Category: Guest Post

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IPDE

This is a guest post from Chris Thomas. She shares whatever happens to find its way out of her addled brain over at Light Green. Inspired by friends, family, faith and public transportation, you never know what little nugget of wisdom you might step in.

I didn’t get my driver’s license until my mid-20’s. I lived in the city. I just didn’t have the need, or the means, to own a car and all the responsibility that came along with it. So when I did decide to get one, I had to sign up for behind-the-wheel lessons at Sears Driving School, or some such place. This was at a time when my life looked pretty close to a season of “Cops”. My instructor was a guy named Curt, who was probably 10 years older than me. He picked me up everyday for a couple of weeks to go driving. We ended up having lots of interesting conversations, and occasionally ended our sessions having a Coke and fries from the McDonald’s drive-thru. I’m sure it was obvious to him that I was some kind of mess.

Part of my lesson was learning the IPDE system of defensive driving – Identify, Predict, Decide, Execute. It was very funny to us for some reason, I suppose because he was obligated to teach it with some faux authority. After I had successfully passed the driving test, he dropped me off for the last time. Sitting outside my house, he said, “You know, I think the IPDE system might be valuable for you to keep in mind, even when you’re OUT of the car.” And then he added, a little hesitantly, “And, uh, I think you might like to know Jesus at some point, too…you know, just in case.” I laughed uncomfortably, feeling pretty creeped out that my cool new friend had all of a sudden turned on me, and that was that.

Since then, I’ve had many, many adventures on the open road. IPDE pops into my mind quite often and still makes me laugh, now with the knowledge that Jesus has been there all along. It’s a wonderful thing, isn’t it? How our lives weave together, even briefly, for the glory of God.

Photo courtesy of TurboPhoto.

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Being Inside the Box

Inside the boxThis is a guest post by Elizabeth Howard. Read more about her at the end.

Everyone always says: “think outside the box.”

Yet…

When small hands slowly pull the cardboard lid over themselves, inside the box is where I’d like to be.

Inside the box, arms and legs tangle– and what belongs to whom doesn’t matter anymore.

Inside the box, a torrent of laughter twists with begging for turns. This is where Negotiation and Joy make love.

Inside the box, we draw shades of darkness willingly, forgetting our unhappy freckles, our crooked teeth, our tortured skin tones. Darkness makes us same.

Inside the box, we push against boundaries together, exploring the limits of strain nearest breaking point.

Inside the box, physical closeness becomes intimacy: familiarity unmentioned but worn like skin.

Inside the box, the roaring dragon flees across an unchained mind.

So that…

Even when seams break, sides collapse, and bodies explode out, the inside prevails.

The spirit of the box keeps itself on call, for the next bottomless adventure.

At Letters from a Small State and The Least Weird Person I Know, writer Elizabeth Howard examines how we survive and occasionally thrive in America, through the lens of our smallest details. A writer and poet living in Connecticut with her new family, she works daily in her own slivers of creative space and time.

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Obsidious scatter

I’m thankful for this guest post by Johanna Fenton.

“Few things make you feel as helpless as trying to find your glasses, because the very thing you need is the thing you seek.” -James Lileks

I’m a sucker for deep, philosophical statements packaged in the ordinary. And this one helps me dive into a memory that presented itself to me this evening, out of the blue. As I was brushing my teeth, I was remembering the time I slept inside a sleeping bag near the base of a mountain in Oregon. (Sort of out of the blue, yet now I remember my sister wondered aloud the other day what it would be like to see a mountain. There are few–oops, none–in Minnesota.)

It was the first time I had ever woken to view a mountain before me in the bright light of morning. When I opened my eyes and turned my head, it was … glorious and majestic … no, fuzzy.

Imagine if you will: every morning you wake, you fumble for your glasses, and in the mere seconds before you put them on–or contacts in your case – you’re only really looking maybe 10 feet tops in the farthest direction. But a mountain, I mean, come on! There are miles involved! Plus the glare of the morning sun hit every obsidious boulder (made that word up), producing more brain scatter.

Anyway. It’s just a strange experience to recount. On second thought, maybe I didn’t make the word up:

Obsidious, it turns out, isn’t in the free Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary, where you just searched.

However, it is available in our premium Merriam-Webster Unabridged Dictionary. To see that definition in the Unabridged Dictionary, start your FREE trial now.

Would anyone like to look for me? (Thanks.)

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On Connection, Meaningless to Almost Anyone

This is a Guest Post. Elizabeth Howard writes poetry on demand on a Olivetti Lettera 33, and refuses to believe the internet is a gutter for poorly constructed metaphors and overly-bullet-pointedness. If you agree, read more, comment more at her blog, “Letters from a Small State.”

I tweet. Because if I leave the keyboard, I have to subtract myself from the safety of limitless connection.

Blind, ever-pulsating links between me and a perfect unknown.

You know: what Simonpegg or mommywantsvodka are chattering on about at 9:37 p.m. scratches a certain itch. Ahhhhh.

And it deflects. Very nicely. From the complicated love that burrows down. Love that lingers and love that is canyon-width and acid edges, but isn’t all that interesting. Aged and unattainable. Grizzled and drinking beer with its feet on my coffee table.

So, then it’s Us Weekly tweets to soothe the soul — from the constant berating of Not-Us Daily.  Life hiding its regalement in banality. That is to say: rotten-fierce love between two people who are ordinary.

I facebook to imagine myself on the wings of electricity, a fairy of fiberoptics.

I lace my imagined self with curiously tangled and dementedly true details. Meaningless to almost anyone.

To everyone but the most ordinary, steel-toed lover.

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