Journeys of a Wandering Wordsmith
Journey with me on my blog!
After Helene: And the Leaf Still Holds
Walking out your front door, you rarely consider how different life will be when you return home. When you walk back through that door. Like a portal, you leave one home behind ... and return to another altogether. On September 21, I left Asheville for a road trip to visit family and friends across Pennsylvania. On October 2, I returned home to a hellscape like nothing I'd ever seen.
The Joys and Challenges of Traveling Solo Across Alaska
Here's a multi-faceted realization I've found in recent years: I absolutely love to travel solo — and most people absolutely do not. Traveling solo doesn't daunt me; indeed, it ignites something primal and wondrous in me. Comparing myself to how most other people travel, though, is another mountain: Why are they not like me? Why am I not at all like them?
Alaska, At Last
Back in 2020, in that early sliver of what was sure to be a promising year, I started making preliminary plans to visit Alaska. Known widely as "The Last Frontier" and my own final frontier, too. I’d traveled to 49 states since touching down in Hawaii a couple years prior, and it was time, at last, to conquer them all. Well. We all know why that trip didn’t happen. And it’s been plaguing me ever since. Three and a half years of longing for Alaska. Until now. I refuse to long any longer.
Four Seasons of America; Four Seasons of My Soul
Now months removed from this trip, I look back and notice something of a correlation with both the climate of these diverse corners of America and also the climate of my soul as I encountered each one...
I Can't Believe I Came From Her
My grandmother died. These words rattle around my heart like pinballs that won't settle, even a week beyond her funeral. And yet I wonder if the settling of these pinballs would be any better – the finality of their lodging into the belly of that machine, no longer kept alive by another flap of the paddles. Mayme Alice was the last of my grandparents to leave this earth, and undoubtedly the one with whom I grew closest.
2021: Wasted
I look back on this year and can't help but feel the wince of apparent wasted time. The lethargy of a lingering pandemic, the apathy of my creative soul, and the heavy, sometimes brutal work of ministry. Of holding less and less tightly to relationships – even if it means letting some go. My 34 years of life feels increasingly like a bell curve. Isolation and worthlessness filling the lowly cracks of my adolescence; a rising wave of optimism for my twenties, filled with new friends and adventures aplenty; and a steady decline of ambition into my mid-thirties.
Beyond the Rot of This River
I've become more justice-minded in this year of isolation - to do something with this faith of mine. To borrow a vivid example from Ronald Rolheiser's "The Holy Longing": to not just retrieve dead bodies from the river, but to go upstream and find the source of all this death.
5 Years With a Blue Ridge Home
Come whimsy or mayhem, for five years running the road keeps leading me back here to the Blue Ridge. However many nights I've actually slept in a bedroom here, it is indeed starting to feel something like home. I stared at the hills the other day and prayed, "God, please don't let it ever grow old."
Another Dawn Closer
What a comfort. What an assurance. That no matter how much the last day or last four years have tested us, drained us, broken us . . . the sun rises anew. Gives us a new chance to absorb the light and also a new chance to shine it. Or as poet laureate, Amanda Gorman, perfectly put it at today's inauguration: "For there is always light if only we're brave enough to see it, if only we're brave enough to be it."
What Will I Have Done This Year?
Instead of saying, "What do I want to do this year?" try saying, "What will I have done this year?" It's a productivity tip I learned from Donald Miller, and I've never been more eager to implement this subtle mental tweak for 2021.
Change, Leave!
I want to leave my usual ways of changing, leaving. Of always running from things, even if I'm also running to new ones. Of masking my loneliness and shame with adventures and Instagram posts. I want to continue learning to stay for a change, staying for change.
Prisoner of Hope
Oh, the freedom to no longer hope in anything far off. To forget the future and, perhaps, attain a greater ability to live in this present. It hurts to hope, I've been learning (groaning) through adulthood. It hurts to hope for things, only to see them fall flat – or, worse, fall further.
These Hills Have Me
I'm not getting out much these days. I used to sprawl all over this city and region, but I've become more of a homebody than ever before. But I'm living in my favorite dwelling I've ever built for myself, a homier, "Tom-ier" place than anywhere else, complete with maps and globes and buffalo art; early mornings with lighted candles and open windows and blanketed fog amidst the canopy. It feels good to be a body in this home.
Teach Me How to Live
Of course, I want to travel again one day, set loose to wander once more. I want it badly. But for now, I do have this strange desire to be settled. To stay home and enjoy safety and solitude. And I don't necessarily feel relegated to this reality, forced into it against my wandering will. For all this restless angst I've had since childhood, perhaps I'm finally stumbling onto the cure?
A Time to Refrain from Embracing
Looking down at my precious niece in my arms, I realized it's really something, how we need physical touch to survive. Need to be swaddled. Need to be held. Need to feel the warmth of another human emanating against us, if only to affirm to one another we are not alone in this desert. To embrace for my soul or not to embrace for my body? Life with an autoimmune disease during the pandemic of the century: one calculated risk after another.
Pen Strokes and Chisels to the Soul
I've grown more in the last two years than the previous ten. More than ever, I feel God's hand guiding mine like pen strokes while chiseling my soul. A mystical also brutal process.
Sexy Changing in the Staying
Traveling changes a man, certainly. It's what draws me to the road and the skies, again and again. The blaze of colors to my exterior and interior alike. But staying put changes a man, too, I'm better realizing. It's not as sexy. Not as readily apparent sometimes.
God's Love is Still Reckless
When "Reckless Love" first came out in 2017, I, like many others in Christian worshipdom, fell out of my seat. For the last year and a half, though, as many songs just do, it faded. Back at church, the electric guitar strings belted a familiar intro. One I'd not heard in a church setting for many, many months. "Reckless Love" returned to my life. And I couldn't skip it this time.
I Like Coming Home?
I recently climbed the stairwell to my new apartment with a bag full of groceries and thought this distinct thought: I like coming home. It startled me, and I immediately recognized its significance. Because I couldn't remember the last time I'd thought this thought. Alas — it's been years since I truly enjoyed coming home.
The Whispers I Followed Home
After 147 days, I followed the whispers back to Asheville, and I'm thrilled not to be wandering any longer. I found an apartment in town, and a phenomenal one at that. I hesitate with clichés -- especially Christian clichés -- but y'all: this was a God-thing. I'm living in a phenomenal apartment in a phenomenal neighborhood with a phenomenal landlord, and I follow a phenomenal God of provision.