Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.
And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.
When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.

So, friends, every day do something
that won’t compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.
Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.
Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millenium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.
Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.

Listen to carrion – put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
So long as women do not go cheap
for power, please women more than men.
Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?
Go with your love to the fields.
Lie down in the shade. Rest your head
in her lap. Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.
As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn’t go. Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.

-Wendell Berry (1973)

Every year around Christmas, this poem flows into my mind, swirling ’round and round as Advent invites me, past all my busy-ness and penciled-in schedules, to a place where the coming of God speaks unending wonder into my life. In the midst of all of that, these words never fail to move me.

It comes from a book called Light from Heaven, which is part of a series by Jan Karon about an Episcopal priest who lives in a small North Carolina mountain town called Mitford. My mother introduced me to these books and for months I staunchly refused to read them because I considered them to be “old lady books.” (Sorry Mom, you aren’t an old lady.) Finally, a few years ago, I picked up the first one during the boredom of an unemployed autumn and unwillingly found myself the newest devoted citizen of Mitford. Despite their middle-aged appearance, they are warm and beautiful, settling in my chest like hot tea and good company.

Anyway, the poem comes from that book and I must say, I did not copy down the author in my notebook, so I cannot cite it properly. But in any case, here it is:

Let the stable still astonish
Straw — dirt floor, dull eyes
Dusty flanks of donkeys, oxen;
Crumbling, crooked walls;
No bed to carry that pain
And then, the child,
Rag-wrapped, laid to cry
In a trough
Who would have chosen this?

Who would have said “Yes,”
“Let the God of all the heavens
And earth
Be born here, in this place”?
Who but the same God
Who stands in the darker, fouler rooms
of our hearts
and says “Yes,”
“Let the God of Heaven and Earth
be born here –
in this place.”

I pray you will let these words move you and push you forward, sprawling, into the dusty starlight that penetrates the stable walls, revealing to us our Mighty God, Wonderful Counselor, Prince of Peace. His love for us was so immense yet so personal that it crescendoed in the cry of an infant, cradled in a cold feeding trough, whose name was Emmanuel, God with Us. In this place of dirt and dust, devoid of all of the earthly trappings of a king, God humbly presented Himself in a way that proclaims He is close, He is here and He is love.

“Yes, let the God of Heaven and earth be born here, in this place.”

I’m taking a class at my church right now on Wendell Berry, and slowly, naturally, like water in earth, I am absorbing this man and his words. This poem in particular struck me and left my heart reverberating, like a violin string.

The Peace of Wild Things

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

— Wendell Berry

(I think Max would approve…he and Wendell might understand each other…and perhaps share a wild rumpus together. I really need to see this movie.)

I have had all sorts of thoughts buzzing about in my head lately, which has produced a messy handful of notes that I wrote to myself all over the place — on walks, while driving (at stoplights), and when I woke up in the middle of the night.

But those thoughts are still forming themselves into something more than scrap paper scrawls.

For now, because today is beautiful and deserves to be celebrated for simply being itself, and because I just love ee cummings, I share this poem with you. (I so dearly want to sneak out of work, and go find wherever this picture was taken, and wander there all day, with a book of poetry, a big cup of coffee, and a good friend.)

i thank You God for most this amazing
day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun’s birthday;this is the birth
day of life and love and wings:and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any-lifted from the no
of all nothing-human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

may my heart always be open to little
birds who are the secrets of living
whatever they sing is better than to know
and if men should not hear them men are old

may my mind stroll about hungry
and fearless and thirsty and supple
and even if it’s sunday may i be wrong
for whenever men are right they are not young

and may myself do nothing usefully
and love yourself so more than truly
there’s never been quite such a fool who could fail
pulling all the sky over him with one smile

Two entirely unconnected things that make me really excited.

#1. Adam

I cannot WAIT to see this (thanks to a glowing review it got in Relevant today). a) It simply looks extraordinary — courageous, funny, not-your-average-love-story, but also not some typical “see the mentally handicapped guy triumph and get a high five” kind of story. (Oh, and b)…I’ve had a thing for Hugh Dancy forever. That’s pretty much b.)

#2. Bird by Bird

To say I love this book simply isn’t enough. Perhaps to say I’ve found a kindred spirit in Anne Lamott is sniffing nearer to the truth. This book is full of all sorts of things that I have always thought and felt, but now, it turns out I wasn’t alone in it this whole time. (And I have to admit…it makes me believe more that I just might be a “real writer.”)

“Because for some of us, books are as important as almost anything else on earth. What a miracle it is that out of these small, flat, rigid squares of paper unfolds world after world after world, worlds that sing to you, comfort and quiet or excite you. Books help us understand who we are and how we are to behave. They show us what community and friendship mean; they show us how to live and die. They are full of all the things that you don’t get in real life — wonderful, lyrical language, for instance, right off the bat. And quality of attention: we may notice amazing details during the course of a day but we rarely let ourselves stop and really pay attention, and this is a great gift. My gratitude for good writing is unbounded; I’m grateful for it the way I’m grateful for the ocean. Aren’t you?”

Tonight, the second bat in the past week made its way into our house.
Hence, for the second time in the past week, I screamed like a banshee and locked myself in my room until someone more brave got rid of it.

On a better note, it was a deliciously gorgeous warm day, so I walked to the Sparrows, drank iced tea and began reading this book:

I think this man has somehow crawled inside my head, and is now confronting me with all the rational thoughts I should be having through this book. Anyone who ever struggles with not knowing, anxiety, worry, decision-making etc. should read this. It’s just a tiny little 120 page book, but it packs a punch like you wouldn’t believe.

In addition to all that excitement, I spent an enjoyable movie night with Amanda and her little dog Macy. Thank God for lovely friends, good wine, turkey meatball pizza, and the general circus-like insanity that is my life.

Though I could have done without the bat.

Victory, my friends.
Pure, unadulterated, glorious VICTORY.

After almost a year, I have finally finished Albert Camus’ L’Étranger (The Stranger in English).

This was the first book in French that I have timidly tackled since college, and being several years out of practice, I was not sure that I would come out on the other end with any idea of what the heck the book was even about (the existentialists are vague enough in my mother tongue). I am proud to say that I fully understood, on average, 87.6% of the book, and while I still cannot figure out who Celeste is, or whose avocat (lawyer) was whose, I do know the basics. And for this, I am immensely fière de moi-même (proud of myself).

So now I am celebrating with a cup of Earl Grey and a bowl of oatmeal, with about a pound of cinnamon in it (delicious and good for you; proven to lower cholestorol and prevent yeast infections, neither of which I struggle with, but I won’t now, thanks to cinnamon). I suppose it would be more French to drink a bottle of red wine and drunkenly sing “La Marseillaise,” but it’s 8:30 in the morning and I don’t know the words.

Remember those giant flat wheelie-things on the playground that had a bunch of railings on them; one person would start pushing it in circles, then jump on and it would whirl around so fast that by the end of the ride, you felt like your eyeballs were in your toes, and you stumbled dizzily around, trying not to throw up?

My brain feels like that right now.

I have so much on my mind, and cannot seem to focus in on one thought without fifty others flooding in. All my thoughts are bleeding into one another, like watercolors. Big decisions are looming in front of me like skyscrapers and I feel so, so small. One passage from Donald Miller’s Through Painted Deserts keep swirling around in my watercolor thoughts, so I thought I’d share. I love this book possibly more than almost any other book I’ve read, so when I come to big life decisions, I tend to come back to it again and again. What he shares in his author’s notes in the beginning has provided much insight to me and I find it very wise. I read it out loud last week, on the deserted beach, and I wept, both for its beauty and how much it frightened me.

…I could not have known then that if I had been born here, I would have left here, gone someplace south to deal with horses, to get on some open land where you can see tomorrow’s storm brewing over a high desert. I could not have known then that everybody, every person, has to leave, has to change like seasons; they have to or they die. The seasons remind me that I must keep changing, and I want to change because it is God’s way. All my life I have been changing. I changed from a baby to a child, from soft toys to play daggers. I changed into a teenager to drive a car, into a worker to spend some money. I will change into a husband to love a woman, into a father to love a child, change houses so we are near water, and again so we are near mountains, and again so we are near friends, keep changing with my wife, getting our love so it dies and gets born again and again, like a garden, fed by four seasons, a cycle of change. Everybody has to change, or they expire. Everybody has to leave, everybody has to leave their home and come back so they can love it again for all new reasons.

I want to keep my soul fertile for the changes, so things keep getting born in me, so things keep dying when it is time for things to die. I want to keep walking away from the person I was a moment ago, because a mind was made to figure things out, not to read the same page recurrently.

Only the good stories have the characters different at the end than they were at the beginning. And the closest thing I can liken life to is a book, the way it stretches out on paper, page after page, as if to trick the mind into thinking it isn’t all happening at once.

Time has pressed you and me into a book, too, this tiny chapter we share together, this vapor of a scene, pulling our seconds into minutes and minutes into hours. Everything we were is no more, and what we will become, will become what was. This is from where story stems, the stuff of its construction lying at our feet like cut strips of philosophy. I sometimes look into the endless heavens, the cosmos of which we can’t find the edge, and ask God what it means. Did You really do all of this to dazzle us? Do You really keep it shifting, rolling round the pinions to stave off boredom? God forbid Your glory would be our distraction. And God forbid we would ignore Your glory.

…no, life cannot be understood flat on a page. It has to be lived; a person has to get out of his head, has to fall in love, has to memorize poems, has to jump off bridges into rivers, has to stand in an empty desert and whisper sonnets under his breath:

I’ll tell you how the sun rose
A ribbon at a time…

It’s a living book, this life; it folds out in a million settings, cast with a billion beautiful characters, and it is almost over for you. It doesn’t matter how old you are; it is coming to a close quickly, and soon the credits will roll and all your friends will fold out of your funeral and drive back to their homes in cold and still and silence. And they will make a fire and pour some wine and think about how you once were . . . and feel a kind of sickness at the idea you never again will be.

So soon you will be in that part of the book where you are holding the bulk of the pages in your left hand, and only a thin wisp of the story in your right. You will know by the page count, not by the narrative, that the Author is wrapping things up. You begin to mourn its ending, and want to pace yourself slowly toward its closure, knowing the last lines will speak of something beautiful, of the end of something long and earned, and you hope the thing closes out like last breaths, like whispers about how much and who the characters have come to love, and how authentic the sentiments feel when they have earned a hundred pages of qualification.

And so my prayer is that your story will have involved some leaving and some coming home, some summer and some winter, some roses blooming out like children in a play. My hope is your story will be about changing, about getting something beautiful born inside of you, about learning to love a woman or a man, about learning to love a child, about moving yourself around water, around mountains, around friends, about learning to love others more than we love ourselves, about learning oneness as a way of understanding God. We get one story, you and I, and one story alone. God has established the elements, the setting and the climax and the resolution. It would be a crime not to venture out, wouldn’t it?

It might be time for you to go. It might be time to change, to shine out.

I want to repeat one word for you:

Leave.

Roll the word around on your tongue for a bit. It is a beautiful word, isn’t it? So strong and forceful, the way you have always wanted to be. And you will not be alone. You have never been alone. Don’t worry. Everything will still be here when you get back. It is you who will have changed.

Donald Miller, Through Painted Deserts

P.S.  If you’re looking for good book recommendations to curl up with over the holidays, I just updated my “I Read” section. If you don’t look at it, I’ll know and then I’ll cry.

Ok, maybe not.

But I did work hard to make it look cool…so check it out.