Last night as we launched our new live event/podcast/broadcast, The Kindling's Muse (TKM, I came as close to childbirth as I guess I ever will.
It was messy. Everyone who was there will agree a baby's first sounds are a little scary and the little critter learns to crawl before it walks. We got off to a late start (10 minutes) and when we played the pre-recorded introduction to the show, we could hear the music but not the rich basso profundo of Ron Turner. We thought it was because of a last minute switch to stereo recording from mono, but a hour later and a lot of buttons pushed and cables checked, we discovered the culprit: a chair tangled with a cord unplugging it from our system! I hear the newborn is as messy as the birthing process! Next come the dirty diapers, spitting up and crying though the night!
It was paced poorly. Mom wants baby now, but delivery can go on forever! I tried to move the conversation too quickly and it kept us from getting very deep with our stellar panel (Bryan Burton, Heather Hawkins, & Gregory Wolfe). Pacing also prohibited us from getting to MOST of the audience questions and comments (We're going to post them with the podcast so everybody can see the kinds of audience reaction we were getting).
TKM has a face only a mother could love. Every baby is beautiful to mom and dad and we were able to see glimmers of beauty in the newborn TKM. We had a great crowd, good venue (Thanks to Mike and Kathleen Hale), the panel was superb, intelligent and engaged. Robert Deeble's music was spot on and Jeff Berryman's reading of the late poet laureate Stanley Kuntz's "The Layers" was inspired.
The kid has potential. When our son was a child I liked to play a little song titled "I am a Promise." It went something like this: "I am promise, I am a possibility I am a promise, with a capital P, I am a great big bundle of potentiality. And if I listen and hear God's voice and if I promise to make the right choice, I can be anything, anything God wants me to be!" And that is how I feel about "The Kindlings Muse." I believe there is a need for intelligent, imaginative, hospitable explorations of ideas that matter in contemporary life, and as Stanley Kunitz said in The Layers:
In my darkest night,
when the moon was covered
and I roamed through wreckage,
a nimbus-clouded voice
directed me:
Live in the layers,
not on the litter.
Though I lack the art to decipher it,
no doubt the next chapter
in my book of transformations
is already written,
I am not done with my changes.
Yours for the pursuit of God in the company of friends, Dick Staub.
