something a little closer to the bone ...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pilgrim's Progress

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Amen.

"And The World Spins Madly On"

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

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

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

- Howard Thurman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Late Night Ramble

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

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

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

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

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

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

-Kahlil Gibran

"Everything Gains in Grandeur Every Day"

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

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

Anyway, how about specifics, huh?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

- Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Remembrances of a Road Trip

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’ …

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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.

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Mid-December:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

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

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

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

'Dancing Exuberance'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


---

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Presence

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Quiet

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stretch

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

http://www.ryanmontbleauband.com/

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


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


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


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


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

Stretch

http://www.ryanmontbleauband.com/

Go West, Young Man

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Go Ask Alice

I almost got locked inside of the bookstore tonight.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All that ink made me happy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

We only have these times we're living in.

- Kate Wolf

Be here now.

- Ray Lamontagne

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

- Herman Hesse

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

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

It’s been some time.

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

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

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

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

You are my friend—and I was the same.

And riding that hope was like catching some train.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An Evening with David Wilcox

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Desiderata

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

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

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



Desiderata

by

Max Ehrmann

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We're all pilgrims, of a sort

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

______________________________

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

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

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

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, p.82

www.anniedillard.com