Last night I decided to join the Starbury movement. For those of you that don’t know about it, basically, Stephon Marbury decided to create a line of shoes that cost only 14.98 per pair. It started out as just basketball shoes, but now there are several styles. He even wears his shoes on coart along with Ben Wallace and a few others. Suposedly, they are just as good as expensive shoes, but without the price tag. The whole point was to create a quality shoe that everyone can afford. So, I decided to pick up a pair mainly because I needed some shoes and they are only 14.98. I got the “cyclone II” style in brown/black/tan. they are really quite comfy and have that classic old school “new balance 574″ look to them. I have had 3 pairs of New Balance 574’s so they are kind of the standard of measurement for me as to how these shoes feel and hold up. So far so good, but it is the first day, so we will see how long they last.
Last night, after our worship gathering and a trip to Pier 500 for appetizers, we decided to go back to our house for some additional hanging out. Our first plan was to have a fire and sit around, but it was a bit warm for that, so we decided instead to just hang out without the fire. Then we thought that it would be a good night to start drinking some Malian Tea. So, I busted out the tea pots and the tea and Mark Fisk and I got to work brewing the tea.
This tea seems as common as the dust in Mali, and is often had 3 times during the day, and each time consists of three rounds. The first is very strong (“as bitter as death”), the second is slightly sweetened (“just like life”), and the third is well sugared (“as sweet as love”). The process of making it is probably just as important as the tea itself.
The process goes a little bit like this…
- Take your time. If you’re in a rush, then making tea will drive you nuts. Kick back into African time – perhaps by pretending that you’re waiting for a bus to fill up – and slow down your actions. Making tea is a ponderous, plodding process, and if you try to rush it, it will simply find a way of forcing you to slow down. Relax, take a deep breath, and procrastinate.
- You now need to light your charcoal burner. The charcoal sits in the top in the shallow bowl, so the wind can blow through the various holes to keep it red hot; stack some charcoal on the top, slap in some paper impregnated with lighter fuel, and light it up like a barbecue. If you’re in the desert and don’t have a stove, a small wood fire will suffice.
- Wait for the coals to start glowing, while fanning the stove with a flag-shaped fan made from weaved grass. If you’re feeling efficient you can start preparing the teapot at this stage, but feel free to sit around doing nothing while the fire settles, if you prefer. There’s no rush, after all.
- Once the coals are glowing red, you need to fish out your teapot. This all-metal affair, normally painted, is shaped like a normal round teapot, with a long spout, a hinged lid on top and a handle at the opposite side to the spout. Put a heap of tea leaves into the pot, along with a little water, and pop it on the stove, directly onto the coals. The tea you choose depends on who you are; It’s up to you, really; There are no rules.
- Soon enough the water starts to boil and froth out of the teapot’s spout, and this is a sign to start brewing the tea. Fish out up to three glasses, each of them the size of a shot glass, and start the concoction process. Pour water into one glass, filling it right to the top, and tip this into the pot. Do this three times, put the teapot back on the coals, and if you’re looking for something else to do, rinse the glasses in water, making sure you don’t waste more water than you have to. This is the desert; water is precious.
- It won’t be long before the pot is boiling again, spurting steam out of the spout and quite possibly bubbling around the sides of the lid. Pour white sugar into one glass, filling it right to the top, and tip the sugar into the pot. Fill this glass with tea from the pot, starting to pour from a low height and raising the teapot as high as you can before bringing it low again as the glass fills, and take the glass and pour it back into the teapot with a flick of the wrist. Repeat.
- And repeat. And repeat. This part of the process can go on for ages, with some tea pourer’s pouring and tipping 20 or 30 times to get the tea to the right strength. When you think your tea is ready, leave a little bit in the glass and taste it; if you want your tea to be stronger, or you want it sweeter, then keep on pouring or adding sugar as required.
- If, however, the tea is ready, fill the glasses with the same high-pouring action, so each glass gets a good frothy head on it, and pass them round. You should get three glasses from each pot, and it’s important that they’re all drunk; if there are two of you, pour a glass for your guest, then another one for them, and then one for yourself.
- Drink the tea in short slurping sips. It won’t be too hot to drink, as all the pouring will have cooled it down to a drinkable temperature, and before you know it, it’ll be gone. And then it’s probably time for another pot, if you have time… which you almost certainly do.
It was a good time to enjoy some tea together and teach a few others about the ritual of the tea. It got me excited to go back to Africa and continue to learn how to slow down. I hope we can make the tea brewing a regular part of our lives as it causes you to sit and wait and just share life together for a moment. Our first time was a success, and the tea turned out quite good.
I decided to do another recording with my home-made guitar. This time, It features the electric portion of the guitar. If you have no Idea what i am talking about, I explain the guitar in an earlier blog post HERE. This recording is a song from the band that I am in, “Montreal”. It is a song called “Plate Glass Beauty”. I didn’t quite get the tone I wanted due to the fact that in order to really get the best tone, I would have to crank my amp quite loud and I am not sure my neighbors would appreciate that. But I still think it sounds pretty good considering I recorded it in about an hour from start to finish including vocals and editing and all that. If you want to give it a listen, click on thie link:
If you want to listen to the earlier recording of Ray LaMontagne’s song called “Empty”.
Thanks for listening and let me know what you think.
It has been quite a while since I’ve updated my “current listening” sidebar. This is not because i haven’t been listening to music. In fact, it is quite the opposite. So i thought I would let you know what I have been pumping into my ipod as of late. I am not saying that these are the best albums in the world, but simply what I have been listening to lately. Check them out and let me know what you think. Also, I am always up for suggestions on cd’s to check out. If you are wanting to only check out a couple of these, let me point you to my favorites. The new wilco album is a MUST!!! I will just say that off the bat even though it doesn’t actually come out till next week. (you can listen to it on their website) Also, the new Andrew Bird album and the latest from the Cold War Kids is quite good. Ok, who am I kidding, these are all really good albums for different reasons. Check them out. By the way, this is the model Ipod I have. 40gb…black & white…it’s still kicking even though it does act up from time to time. No need to get a new one…yet. (although it is completely full!!!)
So far, Sanctuary has been without a logo or a “branding” so to speak. That is going to change. Not because we have to or feel that we are supposed to market ourselves, but because we want to have a sign made, do some print media with our info, and for future items that we may want. It is also because we would like to have some sort of symbol that becomes familiar and pleasing to the eye to our committed community and the community we are surrounded by. I don’t think it will make or break us, but as someone who is very visual and artistic, those things matter to me and I tend to judge companies/churches/organizations on their appearance. That can be many things such as a website, an advertisement, product display or packaging, and logo. Now, I wish I didn’t do this, but first impressions make a big deal in this fast paced life.
So, I am trying to come up with something. I hesitate in this whole thing because i just don’t always like the idea of acting/thinking like a company in any way, but I think it will be a good thing to come up with a simple effective symbol/logo that we can put on various media.
The reason I write this post is simply to see if anyone has any ideas. If you don’t know what we are all about and who we are, go to our website and just read some of the info on there. Then tell me your thoughts. It doesn’t even have to be a full concept, just even an abstract idea or word that pops into your mind when you think about Sanctuary. It will help me to think outside of my own brain and get input from people that think differently than I do. Then I can take those ideas and start coming up with some initial designs.
Please, comment or email me if you have anything to add to my list of words/ideas of who we are and what we are all about.
Ever since I finished my guitar I have been meaning to do a recording with it to see how it sounds recorded as well as to share with some people that have been interested to hear how it sounds. Well, this weekend I did just that. I recorded a Ray Lamontage songe called “Empty”. This is a great song off his 2nd major release called “till the sun turns black”. I recorded all the guitar parts with my home-made chambered body hybrid guitar. If you don’t know what i am talking about, it is a guitar that I built that allows me to acieve either acoustic sound or electric sound, or both. It has a D-Tar Wavelength pickup under the saddle for the acoustic portion, and a Mag pickup designed by Tom Anderson specifically to work with acoustic strings for the electric portion. It sounds quite nice.
For the Recording I plugged my guitar into my little mackie mixer and then into my Powerbook and recorded straight to “garage band”. I tracked the acoustic and the electric parts separately for editing purposes due to the fact that I don’t have a multi-channel interface for recording. The acoustic is just the “Wavelength” straight to disk with a little eq, and that’s it. The electric portion was run through my pedal board effects and then to my DR. Z Maz Jr 2X10, which was then mic’d and sent to the powerbook. I then recorded vocals on top of that using my Neumann TLM 103, and into the powerbook. So, nothing super fancy, but I do have decent gear, so that helps.
All in all I think it turned out pretty good for banging it out in an afternoon. I mainly just wanted to show what the guitar can do in terms of both electric and acoustic tones. In a real recording setting, I would play a regular acoustic and mic it, but this way actually turned out better than I thought and in the mix it sounds very acoustic, which it should, but often times recording an acoustic using a pickup sounds terrible. This is a hat tip to D-Tar for making a really nice pickup that is easy to install, sounds very natural, and yet is extremely feedback resistant.
So, do you want to hear it? Click on the link:
Enjoy, and please give me feedback on what you think. I am going to do another recording at some point. This next one will be more “electric” to give you a better feel as to what it can do in terms of electric tone.
I am constantly looking for new music to listen to, and realized that as of late, I have not been very successful in finding any new good music to use in corporate worship settings. If anyone has any suggestions, I am all ears.
Right now I am sitting in on a “lecture” at the C&MA Western Great Lakes District Conference. I gotta be honest; I am not a huge fan of these things. I don’t mind connecting with others in the denomination, and I don’t completely mind sitting and learning from the speaker, but it is the “business” part of it that I don’t like. And even more than that, the questions that others ask one another in order to compare themselves or their church with the others. It is not easy to describe to some of these pastors what we are doing in Hudson. It is not concrete enough for some. It is not logical to some. Thankfully there are those here in the denomination that get it and support us and stand up for us and fof what God is doing in Hudson.
After this session, I am going out with all the “worship arts” pastors for lunch. It will most likely be quite interesting to sit back and watch as they discuss and share with one another what they are doing in their church’s in regards to music. It will be even more interesting to try to explain to them that in our community, we worship in many ways outside of music and that lots of the songs we sing are not as happy-go-lucky as your typical evangelical “worship” song. Plus, it is just me and an acoustic guitar, so I can’t join in the conversations about the latest sound system and lighting systems that are being used. Don’t get me wrong, these things are not all bad, and in may be completely appropriate in this setting to get ideas and talk about what others are doing. The only thing I don’t like is when it becomes a contest to see who has the nicest stuff and who’s church claps the most during the “worship” time. I also don’t like how people like to look to the “Big boy on the block” and then go back and try to copy what they are doing as if there is a right and wrong way to lead a community of people to the throne of God. I think we need to asses our individual communities and then come up with ways to lead them in worship through song. It will most likely and probably should look very different depending on where you go.
I really hope that I am wrong in all this and I am blown away by the people I interact with and the love and support that they show one another. That would be awesome to see and experience. However, If I am honest, I am not going to be shocked if it doesn’t happen.
Ok, after being very negative this whole post, I do want to say that despite the things that I talk about here and have experienced in the past at things like these, I must say that overall I have had a wonderful experience with this district and denomination. On the whole, the people are truly striving to Follow God in all they do and are giving their all to the ministries they serve in. It may look different that the way that we are doing it in Hudson, but that’s good because they are being true to themselves and to their people, and thats what we are trying to do as well.
That’s enough ranting and raving for now. Please pray that I have a good attitude in all this despite the fact that it is easy for me to be overly cynical at gatherings like these. I really am thankful to be a part of this district and denomination, but just have to voice my opinion from time to time.
Prayer is an element that is regularly practiced in our Worship Gatherings for Sanctuary. Sometimes this takes the form of spontaneous prayer, or silence, but at least once every gathering we participate in a written prayer. These can be from scripture, or historical church prayers, or just a written prayer from another part of the body of Christ. This past week as i was preparing the worship Gathering elements, I was reading and praying and ran across this prayer by Thomas Merton and we prayed it together on Sunday. Although I fumbled through the words, I think the prayer is quite profound, yet really simple. I think it is something that everyone would resonate with at certain times in life. I thought I would share it here for those that are interested in it.
Prayer of Thomas Merton
My Lord God,
I have no idea where I am going.
I do not see the road ahead of me
Nor do I really know myself,
And the fact that I think I am following your will
Does not mean that I am actually doing so.
But I believe that the desire to please you
Does in fact please you.
And I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire.
And I know that if I do this,
You will lead me by the right road
Though I may know nothing about it.
Therefore will I trust you always though,
I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death.
I will not fear, for you are ever with me,
And you will never leave me to face my struggles alone.
Amen
One of the downsides of owning a house (especially an old one) is dealing with things that go wrong from time to time. We are in the midst of one of those moments. We have ourselves a small leak that is dripping down the ceiling/wall of our “office” room. It is coming from the bathroom above, but that’s all I know. There are 2 things that are good about it though, and that is that it is not very bad and doesn’t seem to be causing any damage (yet) and the other thing that is good is that when we bought the house, we were given a 1 year home warranty that should cover any repairs that need to be done. I just hope it can get fixed before it turns into a worse problem.
wilco
cold war kids
andrew bird
