North Writers' Common

Hero Held Out For

2009-01-03T20:20:00.001-06:00

by Seth Wieck

He created us with one simple breath,

And then shortly after we fell to death.
But ever since we’ve been spending our lives
Clamoring and clawing, toiling with strife,
Fighting this longing for eternity
With sticks and stones and shameful bribery.

And though it would have been much more simple
To crush us, and let hist’ry be forgetful;
He managed to soften a single man’s heart,
And plans for restoration began to chart.
“How much,” we have to ask, “Did Noah not know
When God prism’d through rain the first rainbow?”

And then there was the building of a nation,
But the plan was to do it with such a ration
That it would all begin with one old man
And his wife whose womb was dry and barren.
Though he tried, it was only the promise
That conceived a son and proved God honest.

Oh, it would have been much more simple
To crush us, and let hist’ry be forgetful;
But hist’ry has been the pen in His hand
Reminding us that though we have been banned
There are still pages left to be written
In a love letter from One who is smitten.

If the tidal rise and fall of nations
Is a true barometric indication
Of the lengths that He is willing to go;
If the God who wields hist’ry as a note
Should favor us, should extend us that grace,
Would we really be so out of place

To suppose He might put on the skin of man
To be buried when He bears the sin of man
So that the once and always sinful man
Might come to life when He is raised again?

If this is true, then I must recommend
That you forsake me – us - and fall for Him.
Because ours isn’t much of a story,
It is so poor, and told so, so poorly.
I’m doing the same, I think you should know.
It’s only fair. I really do love Him so.

Anno Domini - An Advent Sonnet

2009-01-03T20:14:00.003-06:00

by Seth Wieck

In the year of our Lord was a great hush;
400 years since He’d spoken a word.
No man or woman had felt the great rush
Of His wind, felt fire, quake, or still small voice heard;
No prophet with pen in hand was carried
Along by His Spirit, but sat unmoved
To speak from fathers to sons - sons were married -
Had sons of their own still no words to prove,
No dreams to interpret, no visions to explore;
Just the round turn of the world, the sliding of stars
Through the sky, crops to plant, crops to store.
All was silent as night, night was quiet as stars.

Then the Word that began it all went to press,
And the Word that was Light, that Word became flesh.

Vienna, or Where are the Sausages?

2008-08-11T14:55:00.001-05:00

by Christopher Myers

I can’t really say much about Vienna. We did spend two days there, but we really didn’t do much. In Vienna we all started to feel the weight of the trip. We had covered a lot of miles, seen countless amazing things, and eaten numerous amazing meals, and in many ways we were just completely full in every sense of the word. Plus, living like a gypsy out of a backpack takes its toll.
That’s not to say that we did nothing. Doris, our couch surfing host, suggested a food market, an ice cream parlor, and a place to swim in the Danube river, and that’s pretty much all we did while we were in Vienna.
If I were explaining that to a non-travel weary version of myself, the fresh version of myself would probably say something like, “It doesn’t matter if you are tired. Go see a classical concert. Go to the Hapsburg palace. Go see the Breughals paintings, for heaven sake.” And it might sound crazy to you as a reader, but we were dead tired, and in travel there really is a law of diminishing returns. You really can see too many churches, museums, historical sites, or whatever.
In this way travel is a great reminder that you can’t live life at full tilt. A life of constant stimulation is ultimately futile because the stimulation that used to invigorate you is the same stimulation that exhausts you later on. You need space. You need distance. You need rest.
Or to put it this way: I need space. I need distance. I need rest.
I was thinking about this idea of diminishing returns in terms to my approach to a particular place like a museum. After a museum visit I was telling Joey how much more satisfying it would be to me if I had a membership to that museum, and visited it throughout the year to see a particular piece or a particular group of pieces after I had studied them on my own. Then when you see the thing it isn’t about consuming it as a tourist, but enjoying it as an appreciator. When you travel this way, so many places in a short span of time, you see most things as a consumer. Honestly, the places and things I have enjoyed the most on this trip are not the surprises, but the things that I already knew something about, things that I already loved, like the Ghent Altarpiece or The Oath of the Horatii in the Louvre.
I went into this trip having down a minimum amount of research compared to previous trips. This was for two reasons. The main reason was that I had been to a large percentage of these cities before, and I already knew what to see and why it was important. The second reason was that I thought being a little underprepared would add to the spontaneity of the trip. I don’t know if that has been true or not, but either way, I wish I would have prepared myself more in terms of research. For me enjoyment doesn’t come from just being in a place, but from understanding the place from a historical or artistic or philosophical perspective. I have to have context, otherwise it is just a pretty place that feels strange and that I feel alienated from.
Anyway, I would like to go back to Vienna some day on the front end of a trip. It really is a beautiful city.

Munich or Epcot, Germany

2008-08-11T14:41:00.005-05:00

by Christopher Myers

Munich, in many ways, seems like a very large German annex at Epcot Center. The part of the city worth seeing is a self-enclosed square called Marienplatz, which all centers on a fantastic building called the Rat Haus. The opulent gothic spires, the glockenspiel, the dragon climbing the side, all make the building look like the entrance to a crazy ride, probably called “The Glockenspiel.” Adding to the amusement park-like feel is the church that supposedly bears an imprint of the devil’s footprint. Plus, everyone in the service industry wears traditional Bavarian garb. There’s nothing getting some brats and sauerkraut from a grown man in a lederhosen.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t begrudge this at all. I quite enjoyed it. I was just never sure if I was in Germany or on an elaborate movie set of Germany, a distinction that’s even harder to make when you visit a place like Neuschwanstein, a romantic castle nestled in the Alps, which is, interestingly enough, the basis for the Disney castle.

I hope none of this dissuades you to visit Munich because it really is an amazing city. I just found all of this kind of funny.
For sure, the castle is worth visiting. When your mind thinks of a castle, I’m pretty sure you picture something like Neuschwanstein. The idyllic alpine setting, the lofty ramparts and towers, the fantastic interiors, all come together to make pretty much the perfect castle. It even rained while we were touring the interior. We could hear the thunder echoing of the sides of the mountains. You couldn’t ask anything more of a castle tour.
Munich was an especially big deal for Joey. Due to a serendipitous entwining of time off and cheap flight, Joey was able to fly his girlfriend, Melissa, over to Munich for a few days. So for three days Tyler and I watched Joey be Mr. Romantic.
Actually, while Joey and Melissa were off being romantic and enjoying the city, Tyler and I were off being goofy and enjoying the city. We visited an amazing technology museum called the Deuthches Museum, walked along the river and in a large park, and spent most of the time speaking like 19th century British explorers, claiming we’ve discovered things like indigenous drum tribes deep in parks of Munich. Basically, it was your run of the mill silliness, and it was quite fun.
I don’t know what it is about traveling overseas, but I find myself speaking in accents a lot of the time. Being with Tyler amplifies this, of course, but I think there are a couple of reasons why I do this. For one, it is my feeble attempt to “speak” another language, and more to the point, if I speak in a caricature of a language then I don’t feel as bad for not speaking that language. The second reason is that when you are deep in Bavaria, it is kind of cool to say silly things in British accent, like “It’s just around the bend. I’d bet my life on it,” because no one around you is going to understand. The language barrier affords you the opportunity to act like a kid again. Thanks, language barrier.
For more pics of Munich, see Joey’s website.

Lucerne, or Learning to Fly

2008-08-04T15:43:00.000-05:00

by Christopher Myers

Our second full day in Paris was a lot like the first. We walked around the whole time stunned at how amazing the city was and shocked at how much money we were willingly spending. We went to the Louvre, enjoyed some shopping in a trendy neighborhood, had an amazing meal, and an amazing night walk along the river Seine.

I could describe it all but I really want to talk about Switzerland.

The next morning we headed to Lucerene, but first we had to settle our bill at the hotel in Paris. We had used the hotel’s laundry service to wash our all clothes, and when we went to pay out the receptionist informed us that we owed 300 euros. Gulp. That’s equivalent to $450, and was more than we had paid for the hotel itself. Apparently the French think washing other people’s underwear is the greatest and most luxurious service on the planet. I expected to pay a premium, of course, but not a king’s ransom just to get some clean clothes. The moral—always ask how much it costs. Alternative moral—don’t let the French wash your unmentionables.

We arrived by train in Lucerne where the couch surfing experiment continued. Our host this time was Natalie. If couch surfing were a business, Natalie should be its spokeswoman. She was an incredible host. She told us that when she was girl she used to dream about owning and running a hotel someday. If she did it would be the best hotel on the planet because she may be the most hospitable person I have ever met. She completely welcomed and integrated us into her life. She picked up from the train station, found us in her car when we were lost, gave us the keys to her flat, cooked us a traditional Swiss meal—I could go on and on about her hospitality, but the best part was talking with her.

When we were all chatting one night, she said something very interesting. We mentioned something about how trusting she was, and she replied, “I don’t think people have to earn trust, I think you just give it to them, you know?” This struck me as brilliant and as a pithy way of summing up a difference I have seen in European couch surfing culture and my own way of thinking. My thoughts on trust, and I would dare say this represents the American stance on trust, is that you distrust someone until they prove trustworthy. It is a guilty until proven innocent approach. And that is probably not the best way to treat people. Something to think about it.

The highlight in Switzerland was, of course, the Alps. The first day we went hiking on Mount Pilatus, a particular famous Alp near Lucerne. After riding the gondola up, we decided to hike down the backside. The first half of the hike was idyllic. It was peaceful, serene, where the only real sound was the jingling bells of the Swiss cows. The air was just cool enough and scenery was shockingly beautiful. The whole experience hardened my resolve that rest for me looks more like spending time in nature.

I mentioned in an earlier post that beauty is an echo of God’s Voice in the world. I also mentioned that art is an echo of the echo. I think one reason that I am connecting more with nature now is that it is one degree closer to the Voice itself. The heavens after all declare the glory of God. You would have to be sensory deprived not to see the truth of that verse in the Alps.

The next day we decided to take a train to Engleburg, a nearby town, to enjoy some adventure sports. We threw around the idea of biking and some other things, but what we really wanted to do was paraglide. So we signed up for a flight and soon enough we were on our way up a mountain to fly.

Like skydiving you have to tandem fly the first time. My pilot’s name was Ottmar. After a short gondola ride, he pulled out the glider and spread it out on a grassy plain on the edge of the cliff. He strapped me to the glider, counted to three and before I even knew it, Ottmar had me running off the side of the mountain. Just when I thought I would start plummeting down the mountain, the glider caught the wind, and we soared about twenty feet above the take off point. I was thousands of feet in the air. I was flying.

For the first minute or so I was in a state of shock, and Ottmar could tell. He kept saying, “The hard part is over. We have taken off and now we are flying,” in his most soothing Swiss accent. I was in such shock that I actualyl was flying, the best I could muster in response was, “Yes we are.”

It really was like flying in a dream. You don’t feel like you are tethered to anything. You feel like you are leisurely floating, which is a rush in itself, but add to that the stunning landscape of the Alps and the Swiss countryside, and you have yourself a dreamy 15 minutes of flight. Truly a highlight.

For pictures of Lucerene and of all our adventures, see Joseph’s website.

Ghent, or The Magical Sheep (Mystical Lamb)

2008-08-04T15:38:00.002-05:00

by Christopher Myers

As a senior in high school, I took a humanities course. That complete immersion in the painting, sculpture, architecture, music, and literature of the Western world may have been what C.S. Lewis calls the baptism of my imagination. At the very least it created an appetite in me for culture and aesthetics, and I don’t know that I would be in Europe right now if it weren’t for that class.

One of the paintings I fell in love with in that class was Jan Van Eyck’s, The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb. I have been fortunate enough to see many of the world’s great masterpieces in the world’s greatest museums, but seeing this painting had always been at the top of my list. Part of my affection for the painting is that when I saw at as a high school student, it was one of the first times that I truly understood the ability of a painting to a tell a story. Even if you didn’t know the story of Christ, you could glean so much of what was going simply by looking at the subjects’ faces. I knew that I had to see it and since it was a short train ride away from Paris, we headed for Ghent, Belgium, home of the altarpiece and waffles. Clearly we were going to have a great day.

And it was.

Mostly.

It was windy, rainy, and overcast in Ghent, and because I sent all of my clothes to be cleaned, save for a short sleeve shirt and a pair of shorts, I was completely under dressed. I looked like Johnny America, Lord of the Tourists. I maybe saw one other person wearing shorts the whole day, and I think he was drunk. I decided to buy some pants.

I was so cold and so eager to see the painting that as soon as the tram dropped us off, I headed to the nearest gothic church, power walked through the doors, and proceeded to do a lap around the transept. I looked in ever side chapel, but the painting wasn’t there. I panicked. Maybe the painting was on tour. Maybe I wouldn’t get to see it.

It turns our Ghent has multiple Gothic churches. We found the right church and I continued my power walk search for the painting. And there it was in a side chapel.

But not really.

It was a life size, photographic copy. You had to pay to see the real one.

But I wanted to see the painting in the context it was painted for—in a side chapel meant for personal devotion. I have to say, it took me awhile to realize it was a photograph. Even as a copy, the colors, and the level of detail are remarkable.

And it turns out we were rewarded for looking at the copy. When we walked in the chapel, a slight, old man stood at the doorway. He had a small smile on his face, and you could tell he was waiting for a crowd to gather so that he could tell the story of the painting.

And tell the story he did. He loved the painting. He loved its beauty. He loved the attention it brought to his beloved Belgium and to Ghent. And you could tell he was still personally offended by the theft of one of the paintings panels in 1934, a panel that has yet to be returned. He spoke with pure devotion and illuminated many of the paintings mysteries and symbols. He spoke of the single horsehair brushes Van Eyck used for some of the finer details. He spoke of Eve, the mother of humanity, of Christ, the mystic lamb himself, and of God, enthroned at the center of it all. And because of this man’s passion and knowledge, when we paid to see the actual painting, I had a renewed sense of fervor for the painting.

It did not disappoint.

The painting has too much symbolism, too much detail, too much history to go into here, but it is so worth seeing. It is the story of the gospel, told in image and symbol. This painting exists to create devotion in the viewer for the mystic lamb who was slain from the foundations of the world.

So Johnny America had a good day in Belgium. We saw the painting, enjoyed Belgium’s two greatest inventions waffles and fries (though strangely not waffle fries), and we even were trapped in a parade.

For pictures of Ghent and of all our adventures, see Joseph’s website.

Paris, or Turn Your Chair 90 Degrees

2008-07-29T10:27:00.000-05:00

by Christopher Myers

I’ll admit it. We were pure tourists in Paris. You can’t help it, really. For one, there is such an overwhelming amount of amazing things to see and something beautiful around every corner that you walk around with your mouth open and your camera out. Another thing is the French don’t ever let you forget that you are a guest in their country.

I know the stereotype is that the French are stuck up and snobby, but I don’t see it that way. I think they are proud of their country in the same way that we Americans are proud of ours, and to us that comes across as snobbishness. Americans can’t imagine that there is any better place than America, and the French can’t imagine that people aren’t falling all over themselves to learn French.

When you are in France you actually feel bad that you don’t speak French. It isn’t a guilt thing. I never felt guilty for not knowing French. I just had a huge desire to communicate with them in their language. In other countries I usually just go straight for English and then see what happens. In France I always tried to open with some French. I don’t know why that is, but it is something that I noticed. Maybe it goes back to their pride in their country—you want to respect that.

Since we had lost one of our Paris days to the horrors of the Barcelona train system, we knew that we would have to cram a lot of Paris into a little amount of time. And that is what we did. As soon as we got off the train and put our bags into storage at the station, we headed for the Eiffel Tower, then to a boat tour, then to the D’Orsay, then to St. Chapalle, then to Notre Dame. See what I mean—pure tourist.

Of these sites St. Chapalle is my favorite. It is a church in the gothic style, but it is not overwhelming in size. I love that the space is small because sometimes it is easy to get over stimulated by the size of cathedrals, so much so that you can’t take everything in. Not so at St. Chapalle, though it does overwhelm in other ways. The walls are almost purely stained glass, and the vibrancy of the colored glass makes all other stained glass seem anemic. As you turn your hands in the colored light, the color of your skin changes, at once deep blue, then vibrant red. The small space allows you to be swallowed up in colored light. Truly an unbelievable place.

I’m glad in one sense that we lost a day in Paris because it is an expensive city. I don’t think it costs more really than London, but you just want to spend money in Paris. You want the big meal. You want the desert. You want the coffee every couple of hours. You want Parisian clothes. You want everything you can get your hands on. There is something about Paris that makes you manic to experience everything.

I think this is because the French enjoy life in a way that is paradoxical to Americans. We want to figure them out. There are so many books in America about how French women eat incredible rich and decadent food and stay skinny. Which is true on both counts—the food is decadent and the women are skinny. I think the key to all of this is pace. They do enjoy life but they enjoy it at a more leisurely pace than us.

Take their café culture for instance. All the seats that are outside face the street so that the café goers can leisurely enjoy their coffee and people watch. This would never happen in America. When we are in a coffee shop it is for a specific reason. It may be to work. It may be to get a caffeine fix. It may be to read. It may be to study. Even meeting a friend for a chat is a stated purpose. I think the French take life more as it comes, and I think in that non-pragmatic, non- ends driven approach is at the heart of how the French do things. There doesn’t always have to be an agenda. Which is a hard pill for us Americans to shallow. We always have to have reasons for things.

The very premise of this travel blog shows that my American brethren and I are driven by pragmatics. With these posts I’m attempting to show why travel matters, which is a presupposition inherently about value and pragmatics. It is an attempt to show that the cost/benefit analysis of travel actual comes out in my favor in the end. And that may or may not be possible to quantify. Some things are just worth it, even if you can’t explain it.

Look what the French have done. They simply turned their chairs ninety degrees toward the street, and I’m questioning my pragmatic presuppositions. C’est la vie.

For more pictures, check out Joseph’s website.

Barcelona, or Let's Try This Again

2008-07-28T10:18:00.001-05:00

by Christopher Myers

I was no longer the navigator. After two days of utter defeat at the hands of Barcelona’s public transport system, I relinquished my role as map keeper. It felt good to no longer bear the burden of getting us places. From then on I would be in charge of trains and activities, of front end logistics, and this was a relief.

So a new day. That night we planned to get a sleeper car to Paris, so we headed to the train station to get the tickets. Except they only had two spaces left on that sleeper train. And we had to sit in the train station another hour waiting in line to buy tickets for the following evening. This meant that we basically had two more days in Barcelona. This was good and bad. At worst we had lost a couple days on our schedule. At best we gained a chance to actually enjoy Barcelona. Joey booked a hotel in the city center, we checked in our bags, and headed out to enjoy the city.

Our first stop was the Sagrada Familia Temple, an architectural masterpiece that is still under construction after more than one hundred years. I considered seeing a cathedral while it was under construction a great gift. I’ve always been overwhelmed with the beauty of cathedrals, and I could never understand how they were built. I couldn’t believe that medieval man could persevere in the construction of something so cohesively beautiful, so harmonious in construction, so massive, so overwhelming in scope and purpose. To me the best cathedrals are seamless. They feel like light filled caverns carved out of hulking pieces of marble. To see in the present moment workers piecing together columns of marble, to watch them climb scaffolding to carve out the ceiling, to see the construction of something that seems timeless, helped me see the collaboration, the shared vision necessary to achieve the desired end.

Much of the cathedral is complete, and for me the most affecting part of the cathedral is the Passion Portal. Featuring sculptures by Sabiruchs, the portal depicts the final hours of the life of Christ. The sculptures themselves are blocky and weighty; it is almost as if you can see gravity pulling them down. The weight of the sculptures communicates the pathos of the scene itself—here the innocent Christ suffers willingly at the hands of vindictive man.

Each scene is powerful, but it is the centerpiece that pulls the entire portal together for me. At the center of the portal is Christ himself, bound to a column, weary and bloody from Roman lashes, and on the door behind him in gold letters Pilate’s infamous question to Christ, “What is truth?” glitters in the afternoon sun.

What is truth? These sculptures, all art really, attempts to answer that question.
Keats famously wrote that truth is beauty and beauty is truth, which at least means that we experience truth by experiencing beauty and that we experience beauty by experiencing truth. In many ways I agree with Keats. There is most certainly a relationship between truth and beauty, because our voracious appetite for beauty indicates that there is something more than aesthetic appreciation going on when we experience something beautiful. But I can’t go all the way with Keats. As N. T. Wright argues in Simply Christian, I think beauty is an echo of truth; beauty is not truth itself—it is something that indicates there is truth. In the same way that an echo is not a voice, beauty is not truth. But when I see something like the Passion Portal, that echo resonates more strongly, and I know that truth is afoot.

I love travel because I think travel teaches us how to keen our ears to that echo, and it is important to find that echo. It reminds us that there is someone speaking.

There is a Voice.

I’ve been meditating on Psalm 29 for the last few weeks. In it King David enumerates the many ways in which God’s voice is powerful. One of my favorites is, “The voice of the Lord is over the waters.” For me this image hearkens back to creation, when God’s spirit was over the waters of the earth, waiting to burst forth in creative power. When that voice speaks, it does echo throughout the cosmos. “The heavens declare the glory of God” mostly because they still vibrate with the power of His voice. So what about art? The feeble work of our hands—our paintings, our sculptures, our buildings, and our words—are echoes of an echo, and even the echo of an echo points back to the Voice.

For more pictures, visit Joseph’s website.

Pamplona, or Why are the Bulls Just Trotting Along

2008-07-21T10:07:00.003-05:00

by Christopher Myers

On the train to Madrid, Tyler struck up a conversation with some Spaniards and discovered that the festival of San Fermin, or the running of the bulls, was still happening. For Tyler the running of the bulls represents the pinnacle of what a trip like this should be for a few reasons. First, we had to modify our schedule and timeline for the trip in order to make it to Pamplona, which instantly creates adventure. Second, running with the bulls is inherently dangerous, so it’s exciting. Third, everybody has heard of it so we will all be able to tell a great story about it someday.

Getting to Pamplona turned out to be much more involved than a three-hour train ride. In Madrid I was waiting for Tyler and Joey in a café, working on this very blog, oblivious to the time, when they rushed in scrambling, new white clothes for the bull run in hand, asking me why I wasn’t ready to go. It turned out we only had 20 minutes to make it to the apartment we were staying in, collect our things, make it to the train station, buy our tickets, go through security, and board the train. Clearly we didn’t think this through.

After sprinting through a metro station, after bounding up the stairs, after flagging down a cab, after speeding to the train station, after Tyler had to run down the same cab to reclaim his camera, after running full speed with all our gear to the ticket office, after panting in line waiting for tickets, after hurtling to the train and through security, we arrived on the train panting and soaking with sweat, claiming we would never do such a thing ever again. Somehow we had made it.

We arrived in Pamplona on the last night of the 8-day festival, so everyone there looked a little weary. Their white pants and shirts were dusty. Their red scarf’s and sashes a little rough around the edges. The night before the last run we walked around the city square to take in the festival itself and to eat some dinner. What we saw was men and women throwing up and urinating in alleyways, and many weary people who had been drinking nonstop for over a week. I knew then why people were gored by bulls—they could barely stand, much less walk, let alone run from a bull.

So we decided to sleep, so that we would be nice and rested for the bull run the next morning.

After waking up at 6:30 and groggily making our way through the streets, we saw the erected barriers that formed the path for the bulls to run. People were everywhere, sitting along and atop the barriers, milling in the rain soaked streets, accumulating in masses all around the path of the bulls. Most people it seemed hadn’t slept at all, so they weren’t hung over but still drunk. I expected a blood bath, so Joey and I found a perch to take it all in. I decided to videotape Tyler’s exploits instead of running, and Joey thought taking pictures would be a better use of his time.

Tyler ran with the bulls indeed, but we missed watching him do it, partly because the whole thing lasted about two minutes, and mainly because Tyler ended up starting ahead of our vantage point. At exactly 8 am a canon blasted and the runners in front of us started sprinting down the street. After about thirty seconds, we saw a group of 13 bulls or so, trotting (that’s right, trotting, not running) past us. And like that it was over. No one was trampled. I saw no one gored. It was just some bulls trotting down the street.

Tyler claims that one of the bulls was a mere couple of feet from his right side, but I’m not sure. You never know with Tyler.

Of course, my favorite parts of the event were cerebral, mostly because when we perched ourselves on a concrete ledge 40 minutes before the running, I had a lot of time to think. I fantasized about jumping from 10 feet above on top of a would be thief who would surely attempt to take Joey’s bag of lenses. But it never happened, so I directed my thoughts elsewhere, and as it happened while we were waiting we saw a man who looked remarkably similar to Ernest Hemingway.

This was pure serendipity. While not detracting from the media coverage of gorings and tramplings at the running of the bull’s, I have to say that any American who was at that festival was there, directly or indirectly, because of Hemingway’s portrayal of the event in The Sun Also Rises. He made this festival famous. I find this vastly interesting because ostensibly the festival venerates the patron saint of Pamplona, Saint Fermin, but it didn’t feel Christian at all. That’s not to say that it wasn’t religious—it was wrought with ceremony and ritual. After all bullfighting has its roots in pagan sacrifice, and the week long drunken revelry certainly felt like it was rooted in paganism. So by my count most people who were there were a few steps removed from anything having to do with the original reasons for the festival. Some were there because of Papa Hemmingway, possibly chasing some sort of validation in terms of his definitions of masculinity. And some were there just to drink and to have a good time. So why were we there?

We were there for a good story.

Travelers are story chasers and a trip finds completion in the telling and retelling of your exploits. But as I’ve thought about this motivation to travel, I have to ask myself, am I looking at and experiencing these things because I am moved by them and am learning something about life and humanity from them? Or am I simply marking them off a list so that I can feel culturally significant?

That may seem harsh, but it does come down to this simple question—do I experience the thing in the moment or do I experience it later when I get to tell someone I saw such and such painting? Obviously, there is a little bit of both. Certainly it isn’t wrong to share experiences with people. A vital aspect of travel is the social ceremony of sharing your experiences with others when you return. As all of us have noted on this trip, certain things don’t feel real until you talk about them with people that you care about. For the most part, people want to see your pictures and hear your stories. But there is a fine line between the communal sharing of experience and cashing in the cultural cache you’ve accumulated by being a world traveler. I’m still trying to figure out where I fall on that spectrum.

For more pictures from our adventures, go to Joseph’s website.

Prado, or Why Time Always Wins

2008-07-21T09:51:00.001-05:00

by Christopher Myers

For our first full day in Madrid, we decided to visit the Prado Museum. This made me happy, since I am something of a museum junkie. I love how you can move through large, crisply lit rooms and know in a purely visual way what different artist’s cultures valued and what was beautiful to them. For example, you can see the non-dimensional, non-expressive faces of Gothic frescoes and know that these anonymous artists lived in time where God was emphasized and man was flat. You can stand before a Raphael painting, noting the stunning attention to anatomical detail, and know that he lived in a time when was beginning to become the measure of all things. Art, in all its forms, unlocks the values of a culture and allows you to step into a by-gone era. Plus, it looks cool.

At the Prado seeing works by El Greco and Bosch were particular highlights, but as we moved through the gallery spaces a particular theme emerged for me personally in the art—the fragility of man and the ravages of time. Two paintings particularly embodied this idea for me. One was Peter Brueghel’s The Triumph of Death.

This painting is a panorama of a burning landscape where Death and his minions have free reign of humanity. At the center is Death himself, scythe in hand, riding an emaciated horse, commanding a horde of skeleton soldiers who flood the entire landscape, each administering awful punishments. In one scene people are hanged on a makeshift gallows. In another people are beheaded. The whole ordeal is horrible, apocalyptic and gruesome, and most would describe it as morbid, but I saw in the painting a stirringly honest picture of an oft-forgot reality—that Death will come for us all. On this side of Eden, we are on the clock.

The idea of time leads me to the second painting. In Mark Buchannan’s The Rest of God, he describes the reality that we are slaves to time, and he illustrates this with the story of Chronos. Chronos was the Greek god of time, and in the myths, because he fears being usurped, he chooses to devour his children. Buchannan sees in this story our plight as humans—that we are all subject to time’s gnawing mouth. Goya captured this horrifying scene his painting Chronos (Saturn) Devouring His Children and when I saw the painting I instantly connected it with the Brueghel painting. They are really about the same thing. These paintings are vivid, if macabre reminders, that as children of Adam, we are slaves to time, and that in many ways time does devour us.

I know this is true in my own work, how there is never enough time to accomplish everything you think to do or even everything you have to do. But work isn’t the only thing that time devours. On this trip I came in thinking I would have scads of time to read, to blog, to reflect, and to see everything that I wanted, but it hasn’t been the case. In everything you always have to choose what you really want and even then you mostly run out of time. Both these paintings were reminders to me that in God’s scheme of things, we are no longer enslaved to time. Yes, death will come, but it will have no sting because there is a world coming were time does not exist and we will not decay. Sometimes it takes a glimpse of horror to remember that.

Segovia, or Cathedrals Aren't What They Used to Be

2008-07-17T15:14:00.001-05:00

by Christopher Myers

About a year ago Joey and I were at Barnes and Noble flipping through photography books on Europe. While looking at a book on Spain we came across a few sweeping panoramas of a tiny medieval town called Segovia. One look at the fortified walls, the forbidding castle, the jutting spires of the cathedral, and the endless arches of the aqueduct, and I knew that we had to go. Luckily, Segovia is a short bus ride away from Madrid and after our night in the inferno of Jeremy’s apartment, a day in medieval village sounded nice. We bought some food, boarded the bus, and headed to Segovia.

Segovia is beautiful and if you are in Madrid for any amount of time at all it is worth the bus ride. But I have to say, our time in Segovia solidified a shift I’ve sensed in myself concerning travel. I’ve been to Europe a handful of times and to other places where you travel in a similar way, namely, you stay in a major city, take in the major sights, enjoy the local cuisine or some of other culturally significant thing like flamenco or bullfighting.

But lately I’ve really just wanted to be outside, to hike and to enjoy the landscape of a place more than the things I’ve traditionally enjoyed. The castle was amazing and I always love cathedrals, but the best part of the day in Segovia was when we hiked around the perimeter of the city. At one point we were lost, so we cut across a field and down a hill through some trees, and that was the most fun I had all day.

I enjoyed it because it was restorative. I didn’t feel like I needed to accomplish anything other than enjoying the landscape. Much of the way I travel is reflective of how I live my life, namely that I am striving to learn and to accumulate information, purely for sake of having information. My number one strength is input. I collect information like middle school girls used to collect trolls—that is, crazily. Europe is great for that because everything has a story, everything has cultural weight. There is information everywhere and if you are wired like me, that can turn into work rather than pleasure.

One thing I’ve been learning this year spiritually is the difference between vacating and recreating. The vacation implies vacantness, that you are fleeing a space, fleeing your life. But that never works. If you are a workaholic at home then you are going to manifest those things on a trip. Vacating isn’t really possible in my opinion, and if it is then it certainly isn’t healthy because it is probably coupled with mind-altering substances. Recreation is different—it is re-creative. What this means is that when we travel or take any time for ourselves it should re-create us. Our day in Segovia was that for me.

Madrid - Day One, or I'm Tired of Sweating While I Sleep

2008-07-15T10:53:00.002-05:00

by Christopher Myers

We left Seville and reached Madrid by train in around 3 hours, which I think is the perfect amount of time to spend on a train. While enjoying the Spanish countryside, we learned from some Spaniards that the festival of San Fermin, including the running of the bulls, was still going on that we could be there with another 3-hour train ride. We decided that we would go after leaving Madrid, but more on that later.

We arrived in Madrid and made our way to the Plaza de Espana to meet Jeremy, our first couch surfing host. For those of you who don’t know, couch surfers are an internet community of people who offer their homes to travelers for free, and since you typically end up sleeping on their couch, they call it couch surfing. Joey and I have hosted a handful of travelers over the last year, and since none of them were serial killers or that weird at all, we decided that we would try it as travelers. At the very least we would save some money and meet some interesting people.

And we met Jeremy. Jeremy is a French ex-pat who lives in Madrid, working as a language tutor. As you will see from the pictures, Jeremy is, in my opinion, very French looking. According to his profile, he considers himself an expert in English, but he is an earnest amateur at best. During one conversation it took me ten minutes to understand that in France three separate channels show Desperate Housewives. Really?

Hardly worth the effort. I’m not criticizing him—Jeremy honestly loves language, he says he knows 8, and you can tell he hosts couch surfers, particularly English speakers, so that he can practice. I admire this for two reasons. One, if my French were at the level of his English, I would never dream of hosting a French speaker, so he is certainly brave. Two, though we struggled to understand each other, he genuinely wanted to communicate with us and he strove to make that happen. During conversations he would look up words and then ask us how to use certain phrases or verbs.

In all of that I didn’t ask him how to say one thing in French, and I realized we native English speakers aren’t very generous with other languages. For us other languages are more like novelties because we understand that English is the language of culture and commerce, and that in terms of cost benefit analysis, the effort necessary to really learn another language isn’t worth it since English is king. Traveling helps us see how the rest of the world perceives our language and our culture and how we perceive ourselves, and I love this because I don’t know if I would ever think about this if it weren’t for encountering people like Jeremy. I realized that Europeans are like distant cousins to us Americans, so even though we have relatives in common, our families are different, and it’s always interesting to see how other families raise their children, so to speak.

But Jeremy was only with us in Madrid for one night because he was going to a nude beach for a couple of days (true story). We thought this meant that we were getting kicked out after one night, but then something incredible happened—he gave us the keys to his apartment—and he told us we are welcome to come and go as we please. Crazy, really. But then I looked around and realized he had no fear of us taking anything. There was nothing to take, unless we wanted a PC laptop with a French keyboard. We didn’t.

Now to that first night. His apartment had three bedrooms, but one of them was inaccessible for reasons that remain inexplicable, and because Jeremy’s roommate had the other room, this meant that all four of us would be sleeping in Jeremy’s room—his tiny, tiny room with two mattresses and a fold out couch. It was kind of like if you combined a sleep over with a refugee camp in Africa, except hotter. Way hotter. Jeremy had no AC because Europeans love to sweat and love to smell like sweat. I’m serious—there was nary a fan, which blows my mind because it’s not like ceiling or floor fans are a big secret. That first night in Madrid may be the worst night of sleep I have ever had, if you can call having your eyes closed for eight hours pretending to sleep while you roll around in your own sweat sleep. Hey, at least it was free.

Seville, Spain

2008-07-11T11:22:00.001-05:00

by Christopher Myers

Our flight from London to Seville was easy overall, aside from having to get up at 4 am to make the airport. This compounded our sleep debt and when we finally got to Seville the only thing we were able to see before taking a 6-hour nap was the Seville Cathedral. I knew for sure that I needed to sleep when trudging through the world’s largest cathedral felt like a chore more than a privilege. Christopher Columbus’ stunning tomb only inspired a mild response. We did see a wooden alligator hanging from one of the outdoor transepts. Though I should have been asking why there was a wooden alligator at a church, I instead named him Woody Allengator. Tyler and Joey both laughed, which is concrete evidence that we all needed to sleep. Clearly, we weren’t thinking straight.

So after a glorious 6-hour nap we enjoyed a meal at a 300-year-old tapas bar. The food was good but the surprise of the evening was discovering a half-formed pearl in one the oysters we ate. Actually, my teeth discovered it. And after realizing what it was, we decided to make it the trip mascot and to name it. We settled on Gary Lawrence of Iberia. Unlike Woody Allengator, the pearl’s name is absolutely brilliant. He was too small though, and I lost him the next morning. Tyler cried.

We planned to head to Madrid the following morning but Tyler found out that there would be a bullfight that night in Seville. This was exciting to all of us, since attending a bullfight was at the forefront of our imaginations from the planning stages of this trip. There seems to be nothing more quintessentially Spanish than a bullfight, and Seville is the world capital of bullfights.

But I have to say the overall experience was strange and a little unsettling for me. One bull, for instance, had blood gushing out of his mouth by the end of the fight and when the team of horses would drag the dead bull’s body away, it always felt like they were celebration was a little too extravagant. It’s not like the bull had a real chance.

The most fascinating aspect of the whole ordeal was the matadors themselves. I didn’t realize there was a team of matadors each with a different job. The main matador though is the most fascinating. He is the one who ends up killing the bull, and he occupies a strange masculine/feminine space. In one sense his main job is to seduce the bull, luring him into a hypnotic dance. His main weapon is a kind of dance, a dance full of graceful and strikingly feminine steps. The bull spins and lunges into an ever dizzying trance, and ends up utterly stunned, standing woozy in front of the matador, who then plunges a sword into the bull’s back. This is where the matador becomes decidedly masculine. What starts graceful and seductive ends forceful and aggressive. And though we saw one matador toppled end over end by a charging bull, I never felt like the bullfighters were in danger. The only one in danger was the bull. His fate was sealed as soon as he stepped into the arena. What I thought would be a true confrontation between man and beast was really more pageantry, a prelude to a known end—the death of the bull.

Now on to one of the reasons travel is so great. Edward de Bono describes the human brain as a “self-organizing system,” which means, among other things, that as your brain figures something out, a place, a process, etc., it creates neural shortcuts for that thing. These neural shortcuts self-organize so that when certain stimuli hit your brain, your brain knows exactly what to do, so that over a long enough period of time you can do certain things on autopilot. Think about driving in your hometown. For the most part you aren’t paying attention because your brain knows how to get around.

What this means is that to learn, to grow, to shake up your brain, you need new environments and challenges. Travel, especially in foreign countries, jump-starts your brain.

In London when we walked into Victoria station and there were thousands of people moving in every direction and I was on no sleep and I had to figure out what tube to take, my brain kicked into overdrive. And I loved it. I had to form new patterns or at least develop pathways between existing patterns in my mind. I’ve always described travel as heightened living. You do many of things that you do in your regular life, but you experience them in a heightened way. If your every day life is standard definition television, then travel is high definition television.

Chris Goes to Europe

2008-07-10T14:14:00.005-05:00

North Writers' friend, Chris Myers, is spending a little over a month traveling through Europe. He's keeping a blog to log his journeys, and we'll be copying his entries here. You can also follow his blog by following the link in the "North Writers Read..." section on the right side of this page.

34 Days in Europe Starts Here
by Christopher Myers

“Why do you like going to Europe so much?” My grandfather asked me this question the day before I left for a 35-day jaunt to the continent, and in asking this question I know that he wanted me to justify the time and expense involved in such a journey. My sense is that his question is a lot of people’s question. Put simply, he’s really asking why travel matters. For someone like me who has been to Europe a handful of times and considers travel unquestionably valuable, the question strikes me as odd, almost nonsensical really. Surely there is no need to justify travel as a worthwhile investment of time and money?But maybe there is.

In addition to chronicling where we have gone and what we have done, I want to use this blog to attempt an answer to my grandfather’s question. I want to examine my own motivations for traveling and to dissect the underlining premise of the question, namely that things must have a measurable utility in order to be valuable.

So it begins.

None of us slept at all on the flight to London. This was a huge tactical error because we landed at 7:45 am local time, putting a whole day before our weary, plane-fatigued bodies. We decided that the rush of adrenaline and the aid of energy drinks would keep us going. It didn’t. When we finally made it to the British Library, it was all I could do to keep my eyes open. And that is saying something, considering that the only existing manuscript copy of Beowulf was two feet in front of me. If Beowulf or Paul McCartney’s handwritten lyrics for Yesterday or pages from Da Vinci’s notebooks can’t wake me up, then I really need a nap.

Part of this trip is about staying with people rather than in hotels. Saving money is part of it, but meeting new people is our main motive. We started with two of my college friends, Matt Gierhart and Josh Montgomery. They ive in London, and they were gracious enough to let us stay with them for a night on the floor of their flat. After a much needed nap, Matt and Josh took us around the corner for some local fare at the Indian Cottage. I grew to love Indian food in New York City, and I’ve quite missed it in Amarillo. The meal was great. Meals and friends seem like self-justifying reasons to travel, but I will explore the reasons for travel in my next post.

We slept for four hours that night and caught a flight to Seville, Spain. More on that later.

All photos by Joseph Schlabs.

Sleepy in London pub

Posing in the tube

Matt and Josh's apartment

Baseball is Dead; Long Live Baseball

2008-06-25T17:29:00.000-05:00

by Seth

Baseball season is in full look-to-the-fences swing. My Cubs are currently sitting at #1 in the National League, and they also have the highest win percentage in Major League Baseball. Despite my knowledge of that fact, I really don't keep up with baseball too much during regular season play because there is just so much information to process. There are 30 teams, and each one of those teams plays about 160 games in regular season; each one of those teams has 9 starting players (10 in the American League with the designated hitter position); those players can be broken down to: infield, outfield, and a rotating roster of pitchers (and then break that down to openers, relievers, and closers which all have sets of stats), then each player has both offense and defense stats, etc. Every single game these teams play produces an unbelievable amount of data that is disseminated to the appropriate coaches, managers, physical trainers, doctors, groundskeepers, and business administrators who need to make decisions about the next game's line-up.

Despite the stat machine, the reason people enjoy watching baseball is the human story that can be pulled from the numbers. The machine might see a centerfielder's batting average dip below .150 (that's 1.5 hits for every 10 at-bats for you non-baseballers) in the month of June; a fan would see Brian Barton, a 26 year-old Cardinal who, aside from almost completing an aeronautical engineering degree in Miami, is struggling to adjust to the big leagues when he was called up to mend the broken lines of the injury-plagued Cards. A real fan might know that Barton has the potential to be a solid addition to the roster - after all he does co-own the record for highest batting average at the University of Miami - so they're willing to have a little hope that he'll find his groove shortly. (For more on Barton, check out this article).

The problem is people long for the heroic feats. Heroism comes from overcoming a compelling conflict. The ultimate conflict in baseball is between the pitcher and the batter because it is one man against another; one man's training and physical prowess against another's. This is what makes pitchers and the batters become the superstars. Which batters are triumphant over the pitchers, and which pitchers are triumphant over the batters? All other defensive plays are tertiary; no matter what sort of athletic ability is required to track a line drive to the wall; the other eight players on the field are there like the ropes on a boxing ring.

This is also why the vaunted stats, the numbers that make legends, all have to do with batting and pitching. Nobody remembers the Golden Glove winning centerfielder from 1994, but they do know who Ken Griffey Jr. is because he was cranking out homers for the Seattle Mariners. Funny thing is, Junior was the Golden Glove winner, and that was just one year out of ten in a row that he won the award, setting a new defensive record.

That's also why the home run records are so compelling. In 1961, Roger Maris broke the single season home run record set by Babe Ruth 34 years earlier. Roger Maris was 26. He hadn't even been alive when Ruth set the record. That record stood for another 37 years until Mark McGwire broke it. He was 34. It only took three years for Barry Bonds to break the new record. We all know the story: both McGwire and Bonds were allegedly using steroids to enhance their games and there has been an endless investigation by the United States Senate, no less, into the depths of baseball to see if all that information provided by the stat machine for the past ten years can even be trusted.

As the investigation unfolds, it turns out that a lot of players were using steroids. A lot. But it's only players who were known for their hitting or their pitching. First it was McGwire and Bonds, now it's Roger Clemens, the ace pitcher who was known for his enduring career, health, and fastball. It turns out, players don't juice to enhance their ability to field a one-hopper down the third base line.

But why, all the sudden, are players turning to illegal methods to up their games? There are a lot of factors, including the pressures that earning absurd amounts of money will put on you to be a superstar, but I think there's a much deeper and universal root than greed. I think it has to do with the fact that baseball has nearly 100 years of professional history behind it. The human limitations of the game were explored early in the game. Babe Ruth set a mark that took 34 years to clear, and when Roger Maris did it he only bested the record by one home run; and it took more games for him to do it. In the meantime, pitching evolved. Pitchers learned better mechanics, had better practice facilities, utilized teams of stat keepers to find out batters' weaknesses. Everything that was humanly possible has been done. Baseball has told its story. So baseball is a machine now. People are still playing; fans are still watching; kids are still learning the fundamentals; the temple has been built; the players are looking to make their mark, but all the marks have been made.

So is baseball as a human endeavor dead? Can it no longer tell us anything about the human condition? Has it ceased to speak? It's done, it's time to move on. However, I know what it says to me every spring when I pull out the mitt. When I personally throw that 5 oz., 9-inch circumference sphere of leather, and string, and cork, it feels like something a human was made to do; like my body was engineered for that. I suppose that's the difference between doing and observing; the difference between participating in the organism and decoding the stats; the difference between gods and idols. Far be it from me to get in the way of what baseball has to say.

Long live baseball.

Ana Luisa Smile

2008-02-26T16:44:00.005-06:00

I met Ana Luisa, 21, for our first interview, at the Bethesda Outreach Center. My guide, and soon-to-be interpreter, Stefanie Murray, peeked around the corner into a classroom full of mostly Hispanic women of all ages and said,
“Ana Luisa is still teaching her craft class. She should finish pretty soon.”
Twice a month on Thursdays, the outreach center holds a clothing outreach, Bible studies, and some classes to teach mothers how to make cheap recipes and activities for their homes. Sort of like a mini-home economics for women who never had the benefit.
While I waited, I told Rita Wilkinson, an assistant at the outreach center, why I was there. She fondly replied,
“You’re interviewing Ana Luisa? She’s out here all the time. Yesterday she cleaned the bathrooms after she helped out in the nursery. She’s beautiful. Strikingly. You’ll do a double-take when you see her.”
As Rita hustled back and forth between entertaining me and her normal duties, I thought it was strange that she said Ana Luisa helps out there. I was expecting to speak with someone who came out there for help. About that time the class let out, and over 70 women began filing through the warehouse door to find new clothes. I wondered if I ought to grab one of them for the interview instead.
But Stefanie Murray, who’s a fast walker and even faster talker, came cruising around the corner with Ana Luisa in tow. Rita was right. Ana Luisa, or Ana as many of the women refer to her, was dressed nicely in a bright green jacket, jeans and white athletic shoes, and her jet-black hair was pulled in a tight ponytail. She has large empathetic eyes which, as I would later find out, she has passed on to her four-year old daughter.
All three of us sat down in an office and introduced ourselves. Ana reclined in a large chair, and she watched Stefanie and me talk with the kind of posture a teenage girl has when she’s watching t.v. at a friend’s house. She twisted her gold wedding band around her finger while my questions were translated, and she never once sat forward in her chair. She relied on Stefanie to interact with me.
She originally came to Bethesda in September 2006, because her husband, who repairs appliances, was low on work, and her friend would bring her food from the center occasionally. Eventually, she cut out the middleman, and started coming on her own.
However, throughout the interview it comes across that she rarely takes aid anymore. Stefanie even says that they try to get her to take diapers home, for her 13-month old son, but Ana usually replies that she has already bought diapers.
“She’s very independent,” Stefanie says. “She makes $50 a week at the flea-market, and she has to use that to buy groceries, clothes, diapers, pretty much everything for the house.”
I point out that Ana is at the outreach center several days a week cleaning for free and working in the nursery, and if she isn’t coming for aid, then it doesn’t make sense for her to continue coming to the center.
She said, “I’m alone in Amarillo. They are my family.”
From a few conversations I had with people around the center, I gathered that they all considered her family. Everybody who knew Ana praised how hard she worked. And everyone talked adoringly about her children who were playing in the nursery. Her daughter is bilingual, and is the only person in her household who speaks English. Her son is legally a United States citizen because he was born here in Amarillo. When I was leaving, her kids came out of the nursery, and several of the older women helped the little ones into their coats before they went home.
I ask about her relationship with her husband, and I strike a chord.
“It’s a challenge. Right now it’s going well, but off and on, it’s difficult.” Stefanie interjects that Ana gets a lot of marriage counseling at the center.

They met when she was 16, in Chihuahua, Mexico. He was very sweet when they began dating, but Ana is quick to include that she thinks that she was a just trophy to him and his friends. They were kids. The first time they were together she became pregnant. And they married.
They actually lived very well in Mexico. Both of them had full-time jobs at a factory, and she had been accepted to a nursing school. They lived in a nice house, and he bought everything they needed like new furniture and groceries.
But one day while she was at work, his parents came to visit. They had already moved to Amarillo because a relative had told them that there was plenty of work for an appliance repairman. They came back to Chihuahua to celebrate his birthday, and they convinced him to move to Amarillo. When she got home, he told her to pack everything because they were moving. Ana cried because she loved Mexico, but he said that if she didn’t come with him, then she and their daughter would never see him again. So they got work permits and followed her in-laws here.
She called her mom from the States to let her know, for the first time, that she had moved. And now she hasn’t seen her mom, nor her sisters, in three years.
Ana Luisa wipes a tear away from her eye before it runs down her cheek, and we all three sit in silence for a moment.
Her mother sold their house, and all of their things, and sent the money to Amarillo. I ask if things have gotten better or worse since they got here.
She answers, “Peor.” Worse.

***

Her husband works at an appliance repair shop on Amarillo Boulevard, a few blocks from their house. He is able to pay for rent, and their car payment, but she says that she is responsible for the rest with the $50 a week she earns at the flea market. I don’t ask how much their rent and car payment are, but I sense that there is something more that she hasn’t told me.
“He makes a good living, it just goes on other things.”
“What else does he spend the money on?” I recognize the words cantina and cerveza in her response before Stefanie has a chance to translate because I saw them airbrushed on several brightly colored, but dilapidating buildings all along the Boulevard.
Stefanie translates, “What he does in his spare time: the bar, drugs, alcohol. And those bars don’t kick you out. They’re pool halls.”
Later on, Stefanie just plain tells me, without a prompt from Ana, that the husband has a problem with drugs and alcohol.
I ask how long it’s been going on, and she says since he was 16 when they were still in Mexico, and that he picked it up from his father. Stefanie explains that especially in the Hispanic culture, if a father behaves a certain way, then the son automatically gets permission to behave that way.
“If mom and dad don’t say anything, then the wife probably shouldn’t say anything.”
I ask Ana if she has seen any difference in his behavior since she began coming to Bethesda. And she has, but it’s an interesting answer. Her mother-in-law began coming to Bethesda with her, and before long she started seeing what her own husband, and what her son were doing was wrong.
“Now my mother-in-law talks to my husband. Last week, she pulled him aside and told him, ‘You think she’s alone because she’s here [Amarillo], but she’s not. Bethesda has stepped up, and they will help her take care of her kids.’ It really weighed on him. He began thinking. Usually he’ll go out on Sundays while I stay home with the kids. But all day Sunday he stayed with me. We went to the park and did family stuff.”
Stefanie adds, “Anytime something happens here, he’ll go through a string where he’ll stay with her. He won’t go out to the bar, won’t do anything, and he tells her he wants to change. She told me yesterday that when he’s not doing it, he doesn’t want to do it, but of course it’s an addiction that comes back. Especially when dad’s doing it.”

***

I begin to understand why the husband relapses as I drive to their house for a follow-up interview. There are at least ten cantinas around the area that he lives. Everyone generally stays in the area of their home when they socialize, especially if they have limited means of transportation. Add to that the fact that he only speaks Spanish, and that this small area of town with the competing cantinas is the only area that caters to Spanish speaking people. He lives in a very isolated sphere in Amarillo. Ana has gotten lucky, and found a group of Spanish-speaking women with whom she can socialize, and a safe place she can take her kids in Bethesda, but his world consists of work with his father who is using, and anybody else that enters that sphere. The circumstances seem a bit helpless, and I have a bit of a frustrated moment as I pull up to the address they gave me.
I’m promptly relieved of my contemplation as a ferocious terrier mutt meets me on the front porch. His orange and white hackles bristle as he strains at the rope that is tied to his doghouse on the porch. He sounds the alarm incessantly in little high-pitched barks. Yip! Yip! I cautiously reach from beyond his restraint, knock on the door, and wait. The dog continues to bark. Yip! Yip!
The house seemed bigger than what I had imagined. Ana had said that she, her husband, and their two children lived in a one-bedroom house. The house I now stood before was much larger than a one-bedroom.
But this was the address I had been given. It said so in little metal numbers right in front of my face.
Yip! Yip! When the door finally opened I did not recognize the girl looking at me, and by the look on her face, she did not recognize me.
“Is Ana Luisa here?”
“¿Uh?” The girl turned and called her abuela. The woman came from another room and yelled at the dog,
“¡Silencio!”
The dog obeyed, and went back into his house.
“I’m looking for Ana Luisa.”
She pointed towards her driveway, and hooked her arm to the left, pointing at the back of the house.
“Aqui, aqui.”
“Um, gracias.”
I stepped around the side of the house, and hidden at the back of the driveway behind a few cars was a tiny white house. This seemed more like the description I had received.
Ana met me at the door with Rosinda Hoehnes, another interpreter and volunteer from Bethesda. When you walk into the house there’s a bedroom. You are literally standing in their children’s bedroom. There’s a crib to the right, and a very small and neatly made bed in the far right corner. The room is painted a bright purple, and there are stuffed animals in little groups. There’s a tiny television above the crib with a shelf of children’s movies. High on the far wall is a shelf with framed pictures of Ana’s family. She shows me her mother and three sisters. The middle sister just had her quinceañera in February, and her family is supposed to be sending pictures of it soon. The youngest sister, who is ten, is posing in a white Cinderella dress that her mother made her. They sent that dress to Ana for her daughter’s fourth birthday, and she took it in so it would fit her. I see a picture in a yellow, fabric covered frame, and could swear it was Ana when she was little. She says no, it’s her daughter, in pigtails. They have the same empathetic eyes. I don’t see any pictures of her husband’s family.
The next room is she and her husband’s bedroom. There is no door between the two rooms, just some Mexican beads that are pulled to one side of the broad doorframe. This room opens directly into la cocina, again with no door. The bathroom is in their bedroom. It has a door.
Rosinda and I sit down at the kitchen table while Ana puts her son in a high chair, and gives him a bottle. He’ll hold your gaze for a long time, like children his age do, and he’ll get a big kick out of it. He’s very well behaved. Her daughter, she tells me, is at school. The kitchen is furnished with a refrigerator and a gas range. Above the kitchen table hanging on the wall is a painted mirror with the Ten Commandments written in English, although no one in her household can read them.
Ana joins us at the table, and tells me a story about her daughter. She had just had surgery removing a lump from her neck. The doctors had worried that it might be cancerous, so they removed it and performed two biopsies. But the volunteers at Bethesda had prayed over her daughter several times, and the lump was benign. She said the doctors considered it a mystery.
Rosinda adds that many people at the outreach center had pitched in and raised almost $2,000 for the surgery.
There’s no doubt that her husband took notice of this. It reminds me of something Stefanie Murray told me before I left the previous interview.
“She’s been a light for her family coming here to church. She calls it church. This is church to her. And the example that she brings to the family now, it’s amazing how everybody can be in the wrong, but you can bring light and it begins motivating. That’s what’s helped her husband [recently]. Just seeing what church has done for her, and he’s starting to be challenged to grow in that.”

* Photos by Joseph Elliott

My Neighbor's Bathtub

2008-01-04T11:29:00.000-06:00

by Seth Wieck

Katie already owned a house when we got married, which was great for me, because I knew nothing about real estate. Well, I knew that you were supposed to own real estate because it's a smart investment. You know, appreciation and all that. However, the act of buying land was a scary proposition for me. That would lock me in to making monthly payments to the man and that would limit me from wandering around the world and experiencing different cultures. Not that I was doing that anyway, but at least I could.

So when we got married, her obligation also became my obligation. It's actually pretty exciting, owning your own house, and I would recommend you do it sooner, rather than later. All sorts of projects pop up. I learned how to hang and wire ceiling fans before I even moved in. Then there were light fixtures and switches, and then once spring rolled around I started working on the yard. I'm sure, now that I've worked on my own yard, that man was meant to cultivate things. I have spent many evenings just standing in my yard looking at the grass.

***

With the purchase of a house also comes new relationships with the neighbors. Neighbors are interesting, because they are some of the few relationships in your life that you don't choose. Kind of like co-workers, but at least with co-workers you share common goals: projects, meetings, dogging the boss and Christmas parties. You don't share much with your neighbors except a fence that separates your stuff from their stuff, and the occasional tool.

The neighbors to the south are closest to our age, so we have something in common. It turns out that I went to high school with the husband. He used to be a sprinter on the track team, but that was 40 lbs. earlier, and now he has an amazing tobacco habit that occupies one entire cheek morning, noon, and night. His lips are cracked from the constant stretch and spit, and the cracks are stained brown from the seepage. He's very handy but I get the feeling that he's a little bit compulsive, and a terrible time manager. He has one of those old bathtubs with the legs sitting in his driveway. He patched it with some putty, and then primed it for a repaint, but that's as far as the project ever got. The bathtub has been sitting there since I moved in about a year and a half ago, and it has slowly filled with newspapers that never get read.

Speaking of projects that have gone unfinished, the fence in our backyard has been in disrepair for a long time now. Our neighbors to the south and I talked over that fence one day last summer, while I was looking at my grass, about setting aside a weekend to get the fence fixed. We picked a date and sketched out a plan for raising the new fence. He caught me the week we were to build the fence and said that he had come down with a bad case of shingles and that he wouldn't be able to work on the fence. I said, "Ah, don't worry about it. We'll take care of it as soon as you get better." I've never had shingles, but it sounds like a terrible disease where basically your nerve endings feel like they're on fire. Anyway, the fence still isn't done.

Let me explain the state of disrepair our shared fence is in, because it happens to be symbolic of the state of disrepair our neighborly relationship is in with the southerly next-doors. Said fence isn't a normal picket fence. Rather, it's comprised of posts, and then slats that are tacked on horizontally, one on either side of the post, all the way around the yard. Small dogs can fit their heads through it, or if they really try then they can get their whole body through. We have small dogs, they also became my obligation when I got married, however, they never try to get through the fence. Occasionally, they'll sneak out the front gate and mark the neighborhood cars, but they don't get into other peoples' yards. Our neighbors also have smallish dogs. They're some version of a Russell Terrier, but with a little more mean built in. If they're left outside overnight they'll bark at everything non-stop. And by non-stop, I mean they take turns breathing so the other one can bark in its place. I think they hear the echo of their own bark and think it's the reply of another dog, and so they'll get more and more vicious all night long. I've laid awake for hours at night sometimes trying to discern if there is any language to the bark. Are there different kinds of barks that can be grouped into categories such as greetings, or humor? Mostly they all sound like death.

One morning I was in my office reading and the neighbor dogs were snarling at everything as usual. I tuned it out and continued my reading. After a while I thought the barks were turning into screams, like the screams of a woman. These were different kinds of barks than I had heard those dogs make before which is originally what got my attention. Then I realized that those were the screams of my wife.

Upon this realization, I leaped from my chair and ran out the back to see one of our dog's ears hanging off, and my wife holding her own arm with blood running through her fingers. "They bit me," she said as she walked hurriedly through the door. I took her in and got her bandaged up, then we took Popcorn to the vet. Katie was much more concerned with Popcorn's injuries than her own, and I of course was livid that something, anything in all of creation, would put my wife in danger. We took Katie to the doctor, and the doctor called Animal Control.

Throughout this whole ordeal I played through a spectrum of lashings that I would give my neighbors as soon as we got home; from physical lashings to curse-filled tirades that mostly concluded with me killing their dogs. When we got home from the emergency room I stood in our backyard with a baseball bat and taunted their dogs to come over. They didn't take the bait. This wasn't the most creative way I had imagined killing the dogs, believe me I had months of nightlong bark sessions to plan sadistic things, but this one sure would have felt the best. By the time the neighbors got home, I had decided to put my baseball bat back under our bed, and deal with our neighbors peaceably. It's surprising how much it benefits your peace of mind knowing that your neighbors are on your side.

By law Animal Control had to come over and at least check out the dogs. Of course, their dogs came through the fence and chased the Animal Control lady which got them sent to the pound. Our neighbors were given a ticket for not keeping their dogs under control. They came over and apologized, and said that they would get rid of their dogs. They also told us that their dogs had bitten several of their guests previously, so we all agreed that the dogs should not come back. Katie, wonderful woman, even went to court with them later and convinced the judge to drop the charges.

Well, after an 11-day observation period, the dogs were back. They're still there, but now they're in a cage. And our neighbors don't stop to shoot the breeze and catch-up like they used to. To me it seems like they're being sheepish about the whole dog situation because they didn't stick to their word. I don't know. We enjoy their company. I'm willing to bet if we got that fence fixed, we all could be friends again, but judging by that bathtub I don't think that's going to happen anytime soon.

Theological Question - Am I Understanding This?

2007-11-27T14:55:00.000-06:00

The following post is a conversation over email. It starts off with a question, then some replies, then the conclusion from the original person who posed the question.

>> Question
Gentlemen,
I was reading Matthew this morning, this passage in particular:
The Parable of the Sower Explained:

Matthew 13:18-23: "Hear then the parable of the sower: When anyone hears the word of the kingdom and does not understand it, the evil one comes and snatches away what has been sown in his heart. This is what was sown along the path. As for what was sown on rocky ground, this is the one who hears the word and immediately receives it with joy, yet he has no root in himself, but endures for a while, and when tribulation or persecution arises on account of the word, immediately he falls away.As for what was sown among thorns, this is the one who hears the word, but the cares of the world and the deceitfulness of riches choke the word, and it proves unfruitful. As for what was sown on good soil, this is the one who hears the word and understands it. He indeed bears fruit and yields, in one case a hundredfold, in another sixty, and in another thirty."

In verse 19, Jesus says that “anyone who hears the word of the kingdom and does not understand it, the evil one comes and snatches away what has been sown in his heart.” In effect, the hearer who simply doesn’t understand loses his chance at being a fruit-bearing Christian, and we know what happens to people who don’t bear fruit – they’re cut off and thrown in the fire (Matthew 3:10).

So, is the Kingdom of Heaven so exclusive that it doesn’t allow people in who lack understanding? Does a person who has hours per day to study and meditate on Scripture have privilege over the person who has 3 kids and 2 jobs and simply doesn’t have time to develop a thorough understanding? Or the person who wasn’t raised to “think deep” about things?

I know in my own life, quite often really, I don’t understand Scripture beyond the literal meaning of the story. I know there is something beyond my grasp, and I might ponder it for days, but I still have no further comprehension. Is the evil one snatching bits of the kingdom from my heart, and am I in danger of being poor soil and lacking fruit?

Seth

>> Reply from Joey
In the passage, after Jesus tells the famously accessible parable, no one understood the parable except Jesus himself. Not even his buddies the disciples got it. So does that mean Jesus chose bad soil when he picked those dudes? Does that mean
His disciples were going to get the "seed" snatched away? Nope. The only reason the disciples got the picture was because they asked Jesus what the parable meant. They became good soil by listening to the voice of God.

When we encounter scripture, the only way for us to receive the seed of scripture and thereby be "good soil" is when we ask God what He is saying to us. When we read Scripture and don't meditate on it or ask questions or even give another thought about it, basically we are being bad soil at that time. It's when God whispers what He is saying to us through the Scripture.
Then, we grasp it all at once and revelation occurs.

So good soil is the person who hears (or reads) Scripture, and then asks God to reveal. And bad soil is the person who hears (or reads) Scripture, and doesn't ask God anything or even give it a thought.

Being good soil is about being dependent on God.

Joey

>> Reply from Chris
This parable is scary no matter how you look at it. The way you're looking at it, Seth, seems like we need to be a whole lot smarter and diligent. The other way is that our understanding is completely dependent on God. I go with the latter--the scary Calvinist way. For me 2 Cor. 3:14-18 is instructive in a matter like this. Basically, Paul argues that those who accept Christ must have their hearts unveiled (notice that the veiling of the heart is in relation to Moses being read, in other words, the situation is similar, in that the word goes out and people are able to percieve or not based on their veiling).

So this begs more questions. How does a heart become unveiled? Can we unveil our own hearts? I don't think we can since Paul is basically saying our hearts are blind, which is just another way of saying they are dead, which is what Paul says in Rom. 3--no one seeks God. Now if that is literally true, that no one seeks God, how does anyone come to seek God? God Himself must unveil our hearts. Then we aren't blind anymore and we can see ourselves for who we are and God for who He is. Hence, 2 Cor. 3:18--when our faces are unveiled we are transformed because we see God.

Also, the seed in the Parable could just as well be the proclaimed, spoken message of the Gospel, rather than the written word. In that context think about the state of your soil during any number of sermons. There are days when your soil is is receptive and other days when you are a rocky path at best. Either way, spoken or written word, there is a heavy emphasis in the New Testament on God's perogative in this matter. Jesus himself says that no man comes to him unless the Father draws him.

Of course, my answer only addresses the two extreme types of soil, not the middle ones, which are the most terrifying.

Chris

>> Reply from Bryce
I agree with Joey on this one. I think meditation is the key.

I think in some ways we have a measure of control over the state of our own hearts. While I do think God can harden and soften the heart (i.e. Pharaoh), I believe that we choose response and acceptance.

No soil, even sand, stays soft and fertile over time. It requires the right measure of elements and personal attention to remain fertile and soft. I think that Christ through the Holy Spirit is the initiator of the process. But I think we, like good farmers, must continually tend, weed, and till our soil. I also think that God brings elements such as good and bad weather in our lives that depending on our response and reception will help us remain soft.

Remember Romans 1...God chose the simple to confound the wise...

Let us not think of ourselves more highly than we ought.

We are all bad soil. Thanks be to Jesus that He even tried to sow His seed in us.

Bryce

>> Final Conclusion
I think the scary part about this dilemma for me was the fact that poor soil does not bear fruit, and like I suggested in the original question, things that don't bear fruit get cut off and thrown in the fire. Would my lack of understanding, like my inherent inability to understand college level algebra, keep me from bearing fruit?

The thing that settled it for me, especially in light of Bryce's final statement, is this verse: Matthew 3:8-10 "Bear fruit in keeping with repentance. And do not presume to say to yourselves, 'We have Abraham as our father,' for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children for Abraham. Even now the axe is laid to the root of the trees. Every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire."

John the Baptist is the speaker, and he is reaming a group of Pharisees and Sadducees. He's basically saying, "Don't consider yourself anything special, you are, but for the grace and favor of God, no better than these stones. But if you keep an attitude of repentance, like Bryce said, "Thanks be to Jesus that He even tried to sow His seed in us," then you will bear fruit. Realizing our poor soil composition, and asking for God's mercy, does in fact make us good soil. Of course, that realization requires a decent amount of thought concerning our constant shortcomings and depravity.

Folksy Wisdom
I got married a little over a year ago, and when we moved into our house, my first big project as a husband was to fix the yard up and plant a flower garden. It was pretty exciting when the spring rolled around and the grass started to green up. I went and bought fertilizer and a new lawn mower and set up a multi-year plan of establishing a beautiful landscape. I really do think that men were made to cultivate things. Early on it may have been crops and herds, but that has evolved into business and even relationships, and in this case an attitude of repentance. It's a constant and daily discipline to take out the weeds, water the crop, feed the crop, and eventually harvest. Funny thing about harvest is all the fruit - it feeds you, it feeds the people around you, and it has a bunch of seeds in it so you can plant another crop.

Seth

Nobody lost their faith, or even had a serious crisis; there are just questions that arise during the course of your life that need to be addressed. The first truth from which you go about answering the question always has to be "God is love." Everything else falls into place after that.

Go Broke Quick (And Amused) Schemes #1

2007-11-16T14:19:00.000-06:00

By Seth
Follow your childhood dream of buying your own plot of land and living quietly in the countryside while you live off of the revenue generated by your farm crops. Start small with:
1. 25 acres ($25,000)2. A small used tractor (1987 John Deere, 140-hp = $44,500),
3. A plow ($20,000),
4. A drill for planting ($30,000),
5. 200 gallons of diesel to fuel the tractor for a season ($600),
6. A custom-harvest crew to cut and haul your crop to market ($500 - $700).

Then collect your check from the grain co-op ($4,660 for a good wheat crop on 25 acres). Revel in the fact that you just lost about $115,000 following your childhood dream.

My Musical Heritage

2007-11-11T20:12:00.000-06:00

by Christopher Myers
A List With Stories

1. "You Can Call Me Al", Paul Simon—My dad likes to randomly sing lyrics from songs. He’ll grab my elbow and sing whatever tune has just popped into his head. When I was growing up, it was usually a Billy Joel song. One of his favorites, though, was from this song, particularly the line “roly-poly little bat faced girl.” But what I really remember about this song is dancing around the living room when the trumpet solo started.

2. "Johnnie Be Good", from Back to the Future—This scene in BTTF is a pivotal moment for me because when I saw it I knew that I would some day play guitar and that I would own a cherry-red Gibson ES-335. I still haven’t gotten the guitar, but I at least play a guitar. When I see this scene I like to think that Michael J. Fox is really playing.

3. "Goodnight, Saigon", Billy Joel—We were once at a restaurant, All the Fixin’s. We went there a lot because they had a $0.99 kid’s menu. One night I decided to listen to my Walkman before we ordered, and for whatever reason my parents let me do it. I was listening to a Billy Joel greatest hits album. The waiter pointed out to me that they had music in the restaurant that I could listen to, and he asked me what music I liked. I said Billy Joel without hesitation. I was 10 years old. The song I remember loving was this, and it’s about Vietnam. I think I just liked the way his voice echoed when he sang “sharp as knives.” "Uptown Girl" was another song my dad liked to sing random lyrics from.

4. "Hotel California", The Eagles—There may not be a better story song that makes no real sense in the history of music. I like the part about steely knives. I must have had a real thing for knives. Now that I think about it, the main thing I used the burner in my chemistry set for was to blacken the blade of my Rambo knife.

5. "Highway to the Danger Zone", Kenny Lofton—I’ve seen Top Gun more than I’ve seen any other movie ever. There isn’t even a close second. And I’m not embarrassed at all. In fact, I recently re-watched it, and I’ve been quoting it to my friends ever since. When aren’t you daily in a situation where you can legitimately say to someone that they’ve “lost the edge?”

6. "Secret Ambition", Michael W. Smith—W. will always mean Michael for me and not George. This song is a stand-in for any dozens of his songs that I loved. I owned all of his records and the first recording I ever did was myself singing "Kentucky Rose" into my tape deck.

7. "Love is a Verb", DC Talk—Outside of DC Talk I didn’t even know rap existed. I was pretty sure that they invented it. In any case, this is the first song I thought of off of Free at Last, so here it is on the list. Is there anything stranger than a rap group teaching kids grammar and parts of speech?

8. "Flood", Jars of Clay—In early high school a Beatle-esque CCM band called PFR played a concert at my church. I don’t remember anything about their set, I just remember that Jars opened and that upon leaving I was given a tape previewing their first record. The tape had a 30-second sample of "Flood" on it and I must have listened to that clip around 100 times before their album came out. Sometimes I marvel at the musical OCD of my younger days. By this point I actually was learning guitar, and I had to have a Taylor just like the guys in Jars. I also bought a few unflattering hats because the guys in Jars wore them. Those hats represent some of the worst decisions I have ever made.

9. "Norwegian Wood", The Beatles—My best friend Jonathan was a Beatles freak and he learned this song on guitar, sitar solo and all. As a consequence, this is the only Beatles song that I know how to play all the way through. I always tell myself that I should learn more Beatles songs, convinced that they will make me a better player, since they invented so much of what we know as popular music. This is one of my many theories that I’ve never actually tested.

10. "Shine", Collective Soul—When my mom would run into a store, I would ask to sit in the car, and I would turn the radio station to Rock 108. This is how I was exposed to grunge music. During one listening session in the car, I heard this song. I remember it sounding like the heaviest thing I have ever heard, and that’s coming from someone who had been raised on a steady diet of Petra. In retrospect it is ridiculous that anyone would describe Collective Soul as heavy, even if they have a song called that. The opening riff is still one of my favorite things to play on guitar, though I’m pretty sure the solo doesn’t really fit at all. Go back and listen. You’ll see.

11. "#41", Dave Matthews and Tim Reynolds, Live at Luther College—Whenever my iPod shuffles to a DMB song these days, I invariably skip it, unless it is a song from this album. I was into acoustic guitar from Jars of Clay, but when I listened to this I thought, “You can do more than strum it?” Plus, #41 has a great melody. Trust me it does. Even if Dave sounds like his vocal chords are actually in his nose.

12. "One Headlight", The Wallflowers—Here is another song and group that inspired a bad hat purchase. In this case it was an old man’s dress hat, a la Jacob Dylan in the liner notes of Bringing Down the Horse. I eventually bought a telecaster because of this video, which was a good purchase inspired by music. This song and album probably single handedly got me off of grunge music.

13. "Airbag", Radiohead—There are two reactions to Radiohead. The first is, “This is music?” The second happens when you hear other music after listening to Radiohead and you think, “This is music?” I imagine that hearing Sgt. Pepper for the first time had the same effect.

14. "Slower", Mineral—Before emo went pop, there was real emo. And I loved it. My friend Jay would loan me emo CDs that he’d ordered from crappy, black and white zines. Mineral was one of those bands. I can’t recommend them now, because the guy can’t sing. But I remember loving this lyric: “I would gladly trade a lifetime of convenience for an honest day or two.” And that was before I even knew what Romanticism was or what carpe diem meant. I was an earnest kid.

15. "Judas Skin", Vigilantes of Love—Horrible band name…amazing band. I saw these guys the first time I went to Cornerstone, a Christian music festival in the middle of a cornfield in Illinois. I didn’t know their music but I remember he closed with this song, and I remember thinking then that I’d never heard Christian music that was so like the Psalms or so honest about not having it all together. As another example of my musical OCD, I will say that over the course of the year after I saw them, I acquired 10 of the 13 VOL albums.

16. "Round Here", Counting Crows—Best opening lyrics to a song ever. Plus, these guys are the modern day realization of the California country I grew up listening to (The Eagles, Jackson Brown). August and Everything After may be my favorite album.

17. "Come Pick Me Up", Ryan Adams (via a Counting Crows concert)—In retrospect I can say this: Never go to a concert with a girl you’ve just broken up with, even if you bought the tickets while you were still together, and especially if the band had sentimental weight in the relationship itself. As terrible as that weekend ended up being (a cat died on the drive back), I can’t regret going though it because in the middle of "Round Here," Adam Duritz started singing the lyrics to "Come Pick Me Up." I remember saying out loud, “What song is that?” because the lyrics were killing me, and a lady turned around and drunkenly said, “Come Pick Me Up, Ryan Adams.” When I got home I found some Ryan Adams, and I’ve been in love with his music ever since.

18. "Latter Days", Over the Rhine—I saw them the second time I went to Cornerstone at midnight on the fourth of July. The concert was easily one of the best I’ve ever seen, and I hardly knew any of their music. About three in morning, when we were driving back to the dorm we were staying in, I popped in their album, Good Dog, Bad Dog. As soon as the song started, the whole car went silent. The piano chords grabbed us right by the throat. Then she started singing—What a beautiful piece of heartache this has all turned out to be. I was in my twenties by then, and I knew she was right.

19. "Street Lights", Josh Rouse—I bought the record Nashville about a week before I moved to NYC. The record was about saying goodbye to one place and embracing another one, so thematically I couldn’t have bought a better record. On the production level, this is a perfectly crafted pop song with a great melody and arrangement.

20. "Fix You", Coldplay—I remember standing in a subway station waiting on an F train in NYC. I was listening to this song and just as the song started to build with that three-note guitar riff , I felt the air start to move on my face from the approaching train and as the song climaxed the train was rushing by me. This is one of my top five NYC moments, when the whim of the city smiled on me and I felt a part of its beating heart. Obviously, there weren’t enough of those moments because I don’t live there any more.

I have another story related to this song. When I visited home I would go to church, and the videos always had cool music like this song, or Ryan Adams or Counting Crows. I would always wonder who was picking the music and would think that they were cool. When I moved back they all ended up being my friends. So this song is all about serendipity for me, even though it’s really about not getting what you want.

See other Musical Heritages.

Don’t Forget Your Consonants or Why I Sometimes Hate My Dreams

2007-11-10T19:33:00.000-06:00

By Christopher Myers

This morning I woke up angry with my mother. Not my real mother—my dream- mother, and not my dream-mother, as in my ideal mother, but my mother in my dream. I was angry with her. But we’ll get to her in a minute. First, the dream itself. From what I can remember, I seemed to be in the balcony of a church. The balcony was more like the upper deck of a baseball stadium than a church because everyone on stage looked small. I don’t remember what was happening, but I do remember an organ playing, and not a “How Great Thou Art,” Baptist Church, pipe organ, but a whirling, rock and roll, Bob Dylan with the Band organ. So maybe it was a rock concert in a church, or a baseball stadium that felt like a church, or some other non-logical possibility that only exists in dream world. I’m not sure.

What I am sure of is that my mother was there and that she was sitting next to an odd looking man in the balcony. I have no problem pointing out how strange this man was because I have never met this man in my waking life, and as far as I’m concerned, he doesn’t even exist. (How’s that for some writerly solipsism?) He was bald but the hair he did have was scruffy and his smile went up too easy and fast like his gums were greased with something. My dream-self didn’t trust him. Plus, he had sweaty hands. I don’t know that he had sweaty hands, but my dream-self was pretty convinced that he did, considering that he kept them palm down on his thighs and made no effort to shake my hand. But my dream-mother looked like my real mother, so my dream-self never thought for a minute that sweaty-handed guy was my dream-father. My dream-self was relieved.

I started talking to my dream-mother, but I don’t remember what we discussed. I just know that I got angry, because she used the phrase, “Don’t forget your consonants,” not once but twice. The second time she said this my dream-self exploded and started into a tirade that I can pretty much sum up with the phrase, “I don’t seem to be speaking in vowels right now, do I?” After that my dream-self started to mock my dream mother with a stream of consonantless phrases. Then I woke up. Angry.

Now, has my real mother made a request of me that seemed at the time to be as ridiculous as not forgetting one’s consonants? Absolutely, and I got angry at those too, though I don’t remember being as vindictive as my dream-self. But that isn’t the point. The point is how in the world can I wake up angry with my real mother for something my dream-mother said? Or put another way, how can something fake make me feel something real?

The whole realm of entertainment is built on the premise that people can have real responses to fake things, and on that level I’m glad for it because I, like the rest of humanity, like to be entertained. But that makes me think about how silly entertainment seems when you think of it that way—engaging in something fake in order to feel something real. What if the only real feelings I have are all products of entertainment? Or more specifically, what if I only seek out feelings stimulated by fake things because, in some weird inversion, those fake things become more real to me than reality? The dangers of constant stimulation are many, but the greatest danger is that it feels so real. It is not wrong to be stirred up—we were meant to be passionate. The question is what stirs you up? As John Piper points out, you can tell a lot about a person by what they are passionate about: “To know a soul’s proportions you need to know its passions. The true dimensions of a soul are seen in its delights. Not what we dutifully will but what we passionately want reveals our excellence or evil.”

What does it say about my soul if its only delight is in the latest season of The Office or the next Batman movie? Mostly that my soul doesn’t have much dimension. And that’s scary. Our parents, it seems, were right about too much TV, but not for the reasons they thought—it doesn’t rot our brain. It trains our brain to feel constantly flooded with feeling and emotion so that if we watch too much of it the real world doesn’t feel like much of anything at all. But even I could muster up the courage and rid myself forever of the glowing tube, I’d still have my dreams to contend with.

Former Top Chef Now a Servant

2007-10-25T01:41:00.001-05:00

By Seth
Raymond Gonzalez, Social Services Director at Faith City Ministries (FCM), was bursting at the seams with a big story to tell, and his black eyes darted down the nicely painted hallways as he decided where would be a good place to begin. He settled on starting the tour in the kitchen.

The kitchen was bustling with activity as they began serving the first of three lunches that day; each lunch was representative of the different groups of people the organization reaches seven days a week: one for the “students,” both men and women who are going through a 12-month rehabilitation program that sees participants from addiction to productive lives with a great rate of success, another being families and single women who are currently homeless but are getting back on their feet while staying at the NE 2nd Avenue campus, and finally between 100 and 150 homeless people who need a meal. This three-meal process happens three times per day for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

“In a given month, we serve between 12 and 14 thousand meals. We’re the only organization in the area that is doing it right now on a daily basis,” said Raymond. Planning and cooking all of those meals would be a logistical nightmare for most people, but Raymond has a unique background.

He moved to Amarillo over 30 years ago, from Santa Fe, New Mexico, when he was 18. “I needed to leave. My parents didn’t think that Santa Fe was a good place for me. I wasn’t a good guy. So I came here with a one-way bus ticket, a suitcase, and a job reference from an old acquaintance. I started working as a busboy at the Amarillo Club.” Eventually, he apprenticed with one of the top five chefs in the country learning everything about a restaurant, from slicing vegetables to managing the food supply. He was even voted Amarillo’s Best Chef two years in a row while he worked at the Downtown Athletic Club. He shies away from those accolades now.

“I enjoyed those experiences, but it was never my passion. I don’t want people to remember me as just a chef, I want them to remember me as a servant,” he said. Which is why he is currently training one of the FCM students to manage the kitchen. He introduces Rick, a polite middle-aged man with a graying goatee and glasses.

“Rick just got promoted to the Interim Director of Food Services,” said Raymond. Rick is clearly pleased with his new title as it speaks a great deal about the progress he has made in the past several months.

Raymond continues the tour at the loading dock where food and donations are delivered. “We usually buy about $6,700 worth of food every month from the Food Bank and other vendors. It sure does help when people donate though, especially with Thanksgiving coming up. Turkeys and hams would be a blessing.”

In fact, Faith City Ministries is entirely funded by donations from individuals.
“We have some people who can give a lot, and we have some people who mail us 50 cents every month. That’s what they can afford. It’s all appreciated. There are always people who need to be fed, but we like to provide a place where these people still have some identity, where they feel like somebody. This place is more than just a soup kitchen. We have a shelter for children, we give out clothing, and we help with addiction; that’s why our name changed from Faith City Mission to Faith City Ministries.

For more information about donating to Faith City Ministries, please visit their website at www.faithcity.org, or give them a call at (806) 373-6402.

A Farewell To Arms - Conversation 1

2007-10-24T22:34:00.000-05:00

It's official. The first book for conversation is Ernest Hemingway's "A Farewell to Arms." If you care to join this conversation, then read the whole novel, write your thoughts, and send them our way. It may be a little while before this conversation gains some momentum because we're all busy and we don't sit around reading books all day. But we're confident that once we've had the chance to let this book brew a little then we'll have a good conversation from a variety of very talented writers.

By the way, if you're new to the Writers' Common, conversations about books aren't the only things we do around here. We'd also like to encourage people to send in some journalism and humor pieces.

Conversations

2007-10-22T22:02:00.000-05:00

If you've been to the Welcome section, then you'll see that we like to promote relationships here at the Writers' Common.

A while back a few of us read Oryx & Crake, a novel by Margaret Atwood. Each of us read it at different times over a period of about six months. As we would finish different sections of the book we would bring it up in conversation. It wasn't a monthly book club meeting, like Oprah's little thing (which by the way, she's been knocking it out of the park on her selections lately) with a curriculum and prescribed critical thinking questions, it was just that we couldn't help talking about Ms. Atwood's book. It was a deeply affecting book, and since we knew that several other people had read it around the same time we would bring up different sections to be discussed while they were still fresh on everyone's mind. It kind of surprised us that it was that enjoyable to recall the work. There were lots of, "Oh yeah. I forgot about that part. What a great book."

Now, before you say, "I thought this was a Writers' Common, not a book club. If I had wanted to get together with my girlfriends, drink Swiss Mocha, and talk about the latest Francine Rivers' book, I would have done that. But I wanted to write." Just hold on, we're getting there. We're going to launch a few "official" books that some of us are going to read for kicks. Right now, we're thinking some Hemingway (we're currently involved in a debate about which novel). As soon as we decide, then we'll post the selection and open the Common to peoples' responses to the work. We'll leave the section open for further responses for six months. We want from you, the writers, thorough responses to the book. It doesn't have to be a critical analysis of the entire novel, in fact, please don't do that. But we would like you to write about scenes, themes, motifs etc. Also, if you have a question, feel free to post that. Somebody will probably have an answer. We find that this sort of conversation helps us digest the work. Kind of like how certain fats in butter help you to digest vitamins that are naturally found in vegetables better than if you just ate the vegetables alone.

This first novel will be a bit of an experiment to see if this blog can handle something like this. But if it works out, then we'll continue to post new books for conversation. Just look on the right side of the blog for new books. If you have a suggestion for a book, you can submit it to the editors, but don't get your hopes up.

We'll link each conversation together by book title, and you will be able to read all of the responses as they come in. We think this will inspire some good reading, and eventually good writing.

My Musical Heritage

2007-10-02T16:46:00.000-05:00

By Seth
1. America’s “Horse with No Name” - The first time I remember hearing this song was in my cousin’s Dodge Daytona, although it wasn’t the first time I heard it because I already knew the chorus. I was almost in Kindergarten , and my cousin was probably 18. He came around in the summers to help my uncle and dad work on the farm. He always asked if I had a girlfriend, and when I told him, “No” he would always say, “Good, they cost too much money.” He had a permed mullet, wore a black stetson and hot pink cowboy shirts, and I thought he was awesome. When I was in jr. high, he knocked a girl up who he eventually married and had more kids with. Now he refs jr. high basketball games after his real job. He used to be so cool.

2. Phil Collins’ “Another Day in Paradise” - On Sunday afternoons somewhere around 2nd grade, I would come home from church and have to clean my bedroom. What usually happened was me sitting on my bed listening to Casey Casum’s Top 40. This song was number 1 for awhile, and mind you, I do think twice, because it’s just another day for me, for me and you, in paradise. Poor bag lady.

3. James Taylor’s “Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” - Sometime around Kindergarten or first grade my family took a trip to Riodoso. I gambled $3 at the horse races on a slow horse with a name like Moonshadow or something (which happens to be the name of a cool Cat Stevens song that will not make this list). I lost $3 of my dad’s money that day. Anyway, the soundtrack to that trip was a recently released James Taylor album, and one song in particular was awesome. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is about a guy who killed a bully outlaw. There’s also a movie with John Wayne and Jimmy Stewart by the same name.

4. Jon Secada’s “Just Another Day”, Rod Stewart’s “Rhythm of My Heart” (Actually several songs off of his Vagabond Heart album, the last decent Rod Stewart album) - Country music was exploding at this point in my life. Brooks and Dunn came out with Boot Scootin’ Boogie, Garth Brooks was causing my friends to wear Wranglers. I joined in on listening to those radio stations, but really when I was thinking about this part of my life (5th grade), the only thing I could remember was my mom saying that she hated country music because it was so depressing, and her listening to these songs instead.

5. dcTalk’s entire “Free at Last” album - In 7th grade I would carpool to basketball practice and the kid I rode with only listened to this album (he was a redheaded guy named Brady Schenk who was an amazing baseball player, and in high school had a great collection of oldies that we all liked to listen to a lot). When I hear this album, I actually have a physical reaction that feels like running lines at 6:30 in the morning followed shortly by standing in a cloud of Aquanet and Stetson cologne while some fat kid was taking a crap.

6. Boyz II Men’s “II” album - My girlfriend in 8th grade got me this album, along with a small bottle of Nautica cologne, for my 14th birthday. She broke my heart 3 times in the matter of a month and a half, and she was the second girl I ever wrote poetry to. I wooed her by stealing some Tootsie Rolls from the teacher’s desk during detention one day.

7. Cranberries “Linger” and “Zombie,” and the Eagles’ “Hell Freezes Over” - I remember recording the Cranberries on Saturday Night Live, and asking my dad if he knew what chords Dolores O’Riordan was playing on Zombie. That’s probably the first time I was interested in playing a song. Hmm. I just remembered that. Hearing The Eagles’ Learn to Be Still is a decided turning point in my life.

8. Beethoven: Fur Elise (With Nature Sounds)- I have no idea why I had this album, but after my 8th grade girlfriend broke my heart for the third time I listened to this every night while I went to sleep.

9. Guns and Roses’ “November Rain”- I bought Use Your Illusion I the same day I bought Led Zeppelin IV and Eagles’ Hell Freezes Over. The other two fell off the radar after I heard Don’t Cry. But November Rain won me over.

10. Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Have You Ever Seen the Rain?” - I bought my first guitar magazine because this was on the cover. And wrote my first song with the chords that I learned from that song. I also called my friend Eran that week and asked him if he wanted to start a band. He dropped playing bass in his brother’s hardcore punk band. Eran could play the solo to AC/DC’s You Shook Me All Night Long, and I was sold on live music from that point on. But CCR did it.

11. Guns and Roses’ “Paradise City”- For those of you who think that I can’t use this song because I already have a Guns and Roses song, then you have a thing or two to learn about G’n’R. This is on Appetite for Destruction which is a whole other ball park from Use Your Illusion. This was one big party.

12. Guns and Roses’ “Estranged”- What’s funny is I was listening to this at the same time that One Headlight was around. I liked that song, I used to sing the part about the beat up truck in my English class with some other guys, but I only had room for Guns and Roses. I listened to this on repeat for about 4 months. I also bought the live concert in Tokyo on VHS and watched that about 80 times. I think my parents were worried about me.

14. James Taylor’s “Greatest Hits Vol. 1,” and Don McLean’s “Vincent”- Thanks to my new friend and roommate Ryan Culwell, I was reintroduced to James Taylor, but the famous stuff that I should have already heard. If you've only ever heard James Taylor in the context of your parents or the oldies station, you should really give him a shot. He really is an amazing songwriter (and while you're giving him a shot, pick up some Paul Simon. Get past the cheeseball production and listen to the songs). Also, Don McLean’s Vincent is amazing. He kills the cliché we've made of Van Gogh's Starry Night.

15. The Wallflower’s “One Headlight" - The summer after my freshman year in college, Napster got huge. And then I ripped Jakob Dylan off. Actually, he was on the cover of Rolling Stone (with a white Telecaster) that I somehow was getting a free subscription to, and I read an article that changed my life. "Oh, nobody died, it was just a metaphor. There's not really a beat up truck? (This place is old/ It feels just like a beat up truck / I turn the engine, but the engine doesn't turn / It smells like cheap wine, cigarettes / This place is always such a mess / Sometimes I think I'd like to watch it burn). That was just a simile for the loss of innocence? It makes so much sense." This is an amazing song. This song is an experience. I think my jaw still drops when I think how perfectly this song is written. I feel sorry for Jakob Dylan who has to sing it everywhere he goes so that it's lost its meaning for him. But I guess that's what the song is about, anyway.

16. Anything Third Day - This was my Christian music phase. I didn’t listen to anything but Third Day for about 2 years. They were really a pretty good rock band, Christian or otherwise, until Come Together. They had a four song EP called Southern Tracks (which I believe was recorded at the same place as the Wallflowers’ Rebel, Sweetheart) that sounded like them having a little fun playing southern rock before they had to tighten up and play polished contemporary Christian music (I'm happy for their success). I had to steal it on Napster because it’s not available anywhere else.

17. Ryan Adam’s “Sweet Lil’ Gal” - After I graduated from college there was a period of several months where I moved back in with my parents before I found a job. I slept a lot, did some farmwork, read a lot of Texas history, applied for jobs in other parts of the United States, read Robert Penn Warren’s “All the King’s Men” (which affected me at least as profoundly as One Headlight). One afternoon I woke from a nap in a pool of sweat crying to this song when the piano hits that dissonant chord and the guitar delays forever. I think that was the lowest point ever in my life. I'm much happier now.

Art > Experience > Wisdom

2007-09-30T16:49:00.000-05:00

By Seth
There have been a lot of discussions about art. Is art a reflection of society, or does it influence society? In other words, “Is a Metallica song about suicide and hopelessness just a reflection of the society we live in, or did it really influence a kid to commit suicide while he was listening to it on repeat for days?” I’m not going to tackle that one today. There are plenty of people who have over the years from Aristotle to Tipper Gore.

When the Industrial Revolution came, and it appeared as though mankind could cure all of its ills with science and industry, the modern discussion of art became “Does it have a function? Can a person break it down to its factors, study them with a microscope, and then figure out how to reproduce it in mass quantities?” kind of like a measles vaccine. We sort of answered that one with technology. Now we can get a variety of 18-minute stories jam-packed next to each other all across the world through the old television set. The obvious next question posed by that answer would be, “Is that really art?” Yeah, I’m not going to tackle that one either.

More recently, these types of discussions have become more and more abstract and as numerous as there are persons who want to sit around a coffee shop and discuss them. The rule, so it seems, is that each person’s idea of art, from the Goth kid with the composition book full of angry missives to the secretary with the Thomas Kinkaid desk calendar, is equally as valid as the next person’s idea of art, and equally as valid as the old schools of thought that took generations of brilliant thinkers to establish. I’d like to take the discussion back a ways to re-establish something that I think people have begun missing in art: The first thing art should accomplish is to provide an experience.

There are several types of experience that art can provide. We’ll lay those out, and then move on with the discussion. If you want to discuss these four basic ones, then please leave a reply. The four basic ones are:

Literal – You have a friend. He tells you a story about going to the grocery store to buy a half-gallon of milk. Perhaps he’s a funny person with exaggerated expressions, and he tells the story very humorously. Or perhaps he’s very observant and he tells you all of the details about the store, like Paul Simon’s “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover” was playing over the speakers, and an old lady was wiping down a countertop humming along to the music, but overlooking her responsibilities to her customers. You had a literal experience. You went from Point A to Point B in the narrative, you even had tangible details of the setting. Also, the way he told the story was entertaining. Entertainment can be included in the literal experience.
Allegorical – This takes it a step further adding one-to-one correlations between seeming literal objects in the story and abstract ideas. For example, your friend went to the store to buy milk, but really he was going on an heroic journey, leaving the lifestyle he was accustomed to in order to find milk, or fortifying truth. On his journey he had to find the truth amid so many tempting options, like candy bars and gossip magazines, or non-truths. In the end, he triumphed.
Moral – Your friend went to the store on his way to class for which he was late. The lady wiping the counter wasn’t paying attention so he had to wait longer. The possibility of walking out of the store without paying the $1.50 for milk was real and easy. Your friend weighed the possibilities in his mind, and made his decision. Hopefully, you as the listener gain some truth from his conflict. Either he walked out and was arrested and had to pay a $1000 fine, or he dealt with guilt, or otherwise he simply gained the old lady’s attention and paid for the milk.
Anagogical – This one is more complicated. According to Merriam-Webster’s, you could interpret a fourth type of experience from your friend’s story, an ultimate spiritual or mystical experience. For our purposes, spiritual experiences are beyond capacities of reason and really beyond your own ability to conjure, but perhaps your friend’s story set off a trigger that prepared you or made you vulnerable to such an experience.

Why are these experiences important? Well, think about it in these terms: Experience is the best teacher. (This is for the most part true, unless you feel like you need to experience methamphetimines to learn that you should say “no” to drugs. More than likely that experience will kill you before you learn your lesson.) Experience can give you a perspective on life, a tower from which you can view circumstances in a clearer fashion than if you were down right in the muck of life. Life is life and it keeps on moving so at some point you will have to be in the muck of it, I’m not asking you to hide from it, but it’s much easier if you had the benefit of seeing it from up high for a little bit to know that there’s going to be a clearing just ahead if you keep going straight.

Let’s take that picture and apply it in a real life scenario to see how it might benefit us, how will reading the poetry of a guy who lived in England in the 1930s benefit me?

The specific example I have in mind is T.S. Eliot. (The following is much abridged) He started off as an American, but through a series of events, he moved to England to pursue a career. Much of his work, including poetry and drama, dealt with disillusionment in the popular modes of what many of his contemporaries called salvation. Science was supposed to bring about mankind’s salvation with its resulting technologies we could cure diseases and produce enough food for everyone, and by teaching people how to think logically we could enter peace. Newer more civilized forms of government were going to provide for everybody. Then World War I happened, the biggest war history had ever seen at that point, and everyone realized that man’s little modes of salvation weren’t going to work. At that point, Eliot was a hero of the academic mode of salvation, and even of the mode that art could save people (it could be something to hope in, to extend your legacy beyond your own life, be a passion so thoroughly encompassing that you could spend your whole life pursuing it without exhausting it, and be a central point that all of humanity could rally around to live peaceably). Eliot’s career peaked with the publication of the long poem The Waste Land. His poem The Hollow Men ends “this is the way the world ends/ not with a bang but a whimper.” In 1939, he converted to Christianity. This was a betrayal to many of his contemporaries. It was seen as a copout, that his reasoning capabilities and his talents had failed him, and when his first poem post-conversion (Ash Wednesday) was published many derided it, although it’s a wonderful, and well-accomplished poem.

This essay is not intended to defend Eliot’s conversion; I’m now at the point of explaining why the experience that art provides is important: because very little of all that biography I just wrote holds any bearing on the experience the poem will provide you.

Sure biographies can be interesting, that’s why memoirs are so popular these days, but honestly you don’t need all of that history to have the experience intended by the artist (the poet in this case). You really don’t even need your own feelings to be satiated to have that experience (in fact, Allen Tate writes of Ash Wednesday that you need “to detach your own needs from the experience set forth in the poem,” and if you don’t then you will “try to deduce a history of the poet’s case, to which you will attach yourself if your own case resembles it; if it doesn’t, you’ll look for another one" and totally miss the importance of this one). You don’t have to bring anything to the table other than your ability to read, some faculty of reason, and an ability to recognize the images (like 3 white leopards) in the poem. If you can follow along with the narrative of the poem, then you can have the experience of a person who has championed a cause all of his life to have it come crashing down around him, and then pick up the pieces from the ashes, meditate and reflect, and come through the bitterness with a newfound wisdom and a fresh and innocent hope in his heart. You can have the wisdom that he has attained without having had to spend your life in his experiment, and without having anything historically in common with the artist.

So much of our society today can be identified with the overwhelming sense of cynicism because we all have seen so much that was purported as good come to a crashing end, or even as Eliot wrote, a whimpering end with its tail tucked between its legs. All things have been exploited for commercial gain, even charity, powerful men of God have incredible moral failings, marriages don’t work out, parents turn out to be as clueless as you, and every possible mode of salvation that we try to manufacture fails us in the end.

Art will not save you, but it does have the ability to provide an experience from which wisdom can be gleaned and truth can be wrestled.

Welcome to the Writers' Common

2007-09-28T11:33:00.000-05:00

If you have ever studied the art of writing, then you probably realize that throughout literary history writers, and literature, have been nurtured in groups. Whether it was Tolkien's and C.S. Lewis' Inklings that met in a pub after their classes, or Hemingway's and Pound's Lost Generation expatriates in Paris, all the greats conversed, shared, encouraged, and competed with one another as they developed as writers. On the other hand, there are probably countless groups in every public library, trendy coffee shop, and university creative writing class that never made a dent on the literary world.

Our goals here aren't really to change the world through literature or written communication. That would be a little presumptuous of us, but rather there are 3 things that we would like to accomplish and cultivate:

1. Relationships - This is a big one. We'd like to put the picture of Wordsworth and Coleridge in front of people to show how valuable close relationships are to writing, but honestly we believe the writing is secondary here. Like it says in Ecclesiastes, it's a miserable business to work and toil without friends in whose company you can enjoy the fruits. No matter how lackadaisical writing may seem, it can quickly become work. We want work to always remain secondary to relationships.

2. Good Writing - We want to provide a place for writers to have their work read. That said, we also want to provide a place for writers to have their good work read. No offense, but one of the problems we've seen with blogs is that they give anybody with access to a computer the ability to put whatever thought they have, developed or not, informed or not, in front of potentially billions (but probably tens) of people. We'd like to save you the embarrassment of having your diary online. So we are starting off with a few limitations on categories that we accept:

Reviews - Books, Music, Movies, Art. All of these, and they don't necessarily have to be new releases. If you just stumbled upon Matisse, feel free to review one of his paintings. Chances are somebody else has never heard of him, but it's about time they had. We just ask that your reviews be well-founded, well-structured, thorough, and easy to read. If you want to tell us how something made you feel, that's fine, just make sure you tell us why it made you feel that way, what combination of components did the artist use to elicit an emotion from you.
Essays - Currently, these are limited to theology and culture. Of course, those are pretty wide topics. We would like theology to be edifying studies, based completely on Scripture or respected theologians. Culture is huge, so let's limit it to something manageable like "How does ____ positively or negatively affect culture, and how can you do something about it?" Answer that question with your essay.
Humor - Lists can be funny. If you're an aspiring cartoonist, that would be awesome if you would submit something.
Journalism - Stories about people, places, or things that you want to write about.

And finally, we have editors to whom you can submit your work as a final filter for this Writers' Common. If we think a piece is good enough, then we'll post it. If it's close, then we'll work with you on the piece. If it's not good enough, please don't feel bad. We'd be happy to give you some pointers and some goals to work toward while you're getting this writing thing down. Give it a year (or 20) of practice. We all did.

(Please notice there are no fiction or poetry categories. We don't feel like we're up to the task of handling that one yet, maybe in the future.)

3. Culture - Finally there is culture. We would like to add to culture something positive. A little thought, a little inspiration to think some more. And as a further caveat, a picture of the culture we want to create here: we want to warm people to the idea of the Gospel.

So if you think you'd like to be a part of the Writers' Common, then please visit the "Submissions" section on the right side of this page, or just read along as other brilliant people exchange their thoughts.