Incredible video using only still photos

Twenty days. Twenty thousand still images. A single message. Toronto Star photographer Lucas Oleniuk captures the issue of global warming in a video created entirely by using still images. It's part of the countdown to Earth Hour, March 29.

Click here to view it. It's lovely, and depressing, all at the same time.

Worth a listen

I'm a frequent visitor to the Vineyard Community Church of Iowa City Website. Two big reasons are the church's pastors, Adey and Tom Wassink. They are two of the most dynamic, poignant, smart, funny (funny is very important to me; though it’s not in the Bible, I imagine Jesus laughed quite a bit), eloquent, engaged and real preachers I’ve ever heard. I know this because, every chance I get, I go to the Vineyard site and download and listen to mp3s of their sermons. (Go here, click on Downloads in the left-hand navigation bar, and then on Teachings.)

Adey and Tom spin wonderful stories, drawing from the Bible, of course, and tradition, yes, but also from their own lives, detailing their personal and spiritual travails and the opportunities they encounter for exemplifying Christ, as well as the struggles and joys of members in their congregation, and of their church as a body. Adey's most recent lesson begins with a story about an almost surreal encounter with a severely asthmatic woman and her traveling companions late Christmas Eve night in Chicago's O'Hare airport during a harried attempt to get home in time to be on church Sunday. The story, and intricately woven lesson contained within it about making one's life matter, is incredibly moving.

Trust me: listen to these sermons and you will be transported. You will feel lighter and more substantial at the same time. You will laugh. You will cry. You will yearn to be part of a community like theirs, part of the vision they so vividly and passionately describe. Above all, you will be inspired and challenged to serve Jesus Christ more creatively, more dynamically, more immediately. I am not exaggerating when I say I await the posting of a fresh sermon each week the way a five-year-old child looks forward to Christmas morning.

I read a lot of books. Books on theology, mission, evangelism, social justice. Occasionally I’ll come across a particularly well-turned phrase or anecdote that makes my heart soar with a sense of new possibility. But I don’t retain much of what I read, and in very short order the text, the lessons, the anecdotes begin to sift out of my brainpan like sand through a sieve, leaving little behind. But the stories Adey and Tom tell, their sermons, stay with me for weeks, for months. I’ve shared a few with my wife and we’ve talked about them for days afterward, in particular one of Adey’s teachings about demanding maturity from one's husband or wife. I won't go into why my wife found that topic so fascinating.

Like the best stories, theirs impart lessons but also inspire a certain joyful urgency, an anxiousness to roll up one’s sleeves and get to God’s work. If you have time and courage (because these are more than nice, neat Sunday School lessons), I encourage you to listen. And if there are some sermons/talks out there that have had a big impact you, let me know so I can post links to them here.

Peace

Stephen

Just For the Feng of It

It’s amazing the kind of curiosity you can stir when you do something as seemingly innocuous as clean your office.

I admit it, I’m a bit of a slob. OK. I’m not as bad as my old friend, Fritz. His apartment was perennially strewn with dirty clothes, dinner plates of congealing beef bones from the local Steak-Out restaurant and paychecks he never seemed to get around to cashing. One time he so convinced himself he was going to be fired from the newspaper where we worked as reporters that he stocked his freezer with six months worth of meat. He also bought a pair of pricey Kenneth Cole shoes for future job interviews, and then refused to take them out of the velvet bag they came in and actually wear them for fear of scuffing them up.

But I digress.

Neatness and organizational skills aren’t my strong suits. I like a tidy house just like the next metrosexual husband of the 21st Century. At home, I’m more inclined than not to pick up the stray sock and toss it in the hamper, empty and reload the dishwasher when the sink starts getting full and wipe down the bathroom countertop when it gets a tad too hairy for my liking.

Work, however, is another matter.

A lot of paperwork crosses my desk each day. OK. Not so much crosses as flounders halfway across the channel, gets leg cramps and sinks beneath the undulating waves of languishing press releases, story tips, newspapers, magazines, phone messages and notebooks, settling into a papery pauper’s grave. Dust gathers there too. And crumbs from lunches long digested and forgotten. Sometimes money and plastic toys my girls play with when they visit my office. Now and again I hear the faint howl and moan of a small dog, but I suspect this is rather a trick of acoustics and that the dog is actually outside somewhere or else a complete figment of my imagination.

Well, a week ago I decided to do something about the mess. My computer was being upgraded and could not be used for a couple of hours, so rather than stare out the window I thought it would be a good idea to neaten up the place where I essentially live for forty hours a week. I threw away a forest of paper, actually put files in my big gray file cabinet (so THAT’S what that’s for), wiped down all flat surfaces and a few vertical ones, donated an extra chair to my friend Blaze. My wife, excited at the prospect of no longer needing a tetanus shot when she comes to visit, celebrated my clean sweep by buying for me a small bookcase and a lamp so I wouldn’t have to sit in the glare of overhead fluorescent lights anymore. I had to admit, the lamp provided a nice aesthetic balance to the tabletop fountain I made during a fit of craft-mania one year.

Others seemed to notice, too.

“Looks like you’ve been watching a little too much ‘Queer Eye for the Straight Guy,’” my alleged friend, Blaze, said as he walked by my office one morning. “Trying to put a little more Feng in your Shui?”

I noticed he was carrying a bag full of potting soil and other products for the plants he was nursing in his own office.

“Look who’s calling the kettle black,” I retorted smartly, cranking up my CD of chanting Benedictine Monks to drown out his ridicule.

A couple days later Blaze stopped by again and took a look around my now clean and sparkly office.

“You know, you can get your aura realigned too if you want,” he said. A few minutes later he sent an email proving that he wasn’t fibbing – a university in California (where else?) apparently offers the service to students, faculty and staff through its health clinic. I tried to imagine what an aura realignment entailed exactly. Did they rotate your chakras? Top off your body fluids? Would hot candle wax be involved?

Another coworker used the occasion of my recent office purge to recount her experience at a local spa. After her massage, the masseuse said my colleague still seemed a bit tense and offered to do a "magnetic deruffling" for her, gratis. The masseuse drifted toward the foot-end of the table, but my friend was stomach down and couldn’t tell what the masseuse was up to down there.

“Now,” said the masseuse, sotto voce, “I want you to relax and imagine a blue flame at the bottom of your feet.”

“Oooookay,” my friend responded.

And then – nothing. No sound. No sensation. Curious, my friend craned her neck to take a peak and found the woman making dramatic sweeping motions with her hands, from just behind her feet toward the floor. Needless to say, my friend was not impressed.

Then I got a Feng Shui kit.

It was a gift from Blaze and his wife, Amy, who picked it up at a Starbucks, where they make almost daily pilgrimages for the new Chantico drink, which I’ve been assured tastes like a liquid brownie. Strangely, although I love chocolate, I find the idea of a liquid brownie unappetizing. The Feng Shui kit, on the other hand, is pretty sweet.

This is what it comes with: Tazo tea in three flavors -- Zen, Calm and Awake; a Feng Shui Color Guide, a Legend of Feng Shui, Three Powerful Figures of Fortune, the Feng Shui Guide to Happiness, a list of Nine Perfect Thoughts, a Feng Shui Wind Poem, Three Lucky Coins and One Powerful Dragon Figure.

Imagine, all that wisdom and serenity in a box that weighs in at just 1.4 ounces.

Of course, the figures are little cardboard cutouts, as are the coins. And the Nine Perfect Thoughts, which are to be torn off at the perforations and carried around for good luck, are about as profound as the slips of paper you find in fortune cookies at low-rent Chinese restaurants. They range from banal to painfully unfunny. To wit (or not):

“I possess the luck and the fortune of the dragon.”

“When my furniture is in alignment, I no longer bump my shins.”

“Don’t forget to turn off the stove before I leave to work.”

“Perhaps this is the year I will get new drapes.”

And so on.

In the brief Legend of Feng Shui I learn that the term itself is pronounced foong shway, not like something Garth from Wayne’s World might say when a good-looking woman passes by.

I have to admit, though, I do kind of like the Wind Poem, or “weathergram,” that comes with the kit. It’s basically a tag where you can write down a simple thought, prayer or poem, and then hang it from a tree limb for some stranger to find. Inside the tag it says, “If you are touched by the message on this Wind Poem, please feel free to take it: You might offer the string to a bird for its nest.”

I like the idea of leaving inspirational messages where people you don’t know might find them, the anonymous kindness of it. It seems like a very simple, pure gesture in a world where we’re bombarded by messages and demands and come-ons. There’s no reward for our gesture – or at least none we will know about. If we find the tag missing one day, it could just be that the wind blew it down, or some litter officer stuffed it in his trash bag, or a bird decided to use the whole thing to line its nest. Then again, maybe someone who was on the edge of despair came across it just when she needed it and thought of it has a blessing from an angel, which in a way maybe it was.

So the next time you’re out and about, walking among the budding trees, keep an eye peeled. There might just be a little Wind Poem blowing in the breeze, waiting for you to pluck it from a quivering branch.

How Shui it is.

A Wing and a Prayer

From up here it looks like someone murdered the Holy Spirit.

The pigeon is splayed on its back against the alley’s wet, filthy pavement, its head wreathed in fresh blood. The tail feathers are fanned out, and the smoky blue wings – which are creamy white on the undersides – are half open and akimbo. The head is cocked slightly and a solitary, tangerine eye remains open and fixed on the purple-gray sky as if the pigeon is waiting for someone to descend from the clouds, scoop it up and take it back where it belongs.

I’d heard the soft thump of flesh striking glass, a common enough occurrence in an office building with large picture windows. Usually the bird glances off, tumbles a bit and then claws its way back into the air, no worse for the encounter. But this was different. It sounded different. The flurry of feathers dropped away and down like a diver pitching backwards off the gunwale of a boat. I stood up to look where it had gone.

The pigeon was upright on the ground, two stories below, taking halting steps along the alley and shaking its head, the way people do in cartoons when they’re trying to shake loose some crazy idea. Okay, I thought. It’s disoriented. In a minute or two it’ll flex its wings, scoop up some air and join the thirty or forty of its kin making the mid-afternoon rounds of the downtown sky. Only it didn’t. The head-shaking slowed until the pigeon looked like it was nodding off to sleep.

I closed my eyes and said a silent prayer, asking God to fix whatever was hurting in the bird. I tried to will it to fly. But the impact and fall broke something inside it that was beyond repair. Suddenly, the pigeon started flapping violently and flipped itself onto its back. That’s when I saw the splatters of blood on the ground, the red glistening in its beak. It took two or more shuddering breaths and then it died.

Now I feel as though I’m in mourning. Yeah, maybe it’s a little crazy. I mean, lots of people consider pigeons to be nothing more than “flying rats” that carry diseases and crap on statues and fight over breadcrumbs in the public squares, making a general nuisance of themselves. But I’ve never liked to see birds or other animals in peril or suffering. I always brake for squirrels. If there’s a bug in the house, I catch it, open the door and let it loose outside. Once, when I was living in South Carolina, I stopped my car to help a turtle cross the road because I was afraid the next driver might not notice it and smash it to smithereens.

A couple years ago I made the mistake of leaving a door open to my garage a few days too many. A family of sparrows came in and built a nest in a stack of wood I kept on shelves mounted close to the ceiling, which meant that I couldn’t close the door all summer because the mom and dad sparrows wouldn’t be able to go out and look for food for the babies. One morning I saw that a recently hatched chick had fallen from the perch, hit the roof of the van parked in the garage and tumbled to the cement floor. Miraculously it was still alive. So I put on my leather work gloves, gently scooped the frail creature in my hands and climbed a ladder to put the bird back in its nest. All summer I worried about that chick, wondered if it would survive, wondered if it might have picked up my scent and been rejected by the parents. The next summer I got my answer. We had bought a new house and I needed to take down the wood and there, dry as a fig and half as big, were the desiccated remains of the baby bird. I tried to not let it bother me, but it did, and I felt like I shared some of the blame for the bird’s death, though I can’t say why.

In Luke, Jesus says, “Are not five sparrows sold for two pennies? Yet not one of them is forgotten by God. Indeed, the very hairs of your head are all numbered. Don't be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows” (Luke 12:6-7). Most folks who read that passage focus on the part about people being really important to God. And while that’s true, it also says that not a single creature on Earth is forgotten by God. Not an ant. Not a flea. Not those annoying bugs that skitter up your nose and buzz in your ear at the height of summer. Not an elephant killed for its ivory, or a bear for its paws. Not the loon that gets caught in a plastic soda can ring carelessly discarded by a boater and drowns. Not the baby sparrow born in my garage. Not the pigeon that, giddy for the gift of flight, mistook a window for the sky and flew straight through death’s open door.

Personally I prefer the other name for pigeons, the one they had before they fell from grace in the eyes of human beings and were relegated to the trash-heap category of pest: Rock Dove. Dove. Symbol of peace.

Symbol of the Holy Spirit.

It’s a little thing, but I’m glad the Rock Dove didn’t die alone. Even though I was two stories up and could do nothing to save it, it wouldn’t seem right for its life to pass without someone noticing. No one, no living creature, should die alone.

Every hair on your head. Every feather. Every first and final breath.

Sad news

Will, whom I wrote about earlier here, lived for just a few short months and he never ventured beyond his bed in the neonatal intensive care unit. Born at just 24 weeks, he faced enormous obstacles just to try to get to his original due date, which was supposed to be in mid-February. Early Saturday morning Will passed away.

Through it all his parents, my friends Mary and John, remained at his side, watching as their firstborn struggled to breathe and squirmed against the constraint and pain of of the wires and tubes snaking in and around his body. They only got to hold him a couple of times, and in the few photos I've seen the look on their faces as they cradled his tiny head against their chests is pure joy. They read him books, including Goodnight Moon, Two Little Trains, and Jamberry, played him lullaby CDs, got to know him the way only parents can know their children.

As a way to keep friends and family abreast of Will's condition, John started a blog, which can be found at www.willkenyon.blogspot.com/. As I've said before, John is a gifted writer, and before long many people were following Will's journey, including many strangers who stumbled upon the site by accident or heard about it through the Internet grapevine. Thanks to John's blog, many of us got to know Will in a way we would not have otherwise, sharing John and Mary's joys every time Will seemed to be turning a corner, their fears as he struggled to rid his body of excess fluid and to fight infection, and their great loss, which now is our loss, too.

Amazing, isn't it, how much of an impact even the smallest, most vulnerable among us can have on the world? There's a great lesson to be learned there.

For those of you who are the praying sort, I hope you'll offer up some prayers for John and Mary. They need to know how loved they are, and how loved Will was and is, and after their hearts are wrung out and their throats raw from crying and the condolence cards have stopped showing up in the mail and people have stopped shaking their heads sadly when they pass by and giving them wide berth -- when John and Mary enter that long, lonely silence that follows all tragedies, that place where they have to go alone -- they need to know that they are still not alone, that God is with them yet, holding them the way they got to hold Will those too-few times in the hospital. They will need to know that peace. Pray for that, will you?

As far as my own blog? Well, I haven't updated it in a while, partly because I've been really busy and partly because my heart just hasn't been in it. I hope to put some new things up there soon. But they may take this blog in a slightly different direction. I've been doing a lot of thinking about my faith, about Christian spirituality, about prayer, and maybe I'll share some of those thoughts with y'all, if for no other reason than to keep me honest. The truth is, I'd considered launching a different blog, an anonymous "God talk" blog that even my friends didn't know about because I was afraid what they might think about me. "Oh man," they'd say, "looks like Steve's gone off and got that old time religion. Hide the booze."

But maybe I'll take that chance anyway, because this is really important to me. And in the end, whether people want to admit it or not, I think that is what's really important to everyone -- figuring out why they were put here on earth and what they're going to do about it.

The Pleasure of Simple Things Done Well

Yesterday afternoon my daughters and I planted a bleeding heart root and a couple dozen daffodil bulbs. Wearing gardening gloves five times too big for their hands, the girls knelt on scraps of cardboard I’d retrieved from the recycling bin and bent over the loamy, fragrant soil, carefully digging up small holes with trowels and now and then holding up a worm or a stone they’d come across like prizes plucked from a Cracker Jack box.

I don’t know how good a chance the plants have of surviving. It’s pretty late in the fall planting season, and today we woke to a scene straight out of Currier & Ives. The first snow of the year always seems the purest and the whitest and this morning it blanketed the trees and landscape like the robes of Arctic royalty. The small patch of woods behind our house was transformed into a magical forest where I imagined unicorns and wizards in white cloaks moving among the frozen trees and acting out some drama beyond the ken of human senses. But how the weather bodes for the plants we put to bed we aren’t likely to find out until next spring.

And that’s OK, being uncertain about the future. Because the real pleasure is knowing that my daughters and I did a good thing, a simple thing, the best way we knew how at the time. It is a realization I come back to with greater frequency the older I get: the deepest satisfaction often comes from the simplest activities. Planting daffodils, for instance. Or, as my daughters and I did afterward, picking up sticks to use later as kindling in our fireplace. Or sipping a cup of hot chocolate in the kitchen, where we could survey the work we had done.

I have come to this pleasure in other ways, too. By cutting wood or hammering nails, “drows’d by the fume” of cedar, oak or pine. Walking in the woods early in the morning when much of the world is still asleep and the air is taut with the sound of rustling leaves and wind and the scurry and scratch of squirrels vaulting from tree to tree, their tails following them like wisps of grey smoke. Writing a letter – on paper with a pen in cursive, not by email – to a dear friend I haven’t spoken with in years.

If this all seems obvious – that simple things are best – why is it that the lesson is so easily, repeatedly forgotten? Why does it require so much effort to do so little, especially this time of year when greed and gluttony take center stage? Who knows? But now when I get the urge to reinvent myself, to figure out what life is all about, to plumb the depths of my soul, I know the best course of action is not to think but to do.

To plant a flower.

To hand-wash the dishes.

To build a fire in the fireplace.

To make soup. Which is precisely what I did yesterday afternoon, a hearty Italian recipe my grandmother brought over from the old country.

I blended together Parmesan and Romano cheeses, breadcrumbs, nutmeg and black pepper. I grated lemon peel into the mixture, the citrus tang tickling my nose, and cracked three large, bright white eggs into the bowl and kneaded the dough to the consistency of polenta before stuffing it into a potato press and watching the noodles drop into a boiling pot of beef and chicken broth. I inhaled the steam rising out of the pot and was absolutely transported by the smells it contained.

This was heaven. This was joy.

Want Some Cheese With That Whine?

Yeah, I know. It’s been a few days since I’ve posted here.

Not that anyone’s noticed.

By last check of my web stats, I’ve had about three visitors over the past week. A couple were apparently just clicking the “Next Blog” button at the top of the page and came across mine by accident. No visitor has stayed on for more than a couple minutes. So if I don’t write anything today – or ever again – will the world care? If a blogger types something in the woods and no one’s around to read his stuff does he make a sound?

I was making this argument to my wife last night. Told her I was thinking of booting the blog. Fishing for a little pity.

“It’s only been a week,” she said, deftly avoiding the baited hook.

I took a bite of my fifth chocolate bar of the evening, putting a big dent in my diet plan but just a teeny dent in the supply of candy collected by my children Halloween night. “Yeah,” I said. “But what about the friends I emailed to tell them about the blog? So far no one’s tuning in.”

“First,” my wife said, “you only emailed them the middle of last week. Second, they’re probably busy and haven’t had time to look at it yet.”

She was right, of course. Still, I’m not sure which is worse. Being ignored or being damned with faint praise. Right now I think I’d prefer the faint praise.

Let’s face it. This isn’t Hemingway I’m writing here. Before this entry -- and not counting the very first one where I basically just said “Hello, world, here I am!” – I’ve written a total of just six essays. And a couple of them aren’t really essays at all but preambles to older material (an essay and some poems) I decided to inflict on – well, on whoever might happen to read my blog.

Which is no one, really.

I’m not a stupid person. Well, in some ways I’m really quite remarkably stupid. But I know people have little time to read, and when they do read they want something fun or intellectually stimulating or mysterious or titillating. To date I’ve posted essays on a friend’s vasectomy, the challenges of raising two daughters, another friend’s premature baby, the pleasure of watching a meteor shower (which, it turned out, I never got to see anyway because it was cloudy all that week) and my freaking out about some heart flutters. Oh, and some poems whose only distinction is that they’ve been rejected by some of the better poetry magazines in the country.

And I wonder why no one has offered me a book deal yet.

OK. So maybe I won’t give up the blog just yet. As my wife says, if I really ever want to be a Writer – with a capital W – I need to keep at it, regardless whether anyone is reading. It’ll help me sharpen my skills, find my voice, develop a stronger sense of narrative. And because I’m writing on a public website and there’s the potential for someone reading me, the blog puts the onus on me to write rather more regularly than I would otherwise – and, frankly, ever have – in a personal diary.

Which raises a good question: Just what exactly do I want my blog to be? A confessional? A sounding board? One of those albino lab mice I inject my poetry and prose into to make sure my writing’s safe on animals before exposing humans to it?

I guess I’m still kinda working that one out. So if you’re up to seeing where all this leads – yeah, you who just stumbled across my blog from the SatanDogLover blog – stick around. I probably won't provide much titillation, but at least the writing should improve with time.