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What I Heard This Morning in the City at 5:30am

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In typical Monday morning fashion, the trash guys toss a garbage bin too close to the car parked in front of our house. Apparently the car isn’t happy about it, and in our noisy culture we’ve even given our automobiles the ability to respond.

whoooooooop whoooooooop whoooooooop beep beep beep beep beep

I roll over and look at the clock. 5:30am. I push back the warm covers, cross the room, and close the window. The car alarm is immediately muffled, as if it is a few blocks away and not just under the sycamore tree. I listen to see if the noise has woken Leo, but he’s a city baby, born and raised on James Street (unlike me, unlike our other kids). He sleeps through it.

I walk downstairs and boil water for coffee, thinking this would be a good time to practice some silence, to sit in the quiet and center my mind for the day ahead. I sit in a dining room chair and close my eyes, repeating a section from the Book of Common Prayer in my mind:

Grant us, O Lord, not to mind earthly things, but to love things heavenly;

A few minutes later, I hear…what is that sound…is it water dripping? My mind is snapped back to earthly things (this isn’t really working). I stand up. I listen again. I follow it into the kitchen. My boiling water has flown the coop, overflowing its pot. Water drips on to the stove top, hissing and bubbling.

I make a cup of coffee and return to my chair. Close my eyes.

Grant us, O Lord, not to mind earthly things, but to love things heavenly;

Then the sudden crashing of a truck hitting a pothole on Prince Street; the exploding sound of construction workers dropping a skid load of cement blocks in the vacant lot behind our house; and when it’s a sound not quite so obvious, the rushing of water through the pipes.

Grant us, O Lord, not to mind earthly things, but to love things heavenly;

* * * * *

This business of finding silence, especially in our world, is a difficult one. Noise has infiltrated every space, has set up camp in our minds, and by now we don’t even recognize it. It lends a comforting numbness to our existence, an easy excuse to pretend the important things in the world don’t exist. Most importantly, the noise allows us to ignore the small voice speaking to us about the true state of our being.

This business of finding silence has never been more important. Without it, without the wisdom of that small voice, we respond from our own earthly perspectives of selfishness and hate. We are too easily influenced by the American dream or our particular strain of political leanings, and in that moment we miss the movement of the Kingdom. In the noisy moments, we bypass a response of love and instead respond out of fear…or anger…or frustration.

* * * * *

All of the most important conversations I’ve had with God, the most difficult revelations about myself, the most influential thoughts: these have had one thing in common. They’ve come in the silence.

In my own experience, I’ve found that if we do not make room for silence, God or our minds or our subconscious (blame whoever you want) will force it upon us. It’s a natural safety mechanism. It’s like the forests in Yellowstone, overgrown, trees too close together, a forest fire waiting to happen. One metaphorical lightning strike in your life, and you’ll find yourself in a bleak landscape, surveying the misty smoke and the silence, finally able to recognize the chaos you had once been living in.

Finally able to hear the small voice.

Grant us, O Lord, not to mind earthly things, but to love things heavenly.

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This is Why I’m Telling You This

APTOPIX Turkey Migrants

There is something I want to tell you
but it starts when we are far from home.
Stay with me.
Come along.
Don’t get lost.

Sometimes we drive back to our house late
at night, on long straight roads
from a friend’s place
after most people are sleeping.
We enter the city on Walnut, street
lights flashing on the windshield
a slow strobe revealing
hiding
revealing
our five children
asleep
eyes the shape of new moons
mouths agape, breathing in
the light that hits all of us
as if we are planets, spinning.

I try but cannot avoid all the potholes,
and the truck lurches. The kids’ heads
are on swivels,
fall to their opposite shoulder
they lick their lips and settle back
to sleep, mouths drifting open
again. Who knows where they are? What
universe their dreams have dragged
them to?

If we’re lucky there’s a parking spot
in front of the house beside the peeling
sycamore. But usually we must circle around,
park in an orbit
somewhere down Prince, across
from the minor league ballpark where we
sat in the sun just last month, roasting,
gulping down water,
soaking in the summer.

At that time of night,
when we return late from our friend’s house,
our truck is
light-years from home.

Or a few hundred yards. But this
(finally)
is why I’m telling you this.
Because we wake up the four oldest and
they grumble-stumble
down the cracked sidewalk
past the shadows, past the alleyways, around
the corner, towards home.

This is why I’m telling you this.

Because I
take 1-year-old Leo from his seat and his
arms hang limp, his legs sway like
pendulums
two separate clocks
keeping the time, counting the seconds
as they drip through the dark night. And
the movement of Leo’s legs reminds
me

of the little boy carried by the soldier,
his tiny legs swinging at the knees,
his waterlogged shoes
measuring the
seconds in drips, measuring
the time it takes to clear
the beach.

These are the longest moments
of all.

* * * * *

To find out how your church can help with the refugee crisis in Syria, please visit the website We Welcome Refugees.

Preemptive Love is a wonderful organization providing relief, education, and medical support to refugees throughout the region. Check out their work HERE.

Or find something else to do. We can all do something.

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In Which I Have Trouble Making Up My Mind

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I don’t normally share my newsletter posts over here, but I thought yesterday’s newsletter was one I wanted all of my blog readers to catch. (Also, why haven’t you subscribed to my newsletter yet? It’s so simple – you can do it HERE.)

When I left Facebook and Twitter six weeks ago, I wrote a farewell blog post. Maybe social media doesn’t play much of a role in your life, but for me it was a big deal – it felt like I was leaving some dear friends, and I wondered how in the world I would continue to expand my reach as an author without the tools of Facebook and Twitter.

But I also felt an immense sense of peace. Social media had grown into a time-consuming, distracting, noisy force in my life, and I needed a break. As I stepped away, it was with a strong sense that it would be a very long time before I returned. I certainly didn’t think that a mere six weeks later I’d be reconsidering my decision.

The primary force in getting me back into the social media circus is the fact that I recently signed with a literary agent. I reached out to various agents, through a few close writer friends, with the hope that an agent might help me take that next step in my career as a co-writer/ghostwriter, linking me up with more and higher profile jobs. As my agent and I spoke, she expressed her conviction that she could do that for me – but she also wondered if I had any book ideas of my own that she could try to sell to publishers. That sounded exciting.

As we wrapped up our conversation, she said something that left me with the realization that I had a decision to make.

“Okay,” she said, “Get working on your platform. Try to get your numbers back up.”

* * * * *

Social media silence can be a very healthy thing. It can give you the space you need to reevaluate how you’re interacting with the world. It can give you a quiet dwelling, the ability to actually hear and discern the driving voices in your head. But for some of us, either because of our careers or our personalities, social media can also be a huge tool, a wonderful way of staying in touch, or the thing that keeps us from becoming too isolated from the rest of the world.

Just as I was asking myself some tough questions (“Am I selling out by returning? But I miss my friends – wouldn’t it be nice to be back on Facebook and Twitter? How will I keep it from taking over my life again?), I read this, one of my favorite passages from Thomas Merton’s book New Seeds of Contemplation:

“But if you try to escape from this world merely by leaving the city and hiding yourself in solitude, you will only take the city with you into solitude; and yet you can be entirely out of the world while remaining in the midst of it, if you let God set you free from your own selfishness and if you live for love alone.”

You know, there is a way for all of us to find the silence we need, even in the midst of social media’s chaos, the 24-hour news cycle’s din, the bickering of politics. We can take part in these things and still experience a life-giving practice of silence, if we can step away from our selfishness, if we can set our sights on living a life of love.

So I guess this is the next challenge for me. Returning from my solitude, yet somehow keeping the wonderful peace I found. I hope you’ll keep traveling with me. I think we all still have a lot to learn when it comes to silence, solitude, and living the best life we can…even with Facebook’s little red numbers flashing on our screens.

BIG QUESTION: What are social media’s positive affects in your own life? How do you keep a balance between its noise and finding the silence we all need?

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A Peek Inside My Office (or, The Case of the Broken Prayer Beads)

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Go ahead, open the door to my study. The room is messy. My small desk is covered in books written by friends. There are more stacks of books on the floor. On the door hangs a framed saying that my friend Bryan Allain gave me. It’s a John Irving quote from one of my favorite books, A Prayer For Owen Meany:

“If you’re lucky enough to find a way of life you love, you have to find the courage to live it.”

Look to the left – there’s a seven foot high bookshelf. On one of the shelves is a small glass bowl, and in the bowl lies a mound of beads, a string, some decorative silver pieces. These are the remnants of the prayer beads I bought in Istanbul when I was writing the life story of a man named Stan Steward. He was dying of cancer, he became my friend, and he passed away about six months after I finished writing the book. Now he’s buried somewhere along the Euphrates River.

The thread snapped one day while I carried the beads in my pocket, and now they are there in that bowl, waiting for me to restring them. But it’s not time yet. I don’t know why not. For now, I look at them and sometimes I pick a few of them up and stare into their cloudy whiteness, and they remind me that I will not be here forever. They remind me that my friend Stan is gone. They remind me that there is more to life than the books I want to write, the audience I try to please, the platform I try to build.

* * * * *

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about things like perseverance, fear, and the power of time. I’ve examined my willingness to stick with something for the long haul. I wonder if my past failures (or non-successes) have affected my ability to start new things with passion and commitment. Maybe the last five things haven’t taken off the way I’ve wanted them to – does this mean I should lessen my hope, have “more realistic expectations”?

I’m not sure. These are all questions I mull over.

* * * * *

I was watching a show recently where two men tried to climb a mesa in Utah, one of those steep, rocky plateaus. They had to go sideways along the cliffs for a long, long time before they found a way to the top.

Are we willing to climb, not up, but sideways, for months, years, decades even? Are we willing to do the hard work, the regular everyday work, the one-foot-in-front-of-the-other work?

We need to spend more time celebrating the fact that we are HERE – wherever HERE is. Because we have all arrived HERE with great effort, along trails fraught with danger, the summit constantly in view but for most of us, for now, inaccessible. For once, let’s not worry about THERE. Let’s celebrate HERE.

And if you’ve found a way of life you love, for goodness sake, find the courage to live it.

What aspects of your life right now do you need courage in order to live?

I decided to walk away from my Facebook and Twitter accounts in June (you can read more about that HERE), at least for a time, so this little space of mine depends entirely on you to spread the word. If you read something you enjoy, please share it.

Also, if you’d like to receive my twice-monthly newsletter (basically a few bonus blog posts every month plus information on upcoming books) you can sign up for that HERE.

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The Long Lines Between Us

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Abra walks with me to work
her pink flip-flops flapping the sidewalk
all the way to the cafe,  where she
sits on the tall red chair
huddled behind a swimming pool
of hot chocolate, and cuts out
photos from her magazines
to go with the letters at the top
of the worksheet: M and N and O.

Across from her
in my own red chair
I work with words to help a family
tell the story of their daughter, how she
pulled her hair out by its roots
strand by strand
how she cut long lines in her pale arms
with a broken tape case
how she poured her old pills
into a mason jar
where it stratified, a rainbow
of sand art, documenting everything
that didn’t work.

Abra draws long lines on her
paper, a rainbow of colors
and somehow gets hot chocolate on
her forehead, a dark mark on her
pale skin. We laugh, and I wipe
it off, and we watch the traffic go by below us
on Prince Street. Then, as Abra sits across
from me reading The Moffats,

I spill the words, the story of this tired
young girl, twenty years ago, who wrote her last
journal entry, explained how she would not
make it through October
how the pain was world-heavy
how she planned on walking into the water.

She was a little girl, once.

Life with my Abra is August, and it is hot.
Nothing like that October when the girl
walked into the water, nothing like that.
October has smooth breezes and rainbow leaves.
August shadows are dim and uncertain,  like
underwater lines – October shadows are long and
sharp.

The cafe windows are clouded with dust. There
is no clear view of the sky.

Abra and I walk home along the lines of traffic,
past cars idling,
waiting for the light to turn,
waiting in the August heat. We walk Prince Street, and
I hold her hand the entire way.

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What’s Happening Every Moment

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“Every moment and every event of every man’s life on earth plants something in his soul.” Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation

Our small backyard garden, lost in the cement jungle of this city, shows all the signs of the end of the season. Withered beanstalks wait to be turned over, weeds pop up between the old rows, and vines of snap peas yellow, dust returning to dust. Even the tomatoes and the peppers are showing signs that summer will not, thank God, last forever.

It’s amazing to think that, somehow, the rich brown soil, once clear and holding seeds of promise, is now spent for another year. Winter will take it all back as we bury our compost in the dead earth. Spring will return it to us again, offer her gentle arms and wispy rains and then seedlings will, so improbably, unfurl into summer again, green and hot, the seasons always folding over each other like waves on the shoreline.

* * * * *

What seeds are being planted in my soul this very moment, at five in the morning on a Tuesday, with music playing quietly and five children sleeping in the rooms above my head? I can hear Maile’s footsteps, more seeds planted by this morning. Soon the sun will rise above the buildings lining James Street. What is being planted in me this moment? This moment? What about this moment?

What cosmic messages, what prophetic visions, what desires, what boredom, what dreams? What hope, what bitterness, what patience laid bare in the turned up furrows of my soul, folded over?

This moment? This one?

* * * * *

August came and went this year like a wave of heat rising off the pavement. Came and went. What are these days, these months, these years, if not vapor? What are these mornings, if not moments planting seeds in me? Quicker than the sunrise, 2016 will be here, a year I’ve not contemplated in my mind until this moment. 2016? How can it be that I live in some futuristic movie?

I look ahead less than I used to. Each day holds enough for my mind to consider. Each day with its moments. The years ahead are gossamer threads heavy with due. Heavy with moments.

Next year I turn 40. My grandmother turned 40 in 1973, three years before I was born. My father turned 40 the year I turned 20, the year before I met Maile.

These heavy stones drop in deep water with a resounding !thunk!, and the ripples go all the way, stirring the shallows.

* * * * *

What are these moments planting in your soul?