Exploring the Well

Wandering the savage garden...

Being Satisfied

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My first thought today, when I thought of writing, was about how dissatisfied I am with one of the simplest of things: my floor. I often sit on the floor to work and play, so it’s something that’s, well, always there.

Of course, the floor is always there regardless of whether you pay attention to it or not. (You’d… what? Float in space otherwise?) But I found myself thinking of it as a constant, and an irritant at that.

I’m not a fan of any flooring, I find. Stone floors are cold and hard; hardwood floors are warmer, but still hard; carpeted floors are softer, but that depends very much on the type of carpet and the padding underneath. I’m currently sitting on a shag carpet (I think?) — I’ve had a Berber carpet before, but that was less comfortable than this.

But this carpet isn’t especially comfortable either.

I don’t know if what I want is actually a sort of foam – like a Tempurpedic bed, I guess? But that seems ridiculous for a floor. When I think of it, I can’t help but see it as silly, laughable… and that’s exactly what it is. Maintaining such a floor would be a nightmare; walking on it would be exhausting. (Sleeping on it, though… but… that’s not what floors are for.)

The core focus for me, though, isn’t the floor. It’s my dissatisfaction with something that is, in the end, not negotiable; the floor will always be there, and as long as I like to sit on it for whatever reason, it’s going to be slightly uncomfortable.

The floor isn’t the problem. I am the problem. It’s my dissatisfaction with the floor, not the floor itself.

To be sure, my dissatisfaction is pretty mild – I’m not actually sitting here fuming about the floor. (I was sitting on it, and realized that I could write about the floor, and how I felt about it.)

But it got me thinking about other areas of dissatisfaction. I actually choose my level of dissatisfaction, largely based on my focus on things that shouldn’t really matter. Most of the things I’m not entirely happy with are things that I cannot control very well, and thus my dissatisfaction turns into a weight, a yoke.

I chain myself to problems with which there is no negotiation. That seems inefficient. In a lot of ways, it seems wrong.

God’s put me into a Creation that is marvelous beyond my ability to imagine; I see things almost every day that are amazing, even if they’re not understandable. (Why do people support Donald Trump? Or Hillary Clinton? Or Ted Cruz? Or Bernie Sanders? … but they do. And that’s amazing, even if I think it’s silly.)

It seems unfortunate to see even things like that as problems in the world that hurt my ability to appreciate the glory that God reveals on a regular basis. So maybe I can take my slight observation about floors and turn it into a decision to appreciate everything – including my floors – around me.

The Reach for Vocabulary

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One of the things I’ve been reading is Analog Days, about the invention and impact of the synthesizer, primarily as driven by Bob Moog (pronounced to rhyme with “rogue,” as it’s a Dutch name). It’s a good read, even if you’re not really into synthesizers much. (I am, so there’s a lot of fascinating history in it.)

One of the things that has come up many, many times in the book is the recounting of early synthesists in the need for a vocabulary. For example, think about how R2-D2 sounds – that sounds like a ‘droid talking, right?

Well… if you couldn’t use the word “‘droid,” how would you describe the sound?

Or imagine a starship flying by; because of movies like Star Wars – by the way, this is an example straight from the book, thank you, even though I’m writing it in my own words and in my own way – because of movies like Star Wars, we know what a spaceship sounds like as it flies by.

Actually, we get it wrong; space has no sound. So the “sound of a spaceship” is actually no sound at all… but because of the convenience and pervasiveness of movies, when we say “what does a spaceship sound like?,” something comes to mind. That’s our vocabulary.

So now, we have a massive socially-driven library of sounds. When we want a sound, we can at least say “It’s sort of like the ‘whoop, whoosh’ in this song, where it goes ‘bee boo bob-o-beep.'” That may not be the sound that we want, but it’s a starting point.

What other vocabularies exist? One of the things I was thinking about – in context, of course, because this is a Christian blog and I’d really like to keep it focused on “Christian” and less on “blog” – was the Christian vocabulary. We use words like “sin” and “redemption” and “sacrifice” and “good” … and we mean specific things by those words, usually, and I wonder sometimes if our vocabulary doesn’t get in the way of our goal.

We get caught up in a message of redemptive grace through faith to rescue us from sin, but … I was trying to think what a nonbeliever would think of all of that.

“Message” might be clear enough, but many Christians might also use “gospel,” which nonbelievers might not understand the same way Christians do.

There’s my non-editing in motion; as I thought about it, “gospel” was far better an example than “message.”

“Redemption” might make no sense at all for a nonbeliever – what is redemption without the accompanying concept of condemnation?

“Grace” usually means something to a Christian, one hopes – what does it mean to a nonbeliever?

What about “through faith,” as in “grace through faith?”

I don’t really have good answers for the differences in vocabulary. After all, I’m a Christian and have been for decades. But reading the book on synthesis got me thinking about the vocabulary, and I wanted to record the thought.

The Anchor of the Past

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It’s one of those days where I’m recognizing the value of writing as a habit, because I really, really don’t want to write, at all. It’s been a big day – great highs, and incredible lows. I’m still trying to process it all, and the thing that’s keeping me grounded is God.

I’m having to remind myself of the patterns we should follow through the day. They easily become rote and dry religion, but their true value is when they keep us afloat even when everything’s messed up around us.

Right now, everything’s messed up. Like I said, it’s been a triumphant day – and a difficult one, even in the height of victory.

It’s my own fault, too. The pain was lurking in the heart of success, and it was my own action that put it there; it was a random comment that set it loose. To the best I can tell, it wasn’t intentional, but it’s been severe, opening a wound that I thought had healed and scarred over.

So now I’m retreating, reminding myself that this is a storm that can and will pass, God willing, and that the routines I might otherwise despise for being empty ritual are also things that give us momentum and context.

I ask for forgiveness every day, which can easily become arrogance and ignorance… and when I need it, the beauty of the request shines through, breathing life into the dry bones.

Including my own dry bones. I don’t know how I’ll make it through this moment, but like I have done before, I will find a way, with God’s help and guidance, to healing. I know it won’t be easy; it’s redemption I seek, not simple forgiveness, and not an excuse.

That’s not to say that I don’t need to pray further about it. I try to be accountable in everything I do, because I don’t want an accusation to have legs; I want it to be obvious that the Accuser lies. And I resent the accusations, when the truth is told; “I am wronged,” I say to myself.

And I guess to some degree, I am wronged. The accusation is, in this case, not accurate. But that doesn’t mean that other accusations were also inaccurate – that’s why I know this is simply the long-buried fruit of sin from long ago. This is a burden I should bear, not one I should avoid, regardless of whether I wanted to avoid it or not.

In the end, it’ll be okay; I’ll endure, somehow, and with God’s help everything will be okay, and stronger than it was. Here’s hoping.

I realize that I haven’t actually written five hundred words, even though this is today’s “five hundred word” entry – I’m trying, but I’m really struggling right now.

What does it mean?

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A few days ago, I wrote a series of vignettes, in an attempt to try to represent my actual internal thought process/representational framework of thought – something I’d call a “paradigm,” but I don’t know if that’s the right word or not.

Basically, I wanted to take the way I think – a lattice – and try to write from that point of view, without translating it into a linear progression. I wanted to write the thought down, as I thought of it, more or less.

I can’t actually write it how I think it – it’s a flash of concepts, not vignettes. A boy, a raccoon; the vignette grows out of the correlation of the thoughts, and doesn’t serve as the thoughts themselves. If I were to write it, it would be a series of just words, largely unrelated.

They’re not actually unrelated, though.

That’s the thing about truth – it’s actually one vignette, one lattice of thought. It’s presented as a series of unrelated concepts: a boy and the raccoons that don’t know that the boy has claimed them; the girl with poor tools; the dog that feared airplanes; the grass that saw them all and did not care; the title of the post.

All contribute to the overall wave that the piece creates, and they’re all part of the piece. I wanted to write something true about truth, as I see it internally.

It’s not everything about truth; truth as a concept is greater than what I’d written (both to me and to the world, hopefully). Truth was presented as an absolute concept, in a set of subjective (and faintly maudlin) vignettes that tried to draw a shadow of what truth might be for a moment.

As such, I’m quite proud of it. I don’t think it’s great, per se – I can’t see it taking over the Internet – but it’s closer than I’ve gotten in a while. Even when I journal, I try to keep it somewhat linear, because I want to be able to go back and use what I’ve written. The way “Truth” is written, it’s a one-way trip; if I record the heartstone memories in my head in a journal, I’d be able to recall the framework of that moment, how I felt, but not necessarily why.

Plus, I’m used to trying to translate my thoughts into linear “this, then that” form, because I used to write for a daily audience. I have kids; I have to teach them, too. Everything around me is linear; abandoning that construction mode violates my own habit of trying to translate things so the people around me can use them.

But I’m still quite proud of it; I think I learned something through the writing.

First, that I could do it – on two levels. One level was the simple fact of writing, because I was tired and not feeling very well; I didn’t want to write, so writing was a “win.” The other level was that I was able to write in something approximating my internal mode of thought, which I don’t do very often (as I’ve described.)

The other was that I think I saw something of how I see truth in what I wrote. Hopefully it’s there for someone else, too.