I was running today and among the many things I saw was a street. I didn’t run down this street I only looked down and noticed it being mostly empty, not a car in sight. Then I looked up and was taken back by a row of pine trees marking both sides of the street. All of the palms were bending at the exact same angel-up and to the right. It was like they were bending with the curve of the earth, ever so slightly and unified. They had a kind of tragectory and confident swagger I was attracted to. I am looking out now from the porch of the library and the palms out toward the mountains have a similar thing going on but not quite like the street I ran by. These trees had braved the storms had grew up together and now calmly shade this block like its their job.
And to be honest I have no job. What I mean is that I am unemployed, sure, but also I have no job. And there is something that I have found very attractive about this joblessness and ironically it is the very thing that I end up hating. There is freedom for the one who chooses to wander with no real ‘job’. My sister got me a tee-shirt that said, “not all who wander are lost” as I graduated high school and that idea is so freeing to me. Those who wander have a sense of wonder often about things such as palm trees but I fear that in certain ways freedom can breed a chaotic soul. This guy Rolhiser has said that we must worship at two shrines: the god of chaos and the god of order. It is in this tension that flesh and blood reality, what he describes as a living eucharist, seem to touchdown in our lives.
We find a kind of vocation a calling toward concrete structured action that orders us as people. Freedom can be as one friend has put it-death dressed up as life. These palms seem to live in perfect tension and perhaps that is why they are so interesting. They shed layers of bark every day and are all just a bit off kilter, but it is because they have lived and hurt and grown. I guess what I am saying is I need a job to keep on keeping on. To see these years in the west less as a vacation and more toward vocation.
