yeah yeah yeah

yeah yeah yeah
Originally uploaded by rod lewis

Willby is our second son - middle child of 3. The only thing worse than being a middle child, is having your birthday 3 days after your older brother, and 11 days after your dad.
Usually, when Will's birthday rolls around, there are a couple of stale leftover pieces of Jack's and my cakes, so there's really no need to bake one for him. Usually it's hard to press a candle down into the hardened cake-like leftovers, so we have to drip wax onto the top to get the candles to stand up.
Also, by then, Jack and I are usually tired of our worn-out birthday gifts, so we can just rewrap them and give them to Will. Sometimes, we have to give him new batteries though.
After celebrating 3 birthdays in 11 days, we're kinda tired of the whole hoopla, so instead of singing "happy birthday" to Will, we just sort of mumble, "yeah yeah yeah", or "yada yada yada," or some such.
All of this is fine with Will because he's the middle child. Were we actually to celebrate him and make him feel special in any way, he'd just be riddled with guilt for having made us go out of our way to make him happy. Guilt and happiness don't mix, so it's best that we just go through the motions and spare him the guilt. Will actually prefers that we don't even come home on his birthday until after he's gone to bed. That way he knows for sure that no one has put forth unnecessary effort in an attempt to bring him joy.
Thanks for being such a low-maintenence, effortless kid Will.
yada yada yada

harrar

harrar
Originally uploaded by rod lewis

I had a very skunky cup of the coffee this morning. By very skunky, I don't mean the undrinkable cup of robusta I had at Dunkin Donuts in Philadelphia. That, my friends, was the only cup of coffee(?) from which I've taken but one sip, and dropped into the recycling bin. Rather, this was the kind of skunky from which one takes a sip, complains of its inferiority, takes another sip and expresses another complaint, and thus carries on the pattern to the bottom of the cup.
Until this morning, I had thought the mermaid's consistent mediocrity to be utterly trustworthy. It may not be the finest there is, but you can always count on consistency.
The irony of it all is that I'm sitting in a very cool space staring at these two wonderful posters of my TOP TWO favorite coffees on the planet. Do you realize how cool is advertising for top shelf when you're sipping back-of-pantry-bottom-shelf fare?
There is a greater irony. I'm sitting in this cool space with two of my students/friends, discussing self-denial, sobriety of heart, and spiritual introspection with ashes on our foreheads in the golden light of dawn meant to bathe in hope the victims of Wednesday morning's storms . Add to that that everyone else in the room also is wearing ashes.
We're all sitting in the atmosphere of the epitome of american consumption (though for the purpose of community) discussing wilderness experience and upon every sip between sentences, I'm complaining inside about the skunkiness of my non-Harrar, and non-Sumatra.
Honestly, I wonder if anyone who harvested my favorite beans could afford the cup of skunky coffee I'm drinking.
Kyrie Eleison

a somber heart

a somber heart
Originally uploaded by rod lewis

A heart that is scarred, bent and broken is right to be manifest with a face of sorrow. To wear a façade of joy around a broken heart is fake, or worse, a state of denial.
A heart that is healed, or even being healed will wear a face of joy. This is a heart that hopes.
It is a sad truth that healed hearts often, in forgetting they were ever broken, become quite superficial, careless, and lack a healthy guard to protect them from being broken again, or perhaps worse, breaking another heart.
It is necessary to take inventory, to look deeply, to excavate our depths, to come to know who we are and why.
This is a discipline that requires much serious and somber searching. Sometimes it requires a bit of mending, or even excision, but this is a submitted breaking for the purpose of complete healing and is worn on the face as joy even amidst great pain, sorrow and shame. Never hopelessness though - for there needn't be hopelessness in a heart that trusts.