6 below

Good Friday - Lenten Reflection (worth the repost)

Enjoy -

Seismic Changes

These are rather dramatic vids of first-hand footage of the earth shifting during the 3/11 quake. Simply astonishing . . .

What are you risking into in 2011?

My oldest loves to climb & slack-line. Our family received a slack-line for Christmas. Slack-lining is both sport & meditation - it requires a semblance of courage, focus, & balance. I can manage about six steps at best. And then the fall. But perhaps I'll manage six steps more in 2011. Not all of us will cross huge chasms in 2011. But really the question is why not? What's preventing us from doing something remarkable? Something different & out of the ordinary that will move us toward goodness, beauty, renewal, & deep adventure. The honest person will say it is simply fear. The curmudgeon will declare that risk is for fools. The courageous will say that there is no other way to truly live. Please, please don't opt for predictable living in 2011. Start with one step - keep going - and move courageously & uncertainly ahead as the path unfolds before you.

What's Your Art? II.5

"When my daughter was about seven years old, she asked me one day what I did at work.  I told her I worked at the college - that my job was to teach people how to draw.

She stared back at me, incredulous, and said, 'You mean they forget?'"

- Howard Ikemoto quoted in Art & Fear by David Bayles & Ted Orland

What's Your Art? II (A Skate Escalation - Kilian Martin & Brett Novak & Patrick Watson)

Art is canvas & paint.  Art is brush & pen.  Art is music & movement.  

The question we need to ask is what is my particular canvas?  What brush do I work with best?  And what music do I really move to - deeply & intimately. Or rather - what is the thing I do that I lose myself in entirely? That I get so far caught up into the "flow" & "zone" of this activity that hours become seconds & days become mere hours?

My daughter who is seven & can't help but move her legs & dance puts it this way - "I love to dance - I just have a song in my feet & it has to come out."

Beautiful.

And so then I must ask myself - what is the song in my feet that just has to come out?  And why I am so incessant at keeping that song unsung? 

The point is - we all have a song in our feet.  We've been to the promised land of having lost ourselves in something at some point in our living.  The greatest gift is finding our way back there.  To move out of the house of the mundane & to rhythm into the house of our art - our deepest calling.  

And there we must relentlessly guard the sacredness of that living.  This is not selfish. It is the unfolding of ourselves - of who we were meant to become.  And in that unfolding there exists great renewal not only for ourselves but for the universe at large.

God didn't make pawns - God made giants in the breath of love.  We simply need to wake up from our dogmatic slumber of the routine & the small. 

But here's the catch.  You will not get an official invitation in your inbox or mailbox asking you to risk into your art.  In fact the opposite is true: you'll receive a hundred invitations a day to live into the quick & the easy - and it's all junk mail.

Rather the great grand invitation from the King is inside of you.  And a response is inevitable.  You can deny it & give up the sacredness of your life.  You can accept it & embrace a journey that will lead into dark valleys & grand peaks.  Or you can ignore it (which I think many people do -religious & non-religious folk included) - and live reluctantly in the land of bitterness & regret.

The short films below are a meditation of sorts.  Initially we may be tempted to think that the only artist is the skater - indeed the art is in the choreography & power of the skating - but it is also exists in the colors & the shadows & angles of the film that the director captures, & it is in the music that underscores the depth & intimacy of the skater & his particular canvas.  Thanks to Dustin for giving me a heads up on these videos & cheers & blessings to him as he lives into his art in Antarctica starting tomorrow.