I get a breathless feeling sometimes when I am going through something that is uncomfortable. It is lased with anxiety, that breathless breath. It came not because I was short of breath but because I couldn’t see where I was, why I am… and other existential questions like these. It was one’a those weeks. In the mornings I awoke having felt as if I hadn’t slept, yet strangely I was unable to get back to sleep. I felt a bit like zombies probably do—in a kind of half-dead fog. I would pray but mostly breathe, because prayer isn’t magic, it is mostly thinking and saying for me. Saying what you think to God, that is, so God might know what is going on. It is hard sometimes when God says stuff back— especially through people who care for you—because it just might shift what you think and therefore what you say back. It all sounds kind of circular to me, but maybe that is the way communication works best—with two faces and a shared edge, it can all look like a rolling coin.
So it’s rolling but it was just one’a those weeks. And I have been causioned in using the word ‘just’ so loosely. It minimizes, too often, the things that actually matter most. SO it was just one’a those weeks. I can say though, that I am excited for a new hymn to sing this summer, and some new space to open up the colder parts of my own heart, letting them melt like sorrows at the beach. My sister Erin was out here and experience a week with my friends and I. It was a gleaming highlight even while I felt displaced from the ‘dave’ I am most comfortable being. You know when you feel a few seconds behind every thought? Erin picked up on it and named my disposition well when she reflected on the amount of stress I carried the past year or so. What is it that our minds are doing when they take the world in, fondling it enough to repeat it back for some kind of test? I’m learning that life is best lived slower than I thought, adding confidently the things that belong and forgetting that there was a test.
Anyway, I got a job at a bookstore (Fuller Seminary Bookstore). It only took nine months and I am stoked to paid some bills and get a few trips together. I’m taking a train somewhere with my bike and still planning that LA»GR ride for next summer, which means I won’t die in the dessert now, feeew.
