Fresh Coffee and Drums

On Saturday I went to a Refugee/Asylum Seeker event at St. Fagan's open-air museum.  I admit I hadn't given much thought to the situation of refugees until I met some a few months ago, and now it's something I increasingly care about.  I also love the warm, vibrant cultures that many of these refugees come from; it stands out brightly against what can sometimes be a rather dreary context here in rainy Wales (sorry, Welsh friends - I do love Wales.  It's just awfully cold and gray, and a bit formal sometimes).  Saturday was intermittently rainy and characteristically overcast, but St. Fagan's was a lush green and the tent that housed the event was filled with the nutty smell of roasting coffee beans as Almas performed the traditional Eritrean coffee ceremony - washing, roasting, and grinding the beans before finally brewing and serving the thick, sweet coffee.

Modernity means camp stoves and electric grinders

 We stood outside the museum for a while as Max from Liberia played drums, inviting passers-by to give it a try and encouraging them to come by the tent later.  As numbers lagged, we each sat down in turn and tried to drum along.  Max showed me harder and harder rhythms but I kept up ok, though I can't seem to get a very loud "boom" out of the center of the drum head; he told me I needed to cup my hand and that helped a little bit.  "You're good," he said, "Do you want to play again with me later?"  

Can I just tell you now that drumming is ridiculously fun?  Naturally I said yes.  I've tried to play a djembe before but never really grasped it like this before, and I was itching to play more even though my hands ached already.

Back in the tent, a Zimbabwean refugee animatedly told the crowd stories from his childhood, and a Sudanese man sang two hauntingly lovely songs in Arabic, a capella.  Then they called Max up to the front to perform- there were maybe 40 people gathered to watch, I guess, I'm bad at numbers so I could be really off - and he said to me, "Come on - you're playing with me, right?"

So he announced me as his drum assistant and we played together, me on one drum and Max on two.

It was a long day, cool and rainy, but warm and filling nonetheless.  I got to observe most of the time, which is what I really love doing, but I was pushed out of my comfort zone in many ways (not just by impromptu drumming), with delightful results, and made a few lovely new friends.  Also, the food and coffee was delicious.

Any minute now...

I'm sure you know the song "Down Under" by Men at Work..."Do you come from a land down under?  Where women glow and men plunder?"  Well, this post is not about that song - even though it's a great song.  Naw, Men at Work frontman Colin Hay does acoustic albums now, which I discovered several years ago.  One of the most memorable is "Waiting for My Real Life to Begin". (YouTube it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cvrzqcfv9mY)

Any minute now, my ship is coming in

I'll keep checking the horizon

And I'll stand on the bow

When I awoke today, suddenly nothing happened

But in my dreams I slew the dragon

And down this beaten path

And up this cobbled lane

I'm walking in my own steps once again.

Don't you understand?

I already have a plan

I'm waiting for my real life to begin.

I admit that, against my better judgment, contrary to the knowledge of the things I know to be true, I have lived long periods of my life with this mindset.  That someday soon, next month, six months from now, next year, "real life" will finally begin.  Like I'm waiting for something.  Like I'm just in the first chapter of the book of my life and we're just trying to get all the back story out of the way.
I know that this is a shallow, lazy, and unfaithful mindset, yet I continue to come back to it.  I think Paul hits the nail on the hammer when he says in Romans 7: "For I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate...For I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out."  That's not an excuse, though - just an acknowledgement that I can do very little, if anything at all, without God's help.  Even now, I am planning and waiting and regarding my present time as just something to "finish up" before the next stage of life, instead of fully embracing the time here as purposeful and God-given.  That's how I regarded last summer, how I regarded the last couple years of college, last two years of high school, etc.  
This post is not going to have a neat, self-revelatory, problem-solving ending.  It's merely a confession.  Maybe you can empathize with it.
In a few months, I will be moving back to the US.  I don't expect that my "real life" will begin then.  It's happening now, and I'm missing it because I'm dreaming about slaying dragons.  (Not literally, I haven't dreamed about dragons in a while...)  
Life is not a dream, and dragons are real.  They just don't always look like dragons.

Pic source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/joel_r/5590291023/in/photostream/

Where I've been, What I've seen

  

Unexpected Inspiration

I've added this hastily taken pic of my
guitar to break up the acres of text

I have a folder in my Documents entitled "Creative Writing."  If you're ever on my computer (you creeper), don't go there.  It is a gunky mire of nearly 10 years of creative angst, inflated belief in my own abilities, maudlin drama, and trite ideas.  Every once in a while I go there to remind myself of the creatively productive life I used to have, and how much of that creative product should be flushed down a toilet.  It's seriously scary in there.  It helps make me humble (although the effect usually doesn't last for long).  New files are rarely added these days; most of my productivity that hasn't been sapped into the black hole of scholarly essays goes into songs, which are almost always written in pencil in a small notebook.

I haven't quite gotten a grasp on a good method of songwriting yet.  If I come up with a motif on guitar or ukulele (or piano, when I have one), it will live in limbo for weeks, maybe months, if I don't attach it to something, some words or ideas of varying degrees of permanence.  And when I really get the itch to write a song, well, there goes my whole day, because I will be frustratedly attached to notebook and instrument, playing over and over again and talking to myself and occasionally yelling at a chord for sounding horrible or trite and often throwing down (more like gently setting down, I don't throw my babies even when I'm mad at them) my instrument and saying "I give up!  No more of this today!" until about 5 minutes later, when I realize that I can't just leave it unfinished like that, and I take up the nerve-wracking repetitive process again.  And then I wonder if songwriting is this frustrating for everyone.  I'm fairly certain it's not.

Sometimes words can be the hardest part.  Sometimes the song can't go anywhere without words; words seem to shape the melody.  (I could quote you a few academic sources supporting that claim, and a few more refuting it.  Thank goodness for such a useful degree!)  Words are my most frequent stumbling block, my most obstinate obstacle.

Some madness seized me yesterday, and I ventured into the murky depths of the "Creative Writing" folder to retrieve what is probably one of my least contrived poems, which I wrote in 12th grade.  I know it was 12th grade, because I remember reading in my AP European history book about the Duke of Orleans having issued a poetry contest, where the poems submitted had to start with the line "I die of thirst beside the fountain."  I remember thinking, this is an absolutely amazing prompt, and I wrote a poem accordingly.
Yesterday I pulled up this poem, read it, and thought, that's not terrible.  It's in a pretty regular meter.  It feels like a minor key. And thus began an afternoon of the tortuous process outlined above, and in the evening I had a new song.

I have a love-hate relationship with the songs I write.  I don't know if that will ever go away - maybe it's best that way, if I loved them all the time I might not work very hard to make them better.  And as difficult as the process is, I know the more I write the better, because practice makes better (not perfect, never perfect, just better) in pretty much everything.  Maybe in 6 or 7 years the songs I've written at this time in my life will rest in the future equivalent of my "Creative Writing" folder, to be reevaluated for education, humility, and maybe even inspiration.

I'm not trying to be eco-friendly, I just want to survive

I wish I was a survivalist.  I've wanted to ever since I read My Side of the Mountain in elementary school.  In case you haven't read it (which would be a true tragedy), the protagonist, Sam, is a boy who runs away to the Catskills, lives in a tree, forages his own food, and trains a wild peregrine falcon.  He was so clever.  (I realize he's fictional.  Fictional Sam was so clever.)  I grew up playing in the woods, hiking and climbing trees, and I can identify a lot of plants, but I know if I tried to live out there, I'd die.  It's humbling, really, to think about how dependent I am.  I've never even been LEGIT camping.  If you're wondering what legit camping is, it's the kind where you hike in somewhere and there's no toilet.
Can I take survivalist classes?  Am I the only one worried by their utter dependence on commercial industry?

The Beginning of the End

It's weird to think that a year ago I was taking my last undergraduate exam.  Afterward I threw up magnificently for several hours, but I think that had nothing to do with exams and everything to do with eating expired applesauce for breakfast.  It just seems like it was sooner than a whole year ago.  I can still smell the excitement of the end of school, just like every May, but magnified times a billion by the relief of completion.  It's done, 18 years in the making, school is finally done.  Except for some reason I wanted to go back, add some more on top of that.  So instead of breathing in the freedom of The End, I'm trying to motivate myself to finish the last essays before a summer of thesis-writing.  Still, at least I picked a country where Master's degrees only take a year, and in September it will be The Real End, also known as The Real Beginning, when I can't hide behind the comfortable excuse of "Student" anymore.
It's about time, anyway.

Politics and Protests

When there are people dying without hope, why would I waste my time with hissy fits?

I should read more

I miss writing.  I think I forgot how.