1. Today began a two night stay in North Spokane that I've been looking forward to for weeks. On my trip to Spokane, I decided to take a break from the Breakfast Nook in Coeur d'Alene and went to Michael D's. I think this was just my third time eating here. One morning, Christy, Carol, and I began a Sibling Outing here and I remember another time when Ed and I had an impromtu breakfast with Mike Stafford here several years ago. I ordered corned beef hash and eggs and sourdough toast, hoping the hash might be made in house, but it wasn't. Like Brails, Sam's, the Breakfast Nook, IHOP, and any number of other places (but not Eugene's Cornucopia), they served canned hash. I think I understand why these places do this and the hash out of the can is fine, but I did make the mistake of wishing otherwise.
I bopped up to Supercuts to get my hair trimmed and then I was off to Spokane.
2. Between 1974-84, I went to school, worked, and lived in Spokane two different times for about five to six years and I never went on a single hike. This summer, through reading and through advice from Byrdman, I've been thinking a lot about trips to make over here and trails to try.
Today, I went to the Indian Painted Rocks Trailhead. At about 2:00, I started to hike. The trail is located west of Spokane, just past where Indian Trail Road turns into Rural Route 5. The sign says it's Rutter Parkway. The trail winds its way near the Little Spokane River through a variety of nature systems. Above the trail, the hillside is populated with huge rocks and, in places, the trail goes through some of these rocks; the hillside is also dotted with pine trees and the charred remains of a fire that burned here about four year ago, with many logs resting on the ground. The trail also winds near marshland along the river and, today, several ducks were in view, calmly swimming and occasionally quacking at one another.
I didn't see the painted rocks. I also didn't hike to the end of the trail. My check in time at the Airbnb I leased was at 4:00 and I wanted to arrive about then and get settled in before heading out for the evening. So I hiked about a mile. I had my camera, but I wasn't feeling like taking pictures. I just wanted to get familiar with this place, take it in, hike slowly, enjoy what, for me, was exactly the kind of landscape of rocks, trees, and water I've always most loved about Spokane -- but always from the car.
I've been thinking a lot over the last few months about people who write about hiking cleansing them spiritually and mentally. I don't experience this. The things in my life that trouble me often visit me in my solitude on the trail and never get resolved. I'm no less troubled when I leave the trail than I was when I started a hike. That's fine.
Today, what troubles me pretty much stayed away. Instead, my mind got busy. I'm returning to Spokane next weekend on Saturday to watch a matinee performance by Whitworth's theater program of A Midsummer Night's Dream. On the trail, out of nowhere, came a fantasy that I was invited to give a short lecture introducing the play. In my fantasy, I recapped the traditional understanding of the genre of comedy; I talked about dreams, wishes, renewal, resurrection, transformation, and vitality; I drew upon a contrast that was alive at Whitworth when I was last there thirty-five years ago, and looked at the play within the framework of Dionysianism vrs Apollonianism. I don't know how this lecture would have gone over in the Bing Theater, but, for me, in the theater of my mind, it was a way of revisiting ideas that were at work throughout my years of teaching at LCC. I thought a lot about how I miss working with those (and many other) ideas with students and miss being a part of the life of LCC's theater.
3. I've been yearning for cultural stimulation. I have satisfied some of my yearning at home, watching movies. I also experience the works of Shakespeare by reading and watching John Barton DVDs. It helps to listen to music at home and I loved the live concerts I recently attended in Missoula and Spokane.
I moved back to Kellogg two years ago. It's taken me this long to sort out what I can do in Kellogg that's invigorating and what lies elsewhere -- possibly in Coeur d'Alene, possibly in Moscow, and certainly in Spokane.
I've decided to try to attend more cultural events given by Whitworth University. I came to Spokane today to attend a talk Bob Woodward will give at noon downtown on Oct. 4th, sponsored by Whitworth. After I decided that I didn't want to drive to Spokane Friday morning, but come over on Thursday, I went to the University's events calendar and saw that Whitworth would be hosting a lecture at 7:00 given by Christian artist Makoto Fajimura. Fajimura not only creates stunning canvases, he's also dedicated himself to writing about culture. In contrast to the common idea that we are in the midst of a long culture war, he decided to change the metaphor from war to care and wrote a book, Culture Care: Reconnecting with Beauty for Our Common Life.
His lecture grew out of a metaphor provided by the Japanese art of Kintsugi. It's the art of embracing damage. It's the art of putting broken pottery back together with gold (or other metal) lacquer, thus creating a healed piece of pottery that is stronger and more beautiful than the broken piece was.
Put simply, as a Christian artist who views the imagination as sanctified, Makoto Fajimura sees art has a means of healing a broken world, making the fragments of the world's brokenness stronger through the healing and generative power of art. I hope this summation, at least in part, represents the very optimistic view Fajimura has of artistic creation, of the role of the artist, and the power of art itself.
I was very interested in a detour Fajimura took during his talk. He had once heard a writer (whose name escapes me) say that if a person would write for two hours every Saturday, in two years (or was it one year?) that person would have a novel. Fajimura follows this discipline. Out of writing for two hours on Saturdays, his book Culture Care emerged.
I write in this blog for anywhere from 30 minutes to two hours each day. The task of reading back through all this writing I've done since 2006 (over 4700 posts) feels daunting, but I have wondered from time to time if any patterns would emerge, if there's anything in all of this writing I've done that could be pulled together into something coherent. Sometimes I think I'm not the one to determine that and sometimes I wonder if a person experienced in editing might see something in all of this. If nothing else, Fajimura got me thinking about kellogg bloggin' in a way I hadn't really thought about it before.
Before I saw the listing for tonight's lecture in the Whitworth events calendar, I'd never heard of Makoto Fajimura. He's an internationally respected and renowned artist, speaker, and writer. If you'd like to read more about him, just go here. You might also be interested in one of his commissions in commemoration of the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible, called The Four Holy Gospels. You can read about the project, here, and see a slide show of five illuminations, starting with the Tears of Christ and then illuminations of the four gospels, starting here.
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