I want so many things.

I want so many things.

Why do I want so many things?

I love people. I want to listen to them, cry with them, teach them, inspire them to be the selves they were created to be. I want to feed them and free them from prison and sing with them and help them find wholeness. I want to love them, to love them in North Carolina and Maryland and Minnesota and Gaza and Bangladesh and Tanzania. I want to reconcile us all with each other—the women and men, the liberal and conservative, the rich and poor, the young and old, the black and white and native and Latino and Asian and Arab and Jewish and everyone in between.

I love the arts. I want to write beauty and vulnerability and redemption. I want to sing with the spirit, to play the melodies and harmonies of hope.

I love this earth, this creation. I want to run and hike and swim and climb. I want to learn and teach us all to eat the fruit of the land rather than the factory, to find goodness and simplicity in the everyday processes of growing and eating and coming and going and waking and sleeping.

I love the church: its babies and nonagenarians, its liturgy and communion and song and scripture, its touchy-feely sharing and tearful prayers and most of all the God who is creating and recreating us all. I want to see the church willing to die and come alive anew.

I want so many things.

I cannot have or do all. This life, this in-breaking kingdom of God is too rich for me to drink it all in. And if I am to give myself fully to this world, I will have to choose: between the piano and the garden or between Maryland and Tanzania or between the incarcerated and the nonagenarians.

What I mean is that I have this one fleeting chance, as we all do, to run at the world holding all the love I can.

And when I choose where, specifically, to run, I will choose also where not to run. I will lose pieces. I will let go of the other dream, the other country, the other song. I will release them into the air and pray one day they come back and find me further on the journey.

I suppose in all truth, it is a good problem to have: the desire to love and create and heal more than is humanly possible. A heart too full to narrow itself to one passion.

The fullness in this heart, though—I just want to bring it to the right place.

I want so many things.

Running uphill

Even if you’re not a runner and have no interest in ever being one, I hope you will read on today, because today in my writing about running, I suspect that I am writing about more than running: about practice and discipline and being weak and being strong.

I started running in college for exercise and continued because I enjoyed it, because it was a way to process thoughts, to calm myself when stressed, to feel the breeze blowing and muscles working and sweat dripping. I love being alone with my thoughts and sometimes a deer or a bird. I love the way the synergy of all my bodily muscles seems to loosen and work out the tangled knots in my mind. (And I love a big spaghetti dinner.)

A couple years ago, I started signing up for occasional races, because it motivated me to run regularly. I raced for the sake of the training. Before my first half marathon, I’d never run more than five or six miles, but as I trained, I found that I enjoyed the long runs of eight or ten miles; I enjoyed the sweat and the sore muscles and the pounding and the time to think.

Even as I came to love long runs and harder challenges, I never liked hills. When I moved to the mountains, I found ways to avoid them. I always ran paths along residential roads and rivers, flat and meditative, where my lungs and legs and arms and legs could reach a perfect rhythm. If I had something interesting enough or confusing enough on my mind, I could lose myself for a while and forget that I was running at all. I liked this state of semi-consciousness.

I disliked hills. When you are running uphill, there is no way you can forget that you are running.

My philosophy was that hills should be about 100 or 200 yards maximum; that hills are something to get up and over as quickly as possible so you can move on with the rhythm of the run.

Then I ran a crazy 200-mile relay race across the Smokies. In my last 6-mile leg of the relay, I had to run uphill for the first three miles. I was exhausted and weak and cranky and I honestly walked up most of the hill, which did not meet my 200-yard maximum, which could not simply be gotten over. And then after climbing endlessly, I suddenly turned a corner and there ahead of me was the crest of the hill, the Appalachian trail crossing, and the panorama view of the mountains in all its clear-skies spring glory. The next three miles were downhill.

After that, my hill-running philosophy changed slightly. I figured hills were something to be got over, but they could be rewarding. I figured I should start doing some hill runs once in a while, up the Blue Ridge parkway near my house, where I could reach an overlook and exult in the view paid for by my hard work.

As I began to run up the parkway, the end goal kept me going. I knew I could stop when I reached the first overlook (or eventually the second, or the third). I knew I could see mountains, and then I could turn around and coast back downhill.

Slowly, though, something changed. Running uphill never became as meditative and rhythmic as my trail runs, but it stopped being entirely about the destination. I learned to look down at where I was, rather than up at the insurmountable hill. I learned to enjoy the feel of my body pushing hard against gravity.

Depending on the grade of the incline, I’ve gotten now to where I run upwards for one or two or maybe even three miles without stopping, even if there’s no great view as a payoff. I’ve gotten to where I can be on the hill, body pushing, mind spinning, and find a new kind of rhythm—not the rhythm of losing myself in my mind and floating off into meditation and forgetting about the run; but the rhythm of feeling it all in my body, feeling the struggle, the reach, the exertion of every muscle; feeling that I am strong, I can do this, I can keep going.

There are some days when I am too tired, and I stop early and walk to catch my breath, and collapse on the floor when I get home again.

But with each new day I pray that it is true: that I am strong, I can do this, I can keep going.

Autumn in Cherokee

Autumn has blown through Cherokee. It came so quickly, now the leaves are almost gone. And with autumn has come fresh, crisp air.

Maybe it started with running in the mornings, beating my body on the pavement at my least favorite time of day, with a couple local ladies. Getting to know them a little. Coming to find that I like being up early, when there is time to pray and wait for the light.

Or it started when I got assigned to teach the night GED class. Which I disliked at first because on Tuesdays and Thursdays, I come home from morning GED class around 3. I lie on the couch like a zombie until 4:30 catching up on TV, then drag myself off of it and head back for evening class. But then, it’s such a good class. Molly is the first student who has ever told me she enjoyed the Sylvia Plath poem, and she writes beautifully, and I wonder if I might just graduate my first English major. James is 65 and has worked his whole life as a carpenter and wants to get his GED just to see if he can—and he can. Ashley and Jake are so young, only 16 and 18, and it’s only when Ashley writes her essay I find out their baby daughter has cystic fibrosis. They are going to get married, and the world is stacked against them, and I want them to beat it so badly.

Or it started with this writing project. When I decided to write only the things I want to write, the stories that are inside me and want to be told. My marriage. My faith. My family. When I started collecting stories about my Grandfather who died earlier this year and writing them down for the family. When I connected with people through this writing.

Or it started when I went to seven weddings and a funeral this summer, and I started missing the feeling of being home.

It starts in a lot of places sometimes. Sometimes that’s the only way. But then one day I wake up and realize this might just be called joy.

And suddenly I have a new fear: not of plodding through this next year hazy, but of leaving yet another place I have grown to love. Grown to love slowly and skeptically and with many asterisks, sure, but nonetheless—yes, I must name it—grown to love.

It’s not a straight path, of course. This doesn’t mean I won’t be lonely again, couch-ridden again, resigned to anger again—this year, probably even this month.

But for the moment, I roll down the road playing my music and gawking at the blue sky and the orangey-red trees and the sparkling river and I feel amazed at the beauty of it all. I feel desire and drive and purpose and I revel in it, because it seems like it’s been so long. And it is a gift.

Detox

I have gradually become addicted to entertainment and communication technology. It started a couple years ago with a little TV to unwind after work. Since I started living in the middle of nowhere, it has grown into Netflix and blogs and Facebook galore, trying to find ways to connect. I no longer think, as I once did, that these technologies are inherently bad. I have seen how wonderful it is to catch up with old friends on Facebook, or to share real stories via social media, or to relax with a glass of wine and a comedy.

But as I was driving home the other night at twilight, with the windows rolled down, watching thousands of fireflies twinkle in the lush grass, I felt I was tapping into some beauty that I've been missing. I am tired of living in the numbness that I've made for myself. I feel like I can only concentrate in 3-minutes segments. I find my favorite books, and the Bible, boring. My thoughts are sometimes fuzzy and unable to be separated from the cacophony of images and voices in my mind. As I'm doing something enjoyable or clever or ironic, I find myself thinking in 150 word blurbs, thinking how I would present my experience to the world via Facebook or my blog.

I want to take a break. So I am going to attempt to remove myself for an experimental period, from most entertainment and communication technologies: mainly Facebook, articles and blogs (including this one; I need to take some time to write just for myself again), and television. Debating about the Orioles games, but following them online is lame anyway so I think I'll just get the scores from my brother! I will attempt this with some degree of grace and reason, in order to avoid the legalism and asceticism that I have so often tried unsuccessfully. I am planning to do a 7-day backpacking trip in August, and when I return from that I will reflect on the experience and may come back to the blog and Facebook.

 I wish it didn't feel so radical to half-unplug for 6 weeks (after all I'll still be on email, phone, google maps, etc). I know this is going to be difficult. I'm so accustomed to coming home from work, getting myself a bowl of ice cream, and flipping on the computer in order to read blogs or watch something. But I'm ready for this to be hard. I'm ready for a challenge. I'm hoping this time will give me a chance to reflect, to learn again how to pray, and listen, and process, and hurt, and be bored, and sleep, and wake, and go on walks, and sigh contently. To live my own life and think my own thoughts. I'll let you know...

Big Rains in Cherokee!

We have had a giant rainstorm this week. It started raining Saturday and seemed like it didn't stop until today. Still drizzling, and we are expecting snow tomorrow. As far as I know no one's been hurt, though there's been minor flooding of some campgrounds in the area, and part of the road in the national park washed into the river in a mudslide.

It's hard to put words to describe the power of the river with all this water, or the curious beauty of the trees sticking out of the water, or the misty mountains in the morning.

So I'll just say this:

I think it's good that every now and then something comes along that brings us out of our little individual problems, to experience something big together.

I think it's good that we can be reminded every now and then, even in a culture where we insulate ourselves against heat, cold, loneliness, quiet, lack of power, etc.--that some things are out of our control. 

It is a truth that is frightening. Awe-inspiring.

Beautiful.