I leave for Europe tomorrow for two weeks. I'm going with a group of students and adults, and we'll be in Milan, Florence, Rome, Assisi, Venice, Athens Mycenae, Pompeii, and other places as well. I'm excited, though the trip has crept up on me and doesn't feel real yet. I haven't even packed, though I have many of the supplies I need.
I'm leaving, the only regret that someone I've come to care about won't be there to see me off, so it's a mixed departure.
I'm taking my camera and journal, hopefully with many stories yet to come.
Be back in a couple weeks, God willing.
Tuesday, May 22, 2007
Friday, May 18, 2007
A Question of Value: Struggling
Sometimes we're so afraid of being hurt that we'll do anything we can to prevent it, whether it's healthy or not.
A man or woman buries themselves in work. One more meeting, one more project, one more promotion will make us feel validated. It's a rush to be recognized, to have an employer or fellow employee or student tell us "good job. You made a difference."But what happens when we go to work to get our validation rather than find it in a marriage of thirty years? Or we've just started a relationship and we can't let go of those Saturdays at the office, or an extra hour or two rather than spending time with the person we care about? It's fear of being hurt, fear of losing ourselves, or that the person we're with won't see us as wonderful, or we won't be enough. At work, why do people fight and backbite and gossip and try to take projects or complain about someone else getting a raise if it's not getting at this idea of value and the fear of losing it?
Our value doesn't come from our jobs.
A man is married to a beautiful woman and has children who love him, a great job, a wonderful home. Yet he masturbates rather than has sex with his wife, or sleeps with other women to feel like he still "has it," that he's still potent, that his value comes in his conquests, his virility, his sexual appeal. It's scarier to be vulnerable with the woman who's known him for years. She knows his flaws better, he can't hide them as well, and there's the risk that she'll criticize him for them, that he won't be enough. She's not always in the mood, and if he's honest, he isn't either. He doesn't always take the time to notice the things she does for him, or tell her he loves her, and when he's honest, she's more a mystery to him now than ever, or he feels like they've gotten in a rut and there's nothing new. He wonders if there's something else, somewhere else, if this is the life he was supposed to live, or if his value lies elsewhere.
She wonders if they need a bigger house, or more furniture, or new curtains on the window and new carpet in the living room. There's a new dress on sale, and shoes to match. Yet she wonders why the dress doesn't make her feel prettier after it's been washed a few times.
A poor man wonders what it would be like to be rich; a rich man wonders what it would be like to be richer; a single person wonders what it would be like to be married; a married couple wonders what it would be like to have kids; a teenager wonders what it would be like to have a car; a kid wonders what it would be like to have an amazing toy; a workingman or woman wonders what it would be like to be retired or on vacation in the Caribbean; a person in the nursing home wonders what it would be like to be young again or to have family once again around them. A dog wonders . . . who knows what dogs wonder, they seem pretty content as long as they have food, a place to run, and people to sniff.
We all long for something, and finding our value seems to be ever elusive, this hole in us, and sometimes we either close ourselves off from our dreams to keep from being hurt, to keep them from being snatched away, or we fight tooth and nail to hold onto the things we hold to be important, the things that make us feel validated.
In the day to day of that we make mistakes, we break things and hurt each other and enter families and workplaces and love and sports teams and social settings with these hurts and fears fighting within us. It's hard to lay down our armor and our swords. It's hard to say I'm sorry. It's hard to trust and become vulnerable with our greatest hopes and deepest fears, to be honest with the things that make us feel guilty, and it's hard to find our value, not in our jobs, or successes, or even relationships, but in something else entirely, more permanent.
A man or woman buries themselves in work. One more meeting, one more project, one more promotion will make us feel validated. It's a rush to be recognized, to have an employer or fellow employee or student tell us "good job. You made a difference."But what happens when we go to work to get our validation rather than find it in a marriage of thirty years? Or we've just started a relationship and we can't let go of those Saturdays at the office, or an extra hour or two rather than spending time with the person we care about? It's fear of being hurt, fear of losing ourselves, or that the person we're with won't see us as wonderful, or we won't be enough. At work, why do people fight and backbite and gossip and try to take projects or complain about someone else getting a raise if it's not getting at this idea of value and the fear of losing it?
Our value doesn't come from our jobs.
A man is married to a beautiful woman and has children who love him, a great job, a wonderful home. Yet he masturbates rather than has sex with his wife, or sleeps with other women to feel like he still "has it," that he's still potent, that his value comes in his conquests, his virility, his sexual appeal. It's scarier to be vulnerable with the woman who's known him for years. She knows his flaws better, he can't hide them as well, and there's the risk that she'll criticize him for them, that he won't be enough. She's not always in the mood, and if he's honest, he isn't either. He doesn't always take the time to notice the things she does for him, or tell her he loves her, and when he's honest, she's more a mystery to him now than ever, or he feels like they've gotten in a rut and there's nothing new. He wonders if there's something else, somewhere else, if this is the life he was supposed to live, or if his value lies elsewhere.
She wonders if they need a bigger house, or more furniture, or new curtains on the window and new carpet in the living room. There's a new dress on sale, and shoes to match. Yet she wonders why the dress doesn't make her feel prettier after it's been washed a few times.
A poor man wonders what it would be like to be rich; a rich man wonders what it would be like to be richer; a single person wonders what it would be like to be married; a married couple wonders what it would be like to have kids; a teenager wonders what it would be like to have a car; a kid wonders what it would be like to have an amazing toy; a workingman or woman wonders what it would be like to be retired or on vacation in the Caribbean; a person in the nursing home wonders what it would be like to be young again or to have family once again around them. A dog wonders . . . who knows what dogs wonder, they seem pretty content as long as they have food, a place to run, and people to sniff.
We all long for something, and finding our value seems to be ever elusive, this hole in us, and sometimes we either close ourselves off from our dreams to keep from being hurt, to keep them from being snatched away, or we fight tooth and nail to hold onto the things we hold to be important, the things that make us feel validated.
In the day to day of that we make mistakes, we break things and hurt each other and enter families and workplaces and love and sports teams and social settings with these hurts and fears fighting within us. It's hard to lay down our armor and our swords. It's hard to say I'm sorry. It's hard to trust and become vulnerable with our greatest hopes and deepest fears, to be honest with the things that make us feel guilty, and it's hard to find our value, not in our jobs, or successes, or even relationships, but in something else entirely, more permanent.
Wednesday, May 16, 2007
Michigan
Tonight I'm grading writing finals and am watching the stack of papers in the manila folder get smaller. My least favorite part of teaching is the grading, mainly because it's something I do alone, and no one else is there to share it. I've spent hours in coffee shops, at my kitchen table, in an office, sometimes reading papers about the benefits of thinking critically, or about someone's life experiences at work, or their childhood, or their divorce, or swimming in the ocean and almost drowning, or the birth of their first baby, or the time they had to shoot someone.
I think a lot. Sometimes I wish I didn't. Married friends say they don't think, or have shifted to autopilot, and sometimes assume I have no idea what's that like.
I did. In Michigan. Sometimes I was in a different city every night, four nights out of the week. My house was in one city, my office in another, and on average I drove two hours a day. For six months I drove four hours a day, plus had two teaching gigs. I stopped counting how many hours I worked. If I was awake, I was working, or at the gym to try to clear my mind. They were 80 hour weeks, easily. I slipped into autopilot then. I kept moving, wondering how long I could keep up this pace, begging for it to end, feeling more lonely and more emotionally bare than I'd ever felt before in my life. Only twice before had I been so sick of working; I felt like a machine, stripped down to whatever was needed for the job. I couldn't remember who I'd been before, only what was needed of me at the moment. What had happened to dreams? What had I thought life would be like? Not this. Hope was erased and in its place was dogged pushing until it was finished. Some days I wondered if that day would ever come. I prayed that I wouldn't lose my soul. I was glad to not have close friendships or a relationship in my life, I'd have nothing to give. I was dead inside from pouring too many places and having too many one-sided relationships where my value came from what I could give, not in the fact that I just was.
But on nights like tonight people and places start to resurface, images, and I get a little homesick for this time in my life. I wanted to share it. In Jackson there's a street with brownstone houses on the righthand side of the street once you turn off the main road (127) and are heading toward downtown toward the center. I wondered what it would be like to live there; it would feel like a castle. Nearby there's a restaurant on top of one of the hills called Steve's Ranch that has decent codfish, beer battered onion rings, and lowlit ambiance and a salad bar that looks like all the color has been sucked out of it by a vampire. The downtown has cobblestone streets, a few highrise skyscrapers, and buildings with theatrical masks set in concrete of men and women smiling (comedy) or frowning (tragedy). There are boys and young men who drive through empty alleyways and parking lots at night on bikes, coming and going from a drug deal. There's a police station a few blocks beyond that. The city center gets quiet at night, and hooded men and homeless wanderers hide out in bushes or under overpasses. I saw a couple students making out in a car one night as I was walking across the parking lot, then she got in her car and he drove away in his.
I worked with a man named Glenn who stood 5'5", rail thin, a Japanese American who had grown up in Hawaii and was surprised that I knew about the conflicts between the Filipino immigrants and the Japanese immigrants over the pineapple farms. He had a daughter a few years younger than me who had moved back to California because she never felt like she fit in in Michigan, and another daughter who was in high school. Glenn liked to talk theology or missions.
There was the girl whose boyfriend did drugs and stole their color TV. She couldn't leave him and was more worried about her gambling problem and how thin he was getting because of his heroin addiction. There were the women who'd been molested as kids and were still grieving it in their sixties. There was Eric, the formal African American fire chief who sometimes missed class because he was called to a fire, was tending to his rental properties, or thinking about moving to Florida. There was Lenny, riding in to class on a crotch rocket, struggling to finish his thesis and justify to his wife the purchase of his bike.
There were R, J, and T, always cracking jokes in class and making me laugh, then talking about their posttraumatic stress disorder from getting shot at in the line of duty and shooting a man. I ended up going on a ridealong with them and got caught up in a drug bust, SWAT team and all.
There were the ex-military students who had done their tours of duty and now were working on business degrees. Some came to class in uniform. A couple were deployed in the middle of the course and couldn't finish. They left behind families, didn't tell where they were going, only nodded stiffly, shook my hand hard, and said it had been a pleasure.
All these people. They cross our paths for brief moments and then are on their way to something else, or we are, and we're left with some good experiences but also sadness. At first this was very hard. I connected with a number of students and had a few crushes and would have loved to have been friends with a number of others. After hearing pieces of their life stories, sitting across from them, sometimes weeping with them or laughing, it felt like we had shared something. We'd see each other sometimes in the halls of the centers, or at the grocery store or graduation, but things had changed. We had had our time, and now it was different.
Over time, it became harder to connect. I knew the students would be gone in six weeks and besides, the faces started to blur together. So did the roads. Some nights I wouldn't know if I was driving north or south, home to Lansing or away to Flint, Jackson, Bay City, or Battle Creek. It was disorienting, like blacking out and coming to only to find that you've lost all bearings, have no idea where you are. Your soul has come unglued.
I think a lot. Sometimes I wish I didn't. Married friends say they don't think, or have shifted to autopilot, and sometimes assume I have no idea what's that like.
I did. In Michigan. Sometimes I was in a different city every night, four nights out of the week. My house was in one city, my office in another, and on average I drove two hours a day. For six months I drove four hours a day, plus had two teaching gigs. I stopped counting how many hours I worked. If I was awake, I was working, or at the gym to try to clear my mind. They were 80 hour weeks, easily. I slipped into autopilot then. I kept moving, wondering how long I could keep up this pace, begging for it to end, feeling more lonely and more emotionally bare than I'd ever felt before in my life. Only twice before had I been so sick of working; I felt like a machine, stripped down to whatever was needed for the job. I couldn't remember who I'd been before, only what was needed of me at the moment. What had happened to dreams? What had I thought life would be like? Not this. Hope was erased and in its place was dogged pushing until it was finished. Some days I wondered if that day would ever come. I prayed that I wouldn't lose my soul. I was glad to not have close friendships or a relationship in my life, I'd have nothing to give. I was dead inside from pouring too many places and having too many one-sided relationships where my value came from what I could give, not in the fact that I just was.
But on nights like tonight people and places start to resurface, images, and I get a little homesick for this time in my life. I wanted to share it. In Jackson there's a street with brownstone houses on the righthand side of the street once you turn off the main road (127) and are heading toward downtown toward the center. I wondered what it would be like to live there; it would feel like a castle. Nearby there's a restaurant on top of one of the hills called Steve's Ranch that has decent codfish, beer battered onion rings, and lowlit ambiance and a salad bar that looks like all the color has been sucked out of it by a vampire. The downtown has cobblestone streets, a few highrise skyscrapers, and buildings with theatrical masks set in concrete of men and women smiling (comedy) or frowning (tragedy). There are boys and young men who drive through empty alleyways and parking lots at night on bikes, coming and going from a drug deal. There's a police station a few blocks beyond that. The city center gets quiet at night, and hooded men and homeless wanderers hide out in bushes or under overpasses. I saw a couple students making out in a car one night as I was walking across the parking lot, then she got in her car and he drove away in his.
I worked with a man named Glenn who stood 5'5", rail thin, a Japanese American who had grown up in Hawaii and was surprised that I knew about the conflicts between the Filipino immigrants and the Japanese immigrants over the pineapple farms. He had a daughter a few years younger than me who had moved back to California because she never felt like she fit in in Michigan, and another daughter who was in high school. Glenn liked to talk theology or missions.
There was the girl whose boyfriend did drugs and stole their color TV. She couldn't leave him and was more worried about her gambling problem and how thin he was getting because of his heroin addiction. There were the women who'd been molested as kids and were still grieving it in their sixties. There was Eric, the formal African American fire chief who sometimes missed class because he was called to a fire, was tending to his rental properties, or thinking about moving to Florida. There was Lenny, riding in to class on a crotch rocket, struggling to finish his thesis and justify to his wife the purchase of his bike.
There were R, J, and T, always cracking jokes in class and making me laugh, then talking about their posttraumatic stress disorder from getting shot at in the line of duty and shooting a man. I ended up going on a ridealong with them and got caught up in a drug bust, SWAT team and all.
There were the ex-military students who had done their tours of duty and now were working on business degrees. Some came to class in uniform. A couple were deployed in the middle of the course and couldn't finish. They left behind families, didn't tell where they were going, only nodded stiffly, shook my hand hard, and said it had been a pleasure.
All these people. They cross our paths for brief moments and then are on their way to something else, or we are, and we're left with some good experiences but also sadness. At first this was very hard. I connected with a number of students and had a few crushes and would have loved to have been friends with a number of others. After hearing pieces of their life stories, sitting across from them, sometimes weeping with them or laughing, it felt like we had shared something. We'd see each other sometimes in the halls of the centers, or at the grocery store or graduation, but things had changed. We had had our time, and now it was different.
Over time, it became harder to connect. I knew the students would be gone in six weeks and besides, the faces started to blur together. So did the roads. Some nights I wouldn't know if I was driving north or south, home to Lansing or away to Flint, Jackson, Bay City, or Battle Creek. It was disorienting, like blacking out and coming to only to find that you've lost all bearings, have no idea where you are. Your soul has come unglued.
Thursday, May 10, 2007
A boy and his cat, a talking donkey, and a snake
The last day of class ended yesterday. Now what's left are piles of papers and projects to grade, finals next week, and then I leave for Greece and Italy. I don't know how I feel. It's been an intense year, and often I've felt like I can only see a few feet in front of me, but now it's ending, and there's a feeling of loss. I've always had a hard time saying goodbye, whether it was moving, the end of a schoolyear, the end of summer, of camp, the end of a play, or the loss of a family member or friend.
I've been dating someone. I'm smiling as I write this, and yet I also find myself hiding sometimes. It takes me to places I've rarely been in my life, memories I've tried to shut out or ran from. Sometimes the closer you get to someone, the more you realize that there are parts you can't know about them, and parts you can't share. I've felt this before, almost always with my closest friends. It's a lonely feeling. We're broken people.
And yet once, a donkey spoke and his rider wasn't surprised that he spoke, but was more surprised at what she had to say. "There was an angel in the path about to kill you, and I saved you. So why are you beating me?" The man had forgotten how to see and hear. His senses were dulled. He was out of tune with the world around him.
A snake spoke in a garden, and the woman (and man) weren't surprised, but what he had to say made all the difference. He promised they would see, but instead we've been groping in the dark ever since.
There was something more, and on some level, I think we all feel this. Maybe we were more connected once: to animals, to each other, to the grass beneath our feet and the trees that swayed in the wind, to God, to the universe around us, to the things that we can't see and no longer believe in. Maybe we could even feel the grass growing, the trees stretching up to the sky, from the depths of their roots to the tips of their branches, and their growth was good. The food from their branches didn't just give us nourishment, but also deep pleasure. The water sparkled on our tongues and sang in our throats, and made us laugh. The marching of ants and the building of webs could distract us for hours in deep fascination.
We feel this absence deeply, and yet try to drown it out at the same time: through music, images, words, media, coverings that remove us from the outside world, from nature, from the wild beauty of it . . . because the memory of what we lost is too painful. A deep part of us longs for it: we have commercials offering getaways into the mountains and outbacks of the world if we buy the right mountainbike or off road car; we have well toned and tanned men and women sitting by the side of a pool or on the beach, sipping margaritas and relaxing in a paradise of contentment. We have offers for products that will make us feel sexy, feel comfortable in our own skin and reconnect us, usually sexually or romantically, to each other. We still long to be connected.
For the moment, I'm caught between this absence, yet also aware that there are still glimpses of presence in the world. I've smiled more this month than I have in a long time. When I'm with people I care about there are long periods where I feel peace, connectedness, like I've come home.
There's a boy I know who has a special relationship with his cat. When the boy leaves for the weekend, the cat wanders around the house, looking for him, crying for him, wondering when he'll come home, and when he returns, the cat follows. The relationship we once had is broken, but glimpses of it remain. The cat doesn't talk, but almost.
There are words that heal, words that communicate value, words that once spoken can wipe away mounds of fear and doubt and bring grace to a situation. None of us moves through life without deep scars and wounds along the way, but the glimpses that remain of what once was give us hope that someday it will be restored again.
I've been dating someone. I'm smiling as I write this, and yet I also find myself hiding sometimes. It takes me to places I've rarely been in my life, memories I've tried to shut out or ran from. Sometimes the closer you get to someone, the more you realize that there are parts you can't know about them, and parts you can't share. I've felt this before, almost always with my closest friends. It's a lonely feeling. We're broken people.
And yet once, a donkey spoke and his rider wasn't surprised that he spoke, but was more surprised at what she had to say. "There was an angel in the path about to kill you, and I saved you. So why are you beating me?" The man had forgotten how to see and hear. His senses were dulled. He was out of tune with the world around him.
A snake spoke in a garden, and the woman (and man) weren't surprised, but what he had to say made all the difference. He promised they would see, but instead we've been groping in the dark ever since.
There was something more, and on some level, I think we all feel this. Maybe we were more connected once: to animals, to each other, to the grass beneath our feet and the trees that swayed in the wind, to God, to the universe around us, to the things that we can't see and no longer believe in. Maybe we could even feel the grass growing, the trees stretching up to the sky, from the depths of their roots to the tips of their branches, and their growth was good. The food from their branches didn't just give us nourishment, but also deep pleasure. The water sparkled on our tongues and sang in our throats, and made us laugh. The marching of ants and the building of webs could distract us for hours in deep fascination.
We feel this absence deeply, and yet try to drown it out at the same time: through music, images, words, media, coverings that remove us from the outside world, from nature, from the wild beauty of it . . . because the memory of what we lost is too painful. A deep part of us longs for it: we have commercials offering getaways into the mountains and outbacks of the world if we buy the right mountainbike or off road car; we have well toned and tanned men and women sitting by the side of a pool or on the beach, sipping margaritas and relaxing in a paradise of contentment. We have offers for products that will make us feel sexy, feel comfortable in our own skin and reconnect us, usually sexually or romantically, to each other. We still long to be connected.
For the moment, I'm caught between this absence, yet also aware that there are still glimpses of presence in the world. I've smiled more this month than I have in a long time. When I'm with people I care about there are long periods where I feel peace, connectedness, like I've come home.
There's a boy I know who has a special relationship with his cat. When the boy leaves for the weekend, the cat wanders around the house, looking for him, crying for him, wondering when he'll come home, and when he returns, the cat follows. The relationship we once had is broken, but glimpses of it remain. The cat doesn't talk, but almost.
There are words that heal, words that communicate value, words that once spoken can wipe away mounds of fear and doubt and bring grace to a situation. None of us moves through life without deep scars and wounds along the way, but the glimpses that remain of what once was give us hope that someday it will be restored again.
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