All abstract knowledge is a faded reality: this is because to understand the world is not enough, you must see it, touch it, live in its presence and drink the vital heat of existence in the very heart of reality.

- Teilhard de Chardin

           14 December 2009 2:02am                                                   

It is morning. I drink from a warm cup and watch the #10 bus take its medium pace. People are leaving the grocery holding white jugs of orange juice, gripped by the handle. For the fourth day, the sun is lithely washing down the shop fronts while an icey air vibrates its way into people's necks and knees. Winter. I am standing in a warm window and viewing this good day stretch out like a rabbit from his den. Some mornings have this gentle quickening, most don't. I like it. I think people are walking with a slightly better posture because the sun is feathering them with pleasant emotions. I think they, like me, are by it something caught up. This is the kind of day to find new friends or parks or parking spots.

It is the peace of it I love first. It is sureity of going to the store and buying juice. It is using a crosswalk and catching your bus. It is sitting down at a desk and meeting work with your own medium pace, a leveled way of doing that doesn't make a maniac. People come by with good ideas, and you find yourself free to fully listen. I love having ample time to plan, to allot things with what they deserve. It is the joy I love second, the happiness I am filled with when people I care about find a new way of looking at this old world.

I did not make this day, this peace or this joy. It happened to me and to them. It found us. I cannot plan for this, nor make it happen. I only find it waiting in the morning, fresh as a bun on the counter. No, the only thing I can do is grab hold, dab it and smear my thumb above my eyes, drape it around my shoulders and smell, set it as a seal upon my heart, and go. All I can do is turn its way, catch it by the crook of its arm, and let it pull me to pieces.

The aged matchless love of God is found in this, that vitality of such volume has found me today despite my best efforts to hide. I had walked to the window out of habit, and now find myself being shot at close range by a cannon.

You have won me, my God.

           12 December 2009 4:14pm                                                   

When I was a child, I acted like a child. I purchased things that wouldn't last. I was petty and vile. I lived for the moment before me, never considering long term plans unless they were unattainable. Unattainable visions for the future, however, I took up with reckless hope. I shined the shoes of politicians and pastors. I ate and drank beyond my means. I watched Entertainment Tonight and practiced deep emotional concern for the popular and conspicuous. I committed large sums of cash toward tackiness. I held thin rowdy allegiance with men in a manner that never required honestly. We met in the halls of dying restaurants and spoke humorously about almost everything that came to mind. We promptly forgot about each other. When I was a child, I turned my attention to getting with the sort of girls who I would always abandon. I ate stacks of processed food served in styrofoam, and optioned for extra mayo. I never tipped. I cultivated swaths of resentment towards large portions of the population. I was defined by what I was not. Each night I vowed to die for conquest, and each morning I forgot all my vows. I was quick to bristle in opposition, quick to speak malice, quick to heap judgment on innocent victims, quick to disown my supporters, quick to waste scant resources, quick to forget my parent's lessons, and quick to remain in my seat when I needed to quickly act.

One night in Chicago I was going home on the L 'green line'. As the doors pulled shut and the train began to leave, I watched a women crying and running for the leaving subway. She had blood streaming down her face and was screaming for it to stop. She pounded on a window to anybody inside, pleaded frantically while the train began to slide away. When she realized it would leave her, she wheeled around and turned to face her attacker. The lit platform disappeared from my view. I never found out what happened. All I would have needed to do was pull the emergency string above my chair. The subway would have screeched to a halt, and the police would have arrived. I had the chance to save her life with the effort of flicking a light switch, and I chose the high road. This is because, when I was a child, I was a guilty bystander.

In 1910, when a popular newspaper in England offered a number of authors to write essays and answer the question 'What is wrong with the world?', they received the following reply: "Dear Sirs, I am. Sincerely yours, GK Chesterton."

           9 December 2009 1:27am                                                   

           4 December 2009 12:02am                                                   

There's that phrase that hindsight is 20-20, but I see the past as through a hole in a door. It doesn't matter how hard I press my face against the surface trying to get a feel for the other side. It doesn't matter how much I tilt my face sideways or anything. I am only given this much. And in the most honest expression I can muster, truly, I am looking and believing in the validity of what has happened. I believe in the posture it found itself. Through that limited view, I cannot deny the sincerity with which it's laid, scenery so concrete that there's nothing left movable. CS Lewis read a comic book once that had a man time travel into the past only to get killed by the rain. The years behind were inexorably decided, the past was so completely unalterable that the immovable rain drops sliced like bullets from the sky.

And, oh, isn't it strange, how fine everything seems anyways, neither wondrous or ruining? It is more peacefully meticulous than anything I've ever known. Everything is laid out with such precision, despite having been placed back then so haphazardly. Like our planet earth, a limping careening movement madly placed something so perfectly in balance that people could study it for generations. I feel my fourth grade elementary school year was as wondrously large and ineffably complex as a continent.

But, admittedly, I can only make out what I see through that limited plane in my memory. And, God, I am sitting here aching. My eyes spin under their lids for how they lack when they look upon that view. That surreal view of what has-been is so full of detail and yet I can notice, staring for hours, only the thin skin. My careless gaze catches only a veneer of the thousand torrential effectors.

And I feel this rear glace, biased and constricted, is five times the level of understanding compared to my view of the present moment, the wide expanse of the now. God, I want to see the undercurrents, about where things are rooted and for what they deeply desire. I want to see how inherently stable and chaotic things are all at once, because I want to help. This limited static view gives me only guesses, and tomorrow I am doing very important things. Tomorrow I will be greeting people in the morning and later on I will be telling them a joke.

Looks to me there's lots more broken than anyone can really see
Why the angels turn their backs on some is just a mystery to me.
But all at once I hear Your voice, and time just slips away.
-bonnie raitt

           29 November 2009 12:12pm                                                   

I am reminded of the failure of knowing things coldly. Starting with a tree in Eden, knowledge continues to fail the world. We finally invent a car to travel faster, and not even two generation in we find the auto institution as our greatest dilemma. Yes, when somebody is distraught, trying to fix that pain with limp facts does little. Facts are tepid. They lack moxie. When tough times come, usually people just need somebody near them. I think most of my friends and me learned this when we were fourteen.

I was feeling blue last week and most people I knew were busy. I've found the next best thing that solves my emotional downs is walking, so I usually try to go someplace new. A hero of mine once said that mystery exists on all spheres, that grace is radiating in abundance throughout creation, and the least we can do is try to be there. I didn't believe her. Maybe the deep woods of Acadia contains wonder, but the urban landscape is a gutter. It is beautiful if yard waste mush and gray roof runoff is beautiful. But, well, this block of 12th Ave E is all I have, so I thought I would give it a chance.

It only took six minutes. Six minutes away, I found a Russian Orthodox church. My cynicism wilted. The building's minarets and basic blues & whites broke my assumptions. Another block on and I found the setting sun basking a side of a house in an otherworldly way that startled my pattern like a hiccup. I shook my head trying to enforce the concept that a wall like that can possibly exist. That really heavy gold settingsunlight was knocking and knocking with bravado on antique stain glass and painted Victorian edges, and nobody else was there. One block later, a large maple tree was totally bare, shed of a thousand stems and hard-ready for winter except for a single curled leaf (the real die hard) at the top. I reentered my room, 45 minutes later, my malaise broken and near forgotten. I reignited the day's plans.

I'm not sure to which category these things belong. In my solitude and blues, were these miracles useful facts, or were they a holy being-there? And I have to realize that when a friend does the being-there for another, something is being spoken. Without a word, something new and sustaining is revealed and placed underneath, firm enough to balance on and regain composure. That day, without a word, I had been sustained by what I had seen. If somebody had walked up to me and told me that the sun shines beautifully on a building nearby, I would have believed them, but it wouldn't have been a salve. But when, turning the random pages of the sidewalk, I chanced upon it already happening, something that God seemed to be doing almost for himself alone, I was leveled healthy. I was a child, realizing the nonsense of his tantrum, returning to the family room to sit near my mother and listen.

I am stooping at your feet God. With my nearblind eyes, I am feeling the hem of your garment and hanging on for dear life. A scent of something invisible curls up and opens my eyes. I regrip with deepened resolve. And each moment is the growing notion that I am being led, gripping, closer to some sort of a different lighted place, less dark or less blinding and more seeable. I am leaving a hospital bed into the wide outdoors. I am walking homeward on shore after months at sea on a tired ship. And this faint notion, even the distant echo of such a shining rhapsody, is so captivating that I am regathering my life to you again today.

           18 November 2009 9:10pm                                                   

For the first time, I am making a home. A second home maybe. I grew up somewhere other than here. The mental notches of the years, the birthdays, the rites of an American childhood were all ticked away in a brick house in Michigan. But then, classically, I left home to be trained as a worker. In that four year college process, I lived in three different buildings. And then I moved to Kenya, three years of even greater motion than before. As soon as I felt settled I began to explore the region, the country, and the continent. Inschool friendships no doubt suffered by my wanderlusting ego. For that final term in 2008 I bet I was absent for a third of class, camping in Uganda or something. My academic adviser actually (rightfully) threatened me with not graduating one time if I didn't come back from Kampala. I barely slept in that Q-block bed at NEGST near the end. And the final graduation gave me such a liberating permission to travel that I took almost a month to make it home, half that time traveling alone in foreign countries, staring and wordless. Then a new term of seminary in Michigan, once familiar now foreign. Five more months and I finally have some great new friends, but move to New Jersey on New Years Day 2009. Five more months there, a final three in Michigan, and I move to Seattle in early September.

What was the constant in this mess, but only myself and a few possessions like a red guitar and my family on the phone. The presence of God also was there, God who never left my shoulders, who told me to get more sleep when I was delusional, carried me through dangerous places. Reassurance was a Reality that fed me each day real honest calories and liquids. I dreamt soothing dreams.

I am leaving that way of life. I am ending a chapter of far too much movement. I am seeing the same people each day for the first time. Weeks roll sweetly fettered with consistency.

Today a person asked me if I had finished The Wordy Shipmates book. I said I had and she was interested how it ended. Today a person invited me to a gathering across town about a topic I was interested in. Today somebody offered to share something to eat. Today somebody was asked for an update about a health issue. Today two friends prayed with me (we prayed for endurance) and followed it with a walk to get coffee nearby. Today somebody drove me back to my house so I didn't have to walk fifteen minutes uphill.

There is far to go, a decade maybe, before the ground of Capitol Hill is akin to Harrietta's. But I am trying to listen as hard as I know how, and I am catching a rhythm. Like a bar measure, it takes listening to counts before you can fall in sync with it, add your instrument to it, receive.

Usually songs intro with four counts. Well today felt like count-one. Something gelled that should be followed by something like it, something gathered a familiar shape, a balanced roundness I haven't heard since before I was sixteen and leaving the gravel driveway with a shiny pocketed license. Today, November 18 2009, I caught count-one.

           17 November 2009 12:34am                                                   

I took a picture in a photo booth. Two friends and myself crowded tight into that little space, against my will no less. They pushed and smiled me inside, sponsored the quarters, cajoled and kidded until I was agreeable only that the photo booth would be a release from their begging. The curtain was pulled, the dark box grew warm from us being close, and we stared onto the blank screen wondering when everything begins. I'm not wanting to be in there. "Photo booths, how stupid," I remember thinking. I am a mindset of poisonous disregard. They are laughing and getting posed. I am stern between them, waiting this out. "What pose do we do?" they ask. They decide, without discussion, on 'fun'.

BAM, the flash goes off and the first of four is taken, me ironclad serious between two smiling excited friends. I am beginning to feel being somber is unlikable, so I prepare myself more acceptable for picture two. My friends are laughing, "ready?". BAM, I am cleverly and morosely fake-excited in this picture, creepy even, squished between their goofy anticipation. I am playing along grudgingly, getting the pressure off, faking it.

I crack. The feeling is too much. The thrill grabs me by the collar and tosses me into the sunlight. Something like joy bursts open in my heart. BAM, picture three and I'm awash in this huge sincere grin, a rush of feel-good from caving to joy. My favorite picture. I get happy just looking at picture three. BAM, picture four (final one) and I am ducking off camera, bashful. We pull the curtain open and wait for five minutes until it taps down into the dispenser slot. They are laughing again as we walk out into the Seattle night.

I don't want to be stern, and I am so often these days. I am tired of playing along. I want to break into that open heart always. I want love of living to be central to my soul. I want to be singing at all times, to be glad for the hour, glad for the circumstance, glad for what little I have. I am staring at that picture, now on my desk in front of me, and realizing how much better life is when I just let go.

           14 November 2009 1:17pm                                                   

'At the time of Lewis and Clark, setting the prairies on fire was a well-known signal that meant, "Come down to the water." It was an extravagant gesture, but we can't do less. If the landscape reveals one certainty, it is that the extravagant gesture is the very stuff of creation. After the one extravagant gesture of creation in the first place, the universe has continued to deal exclusively in extravagances, flinging intricacies and colossi down aeons of emptiness, heaping profusions on profligacies with ever-fresh vigor. The whole show has been on fire from the word go. I come down to the water to cool my eyes. But everywhere I look I see fire; that which isn't flint is tinder, and the whole world sparks and flames'.
    -Annie Dillard

           10 November 2009 11:50pm                                                   

It took the place of just a regular thing, a normal routine then interrupted. That evening was supposed to be full of that nice post-work deceleration, sweet sitcoms, the lazy unwind from the wind. But delicate and quick, like forgetting to look both ways, everything became undone. And suddenly her history was thunder in her ears, a pained familiar voice streaming from the pressed phone. The serenity fractured like glass. And I listened as my friend bore the news with spasms while a buried reality bubbled up to the surface and broke.

It is over now, but it will take long to subside. Time in tall stacks will be needed in order that the memories, now freshly polished, might be picked back up and studied until they lose their luster and again become bad facts. The clocks will slow, a tired filter will be applied to reality, and each day's delicious routine will lose it's escape. But all this happening is right.

The arrival that night should have been softer, but the destination is spot on. I realized that this past history was a painful thing that had been shuttered away. It is open now. The odor is nauseating, but its open. And the plain and addressed condition of the main room is bleeding into that closet's dark corners. The boxes are slowly being pulled out and sorted. And I am privileged to be her friend, privileged to encourage and to watch as stability steeps slow through her heart like liquid taking hours up paper.

           8 November 2009 1:16am                                                   

Favors shared
stories bared,
circumstance traded
futures laid.

Yes we are
winding,
God we are
waking.

Rising stressed
slowly dressed,
measured by another
easier than before.

A wide world
tender,
a wild life
rendered.

Loose the pull
to disappear,
rise to find
everybody.

           26 October 2009 11:09pm                                                   

The open sky is clouded these days. People had said Seattle would be rainy. But it isn't actually. Its very cloudy and drizzled, but rarely are there heavy downpours. What people failed to mention, what people did not know about was the beauty of sunlight through a clouded sky this far up the northern hemisphere. It's difficult to explain, but the angle and the clouds make the light almost completely diffuse, which means it splinters and fractures on its fall to the surface of the world. By the time the light touches the tops of the houses in my neighborhood, it has been so tampered, so worked over, that it almost glosses down from every direction. The multi-directional light defines textures and surfaces too complex for direct light. And so the whole of Capitol Hill, the houses and streets and trees, are at times so imbued with a feathered radiance and delicate exposure that walking from inside to outside is like waking into color. And if a sheen of water from a recent light rain is added, which is common, then that previously mundane landscape is transformed into visual opulence, luminous and crisp beneath that soft grey sky.

What if things are like this normally? What if a single light source, direct and unmoved, does injustice to the world because of what it lacks to illuminate? What if the eye of God, which sees all layers, which knows intimately the complexity we fail to notice, sees like this all the time? And what if, in our attempt to mimic this true sight, our view of the world would gain such depth and appreciation that we would run and love it madly, without waiting or consideration?

My daily walk to follow Jesus, the path to God as I know it, is simply each day's growth to take on those eyes.

           24 October 2009 2:44am                                                   

“Listen
with the night falling we are saying thank you
we are stopping on the bridge to bow from the railings
we are running out of the glass rooms
with our mouths full of food to look at the sky
and say thank you
we are standing by the water looking out
in different directions

back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging
after funerals we are saying thank you
after the news of the dead
whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you
in a culture up to its chin in shame
living in the stench it has chosen we are saying thank you

over telephones we are saying thank you
in doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators
remembering wars and the police at the back door
and the beatings on stairs we are saying thank you
in the banks that use us we are saying thank you
with the crooks in office with the rich and fashionable
unchanged we go on saying thank you thank you

with the animals dying around us
our lost feelings we are saying thank you
with the forests falling faster than the minutes
of our lives we are saying thank you
with the words going out like cells of a brain
with the cities growing over us like the earth
we are saying thank you faster and faster
with nobody listening we are saying thank you
we are saying thank you and waving
dark though it is.”

-WS Merwin

           14 October 2009 12:38am                                                   

I was told to do all this when I was young because it was correct. But I was so small, and I barely saw the benefit. Now, having kept it after all these years, I realize they were right. This really is the most beautiful and meaningful way to exist. And now my mind has a levied practice behind this way of being. My hands have a patterned motion that encourages all the rest of me on. Like a wooden house in the rain, everything expands with the sound.

Because of her m.s. she had not left the house for weeks. Now she was watching with unadorned gratitude the richness of our commercial district that sits only a block from our house, a district I walk every day without thought. And my invitation had been so tiny. I would be tempted to fashion it up into magnificence if it hadn't been so casually offered. "Want to come with me?" I had asked while zipping a jacket.

What a thing to know this secret.

           3 September 2009 5:07pm                                                   

Finally am beginning to get set up in Seattle. Arranging the various parts of being in this place: housing, jobs, bank accounts, phones, etc. So much to arrange just to be alive. And in the middle of it all there is the chaos. I got burglarized two weeks ago. Someone came into my house in the middle of the night and stole my laptop with tons of memories from Africa which I'll never get back, along with opening sections of a book I've been writing. Nerves were racked about the car's health during the 40hour drive from Grand Rapids to Seattle. Then more chaos as I got here, as the last day was done driving through the mountains in the dark, other cars blaring at me to go faster, passing and passing around me in a gain and dim of headlights, all while I drive the speed limit. A screaming 65mph trip down winding mountainsides in the middle of the night, and I'm the one who is out of line? I finally collapse at my host's house, and he has just been robbed that very hour. I may have even scared the criminals away when I arrived.

Strangely, I am pushed by this nutsness into gratitude, thankful that the man in my house two weeks ago didn't wake up my housemates with a gun, thankful that I did indeed survive the insane mountain drive down I-90 westbound in the dark, so thankful that I did not have to meet the burglars face to face when I arrived, but scared them off. So much more could be wrong right now and it isn't.

I remember, back when I was deconstructing and reconstructing the Christian religion during seminary, when I was thinking through some of the more dicey issues that required me, at each corner, to reconsider whether God did exist and whether or not he was worth following in this way. I remember the disillusion I felt when all would disintegrate some nights, while I had bad digestion or was awash in emotional misery, steeped with chaos to such a degree that it had sunk me below water, where I was twisting below the waves, struggling whether to fight back to the surface for air or whether to just sink all this nonsense. Because, with the right lack of light, the world is cast in a ridiculous glow and nothing seems worth spending time on. The people you pass by are all into themselves, the houses are in disrepair. Everything expels fumes just enough where nobody can outright complain.

The truth is that this condition is strangely human and well represented in the holy scriptures. In fact, the entire psalter of the bible is common with my kind of madness. If this book is holy because it catalogs the true condition of mankind and the true condition of God, and a desperation and need for stability is the theme of Psalms, then how truly human and normal is my heart during this dark moments?

Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I escape from your presence? If I go up to the heavens, you are there; if I make my bed in the depths, you are there. If I rise on the wings of the dawn, if I settle on the far side of the sea, even there your hand will have me, your right hand will hold me and not let go.

If I say, "But this darkness will hide me and the light will become night around me," even the darkness will not be dark to you; the nightime will shine like the daytime, for darkness is as light to you.
psalm 139

And I rest in that truth. Because while chaos is a part of this move to Seattle, I am even moreso swathed in God's embrace. There is no darkness when I am anchored in him, there is only the daytime of himself. And all of life, by this light, becomes illuminated as a gift. The whole world is turned right in this condition. A slow methodical beat begins to takes charge in my center, a stirring and resolution and peace that things are allotted as they should be for this moment. Not only myself, no, all the world is being held by God. The continents are filled with this psalm. And if the current state of all I see is in both that beautiful and hurting way, both as living and needy as myself, then I am pushed to join his work, to be those hands in that compassionate embrace of this world that loose the cords of despair and help others to stand upright and free.

God, teach us to count the days. Teach us to make the days count. Lead us in better ways, because somehow our souls forgot that life means so much.

           11 August 2009 11:03pm                                                   

Did you know that they sang 'This Little Light of Mine' in the superdome during Hurricane Katrina, while people were dying of thirst, being separated from their loved ones, while the world was being torn apart? Did you know that it caught on like an agreement, and that hundreds of black men and women were marching the round circlet of the stadium, clapping and singing this song like a Sunday morning service of a hundred thousand people?

And do you know why they sang this song? Because it contained two things: meaning and practice. Speaking towards its meaning, 'This little light of mine' contains a barebones message of strength. Thats all. And its practice was equally important. The African Americans in the Superdome had sang this song countless times, as many of us had, and did not need to learn something new. Its practice allowed a very simple song to breech into something deep and waiting: a communal desire to endure.

One last thing remained: a person had to strike up the song. Somebody needed to hear the call, catch the divine spark, the wit, and the guts to make that activating motion. This is the believer, and that is how God is singing the world to help itself.

           15 July 2009 1:24pm                                                   

I don't understand why some of my favorite ideas come while I'm in the shower or taking a bath. The heat and the water are on my skin, and for some reason I become an inventor.

I've recently realized what a machine a mind is. If much of my work in life is to come through deliberation, then how can I facilitate this process? Its like how a good physique is the product of being healthy, not the means to be happy. I want to be healthy, to eat good wholesome foods and drink wholesome drink, that a good mental state might come about. I heard that good brain chemistry is as linked to cardiovascular health as lifespan.

But I'm trying not to be too American here. Because my culture is doing everything to maximize production through trimming things to efficiency. I am so thankful that the 'business' of God values the child and the fool, the unproductive and the unaccomplished. Any day which has been a waste causes many to hang their heads in shame. "I did nothing today," some say morosely.

Let me live between these poles, or perhaps, one leg within each extreme. I want to have weeks, months even, where I get nothing produced but simply affirm my love for you and for your world. Do not let me be tempted to put a price on priceless things: time with family, walks in the biosphere, and caring for the poor. And also maximize my life God. Let me use my 'talents' to their fullest, to more make love reverberate through the land. Let me prepare for hours what I say in moments, read and meet and write and organize full of sweat and outcomes. Because all that sounds like how you were, stretched between heaven and earth.

           3 July 2009 9:40pm                                                   

We are weighing what works, watching the results, trying twice what works once. Sometimes it works again. This is the pragmatism of peace-bringing, the trial and error of excellence. We are making money second place, pushing prestige and ambition back in their chairs. We are focused and working on a single goal: the perfect world of God, how things used to be and how they will be again.

Two things make this work. Firstly, we meet people on the way who are resonating with this work. "All things will be made new," we remember. "The old is passing away brick by brick, in God's own way, and we are simply a small part of it." And with these words, the people we meet are stirred to rise. They nod with wide smiling eyes and leave behind the conversations of yesteryear.

Secondly, it is wonderful. In other words, people really are finding the fullest of life they could imagine. People are healing broken relationships and focusing the work of their hands. They are becoming better parents, husbands, friends, and citizens. This is the wonder. Because nothing is more deeply enthralling than good friendship and work. This alone is worth the life-choice.

And so we are finding work because people want more of it. Because the depth of our need is solved with a new lifestyle of each minute. Because holding unending value of everything one sees and hears may start with a decision, but really comes with practice.

           15 June 2009 6:02pm                                                   

The best part of the people I am meeting are their dreams. I ask them about their visions for their streets and neighborhoods, and they paint the same long winding dream-drunk pictures of health in their area: housing, business, community: sleep, work, play. With the million lives winding in and out of the city block, with the now closing now opening storefronts and changing street flyers, with the homeless men of ten years ago, I watch them remake it all in their minds eye.

Here is the hope of God: beauty and health as common as oxygen, His vision so grand that he wrote himself into our story to make it happen. And the crazy thing is, and I know its stupendous, the crazy thing is that I am meeting people here who, centered on this God, are their neighborhood's prime points of shining health and fruition: life, love, and strength.

           21 May 2009 10:37pm                                                   

How is it that tragedy strikes two people, and one finds in it new strength while another finds new despair? One has newfound song and another gains a void of hope and promise in life. Two people have such hardship, and their result is polarized in such a way. One grows stronger, another weakens.

Here is one way this can happen: the one who finds new life is supported by outside love in their misery. This isn't always the case. Sometimes people in struggles who are loved maintain a rugged and tested cynicism. But overall, the rule remains: life gains beauty from tested love, and I am enraptured by this. I've seen it blossom like petals after storms: a person emerges from darkness and sees anew the light that shines around us every day.

           8 May 2009 1:11pm                                                   

There are times throughout my week where something reminds me of living in Kenya. This past weekend I was having some cheap sushi in Morristown, and Eric Clapton's song 'Badge' came over the speaker. Seriously, a Clapton song? But thats what did it.

I was transplanted to Kurialand in south Kenya, to driving around in Thomas' brother's taxi, trying to find Nescafe. His brother put his taxi business on hold for my visit, so that we could be driven around, since their family didn't have any other cars except the one used for the business. And they knew I was a coffee drinker in the morning, so there I was, hours and hours south of Nairobi, driving down rutted two-tracks, watching Tom jump out of the back seat and inquire with each tuck shop about Nescafe instant coffee.

We kept losing out: shaking head after shaking head framed by hanging chickens and bags of sugar, by leather-brand soap and stiff brown paper bags of Unga. As each shop owner told Tom 'no', my desire not to be such a nuisance increased. "Its ok Tom," I told him. "I can go a day without it." No answer back, just another tilting rutted ride to another shop. Finally, paydirt. Tom comes back with four packets of that stuff. And so we are back on the road to his brother's house, doorways of hanging sheets, oil lamps surrounded by ugali and sekuma wiki, pictures of themselves hanging above the stiff handmade couch.

As we head back in the dark to that wonderful house, I hit play on a CD player, and Clapton's 'Badge' begins to beat through my ears, a mental folded page-corner of a time when people went out of their way to call me family.

           21 April 2009 2:16pm                                                   

Sometimes I picture myself and everybody around me as garments. This is because, out of everything I know, clothes look the most used and the most lasting. And people are like that. I'm used and still alive.

'Thank you God for waking us up today,' everybody says here in Paterson. Maybe here that's cliche, but to me, to have this as a well used prayer is beautiful. Yes, God, thank you for waking me up today. For when I come off my bed I feel like a garment. I feel folded and wrinkled at once, ready and tired. And always alive. Still after twenty six years I am waking up in the morning.

The past week I listened to a CD that I had discarded after the first listen. And now, a week on replay, I am beginning to see it fully. After it is used and tired does its soul shine, and do I see its stamina as a CD for years and years. Only now, after I had grown tired of it, did I have the unsuspicion or the lack of attention to let it find a way into being beautiful on its own. As I drive numb on errands and through lots and streets, as I go to the post office or markets, and as it spins innocent in the dash, its content lifts up and sits on the ledge on its own. And suddenly I've been enjoying for hours, more by each minute, unsuspecting.

How contrary to logic all this is. Things are supposed to be beautiful upon energetic inspection, not in exhaustive apathy.

Is this what it means to be alive? To be foundationed in joy and exhaustion? To be that worn, freshly folded garment, mended on its edges, handed down from one place to another, useful, and sometimes set aside? And are you the One who loves these? Calls us sons and daughters? Makes us to be your visible representatives, your outward coveralls? Stand upright God, as you always have, valiant and strong. I want them to see what I cover. I want them to notice the shape we make as we live each day, the image of the invisible God, used and still alive.

           2 April 2009 4:15pm                                                   

Apparently its April. Does perception of time keep on like this, growing in obviousness like a feedbacking microphone? I know time is passing because my tube of Dabur Herbal 'Salt & Lemon' toothpaste is empty. I bought this in Nairobi right before I left. Its like Crest but with moxy, having 33% ppm more fluoride. And that salt and lemon flavor really gets me going in the morning.

I still think about life in Kenya all the time. Today I took the 'dollar bus' downtown to a local CC, and the driver kept it rolling when I was stepping out, so I disengaged midroll, like most so many matatus over the past three years. In other ways, Nairobi is such a world away. Coffee is so much more prevalent here. I don't have to walk/bus fifteen minutes, since most places have a machine right inside. But the deliberate slowness to the brew I miss. There is a percolator in my kitchen, but nobody ever uses it.

I wish the return was over by now, but its not. I wish the memories from Kenya would be crisper and more full of solid lessons, but they aren't. I wish community and friendships were quick as striking a matchstick or turning a car key. Sometimes that engine just seems to turn and turn and turn these days. But I think that such a return will be done soon, and I will have fully arrived somewhere. I believe the stories from Kenya (as I relive them over and over) will gel and take a solid factivity, and that good friendship will be made to stop the turning of my feet, gain a sense of place, and bring a daily purport of commitment in a way that fosters sustaining love. I hope this is bound in finding work, that a focus on a place will begin tying all these loose strands together. Yes, this is my prayer today God, as I look towards the coming year and know it is coming fast.

           23 March 2009 10:25pm                                                   

The clouded ending of winter has passed, and a strange shining entrance of spring is layering the surface of my neighborhood like a veil. We have left home our collections of winter coats and hats, and I haven't used the heat in my car for two weeks. The other day I let the window sink down and the cool wind in, and the musty smells that collected in the bottom of my car, the odors of all that evaporated grey slush, just spun up and out forever. I drove slow past people standing outside the corner stores, drove past women talking easy on their stoops, drove on by a world which had come outside. Some sort of quickening was flicking in the air, pushing an acceleration upon our walking and opening of doors, our collective goodmornings and invitations for lunch. When I push the key through the lock and turned, it seems to take less time.

And my friend Frank is walking with a familiar bounce towards me outside our house. "Hey!" he waves at me smiling. And a simple couple steps of me to meet him prompts him to say his news: today he got his warrants erased and his record clean for the first time in 22 years. "You don't know what its like Simon," he says in that sliding Jersey accent, shaking his head in amazement. "I walked down the street today for the first time without looking for cops."

We split ways, and I know he was telling the next guy too. And I was thankful to God for bringing us together: different people from different places to share in the fact that things truly are getting better, death truly is still slowly dying. And the weather today was an usher of that fact.

           15 March 2009 7:09pm                                                   

We are in a hospital room, surrounded by visitor parcels, gifted physicalities of previously expressed love. People had come to show how much they care, come to express their sympathy, and they come tangibly. A flower, a card, a box of Girl Scout Cookies (thin mints): people have been here before us. The shelves of the hospital know the deal. There is a ledge for this stuff built into every wall. Their visitor policy is part of the room's blueprint.

And we are standing there, so obviously attuned to her. In the bed she is metastasized and terminally ill, IVs and a tray for hospital food are her bed attachments. The whitened plastic halfcup of apple juice with its foil lid is untouched, as is the rest of her meal. The uneaten tray is not from lack of appetite more than its coincident arrival with the arrival of guests, and she doesn't mind. "We decided something today. We're going to worry about life instead of worrying about death," her family members tell me. "We're moving out of here. We want this to end in our house, in our living room or in her bedroom. Peace is hard in hospitals."

And we are holding hands: her goateed son-in-law with his racing tshirt and her grandson with his AC/DC black tshirt and her granddaughter with the lip ring. We are carving a hollow within the hospital craze, aligning ourselves with God that we might be pulled a notch higher than the madness of the sickness and be given full breaths of life and solidity.

I have the honor of holding her hand, as I am on an edge of the visitor pool. And as we pray, I am blessed to feel God's Spirit soaring in her with such heavy delicacy, thundering whispers of peace through her mind, and so I follow his lead. By and by we amen and touch goodbyes all around, and everybody is feeling better already.

           7 March 2009 4:16pm                                                   

Finally was able to stop from the motion and go by my favorite local Dominican eatery. The bustle of work gets under my skin sometimes, and the world sort of bleeds linear. I wish things rolled off with less resistance and attention, but they don't. But eating helps a lot, so thats why I went. And I swing and ding the doorbell at the restaurant, search my pockets, and come up with a measly 5 dollar bill. Lincoln.

I roll with it, so in control and so Captain Flexible. "Only rice and a soda", I tell the busy woman behind the counter. What meat do you want, she motions. No meat, I say again, tighter spoken, so sure her lack of English proficiency is the cause of this problem. Only rice. I break into bad Spanish while holding up the Lincoln saying, Yo tengo solo cinco dolores, or something like that. But she comes back at me - what side dish? Roasted chicken or porkribs? I am about ready to call the whole thing off, its not worth this. I just don't have enough cash today. Why can't she understand that?

She calls over a bilingual man from another table, black smooth hair combed perfectly. He stands from his soup and walks over. "I only have five dollars," I tell him, "So I'll have the plate of yellow rice, the green sauce, and this soda. He speaks with her, and turns to me, saying that she will give me the meat side anyways. Dumbfounded, I motion to a rib.

Impossible boy, I say inside, forgive myself I tell myself. This whole time when you thought she was dumb, she was actually trying to be kind and give you a full meal. This whole time she was communicating, in her second language, that its ok I have this five dollar bill, that it doesn't matter.

When is the last time they did 'that' at McDonalds or Wal-Mart, deliberately lower the price for somebody who didn't bring enough cash? God, thank you for the small eateries, the bodegas, the local owned restaurants who seem at times to be the lights on our hills, the specks of actual blooded humanity within that greater mechanical enterprise.

           27 February 2009 8:08pm                                                   

We are marching in the light of God. We are walking to the rhythm of this holy ghost. We are dancing and clapping our way into paradise. The walls of trouble, of danger and shame, of pain and position, these walls fall away with ease beneath our feet. We are stomping down the establishments of oppression, of depression and hunger. An air from somewhere unseen fills our lungs with hope and resilience.

Something happened two thousand years ago, and it undermined all these structures which have for so long intimidated us into apathy and cynicism. And we are marching through them, sending shockwaves.

A song is heard above our feet, a hymn of healing and bliss, of joy and laughter. The song echoes off the mountain sides and peals across the sea. Reaching the edges of creation, it ricochets back the other way, growing in cadence.

What can be against this? What chance does anybody or anything have in the face of such a wonderful terror? The very establishment of the grave has been ended, has been put to death. Nothing remains.

We are walking in the light of God. We are moving to the beat of grace, and it barrels through our veins and sends song into our lungs. We are standing upright, full facing the coming future. We are breaking the margins and edges of what we had known, breaking the definitions of our minds and books, and the tumultuous collapse is almost unnoticed because of what lies before us. And neither words nor expression can contain this. Our eyes alone are failing to see it all. Only this: that we are marching in the light of God, and it is good.

           14 February 2009 1:08pm                                                   

I was waking early. Afraid I would miss my ride to Harlem, I actually awoke at 5am instead of my alarm's preset of 6.15am. I shifted and lost consciousness again, with the alarm beeping an hour later. I've always had trouble waking up. I sort of groan and loll on my back for at least ten minutes while the blood begins to flow and my mind sputters to a manageable level of functionality. I spend about a minute or two dealing with it, grudgingly, then beeline to the preset coffee maker and pour, sip/stare/sip/stare, and wait for normalcy. I would be ashamed of my chemical dependency, but thankfully in our culture such a thing is pretty typical, like khat in Yemen or kola nuts in West Africa. Yes, caffeine is buddied with America, and I'm on the bandwagon. That morning at 6:15am it arrived in its usual quiet splendor. My morning coffee is like a rising sun, and I am as an unfurling city, being gilded awake beneath its morning gaze.

Usually I get up at 7.30am, but today, because I was earlier, I was able to witness my roommate's morning routine. I walked back into our room and he is laying prostrate beside his bed, praying his morning prayers. I felt bashful watching, but privileged just the same. He wasn't bent over his bed with his hands folded, austere and smiling like a precious moment doll. No, he was laying collapsed. I remember wondering if he was praying or asleep. But he eventually rose and began brushing his gray hair.

What sort of God is this, who cares for the ruined elderly, who saves them from their chaos and deposits them into safety and love? I watched him pray that morning, unabashed and full, pray with every part of his body and mind, pray like one being both coddled and knighted. I watched because I knew I was witnessing something magnificent. I don't know a greater privilege in life than the witness of dependency between the earth and God.

           11 February 2009 5:50pm                                                   

There is something of the way he holds his hands, his cross, his face that has garnered my life, my actions and thoughts. You would think one grows bored with the same person day after day. But I have to only take a moment and look at him, and I am ushered into the fullest of life and joy with God.

How can such a simple and mysterious thing be communicated? I think of the healed blind man who is brought before the courts. "Tell us how this happened," they demand. "Tell us." And tender power of the God-breathed text is revealed in his answer: "I don't know," the healed man answers. "All I know is that I once was blind, and now I see." I once was without a song in my heart, without a source of peace and stability, without life, and now I have it. I have no idea how this happened, but it did, and it has something to do with that lonesome abandoned lover of mankind. I watch him stoop to the face of a child, touch a leper's sores, dine with a prostitute, and quietly abandon the crowd's adoration. And I look down and, oh, I am running after him. I am running and I am not looking back.

Please don’t wait for me
I lost my way again
I lost my house and my good name
When I found the road of my king

When I was young I dreamed
Of a life that had beauty that had joy
But now I lost my life
For the one I dreamt of as a boy

Please don’t wait for me
I ain’t coming back again
I cannot turn around
From the place I’m going to where I’ve been
-Josh Garrels

           7 February 2009 12:05pm                                                   

To understand my neighborhood, you must understand cancer, the mute geist that haunts the corners of each room, no exceptions. For when we round the members who were too sick to come Sunday, who do we sit with but its victims. Each week another living room, another endured chemotherapy or mastectomy, another patient.

From the way they speak, to fall from a balcony would be better than this. At least the injury could be grasped, at least there would be a bruise to point at and say, 'Yes, this is it.'

Instead the awful unknowing lies stagnant in the mind. And I would be overcome with hopelessness if it weren't for the words of the victim, if we hadn't taken time to slow down and listen:

"I was in bed for hours the day I came home from the hospital," she told us. "I was thinking over and over how the owner of the factory told his bosses not to drink the water we had been drinking for months. I was thinking of the six friends I worked there with, all down with cancer like me."

"But the day I got home, I told myself, get up! I stood and walked to the mirror and looked in, and I swear you to, my face was shining. I had looked in the mirror expecting the worst, and instead saw my face giving off a beautiful light. And I said to myself, ok. Ok. God is with me. Whom shall I fear?"

rising
a cry of the once born
to a remembered hope
stretched to solid
the delight of earth
and heaven join

           5 February 2009 6:19pm                                                   

Oma's body lies on the bed, in the same bed where she died three days ago. People have been coming into the house, reserved, loitering until a proper moment. Opa stands, stooped and simple, and leads them close, leads them into the room and is speaking to them quietly. This is a one sided conversation: he is telling them all about how it went and how it is going, and they respond in pure listen. The perked faces that emerge take a moment to adjust, take a moment to come down because they were caught up.

The Netherlands is cold and sunny in February, colder and sunnier than any other time of the year. There is little rain, a fleck of snow at times, and a horizon silent and weighted as a mountainline. The sky, usually gracious in Holland with rain, the source of this country's mighty fields, the sky gives nothing. Its a one sided exchange. Any heat is given leeway to leave by that vast emptiness. The sun sends down a beautiful light that tempers the steady Dutch landscape, but the beautiful light lands cold.

The men who came for the casket are all I can understand right now, because the experience was too big to grasp. The men were as silent as that sky, steady, dark suits going into that bedroom. We were drinking coffee that morning, gathering coats and clarifying little things. There was a gentle business between everybody as we sorted details, like tying and retying laces, but an eye of everyone was held pensive against that open doorway where the men went. So when the dark suits silently reappeared we all started behind. We followed them as they feather coaxed that large box down the hall and into the elevator. We were talking, imagine that, and it lightened the mood. My mom made a joke, because we didn't dare, and it worked. My Opa is smiling, so I am allowed, and it feels good.

           23 January 2009 12:58pm                                                   

fashioned on a spindle, braiding dna as twine
god makes us still
cup overfilled with heart and strength and mind

           17 January 2009 9:25pm                                                   

A new friend today. He moved in today. He is over fifty and Indian, the kind in Asia. He arrived a bit nervous, like I did. Moved in with four or five black plastic bags worth of stuff, moved onto the bed next to mine, set up a spot in the bathroom, a corner of shelf in the kitchen. And he is brilliant.

Wherever he came from before here, wherever he's been, I can tell that his entry into this country has not been easy. He looks Indian. His accent is thick, and I bet it attests him everyday to where he is. I bet there is a thick hindering remnant of his culture that crusts almost everything he calls himself. I imagine this crust hints like heartbeat softly within him to become the source of his awkward kilter, the foundation of what drove him to do very destructive things, drove him to end up in the ward of a hospital, the ward of a very different kind of 'internal injury'.

And he's brilliant. The mild mention of a verse in scripture causes him to softly burst forth in a passionate dutied reciting of whole passages as a tumbling brook. Today somebody casually leveled the first verse of the twenty seventh psalm, and my roommate lofted it like a verbed foxtail, its timbre and rise gliding with heavily Indian-accented spoken grace.

I am half his age, twice his height, and a fraction as memorized, but I can tell that he is to be my roommate as God would have it. Just as God works such places of things in all lives, today here in ours he has worked this.

           15 January 2009 8:08pm                                                   

Where will we find God? Where will he be found? Will we feel his lazy presence on a television screen? Will we see him poignantly diagrammed in a textbook of higher learning, resting easy?

I am adjusting so harshly at times from three years abroad, watching myself twist under the rigors of again being American in the United States. Each day is heavy as a driving test. And in it a light shines down into my will, not pleasant like a lite stream of sound, but fierce and valiant, the wind of God's burning. The bundled people of this city, the plastic upholstered chairs in my house, the cracked drywall in my office, reheated chicken: these are the points of my hours. And as I twist under these rigors, held in God's arms like one teething, I am beginning to see anew. Rise up you Spirit of truth, and devour me; return me sober to where I live.

           11 January 2009 8:07pm                                                   

After dinner on Thursdays a group of folks meet in a parking lot down the street and begin walking the neighborhood. They call it prayerwalking. The pervasive broken area is viewed, current and head on, each prayer directed like an arrow at each of what needs it. An abandoned lot is filled with trash and rubble, and it is prayed to become good, perhaps a house with a family. A store is standing tired, empty and boarded up, and on its behalf it is held up to God for the promise of what it could become. The level need is met by the level of the petition. A homeless addict, a wandering child, an abandoned car, an empty apartment complex: these things are broken versions of what they should be. And we don't fool ourselves to think human hands have the ability to bring such reversal to our world. No, the depravity is to such a depth that only a god could save this. And us with it.

So we prayed for the depravity, we walked the broken streets of Paterson and held things to God's attention, asking and wrestling with him that these things would be given vitality and radiance. And I felt afterward that everything seemed to gain luster. Well, not everything. Not the sources of the bad. The endless liquor stores are asked to end like a stubborn flu. "May these businesses fail, God," we prayed. "May the poison which saturates this neighborhood drain down the gutter. Let it take the ragged bags with it, the food wrappers and the threadbare car tires. Restore this city's industry to health."

A liquor store on Martin Luther King Blvd was hosting a group of men that night. We stood with those willing and we altogether asked God for life and fullness. A man who had set down his can of malt liquor to pray had suddenly begun to weep, his tears mixing with the glistening salted pavement. His voice broke when it came his turn, broke as he said he was 'sorry' and that he'll 'try harder next time', broke like the streets and the houses and the very air we were breathing.

Please God. I am torn in two by the good hearts of such people, good hearts sore from the merciless circumstances where they live. If such a person can be righted then surely such a terrific work of balance could not come through any work of mine.

           6 January 2009 5:19pm                                                   

At the 8th Ave and 50th Street subway stop in Manhattan, both the C and E trains head downtown. I was headed in that direction, but I saw that the two trains arrived on different platforms. The E platform is actually down the stairs from the C platform. But since both trains go to Pennsylvania station, I was confused about where to wait.

Many people were going downtown like me, waiting near the rusted steps on the top level. Nobody was crowded around the platform like normal, everybody was set back a ways. And I looked and immediately saw that they were standing and waiting for whatever train was coming first.

A distant murmur soon began to emanate from the tunnels. It was too obscure though. It had too little definition. It made my hand buzz slightly on the rail, stirring the air to reverberate like a pipe organ chord, throwing itself lightly from wall to wall. The sound grew in volume, but still I didn't know where to move. Nobody moved. Steadily the murmur grew into a rumble, and for sure I knew then that a train was coming either to the upper or lower platform. The air thundered with the approaching train, absolutely shook the ground and air and walls, making the station like the inside of a boiling kettle, and still I couldn't tell anything as to its source. The train seemed at times like it would come from the rusted ceiling, or like it was about to crash through the gummy floor under my feet.

A girl in front of me moved first. She was closer to the lower level than others, which maybe helped. I bet she had done this before. I saw her lean and begin to walk down the rest of the stairs, where she turned left and disappeared into the corridor that leads to the lower E train platform. Others, like the girl, seemed able to pick the roar coming more from the lower area, seemed to differentiate it from the roaring rest of the station. They started down and everybody followed them. I couldn't tell it still, even when I began to walk after them. To me, it was all still like static.

Sure enough, the E train screeched heavy into the lower level. We got on, the doors shut, and I took it two stops to Penn Station on 31st Street on my way back to Paterson. But the image of all those tired evening commuters stayed like an ember in my mind, how they stood between the platforms, picking out the noise of the approaching train from the noise of the approaching train.

           1 January 2009 10:23pm                                                   

I am living in northern New Jersey with a bunch of wonderful guys who are recovering from drug and alcohol addictions. They've all been clean for at least nine months, and you can tell. Right away I saw the kind of confidence in their eyes that only comes from deep seated accomplishment. They were so genuine in their posture when they helped me unload my bags. They were tried and real, truly interested in where I had driven from, where I had lived, and how long I was going to stay. I was talking with one of them, and came to the sudden realization that he was super intelligent. Assumptions are so ridiculous sometimes, like that only real thick skulled guys would get addicted to stuff. Shows what I know.

As my new housemate took my suitcase and brought it inside, as he commented on the weather and the room I was in, I saw a razor level of perception in his eyes. May my assumptions burn in flame. He was brisk footed and quick talking, and I knew he must have hoards of stories about surviving wherever he came from, whatever street it was where he was forced to survive through witted dexterity. And I realized I was going to get near nothing past him or any of the other guys in this house.

           27 December 2008 11:38am                                                   

The ebb and flow of the human heart is bewildering at times. Who can keep up? Who can stay on top of this turvy thing. With the smallest prick of difficulty, the slightest lost expectation, and we can be sent reeling. A stormy day for instance colors our world gloomy. The sheets of liquid lash the house sides and tired trees, the air sputters and turns to slog everything it touches. The weather is outside; we go shuttered inside.

We are waiting.

And all at once the sun stoops below the heavy cloudline. Its rayed royalty comes down to our level. And when this happens, the difficult drizz is revealed in all its gorgeous painted symmetry. All at once, the gloom is given a revelation that we can more easily carry. The exact same situation, nothing different, and yet we suddenly can't get pull our eyes away. We take deeper breathes. All we know and walk through is transformed as something wonderful. All. And now I have a hard time remembering how dreary it was before.

So much is like this.

           16 December 2008 7:21pm                                                   

Our neighbor's husband died three years ago. A month ago she was in our house, laughing and making jokes. And she was hilarious, especially considering such stuff was coming from a sixty year old woman. But then her face pulled serious. She asked us for just a couple dollars. We instead asked if she wanted some of our dinner we were making. She politely refused, laughed some more, and left.

Her husband's death wears on her still. I could faintly see something was broken behind her comedy, because whenever the joke was over (and just before she said another word) her face was stuck fierce, just for a moment. One of my housemates said he went over to her house earlier that week and found her alone and drunk on whiskey, wanting to talk about her husband.

Sometimes I get so furious at myself for how I underscore the plight of the widow, as if its like any other problem. But I was sobered by her struggle that night, in between her wonderful humor, bent in half from the grief, and begging for escape. I saw an aged and unyielding anguish, like a broken bone that won't heal. Like arrhythmia.

God, be with the widow this frigid December evening.

           14 December 2008 4:01pm                                                   

I dreamed two nights ago that I was trying to get into a multi masted schooner that was leaving for across the ocean. The water was deep and blue, the wind light, and I jumped in the water as it was leaving, fighting to catch up. I remember how it was on the lip of the horizon, how its squared aft slowly sank sickly over and beyond my sight. I was swimming after it so hard, and was panicking that it had truly floated beyond me, that I was stuck in the middle of the vast expanse of liquid alone and distraught. I slumped down.

Then I saw through the water, deep below and before me, a blue giant whale with a large tail, slowly moving in the same direction as the schooner. It was less swift than the ship, and I kept my face down in the water and swam after it, and it stayed in my sight, staying with me. I swam for hours and the blue fish swam strong and peaceful, deep below me. The only noise over the ocean expanse was my own swimming strokes, and I began to calm down. And the whale led me across that entire ocean, and I bumped my head against the other side. It startled me, and I woke up minutes before my alarm.

How bewildering are these days, trying to live again in this manic society, trying hard to make appointments and turn forms in on time. I feel anxiety has finally become real to me, more than anytime before. But through it all, God is with this effort, and creating the trail I am walking. As I move from that shore to this new one, he has me in his sight, in his steady wake, and I have only to move my feet. Its all I can do at this moment anyways.

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