"It's going to be a beautiful day" and other wonders of the western world

This is my second blog in two days!  Don't get too excited :)  Besides, I'm sure I'll make up for it by not blogging for another few months after this little spurt is over.  Anyway, wanted to share with you all a little free verse poem I just did.  There's a song in there somewhere, but for now:

“It’s going to be a beautiful day”

the hope of something not yet seen

but with quiet confidence I hold it

calmly, irrationally

with little fear of its running

it’s capnip’d cat, yet here I sit

you see, butterflies might entice it to leap

from me

to the lap of some new love

or, sadder still, away

and as the chrysalis splits,

I claim my life again

not the unperturbed balance

unwavering serenity

claimed by many, held by few

but the tension between passion

and control, that god of man

where life is “Yes!”

against not “no” but “perhaps”

that sink of dreams

you won’t take me down

It’s going to be a beautiful day.

The future

I'm sitting in the kitchen of my house.  Not really something special, except that today there's a for-sale sign in the front yard.  The funny thing is, I'm not quite sure why.  Sure, I know it was put there by a realtor, my realtor in fact.  And at my request.  But I'm still not sure why.  Let me explain:

My wife, Missy, and I have felt for about two years that we need to sell the house.  We were never sure exactly why, but somehow we felt like that was the thing to do.  We didn't try to sell it, of course, for various reasons, not the least of which was IT MADE NO SENSE!

Then,  year ago or so, I asked on a whim and was told I could work from the road.  As in, from a vehicle in which I would travel.  I then bought said vehicle.  Ok, it's a 15-year old school bus the state of Maryland no longer considers safe to transport school children, but it's ours.  We've ripped, gutted, and otherwise maimed this bus into, well, not much yet, but it's going to be a great little RV when we're done.

If we get done.  I've now the time to do the renovations, and enough cash put aside to make it happen (probably).  But I no longer have the obvious opportunity.  See, HR balked at my proposed working arrangements, and don't seem to be willing to budge.  I've looked into other jobs, but they're already pretty hard to find without the "oh, by the way, I want to work from an RV".  You should see the looks I get on that one.  And the whole music thing just isn't feeding my family yet.

But we're still selling the house.  Or renting it.  Maybe.  We've had one showing.  And we're under water.

And I'm not sure why it's on the market at all.  I've got no reason to sell it.  Except that we're supposed to.  And because Isaiah 30:21 keeps coming up.

Jack of all Trades

I can do a lot of things well.  I’m not trying to pat myself on the back, but it’s true.  I’ve placed in the top 25% in 5k’s and my only marathon.  I’ve won the C division of a local bike club race series.  I can pick up most instruments and make them sound passable; my guitar playing and singing are good enough that I can lead music without worry.  I placed in the top 15% of math teachers in math aptitude on a national test.  I’m a solid carpenter and theatrical lighting designer.  I’m confident that I can develop passable ability in nearly any challenge put before me.  Thank God for all that.

There’s a challenge for me, however.  I really like learning to proficiency (as you can see from my laundry list above), but I find it very difficult to learn to mastery.  It’s not that I don’t think I can do it (or so I claim), it’s that I find hard to be one thing.  Maybe it’s my ADD talking (ooh, shiny!), maybe it’s my perfectionist nature (why work harder if I can’t be perfect?), or maybe I’m just not able to be great at any one thing. 

Maybe, however, I’m just blessed and cursed with the ability to see the big picture, to want to know how a forest works when to be an ‘expert’, I’d need to study the trees and cells.  I miss out on the details.  I hear a piece of music and I love it; I see the whole of it and don’t know how to break it into parts to reproduce it.

I want to make music, but I can’t arrange the whole thing by myself.  With me, for whatever reason, the piece has to create itself organically – with all the parts in place from the beginning.  There’s an earthiness that comes with music created from the ground up as one piece of music that is lacking when it’s built one part at a time.  This can be stifling for the solo musician with little money to pay a band (me!).

The beauty and pain that comes with this points to another universal truth: we need other people.  Just as music thrives in collaboration, any community thrives when each member contributes equally to the spirit of the group and stagnates when a sub-set of members set the principles to the exclusion and devaluation of others.

It’s not possible for me to know and individually value every human on earth.  I just don’t have the time.  I don’t have the time to learn every instrument, understand each mathematical property and topic, train to peak performance for running and cycling, and hone my (somewhat lacking) finish carpentry skills.  I can, however, be an expert at one thing (even if that’s an expert at the big picture), surrounding myself with experts in other areas. 

You see, together we can be all things and one thing simultaneously.  Bono can’t play guitar like The Edge, but he doesn’t have to.  I can involve myself in one of a global network of intertwined communities,  spanning from me to a little boy in Uganda, trying to escape the LRA.  I may not know him, but we’re connected.  If we do this right, the world would look like a very different place.