She shows me our God.
A light before the sunrise
To have and to hold.

On the subject of the big picture - recently I discovered hugin - part of a ‘toolchain to create panoramic images.’ I put it to the test with some shots I took last week and I’m impressed! It is very easy to use and I like the results.

Here are three shots taken around our little community. It’s not much to look at but a lot of very good things happen here. I know that I will remember some of the conversations from last week every time I look at these pictures.

These are some reduced shots from my phone camera during my daily rides this weekend, and some I have taken with my other camera around home over the last couple of weeks. A camera can’t do the world justice. Beauty is intoxicating - sometimes more than I can take in and stay standing.

A beautiful mind takes treasure and throws it on the ground to be walked over!

What kind of mind would not know that all the earth is holy ground?

What kind of eyes would see the gift and not notice the giver?

Who would hear and feel and taste the breath of life and not love the one who breathes?

Who would drink love and hold back the lover?

love is loooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooong suffering.
love is not nice pictures of sunsets and flowers.
pretending that everything is OK is not love.
pretending to love is not love.
saying that you love is not love.
not loving is not love.
and everything else is bullshit.
and you know that is true!

I’d been thinking about these things this week - dealing with the consequences of not love (make of that what you will) - feeling the pain of love deal once more with the pain of not love - wondering how far this goes on. Three things remain, and one of them is love.

This then, is a sample from one of our lectures this week.

I sleep in the wind.
It rushes from ear to ear
making strange music.

Please! Not an ipod. The battery will die - which will be a particular pain in the butt on a desert island. At least let me hack a solar panel or something on to it before I go. But more importantly it symbolises and re-enforces so much of what is bad about the ‘music industry’.

Does anyone understand what that phrase ‘music industry’ means?

It means that once we made music. Now all we have is a ‘music industry’ to do it for us. I almost wrote ‘to do it to us’ - talk about a Freudian slip! It means that we have out-sourced the things that music is really about: our imaginations, our passions, our intimate longings, our sense of belonging and identity.

Girl: “Listen honey - they’re playing our song.”

Record company: “Listen honey. They’re playing OUR song!”

Cash register: ka-chinggg.

Band: (heard somewhere in the distance) “Whose song did he say?”

The ipod is a product of a culture that assumes you are here to consume. Some people get to make music, some people get to listen to it, and some people get to decide who does what. In a world of producers and consumers, god makers and god breakers, a world with a hungry empty manipulated public looking for something to worship, your role is to be a good little consumer.

In that kind of world there is no need for an ipod to be good at helping you make music - even though it could easily have been made that way (and there are some good alternatives that are.) In that kind of world there IS a need for the ipod to be good at controlling and enforcing what someone else says you are allowed to do with the music you have paid for. And that is what the ipod IS trying to be good at.