incomplete theology

artist's statement:













apocalyptic...
pyro-theology...


some very quickly taken random snapshots of the unfinished sketches, Incomplete Theology, up in the back room at Common Grounds for July. i didn't have time or my camera to focus in on the pencil notes written on them and detailed elements that you need to be up close to see, but you can click on them to enlarge allthesame. i guess this is something of a visual doodling about and around what Adele, aka, existential punk is describing in her latest post. kind of...


G-D, rid me of God...

Epoché...

Queer...
















Christa ...













Heresy...

retrospective sketches of ikon, unfinishe...

snapshots of a selection of the works-in-progress that have been taking provisional shape over the last few days...









LB

"in a turbulant world..."

hard to know what one can say such is the speed of news and developments coming out of the ::green revolution:: in iran - but i think this is twitter perhaps finally finding its true value. and given the power of blogging in iran in recent years, this is perhaps not surprising. reading the tweets out of the raided university dorms has made for sobering reading. it never ceases to amaze and humble me at how couragous humans can be when faced with physical threat.

in other, totally different, news - i'm sorry i haven't a clue returns.
it'll be on radio 4 and the bbc iplayer as of tonight. episode details here. nice.

yesterday's collaborative session with jayne and jonny went well so i now have two weeks to take the ideas and the processes we messed about with back to dublin and create the pieces for the exhibit. but i'm glad i asked for their energy and input. it was something of a masterclass in experimenting with techniques and i'm looking forward to playing with ink and graphite powder, salt and acryclics over the coming days.

last night's ikon was a good step toward greenbelt. i spent much of this morning sorting and typing the notes from the creative discussion we got going. colour me feeling very hopeful at what it could become...

downpour has finally passed over and despite continued rain it's time to get moving. a trip to the art store and chats with The Father and with my gay boyfriend await. and soggy converse i suspect.

LB

3 signs

look familiar? ikon used detail from one of the lovely todd greene's amazing artworks. click here for more of his work. then covet. and perhaps purchase.

::

i headed into the city yesterday for a meet-and-greet conversation on behalf of ikon and detoured down to the Dáil a couple of hours after the march of solidarity (report here) to view the ribbons, children's shoes, flowers and placards that had been tied to and placed at the gates. the crowds had dispersed and the barriers folded away...



(molesworth street, dublin)

::

while in town, i had *intended* to pick up some academic texts that i'm looking to read before i get back to university. somehow i ended up in a comic store instead. oops. i picked up a copy of Persepolis, long overdue, and i now know where and when i can get my mitts on a copy of the collected edition of gaiman's recent Batman 2 parter, whatever happened to the caped crusader? and as if to remind me why i knew when i started reading graphic novels that i'd need to resist compulsive tendencies, it didn't end there...



(click image to enlarge)

and so it is that after several years of persistent-and-rather-shameful-not-getting-around-to-it, i'm finally reading, Watchmen.

it all looks amazing, the story is unputdownable, and this paperback edition feels gorgeous. i wish all books would be printed in this format. it's kind of floppy and the pages have a lovely texture.

the likelihood of me changing out of my sweats today, let alone doing anything remotely productive, is gonna be a challenge. the list of academic books will have to wait...

LB

don't play with fire...

unless you're coming to ikon.

this coming sunday:

pyrotheology - "the only church that illuminates is a church that is burning"

as is usual, the june ikon gathering is our last before the summer break (i.e. gb09 prep time) and so, as is also usual, we'll be experimenting on the small scale with the themes we'll be exploring on the big scale at the festival.

if you care to join us in some theological arson, you are invited to bring a short prepared reflection to read to the assembled crowd. make that, *very* short. or you might find yourself burned.

date: sunday 14th june -
doors: 18:00 (i'm guessing) -
place: the black box, cathedral quarter, belfast

further details will be going up shortly on pete's blog, ikon facebook page and ikon announce mailing list. and probably twitter too.

LB

(hat tip to a daily dish reader for the ad)

a/theistic twits

ikon is now on twitter:

see: ikonbelfast if you're into this newfangled technology lark...

LB

tyra banks can bite me

yesterday turned out good. choppy internal seas calmed thanks to some writing and then lunch with jayne in which we concluded that hormones are a rollercoaster of shit and that the only solution is a good cry and some cake. drinks in muriel's followed (photo's below) with lovely folks, and then ikon Last Supper at The Roost.

it was a privilege. peterson shared poetry, an extended scene from doin' time in the homo nomo halfway house and a wonderful extract from a brand new project he's writing.

and then peterson's partner, glen retief, shared an incredible chapter from his memoir, the jack bank, which is due to be published in 2010. an equally powerful extract available here. their offerings left me speechless, shaken and stirred. amazing stuff.

::

which brings me to today...
my plan was to return to dublin this morning but instead i'm staying an extra night. am heading to QUB tonight for an event peterson's doing (details here), and looking forward to a final nightcap with P&G after.

and the morning has proved rather eventful...

i awoke to find my plan B for 2009 of applying to be on America's Next Top Model cycle 13 (all models under 5'7") is no longer necessary. which is a relief, since Celia was knocked out of cycle 12's final 4 for being "too old". at 20-fricking-5.

so this plan B is in the bin thanks to,
(1) getting notification from UCD that,

"The Graduate Board of the College of Human Sciences has approved your application for the MA Women’s Studies programme (full-time)...We hope you will accept the offer and look forward to seeing you here in September"

colour me saying, "i will."

and

(2) at the age of 35 and a 1/2, i'm now adding "cover girl" to my resume - *without* the help of the above mentioned ms banks. seventeen magazine?, i hear you ask. oprah magazine? french vogue? ms.? bitch? bust? national enquirer? fly fishing weekly? nope. Christian Century. details here on pete's blog. the article's actually an interview with pete but the cover makes for a kind of ikon where's wally? of familiar faces and silhouettes.

as of tomorrow i'm gonna follow in ms evangelista's footsteps and won't get out of bed for less than $10,000. i presume this means i need to purchase a cathater forthwith.




















::

photos of some of the lovely folks of the week - sadly missing is a pic of steve lawson, who surprised us with a visit. he managed to convince me of the beauty and possiblity of twitter. and did so without the use of thumb screws. i usually don't get to see steve any other time than greenbelt so this made for an unexpected treat.


peterson and ian (mrs tumnus) strike a pose in muriel's...
















LittleBird and Pád, my love...
















The Father (our host for the week) and Glen sharing a lunchtime pint at The Nook,
before walking down to the Giant's Causeway on Monday...















right, i'm off to meet the rollins for lunch. which reminds me,

friday night, centaur, gb09. ikon will be committing theological arson. we is rubbing our collective and collaborative hands together gleefully at the plan that is coming together... we've now 3 months to do a Macgyver on it...

LB

p.s. i'm really rather proud and admiring of fr tim bartlett for standing up for his convictions. tim's a nice guy, was very supportive of zero28 and i've seen him faced with some very difficult questions over the years in various fora. but none as difficult as last sunday.

sacred questions before this 21st century cross

interrogate everything
- ikon, lessons in evanDelism, '08

i've been listening to david's talk at ffm 09. which is about as frustrating a thing as a person can do for pleasure of a rainy sunday. my brother said he enjoyed it because it's like having david in the room. a comfort in a familiar voice. and that's why it's frustrating. david peppers all his talks with, does anyone have anything they want to throw in on that?

and david means it. which is one of the reasons i like him so much, why he's one of my favourite people to be in conversation with. he's got, what seems to me, something like an instinctual Ricoeur thing going on. it's all about the space inbetween, in the exchange, in the Q&A, the back and forth of that inbetween where things get electric. that to me is the space of divine happening.
so i'm speaking to the laptop. saying, yes, i do... i wanna talk about this. wonder around this. i want to see the space spark and breathe. i want how i envisage it to be expanded. see its edges perforated, where my limitations only now see solid boundaries. i want cracks to appear so that more light comes in... but all i have is the laptop and me responding to an audio recording...

perhaps when we have a space in between that's closed, small... claustrophobic, only reaffirming of what we already think or finding ways to reaffirm what we desire to achieve, then the possibility of divine happening is being squeezed out. it's the kind of space in which politicians sit with lawyers and find doublespeak loopholes that will make, pervert, justice to be synonymous with brutality. that's a space that's not opening up room for revelation, for truth. in those spaces, people become bodies. and we become God, rather than G-D being revealed... and i don't know what to do with that... not a fucking clue other than to pray... and praying to G-D i pray is outside of my head... the G-D that suffers here:















david quotes Marx,

religious suffering is at one at the same time the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering.
religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature the heart of a heartless world and the soul of souless conditions.

the man who also said, "religion is the opiate of the masses"... and david poses a question about how we define religion. global consumerism as religion perhaps...?

and so i'm there speaking back to the laptop and asking, what happens if we say it's democracy that's the opiate of the masses? or maybe, the drug's a two party system played out in the media as a false dichotomy of left v. right, that reduces what should be moral action to mere party political?

what is it that's keeping us asleep?

because religion, when it's weak, when our G-D is weak, by which we might mean self sacrificing, might help us speak to power... i'm trying to make sense of how interrogate everything without adding to the brutality... faced with this cross, what do we stand for...? what will i stand for?

i was reminded of this:

If anyone asks: "How did Jesus raise the dead?" kiss me on the lips, say:
like this!

- Rumi, Like This, translation from Rumi's Divan by Fatemeh Keshavarz

when i heard this:

justice is what love looks like in public
- cornel west, ffm09

that's about as religious statement as i've ever heard. we need this space for the apocalyptic, for the conversations from the war room to the campus to the check out aisle to the hospital room waiting room to the prison to keep being broken open with our questions, out interrogations. i know i need it, 'cause i don't know what to do with all of this.

and so by way of cornel west and solomon burke and all the other poets, i find those edges of the conversation that david and others keep bringing to the table, that i talk to as i stand at the kitchen counter with coffee and scrambled eggs... those edges are pushed out wider for me... this, i say, i believe:

it's not the religion of Jesus that keeps me numb... that's what keeps me hoping there's something impossible around the corner... that justice, which is beyond any impeachment, but looks like heart rending change in the name of full force goodness... it keeps me questioning everything, even when i'd rather sleep easy and not have to look this cross in the face.


::

this i used to believe. 4 very different stories on this american life. all worth hearing.

edited to add: as is this sobering conversation between bill moyers and co-creator of the wire, david simon on the truth about what he calls the war on the underclass.

"If you don't need 'em, why extend yourself? Why seriously assess what you're doing to your poorest and most vulnerable citizens? There's no profit to be had in doing anything other than marginalizing them and discarding them."

::

thy kingdom come
thy will be done

LB

(photo from this in the daily dish.)

judas recalled and some rambling thoughts

pete's posted up a summary of ikon::recalls Judas, including our recordings of the reflections.

the live version of mine ended up being more like as i intended it - more pitching and heaving, fast paced and well... angry than the earlier recorded version. that said, the table was so crowded with folks that there was no room to gesticulate. my body felt like a coiled spring and there was no room to physically express as i'd have liked. jonny was behind doing the live mixing underneath our voices and commented afterward, it's a shame you couldn't stand. and this is what i love about the whole collaborative experiment, that we try stuff and it's okay for it not to be perfect...
(i toned it down to a much more meditative level for the audio-only version. but, as an experiment, i'm glad we have kept a record for once. )

in the '08 gathering, Satisfaction, and in our workshop at gb08, lessons in evandelism we recognised that it is disatisfaction that keeps artists making art, not success. you keep trying to make it better and learning as you go.
it was a real treat to back at the ikon table after leaving the cyndicate 6 months back and taking a break. i loved what everyone brought to the table, it really provoked me. i can't wait for whatever we're gonna try next.
even as an ikon::recalls, this was *so* different from the 2002 version of Judas, that it was still a one off.
we prepare, we do it and we move on to the next... Sunday night really got close to embodying what i think theodrama might be about...

on a not unrelated front, i haven't watched all the videos, but in thinking over Easter about what the heck it is i actually mean when i say, i believe, i came across this theopoetics site, which i'm really enjoying exploring. and in a way, this gets the closest yet to articulating how i understand my belief, without making me feel boxed by the technicalities of labels such as Christian Agnostic or a/theist. this breaks something open for me. this video on bruggemann's dialogue with the emerging church really did it for me. i kind of want to pull up a chair with david and sarah and this guy, and several folks besides. actually, no kinda about it.

i've been wondering for a while what would develop from my journey through deconstruction and the psychoanalytic, and have been in increasingly finding suggestions of narrative and the unsystematic and the poetic coming out of my mouth... embryonic unformed questioning attempts with several nouns and adjectives increasingly taking on a verb form. which probably stems from exploring in '07 the idea of "G-D as event" (rather than as being) in The God Delusion. and i think it's also been an attempt to wonder what category to put what i did at Vanderbilt last October into... i've been filling out a college application and trying to describe what i've been up to on the ikon journey has been wrecking my head.

the experience of ikon is very often doing something that i don't know how to describe. and i'm willing to confess that it can be bloody intimidating when the kind of people who typically describe what you're doing are philosophers like Jack Caputo. (there's a reason why when someone approaches and says they've been reading Pete's work and Caputo's and they're a big fan of ikon although they've never been and would love to talk about what we do that i typically respond, "let's get a pint". thank G-D we do a lot of stuff in pubs!) i love the conversations but man do i have to work hard at them. and i don't say that to imply i'm stupid or ignorant, or that i have a problem with the philosophy that's been used to describe and inspire ikon. it's just i'm more comfortable with, and have been in want of, an alternative language set that allows for all the provisionality but which flows more freely rather than making me feel tongued tied beside the academics.

i suspect of a fair few of us collaborators in ikon have at this stage enough knowledge in our heads and have done the stuff enough times to get an honourary PhD in Philosophy but don't realise it because we are doing it without the need, or indeed in some cases desire, to articulate or even understand it philosophically.

so anyway, all that is really meant to say, some helpful dots are being joined through this theopoetic stuff... this all intrinsically seems to make sense to me in a way that feels potentially liberating and worth exploring more. and my brain's not hurting.

Reknitting our creeds light in hand
We are liberated by our uncertainty
Our fragile belief
where G-D is the wound, the hole in the weave
We discover the world
We face the other
Undergoing, Listening, Wondering, embracing
Asking, Is this how it could be?
...

Let our stories unravel and be told without conclusion
Let us knit our lives together
With meaning that cannot be grasped by our words

(from the liturgical poem i wrote for The God Delusion. seems to fit. somehow.)

Brook, if you read this - l'engle gets a mention on the theopoetics site, which brought you to mind.

LB

Easter

happy easter... as i write the bells of the local church are pealing.

last night after a lovely meal and company hosted by Pádraig, he, Willow, Mark and i headed round to Clonard for the Easter Vigil. Will Crawley was there to film the vigil for an upcoming BBC programme on religion in Northern Ireland, and i'm pretty sure the cameraman must have been pretty delighted with the scenes on offer.
the vigil began outside the church with a fire being lit in a brazier from which the Paschal candle was lit. from this in turn the candles held by the congregants were lit and then the light passed from candle to candle throughout the crowd as the people followed the Paschal candle into the darkened church.
inside, a traditional Irish litany was sung by a priest and when the congregation sang the refrain of praise the candles were lifted up high. it was beautiful. each time the candles were lifted it was as if light was being breathed into being. it wasn't til after a reading of the entire creation story in Genesis that the electric lights in the church were slowly turned on to reveal Clonard's rich interior. we later relit our candles for the baptism of a South African man, Philip. the congregants were invited to renew their baptismal vows and once Philip had been baptised several priests moved through the church with bowls of holy water, dipping evergreen branches, ("palm leaves" from Palm Sunday) into the water and annointed the people. i've been in Clonard and masses in general enough times to not mind that i can't remember the entire liturgy. the vigil was a feast for the senses. but i left the service with a sense of incompleteness and questions, lightly held, but suspended within me and seeking resolve...

to have been raised in what were for the most part ecumenically minded Presbyterian congregations i am used to communion being preceded by a very intentional welcome to all. what i write here i write without rancour or resentment and i know enough about the monastic community at Clonard and its ecumenical activities to know that had i chosen to receive communion i could have done so without fear of reprisal or judgment. i was present several years back at a Presbyterian communion at which one of Clonard's priests took his first public communion in a Protestant church - it was a *deeply* moving occasion of ecumenical friendship. so this is not about Clonard or its people. but as the liturgy unfolded i was struck by the absence of the explicit welcome i expect to find weaved into the liturgy...

the Roman Catholic liturgy does contain these lines,

Priest: This is the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. Happy are those who are called to his supper.
All: Lord, I am not worthy to receive you, but only say the word and I shall be healed.

in conversation after the service, Pádraig noted these lines as being the basis of welcome, that i could have participated, and i had heard them. but i wasn't the only one in our group who heard the absence of the welcome we are used to our own traditions. i believe that not sharing in the Mass was my choice. i did not desire permission in order to partake. through lack of belief in transubstantiation, or feminist principle, or as one who is divorced, i might have found various reasons to not partake. but it came down to this... to have come from a denomination in which one can measure the theology of the church one finds oneself in by how the welcome is phrased (and in my own tradition were it absent or delivered in a way that inferred exclusiveness, i would not take it) last night, not being on 'home turf', i found myself not being one of the 'welcoming' but one seeking explicit invitation as a visitor.

i have shared communion, although not in recent years, non-attending backslider that i am, in both the lowness of Presbyterian tradition and high Anglicanism. the mass liturgy is no different from these in showing the limitations as much as the rich beauty of liturgy.

i haven't taken mass when at the midnight Christmas eve vigil in Clonard. but this Easter vigil... something was different. it mattered in a way that it had not before. i left the church, grateful to have been there but with a sense of there being a gap... there was something i did not receive. the choice was mine to not step across that threshold, and so i write all of this, not to criticize but to question... what does it mean to feel welcomed to the table? what were the words i needed to hear?

i hold these questions lightly. they do not feel like a burden. perhaps they are an invitation of their own... to understand better what belonging at the table means to me...

::

today, Easter Sunday, marks a moving from orthodoxy of the vigil to what some might call heresy and others think of as theodrama. as i sat in the church last night i contemplated several times on what is to come in the ikon gathering, Judas. Pete's been recording the reflections, which Jonny's going to mix with music and then they'll be posted online. he recorded mine yesterday morning.

i believe in G-D as the ear that hears all human hearts... and is witness to both our suffering and our resurrecting
the homily delivered last night sealed for me why i feel complete peace with what we will be exploring. for the boundaries we are pushing at, the story we are trying to break open... even though some of my own words might be recieved by some as a kind of blasphemy...

here it is, paraphrased... (how to spot the Presbyterian in a congregation: the one taking notes in the sermon ;) )

when we move from self-centredness and focussing on our own happiness to giving to others,
resurrection is happening. new life is emerging.
when hopelessness and despair turns to hope, resurrection is happening. new life is emerging.
when we are released from addiction into freedom, resurrection is happening. new life is emerging.
when we find a way through to heal dispute, resurrection is happening. new life is emerging.
when in chaos, we find meaningful sense, resurrection is happening. new life is emerging.
when we are suffering and we find a place of acceptance and even meaning, resurrection is happening. new life is emerging.
in survival of hardship, resurrection is happening. new life is emerging.
when we find purpose, meaning and happiness in unexpected places, resurrection is happening. new life is emerging.

find resurrection in your life. and share it. with those you love. and perhaps even with those you might hate.

if you are still at Good Friday, still at the cross, then hold onto trust, that Christ is risen and brings new life.

Judas has remained in a perpetual Good Friday... his legacy - a long anguished cry throughout history, as the one who is scorned as betrayer and does not live to see resurrection. i believe in a G-D of welcome and invitation. who stands with Judas and all others in pain of Good Friday, and who being outside time is waiting on Easter Sunday, inviting us to be surprised by resurrection. to hold on to trust... that all things are possible. to have hope in darkness for what is always to come. G-D is both the cross and the empty tomb. and i believe we are held wherever we are. and perhaps in truth, we are all of us living in Easter Saturday, in the place inbetween for much of the time. neither there nor here. i believe in G-D who is present in that inbetween - in the vital wrestling space between endings and beginnings. the space of daily resurrection. where we might defy death with hope, however fragile. On Good Friday, there is an Easter Sunday that never ceases to be coming, just as we are always emerging...

may we hold on to trust... and may we emerge into welcome... to allow those parts of ourselves and our lives that are caught, like Judas, at the place of suffering to be heard, so they might be healed.

LB

next ikon

as part of the ikon :: recalls series - ikon revisits a previous gathering, Judas, with a new take

all good things

clements, botanic...

belated happy 14th february.

i was pretty down on all things valentine this year... which i'm aware was not because i'm unromantic but speaks to just how romantic i probably am but refuse to admit...

in truth there were moments in the past few days when i would've happily nuked the entire male species (well, the straight ones anyway) but i decided to err on caution and put it down to PMS...better to be safe than sorry. and it has to be acknowledged that stuarty and mark proved themselves to be fine upstanding representatives of their fellow men... the former created a fantastic lunch for his good wife and myself, complete with red roses for the table. the latter called over in the evening and he and i had great chats over a picnic of cheese and assorted delicacies, washed down with a bottle of muscat he brought back from last year's jaunt to Provence - a little dessert number we drank in copious quantities and like all good muscats tastes like an elixer of the gods... we drank it from martini glasses...
it was a great way to spend the evening and my spirits lifted greatly, although my half of the bottle of muscat may have played a little role in my improving humour... we talked of what matters to us and the people that matter to us and quietly acknowledged that (rather frustratingly) you can't tell your heart what or who to fall in love with... part of life is just feeling stuff and the challenge is to know how to live with that uncontrollability...to live with intent... to be fully alive... and that running from oneself is a futile pursuit that takes us nowhere... to wonder what the hell that thing i call the zing is, that spontaneous sensation of a stomach flip at the mere sight of another, and whether it's enough, and what caring looks like...

i'm so glad marky is back in the neighbourhood... we texted jude, both mindful that were he still in london it would no doubt be to her doorstop he'd have gone to celebrate friendship rather than mourn singledom...

so the day lacked any sigur ros soundtracked big gestures of passionate undying love but rather the warm generosity of friendship... and maybe that's what i needed this 14th february... thanks gents.

::

since the arrival of the 'Pod, i've discovered the sucking vortex of expenditure that is the iTunes store... so right now i'm listenign to Red, the second album by the communards, which was one of my favourite albums in my early to mid teens.
somewhere i still have an essay i wrote for my very own "captain, my captain" although it's taken me the best part of 20 years to start seeing in me what i think he saw back then... he asked us to write about our favourite song and in what seems now like a very 'me' thing to do, i chose 2...both songs from this album, contrasting in terms of style but together making social point...

no one had up to this point educated me in gay rights, in fact i'd suggest the opposite, but with the mere glimpse of the first gay couple in eastenders and a subsequent household ban of said programme, (the daily mail was delivered to our house at the time and i have doubt it was probably up in arms), i went with my gut... i suspect if my parents had had any idea what i was playing on my walkman it would have been confiscated... so my early teenage listening was heavily weighted toward british gay pop acts (although at the time i didn't make the connection between some of favourite acts...) my younger brother would educate me away on the path to very different sounds over the coming years, but relistening to this album for me still feels like a private but somehow innately political act... moving one moment, celebratory the next... undoubtedly synth-ridden but this is a great 80s album... it does what it does very well, and i feel like i'm coming home listening to it...

if i ever find that paper i wrote amongst my boxes of stuff from the past i'll post it here (in all its unedited defiant teenage and no doubt fairly naive glory) along with the comments from my english teacher... 'cause funny thing is, i'm pretty sure there's little i'd change with it and be pretty proud that i held a passionate conviction that would last well into adulthood and not be replaced but only added to with the arguments to back it up... as new friend tim said over coffee, "oh to go back to your 13 year old self for a night with the experience you carry in your 33 year old self"...to offer some encouragement amidst the excruciating insecurity...

::

last night i saw the episode of the west wing where toby is confronted by a group of rather convincing child suffrage activists. as i realised with shame and bemusement that i somehow didn't get myself round to registering to vote in the upcoming elections, i kinda wish i'd had the vote when i was 13, before i learnt what cynicism was, or at least, before apathy set in... i can't believe i didn't register...women died to get me the vote. i consider this nothing short of an insult to their memory...

::

ooh shuffle has just offered mmm mmm mmm mmm by crash test dummies. i must take a religious moment...

::

spent the last few hours having a long overdue one-on-one conversation with Pete (he who spawned ikon). we've been at the ikon table a lot in recent weeks one way or another and as my feet very naturally firmly swing back under said table, (after spending much of 2006 on self imposed 'sabbatical' to concentrate on giving my inner world some attention), i've been looking forward to getting some time for intentional discussion...
in the ongoing collective conversations those of us who are sometimes called ::old skoolers:: often find ourselves re-walking what is for us well trodden ground with the newer folks in the crowd, or clarifying one's vocabulary or individual perspective with those whom one does not share a history. this is typically pretty exciting and challenging, and i love hearing fresh perspectives of others, but on days like today it's just really nice being able to converse with the full knowledge that one is standing on mutually understood ground with rarely any need for translation...i guess it's just a rather different kind of conversation... so we explored with length and depth all things ikon and then some... this kind of time with Pete is something i treasure as friends as much as collaborators, and it is a marker to me of our shared commitment to our friendship in the passage of time that we have learned how to communicate together... our conversations are unique to us... i think we've learned to give each other space to try ideas on for size and not rush ourselves into decisions or hard held positions... and in doing so find a nice kind of shared perspective which still reflects our individualities amidst this dynamic crowd... colour me energised and thinking this is shaping up to being a good year for the crowd...

::

right, better drag my ass home and get me some dinner...

LB,x