Writing to Connect

A Love Letter to My Dear Peru

2011-12-06T13:21:00.002-05:00

“The belief that he [Gustave Flaubert] had been ‘transplanted by the winds’ … was to find repeated and more reasoned expression in his maturity. On his return from Egypt, Flaubert attempted to explain his theory of national identity ... to Luis Colet [his mistress at the time]:

‘As to the idea of a native country, that is to say a certain bit of ground traced out on a map and separated from other bits by a red or blue line: no. For me, my native country is the country I love, meaning the one that makes me dream, that makes me feel well. I am as much Chinese as I am French, and I cannot rejoice about our victories over the Arabs because I am saddened by their defeats. I love those harsh, enduring, hardy people, the last of the primitives, who at midday lie down in the shade under the bellies of their camels and, while smoking their chibouks, poke fun at our good civilization, which quivers with rage over it … I’m no more modern than ancient, no more French than Chinese, and the idea of a native country—that is to say, the imperative to live on one bit of ground marked red or blue on the map and to hate the other bits in green or black—has always seemed to me narrow-minded, blinkered and profoundly stupid.’

We are all of us, without ever having any say in the matter, scattered at birth by the wind onto various countries, but like Flaubert, we are in adulthood granted the freedom imaginatively to re-create our identity in line with our true allegiances.”

-Excerpt from The Art of Travel, by Alain de Boton

“Home is where I wanna be—but I guess I’m already there.”

-David Byrne

A mi querida Perú,

I awoke this morning with a heavy heart, and, upon examining my sentiments, found that I have finally accepted the fact that our two-year courtship is rapidly coming to a close, for reasons neither you nor I can control.
Yet I feel compelled to assure you that your varied charms (your scents, your voluptuous curves, your flavors!) will all remain imprinted upon my soul as long as I walk this earth.

I love you, as Pablo Neruda once wrote, “Without knowing why nor how—because I know no other way”: though you say I will forget you, you cannot fathom how profoundly your rhymes and rhythms have affected the deepest parts of me—you have struck a chord in my essence.

I love your hot, arid, wind-swept North, where great electric-green expanses of rice crops pop in relief against the sun-baked tans and muted browns of an October afternoon. Where the mighty, swelling depths of the Pacific can be heard, day and night, pounding the shores, its briny presence like the breath in my chest—on days when I stop to consider it, the very constancy of its rhythm provides a calm to even my most tumultuous inner storms.

I love the towering heights of your cordillera, where hulking stone reaches for the heavens, crowned by cloud and snow, with icy, azure lakes and verdant pastures hidden among its folds, all set amidst a holy silence the likes of which I have found nowhere else on this great blue globe.

I love your cloud forests, where scores of ancient ruins lie hidden beneath lush vegetation on the magnificent slopes and valleys surrounding Chachapoyas. The imposing grandeur of Kuelap. The eerie, otherworldly quality of the tombs high on the cliffs at Karajia, their faces forever gazing eastward toward the rising sun.

I love your cities, in all their disparity, as much for their general lack of artifice as for the poetry hidden beneath the ordinary: there is a certain special attraction to the stink and heat, bustle and bulla of a crowded market in Piura—a powerful allure to the cries of vendors, the piles of exotic fruits arrayed in multihued splendor, the engine smoke, the disparate galleries of so many lined, sun-weathered faces.

But above all of these things, I love the people of my pueblo—mi hogar—a tranquil place, a campo place, whose citizens took me in, a foreigner, and allowed me to be a part of the workings of the community for a time. I left a wonderful family and incredible friendships behind to come courting you, Perú, and you showed me that the terms “family” and “friendship” can encompass and embrace much more than I’d thought possible: you have given me a family here, and it aches to be leaving them.
Perú, I love all of these things about you, as well as all the charged, come-hither mystery present in the parts of you I have not yet seen: The shrouded depths of the jungle! Arequipa! Puno! Apurimac! Huancavelica! Cajamarca!

So while I bid you a fond farewell for now, it is, to be sure, an hasta lluego, an hasta pronto, but not a goodbye. No, mi Perú, goodbyes are for lovers with less in common and less water under the bridge—goodbyes do not apply here.

I will be back, God willing, to dance away the hours of the early morning once more amidst the thumping bass and brassy trumpets of your best orchestras. Play on Caribe. Play on Harmonia. Viva la cumbia. I will be back, God willing, to sit on a porch one black night far from now during one of your all-night rain storms, the deluge soaking the earth and pounding with all its might on the calamina above my head. I will be back, God willing, to lie on your beaches, to hike your slopes, to shovel in as much ceviche as I can get my hands on, to join the drinking circle once more.

Perú , though I leave you today, you will be in my thoughts tomorrow and in all my tomorrows until I see you again. You, Perú, help me to dream. You, Perú, have stretched me beyond what I once was. You make me feel well.

Encantado,
Greg

On Sunday Mornings Such As This One

2011-11-03T01:55:00.001-05:00

23 October, 2011

On Sunday mornings such as this one, I find myself wondering what other Sundays will be like.

Woke up late, turned over, fell back asleep. Woke up again, lay there thinking about family and friends—what I plan to do when I get home.

A good friend called while I was still in bed, and before I knew it I found myself laughing … deep, full, belly laughs. Every morning, perhaps, should start off with belly laughs, but on Sundays they are especially nice.

We talked about our hopes for the future, about our travel plans once our Peace Corps services end—we talked about girls, too. Talking about girls on Sunday mornings such as this one also somehow just feels better. Clearer, perhaps. More coherent.

Got out of bed at last, left my room and said hello to my darlin’ little host sister, already busy sweeping the floor and cleaning the kitchen (poor little girl … her mom won’t let her have a Sunday morning such as mine).

Next came boiling water, a fresh bag of coffee, cleaning out yesterday’s grinds from the French press. Pancake batter. Hot oil.

On Sunday mornings such as this one, I remember Sunday mornings past: the making of pancakes now somehow links this morning to all those Sunday mornings when Mom would make pancakes, back in the good old days when the family all lived under one roof. I miss the expansive nature of those Sundays: the way they felt like a world unto themselves—long, luxurious and sweet. There was the safety of Dad with his newspapers, my big brother cursing at the television, my little sister and I trading barbs, bottomless mugs of coffee, fat cats baking on sunny windowsills.

My host mom, on this Sunday morning, steals one of my pancakes (with apologies)—I give her another, and tell her about how pancakes on Sundays remind me of home. I hope she doesn’t mind my sentimentality these days.

Not in spite of, but because of these echoes of the past, because of the fullness and small pleasures of my life with my host family in the present, on Sunday mornings such as these I find myself wondering what other Sundays will be like.

It is painful to say goodbye. The other night my host father, in a rare acknowledgment of my pending departure, jokingly asked me whether there was another American they could adopt to fill the gap I will leave when I go. It is painful to leave a place where you’ve been welcomed so graciously. Part of the wonder of these two years has been the unprecedented gift of being able to live as part of a family unit again—the opportunity to be an older brother to my two rambunctious host siblings. The rhythms of family life, here, have brought me back, time and time again, to life with my family in the US when I was young: the dinner smells and clinking pans that encircle you, lending the evening a sense of inclusion and fellowship; the screeching of my host mom in the mornings, reminding me of my own Mom’s persistent yells of warning from the base of the stairs as I tried, always in vain, to turn over and tune out an impending Monday full of classes; the whispering of parents in the kitchen, late at night, hinting at concerns outside the cocoon of protection afforded to kids with good moms and good dads.

There’s a wild, sometimes terrifying faith that comes along with Sunday mornings such as this one—a faith that life will continue to be filled with family, with richness and depth, with challenges that circle out from you in ever-widening orbit, while inside you tide after tide of memory crashes back upon the beaches of your awareness, providing some context and coherency to the ceaseless rush of moments.

On Sunday mornings such as this one, I find myself wondering what other Sundays will be like.

Two Years And Counting

2011-09-12T15:27:00.005-05:00

Well. What to say. It’s been some time since I last wrote here, for myriad personal reasons that are too complex to really dive into at this point.

Suffice it to say, however, that it has been a tumultuous year thus far, though not a bad one by any means. The tumult, I’m coming to see, is perhaps a natural part of life … a part that one had better get used to embracing.

I am writing now because I feel as though I’ve just begin to emerge from an emotional fog that was making it very hard for me to gain any type of a big-picture ‘fix’ on anything—I was figuring things out, processing, probably, and I’ve come to realize that the complex set of emotions that I associate with a lack of clarity is usually just the state I revert to when there’s a lot on my heart and in my mind that remains unresolved.

But I feel as though I’ve resolved much of what was clouding me, or some of the big-picture issues at the very least. And, this time, it took a cathartic week in Lima amongst a group of Peace Corps friends whom I’ve grown very fond of, followed by one of the more incredible birthdays I’ve ever celebrated.

And though catharsis, I believe, comes at the most unexpected times and from the most unusual places, I’m going to attempt to describe at least the broad-brush outlines of what happened. The central piece of those two experiences—both the week in Lima and my birthday—was that they both drove home for me just what an inspiring and fun network of people I have stumbled my way into in this country.

That’s the paradoxical nature of the whole thing, I suppose: exactly two years ago I was just arriving in Lima, just getting my first sense of the quirkiness and disparity of our whole group of volunteers, the 14th such group to serve in Peru, and I was scared, I’ll admit that. I have a strong and abiding love for the cast of characters—both my incredible family and a small cadre of caring friends—that I have always counted on for support and guidance back in the US, and it was very, very difficult to separate myself from those people. In the first months here I found myself backing off from people more than I typically do, keeping quiet more than usual, keeping to myself. And while I opened up in degrees throughout our 10-week training process and those initial months in site, there are only a few volunteers that I ever really developed a close friendship with in the first year. A part of me, emotionally speaking, remained back in Pennsylvania, back amongst the love and support I’d come to trust. All of this, I’m sure, is typical of anyone leaving home and moving to a foreign country, though the level of reserved-ness, I would imagine, must vary vastly.

Anyway, as I said, I’m necessarily painting in broad brush strokes, because there’s obviously so much about each of our internal workings that we can never effectively communicate to another human soul. But fast-forward from that reserved ‘me’ of two years ago to the ‘me’ present at this computer, today, and the tables have flipped to a certain extent. I am now very, very reticent to leave behind the network of caring souls that people my days here, whether it be in Oidor, among the volunteers in Tumbes, or among the larger group of all 50 Peru 14 volunteers who have survived and thrived throughout these two years. I am not, by any means, close with all of them—not by a long shot. Yet this past week in Lima made me realize just how much I like even the ones I’ve barely had any contact with over the entire span, and just how very much I am going to miss the few kindred souls who have let me into their inner worlds as much as they possibly could. And from that experience I came directly back to a giant surprise birthday party in my town, replete with a piñata, several cakes, dinner, lots and lots of beer, and dancing with my friends and counterparts until the wee small hours of the morning. We volunteers, I believe, are always balancing on a fine line between indulging in the friendships we’ve made with other Americans while we’re here (and the subsequent guilt we feel at spending all of that time away from our towns)—or we feel like we’re drowning in the cultural differences and lack of deep connection with others that can result from several long weeks in site. Or maybe not all of us, who knows. But for me, it is a true joy to get to a point, two years in, where I finally feel as though some part of that balance I have been trying to strike has been real and true and good. As though some of the long periods of time in site, struggling through conversations in a language I’m not even close to fully understanding, have been recognized and heartily received. Because I DO feel that I have meaningful ties with both my host family and a small group of friends/co-workers in my site. I DO feel like part of the town’s structure, or as much a part of it as I could ever expect to be, given the circumstances. There is so much about the feel of the place—the particularities of the sights and sounds, the habitual occurrences, the tacit ‘stuff’ of the day that comforts you on some deeper, almost unconscious level. Maybe it’s just knowing that you’re now ‘home’ in a space where you used to feel so alien and different.

Anyway, maybe that’s enough exposition of what are, when all is said and done, heftier concepts that are, somewhat paradoxically, made somewhat cliché by virtue of their very oft-repeated status: the utter difficulty of full, heartfelt communication with others on the one hand, and the soul’s need for acceptance and community on the other. But that’s the catharsis, I believe, that has been taking place in these last weeks, as my system has been processing the impending end of this full, complex experience. As has often been the case in recent years, the words of one of my favorite authors, David Foster Wallace, have been helping me to move through some of these concepts, providing daily dosages of candor and eloquent heart at just the right times. In one beautiful short story I read some weeks ago, he fleshes out these very concepts in a way that cuts through so much of the artifice that strips the emotional weight off so many other writers’ words:

“ … it’s what makes room for the universes inside you, all the endless inbent fractals of connection and symphonies of different voices, the infinities you can never show another soul. And you think it makes you a fraud, the tiny fraction anyone else ever sees? Of course you’re a fraud, of course what people see is never you. And of course you know this, and of course you try to manage what part they see if you know it’s only a part. Who wouldn’t? It’s called free will, Sherlock. But at the same time it’s why it feels so good to break down and cry in front of others, or to laugh, or to speak in tongues, or chant in Bengali—it’s not English anymore, it’s not getting squeezed through any hole.”

“With David Wallace also fully aware that the cliché that you can’t ever truly know what’s going on inside somebody else is hoary and insipid and yet at the same time trying very consciously to prohibit that awareness from mocking the attempt or sending the whole line of thought into the sort of inbent spiral that keeps you from ever getting anywhere (considerable time having passed since 1981, of course, and David Wallace having emerged from years of literally indescribable war against himself with quite a bit more firepower than he’d had at Aurora West), the realer, more enduring and sentimental part of him commanding that other part to be silent as if looking it levelly in the eye and saying, almost aloud, ‘Not another word.’'

(From the last page of the short story ‘Good Old Neon,’ in the story collection titled Oblivion)

A part of the reason I haven’t written for so long is that I’d been worrying too much about what everyone else would think about what it was I had to say—about whether people would think I was struggling for this effect or that effect, when in truth we all do that every minute of our waking lives … the only real difference is how much we allow the knowledge of that posturing to worry/define us. The truth is that it’s what we do as humans, and the only thing that really matters is the heart beneath it … the attempt at connection and decency. I want to write much, much more in this, the 28th year of my life, a year that promises to be rife with ever more changes. I want to write more, at least in these next months, because I want to tell people back home about the kindness and quirkiness that surrounds me in my site—and because I want to stop pretending I live in two worlds when the truth is that it’s just one big one that we’re all trying to find our ways through with some measure of dignity (whatever that means to each of us) and with as much good company as we can find along the way. I’ve found it here—both among the people who have welcomed me so well in Oidor and all the volunteers up and down the coast.

So to close I guess I’d just like to congratulate all the Peru 14ers for the myriad accomplishments you’ve all made in your communities, and, more than that, just for living and loving under difficult circumstances—so many of you do it with style and grace, even if you can’t always see it in yourselves. Maybe I kept referring to “two worlds” for so much of my service because I found myself in another piece of this world that, initially, just felt too far removed and foreign from the one I was used to—and, mentally, I segregated it off. Maybe part of being a decent citizen of this world, then, is trying as often as possible to collapse those mental barriers … trying always to see the common bonds in it all.

The Year of the Great Existential Resolution

2011-01-10T02:20:00.003-05:00

Welcome to 2011 folks. My good friend Momo has dubbed this the “Year of the Great Existential Resolution”, and I have to say that it has a certain ring to it. Maybe this is the year where a large percentage of us will figure out some underlying key to the meaning behind each of our lives.
I dunno though.

Sometimes, I think, life tricks us into wanting to answer the ‘bigger’ questions while their answers are still in gestation … our brains, I think, constantly want to define things, to fit happenings and daily sufferings and joys into a plan that we’re consciously acting out. Or at least mine does.

Some stuff works like that after all: we can all think out ‘dream jobs’ or pick a list of graduate schools we’d maybe like to go to down the road—and then we can do our damndest to make sure that the actions we fill our days with help to advance those goals in some fashion.

I guess I’m more talking about the types of ‘bigger’ questions like “What’s my purpose here?” “Will my life have an impact on others?” “Will I get to raise children beside a woman I love?”

You know—the big ones.

As a result, I feel like I’m always two weeks ahead, or even six months ahead, or a year for that matter. I’m always up in my head, rolling out possible narratives for my life, thinking through the arc of my actions.

And it cuts into my presence, to tell you the truth.

I guess the trick is to take firm hold of the big questions that you have some control over, and to let go and have faith that you’ll ‘live your way into the answers’ on the bigger, existential ones, as Rainer Maria Rilke says.

I’m determined to start ‘letting go’ a bit more … ‘living my way’ into whatever lies on that distant horizon. I’m determined to try to live more intentionally within the passing minutes and hours as they stack up, one on another. I want to soak in the peculiarity of my present condition—to really notice the poignancy of the ordinary stuff I do each day in Peru … stuff that, a while ago, I would never have considered all that ordinary.

For instance, here’re the two experiences that prompted me to sit down and write this:

Just before dinner I went outside on the front porch to wait for my host father to finish getting ready. My host mother and two little host siblings are away on vacation, visiting family in Lima, leaving my host father and I to a week and a half of awkward male bonding and simple meals.

Sometimes, when we’re sick of the simple meals, we go out to eat in the next town over. This was one of those nights.

So I’m out on the porch, waiting, and my next-door neighbor’s little girl—just 1 and a half—comes tottering out into the darkness. And before I go any farther, I must say that this is the most adorable little black-eyed, round-cheeked, vibrant little person I’ve ever met. The girl is just HAPPY—all the time (or at least when her mother isn’t yelling at her for some ridiculous infraction). I adore this little girl, and I get a huge smile on my face and my voice goes up about two octaves every time I see her. As a result, I think, she has taken a shine to me—probably because I’m the goofiest thing in her universe.

Anyway, she sees me, and she comes running over with her arms out, gurgling something only she can understand, but clearly wanting to be picked up. So I pick her up. And as she’s standing there on my lap, she just starts dancing! There’s cumbia music blaring on the sound system in our house, where my host father is still preening, and we’re out there in the dark, I’m sitting on this concrete divider between the two porches, and she’s dancing as she stands there in my lap, one hand stuck in her mouth because she’s teething like mad. She’s dancing, and she’s grinning through the hand that’s in her mouth.

And … well, I felt a giddy happiness, then and there, a presence, an exultation just to be witnessing this beautiful little child exult in the beats drifting at her in the darkness. Given the choice between one or the other in that eternal dichotomy of innocence and experience, innocence is definitely the state I wish I could freeze myself in … yet, that not being possible, I guess I’ll just have to settle for these few moments when I can revel in the presence of children.

Second experience: After dinner I was still hungry, and so, in the spirit of trying to be healthier after the great “Christmas Holiday/America is Awesome Binge”, I pulled a giant carrot out of the fridge and went to sit on the front porch to cut it up and eat it. One of the little neighbor boys promptly came up and sat next to me and basically asked me why the hell I was eating the thing RAW. You don’t really eat raw veggies if you’re Peruvian and live in Tumbes.

I told him I was eating it raw because it was tasty … and I cut him off a hunk. Mind you, this was a GIANT carrot, very thick, so the hunk I cut off was massive. So he’s chawing on this thing, and asks me again whether I thought this stuff tasted any good.

Yes, I said, I think it does. Do you?

He said that it pretty much tasted good (but I guess he was still skeptical).
From there, he proceeded to accept, and chaw on, three more large rounds of the carrot, before turning down the final bite. During the eating, we talked about how Americans like to put dressing on their salads, whereas people in our town usually put just lime juice on theirs. We talked about how a kid in his grade had been having vision problems, and the doctor told him to eat a lot of carrots, just like this one, raw … and, well, he looked like a rabbit (according to the boy). So I asked him why, blatantly playing dumb, and he informs me in this very learned voice that rabbits eat a TON of carrots, clearly amazed that I did not know this fact. One of my current favorite pastimes is to play dumb with Peruvian children, allowing them to explain really simple concepts to me … I feel it helps me remember what it was like to be that age, and to think in that specific, focused way.

Then, without missing a beat, he says, “See you tomorrow Gregory, I’m going next door to play” … and off he goes.

My day, aside from these two flashes, was really kinda crummy … all anxious and off-kilter, as I tried to get my heart behind the idea of living in Peru for another 10 or 11 months. My family and friends in America, and my beautiful girlfriend in America, are ridiculously supportive, loving, and just flat-out fun … and being home for two weeks definitely reminded me of all that I’m missing back there. I miss them so, so much right now, just a week removed from my last visit.

But looking at it as “the life I’m missing”: that’s just one way to look at it, and it’s not the way that dominates my thoughts, luckily.

In general, I’m overjoyed to be here, still, even after 16 months of it. My life has become this, here, more than anywhere else … and by that I mean that I’ve allowed myself, somewhere in there, to accept that my friends and support network here are powerful forces in my life, my job is currently here (and it’s cool), and I have a family here that, while dysfunctional and loud and enveloping (given the dimensions of the tiny little house we share) cares for me, and for whom I care a great deal as well. And each day is a challenge, which is something I hope to replicate wherever I go after this in life. I don’t want to ever be bored.

I just read this Don Miller book, “A Million Miles in a Thousand Years”, and in it he talks all about his efforts to write his own life—or, rather, to live a more interesting story with his life. He’d been writing, successfully, for a long while, and—as he tells it—the way of life he’d been living just suddenly seemed empty and shallow. He wasn’t chasing the girl of his dreams, he wasn’t going on adventures—he was bored. He was filling pages like crazy, he said, but his life was a blank page. So he set out to live a better story. I won’t spoil it by fleshing out any more, but it’s a good read for anyone with early-2011-trouble-defining-how-I’m-going-to-tackle-this-year-angst like me.

And, while “our lives as either boring or great stories” sounds simplistic, I devoured the book, because I think it’s a message that needs to be thrust into our faces—because sometimes the most facile messages are the ones our consciences glaze over, like that statue in your parents’ living room you never see anymore because it’s been there for decades.

Each of our stories has a chance to be epic if we can harness our innate courage and let it shine out every day. If we can just learn to quiet the depressing voices that tell us to be quiet, to sit still, to forget about contacting so-and-so because the message you want to send is too mushy and emotional. If we can just learn to leap at our biggest dreams, ass-over-elbows, heedless of the consequences of failure … because hell, shitty consequences are better than boredom anyway, and sometimes you succeed without even failing once. Sometimes.

This is why I watch the great Bill Murray Christmas classic “Scrooged” every single Christmas: he ends it singing “Put A Little Love In Your Heart” with a crowd full of people, talking about how Christmas is that one day of the year where people are receptive to drastic changes, to connecting with long lost loves, or long lost friends, or whoever. I feel it helps me slide into the New Year with a bubble of hope atop my head.

And so, without further adieu, I wish you all a Happy New Year, and I hope the stories you’re living are exciting and gripping—and if they’re currently not, I wish you courage and strength and fortitude as you begin to make them so.
Let me leave you with a passage that’s been really important to me over these past few months. I feel it speaks to the heart of what I’m long-windedly trying to say. Maybe the future, after all, is really more of our choosing than we think.

If only it were possible for us to see farther than our knowledge reaches, and even a little beyond the outworks of our presentiment, perhaps we would bear our sadnesses with greater trust than we have in our joys. For they are the moments when something new has entered us, something unknown; our feelings grow mute in shy embarrassment, everything in us withdraws, a silence arises, and the new experience, which no one knows, stands in the midst of it all and says nothing.
It seems to me that almost all our sadnesses are moments of tension, which we feel as paralysis because we no longer hear our astonished emotions living. Because we are alone with the unfamiliar presence that has entered us; because everything we trust and are used to is for a moment taken away from us; because we stand in the midst of a transition where we cannot remain standing. That is why the sadness passes: the new presence inside us, the presence that has been added, has entered our heart, has gone into its innermost chamber and is no longer even there,--is already in our bloodstream. And we don’t know what it was. We could easily be made to believe that nothing happened, and yet we have changed, as a house that a guest has entered changes. We can’t say who has come, perhaps we will never know, but many signs indicate that the future enters us in this way in order to be transformed in us, long before it happens. And that is why it is important to be solitary and attentive when one is sad: because the seemingly uneventful and motionless moment when our future steps into us is so much closer to life than that other loud and accidental point of time when it happens to us as if from outside.

The quieter we are, the more patient and open we are in our sadnesses, the more deeply and serenely the new presence can enter us, and the more we can make it our own, the more it becomes our fate; and later on, when it “happens” (that is, steps forth out of us to to other people), we will feel related and lcose to it in our innermost being. And that is necessary. It is necessary—and toward this point our development will move, little by little—that nothing alien happen to us, but only what has long been our own. People have already had to rethink so many concepts of motion; and they will also gradually come to realize that what we call fate does not come into us from the outside, but emerges from us. It is only because so many people have not absorbed and transformed their fates while they were living in them that they have not realized what was emerging from them; it was so alien to them that, in their confusion and fear, they thought it must have entered them at the very moment they became aware of it, for they swore they had never before found anything like that inside them.

Just as people for a long time had a wrong idea about the sun’s motion, they are even now wrong about the motion of what is to come. The future stands still … but we move in infinite space.

Rainer Maria Rilke, from “Letters to a Young Poet”

A Note on a Second Thanksgiving Away

2010-11-25T20:07:00.001-05:00

Being away from your family on the holidays is notoriously difficult. I was on guard for the pang of separation and homesickness this year, and I thought I had myself emotionally prepared. Yet when the holidays spent away start to compound—say, you reach your second Thanksgiving away from home, as I did today—the jolt of the obvious separation takes on a deeper, hollower quality, I believe.

Today I miss the easy-going, relaxed quality of my parents’ kitchen in the aftermath of a huge Thanksgiving meal: the hum of the dishwasher, wiping grease off the counters, picking at the remains of a casserole dish, catching up with older brother and younger sister. I miss the chill of a Pennsylvania evening in late November, and I miss the blackness outside the windows that accentuates the warmth and light inside. There’s something about feeling sated and a little sleepy, surrounded by loved ones, that’s good for the soul … we all need time to slow down and just ‘be’ in the presence of those we love. I also miss sleeping in the house I grew up in, surrounded by family, even if it only happens a couple nights a year—the way it ties together past and present, paradoxically accentuating the changes like has wrought while erasing all the years that have piled up since childhood … it all gets me in that throat-swelling sort of way.

Here in Peru, we all look out for each other on these days. We flock to the same areas, cook familiar foods, buy each other drinks. We all know that we’re at our most vulnerable, and we take comfort in our shared predicament. I’ve been truly blessed here to have made friends in my region (Tumbes), who I care about very deeply, and who bring laughter and companionship not just to my holidays but to my day-to-day living as well. And beyond Tumbes, I’ve made a few deep friendships with people who I can talk and talk and talk with on the phone, people I look up to, people who inspire me. And while none of my relationships with Peruvians in-site quite hit that caliber, the people in my town are markedly friendlier lately. It’s as though the one-year mark holds a certain weight in their eyes … almost as though they “see” me a bit more clearly.

So while I am finding it extremely hard this year to chalk up yet another Turkey Day away from those I love the most, I am thankful that life has provided loving souls in their stead. I am thankful that my new country has much to teach me still. I am thankful that I have another year of learning yet to do here, because I believe I’ve finally ‘settled’ into my site, and I believe that the cultural interchange that takes place is what makes Peace Corps special. Forget the projects for a little while, forget the goals: just talking and opening up a new space of awareness, adding new characters to your memory, letting people of another culture into your heart … that’s the deepest thing I’ll take away. Two years ago I couldn’t even envision what Peru would look like, anywhere. Now the heat, electric green rice paddies and plantain fields are my daily reality.

And the silver lining today is that, 30 days from now, si dios quiere, I’ll be waking up in my parents’ house on Christmas morning.

A Note on a Second Thanksgiving Away

2010-11-25T20:07:00.000-05:00

The Importance of Being Earnest

2010-11-01T16:27:00.001-05:00

“Continuing is everything.”

I’m reading a book right now entitled A Different Kind of Luxury: Japanese Lessons in Simple Living and Inner Abundance, written by my uncle, Andy Couturier. It contains 11 portraits of Japanese men and women living in remote mountain communities, “attempting to live sustainable, fulfilling lives”. They are presented in contrast to the tumult of modern-day Japanese corporate and consumer culture, and, more widely, to corporate and consumer culture the world over. I’ve just finished the chapter on Kogan Murata, a “bamboo flute player, storyteller, rice farmer and student of Zen”, and this Zen-inspired quote struck a chord in me. I am loving the book, so far, I think because the ideas of mindfulness, creativity, along with what really makes up that slippery term ‘sustainability’, are issues that I now face as a volunteer in Peru with the Peace Corps. Furthermore, if you crack the surface of most volunteers here, I think a lot of us would admit that part of the reason we are here is to explore the very notion of how to live a meaningful life, by viewing the lives of people in another culture with vastly different lifestyles and value systems, and by living in rural communities where we can get away from the constant, addictive connection that most of us have become accustomed to in the United States. Further, I think a lot of us, when pressed, would say that we’re also interested in the BIG question: Why are we here? What is the purpose for our lives on this planet?

In my case, I’m beginning to feel that helping other people, connecting with other people, allowing myself to break down the walls between “me” and “the other”, is something fundamental to my being … something that makes me come alive.

That said, there is a lot of unnecessary pressure in the Peace Corps that makes it easy to lose sight of some of the deeper, soulful elements of the work that we do. I’m talking, mainly, about the pressure to show concrete numbers: numbers of people whose lives we’ve changed, who have been given better access to potable water, who have shown some tangible behavioral change in regard to waste management (just to name a few of the focal points). Being the sprawling government-run organization that it is, these numbers are what keep the money coming in. These numbers are what speak to the bureaucrats in Lima and Washington who review our work. I know this.
I know, deep down, that those ‘numbers’ are well-intentioned, but my sense is that the bureaucrats have gotten a bit carried away and confused by all of it over the years. The numbers are supposed to flow from our slow-paced, well-intentioned lives in the villages and cities where we operate—they’re not supposed to direct it. Yet that’s the very aspect of Peace Corps service that I’ve found most frustrating to-date: the entire organization seems hell-bent on increasing the “numbers” of everything that we do, from activities to the number of volunteers present in-country, regardless of whether the necessary staff and other prerequisites are in place to grow effectively. Where activities are concerned, there are a multitude of “initiatives” that the Peace Corps would like us to work on (all, again, well-intentioned and important), from HIV-AIDS work to children and youth development, to technology and mass communications, to environmental management and everything that falls under the umbrella of “community health”. Yet these initiatives are piled on, and expressed in such a way that I think a lot of volunteers end up suffering from a heavy-duty case of overwhelm. As far as volunteers are concerned, Peace Corps Peru is set to almost double the number of volunteers in-country over the course of the next two years, when the truth is that the current 170-180 volunteers currently serving do not have adequate security and administration staff backing them up (as I see it).

For example, there is currently an excellent one-man security staff in Peru, who is tasked with handling all of the volunteers’ security concerns, which can be anything from petty theft to armed attacks and even, in rare cases, sexual assault. He is a wonderful human being—at once jovial and tough, an expert in his field—and he does his job as well as one man can … yet he’s just one man, and sometimes his response time is not what it should be. He cannot be everywhere at once in a country this big, and the problem will only magnify if the number of volunteers continues to grow. I’ve heard many complaints about volunteer site placement and volunteer security issues that seem to go unanswered. He needs a team.

Another example is that of the program directors—the heads of the five different program groups operating in Peru (small business, youth development, water and sanitation, health and environmental management). Quite often the only communication we volunteers get from our program directors are “check-up” emails every month or two, stressing the things they’d like for us to get done. There’s no regular back-and-forth, no mentoring, no nurturing of the process that Peace Corps supposedly espouses: relationship building, community activism, sustainable development. What’s more, those emails often take the tone of business memos, reminding the company’s employees of what’s expected of them. The simple truth, I believe, is that there are certain deeply ingrained aspects of Peruvian business culture that enforce a strict hierarchy of positions among large organizations, perhaps even more so than what you find in large US companies. If you’re in a position of authority, you’re trained to relate to those under you in a certain authoritative manner. Anything less than that is outside the realm of your experience. Accordingly, a large portion of the program directors and upper-level management are Peruvian, and I think they often view us volunteers as spoiled rich kids that are away on some extended summer camp. We are often policed and watched suspiciously, rather than treated with the respect and esteem we deserve as volunteers serving under the auspices of a humanitarian development organization. And that’s the trouble: we volunteers make up a wide range of ages, ethnicities, backgrounds, and professions, yet we’ve all come together to be a part of an organization that we think is worthwhile. We receive very little money while we’re here, often living in very basic housing conditions, and we do it because we believe in the idea of the Peace Corps, and in the idealism of the Peace Corps. Any attempt to generalize about our members is bound to distort that reality.

To be sure, there are some volunteers who do nothing to dispel the “spoiled, bad-apple” image, partying too much and just generally goofing around throughout their two years of service. Yet I believe these cases are few and far between, and do no warrant the type of hard-line managerial style that manifests itself in the organization. The rest of us are trying as hard as we can, stressing out about our language skills, how we spend the hours of each day, how we structure the meetings and workshops that we run. One of the true joys of service so far, for me, has been the chance to meet and work alongside the rest of the hard-working and incredibly determined volunteers serving in this country. Before this, I never had a real idea of the types of people who do this kind of work. Now, I count them among my friends and my mentors in this two-year journey we’re all on. There is a real spirit of camaraderie and respect. In my case, not being able to communicate very well in Spanish has been a huge hindrance, one that causes me to brow-beat myself for my inability to pick up the intricacies of Spanish a bit more quickly. Likewise, I’ve often been someone who excels at one-on-one relationships, and I communicate very effectively amongst small crowds (in English). Speaking and organizing large groups has never been my forte, and so when I attempt to do so, in Spanish, I often feel very, very inadequate. Yet I am trying, harder than I’ve ever tried at anything in my life, and one thing that would take some weight off of my shoulders would be a more supportive, proactive Peace Corps management. Some of us have been lectured several times in recent weeks about the importance of sticking to the “spirit” of the Peace Corp’s rules, when the truth is that we’ve given two years of our lives to that spirit. We all believe in the mission, otherwise we wouldn’t be here. We deserve the benefit of the doubt, I would argue, unequivocally. Peace Corps has a long and in-depth selection process for a reason—the managers ought to trust that the people who make it through, who survive the three-months of training and the lengthy vetting process that precedes it, are a good bunch. If they do not trust that the selection process brings in only the finest volunteers, then they ought to make changes at the source.

So. “Continuing is everything” is a good message to hear, with “everything” being the active word: continuing is not just the most important or integral part of our service here—it is the only part, the only thing that should occupy your mind. Continuing, in my own way, is all I should concern myself with. Waking up, trying to start each day aware of how special this opportunity is, and going about my activities in an earnest and open-hearted fashion … that’s it. That’s the whole of it.

And so I’ll “continue to continue”, as that old Simon and Garfunkel song goes, in the hopes that as time goes by, as I near and then pass my one-year anniversary in my site, I’ll gradually live my way into an effective service here. I have indeed been making progress, albeit slowly, and I believe I’ve been getting better at treating myself more fairly: no more self-criticism when things don’t happen and when people don’t show up for meetings or events. From here, I just want to constantly ask myself: How can I live in a more earnest fashion here? As this new year in Peru approaches, I want to continue to do art projects with the children and teens in my town—that’s a lot of fun for me, and I believe it will give those kids lasting memories of my time with them, along with some fun moments (I hope). I want to continue trying to organize a sustainable trash-management system in my town, and, if all goes well, extend the system to cover the three closest neighboring towns as well. At present, that system is not operating very effectively, but hey, there is a trash truck coming once a week (usually), and that didn’t used to be the case. Likewise, there are about 10 women who give their time to walk around each week picking up other people’s trash and doing what they can to get rid of the waste that contaminates their families’ food and drinking water. I keep stumbling through various reincarnations of our trash management program, and the same 10 women keep sticking by my side. My hope is that one of my efforts will bear fruit, even if it takes me the whole of my two years of service. But above all else, I want to continue learning from the people here, learning about what makes their lives tick, learning patience and respect for worldviews that are different than mine. That’s a very valuable aspect of Peace Corps service, as I see it, and one which trains the lot of us to be thoughtful, valuable members of US society when we return home.

In closing, I would just like to clarify that I do not mean this as an attack or a put-down of Peace Corps’ worldwide efforts (since I have no idea how much any of this translates to other countries), or of Peace Corps Peru. In writing this, I’m trying to give voice to my belief that constructive criticism on the part of an organization’s members is the most valuable tool that an organization has in order to grow and improve its services. My worry, of late, has been that Peace Corps Peru is growing too big to self-correct, too big to listen to its members, too big to adapt to this present moment in the dynamic ways that would make its mission more effective. I believe it is my duty, as a current volunteer, to do what I can to see that the whole is as earnest—and considerate—as the sum of its parts.

Nearly A Year In Site

2010-10-17T13:34:00.004-05:00

It’s been a really long time since I’ve written anything, and I apologize for that— this is actually a mass email I'm sending out to my friends and loved ones, but I thought it could double as an "update" blog post as well. I'd like to write much more frequently in the coming months and on into the new year.

Essentially, I find myself trying to process the fact that, when Thanksgiving rolls around this year, I will have been in my site for one year. This fact, coupled with how quickly the past few months have passed, is causing me to really examine how I’m spending my time and to think about what I want to get done in the year to come. I arrived in my site on Nov. 22nd last year, and I find myself viewing this coming November 22nd the same way I typically view New Years Eve—a momentous mark on the calendar, a closing of a chapter, the opening of a new one. I find myself sitting in my room at night sometimes, staring at the wall and thinking about changes I want to make in my behavior (like, “run more”, or “start studying Spanish in the evenings”), as if I were compiling some sort of mental list of resolutions. The Peace Corps, for a long time, was just an idea to me, an ideal even, and then when it finally happened it took so long to get used to the reality of it that I feel like I’ve only just recently settled into my own skin. Don’t get me wrong: I wouldn’t trade the past year for anything, for I’ve learned a great deal about myself and my fortitude, but I recognize that I’ve been struggling for clarity and confidence the whole way.
Yet something has changed in recent months, little by little, and I now find myself feeling much more centered and motivated to start projects and have fun in the time that I have here. Part of what has done it, I believe, is a certain melding of my worlds. I went home in June to see two of my best friends get married (to each other), and then I spent a wonderful week at the beach with my family and my girlfriend. A few months later, my girlfriend came down here for a visit, and we traveled up and down the coast, from Lima to Tumbes and back down to Lima, stopping at the beach, then at my site, with a few other stops along the way. The trip home, in many ways, helped me to realize that everyone’s O.K. back in the States, that I’m still a part of people’s lives, and that all the familiar places are still there, waiting for me. It charged my batteries, to a certain extent, and soothed the ache of separation I’d been feeling since I left in 2009. Yet Amanda’s trip was what really helped me to unite the world and the life I live here with the world and the life that continues in the U.S. Somehow, showing my daily environs—and the people in it—to her helped me realize that although the two worlds are vastly different, the things that happen when they come together are very special: the relationships that are forged, the struggle to communicate, the memories that are generated. In the weeks that have followed Amanda’s departure from Peru, I’ve listened to my host siblings and my host parents recount their own little stories of things they remember about her visit, as though they were polishing a very rare event in their minds, making sure it is clean and clear and speaks truthfully of the time that passed. It is not often that one, let alone two Americans come to this sleepy little town, and it’s not an even they’ll soon forget.

In many ways, seeing the ripple effect of Amanda’s three-day stay in my site has made me realize that my stay here will have more of an effect on people than I yet realize. Aside from the pressure that I put on myself to “improve the quality of life” here, aside from the pressure that my bosses put on me to show tangible results, the important human interactions—the intangibles—remain.
Here are some intangibles, of late, that have stuck with me … moments that I will never forget, and which, I hope, will make a lasting imprint on the people I’ve been with.

1.) I spent last Thursday night painting a bright red border around a huge world map mural on the wall of the local school. The map is the first project undertaken by a youth art club I started a few weeks ago, and it’s been a blast getting to hang out with the 10 or 12 kids that regularly show up for classes. We meet for a few hours every Wednesday and Thursday afternoon to work on the map, listen to music and goof around. Generally, about half the time is spent throwing Frisbee, and roughly 6 or 7 of the kids actually ‘work’ while the others use the time as a sort of after school social club. I put music on—sometimes American, but usually Peruvian cumbia music or any random Spanish-language songs I can find on my iPod—and we get to work. This past Thursday one of the wildest teens in the bunch, Juan, asked me if I have that song that goes, “Yoooou’re not gunna tek it.” Laughing, I immediately went over the iPod, scrolled through the hundreds of artists, and found, luckily, that I do indeed have Twisted Sister stored among the thousands of songs that I never listen to. That afternoon, we listened to “We’re Not Gonna Take It” about 30 times (consecutively), while Juan did his best to sing along with the English lyrics. I started singing with him, and the resultant ‘harmony’ made everybody laugh so hard that Twisted Sister is probably going to the most-requested artist on our club’s playlist from here on out.

2.) Throwing baseball at night before dinner with my 9-year old host brother, Helson, and Kevin, one of Helson’s best friends. The sound of the ball thwacking into my glove, the motion of winding up and throwing (hard-wired into my body from all those fall afternoons spent at Little League practice), and the time of year all have me feeling a pleasant nostalgia for a more carefree time when I was Helson and Kevin’s age, just learning to throw baseball correctly for the first time myself. Doing this, night after night, often until it gets so dark we can barely make out the white ball in flight, has made me miss my Dad, my brother, and my childhood. This transport, and all the mental and physical associations that come along with it, is something I hold dear right now.

3.) Last night the lights went out, a common occurrence here, and I spent three hours at the kitchen table with my entire host family, talking about U.S. culture, the places I’ve traveled, and leafing through a LIFE photography book entitled “The World’s Must-See Places—Heaven on Earth”, which Amanda brought down during her visit. They were happy that Macchu Pichu had made the cut, excited to see the nearby Galapagos Islands listed, and amazed by the site of Hong Kong, shot at night, with billions of little lights shining from foreground to background, reflecting off of the water and just generally conveying the sheer quantity of people living in that far off metropolis. A picture of Paris caused my host dad, Genry, to pause in wonder for a few minutes, while a winding road through Tuscany caught the eye of my host mother, Esther. Keren, my younger sister, seemed to love the site of the peaked rooftops of Kyoto, while Helson marveled at a shot of a climber poised atop a peak called Mont Blanc, high in the Alps. The lights soon came back on and the family scattered to their different pursuits, but for those two hours we were all transported by pictures of the marvels of this world, transfixed by wanderlust.
And I think I’ll stop there. I could go on and on with these special moments that have given me pause of late—moments where life’s richness seems to finally make its way through my often dulled senses, awakening a joy that any of this is happening at all.

I think one truth of life is that sometimes our senses do become dulled by the forces of routine and stress and overload, but these bright moments that break through the clouds wake us up and give us pause, give us perspective, and remind us to celebrate the small stuff.

I hope that you all are having a wonderful fall, and that life is bringing you some rich, sacred moments amidst the hustle and bustle.

Uphill

2010-07-20T15:54:00.002-05:00

I’ve been reading a fair amount of poetry lately, which is not a normal thing for me. Normally, poetry doesn’t stir me … I typically can’t make myself stay focused on the long, lyrical ones, such as “Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner,” and some of the shorter stuff either seems trite, to me, or simply lackluster. I’ve always been a big fan of novels, and of fiction that reels out a web of character and plot and gives you some meaty question about humanity to chew on. Maybe, however, I just wasn’t old enough or versed enough in the ways of this world to appreciate good poetry before.

My Dad lent me a very special copy of a poetry anthology while I was visiting the US in June, and the significance and history of the book have made me want to give my poetic ignorance a little more attention. The book, called “Other Men’s Flowers”, compiled by A.P. Wavell, is accessible in a way that I haven’t experienced before: organized by topics, such as “Love”, or “Music, Mystery and Magic”, or “The Call of the Wild”. Having these classifiers, I think, has given me an inroad that allows me to dip into the book based on whatever mood I’m feeling, stopping at titles that strike my eye. Also, the book used to belong to my Dad’s father—my grandfather—whom I never knew. The inside cover bears his signature, in pen, and there are comments throughout the pages, in pen and pencil, which could belong to my father or my grandfather. I don’t think I really want to know. I just know that I want to add my comments—I want to be a third generation of words in the yellowed pages of this hardcover tome.

Here are two that have struck me lately, perhaps because I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how tough this Peace Corps road has been, the whole way, and about how to think about my actions for the rest of my service. Courage, and Kindness, and the certainty of shelter from the storm—and friends to help guide the way—are some of the things that I believe in, and which these two poems seem to champion:

Man’s Testament

Adam Lindsay Gordon

Question not, but live and labour,
Till yon goal be won,
Helping every feeble neighbor,
Seeking help from none;
Life is mostly froth and bubble,
Two things stand like stone,
Kindness in another’s trouble,
Courage in your own.

---

Uphill
Christina Rossetti

Does the road wind uphill all the way?
Yes, to the very end.
Will the day’s journey take the whole long day?
From morn to night, my friend.

But is there for the night a resting-place?
A roof for when the slow, dark hours begin.
May not the darkness hide it from my face?
You cannot miss that inn.

Shall I meet other wayfarers at night?
Those who have gone before.
Then must I knock, or call when just in sight?
They will not keep you waiting at that door.

Shall I find comfort, travel-sore and weak?
Of labour you shall find the sum.
Will there be beds for me and all who seek?
Yea, beds for all who come.

---

I think I’ve been reading so much poetry because my head is trying to chart a new course in my Peace Corps service, and to redefine the way I look at my days here.

I suppose, when I let myself think rightly, I know that this experience is finite and passing. The days pass and the months rack up, and sooner or later it will all be finished.

Yet it’s easy to lose sight of this. Sometimes it feels like life has changed so drastically that it might never get back to that old normal of the American way of life. Like I said—clearly that’s not the case, but things are just so different here … and maybe on some level I’m curious about what life would look like if things didn’t ever return to that normal.

That’s the interesting part about this. Although it’s hard to be away from family, hard to be away from friends, hard to get used to the lack of physical comforts … there’s a certain pride when you DO persist, month after month, in being away from them. There’s a certain sense of accomplishment. I’ve begun to realize just how variable experience is, and just how different your life outlook becomes when you take yourself out of one culture, out of one socio-economic structure, and plunk yourself down into another set of experiences that are vastly different from the first.

What I’ve been faced with recently, I suppose, is how to make sense of the block of time that I have remaining. I’ve been in Peru now for almost 11 months, and I’ve been fighting the feeling that I have “nothing to show for it. This is, of course, wrong-headed, but I’m just trying to be honest about the stream of thoughts that’s going on upstairs. After all, I don’t have a lot of things going on at the moment. I have a couple of short projects, and several starts and stalls, but nothing still going on.

I taught English for several months during the kids’ vacation period. I’ve been trying to start up a trash program for months on end, with a ton of setbacks threatening to halt the whole thing. I’ve attended a lot of meetings regarding the AIDS awareness work that some other volunteers are doing in neighboring towns. I did a community diagnostic project at the beginning that allowed me to interview and get to know about 50 different families.

From here, according to Peace Corps, I’m supposed to harness all of the information I’ve culled together, all of the contacts I’ve made, and all the trust I’ve gained in town in order to improve the town’s access to potable water and trash collection services. I’m supposed to petition for grant funding from several sources that the Peace Corps connects us with. This seems a rather daunting process to me at present. I can’t get five people from town to meet for a trash committee on a regular basis, but I’m supposed to harness their ideas to write a project plan and a grant proposal by mid-August. I’ll do it, I know that, but it’s giving me a lump in my throat. If I do this project well, it will be the cornerstone of my service, and it has the potential to really improve the health situation in town. That’s where the lump comes from: I want it to work. I don’t just want some project that looks good on paper, works for a while, and then falls short when my time here runs out (as many of these types of trash-management projects do). There’s a town nearby that hosted a Peace Corps volunteers a few years ago, did a trash project with small micro-landfills in the peoples’ backyards, and right now there’s virtually no evidence that Peace Corps was ever there. I’m not saying that to downplay that volunteer’s service at all—I’m just saying that the prospect of that type of transient impact is scary.

It means, to my mind, that I should re-double my efforts for the trash project to focus on behavior change and small, finite steps toward the final goal, rather than trying to tackle it all in one go. If I can change 30 families habits, cleaning up one section of town, that’s a success that will last.

But more than that, I also think that it means I ought to focus on the present, on individual experiences and positive interactions, and not get so caught up in the big-picture “what’s my service going to look like” questions.

Sitting outside tonight, looking at the glow of the street lamps in the dark black night, I listened to the dogs bark down the street, posturing at each other, snarling, playing; I listened to the quiet murmur of my host Mom and her sister in law discussing their kids, other women on the street, gossip of all stripes; I listened to the sporadic honking of moto-taxis chattering down the dirt road in front of the house; I heard the cry of the toddler next door. All of it’s so familiar these days that I hardly stop to think about the new world I’ve come to feel comfortable in. At times, on quiet nights, I compare sitting on the porch here to sitting on the porch at my parents’ house back in Pennsylvania, and I get sharp pangs of homesickness. I remember being more relaxed, generally, on that porch in Pennsylvania, while I’m less so here. Here, I think, I let myself get too stressed about what I SHOULD be doing, and as a result I don’t always let the impact of what I AM doing sink in. People accept me here now. I’m a part of their days, and an actor in town. Though I’m somewhat of an oddity still, I’m a known oddity. Years from now, most of them will still be living here, walking the same ruts in the earth, leading a different generation of cows and goats in from their farms, and I will be elsewhere—an elsewhere that I can imagine a big better than they can.
But why imagine it? Why not just let it be, having faith, or trust, in the ability of the present to work out my future? I’ve been spending so much time wondering and extrapolating what COULD happen down the line that I feel more than a little bit guilty. I’ll never do anything like this again, and I want to cherish it in whatever small ways I can find.

So I have decided to make a renewed effort here. A renewed effort to live each day with purpose. To wake up just a bit earlier, to keep a schedule with the varied network of community leaders I’ve come in contact with, and to write out step-by-step plans for the projects that I think will improve the quality of life here. I also want to do some small projects that I’ll enjoy … like a community art and environment club (I just got $450 in grant funding for that!) … like a household composting bin/small vegetable garden … like a world-map project to teach the kids some geography. There’s a certain initiative I haven’t taken to date because I’ve been up to my eyeballs in culture shifts, language difficulties, and unhelpful community partners. Others in Peace Corps came to their sites and replaced old volunteers, inheriting a network of counterparts and projects that they could fall into. Others just lucked into sites where there was an NGO already working, or a health post with particularly strong leaders. I have none of that here in Oidor. What I have is a community that’s never been helped much by anybody, and which has come to distrust people who say they’re going to bring change. I’m determined not to let them place me in that category.

Earlier in the evening I was running, doing repeats up this somewhat steep hill outside of town. I was actually enjoying the effort involved, the exertion, the inherent thrill in conquering a slope, any slope. And I thought about the existentialist ideals that I first learned in English class in 12th grade (thank you Mr. Skinner)—about the myth of Sisyphus and his constant struggle to push that boulder up that hill. I liked the myth, and always have, but for very basic reasons: there’s something noble about the struggle, about gritting your teeth and continuing, through boredom, failure, lack of progress ... there’s something human in the idea that the struggle, any struggle, is not just worth it in order to reach some finite end, but inherently the struggle IS the end. The struggle, and how we comport ourselves during it, defines us.

Up until now, I’ve been in the arena of this service experience, but I’ve been sort of taking rests in the stands whenever things start to look tough. If the credit belongs to those who are in the arena, who are giving it their all day in and day out … then I think I’m ready to make a more concerted effort. I think I’m ready, now that I know I have friends in the Peace Corps here in Tumbes who are rooting for me and wishing me well. Now that I know I have other volunteer friends spread across the country. That support, I suppose, makes me realize that I’m not a solitary figure with shoulder bent to the rock … I’m one of a hearty team. Here in Oidor, where so many days look the same, where the people pass such listless hours, I want to practice a new type of discipline—not because I think I’ll someday get that rock onto the summit, but more so because my efforts, in themselves, might speak the words that I still haven’t learned how to say in this foreign tongue.

something a little closer to the bone ...

2010-07-18T02:00:00.002-05:00

If you have built castles in the air,
Your work need not be lost—
That is where they should be.
Now put foundations under them.
- Henry Thoreau

When I’m ‘on’, there’s a certain thread running through all of my days, making me feel as though the world’s a place with a good breeze and a lot of valid chances … I feel strong and confident, running on a certain faith that the things I believe in most—the importance of staying open and receptive to new cultures and ways of life, the soul-liberating nature of travel, the all-important value of interpersonal communication and service—will be affirmed for me somewhere out along that distant horizon where the castles I’ve built way up high in the air await the completion of the foundations I toil over day after day.

When I’m ‘on’, It feels as though I’m riding the coattails of some benevolent giant, in a way, hanging on for dear life to a sweet, sweet feeling that threatens to outstrip me if I don’t let the choke off of my exuberance. I’m not sure how other people think about exuberance, but I’ve come to view it as the most valuable form of expression we humans have. Pure, unbridled joy is a blazing and beautiful thing, and so rarely expressed in this world. Yet when it comes, it inspires crowds. It inspires action. It inspires hope and changes for the better. That giant with the long coattails isn’t trying to leave us behind, after all … he’s just trying to show us the speed it takes to catch our dreams.

That’s me, though: that’s what I conceptualize on the inside where I don’t usually let people look. Maybe I read Roald Dahl’s “Big Friendly Giant” too many times as a kid, who knows. But I like viewing exuberance through the lens of giant steps, where all of us are hurtling along in a land of magical realism, and if we’re lucky, we’re sharing our ‘oohs’ and ‘ahhs’ with as many our fellow travelers along the way.

You, undoubtedly, have your own frame of reference for life’s goodness, and only you know how it feels inside when things are flowing and you can maybe—just maybe—make out the contours of the road ahead and the things you’re meant to do.

Yet the truth of life is that we’re not always ‘on’, as all of us have come to figure out in our own separate ways. Jobs get old or lose their sparkle, people disappoint us, or maybe we just feel alone in a place far from home. Whatever it is, I think all of us experience times where it’s difficult to shift gears … difficult to find the velocity to be adventurous.

I worked part-time on an adult psychiatric ward for several months the summer before I came here, and things have been so crazy this year with all of the ‘change’ that Peace Corps involves that I’ve hardly had time to process the experience. Yet lately some of the more vivid memories started creeping back into my skull. Some of the patients were so far out that it was hard to really get a read on what was troubling them. With no training or prior psychiatric experience, those were the times when I felt like I was in over my head … those were the times I wondered why I’d been drawn there in the first place. But then there was something magnetic about it at the same time that I couldn’t deny, and which kept me up at night: all of that emotion and pain felt more real to me, sometimes, then the masks and fakery you sometimes experience in the America of offices and suits and 401k statements. Out there, sometimes, it felt miserably lonely. Too many people believing that tears and laughter were unacceptable forms of expression in a world with such serious problems to solve. I, however, feel that the world’s problems are such that they’ll never be solved unless people recognize the value of sharing … on all levels, from resources to feelings. So the psych ward was a change of pace, I guess you could call it. A world of stories and lives halted in mid-step, and a chance to connect and learn from all of them, and maybe, maybe, help somebody just a little. Although there were more tears than laughter, it was something, at least.

There were recent college grads, mid-twenties people who had just lost their jobs, late-50s men whose wives had left them, and all of their stories were sad and troublesome. I could tell, with a few of them, that they’d lost the thread of whatever it was that had held their days together, and they were struggling to rediscover their reason for going on. They remembered what it felt like to catch the coattails of some benevolent giant of happiness, and they cried for the loss of that feeling. They needed a place to rest, a place to reassess, and a place where people—even if we were paid to do it—would sit down, look them in the eyes, and listen to the swirling thoughts inside their skulls. It was powerful, and it was instructive. It made me think hard about the choices I was making, the choices I’d already made, the people in my life … the whole shebang. It made me re-analyze my decision to join the Peace Corps, and I came away from that summer believing in the spirit behind this thing we’re all doing even more than I had before: in a country like America that makes it so easy for its young people to feel like cogs in a wheel, institutions like the Peace Corps that encourage searching and community and cultural sensitivity are essential.

So the summer ran out, I flew to Peru, and I found myself thrown into a fog of culture change and language differences and homesickness and general emotional malaise that I think I’m only just now getting a handle on, 10 months later. To say that I “lost” that thread would be understatement: I’ve never cried so much in my life as I have in this country, nor have I ever had so many listless days where even the bright, hot sun of Tumbes couldn’t cut through the shades of gray.

But I’m beginning to feel my speed pick up again, here in this little Northern Peruvian town surrounded by banana and plantain trees. I’m beginning to remember the playfulness in my heart, and I’m finding that laughter has replaced crying as my dominant expression of emotion. What did it, finally, was communion with others … what did it was a small group of other volunteers, their willingness to share of themselves and the wisdom gleaned from their walks through life, and their time. Where before it felt like I had put life on hold back in the US in order to come here, now it feels like my life is clipping along at an insane pace, and I have a cast of characters around me, spread out from north to south throughout this eclectic countryside, all of whom need communion, too, in order to puff up their sails and give flight to their exuberance.

As I traversed up and down the Peruvian coast and back to America for my first return visit in June, I found that in each place I visited, be it Chaclacayo, Lima, Pennsylvania, the Delaware shore, Washington, or Pacasmayo, I encountered friends. I encountered people willing to sit down and make eye contact. Willing to tell stories. Willing to give of themselves. I spent a day and a night with my old host family from training, and was overjoyed to find that our connection still remains and their lives are full and happy. I spent a day and a night with the new class of volunteers—here’s to you Peru 15, welcome—and I got a bit emotional watching all of their faces and hearing the uncertainty and expectancy in their questions. I went for a run through the streets of Chaclacayo early one morning and realized on some guttural level just how far I’ve come in six short months since our training period ended. And then I went home to Pennsylvania, and I sang and danced and talked the days away in a flurry of exuberant motion. And then I returned to Peru, half expecting to feel pain and heartbreak upon my arrival. Instead, I felt a surge of hope. A friend called to make sure I was ok, and within 24 hours I was surrounded by a merry crowd of volunteers, some of whom I already feel a very close kinship with. I realized that I have community here, and I have connections that inspire me and make me want to live life hanging on the coattails of that elusive zeal that touches us all on our sunniest days. Friends who make me laugh and feel joyful. Other volunteers whose direct and confident pursuit of good works in their sites buoys my faith in humanity.

A favorite author of mine, the late David Foster Wallace, wrote this about personal freedom and communion with others, about service and the authentic display of emotion:

“There are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying. The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the ‘rat race’ - the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.”

None of us feels ‘on’ all the time. That’s not how life works. But I wanted to write this article for all of us volunteers—all of us—who are here, each of us striving in our own ways to put our best-selves forward, to do our best for our new families and the families in our new homes. America is a big place, with a lot of big problems …. yet the freedom it has afforded us, the freedom to choose this walk and to choose to serve others in whatever ways we can find—that’s a strong weight on the positive side of the scales. I wanted, initially, to write some sketches here about a few people in my site who have inspired me to action, or given of themselves, or taught me some vital truth about Peruvian life. But this came out instead.

I believe sometimes we all forget just how important the little bits and pieces of experience are that make our connections last. Maybe you stop to play a game in the dirt outside your house with a small Peruvian kid, just ‘cause it reminds you what it was like to be that young, to see the world through more innocent eyes. Maybe you linger longer over dinner with your host family, because something tells you that your presence is warmly welcomed. Maybe you go home to visit family after a long time away and it hits you, harder than it ever has before, just how incredibly blessed you really are to call these people ‘yours’ … to be amidst such kind souls.

Sometimes, I believe, we all need to focus on the basics for a while until that old familiar joi de vivre comes back into focus. And when it does, maybe we just need to grab hold for dear life, keeping in mind as we’re whisked away that the people in our worlds need our attention, our awareness, our discipline, our effort. What else are we here for?

Pilgrim's Progress

2010-03-28T12:44:00.010-05:00

Kris Kristofferson put out a brand new album recently, “Closer to the Bone,” and listening to it today for the first time filled me with layers of emotion the likes of which I haven’t felt in a long time.

I’ve had an unyielding enthusiasm for Kris Kristofferson’s music ever since his album “This Old Road” came out in 2006. That album, made up mainly of spare guitar licks and Kris’s gravelly, wizened voice, was chock-full of anti-war ballads, songs about life on the road as a musician, songs about redemption, and words of optimism for Americans growing up in our time.

When I first heard it, I had just graduated from college and was about to start my first job—and I was freaked out. On a personal level, the job I was taking was convenient more than anything else, and I think that maybe a part of me could already feel that I was taking the easy road rather than the idealistic one. On a national level, our country was looking more troubled than it ever had in my lifetime, six years into the most destructive presidency our country has ever suffered through. In both those contexts, it felt good to hear an old man sing about hope and the ‘good fight’ … it felt like I had found some type of grizzled mentor coming to me through the stereo’s speakers.

In a song entitled “Pilgrim’s Progress”, he sings of a determined, optimistic struggle for personal development and social justice that still puts a wind in my sails every time I hear it:

“Am I young enough to believe in revolution?
Am I strong enough to get down on my knees and pray?
And am I high enough, on the chain of evolution,
To respect myself and my brother and my sister,
And perfect myself in my own peculiar way?”

I could go on and on about how that album affected me throughout that year and the years that have followed, but I’ll spare you all. From that point on, I scanned the web for articles about Kris’s life, I scanned the racks of my local Borders for his older albums, I looked up the work of the other classic country artists he alludes to in his songs, and I just generally immersed myself in his music. It was a rabbit hole filled with long and meandering side tracks, but the musical journey it began continues to be the most fulfilling that I’ve ever experienced.

Kris’s music vaulted me into a love-affair with the lilting voice of Willy Nelson, gave me a newfound respect for Johnny Cash, introduced me to the likes of Waylon Jennings, Steve Earle, and Ray Price, and rekindled my affection for the timeless crooning of Emmylou Harris. Kris, Willy, Waylon, Johnny, and Ray were part of something called “Rebel Country” back in their day—a gritty mix of country stars singing about more than their women leaving, a lost job, or their dog dying: they were putting out inspired ballads about social problems in America and abroad, and they were putting out a type of country music that was much more complicated, rhythmic, and romantic than anything at the time.

Now, four years after I first heard Kris’s music, his new album feels like revisiting an old friend—one who has shepherded me through both good times and bad and helped to mold me into a more experienced, tougher, and hopefully wiser version of myself than I was when Kris and I first met.

In 2010, unlike 2006, I now find myself pursuing a path that is pushing the envelope of my abilities and teaching me just how hard it is to follow your idealism. The Peace Corps in Peru has been challenging through each of the almost seven months I’ve been here thus far—and it has been nothing like I expected it to be. I expected the language-learning process to be easy, when it fact it has been incredibly difficult. I expected the projects in my new hometown to fall, ready-made, into my hands—and they haven’t. I expected to fall in love with Peruvian culture, but at times it has been almost impossible to veil my distaste for some of the practices in my community. But you know what? If any of it had been the way I had expected it to be, it would have been a vacation, rather than the profound growth opportunity it has turned out to be.

As I sit here listening to Kris again, he’s still the same hopeful older crooner. He’s still laying down lyrics about love and optimism, yet he’s somehow found new and upbeat ways of getting into my head. And his new songs are filling me with a much-needed dose of inspiration.

On the second track, entitled “From Here to Forever,” that familiar low-register, wavering voice states, “Here’s one I wrote for my kids”, and what follows is a lullaby that any kid, young or old, could probably use on tough nights:

“Cool shadows fall through the moonlight,
Soft as the breeze through your hair.
And the smile on your face while your sleeping,
Is the answer to anyone’s prayer.
Fill your heart for the morning tomorrow—
You still got a long way to grow.
And the love that you’re dreamin’ will guide you,
And live like a song in your soul.

And darlin’ if we’re not together,
There’s one thing I want you to know:
I’ll love you from here to forever,
And be there wherever you go.

There are so many feelings to follow.
So many chances to take.
So many ways you can stumble.
Some day your heart’s gonna break.

Darlin’ take all the time that you’re given.
Be all you know you can be.
And if you need a reason for livin’,
Do it for love and for me.

And darlin’ if we’re not together,
There’s one thing I want you to know:
I’ll love you from here to forever,
And be there wherever you go.
I will love you from here to forever,
And be there wherever you go.”

I consider myself an out-and-out optimist, a dreamer, and a shamelessly sappy romantic. Yet, as everyone knows, life hits you in the gut from time to time and it’s hard to go from day to day feeling the type of full-throated enthusiasm you know you’re capable of. Lately I’ve been feeling as though I’m coasting through my days, lacking the mental clarity and discipline that I typically rely on. Lost in a foreign context, I get frustrated with my inability to communicate and I feel sometimes as though I’ll never learn Spanish. And, with the woman I love living back in the US, I have days where I begin to wonder why I can’t just throw in the towel and go home to her. I know that sounds a bit bleak … but hey, I’m just trying to be honest: it’s hard to chase your dreams, it’s hard to be away from family, and it’s painfully difficult to be far away from a good love.

But lately I’ve been feeling a familiar wind in my sails when everything out on this ocean felt still and silent. I’ve been feeling a stirring in my gut telling me that it’s ok to hurt, to moan, to grieve the loss of a former life—but at some point you have to point your head up and live with purpose. I watched the movie “Crazy Heart” recently, and the main character, Bad Blake, inspired me. He reminded me a lot of Kris Kristofferson, and I heard somewhere that the actor who played him, Jeff Bridges, actually based his acting on some of Kris’s style and mannerisms. Blake is deeply flawed, he struggles and stumbles and makes mistakes, but in the end he finds a depth of hope and creativity at his core that enables him to rise up.

In the title track, he sings “This aint no place for the weary kind, so pick up your crazy heart and give it one more try.”

Not a bad sentiment to take us barreling into Spring, eh?

So while I know this has been a bit long and meandering, I guess I just wanted to flesh out some of these ideas here, and to say that if anyone else out there is feelin’ stressed or worn out or just plain low, at some point a fresh wind will come along … it always does. We’re all pilgrims, of a sort, in our own personal journeys, yet as much as we can I think we’ve got to remember that each of us are here to support each other, to lift each other’s spirits, and to love one another. It’s inevitable that life’s gonna hand us all some hard times, but it’s how we persist through those struggles that really matters. I see a whole different class of hardship here than anything I’ve ever seen before, and I hope with all of my heart that I can summon the guts to combat it.

So be well, be happy, keep dreaming, and don’t let that old, ugly cynicism creep up on the love you’ve got inside you.

“And the love that you’re dreamin’ will guide you—
And live like a song in your soul.”

Amen.

"And The World Spins Madly On"

2010-02-07T15:03:00.002-05:00

Well it’s the last day in January as I write this, and I’ve been in Peru for almost five months now. It’s been a ‘full’ process, to date: I’ve struggled a lot, to say the least, but I think I’ve finally begun to find my stride. I teach English classes four days a week, with four separate groups—two groups of little kids, one group of teens and a group of adults—and on Fridays and Saturdays I usually go out and do interviews in my community as part of a ‘community diagnostic’ that the Peace Corps asks volunteers to do during their first three months of service. I’ve done over 30 interviews now, and in addition to helping me find out about the health and sanitation issues in the town, it’s also been a great way to meet people ... to see their houses, to understand the layout of the streets, and to learn the ‘factions’ that exist here (as I imagine they do in all small towns). I think that getting out more has allowed me to feel more like a volunteer, finally, to feel useful and, by extension, more enthusiastic.

And now that I’m a bit more settled, I’m beginning to wrestle with the ‘how’ of this whole experience—how to approach these two years in a meaningful way.

"Don't ask yourself what the world needs; ask yourself what makes you come alive. And then go and do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive."

- Howard Thurman

My older brother Graham sent me that quote in an email a little over a week ago, and it’s been rattling around in my head ever since. It gets at the crux of life’s central conceit, I think, and one of the things which has flummoxed me up to this point: what can I do with myself that will make me feel vibrant and alive?
Too often I think I’ve been guided by the impulse to “ask myself what the world needs,” only to find that, of course, that question is too damned big and too damned overwhelming to come at from that perspective.

Now that I’m Peru, actually doing this Peace Corps thing that was just a concept in my head for so long, I find myself upset, quite a lot, about the way the organization is run and miffed as to why there’s not more organizational clarity and project management. Yet I’m beginning to realize that, for all it’s failings, the Peace Corps remains a wonderful ‘idea’, a wonderful concept, a wonderful chance to learn about another culture. And I’m trying as hard as possible to move toward a more productive sense of community development on my own terms … because that’s what it’s really all about. Sure, I would have more support if the Peace Corps were managed more effectively, but it’s not, and a person has to accept reality, right?

What’s more, there are plenty of “Type-A” personalities in the Peace Corps here in Peru, doing wonderful work—they’re incredibly self-motivated and ever-energetic, but I, unfortunately, am not one of them. I prefer one-on-one conversations, small groups, quiet spaces. In his email to me, Graham offered up the idea that we can’t all be those “cheerleader” types … we can’t all be “on” all the time, and instead of trying to force myself to fit some pre-determined mold, maybe I ought to focus on the things that make me “come alive”. In other words: care for myself first, care for my enthusiasms and my passions, first, with the understanding that my heart is in the right place in this venture and good things will flow forth during my service if I can just keep myself enthusiastic and motivated.

So the follow-through, I suppose, is self-care, and it’s been doing me good. I’ve developed a ‘quiet time’ for myself—apart from the neighbors and my noisy family—when I’m out on the road running. Now I actually look forward to my evening runs, and I get to catch more sunsets than I ever did before I started. I’ve also spent long afternoons and late nights reading in my tiny little room, roaming from book to book, with the knowledge that my mind, for some reason, needs these imagined worlds and stories to stay creative and passionate about the world we live in. They’re a guide, in a way, that gets me to thinking about the past, dreaming about the future, and ruminating on the present. Meditation and prayer, I think, are two more things that could ease the pain of being away from home, and maybe allow me to remain more ‘present’ in my days.

The fruit of this presence, I think, is that on good days I’m able to enjoy the odd moments that happen here, the funny bits of time, the weird Spanish turns of phrase, the totally beyond-belief health ideas. I was interviewing a woman this past weekend as part of a community diagnostic I’m doing, for example, and when it came to my question about “who was the last person to get sick in your household and what were the symptoms?”, the woman responded that her little boy, about 2, currently has the flu, which he contracted from eating a piece of watermelon that was “too cold”. I shit you not. For Peruvians, cold beverages, any type of severe temperature change, and, apparently, cold fruit, can all cause severe throat problems and bring on raging cases of the flu. I’m working on understanding, I really am.

Other experiences are just flat out funny: I was interviewing another guy, right after that woman, and he was ticking off joke after joke, laying there in his hammock, shirtless, round belly bulging, laughing his ass off. It took us about 10 minutes to start the interview in earnest, because he kept making little quips to my counterpart and me, and then breaking out into peals of laughter. This guy was so jovial and so clearly happy that I couldn’t help feeding off his good humor. When I asked him his occupation (though I already knew he drove a taxi back and forth to the city every day), he told me he was an engineer—a profession that’s virtually unheard of out here in the campo. When I asked him what he grew on his farm, he listed the usual staples and then added ‘dos hectares de cocaína’, just to see if I was paying attention. He then proceeded to lace his responses with so many sexual innuendos and quips about his ‘woman’ that my interview, which normally takes about 20 minutes, took about double the time. His responses were all delivered with such gaiety that I walked away grinning. He was my kind of guy: bawdy and alive, and quick with a joke.

The following day, in contrast, was a particularly good day for slowness, as the one and only interview I did took over an hour, and the woman I met sat on her front porch and regaled me with stories about how Oidor used to be when she was a girl, about all the Catholic religious holidays that are celebrated, about which customs have died off over the years and which have remained, and also about her feelings on various health and sanitation issues we have in town. She was expansive and alert, whereas some of the people I’ve interviewed just seem listless and uninterested. I walked away from my meeting with this woman feeling like I’d made a friend, and feeling like I’d gotten a small window into her memories and aspirations. I realize not all interactions can be like that, but I savored that one for the rest of the day.

In short, I think maybe I’m learning to listen harder, to sit and let conversations flow, and to smile more broadly in an effort to communicate to people that I really just want their friendship and their ideas about how to improve life here in our town. I still have dark and down days with some frequency, but the good ones are getting all the better the more I strip away the “shoulds” and the idea that I need to be following some kind of script for a productive Peace Corps service. No two services are alike, and I know that I need to find the practices and people that will help me come alive, here, because that’s got to be the starting point.

I realize this has been one of the longer posts I’ve put up, and perhaps a little more ‘intimate’, but I guess I just wanted to accurately and fully communicate with you all, you know? I miss everyone, immensely, and I’m looking forward to the next time we can get together. I will be home during the last two weeks of June for a visit, and for the wedding of two very close friends, and I’d love to see as many people as possible during that time.

In the meantime, please stay in touch. I hope you’re all doing well.

Late Night Ramble

2009-12-07T03:20:00.001-05:00

I’ve stumbled out of the gates here in the first weeks at site … slow and lethargic, itchy all over my body from some bizarre food allergy, rattled by the sounds and smells and heat and language. Surrounded by mango and plantain and banana fields, with high coconut trees jutting out from the foliage at odd intervals, the area where I live has beauty in abundance, but also a lack of proper waste disposal that leaves a collective blemish on the land. I’ll write more in the future on the specifics of everything, to be sure, but for now I guess I just want to say ‘hi.’

For now, I suppose, I just want to say that I miss everyone dearly, but that I’m ‘ok.’ I’m realizing that it’s only natural to crave silence and solace for days on end after such a grand upheaval in life, no matter how much I was expecting it. I’m realizing—and embracing—the fact that my system needs time to adjust to all that is ‘other’ about my new country, all that is different.

But I will embrace it, because I’m finding sparks in the quiet places in my days lately … I’m finding the exuberance behind my smile again, and the awe at this world that pushed me to do this. I talked to my wonderful older brother tonight for over an hour, watching his expressions and taking in his insights via the wonders of video skype, and it felt good just to know he was out there, just to connect and breathe deeply and realize that just because I’m remote doesn’t mean I can’t connect from time to time. I talked to a dear friend of mine who’s spending December at an orphanage in Kenya via G-chat, once again marveling at the ‘proximity’ that the net provides all of us.

All of us have this huge world to see, this huge place to learn about and gulp in and explore … the trick is, I think, learning to ride the wind in your sails, the wind in your willows, the wildness in your soul that will keep you buoyed and shining while you’re on the journey. When the tides shift, or the wind dies down for a time, it gets dark and lonely and lonesome.

But just today a funny thing happened to me. I woke up to the hot smells of a fried breakfast. I stumbled out to a plate of food and a cup of syrupy sweet instant coffee. I smiled at my new host brother and sister and made a dumb joke in my pidgin Spanish. I smiled at my host Mom and Dad, and another day rumbled forward.

“For life goes not backward, nor tarries with yesterday.”

-Kahlil Gibran

"Everything Gains in Grandeur Every Day"

2009-10-11T18:53:00.003-05:00

I’m a month in, today – 10/10 – and I’ve barely written at all as of yet. Life’s been in flux—I still find the language barrier incredibly difficult … not being able to express my thoughts or desires fully is a constant struggle.

That said, it has been one heck of a rush so far—lots and lots of new people, new foods, new customs. The weeks end just as they feel like they’re getting started, and my universe feels somehow crisp but altered: everything is exciting, but everything has been altered, so, so much. I miss my family and the people I love back home, and I try not to think of just how long it’ll be before I see everyone again.

Anyway, how about specifics, huh?

I’m on a combi as I write this, a commuter bus, of sorts, which take people back and forth along the Callaterra Central (the main highway between Lima and the town I’m living in, Chaclacayo). Me and a big group of Peace Corps “aspirants” (we haven’t been sworn in yet), are on our way to the Universidad Catolica, where we’re going to get some sort of tutorial on water pumps and improved water systems.

There are crumbling, dusty brick walls everywhere, rushing by outside my window … rebar sticks out of the top of everything – walls, homes – a sign that more building is expected. Another story will be built. Grafitti covers other walls … “Fujimori—Libertad” … burning trash here on the side of the road, smog and motor fumes hanging in the air.

Along the Callaterra Central, the dilapidated gas stations interrupt the crumbled brick every several blocks. Driving, here, is not something I ever hope to experience. Every combi whines its crazy honking whine, people sprint across the street (sacks of groceries held close), cars gun their engines, shooting for the tiniest of gaps.

Our combis, now, are racing each other—we gringos grinning wide-eyed through crusty windows, or looking bored, or maybe a little jittery, exchanging glances as we jockey past each other at intervals on this three-lane clusterfuck of a road.

Signs, signs, signs—Senor de Los Milagros, planos, copias, farmacia, lavanderia, mariachi’s—and a dog ripping into a bag of trash in a roadside pile. Policlinico, Banco Azteca, La Curacao. Even here, in the craziness of this traffic, a dude in his dirty white sedan is talking on his cell.

There are lots of open-air markets along this main highway—lots everywhere I’ve gone so far, really. You buy your meats, fruits, veggies and whatnot wholesale here … no Giant, no Safeway for that sort of thing. Well, not for my family’s income bracket, at least, and for a large mass of other Peruvians.

Things have changed oh-so-much in this one, beautiful year. The trick, I think, is going to be a reliance—a bear-hugging cling—to that kernel of wonder regarding each new morning, each new breath, each new sight. These days will be a memory soon—time will work its slight of hand, that much I know. What will remain, as always, will be impressions, notions of time well spent—or not—life lived in gulps or sips, taken with relish or with a grimace. Too short to grimace, I say.

Terraced houses on the hill now. Moto-taxis, clothes drying on grim, cluttered rooftops, and a big, pot-bellied, green-capped member of the policia. He’s got a dark, weather-lined face, and he’s wearing a scowl against the gritty wind, waving traffic on for no apparent reason. It’s creeping along, and not going anywhere fast. There’s a dude pissing on smoke-blackened wall. More burning trash: thick, dark, smoke pluming out and up.
___

I’ve been reading this beautiful, beautiful book by Annie Dillard these past few weeks – “For the Time Being” – containing her reminiscings on a whole range of subjects … from sand to clouds to Talmudic scholars from centuries past. She included this quote a few chapters back:

“The more I work, the more I see things differently, that is, everything gains in grandeur every day, becomes more and more unknown, more and more beautiful. The closer I come, the grander it is, the more remote it is.”
- Giacometti

A few chapters before that, she included this one (both remind me of the wonder of all this vastness):

“Throughout my whole life, during every minute of it, the world has been gradually lighting up and blazing before my eyes until it has come to surround me, entirely lit up from within.”

- Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Remembrances of a Road Trip

2009-04-18T11:59:00.011-05:00

I’ve been feeling, lately, as though way too much time has gone by since my last blog post. It’s not that I haven’t been writing – I have – it’s just that sometimes I have trouble figuring out what’s a ‘blog post’ and what’s just an internal, personal ramble.

However, I just pulled up some short little things I’ve written over the past few months, and I felt like a few of them might be good things to share with people. I’ve been wondering, lately, how best to share some of the experiences I had on my trip. I've driven over 11,000 miles in the past five months, from Pennsylvania out to California and back ... and it's been the most densely inspiring period of time I've had in my life to date.

The trip changed me in ways, both profound and subtle, that I’m still sifting through.

I have so many photos, so many journal entries … and I think that sharing some of it is a way for me to keep the experiences alive and fresh in my psyche. So here are a few little ‘ramblings’ …

---

Early April:

Perhaps learning to love, exuberantly, is the central piece of self discovery, of self fulfillment. Maybe we really only find ourselves by gulping in the brilliance of those around us.

Spending days like today and last night, deep in conversation with friends like Erin, learning new music from – and talking about life with -- friends like Freddie, giving big old bear hugs to old friends I haven’t seen for months … it all makes me so deeply happy to be alive and exploring, breathing and smiling. Add to that a collection of sights and sounds from across the country and I’ve suddenly found it utterly impossible not to see the grandeur of what we’re in the midst of.

It’s been a long while since I’ve practiced any sort of dogmatic, orderly type of religion … a long while since I’ve gone to church … a long while since I’ve prayed with any frequency. Yet I feel there’s a deeply loving God, made manifest in the mountains, sparkling down from the night sky (as Donald Miller rightly says …), wishing fervently that we’d all just sit back and breathe. That we’d all stop to take stock of how much we have around us to be thankful for.

I laid in the grass on a hillside overlooking a meadow, way, way, way up in the mountains of Northern California and I stared at the blue sky for longer than I’ve stared at anything for quite some time. I felt the breeze hitting my skin, watched vultures circle down in the valley, took a brief nap on the firm ground. I thought about the things I’ve been through in the past few years, the people I know and love, the people that love me. I thought about how we’re all on our own separate paths towards our own separate visions of goodness, of worthwhile work, of family and community. I thought about what it was like when I was a kid … about how I used to sit or lie outside like that FAR more frequently, thinking thoughts that I’ve long since forgotten, but which, at the time, drifted into my psyche with a simplicity and unexamined ease that a body never quite regains when the duties and responsibilities start piling up. Yet there I was, letting them drift again, astounded by how similar it felt to those long-forgotten lazy childhood days in the sun.

---

Mid-March:

Drove down Highway 101 today, all along the coast of Oregon, stopping off here and there at beaches and historic lighthouses along the way. I bought a sub and a coke and sat at a picnic table watching the sunset in a state park … and kept having this thought that maybe there was a ‘better’ vantage point. How silly is that? The simple fact of the gorgeous sun setting, anywhere, is enough of a holy bit of wonder for me.

Drinking from a bottle of wine right now in a yurt in the woods in Umpqua State Park in southern Oregon – the yurt being much more posh than I would have imagined. Little wooden laminate table, four chairs, nice lamp, forest green curtains and curved lattice-work walls … bunk beds, with a bigger, almost double-sized bed on the bottom. Also a couch, an electric heater … a front porch with a light!

I’m entertaining the idea of staying at this park for one more night, maybe getting a cheaper tent site tomorrow. That way I could drive back up to the lighthouse to watch the sunset, and then drive back on down here with supplies and wood for a fire, dinner, and a proper camping experience. Then again, I may just keep heading south. The cabin calls my name. There’s wood to chop.

I’m feeling the arc of this trip pretty fully these days. When I began, I had no idea how I’d respond to the movement and change, and now I’ve been the entire way across the country and explored a little taste of California and Oregon. This country is incredible … I hope that I’m able to come back here again and do this sort of roaming.

---

Mid-December:

I believe that the single biggest concept that I’ve grasped as a result of this trip is the notion that life is too beautiful—and the people in it too precious—to harbor doubts and regrets about the life I am living.

I just sat down and looked through most of the photos I’ve taken in the past two months, starting with the ones I took of my cat, Toby, at my parents’ house in Lititz the night I left for Chicago. There are shots of me with my aunts and uncles in cities and towns all across the US … and many of those places were firsts for me. First glimpses. First real tangible ideas about what life looks like here, what it looks like there, how they talk somewhere else or what types of music and culture go on in new places that used to be outside of my experience.

And now they are all inside. And that opening, as it were, has allowed me to feel a certain come-uppance in the world. I feel as though there’s so much more to explore—but that I have made an earnest start.

Now, contemplating my return to Lititz and my family and all of the visits with friends that I will likely engineer, I can’t help but feel that my interactions with them all will be a bit more poignant, simply because something about all this travel and distance has made me appreciate the particulars and the people of my life so much more than I was ever able to before.

For a while there I felt as though I was living the earliest parts of adulthood in this completely baffled state. My choices felt rushed, my thoughts muddy … it was uncomfortable, at best, but mainly just frightening.

Yet now I feel changed somehow. I feel a profound exuberance to be alive and surrounded by such a loving mix of people. I feel deliriously excited to have the freedom to choose the rest of my path forward in life. Joseph Campbell says that “awe moves us forward.” My friend Claire, in a birthday card to me, wrote about the “awe-inspiring uncertainty” of this time of life. What a perfect way of saying it.

So if you combine those two ideas … the very fact that all of this uncertainty inspires awe is the thing that moves us forward. I am certainly uncertain right now about what path or paths to take in the coming months and years. Yet I have spent the past two months in awe … and I can already feel my spirit’s forward progress.

---

ps -- I've been using Facebook as a way to share all of my photos from the trip with family and friends. However, I thought it might be cool to have all of the links culled together 'here' for other people who might not be on 'there' ... or who might just want to scan through them in a more sequential context:

Road Tripping Part 1: Chicago
Road Tripping Part 2: Madison, Wisconsin

Road Tripping Part 3: Snowy South Dakota
Road Tripping Part 4: Bend and Missoula

Road Tripping Part 5: Seattle
Road Tripping Part 6: Portland

Road Tripping Part 7: California
Road Tripping Part 8: California, Act II

Road Tripping Part 9: The Oregon Coast
Road Tripping Part 10: Arizona and New Mexico

'Dancing Exuberance'

2008-12-29T15:19:00.003-05:00

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about the sheer volume of incredible artwork, literature, media, music and creative output of every sort that we have at our fingertips. I’ve been home in Lititz for about two weeks, soaking in the vibes of my family and friends and really trying to slow down to enjoy the specific milieu that makes up my concept of ‘home.’

I have a couple of friends (I love you all ... ) who have these brilliantly active minds that seem to be constantly seeking out new sources of musical inspiration, literary inspiration -- new voices of any kind – voices to propel them through their days and help them to contextualize and make sense of this process of self discovery all of each individually go through. I love meeting them, because through their individual searches, they turn me on to new ideas and ideologies that spin me off in new directions. I know I’ve written about this before … but it’s something I don’t think I’ll ever get over. I feel as though all of this time alone and time to travel has helped me to crystallize my thoughts about the intrigue of it all … and has helped me to be just a bit more receptive.

I think each of us has an inward search going on, and the ironic thing is that the inward seeking we do is enriched tenfold when we open ourselves up to other people. It’s like there are these layers of receptiveness, and each of us (at least as I conceptualize it), are all on our own separate – yet intermingled -- journeys. I feel as though I’m learning, gradually, to become more receptive to my own inner world, and, in turn, receptive to the inner journeys of others.

I do, of course, realize that the pooling of ideas I’m talking about is a pretty basic notion – something that’s no doubt been discussed and articulated in any number of ways – I guess I’m just trying to articulate the fact that I’m finally reaching the point where I’m not at all scared of the results of that ‘dialogue of minds’, so to speak. The notion of limitless ideas and ideologies, endless books and thousands of new musicians used to scare me on some deep level. I shied from it at first, for reasons I think I’m still working out.

Now, though, I’m beginning to realize that the best thing about this life is that no matter how receptive we manage to become, there will always be this endless bounty of new voices to discover. So yeah. That’s all I really had to say … it takes me a while to spit out even basic thoughts though, ha.

Here’s a quote I’ve been loving from this movie called 'Waking Life' that absolutely floored me a few weeks ago. I’ve watched it twice now … and there are so many ideas, constructs and influences bandied about that I think it’ll take me many, many more viewings to begin to appreciate the full scope of the movie. This particular quote is by this guy named Timothy “Speed” Levitch who appears in the film … I could describe who he is, based on my admittedly limited knowledge of him, but here’s what good ol’ Wikipedia has to say:

Tim "Speed" Levitch (born 1970) is an American actor, tour guide, speaker, author and voice actor. His nickname is derived from his trademark fast talking style. Levitch has appeared in multiple films and has had his poetic and philosophical works published in books and periodicals …

The entry goes on, true to Wiki form, in voluminous detail. The article has links to various aspects of his biography, the films he’s been in … on and on. You get the picture. My Uncle just loaned me one of Levitch’s most famous films – The Cruise – and I haven’t even had time to watch it yet. No doubt when I do, it’ll spin me off in a hundred more directions … just like “Waking Life,” the film that just introduced me to him. There’s no end to it … it’s beautiful.

So! If I use up every blog I ever write from here until the end of my life writing and rhapsodizing about the beauty of these rabbit holes … I don’t think I’ll ever get bored of it. It’s fun for me to tease them out, to follow them and explain them as far as I can ... to help myself understand and remember the course. And even now, in the process of writing this all out, I’m realizing that the act of writing helps me to express my thanks for this “ongoing wow” – so PLEASE, please … if you’ve got something, some things, that are dazzling you, waking you up, keeping you awake, whatever ... share them with me.

I feel as though that’s what Levitch must mean by “this dancing exuberance,” right?
Ok, here’s the quote, finally:

---

On this bridge, Lorca warns, "life is not a dream. Beware and beware and … beware." And so many think because "then" happens, "now" isn't.

But didn't I mention the ongoing "wow" is happening right now? We are all coauthors of this dancing exuberance ... where even our inabilities are having a roast.
We are the authors of ourselves, coauthoring a gigantic Dostoyevsky novel starring clowns. This entire thing we're involved with called the world ... is an opportunity to exhibit how exciting alienation can be.

Life is a matter of a miracle that is collected over time ... by moments flabbergasted to be in each other's presence.

The world is an exam to see if we can rise into the direct experiences. Our eyesight is here as a test to see if we can see beyond it. Matter is here as a test for our curiosity. Doubt is here as an exam for our vitality. Thomas Mann wrote that he would rather participate in life … than write a hundred stories. Giacometti was once run down by a car, and he recalled falling into a lucid faint, a sudden exhilaration, as he realized at last something was happening to him.

An assumption develops that you cannot understand life and live life simultaneously. I do not agree entirely. Which is to say I do not exactly disagree. I would say that life understood is life lived. But the paradoxes bug me, and I can learn to love and make love ... to the paradoxes that bug me. And on really romantic evenings of self, I go salsa dancing with my confusion.

Before you drift off, don't forget. Which is to say, remember. Because remembering is so much more a psychotic activity than forgetting.

Lorca in that same poem said ... that the iguana will bite those who do not dream. And as one realizes ... that one is a dream figure … in another person's dream -- that is self-awareness.

-- Timothy 'Speed' Levitch, from the film 'Waking Life'
---

Oh, and ps – who’s Lorca? I have absolutely no frigging idea ... so I’m off to the land of wiki to find out, ha. And don't you love how sometimes it seems that certain movies, certain books, which end up being perfect for a given moment in our lives, or perfect for our moods or temperament, seem to continually find their way into our hands through whatever channels are open? I had seen mentions of 'Waking Life' years ago ... I'd already fallen in love with some of the director's other work (Richard Linklater ... he's the guy who directed 'Before Sunrise' and 'Before Sunset')... and it took me years to finally watch it. That's a function, I think, of all that is out there, along with that whole notion of receptiveness.

Ok, I'm done, 'promise. Happy New Years everybody.

Presence

2008-12-03T02:16:00.003-05:00

It’s early December, the holiday season is in full swing, I’ve driven my car over three thousand miles in the last five weeks, Barack Obama has just been elected as America’s 44th President, and I’m at a Travelodge in Grant’s Pass, Oregon, with a guy sawing away in his sleep in the room next door.

The trip has been such a whirl of cities and suburbs, time changes and time on the road -- it has brought me closer to my extended family than I had imagined it would or could at the outset, allowing me enough time to immerse myself in the lives of my aunts, uncles and cousins in a way that I am relishing.

Tomorrow morning I’m planning to get up and out early, pointed south toward one of California’s Redwood state parks. The thought of seeing those giant trees is touching a childish part of me, an awe I can remember feeling while looking at pictures of Redwoods in books when I was very young. And that’s fun, really … I guess that’s all I’m trying to say. To reconnect with that innocence, to feel it bubbling up gradually over the past several days amidst the rush of all the other positive emotions and thoughts I’ve been having, has been a blessing.

So much of what I have been seeing is entirely new and fresh to my 25-year-old eyes. Driving through each vista, my senses seem to bound and leap to keep up with it all … I catch myself chuckling at my mind’s inability to process it all at once. I lie in bed and try to recall the images to the surface, willing myself to catalogue all the beauty. I realize on an intuitive level that the riches I’m getting aren’t those that can be filed away and saved … they’re of a different sort entirely. This sort of riches leave their mark on the subconscious, maybe, or on the chemical makeup of the brain. The eyes take them in and the mind goes “AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!” … and the high you get is your reward for slowing down enough to really SEE them.

I just finished reading Anne Lammott’s wonderful book on faith, Traveling Mercies. In her teasingly sardonic, clear way, she repeatedly tells of days in her life where she felt as though God has simply been showing off – making the luster of things jump more than usual, or sparkle that much more brightly. Today, leaving Portland, I had this ill-defined, sleepy, dragging mood hanging around the edges of my head. I knew the trip I was taking was fresh. I knew a part of me was happy to be back on the road … but there was another part of me that was sad to be leaving my aunt Anna Lisa after a trip where I think we both felt a real bond. The mood lasted for hours, and I was actually getting pretty frustrated. Here I was driving through fields that were, quite literally, emerald green and dotted with herds of tan sheep contrasted against the low dark mountains in the distance, and all I could think about was how much I was wishing I could relive the last month again. I have never had a month that has been more varied or stimulating, and a part of me was – and is – sad that it’s over. I was also missing my friends back home, my brother and sister, my parents. My brain was looking backwards … it was projecting forwards … it was doing everything but drinking in the emerald around me.

And then the sun began to set. Shadows started getting long. From time to time I’d see the shadow of my little car speeding to the left of me, twice as large, on the bank of a hillside. I climbed a little in elevation, passed through some low-hanging fog in the hills, and came around the bend with a beam of sunshine square in my face. The remnants of passing storm clouds hung below a dense blanket of higher grey cover. Backlit by the brilliant rays, the wispy lower clouds shone with a white intensity around their edges, giving me this whole expanse of gleaming, multi-tiered blazing beauty. God was, as Anne would say, really hamming it up ... putting on a show for the finale of the day. And like that, I was there. I was in.

And now I’m back here … back in this Travelodge. I’m thinking of the beauty of what I might see tomorrow, the guy (or gal) next door is still snoring away, and I’m trying to push back the nagging questions I have about what I’m going to do with myself once my money runs out and this wonderful trip comes to a conclusion. When I was little – and a lot of the time now, still – I’d be engrossed in the adventure and grandeur of a movie, getting whisked along in some other, fantastic world, and then suddenly I’d find myself stepping out of the plot long enough, there in the darkness in my seat, to worry about the fact that eventually the whole mystery would end, the lights would come on … and I’d have to get up and go back to my world … to a place not quite as fantastic, to people that were a little less dramatic and engaging in circumstances that seemed, at times, painfully ordinary. And in removing myself from the movie in that way, I’d killed the magic of that piece of the film … I’d taken something from the enjoyment I might otherwise have had.

My sole desire, really, for the remainder of this trip is that I can hold the ghosts of that dread at bay -- or, better yet, obliterate it entirely. I pray that I can slow down enough, open my eyes wide enough, open my arms far enough to be able to embrace those Redwoods tomorrow – but also to love the comfort of a cheap hotel room today … to love the music I’ve put on, to love the movie I just let myself get carried into, to love reconnecting with the words of Joseph Campbell on the pages of a book I bought in Portland. I am moving toward that mindfulness, gradually: that much I know. I'm learn to love the time I am in, simply because it allows me to look deeper within myself, free from the distractions that typically inundate my brain.

"The warrior’s approach is to say ‘yes’ to life: ‘yea’ to it all …
The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are."
-Joseph Campbell

Quiet

2008-11-17T20:36:00.005-05:00

Looking around this afternoon at sunset, I saw an expanse of fields surrounding me in all directions to the horizon -- white from the snow and stubbly with freshly harvested stalks.

I saw truckers lined up at the four-way stop, anxious to get back on the interstate now that the road had re-opened after the blizzard.

I saw people driving to the local grocery, picking up provisions. I saw people walking back to their rooms from the bar, luxuriating in this respite from the storm.

Back in my room, there are any number of distractions to keep me from quieting my mind. Slowing my breathing. I turn on the television, soaking in the news, absently flipping through the channels, then watching the first twenty minutes of a movie I have no interest in.

I light a few candles, settle in with a good book. The sun goes down. The noises outside in the hotel parking lot grow more and more infrequent and subdued. Gradually, my mind quiets, helped along by the measured prose of the book, the familiar smell of candle smoke.

It used to be that each day I would busy myself with the stuff of my rituals and routines. Once in a while, if I was lucky, I'd find a few minutes of blessed quiet: breath, blackness, the buried insights would begin to swirl into focus.

Yet now I find myself with this incredible gift of time -- this period of pause, where I can take stock of who I am and what I wish to be. The knowledge that I can pick any track I want somehow isn't producing a great deal of anxiety. And maybe that's because I've found my way off one track that didn't feel sound -- didn't feel right for me -- and in the process I found out that I am resilient. I found my creativity was still there, waiting for me to slow down to find it.

Now, I find myself smiling much more often. I find myself connecting much more often with my inner self, my quiet self.

Stretch

2008-11-07T20:28:00.008-05:00

“Living on the road my friend, is gonna keep you free and clean.”

- Willie Nelson (and many other artists), “Pancho and Lefty”

I’ve been out of work for almost three weeks now and on the road for two.
So far, my route has taken me through Chicago, Illinois, for a week with my Aunt Michelle, my Uncle Bill, and their two beautiful girls Nikki and Leah, then on to Madison, Wisconsin, where I got to spend the first real one-on-one time with my Aunt Denise, my Uncle Barry, and my cousin Eric. The time with family has been wonderful … I think it’s tough to really get a firm hold on the structure and feel of the lives of your loved ones unless you manage to break off a chunk of time to really expose yourself to it. That gets even tougher, however, when those loved ones are spread out across the country and even the world.

To get almost a week in both of those places right off the bat was pretty wonderful. I had felt so incontrovertibly stuck in my lifestyle in Virginia that the time just seemed to role by without any substantive thoughts of my future or my dreams beyond the world of bills and the rent payment, my work schedule and the glimmer of the approaching weekend and the promise of time with friends.

Now I’m cooling my heels in Murdo, South Dakota (I’d never heard of it before either), with all the roads blocked due to a massive blizzard that hit the western portion of the state yesterday. When I left Madison on Wednesday, I had the sun roof open under a clear blue sky with the windows open to a beautiful, 70-degree fall day. But as I crossed the Mississippi into Minnesota and on across South Dakota, the temperature began to plummet steadily, until I finally had to pull off the road, 650 miles later, due to a steadily worsening mix of sleet and snow.

So that brings me back to the “time” thing. I’ve had a brimming supply of it over the past several days in this hotel room. And I think sitting here on my ass has helped me crystallize the idea that all I really want from this trip is time to think about what I want to do next with my life. Time to be with people. Time to write or to create something, or even just to breathe and enjoy the simple stuff that seems to glide by unnoticed each day.

There’s a song I’ve been listening to a lot lately by this guy named Ryan Montbleau that seems to be hitting exactly the right note. It’s called “Stretch.” I take it as a song about learning to more fully appreciate the simple goodness around us … about becoming the full and inspired people we all have down inside … about opening up to others and hoping they’re receptive to whatever creative products each of us might manage to spill from our hearts.
Here’s a link to his website. A lot of his other stuff is fantastic as well … so have a look:

http://www.ryanmontbleauband.com/

"Take me under and make me understand.
Block my lungs off and make me appreciate the air.
Show me the way to touch my toes.
Make it a little bit easier, now, this pain it ever grows.
Show me the way to do the things I’ve always wanted to do,
To do.

Open up my eyes, tell me all about these lies that i’ve been telling.
Buying into fantasies and dreams my own demons were selling.
Show me the way to spread my wings.
Make me wonder how i never trusted those things.
I know that I could fly the highest if I’m only given the time,
The time.

And it’s going to take microphones and stages,
Many people rearranging what their plans are for the night time
Hope they show up at the right time
And I’ll sing them my song
And I hope they sing along
I know they always sing along in my imagination.

Take me under and make me understand.
Block my lungs off and make me appreciate the air.
Show me the way to touch my toes.
Make it a little bit easier, now, this pain it ever grows.
Show me the way to do the things i’ve always thought that i could do,
Could do.

And it’s going to take microphones and stages,
Many people rearranging what their plans are for the night time
Hope you show up at the right time
And I’ll sing you my song
And I hope you sing along
I know you always sing along in my imagination.”

Go West, Young Man

2008-10-24T21:12:00.004-05:00

My Dad has been saying that around the house a lot the past several days ... and I have to admit, it has started to take hold of my psyche. I'm about to start driving West, in an effort to see a lot of family and friends I haven't seen much of lately and to get some much-needed time to think and explore.

I'm leaving in about 20 minutes for an all-night drive to Chicago ... and for those of you who have been keeping track of my departure dates, I'm a bit behind.

But before I disassemble my computer and put it in the basement, I thought I'd post something here. I'm hoping to update this page much more frequently throughout the course of this trip, with pictures, thoughts, and whatever else seems like it might make people smile.

I just want to say thank you to all of the friends who have made my 'long goodbye' to Washington so wonderful. The dinners, happy hours and talks over the past several weeks have sustained me and kept my spirits higher than I can describe.

I love DC itself, but the people in it (all of us Warwick kids and the rest of the crew I've just met in recent years) are what have given the city a warmth and spirit that I'll always love. Because of all of you, I have so many positive memories of the time I've just spent ... and a genuine desire to live in the area again sometime further on down the road.

So be safe everyone, and I wish you the best as the holidays approach. Please give me a call if you want to catch up -- I'm sure I'll be in need of some friendly voices once the miles start adding up.

I think a visit to the Toy Soldier is in order right before Christmas.

Go Ask Alice

2008-05-31T00:13:00.005-05:00

I almost got locked inside of the bookstore tonight.

I was in the back, among the literary criticism and poetry, lost in this great collection by McSweeney’s of all sorts of new poems I’d never read. The stuff was hitting me down in my bellows in that certain way that gritty literature sometimes does when it finds you in the right place.

Then I heard the guy on duty yanking the chain-link guard across the big plate-glass door in front. Somehow I’d been lost in Neverland and time had worked its slight of hand. As fun as a night in an independent bookstore would probably be for me (honestly), I ducked out.

But on the way home I looked at the sun hitting the manicured grass and hedges that I pass every day …. and I got to thinking about “rabbit holes” … and how much I hope I get to have a lifetime full of them.

You know rabbit holes, I’m sure you do.

In the bookstore, I had pulled out a pen and a paper and started down into one – writing down titles by Wallace Stegner, which in turn led me to William Styron … simply because their initials are the same and Styron happened to be prominently displayed on the next shelf down. But also because a good friend, who’s judgment I really value, had recommended Styron months ago. Right next to that Styron book was the McSweeney’s collection.

Three rabbit holes opened up right that moment, which will probably multiply another nine times over once I go to order the books on Amazon … “Other shoppers who bought this book also purchased” … and then off you go. And that’s not even getting into the scores of references within each book to each author’s contemporaries and friends.

I’m particularly susceptible to those rabbit holes of the literary variety. But there’s also music, of course.

In the book store, I wrote down the name of the documentary about the making of The National’s new album, “Boxer.” I also wrote a note to myself to get some music by The Swell Season. From there, I inked the name of some guy named Jason Collette … purely because I liked the description of his sound that one of the workers at this wonderful bookstore had so lovingly penned based on her own attraction to the guy’s “soulful lyrics.”

All that ink made me happy.

It made me think of all the new discoveries I’d make for myself. All the new sounds and souls I’d be able to commiserate with.

Just last week, my next-door neighbor who I’d never had a whole lot of contact with decided to drop by to talk. Once we realized how much we had in common intellectually, our “chat” turned into a four-hour conversation FULL of rabbit holes and a stimulating new friendship. She’s actually the one who kept using the term. She gave me this magnificent book by Herman Hesse, “Siddhartha,” which did more for my spirit than anything has in months. She also lent me a bunch of music compilations which a friend had made for her … and from them I’ve discovered about 15 more folk artists who I’m determined to chase after, doggedly.

But I guess all this talk of music and prose is masking the deeper rabbit holes I’m really talking about, huh?

That talk with my neighbor was a highlight of this year so far. Yet I’ve found myself gravitating towards other people in my life as well … people who’s spirits are inquisitive like mine. People who are struggling to find their paths … people who are open and honest. The talks—the emails—the time spent with those people has opened up these personal rabbit holes, these personal paths of exploration, both in myself and into the lives of others. Each time I meet a person willing to really listen; each time I really listen, good things, more deeply felt experiences, seem to take place.

And when they do, it’s as though the veil of the present drops away and you see the suffering, the joy, the struggles and the intricacies of people you used to just have a passing knowledge of. One of the books I wrote down tonight was by Milan Kundera, titled “The Curtain,” which is about how novels, good novels, possess the singular ability to slip aside the “curtain” that all of us form for ourselves … the narrative we assign to the world … the structure into which we fit every happening in our lives. I haven’t read the book yet, so I suppose I shouldn’t attempt to sum it up. But from what I did read, Kundera believes that novels, at their best, push aside that curtain and show us elements of the world that can’t—wont’—fit into our neat structures. They bust the structures, and force us to form new ones.

And that, to me, sounds so, so healthy.

Anyway—it just seems to me that when we, as humans, open ourselves to the situations and struggles of others, we give the lie to any feelings of loneliness that might try to isolate us. As I learn, gradually, to become more accepting, I’m learning that people continually surprise me with their depth and verve.

Think of all the rabbit holes we have in store. On top of each breath, on top of the lyrical evening breezes and moonlit rivers flowing by, we have each other. We have new heights to hit and new riddles to solve. But only for the curious. Only for those who are willing to look for the rabbit holes ... and willing to jump.

---

We only have these times we're living in.

- Kate Wolf

Be here now.

- Ray Lamontagne

The true profession of man is to find his way to himself.

- Herman Hesse

Well It’s 3 a.m. again, like it always seems to be,
Driving northbound, driving homeward, driving wind is driving me.

It just seems so funny, how I always end up here – walkin’ outside in a storm while looking way up past the treeline.

It’s been some time.

Give me darkness when I’m dreaming. Give me moonlight when I’m leaning. Give me shoes that weren’t made for standing.

Give me treeline, give me big sky. Give me snow-bound, give me rain clouds. Give me bedtimes, just sometimes.

Now you’re talking in my room, but there ain't nobody here. Cause I’ve been driving like a trucker, I’ve been wearing through the gears.

I’ve been training like a soldier, I’ve been burning through this sorrow. And the only talking lately is a background radio.

You are my friend—and I was the same.

And riding that hope was like catching some train.

Now I just walk, but I don’t mind the rain.

Mmmm … singin’ so much softer than I did back then.

Well the night I think is darker, than we can really say. And God’s been living in that ocean, sending us all them big waves.

And I wish I was a sailor, so I could know just how to trust. Maybe I could bring some grace back home to dry land for each of us.

- Gregory Alan Isakov, "3 a.m."

2008-03-25T22:01:00.003-05:00

I'm reading Saul Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March right now, and it's affecting me in some ways I hadn't thought it would, or could. Bellow's one hell of a writer ... he just comes at the impact in a vastly different way than a lot of other authors might.

As a result, it took me a long time to really get into the story ... to get my heart behind the characters and to really jive with the narrative, if you'll forgive that expression.

But I'm so, so glad that I did.

I read this tonight, and it spoke to me. Perhaps it'll speak to somebody else. Perhaps not:

“Because nobody anyhow can show what he is without a sense of exposure and shame, and can’t care while preoccupied with this but must appear better and stronger than anyone else, mad! And meantime feels no real strength in himself, cheats and gets cheated, relies on cheating but believes abnormally in the strength of the strong. All this time nothing genuine is allowed to appear and nobody knows what’s real. And that’s disfigured, degenerate, dark mankind—mere humanity.

But then with everyone going around so capable and purposeful in his strong handsome case, can you let yourself limp in feeble and poor, some silly creature, laughing and harmless? No, you have to plot in your heart to come out differently. External life being so almighty, the instruments so huge and terrible, the performances so great, the thoughts so great and threatening, you produce a someone who can exist before it. You invent a man who can stand before the terrible appearances. This way he can’t get justice and he can’t give justice, but he can live. This is what mere humanity always does. It’s made up of these inventors or artists, millions and millions of them, each in his own way trying to recruit other people to play a supporting role and sustain him in his make-believe. The great chiefs and leaders recruit the greatest number, and that’s what their power is. There’s one image that gets out in front to lead the rest and can impose its claim to being genuine with more force than others, or one voice enlarged to thunder is heard above the others. Then a huge invention, which is the invention maybe of the world itself, and of nature, becomes the actual world—with cities, factories, public buildings, railroads, armies, dams, prisons, and movies—becomes the actuality. That’s the struggle of humanity, to recruit others to your versions of what’s real. Then even the flowers and the moss on the stones become the moss and flowers of a version.

I certainly looked like an ideal recruit. But the invented things never became real for me no matter how I urged myself to think they were.
My real fault was that I couldn’t stay with my purest feelings. This was what tore the greatest hole in me.”

Maybe we're all just struggling, in our own separate ways--separate, but yet similar in our struggles--to stay with our purest feelings. To eventually learn, through trial and error and pains, how to stop those holes from tearing away at our fabric. To hold true to the chords of beauty that make us want to act out the best within ourselves, even if doing so looks insurmountable at times.

An Evening with David Wilcox

2008-03-07T01:14:00.005-05:00

I walked out of a David Wilcox concert tonight -- at a place called The Barns at Wolf Trap -- into a quickly emptying parking lot, into the still of a clear night in Northern Virginia, with Orion’s belt hanging askew as it always does, just above the jagged tree-line, and a definite tinge of spring mixed into the wood smoke in the air.

As I walked across the pavement to my lonely Ford Escort, I found myself taking very deliberate and very deep breaths … and walking with my eyes up to those stars. I didn’t want the night to end. I didn’t want those moments to fade. Over the course of two hours, he had dragged away all of the surface, nagging vestiges I’d put over my deepest feelings, leaving me strangely alert and in tune. I think I grinned throughout the entire show, except for a few songs which brought me to tears.

The guy is an unparalleled inspiration. I don't know how else to describe him -- his music does the describing, the unraveling, the explaining, the soothing, the challenging. His music is powerful. It's tender. It's about love and relationship, about the importance of our internal processes, the importance of finding calm within. It's humble and ingratiating, full and robust and honest. Ok. Sorry... I'm going to stop trying to explain.

I’m only posting this, really, in the hopes that one other person might read this and discover him. I’m going to thank my uncle Andy profusely for sending a CD to my little sister and thereby introducing me to him, so to speak. Wilcox’s words have enriched my life so much this year and have provided me as much with spiritual sustenance as challenge.

If you’re not familiar with him, please, please go to http://davidwilcox.com/ right now and order a CD. Or talk to me and I’ll burn you something to start off with.

Here’s a snippet of the lyrics to “The Reason,” by David Wilcox:

Look hard, long and slow
The stars will be your guide
Be smart and let your heart decide
We see best at night
Our sight can reach so far
Deep into the universe of stars

Bright light hides the view
Into what’s far from you
And makes your star so hard to find …

Desiderata

2008-02-19T21:31:00.002-05:00

I don't really have much of anything to say tonight ... I'm too confused about too many things. But I've been getting a lot of emotional sustenance so far this year from a poem my mom sent me when I started college. I've had it hanging on my wall in every place I've lived since then. Yet somehow it's easy to skip over, even when it's right there staring me in the face every day. Maybe I ought to read into that a little.

Anyway, I figured I'd put it up, just in case anybody else was in need of a little inspiration. Somehow the older I get, the more it hits me ... it's comprehensive and nuanced in a way that I really like.

"Despite it's sham, drudgery, and broken dreams -- it is still a beautiful world. Be cheerful. Strive to be happy."

Desiderata

by

Max Ehrmann

Go placidly amid the noise and haste,
and remember what peace there may be in silence.
As far as possible without surrender
be on good terms with all persons.
Speak your truth quietly and clearly;
and listen to others,
even the dull and the ignorant;
they too have their story.

Avoid loud and aggressive persons,
they are vexations to the spirit.
If you compare yourself with others,
you may become vain and bitter;
for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.

Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans.
Keep interested in your own career, however humble;
it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time.

Exercise caution in your business affairs;
for the world is full of trickery.
But let this not blind you to what virtue there is;
many persons strive for high ideals;
and everywhere life is full of heroism.

Be yourself.
Especially, do not feign affection.
Neither be cynical about love;
for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment
it is as perennial as the grass.

Take kindly the counsel of the years,
gracefully surrendering the things of youth.
Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune.
But do not distress yourself with dark imaginings.
Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness.

Beyond a wholesome discipline,
be gentle with yourself.
You are a child of the universe,
no less than the trees and the stars;
you have a right to be here.

And whether or not it is clear to you,
no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.
Therefore be at peace with God,
whatever you conceive Him to be,
and whatever your labors and aspirations,
in the noisy confusion of life keep peace with your soul.

With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams,
it is still a beautiful world.
Be cheerful.
Strive to be happy.

We're all pilgrims, of a sort

2008-02-04T22:12:00.000-05:00

As usual, life has taken on a speed which has subsumed all of my efforts to write on a regular basis. The thoughts are there ... once in a while notes take shape ... but on the whole, I still lack the discipline to sit down and piece everything together. It’s 2008 and I’m feeling the need for discipline and change … seeking inspiration around every corner and searching for fresh voices in the mix of articles, novels and music that I’ve been consuming at an ever-quickening pace.

At the end of 2007, I drove out to Chicago with my older brother Graham and my Dad to spend Christmas with my Dad’s side of the family. My Mom and sister flew out … but I was happy for the drive. It gave the trip a sense of place and weight. If we would have flown, I feel like the trip might have just folded into the tumble of my day-to-day life. And I didn’t want that. I’ve been trying to slow down. To appreciate the present as fully as possible – but it’s beguilingly difficult when so many thoughts and events are colliding at such a clip.

So we drove. I guess we all had our reasons. Mine was that I wanted some precious time with my Dad and my brother … because I guess I was never really prepared for the type of separation that occurs when everybody moves away from home, for good, after college. Graham’s all the way in Africa, across oceans, and I find myself, regularly, missing my friend and confidant. I also find myself -- at times -- wishing for just another day back with the five of us living under one roof. I guess I just miss the dynamic, that’s all.

The trip itself was special for me. I got a lot of time to talk to aunts and uncles. I played a shitload of ping-pong with my beautifully vibrant, rambunctious and super-competitive cousin Leah, during which I lost all concept of my age and where I was and just got down to the hard business of not getting beaten by a little girl (she’s freaking good). Likewise, the comic banter back and forth with my cousin Nikki – Leah’s older sister – bowled me over as well. She’s quick-witted and funny; they both are. Spending time with them just makes me wish I could see them more frequently … could watch their progression more intently.

There were countless other moments I’ll hold close for a long time as well – but I can’t recreate them. Time spent with my little sister Anna feels like such a blessing these days, because I rarely see her anymore. She’s got a life of her own at Temple, and is just settling in to her college career.

Yet having the five of us all under one roof again for a week set my soul at ease in a way I haven’t felt for years and years. Though so much has changed, it was heartening to feel the closeness of family all over again.

Anyway, enough of that. I don’t mean to belabor things that are personal to me, and probably don’t entirely translate. But I’m interested in the present, lately, due to a book I’m reading by Annie Dillard called “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.” I’m interested in how we all process the moments of our lives, and the intricacy of it all. So often I feel I’m on auto-pilot, and it makes me unspeakably angry. Each day, even in the depths of our routines, we pass sights that should never, ever, be taken for granted. The bodies we have, the minds we carry around, are so complex and beautiful … and yet they slip into the fabric of the “everyday” and the ordinary.

The sky each day, in all its variegated presentations. The color saturating the air at dusk. The particular slant of sun-beams through the plants by the window at 4:00 pm on a Sunday afternoon. Wood smoke from the chimneys of neighbors on a frigid, clear winter night.

We all have our particulars – our particular settings, our particular friends and loved ones. I’m feeling so blessed these days to have the people around me that have sustained my mood and my inspiration as heartily as they have. But sometimes it’s tough not to slip into that shadowy place where you start coasting, isn’t it?

Riding back from Chicago, sitting in the back seat while my dad drove us through the flat, snow blanketed fields of Indiana, I tried to settle myself in that particular moment. To freeze frame each “shot” as it went by. Dillard talks about how the present is forever flashing before our eyes, and as soon as we think “Ahh, here it is, this is it” – it’s gone, and we’ve got some new mystery in front of us, and then gone. The key, she seems to be saying throughout the book … is to remember just how much of a mystery “it” really is.

With old Kris Kristofferson songs playing on the CD-player and my brother asleep -- head bobbing -- in the front seat, I watched the stands of trees separating the fields as my Dad steered us down the interstate. Long, elevated irrigation pipes stretched out across the rows of scrubby, frozen crop stalks. Big old trucks screamed by in the opposite lanes. Just east of South Bend, Indiana, we picked up the hour we’d lost heading west. Time – or our constricting human idea of it – literally shifted ahead an entire hour. In a blink. And do you think that didn’t register on some guttural level as I was trying to drink in the here and now?

Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania … and later, south through Maryland to Virginia. Across the river by train to DC the next morning. Time and place, in our lives, are continually careening here and there, coming together at times to put a sharp focus on a particular moment … but often times blurring.

Time. Just blessed time. Time to assess – to reassess. Take stock. Whatever. Memories cropping up thick and rich. All I could think of was how nice it was to be there, in that hot car, whizzing through the freezing landscape.

That was over a month ago. The same deeper currents are still going through my head … and I have to say that I’m nowhere close to deciphering my direction – but that I have succeeded, on certain days, at taking stock of the moments going by … at enjoying the sliding freeze-frames of each scene that makes up “the present.” I need a change of pace – a plan – a path to set out on. But I suppose I can’t talk about it here in a way that would make any sense … at least not yet. Not now.

For now I just want to pass this along. It’s a passage on the present – on innocence, from Annie D.’s book. If you’re searching for a way to quiet the babbling brook in your brain, to slow down, she is indelibly refreshing.

"These are our few live seasons. Let us live them as purely as we can, in the present."

______________________________

Self consciousness is the curse of the city and all that sophistication implies. It is the glimpse of oneself in a storefront window, the unbidden awareness of reactions on the faces of other people – the novelist’s world, not the poet’s. I’ve lived there. I remember what the city has to offer: human companionship, major-league baseball, and a clatter of quickening stimulus like a rush from strong drugs that leaves you drained. I remember how you bide your time in the city, and think, if you stop to think, ‘next year … I’ll start living; next year … I’ll start my life.’

Innocence sees that this is it, and finds it world enough, and time. Innocence is not the prerogative of infants and puppies, and far less of mountains and fixed stars, which have no prerogatives at all. It is not lost to us; the world is a better place than that. Like any other of the spirit’s good gifts, it is there if you want it, free for the asking, as has been stressed by stronger words than mine. It is possible to pursue innocence as hounds pursue hares: singlemindedly, driven by a kind of love, crashing over creeks, keening and lost in fields and forests, circling, vaulting over hedges and hills wide-eyed, giving tongue all unawares to the deepest, most incomprehensible longing, a root-flame in the heart, and that warbling chorus resounding back from the mountains, hurling itself from ridge to ridge over the valley, now faint, now clear, ringing in the air through which the hounds tear, open-mouthed, the echoes of their own wails dimly knocking in their lungs.

What I call innocence is the spirit’s unself-conscious state at any moment of pure devotion to any object. It is at once a receptiveness and total concentration. One needn’t be, shouldn’t be, reduced to a puppy. If you wish to tell me that the city offers galleries, I’ll pour you a drink and enjoy your company while it lasts; but I’ll bear with me to my grave those pure moments at the Tate (was it the Tate?) where I stood planted, open-mouthed, born, before that one particular canvas, that river, up to my neck, gasping, lost, receding into watercolor depth and depth to the vanishing point, buoyant, awed, and had to be literally hauled away. These are our few live seasons. Let us live them as purely as we can, in the present.

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, p.82

www.anniedillard.com

Show the Way

2007-10-03T22:56:00.000-05:00

I knew it’d been a long while since the last time I wrote anything here, but I didn’t realize it had been over five months. It scares me a bit, to tell you the truth, when I see the dateline of that last entry. I use writing, more than anything else, to purge and name the spinning thoughts in my head.

When they spin and spin without release, too often they get so garbled over time that I begin to lose the realizations I’ve come to … and allowing that loss does a disservice to my mind and to my desire to find myself and my place in the world. It discredits those realizations, and makes it so much harder for me to yank my creativity from the haze of my daily routines.

For tonight, right now, I want to post some lyrics on here, from a CD my uncle sent me a few months back. The guy’s name is David Wilcox … and I’ve found the messages behind his music incredibly refreshing. The song below is about as close to a verbalization of my feelings on ‘faith’ and ‘God’ and ‘trusting in the Goodness’ around me as I have ever seen … and I’ve held the message close to my core since I first heard this song. So I guess this is a bit heavy … but oh well. If you’re reading this, you’re probably used to it.

So here it is – "Show the Way," by David Wilcox:

"You say you see no hope, you say you see no reason
We should dream that the world would ever change,
You're saying love is foolish to believe
'Cause there'll always be some crazy with an army or a knife
To wake you from your day dream, put the fear back in your life ...

Look, if someone wrote a play,
Just to glorify what's stronger than hate,
Would they not arrange the stage
To look as if the hero came too late?
He's almost in defeat -- it's looking like the evil side will win,
So on the edge of every seat, from the moment that the whole thing begins …

It is love that mixed the mortar
And it has been love that stacked these stones
And it is love that made the stage here
Although it looks like we're alone
In this scene set in shadows
Like the night is here to stay
There is evil cast around us
But it's love that wrote this play...
For in this darkness love can show the way.

So now the stage is set.
You feel you own heart beating in your chest.
This life's not over yet.
So we get up on our feet and do our best.
We play against the fear.
We play against the reasons not to try
We're playing for the tears burning in the happy angel's eyes ...

For it's love that mixed the mortar.
It was love that stacked these stones.
It was love that made the stage here --
And made it feel like we're alone.
In this scene set in shadows
Like the night is here to stay
There is evil cast around us
But it's love that wrote this play...
For in this darkness love can show the way."

Too often I find myself listening to the “reasons not to try” – the reasons which seem to line up one after another, stretching on without end. I find myself wanting to give in to the fear that I’m never going to find my way and never going to get myself on a track I can be truly proud of. But it’s senseless worry.

"We play against the fear. We play against the reasons not to try."

Literature has used the metaphor countless times: life as a stage … life as a play … and our actions within that play, upon this stage of life, are described to different effect depending upon the impression the author is shooting for. Maybe the most famous of all of them is the one below, from the Godfather of literature himself:

"Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,
that struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
and then is heard no more.
It is a tale told by an idiot,
full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."

- William Shakespeare (Macbeth, Act V, Scene 5)

The setup is a little different, but the idea is essentially the same. Your life on earth is like an actor’s part upon a stage, and the curtain’s got to come down at some point. That much I think we all agree upon. It’s the part about "signifying nothing" where people start riffing and coming up with their own ideas.

I think I’ll go with Wilcox’s version. Shakespeare’s sounds too much like one of those "reasons not to try," to me, and it discounts the very author of that play. Now, obviously, some people don’t believe this whole show has an author, and I respect their right to that feeling.

My belief is that there is a higher power … that there is an author to our existence, and the only concrete proof we’ll ever have of that ‘entity,’ whatever you want to call it, is the love we find in ourselves and refract out to the world – or the love we find emanating from others.

Our world’s a crazy place these days. It’s hard to go from day to day with a sustaining belief in a concept like an overarching love – or in "peace, love and understanding," as Elvis Costello so eloquently put it (my friend Freddie keeps playing that song at his shows as a tribute to those fighting and dying in Iraq, and every time he plays it, I marvel at how fitting the lyrics really are).

But when you look at Costello’s words, when you look at Wilcox’s words, when you look at the words to so many other protest songs, so many other writings searching for hope amidst the darkness, isn’t it the same spirit and the same underlying query behind all of them?

Wilcox writes:

"You say you see no hope, you say you see no reason
We should dream that the world would ever change,
You're saying love is foolish to believe
'Cause there'll always be some crazy with an army or a knife
To wake you from your day dream, put the fear back in your life ..."

Costello writes:

"As I walk through
This wicked world,
Searchin' for light in the darkness of insanity,

I ask myself
Is all hope lost?
Is there only pain and hatred, and misery?

And each time I feel like this inside,
There's one thing I wanna know:
What's so funny 'bout peace love and understanding?
What's so funny 'bout peace love and understanding?

And as I walked on
Through troubled times
My spirit gets so downhearted sometimes.
So where are the strong?
And who are the trusted?
And where is the harmony?
Sweet harmony."

… You see it, right? They’re both confronting the same issue, the same “wickedness” – because it’s so pervasive sometime that it’s unbearable, and their art form was their greatest expression … their best chance of reaching sympathetic minds.

So while I’m not trying to pull this all together into some neat synopsis, I think it’s all coming out for a reason.

I think we all face a choice, as we grow up and grow older, of whether we’ll become a voice for change, or whether we’ll slide into the numbness of conformity presented by the 40 hour work week, the endless creature comforts, the countless distractions. Ours is a country rife with opportunities … and if we’re lucky enough to have been born into middle class, “American” families, I think that’s probably the greatest lottery we’ll ever win.

The problems start when people start to feel entitled. We’re not entitled to anything. What good is freedom, what good are comfort and security and a life of plenty, if we don’t all use that status to produce some change in the world … and a change for the better? To be borne into a country like this and to assume that conformity is all that’s asked of us – that strikes me as painfully short-sighted and arrogant.

Costello asks: Who are the strong?

I think your answer to that is perhaps the greatest statement of your morality you can make. Strength has been mislabeled in our society … just take a look at the talking points of most of the presidential candidates on "National Security," and you’ll see that they’re talking about violence. It has become "strong" in our country not to hold talks with our enemies if they disagree with us. It has become "strong" to turn a blind eye to whatever happens outside our borders. It has become "strong" to call people who are against the senseless death in Iraq “un-American."

But what if strength were viewed as the culmination of all our highest ideals? As the achievement of peace, love and understanding? Would we see diplomacy work its way back into our foreign relations? Would we see respect for discordant ideas work its way back into the speeches of our leaders?

I believe that any American worth his or her salt should answer a few questions for themselves, untrammeled by the stale definitions passed around in politics and in the news: Just who are the strong, anyway? What is the burden that comes along with our freedoms?

I believe that the strong are the people who still believe in love … and who seek it out every day, no matter what their situations. They’re the people who long to communicate with others, in any form, because they believe that all of us can inspire each other to greater heights. They’re the people who find a way to impact the world, based on their own special gifts.

The burden of freedom, in turn, is to realize your own strength, and to use it to bring happiness into your own life and the lives of as many others as you possibly can.

So, as if this post hasn’t been long enough, or filled with enough quotes, here’s a few for the road, which I think have inspired a lot of this stuff. I didn’t set out to write something this long or this ideological … but hey, it is what it is. Big or small, individual or global, I think a lot of these issues boil down to the same core questions.

___

“Lord, help me to shoulder the burden of freedom
And give me the courage to be what I can.”

“When they burn your brother down in the name of Freedom,
I don't care if it's left or right
It's wrong
If that's all they can do then you don't need 'em --
You're the one, Wild American.”

"Not in my name, not on my ground
I want nothing but the ending of the war.
No more killing, or it's over --
And the mystery won't matter anymore."

Broken dreamers, broken rules,
Broken-hearted people just like me and you.
We are children of the stars,
Don't blame God, I swear to God he's crying too."

__

From Kris Kristofferson’s songs "Burden of Freedom," "Wild American," and "In the News," respectively.

Here are some links to Wilcox and Kristofferson:

Kris Kristofferson
(The new ablum's incredible ... but all of his songs are poetic and powerful)

David Wilcox
(You can listen to "Show the Way" via a stream on this site. Check it out if you're interested. Try "Two Roads Diverge," too.

Becoming. Translation. Confusion.

2007-04-09T20:53:00.000-05:00

I almost cried last night while watching the Dakota Fanning remake of Charlotte’s Web. My eyes teared up multiple times, I shit you not.

What would you make of that? Clearly, the first – and possibly the correct -- response of the level mind is that of ridicule.

I mean, honestly, what the hell am I so emotional about anyway? Isn’t it a bit too much?

Perhaps.

But when life’s brimming with questions, I suppose it’s hard to react rationally. And strangely enough, I’m not so ashamed.

Becoming. Translation. Confusion. Nuance. Companionship.

These are the concepts that have been rolling over and over in my head week after week after week. Because I’ve stopped writing almost entirely, the process feels at times – all the rolling around and about – completely chaotic and unkempt. Inconsequential, meaningless.

I need to get some of it out, so here it is:

The concept that we, as humans, are forever in a state of becoming has popped into my conscience from every angle in the past months. In various books, in conversations with family members, and the strongest in a particularly incredible email from an old friend, it keeps coming to the foreground of that rolling tumult.

I guess I can’t shake it because it’s the word that seems to best suit my current condition. To give it a meaning … a place … a semblance of decency.

I’m reading a book now (just started, really), that is shaping up to be about the lives of two men in a perpetual state of becoming. It’s called Letting Go, and it’s the first novel written by Phillip Roth. It’s also, maybe fittingly, the first of Phillip Roth's novels I've read.

One man, Gabe Wallach, is from a wealthy Jewish family from New York. Gabe’s a graduate student. He’s just lost his mother. He’s just found out that his mother wielded a controlling and domineering influence over Gabe’s father throughout their marriage. His father’s now utterly at a loss for how to continue on in life.

The other man, Paul Herz, is from a not-so-wealthy Jewish family, also from New York. Paul’s a graduate student. Paul’s married to a woman named Libby who’s from a Catholic family and trying desperately to finish her undergrad.

Paul’s family denounced them because Libby’s a gentile. Libby’s parents denounced them because Paul’s a Jew.

Paul and Libby had to take a two year break from school to work menial jobs just so they could scrimp together enough savings to continue on with their degrees. Paul and Libby have gotten pregnant. They’ve had an abortion. They’ve argued nonstop from the beginning. Paul is totally idealistic. Paul believes in having principles … in dealing with hardship and pain in order to live rightly by those principles. Paul and Libby got married because they were in love, and now they’re trying to sort out how exactly love can be so unpleasant.

Anyway, you see the structure by now I’m guessing? One guy’s rich, the other’s poor – one’s single, the other’s in a marriage that’s far from the idyllic setup he imagined it to be. Gabe’s in love with Libby, Paul’s wife, and I’m pretty certain Libby’s in love with both Gabe and Paul at the same time, though I can't be altogether sure at this point.

I can’t begin to explain the layers of the various relationships that have been introduced in the novel so far … but they delve into how men make lives for themselves, how men make lives with the women they love, and how fathers and mothers and sons relate over the span of entire lifetimes.

The passage that I can’t get out of my head, however, is way back on page 22, near the beginning:

“Here was I (I had been reminded) with all that these Herzes were without. When my mother died, in fact, she had left to me all that her family had left to her, which, if not a fortune, was enough to spare me from calamity for the rest of my life; on top of this there was my father and his checks. Phone calls. Love. Money. It did not seem very manly of me to be suffering over my abundance, and I began to wonder, as I went to sleep that night, how I would perform if I were Paul Herz.”

I think I’ve been bombarded by all these reminders, lately, of how we’re all in this constant state of becoming because I’ve been, in a way, looking for them. Also, because I feel I've been complaining a bit too much ... when, like Gabe, I really have an unbelievable amount to be thankful for. Suffering over my abundance, to steal Roth's words.

I’ve been telling anyone who will listen about how confused I am about why life on my own is so damned confusing, why all that insulated “preparation” had to come to a close. Some have responded with genuine kindness and solidarity … and they’ve been the people who have given me, I think, the only answer that they’ve been able to cling to: becoming.

And, to add to the confusion, I’ve learned something else from a select few of those conversations: if we’re all continually in a state of becoming, a huge part of connecting with other humans going through the exact same process is being able to translate your own inner workings, your own true self, to the outside world, in whatever form it happens to be in.

It’s not enough for me to just shrug my shoulders when an old friend asks how I’m doing. It’s not enough to just consider the disquiet in my mind as a symptom of “real life” – nor will I resign myself to the blur of the days sliding past, one into another.

The confusion of this year, I’m beginning to see, has been a case of unhitching, a case of letting go. Letting go, but also holding on.

Letting go of that which restrained me. Letting go of insularity. Letting go of childhood and family and friends and the places and spaces and plots of ground that have made me the person I am, in this moment. Letting go of them because they can no longer prepare me for the lessons I must learn myself.

Yet also holding on. Holding on to my deepest convictions and love felt for a family that has shown me more solicitude than most people are ever apt to experience. Holding on to a background that has given me a love of nuance, of alternative views, of eccentric pairings and emotions. But also a love of duty, a love of responsibility. A love of the layers in truly incredible relationships.

Holding on to friends that have embraced my searching. Holding on to friends that have embraced me throughout my various failings and incongruities. Holding on to the people that allow me to peer in on their own process of becoming. Friends who struggle, alongside me, to take part in the same act of translation … maybe because they believe in our ability to help each other toward a shared ideal.

Holding on to those things because, I’m convinced, we only become all we truly can be with the assistance of others. There are going to be continued and maybe perpetual stumblings, I know: but no matter how far I get off the path that feels good and right, I guess I’d like to believe that the love and friendship of others will never cease to call me back, to hold me accountable.

Letting go and holding on. It is this process that has shaken me to my core in the months following my graduation from college. It is this process that has left me feeling drained, tired, and uncertain about anything a body can possibly become uncertain about.

It is also this process that has reawakened me to my own potential, to the love within me.

In short, my love of anything and everything that expresses nuance. Things that don’t encapsulate, don’t try to simplify or assign things into neat boxes. Things that step back and let you see how wide a problem is, or how deep a conflict. I think our culture doesn’t always encourage such love – but there it is anyway.

Each day I find new reasons to listen to myself, to listen for the small realizations gleaned from all of this searching.

I’m reading this book, and I’m watching Gabe and Paul struggle to become … to become what? To become some ideal of human wholeness and fulfillment? I don’t know. Maybe Maybe just to realize and embrace the act of becoming … and to devote themselves fully to it. Because I think it’s possible to ignore it, and I think that’s where we all can get into trouble. Maybe that’s what that overused phrase, “lost in translation” is really all about: when we settle for the black and white areas in our lives, and abandon the effervescent and colorful world of the grays.

If we are all truly in a perpetual state of becoming, perhaps it is possible to become that which you are not – and isn’t that a fucking scary concept?

Paul and Gabe are struggling to listen to an idealism inside themselves that sometimes runs in step with all the lessons they’ve been taught by their families – and sometimes runs decidedly against them. They’re struggling to be good men, and I suppose I feel a certain kinship with what they’re going through. Through uncertainty and doubt about the tracks of their lives, they’re realizing that life is not black and white, and it sure as hell is not easy.

They’re embracing the gray, no matter how confusing it gets … and I’m loving it because I’m right there along with them. But it’s hard hard hard sometimes – and those are the times, I suppose, when I’m happy that some of the nuance CAN be so neatly encapsulated.

When the story of a terrific, humble little runt of a pig can remind me how important it is to embrace the simple truths, even when the thunder of the big ones threatens to drown them out.

I’ll admit though, Dakota Fanning’s still a tad bit melodramatic – even for me.
Maybe I shoulda just read the book.

Ninja mouse

2007-01-15T00:39:00.000-05:00

I have a ninja mouse in my apartment. I set six traps for it: two live catch traps, two of these new, black, fancy traps -- and two of the good ol' fashioned Victor snap traps.

I set the live catch traps with peanut butter and a mix of mozzarella and cheddar cheese. The four snapping traps each got a small pile of crumbled cheese bits.

The cheddar was Tillamook, extra sharp -- good stuff, really. I laid out a feast for this little guy.

I placed all six traps around the dining room and on the counters in the kitchen in places where I'd seen the little mouse droppings. And I waited.

A few days went by, and nothing. The cheese was getting hard ... and it sorta looked like some was actually disappearing. Couldn't be. The traps were still set.

One day, I noticed a few mouse dropping right next to a few of the traps. Lovely. It was like the thing was defecating on my sense of human superiority.

But that was before today. Today, I woke up ... and all of the cheese was gone from the four snap traps. The live catch traps ... still stocked. But the other ones? Clean. Not a crumb. Not even the slightest trace of cheese.

How in the hell does a mouse do that? If you think about it, that's a ballsy rodent. Not just one trap ... but four ... picked clean, at great risk of not just injury, but immediate and spine-cracking death.

You couldn't find a human with those kinda cajones. And yet, there they were: four clean traps. It was like a big "F*#@ YOU for trying to catch me!" from the mouse.

I'm not sure whether to be impressed or scared.

And so I've nicknamed him Ninja Mouse, in homage to his/or her incredible stealth and lightness of foot. Let's call it a him ... I don't think a girl mouse would have the audacity to crap on my counters.

Also, I'm going to assume, for the time being, that he works alone. A posse of ninja mice would be too much to take.

I've never seen Ninja Mouse, but his shit on my counters is the proof in the pudding. Ok, maybe that's an inappropriate metaphor. Ugh.

It's like a daily reminder of my inability as a big, bad human to reign him in. A trail that leads to nowhere. No big holes ... no chewed up food ... no nothin'. A mouse trained in the shadow arts -- adept at deception. I've searched everywhere, mind you. Behind all the furniture, in every draw. I've even cleaned up a storm ... only to have him shit on my sparkling counters.

I picture him slinking down the walls on a strand of rope, dressed entirely in black with a pair of nunchucks strapped to his back for protection. Silently he parcels off the cheese, slipping each chunk off with a dexterity honed through years of practice. In my mind he has the skill of a highly trained professional ... preparing to shlep it all back to his hungry family in a leather side pouch that has grown worn over the years. Worn and tattered from loads of rice, cheese, peanut butter, crackers ... who knows.

He's sly. He's got a sense of humor. Why else would he crap the most right next to the damned traps?

Then, just like that, he's gone. Perhaps I stumbled into the living room on my way to the coffee pot ... or maybe, like some odd Pavolovian trick, he's realized that when the alarm clocks blare, it's time to skidaddle.

Whatever the disturbance, he's always gone without a trace or a sound by the time my roommate or I round the corner into the kitchen.

It's a slight knock to my small-town pride that the very traps he stole the cheese off of were manufactured at Woodstream just off the main street of dear old Lititz, Pennsylvania.

And so I submit this entry as a tribute to the third inhabitant of my apartment.
Ninja mouse, you have bested me for now. At present, there are two lines of three snap traps waiting for you out there, two live catch traps ... and gobs and gobs of peanut butter.

I went out today looking for glue traps, but the stores around here don't seem to carry them.

So, to ride the horse that brung me, so to speak, I bought two more of Lititz's most updated Victor traps. The bait is set, the springs are taught ... and all I can do is hope I awake to a snap in the night.

The exterminator's scheduled to come tomorrow ... I need back up. With luck, it'll be curtains for you.

But you, Ninja Mouse, have proven yourself a worthy adversary -- you have humbled me, and won my respect.

slumming it

2007-01-08T22:29:00.000-05:00

There’s mouse or a rat or some sort of animal in my kitchen that’s been shitting on the counter.

Next to the dishes. Next to the food. Around the sink. It’s lovely, really.

We set out four traps: two live catch traps (my roommate’s a saint), and two snapping, killer traps (I bought those … the thing shat on my plates).

This morning when I woke up, there were 3 pellets of mouse shit right next to the snapper trap.

We told my landlord – but she sent the exterminator to the wrong apartment. Tonight I caught her in the laundry room, trying to fix the fuse box after floors five and six of our lovely Crestmont apartment complex lost power.

She was unsuccessful at fixing the fuse.

I asked for some specifics on when the exterminator would come to OUR apartment … and she told me I ought to have a cat.

She has two, and doesn’t have any shit on her counters.

The exterminator might be able to make it out tomorrow. Might.

Chamomile and Worries

2006-12-05T22:14:00.000-05:00

This is something I wrote over a year ago, at the close of the summer before my senior year at LVC.

It's funny -- once in a while I read back through something I'd written a while back, and it startles me to realize that I'd been turning over some of the same issues in my mind ... sometimes I feel like my head and heart are some kind of awkward slow-cooker, and all I can do is hope that the result that comes out after all that turning tastes ok.

All of my writing in the past few months has been about the pain and confusion of entering the world, coming out from the shelter of college and having to look your gifts, along with your demons, straight in the face.

At the very least, the following piece made me realize that I definitely saw it coming.
___

There’s something in the rush and flow of daily routines that’s been jarring lately. It’s like my body, my mind, can feel that I’m on a precipice, at the close of a period in my life. A carefree period where it was ok to take summers full of listless hours spent socking away money – full of carefree time with friends – full of lovely evenings spent reading and knowing there weren’t any deadlines to meet or responsibilities hanging over my head.

And now that suddenly seems not to be the case. Now my mind has trouble relaxing. It has trouble tackling the fact that there’s a lot of things I could and should be doing to get ready for the responsibilities of the future. Typical pre-senior year angst? I guess so.

But it’s a lived experience that you don’t really understand until it’s you – you realizing what they always say about staying young at heart…about holding onto your childhood.

I sat in MJ’s last night reading and drinking chamomile – and as stupid as it sounds it made me realize that it was the second cup I’d had that week – and also the second cup I’d had since I was 9. When I was little I used to have sleeping problems. My mom would give me tea to quiet my nerves…she understood that even little kids have things to be nervous and upset about. So it’s funny now that I’m reaching for the chamomile when my nerves are frayed and bothersome…when I’m feeling lonely and missing home. When I’m wondering about my own direction and purpose. I guess it doesn’t matter if you’re across the sea or 30 minutes away – it’s still something extraordinary to make the cut from the comfort of a wonderful family.

The nights spent at home are certainly easier to treasure lately.

Night after night after night I’ve been trying to drag out the reasoning behind the knot in my chest – and haven’t been able to find it. Yet tonight something clicked. During a mundane moment of downtime I realized that my mind’s really just reacting to change. I’ve lived an incredibly comfortable life thus far. I’ve had the privilege of growing up with money and a car and education and food on the table when I want it. Essentially, I’ve known more happiness and comfort in my short life than anyone should really be able to hope for.

The change, now, is that my mind’s having trouble making the leap I want it to make. I’m trying to get myself to realize that in order for my soul to be happy with the life I’m living, I can’t just make myself go straight into grad. school – and then from there into a steady 5-day-a-week job covering obituaries and traffic jams for five years, pretending that the work I’m doing matters. It won’t. On some level it does. But if I do that eventually, it can’t be from a bubble. It’ll need to be after I’ve lived enough to realize how those obituaries – how those traffic accidents fit in with the lived experiences of others in other parts of the world. I need to see it with my own two eyes – I need to be enveloped by it, a part of, engaged with more than just my simple, wonderful life.

So I think the hurdle I have to jump within myself is to learn what options I have to combat the doubt and lack of motivation within me. To cherish the wonder that’s categorized all of my years so far – the utterly crazy wonder that’s shaped my decisions and friendships and loves and losses…To remember those late nights laying awake in Ardmore, 12 years ago, thinking thoughts that I’ve long since forgotten…stressing over problems that I’ve solved and stepped over. Problems which, like those of today, are real and tacit while they’re staring you in the face – but which enfold themselves over time into the fabric of your life. The problems that, as you look back, really aren’t or weren’t problems at all, but changes … steps forward in a life that’s as amazing both for the things we have the opportunity to do as well as for the people we meet along the way.

Years before the chamomile, when I was very small, my dad used to sit by my bed when my five or six year-old face was red with tears from some youthfully tragic event … an unkind cut or a friendship gone sour. He’d sit there, with a hand on my face, singing this song – ‘The Red River Valley.’

“Come and sit by my side if you love me …” – that was the most powerful line. And I know that’s why he sang it. Someone, once, sang it to him. “Just remember the red river valley, and the cowboy who loved you so true.”

Amidst the fear of growing up I think I’ll always hold a bit of the ‘sappiness’ – the emotion of those nights … nights where I had the sound of my father’s voice to soothe away fears, where I had the warmth and comfort of a hot cup of tea and the loving ear of my mother to listen to my troubles. They gave me something I’ll cherish forever: a love of emotion, of heart, of honesty and tenderness – and a love of people who exude those qualities. And in their own way they’ve shown me, through the work they do, that as you grow up, that honesty and heart and tenderness, directed, can be the fiercest and most forceful tools you own.

I guess the leap comes when you realize they’re about to be tested.

After Rain

2006-11-14T01:20:00.000-05:00

A tourist of DC I am no longer, that’s for sure.

I’m amazed at the time that has passed.

When the day was over today, sometime after 6, I ambled slowly to the metro, just kind of starkly amazed for a few moments by how different life has become – this November compared to the last.

On the ride home I read from a book of short stories my Uncle John had given me for Christmas by a writer named William Trevor – I’ve been consumed for about a week.

They’re all so disparate, but here’s one example: there’s a woman in her mid-40s who has reconciled her husband’s cheating as “his due,” since she never bore him children. She prepares his dinner each night through a haze of gin, only to pass out before she gets done cutting the fat off the chicken, or prepping the pork chops. He inevitably comes home to the site of her passed out on the floor, carries her up to their room, and they sleep in separate beds.

She then wakes each morning (we’re given to feel this is a recurring, long, drawn out cycle) groggy, only to realize that the her resignation has continued unabated.

Cheery, huh? But that’s the kind of stories they are. Each is starkly different from the others, all unkempt and unseemly stories about conflict and love and loss and gritty windows into personal moments – yet somehow it’s refreshing, not disheartening. It’s less canned somehow. Less processed.

Like think: what sorts of hopes must have been killed, what kind of daily reckonings and regular disappointments and feelings of duty lead them both to ignore the twin elephants in the room, sitting on their life? His cheating and her ensuing alcoholism have made a misery of what could have been marriage.

The collection of stories is called “After Rain.” The story of that title tells of a woman recovering from the end of an affair at a resort she’d visited with her parents as a child.

She realizes, stepping out of an old church she’s visited … just after a rain … that she’s been cheating her sense of love and duty and relationship with each half-started romance. Realizes instantly, in a sharp, deep, no-questions-about-it way. Realizes it after the rain, when the heat of the day has been soothed away and things are cool and washed and shimmering. When smells are fresh and life is fresh. Trevor’s description is powerful in a subtle way I can’t explain … we all know what it looks like after rain. We all know what it feels like … though we probably all ignore it most of the time.

But do we ever really acknowledge how our setting sometimes spurs us to think and to come to realizations?

Tonight it rained, and I came up from the metro just after it.

I thought of the story as I walked up the hill – thought of the way the author described the newness of things after rain … and formulated my own opinions as I walked.

After rain tonight it was cool, misty – and quiet. There was no one out on the walk back except a few people saying goodnight outside the apartment building across the way, and a driver with his cab jacked up on the side of the road, replacing a tire.

I reached my apartment having felt a peace and endearment for my situation I hadn’t felt before. I say situation because I think everybody’s got their “situation” – some lifestyle or set of circumstances that are either agreeable to them or full of parts and pieces they’d rather change.

I realized that a growing tide of exceptions, “settling,” small disappointments and an extreme lack of self-confidence have held me back for too long. Yet in spite of this, I’m OK. I am, perhaps, in a better situation than I realize. For all my fixed insistence that I’ve been betraying my innermost beliefs, I know deep down that isn’t true.

After tonight’s rain I realized that it’s time for action and planning to shape my future, and nothing else. Don’t they say sometimes our callings are shaped in the valleys of our lives … during the storm and confusion?

---

Here's a link to Trevor if you're interested.

Give yourself to love

2006-11-07T00:00:00.000-05:00

I feel like the entire “post-graduate milieu” is something that has been so over-scrutinized, over-generalized, and over-simplified that when college grads finally get through the door and into “real life,” we a get huge, f’ing angry, snot-nosed Rhino instead of the fuzzy rabbit we were expecting.

I mean, sorry to be trite and corny, but I need humor and imagery to break down some of this stuff that’s encrusted up in my head.

I graduated less than ½ a year ago. Not even a full semester removed – with memories of my friends and housemates still so damned close to the surface that it hurts whenever I think of how I’ll never get that time back. Now I’m working. Full time. In front of a computer. I have a 401-K plan that I can kick off in another month, at which point I can effectively start saving for retirement …

I walk the same route to work each morning, ride the same train line to the same stop on the metro (McPherson Square!!), walk up the escalator and typically wait amidst the same dour faces on the roadside for that little white man to appear on the traffic signal across the way so that we can all trundle across L Street to our offices.

I’m 23 and in the midst of a routine so firm and shiftless it makes my spirit chafe beneath its solidity.

But that’s not really why I’m writing this. That’s just what’s causing the thought process.

I guess what I want to say is that I know in my gut that I don’t “have” to be doing this. That I’m very, very much lucky to have the means to pay rent, to buy food at the local Safeway and to be surrounded by my creature comforts: my computer, tv, my books and what-have-you.

My parents are proud of the fact that I have the job. I know that. Trust me, I do. Other friends are doing other things: some are saving the world and doing things I truly wish I was doing right now. Some are teaching, some are working part-time jobs, some aren’t working at all. I’m proud of them all.

But that’s not the point.

The point is, all of that “doing something” and “making a life” is for whatever reason the perfect thing to put that damned Rhino right to sleep. And at least for me, that’s the last thing I want. I think the life you end up making with that kind of work often falls short of what your heart might be yearning for.

I don’t ever want work and paycheck to undercut feeling and emotion and intrigue. I don’t ever want boredom and monotony to dull my sense of wonder. I voiced that concern to my Mom this weekend … and she told me that it never would. That it couldn’t with me. I sure as hell hope so.

Because there’s a whole generation of us (people my age), and there have been many before us, with the “work” part emphasized, but not the Great Battle with the charging Rhino. And if we’re not careful, we’re all going to learn to subdue the danger and magic inherent in that fight with cheap routines and thoughtless actions which keep the charging passion inside of us at bay … but can never fully eradicate our soul’s need for its sustenance.

I’m NOT for one second trying to say that we should all abandon work. I also don’t think we’re all capable of doing things like the Peace Corps, or of moving halfway across the world to help a war-torn Africa. Some of us aren’t made for that type of jarring change. For those of us who are, I think it’s a wonderful thing. But we’re all cut differently, we’re all suited for making different change. But I think it’s the act of effecting that change that is truly important.

I really do think that we can all work in such a way that we lets us contribute to a world that is better for the war-torn villages in Africa as well as for the impoverished right here in this country. They don’t call it a “shared humanity” for nothing.

I wrote part of this and walked away to make a few phone calls – and to sort of let things process … and I had a thought: what would Kahlil Gibran say about work? What would he say about a ‘calling’? I’ve found his words so comforting in the past … I guess I couldn’t help but check.

Here’s what he says:

“And all work is empty save when there is love;
And when you work with love you bind yourself to yourself,
and to another, and to God.
And what is it to work with love?

… It is to charge all things you fashion with a breath of your own spirit,
And to know that all the blessed dead are standing about you and watching.
Often have I heard you say,
as if speaking in sleep, ‘He who works in marble, and finds the
shape of his own soul in the stone, is nobler
than he who plows the soil.
And he who seizes the rainbow to lay it on a cloth in the likeness of man,
is more than he who makes the sandals for our feet.’

But I say, not in sleep but in the over-wakefulness of noontide,
that the wind speaks not more sweetly to the giant oaks
than to the least of the blades of grass;

[ I love this next line …]

And he alone is great who turns the voice of the wind into a song made sweeter by his own loving.”
Kahlil Gibran. The Prophet. Pp. 27-30.

And there’s not much I can say to add to that. Gibran gives me insight into the reason why some of my most vibrant memories and happiest times were with people I met waiting tables at the nursing home I worked at in Lititz; mowing lawns with a middle-aged Mexican immigrant named Miguel who always, always seemed cheerful; pouring concrete with a bunch of guys whose skin would be like leather in two decades while they were still out under the same hot sun doing the same old thing.

It also gives me insight into some of the fallacies of reasoning that get us all in trouble: we start thinking of one type of work as “better” than another, and disparage things in our own minds before we even begin to realize the utility it might hold. We work boring and mind-numbing jobs and forget that the passion inside of us can be nourished and can grow in the time we’re there.

When I really sit down and admit it to myself, I'm learning a lot at this job ... about myself, about the world, and about other people, their professions and the lives they make.

Yet soon I will undoubtedly need to take on that damned old Rhino charging. The thing has shaken me lately, that’s for sure. But in the end it’s a battle for relevance and change – for wrestling the spirit from all of the societal fetters that have made it seem like heart is bad.

“And all work is empty save when there is love ...”

I’m sorry to put that all out there so abruptly … but I guess I just feel like maybe I’m not the only one who feels like I stepped into a battle I wasn’t quite prepared for, and that I’m winging it now, hoping to beat a path toward something that I can do with the love inside of me.

Jack-O-Lanterns and old memories

2006-10-30T23:15:00.000-05:00

I've been pretty down lately ... that's the bottom line. Though I only moved three hours from home, from comfort, from all of the roots I had set down -- I'm just fully feeling the emotional impact of all of it.

I'm trying as best as I can to affirm to myself that feeling every ounce of the pain and dealing with it and even letting it show are not emblems of weakness but strength.

Going out on my own smacked me full in the face in a way I wasn't entirely prepared for. I made every piece of my life in Annville comfortable and safe and protected -- and loved it -- but ignored any thought of the place I wished to occupy in the world when I got out. Now I'm trying my best to live in the moment and even plan for the future (because I know I owe myself that)... but a part of me is having so much trouble letting go of all that "past."

If there's one comfort I've had, through the struggle that has been these past few months, it's that a piece of me can't stop being tugged toward recognition of the beauty beneath, breathing life into, some of the mundane acts and "background" environmental things that are around me everyday. And this underlying spirit makes being where I am, being here in this apartment in N. VA, take on a semblance of sense. Ties it into the memories from before ... gives the present weight and clarity because the seasons have changed like this before, and fall, despite the darkness closing in, will always be my unrivaled favorite.

Underneath my loneliness when I'm walking around Rosslyn, kicking up fallen leaves on the way home from the store, there's a remembrance of what it felt like to do that 15 and 10 and five years ago ... and last year ... and a twinge of the same simple awe, and a steady stream of memories from those times.

Underneath the thudding sound of my heels on the sidewalk during a run through Clarendon, there's a recollection of the streets of Ardmore, the town where I grew up, and swell of love for the mix of smokey smells and fenced yards and cracked sidewalks that elicited the memory.

Underneath the monotony of my commute to work in the morning, there's ALWAYS a a stitch of wonder at the HUGE passenger jets flying so close overhead -- their flight path to Dulles directly above my apartment. Remember that sight before your eyes became accustomed? Remember being amazed by what's now commonplace? I do, and a part of me deep down still is. I love that part.

And, oddly enough, the thing that has brought the biggest smile to my face lately -- the thing that has made me grin and soak in the childish fun of it all -- was digging my fingers into the goo and guts of a pumpkin last Thursday, carving out a zany nose, giving it a gaping, laughing mouth, and standing in the dark on my porch to stare at its features glowing in the blackness.

My roommate threw a pumpkin carving party, and everybody there sat cross-legged on the floor, their rapt attention held in the simple fun of creation.

Maybe, as long as I can get lost in the simple fun of creation whenever I'm feeling down -- I can grow up in such a way that it'll come out from underneath the oppression of monotony and lonliness and really shine.

A statement of purpose

2006-10-29T21:34:00.001-05:00

Hi everybody. I've been meaning to do this for quite some time ... "this" being start a place where I could put my writing up for anyone to see it. I put it off for a long time because a piece of me thought it would somehow be "self-serving" and that no one would read it.

On the first matter: I've come to some realizations lately that have made me believe in my core that the only part of "myself" it would be serving would be my love for the people in my life and a desire to be closer to them. For those who know me, you know I'm not about self-promotion. Moving away from your roots and your comfort zone can get lonely at times -- and I'd like an honest avenue to let people know what's going on in my life -- in the hopes that they'll feel comfortable enough to let me know about theirs.

On the second matter: I'm trying to base my decisions these days around my work ethic and my heart -- rather than from some ill-founded fear of failure. We'll see where it gets me ... and I'm hoping people will read.

So, the first post is something I wrote about 2 months back (given the dated material). But yea, I think it's a beginning, and a fitting one.

Thanks for taking your time to read. Any, and ALL feedback is not just ok, it's needed and fully yearned for.

A beginning.

2006-10-29T17:20:00.000-05:00

I just figured out, not long ago, that somewhere in the tumult of the twilight of school, I’d forgotten why I love to write.

I used to write these quite frequently — about anything and everything — and what started as a form of stress relief and a way to decipher the distorted confusion of everyday life blossomed into a curious and wonderful opportunity: it breached the barriers of propriety and distance and timidity and inhibition and all of the countless phenomena that so often keep loved ones and friends from discussing the things that are on their hearts.

I don’t mean to be obscure. I’m not referring to anything indistinct or hard to grasp. I’m simply talking about the things that make being a part of a shared humanity so extraordinarily worthwhile.

My sometimes inane and confused ramblings allowed me, every once in a while, to have genuine and stimulating conversations with people I’d otherwise never had bonded with. It strengthened old friendships — kindled new ones — and introduced me to the hearts of strangers.

And God did I love it.

Writing that now makes me wonder how I could have ever forgotten. But I did.

Gliding through my days. Ignoring the tumult of thoughts bouncing around in my head. Believing I’d take the time “tomorrow” or “when things settle down.” It’s all bullshit.

Yet I suppose the stumbling and the confusion are part of the lesson as well, aren’t they?

I need writing. I need a space to share my thoughts and beliefs with others, and to converse with others. I need to spill my guts so I can make sense of them. I hate the walls people put up in their lives to keep people out, and I want to try to break down mine, and see if other people will let theirs down too.

And I think realizing all of that is simply tied into maturing and growing and learning to be the person I have inside me…the person of quality that seems so utterly unattainable at life’s most trying times.

Life’s been trying lately, I have to admit that. But its changing…really rapidly…so I guess I was expecting some of the discomfort. Yet now I feel like I’ve finally gotten to a point where I can slow down and assess where I am, and how I got here.

It took over three months.

Three months of living out of a suitcase on an air mattress on my older brother’s floor.

Three months of learning to communicate with said older brother again…of getting used to being a part of his life for the first time in years.

Three months of work in what everyone seems so fond of calling “the real world.” I don’t think I’ll call it that — it’s too perfunctory and unthinking. Why don’t we call it:
“The world of living independently, on your own two feet, according to your own terms. Passionately or as a drone: your choice.”

I just feel like I have yet to set those terms — and each day I push it off just pisses me off more and more.

So. Three months.

My older brother’s in Africa, caught up in the concerns of a people who genuinely need his help, trying to right the wrongs of a violence that’s plagued a continent that our country cares very little about. I’m so profusely proud of him I can’t even begin to relate it to anyone. I’m proud to have his light and passion to guide me, but more proud that he’s taking that kernel inside of him that says “UNSHACKLE YOURSELF FROM AMBIVALENCE AND REALIZE THAT YOUR COMFORT COMES AT THE EXPENSE OF OTHERS – AND THAT AMERICANS NEED TO BE SETTING AN ENTIRELY DIFFFERENT SORT OF EXAMPLE.”

And there’s a growing piece of me that wonders why the hell I’m not following that voice inside me telling me the exact same thing.

I just sat for about an hour and read through some old entries I wrote in a journal at the beginning of this year. I was kinda astounded by how lucid and clear my desires were. Strangely, they echo some things I could swear I just recently figured out. I guess it just goes to show that certain realizations take longer to form than you think they will:

“What I want is something useful, something humble, and something plainly ‘good’ to do for as long as I see fit. I believe some of the writings that I’m reading in my religion class—that ‘all we have on earth is our happiness’—and ‘the way to be happy is to make others so’—so perhaps all those mundane classes aren’t so bad after all.

It’s strengthening my resolve. Strengthening my desire to find a way to forge a life free from the constructs of ‘others’ wishes — wishes for following a career track, for gaining as much money as I can, for doing ANYTHING other than following my damned old heart.

So lately all I’ve been doing is trying to emerge from the fogginess that has surrounded my days…trying to gain a clearer perspective on the fleeting time I’ve got with some of the best friends I’ve ever found.”

I read that and stopped. I stopped and laughed, and got a little choked up. I really don’t want to do anything other than follow my “damned old heart.” The crux is learning how to listen to it. I’ve got time now to do that, and there’s the rub.

Reading all of that hammered home how idealism has to be married with action before anything substantive can come of it.

So in the mess of rambling thoughts that my brain has become, I’m holding out a firm hope that I can push myself to do something that will reverse even just a tiny iota of the shit that seems to be consuming this world.

I read a book called “Mountains Beyond Mountains” about a guy named Paul Farmer, a doctor, who is spending his life combating the injustices in the medical community. But that explanation can’t begin to even explain what he’s doing.

Here’s an approximated summary of his view: “I’ve become a doctor to help people, not to make money. Therefore, I will donate all the money I earn to a charity to further the medical work I do. The people of Haiti are some of the most impoverished people in this hemisphere, and their illness, TB, is one that Western medicine could cure if it really gave a shit. I give a shit. I’ll cure it.”

And he did.

He realized that TB medicine only costs a lot because of a lot of Capitalist bullshit and bureaucratic bullshit that he and his foundation could wade through if they cared enough…and they did.

And from there they began to tackle AIDs…in Haiti, Peru, Russia, America…anywhere they could, all while continually staying vigilant against TB. The list of things he has done and minds he has changed is endless.

He saw that American policy more often than not works against impoverished people in third world countries rather than for them. He saw that Communist Cuba actually has some things to teach the world about healthcare, rather than putting it in a category, labeling it as “bad” or “evil” and walking away. He was open-minded about every damn thing he did.

He’s a true inspiration for anybody who wants some hope in the world, and a different view of things. Google, Partners in Health. You’ll see.

Most importantly though, he realized that most people must endure a certain feeling of ambivalence towards the suffering of others in order to live the lives of comfort they’ve dreamed of – and he set out to develop a life that would ensure he’d never feel that same ambivalence.

OK. Sorry. I promise there was a point to that.

The point is this: I don’t think I could ever sacrifice everything. I really don’t think I have it in me. But I DO think that I can make a difference in some small way, because I’m fed up with feeling like a willing accomplice to a country that wittingly and unwittingly fucks over the rest of the world to get what it wants. I’m tired of endorsing our black and white international relations by doing nothing.

I just want, desperately, to begin to plot a course to do something plainly “good” as a member of a global community.

Sorry to use a wide lens, but lately I haven’t been able to see it any other way.

Maybe it’s all these news stories I have to keep reading about big international oil companies sucking the reserves out of the ground in Nigeria, Latin America, Northern Africa, Iraq, and on and on and on…while the people living in huts with bloated bellies and starving eyes watch helplessly.

All so that I can drive a car? All because “that’s just the way it is?” All because they don’t matter as much as “we” do? That seems to be the message.

Bullshit.

Call this a gestation period. I don’t know. But I feel empowered to continue thinking for myself, and to continue feeling with every ounce of me that I can get to feel, and to somehow find a way to act.

Let me know if you have any ideas. Seriously.