Idle and Blessed

I always really want to be outside. I have a hard time being still. The worst thing about being in school is sitting down under florescent lights to learn. I don't know how people do it all the time, or why. I guess adults in offices everywhere have grown content with it. Have we forgotten what it feels like to be alive in the dirt and sun, learning from the trees we climb and the streams we jump over? Kids know. We should listen. I at least have the luxury of going to work at a yoga studio every other day, instead of a typical office. But there are still days when the little skylight above me is not enough and I leave for lunch just to smell the air. I think if we remembered how mortal we are, we would stop sitting down in buildings. Our bodies are how we move through the world. Our bodies are how we know the world, how our souls find their place in creation. I remember my place in creation when I'm in the woods. When I see the stars and feel the smooth rocks on the b...

We are all just people moving through the maze of life at different speeds and starting times. Learning lessons as we go, as the world speaks to us and bumps up against us in its strange ways. We're just people getting it at different times, standing next to others as they get it too. There's an episode of Gilmore Girls where Rory gets arrested for stealing a boat. Lorelei picks her up from the police station, and they stop at Luke's. While Rory is in the car, Lorelei rants to Luke about the situation, freaking out because she doesn't have soap to wash the fingerprinting ink off her daughter's fingers, and her car is still at the marina. Luke, in his brilliance, just keeps saying common-sense things like, "I have soap," and gives her a doughnut. When Lorelei gets back to the car, suddenly Rory is hit with the reality of the situation. "I was arrested! I have to go to court! Where is my car? I need soap!" And Lorelei just looks at her with the...

I encourage anyone who wants to practice transcendence to take up ultrarunning. I don't have the right words to explain exactly what happens out there on the trail. First my mind stops its linear thoughts and instead starts to swirl around in circles. Tree. Rock. Jump over. The song stuck in my head. Person ahead of me is slowing down. My knee hurts. The wind. I hear the river. The swirling goes on and time doesn't pass in a normal way. After 4 or 5 hours of running, there are less thoughts and more feelings. More noticing. It is no longer "I need to eat exactly 90 calories of carbohydrates at mile 24," but "I'm hungry." And I start to feel pain all over and somehow am completely happy at the same time. I remember seeing a white fuzzy caterpillar around 6 hours in. He was on a rock I jumped on and I made sure not to hurt him. Caterpillar. I can't remember the last time I noticed a white caterpillar. I don't remember anything else from that fe...

How surely gravity's law, strong as an ocean current, takes hold of even the smallest thing and pulls it toward the heart of the world. Each thing - each stone, blossom, child - is held in place. Only we, in our arrogance, push out beyond what we each belong to for some empty freedom. If we surrendered  to earth's intelligence we could rise up rooted, like trees. Instead we entangle ourselves in knots of our own making and struggle, lonely and confused. So, like children, we begin again to learn from the things, because they are in God's heart; they have never left him. This is what the things can teach us: to fall, patiently to trust our heaviness. Even a bird has to do that before he can fly. -From Rilke's Book of Hours

Your first word of all was light , and time began. Then for long you were silent. Your second word was man , and fear began, which grips us still. Are you about to speak again? I don't want your third word. Sometimes I pray: Please don't talk. Let all your doing be by gesture only. Go on writing in faces and stone what your silence means. You be our refuge from the wrath that drove us out of Paradise. Be our shepherd, but never call us-- we can't bear to know what's ahead. -From Rilke's Book of Hours

About a year ago, Don Miller wrote a blog about why he doesn't go to church , and it went a little viral. I haven't gone back and read it recently, but I remember him saying some things about the modern church being a business, aimed at getting more people in the door and giving them an experience as efficiently as possible. I very rarely attempt to disagree with Donald Miller on things, considering he's the one with the successful career in ministry/writing/blogging/conference-leading and I'm the one sitting on my couch blogging on my old MacBook, but now that the rest of the world is done blasting him for that article, I have some things to say. I don't usually want to go to church. Let's start here. I grew up going to a wonderful, vibrant, connected, growing, teaching church in Nashville that I still call home. My favorite place to be on Sundays (and any other time they let the youth group in) was church, and even when I struggled through my theology clas...

So welcome to mid-September, when pumpkin drinks make their annual debut and candy corn lines the outer walls of grocery stores. But have you stepped outside in Georgia lately? It's still really summer, guys. I always have this frustration with our refusal to see a season all the way through. There might be some mornings when, if you wake up early enough, the dew on the grass and chill in the air talk to you about autumn. But I say let's be here now, in our summer selves, barefoot and warm in the sunshine. Autumn will come soon enough. School will get busier, fall races will be run, pools will close. But for now we have the magic of trees green and lush, tomatoes fresh from the ground, and a sun that flushes cheeks, and my soul isn't ready to come back inside yet.