white blazes

Life is far more spacious than we seem to see. Reality is open and full and ripe with grace that is constantly wooing us into a more honest more loving more true relationship with everything. Life is so spacious that this deeply connected reality that we wade through can even include death. In fact death is central to the pattern of the crucified God. God carves this pattern into the very fabic of reality as Jesus dies and rises. Someone who trusts Jesus carries a cross like the One who has gone before them, it often ends up being the price of social non-conformity. It is a descent rather than an upward path. Richard Rohr talks about it as a river that we can’t, or dare, push. We are already in it and it is deep, rushing with love and truth. We lift our feet and allow ourselves to be taken by this “Big Juicy Goodness,” as I have heard Anne Lamott say. We have no ladder to climb and no place to be, but here, collected and connected in every moment that flows to us and through us. Annie Dillard once wrote:

i can not cause light; the most i can do is try to put myself in the path of its beam. it is possible, in deep space, to sail on solar wind. light, be it particle or wave, has force; you rig a giant sail and go. the secret of seeing is to sail on solar wind. hone and spread your spirit till you yourself are a sail, whetted, translucent, broadside to the merest puff.

Jesus invites people to open themselves to the possibility that God might reign through them, that the reality of God might flow through their very being and fundamental existence, how they relate to everything—how they see everything. Often what we understand  or see in our small little worlds feeds back to us what we have already determined about a situation or that person or groups that think that way. I find myself doing this every time I talk about war and think about Christian traditions that support state military action. It is like they are trying, passively, to relive the Crusades. I label, I dismiss, I get angry and defensive and the feedback loop tells me more about myself than them, whoever them might be. There is a solidarity that is planted in us when we open ourselves to God, when we lift our feet and float. Rivers flow and move in ways we can predict if we are in a boat, but when you are in the thing—it moves you. And maybe that’s the point—we are restless people—fighting all sorts of things, giving ourselves to a mistaken oasis, trying to land and conquer for ourselves the places we make sacred. When it is all sacred, even the pain, we settle not on some secure land mass but in our very being trusting the flow of God’s spirit giving every breath, every puff of solar wind. 

There is this quote that rings in my head lately as I read for class and make my way through the Torah. It goes something like—scriptures are unsettling but it is because of the unsettled Character behind the text. It is quite a claim, I am realizing, that Someone is not only with the most challenging of texts but also within the content of these stories of desperation, judgment, humanity and grace. It is unsettling right?

It feels as if I am the one who should describe the world—me tell me how to live into this whole thing, but it seem the unsettling has a way of giving opportunity to trust in something beyond my own experience. God is the one with whom all experiences are given voice and redemption. God is, in some ways, a giving back to human experience—having absorbed your ache and fear and hurt and trust, God is the one in the text that is coming alongside characters like Hagar—the one enslaved, impregnated and sent away. This Character is on the move as well, surrounding a situation with the thickness of presence and then having to turn an ear to hear the cry from what seems to be too far sometimes. 

Another quote, offered by the same author in a different book, has a pinging echo in the mix of these thought. That is that home—landedness—is not so much a place but a place on the way with YHWH. That is, God is the one with-us, even now—the God of the living. That is settling and unsettling. So, as I find some new rhythm and rhymes in this new and old place, I have this sense that the story is going somewhere. That the events, desperate wanting collections of human existence, are the unsettlement we situation ourselves in—with hope and honest vigor—that tomorrow meets us today, that God’s wind inhabit our lungs so that we might sing a song with our lives, from the unsettled crevasses of soul—thick with blood, healing the plains.

I just got back to Pasadena a few days ago. I’m crashing in my buddy Adam’s old bed and using his pillow until I move into a new place this Saturday. The “Six Man Crew” pad is nearly on Colorado Blv, where the Rose Parade marched by just hours ago.  And so it begins, a new year, a re-engagement with school and a new cell number (616.258.9004).  The journey from Michigan to here was a good time. I stopped off in Minneapolis for a few days and hung with the Diehl crew, it was great, minus Caila getting bit in the face by a dog. We spend our first day together in the ER. She has healed up fine with a stitch or two and a good story. As we sat waiting for the doctor (for hours) we talked about how this is life, and how we are glad to be doing it together—it feels like home when we are in the same place.

Everything seems oddly new. I’m not sure what to make off it yet. I stopped by the café I would current and the menu went an’ changed on me. However, the newness is familiar. Caila and I had ourselves a date for our 16 month, at a pub of all places. But we had never been and it seemed just right as we roamed the quiet town of Sierra Madre. This is my last quarter at Fuller, I have very little to my name, I gave myself a haircut today—I’m feeling nimble in a way I haven’t for some time. Nimble yet planted. My buddy Sean and I are both jumping headfirst into writing projects these next few months, which feels rad and might influence some thoughts that land here. So this is sort of an update, a report of sorts. 

Every moment, every subtle touch and each hellish thought finds placement in the Divine economy. It is subsumed, eventually. And so, it is that our human longings, as shattered as they are, were worth trusting at some deep level. At the vocalization of lament and sorrow, we find God—when the rug’s pull lands us on our back, we have a view to the stars. And maybe I am the pathological optimist, granted, but, death’s door is a stones throw from heaven’s gate. 

Babies are born into the fight, this raging world of ours, and it seems to often a sort of death sentence. From the shopping mall to those living off its waste, death is often dressed up like life. When you get really old you move as slow as when you were born, you unlearn everything, you can barely see and you land back in the hospital, on your back, next to a room where a baby was born just the day before. Life and death are neighbors—they share a wall.[1] Babies and hearses are a stones throw away from one another.[2]

I turn 27 years today. This is late-twenties if we are counting. And age has a way of marking a life, defining seasons and giving description—dark and bright strokes their significance. It is no surprise that with age you grow in thought, slowly creeping in and out of adulthood. You learn the rules the first half of life while the second you learn, not how to apply them, but rather, what it is to transcend them. Rohr talks about both transcending and including this first half of life. The mark of maturity (or better—a realized placement) is that one has passed through to a different view, new perspective, phase, season or general differentiation. In this time, that seems to always come in cyclical patterns—year after year, we get better at identifying the life that the container holds, rather than confusing the container with the life it holds. I have lots of containers, these are the projections of my world that I’d rather live in all to often, sometimes preferences sometimes I use the word ‘tradition’ for this sort of thing. These rugged buildings look like my town, the place I am from and the people, moments and stories that have shaped me. It is a template that encourages me to draw outside the lines, but is a rather safe place. 

Leaving a place helps you see it for what it is. I left California and found that it is a place I like to venture and explore but feel burned, lost, disregarded by the whole thing—as I’m sure many do in a place as transient as L.A. The beautiful thing is that it is a million places at once—a bunch of gardens blooming in a concrete jungle. But, like leaving high school to walk the trail, I can only feel liked but not loved, held but not placed. Monday, I go back. And a lot has changed, in me and in friends. Plenty of death and life have redecribed the landscape. The new contour of a place is what I noticed first landing in G-Rap. I was back in the place I was born, born into the fight of broken hearts and bleeding soul. Community was dispersed, people have died, some are dying to live, but it all felt like a tilted picture frame. The new norm has set in and all the containers seem to be frustrated that I’m finding life beyond their bounds. Maybe this is what it feels like to be sent, your roots trusting better than you that things will be all right taken up into the story of this moment and the next—the death and life, these leavings and returnings being apart of the same plot and passage.

I told my counselor that I wasn’t sure how to end, say good-bye and leave Michigan this time around. When I moved a few years ago I was under the belief that I was just saying a see-ya-later-kinda-good-bye to everyone. Turns out, when you move, you loose contact, people continue on and things are never the same. This is how life goes—it flows on with and without you. So, reentering the stream this fall has been wild: old-time moments with folks who get me, new people and deepening friendships that have only bloomed these past few years. It’s taught me loads about how community works.

And so, this next week I leave Michigan with no plans to return, it feels weird. I need to say good-bye, not to a Mitten but to certain flesh and blood peoples that I love—deep in my bones. The intensity I think I owe them would be nothing less than sitting them down, looking them in the eyes—noticing the contours in their face—and telling them about their significance, the stuff they are made of. Its this stuff, their lives, that has encouraged me into open space. Just yesterday, however, the tables turned. Greg, my former youth pastor came in to work to say good-bye to me, it seemed really significant. It caught me of guard, perhaps because it was a real good-bye—one I felt. The distance, the encouragement and the significance of someone going out of their way to bless you, its a sending—but its an ending. I had told him about a job I turned down, that would have kept me in Michigan, but also, how I felt God’s frustrating tug to continue on the path I’ve been trekking out west—and he got it. He didn’t run through the pros and cons, the what ifs of the world, just got it. I felt sent by him. Kind of like when I sat down with my friend Matt years ago and he helped me see that Fuller might be my next right step. There is no right or wrong, no ledgers in these moments—just two people in a peace of mind and off someone goes, the end and the beginning happening at once, good friends pushing off from the same land toward distant shores.

I ran into a friend that is moving to Chicago this week. She was at work and I just happened to show up on her last day. The employees had made her a cake and were lined up saying good-bye telling her she should get off the floor and go eat cake, like-ya-do your last day at work. It all seemed really significant, the ending and the sending.

Now, some might say that with technology and blogs and cellphones and cars and Skype your really not saying good-bye, but I think that is bullshit. I give this excuse when I rather not feel the fabric of friendship rip, the sound being unbearable. The truth is, you leave and you land, but you have been redefined—and so have they. Your clan sends you and you either return a man or you start a clan somewhere beyond the territories of your kin. Abraham left to start a new family, and those of us who are not making babies, and stuff, start communities that work similar. But it all begins with, not so much being willing to leave (to adventure some place extreme), but in the ending and the sending, a certain kind of peace is enabled to lead us to a new land. 

Several months ago I was going through one of the hardest times of my life, things felt crushing and Caila made a doorpost banner, from wood, that had the Hebrew word shalom and a passage from Isaiah 43 written in the letters. On the back of the thing the shema was written, that says something about writing Scripture on your doorpost. There is a lot to these verses, meaning and metaphor, I look at them everyday. I leave my room under this banner of peace, exodus, hope, justice and other big ideas that play themselves out in the everyday happenings of life. But I leave to return, I enter this space like a cathedral in time to rest and think and wonder. The doorway, however, is also a passage and entryway to the unknown and mysterious world in which I tread. We all tread lightly these days, afraid of the dragons that be abound. But I am, convinced more and more, that we might just be better off treading firmly and facing the dragons—naming the the chaotic powers with presence and love that redefines space, the landing of our lived existence. 

It has come to my attention that the world is as it seems, sometimes. Things are fragmentarily realized in glimpsed form all the time but this is characterized mostly by surprise, not the usual consistent performing patterns that we make our world out to be.

You see, everything changed when I got an iPhone: my calls clearer, self-esteem brighter, and my getting back with people ratio—better—not great, but better. I got places confidently, and now I am a photo-grapher of normal type things that I see around (like books, trees, people—other stuff I like). Things got streamlined. For a while there I didn’t even have a computer, just using that good’ol iPhone for everything. The effects of iPhone usage have been positive, sometimes. But mostly the thing keeps me busy and subsumed by those multi-medias that organize life, and in so doing, tell you subtly how life should be, what constitutes the whole thing. Now, I know there are probably many writing on such things, Postman & Hipps being helpful to me, but I wonder more personally the effects of a mediated world. 

The past several months I have been working customer service at a bookstore. My primary jobs are to ship things to people around the country and world, order things for people around the country and world while, finally, answering phone calls from people calling in from around the country and around the world. I dig it, being around books and the potential ideas that might be incited by them is scandalous to me. But, when it is all said and done I am a medium, a between point for people on their way to a product. Shippings, orderings, answerings are actions that constitute my role—its the invisible thing that happens when you buy something on Amazon from the bakerbookhouse account. Also, I have been taking online classes this quarter, dating long distance and living with out a car. Let’s just say, in these cases, bad mediums (be it riding your bike through a Michigan winter or simulated class debates) make for bad messages and frustrated reality. The whole disconnected-while-being-connected enterprise is a promotion or an insistent on the way things are, that when questioned, falls apart. It’s an insistent on the way things are, sometimes. And so, when everything else is falling apart I can enter a self-ordered world of getting things the way I want. Unless of course the Internet crashes (which it did yesterday) and everyone turned all apocalyptic. The trouble with this ethos shaping how we interact is that what is real, with tactility and all, becomes the icky substitute to things-my-way. Many will say that things-my-way is a fair description of hell in most cases. I’d venture to agree.

So, I want the real thing these days, even if it is fragmentarily realized. Putting a book in someones hands and telling them about it, sitting second row in a classroom, kissing Caila’s face—there is just no substitute. Mediators are bunk. And the self-esteem produces by an iPhone is peanuts compared to being connected to ones wirkungsgeschichtliches bewußtsein and seeing the world as-is. 

And all the people gave a great shout of praise to the LORD, because the foundation of the house of the LORD was laid. But many of the older priests and Levites and family heads, who had seen the former temple, wept aloud when they saw the foundation of this temple being laid, while many others shouted for joy. No one could distinguish the sound of the shouts of joy from the sound of weeping

I am sitting reading David Sedaris today in the strange town of Wheaton, Illinois. I was, walking to a church, I thought I might drop in on and check out—you know, feel the place out, and as I say whenever I visit a church, “Walk in on people making out with Jesus,”—it’s just always odd. I often don’t know the language, songs or even dress code. I was looking like a homeless person while most of the people funneling to the church looked like they had just left a Land’s End photo shoot. So I asked a few people where I could find a local coffee shop—they said it was right next to the Starbuck, which for a visitor, wasn’t to helpful. I sat down and jumped into Me Talk Pretty One Day the collection of short stories by Sedaris. He describes, at one point, his experience of moving to Paris to learn French—the experience oddly reflected the goofy feeling I imagine many having when they talk to Christians. At one point the teacher used her French inflected English to tell David that she hated him, “Really, really.” Now, surely that is not what was being communicated on the surface as I walked along a group I felt on the outside of. But maybe, at the deepest levels this is the script—“you don’t fit, because your not wearing a collar, and so you probably don’t belong… we hate you.” 

Now, I follow Jesus— I get the odd churchy thing, I grew up in Grand Rapids and was not Dutch or Reformed, and I even had blond hair. I know the odd impulse to just walk by the church and go to the coffee shop, another sacred center in culture—where you can get juice and bread too. At Starbucks they even have collars and serve you across an altar/counter. People are now finally getting to the coffee shop to connect with each other and talk openly about Jesus and read their bibles. It just all seems odd, I’m not trying to make sense of it—just wondering how a text like Ezra 3 has some voice in this context.

The temples go up, and people dress up and get into it—but the old sages know that the glitz of the new can’t replace the times when God was with them. God is not to be found it seems. Humans can’t seem to erect a steeple big enough to get God there, a left over impulse of Babel. God is with the old thing or still in exile it seems to those who have made the journey from temple to second-temple. The crying could not be distinguished. It seems that this impulse gets at the distance between coffee shop and a steeple. If God is there where is God not? And what does the worship of God look like—who’s your priest—might be the question? And when is God going to redeem the whole project of humans trying to glimpse God’s presence. Moses wants a peek even after the Exodus event and we are trying to build spaces and dress certain ways even after Jesus passed through and reclaimed this world as his own. 

Seeing God, knowing God is a language we stumble into—often through pain and the times when we can’t imagine putting on a face to worship God. I’m convinced that it is a rugged language that doesn’t seek to resolve exile with a building project but sets itself in the rubble and asked the teary question, what now God, what now?

It’s those people that have gone before you that give you a dash of hope concerning the path. Sometimes you don’t even know who they are, but there is always the sense that things could be much darker or even a bit more bright.

What is this awkward between we seem to traverse? Somewhere on the spectrum of hope and hell. I can’t seem to shake the fact that life is a paradox, I guess? As soon as you get to that place on the path, the long off distant horizon, the sooner you find that the ones who went before were only exaggerating—painting the situation in light of their experience. Marriage is just okay, your dream job is still a job, have kids be tired for life and make sure you buy a house—or something like that. You know, I even hate the word ‘experience’ for this very instance—it makes you feel like you should know something after it happens, whatever it may be. I have always thought, based on my ‘experience’, that to know something is to be known by it. That the pseudo-arrival points in life are characterized by a deep intentioned knowledge that you come to concerning the world, the people you love and suffering. To love is to be known, to beloved is know something.

But I think knowledge is a category that is loosing its edge. I can gather knowledge on my iPhone and blog thoughts into the world via a simple upload but this kind of knowing has nothing to do with the deep, most penetrating, tactile contours of who we are as people. I venture to say I know nothing when you really strip the lofty arrogance of theological mambojambo and the closed selfish sights of what I hope for. I know little at best. But here’s the thing, I trust people, I believe my friends. I see differently the depths of a person when I hope in them—knowing them beyond their fears and aches, the stuff of trust. Now I’m sure this probably describes something someone wrote concern love languages or something like that, but I think this sort of thing is bigger than dissection or easily translated systems that measure people as if humans are simple things nicely dialed into certain ways of being.

Here is where I am going with this. Life is much harder than I ever thought possible, and I have an easy life. Shit happens, and you grieve and you ache and you wonder if you could change things and you even try to change things, but fail. But life is made up of entropedic cycles where you find yourself dying and living all at once. And its good, it is worth trusting. And people, those ahead or behind, need you as much as you need them—we are the cairns of the cosmos—pointing people home. 

I was downtown today walking through town, enjoying the absolutely beautiful afternoon. I was on a pilgrimage of sorts to find a great sandwich shop. My eye was on Schuler’s Books, I remember the artichokes they sneakily put in their sandwiches making me drool three years ago—Pavlov’s experiment played out on humans. I turn the corner nearing the spot and I am stopped by marchers. They were carrying caskets, they were all dress in black, with signs that announce “Death to the Middle Class.” The prophetic enactment caused me to completely forget about my sandwich. They funeral procession stopped the intersection dead center in the middle of town as the congregants walked in line. I observed the ironic scene as a Cadillac tried to punch through the crowd. A mid-sized man with a bright orange vest jumped in front of the car so that the vehicle would not hit others, he was touching the car. Then the driver started to push forward into him, and he held his ground hitting the hood of the car as it was causing him to stumble. I grabbed the license and was getting prepared to run into the side of the car, as I have been known to do. 

It was ironic because it was a Cadillac running down a group advocating for the middle class of G-RAP. Larger questions surround the whole situation, like, the vested interesting of these groups facing off. However, what is central in the question is what ethics ensue from these commitments. What do you think?

After the Shema is commanded in Deuteronomy the explaination to the command is given. And it is as simple as, “so you can tell the story of your salvation from Egypt to your kids.” The story begins in slavery in Egypt and moves to the promised land, and so, as the description embeds, Shema is an act, a command, involving memory. The section ends the  salvation narrative with an odd phrase, “So that we might have shalom as we’re doing right now.” Memory and a full engagement with Shema is also an act in naming where you are now. You can imagine a grandmother have this moment with her grandson, “you see where you are right now, it’s because God has rescued us—wrapped us up in shalom and so we live and love well in response, that’s it.” What is interesting in Deuteronomy specifically is its tendency to not speak of the command(s) but rather the command. Sure there are rules and regulations, but when it comes to command—Deuteronomy seems to jump from Shema into the complex realities it deals with—as a new community finds itself with responsibility to live now in light of a story—a bloody, weary, odd story of their passing through.

What are you doing right now, and how have you landed just here and just now? The deep and telling question is if you know how you got here. Is there a beginning to your journey? A moment you live in light of, trying to stay in its glow? I’ve been thinking about how it is life seems to flow all around me taking me forward and that naming the stream is an achey exercise in coming to terms with what drives you forward. Is it you, or is it something wider—that started before you were born and will continue on without you. But, here you are doing what you are doing right now. As Father Rohr has said along with others, don’t push the river. I would add, as I find a flow—trust where it is from and where it is going.

She said God’s words back to me as she leaned in, to interpret what she had heard. 

Know your people.

A simple phrase I had heard and studied and ran by people. I thought it meant something like, “know well the ones that you are to love well.” Turns out, that is one part of the story packed into that phrase.

The past few weeks have been full, of life and struggle—the kind you are willing to bleed for but not die for. You know when life is good and steady, when you are about to reach a clearing— eyes wide hoping to see for miles at the top of just… this… next… lump of frustration? You get there, just about always, but the view is cloudy, the shore is foreign and cold—you’ve landed on Greenland you might say. The bitter cold calluses your throat and you forget to swallow and breathe the air. The mar of the wind—this bitter resolve—does not quite enter your soul and you walk on. You walk on because there is little worth dying for and your learning that death is a process full of half-lives and glimpses of tomorrow.

I’m moving forward it seems, knowing my people—naming those I know I need. The systems of knowledge, of safe ideals, just don’t work in the open and broad place I am hooked into.

Know your people.

Because if you don’t you’ll bleed out—and die alone and without love that’s been there all along. I think to be-loved is an unending exercise in reentering yourself without turning in on yourself, it feels dangerous—as chaos boils up. But the reentering process is a thing that people, your people, must venture to traverse with you. They need to be invited and trusted, but, they must go with us as we enter the deepest wounds that we have been given. Their words are God’s words to us, words of compassion (with-ness) and they are the naming of the clouds—these realities that are to be engaged, loved and found to be the way to life.  

There are voices to trust and others that feel unsafe. Someone who has suffered, I trust nearly instantaneously because they have reflected on a great mystery. They have understood, like Job, that they occupy a certain place in the unfolding of the universe and it is not all explainable.

In the past months I have been reading modern classics. I didn’t realize this until yesterday when I was investigating the back cover of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and it was called just that, a modern classic. John Yoder’s The Politics of Jesus has received similar credits, but said to be a non-classic because it is too good and uncategorizeable—I picked up my 7^th copy this week, can’t wait to give it away. Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is so good but feels unoriginal set next to Walden and On the Road I don’t plan to finish because I don’t think it is going anywhere, which I kind of like—so maybe I am just saving it for a day I feel more existential. What draws me to these works is something they all share, that is; there are voiced from a place. They “imagine in place”[1] without feeling the need to explain why it is they write from this disposition. They are masters of the mundane and express the god honest truth full of color and texture as they see it drift by. Their not dramatic, which I appreciate. Also, they know their descriptions have a contribution while being disciplined enough and wise enough to back away from the whole, never offering a unified theory if you will. 

I ran into a former student today. The reason I noticed her was due to listening in on a conversation and having the thought, “wow, that person is really thoughtful,” but also, I was interested in the conversation they were having. When you catch up with someone you haven’t seen in years or just get reintroduced to someone (like the friend from elementary school I also saw today) you find yourself asking questions of that person you would hate for someone to ask you. Like, “What are you doing these days.” Or worse, “What do you do now.” I often feel like my jobs and experiences are getting less interesting, as if I’m arriving somewhere I never have been aiming at. It hit me not to long ago, however, that we are becoming who we are not yet. Who you want to be when you grow up assumes a unified theory to who you are and a mold to fit that person into. I said to my friend that the next ten years I expect to be doing several things. This was the first time I ever answered the question, “what do you want to do,” like that. She totally got what I was trying to say, which is good because I’m not sure I did. 

[1] Wendell Berry, Imagination in Palce –a resent one.

These are tough days. They are full and burdened with the details, without the thriving witness of a warm blood-filled body. Reaching for the shadows you get spun, turned around in the nexus of teamed reality. You got to swim out of the eddies to see the swirling surface in order to swim the right direction. To order life, to separate light and dark, is then, an exercise in seeing connection and practicing the art of differentiation—this is an upstream paddle.  This traversing is endless, no arrival because we are constantly touching down and lifting a foot forward. To walk a straight line, one foot is planted the other lightly leaning forward. Also, the right and left halves of your mental energy have to coordinate to move forward. Walking is creative movement surging forward within a structure—its like life is best lived as a song. Deep, tuned to the harmonies the worlds echo around the cosmos.

 Everyday, the eternal chorus of the heavens awake and reel. The buzz of my bike tire howls a tune. At the curbside the world dies into fall, bright and rushing full of leafy messages of the season’s passing. The colors change and die out in variety, yet, in coordination, all bowing and fading toward decay. I bow with them in these bitter tough days, bent over, avoiding the turn toward self. But I’m restless, leaving time to its own ticking, looking pass the chronology of death toward spring, the climax of the song. Resurrection, fertility, raising, greening sound fills the heart of creation. It is a bud ready to blow out of idle space into fullness. It must hide itself in death for a while, trusting the structure that turns the world, God tuning reality to the soul of love the seasonal celebration, fullness.

 The thing about life is not so much the circumstances nor the emotional reveling highs or depleting lows but rather the constant grandeur of each moment. The given, the static buzz of reality, is my dog breathing and occasionally woofing coupled by the glow of light in the distance. This place is full, filling out our imagination if only we would notice from time to time the wind, smell and taste of what it is to be human, here in the tricky business of redemption. It is not somewhere else that life happens; the past can only serve today’s sunrise and the future is presently working on itself. We inhabit an interesting moment in the landscape and fluidity of life.

I thought eagerly the other day of things I was wanting to do during the three months I have back in Michigan. Graduate school is coming to an end and a job (other than shelving books) hops up and down trying to get my attention waving arms back and forth. I felt as if these waving hands were best not to acknowledge directly. So I did something wholly unnatural. I made a list. These lists I find myself making in the heat of complacency are more like brainstorm-vomit-sections that just so happen to land on paper. I tell myself I need to get something done, to be a productive person, that is, and then I proceed to project wants and deep desires, leaving out of course the things I actually need to begin that day. In panic I escape the moment to some safe mirage of mind which mingles with tomorrows forecast. Being in Michigan without a car, however, has me with a watchful eye on the forecasts.

These projections are what I intend to chase in my writing the next few months, coupled with some biblical reflections in Deuteronomy, Jeremiah, Luke and 1 Peter. When minds wonder they are attempting to concretize reality into dimensions that make sense of the life that is happening. Often when I write I am abstracting life to universalize the whole thing into something that makes sense to everyone. I find myself lost in thought and in a sort of masturbation of mind rather than describing reality well and honestly. I’ve been reading Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek alongside one of my favorites, Walden. What these two writers do so well, I think, is that they live well—connected to the ground, rooted in place and attentive to the texture of their worlds. The place I grew up is near to Plaster Creek, I can just about see it from where I sit. It is a kind of runoff stream that creeps through Grand Rapids and I know the thing like the back of my hand. I remember ditching off after school and following the creek further and further each time I would return. A friend told me once that he and his brother went past Division St and almost got caught under the bridge. The next week I went off on my own about a quarter mile past the bridge—I didn’t dare go further by myself, who knew what could happen!?! The next week we planned a bit of an expedition down the creek deep in to GRap. It’s this pushing out further and carefully that I respect of those who live well in place, who take time to notice and master the art of the mundane happenings of home.

And so, I’m looking these days, taking ground samples and the lot, so that I might see this place anew. What helps is that so much has changed, people have moved, everything seems in an odd place—like a tilted frame—and time feels older and more patient. The scenes are drawn in sharp contrast to what I have known and I notice them drawing out fear, ache and joy deep in me as I look, this way and that, to the end of the street and further in concentric circles I map the texture and contours of life. As Ellery has put it, “ to the life that’s just beyond this small perimeter of me.”