while i was driving:

you can't keep anything

what you don't give away

will be taken from you.

like jenga in reverse

sometimes things fall together just so neatly

and all the pieces gently slide into place

all you can do is smile so sweetly

and there's no amount of rain that could wipe it off your face

sometimes i get dizzy when i'm sleeping. my dream gets all topsy-turvy. i feel as though i'm sliding head first down some sort of chute. i wake up and the room is spinning so i shut my eyes to try to make it stop. does this allude to a sub-conscious feeling of lost control?

The Speed that is Possible

Sometimes when I ride I am a man on a bicycle. I sit up and my head swivels to take in storefronts and pedestrians and trees. I grip the handlebars with fists at the end of arms held stiff by locked elbows. I pedal and coast and pedal and coast. I chug up hills and lift my body off the seat. The bicycle leans first this way, then the other, back and forth until I am at the top, where I pause, panting but puffed with the accomplishment and look around to see if anyone has noticed my triumph over gravity. I am careful but I let my mind wander. I think about what I am going to cook myself for dinner: “Macaroni and cheese? No, burritos.” I think about the current object of affection, if there is one, and review our last interaction, scouring for hints to intentions or expectations or the future. I carry on an imaginary dialogue in which I am clever and charming and she drowns in me. Maybe I have a basket full of groceries or library books to return. When I reach my destination, I carefully lock my bicycle to a street sign or lamppost or carry it up the stairs of my building.

Other times I am not a man on a bicycle. The machine and I have fused into a being of pure motion and reflex. Amongst calculations of position and vector there is no room for plans and girls. The bicycle and I, we are a rocket, we are a jet, we are a comet, we are sound waves that are unscathable. We dart past parked cars and into turn lanes. We swoop around children crossing the street and confused, barking dogs that do not mean to hurt us but whose canine brains can not grasp what could possibly be moving so fast. Our heart and legs are pumping and our chain orbits the gears faster and faster, pulling the teeth of the sprockets and the back wheel spins and we move.

Our face is grim and our eyes squinting, scanning peripheries for danger. A car pulling out sees us and jolts to a halt as red brake lights ignite. Green to yellow, we hunker down and dig our toes into the pedals and clear the intersection just after the light has gone red but before the sluggish cars can react. The cars and their drivers cannot know what we are, have no way of knowing. To them we are a surprise, a sharp inhalation of breath, a streak and then we have disappeared. They worry that they will hit us, will damage us, that a brush with their fender will cripple us and send us to the pavement, but we know, as the cracked concrete uncoils below, we know that we are untouchable. We know what the cars will do before they do it and we are ready. The ground that is a blur below us is only for our tires, the rest of us will never touch it. It is not meant for us.

We are a flash on the side of the street, sometimes in the middle, but always on the street, not on the sidewalk, never on the sidewalk. That is where the people are. They are smaller than the cars and they do not move fast, cannot move fast, or will not, we are not sure. What we know is that they are best avoided because they are unpredictable. They will panic when they see us and will not just let us roar by, but will try to get out of the way and we will hit them because they are stupid and they think that we do not know what we are doing. We stay on the street and go fast, always faster and faster and never slowing down unless we have to, unless there is no possible curve or angle or maneuver we can make. When there is no escape and we are fenced in, we slow but as soon as we are clear we pump and push and spin and we are going fast again.

Often we do not know where we are going. It is almost as if we have some mystical connection to the city, that through our tires’ contact with the ground, instinctual knowledge of thoroughfares and distances flows through us. We do not have errands to run. We are not conducting business. We are cutting through the air like a knife because that is what we do, that is what we must do. There is nothing else that we can do. This is who we are. It is the actualization of our primary cause. We are, therefore, we are fast. We are pushed on and on, faster and faster by a passion and a fire burning in our marrow and in the very air in our tires. This is how we know that we are alive, to see the world blur into streaks to our right and our left and to feel our speed humming through us.

When we get to the park, the one by the lake that is all green and grass and trees and dogs, we swing one leg over our frame and coast with both feet on one pedal until we run out of momentum and collapse on the soft turf. We are panting and puffing and our limbs and tires are hot and we sweat. We lay on our back and look at the sky, at the bright blue, so blue it makes our eyes lost in it and we can not see the other side but we try and try and can not tear our eyes away and we peer into the huge brilliant nothing that is everything. The sun is there and it is not like us but we like how it feels on our skin and on our paint. It dries our sweat and makes us smile and the breeze ruffles our hair and feels like the air rushing past when we were a rocket, a jet, a comet, but like a baby of that air. It knows only a hint of the speed that is possible. We also see the clouds. They make us smile. They are so round and fat and the way they float without seeming to move at all makes us think that they know both nothing and everything about being fast. Like Zen masters, they watch us from above, smiling at how fast we can be, smiling at how much faster we could be, not judging us for how we are sometimes slow, but just smiling and smiling. We feel their distant benevolence and think that if anything understands us it is probably the clouds.

We close our eyes and can see the shadows, the traces of the cars, the people, the obstacles we have just navigated and the street, always the street, the two lines, parallel but intersecting somewhere, somewhere out there, somewhere we have to find, have to get to, have to get to now, have to be at this very moment! We do not know if we will ever get there. There is a nagging feeling that we will not, that there might not really be such a place, but we are young and fast and we will see that feeling proved wrong.

drift away, drift back

i once compared blogging to keeping a pet fish. if this was a fish, it has died. that is certainly one way to look at it, even if it is a bit fatalistic. let us rather take a broader view and see this thing as a critter that has undergone a metamorphosis and become something that it previously was not. isn't that the only constant, change?

to get you up to speed, here are some things:

• jack, kate, hurley, sun, aaron, and sayid have left the island. wait, thats lost.
• i left the islands in november and after a short search have found myself a job in chicago. re-adjusting has been well, something, but not as mountainous terrain as i thought.
• a few things i like about being stateside: hot showers, fresh fruit, friends
• a few things i miss about majuro: students, speaking marshallese, the ocean, "morneeng!"

i've been trying to explore many things; things like yoga, music thats come out in the past 2 years, and miles and miles of sidewalk.

i think i will be putting up snippets of this and that here over the next period of time until i stop. if you think of anything i should know about, just sing it loud and clear and it will be carried by way of melody to mine ears.

aaron

a betrayal of trust, or, living with the oppressed is easy until they start breaking into your house

there are numerous kids that hang out around our house. we give them drinks of water and they laugh at our attempts at marshallese. its a symbiotic relationship. one of the boys we were the closest to was Kan. he was in 5th grade at assumption elementary. he is really outgoing and often helpful. sometimes bridget would wash his uniform and we would help him with his homework around our kitchen table.


two weeks ago mike noticed some of his money was missing. then, last saturday evening, i came home from church to drop off my guitar before going to a fijian baptism party (if you ever get an invite to one, go. fijians know how to have a good time) and i noticed that the lights in our bedrooms were on. curious. the next morning shannon noticed that she was missing some money as well, not all of it, but half of her stash was gone. sunday afternoon, the lights all mysteriously turned on of their own accord again and the rest of her money was gone.


the pieces started to come together. our roof/cieling are still in the state of (dis)repair that they have been since late november and a panel of the cieling in the roof was broken. a chair that didn't used to be there was found under it, dusted with bits of wood which was curious because shannon had just swept the porch. hmmm. fr. rich had seen kan after someone broke in eating an apple and was pleased and surprised that he had made such a healthy snack choice. we had just gone grocery shopping. hmmmmmm. then kan started walking around with a new bike and new clothes, including a oversized black gangsta shirt with a huge sequined dollar bill sign. hmmmmmmmmm. then there was the realization that before someone broke in, kan was asking all of us where everyone was. hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.


we set a trap for him, telling him that we were all going to church monday evening while fr. rich hid in our bathroom. he didn't show, but the next day, he did. bridget saw the light go on from far away and ran to the house, catching him on his way out. we got our man.


there was an ensuing mess with meetings and consequences that i wasn't a big part of because thankfully, nothing of mine disappeared. i figure i only have two things anyone would want to steal, my ipod and my guitar. the guitar never would have made it out the ceiling and i keep my ipod camouflaged. so while it didn't effect me in that way, it did in others.



just the idea that we considered kan a friend and trusted him and that he would betray that just hurts. that he would sit at our table talking with us, knowing that he was going to come in and rifle through our belongings when we were gone feels so bad. on a different level it sucks because at least part of why we're here is to serve. it makes it much harder to do that and to openly embrace this place and people when things like this happen. by no means has this soured me on the people of the marshall islands, it just makes it a little more difficult to be welcoming to the kids that frequent our porch. my friend Jeremy, who lived in intentional community in the Camden House once told me something to the effect that making the oppressed your neighbors and living in community with them is easy until your neighbors start breaking into your house. what is most foul about this situation is not that kan stole from us, but that he would steal; that we live in a world that makes children into thieves.

i am a part of something big, or, my thoughts from this morning

in september i started getting up early to pray with the sunrise. i have a flat chunk of concrete i spread a towel out on and i meditate, calming all the worrying and planning about the many stresses that buzz through my brain all day long. i listen to the waves and the wind and God. sometimes i have deep, moving experiences but mostly i don't.

this morning i had a great feeling of joy. i opened my eyes after meditating and was overcome with how beautiful life is. i am a part of this huge, minutely detailed, incredible patchwork of life with God running through it all. i looked around and saw the ocean and the sun and the clouds and the houses of Small Island and the coconut trees and i just couldn't help smiling and even laughing a little. this is all so amazing! not the tropicality of my location or what i'm doing here in majuro, but this whole earth is such an unbelievable place and i get to be a part of it. i get to see and taste and draw meaning from all of this incredible creation. what more could a guy ask? there's no reason in this crazy world to be angry or sad or anything you don't want to be for more than a second!
its simple but it absolutely set me on fire.