new year, new you

Well folks. It's that time of year again. That time where we sit back and take a look at life. Where are we now? Where were we this time last year? Where do we want to be this time next year? HHHHMMMMMM that was the million dollar question...

In a few days we'll be back at school, digging deep into some interesting topics, aligning our direction with the things we learn and with the application of those things.

This semester, this 2011, we need to find a place within which to do some more of that application. Life is so abstract (...just read Alex's blog this morning...it's so true! Legendary and Abstract! ...yesterday is already legendary and abstract. Uhoh...) and the existing practice of journalling through it when we can spare a brief moment and bear the scrutiny is just not making anything more tangible. Our existing context is disjointed...with amazing friends all over the place but with no One Amazing Place to return again and again to develop any sort of spiritual discipline.

There's a painting at My Dog Joe in Westdale, it grabs me everytime I'm in there. Blue, with a lone figure, and the words (and I'll paraphrase, because I don't remember exactly...) "When I'm not with you, I forget you. Is that awful?" When people we know become legendary and abstract, they are still people---friends. We have Facebook and phones and snail mail and photo albums and the ability to travel---we pull each other out of the legendary and abstract and into a reality which involves community, love, confrontation, harmony. But we can just as quickly retreat into legendary and abstract when we say good night, log off facebook, get on the highway for the hop-skip-jump-trip home. We scroll through iTunes in an effort to connect to real heartbreaking music, but the names and titles which fly past our eyes are legendary and abstract in their silence. We can just as easily enlist the shuffle button to help pull us out of the cloud, and sometimes we touch reality in a brief moment of musical truth. This is a recurring theme, it was worrying me already last year. The craving is there; we're craving something real and true but it's beyond a veil of the legendary and abstract, and we just don't know what words to type into the search engine.

Is this a post-modern angst? Do we need a label in order to decide on a plan for 2011? We're looking forward to B Walsh's Beyond Homelessness this semester--high hopes for some ideas, at least, for breaking out of the legendary and abstractness that life has become. And we'll all float on. Alright!

Okay, now that we've waxed so eloquently on

the legendary and abstract state of 2011 so far,

we also need to start working on this paper.