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Coming out of Lancaster city, I keep making the same wrong turn on to the back roads that lead to our old house. You would think that after being away for four months, these ruts of routine would have been worn away. Big adventures, like big rains, can have a huge amount of eroding power. Yet the outdated pathways in my brain that lead to our old home prevail, and I find myself making a lot of u-turns or simply driving out around on roads that seem to have nothing in common with my actual destination.

* * * * *

In her less lucid moments, Grandma asks about our cows. Or talks about the wonderful dinner she had in Virginia earlier that day. Her mind circles around to the past quite a bit, like someone trying to get home but making wrong turns. She did not remember me on Monday evening when my dad and I went over to visit her.

“Kyle,” she kept saying slowly, referring to my cousin, and all the while her distant eyes looked deep into mine.

I leaned in close to her and noticed that she smelled good, like some kind of hand cream, and her skin was soft. I kissed her cheek and held her face in my hands, something which for some reason made me feel very happy. I smiled.

“Grandma, I’m Shawn. Shaaaawn. Not Kyle.”

“Oh……my……yes……Shawn.”

“Yes, Shawn,” I said. “I’m much more handsome than Kyle.”

She paused, looked at me, and for an instant she was there. Present. The flash of a clear signal on a station otherwise clouded by static.

She smiled.

“Shawn,” she said slowly, and I could tell she was disappointed with herself for forgetting.

* * * * *

I pulled into the country church parking lot. To my right, the old hide-and-seek graveyard. Behind me, the woods that led down to the creek. In front of us, the farmhouse where I grew up.

“There it is, Cade. That’s where I grew up.”

He always asks me to take him there. I had finally made the time.

“We use to tear around that house,” I said, smiling. “We used to climb those apple trees.”

I find my mind circling around to those days a lot. I find myself seeking out the old, familiar paths.

* * * * *

I sat quietly with Grandma holding her hand. Even though I desperately love them, sometimes spoken words are meaningless, especially in such uncharted territory. I feel her knuckles. Her tender skin. Her fingers, sometimes still, sometimes searching for perhaps the border of a quilt, or the eye of a needle, or the hand of my grandfather. Who knows what.

And because in that moment our words felt meaningless, like back roads no longer needed, we sat in a beautiful stillness, an endearing peace around us. It was there in that nursing home that I wondered if perhaps it wasn’t by driving that I would get out of the circular rut I was in. Neither movement nor action nor words could deliver me.

I was trying to achieve with “doing” what only silence and waiting could accomplish. So I sit. I wait. And new, previously uncharted ways begin to form in the persistence of these small drops.

Four months on the road.

Four months of showering in an RV.

Four months of emptying the waste tank every few days.

Four  months of waking up in campgrounds or Walmart parking lots or curbside to a friend’s house.

Four months.

And then, on a warm weekend in June, the adventure ended. We unpacked and vacuumed and polished and swept and scrubbed. My dad power-washed the outside of the bus, and we unhooked our van, and we returned the bus to its owner.

What do you do after four months of a life-changing adventure?

You can find the rest of today’s post over at Joyce Glass’s blog, “Grow, Pray, Serve.”

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If this is your first time here, check out the posts I wrote about our recent four-month road trip. Or my E-book (Building a Life Out of Words) about how I lost a lot of stuff, chased my dream to become a full-time writer, and gained a lot of stuff way more important than the stuff I lost.

You can also follow along on Twitter or over at my Facebook writer’s page.

So it’s been a strange week. Getting home from a four-month road trip. Moving into my parents’ basement. Cleaning up Willie and putting him back into storage. Seeing so many friends who we hadn’t seen for what felt like years. Visiting my grandma. Hugging my bald aunt.

At many points during the week, my brain simply could not compute the the continuous accumulation of stimuli. It was like walking down a long, dark hallway, then opening a door to a room with loud music, flashing lights, strange smells, and dancing clowns. I just wanted to stand there in the doorway, my head cocked to the side, eyes squinting.

What is this place?

* * * * *

In some ways it feels like we’re starting over. 32 months ago we left a close community in Northern Virginia to pursue my dream of becoming a writer. During the first two years, I had picked up some momentum, found new leads, began new projects. We made headway. But after four months on the road, many of my leads have grown cold. I’m left wondering where to begin. All of my current projects are ending.

So it was during this strangest of weeks, feeling like we were at the beginning again, wondering how to move forward, that I kind-of-sort-of panicked. The voices started up again. You know. Those voices.

You’ll never get another writing project again.

Your writing life has peaked – it’s all downhill from here.

You’d better get a job while you can. Anything.

You’re going to end up on the street.

You can only pursue a dream so long before the wheels fall off and you have to give up.

They are always very convincing and nasally. And matter-of-fact. And for some odd reason they have British accents.

So on Wednesday night, I called a friend about getting a job. On Thursday I was told I could have the job if I wanted it – the pay wasn’t great, but it would be regular income. I said I’d call back on Friday morning.

When I went to bed on Thursday night, I had no idea what to do. When I woke up on Friday morning, what began as a vague feeling turned into a determination: I would not give up this easily. It was too soon. I needed to stay the course of writing for a living for a little longer, and if I took this 40-hours-per-week job, my writing would be pushed to the back of the line for a long time.

Most of all, I remembered how difficult it was to go from a complex life to a simple life. To go from a regular income to a sporadic one. I do not want to go there unless I absolutely have to, because the road back to this place is way more intimidating than continuing on the road I’m currently walking.

Does that make any sense?

So I passed on the job. I might be crazy. But I feel like there’s something good coming just around the corner. Which reminds me of some of my own crazy advice:

You will want to give up. Don’t.

Have you wanted to give up on anything recently? What kept you going?

(Photo used with permission)

Those were the days when I ran down the stone driveway, past the barn where they kept the younger cows, and past the apple tree out of which my neighbor friend had fallen that summer like a piece of over ripe fruit. His mother had broken off an aloe leaf and rubbed the sappy goo inside of it on to his back while I had stared in wonder at such strange medicine.

A red brick church sat peacefully across the road, its steeple staring down at me with stern eyes. Its parking lot was a mother lode of monkey’s gold, and the door was always locked.

I slowed in the church’s parking lot, staring out over the graveyard where we sometimes played hide and seek when the nights were warm and the fireflies drifted like neon-yellow sparks through the humidity. But on those kinds of hot days, the only thing that moved was the air, shimmering and oppressive and hypnotic.

Then into the shade behind the church. I slipped down the dirt bank to where the creek curved up against the trees. Those were the days of innocence for me – I knew so little about how the world worked, so little about the atrocities or the injustices. The muddy water drifted by.

Sometimes my dad walked down there with me carrying a shovel and two fishing rods. In the shade that washed up next to the creek, he dug the shovel into the wet dirt and the ground made a sucking noise as he flipped it over. The squiggling ends of worms frantically waved like flags of surrender. I plucked one of them and methodically pierced it with the hook, then cast it into the water. The bobber floated like hope.

We waited.

* * * * *

This weekend my own kids will draw pictures for me and give me boxes of candy (usually not my favorites, but the candy they most associate with me, which for some strange reason is the Atomic Fireball). I will hop into the pool with them and chase them around the outside of it the way my dad used to chase me. Or I’ll threaten to throw them in while they’re still in their church clothes, and all of it is learned bahavior.

Then on Monday night I’ll mow my father’s lawn, and I’ll think how strange it is that I enjoy it, especially after all of those years when his command to “Go mow the yard” brought so much angst into my soul. I’ll mow the lines straight, not because he is nagging me to, but because after all of these years I appreciate a lawn with straight lines. I’ll use the catcher, not because he tells me to, but because after all of these years I appreciate a freshly mowed lawn free of grass clippings.

These are the things that rise through the murky water of my mind, three days before Father’s Day.

 

Our entire family is in a strange adjustment period. Cade and Lucy aren’t sure what we mean when we talk about home. Sammy cried on our first night back because he wanted to sleep in the bus. Only Abra seems to bounce around the house as if nothing new is going on.

While there are many fun and adventurous things about living in a big blue bus, here are seven that I don’t miss:

1) Emptying the waste tank every few days. I’m not going to go into detail on this one, but let me say this: it’s rather amazing how much waste a family of six produces.

2) Going to the bathroom anywhere but in the bus. Due to #1, we tried to use other restrooms as much as possible. Restaurants, Walmarts, the bathrooms in the campground that were half a mile away. It’s amazing how far you will walk to use a restroom when you’re the one responsible for emptying the stuff.

3) Worrying about the bus. After getting stuck in a ditch, I felt like I had an ulcer. After losing the brakes, I thought I was having heart palpitations for weeks. It was all I could do not to break out into song the moment I handed the bus keys back to my uncle.

4) Showering in the tiny shower. Get wet. Turn off the water. Lather up. Turn on the water. Rinse. Turn off the water. And all of that done in a rather tiny space. Yeah, I’m enjoying normal showers quite a bit.

5) The occasional feeling of isolation. We went on a long stretch from Pasadena to Mount Rushmore without seeing anyone we knew, and even I, the ultimate introvert, started to crave the sight of another familiar face.

6) The smell of a dirty diaper in such a confined space. Enough said.

7) One on one time with my wife – you can take that however you’d like (the kids were ALWAYS around!).

If you went on a trip, what do you think you would enjoy the most? What would you miss the most about normal life?

Madness does not come by breaking out, but by giving in; by settling down in some dirty, little, self-repeating circle of ideas; by being tamed.

– GK Chesterton, Manalive 

There is something about seeing animals in a zoo that saddens me. I know they are, for the most part, treated well. I know that many of the animals in our zoos today are there because there were found injured or orphaned. But walking on that paved path, seeing them lying lazily under fake stones with huge balls to play with while people gawk or laugh or take photos, is such a desperate sight.

Then our big blue bus pulled through Yellowstone.

* * * * *

For the five days we were there, all we wanted to see was a bear in the wild. Preferably a grizzly. Preferably with cubs. And preferably at a safe distance. There’s nothing like a mauling to ruin an otherwise good vacation.

We saw huge, lumbering bison wandering through fertile fields. We saw lone coyotes scamper along the edge of the forest. We saw majestic elk running in herds. But we couldn’t find any bear.

Then, on day three, I decided to drive out to check my email. We had no internet or cell phone access at the campground, and it was about thirty minutes to a high point where I could get online. Maile and the kids decided to stay behind, and I took off in the minivan. You see what’s coming right?

Along a particularly beautiful stretch, cars lined the road – this usually means there’s something cool to see, so I slowed down and parked along the edge. Then I saw them: a grizzly bear and two cubs galloped down a nearby hill, towards the road. Everyone outside of their cars suddenly scrambled for cover as the bears sprinted across the road, between the single-file line of parked cars, through the adjoining meadow, and into the river. All three of them swam through the icy water, their heads bobbing along.

They were wild and untamed and unpredictable. There was something hugely appealing to this thought, that they lived life on their own terms, without protection from mother nature or other animals. They foraged for their own food. They bred and bore cubs and hibernated, and the life they lived was their own.

They were assured of little, but they were also imprisoned by no one.

* * * * *

Do not settle down. Do not allow yourself to be led into some “dirty, little, self-repeating circle of ideas.” Do not allow yourself to be tamed by your parents or your peers or your pastor. They mean well. They want things for you, things they think are good, things like safety and comfort and predictability.

Free yourself. Live the wild adventure that God has prepared for you. Run through the fields. Swim the icy river. Be who you were created to be – it’s the only way to stay sane in a world gone mad.