An unillustrated life.

My daughters were grown, their rooms were vacated, and the possibilities of developing a creative life again inspired me to consider how I might decorate one of the rooms to make a dedicated space for writing. Seeking inspiration for my newly acquired home office, I had scoured old boxes and files and crudely stapled and pinned evidence of my former life as a musician and songwriter on an entire wall of the room.

But I was still deep into my real life of teaching, and rather than encouragement, staring at that wall haunted me with a pressure to create I could not muster. I remember standing in front of that wall of memories and having a “Come to Jesus” moment with myself.

That life was my past.

Those memories were too raw for me. To move forward and not live in a constant state of discontent, I had to exorcise that former life from my heart. I stared at the images and letters on the wall one last time. Then, one by one, I slowly ripped every memory from that wall, shredding them as I did, leaving a blank wall dotted with the tiny remnants of push pin holes and staples.

And I said goodbye to my old life.

But somewhere in the back of my brain, I took comfort in knowing that there were keepers

of those shared memories living their lives in places throughout the country. Perhaps, they, like I, had moments in their mundane lives where they recalled those days of life filled with with creativity and laughter.

Perhaps they, like I, recalled days filled with the dark shadows of lives lived without common sense and boundaries, which often left a trail of human misery in its wake.

But you know how it is.

Mostly the memory of misery dilutes with time, and so, over the years, I had been sporadically trying to locate old band mates through social media, usually in moments of boredom or discontent with the daily grind of life. I wanted to reconnect to those memories…to find someone to relive the stories with.

Of all the musicians I had worked with, there was one whose image loomed large. He was inordinately talented and sadly addicted, a flaw that had kept him from true greatness. He was charismatic on stage, unless the alcohol took over. His passion ran deep for music, for drugs, for alcohol, and for just about any other vice.

But I loved that guy.

Over the years, Tim and I talked about how cool it would be for them to meet. My husband had heard some of his work on recordings and came to view him with the same admiration I did. I envisioned our getting together, playing music, and getting caught up on decades of lives apart.

My research was sporadic over the years as work consumed all my energy. But one Saturday in my fifties, I decided to actively pursue finding him so Tim and I could plan a reunion trip. The rabbit trail I followed was time consuming, hitting dead end after dead end until I saw one article with his name in the headline.

The headline, dated three years prior, announced to the world that he had died at 58.

My heart exploded. A chasm opened up and into it dropped all the corroborating evidence of that old life, the life that floated in a sea of possibilities and the life lived outside the lines. Gone was the corroboration of nights of music in biker bars and drinking vats of cigarette flavored coffee at the local IHOP while the sun rose over the plains of Colorado. Gone was the corroboration of long drives with a car crammed full of sleepy musicians and instruments, just me and the moon awake and a trucker's radio station blaring to cover the sound of their snores.

Gone the corroboration that there was a time when the music was all that mattered and being broke for the love of the muse was a badge of honor.

It's a bit like going to your high school reunion and finding out you are the last one standing. With whom do you swap tales of memorable moments? With whom will you muse, "remember when” and then share the tears and laughter such reminiscing brings? With whom will you imagine that you still have what it takes to do that again?

At the time, I wished I could go back and piece together those torn photographs and memorabilia ripped from the walls of my home office. The pictures told the tale of a life lived passionately and, sometimes, recklessly in the pursuit of creativity.

But, as Thomas Wolfe stated, you can’t go home again. That was a home that lived its purpose. And my life now is lived not in the memories of what was, but in moments of what is…

A quieter creativity floods my life now, free of the tyranny of schedules and unembumbered by the weight of bad decisions. It is soaked in a desert landscape that fills my life with inescapable beauty and inspiration.

And for that, I need no pictures on the walls.

The addiction of adventure.

My friend is 82. She’s travelled the world already. For her, a rich internal life characterized

by a deep curiosity is adventure enough. It made me wonder when she started

to recognize her own contentment with smaller things. Nadia Boltz Weber

Adventuring has been an avoidance strategy I have used my whole life. Perhaps it was born with me in my life as a military brat…the moves, the having to get comfortable with being unsettled, the never knowing when the school would change or new friends would have to be made.

Friends I made along the way shared rich memories of mom at home, pre-school, church… all American things. In my youngest memories swirled the smell of tatami mats and sliding rice paper walls, art deco fish flags and dancing dragons whose movements were punctuated by Taiko drums. My friends had memories of trikes and car rides. My three year old brain stored memories of the U.S.S. Gaffey and the deck chairs as we crossed the Pacific from Japan to San Francisco, in calm and in storm.

Other kids’ moms cooked and cleaned and welcomed them home from school. Mine started her own business and set us out into the world unsupervised. Other families had friends for dinner, or for cards or for barbecues in the backyard. In eighteen years in our family home, we never had a visitor, except for the day my dad was killed by a drunk driver and the lady next door brought over a foul smelling casserole to comfort us in our grief. It was literally the first time we had exchanged words.

That is not to say mom was not social. While my dad did his soldier thing and then went off to run a theatre at night, she reveled in collecting characters at work, eventually making them part of “our work life”. I say our, because she made child labor a major part of her children’s existence when we were old enough to help.

While our friends played games with neighborhood kids, my younger brother and I would be collating some mimeograph job having contests to see who could do it faster. And there were stuffing envelopes contests and licking envelopes contests, being careful to not have the sharp thin edge cut into our tongues.

The adults in our lives were introduced to us at her place of work and most had recently stepped off the greyhound bus from a station across the street, a street once walked by John Steinbeck in our shared home town.

There was the older man named John, who was a Watcher from Mars, here only to observe those of us on Planet Earth. His stories about outer space were shared as I stood carefully watching the mimeograph barrel circle rhythmically, hoping for no jams.

And there was Erickson, the escapee from a mental institution who lived with Lilly the bird lady in a Miss Haversham style home. The curtains were always drawn against the light and her parakeets fluttered in the dusty light from curtain rod to curtain rod. In a short amount of exposure, I came to learn he saw dead people and had conversations with spirits no one could see. He haunts me still.

It seemed for most of my life I was trapped in situations that wrapped me in a state of dis-ease and from which I could not escape, only disappear. Except for family adventures in nature. On those occasions, I could escape because the first thing my parents would do once we arrived was disappear, leaving four children to be free of any expectations. Only then did my life seem safe.

I couldn’t run from my life then. But set free as an adult I could, and I did. Whenever some growth opportunity reared its painful head. Whenever I felt like I couldn’t breathe. Whenever I felt my life on the edge of conflict, I moved. I called it adventure.

And thus, adventure became a distraction. From the reality of my circumstance.

But these days, the siren’s call lands on ears damaged by time. The lure of dotted white lines has disappeared in the rear view mirror. Everything I ever have wanted to see, I think I have seen. Everything I wanted to do, I have done. And as the landscape of my heart has undergone exploration and renovation, I have grown weary of my addiction.

And so, I begin a new journey…to stay rooted in one place…

to find contentment in the small things

Because it is in the small things that hope lives... the sun in the morning appearing with its Ta Dah rays over the Santa Rita mountains….a drop of dew clinging delicately on a tiny flower in a jungle of cactus…a sunflower with its face turned towards the morning reflected in a small lake.

Here, in this desert place, I find adventure in turning over stones as prehistoric creatures with frantic legs flee from the light. I move agave plants from one location to another one I have deemed more suitable. But I take great care to keep the siblings together, as I feel they have become accustomed to one another’s sharp embrace, and I cannot bear to separate them. I move gravel from one place to another and back again reveling in the sound of its sharp stone edges hitting the the metal blade of the shovel.

So, like Nadia’s 82 year old friend, I am making friends with small moments.

Around me, war swirls across the globe, and here, in our own borderlands, the dance of hope and the finality of death weave in and out of the dry, sharp landscape of the desert. Sirens scream in the night, and though I hunger for a sense of peace, it eludes me in the onslaught of cruelty that pervades our human landscape.

I feel helpless. I have no where to turn.

And so, in my inadequacy and the paralysis of my heart, I turn to these stones, these pebbles, these plants. I dig in the dirt in the morning heat, and I stand under the night sky and soak in the stars. I cry out to God in the darkness and beg for release of the suffering of this world. For healing. For peace.

And then in the morning light, like Sisyphus of ancient lore, I begin again, finding small things to love and to move again, from one place to another.

In the face of such tragedy bombarding our hearts in the world today, one might find this work of little value or consolation.

But like Camus, I believe that in this never ending task I am learning that “the struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man's heart…and… imagine Sisyphus happy…”

And in these small moments, so it is with me.

Not my story to tell

When a car runs a red light or a stop sign and crashes into the side of an unsuspecting driver, the term often used to describe the event is “t-boned”. After such an event, the victim is often left not just with physical trauma, but mental and emotional as well. The world becomes an unsafe place and danger can seem to be lurking in every shadow.

In our family, we used the term universally, especially when it came to relational and emotional areas. When a distant family member’s response to another’s vulnerability and honesty was unexpected and cruel, we would say, “That was a t-bone.” When a social issue came up where we assumed everyone was on the same page and something cruel and expected came out of somebody’s mouth instead, that was a “t-bone”. If instead of expected love, we received intentional harm, it was a t-bone.

And lately, I feel like a walking car crash.

It is not because people are cruel, though they can be. It is not because anything is going on in my social relationships, though sometimes there can be. No, it is because, though I should expect no different, our culture has been crashing into my recent new vehicle, and I am always unprepared.

This new car is different from my old one. My old car was safe and unnoticeable. I drove around in it and had conversations with myself about the state of the world, and then I drove to the mountains or to the vast sea and walked and talked with God and everything was good,because my world revolved around the thoughts in my head and my perceived notions about the world and its occupants.

But this new vehicle was built on confronting reality and not safety and escape. This new vehicle has four wheel drive, with the top down in the heat and the wind and the dust. Its views of the desert are not of sunrises and sunsets over a manicured path, but of rocky ravines and desiccated river beds.

This new vehicle does not just read headlines and plaster bandaids and frolick off into an interior life of peace and security in solitude on well marked roads.

My old car touted the value of social justice. But it only received dings in the parking lot. Here, every time I get into the new vehicle, the side of it gets destroyed.

I cannot drive down a road without encountering a cross where hope died crossing the desert, often steps away from civilization…more often in remote places, unforgiving places…inhumane places to die. I cannot unsee the images that surround us here in the borderlands. Nor can I unhear the despicable responses to the sufferings of others.

T-boned. Every day.

As hard as this is, I have lived here less than two years. Others have been driving their battered vehicles through these deserts for decades, tending to the lost, the thirsty, and the bruised and never giving up hope for a more just world until it becomes one.

I had breakfast with a road warrior like that. Decades of driving through these desert roads, tending to the broken hearted, building bridges where others build walls. I felt the warmth of her spirit and sang baby shark to her granddaughter. She shared her vision for the work she does for a more just world. She promised to send a public documentary video of her life story.

I would never want anyone to be experience being t-boned in reality, but today, I am inviting you to be t-boned in your spirit and watch the short documentary at the end of this post. Hear the story, her story, and let it wash over you into any dry places you might have when it comes to issues around the border and immigrants.

Hear the story of someone who lived the headlines, and now, even knowing the dangers, has been cruising through the intersections anyway, because being on the road matters. No matter the cost.

It is her story to tell. I could never do it justice.