Chamomile and Worries

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

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

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

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

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.

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.