Presence

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

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

“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.”

Stretch

http://www.ryanmontbleauband.com/

Go West, Young Man

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

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."

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

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

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

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

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.

Show the Way

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. So I warn you … this is a bit long, and a bit far-reaching.

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?

Well, 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.”

Yet I think a lot of the people proclaiming that type of strength are really just hiding behind their favorite TV pundits, or perhaps they’ve just realized that they can get by in our country without really thinking. I’m not talking about the kind of thinking needed to pull your weight at work. I’m talking about the thinking that marries your heart’s knowledge with that of your mind.

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’ve just begun to formulate my own answers, and I think my path through life going forward will be a measure or how slowly or quickly I come to my own understanding.

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.

___

“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.

Becoming. Translation. Confusion.

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

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

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

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.