Aah…the joys of wireless and a high-speed Internet connection (something I pray my parents are discovering for themselves!)….

Blogging backyard and live from the “High Surf Warning Tiki Bar” in Phoenix’s East Valley, it’s The Great White Shank. I just wish we had a camera so Tracey could take a picture. Hard to believe this is the first time I’ve blogged from the Tiki Bar. A cup of steaming joe next to me and mercifully protected by the shade of a thatched roof above, I could be blogging from the most remote part of deepest, darkest Micronesia…. well, except for the neighbors’ houses all around me, the whooshing of airliners on approach above, and the swimming pool vaccuum chattering away happily in the background… but you get the picture. I oughta try working from here one of these days.

It is hot this morning - H-O-T hot. Taking my weekly walk about the property, coffee in hand, I couldn’t believe just how searing the sun felt on the skin - and this was only a little after 9 AM. What little breeze there was stirring the leaves of the whatever-the-heck-you-call them trees (one of these days, I ought to find out the names of all the trees and bushes we have on our property) made no difference. There’s a bit of humidity in the air today, but unfortunately it it now looks as if the moisture from what-was-once Hurricane Dolly is going to stay to the east over New Mexico.

For a Saturday morning, it is really quiet around here. You would think with the houses around us in such close proximity - the house on the other side of the wall in front of me is no more than 80 feet away, and I can see the roofs of eight houses from my Tiki Bar perch - you’d think you’d hear something, anything to make you think you’re not the only human left in this subdivision, but there’s nothing. I’ve always said summer in the Valley of the Sun is just like the dead of winter back home in New England, and it’s true. Only loons go outside in this heat, only stupid loons go outside to blog.

The neighbors next to us who had their house up for sale either took their house of the market or sold it within two weeks’ time. I doubt it’s the latter, but you never know. What’s strange about them (and everyone who lives on our street, for that matter) is that you never see them, just signs of people activity from time to time. Take this week for example: next week is bulk trash week, so two days ago there was some broken white-painted shelving left on my neighbor’s curb. Yesterday, there was an old desk lying atop the shelving. This morning I see some more junk on top of the desk on top of the shelving. Tomorrow I have no doubt this faux monument to human refuse will be further adorned with additional contributions representing the broken, discarded, and unwanted.

This is time of year where the flora and fauna is making its greatest statement on the beauty of Southwestern desert landscape. Our Texas Sage is out big-time this week - their delicate purple and white flowers are covered with bees of all kinds. Most of them are kinda tiny and brown, but every once in a while this gigantic black bee only a tad smaller than a Hummer H2 sounding like a flying lawnmower comes noisily by. He’s big. He’s bad. But he seems to care little about the human presence nearby. Our lantana bushes are bright yellow and orange, but for some reason they never attract bees. There’s also this orange leafy kind of thing that just only a few weeks ago was tiny and scrawny - now it’s gotten four feet tall and so thick that you can no longer see the phony pink flamingos under the real palm trees.

I’ve only been out here for around twenty minutes, and that plane on approach above me is like the twelfth one thus far. And a helicoper just went overhead, followed by a prop plane. The skies are busy thus morning. …and here comes another plane. Aah the joys of living under a Sky Harbor Airport flight path!

I can’t watch the Red Sox when they play the Yankees - it’s just too frustrating for me, especially when the Sox lose like they did last night. But I will say this - that called third strike on Mike Lowell in the 9th inning last night was the worst strike call I have ever seen made by an umpire; whoever that was should really be called on the carpet for that. And J.D. Drew keeping the bat on his shoulder while the Fruitbat poured strike after strike across the plate really got me to swearing. (I had to include a confession of sin to my morning players because of this, but the blame should go squarely on J.D.’s shoulders - just where his bat probably still sits this morning.)

…And everyone knows Manny Ramirez sat out last night’s game not because of his knees but to make a statement to management over his contract. To me this was the last straw - I’m sick of Manny’s act and I can only hope Sox management feels the same. It’s no coincidence that Manny chose this latest aggravation just days before the July 31 trading deadline. I don’t see how the Sox can move him with that contract, but they ought to at least suspend and fine him. There’s simply no excuse him sitting out the biggest game of the year.

Well, I’m off to take a quick warm dip in the pool before errands. Today it’s 1) stop by the pool supply place to have my water checked and hear for the nth time that the pool needs chlorine; 2) a stop by Omaha Steaks to re-stock our freezer; and 3) a trip to Hi’s Silk Flowers to price some phony palms to replace the real flowers I planted in our patio pots back in May but get either too much sun and heat in the afternoon or not enough sun in the morning to thrive. Later on it’ll be Mass and, after supper, perhaps a dip or two in the pool once the day “cools” off. Perhaps by then we might see a thunderstorm - that would be nice.

Today is the Feast of the Parents of the Virgin Mary. Hard to believe July is just about over with - the year is flying by incredibly fast. Where does the time go?

The best thing about having a pool in your backyard with 8 ft. walls all around is the wonderful freedom of going swimming at night (or at any other time, for that matter) without having to wear a bathing suit. Like tonight, for instance - the outside temperature even at 10 PM is still 100 degrees, the sky above is cloud-filled, the water temperature is 94 degrees, and everything is bathed in shadows of gray and brown. There’s a slight breeze from the southeast rustling the palms; tonight they’re the only sound. Well, except for our wind chimes a-tinklein’. Kinda strange that everyone’s A/C units aren’t humming away, but I figure that’s because the clouds came in late this afternoon to temper the blistering July heat. Nevertheless, strange to walk out on the patio at this hour and still feel the heat of the surface on your feet.

A side note: this past wekend the Goodboys played in some of the most oppressive conditions I’ve ever played golf in, but as humid as it was, to me it still didn’t compare to the sheer blazing heat you get in Arizona this time of year. People can talk about “dry heat” all they want, but until you walk out in 107-degree heat in a mid-afternoon with the sun beating down upon your skin you just can’t appreciate what raw desert heat feels like.

But I digress.

So here I am, lollying around in the pool and it’s truly amazing just how quiet the surrounding are. In this subdivision, you can sit on the patio and see at least eight houses; nevertheless, I’m still amazed at just how quiet the nights are around here. I can’t speak for the houses out our back, but I do know that the houses on our sides and front are all occupied, so I doubt it’s like some of the towns to our south and east where builders built entire subdivisions that are now empty except for one or two families that have decided to gut out the housing slump.

But I digress. Again.

Thoughts flit in and out of my mind while I’m floating. Tonight I’m thinking all sorts of crazy things - like how Olivia Newton-John had to have been a huge George Harrison “All Things Must Pass” fan, since she recorded the songs “What Is Life” and If Not For You” (the latter her first big hit) from that album. She gives both a good try, but I have to say, it’s hard to listen to Olivia’s renditions next to George’s originals - quite a difference in substance there, if you know what I mean. Course, she was a heckuva lot easier on the eyes than George ever was…

I’m also thinking about the Goodboys this past weekend encouraging me to upgrade my current decades-old CD player with a MP3 player. Like they were saying, why limit myself to five or six surf music CDs when I can have literally a thousand surf tunes to shuffle through on an weekend day? But then I start looking at all the software available to help people organize their MP3 collection and I start getting the heebie-geebies. I don’t know…. I’m really not a techno-junkie.

Back to “All Things Must Pass” for a second - I remember this post from way back when I first started this weblog. Considering I wrote this before my spritual re-awakening of the past year, all I can say is the Holy Spirit had to have been planting seeds I simply could not foresee at that time working the harvest with. But that’s why they say that, no matter how hopeless and daunting things might seem, with God all things are possible. When I wrote that post, I was absolute choked by the darkness surrounding me. I remember it, and believe me - it was real. And something I’d rather not experience again. God be praised.

We paid off another credit card today. Five down, four to go. Talk about painful! But like Dave Ramsey says, it takes twice as long to get out of the debt you put yourself into.

The rabbits are also on my mind tonight, those buggers. Our baby rabbit Peanut is, frankly, a bitch. Not in a bad way (well, at least not totally), but in a mischievous way, for sure. The other day she got loose and wrangled her way inside our couch - from underneath! That’s right, she somehow ripped the cloth under the couch and hopped up inside. Took us an hour to figure out where she had hidden herself. Rabbits sure like out of the way places - but that’s what you have to expect with prey animals. You gotta laugh…

The clouds are moving kinda fast tonight from the southeast to northwest. Word is, there’s a chance we get some moisture from the remnants of what was once Hurricane Dolly this weekend. That would be cool. Anytime you can get rain this time of year out here, that’s a good thing.

A shout out to my friends Jerome and Paul tonight - for some reason you’re on my mind.

…So there I was, nursing a Sam Adams at the Chili’s at the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport, waiting for my flight to Phoenix. It was only mid-morning, but I had been up since 3 AM so I could catch my 6 AM flight out of Boston so it felt like past noon - it’s five o’ clock somewhere, right? Even though the bar was noisy, filled with a bunch of corporate big-wigs excitedly anticipating some Vegas convention they were all heading to, my thoughts were focused on the past week and my visit back east - a rather hectic one filled with hurrying and scurrying around, chasing after wireless connectivity for my parents’ PC in their new apartment and my own stray golf balls on the Cape. Neither of which, upon reflection, I seemed to have performed with a fair amount of charity and good humor.

What bothered me was the fact that, having committing myself to a return to a more disciplined prayer life, I couldn’t remain spiritually focused when not doing spiritual things. Or, at least turning what might have appeared (at least on the surface) to be non-spiritual things into spiritual things for the glory of God. After all, what good is a spiritual life if it is lived under a bushel basket, and not on a lamp post for others to see? It’s easy to be quiet and contemplative in one’s daily offices, quite another when one is out there in the crazy world we live in these days.

And when I got right down to it, what I realized was bothering me was my own inner frustration at attempting to live a life completely out of balance between the spiritual, social, and professional lives I was somehow trying to reconcile between themselves - working 12 hour days, trying to leave time for Tracey and the rabbits, my blogging, a bit of Red Sox or the Fox Business Channel, and, on the weekends, working in church, housework, some surf music listening, and various errands. All the while trying to turn each of these into some kind of Brother Lawrence / practicing the prayer of God kind of thing. And my frustration at the vast difference between where I long to be, and how I long to live spiritually, and where I actually am. Were I more mature spiritually this kind of thing wouldn’t manifest itself in frustration, but rather a kind of inner joy. But I’m not, so I guess it does. Frustration within leads to frustration without.

I was thinking about these things while flipping through Henri Nouwen’s wonderful book “The Road To Daybreak”, his journal of a year’s time spent between leaving a faculty position at Harvard Divinity School and taking a position as a priest-in-residence at Daybreak, a L’Arche community for mentally handicapped people in Toronto, when I came upon a particular entry in his diary. And I realized this was not just one of many poignant and deeply personal entries contained in that book, but a mirror image of myself staring back at me. Contemplating the Gospel lesson of that day, Nouwen had written:

“…The rich young man loved Jesus but couldn’t give up his wealth to follow him. Nicodemus admired Jesus but was afraid to lose the respect of his own colleagues. I am becoming more and more aware of the importance of looking at these fearful sympathizers because that is the group I find myself mostly gravitating toward.

I love Jesus but want to hold on to my own friends even when they do not lead me closer to Jesus. I love Jesus but want to hold on to my own independence even when that independence brings me no real freedom. I love Jesus but do not want to lose the respect of my professional colleagues, even though I know that their respect does not make me grow spiritually. I love Jesus but do not want to give up my writing plans, travel plans, and speaking plans, even when those plans are often more to my glory than to the glory of God.

So I am like Nicodemus, who came by night, said safe things about Jesus to his colleagues, and expressed his guilt by bringing to the grave more myrrh and aloes than needed or required.” — The Road To Daybreak, pp. 147-8

“So I am like Nicodemus…”. Boy, not only did Nouwen have himself pegged at that point in his life, but at me in mine. Heck, I could have written virtually the same damned thing. Nouwen was writing out of the frustration that arises from the tension existing between God calling you to a specific place (figuratively speaking) in your life, and your resistance to that calling. Perhaps in my case there’s a little bit of self-preservation going on there - after all, I once thought God was calling me to the priesthood but I didn’t handle that calling very well. And now, not knowing exactly what that particular calling might be, I want God to show me His cards before I’m willing to lay down my own. But that’s not the way the way of the Cross works, and certainly not the way God reveals Himself to undisciplined, impatient, and spiritually immature clowns like me.

So this is yet another challenge, another self-awareness kind of test God is laying before my feet. Another fork in the road where I am being asked to choose a direction - one that involves greater faith and trust in God, or one that doesn’t. The stakes couldn’t be higher. As Nouwen asked in closing out his entry that day:

“Can I stay a Pharisee and follow Jesus too? Doesn’t that condemn me to bringing costly spices to the grave when it is too late?”