Dog days
Our friend Andrew has posted some of his pictures from the European tour. He ended up in the hospital in Belgium with a collapsed lung and it's a relief that he's safe and at home now. I have yet to go through my own pictures from the trip.
I continue to reflect on the tour and what it meant, personally and collectively. It's part of a larger nexus of upheavals this summer that have included buying a house, switching jobs, and my dad having surgery to remove cancer. I haven't tweeted or posted in a while because I'm living in the new house, and currently not working, but haven't been able to have an Internet connection installed. Mostly my days have been spent solitary; installing fixtures, moving furniture, setting up a new home. I did bike out to Wernersville, PA (~63 miles each way) with my dad to spend a couple days at a Jesuit monastery. Sustained silence is unnerving for people raised in the technological/Internet milieu, but it's a valuable exercise. I spend a lot of time craving quiet, living in the city. But when I finally achieve that quiet, I don't know what to do with it, and the noise in my head becomes louder than the usual noise outside.
I have also found that during times of stress and change, it is helpful to paint a room orange:
posted by M. Weed at
3:15 PM
6 Comments:
intense color dude. that's the color i'd imagine RAWBERRY would be.
The picture turned out a little weird, depending on whose monitor you look at it on --- but yeah, it's interesting how some people see it as orange and other people see it as red. I think our next project is to paint the guest room violet.
Well when I saw it I instantly thought magnolia!
praying for your situations
Matt,
Your mention of staying in a monastery reminded me of a documentary I watched in recent months called "Into Great Silence" which had no narrative, and obviously no other dialogue:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0478160/
It was fascinating. Sometimes out here I go out into the desert at night. There's an old abandoned military testing range about 80 or so miles west of Salt Lake City. It's nice to get out of the city lights and noises and see the stars. It's so quiet out there that I can literally hear a constant ringing in my own ears. I enjoy it greatly.
I hope your father gets well soon.
Conor, you're the second person to recommend that I watch that. I have a friend here with an abiding interest in monastic life, and he saw Into Great Silence when it came through the Philadelphia Film Festival a while back. Now I really have to go find it and watch it.
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