This week has been exciting in my genealogy research. This has been my hobby for the last 15 years or so. When my dad passed away, all of the knowledge of his side of the family died with him. It has been a long quest to find out what I know. One thing I learned years ago was that my dad was the child from his mother’s second marriage. She had two children from her first marriage. This means dad had a half-sister and half-brother out there somewhere… and I have a half- aunt and uncle and probably cousins…. but all my years of searching have been fruitless, and believe me, I’ve tried and either found the wrong person with the same name as my aunt or my inquiries were ignored or landed in a dead-letter office. We’ll early this last week I was at the local library using their subscription to Ancestry.com and was doing some additional searches and found some new entries on birth records in Minnesota to a mother with the same name as my aunt. And I knew she had lived in Minnesota for some time… so I took the names of her tow boys and tried to do some additional searches. Looked promising… but then out of curiosity I found both the names of both brothers on Facebook and they were listed in each other’s friend list. So this HAD to be them. A few facebook messages with the younger brother (my cousin) later and I have my aunt’s email address. Yay! She answered my email with a “Hallelujah!” because she apparently loved her little brother (my dad) a lot. She had no idea that he had died 20 years ago and was sad about that, but we had a great conversation with lots of memories to share with each other. She lives in Utah now and is a really warm lovely person and I quickly felt like I had really found family. She oldest son lives in the Denver area so the younger son in Indiana and we’ve agreed to meet up sometime in Denver. Not only is this personally meaningful, but it will help me fill in so much of the family story that I am writing for my kids. The background, people and incidents that shaped the lives of my paternal grandparents is very vague. My aunt can help fill in many of these details for my narrative.

I am a 100% wholehearted family man. I love being a dad. I love being a husband. I am a better person because of it all. I need to be connected to my family… Yet I am also plagued with wanderlust and if it were not for my sensible, level-headed wife, I would probably have bought an old RV or a bus and taken off long ago and dragged my family to God-knows-where. I have this terrible free spirit thing that brings me to a point in my endeavors that I want to quit it all and do something completely opposite.

A mere year or two ago I was designing international computer network infrastructures for a global corporate enterprise over which I deployed high definition video conferencing on wall-sized plasma screens and jetted about coordinating installations all over the world. It was fun… yet I sometimes wanted to quit it all and just paint, or whittle away on my poetry and live outdoors. Sometimes I would go to the store and I’d look at the cashier and envy their job. Sure, it paid less, but the routine seemed so comforting, the familiarity, the relative predictability sounded refreshing compared to my constant high-demand frenzy of throwing myself into problem after challenge that I had no idea how to solve going into them. That is why they liked me. I was the guy who’d bang his head on the wall until a solution was figured out. Sometimes that creative process was way cool and lots of fun, but a lot of the time I got tired of flying by the seat of my pants. Somehow it always worked out, but sustained high-pressure technical creativity can wear you down too. I know the working-class folks I envied had a less-than-ideal existence too. It’s all relative, right? I’ve paid my dues as a shift-worker and laborer. I know what I am talking about. And now… I’m getting what I wished for in some way. I’m unemployed now. And although I’ve had to go through some withdrawals after weaning off the breast of the corporate world, I’m breathing nicely now and really enjoying being with my family and being forced to apply my time to ideas of enterprise. I tell you honestly, I would have bought an RV already. Who knows, maybe we still will. The wife is not opposed. She is just smarter with money and less impulsive than I.

I’ve always had this pendulous tendency in my interests and passions. I get really excited about something and start taking it to the extreme, and then I reach a saturation point and revolt against it and go the opposite way. My wife knows this about me. Keeping centered is a very important discipline for me. Euphoric enthusiasm and drive followed by doubting and curtailing and depression. That’s me sometimes. It’s kind of funny to me that I was always the one with the level head at the workplace when everything seemed to be going down in flames. Strange how that works.

I keep applying for jobs and I’m somehow not excited to work in the corporate world again. Something draws me to it, though… the money, the familiarity somehow, the illusion of security you have chiseling away your paychecks, 401K and whatever there in your office/cubicle, waiting for 5 o’clock and the weekend to come. Wait a minute… nevermind. I don’t miss any of that. The money, sure. But you simply trade one kind of riches for another. I think I like the ones I have right now. I’m not saying that I won’t go work somewhere again. I don’t really know. One day at a time. But if an international position opens up, I’m jumping at it. Or else desperation will drive us to an RV lifeboat. Either way I’m looking forward to what’s going to happen. We’re ready for something radical.

I’m embarrassed to say that I’m struggling with having seen art and having been around artists lately. Years ago I was in the middle of a large painting… and somehow this nagging feeling inside me kept telling me that I can’t continue making art and that art is not my destiny or my path because I am not “called’ to make a name for myself. And that is what I had been doing. Or at least that was a big part of what I liked about it. For years I had been creating art for its affect on people, and indirectly it would develop this ‘air’ about me being this artist or profound expressionist of some sort. I had this little clutch of fans and people would ask me to design art for their guitars and tattoos and all sorts of funny things. But I was in the middle of this big almost mural size painting and something just soured in me about it. I was really excited about the piece. That wasn’t the problem. But somehow it felt low and dirty of me. Like I would regret chasing the artist’s life when I was old and dying. So I boxed up all my paints and threw sheets over my canvasses and….

This is where I am stuck. The thing that was different about my relationship with art in the beginning, say, high school years and some time after was that art felt legitimate in its own right. Anything went. No rules. Just creativity. The relationship to art changed after I came to God and gave my life to Christ. The big change there was that I had previously given myself to art and to, well, myself through art. But after encountering my Creator and lover of my soul, I felt a transition to live my all for Him. And that meant that I would not live for art for art’s sake or for self through the vehicle of art. So as I approached my painting again I felt a renewed sense of purpose in the beginning, to use the language of visual art to communicate these realities that I was experiencing about the nature of being and struggle of conscience, the discovery of eternal beauty and the battle between good and evil. These themes were right there on the tip of my pencil and paintbrush and I could imagine canvasses filled with these explosive narratives.

Creating art was something that my Dad encouraged. I met him when I was 15 years old. He had just come back to town after spending many years abroad finding himself, I guess. He came back for one reason: Me. I can’t explain how meaningful that is to me now. He died a few years later when I was 18. But in that few years he equipped the entire basement of his rented house with paints, canvasses, brushes, plaster, latex molding material, gessoes, airbrushes and everything he could afford to create a space for us to commune with each other and the act of creation. This studio evolved into a dedicated rented space near the local library that became a gallery of our work up front and a workshop studio in back. We got inspections and permits and finally a grand opening with fanfare and martinis. That little art house became a hang out for me and my friends. Dad and I cranked out art including a few mutual pieces which have since been woefully lost. The studio was not making money of course so we eventually folded it up but still set up studio space in his new apartment. I moved in next door to him (my first solo place) and kept the art flame alive. When he died of AIDS less than a year later, my immediate artistic ventures were dark and epic fugues filled with black and red and intricate dragons belching out in agony. I dropped out of school and into heavy drug use. But at the apogee of it all I bumped into a little pearl called conscience. And it pointed me to Jesus. The wind was low and I felt His hand, and joy began, and there was meaning. Meaning where there had been no meaning. And with it a power touched me and a desire to serve Him and spread that meaning.

But here I was with my big board covered in gesso and graphite smudges. My colors were going on magnificently. But there was this feeling that I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t do it like I had done before. It had always been about me. And was I going to take these profound things I had been experiencing from my contemplative life with God and put my stamp of ownership on them and take credit. I knew it wasn’t about me. Yet I already begun developing some admirers who wouldn’t see it any other way. And frankly, some part of me liked taking the credit. But in my conscience I knew I was, in essense, stealing.

I’m not my own. I’m bought with a price. A very dear, precious price that means everything to me. It is not a question of aesthetics to me. For me, just making things pretty or elegant is more of a craft. Art is communication. Art is the presentation of a costly essence. Like expressing oils out of organic matter… there is pressure… there is a sort of bleeding that comes with expressing that something.

We are taught crafts as children that we can then experiment with to create art. I tooled around with various craft my entire childhood but I remember my first struggle of expression in my first year of high school. I was sitting in the library at lunch time in one of those private study cubicle things. I had a blank sheet of paper in front of me and I was agonizing. Not because I was trying to find inspiration, but I just felt angst… probably of a normal adolescent, growing pain sort of thing. But it was overwhelming me. I had to do something. I looked down at this blank sheet of paper and a motion just came to me as this surge of need came through me. Then more detail called out and I yeilded. A form here, and impression there… and yes… this is it. This is what I am feeling. It’s coming out. It was a violent image. Not something that I would frame or want to share necessarily. But I remember it vividly. I walked out of the library as if a 100 lb weight were lifted off my shoulders. I could breathe easier. For that afternoon at least, I was undeniably an artist.

So what happened later when I decided to turn away from my art? I remember a kind of grief that shadowed me for a few days. I remember realizing that art is not bad. It’s just that I had other things to do first. There was additional perspective I needed to obtain and that this was going to be a distraction on this journey… because of the attention I always got. I needed humility. I was young and NOT humble at all. Outwardly it looked like it, but I thirsted for attention too much. I realized that I could return to art someday, but I had to be strong enough to deny myself this for now.

What about now?

After 7 years of living away from this town, I’m back here in the same spaces where my Dad and I cruised his motorcycle around and discussed art. My kids are taking classes at the local arts center. When I peruse the galleries and talk with local artists here… I find myself so confused and lost. It’s been 20 years since my Dad passed away. My art has sat mostly dormant the whole time. I painted a very small handful of minor works on a recreational basis. What now? One of the resident artists at the center asked me in polite conversation “What do you do?” I told him that I was currently unemployed but that I work with computers. I’m an IT guy. I felt like I was talking about someone else. Who am I or what am I becoming?

My other childhood craft that became art was my writing. This is something I’ve been more consistent about because of its less public nature. Visual art has an immediacy to it. Writing is more discreet being laid out in journals and whatnot. And somehow as a person into God it fit better as a craft of soul and the unseen contemplative life. There is less “Look at me!” than is inherent in visual arts. I found a letter from my father to one of his writing penpals. He kept a number of them over the years, primarily academic-types in Asia. In a letter that he wrote to his friend Lin Ju-mei in China he described me as wanting to be a writer someday. He didn’t say that I was aspiring to be an artist. That’s interesting to me. We did art together a lot. But somehow the writing part stuck out to him. Maybe because it was something I identified with and talked about as being of more value to me. In retrospect it makes sense. The attention and support I got from a few people regarding my writing was of a lot more weight and seriousness than my drawings. I actually did more drawing than I ever did of writing. But the writing seemed to move people in a way that the drawings didn’t. The drawings and art projects frequently got compliments, but there was so much ambiguity in the interpretation of image and form. The accuity and sublime dance of meanings in the mind that you could paint with through the turn of phrase or metre of syllables was sastisfying. Wordsmithing was a delight.

But I love paint. And brushes. I love tiddling for hours, coloring and shading in my designs and watching them come to life. I love the smell of oils and thinners. But I also think this love is because I miss Dad. The smell of oil paints is his smell. And if I also put on some chamber music like Bach’s Brandenberg wedding music, I immediately get really sentimental. We used to play that stuff almost constantly when we worked. We also played a specific classic recording of Beethoven’s Emperor from the “Deutsche Grammophon” label. Whenever I hear any part of it, I am immediately transported to 1987, hunched over a piece, my hands mottled with blues. Dad nearby. ouch

SO I guess this is not so much of an identity crisis as a grieving. Grieving my Dad still after all these years. Not being an artist is like not having him around. And I guess that is why I feel pulled so strongly back to it sometimes. It’s not that I feel I can’t or shouldn’t paint now. That is not the issue so much any more. I’ll probably do that. The thing that was confusing is that with Dad it was a whole self-defining, world changing endeavor. My Dad wanted to be a right in the middle of the arts scene here. It was barely smoldering along at that time. Now it is getting some real momentum. The arts community here is very real and visible now. He’d love it. I guess that is what makes me want to jump in with both feet. I know that is what he would be doing and its something that we would do together…. maybe… if it was 1988. But I can’t bring him back by doing that. It will be a mirage. My home for now is here, with my words.

Strike One!

Homeschooling is most definitely on the radar.

Tonight I was reading Uncle Elephant by Arnold Lobel tonight to my girls.  I have always loved Lobel’s work.  As I was growing up I cherished Mouse Soup and read it probably hundreds of times by myself.   However, this was the first time I read Uncle Elephant.   Its a simple story with an unexpected undercurrent of emotion.   Lobel is brilliant.  I cried when I finished the last page.  A real work of art.   I know Arnold Lobel is a famous illustrator.  It’s hard to find a child’s book section without one of his titles there.   But not many people mention him.  Everyone knows Sendak.  Especially with the movie and everything.  His illustrations were somewhat muted in color too.  But Maurice Sendak is brilliant in a different way.  I never liked Where The Wild Things Are as a kid.   I had it and I felt I was supposed to like it because the grown-ups were always so eager to read it.  But to me the story was unsatisfying.  The direction of the book always left me wanting more Suessian fun.   Maybe I was a shallow child, I don’t know.   But Lobel was always different.  The pictures were simple and the colors were muted just like the endings.   They seemed believable and they tasted good.

I always sing songs to my girls as the last thing before goodnight kisses.   I sometimes sing 1927 Kansas City like I did tonight.  I heard it sung by a barroom piano player in Cripple Creek, Colorado when I was a kid, having gone to see the Imperial Players melodrama in the 1970s.  I’d sip my Roy Rogers with a cherry in it, smell the beer being poured around me and take in the sounds of performance complete with boisterous cheers, boos and hisses as the drama played out.  The piano player, Danny Griffith, played the intermission and he was spectacular.  He’d bring the house down.   1927 Kansas City is about a young couple that fall in love in the 1920’s and the lyrics are vignettes of their life until they are a “little old couple in love”.   One line says “It’s been 50 years since they met at the fair.  And he still brings her flowers in the morning.”   I remember singing that to myself as a kid and that line would put a lump in my throat.  It was one of the loveliest things I could imagine.   I knew, even at age 10, that this was the kind of old man in love that I was going to be some day.

I hate writing about writing.  Well, maybe I do like to do it, but then I read what I’ve written and it all sounds so obvious and pretentious and boring.   I am boring.  How’s that for truth in writing?    I’ve had a spell of self loathing these last few days.  I go through that sometimes.   I like to think we all do.  But whenever I ask how someone is doing they always say the same thing.    Fine.   Fortunately I have this awesome wife that helped snap me out of it.  Reminded me of all that is good and is actually going right.   So what if I don’t have a job, or a place of our own.   Or any clue as to what is going to happen.  So what if we’ve been in a state of this for over a year.   So what!   Everything is actually going fine.   Really.   I can’t explain it without talking about God.    Really.   And it sounds crazy and I’m going through a gauntlet of mini crises while I learn how to breathe underwater…  at least that is what it feels like sometimes  (been reading a lot of mermaid story books to my little girls at bedtime) .    Whenever I come up for air I seem to get in trouble because that is where I start worrying and acting all immature because I can’t have everything on my terms.  Not that I know what those terms are.  I guess I mean that I can’t go back to the familiar.    So I dive back into this faith state, which is relieving to do, and I’m frequently reminded of that dream I had after we felt moved to sell our house in Boulder.   I was in a jetliner and I was looking out of the window.   It seemed that we were descending.   And descending.   And I started to think, “Man, we are really going down fast.”   As I kept looking out the window the ground was coming up much faster than I ever had seen it before and I realized we were “going down.”  Everyone started to gasp and you could feel your stomach in your throat like you are falling.  The ground was expanding into view just as the moment before impact.  I just  thought, “Well this is IT.” and I put my head down and kind of curled into it with the full understanding that my life was ending.

And I woke up.   Pretty happy to be alive of course.

The first thing that entered my mind was that my aircraft or “vehicle” of life had been sustained by the machinery of the world.   But that I was entering a new state in which I would be required to keep the vehicle aloft, but with faith this time.   No messing around.  I am going to have to have the goods.  No just talking about it or discussing it with other pseudo-faithy people.   The aircraft will stay aloft by faith.    No going back.

I’m still figuring it out.  I mess it up some days.  Like today.  That is why I say I feel like I’m learning to breathe underwater.   It just doesn’t feel natural yet.  Well, not all the time anyway.  ’Self’ gets in the way still.    I need to trust in the “equipment” and relax.  I should try scuba diving.   Maybe we’ll visit Florida again and I’ll have to try that out.  I might learn something I need to know.

I watched the opening Olympic ceremonies in Vancouver tonight.  I wasn’t interested at first, but my wife made me feel guilty for not wanting to hang out with her on the couch.   Most years I’ve thought it was like one giant weird avant garde drug trip.  But this was pretty good.  Just when I thought I’d yawn, it would get pretty creative.  My favorite part though was the expressions on Wayne Gretzky’s face when the Olympic cauldron malfunctioned and wouldn’t appear.  And then he had to swap out the torch on the way to the second official cauldron because the flame was going out from holding it up in the rain.

I enjoy the Olympics mostly for all the personal biographies they give of the various athletes.   Their commitment, focus and hard work are really inspiring, and often against seemingly impossible odds.    My heart really goes out to the family and team mates of 21-year-old Nodar Kumaritashvili, the Georgian who died this morning in training.  You could see the grief on the faces of the Georgian athletes when it was their turn to enter the stadium.

I’ve spent the last 13, almost 14 years plugged into email.  I don’t mean daily, but hourly, if not minute-by-minute.  As a technology professional it just came with the territory.  When I started as a desktop support guy back in the mid 90s, most of my support requests came through email and there was constant email dialog and conversations buzzing about between the various departments of the company where I worked.  That is what started it.   Then I telecommuted for a few years and that deepened the dependency further.  A few job jumps later and I found myself as an IT manager for several companies right when smart phones were going main stream and I was plugged into email almost every waking moment monitoring 24/7 server environments.  And people got used to my instant availability.   To keep it discreet I had my phone on vibrate most of the time.  If I happened to not have my phone with me for some reason, which was rare, I would still experience these phantom vibrations and constantly reach for my phone like a nervous tick and be disoriented when it was not there in my pocket.   Then last year I got an iPhone which made it slicker and easier to get sucked into the pretty little window.   It is like living your life on a little ship that is inside a bottle.

I’ve had enough.

Time to start sandbagging the flow of technology around me.  I believe it is eroding the banks of my soul.   I no longer believe that multi-tasking and effectiveness go together.  We’ve been duped.  The technology is amazing.   I’m not arguing that.  I’m not going to throw it all away and go live in a cave or some hyper-reactionary thing like that.  But I’m taking a step back.

My plan:   Email will not be lived in.  I will check it once in the afternoon around lunch time.  And again in the evening.  That goes for that Facebook too.   That’s supplanting email for a lot of people.   I am also disabling the data plan on my iPhone.  It’s wifi enabled and I have wifi in the house and can get it free in a lot of places, but do I really need to pay the extra $30 a month right now while I’m “unemployed”?  No.  Especially since there is no 3G here yet.  I’m like a caveman using Edge.  I might as well run some coax and token ring. (Oops, I’m letting my geek roots show.)   And I will turn off the tone that informs me of new email.   Texting I’ll keep for now.   Even my mom uses that to contact me for time-sensitive instant message type things and meeting up with people.  And I’ll still blog because it helps me.    But Twitter…. I don’t know.  That’s a weird beastie and tied to my Facebook.  I can’t treat too many ailments at once.    It’s probably next.  Yeah, its’ definitely next.

What do I hope to gain from this?   Some degree of clarity.   Ever gone on a media or technology fast?  I mean long enough to last through withdrawals and end up with a different view on the world?   It’s a cool thing.    I just have this nagging feeling that I’ve lived in a haze of semi-distraction, being plugged into e-communication like some junkie.   I’ve taken some time to reflect on the real ROI of my time and energy being applied in that way and I’m no longer convinced it is healthy on many levels.   The “news” and entertainment media is something I’ve already benefited from taking big steps away from.  You don’t realize how your soul actually breathes until you detox from the things choking it for so long.   This week became clear that I need to do this with email too.   An overload of e-communication and information blurs the lines between the urgent and important.   Life is so much broader and richer than the filtered, clunky existence in text and pixels and mass quantities of information potato-chip junk food.   Time to go on a diet.  No…  not a diet. Those don’t work.   A lifestyle change.

I’ve recently recommitted myself to keeping this blog active.  I know it’s a phase, but if you look at the archives…  I have them since 2003.  Some seasons I fall silent but I always come back to it.  I’ve reached kind of a plateau and feel pretty even about it.  More so than I used to.  But this time it feels kinda lonely.  It seems that the “blogosphere” is not what it once was with its comradarie and novelty.  There was a comfortable habit about checking your friend’s blogs and using it as a way to lay out larger ideas for relational fodder.   But most of the old bloggers I connected with, and there weren’t that many of them, have fallen relatively silent.  They are growing up I guess.  Blogging, now that its not a smug little subculture anymore, is so much a business tool.   If someone comments on one of my posts and I don’t know who it is, I can be sure that they are including a link to their commercial site peppered with Google Ads.  Blogging is now considered a business communication tool.  That market side of it kills it.  Mix money into anything and its screwed.  I remember going out for coffee with this young guy a number of years ago who was a foreign policy student.  He had this very active, smart blog about foreign policy issues.  It was a totally different vibe.  He cared about those issues and his blog… but it was about figuring out how to make money out of it.   All the modern content management tools I’ve learned like Drupal or Joomla all have blogging modules as part of the suite of business tools.

And then there are the has-beens like me.  Blogging to myself mostly.  I once read that to be a writer you have to have a certain degree of arrogance to believe that what you have to say is important enough to persist through the agonizing process of writing.   I guess my disease is something worse, because I don’t think I have anything particularly meaningful to say.   I mean, sometimes I do.  We all do.  And if my blogging intersects with one of those moments, great.  But making that happen is not my goal.  It used to be, I think.  I just couldn’t quite hit it very often.  I got too concerned with coming off right, or smart, or in creating something beautiful.  And it really was frustrating.  I’m a terrible shot.  I’m not even that great of a writer.  But I can technically say I am a writer.  Not because I’m good at it, make money at it, or am working on “my book” or whatever.  But simply because I do it a lot.  This blog is one avenue.  My academics that I am pushing through is another.  And then my own projects and poetry that I keep chipping at.   That’s about all I should say.  Hemingway and others did say that if you talk about it too much you lose it.

That said, blogging just isn’t what it used to be.  Or maybe my relationships are not with bloggers anymore.  Never idealize the past, right?  It was beautiful and crappy in its own right.   The golden age lies ahead.

Blogging is dead!  Long live blogging!