Merry Christmas!

Here I am, at the in-laws' place in the Bay Area of California. I always enjoy making the trip out here, and I am constantly telling Tara how happy I am that she's not from North Dakota or some other fill-in-the-blank-bummer-state! (no offense N. Dakotans;-)

Tara and I had a funny little exchange on Facebook the other day (especially considering our current setup)...


Mistletoe? Psshh. HDTV! It's a groovy kind of love, people:)

The End of Suburbia.

I love movies (just had to get that out there). I love the motion-picture medium, I love transcendent acting, I love the special effects, I love the wide range of audioscapes, on and on. And yet, when I look at my Netflix queue and history, it’s completely dominated by DOCUMENTARIES. If that makes me a GEEK, well then give me the pocket-protector because the wedgie fits! Documentaries are rockin’. Oftentimes biased towards a particular viewpoint, yes, but a great source of new perspectives nonetheless.

Accordingly, I’ve experienced a number of impactful documentaries lately. One of which deserves a separate post (which I plan to give) and another that I’ll talk about now...

It’s called The End of Suburbia: Oil Depletion and the Collapse of the American Dream. I watched it a few weeks ago and when it finished, I just sat silently... and thought... and worried (a little). Okay, I’m not gonna lie to you: it pretty much freaked me out for the evening. Yet given a few weeks to reflect on the topics, I’m not freaked out anymore, but instead I’ve been downgraded to simply “soberly concerned.” ;-)

The premise of the film centers upon the concept of Peak Oil (yes, despite the inherent downfalls of Wikipedia, this link offers some decent info on this concept). And while certain people interviewed come across as “alarmists” foretelling a Malthusian catastrophe, the science underlying their theories pretty much stands alone.

At Thunderbird, we were consistently guided to keep the concept of Risk Management in the forefront of our sights as business managers. And this film profoundly touched the risk management nerve in me. I’m increasingly convinced of the unavoidable problems of American suburbanism (both from a land-developer’s perspective and from a spiritual perspective). Obviously, this view is in direct opposition to what I currently do for a living, but the intricacies of that situation and my plans for the future aren't something I'm going to divulge on a public blog [but feel free to ask me about it all if we're ever hanging-out in person:-]. Anyway, without fleshing out anymore of the details of the film, how about I just pose some of the questions that have been rolling around my skull as a result?

- What if the suburban lifestyle (which America promotes and accelerates) that thrives on consumption, individualism, and driving becomes virtually unworkable in the not-too-distant future due to oil production issues?

- What will the economic & social transition period look like? How devastating will it be?

- Could the transition effectively eliminate the “middle class” (for some amount of time)?

- Is New-Urbanism the only solution? If not, then what else?

- America looks to be, hands-down, the most ill-prepared for this new world economy... could this “event” effectively end the six to seven decade reign of U.S. geopolitical dominance?

And more personally…

- What does this mean for my family?

- What sort of actions should I take right now to prepare/safeguard?

I really do have quite a bit of confidence in the entrepreneurial zeal and innovation that is a hallmark of American culture, but there’s definitely a rub here, in my mind. While my parents’ generation (the Baby-Boomers) will likely live almost their entire lives in a world that operates under U.S. hegemony, I feel fairly comfortable saying that my generation will see these circumstances unexpectedly change. And it’s kind of uncomfortable to think about: because, as Americans, we’re used to calling the shots in a lot of ways... we’re used to having numerous currencies pegged to our dollar... we’re used to countries importing our entertainment, our culture... we’re used to foreigners speaking “our” language in THEIR land rather vice versa. Even I, someone who dislikes many of these aspects of the U.S., am instinctively unnerved by the thought of living under a different regime.

So, there it is. Sorry for the wordy post... (why do my ramblings end up being so wordy??) I’ve formulated some responses to the above questions, but nothing of much worth. I’d be very interested to hear anybody else’s thoughts on these matters.

(And we haven’t even touched on the spiritual implications of all of this! Oy… must lie down:-)

*Photo Credit: SingInYourSleep

Serve God, Save the Planet (Part II)

My lovely wife recently finished this book and wrote out her resulting thoughts, and this reminded me that I never wrote the Part II of my review that would logically follow my Part I (uh, duh). So, in contrast to Part I which was mostly transcribed statistics, I’m going to throw out some more intangible thoughts that I’ve been rolling around as a result of this book lately.

Just to clarify, I never want to come across as claiming to be an expert in these matters. That’s certainly not the case (which is a notion that you should feel comfortable applying to pretty much anything I write about on this blog!:-). While I often enjoy getting into the science and tedious details of some of these complicated issues, I’m very certain that I’m only getting a glimpse of the larger realities, and thus I feel most comfortable simply talking about these matters from my perspective as a regular guy with a family in America who’s trying to pursue Jesus.

And it’s at this level of interaction where the author, J. Matthew Sleeth, connected with me. I don’t think everything he writes in this book is gold-plated truth or wisdom. But the framework that he proposes ideas within is what resonated with me. Instead of touting from a soapbox about how the sky is falling and that there’s a toasty place in hell for all of us who are contributing to the problems, Sleeth speaks plainly to our humanity... to the systemic mindsets that are manifested in problems of our physical world. Let me give you an example:

“The content mind is one of the greatest obstacles to a rich spiritual life. The content mind is a proud mind. It has nothing to learn; it has an answer to everything and no more questions to ask” (62).

The motivation of the book is not to persuade readers to be “treehuggers.” Rather, Sleeth is challenging all of us to strive for a proper sense-of-self... to view our actions within a global reality... to live radically and counter-culturally because this is what Jesus incited his followers to do. And when this is done, it just may end up looking treehugger-y... and it can be transforming & divinely beautiful.

While I’ve read some reviews from other folks who felt that Sleeth comes across as judgmental and preachy, I didn’t get that sense. While he does speak about some very specific lifestyle issues (e.g., electricity use, parenting, food, Sabbath observance, consumerism, etc.), I never perceived his statements as black-and-white declarations. I just took them as really challenging observations/propositions on his part. The fact that I felt stung a few times points only to my personal conviction, not a superiority complex of Sleeth. And that’s because, above all, he speaks to the condition of our hearts:

“It is not our possessions or our homes that will keep us out of heaven, but our unwillingness to set them aside in service of the Lord” (142).

So, yes, I highly recommend the book because it really stirs up some motivation to actually make some changes in my lifestyle (rather than just stirring up a bunch of head-nods and thoughtful “hmmms…”)

Hmmm.

Enough on that.

(I was now going to transition to talking about a film I recently viewed, but this is long enough... so come back in a couple days and I’ll post my film thoughts then. Thanks for reading!)

*Photo Credit: Forestgladesiwander

Bleh.

I was trying to talk myself into making a decent post tonight... but that's not going to happen. "Why?" you might ask. Because I have a head cold. And I'm a pansy. A pansy with a head cold.

So in lieu of a post of any substance, here's my upcoming blogging prospectus for those of you who are even remotely interested:

- Gonna wrap up my Serve God, Save the Planet review that I left open-ended (plus I'm gonna throw in a film review of a recent documentary that seriously caused me to pause.)

- Gonna get a few thoughts out on the concept of "population" and pose a few related questions that are rolling around in my head.

- Gonna get a series of posts going on the concept of "non-violence," which will likely included meanderings from Fight Club, to Jared Diamond, to my childhood fist-fights, to Darfur, to James Bond, to the Revolutionary War, to Jesus Christ, to Transformers, to Uganda, to the Forbidden City, to the Mennonite tradition. Yikes, how am I going to make sense of all that?? I have no idea... but tune in to find out!!:-)

----------

Okay, I'll leave you with a haiku (the beloved poetic form of my buddy, Justin;-)... because, really, what else would I leave you with??

Head Cold Pansy

Sinus explosion
Wishing for softer tissues
Snot... tremendous snot.

Aesthetic Adjustments...

One of my biggest attractions to the Mac OS X experience is the overall aesthetic feel. It all just flows and renders so nicely. I've always liked all sorts of design, but haven't had much time to dig into it myself since I was a boy. But, I've got this blog, and I figured I should at least have some design-fun with it. So, I've been dinkin' around with different Blogger hacks that I learned at this site, and I decided to pop in an image-based header. It's kinda fun.

After taking a picture of my semi-hollow body guitar, I created the image within Seashore (a great open source image editor for Mac OS X), which has a very alluring pricetag ($free) for those of us who aren't talented enough to justify the cost of professional tools like Adobe's Creative Suite ($CHA-CHING$). I was also tipped off about Pixelmator (more like a $ch-:) by Matt, which I've been impressed with but haven't pulled the trigger on picking it up just yet.

Also, to round things out, I've added some albums that I'm currently listening to on the sidebar as well as a cool javascript element from LibraryThing below the albums. Plus, I threw in a random iSight picture of the fam, just because. Enjoy!

**Update**
I've also just added a "Recent Videos" sidebar element which dynamically pulls from our Vimeo account. After interacting with Vimeo for the past few months, I can't recommend it enough. The interface is clean and simple, and the whole site is just plain intuitive, in my opinion. Now that our video camcorder speaks to iMovie '08 natively, my export-resolutions and file sizes are much improved, so watch for more video output from the Bams in coming months;-).

Pray for Peace.

My heart and mind are heavy for the Middle East right now. If you're the praying type, please talk to God about the Middle East Peace Conference being held in Maryland this week. More than a dozen Arab countries will have delegates present for the dialogue aimed at ending the seven year impasse between Israeli and Palestinian negotiators. Some are skeptical about any progress that can come from this kick-off meeting, but I’m floundering to find any alternative to latch onto for hope in this region.

To help bring some perspective to one aspect of this cripplingly complex situation, I want to pass on some words to you from the "inside." My friend Philip, an Egyptian-German who was my suitemate in the dorm during our freshman year at Wheaton, maintains a blog titled Tabula Gaza. Over the past couple years, Phil has been residing in the heart of the Gaza Strip in an effort to reach out to the Palestinian people who are suffering and often misrepresented by popular media outlets. Since returning to Cairo for graduate school, Phil’s most recent post is a letter that he received from a friend back in Gaza, which describes the current state of affairs. While I encourage you to read the entire letter, I’m going to present the final paragraph here:

"It's hard to not feel like we're in a large concentration camp as I see Gaza's empty streets, and the hopeless feeling in the air…and just the gloominess that has covered Gaza. I think most people feel abandoned as we are literally locked up in this small, concentrated space and we don't know what the world plans for us, or what to expect next. It's hard to imagine what being in Gaza does to someone's will until you've come here. You no longer feel alive, in fact, you're not living; you're just killing time until some sort of change happens. Sadly, Gaza has become desensitized to the rest of the world, as it feels like the international community has turned a blind eye to the reality that is Gaza, and as long as Israel is allowing some food in and hasn't completely cut off electricity or gas... and as long as we are kept alive, no one will ask about us.

But just because we are breathing, that doesn't mean we're alive."

God wants us to ache for this woman and her people because this is not what He intended for His creation. (For another glimpse of this woman’s bloody reality, read this story.) It doesn't matter where you come down on these issues politically... the current state of this region of the world is something that we are obligated to grieve as human beings… as children of God. In America, where uncensored information about the rest of the globe is so readily available to us, I have a hard time stomaching the fact that our dominant culture is far more interested in the cover of Us Weekly or Sports Illustrated than in having a basic understanding of what’s happening outside of our insulated lifestyle (especially within the Church). How can we expect to learn to be a voice for the voiceless if we don’t even care to learn about their plight, be it outside America or within?

Just as I did not choose to be born in Denver, Colorado, USA, these children of Gaza pictured here do not choose to wake each morning in fear of Israeli raids and airstrikes. And they still have no say in the matter.
----

Tara and I watched the film A Mighty Heart this afternoon, which details the events surrounding the 2002 kidnapping and murder of Wall Street journalist Daniel Pearl in Pakistan and how his pregnant widow, Mariane, coped with the aftermath. It’s a difficult and raw movie, yet it does an artful job of portraying the powerful subtleties inherent not only to Pearl’s story, but to the regional strife in general. The simple lesson that this movie drives home for me is that it is quite nearly impossible for violence to solve anything. This is a lesson I have repeatedly encountered from various mediums over the past year, and one that has really challenged my instincts (I plan to flesh this out in coming posts).

So, to bring this back to my original intent, please seek out peace... pray for reconciliation… long for warring tribes to embrace humility and healing. Kingdom come…

Degrees of Separation (Thorns). [Part 2]

Okay, just to recap the main points from last time:-)
- The advanced world around us (particularly in the U.S.) confronts us with a deluge of distractions from God... oftentimes in unassuming areas of our lifestyle.
- A key temptation is to separate our faith from our lifestyle... to justify certain aspects of how we live (or to glaze over particular social issues) as unrelated to what we believe about who Jesus was and the movement he came to enact on this earth.

Let's jump to some excerpts of one of Jesus's parables (that I'm sure many of you have heard) as recorded in Matthew 13:

"A farmer went out to sow his seed. As he was scattering the seed, some fell along the path, and the birds came and ate it up. Some fell on rocky places, where it did not have much soil. It sprang up quickly, because the soil was shallow. But when the sun came up, the plants were scorched, and they withered because they had no root. Other seed fell among thorns, which grew up and choked the plants. Still other seed fell on good soil, where it produced a crop - a hundred, sixty or thirty times what was sown. He who has ears, let him hear."

I want to pull out some ideas from the italicized section above regarding the thorns. Let's hear how Jesus later explained this particular section of the parable:

"The one who received the seed that fell among the thorns is the man who hears the word, but the worries of this life and the deceitfulness of wealth choke it, making it unfruitful."

Also hear how Eugene Peterson adapts the same passage in his interpretation, The Message:

"The seed cast in the weeds is the person who hears the kingdom news, but weeds of worry and illusions about getting more and wanting everything under the sun strangle what was heard, and nothing comes of it."

This is where I conclude degrees of separation = thorns.

Thorns that separate... temporal worries... deceptive "wealth"... wanting more and more... chokes it... precludes fruit. What are these thorns? Fashion trends? Houses? Cars? Electronics? Debt? Church buildings/financial-"needs"? Television? A Job? Career goals? Food? Obviously none of these inherently strangle-out what God is trying to do with those who believe in Him. But I do know that various combinations of this list act as degrees of separation for many people around me... especially myself. And this isn't the kind of situation where we realize what's happening and say, "Hmm... yeah, that's not too good. I should get around to making some changes at some point." If we are who we say we are (follower of Jesus), and we're about what he's about (building the Kingdom), then these separating thorns are severely important to identify and address.

Now, I don't really know exactly where I come down on the whole "once-saved-always-saved" debate, but I find myself leaning towards there being a much more dynamic reality at play than simply saying the proper prayer to shore up your eternal destiny. I guess what I'm resistant to is this view's lulling sense of security that often creates complacency and impotence in its adherents.

Life is to be lived, not won. People are to be unconditionally loved, not converted. The kingdom Jesus spoke of is not simply an enchanted afterlife that we get our ticket for now, but rather it is intended to be brought forth within our world today, our city, our neighborhood, our home by humble action. humble. action.

This takes me to a few final thoughts on degrees of separation = pride.

The common thread in all of this is an adjustment of how we perceive ourselves. I would argue that at the core of building the Kingdom is the minimization of self. The deception of wealth pumps pride into our veins: I need this, I deserve that, I want this, I'm unhappy without that. As we hack away at the gaps between God and ourselves we begin to see how little we really do need (by our cultural standards), and it also bears a genuine mind of gratitude for the essential things that God does provide for us: health for my little girl, shelter for my family, lack of violent war in our streets, etc.

Don Miller gave a fantastic talk at Mars Hill last week titled Story. (I highly recommend giving it a listen). The key takeaway for me is that our lives are all stories being written in real-time. And stories where the main character is primarily driven by self-service, by shallow goals, and by near-sightedness are boring. They don't draw interest to the character's personality and they lack value.

Degrees of separation make our stories boring. They feed our bloated sense of self, and they distract us from what would make for a wildly interesting journey: one charged with challenge, action, devotion, uncertainty, & faith; lined with selfless love. And this is a lesson that I'm trying to learn so that I can pass it on to the next generation.

*Image credit: Flightsaber

Degrees of Separation (Thorns). [Part 1]

And we're baaaaack. (sorry folks, I'll try to be a bit more regular at the blogging here... maybe somebody makes metamucil wafers for blogging, hmm:)


True to form, I've got more swirling around in my hat-rack than I know how to articulate, so I'm going to try my best to flesh out a concept that I've been grappling with over the past weeks (and, as it turns out, my entire life! duh duh duuuuh): degrees of separation.

>>Somewhat Unnecessary Disclaimer: Chances are that if you're reading this, then you know me personally. If you know me personally AND you know that I have a blog, then the chances are fairly high that you are in one of the following categories: a) a Christian; b) at one time were a "believer" and/or are currently investigating spiritual elements. [If you do not fall into either category a) or b), then you should leave. JOKE! Please stay and bear with me. Hopefully these ideas apply generally to the human experience...]

So, degrees of separation. A number of messages and written words that I've been exposed to recently (mostly from Rob Bell and Matthew Sleeth) have planted a new perspective within me. The more I roll it around, the more I realize the breadth and depth of the concept. At face value, it's very simple and logical... yet when I choose to take my personal life down the rabbit hole, I'm confronted with a mosaic of mirrors and pathways.

Here's the simple version:

The world (and more specifically, culture) in which we live can subtly impose degrees of separation between God and ourselves.

Simple enough. Most of us can probably jive with that at some level. Yet it's the personal application that opens things up for me...

In the "God is Green" series that Mars Hill Bible Church in Michigan recently walked through, Rob offered the thought that so much of our "advanced" lifestyle, while admittedly adding "comfort," has simultaneously pumped degrees of separation into our day-to-day. For instance, so many of us feel distant from God's natural creation, yet we go from our garage to our car to the office to our car to the garage (or better yet, if you live in suburban Phoenix, it seems everywhere you look is fully comprised of something manmade or manipulated landscape). We aren't even compelled to think about the origins of our food because it's always right there in the supermarket (nevermind if that particular fruit's in season right now or the distance it traveled to get there). Our beef comes butchered and ground, and our chicken breast comes cleaned and skinless in a shrink-wrapped bag. Our water comes out of a faucet with the turn of a little knob. We get as much electricity as our appliances desire from those plugs in the wall. Our trash disappears in seconds when that truck swings by. Our gasoline always comes out of those filling-stations if we give them enough money.

Point being, as advanced as all of this is, one might argue that these conveniences have profoundly distanced us from God. If we want to actually learn about the implications of our beef's origins, or what kind of power plant shoots electricity to our house, or where our trash goes after it has "disappeared," then we've got to intentionally seek out, read, probe, investigate... or in other words, we have to chop through the degrees of separation. And I am increasingly convinced that to passionately pursue God in the U.S. necessitates an awareness of these separating elements. Notice I say awareness rather than avoidance. I'm not advocating that we all start our own farms while living off of the grid and jogging everywhere we need to be. But I also wouldn't rule any of that out either;-) In my mind, it's the awareness that sets up change... that pricks our heart in a Godward manner. As Rob said in one of his sermons, "Removing degrees of separation brings us closer to God."

We all have our specific situations where radical, counter-cultural changes may be opened up to us... and a willingness to enact these changes in our lives is what I'm advocating. The prevalent temptation that we face is to mold our faith to our lifestyle, rather than our lifestyle to our faith. Maybe this sounds sort of fundamentalist... or hippy...

Anywho, this is getting long, so I'm going to make this a two-part post. In the next installment, I'm going to bounce another notch deeper into the rabbit hole and offer some more personal insights into this concept, as well as expand on these thoughts:

degrees of separation = pride

degrees of separation = thorns

Messages From the Past For the Present...

21st Century Schizoid Man

Cat's foot iron claw
Neuro-surgeons scream for more
At paranoia's poison door.
Twenty-first century schizoid man.

Blood rack barbed wire
Politicians' funeral pyre
Innocents raped with napalm fire
Twenty-first century schizoid man.

Death seed blind man's greed
Poets' starving children bleed
Nothing he's got he really needs
Twenty-first century schizoid man.

Epitaph

The wall on which the prophets wrote
Is cracking at the seams.
Upon the instruments of death
The sunlight brightly gleams.
When every man is torn apart
With nightmares and with dreams,
Will no one lay the laurel wreath
As silence drowns the screams.

Between the iron gates of fate,
The seeds of time were sown,
And watered by the deeds of those
Who know and who are known;
Knowledge is a deadly friend
When no one sets the rules.
The fate of all mankind I see
Is in the hands of fools.

Confusion will be my epitaph.
As I crawl a cracked and broken path
If we make it we can all sit back
and laugh.
But I fear tomorrow I'll be crying,
Yes I fear tomorrow I'll be crying.

From the 1969 King Crimson album, In the Court of the Crimson King

Serve God, Save the Planet (Part I)

Tara recently got me reading a book that we picked up for her birthday titled, Serve God, Save the Planet by J. Matthew Sleeth, MD. You may recall back in this post where I began describing some of our journey towards intentionally respecting the earth that God so amazingly created. Seeing that today is Blog Action Day, I thought I'd pass on some ecological/lifestyle stats from Sleeth's book that jumped out at me. I've decided not to comment on them much at this point because they paint a fascinating & jolting picture all in their own right:

• Rate of forest destruction worldwide = 1 acre per second


• Number of species going extinct = more than 100 per day


• The U.S. uses more natural resources than any country in history

• In the next ten years, 20 million Americans will be diagnosed with cancer (1 out of every 15)

• Currently, more than 700 man-made toxins can be found in human tissues

• If every household changed its five most used light bulbs to compact fluorescents, the country could take 21 coal-fired power plants off-line tomorrow
• "This would keep one trillion pounds of poisonous gases and soot out of the air we breathe and would have the same beneficial impact as taking eight million cars off the road" (Sleeth 66).
  

• Approximately 64,000 Americans die annually as a result of soot in the air

• One power plant in Massachusetts was alone found to cause 1,200 ER visits, 3,000 asthma attacks, 110 deaths annually

• The average American watches 1,700 hours of television annually
• The average school-age child attends 900 hours of classes a year

• By the time a typical American reaches age 71, they will have spent a solid 10 waking years in front of a TV

• There are 300 million television sets in America, which consume five times more energy than is produced by all the geothermal, biomass, solar, & wind sources in the U.S. combined

• Ten times more energy, water, & grain is needed to produce a pound of beef or pork than to produce a pound of milk or cheese

• The loss of rain forests in South America means that the clouds they once made no longer blow across the Atlantic to drop their water on Africa
• As a result the Sahara grows by thousands of acres per year

• Nearly a billion people live in chronic hunger

• Every 10 days, a quarter of a million people die from starvation (25,000 every day)

• Haiti's forests have been cut down and shipped to the U.S. As a result, Haiti has lost 90% of its topsoil

• In America, junk mail fills 340,000 garbage trucks per year all bound for landfills
• 4 out of 5 pieces of junk mail aren't recycled

• About 70% of U.S. electricity is generated by fossil fuels, 20% nuclear, 9% hydropower
• Solar, wind, geothermal, biomass, and methane combine for the remaining 1%
• We have been developing these alternative sources for three decades

This is a lot to take in at once, but my goal in relaying this info is to drive at a major theme: an element of interconnectedness defines these statistics. Nearly ALL of us in America play a role in the problems, and ALL of us have the option sitting right in front of us to play a role in the solutions...


*Note: While I haven't taken the time to research and provide cited references, I have a reasonably high degree of confidence in validity of each of the above statistics. Of course, I'm completely willing to be persuaded otherwise if contradictory data is out there... but I haven't seen any.

We Feel Fine.

Those that are close to me know that one of my favorite web destinations is the TED site (especially since they started posting videos of the various presentations over a year ago). I think I originally learned about TED a few years ago via John Chandler's stellar blogging and have admired it ever since.

Anyway, the latest presentation** that I viewed was given by Jonathan Harris on his project titled We Feel Fine. This melding of art + digital programming + humanity really captured me. I found the thought-process behind it all and the dynamic results simply beautiful (...not to mention Harris's incredible knack for minimalist asthetic).

This from the Mission of the project:

Since August 2005, We Feel Fine has been harvesting human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Every few minutes, the system searches the world's newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases "I feel" and "I am feeling". When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the "feeling" expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.).

Because blogs are structured in largely standard ways, the age, gender, and geographical location of the author can often be extracted and saved along with the sentence, as can the local weather conditions at the time the sentence was written. All of this information is saved. The result is a database of several million human feelings, increasing by 15,000 - 20,000 new feelings per day. Using a series of playful interfaces, the feelings can be searched and sorted across a number of demographic slices, offering responses to specific questions like: do Europeans feel sad more often than Americans? Do women feel fat more often than men? Does rainy weather affect how we feel?...

Since starting in 2005, they've collected nearly 9,000,000 feelings from almost 2,000,000 unique individuals all over the globe. I encourage you to check it out, and spend some time rolling around with other peoples' emotions. It effectively erases physical and social barriers, and I think there's great value in that.

Ok, so let's see if I can get my feelings pulled into the We Feel Fine project:

I am feeling a lot of tension when I think about how to follow the ways of Jesus in the American suburbs (but that's a subject for a separate post...).

**If you have a spare 17 minutes, below is the Harris presentation (he explains his projects far more interestingly than I have...):


.

Head of Radio...

I overfloweth with great anticipation!

Radiohead has just made their new studio album, In Rainbows, available for pre-order.

In true Radiohead-curveball fashion: you name your own price when you pre-order the album download.
Seriously.
No, really.
I just did it. Just fill in the blanks.
Welcome to Radiohead in their post-EMI contract world.


(Sidenote: I think this is really a fantastic experiment, but if you're a Radiohead fan, I think that you should pay what you deem their art to be worth... rather than see how little you can pay to consume... just my two pence.)

I'll plan to post my thoughts on the album after I am able to download it on October 10th...

::anticipatory grin::

*Photo credit: Dead Air Space

Rite of Passage

A couple nights ago, I was watching a recent episode of the Charlie Rose Show (I highly recommend this talk show) in which Sean Penn and Eddie Vedder were interviewed regarding Penn's latest movie as writer/director & Vedder as score composer/performer, Into the Wild.* The film is based off of John Krakauer's book of the same name and details the true story of Christopher McCandless's adventures & ultimate tragedy in the early 1990s. I thought the interview with Penn and Vedder was mostly interesting, but the subject matter surrounding McCandless's journey was what really captured me.

Here's a synopsis of the closing years of McCandless's life from Publisher's Weekly:

After graduating from Emory University in Atlanta in 1992, top student and athlete Christopher McCandless abandoned his possessions, gave his entire $24,000 savings account to charity and hitchhiked to Alaska, where he went to live in the wilderness. Four months later, he turned up dead. His diary, letters and two notes found at a remote campsite tell of his desperate effort to survive, apparently stranded by an injury and slowly starving. They also reflect the posturing of a confused young man, raised in affluent Annandale, Va., who self-consciously adopted a Tolstoyan renunciation of wealth and return to nature.

In the Charlie Rose interview, Sean Penn explored the notion of a "rite of passage" that McCandless seemed to impose on himself:

"I think in a societal, organic sense [a rite of passage] almost doesn’t exist anymore in terms of something that presents itself to you (whether you choose it or not) it’s something for your survival and it’s mandatory. That exists very seldomly, particularly in our culture here in the U.S. Increasingly, I think that men and women are recognizing that this is not a human luxury, but a human need: to test one’s self, to find one’s self, and most importantly to return to one’s self..."

These ideas got me musing on the effects that modern American society and technological advances have had on our development as individuals (and consequently, as a nation). When I look into the direction taken by Christopher McCandless, it's sobering to see how certain decisions led to his death, yet I can't help but sense that he was on to something.

Is it possible that our "advanced" culture is gradually drawing us away from the necessity of interacting and grappling with the physical world?... away from the raw process of maturity? I think many of us, at some point, endure a disruptive event that forces us to either shrink back or grow up; but in 21st century America it seems that these events tend to be trite, virtual, or contrived for those with excess. Being human seems to require an almost primal simplicity at times, and I think our material crap can really get in the way. (It does for me anyway)

Well, enough rambling about that. I'm really looking forward to seeing this film at some point (and hopefully read the book ahead of time). In my mind, all of these thoughts keep tying into the concept of degrees of separation that I still want to write about sometime soon. Until then... adieu.


* You can view this particular interview here.
Photo Credit - www.intothewild.com

Commemorating an Uncle...

Tad S. Taylor (2.22.1950 - 9.7.2007)

My uncle died last week at 57 years of age. Tad Taylor (my mom's younger brother and a very well-liked man) had an infectious, rhythmic laugh, an ever-present sense of humor, a trademark bald head, and scores of friends and family members who are heavy with pain at his unexpected & abrupt departure. Tad was an incredible fisherman who taught me how to fly fish on the Madison River in Montana and gave me my first fly rod years ago. He was the kind of fun-lovin' uncle that seemed to always have a different nickname for me (although he generally referred to me as "turkey-lips":-), and wouldn't hesitate to hop on the Xbox with my brother & me for a quick game of Halo when visiting from Texas for Thanksgiving. While the burden of his death is heaviest on people such as his wife, his children, and my mom, I'm also going to miss him as I find myself wishing that I had valued our relationship more while he was still around.

Death confuses me. It is an incredibly disruptive force. It raises so many questions, and yet, for those of us who remain it also brings certain aspects of our lives sharply into focus.

Death is certain... unavoidable... unpredictable.

I felt the gravity of this fact as I rocked my baby in my arms during Tad's funeral. Shea's eyes shine with wonder as she experiences all sorts of "firsts" each day, while at the same time we found ourselves contemplating how Tad's journey has drawn to a close. This is a finite journey that we're all experiencing. (Of course many of us have faith in a larger reality, but my thoughts here are limited to our experiences that are constrained by time) All of us, including my daughter, are facing a quantifiable number of days on this earth... and this is a sobering thought for me. And what's more, as I transition fully into adulthood, the departure of those near to me will only increase in frequency as time progresses. I don't like that... but I can't hide from it either.

Accordingly, I don't think I give death enough thought, especially for something that is such a huge component of being a member of the human race. It seems that we should strive to maintain some sort of balance in our living when it comes to these realizations: embracing our mortality, and the mortality of those around us, to a degree that helps us appreciate and optimize the present without being scared of the future. I need to work on this.

As was said at Tad's funeral, "What love leaves behind far exceeds what death can take away."

Decisions While Standing at a Crossroad...

Welp, it's an important time in history to be a human being (some may say). From the range of views pumping out of pop culture/the mass media, I hear one side claiming that this generation (OUR generation) is staring global problems AND global solutions in the face like no people group to come before us. On the other side, I sometimes hear voices saying that to agree with this notion that we are a "generation standing at a crossroad" is incredibly self-absorbed, and that to fill our heads with these shallow, bandwagon-joining ideas of "saving the world" is little more than idyllic fantasy. I think I see where each side is coming from, but I definitely tend to side much more with the former than the latter.

Never before in history has so much wealth existed on this earth... so much mass production of goods... so much excess. Never before has digital information touched every country on the globe... tools of empowerment becoming so readily available. Technology continues to plow forward with innovation, systematically uncovering information and solutions to long-standing problems. And yet the problems are of unprecedented proportions as well: never before has humanity seen so much material disparity between haves and have-nots, such massive and multiplying populations, such uncontrollable pandemics, such irreparable damage to our environment, etc.

These circumstances demand intervention on a grand scale, and human intervention can always be simplified to one origin: individual decisions to act. If we sympathize with the dying poor in the developing world, yet our sympathy ends at sentimentality... the poor still needlessly die. If we are concerned about the increasing pollution in our cities and with the mounting data that points to human-caused climate change, yet our frustration isn't powerful enough to change our very lifestyle which is contributing to the problems... then how can we characterize certain decisions we make as anything other than selfish or lazy?

These are realizations that I've been rolling around in recent months, and I think they apply to so many aspects of our daily lives. The challenge is finding the proper balance of learning, realizing, taking action, and being realistic.

Along these lines, there's a "green" movement gaining momentum in our country and among pursuers of Jesus who are trying to build God's Kingdom on this earth. Tara and I are trying to learn more about what we can do to reduce our impact and embark on some new lifestyle adventures along the way. We've got a looooong way to go, but the path certainly looks intriguing. Tara's really been guiding us in new directions at home, and I've recently had some exciting ideas come along in this realm as well, but this post is now far too long... so I'll save the idea-sharing for another post:-)

*Photo Credit - "Marc:" on Flickr

Thank you, Vusi Mahlasela.

My wife tells me that I don't post enough (and I agree). She says that I shouldn't be afraid to just post random things because that's what blogging's all about: giving people a window into what's happening in your realm (and I agree... I like to agree with her because she's smart and good lookin' with a capital "GOOD LOOKIN'"). So rather than posting wordy, in-depth commentaries about the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, the spiritual application of the concept regarding "degrees of separation," or my musings about my medium-term plans for what to do with myself and my family [all of which are dominating my mind these days], instead I'm going to succinctly thank a musician that I just discovered: Vusi Mahlasela.

South African singer-songwriter Vusi Mahlasela was a crucial artistic voice during the fight against apartheid, and now in the new modern-day nation. Blending traditional African music with soul and blues, his music showcases powerful vocals and poetic lyrics.

As someone who used to spend a lot of time playing guitar, I love the tone that he produces with his fleshy-fingerstyle. But beyond that, as I watched him play and sing for the first time, I was reminded of why I originally fell head-over-heels in love with music when I was 17 (wittingly or not): There are times when I experience a profoundly intimate connection with someone's creativity in sound... just me and the notes, the words, the melody. And it rings throughout my humanity... sweeps me into the reality of what beautiful is, that God made this, and that there's hope for this messy world because a God that can create such nuanced wonder most certainly has a plan for His people going forward. [That probably doesn't really make sense, but it does for me;-]

Anyway, I hope Vusi's music, his creativity, grabs you as it does me...

Whew! Transition to dénouement...

dé|noue|ment [noun] - the final part of a narrative in which the strands of a plot are drawn together and matters are explained or resolved.

Looking back over the recent months, there have definitely been a lot of strands thickening the plot lately. And yet, within in a matter of a few weeks, our own personal dénouement seems to have taken place (and not a moment too soon) after nearly two years of intense rising action. Seeing that my last post here was in December of last year (good grief), I'll do a quick rundown of the most noteworthy recent events:

I became a daddy.
My little girl, Shea Marin, was born on April 29th, and wow... what an incredible experience that was! The weight of the implications surrounding the birth of my daughter is oftentimes more than I can manage in my mind (much less describe in a blog post), so I'll not even try to convey all of those thoughts at the moment. Here are some internal snapshots from the journey thus far:
- I am SO in love with this little person...
- Having an infant reveals my selfishness and weakness...
- It is amazing, regardless of how much I internalized it beforehand, how one tiny baby can rock your entire reality and worldview...

I finished grad school for now (pretty much:).
On May 4th, I walked across the platform to receive my MBA from the Thunderbird School of Global Management, and it has never felt so good to come home from the office and wind-down as opposed to ramp-up for conference calls, case-reading, and various other forms of self-inflicted torment. After 20 non-stop months of being in class, three continents visited, 20 ridiculous professors, and many classmates-turned-friends, I count the grueling experience well worth the sacrifice (although, one that I will not soon replicate:) I wrote "pretty much" in the header because Shea was born the morning that I was supposed to be in Glendale for the final week of lectures, so I'll be making that up in August and THEN I'll get my diploma... [kinda like the time I couldn't get my diploma from Wheaton until I paid $150 in past-due parking tickets... insufferable Public Safety officers!!!]

I went to China.
As part of my Thunderbird study of the Asian business environment, we spent a long week in Beijing in January earlier this year. Entirely fascinating land that I hope to revisit someday with my family. Journeying through the Forbidden City and hanging out in modern-day Tiananmen Square creates quite a background and framework for the present paradox that is China today. I got this very intangible vibe from the culture that I think stems from the rub of free-market forces marching out of step of the Communist Party.

And as I witnessed the Party guard lower the PRC flag in Tiananmen Square as the sun went down over the polluted urban sky, a sobering reality came over me that I was experiencing perhaps the early markings of a burdgeoning world military power to be reckoned with in the not-too-distant future... time will tell.

My bros came to visit.
In February, four of my closest friends from my Wheaton days popped down to the desert to see me one last time before I became a boring father;-) Man, did I make some poor choices when it came to college buddies!! (ha, I jest) No, honestly, it was such a great time to have the five of us in one place again... a tradition that we plan to execute for years to come. Whoever said that many of our closest friends are made in college knew what they were talking about.

Still working on finding rhythm...
Zach Lind titles his blog "Finding Rhythm," and I really resonate with those words. As Tara and I (& Shea) progress on our journey through life together, we find ourselves increasingly pushing to discover some of the sacred life "rhythms" that Jesus has in mind for his followers. Stay tuned as I continue to stumble along this path in community and share some thoughts along the way...