Sunday, January 28, 2007
I find myself numb more often than I like. It’s the feeling of taking prescription drugs…except you’re completely aware that you’re not taking prescription drugs. A mental vortex, a spiritual desert…one of those stages where nothing makes complete sense but everything’s a nice distraction. It’s not exactly sad and it’s not really happy…I have cried more these past couple months than I have my entire life. In the past, I would cry once every six months as a mandatory emotional cleansing (usually encouraged by Million Dollar Baby). Now I cry at really beautiful things such as Bob Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” (“So long, honey babe, where I’m bound, I can’t tell. Goodbye’s too good a word, babe, so I just say Faretheewell.”) and six-month-old children that laugh like adults. And then there are the times I cry because I’m scared, I’m lost, cancer has sneaked itself into the families of my friends, my other soul mates are struggling with loneliness, and all I want is to build an orphanage right next door to Many Glacier Hotel with classrooms where my favorite professors can continue their passions of Chaucer, Keats, Welty, Yoder, Bonhoeffer, and Edwards in the hearts and voices of students. I keep telling myself that this new-found emotional treasure chest will make me a better artist, lover of art, writer…and maybe it will. I have only listened to Patty Griffin this past week (ALWAYS a sign it’s been rough) and I’m already finding her more poignant. That’s got to be something.
And if these moments are a desert like I gestured before, I think I’m okay with that. Deserts tend to prove that I’m less profound than I once thought, and that I really don’t know what’s best for me. In my experience deserts also have a tendency to make you slow down, be silent, listen every once and a while, and remind you that everyone needs a dash of humility. Water is provided along the way—sometimes in the short relief of a shot glass and other times given in the abundance of a nalgene. And desert’s never last forever…I know that Edward Abbey was crazy about them, but seriously, they just get a annoying after awhile.
Most of those sips of water are in the form of the aforementioned ‘nice distractions.’ Here in Colorado the past 2 months I’ve found that there really is nothing cuter than an infant swallowed whole by an REI snowsuit. My new-found exploration as a skier has not only taken me down my first black diamonds but has made me realized that Sigur Ros was meant to be heard while the sun turns snowflakes into crystals and skis surf mountaintops. Two weeks ago, the church I’ve been attending played a Martin Luther King, Jr. tribute video with U2’s “In the Name of Love” playing in the background, the preacher used Amos 5 as the point of reflection, each Sunday morning is polished off with a “Shalom Response” to each other, and there is one woman in the choir who looks just like Shirley Maclaine and another who’s the spitting image of Kathy Bates—both sopranos (seriously, people, I’m pretty much a Methodist now). I have become happily obsessed with tea, oranges, and avocadoes…nectar of the gods, really. And nothing has been more surprising then while snowshoeing on top of a deserted lake, the surrounding snow completely traps all sound.
These diversions are welcomed as my life prepares me for new change. Change to go back home in just a few more months, and for the first time in my life I’m ready. Lately, I have found great truth in a section of Donald Miller’s Author’s Note of Through Painted Deserts:
“I could not have known then that everybody, every person, has to leave, has to change like seasons; they have to or they die. The seasons remind me that I must keep changing, and I want to change because it is God’s way. All my life I have been changing. I changed from a baby to a child, from soft toys to play daggers. I changed into a teenager to drive a car, into a worker to spend some money. I will change into a husband to love a woman, into a father to love a child, change houses so we are near water, and again so we are near mountains, and again so we are near friends, keep changing with my wife, getting our love so it dies and gets born again and again, like a garden, fed by four seasons, a cycle of change. Everybody has to change, or they expire. Everybody has to leave, everybody has to leave their home and come back so they can love it again for all new reasons.”
This season of my life is just preparing me for my next. I have changed quite a lot in the past year…some good, some bad…or maybe there is no good and bad, just a constant metamorphosis. In any case, I’m starting to be thankful for the desert, the tears, the avacadoes, the REI infant clothing, the confusion, the awareness of change, and the new reasons.
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