Tap

A car drives over a loose manhole.  Click clack.  Tha-thump.  Traffic lights hum and change.   Bzzzt-tick.  Horns blaring and brakes squeaking.  Sometimes the cacophony of sounds that surround someone in the city are quite beautiful in their own way.  People that grow up in a city soon learn that they cannot fall asleep without the chaotic tumult.  It’s funny, but the environment becomes a part of us.  As I made reference in my previous blog entry, Gregory Hines’s character finds inspiration in the world around him.  In this scene, he and the dancers from a local club go into the streets and tap into a source of inspiration that most people would not find.  To the poet in me, I wish my feet and legs were more coordinated and trained.

Intrinsically, poets and writers of all shapes and sizes train their eyes and ears and hearts and minds to absorb the everyday, and like farmers of wheat or grain thresh out God’s touches everywhere.  Just like the jazz performers that I have followed and tried to emulate or the tap dancers who bring the rhythm of the world alive, I want to see the ordinary and the mundane and see the beauty within it.

Writers choose the written word to use as their medium, just as musicians are defined with sound, and the tap dancers I’ve been talking about for four entries use percussion and rhythm.  I believe that just as we are to be true to ourselves, we must be true to the God inspired creation around us.  To see more than just the winds blowing, to see more than just ordinary actions happening, to express more than just the basest feelings…  Writers have this burden to pluck out of the humdrum the extraordinary.  Poets are to find the impetus for joy and sorrow in the incarnate day. 

I find myself praying often for writers that I know.  Some are scholars, others are mothers who have the gift of writing, still others are those who have the burning within them that never lets them go.  I also prayed labouriously for my mother to find the words to be able to communicate her burden for the people to which she was sent.  As a Christian, I find myself wrapped up in fellowship and relationship with the Word… 

The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.

John 1:14 NIV

A living and breathing Word in the person of Christ.  That’s who I try to be connected with.  Yet, He is there in all of creation.  The birds, the streams, the sunrises, the storms… one can find the echoes of the divine throughout our world.  Writers have an obligation to continually be attuned to hearing and seeing that all around them.  Not everyone has that gift.  So, writers have that responsibility.

Whether a writer expounds on social commentary, or helps us to walk on fictitious streets we’ll never see, they help us to see more of what we often take for granted.  We need them to help us unpack information from all around us.  I, for one, pray this often for the writers I know…  Not just for the words to say, because fashioning words is an art in and of itself, but that they could be challenged by who and what they see. 

We can only possess what we experience, truth to be understood must be lived.

—-Charlie Peacock, “Experience”

I believe in my heart that writers and artists experience the world differently than most, in that they strain to touch upon inspiration, and hope to be embraced with the arms of truth.  For us, we have an inherent need to have a manifestation of what is churning and boiling inside of us because of that encounter.  And as a writer, a Christian, and a dreamer, I feel called to try to expose what I see to paper or screen.  We should all strive to be that engaged with our communities, our environments, and especially the One who set it all in motion before time began for us.  To be tapped into the Word living amoung us, as it were.

 What a transcendent choice for us to have!  To let the echo of God’s divinity wrapped in the clay that is humanity have the opportunity and responsibility for seeking out His fingerprints in our lives… to quote one Peter Pan from the movie Hook…. “to live would be an awfully big adventure”.

Living exposed to the divine is what the garden of Eden must have been like.  Heaven on earth.  Tapped into a vibrant relationship with our Creator and living in His creation.  How utterly sublime!  It makes me want to dance… 

 

Tapped

I have found over the years, a deep-seated admiration for those people who can take that drop of water and incorporate the divine and the inspirational from an ordinary source into their lives.  There are a couple of scenes from a movie called Tap with Gregory Hines that have taught me lessons about not losing sight of what makes us who we were created to be.  In the opening scene, he is trapped, very much like in my previous post.  A man, in prison, due to his unwise choices.  A man, suffering the consequences of a broken dream conflicted with a faulty, but self-reasoned present.

But in this scene, he taps deep within himself and at the end of his sanity, he finds this internal space.  Jazz performers understand this concept very well.  Areas inside our souls that can only be touched by a particular activity, a particular way of living one’s lives that resonates with who we are created to be.  For jazz performers, it is the edge of confined music.  The meshing of rhythm and tonality within a chord progression.  For tap dancers, it is a rhythm that translates to the legs and feet, pounding out the percussive dynamic of the world both inside and outside of them.

Gregory Hines’s character finds himself again after being lost behind bars of his own choosing.  He finds the sublime in a simple pattern in the falling water drops.  There is such exhilaration found in that moment, that even those of us who are not tap dancers can taste the richness and feel our own spirits move.  For an instant, I could feel my body involuntarily respond to the rhythm.  This image has taught me much about what Shakespeare gave to dear Polonius…

This above all: to thine own self be true

—-Hamlet Act I, Scene III

As someone who has been struggling much of his adult life to reconcile what his dreams have been to his current existence…  There are things that resonate with my soul.  Writing has long been a piece of the puzzle for me.  Talking with people, counseling them, and working with them also seems to be another piece.  The issues of reclamation and reconciliation are important to me as well.  The expression of such in my life, I do not yet have a grasp on how it will become manifest.  Sometimes, I find that I am on the cusp of discovery, and the extension of what God has infused in my soul.  What rich gifts are those times in my life, and knowing that God put them there for me so He may use me is truly special.