Place

A sense of "place" is very important to me. Places can be magical, as anybody who's ever roamed the Baylor campus knows. Many cities have that special sense of place that makes them tourist destinations- San Francisco, or New York, or Savannah, George, for example. Dallas- not so much. Until now, I hope.

Dallas has jumped right up there on the hot architecture list with the opening last week of the Dallas Performing Arts Center. The highlight of the new space are two buildings.

The Wyly Theater

The Winspear Opera House

Inside view of The Winspear:

And, literally, on top of it all, the city is building a 5-acre park on top of the Woodall Rogers highway running through downtown. Can you believe that?!

It's like our own little Central Park, on top of a highway! Sic em, Dallas!

It will have a dog park,

recreation fields,

a restaurant,

botanical gardens,

chess games,

and more!

The Park website says "The Park will serve as a central gathering space for Dallas and its visitors to enjoy in the heart of the city. The 5.2 acre deck park will create an urban green space over the existing Woodall Rodgers Freeway between Pearl and St. Paul streets in downtown Dallas. Plans include a performance pavillion, restaurant, jogging trails, a dog park, a children's playground, a water sculpture, an area for games and much more.

Connectivity is central to The Park's pupose. The Park will promote increased pedestrian, trolley and bicycle use between Uptown, Downtown, and the Arts District, contributing to a more walkable city center.

The Park will create a front lawn for the surroundign cultural offerings including the Dallas Center for Performing Arts, Dallas Museum of Art, the Meyerson Symphony Hall, the Nasher Sculpture Center, the Crow Collection of Asian Art, Booker T. Washington High School for the Visual and Performing Arts and the future Museum of Nature and Science. Construction will begin in October 2009. The base park is expected to be complete in late 2011 with amenities expected to be complete in 2012.

You can learn more about the very famous design team, park features (can't wait for the reading room, The Groves, or the Icon Fountain!), timeline and more at http://www.theparkdallas.org/.

In addition to my beloved hometown, there's a second place far away that's capturing my heart today.

Kenya.

My dear Satpack is there right now, loving people right and left.

Guess which one is little Satty:)

How often would I go to church if my church had no chairs? or air conditioning?

See the blend of old and new. See the difference a well makes.

Well done, little Sarah, and her companion Wade!

What a beautiful woman, what a beautiful ring.

Love "Lay Em Down" by Needtobreathe

Love "Marianne" by Matt Wertz.
And my FAVORITE NEW SONG-
From David Crowder Band's new release...

Geez Louise

I stumbled upon a really interesting online magazine called Geez several months ago. In their latest issue, an article called "The War on Cancer" has got me thinking.

The article begins with this:

"Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place."

When I first read these opening words in Illness as Metaphor by Susan Sontag, I thought them interesting, but not personally relevant. Now, over 30 years later, having been diagnosed with and treated for breast cancer, I read them as one whose passport is stamped as a reluctant traveler into “the kingdom of the sick.”

Then, later in the article:

The only way we in the West seem capable of coping with things we fear, whether cancer, drugs, or terror, is to declare war on them. Making war still seems to be the way we choose to muster, or manipulate, large numbers of people in a common cause. So in 1971, President Nixon declared the "War on Cancer."

The war metaphor has served the cancer industry at the expense of prevention.

In her book "The Secret History of the War on Cancer", Devra Davis says the "proof that how and where we live and work affects whether we may get cancer has been ignored." She says cancer reserach is controlled by members of "astonishing alliances between naive or far too clever academics and folks with major economic interests in selling potentially cancerous materials."

Along the same lines, the article discusses chemical conglomerate AstraZeneca. AstraZeneca makes Tamoxifen, the number-one selling breast cancer drug, but they also make Acetochlor, a herbicide that has been classified by the Environmenal Protection Agency as causing cancer.

(Dear AstraZeneca employees who are now reading due to this blog entry setting off a Google Alert in your marketing department: That is pretty damning. You cannot put a pink-ribbon gloss on dousing our environment in carcinogens.)

The article ends with this powerful thought:

We need more of what the Poet Laureate Audre Lord envisioned - the halls of power reverberating with the demands of thousands of one-breasted women and those who love them demanding that cancer-causing chemicals be outlawed. After all, I can only be healthy if I live in a community in which the air, water, and food is free of poison for everyone.

I wish I was a Yes Man!

Please, for heaven's sake, Please, go read about the Yes Men. I think they are hysterical, and I completely support this kind of truth-telling, using humor to bring attention to really evil things occuring right here. They have a movie currently screening across the country (including Sundance!) called "The Yes Men Fix the World". I wish so badly there was a screening in Dallas! Check the website to see if a screening will take place near you- they're having dozens of them. At the end of each screening, the audience goes and does something crazy. Last week a screening audience in New York went to a Chase Bank around the corner and 'decorated' on the sidewalk outside- except using coal, not chalk. They did this to draw attention to the terribly damaging and unhealthy "mountaintop removal" coal mining practices that Chase is financing in rural American. Truly- go read about the hijinks!

Happy fall, friends.

Craigslist, Smallworld

The craziest thing happened last night.

50 million people in the US alone use Craigslist.

There are 6.3 million people living in the Dallas/Fort Worth metroplex.

I posted an ad to sell a nightstand.

A lady called and asked to come buy it. She sounded nice.

I opened the front door........ and I said

"Wait, I know you!"

I knew her! She was several years ahead of me in the youth group of the church where I grew up.

Because she was probably five years above me, we weren't close. But. I will always remember one night. We had a weekly youth event, and she was going to be the speaker.

She got up and bravely, courageously told the whole youth group that she had had an eating disorder.

She talked about how it started, and the messages that were inside her, and the feelings she had felt. She talked about what she had done, the practices, the habits. She talked about her recovery, and how it's kind of a lifelong thing, not like the flu that you "get over" all at once.

I didn't even remember her name when I saw her face, or where she went to high school, or college, and I have no idea what she's doing in life today (other than collecting Swedish furniture with her boyfriend), but the courage of that testimony and the power of its honesty have stayed with me.

My husband wasn't home yet when she came to get the nightstand (which is scary- I won't do that again), but when I told him who had come, the first words out of his mouth were remembering her testimony also (we grew up in the same youth group).

This in no way diminishes the rest of her full life, it just speaks to the incredible power of personal testimony, and the lasting results when one is brave enough to get real and honest with her peers.

I love Wordle!

The Hole in Our Gospel

Defend the cause of the weak and fatherless;
maintain the rights of the poor and oppressed.
Rescue the weak and needy;
deliver them from the hand of the wicked.
-Psalm 82

He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.
-Jim Elliot

Those who cling to worthless idols forfeit the grace that could be theirs.
-Jonah 2:8

I am a little pencil in the hand of a writing God who is sending a love letter to the world.
-Mother Teresa

Tragically, in the industrialized world there is a terrible absence of understanding or concern about those who are enduring lives of despair and hoplessness.We have not yet made the commitment to share with others an appreciable part of our excessive wealth. This is a potentially rewarding burden that we should all be willing to assume.
-President Carter

I'm reading The Hole in Our Gospel. It is destroying me.

Things I've Learned:

1. Only 4% of American charitable giving goes to international causes.

2. 26,500 chidren die every day of preventable causes related to their poverty. That is like 100 jetliners crashing today. And again tomorrow. And again the next day.

3. A journalist named Susan Moeller coined the term "compassion fatigue" to describe what we have these days- I think its a brilliant term.

4. The average income in America is $38,611 per person, or $105 per day. 40% of the world population (that's 2.6 billion people) live on less than $2 per day.

5. The wealthiest 7 people on earth control more wealth than the combined DGP of the 41 most heavily indebted nations.

6. The top 20% of the world's people consuume 86% of the world's goods.

7. The poorest 40% of the world's people receive only 5% of the world's income.

8. In 1820, the gap between the richest and poorest countries was about four to one.
In 1913, the gap was about eleven to one.
In 1950, the gap was about thirty-five to one.
In 2002, it was seventy-five to one.

What do we do with that information?
What do you do? What do I do?

October

Happy fall, friends.

What did my husband and I do on this fine chilly fall evening?

1. Wear fleece.
2. Eat popcicles.
3. Read blogs/news, get disturbed about state of world.
4. Snuggle.
5. Talk to friends.
6. Read Hole in Our Gospel.
7. Dream about our future.

Goodness is a process of becoming, not of being.

What we do over and over again is what we become in the end.

- Joan Chittister, author, lecturer, and member of the Benedictine Sisters of Erie

"...every time you make a choice you are turning the central part of you, the part of you that chooses, into something a little different from what it was before. And taking your life as a whole, with all your innumerable choices, all your life long you are slowly turning this central thing either into a heavenly creature or into a hellish creature: either into a creature that is in harmony with God, and with other creatures, and with itself , or else into one that is in a state of war and hatred with God, and with its fellow creatures, and with itself."

- C.S. Lewis

In TheHills-ese: is Lon the new Dom? Shut up.

SHOCKING BREAKING NEWS: CNN reports that a new study ranks money as the number one cause of stress in families around the world. Dear scientists, I think I could have saved you a bunch of money and told you that already.

Ok, I read a really good review of the H1N1 flu shot situation and I'm forwarding it to my approximately 2308757 pregnant friends and baby daddies.

Are paper business cards going the way of the dodo? Investigate further here to learn the hot new ways to go digi (and green!) with your contact info.

And finally.

The blogosphere is buzzing about the debut of LonnyMag. "They" are saying.....

(lean in, cover mouth, speak in whisper)

***that LonnyMag may be the new Domino*****

(resume normal position).

Dare I even dream!!!!! Be still, my beating heart!

I am particularly fond of their feature on Ivy style.