Note to self: Play lots, like all the time

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/stuart_brown_says_play_is_more_than_fun_it_s_vital.html

A great explanation of the benefits of play (from a really cool website for intriguing talks like this one - TED.com).

I should listen to this every morning before I start my day. Play makes us smarter, creates the context for more trust, and even greatly improves the workplace. Oh yea it's also fun!

Safe

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B7aMrkGBDBQ

(unable to put actual clip on here, just have to click on the link)

This clip reveals something deeply significant about what is real safety, and what we really need as human beings.

The little girl in this scene is scared. Rightly so. Her dad has been out working late, leaving his 5 year old daughter alone in a scary neighborhood. He finds her under the bed and wants to assure her that she will be ok.

Every parent has found themselves in this situation. And it is what he does that is so brilliant.

He could just tell her that she needs to get some sleep, forcing her to get out from under the bed, very easily shaming her for being scared in the first place. This shaming would lead to a feeling of being missed in her fear, leading her to accuse herself for having any kind of feeling in the first place. She is left feeling alone. She is scared and alone. Now that is scary.

But what he does is not only validate her fear, he engages her world. He leaves the rational world of adulthood and moves into the heart of a 5 year old girl. How does he do this? He uses her language. He uses her imagination.

And this is what the girl needs. To simply be told that her dad would protect her is one thing. Her 5 year old brain would maybe hold some of those words, for maybe one second.

What he gives her is relationship. She is known by his ability to dream with her. Her protects her by inviting her to imagine.

That is safety. Not the circumstances. Not the facts. But whether you are with someone who can enter your world and know you through that. Safety in being known.

Safety is a space where words can be put to our experience. We need words. We need symbols, symbols that hold the medium of imagination and creativity, making meaning of what is going on instead of an unnamed dread. When we cannot make meaning of experience, it festers inside our bodies as a blob of confusion, like a parasite we cannot see but know is there because of its continual growth and disruption.

Leads me to think about artists. Often the most talented are the most neurotic. They're trying to work something out, something that is unnamed, something that needs to be expressed. And what better way than painting or making music. Unnamed meaning moves their bodies to create, funneling their confusion and desire onto a painting or into the keys of a piano or strings of a guitar. Thank God. Their work touches so deeply our own stories of confusion, allowing us to meet over something that names so well what we feel.

That is what makes the scene so touching. A man who enters the imaginative world of a child. And because of this she is not alone. She is safe in being known.

Slicer

Random, mundane experience #1: Cheese slicer

Happened to be in Fred Meyer with Eden looking for a spaceheater for her when I ran across the aisle of kitchen appliances. Cheese slicer quickly came to mind. My trip back home in Michigan reminded me of how much I loved these things. And now was the time to capitalize.

We got back to my place where I proclaimed my victory to the roommates, upon which one of them quickly opened the kitchen drawer and pulled out her own cheese slicer. I was unaware we already had a cheese slicer.

Sooo I kept the cheese slicer because it was from Good Grips which is always a good choice. And I must say, this little piece of metal and rubber has doubled my lunch satisfaction. Amazing how cheese sliced a little thinner makes all the difference.

Usually I would say this is stupid, why am I getting so excited about thinner cheese? Stupid to get excited about little things. Stupid to get excited. Better to get excited about the big stuff. The big trips. The weekends. The holidays.

Thing is the big stuff comes and goes and almost never is quite what we wanted it to be. Either too short or thinking about how great it is so much and how much it will suck when it's over that it gets over way too quickly.

Thus my proposal. Get lost in the sweet glory of a cheese slicer. Allow for celebration. Stupid, glorious celebration. Celebration that doesn't need to wait for the grand vacation getaway. So great getting excited about the small things. It's like singing in the shower, like dancing in the kitchen, like letting out a little shout that you made the street light just in time when you thought there's no chance.

And what's even better? Someone to enjoy you in the midst of your glorious over-excitement. Who loves it and joins you well in the midst. The adverse is obvious: someone telling you to stay in line, ship up, stop acting like a fool, why the hell are you getting so excited about a cheese slicer. And I would like to tell those voices that it is sad that your envy carries itself so far as to want to ruin someone else's day because yours is so boring.

Knowing very well how boring I can make the day to day, I call myself to repent to the sweet glory of slicing cheese. I invite you to join.

Wolves

"They tumble and fight, and they're beautiful
On the hilltops at night, they are beautiful
Blazing with light, is the whitest and the tallest and the biggest one
She's muscled and fine
When she runs"

Wolves are in his house, in his mind. Haunting. Hovering. Invading. Disrupting.

And then the most haunting statement yet. He describes them. Beautiful. These creatures, these creatures that haunt, they are so beautiful.

Maddening. And thus is beauty. Beauty is maddening. Scandalous. Seductive. As if it gets away with too much. That too much haunts us. Beauty haunts.

Even the way you say the word, the letters that comprise it, the first three from the beginning of the alphabet, the last three from the end. As if the letters are describing the range of life beauty is able to hold. Beauty is good and it is bad. It does not allow for a split, instead holding a complexity and spectrum of experience that will never be defined in simple terms.

We want to split, casting beauty in an over-sexed, denigrating, violent objectification of women, or over-spiritualizing beauty that is naive and out of touch with the real world, a world without real desire, pain, heartache.

Beauty is not perfection. Perfection is fragmented. Beauty is wholeness. Beauty is the mysterious winding of flaw. And one who can bear their own flaw is a beautiful person. These beautiful people are so wonderful to be around.

Beauty is dark and light. One needs the other to create, and beauty the medium in which they dance, the canvas in which one dares allow their mixing. No wonder any real creation involves risk.

These wolves. They are terrible. And they are amazing. He fears them and cannot keep his eyes off them. Thus is beauty. Thus is life.

Come with me

...get closer to that story - the story that is the story of all stories - it is the best story - it is the worst story - it is THE story - it is the story that is uniquely yours, that only you can tell - that in your telling you share in the story that encompasses all stories - the story of God - it is not whether or not it is a good story - it is whether or not you dare to tell it - evil hates the real story - evil fabricates - evil distorts - evil hides - evil lies - evil trembles when you begin to tell the truth, because you are at the center of the truth, because Christ is at the center of the truth

come - let us tell the stories that haunt us with their darkness - come - let us tell them in the light, that we may not bear the burden, that we may not bear the weight on our own - one should never have to tell their story alone

come with me into the light, i have a story i've been wanting to tell...

Years Best

A few of my favorites, highlighting the artists that I turned to the most. The first is Ben Sollee and his album Learning to Bend. His voice and brilliance on the cello are the perfect match. Every song is good.




Secondly is the Walkmen. Their music brings lots of sound, lots of different, unique sound.



Thirdly, M. Ward. His lyrics have an unfinished quality that makes you believe he threw down on paper exactly what he was feeling in the moment.

Finally, what I predict will continue to be one of the most listened in the new year: Rural Alberta Advantage. A very healthy dose of angst. Never had the angst-ish personality before to get into this as much as I have, but I think I'm long overdue to pick up an edge, and this album definitely helps with that. (No YouTube for them, have to check them on MySpace if you want a listen.)

Sense (Part 3)

"...I have a tape of a Tibetan nun singing a mantra of compassion over and over for an hour, eight words over and over, and every line feels different, feels cared about, and experienced as she is singing. You never once have the sense that she is glancing down at her watch thinking, "Jesus Christ, it's only been fifteen minutes." Forty-five minutes later she is still singing each line distinctly, word by word, until the last word is sung.

Mostly things are not that way, that simple and pure, with so much focus given to each syllable of life as life sings itself. But that kind of attention is the prize. To be engrossed by something outside ourselves is a powerful antitode for the rational mind, the mind that so frequently has its head up its own ass - seeing things in such a narrow and darkly narcissistic way that it presents a colo-rectal theology, offering hope to no one..."

- Anne Lamont, Bird by Bird

I would say one of the most common responses I have to my clients (particularly the adults) is a feeling that we need to slow down. As if counseling is a race to get as many words out as possible by the end of the session, that as long as the week is purged into the room something may miraculously change. A sprint to the finish. Thing is that instead of a nice energizing run, this kind of sprinting feels more like running with our heads cut off, leaving us both exhausted. And not a good exhausted. An overkill, burnt out exhausted. Instead of a connected session, I end feeling as though I just came out of a manic episode.

How often my work so far has been to kindly interject, and ask for us to slowly step into just one piece of what was just ejected my way.

How can I move us into our senses? What if we said the same eight words over and over? The awkwardness alone with leave us ending up with more connection, more levels of being, of seeing, of hearing, of experiencing each other than the manic states could ever create.

The same eight words, refocusing the attention from content to process. From mindless chatter to actually experiencing and noticing what it means when two people exist simultaneously in the same room. To give space, to give care to each moment, to each expression, each nuanced, delicate expression that speaks of the heart more loudly than any words ever could.

That is not easy work. But it is here I feel that I am actually doing work. Only then do I feel as though I just went on a good run, blood flowing, breathing heavy, endorphins kicking in, connected to my body. It is not easy work, but it is good work. And again, it is kind work. I don't feel as though I just had to run 20 miles in the freezing rain with a t-shirt on. I went on my time, paying attention to my body, what I needed, what I wanted. A good run. Good runs are so good.

So is a good session. It is so good. Existing in such a deep simplicity of the moment with another human being. That is why I am in this work. For those spaces. To have the privilege to be in those spaces. That is a gift. And as Lamont says, I pray I can remove my narcissistic head out of my own ass so I can look up and have the privilege of truly seeing, and truly experiencing that gift.

Sense (continued)

"On a dark afternoon - I was ten or eleven - I was walking on a country road. On my left a patch of curly kale, on my right some yellow Brussel sprouts. I felt a snowflake on my cheek, and from far away in the charcoal-gray sky, I saw the slow approach of a snow storm. I stood still.


Some flakes were now falling around my feet. A few melted as they hit the ground. Others stayed intact. Then I heard the falling of the snow, with the softest hissing sound.

I stood transfixed, listening...and knew what can never be expressed: that the natural is supernatural, and that I am the eye that hears and the ear that sees..."

- Frederick Franck

Sense

I bought a Dialectical Behavior Therapy book online to prepare for upcoming clients at my internship. My school doesn't teach this orientation but the psych hospital does and most of my patients at the agency are not exactly ready for psychoanalysis, nor does the medicaid system allow for the long term psychodynamic psychotherapy I have been learning the past 3 years.

It's mostly exercises, many involving some kind of meditation. I've been trying them out, especially the ones I may be using and teaching the clients. Several come off to be painfully trivial. My mind and body resist such simple tasks, thoughts whining "this is stupid, this is boring, this is so painfully mundane."

I'm supposed to breathe deeply, then touch and describe an object in the room, what it feels like, color, shape, smell. Or simply breathe and listen, picking up every noise in the room. Or simply breathe, just breathe, counting each breath.

It is boring. It is mundane. It is incredibly simple. But why then is it so hard to do? It's so hard. Even counting my breaths. It's painful. I can't do it. I lose focus, mind wandering to anything but the moment.

It is painful. And it is so good. In the midst of the exercise I feel something soften in me. I feel something loosen up, calm, ease. I feel kindness. So much kindness. Kindness that allows for the moment, the moment that allows me to once again be a child. To live again as a child, existing in my senses, in the moment. The child that only knows its body. The child that only knows touch, taste, see, hear, and smell. Its like going back to the fundamentals. Going back. The humble, kind task of going back before going forward.

It's crazy but it's like I can hear this voice speak to me. This voice that slowly, softly speaks, "it's ok... it's ok...it's ok..." It is so soft. It is so strong. It is so kind.

The exercises feel like confession. They feel like repentance. I feel a soft grievance of the years and years spent in a mind/body split, the years spent moving so fast I can't even think. To be talking to someone and be ten steps ahead, to feel like I'm looking from a bird's eye view instead of right across from you. I'm gone. I'm not there.

That is not cool. And that is why doing the mundane, painful exercises that call me to the moment, to the details, to the rhythm of my breath, to the still sounds and calmed eyes that take a moment to stop and look; that is why these exercises feel like repentance. I am confessing my absence from the moment. My years of absence from the moment. My years of absence from myself. My years of absence from you.

These exercises coax me into the mundane. I confess and repent how I have called the mundane unholy. It has always been the fantastic, the perfect worship song at the right time with the amazing insight and revelation where holiness was found. Why can't the holy be in the mundane, in the practical, in the moment? Why can't it be in the simple? Why can't the holy be in the touch, in the smell, in the ability to hear the stillness, to hear the sounds that can only be heard when you really listen?

It feels so kind. So kind. To be in the moment. It is repentance. It is holy.

"Will you stay with me in the moment? In the simple. In the touch. In the look. I miss you there."

Hello Mac, My Name is Michael

So last week I went on a date. With my roommates Mac. It was all part of the process of seeing whether I should make the switch. You know. PC to Mac. As you can see from the pictures, it wasn't even a contest. Look how engaged we were! Laughing, getting serious, and my own personal favorite moment of the night, when I gave her the eye. I didn't even try, it just happened. Caught up in the moment and there we were.

Two days later, my own is on its way in the mail. Haven't been this excited in a looooong time.

Festival

(not the real video, just using it for the song)

I know little about speaking in tongues, but it came up after church the other day. Whether or not I agreed with it, the conversation moved towards what it possibly could be. That is, the times when you feel so deeply moved that waiting for the full articulation of words seems like an inconsequential need to the weight of the moment. Instead what flows is the candid, unfiltered, spontaneously passionate language of the heart. As if the use of words breaks down at this level of being, this depth of existence. They melt away and all we have left is this spirit, pulsing with the purest form of life, of being, of what is true. It is here that spirits communicate. In spirit language.

I was listening to the new Sigur Ros album and came across the song Festival. Then it hit me: this is what speaking in tongues should be. The song was doing exactly what I was talking about a week ago. It got in me. It made me weak. Cutting through the familiar surface of words. I had no defenses for this level of engagement. My lack of understanding of what was being said compelled me to an understanding no words could convey. They would simply stifle, box in, limit this level of beauty. Ineffable beauty.

Lifting, moving, heightening, softening, inflecting sound the only medium that can express what is and what always will be, forever unchanged but always changing so that it may never be chained, love so deep and wide and full that it can only be known in knowing its being. This song captures that being, that Spirit. I should say, it captures it in letting it be what it is and always will be; free.

Gimpy

So, little did I know how much a beating up on the 2nd years in flag football would take its toll on my now 28 year old aging body...

Quarter way through the game, I got my flag pulled/tackled to the ground by two 2nd years, tearing my shorts, a knee slamming into my thigh. Leg throbbing, I slowly got to my feet, hobbled away, tried to shake it off and returned a few possessions later. We went on to slaughter the youngins by 19 points :P

More than a week later I'm still gloating over the win while simultaneously disturbingly humbled by my throbbing, still swollen thigh. I wake up middle of the night with a monumental ache and think, "seriously? no really, seriously? a charley horse hurts this bad?"

I looked online and felt a sense of community and place to grieve the charley horse pain, to post the absurdity of the pain and needed time of recovery. I seriously felt a sense of relief that I was not alone in this experience...this site brought the most satisfaction. I am not alone...

In It

A soldier fighting on the battlefield tells a much better story than one who hears about the details on the news.

Work was hellish last week. It felt like the battlefield. It felt like blood and sweat, muscles aching, raising my loaded gun at the apparent enemy, wielding my weapons that can do serious damage. My desire scaring me. I wanted to jack some patients right in the face. Engaging at a psych hospital is dangerous. I am dangerous. Yet even more dangerous is the belief that I am not.

That to say, it is good to fight. Goodness. Goodness is bloody, angry, grieving, joyful. Goodness is instead of looking on from miles away, getting close enough to bleed. And no one can tell better stories than one who has the wounds to prove it.

I want to tell better stories. I want them to be less anesthetized. I want them to be more personal and more dangerous. Only then will they be stories of real life. Only then will they play a part in the grandest story of all.

"When you tell the story, the way you were in it, when I can smell your breath in the details, you tell a damn good story."

Music Week

It was Joe Purdy on Monday night at Nectar's. He didn't have his band with him, so it was an acoustic, melancholy performance, similar to the video below. Such transparency in his music, this song probably at the top of that list. He's a great story teller. This is his story of loneliness, which in his telling seems to bring intimacy. Funny how that works...




...followed by a list of performers on Saturday at Bumbershoot. The main performers I caught were Thao, The Walkmen, The Round (with Damien Jurado and others), Band of Horses, and then Beck. I highlight Thao below. Amazing performer, she gets lost in her music on stage. And her new CD is fantastic.

Leaving

"Would you like to invite me in when you are left alone?
Or would you rather be left alone in your aloneness?

The real loss will never be whether or not she leaves.
It is in your refusal to come to me when she does."
- God

So spacious is he...

"He was supreme in the beginning and leading the resurrection parade he is supreme in the end. From beginning to end he's there, towering far above everything, everyone. So spacious is he, so roomy, that everything of God finds its proper place in him without crowding. Not only that, but all the broken and dislocated pieces of the universe, people and things, animals and atoms - get properly fixed and fit together in vibrant harmonies, all because of his death, his blood that poured down from the cross."
The Message - 1 Colossians 18-20









Can our screams return in harmony?
Is there a place for all our rage?

So spacious are You
Even the cacophony will echo in praise

Carolina 08

Some pictures and comments from the 4th spent in the Smoky Mountains of North Carolina...

Another overnight flight on the way out, this time in the middle seat. Thank God for the little flaps that came out of the head rest. At 4 in the morning the body gets desperate and is willing to do anything and at that point it was going to be my neighbor's shoulder if not for the head rest.

The river was really low so no tubing this time, but fishin and chillin was good enough. The highlight was Ira, the 7 year old girl who was staying with my sister Beth for 6 weeks. She didn't speak English but more than learned to get by on non-verbal communication and laughing. A great fiery spirit can be translated from any human being to another and that is what she brought us. Every glance her way brought perspective, of life in america, of what life is like in Belarus, of a spirit that knew what it meant to have 6 abscessed teeth (and to have that no longer!), of a spirit that would eat a whole watermelon if we let her, of a spirit that would turn keep-away into tackle football, of a spirit so excited about a digital camera she would capture every angle of every one of our faces (along with the closet, stove, fan...). It was blessed, holy foolishness.

I love the Smoky Mountains. While it's pretty cool to come back home to mountains here in Seattle, I miss the soft, misty fullness the Smokies offer. Like the humidity, they hug you, keep you close. They got me a long time ago, the West didn't have a chance.

Can I Be Known

In the confessional cry
In the repenting proclamation

That I have nothing without you
That I am nothing without you
That I am nothing
Nothing

I am
No
Thing
Without you

I am suddenly opened up
To the fullness
Of everything
The world comes alive
And with new eyes
I see everything

With new eyes
I see the fullness of
Every
Living
Thing

When we meet
Face to face
When you see me
And I do not to look away
And I choose

Nothing

No illusion
No vanity
No comfort
To cover my countenance

When I choose your searching of me

My beginning and end

When I choose
No
Thing
But you

When I choose
You

This world does not diminish
Instead

This world pulses

It breathes
It speaks
It reveals
It proclaims
It glorifies

It lives in the fullness
Of seeing face to face
It lives in the fullness
Of being fully known

“Now we see but a poor reflection in the mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part, then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.” 1 Cor 13:12

The kingdom is here. Our bodies are screaming to be known.

Spirit

"The Spirit is like the wind, it blows as it pleases, it cannot be controlled."

Reading a book for class awhile ago on the Spirit, I was reminded again of its unpredictability, its tremendously passionate way of refusing to be kept locked up and controlled. To those who like control (me) this carries with it a reckless intimidation.

"The future really is unknowable. Otherwise it is a play of the past."

I am a master of prediction. I calculate what will happen. I measure the ins and outs of the day, the conversation, the meals, the places, the sleep. Because I don't want to let go of the past. And because I don't want to let go of it, I don't allow the future. To live not knowing the next move, to live with my hands open instead of in a fist, to live embracing instead of bracing - that is reckless.

That is life with the Spirit. The reckless Spirit that moves in unbounded freedom, in imagination run wild.

I think of a dog that gets abused by its keeper. It gets hit enough times, the dog will turn skittish, scared to death at the slightest motion of the owner. It's been taught, and it has learned well, to be wary, to keep an eye out, to watch for any movement, any sign, to always be ready. Don’t let your guard down, or you’re done. Stop for a moment and your ass is beat. Any motion and the dog flinches, ready for the blow. The dog's reality of the world has been shaped by the past. Its future is set. Its future is clinched.

I think of my past, the past that has shaped my reality. The past that has shaped my future. The past that has set my future. That past that has clinched my future. If I continue to live in these paradigms, these realities that appear way too real, my future is set. It will be what it was. What was always will be.

What was always will be. That just sucks. That is so boring. That is like the weather always being the same. Not just the same, but always cloudy. A calm, safe, 50 degree cloudy day over and over. There is no waiting, no hope, no looking forward, just the same. What was always will be. There’s no need to think. There’s no need to wonder. Just the same damn thing.

Unless. Unless there was something that was not bound by any single reality. Unless there was something that named its own reality, a reality that said it could never be owned by any single reality, that it would never be bound by any stifling, dogmatic system to keep it in line, to keep it under wraps, to keep it from being to much of a hassle, to keep things safe. Unless there was something whose very nature held freedom, gave freely, whose very nature was to live into and engage the unknowing. Unless there was something whose very nature did not seek to control power, but to enable, to empower, to bring intimacy instead of exclusion. Unless there was something that did not coerce you into some conformed pattern, but instead joyed in your uniquely spontaneous humanity, that allowed you to express and feel and fail beautifully.

Unless there was something whose very touch upon you stopped you in your tracks. A Spirit that made you take a step back. A Spirit that made you think. Not in the sense of a mind racing a mile a minute, but a mind that could be still, and really think. A mind that said, wait, does it really have to be this way? Why do I live in such fear? Why do these things still have such a hold on me? What am I so afraid of? What if I didn't have to be looking around, waiting to get hit? What if I didn't have to flinch at the slightest motion? What if I could sit? What if I could close my eyes? What if I could still my body? What if I could actually engage the moment, without the static of the past, without the worry of the future?

I believe that when these questions are met with the imagination of the Spirit, the fear and shame that have bound us with their rules are scared shitless. They don't know what to do. They are being engaged by the Spirit that that knows no confining paradigm, that dreams without limits, that is bound by no past.

The ever-present Spirit leading, senses engaged, mind stilled. The only place where true beauty can be known and experienced, where one is still enough to sway in awe of the haunting cadence of life, where the rhythm of the Spirit meets the rhythm of the human story. I believe it is in these moments, in this stillness, where the only sound one can hear is heaven crashing into earth.

Beard Man

Yep, I got a beard. I think it's pretty cool. It just crept up on me, no plan, just took it day by day, and each day said I would give it another. And there ya go.

Not gonna lie though, its starting to drive me nuts. Definitely not used to this much hair on my face. I may break down soon.

But we'll see, I mean I do enjoy it and feel old, a distinguished old, like I know what I'm talking about kind of old, not a beer belly old.

Ok enough beard talk. If I end up working just the stash for a day I will post that look for sure.


....Updates!