move over

is the spell finally broken? are blacks shaking off the dust that makes them more likely to blend in with the terrorists than be considered for high power jobs? i know that racism is considered to be abolished, and i know it will be for my kids. but recently i've seen the the color of the thumb that's clogging the entry way for all minorities. and now, through the footsteps of obama and other black leaders, i think we're finally crawling out from the drain.

grad school? maybe?

i can't believe i'm still in school. actually i can. but why can't i be done already? *sigh... next up, boston u. cross yo' fingers

from the window

I saw two fences flush against each other. A rusted wire, red with age and blue from a time when it was new. And a jagged edged wood, picket and proud as they come.

Life is a texture. Every day I touch it I feel something different.

Twisted

When trees are hit by lightning they are never struck straight down from top to bottom. Rather the lightning wraps itself in a coil around the tree, cutting long rivets right through the bark all up and down its trunk. The tree is stripped bare. If the tree survives, it continues to grow upwards into its lightning made spiral; it’s trunk, frozen in a warped suspension for the rest of its life. Honestly, it looks as if a God-like hand wrung the thing out and stuck it back into the earth to finish its life. Imagine, a whole forest of these warped and twisted trees. What a sight that would be.

The Written Condition

When I was in Kenya my friend, Brenda, told me that I had too many emotions. That phrase has stuck with me for quite some time. I never paid much mind to my inability to harness my emotions till of late when I realized that my adolescence is over. Really, I’m no longer a teenager but my emotions, like rapid fire, are constantly changing faster than any mood ring could signify. So, as luck would have it, in finding out what it is to be an adult I’m discovering that I am way too emotional! And I’m finding that to live in this world as a student, as a young professional, as a social being, and as a writer, I have to be a bit schizo to enjoy the normality’s of life with which a person who has been averagely endowed with emotions would live. This means putting a preconditioned block on the depths with which my soul tries to understand each and every situation I encounter during the day. Simultaneously, I need to feed the flame of my dream like state to relieve the emotions that roar within me. I’m forming a split between the life I live every day and my dream world of writing. Both personalities are within me, feeding off of the same stream of Self. In a complicated way, both my natural self and my logical self are being cut in two, like a log hammered through by the wedge of an axe. In this split, I have not one conscious but two conscious’. I’m not living one life but two lives—life in the real and life intangible.

on love

We young adults are creeping up on the climax of life, aren’t we? We are peeling off our layer of adolescence to the new, soft skins of adulthood. We are filled with the wonder of what marriage will be like, of what having sex with the same person who helps to pay bills will feel like. Our eyes are wide open to life beyond college. And honestly, the view from this ethereal climate has got my heart sinking faster than I can graduate.
But God has given us a scapegoat on even this. All the evils of this world, the lost siblings, the violence on the news, the shallow moral standards our society seems to support, can all be blocked out by viewing the world in the same naïve perspective as a child.
As children we were, in simple terms, stupid with the spoon fed reality painted for us by our parents, cartoons, and teachers. The world was crisp and fresh, like an unopened Christmas present. It’s just too bad that once we hit our twenties, the whole brilliance of the shiny new world we had set out to conquer after high school turned out to be a piece of coal rather than a shiny new bicycle. Our parents made it look so easy, so wonderful. Now, here I sit, months before my college graduation and I wonder what this “shiny new” world has to offer me. Bush has gone and run the whole of the economy through the mud. How am I as an artist, a writer, a musician, going to fit into this trash can of a mess? When thinking of my future I get the image of me walking up to strangers with a tin can asking, “do you wanna hear me sing?” Pathetic really….
Regardless how dire the situation may appear, I think God made an escape clause even for those of us budding into adult hood. Because really, how could a child want to grow up into anything if it really new what this world had to offer? And there is no denying that God wants us to be like children. In asking us to believe like children God made love to be this infamous clause—the clause that can pull the wool over our eyes. The clause that can make my college debt look manageable instead of setting me off on a suicidal rampage immediately after I’ve taken off my cap and gown.
Falling in love is what got my parents through the first years of post college poverty. They had kids, they had debts, they were fighting cancer and saving the orphans in Africa, all the while they had each other. Love… not just love, but romantic love, has the capability to allow us to feel and think and know the world as innocent children do. With romantic love we are willing to walk into the greedy jungle that is this earth, every day of our lives, and mine a bit of its goodness and bring it back home. Because home is where the heart is. Home is where the love is.
And I ask, “God, where is my romantic love, now that the naïve veil with which I held this world in so much affection has now fallen from my eyes? Ecclesiastes 4:9 says, “Two are better than one, because they have a good return for their labor: if they fall down, they can help each other up. But pity those who fall and have no one to help them up!”
Usually I would take the matter into my own hands, go out and find me a man. But I’m trying this thing where I pray and ask for guidance before I make any irrational and emotion based decisions. Solomon says about three or four times in the Song of Songs, “do not arouse or awaken love until it desires.” Melissa Otto sings a song with the same lyrics, “don’t awaken love till it desires, God’s more than enough.” And so I trust, that if God can put all of those road signs in my life telling me to wait it out and that the good stuff is yet to come, well then heck, I’m going to have faith and hold him to his promise! He’s going to come through for me in a mighty way.

bicycle high

Last semester I went through a huge burnout. Coming back to AU after a long summer of healing I thought that I had wiped away all residue of my burnout. But when I got back to school anxiety still nestled tightly between my shoulder blades, the loneliness, and self deprecating thoughts came back to me in my afternoons. But I couldn't forget all of the good I had been taught over the summer. For one, I had learned that depression and loneliness were part of the deception of sin. I had to remember what dire straights God had pulled me out of over the summer. It was only then that I could depend on the assurance that I wouldn't fall back into the pits that had caused me to stumble before. Because I had stopped driving my life and I had given the wheel to God. So, knowing that God was in control and that life was full of unexpected happenings, I stopped worrying about the future. It was amazing the turn around I experienced. I can honestly say that this afternoon, while riding my bike in the early fall weather, that I felt completely free from all the pain and confusion that desiccated my life last semester. I was flying high on Christ, on life, and knowing that He is in control of everything. An unparalleled bliss.

Grill Igloo Cheatham

Oh GoSH! If you want something interesting to read. Read THIS. Especially since I've only just learned of Anne Lamott from my Approaches to Writing class. I've fallen in love with the assigned reading she wrote called "Bird by Bird." Anyway, read the article. It's a good one.

the climax of life

We young adults are creeping up on the climax of life, aren’t we? We are peeling off our layer of adolescence to the new, soft skins of adulthood. We are filled with the wonder of what marriage will be like, of what having sex with the same person who helps to pay bills will feel like. Our eyes are wide open to life beyond college.
But after the climax, after we have settled into our grandly large or horribly small yearly incomes—after we’ve had a kid or two and managed to finally pay off our college debts—life will be a warm fall day instead of a bursting spring one. Because it is at the climax of our lives—when the hill we’ve been climbing our entire academic lives finally starts to level out—that the terrain of life is altered in a non expected way.
We will have conversations with friends who are dying from this or that. We will watch as our siblings who have somehow righted themselves from the waywardness of their youths fill up with one disease or one debt or one spouses horrible accident. And we will lament for them, for their crashing and burning world… but we will keep on. Because strangely enough life is summed up in these small grievances, but at the same time turns out to be much more impressive and worthy of our hope even after these mishaps. We will see worlds in other people, other things, in our children and the familiarity of how our houses squeak when we pad down the hall to the restroom. We will cradle the frailty of life in the crooks of our arms and shoulder burdens far too large for our backs and sometimes our wallets, just as they were too large for our parents’. And strangely enough, we will keep on keeping on.
And when we have turned over the graves of our parents, when we have become the elder in the lives of those around us, there will be no stopping the snowball effect of life. Life will push through our sickness, our age, our broken hips. Life will push through our rebellious children and dusty offices. Life will consume our resources and weedle into our joints to slow us down. Life will and will and will. And one day we simply won’t. How do we counteract something with so much absolution?
My bright conclusion is that the way to conquer the depression in the things we will discover about tomorrow is to simply love more of what we can’t control today.

shine light

Marianne Williamson said, "Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure." That's only a snippet of her famously quoted text called, "You Are a Child of God." But the depth of that statement grabbed me by the heart strings when I first read it. I remember when I was a youngster in private school. There were always career days in grade school. Most innocently we all thought that we could be Buzz Lightyear or Symba from the Lion King. We picked those guys because they did remarkable things. I remember wanting to be a super hero. I kind of still do, but unlike back then I don't really have a hero. We live in a day age where everyone has the power to be whoever they want to be. We can be published writers and show the world our opinions but signing up for blogs. Where have all the hero's gone? Like MLK and Langston Hughes. Like CS Lewis and JF Kennedy? This is a day and age where we can truly shine, where we can live our dreams, we just have to go out and get them. Maybe someday we can be the heros that we lack today. Maybe if we try hard enough our kids will have heros."It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be: You are a child of God." I took that quote by Marianne Williamson and pinned it to my night stand. I want to remember to to shine.

Falling Slowly

Obama said,
“There are a whole bunch of folks in small towns in Pennsylvania, in towns right here in Indiana, in my home town in Illinois, who are bitter. They are angry… So I said, well ya know, when you’re bitter, you turn to what you can count on. So people, ya know they vote about guns or they take comfort from their faith, and their family, and their community, and they get mad about illegal immigrants who are coming over to this country, or they get frustrated about how things are changing. That’s a natural response.”
But these traditions that get passed on from generation to generation are important, he said.
“People don’t feel like they're being listened to," Obama said. "And so they pray and they count on each other and they count on their families. You know this in your own lives. And what we need is a government that is actually paying attention, a government that is actually fighting for working people day in and day out, making sure that we are trying to allow them to live out the American dream.”

We are bitter. Kenyans are bitter too. What are we to do about it? Should we just not have an opinion? Maybe if it's eating you up it's better to be neutral. We cling. We cling We clingWecling to religion and guns... and food and Harry Potter.
I think I'm starting to understand that novel by Cormac Mcarthy, "The Road." The world is a hopless place without someone to love in it.

"Take this sinking boat and point it home We've still got time Raise your hopeful voice you had a choice You've made it now Falling slowly sing your melody I'll sing along "-Glen Hansard

(I know. It's random)

Dreams in the Mirror

Ever had someone tell you you have to many emotions? Well someone told me and... I agree with them. I do have to many dang emotions. I need to think less and do more. Which is why I think I would rather go here than here. I'm hoping that these extra emotions will make for a better writer.
What's all this about? It's all a wicked plan I conjured up in my bed last night. Further investigation is needed, but the thought of living in Chicago rather than Berrien Springs... um, no contest! We will see... I won't get my hopes up just yet.

Dreams
Hold fast to dreams
For if dreams die
Life is a broekn-winged bird
That cannot fly.

Hold fast to dreams
For when dreams go
Life is a barren field
Frozen with snow.
--Langston Hughes

A Dream Deferred
What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore--
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over--
like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?
--Langston Hughes

can this please make more sense

it's this whole thing about self that has me confused. if you are not happy and you don't know how to be happy, do you do more for yourself or for other people?
i've been here at the caucus for 3 weeks now, and i feel useless. i spend a lot of my time on the internet or writing my devotional. i'm greatful for the time to write, but i flew halfway around the world for this? on my mother's dollar? i'm angry because i feel a bit taken advantage of. what i imagined this internship to be and what it has turned out to be were two very different things. is that my fault? have i tried to make the most of it? or am i ungrateful and selfish? where does this stuff weigh out? stuff like this used to make sense to me. now i can't see heads or tales of any one situation. the damn zebras' all mesh together.
i guess i have to try harder to put myself aside. i have to accept that i'm not here to heal. i'm here for mom, for christine, for whatever God has in store for me. no more pity parties. i have to try a little harder, stand a little taller. help out more, give of myself just as Christ gave of himself. God help me to see the black and white, cuz all i see is gray.

PIZZA!!

There are so many things I miss from home. Pizza is only one of them. Surprisingly there are no pizza and sub shops scattered at

every corner. What the heck to people eat here, you might ask? Oogali and greens. That's what they eat. And Chapati with beef.

Maybe some fish and chips. Roasted maze. Had enough of foreign food words?

Yes, well I'd had enough of foreign food.

SO! I devised a plan to make a pizza. Thing is there were some snags. Like we couldn't find pizza dough in the market so we had to improvize with biscuit batter. Hahaha. And... No tomatoe sauce, no spaghettie sauce. So I had to conjure up some Crystal Style Pizza Sauce. THEN! We didn't even have an oven. SO we put hot coles on a bowl and put the pizza on a pan under than bowl. About two hours later we had pizza! hahahahahhaaaa

Let me tell you it was the best frickin frackin pizza I've eaten in a long long time. *sigh... fragments of home.

save the trees and kill the children

Today looking out at Nairobi I see poverty. It's not that I didn't see it when I first arrived. I saw, I was just overwhelmed by everything else I was seeing. Although the city is pulling up the frame work for a great democratic country, there are so many holes to be filled. That's just what I see as an American. Yet these working ants know some things that we Americans don't know. They seem to value friendships and family in ways that we have yet to discover. Or if we did know we've cut the strings linking us to the network of emotions that allowed us to think first with our hearts and then with our wallets. I can't say we are in the wrong. Is it my fault that I come from a consumer state? What I value is different than what these humble workers value. What I do in my leisure time are things Nairobians deem frivolous. "Save the money for something else," they've told me time and time again.
But today on our twice daily drive to work I didn't see the swarms of people walking to work as an army of stick people. I didn't see them as cattle meandering to their next destination. I saw fellow men, fighting tooth and nail for their version of the American dream. The Kenyan dream. My only prayer for them is that they get it right. Is it wrong for me to look back at the US, and scoff at how we allow our dependence on the security in the promise of tomorrow to shape our moods. I never saw it before but looking at myself from Kenya I think I live a very disillusioned life. All my tears over spilt milk are suddenly irrelevant here... These people truly live as God asked them to. "Don't worry about tomorrow, you have enough to think about today." Even those considered "upper middle class" have one foot inside the slums. I shake my head at my ignorant folly. I'm ashamed. But then again, how can I avoid it?
So today I see poverty. I also see that the world is horribly unfair. As Casting Crowns put it, I don't think there will be a day when we don't "save the trees and kill the children."

nothing new is something new

A funny thing happened the other day. We were driving to work. you know the roads here are bad. Well in Nairobi they aren't so horrible. It's the drivers that are the crazy ones. So Peter is navigating his little red Toyota around matatu's (public transporation vans. Example to your left), cars pulling in front of him without signaling, and people walking in the middle of the road to hop into the still moving matatu's. All the sudden a biker swerves out of the way and we are coming up fast on a horse drawn cart loaded with vegetables. Except there's no horse (no horses in Kenya only something they call a ZeebDonk which is a mixed breed of half zebra half donkey. whatever anyway). Instead of a horse there is a skinny-as-sin man in floppy leather shoes and red pants that barely reach his ankles running up hill, clutching this two wheeled cart with the grip of death. he's running and behind there is another guy, equally as skinny in a half buttoned dress shirt pushing the vegetable cart from behind. The tales of his shirt flapping in the morning breeze. Peter slams on the breaks and casually whips the car into the right lane, cutting off a giant truck whose tale pipe is busy chugging black smoke at pedestrians walking on the median. I watch to my left as we speed past the two men and their veggie cart. The crazy thing is, none of this even registered as strange till about two minutes later. We were driving off the speedway onto the road leading to the Caucus when it struck me how nonchalantly I reacted to the traffic set up. Yes... in spite of all my cries for home I'm actually getting used to Kenya. Trash pits on the side of the road mean nothing to me. I think I'm starting to see past all the dirt and confusion. After nearly two weeks I see people, I see a civilization, I see a society thriving and flowing just like everything I've known in the US. Crazy right? I wonder what's next.

Badge of Honor

In this ever shrinking world the accent is a badge of honor. It says "yes I can participate in the universal currency of language, but when I go home I have a secret code common to only me and my countrymen."In my travels I have strained to hear past this badge of honor to hear traces of my native English more times than I can count. English comes in so many colorful influxes fashioned by so many lips, slung from the umlauts, diphthongs, and tongue clacking consonants that link the speaker back to all parts of the world.
Here I am proud to show my American accent. I walk up to a clerk and brandish my American English. Immediately the clerk knows I am traveling and my country is one of the wealthy ones. He knows Obama might be my next president. He knows I might not understand his vernacular, but save some repeated phrases communication is possible. And he knows that if no one is around to verify his lies he can screw me out of a couple hundred shillings (note: the exchange rate is 65 cents to 100 shillings). The theft is probably justified as vendor tax.
You come into a country and are immediately unarmed by your accent (sometimes your color), and you are forced to pay the tax of ignorance. You ask how much something costs or if the service is free. Your eyes say "tell me how this works, I'm new here." By your blank trusting look the vendor thinks, "I can see riches in my near future." Then he assures you that everything is fine. And if you can't spot a liar you will soon come to realize that the quiet ones are probably robbing you blind. The less they talk the more they are screwing you. I learned this about 2,000 shillings ago. But it's no skin off their nose. If it weren't for my damn "badge of honor" they wouldn't know my vast level of ignorance in the first place.

Carnivore!

Thursday night we went out to a restaurant on the edge of the Nairobi National Park called Carnivore. The name speaks for itself. The facilities are huge including over 300 person seating, in numerous open rooms, a landing leading out into the bare naked forests, and a disco dance room surrounded by more tables and chairs. In the center of this vast establishment is the grilling pit attended by 8-15 Cooke's and servers who randomly come and go.

While they are busy grilling whole carcasses waiters wonder in and around the pit with swords staked through ready grilled meats. This fleshy feast consists of any poachable beast under the African sun. Amongst Carnivore's finest delicacies are Ostrich meatballs, Gator steak, lamb, chicken, beef, pork... and a much more.

What happens is, you sit down at your table. Your server brings you your drink of choice, a plethora of sauces, salad, soup, and bread. Then and only then, the massacre is served. Guys dressed in stripped safari aprons haul a choice carcuss to your table on a sward and hack of the meat right onto your place. They continue to bring meat to your table until you've had your fill and are forced to surrender the little white flag on your table. AHhaha, what a beautiful finish. THEN they top off your meal with dessert and coffee. All of which is bundled into one tight price. I don't know how much cuz I didn't pay but I imagine it is expensive cuz the performance alone is worth a pretty penny.

Faith Despite the Negative

Today I actually broke down and checked my flight itinerary on BritishAirways.com. I came into the office in near tears. And when they finally broke free and poured down my face I thought I couldn't take the loneliness anymore. If my mother hadn't called offering gifts of support from family and friends at home the floodgate of tears would have happened so much sooner. I think it's all due to the fact that I've pissed away my second weekend in Kenya and still have no extravagant experiences to show for it. In short, I'm bored. I'm also not entirely healed from my semester of stress and pain. It's a good thing I brought my extra Bible to the office or I would have cried all afternoon. I was clicking through my flight details to figure out if I could leave early. I think I can deal with the loneliness, it's just the lack of adventure that is whittling away at my sanity. I realize that I'm sacrificing a lot for this Kenya trip and nothing seems to be coming of it. Nothing so far. God is bigger, I know, but when I think about it this trip puts me in the negative.
1. Because of my time here I won't get to go to Italy--not enough $ and not enough time (Italy was the BIGGEST reason why I wanted to go to the UK in the first place...)
2. It doesn't seem to be that Kenyans are in the proper financial state to purchase Cd's-- I need to pay for that brand spankin new laptop I got
3. I have an unquenchable desire to explore but my benefactors are so busy, there is little time to do anything but sit in the house.
Now, these are my issues and I need God to work them out. I just don't have the brain power or the strength.
One thing good that is coming of all this is that I am finding time and information to write my devotional. Waking up early and getting into the office is proving very lucrative for my thought process. And I finally found a place to run. Although it's a stretch to say that I will be ready for my marathon. *sigh... God is Bigger

Let those who have ears

I walked into the Kenyan equivalency of Wal*Mart to find a hair dryer. While browsing the isles of hair products and nick-knacks a familiar song began to play over the loud speaker. Before long I was unconsciously humming along to the tune of Kirk Franklin, “Without You.” And when the realization struck me that I was singing a Christ centered song in a public shopping center, I was struck dumb in song and stance. I even felt uncomfortable to be showing my love for God in front of so many others. It was both welcoming and shaming. I asked myself, “Does God belong here? How dare they bring Him into this common marketplace.” And then with the same passion I caught myself thinking, “how come we don’t play music like this in public in the US?” Honestly friends, when did we become as private with our God as we are with our love relationships? How dare we lock him out… Since when did I separate my worship from my daily life? It’s a disturbing thought, aye?