Texas, part 1

I'm in big sky country (surprise: the sky really is bigger here!), and the trip is already shaping up well. The conferences begin tonight. So far we've been visiting people, seeing their homes and meeting families. Its been great connecting with Brett and Maggie, I'm really glad it worked out for me to stay with them.

The business portion of the trip will begin on Sunday really. I'm kind of nervous about that, but mostly because I have a really strong sense of how well everything could go. I'm beginning to think that I could really begin apartment hunting by September or October!

Its also looking like I might stay an extra week here, and then road trip back with Jonathan! Which, needless to say, would be unbelievably amazing. More on that as plans are firmed up.

Friendship part 2

Again, I've been thinking a lot about friendship lately, but after re-reading my last post I realize that it only presented the kind of negative track that my mind was taking at that moment. So consider this the ying to that post's yang...or is it the other way around? I can never remember which one is black or white. Anyway...

Friends are.........................................I'm searching for a word but they all feel tiny. "Wonderful" would be like a child in grown-up clothes playing pretend. Its cute and you get the point, but everyone knows its not the real thing. Friends are whatever the fully adult, amazing-but-not-full-of-itself version of "wonderful" is. I think these days I am understanding a little better why people go insane when they're marooned on a deserted island.

After all....what are we in total isolation? I do believe that before everything else God Himself is the only complete source of joy and friendship that can satisfy this wild hunger to be fully known that devours us all, but I also believe that each one of us is intended to be an expression of that kind of "I still love you when you're ugly and smell bad" kind of love to each other. I'm blessed enough to be able to rattle off a whole bucket-list of people who have been that for me.

Our triumphs mean nothing if they cannot be shared by people who understand the one thousand and one things that make them uniquely spectacular.

Our tragedies would destroy us if we didn't have people just far enough outside of our circumstances to tell us that its really not such a big deal after all, and then make us laugh again.

So to all of you who have been with me, stayed with me, learned and loved with me...thank you. I'll be spending the rest of my life raiding the lost arcs of language to find a word big enough to carry the full weight of just how grateful and humbled I am to be on this crazy journey we call life with you. But in the meantime...thank you.

Friendship, Part 1

Wow, its been more than a week since I posted something. Things have been rather hectic on the home front, but I'll try to keep things more consistent here.

So let's see. I've been thinking a lot about friendship lately. How important it is, how fragile it can be, and how strong. It's really pretty amazing if you stop to think about it, kind of like water. It takes so many different forms. Sometimes it seems invincible, other times its just evaporating in front of you.

The thing that I just don't understand is how we humans seem to inevitably hurt the people we're closest to and care the most about. You'd think it should be the other way around. I guess it makes sense, in that you can only be hurt deeply by someone you love deeply, but the part that confuses me is that it seems like the hurt is always delivered at some point, in some way.

I guess I've been feeling a little overwhelmed with this fact lately. Like I said to a friend recently, "it's like I'm the proverbial bull in the emotional china shop." Most of the time it's because I just completely fail to connect the dots and realize "oh hey, maybe that might not make so-and-so very happy". Sometimes I'm just a selfish asshole for a while. But the hard thing is knowing full well you're going to hurt someone, and doing it anyway because you know that what you're doing is the right thing, even if it hurts.

Anyway, if you're reading this and I've ever done something thoughtless, insensitive, or selfish that caused you pain, I'm truly sorry. I can only take comfort in the fact that God and Time are bigger than me, big enough to heal and restore.

Spring Beats

I just wrote this, sitting outside on our front portch. I took a crack at putting into practice some of the things I'm absorbing from Writing Down the Bones, and I'm a little surprised at the result:

Spring is the Philharmonic, blasting concerts at the vaulted ceilings of the world!

The granite bolder to my left rumbles deep bass blue, no less joyful than the Poplar arpeggios. It grips me, rips me right off my front porch. The music in my liver wants to explode along with the beat.

I will scream with the new grass!
I will rumble tumble drum beats with the marching ants.
I will warble wrong notes with the woodthrush, and we will laugh because that will make them the right ones.
I will let the flushing red destroy my cheeks, utterly wreck them in smiles.
I will shatter my windows and drink down the sunlight in great heaving gulps, like a sailor who stumbled into the first tavern of a new port.

The water wants in, wants to mimic the wind with its sighs and thrilling highs and after all who am I to say no to a lonely stream.
But, I will ask it to keep it down some,
So the blushing snowdrops in their lily white frocks have a chance to test their new found feet in a little tap dance of farewell to the sleet and snow.

There is something behind my not-mind that thinks,
"Yes, this is what we are here for.
To witness the rippling symphony of Spring,
and the thousand and one things that make each detail sharp and beautiful.
To dig around in the pit of our lungs and rip out a full throated

YES!

And wildly, childly, each in our own tongue,
Fling it at the treetops and hope it sticks there
Like a Kite.

Writing Down the Bones

I've discovered a new book. I'm still in mid-breath, reading slowly and inhaling it deeply, but I already know God gave it to me. It was one of those strange moments in Barnes and Nobles (I think God really likes it there, I have lots of encounters with Him in those bookshelves). I was headed somewhere else in the store, and I passed one of those book displays they arrange on the ends of one of the shelves.

It was a collection of books about writing, and it just grabbed my attention. I knew that one of the books on that shelf was for me. It was a little strange actually, I didn't even stop to think about it until I was looking for a chair with five of them under my arm. Anyway, long story short, the fifth of them was this book, Writing Down the Bones.

Its basically a collection of essays by a very interesting woman about writing and creativity as a state of mind, a way of holding yourself in respect to the world and your own life. Very interesting/instructive/challenging for me, it's basically proving to be an excellent counterpoint to the technical focus on the craft of writing that I've been working on lately.

I've been tempted to just load this blog down under a backpack's worth of the quotes and thoughts I've been extracting, but that would kind of ruin the fun for everyone else, so I'll just put up two. Go read the rest for yourself!

This first quote is, so far, almost like an anthem for me. She's touched on so much of what's been burning inside me, a beautiful expression of why writing (though she's really talking about art in a larger sense) is so critical to life. I started to cry when I read this out loud to my parents, so I know there's a lot here for me:

"Our lives are at once ordinary and mythical. We live and die, age beautifully or full of wrinkles. We wake in the morning, buy yellow cheese, and hope we have enough money to pay for it. At the same instant we have these magnificent hearts that pump through all sorrow and all winters we are alive on the earth. We are important and our lives are important, magnificent really, and their details are worthy to be recorded. This is how writers must think, this is how we must sit down with pen in hand. We were here; we are human beings; this is how we lived. Let it be known, the earth passed before us. Our details are important. Otherwise, if they are not, we can drop a bomb and it doesn't matter."


The second quote is lighter, more of a mantra that I've adopted to push me past the dreaming and imagining stage, and into the early rounds of real creation and just plain hard work:

"Take out another notebook, pick up another pen, and just write, just write, just write. In the middle of the world, make one positive step. In the center of chaos, make one definitive act. Just write. Say yes, stay alive, be awake. Just write, just write, just write."

I'm going to go write.

The Waiting

I haven't written a poem in years, but this one kind of came to me in the shower yesterday:

The Waiting is the one place
were nothing and no one
can make me taste anything I don't want to

Where I breath
in the smell of my soul
And run my fingertips along
the crests and dips of
my future self

It is a hairy gray gnome
Just short enough to ignore if I try
though he taps and raps at my knees.

Sometimes I slam on my headphones
with a scream.
But he just climbs up onto a barstool
and does handstands
While he looks me in the eye

The Waiting is a '5os bomb bunker
I built it in case of a
zombie attack

The funny thing is
I was so certain
that of all the frightened people
casting shadows in this world
I was the only one who knew how to find it

But when I switched on the light
I found my friend
Waiting for me
And because of the look of surprise on my face
or perhaps in spite of it

He smiled

Storyteller

This is a thought that I've been mulling over for a while. It was born out of some ongoing conversations I've been having with a few of my close friends over a question:

"Do you need to consider or describe yourself as a Christian to truly follow Jesus?"

Or, stated from the other direction:

"Given the state of cultural Christianity in America, is it possible to remain relevant and sensitively faithful to what God is doing and still be 'Christian'."

It's a question I've really wrestled with a lot lately. At times it's felt like I've been spinning my wheels on a symantic or philosophical issue, but I've found that discovering an answer to that question has become very important to me and to many of my friends.

Until recently I had thought it was one of those "endless questions", the kind that everyone needs to determine their own answer to, and perhaps it is. But since my earlier post about the importance of storytelling, my whole perspective on the question has been simplified by a realization I've had: Jesus was the greatest storyteller in history.

"What the hell does that have to do with anything?", you may be wondering.

Well, I've gone back and looked at his life in the gospels, at the things he taught people and the kinds of conversations he had. Many of them were stories, it's true, but what struck me is that the great message that he brought, his great purpose, was to tell a new kind of story to the world.

Jesus lived in a world that didn't exist. He lived in a world where people fed and clothed the poor, where sick people who were about to die could be healed by a touch or a kind word. In his world, the universal constants of gravity and death were negotiable, but the command to love God and everyone around you out of the deepest fabric of your being was not. In this world, love was everything, and those without it were nothing. It was a world that crazies and dreamers and been whispering about for centuries. It had been hidden in songs and laws and prophecies, and all the sudden here was a man who just lived there, all the time.

It freaked everyone out. Not surprisingly, no one really believed him. But the story was so beautiful that some people just couldn't help themselves. They followed him around, hoping to hear it again, needing to feel the color of it in their own lives, even for a small moment. It didn't matter that there was no way it could ever really be true.

But something happened to them. Over time, they started to believe that this story could be real. Sometimes they even acted like it was. Sometimes they didn't. But Jesus forgave them quickly when they didn't, because he knew how hard it can be to live in a story like that. He knew how painful it can become when the life you live becomes unreal, and goes to war with the very fabric of the world you're living it in.

And basically the whole history of the Church from that point on has been pretty much the same thing. Lots of people trying their best to tell that story. Some people added things that weren't there before. Some forgot parts. There were times when the story honestly didn't sound anything like the one Jesus had told, but there were always people who went back and found the old story again. Some of them were killed for it.

This is such a simple thought that it doesn't seem like it should make much of a difference, but I can't describe how much relief it has brought me. It's answered the question I began this post with. As long as I keep coming back to this impossible story we've inherited, it doesn't particularly matter what I call myself.

The fact that we speak with different accents shouldn't stop us from learning to tell this story together.

As Shakespeare would say, "the play's the thing."

These thoughts are very new for me. I'm not convinced that they're completely accurate or valuable. They certainly aren't complete. But it's something I've been thinking about a lot these days, and I thought I'd throw them out to all of you, my fellow storytellers.