Life Starts Here
There is little that marvels anyone anymore, and much that blows the socks off anyone who is willing to notice.
Life …
Life is …
Life is a complex series of time, space, particularity and inspiration.
Life is the most despairing series of events anyone can witness or experience.
Life is the most awe inspiring series of events that anyone can witness or experience.
Others determine so much of life, yet 90% of life is determined by our responses to what happens to us, and what others do to us, good and bad, and both good and bad simultaneous.
If you have never experienced that you are like the pastors who reported that their congregation had no alcoholics among the members, had not … and you can fill in the blank.
The truth is their congregation had its fair share, some said 1 in 10, but the pastor was too ignorant and proud to know the truth.
Ignorance does not determine that something is true. Perception by ignorant masses, small or great masses, does not create reality; it creates a falsehood built out of ignorance; and that is something to be feared more than fear itself.
Life in the face of all this is simple. Not simple on this side of complexity, but simpler on the far side of complexity. What is simple is that beauty is a given, and an option to participate in … or not. Just as Grace, Amazing Grace, is a given, and an option to participate in … or not. I consciously have chosen again and again to embrace beauty, grace, and Life as I trust it was given to be lived.
Beauty comes washing over us in so many forms, visual, in the dance of light and shadow, colour and surprise, drawing in, renewing of value, and a sending out to embrace the world, and therein to permeate others and situations with … with the essence of life: grace.
Dance the light, dance through the darkest valley of death that grips us all in the vice of fear and denial, dance in the detail and the relationships between waves and particles, between inanimate and animated, between the found and the created.
Beauty is also what one makes of space. My travels from North America to Europe, mostly Germany, and my childhood in Tanganyika, have left me desiring space abundant and a knowledge that space is often limited, precious and to be optimized for function and effect, to become beautiful in design, economy of resources, elegant in its use, and wondrous in the juxtaposition of the required and the hoped for, the vertical and the horizontal playing to their fullest and the stunning emotional effect of good craftsmanship applied to wondrous materials.
This first entry is a simple view to what and how I see my surroundings.
Simple homes in a simple neighbourhood, development at a standstill by the oil bust.
The view from up close to out there.
The quiet simple calm that comes between ferocious tempests.
This is my view … yet so much cannot be published.