6 below

Give More - Buy Less . . . Advent Conspiracy

I'm a fan . . . watch & live a little differently this season:

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.

 

First Tweets - I'm nobody! Who are you?

I just entered the Twitter-verse (http://twitter.com/#!/BrianBajari) with a bit of reluctance . . . for a variety of reasons. However, I thought my initial foray into tweeting should begin with a poem from one who was rather hidden & better known as a gardener in her lifetime - though her poetry would later change the world. Needless to say, the practice of quiet & anonymity was good for Emily & the poems hidden in her desk drawer needed to remain hidden until the correct time emerged.  Doubtless she would have remained rather unknown in the web 2.0 world.  So I hold her thoughts with me as I plunge deeper into a world of savage verbiage.  Of course quiet & a movement toward hiddenness may be a tonic for all of us so immersed in instantaneous information.  So yes I now tweet but with a sense of nobody-ness in & around me.

 

I'm nobody! Who are you?

I'm nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there's a pair of us -- don't tell!
They'd advertise -- you know!

How dreary to be somebody!
How public like a frog
To tell one's name the livelong day
To an admiring bog! 

 

-Emily Dickinson

 

 

The Predicament of Nuclear Man - Henri Nouwen

This seems relevant now more than ever . . .  It's a longer excerpt than I generally post but certainly worth the read.

"Let me tell you an old tale of ancient India which might help us to capture the situation of nuclear man:

Four royal sons were questioning what specialty they should master.  They said to one another, 'Let us search the earth and learn a special science.'  So they decided, and after they had agreed on a place where they would meet again, the four brothers started off, each in a different direction.