Here

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.