On Writing:

{ October 15, 2008 @ 1:24 pm } · { Original pieces }
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Why do I write? What do I think about writing? Why does it matter to me? In what ways does it matter to me? What is it for, and where is it heading?

These questions have been rolling around inside of me and creating quite a ruckus for the past few weeks. I have thought about them, but I don’t know that I have many answers for them. At least, not as many answers as I would like.

A few months ago I was scanning through an old journal of mine and found the opinion of a younger me on this matter. It was from 13-year-old me’s journal, and it said something like “I love the way the words feel beneath my fingers, I love finding them inside of me and then expressing them outside of me. I love writing more than anything in the world, and I hope I never stop.”
I love writing more than anything else in the world, and I hope I never stop.

This is encouraging to me. It is encouraging that I felt it then, and encouraging that I still have days where I feel it now. It is like any love, though. The feeling of it wanes and waxes and shifts across the sky, just like the shape and path of the moon outside my window. Its always there in the back of my mind and soul, waiting for me to remember and return to it.

Sometimes I am more consistent with writing than others. I don’t really have a good groove down yet. This is because I don’t trust myself with words, even though I love them. I don’t trust myself with soulish ideas and the depth of emotion contained inside of myself, let alone all that I see in the world around me. I don’t fully trust myself, and this makes me-as-a-writer seem like a wild animal that has been brought in from the outside, half-starved and in need of some serious TLC. Sometimes I bear my teeth and flail, even though I know the warmth and intimacy of the writing process is exactly what I want and need.

It is a solemn thing to realize that my life and the world around me get along best in the realm of the written word. There is a part of me that feels like it is too good to be true, and another part of me that feels like there must be some mistake: me, as a writer? I can’t. For a million zillion reasons, I can’t and maybe even shouldn’t. Yet its been in me for such a long time, and I don’t think its going anywhere. I might as well make my peace with it and move into the future.

I hope my skittish heart settles down soon. I hope I find more freedom inside of myself, and that the freedom becomes a solid base that I can build the rest of my life and writing career on. For now I press on, eeking it out where and when I can as faithfully as I am able.

Shades of Love

{ October 5, 2008 @ 9:34 pm } · { Original pieces, Other Authors }
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This is a piece I wrote for the wedding of my wonderful (and now wonderfully married) friends Ben and Jessica:

Rainer Maria Rilke wrote “Love consists in this: that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other.

I agree with him. I have come to believe that we each are, at heart, solitary creatures. In the deepest places we are solo in our humanity. We stand apart from all others to sort through our experience of life.

But I also believe that this adventure of life is mostly so that we can learn to unite our solitary hearts with others. It is about learning to mix our shades of solitude together; to be unashamed of the new colors that appear when we learn to protect and touch and greet each other.

This sort of love has been pondered and written about since the beginning of time. It will never get old to try to parse out the mystery of two becoming one – the beffudlement of how solitude lays the foundation for being together.

This love is mysterious in theory, but in its manifest reality it is not. There is nothing mysterious about pilow talk, afternoon walks, passion-filled nights or cuddling by a fire. It is not mysterious because it is necessary, even when it hurts.

This is how we color our worlds in: the secret of mixing people is the same as mixing colors, and there would be no life without it. This is what I wish for you, Ben and Jess: that you would be relentless about mixing your colors and unifying your solitudes.

Your love is a unique color that the world – and our worlds – cannot do without.

The Bus.

{ September 23, 2008 @ 8:20 pm } · { Uncategorized }
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Everything I need to know about living a full life, I have learned from guys on the bus. Its a funny thing to realize, but it is true for me. Haphazard conversations have provided me with abounding amounts of humor, wisdom and insight.

Here are some of the things I have learned: Stay in school, work hard, don’t be afraid to dream, take lots of picutres, laugh at cartoons, don’t be ashamed to cry for your loved ones when they die, do what you love, be respectful, life isn’t always fair but it is good, don’t have kids too soon, be careful who you sleep with, and make sure you always have your bus pass with you.

These conversations are rich, even when they are short and even when they are uncomfortable. They are valuable every time. No matter how much I learn about others and where they are from I feel like I always walk away with a thousand tidbits of wisdom for myself. I swear: guys on the bus can see into my soul. There have been a few that have guessed things about me that are eerily correct, and others that have been way off. I’m grateful for every one of them, though.

I could write a whole book just about guys I have met on the bus. It makes me wonder why the women always stay silent. Maybe it is something about me, or maybe it is that they generally don’t have the cocky confidence that says what they say is valuable no matter what it is.

It feels like I am a magnet for old guys that just like to hear themselves talk. Its okay with me, because I love to hear them talk. Each one is a snapshot burned into my brain, and I never want to forget a single one. I don’t want to forget their faces, their tears, their stories or their smiles. I don’t want to forget what they’ve given me: confidence, resolve, affirmation, insight, wisdom, and a reminder that people are beautiful, and they never stop being beautiful, even when they are a mess.

Youth

{ September 8, 2008 @ 6:41 pm } · { Original pieces }
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I don’t know if this bit of my life – this ambiguous ‘youth’ stage – will feel like a blink or more than a blink by the time life is all said and done. In moments I don’t feel young. Many moments I don’t understand what it means to be young at all. I feel weathered by life already. I have seen many places and met many people. I have learned that there is always something that comes next as long as I am breathing, which is something I had no grid for even a few years ago. Some days I feel like I have life by the horns, and some days it feels like it has me by the horns. I even have gray hairs on my head! That must be a sign that this 22 years has been robust in ways that have grown me older than my baby face allows onlookers to understand.

I think youth is the time before the concrete of “real life” has hardened in the mold of life’s foundation.

Regardless of how I feel, I know I am young still. I know it because there are so many unexplored territories of life that hold unquenchable power in my imagination: Marriage, sex, a steady paycheck, kids, success in concrete and fleshly terms… All these things can still claim to be the answer to everything that my life is about. I haven’t lived long enough to find out that they aren’t. Maybe that is why people rave about youth.

The bundles in our young hands unravel upward to balloons that are still floating innocently in the sky above our heads. I get the feeling that people who have lived longer find themselves more often than they would like hunched over collecting the little torn bits of rubber that are left after those balloons pop. I get the feeling that many of those hunched over people look at me in my youth and think “If only I could go back to those days when the balloons hadn’t popped, I could do it right and they would never pop.” I hear grief leaking out between their words when they marvel over my youth and try to convince me that it is the most valuable time of life.

I don’t agree with this outlook, though. I think that these balloons were meant to be popped. As long as there are years left to live there will be balloons that are popped. And it might not always be by disappointment! It might be by joy and fullness that looks different than I first thought. It might be tragedy or something less harsh but just as befuddling. It could really be anything. At this point in time I am still sitting on the unmarked end of what might be a string of these tragedies, disappointments and joys – and that, I think, is why they gush.

Here is how I think about it: Gravity and entropy are forces at work on our physical realities all the time, altering, changing, and securing things. Age is the force at work on our mental [balloon] pictures of what life will be. It is a natural force: why fight it?

I may be young, and I may have a flock of balloons above my head that I can’t chase away. But hear this older people, “not youth” and youth alike: those balloons will not be the point of my life. The sky above them is the point. You can rave all you want about my youth and how I don’t know how valuable it is, and I’ll miss it someday. I don’t care. I don’t plan on missing it. I plan on enjoying every gray hair, wrinkle and every popped balloon. I also plan on enjoying every moment until those other moments come. I plan to find life and joy in the undiscovered moments of every day, whether I’ve crossed the big finish lines of life or not and regardless of how desperate and disappointed they or their absence leave me feeling.

I will live for life itself, and not for the ideas and pictures and possibilities that cloak themselves in the disguise of “answers” to all that I am doubtful of and anxious about.

December 25th, 2007

{ January 3, 2008 @ 3:14 am } · { Original pieces }
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There was no way to know that this moment would turn up like this right now, with this cast of characters forming this specific context. It is Christmas. So temporal, so short, so flimsy that I can see right through it. The flimsiness of it makes me want to break it. I know I can.
At the end of all things it means close to nothing – like a kid who does a job for a quarter. It is only a quarter. It is a piece of extra change, and if it got dropped behind the dresser no one would notice. Yet, to that kid it means the world. It is just a day, just a Christmas day in the 21st century. Like a kid who misunderstands currency, we place too much weight on a day.

But it is a day: a holiday, a remembrance day. A day to remember how involved, or not, we have been in our own lives as we face the close of another year. Well, here it comes: closing fast, closing tight with all its mountain peaks and valley depths, stationary, painted onto the canvas of our past. On the frame of this piece will be a little gold plated rectangle with the numbers 2-0-0-7 engraved into it. That will jog our memory as to the anatomy of the particular peaks and valleys years from now. Without that label it would blend into the last set, or the next set, or a set tens years ago.

At the end of my life I imagine myself walking down a long corridor, pausing at each frame with its own little number, and then I’ll look up and realize that despite the frames and three inches of wall between each, they become a solid stretching mountain range. One unbroken range lined up in front of me. Who but me – or you – could have scaled those peaks or waded those depths? They are all circumstances created that I climbed over or under or through. Each lake of tears that reveals my reflection and each sunburst of laughter painted throughout: they are mine. It is my painting, my life that I’ll look back on.

As I gaze towards 2008 I have no idea what to expect, and yet I know exactly what is coming: peaks, valleys, tears, laughter and all that will be painted in between. It won’t be easy. It never is. It won’t be ideal, but the real quality of the mess and the places that come up short are what make it me.

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