41: She is the Storm

 She laughs with the lightning strikes, swiftly dancing between raindrops and hair torn loose in a gale of golden streaks in the storm. Her eyes flash with Joy as the world strives and exhausts itself in tidal assaults, again and again daring to bring her to her knees. 

She is the Queen of herself, she has studied and steadied and built a bulwark around herself make of bricks of truth. Truth of who she is, truth of who she serves and who she follows and truth of whom she Loves. 

She shall not be shaken, nor shall she be threshed into grain by the tossers of chaff, the winnowers of the soul who make to craft her into demure dimness. The steps of her swift feet are alight and her sight is keen, honed towards her task and her purpose. 

—————

The young girl strove and struck and flashed and bared her teeth. She lashed and kicked against who she detested to be, who she thought she was press-molded to become. 

Her passions: Boundless. 

Her fury: Unnamed and barbed in all directions. 

The sword: drawn and the cuts were deep, she made war with no banner other than her heart and all were foes, all were deadly foes. 

But softly, soft and surely there was a deeper current that she stepped into, gave herself up to. Laid down in with wide eyes and piercing; rapid breath labored less as the water pulled her to the deepest truth. The childhood rent away became a reminder that her child to girl to woman cocooning was always in the palm of her God and her King. The current pulled, and she did not swim up it, though all of heaven knows she would have bested it. 

Minute, moment, week and year; she gave the untamed to the Sure Hand and her sword and bow to the King. He drew and draws her close and closer, knowing the very basement of her fears, doubts, disbeliefs, danger and destruction and pleases himself to regift her with the Steadfast assuredness, clarify and purity of knowing that she can defend those she loves with a danger derived from Him. 

Like the scales from disciples eye, her armor chinks loosened and pried themselves from her chest, dripping like the early springtime snow from her chest. The surety salved her heart. The armor broke and decayed yet the shield over her strengthened. 

Through soft degrees, imperfectly and with stumbling. She masters herself through the wisdoms of His Hand. 

Passion still rages, as every good passion must. Across the grasslands in a fearsome wild scream of exultation. The mane of which cannot be set in ink, and it be blasphemy to try. 

The armor is still iron-clad, yet set firmly around her kin and the newborn who nuzzles the deep into her neck to seek peace. 

The sword is still sharp, and it is drawn in righteous wrath. Yet sheathed beneath the Crown in times of peace. 

There is none like her, I hold to this as one of the Foundational truths. She holds the steeds of her heart in firm reins. She rises before the dawn to make it unmistakeable that no opportunity goes unreaped. Her gaze is pure and piercing. She laughs with such mirth that there are none who would not come to her table. All who know her Love her. All who are truly known by her are truly loved by her. 

I take small credit for your Journey. Yet it is unspeakable how proud I am to be your Husband. 

40: I noticed my breath while at a gas station...

   

    I have been thinking a lot about ghosts recently. This thought train has been partly catalyzed by the Christmas season and the natural proclivity to aim musings towards the nostalgic and the ethereal; i’ve always assumed that most of us fall into a similar pattern. The darkness of the winter days also produces both a bleak and a mystifying backdrop for internal pondering. We have limited physical sight with only the hints and outlines of trees and terrain flitting at the edge of our eyesight, so we naturally turn both inwards and backwards with our sight (with a touch of cautious soothsaying directed at the nebulous future that may lay out there in the blackness). It would also be unkind towards Dickens if i didn’t admit that he has always had a small part to play in my annual introspection. His inspiration for a tale set “at a time when the veil between spirit and physical world is thin” revolved around the wisps of past, present and future that tend to nestle about the rafters of our houses during such a season as this.


    My breath exiting my lungs and hitting the cold winter air is the ghost of my reliance on the physical and chemical requirements, I noticed this more acutely this morning while filling up my gas tank. This charges my imagination into seeing ghosts luridly leering from street corners or timidly tip-toeing along empty hallways. The specter of the future that a homeless man veered from leans tired and cold against a street sign. A healthy glow of satisfied and contended presentness that wafts from the curled body of my Dog as he dreams of rabbits by the fire. The nagging wraith of regret from things i have done or, worse, haven’t done wrap a silky shawl around my shoulders. The spirit of budding tenacity radiates from the young boy pedaling an icy bicycle up a snowy hill in defiance of the difficulty, portending a possibility of a fierce and fearless man of self-possessed prowess. The low, dull moan of the bravado of youth being dragged behind a man who sees only drudgery and paperwork between his current commute and an ill-defined retirement into soul-less golf trips. The lost spirit of direction eking out of the teary eyes of the old tribal chiefs eyes as he sits mournfully on his hospital bed with self-inflicted but healing neck wounds. It all plays the imagination into a whimsical but weary contemplation of what we truly carry with us aside from the clothes and scars and bits of lint in our pockets.


    In a more literal sense, this line of thought brings me to my Dad. I have tried multiple times to write something meaningful and poignant about his recent death, but the saved document from 11 months ago hasn’t magically catharsed itself into prose yet and that leaves me with the unfortunate task of having to actually wrestle with the ghost of his absence. I don’t claim to have any special knowledge of the inner-workings of the afterlife; what is left behind, if anything is left behind and how much of that can or should be interacted with. It seems like a cheapening of Heaven for any part of my Dad to have to experience even an ounce of the pain and hollowness that is left in the wake of his departure. It seems even more cruel that he should have to have any conscious interaction with the pained family who he is apart from. It should never have to be that he sees even the flicker of sorrow on my face when, absentmindedly, I pick up the phone to call him regarding a water heater issue that I can’t puzzle through. I sincerely hope that his ghost is solely the echo of our collective memories and projections of him onto our current lives. His is a welcome haunt, but one that I pray that he never experiences.


    The lives we could have lived, the people we should have loved more, the grace we should have extended, the doors that we should have opened (or shut hard and bolted), the echos of laughter and crying and wailing and singing and muttering and screaming and cooing and swearing and lying and comforting and calling out for a loved one all wrap around us in an ethereal cloak as we traverse this mortal way. We can so easily be enslaved and entrapped by the lost longings or lifted up by the lofty legends of old that stir us to be something better than we are. Ultimately, we can be engulfed by the could be, should have been, want to be, would have gone. Praise be to God for allowing the Ghost called Holy that we can willingly be haunted by. The one we can allow to echo more loudly than the misgivings and the lost trust, the one we can give our could-haves to. The one who we can show the secret sins of our selfishness to with no fear of condemnation and every hope of reconciliation to and with the Author of the truth.


    Having seen the inexplicable smile of pure Joy on my Dads face as he “gave up the Ghost” while the sunshine poured onto his deathbed removes the pause that I have that this same Author is writing something profound and deepening, Holy and wholly unfathomable by our surface-scraping knowledge of the cosmos. Painful and poignant, peaceful and tempestuous, equal parts rending and unifying. He is penning something deeply disturbing to our land-locked line of thinking that revolves around plans for costco-runs and fears that our co-workers don’t like us, something that upends our minor-league concerns about the now opens up keyholes for us to peep through into something terrifyingly beautiful and completing. And just as confounding as all of this, he allows us to decide whether we would prefer to be haunted by the sins of our petty past and our unfulfilling future or the Ghost who was with and one with the Author when pen was first set to cosmic paper. Choosing the former leads to the swirling drift of compounded and morose “what-ifs” that we are all so familiar with. Choosing the latter is an invitation to step into the very essence of the only story that we ever needed.

39: In Defense of Moments

 

The destination eludes me, and I cannot remember anything about which airport I had boarded at. I also cannot remember the year, the purpose of the trip or the events surrounding the flight. All I remember is that it was an afternoon flight heading from the east to the west and that I was in an aisle seat. We rose up above flat sheets of clouds that had gloomed our departure and entered into a race against the setting sun. We were hopelessly outmatched by the celestial angles and the torque of our raceway, but it provided one of the most singular sunsets that I have ever witnessed.

 

As I am wont to do, I jumbled words around in my head attempting to praise the beauty and the artist who painted this serenely soul-scorching scene and in a haphazard twist of clumsy luck and a smattering of AP lit experience, I composed what I am convinced is my most heartfelt and eloquent poem. I proceeded to immediately forget it.

 

There wasn’t a napkin on my lap and, as I had not entered any version of a career yet, the pen that predominates my shirt pocket these days had yet to become a staple of my wardrobe. I’m fairly certain that my phone was dead and, as my wife can attest, my overall ability to remember any given sequence of words (or numbers, I’ve found) is on par with a racoon having a stroke. All of the words I had composed fell out of the back of my head and probably puddled somewhere between the cheap faux leather of the seat and my beltline.

 

There have been countless attempts to re-create that prose since then, all failed and all more frustrating than fruitful. For the longest time, the main emotion that I linked to that experience was one of irritation and a sensation of lost treasure. My mind wanders back to that flight and does everything in its limited power to piece together specific light fragments hitting the jut of a cloud back and hoping that the mental image strikes the flint of my forgotten sonnet.

 

            As is my bent, this fixation turned to reflection. Realization flitted in fitful spurts and eventually seeped in the groundwater of my perception of this tendency to attach specific and regretful sentiment to the images, the expressions, the explosion of color and sound and emotion that I had failed to capture. This could be in any medium, whether I had not swung the pen mightily enough to regale a reader with the majesty of a mountaintop or If I had not painted a friends face with a camera, lit by healthy firelight as they listened to a story and laughed. Small things and large things that I had let pass me by without a concrete memento began to pile up in my remorse cabinet, which was overflowing with the vexation of a life not documented and fixated in its proper place.

 

            It is most likely not a stretch to say that many feel similarly in this regard. Life is a precious gift from God and there is almost a pressure to prove to ourselves and those around us that we are appreciating it with accordant zest. The motive has the capacity to be pure and lining up with the original intent of creation to be a window through which we see the creative beauty of God. It can often and easily be remade into our own self-sycophantic abyss that both consumes itself and feeds itself. My motives in wanting to remember a key anthem that was inspired by nature could not be completely extricated from my desire to share it with others and the subsequent praise received for my wordsmithery. Many pictures I’ve taken are less about the subject in the lens and more about showcasing the skill or perceived unique personal nature of the idiot holding the camera. My aim in capturing a moment has transitioned from glorifying the scene/person/moment and more about becoming a captor of a thing of beauty. The words I wield can treacherously become shackles to bind the moment to my whimsy and personal gain, the portrait I paint (with light or liquid or other) can easily become a cell for the subject within.

 

            Qualification: I do not denounce the act of marking time and moments with man-made tools, language being one of them. There is much to be said for the act of sharing and remembering the times and places and people who have impacted our lives greatly, and in its right place, the art of remembering can be beautiful and wholesome. The best way that I can describe my thought is to steal someone else’s. Pervasive commercialism aside, the movie “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” carries the essence of my thought best.  When the character of Sean O’Connell has the opportunity to snap an exquisitely rare photo of an elusive snow leopard, he disregards the camera and addresses the protagonist. “If I like a moment, I mean; me, personally… I don’t like to have the distraction of the camera. I just want to stay in it. Right there… Right here.”  In a similar vein, we can see what the book of Ecclesiastes has to say of it in chapter 3, vs 11 “He has made everything beautiful in its time. Also, he has put eternity into man’s heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end. I perceived that there is nothing better for them than to be joyful and to do good as long as they live.”

 

            I am letting that sunset go. The memory of it will be a happy one from now on. I will stop grasping for ties and mental hooks that may give me a handhold on the words I strung together in that moment and simply remember the glow blushing off the upturned clouds. Everything is beautiful in its time; and if my hubris and self-made sharing empire obstruct the intrinsic beauty of the thing I intend to capture, then it must be my duty to dismantle my empire and only use my words and my lens as a mode to remember, not to take ownership of it.

 

 

 

38: The Great Grey

 

There is no real question in my mind about why I am thinking in terms of grey. Right now I am looking out my February-stained window and all that meets me is grey. Sky is flatter and more boring than ashes in it's monochrome yet cold blandness. The trees have forgotten how to speak any language and are left contorted and embarrassed in their nakedness. The slowed and bloated (and aptly named) Tar river sloths past its banks after having gorged on too many rainstorms up in the Appalachian foothills out west. 

My street is littered with both wet and withered leaves, color leached from their veins. My walls have soaked in the outside sulk and are dripping in sullen shadows. My metaphors lay in a puddle on the floor, though that might just be remnants of a tipped cup of coffee. It is fairly tough to tell at this point and everything muddles together as I start to count on my fingers to determine which day of the week it is. 

Huh, even my shirt is grey. I didn't plan that. 

Plus Im fairly sure that i'm using the wrong spelling for grey, or maybe its just the British version. Grey vs Gray: The worlds most limp-wristed dispute.

The main thrust of putting any of this down onto black and white is to try to delineate and put margins to why I have been feeling so dissipated. I'm not going to share this one because it is much more about my process in capturing and taking meditative stock of my current mental and spiritual state than it is about entertaining or provoking thought or whatever self-aggrandizing motivation could be tagged onto previous entries. If someone happens to run across it for whatever reason and scrapes some personal insight off of its untidy floor, then they can benefit or increase in confusion at their own risk or reward. This one is for me. 

A majority of my life feels hemmed in by a thick and bloodless fog. Mind is addled by a continuous circuit of task to plan to task to outcome to task to error to task to solution to task to task again that limits itself almost entirely to fingertip motions and monotonous and pyrrhic victories over unimportant and ultimately crumbling hills. I'm sure that part of this stems from the nature of hospital work. Every person who I will "heal" or have a hand in "healing" will eventually run out of ability to be mended and will be subjected to worms and dirt. The sole aspect that puts its finger in the dike of overwhelming cynicism and deep sorrow is that each day that the person in the hospital bed is taking their own breaths is a day that can redeem their souls from the pitiable and horrible fate of being their own wildly inept and hideously foolish gods and return the throne of their lives to the rightful King; or at very least to stop eating themselves to death. 

All things considered, I still cannot blame my current emotional/spiritual state that is best compared to cold and unsalted grits on the population of humans coming into my workspace anymore than I can blame it on the odd influx of cockroaches into our kitchen in recent days. I'm sure that it is a factor and it would be fairly stupid of me to dismiss it, but if I hang my hat on it as the root diagnosis for the malaise i'm mucking around in then I would be blandly lying to myself and very aware of the fact. 

Without any froofy wordplay, the issue is that I have forgotten my margins. Forgotten or failed to retrace them on a regular basis. My personhood has osmosed out into the aether and mingled with it to the point where neither have their own distinct existence. Annihilation at its meh-est. I sat in a cheap armchair too close to the abyss, we melded and now neither of us have eyes to stare at each other through. Melodramatic: Minus 2 points off my blog scorecard. 

It is eerily near the portrait that Lewis paints in "The Great Divorce" where the wisps of human souls who have chosen their own solitary and foggy gray hell are suddenly forced to interact with the starkly self-embued grass of heaven. The souls are so lost in terms of their own purpose and meaning and source that they have forgotten their weight and their realness so that when they step on grass that is in concert with its source and self and purpose and meaning, the grass pierces through the feet of the ghastly souls because it meets no margin to interact with. Each blade of grass is so itself that it needs to interact with something of similar self-embodied substance to bend and be walked upon. As per usual, Lewis rapidly elevates an iron-toed boot into my crotch and forces me to look at myself without my spiritual make-up on. 

I have forgotten who I am because I have neglected to root in the source of the one who made me. My substance has softened into the gray around me because I turned my face away from the God who holds my only true name written on a white stone in his hand. I have refused the artists chisel with apathetic gestures of self-sufficiency and have attempted to slap sloppy, soggy clay on the statue of myself in attempts to finish what God started because "I know what I need". 

"Who has made mans mouth? Who makes him mute, or deaf, or seeing, or blind? Is it not I, The Lord?" Exodus 4:11

"For you formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother's womb. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; my soul knows it very well." Psalm 139: 13-14.

"Or who shut in the sea with doors when it burst out from the womb, when I made clouds its garment and thick darkness its swaddling band, and prescribed limits for it and set bars and doors, and said, 'This far shall you come, and no farther, and here shall your proud waves be stayed'?" Job 38: 8-11

Delineation. Margins. Shape and substance and form and everything that defies that nebulous abolition of man into mist come from God and his careful and fierce carving of our lines, his searing forge giving shape to our metal, his sharp-tipped pen inking our personhood on paper. He abhors the lukewarm and the osmosed man I have drifted towards being and demands that my skin be drastically hotter than the surrounding fog so that I will starkly contrast the dim grey that surrounds my every day life. 

William Ernest Henley hoarsely shouted "I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul." Before I get too far ahead of myself, I would make sure to point out that there is no ill will towards Henley. I do believe that we all have impetus in how we conduct our lives and that our responses to hardships are our duty and task. We should take hold of the helm and not be tossed every which way by the storms or life, but the main issue I take with this poem is that a quick google search shows that he was born on August 23, 1849 and died on July 11, 1903. The self proclaimed master of his Fate fell out of a railway carriage which caused his tuberculosis to flare up which ultimately killed him. Similarly, I suspect that he had next to no influence over his birth (due to my having little to no perspective over the supernatural realm, I refrained from speaking with certainty.) 

He may have had an undaunted spirit during his 53 years on earth and his personhood was impressive enough to influence Robert Louis Stevenson to fashion his infamous character of Long John Silver in Henleys likeness, but it is difficult to switch my brain off from a very specific "The Office" reference in this scenario. That being when the office crew takes a booze cruise and the captain of the boat gets sick of Dwight and shows him to a fake steering wheel which Dwight enthusiastically grips onto and begins deluding himself into thinking that he is steering the boat. We all know who is actually steering the boat, Dwight/Ernest. Lets stop pretending. 

This could quickly de-rail into a discussion about free will versus predestination and I definitely feel that i've already digressed further from my original point than I should have, so this is where I will end. 

To sum up. God is God and I am not. I am God's son and He authors my character. My self-ness is rooted in his God-ness. My Man-hood stems from his God-hood and I praise him for that solid, weighty, circumscribed fact. 

37: Glass man

 I don’t think I’ve ever really given enough credit to glass. 

In my stereotypically masculine mind, I’ve tended to equate it with cracks and shatter and being unable to walk barefoot in the kitchen after a cup met an untimely elbow or wayward ladle. It’s always been equated to something to be wrapped up in old newspapers and great-grandmothers quilt when you’re loading up the U-Haul. It is put up on the top shelf outside of the wingspan of anyone younger than 9 and, if used in fluorescents, to be shielded behind a perpetually grimy plastic coffin latched to the ceiling of an office that no one wanted to come into today anyways.

 

I’ve spent my life praising the resilience of steel, stone and heavy oak timbers. Things to build upon and to hang one’s life on. “A house made of glass…” being juxtaposed inadvertently with the comparative infragility of a well-lofted rock. Mr. Glass, cracked spectacles, an opera soprano blasting the wine glass with her lungs; each of these images has reverberated the anti-virtue of glass into my head and subconscious heart. For 30 years, I have actively snubbed the thought of pursuing a life that had any resemblance to glass.

 

Recently, that has changed.

 

I saw a man that I had once perceived as iron turn out to be glass. And it was beautiful.

 

Because it showed me that there is more to glass than just breakage and shattering, it showed me that there is a strength in its sheer translucency that something like steel will never be able to even wrap its figurative mind around.

 

Light makes all the difference.

 

Instead of seeing my Aunt’s flower vase scattered over the parlor tiles, I began to see the thick panes enclosing a lighthouse. A shelter for what was historically fire as it radiated out bright warmth, hope and safety right back out through that which was being brutalized by wind and wafted waves and the dreaded nor’easter. A steel slat would undoubtably have kept the fire from the elements, but at the cost of countless lives.

 

Instead of seeing my cracked phone screen, I began to see the window into a home. The soft warmth of a newborn morning sun looking out over a million miles of creation and being able to meet my eyes through this dusty, flat slat of melted sand that will (if forecasts stay as they are) keep the coming hurricane from entering the safety of my home.

 

I see a lantern. And I see that sad-warmth of a lone candle inside it. And it lights the way for anyone who holds it so much more effectively than a barbecue grill would (for a lot of reasons, portability being an easy target).

 

It would be easy to pretend that I can live my life like stone, steel or oak. But the reality is that my fragility is inherent to my simply being alive. A wise man is teaching me that it may just be best to embrace being glass so that the light of Christ that is in me can shine through me.

Thanks, Dad. 

36: ..And forgive us our If-Thens...

Luke 12: 16-21. And he told them a parable, saying, "The land of a rich man produced plentifully, and he thought to himself, 'What shall I do, for I have no where to store my crops?' And he said, 'I will do this: I will tear down my barns and build larger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. And I will say to my soul, "Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.'" But God said to him, 'Fool! This night your soul is required of you, and the things you have prepared, whose will they be?' So is the one who lays up treasure for himself and is not rich toward God."

These last few years have been full of Ifs and empty of writing for me. I'd like to blame my lack of thoughtful excursion into the deeper meanings behind my recent life events on those Ifs, but ultimately that blame would be hollow. I didn't write because I didn't want to write. My dedication to knocking rust off of a skill that most of my adolescence was built around wasn't as fortified as my dedication towards knocking my boots off my toes and tuning my mind to a radio station with pleasant vapidity playing all day. Medical school was and continues to be hard work, and one of the first things to be shoved off the wagon for space's sake was introspection via the keyboard. I would often quibble with myself about certain circumstances that would allow me access to my old pasttime, but they were always If-Thens that were based in nebulous intentions and therefore had no ability to root in reality.

The thens piled on up behind their half-formed Ifs "If I am let off before 6, Then I will jot down some thoughts." I was let off at 5:50, but being so near the fulcrum of my decision point gave laziness all the momentum it needed to knock the scale its way. This became pattern and pattern became habit and habit became routine and that routine threatens to be one of my defining characteristics. I can call it procrastination or maybe it would be more prudent to name it bargaining, but what it really centers in is my version of the rich man in the parable above. The striving to be better, holier, more just, more compassionate, more eternity-aimed is whisped aside at the mere mention of a youtube video of kids getting hit in the face with aerobic balls.

Lets not be ridiculous, there is a definite time and place for such videos.

And I know that "Whisped" isn't a real word.

Truth hardens on me: I am the rich farmer. I have taken the riches and bounty of life as resultant from my hard work and due to that, mine to shelter under for the forseeable future. What ultimately drove me to this conclusion was a recent instance where my wife asked me to work out with her. She is driven, passionate, unrelenting in her pursuit of excellence and regularly asks me to join her in her conquest over apathy and self-annihilation via sloth. After belching my way through the contractual half (We had struck up a deal that factored in her superior athleticism and my superior love handles) of the workout, I sweated my way to the shower and turned it full cold as I heard the furious pounding of her nike trainers on the spare-room wood-planks. Realization hit me in the midst of cold drops on my brow: The past experience as a track athlete that had fueled my young adulthood was being used as metaphorical grain in my barn.


And there are a myriad of other ways that I act like I have full barns: My relationships with my family, my friends, my Wife; my pursuit of apex excellence in my chosen craft, my active love of real and true fun that comes through learning and growing in knowledge of God's creation that surrounds all of us; the very person that God created me to be had been consolidated to a pithy equation that relied on If-Then statements.

If they reach out, Then I will respond.
If she asks, Then I will make the effort.
If I find myself interested, Then I will delve more into that.
If I feel worthy, Then I will act like I have worth.

Subjective, banal and ultimately rootless have been my motivations to do or say anything. My flitting internal motor has left living life up to the confluence of random chance and whether I feel caffeinated enough. What a foolish way to live.

Tomorrow, the results of months of interviewing and testing that topped years of study and exams comes to bear. My wife and I will learn the location of the program that will train me for the formational years of my medical career. I could easily treat it as an "If I get the program I want, Then I will be a good doctor". Let me be clear in this: I choose to trust that God is sovereign wherever we go and whatever the milieu ends up being. Not only that, but I recant my loyalty to perceived chance and my fealty to the If-Then.


And Mom, I'm sure you're reading this. I apologize for any split infinitives and other grammatical errors. It's been so long that I have forgotten what they are.

35: Wonder

I lost something important during my flight a month ago. I’ve been looking for it ever since. The very fact that I had the capacity to lose it is what worries me more than anything, but nonetheless, the desperate clawing through my carry-on and checked bags will lose none of its desperation until this key piece of me is back in its proper place.

It wasn’t a toothbrush, and it probably isn’t a favorite book

I’m not even sure if I know what it is, but this is my attempt to find out.  

Remembering back to the days of wide eyes and bowl cut heads is step number one in retracing my symbolic steps as to where I left this lost item. The trembling toes and tight grip on my mother’s fingers as we walk like astronauts down the fluorescence lit jetway echo down my spine as each shuffled step brings me closer to the metal tube preparing to launch me and all these other brave souls off into the sheer nothingness of the sky. The dangling of my legs off of the seat provides little comfort, as the only semblance of ground eludes my short stature and leaves me completely at the wiles of the imagined upcoming loop-de-loops and barrel rolls replaying over and over in my soft head, peaking over the brim of the window to find bits and pieces of buildings and structures sliding by as we taxi out onto the flat and empty runway which, for all I know, was the cape Canaveral of this rocket.

God himself pushes my head, gut, shoulders into the seat back with a gentle violence as the roar of an unknown fire grabs our metal and plastic world and hurls it forward toward the tops of the trees… and suddenly open white is the only thing that exists outside of our flimsy shell.

……

 Frustrated that the zipper on my slingbag won’t close after the security checkpoint, I yanked on the small leash 17 times in rapid and unsuccessful succession before nearly tearing the guide from its teeth and whipping it shut.

“Gah, finally!” growled my chest while I huffily strode through the crowded aftermath of TSA searches, dodging loose shoes and partially deconstructed suitcases. I cannot waste a second, because I have to get to my seat as soon as humanly possible so that I don’t have to do the awkward crab-shuffle across some strangers lap to get to my middle seat. Please, nobody touch even my shoulder with theirs.

Threw my travel case up into the already overcrowded overhead storage, most likely crushing some fragile item in the bag next to it. I threw myself in a similar fashion down into my middle seat, which is silently cursed and prepared to gripe about throughout the flight to myself and to my phone after I reached Seattle.

I was severely disappointed that the g-force change of the engine doesn’t rush enough blood away from my head to put me to sleep.

……….

…Don’t…. Move…..

My grimy hands are barely wide enough to gain purchase on the edges of the armrest, but the thumb and pinky of each are locked to the textured plastic as my bowl-cut hovers half an inch away from the seat back in a trembling state of fixation. My periphery is filled with gold, but I make the mistake of looking out of that shining window already into the chaotic tumble of heaven: Thick legs of clouds, pivoting and swaying, bouncing and refracting the molten heat of the late sun in the snow crystals thickening their lofty heads. A wrestling of the gods caught in the freeze frame outside the tiny metal tube I sat in, as if they were so surprised to see mankind above the mat of clouds that separates mortals from Olympians that they stop their games to watch us glide by.

A hand blankets mine, warming and squeezing it. I find my Mother’s smiling green eyes with my alarmed gaze, and the ice in my bones starts to thaw. Still holding her hand, I put my fingertips on the window sill and pull my nose up over its edge to press myself against the plastic partition between man and immortal and watch the immensity of the world sail past heaven’s feet. The clouds dismiss us as a fly, and I stare up at their games in unabashed awe born of terror, but the warm reminder of my mother’s love around my fingers shields me from danger. I look down through a hole in the white fields of Elysium and see the clay-red of cliffs and scrub brush of the American southwest, and I imagine falling through that hole, plummeting in the most glorious fashion , framed by the gentle fire of sunstruck clouds above the stark bluffs and rugged arches of the earth’s ribs; the most spectacular entrance into heavens gates my young head can create.

……………………..

For what had to be the third bathroom break for the prostate challenged gentleman in the window seat, I groaned up out of my slumberless stupor and shuffled out into the aisle, careful to knock my head into every possible extrusion on the underside of the ceiling. The aisle seat patron and I groggily waited with our butts in the faces of the unfortunate aisle dwellers of the opposite lane as the offending party slowly side stepped out of the cramped quarters of our transient home and murmured thanks to our sullen faces before hobbling down the length of the plane, bumping into every third shoulder on the way. I contemplated standing for the duration of his frustratingly short bathroom break, but caved to societal norm and flopped back down into a temporary relief.

But then I saw my chance.

The obnoxiously bright golden blaze that had been disturbing my precious circadian rhythms lay just to my left, and the guardian of the window was currently occupied in emptying his uncooperative bladder. With a sly hand, I slid the shutter to heaven closed in an attempt to get some sleep.

2 minutes later, a tap on the shoulder kicks off the awkward dance all over.

…

Sometimes, the clarity I need to address an internally roiling issue can only come through putting it on paper. Some of you may read this and scrounge a chuckle or a childhood flashback out of it, but I have to admit that this entry is selfishly motivated. You see, I am attempting in the best way that I know how to regain my sense of wonder at the world around me. And the only way I could think to do so was to write, and to write through the eyes of a child. And in this last chunk of time spent pushing buttons and listening to the “deep focus” playlist on Spotify, I have started to see the edges and define the lines of what caused me to forget one of the most important aspects of living and more importantly, believing.

My best guess is that there are several strands that wind this rope of wonder, and I can distinguish three at this point.

First, I stopped fearing. More precisely, I stopped knowing that I should fear. I am beginning to suspect that fear is slightly more than a simple physiological response to an imminent threat to life and limb, but is meant to be a striking and undeniable reminder of our own fragility and smallness in the world. Nothing can really shake you out of a sluggish state of apathy like a crate full of rattlesnakes being dumped on your lap. Most people start to question a few things at that point, not least of these being “What if I had been bit?” and “What if I died?” It’s easy to forget one’s place in the universe when engrossed in a procedural cop show. It’s less easy when you’re being chased through the brush by a bear or when sitting on a hospital bed about to start Chemotherapy.

We need fear like we need pain in our toes. A stubbed toe hurts, but to a leper, a stubbed toe serves as no warning, and he continues to damage his feet against every rock and coffee table corner until they become necrotic and poison his blood. Ignorance is not always bliss, and fear is not always bad.

Secondly, and strangely not as in conflict as the first as one might think, is beauty and the active pursuit of acknowledging it. This should never be a passive aspect of a person, and the pursuit does not necessarily mean a physical location change (The “wanderlust” craze isn’t necessarily bad, but if you can’t find beauty in your own backyard, then your travels to far off lands will never fill that anomalous gap in your soul, no matter how many Instagram brags you post) as much as a perspective change. A child constructing an imaginary world from sticks and mud, the slight squeeze that your loved ones give your hands to let you know that they savor every second shared, the aching of the belly and the rolling on the ground from laughing so fervently at something truly funny, watching the wind roll through linen sheets hung to dry. There aren’t enough pages to hold all of the examples.

We need beauty to remind ourselves of the echo of heaven ringing in our hearts. A lost connection to a perfect time and state that peeks through at us, wanting to be seen but ignored and distracted from or masked as pure and unbased emotional drivel. We need fear to remind us that we don’t belong, and we need beauty to remind us of a place where we do.

The third and final strand in this woven cord is the bridge between the two, and that is faith. I don’t know what you believe, and frankly, I don’t mind much at this point. This is an exposition on an internal frustration and attempt to rectify it based on what I believe God is teaching me through his word and world. The push of fear from something and the pull of beauty towards something must be given outlet, and the faith that there is a way to resolve that existential tension is the only real way to merge these three concepts into the overarching state of wonder. Faith that there is a way to return to the source of the echoes of beauty, faith that gives hope as an alternative to absolute black despair for those who fear, faith that there is an order and a reason beneath the crust of everything that we as finite and mortal beings are able to touch, that is the binding cord that winds the rope of wonder and tethers us to God.

Airplanes are trivial in the larger scale, but the discrepancy that is outlined between what an experience of sitting in a flying chair should be and what I have made it into as an adult gave me a kick in the spleen that woke me up to a much more disconcerting pathology than a simple sore back from a small seat. This is my first step to recovering what I lost. Every moment that I can remember to dedicate to reclaiming the sense of wonder that I felt as a child, I will clap my hands around and be mindful of its terrifying, beautiful secret and the faith that it instills in me.