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November 22 - December 31, 2018
I had, in normal fashion, trailed off from talking to God to simply thinking. Talking to myself. I always scolded myself for doing this. For doing it wrong. For not actually talking to God. “Amen.”
It is a coastal ecosystem separated from the rest of California by the scale of its barriers.
The mountains push up from the fog, cooking in the sun and feeding
The permanence of pen on paper means something. You say it, and it’s there, and if you change your mind, the scribbled-out words are still there—no pretending you’re perfect.
For me, thoughts and emotions stay cloudy until I put them into words, give them bodies to walk around in and be their own thing. That’s when they become knowable.
There is a weird paradox in trying to live a meaningful life, one you will talk about and tell about.
Born and raised in Tennessee, I have always wanted hills and trees. I trust land like that. Flat land and barren desert threaten my sense of understanding. I cannot get my bearings. I have no point of reference, and can’t wait to leave. But around hills, trees, streams, and valleys, I want to linger. This part of California does that to me. I want to know every streambed and hill. I want to climb into the rafters of every barn. But I think it must matter where you were raised. I have friends from the Mississippi Delta who can’t stand land like this. Because they can’t see the sky behind the
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first time in my life where I learned the difference between dreams and goals.
Dreams are like a compass that points in a general direction, and goals are the islands in the ocean along the way.
The crossing point from known to unknown. From my language to their language. From trusting myself to trusting God. From
Southern California is a man-made garden. Finally,
known. I lay there thinking back through my life—how much energy I put into planning, trying to guarantee my independence, but how so many of my best memories have come from the times where I needed help and received it.
but I was hypnotized watching the boy learn piano all by himself. I remembered my own piano lessons as a kid, and how begrudgingly I practiced for fifteen minutes a day, with my mother watching me like a hawk to make sure I didn’t sneak off to watch TV or eat BBQ potato chips. How inconvenienced I was in my roomy house with so many entertaining distractions. And here was this boy, a lover of music, using the free music lessons posted by some random person in Ohio to learn to play on his busted-up Casio, in the middle of a desert town with one paved road. What if he becomes a great musician? I
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boojums. They grow mainly in central Baja and reach up into the sky fifteen feet or more. They look like tall, spiny green road cones and often have no real branches—the
It’s remarkable how normal moments live on in the middle of chaos and tragedy.
knew it was not for nothing, but what, I didn’t know. I just knew it was somewhere in me, and I needed travel to shake it out. I needed to see different things to remind me what I was, in contrast to what I already knew. To see clearly what I had become.
If our shittiest actions can lead to beauty, what does it mean to do right and wrong?
It felt like a metaphor for life, of fighting against or riding with the current of God. Life can feel effortless, like you’re carried along by an unseen force. Or it can feel like you’re in a losing fistfight with a brick wall. It all depends on which way you’re headed.
I couldn’t put a finger on it, but I knew that my deepest wounds were the place of my deepest meanings. And she was ground zero. My salvation was somewhere inside her.
But I had no one to sing the praises of Creation to. Only the Creation itself. Maybe God was there, proud of His work. But He isn’t surprised by things, and He doesn’t respond with laughter when I jump for joy. Not that I could tell anyway.
The Eden we pine for is not under our own feet or bike tires, but over the next mountain.
