Where Eagles Soar

White people. We're a funny and strange tribe. It sounds bizarre to many people when you say "tribe" and refer to caucasian white people. We forgot our past and that it was tribal! When you are the ethnic majority in the society you grow up in you tend to develop the view that you are normal, and others (visible minorities) are "strange" or "different" or outside the norm. It's called ethnocentrism. It's more than likely part of the human condition regardless of what race or ethnicity someone is. Everyone has it. It is to assume that one's own customs and ethnicity are the "centre" of reality and the norms against which all others are measured.

The history of caucasian white people is very much tribal! A simple and quick stroll through the inerrant wisdom of Wikipedia (or a more detailed analysis of respected historians) will reveal that caucasians are very much the tribal Barbarians that wreaked significant havoc throughout Western Europe during antiquity. This was, of course, through the lens and the view of the civilized ruling Greek and Roman majority. But it is true. White Northern Germanic tribes in one form or another came swooping through much of Europe with strange customs and a thirst for conflict and conquest. Completely tribal and, incidentally, the reason for the coining of the word "barbarian".

Today for many reasons we are uncomfortable talking about ethnicity and race. The reasons for this are good, but sometimes the outcomes are not so good. Sometimes it's just the right thing to pay attention to the proverbial "elephant in the living room". We're all from one tribe or another and we all have customs that are strange to others. And we DO look different. The history of racial slurs, racism, slavery and oppression now in the light of political correctness and a properly formed conscience has taken our comfort level away in talking about these things. And certainly laughing about some of the cultural differences that are humorous makes us uncomfortable. But if we're really honest, sometimes these things are funny and celebrating our cultural differences is not always a bad thing. What I have noticed about those of us who are of white European descent is that we tend to mistakenly assume ourselves to be kind of neutral when it comes to interaction with and around other ethnicities. We act a little antiseptic about it. Almost as if there is an assumption that other ethnicities and groups who are still closer to their tribal backgrounds are for us like study experiments in school. We try and be very appropriate about it, but we tend to believe that matters of ethnicity, tribalism, and ancient traditional customs belong to "other" groups but not to us, and they are matters of study and observation. We forget how strange and tribal we actually are.

Having said that, back to our team in Africa! A team of primarily "white" Canadians in Uganda as you can imagine is going to stand out a little and put race and ethnicity right in the forefront of our awareness. And for the "white people" of the team the African experience turns the tables around. And then comes the fun part; two of our team members who I want to highlight are Gilbert and Velma Eagle Bear. Two First Nations Canadian leaders from the Blackfoot nation and Blood tribe. Add us, the other 11 Caucasians, and then drop the team into rural East Africa to work with African villagers of the Samia tribe (some of whom may not have seen caucasians before), and it will certainly be an eye opening experience. And one loaded with the possibility of boo-boos made and for funny as well as touching experiences happening.

Being a visible minority is a unique experience for those of us who are caucasian. We stood out like sore thumbs. We're funny and strange when we try and make no big deal out of it. The word used commonly for us in East Africa is a Swahili word used for white people, "Mzungu". You hear it everywhere. The children call it out everytime we go near them. It made us wonder what was going through their minds when they see us. Do we look strange? Do they think we are dangerous? Do we seem primitive? Do our mannerisms offend or frighten them? What are their perceptions (being the majority) of us as the minority? One of the obvious things (and difficult things) is that Africans with some knowledge of "whites" have grown accustomed to the mzungu as one having money, and lots of it. Stories about our countries in the west have built the impression that we have money trees in our yards and loads of it to spare, as well as the need to give away without thought or reason. It does not take that long for a white person to begin to feel what it might be like for a visible minority back home to feel stereotyped and one dimensional. This is why international development work like this (we believe) must be relational and long term. It is so we know and love each other as family and not as images of stereotypical "white people" or "black people" or "native people". At some point in a relationship like this (familial) we need to be ready for the heart to heart talking and the sharing of customs, differences as well as what happens to us when the other party says or does certain things that bother us. And that needs to go both ways if it a relationship of equals. Mzungu's who go to Uganda for the first time usually buy the T-shirt that says "Mzungu". By the end of their trip they want to buy the one that says "my name is not Mzungu".

One day we went to Luzira Prison in Kampala. Our bus stopped at the checkpoint gate of the Prison hill to register with the officers. Douglas had arranged our permission to enter the prison with the authorities previously, and so our entry was not difficult. At the checkpoint he got out of the bus with the permission letter and explained to the guard who we were and how many. We overheard him say that there were 13 "whites" with him and the other Ugandans. We laughed and although it did not offend us, it certainly makes one think about how terms are used. I wondered "should that offend me?" "...am I not offended because it may just be a language difference?" "...am I not offended because I am used to being in the majority and above offense?" "...would I say 13 'blacks' if the shoe was on the other foot back home?" No, back home we are not even supposed to say the ethnicity of even the perpetrator of a crime if it is not essential to catching them. Instead we say something like, "some rude guy got in my face!" we don't say "some black guy shoved me at the Dave Matthews concert!" If a crowd of young urban men gathered at a convenience store makes us think again about stopping, we simply say something like "ya, thought twice about stopping but didn't ...too many boys in baggy pants standing around".

Inside the door of Luzira Prison is the Admit area where the administration is and where we wait to be searched for entry. On the wall was pinned a poster that warned about the dangers of drinking alcohol which is frowned upon in Uganda more than here at home. I don't remember the words but I'll never forget the picture. It showed 2 or 3 respectable and well dressed Africans walking through a park. On the park bench sprawled out with his head hanging over the edge was a passed out drunk. And the drunk was a white guy! Rhonda and I laughed like mad and wondered what their perception of white people is.

On top of these interesting things is the fun part of introducing Gilbert and Velma! How do I do that?! All the history and nuance of the changing 'once appropriate but no longer' terms by which we identify Canadian First Nations people is not possible across the language divide even in English -nevermind through a translator in the Prison or the villages! What would I call them in my introduction? We know the terms back home. Today it is "First Nations" people. It used to be "Aboriginal", preceeding that it was "Native", and many years before that the term was "Indian", going back to the history of Christopher Columbus believing he had reached India when he met the First Nations people of this continent. I felt a little stumped wondering how to introduce them.

In the end it didn't really matter. I knew that the Ugandans would have a fascination with the Blackfoot tribe, and they quickly understood who I meant when they met them. I was more interested in the way the Africans held such a fascination by them. The experience of it was like introducing two ancient friends. Africans and First nations people both have retained tribal customs unique to them. The highlight for me personally was to see Gilbert in action in the Condemned section with 150 men on death row. After our introductions and their comments and their singing, Gilbert was introduced and came and spoke a long prayer and blessing over them in Blackfoot! He told the men that they would not understand and to simply join in with him and pray in their own languages. They did. Their voices rose with his and then he concluded. It was an amazing experience.

On another occasion, we were discussing African customs and we learned about how in African traditional culture a mother-in-law does not sit in the same room as her son-in-law. In fact, it is not appropriate for them to even see each other. To our amazement Gilbert and Velma explained that for Native tribes it was exactly the same thing. It makes one wonder a lot about history and who knew who and when they knew each other or shared these things. There is more evidence for our common human ancestry and history than we know!

One of the Community leaders in our village and in Busia got very excited when I told him that he would meet Gilbert and Velma. He said to me, "is he a real red Indian?" I said, "...ummmmm... ya!" "Years ago that was the name used for them". He explained that in high school he did an exchange near Buffalo and had some classmates who lived on a reservation. He held a fondness and fascination for the culture. When he and some associates stopped by to visit us, they chatted with Gilbert and Velma for hours and had a great time.

Many of us at the Jail here at home have known Gilbert for a long time. I have known him for ten years and worked with him for most of them. He is by all accounts a very special man. I had only met Velma once or twice but getting to know her on the trip was a treat for me and for all of us. She's a tower of quiet strength and it makes sense because Gilbert is a story teller! He has lived a remarkable life and I as well as others never want to take for granted who he is and what he has to offer. He has worked in Corrections on and off for 20 years and is now the elder for the Jail.

I did some digging and found out that Gilbert is 65! You would never believe it! This also means that he remembers all of the painful parts of the past to for those who are Native. He remembers what it was like to need permission from the "Indian Agent" to go off the reservation. He also knows the hard effects of the residential school disaster and the resulting broken spirits in many native people. Velma retired after 38 years as a social worker on the Blood Reserve, and therefore dealt with everything imaginable and difficult. In Africa, the both of them worked just as hard as any of the rest of us and as hard as the young "glowing ones" on the team laying brick under the hot sun. Gilbert has all the benefits of age without ageing! Whether it was zipping through London, Amsterdam, or laying bricks, he is every bit the young man he believes himself to be. And good luck trying to stop Velma from laughing once she really starts... simply not possible! When Tim Kreft discovered either a chicken or goat skull as part of his supper one night and started acting out his tender little puppet show with it, Rhonda and Velma were in tears laughing like naughty kids in class while the rest of us were trying to be serious in our discussions.

Gilbert and Velma have a depth that comes from being what life has made them to be as elders and people of influence on the reserve and in many other circles where they give leadership and wisdom. He has worked for Children's services, Health Canada, served years in politics on the Blood Tribe council, head of the Blood Tribe Police Commission, and as an elder and member of the traditional Horn Society. They have 5 grown children who are successful, grandchildren and even 1 great grandchild! They love to travel and like Hawaii as well as Albuquerque for the Gathering of the Nations annual Pow-Wow.

Gilbert brought several Eagle feathers with him on the trip meant to be given to certain African leaders we would meet. It was a thing of honor for him. The Eagle is a very meaningful and significant symbol to the Blackfoot people and to give one away is very meaningful. It is a thing of special honor to receive one. I thought about the significance of eagles and the significance of what Gilbert and Velma brought to the trip, the team, and to our friends in Uganda. There is a verse in the Jewish scriptures about those who trust in the Creator finding strength and soaring high on wings like eagles. It says that even young men will fall in exhaustion. Others will soar like eagles. To me and to our team members as well as many who know the Eagle Bear's, this is true of them. Not only did they work as hard as the "young men and women" who grew tired, but they brought a spirit that is so central to who they are. They soar. They are always positive. They see life from high above and can then help those who have hit their lowest low. They were a late addition to the team and decided to go only 3 or 4 weeks before we went. Gilbert lost his mom not too long before, and last year his brother Alfonse. Grief and loss has visited the Eagle Bear family over the years as it has so many First Nations families. These losses in life have carved out in Gilbert not a huge hole of emptiness and bitterness, but a big place where he lets people come in and find shade as well as comfort. He has turned his grief into the reasons why he helps people and the wisdom to do it. It made sense for him to celebrate his love for his mom by coming and helping the Africans and sharing himself with them. It was good for him. And it was good for us.

Today (Thursday June 24) he will lead the Project Africa team in a sweat lodge. We are excited. Gilbert loves to share Blackfoot culture with others. What he isn't always aware of in his modesty is how much wisdom he shares by being who he is and by soaring where he soars.

The Shape of a Soul?

We are blind. I hate that about us. I really hate it. And we are getting more blind by the year. Our culture that is. North America. We are blind to the full measure of the width, the depth, the mystery, the awesome magnitude, and the creative drive for life that exists inside every other human being. That is we don't or can't really take in the fullnes of what another human being truly is, and is about, and has to offer. This is because we are a society of masters at type-casting. Cookie-cutting. Boxing. Minimizing. Stereotyping. Reducing. We do this to each other in Canada because we are part of the North American mental disease called forsaking our humanity. 'more for less', 'big box', 'bottom line is the only line', 'what can I get out of you?'. We are becoming more and more inhuman, and as a result, inhumane.

This is how it sounds at the beginning... "that guy is an electrician, or a cop, or a manager, or an idiot, or a bad driver, or a misfit, or a benchwarmer, an inmate, or an alcoholic." Or, "she is a liar, that lady is a banker, or a teacher, a crazy, a hottie, gay, she's just emotional..." and on and on it goes. We refer to people as simply one dimensional. They are only what they do for a living, or what they are the moment we happen to see them and depending on whether the moment is favorable or not towards them, that is how we assign to them what they are and that's it. Nothing more.

It's no surprise that our institutions have us all in their databases as just a number. That's all we are, a means to their end and viewed as useful or not. The banks categorize us in one of only two groups; good for their bottom line or not. The prison system is the same. Could be for murder or it could be for driving without insurance, doesn't matter. Both have a number and are viewed by us as just the same -lowgrade. Inmates do it too. A uniform means copper and all cops are the enemy. One dimensional and that's all. Blockbuster Video has each of us as well tracked as Revenue Canada! Yesterday I learned that I am in the "system" at Spic and Span dry Cleaners! Wow! All I want is the horse shit cleaned off my jacket... I don't need to be known as a name and profile number on the receipt!!! If you want to "know me" why not ask about what things add to my happiness and what things might cause depression in men since sometimes I might come in and "seem a little more off than my last visit"!

Our whole society has perfected the art of stamping everyone else out of one sort of cookie cutter or another. It can only result in a dehumanizing outcome, and I would argue that it has. Uganda demonstrated that for us on this trip. Our Luzira prison visit showed that even though it's a third world country, the relationship between human beings (which is most revealing about us when it is the relationship between keeper and kept) is a lot more human and a lot less one dimensional. Guards and inmates are brothers and sisters there and the guards are trained to take into account each prisoners situation and personality. Wow! There's a concept. Personality. In other words a human being is more than the coat or hat they happen to be wearing and they are more than the one thing they did to result in their imprisonment, and they are more than the classification we have given them. They are more than just a utility, and more than a means to an end.

The cost of our psychological malnourishment induced blindness is that we cannot see the true shape and measure of what another human being has to offer. Organizations that employ us then try and manipulate us into their own one dimemsional pigeon hole by flattening us into just the right shape so that we are "useful". If we do not become that cardboard cutout that has been assigned to us, we are frozen out and discarded. This is obvious in any organization and certainly true in Law Enforcement. Few other organizations are so hard pressed to flatten people's personality as is law enforcement's need to drive the creativity, shape, and personality out of someone before they can fit them into that uniform. Once in, the pressure to remain flat, and dull, and obedient, and shapeless is applied and remains as a constant. There is only one other type of organization that does this more aggresively, inhumanely, and brutally than Law Enforcement, and that is churches and religious organizations. But that's a story for another day, and it is truer than the next breath of air you take in!

All of these realities are a result of what our society has given birth to -shapelessness and formlessness. Imagine North America as a culture of 330 million cardboard cutouts all travelling at warp speed, in different directions, passing each other inconveiently, frustratingly late for the next task or meeting designed to ensure that everybody else remains exactly that way so that we can continue to make money and find ways to speed the whole thing up. And for God sake, don't stop or slow down too much or somebody might notice that we are all made out of cardboard and begin to question if there is more to life, more personality, more flair, more meaning and substance. They might want out of the "Matrix" as it were. And that might throw a wrench into our wonderfully well oiled, profitable, consumer driven, and dehumanizing society.

Well, what does all this have to do with Project Africa 2010 and our trip to build the clinic? Everything. Because 13 cardboard cutouts from Canada were, by virtue of being dropped into a culture that for all of it's brutal history and its current poverty, forced us to slow down enough to make relationships with people in our village and with each other. In rural Africa, time is everywhere. there's nothing else to do. Life is only about scraping together tonights meal and so life is spent in the yard or under the tree doing that together. And without reliance on your neighbors you won't survive. For them survival hinges on relationships and the time it takes to nourish them. For us survival hinges on having fewer and more superficial relationships because they take too much damn time!

That experience gave us a chance to meet them in a deeper way. It also gave us a chance to meet each other in a deeper way. I have thought about that alot during our trip and since. I was fortunate to lead a good team to Uganda. But I had to resist the temptation to view each of them as the cardboard cutout they are back home. Our success relied on giving opportunities to open doors that would let their true nature and true personality shine and find its place in order to let Africa do to them what it has the power to do to a human being. Help them come alive. Help them see. Help them feel the connection with human beings who are totally different than we are and who want to connect with us as Africans do. At the end of the day, or maybe I should say the beginning of the day, we are all Africans. According to the scientistst that's the place of our origins. And so they still have what we have lost -humanity. So I tried to re-think even how I introduced the team members. Back home it was Jon the Cop, Scott the Guard, Michelle the Psychologist, Gilbert the Native Elder, and so on. Impressive list actually. That is when you paste them all together as cutouts on a page. But what about the individual personalities? What about the true human beings each of us are? What is the shape of each soul and the measure of it's magnitude and creativity and it's drive to create and feel life in all the mystery that life is? Thankfully, those answers are far too big for my mind to fully take in. But I want to try.

So I want to profile all the team members on this Blog as well as the Africans who have become family to us (or always were). Jon Blackwood and Jordan Clavelle were fun to watch during the trip. First the culture shock, and then how each began to take Africa in but then reflect it in what they gave back to Africa. The measure of those two souls can be glimpsed in the creativity that their photography reflects. More than Cop and Jail Guard, they had eyes to see something that could reflect the artistry of the human spirit. Watching the Africans meet Jon was fun as well. This huge white guy with all those tattoos might at first be frightening, until they felt his gentleness and his thoughfulness, as well as how much they meant to him. Not just a workhorse at the job site, Jon added so much to the life of the mixed team by his presence that it would be hard to imagine the experience without him. I think Jon is the type of guy who can see. he doesn't just see things, he sees into them. He fights the urge to simply forfeit his humanity and become just a Lawman. He sees someone in a way that most don't and is able to reflect it in his art which is photography.

Jordan is one of those guys where you get more than you pay for. He's quiet, and drinks in the experience very reflectively. Makes sense too since he is a writer as well as photographer and tech wizard. Whenever something edgy was said by a group member, which with jail staff was pretty much always, we could count on Jordan's one word reflection; "wow". Jordan seemed to always operate out of an inner knowing and a sense of wisdom that is larger than he should have given his young age. He flourished there, and Africa seemed to fit him. he was also a huge comfort to us in that he too is a workhorse, and could easily come up with solutions about how to present our project in some kind of tech savy way. Always optimistic, I think he got frustrated only once and that was crowd control which demonstrated his sense of things and the spine he has when it is needed. Certainly he is more than 'jail guard' and gladly he is not cardboard!

Anyway, I'll let the images do the rest of the speaking. Jons' are on the left side throughout this blog entry and Jordans' are all on the right side. Hopefully you get a glimpse of what the Africans got and of what we as a team got as far as the shape of the souls of these two team members. Be ready to throw away your cardboard. In the next entry I will profile other team members and what happened to them in Africa.

Check out Jordan's blog through his
Facebook page, and Jonathan's pics
are accessible at his website listed at the top of my Blog.

Project Africa 2010 Uganda Clinic trip

We made it. Nine months of planning, fundraising, and preparation and the idea had become reality. Our team of 13 staff and friends of the Lethbridge Correctional Centre boarded our British Airways flight from Calgary to London on May 10, 2010 and from London to Entebbe in Uganda. Our humanitarian effort was underway.

Like a child from conception to birth our project needed nine months of hard work, nourishment, and encouragement before it could arrive on the ground in the village of Akobwait, of the sub-county of Buteba, in Busia District in Eastern Uganda.

It worked. We raised over $53,000 including some professional Architects services donated to us by Al Fritz Architecture and his creative designer Matt Koutsky. Concerts, Firewood sales, banquet dinners, silent auctions in generous Lethbridge pubs, and many donors had produced the results we needed to undertake our goal of starting the construction of phase one of a 30 x 60 medical clinic.

Okay, it's time to put the cards on the table. I don't think we really thought we would pull it off. It looked too daunting. That's a lot of money.Other than myself the team leader, and Steve Bateman who had visited Uganda before nobody else had even seen East Africa and had no idea what to expect. On top of that, even if we managed to raise that much money, how could we dare think we could basically be the general contractor of an 1800 sq. ft. medical facility built according to the standards and availability of materials in a third world country?! Aside from a few of us who have some experience in renovations and general building practices, most of our team are freakin JAIL GUARDS only! We are not builders of structures of architectural magnificence. We tell repeat criminals what to do and when on a daily basis and try to keep one step ahead of the dysfunction and manipulation and not usually successfully. When you work in a jail, it does things to your mind that undermines your ability to dream or be an idealist of any kind. We deal in reality and it's usually ugly! Outcomes for Jail staff are usually visible as failure and repeat human misery. It's part of the job. For Police Officer Jonathan Blackwood (a team member) the same is true. Those of us in the Law enforcement profession deal daily and exist in the rather ugly side of life. We don't normally dream up idealistic possibilities of how we can make the world a better place. Sure we had a few of us on the team who could be considered "do-gooders"... myself as the Chaplain, Michelle as the Psychologist, Gilbert and Velma Eagle Bear as a Native elder and social worker, Steve the Pastor, and Nikki the Bible Camp worker. But even we probably nourished our own cynicism and doubts about what we had gotten ourselves into.

I remember the day the last fundraiser put us over the goal line. Lowater (Scott) who had a hand in organizing that fundraiser was like a giddy kid in a candy shop! The whole team was ecstatic, and somewhat stunned by the fact that we had met our fundraising goal. It felt a little like when you are in the middle of a dream that you had won the lottery. We did it. We raised enough money to go! And it was real.

At that point, and keeping true to a bunch of true jail guards, we turned our cynicism not into joy and confidence, but we moved it from fundraising and onto actually building a clinic in Uganda! Nobody said too much, but I can read faces. I can read souls. They betrayed serious doubt that we could build a clinic in a place we had never even seen, and with people who aside from me, we had never even met! I kept telling them that we have good people working with us on the ground, but I might as well have told them that 25 inmates had changed their ways and reformed their character and became saints from sinners. Not bloody likely! And the real risk and fear was that after nine months of selling our idea to donors, we would inevitably fail and look like a bunch of chumps.

To mask our doubts and fears, we did what Jail people do. We laughed a lot as we boarded Jarrod's Hog.... no not a Harley Davidson but a big Hutterite van that generously offered us the aroma of last weeks hogs transported to the auction market. Jarrod offered to drive us to the airport and we were grateful for that -smell or no smell! So we laughed at each other, insulted each other, made wisecracks about each other, argued a little here or there, and thought not too quietly about all our colleagues back at the jail who not so secretly predicted our impending disaster at the hands of rebel guerillas, AK47 toting roadside thugs, horrible flesh eating diseases, Machete wielding crazy bush warriors, HIV infections, military coup's, and general human misery of a scale and in a world that would look like Mel Gibson's post nuclear Road Warrior game of survival. What can I say? Optimism doesn't really abound in our workplace!

Maybe we even silently agreed with that assessment. So our strange sense of Jail staff humor served us well. Lowater and Clavelle kept their word and shaved mohawks and the rest of us just got into the flow of laughing about everything that was amusing, which was pretty much everything. I wondered about Steve the pastor from E-Free, and Nikki, Jason's wife who works at an amazing Bible camp. Would this strange group of people accept them as one of their own. They had to. We had to live and work together closely for 16 days. Nikki had the advantage of being hitched to Jay, but Steve was new to the gang. Jail staff accept you or they don't. It's simple. No phony bologna and plastic smiles and pretense (like you find in church), but it's all or nothing, and you clearly know which one it is! Well for Steve it quickly became apparent that it was all. He matched their humor at every turn and joined in the cutting up from the get go. He was one of us, and one of them! When a jail guard offers an outsider to come for a personal tour of his jail, it's tanamount to slicing open each other's arms and mixing blood to be lifelong blood brothers. It's a sign of full acceptance. And he had his offers.

We hit London after nine hours on a night flight, and from there Jordan led us to downtown where we enjoyed a fun dinner at the famous Sherlock Holmes Pub. Then quickly back to Heathrow for our evening flight to Uganda. By the way, "mind the gap" is now jail vocabulary as we found out you better mind the gap or the London tube will swallow you but not your backpack if you don't get your ass on the train before the doors close. Steve almost found out what half in half out means!

9 more hours and finally, Entebbe airport and arrival. Douglas Mugabe, Raphael Kajjubi, Edgar Mase, and Paul the Kenyan who were our local partners met us with the bus that would be ours for the entire time. Moses and Madson were the drivers. A team of Alberta jail guards and African partners had finally met. Would it work? Would we get along? Could we trust that they would look after us? Would we mind our manners? Would we end up abandoning them and killing each other? Would our group turn into a remake of Lord of the Flies? Could we make it for 16 days without doing the jail guard thing and open our mouths and say something inappropriate and culturally offend them? What was in store? Would this be a success or one big gong show? Like our jail itself, our trip was simple and held no nuanced subtleties. It would be either yes or no. Thumbs up or down. Success or failure, and nothing in between. The chips were piled high on the table, cards ready to be laid down and shotguns loaded just in case it got ugly. This was no polite and polished church group. It's a jail thing. There's no other way to put it. Stay tuned, I will pull aside the curtains and let you see.

Reading things worth being written

So the iPad is on its way. Apple has pulled off another success launch of a tech goodie. Of course Steve Jobs and Apple's real success lies in their incredible ability to plant an inevitable process into the human mind. That process is exactly the time between when they publicly release their latest invention and the point at which after we have realized that life will not go on properly unless we have it that we go out and buy it. Unlike most products that hit the market, Apple has a curious and very powerful way of creating the certainty that we will end up having their stuff. It just makes sense somehow. It's going to happen and the only variable is the length of time between seeing their goodies for the first time and owning them. Take the iPhone. How long was the lag time between it's release and you or me owning one? Probably about the time it took the cell phone companies to figure out how to make it affordable by hooking you for another three year contract. Maybe a year or eighteen months? With Apple it's not a matter of CAN I justify the cost of this or that thing, it's a matter of what point I WILL buy it because it was always justified.

And I don't think it's just clever marketing. Although brilliant in how they time their launches, Apple delivers a good product that is fun to use. I am actually better at communicating in my job with my iphone than I was before with all the crappy cell phones that didn't last, were no fun, hard to text from and hard to hear, and were truly inferior. With Apple I am convinced that human life and evolution will now carry on past December 21, 2012.

So back to the Ipad. Why have one? It's not a phone and we already have our PC's and laptops. It's very simple. Reading. The beauty and pleasure of reading. That's it. At least for me and for now. I am sure once all my 15 month lag time of inevitability is completed I will have thirty three other sound justifications for having an Ipad, but for now it is the sheer power of print. I love to read and this will make it so much easier. Forget all the time it takes to track down books I want to read, ordering them from Chapters, stealing, begging, or borrowing from my friends libraries, or running from the library cops for late fees.... I can access the book I want, perhaps even out of print ones, the article I need, or any literary serving from the web world's buffet... and on demand. Apparently the Ipad will come out with a 10 hour battery too so no need to join the poor mass of sad souls huddling around an airport or hotel lobby electrical outlet looking like they need a World Vision sponsor. If a book was a window to the world then an Ipad will be a thousand windows.

Oh and that reminds me too. My other passion in addition to reading is our beautiful little Project Africa 2010. Sustainable development in a village in rural Uganda that we are beginning. Our team of Correctional staff go in May and will build relationships with our friends in Uganda to bring relief to poverty in a corner of the world that we found in need. It's a long term committment we are making to these beautiful people who help us perhaps even more than we help them. I want to ensure that every desk in the school we build eventually has a computer. No child should be left behind from the information age as a way out of poverty. Perhaps no hut in rural Africa should go without an iPad too! Imagine that! In any out of the way village in Africa you find a child with an iPad in his or her hands looking through that window by reading. Reading about the world he or she will step into as she steps out of the poverty that holds her back. Giving him access into a world of commerce that will open up to him because he has learned about it by reading. Maybe in the LuSamia language, maybe Luganda, English, maybe even Spanish. Reading. letters put together. grammar. punctuation. ideas. concepts. truth conveyed and a mind opened up to the world. Something so powerful we take for granted so much.

I remember being moved so much by the books I began to read when I was younger. The world came to me and opened up. When I read C.S. Lewis for the first time I felt like I had been washed by water from somewhere I've never been like heaven. I was 18 and stayed up all night because I could not put it down. It was his fictional book The Great Divorce. It was as though I could see the universe open up and I could look into what it really looked like and my mind has never forgotten. That is the power of reading. It makes the mind open up and find it's place in the world and it's the most powerful way we learn how we experience living on the planet and how we relate to what is real. For me it was fiction, poetry, the Bible, theology and they stretched my mind open to be able to see that the world was big and God was bigger. Then even the textbooks they made us read; psychology, anthropology, history, all of them opened the world to be explored. For other people it might be commerce, economics, Shakespeare, Spiderman, engine repair, or how to renovate a kitchen. Simple letters put together (26 in our language), but entire worlds open up. Reading is human development with no limits.

We learn things about life pretty much from only two places. Books and then life experience. Some people think that reading and learning from books is not useful and that it's life experiences that truly educate and teach us. That is only partly true. While it is true that life experience puts the needed practical reality to our head knowledge, the knowledge we get from books and reading is the way our life experiences make sense and connect us to something bigger than ourselves. Without reading adults go through lifes experiences and end up in a very small mental room where there is not enough air. One of the challenges of working in a Jail is to see what the negative environment can do to ordinary grown ups year after year if they have no outlet to the world that is so much larger than the four walls of the prison they work in. I see it all the time. Some slowly die and some harden in unjustified opinions. Some get cold, some get bitchy, some get very toxic, and some simply check out. With no windows opened up to the expanding universe and the world of joy, creativity, and satisfaction or even curiosity to learn, and yet are confronted daily by the same old same old worst of the human condition, the outlook gets grim. Others don't fall into this and you can see the difference. They read. They explore. They open their mind to knowledge and experiences that require risk.

In my world I also read blogs of other pastors who have something interesting to say. The beauty of the web is that there is something for everyone. From my field I don't like a lot of what is being written either in books or blogs.. by that I mean the religious or spiritual ones, and especially if they are current best sellers. No offence but its a pet peeve of mine. I have read enough literary masters to want to barf on a lot of what is printed today in the Christian market. Some things seem really worth being written. Many church leaders like reading about the ten ways to grow your church by purpose driven values. I do not and I never will. Shrinking your church through authenticity and transparent spirituality by pastors who can be real is more like the kind of book I would buy or download in the iPad. Or I will read David Hayward on www.nakedpastor.com and read someone who opens my mind because he is honest and very edgy.

Anyways, I better wrap up this entry before I go off on the Left Behind series. And you don't want to hear that. I might say something politically incorrect like that book series is a masterpiece on successful business ventures aimed at stupid American Evangelicals. Perfect case study for a class in Commerce or business 101.

Let me leave you with a sampling of a truly great modern writer Frederick Buechner (pronounced "BEEK-ner"). We all have the same basic components to open the minds of those who participate in that wonderful mystery called reading. 26 letters, some spaces between and some punctuation. That's it. Like Lewis, Buechner is a master.

-------------------------------------------

"If we are to love our neighbors, before doing anything else we must see our neighbors. With our imagination as well as our eyes, that is to say like artists, we must see not just their faces but the life behind and within their faces. Here it is love that is the frame we see them in."
— Frederick Buechner (Whistling in the Dark: A Doubter's Dictionary)

"The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet."
— Frederick Buechner (Wishful Thinking: A Seeker's ABC)

"Compassion is the sometimes fatal capacity for feeling what it is like to live inside somebody else's skin. It's the knowledge that there can never really be any peace and joy for me until there is peace and joy finally for you too. "
— Frederick Buechner

"It’s less the words they say than those they leave unsaid that split old friends apart."
— Frederick Buechner (Godric: A Novel)

"Doubts are the ants in the pants of faith. They keep it awake and moving."
— Frederick Buechner

"I have come to believe that by and large the human family all has the same secrets, which are both very telling and very important to tell. They are telling in the sense that they tell what is perhaps the central paradox of our condition—that what we hunger for perhaps more than anything else is to be known in our full humanness, and yet that is often just what we also fear more than anything else. It is important to tell at least from time to time the secret of who we truly and fully are—even if we tell it only to ourselves—because otherwise we run the risk of losing track of who we truly and fully are and little by little come to accept instead the highly edited version which we put forth in hope that the world will find it more acceptable than the real thing. It is important to tell our secrets too because it makes it easier that way to see where we have been in our lives and where we are going. It also makes it easier for other people to tell us a secret or two of their own, and exchanges like that have a lot to do with what being a family is all about and what being human is all about."
— Frederick Buechner (Telling Secrets)

"The life i touch for good or ill will touch another life, and in turn another, until who knows where the trembling stops or in what far place my touch will be felt."
— Frederick Buechner

"What's prayer? It's shooting shafts into the dark. What mark they strike, if any, who's to say? It's reaching for a hand you cannot touch. The silence is so fathomless that prayers like plummets vanish into the sea. You beg. You whimper. You load God down with empty praise. You tell him sins that he already knows full well. You seek to change his changeless will. Yet Godric prays the way he breathes, for else his heart would wither in his breast. prayer is the wind that fills his sail. Else drift with witless tides. And sometimes, by God's grace, a prayer is heard."
— Frederick Buechner (Godric: A Novel)

"The original, shimmering self gets buried so deep that most of us end up hardly living out of it at all. Instead we live out all the other selves, which we are constantly putting on and taking off like coats and hats against the world’s weather"
— Frederick Buechner (Telling Secrets)

"You never know what may cause them. The sight of the Atlantic Ocean can do it, or a piece of music, or a face you've never seen before. A pair of somebody's old shoes can do it. ... You can never be sure. But of this you can be sure. Whenever you find tears in your eyes, especially unexpected tears, it is well to pay the closest attention. They are not only telling you something about the secret of who you are, but more often than not God is speaking to you through them of the mystery of where you have come from and is summoning you to where, if your soul is to be saved, you should go next." -Frederick Buechner (Beyond Words)

"Martin Luther said once, 'If I were God, I'd kick the world to pieces.' But Martin Luther wasn't God. God is God, and God has never kicked the world to pieces. He keeps re-entering the world. He keeps offering himself to the world by grace, keeps somehow blessing the world, making possible a kind of life which we all, in our deepest being, hunger for." From discussion with reporter Kim Lawton on Religion and Ethics NewsWeekly

Off with the DUST!! Nile Beginnings is back to life!

Welcome to Nile Beginnings!! If you followed along this blog back in the summer of 2008 you will remember it chronicled my trip to Jerusalem and Uganda. Well.... Africa is back on the front burner again. I want to use the blog again to chronicle the ups and downs of a much too ambitious project called PROJECT AFRICA 2010. If you can believe this, we are taking a team of 17 or 18 Correctional and Police officers and staff to Uganda in May 2010 to build a school / clinic on land that has been given to our team together with Sophie Osaya (who owns the land).

Now I suppose you imagine at this point I will extol the virtues of a project like this, sell you the idea by using the rosiest scenarios I can create, and make it sound like this is going to be 'simple as pie'. Well hopefully you will get some of that. But there is another side to this I want to share with you along the way. that is that WE ARE FRICKIN CRAZY TO TRY SOMETHING LIKE THIS!!! ARE YOU KIDDING ME?! 18 typical A-personality Corrections and Police officers spending two intense weeks together building a project after having spent 8 months together raising $70,000?!!! If there is a God, WE NEED HIM NOW. The vision is simple: put aside all opinions of each other, all previous beefs, and come together under the humanitarian banner to help poor kids and poor families in Eastern Uganda together with their partnership. We plan this to be the first of many trips to come where we build this little community of sustainable development and poverty relief.

Anyway, it's going to be hard as hell. That's o.k. We will pull it off. We will learn something along the way, and we will both have an impact there as well as they who we will become family with us will have a (probably bigger) impact on us.

Nile beginnings is my personal blog about such things and other rambling nonsense. I guess nowadays I might as well join the societal cult of feeling that any and all self-absorbed personal observations of life happen to be SO IMPORTANT that it must be published. I have been thinking a lot about life lately, and some big issues of faith, belief and relationships that have been either on my mind or driving me insane. So like the honesty I want to use to share Project Africa 2010 with you, I want to use the same honesty about a number of other (perhaps deeper) things I have been wrestling with. I'm 41, been at my job 10 years and have done well and enjoyed it, but reaching a place of restless unhappiness that I don't quite understand. I sense a new chapter of my life beginning to find paper met by pen. Nile beginnings is about that kind of thing. The Nile is a fascinating River. Longest in the world, it starts in Uganda in a beautiful place called the Source of the Nile (I know... creative name). From there it winds it's powerful reputation and mystique all the way to the Nile Delta in Egypt where it enters the Mediterranean.

Having stood there on the banks where Gandhi had his ashes released into its waters, I like so many feel something meaningful about the Nile river. With all its history, lives that were shaped by it since the time of the Pharaohs, the lives sustained by it, the lives taken by it, and its life giving importance I felt drawn to stand and watch it flow past me. But at every moment, no matter what it's mighty reputation, the Nile has it's beginning point. The place it starts all over again. It too must begin all over again. It's previous importance and accomplishments mean absolutely nothing now. It must begin again, again, and again.

I want that for me too. I want to begin all over again in many areas of my life. I can't jump into the source of the Nile... (I'm terrified of snakes and crocodiles), but what I can do is release myself into the hands of an all powerful and creative God who can write on me the next chapter of my life as He does on a scroll with the ink of his mysterious and unknown love and purpose.

For me to do this I have to rant a little and bring honest cards onto the table. I need to shed the past. This is the most difficult thing for Church people to do! Most of us live a series of emotional lies and half truths when it comes to organized religion. We are not honest about many things we see and experience and so we tend to do the next best thing and that is put on a stronger sales job. I'm so done with that. When you go to Uganda and meet little children and look into their eyes and see hope, joy as well as gut wrenching deep need, it brings you back to what matters most in life. The simple things. love. people. laughter. joy. help. kinship. I remember that passage in the scriptures where it says true religion is to look after the needs of widows and orphans. Pretty simple. As I look around at most organized religion we are doing today in our part of the world I can't help but wonder where all the bullshit came from. Enough already. Strip those filthy shit rags woven by the ego needs of men and women who obsess about controlling outcomes and making themselves feel validated by putting their stamp on the spiritual lives of others. We need a few more new beginnings, we need to flush a few more filthy rags and perhaps flush a few men and women who weave them.

The Nile is mighty because it has it's Beginning. The place it all starts. A new chance. A do-over. a limitless source of being fresh. And it is a powerful source. The mouth of the Nile is massive. It's one of the rivers in the world that runs opposite to many others that start small and end huge. The Nile Starts Huge and ends smaller as it loses most of it's water along the way of passing through dry North Africa. But that is how it sustains so much life.

OOO man...! Sounds like me!! Raising kids, holding down jobs, a ministry, and mostly tending to the needs of others as a pastor, I am spent. I feel much smaller and feel like I am putting out much less than when Istarted. I am looking for a new start, a new beginning, a new chapter, a Nile Beginning. If you're in the same boat as me, then hopefully you find yours too. Maybe we'll find it together. I feel no guarantee that I will. However I do feel certain that without an honest look at the way things are we will just rely on yesterdays accomplishments and bullshit ourselves enough to maintain a semblance of useless organized religion or a bunch of moderately happy lives. Nope. Not for me. Not any more.

miners and manners (originally posted January 2007 on Sacred Heart)

miners and manners (originally posted January 2007 on Sacred Heart)

We men lie to ourselves often. Subtly. These lies are designed to make us believe what is supposed to be true about us. We are Kings.. or at least share in God's royal kingliness. Ususally we don't feel like a king and so we begin to lie the truth to ourselves -if that makes ANY sense! there are sometimes foundational truths that make the lie possible by giving it something firm to sit on. Maybe "lie" is too strong a word to use ... "illusion" might feel a little less severe and allow us to admit we do this.

the illusions we hold (or lies we tell ourselves) usually have something to do with our yearning to do and become something great. think about it for a moment. "I'll be in the NHL one day"... "some day I'll front the biggest rock band ever and change the course of rock and roll"... "I'll go down in history as the greatest PGA golfer"... "I'll save Africa"... "I'm the greatest lover since Casanova"... "I'll be wealthier than ...." "I am a prize-fighter..." and on and on they go.

Men get along really well with each other when they allow themselves to tell those lies in each other's presence. Providing we don't push the lies too far, each guy respects the other guys lies, each guy believes his own, and yet each knows full well that there are many lies alive in the room and everyone is cool with that. it is when having a cold Coors Light packed perfectly in Povey's homemade wooden first aid box as a sacred ritual it keeps me and all the other guys on our Jail hockey team coming out and staying in the dressing room for an hour after every game. Thats when man-manners come out and we all tell lies to each other. It certainly isn't our win-loss record that keeps us coming out!

Sometimes when we as men are busted living smack dab in the middle of our lie (usually by the woman closest to us) we protest and we feel righteously offended that someone (SHE) has the audacity to think we would lie or live in an illusion.... or, hahaha that she is minding NONE of her business! I think there are two reasons for this objection and protest. One is that many of the illusions and lies are not really as big as the one's I mentioned above and are actually not that far from reach -at least in our own minds. The other reason is that the foundational truth the lie sits on is really true and we can stretch the kernel of truth into something that is or could be true about us.

As well, there might be a third reason we object to someone bursting our illusion bubble and I wonder if it has to do with the thing I have noticed about the benefit of having those lies around. They always seem to provide the occasion, discussion, project, or activity that allows men to hang around together without having to say to each other that "we want to hang around together". In other words either we are better off alone -or we are just clumsy and don't know how to hang around each other without some goofy project or activity that brings us together without the focus being on something silly like our emotions or feelings. No offence meant here to anyone, but sometimes the women in our lives just don't get this about us. That's because these are man-manners and they are built into the fabric of our creation as men. YOU DON'T NEED TO TALK A LOT ABOUT MUCH TOGETHER TO RECOGNIZE THE OTHER GUY'S ROYALTY, or his right to stretch the truth about himself. He needs to, we all do.

o.k, here's one of the foundational truths about myself I'll tell you that I can prove and I'll leave it to you to judge what I build on it. I am a registered Free Miner in the Province of British Columbia! I could pull out my Free Miner's certificate and I can go online to claim territory I've staked out in B.C. that I can purchase as MY claim entitling me to rights to the minerals I find in the ground. Once claimed they are mine and nobody else's. My Dad is also a Free Miner like me, as was his Dad before him (my grandpa) and likely his dad too back in England, and so on, but that's not my point. Me and my Dad spend time poking around in the mountains prospecting for gold, hunting for obscure creeks and panning in them when we find them. I got the miner's certificate last year for a trip the two of us made to northern B.C. and the Yukon to prospect. I will renew the certificate each year and each year we plan trips to various creeks, now mostly in Southern B.C. as 36 hours along the Alaska highway (one way) no longer has the same appeal it had the first time. Cool hobby ain't it.

The thing I tell myself now that my foundational truth (I am a Free Miner) is in place is that one day I'm going to find the mother lode. Me! and my dad tells himself the same thing -I know he does. If he says he doesn't he's lying! He believes it more than anyone could. It's the story and the plan we share together, tell ourselves and each other... that one day, after enough panning and poking around we'll look where no one has and find the gold that the good Lord has placed in the earth and has sat waiting for a gazillion years for us to come and put our name on the claim.

Meanwhile, we pour over maps, we bought a good GPS and computer mapping program, we buy rubber boots, we talk to Uncle Hank about his diamond drill and how we'll need to pull it back into the mountains to a promising site, we design the best ways to load the back of Dad's Rhino so the shovels fit, and we argue over how much extra gas we need to pack in a jerry can for the ATV versus room for the chainsaw. Then Dad does his "witching" thing with a rubber hose and gold nugget wrapped onto it either towards a direction in the mountains or even over a map, and we argue over that since I tend to favor praying and asking God where we should look rather than his voodoo shit with a hose and a map. Then, since I've hurt his feelings, he goes and mixes a strong crown royal and disappears for a while. When he comes back (feeling better) we pull out the map again and he tells me how proud he is that I "became a minister" and that perhaps I am right that God will lead us to the gold. that's when we go back to packing the rhino and truck and oh yeah, the shotgun since he's terrified of bears and I can't handle him being twitchy all day when we're back in the mountains. When plans are finalized and everything packed we know we are ready to get going early the next day. For us this is the ritual before the ritual of actually going into the mountains on any of our trips.

I should tell you it wasn't always this way or this good with my dad. They divorced when I was 10 and we had very little actual contact for the next 25 years except for occasional things like graduations, my wedding, and a little more often when our kids came along. Our Yukon trip broke the ice only last year and.... well.... you know, I guess it's complicated between fathers and sons at the best of times never-mind when you are really only getting aquainted and that as grown men! I've never really felt anger towards him, mostly gratitude when I'd see him followed by some sense of sadness when he left again because I still really didn't know him and whenever he'd leave again, it reminded me of the hole in my soul I still had because of him. But this last year thanks to my miracle working little sister Christine, we had occasion to really have some heart to heart talks where we told him we fully forgive him for being missing all those years and are just happy to be able to hang around so much now and perhaps only now we can understand what was in his mind that caused him to feel the need to run. He cried. I told Lisa I don't have a clue what the hell to do next, and she said relax you're both learning only now how to be around each other.

He lived with us for four months this summer which was awesome, weird, awkward, funny, complicating, and felt for me a lot like a railway accident constantly about to happen, yet you want to keep going because you like the ride and hope you can avoid the wreck.

I remember when Carlin was born I was terrified because I had no certainty on how to be a dad. After 15 years of being a father I don't fear that anymore but for the first time this summer I found myself realizing at 38 that I had no fricking clue about how to be a son. in 16 years of ministry I'd done loads of Bible studies, sermons, summer camp devotionals on the father heart of God and I'd read many books on it.... I could say a lot about God as a Father, but I knew absolutely nothing about the son-ship of men. Nor did I have a clue how minute by minute to be a son myself. I guess that's why I felt so awkward during those four months, he felt it too I could tell because he kept his bottle of Crown Royal handy so he could turn to it when he needed to take the edge off his own feelings of inadequacy or uncertainty. We found a rhythm after a while, and sure enough less crown royal was needed. Even amidst the awkwardness, it truly was a good summer and in a real sense the gift of God for both of us to get to really know each other (He's almost 60) for the first time ever.

We each kept our Free miners certificates and maps handy however, and would pull them out now and again when we didn't know what else to say so we'd stir up the conversation about where we would next go panning and how to get there. we made plans about buying a good canvas wall tent so we could really work a claim for days on end and drill a few samples with Uncle Hank's diamond drill. Our current dilemma is how to get a hold of a small track hoe or tractor with a rear hoe bucket in order to dig down to the important three feet of overlay that sits on top of bedrock where most placer (pronounced "PLASS-er) gold is found. Since we go back far enough into the mountains by ATV the hoe is too slow because of it's tracks. But, and this is important, if a guy gets a hold of one of those little Kubota diesel tractors with a rear hoe bucket, then one guy can drive the rhino with the little ATV trailer loaded with our prospectors gear, followed by the other guy driving the tractor. We thought we could put a few jerry cans of diesel fuel in the front bucket of the tractor solving the space problem of where to put tractor fuel. That way Dad and I wouldn't need to argue much and swear at each other over the lost packing space taken up by fuel. We agreed it was a brilliant idea and would set us up to do enough digging to get a good idea on how much placer gold was in a claim and indicate if we should pull the diamond drill there on the next trip to do some drilling. Dad figured he could do the digging since he does it for a living (oilpatch guy) and he is an expert on reclamation which in B.C. is important as you must leave the ground exactly the way you found it after you dig. The other thing is that he insisted I could then man the shotgun since there would certainly be a grizzly bear hiding only thirty feet away waiting for the time to charge. You know, with all the noise we were making with diesel engines, chainsaws, arguing etc. a bear was sure to charge!! These are important discussions you know.... and worth the occasional argument in pursuit of the dream of the mother-lode.

man-manners have their important God-assigned place in the heirarchy of creation. They are the crucial oil that smooths the machinery of men interacting together.... it's true with fathers and sons and its true with men in general. Some people might be tempted to call them lies and illusions or show-offy male competitiveness -comparing who is actually the bigger legend in their own minds. But those people forget how much we need those man-manners. Without them I'm not sure we know how to really interact with each other.

I'm not saying that we don't tell each other the truth... not at all... especially between good friends and certainly amongst Christian men. But I've noticed that I often find it harder having good friendships of any depth with Christian men because somehow the ridiculous and dishonest church circles we were dragged into taught us that to be godly men we should not engage in exaggeration, or unrealistic dreaming, and instead should only speak biblical truth to each other. I have no issue with talking biblical truth (certainly given my profession), but have you ever noticed that Christian men often don't get the chance to talk about some of the real issues going on in our lives because we feel tied to this forced "niceness" that renders us unable to talk for example about the latest stunt by the notorious workplace idiot who everyone knows was only promoted because of his ass-kissing skills and not because of merit or trust given to him by the other guys? Sometimes I find myself more at ease with the non-churchgoing guys who know this and feel free to say it than the church guys like us who were told never to talk like that and consequently never really bond because the necessary glue of real life issues was never brought up. Man-manners is what we do in light of those problems that we encounter in daily life that help us all to still realize our greatness and the fact that we still need to be kings, if only in the eyes of other men who know this secret and respect it since we allow it for them too. Man-manners is what allows us to be kings around other kings without needing to steal each other's kingdoms nor defend our own.

So I am enjoying owning my Free Miners Certificate and that two kings like my Dad and I will spend important time together in search of the mother-lode, and in knowing it is only a matter of time until we find it and become wealthy beyond our wildest dreams, take care of a lot of people, he'll finally find a damsel in distress to rescue (in actuality it will be the reverse) and I'll go on leaping tall cathedrals in a single bound. When he's gone one day I'll be really glad for the time together planning trips, packing atv's, panning creeks, arguing over fuel, and marking up maps because it is the only way a clumsy son knows how to enjoy his clumsy father when both don't know what to do next.

The other thing I'll do is carry on what turns out to be a family thing that goes back many generations and is in the blood and connects the line of kings in this family. My sons will learn it as well. I see it in Dad's face when he's prospecting -he's honoring grandpa and he feels the connection that began when he was taught how to look for gold as a child. It just seems to be this way with men.... our manners are unique with one another and probably it should be that way since it is unique amongst kings.