The robin's alarm and the crow's rude cackle are all to be sensed...
The world still sleeps, except for the birds of pre-dawn...
So complete is the darkness here, no laws exist, no rules of thumb...
No principles that explain.
Line these windows with heavy canvas to keep out the expected sun...
The chairs, table, books on shelves all melt and blend into this dank space...
The sense of nothingness actually humbles...
Movements are tentative and groping...
When the sun rotates high to bathe us all, we will move fast and graceless...
We will make our lists and finish tasks, greet others....
Humans in motion.
We will raise money and steal it, we will find lovers and reject them...
We will sing and sob...
We will wear down the already trodden paths, and avoid others...
The existance we have constructed lays exposed, calls us with a familiar tune...
But now, here, assimilated with the dark brown humps and shapes of the room...
Here the mind runs free, unwilling to feud with imagination...
The lightless place gives possibilities a chance to fly...
There is no order and the chaos has no shape...
We all dance.
We swing in a quiet flow that defies the conventions of the lighted time...
Only the chattering noise of perched birds intrudes, actually dominates...
But it's fine, as we float on a sea of unknown form and time.
He's quite certain that his parched throat, his squint means no disrespect to the sun.
Morning breaks and with comes the bravery of songbirds seeking food
It humbles him ... the wispy clouds... the brilliant blue.
The smells of the day make him reverent... the heat from the grass... the saturation of growth.
Why does he feels these measure so strongly... the rhythms of people around him...
What's so powerful?
Peers listen, but do they want to know... they care, but are they willing to allow...
For happenstance?
When they rest... when they finally square up and claim the ground they want...
How will they -- care for it...
Communicate about it...
Tend it...
Laugh over it...
Earn a living from it...
Give in to it...
Praise it or master it...
Cry on it...
Make love within it...
Breath their last breath lying there.
What repayment do they all make, he thinks, when the marketplace comes for its due?
Fire in the hearth and a place to make sighs... where the mind can linger from a depth within.
Help, he asks, to recognize that space for growth, for failure and more attempts, for rest and querying.
Help to speak to power as you would the feeble... and smile just the same.
On Friday, Minnesota Public Radio's Midday program will air a discussion about the changes in journalism. Average people who just consume news sat with people in the press who are dedicated to reforming the way it's done.
As the moderator of this forum - I sometimes played devil's advocate.
One woman had just complained that reporters, in their rush to get the story first, sometimes botch it or missed the broader details.
To keep the conversation moving, I said something about how competition has long been a hallmark of the profession. And if you have reporters competing, that forces information out there quicker.
"Isn't that what people want?" I said, playing that contrary role.
Another woman, her name is Elizabeth, said in a baffled tone - "You're not competing against each other. You're competiting for us."
Got it. Oh my, how we've gotten it. People's trust in the press is low. And there are challenges in keeping readers, viewers and listeners in a much more fractured media universe.
Let's get back to that notion of compeition for a second. Understand that journalists have always loved to get the story first, to beat the others in town and strut for the next day. Conversely, you would stew and mutter when a reporter from a competing outlet beat you on a story. You'd vow to get them back.
That competition sizzled the juices. And we truly believed that this competitve environment meant more news getting out to the public. Then came consolidation of broadcast outlets ... and towns that lost all but one newspaper. How our profession lamented the loss of that competition. We'll be sleepy, we thought, we won't be as tenacious.
Then came the Internet and the currency of "the scoop" became devalued. Now you measured you're ability to get things first in hours or minutes rather than days.
And the explosion of media meant news programming had to compete with other forms of content. And there was much more of it out there. The competition didn't go away... but it morphed.
But more importantly, there was the idea that people had felt estranged from their news sources. A colleague of mine, Michael Skoler, likes to talk about a recent Zogby poll that showed roughly two-thirds of the people valued news that helped them with their civic life... but that about the same amount felt they weren't getting that kind of information.
Competition for its own sake wasn't enough. What were we telling people? How did that information enlighten them? Were we helping people to make sense of things?
Maybe these were the new challenges.
What I like about the people in my profession is their tenacity. Oh, yes... we grumble with the best of them. And we can whine. But I'm telling you that the best journalists rise up to challenges. And I'm convinced we are ready to compete for, as Elizabeth put it, you.
The truth is, however, that people in the profession will take different routes to compete.
Some will embrace a philosophy or ideology and champion it.
Some will go for the sizzle of gossip and celebrity coverage.
And some will try to become indispensible civic tools - providing information for an informed community and convening those people by any means at their disposal.
Tim McGuire, a former Star-Tribune editor who now if faculty at the Cronkite School of Journalism, puts it best. He talked about newspapers - but it goes for all forms of the press: "One of the greatest threats to democracy is that our long-tailed world might destroy all sense of community. It should be newspapers that save us from that fracture..."
How about we give that one a try Elizabeth.
I swore off the whole damn thing not a week ago. I vowed that I would shun for the rest of the baseball season a team that I had long rooted for - the New York Mets.
But that's like kicking the White Horse cold turkey.
Not going to happen.
Once upon a time my Mets were a pack of loveable also-rans - playing hard, having fun but not always coming out on top.
But they had their surprises. I was too young for the baseball miracle that was the 1969 champion Mets. But I saw a lousy team suddenly blossom and make it to the World Series in 1973. I was hooked.
They weren't the Yankees (the other New York team - - - the ones we must forever be compared to). The Yanks were juggernauts without a soul. They threw around big money contracts and lured big names.
Not my Mets. They grew their players through the minor leagues.
And then came 1986. The Mets were rough-and-tumble, scrappy and pugnacious. And they won. Big. And they won a championship. A winning team that you could give your heart to.
The years became lean. Then a period where we took some pretty good shots at the top. Once we made the World Series, but the hated Yanks beat them. Then another backslide.
But a couple of years ago the Mets came of age again. They grew new talents... a poster-boy third baseman who could hit the tar out of the ball. A Dominican speedster who electrified the crowd with his all-around skills. And the Mets did something else -- they started to spread the money around too. And they added big-time established stars to their lineup.
Mets fans were okay with that, especially when we made the playoffs in 2006 and came a win away from the World Series. So close. And we were fine with these guys.
Then a year later - 2007 - they choked. A sports term - choke - meaning you have the win in your grasp and you let it get away. That's what they did, losing an ungodly number of games at the end of that season and giving up what seemed a sure hold on first place.
We were hurt, but believed we'd get over it. And then the Mets continued spending big. They forked over something like $137 million to land the services of an elite pitcher. That's okay, we Mets fans thought, they got to turn it around.
And this year -- with all that talent -- they played like logy uncles with their belts undone after Thanksgiving dinner. They seemingly lacked heart and hustle and drive. They were damn hard to watch. They were like the A student who couldn't stop cutting up in class.
So after a particularly bad loss - I vowed I'd stop following the team I had always followed. I made it public (well, at least as public as my Facebook and Twitter sites).
And for a few days I paid them no mind. Then I glanced at the sports pages. Then I check the score on the computer (just a quick glance mind you).
Then a funny thing happened. They started winning, beating teams who were ahead of them in the chase for the playoffs.
And tonight, as I finish this post, they have won their fourth-in-a-row. And they look, well, worthy of the fan adoration I've always showered on them.
Now, I know how this sounds. It's pathetic in a way. I accept that. I'm a grown man with kids and a job and bills to pay.
Why get so worked up about a ball team.
And even if you accept the fan concept -- why get so carried away, like some swoony teen-age girl.
I don't know. I can't explain it.
Just like I could never explain to my parents my ritual at night when going to sleep.
On one wall of my bedroom I had plastered posters of every Met player of the day. It was to the left of my bed.
If they won, I would sleep on my left side, facing the poster. If they lost, I'd go to the right, giving the poster papers my back.
Tonight I sleep on the left side.
See the sly boy's face...
Between the thicket of two pines...
Look up, see the sunshafts...
Busting through branches, through leaves and tangle...
Of maple fronting elm fronting maple...
Move and the whole damn show changes...
The light hops through new gaps... made for you only...
The boy is gone...
And what charges this display?
The hard and solid forms we know by name? Or the gaps in between?
---
See the sky beyond... on high, lines of snaky clouds...
Their bellies painted orange by the sinking sun...
The spaces between those misty, moving formations... they, they are the artists
---
The boy runs with a bit of bark...
"It's rough," he says... the devil boy and his comments...
Yes, yes it is... see the grooves and the cuts of it...
The spaces animate the touch of it...
---
Water tumbling down our throats...
Filling then fleeing that otherwise empty pipe...
On warm days you feel the cool down to the core...
Now in tighter... beyond the discernment of the eye....
The space of our body cavity... of our gaps atom by atom...
What's our animator? Our place in it all?
Our space -- within and beside you.
---
What every composer knows - note by rest by note...
What the philosophers use as a rule to learn by...
What charges mother and newborn between the gaze...
The pause before uttering the truth...
The charged air between bodies attracting...
The knowing without the mind thinking...
The settled grass after the breeze dies...
We are not taking space as much as
We are space...
---
We are ruled by a vastness unnoticed...
See it... see space... offer up to it...
Lose it and regain it... ride on it...
Space creates the living... and, yes, suddenly death has purpose...
The exhale to the birth breath...
You came to us in May... that big bounty from our government. You were to find a home in the purchase of, say, video cameras and iPods, maybe Gameboys for the kids.
But we didn't find those things in our house. And we began to worry. Where was ol' economic stimulus check? Were you lost? You had come into our home with such high hopes and a promise to keep the good times rolling. Now we couldn't find you.
Imagine the relief when we finally figured out where you had gone. A note from the bank that told us that our escrow account didn't come close to paying off the local tax bill -- that's where you were you sneaky little eco-stimulus check.
The little trickster.
You were in there in the taxes that pays the city that has complained about being starved by the state's cutback in funds and the federal government's indifference. And those taxes that pay for the schools, which have been ordered by the feds to make sure the kids pass those tests (you know, No Child Left Behind and all).
This was the second time in the last six months that escrow had to be bumped up to cover such things. But eco-stimulus was now around, able to help.
Now you were found, or at least most of you. Pieces of you could also be spotted in the 40 percent increase in a pound of apples, the nearly $4-dollar-plus gallon of milk, not to mention the gas. Oh that's where a lot of your eco-stimulus brothers and sisters are tucked away, huh.
It's funny, the folks in Washington who gave birth to you and your buddy checks thought you'd be in shiny new toys and trinkets, maybe even part of new car down-payments... you know, boosting the economy.
But that's just like a kid... they have their own mind don't they.
Instead of big time purchases, little eco-stimulus check, is hiding in the places that are keeping us afloat.
We appreciate it.
I wonder if the Washington folks feel the same.
It's typical... it's cliche... and I love it.
Family on the Fourth.
Hey, if you want edgy... go read something else.
It was a gift... unexpected... and unaware you needed it until it was there.
The best kind of gift.
Lunchtime in downtown StP. The tension of a work morning at a terminal screen raised the anxiety level.
Where was the relief?
It came in the form of music.
Everywhere you turned the notes came at you - on a course to soothe.
From Mancini's Pink Panther theme to Brubeck's "Take Five" to Dylan's "All Along the Watchtower."
The songs were different but they all plucked the same chord within.
You found yourself noticing the friendly nods of the musicians to those who went by.
You smiled at their understated "thank you" as the passerbys dropped money into the plastic coffee can or the saxophone case.
It was a gift, by God.
A few bucks wasn't nearly enough in return.
Man, has the phrase "there are no guarantees" ever been more true?
Each day comes a new story about jobs that are going away - and that our comfortable lives are in a bit more in peril. From airline workers to barristas to health insurers.
Does this feeling of economic quicksand under our feet make us want to call out for help, stretch out our hand for the sure grip of someone with the power to pull us free, brush us off and send us on our way.
Are we gravitating to some hero to save the day?
Look at our presidential race. Sen Barack Obama, some believe, is an orator who will inspire us all to join hands and provide comfort and a boost to lagging economic fortunes. His speaking skills will urge us to find solutions to these perilous times and drive us to pick up our faltering brothers and sisters when the axe falls.
Yeah, right say the anti-Barack-istas. This is just a glib, slick-talking politician with a sharp-looking mug who will dazzle us enough so he gains enough votes to get into the White House. And, they'll pose, hasn't Obama proved that with his campaign finance pledge change-up.
We need a seasoned steady hand who has endured before and will help us endure now, say the backers of Sen. John McCain. He's a war hero, a POW who held up under years of confinement at the hands of the enemy. And, by God, say the McCain-ites, he's bucked his own party from time-to-time.
Really, counters the un-McCainiacs. He's embraced his party's platform like a mama hugs her college boy at Christmas break. And, if McCain were really secure in his military credentials, would he get so steamed when asked if they qualify him for the presidency.
And yet, the times they are a straining... and someone out there has got to right the wrongs?
If not those guys, what do we do?
Maybe we put out an ad in the paper... seek someone who can fill the bill and be the savior.
Just watch out for the stampede of applicants, looking for some kind of job.
If you live in the Twin Cities
– and those harsh winters – you feel
some gratitude for the skyway system.
In St. Paul, they are vast and can get you around a fair chunk of the downtown area.
And there are plenty of places around these skyways to get a bite to eat, a haircut, a cup of coffee, a last-minute gift for a spouse (not that I’ve ever done that mind you… no).
But these skyways of St. Paul – as colleague Bob Collins of NewsCut put it a few months back – are not exactly screaming “vibrant.”
Not by a long shot in some sections.
Collins wondered then what the Republican convention-goers might think of the vast unused space. Apparently he’s not alone.
Another colleague, MPR reporter Laura Yuen reported last week, that city business leaders are coming up with a plan to give short-term leases (as little as a week) to house their business in an empty space. Matt Anfang, president of the Greater St. Paul Building Owners and Managers Association, told Yuen that the plan will help make downtown look more alive during the convention.
But another Chamber of Commerce official bristled at the notion that the effort is an attempt to make it look like downtown is more bustling that it really is. Some in the story said maybe this would be the entrée some business owners need to stick in the skyway space long after the convention has left town.
No one doubts that the idea to have these unused spaces
filled for the convention makes sense.
But do we really need to have any other justifications (it could get the skyways more business, for example)?
Should city business leaders really feel aghast that one
might suggest the effort is simply away to dress up the very dormant
skyways?
At least those spaces can be worked on.
Other spots in the skyway leave you wondering.
How, for instance, could city leaders possibly explain the atrophied escalators in the Town Square area of the skyway complex.
They once led to an indoor park, a great idea for those
winter months, but one that couldn’t be sustained by city.
How do you dress those up?
Maybe an answer is forthcoming.
But there should be no reason for anyone in St. Paul to runaway from the idea that we want to make the downtown look as presentable as possible for the Republican convention. And if five-day leases in the skyways helps, fine. No need to make them out to be anything more than a quick makeover.
