Being terribly, terribly decieved

So I’ve decided to create my own band.

Its going to transcend genre, but if one had to classify our style, I would call it post-Mongolian nihilist folk opera.

Here’s concept art for the first album. =)

I am impetus

“I am impetus”

Me choose?
No.
I am choice,
I am impetus and consequence.
When I was a child
I thought I was myself
When I was a child
I thought I was more powerful
Than the world
Though now I know.

I am seaweed in the tide
Of a haunting moon.
And seven devils too

At war and in love
At midnight and on Mondays
We are legion
Mongrel, and knotted flesh
And not superheroes
None rises above
A mutant race
The world
Is supersaturated with souls
And lives spray, drift, crash, shift
And the waves mock the lines
We’ve scratched into our maps
The boundaries
The ink blurs, runs, stains
And the pitched waste roars
We are never ourselves alone
And nothing is untouched
Nor free to be indivisible
But history was always a universal solvent
Before I knew so
I was solute
I am myself a bit
But millions inscribe my soul
The cemeteries are lies
We are the gravestones of our fathers
We are the prisoners
Of a dead moon hanging.

Timothy and Mary, part one

If there’s one thing that I’ve learned this summer, it’s a deeper appreciation for the difficulty of translating ideals into reality, plans into action, the exciting and imaginative conceptual into imperfect and everyday concrete.

I think of the lines T.S. Eliot penned in “The Hollow Men,” chilling but all-too-true:

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow

And so I’ve been reflecting on the last two months, trying to discern where the shadow fell, and why.

I think that my capacity to dream -to hope- is greater than my capacity to enact, greater than my capacity for the elements that form the foundation for action: persistence, patience, faith, sacrifice, love…

And I think that to some degree my hope itself has been mis-founded, resting more on an overconfident estimation of my own ability than on Christ’s ability to form me as his disciple, that process I so frequently resist, that life-long journey I wish could be done in a moment. One day there may be such a moment, a “twinkling of an eye” (1 Corinthians 15:51, 52), but that day is not now, and I remain myself, imperfect and needy for the outstretched arm, the loving rebuke, the spirit of the cross: that mundane, everyday sort of resurrection. In short, needy for the wiser guidance of real love amidst all my dreams of heroism.

Questions: Freedom, Meaning, and Facing Failure

I want to live life well.

And my hope is in the living God, whose will is to teach me how to live well.

Yet, still, it is so difficult.

At college I’m able to just go with the program. There are classes, events, and clubs already established, scheduled, in motion. And so, while I did have some “free time” to figure out what to do with, for the most part my life there is a matter of participating in the larger life of the campus.

Then summer began, I came home, and found myself waiting for my job to start, with weeks and weeks free. There is emptiness, open space. And it is in this emptiness that I can no longer avoid the fundamental life questions I’ve been shoving in drawers and under the bed all year. “What do you want to do with your life?” becomes not a question for the distant future but rather one that is quite explicitly needing to be answered today.

“What do I want to do with my life?