Wednesday, March 31, 2010

i will never make a criticism,

if i don't have a resolution.

Seed Cathedral in Shanghai

Called Seed Cathedral, the wooden structure is pierced by 60,000 fibre-optic rods that each contain plant seeds at their tips. The rods will draw light into the pavilion during the day and direct it outwards at night. After the expo, the rods and seeds will be distributed to schools in China and the UK. The Shanghai Expo will take place 1 May to 31 October 2010.
by thomas heatherwick check him out!

never forget.

Friday, March 26, 2010

struggles.

i had a friend over the other night for beer and chitchat. the topic of struggles came up and it was nice to talk about. he had been going through quite a bit recently; moved to a new city, had finally gotten a job he wasn't sure he liked, was still trying to fit in and find a community, and it hadn't been nor become easy. it wasn't joyous. and he vented that he was having trouble reconciling the narrow path (matt. 7:13). he didn't want to struggle as much as he was. he wanted to be happy and to feel joyous everyday. he was confused as to why God would bring us down such roads. roads that seem never to end and are narrow. or even more specifically, he was questioning why God would have us go through things for such extended lengths of time. he was tired.

and i believe some of his answer is found in one of Oswald Chambers works called The Love of God.
"The disciples would have gone to any length to prove their devotion to Jesus. It was true devotion, but it wilted because it was based on an entire ignorance of themselves. In the end they "all forsook Him and fled," not because they wanted to, but because they did not know how to go on. Jesus put the disciples through crises to reveal them to themselves and bring them to the place of receiving the Holy Spirit. They could not see their need to receive the Holy Spirit until they found out that they were spiritual paupers. Jesus allowed Peter to go over a moral precipice and deny that he ever knew Him before Peter realized what it was that kept him from being a disciple. It is not necessary for everyone to go the way of Peter's sifting, but the sifting must come in some form or other. The preaching of the gospel of temperament will not do for the making of disciples; nor will Jesus shield us in the slightest degree from any of the requirements of discipleship."

i'm thankful that God sifts. that he cares enough about us to separate out as much of the bullshit in us as we'll let him. and i'm thankful we struggle. i'm thankful we question and have doubts. i'm thankful we care enough to talk about such problems. and i'm thankful i have friends who are honest and want to fight.


Friday, March 19, 2010

Thursday, March 18, 2010

you know what i don't like?

expectations.

i wonder how much labor and wasted time i have put and do put into this cruel little word. i even feel grief when i say it out loud.

lady gaga is an artist i never liked. her videos seemed to be nothing but pretentious works of visual overload from a young girl who has no clue who she is. she was annoying to say the least and conveyed a sense of desperation with every new song and music video she churned out. that is, until i let myself give her a chance and watched a few interviews on her.

in brief, i found her to be very down to earth and almost ADHD in a sense. she has little regard of what people think about her. and i like it. she is very direct with her thoughts and loving with her beliefs. from what i gathered, her vision is to help people celebrate what they hate most about themselves.


oh what a world this would be if we all ventured into such a flip.


however, i share my thoughts on her only to preface for what i want to say about expectations. i watched a performance of hers recently that, i believe, made a few jaws drop to say the least. it was her VMA performance last year of her song "Paparazzi". now, i could take this time to go into detail about how relevant the song is to the suffocating direction of our American culture, but maybe another blog. what got me after watching this performance, or should i say witnessing this performance, was her unanticipated and grotesque death in the end.
as i watched her bedazzled bloodied corps swing among those glorious stage lights, that bitch of a word, expectations, popped into my mind. and i thought to myself, "why did i just think that?!?" why would that word come to me so freely and fast? it was as if an old friend just stopped in to say hello. so familiar. so amiable. it sucked. and i didn't like it.

that's how expectations make me feel. murdered. and as i switched off the the TV, i was left in my comfortable warm-lite den, drinking my Sam Adams and eating my Nutella on wheat, and began to deliberate, for the first time, over what i had just realized about myself. as Brennan Manning says in his book The Ragamuffin Gospel, "something was radically wrong."

my sin is that i don't want anyone to think i don't have it all together. i'm pretty good at fooling myself and fooling others into believing that "i'm fine". and my issue doesn't stem from the expectations others put on me. for the most part i fool myself. i put such high expectations on my life that i deceive myself into thinking others hold their standard of me just as high. as if it's some sort of universal given that i should be a certain someone, dance at a certain level, create art at a certain pace, or have so much love in me to always have enough for a friend in need.

Donald Miller wrote once that if it weren't for God, we'd be more efficient. He says, "In the clarity of this morning, I’m thankful for sleep cycles that disrupt our progress, for children that stop your work and force you to keep someone you love alive, for the need to stop and eat, to stop and drink water, to stop and talk to friends. We buy billions of dollars in books that help us be more efficient, we praise the profit margin, and all the while, God is trying to slow us down, trying to remind us of what matters and what doesn’t, trying to stop our human progress, stop our creation of false Gods.

I’m grateful."

And he's right. Unless I slow down and connect with the Creator of All, i'll live in slavery to my expectations instead of His.

What a Freedom we are called to live in my friends.

Wednesday, March 17, 2010

happy st. patrick's day.

Originally the color associated with Saint Patrick was blue. However, over the years the color green and its association with Saint Patrick's day grew. Green ribbons and shamrocks were worn in celebration of St Patrick's Day as early as the 17th century. He is said to have used the shamrock, a three-leaved plant, to explain the Holy Trinity to the pre-Christian Irish, and the wearing and display of shamrocks and shamrock-inspired designs have become a ubiquitous feature of the day.

and remember, "An Irishman is never drunk as long as he can hold onto one blade of grass to keep from falling off the earth."

cheers.

hadn't posted a great restore in a while...


Monday, March 15, 2010

i had a dream last night. about honesty. eerie, i know.


but i thought i'd write about it while i sit here and eat my pistachio muffin.

mmm.

last night i dreamt about lying and how it spirals us down into a well of guilt, fear, and chagrin. my dream was weird and simple. i was hanging with my twin sister and some friends. it was late at night and we wanted to go to a party. in order to get to the party we thought it'd be comical to, oddly enough, (though it wasn't odd
in my dream, you know how dreams go) run through someone's front porch to get to the party that was next to that specific house. the porch had two side entrances so you could shot gun through the house as fast as my crew got eliminated from ABDC.
the house belonged to my sister's future in-laws. so as we piled onto the porch running kind of slow as i think most of us were tipsy, my sister's future dad-in-law came running out raising hell. we bolt. he chases and yells. and i never stop running. in my dream, i was petrified that i had just ruined the chances of my sister getting married into that family. silly, but alas, it's a dream. he never caught me.
the next day, in my dream, the father-in-law, we'll call him Bob, came up to my house and asked me where i was the night before. lying through
my teeth, i explain i was home, and he leaves. a few hours later i get a call from my friend Martha and out of fear and shame, i don't pick up. the phone was kind of like a fax machine in my dream, so at the end of the call, she faxes me, and it reads,
"I know how to give you your voice back. Call me now."
end of dream.

what a bizarre dream to have right? yeah i thought so too.

when i awoke this morning, i thought about it a lot. what was the dream all about? why would God give me not only a daft dream like this but also make me wake up in a state of discomfort and fear. i hate dreams that leave you feeling uneasy when you awake. you know... the ones where you see the person you're in love with making out with someone that's not you.

or when you dream about being hunted down by creatures that look like the skeksis from Dark Crystal.

or when you wake up feeling twisted in a lie.


why did i, do i, feel the need for a cover-up? why do i lie? there Adam and Eve were, hiding from God after the First sin because they wanted to be just as smart as God. and i find myself resonating with their reaction today. call it self-protection, call it cowardice. whatever it is, it's sin. and i don't like it. cause it separates me from God. He being the one thing that makes me great. and jabbing the knife even deeper into my already gashed self-image is the fact that God asks the question, "Where are you?" (gen. 3:9). here we have an all-knowing God who's perfect in every way, with full knowledge of where we are, what we do, and what we think, coloring the dark sky with a simple question pregnant with love. with these three words i see a remnant of who God is and how He views the best things He ever created; us. He's saying, "here i am. i am who i am, i love you. i seek after you. i call to you to come. this is a relationship. you are not my puppets, and i want you to want me back."

martha said that she knew how to give me my voice back in my dream. well i think that's how you get it. you come shitty and broken to a God who calls you by name. every day.

what does your voice sound like?


Sunday, March 14, 2010

honesty.

so i'm gonna shake this blog up a little. it'll be more personal. i never write. for those who do follow me on here and actually read what i blog about, you know that i'm an artist and a dancer. aren't those the same thing? but you don't know about my faith and the thoughts i have about things like that. i hope you continue to not only read, but share. because what you think matters in the world.
i'm a mess but i'm here and i wanna write. so here it goes....


honesty

i don't think people are honest enough. i think we lie. i think people lie a lot. not necessarily because they care to, but because they either don't care enough not to or they don't like the truth, whether it be as is, or in how it exists in their life.
i don't think the majority of Christians are honest. i think they lie. i know i lie sometimes. i lie to others or i lie to myself. and when i say "lie" i don't mean a fib. i mean a massage of the truth, which is, from time to time, even more destructive than the first. in other words, not something that is untrue, which would be a lie, but something that is distorted into looking like the truth. i believe there are many things in people's lives that take on that soiled shape. And I want to start being honest. i want you to be honest. not only with me but with yourself. i want you to find freedom, be it in art, in music, in writing, in dance, in love, in God, in honesty. let me know your thoughts. share them here freely. if you believe in and support what i write then share it, if not, acceptable. life is boring without contrast.


Tuesday, March 9, 2010

in honor of Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland releasing,

and since i'm also a dancer i thought why not throw in Wade Robson's Hommage to Rabbits.

Tuesday, March 2, 2010

after long hours of rehearsal last night, i pulled in the driveway at 1am, showered, crawled into bed, finished the Noticer (which has a bit of a cheesey ending which was disappointing, but all the same worth buying) and slept in late only to wake up to SNOW!!! it's not much but man it makes my soul do the cancan.

Monday, March 1, 2010

i don't follow a ton of blogs.


but i do read a few. one is Donald Miller's.
discussions of the Lord. Scotch. and Bon Iver.
i think we'd be friends if i knew him.


(one of his tweet pics)

a must read.

I don't plug books often because I know people have different perspectives and come from different places in life. Currently, I'm in a place where my potential is clouding up what I believe is my calling. They are not the same thing and I think there's freedom in knowing that. This book has helped me this week, so give it a shot if you feel you could use some help yourself.

since the film is coming out in four days...