Lake Tahoe 2009

We went to Lake Tahoe. It was beautiful, to say the least.

Shea found the water a bit chilly, so she rode on my shoulders...

Progress.

I'd like to offer a wide range of thoughts, but for tonight I'll just leave it at this:

...my patriotism for this country is ultimately trumped by my citizenship in a larger story. But, nonetheless, the outcome of this election has left me proud, hopeful, and energized about what may be ahead of our national community as well as our global community. Tonight will be remembered for many, many years.

Now let's all get to work.

*more Callie Shell photos here

Hiking Chevelon Canyon with my bro...

Well, seeing that I've had such a prolonged absence from the blogging realm, I figured I might as well record a bit of what I've been up to. I haven't forgotten about "the list," and I still plan to finish it out. But in the meantime, I'll toss out a few posts to catch-up anybody who's still reading this weak-sauce blog.

A couple years ago, my brother, Dave, talked me into going into the northern Arizona wilderness to hike our little boots off. Over the course of two and half days, we did around 23 miles and probably a couple thousand feet of elevation change, most of it without trails (thank you GPS:). Oh yeah, and we almost died... (joke... kinda). But I was definitely starving and walking funny by the time we made it back to the truck.

This year we decided we'd head back to the same location, but we only had wife/child-clearance for one night (which was just right). So it was back to Chevelon Canyon on the Mogollon Rim, northeast of Payson. The below video is nothing special, but it shows the beautiful Arizona forests that exist less than a couple hours north of the barren desert of Phoenix.

Bamford Bros Hike Chevelon Canyon from Arizona Bam on Vimeo.

+

Too many days between blog posts here... a sign of the times.

Some of my favorite blog posts by Joshua Longbrake [seemingly put on ice at the moment...] are his creative additions (generally photography), which are always simply marked by a "+" as the title. So, I'm going to copy this minimalist concept of his (hey, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery right?) and begin offering up some of my meager creative content to the blogosphere from time to time.

And today isn't even MY creation. Ha! [hey it's my blog... I make the rules around here: there are no rules]

=====

My wife shows signs of being a fantastic photographer. My daughter shows signs of being increasingly stunning with each passing day. Pretty good combo, I would say...

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...):


.

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

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...