the compost file

2003-08-02T22:18:00.000-05:00

CONFESSIONS OF AN UNFAITHFUL BLOGGER

OK, so I became infatuated with this blog thing, thought about it a lot for a week or two, had some passionate ideas, and even led a couple of friends on about it. And like a fickle woman, I found other things to do. Oh, I know it all sounds like excuses: weeds to pull, house to clean, lists to be made of more things to accomplish.... but, I just went to the cstone.blogspot.com site and linked to other bloggers and discovered that- maybe I don't have to wait till fireworks light me up as a literary bombshell, a vixen of voice, or a desirable destination for bloggers. Maybe I can just be an ordinary, faithful blogger and stop allowing myself to be "distracted" by all the continual jobs that just have to be done and redone until one day, at the end of my life, I would stop and say, "I once loved a blog; why did I let it go?"

2003-07-17T12:41:00.000-05:00

More on Cornerstone later, but this is why I go:

THE CROSSING AT CORNERSTONE

Thank you God, for a glimpse of your kingdom. The bagpipes, the fiddle, the bodran, the cello, the voices singing the chorus "RAISE YOUR HANDS IN PRAISE". A circle of worshiping dancers spontaneously forms, praising You with hands and feet, arms and legs, muscle and blood. A young man, naked torso glistening with sweat dances in a long India print shirt and sandals. The bandanna on his head captures his wild hair, but his smile breaks through the irrepressible beard springing from his face.

Circles of linked dancers form and reform as hands connect Canada and Texas, New York and Australia, downtown Chicago and small town Indiana. Unity but no uniformity. One dance, one beat, one king, but differences rivaling that of a million tropical fish on a reef.

Women in cotton hippie dresses. High school boys in T shirts and falling off shorts. College students and drop outs, musicians, writers, business women and computer consultants. Catholics and Charismatics, liberals and conservatives. Don't ask, don't tell, who cares!!! All holding hands as a holy dancing train snakes in and around the circle. The sun beats down and the sweat drips with enthusiasm. And as the band sings the chorus "RAISE YOUR HANDS IN PRAISE", all arms reach up in unison. Another shirtless young man with thick black dreds raises his arms, eyes closed, with joy exuding from his face, and brings tears to my opened eyes. Young people, old people, a few even older than me. All hearts beating to the same ancient Celtic rhythms, linking these knit bones to those scattered for two thousand years.

One young father dressed conservatively, baseball cap bobbing up and down, can't connect his hands to anyone else or raise his arms heavenward because he is using them to secure two young children, one on each hip. But his feet are in the dance anyway. Suddenly he finds himself in the center of a circle as the other dancers embrace him with space.

The very dust of the earth is rising up in praise from under the beating feet as a smoke offering. Dust and fingertips and faces are all reaching up. The Lord surely accepts this offering of sweat and dirt ascending to his nostrils, for joy has fallen on us all, descending through the rising dance cloud.

2003-07-15T20:21:00.000-05:00

Well, here I am, a lover of words, but a confirmed technophobe, sitting here under the patient tutelage of my teenage son. I went to a series of publishing seminars at Cornerstone Festival a few weeks ago (more on Cornerstone later) and learned that if I want to share my words with the world I have 2 publishing options:

A. Self-publish: which means I spend a whole lot of time learning about stuff I'm not at all interested in and phobic about learning and spending a fair amount of money which would end up in the form of piles of books sitting in a closet in the spare room....
or

B. Getting published by a company which wouldn't happen and if by some miracle it did, would result in larger amounts of money being transformed into bigger piles of books in a larger closet in the basement.

Then I went to some seminars called "Blog On" by Dave King at Ideajoy (I'm still at Cornerstone, mind you) and found out I can get my words out there without spending a dime and not having to please anyone with what I say!!!!!! Now Dave assured us that any moron (well, not his words exactly, but close) could set up a blog site. Well, what Dave didn't know was that sitting in his audience was not just "any moron" but one in particular. Now I've already lost this post once, and trust me, it was better the first time I wrote it. This is why I'm a technophobe. You may think it impossible that anyone could be so computer illiterate in 2003, but I never even heard of the term "blog" before July 1. But I believe I am about to get my blog up. (Is it just me, or does that sound a little risque?) Fortunately I gave birth to a computer geek about 16 years ago and he tells me it is now time to go to the next step.