Señora

She lives alone.
She's got her t.v. and her telephone.
Young ones come here but they always go home.
This place is just a place to stay.
I saw a man
holding her look-a-like by the hand.
Fifteen years past, perhaps I'd understand
this place is just a place to stay.

clips from our trip

Here's some footage from the trip that Bryna, Alaina, and I took to Rome. Yup, we got blessed by the Pope.

…and still I hold the pestle.

You tell me "rest" and wrestle
with me for the pestle
my hands are tightly gripping
knowing time is slipping
where I cannot ever find it,
put it in the mortar, grind it,
milk that time for all it's worth,
before with tears it's spilt to earth.

You let me cry and dry
the tears beneath my eyes.
My sight is slowly finding
love so bright it's blinding.
I can't see time that's been wasted.
It's all been worth what I have tasted:
milk and honey spoken sweet,
resting, grounded, at your feet.

Inspired by this cuadro by Velázquez, "Cristo en casa de Marta y María."

Trevélez

This was Palm Sunday weekend.

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Rebecca and Rachel ride rollercoasters in the rain.

We were walking home in the rain together, talking. I noticed that if I angled my umbrella just right (concave towards the building and a little in front of me) it would echo my words back to me. Sweet.

The sky kept speaking rain to the earth and we kept talking. Something I said hit Rachel just right (in the poetic part that loves creation and relationships) and she echoed the feeling back to me. Sweet.

The blissful moment of being together and knowing just exactly what each other felt left us plunging into the abyss of knowing that this is just a semester. "I can't leave!" we agreed. Words could not express the agony of this impermanence, so we followed the example of the Spirit– we groaned. Audibly, pathetically, we interceeded each other's pain.

It was good to know that someone felt just as horrible as I did. It wasn't spite, it was a connection. Friends laugh together. Good friends cry together. Really good friends laugh and cry at the same time together. They ride together in the front car of the roller coaster with their hands in the air and when they turn a sudden corner, they don't mind slamming into each other, because it's a connection.

I'm digging in my heels, knowing that God's about to lead me to another place where I'm going to make a whole bunch of friends that I'll just have to say goodbye to. I've waited in line for this rollercoaster too long to not enjoy it. And I know I will. But if you´re going to sit in the front car of this roller coaster next to me, get ready to get slammed into just a few times. Because I know I can't hang on, but I'm still looking for connections.

Rome pictures for you!

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Rome. And this isn't even the half of it.

a week in review:

Friday morning: take the bus to the ruins of a Roman city a few miles from my house.

Friday afternoon: lay talking to my friend Rachel under a palm tree for hours.

Friday night: "sleep" on a bus.

Saturday morning: miss an international flight.

Saturday afternoon: get to Rome anyway.

Saturday night: receive an email with the subject "Give the Pope a high five for me!"

Sunday morning: see the Pope. I gave him an air high five.

Sunday night: taste my first vodka. Quite likely my last.

Monday morning: read Romans in Rome while waiting in line to see the Sistine Chapel.

Monday night: find out that my family is moving to Ft. Collins after twenty years on Borchers Rd.

Tuesday afternoon: realize a half-a-life-long dream to visit a catacomb.

Tuesday night: attend a concert of opera in a beautiful gothic church and realize that the locals can actually understand the words.

Wednesday: lay on a black sand beach by the Mediterranean.

Thursday: eat tortillas, fish paté, and tomato sauce while sitting outside the Madrid bus station in the pouring rain.

Thursday night: email my family while sitting along a street in Sevilla and being passed by tipsy people in flamenco dresses.

Friday morning: type up my seven thousand word journal that I kept throughout the week just to keep me sane.

that's how

scrawled in a notebook on April 7

I slept better than I'd thought humanly possible in a hostel room with ten other people and just a blanket on top of me. The secret to sleeping well is being tired. The secret to being tired is to live life like we do– going crazy with the dream of knowing, maybe, someday, enough small bits to make up the big picture. Yearning, we are burning two-ended just to get closer and closer to wholeness. One flame. The tryer I hard… let's try that again: The harder I try to become whole, the more I feel like I'm falling apart. But the smaller pieces I am in, the easier it is for me to be scooped up and given as a blessing to others, pressed down, shaken together and running over. Because that's how I've been blessed.

eighty extra euros

After we missed our flight to Rome (the things we teach ourselves the hard way after "getting a night of sleep" in a bus) I was asking God just how much it cost to get from one place to another:

God, how much does it cost to get from one place to another?

"More or less my child. More than you thought it would, but less than the value of my thoughts about you. I love you, and I paid for you to fly direct from hell to heaven. I will pay for Alaina's training to become my messenger. Don't let her worry, I won't let her fail at the task I have given her. I bought the smile on Bryna's face. I will carry your family to their new home. And I will carry your heart through its mountainous journey until you yourself have a place to call home.

"None of this is what you expected. None of it will be as you plan. That is because you asked me to make this less about you and more about me. And I answer prayer.

"I will give you less and less of what you expect. You think your life is crazy now? You haven't seen crazy yet. The only place your going to settle anytime soon is in my heart. Isn't it funny how some gentle shaking has a settling power? I will never shake you to hard.

"Borchers Road will not disappear. This summer will not return you broken. I will carry you from Sevilla to Sol Duc in the palm of my hand. I will watch over your coming and going both now and forever more."

Coming and going. God, how much does it cost to get from one place to another?

"More than you ever dreamed, but less than I am willing to pay. For you, my child."

I'll get back to you about Rome.

I'm not quite ready to publish anything on Rome yet. It was a wonderful eventful trip, full of gravity. Here's some that I wrote about a night at Feria, the local fair that is the biggest and craziest in Spain:

The sound of dancing heels on marble floors is loud at four in the morning. My feet are tired, in peculiar areas I've never felt before, but I'm just glad my knee doesn't hurt. I was worried because I had bruised it earlier, tripping over a curb. Usually when I trip, I can keep myself from falling, but this time I could hardly break the fall. I was up again in a second, but not before some guapo Spanish man could take me by the elbow and ask me if I was okay. It reminded me of the time when I fell completely down the steps in Matalascañas. Then they came running to my rescue from their seats at the bar.

After supper (Spain's frozen food section utterly fails at spring rolls), we dressed ourselves to go out. Alaina makes it in an authentic flamenco dress. I mock it in a long flowy skirt, an embroidered shawl, and silk flowers above my tight bun.

I met up with my friends at eleven at the information booth. It was still so early, but I was already tired. I wondered why, and then I figured it out. Nevertheless, I had to be the responsible one in the group. Gretchen was excited about the one euro tinto de verano, Melanie has no inhibitions to begin with, and Rachel was running on the sleep she had gotten on the airport floor.

Melanie wanted to dance, so she asked some guys if they wanted to dance with her. They didn't, and she wondered how anyone could turn down such an invitation. But at the next public caseta, I was videoing a couple couples who were dancing in the back half, and they noticed our interest. So that's how we ended up dancing with some half drunk Spanish guy and his wife.

Gretchen wanted another tinto de verano, so we went back to that caseta. While she was pushing her way to the counter, I suddenly became Melanie's coat rack. When Gretchen returned, balancing our mixed drinks, she asked me where Melanie was. I pointed to the center of a crowd of dancing jóvenes. There was Melanie, feeling the rhythm, moving her hips, shaking her tooshy. Her arms curved gracefully up and down as if bringing an apple from the branch to her mouth to the wind at her back. She caught everyone's eye, and we knew we would have to keep an eye on her.

Soon enough, we had been invited to a private caseta. It took a little patience to actually get in, but once inside, we saw dancing worth waiting for. "How did they learn how to do that? How do they both know what to do next?" Gretchen asked. This dancing wasn't choreographed (so little is) which meant that the couple had to be communicating. Francisco, who had invited us, chatted with his friends at the bar while we rumboed in the front half, speaking in Spanish to prove our legitimacy.

"Why didn't Francisco dance with me?" Melanie mused as we later meandered through the midway. At 3:30 in the morning, I have no perfect words to say. But our God never sleeps, never slumbers, and he told Melanie that she is His princess, and that she doesn't need to look for her prince in crowds of lightly intoxicated Spaniards. Through my amazed mouth, God told Melanie that, just like her lack of inhibition did wonders for our feria experience tonight, God can use her to work his wonders in this drunken world.

I decided to be the man in the group and walk my girl friends home. After kissing Gretchen goodbye, I had time to just walk and think. That's when I realized how much my feet hurt and how much God had spoken to me and through me. Sometimes he speaks as loud as dancing heels on marble floors.

whilst sitting in the airport

I'm going to Rome–
farther from home–
but where is my home anyway?
Is home where I live,
or home what I give,
when I offer a safe place to stay?
It could be an ear
that I offer to hear
the wandering train of a thought
of a wandering soul,
who like me is made whole
by seeing, themselves, they are not.
It could be a hand
when too tired to stand
or an arm when too tired to walk.
It could be my eyes
to see through the lies,
clear the sand, build a home on the rock.

The tentmaker went.
His last months he spent
in the city where I will soon fly.
In a house, under lock,
he was stuck in one spot.
But he knew he'd go home when he died.
The tentmaker stayed.
He wrote and he prayed,
living and giving a place
to stay and be blessed
by God's full peace and rest
and to go with the strength of His grace.

Easter Sunday: from low to high at sea level

9:30. The alarm rings on a Sunday morning. I hit snooze, but soon enough we are up and eating pine nut cheesecake. Mmm.

10:45 ish. We check the schedule on the Catholic church's door. We have a little over an hour until the Easter mass. We decide to go take pictures on the beach.

11:55. Back at the church, but there is no one there. Just one man dinking around on the other side of the flowers. We make a loop around the church to see if there is another door open, There isn't.

12:01. A man comes across the street and asks us something. I tell him, yes, we'd like to attend an Easter service. He tells us to wait there and he'll unlock the door.

12:20. Still sitting in the second to the front row, looking at the life-size bleeding Jesus on the cross, watching the two sacerdotes throw together an order of worship and get a tiny amount of sacrements ready. The three other non-locals who were waiting for something to happen have already left. We want to leave too. If the service ever starts, we are just going to make fools of ourselves by not knowing how to cross ourselves correctly. We laugh off the awkwardness in a whisper.

12:25. The sacerdotes are in the room off to the side singing/chanting. Then they walk out to the courtyard. That's the last straw. We get our things and go. They say "buenas" as we walk out.

There was no more nervous laughing as we walked down the street, quickly so as to shake off the silence and uneasiness. I was mad. There had been seven Christians in that church for a few minutes that Easter morning, but there had been no gathering in the name of the resurrected Savior. Jesus was alive again and all we did was stare at a statue of his bloody body.

I missed my protestant church. At that moment, the congregation of Iglesia Prosperidad was overflowing and God's word was being spoken with passion and conviction. At that moment, my parents were getting out of bed to go and attend the Easter sunrise service followed by a breakfast potluck. All over the world people were singing, "Christ the Lord is risen today," and "Up from the grave he arose!"

It made me mad that no one, hardly even the sacerdotes, seemed to care that Jesus had really brought himself to liberating life again after being very violently dead for three days. Maybe they didn't know. How deeply do I know this myself?

We went to the beach, ran in the water, screamed at it's coldness, laughed and splashed, collected shells, then settled into the cliffside to warm in the sun. Alissa brought out her iPod and we celebrated the rising of the Son of God as the sun slowly set over a rising tide. At the top of our lungs, we sang Keith Green's "Easter Song." I hope that we didn't bother the girls who were tanning topless twenty feet away.

Palm Sunday: from low to high at 13,000 something

We weren't even to the trailhead and I could tell that something was going to have to change. It wasn't just that my camera was too big to wear at my waist or that my shoes weren't tied tight enough. It was that I was struggling to keep up with my friends, Rachel, Steven, and John. They just walked so fast. I felt the weight of my camelbak and sipped water, hoping that carrying the water inside of me rather than on my back would make me feel lighter. Each time that the group stopped to rest and take pictures, I had just enough time to catch up, and we were off again.

Stephen decided to walk behind me so that I wouldn't be walking alone. That was really a good feeling, except that now the group was divided into two. "I'm sorry guys, I just can't walk any faster." I panted. "Unless we all slow down, we're going to have to walk in two groups the whole way." My friends let me set the pace. It was a pretty slow pace.

The mountain didn't get any easier. Besides the vision of my fading leather shoes clumping one in front of the other, I don't really remember much of the ascent to Siete Lagunas, our main landmark on the way up. We stopped there to eat oranges. I felt that nauseous feeling that you get when you are trying so hard to hold still while threading a needle that you forget to breath. I sat down with my head in my knees and dreaded the moment when I would have to stand up. I made myself drink. I was realizing how dehydrated I was.

The dreaded moment came, and we started the next stretch of the hike. The other part had been "easy" and this part was going to be hard. Added elevation, added wind, added snowfields and a dramatic decrease in temperature. The wind pounded at the scarf I had wrapped around my head and I longed to scream back at it. I might have if I had had the energy.

I was getting behind again, but my friends never let me walk alone. The peak, the highest point in Spain, Mulhacén, was in site now, but it was so far away. I told Stephen I wasn't sure if I could make it. The next time we caught up with Rachel, I asked, "How are we doing on time? Because I can't go any faster and if I'm not going to make it to the top at this speed, I need to find a rock to hide in while you guys make the ascent."

Rachel looked at me seriously and said six words. "I think you can make it."

And I did. Once Rachel said I could make it, I decided to quit thinking about not making it. I didn't even stop. I walked so slow I didn't have to. We made it to the top of Spain together. We sat in the 100 km wind at the top of Spain, 1.45 miles higher than where we had woke up that morning, under the bright blue sky. We felt triumphant as we read about the triumphal entry of Jesus Christ into Jerusalem.

Hosanna! It means, 'oh save!' and that's what God does.