The Lingering Lemon of Death

the election was rigged, i'm shocked and apalled!

so the iranian elections are suspect.  i refer you all to the fact that the 2004 us presidential election wasn't exactly a triumph of fidelity to democratic ideals ( see the rolling stones article )

there is plenty to be outraged about.  plenty to be concerned about.  if you are the praying type, plenty of things to pray about.  but there are no democracies in existence that don't deal with election fraud.  when that becomes the main issue in iran's treatment of it's own citizens, that will be a very good day.

nobody cares about: my opinion on sonia sotomayor

in 2001.

2001.

that is like, 8 years ago.

she said, after a lot of talk about wise old man making decisions, " I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life."

and now she is being accused of having made a racist remark.

here are my opinions on the subject, and this matters to the universe not one tiny bit, but i listen to npr when i drive to and from work, and so i have spent some time yelling at the radio on this topic.

1. absolutely it is racist.  if we were to flip that around, and a white male said that about a latina woman, that would be the end of that white male's political career.
2. if she knew in 2001 what she knows now, i suspect she would have said something like "i would hope that a court with a wise latine woman member with the richness of her experience would more often than not reach a better conclusion than one without that voice" 
3. it was flipping 8 years ago, holy cow.  get a life 
4. i have been the person in the corner a few times when discussions on race are conducted, from college days through today.  it seems to me that the people who have fought against unjust tides to accomplish things very often do feel superior.  and they have a good reason to.  if two people run a 100 yard dash and finish at the same time, but one had a 50 yard head start, the runner who ran the longer distance knows something about themselves.  they might even want to claim, as a way of thumbing their nose at a racist society, that they succeeded because of their race, not despite it.
5. we should let them do that. 
6. it is still racist.  

 
i am saying that we should not have a double standard about what a racist remark is.  it is nonsense for two people of different color to claim that their heritage and  life experience gives them an advantage and for that to not be equally racist when spoken by both people.  both people are saying "the other lacks something that i have, that they can never have because of who they are and who i am"

in my dream world, people of all races would be able to say. "i believe my heritage gives me a unique perspective and i'm not apoloizing for that, in fact i feel like i see a lot of things more clearly than some people who don't have my perspective"

it is wrong for a white person to say that today.

i think it is ok for judges otomayor to say it.  if we are going to have a double standard, lets have it here.

and it will be a landmark day, when a  white mail supreme court nominee can say it.

finally the one thing nobody says is that it is impossible for the supreme court to look like america.  at some point, what makes a good justice is someone who can make a decsion which weighs fairly the voices of someone whos life experience is not represented on the court at all.  in fact that might be a more important question to ask about a supreme court justice than what life experiences they have had.

the rotting lemon

i seem to have run out of energy to write blog posts.

i know longer know who i am writing for, and what i want to say to them.

if this is the last thing i ever post here, thanks for reading, i have appreciated every single hit on my web site, even the spam.  it was nice to be noticed.

psalm 23 beta 2

at the conference grounds that some friends and i used to gather at every year, there is a giant bible open to psalm 23.

it turns out that if you take pictures of the bible, zoomed in close so you only pick up two or three words, you can find, by linking two words that are on top of each other instead of next to each other, pieces of wonder.

here is psalm 23, read not left to right, but rather along a different, not better, but equally beautiful set of dimensions.

psalm 23 beta 2

I will art no evil.
Leadeth me,
my soul in the paths of death for thou.
No fear with me.
Goodness follow me,
me in the enemies.

Mercy the days
and comfort is my want.

He leadeth the still.

hope

i wrote this poem for a magazine some friends have created, and then i wasn't brave enough to submit it.  the theme was "resurrection", and i was sitting with the feeling of emptiness inside myself that i experience sometimes when encountering really passionate people who are trying to save the world.

hope

it cannot be written on banners
stretching across the street as the parade passes by
the larger the letters
the more stylish the font
the more tragic the death when the parade is over
and the banner fills a dumpster

it cannot be preached
broadcast radiant heat warming masses
the stronger the rhetoric
the better the story
the more encouraging the afterglow
the more empty when it didn't come true
and there is no one to blame but ourselves

it must be buried
wrapped in a prison of stone
and pushed deep into the darkness where no one can see it
the thicker the walls
the bleaker the grave
the more glorious when it rises

a requiem for emergence

this poem was written as it became increasingly clear to me that it was going to be a popular activity to declare that "XXX" is the new emergent and that emergence itself was now boring and old hat.  hearing that over and over again made me quite sad, because the emergent journey is in many ways a journey where you learn to let go of the idea that you have discovered the next new thing, and in conversation finally learn to connect to the newness which god is, and has always been, creating.

so since emergent was now so 2002, i wrote this poem, mostly to remind myself that even if it was stupid and old hat, it was still special to me,  and also to remind myself that whatever i thought was bad and need emerging from, i was the one who had chosen to be buried in the first place.

a requiem for emergence

or

an ancient future narrative of being buried alive until, on the night of the full moon, in stark post foundational clarity, emergence manifests as other

it was a full moon
when he emerged from the grave.
it was a triumph.
over his enemies,
over the darkness which entombs.

while buried,
to occupy his mind,
he had prepared
an instructional series of lectures
on the discipline of oxygen management
and the techniques of opening the lid
and the trick of rising through six feet of soil
and a humorous anecdote about earthworms.

the last 9 inches, he had to dig through potatoes
without time to wonder what potatoes were doing there,
oxygen being short

the loose soil sandy soil in which the potatoes had been planted
parted like a gauze curtain.
so easy after all that clay and rock
and then there was air to breath.

he clawed himself out of the hole
he lay on his face
coughing up mud and blood.

he lay on his back, panting,
squinting at the moon, wondering
what was wrong with the sun and sky.

he kneeled, waiting for his head to clear.

he straightened and stood,
waiting for someone to request his story
naked, dirty, hands bleeding,
in the moonlight,
standing

when no request came
he stepped, and before he could stumble
a gentle hand under one arm
a blanket was set on his shoulders,
and the hands guided him
shuffling, away from the grave.

when the hands released him, he sat,
not alone, he gradually realized.
others sat, or sang, or worked
as he ate the bread
which had arrived in his hands
unnoticed, but not unwelcome.
he listened to the songs
too tired to speak, the lectures could wait
he let his eyes close
and he lay down,
in the darkness,
dreaming.

dreaming of floating down from the moon
on a moonbeam,
sent by the moon king moogaboo.
appointed ambassador the hat people
and their sentient furniture,
a job for which he had been specially trained.
only to drown peacefully on arrival,
unable to speak
in the syrupy atmosphere.
leaving the somewhat confused hat people
the trouble of explaining it to the moon king.
which casually and logically,
as it happens in dreams, became his task.
well, his and the sofa with the thick german accent

the next day,
he went back to the scene of his triumph.
in the triangular sunlight of morning
already someone was fishing the potatoes out of the crater
and then swinging tools he didn't recognize.
chopping the dirt as if to punish it for some misdeed.
turning the vines under,
were they ... planting things there?

when curious faces turned towards him
from the work,
he opened his mouth
and closed it without making any sound
more than a breath in and out.
the lectures unspoken
it seemed more interesting
to learn about the potatoes.
he waited quietly,
in the daylight,
listening.

at the next full moon,
he was well enough to drink wine.
there was more singing
no longer fragile, people slapped him on the back
and told it was good that he had
finally come out of the ground.

by the next winter, children no longer pointed at him
one long dark evening, he sang
the ballad of the fool who buried himself,
and they all sang the chorus together,
in the firelight,
laughing.

"the u", and you

this last weekend, i was part if a group of people who showed up to try and see if a large number of people could make a decision which was too difficult for a small number of people to make.  when put that way, it seems pretty clear what the result would be.

if you weren't there, the rest of this post probably won't be too interesting.  feel free to read it, but it might not make much sense and i don't feel like explaining everything.

at the level of "how many checklist items can i mark off per second of my time", pretty much what you would expect to happen happened.  we entered into a process which is apparently called "the u" and came out with ... i'm not sure what.  we talked and listened to each other a lot, and accomplished very little in terms of concrete decisions.

i'd love to write the redemptive turn paragraph here, where i talk about the surprisingly beautiful and wonderful thing which was created which is so much more important that some mundane thing like a decision.  that paragraph is eluding me.  i want to write the paragraph because i was in a room with 20 other really beautiful people who suspended their pragmatic on-the-clock-my-time-is-important self protection to give to each other and to a process.

there was suprising beauty.  there are things too personal to share for me, and things that other people shared which are too personal to write.  if you love people, you have to love that.  we all spoke of dreams we had, dreams for a better world, where the church is aligned with justice and healing and all the stuff that we hope for.  we talked about the way that a movement bigger than emergent village, realy a movement bigger than christianity, seemed to be in process and we also talked about our weakness and how we needed something, something like the emergent village, to help us continue to reach for that dream.  so very fabulous and wonderful.

i personally learned a lot this weekend.  learned some things from people who have no idea how much they have changed me.  and as i read blogs of other people who were there, they are all looking back on the weekend tenderly and gently.

so i am not allowed to say that it was a huge waste of time which didn't accomplish anything.

however, if our task was to make decisions, then we have to live with the above sentence hovering over all that beauty.  because a lot of really hard decisions are now going to have to be made by a smaller group, which will somehow have to channel the spirit of the larger group, and the even larger group of people they came to represet.  questions like these:

• does there need to be an organization called "emergent village"?
• what are the goals of such an organization?
• what are the resources needed by that organization in order to accomplish those goals?
• what are the values of this organization which help it focus, say no to the right things, and also say how it wants to accomplish it's goals?
• what structures wil serve the goals and values of the organization?
• is this an organization which needs to be "for everyone", like a eccumencial council which is shamed if there is even one person left off, or is it comfortable with being "for" a smaller group of people than everyone.

we spent a lot of time learning to listen to each other and trying to tease common themes out of individual dreams, and all of these questions were mentioned in the process, but we never had a real down and dirty, ugly enough wrestling with the above questions.  as a result, someone else will have to wrestle with the questions.  i don't feel like, the output of the "u" weekend is strong or clear enough that even if 3 people from the weekend sit in a room and have all the data from the weekend in front of them, they would be able to answer those questions feeling like they had adequately represented the will of the weekend participants.

and i feel really badly having said that.  this weekend was a joint art project, a loving creation put together by a lot of great people. i think the art is indeed beautiful.  i am wondering if it is useful.  if it isn't useful, that doesn't mean it isn't art, in fact it might signifiy even more the artistic validity of the thing.

the question i have been mulling over in my head is, what else could you do?  if i knew the answer to that one, i'd probably be writing a book.  to try and answer that would just be a stupid, arrogant move, like a drunk fan in the stands at a sporting event yelling at the brilliant coach about how his strategy sucks.  so here goes:

i think the "u process" needed to be modified for this group of people.  it seems like it was designed to help task oriented people reach beyond their local concerns and think globally and creatively.  we had a room full of people who had by and large already made that leap.  we needed to figure out how to narrow our creativity into actionable statements, and we had too little time narrowing compared to the time we spent broadening.  this group needed more time and more help reducing and less help imagining.

i think we needed a clearer overall goal for "why are we in this room" because the focus kept shifting from the narrow set of questions which would help emergent village decide what to do, to the broader set of questions on what people of faith can do with themselves to actually help heal a broken world.

that's my report from the weekend.  if have been harsh or unfair with a thing of beauty that someone really treasures, i apologize.   i tried very hard as a i wrote this to honor the gifts that were given, both on that weekend, and the gifts given which had created and sustained  "the emergent conversation" as long as i have been a part of it.

off to dc

i'm headed to washington d.c.

two days of meetings.

last time i was in a room of endless meetings, i wrote some of the most depressing poetry i have ever written.

maybe we will figure out how to help emergent village be something which continues to make the world a better place, and we will have fun doing it.

maybe i will be the guy in the corner banging my head against the wall screaming "when will it end, please just let it end!"

probably the truth will contain a little bit of both of those things.

mostly looking forward to seeing the people who have become my once-or-twice-a-year friends, who keep me sane.  i may be the only person in my city who thinks like i do, but i am not the only person in the whole world.  there are sane beautiful people who listen to what i dream about and do not walk away in confusion, but instead nod their heads.  that's worth some head banging time.

poetry of the recovering evangelical

different people read my blog for different reasons, and there are some new links to the lemon, so i am taking a second to explain this poem.

i am a person of faith, but i am sort of in recovery from a long period of submersion in the evangelical church.  somewhere in the late 90s i began asking questions that should not be asked.  the answers to those questions have taken me on a journey to where i now hold fast to a faith which is in some ways radically different than the one into which i was baptized.

while i will always happily wear the label "evangelical" out of gratitude to the people who told me the stories of jesus, i will also to some extent always now be in recovery from the wounding to my humanity that was done by evangelical christianity.  in the evangelical world, there is only right doctrine, and demonic evil with no middle ground and no grey areas and no grace for the difficulty of the task of being human.

i have been exploring my parting with some of the core views of evangelical faith in poetry, because in prose, sentences seem to begin well, and then run into a wall, but in a poem, my voice is more free to just keep talking.

this is a complex poem because it was written in the red rock coffee shop.  which is a non profit space for arts and coffee which is being offered to the world by the very evangelical church that i am griping about.  so it is perfect that i have to acknowledge evangelical christianity and my debt to it, even as i do a bit of venting about it's view of what will save us from ourselves.

blame it on the huehuetenango


i hold in my hands a tiny cup
of single origin espresso
a perfect pull
of huehuetenango

yes
it is fair trade

little sugar
like they do in italy
BOOM
wow, the smoky flavor
it reminds me of something ...

they say the fires burn there
with a heatless flame
that never dies,
bathing you in pain
but never consuming.
they say this is reserved
for those not under the blood
who don't acknowledge the lordship.

they tell me that i need to understand, that god has a reputation to protect
and can't be seen in my company
him being perfect,
and me
not

they tell me not to worry
god has donned human flesh,
    like a hazmat suit.
walking bravely into the contaminated area
to bring us good news.

they say my remaining time can't be predicted, it could be decades or microseconds
they tell me i need to make sure,
    before that final surprise package,
to save myself by accepting the free offer of salvation.
they tell me once i die and finally see jesus as who he really is
full of glory and love and wisdom
without the witness of the crusades
    the inquisition
    the catholoic pedophiles
    the protestant slavers
    or the non denominational spectacularly coiffed televangelists
to cloud my vision.
when i finally see him as he really is,
it will be too late.
like trying to place bets on a horse race after it's over.

before this once in a lifetime offer expires,
before the last grain of carefully measured grace falls in the hourglass,
before the winged monkeys come to bear me away to the castle of fire,
they tell me i need to declare that jesus is the lord of my life

they even drew for me a diagram
which represents my life
to show how pretty it would be
if i put the cross, right in the middle
like a child matching up the red cube
with the red square shaped hole
i will win the prize
i will be saved

and ooooooh lordy
the polyester hell you end up in after that salvation
with the unquenchable flames
of smiling people who are "fine" every sunday
and want to know how your "walk with the lord" is doing
as if it were a third person in the room
whose name nobody can remember
but is also "fine"
sip the crappy perked coffee
what's for lunch?

how happy you will be to sing on that morning
of god's glory and the beauty of the far heavens
    where the lord sits waiting for you to die
so that all the ugly repulsive parts of you,
    that you are learning to hate as much as he does,
will finally be gone and you will at last
be fit to be seen in the presence

i need to pray more
i need to read my bible more regularly
i need to hate the sin and love the sinner
i need to take detailed notes when listening to sermons
i need to memorize more scriptures,
    including the gps coordinates of key passages
i need to get to work, be part of the family business
i need to see the angels helping me cross the street safely
i need to avoid listening to the false teachers
i need to hold fast to the teachings of the apostles
i need to be ready to give answers about the hope within me
i need to understand the deep significance of the hebrew word for "know"
i need to let go and let god
i need to shine the light of jesus in a dark and desperate world
i need to inventory my spiritual gifts
i need to discern my calling
i need to find an accountability partner
i need to keep piling more of this on, as i gain the strength,
growing in maturity,
ever vigilant ever striving

to not be like the hypocrites, the pharisees that jesus yelled at
who had a list detailing
exactly what god required of them
but couldn't see him when he was right in front of them
inviting them to sit and eat and drink.

invited to a feast,
i wonder if i am even brave enough
to take a second sip.

onlive announces and i no longer work for the cia

about a year ago i went to visit my friend tom paquin at his work.  they made me sign an NDA, which isn't that unusual in the silicon valley.  i saw 10 seconds of demo and i said, "ok, i'm coming to work for you, you are going to change the world".

since then i haven't been able to tell anyone, not even my kids, what it is that i do.  which has led to rampant speculation that i am working for some sort of top secret government agency.  this was fuled by the fanatical devotion this place has to secrecy.  i couldn't even tell people the name of the company i worked for.  to the outside world, we were "rearden labs", a company which did some sort of non specific work in some sort of technological area.

today the company is announcing that it exists, that it has a name, what that name is, and what general area of business we are aiming at as we attempt to make billions of dollars.

and i don't have to keep any more secrets except for the normal kind of secrets, like exact details of technology or partnerships or financials.  i am so very very very happy to be out of this stealth mode.

i am so glad that i don't have a brilliant idea that would require me to gather resources and people and keep it all under wraps for seven years in order to bring it into existence.  because if i did, i would fail.  i have only had to keep my mouth shut for 12 months and i have hated every second of it.

i'm still under some restraint, so i can't really write anything about our product, or what i think about the company or the future of this technology.  we have smart people who we are paying lots of money to say all the right things and stay on message, and i am just a  troll guarding one little bridge of large and complex world.

i've been working slightly longer hours recently but i am not one of the people who have been killing themselves to makes this possible.  i'm all done with that kind of living.  i'm glad to be here, to be able to be a part of this because it is going to be a very interesting and challenging ride.  i believe that there is a chance for this technology to make as much of a difference in the next 10 years as the internet did in the last 10 years.

if you play a lot of video games, google "onlive" and check it out.  there are some good articles and videos, and i think there is a live webast of the "big show" reveal annoucement which is hapening tonight.

the quiet before

i forgot to pick up the coffee. i forgot a lot of things actually, but as i sit here drinking "western family" coffee which i got out of a coffee can, i am mostly thinking about the coffee.

it is six am, and i am sitting in the toy/duvivier/etchart/schneider/wacker family getaway. this house, a three hour, coast hugging drive north of san francisco, has been the scene of many many gatherings of my family. this weekend instead of being one of "the kids", i get to be the grownup. a bunch of friends from places near and far are converging here for a couple of days.

the view from the balcony, on a clear day, looks across a meadow, and rows of cypress, and down the slope to the ocean, which is about a mile or so away. you can stand there at night and listen to the frogs in the creek, look up at a sky full of stars unspoiled by city lights, and still hear the waves hitting the beach. i'm up early this morning, watching this view gradually materialize as the sun rises. the weatherman suggests that i enjoy as much of this view as i can get, as it may be raining for much of the weekend.

raining or not, it is going to be a good weekend. a few too many people are making the drive here. the house, which has been resting, seems to be eager for the challenge to stretch a little and wrap itself around the miscellaneous and mischievous mystics who are headed here. i'm smiling now in anticipation of their arrival.

this morning, once i am done drinking canned coffee and the sun is done rising and the stores are done sleeping, i am going to zip down to the supermarket for some yeast, and then come back and bake some bread. my grandmother, when she was living here, used to bake bread pretty much every day when the family was here and it seems like an important part of opening the house up. unlock the door, turn on the lights, turn up the thermostat, bake the bread.

i'll also be running over to the coffee shop, the only place around here where there is signal, to post this. no internet, no cell phone at the house. the house is off the network. i used to drive up to the house and, with shaking hands after a three hour span away from beloved connectivity, plug into the phone line and modem into the network, sipping desperately at the stream with a tiny straw trying to get enough signal. these days i'm pretty content to let e-mail and e-friend and e-bills pile up, confident they'll still be there when i get back. i am not sure, but i think i came up here a day early because of this. to be able to sit down at six am with nothing particular to do, and NOT rush to my rss reader and see what is happening in pakistan and what new thing apple just made and what funny video everyone else is watching and what what what what what.

i'm just sitting here in the quiet before, listening to the heater rattle, and the coffee pot gurgle, and the songbirds twittering, and hearing my own voice, which i find oddly surprising. who is this guy making typing sounds? do i like him? i guess he can stay, if he gets me some better coffee.

what are friends for?

dave is writing a really interesting blog, and you should go read it. click the picture and go have fun.

this is a man who has an idea of balance which is different enough from mine that he kind of makes me feel off center every time i talk to him, but always in a good way. he's taking a run at blogging and i hope he finds thousands of readers.

click here to see body parts

apparently web sites with pictures of of parts of people's bodies are a big deal.  apparently one of the ways you get lots of people to come look at pictures of parts of people's bodies is that you have a software program which searches the internet for blogs, and when it finds a blog, it posts a comment which almost sounds like someone wrote it, but then in the "author information" portion of the comment, it puts a link to your website which has pictures of people's bodies.

when this started happening, typepad, my blogging service, worked really hard to weed out the spammers, to make it really hard for machines to do the work.  and things got better.

but somewhere, probably somewhere that $5 pays for more than a fraction of an hour of work, someone is paying humans to post spam comments.  i know this because despite all the safeguards, i still get comments like this occasionally:

really nice *BODY PART NAME* Well, i met someone who want you say, thinking of nothing at the cool mirror.

this person's e-mail address would be something like reallynicebodyparts@shadydealings.com, and his "homepage" would be something like "http://23.4.31.123/see-a-lot-of-body-parts.html"

what's weird, and the reason i am writing this, is that  when i look over the recent comment activity on my blog and find one of these ads for body parts disguised as a comment, of all the 6 years worth of blog posts i have written, they ALWAYS add their spam comment to the same post.

the god who is far away -- leading the lost -- and vinagrette.

i am really curious why this post is the one that always gets the comments.  asking google, just in case this post had somehow become an underground hit and a source of lots of page views, i discover that there are zero links to that page anywhere on the internet.  this makes me glad, because it wasn't one of what i consider my "good writing" posts.

so what is it about this one page that makes it so attractive to the comment spam community?  are there keywords in that post that make it show up when you type in search terms designed to help you find body parts?  is it the photo of the bottle of salad dressing, which is in a file called "dressing.jpg", did that somehow wakes up the sleeping monster?

i finally got tired of the game and closed comments on that one post.  as an experiment, i am adding this image to this post, and the filename is "undressing.jpg".  we'll see what happens.

in retreat, but not defeated

we have lost a battle in the toy house.  it is a battle i can't talk about much, but we have lost.  it is a battle we have been fighting for a long time and now it is over.  the toy family is in full retreat from that battle.

we are not, however, defeated.  while we are wounded, and withdrawn, we are still alive, we still have hope.  i am sitting looking at a view of ocean and volcano, inhaling the slightly salty air, and working on the little things.  smiling, looking someone in the eyes, being able to care about someone other than myself for 45 seconds in a row, putting dishes in the dishwasher, eating breakfast lunch and dinner.

i usually hate using war metaphors because it turns everything into a struggle for dominance and victory. today though i find this language really peaceful. we are in retreat, but we are not in infinite retreat. we will get better.

so that's the news from toyland today. we are in full retreat, and it is very very good.

photo walk in my backyard

click the link to see the pretty pictures