“I knew a man who, in the age of chainsaws, went right on cutting his wood with a handsaw and an axe. He was a healthier and saner man than I am. I shall let his memory trouble my thoughts.” – Wendell Berry

I’ve written about this quote before, and my writing doesn’t even come close to doing justice to the times Berry’s words have troubled my thoughts and meditation. Recently it has come to my conscious again, as my History and Principles of Rhetoric and Composition class has been discussing media determinism and media instrumentalism. A rough sketch of these ideas:

-media determinism is the thought that technology directs and motivates a society’s cultural and social structure and values.

-media instrumentalism views technology as a tool that can be used for good or evil and have positive or negative effects on a culture based on how it is used.

Like Wendell Berry and Marshall McLuhan, I err on the side of determinism. I believe that our technology has an impressive and deep rooted impact on our society, and thus our technology should be dissected and reviewed and evaluated thoroughly, lest it harm us without our consciousness. Another main reason I deter myself from instrumentalism is that it implies that all things are inherently neutral; which I don’t think is true. Some things might be used for good or evil or both, but some things are good and some are evil…or at least some things are certainly better for us than others.

How is technology affecting you, affecting us?

How do tools and processes we use on a daily basis influence our health and general good? How do they manipulate our joy?

If we don’t ask those questions, not just about technology but everything, it gets easy to just get swept along with what seems “good” or what makes us successful or productive. I don’t know about you, but I don’t live my life in order to be successful or productive or efficient, I live it to experience and to love and to be awed.

Some day I hope to have a house with a wraparound porch and some land with trees. I hope to have a big stone fireplace that burns wood; one I can put blankets in front of and take naps and make out and talk about dreams near. I hope I use an axe to cut that wood. It will make me a healthier and saner man. How can I be a saner man today?

I spent the past weekend plus a few days visiting my best aunt in Fairfield and best friend in San Jose with my best girl. California is a wonderful retreat, especially from Kansas City in the winter, where the air is bitter and I sometimes wake up breathing steam because my room is so drafty and cold. The ocean, the hills, the vastness of the Bay area – they and sweet fellowship were so good for my soul, which can far too easily get caught up in planning and deciding and arguing and wondering. California just let me be.

The highlights of the trip were many. Time spent with my aunt and uncle and cousin Cameron were rich (and not just because of the delicious cookies my aunt prepared for us). The cute joy of a three year old who loves trains is refreshing, and the peace and humor my aunt and uncle offer is just, well, grand. Napa wasn’t so terrible either.

Our plan was to take the BART from Berkely to Millbrae, and then the Caltrain to Santa Clara. However, after our stop in south Berkeley a Californian-looking man with copper rings and long hair dressed in leather sat across from us. “He’s wearing a Kansas City shirt”, Abby told me. “Should I ask if he’s from there?” I recognized the man from somewhere, but couldn’t quite place him. Because I’m a chicken I had her ask him, and after a few minutes talking I realized it was Shayne, a guy who pastored at Jacob’s Well during some very spiritually formational times in my life and who led some Wednesday prayers using Psalms that I still reflect on. He’s in Santa Cruz now, working as a young adults pastor at a church there, and though our extensive conversation with him led to missing our connection in Millbrae, he gave us cash to take the bus to San Jose and a couple hours worth of incredibly life-giving conversation.

San Jose was the San Jose I love. The Sandovals are phenomenal hosts, and having them and Abby meet each other was, for lack of any other appropriate phrase, a king’s dream. We went on a hike in Santa Cruz and walked the boardwalk, had a dessert called “the chocolate orgy”, drank Sierra Nevada and smoked pipes, cruised San Fan and went to 826 Valencia and the wharf, played Catan, and had many, many, many fine meals and discussions. Spending time with people as encouraging and life-loving as Mike, Lorrie, Marshall, Ally, Isaac, and the group of friends we went on adventures with was seemingly prescribed for this weekend. I needed it.

And now I’m en route to home, sitting in the middle seat of a Southwest flight over snow capped mountains that should be Utah. My girl is next to me, curled up around my arm as sweet and loving as ever. I’m just thankful for the people I know, just thankful that I get to see. I’m thankful I have and will have many homes.

Do you remember the thrill of hope that might have sparked your soul and you might have just sang about a few weeks ago?  The weary world is still rejoicing. I left my fiancee’s house with sharp winds of spitting ice hitting my face and the scent of a fireplace or two burning logs for extra warmth gracing my nose, I saw a car slightly miss crashing fender first into a stop sign’s slender stem on the cautious drive back to my house, and I can’t tell the difference between smoke and steam breath as I smoke my pipe on my porch now, gazing out over the dusty rooftops and car hoods and littered trees around my apartment deck. There’s no one else scuttering out tonight. All, I assume, are nestled in their beds or on their couches under plenty of blankets, staying as warm as they can.

I…I just remember. The goodness of it all, the things that feel like a home you weren’t aware your heart knew. The thing about Christmas is it really isn’t about Christmas at all, it’s about love and cheer and grace and all of those goodhearted things you read about in Guideposts magazine or watch on the Hallmark channel. It’s about things that last, however long, as some things stay only a bit but some things, I’m coming to find out, make good and nest for the long haul, and these are the things I remember, and I can see, and the future almost feels like remembering in this cold as hope so beautiful and stern urges my heart and soul towards choosing love, picking promises, and belching out hope to all who would hear it.

Rejoice, have hope, take heart.

(the 1860s theme's been done, obviously, and man it looks neat!)

While I know some of you will probably tire of hearing about how head-over-heels excited I am to marry Abby and plan this wedding, I’m placing myself in the honey badger’s posture and just going to talk about it anyway. For your entertainment I’m keeping a running tally of all the ideas surrounding my wedding that I myself deem terrible (or just terribly good). Here’s Volume One of ideas that just won’t fly…

- using a replica Lord of the Rings ring, with Elven inscription only shown in fire, as my wedding band

- catering? don’t need it. a couple pigs on the spitfire would do just fine

- the reception dance playlist will consist of the entirety of R Kelly’s “Trapped in the Closet” plus Toby Keith’s greatest hits

- a Civil War theme, with groom’s side dressing in CSA grey and bride’s side in Union blue

- on-site moonshine distillery

- hand out wedding Pixie Sticks instead of cake. you know, like the ones strange people sell in the median.

If you think one or any of these ideas are good, let me know. I might use your testimony as evidence.

“Our bond is no little economy based on the exchange
of my love and work for yours, so much for so much
of an expendable fund. We don’t know what its limits are–
that puts us in the dark. We are more together
than we know, how else could we keep on discovering
we are more together than we thought?
You are the known way leading always to the unknown,
and you are the known place to which the unknown is always
leading me back. More blessed in you than I know,
I possess nothing worthy to give you, nothing
not belittled by my saying that I possess it.
Even an hour of love is a moral predicament, a blessing
a man may be hard up to be worthy of. He can only
accept it, as a plant accepts from all the bounty of the light
enough to live, and then accepts the dark,
passing unencumbered back to the earth, as I
have fallen tine and again from the great strength
of my desire, helpless, into your arms.”

- Wendell Berry, “Country Marriage”

For the next few months, and possibly the rest of my life, I’m going to be writing a lot about love on this blog. It’s not that love is a recently discovered concept to me, just that it is more real than ever; it has been manifested practically and sweetly.

Love has never changed, but I have. I’ve grown, somehow and seemingly magically, into a man who receives love and longs to give love and hopes to create things that are love and point to love. I don’t really know how it happened. It feels like just yesterday I was a young and stupid rapscallion who only cared about myself, and even though my soul is still littered with unwanted selfish feelings, somehow a brightness has entered, a light that urges and sincerely prods me to give of myself to others, and particularly one other person. Somehow I have…I guess you would call it “matured”.

It’s egotistic and vain, but I often think about my life as a movie or newspaper story, like there’s a camera following me around or a columnist spinning stories to the universe about the things I do and say and even the thoughts I feel. I think it keeps me wanting to live a good story and interesting life, and I guess it’s not too far-fetched because people really do look at my life and make assessments.I know we’re not supposed to care what people think, but shouldn’t we care about how we live so that others will be led into a better reality? So that others see our stories and are urged to do fantastical, whimsical, and inexplicable and good things with their own?

This current experience of being engaged is, I’m sure of it, the most impassioned/exciting/life giving time of my life thus far. Life is presenting itself to me as a springboard and I am being urged to jump into adventure by hope and a fervent peace. I know the most important thing is loving Jesus and my future bride (which isn’t hard, because she’s incredibly sweet and a bombshell). But succeeding those non-negotiables, the remainder of my earthly existence is To Be Announced. While I feel my past has been scattered with certain moments of intrigue and joy and journeys, the space I’m jumping into is a space I believe I’ve been wired to engage and enact wonderful things in. This next chapter, which is arriving sooner than I ever imagined it to come, is what I feel made for. Loving and being loved by a beautiful wife, spending my time writing and reading a teaching, and creating new things (where the opportunities are endless). My heart leaps at those prospects, which seem pretty keen on coming to my realm.

I hope the love I have is infectious. I hope it looks beautiful and unbound and free and deeply rooted, because it is. I hope it is felt truly by those around me, because it is good, and it is worth knowing.

I’m compiling my list of books to read in 2012 and I think I have a hearty jump for this spring semester. Some of my picks are trendy, while others are just pieces of literature I’ve missed somewhere along the way. What are you planning to read in 2012? Any suggestions for me?

Game of Thrones (entire series, thanks to my bud Eric, who got me a box set for my birthday) by George Martin

Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry

The Swerve: How the World Became Modern by Stephen Greenblatt

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard

The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery by Eric Foner

The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach

Jesus, my Father, the CIA, and Me by Ian Cron

(and of course, my yearly reread of Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead and The Hobbit)

Birthdays are invariably a time of not just celebration, but reflection. As years tick away, (okay, I know I’m only 23, but I feel old. I’m in an office on my birthday. I should be out putting baseball cards on my bicycle tires to make it sound like a motorcycle or something) you begin to spend more time thinking about what a year means: the last one, the ones before, the one ahead, and those in the distance, which always seem to creep up faster than we think they will or than we’d like. I think, since I have a January 4th birthday, being only 3 days after the official time of reflection and pondering and goal making – New Year’s – I’m even more sensitive and prone to getting nostalgic, jittery, and hopeful on the day one of my moms ushered me out of her warm uterus and into this colorful world.

I have been dwelling a lot lately on memories and experiences of the past, and how they often don’t seem far away. In fact, they more than not feel very close, like they are still happening, just happened, or are even about to occur to us again. Does anything ever leave us? Does a moment, a relationship, an experience, a thought, ever cease to breathe inside our bones? I don’t know. I can’t remember everything, but although I’m sure there are things I’ve forgotten I always get the eery sense that every breath I’ve breathed, sip of water I’ve taken, grass I’ve plucked from the ground and glittered over the sidewalk, touch I’ve touched, stride I’ve strode, kiss I’ve indulged, and more, are still a deeply rooted part of me.

Two years ago I was sauntering through the bitter-winded streets of the Plaza shopping with my mom after an intense night of Settlers, Boulevard, and catching up with old friends. I remember the party we threw at our house on Pennsylvania: my friend Paige baked me a yellow cake and Marshall used my dining room chairs and stilts and there was laughter and dancing, despite the cold our drafty house let in.

Last year I was sitting on the deck of a cruise ship on my birthday, wandering. I had my Ray Bans on and tears would fall every once in a while as the ocean seemed less dangerous and distant than my dreams, than what I figured was supposed to be.

I remember skiing the ice-concrete slopes of Snow Creek with friends and cousins, cigars in our mouths because we could now buy them and holes in our ski pants because we’d drop cigars.

When I was 12 I went to a Harlem Globetrotters game at Kemper Arena, a place they always seemed to play around the beginning of January. I ate cotton candy and my dreams of playing basketball professionally died, like the Washington Generals’ chances of winning.

In late elementary through middle school it was tradition for the guys in my small, Christian school class to have sleepovers. We had rubber band wars and listened to POD and ate sour skittles and played our own version of Survivor, in which one of the challenges included drinking club soda, as if it were some noxious beverage. This Christmas, my girlfriend bought me moonshine. Times change…

But do we? Yes, we do, a little. But the thing about changing is that the past is never completely gone, it never leaves us. I can still taste the sorrowful taste of the sea air on the deck of that cruise ship, feel the blurring in my head after a night of dining room table chair dancing, hear the screams of my cousins’ friends – who wore jeans to snowboard – as they fell down the big hill, hear my name get “voted off” at my own birthday bash, and smell the must of Kemper.

I’m 23 today, and my prayer for me and for you is to saunter. Saunter through memories, saunter through the past and present and future. Drink deeply, breathe intently, smell with fervor. When you feel something, feel it strongly. When you hear, listen so close. Engage every moment of your life like the world and your place in it is a curious, beautiful, worthwhile endeavor.

P.S. The 11 year old in me is pumped that this is my year sharing Jordan’s jersey number.

Two-thousand and twelve is a beautiful name for a year. It sounds elegant yet comfortable when it slips off your tongue, like a meal composed of caviar and fried chicken or like watching Friday Night Lights in your PJs with Kate Middleton. It’s the best of both worlds, really. I don’t have any resolutions this year, but that’s not because I’m perfect or have things figured out. In fact, my gut is growing a little and I feel I have less control over life than ever before. It seems like this would be the perfect year to set some goals, achieve some stuff, better myself – but it’s not. This year, like the last couple, I have a mantra:

create more than you consume.

I could go on and blab for awhile about our consumerist culture with its fast-paced social technology and how it negatively affects us, but I’ve done that many times before. Instead, I’m offering you my attempt at a process to help curb the overwhelming anxiety that over-consuming (in relationships, in news, in blogs, in social networking, in food, in drink, in sleep, in books, in moves, in TV, in purchasing goods) inflicts us with. I’ve always been a proponent of posing questions and offering better realities for problems and aches and issues. In the realm of consumerism, which I believe to be our deepest societal wound and invariably one that strikes our individual hearts, I think we need to create more. Well, not just create more, but create more than we consume.

You see, the thing about creating is that we want to create for other people. We want praise, we want them to read our stuff and buy our stuff and give our stuff – whatever it might be – worth and value. We want to believe that how we spend our time and talents and efforts is meaningful. Thus I think rather than creating more, we consume more, in hopes that by consuming we pick up necessary knowledge and experience that is needed to create THE ULTIMATE THING: that creation that people will tweet about, buy on Etsy, repin, or pass along to their friends.

The thing is, our economy is messed up.

We do not create for others. Sure, in writing we need an audience. In art, we need someone to hang our painting. In carpentry, we need someone to use our coffee table. In photography we need someone to look at our pictures. In music, someone to listen to our songs. But that is just the end product, and shouldn’t we know by now that PROCESS is more revealing, life-giving, and graceful than the product, than the end?

I spend a lot of time looking at pictures of people, peoples’ blogs, their Twitter timelines and who they “@”. I spend a lot of time reading The New Yorker and trying to find cool jeans so I’m not only a damn good writer, but a stylish one too. I spend way too much time consuming.

I’m not saying that experience and inspiration aren’t necessary to the creator. Oh, how they are. But where is the weight of your heart spent? Consuming, or creating?

We have a lot to say, we have a lot to make. If we took more time to do and be and let our hearts breathe, oh what a world it would be. It would be a colorful one, a passionate one,  a world with taste and breath and feeling and nuance.

Create more than you consume.

I’m not a big fan of sharing sweet, sweet news via the internet, but if you’re a loyal blog reader of mine, then I think ya damn sure deserve to know THIS news. I asked her, and Abby said she’d be my wife. I’m the most blessed man in the universe. I’d love to share the story of how it all went down with you, and I’m sure Abby would too. Let’s do that in person, or give me a call. However, I thought I would go ahead and share a bit. I wrote Ab a little something and read it to her right before I got down on one knee (and tried to put the ring on the wrong hand because I was nervous). It goes a little something like…

I’ve carried around the same slim, lime green, ruled Moleskin notebook since May of 2011, my graduation year. As of now, it contains various genres of my writing: reflections, grocery lists, lines of poetry, sermon notes, character sketches, ruminations on life events, and more. 8 months of my brain, heart, soul, lungs…well, you get the picture. I was thumbing through that notebook the other day (it’s a color I like, but that the world might not necessarily approve of a gentleman carrying. That’s why I have my girlfriend walk in with it to church, and then slyly hand it over when it’s time to take notes), and sorting through my passed thoughts is a common practice of mine. I think there’s something therapeutic and wisdom-giving about periodically reviewing journals; it gives you context, it acts as a sort of Communion between who you’ve been and who you’re becoming. That last almost-year of my life has been FULL, and a review of my scribblings reflect that.

In my notebook I came across a paragraph about anger that I thought about after an in-depth study of Proverbs 19:11, a quote from The Odyssey I copied – “Now from his heart to his eyes the ache of longing mounted…” -, and a recipe for falafel I failed miserably at making. I found a list of graduate programs I applied to, a convoluted few pages wrestling with “time”, and sermon notes about hope. I found my weekly schedule from Young Life camp in Georgia this past summer, and a bulleted portion titled “Dreams” that included “have an apple farm” and “coach baseball”. My life, I think, is pretty well exemplified from this sampling of writings. I think it shows how full these past months have been, and I think it’s an accurate depiction of the chaos I feel I’ve been sorting about, anxious space I’ve attempted to navigate with hope and in love.

And then I look over to the back cover; an unchangeable facet of my writing time capsule, clothed with the semi-Reptilian skin of citrus Moleskine on the back side. There’s two lists there, fragments of writing I cannot remove, not unless i want the whole thing, all my pages, to fall apart, to scatter on the ground, to blow away in the wind, runaway forever.

In early August I set off West towards Colorado in my mom’s Camry with the girl I love, plenty of trail mix, and a whole lot of joy. Abby, the girl I met just 3 1/2 months earlier, and I went out to the Rocky Mountains with readiness for camping and hiking in our hearts. It was a rich trip. We camped in a valley of wildflowers next to a stream, hiked far above treeline, met up with her family in Breckenridge, saw a moose and rode the Gondola over and over again with two-year-old Blake, and we walked in the misty Breck streets and drank coffee (a chai for her) at the best yellowhouse Starbucks in the world.

But out of all the joyful memories of the excursion, two things will always be pinned to my soul from those days.

The first was a transcendent moment on the way home, a 12 hour drive through the entirety of Kansas. As the sun dipped into the humus of the earth and dusk came closer and closer across I-70 in Kansas, as the tops of snowy mountain peaks were nowhere to be seen (only blue lakes and red barns and monotonous rows of crops and broken down, rusty tractors in fields), my heart was brushed in a peculiar (yet somehow familiar, like a letter I knew was coming in the mail but just hadn’t made it yet) manner.

The land was flat and the air becoming soggy (with, no doubt, a stench of hogs or some farm beast infiltrating too), and no unnerving beauty or ruggedness filled my view; I should have been bored. But I wasn’t.

My soul inherited peace in those plains, my heart was at rest. Cerulean patches of water and shabby barns and stubs of stubborn corn incited a posture of grace and love – real, real love – throughout my bones and every other part of my being. The girl I love was falling in and out of sleep while relaxed on my shoulder, The Avett Brothers were crooning “If it’s the Beaches” through my dim iPad speaker, and from the looks and feel and smell of things, it seemed like a taste of Indian summer had arrived to kiss the Midwest, if only for a night or day or two or three.

That moment in the plains, in Nowhere, KS, on what could have been a lonesome stretch of highway leaving excitement and adventure behind, there was no sadness, no fear, because the girl I loved and forever will was holding my hand.

The other moment of that trip I’ll remember forever, since it was that forever sort of implication and is marked in ink on the skeleton of my lime green notebook, was the making and owning of two list.

The first says, in the cutest handwriting I’ve ever seen, “Honeymoon Trip West”. It lists the following places:

-Hike to the bottom of the Grand Canyon

-Grand Tetons – Jackson Hole, WY

-Yellowstone National Park

-Glacier National Park

-Visit Marshall: HWY 1 San Francisco to Carmel

-Yosemite National Park

-Salt Lake City

-Great Sand Dunes, CO

The second is titled “Honeymoon Trip East”, and lists the following places:

-Acadia National Park

-Eat pancakes in Vermont

-Charleston

-Savannah

-Boston

-Cape Cod

-Walden Pond

-New Port, RI

-Martha’s Vineyard

-Chesapeake Bay

-Appalachian Trail

Bold, huh? A little silly? I remember Abby, with her legs pulled against her chest in the passenger seat, making those lists as we drove down into valleys and up over mountain ridges and through casino towns hidden in hills and deep through tunnels. There we were, Mat Kearney blasting in the CD player and knowing each other almost 4 months, making honeymoon plans. And it felt right, because it was…is right. And it is good.

I think often about what that list means. Besides being a declaration of whimsy, it’s an utterance of HOPE…the good kind, the kind that wishes and dreams. I had never known that type of hope before, because I had never discovered the compassion and peace of gods heart do deeply planted and sprouting in another person’s before. But in the lovely wake of the making of a hopeful list, in the vicinity of a hundred adorable grins from a sweet girl scouring the mountains, throwing snowballs…gazing at the Colorado stars…I knew. I’ve brushed the fringes of hope in plenty of people, places, ideas, and things before. In running, for a while. In writing, as I sometimes still do. In achievement, though they always fade somehow. With the girl I’m now in love with, for now and ever, I think hope has found me, and wrapped me in its arms and kissed me with its lips and picked me off the ground and given me purpose and grabbed my hand to say, “We are meant to be. This world, our hearts, will be a better place since we’re together.”

Your heart, Abby, is the brightest, sweetest, most breathtaking thing that’s ever graced my life. My heart knowing yours has changed my history, reinvented my present, and magnificently painted a future full of beauty, truth, and adventure.

“Abby Kay Miller”, I said with my voice and hands shaking and heart incredibly joyful, “Will you marry me?”

She said yes, and then we made out a little.

The thing about Christmas, is, it happens every year. Well, that’s not the one and only thing about Christmas – there are parties and presents and communion takings and songs and traditions galore. But one thing I know for sure about Christmas is that it happens every year. I think we’re a society who gets frustrated with rituals because we perceive them as silly or naive. We, for the most part, want to participate in activities that lead us towards new knowledge, gain, or insight. Thus, the idea of celebrating something we either A) already believed has happened or B) don’t believed has happened, but trod through the actions anyway doesn’t appeal to our culture, and it doesn’t always appeal to us. Like the title of this blog, sometimes it feels like “Unto us a child is born, unto us a Son is given, and given, and given, and he’s given, and he’s given some more”.

See, I think Christmas is tough for us because causes us to do something incredibly counterculture and counter-intuitive to what our society beckons us to do: reflect. When we approach Christmas as Christians we calculate: “Okay, Jesus has been born. He was flesh, so He experienced a human life. His birth meant salvation”. We might not say or write it so drolly because we know we need to be excited about it, but it’s true, the ritual of celebrating Christ’s birth can feel so worn, so stagnant, so “I’ve heard this before”.

I’m not advocating that we need to be more excited about Christmas or should tattoo “Jesus is the Reason for the Season” on our lower backs. Rather, I’m championing a different tune: let us embrace the perpetuity of it all, let us love the ritual.

I think one of the great markers of wisdom and peace residing in a person is that their heart knows, accepts, and creatively engages the seemingly tedious and repetitive veins of this life. THAT, my friends, is incredibly counter-cultural, and it is something I believe to be deeply spiritual and truth. I was reading a Wendell Berry poem today as I sit in a posture where I’m getting ready to fling myself into another very different chapter of my life, where I was reminded of the beauty and goodness in things that feel like home, even when they appear as stagnant or too well-known.

Berry writes in “A Country Marriage”:

Sometimes our life reminds me
of a forest in which there is a graceful clearing
and in that opening a house,
an orchard and garden,
comfortable shades, and flowers
red and yellow in the sun, a pattern
made in the light for the light to return to.
The forest is mostly dark, its ways
to be made anew day after day, the dark
richer than the light and more blessed,
provided we stay brave
enough to keep on going in.

Oh, the beauty of life, and the richness of the repetitive, for in that which happens over and over and over – in that which we know and keep knowing – is a sweet example of faith and a love that stays.