what is possible

Feverishly checking in on what is happening in Egypt.

Wael Ghonim's twitter profile: Constantly Changing, Serious Joker, Internet Addict, Love challenging status quo!
Sounds like something to aspire to.

And, on completely unrelated matters (on second thoughts, it is all related), there were a couple of drawings from bloggers that I wanted to highlight this week, both of them very moving.

Guy DeLisle has posted a wonderful page from his upcoming book - pretty universal and challenging of the status quo.

One panel:


And then there's this, from Hugh at Gapingvoid on what is possible.

Take that as far as you like.

edging

My first flush impression on reading about Freeman Dyson is largely the same as the feeling I have about Christopher Hitchens. I would not in any way deny their respective smarts (and, in Hitchens' case, find myself nodding along with a lot of what he says) but they ultimately seem to be so enamoured with taking a contrarian stance that it muddies their thinking when it needs to be clearest. This makes them vastly more entertaining than many other public thinkers but I they seem to do a lot less to helpfully move debate forward towards change (in the form of changed minds or social change). Maybe I am wrong about this.

Any value in being a contrarian would seem to depend on what you are against and on your stance being rooted in some sort of objective truth (what you are for). I think the same is true of faith, which is not a good or bad thing in and of itself. The object of one's faith is where the true interest and value of the faith lie.

Maybe thinking like this leads me to look too often towards thinkers and friends for whom I already have a positive bias. But even the places and people I go to, who shape my thought and sense of God and the world, can leave me frazzled and challenged. I have already mentioned this in regard to The Gospel According to America. It happens all over again when I read N.T. Wright. What is my love like? How do I actually see the world and what does my seeing say about where I am really placing my faith?

I should say that Dr. Dyson looks more gentle and less foreboding than I have managed to draw here.

I have been posting for three months now. I like posting. Not sure how I feel about what I post. I feel myself edging towards saying more about me, which I am happy about. The drawings are part of that and part of a larger process. I am happy about the anonymity too at the moment. Now I sound like a contrarian (at least with myself).

when you're making the bread...

I baked some midweek bread on Wednesday...


Before the last twenty minute rise...


After the last twenty minute rise...


In the pans immediately after the hour long bake...


Freed from the pans...

Almost everything I know about baking bread, so far, I learned from The Tassajara Bread Book by Ed Espe Brown, a zen monk who for a long time ran a monastery kitchen, and then Green's restaurant in San Francisco. I found out from a friend of my wife today that he stumbled into the cooking and baking somewhat by accident shortly before encountering Zen...the resort he had started in as a dishwasher was taken over to be a monastery and he decided to stay. I like his books a lot and have learned a bit about slowing down from them - not sure what it says about me but mantras like, 'When you are washing the rice, you are washing the rice' help me try to thankfully do what I am doing, which I need more of. I am caught up in the fastness of modern life as much as anyone, with a very skewed sense of time - this spills out into right and wrong, values, friendships, thinking, lack of love, everything. The blog might help with this as I go on. The writing and baking do. Right now I am waiting for the dough from what will be my first pie crust to chill. I don't think of my time on the computer as multi-tasking, while the dough cools. I stopped the baking activity, started the blogging activity, will post the post, and then start the baking again.

My drawing of Ed Espe Brown is very bad. Here's the picture I drew from, which is in the back of this book...

posting

Well, that's just over a week of 'blogging' and I have to say that even this short post format output has been quite hard. [And several/most/all of my posts consist of little more than quotes and/or drawings with one or two words from me.]
The difficulty comes from not knowing exactly what I want to do with the blog and from a self consciousness that descends every time I want to post something (to try and escape that this time I drafted this post on a post-it note - several post it notes, actually). There are two main results arising from the self consciousness:
1) I sound very pretentious (maybe its that I am very pretentious). This is best illustrated in the post on economics - going for pithy insight I spout incomprehensible twaddle. See also my film posts, though I like them better.
2) Nothing is expressed very clearly. It is only now sinking in that I need to think about what I write before I post it.
That said, I like blogging (the process of putting something up), having a place to store things I have made or like, a diary, a journal, a record, media center, whatever I might want it to be or become. It would be nice to be less self conscious about it all. Maybe even to reach the point where I tell other people that this exists.
I want to have some original thoughts (is this sounding pretentious again?) and to write about drawing and baking (or at least post pictures and photos), link to films and things that move me and make me think, that give me hope, to write some personal theology (isn't all theology ultimately personal?).
Right now I want to get better at this, the drawing and the baking, not to mention the relating, loving, befirending, contributing, etc.
Phew.
So, here's a picture of two loaves of bread. These are among the first, from June, 2008 (we have not bought bread since then).
It's beautiful; made by me collaborating with time, yeast, Ed Espe Brown's recipe, the sustained world and its maker.