on http://www.commarts.com/column/stop-calling-yourself-creative
One of my favorite quotes from this interview:
“One does not master skills. Skills allow one to interpret the world. There is an energy that flows throughout life, and skills help you understand that energy. So, I have no desire to master anything. I wish to experience it with wonder.” -Amos Paul Kennedy, Jr.
on “The things which are most important don’t always scream the loudest.” —Bob Hawke
on “To do two things at once is to do neither.” —Publilius Syrus
on “When everything feels urgent and important, everything seems equal. We become active and busy, but this doesn’t actually move us any closer to success. Activity is often unrelated to productivity, and busyness rarely takes care of business.”
from The ONE Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results
by Gary Keller, Jay Papasan
on “We are kept from our goal, not by obstacles but by a clear path to a lesser goal.” —Robert Brault
from The ONE Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results
by Gary Keller, Jay Papasan
on “Multitasking is merely the opportunity to screw up more than one thing at a time.” —Steve Uzzell
from The ONE Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results
by Gary Keller, Jay Papasan
on “Those who can’t change their minds can’t change anything.”
-George Bernard Shaw (Irish playwright and a co-founder of the London School of Economics)
on On father’s day, we sang a hymn at church entitled “Loving Spirit” written by New Zealand hymn writer Shirley Erena Murray (b.1931), set to one of my favorite tunes, RESTORATION*, from Walker’s Southern Harmony of 1835.
Full disclosure — I picked this hymn (as the music director of our church). I should also add that I’m not a fan of letting secular holidays or observances horn in on the worship of the church. In my view, Worship isn’t about Mother’s Day, Veteran’s Day, etc. But that’s not what this post is about. It just so happens that this hymn uses father imagery (as well as mother, friend, and lover imagery) to explore the nature of the Holy Spirit. But it did seem particularly poignant to me as I stood in the pew with Ann and our two boys on Father’s Day, that this hymn included this line:
“Like a father you protect me, teach me the discerning eye, hoist me up upon your shoulder, let me see the world from high.”
It caught my attention for a number of reasons– the joy and responsibility that comes with being a parent, that parents are called to protect and to teach. But what really moved me was this idea of helping our children (as well as God helping us as God’s children) to see the world in a different way, from a larger, higher-altitude perspective than a child could on his or her own. The image of hoisting up on our shoulders is beautiful. It also made me sad to think of all the times when Max (our now six year old) has asked me to put him on my shoulders and I’ve said, “you’re too heavy” or “it’ll hurt my back” or “we’re too busy for that right now.” I’m going home after work today and putting him on my shoulders just because I can and to think about what such an act means. I’m also thinking about what such an act looks like with our oldest, Carter (now eleven and almost as tall as me!)– perhaps more figuratively than literally! This act is not just about the mechanics of one person sitting on top of another person’s shoulders. It’s about connecting, doing for others, of partnership, of being a servant, of lifting up another, of sharing an experience and view of life.
*Here’s a link to an organ arrangement of the tune by Herbert Colvin, who was my music theory professor during my undergrad.
on This is an excerpt from the confession and absolution during a recent Lenten service at my church, St. Matthew Lutheran, that was particularly meaningful to me:
Pastor: Talk is cheap. There is an enormous gulf between a word said and a deed done. We know too well the pain of broken promises and the hurt caused by empty assurances. People have failed us. But we know that we also struggle to keep our word. We have caused and continue to cause our own hurt and pain. We have failed others. We have failed God.
Congregation: Lord God, I have not been faithful. I have made promises that I could not keep. I have spoken a word of agreement and then forgotten to uphold it. I have given assurances and then failed to follow through. I have committed and then changed my mind when it became difficult. Forgive me for my empty words. Forgive me for my broken promises. Forgive me for being faithless.
Pastor: When we are faithless, He remains faithful…
on Today I worked with Jann Cosart and her Medieval music history course to facilitate the exploration of Baylor’s Medieval music manuscript collection (the Jennings Collection). It’s always a joy helping introduce students to these amazing artifacts, dating from the 11th to the 16th centuries. It’s hard to get their heads (and mine too!) around the idea that we’re looking at a document that’s nearly 1,000 years old.
For whatever reason, sleep slipped out of my grasp about 4am this morning and no matter how much or how long I tried, I couldn’t go back to sleep. Instead I got up and relished the quiet, dark, drinking an unhurried cup of coffee and re-acquainting myself with a book I rediscovered on our bookshelves just yesterday but fondly remembered from fifteen or so years earlier. The book was Meditations On the Monk Who Dwells in Daily Life by Thomas Moore.
Two meditations caught my eye as I thought about meeting with the class today:
What is the difference between an illuminated manuscript created by a monk and a page freshly spewed out of a modern word processor? The computer page is eminently legible, quickly produced, perhaps beautiful, and created by the collaboration of human and machine. The illuminated page is beautiful, slowly produced, not terribly legible, and printed in solitude. The monk works with his hand, close to his ink, ready for a slip of the pen, meditating as he works. Is there a way to bring the spirit of the monk to the computer, and by extension to all our machine work, without making either an anachronism?
And one that was perfectly fitting for the day and the way it started:
Sometimes in their chanting, monks will land upon a note and sing it in florid fashion, one syllable of text for fifty notes of chant. Melisma, they call it. Living a melismatic life in imitation of plainchant, we may stop on an experience, a place, a person, or a memory and rhapsodize in imagination. Some like to meditate or contemplate melismatically, while others prefer to draw, build, paint, or dance whatever their eye has fallen upon. Living one point after another is one form of experience, and it can be emphatically productive. But stopping for melisma gives the soul its reason for being.