UpfromtheStump - Archive 56

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.