Saturday, November 03, 2007

Icelandic preciousness


It was winter of 2002. Christmas was here and I had a long holiday season to endure. A friend had lent me a CD that he had told me was going to change the way I thought about music. I remember sitting in my room and putting the CD on my laptop with a slow Window's media Player visualization playing in the background. The songs were trully like none other I had ever heard. They seemed to lack a general motive and a goal. They didn't give me the usual verse, chorus, verse, chorus flow and a poppy tagline. I couldn't even understand the words(besides, who understands the imaginary "Hopelandic" language anyways). And so I listened...every night as I fell asleep...for two weeks straight... to one of the most glimmering, creative, enthralling pieces of music I had ever heard. Two years later I found myself in a small Chinese apartment doing the same thing to an amazing follow-up album. On tuesday Sigur Ros will be revealing quite possibly one of the most dazzling audial/visual compositions of all time. It's a two disk DVD collection featuring a film documenting the bands return to Iceland for a series of home shows and a new album "Heima"
Please see the video below and try to refrain from crying:

Thoughts on Love and Sacrifice


Sometimes I ask myself, "Will I ever really know what love means?" Love is such a dynamic, shifty, changing word. It has such different meanings in different context, differences vary between people. A year ago I stopped caring about Love's meaning. It seemed too unsearchable, too lofty, too distant and too unattainable to grasp.
I always have loved looking back at old photographs and asking, "What was I thinking about at that time in my life? Who was that person then?" I was looking back at some of my postings on this blog again today and it was kind of like that. I saw an image of the person that I was this past year. It made me sad, humbled, and encouraged. He started all over again, right from the ground up. Things weren't making sense to him. He had thought he had done everything right, and yet, things still didn't work the way that he wanted them too. Frustrated, hurting, lost, he typed out his brokenness on a keyboard hoping that maybe someone would understand. He didn't have any idea what love means, nor did he care. He was more concerned about making it through weary days. Days that seemed endless and long and sometimes too much to bear.
A year passes and something about a year makes things change. Problems that were come into perspective. You regain that balance that was lost.
I guess what I am trying to say is that this past month I remembered what it was like to love again. It feels good to fall in love with life. There is an intricisy in love. It lifts you high, drops you on your head, picks you back up and dusts you off, just so that you can do it all over again. There's something beautiful about genuine love. Not that kind that movies make or that is idealized by our culture, but the real kind that hurts and heals and makes us stronger and more joyful in the end. One can never regret pain if it ends in love.
I renamed this blog in an effort to recapture my love for writing and refocus the purpose of this site. I used two metaphors that are often used in Biblical Prophetic imagery.
The first, "Honey" is often shown to represent the sweetness of love expressed specifically through truth:
Ezekiel 3:3 (English Standard Version)
3And he said to me, "Son of man, feed your belly with this scroll that I give you and fill your stomach with it."(A) Then I ate it, and it was in my mouth(B) as sweet as honey.
The second, "Ashes" represents the oftentimes painfull, crushing, and desperate aspects of a life of spirituality. Again expressed through Ezekiel:
Ezekiel 27:30
30 and shout aloud over you
and cry out bitterly.
They cast dust on their heads
and wallow in ashes;
These two aspects of love seem to forever be intertwined in this filthilly beautiful home on Earth. May we seek these aspects together through both the practical and metaphorical.