I’ve stumbled out of the gates here in the first weeks at site … slow and lethargic, itchy all over my body from some bizarre food allergy, rattled by the sounds and smells and heat and language. Surrounded by mango and plantain and banana fields, with high coconut trees jutting out from the foliage at odd intervals, the area where I live has beauty in abundance, but also a lack of proper waste disposal that leaves a collective blemish on the land. I’ll write more in the future on the specifics of everything, to be sure, but for now I guess I just want to say ‘hi.’
For now, I suppose, I just want to say that I miss everyone dearly, but that I’m ‘ok.’ I’m realizing that it’s only natural to crave silence and solace for days on end after such a grand upheaval in life, no matter how much I was expecting it. I’m realizing—and embracing—the fact that my system needs time to adjust to all that is ‘other’ about my new country, all that is different.
But I will embrace it, because I’m finding sparks in the quiet places in my days lately … I’m finding the exuberance behind my smile again, and the awe at this world that pushed me to do this. I talked to my wonderful older brother tonight for over an hour, watching his expressions and taking in his insights via the wonders of video skype, and it felt good just to know he was out there, just to connect and breathe deeply and realize that just because I’m remote doesn’t mean I can’t connect from time to time. I talked to a dear friend of mine who’s spending December at an orphanage in Kenya via G-chat, once again marveling at the ‘proximity’ that the net provides all of us.
All of us have this huge world to see, this huge place to learn about and gulp in and explore … the trick is, I think, learning to ride the wind in your sails, the wind in your willows, the wildness in your soul that will keep you buoyed and shining while you’re on the journey. When the tides shift, or the wind dies down for a time, it gets dark and lonely and lonesome.
But just today a funny thing happened to me. I woke up to the hot smells of a fried breakfast. I stumbled out to a plate of food and a cup of syrupy sweet instant coffee. I smiled at my new host brother and sister and made a dumb joke in my pidgin Spanish. I smiled at my host Mom and Dad, and another day rumbled forward.
“For life goes not backward, nor tarries with yesterday.”
-Kahlil Gibran
Monday, December 07, 2009
Sunday, October 11, 2009
"Everything Gains in Grandeur Every Day"
I’m a month in, today – 10/10 – and I’ve barely written at all as of yet. Life’s been in flux—I still find the language barrier incredibly difficult … not being able to express my thoughts or desires fully is a constant struggle.
That said, it has been one heck of a rush so far—lots and lots of new people, new foods, new customs. The weeks end just as they feel like they’re getting started, and my universe feels somehow crisp but altered: everything is exciting, but everything has been altered, so, so much. I miss my family and the people I love back home, and I try not to think of just how long it’ll be before I see everyone again.
Anyway, how about specifics, huh?
I’m on a combi as I write this, a commuter bus, of sorts, which take people back and forth along the Callaterra Central (the main highway between Lima and the town I’m living in, Chaclacayo). Me and a big group of Peace Corps “aspirants” (we haven’t been sworn in yet), are on our way to the Universidad Catolica, where we’re going to get some sort of tutorial on water pumps and improved water systems.
There are crumbling, dusty brick walls everywhere, rushing by outside my window … rebar sticks out of the top of everything – walls, homes – a sign that more building is expected. Another story will be built. Grafitti covers other walls … “Fujimori—Libertad” … burning trash here on the side of the road, smog and motor fumes hanging in the air.
Along the Callaterra Central, the dilapidated gas stations interrupt the crumbled brick every several blocks. Driving, here, is not something I ever hope to experience. Every combi whines its crazy honking whine, people sprint across the street (sacks of groceries held close), cars gun their engines, shooting for the tiniest of gaps.
Our combis, now, are racing each other—we gringos grinning wide-eyed through crusty windows, or looking bored, or maybe a little jittery, exchanging glances as we jockey past each other at intervals on this three-lane clusterfuck of a road.
Signs, signs, signs—Senor de Los Milagros, planos, copias, farmacia, lavanderia, mariachi’s—and a dog ripping into a bag of trash in a roadside pile. Policlinico, Banco Azteca, La Curacao. Even here, in the craziness of this traffic, a dude in his dirty white sedan is talking on his cell.
There are lots of open-air markets along this main highway—lots everywhere I’ve gone so far, really. You buy your meats, fruits, veggies and whatnot wholesale here … no Giant, no Safeway for that sort of thing. Well, not for my family’s income bracket, at least, and for a large mass of other Peruvians.
Things have changed oh-so-much in this one, beautiful year. The trick, I think, is going to be a reliance—a bear-hugging cling—to that kernel of wonder regarding each new morning, each new breath, each new sight. These days will be a memory soon—time will work its slight of hand, that much I know. What will remain, as always, will be impressions, notions of time well spent—or not—life lived in gulps or sips, taken with relish or with a grimace. Too short to grimace, I say.
Terraced houses on the hill now. Moto-taxis, clothes drying on grim, cluttered rooftops, and a big, pot-bellied, green-capped member of the policia. He’s got a dark, weather-lined face, and he’s wearing a scowl against the gritty wind, waving traffic on for no apparent reason. It’s creeping along, and not going anywhere fast. There’s a dude pissing on smoke-blackened wall. More burning trash: thick, dark, smoke pluming out and up.
___
I’ve been reading this beautiful, beautiful book by Annie Dillard these past few weeks – “For the Time Being” – containing her reminiscings on a whole range of subjects … from sand to clouds to Talmudic scholars from centuries past. She included this quote a few chapters back:
“The more I work, the more I see things differently, that is, everything gains in grandeur every day, becomes more and more unknown, more and more beautiful. The closer I come, the grander it is, the more remote it is.”
- Giacometti
A few chapters before that, she included this one (both remind me of the wonder of all this vastness):
“Throughout my whole life, during every minute of it, the world has been gradually lighting up and blazing before my eyes until it has come to surround me, entirely lit up from within.”
- Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
That said, it has been one heck of a rush so far—lots and lots of new people, new foods, new customs. The weeks end just as they feel like they’re getting started, and my universe feels somehow crisp but altered: everything is exciting, but everything has been altered, so, so much. I miss my family and the people I love back home, and I try not to think of just how long it’ll be before I see everyone again.
Anyway, how about specifics, huh?
I’m on a combi as I write this, a commuter bus, of sorts, which take people back and forth along the Callaterra Central (the main highway between Lima and the town I’m living in, Chaclacayo). Me and a big group of Peace Corps “aspirants” (we haven’t been sworn in yet), are on our way to the Universidad Catolica, where we’re going to get some sort of tutorial on water pumps and improved water systems.
There are crumbling, dusty brick walls everywhere, rushing by outside my window … rebar sticks out of the top of everything – walls, homes – a sign that more building is expected. Another story will be built. Grafitti covers other walls … “Fujimori—Libertad” … burning trash here on the side of the road, smog and motor fumes hanging in the air.
Along the Callaterra Central, the dilapidated gas stations interrupt the crumbled brick every several blocks. Driving, here, is not something I ever hope to experience. Every combi whines its crazy honking whine, people sprint across the street (sacks of groceries held close), cars gun their engines, shooting for the tiniest of gaps.
Our combis, now, are racing each other—we gringos grinning wide-eyed through crusty windows, or looking bored, or maybe a little jittery, exchanging glances as we jockey past each other at intervals on this three-lane clusterfuck of a road.
Signs, signs, signs—Senor de Los Milagros, planos, copias, farmacia, lavanderia, mariachi’s—and a dog ripping into a bag of trash in a roadside pile. Policlinico, Banco Azteca, La Curacao. Even here, in the craziness of this traffic, a dude in his dirty white sedan is talking on his cell.
There are lots of open-air markets along this main highway—lots everywhere I’ve gone so far, really. You buy your meats, fruits, veggies and whatnot wholesale here … no Giant, no Safeway for that sort of thing. Well, not for my family’s income bracket, at least, and for a large mass of other Peruvians.
Things have changed oh-so-much in this one, beautiful year. The trick, I think, is going to be a reliance—a bear-hugging cling—to that kernel of wonder regarding each new morning, each new breath, each new sight. These days will be a memory soon—time will work its slight of hand, that much I know. What will remain, as always, will be impressions, notions of time well spent—or not—life lived in gulps or sips, taken with relish or with a grimace. Too short to grimace, I say.
Terraced houses on the hill now. Moto-taxis, clothes drying on grim, cluttered rooftops, and a big, pot-bellied, green-capped member of the policia. He’s got a dark, weather-lined face, and he’s wearing a scowl against the gritty wind, waving traffic on for no apparent reason. It’s creeping along, and not going anywhere fast. There’s a dude pissing on smoke-blackened wall. More burning trash: thick, dark, smoke pluming out and up.
___
I’ve been reading this beautiful, beautiful book by Annie Dillard these past few weeks – “For the Time Being” – containing her reminiscings on a whole range of subjects … from sand to clouds to Talmudic scholars from centuries past. She included this quote a few chapters back:
“The more I work, the more I see things differently, that is, everything gains in grandeur every day, becomes more and more unknown, more and more beautiful. The closer I come, the grander it is, the more remote it is.”
- Giacometti
A few chapters before that, she included this one (both remind me of the wonder of all this vastness):
“Throughout my whole life, during every minute of it, the world has been gradually lighting up and blazing before my eyes until it has come to surround me, entirely lit up from within.”
- Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Saturday, April 18, 2009
Remembrances of a Road Trip
I’ve been feeling, lately, as though way too much time has gone by since my last blog post. It’s not that I haven’t been writing – I have – it’s just that sometimes I have trouble figuring out what’s a ‘blog post’ and what’s just an internal, personal ramble.
However, I just pulled up some short little things I’ve written over the past few months, and I felt like a few of them might be good things to share with people. I’ve been wondering, lately, how best to share some of the experiences I had on my trip. I've driven over 11,000 miles in the past five months, from Pennsylvania out to California and back ... and it's been the most densely inspiring period of time I've had in my life to date.
The trip changed me in ways, both profound and subtle, that I’m still sifting through.
I have so many photos, so many journal entries … and I think that sharing some of it is a way for me to keep the experiences alive and fresh in my psyche. So here are a few little ‘ramblings’ …
---
Early April:
Perhaps learning to love, exuberantly, is the central piece of self discovery, of self fulfillment. Maybe we really only find ourselves by gulping in the brilliance of those around us.
Spending days like today and last night, deep in conversation with friends like Erin, learning new music from – and talking about life with -- friends like Freddie, giving big old bear hugs to old friends I haven’t seen for months … it all makes me so deeply happy to be alive and exploring, breathing and smiling. Add to that a collection of sights and sounds from across the country and I’ve suddenly found it utterly impossible not to see the grandeur of what we’re in the midst of.
It’s been a long while since I’ve practiced any sort of dogmatic, orderly type of religion … a long while since I’ve gone to church … a long while since I’ve prayed with any frequency. Yet I feel there’s a deeply loving God, made manifest in the mountains, sparkling down from the night sky (as Donald Miller rightly says …), wishing fervently that we’d all just sit back and breathe. That we’d all stop to take stock of how much we have around us to be thankful for.
I laid in the grass on a hillside overlooking a meadow, way, way, way up in the mountains of Northern California and I stared at the blue sky for longer than I’ve stared at anything for quite some time. I felt the breeze hitting my skin, watched vultures circle down in the valley, took a brief nap on the firm ground. I thought about the things I’ve been through in the past few years, the people I know and love, the people that love me. I thought about how we’re all on our own separate paths towards our own separate visions of goodness, of worthwhile work, of family and community. I thought about what it was like when I was a kid … about how I used to sit or lie outside like that FAR more frequently, thinking thoughts that I’ve long since forgotten, but which, at the time, drifted into my psyche with a simplicity and unexamined ease that a body never quite regains when the duties and responsibilities start piling up. Yet there I was, letting them drift again, astounded by how similar it felt to those long-forgotten lazy childhood days in the sun.
---
Mid-March:
Drove down Highway 101 today, all along the coast of Oregon, stopping off here and there at beaches and historic lighthouses along the way. I bought a sub and a coke and sat at a picnic table watching the sunset in a state park … and kept having this thought that maybe there was a ‘better’ vantage point. How silly is that? The simple fact of the gorgeous sun setting, anywhere, is enough of a holy bit of wonder for me.
Drinking from a bottle of wine right now in a yurt in the woods in Umpqua State Park in southern Oregon – the yurt being much more posh than I would have imagined. Little wooden laminate table, four chairs, nice lamp, forest green curtains and curved lattice-work walls … bunk beds, with a bigger, almost double-sized bed on the bottom. Also a couch, an electric heater … a front porch with a light!
I’m entertaining the idea of staying at this park for one more night, maybe getting a cheaper tent site tomorrow. That way I could drive back up to the lighthouse to watch the sunset, and then drive back on down here with supplies and wood for a fire, dinner, and a proper camping experience. Then again, I may just keep heading south. The cabin calls my name. There’s wood to chop.
I’m feeling the arc of this trip pretty fully these days. When I began, I had no idea how I’d respond to the movement and change, and now I’ve been the entire way across the country and explored a little taste of California and Oregon. This country is incredible … I hope that I’m able to come back here again and do this sort of roaming.
---
Mid-December:
I believe that the single biggest concept that I’ve grasped as a result of this trip is the notion that life is too beautiful—and the people in it too precious—to harbor doubts and regrets about the life I am living.
I just sat down and looked through most of the photos I’ve taken in the past two months, starting with the ones I took of my cat, Toby, at my parents’ house in Lititz the night I left for Chicago. There are shots of me with my aunts and uncles in cities and towns all across the US … and many of those places were firsts for me. First glimpses. First real tangible ideas about what life looks like here, what it looks like there, how they talk somewhere else or what types of music and culture go on in new places that used to be outside of my experience.
And now they are all inside. And that opening, as it were, has allowed me to feel a certain come-uppance in the world. I feel as though there’s so much more to explore—but that I have made an earnest start.
Now, contemplating my return to Lititz and my family and all of the visits with friends that I will likely engineer, I can’t help but feel that my interactions with them all will be a bit more poignant, simply because something about all this travel and distance has made me appreciate the particulars and the people of my life so much more than I was ever able to before.
For a while there I felt as though I was living the earliest parts of adulthood in this completely baffled state. My choices felt rushed, my thoughts muddy … it was uncomfortable, at best, but mainly just frightening.
Yet now I feel changed somehow. I feel a profound exuberance to be alive and surrounded by such a loving mix of people. I feel deliriously excited to have the freedom to choose the rest of my path forward in life. Joseph Campbell says that “awe moves us forward.” My friend Claire, in a birthday card to me, wrote about the “awe-inspiring uncertainty” of this time of life. What a perfect way of saying it.
So if you combine those two ideas … the very fact that all of this uncertainty inspires awe is the thing that moves us forward. I am certainly uncertain right now about what path or paths to take in the coming months and years. Yet I have spent the past two months in awe … and I can already feel my spirit’s forward progress.
---
ps -- I've been using Facebook as a way to share all of my photos from the trip with family and friends. However, I thought it might be cool to have all of the links culled together 'here' for other people who might not be on 'there' ... or who might just want to scan through them in a more sequential context:
Road Tripping Part 1: Chicago
Road Tripping Part 2: Madison, Wisconsin
Road Tripping Part 3: Snowy South Dakota
Road Tripping Part 4: Bend and Missoula
Road Tripping Part 5: Seattle
Road Tripping Part 6: Portland
Road Tripping Part 7: California
Road Tripping Part 8: California, Act II
Road Tripping Part 9: The Oregon Coast
Road Tripping Part 10: Arizona and New Mexico
Monday, December 29, 2008
'Dancing Exuberance'
Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about the sheer volume of incredible artwork, literature, media, music and creative output of every sort that we have at our fingertips. I’ve been home in Lititz for about two weeks, soaking in the vibes of my family and friends and really trying to slow down to enjoy the specific milieu that makes up my concept of ‘home.’
I have a couple of friends (I love you all ... ) who have these brilliantly active minds that seem to be constantly seeking out new sources of musical inspiration, literary inspiration -- new voices of any kind – voices to propel them through their days and help them to contextualize and make sense of this process of self discovery all of each individually go through. I love meeting them, because through their individual searches, they turn me on to new ideas and ideologies that spin me off in new directions. I know I’ve written about this before … but it’s something I don’t think I’ll ever get over. I feel as though all of this time alone and time to travel has helped me to crystallize my thoughts about the intrigue of it all … and has helped me to be just a bit more receptive.
I think each of us has an inward search going on, and the ironic thing is that the inward seeking we do is enriched tenfold when we open ourselves up to other people. It’s like there are these layers of receptiveness, and each of us (at least as I conceptualize it), are all on our own separate – yet intermingled -- journeys. I feel as though I’m learning, gradually, to become more receptive to my own inner world, and, in turn, receptive to the inner journeys of others.
I do, of course, realize that the pooling of ideas I’m talking about is a pretty basic notion – something that’s no doubt been discussed and articulated in any number of ways – I guess I’m just trying to articulate the fact that I’m finally reaching the point where I’m not at all scared of the results of that ‘dialogue of minds’, so to speak. The notion of limitless ideas and ideologies, endless books and thousands of new musicians used to scare me on some deep level. I shied from it at first, for reasons I think I’m still working out.
Now, though, I’m beginning to realize that the best thing about this life is that no matter how receptive we manage to become, there will always be this endless bounty of new voices to discover. So yeah. That’s all I really had to say … it takes me a while to spit out even basic thoughts though, ha.
Here’s a quote I’ve been loving from this movie called 'Waking Life' that absolutely floored me a few weeks ago. I’ve watched it twice now … and there are so many ideas, constructs and influences bandied about that I think it’ll take me many, many more viewings to begin to appreciate the full scope of the movie. This particular quote is by this guy named Timothy “Speed” Levitch who appears in the film … I could describe who he is, based on my admittedly limited knowledge of him, but here’s what good ol’ Wikipedia has to say:
The entry goes on, true to Wiki form, in voluminous detail. The article has links to various aspects of his biography, the films he’s been in … on and on. You get the picture. My Uncle just loaned me one of Levitch’s most famous films – The Cruise – and I haven’t even had time to watch it yet. No doubt when I do, it’ll spin me off in a hundred more directions … just like “Waking Life,” the film that just introduced me to him. There’s no end to it … it’s beautiful.
So! If I use up every blog I ever write from here until the end of my life writing and rhapsodizing about the beauty of these rabbit holes … I don’t think I’ll ever get bored of it. It’s fun for me to tease them out, to follow them and explain them as far as I can ... to help myself understand and remember the course. And even now, in the process of writing this all out, I’m realizing that the act of writing helps me to express my thanks for this “ongoing wow” – so PLEASE, please … if you’ve got something, some things, that are dazzling you, waking you up, keeping you awake, whatever ... share them with me.
I feel as though that’s what Levitch must mean by “this dancing exuberance,” right?
Ok, here’s the quote, finally:
---
I have a couple of friends (I love you all ... ) who have these brilliantly active minds that seem to be constantly seeking out new sources of musical inspiration, literary inspiration -- new voices of any kind – voices to propel them through their days and help them to contextualize and make sense of this process of self discovery all of each individually go through. I love meeting them, because through their individual searches, they turn me on to new ideas and ideologies that spin me off in new directions. I know I’ve written about this before … but it’s something I don’t think I’ll ever get over. I feel as though all of this time alone and time to travel has helped me to crystallize my thoughts about the intrigue of it all … and has helped me to be just a bit more receptive.
I think each of us has an inward search going on, and the ironic thing is that the inward seeking we do is enriched tenfold when we open ourselves up to other people. It’s like there are these layers of receptiveness, and each of us (at least as I conceptualize it), are all on our own separate – yet intermingled -- journeys. I feel as though I’m learning, gradually, to become more receptive to my own inner world, and, in turn, receptive to the inner journeys of others.
I do, of course, realize that the pooling of ideas I’m talking about is a pretty basic notion – something that’s no doubt been discussed and articulated in any number of ways – I guess I’m just trying to articulate the fact that I’m finally reaching the point where I’m not at all scared of the results of that ‘dialogue of minds’, so to speak. The notion of limitless ideas and ideologies, endless books and thousands of new musicians used to scare me on some deep level. I shied from it at first, for reasons I think I’m still working out.
Now, though, I’m beginning to realize that the best thing about this life is that no matter how receptive we manage to become, there will always be this endless bounty of new voices to discover. So yeah. That’s all I really had to say … it takes me a while to spit out even basic thoughts though, ha.
Here’s a quote I’ve been loving from this movie called 'Waking Life' that absolutely floored me a few weeks ago. I’ve watched it twice now … and there are so many ideas, constructs and influences bandied about that I think it’ll take me many, many more viewings to begin to appreciate the full scope of the movie. This particular quote is by this guy named Timothy “Speed” Levitch who appears in the film … I could describe who he is, based on my admittedly limited knowledge of him, but here’s what good ol’ Wikipedia has to say:
Tim "Speed" Levitch (born 1970) is an American actor, tour guide, speaker, author and voice actor. His nickname is derived from his trademark fast talking style. Levitch has appeared in multiple films and has had his poetic and philosophical works published in books and periodicals …
The entry goes on, true to Wiki form, in voluminous detail. The article has links to various aspects of his biography, the films he’s been in … on and on. You get the picture. My Uncle just loaned me one of Levitch’s most famous films – The Cruise – and I haven’t even had time to watch it yet. No doubt when I do, it’ll spin me off in a hundred more directions … just like “Waking Life,” the film that just introduced me to him. There’s no end to it … it’s beautiful.
So! If I use up every blog I ever write from here until the end of my life writing and rhapsodizing about the beauty of these rabbit holes … I don’t think I’ll ever get bored of it. It’s fun for me to tease them out, to follow them and explain them as far as I can ... to help myself understand and remember the course. And even now, in the process of writing this all out, I’m realizing that the act of writing helps me to express my thanks for this “ongoing wow” – so PLEASE, please … if you’ve got something, some things, that are dazzling you, waking you up, keeping you awake, whatever ... share them with me.
I feel as though that’s what Levitch must mean by “this dancing exuberance,” right?
Ok, here’s the quote, finally:
---
On this bridge, Lorca warns, "life is not a dream. Beware and beware and … beware." And so many think because "then" happens, "now" isn't.
But didn't I mention the ongoing "wow" is happening right now? We are all coauthors of this dancing exuberance ... where even our inabilities are having a roast.
We are the authors of ourselves, coauthoring a gigantic Dostoyevsky novel starring clowns. This entire thing we're involved with called the world ... is an opportunity to exhibit how exciting alienation can be.
Life is a matter of a miracle that is collected over time ... by moments flabbergasted to be in each other's presence.
The world is an exam to see if we can rise into the direct experiences. Our eyesight is here as a test to see if we can see beyond it. Matter is here as a test for our curiosity. Doubt is here as an exam for our vitality. Thomas Mann wrote that he would rather participate in life … than write a hundred stories. Giacometti was once run down by a car, and he recalled falling into a lucid faint, a sudden exhilaration, as he realized at last something was happening to him.
An assumption develops that you cannot understand life and live life simultaneously. I do not agree entirely. Which is to say I do not exactly disagree. I would say that life understood is life lived. But the paradoxes bug me, and I can learn to love and make love ... to the paradoxes that bug me. And on really romantic evenings of self, I go salsa dancing with my confusion.
Before you drift off, don't forget. Which is to say, remember. Because remembering is so much more a psychotic activity than forgetting.
Lorca in that same poem said ... that the iguana will bite those who do not dream. And as one realizes ... that one is a dream figure … in another person's dream -- that is self-awareness.
-- Timothy 'Speed' Levitch, from the film 'Waking Life'
---
Oh, and ps – who’s Lorca? I have absolutely no frigging idea ... so I’m off to the land of wiki to find out, ha. And don't you love how sometimes it seems that certain movies, certain books, which end up being perfect for a given moment in our lives, or perfect for our moods or temperament, seem to continually find their way into our hands through whatever channels are open? I had seen mentions of 'Waking Life' years ago ... I'd already fallen in love with some of the director's other work (Richard Linklater ... he's the guy who directed 'Before Sunrise' and 'Before Sunset')... and it took me years to finally watch it. That's a function, I think, of all that is out there, along with that whole notion of receptiveness.
Ok, I'm done, 'promise. Happy New Years everybody.
Wednesday, December 03, 2008
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 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
Monday, November 17, 2008
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.
Friday, November 07, 2008
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.”
Friday, October 24, 2008
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.
Saturday, May 31, 2008
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."
Tuesday, March 25, 2008
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.
Friday, March 07, 2008
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 …
Tuesday, February 19, 2008
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
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.
Monday, February 04, 2008
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."
______________________________
Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, p.82
www.anniedillard.com
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
Wednesday, October 03, 2007
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.
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.
Monday, April 09, 2007
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.
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