Salt of the Earth

Fiction:

Clay Walker was a decent man, dependable and without pretention. He was born and raised in hard times crossing the prairie as a youngster with his parents in the late 1880's. They made it to Montana and settled on the edge of the plains in Billings where he grew up. At the age of eighteen, toughened by lean years and hard work, he left home for Missoula.

"Want to work the timber," he said. "I like trees, Ma. I want to go work the timber." She was a woman of fiber and told him he'd be alright. "You'll go far, Clay. You just look up, you here me? You trust God and he'll bless you."

Clay worked the timber out of the little town of Border near Missoula where he learned how to dance on logs. But the money wasn't good there and the men were a bit raw for Clay's liking so he moved on to Thompson Falls where he became a River Pig, one of a rare set of men who rode cut logs to mills down river. River Pigs kept the logs moving, pried the jambs loose or blew them apart if they couldn't pry them. It was a dangerous game; but Clay figured it was "no worse than 'tother."

In the spring of 1907, he and four others worked their way down to Sandpoint on logs and boat through the rapids of Cabinet Gorge into the windy waters of Pend d'Oreille Lake where they boomed the logs to wait for a tug. A few days later they brought them to bay at the Humbird Mill. Hanging around there for a few months he was promoted to Bay Captain. by Mr. John Humbird, owner of one of the most prosperous mills "west side of Minnesota." It was his first job of recognition and importance and he accepted with sincerity.

Humbird said Clay had "leadership quality," which he thought meant he'd be good at leading men in war. So he took his job with serious intent and managed the men beneath him with gentle, but firm command. He'd seen a general of the U.S. Calvary once and remembered how that man was. That's how Clay Walker managed the rough and strong men in his charge: just as his mother had told him was the way to oversee men, "in simple truth and a straight forward manner."

Clay Walker wasn't a fighter, but he wasn't one to cower down either. He was a man of truth and the truth was that if a man in his charge was out to hurt someone that man was out of a job. He was quick in judgement and discerned with a sharp eye. The men who worked for him respected him for that very reason and those who stayed with him, found him loyal and true.

Taming the Shrewd

If you've played Scrabble, the word-game on a game board, you know the result of a good game is a maze of interconnected words. If you've played competitive Scrabble, you know of strategies that can improve your odds of winning. Add further word studies and memory lists of words behind those strategies and you have a better chance of winning in competition. But of course, the same is true for your opponent.

I liken competitive Scrabble to being on the web effectively. We have millions of people and hundreds of thousands of businesses plying waters on the great-blue pixelled ocean. Motives are almost instinctive, certainly primary. Most want recognition. Whether business or person, nearly all are looking to mark their presence on Planet Earth.

That's just like the millions of Scrabble players who play the game without strategy or studied thinking in place. The odds of their success in competition are diminished to almost zero. They become the sand on the beach overwhich the real sailors tread. If they gain recognition at all, they may be nothing more than a footstep in the sand at low tide. They'll wash away in time.

To play competitive Web, you need a model like competitve Scrabble. You are entering a maze, step by step. To become competitive, you first have to start. No entry, no gain; and entry without much knowledge surely spells failure: if nothing worse, in the form of minimized results. So you don't give up there; if you want to sail successfully on the pixelled waters, you have to gain the skills of an advanced sailor: study, application, study, application. This is true for any form of learning.

Get your feet wet. Taste the salt air. Feel the wind. Tack and cut. Use the rudder. Play it safe and return to port; but prepare always to sail the ocean grand, because out there, across the seemingly impassable sea, are new worlds that can bring you rich return on trade.

So I have two metaphors working here to understand what it takes to make it on the web. One is about what it takes to make it in the maze of competitive Scrabble; the other, about learning to sail well-enough to cross an ocean. These two models give clue to my approach to the ever-advancing, always-changing pace of the web and web design.

Do I want recognition? Of course! Do I want to engage in a prosperous trade? I don't want to be an ordinary grain of sand on the beach. I want to sail the sea all the way across successfully and back again. Of course! How about you? If you want what I want, then stick around or come back to my beach once in awhile where I expect you'll see results of applied learning as I go through the failures and mistakes inherently necessary to maximize my understanding and consequent ability to use the web effectively.

A Good Question

It's a good question...for me. I've been playing piano since 1982 when I first had the notion that something musical was happening inside my brain. I wanted to know what it was. I was distraught, divorced, alone and wondering.

A friend had a piano and I was close enough to her to gain permission to play it once in awhile. Tinker might be a better word for those early days. But something was happening inside me. I could hear simple musical melodies inside that were pleasant and soothing for the most part and sometimes lamenting or angry. I found that expressing myself on her piano with no one around was good for me. It gave me a kind of footing to stand on. But I kept it from everyone else.

When I tried to play for someone with whom I wanted to share, I could not. Self-consciousness inhibited me beyond any capability to override it. My music just wouldn't come out the same when effort was in the way. A few months passed by in this manner. I moved from a rural setting into Coeur d'Alene, Idaho and bought an old upright piano for my apartment.

By then I had decided I didn't want to imitate other piano players. Either I would express what I had or I would not. Playing music that belonged to others just wasn't in my spectrum. I admired Stevie Wonder and Ray Charles both at that time because they could really bust loose and neither one, I reasoned, could see sheet music. I wanted to play with the same kind of lively freedom they showed.

One night I put it into practice. I closed my drapes, shut off all lights and went to the piano where I stayed for a long time, feeling the keys and hearing the sounds without being able to see my fingers. I was encouraged by what I discovered that night, so I set up another rule: to play an hour at a session in complete darkness without correcting anything. I did that for several weeks wherein I realized something else. New music began to pop out...sometimes in the simple misapplication of a finger placement. Because I refused to correct myself and start over, I had to feel around and wade through more risk in order to find my way back to where I had been.

The new phrases, born in that manner, were sometimes exceedingly pleasant, brief as they might be in my stumblings. So I placed a tape recorder beneath my feet "to catch the musical butterflies" as they flew in and out of my mistakes.

During the day, I'd listen to the tapes until at night I could repeat some of those "special little guys" at will. I learned new songs that way, new expressions and I learned how to make spontaneous adaptations on the piano.

This was my beginning. I never set out on piano road wanting to be or trying to be a piano player. But I am today. In some circles, especially the more academically trained, I am somewhat of a nemisis or at least an apparent irritant. But in other circles I am a pleasing source of inner music. I am able to tap into some people in ways that more traditional musicians cannot.

What can I say? I never set out to be a piano player. It just happened. But it happened because I started and stayed with it, refusing to adapt to ways others insisted was the only way.

Imagination Crosses The Barriers of Time

I'm not necessarily sure from whence these characters come. They are just inside me.

This man's name, by some ethereal imagining, is Pinkerton. He lived more than a hundred years ago according to my empathic interpretation of him. He's another character in the novel-in-progress, Humbird.

I suppose you could say it's an historical novel, not hysterical mind you, but historical in that I'm drawing from an actual event that took place in I'm guessing roughly 1912 on the shores of Lake Pend d'Oreille in North Idaho where I currently live. The North Idaho pronunciation of the french phrase Pend d'Oreille is ponderay. Some people spell it the latter way nowadays, but I like the old french version. Quite a history here.

The event I refer to was a mill fire that burned down a relatively brand new all-wood (and quite sizeable) cutting barn for the Humbird Lumber Mill. The cutting barn was built out over the waters of the lake on pilings. A train track brought logs to the water on a long pier where they were dumped into Pend d'Oreille Bay for holding before being singled out and ramped up to the saw blades for lumber. Many water-logged timbers still reside in the clay bottom of the lake. And incidentally, these characters are all made from clay taken from the shoreline where the mill existed.

North Idaho had a major rail line passing through Sandpoint (google it on google maps), so the mill was worked partly by transients who travelled the line. This character, Pinkerton, is my imagination of the man who controlled the paychecks for the mill owner, a true Mr. Humbird. Jim Paton, posted earlier is the villain who started the fire, having been, in his mind, swindled from partnership in a Minnesota lumber mill.

Leave it to writers to imagine history. Remember it's a novel; i.e., fiction. So these guys didn't really exist. Or did they? Hummn. Your guess is as good as mine. All I know is that there's real mystery about that fire. There were human bones left behind and period-dated shoes found along the shoreline. Much more. Mystery?

Why do I post them here? Because they are also part of my journalling dialogue about creativity. Scultping and photographing them helps my imagination give them life.

Another Language

Every soul has a song it sings. When you're tuned in to the inner being, you hear it; it moves you. It may be rhythm, beat, melody, harmony; it may be voice, percussion, or some form of instrumentation such as piano as it is for me. It may be orchestral and it may be nothing more than a whistle playing in the background of your mind.

Even then it may express anger, happiness, sweet joy or sorrow.

What is music that it stirs so many into life? One of the better memories I have of piano in performance was playing for my Grandmother Hattie who'd suffered a stroke and lay mute in a rest home nearly 300 miles from where I lived at the time.

One morning I resolved to drive there and play for her. She hadn't spoken a word to anyone in close to a year. I drove the whole distance with a recording of my piano on tape, playing in the car stereo, over and over. I arrived after six hours of driving, went to the management whom I had not called and asked if I could have her wheeled into the reception room where an old upright stood against the wall. They agreed there would be no harm in that.

They brought her to me in her bed, which they positioned next to the piano. Several elderly folk sat in that room, too, all in various states of condition. I started playing to my grandmother, who'd never heard me play before, watching her and she looked at me too for quite a while. I played on and on without sheet music, just thinking on the piano. She fell asleep finally, but I continued anyway. I played out my soul. I played with everything I had in me because it was the only way to communicate the love I had for her.

At one point, while she slept, I was drifting in some rather melancholic thought line when an old woman, who'd been stooped over in her wheel chair apparently asleep, called out, "Help...help...help..." so softly. No one came to her so I stopped for the moment and went to her. I leaned over and said, "I'm here." I put my hand lightly on her back to comfort her and connect. She asked without looking at me, "Are you God?"

"No," I said, "But I am his helper. Are you alright?"

"Oh yes, I'm alright," she said.

I went back to the piano and played again shifting into something more lively. An elderly man took hold of my rhythm and began to sing as if he were dancing, wordless sounds that mimicked the melody. He was caught up in the joy! He stayed there, in that place of rythm and sound for more than two days according to the people who worked there. They hadn't seen him that happy in many months.

When I finished, my Grandmother had awakened again and was looking at me with pleasant eyes. I went to her side to kiss her on the cheek, but before I could she looked up at me and whispered in a voice clearly that I shall never forget, "Thank you for playing the piano for me." It was a soft, raspy whisper, but the words were clear as tiny bells.

To my knowledge that was the only thing she spoke to anyone in more than a year. She died shortly after that. But she gave me in return a lasting, penetrated reason to play piano from the heart. It's been now, fifteen years and I still carry her memory, her look and her words inside. She visits me in that way at those times when I might lose heart.

Lay Down the Burden

I'm fast approaching the legacy years. Seems like yesterday that I was a young man. When I reflect back on the span of time between then and now, I see a lot of things I wish I had done differently. I know this is true for just about everyone who passes over the half-century mark. But the past was lived just as it was, right and wrongly. We can't change it. We're beings bound to the laws of time.

We can lay down the burdens, however. If we're the guilty party, then we can't free ourselves until we've confessed to God himself in honest, deep and penetrating rememberance. He'll see right through our falsehood, our coverings and any pretentions we have about the matter.

My advice for the guilty is hold back nothing. Lay it all out before God or you won't be moving forward. In my own case, this took time, several nights alone on one specific incidence, a lot of nights and searching days on others. But I can stand now, cleansed and renewed, looking forward because I confessed everything to the best of my ability to remember--everything.

If you are a victim of someone's guilt, I'd say to you the same thing. Lay down the burden of unforgiveness and bitterness. Hard to do, huh? It's probably more difficult to do that than it is to ask forgiveness for your own guilt.

I once was confronted with a situation in which I had to forgive someone close to me for what I felt had been a great injustice and a lot of hurt. I had suffered greatly from their outspoken judgement and what I believed was an errant misinterpretation of who I was. When I approached the moment, I had to confess to God that I could not forgive that person on my own. I simply did not have it in my heart to forgive this injury. So I told God that.

Knowing He is the source of all forgiveness and that Christ died for my sins as well as yours, to catch them up in His Resurrection and take them before the Father of all creation from whence forgiveness is handed down--knowing I could not do this on my own, I asked Him to intercede through my heart. I asked God to move through me in spirit and show me how to forgive the one who had injured me, show me how to use His Divine Forgiveness. I was moments away from the actual necessity and only a breath away from one of the greatest personal insights in my life.

God did what I asked. He stepped into my consciousness in a way that showed me that this other person was no more guilty than I...and hadn't the Father, in his Divine love for His Son, forgiven me? Oh, what a revelation! I stepped up to the situation with a glorified awareness. I looked out across the room full of people where my heart was being challenged and silently forgave the one person present who inhibited unknowingly my ability to play piano in performance. By God's Divine intercession, I forgave that person as God had forgiven me: through and by the power of Jesus Christ.

I laid my burden down. to this day, I don't know if the other person ever knew that such a thing had gone on in me, but I know that my relationship to that person changed significantly from that moment on. Not only did I step up and play piano with an exhuberant and joyful heart, I played with a freedom uncommon to me at that time. That incident became one of the greater lessons of my life.

It also healed the relationship I had with that person. I no longer felt the burden of judgement against me. In the turn of my heart, it no longer mattered what that person thought. I was free from caring one way or the other. So I was free to love back instead and regardless of whether my love was accepted or not! A Divine circle of truth and consequence passed through my being and left its permanent track.

Unfinished Matters

Without an adversary, nothing great would get done. What's left unfinished matters very much in that the desire to finish gets it done. That's why having before us, the unattainable, the impossible, the difficult, the very hard, the greater challenge (name it what you will), that's why it matters and that's why we have adversarial confrontation in nearly everything that's important.

The greater the adversary, the greater is the faith required to overcome it. Faith is the realization that you are not alone, that God exists and is with you. The path down which you walk is not chosen by whim, nor is it there by some random coincidence. For greatness to occur, there must be difficulty in front of you and the difficulty is ALWAYS defined by the nature of your desire.

Otherwise you would not grow.

That's what's missing from the 3-part creed entered below in A Map for Change. I had no mention of the adversary inherent in every growth process. When I wrote it, I knew it came from some one's experience outside my own, that it was some one's statement not my own. It was their idea. I thought about it, thought it worthy to write about; but I had a tough time with it because I knew it wasn't quite that simple.

I dreamt during the night and woke with the title above in my head. I knew as the phrase repeated through the fog of half-sleep that I had hold of something important. I woke myself up quickly, shook my head and threw the blanket back. I grabbed a shirt off the rack and pants from the floor. I put my feet in slippers and came to the keyboard quickly to release this butterfly into the pixel garden before it left.

I knew something was inherently right about the notion. All adversarial confrontation signals something. It means you are on the right track. You wouldn't have the adversary there if you weren't taking the specific steps your desire requires. I wouldn't have the abyss in front of me if I wasn't on the Edge of Awakening. The barrier wouldn't seem so impossible if I wasn't right near a true break through. I wouldn't have the pain if healing wasn't underway.

I broke my back once, and my neck fracturing 4 vertebrae and compressed a fifth. The pain from the injury was a lot and constant. I was in and out of consciousness for quite awhile, but I saw some things in that ethereal place of spirit that assured me the pain was good. I could feel my toes. Lying on my side in the hospital bed, I woke to see my hands in front of me which I opened and closed in pain. Pain saturated my whole body. It felt like I had 80 pounds of crushed rock stuck in my back. Pain was everywhere.

But I was alive and could feel my toes. The first words off my lips were, "Thank you, Father, for the pain. Thank you for the pain, O God! I know what it means." I knew it meant I was going to heal, that He had given me back to life for His good reason, that I was alive by Grace alone and would return to full health in due time. I knew right there I would once again play piano and that I would play with greater freedom, write with more fervor, create with greater creativity--because I was not only alive, but aware of how temporal life is as well.

I knew also that I had not yet finished what matters.

The adversary comes with many faces. Most adversarial conditions in reality have the face of something outside yourself. It might be a mountain, a person, a power in place, a circumstance--might be anything. Only you would know. But here is a most important cue: The nature of all adversary resides within the mind of the one challenged by it. The mountain climber faces fear. The abused faces the abuser, but only in fear. The oppressed face the dictator who rules by fear. The weak and un-achieved face impossibility, but only by fearful conclusion.

The opposite of fear is faith. Faith is knowing that God is with you. If you don't know that yet, you had better get down on your knees and confess your wayward ways, because He is greater than you are. He created you. You are the creation. So humble yourself, then look your adversary in the eye and say to it, "Thank you, Father, for the pain that holds me back, for it draws me closer to You."

That's when faith comes into the heart and that which oppresses the potential is laid down before an open path.