Talking Notes

“I’ve been meeked!”

I read this line a few weeks ago in a lovely book by Charlie Shedd. He was describing a friend’s reaction to moments in his life when he had essentially been put in his place. Meekness is a funny word. It isn’t common in the current English language. We don’t see it in print, or hear many people use it in public with any frequency. Yet, here it is, just three lines into the propositions Jesus is setting forth about what life in the Kingdom of Heaven is like. Meekness is often thought of as something having to do with humility. But there’s a little more to it than that. The word is more literally translated as mild, and by extension, having a mild disposition, or gentleness of spirit. One can envision humility being a part of that, but meekness is much more than being humble.

Related Links

* The lovely book by Charlie Shedd

* How we are like children

* Just ask the father

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I’m a crier. I do it a lot. I’ve given up trying to stop. I just let it come, whenever and however the emotions arise. Instead of fighting it, I get curious. I ask myself why? What might be fueling these emotions? Maybe I can learn something from what my body is telling me. I have discovered that a lot of it for me is a simple, deep sadness, about the hardness of life. Loss, separation, death, betrayal, illness, hard hearts, and the many other hard things just make me sad. Whether the source of the hardness is someone else or me, it doesn’t matter. I still get sad. Jesus has something to say about this, and it isn’t what you might expect.

Related Links

* A man of constant sorrow

* Jesus speaking on the hill

* The Fertile Crescent

* We are children in God’s eyes

* A video I watched during my burnout

* A book I read during my burnout.

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Debilitating burnout, a pandemic raging across the world, me moving internationally twice in two years, gaining and losing full time employment, have all been part of the last three years of my life. In the midst of all of that, I experienced feeling closer to God than ever before in my life. While I can say that I have known God for a significant amount of my life, this closeness was qualitatively different. There was a kind of casual conversational aspect to my relationship with God that I hadn’t had before. I used to pray with questions and for solutions. Now I experienced wonder as the entry point, and discovery as the experience. In the midst of this there was specific revelation. That’s just a fancy way of saying that God showed me specific things. One of those things was that the beatitudes, a series of propositions that Jesus is documented as making in the book of Matthew and echoed in the book of Luke, was somehow more than just a list. This is what we’re getting into this week.

Related Links

* Book of Matthew

* Book of Luke

* A note about Maps

* A note about The New Thing

* Learning how to tap dance

* My convictions

* The way, truth, and life

* Seeking the Kingdom of God

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This last note of the year is a little different. At the end of the year have learned to turn my thinking towards reflection. As an artist, the work I do is never far from my experience of life, the things I’m actually thinking about, and what I’m working out in myself. As a freelancer, however, I often jump from project to project without much time to reflect in the middle of the season. So it has come to the end of the year to be a time of reflection for me. That said, I wanted to share with you some of what all has happened in the past year. In the midst of really hard things, there were some really good things, too. So here it is.

Related Links

* EXPLORE – Projects

* The Notes

* the Breakdowns – short deconstructions of the weekly Tap Dance Notes

* Asking the Questions – question-driven deep dives into The Note of the week

* Identity: The Andrew Nemr Story Watch the live performance and talkback here

* What We Leave Behind

* Rising to the Tap

* CREATE – Services

* Tap Dance + Empathy Building

* GROW – Courses and Coaching

* Spiritual Formation for Artists – now open for registration.

* Want Professional Mentor Coaching? drop me a line.

* Press

* My profile piece in AramcoWorld Magazine

* My ____ on Mondays

* All Places Together

* Mere Christians

* BONUS: Watch me dance with the impeccable Tommy Emmanuel C.G.P.

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There are a few key elements that need to be present for us to hold on to a process of transformation. There are some that come from within, like our own desire to transform, continual intentional choices towards transformation, and a seeking for the means (especially if we don’t already have them) that will facilitate the transformation. There are some that come from without, like the means themselves (if we don’t already have them), inspiration from others who share stories, information, or model their own transformation, and the thing I’ve been thinking about this week – good, old fashioned, encouragement.

Related Links

* my previous note about suffering

* social post

* God is a spiritual being who is love

* An encouragement from Jesus

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A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to teach a workshop entitled Tap Dance and Empathy Building at the National Museum of Asian Art, a part of the Smithsonian Institution. The participants were an eclectic gathering of museum directors, curators, and programmers who had convened for the Designing for Empathy Summit. In the workshop I used tap dance as a kinesthetic learning tool through which we could physically experience some of the ideas that come up around change. After all, empathy building has to do with change, and change can bring pain, sorrows, and suffering. But what if we could walk through change in a way that's so excited about the possibilities of what is to come that any necessary suffering is considered a joy?

Related Links

* Training: Tap Dance and Empathy Building

* The Designing for Empathy Summit

* Coach Michael Bungay Stanier

* Book: Mortification of Sin by John Owen

* Jesus said we should take up our own cross and follow him

* The Sacrifice of Communication

* Asking the Questions

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This is the way we always have done it. That must make it good and right, right? This is the way things always have been. That means we must simply accept them as they are, right? As someone who was grafted into the oral tradition of tap dance, I have spent a great portion of my life navigating the obvious tension that arises between tradition and innovation. That is, what has always been done, and the possibility of a new thing.

This week I’m using four words – tradition, innovation, disruption, and backlash – in thinking about what coming to a new thing in a good way might look like.

Related Links

* Answering the Questions

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My mother cooks for a football team on every special occasion. Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter, Birthdays – you name it, if there is an opportunity to cook, she’ll take it. If she had the time, she would probably cook a meal that way every day – it doesn’t even have to be dinner! The love and care she puts into the meal is directly connected to her giving nature. But there is a problem. As good as the meal is – and it is really good – we always end up with tons of leftovers. It seems that it doesn’t even matter how many people are at the table. There is always more than enough food for everyone, and more than enough left over. The running joke in my family in fact, is whether we’ll be able to fit all the leftovers back in the fridge or not. It really is a thing.

Related Links:

* What do we have to give?

* Rising to the Tap

* Asking the Questions

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For much of my life, I have lived at a pace that didn’t allow me to stop to smell the roses. Even worse, when I was forced to slow down and smell some roses, I began developing a defense for the practice in relationship to my work. Smelling the roses had to be something that served the larger purpose of work. I smelled the roses so that I could rest, or be inspired, so that I could get back to work. Why? Well, simply because I believed that I never did enough.

That has changed a bit in the past few years, thankfully. My experience of burnout, my life turning upside down on account of the pandemic, and a tactile encounter with a way of life that didn’t spin me out of order, all pointed to the real possibility of a different way. The grooves of intense productivity, singular focus, and high achievement are still there and often take significant work to not land in again. However, my experience of the alternative – a life of ease, lightness, peace, and rest – is strong enough within me that I know what it feels like. I have some sense memory of the difference between the two. Which brings me to thinking about thankfulness.

Related Links

* More about my experience of burnout

* More thinking about loss

Go deeper with Asking the Questions.

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I had written almost two thousand words this week, working out this idea, and decided to scrap them all. This is a rewrite. The question this week is simple: what do we have to gain? Two years ago I came upon Dallas Willard’s four great questions of life. They became so formative for me that I gave a TED talk about them. This week’s thinking zeros in on the answers we carry for two of the four questions. What if there was a way of living through which the outcome would be receipt of the good life, and becoming a really good person. Wouldn’t that be something? It would indeed be something to gain.

Related Links

* I gave a TED talk!

* What We Leave Behind

* The Fruits of the Spirit

* The Kingdom of Heaven is at hand

* a hidden treasure

* special pearl

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