Looking For The Long Ride

The phrase “out of the box” is used to describe behavior that is not within the status quo.

When we think about something in a different way from what our normal thought processes would be, we call it “thinking out of the box”.

Our boxes define us and our behaviors.

When we ask someone we have just met what they do, we are in a sense asking them to tell us who they are by the type of job they report to Monday through Friday.

When we say that we belong to the First Presbyterian Church (or any other denominational or non-denominational church), we are saying that the box that we have chosen for our expression of Christianity looks this way.

When we did our coloring books as a kid, we stayed within the lines of the drawings on the pages because that is what we aspired to. That is what pleased our parents and so that is what we tried to do. It too is another box.

I guess you could go as far as to say that our very bodies are boxes that hold our organs together so that they can function correctly. When you are involved in an accident and break the “body box” all kinds of bad things can happen.

Now don’t get me wrong—boxes are not inherently bad—as if anything you put into a box is no longer ok just because it is in a box.

Our lives need structure just like a train needs tracks…to get from one place to another you have to follow a road or path of some sort.

I guess what I am really talking about is laziness.

What’s that got to do with anything, you ask.

I have just come to realize that I have allowed people during my brief stay on this earth to define for me what my walk or ride looks like. Especially the past couple of years.

By being in a certain box (lets just say for arguments sake a certain local church), my Christianity and it’s outward expression was being defined for me and I hardly realized it. Not that this is bad. We all need to agree on certain things like who created the heavens and the earth, the virgin birth, and Christ’s atoning death. Without agreement in this area, we could never move forward.

However…how we “do” church and what that looks like on a daily or Sunday basis is really up for grabs.

We are the “church”, the “eklesia”, “the called apart ones” not the buildings that we gather in.

We all want to fit in and be a part of something. A counselor friend of mine would say the greatest need we have is to be loved and accepted.

Where the laziness fits in, and for this reason I could give myself a good swift kick, is where we just settle for the staus quo and even though we have a “feeling” that something isn’t right, we choose to go along and not make waves.

Or when we made waves, we were made to feel bad (coloring outside the lines) and so made an uneasy peace with ourselves that we could live with the stuff that made us feel unfullfilled and frustrated.

Wanting to belong and thus live inside that kind of box is what has prompted me to write today’s journal.

I am tried of just getting by, getting along, and just making do.

I don’t want to have to get into your “box” just to be accepted by you. Nor do I want you to jump into mine for the same reason.

We need to love and repect one another enough to embrace the differences in the ways we were created and the jobs we are destined to do. In other more appropriate words, we need to “spur one another on to love and good works”. And not worry so much about where we go to church and what we do as an expression of that.

Life would be more interesting and our ride so much more enjoyable. It’s not an easy choice, but one that will bring lastng peace and happiness.

It’s late afternoon on December 25th, 2006 and my mind is wondering about this celebration we call Christmas.

I have always believed that traditonally we celebrated Christmas to remember the birth of Jesus.

We raised our kids this way.

I remember, lo those many years ago, walking into a bank in West Jefferson, North Carolina with my five year old daughter.  It was pre Christmas and a kind lady approached us and asked my daughter if she was excited to see Santa Claus. Jessica, 5 at the time, informed the lady that she didn’t believe in Santa Claus but believed in Jesus.

The lady’s jaw dropped and it got all quiet in the bank. We did our business and left.

People didn’t know what to do with us because we took Christianity seriously. For many years we didn’t do a tree because pagans used to worship the fertility gods in groves of green fir trees.

Halloween was out as well and Easter bunnies…well you get the point.

I was a writer for a twice weekly newspaper and always did the research for articles during all of our traditional holiday seasons. Or at least I thought I did. I mean look what happened to the American Indian after that first Thanksgiving. They are on reservations, own casino’s and haven’t seen a buffalo in many, many moons.

Don’t get me wrong…I like Christmas—I think it is a great holiday. It is just that I don’t think it really has a whole lot to do with Jesus anymore. We used to read the bible stories and pray for those in need and say special prayers for those family members we couldn’t be with during the Christmas season.

But it’s kinda like I told my kids many years ago—we celebrate His birth and death every day that we focus on what He did for us and as we try to walk out our lives in a relationship with Him. In other words, His birth was very special. But the whole act of commuion is a celebration of His death and resurrection not His birth.

His true birth was probably late August or early September…but that’s just stirring things up don’t you think?

I am clearly on a quest to find out more about the Jesus that I say I believe in.

The holiday we call Christmas is observed by many who are far from being Christians. That’s not a bad thing. Let’s just not fool ourselves into thinking that it is really any more than what it is.

I certainly can’t tell you how to celebrate this time of year and don’t want you telling me how it should be done either.

What I am feeling however is this: I truly want to dig deeper into what I think I believe and why I do the things I do. After all, the examined life is really a part of why we are here in the first place.

It’s like seed time and harvest—a cycle that repeats itself as long as the sun still rises.

Is this a bump in the road—a detour—a fork in the road—or just slightly off the beaten path.

I don’t know at this point…only time will tell what kind of ride this has been.

I can’t really say that one of the reasons my wife and I moved to North Carolina was because of the mild winters. I came with her in March of 1978 and we sun bathed in Moravian Falls, only to return to Michigan a few days later to almost a foot of snow.

She was going to move anyway (we weren’t married at the time) and the invitation to join her was one I couldn’t turn down.

How she picked North Carolina is another story but suffice it to say, we both fell in love with it.

We brought our cross country skis with us and sold them after a year or two because of the lack of snow. Not that we were complaining, it was just a fact. When it did snow, it would often get warm the day after and make mushy conditions for cross country sking at best.

So weather was a part of the process of deciding, but certainly not the top reason. The truth is I loved my wife to be and would have followed her anywhere.

So today, Christmas eve 2006, I refect upon our decsion to move here 27 years after the fact.

My prompting in this direction is that fact that at 12:30 pm today I took a 16 miles bike ride with a friend in almost 60 degree weather. It was a perfect day. People who put their bikes away in September or November are really missing some of the great cycling times.

Today, there was a light cross wind as there always is on Railroad Grade Road. But the lack of traffic and the ease and joy of riding was at a 5 in a scale of 1-5.

Lonnie, my riding buddy is several years younger than me. And although he doesn’t ride as much, his legs have a lot of life in them.  We would often average 16-18 miles per hour on the way out and only 13 or 14 on the way back. Today, he pushed it to about 16 on the way back and it took a real effort for me to keep up that pace.

Anyway, it’s Christmas eve in the high country of North Carolina. Indian summer has never been this good. I am thankful that we have had this day to make another memory in.

It’s almost time for dinner (supper in the south). The kids are coming and I need to put the leafs in the table and make coffee. Maybe I will even have a glass of wine.

This is a good ride. Hope your’s is today as well.

Merry Christmas.

Once again it is Christmas time and all that that implies.

This means for me long days at work and short nights mixed with lots of last minute present buying opportunities.

Maybe next year we will step back and take another look at what we do during this time of year and what it all really means.

I read an article in the Winston-Salem Journal the other day that dispelled the notion that Christmas has gotten more commercial the past several years. The crux of the article was that the Christmas celebration, or at least what we know of it culturally, has always been commercial. The celebration was originally founded in it…not in the celebration of Christs’ birth.

Be that as it may and how many rabbits we could chase with that one—that’s not what prompted me to write today, Christmas eve 2006.

While shopping the other day, I ran into an old friend that I hadn’t seen in some time. We live in the same town but through circumstances in our lives, rarely get together anymore. Not that the possibility doesn’t exist, it is just that we are really living in two different worlds. Not to say they can’t intersect at some point, just that they haven’t in the past several years.

Many years ago, we went to the same church.

When they left, we still saw each other every once in awhile but soon drifted in different directions. My wife and I would, during the peak of our friendship, see them at least once a week. We would often dine at their house, as Robert (not his real name) was a great cajun cook. We’d drink a beer or two, eat well and talk about life and the adventure we were on together. Duirng the work week, we’d often take off work early and catch a movie at the theatre.

In our most recent meeting in the local department store, I mentioned that Sandi and I had left this same church after 22 years and that they, of all people, would understand what had prompted us to do so.

He said that he had often wondered what had become of me and that he missed our friendship.

In a moment of defining clarity, I had this thought: What we had was, as I remembered it, very special and something that most people only dream about having. Also, that this friendship was still there in my memory banks and no one could damage it or re-define it in any way. That, even if we never got together again, we had had a moment in time which was very special and we could still savour that as part of our life journey.

Have they moved on…Yes! Are we…Yes! Will we ever break bread again…Maybe!

It seems like at this very moment, it is more important to look forward rather than look behind. To begin to fill our lives with the stuff of our dreams and not give in to the cynicism that nips at our heels.

God is not finsihed with us yet…we still have a life to live, whether that is a few days, a few years or a decade or two.

I want to get to the part where I experience it (life) in the moment of lving rather than in the memory of the past.

There are still a lot of flowers to smell and rides to take.

A while back I was faced with one of those life dilemmas that pop up every so often.

In the course of living, I have occasionally found myself at odds with someone over issues and perceptions of issues. In my frustration over situations that seem to get worse rather than better over time, I would sometimes talk about my frustration or situation with other people. It was not my intention to hurt the people I had issues with or malign them in doing this, but it was often perceived that way.

I call it “leakage”.

If personal situations or disputes in our lives are not handled quickly and correctly, we often reap consequences beyond what we would normally expect.

Things have to be dealt with correctly in order to keep us from leaking out our feelings and frustrations.

That’s the difference between having been listened to and really being heard.

I have known people who will listen to anything you have to say about a subject or situation. Even if what you are pointing out is a perceived weakness or a criticism of sorts. You leave the conversation thinking that things have been taken care of and the relational frictions will disappear. However, it often only takes a few weeks to realize that nothing is happening and that things have actually gotten worse.

After having reached several of these “dead-ends” during the past year, I have learned what it means to leave somethng up to God.

When we have reached the end of what we feel we can bring to an area of conflict, it’s time to get out of Dodge and trust that by leaving it alone, God can do His best work.

We have to leave our judgments as well. Repent of them if we have made them and move on. There is a very important lesson to be learned here.

What you judge, you will become. It’s like gravity…you don’t have to understand it to know that it works.

When we make judgements towards someone or something, we lock that situation away from God’s judgement, which is always true and made from a whole different perspective than ours.

This dynamic works most often in relation to parents and kids. A son judges his dad for being harsh and lo and behold becomes that which he judged. It may take years to manifest itself and by the time it does, the behaviour doesn’t seem attached to any particular thing or event.

These types of behaviours become what we call generational…passed on from one to another until broken by forgiveness and repentance.

In the situations I have found my self in, I have chosen to forgive and bless and in so doing move on with a life that is much too short to carry around that sort of baggage.

Life is a much better “ride” that way.

What do you think?

Last night I was thinking that I would start a poem out with the statement that I have always wanted to use the word “undulate” in a poem.

Undulate means:

to move with a sinuous or wavelike motion; display a smooth rising-and-falling or side-to-side alternation of movement.

Or having a wavelike or rippled form, surface, edge, etc.; wavy.

So, in other words, undulate is all around us.

Really, I just rediscovered the word in a book of poems by Spanish poet Frederico Garia Lorca. I didn’t even make it all the way through the poem before I wanted to write my own. I find that good poetry and good music always make me want to do it myself rather than read about somebody else doing it.

It is the process of being inspired.

I guess I have always wanted to talk about Lenny Bruce as well.

He was a comedian back in the day who ran afoul with the law for some of the words he used in his act. He got so entangled in the process of fighting city hall that he drove himself deeper into the drugs and depression that he was already prone to.

He was a New York Jew and was a very funny and hip guy long before it was cool to be a comedian. One thing I remember about Lenny was that he loved words and what they meant….he used many for the shock value and that is what ultimately got him into trouble.

One of his bits about words went something like this: Words and images evoke certain emotions. If you raise the American flag and I view it all wavy and such…I get this feeling of pride that wells up in me. I won’t get that same feeling if you raised up a wash cloth on that same flag pole. (or something to that effect)

However, I began to wonder if words and images can be corrupted and to what degree we can know the purity of something.

I bought a record by Rokia Traore, a Mali singer. One of the songs was about how much harm the African native belief in polygamy brought women. How it demeaned them. Most of her songs are about real stuff…people’s feelings, living with one another in harmony, thanks to God and so forth. I only mention this because I like to know what I am listening to even though I don’t speak the Mali language. It’s almost like glossalalia. But that’s another story.

Anyway, she has a great voice and the record is upbeat and very catchy tune-wise. So, when I clicked on her web site and saw her dancing (all wild and undulating), I wondered if this came from the same place as the belief in monagamy came from. Or if my mind had been reduced to seeing this dance freedom from a western perspective and therefore with some sexual connotation. I agree that dance, like art a music, has been used to entice and sell products.

I guess I will never truly know what her inner motives are. But at this point, until I do, I don’t want to paganize everything that I don’t fully understand or that makes me feel a little uneasy. Pagans dance for one reason….the college girl in church during a worship service dances for another. What I do with it is up to me.

If there is something I don’t understand I generally ask questions. That’s the ride that I am on today. It’s a little rainy some times…but when the sun does shine…watch out.

What can we really know about life itself and what does it really matter?

It seems like we spend our lives trying to discover something that we only have a vague idea about in the first place.

Some days it seems like life really has a purpose and everything is falling into place. Other days are the opposite. Nothing seems to work or go right. Just when we think we have it all figured out, life throws us a curve ball.

Spent the late morning Sunday in the Barnes and Noble bookstore in Winston-Salem. Had a $100 gift certificate that needed to be spent and today seemed like the day to do it. We meet for church at 5 pm so this schedule leaves time during the day to do a little more than just read the paper and take a nap.

Anyway….after finding an African music cd, I went to the poetry section to see if something jumped off the shelf at me. Having the Spanish language on my mind, I naturally thought of Federico Garcîa Lorca. It turned out I was thinking of Octavio Paz, but that’s another story.

So I buy Lorca’s selected poems and within the first few sentences of the introcduction, the translater tells me that Lorca’s major theme is the impossible: the melancholy conviction that all of us have certain indefinable longings that cannot be satisfied by anyting around us. That to Lorca, the essence of poetry is mystery and “mystery” means that language can only point at, and never adequately name, what it is that we want.

So I am sitting in my easy chair reading this and thinking that there must be one reality in life…that the setting sun is just the setting sun and so forth. Yet I realize that to each of the billion people on the earth, the setting sun has certain emotional qualities attached to it…if and when one would take the time to think about it. It’s the same sun all around the world although the geography of where it rises and sets is different. The time zone is different, the language unique to the town or country.

But I can relate to what I am reading about the way Lorca thinks. Words and pictures and music do not adequately explain who I am and where I have been. The depth of me has never been totally reveled.

In Ecclesiates 3:11 I read: He has made everything appropriate in its time. He has also set enternity in their heart, yet so that man will not find out the work which God has done from the beginning even to the end.

I have always felt this meant that we can have the belief that there is a lot out there, but we will never truly grasp the depth of it. That a compete sense of purpose and destiny will never come our way. That we will keep aiming for something that we somehow know exists, but at the same time will never completely understand it.

We are all unqiue…there are no two of us alike. As I drove back from Winston, the thought occured to me that even though trees have a certain similarity, no two of them are alike as well. They all have trunks and branches and leaves but none are identical.

We are all going to see things a little differently from each other. The you said “po tay to” and I said “pa tat to” thing.

We can keep trying to understand the world around us. We can keep trying to attain the perfect expression of what the family of God looks like.

We need to grab ahold of the handle bars and hold on for all we are worth. And trust that the tires will hold and the brakes will work if and when we need them.

It is interesting to note how much stuff resides upstairs.

By upstairs I mean our minds.

I am fascinated by the poets who explore the places that most people don’t go to.

I often think that we live within certain structures that are not really who we are but what passes for all the stones that have been placed into the chimneys of our lives.

In other words…we are not what we think. Entirely. We are certainly a part of that. But not entirely defined by it. I like African music, but that doesn’t make me African by any means.

What I am talking about is how far into ourselves do we have to go to find out who we really are.

What makes us tick.

I remember talking to my mother several years ago. In the course of the conversation, it was determined  that I was a lefty at birth and that my mother, as was the  convention at the time (the 50’s), turned me into a righty.

Imgaine my surprise, later in life, when I looked back upon my baseball and hockey days, only to realize that I was really a left handed person trying to be a righty.

I was a switch hitter in baseball. I could hit right and left. Yet I threw the ball with my right hand.

I kicked the football with my left foot ( a righty would use his right) and hit the hockey puck left handed (I thougjt it was right until corrected).

I don’t remember how the conversation began but, in talking with a friend at work,  I learned from him that in early  times left-handedness was considered almost demonic. Like people who displayed left handed characteristics were possessed.

Society is most certainly right handed.

Being orignally left handed is a part of who I am…a part of my ride. Born lefty only to be turned into a righty.

When my mother told me that bit of information, a lot of things that happened in my life as a youth were clarified.

I remembered learning to write. I had what they called at the time a backward slant. In other words I was writting right as if I were a lefty. Everybody else wrote the “right” way. I remember having an urge to try and write with my left hand. I guess it was my mind telling my body something I didn’t have a clue about intellectually.

Now I am not saying that everything that went wrong in my early days was because I was forced to be a right handed person. Because on the other hand, it would also be possible, if that be true, that everything good that happened and was unique to me was due to that fact as well. It is a goose and gander sort of thing.

What I guess I am saying is that what made me different, or at least feel that way, was the fact that I was cross brained to a degree. We all have probably felt at some point in life that we didn’t quite fit in. That feeling is not neccesarily caused by being left handed in a right dominated society. But maybe it has more to do with things and the way they truned out than I woud suspect.

As I was writting this, I “googled” lefthanded and came up with a whole web society of sorts based on lefty’s who had been turned into righty’s and other things “left”.

So, there is proably more to this thing than meets my eye at this point.

But that’s another ride for another time.

We have all pondered the question, “If you were to be stranded on a dessert island, what would you take?”

I guess my all time favorite album would have to be Miles Davis’ “Kind Of Blue” recorded in 1959 in New York City. It is the album that got me through a lot of strange nights in the early and late 60’s. Besides Miles on trumpet, it featured John Coltrane, “Cannonball” Adderly (who was “bigger” than Tran at the time), Bill Evans, Paul Chambers, James Cobb and Wynton Kelly. I played it so much that I knew every nuance. It had a beat that resonated within me…a bass line that was almost like me walking down the street feeling good. With earphones on I could almost feel the spit hit the trumpet as the notes were played.

Miles always had a way of getting the best people to play with him on his albums. He was the “master” and they were the disciples, getting ready to bust out on their own. To have played on one of Miles’ albums was a sure bet if you didn’t blow it by being a junkie or soemthing like that.

I have made the statement many times over the years that the gifts and callings of God are without repentance. What I have taken this to mean is that all gifting comes from God. He created us and gave us gifts. Once they are given, He doesn’t go back on us or take them away. Whether or not we give God the glory…that’s another story. Miles gift was given by God. I never saw anywhere in print that Miles ever acknowledged where his gift to play the turmpet came from. I can enjoy the gifting he received because within what he created was a Godly seed.

Another album I wouldn’t mind being stranded with would be Joni Mitchell’s “Blue”.

This is an album that almost defines the artistic melancholy prevalent in so much of what came out of the sixties. I guess that is why I like it som much. She creates movies in my head with her words.

Joni, like Leonard Cohen, is a Canadian. She moved to America when she married Chuck Mitchell and hung out in and around Detroit, Michigan, where Chuck was from. He was a balladeer….singing songs written by Bertolt Bretch and Flanders and Swan…..he even did a great version of Jerry Jeff Walker’s “Mister Bo Jangles”.

The ladies liked him. He played the coffe house circuit, which at the time was very big around college towns.

We had one in my town of Port Huron (60 miles north of Detroit) called the Cellar. It had been operated under several names, Someplace Else, The Undesrground and so forth.

One weekend, Chuck and Joni were scheduled to play. Mind you, this was before Joni became almost a household name.
I was in town after school and eating dinner at a little restaurant next to where I worked as a parking lot attendant. I knew  the guy who ran the Cellar and saw him sitting at a table with a handsome couple. It turned out to be Chuck and Joni Mitchell who had just arrived in town for their gig that evening. My friend introduced me to them and I can remember falling head over heels for Joni who had this great big smile.

Needless to say, I went to every performance that weekend not knowing what was to happen in the  following weeks.

It was 1968 and Judy Collins, a noted folk singer, had just recorded Joni’s song “Both Sides Now” and was getting national attention with it. I think it went to the top of the pop charts. There was a story about it in Newsweek magazine and everything and that signaled the end of Joni Mitchell ever coming back to Port Huron and working the coffee house circuit. She was supposed to play with Chuck in Detroit at a club called The Spot later that month. We went down only to find that her and Chuck were separated (soon to divorce) and she wouldn’t be playing with him anymore.

What that has to do with the album “Blue” you will have to figure out. Somehow it all runs together for me. It is a part of who I am and a part of the ride I have been on.

I still get chills when I listen to some of Joni’s early work, even though I don’t think she ever gave God the glory for her gift. She influenced a whole generation of musicians (Crosby, Stills and Nash and the like).

I guess that 15 minute meeting in 1968 influenced my life as well.