Monsoon

There is something distinctly beautiful about the desert when it rains. It is always a little ironic. It’s kind of like financiers handing out balloons at an animal shelter. We expect it every year. It is the season that justifies the fact that we call desolate washes, rivers. And they really do become rivers, if only for a couple of days. It usually starts with a lot of humidity and heat. There is some meteorological juju that happens with that combination. And, before you know it, the sky becomes black. We sometimes see lightning, we sometimes hear thunder, and we usually get torrential rains from out of nowhere. The storms don’t usually last long, but while they last, they are vicious. Streets become streams, and as I said earlier, washes become rivers. It’s dangerous to drive. People inevitably try to cross washed out roads and often get trapped. In this situation the best case scenario is, needing to be rescued by the fire department. The worst case scenario is peril. It’s so bad that, we here in Arizona, have enacted the stupid motorist law.

Okay, so the point of all of this is, contrast. I was in Belfast this summer hanging out with some friends. When we arrived the weather was rather warm and balmy. They told us it had been like that for a few days, and that such weather was really odd. We were told that there was supposed to be a change the next day. Sure enough, the next day it began to rain. It continued to rain for the duration of our stay. It was that second day however, that was really remarkable. I guess because it had been so hot previously that when it began to rain, the ground wasn’t ready to receive it. Consequently, they had what we refer to as the great flood of Belfast. It was so bad that a friend of ours had to be rescued by firemen. I had left the windows open at the house we were staying, the house of our friend Jayne. I had met her the day before and thought for sure that I had destroyed her house. Rest assured that her house was not ruined.

This week we have been enjoying a pretty good monsoon season. Now, note that I am a native to Tucson. I have seen my share of monsoon storms. So when I say this year we have gotten some decent storms, it means something. Twice this week my street has become a river. It has been nice. So, at last we come to the anti climax of this narrative. I wanted to share some photos with you. Enjoy. All of these photos were taken outside of my home near the University of Arizona.

cook out

So I promised Ben that I would upload some photos of the cookout we had outside of his home. Don’t let him fool ya, he can cook a mean steak for a Finn! we also had grilled figs filled with chocolate, very interesting. Oh and notice that even in Finland weber is the only way to grill.

a question

if you were presented with the option of living a long but rather regular life or a shorter but more inspired life which would you choose?

(A/Poem…

Quiet, subtle and queer, the man like Jesus.
He wore eyes like emerald in their sparkle-
Much like a warriors’ arms, disarming hostility.
Blessed are the peace makers.

Landscappy, abstacty, and smiling eyes.
Cheers

Jerky, quick, generous and genius.
The philosopher is. And always laughing.
He’ll speak in tongues when no one is looking,
Buckdaft, nice one, take the piss, bang on, and cheers.

Oh and she knows pain, she’s so creative with it, that, and those liquid Caucasians’ she’s an artist-princess and he has such cool hair, he’ll rouse the crew for a drink or two.

I feel hope; it emanates from the wall of this new expression. Roxie’s a dreaklock dog that aint dreading so well.

Oh well, he’ll ramble us through and explain it better than any of us, with fire.

Add tunes and she’ll capture our faces landscaped in a dream.

They are… iconic, apocalyptic, heretical, emerging, failing…

and they are friends.

I am a Guinness! Was there ever a doubt?

You Are Guinness

You know beer well, and you’ll only drink the best beers in the world. Watered down beers disgust you, as do the people who drink them. When you drink, you tend to become a bit of a know it all – especially about subjects you don’t know well. But your friends tolerate your drunken ways, because you introduce them to the best beers around.

What’s Your Beer Personality?

I am thinking that this is the most important personality profile that I have come across to date. Only a beer categorization can describe the real you!

back in Arizona

Well folks we are back in Arizona and finally getting over the jet lag. Our time in Finland connecting with Family and friends on that side of the pond, passed much too quickly. Now we are getting re-acclimated to 100 degree heat everyday and at least 50% humidity thanks to the monsoon season! For those of you reading from AZ, please forgive my whining.

The best things about being home are…

¬ Familiarity, with everything from roads to restaurants, and of course my toilet seat!

¬ A non working swamp cooler stuck in your window

¬ Mexican Food!

¬ Mexican Food!

¬ My own bed

¬ And especially friends and family (aw, gushy) but seriously it’s nice to pick up the phone or open the front door to loved ones who are glad you are home. Which makes me think that what really makes a place home are the people you share life with.

Now to our family and friends in Finland, our home away from home, we feel much the same way when we are with you, all except the Mexican food and my toilet seat part.

Palo Verde Beetles- Yuck!

 

I loathe these things. Every night this time of year we kill at least one on our front porch. The other night we killed two on the front porch and a few nights before that, we killed three in flight in our back yard. They resemble something like an armored demon. In these parts they are three inches long at least, they look like humming birds in the air and I think they are disgusting. You can learn more about these disgusting, good for only God knows what… things here.

Presentation matters?

Okay so you have seen this image before, a picture is worth a thousand words, they say. So as I said this image has helped me to think through things for a couple years now. From time to time I will repost this image and just babble my thoughts, no guarantee on whether or not they will be coherent. Join me in the thinking, what say you?

Does presentation matter?

What if I were to prepare for you your favorite food? I even made it so well that it made you want to immediately go fight your mom. Why would you go fight your mom? Because she never made it so good. Anyway, that’s not the point, the point is that it’s your favorite food, and it’s well made, and I am offering it to you. Only thing is, I present it to you in a dirty, old toilet bowl. You still want it? Hopefully you said no.

Don’t they say that you can never undue a bad first impression or something like that. Say you meet me for the first time and I am dirty and incoherent because I have been out in the Arizona sun, working in my yard. So my brain has literally been fried. What might you think of me? You may think that I am a crazy person, you may be right. Now, if you just happened upon me in my yard .the context of my condition), it may make sense to you. You will now understand my condition and probably give me the benefit of the doubt. But say I went to your house immediately after working myself into an insane frenzy. It would be stupid of me, to show up in this condition, knowing that I am about to meet you for the first time.

So what the point? Perhaps we can at times be genuine in our excitement for God, for God’s love, justice and peace, that we present our excitement in ways that make us seem crazy. Perhaps we in our ignorance and lack of being evangelized (being a student of life and culture) inadvertently present or offer good things in bad ways. And when we do this, the good, becomes bad. Like the food, once I put it in a dirty toilet bowl, it’s no longer good. What a waste.

We can all be guilty of doing this. For the fundamentalist peoples out there, it’s done through aggression and salesmanship, which in many cases makes good news very bad. (And granted there are places where what is being offered is not actually good news, or food or whatever, but it is actually something other, that’s not the point.) For my emergent/emerging/POMO & socialist friends sometimes our cynicism and reaction*ism to what we see as wrong, makes our good message, bad.

I know personally, that I want to move beyond cynicism, to let it push me to hope and move me to compassion. I want to present something beautiful, to put on display a life that accurately represents who I say I am. I don’t want to take something beautiful and make a monstrosity out of it.

citywide hide and seek

Wouldn’t it be fun? I had this idea while I was hiding out in the suburbs today. A friend called me and apologized for bugging me at work (thanks Forrest). I told him that I was actually hiding out in the suburbs, to which he promptly responded, “I’m going come find you, I’m gonna hunt you down.” What a great idea I thought, a game of citywide hide and seek. Surely someone else has had to have played this before, so I googled it, Here are some of the results…

The game would be played in teams of hiders and seekers. We use cars, but must stay in public places, so you can’t just drive around all day we would put a limit to how long you can drive around before going to a public place where you must remain for 30 minutes or so. After you leave you must tell the seekers where you just were, and possibly give a hint to where you are going, say in the form of a riddle. We’d use cell phone to tag people we catch. We could even play the game downtown and on foot for some smaller scale practice… huh whadda you think, wanna play…

Orthodoxy is Heretical

{Disclaimer the image contained in this post may be disturbing, it is intended to be…}

First of all I need to say, mostly for my own benefit that this post, and all posts for that matter, are more dynamic than static. In essence I am thinking aloud and inviting you (whoever you may be) to join me in thinking things through…

I made this image a couple of years ago, I am not claiming to be a designer of any merit for such a claim would only be lunacy, obviously. I made it to help me think through my thoughts on God. Or more aptly what we often make God into. There is a quote out there (I forget by whom) that goes something like this, "God rid me of God." I think at the heart of this quote, as with the title of this post and the image to the left, is that often our thoughts on God, are the very things that keep us from God.

A friend of mine recently introduced me to some thoughts shared by an Irishman by the name of Peter Rollins, who is a part of a community in Ireland called Ikon. I liked him instantly because for one he is Irish, and he likes Guinness, as all godly people do. Anyway the idea is simple, and profound, as most simple things are. It is that orthodoxy is heretical, which I think was the original title of Peter’s book  How not to Speak of God". The idea is, that when we say this is how we ought to think about God, or that this is who God is (definitively), we have at that moment made God not God, and have in a sense created our own image of God. Remember it is always important to be aware that we are made in God's image and not the other way around, although we are very fond of doing the later.

I think this is at the heart of that ol' commandment of Ancient Jewish Scripture: "You shall have no other gods before Me. You shall not make to yourselves any graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in the heavens above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth."

I have always thought of this commandment as applying to not worshipping other gods and it does. Only until recently have I thought that this commandment could apply to people trying to express God definitively within the framework of their own understanding. That is to say that the moment we say, look here at this statue, this is what God is like, we have made another god. When we try to nail God down and define God, God stops being God. Perhaps that is why God issues this commandment, maybe it’s a way of saying I am beyond anything you can think of, and the moment you limit me to any created thing, at that moment you have made for yourselves a god that is not me.

So then how are we to think of God. I think a part of the secret can be found in the relationship God had with ancient Israel. They were not a people who carried a message to the world; they were the message to the world. They were chosen, not just for the sake of choseness and the eventual establishment of a country club, and drinks with little umbrellas in them, but rather they were chosen as a way of example and invitation. Namely that they would exemplify to the whole world what a relationship with God is like and in this way reveal what God is like, and in this way issue an invitation. They showed people what God is like through their relationship to God, as people who embodied His way (not that they always did this, but neither do we, so let's not play with rocks) rather than showing people what God is like with statues and empire, it was done in a relationship.

Relationship is not static it is dynamic. I remember one of the first road trips I ever took with my wife. I took her to the beach, (500 miles away) for her birthday. I think we had been married about a year. Though we had been married a year, I remember thinking as we drove, "whoa, who is this person sitting next to me, how well do I really know her?" I realized that getting to know someone is an ongoing process, and that that it is what relationship is. It doesn't work that you get to know someone, say by reading a book about them, and then you go into a relationship. No, relationship helps you discover who a person is, and as we all know, it is an ongoing thing. Even after five years of marriage I can't say that I know my wife completely (although I do know her in a biblical sense) I am still getting to know her. I am learning more about who she is and consequently who I am, and who we are. We are in relationship.

So perhaps that is how it goes with God, that as we change, as our thinking grows, as we relate, we know God more. This never ends, so perhaps saying what God is like, or who He is definitively, is as ridiculous as the image above. No doctrine, no ritual, no image can fully express God; they are all, when they claim to do so completely, heresy.

Now, I think that Jesus is the fullest representation of who God is and what God is like. And this itself says something. Jesus is a person. A person can only be known relationally. It's been 2000 years and it seems that we are still trying to understand and getting to know Jesus. Shouldn't that tells us something?

Maybe it is that what is often rejected about God, or Jesus is not actually God or Jesus, perhaps it is the monstrous image that we have made God or Jesus into.

Something to think about…

 

read fast foo

The rumours have been confirmed, I am working on becoming a speed reader. It is this that I am happy to share with all you voyeurs who have happened upon this page. So why become a speed reader? Because it's cool! Don't you think? You can sit around and impress the friends that you never hang out with anymore, as you are always going from one library to the next in search of something you haven't yet read. you can read the backs of all the shampoo bottles as you pass them in the grocery store. No more standing there for hours! Think of all the cereal boxes!

Okay the real reason, I have so much reading to do. It seems like I am constantly reading a stack of five books and they take me forever to finish. I have been frustrated for sometime now with the slowness of my reading. Then a friend,( who happens to speak 13 some odd languages) told me that he used to teach speed reading. I was intrigued, a real life speed reader sat before me. He looked so normal, well for a guy who looks a little like Jerry Garcia. But there he was. Then, a mutual friend of our speed reading Jerry Garcia look alike, decided to become a speed reader too. It just escalated from there, it was like an addiction or a wildfire, or being addicted to wildfires… All of the sudden all of area 215 were becoming speed readers…

Does it work? I think so. In about a week and a half I have doubled my reading rate. shoot, I learned how to calculate my reading rate, which was almost impressive enough. I went from reading about 217 words per minute to reading around 400 words per-minute, in a week. Its actually fun, I find myself wanting to read more, to go faster, and faster, to be the superman of speed reading, I may just buy a costume.

so if you happen to be looking for a new addiction, one that may cause you more anti social bahavior, give it a shot. The book I am usding is listed to the right. It's fun, and besides, everybody's doing it.

arg says the pirate

So, I'm still breathing air, for the most part. I have recently returned from a road trip in the great southwest of the USA. My travel companions and I hit Vegas(the fakest city I have ever visited), San Francisco, LA, San Diego and finally back home in 7 days, by car. The trip was fun, exhausting, fun, annoying and fun. We put something like 3000 miles on the car we rented(the car in itself is a story that I have told to some of you already)…Anyway the trip made me wonder, more than once, would Jesus have me punch someone out to help them learn others centered living? I decided not, but I really wondered for a bit. he, he, he…

the brief rundown- 

Vegas is a farce, like much of the world system and its consumerism that is so consistently forced upon us.

SF- i wish i would have had more time there

LA- traffic, traffic, traffic

SD- yes, oh thank God we made it, oh no do we have to leave already?

Death VALLEY looks like the moon,only with 109 degree F temps.

Yosemite- was snowed in. This caused us a four hour drive out of our way in order to find a cross-able mountain pass.

and I have many thoughts and stories to tell, for another time…

lots to say

it's true, more or less, that I have so much to say, and that is why I have'nt really said anything for a while.

The semester is coming to and end and the working full-time, running another business full-time, and going to school has kept me from posting the last few weeks…

If anyone out there is still interested I would like to share a short story I have been working on. and I will as soon as I figure out how to upload a file… 
also, remind me to tell you all about my thoughts on good news and St. Catalina day- how that led us to buy lunch for a king snake wielding homeless person… 

Gizoogle

ur-blogging

and so am I…

Okay so a friend of mine from up north, way up north, like almost the top of the world literally, suggested I start a blog. He actually said that something I had written on a website that I have since stopped updating had encouraged him. Hmm, didn’t expect that. Now, another friend, from the same country, actually the business partner of this first mentioned also started blogging and suggested I do the same. I was hesitant at first as this second mentioned friend is the same guy that talked me into a naked snowball fight and rolling in snow, naked after sauna. Yes, these friends are Finns as in from Finland. Who else would talk a “friend” into a naked snowball fight?

So thus begins the blog…