Beneath the Starry Threshold

I was looking back through old entries just now, trying to pinpoint when I did my first blog redesign, about this time last year.  Last year I was entering my last full month of college as March unwound.  I could go on and on about how I was wrong and right in surprising ways about life now, and about what I know now and didn't then and all that's happened since, and all that.  A general catch up reminiscence post, and maybe I'll do one of those someday, but not today, not right now, because, though I resist it as much as I can, I'm realizing a theme to my writing, and I guess, if my writing has to have a theme, I'm honored to have this one: Betweenness.  Liminality.  Indefiniteness symbolized by spacial uncenteredness.  As college came to an end, I felt the betweenness of life's changing tide, the now and not yet of there and the rest of my life.  As it turns out, circumstances change but I still feel the sharp pangs of betweenness and I'm kind of a walking example, at least in my own mindset, of the livability of the post-modern ideal.  I don't know if there can be such a thing as the post-modern ideal, but if there is, it is the ability to live liminally.  That's not to say it is to be tried for- it is to say that we all live liminally and are at our best when we fully acknowledge that we're between centers at all times and can't really know anything about the centers till we step back and let ourselves exist between them.  And that's what I do.  That's what I've been doing for at least a year, subconsciously and most definitely super-consciously at times.  That's not to brag, well, maybe it is a little bit but I don't mean it to be...it's just that I've thought recently, quite a bit, that I've felt the most in-between things in life as I ever have, and reading through what I wrote last year, I wonder if that's true or if I'm simply more aware of it now than ever before (perhaps largely brought on by the forced introspection of forcing myself to average one post per day during lent save for Sundays).  I do know I'm living and feeling in between many things now, but I have been for awhile.

But that's life in this world, between many things.  Ultimately though, it's a direct analog to the now and not yet that is the Kingdom of God.  There are parts of it here, there are elements ongoing.  But they pale in comparison to what is to come, and we're constantly between those facts.

There is however, one center that is constant and our own disparateness with it is our own shortcoming.  Hope in that, hope in Him, is the fuel to fire the engines of a life stuck between many things thanks to the brokenness of our suffering world.  But it's not eternal, and if nothing else, that's where we can get our hope.  I'm not positing the value of inbetween living, just pointing out its existence, because we're all always in between and we're all always in process and we always will be til He returns.  But He loves us and will not withhold all blessings prior to that day.

Even so, right now, I'm between many things, and he wants me to be that way for the time being, and when that time is up, I'll be between other things.

Last night I went on a very impromptu stargazing trip with 4 students at the University of Findlay.  My love for that particular institution and city will have to wait for another hypothetical post that may never take place.  I don't know that it matters the context, but looking up at the stars, even in our attempts to objectify them as our own constellations, always makes me feel small and warm and filled with wonder, like a child in his or her mother's arms not long after birth; there's a rightness and a warmth to the smallness and the fulfillment from the experience.  Somehow, gazing up, I don't feel inconsequential despite the vastness of the universe.  I feel small compared to its largeness, but I feel close to it all the same, and somewhere in that lies the love that passes all understanding, because the God that made all of that still loved us enough to not just die for us, but to come here in the first place, from up there where, even if not literally heaven that is the heavens of outerspace, I'm sure the stars look more brilliant.

-Zack

"I want to know if you feel the same way, cause if you do I want to stay forever"
-Ween

Have you ever seen the light?

No.  Not when I knew what it was at least.  But yes.  

I've become obsessed with themes of movement lately.  I don't know why, and I don't realize it, until I try to sum up thoughts or feelings.  I could give you a list of reasons probably; obstinance toward moving on, waiting to move up, being in capable of moving on, thinking of moving past, envisioning movement toward or away from this or that.  

It's all movement.  

Lip Sync was bad last night and the judges were worse.  

This is being simul-posted on facebook now.  I'm still not sure of that decision on my part.

The NBA Playoffs start this week.  They're my favorite playoffs by a lot.  The NBA is second only to NCAA Football in my personal hierarchy of sports leagues, and I would like the NCAA less if there was a playoff (although I am one of few...actually, I would like it most if it went back to the pre-BCS style....just like I would like baseball if they scrapped divisions and playoffs and just played the World Series at the end of the season between the winner of both leagues)  I'm not terribly positive why I think the NBA gets it right with playoffs but none of the other leagues do quite so well....I would shorten the first round, but that's about it, and I don't think I could support that even, when it comes to non-1-8 seed match-ups.  The NFL has too many divisions....if you're going to let six teams in, have 2 or three divisions and take the top 3 or 4 teams in the conference after those winners....having two wild card teams with better records than division winners is ludicrous...because 16 games is too short for a four division sport, and football is too violent to have a true playoff without the most meticulous care to make sure the right teams are there....and it's just wrong right now.  The NHL is pretty fine I guess...if I followed it more.  I actually really really like the point system.  I might follow Hockey more when I move to michigan, since they love their red wings up there...maybe not in Hillsdale though....  I'm not even going to start talking about the NCAA basketball tournament.  I don't think a team that doesn't win its conference should be able to win the national championship, I don't think there should be conference tournaments unless you're going to have to win it to get to the national tournament.  Really, I just hate trying to appease public opinion when it comes to sports.  Prove it on the field.  I probably seem backwards with College Football then, but until a playoff could happen in which every conference winner (and NO ONE) else would be allowed in, it's just too big to have a legitimate playoff... so the opinions of the media and coaches should decide the national champion.  That, and I don't think national championships in college football should mean as much as they do.  There's more to the sport than that, and the ESPN/ABC have done their best to make us forget.  Bo never won a national championship...I don't care, because his goal was to win the Big Ten, beat Ohio State, and win the Rose Bowl each year.  That's college football...win the conference, beat your rival, win your bowl game.  It's too localized and too spectacular a sport to weigh down with national implications.   But it's a little late.

Okay, that's all about sports.  Sorry....

But the Go Cavs!  nonetheless

Light actually does, undeniably, exist as a binary to its opposite.  It's opposite, indeed, cannot even exist in its presence.  

Theoretically, as is everything else.  Even though that's harder to prove, I don't want to be anything but in, around, and through all that is light, so I'm not striving to exist as anything but the opposite of everything I don't want to and am not supposed to be.  That's what redemption is.  There are just two sides, and they are defined by being one side or the other.  Christ said all those that are not against me are for me, and that's what redemption means.  But we're all kind of fragments really, a sum of our parts, if you will....sure, they make us unified, or something, but you're not walking with the Lord if you think you're totally redeemed all at once.  It's a process.  God gives us pennies, when all we want is a dime...in the end though, we'll always end up with at least 11 pennies.  And when we are fully redeemed, we aren't anything at all attached to the world, and at that point, we're forever, perfectly, wholly in the light, where there can be no darkness. What would happen if everything were illuminated, and darkness ceases to exist?  Someday, we'll find out.   Light, right now, is light because it isn't dark, but if you spend long enough in the light, the necessity of a word for dark will cease, and all darkness will be but a memory of what was, if even that.  And we construct our understanding of the world on the words we use to describe it.  That's why light is necessarily the opposite of dark...because that's the only way we can understand it...that's why we can only understand good as the opposite of bad.  When bad ceases to exist, perhaps good will too, but I suspect, then, words will be different too, so what is good now will not be good, it will simply be, dizzy, light, and free of all that it could be that it isn't now, as it is trapped, tied, bound to its reliance on the existence of bad.  Right now, I am but Zack, the only Zack that is me, and therefore different from everyone else.  But someday, perhaps I will be Zack because of something essential.  But maybe then, I won't be Zack at all.  I don't really believe in essentiality, not in this world.  There won't be the need to believe in it in the next.

Read the Name of the Rose and watch Howl's Moving Castle.  Then you'll be in my aesthetic viewpoint for the week.  Or at least the biggest part of it.  I've done my best to fragment it, so that will never be possible.  Just working to develop difference and identity, that's all.  Actually, that's not even true at all.  My identity is not mine to craft.  I just have a short attention span, so I've seen about half an our of like, 4 movies this week, and the last hour of Howl's Moving Castle.  And I've read about 350 pages....and only about 80 of them have been The Name of the Rose.  

So bigness wins, that's democracy.

But bigness is an inherent fallacy.  I've proven that through me, but democracy proves it better every day.

I'm going to have a lot to learn next year, just about living on my own.  I realized yesterday that I've never done my taxes.  I've never paid a monthly mortgage.  I've never bought my own food for a sustained period.  I've never owned a car and had insurance or any sort of retirement to think about saving for.  But it's coming soon....

....at least I have a job

-Zack

"Take me home tonight, I don't want to let you go til I see the light"

-Eddie Money