... (silence) ...

These days are rather crazy. Lots of fast and loud to take in. Most of it's good but also exhausting. Laughter, song, and play with occasional meltdowns and time-outs. So the quiet becomes very important. A chance to reset, recharge, remember. And The Quiet Book (by Deborah Underwood), with it's simple statements and soft images, serves as an invitation to embrace the "many kinds of quiet" that so kindly sneak into our days.

Some of our favorites:
- don't scare the robin quiet
- coloring in the lines quiet
- swimming underwater quiet
- lollipop quiet
- sleeping sister quiet

"... we're not able to receive it for thinking we already know what it says ..."

Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you ... my brother:

David Dark at Downtown Presbyterian (April 25, 2010) from Geoff Little on Vimeo.

The Story of Stuff

Happy Earth Day! Celebrate with me by watching Annie Leonard's The Story of Stuff video that explores the life cycle of our material goods. I'm posting it to draw attention not so much to the corporate character, "those guys" illustrated as bloated men with dollar signs on their bellies, but rather to the consumer character, the "me," as shown above- also a bloated man carrying as many shopping bags as he can. "My" story begins somewhere around 40 seconds into minute 8. And the bit on "perceived obsolescence" convicts me. I can remove the golden arrow's perception filter in any number of ways. My niece Dorothy taught me one such way with her practice of walking down the toy isle pointing to things saying, "I don't need you, I don't need you, I don't need you." I suppose her mantra is a good place to start.

Twinkle, Twinkle...

"...ye lights of evening, find a voice..."

The Rosette Nebula, a stellar nursery

(thanks to Elizabeth Streight for bringing this to my attention)

"Spring has returned. The Earth is like a child that knows poetry."
-Rainer Maria Rilke

The opposite of faith is not doubt...

"When I was a little kid, nine years old, I remember a rainy Sunday afternoon and you couldn't go out to play and you were stuck in the house. And my mom came out with a deck of cards and dealt them out and we played rummy together. Now, my mom can beat me in cards because I'm nine years old. That wasn't the point of the game. The point of the game was this was her way of telling me she loved me, in a way that she couldn't just say, you know, "Son, I love you," because I'm nine years old. I'm going to squirm and go, "Aw, Mom," and run away. In a way, being able to do science and come to an intimate knowledge of creation is God's way of playing with us. And it's that kind of play that is one way that God tells us how he loves us."

- Brother Guy Consolmagno, Jesuit astronomer in a great conversation with Krista Tippett and Father George Coyne (Asteroids, Stars, and the Love of God)

...perhaps my favorite Speaking of Faith show thus far...

The title of this post comes from Brother Consolmagno paraphrasing Anne Lamott, "The oppposite of faith is not doubt. The opposite of faith is certainty."

And it all seems to go nicely with this photo from the Hubblesite....each speck is a different galaxy.

Daily

"With ominous frequency, I can't think of a right word. I know there is a word; I can visualize the exact shape it occupies in the jigsaw puzzle of the English language. But the word itself, with its precise edges and unique tint of meaning, hangs on the misty rim of consciousness. Eventually, with shamefaced recourse to my well-thumbed thesaurus or to a germane encyclopedia article, I may pin the word down, only to discover that it unfortunately rhymes with the adjoining word of the sentence. Meanwhile, I have lost the rhythm and syntax of the thought I was shaping up, and the paragraph has skidded off (like this one) in an unforseen direction."

-John Updike, The Writer in Winter, from AARP Magazine (that's right)