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Words like undiscovered country
there’s something in the wind in the barren places
all you can hear is voices whispering in your head
when the reality is silence and the words remain unread
the desolation of isolation
and the language unspent
words were never meant to be
undiscovered country
unfolding from the horizon like insight dawning
shadows retreat as your words melt my mourning
from the abandon of silence I return and repent
the distance of time dissolves
you speak the love of my letters unsent
a true word spoken is a shining light
this silent night
it beckons me into this undiscovered country
there’s a story to tell, a life to share
speak, take me there
words were never meant to be
undiscovered country
© 20 December 2005
Sara’s finished her Matterhorn commission and it looks spectacular… (the photo isn’t super sharp, but you should get the idea…)
Sara is available for further commissions of course. Contact me.
As I try to build this blog into a more living, breathing thing… I’m kind-of curious about what might keep people coming back. What is my market? Will it always be friends and family, or can it become something relevant to people who might wander by?
It’s pretty clear that it’s going to be me largely spouting my opinion on the world, things I’m reading and listening to, and likely also an outlet for the creative side.
Poetry, short stories (?), perhaps Sara’s art too, some of my/our photography…
What would keep you coming back? Please feel free to leave me a comment (click the big red number above each post), let me know.
‘Living, breathing’ should also naturally lead to ‘evolving, growing’. So keep tuning in, who knows what you’ll see!?
I’ve just been reading a great article on @U2 with an interview with Eugene Peterson… I love articles like this for a number of reasons – but mostly because they bring together two rather significant passions in my life; my faith, and my love of U2. Actually, it ties in the whole writing thing as well – Mr Peterson being a successful author, particularly on faith related topics. So if I was to think a little more about it, both represent my aspirations, in that they are both (significantly) achieving the things I want to be achieving: ie making music and writing! Anyway, bearing that in mind, I just had to share!
An excerpt:
To U2 fans, Peterson is known first and foremost as the guy whose Bible Bono likes. After the National Prayer Breakfast on February 2, Bono shared with reporters that he gets inspiration from reading The Message “by the very gifted scholar and poet Eugene Peterson.” During the Elevation Tour, Bono recited from The Message a portion of Psalm 116 as the introduction to “Where the Streets Have No Name.” When his father was near death, Bono said he would sit at his bedside and read aloud from Peterson’s translation. (@U2’s Angela Pancella’s reported on the U2-Peterson connection in 2002.) Bono sent Peterson a video thank-you when he finished work on the whole Bible, to share
“… my thanks, and our thanks in the band, for this remarkable work you’ve done translating the Scriptures. Really, really a remarkable work….There have been some great translations, some very literary translations, but no translation that I’ve read that speaks to me in my own language. So I want to thank you for that.”
The appreciation goes both ways, Peterson said. He’s thankful for U2’s remarkable work of spreading a message, calling people to forsake lives of selfish pursuits fueled by destructive delusions. In U2’s songs, he hears the sound of truth and love. Peterson can hear, when Bono sings, the voice of the prophet in pop culture. In the foreword to Raewynne J. Whiteley and Beth Maynard’s, Get Up Off Your Knees, Preaching the U2 Catalog, Peterson wrote:
“Is U2 a prophetic voice? I rather think so. And many of my friends think so…
And EP goes on to explain this further in the AtU2 interview:
…They say unconventional things and use unconventional language. When the Rolling Stone interview came out (People of the Year: Bono, November 2001), one of my former students sent it to me. My friend told me I was in there someplace, so I read it through and I was hoping that when he got to me, he wouldn’t use the f-word on The Message. [Laughs.] My daughter was reading it too, and she said, “I thought they were Christians?” and I said, “Well, I think that’s the way Irish Christians talk.”
That’s funny, but you know that is a question which in one way or another has followed them their whole career: Are they capital “C” Christians or not? Do you think that’s even a valid question to ask?
No I don’t. I don’t think it is.
What is the right question to ask?
Maybe we shouldn’t even be asking prophets questions. They are asking questions of us. Maybe the question we ask should be, “Is God using these words, this stance, to say something to me, to my society, to my neighborhood?”A prophet, almost by definition, doesn’t fit into the categories you expect, which is what gives them bite, and clarity, and the sense of grabbing us by the scruff of our neck, and saying, “Listen to this: this is truth, this is what’s going on.” The whole authority of prophets comes not from what people say about them or the credentials that they have, it’s from the truth of what they are saying…
