why I read | Michael Valliant

Here to Wonder

Do you ever get to wondering? I seem to spend a lot of time that way, wondering. There is a conversation towards the end of Alice Walker’s novel “The Color Purple,” where Albert gets to wondering:

“You ast yourself one question, it lead to fifteen. I start to wonder why us need love. Why us suffer. Why us black. Why us men and women… It didn’t take long to realize I didn’t hardly know nothing. And that if you ast yourself why you black or a man or a woman or a bush it don’t mean nothing if you don’t ast why you here, period.”

Now we’re getting somewhere. Our lives are often defined by the questions we ask. So let’s ask the big ones, the juicy ones. And the right ones. So why does Albert think we’re here?

“I think us here to wonder, myself. To wonder. To ast. And that in wondering about the big things and asting about the big things, you learn about the little ones, almost by accident. But you never know nothing more about the big things than you start out with. The more I wonder, the more I love.”
Albert, via Alice Walker, “The Color Purple”

The more I wonder, the more I love. Yes to that, and so much more of it.

I wanted to read “The Color Purple” because of a quote; a quote I read and loved immediately; a quote that spoke directly to my soul and I have thought and used and felt so many times since, that I knew I needed to read the book where it came from.

And when I read it in context of the story, it was even better and deeper. Two of the main characters, Celie and Shug Avery are talking about God. And about how God is not an old white man in robes sitting on a throne. And how “God is inside you and inside everybody else. You come into the world with God. But only them that search for it inside find it. And sometimes it just manifest itself even if you not looking, or don’t know what you looking for.” Shug talking. And what a wonderful way to describe the Holy Spirit.

And Celie asks what God looks like, if not an old white man. And Shug says:

“Don’t look like nothing, she say. It’ ain’t a picture show. It ain’t something you can look at apart from anything else, including yourself. I believe that God is everything, say Shug. Everything that is or ever was or ever will be. And when you feel that, and be happy to feel that, you’ve found It.”

Shug says people “come to church to share God, not find God.” And I love that thought and thinking that sharing God is what church is for.

But none of those are the quote that made me want to read the book. Here’s the conversation:

Shug: God love everything you love–and a mess of stuff you don’t. But more than anything else, God love admiration.
Celie: You saying God vain?
Shug: Naw. Not vain, just wanting to share a good thing. I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it.

And there it is. “I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it.” That quote has been a part of me since I first read it years ago. It describes how I go through life. God made a flower, a field, a planet, a universe for us to wonder at. To ask about. And the more we wonder, the more we ask, the more we love.

And God made us for each other. He made each of us, to love each other and to love Him. And I don’t and won’t ever claim to speak for God, but it seems in the same way, it pisses Him off when we don’t love each other; when we spew hate and not kindness; when we divide, point fingers, and blame, instead of helping each other up, lifting each other’s spirits, using our gifts and His gifts to connect us to each other and to God.

Celie and Shug keep talking (Celie writing) –

What it do when it pissed off? I ast.
Oh, it make something else. People think that pleasing God is all God care about. But any fool living in the world can see it always trying to please us back.
Yeah? I say.
Yeah, she say. It always making little surprises and springing them on us when we least expect.
You mean it want to be loved, just like the bible say.
Yes, Celie, she say. Everything want to be loved. Us sing and dance, make faces and give flower bouquets, trying to be loved.

Everything wants to be loved. Everyone wants to be loved. God is giving us opportunities–what are we doing with them?

What if we try to notice the color purple? What if we try to see, to really see, and get to know each other? What if we wonder? What if we ask? What if the more we wonder, the more we love.

Quarantine All-stars

I’ve come to realize that living life in quarantine isn’t that much different than my daily life. Less nature than I would like, and my work schedule may actually be busier working from home, but on the whole I dig being at home. In the case of the Coronavirus and everyone being home, and teenage girls having to change their mindset; and just the general mental and emotional uneasiness of a global pandemic, there is something different afoot.

When we look back, everyone will have different things that buoyed them, or helped them re-acclimate, helped them connect. So I thought I’d look at some of my quarantine all-stars to date.

You can’t overstate the importance of music. I concur with Friedrich Nietzsche when he wrote, “Without music, life would be a mistake,” and Kurt Vonnegut who said his epitaph could say, “The only proof he needed for the existence of God was music.”

I am a fan of Nathaniel Rateliff and the Night Sweats. I’ve dug hearing them on 103.1 WRNR. Hearing the title track from his new solo album, “And It’s Still Alright” on the radio, I’ve always let it play. Then multiple people started weighing in with how good the whole album is. Rateliff started writing the album at the unraveling of his marriage and later had to get through the death of a close friend. From his website, talking about the album, and how he worked through what the album wanted to be:

“out of his restless subconscious, helping him address some big life questions — the ones that have stumped philosophers, statesmen and profound thinkers since time began, exploring the unsteady terrain of love and death. But in the end, what he really was doing was creating an homage to his friend.”

It’s an album about questions; it’s an album about getting through things; it’s an album with lines that stick in my head, such as, “If the world goes strange, its dying flames / Would light the end of the last morning.”

Questlove, live from his house, paying tribute to Bill Withers.

A different take on quarantine soundtrack has come from Questlove of the Roots. With the band staying home, Questlove has been holding DJ sessions from his house, raising money for different causes, and paying tribute to eras of music, with his Native Tongues Review, and to Bill Withers who just died, with Bill Still. I am telling you, if you want to put something on in your house and let it play for a couple hours, Native Tongues brings back an era of hip hop with A Tribe Called Quest, De La Soul, the Jungle Brothers, you name it, some formative bands, and just blending it altogether. And Bill Withers, man, the whole session is just smooth and flowing and feels good.

I’m used to Questlove being the drummer and front man for one of my favorite bands. He’s written books and been featured in great articles, and this social media scholar and DJ is just another aspect of a guy who carries the cool banner for this, and other eras.

From music to movies. I’ve watched Rian Johnson’s “Knives Out,” multiple times now. I didn’t catch it in the theaters, so one night I kicked back and pulled it up at home. And I knew I needed to check it out again. So a few nights ago, I pulled my daughters into the next screening. Both girls loved it, Anna (18) said it was the best movie she’d seen in a long time, and maybe one of her favorites. It’s a great whodunnit-typed movie; it’s got James Bond (Daniel Craig) and Captain America (Chris Evans), who play roles nothing like their famous characters; and as someone who likes to figure movies out, even when halfway through the movie you think you know everything, you don’t. Not even close.

Screens certainly dominate media these days. And I am psyched that “Cheers” is now on Netflix; “The Office” is a constant connection, time-filler, and connector between the girls and I, who quote it back and forth frequently; and I have them part-way through the series “Lost,” which was a favorite show of mine while it was on TV.

You know I have to finish with books. We have had substantial reading going with work–studies of John’s Gospel, which started last October, a quick devotional through Matthew’s Gospel for Lent, and looking for our next online classes–but in this case, I am looking at the just for fun reading.

On the graphic novel front, Kieron Gillen’s “Once and Future” plays King Arthur’s legend into our modern world, which is a trippy, mythical, re-imaging as a kind of ghost story. I ate Arthurian legend stuff up growing up (named our Golden Retriever “Morgan” after King Arthur’s sister when I was nine) and Gillen has become a writer who I try to read about everything I can from. Christian Ward is known as an artist, but is trying his hand at writing and in Machine Gun Wizards, he looks at Eliot Ness and prohibition, but if prohibition was outlawing magic, not booze. And what can I say about Neil Gaiman’s “Sandman,” which was cited as one of the 100 best books (not graphic novels, books) of the century. It bears reading and re-reading. And since a friend and I are currently taking Gaiman’s masterclass on storytelling, this seemed like a great time to dig back into the world of dream and open my imagination.

I’m 180-something pages into Emily St. John Mandel’s “Station Eleven,” which we will be doing an online/Zoom book club for in the very near future. I am having a lot of fun with it. It’s set after the collapse of civilization due to a global pandemic virus. This is one of the blurbs that pulled me in:

“An audacious, darkly glittering novel set in the eerie days of civilization’s collapse, Station Eleven tells the spellbinding story of a Hollywood star, his would-be savior, and a nomadic group of actors roaming the scattered outposts of the Great Lakes region, risking everything for art and humanity.”

A motto of one of the main characters is “Survival is insufficient.”

Sometimes when we enter new territory, it’s not novelty we need, but familiarity. We need something to ground us and help us get our footing. I’ve written a lot about Jim Harrison, who I consider one of the writers to have the biggest impact on me, both through his writing, his persona, and how he lived his life. And despite having written numerous great novels, novellas, and short stories, it’s often his poetry that I end up keeping nearby.

I was reminded recently of Harrison’s poem, “I believe.” He lists things he believes in, which include: steep drop-offs, empty swimming pools, the overgrown path to the lake, abandoned farmhouses, gravel roads that end, leaky wooden boats…”

You know what? I’ll let you read it for yourself, noting that the poem ends with “struggling to stay alive in a world that grinds them underfoot.” Let me just say that music, movies, books–these thinks aren’t just diversions that distract us from what’s going on in the world; instead, they are connection, connecting us to the artists, connecting us to something bigger than ourselves; connecting us to each other through music, art, and stories; and in the process of creation, connecting us to God.

One bloom might hold it all

The magnolia in the front yard is a ten-day tree. For maybe ten days at most, there is nothing like it; it’s in full blaze glory. Then it drops its bloom and doesn’t say much the rest of the year. But those ten days.

As our unplanned retreat/social distancing kicks in, we are in the middle of ten-day Magnolia time. It’s an excuse to sit on the bench under the tree, to walk around it, to put my head between blooms and breathe in. If I’m honest, I don’t need a virus to do this, it’s life everyday as long as I’m paying attention.

The sky is still dark, but the birds are noisy. It’s transition time, just before the sun changes the horizon’s color. Morning routine: coffee, prayer, reading, writing. Cat purring on the armrest against my left arm, dog curled up against my right thigh–demanding bookends with fur. As it warms, morning time will be on the deck or in the writing shed.

This early dark time matters. It frames the day with attention. It sets the tone before the day’s demands start. Lately, I’ve been thinking about writing, storytelling, the force of words that point to something words can’t really get to.

One of the books currently traveling with me–in the car, in waiting rooms, to work, the spare minutes picking the girls up from school.

In the preface to “The Field Guide to Writing Flash Nonfiction,” the Rose Metal Press folks point to Bernard Cooper’s notion that short nonfiction needs “an alertness to detail, a quickening of the senses, a focusing of the literary lens… until one has magnified some small aspect of what it means to be human.”

Mull that last phrase as you sit to pray, read, or write, “some small aspect of what it means to be human.”

Overshadowed by the Coronavirus these days, is Lent, a season where we look to pare away those things that distract us so that we can draw closer to God. When I spend time in the Bible, it’s the Gospels that sing. It’s not Paul’s letters, it’s Jesus’ stories. Christ tries to show us and tell us what it means to be human in a way we too often overlook.

“The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed that someone took and sowed in his field. It is the smallest of seeds, but when it has grown it is the greatest of shrubs and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches.”
Matthew 13:31-32

Ummm… thanks, Jesus. What the heck are we supposed to do with that? Even his followers want to know why he always talks in parables. And this is a parable told after the Parable of the Sower and after Jesus broke it down for them. It was part of our reading in N.T. Wright’s “Lent for Everyone,” on Saturday. Wright points out that, Jesus, “told parables because what he was doing was so different, so explosive, and so dangerous, that the only way he could talk about it was to use stories. They are earthly, and sometimes heavenly, stories with an emphatically earthly meaning. They explain the full meaning not of distant, timeless truths, but of what Jesus was up to then and there. This is what is going on, they say, if only you had eyes to see. Or, indeed, as Jesus frequently says, ears to hear… Jesus’ parables invite the hearer, to look at the world, and particularly at Jesus himself, in a whole new way.”

I am guilty of not catching anything the first time, or first several times, I hear it. It takes time for me to learn things, to let them sink in. I need seeds. I need seeds that take time to take root, take time to grow, but once they are there, they stick, and maybe they bloom in each of us uniquely, in ways that can only be made manifest in the exact way, with our particular eyes and ears.

Often my eyes and ears work against me. Words I’ve heard or used too many times or sights that have become ordinary and overlooked. We don’t see God if we don’t look, or take the time to make the connection. Maybe the more we connect, the more we awaken ourselves to His presence.

American Goldfinch, by Michael Brown. Macaulay Library at Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

Reading further in the Flash Field Guide, there is an essay by Lia Purpura called, “Augury.” She walks up on a dead Goldfinch hanging in a tree, caught up in fishing line. It’s jarring, disturbing, unexpected, confusing. It’s wrong for what is supposed to be there, how things are supposed to be.

Her description of this moment, this encounter is eerie and uncanny and beautiful all at once. In maybe a why moment for the experience, she latches onto, “It’s good to stand beneath a thing that takes words away. It’s good to be in a place where thought can’t form the usual way.”

Experiencing things that take words away, where thoughts can’t form the usual way.

I prefer my encounters to be with live Goldfinches, as I am sure Purpura does as well. But I appreciate her flash essay in the way it helps me to look at Goldfinches with new eyes. It helps me to look at writing with new eyes. Hopefully it helps me look at life with new eyes.

Life and death loom large. While I sit here, for the time I have, life looms larger. It’s part of the ten-day tree time. New birds, Goldfinches included, are appearing at the feeders, and at the edge of woods where I hike or trail run. Crisp, spring sunrises and sunsets are punctuated with cool, clear night skies full of stars. in the midst of it all, the magnolia makes a statement.

If I have eyes to see, one bloom might hold it all.

I hope my daughters figure out time travel

Empty parking lot off Idlewild Avenue. Parking curbs. Concrete. Asphalt. No people, so I pull out my time machine, step on, and the sound of polyurethane on pavement spins back decades. The sound, the vibration under foot, the feeling of cruising carelessly, for no reason except that it’s fun.

What are the things you do regardless of what anyone else thinks? Things you can’t wait to do, that bring you happiness, just by doing them.

Rolling up to a curb, I sit down with a pen, notebook, Mary Oliver’s “Thirst.” I look up.

“Clouds are not only vapor, but shape, mobility, silky sacks of nourishing rain. The pear orchard is not only profit, but a paradise of light. The luna moth, who lives but a few days, sometimes only a few hours, has a pale green wing whose rim is like a musical notation. Have you noticed?”

When Mary O. asks you a question, you do well to consider it. Do I take the time to notice what goes on around me? Really notice? There are everyday miracles, right here on Idlewild Avenue in an empty parking lot on a Sunday afternoon.

Those things that you do for you–how did you figure out what they were? And how long have you been doing them?

When I think back, some of the things I most love doing today, I started in my early teenage years: comic books, skateboarding, writing, reading, running, being on the water, just being outside. And it’s some form of those things that still fill me up a few decades later. Those things maybe as close to time travel as I will get. They connect me to past and future versions of myself. They mark a moment in time, but revisiting them, they create moments outside of time.

I don’t know if my daughters will figure out time travel. I hope they do. I hope they walk the same beaches (and new ones) over decades, and remember when their feet were smaller, their minds saw more colors, and there were fewer distractions. I hope they remember, connect, and see outside of time.

I land in the parking lot again. It’s not supposed to feel this warm in February. The day is a gift. I can hear life in the back yards of Aurora Street. If I get quiet enough I can hear the universe.

“He or she, who loves God, will look most deeply into His works.”
Mary Oliver

Maybe that’s it. We don’t need to stay at the surface. If we look deeper, we can lose ourselves. We find ourselves connected; to our past through memory; to our future through hope; to each other through God, who is Love.

Mapmakers & Travelers

“I don’t know, maybe your experience differed from mine. For me, growing up as a human being on the planet Earth in the twenty-first century was a real kick in the teeth. Existentially speaking.” – Ernest Cline, “Ready Player One.”

Ernest Cline lured me in with Oingo Boingo, got me to sit down with Atari 2600, and handed out popcorn with 80’s pop culture references in spades. For the better part of two summers growing up, I had a boombox covered with skateboard grip-tape and anarchy symbols on my 13-foot Boston Whaler. The cassette tape that lived in the boombox was dubbed from vinyl records: on one side was Bob Marley “Exodus” and on the other was Oingo Boingo “Dead Man’s Party.”

I can’t tell you how many times we listened to that song. I can hear the music over the wail of the outboard motor with the boat planing. Cline conjured up the beginning of Dead Man’s Party and I was there.

Ready Player One’s main character Wade Watts is born into a crappy existence where virtual reality (the OASIS) is much more inviting and compelling than real life. And the more he learns about history and life in general, the further he is convinced that life is a raw deal.

“I started to figure out the ugly truth as soon as I began to explore the free OASIS libraries. The facts were right there waiting for me, hidden in old books written by people who weren’t afraid to be honest. Artists and scientists and philosophers and poets, many of them long dead. As I read the words they’d left behind, I finally began to get a grip on the situation. My situation. Our situation. What most people referred to as ‘the human condition.’ It was not good news.” – Ernest Cline, “Ready Player One”

Map of the world of Greyhawk. Yeah, definitely spent more than a normal amount of time pouring over, recreating, and drawing my own maps on graph paper.

Cline walks us through the interior minds of any of us who grew up immersed in pop culture and fantasy during the 1980s. And he also walks us through our current culture and the pull of virtual/screen reality over the world around us. He both maps it and travels the terrain. I’ve been mulling over a comment from Brene Brown in her book “Daring Greatly,” when she says:

“I have found that the most difficult and most rewarding challenge of my work is how to be both a mapmaker and a traveler.”
Brene Brown, Daring Greatly

I’ve been fascinated by maps for as long as I can recall, and it could have started with the map of Greyhawk above. But it’s not just the map itself–hiking through the White Mountains more than 10 years ago, and seeing where we were on the map, there was just something inherently cool about it. Maybe it’s a combination of knowledge and adventure, which multiply into some sort of lived truth. It’s also the idea of charting the intersection of imagination and culture, say in Cline’s case, which made reading feel like both a revelation and an adventure, and left my head spinning.

Neil Gaiman, taken by his wife Amanda Palmer

“Truth is not in what happens, but in what it tells us about who we are.” If you want to get inspired to read and fire up your imagination, go read Maria Popova’s piece on Neil Gaiman writing about what books do for the human experience.

In the mornings, when I read or pray, my mind, heart, and soul soar and dive and question and sit in awe and wonder. That’s part of being a traveler, making an interior journey. For me, there is then something in the act of trying to write down what I am seeing, feeling, wondering about; the act of writing becomes an act of mapmaking. I try to do the same thing when my mind wanders somewhere cool while running or whatever I am doing (hence always having a notebook and pen in my pockets).

Gaiman goes on to give his own take on things hidden in old books:

“Books are the way that we communicate with the dead. The way that we learn lessons from those who are no longer with us, that humanity has built on itself, progressed, made knowledge incremental rather than something that has to be relearned, over and over. There are tales that are older than most countries, tales that have long outlasted the cultures and the buildings in which they were first told.”

So many times it’s the old tales. When we study the Bible, I am always taken to these other places, God journeys, that almost always end up also describing something I am currently feeling, or a feeling I know. So the journeys become linked; the traveling is not alone.

Maybe the act of reading, the act of imagining, the act of praying, is also an act of connecting. It can be connecting with the past, connecting with the writer, connecting with God. But we are forming connections. We aren’t the first or the last to find or feel them. But in the same way that we benefit from what these cultures, writers, and artists have left behind–the maps they have given us–maybe we are compelled to chart out our travels, our journeys, so that we can leave them behind for others to do the same.

Maybe we can help make some better news for the human condition.

Prodigal in Flux

Two kids. One is out of control, squanders opportunities, messes up, fails repeatedly, doesn’t know which way is up, goes off track, loses track, what track? Tries to find their own way in so many ways they get lost. The other child doesn’t question, stays in line, is dutiful, doesn’t stray from home. And a father (or parent) who loves them both. That’s a set up of the parable of the prodigal son that Jesus lays out in chapter 15 of Luke’s Gospel. And it’s a story, and family dynamic that is familiar to a lot of us.

I have always been the first example; I am much more prodigal than prodigy. I’ve taken more wrong turns, wasted time and money, and been clueless enough to be dropkicked more times than I can count.

But a funny thing happens to the wayward, reckless prodigal son in Jesus’ parable. When he is lost and at his lowest, he humbles himself. He swallows his pride, casts off his son-ship, and looks to return home to his father to beg to be a servant or slave, no longer a son. The father is overjoyed, knows in his bones that his son was lost, but now is found, welcomes him home and celebrates.

Meanwhile, the other son, the one who was there all along, didn’t stray, stayed in line, is furious. And we get that, we recognize it, we see that tendency in ourselves. When Jesus told his parable, he used it as a way to talk about groups and types of people, but man, can we feel it personally and emotionally. It works both ways. We recently discussed it in our Luke studies and it is remarkable what it stirs up in us. It’s the parable in the Gospels that I most identify with.

Writer and theologian Henri Nouwen had an encounter with Rembrandt’s painting, “The Return of the Prodigal Son,” which changed Nouwen’s life. It started him on a long spiritual adventure, got him thinking about his own life and calling in terms of the parable, and sent him searching inside himself in new ways. He took his reflections and experiences and turned them into what he calls his favorite of the many books he has written.

“For many years I tried to get a glimpse of God by looking carefully at the varieties of human experience: loneliness and love, sorrow and joy, resentment and gratitude, war and peace. I sought to understand the ups and downs of the human soul, to discern there a hunger and thirst that only a God whose name is Love could satisfy.”

Rembrandt’s painting helped him find God’s home in Nouwen’s own heart, showed him to look inside himself as well.

“I have to kneel before the Father, put my ear against his chest and listen, without interruption, to the heartbeat of God… I know now that I have to speak from eternity into time, from the lasting joy into passing realities of our short existence on this world, from the house of love into the houses of fear, from God’s abode into the dwellings of human beings.”

Jesus invites us into his story and Nouwen invites us along for his journey of personal discovery. This March and April for five weeks, I am stoked that we are going to make it a group adventure. Wednesday evenings at 6:30pm, from March 20 through April 17 at Christ Church Easton. If it’s the kind of adventure that you are looking for, you can sign up here.

I like this from the back cover of the book, “For all who ask, ‘Where has my struggle led me?’ or for those ‘on the road’ who have the courage to embark on the journey but seek the illumination of a known way and safe passage, this book will inspire and guide each time its read.”

And I am a big fan of Charlie Mackey‘s bronzes and drawings of the prodigal son (below).

Ultimately, I wonder if we are each of the characters in the story–the prodigal when we are reckless, self-destructive, stray and feel lost. And when we humble ourselves and look for forgiveness. The other brother when we feel resentful of others, entitled to what we feel we deserve, and maybe when we go through the motions without putting our hearts and souls into things. And we are asked to be the father when we forgive, welcome back, and celebrate those who were lost, but now are found.

Dreams and Song

2019 is a blank page with a big box of Crayola crayons spread out around it. I dig the above photo that Caroline Phillips took on one of the last days of December, on assignment for Shore Monthly Magazine. It’s sunrise, with friends doing something we love, up and outside early that let us catch a crisp, clear morning to laugh, skate, and reconnect.

2019 is a year I don’t have a clue about in many ways. And part of that not knowing is that the past four-plus years have been foundation building.

Life has a way of pulling the rug out from under us when we get comfortable. I like to think that happens because we are getting comfortable in a way that is keeping us from where we need to be; where we could be going; what we could be doing. But that perspective likely only comes with some distance when we’re looking back.

When we get displaced, we try to get our footing–spiritually, mentally, and physically. We try to put our pieces back together in a meaningful way. We look for that place where we can breathe deeply and be ourselves. We look for somewhere we can build, and re-build our lives.

Over the past four years, I’ve lived in three different places and I’m in the first house where it feels like home, where the girls and I can be for a while, put some roots down and figure out where life goes as Anna gets closer to graduating high school and Ava finishes middle school.

The thing about building a foundation or putting down roots (choose your metaphor) is that that’s the beginning work, the base. For that to amount to anything, you’ve got to build something awesome, grow or bloom into something that no one else can–that’s what each of us has in us. And that’s what 2019 feels like it’s calling for–personally, professionally, physically, creatively–it’s time to stretch, to grow, to build, to do something more; something cool, fun, inspiring. The stuff the God puts each of us here to do.

Field guides, existing colors in the box of Crayolas that we get to color our lives with, to help show us what is possible, what’s been drawn, and what we can do.

Writing about Jorge Luis Borges, introducing Borges’ book, “Dreamtigers,” Miguel Enguidanos talks about dreams and song. That it is our capacity to dream and sing that “makes the world bearable, habitable; they make the dark places bright… Dreams and song. About the whole and the parts. About the universe and about each of its separate creatures.” And that “in spite of incompetence, stumblings, and disillusionment,” that our dreams, played out in the song we choose to sing with our lives can connect and resonate with others.

I guess that’s my hope for 2019. To feel our dreams and find and sing our song in new, surprising, inspiring, and wonder-filled ways. And in doing so, to help others do the same with theirs.

Via Contemplative Monk and Mystic Prayers

“I knew every raindrop by its name”

The unexpected voices stay in our heads. They speak lines, phrases, words, pictures that we didn’t see coming, but that we can’t forget. Denis Johnson planted a stop sign in my soul with, “I knew every raindrop by its name,” as I tried to get to know his heroin-addicted narrator in “Jesus’ Son,” a book of short stories, which has been called one of the best written in the last 50 years.

Johnson’s voice, his writing, was born from his experience with addiction. He was worried at first that sobriety would affect his creativity. But the distance, clear-headedness, and productivity of being clean let him more fully access his past and own his voice in a way only he could. My copy of “Jesus’ Son” (named from Lou Reed’s “Velvet Underground” lyric in the song “Heroin,”) is full of underlinings where Johnson knocked me off-guard, off-balance.

He died of liver cancer in 2017. The New York Times obituary gave Johnson his own take on his faith:

Mr. Johnson thought of himself as a Christian writer who wonders about the existence of God in a troubled world.
“I have a feeling God finds us pretty funny,” he told New York magazine. “But that’s all the speaking I should do for God–he doesn’t go around talking about me.”
Richard Sandomir, New York Times

I’ve been thinking about and trying to read distinctive, original voices lately, gravitating toward short stories. Johnson is one of the first people I thought of. Another is Barry Hannah. Hannah begins his landmark book “Airships” like this:

“When I am run down and flocked around by the world, I go down to Farte Cove off the Yazoo River and take my beer to the end of the pier where the old liars are still snapping and wheezing at one another.”
Barry Hannah, “Water Liars”

In an appreciation of his writing, author Richard Ford says that Hannah, “recasts the world in the way obviously great writing does… Barry’s voice was the one many of us hear when we speak candidly to ourselves–subversive, inventive, unpredictable, funnier than we can be in public.”

Recasting the world. That’s what great writing should do for us. Help us see differently or think differently about something, or maybe see something we haven’t seen. Fantastic stories, well told.

I’ve had Tom Robbins lines and phrases typed into my subconscious for 20-plus years now. He can take something as mundane as mockingbirds and cast a slanted light on them:

“Mockingbirds are the true artists of the bird kingdom. Which is to say, although they are born with a song of their own, an innate riff that happens to be one of the most versatile of all the ornithological expressions, mockingbirds aren’t content to merely play the hand that is dealt them. Like all artists, they are out to rearrange reality. Innovative, willful, daring, not bound by the rules to which others may blindly adhere, the mockingbird collects snatches of birdsong from this tree and that field, appropriates them, places them in new and unexpected contexts, recreates the world from the world.”
Tom Robbins, “Skinny Legs and All”

But for all our disparate voices, it is not enough to recreate the world from the world, but to try to add some meaning, some connection, something universal within the personal.

Stories connect us in ways that nothing else does. Jesus told stories so he could be sure we would remember them, re-tell them, and talk about them. Hemingway and Twain are household names because we connect with Huck Finn and the Old Man and the Sea. And when Johnson’s narrator says he knew every raindrop by its name, I am transported back to being a kid, looking up into summer rain with my arms stretched out to the sides, trying to count raindrops and see if one looks different from another.

Tangents and Timing

I waited until I was 45 to meet William Stafford. Sure, I’d heard of him. Maybe run into him at a couple parties (figuratively). But there is no reckoning, or quickening if you are a “Highlander” fan, until it is time.

Tangents seem to be the most direct route to my soul. Stafford is a writer who I have known I wanted to, and needed to read for probably 20 years. I have read bits and pieces and read articles about him, but haven’t made a point to dig in. And then he appears in a birthday compilation of thoughts, memories, and musings, writing about Great Blue Herons.

So I take the hint and find a greatest hits book that has that same poem in it. And reading Stafford it is instantly clear that he has his own unique place in my tribe of soul writers.

Timing is everything. I’ve seen it and felt it countless times: I read something or hear a song that seems cool, but doesn’t resonate. Until I have had the experience that makes the lid blow off it, and it drives directly to the heart and makes a home there. Until it is time, it doesn’t make sense.

Stafford is like that. I needed a birthday reminder to get in touch with him. Scripture is like that. For more than 40-some years, I have read spiritual tomes and everything I could get my hands on. But it wasn’t until last year that I knew it was time to immerse myself in the Bible. And now, finding the connections between the Old Testament, Gospels, epistles, and seeing how God’s Word becomes living words in our lives; I know I wasn’t ready for that search, that journey, those connections, until I was.

At Christ Church Easton, we’ve finished up our Lent Bible studies, which came on the heels of an Ephesians group. We’ve still got an Old Testament study underway, and Alpha groups, but I look forward to what’s next, what direction groups will take this fall.

But first it’s Holy Week and Easter. And spring and summer. And spring break for the girls. It’s finding the soul tangents and being led to follow them. Those tangents can be adventures, people, paddling, reading, traveling, sunrises, birds. They are the threads God puts in our lives, puts in front of us for us to follow.

He Speaks in Silence

Much of this spring has been scheduled, busy, on the move. All to the good, but jam packed with it. And so it has been the unscripted moments that stand out.

Tucked into our readings for an Old Testament class at Christ Church Easton, was this wisdom from 1 Kings 19:11-13:

Now there was a great wind, so strong that it was splitting mountains and breaking rocks in pieces before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake; and after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire; and after the fire a sound of sheer silence. When Elijah heard it, he wrapped his face in his mantle and went out and stood at the entrance of the cave.

When Elijah hears the sheer silence, he knows God is about to speak to him. It strikes me as absolutely and beautifully profound that he lets the pyrotechnics of the wind, earthquake, and fire go by, but knows God in the silence. He speaks in silence.

It was this time last year that Jim Harrison died. He has been a literary and life hero/model of mine for 20 years or so, and I have been thoughtfully and randomly reading in his books, “The Shape of the Journey” and “Songs of Unreason” since. I came across this last week in the latter:

Don’t bother taking your watch to the river,
the moving water is a glorious second hand.
Properly understood the memory loses nothing
and we humans are never allowed to let our minds
sit on the still bank and have a simple picnic.

Sitting on the still river bank for a simple picnic. Again it’s the stillness and the silence that houses the profound moments. Where we let ourselves catch up.

Running has always been a listening time for me. Even with music playing into headphones, there is a stillness and silence in the motion and the head space that I crave. I have been on the shelf from running this winter, but managed to sneak in a couple five mile runs of late, unscripted, unscheduled, when time and weather have cooperated.

Tuesday was one of those days. After picking Anna up from lacrosse practice, I ran around Oxford, watching as the sun wound down, then grabbed the girls and Harper and hit the Oxford Park to catch the sunset. The clouds got the better of the horizon, but it didn’t matter. It was getting off script, taking advantage of an evening, making a few moments.

Life has its landmarks–those big, defining moments that we measure and remember. God is in the majestic, the heroic, the can’t miss pyrotechnics that leave us in awe.

But I’m trying to cultivate and make the most of the in-between times, unscripted, still. Those times when He speaks to us in silence.