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ou to get it here s a taste of what happens there this is from last summer s issue in which i reflect on the experience of turning fifty our publishing house sponsored an online event called the spiritual first aid summit it s still online if you d like to see it really great and practical presentations from a broad swath of religious leaders hosted by the humanitarian disaster institute woven into the event was our recent release the message of hope a curated collection of passages from the message version of the bible i m very proud of this little collection which isn t just some hope bludgeon that denies and avoids hard times and hard things the book begins not with hope but lament because hope is not something we begin with but something we search for lament is then put in conversation with the promises god makes in the scriptures which points us to an assurance of god s love and newfound trust that god is with us and for us ultimately hope is a matter of vision a way of seeing the world without being undone by what we see some projects work on me as i work on them the message of hope is one of those as emily dickinson writes of hope i ve heard it in the chilliest land and on the strangest sea yet never in extremity it asked a crumb of me or as god puts it in the scriptures your god is present among you a strong warrior there to save you zephaniah 3 17 the message at july 23 2021 no comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest wednesday july 21 2021 a soft soundtrack of lowered expectations excerpts from middling i put out an occasional newsletter about music books work and getting older you can subscribe to it in the sidebar my next issue is coming out next week and i d love for you to get it here s a taste of what happens there this is from last summer s issue in which i reflect on the experience of turning fifty i once read an entire book dedicated to the big transition in pop music that took place in 1970 the year of my birth as the 1960s gave way to the 1970s the book argues a playlist of social disruption ceded airtime to a soft soundtrack of lowered expectations the beatles broke up simon and garfunkel broke up crosby stills and nash broke up james taylor moved into the void with his sweet baby james a record that included among other things a veiled reference to the collapse of his own sixties era band sweet dreams and flying machines in pieces on the ground and a cover of oh susanna a stephen foster song first made famous by minstrel singers in blackface in the decade before the civil war some progress is not progress the book is self servingly myopic largely ignoring what was taking place in every genre of pop music let alone all other music forms outside of its preselected subjects but i enjoyed reading it nonetheless and melancholic that i am i find it compelling that the year of my birth could be considered a year of a kind of musical death some spectacular records were released in 1970 including sweet baby james oh susanna notwithstanding it deserves its popularity bridge over troubled water by simon and garfunkel moondance by the great van morrison and the soundtrack to jesus christ superstar not to mention two records from the beatles hey jude and the immortal let it be and stevie wonder s wonderful signed sealed and delivered you can hear the sixties fatigue in the title tracks from the beatles and simon and garfunkel and in wonder s plaintive heaven help us all we are also notably confronted with the harsh reality that even when we grow tired of the hard things in the world they don t just go away because we wish it as csny sang about the kent state shooting that year how can you run they shouted in four part harmony when you know heaven help us all indeed at july 21 2021 no comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest monday july 19 2021 when i was younger excerpts from middling i put out an occasional newsletter about music books work and getting older you can subscribe to it in the sidebar my next issue is coming out next week and i d love for you to get it here s a taste of what happens there this is from last summer s issue in which i reflect on the experience of turning fifty i used to bob or bang my head in unison with the who hope i die before i get old and later r e m i can t see myself at thirty somewhere along the way i started to stare my future in the face to a soundtrack of neil ironically young old man take a look at my life i m a lot like you the words of steely dan are you reeling in the years stowing away the time sent me into moments of circumspection teetering on the edge of existential crisis i began to bob and bang my head to the ironically old 97s i used to be the new kid and to ben putting the old in folds once you wanted revolution now you re the institution and he s forgotten but not yet gone now the day has come i am what i am and what i am is old if i happen to forget now and then something that happens to those of us of advanced age there s always some snarky millennial nearby ready to shock me back into awareness people who are older still than i am occasionally pat me on the head when i fret about the aging process which is comforting in a way i have ample role models for aging well but it s the number the roundness of it the ffffiness of it that stresses me out i m closer to a century of life than i am to my birth a fact that naively presupposes that i ll make it to a hundred without my heart stopping or my bank account running out of money fifty is a slap in the face a rude awakening to the reality that we are all of us living on borrowed time shortly before john lennon turned twenty five he wrote the immortal words when i was younger so much younger than today i never needed anybody s help in any way but now those days are gone i m not so self assured isn t that cute that was less than a year before he called the beatles more popular than jesus it was in any case an insightful line the young are blessed with audacity a sense of permanence and invulnerability only time can whittle away at it fifteen years later john wrote a song called borrowed time drafted shortly before he turned forty and recorded a few months before he was shot and killed by this time when i was younger has given way to now i am older the desperation that fueled help has given way to an optimism born of humility and hope the more that i see the less that i know for sure the future is brighter and now is the hour humility and hope are not bad gifts to carry with me into my fifties i suppose i observe them in my own elders the people i look to as guides for this new season i look for them in myself as well and on good days i find them there on bad days i try to remind myself that they re only hidden not lost and i can still recover them if i put in the effort at july 19 2021 no comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest friday april 02 2021 the virtue gift and discipline of secrecy excerpts from middling i write an occasional newsletter quarterly when i don t forget to friends and family about my life music books work and getting older i d love to send it to you sign up for middling here color what follows is an excerpt from the winter 2020 issue before the whole world shut down considering how regularly i assail you with blog posts tweets instas and newsletters you might be surprised that a favorite recent read of mine is titled how to disappear color akiko busch sucked me in with her introductory chapter as she sat quietly in a forest observing how intentionally most of creation seeks to hide that insight springs into a series of essays on the virtue gift and discipline of secrecy of not making a scene of ourselves of allowing ourselves to be simply part of something larger i was drawn to the book by the title but i moved it to the top of the pile after someone suggested to me that i was too power hungry a critique that comes up occasionally enough that i can t ignore it even though i kind of resent it if how to disappear isn t still my favorite read nine months from now i ll be surprised and i ll surely let you know a much less transformative but similarly knowing book i read recently is the lager queen of minnesota color i heard it praised as an homage to the midwest and that sounded pretty good to me and it is quite good keenly insightful about how midwestern relationships work even when those relationships proceed without contact over the course of decades i want to give it to my mom because i think she ll like it and i want her to give it to her siblings because she thinks they ll like it at april 02 2021 no comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest wednesday march 31 2021 anachronistic today excerpts from middling i write an occasional newsletter quarterly when i don t forget to friends and family about my life music books work and getting older i d love to send it to you sign up for middling here color what follows is an excerpt from the winter 2020 issue before the whole world shut down i got some great music for christmas a new record by the avett brothers the debut album of the americana supergroup the highwomen a three disc concept album by sleeping at last and the thirtieth anniversary reissue of one of the most personally significant records of my life shawn colvin is what might be called a folk music superstar her music has been the soundtrack to several significant points of my life i first heard her cover of every little thing she does is magic by the police while kara and i were hot tubbing on our honeymoon and her collaboration with steve earle on the beatles song baby s in black was playing when a giant truck pulling a giant trailer plowed into the back of our one week old toyota rav4 my pastor and i figured out that we were probably at the same shawn colvin concert in the student activity center at northwestern university in the early 1990s but before all that shawn colvin was the artist behind one of the first cds i ever bought steady on would become the grammy winner for best contemporary folk album of 1991 how she won two years after the fact is beyond me while aging teen idol donny osmond was reinventing himself as the soldier of love depeche mode was milking the life out of your own personal jesus and milli vanilli was pretending to sing blame it on the rain shawn colvin was quietly strumming the opening chords to the title track and offering an ode to vulnerability china gets broken and it will never be the same it only got better from there with the second track my favorite at the time you re shining i can see you you re smiling that s enough i m holding on to you like a diamond in the rough i had tracks i preferred over others of course but i very nearly wore the grooves off that cd or however the technology works it occurs to me as i write this that this cd still in my possession is older than at least one of my coworkers in the past that would have sent me into a fetal position but i seem to be coming to peace with my advanced age anyway this year shawn colvin celebrated her thirtieth anniversary as a recording artist with a track by track return to this first album stripped away are the 1980s production values tastefully executed at the time but certainly anachronistic today the heart and soul of the record remains piercing and sober storytelling over lovely melodies and expert guitar work nobody does it like shawn colvin and these songs prove it just as effectively as her later more mature work i ll draw your attention to two songs from the record the first cry like an angel was the song i turned to after terrorists flew two planes into the world trade center in new york city on september 11 2001 and aimed a third plane at the pentagon the streets of my town she prophesied in 1989 are not what they were they are haloed in anger bitter and hurt may we all find salvation in professions that heal the second was one of the lesser lights to nineteen year old me but it s the song she used to promote this new record and it s doing it for me quite nicely these days it s hard to believe she had this much soul when she recorded it in her thirties i don t mean that as an insult to my thirty something readers that s an age range not a quantity only to point out just how much soul she crams in there at march 31 2021 no comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest monday march 29 2021 there was a chance 2020 would be great excerpts from middling i write an occasional newsletter quarterly when i don t forget to friends and family about my life music books work and getting older i d love to send it to you sign up for middling here color what follows is an excerpt from the winter 2020 issue before the whole world shut down the safest place is the more or less middling the mean average is not noticed w h auden the age of anxiety when i was a kid i thought about 2020 a lot that would be the year i would turn fifty and at the time fifty seemed to me about the oldest a person could get to speculate so far into the future seemed both pointless and irresistible what would the world be like what would i be like there were good reasons to wonder when i was a kid my society was enduring the aftermath of the abrupt end of a corrupt presidency we were facing global tensions on several fronts i read more than one library book about inter continental ballistic missiles before i was ten the middle east was a powder keg the economy was sputtering people hadn t learned not to pollute yet there was disco music it wasn t all bad of course sure we had barry manilow to deal with but we also had the ramones and schoolhouse rock color rest in peace jack sheldon sure the rain had acid in it but there was also this owl and this native american guy actively appealing to us to give a hoot and not pollute there was a chance i d make it to fifty there was a chance 2020 would be great i think about the past differently than the future or the present in my memories the hard stuff is less hard because i know i ve survived it the scary stuff is less scary because it s become more known than unknown even the lofty ambitions are right sized by the passage of time we aren t cured of the past we carry it with us but the passion and the pain of it levels off we become detached enough from it to consider it with grace in a matter of months i ll be hitting my fiftieth birthday having reached this year of my preoccupation i suppose it s time to be preoccupied with something else 2070 perhaps when i ll be a hundred years old which seems like just about the oldest a person can get meanwhile it occurs to me that there will be people thinking back to this unfolding decade with the same mix of melancholy nostalgia and i hope gracious detachment as i now think of the 1970s maybe one of those people will be me maybe it will be you maybe we should start pra...