Madison

Prologue 

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I've got 3,762 photographs in a folder from this summer alone. Moments captured and then thought about then forgot about, ideas and accidentals and 'what...was I thinking...here' pictures. And because of a small sojourner's sabbatical -a trip to the eye Doctor to get new vision- they lie in my harddrive in neat, categorized order until I can properly articulate up close, the message that I saw far off. It's both a comfort and a jar to know that I'll always have images to fall back on.

I've finally come up for air, it feels. And pleasantly so. 

I'm taking deep breaths of inspiration, feeding the cells of my imagination with the oxygen of Real things. Things that are in one sense just the same as the old things, yet at the same time they are now somehow different. Deeper, richer, truer. Lewis describes this sense of seeing things in a way that is "deeper, more wonderful, more like places in a story: in a story you have never heard but very much want to know."  

  My unlined journal is all filled up in black ink with theory's and charts and stats on the source of this story, but my heart is all filled up with the steady secret that this Story is a True one- this grand tale of Real things, A Real Man, Real Words, Real Love- it is not written about me, but I get to partake in the mystery of its unfolding. I stand, reading, singing, speaking, weeping at the beauty of the Truth.

 A business/empire/marketing-driven, self-expressionist yuppie art endeavor will not hold up underneath the weight of this glory.  Mine didn't. I stand comforted by the fact that I don't have what it takes to make a name for myself. Only One man ever did, and he yielded his right to it. He was Real. He's making me Real. 

                                                                       

                                                                                                     ...

Speaking of Real things. I went to Madison, WI this past weekend to experience the sensation of listening to REAL music: Opera. Puccini's LaBoheme was ripe and in season.

The sublime voices, wooshing out of well trained lungs could have just blown the watercolored leaves from their fragile clasps,

 even the old oaks. 

The rustling leaves kicked up by pedestrians,

synonymously sounding with the rustling ideas

clasping onto smiling conversations, 

even the old jokes.

It was lovely. 

A smattering of images from the weekend follows: