not of this world

my disparate existence blessed me to be able to take time out to paint my second icon a few weeks ago. am only posting a few of the stages as i had to redo her face at least six times and all facial attempts beyond the one i finished with seemed too corpse-like to ever allow the light of day to reveal.
icon painting, like gardening or any other such activity requiring patience and co-creation is a great opportunity to attempt to be worked through, and to be enriched in the course of the attempting. the process itself is a gift, and so far, the two results i have borne have not been displeasing, though i am in no way in danger of thinking that those results range anywhere near the heights of iconographic art…

She who is more spacious than the heavens, She who contained what the universe cannot contain, pray for us!

don't, and i mean don't, miss everybody's favorite computer genius

waxing phat on  calculus and the mind of God   

a few weeks ago i found an old stun gun of my father’s when i was cleaning out one of our spare rooms.  i decided i should toss it into my satchel seeing as i often tend to sometimes wander about alone in places that could be considered sketchy, though i usually tend to count on the fact that i could convince any potentially harmful meanies that i was a human, they were a human, no need to be uncivilized, etc.  but i’ve been counseled not to count on that with desperately undosed meth heads and the like.

so anyway, threw it in the satchel and forgot about it.  at the airport security checkpoint they informed me they needed to check the bag.  they found some pliers but since they were under five inches or something, i got to keep them.  the guy actually asked me if there was anything else he should be looking to which of course i replied in the negative.   i continued on without a hitch.  just rediscovered the stun gun and am really glad that i didn’t have to try to explain that one, not so glad that security really is as pathetic as i’ve always suspected it is…

“The Christian faith is the most exciting drama that ever staggered the imagination of man — and the dogma is the drama. That drama is summarized quite clearly in the creeds of the Church…. The plot pivots upon a single character, and the whole action is the answer to a central problem: ‘What think ye of Christ?’….

“The Church’s answer is categorical and uncompromising and it is this: That Jesus Bar-Joseph, the carpenter of Nazareth, was in fact … the God ‘by whom all things were made’. His body and brain were those of a common man; His personality was the personality of God, so far as that personality could be expressed in human terms. He was not a kind of demon pretending to be human; He was in every respect a genuine living man. He was not merely a man so good as to be ‘like God’ — He was God….

“If this is dull, then what, in heaven’s name, is worthy to be called exciting? The people who hanged Christ never, to do them justice, accused Him of being a bore — on the contrary, they thought Him too dynamic to be safe. It has been left for later generations to muffle up that shattering personality and surround Him with an atmosphere of tedium. We have very efficiently pared the claws of the Lion of Judah, certified Him ‘meek and mild’, and recommend Him as a fitting household pet for pale curates and pious old ladies. To those who knew Him, however, He in no way suggests a milk-and-water person; they objected to Him as a dangerous firebrand. True, He was tender to the unfortunate, patient with honest inquirers, and humble before heaven; but He insulted respectable clergymen by calling them hypocrites. He referred to King Herod as ‘that fox’; He went to parties in disreputable company and was looked upon as a ‘gluttonous man and winebibber, a friend of publicans and sinners’; He assaulted indignant tradesmen and threw them and their belongings out of the Temple; he cured diseases by any means that came handy, with a shocking casualness in the matter of other people’s pigs and property; He showed no proper deference for wealth or social position; when confronted with neat dialectical traps, He displayed a paradoxical humor that affronted serious-minded people, and He retorted by asking disagreeably searching questions that could not be answered by rule of thumb. He was emphatically not a dull man in His human lifetime, and if He was God, there can be nothing dull about God, either….

“‘And the third day He rose again’. What are we to make of this? One thing is certain: if He were God and nothing else, His immortality means nothing to us; if He was man and no more, His death is no more important than yours or mine. But if He really was both God and man, then when the man Jesus died, God died too; and when the God Jesus arose, man rose too, for they were one and the same person…. There is the essential doctrine, of which the whole elaborate structure of Christian faith and morals is only the logical consequence. Now we may call that doctrine exhilarating, or we may call it devastating; we may call it revelation, or we may call it rubbish; but if we call it dull, then words have no meaning at all”.

from The Greatest Drama Ever Staged, Dorothy Sayers

we had a fantastic coastal storm last night, went on for hours, dropped hail and snow, lit up the sky and shook the house, made the roads a mess but the forest where I go walking absolutely perfect. especially the smell of it all, the crispness of the air sharpening the mixed scents of bay, redwood, pine, and oak, everything dripping and misting, crunching about atop the normally muted padding of forest floor.
nothing makes me happy like a good rousing storm makes me happy, and if every morning was like this one, my journey to someday being a permanent morning person would be a lot less painful…