a brief examination ofBrian Lightfoot's music, thoughts and life.

beautiful. temporal

2011-11-25T18:49:00.001-08:00

She draws up a bath

The leaky faucet drips continually into the foot end of the tub. Repetitive, clockwork, industry.

Heartbeat.

Primordial.

The rusty joints and dusty baseboards, the tired linoleum all creak and crank, yellowed,

From a quieter world now gone

This room designed for a different era, groans happily under warm water

Time is familiar with warm water

She is the guest in this old building

She sighs long over the water, which responds with blooming

exponential ringlets

Reproducing in perfect order, towards her reddened feet

Single cells rapidly descend grasping one another, forcibly inclined to join the dance

complexity

Birthed from breathing.

her body stirs, which long she’s loathed

she nods forgiveness, and mercy to her skin

She is walking through a hallway with friends when she comes across a weathered face

Eyes lock like magnets then repel oily water

certainty of youth and God lie within her own

Though death and life are in those eyes, her failure to recognize the depths of time prevent reception

Sinking deep

Tonight God is mystery. Wilderness beyond her. Dangerous. Foreign.

Tonight God is too close

Lips stirring quietly against the warm water,

Half submerged, amphibious between two worlds

She knows that life is piercing, feels it in her side

Beauty and affliction

A lost soldier in a foreign country, writing letters to a nearly forgotten lover

She listens at the creaking universe that does not know her from any other,

Her body beautiful. Temporal.

Repeated breaths and lilting tongues.

Her prayers grow green and cold magenta lamentations

If I’m loved, things are different

I cannot prove one more thing.

If you came running, things are different

She unstops the drain, the evolving waves shudder, tumult.

A universe destroyed at her feet, her body levitates momentarily

Like resurrection.

the water drains slowly.

Impressions remain but the tub stays in wait

Goosebumps. Hallowed Bread.

2011-06-29T13:12:00.000-07:00

I believe more and more that we are deeply spiritual creatures, that our physical being and our spirituality are inseparable and knit together mysteriously and beautifully by God.

CS Lewis described us as amphibious, tied between two worlds. We are pulled and lodged between the spiritual worlds beyond our restricted material one and yet rooted deeply here and meant to celebrate the nature we currently inhabit.

Jordan my dear friend and I were talking yesterday about the powerful effects the mind, beliefs and attitude have on human health. He daily as an EMT, sees people that have given up hope and are thus actually dying physically. He told me of the wonders of placebo and how bizarrely the human mind, when clinging to hope, can actually change the physical ailments a person is being subjected to.

The two of us talked of incarnational truths, of the physicalness of Christ, of the concepts that emotional and spiritual energy actually change the material structure of things around us and the pure poetry of it all.

We imagined the purposes of the Son of God and his material body, talked about the beauty of the world and of music and sexuality and poetry and art and both of us several times were chilled. Goosebumps.

We talked about a study done a short time back in which identical plants were placed in very different surroundings. One was placed in a chaotic home full of negative energy and shouting and the other in a peaceful home where love and order ruled and amazingly (to the scientifically inclined) the plant in the peaceful home though given the exact same nourishment by means of soil, water, oxygen and sunlight, failed to thrive while the peaceful one flourished.

We also talked about a study in which Buddhist monks prayed and chanted over containers of water and left other containers unprayed for. The containers were then frozen and the ice particles proved to have drastically different structures.

The ice the monks had prayed for was said to be much more beautifully and complexly structured than those that were left alone.

I believe that humans bear the image of God and that God loves this physical reality and that he knits the spiritual and material in incredible, beautiful tapestries.

I believe that goosebumps have biological reasons, when a cat is cornered, her hair prickles and her nerves heighten etc. but when people speak of deep truths, art and God and the mysteries beyond us and our hair stands on end, I have to believe it is our spirituality and physicality working in unity.

Praise the great living God that loves justice and kindness. That knits us together perfectly. Amen

Further thoughts A Wind in the Door

2011-06-08T11:01:00.000-07:00

I can’t help it that I love Madelien L’Engle. She has the wit and candor of CS Lewis, the theological wherewithal to stand up in a religious arena largely controlled by men, and more imagination than any religious writer I have ever read.

I wanted to write a few more comments about A Wind in the Door her second book in the Wrinkle quintet.

The most dramatic and beautiful concepts are expressed in this book as the characters learn that size and distance are subjective human concepts and that they have little weight in deciding the importance of a thing or event and that communication between all things created need not be limited by such confinements either. She also teaches beautifully that selfishness and lack of regard for one’s purpose in God’s natural plan can ruin the reality of things we barely understand and change the scope of history in massive unseen ways.

The children in the story learn that Cherubim are dependent on humans to recieve lessons about God’s plans just as much as humans are dependent on them to deliver God’s messages or to bring protection (Cherubim are biblical in this book like Isaiah 6 all covered in wings and eyes and smoke, awesome!). They learn that mitochondria are effected by selfishness just like us, and that when their smaller cells refuse to do what they are meant to do (as in a nonsense mutation found in many diseases including Cystic Fibrosis) they can ruin the universe they live in (which unawares to them oftentimes, is a human body) and thus destroy their whole cosmos and themselves just by selfishly pursuing their own pleasure and independence. They learn that in God’s eyes each star and each mitochondria is the same size and of equal importance. Each serves a vital role in the structure and nature of the universe. Each is symbiotically dependent on it’s surrounding cosmos and provides a service to that cosmos that makes it stay in existence.

The characters learn that communication with God or with one another can happen through much deeper parts of ones self than simply speaking. They speak through their hearts, emotions and minds in a process L’Engle calls kything. Angels and mitochondria communicate with nature and God and one another through their souls, through rhythms and pulses of heartbeats, deep thoughts and emotional waves that can span any distance. These communications are like prayers coming from “groans too low for muttering” and effect or affect those to whom they are projected at or are given in the name of with similar profundity. The communicators that practice kything, actually feel each other the way a listener feels the emotions of a composer while hearing a piece he wrote. The symphony communicates with the composer (even if he is now passed on) by expressing his feelings, heart and mind through passion and vibration, and the audience receives the composers message without needing regard for the time when the piece was written or how far away the composer might be from them now. He has communicated something deeper than words through processes that transcend space and time and language barrier.

The messages of prayer and kything are conveyed not through words but through something deeper. These are like lovemaking, sometimes gentle, but powerfully raw and unshrouded; they are sometimes silent, but nonetheless radically communicative expressions of the deepest parts of a being.

Mitochondria and their living cells learn in the story that if they rebel against the symphony of God’s plan for them, to chase their own plans and pleasures, they can reek havoc unimaginable. Cells and mitochondria in the story are connected to the stars in a profound poetic way and when they die stars go black. The universe filled with God’s presence, the stars named by angels and massive in size to us are relative in importance to the microbial life that exists inside human bodies. The universe reflects (or maybe vice versa) the importance of the ballet or symphony inside the human body.

The demons in the story convince the little life giving cells inside a boys body that they should seek their own pleasure only, that they should never settle into the symphony but should play their own smaller independent “unique” songs which to them sound good but are really just crummy chaos. They are wrongly convinced that they stand stronger when they are alone, that their individual wills are more important than anything in the universe and that they can pursue their own things without harming anyone else. Or (much worse) they are convinced that it doesn’t matter if anyone else is harmed, their pleasure matters now! The universe has no meaning so have fun, the enemy promises. These small invisible life forms unknowingly pursue their own purpose at the expense of the life of their older wiser mitochondria and even on a larger scale at the expense of the human body they occupy. A world without this particular human (the story hints) would not be able to exist for long and a world without humans filled with the ballet-like, symphonic dance of mitochondria and healthy dividing cells, would black out the stars. All things hinge on the purpose God has made them for. Size doesn’t matter. The small unaware cells' partying and selfish pleasure seeking could easily end up wrecking the entire universe. Their ability and importance is unrecognized. The fact that their rebelling sways the fate of all things, causes death and destruction of other beautiful things and themselves all for selfish fun and the sake of “being unique and independent” is kept from their eyes by the demons that come against them.

This is true of humans too in the story and in our story. Some of the characters in the story say that all this concept is too much for them and that they would rather pursue money and a good income than they would try and figure out the deep truths of the universe or to know where they fit into God’s plan, or to admit their dependence on one another and on God. Independence, self-reliance and so on are the promises of the enemy.

Whenever we decide to depend on our own plan, to make our own comfort and pleasure the center of the universe, we actually end up killing and exploiting others. We exploit factory workers by shopping for the cheapest buys, hurt family and friends by acting wildly and shortening our lives, we lose parts of our brains and hearts not easily regained or never regained, we fill our homes with stuff and junk while others starve, we cut ourselves off from others and eventually drown ourselves in selfishness. We may actually be doing more evil and destruction to the cosmos around us than we’ll ever know when we seek our own will above God’s. This truth has never been expressed better than in this book.

It is according to L’Engle our purpose to seek God’s will, to become creators, to find ourselves in this dance and poem he is telling and to learn to kythe with one another. To express deep pieces of our hearts, God’s heart, natures heart and so on and to share through art and deep feelings and love and compassion is our purpose and brings structure to the universe. Or as L’engle says it elsewhere “cosmos in chaos”.

Naming The Universe

2011-06-04T00:01:00.000-07:00

I am finishing up Madelien L’Engle’s second book in the Wrinkle in Time quintet titled A Wind in the Door and think that this one far exceeds the conceptual and spiritual bounds of the first book in the series.

L’Engle deals with ethical, astronomical and cosmological concepts in the most artistic, imaginative, theologically generous and (best of all) believable ways one could possibly ask for. As she often speaks about and conceptualizes in her other writings, L’Engle portrays characters as needing to “name” one another throughout the story as a sort of offering of dignity to the person or thing and as a sort of anchoring for that person into reality and eternity. I’ll try to explain better. L’Engle believes that the usage of words impacts a person greatly and that when something is named, it is thereby focused and set onto a more sturdy foundation despite the chaotic world surrounding it.

Naming a girl (or boy, but I'll stick with the feminine for good balance) helps to make sense of her, to put her into a workable framework, to set her apart from the masses of other girls, etc. To name someone means not just to give some scribble or sound for a nametag or to call them by, but moreover, to identify what that person looks like to the outside world, to point out his unique attributes out loud and to affirm the beauties (and sometimes ugliness) that the person has and often is not capable of seeing in himself. To help a woman know that she is unique and that she is noticeable and not just a piece of background noise helps her to know her role in the eternal workings of her Creator and in the daily workings going on around her. It helps a man or woman to be set apart and proved worthwhile. Recognized. I imagine that the naming also goes into the concept of affirming the goodness of a person who has truly given up on him or herself. To project onto the person the beauties that may be laying dormant inside, in order to help them wake up to a potential he/she never could have come to without the process of naming. Some of the biblical references to this are Adam in the garden naming the animals, letting them know that they are recognized, key players in the creation and intricate artwork that is God’s nature, while also affirming him, the namer (Adam) as one that is co-creating with God. The second reference (as I remember) is the point in Revelations in which God gives all the people in the Book of Life New Names. Which is the most beautiful concept, that we will one day be called by new names, which will reflect our truest nature. That God will have seen the brave heart of the meekest person on earth and call him Strong, like how Jesus changes Simon (pebble) into Peter (boulder). He sees the pillar of a man that the emotionally unstable, insecure Simon is going to become and begins calling him by a new name which in turn proves to recreate this man into something greater than what he could have been had he not been named in advance. A beautiful concept.

The children in the book thus are forced to recognize the importance of seeing the beauty in others and reaching out to them on these terms even when it seems impossible.

Cherubim are assigned the naming of the stars, children assigned the naming of their hated principle, and mitochondrial organisms required to recognize their true nature and purpose in God’s intricate plan for life and creation.

I know from experience that we all have the power to look a person in the eyes and either name them something that will lead them on to live a more self-hating and destructive life, or to name them something that will help them learn to accept their true beauty and go on to pursue the depths of heart they were no longer capable of seeing.

Let’s name well then.

Here's a quote from L'Engle about words and naming... (Above is a picture of Sawyer from Lost reading A Wrinkle in Time. His character was one desperately in need of being named something worthwhile in his desperate struggle with his past but that's another blog).

“We cannot name or be named without language. If our vocabulary dwindles to a few shopworn words, we are setting ourselves up for takeover by a dictator. When language becomes exhausted, our freedom dwindles--- we cannot think; we do not recognize danger; injustice strikes us as no more than “the way things are.”

-Madeleine L’Engle-

2010-09-02T10:36:00.000-07:00

I was reborn. The air was clear, the trees in better perspective, some seeming larger than they had before, others just seeming to drip gold in those morning hours.

I let in the air and stretched limbs that didn't hurt.

After two days of super high fever that kept me in bed, the world was brand new again.

I joked my friends that I had brain damage when I finally came out of it because I was so giddy and happy to be walking around doing menial tasks. I pulled some shots at Augie's and threw down a few perfect cappuccinos and then took a drive just to feel the wind through my window.

It is a shame that these experiences can't last. That the dopamine highs after such deep lows or the juxtaposed happiness after prolonged down periods can't just be the regular. Maybe the real shame is that the gratefulness never lasts. It takes me about thirty seconds to re bundle super heavy burdens all over my shoulders (which has always been my nature).

However, yesterday I had a little religious break through in my time of physical reawakening.

I felt this overwhelming sense that God was saying he loves me.

At some random point in my day it was like a real, clear voice spoke to me, "do you know that I love you?"

My answer in honesty was a definite "no."

I am an earner. If someone does me a favor, I repay it. I have a horrible time being served, I can't take compliments without sweating and I love to do things to make other people happy.

I get squirmy around kindness towards me.

Lately with all the uncertainty in my life, with feeling like I have no idea what direction I am moving in, with acting recklessly and blindly in some cases, I had begun to feel that God was gone.

Like there was just a heavy curtain between us.

I'm a sensitive person relationally and feel awkwardness quickly between people. That awkwardness was there with God. I kept blaming it on Him like, "I'm the lost one, save me, guide me!" and interpreted the silence as his abandonment.

Then yesterday, "Why don't you know that I love you?"

I just welled with tears.

I was hating myself. I was building the curtain, I was the one assuming that God judged me the way people do.

People are equal. We all struggle we are no different than one another.

I said this loudly the other night at a late birthday party with a cigar in my mouth, two gay friends, two tattooed irreligious sweet vegans, and my closest childhood friends. Everyone heartily agreed.

That's the truth though. Religion often misses the point brutally because it sets up hierarchies of holiness in men only to find out that the really holy ones are committing unspeakable sin in the shadows.

The point of Jesus' message is that we are equal. We are little kids. We are lost. We are like sheep on a hillside with no idea where to go and what danger awaits. The day we decide we are shepherds and lose grip of the fact that we are all in this together and equally in need of kindness and love from God and each other, is the day we set ourselves up for massive failure.

The most unique thing to me right now about Christianity is that here, God says, "I love you" to us. And in response to this love hopefully our lives change. Every religion hopes to appease angry Gods or to set us right with the universe or to make us one with all things or to makes us gods ourselves. This one makes us stop and say, I'm blind and I need someone to love me and hold my hand.

I think most people don't think God loves them. I think they don't process it. They take circumstances and paganly assume that they are punishment; they behave well and are shocked that they don't get rewarded. This isn't the right religion though.

Do you really think God loves you?

Do you really think that you could earn it if he didn't?

God wants to be a new dad to you. He is not your earthly dad that failed you in so many ways.

He's not going to abandon you, ignore you, grow disappointed in you.

He loves you completely. Believe it. For two seconds imagine it and then just accept it.

2010-06-15T22:19:00.000-07:00

Tonight I am a criminal.

I step to the curb in the night, a car races by. The driver doesn't see me. I move briskly into the street, and half-jog to Augie's Coffeehouse with my eyes darting in either direction for witnesses.

The store is dark and my key dips silently into the door. One final glance around and I am into the empty shop pulling the door shut behind me. Disarming the building I stand still for a moment as another car goes by. I am alone in the dark store listening the hum of the fridges and the soft hiss of the espresso machine with it's broken gasket.

I stoop down below the counter and do what I came to do.

I grab my computer charger so I can go home and blog.

And then I do something gutsy.

I make chocolate milk.

And drink it.

I am sentimental and like to drive late at night. I drive up Buena Vista street and peer into the windows of my parents old Spanish mission style house. I listen to the street and CD's that invoke memories of different times.

I drive up Parkwood and look at Jordan and Shona's old apartment. I look into the darkened park to see if anyone is playing glow-in-the-dark frisbee. No one is.

I drive to my grandma's old house and roll the windows down to see if there are kids on the grass under that great big pine tree. Kids with sap on their fingers and ninja turtle toys. There aren't. I listen to see if NPR is playing from a radio in my Grandma's bedroom. It is not. She doesn't live here.

Sometimes I think that I will see myself standing in these places, enjoying these people and memories but then I remember how the universe works and I look down at my legs and look at the cockpit of my automobile and remember where I am.

One night I rode my bike to some of these places and got off and let my feet touch the holy grounds for the first time since I had left a lot of them years before. I felt like a time traveler and wondered at the way ticking clocks change things. I wondered at the fact that I have keys to locks that don't exist anymore. I wondered at the concept that if I were to enter any of these old places now, they would not be the same as I had remembered them.

I felt sad.

Tonight I exit Augie's, chocolate milk and charger in hand and lock the door behind me. Three years, almost four spent in this place. Watching all employees come and go but sticking it out for some reason. I look at the park across the street and see myself reading Kerouac and believing in obscure politics. I see my friends riding bikes to the storefront and seasons changing. I smell clove smoke. I lock the door and move to my car.

Time doesn't exist. Or at least I never want it to.

Faith

2010-05-06T22:24:00.000-07:00

When I first met God I was seventeen. I had heard hints of his voice everywhere up until that point, but when I first had an undeniable encounter with God, I was a skinny, pale, vegetarian, punk-rock seventeen year old.

I was on a choir tour trip that I signed just to hang out with some cool people and because it sounded interesting. I didn't know that on those winding coastlines moving into Oregon, in those conversations between sincere hearts, on those cold campground pine needle nights, I was going to find a Living God.

I did though. Or that God found me.

When I stood before criminals in prisons and homeless in shelters and brought a little hope with that terrible choir, the truth smashed me. It shook me and gave me new life. The cross, in all of it's paradoxical glory made sense to me. The hope that was growing in me was coming from my service to broken people and my simultaneous admittance that I was broken too. This was the foolishness of the cross that Paul talked about. I, a cussing confused teenager was beginning to see hope everywhere; with no real understanding of what I was saying or where I was going, I started telling other broken people about this hope that was growing in me. A sincere faith with no hint of cynicism made me a powerful person on that trip. Knowing nothing, tainted by nothing, I just freely served and reached out to everyone I could find.

This of course didn't last forever. I got tainted and burned here and there but have come out with my faith alive and well and quite a bit more knowledge behind it now.

The joy, the recklessness of my early faith though is something I am only beginning to win back. When I was so young, I never thought about rent or jobs or healthcare. I just went for it and God met me. I sense that this is where He is calling me again, but have more reservations now. I had a great conversation with my old friend Greg Noble tonight and was inspired by his faith. He is a person that kept walking on that kind of faith I used to have and is now about to walk into Haiti with incredible connections, a desire to start a beautiful nonprofit and no one to credit for it but God. My friend has no money, no degree, no nothing but faith. I sense that something is changing in me. God is preparing me for the next journey of my life. I think it will involve music and touring and missions but I most importantly sense God telling me that I will need to let go of fear and just step out again.

Since when did we buy the myth of security and lose our hearts? Since when did we really think that we could take care of ourselves? How many of us have actually followed a dream and been forced to let God take care of us day to day?

Faith is scary. Faith is a gift. I want more.

Jonsi

2010-04-20T23:54:00.001-07:00

This is my best description of the Jonsi concert I went to last weekend with my friends.

I don't mean to be dramatic, it was just heavenly. I compare it to what standing in the presence of God might be like.

Out of the shadows barely illuminated walks the tall figure of a thin, eclectically dressed man. Acoustic guitar in hand, a floodlight spills gold onto Jonsi's face and shoulders. He is like a bird, fringe hangs from his clothes, his hair is choppy and varies in length here and there wild and weird. His first few notes cut the tension in the air like a boat through dark water. His voice is like bells, glass, tonally stable and captivating. Behind him another musician mallets notes that are difficult to separate from those breathing from the mouth of the Icelandic singer. Slowly with the building momentum in the first few songs, the stage begins to take life. Projections are inseparable from the screens they are thrown upon. Glass boxes fill with light and life from multiple angles and in impossibly three dimensional quality. Ants crawl, fire turns to ash and blooms butterflies, birds glide and stutter as they dissolve into grey dust. The sounds of the stage dance with the images beautifully; pain and joy flicker through the artfully depicted patterns of life.

The drums are big. Not holding the songs down, but more breaking out and celebrating the natural rhythms created by the pulses and streaming sounds of Jonsi's voice and the accompanying instruments. Suitcases and strange appliances add to the percussion. Stomping and dragging things across other things, brushing, malleting, pounding and scraping helps to draw pictures of swings, rusty door hinges, childhood and nature.

The guitars, pianos, vibraphones, and various tracked strings dance and flicker, like little flames in an oxygen deprived room.

Jonsi comes across as magic. He is kind and humble in the silence, but a fully devoted, unrelenting performer through the duration each of his songs. At one point he falls to his knees and jams his hands against a typewriter while a series of delays echoes his voice into a haunting wave of chaotic sound. The time of each delay is warped until an entirely digital noise overcomes the raw harmonic power of Jonsi's voice. The stage goes black.

In the encore, a tornado hits on the massive screen behind Jonsi and water explodes from the glass boxes on stage. The sound crescendoes into a hypnotic drone like bees and whirlwinds fighting towards total pandemonium.

The general consensus was that we wished it would never have ended. I hope to see him again one day very soon. I am so inspired by his innocent pure songwriting and musicianship.

Look underneath the floorboards for the secrets I have hid.

2010-04-14T09:47:00.000-07:00

I had the most bizarre and beautiful experience the other day while doing food deliveries with some of my best friends.

First off, my church began an initiative some time ago to befriend and help some local people that are suffering with HIV. HIV/AIDS depletes a person's immune system, saps his/her energy and creates all kinds of havoc for a body, slowly killing a person. Some people get lucky enough to take a "cocktail" of medicine everyday that at least partially helps suppress some of these symptoms, but it doesn't help forever and it won't help at all without being paired with a healthy diet. We started food deliveries.

The results have been incredible. It has easily been the most powerful, effective and unique ministry I have ever been a part of. First considering the fact that the Christian church has largely decided to play no role in helping those with HIV (also ignoring entire gay communities), and second, many missional ministries are comprised of simple one time acts of kindness in which no relationship is formed and a bit of information is pressed into the recipients hands with a clear religious agenda, this ministry stands apart to me.

We come back every week and have made real friendships with people that are at the end of the rope. People that often have given up hope, as their hips and joints grow weak and their houses get lonely and dark in an already dark area code. We went with the thought of blessing these people, but have found the experience to be entirely cyclical. We bring some laughter, food, attention, and kindness and are returned with depth, perspective and sometimes encouragement that could be found nowhere else. We gain trust by not shoving an agenda and we admit just how powerful these people are to our lives too; which in turn brings some hope back to them about their worth and humanity and proves something about the gospel and the truth about life coming from broken places.

This week was the most beautiful and heartbreaking of all the weeks so far to me and deserves to be recorded in some way. My friend Michael (to whom we bring some food every week) gave me some unexpected encouragement that shook me to my core. Michael has had a violent past. He told us about being beat and sexually abused as a five year old and the hope that was lost in those experiences. He told us that the violence has crept into him and that instead of desiring to be the opposite of those that have harmed him, he often has found himself taking control into his own hands, drawing a knife to a persons throat or taking revenge and feeling in control "like god", while drawing a person's prayers to him and not to God. The conversation was obviously a little unnerving, as he admitted the evils in himself and the things that had brought him to murder and the ways in which violence tempted him even now. We sat silently, in awe of his candor and childlike lack of fear at admitting such ugly things. We love him. We see his heart.

After hearing some of these heavy reflections, Michael told us that the only thing keeping him from doing something violent over the past few months had been our friendship and presence in his life. We give all this credit to God knowing that it was His idea that we go do food deliveries and His Spirit that gives us the hope we bring, but we were all broken nonetheless. Michael told us that our friendship was the only beacon on his often dark shore and that it kept him from going back to prison to die.

My heart pulled on me and I told him the ways in which I sometimes slip out of control, my old fear of conflict and my sometimes inability to speak up for myself. He warned me of the ways bitterness could creep in how at some point there was no turning back.

I asked him to keep on fighting those devils at least for the sake of us continuing to be able to see him.

As we were leaving that night, Michael grabbed my shoulder and told me that I shouldn't worry if people try to walk on me because of my kindness. He told me that he could see the light and joy and creation in me and that anyone who wouldn't be able to was a waste. I nearly cried. He had heard one of my songs earlier that week and really believed in me. Really. His sincerity was breathtaking. He had a fatherly look on his face and I couldn't talk. I thanked him and climbed in the car.

My life is changed by this friendship. Glory to God.

Above the Waters

2010-04-08T12:00:00.000-07:00

Music is one of the truest things on earth.

We are humans created in the image of a great Creator.

As Donald Miller says, God's words make something out of nothing.

Likewise when my friends and I release vibrations into the air and let loose melodies and harmonies, something comes from nothing. Our spirits too hover above the water of our lives (Genesis 1:2).

That imagery of peace and light hovering over chaos and darkness, of a beautiful Spirit casting peace over a tumult is exactly what I feel about music.

Whomever reads this blog, I encourage you to listen to the new record by Jonsi (singer of the beautiful Icelandic Sigur Ros) and read Genesis chapter one.

There is so much to be said for our need to create.

There is a spark of God in us friends.

Good God

2010-03-28T22:03:00.000-07:00

The other night my friend Eric and I sat up late on the porch talking about the universe. It was a beautiful night; the stars were bright and the newly bloomed orange trees smelled sugary and foreign on the breeze. Eric and I talked God.

We talked about the ways religion had manipulated him as a younger man and the ways in which he felt that Christianity had failed to express the true nature of reality. His perspective was not so much that there was no God or underlying truth in the universe, but that religion seemed to cheapen the complexities of life.

I didn't disagree but made it clear that I have a profound and often unexplainable connection with God that comes through a faith in Jesus as the son of God, and intercessor to my prayers.

He told me about the truths he had found through some Buddhist perspectives and I told him about the beautiful experiences I had with monks in Cambodia and how shamed I was by their utter devotion to serving the poor and outcast while my personal religious life reflected Jesus much less than theirs did. We laughed at this irony and I wondered if this was the reason that so many people have turned from Christianity. When someone claims to be a follower of someone else but then leads a life that looks nothing like that person, they cease to be a credible source.

The conversation went on from there with the two of us drawing common ground and admitting our doubts and areas in which we saw faith as viable. Eventually we got too cold to stay out on the porch and Eric smashed his cigarette butt beneath his sneaker.

The conversation was nice and made both of us think. Eric told me that night that my openness and lack of defensiveness made him feel like looking into Jesus again and I told him that I respected his pursuit of truth and his unflinching ability to point out inconsistency in the world. Both of us meant it.

Later that night I thought about something I had told Eric earlier and realized even more deeply how profound and different the promises of Christianity are than those of other philosophies and religions. The concept of grace is what makes all the difference. There are many techniques to becoming a nicer person, but at the end of the day we still put ourselves first every time. Buddhism might tell you how to rescue yourself from desire but it doesn't tell you how to rescue child slaves or how to set right your past wrongs. The concept that God loves people so much that he would suffer unspeakable trauma and make the ultimate sacrifice to cover over and slowly heal the wickedness that drowns us is the most beautiful thought in the universe. The thought that God then wants us to dirty our hands in setting things right in the world while he works in us is very near the most beautiful thought in the universe.

I hope for many more conversations like this with Eric. We have plenty to learn from one another. What a good world. What a good God.

2010-03-23T16:54:00.000-07:00

What an interesting chapter I am entering in this story that is my life. I am coming to a place where it looks like my dreams might actually take off; that is, a place where I might actually get to make music that I love, with people I love, for a cause I love.

Some of you know that when I was about eighteen I had a random stranger tell me it was my destiny to write music that would heal people's hearts and that I have been ever since fighting to find out how to do that. I was crippled by the obvious doubts people had. I was forced into positions that fit other people's dreams and expectations for and from me and I often doubted my purpose and the growing dream and sense of life I found in music.

I tried at different times to play my songs for people but most often found closed ears, and a sense that people didn't recognize my potential or more like, people wanted me to remain their humble little unaccomplished friend. I sensed this patronage that broke my heart. A sort of "good job little buddy" (envision a pat on my proverbial head), but an overall feeling like these people hadn't listened anyways.

I suffered through those feelings, continually baring my soul and feeling the nakedness that an artist feels when he exposes himself and discovers that the world is largely critical and bitter. I barely survived those feelings and scoffs that I received from some in the early days and clung hard to this feeling like the pleasure of God at my writing and performing. I felt extreme loneliness after playing shows and didn't know how to reconcile these feelings. Eventually by God's grace alone I came to realize that music and art cannot be created with intentions of receiving a certain reaction from people. They have to be created with pure motives and they have to be performed by people that have thicker skin than I normally do. Part of being an artist that succeeds is the ability to ignore stupid criticism and receive the good kind, and to not take one's self too seriously. It takes a good shaking off and the ability to stop and ask oneself whether the art being created is enjoyable to the artist and true to what he/she wants it to be and then a choice to then go and do it, no matter what.

For whatever reason, people are starting to listen to my songs. I didn't really change. I think I started to believe in what I was writing, I got organized and I performed my heart out a few times and then it just started rolling. This is all a mystery to me, but it's an ok one in which I feel like I am holding God's hand and saying "here we go" without the slightest idea where things are moving, only the sense that things really are getting rolling and that God wants me to keep going. The current project is fun. The CD is interesting, rough and raw but it is going to represent me well and so I am proud of it.

The newest thing that intrigues my soul most and feels very providential is the songs Roxi, Ben and myself are writing. There is a real recognition of strengths and weaknesses between us that is allowing us to share the load of songwriting and there is something truly beautiful coming out of it. I believe in this something and feel most excited about being able to do something that heals people's hearts. amen.

goals

2010-02-05T10:44:00.000-08:00

I have some goals.

1.To write music (and a book/short performance piece) that touches people's hearts and hopefully to be able to make a career from it for at least a while.

2. To learn to roast coffee and to work for a really great roaster and maybe start my own coffee company while traveling the world a bit and encouraging sustainable agriculture and community growth in the places where my beans are grown.

3. To work on school all the while and eventually become a professor of religion or philosophy in a small green town.

4. I also want to be a dad. This is a new development for me. I just know I was meant to be.

All of these goals exist alongside my desire to really bless and change the world for Jesus.

2010-01-26T16:04:00.001-08:00

I am getting really close to final release of the CD. A lot of bootleg versions are going around out there, but none are the real thing, so await the final beautiful mastered version coming later next month. Roxi and Zack came over today to help record marimba but we couldn't do it because of technical difficulty.

listen to the raw stuff here

http://www.myspace.com/brianlightfootmusic

serendipity and weird stuff.

2010-01-26T00:21:00.000-08:00

Here are some things that I find weird and or uncanny.

My pastor and close friend Jon Macdonald made me a mix cd for my recent trip to San Francisco and I found myself troubled by the names of the first two bands on this mix. The names were "Passion Pit" and "Temper Trap" (both great bands). What struck me though about these two band names was that both used alliteration (PP or TT) and that both had two words that were nearly synonymous or at least had some connection with one another; i.e. Passion and Temper are connected. A passionate person might act from his or her temper, or in a fit of passionate temper a person might make a bad decision. Likewise a trap and a pit are obviously connected. A pit could in many cases prove to be a trap and thus the two can even be straight up synonyms! Both of these bands are getting plenty of recognition and even radio play but I am too hung up on this weird connection between their names to go and purchase either of their albums. I smell conspiracy. Not really though.

Next... and more serious perhaps, I have been experiencing a strange amount of serendipity lately. I find that serendipitous things in my life are often really encouraging to my faith in a benevolent God. I know that some would argue that choosing to only recognize the weirder parts of my life and to call these moments spiritual would be nothing more than cognitive dissonance, but honestly these things that have been happening lately are strange!

Just after my show at the Wire in Upland, I was sitting in a room full of friends listening to an iPod that was on shuffle (meaning it could play any song in it's library of hundreds or thousands) and before the next song started, I was already singing it (and in the right key). Everyone stared at me and asked how I knew it was coming and I had no idea. Next, I was in San Francisco walking with my friends through a parking garage outside of an Indian restaurant and I started singing "I love you baby and if it's quite alright, I need you baby, to warm the lonely night..." I struggled through the lyrics and had to ask for help through the song from all the annoyed people in the car. I sang the song for at least fifteen minutes until my friend Lindsay's brother took me and my friends to a martini bar called Martunis. Upon walking through the door, to our amazement a piano playing man was singing that very tune.

My friends just stared at me.

Finally, walking through Oakland on the second or third day of our trip, I started joking about the names of cafes we would visit, I told Austin we should try cafe Le Petit Dejene, weirdly enough quoting a Will Ferrell sketch from SNL and totally making a joke about some of the fancier names for subpar coffee places. When we finally reached the BART station to go to SF, sure enough there was a cafe Dejene on the corner. My friends again just stared. I don't think I am psychic, I just think that there are hints coming at me through my surroundings encouraging me to remember that there is more design and structure in this life of mine, and spurring me on to continue believing. My decision to make music, to go to Thailand and to start following Jesus were all based on similar events and all have proved to give me incredible hope and life. I will write more about this soon and I will also trust these inclinations inasmuch as they have lead me so far to be a really happy, well-rounded person with more depth than most people my age.

A loyal friend

2010-01-20T18:31:00.000-08:00

Loyalty is rare. Uncertainty about others and about circumstances often keeps us from being loyal friends. You don't often find a person in life that will simply stand behind you no matter what.

I had a friend however, that unquestioningly would have died for me in a heartbeat. She was not a human though, she was my dog Angel. For whatever reason, genetics, breeding, heart, spirit or what have you, this dog treated me like a friend and would have stood in front of me if I were being charged by a rhinoceros. She was fearless and she was cuddly.

My sister rescued Angel from a yard in which she had been abandoned without food or water for some time. Angel was famished and took some nursing back to health, but through these circumstances proved to fall in love with our family. She wagged her stub tail like a car-shifter moving back and forth in neutral. She growled ferociously at anyone in the room that dared make eye-contact without petting her and she forced her way into my bedroom at night to see if I was sleeping. I loved her more than I can say. Being friends with something that sees the world in a completely alien manner from yourself but that values you above itself is really special. I am really sorry that she had to go.

Goodnight Angel.

2010-01-18T23:21:00.000-08:00

Some of my dearest friends and myself went to San Francisco this weekend and tried out the best coffee in the area. We had a wonderful time, wandering around the city and getting sore feet and knees. Four Barrel Coffee is now officially my favorite coffee place, with a fantastic single origin espresso bar, kind friendly and educated baristas, incredible atmosphere, strictly vinyl music and the best pour-over cup at a time coffees I have ever tasted. check it!

2010-01-18T11:17:00.001-08:00

So it has been the start of a new great year. The band and I have been playing some really great shows, recordings are in the process of being released this year, and there is more writing for my next project in the mix. The photos featured here are done by a great friend and photographer named Zack Pianko (http://zpiankophotography.blogspot.com/) who is also the fiance of Roxi Opris, who is working with me on writing a concept album this year. The idea is to mix mediums, and create a concept story album that is told in multiple ways at once. You'll get it when you see/hear it. again look at Zack's work here.

http://zpiankophotography.blogspot.com/

2010-01-18T11:11:00.000-08:00

A hope in coming winter.

2009-11-08T23:31:00.001-08:00

My hope is built on nothing less than Jesus' blood and righteousness. I don't want to walk around with expectations from others or life, only a renewed sense of wonder at the fact that I am forgiven and redeemed by a good God.

Restoration has been so wonderful lately and the ministries we are doing are absolutely unique and close to the heart of God. Sometimes our church seems to be the only thing that keeps me going.

Thanks God.

Techno no.

2009-10-24T16:20:00.000-07:00

I hate technology. I have all of these sneaking suspicions that technology is stealing wonder from our society. People don't look at stars anymore. The lamps outside my house blot them out.

I love books, paper in my hands and the smell of libraries. I love music, the kind that carries me someplace else, often analog and preferably live or on record. I am not becoming an old man, I am going back in time to where I never existed before. Like Jack White, believing that in raw energy the human spirit exists and thrives. Like John Muir, and Thoreau, I am longing for nature and a place where my spirit is one with this physical reality. I believe that we should be inseparable from creation, the crown of it maybe but not separate from it.

Maybe it's wrong that this is in an internet blog, hypocritical even but o well. I'll go play outside. See you later.

"Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul." -John Muir-

"When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe." -John Muir-

Hazards of Love

2009-10-23T18:18:00.001-07:00

I saw the decemberists this week with Austin at UCLA. They had just completed this insane animation that fit to their entire new album. IT was beautiful. Inspiring.

O God and hot Autumn

2009-10-23T17:48:00.000-07:00

This autumn has been as moody as me.

Hot one day and cold the next. Some days the sun sets so early, that it seems like night all the time. I have been living. I have been learning some of my most profound lessons, but I have been tired. God is with me, all around me in voices and dreams and friends and in the air and trees but some days I feel defeated. I have been finishing up my album and have this sense of completion as it is reaching it's maturity. There are all these little dreams, thoughts, and visions of mine growing into something tangible and that is a good feeling. I (as you know if we've talked much) dream of playing music and writing music as a way of expressing my feelings, philosophy, worship for God and poetic nature. I dream of doing this full time. This little album will be a big step for me.

God has been teaching me to let go lately. To have faith but to also, paradoxically to trust parts of my intuition that has been developing so much over the past few years. He has been giving me new friends and new life and some pain and joy and letting it shape me. I just hope that I am making the right decisions.

The house is full of life, with Smalls moving in to the room next to me. We talk about whether God is a boy or girl late at night through the wall. Alys and Nicky are engaged and I wake some days to Nick playing these stirring upside down guitar songs or to kids in the park. Johnny sits at the far end of the table from me at night while we all talk about a post-apocalyptic world and drink cheap wine. God lives at this house.