The Other Everything: Recent Episodes
Dave Petty
"The Other Everything" is the podcast version of the journey that nudges us to dream and reminds us that life is more than what our senses can only suggest: there is more to life than what we see, hear, taste, touch and smell!Through a sonic excursion of predictable and unpredictable narrative via "spoken word", prose and song, we travel through the daily and not-so-daily places of culture, thought, emotion and imagination to find what is true and real and impossibly possible. "The Other Everything" podcast is one part of a growing project of the same name. Beginning with a book, found on Amazon, and music at Apple and Spotify (look for albums by Dave Petty). Visit our website: www.theothereverything.com. You will find our growing treasure trove of other writings, sounds, images and links connecting you to the work of creatives and "creativity connoisseurs" like you!
Part 7 of an enhanced audio version of my book, The Other Everything.
•Season 2 coming in the Fall (hopefully)•
Dreaming is important! Daydreaming, envisioning possibilities and impossibilities.
Our capacity to imagine beyond the four walls where we eat, sleep, work and play...
I'm addicted to my senses. I know I'm not alone. The things I see... I just can't get enough of the blue, blue sky and the shiny things made ever shinier as the bright, bright sun shines perpetually on a clear sky day.
"We've got this rhythm. We've got this chance. To be caught in the movement. Of the deeper romance."
Love can look crazy. Love says, "I would do anything for you..." and it actually does... anything.
God's love... being love as He is... recklessly.... extravagantly... spares no expense!
Outcry is another word for Protest.
And protest is a resistance to what is often perceived as the abuse of power.
Protest has taken many forms over human history; designed to turn word and symbol into transformation.
Recognizing that silence has a "golden" quality to it and a "rusted" quality, depending on why silence is present, let's talk about talking... and speak into the silence.
"I know you think you understand me but I'm not so sure that what you think you understand is in fact what I mean."
"Really listening to people, and, by that, I mean listening well to people, is a love thing. I'm not in the business of me if I'm in the business of love."
"The door is not a door. Rather it is the idea of a door."It is a strange reality how ideas and images and imagination and even words are not the things themselves but only represent things. It's the nature of image. Interestingly enough when we consider "likenesses" there is most certainly a correspondence between what is the image and the original from which the image was made.
"When is a door not a door? When it is rolled away." -Steve Turner
Beauty can often stun us. A sunset, the face of some one we love, a daffodil in bloom, a newborn baby... Beauty catches us by surprise and seems to make the day worth all the trouble.
What then is the difference between what is beautiful and what is ugly? Is it up to the beholder to determine? Or is it grounded in something more?
One of my favorite lines in a lyric is:
"Pay attention to the poet. You need him and you know it."
The poet often sees things and says things different from others. And while one might say she gets us into trouble, they can in fact get us out of trouble. I think I like this lyric line because I often have seen that I am ignored or dismissed or side-lined. I have had to learn that, as a poet, my voice is really, really important... regardless of whether anyone hears me, much less understood me.
On this side of everything: Madison Ave says: "consumer".
But on the other side of everything; God says: "more."
Teleology. The study of the end of things. But rather than a time orientation, it leans into where are we headed? It's fair to say, it asks "why are we here?" What is our purpose?
But it's also fair to ask, "what is the last chapter?" Where are we headed? What will the ending be? Of our individual lives, of a society, of the world, as we know it.
Upon making introductions to people and dogs and cats and fields of study and books and places we have never met and never been, we, deep down know that we have, after all, only just met. We know there is more. We just know it.
How profoundly ironic! If you want to stay in the fray with meaningful influence.
Then you've got to get away so you can get back.
Albert Einstein, Stephen Hawking and many other scientists. have their theories about the beginning. It's a bit tied to the "theory of everything". But only the start part.
We'll come back to the theory of everything sometime later in our episodes but for now we'll just start with the start part.
If my expectations are limited by what I cannot presently see, or at times refuse to see, then it may be a time for those expectations to be stretched. My expectations, at their very best, should match what is and what is to be. And if my vision of what is, is self-limited, one wonders whether there might be a place for my self-limitation to be stretched.
There is a gift that we are given to finally, at last, "Eureka", look out from our lonely and self-isolating place of having to make things and make-up things on our own. The moment when we see that we didn't make this world we live in. And can finally rest in the knowledge, the re-assuring knowledge that one has made this world, this galaxy, this universe... That the very notion of a self-made man is, in fact, illusory at best. Well, it's when we are given the sweet gift that wakes us up from our dream... that we can be genuinely freed to not have to be more than we really are.
"Art that penetrates, extends from a God who penetrates the darkness of our existence, the malaise of our regularity with His intimacy, His love, His creativeness, His concern, His passion, the unsearchable depths of His character." -Dave Petty: "Passion"
It's not that I believe that there is nothing there. I've grown up and out of that. I've learned to know better. And it's not that I'm afraid of what lies beneath, or behind, or beyond.
No. That's not it. It's just that I've been taught by someone who's been to death and back, someone I implicitly and reasonably trust to address this sort of thing in a different way entirely. He sees dead people. And he is not afraid. (Unlike many priests in so many movies like the Exorcist seem to be.) He recognizes a reality beyond our senses and says, literally says:
“Do not be afraid."
Often undervalued, living with a heaven-minded point of view is the key ingredient for living a life that really matters.
The Other Everything is a podcast about dreams and visions, simple faith and magnificent impossibilities. Through a sonic excursion of predictable and unpredictable narrative via spoken-word, prose, and song, we travel through the daily and not-so-daily places of culture, thought, emotion and imagination to find what is true and real and impossibly possible.
"and if heaven is interested in Earth, who am I to ignore its interest?" -Dave Petty