In defense of loving and losing love

“The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places.”

—Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms

_____________________________________________

Earlier this year I took a test to determine my Enneagram type, just out of curiosity. I was already pretty confident which type I was, but I wanted to see if anything different turned up.

Not surprisingly, Type 9, the Peacemaker, was most prominent—consistent with how I’ve understood myself the past several years. What was surprising, though, was the type that came in second. 

Two years ago I got divorced. To this day my ex-wife is the only person I’ve ever been in love with. She brought this beautiful presence of energy, a distinct liveliness, positivity, passion, and zeal for life, a relentless creativity and excitement for what the future had in store. I was infatuated with her from day one.

For those of you familiar with the Enneagram, you’ll recognize these traits as the telltale signs of a Type Seven, the Enthusiast. 

As the Enneagram Institute puts it, “Sevens are enthusiastic about almost everything that catches their attention. They approach life with curiosity, optimism, and a sense of adventure, like ‘kids in a candy store’ who look at the world in wide-eyed, rapt anticipation of all the good things they are about to experience. They are bold and vivacious, pursuing what they want in life with a cheerful determination. They have a quality best described by the Yiddish word ‘chutzpah’—a kind of brash ‘nerviness.’”

That was Lauren. She was always coming up with new ways to experience life: putting candles in the shower, dragging me to a Dia de los Muertos celebration, sleeping on the floor in the living room by the soft lights of the Christmas tree, or coming up with endless variations of pancakes (pumpkin, banana-maple, sweet potato, and more). She was constantly scheming up new ways to celebrate people, creating handmade gifts for my family, flying out to visit her sisters during a midterm break, buying an original painting of the Last Supper rendered in prismatic colors and shapes.

I loved it. As a more routine-driven person, someone who felt like I was wasting my life if I didn’t spend at least an hour or two writing every morning, I found her presence profoundly disruptive—in a good way. She was inspiring, life-giving, and beautifully challenging, so much so that sometimes people would question if her enthusiasm was actually sincere and wonder if it needed to be balanced out by the harsher realities of life. But to me it was magnetic. I loved it. I wanted more of it.

Back to the Enneagram test I recently took. Guess what my second most prominent type was? 

Yep, Seven. 

That’s different than what I would have scored three or four years ago. Looking back, it’s not hard for me to understand why. When you’re in a deep relationship with someone, forging a life together as in marriage, you tend to absorb and take on some of each other’s personality traits. They say some couples even begin to look more like each other as they age through decades together.

I don’t think it was just the having of the relationship that changed me though. It was the loss too. When Lauren left me, I lost her presence and everything that came with that—her enthusiasm, creativity, joy, and vivacity. A void opened up in my world.

It was agonizing, but it also galvanized something in me. Being with her expanded my horizons. She awakened my sense of possibility for how one can move through the world and experience life. She showed me, in tangible, embodied ways, that it’s okay—actually really wonderful—to get unabashedly excited about something, whether it’s singing a worship song, celebrating someone’s birthday, or creating a new culinary dish. 

Since getting divorced, I’ve noticed that I have internalized something of her spirit and personality. In her absence, I’ve discovered that I have more freedom and power to live out a similar kind of creativity and life-enthusiasm for myself. It feels like I’ve grafted it in, like a branch taken from the tree of Lauren’s self and fused to my own, and it has taken hold and begun to bear fruit. Since we split up, I’ve taken a solo trip to Mexico for a month to learn how to surf. I’ve stood up in front of my church and worshiped in spirit and truth with reckless abandon, utterly un-self-conscious. I’ve moved to the desert to start a conservation program so I can land a job as a wildland firefighter. I’ve gotten in disagreements over faith and politics with my parents. I’ve walked up to a cute barista and asked her out on a date just because I liked her vibe (and she said yes!). 

The old, pre-divorce Andrew would never have done those things. But something inside me has wanted to do those kinds of things for a long time.

In one sense we could say this is Lauren showing up in me, that grafted-in branch, so to speak. But in another, deeper sense, I think it is actually a fuller, truer me showing up. It’s a man who has finally had intimate, vulnerable, contact with someone, an experience tragically complete with relational friction and sparks and explosions. It’s a man who has climbed out of the debris of the worst kind of breakup with a heart that is broken yet somehow more full, more in touch with the pain of the world but also more in touch with the joy of my type seven-ness—and as a result more wholly human.

I’m not saying that I’ve grown in such a way as to not feel Lauren’s loss or long for her presence. It’s more about learning to choose, in the aftermath of loss, to stand on my own two feet. As much as I loved her, the fact is that I often used her as a crutch, leaning on her intiative and zest for life to brighten my days and shake me out of my comfort zone. Now that we’ve broken up and I’ve lost that crutch, I’ve found a new courage to step out into the world, no longer quite so worried about tripping because I’ve already fallen flat on my face and broken half the bones in my body (at least that’s what it felt like).

This is why I’m convinced more than ever that it’s better to have loved and lost love, as the famous adage goes, than to never have loved at all. When we lose someone we love, the world breaks us. But in our breaking, in the depths of our pain and vulnerability, it also holds out the opportunity to become strong at the broken places. We see new gaps, but our bones grow to fill them in, and somehow, through the deep mystery of redemption, we become more than what we were before.

Getting divorced broke me. But in the breaking I found there was more room for me than I’d ever had the freedom to acknolwedge. I’m still not particularly happy about it. It still wish there had been a way for me—and us—to grow more whole and more fully ourselves together. But despite not getting what I wanted, I still must bear witness to the beautiful, particular ways I find new life emerging in myself. 

And the awful, severe mercy of it all is that it never would have happened without a breakup. 

Stories and meditations from the Mojave

I wrote these reflections from the western edge of the Mojave Desert, where I returned for a two-night technology fast after a week and a half of COVID isolation. Last month I spent a week out here with a team from my conservation program fixing excursions—trails made by off-roaders that deviate from roads and routes established by the Bureau of Land Management.

As a friend of mine recently put it in a letter he wrote me, the desert is a place that guarantees “good nothingness.” During my full day out here I hiked to a rocky outcropping where I could see for miles in every direction. There was not another human in sight, only creosote, rocks, and the occassional Joshua tree. I was alone out here, a reality my body found both invigorating and unsettling. For two days the breeze was faint and gentle, thank God, and the silence was interrupted only by distant birdsong or the dull roar of an airplane in the distance.

I was worried about coming out here right after so much time in isolation. Did I really need to take my newly-won COVID antibodies out into the desert, as far away from civilization as possible? Yes, I think I did, because I needed some silence, a break from the noise of my Facebook feed and text message notifications and the constraining walls of a bedroom.

To my surprise, my leap of faith was rewarded. I showed up in the desert and found myself in a place of almost abrupt wellness. The land grounded me afresh in who I am and who I follow, and it released me, for a time, from the cares and temptations of the world. I wrote the following anecdotes while I was out there. I’m sure there is a way of finding a narrative thread or two that ties them all together. But I’ve decided to release them in the order I drafted them as a series of anecdotes and meditations, unearthed from my experience like ore that has yet to be refined but is precious and meaningful all the same. 

I. 

Belden Lane, a writer and theologian who has devoted much of his life’s work to exploring desert and mountain spirituality, is my guide out here. In The Solace of Fierce Landscapes, he talks about a researcher who journeyed into the Himalayas for the professional purpose of study the migratory and mating patterns of Himalayan blue sheep. His real purpose though—his soul purpose, you might say—was to stalk snow leopards, the rarest and most beautiful of the great cats. 

“The snow leopard is a symbol of ultimate reality, that fleeting beauty we see only in occasional snatches,” Lane writes. He goes on to explain how our work or our job is really just a cover, and act to appease “polite society,” to give us a chance of encountering the sacred—the holy. In a culture that tempts us to make our work the measure of our worth, we often seek to find in our jobs an “ultimacy they can never provide.”

“The holy is seldom captured in the places where we seek it most,” Lane explains. “While we’re preoccupied with Himalayan blue sheep, it slips into the periphery of our vision in the furtive silhouette of a great cat.”

I read about this while I sit atop a rocky crest on the western edge of the Mojave Desert, and suddenly I feel the same metaphor come to life, except for me it is the desert tortoise. As of 2014, the latest data I can find after a quick Google search, these threatened creatures have an estimated population density of only about seven tortoises per square mile, and they spend about 95 percent of their lives underground.

I look out at the flat expanse, a spotty carpet of creosote stretching out more than 60 miles to the hills of the San Bernadino National Forest. There are maybe a few dozen tortoises walking out there now (assuming they go outside at all during the winter), just a handful of aged, sacred needles in an vast haystack that might as well be endless. Better pay attention, then, to the edges of the infinte desert where I wander. A fresh sense of meaning begins to well up in my day. I’m not out here for work; I’m out here to do nothing, to wander around without aim or goal, to give myself a chance of glimpsing a desert tortoise. 

Just a chance, a tiny window through which I might—maybe, it’s a long shot—glimpse revelation.

The trick is staying present when it feels like there’s nothing to see in the desert’s mundane, repetitive landscape. “Stalking the snow leopard is not so much an exercise in grapsing the numinous as in paying attention to the prosaic,” Lane reminds me. “Full awareness of the unnoteworthy immediate moment is the grandest and hardest of all spiritual exercises.”

I want the mountaintop experience, to come out here and be utterly undone by God’s love and see my wounds healed and my fragmented heart restored. But that isn’t happening. Instead it’s just one damn creosote bush after another. Granite and sand. Droning airplanes in the distance. The only command I feel is to exist and pay attention, to wait without expectation—but not without hope.

Yes, it’s a long shot, but if I do see a desert tortoise, oh my. I will take off my shoes and fall on my face, for surely I am on holy ground.

II. 

Speaking of coming out here to do nothing, it feels so risky to offer that to myself, to give myself 48 hours to simply be out in a place of “good nothingness,” with no demands no obligations on my time. It feels like a risk to be unproductive, especially after self-isolating for a week and a half to recover from COVID and not accomplishing much beyond writing a couple thousand words and making a few phone calls. It also feels like a risk to be undistracted, to put away my phone, leave my laptop at home, and go out to a place where no source of entertainment is readily forthcoming. I fear what the desert’s nothingness may hold—pain, loneliness, boredom, heartache?

To my surprise, this time it holds none of those things, at least not in any acute, heart-aching form. Instead I find myself strangely calm, oddly at peace. I move through the day slowly and patiently, utterly unhurried, and what I find is a steady outpouring of gifts. Yes, this time the desert demands nothing of me: no need to fix or restore, only receive. 

It begins early, in the faint, pre-dawn light. I wake and dress and step out from my tent into the cold morning. Before I even make it to my car to prepare a cup of instant coffee, four shadows appear in the air above my camp, silhouetted against the navy blue sky. They flap their wings and dart left and right, up and down. I watch their movements, studying the contours of their shape. They don’t make a sound.

They’re bats. Bats! Flying right here of all places. Miles of desert and they pass just a few yards from me. I watch them, marvelling, until they flap out of sight into the pale pink horizon. The sun has not yet risen, and already I am a witness to one of the desert’s silent wonders.

I make my coffee. Sunrise is nearing. There is a small crest nearby covered in small, broken-up chunks of granite. It grants me a distant view to the east. I climb it and look up. Long rows of clouds have turned pink, stretching directly overhead all the way to the horizon where the rising sun has turned the sky orange and gold. There on the crest it dawns on me that I am likely the only person in at least three miles every direction. That means I am the only one who is seeing this right now. All of its particulars, the swell of pink in the cirrus clouds overhead and the burning orange blazing out above the rocky hilltops in the distance, these all are exclusive to my eyes alone. I am the sole witness—the one human recipient. What a gift. What a treasure! At this moment I might as well be the wealthiest man in the world.

Later in the evening, after the sunset almost knocks me off my feet—the sky explodes with color again so suddenly—I build a fire. As the dusk begins deepening into night, a feathery shadow emerges in the air above out of the fading landscape. This time it’s an owl making a pass above my camp. It glides like a phantom, silent as death. If I hadn’t noticed its silhouette, I’d have never known it was here.

I did not seek out these experiences. I didn’t work for them or make any effort to manufacture them. I simply came out to the desert with open hands, trusting grace to provide something but having no guarentees. In the silence, the cold, barren nothingness, the desert offered up her treasures.

That’s the thing about stalking snow leopards. You go out looking, hoping to catch a glimpse, but in the end it’s actually the leopard that’s stalking you. As Lane says, when we go out into fierce landscapes, we often discover that it’s not so much about finding truth as in being found by the Beloved. Is not that the divine way, after all? God shows up, piercing our mundane day-to-day life with a glimpse of holiness, and all we’re left with is flummoxed wonder and gratitude, “surely the Lord was here, and we knew it not!” 

III. 

I ponder the landscape as I walk through it. Aside from the creosote and Joshua trees, which have some green in their leaves, everything out here looks dead. The grass and underbrush is sparse, dry, and brittle. It breaks and crunches under my feet when I venture off the roads.

But I know it’s not dead. It can’t be. I mean, it’s here, for starters. It must have grown here somehow, rising up from the sand despite the arid sky, scorching summer afternoons, and freezing winter nights. Yes, life is here, latent in the land, biding its time. I’m sure one good spring rain is all it would take for the grass to turn green and the brush to flower again. In the meantime they’re patient, biding their time in the long, empty silence, not in a hurry to grow or do much of anything…until the time is ripe.

IV. 

In his autobiography of coming to faith, C.S. Lewis talks about the experience of being surprised by joy in a number of experiences over the course of his early life that he describes as “unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction.” I know this joy that he speaks of, but today I was surprised by something else. I was surprised by peace. After hiking through the late morning and early afternoon I arrived back at my campsite with about an hour and a half of daylight left. I was tired from the walking, and hungry. I felt vaguely empty inside, and I wondered what I would do with myself until it got dark enough to start a fire.

Something caught my eye on the ground just behind my car. It was a small ant colony. I stooped down to look at it. The ants were moving slowly. At first glance it almost looked like they were standing still, frozen in place by some wintry spell. It was as if their little corner of the universe was caught in slow motion. They were in no hurry at all—or maybe the dropping temperature was sapping their energy. I found a raisin from some trail mix in my car, spread a picnic blanket on the ground near the ants, lay down on my stomach, and dropped the raisin nearby to see what they would do.

For a moment—I don’t know if it was fifteen minutes or an hour—the vastness of the desert faded away. I forgot about the girls I was chatting with on dating apps, the tumult at the capitol in Washington, D.C., the fear and oppression of the pandemic. There was just the ants. I watched their movements. Some latched on to the raisin, others wandered off many inches to explore the far reaches of their developed land, and some moseyed about the entrance of their colony, not seeming to do much at all. A deep peace settled over me, and in a surreal moment of self-awareness I realized that I felt content. For a wonderful few minutes the world was enough, it was enough to simply be here, watching the ants and letting my body rest from the exertions of the day. All was calm. The desert was silent. Only the ants toiled at their steady, unhurried pace. They had no worries about tomorrow. The raisin would still be there for them. All of it was enough, and there was nothing I needed to do about anything.

V. 

While I was sitting on the aforementioned rocky outcropping writing a letter to a friend, an abrupt ba-BOOM errupted behind me. I started and turned around, looking for evidence of a gunshot or explosion. Overhead an F-22 Raptor, the latest-generation fighter in the United States Air Force, was streaking across the sky.

The sound had stunned me, but having identified its source I suddenly felt nonplussed. “Huh, so that’s what the speed of sound looks like,” I said to myself as the jet turned into a shrinking dot above the horizon.

I had seen a pair of the same jets flying above the desert in a broad arc earlier in the day. It was so strange, the juxtaposition of worlds that happened during these sightings. I was out here in a sparse, elemental landscape where life feels stripped down and harsh, a place where the silence of God interposes with a strange, sacred violence on the soul. Then to spot an F-22, one of the most advanced and deadly feats of engineering in human history, well, I’m not sure what to make of it. I wish they weren’t here. I wish I had the desert’s uninterrupted silence, the way it was before human development clove the sky with the roar of jet-engines. Even here, in the Mojave’s holy emptiness, I cannot fully escape the world of human kind and the weapons of destruction we have wrought. Even here—especially here—I long for the restoration of all things, for springs to burst forth in the wasteland and swords to be beaten into plowshares. 

VI. 

I feel compelled to commemorate my time out here with ritual. I brought a handful of communion wafers with me, blessed and distributed for use during online services by the Anglican church I used to attend. I pull one out and hold the thin, tasteless morsel in my hand. “This is the body of Christ, broken for you,” I mumble to myself. I break it into four pieces, calling on Jesus Christ to have mercy on me. I haven’t been to church in a few months, but I decide to step boldly into my identity as a priest anyways, breaking bread and consecrating the land that has held me these past two days.

I place one piece on the small hill of granite rocks, a place of contemplation, breathing, and stillness, stacking three stones on top of each other in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. I ask God to meet the next person who wanders to the top of this hill as I have.

The next piece is for the fire, warming and life-sustaining yet consuming force that it is. I’m going to become a wildland firefighter in four months, and I know that my relationship with fire will grow much more involved and complicated as a result. Already I watch the fire with a heightened attention, noticing how its flames react to the wind and spread to consume the wood I’ve assembled for fuel. It’s nearly out now, barely piercing the cold morning air with its heat. I bless the smoldering flames before me, and I bless whatever the future holds.

The third piece of the communion wafer I eat, blessing my own body and the reality that Christ dwells in me and I in him, even out here in the far wastes of the world. I’ve been reading Psalm 139 the past two days, and I call the words to mind as I partake: “Where shall I go from your Spirit? Or where shall I flee from your presence? If I ascend to heaven, you are there! If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there! If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there your hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me.”

The fourth and final piece I take out to a Joshua tree growing a few hundred yards away from my camp. If anything symbolizes and defines this land and stands as its symbolic head, it is this tree right here. If there is anything out in the desert here that God loves, I know it must be this lone, solitary being. It’s the Joshua tree that Christ loved, as the Apostle John might put it. I put my hand on its trunk and bless it, praying for its flourishing, knowing that as I do so, I mysteriously pray for every other living being around me as well. 

In the sand at the base of the tree I dig a little hole with my hand, feeling the gravelly soil slip through my fingers, and bury the last piece of the wafer. Deep breath. The land is still silence, still somehow both fierce and calm. I feel depths of peace. Now I can leave and return to my life, having, in some small way, lost it and found it anew. 

Here Am I: Reflections from Lake Jennings Reservoir

I’ve found a place to meet God. It’s a spit of land, mounded like a long hill, that juts out into the Lake Jennings reservoir near our campsite. I am spending eight days camping here in Alpine, California, working with a team of a half-dozen volunteers to remove arundo donax, an invasive, bamboo-like grass. We work from sunup to sundown each day, almost ten hours. It’s a grind.

There is rarely anyone else out here in the dark hours of the morning, just after the stars have faded. I come out to an open space atop the hill and sit at an aluminum picnic table. A ring of trees of varying sizes and species along the waterline encircles me. Dozens of birds populate the reservoir: tiny songbirds singing melodies, an osprey soaring overhead on the hunt, an assortment of waterfowl paddling near the shore.

It’s a good place to begin and end the day. The peninsula formation of the land jutting from the north to the south means the sun both rises and sets over the reservoir. Here I pray. And wait. I breathe and feel and reach out, like a blind man groping for Jesus of Nazareth. “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me. Have mercy on me!” I speak the words and try to listen. “I know you’re out there.”

I wish I had something with which to consecrate this place, but I’ve misplaced my holy water and chrism oil. They’re in storage with most of my personal belongings. There is a wide, flat dirt clearing, enough open space to drive a car out and turn around. Maybe the dirt itself is enough. What more would God want of me anyways? Here I step into the depths of a season of solitude and loneliness, of the deprivation of modern comforts. I will be sleeping in a tent for at least half of my nights over the next six months — maybe even the next year if my plan to fight wildfires next season works out. The rest of the time I will be intinerant, flitting from bunk bed to guest bedroom to pullout couch.

The season of Advent is beginning, but out here it feels more like the early arrival of Lent. I stand in the dirt at dusk, surrounded by fading reflections on the smooth surface of the water, waiting for a whirlwind to rise up and call me to dress myself for action and face the cosmos like a man. The osprey dives from the top of a tree. I hear a splash. Just like that, a fish’s life is ended. It has played its part in the circle: raptor food. 

It’s dust to dust out here, I must remember that.

Here am I, taking it all in, ceasing my feeble prayers to marvel at the graceful, steely intent of the osprey’s locked and angled wings, diving like a homing missile. Here am I, delighting in the songbirds darting in and out among the cacti and eucalyptus trees. Here am I, feeling my stomach grumble in anticipation of the orange chicken my companions will prepare for dinner tonight. I guess I’m not so holy after all, thinking about orange chicken at a time and place like this.

Here am I. Do I dare ask the Lord to send me? Send me where? For what purpose? The world seems to be holding together decently enough, all things considered, without my meddling under the guise of divine mission.

Then again, perhaps I’m already as holy as ever, with my longing for a lantern-lit feast and a few dark hours of rest. Perhaps there’s not a mission to submit to, but freedom to shoulder like a pair of big, floppy wings. “You’re a big boy,” God the Father tells me. “You can make your own decisions.” And so I have. I’ve led myself here, working for pennies on the dollar, waking up to the stars, working by the sweat of my brow, sitting in the heat of the day eating pretzels and beef jerky in silence.

I must be on mission, though, one way or another. I know of no other way to live. It’s either mission — hacking arundo out of a San Diego watershed — or abandoning my heart to the impersonal gaze of a thousand photographs of women. It’s either mission — writhing on the couch, weeping in agony after signing my divorce papers — or a long string of evenings making my way through an on-demand streaming catalog over a meat lovers pizza.

I come out here seeking beauty and peace. I find them. They whisper to me like an intimate friend, then bid me go into the darkness and die. Sometimes I take their word for it, and the death gets drawn out, like a long, sleepless night in a cold tent. The night drags on too heavy. I abort and become a phantom of my true self, strung out and uninspired even by the constellations in the night sky.

But there is another way. It’s the way of writhing on the couch, of calling my mother the week my grandmother died, of weeping out prayers for the nurses in the Covid units, of watching a black man die under the knee of contempt incarnate. I scream and curse and throw my hat across the room. It’s all wrong.

Somehow — how could anyone ever explain it — this way leads to love. Again I cry out, “Son of David, have mercy on me!” Mercy? Yes, always mercy — always. But to what end, exactly, are my eyes being opened? Am I healing only to see thick patches of arundo suck the water out of the hills, choking the valley oaks and draining the osprey’s hunting grounds? Are my ears opening only to hear my now-ex wife say she’d felt more pursuit from a stranger at a bar than she’d ever felt from me? Is that where all this is headed, an endless battle against entropy, and in a house of mirrors to boot?

My god, the path is long and tortuous, an uphill scramble over shale and loose soil. It is seared with anger and carved out with the hot knife of heartache and sorrow. No one deserves such a road. But here am I, falling back into the precious tears of love’s release, abandoning all pretense. Falling, falling, saying again and again, “I am not well right now.” I show up in the world with a limp. Only then does it seem to appear: a steady, gentle hand at my side. New teardops fall alongside my own.

I don’t know what else we could possibly be here for. 

POEM: Liminal Space

I lost more than a year and a half

When my wife dropped me off on the curb

In front of the neighborhood bar

With nothing but a carry-on-sized suitcase

And a fleeting hope that she didn’t mean the words

“You just lost your marriage.”

_______

I lost more than a year on the banks of the Chesapeake

When I drove downtown to the King County courthouse

And delivered a petition for divorce

That felt like death to sign

A fall into an abyss deeper than I could see

_______

The fall — not the impact — cracked me open

Blood flowed at last from festering wounds

That I had bandaged again and again

In tumbleweed towns and the land of cookie cutter privilege

In Bible-thumping bubbles and ivory halls of suit-and-ties

Here the brick towers of the Baptist church crumbled

Under the weight of concrete and cedar born amid loss

The welcoming abode on Margalo Avenue

Where the walkway bears my handprint

And my high school diploma sits in a filing cabinet

Has evaporated like the river in the summer heat

The heaven-like facade has burned down

Into purgatorial ashes

I enter the ashes and weep

I ride the metro into Capitol Hill

And emerge in a world turned gray and cold

My heart recoils as I look back at the open gorge

Listening to the echo of the collapsing bridge

That held a score and six years of my life

_______

I say to my soul:

Breathe; feel your feet

Retire to your bed — and fear no darkness!

Take your lunch on cinder blocks

And let your stomach be full for an afternoon

How else will you be able to stand up

With such a heavy heart?

_______

Alas! My kingdom has fallen

With its garden of delights —

Flowers in the full bloom of youth

The fellowship to defy death has failed

And the ruins lie about everywhere

To my right and to my left

Haunted by the ghost

Of a woman who is not dead

I touch her only in dreams and in memory

As I wander emerald hills

Limping from dagger wounds

Pricked by the sight of every silver SUV

_______

The road ahead appears — I have only to desire

To desire — but not the one whom my heart still desires

Where then shall I go, O soul?

Where then shall I go!

_______

I cannot make out the contours of home

Among so many modern lines

And my old inner voices crying “danger!”

To choose before I’ve chosen is bad faith

To not choose is violence at best, they say

Or damnation at worst, say the others

There is no balance, no compromise

Only tension

Magnets suspend me in the in-between

There is only the weary journey

Of walking in one man’s shoes

And then another’s — over and over again

Until my teary eyes are spent

And I fall back on those wooden beams

Singing the lament of the lyre and harp: How long?

How long, O lord?

_______

Sing to me of flames ravaging the forest

Of salt spray in the barrel of a wave

Of desert saints tending a parched and holy land

I will wander in search of my inheritance

A kingdom that was, and is, and will be

_______

I say to my body:

Sharpen your sword and feel your wounds

Sink your hands in the earth

Trace the wisdom of the trees in the grains of spruce and fir

Lace up your boots and stand in the rain

Hold your brothers close while you can

Feel their hearts beat, their lungs heave

Set your eyes on what you love

Let your gaze be strong and steady as folded steel

And your heart be soft and tender like a child’s

_______

I will seek first the kingdom, and trust uncharted paths

Through barren deserts and mossy groves

Rocky coasts and fields of quiet streams

I will welcome the warmth of a companion around the fire

Or the solitude of a cold night beneath the stars

When my heart stalls

And the way feels shut and dead

Still I will lift up my song and cry —

From the depth of my being, or with no depth at all

How long, O Lord, how long?

How long?

The five best books I read in 2015

In 2015 I set what I thought was a modest – but not insignificant – personal goal for reading: one book every two weeks – or 26 over the entire year (by comparison, Mark Zuckerberg set a similar goal for himself, and Bill Gates reads about a book a week; so I figured if those guys can carve out time then surely I can too). By the end of December I had finished 31 books, which I was pretty satisfied with. From those books, here are the five that made the biggest impression on me and were most worth my while.

1. East of Eden by John Steinbeck

John Steinbeck called East of Eden “the first book,” and indeed there is something elemental about this masterful work. It aims for the moon and soars to the stars. Through the multi-generational story of several families who all cross paths in California’s Salinas Valley at the beginning of the twentieth century, it captures both a thousand stories of an era and that singular, timeless, origin story of human nature. At a time when many people still felt bound by fate, especially their own heritage, East of Eden proclaims the great freedom of human choice in a fallen world to break the moral trajectory of one’s lineage. The book finds its mythic roots for this in the Old Testament: Genesis 4. God accepted Abel’s sacrifice but not Cain’s, to which Cain responded with jealousy and anger. God asked Cain why he was angry and challenged him to overcome his temptation to sin. Per the King James Version: “If thou doest well, shalt thou not be accepted? and if thou doest not well, sin lieth at the door. And unto thee shall be his desire, and thou shalt rule over him.” The key word here, one character insists, is timshel – the Hebrew verb that means “thou mayest.” The “thou shalt” from the passage, he says, should be rendered “thou mayest.” The message for young Cal Trask, who poetically revives the part of Cain in the book’s retelling of the story, is that evil is crouching at his door, but he is not destined to repeat Cain’s sin (or the sins of his parents).

Steinbeck’s prose – his ability to portray characters, to delve into the great perversities and nobilities of human motives, and to craft scenes that deeply engage the reader – is some of the best I’ve ever read. East of Eden is a tome, weighing in at more than 600 pages, but it is well-worth the toil of reading it.

2. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig

Before reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, I’m not sure I had much of a propensity to connect road trips and motorcycle mechanics with philosophy, but I do now. Robert Pirsig’s account of a former college professor’s motorcycle road trip to the American northwest with his son alternates between the physical, concrete, and calculable to the realm of values and meaning. It moves to and fro from the task of keeping a motorcycle in top shape to abstract musings that probe all the way back to The Phaedrus, the ancient dialogue penned by Plato between Socrates and Phaedrus. These musings, conducted over long hours spent traversing America’s backroads, revolve around a deceptively simple question: what is quality? It eludes simple definition, but put two papers of decidedly differing quality in front of an undergraduate English composition class and nine out of ten of them will pick the same one as being of better quality. So quality is real, it shapes how we live and perceive and engage with the world, but is there any way to put a finger of what, exactly, it is – to capture its essence in words?

The book grows more and more philosophical as the narrator delves deeper into the troubled intellectual toils of his past, but as it grows in abstraction it also grows in tension and suspense as it is revealed that the narrator’s inquiry into values ultimately drove him mad. Will he return to the madness of the pursuit? Is there any other conscionable thing to do – any other way to stay committed to the truth? The book was published in 1974, but its subject remains timeless and profound.

3. The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker

In The Denial of Death, the late Berkeley anthropologist and writer Ernest Becker works his way through the inherent tension of man’s nature, delving farther into the Nietzschean abyss than most modern, secular people have gone. As the title indicates, this book is about man’s struggle to reach the eternal and find meaning as a mortal creature – the result of this impulse being that we obsessively deny the impending reality of our own death. Sure, we have the head knowledge and pay lip service to the idea that we will die eventually (YOLO!), but most people go about their days without a deep existential realization of the dagger hanging over their heads by a thread. We long for greatness and transcendence and try to find it by investing all of our purpose in the nation state or existential act or romance or faith. We are gods, so to speak, yet we all end up as worm food. As Becker memorably put it, men are “gods who s***.”

The Denial of Death’s diagnostic of the human condition is spot on and much more honest about the secular worldview, I think, than most intellectuals are willing to be. It is bleak and concludes without any hope beyond some abstract notion of throwing oneself into the life-force of the universe. Reading it shook me up pretty bad and deeply disturbed me at times, but in a good way. It’s not beach reading, but for those courageous (and perhaps foolhardy) souls who can’t get past the most basic questions of what it means to be alive and who value delving into the ideas of guys like Freud, Nietzsche, and Kierkegaard, I commend this book to you.

4. This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald

“I have sworn not to put pen to paper until my ideas either clarify or depart entirely; I have quite enough sins on my soul without putting dangerous, shallow epigrams into people’s heads…” This conclusion to the despairing rant of Amory Blaine, the young protagonist of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s freshman novel, captures the angst of the young, talented writer. It’s a conundrum I often run up against myself. How does one justify his own participation in a world constantly in flux, in which public opinion shifts with the winds of the media’s ideology, true love feels eternally elusive, and matters of life and death seem to be dictated by cold, impersonal happenstances of car accidents and stray bullets?

Fitzgerald published This Side of Paradise at the age of 23, delivering a quintessential coming of age tale as America entered the Roaring Twenties. It is a fictionalized memoir of sorts, drawing heavily from his own crash-and-burn experiences with women, attending Princeton University, serving in World War One, and moving to New York City as a young man. I don’t have an answer for all of his frustrations, but it’s nice to encounter a youthful, zealous personality whose ambition and optimism crashes on the rocks of vanity. It’s also refreshing to encounter someone who is aware of his own self-absorption enough to refer to himself repeatedly as “the egotist.” Millennials may be the self-absorbed generation, with our Instagram and smartphones, but This Side of Paradise shows that adolescence hasn’t really changed much since it first came into being a century ago.

5. The Autobiography of Malcolm X

I don’t read many autobiographies (or biographies, for that matter), but maybe I should. Back when I was in college a writing professor once referenced the Autobiography of Malcolm X, so when I saw it sitting in a box of free stuff on the sidewalk I picked it up. My professor had recommended the book because of its account of the turning point that steered Malcolm X’s life away from a vicious cycle of crime and prison to standing as a ideological and political leader among African Americans in the tumultuous lead up to the civil rights era. Everything changed in prison, as Malcolm himself recollects. When he first went to jail he estimated he had a vocabulary of just a few hundred words. He got religion through a Black Muslim, and then he decided to teach himself English – proper English. His method was simple. He opened a dictionary and started meticulously memorizing it one word at a time, starting with “aardvark.” By the time he was out of prison, he had read a vast swath of literature, history, and philosophy, and his education rivaled that of any college graduate. He became an eloquent speaker and powerful societal voice. As my professor would have said, he “mastered the civilization in which he lived.”

The literary and intellectual prowess of Malcolm X is evident in this book. It thoroughly transported me into his shoes. Given the great disparity between our life experiences – me, a college-educated middle-class white Christian from California, and Malcolm, a black hoodlum who cut his teeth on all manner of unlawful dealings in Boston and then Harlem – that’s really saying something. Even though much of his career was marked by decidedly extreme, violent rhetoric, reading his autobiography gave me a fresh empathy for the African American experience that has expanded how I think about racial issues today.

Autumn’s death and the whisper of resurrection

It’d be a damnable shame to dwell on morality, as in my previous post here, without a subsequent meditation on the prospect of immortality. Namely, the hope of resurrection.

Autumn is like dying. There’s a reason we use the seasons as metaphors for the trajectory of life. We have the glowing, invigorating spring of childhood, the glorious summer years of adulthood and family life, the ripening of autumn and decay of old age (not without its own beauty of peaceful, resigned contentment) and finally the cold death of winter, the lifeless chill from which the fauna retreats into hibernation and the flora goes dormant.

Here we are in the heart of autumn. October is over, but November and December feel full of promise. The holidays bring with them the prospect of rest – most of us aren’t farmers these days, but even those working in today’s information economy need rest from the digital harvest of their labors. And so winter seems to me to offer a gateway to restoration, through time to retreat and reflect, to spend long hours in reflection and conversation under blankets and around fires with hot mugs of tea and coffee. Winter is a time to take stock of my soul, to descend into dark places so as to correct the awry trajectories of my heart, and to refresh my zeal for another year of adventure in a world of stories.

What I’m getting at here is that whispers of restoration and resurrection run everywhere through the fibers of the natural world. “Our Lord has written the promise of resurrection, not in books alone, but in every leaf in springtime,” said Martin Luther. From the falling of the leaves to the eclipse of the moon, we live in and among these divinely orchestrated cycles, mighty and mysterious. The rain falls down, waters the land, fills the rivers, and runs to the sea. What brings it back? Evaporation, changing from liquid to gas… you can describe the scientific process, sure. We might as well call it a miracle.

Marilynne Robinson has some wonderful reflections on this question in her book “Housekeeping.” At one point the narrator, a young girl named Ruthie living in her deceased grandmother’s house, looks out and sees that two of the apple trees in her grandmother’s orchard have died:

“One spring there were no leaves, but they stood there as if expectantly, their limbs almost to the ground, miming their perished fruitfulness. Every winter the orchard is flooded with snow, and every spring the waters are parted, death is undone, and every Lazarus rises, except these two. They have lost their bark and blanched white, and a wind will snap their bones, but if ever a leaf does appear, it should be no great wonder. It would be a small change, as it would be, say, for the moon to begin turning on its axis. It seemed to me that what perished need not also be lost.” (emphasis mine)

Things perish. That is their nature in a universe of entropy. And even though they have a tendency to come back in new incarnations, what about when those cycles cease, as surely someday they must? Will they perish forever at the end of all things? Robinson doesn’t think so, for it would contradict our nature, our great expectations, our pesky, tenacious human impulse to cling to hope in the most wretched circumstances – especially, in fact, in the most wretched circumstances.

Indeed, for Robinson, desire and longing are a type of prophecy. As C.S. Lewis might say, we have cravings only because something exists to satisfy them. Here’s Robinson again (emphasis once again mine):

“Imagine a Carthage sown with salt, and all the sowers gone, and the seeds lain however long in the earth, till there rose finally in vegetable profusion leaves and trees of rime and brine. What flowering would there be in such a garden? Light would force each salt calyx to open in prisms, and to fruit heavily with bright globes of water—peaches and grapes are little more than that, and where the world was salt there would be greater need of slaking. For need can blossom into all the compensations it requires. To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow. For when does a berry break upon the tongue as sweetly as when one longs to taste it, and when is the taste refracted into so many hues and savors of ripeness and earth, and when does our sense know any thing so utterly as when we lack it? And here again is a foreshadowing—the world will be made whole. For to wish for a hand on one’s hair is all but to feel it. So whatever we may lose, very craving gives it back to us again. Though we dream and hardly know it, longing, like an angel, fosters us, smooths our hair, and brings us wild strawberries.”

The darker life gets, the greater our craving for the light. Where evil and oppression proliferates, our cries and prayers for justice go up all the louder. Where the world is salt, there is greater need of slaking. In the valley of the shadow of death, the soul yearns for life abundant beyond the grave.

I’m at a loss to explain why, but the plain fact is that struggle, destruction, and lack are built in to the universe – often as a necessary precursors to some good end. Craftsmen labor for decades to hone their handiwork. Scholars study books without end in order to master a subject. The athlete trains with weights that make his motions more difficult and becomes strong. Salmon swim upstream against nature’s currents. Irritation turns grains of sand into pearls. Forest fires till fertile ground. Grapes are smashed, left to ferment, and become wine.

Back to the question. Does the autumn of life, the waning years, represent the final descent into vanity and death, or is it the path to new life? That’s the rub. Like Robinson, I can’t bring myself to accept and end of nothingness, of trees that never return with spring leaves. If autumn were followed by a never-ending winter (a la “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe”), it would be a depressing time indeed – the last gasp of life’s pleasantries and warmth and joy. The sentimentality we experience during this season – harvest festivals and joviality, pumpkins and spices, flannel and friendship, bronzed foliage and wood fires burning through the nights – would become impossible. It would be the season of deepest despair and futility.

For those with a limited view of reality, it is a season of despair. Death is the last enemy, the one fate that we cannot defeat. We all fall to winter’s chill in the end, completing the cycle from dust to dust, and we cannot see past it, at least not with our physical faculties.

“Is there someone buried beneath this skin?” sings Jon Foreman. “Is he free when I am locked in my coffin?” Foreman finds a grounded answer first by looking back to the Maker, the one from whom all births spring, who ordained the seasons, turns the rain back into clouds, tells the trees to put out new green leaves, and who has himself passed through the great death of winter. From that old story we look forward, with the assurance of things hoped for and the conviction of things unseen.

“Resurrection comes, but death comes first. All of our entitlements and rights drive the hearse. In the Maker’s death, death is unmade. And when I lose myself I’m saved – in my coffin.”

Memento Mori: My Signposts of Mortality

In normal times we move about actually without ever believing in our own death, as if we fully believed in our own corporeal immortality. We are intent on mastering death…. A man will say, of course, that he knows he will die some day, but he does not really care. He is having a good time with living, and he does not think about death and does not care to bother about it—but this is a purely intellectual, verbal admission. The affect of fear is repressed.

– Gregory Zilboorg, “Fear of Death”

I think most people understand there’s a difference between intellectual assent and genuinely believing something. It’s the difference between mentally affirming that something is true, and experiencing it existentially so that it is felt and understood from the heart – as Mark Twain might say, the difference between a lightning bug and actually lightning. We all know, as a factual matter, as head knowledge, that we are mortal. Everyone dies. One day we will too, and yet, as Zilboorg says, we suppress that knowledge, we fill our lives and our thoughts with other things to escape contemplating the fate that awaits us – that one day we will cease to exist in this world.

As a 25-year-old, in the peak of vitality and strength, this is especially true for me and my age demographic. I know I’ll die, but I can type that sentence without a shudder. Death is likely still decades off, after all, why should I be so preoccupied with it? Statistically I still have a good 50 years or so, and sure, maybe I’ll suffer a premature death, but the odds are slim, and I don’t want to be controlled by the minuscule odds and irrational fears of plane crashes and shark attacks.

But the years are starting to go by faster, and still I suppress the thought of death. Well, perhaps not so much the thought as the belief in my own mortality. I can be a pretty cynical person. The news reports make me aware of death – again, as a matter of head knowledge. As a Christian, almost every Sunday when I step into church I’m driven to consider the ancient wisdom of the Psalmist: “Teach me to number my days, that I may gain a heart of wisdom.” But still, odds are I am relatively distant from the Reaper, and so I remain emotionally estranged from that most obvious, grim, and terrify fact.

Sometimes, however, reality breaks through, terrifying and exhilarating, and we confront our mortality head on. In these experiences, the tenuous nature of existence comes into sharp focus: I could die tomorrow, tonight, so soon; my God, it’ll happen so soon.

As best I can remember, I have had three of these moments over the past three years. Each only lasted a few minutes, perhaps just seconds. They were outside of my control, impossible to generate, unpredictable, but awfully real.

The first occurred in my apartment in Santa Clarita, CA about three years ago. I was home alone at night reading the Bible. I don’t remember which passage exactly, but it was somewhere in Job or Ecclesiastes, when suddenly I felt the sharp, stabbing sense of my own morality. The temporal concerns of my first job, unrequited romance, food, chores, what-have-you – those all vanished. I felt the nearness of judgment day and the immanent prospect of heaven. The spiritual waverings that kept me in a state of lukewarmness steadied and became grave. The stakes beamed bright and clear and eternally high. I shuddered, resolved to continue seeking God, sat in place, fearful.

The second happened in Washington, DC, in 2013. I was going for a walk at dusk on a warm summer day around the parking lot at RFK stadium. I had earbuds in and was listening to a song called “The Setting Sun” by Switchfoot. The vibrant hope of the music and the poetry triggered an eternal rush: “It won’t be long, I belong somewhere past this setting sun. Finally free, finally strong, somewhere back where I belong.”

It’s a great song; I’ve listened to it dozens of times, maybe even hundreds. Many of them were during sunset, in more idyllic settings, but only once has it struck me quite this deeply. Something lifted the fog of digital distractions and musical escape and city noise. I’ve never had an actual vision, but the sky looked ripe for one, like a conduit of final redemption and restoration. The Savior and Judge is coming back in the skies. Good Lord they could rip open any moment. And soon I’ll be past them, past this world with its burning-out sun and universe of entropy and chaos. I’m so close, I thought, so close. If my hope is true, paradise is but a sky away. The sun of my years will set, and I’ll awaken to a dawn that makes the first 25 years of sunrises look like a tiny lantern in the dark. I’ll run with no pain in my side, glorified, invigorated, and whole.

The third was probably the least intense of the three, and the most perplexing given the context. It took place just a few months ago – again in DC. I was at a friend’s house watching the film District Nine for the first time. It is full of action and swearing, nothing too atypical for Hollywood fare, but it has a realism that few alien films achieve. The story is dark and hectic, but designed to evoke pity and empathy. The main character, Wikus Van De Merwe, contracts alien genetics somehow and begins to turn into an alien. He is taken into a secretive lab, forced to fire guns and blast aliens to jelly, and soon doomed to be harvested so that human researchers can unlock the genetic secrets of the alien race they are oppressing (I promise I’m going somewhere with this, stick with me). The South African setting makes the apartheid undertones of the film clear. Wikus is a rather unassuming chap, just trying to do a little humanitarian field work (except not, technically, humans; “alienatarian”?), and suddenly he finds himself about to be harvested – doomed to a lab death behind closed doors. I don’t know why but that sense of “that could be me” enveloped me – a tiny taste of the fear and shock experienced by those who lose loved ones in freak car crashes, a microcosm of the soldier whose buddy is shot, inches away, while he lives unscathed. It’s that sense that we really do live on a precipice of comfort and normalcy, and the next moment could snatch it all away and drop you in some secret, merciless underground lab. That poor guy with the alien hand, friendly little Wikus, he’s going to die right after celebrating his birthday. That’s horrifying, I thought. Because I will too.

I had a fourth episode just a few months ago that didn’t quite reach the intensity of the prior three, but I want to point it out because while all of aforementioned experiences drove me to hope, this one ended on a much darker note. That’s what’s scary about these moments; they push the soul to the extremes – either a radical, desperate leap of faith, or the deepest despair on the brink of the abyss. I was reading a book called Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance on the metro on the way home from work. It’s a long, meandering philosophical reflection woven into a motorcycle road trip through the Pacific Northwest. The narrator is a father traveling with his young son. As he tries to piece together his past as a philosopher, looking back at all the havoc and angst it wracked in him as he sparred mentally with human history’s greatest thinkers, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle all the way down to today’s academics, he looks into the future and sees the same relentless, endless drive for truth in his son:

“(He’s) being driven by forces he doesn’t understand. The questions… the same questions… He’s got to know everything. And if he doesn’t get the answer he just drives and drives until he gets one and that leads to another question and he drives and drives for the answer to that… endlessly pursing questions, never seeing, never understanding that the questions will never end. Something is missing and he knows it and will kill himself trying to find it.”

At that moment on the yellow line train to Fort Totten, I saw my life splay out before me as an endless string of questions, with answers I have no choice to embrace but cannot help but doubt. I saw myself driving on, floundering, in an endless sea of knowledge, data, ideas, and theories for the rest of my earthly days. It was nauseating.

The late anthropologist and philosopher Ernest Becker uses that opening quote from Zilboorg in the opening for a chapter in his book, The Denial of Death. In that book Becker says: “I believe that those who speculate that a full apprehension of man’s condition would drive him insane are right, quite literally right.”

I’m inclined to agree.

It’s a funny exercise, writing about these moments. I can’t re-experience them, and even if I could I couldn’t find the words to do them justice. But they’re worth remembering and treasuring. They remind me of the truth of my condition. They prove that the ruminations of philosophers like Becker, bands like Switchfoot, filmmakers like Neill Blomkamp, and Moses aren’t some dry intellectual exercise. Rather, they cut to the core of who I am and the fate I am destined for, which is death: to perish, to cease to exist in the face I look at in the mirror every morning. These moments are markers, mementos mori left by the Teacher to teach me to number my days. They remind me that I’m too weak to handle the ultimate reality of death; that I must suppress it and go about my business of eating, sleeping, talking, walking, and all the passing things that make up my life, or else go insane. By causing my awareness of my suppression, however, they affirm and ultimately validate my hope that in the end I will escape the black of the void. And not only the black of the void, but the much more terrifying and disturbing prospect of the horrors of damnation.

From whence comes that hope? It comes from a Man who came from beyond the setting sun, a place of true freedom and eternal strength, somewhere back where I belong.

Dyin’ to Live: Smallpools’ millenial anthem

A good friend of mine once remarked that our generation is the first that isn’t willing to die for anything. I think he was on to something – not to say that we don’t care about anything (quite the contrary), but rather that confidence and conviction in something outside of self is hard to come by these days.

If Fun.’s “Some Nights” is the anthem of my generation, unsure of what we stand for, then the band Smallpools has written something of a secondary anthem with their new song “Dyin’ to Live.” It probably won’t make the same cultural waves, but it captures the digital ethos of the new millennium. Consider the opening verse:

I wonder, Have I lost my mind?

I was having a meltdown, but I don’t know why

‘Cause I sleep alright, and I eat just fine

I’m not scared of being a lonely man, or even dying, just missing out

That’s a remarkable statement. It is weighty with a sense of its own irony. Who isn’t afraid of loneliness or death? Those are the quintessential human fears. But it is pithy in substance. In the modern age, all of our immediate material needs have been met. We sleep safe and sound with a roof over our heads; we can afford to eat healthy. And so “FOMO” – Fear of Missing Out – is the not-so-deep and dark terror that haunts us. What could be worse than missing out – blowing a chance for greatness or love, not being there with your friends in the most “epic” moments, lingering in your own unfulfilled potential while everyone else goes out and lives awesome lives?

When you consider the current human condition in the broader perspective of history, it’s not hard to see that FOMO is trite. It is caught up in the present era, decidedly narcissistic, and arises from a skewed view of our friends and acquaintances. But trite or not, the lyric is still an accurate diagnosis. If you were to somehow chart my mind’s activity, a fear of missing out would come up much more frequently than a fear of loneliness or death. And I suspect I’m the rule among my peers, not the exception.

So what is the answer? The song issues no grand aspirations to heroism, honor, or immortality; instead it cries out for an elusive, simple contentment:

It’s not much to ask for

We’re only trying to just feel alright

We’re only trying just to find that steady love

We’re only trying just to buy some time

We’re all just dyin’, we’re all just dyin’ to live

What an anthem. I can imagine this one in a live concert, all of the kids belting it out, voices raised in a unified cry. We wonder why we’re so sad, and feel a rush of fleeting camaraderie with the strangers around us. We think of the love we’re still looking for, and feel just a little more optimistic. We remember the times we wish we could have back and consider the ever-shrinking future. The very act of expressing the longing washes us in a wave of catharsis, which reaches its peak in the bridge:

I know there’s something better

I cannot fight what’s falling apart

I’ll get myself together, together, together

My shield of rusted metal can’t keep this world from falling apart

So let’s tear this down together, together, together

It’s not much to ask for

It’s easy to dismiss the young person’s angst in the midst of raging emotions and a life with hardly any meaningful responsibility. But as C.S. Lewis might suggest, this guttural sense that the life we have right now isn’t good enough is a clue about the deeper appetites of the soul. It’s pretty self-evident, after all, that the world is falling apart. We also know that our lives could be better. And we fear (rightly so) that there’s nothing we can do to stop it or fix it. We don’t think we want much, just to feel alright and find that steady love and not feel pressed for time.

Time, love, and a clear conscience, however, are a tall order. Should we really expect life to deliver them?

The older voices in our lives tell us to suppress these questions. They tell us to suck it up and realize the world doesn’t revolve around us. There’s a lot of practical wisdom in this. Most of us won’t amount to something “special” – whatever “special” means. We may find a surprising amount of satisfaction in casting aside some of our insatiable ambitions, making a decision, and sticking to it even if it doesn’t fulfill all our expectations. Planting ourselves in one place with a steady job, a spouse and a family may feel like settling, but there’s a lot to be said for stability – and for choosing contentment (which is a choice, after all). Here in the routine of selflessly sustaining others, perhaps, is something of that steady love. Maybe by letting go of our obsession over all the things that we potentially could be doing with our time, and enjoying on the present moment, we can buy a little more time.

Maybe. There’s a scene near the end of the film Boyhood where the main character Mason’s mother is about to send him off to college. At this point we’ve spent about two hours watching him grow from grade school nearly to adulthood. He decides not take a certain picture of himself to college. Why would he want to take a piece of his past with him like that, he reasons. His mother sees it, and for some reason the act of leaving the past behind, forgotten, triggers an existential breakdown. She begins to weep.

“You know what I’m realizing? My life is just going to go. Like that. This series of milestones. Getting married. Having kids. Getting divorced. The time that we thought you were dyslexic. When I taught you how to ride a bike. Getting divorced… again. Getting my master’s degree. Finally getting the job I wanted. Sending Samantha off to college. Sending you off to college. You know what’s next? Huh? It’s my f***ing funeral!”

I haven’t been through the generational process of marriage and children, but that scene scares me. It sounds like even the more traditional steady life, pursued as an end in itself, will leave us like Saito in the film Inception: lost in unreality, “filled with regret, waiting to die alone.”

Where, then, can you go for the life Smallpools is singing about here? I think they’re asking the right questions. They’re right to feel dissatisfied. Most nights we don’t know what we stand for, but we’re pretty darn sure it’s something better than what we’ve got right now. We’re all just dyin’ to live.

In the back country: A meditation on man’s relationship to nature

The seething earth, it opens up and spits us out.

This vicious child, nature never wanted us

This vicious child, a cancer burning black into its heart.

A few weeks ago I spent a weekend at Prince William Forest Park in Virginia (pictured above and below), near Quantico, where the Marine base is. Two mornings in a row, I walked into the “back country.” At least that’s what the park rangers called it. It’s an area that, if not miles, is at least many hundreds of yards away from the nearest road or any people. I realized this is not remarkable isolated, but for an urban DC-dweller, it was enough to feel profoundly alone.

There’s something remarkably cathartic about nature, especially experienced in contrast to the city or suburbia. It evokes a sort of primeval Edenic memory. I saw beauty at all levels and from all viewpoints, from the small grey moths sent aflutter from disturbed grass underfoot and the carpet-y moss and tiny flowers, all the way to the vast expanse of the reservoir separating us from Marine territory, lined with hills of deciduous trees and brush, sky, clouds, and green glittering in the water in a landscape I’d like to paint. A crane flew by, no higher than the treetops, adding the perfect touch of disruption to the ambiance of twittering and chirping and water lapping and wind dimpling the lake.

It feels welcoming, like a big collective embrace of life, warm and calming, soul-stilling. Ah yes, “be still and know,” it says. Come weary one, and find solace, be at home. The colors are bright and lively at the beginning of summer. The cleansed air speaks to how life was meant to be. It whispers that the world should be better than the urban jungle or cookie-cutter suburbia or the dilapidated cabin I’m staying in. It echoes of a home that I have yet to find. Not where I grew up, and not where I live now, but Somewhere Else. . . ideal.

I’ve always felt it, right in front of me but always just behind the next river bend in the river or beach peninsula or mountainside boulder. Camping at Hume Lake in California’s Sequoias every summer, day trips to the beach in Santa Barbara, even driving through the Mojave Desert at dusk – it tapped into some deep-set sense of beauty and belonging. I never put my finger on what it was about hiking in the Sequoias or walking along Ventura beach in the surf that made me want to adventure like the explorers of old and drink more deeply of its beauty. I still can’t, but against the backdrop of city life and my digital workplace I sense it with more volume and clarity now.

Here on the east coast, in Prince William Forest Park, the world teems with life. It slinks between the plants as insects and fungi, every square inch of the forest, it seems, is a picture of vitality. Every puddle and fallen trunk is an active ecosystem in its own right, in balance, dancing the symbiotic steps of life together. Bugs creep and buzz; occasionally I see hints of larger, warm-blooded creatures like squirrels and deer; and beneath the lakes fish glide like shadows and sometimes burst into the world in a flash of droplets to seize some hovering insect that lingered too near the water.

Yes, nature is more vibrant than even the most densely packed, active city ever could be. It is beautiful and delicate.

But it’s also vicious and vile, and I recoil from the wood’s summer awakening. For all my embrace of beauty I feel unease and alienation. “Thorns and thistles it shall bring forth,” goes the fabled curse – and also needles and fangs and stingers. A mosquito comes near my ear, and I slap at the whine. I keep a lookout for snakes – the ranger warned they had been active this year. Flip flops were a bad choice. Near stale pools of warmed rain water, mud puddles on the trail, the whining grows. I forgot bug repellent; also a bad choice. At the reservoir I lay down a towel, clearing sticks that poke into my back and scattering tiny spiders and ants in the untouched grass.

I try to read – philosophy, longform journalism, the Old Testament – but every itch and twitch and buggy sound jerks me away. Sometimes a tick really has jumped on me, the bastards. Sometimes it’s nothing. But the point is that I’m not at ease, not all the way. The spiders don’t want me. The mosquitos only want my blood. This isn’t my home.

Our relationship has issues. Nature draws me, or perhaps a better way to put it is that I am drawn to nature – the freedom of the woods calls. But nature doesn’t want me. It flees from me. It does violence against me. So many of these creatures are designed to bite, paralyze, kill. The bugs are tormentors. I curse them here just like I curse them when they are in my house. And they’re just the beginning. I need not digress into lake water, leeches, copperheads, poison ivy.

And so here in Prince William Forest Park I find a tension in my desire for beauty. In the woods I hear whispers of home yet feel profoundly misfit – on edge, discomforted. I even fear sleep in my dilapidated cabin because there’s a mouse running around and moths bumping against the shoddy screen windows. There are urban myths about spiders crawling in your mouth as you sleep. Here they seems plausible.

Those lyrics at the beginning are from a song called “Above and Below” by The Bravery. I like what it has to say about man’s relationship to nature. The seething earth opens up and spits us out. Disease saps our lives away. If nature is our Mother, she has cast us out of the cradle. But we keep venturing in to the forest, looking for new life.

Why?

Nature doesn’t want us, but that doesn’t mean she never did. The Edenic memory is in us all. It testifies that we did belong – once upon a time. There used to be harmony. The world used to be good.

I hope to God it will be good once again.

A word on air travel

I like flying – in large part because air travel is one of the few environments these days in which I get uninterrupted blocks of time. Flying somewhere means a solid couple hours where I’m left to my own thoughts (I rarely talk to people on airplanes). It’s a good time to think, to pray, to read and write. On my last trip – from Washington, DC, to Texas, and back – I couldn’t even listen to music because I stream everything on my phone. And so silence; the dull, roaring white noise of engines and pressurized cabins and snoring – cruising along the jet streams at hundreds of miles an hour.

The takeoff and landing create a healthy bracket of perspective for the time alone because they remind me of my smallness and relative insignificance in the world. Even just looking down at a single city or neighborhood, I can feel it – thousands of homes and cars and stores and people splayed out below. That’s the world, and oh, what a tiny niche I have; what a meek little slice.

And yet on the other hand, flying compresses our sense of space and time. It shrinks the world down to our palm-sized GPS’s. In five hours I can go from Washington, D.C. to Los Angeles and barely see the 2,300 miles in between. I can traverse an entire content in the comfort of air conditioning and padded seats with orange juice served to me. That’s a remarkable feat of innovation and communication and engineering, and I’m thankful for it because I can see my family after just a few hours of travel time and for the cost of just a few hundred dollars.

But all the same it strikes me as a profoundly unnatural phenomena. As I take off and look down, I try to remind myself not to forget the bigness, not to grow bored with this world, and not to despair when it feels like I’ll never make much of a difference in the city below.