Custom printed DVDs

I screenprinted a bunch of blank DVDs today.

I started by designing them in Illustrator on computer:

Then I burned two screens ( two on each design ), and then printed the designs by hand, onto a bunch of DVDs.  Check them out:

It's really satisfying to go through a process all in one day.  I can't wait to burn these discs for people and give them out.

Published!

Great news!  I've been published!  I just took this picture today, too!

"poetry is not a luxury"

over the past few weeks, i've spent some time going through my older writing for a couple sharings of my spiritual journey (for cell and class) when i came across this one. the piece is a reflection on an essay by audre lorde (african-american womanist "poet warrior", as she calls herself), and you can find her work on google books. it was convicting for me to remember "poetry is not a luxury."


Reflection on "Poetry is not a luxury"

In the beginning, in the dark emptiness, the Creator used His voice to break the darkness and give name, life to what was becoming a new creation. With a few simple words, God revealed part of God’s soul with the birthing of the world, for six days whispering “let there be, let there be, let there be” and calling us into shape, knowing both the joy and pain of what was about to be created; with the first poetry, God revealed part of God’s soul as labor pains
formed the light and the skies, the dirt of the earth and the flesh and blood of humans. And then, on the last, God breathed that restful sigh, “Yes.”
* * * *
Throughout Audre Lorde’s piece “Poetry is not a luxury,” Lorde uses her own poetic writing to remind her audience that poetry is not the noble privilege nor protected domain of the Canonized “white fathers”; rather, poetry is the necessary, uncomfortable disclosure of one’s own feelings and dreams, formed into tangible realities through language. Poetry is not structure and metered lines but the soul’s wrestling with what we are doing and who we are
becoming; not an act of composing for the well-trained writer but the act of creating for the soul of the creator; not a luxury but a necessity to live fully. For it is this venture into a human’s deep longings that “forms the quality of light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action.”

Even though I believe the truth of Lorde’s words, I too often forget the “necessity” of poetry and my journal is left behind for sleep at the end of long days, for the act of creation/creating is both tiring and frightening. What will I find when I crawl to the depths? What emotion is waiting for me there? What have I seen today—the silhouette of the homeless man sitting in the rising steam of a manhole; the boarded-up homes and schools that line the streets near
my church; the tired woman on the crowded bus trying to hold three children at once—and where will I find the holy in these places? Where was God’s face revealed to me—and did I turn my head when Jesus’ eyes met mine? Indeed, Lorde is correct—poetry is a “vital necessity of [my] existence” for the act of writing poetry is the revelation of my gut and heart, drawing me to the raw, honest places of my being that I fear. And yet, it is in that unveiled brokenness that
I am created again (renewed in hope?); there, I am breathed forward by the breath of the Creator; there, I am molded into who I am called to become.

From this place, poetry creates “sanctuaries and spawning grounds for the most radical and daring of ideas” that urge me to realize that “becoming.” Indeed, my words reveal who I am—named and beloved—but this is not enough. If I were to travel to these depths of who I am and who God is for the sake of the journey there, then my poetry would be a luxury, a writer’s game. Rather, poetry as necessity is taking pieces of what I have found there, putting together
hopes of what could be, and taking that idea back into the world, however frightening that may be. Perhaps it will only be a few bold words; perhaps it will, over the years, result in more weary work than joy, but the “farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.” Perhaps this work of creating poetry is the most hopeful thing I have, as I humbly imitate my Creator in shaping dreams into words, words into ideas, ideas into actions and return again, at the end of the day, to writing this poetry in my journal by my bed.
* * * *
In the early morning, Miss Mary and I met in the dark church office to pray for the day ahead. Her deep, rough voice rolled with quiet strength through that dark room. In her voice, she carried the words that crafted her life as a black woman living in East Baltimore; in her words, the Spirit rose and fell, groaned with her humming and “dear Jesus.” Her voice created a sanctuary around us, a safe space to cry and petition, to hope for the kingdom and to be a part in its becoming, to be formed in our own becoming. And when she said “amen,” I breathed my “amen” in response and flipped on the lights—we had the world to walk into, now that we had spent time sharing our poetry with one another. The work of the kingdom was ahead.