‘when country wasn’t cool’ – some initial ideas for a country song a la john prine (shya, i wish :/)

When my last old lady left me
When she told me we were through
She busted my ol’ guitar
And my Waylon LP’s too
She said that she was fed up
Shackin’ up with this ol’ fool
Who wishes he was country
When country wasn’t cool

After that I packed my boxes
And to Dubuque I bid adieu
I headed down to Austin
Now there’s a town with a better view
I claimed an empty beat-up bar stool
In a dive fit for a fool
Who wishes he was country
When country wasn’t cool

Well, I was sippin’ bourbon whiskey
Ol’ Buck Owens on the juke
When I heard the sweet, sweet shufflin’
Of your sequined snake-skin boots
I turned and saw your figure
Figured here’s another fool
Who wishes she was country
When country wasn’t cool

…

I finally found me a woman
Who agrees a pleasin’ time
Is a pickup truck and eight-tracks
Of Gene Autry and John Prine
But I wait for my next heartbreak
For it’s the fate of every fool
Who wishes he was country
When country wasn’t cool

 

…like a seed

This evening, Moses held my face in his hands, stared me in the eyes and said "Daddy, you're a cutie. I'm gonna plant you like a seed."—
Dustin Pattison (@dustinpattison) March 31, 2011

 

may 31!

Iron & Wine at The Crystal Ballroom!

Put a bird on it, Sam.

 

baby sea turtles

Moses and I just finished watching some of BBC’s Planet Earth series – which, by the way, never ceases to amaze (and mesmerize) me. During one of the segments, Moses was especially captivated by the baby sea turtles. He perked up when they first arrived, newly hatched, on the screen, their adorable little flippers teetering across the beach’s sand. And when they made their fateful (and for many, fatal) journey into the violent ocean tide, he began to cry. A number of times after that segment was over, Moses would turn to me and tell me he loved and missed the sea turtles and tears would again well up in his eyes and he would bury his head in my chest.

Later, when getting into bed, he expressed again his love for those turtles and had the closest thing to an emotional breakdown I’ve ever seen him have. Granted the heightened emotions are surely in part due to the tiredness that is the result of a long and eventful day but it was still no doubt heart-felt and very touching. I suggested he try to fall asleep and dream of baby sea turtles. He nodded, thinking this was a good idea, laid down, and fell immediately to sleep.

O, if we could all have the simple compassion and love of a three-year old.

Maybe that’s what I’ll dream about. Good night.

 

solidawidy!

This morning, on our way to Moses’ school, he and I were excited to stop and join a local construction workers’ strike. We stood in the line and chanted with them: “Exploitation’s not the way! Give the workers better pay!” You’re never too young to learn solidarity. Now Wisconsin, you need any feisty 3-year-old revolutionaries?

 

remembering

I’ve been reading recently through the old blog posts that chronicled our adoption process. It’s amazing how many details I’d already forgotten. Maybe its my coping mechanisms at work, but I’d even started to forget just how challenging and frustrating and sorrowful the journey often was. Oh but what a precious story it is – ultimately one of love and hope and joy and miracles! And oh the wonderful people, both in Malawi and in the US, who were there, caring for us and rooting us on. I’m reminded that Moses’ middle name, Wetu, means Ours – as in he belongs not just to himself and not just to his parents but he belongs to the community. As I read these old posts, I am grateful for my beautiful, beautiful, beautiful boy and for the community to whom we belong.

Here are the posts if you’re interested:

http://littlebabymoses.blogspot.com/

 

may 5!

 

lately,

I seem to be surviving quite well on a steady diet of whiskey and the music of these two gentlemen:

a dashing young Swede by the name of Kristian Matsson aka The Tallest Man on Earth…

…and Joe Purdy, the talented Arkansan with enviable facial hair. (in fact, gots me some tix to his Doug Fir show in May – so I’ll actually be in the same room as his beard!)

 

a sad week

As the end of my work week comes into view, I can’t help but feel relief. As much as I love what I do, as much as I love the community with whom I work and spend my days, as life-giving as it often is, it is seldom easy. Living in community – of any sort – rarely is, I guess.

This week has been especially challenging as we’ve all been reminded in the starkest of ways that we live ever-surrounded by violence and oppression in their many forms.

We came in to Sisters on Tuesday morning to discover that, in the night, an incident of partner violence had occurred just outside the cafe. A woman was thrown through the cafe window by her male partner in, word has it, a dispute over a crack pipe. Shards of glass were strewn about the cafe and two large pieces of plywood had already been placed where the window once was. We learned from the officers who responded to the incident that the man had been apprehended and the woman had been taken to the hospital but was, thank God, not in critical condition – physically, at least.

Even on these sunny winter days – so rare and welcome in Portland – a cloud of sadness looms over our community as we hold this woman (we’ve not yet learned her identity) close to our hearts and think of (and, yes, make certain assumptions about) the situation in which she finds herself.

I’ll try not to wax philosophical, political, or otherwise about this. I just want to say that I’m sad. Sad for my friends who live every day with the threat and realities of violence, disempowerment, and dehumanization. Sad for my community that can never be whole and free when so many of its members are not allowed to be. Sad for my society and culture, whose very cornerstones seem to be violence, patriarchy, racism, classism, etc., etc., etc.

Last week, my outlook was more optimistic. Maybe next week too. But right now, I’m just sad.

 

some gems from j.c. (joseph campbell, that is)

These are a couple passages I just read in The Hero With a Thousand Faces. They resonated with me and I thought they were worth sharing.

“It has always been the prime function of mythology and rite to supply the symbols that carry the human spirit forward, in counteraction to those constant human fantasies that tend to tie it back. In fact, it may well be that the very high incidence of neuroticism among ourselves follows from the decline among us of such effective spiritual aid. We remain fixated to the unexercised images of our infancy, and hence disinclined to the necessary passages of our adulthood. In the United States there is even a pathos of inverted emphasis: the goal is not to grow old, but to remain young; not to mature away from the Mother, but to cleave to her. And so, while husbands are worshiping at their boyhood shrines, being the lawyers, merchants, or masterminds their parents wanted them to be, their wives, even after fourteen years or marriage and two fine children produced and raised, are still on search for love.”

………………………………….

“The hero is a man of self-achieved submission. But submission to what? That precisely is the riddle that today we have to ask ourselves and that it is everywhere the primary virtue and historic deed of the hero to have solved. As Professor Arnold J. Toynbee indicates in his six-volume study of the laws of the rise and disintegration of civilizations, schism in the soul, schism in the body social, will not be resolved by any scheme of return to the good old days (archaism), or by programs guaranteed to render an ideal projected future (futurism), or even by the most realistic, hardheaded work to weld together again the deteriorating elements. Only birth can conquer death – the birth, not of the old thing again, but of something new. Within the soul, within the body social, there must be – if we are to experience long survival – a continuous ‘recurrence of birth’ (palingenesia) to nullify the unremitting recurrences of death. For it is by means of our own victories, if we are not regenerated, that the work of Nemesis is wrought: doom breaks from the shell of our very virtue. Peace then is a snare; war is a snare; change is a snare; permanence is a snare. When our day is come for the victory of death, death closes in; there is nothing we can do, except be crucified – and resurrected; dismembered totally, and then reborn.”