martin has a crack

yep, my martin has developed a crack.  right down the front center of it.  seriously: whose guitar just CRACKS?  whose MARTIN guitar just cracks?

sigh.

sometimes your good friends just fall apart.

we must forge on.  

"sleeping diagonally"

i appreciate the fact that there are a lot of things about God and being human that are mysterious.

like the latter half of this verse in psalm 139:

"when i awake, i am still with You."

i've been a christian for, like, ten years and i still dont understand why David randomly throws this stray conclusion in among his musings of how numerous and precious God's thoughts are to us.

i do have some ideas though-

the phrase "i am still with" means "again and again, repeatedly: an action, hardly intermitted, is repeatedly begun anew."   like breathing maybe.

lovely, right?  

my awareness of You becomes fresh all over again.

but i just think it's weird that he makes the implications that he does in this verse.  what does sleep or wake have to do with God staying or going?  it still speaks to me though, deeply, as good poetry should- maybe because the implied conclusions of our own thought processes really are this odd.  

the only idea i can picture in my mind is this:

two seconds into your newly acquired consciousness for the day your mind is pummeled by the fact that you've got to be late for something.  Seconds number three to five of your consciousness then is spent in INSTANT PANIC choking down a gasp while reaching for your clock/cell phone to figure out-for-the-love-of-crimini  what time it is.  

dont worry.

its 6 am.

you dont have work till 8.

you were stressed for nothing.

in the summer time the sun comes up really early, remember?

you let out a sigh from the gasp you were holding in and instantly relax your entire being in full body relief.

maybe thats the experience that David was talking about- not in the physical sense so much, but (and here's where the poetry comes in...dont be afraid...poetry is good....gooooood...nothing to be worried about) in the sense that when something slumbering inside you jolts to life in instant panic, it wonders if this whole time it was sleeping alone and what might have happened to it unawares while it was dozing on the job.

and we all know how rational a newly awakened anything is:

"maybe i missed Him...maybe He got tired of waiting and left...Maybe he gave up on me...Maybe i'll never get Him back....Maybe i screwed up my own life by ceasing to be aware of Him for a while and now its all over..."

"maybe" is a cruel word, full of fear.

and in the panic we gasp and reach for the indicator that will tell us if He is still there...His hand, His face perhaps.  and our hand touches something solid and familiar and warm and our body gives itself permission to lay off the adrenaline.

and in David's world, this is an again and again thing- like some people's compulsive habit of checking for their keys to make sure they didnt lock them in the car.  

and every 

every 

every 

single time

i realize You are still there...

i didnt screw up for good...

i didnt lose the one thing i have worth living for in You...

i didnt sleep alone after all.

cas mcshady

view from van Gogh

-or-

"i wear my suuunglasses at night"

dang.  i have too much time on my hands.

last final tomorrow!

San-Remy

i wish i would have made toast this morning.

the coffee is shuffling a geriatric pace through my blood and has spitefully neglected the region of my brain.  the morning is a promise of cooler, normal weather- like a last meal before execution.

"here ya go.  here's some comfort before the heat.  drink your coffee while its still cold enough to enjoy it."

we walk like musical instruments across our second story college apartment, lovingly referred to as The Tree House.  it must be like listening to a Balkan garbage can tuba band from the apartment beneath us.

and last night, when i dared to play guitar in the delicious gloaming of the warm night out on our shared  porch, the neighbors opened their window to listen, saying when the noise bleeds through the walls they quiet down and eavesdrop.  

and today, i am Abraham all over again.  at least in his beginning sense.  "here's for today, Abraham: go.  dont try to understand or plan.  just go and live."  permission and command.  command and permission.  

It reminds me of driving across the salt flats when i was 14 and we were almost out of gas so we couldnt listen to the radio or feel conditioned air.  

it reminds me of lying in bed when i was 18 years old the night before i left for bible college, wondering.

it is blank canvas, picking the colors in my mind...wishing You would pick them for me.  my imagination is not a long distance runner.

van gogh eating yellow ochre oil paint at San-Remy.  a childish wish to take the color into himself.

by this time next week, the long dark dream of chico will be over.  i want to lay my head on a rock and live somewhere between esau and a withered hip socket- watching the ladder carry traffic from Him to me.

"surely the Lord is in this place and i knew it not."

mute

it would almost be easier to talk to You if You were only half listening

like everyone else

like i assume You are

and me with my new type of perjury

lying thickly to the teary child face

still poised on Your knee

still attached to me

but sometimes, faintly

i know i've slipped away from the cruel falsehood

of Your diverted attention

and arrive breathless from fleeing

i cant remember what i came here to say 

now that i believe 

in Your nearness

but how can anyone be awkward around You?

how can anyone feel at a loss with You?

maybe i didnt lose my words and my thoughts

maybe i just dont need them.

finally surprisedly willingly confined in what i came for

realizing that it was 

just 

and simply

You 

this whole time

the parking meter i drew that day

parking meter in ball point pen.

what a symbol of frenzied, restricted time this thing is... kinda like my time here i think.  try and try to make it beautiful and its still just a parking meter, counting time, gray and metallic, void of person or passion.

i have grown exceedingly discouraged with the course of my life right now.  i don't see the point of getting twelve grand into debt over an art degree.  

pray for me if you think about it.  

the brotherhood of man

"can i see what you were drawing?" came a voice from beneath the shaggy blonde haired head that had been sitting at the small table to my left since i started the picture.  he had come in from sitting outside where i had walked past him a quarter hour before into the coffee shop.  i had noticed him because i always notice shaggy people who mean to be shaggy- they have the look of a forest animal so proud of its winter coat that it will stand unflinchingly in the snow.  maybe its a hippy thing deep inside me trying to find my own kind.

"ya, sure," i said furtively.  good thing i had been drawing something worth looking at this morning...its not always like that.  i never know if its a scrimmage or a game day with drawing.

today, it was the parking meter batting its flashing zero eyes at me from just outside the window.  today would be working on tones with a blue ball point pen.  an emaciated hippy girl with a half-sleeve tattoo and a nervous cigarette flounced spasmodically in and out of my line of vision of the meter as she talked to her two seated friends outside.

holding my drawing up awkwardly and probably crookedly from his perspective, i held it up long enough for him to say, "i like it."  

"what are YOU doing?"  

"planning my day," the shaggy head answered pleasantly.  

i glanced quickly at his tattered notebook written all over with sloppy male handwriting: one doesn't look too long at personal thoughts.

"everyday i try to just sit and think about what would make up a totally amazing day- what i would REALLY want to do that day.  after i write it down and get it all out on paper, i go about my usual life and feel a little better about what happens."

"do some of your 'amazing day' things ever happen?" i asked as i packed up my sketchbook to leave for class.

"o ya," he assured me with a quick smile which i didnt take the time to enjoy.  i always wish for random people to talk to me and then i get all flustered when they do.

"well, i hope you have an amazing day," i said sincerely.

"i hope you do too," he answered in the same truthfulness.

"thank you," i muttered as i walked out the door to my own waiting day, taking with me a shared part of his.

ps.  the parking meter sketch will come later.  had to turn my sketchbook in for class.

aunty cas

my friend jen has a new baby bird-- silas jude.

i've never held a baby this small before!

cas, silas and his mum.

i'm in love :)

you can take the girl out of humboldt, but...

a guy with dreds who i was sitting behind at a cafe.  i love the one bead he has on that one dred. 

tree study at bidwell park

new

hug.

-painting on raw canvas

come home.

-acrylic glazing project

day.

(i am an art major for at least one reason: how painting stuff like this takes you back to 3rd grade)

-modeling paste exercise

night. (bad photo colors on this one, as usual.)

-modeling paste exercise

some wisdom

dont fart in front of the oscillating fan

(unless you really mean it)

:D

grace

my dear Friend, i have missed You.

dear because i fancy to disagree with You

and fight with You

and wish my will for my own sake

and pretend quite convincingly that You can be unraveled just as You were wound

until to blush when i hear of You

like a flower that blooms at night

that You silently kiss and tuck in Your coat pocket

the one on the left, just by the heart

proving you noticed

until i wish of  Your bias

like the spot in Your mind that holds the music

tilted out in your own voice

my favorite voice

Your favorite grace

i'll just lay here and listen

just sing whatever you want

which hat?

looking...looking...

shrug.

i was wondering if anyone could tell me what i should be when i get around to growing up...

wondering if anyone had any good suggestions...

or strange suggestions...

or light and fluffy suggestions...

lemmeknow.

in progress

our assignment this time in painting class is to paint all the tones in on a picture and then to go over again with transparent color (kinda like coloring an old photograph).  this is stage one in the process that i finished up at a picnic table in the park today.  stay tuned for further stages.

i stole the picture from my roomate's vogue magazine, so i cant take credit for how amazing the image is :)

speaking of in progress, here's your verse of the day, kids...

in case we share the same fear that we'll outlive our chances:

"...He who has begun a good work in you will complete it until the day of Jesus Christ."

-or The Message version-

"there has never been the slightest doubt in my mind that the God who started this great work in you would keep at it and bring it to a flourishing finish on the very day Christ Jesus appears."

art and and the finer aspects of obeying traffic signals

well kids, here's some art for ya

i put up two pictures of the same painting because it's really hard to take a good picture of a shiny canvas...the actual colors of it are somewhere between the two images.  the assignment was to paint without the use of white or black.  

this is an etching print, done with acid eating away at the spots i designate it to on a copper plate.  this will have more versions up soon because i keep changing the plate.  we  had a little student art show this last week and i actually sold this image printed on pages of old robert frost poems.  the money goes to the art department...but i think this might be the first piece that i have sold to a total stranger...kind of exciting :)

(in case the photo is exceptionally and characteristically crappy, it is a tree whose arm has turned into a typewriter while another arm types...the assignment was to make a surreal image that also gave the idea of space)

this is a "linocut," print which means on a linoleum block i carved away all that is white in the picture, inked it, and ran it through a press.  it's called "love your neighbor as yourself."  i really like this one but i think i only got, like, a B on it.

in other news, i almost accidentally stepped out in front of a bus today- 

i had just got out of school and my mind was completely distracted when i got to the corner i was going to cross that is in front of the school.  the sign going down the street said green...so i thought that meant me...but my sign was red.  so i stepped down off the curb and looked left and this bus was coming super fast with its blinker on to go right.  since i thought it was my turn i was a second away from just stepping in front of it- i just thought he would stop because apparently i am a little to overtrusting of traffic lights.  through the haze of my tiredness i think God just stepped in and stopped me.  when i saw the bus go past me i realized how gnarly that could have been.  

it was surreal to walk safely across the street, knowing i had just escaped smearing my body all over the pavement...it was like those books with two endings...or like a soul passing into heaven on a bridge over hell thinking, "that could have been me down there."  

*shudder*

let me tell you, that's enough to wake you up.

beer pong

in case you still wish you could be twenty again and in college, just know that the apartment next to ours is playing beer pong on our balcony as we speak.  i cant think of anything more annoying than beer on the breath of twenty year olds standing right outside our door.

hopefully, if you had forgotten how good you have it, this will remind you.

now if i could just convince myself of the same thing.

spring break and rugs

on the edge of the north american continent

(the ocean is beneath us there)

this view of the trees will most certainly end up in an art project

mo on my shoulders to take a picture

quite an expressive one, mo.

we may be smiling, but at this point we smell like campsite.  

the only thing running through our heads is the word, "shower."

well kids, school starts tomorrow at 8 am.

the first monday after spring break...o man.  pulling into the driveway of my apartment complex has never been harder.

the pics are from a weekend trip mo, her cousins and i took to big sur for her birthday.  un-bloody-believable scenery.  it reminded me of something i heard one time in some sermon some where about the beauty of our pure life in the garden before sin came- how God gave man the job to basically wander around and explore for the sake of exploring.  

to enjoy for the sake of enjoying.

a concept we made foreign almost as soon as the world was introduced to us.

"and now, for something completely different,"

 mo's family owns a rug business named "creative accents" and they had me sketch out some designs for them for some new rugs back in january.  while i was in tehachapi for break i got to see a picture of one of my rug designs in actual rug form... meaning from my sketch they made a digital template of it and actually made a rug from it and then photographed it for the new catalogue. 

there was my rug.  

in my hands on a piece of paper.

descended from a casual sketch i made on the side of my binder paper a year ago in community college.

i just held it and stared at it in wonder like it was a newborn child.

a true fruition of art....

amazing.

 

i gave them 5 or 6 designs so we'll see what they end up using.

so stay posted, kids, and as soon as they have them up on their website you'll be the first to know :)

here's their website in the meantime.

and i'll have some more assignment art up soon.  

gotta get around to taking pictures of it.

gotta get around to real life again.

forest for the trees

i had a small epiphany while i was people watching at school a few days ago.

i was sitting on a bench under a redwood tree, thinking about the things  my painting teacher had said about her view of God.  she had said them casually and with sad eyes... how she'd lived too long one way to change and how the church is chauvinistic.

the opposition is in the air.  

so is the deep-seated pain.

from the second floor of the art building to the bench beneath the redwood tree to the .6 mile walk home, i cover my mouth to breathe.  

there is a feeling of being overwhelmed.

between watching people walk to and from classes to the rhythm of my ipod music (a surreal by-product of listening to music that isnt much faster than a heart beat) i read in matthew 25 about the sheep and the goats.  

maybe its the hippy in me, but i am a shameless liker of "the message" bible.  this is how it phrases Jesus' words to the sheep and goats:  "Then the King will say: 'whenever you did one of these things to someone overlooked or ignored, that was me- you did it to me...whenever you failed to do one of these things to someone who was being overlooked or ignored, that was me- you failed to do it to me."

in surfer lingo, we call a verse like that gnarly.

obviously what really struck me was the "overlooked and ignored section."  and how in real life it is a section.  a section of people about whom we are being watched, to see how we react.  Jesus reacted to them by BEING them.  one reason i read the message bible is because i know what the text says in the formal language; "the least of these my brethren" is what that section of people is called.

i realized that the caustic fumes brewing beneath our fallen beings will get stronger, but being overwhelmed for the lack of fresh air isnt the right response.  that's called panic.  it stops a  person from thinking straight.  instead, i think what Jesus is saying to me, to us, is to stop ignoring the needs of the people around me that i notice.  

"i was hungry and you fed me...i was in prison and you came to me," the rabbi says.  i found myself one way, and you wouldnt let me get away with it, even for just a moment, both emotionally and physically.

i have noticed that when a person really is able to show God's love to people, there is usually no lack of a hungry and lonely and thirsty section lined up for just a second's worth of pure, fresh light.  think peggy pottenger: need i say more.

its because a person who shows God's love isnt ignoring what he or she notices about other's needs just because its easier.  

i dont know.  i guess it helps sometimes to take the bigger picture and narrow it down to my part.  

its a funny feeling to have permission to miss the forrest for the trees.

horses and girl fights

i went to a training class today for some volunteer work i'm going to do in the next couple months with an organization that helps disabled people ride horses. 

maybe it has something to do with a childish wish for a horse, but i like the scene...i like the dirt...i like the work...the perfumey aroma of horse dandruff...the fact that we are helping disabled people have fun...the people...

horse people are hilarious.

there are a few types: 

-the wishers (thats me): wide eyed with wonder and the feeling of being 5 years old watching a parade...dreamy with visions of thousands of years of history born on the back of horses...wishing cars would go away forever and that a regression of transportation modes would take place.  i think it has something to do with being a girl, but i still dont know what the draw is. 

-the talkers: the people who really want you to KNOW that they own horses 

-the genuine: the people that own horses who dont care what you think or know (these are the ones you want on your team...they are also the ones who you dont mess with...they push around thousand pound animals and they arent afraid of YOU)

it felt lovely to get out of chico and feel like a human again (author's note: humans and students are different entities, and shifts can be made from one to the other in an osmosis-like fashion based on a combination of internal and external circumstances.  please do not mistake students with humans, and be sure to feed any students you encounter in the wild).  

i made a friend (actually God made a friend FOR me) who has 3 horses and she says she'll let me ride with her, which made me so excited i couldnt even see straight.  i must have REALLY looked five years old and wide eyed and dreamy when she told me that.  i was talking to her for like 5 minutes and she busts out with, "you've never ridden in an english saddle before?  well you should come out and ride with us [her mom was there with her].  let me get your number before you go."  

who does that?  

she's a high school student who is taking her senior year at community college.  she was telling me stories how she got so sick of the girls at school picking on her that she just started punching girls who picked fights with her.  like, literally decking them, which is funny because she's this skinny quiet thing.  she said after 5 or 6 fights, she didnt have anymore problems.

as you can see, my new friend falls into the third category of horse people as listed above.  she trains this thoroughbred that is 16.3 hands high...that means that if she was standing on one side of its withers and you were on the other, you wouldnt be able to see her...and she's an inch taller than me.  you would see horse shoulder.  thats it.  thats crazy.

the serrano incident -or- a short primer on the exfoliating effects of oatmeal

hey kids-

here's a new lesson of the day for you!

serrano peppers may produce a burning sensation on the skin if...i dont know...it floats in the air after you cut it and it lands on you.

symptoms can be indicated by an acute burning sensation on the face, like how spicy things make your mouth burn...except on the face

exhibit A:

notice in this photo series how she has spread softened oatmeal (at the behest of her roomate) all over said burning area in order to alleviate the burning

note that she is probably not having as much fun as it may appear.  after all, her face was on fire.

this is a true story...

all i know is that i was cutting up a serrano for a curry recipe i found and a couple minutes later, this.

i have to say, rubbing soft oatmeal on your face is actually kind of amazing.  it smells all oaty and you want to eat it...except my snot was dripping in it from the whole burning face thing so i decided against eating it.

happy to say, the burning went away after like, 15 or 20 minutes.

so take notes, kids.  

this could be you someday.