Idle and Blessed

I think partly I’m homesick. I miss my town. My places and my people, the hills and valleys and the landscape of Familiar. Really familiar. Like, simplistically meaningful. Unassuming and raw and quiet the way Tennessee is. I want that surrounding me again. And Jenny, who turns 24 tomorrow in Thailand, who won’t be home for years. The girl who has seen my soul unedited and loves me still. I’m homesick for her and the other people who grew me. Partly it’s this time of year. November. Two Novembers ago my heart was broken enough to re-chart my course and change my life. The way it gets dark early, the sun fleeing fast each day, like it’s not quite brave enough to stick around; the way the leaves all change colors and die so fast; the way my breath makes clouds when I run long miles…it all brings me back to a profound memory of trying to get out of bed every day, trying to ask God questions with no answers. It could also be the halfway point of my Master...

There are some things about this career path that are impossibly hard. How do I stand in front of 24 state prisoners and teach them medical ethics? They're the ones who really know about abortion, about a stage 4 cancer diagnosis, about losing their parents and kids. And how do I take this Bible I wrestle with and make sense of it? For my theology and my ethic and my world? How do I tell someone where my hope comes from, why I can say "death is not the enemy anymore?" How do I choose to uproot my life every 3 or 4 years and start a new degree? How about choose to really know people in those places I won't stay, those places I know I'll leave behind? I can put up walls and be safer but the heart of God is about risk and costly love and I promised to follow. How do I watch my professor battle disgrace for the sake of the gospel, and still choose to follow in his path? How do I continue to stand in the gap between what I used to believe and what has been re...

"I just wanna make a difference," she said. "I been in here a long time, you know, but I'm about to get out soon. There's a lot of things I want to do." She's tall and authoritative, even sitting down, and her brown eyes are serious. The others always listen when she talks, like she's a wise old woman, but she's probably only 30. She has a lot of opinions, is skeptical of most things, and she talks about suffering more than the others do. When we discussed abortion, she was the first to say a severely disabled child should be "aborted so it wouldn't have to suffer." When we talked about suicide, she didn't raise her hand before giving her opinion. "I just feel like if life is total suffering to someone, they should be allowed to stop it." Why wouldn't we stop suffering? She doesn't talk much about her own life but I see her old suffering, below the surface of her eyes. She takes care of the other women ...

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