i’ve stumbled on the charming and fascinating work of petra bindel, a sweden-born photographer who excels in documenting people’s homes. she is all about the quirky and the personal, and kinda reminds me of the selby with her focus on how objects characterize the people who own them. see below for some of her snapshots. do you dig? cause i sure do.
a handful more cute photos under the cut!
more good friday thoughts. whenever i listen to someone read the passages in the bible when jesus dies and the temple curtain rips in two, i get goosebumps. no matter how domesticated our image of jesus may have become, there’s something about the passion story that immerses us in the stark fierceness of what love can be. this story is it, this is why we tell stories. curtain as metaphor, curtain as symbol of boundary and rule and religion, and god’s love so fierce it rips this thing. god’s love has teeth. showing us that otherness and strangeness and divinity and holiness are unwrapped, unravelled. what faulkner called the wild blood boiling in the earth was appeased. like a dislocated shoulder crunching itself back into harmony with a tired, hopeful body. teach it again how to dance.
spoiler alert.. the whole dead thing didn’t keep. you kidding? jesus is way too badass for that.
this is my favourite song about easter:
ps: housekeeping. you might have noticed i’ve revamped the layout again.. as i’m prone to do spontaneously. i’m re-organizing each post, so photos may go missing in the meantime. thanks for sticking around!
hope you have a meditative friday, full of the biggest and messiest and most uncomplicated kind of love. the kind that jailbreaks out of tombs, that kind of love. see you soon.
josh ritter is one of my favourites. and this is a beautiful, enormous effort of the imagination: 12,000 pieces of construction paper, no special effects. plus.. it’s just a marvellous song.
via poppytalk
a little tom waits, a little william faulkner: weirdness, whiskey and words that ring with a gritty kind of pathos. whisk together and enjoy.
edit april 7: fun new graphic, woohoo. the apothecary bottle used in the collage is from this cute etsy shop.
the really magical snow comes at this time of year, when it’s not too cold. the way it falls, you can get goosebumps from the silence of it, as if god is tapping your shoulder. i try to hate it, and most of the time i succeed. i don’t like march, or april, and even may is hit and miss. the messy brown-and-greyness of a city in transition translates to a slurred apathy. a lack of motivation. brown brown everywhere. someone put lethargy in my coffee and i can’t get it out of my system. and yet – and yet. i blow a kiss to my parent’s house and drive through crystalline stillness. i look out my window when i come home and the silhouette of tree against just barely luminescent sky freezes a sigh in my bones. pushes it deeper, to where there are empty spaces only filled by the whispers of yahweh. most of the time, i only hear echoes. but sometimes, sometimes i can hear his voice. and his voice is the white blur of heaven sifting down, down. shhh. as i walk into the house, stick out my tongue and try and taste it. his voice is the stock-still rabbit on the front lawn, ears cocked as if he’s listening too. i wonder if god unfurled from on high like a dove in the bible, if he could be here. the white bunny on my lawn. saying, look. saying, we are here together.
earlier when i pull up to my parent’s house the boy i used to talk to (and rescue his runaway planes) sees me drive by and sidles up the driveway. he’s nine now, taller, same bright blue eyes. same tendency to charm all his neighbours. it’s strange, missing someone like that now. when i was younger i had disdain for the suburbs, all of its sterilized organization, the vigorous upkeep of individual bubbles and houses that looked all the same. but talking to him reminds me of slow warm summers wearing long skirts and no shoes, knocking on cul de sac doors to find a ladder and get his plane back. his knock on the door almost everyday, can you play now? can you play now? the friendships, however temporal, kindled between fellow bus passengers while walking home or waiting in the snow. and i remember how much larger our overlaps are. the slide of corresponding memories and the way we all carry pieces of each other.
oh yeah, hear that soul. i love music like this and all its gorgeous hope.
edit: also, this. tom waits is my favourite.. jj does him justice.
i like to dream about the what ifs of church culture, because it’s something that’s so vibrant and volatile and always moving forward. isn’t that the story of creation, god slowly restoring us back into his vision of what beauty means? sure we have a long way to go, but we’re coming along slowly. all the lint that used to be toed under the table is being brought out to talk about. we’re beginning to acknowledge the stains of history and how we need to come forward to meet the world in humility because of that. jon foreman wrote an article awhile back for relevant magazine about how the church needs to be more like the bar.. a place of voluntary confession, of honesty, and of spilling out problems. of acknowledging our brokenness instead of hiding it. and even if we don’t find all the answers, to be able to uplift, encourage, share and buoy each other through it all.
that’s a beautiful vision. and the best part is, it’s possible. i’ve seen it happening.
when i grew up in church things were nice and neat. bible stories smoothed over the parts of god that could scare us. we dressed up and looked pretty and sometimes got to sit in pews with the grownups. and then as i grew up i started to feel uncomfortable with the demons in my chest: insecurity, lust, depression, isolation, loneliness. and there was nowhere to put them. church became a place to hide who i was. until occasionally, someone who could read me well, or someone led by the spirit would look through me and see the hurt. most of the time though, i became a virtuoso at the art of lying without words. i look around now and see changes. even the fact that things are being talked about, slowly, encourages me. there’s dimension in dialogue. we might feel lost in ourselves, but when we’re together we have grounding.
i know, wholeheartedly, that there’s a painful gap between what our world could be, and what it is. anyone with a relative with cancer, a grandparent with alzheimer’s, or even access to the internet headlines could tell you that. anyone who has smelled death or looked it in the eye, or examined the ramifications of our tangled global economy, or catapulted their hearts to other countries stunted by poverty. but i also know there’s a lot of goodness hiding in here. the poetry of the gospel gets me every time, even when i don’t want it to. despite weakness and heartache and loss, it’s possible to celebrate. because what’s dead can live. what’s torn can be healed. the turbulent earth, the fumbling church, even these can be redeemed. and we are part of this vision of emerging beauty. we are part of this vision of ultimate love.
i don’t want my kids to grow up feeling constricted by expectation and suffocated by shame. i want them to take part in the fiesta. i want them to come out of church filled with joy. i want them to dream about what’s possible. i want them to dance. it’s a festival with lanterns and ribbons, stuffed with grace and arms wide enough for all. it’s a party. jesus turned water into wine, after all.
notes to self: remember the good things. write down the stories. capture the moments and the music glimmering in harmonicas and brown, shining skin, the broken guitars and hoarse voices in the hallway learning to take flight, slowly climbing the walls. remember the good things about this. remember the eagles, the paintings, all of the names that you never forgot. the faces you still recognize. the best and brightest days, the days when love steeped the brick foundations so full you felt like crying and reached up up up onto the roof and drifted to the sound of bells. remember what you have learned and what you have seen. refuse to be unchanged.
pack up, gently, with dignity and with respect. pitch a new tent under new stars.
go forth, in love.
