There is the impulse, I think, to write something that is going somewhere and has a point but often I am writing to process. It is inductive then as conclusion emerges as thoughts fine their way to paper or blog. But process is scary, it assumes uncertainty and a journey that has with it all sorts of surprises. You begin the walk the wondering with a certain understanding or imagined reality but then actual reality, the nitti-gridi, reshapes your imagination and therefore your thinking-the way you see everything. It might look like this.
I was about to turn twenty-five the other day and so I thought I should go for a walk. It was nearing midnight and it was freezing so I got on my down coat and start running for my old elementary school. As I kid I can remember always running home from there but never running to there. I would walk a certain girl home from school then I would run to the end of the block really fast so she might think, “gee David sure runs fast, maybe Ill marry him.” I tried this same thing with my friend Sam when I was twenty-two and tore a ligament in my knee. But now as I was about to turn twenty-five I was just about in the field behind the school when a friend called, “Happy Birthday!” they said and I had almost forgotten that I was running to the park because I was turning twenty-five. I got to the field and a beautiful song came on as I climbed one of the thirty giant snow balls students had roled probably during recess, just as I had done years ago. The song starts off, “this is the start this is your heart this is the day you were born”, beautiful right? I stood on top of the giant mound with my hands reaching toward the heavens like the tree that I was facing. I danced too, the way you dance when you are keeping your balance on a giant ice-ball. It looks like squatting-to give you a mental image.
For some reason I had to walk I had to go not knowing were it would take me. Movement is thing that gets my heart warm and impassioned. If I am moving-Ill be alright. So I went to climb the tree and it took several minutes of running at the tree and pushing off the thing to get to a branch that I had once done 360 jams on as a kid. I had to role the giant ice-ball over to get into the tree, actually. And there I sat finally okay with the process and the thought of turning twenty-five. When my friend had called I said that I felt like I was five. And in that tree I was feeling pretty young, connected to the state I was born and raised in, and in a tree that reminds me of my story in some nuanced way. Silent in that tree I sat and allowed God to reshape my thinking a little bit. I have been afraid. Sometimes afraid to live other times afraid to rest. And it was as if God was inviting me to live and rest in love. What was so surprising was that these two realities are completely married. I began to imagine a life rested and alive. Then I walked home instead of running.
