without title

Most of the time, we make things happen. I don't want to swim deep down into the mysteries of God's will and wonder to what degree He controls things and to what degree I control them. That's even the wrong delineation, because one of those could fit inside the other. Those discussions might be helpful, except that anyone who is honest with themselves doesn't really understand almost anything about those things, especially the ones who go around arguing all the time and claiming that they do understand it (I refer to them as Theology Bastards. You can use that phrase if you wish). I have started to see the world as containing things God obviously does and things people obviously do. That leaves room for God to be directing everything else less obviously but doesn't force me to perpetually try to untie that Gordian knot. 

I've spent a lot of time trying to make things happen. By a lot, I don't mean a parcel of land for a building, I mean the vast majority of my life. I used to think I could make anything happen because I knew I could read people really well and that would help me act like I needed to act in order to get what I wanted. There have been times that I've purposefully manipulated situations, and times that I didn't mean to and did, and times that I could have and didn't. That's probably the most that anyone can say, or rather the most that I can say. The fact is, I can't make things happen. Not the things I hope will happen, that I want to happen, that I long to happen. I can't make the kind of love I want happen, the kind that if it burned all the way to ground and the firemen were picking through the rubble, they would find two pieces charred paper and one would have "Please, don't leave" written on it and the other "I will always want you". I don't think anyone can make that happen. I think you find it, or maybe I should say you are given it. One of the places I always go back to in my mind is a bridge in Prague where I was one night and someone was playing violin. I would describe it, but things like that can't really be described and it's my memory anyways and it's saved just for me. There's another memory that's saved just for me, and another one too that just got added recently. There's probably 50 memories you can't hear about because they're mine and I want to keep them to myself, because I don't know what's going to happen and they might be all I get to have.

 There are moments when you feel so emptied by longing that the whole world is on the opposite shore. That's something I know about. Lately, when that happens, I've been thinking that what I really want isn't something you arrive at but something you go on wanting until you can't want anymore because you're dead and after that you find out if you get to find it or have to go on wanting it more and more forever without getting to have it. I'm not sure what's going to happen after I die. That's for someone who knows my heart better than I do to decide. I do hope I find it. I wonder sometimes whether, if everyone all over the world who wanted to know God wrote Him a letter, we could make the biggest pile you've ever seen out of them and climb it all the way to Heaven. It would be like the tower of Babel except that we wouldn't be building it to defy God, we would be building it so that we could shake His hand and say that yes we would love to come in for tea or a beer or a glass of milk and here, have this picture I drew for you its my house where you can come live if you want to or at least come for a visit. If I were to write a letter for the pile, mine would say Hi God, I'm Tyler, and sometimes I want you so bad that I can't sleep and other times I want everything but you and I can't control it really it just seems to happen to me and I would fix it if I could but I can't but I heard you could fix it so, if you wouldn't mind, could you please stop by at 3 tomorrow afternoon and do what you have to do so that I can always want you the most. 

God has done a lot of things to try and help me want Him the most. I see that now. I miss my knees being what they were but God gave me music to replace them so it's ok. That's not the only thing God took, but when I think about it I think that I made it go and God used that to help even though He didn't want me to make it go. I stopped expecting anything. I mean anything. I've left that behind, but there are still times when I tell myself Tyler you've been a fool and fools don't get things back that they let go of, even if it was years ago. I don't know what to think about almost anything anymore. I know that God is on His throne. I know that I love people in a way I never have, and that my heart breaks for other people rather than for myself like it used to, and I know that I ache for something. I also know that I'm not entitled to anything.

I don't know if things you buried because you were afraid can come back from the grave. What I do know is that, sometimes, when you've said goodbye and you're riding an escalator down and reminding yourself that this is what happens when you're a fool and that you had better get used to the idea, someone calls your name from the top of the escalator and says that they missed their train.

I'm a people

I was talking to a friend of mine yesterday about something that Jonathan Foer wrote in his book Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. It's on the first page that you see when you open the book, and it says "For Nicole, my idea of beautiful". My friend made two good points when she said that that puts a lot of pressure on Nicole, which it does, and that that is what people long to be for someone else, which they do. That conversation made me start thinking about what people are like. I've spent most of my life thinking about that. I don't know why, it's just always fascinated me. When I go to a restaurant or a movie or a basketball game or a flea market or anywhere else, I always watch people because I'm a person and I think I learn a lot from watching other persons be persons. Not in a weird way, just in the way that would be more normal if people were less self-conscious and more curious about the world. When I was more arrogant than I am now, and I'm arrogant now which is sad, I used to people-watch like I was watching Animal Planet or National Geographic, which is to say that I felt like the only real human amongst a whole herd of knuckle-dragging bipeds. I used to look down on people because they loved things and laughed hard and wanted to have kids young and wanted to find a job. I guess I was hostile to those things for a long time because, when I was really young, and I don't remember exactly when so don't ask, I remember seeing my parents laughing really hard with some friends and thinking "what is there to laugh about, all of this goes away". This was pre-anything I've wrestled with up to this point. It honestly was a stand-alone thought that got a grip on me for, well, the next 12 years (I think I was ten or eleven at the time) and I don't know why. I just thought that people that loved and drank dark coffee and laughed hard lost everything. So, I don't think that anymore. What I think now is that there are things that can't be totally explained, like why blue whales have humerus bones which are for arms which they don't have, at least anymore, and like why people get married when it's hard and kids grow up and leave and people get old and die at different times and leave one behind, except there's beauty there that can't be denied, which is to say there is an ache there, which is what I know of beauty. Bertrand Russell, on his death bed, told a reporter that if God did exist, he would ask him why He hadn't made Himself a bit more visible. That's a good question. Sometimes I think there are love atheists, which if that were a word would be aphileists or aeroists or something like that. What I mean is, I think people refuse to love because it won't make itself a bit more visible, and they stomp off into their study and write books about how love is just a power play and that it's all bunk. Anyway.

I've always been interested in constellations. I think the reason is that I read a lot of Greek mythology when I was younger and then again when I was in college, and I was always jealous of the people that were turned into constellations, mostly because I was in dark waters during a portion of college and I wanted to get away and being turned into a constellation sounded like getting away. I realized last week that it's funny that we refer to ourselves as a person, because that implies a singularity and solidarity that no one has. It implies that to me, at least. That's similar to how saying the pronoun "I" sounds strange to me sometimes because I don't know which I I'm talking about. Don't worry, I don't have split personality disorder. Tyler thinks we do but we don't. That was a joke. Another joke is that there are people that think that the Holocaust didn't happen, which would be more funny if they just didn't know except that they are being ignorant and trying to un-remember something horrible that happened so that they can keep socially and physically persecuting Jews. Forget isn't the right word, because forgetting is something that you do when you aren't paying attention. You un-remember on purpose. Anyway, when you think about it, you are really more like a constellation than a star. I hated it, even in third grade, when teachers said things like "you're a star" or "you're really special". I mean I liked it, because everyone likes being told that they are special, it was just so cheesy. If you don't think you like being told you're special, pay attention to how you act when someone exaggerates about how good you are at something or says you did something better than you actually did it. You won't jump as quickly to correct them as you would if they said you were worse at something than you are. You probable won't say anything at all.

The point of all this is simple: we are a lot of things at once. If you mapped yourself out over the course of just a day, much less a year, the image would end up looking more like a constellation than a single point in the sky. I love, and want to love, and I want to know what love is, but I also want to never find it sometimes because of what that will mean. I know that real love and success take hard work and suffering to find and I love that and I hate that because sometimes I want what I want when I want it. I want to be a folk singer, a rap producer, an agent for movie stars and musicians, a poet, a computer programmer, an oil tycoon, a sculptor, a photographer, a sheikh, a professional fighter, a shepherd, and a professional fly fisherman over the course of any given day. I hate things only until I love them again, I talk big, I'm learning to work hard, I don't want to work hard, I feel entitled and I hate that, I'm starting to love the Lord for real and I don't like that sometimes, and I stay up late worried that I'm going to lose myself. I imagine it's roughly the same for you. Every morning, I wake up aware of the fact that I'm not a person, I'm a people, and it reminds me of why I need a big, personal, righteous, slow-to-anger, abounding-in-love, begging-to-intervene Saviour.

The Usual

I must say, if I could interview the version of myself the roamed around 2 or 3 years ago, I would not be getting any rave reviews from myself. I used to think the world of business/having a job/working most days was analogous to those man-eating worms that terrorized small town citizens in a series of Sci Fi movies the names of which escape me. As long as the hapless citizens kept moving and stayed on some isolated patches of stone or a rooftop, they were mostly safe. If they ventured off of these sanctuaries(so dramatic and cheesy. I know. I'm starting to sound like a writer for one of these movies), one of them usually got eaten. The point is, 2 or 3 years ago I wasn't going to sell out. To anyone. For anything. If I had to move to the beach and live there naked and play guitar late at night for money and catch fish with my hands, I was NOT going to get a job at a desk inside.

Some of the career ideas that I've had before are things like being a fly fishing guide(be honest, it's a great idea), being the first astronaut to fly into a black hole, preying on the hapless minds of the masses by becoming a motivational speaker who "empowers" people by telling them to go for early morning jogs, to eat less, and see themselves as lonely beacons of hope in a dark world(look, it would more than pay the bills), and getting paid to insult people. I'm not writing any of these ideas off, but I think they will be part-time ventures, at best. The reason is that I actually found work at an inside desk I like to do. Heck, I might start loving it soon. My work keeps me up at night, it's on my mind a lot, I really like being with it, and I take it on lunch and dinner dates. It's basically a girlfriend that doesn't get mad at me for not washing my pants or for forgetting to call. I don't know what happened. I tried to save myself from selling out to the man-eating commerce machine. I tried to tuck my soul away in the lofty tower of pseudo-intellectual trendiness. There were times, early in college, when I thought I was going to be the next Robert Frost. Not because I was good at writing, because I'm just average as you know, but because I wanted to be invited places to talk about my writing, and talk at great length. I've grown up since then. Growing up doesn't mean I've lost my soul and that I now dream of rolling around in Spanish doubloons, because I've always dreamed of that, but I've become more aware of what the world is really like. Here are some things that I've learned:

1. I was created to work.

2. There are things that I enjoy doing that fall under the title of work.

3. Those things require me to work a lot, even if I like them.

4. I am really hungry right now. (I didn't learn that a long time ago, I just learned it a few minutes ago. I worked through lunch apparently)

It's amazing how productive and engaged you can be in your work when you realize that you have to be, because if you aren't you wont have a place to live or food to eat. Girls don't like starving or living under a tree, and I remind myself of that when I wake up and don't want to go to work. Frankly, I don't like starving either. Humans have this tremendous capacity to process different kinds of information and do different kinds of tasks in very short amounts of time. I'm writing this and going through a CSS tutorial at the same time. You're reading this and thinking about what you're going to eat for dinner, that funny joke you wish you had told at the right time so that everyone else would have thought it was funny too, and about when the next time is that you're going to get to kiss. See. The difference between someone who is successful at what they do and someone who isn't, I think, is their level of focus and energy. No one is made to be lazy. You or I weren't meant to be a has-been and a waste of talent. If you think that you are, stop being an idiot. You have a brain, and it can do a lot of cool things, so use it.

 Work doesn't have to be something that is an obstacle to your happiness, it can be a platform for being more human. Work is interacting with other people, it is engaging the world around you and adding value to it. Or rather, it can be those things. I'm not trying to say that work doesn't suck sometimes, because it does. I'm saying it doesn't have to all the time. Don't misrepresent work or the business world or anything else to justify being a loser. Get off your ass and make some money doing something you care about.

Today's thought

This is the thought that has been on my mind today, and for the past few days.

I know only a few things, and this is one of them: I would never want to live in the world I would create if I could.

Today (1)

I've decided to start doing small posts (I'm sure you all will applaud anything of mine approaching linguistic frugality) where I post some pictures that describe what my day is like. I've found this helpful in the past, and since I really like photographs it ends up being a great combination of therapy and amusement.

What We Need

I was lying on a bench in downtown Raleigh this past weekend waiting to get into a bar that was packed at the time when I finally realized why it is that there are so many love songs on the radio. And books about love. And movies about love. And people who are all about love. In fact, people can't help but be all about love. I think love is like blood because when you lose it, you don't go on living in the same way that you used to. You still walk and eat and shave but you don't live. It struck me on that bench how important the verse is that says "God is love" because that means that God is what we want, which other people have said in better ways than I just did, but that's ok because they were smarter than I am. The point is, when people go crazy about love, they go crazy about finding the thing they know they need. Not the kind of need you feel when you wake up with a terrible headache and need some aspirin(I said aspirin because I can't remember how to spell Ibuprofen) or when you get done with a soccer game and need water. It's the kind of need like bones. You aren't you without them, or it.   Where I've always gotten lost is in the object of love, not love itself. I never argued about whether I needed it or not. I've just argued about how to get to it. Like when a couple is on a trip and they both want to make it to her parents house in the mountains in time for dinner, except that they think they should go different ways and the wife says to go left because damn it it's the house she grew up in so she knows how to get there and the husband wants to go right because damn it the gps says to go that way. I've heard it's rare that both members of a couple like going to their in-laws homes for dinner, so maybe that story is unrealistic. Anyway. I've probably said this before, but for most of my life my thought process around love has looked like this:

        Right Girl (More real version of love) > God (less real version of love)

and

        Right Girl (Cool, and makes me more complete) > God (Cool, and makes me less complete)

and

        Right Girl (I want) > God(I need)
    
I know I know, it's wrong. I've always known it was wrong in the way that you can know things that don't affect your heart or actions at all, like knowing that your middle name was almost Squire but ended up being Robert. Now, though, knowing that my thinking has been wrong is affecting me.

Sometimes, when people talk to me about what God's Will is for my life, I think/say/should have said "How the hell should I know?" I think/say/should have said that because I've spent a lot of time saying things like "God has been showing me this" or "God told me this" or "God wants this". When people have heard me say that, I hope, for their sake, they heard: "blah blah blah blah blah blah". I'm not cynical about God's Will, in fact I'm tremendously supportive of it. I'm cynical about my own fake interpretations of it. Instead of saying things about what God's Will is, I've started listening to Him. Quaint, I know. And you know what, He hasn't had nearly as much to say about the details of my life as I've claimed He has. I haven't heard anything about which city I'll live in, or how God uses relationship struggles to show me how selfish I am, or how the stars will align to meet Destiny Girl(as an aside, if destiny girl turns out to be Beyonce, a former member of Destiny's Child, I won't cry), or how Destiny Girl doesn't exist, or how falling on my knees at just the right or wrong angle happened because I was too bad for too long, or how a squirrel ran on just the right branch at just the right time so that an acorn fell onto my head, or any other such things. Not a word. I'm not saying God doesn't tell those things to some people. I've read in books about people who have heard such things from God. I'm saying that God isn't, and probably hasn't ever, been saying those things to me. All I hear, whenever I listen, is "Come, Follow Me".

We, and that includes me, need love. We just won't find it anywhere before we find it first in God. And by that I mean, we won't find exactly what it is we are looking for before we find Him. Finding God lets the people around you be who they are, which is people, and it lets the girl I marry be who she is, which is a person, and not Jesus. A real, freaking cool person, hopefully, but still a person.

Sometimes, I think Jesus nailed himself to a cross so that we wouldn't have to spend the rest of our lives nailing each other to crosses.

Under The Weight

A friend asked me the other night why it is that I'm so pessimistic about love. I think her exact words were "Tyler, why don't you think real love exists?" That wasn't really the question she was asking, because she knew that I know that it exists. What she meant was "Tyler, why don't you think you'll ever find it?" That's a complicated question. I told her I didn't want to talk about it, but she asked later a couple more times and I started telling her some of my reasons, which led to other reasons, which led to me crying. I didn't mean to, I just did. She felt bad for asking after that, and we talked about something else. What I should say before I write anything else is that I'm doing well. Honestly. My answer to her question, and the realization that came along with it, was what broke me down. My mom used to think that I was so pessimistic about love because a girl I know broke up with me unexpectedly in 10th grade, but that's not true. I don't think I thought about that anymore after the end of 10th grade. I used to think it was because I had had too many things not work out like I wanted them to, and I had read too many dark books where the main character almost loves for real but doesn't get to, for one reason or another, like in Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close where the grandfather lost the girl he loved deeply when he was younger because she was killed in the Dresden bombings. I used to want to go to Dresden, but not after reading that book. Or like in Atonement, where something richly moving and tragic happens that I still haven't gotten my mind around and that I won't tell you about because it wouldn't affect you like it should unless you had read it or saw the movie. Some things you can't just hear about. One thing I loved about the movie-version of Atonement was how Briony, when she had grown up, was always washing her hands. Also, there was a string of scenes where she would be under a light and it would go out. This is the sort of movie where symbolism isn't crammed down your throat, its just there, and if you wish to see it you may. She couldn't escape her mistakes. Also, she couldn't escape herself. Things were wrong, and no amount of scrubbing could fix them.
     I figured out, when I was kind-of-talking-kind-of-crying-kind-of-giving-up the other night, why it is that I think the way I do about love. At least, how I have been thinking about it. It's simple, but then again most everything is. I can't explain why it affected me like it did, I can just say it did. I don't even know how to say it, except that when I was in 10th grade something happened that I didn't stop thinking about, that I haven't stopped thinking about, which is that my best friend's sister who loved deeply and was loved deeply and lived deeply was killed in a car wreck.

I'm in heavy rain.

That's the place where, when I had dug long enough, and late enough, the root ended. I heard that her dad went around their property digging holes for months after she died. Maybe he still does. There's been more snow on the boughs of my heart since then. That's why when people talk to me about love, my mind and heart are responding

true,false,false,false,false,false,false,false,false,false,true,false,true.

I believe some of it, but not much. It's not always this way. I mean my heart isn't always this way. For now, though, love is a house that burned down, and we were all still inside.

I think about Christ's resurrection often. I think about it mostly because it actually happened, and because of what that means, because I used to want it to have happened so badly and now, its more simple than that. I don't just want it, I know it. Just like a baby being born. Either it's there or it's not. I don't think about what love would be like anymore. Either it's going to show or it's not. I don't know if good things climb out of dark places. I know it has happened before, like when Jesus came back from the dead, but that doesn't mean it always happens. That's why, when people ask me about love, I would say, if they could understand,

"there was a wreck, and some of us are still inside"

How I Feel

Heavy Rain

I just realized something that has always been true, but that I've been passing by unaware. No, not like two ships in the night. More like how every kind of tree drops distinctive patterns of rain on water during a storm, whether you notice it or not. I just noticed that, and it blew my mind, because it has always been that way and I've been missing out on that for my whole life. My life hasn't been very long, but still. That made me pay attention to the way that raindrops hit my shirt, how drops splatter on cloth, how they soak in where they impact as well as in the places where their pieces land. That's how it is with sorrow, and probably love too. What I know about is sorrow. I realized that that's why people think they are over things and then break down crying in the middle of Barnes and Nobles after they just laughed at the cover of "The Pirate's Captive". They stumbled across a place sorrow had soaked in that they hadn't expected. In the universe, according the Stephen Hawking, most of the mass is comprised of dark matter. He doesn't really know what dark matter is, and neither do I, mainly because he doesn't. That's how the heart is. Most of it's weight, it's heaviness, is made of things you can't define, or rather can't understand or find, which isn't the same as it not being there. Kind of like God. I don't always understand Him, but He's still there. I've wished dark heart matter wasn't there, mainly because it spills over at the strangest times, like now. That's why it's nice that God only gave us two feet. That means you can turn long walks into long, slow walks, which is a way to process things, or maybe just find your way to the edge of things and look through the branches at the other darker branches that are further back. I find myself on the edge of things most often, and I walk those edges on stilts. Mostly, it's my heart that's on stilts, and there aren't real woods, just heart woods. There are fewer and fewer real woods, I'm told. My eyes tell me that, and newspaper articles too. Heart woods go on and on, though. I've been able to walk into them, but never through them. Another thing I thought about was how plants grow. They don't fret, they just grow, and they grow towards the light. My heart is in dark woods. Not tangly woods, not haunted woods, just dark woods. The kind that look back at you when you stand there deciding whether you actually want to go into them, or just turn back and tell your friends that they were really powerful and moving. The kind that aren't so much ominous as they are deep, although those two words sometimes mean the same thing. The kind that probably won't clap their hands when Jesus comes back, they'll just acknowledge him. Like I said, my heart is in dark woods. Sometimes I'm in heavy rain. Sometimes I am heavy rain. I don't think the worst thing is rejection. I think it's being in between places. Just like hatred isn't the worst wound, indifference is.
        If I could go back and change anything, I'd stop Mike from falling asleep at the wheel. If I could change another thing, I'd go back and unsay all the "I love you's" that I've said to people I didn't love, because that hurts them more than it does me. We'd all be safer, then. Everyone I know. I can't go back, though.









I'm in heavy rain.

Don't Give Up

There is something about growing up that has become cliche. I don't mean the phrase "growing up", I mean the action. Somewhere along the way, it started taking on water and sank into this vague ocean of stupid compromise, giving up on hope, and "finding out how things really are". Cliche, in the wrong hands, is a word that is not unlike Santa's bag of gifts. Technically, it's a sack, but I couldn't bring myself to write "Santa's sack" without laughing. I'm twelve, so what. The point is, I used to stay up at night trying to imagine how all those toys found themselves in comfortable accommodations in a sack that Santa could carry around. I refuse to end that sentence with "on his back". I'm not Beatrix Potter. My best idea was that he shrank the toys down to a molecular size and that they would only become their real size again when he took them out and put them under a tree. I was a weird kid, but honestly, what better explanation can you think of? Anyway, I've been thinking about how/why it is that so many things became cliche. My Greek professor always told me that if there was a problem with my understanding of a passage the problem was on my end, because the Greek hadn't changed. Having a family hasn't changed, falling in love hasn't changed, Paris hasn't changed (well ok it has, but I'm talking about the kitsch of Paris, the attraction of Paris, not the lay out of Paris), apple pie hasn't changed. What seems to have changed is how people interact with all those things. In case you're worried, "apple pie" won't appear again in this post. Since when was having a family and finding a job mediocre? Since when was love overdone and archaic? The word love doesn't mean anything other than what it has always meant, it  has just been abused and used in the wrong context so often that people begin to forget that it ever meant anything, like when people who don't like thinking about things decide that an idea is less relevant or true because it was proposed a long time before their great-great-grandparents where plying their trade as sperm. I've been thinking recently that growing up has become just as abused. When you read about the coming of age rituals that ancient cultures had, they were centered on adjusting the children to reality and on giving the children a forum for proving that they belonged in the social strata that they all aspired to enter. I don't care whether you think fire-jumping or simulated combat or isolation were good practices for this or not, that's not the point. The point is that growing up used to mean a further step into reality, a closer brush with the real. In some circles, it still means that, just like how in some circles parents still encourage their children to be curious about the world. More and more, though, it seems to me that growing up is being overrun by a blight of mediocre acceptance in which people don't ask themselves what it is that they love to do, or whom they love, but rather they allow themselves to be taught to expect to be told those things and to accept what they are told. This is only a question. When was the last time that you asked yourself what it is that you love to do? Obviously, since we are accountable to a Creator, we are under an authority that isn't rooted in our own desires. However, given the fact that God encourages wisdom in Scripture, and not waiting around for explicit direction from Him on all things, this question is directly applicable to all of us. Honestly, when have you allowed to yourself to ask that question? Even more importantly, when have you acted on your answer to that question? Does your vision for your life extend any further than financial security and vague domestic bliss? I'm not hitting you, or myself, with the revolution hammer and trying to imply that we should all live out of a back pack and distill our pee into drinking water while we serve remote tribes in the land of Distant Somewhere, although some people should be doing that, but I am curious about what it is that motivates the decision making for each one of us. If growing up means becoming more real, which I think it does, then I think that the way we interact with things like work and love and art and science and people and ideas ought to be maturing with us. Actually, if you aren't maturing in those things, and if I'm not, then neither of us is growing up. I don't care if you're 50 and don't spend time with your family or if you're 23 and are about to marry someone only because it's safe and the people in your church like them. If you're not actively connecting yourself to the richness of like family and love, then you are not mature/maturing. Words like love and friendship and work all convey a complex and deep reality, and growing up is becoming more aware, and more plugged into, that reality. This is as much to myself as to you. The words we use carry a tremendous weight, whether you admit it or not. Live under that weight. Don't give up on yourself. You're going to have to work your ass off doing something, it might as well be something you love. You're going to have to argue and fight with someone, it might as well be someone you love. Don't settle for comfortable.