life. violence. hope.

There are a few things I have been wanting to write about on here.

First, a very recent incident.

It is night. I am sitting on the step on the porch outside my front door. I am thinking about how the depth of my relationships at home are quite different from other relationships. I am thinking about how these suburbs tend to create an energy of lifelessness. I feel almost lonely without the stars to comfort me at night. I feel unprotected without any mountains or trees surrounding me. It just feels lifeless. I sit a little more, still looking at the sky. I hear noises behind me on the porch near the light. I look and there is beetle the size of teaspoon crawling around, moths chasing each other, and tiny creatures of all disgusting shapes and sizes congregating beneath the buzzing light. Life! I look away. My eyes catch movement in the dirt in the garden next to me. A worm slides in and out of the soil. Life, movement, breath. Ahhh! Joy. I take a deep breath. How could I have forgotten the tiny creatures and even the organisms? I am looking at a beautifully crafted spider web running from the leaves and branches of the shrub next to me to the wall of the house to another lamp hanging from the house. I think how spiders are such fantastic creatures. I look down and a nose and two beady eyes make contact with my two (probably also beady) eyes. The opossum skitters away with equal surprise and fear that causes me to jump to my feet. We were not expecting to meet one another here! I softly offer an apology to the opossum if he can hear me still, and head inside. I get it. That's enough for tonight.

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Another also recent incident. A lesson on violence:

I like animals a lot. Well, that doesn't really suffice. I am enchanted, intrigued, and nearly always in awe of the life and sentience of the animals around me. For the first time in several years, I am fishing on a boat with my dad and brother. I have a reel and rod in hand, and I'm ready to go. In the past, I have despised fishing. I get antsy sitting around waiting. I get frustrated because I feel like I am not doing it right and I don't understand it. And the worst part, I rarely catch any fish. But, this time is different. I am determined to enjoy fishing. I am not antsy. I am prepared to sit around and wait. I think of things differently. I get to enjoy nature, the water, the trees, maybe a good chance to try to learn the different birds in the area. I look at it as a learning experience. (This means a lot of questions from me--sorry dad). So the reel and rod in hand. Now I need bait. The worms. I used to love this when I was little. I would stick my hand in the bucket and catch a minnow and help put it on the hook. It was so fun. Why have things changed? I open the plastic container and choose the worm that will forcefully be offering his life as a sacrifice for...well probably nothing, because I probably won't catch a darn thing. I offer my apologies to him before I turn him on his back and prick the metal point through his skin, into his body, and out the other side. ouch. I toss out the line. Okay, I can do this. Phew. Sigh. "Whit, you have a bite!" Ah, okay. Tug, spin the thingamabobber, keep it tight, you got it. Okay, it's out of the water. Oh, it's beautiful. The bluegill with its lovely yellow belly. Okay, what do I do? Uh, Dad...you touch it! The hook, it look like it hurts! Oh, he swallowed it. I turn my head, I feel the hook in my stomach too, I groan and moan. Ah, it's been out of the water too long. Ah, the hook shouldn't be in his stomach. I'm so sorry. There is blood. I made him bleed. He is back in the water. I'm so sorry. So sorry.

I sit in silence for a few seconds. Breath. Sigh. No tears (but close). I think Sheesh that was violent. Then I think Why can't a just be like everyone else and just catch the damn fish and throw it back? Fishing is not supposed to make me feel this many emotions.
So, I try to be like everyone else. I keep tossing out a line for the next couple hours. I catch several more fish. No more hooks in the stomach, no more blood. A few torn mouths.
I like sitting in the boat. I like watching the birds and listening to their songs. I liked watching that Musky snag the Bluegill from the line. I liked watching the fish jump in and out of the water in a [violent(...yet not necessarily bad violence)] fury of feeding. I like the sun and the clouds. But, I don't think I like killing the worms over and over again. And I don't think I like tricking the fish just to put them right back where I took them from. (I might like it a little more if I was trying to catch my dinner.) There's too much life to just fool around with it...at least for me.

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One more thing I've been wanting to write about. Hope.

About a year and a half ago, I was spending several hours by myself (for lack of a better word) in Yosemite Valley. It was January and I wanted to see the bottom of lower Yosemite Falls as I had never seen them at this time of year. There are no other people on the trail until I get to the bridge in front of the falls. There is a young girl on the bridge and she looks at me curiously as I watch the falls. I keep walking and as I pass her she says the letters "H-O-P-E." I look at her and I say, "excuse me?" thinking I had misunderstood her. She said, "Hope! I said hope." Then she smiled at me kind of smugly then ran off in the opposite direction. I stood there kind of taken aback. I found a nice spot near the stream for the next couple hours. My interaction with that girl has been haunting me for the past year and a half. I guess I am trying to figure out what it means, but I don't want to make it more than it was. However, it is undeniable that the idea of hope has been and continues to run through my mind continuously.

The past couple days, I have been thinking about some of my thoughts regarding hope currently.
Wendell Berry sums up the meaning of hope (or lack of ) for me in the past few months:

Yes, though hope is our duty,
let us live a while without it
to show ourselves we can.
Let us see that, without hope,
we are still well. Let hopelessness
shrink us to our proper size.
Without it we are half as large
as yesterday, and the world
is twice as large. My small
place grows immense as I walk
upon it without hope.
Our springtime rue anemones
as I walk among them, hoping
not even to live, are beautiful
as Eden, and I their kinsman
am immortal in their moment.

I have been taught that hope is necessary, that without it there is no reason to live, no reason for joy. However, I am beginning to think that perhaps hope leads away from living presently to a state that denies who and where we are right now toward something imaginary. We have no agency, power, control over the future. I don't hope that my thirst will be quenched and I can go on living and yet never drink water. I just do it, I drink water. By realizing that we do have power, we do not have to simply "hope." We can do something and we should do something about what we love. And a loss of hope does not make life bad or unbearable. Life is good. We are complex creatures and can hold several emotions at once. As Wendell says, a wonderful thing happens when you give up on hope. You realize you never really needed it.

[a disclaimer: Everything I write is mere jibber-jabber, thoughts, meanderings. I am a hypocrite. Perhaps, and hopefully ;) I will turn my meager philosophies into action once I muster up the courage and get rid of some fear]

Annie Dillard and the Present

Annie Dillard is a genius. I thought I would share some of her thoughts with you.

I sip my coffee. I look at the mountain, which is still doing its tricks, as you look at a still-beautiful face belonging to a person who was once your lover in another country years ago: with fond nostalgia, and recognition, but no real feeling save a secret astonishment that you are now strangers. Thanks. For the memories. It is ironic that the one thing that all religions recognize as separating us from our creator--our very self-consciousness--is also the one thing that divides us from our fellow creatures. It was a bitter birthday present from evolution, cutting us off at both ends.

Catch it if you can. The present is an invisible electron; its lightning path traced faintly on a blackened scree is fleet, and fleeing, and gone.

Experiencing the present purely is being emptied and hollow; you catch grace as a man fills his cup under a waterfall.

Consciousness itself does not hinder living in the present. In fact, it is only to a heightened awareness that the great door to the present opens at all. Even a certain amount of interior verbalization is helpful to enforce the memory of whatever it is that is taking place.

Self-Consciousness, however, does hinder the experience of the present. It is the one instrument that unplugs all the rest. So long as I lose myself in a tree, say, I can scent its leafy breath or estimate its board feet of lumber, I can draw its fruits or boil tea on its branches, and the tree stays tree. But the second I become aware of myself at any of these activities--looking over my own shoulder, as it were--the tree vanishes, uprooted from the spot and flung out of sight as if it had never grown. And time, which had flowed down into the tree bearing new revelations like floating leaves at every moment, ceases. It dams, stills, stagnates.

Self-consciousness is the curse of the city and all that sophistication implies. It is the glimpse of oneself in a storefront window, the unbidden awareness of reactions on the faces of other people--the novelist's world, not the poet's. I've lived there. I remember what the city has to offer: human companionship, major-league baseball, and a clatter of quickening stimulus like a rush from strong drugs that leaves you drained. I remember how you bide your time in the city, and think, if you stop to think, "next year . . . I'll start living; next year . . . I'll start my life." Innocence is a better world.

Innocence sees that this is it, and finds it world enough, and time. Innocence is not the prerogative of infants and puppies, and far less of mountains and fixed stars, which have no prerogatives at all. It is not lost to us; the world is a better place than that. Like any other of the spirit's good gifts, it is there if you want it, free for the asking, as has been stressed by stronger words than mine.

What I call innocence is the spirit's unself-conscious state at any moment of pure devotion to any object. It is at once a receptiveness and total concentration.

These are our few live seasons. Let us live them as purely as we can, in the present.

(from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard, 1974, chapter 6 "The Present")

It has been awhile since I've written anything. This semester is coming to end, my second year of college is coming to an end.

Last week, I was camping in Yosemite for spring break, and I think I came to a few realizations and began to understand this semester better.

First, I feel radically different when I am in the mountains, in the forest, away from city life. I feel like I am home (this Greek idea of nostos). Something in my soul and body just feels right, feels at peace. I can slow down in body and mind, I can think clearly, I act more loving, in fact, I feel more capable of loving. And, I don't know if that is just me or if all humans are more at home away from civilization (whether or not we all recognize it). I'm in the woods again this weekend, at a friend's cabin, and I'm reading Thoreau's Walden once again. This just seems how life should be. . .just lazing around on the weekend, waking up slow, drinking a cup of coffee on the porch, walking by the river, playing with the dog, reading in the hammock, watching the birds.

Second, I've realized some of my spiritual frustrations. January started with me having questions about God or the divine or whatever you want to call it. And this caused me major stress and frustration. The thing that confused me most was that other people are okay with not knowing answers about God, they are not deeply frustrated and troubled by not knowing. I think Christianity had pounded it into my mind that knowledge and understanding of the divine is of utmost importance, that knowing God is foundational. More so, I had been told that God loved me and I think this was something that I relied heavily on. Then, thinking that maybe I had just made this god-figure up in my mind, that maybe all I had been told was bullshit, my understanding of the world and my understanding myself was rearranged. And that change, not just the questions themselves, is what caused the stress.

There's so much running through my mind--relational, life, humanity, love, hobbies and distraction, God, meditation, community, education, arrogance, shmarrogance. Maybe I will be able to write something cohesive on it one day. For today, just this smattering.



if this isn't a good way to spend a Sunday afternoon, I don't know what is...