Born Into Becoming

It's Hard Down Here (a poem for Advent)

2011-12-21T23:41:00.000-08:00

Holy, holy, holy!
Lord God Almighty!
Now might be a good time to say
we miss you in the worst kind of way,
'cause it's hard down here--
hard, I tell you!

Holy, holy, holy!
All the saints adore thee,
throwing down Crown Royal every night
in crystal glasses filled with ice.
We drink 'cause it's hard down here--
hard, I tell you!

Holy, holy, holy!
Thou the darkness hide thee,
we come bowed down with grief,
barnyard shepherds in need of relief.
See, 'cause it's hard down here--
hard, I tell you!

Holy, holy, holy!
Merciful and mighty,
have mercy on us who thirst for this--
peace and justice joined with a kiss.
It's just so hard down here--
hard, I tell you!

Holy, holy, holy!
Lord God Almighty!
Oh! How we await thee,
'cause it's hard down here--
hard, I tell you!

A Common History

2011-12-16T22:22:00.000-08:00

I just finished a powerful collection of poetry by Natasha Trethewey called Native Guard. Her poems are haunting, filled with the paradoxical beauty and brutality of the South as experienced both historically and personally. In addition to her content, I love that many of her poems have more formal structure than the free verse that I'm used to reading.

Her collection is also dear to me because it adds one more elegant voice to the relatively few who tell the story of what it means to be biracial in America, particularly in the South. Though she was born in a much different, much harder time than me, there is nevertheless overlap in our stories. One of my favorites from the collection is below:

Southern History

Before the war, they were happy, he said,
quoting our textbook. (This was senior-year

history class.) The slaves were clothed, fed,
and better off under a master's care.

I watched the words blur on the page. No one
raised a hand, disagreed. Not even me.

It was late; we still had Reconstruction
to cover before the test, and -- luckily --

three hours of watching Gone with the Wind.
History, the teacher said, of the old South --

a true account of how things were back then.
On screen a slave stood big as life: big mouth,

bucked eyes, our textbook's grinning proof -- a lie
my teacher guarded. Silent, so did I.

Pillow Frame

2011-11-14T19:21:00.001-08:00

I am driving, cutting
through fields of sorghum
and soybean, but
all I can see is the dying
day fire, glowing behind
clouds pink and blue,
a familiar hue,
like pillow shadows
framing your face flushed
and drunk after
making love.

On Hip-Hop Salvation

2011-06-13T10:51:00.000-07:00

I think part of what is interesting about [The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao] is that it just takes the idiom of hip-hop as a given. And a lot of times in hip-hop literature, they make a big fuckin’ deal out of it. The thing is, once you single it out as an element or as an aesthetic, I think there’s a problem. For me, as someone who grew up in this world just listening to it, we had this understanding that it was just normal. It wasn’t something you became fanatical about, it was just a part of everyday life. Hip-hop for us wasn’t like “hip-hop is life,” it was just normative, man. I thought that that was what was really important in Oscar Wao. I wanted to make the hip-hopness of the book normative, and not something that was sensational. Which I think is very important, because one of the things that happens with this economic shift in hip-hop from a local market to an international brand is that they were really trying to push people into becoming this sensational lifestyle, this almost pseudo-religious practice. And when we were coming up in the Eighties, it wasn’t like that, man. You loved hip-hop, that was that. But you didn’t think of hip-hop as this salvation. Now there’s a lot of corporate money in getting young people to embrace hip-hop in ways that would seem very strange to a lot of people from my era. If you took kids from 1986, 1987 and time-traveled them to right now, I think they would find some of the ways that people are like “hip-hop is religion” or “hip-hop explains the universe” really weird. It was meant to be an organic part of people’s lives, it wasn’t meant to replace people’s lives.

-- Junot Diaz

The rest of his interview with Stop Smiling can be found here. Thanks to John Pattison for passing this on a couple years back.

The Lesser Jihad

2011-05-03T00:48:00.000-07:00

Do you remember when your friends and family could walk with you all the way to the gate at the airport and give you a hug just seconds before you boarded your flight?

Do you remember when you didn't have to take off your shoes or submit to naked X-ray pictures going through the security line?

If you have darker complexion and a beard like me, do you remember when you could read the Qur'an on a flight without worrying about whether the other folks in your row thought?

Do you remember when the government did not have permission to tap our phones by reason of the Patriot Act?

Do you remember when we at least pretended McCarthyite witchhunts were a bad thing? (Please follow the link and take time to read some of the comments)

Do you remember when the the most infamous Cuban body of water in American history was not Guantánamo, but the Bay of Pigs?

Do you remember when we didn't care much about our president's middle name or want to see copies of his birth certificate?

Do you remember?

I still maintain that fighting and defeating political and/or religious enemies is the lesser jihad. As has always been, the greater jihad is defeating the enemy within ourselves.

Our own prejudices and predilection for injustice do not hide in locked down bunkers in northeastern Pakistan, but instead flaunt themselves in sensational newspaper headlines and viral email forwards about the danger of shari'ah law overturning the constitution. These are the poisonous fruit of a flourishing tree of fear-mongering and hate that has deep roots in the psyche of our country, and ultimately in each one of our hearts.

I pray that we will have the courage to fight the greater jihad. As-salamu `alayna.

אלי אלי למה עזבתני

2011-04-05T12:08:00.000-07:00

Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

This is not a rhetorical question, the answer to which is already known.

This is not an interrogative question, the answer to which can be stated clearly.

This is a cry of deep pain and despair, for which there are simply no words.

When our care for loved ones stirs a desire in us to say something--anything--to try and ease the fire of unfathomable pain, we would do well to remember God's initial response was silence.

In that silence, resurrection power had time to speak louder than words.

Let us consider carefully our response to other people's suffering. Very rarely are the answers that fit into words sufficient.

Ghosts

2011-04-04T03:17:00.000-07:00

Ghosts
are watching me
on bustling campus walkways pulled
toward rooms of drab florescent bulbs,
inducing convalescent lull.
As I lay me down to sleep
and rise again to coffee need,
they're watching me bemusedly.

Ghosts
are calling me
with wedding bells aloft and ringing,
from window sills where doves are winging
through heavens rent apart with singing.
Laughing in the yard, they are
a choir of love for all the parts
I've hidden in the closet's dark.

Ghosts
are urging me
to look their way and witness how
they walk the line but don't allow
their consciences to weigh them down.
Floating on the midnight sea,
they have not ceased condemning me,
nor will they heed my guilty plea.

Ghosts
are keeping me
from resting in peace.

Change

2011-01-31T05:27:00.000-08:00

Editor's Note:I am aware that all of the links below are from one news source. I must plead laziness and my inability to gauge my small readership's reactions to using news sources like Al-Jazeera. Nonetheless, the links are good topical starting points from which you can search for coverage in other media.

I am in no way advocating violence, rioting, or looting. However, if you have not been able to keep up with the news lately, big things are afoot in several parts of the world right now. Of course, the events garnering the most media coverage are the mass protests in Tunisia (which resulted in the abdication of a president and subsequent governmental collapse/reshuffling) and Egypt (the results of which are still to be determined).

Before those events, things were already heating up in Lebanon with the collapse of the unity government and angry protests in the street after Hezbollah legally forced the ouster of Prime Minister Saad Hariri, son of assassinated former premier Rafik Hariri. In addition to Egypt, the Tunisia protests have also had a milder ripple effect in Yemen and Jordan.

As I said, big things are afoot. Again making a disclaimer that I do not support violent protests, I want to publicly confess that the recent events stir a certain amount of enthusiasm in me. Why?

Because change can happen.

Change is happening.

While I am immensely grateful for the freedom of speech that allows me to keep this blog and express any opinion that I want, I at the same time get tired of how much us Americans confine ourselves to whining in the ethereal world of the internet. We use our Facebook status updates to complain about what we see as faulty legislation. Many of these people are using Facebook to compel thousands of people to hit the streets in protest.

There seems to be a wide gap in our usage between the words "social" and "media". We don't mind the media part, giving our own views a venue or letting our media personalities carry the "conversation" (ha!) forward. But what about the social part? The actual mobilization of people to come together to do something in society? Why are Glenn Beck and Jon Stewart organizing our political rallies?

Again, I do not overlook the fact that Americans have the right to exercise their freedom of speech. Where I currently live, it is impossible to access this blog without using certain software, and none of my friends here have heard the faintest inkling about what is going on in Tunisia and Egypt. I am very grateful for our right to assemble and exercise free speech.

In fact, that's my point. Let's use those rights! Do you know how much we could accomplish if we spent half as much time getting to know our neighbors and brainstorming ways to make grassroots changes as we did listening to political commentators or watching "Jersey Shore"?

And in case you are hesitant to embrace such activist enthusiasm because of the tinge of violence in most of the above reports, please take note that the media has given much less coverage to what appears to be the largely peaceful dawning of a new age for the people of Sudan.

Hope is founded on the potential for change. It's time that we tapped that potential.

A Short Commentary on Selective Memory in the Pursuit of Empire

2011-01-09T09:09:00.000-08:00

For background on the following, join in the conversation on my friend's blog about the new edition of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn which replaces the epithet "nigger" with "slave". Please note that when I critique empire, I am not critiquing a singular party or movement, but rather the entire American project that rests on the lingering idea of Manifest Destiny. The following is a slightly elongated revision of the comment I left in response to the above post:

Empires thrive on the rewriting of history, and in its short history the United States has shown itself to be adept at this exercise. The problem with the word nigger is not that it’s an ugly spot in our history we don’t want to look at. The problem is that it is a reminder that a previous injustice was in large measure remedied (and that only a generation ago), and thus there is power in the populace to continue effecting change within the structures of empire. Such reminders are dangerous in the extreme and to be avoided at all cost.

From the days that slavery was abolished, the word nigger was used to keep ideological chains on so many black Americans who either transitioned to the semi-slavery of sharecropping or migrated to the cities of the North. Physical violence was paired with these verbal chains in order to communicate one message: “You may have been freed from slavery, but don’t think that EVERYTHING is going to change. White people are still in charge.”

The battle over vocabulary is a battle over imagination. If a country where the word nigger could not be used with impunity was imagined and then realized, why not imagine a country where Latino students can critically examine history from a minority perspective without being accused of sedition?

Such imagination cannot be given room to grow, so the solution is to get rid of words and stories that serve as touchstones of communal memory, which in turn is the foundation for communal transformation. There are two main options to be rid of such words and stories. The first option is to co-opt them. Think of how Martin Luther King Day fixes in time the nation's victory over its own weakness of racism, rather than propagating Dr. King's radical critique of the military-industrial complex and economic inequality.

The second option is simply to delete such troublesome words and stories. Czech author Milan Kundera illustrates this well in a passage from The Book of Laughter and Forgetting:

People are always shouting they want to create a better future. It's not true. The future is an apathetic void of no interest to anyone. The past is full of life, eager to irritate us, provoke and insult us, tempt us to destroy or repaint it. The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past. They are fighting for access to the laboratories where photographs are retouched and biographies and histories rewritten.

It is this latter option which the well-intentioned professor and editor of the newest censored version of Twain's novel unwittingly chooses with his attempts to make the work more accessible to young readers.

Goodbye, “nigger” – you and all the power (good or bad) in your utterance belong to the past, not the future.

New

2011-01-02T05:26:00.000-08:00

Yesterday afternoon on my way home delicate snow crystals gently dusted the sidewalk. Due to the dry climate, it rarely snows here in the lower altitudes (7000 feet), so I didn't think much of it. A few hours later I emerged from the front door to find that it was still snowing, a tiny layer had accumulated on the surface of the roads, sidewalks, trees, and bricks.

I know the last part of that list is kind of odd, but bricks are really quite a phenomenon here. Because there is never-ending construction in Chinese cities, and particularly in our slightly rundown Eastside part of town, there are often building materials piled all over the place. Our part of town additionally features many piles of rubble of the hundreds of houses and tiny storefronts that are being demolished to make way for "development". I noticed as I was walking last night that the thin layer of snow blanketing the piles of brick rubble gave them the eerie feeling of ruins.

Apart from those ruins of the recent past, everything else looked new. Even as I was walking, I knew it was temporary. Soon the tread of boots, the trace of dogs, and the dim neon of drunken urination would sully the shallow purity glowing around me. Nonetheless, it was a fitting sight for the start of another year.

As I was walking around 7 p.m. on the first day of the year in China, the denizens of American Samoa were ringing in 2011 in whatever style Samoans celebrate. Except for two tiny Pacific islands on the very edge of the international date line, practically the entire world was artificially united by our clumsy demarcations of time. For all the disharmony in this world of ours, those few moments still descend upon us in which we feel that, somehow, there is a chance for a new start. It is in these moments where we are faced with a difficult question - do we dare to hope?

I am looking forward to and hoping for some things in this new year:

*Scoring respectably on my first national Chinese proficiency exam
*Securing a longish term residence here in Western China
*Taking concrete steps toward the completion of a significant writing project
*Attending the weddings of two of my favorite people (Natalie Ray and Alexis Harmon)
*Learning how to cook at least five Chinese dishes
*Losing enough weight to wear red leather pants
*Thinking better of wearing red leather pants
*Ending my five year absence from New York City
*Attending a Food for Thought reunion of some sort
*Talking to kids who were just babies when I left the States
*Writing and recording at least three songs

There are of course many more things that could be on this list, but I wanted to leave room to tell you that if you are reading this I am most likely more grateful for your friendship than you realize. As I'm cresting 30, sleeping in a bunk bed and still in school without letters behind my name, I have become certain that I will never have much in the way of money. But there is this - I am well loved and feel rich beyond measure. I pray that you may all be rich in love in 2011!

The Fight for Peace

2010-11-07T23:59:00.000-08:00

I live in a region that epitomizes the ethnic strife and attitudes toward violence of a nation that comprises approximately 20% of the world's population. There is so much about the particularities of this region's situation that I want to write about on this blog, but in my current living arrangement it is unwise to do so. Nonetheless, I am prompted to write something that might bring the "unspeakable" into focus. So it is that I find myself again drawn to the subject of nonviolence.

While it is easy to point at governments, the media, video games, and other "impersonal" structures as the main perpetrators of violence, I am finding again and again that the finger ultimately points back at us--ordinary people. Almost daily I am confronted with often uncomfortably frank conversations about ethnic prejudices which can lead to conflict. On the more benign level, I am asked several times a week if I like to play basketball or "street dance", two activities that are most closely tied to local conceptions of my identity as a black American. Those with whom I have cultivated more of a relationship talk about depictions of black men in American movies as being ultra-violent and dangerous. "But, you're not like that," a few friends have said, one of whom admitted that he was nervous when he first met me because of his preconceived conception of black men.

The reality is that very few black people make their way through this part of the world, and the few prejudices in place have more to do with the ignorance of absence than anything else. However, the more concerning prejudices are rooted in deeply communal, deeply personal ways of interacting with cultural differences. My province is home to a wide array of ethnic minorities (a complex concept in Chinese society which has filled volumes of scholarly works and can hardly be introduced in blog post) with various linguistic, religious, and cultural affinities that sometimes come into conflict. These conflicts can arise in a multitude of situations.

For example, in regards to food consumption, Hui Muslims will only eat at restaurants and homes that are Qing Zhen, literally "pure and true", implying the complete absence of pork. That means that any restaurant or home where pork has ever been cooked or served is out of the question; even cups touched by lips that have eaten pork can be considered unclean. This can lead to awkward situations where a Hui person is invited to a Han Chinese person's home and will not eat or drink anything offered to them to guard against contamination. This awkwardness can expand into offense in socially specialized environments like weddings, banquets, and business dinners.

In many ways, local people are accustomed to this arrangement, with public places like school cafeterias and grocery stores making concessions for Qing Zhen dietary restrictions. However, the imbalance of power in hospitality (ie, Hui can host Han, but not vice versa), such an important part of this society, often leads to what is in practice a habitual lack of contact with members of the "other" group. This mutual absence creates space for ethnic cultural "straw men" which have little in common with the real people who they represent, and these "straw men" are passed on through various mediums to later generations.

The problem with straw men is that they have no brains. They are not rational beings capable of thoughtful adaptation to the complexities of their environment. As such, they can be looked down upon those who live according to subhuman instincts and impulses, or even worse, seen as objects. This characterization in turn provides justification for prejudiced actors to employ violence to resolve conflicts of interest. After all, you can't reason with something that is subhuman, can you?

This may seem like harsh overstatement, and perhaps it is, but the consequences of violence that I see around me require harsh analysis. In many ways, violence is often controlled in the public spaces of the United States. Sure, you can watch UFC matches on television and play Grand Theft Auto video games, but uncontrolled displays of violence are generally socially unacceptable. It is often in the shadows of back streets where people get jumped or mugged, inside houses where husbands abuse wives. Here, these acts of violence are profoundly public. Men can hit women while they are walking down the sidewalk, and groups of young men can shower a rain of blows on a lone victim, all without expecting much interference from passersby unless it is a police officer, a monk, or a pesky foreigner. Violence is in some ways the norm.

When it comes to intercultural strife, small incidents sometimes escalate in more widespread vandalism and acts of violence. Just yesterday in a small town a few hours from my city, I heard the story behind a spurt of violence three years ago. A Hui vendor and a Tibetan boy had a disagreement about a purchase, and the Hui vendor reportedly struck the boy. Whether or not this event actually happened as it was told, the result is that the Hui vendor was beaten badly. That beating fed deeper feelings of offense and enmity which led to the chanting of slogans advocating violence against all Muslims (including those who were not Hui), and a mob formed which began to vandalize Muslim restaurants and beat unsuspecting Muslims out on the street. Soon, the slogans began to include other ethnic groups, and it can be safely said that at some point people participating in the mob did not even know what event sparked the entire thing. It didn't matter. All that mattered was the opportunity to unleash internal rage on nameless, faceless "others" who were clearly the enemy.

Do you see how easy it is for the "straw men" to become objects of violence? While this might be an extreme example, I think it is particularly pertinent for Americans today. On the global level, there is the ongoing American warfare against "enemies of democracy" which extends from the Revolutionary War to the Civil War to today's War on Terror. In each instance, the enemy has to be depersonalized and essentialized as vessels of opposition to our own goals. According to the conventions of nation-state governance, this is the approach required in order to be a head of state. The dissonance which this creates in the thoughtful actor is captured beautifully in a recent article about Obama's visit to India.

On a more personal level, I remember when my former roommate (who is also African American) joined the military shortly after 9/11. Several months later we were chatting online and he used the term "ragheads" in regards to Arabs. I was taken aback by his use of this racial epithet, and chastised him for aiming prejudice at Arabs when black people had been the targets of that exact kind of racism for years.
As he began to defend himself by referencing the 9/11 tragedy, I began to wonder what kind of training he was receiving in the military. Don't get me wrong, I am not accusing the military of training soldiers to be racist. However, I am asking if there might be a connection between the depersonalization that fuels prejudice and the depersonalization that my ex-Marine buddy said was necessary to eliminate the hesitation that most people experience before pulling the trigger with a human being on the other end of the barrel.

I don't want to pick on the military alone. The military is simply the embodiment of a human tendency to depersonalize those we consider "other", and especially those whose goals come into conflict with our own. We can point at the statistic that robberies are less likely to become violent if the victim mentions her family or tells the perpetrator her name. Personalization of the victim makes it harder for the victim to be objectified. I wish I remembered where to find this article, but there was a report several years ago about the reduction of violence and negative perceptions between Palestinian and Israeli youth who played sports together (does anyone else remember this?). The list goes on, but the salient point seems to be that if we are forced to personalize the "other", we are less likely to commit violence against them.

I think this highlights a famous but often unheeded teaching of Jesus--to love one's enemy. Most of us stumble over the seeming impossibility of such an idea before we consider the power that it might have in its accomplishment. Missionary to India and friend of Gandhi, E. Stanley Jones, writes in The Unshakable Kingdom and the Unchanging Person in response to the common objection that "love your enemies" is an impractical command:

Love your enemies, turn the other cheek, and go the second mile when compelled to go one. Impossible idealism -- you would be everybody's doormat, everyone would walk on you. Would they? The aim of a quarrel is to get rid of your enemy. Suppose you strike back and give blow for blow. Do you get rid of your enemy? You fix the enmity by very blow you give. By turning the other cheek you disarm your enemy. He hits you on the cheek and you, by your moral audacity, hit him on the heart by turning the other cheek. His enmity is dissolved. Your enemy is gone. You get rid of your enemy by getting rid of your enmity.

If prejudice and violence are rooted in our own view of the "other", is it truly possible to get rid of our enemy by getting rid of the enmity in our heart? By viewing those who oppose us not as depersonalized opposition to what we want, but as persons who can change in response to their environment? What if our enemies are confronted with nonviolence rooted in the affirmation of their own personhood and ability to change? Can they remain our enemies?

Assuredly, some people can. However, I think that the early Jesus movement, the Indian independence movement, the American Civil Rights movement all illustrate that many people cannot remain enemies in the face of such nonviolence rooted in belief in the possibility of redemption for actors of violence. These movements also illustrate that those committed to nonviolent resistance are also committing to self-discipline and personal suffering which most of us do not have the courage to take on willingly. Yet, if we willingly choose that discipline and suffering, there is tremendous power for justice and redemption.

Looking back over this post, I see that I have mostly been rambling incoherently. Typical. If I would only write smaller posts on a more regular basis, that might be avoided. Nonetheless, scrambled though it may all be, I'd be interested in hearing your responses. Until then, peace be with you.

Temples and Holy Places

2010-10-05T01:25:00.000-07:00

My previous post has served its purpose - enough of you have asked when I'm going to post again that I feel sheepish if I sit in front of the computer and don't write. So, since there is a slight element of "forcing it", don't expect too much :o)

I was walking around today and put my finger on something that had been ruminating under the surface for awhile. One of the main roads in my town runs from east to west, and on this road are two of the religious landmarks near the center of town - a large mosque and a Christian church.

The Dongguan Grand Mosque is on the east side of the city center, and was featured in absentia in a post last fall marking Eid al-Fitr. It is one of the largest mosques in China, and is rumored to annually host the largest gathering of Muslims outside of Saudi Arabia celebrating the end of Ramadan (I'm still looking for concrete statistics to support this). Dongguan is a cultural landmark for the many Muslims in our city, and the area surrounding it is full of small shops and markets selling Islamic merchandise - head coverings and hats, prayer rugs, halal food, religious books (in Chinese, Arabic, and Persian), gold-plated plaques featuring intricate Arabic inscriptions of the shahada, etc. It is a lively, bustling area, and one of my favorite parts of China for its unique Chinese Islamic flavor.

But, after four years of being away, I noticed a few months ago that something had changed at the mosque. When the sun went down and the street lights fired up, lights also fired up on the mosque. This beautiful mosque, which features a blend of Tibetan, European, Turkish, and Arabic architecture, is now covered in very large, very tacky strings of lights. It's like a little piece of Vegas tucked in a corner of Mecca. It would be completely shocking if not for the fact that this is how most parts of Chinese cities look. If you keep heading west on the road, you get to the more economically developed part of the city, chock full of shops splattered with neon, blasting Chinese and Korean pop music. It is the mosque and the neighborhood surrounding it that are the true anomalies.

Further down the road, at the intersection that marks the city center, there is another out of place structure - a church steeple. There many reasons this steeple is out of place, but perhaps the most prominent is that it is the only church building I recall seeing in this part of China. When I visited Shanghai in the spring, I was surprised by how many church buildings and steeples dotted the skyline. There were even DENOMINATIONS! It was quite surreal, and highlighted the oddity of this church steeple in my largely Muslim, Buddhist, and agnostic city, proclaiming in bold white letters: "Church of Christ" (not the denomination).

The other prominent aspect contributing to this building's oddity is the fact that it is just off the city center intersection. Everything around it is stores, malls, shopping centers, and restaurants. There are perhaps more lights per square meter than in any other part of the city. There is a huge video screen projecting various advertisements above one of the few Kentucky Fried Chicken franchises in our 落后 (backward/underdeveloped) little city. Everything around this steeple screams of hustle and commerce, hardly a place for religious reflection.

The stretch of road between the mosque and church is nothing but stores and markets. Walking through that strip today, I was struck by how many people were walking alongside me, raptly drinking in the blaring music and signs announcing 30% off sales. The people were incredibly diverse - Muslim women wearing glittery headscarves and 4-inch heels, Tibetan monks wearing scarlet robes and leather jackets, Chinese college students sporting the newest and coolest tight jeans and spiky hairdos, and elderly people walking slowly with hands that survived the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution clasped behind backs. It is these last who have witnessed the rise of a new religion to come alongside the Buddhism and Islam which have had roots in the area for centuries.

I am not the first to write about the religious aspects of consumerism, nor will I be the last. I am not particularly in the mood to present an academic case for it either. However, I will say that today, the temple of consumerism had more pilgrims than the mosque and the church. The lights that have crept up the front of the Dongguan Grand Mosque and the barrage of blinking signs obscuring the view of the Church of Christ steeple seem to suggest that this is not temporary. The coffee shops and merchandise booths inside some American mega-churches hint at possible milestones farther down the road for these religious landmarks in my "developing" city. I suppose everyone has different ideas of the benefits or detractors of this trajectory, but very few seem able to imagine anything different for the future. Consumerism seems to have won the religious franchise wars.

I'm rambling now. I guess I'm stirred because the other day on Facebook an acquaintance asked if people thought their faith had impacted their behavior. It's actually a multi-layered question that was apparently sparked by a conversation about the correlation between adherence to a faith system and what is considered "bad" behavior. Maybe I'll post my response on here sometime, but if that question is aimed at the religion of consumerism, the answers that arise are a bit disturbing.

I'm reading a novel by Margaret Atwood called Oryx and Crake, which through graphic depictions of the gradual excesses of consumeristic, self-centered behavior leading to societal apocalypse has regularly sent chills down my spine. Self-centered behavior encouraged by rampant consumerism leads to a valuation of comfort and security above all else. As Kahlil Gibran asserts in The Prophet, this lust for comfort is risky business:

And tell me, people of Orphalese, what have you in these houses? And what is it you guard with fastened doors? Have you peace, the quiet urge that reveals your power? Or have you only comfort, and the lust for comfort, that stealthy thing that enters the house a guest, and then becomes a host and then a master?

Ay, and it becomes a tamer, and with hook and scourge makes puppets of your larger desires. Though its hands are silken, its heart is of iron. It lulls you to sleep only to stand by your bed and jeer at the dignity of the flesh. It makes mock of your sound senses, and lays them in thistledown like fragile vessels. Verily the lust for comfort murders the passion of the soul, and then walks grinning in the funeral. (You can read "On Houses" in its entirety here)

Perhaps the religion of consumerism serves the god of comfort. Perhaps that is why many times religion can end up looking very similar to consumerism and the political/economic orders that uphold it as a unifying (and pacifying) strategy. When the lust for comfort has not only become masters of our houses, but of our churches, mosques, and temples, what then becomes of the passion of the soul?

There has to be more to religion than whispers of comfort, or else religion becomes a murderer. But I'll leave that for another post :o)

Rebirth?

2010-09-26T23:38:00.000-07:00

It would be generous to say that this blog has been lethargic this past year, especially considering it has been completely devoid of activity for more than three months. Coming soon, new life will be breathed into this stale little corner of the interwebs. Significant personal experiences have transpired in the interim, and I have no idea how to breathe enough life into my overambitious prose to convey even a fraction of the changes that have taken root in my mind and spirit, but I will try.

It makes me wonder about Lazarus...after Jesus raised him from the dead, how different was he? Was he like a cancer survivor who learns to drink life down to the last drop? Or was he like someone who has a near death experience and grows increasingly strange, like Jeff Bridges in Fearless? It seems like dying might really influence your personality, maybe to the same extent as becoming addicted to cocaine or Lost.

I'm wondering whether my writing voice will change in proportion to my internal changes, or whether writing again will reignite hidden parts of myself that have spent the last year in deep slumber. Whatever happens, I am excited to discover once more the mystery that writing somehow has a life of its own. I hope you'll join me.

The Look

2010-06-02T10:42:00.000-07:00

I know the look well. It is a heartbreaking composite of hurt, astonishment, and disappointment. There's no way to count the number of times I've seen the look, but I can say with some amount of confidence that I paid no attention to it until I was about 16. Up until that point, I didn't care enough to notice.

See, the look is fleeting, though it comes in two stages. In the first stage, it springs out unexpectedly - lifting eyebrows, widening the eyes slightly, and leaving the mouth slightly agape. In the second stage, everything tightens. The mouth seals itself into a grim line and the outside corners of the eyebrows lift at a slight angle as the eyes narrow. If you are not paying attention you will miss it, because depending on the person, it can happen in milliseconds. You have to become attuned to its presence. It was a long time before I realized its cause.

See, the look appears on a friend's face when I am a jerk. I don't mean a jerk who is kind of sarcastic or makes fun of someone. I mean a jerk who says something with malicious intent, who uses all the intimate knowledge he has gathered about someone to cause quick and devastating pain. You may have a hard time believing it, but I am one of the most skilled at doing this that I know.

See, beyond the oft discussed phenomenon that nice guys seem to finish last when it comes to young ladies' attentions and affections, there is another disturbing paradox. When you are seen as nice guy, nobody believes it when you tell them that your heart is full of all manner of darkness and venom. I know this is true, because as long as I can remember people have called me a nice guy.

The crux of this paradox is that being hurt by a nice guy hurts all the more because one has not put protections in place. One might wonder what he has done wrong, because how else can he explain what just came out of such a nice guy's mouth? Another might wonder could be wrong with her, to have let herself be so vulnerable with a guy just because he was "nice". All of these emotions are contained in that split-second of a look. Amazing, isn't it?

I'm not saying I'm a bad guy. But, if you haven't seen this other side of me, you will. It's only a matter of time. Sadly, there are lots of folks who can testify.

I saw the look recently. As soon as the words were coming out of my mouth, I knew the result. And in that moment, I was once again surprised by the forcefulness of the internal resistance to my immediate understanding that what I had said and done was wrong. Too often, the resistance wins. I did not apologize.

But sitting here typing at 3:00 a.m., that look haunts me. It unlocks the door to a host of memories in which I don't remember the words spoken, but I vividly feel the assault I have made on someone for whom I care. It's one of the worst feelings in the world.

One time in college, I was talking to a romantic interest on the telephone, and she was telling me how she did not understand this guy she had dated before who had said things to deliberately hurt her. When I told her I had done the same, she was quiet for a long time before she breathed, "But, why would you do that to someone you love?" I could only answer with a silence that whispered, "I don't know".

Every time I remember the look, it asks the same question. I still have no answer.

Desert Time

2010-05-14T04:05:00.000-07:00

Brilliant, blistering sun
beating down on head
exposed to the brutal blanket
of heat burning the brand,
the mark of wanderers on the back of
your neck, behind your ears.
Lips cracked, cheeks chapped,
calloused lids worn thin by
dust flying on the arid winds
blowing through barren dunes adrift
on a sea of emptiness.
This is the desert.

And when gritty eyes open,
they see differently, clearly,
like they were born again
for softer vision.
Rough edges are worn down,
your heart tuned to the rhythm of hope
working its way around the mountainside.
You know now, like love,
sowing hope is hard work;
but the harvest is peace,
an oasis on the sandy steppes
where you find rest for your
weary, wonder-full soul.
This is the desert.

Wild Beauty

2010-04-26T09:52:00.001-07:00

I want to write something beautiful about you,
to remember you were beautiful to me once,
in the days when our eyes could not
slake their thirst for
the other.

We were lovers in the most elemental of ways,
carved from the embrace of crimson
clay bed and balmy breeze
beneath the blazing
sun's heat.

But I will always remember the night you
leaned into my lips and sighed, "Qué
delicioso y tan peligroso,
mi amor," before you
wept.

To this day I don't know if your leaving was
blaming or saving you, but I believe in
fate too. It goes down smoother
than rejection and/or
self-protection.

Surely fate is the only way to tame your wild beauty,
confine it to a frame of reference that gives
deference to the capricious graces
of love, lest it escape into
heartache.

Earthquake in Yushu

2010-04-15T07:44:00.000-07:00

Below is an email I've sent to some friends to update them on the situation in Yushu, some borrowed from another friend's blog. Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions or concerns.

Hello friends,

I have heard from some of you who were concerned for my safety, so I wanted to send out a short note saying that I am ok. I live in the same province, but Xining is about 800 km north of the earthquake zone in Yushu, which is where I attended the Horse Festival in 2006. It's been a tense couple of days, with people waiting to hear word from family and friends who live in the area. All of my friends are ok, but most have lost friends and relatives.

Many who live in the region have lost everything, as 85% of the houses and buildings collapsed. Yushu is at 12,500 ft. elevation, with temperatures hovering around freezing. Since the earthquake hit early in the morning, many people are stranded outside without warm clothing or blankets. Tents, blankets, and medical supplies should make their way to the area in the next 24 hours. I think the latest news reports I've read put the death toll at around 600 with 10,000 injured, but the word I'm getting from folks down there is that the death toll is well over 1,000, including a four-storey schoolhouse that has yet to be excavated.

As it stands, the government seems to be responding quickly with rescue efforts, but damage to infrastructure is hindering their progress. The Yushu government issued a call for all trained medical personnel to come as quickly as possible, but there has been bureaucratic resistance in Xining to allowing foreigners on student visas to respond to this call. A large number of these medically trained expats are on student visas, so this resistance could have devastating effects. *Update - immediately after writing the last sentence, I heard from my friend, who is a nurse and student, and she was able to get permission to go. Hopefully more will have success tomorrow.

There is an organization here doing fantastic work on the Tibetan plateau called Plateau Perspectives . "P.P." is a non-profit team of scientists and medical personnel working with Tibetans in southern Qinghai on development initiatives (agricultural, educational, etc.) and environmental conservation. P.P. is (as of today) the ONLY non-profit organization that has been directly asked by the government to participate in the relief effort. There is a group that is heading out today from P.P. to start the advance work.

Last night, a friend created a website for P.P. to give daily updates on the earthquake. It is also set up to allow PayPal donations, if you want to give financially to the relief efforts. Will you take a moment and click on the following link that says "Yushu Earthquake Relief"?

Thank you for your concern, friends. Please keep the people of Yushu in your thoughts and prayers,

Ramón

Politics and Poetry

2010-04-08T02:46:00.000-07:00

It is National Poetry Month, and the torrent of poetry that I was hoping to unleash on my unsuspecting readers has not materialized. It's been two years since my poetry took a great leap forward through regular deadlines for production, but I'm finding it hard to set that time aside this year. Perhaps studying Chinese is enough for now; it can certainly be poetic at times (i.e., the idea of jealousy can be expressed by saying "eating bitterness").

In lieu of being a productive writer, I have been trying to keep up with international news. The U.S. government has been undertaking enough provocative political maneuvering to raise China's hackles and eyebrows, that I find it necessary to stay abreast of global happenings in case visa troubles are on the way. In so doing, I came across two recent stories dealing with political resistance and the role of violence. The first is from the familiar Israel/Palestine conflict, but it reveals another side to the story that we don't often get to hear. The second is about the recent violence-tinged overthrow of the government in Kyrgyzstan (highlighted in U.S. news sources due to uncertainty surrounding a US Air Force base used for operations in Afghanistan). This is the same government which came to power as a result of the peaceful Tulip Revolution in 2005, but has failed to deliver on promises to turn away from autocracy.

What does it take to live in peace? What does it take for an enemy to become a neighbor, or even more astonishingly, a friend? These questions have deep political, sociological, philosophical, and even theological underpinnings. But, I will let poet Khalil Gibran's parable "Peace and War" from his collection The Wanderer speak to that issue as only Gibran can:

Three dogs were basking in the sun and conversing. The first dog said dreamily, "It is indeed wondrous to be living in this day of dogdom. Consider the ease with which we travel under the sea, upon the earth and even in the sky. And meditate for a moment upon the inventions brought forth for the comfort of dogs, even for our eyes and ears and noses."

And the second dog spoke and he said, "We are more heedful of the arts. We bark at the moon more rhythmically than did our forefathers. And when we gaze at ourselves in the water we see that our features are clearer than the features of yesterday."

Then the third dog spoke and said, "But what interests me most and beguiles my mind is the tranquil understanding existing between dogdoms."

At that very moment they looked, and lo, the dog-catcher was approaching.

The three dogs sprang up and scampered down the street; and as they ran the third dog said, "For God's sake, run for your lives. Civilization is after us."

A moment of clarity

2010-02-21T09:49:00.000-08:00

Walking to dinner a few days ago, I glanced to the north. On the days when the haze of coal smoke is light and the winds are not clogged with dust, a blanket of soft clarity falls upon the mountains at sunset. Every detail stands in sharp relief as shadows crawl sleepily across weathered peaks peering intently into the coming night.

Why do things usually become clear just before darkness falls?

Feeling nostalgic...

2010-02-06T08:52:00.000-08:00

I've been feeling nostalgic all week, so I was going through the archives of my blogs that have been lain to rest. I found this poem from five years ago and surprisingly, I don't hate it yet. Since most of you did not know me (much less know I had a blog) then, I figured it wasn't too much of a faux pas to post it again.

Portlanders, this mountain is none other than our beloved Mt. Hood.

Without further ado:

In the Shadow of a Mountain

The mountain on the horizon has brought us here
to sit on the sun-drenched curb
in the short time remaining us
Brown bottles filled with good spirits
and the echo of comfortable laughter
I've always had a weakness for girls who like beer

The heat of summer's fall burns the smell
of asphalt onto our lips and tongues
leaving parking spaces hazy and indistinct
newly painted lines undulating dreamily
in the mirage of farewell

But, goodbyes are never for good with us
and the lines around our love rarely keep their places
between sister and brother, friend and lover
or the silence that's born in feeling too much

As clumsy words tumble reluctantly
into the space between our long-eyed gazes
to identify the intimacy

Unfolding in this surprising scene
we're setting the horizon free

In the shadow of snow-capped majesty

© 2005 E. Ramón Chaparro

Haiti Relief Donations Revisited

2010-02-03T05:07:00.000-08:00

Another great article in the NY Times on the fund-raising aspect of disasters.

Thoughts?

an excerpt from "I Love You, Me Neither"

2010-02-03T03:20:00.000-08:00

"This failure to communicate is an abuse of good timing. In him we have in him a mensch of great talents and capacities, including sleight of hand, limericks, baking, and perfect renditions of Serge Gainsbourg songs despite knowing no French. He is above all a listener, a true auralphile with a sincerity of task not used for self-serving ends, making him one of the great potential finds of all time. However, even with this key piece peripheral equipment, he is still running on a standard operating system, and so is naturally drawn to that who does not share such a drawing. Human nature and associated foibles are simply a programming error, it should seem to logical people.

She could use a listener, but she’s too distracted to know this. Distraction is a much easier than introspection, even with the horrible return on investment. She, as aforesaid, craves basic satisfactions, but not really from the troglodytic sort that she incidentally appeals to as much as those that are different from her parents. Again, her stunted sensibility for taking in the world outside of her skin should be a condition of extreme allure, yet in combination with her misinformed conscience, it makes a stew that is awful for sharing. He knows that being of sound mind, but who is driven in quiet moments by his mind?

This for her is tragic, or at least downtrodden, as it waylays her from the substance and thrill she most wants. She loves magic, witty poems of a dirty slant, desserts, and new music, and yet she is 15 billion miles from the good-looking guy sitting immediately to her left that encapsulates the exact parts she could use: a less-brutal love.

She likes him too. Just not now."

--Jason Leary

Read the rest here on the excellent blog project 30POV

My tentative 2¢ on Haiti

2010-01-23T08:04:00.000-08:00

Let me start out by saying, there are of course no easy answers when it comes to situations like this.

I tend to be a cynic, and so I have been waiting for nearly a week to post on the Haiti issue. It has been terrible to read about the destruction, thinking of the places I saw nearly 10 years ago that may have been lain waste in a few short minutes. Yet, seeing people's response to the horrific aftermath of the earthquake, and reading the calls for donations to Red Cross and other aid organizations, has been a good reminder that even if only for brief moments, most people still have some sort of compassion in them that responds to tragedy.

On the other hand, my cynicism continues because the reality is that these momentary outbursts of altruism are rarely sustained. If you have given for Haiti, and urged others to do the same, please understand this is not an attack on you. It is important to help support the massive rescue effort going on right now, as well as the increasing medical needs that are enveloping the area. A friend from high school posted an announcement that groups from my hometown were leaving immediately to go help out. But at the same time I was reading how aid organizations were having trouble landing their planes in the overcrowded airport, and while I'm sure they figured out a way to be useful, I fear a few things in the long-run.

First, I am remembering the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. In particular, I am remembering that the flood of money that went to the Red Cross did not always meet the needs of people in the affected areas. Tons of organizations organized trips in the first year or two to help with the rebuilding efforts there. As salient as those needs were, it quickly became obvious that the real bulk of time and money would be needed for a sustained rebuilding of the city (structurally and communally) over a long period of time. In the wake of excruciatingly slow progress in that rebuilding, we have witnessed such things as FEMA's infamous woes with the allocation and safety of their emergency housing trailers. Could we see a similar imbalance in how time and resources are allocated in Haiti, complete with inappropriate no-bid contracts and lack of accountability?

Second, though I make no claims to expertise, I did get the chance to go to Haiti for a very short trip in 2001 and saw up close some of the large-scale obstacles to stability in that country. Some of those factors, such as infrastructure, have come into play in the difficulties encountered in aid distribution (which is a constant problem in areas receiving large amounts of aid. We only heard about it in Haiti because of intense media coverage). Some of these obstacles have been in place for so long, that no amount of aid seems to do more than skim the surface of reaching long-term solutions.

Third, I'm very curious about what our responses say about us and our nations. There have been two excellent pieces in the NY Times on that subject. The first is an article about the amazing response to the earthquake from Israel and the soul-searching it has prompted for Israelis in regards to Gaza.

The second is an op-ed that tries to put the recent events in Haiti within a larger historical framework. I am not fully onboard with all of his historical analysis of Haiti's governance issues, but he gives a helpful summary for those of us who are not read up on our Haitian history. What I found most intriguing, however, were his treatment of the self-referential attitude of the US government and the US citizenry toward Haiti. Very thought-provoking indeed.

So, friends, continue to be generous. Continue to give of your time and resources. I only ask you to take a moment and consider what avenues might produce the most long-term benefit from the small part that we can do as everyday people.

Sour milk

2010-01-21T04:55:00.000-08:00

*Editor's Note: The following post is not only quite lengthy, but contains some references to bodily functions which might be offensive to some of my more delicate readers. While I have been known to occasionally veer off into the realms of sophomoric humor, I maintain that the references below are in fact essential as vehicles for my humble attempt to capture the humor inherent in intercultural encounters. With that in mind, please enjoy.

My friend Beth is working her way toward that elusive label of "expert" in intercultural communication (she would vehemently deny that label, by the way). She is the only person I know who hears my stories about being AfroNuyoRican, moving from New Jersey to Arkansas, or traveling in China and responds not only with empathy, but understanding. In the midst of experiences here, I find myself wondering what she would think. So, this one's for you, Beth.

酸奶 suānnǎi - yogurt (lit. sour milk)

Yogurt was never one of my favorite foods in the States, though I would sometimes get inexplicable cravings. I may or may not have on occasion "borrowed" a few yogurts from my roommate Jon's plentiful stash in the refrigerator (vanilla was my favorite), and I enjoy the plain yogurt that is sometimes served with Indian food. But, on the whole, my yogurt intake was pretty minimal.

But here in Qinghai, it has become something of a staple. This is mainly because I am incredibly lazy when it comes to cooking. Add to that a propensity for waking up late, and yogurt quickly became the solution to mornings when I woke too late to prepare breakfast before class. Soon after that, I came to know that apart from homemade yogurt, the prepackaged kind in the blue and white box is the best quality. On my more leisurely mornings, I found that a little honey and granola (if available) can transform this yogurt into a 180 gram cup of heaven (complete with small plastic spoon for your convenience).

Enter Sam. At the beginning of December, Marty and I were asked to host a friend of a friend for a week or two. This is not unusual for us, but it came at an extraordinarily busy time for us. So, we put out the extra blankets, gave Sam an extra set of keys, and told him though we would be scarce he should make himself at home. And he did, which I am glad of, because a week or two turned into a month and a half. After all, this is China.

Feeling a little guilty that we had been "hosting" a guest for nearly a week and I had only seen him once, I decided to stock up on some easy breakfast foods so he could at least feed himself. I got a bunch of eggs, some fruit, and (of course) yogurt. These kinds of quick foods fit Sam's somewhat spartan schedule - up before sunrise, wash up, quick breakfast, then to the library until 9 or 10 pm to study for the master's degree entrance exam, which includes eight subjects (the GRE sounds relaxing compared to the system here). Though our paths did not cross often, the steadily depleting stock of food let me know that Sam was not going hungry in the mornings.

Sam was the consummate guest, going so far as to wash my dishes and mop the floor. He was very solicitous on a couple of occasions where I had severe headaches and stomach issues, bringing home Tibetan medicine (which tastes horrible, but seemed to work) to alleviate my suffering, which I appreciated though he tended to hover a bit. In the end, despite our busyness, we also managed to become good friends. As a result, Sam invited me to come to his home in a Tibetan village about three hours from the city. I accepted and made plans to head down soon after the semester ended.

The plan was to say goodbye to my good friend Corrie last Friday night and then leave early Saturday to head down to Sam's village. But, I got little to no sleep the week before, and got to bed late Friday night. When I awoke on Saturday, I felt woozy and had a bit of a stomach ache, so I decided to postpone my departure. My break had begun, so there was no hurry.

After calling Sam with apologies, and receiving repeated instructions from him on how to care for my stomach, I spent the next few days catching up on sleep and getting my affairs in order so I could spend a carefree few days in Sam's village. I said goodbye to another friend Tuesday morning, and then caught an afternoon bus to the village. On that four hour trip, I received several text messages from Sam asking when I was arriving and whether I was having motion sickness (which I was not).

Now, I have to make both a disclaimer and a confession here. My disclaimer is that it is the cultural norm here for everyone to be involved in your health business. Not much is considered private in that way, and people happily dispense advice on how to heal your maladies with all the confidence of a physician at the Mayo Clinic. So, Sam's hovering, giving medicine, and texting about motion sickness may seem overboard, but fall well within the bounds of cultural acceptability. My confession is that I am still not accustomed to this cultural phenomenon, and I was getting a bit annoyed.

This annoyance increased when I arrived at the bus station and Sam's first question was, "Do you have a headache? Your eyes look like you are in pain." Granted, I had been having headaches most of the time he had been staying in my home, but I explained that I did not have a headache, but had just woken up when the bus arrived. He nodded, and after 30 seconds said, "I think you don't feel good. Did you have motion sickness?"

"No," I explained, "I had no motion sickness and my stomach feels fine. I promise I will tell you if I feel sick, ok?" He seemed to accept this and we proceeded toward the area where we could catch a van to his village. As we approached the vans, he suddenly turned to walk in the opposite direction and said, "I'm sorry, I'll be right back." I waited for a few minutes, puzzled, until he returned with a red bucket in his hand. "Yogurt," he explained. "I know how much you like yogurt." Then we took the red bucket on a van and headed toward his village.

When we arrived at his home, I was reintroduced to the double-edged sword of hospitality in these parts. There is no substitute for the amenities offered to guests - seat of honor near the warm stove, food and drink appearing from nowhere. It's truly amazing. But, there is also a sense of separateness that can be off-putting. It is not uncommon to be welcomed so lavishly and then for most or all of the hosting family to refuse to eat or drink, or even to remove themselves to another room. They are often preparing food or performing other chores, but the end result is sometimes that you as a guest are left alone or with one other person in a room who might not look at you or attempt conversation. This situation can be redeemable if the family member who invited you makes sure to engage you, but Sam trapped himself in a library for six weeks studying Chinese politics, and his social skills are a little rusty. So, there were a lot of awkward silences and general discomfort in the three days I spent there.

As soon as I arrived, Sam's sisters brought bread and milk tea for me. His mother (who does not speak Chinese) explained that there would only be bread, noodles, and tea for me. No special foods. It was a little discomfiting to have her say that straight out, but I was kind of relieved, feeling like I was going to be afforded some measure of insider status. And then came the yogurt.

Sam said something to his sister in their local language (more closely related to Mongolian than Tibetan), and a massive bowl of yogurt appeared in front of me. Looking around helplessly, I asked if anyone else was going to have some. "No," Sam told me. "None of us like to eat yogurt."

It took a second for this to sink in, but then I realized that the entire red bucket (probably 2-3 liters) of yogurt was for me alone. This in and of itself is embarrassing, to feel singled out in that way. But it was also daunting in that I could not see how it would be possible for me to eat that much yogurt in the two or three days I planned on staying (I found out later that Sam thought I was staying through Losar, approximately five weeks altogether). If I did not eat it, they would either throw it away (not likely) or endure eating something meant for me that they didn't like.

So, I ate this huge bowl of yogurt. And before they left the room, Sam's mother and sisters made it known that they thought it was a bad idea for me to eat yogurt 1) in the winter, 2) so late in the afternoon, 3) without eating something more substantial first (I had no idea that this was not dinner), 4) having had stomach problems. It is this last point that turned out to be the most uncomfortable. Apparently my headaches and diarrhea had been a topic of discussion with Sam's family before my arrival, and his mother did not hesitate to ask very specifically about loose bowel movements and blood pressure, and make suggestions about diet changes. Every time I came back from the bathroom, she or Sam would ask if my stomach was ok, and I would have to explain that I was only urinating. It was 特别尴尬 tèbié gāngà, or incredibly awkward.

When the girls left the room, I turned to Sam and said, "Bro, you gotta help me out. I don't know what's appropriate for eating, and when, so help me not to go against the grain, ok? And please, tell your mom I am not having any stomach problems!" He looked confused as to my requests, but agreed. However, the next two days would show that he did not understand that I was asking him to be a cultural guide for me, and he continually asked me to do things which put me in embarrassing positions of being utterly foreign and other. Ah, Sam.

The yogurt is the quintessential example of this. Every time we were sitting at the house, mealtime or not, Sam and his family would ask if I wanted yogurt. I was torn between feeling bad for turning it down, feeling more and more strange eating yogurt alone, and reaching the limits of yogurt consumption. Did I mention that I am lactose intolerant, and large quantities of milk, yogurt, or ice cream make my gastrointestinal environment quite lively? Yeah.

Tuesday night was short, and only involved one bowl of yogurt. But, throughout the day on Wednesday, yogurt was put in front of me five times (seriously), as well as several cups of milk tea. I would politely decline the requisite three times, but my hosts were persistent, so I took in more and more lactose. After the fourth bowl in the late afternoon, I was amazed that my stomach had not shown any signs of distress, and I even managed to avoid eating a bowl offered right before Sam and I went out. But, after dinner that night, with his mother in the room, Sam said, "Oh, don't forget the bowl of yogurt from earlier!" and placed the soon to be infamous bowl in front of me. "Oh...thanks, Sam," I said weakly. And then I ate my fifth bowl of yogurt.

Afterward, we went to see some of the students who were preparing dances for Losar, the Tibetan New Year. I had met several of the students in Sam's English class that morning, and they soon persuaded me to make a fool of myself trying to learn their dances. It was all fun and games for about an hour, and then it hit me - yogurt overload.

My stomach began to cramp suddenly, incredible amounts of gas made themselves noticeably present in the abdominal area, and my stomach began churning. I know this feeling. Usually lactose intolerance just gives me a bad case of gas, and maybe some cramping. I consider it a small price to pay for Ben & Jerry's Oatmeal Cookie Chunk or an extra-cheese Chicago-style deep-dish pizza (wow, three hyphens in a row!). But this feeling was different, yet familiar.

How did I know this feeling, you might ask? China. Three times before in China I have had diarrhea so bad I could not hold it long enough to get to a bathroom. Three years ago while I was traveling in northwestern China, I had a two week long case of the runs, and a couple times it was so bad it hit me just as I was leaving the hotel/house, and little slipped out before I could reassert control. The third time was during this visit, when I was in the top bunk and could not get down the ladder fast enough to get to the bathroom. It's an awful feeling, but one that has been mitigated in these situations by being very close to home and being alone or with someone else who is having stomach problems.

So you can imagine my horror when I realized that this was the feeling descending upon me while I was dancing with 50 or 60 Tibetan students, a good 5 minute walk from Sam's house. When there was a break in the dancing, I got Sam's attention and asked if we could go home and pointed to my stomach. He agreed, and after explaining to the teenage girls who wanted me to dance more that my stomach was bad (seriously, nothing is private here), we headed toward the door of their practice area.

But as we turned in that direction, a delegation of Tibetan young men intercepted us. The night before they had been reluctant to accept my confession that I did not in fact know how to tiào jiē wǔ (lit. street dance, which as you might guess means breakdancing), but this time they knew I could grant their request - to sing Michael Jackson's "Beat It". News travels fast in a small village, I've discovered. I had told Sam in private that I knew how to sing the song, that traveled to his sisters, and then to some of the local girls, and then to this delegation of teenage boys. Everyone knew that I could sing it, so there was an air of expectation. What could I do?

So, I agreed to sing a little bit, trusting/hoping that my muscles could hold. After all, this was just lactose intolerance, right? So I sang, they broke out in thunderous applause, and then Sam and I beat a path to the doorway (sorry, couldn't resist). As we walked through the dark paths of the village, I could only concentrate on one thing - hold on hold on hold on hold on.

Just as we turned onto the path toward Sam's house, my concentration slipped, and so did my muscle control. Just meters away from my destination, I added to my bowel woes in China. As soon as we entered the courtyard, I immediately locked myself in the outhouse, and relieved myself. When I was at a stopping place, I surveyed the damage from the initial slip. I had not brought a change of clothes, so I was quite relieved to find that the damage was negligible.

That's where the relief ended. See, my bouts with lactose intolerance generally revolve around flatulence. It's almost superhuman at times, but the consistent factor is that it takes a long time for it to subside. Thinking of the attention that awaited me inside, I decided to stay in the outhouse and massage my abdomen until the bloating had dissipated (I have to thank my abuelita for this trick).

As I began massaging, I realized that all of the concern for my stomach that I had been deflecting for three days was for naught. This incident would prove to them without a doubt that my stomach was irrecoverably weak, and that all their concern and medicine was warranted. It would prove to them the ills of eating yogurt, and reaffirm their belief that we foreigners really like things that are not healthy for us. In the end, I had to chuckle at how miscommunication, aggressive hospitality, and my inability to communicate clearly about my preferences and health had joined forces to guide me into one of the most embarrassing moments of my life. If anyone heard me laughing and farting in that outhouse, they must have thought I was a madman.

When I finally went inside, Sam was alone in the main room. Thankfully, his mother and sisters had gone to bed, though his mother had left inquiries about my stomach with Sam. He asked how I was, and I told him much better. I tried to explain lactose intolerance to him, but the language barrier proved insurmountable. Though my stomach was completely better at that point, I did not try to resist him when he offered me Tibetan medicine, and I knew I would have to take it again in the morning. I told him I was embarrassed, and he assured me I need not be.

This morning, something had changed. I had to take the medicine, as I predicted. But, when Sam went to work, his mother invited me to come eat in the kitchen with her and the sisters. She laughed when her daughter translated that I thought I would skip the yogurt and milk tea this time. I had a great conversation with all three women before I went to meet Sam at his school, and it seemed all the stiffness of the previous two days' hospitality was gone. Perhaps my embarrassing situation had opened a doorway for me to be more normal in their eyes. Whatever the reason, we laughed together a lot this morning, and they were very warm and genuine in inviting me to come back to celebrate Losar with them.

I know that when I visit again in three weeks, and every time after that, Sam and his family will ask, "How about your stomach?" And I will love them for it.

Night Doves

2010-01-17T10:14:00.000-08:00

I have a sister.

She is

filled with spring,

tingling with life,

singing with the

night doves.

She is

soft and gentle

and ripe with

hope.

She is not

beyond her years,

but wears them

like tears,

flowing freely

to leave their

trace down her face,

turned toward

home.

Snapshots at the Threshold

2010-01-07T22:47:00.000-08:00

Happy New Year, everyone! I have neither the energy nor the time to wax philosophical, so I thought I'd just fill in some of the rather significant blanks from my nearly two month silence.

*Thanksgiving was great. A bunch of us lao wai (foreigners) went to our friends' house about three hours outside of town and made a bunch of decadent American-style food. I'm told my sweet potato casserole was a modest hit.

*Christmas was also a lot of fun, but super busy. I somehow was asked to give a speech in Chinese for my university's foreign student Christmas party, and I somehow ended up playing Christmas carols for a small nativity play at my friend's party. In the process, I picked up a cheap suit (about $20 US), wrote a short song for a friend, forgot to bring a gift to a white elephant party, and rode an "ice bike" for the first time. Some pictures of me from these events have been posted on facebook, in case you are a visual learner.

*It was rumored there be fireworks for the New Year, so me and three friends headed out to the alleged location at 11:45 to find it empty and unlit. We decided to stay anyway, unpacked our bag of food and drink, crumbled up some puffed corn and threw it in the air at midnight as our own firework display. A minute later, people began hanging fireworks out the windows of the surrounded apartments and buildings, and they set them off at the same time, creating a tremendous rumbling in the downtown area where we stood in awe at the park. Then we spied the actual firework display happening quite a ways from us. We began walking quickly toward them, but they ended before we arrived. As far as planning and execution, it was a failure, but as somehow magically happens in these situations, the memory sparkles.

*Somewhere in there we had some cold and snow. It wasn't much, but enough to spark memories of winters past. The snowball fight with my dad when I lost my glasses. A crystalline night kiss in New England. The frigid day in St. Louis when our heat broke and I had to wait at home with ice on the inside of the windows for the repair man. Sledding down Art Hill. The great Portland blizzard of 2008. Walking through calf-deep snow with longjohns, a bottle of red wine, and a lingering case of lovesickness.

My time here has been wonderful, difficult, and confusing. I miss home, which primarily means Portland, but as time goes on means so many other things. My family in New York, Florida, and Arkansas. My friends in Little Rock, St. Louis, Chicago, and Portland. Well-crafted beer and strong coffee. Family Dinner and Food for Thought. Coffeeshops, libraries, and forests. Writing and hiking. The ocean. Quiet.

I have wonderful friends here, family really. It feels ridiculous and unfair to continue looking back when they are here, but that's how it has always been for me, I suppose. The more that I leave home, the more that I carry it with me, and it is distractingly beautiful, whatever it is.

I like it here, but it is not home. The people in my neighborhood still stare and get their friends' attention when I walk by. I hear them laugh or remark: "Foreigner", "African", "Muslim". There are many things I expected to cause me culture shock, but most of them passed quickly. This one persists, and creates an enduring dissonance. Above all, home is supposed to be where I belong. I don't belong here.

But I love the language and many aspects of the culture. It's a place that I see myself coming back to again and again with eyes opened by the passage of years, new wonders presenting themselves in familiar places. I guess in that way, this place has become part of the home I carry with me, and that is wonderful, difficult, and confusing.

I am looking forward to 2010. I said 2009 would be a year of action, and I moved across the Pacific Ocean. I think 2010 will be a year of reflection. I'm ready to set a course within myself, purposeful and yet uncertain.

I'm ready to strive for something that has been just out of my grasp, pull myself up onto that heretofore invisible mountainside, and see the horizon from a new perspective. And for once, I don't want my vision to be clouded by planning how to get down to the valley. After all, I only have 357 more days on the mountain.

Postcards Without Postage, pt. 8

2009-11-10T06:51:00.000-08:00

Dear Robin,

It's not the same without you here. Not that you've ever been here before, but in your own way you had come with me every time before. This time I am wandering, looking for clarity, searching for answers. My return has been more hail mary than bullseye, and I keep wondering if divine hands are cupped in the midst of the mob, ready to cradle me from falling.

I wonder why your presence shielded me from this anxiety; wonder why you gently accompanied me down the frantic streets and through the manic markets; wonder why you laughed with me on the evenings when some odd event reminded me of your patchwork idiosyncrasies. All I know is that the sense of wonder has faded this time around. I'm told the newness has run its course, but I wonder if I just finally ran out of excuses to pretend there was an us.

Yet as I wander, I am finding love in this place. The drive-by "Hello!"s from nervous school boys; the guesses that I am from Africa, Pakistan, or Malaysia; the clusters around heated Mah Jong arguments; the elderly ladies dressed in red jogging suits and dancing to techno music on my way to class; the sweet potatoes roasted whole inside a sooty barrel; the white-hatted men carrying prayer mats to the mosque for evening prayer; the beautiful woman who sells stinky tofu in the alley behind the market, wants to marry a foreigner, and just learned that there is an ocean between here and America; guests who come bearing gifts of yogurt or salty crackers.

There is room for me here. Amidst all the strangeness, I feel welcome; like you made me feel. Amidst all the familiarity, I feel estranged; like you made me feel. I wonder, will I ever be able to hold this place and these people in the parts of me that forever belong to you? You never were one for cohabitation.

No matter the answer, I will take it all in. I will spread my arms, expand my diaphragm, and breathe China down to the tiniest toenail of my soul. And when I exhale and let go, I will hope once more that she will stay.

Ramón

Ghost Poster

2009-10-07T10:57:00.000-07:00

Hello friends,

I just wanted to write a quick note and let you know that the reason you are not receiving responses from me on blogger and facebook is that I am not able to access those websites on a regular basis. My good friend Dave Johnson has agreed to be my ghost poster this year, posting blog entries that I am sending to him through email. If you would like a response from me please send me your email address through a facebook message or on the blog and I can respond through gmail. Thanks for the encouraging wall posts, responses to my blog, and facebook messages. You guys are the best, and I miss you dearly.

Ramón

Eid Celebration Pictures

2009-10-03T07:12:00.000-07:00

My friend Amanda is a great photographer, and unlike me, she woke up early enough on Eid to get some pictures of the gathering in front of the mosque. I heard yesterday that the Eid gathering at the Dongguan Mosque in Xining is the third largest in the world after Mecca and Medina. At first this sounds outrageous, but considering the various geographical distributions and geopolitical concerns, it's plausible. At any rate, here are a few pictures from this year.

Celebration, 9/20/09

2009-09-28T08:50:00.000-07:00

*editor's note: this post deserves accompanying photographs, but I am really bad at remembering to bring my camera places. In the future, please accept substitute pictures from a previous year's Eid celebration.

The invitations poured in throughout the week. "Come celebrate Eid with us!" We had been waiting for these calls to make plans for one of the biggest days on the Islamic calendar--Eid-ul-Fitr. The celebration of the end of fasting during Ramadan. While it is my understanding that each region's imams and sheikhs determine when the fast begins and is broken based on the cycles of the moon, it seems the Hui Chinese ahongs (same as imams) really enjoy the spontaneous nature of the timing. A few nights before the end of Ramadan is the Laylat al-Qadr or Night of Power. This night commemorates the first revelation of the Qur'an to Muhammad (pbuh) and some Muslims will stay at the mosque all night, praying and reciting Qur'an with the belief that the heavens are most open on this night for blessing and revelation from Allah. We kept asking all our Muslims friends what night it was, but they said the ahongs had not announced it yet. Finally, last Tuesday morning we get a call informing us, "Tonight is the Night of Power!" That's how it works out here.

Eid was a bit of a mystery as well. It is usually around 30 days from the start of Ramadan, but the exact date depends on the sighting of the crescent moon. Nonetheless, it was "announced" that Sunday would be the day (perhaps the government here requires more concrete planning?), though official confirmation could not be given. That did not stop the invitations from flowing in, and the more calls we got, the more excited I became. It is said that around 200,000 Muslims go to the Dong Guan Mosque on Eid and I was anxious to see it. After that, there was all the good food awaiting at whichever homes we visited. I've observed Ramadan once before, but not in a community, so no Eid celebrations. Today was my first.

After a late Saturday, M and I did not make it up for the traditional small breakfast of honeyed dates, nor did we make it to the khutbah (sermon). We did make it to the mosque just as the crowd was dispersing. I have no way of knowing if it was truly 200,000 people, but I will say that traffic was stopped for blocks around because the streets were filled with elated Muslims wearing white caps and colorful hijab, many wearing new clothes or shoes. Everyone was saying to one another, "Salaam!" and "Eid mubarak!" to us as we walked through the crowded streets and alleys around the mosque. It was incredible. We saw some friends. We also saw tons of beggars who receive a special zakat (charity) from the mosque for the holiday, as well as collect a lot of small change from the worshippers at the mosque. They had come from all the surrounding counties to the great mosque here in Xining. It was a sight.

My friend from the Middle East was approached several times to speak Arabic (true Arabic speakers are rare here), and people looked at me questioningly like I should be able to speak it too, but they weren't sure. My friend UE then started us on the long journey of bringing gifts to people's homes as they hosted us for Eid meals. Between 11:30 am and 7:30 pm we thanked our three hosts with four bags of fruit and a case of yogurt in return for three large meals. It was all delicious, but by day's end I was stuffed to the gills. I was assured by M that for Qinghai standards, these were small meals. Thank goodness!

I also made some new friends at these meals, a few who spoke very good English and few who patiently encouraged my Chinese and chopstick usage. One of our hosts is an influential man who was responsible for the development of sports in western China during the Mao years. He was a bit...impressed with himself, but was the consummate host. He even had us go to a park for post-meal exercises! Our second hosts were a family of brothers, the youngest two of whom were policemen. We crammed eight of us around a small table and ate and talked (or listened, in my case) and laughed. Again, impeccable hospitality, accompanying us down six flights of stairs to the gate in order to say goodbye. Finally, after a two hour break, M and I made our way to his good friend's family's house. We had so much food and so much fun and were again shown the most amazing hospitality (though they are comfortable enough with M to tease him quite mercilessly. I was assured that it would not be long until I would suffer the same fate). We finally returned home at 11:30 pm, very full and very satisfied. There was nothing else to say but, "Eid mubarak".

On a train between Nanjing and Xining, 9/1/09

2009-09-22T15:25:00.000-07:00

I don't usually travel like this, unaware and uneducated about the terrain I'm passing through; uncertain of east or west, mountains or sea. I think it is adding to the wonder, a welcome companion on my second lengthy train ride in three days. This time it's 27 hours, but at least I have a hard sleeper. As I said, I don't know where we are right now, but it is beautiful. We most recently passed a sign for Xin Ta Shi, so I'll have to look up what province we're in later.

Without knowing the attendant characters, and without knowing the tones for the words, I want to add a letter and mistranslate the name of that town as "New He Is." I find that name fitting if inaccurate. This is all new to me, even with my previous experiences in China. Our train is cutting through valleys and tunneling through mountainsides, following the winding path of a sluggish river. It's smallish now, but a half hour ago there were wide gorges sculpted by eons of erosion that left marks on the quietly green mountains rising into the mist. We are riding through clouds, tunnels, clouds again.

The people along this route look to be exceedingly poor. This part of China I recognize. Here are houses made of mud bricks that match the clay beneath. There are healthy looking crops that lie dangerously close to a river that would flood with a good afternoon rain. Despite the dreary landscape, satellite dishes occasionally dot the rooftops. Between tunnels, little scenes of the everyday emerge -- a line of young girls sport brightly kerchiefed uniforms with matching backpacks and climb the steep hillside to get to school; a circle of old mean and women kick and stretch in preparation for tai chi; a woman with a baby strapped to her back fills a washtub with water for dishes or laundry; workers sit and laugh on their break.

All of them dependent on one another, dependent on this polluted river which is nonetheless a source of life. I go back to my statement that they are exceedingly poor and I challenge it. They are all smiling. They have what they need for today and lacking that they have each other. At least so one could think watching from a train window.

Kate's apartment, Nanjing, China, 8/29/09

2009-09-17T06:41:00.000-07:00

The rain falls on the rooftops, a curtain of sound dulling the sharp edge of life teeming in the noisy streets below: honking horn, revving engines, vendors hawking their wares, customers haggling over the prices. We are all made one beneath this baptism of strained silence, listening for who knows what. The still small voice? It is washed away before the anxieties we create as the gentle pitter patter of a drizzle becomes a roaring downpour.

There have been many adventures already. The day I arrived is a blur, but I did get a ride from the airport and got to catch up with an old friend for the evening. He set me up in all kinds of ways, including giving me a cell phone for the week of journeying ahead. Unfortunately, he was not able to get an early ticket for the next leg of my trip, so I had to leave Beijing earlier than expected and had the privilege of experiencing my first hard seat ride on a Chinese train.

For the uninitiated, Chinese trains have four categories of seating. There are hard and soft seats, and hard and soft sleepers. The hard sleepers are open compartments with six platform beds each, stacked three high. There are also fold out seats with small tables in the hallway running past the compartments. These are the best value for a long ride. Soft sleepers are four beds in a closed compartment, which sounds amazing except for two things. First, the beds are not that much softer (hearsay), and second, people are allowed to smoke in the closed compartments, whereas the hard sleepers are smoke free. Hard and soft seats are just what they sound like, though the hard seats on the newer trains area actually quite nice.

The plan was to get a hard sleeper from Beijing to Nanjing on an overnight fast train. My travel time would be about 9 hours and I'd arrive refreshed in Nanjing ready for a day of activities with my dear friend Kate, who I've known since third grade. However, the only option available to me for the next four days was a hard seat on a slow train to Nanjing, travel time 15 hours. Ah well, it could be worse, right?

Yes, it can. And that was proven when I got on the platform for the train to find that every car was filled to overflowing with people. When I say overflowing, I actually mean it. See, I learned that afternoon that if your ticket does not have a seat assignment on it, you are part of the "standing room only" overflow group. In addition, there is really only enough luggage rack space for the people in the seats, so imagine the sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach as I tried to force my way into the train car with a large suitcase (49 lbs.), large camping backpack, and another small backpack. I literally could not get into the car, so one of the attendants opened the door on the other side and forced me in. People were sitting on the floor everywhere, in front of bathrooms and in the space between cars. It was insane.

This was a true China experience. I stood with pack on, suitcase in front of me, fielding dirty looks from people jostling each other for floor space, for two hours before a fellow passenger started speaking English with me. His English name was Apex (there are a lot of interesting names like that here), and he was on his way from work in Beijing to visit his family in Shandong Province. He is an aeronautical engineer working with experimental planes, and his English was impeccable. He was a man of peace. He helped me eventually get my bags situated as people disembarked, rotated standing and sitting with me, shared some food, and talked to me for nearly five hours until his stop. This man was a true blessing.

The packed train car reminded me of the buses in Guatemala, except this time we weren't hurtling down a mountain, honking the horn as we went around curves. People were everywhere, on top of each other, holding babies and sitting on the tiniest edges of occupied seats. A lot of people got off at Apex's stop, and I was bequeathed his seat for good. At this point it was near midnight and and time to sleep. Ha...yeah. Sleep came in 10 minute fragments, interrupted by my head lolling into the empty space of the path between seats or by the food cart guys passing by yelling out what they were selling and running over my foot. I did not get REM of any kind.

But I made it! When I first got on the train and saw there was nowhere to put my bags or sit down, or even get further into the car, I considered leaving. I considered swallowing the 150 yuan (about $22) and getting a plane ticket for the following morning. I kept trying to tell myself it was an overrated adventure, an unnecessary hardship. There would be more worthwhile adventures. But, I felt something deeper at stake, so I stayed. I'm glad I did, but when those doors closed and I had all that stuff on me, the thought of 15 hours ahead was mind-numbing, soul-crushing.

Now I am here, and the 15 hours are behind me. I am, at long last, in China. There is so much familiarity here, yet so much strangeness. I really do not know the language, though it is resurfacing a few chunks at a time. It is exciting to be back, but definitely a little scary. One year. Wow. The scariness is really just the unknown, the inconceivability of it all. What will this year be like? How will I grow, a a student, as a follower of Jesus, as a friend, as a man? What will be the outcome of it all? It will be hard, but I must bring the lessons of Presence in Portland to bear.

Ramón, be HERE each and every day. The answers to those questions will grow out of well tended soil of the Present life. God is here. You be here too.

Airport, Vancouver, B.C., 8/26/09, 10:48 a.m.

2009-09-14T07:08:00.000-07:00

In a little over an hour the next year begins in earnest. I am exhausted. Yes, emotionally, but mostly physically. I'm running on about five or six hours of sleep in the last 48 hours. The emotions are dancing around the edges of my weariness, waiting to break out. I've come close to crying this trip already. I feel fragile.

And I feel alone. It sunk in while I was sipping my coffee bought with Canadian dollars that I really did not prepare for this trip. Obviously I was extraordinarily disorganized and did a shoddy packing job. But there has been even less mental prep, spiritual prep. The implications of leaving for a year still have not sunk in, nor has the weightiness of the various uncertainties. Other people have always handled the details for my overseas trips. They were the knowledge bearers before me. They let me focus on the spiritual, on caring for others. But now, it's just me. And I'm wondering about the basics--will I have a ride from the Beijing airport?

Either way, with all the doubts, the weariness, the feelings of loneliness; there is one thing I cannot deny. There is so much love for me in the pages of this journal. That means there is so much love for me in that city I've just left. That Portland. That home.

It came to me like an old friend a couple nights ago--this is my home. Portland is where I will return, in my heart and in my desires. I am not praying much these days, but my request is to be allowed to return. To really make it home. I wish it was easy enough to say I deserved it, to claim an equal trade for working as a wanderer these last years. But there is no deserving, there is only love.

Will I give it, no matter where I am, without reservation? Will I receive it, no matter where I am, without skepticism or doubt? It's much easier with these fellow broken vessels who are learning to live in love with and from me. God - that's harder. Despite my theorizing, it's hard to know (relationally, like conocer in Spanish) the love of God in these people who love me. But what else do I know of love? It grows on the Tree of Life in that Garden, lost in the fog. It grows at home.

Of Action

2009-08-17T19:21:00.000-07:00

Please excuse the woeful inactivity on this blog of late. I determined at the New Year that 2009 would be a year of action, and so it has become. In 9 days I depart for a year living abroad in Western China. I am going to a region in which I have traveled before, but much uncertainty lies on the other side of the dwindling hours.

I've never been a man of action. As this blog illustrates, I have some amount of comfort with words and the illusions they can spin, and admittedly have often used them to shield me from the reality of my inertia. Lack of follow through. Apathy.

I'd like to say I've turned a new leaf, but for today I will just say I've taken a step that I have not taken before. Some of you know this is my fourth attempt to move overseas. As usual in times of change, I have reflected on those earlier attempts and subjected them to the torments of my overly analytical mind. They have held up admirably, but I still wonder how much heart I put into those earlier attempts. I always question my heart.

But, constant analysis is another form of paralysis. I've used it as a shield too, masking my inability to decide with the veneer of a desire for deliberate wisdom. But this time, I just have to go. I don't know what it's going to be like, but I have to get there. So I'm going.

I don't know what this commitment to action will do to my blogging. I hope enhance it, but it certainly can't get much slower than it is right now. Stay tuned, and we'll see what happens. You see, things are happening in 2009.

Reflections on a love poem

2009-08-05T10:36:00.000-07:00

The point of 1 Corinthians 13 is that love is not our duty; it is our destiny. It is the language Jesus spoke, and we are called to speak it so that we can converse with him. It is the food they eat in God's new world, and we must acquire the taste for it here and now. It is the music God has written for all his creatures to sing, and we are called to learn it and practice it now so as to be ready when the conductor brings down his baton. It is the resurrection life, and the resurrected Jesus calls us to begin living it with him and for him right now. Love is at the very heart of the surprise of hope; people who truly hope as the resurrection encourages us to hope will be people enabled to love in a new way. Conversely, people who are living by this rule of love will be people who are learning more deeply how to hope.

--N.T. Wright, Surprised By Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church

Postcards without postage, pt. 7

2009-07-04T22:22:00.000-07:00

Dear Sophie,

It is the time of barbecues and bottle rockets, and I am once again reminded of you. Did you watch the fireworks tonight? Did you whisper confession to your companion that you have nightmares of real rockets raining down fire, cracking the veneer of peace in your sleepy satisfaction? Did you tell him under the flash and glow how you weep for the ravages of war?

It seems so long ago that we talked that way. Remember how we walked the city night in search of the final ingredients for our summer sauce? How we worked together until sunrise, juices mixing and simmering until all was just right?

Then, we waited. A good marinade has to settle before its true taste can be discovered.

But I awoke later that morning as a lone explorer. I don't know what secret conflict forced you to flee, but I want you to know that our recipe worked. It just needed time to grow into its full flavor. How I wish you had given it time.

From my house in Portland I can see fireworks flying to the heavens in every neighborhood for miles, and I cannot sleep for the flashing and popping. I am reminded how your heart was a restless refugee, afraid to stay and fight the battle to make someone, someplace, home.

Do you weep for me? Please do not, for healing has found me in this place. I hope it might soon make its home with you, a whisper of peace in the night air between us.

Ramón

Loquetur pacem

2009-06-27T22:34:00.000-07:00

The first thing I noticed was her smile. You just don't get many smiles like that in customer service––genuine, warm, and directed. I've given my fair share of fake smiles from behind the counter, mostly in response to the overwhelming lack of humanity I begin to feel at all the mechanical interactions and orders mouthed while talking on cell phones. But to see a genuine, warm smile directed at me is a rarity indeed.

The second thing I noticed was that she had a tattoo on her inner forearm written in another language. Sneaking glances, I suspected it was in Latin (I am in fact a language geek), so I asked what it meant.

Tattoos are funny like that. They can be intensely personal, and yet out in the open for all to see. They sometimes beckon, prompting the viewer to get below the surface level to what is beneath. In essence, I was really asking her, "What's the story behind that smile? What's your story?"

But there is only so much you can ask from behind a counter, from behind a green apron. Sometimes the divide between us is too wide to cross in a single encounter.

In a tiny village a few hours outside a small town with plastic palm trees in Western China, I once met poor Tibetan children who had some of the most radiant smiles I've ever seen. Contentment was written all over their faces (as well as curiosity at us foreigners) but without speaking Tibetan, there was little else I could learn about them. I remember being amazed at how little we take advantage of the opportunity to ask about someone's story when we speak the same language.

"It's in Latin," she confirmed before pausing. "It means, 'The Lord will speak peace over his people.'" As she said this last part, I watched the divide rise up between us. Her beautiful, beautiful smile turned heartbreakingly sad as she remembered her story. As she remembered what had moved her to inscribe those words indelibly upon her fading body. "It's from when I used to be a Christian."

Then she walked over and stirred cream into her coffee.

One of my favorite things in Islamic cultures is how Muslims greet one another with "Asalaamu alaikum", Arabic for "peace be upon you." It reminds me of Luke's story about Jesus, how he sent out seventy-two of his disciples in pairs to the villages where he would soon arrive, villages like that one in Western China. The first thing he told them to say was, "Peace be to this house!" I think there is forgotten power in the pronouncement of peace over one another.

When the terrible things happen, there are often no meaningful words to say. Just empty promises or well-intentioned but misguided assurances that everything will turn out fine. But, the reality is that many times things do not turn out fine. What is there to say then? When we have sat with our loved ones in silent mourning for seven days and seven nights (like Job's friends before they started pronouncing judgment and giving advice), what is left to speak but peace?

In the speaking of peace over someone, we are not describing reality as it is. We are speaking of how it should be. There is simultaneous acknowledgment of the desperate brokenness of a situation, the hope of healing, and our utter powerlessness to bring it about alone.

But in speaking peace over someone, we are also saying, "Don't be afraid. You don't have to do it alone," and it is powerful. It is the first thing Jesus says to his gathered disciples after his resurrection––peace to you.

It's what I wanted to say to her from behind the counter, from behind my green apron. Not because she used to be a Christian, but because she is sad that she used to be a Christian. Because maybe hearing the Lord speak peace over us starts with some guy on the fringes of mainstream Christianity who smells of coffee and chonga bagels saying, "You don't have to do it alone."

Maybe next time I'll have the courage to speak across the divide, "Asalaamu alaikum."

A city in the clouds

2009-06-24T23:28:00.000-07:00

The nights grow longer now. The solstice has carried us over the apex of daylight hours, is guiding us down to the valley floor. What's down there? It seems strange to be at the beginning of summer and realize that we are in decline. Is that what gives these months such frantic energy? We are reminded with each sunset that the days are fading, their exuberance shortening, our somnolence growing.

Portland is renowned for its rainy months, but driving tonight I was struck anew by a persistently overlooked feature of this city––the clouds. Being only a little more than an hour from the coast and mere minutes from the entrance to the Columbia River Gorge, we find ourselves spectators of the mass migration of clouds of all shapes and sizes, colors and consistencies. Quite simply, they are spectacular.

The clouds fit the temperament of Portland's denizens. We are a hapless lot, locked in step with dreams bigger than our ambitions and besotted with the startling enchantment of this place that will never fully be ours. Portland is a city of dreamers indeed, with all the attendant depression and alcoholism tucked into the folds of bewilderingly genuine creativity and optimism.

I was watching Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back a few weeks ago and was reminded of Lando Calrissian's Cloud City. Here is a man who was a gambler, scoundrel, and thief trying to make it legit as a city administrator of a mining outpost. He was trying to leave a lifestyle behind, but the cutthroat in him had to be resurrected when offered the opportunity to ensure his security by turning in a friend from the old days. Even before Darth Vader kept changing the deal, had Lando's betrayal already lost him the real Cloud City––his dream of being legit?

All you non-Star Wars fans can pay attention again. Portland is a Cloud City of sorts. Local author Chuck Palahniuk called his offbeat tour guide of Portland Fugitives and Refugees because of the double lives that so many of us lead. We often come from all over with demons on our trail, chips on our shoulders, and the elusive dream of a new start clutched against our breasts. This makes for some great art.

It also makes for some spectacular failures. What happens when the dream falls to the cold, hard ground of reality below? What happens when it shatters into a thousand tiny fragments of rejection and regret?

Oh, how painful it is to watch a dream descend from the heights of possibility! See the horde of disgruntled pilgrims in its wake! Do you see those migrant dreamers over the horizon, swaying with the ebb and flow of the tide? In waves, we come and go, realizing the demons on our trail were all along in our heads. The dream could not escape the seeds of nightmare buried beneath the surface of our reinvented selves. So we leave again, in search of a cloud bank sturdy enough to hold our legacies.

The clouds are gathered on all sides tonight, towering behind the West Hills and lurking behind Rocky Butte. They resemble mountains, dark and impassive, peaks reaching for the sky. It could be a brochure for another country, Portland being swallowed up by some granite utopia beyond the Columbia.

But I look at the crescent moon hanging in the sky, and I can't help but laugh at how much it looks like nothing so much as a glowing toenail clipping. The things I want to cut off keep growing, inexorably. They remind me that this pilgrim has a long way to go in finding the balance between hope and disenchantment. I'm just glad I am not alone in the journey, for the days grow shorter.

Airplay Cafe

2009-05-28T23:50:00.000-07:00

I'm beginning to have a new place in Portland just a couple months before I leave. It's called the Airplay Cafe, and it's on the corner of E. Burnside and 7th.

Frankly, a lot of the events are geared toward families with kids and are not my cup of tea. However, there's a great open mic every Wednesday night with a featured songwriter (such as Dustin Pattison, who you should check out), which also allows musicians to use the house band during the second part of the evening. But, tonight I moved from giving mixed reviews of Airplay to being a fan. Tonight, there was jazz.

There were four young players who swung hard and funky – Farnell Newton (trumpet), Greg Goebel (piano), Eric Gruber (bass), and Chris Brown (drums). Do yourself a favor and follow the links to check out these guys' music, because it's phenomenal.

I first saw Farnell Newton a couple years ago at the Monday night jazz jam at Produce Row, and then saw him later with local Cuban band Caña Son. He's an exciting player who excels in straight ahead jazz, funk, soul, Latin, hip-hop, and what sounded tonight like a hard-bop/funk fusion.

I first saw Greg Goebel playing at Wilf's with Kate Davis during this year's Portland Jazz Festival, and saw him again at a Produce Row jam. He is quickly becoming one of my favorite pianists in Portland, with harmonically complex and rhythmically adventurous solos that are always tuned in to what the rhythm section is doing around him. He is slated to play a long run of shows with local modified bass master David Friesen in support of Friesen's newest CD release, Five & Three.

This was my first time to hear Eric Gruber, and I liked what I heard. He really helped amp up the energy in the rhythm section and had some fantastic harmonic interplay with Greg on some of the solos. He only took a couple solos himself, but they were harmonically rich and rhythmically driving. He plays with tenor saxophonist Devin Phillips' New Orleans Straight Ahead and the Andrew Oliver Sextet.

I had never heard of Chris Brown, and I can't believe it took me so long. He was leading a lot of the songs tonight and brought high energy and tons of rhythmic complexity. They played one or two of his compositions and a few of his arrangements, all of which were stellar. He's a Portland native (son of the famed Mel Brown), but has been on the East Coast for a decade now, where he teaches jazz theory at Rutgers and plays drums in the New York scene with luminaries such as Benny Golson, Essiet Essiet (see the link for Produce Row above), Kenny Davis, and Roy Hargrove.

These guys put on an amazing show. You have two more chances to catch them as a quartet before Chris heads back East. Tomorrow night they'll be at Jimmy Mak's at 10pm playing as Itutu and Saturday night at they will be playing as the Farnell Newton Quartet at a very cool new Portland event (which sadly ends in mid-June) called 'Round Midnight at 11:30pm.

Do me a favor and go to one of these shows, since my early work schedule will not allow me to enjoy a repeat performance. And after Chris leaves, be sure to catch Farnell and Greg whenever you can. They're well worth the affordable cover fees that Portland's underappreciated jazz scene currently charges.

Journals on fire

2009-05-22T10:05:00.000-07:00

Throughout my childhood I would periodically have these intense episodes of overwhelming anxiety with no apparent cause. It's been ages, but I had one last night. All the crazy bunched up in this tiny space just behind my left ear lobe, and it felt like my soul was going to vomit.

When this feeling comes over me, I want to lay in bed in the dark and stare at the ceiling. But then I feel out of place and I want to eat a pint of Ben and Jerry's Oatmeal Cookie Chunk and drink a Sam Smith Oatmeal Stout. But then I am acutely aware that I am self-medicating and I put on a movie and try to tune out the low level jangling in my lungs.

I can't be around people in that state, mostly because any reasonable person asks if everything is alright and what's going on and is there a reason. I can't talk about this thing very well. It makes me feel like a psycho, and how do you say to someone, "It's cool, I just feel like yelling at the top of my lungs and banging pots together and setting my journals on fire. Don't you ever feel that way?" More frightening is if I somehow aim my anxiety at them and lash out. People avoidance is the name of the game when these moments hit.

Thank goodness for text messaging and email. In the past when I had access to neither I would just hole up in my room and read fantasy books or play video games, sensing that with each page turned or level beaten that I was drifting further away from the relational moorings that make me human. At least now I can communicate with people (in an admittedly one-sided fashion) without having to interact with them that moment. It helps me to feel like I'm still connected, still held together somehow. And now I'm blogging about it to keep that feeling going, I guess.

Deep breath...

Ok. Time to start the day.

One man's house

2009-05-18T21:40:00.000-07:00

I have been sitting in my living room, staring at my laptop, for nearly a half hour. I want to write something profound and moving, because I feel it all swirling just beneath the surface. The other night I took semi-detailed notes on an event I wanted to write about, but the thought of pulling them out and composing a coherent essay is exhausting.

There are other thoughts running through my brain these days, such as the complexity of love in all its forms – familial, fraternal, romantic, divine. And then there is that most elusive love of all, the love of one's enemy. I definitely don't have the energy for that post right now.

No, I am sitting here staring at my laptop, because I am mostly enamored by something so ordinary in Portland that even mentioning it seems pointless. Tonight, I am enamored by the rain. Perhaps more accurately it is the smell of the rain that is captivating me.

Sitting by the window after a string of gorgeously warm and sunny days inviting we denizens of Stumptown to imagine summer in full swing, I am struck by the fact that in all of the autumn, winter, and spring rains we have had, it has been years since I stopped to smell the rain. It's such a distinctive aroma, and it wafted through the window unexpectedly as the sky turned it's final shade of night. My first thought was, "Oh, how I've missed that smell!" My second thought was, "How did I miss it when it's always raining?"

It sprung upon me tonight, held me down and wouldn't let me go. In minutes I will turn off the lamp and lay on my dark bed, drowsy mind dancing slowly to the rhythm of rain falling gently on the walkway below my window. In my dreams, I will wrestle with the rain until dawn, demand some kind of answer for an ineffable question. Perhaps I will awaken with a name that dissolves on my lips before I can speak it.

The rain speaks to me in so many ways. All the powerful imagery comes to mind of cleansing and baptism, growth and refreshment. The first time I came to Portland, I was in awe of the vividness of the greens here. Unless you grew up near a rainforest, there is no way to prepare for how green the Pacific Northwest is. Four years later I can tell you that it is a 9 month deposit of rain that produces the pristine perfection of lush vegetation set against sapphire skies during the summer. It's well worth it.

Rain brings to mind Lauryn Hill's performance on MTV's Unplugged 2.0, the recording of which is the last new material we've heard from Ms. Hill in nearly a decade. Near the end she plays Bob Marley's "So Much Things to Say", which includes the lines:

Though the wicked may find me guilty
Jah will prove my innocence
'Cause when that rain
When that rain falls
It don't fall on one man's house
Remember that

This is Marley's rendition of a troublesome part of Jesus' sermon on the mount. Why so troublesome? Because the original statement is that the rain falls on both the just and unjust, which is meant to underscore Jesus' remarks immediately prior: "You have heard that it was said, 'You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.' But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you..."

There I go, marking the head of a trail I have neither the courage nor the energy to explore tonight. Suffice to say, the smell of the rain is moving me to contemplate the deeply subversive call to love my enemy and the necessity for all of those symbolic functions of rain to come into play for such a call to be followed.

The rain is singing redemption songs, and redemption is a welcome companion tonight.

Improvising

2009-05-15T18:27:00.000-07:00

Jazz is once again a metaphor for my plan, or lack thereof. The essence of jazz is that each song is a framework, a beginning and ending melody which bookend a myriad of improvisations in the middle. Each performance is completely different.

When I started playing jazz, I would go over the songs for my lessons and memorize an “improvisation” that sounded good from start to finish. It worked while I was playing alone, but once my teacher started playing piano with me, he would ask, “Why aren’t you responding to what I’m playing?”

I’m thinking life is like that, for me at least. I’ve got great players surrounding me, a strong starting melody, and now it’s time for improvisation. The trick is that I can’t plan it and I can’t figure it out without committing to play something with no idea where it’s going next. I must put myself out there, then listen and respond to what the other players are offering.

I’m going to China in September, if all continues apace. I will study Mandarin and work with my friend to figure out how to bridge the Christian/Muslim divide in our minuscule corner of a tiny corner of the world. After a school year (semester?), I’ll see if it’s time do something else, and if that something else has made itself accessible.

It is not much of a plan. It is the first note, the first lick, in a longer improvisation that I cannot hear yet. All I can do is surround myself with good players, put my heart and soul into that lick, and pray that I don’t miss what the others around me are playing.

Then, when the time for improvisation is done, I will know the exact changes, exact notes for how the tune finishes. I will be able to look back and see how the improvisations brought the melody full circle. Then, if I’m fortunate, I’ll be able to look back and discern a coherent, plan-like journey.

Either way, I was playing jazz, and that’s what it’s about.

Homecoming?

2009-05-12T00:14:00.000-07:00

The Wanderer Returned

In the middle of the street, I wonder, Where
is the city? It's gone, has not come back.
Perhaps this one is the same––it has houses,
it has walls, but I can't find it.
It isn't a matter of people––Pedro or Juan––
nor of that woman, nor of that tree;
now that city has buried itself,
has tumbled somewhere underground,
and this is another time, not the same at all,
taking on the same lines of streets,
assuming the same house numbers.

Time then does exist, I realize it.
I know it exists, but I cannot understand
how that city which had warm blood,
which had sky enough for all,
and whose midmorning smile
spread like a basketful of plums,
those houses with a forest smell,
wood newly cut at dawn with the saw,
the city that always sang at the water's edge
of sawmills in the mountains,
all that was yours and mine
of the city and its clarity,
wrapped itself up in love, secretly,
and let itself fall into forgetfulness.

Now where it once was there are other lives,
a different way of being, another hardness.
All is well enough, but why does it not exist?
Why is its old aroma now asleep?
Why did all those bells fall still,
and why did the wooden tower say goodbye?

Perhaps the city fell away in me,
house by house, its warehouses eroded
by the slow damp, by passing time;
perhaps it was I who lost the blue of the pharmacy,
the stored-up wheat, the horseshoe
that hung in the harness store,
and those souls who were always searching
as though in a well of dark water.

Then what am I coming to, what have I come to?
That woman I loved once among the plums
in the stunning summer, clear, clear
as an ax blade catching the moon,
she with the eyes that bit
like acid into the metal of helplessness,
she went away, went away without leaving,
without changing house or country,
went of her own will, tumbling through time
backwards, and did not fall into mine
when she opened, possibly, those arms
which clasped my body, and she was calling me
perhaps at the distance of so many years,
while I, in another corner of the planet,
was drowning in the distance of my age.

I will ask leave of myself to enter,
to return to the missing city.
Inside myself I should find the absent ones,
that smell from the lumberyard;
perhaps the wheat that rippled on the slopes
still goes on growing, but only within me,
and it's in myself I must travel to find that woman
the rain bore off, and there is no other way.
Nothing can last in any other way.
I am the one who must attend those streets
and somehow or other decide
where the trees should be planted, all over again.

--Pablo Neruda, from Fully Empowered
(translated by Alistair Reid)

Leaving

2009-05-12T00:08:00.000-07:00

Goodbyes

Goodbye, goodbye, to one place or another
to every mouth, to every sorrow,
to the insolent moon, to weeks
which wound in the days and disappeared,
goodbye to this voice and that one stained
with amaranth, and goodbye
to the usual bed and plate,
to the twilit setting of all goodbyes,
to the chair that is part of the same twilight,
to the way made by my shoes.

I spread myself, no question;
I turned over whole lives,
changed skin, lamps, and hates,
it was something I had to do,
not by law or whim,
more of a chain reaction;
each new journey enchained me;
I took pleasure in place, in all places.

And, newly arrived, I promptly said goodbye
with still newborn tenderness
as if the bread were to open and suddenly
flee from the world of the table.
So I left behind all languages,
repeated goodbyes like an old door,
changed cinemas, reasons, and tombs,
left everywhere for somewhere else;
I went on being, and being always
half undone with joy,
a bridegroom among sadnesses,
never knowing how or when,
ready to return, never returning.

It's well known that he who returns never left,
so I traced and retraced my life,
changing clothes and planets,
growing used to the company,
to the great whirl of exile,
to the great solitude of bells tolling.

--Pablo Neruda, from Fully Empowered
(translated by Alastair Reid)

Staying

2009-05-11T23:46:00.000-07:00

For Everyone

I can't just suddenly tell you
what I should be telling you,
friend, forgive me; you know
that although you don't hear my words,
I wasn't asleep or in tears,
that I'm with you without seeing you
for a good long time and until the end.

I know that many may wonder
"What is Pablo doing?" I'm here.
If you look for me in this street
you'll find me with my violin,
prepared to break into song,
prepared to die.

It is nothing I have to leave to anyone,
not to these others, not to you,
and if you listen well, in the rain,
you'll hear
that I come and go and hang about.
And you know that I have to leave.

Even if my words don't know it,
be sure, I'm the one who left.
There is no silence which doesn't end.
When the moment comes, expect me
and let them all know I'm arriving
in the street, with my violin.

--Pablo Neruda, from Fully Empowered
(translated by Alastair Reid)

Into the spiral

2009-05-11T23:41:00.001-07:00

or, Pablo Neruda tells me why it makes me so sad that my friends Ray and Kelly are moving this week, and that I will be moving at the end of this summer, and that if/when I return it will not be the same

A series of three posts telling my story in verse.

*Editor's note: Pablo Neruda is said to have asked poet Alastair Reid to translate the collection Plenos Poderes, or Fully Empowered. Nevertheless, as in all things involving translation (especially poetry), it loses something. If you speak even just a bit of Spanish, look up the original versions. If you don't, these are still beautiful poems. Enjoy.

Vienna Teng

2009-04-23T01:33:00.000-07:00

Vienna Teng continues to amaze me with her ability to engage me as both an aspiring songwriter and a listener. Her stellar lyricism is a constant, but she has taken two massive steps forward musically on her last two discs. What appeared to be experimentation in her well-received Dreaming Through the Noise is now on display on her newest album, Inland Territory, as full blown musical exploration.

Her collaboration with accomplished songwriter Alex Wong (check out his duo The Paper Raincoat, who played a phenomenal opening set) as bandmate, cowriter, and producer is delivering an incredible variety of styles in which Vienna's musicianship can continue to expand and mature. She has also pushed herself as a musician, including studying with a jazz instructor, and it is fun to see her growing confidence in what she can do on the piano.

And speaking of fun, my enjoyment of Vienna's performances has increased exponentially with the number of musicians on stage with her. Her playing and singing stand on their own, but they take on entirely different dimensions of energy and nuance when she leads a band. Tonight she played in a trio with Alex (percussion) and Ward Williams (cello, electric guitar) and they were locked in tight on every song, which included selections from all four of Vienna's albums.

I really like the songs on the new album, but will give it several more listens before commenting on here. I would love to leave you with a link to one of the songs so you could judge yourself, but I am blogger illiterate. Any help out there?

Easter musings

2009-04-11T23:27:00.000-07:00

Despite the candy, the egg hunts, and the Easter Bunny; despite the overlap of Christianity with a Roman pagan holiday and its eventual wedding to Empire; despite all of this, the roots of Easter are in remembering and telling the story of the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. Thus the traditional greeting is, "He is risen!" to which one responds, "He is risen indeed!"

In addition to remembrance, there is also anticipation. The resurrection of Jesus was viewed from the earliest days of Christian faith through the lens of the restoration of the entire world. The apex of this restoration was the final abolishment of death, perhaps rendered most poignantly through an improvisation on the writings of the Hebrew prophet Isaiah:

"Death is swallowed up in victory.
O death, where is your victory?
O death, where is your sting?"

Therefore, beyond even remembrance and anticipation, there is a present call to action. Behind the anticipation of death's eventual impotence is the faint echo of the most frequent command in the Bible - do not be afraid.

If death is defeated, we are free to live in the risky ways of Jesus that will put us in conflict with the ruling powers - proclaiming good news to the poor, proclaiming liberty to the captives, recovering sight to the blind, setting at liberty those who are oppressed, and proclaiming the year of the Lord's favor. Thus the resurrection as a promise of the full restoration of the world is more immediately an invitation to join the present work of reconciliation. The hope of the resurrection is part and parcel with the hope that what we do can and will in fact make a difference. That is why we remind ourselves, he is risen indeed.

So what does this have to do with the poem in my last post? It's about the hope of the resurrection, in all of those dimensions mentioned above, but this time through the lens of grief. More than the hope of the resurrection focusing on seeing loved ones lost again someday, for me there is the day to day battle against being paralyzed by grief.

I lost my grandfather last spring, and the grief and regret have come close to being paralyzing at times. As I mentioned in the last post, that poem was not written specifically for my grandfather, but for dear friends who lost a baby to a miscarriage this past winter. It was the last in a series of devastating losses in my community, and it cut deeply. That poem was my response to the grief, and in the end, it was about my grandfather too, because it is about the hope of the resurrection.

And what a hope it is.

A poem before Easter

2009-04-11T22:45:00.000-07:00

Rather than my normal explorations of religious themes through the culture and history of 1st Century CE Judea, I've elected to share a poem written in January for dear friends who lost their baby. It is essentially an Easter poem.

Fallen in the Garden

Winter has come
Leaves crowned with autumn
have fallen like tears
wearily
to rest upon roots deep
in the soil of sorrow
A garden of mourning
in bloom

Also fallen
lie the seeds of promise
Joyous burden of spring
dormant beneath skeleton shadow
Hardy shell of hope
waiting within
earthen womb groaning
for glorious birth

Snowfall

2009-04-09T09:32:00.000-07:00

Gliding above these
fields glittering
with snow I am blinded
by a vision
of purity
covering the land.
If only peace
would lay its mantle
upon us with such
bedazzlement,
such finality.
I am imagining
war weary boys and girls
crowing with delight,
gazing with wonder
as whispers of promise alight
from the leaden sky
to blanket the world
in cessation,
violence at last enthralled
with the silent fall
of winter's gentle magic.

The Blues Are Hungry

2009-04-08T11:55:00.000-07:00

I am sitting in a Portland café,
drinking beer and chewing
on history, surrounded by musicians
of varying abilities and obvious ambitions.
We are quintessential musical men,
with all the attendant insecurities and illusions
that what we do matters. That what we create speaks
to others. That it is enough in this world to be
simply a voice, a human inkwell
spilling the dross of molten desire onto
dissonant harmonies,
mournful melodies that echo
from the dark places
behind human faces.

I sit at a table with three
empty chairs, my empty plate.
I am the only one with
dark skin and out of control afro.
I am apparently also the only
one who has come without
guitar or girlfriend. And I can’t prove it,
but I suspect I am not the only
one with a boulder of disappointed indecision
balanced precariously upon
world-weary shoulders. Either way,
I am alone.

A man with a beard like Father Time is playing
timeless tunes on a hungry harmonica.
A hungry harmonica?
Yes, I tell you, it is hungry!
Have you ever listened to the blues so hard
that your soul flickers with each inhale and exhale,
breath stretched on the rack of minor
pentatonic pain? The blues are all flat-fifths and appetite,
feeding on the steady rhythm
of unsightly sorrow, and
they are insatiable.

As I listen to the man play, I suddenly understand
why I have not written a song in
five years. Once lyrics have lamented love
lost and confessed confusion, what is left
to share but latent hope and
cautious dreams?

And I am afraid, so afraid, that no one will care.
What will become of me then?
What will become of me now,
surrounded by love that has found me
in a town I have come to
call home? A town
I am leaving.

I am eating the blues in this café, filling my belly
with cold beer and hot regret, willing
myself to forget that I am sitting
alone.

A Thousand Splendid Suns

2009-03-25T11:51:00.000-07:00

A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini

My review

rating: 5 of 5 stars
The accessibility to the Western reader of Hossieni's narrative journey through the eras of modern Afghanistan is an incredible accomplishment on its own. Add to that the care with which he crafted the characters who drive this story forward, and this novel becomes a signal to me of a writer who will hopefully continue digging deep into the well of his craft, alternately enchanting and educating.

Not everyone who liked Kite Runner will like this novel, but I prefer it. The page turning suspense of his first work is reduced here to moments of narrative climax, while the overall tone is one of subtle persistence. There is an insistence upon the reader to recognize that the mundane in one context can be horrifying or electrifying in another. Sorrow and joy are explored here as Kahlil Gibran paints them--they are inseparable.

In this novel, the ambiguity of Amir's actions in Kite Runner is now extended to nearly every character portrayed. Each has the stain of complexity that makes us truly human. Though the reader might be unfamiliar with the cultural setting, there is a similarity that invites empathy while simultaneously defying universality. The joys and sorrows of the people of Afghanistan--Pashtun, Tajik, Hazara, and Uzbek alike--are unique to their history. Yet, in making us laugh and cry through their stories, Hosseini allows us a vital, and all too brief connection.

I highly recommend this novel.

View all my reviews.

Produce Row

2009-03-24T01:14:00.000-07:00

Every Monday night from approximately 8:30-11:30pm there is a jazz jam at Produce Row. The quality of the music depends on the caliber of musicians who show up each night, but it is always worth the $3 cover.

Tonight was different though. I have never seen so many musicians and such a high caliber of musicians at a Monday night jam. Some of them had played with the likes of Etta James, the Stan Kenton Orchestra, and Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers. Tonight's overall instrumentation included:

Four vocalists
Five drummers
Three pianists
Two tenor saxophonists
Three trumpeters
One flugelhornist (Not your flugelhornist, Jesse)
Three guitarists
Three bassists
And finally, one bad ass who did things on the bass so ridiculous that he has to be listed in his own category - Essiet Essiet (the last bassist to play with the late Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers).

And that's just the people who got the green light to play.

I'm exhausted. I should have been asleep hours ago, as I work at 5:15 this morning. But, the music I heard tonight will not let me sleep.

That is the power of jazz.

These Days

2009-03-23T00:22:00.000-07:00

I had a lover
I don't think I'd risk another these days
These days
And if I seem to be afraid to live the life
I've made in song
It's just that I've been losing
So long

--Kathryn Williams, These Days (originally by Jackson Browne)

I'm in the same boat...

2009-03-17T17:14:00.000-07:00

“I’ve been grappling with that a lot lately: how I have certain obligations to both the past and the future, and they’re not always easily reconciled. I think it’s important to feel the full weight of history sometimes, but there’s also a place for being fearless about things…you know, being naïvely hopeful, taking risks. I’ve been given a pretty amazing life, and I’m grateful for everything it took to put me here. So now the question is, ‘How do I spend this inheritance wisely?'”

--Vienna Teng, from an interview on the Aladdin Theater webpage

If you've never heard Vienna Teng's music, I envy you the discovery process. She has inspired me time and again as both a writer and musician with her sublimely crafted songs, overachieving albums, and enchanting performances.

I'll be there to see her at the Aladdin Theater on April 22nd, 8pm. If you set aside just 50 cents a day, you can easily pay the $17 cover and join me. Afterward, we can discuss how we paid a bargain price to see a treasure of modern American music.

Street Ballet

2009-03-01T23:07:00.000-08:00

Walking home tonight, it got all bunched up inside--the contentment, the angst, the worry, the uncertainty, the excitement, the longing. I tried to pound the asphalt into some semblance of sensibility, my pace quickening to match an eerily appropriate waltz by Laura Marling.

All I could think about was how good it would feel to run through the streets, jagged breath and murmuring heart carrying me up toward the enchanted night sky. How free it would feel to loose gravity in a Swan Lake leap over the puddled curbside. How simple it would be without the need to run toward something or away from something. How elemental it would be to just run.

I thought about it all the way home, hands stuffed in pockets, feet disappointed in their downward mobility.

The Shortest Month

2009-02-28T18:56:00.000-08:00

Before the summer, before the spring
When the snows had blown and gone
I sat at your bedside, listening
To winter rain's whisper song

"It's nearly planting time," wistfully
You sighed with a crooked grin
You lay there in bed so peacefully
Worn body so frail and thin

A man is more than his bone and blood
Without it, he ain't a man
A clue you'd wished that I'd understood
A riddle you'd learned from the land

But I don't understand your passing
The finitude of your breath
Your body bent low like a sapling
Before the grim gale of death

So before the summer, before the spring
Each year in the shortest month
I'll lay at your graveside, listening
For whispers of spring to come

Postcards Without Postage, pt. 6

2009-02-27T23:05:00.000-08:00

Dear Martina,

You were subdued that Wednesday night, when we said goodbye for the last time in that half-lit parking lot. Had I known it was the last time, I might have said some things. Things deep from the heart that while probably understood are better expressed.

So, as always, I listened. There was always something to say, something just beneath the surface that I couldn't position on my tongue. But the time for talking never came for me. I gladly listened, thinking that the bothersome parts of me could disappear, that my misplaced passion could be silent.

Now that you're gone, my tongue is loosed but so are you. I've heard rumors of a new town, a new last name. I would love to hear it directly from you but I scared you away, didn't I? You were subdued because somehow in my listening, the silent was spoken. I didn't know it that night, but a half decade of nights later with no word from you, I'm putting the pieces together.

I found a snapshot of us in the picture box last night. We are in Chicago, bright city lights crowning your windblown hair. We are arm in arm, and it looks easy. If only things had remained that black and white.

I hope you are well in your new life. Know that you are missed by an old friend,

Ramón

Adam Hamilton, pt. 2

2009-02-24T17:21:00.000-08:00

Her classmates were even less attuned to her story. The very few with whom she felt safe sharing would often respond with a momentary blank stare before admitting, “I’m not sure I get it.” Disappointed, Vanessa would love them just as much, but she mentally adjusted the safety she felt with them. She wondered if she was really the only one who got it.

Jenny, however, responded to her story with an easily detectable false comprehension. Vanessa had expected nothing different from her best friend. She’d always believed that best friends came in categories and Jenny was a situational best friend. She had been there from the beginning in every situation imaginable, and that meant a lot. But, Vanessa never felt a soul level connection with her, never felt completely safe sharing everything. Sure, she would confess her crushes and vent her frustrations with her family, and Jenny was always marvelous at fielding those types of interactions. To her, that’s exactly what a best friend did, and she only felt her disconnect with her best friend in the occasional awkward silences of mutual estrangement.

Jenny was as surprised as everyone else when after all the unrequited love declared for Vanessa by the hapless lot of Maple Ridge adolescent boys, it was Adam who managed to get to her. He did it without fanfare, and seemingly without effort. Jenny did not realize that the secret to his success was his questions. From the first time he called her on a Wednesday night and asked if she had ever noticed the calm sound of rain just before sunrise, a unique bond had formed between them. Neither one thought of it as attraction at first. Even Adam’s sleepless night waiting to call was less a romantic agitation than it was a compelling, inexorable wave of curiosity. In Vanessa, he’d found someone worth discovering.

She felt the same about him. Watching him sculpt a place for himself among the crowds when he first arrived in Maple Ridge, she was sure that most of what he was offering to people were masks. Disarming smiles marked an easygoing affability that quickly opened up doors for him in many different circles. She saw in him the ability to become a multitude of Adams, none of which had real substance. She wanted to crack the façade, and she knew she had to draw him in. So, she ignored him.

They watched each other for weeks, fascinated by the ease of their respective presence among their adolescent peers. They saw an echo of themselves in the other, a complimentary insight. And as they watched, they weighed the possibility of a kindred spirit suddenly appearing. They watched and weighed until Vanessa steered her and Jenny’s after school walk home through the hallway where she’d seen him at his locker earlier in the day. She had no intentions other than observing him in yet one more environment.

But Adam had finished weighing, and when he saw them approaching, he was laden with intentions and expectations. Jenny was surprised and slightly appalled to see him turn his attention toward them, and could not hide the agitation on her face. On the periphery he saw her immediately tense, but he was looking for Vanessa’s reaction. He smiled inwardly at a false neutrality he knew very intimately.

“Are you two coming to the track meet this Friday? We need some fans!” He sensed Jenny relax slightly as he broached the trivial and continued. “What else is going on? A baseball game? How boring is that?”

It was an easy out. All they had to do was make a false promise to be there and walk away, and that’s what Jenny expected her best friend to do. Instead she replied, “Well, we’re not really the sports types," to which Adam smiled inwardly.

Jenny quickly scuttled their conversation in the hallway, claiming some prior engagement. Adam’s curiosity was further piqued by the complete absence of annoyance on Vanessa’s face at this interference. Jenny was Vanessa's best friend, but Adam was pretty sure he had a much better idea of what was going on in Vanessa’s head than she had.

Slippery Slope

2009-02-20T20:53:00.000-08:00

The hiking time is upon us once more in Portland, Oregon. At least it has been the last few days. Gorgeous weather with clear skies and temperatures flirting with the mid-50s. Today I hiked up to Council Crest on a trail that gains 700 ft. elevation by way of gentle switchbacks stretched over 1.7 miles. Very relaxing hike with a great payoff. The clear day afforded perfect views of the snow-capped splendor of Mt. Hood, Mt. St. Helens, Mt. Adams, and even Mt. Ranier! It was glorious.

The trail was almost in perfect condition, unlike Eagle Creek yesterday. The snow melt had made the beginning of the trail a complete sludgefest. Nothing like starting an 8 mile hike in 3 inches of mud! But, my friend Ron and I made it through that early patch of muddiness and enjoyed the spectacular views of Eagle Creek (and due to the season, the spectacular silence too). That is until we began hitting the ice.

There's a strange exhilaration when hiking gets that little hint of difficulty. Though most of the trails I've hiked on are very much so groomed and laid out to avoid severe injury by hikers, there are the moments when our attempts to tame and defang nature fall short. Ice is one of those moments for me.

I feel out of control when there is ice on the trail and I probably hike three times as carefully as I need to. It's not so much fear as it is a very vivid imagination of what would happen should I fall :o) So, we took our time and we made it four miles in to High Bridge before we decided to turn back until less icy conditions prevailed. As we backtracked, I remembered another hike where I felt out of control.

My friend Jon Mesh came to visit me from St. Louis and we hit up the coast at Oswald West State Park. Since we arrived late in the day, we forwent Mt. Neahkahnie and headed out Cape Falcon. After enjoying the beauty of the sun sinking slowly toward the Pacific Ocean, we decided to book it back the 2.5 miles to camp before darkness fell completely.

Our plan was slightly ill-conceived. See, if you watch the sun sink into the ocean, light leaves the sky very quickly. In addition, when the trail is mostly through forest, the faint light of post sunset sky is no use to you. And, though we are usually more prepared than this, we did not bring flashlights. Yeah...

As we were getting ready to plunge beneath the tree cover, Jon pointed out a tiny path through the underbrush that seemed to head down toward the beach. "Shortcut?" he asked with his eyebrows. I shrugged and he went down to explore further. After a short while, he called back up to me and said it would work. So, I followed the path to where Jon was standing and looked around.

"Where's the rest of the path?" I asked. I asked this because there was brush to the left, brush to the right, and in front of us, a slick wall of stone leading down to a small sliver of sand which was slowly shrinking with the incoming tide. It wasn't a vertical drop, but it wasn't walkable, especially with the water splashed all over it.

"We can climb down to there," he said as he pointed to a ridiculously small ledge. "Then it looks like we can slide down." I shook my head in disbelief and looked back toward the path we had come down. With the rapid darkening and the steep ascent to return to the main trail, I knew there was no going back.

I couldn't look at Jon, because he seemed disgustingly pleased with the idea. I think he is an Eagle Scout or something, because I would never look at the same terrain that he did and think, "We can slide down this." I believe groomed trails are good. I like a little exploration now and again, but usually only to the extent that I can return when I get uncomfortable. See, I have mild control issues.

Control is elusive, both in its unfulfilled promise and its fickle availability. So why do I strive for it so much? I've tried so many times to put together long range plans for my life, and they never stick, never have time to put down roots and grow. I've tried to make every minute happenstance fit together into some kind of cohesive map to guide me through the unknown. But in the end, life keeps reminding me that control is ultimately an illusion when I try to extend it outside of myself.

I am being reminded of that right now. I have in the past made extensive, detailed plans on how it was supposed to work for me to move overseas. None of them worked out. Yet, here I am, knowing that I have to bounce back. It keeps beckoning to me, singing its sweet siren song into the turmoil of the storm. It's time that I untie myself from the mast and jump in.

Jon proceeded before me and made it look so easy and graceful. Then he stood on the sand, pointed out the roots I could use as handholds, and encouraged me to ease my way down. I grabbed the last root, faced outward, and put my body in a position for a controlled slide. The last step was to let go. Let go of that root and slide.

It was impossible to let go. I kept trying to will my hand to let go, but my brain could only seem to process the fact that height + gravity = falling. So I stayed there, hanging on to this tiny root until a mixture of fatigue and inevitability overwhelmed me and a released my grip.

I was fine. Less graceful than Jon, to be sure, but I arrived at the bottom with minimal scratches and bruises. We then trotted across the beach before the tide rolled in, and voila!, we had a new adventure story to tell.

I feel like the last year and a half have been similar to me hanging onto that root for dear life. There are some things, some people, that I have been unwilling to release, and I am tired. I see glimpses of what is below me on this pathless journey, but all I have control over is when I let go and how I fall. The rest is up to gravity.

My New Year's resolution was that 2009 would be a year of action and I think I'm ready at last to step out into the ambiguity of trying to move overseas, trying to sort out what in the heck the word "missions" might mean. I think I'm ready to see where gravity takes me.

The best thing about it is that I don't have to figure it out. I just have to let go.

Kate Davis

2009-02-18T10:47:00.001-08:00

Ladies and gentlemen of the music jury,

I present to you a performance from bassist/vocalist (in that order) Kate Davis. This phenom lives in my very own Portland, Oregon and already has garnered numerous accolades in the jazz community. Remember this name, as I am quite confident that it will soon extend beyond strictly jazz circles.

Did I mention she is only 17?

So, give a listen and cast your vote. If you live in PDX, you can cast your approving vote by attending her show (part of the Portland Jazz Festival) at Wilf's this Saturday night at 8pm, $5 cover.

The following clip is from Jimmy Mak's this past September, with Tom Grant on piano and Todd Strait (Karrin Allyson) on drums.

Adam Hamilton, pt. 1

2009-02-14T20:45:00.000-08:00

Today, Adam was going to ask Vanessa to leave Maple Ridge with him. He was going to ask her to leave behind her security blanket, leave behind the bullshit, and prove everybody wrong. Prove themselves wrong. From day one there was a slightly forlorn quality to their love, a quiet melancholy. Whenever people challenged their relationship, they would nod grimly, as if they had been expecting this all along. And they had. Interracial dating was just not done in Maple Ridge, and especially not by the crown princess of the Hitchinson family.

Of course, no one was indelicate enough to say that race was the problem directly. But they had their ways of communicating disapproval, their euphemisms designated for polite company. “His family doesn’t have any roots here. No history,” they would point out with concern. “What’s to keep him here?”

The assumption, of course, was that Vanessa would never dream of leaving Maple Ridge. After all, her family did have history here—over 200 years of it. They’d been pillars of the community from the days of the Revolution. Their family’s names dotted the headstones in the local graveyard. The high school football field was named after Vanessa’s grandfather, an All-American halfback.

To the denizens of Maple Ridge, there was nothing more odd, more frighteningly compelling, than the scandal of a Hitchinson daughter beginning a romance with a “transplant”, as they called them. Not only a transplant, but “an…unusual transplant.” Such incidences in the past had been quickly resolved, though not as quickly forgotten. Scandal had a way of lingering unpleasantly in Maple Ridge.

How does one describe the Hitchinsons? They were not particularly wealthy, though certainly not poor. They were well educated, smartly dressed, confident without exuding an aura of pretension, and all without that ultimate mark of the upper class – boredom. They were noticeably involved in the community, but never at the expense of time spent together as a family. They were the paragons of the expression, “Everything in moderation.”

Where the Hitchinsons were admirable in their balance and vigorous spirit, Vanessa was more so. From an early age her teachers and dance instructors remarked upon her special blend of grace and fortitude. Neighbors would delight in telling her parents about her acts of kindness and generosity, smiling fondly and finishing with, “That Vanessa sure is something else.”

She was not the most popular in school according to social currency. Very rarely do teenagers adhere to the same standards of societal status as adults, and her family name meant little to her classmates when it came to forming in-crowds and outsiders. In line with her usual measure of grace, this did not bother Vanessa at all, and so it was that she floated effortlessly between the various groups, soliciting smiles and defusing confrontations. Had she so desired, Vanessa Hitchinson could have claimed the distinction of getting to know more people at Hitchinson High than any other person. She just never thought of it.

That’s not to say she was naive. She recognized from early on that she was a beautiful girl, and the guys paid a lot of attention to her, ranging from wholesome to unsavory. She also recognized that many of her classmates struggled to attain the ease with which she traversed social circles and yet never achieved their goal. She was not the type to host a party and invite people from different cliques without considering the ramifications. She was extraordinarily intuitive about social interactions, and this was one of the things that set her apart from both her family and her classmates.

She would sometimes half jokingly tell the story of the night when she was nine years old and she lay in bed frustrated that her parents had not let her stay up and watch some television show. She lay on that bed and told herself, “I’m done being a kid. I’m ready to be a grownup now.” With that she closed her eyes and imagined all the freedom she would have as an adult, the rules that would not apply to her, the secrets that would not be hidden from her.

But as she imagined these things, something strange happened. She began to see much less whimsical images—broken marriages, financial anxiety, premature death. It scared her to be sure, but as she would tell it, she knew that choosing the one meant accepting the other. So, she lay there on her bed, nine year old brain swirling, until she fell asleep.

She would always laugh self-consciously before continuing. “When I woke up, something had changed. The world looked different.” She would pause thoughtfully. “But I knew the world was really the same, I was just seeing it differently. Does that make sense?”

Adults never knew how to respond to this question. It made sense in the natural flow of maturation and coming into adulthood, but it seemed shockingly out of place being explained by a 14 year-old, much less a 14 year-old recounting the realization of her nine year-old self. She would give them a genuine, slightly sad smile as they gently dismissed her claims with bravos and encores. After all, adults wanted to be entertained by children, not educated.

Postcards Without Postage, pt. 5

2009-02-14T19:09:00.000-08:00

Dear Amelia,

I will never forget the look on your face when I picked you up at the airport and spoke the unspoken. You were looking at me, eyebrows raised, as if to say, "But, how do you know?"

The question caught me off-guard and I had no answer for you. I wish I had said,

I know the same as anyone else knows, I suppose.

I know that when we are together, I don't ever want to say goodbye. But I must.

I know that when something amazing or exciting happens, you're the first person I want to call. But I can't.

I know that when I hear a great jazz recording, you're the first person I want to hear it. But you're not listening.

I know when we are with our friends, I never want to leave your side; never want to miss your smile; never want your laughter to subside. But, I mingle.

I know when you are full of grief I want you to find relief in my embrace. I want to hold all of you -- your shaking shoulders and shuddering breaths, your darkest fears that there is no one left to cry with. But I am there.

I know I want you to know me, in all my weakness and ego and confidence and joy. But you don't really know, do you?

How do I know, you wanted to ask. I don't know. No one does. But with all that I am, I choose you.

What do you know about that?

DASH: First lap

2009-02-14T18:56:00.000-08:00

Looking back, there are several variables that could have contributed to such a high blood pressure reading in January. I am convinced that the changes I've been making in diet and exercise have in fact been beneficial in a short time. Leaving aside blood pressure, I've lost nearly 10 pounds in a month, so that's saying something.

But, the blood pressure was the motivating factor here, and on Friday I went in to see a doctor for the first time in a long time. He took my blood pressure--twice--and it turned out normal. How normal, you ask? 125/76. Better than it's been in a long time. Interestingly enough, there was a nearly ten point differential between the first and second reading, which my doctor attributed to the stress of anticipation during the first reading. Who knew stress was such a factor?

While the changes I've made are good and I plan to keep them around, it is stress that I will focus on mitigating in this next phase of DASH. We'll see how that goes...

My doctor told me to relax and to feel free to practice moderation instead of abstinence when it comes to the stricter parts of my regimen. In his words, "Celebrate your health with a beer sometime". Doctor's orders.

Laughter is medicine

2009-02-12T13:39:00.000-08:00

Need a good belly laugh? Proceed immediately to Trevor's blog. When you stop laughing long enough to type again, leave some comment love.

DASH

2009-01-30T11:14:00.000-08:00

It stands for Dietary Approaches to Stopping Hypertension, or something like that. My friend Bitta works at the Mayo Clinic, and she tipped me off to the existence of DASH. It is an existence that will begin to influence the way I live.

See, this past trip to Arkansas I did all the culinary things a trip South requires: ate lots of barbecue, lots of fried whatever, and drank lots of Dr. Pepper. It was glorious.

It was also excessive. In the months leading up to my trip I had been experiencing various physical discomforts that seemed to be symptoms of something. In the early autumn I gave up most caffeine, which I think helped, but some of the symptoms persisted. By the time it became clear that it would be beneficial to seek medical attention, I temporarily lost my health insurance with Starbucks.

Let's be real though. Partially from my dad's example and partially through growing accustomed to living without health insurance for several years, going to the doctor is usually a last resort. So it is that I began feeling some of the discomfort one night at my parents' house after dinner, and I decided to check my blood pressure.

To say it was high might be an understatement. I was freaked to say the least. But, without medical insurance, a visit to the doctor had to wait at least another three weeks. So, I called Bitta to seek her sage advice on life style changes in response to this new discovery.

Thus, DASH became a part of my life. It's really a pretty common sense as far as diets go. But, that's the point of lifestyle changes, right? They are usually not unexpected changes. Just unwelcome. So, for me here are some of the guiding dietary principles:

*Lower sodium intake. Sodium is one of the primary culprits of elevated blood pressure. The daily recommended value of sodium is 1500 mg, but most people exceed this several times over. One of the dictates of lowering sodium is giving up nearly all packaged food. Things I would not expect to be high in sodium, like much bread and cereal, have turned out to be on the black list. Also, no more free food at the Bux. Other than the overpriced oatmeal, there is not much reasonable there.

*Lower alcohol consumption. I won't dwell on this, but I pretty much hate this part. Thankfully I was dry for a month last winter and I know I can do this. Also, as much as I hate to admit it, I feel better when I'm alcohol free.

*Lower caffeine consumption. Also helping me with the alcohol reduction is looking back over the last few months and being surprised at how easy it has been to significantly reduce how much caffeine I drink. Another consequence is that my awake feels more awake, and my tired feels less tired. My sleeping has also improved.

*Drink more water. Obvious, but something I've not been very good at practicing.

*Increased magnesium, calcium, and potassium intake. Still researching what foods will help me do this, but I am also reacquainting myself with the multivitamin.

*Eat moderately. A big help with high blood pressure is weight loss. Eating smaller portions, and selecting healthier options go some of the distance with this. The other part is of course regular exercise. Thanks to a growing group of friends who love tennis, this has been an easier addition to my lifestyle. Come spring, I look forward to getting more hiking in as well.

There's lots of other things to consider in DASH, but those are the most salient for me. The upside has been moving my focus from what I'm needing to give up in order to get rid of something, to realizing how the changes I'm making are adding value to my life. I am feeling motivated about SOMETHING for the first time in a long time.

Then there are the little reminders. There is that wonderful feeling of exhaustion after a good tennis match which helps me realize that while my shots were wild and unruly, I left every ounce of energy I had on the court. There is that satisfaction of eating just enough at a meal instead of feeling like I'm going into a coma from overeating. There is that appreciation of friends who give recipe suggestions, cook sensitively, and respond to my ridiculous requests to play tennis in the cold drizzle.

Life is good and is getting better. It's nice to say that without trying to convince myself. Which is part and parcel with these changes. Stress elevates blood pressure as well, and there has been no shortage of that this past year and more.

To put it as simply as possible, I have been stressed that time keeps passing even though I don't have a clue what I want to do. I'm confident in who I want to be, and even certain things I want to do, but the day to day of making a living and all that goes along with that--no clue.

The merry-go-round spins...grad school, nonprofit work, missions, teaching, translation, writing, etc. I never land on anything for too long. I'm not looking for a permanent fit, but I'm looking for a meaningful occupation. I hope that's not too much to ask.

At any rate, my attempts to let DASH impact my life are in the infancy stages, but I'm hopeful. I'd like the other decisions in my life to follow that same path of hopefulness.

Come, Captain

2009-01-18T00:38:00.000-08:00

Coquettishly you come to
me in the
night
A faerie masked in mystery
aloft on gossamer wings
soaked with starlight
Close you hover
gentle caress upon jugular
until secret somethings
gush unceremoniously forth
An outpouring of darkened heart
bleeding confession
costly petition
penitent libation

If I could only catch you
stall this dance
uncertain
Silence this cacophony
unceasing
Fill up what is lacking
in my affliction of
ignorance
Oh! to know your coming
and your going
know it with the familiarity
of tide and shore
Wash over me
wipe away gritty
uneven surface
until
smoothly I flow
into the heart of
the sunset

I am lost upon you
I am lost without you
I have tasted the
gravity sinking through
the vortex
yawning beneath idle feet
I have felt the wind blow itself
to pieces against
the drift of
my wandering
upsetting course set
on
what?

Come, captain this ship
Set the sails, tie the rigging
slip the anchor
for home

2009-01-14T16:15:00.000-08:00

"The house rose from its ashes and I sailed on my love of Delgadina with an intensity and happiness I had never known in my former life. Thanks to her I confronted my inner self for the first time as my ninetieth year went by. I discovered that my obsession for having each thing in the right place, each subject at the right time, each word in the right style, was not the well-deserved reward of an ordered mind but just the opposite: a complete system of pretense invented by me to hide the disorder of my nature. I discovered that I am not disciplined out of virtue but as a reaction to my negligence, that I appear generous in order to conceal my meanness, that I pass myself off as prudent because I am evil-minded, that I am conciliatory in order not to succumb to my repressed rage, that I am punctual only to hide how little I care about other people's time. I learned, in short, that love is not a condition of the spirit but a sign of the zodiac.

I became another man. I tried to reread the classics that had guided me in adolescence, and I could not bear them. I buried myself in the romantic writings I had repudiated when my mother tried to impose them on me with a heavy hand, and in them I became aware that the invincible power that has moved the world is unrequited, not happy, love."

--Gabriel García Márquez, Memories of My Melancholy Whores

Postcards Without Postage, pt. 4

2009-01-08T19:32:00.000-08:00

Dear little one,

I had a strange dream last night that made scant sense, but when I woke I knew it was about you.

From atop a mountain, I saw a dark bank of clouds streaming in from the east. They moved swiftly, heavy with purpose. As they reached the sky above me, they began to hover and swirl. Deliberately and ominously they gathered until they became the sky.

I heard a voice neither cruel nor gentle wail, "Cover your eyes!" Against my will I obeyed, the force of the voice driving into me with irresistible compulsion. As the world went black, I could feel the heaviness of the clouds crashing over me, an inexorable tide of darkness threatening to suffocate.

"Open your eyes," said a whisper in my ear, childlike and wise. Oh, how I wanted to listen to this whisper! But against the heaviness I could only manage to loose my left eye from its imprisonment.

I saw the underside of the clouds bathed in a bright orange glow, the reflection of some great forest fire, trees below singing with elegiac passion within the conflagration. It was terrible and beautiful, and I returned to my darkness with a mixture of regret and relief.

"Open your eyes," came the whisper once more, laden with urgency. Again the heaviness prevented me from complying fully, but this time I opened my right eye.

I once again saw the inky cloud bank bathed in fire, but this time the glow was warm and fading, like the sunset. It was another flame of passing, but it burned with the promise of tomorrow's rising. All beneath was silent in anticipation. It was beautiful and terrible, and again I retreated to the comfort of my blindness.

"Open your eyes," came the whisper a third time, adding gently, "Do not be afraid." These last four words birthed a lightness in me, and pregnant with expectation I opened both of my eyes onto the leaden expanse.

Just as I looked, the heavens broke open and the deluge began. The fire beneath the clouds shone through the rain to create a crystal clear rainbow, its arc crowning the horizon. I began to cry.

And then I woke, crying still. My little one, I am awash in sorrow. How will I not drown? I have sent my prayers for peace flying to the four corners of the heavens, but they have returned bearing no message, no assurance. Though I endure 197 days of silence, will I ever again see the world unflooded by tears?

As my red-rimmed eyes surrender to slumber once more, I am searching desperately for the courage to open my eyes to the sunrise. For I know it is you whispering in the morning, "Do not be afraid."

Distance

2008-12-23T18:28:00.000-08:00

When I began telling my classmates in New Jersey that I was moving to Arkansas, the general sentiment was that I was moving a very long distance away. This was certainly true, and probably on more levels than our junior high hearts realized. However, after being asked a few times just how cold it got in the winter, it became apparent that idea of distance was distorted by mistaking Arkansas for Alaska (when you live just a few hours from four of the biggest cities in the country, it's easy to confine everyone else to the geographical periphery...just ask Texans and Californians).

This specter of distance has haunted me since the day I stepped off a plane in Little Rock, Arkansas and had to call it home. As time has gone on and I've grown from a clueless adolescent to an equally clueless young adult, distance has intruded upon every aspect of life and left me just as bewildered as in those first dizzying days of reconciling myself to leaving a home, a life, behind. It has seemingly made everything tangential and derivative. Distance has become the measure of things.

I live in Portland, Oregon. Most days, it is absolutely glorious. The people, the landscape, the energy - they sometimes intertwine in harmony so breathtaking that it reeks of contrivance. But it's just Portland.

Other days, I am reminded of just how far are the places from which I've come. Memories of New Jersey have been rewritten so elaborately that the seams between fact and fiction are impossible to detect. On a spring break roadtrip during my senior year of college, I drove back to visit friends in Princeton. Driving around one day while they were in class, I found myself at a vaguely familiar intersection. I began turning, half from memory and half from instinct, until I found myself in my old neighborhood. At my old school. In front of my old house.

It was bizarre. Everything was smaller and dingier than I remembered it. Yet, I knew those streets. I grew up with those streets, those playgrounds, those comic book stores. I've never felt so distant from reality as I did parked in front of my old house, peering wistfully at the screened porch, waiting for young Ramón to bang out the door to the sidewalk and turn up the corner at Homan toward George's house. I wanted to ask him, "What happened to you?"

I was a stranger in front of the very places where my memories are staged. My self. My history. How can I be a stranger to my own history? A stranger to myself? These are the types of questions that have driven me to write self-absorbed pseudophilosophy or check into an unreflective stimulus response life driven by appetite. Once in those places, I often despair of ever getting out.

I think about the distance between people too. I grew up around my dad's family in New York, and while the roots of familial love are thick, there is no denying the distance between me and my cousins. Our lives have gone on without each other for 15 years now, with sporadic appearances at weddings and funerals. They all have memories together - watching the new generation of cousins growing up and watching the titis and tíos growing older. Each time we see each other again, the love is deeper but the relationship is thinner. I don't understand it.

Most of my dearest friends, those whose history with me is gritty and unpolished, live far away. Because my rootlessness has attracted me to other wanderers, some of them have begun what seems to be a mass migration to the far flung corners of the globe. As I find my life switching tracks from that international train, the geography between us becomes reflective of deeper estrangements.

Don't even get me started on graduate degrees, careers, houses, marriage, and kids. In my less rational moments, it seems that they have been building their dream lives while I have been caught snoring in the bleachers. A weary, uninspired spectator.

But this is no game. A good friend and coworker at Starbucks would sometimes playfully ask, "Ramón, what are we doing here?!" It was funny in the way that only those piercing truths can be funny - two educated men nearing thirty, pouring lattes and eating shit with a smile for any asshole customer who can pay 50 cents for a coffee refill. In that interaction, the distance between a person and an object can be measured in the negligent toss of a credit card toward a stained green apron behind an infinitely wide counter. He and I can't even joke about it anymore. It's not funny anymore.

Something is at stake in bridging the distance between people. By indulging in my little outburst of profanity above, I have succumbed to the same vampire detachment that bit me at work. Now I am objectifying a living, breathing person. Now I am the one biting.

There are two people in my life with whom I'd like to be closer, but it feels like they are pulling me in with one arm and pushing me away with the other. I only know this feeling because I am quite adept at the maneuver. Even recently, there are people I have invited into my life only to become emotionally withdrawn.

What a mess! I feel hurt and rejected by the ones pushing me away so I withdraw from the others and feel detached and lonely. What gives? Why am I letting myself become controlled by pain and the fear of pain? I know these lessons, we've been over this before. What are we doing here?!

I remember the feeling of utter isolation I had when I discovered that we don't actually see or touch anything. "It's all electrons," I was told. What I "see" is the brain's reception of light particles bouncing off of objects. Of people. What I "feel" is the force of electrons repelling each other as they grow nearer. I almost cried thinking that I had neither seen nor touched any of the people I loved most. They had neither seen nor touched me.

I cursed electrons. After all, these were ludicrously tiny particles standing between me and the reality of my loved ones. But, ah, the paradox! It was my electron-laden neurons that carried the signal to my brain that I was seeing and feeling. What good is getting to the reality of things if I am trapped inside my body? If I am only electrons?

There is some thing between us that is both much smaller and much more vast than negative particles. Distance seems too limiting a description, and yet it fails to convey the mind-boggling expanse. I am trying to wrestle with this paradox and I am losing. I'm not sure I would want to win if I could.

I often struggle to find meaning in a holiday season so entangled with consumerism, and so it is almost by surprise that tomorrow is Christmas Eve. This year I think meaning has found me.

In my faith tradition, the accompanying story is one of displacement, hardship, and labor. An impoverished Jewish peasant couple scandalized by premarital pregnancy scour the periphery of the Roman Empire for a resting place, any place, to begin the hard work of bringing forth new life.

Babies are born every day, and it is never easy. But according to the story, something more was born in Judea that night. Wrapped in swaddling cloth was the wailing confession of the measurable and the ineffable.

We are not self-contained objects, isolated from one another. We are not far removed from reality. What has seemed so far has been revealed to have always been near. Love is born in that revelation, and love beckons to us who are far off -- we who feel hurt, rejected, withdrawn, and afraid.

To us love whispers, "Draw near."

The setting sun

2008-12-05T23:00:00.000-08:00

I went on a short hike in Olympia with McHaley today. The trail wound down from a little parking lot just off the road to a rocky beach on the east side of a small cove along the Puget Sound. We were surrounded by lush vegetation and then all of a sudden - tada! Water. Beautiful water.

Looking to the right, the Olympic mountains loomed in the distance, craggy and snow stained. They do not tower, in the normal sense of the word, but their rugged indifference provokes a certain admiration. I love the Olympic mountains.

Looking to the left, the sun was slowly sinking beneath a thin clutch of wispy clouds, caressing the water with the subtlest hues of a sunset palette. Fire and water dancing beneath the wailing seagulls.

We talked about life--family; friends; places we've lived; places we'd like to live. We are kindred spirits of a sort, two wanderers learning in different ways how to make a home. It's not exactly a task with measurable goals. How do you even know when a place first feels like home? I imagine you just look up one day and realize this place feels just like that other place I called "home" did. Despite having no control over this process, it still feels like hard work.

As we talked, I watched the sun descend toward the hills with lazy confidence. I want that confidence. I want to live life with the steady rhythm of the sun rising and setting each day, no matter which place I am trying to call home.

I want to stop clutching at my increasingly outlandish notions of grandeur, as if the days were sand slipping unhindered through my hands.

See, I want to savor the feel of life flowing unfettered between my fingers, to let each grain tell its unique story until there is nothing left to hold.

Then I will stand at the water, gaze upon the mountains, and know the certainty of the sun in its setting.

Postcards Without Postage, pt. 2

2008-11-25T18:02:00.000-08:00

Querida Abuelo,

It was your birthday four days ago, but I nearly forgot. In fact, I always forgot. I've never remembered birthdays besides Mom and Dad's, and I even forgot Dad's 50th. I didn't speak to you much at all while you were alive, and I regret it. I let myself be daunted by a language barrier that was nowhere near as formidable as I imagined. I allowed you to be a mythical figure rather than the warm, solid man the rest of the family knew. I missed out. And as a result, I can't tell these days if my grief is from losing you ro realizing how little I let myself know you. I could never remember your birthday but I will never forget the day of your death. I wish it was otherwise, because yours was a life to be celebrated. Dad says the family gathered for a dinner four nights ago. I imagine them eating, drinking, laughing, and maybe crying later in their bedrooms. I don't know; I wasn't there. For so long I haven't been there, but you were. A pillar of radiant LIFE that I could return to whenever I wanted. Why did I not come? And why now, when you are gone, am I so drawn to you, to your absence? I talked about ministry and family with you, but not about me. Not about my shortcomings. So, I'll tell you now--I often have to write later what I did not have the presence to say in the moment.

Te amo y te extraño mucho,

Ramón

Montage

2008-11-19T15:12:00.000-08:00

The writing project is failing miserably, so no need for secrecy any longer. I was attempting for the second year in a row to win National Novel Writing Month, and for the second year in a row I have fallen short.

"Wait a minute," you object. "There's still nearly two weeks left in November! Keep writing!" I appreciate the encouragement, I really do. After all, that's what I asked for in my last entry, right? 50,000 words in a month is daunting to say the least, but each passing year it seems more doable. Why, then, am I throwing in the towel halfway through the month?

I started out fast, nearly matching all of last year's output in the first three days. I was trying to get ahead, because friends were coming into town and then there was Thanksgiving, and November (as always) was going to be crazy. I was not even accounting for the fact that our country would elect its first black president and I would reel at the significance for nearly a week afterward.

Reality - last year when I did not win NaNoWriMo, I noted that I seemed to be more geared toward shorter pieces. Poetry, essays, short fiction. I think I can echo that realization this year, though I feel like a long piece of fiction is within my abilities, however uninteresting it might be to read. At the very least, I seem to be capable of creating characters that I enjoy spending time with, watching them react to alternately predictable and improbable situations. I can't always put them on paper, but they have begun living with me in my head, working their way into becoming lifelong friends (as if I didn't have enough voices in my head already).

Which brings me to a different conclusion this year. What I lack in writing a novel is not time. It is desire. Motivation. This may seem obvious, but it is helpful for me to articulate. People describe the artistic urge in so many different ways. Often we hear that a writer can't help but write, an painter can't help but paint. I think there is some truth in that, but I think these are also the result of cultivated affections.

Within the melange of competing desires, we make a choice of sorts. We must give space for some of them to grow roots, prepare themselves for the treacherous journey upward from heart, mind, and soul to expression, to action. Certainly, some desires impose themselves upon us more stridently, more insistently. Yet in the end, most people choke out their own desires every day, let all manner of unattended weeds overthrow the garden of their passion.

It often feels like the process is out of our control, but I wonder if we would find with honest self-examination that we gave ourselves over to our omnipresent fears, let them take our most valuable impulses hostage. I wonder if we would find our love to be polyvalent, diffused and unfocused. I wonder if we would find our discipline to be soft and pliable, unable to resist the powerful seduction of inertia.

I wonder all of these things, and yet I do not feel like I've failed this year. I am making a choice. I chose to soak in the atmosphere surrounding the election, field the comments and questions from friends, call my relatives in Arkansas who survived Jim Crow and the dissipation of communal strength born of common opposition. I chose to spend a week with my friends without trying to squirrel away a couple hours each day to write, without the raincloud of guilty inactivity dogging our travels. I chose to let other things grow than a novel this month.

In the process, I had a much needed break from work and an even more necessary rekindling of parts of myself that have grown anemic through disuse. The musician. The confessor. These are parts of me that have lain dormant in the absence of shared history. The reluctance toward openness, toward performance, are symptoms of my inner fragmentation.

My friend Dave was one of the three visitors to Portland this past week, and we shook our heads in disbelief at the decade that has passed since we met awkwardly in the Beaumont basement freshman year. This man has seen me at my lowest, staying up all night to watch movies and their directorial commentary consecutively while the incompletes keeping me from graduating stood firm on unfinished papers and final exams. He has seen me at my best, hitting three bullseyes in a row while playing darts with his hometown friends. We have seen each other struggle and helped each other celebrate. The composite of our memories feels closer to the the self I've been struggling to express since I left the Grand Canyon in January.

My time with Dave, Natalie, and Lindsay was reinvigorating, but also somewhat paralyzing. I know it's futile to wish friends like these would always be around, never be separated from me by timezones and mountains ranges. But in the flood of emotions released by our reminiscences, how can I do otherwise? It's so easy to keep digging deeper with these three, to keep making more space for our roots to grow. For all the people I have come to love in Portland, for those who have loved me so warmly, I have yet to figure out how to release the parts of me that have been hiding throughout these three years in the Pacific Northwest.

Facebook is a trip too. Friends from elementary school in New Jersey have been finding me and it's been releasing memories from even further back. The longer ago the events, the less coherent the attendant narratives. All that comes are images, flashes of seemingly insignificant moments. Why do they come? Why are they remembered? I think these are truer memories than the stories I've compiled for my internal autobiography, and I try to let this montage float to the surface from even recent memory.

They are usually without meaning unless I try to impose it. Paper football matches on the desks in Mrs. Wood's classroom. Poor attempts to shave our heads bald at George's house. Jumping on my new neighbor's trampoline in Little Rock. My first taste of rose milk at Naveen's house. The moment when Dr. Buhro explained that electron shells are visual representations of probability, not solid objects. Sean and I sprinting down the hallway of Nemerov 3. Finding my office at Mosaic covered in Hello Kitty and Care Bear posters. The drive up the Columbia River Gorge on my final approach into Portland as a new resident.

These moments require room to grow. Space to happen. November would be a great month to write a novel, but it's an even better month to create new memories with my friends. To continue writing the story of my life in greater detail, richer hues.

I am bowing out of National Novel Writing Month, assured that what is being written in me far surpasses what I am able to write. At least for today.

Game on

2008-10-31T11:28:00.000-07:00

Starting at midnight tonight, please send every ounce of good vibes, prayers, whatever ya got, my way. I am beginning one of the projects I mentioned before tonight, and I might be around online and in person a bit less over the next month or so. Check in on me...prod me...chastise me if you see me wasting time on Facebook. It's time to get serious about not only being creative, but productive.

Game on!

Voice

2008-10-29T17:57:00.001-07:00

My relationship with singing has been a rocky one, but it has withstood the test of time, as well as overcome my addiction to chronic dabbling. I don't remember much of the early years. I was no child prodigy, singing in gospel choirs or entertaining the family on holidays. In fact, I was noticed for my talent on the clarinet, but I only once remember being complimented on my singing.

We were doing some kind of choral concert in elementary school. Perhaps a holiday one, I don't remember. Fact is, I don't even remember who our chorus teacher was. Anyway, I have this memory in my head of her chastising me for not singing loud enough. She said that I knew the melody and other students were following my lead. If I did not sing out fully, then many others would trail off into uncertain, indistinguishable "counterpoint". So, I sang out.

Memories are funny though. I don't remember her name. I don't remember the setting (did she say this in front of the class? Oh the embarrassment if she did!) in which she delivered her exhortation. I often ask myself, did this really happen at all? Or did I create some memory in order to serve as a reminder to me to continue with the craft? I don't know.

However, I do clearly remember the agony of enrolling in junior high and finding out that I would have to choose between being in choir or in the band. As I mentioned before, I was recognized for my talent on the clarinet, and in the end it wound up not being much of a choice. Nonetheless, there was a pang of disappointment at not being able to continue singing in a choral setting, something I enjoyed immensely.

And that was that for a long time. I focused on clarinet, made All-Region bands, played solos at concerts, and excelled at the path I had chosen for myself. Then I burned out.

I still regret the timing. I was finishing up my sophomore year. I had gotten a relatively high chair in All-Region band and my clarinet instructor was excited about my chances at All-State. But I told him I was done. Finished. I was too stressed out to continue, could not deal with the pressure. He was dumbfounded, but accepted my decision after his initial prodding was unsuccessful. I know he was wondering, "What in the world have we been working for?"

And I had no answers to his questions. I ditched band and played football my last two years in high school, which was a great experience, but athletics were clearly disadvantaged in having a future for me beyond graduation. So it is that I arrived at college and tried to take my alto sax into private lessons and a jazz studies minor. I never got going. I didn't give it the time, I didn't have the passion for the instrument anymore. I could not for the life of me remember modes. Everything just stopped.

Except singing. See, during my senior year in high school the choir teacher made an impassioned appeal to the senior football players to be play the mostly nonspeaking parts of cowboys in Crazy For You. Somehow, several of us ended up signing on, and it involved singing and dancing. There's probably video somewhere, but woe to the person who puts it online.

Anyway, it was my first time to really sing in almost five years. We practiced hard. There were harmonies, and I had to be told that I was in the low tenor range. It was such a great experience that I kept singing in college. But, without an official venue, I subjected my roommate Sean to hours upon hours of torturous, slightly off tune singing while I tried to figure out Boyz II Men harmonies through my computer headphones.

But, through Sean's perseverance, a voice actually started to emerge. The tones got sharper, more accurate. Coming up with accompanying harmonies became more automatic. I sang in public a couple of times at some church events. Then four of us got together and formed a band at the end of college. Listening to the recordings now, I feel like we were as good as we could have been considering our relatively sparse amount of practice. And it was unbelievably fun.

Being in a band is without a doubt one of the defining social experiences of my life. I think can say without any hint of pretension that I miss being on stage. The thrill of being the point of focus for everyone's attention, hidden only by a guitar and the much more talented musicians at my side. While I still shudder slightly at hearing my recorded voice, it was nonetheless a consistently wondrous thing to hear my voice coming out of monitors or house speakers.

Then we went the way of college bands. Sam moved to California, I eventually moved back to Arkansas, and the Fellowship was broken. I still sang on my own. Recorded a few of my songs solo with terrible microphones on laboriously work intensive recording equipment. But, within six months of moving back to Little Rock, the well went dry. Without new songs, singing became an exercise for me, an enjoyment. That's nice, but I lost my voice.

Here in the last five years I've been trying to figure out what happened, trying to recover one of the great joys of my life. My listening in the last few years has honed in on jazz, blues, soul...vocal heritages that I had not explored in my songwriting nor in my casual singing until I joined a gospel choir in Little Rock. The music fit my voice like the missing half of a treasure map. "My vocal cords were made for this!" I thought excitedly.

This is going to sound awful, but even better than gospel choir is karaoke. I'm not gonna lie -- when you sing Al Green at karaoke and make a roomful of drunk rednecks from central Washington get up to dance and applaud when you finish, your ego is insufferable for the rest of the night.

Yet, there is something in me that is misplaced. There's a fear in that thrill of singing now. I don't in any way understand it. As much as I loved being on stage, I hide my voice away now. Ask any of my friends in Portland...most of them don't know I was in a band in St. Louis. If they know I can sing it's only because they've heard me at work or they were present at Lizz's birthday party when I sang "End of the Road".

What happened? Just the other day at work, a friend asked me to sing a line from John Legend to help jog her memory of whether she'd heard him or not. I refused. I don't know why. I love singing John Legend songs...what was the block there?

I don't get it, and I don't like it. I want my voice back. I want to be comfortable with it again, wear it like an old pair of jeans that are slightly frayed at the edges, but oh so comfortable in the seat. I want to invite my friends to witness one of the things I enjoy doing most in life. Seriously, I think there is a lightness in me that is only present when I'm singing and performing music on a regular basis. How many of you have ever seen that?

I don't know what this post is ultimately about. Glancing back over it, it seems a bit narcissistic and self indulgent. But, I think I needed to write it. Put it out of my head and onto some medium, to prod myself to recover that lost love. So, if you've read this far, thanks for following along with my logorrhea. Yeah...

A memory

2008-10-28T18:30:00.000-07:00

When I was still living in New Jersey, we had a huge icy snowstorm one time. School was canceled for a few days and the roads and sidewalks were treacherous, despite prompt plowing and salting. Back in our neighborhood it was particularly slippery, and it was in these conditions that I found myself walking to my best friend George's house a few blocks away.

I was dressed appropriately -- jeans tucked in snow boots, scarf tied round my face against the wind. Each step had to be placed carefully, and I was slipping and sliding all over the place. At one point I must have lost my concentration, because the next thing I know I am staring at my legs unceremoniously splayed above my head, steel sky above my legs.

Yes, I was falling in the most out of control, awkward, unrecoverable way possible. Now understand -- this was the beginning of junior high. Acute self-consciousness falls so far short of describing the paranoia and anxiety of that time. Yet, here I was, walking through the neighborhood where both friends and enemies lived, and I was making a complete ass of myself. Never mind that slipping on the ice is something people do all the time; in that state of mind, it felt like an act with fatal consequences.

After falling solidly on my back, breath whooshing out noisily, I had to take a moment before I could gather my motor control. The first thing I did was look around to see if anyone had seen me. I scanned the crystalline surroundings for any color splashed against the white; any evidence of someone in the vicinity. A beat. Then relief. There was no one.

Once the nervousness of being seen in such a compromised position passed, I began to laugh. A loud, uninhibited laugh. The kind of laugh that carried a hint of the maturity I would have in looking back in hindsight and shaking my head at the ridiculousness of my junior high anxieties turning ordinary clumsiness into social suicide. The kind of laugh that I would never allow myself in any other situation than when I was alone, unseen.

As my laughter subsided and I pushed myself off the ground, I began to get very sad.

I was 12 years old and trying very hard not to believe in God. After all, this was the year that witnessed the only time my father hit me in the face. The subsequent altercation involving a knife and baseball bat ended with me on the ground being choked by the very man who had helped give me life, the man I had just tried to kill.

This was the year I was consumed with guilt after finding out my mother had bipolar disorder, her internal chemistry influencing the mood swings for which I had begun to hate her. When I realized it wasn't her fault, I could direct that hate nowhere other than myself. What kind of son hates his mother?

This was the year I told myself that there could be no God at all if these things could happen to one family. The self-centered trajectory of such thoughts is symptomatic of adolescence, I suppose, but to this day I am amazed at the narrowness of my scope. I had friends in school who had it much worse, and it never crossed my mind to doubt God's existence because of their situation. But this was happening to ME.

Brushing the snow and ice off my coat, I breathed in the aloneness that had moments before released me to laugh wholeheartedly. As that solitude expanded in my mind to a cosmic scale, I was overcome by the stark emptiness I felt surrounding me on Homan Avenue.

And I walked away sad.

Postcards Without Postage, pt. 1

2008-10-27T00:10:00.000-07:00

This is the first in a series of postcards I am writing to people with whom I am no longer in contact--people from the past; people who are estranged; people who have passed away (names have been changed where appropriate). This was inspired by a gift from my friend Natalie Gonzalez...so credit her if you like it, and blame me if you don't.

Dear Elena,

Wow, it's so great to hear from you after such a long time and distance between us. I've thought of you often on this journey. Tentatively, but often. So many things I've seen, people I've met, remind me of our love in its infancy. When I'm melting my eyes out on towering landscapes or crystal clear starlit skies, I am reminded of that perfect New England night. At least, that's how it seemed to me then. Cinematic in its timing, its scenery, its cathartic embrace. But remembering back, I celebrated our kiss like I'd won some race. It was reduced to a goal achieved, an affirmation of self. You were utterly left behind, transubstantiated into a phantom of love's ideal instead of the very solid, very present Elena who had been my friend since I disembarked from my East Coast exodus. Elena, I'm sorry. I didn't even know how to crawl, much less walk with you. I caused you a lot of pain over the next year, willfully and spitefully. Childishly. And now, regretfully. It's been over a decade since that snowy night in New England, and I don't remember the kiss anymore. The feeling of apparent victory. There is only the dull ache of love betrayed. For that, I am sorry. Love is a hard teacher. -- Ramón

Exodi

2008-10-25T10:09:00.000-07:00

One of the inadvertent consequences of deciding to be definitely here is risking the pain of separation after being fully present with people. This is a basic tenet of right relationship -- amount and depth of love is directly proportional to amount and depth of pain that can be experienced.

As I've mentioned before on this blog, my tendency has been to stay lightly disengaged so as to mitigate these effects, but I can do that no longer. It is no surprise, therefore, that soon after making that decision engage fully I am confronted with the potential of two very dear couples leaving Portland. These couples are integral parts of the family that I've found myself among out here, across the Rocky Mountains and Mississippi River from my blood relations.

It's hard. I've always been the one to say goodbye. That's hard in it's own way, but the adventure of what's next is soothing, or distracting at the very least. Staying behind...that's something I'm going to have to learn how to do. Especially in a city like Portland, where so many young people come not so much in search of something as to escape somewhere else. We are refugees, us transplants, often running from things we cannot recognize until we come here and realize they have followed us.

The inevitability of having to deal with those things tends to draw us back to where we have some kind of root system. To family. To friends with whom we have history, inside jokes, even drama. To place...the street corners and sandwich shops where we feel utterly at home.

My friends are not considering leaving Portland. They are considering going home. How could I, who have searched for a home for so long, ever be against that? If/when my friends leave, I will be sad. I will regret all the times I should have called, should have visited, should have hugged.

But more than that, I will laugh with them; remember. We have made a home for ourselves here, in this Portland, even if only for a little while. For that, I will ever be grateful--not to the idea of a city, but to my dear friends. We will always come home to one another.

Here

2008-10-24T17:01:00.001-07:00

I need some discipline, some regularity, in my writing once again. In my life. Perhaps posting simple blogs can help me get that train back on the tracks.

The weather in Portland has been phenomenal for the last three or four days. The mornings have started out pretty cloudy, but over the course of the day the clouds break and the sun begins burning itself into our pleasure receptors. These sunny, crisp days are amazing in their clarity and briskness.

I've been back from Phoenix for nearly three months now. Though I have come back with some very clear ideas of the values I want to drive what I do here, the day to day decisions, the longer term trajectories, are exceedingly unclear. What do I do with myself? How do I occupy my time with the things that highlight and express the values that are infusing me with purpose?

I've got a couple projects I want to undertake. I will not write about them, because I'm tired of talking. I only mention them for the sake of accountability. Ask me occasionally how those projects are going, though I might not share details with you.

Suffice to say that beginning to post on a regular basis is a move toward a habit, a discipline, that may spark other things. Attempting to write a poem a day in April ended up being such a fruitful exercise for loosening my writing as the spring and summer progressed, and I'm looking for a little more of that magic now with other endeavors. We'll see...

I was thinking about the future the other day. Alternately dreaming and worrying, and then I recalled this line from Milan Kundera in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting:

"People are always shouting they want to create a better future. It's not true. The future is an apathetic void of no interest to anyone. The past is full of life, eager to irritate us, provoke and insult us, tempt us to destroy or repaint it. The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past. They are fighting for access to the laboratories where photographs are retouched and biographies and histories rewritten."

I've determined to be fully here in Portland. Here does not describe a locale or a time frame (which has dictated the way I viewed most of my living situations over the last decade), but a way of being. A wholeness. An acute attentiveness. And, perhaps, a contentment.

I believe this requires letting go of the illusion that control of the future can be attained, as well as loosing the absurdity of wishing the past could be altered. Perhaps being created in the image of God means living within the bounds, the freedom, of God's self revelation to Moses from the burning bush -- I am who I am.