chrysanthemum pu-er

chrysanthemum is one of those teas that you give as gifts and for delightful gatherings.  pu-er, you have with dim sum or anything chinese, really... or mexican!  it's a heavy-duty tea, which cuts through sour tensions and awkward pauses.  you gotta appreciate the juxtaposition.

one day soon, i'll be so very very overjoyed by how misery has been turned into reproducing blessings.  do you love the christianese or what?  there just doesn't seem to be a better way to state my anticipation.

so shinobu baba is one of my favourite artists.  i found his work in nagasaki last month and just fell in love.  i'm not often smitten with landscapes and i could never never paint one.  yak.  i'm awful.  i do organic stuff, mostly.  however baba's presentation of simple streets and everyday experiences are like that of a child's.  buildings and clouds seem to be made of the same matter and light has substance and a presence as round drops of color. 

but there are almost never any people in his scenes.  well, the 'scapes themselves have enough movement, drama, and whimsy for there not to have any animals in them at all, but sometimes they make me a bit sad.  they're like beautiful masks, hiding... nothing, because there's nothing to hide... because there exists nothing.... nobody.
that made me think of mondo guerra today.  remember him?  the awkwardly brilliant winner of project runway season 8?  i adore him.  from the first episode, i was a fan.  i think it was mostly because i could relate to the particular problem he had during that episode.

all the contestants had already become acquainted with one another and were beginning to form relationships, but mondo hadn't fully connected yet and was off in other rooms many times.  i wanted to go back in time, fly to ny and hug him.  yes, even among weirdo artists, there could be the "weirdo artist."

one thing that plagued me all my life was being "different." 

DING DING DING! cliche number two!  woohoo!  ooooh, this post is gonna be a winner!

yes, i'm one of THOSE.  except that i don't mean it to say that i always dressed in black and wore black lipstick and sat in the corner of my classrooms as a child and cut myself.  (umm... i'm not saying i didn't do those things either)  but i suppose i discovered early in life that the ways in which i was "different" from my peers were so very strange that they were actually intolerable.  no matter how many times or which kind of peers i chose to have, it was the same story.  so my life mission was to be as normal and blended in as possible.

so that's enough of trying to explain something that's too boring to read in one post...

anyway, just as it might surprise folk that there could be outcasts among outcasts, i wonder if it surprises people that there are persecuted people within the Church.  or better yet, i wonder if people in the Church know that they are doing the persecuting.  ooh, fun questions, no?

it's a grand and wonderful ideal to have a family of strangers who comfort and accept, with no expectation of reciprocation.  what a dream to work for such a community.  but i wonder what can be done to prepare for the long-haul, to incorporate the truly lost, and to discover each other's complexities.

these have been issues that i've dealt with and hoped to ask about over many years because in such an idealistic community, it's not easy "blending in" since that would require lots of disguise, which contradicts the aim and method of such a paradigm.  however, though it's never spoken of, to a certain degree, the truly "intolerable" do have to keep most of themselves hidden until the right time in order to protect themselves and to avoid burdening the rest of the group.  it's a truth that nobody will say, but everybody screams, through behavior.

later, mondo, with his raw talent and honest vulnerability, climbed his way into the hearts of the judges and many viewers.  and finally, he became the winner of the entire competition.  but i still wonder... in his quiet moments, during his travels or at home, if he still experiences the distance between his intolerable "difference" and those whom he considers his peers.