someone else's recommendations

This Link is one i got today from another blog i read. i'm still tip-toeing into the poetry pool, but i'm looking forward to exploring some of these books. currently i'm reading jagged with love by susanna childress after reading some of her work in the poetry workshop i took at asbury. her writing, like so many of the poets we read there, made me both want to write all the time and never write again.

kinda cool how i take a class that talks about poetry as a significant means for exploring and wrestling with the mystery of God, then a few weeks later find a resource for poets who seem to be attempting this in their writings.

LOST interests...

there are few things on TV that interest me more than the show LOST. it is, in my humble opinion, one of the most well-written shows on TV, and perhaps that has even been on TV. right now, due to the writer's strike, we are in a mid-season break, and it is driving me insane. i've read blogs and message boards, theories and ponderings, and i'm now at the point where im having to turn to other shows to help me bridge the gap until LOST starts again. here are the shows that are helping me out:

1. Rob and Big. Rob and Big might be the most oddly brilliant show MTV has aired in its ever-growing catalog of reality shows. Rob the pro skater and Big the body guard/best friend simply do whatever fairly-wealthy, slightly bored people do in hollywood, which includes an impressive list of oddities: buying a mini horse, turtle racing, reviving a stripping career, impromptu skating sessions and, of course, doing work.

2. Rock of Love 2 w/ Bret Michaels. OK, there is no real justification for liking this show, other than the drama that is created when 12 semi-trashy or semi-crazy or semi-obsessed women are thrown into a house to fight for the front man of a bad who was relevant when i was 9. don't get me wrong: i love poison when they show up on my ipod, but wow...this show makes bret seem like he's chris martin, but single and with more bandanas. thank you VH1.

3. America's Best Dance Crew. Yes, i watch a dance show. You watch it and tell me it isn't amazing.

If this list is evidence of anything, it's that LOST cannot come back soon enough. If you have shows i should add to my list, holla back and let me know. (oh, and if you have any of the seasons of Battlestar Galactica, let me know...i watched a show about it and i actually want to give it a try.)

a captured prayer

They frame your wedding memories snap by snap
as we pose, nesting smiles on canvas faces.

A joyful blessing, now frozen forever,
sent as a flashing prayer to the viewers

that will come. Acting now as both a prophet
and shaman, factoring what we know into

what we hope, saccharine-sweet prayers that He,
whom precise doctrine names but never holds down,

would bring destruction, with winds like Katrina,
to your now-constrictive views of love, and build

you both, red brick by red brick, into a house
through trust and conflict and reckless sacrifice.

Caught here, this mystic picture of glory, now
smiles, full of trick and treat; a framed communion.

A pose; a barrack for the storm warring forward.

two things i'm thinking about...

one, i heard a story last night. it was of a church that was going to have a drawing for a wii at an event they were having. the thing is, the way you got your name in the drawing: to make a decision at the event. YES, YOU HEARD ME RIGHT. if you came down to the altar and made a decision to follow Christ that night, you were entered into a drawing to win a wii.

this makes me so angry that i am choosing to pretend this story was made up so i don't have to face that this is the condition of evangelism in some spheres of the church.

i would go on a long diatribe about evangelism right now, but i'm still brewing over this and what it means for us in the christian context. any thoughts are welcomed in the comments section.

the second thing, and i put it here so this post has some merit to it, is a quote from a book i haven't read, but am now tempted to add to my stack. i found it on the Sojourn/Jim Wallis site God's Politics. feel free to respond to it as well:

"The question we need to ask with any spiritual discipline is, What does God want to accomplish through this practice? ... Perhaps we can see, then, that the discipline of fasting has to do with the critical dynamic of accepting those limits which are life-restoring. Our culture would seduce us into believing that we can have it all, do it all, and (even more preposterous!) that we deserve it all. Yet in refusing to accept limits on our consumption or activity, we perpetuate a death-dealing dynamic in the world. That is whey the discipline of fasting is so profoundly important today."

- Marjorie J. Thompson
Soul Feast

bikes and gravel

Cautiously peddling towards
the house beyond the paved road,
the house every mother had
warned their brave children about,

I felt my stomach crawl up
towards my throat and sit, brooding,
rumbling like an angry cloud.

We stopped shy, picked blackberries
and licked our chops hungrily.

This was my first rodeo.