onehouse

The cosmos under the sink.

In last week's Mad Men, Don Draper and his 1960's family end their picnic by shaking out their blanket and letting napkins, cups, and paper plates blow away in the wind. My brother once saw a family near Dubai do the same thing - leaving Kentucky Fried Chicken buckets, plastic bags and pop cans to rot in the landscape. When I was near a wadi in the desert near Dubai, I looked down into a gorge to see bits of plastic and food containers of all kinds. It reminded me of a walk that took me away from a resort in Cancun. At the line where the resort ended the sand became full of garbage while the water held old diapers, oil  cans, and other packaging.

At the very beginning of trying to pay attention to the ordinary, I noticed my kitchen garbage can. It said a lot about my eating habits and about the way I treated not only my body but the world around me. All of these things change slowly. Paying more attention to recycling helped me to change my eating habits. It seems like the worse the food is for me, the more packaging it has around it. I suppose Twinkies or bottles of pop (soda for some of you) defy this rule with those thin layers of plastic around "food" that will survive a nuclear holocaust.

Years later, I do more composting (thanks to my super duper shiny compost pail from a you-know-who-you-are friend) and there is less and less that belongs to instant food in the garbage can. My eating habits have changed but I also see food and its packaging in a larger context than just filling my stomach for the moment.

One of the things that makes me most happy is the ability to recycle plastic packaging. There is so much of it - around strawberries, eggs, house tools, light bulbs - just about everything. I used to save bags of plastic for a friend who lived in a small town outside of Calgary because, for some reason, the big city would only take plastic bags. In 2009, Calgary will institute curbside recycling and we will finally be able to find a use for all those petroleum byproducts - plastic cups, shampoo bottles, and yogurt containers that everyone has been happily adding to the landfills. I'm saving as much plastic as I can and my storage shed is filled with bags and bags of plastic rated 1-7 until the curbside recycling kicks in. It is astonishing to look at and makes me wonder once again, little by little, how can I cut down the use of petroleum byproducts if I pay attention to this.

I often think of that famous verse from the Bible held up at football games and rallies and given to me to memorize as a little child. It talks about loving the world and in a religion bent on over-personalizing everything, teachers often asked us to replace "world" with our own names. Later, I found out that the word "world" could actually mean "cosmos" - all of creation. I guess paying attention to my garbage can is one way of noticing the beloved cosmos beneath my kitchen sink.

Anonymous armies.

On working in a crisis center:

I also learned about altruism and what an important part it plays in our emotions. You don't reach much about that in newspapers; we're taught that our species is mainly warlike. But now I know there are these anonymous armies of the day and night under the surface of every American city, performing acts of heroism and mercy for their neighbors whom they will never meet. In many ways it's analogous to the monastic or cloistered life. Whenever I was doing that counseling I was aware that it was like being in a confessional: the telephone, with its perforations, into which people were pouring out their heart in the most intimate way. You're all alone in that room, and the stories are pushed against your ear; it just feeds into your soul. I felt it was a sacramental transaction.

Diane Ackerman
A Messenger of Wonder
Going on Faith: Writing As A Spiritual Quest
Edited by William Zinsser

Picture Blogging: Day 6: Notebooks

I have been looking for the name of a particular sculpture that has been on my mind. I had to go through an old moleskine notebook filled with scribbles and drawings. I've been unfaithful with my notebook lately. It's the sign of an addled mind as these little black books are a great comfort. My first moleskine fit  nicely inside the pocket of my winter coat and in the side pocket of many of my summer ones. In a pinch, these notebooks  go into a back jean pocket at a meal or a movie.

Inside these pages I have hastily constructed SOS games to keep a wiggly niece distracted until the Vietnamese food arrived. A good friend drew her hand. I scribbled a tree outside another window during supper with friends and mindmapped and doodled my way through lectures and workshops. And of course, there are the scratched out  lists - to do, groceries, ideas, things overheard, other magazines, recommended pens, tracings of glasses frames before buying a new pair. And writing, writing, writing. I'm always writing in my head. It's how I see the world. Someone once told me that he constantly heard music. Another person said they saw words as color.

My friends know how much I like a good notebook. This little stack was one of my favorite memories from Christmas past. I couldn't bear to take the plastic off for months. But when your notebook gets a chance to turn before into after, that's when it really comes alive.

Before:

After:

   

The note on this page says:

"My chemistry teacher used to call me Trotsky."
Andy
Sept 5/2006
Out of the blue

Picture blogging: Day 3: Perspective.

          

Untitled (Head of a Baby)
Ron Mueck

I took these while visiting the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa. Since then the gallery has added another piece by Mueck called "A Girl".

More Mueck works here.

Dying and living

I need to try something different. I've been walking through sludge for a while now and I need to get a different perspective. I'm going to blog something visual here for the 30 days of April. It doesn't mean Onehouse will be wordless - type and typography are vital and visual parts of storytelling - but I'm going to highlight a few things that speak to me.

Benedict's Rule tells us to keep death before us daily, a healthy reminder of who we are in a society that either avoids speaking of death or engages it in sadistic or morbid fashion. Take a look at these photos - "series of portraits taken of people before and after they had died is a challenging and poignant study. The work by German photographer Walter Schels and his partner Beate Lakotta, who recorded interviews with the subjects in their final days, reveals much about dying - and living."

'Tis the season

We have just finished two weeks of sub-zero temperatures and high wind chills in Alberta. This kind of weather always sucks the moisture right out of the air. Calgary is already dry. We've had people invent special lotions for this place as anyone who needs to work outdoors or wash their hands will tell you, it can get downright painful.  Visitors often tell me that they were never so aware of their skin as when they hit Calgary. Their lips begin to crack, their eyes blink against the dryness and their arms and legs start to tingle as the moisture gets sucked away from their body.

Taking a bath on a cold night is a big decision. Do I want to trade the warmth and comfort of hot water for what will inevitably be discomfort and another session of moisturizing in the morning? The answer is often found in diving under a pile of comforters with a cup of hot something and forgetting the bath.

I often think of skin around Christmas -our biggest and most often ignored organ stretching from the tips of toes to the tops of brain-protecting skull. I wonder what it felt like to suddenly be restrained and contained in these bits of bone and tissue - suddenly able to feel touch, wind and sun. Or to see a fresh  scrape or bruise. Incarnated. What a thing.

Madeleine L'Engle

And so she is gone. It has been a comfort to know that she was still on the planet and so it is sad that now she is somewhere else.

From the New York Times:

“Why does anybody tell a story?” Ms. L’Engle once asked, even though she knew the answer.

“It does indeed have something to do with faith,” she said, “faith that the universe has meaning, that our little human lives are not irrelevant, that what we choose or say or do matters, matters cosmically.”

Patty Griffin is singing "You'll Remember":

Maybe one day along the way
You'll think of me, and you'll be smiling

Maybe one day, maybe one day
Maybe one day, you'll remember

Dr. Ursula Franklin

Just finishing up a Tapestry podcast with Dr. Ursula Franklin. What an extraordinary voice - both literally as the vocal chords quiver with age - and collectively, as the host points out, "a life lived adventurously".

I love how this extremely intelligent woman says she is more concerned with the consequences of belief than the associated theological details. She says she feels "sloppy" about the details of belief. She does not spend time on the Virgin Birth. "I'm meticulous about the consequences of belief." She goes on to tell how her shopping habits have gone from frugal, as she ages, to another standard - where justice is incorporated into her shopping habits by overriding what she calls her "personal optimization".

Dr. Ursula Franklin is one of Canada's treasures. Her list of accomplishments is daunting — Ph.D. in experimental physics, mentor to a generation of engineers and women in science, Companion of the Order of Canada, author, peace activist, Quaker. Mary Hynes talks to Ursula Franklin about pacifism, science and why she doesn't own a television. Dr. Franklin's book is called The Ursula Franklin Reader: Pacifism As A Map. It's published by Between the Lines.

More on Franklin here.

Strange Conversations

Northwest Contemplative has posted links to a seven part interview with Bill Hybels and Bono. Yeah I know. It seemed strange to me too but it's quite something to watch. I went to Hybel's church for a few weeks when I lived in Chicago many years ago. Enough years ago to be listening to a tape Unforgettable Fire on my metallic red Walkman. Since then, I've only followed U2 off and on and the megachurch mentality and I have parted ways many times over.  I'm always saying it's important to listen to voices from the margins. As popular as Hybels is in some circles, he's definitely on my margins and I would have probably ignored the whole thing if Bono's name hadn't been involved.. So I listened to this strange conversation between the rock star and the buttoned-down pastor.

Intrinsic personhood.

I posted this a few years ago. It is from Eugene Peterson's First and Second Samuel. I guess it's a little strange that I thought of this around Mother's Day weekend. It's mostly because I've run into those silly gender conversations again. (Part 2 in my 8,673 part series: Things I don't understand.) It's a really good book and I find myself thinking back to it now and again.

Elkanah tries to help, tries to alleviate her sorrow. By asking four rhetorical questions (1 Samuel 1:8), he attempts to shift her attention from what she does not have, a child, to what she does have, namely, a loving husband. Going against the grain of all the cultural assumptions of that patriarchal society, Elkanah valued Hannah simply for who she was, her intrinsic personhood, and not for what she could produce. Against the stream of the age, which viewed woman as an instrument, Elkanah cried out to Hannah, "With or without sons, your are precious to me simply for who you are!" It was a charged moment, woman not as an instrument but as a person in her own right. All these centuries later we are still trying to translate Elkanah's ethical passion into normative living, rescuing women from imposed societal assumptions.