So, I’m out again, leaving for a week with the youth at church at 5 a.m. to drive to New Orleans. All excited about the departure time, raise your hands.
None? Yeah, me neither. The youth are having a sleepover at the church to facilitate a prompt departure time. Guess who’s sleeping in his own bed tonight and passing on an all-night capture the flag before driving eight hours?
This guy.
I’ll be in College Station for the next two days hanging out with Hammy. If you’re in the neighborhood, bring coffee, backgammon, or beer, and a book. It’s Spring Break, and we’re doing what grad students do during Spring Break: study.
Last night, I heard a friend read a portion from Annie Dillard’s American Childhood. First of all, if you’ve never read any Annie Dillard, might I suggest her classic Pilgrim at Tinker’s Creek? Maybe Teaching a Stone to Talk? She has the combination of powers of mystic and journalist that just kills me. Hearing her words is like taking a warm shower when you’ve pulled your back. First, the words soothe with a silver cadence that is reserved for those that have steeped their lives in poetry. If you’ve heard good poetry, ever wondered how Billy Collins came to be or lost yourself in the Four Quartets, you know what I mean. But that’s not where her words stop. After being seduced by their cadence, their lull and repeat, their ebb and flow like the evening tide, they get inside you. The shower becomes less a massage than a baptism, and your throat becomes full and your eyes become full and the follicles of your scalp alive with water everywhere.
You become part of the water. The water ceases to simply soothe, and you begin to yearn for your own body to up it’s percentages, break past 70%, 80%, 90%, and to liquify down the drain, that you too might be part of the water.
That’s reading Annie Dillard. She makes me want to catch a bus to Virginia and live in a cabin.
**
Hearing her last night reminded me of how much I love meditations and good writing. And so, claiming neither of those of my own writing, I’m back to writing what I started this blog nearly five years ago to do: write. Haikus have been a good entry point, to get me thinking about writing, but it’s time to start building. Partly because I’m spending all day reading bad writing for the most part, and partly because good writing often has bad objects in mind (Tom Perotta’s Little Children is the first example to come to mind: don’t waste your time), but there’s catharsis in putting good writing down: there’s prayer in it. And I need prayer. And so, I need writing. I need to get back in the water, hopefully, to start shedding skin cells, drinking it in in little sips, and hopefully, to shut my eyes under it.
The haikus will come back time and time again, as needed, or as Sean and Kevin demand them. Or Riley. But I need to write again, mostly because I need to pray.
A Haiku:
Dear Emo Barrista,
One day your hair will wither
So furnish your soul.
It’s time.
To all things there is a season, and I think that blogging may have had it’s season, for the time being. I started in 2001 with a circulation email with good stories, meditations, reflections, deep thoughts. It’s been a long time since I’ve had anything to say quite like those early emails, or like the earliest posts when this blog was in its first of three incarnations.
Basically, the tank is dry, and coming up with anything to say is more work than pleasure. I love writing; words move me, and I need to immerse myself them in them again, but more for my own soul than for giving them to anyone for the moment.
And so, this isn’t goodbye forever. Just for now. I’ll leave the blog up for your perusal, but the content here is going to be fixed for the near future. I may start the email missives again; I may just take up journaling, something I haven’t done in months. Either way, know that it’s nothing personal. I’m just dry.
It’s just time.
See you when I see you.
So, the weekend was pretty amazing. If you’ve called and I’ve been absent, it was because I was taking in New England air, coastline, and chowder, or because it was I got back and have been bombed by the massive amount of work waiting for me. In the words of Good Will Hunting, I had to see about a girl.
Be warm, be filled, and I’m off to figure out what Dante’s doing with his description of Paradise. You think that Hell was crazy? Wait until you try to decipher what’s going on with the celestial hierarchy. I’ll just say that Thomas Aquinas loooooves to talk and doesn’t talk with any kind of brevity.
I’m moving this blog somewhere by the first of September. I’m open to suggestions.
This is not a drill.
It seems as if summer is the time for blogs to nap, and thus, mine apparently has been intermittently sleeping on the job. It’s been six days since the last post, and with German breathing down my neck, I can’t promise I’m going to be much better for the next few weeks. I was out to Little Rock all weekend, and in Shreveport the weekend before. In August, Kevin Still is doing a mini-road trip, and before then, I have some devos to finish for CBF and a class to survive. Oh, and two papers to try to figure out how to resurrect before September.
Word of the summer: intermittent.
Projects of the summer: Stay mobile.
As of 5 p.m. tomorrow, my semester is officially done. No more papers. All assignments accomplished. One more minor presentation to deliver, and all is said and done.
And so:
If your life was a movie, what’s the title? Who plays you, and who’s your sidekick co-star?
