09/26/14

You can't have roots and wings.

This is the weekend of the Parish Farming Internship we visit Isodore's Plough.

I'm finishing up some of the readings and my journal.

The morning is calm as I sip coffee and express my experiences over the last two months. The soothing sounds of morning pour out of the kitchen into the dining room table where I am perched. I can hear the sink running and the fridge door as Ellen completes her Friday morning routine. Travis stops and talks with me for a moment before he leaves for the morning commute.

I want so much to have wings.

I want to see every country
every city
every tree
every mountain
I want to stand on every continent.

But I hate money.
I don't want to slave away to pay for such things.

I am always reminded of what Christopher McCandless wrote:
Happiness only real when shared.

What good are wings if I fly alone?

Yet roots and feel so restricting.
roots give meaning and purpose to live.
Roots give color to the outlines of the painting of life.

How do I dig such roots while still feeding my hunger to explore?

As years seem to fly by I look at myself and see I am nearly 27.
...27 the start of my late twenties.

I've never been this old before.
My friends, my roots around me seem to be settling into the soil they are around.

I find myself trying to fly together but finding their nests beginning to be built.

I'm not ready for that yet. There is so much more to see and taste.
Marriage and family
those things can start in my 30's but now, in my youth I want to climb, I want to run, I want to see!

How many more summers of good knees do I have left?
How many more years of healthy lungs and strong back do I have to spend?

I'm not ready for my coffin couch with my Netflix grave.

I want to fly with my wings and yet I want to share with my roots.

I am so excited for this weekend. I love this Parish Farming Internship.
It always feeds me more than I can bare both physically and spiritually.

Young Rising Sons - High

9/20/14

As the sun went higher, the color faded and the earth gave way to nothingness, as though the color were a trick, as if the sun were teaching us there is no such thing as beauty, only what it chooses to shine a certain light upon that stimulates a certain chemical in our brains, as though the two were old lovers, teasing each other, reliving some forgotten memory.
But if they were teasing each other, they have certainly stopped. What we have here in all this dead dirt is the stuff of life without life's spark. All of us are made from this stuff, this dirt. Everything in life is just this magical soil, fairy dust, if you will. Plant a seed in the soil and that seed will find the magic around it to make some sprig of wood that, with time from the fairy dust around it, will make a tree, and with the aid of water and more dirt and a hundred years, a tree the height of a skyscraper and the width of a house. All of it from dirt. Grass grows the same way, carrots, potatoes, onions, apples on trees, barely for beer. Rocks are dirt fired in the furnace of the earth's belly, steel is processed rocks, diamonds are rocks forged in the compression of earth's weight, and people, you and I, are dirt lit with, depending on what you believe, the magic seed of the aliens, or the accidental nothingness of Darwin's dreams, or the warm breath of God, the spark of life, giving an embryo a heartbeat, the magical glint that brings the dirt alive, sets in its DNA a coded direction and a mysterious motion that becomes greater than a tree in complexity, able to question its own being, able to guess at its creation, able to love and to hate, to live inspired, then to die, to return to dirt, to the vast abyss of nothing that is a desert in midday, a sea of brown, only beautiful when the sun tricks the eye, only beautiful in the playful metaphor of light.
-Through Painted Deserts, Chapter 6 Trouble by Donald Miller

Echosmith - Cool Kids

09/17/14

It's actually the souls of the trees we're seeing in the winter. In summer everything is green and idyllic but in the winter, the branches and the trunks all stand out. Just look at how crooked they all are. The branches have to carry all the leaves to the sunlight. That's one long struggle for survival.

Robert Earl Keen- Road to No Return

09/13/14

Scuola di Atene


In the Stanza della Segnatura Raphael painted four walls science, theology, poetry, and justice four areas of human knowledge. The science and theology walls are on opposite ends of the room.

In the Scuola di Atene the wall for science it is divided down the middle into two ways of thinking. The sides are divided by the leaders of those schools of thought. The left side is Plato talking to the right side's Aristotle.

Plato was a philosopher of the theoretical that which cannot be seen. On his side of science there is among the crowd Pythagoras the mathematician focusing on theoretical math. Also on the left is Heraclides who believed all things were always in flux thinking by himself at the bottom of the steps writing on a block of marble. Heraclides is painted to look like Michelangelo. Rachael paid homage to Michelangelo who was painting the Sistine Chapel a couple rooms away at the time.

Aristotle who was a philosopher of the observable, the physical has his team on the right side. Euclid was the father of geometry a very tangible type of math. Diogenes one of the founders of Cynic philosophy. Astronomers Ptolemy and Zoroaster one theorized about the moment of the planets and the other holding the celestial orb.

Even in the science area of human knowledge it is divided by the seen and unseen. None of these men were Christians yet here they are inside the Stanza della Segnatura. On the opposite side of the room there is La disputa del sacramento. This painting isn't separated side to side but top and bottom.

On the top there's God the Father, Jesus, Mary, John The Baptist, Holy Spirit Dove among the four gospels, Prophets and Saints surround the trinity.

On the bottom there is Fathers of religion, Priests, Popes, people like Dante. But the awesome thing about this wall is what is in the middle connecting the top and the bottom.

the Bread of the Eucharist the body of Christ is the link between the bottom and top. the bottom group is coming to understand the divine knowledge through the bread the link, the body of Christ. It is through this meal this communion that we are able to understand to reach to connect with God. The gap is bridged by Jesus. His body his blood.

In this time Science and theology lived in the same room. That room was in the Vatican of all places. Where the leaders of Christianity lived on the walls of that place were men who did not claim to be Christian. Today we separate our thinking. It is either science or theology. We cannot stand the contradiction. Yet in the past the two sat opposite each other but still in the same room. God and science together in man as we wrestle question and seek.

All truth is God's truth. Why are we today so afraid to seek? Why are we uncomfortable with the tension between the two? What happened to Christianity that thinking isn't valued instead only faith? Why can't both exist in my mind? Why can't science and theology balance like the struggles of my head and my heart.

Life should never be lived in black and white. Grey is where life and truth live. Right and wrong exist but they can take many forms and different in many situations. Strict law must always be balanced with loving mercy. Grace must always be tethered to truth.

We as humans are stuck in the middle of this room.
Not completely of nature and simply the physical realm.
Yet not completely spirit and of the heavenly.
We are in the middle. We are wrestling with decided to stand with the physical or the spiritual not knowing that the answer has always been both.

It is good to be physical. It is good to be spiritual. It is good to be human.

That is exactly what I am,
Human
Image of God
Soil

Adam.

La disputa del sacramento


Little Boxes - Walk off the Earth

09/10/14

Earlier this month I went home for the Fulton County Fair. I think ever since I have existed on this planet I have never missed one of these fairs. It has always felt like home. But this year was different.

It didn't feel like home.
I felt out of place.
I stood there with old high school friends listening to them talk and I slowly began to realize how much I have changed. The fair doesn't feel the way it once did not because the fair or the community has changed but rather because somethings have happened within me. I have grown. I have changed.

I travel back to Columbus and I go to my friends' house to hang out but even there I find myself uncomfortable with the subject of conversation. I feel out of place among who have always been my friends.

I come back to the place I live. I sit in the living room or at the table silent. Listening to conversation around me and I find myself again not exactly fitting in.

What is happening?

I am getting closer and closer to turning 27.
I have never been this old in my life.

I am beginning to see my friends grow and head in their paths that life is taking them.
I see my own path as I grow older and experience more.

Things are always changing.
I graduated high school
I graduated college
I've moved out
I've grown up
but there are changes no one warned me about.

No one told me about the slow subtle paths we all take and how such close friends begin to seem like strangers.

Where do I fit in?
Where do I belong?

I don't like making new friends. I've had these friends my whole life. What do I do when the people I love change. What do I do when our conversations become shallower and more on the surface?

I want the depth we once shared but now our deep thoughts have taken different paths. No one wants to hear my thoughts, my conversations because they do no interest they do not fit anymore.

How great the urge to fit it always seems as we live out our lives.

What if I found truth but no one wanted it? Would I live in lies to be with a community or would I live in truth alone?

The balance between my path and staying connected. How do I do it?
Life is so strange. Nothing stays the same.

No one told me 26 would look so different from 22. I wonder what 30 will look like. I worry about things I shouldn't.

I want to fit in. I want to belong. I want to feel home. But home keeps moving. I keep grasping for it and it seems like the space to stand is shrinking as the waters of time rise.

Grey or Blue - Jaymay

09/06/14

Man doth usurp all space,
Stares thee, in rock, bush, river, in the face.
Never yet thine eyes behold a tree;
'Tis no sea thou seest in the sea,
'Tis but a disguised humanity.
To avoid thy fellow, vain thy plan;
All that interests a man, is man.
-Henry Sutton

A people without the knowledge of their past history, origin and culture is like a tree without roots.
-Marcus Garvey

If you don't know history, then you don't know anything. You are a leaf that doesn't know it is part of a tree.
― Michael Crichton

The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.
― George Orwell

Study the past if you would define the future.
― Confucius

That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach.
― Aldous Huxley

The farther backward you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see.
― Winston Churchill

Those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it.
― Edmund Burke

To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child. For what is the worth of human life, unless it is woven into the life of our ancestors by the records of history?
― Marcus Tullius Cicero

You can’t tell where you are going, unless you know where you have been.

World Population:
AD 1 200 Million
1000 310 Million
1500 458 Million
1750 791 Million
1800 978 Million
1850 1.26 Billion
1900 1.65 Billion
1950 2.52 Billion
2000 6.07 Billion

United States Carbon Emissions from Fossil-Fuel Burning, Cement Manufacture, and Gas Flaring:
1800 0.01 metric tons of carbon per capita
1850 0.23 metric tons of carbon per capita
1900 2.37 metric tons of carbon per capita
1950 4.32 metric tons of carbon per capita
2000 5.34 metric tons of carbon per capita

The Industrial Revolution was the transition to new manufacturing processes in the period from about 1760 to sometime between 1820 and 1840. This transition included going from hand production methods to machines, new chemical manufacturing and iron production processes, improved efficiency of water power, the increasing use of steam power, and the development of machine tools. It also included the change from wood and other bio-fuels to coal.

An economy or economic system consists of the production, distribution or trade, and consumption of limited goods and services by different agents in a given geographical location. The economic agents can be individuals, businesses, organizations, or governments. Transactions occur when two parties agree to the value or price of the transacted good or service, commonly expressed in a certain currency.

efficiency
economy

When I look back at the history of this world when I look at where we are today I think about the industrial revolution. Out of the 10,000 years of known human history we have only been living at this level for 250 years.

That's it. 250 years of machines and oil and engines. What price are we paying to live at this level of comfort? We have no history to look back upon and find the answers. We have never lived like this before.

Divorce
Obesity
Depression
Boredom
Global warming
High fructose corn syrup

We have no idea the price we are paying to live like this. We are writing the new history as we go.

We have never had this many people living on the planet at one time before.
our use of fossil fuels is increasing per person as our population increases.
Something is going to give.
There will be a tipping point.

thousands of years later people will learn about the industrial revolution this short period in human history where we sucked resources from the earth to create fossil fuel slaves in order to control the climate, to avoid sweat, to avoid work, to sit in chairs for our lives. To dodge pain.

Our scientists speak with such arrogant confidence.
Our economic leaders have all the power.

but the reality of it all is that we have no idea what we are doing because we have never been here before in history.

In the past God use to have all authority
then Kings, emperors, chefs, rulers had it all
Today money rules.

No one can serve two masters. For you will hate one and love the other; you will be devoted to one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and Mammon. That is why I tell you not to worry about everyday life—whether you have enough food and drink, or enough clothes to wear. Isn’t life more than food, and your body more than clothing?
-Matthew 6:24

Today I see the world choosing money over God. I see the world saying life isn't more than food. Our body isn't more than clothing. I see the world loving money and hating God. But at what cost? What are we doing? Where are we heading? Are all of these luxuries really increasing our quality of life or hollowing us out?

I wonder what the history books will say about this time I live in.

Radical Face - Doorways