radical identification, radical difference

"So we must ask ourselves, Do I identify enough? Do I welcome people or am I a member of the holy huddle, the local God squad? Do I hang around people of various beliefs and mores? Do I love the unlovely? Or, on the other hand, am I different enough? Am I Christlike? Do I bring this aspect of Christ's holiness, of his moral standards, of the fruit of the Spirit to my relationships? Or, out of my sincere desire to identify and to love, have I become culture-accomodating?"

Becky Pippert

Andy Goldsworthy and related thoughts

listening to: Terra Naomi "Say It's Possible"
thinking about: the two people I dreamed about last night, scheduling workout time, mural ideas for a pastel yellow wall
thanking Him for: fresh dfw rain, Appa being home, everything my boss teaches me, 2 Peter 1:5-9 & accountability, art

my boss introduced me to the British artist Andy Goldsworthy yesterday.





http://www.goldsworthy.cc.gla.ac.uk/images/l/ag_02945.jpg
http://www.goldsworthy.cc.gla.ac.uk/images/l/ag_02946.jpg

transience, ruthlessness, surrender, flow
Watched "Rivers and Tides" (documentary about his work) this morning at Panera, definitely need to watch it over again when my eye isn't hurting and I'm not in a rush.
In one part, he crushes a rock to create clouds of red in the water and later in the air. The iron that makes the rock, now flowing down the river, red is the same iron that makes the blood flowing in us red. I guess I'm losing how powerful what he said sounded, but I loved that.
There's something incredibly raw and powerful about his work that reminds me of Maya Lin's work. We talked a little about her work after I mentioned that.
In short, I admire her even more now.

Art makes a difference.
And I think learning how to talk about art will help me understand and talk about many more deeply meaningful things.

Christianity isn't difficult

- it's impossible.
(G.K. Chesterton)


P.S. I think I'm going to commit to this fellowship. I could really use some community.

Son of man, can these bones live?

"Am I quite sure that God will do what I cannot do? I despair of men in the degree in which I have never realized that God has done anything for me. Is my experience such a wonderful realization of God's power and might that I can never despair of anyone I see? Have I had any spiritual work done in me at all? The degree of panic is the degree of the lack of personal spiritual experience..."

Utmost, June 1st

My Architect: A Son's Journey

The life of the great architect Louis I. Kahn was in one word, as Umma would say, restless. This is a film made by Kahn's illegitimate son about his quest to find out who his father, internationally renown starchitect, hero to Bangladesh, the head of three different families, "ugly, short, and Jewish", ever enigmatic, ever elusive, truly was.

Lou Kahn's work is characterized by an unearthly heaviness and monumentality (explored in Alex Roman's must-see video: The Third & The Seventh, http://vimeo.com/7809605. full screen it!). With the little I know about the design process at this point of my career, I admire the simplicity and integrity of the servant-served concept carried out in his buildings. There is so much to be said about and to be learned from his work and philosophies.
That said, learning about the way he lives his life brings up the whole question of balancing architecture and life for me once again. Lou blatantly prioritized work over all else, his families, his health, people in general...he wouldn't even let people in his firm go home early to see their wives give birth if there was a rapidly approaching deadline.
As beautiful as the legacy he left through his buildings is, there is something terribly tragic about how he left behind little else for the people in his life. In my eyes, Lou was a human being who was always running away from one place to another, having an idea of what he valued but never resolutely committing to anything other than drawing and building and being incredibly hard-headed about his ideas.

I wonder where I will find myself in the next twenty years. If I have trouble balancing studio and life during the next five years, how will I balance work and life in the real world? Is it going to narrow down to either success in architecture or commitment to family/other relationships?
But I try not to worry too much about how tomorrow Hannah Lee will find a way to love God and care for people through work that I love but not treasure as much as the former two. We'll see. In the mean time, I'll concentrate on soaking up as much knowledge as possible. I'm stoked for interning and the watercolor class and for my summer reading list.

For the record, I think the film deserved the Academy Award nomination and would highly recommend it to anyone interested in Louis I. Kahn, or architecture, or life.

"The mouth of the righteous is a fountain of life, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked."
Solomon, Proverbs 10:11