by tashmcgill | Jun 15, 2005 | Uncategorized

Control
Take control of the atmosphere
Take me far away from here
There is no better loss than to lose myself in you
In a parachute to glide, I am captive in your sky
Surrender has somehow become so beautiful

Its such a beautiful surrender
Its such a beautiful surrender
And I’m calling out
would you take control
And I’m calling out

by tashmcgill | Jun 15, 2005 | Uncategorized

Sex and the City

I’m working 3 days a week 8am-5pm for the next five weeks. Above is the building I’m working in, the delightful Phillips Fox Tower. Even the bathrooms have views. Today is a clear winter day and I am absolutely struck down with love for this city again. I’m such a strange girl. I love Paremoremo and the bush, water, dirt, peace and earthiness of it all. And I adore the rush and bush of the city, the old sweatiness of the concrete, marble, granite skyscrapers. The mad rush of pedestrians carrying takeaway coffees, talking on their cellphones. Black and charcoal suits, briefcases and laptop bags brushing past student satchels, carry-alls and sneakers. Fine italian leather shoes shining up from the ashen, dank asphalt.

I took lunch and just soaked it in. The sense of speed and power, movement and momentum. For a moment I just breathed in and remembered that people do find meaning and peace in the rhythm of a city life. In arriving at work, juggling carparks, gym memberships, Starbucks, banking. Jewellery stores, CD stores and any kind of ethnic food I like all in walking distance, all in the space of a half hour lunch. Bookstores, galleries and just a hint of Albert Park in the distance. This is the city.

I stepped inside Whitcoulls on the corner of Queen & Victoria, opposite my tower. Walking through the sections well laid out and displayed, I found a surreal little world by the poetry shelves. I was looking for something obscure and native, preferably Te Reo poetry translated. Instead I found insipid love poems from every ear and unpleasant covers. The delightful thing about poetry books, is that they normally escape the pop-culture, supermarket read cartoon cover art. Or the softly focussed, overly made up cover model shots that grace Danielle Steel, Penny Vincenzi and so on. No, as much as I enjoy Marian Keyes and Jane Green.. they are a world of fictional merriment and their cartoons suit them. I like my poetry to feel dark and real, bold and intimate from the moment I look at the cover, feel the weight and texture of the paper in my hands. Then the words and timbre can capture me and take me an sacred place.

Today, the surrealism wasn’t helped by a poor selection of ‘contemporary’and ‘classic’poetry. But the moment was saved. I was engulfed in a double pitched clunking rhythm overhead and all around. The internal escalators in that building must be near on ancient now, and sure enough.. the droning bass clunk and the doubletime treble clack clack made a rhythm enclave for me to dive into. The vibrations through the floor travelled to the very end of my fingertips and made even the dullest of offerings seem a little alive. It made me want to record the sounds and play them over and over, maybe even as a loop on some anthemic lovesong to the city.

It’s less than a day spent in her clutches and I am utterly swept away again. The pulse and rhythm, life of it all takes me back to New York and brings me home again. I need to live with a camera on my arm, capturing every moment of these days. In the darkest of spaces, my city reinvigorates me.

I remember now.. the love affair I have with this place. I’m going to prescribe myself more city time, remembering my culture from out in the sometime desert of the North Shore.

Hmm.

by tashmcgill | Jun 13, 2005 | Uncategorized

© Tash McGill

Paradigm Shifting
Sometimes you have these moments in life when you realise the sands are shifting beneath you, and you have limited time to choose your response. I sense this process is beginning in me. And this time I’m wiser and softer than I was before. Hindsight offers the choice to engage in the process and be shifted along as I need to be, or to simply dig in. But the choice is not really mine.

As I’m writing this, I’m also viewing pictures from Luke and Katie’s wedding and admiring the love that they have grown for one another. It’s beautiful to see how they have grown together and to believe in something precious for a moment.

I see now, how in all of my career movement and development, right alongside it, has been this deep drive and need to build a home life. I’m reminded of that John Mayer song actually. The deep longing for a place and community of belonging, that owns me and loves me and keeps me and desires me. A community of people who are friends not parishoners, family not colleagues. A place to celebrate and be celebrated in. And so here in what could be the twilight of my time at Windsor Park, I am seeing signs of this little haven coming into being. Not altogether as I would imagined it, but slowly in small and quiet places. I love my house and my connect points, special friends that are growing deeply into my heart. I love seeing progress and development with some of the things I have been doing here finally taking fruit. And there are of course other things not going as well, that I want to see through and fix. Or at least learn from.

So .. with some dreams having been put to bed by recent developments; I’m looking around and asking God what next, and where to. It seems that age and gender and experience will ultimately prevent for the foreseeable future my ongoing growth or development into the ministry role I feel so called to.

Edited on Advice

I am looking at the reality of accepting a minimal token payment job here next year, with increased ministry workload, albeit some of the very dreams and ideas I had wanted to run with in my internship period; but having to combine that with a role with Eastercamp that I’ve been told won’t be developed beyond what it already is. That would still leave me financially crippled for another year and also in the very kind of volunteer position that my would-be employer has disregarded as ‘countable experience’.

Or I look to be employed somewhere else, and put down my responsibilities with Eastercamp, the passion and call there. I could go full time or partime and continue to study and pursue some things. The optio of staying in Auckland in a position like that is at least one that would allow the songwriting to continue and not remove me entirely from the homelife I have built.

Or, I take my mother’s advice and move overseas. Looking at a position maybe in NSW where I have some contacts and opportunities are available. There are positive things about this. The whole ‘prophet without honor in his own land’ would be easily removed for a season, an opportunity to explore and develop and build. If leadership is not empowering, then it’s either managing you for it’s own benefit or.. it’s disenpowering you altogether.

So there are some smart decisions, and extremely painful ones in my future.

Pray for me, that God’s will be done, and not my own unless the two correlate. Pray for my fears to be held in check.

Song Of The Moment : Home Life
John Mayer

Home life
You keep the home life
You take the home life
I’ll come back for the home life
I promise

by tashmcgill | Jun 9, 2005 | Uncategorized

© tashmcgill

Coming Undone Again
I spent the weekend in Roto-vegas for the annual Queens BDay BYM Training weekend. It was all good quality stuff, a few special moments in seminars talking about the cycle of barrenness, preparation, conception, birth and new life. It has sparked some good thinking for me in terms of preparing for whatever happens next.

Brian Krum polarised me yesterday with the realisation that vocation choices I make now are going to affect the next ten years. It’s a crucial time to look for the opportunities that will allow the right people to see me in the right light at the right time, and a time to be cautious of becoming too crucial to someone else’s gameplan.

When I was working at Mitre 10 there was a sign on the wall saying, ‘don’t be irreplaceable. it means you can’t be promoted.’ I’m thinking that way now.

So… resuming normal life?

by tashmcgill | Jun 2, 2005 | Uncategorized

Out Here in the Wild
I got a phonecall from Steve. He used the words detached .. and some others. He was calling to see if I was okay. I need to call him back, but I’ve put his number somewhere I can’t remember.

I was at a music team retreat for the weekend, trying to inspire and regroup courage into this little band and allow them to see the Image of God in each other for a short while. Simon came along to help out. It was a good and strange time. So many hopes and dreams that I have for this motley bunch, so I guess there is a pastoral heart in me after all. I have a deep and abiding love for these ones.

I’m thinking about the next steps and the where-to’s a little bit. By now, the story’s becoming obvious. I loved a boy, he didn’t love me back. I lost hope and now I’m regaining ground on a slippery slope. See, the love of the boy doesn’t matter so much as how it reminds of the love of the father. I couldn’t figure out how to win his love either. So the doorway of grief was opened up and God has been restored to me in new ways because I’m processing and leaving some of what I need to at His door. It’s all happening in quiet moments, in dark spaces, late at night, early in the morning when I can’t sleep.

I feel foolish when grief grabs me suddenly in the middle of the day. Feel like I’ve been stolen away from myself when words and dreams and hopes of a year ago present themselves again.

I’m not afraid of not being loved by people, I’m afraid that the love of God won’t satisfy me. I know that He will respond as I trust in him.. and the RLP’s dissertation on this clarifies me..some of his other writings are making me think as well.., and but I know and recognize the ache for humanity inside me.

It’s making me think that it’s the Image of God in me, crying out for intimate relationship with the humanity around me. In thinking this way, I’m not making myself more divine. If anything, in this haze I am most sinful in my self-centredness.

Carrying On

I will carry on, Lord. I will seek You out.
Not because your plans are great, or wiser, or more trustworthy.
I can’t say any of those things honestly.
I hope that they might be, but I realise I don’t want to be dishonest with You
by claiming a promise I do not hold, a faith I cannot hold up.
I will carry on, and seek You out
because You are the beginning of satisfaction.
You are the beginning of Comfort, the beginning of Love.
I am too human, and analyse too much the end of things.
So I will look to the beginning.

You make all things new in Your presence.
I still wish that I understood these things though.