Tuesday, February 16, 2010

Hidden from view

Tonight I ran to a super-discount store to buy some boots with steel toes. It is not surprising that the road of my transition would lead me to say yes to work which is as far from what I have known as imaginable.

If certain that this was a short detour, perhaps I would be thinking differently. But moving as I have from the stage to offstage has left me a bit exhausted. For the sake of my youngest son, that weakest one in the family, for now I have essentially stepped out of leadership and left the visionary roles that I had played for nearly two decades.

It is not that I am trying to be dramatic. I am only now realizing that I cannot live this time as a transition. This is where I am to live my faith and put into practice what I have believed about following Jesus. Having chosen, I no longer have choice.

Today I found an excuse to leave the house. Otherwise I would have been inside with Michael, away from the world, for 52 hours straight. But who is counting?

I answered email, communicated via skype with France and Russia, wrote five letters (thus the trip to the post office which broke the cabin fever). My mind was on people and creative projects in New York, Paris, St. Petersburg, L.A., Miami, Austin, Chattanooga and Jackson. And tomorrow will be spent in a friend's factory in my new boots.

This is a curious school in which I find myself.
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3 comments:

  1. MFebruary 18, 2010 at 11:32 AM

    you're a good man daddy

    ReplyDelete
  2. See, Create, RepeatMarch 2, 2010 at 6:54 AM

    i'm proud of you dad. love you very much!!!

    ReplyDelete
  3. David BrazzealAugust 12, 2010 at 2:15 AM

    Jim,
    I ran across an excellent podcast about how caring for the most fragile among us has helped us become for human.

    http://speakingoffaith.publicradio.org/programs/2009/fragility/

    It is an interview with French Geophysicist, Xavier le Pichon who invented the tectonic plate theory and who raised his family in a L'Arche community so that they would benefit from caring for the most fragile. It seems learning about the fragility of the planet helped him see the fragility of humanity. Very inspiring stuff.

    Hope to see you on your next visit to Paris

    ReplyDelete

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The illusion wanes, and in time we return
to our noisy cities where the blue
appears only in fragments
high up among the towering shapes.
Then rain leaching the earth.
Tedious, winter burdens the roofs,
and light is a miser, the soul bitter.
Yet, one day through an open gate,
among the green luxuriance of a yard,
the yellow lemons fire
and the heart melts,
and golden songs pour
into the breast
from the raised cornets of the sun.

from "The Lemon Trees"
by Eugenio Montale
(Translated by Lee Gerlach)