Saguaros

I'm probably going to blog about the new state of my life soon, but for now I'm going to publish a journaling I made in February of 2008:

Driving through the Saguaro Cacti of Northern Arizona, I'm reminded of a Japanese tradition of spending time, concentration, and energy in search of the perfect lotus blossom. It seems to me that this discipline/exercise intends to engage the searcher in seeing. To me the final accomplishment is not finding the perfect lotus blossom or the viewing of a Saguaro which is arranged "just right", but instead the realization that in it's existence as a blossom, as a Saguaro--

it is good.

"The perfect Saguaro of the the West" would sadden the aesthetic of the mountains. Seen out of two-dimensional format it would seem silly.

Does this tie in with human identity? Are we not getting what we should out of our search for the ideal?

Life Off Road

I've made a major change in my life in the last month.

I left my job as Program Coordinator at Camp Wartburg, where I've been for the last four years. It feels like I'm forever away from that first step onto Camp's grounds for an interview in early September. So much has happened, and I've done so much. But I've got a lot ahead of me too. And I just chose to seek what's next outside of Camp.

I've been living off of Camp site for about a week and half. I moved into a house in Maryland Heights, MO with three guys I'm connected with by various channels. West County is a fun place to be! I'm about forty minutes closer to my girlfriend Rachelle, in Ellisville, which makes things quite a bit easier for us. We're just a few minutes from all the cool stuff on Olive and Dorsett, plus Creve Couer Park is just a bike ride away, and Grandma's house is right across Feefee! The house (which is on a cul-de-sac!) has four bedrooms on the second floor, with upstairs laundry, large living areas on ground level with two car garage, and a walk-in basement half of which is finished, the other half is storage. There's a pretty good sized backyard, with a nice deck, and it all backs up to woods and a creek. The housemates are great to live with. Very agreeable on all fronts. Brilliant guys with good hearts and a lot of advice for a camp kid trying to be a grown-up.

The most imposing part of my life right now is the Job Search. It's been what's kept me from updating too many people, kind of for fear of not having any good news. But some folks helped me to decide that that's silly. So here I am.

When people have been asking me, "What exactly are you looking for?" I've been answering, "Hello? A job..." In my head, at least. The truth is after four years in an industry that no one really understands, and in a position that they understand EVEN LESS, I feel like I've got even less career direction than I did four years ago, holding a shiny, fresh Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree in Studio Art. But here instead of looking at this situation as one where I have no qualifications to do any specific thing, I look at myself as having ample qualifications to do anything. I truly believe that with a little bit of an orientation, I could perform in almost any environment, but I'm getting the feeling I'll need to work my way back up.

All this is not to say I don't have an ultimate goal in mind. It is, as it always was, woodworking. Furniture-making to be precise, Art Furniture making to be exact. However, this doesn't add a lot to the job search since the industry is on rough times. I've been in contact with several shops in the area, all are reluctant to hire(which puts it gently) anyone, especially one with no "practical experience." Most of those are actually due for a follow-up call by now, so we'll see. I'm determined to go it alone, however, but more on that later.

Without a prospect for a woodworking gig, my eyes turn to other fulltime employment. It'd be great to get into a management position or a position which would be easily promotable to a management position. I'm working on something with our friendly neighborhood drugstore and should hear by Monday. To be honest the prospects for fulltime jobs has been dismal at best. So I'm also seeking out stackable part-time jobs. The idea being if I can stack a 20-30hr weekend job with a 20-30hr weekday job, or a morning job with an evening job, then by sheer strength of character, I can make ends meet until I find something better. I'm looking into such areas as Outdoors or Home Improvement Stores to direct a little of my two most obvious passions, or just random retail stores. Eventually I'll change gears to look for server jobs at some fancy restaurants. No, not Applebee's fancy...

Done with job search, back to woodworking.

I'm looking forward to having time to devote to wood. It's been so long since I've held something made by my mind and my hands together and felt like it was something that I truly poured myself into.

There are a lot of good things happening on this front. I have a large amount of tools that were rescued from my great uncle's estate this last year, thanks to my dad who's got a lot of faith in my potential. Many are old and in need of repair but they'll one day make fine things I know it. All these tools are taking up a little corner of the garage right now. This space is common use for me and the housemates, and there is a lot of space. It doesn't look like it right now because a lot of it is taken up by my junk. So I need to downsize and organize, and with a little bit of creative storage solutions I think there will be plenty of space there to pull off a few projects. One of the first things I need to build is a Workbench, for my sweet awesome vise, and on which to run my plunge router, which will likely perform most of my joinery as well as some roughing techniques until I get a planer. The other thing is probably an outfeed table for my little old table saw. These are simple items, but until I have money for the materials for these, I'll continue to clean up the space and to design.

I'm working in two areas as far as designs are concerned. I'm of course trying to think of the biggest best stuff possible to continue my thought processes where I left off, taking into account everywhere my mind has been in the last four years, but I'm also working on figuring out the best way to potentially utilize ETSY, the ebay of the handmade. I've begun a set of designs which focus on being simple, creative, and shippable. I wan to put my mark on some items that can be one of a kind, but one of many, that can be great for someone's home and life, but also make me some money for shop expenses. Right now I'm refining the designs for a plywood camping chair requested by a friend. If you have any ideas, please comment here.

All this craziness hasn't kept me from having fun. Last weekend Rachelle and I went and played Demolition Ball(lacrosse on bumper cars) and lazer tag with the teachers from STJ, and like I said I've been exploring Maryland Heights by bicycle. I haven't figured out when to schedule the next epic climbing adventure, but I keep finding new belay partners. In addition to climbing I'm setting my sites on new backpacking adventures this fall and sometime I'd really like to canoe all 109 miles of Missouri scenic riverway along the Current River camping along the way. We shall see.

That's my life as it is now. Peace.

Rising

You'll notice a bit of a new look. Hopefully it'll catch on... Sometimes a fresh look outside is just what you need to get the insides moving. I guess there's a balance there. Like the left side of a scale balances the right, our inside balances our out.

Someone started me thinking a while ago about mind/body connection. I don't tend to think of it that way. It's more of an inside/outside thing to me. And this far deeper than the physical. It's hard for me to decide where one starts and the other begins. But I'm ahead of myself. Anyway, this friend got me thinking with a question in terms of how healing is genuinely and significantly affected by thoughts and feelings. (I never answered her question. Sorry.)

Something called Noetic Science. I'm sure it's fascinating research. But to me it's not all too surprising. I think C.S. Lewis wrote about how we are amphibious creations: part physical and part spiritual. As opposed to an angel or demon, which is pure spirit, but with a capacity to affect the physical realm.

Anyway, it makes perfect sense that our souls which are so very much a part of who we are would affect how our body works. For we are both parts, we are not half physical and half spiritual, with a clean line running down the middle. But our spirit is one with our body and our body one with our spirit. So when one is something bears an effect on one, it does so on the other. Christ will raise not only our souls from the dead on the last day, but also our bodies. Which raises, questions I won't answer; God will take care of it.

I'm quickly getting in deeper than I wanted to. But my point is that there are a lot of people searching for what makes the human body/mind/whathaveyou so incredibly special. For what makes people know things 'instinctively'. They need to look no farther than our created nature as spiritual/physical amphibians. I'll muse more on this point I'm sure. But not now.

Choose.

There's a time at camp I value like few others. It's the time that I spend on the top of the climbing tower, sending high ropes course participants on the Zip Line. The Zip Line is usually the culmination of a ropes course experience which lasts three hours or so. I must admit, sometimes by the end I'm so tired that I let the significance of this time slip by unrecognized, but others I take the time to meditate on the dynamic of this circumstance.

The kids are belayed one by one up a ladder to a 8x8 platform 40 feet up in the air enclosed by a half wall made of the top three and a half feet of the climbing walls. I hook each participant into their own safety line as they arrive and they wait for the zip pulley to be retrieved before being hooked in and sent on a gut-wrenching ride like no other.

They stand with me at the top of the world for usually 2 or 3 minutes, one or two or three of them at a time. Their friends aren't there to see whether they smile or frown, the last bit of normality that is left when your school sends you on a three day field trip in the woods is stripped away, and they are faced with a choice. There's not enough time for me to have much of a conversation with them, but sometimes I can pull something out of that experience for them. Sometimes, I see in their face, in their behavior, what I believe may be a clearer picture of their true self.

I spent the last 3 days with 8th graders. There were very strange moments where I felt like I was in junior high again. I've been talked over, embraced, shunned, embraced again, laughed at, laughed with... But at times I was also respected, listened to, and questioned for vital information of great importance(like the name on my facebook account, yeesh, Tim Nummeman is going to be getting a lot of friend requests.)

Thursday I had one group which was exceptionally encouraging to one another while they were climbing the rock walls, I was excited to see what would happen as each face the choice at the top of the zip line. Most of the kids thought a little as they sat there on the top of the tower, equipment checked by me and ready to go, but they went without much hesitation. Three thought a little longer. One was convinced that I would push her off, but I waited for her to make her choice and encouraged her to take control of the situation and make a decision one way or another. She did. After a half dozen tries to lean herself forward and scooch off that tower, she went. And when the chance for seconds came she climbed up again and took the plunge without hesitation.

Lots of kids get to the top and say, "I can't." That's a challenge for me to work with. I understand the sentiment. It can seem impossible to overcome the body's natural involuntary responses to an emotion like fear especially when that emotion is triggered by such a primal instinct as the fear of heights. When faced with this frightening experience, some people let that fear be the end of the story. "I can't. I'm too scared. I want down." This attitude essentially splits one's self: our desires against our emotions. And it puts fear in the driver's seat. It makes fear into an entity outside of our self, and leave our self incapable of an action.

The truth is that our self is actually capable of quite a lot more than we put to it. There's no reason that anyone could say "I can't," to the Zip Line. Gravity does all the work.

I gave my friend a different alternative. I outlined for her the truth of the situation: that I had set-up for her an experience in which she was safe, checked, and double-checked; that she had a choice to do or not do as she pleased, she could go back down on the ladder if she wanted, or she could take the ride she'd climbed up for. And I left it to her, "Choose."

Ownership and Belonging

I was talking with a friend about life.  We started touching on the idea of setting down roots, committing to a location, a job, a pursuit, and it got me thinking quite hard.  I do that sometimes with things that seem too simple.  

What it all comes down to is belonging.  That condition, that state of mind that lets you be at peace as a human being.  I made a web diagram delineating what I think makes up this condition.  I could spend a lot of time trying to crystallize it in a dignified away that's articulate and acceptable to other minds, in clear and understandable terms, but I'm not gonna do that.  I'm just going to put it all down in some fashion and, well, you can read it and let me know if it makes sense.  If it doesn't make sense... I don't want to know.  

Belonging - rather than a feeling, an emotional condition

Ownership - is the truth of Belonging

made up by:

Means - by this I mean a feeling.  these feelings are the MEANS of asscertaining the Truth.

Commitment - a bond of will.  not of paper or necessity.

Love

Need - a part of what might be called one's niche.  this is specifically the feeling one has that he or she is integral to the system around him or her.

Agents - now these are the (more or less) physical elements (AGENTS) which lead to the feelings which ascertain the Truth of the conditon.

Property - this is significant.  not mundane.  this is the land, the habitation, the car, the investment that one has made in one's future.  As referred to in the rough draft of the Dec. of Ind., right?

Purpose - this is the other part of the niche.  rather than a feeling of need this is the actual job there is to do and the fruit that will come of it.

Protection - I suppose one can't feel they belong anywhere without some manner of security.

Here's a sort of auxiliary bit that I struggle to wrap my head around:

Possessions - now this contra to Property is the mundane.  This is where Belonging and Possession collide in a weird way.  I hear all sorts of people cry out that our culture is falling away from meaningful and wholesome relationship.  More than previous cultures? probably not, but falling away still.  Can materialism be see as an attempt to engage in this process of taking ownership and belonging to something.  Are my unhealthy spending habits which occurred months ago to be attributed to my own feeling of dys-belonging.  If so, would it be any surprise that, as people take to the internet more and more, and venture out amongst the world in their physical bodies less and less, we would see the resultant lack of belonging manifest in greater and greater online sales and a thriving E-conomy?  

I feel that this all has obvious theological implications.  I hesitate to make them, because my brain is tired.  Perhaps I'll make another post on it this Spring.  :)

Death to Taxes

Someone was on their way to get their taxes done at H&R Block and I said a little sardonically, "Have Fun!" You know, as you might say to someone with performance anxiety on their way to stage right. Well she says, "My job's easy, their doing the hard work." This makes me think. What makes a job hard. A job can be hard because it involves the moving of very heavy objects. A job can be hard if it takes intense concentration on many things at the same time. and apparently, a job can be hard if it's very very complicated. But to me the hardest kind of job is one you don't know how to do.

Of all the vices with which I am cursed,
ignorance is by far the worst.

I just wrote that. Yeah, just now. But my point is this. Call me callous but there's not one person at H&R Block who I have a heart to pity even now, except the intern. I don't mind hard work. If my body is capable of a physical task, I won't complain to have to do it. In my mind and to my eye, orderly complication adds a sense of beauty to any system. And though I don't know the United States Tax System, I'm under the impression that it's ordered to the extreme. I'm not saying at all that tax professionals don't deserve their wages. I'm not going to pay them. I don't make enough. I'd rather suffer through filing my four W2's each from a different state, than give up a fifth of my federal refund. I'm just saying that I'll never pity the tax professional, even in his busy season. For knowledge is his business and knowledge is all he needs. Knowledge is power. Truly said. I pity the ignorant, and self-pity is a sweet sweet sickness.

Good Friday

People who know about me know I like to walk. Maybe you might have to be a hard-core fan of Tim to attach that to him as something wholly and truly Tim, but I like to think that people who know me know that. But I especially like to walk on Good Friday after Tenebrae, the service of darkness. So I walked this evening. Some people walk to take time to think. For me that hardly ever happens. Walking is hardly ever a time to dedicate my mind to a certain topic. More often then not it is a time in which all things fall to the back of my mind and I'm simply a body moving through space, ears listening to the voices of others, eyes considering the environment in which God's placed me. These lulls in mental activity, however, seem to shadow a deeper consideration of concerns and worries and the second I pause and cosider what I had set out to ignore, a leap of understanding occurs, or sometimes I simply find I've more things to figure out then I thought.

So I did that today after Tenebrae. Whenever I went to Good Friday service at home,in Overland Park, I could always just walk the five minutes home or take a detour for a longer ambulation, but this time I took to the streets of Waterloo under a full bright moon. I considered my life, in terms of my current and future stations, as well as reflected on times gone by. It seemed that this was one of those times I came to understand nothing in my walk but only found more and more things to figure out. I was not so much frustrated as I was resigned. Almost completely content to be lost and wandering. So I got back to church, hopped in my car, turned the ignition, killed the radio, and set off back to Camp. Then as I was gliding down Maeystown Road, I looked up over my left shoulder to see the moon once again. I remembered instantly an old Family Circus Cartoon. This one was from the good old days when Family Circus was more than one frame. (That or it was not Family Circus. I must admit I'm not sure.) Anyway, the boy, Tommy, I think, is looking out the window of the car at the moon. And he says, "Daddy, why does the moon follow our car whenever we drive at night." The next frame of the cartoon shows Dad on the phone when they get home, calling Grandpa, "Dad, why does the moon always follow our car when we drive at night?" Family Circus, Dennis the Menace, whatever I found myself mentally screaming, "Why are you following me?" I aced Descriptive Astronomy with Dr. Hermann. I know the moon doesn't really follow you, okay? But what we know doesn't always have a meaningful effect on how we feel. The moon appears to follow us, because of it's steadfast position relative to the shifting objects around us. The moon appears to move because it doesn't move. I'm glad to know that my God will follow me like the moon follows my car. Never leaving, for He never moves. Utterly steadfast.

"Dimensional Analysis" haha, get it? ...nerd...

Oh, man, posting two days in a row, Tim? You are already addicted to blogspot.

Shut up, I do what I want.

I just wanted to put something down as I look out my office window onto the pond at camp. (I should move my desk away from the window soon or I won't get any work done.) It's raining, but not quite storming. The wind however is tremendous. I was just looking out kind of mesmerized by the patterns of the ripples as the wind whips and spirals across the pond, and the wind died down suddenly and the only changes in the surface of the water was the fall of the wind torn rain.

I started thinking, as I watched this two dimensional design shift and morph in front of my eyes, about the things we see that we don't really see. You don't see rain fall. You think you do but you don't. You see the blur of droplets passing too quickly to be considered or admired. Today I got to see, plane-by-plane, the composition of a minute and a half of a quarter-acre (?) of rain. I wish I'd been paying more attention.

I wonder how often what we see in two dimensions are actually representations of three dimensions, with the third being replaced by the fourth. And so, was the image I saw in the pond three-dimensional and not two, time having taken the place of depth?

I've been reading Madeleine L'Engle, which makes me think: If depth is taken away and replaced with time then how would Mrs. Which have made such a silly mistake to take the Murray children to a two dimensional planet. Certainly, using the fifth dimension to tesser would be quite different if you were tessering from four dimensions to three, right? Would it be possible, even consenting a fifth dimension, to tesser from only three dimensions, length, width, and time? If you can't have a second without a first, or a third without a second, how come you can have a fourth without a third? Can you have fifth dimension without a third?

Okay, I give that this has dirfted toward, but not into nonsense. Next time you see something, ask yourself how much of it you really see. What might it look like if you could not just see, but visualize more.




I couldn't stop thinking about it. It took the third dimension of the rain to allow the fourth dimension to take it's place. Just like it takes three dimensions of light moving toward a movie screen to lend the two dimensional image the fourth dimension of time. If a tesseract bypasses space time, I wonder if it would be thought of as somthing similar to my pond bypassing the third dimension to show me the rain.

"The Violinist Analogy"

Okay, so I was reading the other day... go figure. And I came across this contemporary philosopher named Judith Jarvis Thomson. Cool name. So her big work is this paper called 'A Defense of Abortion.' Now I'm all about the sanctity of life, but I read about this paper (never read the actually paper, but I hope too) with the utmost open-mindedness to her argument. I really did. She approaches the subject using thought experiments. If you've no idea what I'm talking about check it out on wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Defense_of_Abortion

Check it out, I'll wait. . .

Now this analogy of being hooked up against your will so that you're suddenly sharing your circulatory system with this violinist. It strikes me as wrong. I'm surprised that so many opponents of this argument simply consent that it would be morally permissible to detach yourself. No it's not like you are stabbing Paganini in the face, but since when is it not morally wrong to not do the right thing.

It sounds to me like we're not hearing anymore about Morality, but instead civil responsibility. Theres so much in the criticisms and responses to those criticisms about legality and stuff, but just because somethings not against the law doesn't make it right. I don't think there's a difference between virtue and morality. Courage shouldn't be thought of as something you should have if you can, and compassion shouldn't be something that's good if you feel like it. Courage and Compassion are good Just as Cowardice and Indifference are bad.

Til now I've been writing not as a Christian but as a human being. But now I'm going to write as a Christian for a second. If I understand Wikipedia correctly. Ms. Thomson describes a woman who carries a fetus to full term as a 'Good Samaritan.' I don't care if you see Jesus as Savior or simply an excellent moralist, -- I'd think that if she's quoting him she'd think he's one or the other at least-- but in Jesus' parable, being the good Samaritan is the right thing to do and passing by the Jew, obviously in dire need of care, is wrong. This is interesting. To leave someone for dead is bad, right? Well, does it matter if you've placed the person there or not? Surely, the Levite was leaving the Jew as much as the robbers were. But I digress.

Now in the explanation I read of Thomson's argument, particular attention was paid to the concepts of right to life, and right to do as one pleases with one's body. Thomson seems to find it appalling that those who argue against abortion would hold the fetus' right to life as more important than the pregnant woman's right to use her body as she pleases. Isn't this sort of denial of rights unprecidented in our society? It's not. Our society does not condone suicide. Certainly this example of right to life being greater than right to body, is more clear than the unwanted pregnancy situation. If it's wrong for a person to commit suicide, using their right to do as they please with their body to deny their right to life, then it's wrong to use the right to do as one pleases with one's body to deny another human being their right to life, whether it's a fetus or a violinist or whatever.

This last point is debatable I know. First of all, what does it mean for suicide to be condoned? Well, I don't want to get into the argument about assisted suicide. That brings with it more emotions that I'd like to address right now. What I mean is that if an adolescent attempts to commit suicide their parents put them in protective care, and even before that medical care professionals, by default, fight for life, not for choice. When a prisoner attempt to commit suicide, they are removed of anything on their person with which they might harm themselves. Further, when people make such attempts their rational minds are called into quesiton. That protective care is accompanied by psychiatric evaluation. It seems that we know what is right: that right to life is a priority over right to do as one pleases, even when someone doesn't want their right to life.

My point is that life is more important than what you want. Doing what is right is more important than doing what you want. If what you do is not right, it's wrong. That said we all make choices, and we all make wrong choices. But it matters that we acknowledge right and wrong. Most of the time it's not hard to figure out. It's just hard to act according to what we know to be right.

So what would I do if I woke up back to back with a famous violinist who needed to borrow my kidneys for ninemonths while they were still in my body? I don't know, but I hope I'd do what's right and let him have his right to live. Some people might say that it would be an act of extreme virtue, an outrageously kind gesture to one's fellow man, I'd say it's the right thing to do. Which is ALWAYS beautiful.

I would also say that Paganini better give me nine months of the kickin'est theme music ever. Nonstop, baby!

Tim