I’m going to be making an attempt to blog more about some of the things I’ve been thinking about recently, and in particular, ideas I’m understanding from the Bible. So this is a start and probably an excellent point from which to start.

Paul gives this instruction to Timothy and I think there’s a lot to be found in it. There’s a place for thinking in faith. That in itself may not seem like a profound thing to say but it’s an important thing to say these days. For one, I’ve interacted with several people recently enough who look down on faith, and see it as something that belonged to primitive times and the “dark ages” before we understood the world around us as much as we do now. It’s as if they see faith or religion as an alternative to thought and intelligence, and a poor substitute too.

And church doesn’t necessarily help either. I have the strong impression that many people in church are taught to fight to believe concepts, and it feels akin to a flexing of a muscle – a straining to lift something. I don’t often hear a strong emphasis on growing in understanding, much less encouraging and teaching people to think. So if the Christian faith does not appear to non-Christians as a particularly thoughtful place, I think Christians are at least partially to blame.

But Paul does a lot more here than authorize or commend thinking. He establishes the relationship between thought and revelation. That’s really important in the post-charismatic environment I’m a part of. I know a lot of Christians who aren’t particularly inclined towards the hard work of thought, but are very interested in revelation. And again there’s this idea floating around in the atmosphere somewhere, that revelation falls from the sky. It suggests that you might drop if you have a particularly good and powerful time with God on your own or a great prayer meeting or worship session. I’m not attacking the value of personal devotions or prayer meetings or worship sessions. I’m attacking the suggestion that how God reveals himself is that you’ll suddenly just “know” – out of the blue (or rather out of heaven) you’ll just know whatever you wanted to know or whatever you’re supposed to know. My problem with this “floating idea” is that it does not seem to suggest a connection between thought and revelation, and rarely even suggests a connection between thoughtfully reading and study of the Bible and revelation. In fact, you might get the impression from it that thought is the enemy of revelation. You might think that thought gets in the way of getting understanding from God.

Hearing what Paul is saying will save us from those kinds of floating ideas. Paul does not pit thinking – the using of our brains – against receiving understanding from God (which is by definition, revelation). Admittedly there’s the potential for a battle here. The Bible teaches us not to rely on our own understanding. It teaches us the insufficiency of our own wisdom. It teaches that the natural mind cannot understand spiritual things. So in one sense it’s understandable why some church-goers and teachers would seem to deemphasize thought in the way they do. At a glance it doesn’t look that helpful and actually seems a to be a threat to our potential to understand God. It doesn’t look like a useful tool in this “spiritual” environment. But Paul in a wonderfully succinct way, shows us how thought and revelation are meant to work together. “Think… for the Lord will give you understanding…”  We are to apply our minds to the Bible with the expectation that God will give us insight and understanding. I’m making a big, but entirely reasonable extrapolation of “what I say” to become the scriptures as a whole. If you read more of what Paul says in this letter, the basis for that extrapolation becomes clear.

We are to think about what God says in the Bible. And Paul tells us what that should look like. We’re to think with a posture that is expecting and asking God to show us “wonderful things in [his] word” (Ps 119:18). So Paul, while definitely pushing us to think, leads us away from depending on the sufficiency of our own minds in order to understand the things of God. This is humble thinking, because from the outset, it recognizes that it can’t understand if God does not speak, and it can’t know if God does not reveal. So it must be asking questions about what the Bible says. It knows it’s not supposed just “get it”. I’m amazed how many people read the Bible and have no questions, or suffer under the impression that it is bad thing to have questions. This type of thinking keeps in mind the fact that understanding of God and the things of God is a gift from God. So it therefore must be prayerful because asking and receiving are related.

So Paul has given us a lot but there’s one more spectacular gift here. Hope. Paul teaches us that God will give understanding in everything. Even though this was written to Timothy, the basis of Paul’s guarantee to Timothy is a God revealed throughout the scriptures, who is committed to revealing himself to those who seek him, so this promise definitely extends to all who follow Jesus. So we can read and think and know that God will give understanding. It might take a while and it might be really frustrating at times but God will give understanding. It’s a guarantee. So I’ll end by echoing the Psalmist in Psalm 70:4:-

I think I just need to give it a go, so that’s what I will do. Proverbs 16:3 says “Commit your work to the LORD, and your plans will be established.” I’ve never seen that as a blanket promise, that everything I plan and try will work out, but I definitely take it as strong encouragement to pray and plan and pray and try. So that’s where I am.

The second-guessing is understandable. When it comes to music I’m a perfectionist on steroids and when it comes to performances I’m a tad bit of a control freak. I want to be in control of all the variables and I’m not in this situation. I haven’t done my scouting so the confidence in having the “perfect plan” isn’t there. I’m just jumping in this time. That’s where I think I should be though. That’s been the general sense I have about this stage of my on-again-off-again relationship with being a performer. Maybe it being like this will bring out things in me that will surprise me.

So here goes. Stop by if you can. Seeing friendly faces always helps. It’s between 9:00pm and 11:00pm.

One of the results of my experience of being mostly on the sidelines of live music for the last several years is that I don’t like to talk about plans or dreams that I have for my music career (“career” is a conspicuously aspirational word here). I’ve blogged about this before – several times and in several different ways – so I won’t wax on about it again. But a comeback is hatching again. It’s managed to chip a small opening in the shell around it, and it’s working on making the hole big enough to push its head out, spread its damp wings, and stumble out for the world to see. It’s still mostly covered though, so I haven’t been able to get a good look at it yet. I can’t guess what the plumage will look like or how wide the wings will be our how far it will fly. I’m just excited about the process.

I had a rehearsal last night to work on some songs to play live somewhere. It was just two of us, but I think any two including someone as gifted as Kamla Hamilton is off to a great start. When I work with Kamla I don’t tend to have to tell her what I want. She tends to have ideas that I could never ask for but want as soon as I hear them. Even on a Casio keyboard which seems more like a toy than a tool, she can take what feel to me like bare ideas and clothe them with a richness that makes them seem aged – like they’ve been here a long time even though you’re hearing them for the first time. Don’t get me wrong – I work very hard to write songs that are worthy of high-calibre musicians and arrangements, but I’m always awed to some degree at least, when I hear my work played by people who play a lot better than I do. It’s satisfying and surprising at the same time.

So it was just keyboard, acoustic guitar and my voice, which did a lot better than I was expecting. I haven’t really sang in a while. No disrespect meant to leading worship at church. That is just not a space in which I try to explore my voice in a certain way, and I don’t think it should be. But I was happy with how I was sounding in general and with how I was managing the range of the songs. The basics are there. I now need to work harder and push myself to polish the vocal delivery to move beyond “good” or “solid”, towards “really good” and then hopefully beyond that towards “amazing” or some such superlative. I want to push myself and see how far I can go with what I’ve been given to work with.

We looked at 3 of my original songs and 2 covers. It’s been interesting trying to select songs – both the originals and the covers. I’ve had to try to figure out which of my songs will shine with a acoustic guitar, piano and percussion instrumentation. Warren Harris should be joining us, hopefully next week, with a reduced drum-kit, and I’m looking forward to what he’ll bring, but that’s the extent of what I have in mind for this initiative. I’m hoping the “portability” will result in some opportunities. A lot of the stuff I’ve been working on is difficult to mount because of the instrumentation I had in mind when I wrote it. A number of those songs won’t work for this type of setup, in my opinion, primarily because of design. They would lose too many elements that I meant to be there. I had started working on a song specifically for this setup, but I’ve now changed my mind about it and I think it needs the kind of treatment it would get with a larger band. But I have managed to identify some of my songs that I think can thrive with this approach, and I have a new one I’m anxious to finish too.

So we worked on “Conversations” – which is the only full-length song I have on YouTube, and that is in fact, the only time I’ve performed it with a full band; “To Make You Smile” – a song which hasn’t seen daylight yet, inspired by my daughter Maia; and “Longing For You” – which I was a bit reluctant to throw into the mix. I’m not entirely sure why I feel the way I do about it, but one of the factors is that it feels too traditional to me in terms of structure – A,B,A,B,C,B – which translates to verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, chorus. That was, of course, by design at the time though. Kamla, for her part, seemed cool with it, and she really likes “To Make You Smile”, which is encouraging. It still needs one line and some editing but I’m trying not to over-burden it and let it be what it is.

I won’t say which covers we worked on yet. I’ll wait until I know what we’re doing with them. So the plan is to rehearse another couple times and finalize where and when we’ll play this stuff, or at least some of it. I have something in mind but I’ll say when it is more of a likelihood than a possibility. It’s really good to have started though. I’m itching to hear what it will sound like and to see all the colours and shapes as it emerges. Even though I’ve written most of the material it only lives in my imagination until it’s heard, and even hearing it in rehearsal is dramatically different from performing it for people.

So pray with me that the comeback will hatch fully and become all it should. I have no specific dreams or hopes for it. I think I’m learning not to do that anymore. I wrote about it in the song that was growing when I started this blog, and I’ll close with some of those lyrics.

Meant to fly, this paper plane was never built to take your baggage
Flattened under expectations weighing more than paper can lift
It could soar if you unload imperatives you have imposed
Then point the nose, when you let go
You’ll free your hands
To hold on to the prospect, of the flight delighting you
It will not be perfect, but it might be good…

Bless you.

I’ve found myself looking at her down on the ground stretching up to me or to Sam and thinking thoughts like “Boy, she’s small.” And “shouldn’t she be a bit taller than that by now?” And “has she grown in the last few months?” It’s a problem of proximity. Because I see her everyday it’s hard to look at her and recognize progress in terms of height. She looks very much the same. Other people, every now and then, comment that something or the other has changed, and I shrug and take their word for it.

But viewing her through the lense of the changing table – now I want to point out that I could go in a lot of directions from here. I’ve already started the “seeing” Maia through the changing table” metaphor. I could do the whole “un-changing changing table” thing. Temptation acknowledged. Choice of metaphor and style of expression aside, I finally was able to recognize how much taller she was. I vividly remember putting her on that changing table when she was a few weeks old – partially because one of her godmother’s was cautioning me about doing something wrong. I remember the fact that it didn’t matter that much whether her head was close to the top or in the middle of the pad. She would fit with so much room anyway. She’s much taller than she was then. I know it sounds obvious, but there’s a difference between accepting a fact because it must be so, and seeing it. The seeing does something that the accepting can’t. You marvel at things when you can see things for yourself.

So the lesson I had in mind when I started this post was about the way faith grows slowly and imperceptibly, much like Maia. I am so close to my faith, carrying it each day, impatient with it and often looking down on it, that I can’t see if it’s growing. It takes some reference point, some object to give a vantage point from which I can compare what it was to what it is, for me to see it’s growth. And that’s what tests are for. And I’m going through my fair share. Tests… much too nice a word for how they feel. Trials carries a bit more weight for me. Tribulations is chock-full of King Jamesy substantiveness and emotion. Tests definitely is too lightweight.

So I see much better through the changing table what Peter is saying when he says:-

“…now for a little while, if necessary, you have been grieved by various trials, so that the tested genuineness of your faith—more precious than gold that perishes though it is tested by fire—may be found to result in praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ.” 1 Peter 1:6b-7

This hard slog is necessary if my faith is going to be shown to be genuine and is going to be shown to be growing, so that Jesus gets all the accolades he deserves.

The lesson I didn’t have in mind is how faith allows you to see. You can be handling the same facts and information and it’s not doing anything much for you or in you until, by faith, you see it – you’re convinced of it in a way you weren’t and you’re enthralled by it. And it barely makes sense, because all of the pieces were right in front of you, but you didn’t see it. I think that’s how faith naturally results in worship – which in itself seems to be inexplicable to those who can’t see it.

So to all the Saints – hold on in faith.  This ride will be over before we know it and we’ll be home and happy.

In saying that I realize that I want to be seen as “normal” (who is “normal” really?), whatever that means. I guess what I mean is that I want to be seen as a regular person despite having many and sometimes complex thoughts about God, something which I not sure can be considered “regular”. I guess it would be irregular if that appeared to be the only dimension of my thoughts or if it appeared to be too narrow a focus, never affecting the rest of life. I’m not sure what to do with that desire, but there it is for the world to see. Enough talk of “regularity”, lest I be misunderstood to be referring to something else. I would promise not to ever blog about that type of regularity but I won’t, just to keep my options open.

I’m beginning to suspect some people grow weak in their ability to think things through – their logic muscles begin to waste away – because they are seen by others as authorities. They no longer need to explain themselves carefully and clearly in order for their audience to find them compelling – their audience believes in them perhaps because of position or the giftings they are perceived to possess – therefore they no longer have the need to think clearly and carefully either. That’s par for the course when it comes to politicians and their supporters, I’d guess. I might even be desirable. It’s disastrous for both them and their audiences when it happens to preachers though, and it is something I think they should fight desperately against.

I suspect another category of people (not necessarily mutually exclusive of the first) decay in a similar way because they’ve long decided what is what and they only esteem those who agree with them, and therefore surround themselves with such people. As a result they are rarely put in a position where they need to present and defend their positions (among those who think alike, you only need to refer to a position) and therefore have become lazy in their thinking.I suspect these things because I’ve experienced both sorts of weakness and laziness over the past several months.

I’m beginning to suspect (and I guess this would be a “child” suspicion of the “parent” suspicions above) that being where I am right now – the outsider, the untrusted, the one whose ideas people are suspicious of (there’s a lot of suspicion in this post) – is actually a great place to be for my growth and mental sharpness. I don’t think there are many around me who accept what I say because I, Joel Bain, said it. I could be wrong, but that’s how I feel. Because I feel that way it shapes my behaviour. It puts me in a position where I must carefully think through what I teach or suggest because I fully expect it to be challenged. So I’m always asking myself “Does this stand up to examination? Have I thought this through properly? Is is biblical (in the case of teaching the Bible) and logical and reasonable (in the case of arguments of a more philosophical nature, as well as in the case of teaching the Bible)? What might be some of the objections to this perspective?” I suspect that a part of the suspicion that surrounds me comes from the fact that some of the things I advance are so different from what those around me are comfortable with. In any case, real or perceived I suspect it’s very good for my growth and mental fitness. So thank  you God for hostile, or at the very least, unwelcoming environments.

I’m beginning to suspect that I was wrong in thinking this would be a particularly short post…

I’m beginning to suspect that the teaching and Biblical understanding of the sovereignty of God has inadvertently been trampled under a postmodern notion of the love of God – a notion which out of necessity marginalizes sovereignty to make room for itself. “Good Christians” of course, give lip service to sovereignty but there is little awe and worship, and very few find comfort and security in it, the way they hope in and hide in their notion of God’s love. I’m beginning to suspect that that is an error we’ll come to regret because there’s so much truth, really useful and practical truth, caught up in and built on a correct understanding of God’s sovereignty. I strongly suspect that I should add a sub-category under the category “God” for “sovereignty” because it’s going to come up again soon. Done.

I suspect that Maia will wake up very soon, so I figure if I want to post this today I should do so now.

Happy Saturday.

Here’s what the bedtime routine is looking like now:-

• Goodnight’s to mummy (and anyone else around at the time)
• the brushing of the 5 teeth that have blazed a trail into the visible world by venturing out from underneath the gums… the same 5 teeth that she bit me on the leg with this afternoon (sigh)
• lying down in the crib while I sing her the bedtime song of the night (what I mean is she’s lying down… not me or the both of us), which is either a modified (read honed and improved) version of last night’s song or one fresh off the top of the head (the benefit/disadvantage of having a father who is a songwriter)
• and lastly, the bedtime prayer – which these days includes a spontaneous one of thanksgiving and requests as well as a traditional prayer.

So at last I’ve reached the point of this post – the traditional prayer. The first night I put Maia to bed in this way, by some sort of reflex or conditioning I thought to repeat a children’s bedtime prayer for her. The fact that I felt that way took me a bit by surprise, because among all the things one considers when you’re going to become a parent, or have become one, I don’t recall once trying to plan a bedtime routine before we started trying it. On the other hand it’s not that surprising considering my upbringing. Plus I’ve found that once I started parenting, I started to do all sorts of things that were done to me,  even things I recall not liking. Funny how that works.

What definitely took me off guard was the prayer I repeated. It was the first one that came to my mind and truth-be-told the only one so far that’s not hazy in my memory.

Now I lay me down to sleep
I pray the Lord my soul to keep
If I should die before I wake
I pray the Lord my soul to take

Apparently it’s a classic 18th century children’s prayer. So I start to repeat it for Maia and I hear myself, and I’m a bit shocked. Does it strike you as a tad bit morbid for a children’s prayer? It felt that way to me on saying it again for the first time in… many years.  Death as a prominent theme in such a short prayer? I mean I know there’s the need to teach your children about death, but seriously? So I thought about it.

Near the start of the year I read Psalm 3 and I was very struck by verse 5:-

I lay down and slept;
I woke again, for the Lord sustained me.

I realize that I, like most people I would figure, have come to take waking up for granted… as if it “should be”… as if it just happens. Worse than than, some mornings I’m actually a bit annoyed to be awake and to have to face the day. Even though the context is one in which David is dealing with enemies, I recognize that he’s celebrating the truth that each night’s sleep that we wake up from is because God sustained us (as compared to thinking that God is only “on duty” on the nights when we are aware of danger). It’s something to give God thanks for. I think it’s good to ask for it too, rather than just take it for granted that we will wake up the next morning.

I’ve repeated that prayer several times since that first time and I’ve come to think that it’s not morbid at all. It’s might be a little more “real” than we like being a lot of the time but I think that’s the extent of its crime, if that’s a crime at all. Death is a reality and none of us know when we will die. We hope our children outlive us but that doesn’t always happen. If Maia should die I do pray that God would take her soul. I don’t have a greatly developed theological position on what happens to infants who die but I do have a deep trust in God’s goodness and wisdom.  So I pray that God would keep her and that if he decides that it is best she die, that he would take her to himself. And I pray that when she’s old enough to understand that she would, by grace, have faith in him and that he would keep her walking the difficult path of faith until he takes her to himself.

These days I’m praying that I will grow to be more grateful, more consistently, for life and for sleep and for waking up.  I’m also praying that God would give me grace to honour and please him each day he sustains my life, which seems to me to be a reasonable way to live if I am genuinely grateful.

Interestingly I found that the last verse in Psalm 4 echoed the theme that caught my interest in Psalm 3:-

In peace I will both lie down and sleep;
For you alone, O Lord, make me dwell in safety.

Good night. Now I lay me down to sleep…

Updates

Having not blogged in such a long time a general update is warranted. I’m still running my own business and, I think, getting better at it each month. It’s making me “responsible”, which is a big thing for a person given to being as sporadic and inspiration-driven as I am (I only claim an “artistic temperament” for myself when a situation makes it a greatly convenient stereotype).

Maia, me (Joel) and Sam - Nov 2009

Family and marriage is stable. I’m beginning to embrace how much work and attention it takes to make it good. Maybe its a bit like gardening, but I’m only guessing since I haven’t done much of that. It seems to me to be a good analogy, despite my near total lack of hands-on experience. But I am embracing the need for more work and I’ve started to work.

Maia is growing like a weed – a simile which now suffers an undeserved worsening of its reputation the light of the above paragraph. Growing like a pleasant, enjoyable plant or vine? That doesn’t pop at all. To quote some random client I don’t know, it  ”needs wa-wa-woom!” “Weed” has that “wa-wa-woom” in my opinion, but it clashes with gardening completely. Suffice to say Maia is growing fast and learning fast – both very good lessons and some we’ll need to stamp out. She’s taken to opening the fridge and looking for stuff she wants (even if she has not idea how to prepare it). Parenting is challenging but I’m very grateful for her and for all I’m learning.

I’m trying to read through the Bible this year. I’m reasonable sure I’ve read everything in it but I’m trying to do so in a systematic way. So far so good. I’ve had some good times, and (maybe strangely enough) I’ve been enjoying the Old Testament more than the New. I’m still struggling to have a regular time that I spend with God, especially because getting up early seems completely unreasonable when you’ve been up even earlier negotiating with Maia. I’ve embraced the fight though. He rewards those who seek Him. Nobody said it was easy.

This blog was supposed to be about songwriting and music. It was supposed to chronicle a finite project, that I expected would have finished already. I’ve decided that is should just be a blog. I’ll still blog about music, but I’ve decided I should blog about life.

I might need to do a “how’s the music going?” post. I’m amazed a the number of people who still ask me that. I don’t feel like much of a musician, with how little I’ve accomplished in the last several years. Maybe I should take it as encouraging that so many people still see me as one. In any case the really short update is that there have been some songs and a lot of ideas in the last many months. I have new goals to pursue and people who are (hopefully still) interested in pursuing them with me. I’m growing as a writer and I’m curious to see what I’m becoming. Stylistically no two songs are that much alike now. But perhaps I’m too close to the work. Maybe if I can back off and hear it I’ll hear the similarities instead of the differences.

Where from here?

More blogging, more songwriting, more Bible-reading (and more reflections coming from that), more opinions on the things that catch my interests long enough to think about them seriously, etc. Let’s see what this becomes. I’m back.

I’m tempted think that dreams are too delicate for that kind of treatment. They need to be nourished carefully in half-light, stroked and spoken to gently in hopes that they can grow strong enough to support themselves and emerge suddenly and delightfully, or else die in the privacy of their cocoon where none will know that they once lived at all… that they dreamed once of being. But I know that it’s not dreams that are that fragile. As intangible as they can seem they’re hardy. It’s me that is fragile. Maybe it’s ego. Maybe it’s my picture of myself that I dislike once the hard edges and details have been added. Maybe I prefer the fantasy that’s left when I forget as much as I tend to, to the sentences which can’t be challenged after they’ve been said – the ones that always will say how it really was.

So when the list is made of the things that can cripple a man someone make sure that “disappointment” get’s the prominent position it deserves. But something else insists that I write. It’s push is strong enough that I’ve interrupted my work (work that I actually don’t mind doing and was making good progress at I might add) to capture what it wants to say. I really have so much to be grateful for. And gratitude unexpressed… well… isn’t.

God has blessed us with a daughter. We’ve named her Maia Lisanne and I’ve been so absorbed in all that’s come with this gift – diapers and bottles and burping and vomit and crying and falling asleep and tiny fingers and eyes that follow my face. And I’m amazed at very small things, which I think is as close as I can get to be being born into this world again. And we’re settling comfortably into our new home. And God continues to take good care of us, of all of us each day. So thanks Dad for all you’ve done. I am satisfied with what you’ve given and understand that you give a peace which quiets the restlessness and recriminations.

I don’t think gratitude and disappointment are opposites. But I do know that gratitude has prised me from under disappointment this time. I think I’ll have to battle disappointment a lot along this journey so I’d better label my tools well. So I’m back. The writer isn’t dead. If only I could shape all of this stuff into song…

I think I needed some story to sneak in behind and this one appeases me even though it’s not my own. I’ve been battling failure in my mind. It’s very hard for me to blog when I feel like there’s nothing to report. There are no headlines… weeks upon weeks of footnotes and sidebars but no headlines. I have had some important conversations, had some great song ideas, spent some useful time shaping work-in-progress but there’s no trophy to show from any of it.

And I’ve been fighting with myself. Fighting the fact that so much of me seems to be satisfied day to day without this project happening. Several years ago I thought that I was a writer because I was a writer. I thought it had to happen and what I needed to learn to do was to facilitate it better. I no longer think so. I think the writer can get buried under the rest of life – the phone calls to and meetings with clients, the washing of dishes, the comfort of computer games, the work targets that seem to get up earlier than me and go to bed after me to the effect that I can never quite reach them, the weeks which seems to race to their end once Wednesday morning arrives, the tiredness and the tedium and the search for meaning and understanding in it all.

When I’m in contact with good art a part of me wakes up and itches… I feel my own desparation to create… all the songs singing inside that are scraping to get out. But when I get absorbed again into the everyday, that part of me is stifled and grows weaker.

The interesting thing is that I started paper playing because I felt like God was saying “Go!”, so the days on which I just don’t feel like it speak with less authority than before. It still so hard to get going and keep going though.

Admittedly, the “lack” is discouraging. I have no access to my recordings on minidisk – my player was stolen some time ago. I can’t access soft copies of songs that I wrote over the last couple years – my laptop isn’t behaving. Add to these things the general lack of working equipment for recording ideas or trying out licks on electric guitar, and the absolute lack of money to fund recording and it all feels like now is not the right time. We don’t watch the sky to make our plans though. We know that the moment God is ready, clouds appear and we suddenly the rain is more than we can manage.

What I need to do is to learn how to be a writer in the middle of everything else – the phone calls to and meetings with clients, the washing of dishes, the comfort of computer games, the work targets that seem to get up earlier than me and go to bed after me to the effect that I can never quite reach them, the weeks which seems to race to their end once Wednesday morning arrives, the tiredness and the tedium and the search for meaning and understanding in it all. And the truth is, “everything else” is the soil from which good songs grow.

“I keep some lyrics alive, like a pilot light,
Hoping that one day it will ignite,
And burst into flame and fire…”

Okay… so Gustav wasn’t a hurricane when it hit us, but I’d lose that wonderful alliteration if I had to call it a tropical storm. Artistic license? In any case, we didn’t go on our short holiday trip as planned, because of Gustav. So all my plans to write and blog didn’t happen. I think I was depending on some sort of a break to get some momentum for paper playing. At this point, I think I’m going to have to accept and adjust to the reality that I’m going to have to do this project while doing everything else. I can’t really “stop” anything in my life to facilitate this.

A part of the challenge is that I like uninterrupted hours in order to really focus my attention on a task and they’re really hard to get right now. So I’m going to have to find a way to carve out one hour at a time and make the most of it.

A River Ran Through It

By “it” I’m referring to our house. We live in a section of a house that has been divided up to make several “apartments”, but I do mean a river ran through the house. Gustav was spectacular. There’s a way, when you live in a hurricane zone, that the thought of facing a storm while it’s still classed as a tropical storm brings you a weird comfort. You think of it as a small, weak thing, compared to the wrath of the hurricanes you’ve lived through. But Gustav was a slow killer. I’ve never seen so much rain. I didn’t understand how water grows and changes and how suddenly it can make its move.

I saw the water just after it started coming in under our front door. By the time I could call Sam it was halfway across the room. You can try to fight water but it will win in the end. You find you keep making concessions. You give up the living room as lost and try to refortify in the bedroom. You keep retreating as it keeps advancing and you find yourself fighting for the lives of the few dry square feet of floor left. Our shower was the dryness floor space in our apartment when Gustav was done. I have however managed to salvage some good metaphors which I might be able to pour into my writing (pun unintended at first but milked on second thought). I understand some things about water that I didn’t before. I have a healthy respect for it now. To be honest, before Gustav water as a metaphor had become for me… well… a bit dry.

Where From Here?

I’ve been a bit distressed about the lack of momentum for paper playing. I’m dealing with that by continuing to trust God that I wasn’t wrong about trying to do this and trying to do this now. So I’m managing. I’ve had what I consider to be some good and important ideas about the project. I’ll blog on those soon. I’ve also jotted down what I hope will become some good lyrics. There are some ideas that are less welcome than others. They don’t paint the pictures that I want to paint. They don’t look to me like I want to be seen. But they’re true. I think a part of my becoming a good artist is a growing willingness to live with truth and not hide it. So we’ll see where that goes.

This week I’ll steal some time from myself to have some important conversations about the project and related things. I’ll also start blogging about my philosophy as an artist – as far as its developed up to now. And this week I will write.