balance

Well, this "bi-vocational ministry" of music-making and home-making has been weighted pretty heavily toward the music-making lately, with 3 events this past week, finishing up the first "delivery" of new songs, and a painful learning process about converting recordings to mp3 files (though I now know how to make brand new audio files that sound remarkably like folk records from the 40s...)

So today it was time to focus on the home-making (actually "housekeeping"... OK, laundry, errands, and CLEANING UP...). It was brought to my attention, for instance, that I had 4 different deodorant sticks (tubes? bars?) scattered throughout the bathroom, three of them empty... Do you have any idea how long it takes to go through 3 of those things? Neither do I... I guess it really was time to tidy up. (Not to worry, the vital porcelain fixtures do get cleaned more often than that...)

This "work-life balance" thing is something about which we have been thinking and talking - and occasionally making some fairly major decisions - for quite a few years, it seems. By now you hear about it and read about it all over the place. It seems to me that even this way of framing it - as though "work" and "life" are separate and opposite and competing things - is a significant part of the problem.

That's one of the reasons why I like to use the language of "vocation"...

By the way, listening to Johnny Cash at San Quentin tonight (live recording of the 1969 concert at San Quentin Prison), I couldn't help but think back to the earlier post about "the lost art of lament" ("thanksgiving... and lament"). It seems to me that, for that context, Johnny Cash pretty much nailed it in that concert.

Not sure what the guards thought, though.

Hmmm...