Poetry – Life's Prequel

Flying through Failure into Joy, Hope, and Life

There is little in life that is more precious than to see the one you love enthralled with delight at something simple; for therein one touches the self of one’s soul, the memories of the child grown, and with joy one heals many things that are not so.

With just enough wind to raise the kite, and not so much that one had no challenge to pay attention, provide tension, and bring success through intention against the wind, to give the kite cause to rise against the sky.

There the sun burst through the clouds of the day above the city skyline, giving witness to human effort to create a city and God’s good effort to create beauty at every turn, even amidst the chaos of human effort to falsify the past in order to ruin another.

In God’s world there are of necessity always things of our past that we must haul along with us, and we can complain that they are there, or realize that God leaves them attached so as to stabilize us in the present, to keep our heads up, our hearts beating, and our spirits oriented towards grace. The tails of life are not anchors of disaster, but lessons that can be the source of our wisdom.

There with light pouring through us we can truly be alive.

Or we can deny the past, pervert its memories, and shut out the light, and live a shell of God’s intention for us; we can live in darkness, fear and anxiety.

There is nothing so destructive for ourselves but to think everyone else is to blame for our failings; for then we never learn, we never grow, we never love, and we never truly live.

It is in knowing our own failings and our past, and receiving forgiveness for it all, that we learn to shine, and fly, and stay connected to those we love and those who love us.

As wise Phoebe said: once you lie, though it may seem so small, it leads you places you could not predict, places dark and destructive from which you cannot escape. Okay she didn’t quite say it that way, but she saw that truth: lies seep in quietly and suddenly grow to consume our lives. And we cannot get free of them.

Except, when the light of Christ enters our real though denied guilt, and then we see by grace the goodness we had forgotten and denied, the goodness all around us, and in people we once denigrated and rejected … and the profound goodness that God imputes to us though undeserving. And then we can live free of fear, for we are forgiven and valued and worthy … and able to stand as equals.

Equal in failures; and equally redeemed and made whole. Sinners made simultaneously Saints.

And the fun of it all, and I mean of it all, not just this evening in the park, or this week of lies and hell and hope, rather the fun of it all is like this evening;

It is the enemy’s ace, the Red Baron, which is portrayed, and which delivers the delight, and which, though in previous generations an instrument of death, is an instrument of joy.

Against the backdrop of light and darkness, or cloud and trees this red triwingeddevil thrills us.

And that childlike thrill reaches deep in the soul to heal and bring hope.

God is Good; and all will be well. We shall see the devil of the past, turn into the deliverer of joy, of life, of love, in the present and into the future.

If only the children (the child in us all) could see … the truth and be free.

Through the Middle Darkness

There were very hard days behind me but this speaks so as if …
As if one understood and knew that despair behind my days of fear
As if the light of hope got stuck on a stick and were thrown ahead.
As if the small grass of comfort between my toes were wrenched from the universe by a black hole.
As if there were no holy water that reacts differently in the font, no broken bread, no blood given.
As if …
But as Carver before the Ways and Means, derided and demeaned,
As Bonhoeffer detained from his flock, asking Who Am I,
As Mandela held on an island, knowing slowly they would get long pants,
I still remember who I am, who I’ve been made, by whom I’ve been claimed, though condemned who named me simultaneously a saint.

Where are we?
On a map?
Of convoluted and complicated growth?
We are full of hope and yet desperate to be
welcomed by another saint
rescued by another saint
known past this by all in the light of life.

An old and broken thought invades the will of those with control,
What emptiness grips their fears, and twists them to the dark
Overwhelming darkness like in the caves where bodies lie, dried out, ages gone by.
Where even there the water of life flows unseen
But heard.
And drunk.
And felt as evidence that all is well, connected, blessed.
Even there the grains become body, which is broken and given.
Even there the grapes are fermented into blood, which is poured and shared.

What is my cup?
What is your cup?
What is our cup?
What will we see new today in the light?

Will these ever once again house a family, livid, active, growing, of hope and peace with a smile?

Die schwersten Wege

Die schwersten Wege werden alleine gegangen,
die Enttäuschung, der Verlust, das Opfer,
sind einsam.
Selbst der Tote der jedem Ruf antwortet
und sich keiner Bitte versagt
steht uns nicht bei
und sieht zu ob wir es vermögen.
Die Hände der Lebenden die sich ausstrecken
ohne uns zu erreichen
sind wie die Äste der Bäume im Winter.
Alle Vögel schweigen.
Man hört nur den eigenen Schritt
und den Schritt den der Fuß
noch nicht gegangen ist,
aber gehen wird.
Stehenbleiben und sich Umdrehn hilft nicht.
Es muss gegangen sein.
Nimm eine Kerze in die Hand
wie in den Katakomben,
das kleine Licht atmet kaum.
Und doch, wenn du lange gegangen bist,
bleibt das Wunder nicht aus,
weil das Wunder immer geschieht,
und weil wir ohne die Gnade
nicht leben können:
die Kerze wird hell vom freien Atem des Tags,
du bläst sie lächelnd aus
wenn du in die Sonne trittst
und unter den blühenden Gärten
die Stadt vor dir liegt,
und in deinem Hause
dir der Tisch weiß gedeckt ist.
Und die verlierbaren Lebenden
und die unverlierbaren Toten
dir das Brot brechen und den Wein reichen –
und du ihre Stimmen wieder hörst
ganz nahe
bei deinem Herzen.
(Hilde Domin)

The most difficult paths

The most difficult paths are only alone trod,
disappointment, loss, sacrifice,
are desolate.
Even the deaths that answer every call
and deny themselves no plea
do not stand with us
and only watch to see whether we are able.
The hands of the survivors which extend
never reaching us
are like the branches of trees in winter.
All birds are silent.
One hears only one’s own step
and the step of one’s foot
of the step not taken,
but the step that will be taken.
Stopping and turning about offers no help.
The path must be trod.
Take a candle in your hand
as in the catacombs,
the little light hardly breathes.
And yet, even as you are long gone,
the miracle does not forsake,
because the miracle always happens
and because we without grace
cannot live:
the candle will burn brightly from the free breath of the day,
you blow it out smiling
when you walk into the sun
and among the flowering gardens
as the city spreads below you,
and in your house
the table is set white for you.
And the expendable survivors
and the un-expendable dead
reach you the broken bread and rich wine –
and you hear their voices again
very close
to your heart.
(Hilde Domin Translated Tim Lofstrom)

A familiar path?

For you, too?

Tools

I have built things my whole life, since early on up to and including tomorrow.

The greatest rewards come from building something that allows someone else, or even myself, to be able to do something they are not able to do, or to do it more safely or more efficiently.

I built spreadsheets for my ex-common-law wife’s store. It was terrific to take a process that she or others had spent half an hour to numerous hours, repeatedly (daily, weekly, monthly) and automate the process so that it happened instantaneously or after only a few minutes of copying and pasting. The first thing I did was I took the staff schedule and put in formulas to total the hours worked each day, and a subtotal for each week, and a total for every two week pay period. Gone were the hours spent calculating hours worked every payday.

I took the requirements for sick leave accumulated and taken, built a spreadsheet, and just by entering a staff person’s start up information, their first day of benefits, and then any day they took as sick leave, we would have an accurate record of whether they were entitled to sick leave taken, and how many days they had remaining.

One of the last things I did was I took that schedule/payroll spreadsheet and automated another spreadsheet to read the last nine weeks of schedules to calculate out Holiday Pay for each statutory holiday. That got interrupted so many times, and there were so many odd things to take into account, that it took me the longest to finish, nearly six months. But when I left it worked like a charm.

The second biggest thing I did was take the End of Day reporting process, eliminate the need to print and then re-enter figures for the day into other spreadsheets, and took the process for one staff person who used it the most from a 35 minute process to a 12 minute process each evening. And it exposed all sorts of errors in the software generated numbers, usually an error in communication between two pieces of software, but also all sorts of errors made at the till; and it made it possible within minutes of finding and fixing the problem to verify that the error was fixed correctly. Before these errors simply went undetected … and lost the business hundreds of dollars.

The biggest thing I did was build a very large spreadsheet that updated costs, set prices, discounts, and various other details for items sold in the store. It was more complicated than anything else I’d done and I barely got a chance to use it to set prices.

That’s a story for later.

So what’s this all about now?!

With the right tool, creative imagination, and hard work it is amazing what can be done!

And this tool is amazing. I’m able to make cuts accurate down to a 64^th of an inch! And more than that … well the sander barely has to do anything to even those variations out!

So this helped produce another desk, this one for my second oldest son. Build just right to fit his cramped room and his computer use … and the ability to get the desk up the tight stairwell to his room. So it’s assembled mostly like the others with glue and finishing nails, but some crucial joints, including attaching the desktops, are screwed in place. So it can be finished, oiled, dried and let the smell dissipate, and then disassembled, carried upstairs and reassembled in place.

The right tools, the right imagination, and good work!

Eyes of faith or …

On an evening walk putting life in order from the chaos that was foisted on me gives us this surprise.

And this simple display of autumn beauty came clear.

It gets cold, the leaves turn colour, yellow and bright and deep.

We just marvel and stand wondrous, enjoying this turn, this momentary presence of cold coming pressed on to growth and green, bringing death to the leaves, designed to give up after a short term, so that the rest of the tree can survive the coming deep freeze of winter.

There is not much coming, or going, or hiding … or anything that God knows of us, that cannot come to light, and though, it will be in death of some small part of life and its processes, it will be beautiful if eyes of faith are at play, or ugly and destructive if it is left in the darkness of greed and pride and sin.

How will you choose, to give up things into light, or to continue to hide in darkness? How will you choose, to see the light as God’s beauty impressed upon us and our lives, or to live in darkness and experience all that is visible as the ugliness of broken hearts and minds?

Both is possible, all is possible … all is redeemed by Grace!

But grace is not foisted on us; we can deny it. We can choose our own hell instead.

How will you choose today?

Connections

It’s a walk in the park with the air quite fresh to see

The Red Blood Moon Eclipse,

The most powerful pull the moon will have on our emotions for quite sometime.

This should impact our living and bring us to new connections, perhaps.

There is that shadow … is that the connection?

I’m not sure how that all fits in with my experience:

There are some things that one tries hard not to stay connected with, and yet bring grace to bear upon; not forgotten, but transformed, forgiven, claiming redemption by God.

An End

Last evening as I drove home, a full sized four door white pickup truck followed me, and pulled up right behind me for the last mile or so, shining its lights in my mirrors, wanting to be intimidating? Well yes!

When I pulled into the parking lot and pulled up to back up, it drove right past me and out of the parking lot. So I drove the rest of the way to my own apartment.

There are some things that should not be made public, and others that show up people to be obnoxious and blatantly abusive. I’ve had enough of people taking advantage of me, and I am not going to be different each day: always trusting, always kind, always gracious, always hopeful, always seeing the best things possible for each person I meet. But I am done being taken advantage of, and I am taking a stand here.

Anyone who intimates that I am not an honourable person, anyone who takes advantage of me, anyone who decides to treat me unfairly … I am going to stand up and ensure that the truth of those people’s actions and words are made public, and I will consider all other options available to me.

I have never been violent against any other person, not mean, not degrading, not unjust … as far as I have been able. I have been a pacifist, but not absolutely. I hunted as a youth, and once since, to be responsible for the fact that I eat meat.

But there are ways, like Ghandi used, to bring to bear on people who are unethical, unjust, enough pressure that it is in their best interests to stop being unjust, to stop taking advantage of me, to stop trying to intimidate me.

And this blog, with photos most of the time, will serve to make public what people have done unjustly and unethically to me, and have persisted when I’ve given them an opportunity to mend their ways, to turn around with their behaviour and words toward me.

This sunset, then marks an end.

Its about time

An end that is beautiful.

An end that is long overdue!

Desks

I work on computers.

Through the years I have built many desks to provide the best possible environment for my work.

Many different variations have come out of my efforts and the changing look of the computers I use for work.

This is the latest effort, not for me, and not all built by me, but for my son, and finished by him for his needs.

A little goodness, a great look, simple function.

Renewing

There is nothing quite like renewing friendships!

And this is a bit like going back in time and renewing one’s memory
of all that was, good and bad, out of the past.

The present becomes a new framework through which one is able to see all things mirrored back at you.

The risk is that the present overpowers all vision and leaves things blurry into the future.
But the beauty of the present is usually worthy of one’s attention, even if momentarily one can lose the focus on the future.

The visions of beauty are not surprising, it’s just without much preparation or connection with so many people, the places of celebration are often deserted, inviting, beautiful but empty of everything worthy of life’s purpose: people: friends and family.

Colour Blindness and Darkness

There is little that’s heard
and so much to say.
The radio reports a male’s voice about his mother
being beaten by his father, and verbally abused continually, only when he was drunk.
Horrendous … and we meet this with numerous efforts … still hardly enough.
But there is little to nothing said or believed about how
women too often manipulate, control, deride, blame and verbally abuse
the men closest to them in their lives.
And when the woman owns the house, is the sole guardian of the children, and is the boss at work …
the opportunities to manipulate, control, deride, blame and verbally abuse multiply out of control.

And the justice system, well focused at protecting women from violent men,
is so blind to the women that bring false complaints about their men being violent, when this is just yet another lie, a manipulation, a power trip, a derision, a blaming, and real life abuse of their men.
The justice system takes these men, and judges them, convicts them, punishes them (tossing them out of their home, cutting them off from the abusive women and their own children that rely on them) and intimidates them (actively disrupting the process of justice that would serve them well and bring them a voice, a fair hearing) … convicted and condemned without a trial.

The light of truth is obliterated by the deadwood of lies, the colour of the life cycle which could be a delight is hidden beyond the darkness of death.

The signs are everywhere, of God’s gifts of beauty, streaming to us in real life through the huge bandwidth of our eyes and brains.

Even the leaves are weeping at the injustices, even the leaves are weeping at the misplaced condemnations, even the leaves are dancing with colour promising, though the darkness will set in, new life will emerge, new life will emerge!

Among the maze of life turning towards the winter cold, the small birds still sing and seek and dance with joy.

Where are you?

Do you seek to give every abused victim a voice?

Can you tell the difference between a real complaint of male violence against women, and the complaint that is further abuse?

How can you see behind the curtain?

How can you see past the deadness of manipulative abuse, to see the light of hope and love?

Where is your joy today?

Finding oneself in Work?

Love is foremost,
but meaningful labour is second most significant,
as the leaves turn in a night
and the clouds hang ready to empty their weight again
and the sun peaks out to shine a moment
as the stragglers for the oil field turn the corner
toward meaningful labour for their Monday.

But all our efforts in comparison to God’s display of beauty for us are

so small.