I am standing at a street corner in the predawn blue. A gas station to my right outshines the few remaining stars, and behind me the green-yellow-red rhythm regains its usefulness. We are all waking up.
Ahead, the sidewalk curves into a trail along a river, where I will see deer and rabbits and ducks, and I will keep looking to the right, past the highway to the eastern horizon, and I will be grinning.
Most runs aren’t like this.
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Mumford & Sons in concert at the Gentlemen of the Road stopover in Salida, Colorado, on August 22, 2015.
I’m not much of a concert person, even less a music festival person.
The soundtracks and stages of my youth were limited, and it was a long time before I fell head-over-heels in love with music. But fall I did, and for no one more deeply than Mumford & Sons.
Start a conversation about their craft and technique, and I wouldn’t be able to do much more than agree with every good word. But bring up their lyrics and ponder what their music means to people? I would be so full of thoughts. It comes down to their incredible ability to express the deep longings of the human soul, I would say, and for that reason they have sunk into my whole being and I have carried their music with me for years.
Their new album came out a few months ago, and I made it my (somewhat belated) mission over the first few weeks of August to learn and fall in love with it. Even with the banjo gone, it wasn’t difficult to make room for these new offerings.
But when I saw the band in concert two weeks ago, it was what was in long-term memory that made the deepest impression.
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Six months ago, she hugged her family goodbye, and the page turned as they went upstairs and she stayed downstairs.
The night before, the first night, she lay on the blue-and-white rug looking up at the ceiling, knees pulled to her chest. She won’t remember most of her thoughts from those early days, but she’ll remember these:
There are so many memories waiting to happen in this little house, in this big city. I know there will be days when I’m lying on the floor looking at the ceiling and I won’t be able to stop laughing. Other days, that view will be blurry with tears. Now, though, everything’s a blank slate. Anything could happen!
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Photo by Molly Stoddard on Flickr's creative commons.
I don’t mean to dip my fingertips into the wine along with the bread, but in that dimly lit basement, it sometimes happens. And I’m always glad when it does.
Within seconds I’ve chewed and swallowed, but my fingers are still streaked with light purple. It feels like a measure of grace, like my skin has mingled with something holy, like that holiness is moving down my hands and up my arms and into all of me.
We are speaking and listening together, standing and sitting together, breathing in and breathing out, and I look at the hands that held the bread and still carry signs of their participation in the Presence.
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Photo by Magdalena Gmur on Flickr's creative commons.
Three years ago, I told my roommate, “I don’t know who I am.” She didn’t understand how that could be. But it is a journey I am still on, to find the threads of desire and movement, of the words that leave my mouth and those that shrink back, of fear and freedom, stillness and noise, and follow them to their points of origin.
I try to solve me like a riddle, but I am Rubik’s cube that’s stuck; I am an instruction manual with half the words missing. The threads are knotted and intertwined and frayed. So it is with all of us, I think.
I sit in the library or on a plane and write pages and pages, and then exhale from the deepest part of me and think, There. I’ve figured it out. I’ve discovered what makes me come alive and what crushes my spirit.
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In a few days, I will be offering to others something that is not mine. I won't be able to take credit for a single taste, for the mystery that's among us, for any trembling hands or averted eyes, and I don't want to. The body of Christ, broken for you, my friend, for you, my neighbor, for you who are hungry. The blood of Christ, shed for you.
I tell people I've found a church in Denver, but most of them don't understand how big of a deal this is for me. They don't know the backstory of doubts and church-weariness and all the sharp points that started poking out of my skin two or three years ago. This church I've found now, rich in liturgy, gentle in spirit, a meeting of the old and the new, is a gift in my rocky faith story.
I've inhaled that same sweet air in the written word too, in those men and women who write blogs and books that remind me that I am not alone in the questions I ask, in the injustices I see, in what I'm frustrated and passionate about.
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Photo by Jasleen Kaur.
Please be my people.
Almost every time, I leave their house feeling lighter than when I got there, even in my work clothes and work grime and work weariness. What was dormant in me is now stirring; what was dull is now reflecting bits of light as I walk back to my car on another Wednesday night. It's been two and a half months.
One week into my new city life, I was pressing send on an email to an unknown person. I was feeling around in the dark for an open table, for other hands that would reach back, for faces that weren't hiding behind plastic or paint or cliches. It was a hopeful search for the truest kind of community.
I think I've found it, but I'm not sure it's found me ... or that I've let myself be found by it.
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Photo from Nathan Siemers on Flickr.
The same song echoes in a new room. The acoustics are different, the walls are a brighter blue, and though there are familiar faces in the lopsided pictures hanging between windows and corners, the faces belonging to those who are tangibly here are new additions.
I can breathe easier here. The windows aren't stuck and I don't feel claustrophobic. With all these changes, it's easy to think that the music filling my ears is different too. And in some ways, it is. A couple new stringed instruments are in the group, adding a richness that wasn't there before, and the new vocalist is bringing something to my words that wasn't there before.
There's more experimentation, more stamina, more fullness, but the longer I listen, the more the novelty fades and I understand what a new environment can and cannot do.
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Photo by David Goehring on Flickr
“There isn’t a cloud in sight,” they say, though sometimes there might be a few wispy white things on the edge of the horizon, hovering above housetops and distant mountains. And while I can’t see those distant mountains from here, I looked around, squinting, and there truly is not a cloud in sight.
I’m home.
I’ve lived here for two months now, but this weekend was the first time I left town, stayed away for a few days, and then returned, groggy, with a bag of dirty clothes and several dozen pictures on my phone.
If the 17 pages in my journal sporting new writing are any indication, this trip was steeped in thoughts and feelings as well as faces and experiences. Someday, I’ll write more about these revelations, but for now I’m simply soaking up home.
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Hello Colorado
It needs to stop, this wanting to write but never taking the time.
It needs to happen, this writing I keep talking about.
This is my corner of the Internet. Facebook can feel too much like being at a family reunion, with all the aunts and uncles and grandparents and cousins asking me what’s going on in my life in that big city twelve hundred miles away. Twitter is like a party with all the cool kids: a lot to stimulate and energize, but too much going on and too many people I don’t know to really feel comfortable there.
Read MoreToday, I’m mourning the loss of a man I never knew.
I read line after line about the impact he had on people, about their love for him, about his love for them. There was so much more to him than the brokenness in him and around him. There was kindness and faith, there was a love of Mumford & Sons and Raisin Bran, there was a whole person-sized ray of light.
Then, he returned to his hometown, where he was murdered.
It breaks my heart that he died, and in such a horrible way. That the darkness won.
Read MoreYou hold out your autograph book, the one with the multicolored pages and the dinosaur cover, the one you got when you were a child. You hold it out with pride, not embarrassment, for the decade and a half of memories it carries — of names and notes, of crossed-out words and hard-to-read cursive. You’ve taken this book overseas twice, and you safeguard it in ever-increasing ways after each pen or pencil addition.
Read MoreIt's been three years since a major bend in the road of my life coincided with the start of a calendar year.
Then, I was excited. Then, I pinned all my hopes on a time of transformation overseas. And it was a time of transformation, growth, friendships. I'm grateful.
My attitude now, however, is a bit different. Still hopeful, but cautious and apprehensive and not-all-of-my-eggs-in-one-basket-anymore as I prepare to move from California to Colorado in less than a week. Too much has happened since then for me to believe that transformation will happen so easily. I'm tired.
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Not my rainbow, but the lighting conditions are similar. John Garghan took this picture.
The light is weird: bright, bright sun and a collage of clouds at near dusk, and in the eerie I see the start of a rainbow, oh so vivid.
And I cry.
Twice I pull over on the side of the road to gaze and to hold up my little phone with its weak little camera and to marvel and to feel. The second time, it all rises up in me even more as I see that this, this is a full rainbow. A picture of perfect wild cloud light bow.
I cry more.
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Photo by Kim Carpenter
Thirteen years ago, I was sitting in front of our thick computer playing a spelling game. I still remember the bright yellow on the screen.
I was 12 years old, in my last full year as a homeschooler, and it’s my only homeschooling memory I can pin down to a specific day.
My mom interrupted my game to tell me about two planes crashing into two towers in New York City.
That’s where I was when I found out about the 9/11 terrorist attacks: The first event to imbed itself in the minds of an entire generation. My generation.
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I see art in the turkeys who come to our yard daily. I see beauty and wonder as they drink from the old, metal bucket we keep filled with water, tilting their heads back once they've filled their mouths with a swallow so that the liquid can go down and quench and fill. I am delighted to watch them peck and scratch at the dirt, and, sometimes, sit in it.
They haven't brought their babies here to drink for more than two years now. I wish they would, but I'm content just to see them live and move and have their being right outside our kitchen window.
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Photo by Iain Browne at flickr's creative commons.
They gave me that look and those words, critiquing my lodging arrangements on our trip. She stood in the middle of the street and started singing beautifully, and I realized she would always be better than me at everything. She came up to me and touched the mole on my face, the one that sprouts black hairs.
Two nights ago, I dreamed all those scenarios, one right after another, and what an insecurity bath it was!
Sometimes my confidence is off-the-charts, and I love being me, and “weird” is a badge of honor. Then my world opens up a bit more, or I’m plunged back into an earlier time with earlier people, and it all comes back.
I’m not invincible; I’m fragile.
Two autumns ago, I knew the steps and I walked in them. Literally. I knew that writing helped me understand myself. I knew that walking brought clarity to thoughts and prayers. So I did both often, and the steps were simple, and life was sweet.
But it was easier to carve out the space for these life-giving habits then. I had just returned home from seven months abroad. I was reunited with my cats and the majority of my wardrobe, and everything looked a little newer and fresher than it had before I left. I was afraid of this return, afraid of falling back into depression and old, hated patterns, but I was healthy, the world was new, and I had time aplenty on my hands. And so I slid smoothly into the new rhythm.
But once you slide out of it, as I did after a few months — gradually and imperceptibly — it’s hard to regain that footing.
It’s been almost a year and a half now since those (perceived) idyllic days.
It terrifies me how fragile this is, how fragile I am, how easily I can and have lost my way on the slippery slopes of self-loathing and comparison and laziness and many others.
Writing again has been like exchanging someone else's glasses for a pair that's actually my prescription. I’m grateful to be able to see again, but I’m also fearful. What if I lose them or break them or forget them somewhere? What if I forget to clean them and they get all smudged and blurry and I'm so used to the new normal that I don't realize it's time for a reset?
And how do I even know these glasses are the "magic formula" for seeing? What if there's a better, sharper pair somewhere else, and I'm unknowingly settling for ones that may work for a while, but will give me headaches in the end?
Russell Crowe as Noah (from ew.com)
As I read reviews and then sat in the dark cinema, I was open. I was reaching, as with feelers, into the waters of Noah, open to receiving what was good and thought provoking about the movie. And I didn’t come away empty-handed.
But then I read the lambasting words, and the movie called blasphemous and compared to excrement, and I tucked my feelers under my body, afraid what they would think of me for daring to see anything good in the adaptation.
But I did. I also saw things that unsettled and troubled me. I’m not entirely sure how to make sense of it all, but I’ll try.
First, I don’t think the filmmakers were intentionally trying to mock Christians or distort the biblical account as much as possible. My take is that this was a serious attempt to examine the story of Noah and the Flood in a new way while challenging expectations, looking at human nature, looking between the lines, looking at philosophical questions the story evokes.
Read MoreHere I am in the darkness, and I can’t muster the strength to wave.
Of course, that’s not really true. If it really were coal black inside me at this very moment, I wouldn’t be able to type these words, never mind lift my hand in some half-hearted greeting.
But it comes, this darkness, and I am afraid of my feelings.
So very thin, so very fragile, is the distance between “okay” and “broken.”
In college, “depression” flitted at the edges of my mind and in my Internet searches, but I rejected the notion. It was something else. It was insecurity, it was stress, it was my spiritual state.
This time, there is no doubt, no explaining away, no alternate narratives.
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{Photo credit: CJS*64}
Last night, I went to the cinema with my dad and sister to see the 50th-anniversary episode of the British television show Doctor Who.
I’d only seen about a dozen episodes in total, and was going mostly for my sister, who wore her Doctor Who T-shirt and carried her sonic screwdriver and cheered at all the right times.
Even as the homages and references and plot points jumped over my head and skated every which way around me, I couldn’t help but feel the momentousness of it all.
We all have stories and characters we love. We move in close to them, pressing in as we would around a fire, hands and faces turned toward the warmth.
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