number 14

okay I really enjoy  the band anathallo they have such a fresh sound. To me listening to their music is like running through life. It is like catching glimses of this and that, like being bombarded with smells, like having all senses on and bordering overstimulation. 

But as the movement of the song progresses (the metaphor I want to make is to compare it to running again) there are times when the runner gets winded and slows, only to soak in the sweet melody. The ebb and flow of the songs put into audio form dandilion seeds being caught in a mild breese. In my minds eye, I see the stretching, silky fibers atop the stem of the seed. They flex with the upward presure of the air. In an instant the seed leaps it is afloat. The seed rises, pauses, and falls, only to be caught up again. Okay I do believe that I have made a very nerdy review. But whatever.

love b

Monday, March 30

I was listening to the National Public Radio, as I do from time to time. I heard the news reporter tell a story about a new toy that would cost approximately one hundred dollars. This toy was made and marketed with a Star Wars theme. The person playing with the toy would wear a head set. On a table nearby would sit a sphere in a clear tube. The subject would concentrate on making the sphere levitate "using the force". The head set has a sensor that measures brain activity. It then sends a signal to the sphere which turns on a fan that corresponds to the brain activity. The sphere levitates. Wow. 

Story part two

My head hit a rock. My helmet had been suck off in my initial dip into this beautifully deadly river. The bright light of a hard head impact and the jolt of my body, didn’t happen. I must have just grazed it. I was completely vulnerable in here. The frigid embrace of this lifelike mass living was a jail cell. My sentence was undecided but death seemed likely. My crime was taking lightly the power, the majesty, and the fear of the river. 

Perhaps it was not a death sentence. Maybe it was a gift, the opportunity to truly experience the river. That is why I got into kayaking in the first place. The gorgeous movement of the river is entrancing. Even as a kid I longed to experience the river. I wanted to travel under it, and see it from the perspective of the rocks. I wanted to swim in it, to dive in the current and see how it moved. 

In smaller rivers I welcomed the very experience that I was fleeing from. The rapids were smaller and very safe, but I love to feel the force of the water swing my legs over my head, and push my body this way and that. I would take off my life vest and dive to the bottom of a rapid. I would feel the water churn above me while I sank into the cool, dark, calm below. My senses were activated by the river. The cold, the dark, the churn, but mostly the noise. It was so loud under the surface. 

What was at one point a comforting roar that awakened the deep memories of a heart beat in my pre-birth days, was now a monster. This monster was not hiding in the closet anymore, it had swallowed me whole.

I had almost no fight left in me. Thankfully my head hit something else, yes the surface. I had enough time to breath and glimpse at my surroundings. There was some calm water just down to the right. With the advent of a goal, hope was energy to my bones. I was in a calm stretch and my head bobbed above the surface. The occasional wave would dunk me but this was welcomed compared to before. I am not sure what happened but I found myself sitting in a small pool. The fear and danger seemed like it was miles away. In a sense, it was. It took the river no time to sweep me miles from those initial rapids. I was far from my friends, my camp, and my boat. I had to plan what to do. But the river hadn’t taken me.

Fictional Story

I had read part of a story about a kayaker that had to swim a dangerous river. Part of a book was printed in a magazine. I never finished the story. I have always wanted to know what happened so I made up my own story. Most of this story is fictional. I hope you like it. This is part one. 

Love B

I was immediately sucked out of my boat. My shoes where sucked off. My helmet was sucked off.  Thankfully my life vest stayed on. 

I was being churned so forcefully, that I had no clue which way was up, although I had no intention of going that way. An attempt to swim to the surface would result in another trip through the Washing Machine, the aptly named section of river that flipped me, that is that I capsized in.

Down is where I wanted to go. I caught a glimpse of light and kicked hard in the opposite direction. I’d done it. The current slowed and I began moving down river. Now if only I could hope for a breath, I would aim for that light again. 

Suddenly, but only for an instant, my head hit the blinding surface. I left this collision with half filled lunges and a slight hope that I would survive swimming one of the top rivers in the country.

Before I could finish hoping, the vertigo inducing churn had got me. This must be the rapid known as Forced Landing. It had a tendency to push boaters into a little eddy on the bank. In a kayak this would be bad due to the fact that, although the kayaker was calm and safe in the eddy, exiting the eddy would put the poor boater in the main current heading straight for a strainer. A large spruce had fallen here years ago making an other wise straight forward rapid a challenge requiring quick paddling and spot on positioning.

I hoped with with all I had that I would pop up in the calm waters of the Forced Landing eddy.  But I had no way of knowing if I was even past it or not. All I could do was swim down again, hoping to travel up. I had know kayakers say calmly, “Oh if your stuck in a hole be sure to swim down, and if you are still in your boat and can’t roll push your paddle down as far as you can.” Forcing yourself to swim down when all you want to do is go up into the beautiful air, is not an easy thing. My body was wracked with twinges of fear and warning. I can hold my breath for two minutes in a bathtub or swimming pool, only two minutes when I know which way to the surface, two minutes when the calm, heated pool is not forcing me to swim with all the strength I have. Two minutes is not enough out here. So I swam down. 

Riddle answer

Name and amen. Many people close their prayers "In Jesus' name amen. Now that I look at it you only have to move the N. wow

0hhhh

I have always thought that a person would feel their age slowly greater and greater as the person got older. I thought that a person would start to feel old around 30 or 40. I have a new perspective now. Before I went to NYC, I felt young and strong. Then during my time in NYC and since I feel old. I feel tired.  It came all at once and I’m only 26.

The professor in the class that I am taking told us about this guy named Foyerbach. Foyerbach according to my professor said that the notion of god that people have is a cosmic projection based on the most noble characteristics of humans. It is like people took all of the things that they see good in people and wanted a god, so they made one in their image, so to speak. 

There is a different idea about this, I think that Kant discussed it. I think that C. S. Lewis talked about it too. It is the idea that people get a notion of god from our notion of morality. Lewis calls it the Law of Nature. The idea is that since people have the feeling the they ought to do something that they don’t always do, there must be a standard that people are trying to reach but don’t. This standard must be from God. This is mostly from Lewis, I am not sure what Kant says exactly.

There is another idea that I have heard that says people come to think of god because they are met with unknown, uncontrollable, extremely powerful forces in nature. People then attribute these forces to god.

We also learned about this guy named Schleiermacher. Supposedly he says that Adam’s experience of God was not complete until Eve was created. The point of saying this is to put an emphasis on the importance of community. He even goes as far as saying that redemption is only experience in community. That is to say that one can’t be saved outside of the church. 

This is so interesting.

This is a quick riddle

What two words are commonly found at the end of a prayer and with which the letters can be jumbled of one to spell the other?


PS I even came up with it myself, although I don't imagine I'm the first.

There was a dog in the yard, yes two dogs. Foreign dogs. Scout, the local, was running back and forth, whining and barking. She was very anxious. This average sized dog, Scout, likes to drag large portions of dead deer into the yard. It all started when one night I was trying to get her to come inside. It was dark. I went out calling her and she would not come. I paused to listen. Crunch, crunch, she was chewing on the deer. I knew it was the deer because I had seen her a day previously chewing on the deer. I was disgusted.

Here is a quote I agree with. It is from my new favorite author, Sarah Sumner. It is from the book Just How Married Do You Want To Be, with co-author, her husband Jim Sumner.

  "The command to cleave is given by God to husbands. Some Christian men seem tempted to cleave      instead to a worldly sense of manhood. A husband may distance himself from his wife for fear that his wife's    femininity will somehow make him less of a man."

I seem to remember guys rejecting things they deemed feminine. They also held that strength was manly. The things that were considered feminine were insignificant things, such as wearing pink or the way one walked. These guys would used the phrase "real man". It seems that any reasonable notion of a "real man" would be a secure, stable, consistent manhood that is not changed by things like colors. It seems that if these people had true strength they would not have to defend their manhood, especially in a manner that gives the impression that they are insecure of their masculinity. 

In my younger years I was under the same impression that I had to reject anything that smelled of girls. I even thought, at one point, that drinking out of a straw was girly. It is strange. 

 

I am going to attempt to keep my brain functional. I am going to practice my memory. Hot bod and no brain doesn't go far enough for me

bye for now love b

This is a light hearted post

It has become the trend for some people I know to speak in incomplete sentences. My own wife did it today when she said, "Not a fan of the freaking". I want to strongly exhort people to use a subject, verb, object sentence structure. Please for the sake of understanding, at least out of respect of our linguistic ancestors, oh whatever it is a free country. Just paitient with me, not understanding.

Oh proportion!
Proportion is so important. It is so fundamental. For example why are puppies cute, but small dogs (picture a hairless chihuahua) are not cute? Because puppies have a different proportion (maybe also because they are clumsy). Also I just learned how proportion is so important with balance.

high wire

Hi,

I was reading about tightrope walking. I learned that some high wire walkers use a bent pole with weights on the end. If there is enough weight and the weights are below the wire, then the walker doesn't need any more balance than if he or she were hanging from the wire. I knew this intuitionally, because I have seen a wheel on a cable with a weight below it and knew that there wasn't a risk of the wheel "loosing its balance". I didn't realize it in the case of the high wire walker. It is so interesting to me that a person can feel something without understanding it. It is intriguing, one's intuition.

Another interesting thing is how a high wire walker might carry a straight pole. What is interesting is that the straight pole lowers the walker's center of gravity. I assume it does this by shortening the walker. The walker isn't shorter necessarily, but is proportionally because the pole makes the walker wider. Gravity doesn't care about height, but does care about proportion? Wow, I guess that is right. That is so awesome. I always knew that proportion was important from the artistic standpoint, but I didn't know this.

Thank you for reading this whoever you are!

love braden 

Guest Blog

Hi everyone--(Leslie, Jeremy...I don't know who else reads this!)

This is B.L.W. (Braden's Lovely Wife) and I have invaded his blog to post some of my recent thoughts.

So, I am in seminary and I'm studying Greek and Hebrew (at the same time) and the other day I was thinking of how interesting it is studying new languages.  While many of the main concepts are the same, other details are different.  For example, Greek is practically defined/recognized by cases (nominative, genitive, vocative, etc) whereas Hebrew doesn't have them (per se).  

The thing I was thinking about recently involves the definite article "the."  In Hebrew, this is shown with a specific prefixed letter.  Our professor has taught us that if the prefix is there you can translate it "the" but if it is not there you can't and it has to be translated "a."  This has pretty serious implications sometimes when translating from Scripture.  (Is it "a god" or "the god"..etc etc)

However, in Greek, I have been given the impression that, in translation, whatever fits is how you translate it.  There are some obvious cases, but otherwise it is up for interpretation.  There isn't really anything specific to show it one way or the other like there is in Hebrew.  

I am wondering how much of this is just because I'm at an "elementary" level of learning grammar.  Obviously, if I were a scholar translator and I was actually translating Scripture into something being published then I would have to know more details.  But it was an interesting comparison for me to make.

Okay, thats all for now I think.  It was a little difficult explaining my thoughts without being able to type the actual Greek/Hebrew letters/words....but hopefully my attempts are successful.

Until the next time I hack in here.

Peach out.

two two two in a row

I was talking with some folks about documentary films. My friend was talking about this tight rope walker. The topic of passion came up. This tight rope walker was so full of passion, so tangible that could be cut with a knife. Then we talked about the Grizzly Man, a man who was extremely excited about bears. 

I felt like I hunger for something like the passion. I felt a hunger for greatness and the intensity of experience. 

I've thought, "how do experience something admirable like this?" 

It is an interesting thing how things look in a film verses what they are to really experience. For example I might see a film about biblical scholars who made amazing discoveries that lead to an unparalleled translation. Then I think, " Wow that is cool I should study Greek and Hebrew too." But then when I try to learn it doesn't seem cool.

The thing is I want to be on the cutting edge and making breakthroughs. Maybe the difference is that the people who make the breakthroughs don't do what they do with the purpose of making a breakthrough. Perhaps they merely love what they are good at and keep at it when they don't love it.

I'm not sure.

What is going on?

Just think about it. I am reading a book called Just How Married Do You Want To Be: Exploring oneness in marriage. It is very interesting.  

 When I hear some people talk (especially when I hear culture talk) about marriage I have such a strong negative emotional response. I tend to feel alone, fearful, anxious, angry. I have wondered if there was something wrong with my emotions, and there might be. But as I have been exploring the ideas in this book I have felt something more along the lines of hope, peace, excitement, belonging. Which makes me wonder if there is something legitimately causing my emotions, something that I should be having a problem with.

One interesting thing addressed in my readings is the notion of the husband being a head and the wife being a body, connected to each other, and the comparison of Christ being the head connected to the church body.

I had an idea about this metaphor. There are these friends that I have that I have fond feelings toward.  I just had this weird impression of, "I like them enough to make a formal commitment akin to marrying them."

Then I thought, "Wait a minute I am married with them to God. They are my brother and sister "wife" to God." I know, this is an odd notion of God the polygamist, who has every believer as his wife. The point is to ask the question, "What would it be like if I acted toward God like I act toward my wife, that is if I sought to be one with Him? Also, what would I act like if I treated believers as my fellow spouse or as Christ's wife? How kind am I to my friend's spouse? How much more kind should I be to Christ's wife?" 

a joke i think

why did the pasta go running to its mother? because it was so Alfredo