The breakfast was a rousing success, with total net donation to the family over $700. The event was covered by no fewer than five media sources, including the two newspapers in the area, and we all had a really great time doing it. We served more than our goal of 100 people and hope to make it a regular event. Feels pretty good!

We kept the children home from school on Tuesday so they could witness all the history unfolding with us at home. For all the bane attached to the television (not the least of which from within these very walls), we were very grateful to have had access to the events of the day from the warmth of our own home. Amidst all the tears of peace and joy, the cheering and clapping and general hooting and hollaring, I think we all came away with something that will live like Emily Dickinson's bird of poem in our hearts for the rest of our lives.

Let's carry this pervasive energy of hope and compassion for as long as our spirits are able.

Sharing the Dream

Don't forget that in revernce for the late Dr. King, the holiday celebrated as "Martin Luther King, Jr. Day" was established as a national holiday (day off from work) in order for Americans to be of service to their communities and beyond.

Anyone local can come to St. Peter's from 8 until 11 in the morning Monday, where Marcy and has organized a pancake breakfast under the auspices of the Youth Group. The idea being that one should have a hearty breakfast prior to undertaking a day of service. 100% of the proceeds will benefit the family in Chatham that lost their home to fire recently. With an infant and two older children, the total loss has been even more devestating for the family to bear. Many local service-providers and retailers have generously donated thus far, with both financial capital and locally-grown/produced goods. More than a hundred are expected, and we'll be ready for even more, so don't be shy!

For my friends more far-flung, what a terrific opportunity to show gratitude and Grace in action. Rock on! Change is the popular contemporary mantra, and all change starts from within, so why not get out there and help someone else. God knows we all need to...nothing, absolutely nothing, compares to the feeling of selfless giving, and Monday is the opportunity to just get on board and do it...and all in the memory of a gifted and brilliant leader.

Have a blast out there with your friends and neighbors!

Like Tubing the Approach to Niagra Sometimes

On an early Queen album (as in, 1973), there's a line with a modestly triumphant tune that goes "Funny how love is everywhere you're bound to be...", and it gets stuck in the reel in my mind every now and again, and tonight was one such evening.



Elephants. Our son is passionately fascinated with them, has been for possibly eternity. As I was saying goodnight this evening, I noticed he was crying, and when I asked him what was going on, he burst out in tears and pointed to a cartoon of, of all things, two presumably Neanderthals (literally) hunting a mammoth. It's a kids' book ostensibly, so the images were highly stylized, with googly-eyes on the mammoth, the hunters' no different. But tragically, deeply effected he was.



Truth is: I punted. I mentioned that it was just a cartoon, and when that went over like, well...lead...I went to the door and called for The Mom.



She's good, very kind and infinitely compassionate, and spoke with him very briefly but effectlively. Then she had the chore of explaining life to me. Ha! At any rate, I gathered up an elephant that she had given me for Christmas years ago and headed upstairs. It's beautiful: all legs, trunk, ears, tali and neck are articulated, and it is hand-hewn from a single block of wood, festooned with tapestries and jewels (in paint). It was given to me as a marionette, but upon gazing at it hours after receiving it, I cut all the twine from it to set it free. It actually completely altered the creature.



So anyway, I went upstairs and made the point that the elephant in my hands represented the Indian elephants that are regarded as dieties and exalted with passage and jewels. After describing how they live, I shared a short moment from personal experience with one of my greatest teachers. He made the point that life was vastly less complex if only we do the next right thing. I said, "How do I know what the next right thing is?" His reply was classic Chris-ism. He said, "Just do what's in front of you."






Like it's just that simple.

At any rate, I explained that what that means for us is that we have a choice at nearly every turn to decide: do we want to be ivory-hunters or do we want to view elephants in awe as gifts from God? We discussed that it's not always easy, that we all stumble every day, and that it's about progress, not perfection. Blah blah blah. But sheee-it, did it get me thinking.

Love when that happens.

I'm giving my notice at work on Monday. Marcy has been offered the greatest compliment in that they've not only extended her position, but are currently creating an even greater one for her. She has steadfastly pushed me to move on some other things, and now some are moving toward me as well. I'm fucking miserable at this job. I once again have been put in nearly impossible, no-win situations and shit on for even being there. Problem is (and I have a high threshlold for discomfort in this regard) I end up carrying this sack of shit home with me. The kids are typically in bed by the time I get home, but I wake up ready to chew through the wall, which isn't really that great either. The children have moved so far away from me anymore, and Marcy often just goes to bed to avoid a tirade. At the same time, here comes this glorious news ("news") that the unemployment rate is approaching double-digits, the market is set to fall, pandemonium in the streets and bedlam at the door.

But here's the thing: I've lately been realizing that A) my priority is to be a husband and father, first and foremost, B) I won't get another shot at this, i.e. the kids will never be young again, and C) what am I going to have to look back on when I'm 90? Pay stubs, or relationships with my family full of Grace and Love? And what of the fear? The fear is that we'll nose-dive and crash financially and end up living in her parents' basement or something, I guess. But of course, the current picture is nearly that bleak anyway. And add in how the question was posed to me last week by an esteemed teacher, "Sounds like the choice between Faith and fear.....and what would happen if you took 'The Leap' anyway?"

Indeed.

I'm taking the leap. I love my family way too much. I love my life way too much. I do not believe that God has intended for me (or anyone, really) to be bound by shackles of money, that imaginary, illusory commodity we've all agreed means something. My hands tremble still, to even utter the notion, but I want so much to have my family back, and when push comes to shove, I suppose yes, I am more willing to take The Leap than live in fear and misery.

Life is getting better by the moment, this I do believe. I do believe that Grace is available if only I'm willing to receive it. Happens all the time. All the time, and without fail.

I don't always know what to say or how to respond in this world, and certainly that applies to my own children. I never got the instruction manual. But my love for them is ferocious and empassioned, and I will wear it like a crown and mantle while protecting them like a lion. My wife is perhaps the greatest of blessings in my life. She is strong and wise, and soft and quiet. She guides me and helps me to strive for greater than what my limited human mind can grasp. My love for her is eternal and brighter than the sun.

I am a good father, and I am a good husband, and my legacy will not only be that, but that I lived in Freedom and Gratitude. I am but a servant, forever filled with humility and awe, and I ain't servin' money.

May we continue to know the Prescence of God in all we do.
Let's revere the elephants and show gratitude in our days!
Most of all, may we all tread the path of Light with Love in our hearts and minds.

Smoke and Mirrors sans Mirrors

So as I began to expound in reply to one of Zee's entries on Sunburstgem, I realized I had a lot wound up in this ball of yarn in my noggin.
Oh, the gloom and doom and dire forebodings of the market collapsing and giant corporations tanking and people running mad in the streets. All with the basketball sized pill that the Detroit Three execs rolled up on Washington to plead for money...in their own private jets. Paying taxes this year, anybody? Anybody?
The deal is this: what is the effect on me, lower-middle-class tax bracket guy? Well, at first I thought: not much. The price of fuel is falling which seems like a good thing (I try my very best not to entertain my most cynical thoughts as to that ridiculously volitile market and the reasons driving that farce). I'm not seeing too dramatic a reduction in sales at work, and a lot of folks are saying they're not really aware of any downward trends there, either. But a large factory recently closed in Hudson, just down the way, and that may be a sign. Hmm.
Here's what I've concluded, and in this order (I say that in truth as well as because it kinda makes me chuckle...I don't know why): regardless, and I mean 100% regardless of authentic, genuine experience of the world around us, the media is throwing this market-collapse shit at us like rabid chimps on Ex-Lax. No kidding. It is very nearly impossible to escape the storm of harrowing "news". So as the casual observer of my authentic world, I see a lot of smoke but can't even smell a fire. And so it is with consciousness, I believe: an energy has been generated by this tidal wave of media reporting and whether we choose to hear it/see it/read it/belive it, it's there, it's here, all around us and seeping into our very psychic pores as we merely exist contemporarially. Why this miasma? I'm not sure. Oh I have ideas, but then again you probably do too. Suffice it to say that someone (read: small groups of people) are benefitting heartily from chasing this population of buffalo off the cliff, and even more money is changing hands by the day. This, my friends, I believe.
It's really too bad that it has to be this way, too. But there again, if it is, then surely it must be meant to be so. That's what Faith would have us believe, and sometimes that's bitter and enormous and downright painful....but it's as near Truth for me as I'm able to give anymore. Marcy and the kids and I, animals too, are going to make it, our lives and our life together are amazing, every day, and I really honestly and with all my heart believe that we'll spend the rest of our earthly days with our hearts neatly nestled in this miraculous Truth. We've (collectively) been through the crucible and, sometimes, we think that we just may be there again and again, and that's becoming more and more okay with us.
Marcy and I have come to a very different place with each other. We laid in bed and discussed life the other night. How we ended up where we are, how we need to improve on our situation. How we're going to move through this to the next level, and how we're going to carry the family. Who are you? Remember when we got married? What a glorious time! We were so in love, and so carefree. I still love you madly and God knows I wouldn't want to do this with anybody else. One in billions to me and I'm so very grateful for you in my life.
Our life is fantastic, very much like a fantasy. We have each other, we have our beautiful babies, and we share our space with some pretty amazing sentient beings. Would I do it all over again? In a heartbeat, even on a bad day, and they've been plentiful. All that shit, all the pain and the heartache and the excrutiating pain of loss and lonliness, all so remarkably hot in order to forge this amazing life. Well done, God, well done! We wouldn't turn down a few good breaks, but we get it! Wonderful! Not orgasmically giddy or delusional with abject, laughing happines, but a quiet knowledge that as my understanding (Faith, I think) grows, just to that extent does my inner peace and warm, easy joy. What a wonderful gift. I am really, truly humbled to even consider it.

Oh yeah, that miasma? I'm guessing it'll always be there. But so will my Bella, coming home from school with pictures she's drawn of us as a family with her response to the question inside of "What are you thankful for?" being just the word God surrounded by all different colored hearts, fluttering around the word.
The media will tell me that the darkness has descended on the world market, and Casen will still bring home another Good Citizen award, I have no doubt.
My baby will wake up and awaken me with a big, awkward kiss and we'll play bonk until she's ready for a diaper change. My wife will love me for this soul that lives inside me, with all it's glory and pain, and will show me for all time that it is a Truth. My animal friends will remind me that I can make the biggest difference in the Universe today, right now, by choosing Love.
And God willing, that's exactly what I'll do.
Thank you for your time and consideration and all your wonderful, loving thoughts. It is all given back tenfold.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wtjs0L5Gxlc
The above link, if it works, is something I've found so inspirational as to pull me back from some depths as of late. May it be so with you!

Into the Mystic

I've almost gotten beyond random spells of sobbing with heartfelt joy. There are cynics among us, and some of the suspension of trust and myopic faith in any one politician is not misunderstood. Here's the deal with me and my deep sense of hope and happiness: (you may have suspected a rave at this juncture, I suppose....)

First, we now have voted to become a part and participant in the world in which we live. We have voted to become members of the global village, and I do believe that Barack Obama understands that and all the implications of his being elected to pursue that end. I believe this of him.

Hand in hand with this is that we are experiencing a variety of sensations as a direct and profound result of Obama being elected. We no longer need to live with the fear, however subconscious, that any dissent of the actions of this government is 'unpatriotic' and, of course, worse: punishable. We no longer need to feel the weight and chilling dampness of this shroud we've worn for eight years or more now. We've been freed from the seeming interminable gloom of the obvious lies and the callous disregard. We no longer need to feel embarrassed to be American. On the contrary, seems like most of us are feeling pretty freakin' good about being American right now.

Perhaps I'm overly optimistic, and perhaps a bit naive, but there's so much more at work here, so many things vastly bigger than this superficial stuff. There is something afoot amongst us, those of us who choose to be open to it. We're giddy. We're breathing. Sobbing randomly and getting excited chills. I am, and I don't think I'm alone.

The bottom line is that (as has been said more eloquently) Obama could do nothing and something is still vastly different. Are you with me? It's a sense that something has been freed, given way, and is among us. It's good. It's wonderful. Something very, very big has changed for the better. Think 'genie from a lamp'.

I am so grateful for Barack Obama, and I say so unabashedly. My family is grateful. I, personally, feel hopeful for the first time in a very long time. I hope you allow yourself the opportunity to drop at least a peice of your armor and let some in. Even if for a moment, think optimistically, dream, hope the best of hopes. Set all your best wishes for yourself, this country, and the whole beautiful world on rafts and set them afloat in this. Seriously. It's part of it, I'm sure. I'm sure of it.

He says, "Yes, we can", and personally, I believe him.

Yes we can.



This is just a random photo from
when we went to the mountains
a couple of weeks ago. That's all

Yes we did, and Yes We Can

"Life is beauty and sorrow"

I've lived my life thus far, at least for the past 30 years, with the largely disclosed knowledge that my mother did not love me. The repercussions have been, to put lightly, staggering and the implications as they pertain to who I was and who I have become were something of a malevolent, smoldering forge; this knowledge become creation via crucible.

And I whipped the proverbial horse of this bizarre turn on into the depths, wrestled the demons of the fray, and emerged battered and less than victorious but never fully vanquished. As of late, and since my mother's passing more than a year ago, I've struggled much more privately, due largely in part to needing to be more 'complete' for my family, et al. Now and again my mind would wander the empty streets of the burned out boroughs that were those times remembering. Remembering and not understanding. And at times I would rack with wails and heave in anger and frustration, "how could you do that to a child? What would possess a person to behave that way? Why me? What did I do?" The synapses fired and the water frothed and the frenzy was soon underway. It took days at times to recover.

And very recently something tragic and beautiful happened. Marcy has taken a ten-week, full-time job in order to help alleviate some of the crushing debt we carry, and to help with the times that we gather change from the cars and the house to buy a loaf of bread. Glorious times, and I'm very pleased to say that as far as we can tell, the children have no idea whatsoever. But I digress. So Marcy began this job last Monday. Her mother and father have agreed to help by watching the baby during the day and picking the older kids up from the school bus. Very gracious, and certainly no cake-walk...they're in their mid-70s. I have been going to work a bit later so Marcy can leave the house at 7 a.m. and I can take care of getting the kids to school and the baby taken care of and all that. Poop diapers at sunrise, oh yeah.

And about midway through the week I became so depressed, so very down, and I couldn't pinpoint why. Seemed nothing was bringing me back to the surface, not even the old tricks. I was really struggling with the vortex of this new reality swirling about me, consequences and motives not of my devise, that everything that was now taking place as the new norm was counter in every sense to what I hold dearest in my life. I am a father and a husband, first and foremost, and I can and have become a mad bear when impeded in either case. The new scenario: we're dirt fucking poor and deeply in debt; my job keeps me from my family all but two days a week and doesn't even cover our bills; my wife is now away from our 8 month old daughter from sun-up to sundown; my kids tell me that life is so much crappier since I took this job and that they miss just having dinner with me.........

and there I was, driving my baby to my parents-in-law's house, and the emotions had reached the boiling point and were threatening to blow the lid off. Reaching back into the carseat I felt my baby's little hand grasp my finger and give it a kiss, cooing something all the while. I began crying. I thought, "It shouldn't be like this. I don't want it to be this hard, I'm doing so much that this shouldn't be happening...I just don't get it..."

Then the queerest thing happened.

I remembered something.

I was quite young, 5 at best, and my mom and I were living in Kentucky sitll. We had moved from a tenement apartment with no front door (someone even stole our dog one day) to the backseat of my mom's blue Buick Skylark convertible. It had no rear window, and once it had dusted snow in on us as we slept; I squealed with delight...my mom cried.

So I was maybe 5, and my mom was wearing a pantsuit, her hair down (I used to cry when she put it up). I didn't fully understand what was happening. I was put down in a room full of other kids my age on a floor made up of tan and orange stick figure people. My mother chatted quickly and nervously with one of the older women there, in their green aprons. She bent down and gave me a kiss and began walking out the door. Walking out the door! Well, that's crazy! Why would my mom leave me here? Must be some mistake. Holy shit! There she goes past the window!

And suddenly I remembered with frightening vividity the agony. The pounding on the windows, screaming. The aides pulling me from the window as I kicked and screamed. My mother, her pace quickening to a near run, her hands to her mouth. She was crying. And I just know that she sat in her car and cried till she thought she would die. Her heart broken, that would be the longest day of her life. And all this with the knowledge that this was life now, this is how it was going to be.

I caught a glimmer of that anguish, and I've begun to know the weight that is The Change. And with this pain and frustration, anger and sadness, comes the blossom that is the very genesis of it all, the seed that is Love.

Without some pretty intense love, I wouldn't have such a strong emotional reaction every day; without this love, I may not really care what happened as long as I was taken care of. But that's not how it is. My love for that baby comes from a place so much deeper than I alone am capable of generating that I am certain it is a pulse from the Universe, or, as I prefer to phrase it, the Love I have for that baby is a reflection of the Love of God. Way bigger than me, of that I'm sure. And likely just as big as it was unavoidable for my mom.

I don't relish in discomfort, and I don't look forward to hard times and harder lessons, but by God I'm grateful for the lessons that come with them. And by Grace and diligence I hope I'm able to truly learn these lessons.

Brothers and sisters, we'll never understand God so we may as well give that one up. Let's have Faith that we're not impossible coincidences and think, feel and act Love in this life.

The Love is there, it's just a matter of being open to it.

I love you and I think you're wonderful. Keep up the good work.

Post Script Oblige': A thousand thanks to my brother Adam, without whom I couldn't share this. Not only did he send along a functioning CPU, he paid for the freaking shipping. How cool is that?

Thank you, Adam. Thank you.