ordinarily be a sweltering summer evening actually turned out quite nice -- low hanging clouds, full of unreleasing rain, and a gentle breeze off the lake. A good thing too, because I never dreamed stretching and breathing would be such a workout.

There's an understandable skepticism about this kind of thing among some Christians... the ties to Eastern religion, the idea of disciplining the body as a means to meditation and spiritual practice. But honestly, it's hard to feel spiritual when every fiber of muscle tissue in your arms is screaming at you on your eighth downward dog pose, or when you're trying to make a tree pose that doesn't resemble a sapling in a hurricane.

Somewhere midway through the hour, I felt myself breathing deeper. By the end, lying on my mat under the gray sky, though my thoughts were still more along the lines of "Thank God that's over," at least I was quieted enough to feel the pulse of blood through my veins and my aching muscles. It wasn't some weird New Agey spiritual bliss, but it was a glimpse of that elusive stillness, just enough to ease the craving.


The mindset of our culture is to fill every moment, always be doing, and working hard. A strong work ethic is important, but I wonder if there's also a suspicion ingrained in our souls that if we are not constantly battling, studying, watching and tense, that the prowling lion of evil might have its way in us. Madeleine L'Engle, in Walking on Water, discussed the virtue of time for simply being:

"I sit on my favourite rock, looking over the brook, to take time away from busyness, time to be. I’ve long since stopped feeling guilty about taking being time; it’s something we all need for our spiritual health, and often we don’t take enough of it.

Perhaps this is the missing thing, the time to lie still and feel the blood rush, to watch the clouds race, to know that your heart still beats and be grateful for it. Perhaps even, it is time to hear the laughter of your Maker in the breeze.

The End in the Beginning

"We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always—
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one." ~ T.S. Eliot, "Little Gidding"


Read all of T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets in one sitting last night, and the ending... well... couldn't get past it. So great.

{Guest Post} Grace and Funky Beats

Breaking the relative quiet around here, because it's guest post time! Deeper returns digging into some absolutely unfamiliar ground for me... hip-hop. Blake Collier has the story of how he went from hater to hip-hop head in a year and why this music and culture matters. Thanks, Blake!

What exactly did it take for a white guy from the Panhandle of Texas to become a hip/hop-head? There are a multitude of ways that my music tastes could have been infiltrated, some I have a reasonable grasp on and others that betray my understanding altogether. However, the one that I probably understand the best is my complete inability to turn down a bet, dare, challenge, or whatever you want to call it. I, personally, call it a death wish. Some turn out better than others: snorting a Pixie Stick for $5 in middle school was probably the worst one. (To this day, certain things still have a slight hint of cherry in their aroma.)

But it was leading up to 2011 when I took on the challenge that would completely reinvigorate my love for music. A friend of mine, who was a music sales rep for one of the major music sellers in the country, challenged me to listen to a year of hip hop. He sent me a list of around 70 classic hip/hop albums, mainly from 1985-2000 and I chose 52, one per week. And thus began the revolution of my music tastes.

I cannot rightly take you through the whole experience of the year, so I will try to give you a glimpse. My first album was Lucy Ford: The Atmosphere EPs, because I had already bought it and it was handy. Slug, the emcee for Atmosphere, is a nice entry point for people who know little to nothing about hip/hop and base their negative opinions of hip/hop on other negative opinions by people who never really listened to it either (these people may or may not have been largely white). I can speak somewhat cynically here, because I was one of those people. The only album I had really listened to in the genre before 2011 was N.W.A.’s Straight Outta Compton, but that had always been a trendy thing for white middle class high school kids to do. I was, however, about to enter into the wide world of hard and funky beats.

No holds barred. Take no prisoners. Do or die.

I went from A Tribe Called Quest to Public Enemy to Beastie Boys to Eric B. And Rakim to RUN D.M.C., Ice Cube, Cypress Hill, Wu Tang Clan (and its individual members), Del Tha Funkee Homosapien, MF Doom, Madlib, Company Flow (and its members, mainly El-P) and to a few of my Christian brothers in DeepSpace5. I journeyed across a reasonably good cross-section of the hip/hop landscape. So as the beats traversed my ears week after week, I began to pick up on the slang, the types of samples commonly used, cultural observations of these ghetto reporters and visions of these prophets of the streets. And the strangest thing happened somewhere in that year— I began to care.

I began to care about the things these emcees were flowing about. I began to care about the specific problems that were part of the black community. And, most importantly, I began to dig into how the gospel could answer those issues that were as much a part of hip/hop as the soul/jazz/funk samples that were being mixed by those wizards of the turntable. A white guy, who lived a majority of his life in a town that had probably no more than four black families within its city limits, began to be moved across the tracks, to the streets, to the ghettos, to the places that most comfortable, American Christians would never want to go nor to understand.

I inundated myself with documentaries, books, artwork (largely graffiti) and anything else that was essential to the definition of hip/hop, all the while coming to understand elements of my faith that I don’t think I ever would have understood if it had not been for this personal displacement. Yes, there is gratuitous violence in gangsta rap music, but there is gratuitous violence in the ghettos. Yes, there is gratuitous misogyny in hip/hop music, but there is gratuitous misogyny in all parts of our country (and in all cultures). And, yet, we only point our collective finger toward this one genre of music. Classic avoidance of blame. These things should be fought against, but pointing the finger just at hip/hop is not going to fix it. We need to point that finger right back at ourselves, for we are just as much a part of the problem. Part of our effortless ability to shift blame lies in our society’s lack of knowledge about the origins of hip/hop and what it was originally meant to do. At the dawn of hip/hop, its creation was meant as a force for good, to provide an identity for a ghetto youth that felt abandoned (by migration out of the inner cities to the suburbs). Afrika Bambaataa could be said to be the father of hip/hop, because it was largely his vision. He wanted to give the black youth something to make their own and they did, at least until the record companies saw the profitability of hip/hop in the mainstream.

All of this to say that what I came to find in hip/hop was grace. Grace, because it is given not earned. It is the doctrine that renews all without allowing any single person to boast (Ephesians 2:8-9). I can hear the laments in hip/hop of a fallen world. The laments of the black community scarred and angered by their collective history in America. You want to see part of the reality of the fallen world we live in? You ain’t gonna find it listening to music within the Christian subculture. You gotta displace yourself, like Amos, the Judean who spoke the judgment from God to Israel, and be willing to place yourself near the ugliness and sin and relate to the brokenness and suffering of humanity before the beauty of Christ’s work and the bright glory of God will fill you with hope and give you the courage to speak truth and shine that light in the darkness.


My Personal Selections for Your Listening Pleasure: 

• Buhloone Mindstate by De La Soul – Probably my favorite hip/hop album. Soulful, jazzy, and fun. Hard to go wrong with the first four De La records. 
• Midnight Marauders by A Tribe Called Quest – The first three Tribe records are essential hip/hop listening, but this one is my favorite of the three. 
• Madvillainy by Madvillain – One of the more recent selections. Short, punctuated songs with no hooks. Brutally honest collaboration: Madlib’s production and MF Doom’s flows are tight. An absolute classic. 
• Things Fall Apart by The Roots – Though, by no means, the best hip/hop crew, these guys put together a smart, socially conscious and emotionally resonant album here. 
• Cold Vein by Cannibal Ox – Probably the least accessible selection in this list. This is a powerhouse record. The flows are bleak and forward (and not devoid of “hard language”), but the atmosphere that is produced by El Producto is truly moving. Think of that one record you always listen to when you are feeling melancholy. This is that record translated into hip/hop.

Blake Collier has been blessed as an interim college minister for a Presbyterian church in Amarillo, Texas. He has his Masters in history from Texas Tech University, which he, still to this day, finds extremely unmarketable and incapable of being terribly useful. He makes shoddy attempts at poetry, fawns after Flannery O’Connor and has seen Grosse Pointe Blank near one hundred times. But, most important of this highly incredible information, is the fact that he is a sinner saved by grace, something that can only be explained by the ravenous pursuit of God. Check out his insanity and varied loves at fromexilegrowman.tumblr.com.