Life is like a staircase...

For some reason, I recently found myself recollecting and reflecting on the different stairs back at Verity's South Campus.  Pardon me my strange nostalgia! 

There were the corner stairs in building 1...trekking up and down, down and up, morning after morning for chapel, sometimes awake, more often pretending to be...and one time stopped in my tracks because the window was thrown open, it was Spring, fresh fragrant air was rushing in, and a Robin was singing outside.  Those stairs were also the scene of adventure one fine night, when an unnamed daredevil decide to bypass the second floor flight by scaling her way up the outside wall...

There was the red staircase:  The long, endless waiting, surrounded by people and yet so alone, staring out the windows until the dungeon doors, otherwise known as the CLEP testing center, swung wide to receive its quaking victims.  But also the chance meetings, good conversations, an encouraging smile and a friend to talk to at the end of a rough day.  Also the occasional entertainment of moving a piano from one floor to another!

The building 1 North Staircase:  Early, early in the morning, alone and unnoticed, sitting down and crying, because I had never heard someone play the piano so beautifully before.  On dark afternoons, dragging my exhausted limbs painfully to the 3rd floor, sopping wet and happy, carrying a pair of muddy volleyball shoes and a dripping jacket.

Staircase in the middle of building two:  Carrying things--everything from desks to mattresses to Christmas trees.  Making movies in the basement!  Running for my life from Jess, right before '07 Grad. 

The little flight of stairs leading outside building 1 on the first floor...I always wanted to be able to run and jump right to the top of them, but I could never quite do it.

So, as I pondered, it came to me that life is like an infinite staircase... you can always go further up, and you can always go further down.  You never know who you might meet, or which direction they are going.  Come to think of it, is the Christian life in some ways more like an escalator?  I'll have to think about that.

For now my musings are at an end.  If I left out anything important, please feel free to comment and add!

Stop for a moment and listen...what do you hear right now?  Besides the quiet whir of my laptop, the noises a house makes at night, and my little brother restlessly turning over in the top bunk, my ears are unassaulted by anything.  Sometimes, though I have a longing for a deeper silence.  The kind you really only get outdoors, walking alone in some far off wild spot, the forest falling into a silent hush whenever you pause.  Do we ever stop to ponder how rare and valuable silence is?

I once heard someone make the point that our modern culture hates silence.  The statement rang true with me, and I would agree, though I would say that our culture even fears silence.  When people live for short-term self-pleasing empty pleasures, silence can tell us things that we don't want to hear.  We wake up to an alarm and then keep the radio on most of the day.  We jump in the car and automatically turn up the music.  When we take a break, it is usually to talk on the phone.  And now a multi-million dollar industry has developed around gadgets small enough to take our music with us virtually anywhere.  Imagine that: now the modern man can safely venture outdoors to take a jog or mow his lawn without risking exposure to silence(!).  We can visit spots of natural beauty so full of the display of God's power and majesty that our forefathers would have been awed to stillness, but we cart along our boom boxes and ear buds.  It is implied over and over that our identity is determined by what we listen to.  No, no and a thousand times no!

Silence leaves us vulnerable.  Just because of this fact, some people lock themselves inside a sphere of noise that nothing can penetrate.  It is sad to see.  Silence makes us (sometimes uncomfortably) aware that we are not self-sufficient, that there are bigger questions to be asked.  The Psalms say "Be still, and know that I am God."  How many of us take that command seriously?  According to the history of Elijah, God was not in the earthquake or the tornado...His Spirit spoke in a "still small voice."  In the current trend of "more and more noise" I see a culture that is trying hard to ignore that small voice.  And yet God still calls us...calls us to come out into a quiet place to meet with Him.

Why does the New York Philharmonic play in Carnegie Hall?  Why not give concerts over by the subway?  The truth is, even things of the most exquisite beauty can be easily ignored when they are covered by a roar of noise.  If you want to put yourself in a position to ignore God's presence, then beware of silence!  Run from it at every opportunity.  But if that is not the case, then why don't we take the gift of silence more seriously?  We ought to thank God for those precious moments of quiet He gives, and make use of them for better purposes than wondering why we left the iPod at home.  Take some time...go for a walk in the woods...be still--and know that He is God.

P.S.  It might seem odd for me to write something like this; after all, I am a musician who loves to make music, listen to music and even talk about music.  :_)  However, there is a balance to everything in life.  Without times of reflection and quiet, even the most profound music can become stale.  Nothing ruins something like having too much of it!

P.P.S.  Since I *promised* in the last post that the next would have visual interest, here is a random photograph showing (half of) me and (half of) my band at rehearsal tonight:

(no, I am not about to stab someone---I am acknowledging the trumpet player asking a question!)

Tuesday has never been my favorite day.

Sometimes I miss Mexico...the mountains, the people, and the sunsets like this one:

This is a man who has impacted me quite a bit, especially through his writings.

I don't often do this, but I would like to ask a favor of my faithful xanga readers--- go to Ken's website at www.kenpierpont.com and subscribe to the weekly "Stonebridge newsletter."  Let me know if you like it.  If you have time, read some of the many wonderful stories he has written to share.

October has to be my favorite month of the year. =)  A perfect fall day in Michigan defies words to describe, and we have had several already.  Unfortunately, cold weather will soon put an end to my habit of cycling all over the county.  Here are a some snapshots from a few days ago of one of my last bike rides for the year.

That same day, for a horrible 15 minutes I thought my bike had been stolen.  It doesn't look like much, but I have put well over 1000 miles on that bicycle---you can imagine how I felt!

And here is me, badly needing a haircut.

I saw a dictionary entry for "harmonic analysis,"  which turned out to have a mathematical definition.  Shocking!

I leave you with a classic Anders quote:  "Reality: a stark reminder of what's actually going on."  --Jared