Flamenco

On Friday night I went to see a Flamenco performance at the Orange County Performing Arts Center. My colleague gave me her ticket! I sat in an Orchestra seat, center, and enjoyed the colors, the dancers and the live music. I do believe that what I now need is a Flamenco dress! Although I don't Flamenco, I did end up going Salsa dancing this past weekend at Tapas in Newport Beach!

I'll run away with you ... I'll run away with you

I think this is a wonderful song,



but I didn't realize how lovely it is until I heard Katie Melua's version.


"Show me how you do that trick
The one that makes me scream" she said
"The one that makes me laugh" she said
And threw her arms around my neck
"Show me how you do it
And I promise you I promise that
I'll run away with you
I'll run away with you"

Spinning on that dizzy edge
I kissed her face and kissed her head
And dreamed of all the different ways I had
To make her glow
"Why are you so far away?" she said
"Why won't you ever know that I'm in love with you
That I'm in love with you"

and, that last line of the last verse --
And drowned her deep inside of me


Although this isn't her version, I found this other Melua song lovely as well.

Full Cold Moon tonight

Some friends in my "Cuddle Call Group" are camping it tonight to see the largest full moon of the year. Sigh. I wish I could go.

Friday December 12 — The Full Cold MoonSky watchers will be dazzled by an exceptionally high, bright, and large Moon. In fact, this Moon is 14% bigger and 30% brighter than other full Moons this year. Why? The Moon is both in its full phase and at a point in its orbit that is nearest Earth, called its perigee. When these events occur together, the Moon is closer to Earth than usual. The effect? The Full Cold Moon will appear especially large near the horizon as the Sun sets.

Finished: Of Water and the Spirit

I'm taking it slow these days -- this week in particular I've slept more than I have in a long time -- but with books in particular. I remember skimming How to Read a Book by Mortimer Adler (along with his Six Great Ideas) in the midst of my undergrad education when I was reading too many books a week. Adler couldn't stop me from engulfing myself in the words of other for the sake of an "A." Nowadays, I'm taking it easy. Of Water and the Spirit is the first book I've finished in about a month it seems. And, it was great.

Malidoma has me questioning words.

I recently was looking at the word "logos," which to my understanding is translated as "the word" in Greek. In the famous John passage about the word became flesh, I came across a study that argued the word "logos" could have been more appropriately put as "sophos" or wisdom. This is fascinating to me because being a word nerd myself -- I've been struggling with understanding how words are not adequate to express the complete feeling or meaning. Wisdom -- and with it I believe comes less words and more of an image, like Sophia -- might hold the key to greater understanding I'm thinking; the wisdom became flesh?

Nevertheless, tis hard for me to forsake my occupation -- English Literature person that I am -- as well as my passion -- I identify as a writer. Poetry, some argued (I'm thinking of Laura Riding -- a next read), was the key to what I would put as a link between words and wisdom.


Malidoma is really questioning questioning or the desire to intellectualize or take apart meaning. Here are some passsages I found most moving:

I became conscious of an overwhelming urge to analyze and intellectualize everything I was seeing and experiencing. This impulse to question was cold and purposeless. I was tired of getting nowhere in my thoughts, tired of being constantly defeated in my understanding. I felt trapped, caught inside a stone wall, trying uselessly to break out. But I didn’t know where I would be if I escaped. (200)

But, I kept telling myself, one cannot continuously ask questions. One cannot always sculpt theories to frame experience, or top experience with the roof of theory. The techniques of indigenous learning were revealing themselves before my eyes, sweeping away my preconceived notions of how learning was accomplished. The contrast between this state of mind and what I had been accustomed to at the seminary was the same as the difference between liquid …living, breathing, flexible, and spontaneous… and solid. What I was learning made sense only terms of relationship. It was not fixed, even when it appeared to be so. (203)

I cannot repeat the speech of the green lady. It lives in me because it enjoys the privilege of secrecy. For me to disclose it would be dishonor and diminish it. The power of nature exists in its silence. Human words cannot encode meaning because human language has access only to the shadow of meaning. (222)

Meaning does not need words to exist. (258)

Questions are the mind’s way of trying to destroy a mystery. The mind of the village elder has become accustomed to living with questions while his heart dances with the “answer.” (264-5)

The speech of silence is achieved when words, and their potential ability to hurt meaning, are done away with. Words entrap meaning, torture it, slice it into pieces the way a butcher cuts the meat of a slaughtered animal and serves it to us. The speech of silence has profound respect for the integrity of meaning as an entity separate from language. In silence, meaning is no longer heard, but felt’ and feeling is the best hearing, the best instrument for recording meaning. Meaning is made welcome as it is and treated with respect. (272)

Crazy enough, some of my Unity Bridges friends have attended Malidoma's trainings, and I'm hoping to attend his Intensive Retreat in ritual for 2009 up in Santa Rosa. http://www.malidoma.com/intensive2009.html,

It's time for a little S and G

It's one of those blustery mornings where the clouds are moving about in a orange and violet sky -- I caught the sunrise this morning -- the wind seems to come up and kiss you, and the sweater as well as the coat are needed.

And, because I mentioned noise and such in a recent post, I thought Garfunkel's thoughts on our inability to communicate emotionally or even love each other was apropos.

Dia de Guadalupe

Today is the day to celebrate the Virgen of Guadalupe's appearance to the Mexican people. I was given the chance to visit the Shrine in Mexico City a couple summers ago. I had a rosary my grammie gave me blessed by the priest, I walked around the Cathedral, I stopped to gaze at Juan Diego's cloak, etc. Although I question the Catholic church, the uses of events/miracles to "convert the natives," and the fact that visitors aren't really allowed to get very close to the cloak itself, I had an amazing experience. I was moved by the faith of my Mexican family.

Total Noise

A professor/mentor came into the office yesterday as I was going through my facebook pictures and deleting photographs that certain new "friends" -- students, potential funders of my projects, family-friends -- might deem inappropriate for a teacher, chaplain, mentor. It's silly really, but my visiting professor/mentor friend asked me how much time I spent on facebook and myspace, and I know already that I spend too much time developing these relationships through popular and temporal mediums, but my professor/mentor's thoughts on these time-consuming and relationship-stunting endeavors hit home. Texting, chatting, emailing, myspacing, facebooking can't and don't compare to real face to face relationships. Sure, I'm thankful for the ability to stay in contact with those I love that live far away; nevertheless, I'm feeling the need to, at least, call friends on the phone.

The conversation with my professor/mentor turned to Wallace's thoughts on "Total Noise." Wallace seems to speak to the heart of the matter -- the need to be "in the know." I think it's an addiction and it's insanity in an age of seemingly limitless information, people, possibility.

I need simplicity.


David Foster Wallace, Intro to The Best American Essays, 2007 Edition


"...essays on everything from memory and surfing and Esperanto and childhood and mortality and Wikipedia, on depression and translation and emptiness and James Brown, Mozart, prison, poker, trees, anorgasmia, color, homelessness, stalking, fellatio, ferns, fathers, grandmothers, falconry, grief, film comedy -- a rate of consumption which tends to level everything out into an undifferentiated mass of high-quality description and trenchant reflection that becomes both numbing and euphoric, a kind of Total Noise that's also the sound of our U.S. culture right now, a culture and volume of info and spin and rhetoric and context that I know I'm not alone in finding too much to even absorb, much less to try to make sense of organize into any kind of triage of saliency or value. Such basic absorption, organization and triage used to be what was required of an educated adult, a.k.a. an informed citizen -- at least that's what I got taught. Suffice it here to say that the requirements now seem different.

...Or let's not even mention the amount of research, background, cross-checking, corroboration, and rhetorical parsing required to understand the cataclysm of Iraq, the collapse of congressional oversight, the ideology of neoconservatism, the legal status of presidential signing statements, the political marriage of evangelical Protestantism and corporatist laissez-faire ... There's no way. You'd simply drown. We all would. It's amazing to me that no one much talks about this -- about the fact that whatever our founders and framers thought of as a literate, informed citizenry can no longer exist, at least not without a whole new modern degree of subcontracting and dependence packed into what we mean by 'informed.'