Growing Wild Tambourines

we’re a foot and a half of snow sleeping on the driveway.  we’re a box of tinsel and dry lights, celebrated with egg nog and stuffy memories.  we’re unfathomable stretches of land from the oasis, countless staggering crests from the harbor.  though we don’t know it, we’re traveling.  there’s always a suitcase in the closet loosely entertaining clothes.  we’re accustomed to standing on peaks and comparing our distance with how many slopes we’ve conquered.  but now i’m at the roots of a tree in this deep-seated valley and all I can see is up and out.  And each ascent and collapse into the next canyon provides a new bowl of possibility. 

this is an abstract for happiness, for our unseasoned developments, our surprising breadth.  the new year isn’t even here yet and I feel a sweeping satisfaction of place and well-being.

Remember when spinning in circles, repeatedly, without concern for caution, was how we got by?  Now we have radiohead and driving down dark foreign roads to help clear our heads, numb our anxieties, completely lose track of thoughts, feelings, desires.

These are big steps for a child, reaching, grasping for film worlds and strange stars.  The cardboard box tunnels are too narrow; I try to sleep in them, but my knees rub against the sides and my ribs can feel the carpet between the flaps.  I go to take a stranger’s hand to lead me out, but it’s me, both pulling and climbing.

Remember when spinning in circles, repeatedly, without concern for caution, was how we got by?

An empty apartment in an unrecognizable town reminds me of shaving.   I let my beards grow remarkably long until I cut to the skin; there’s never a consistent in-between.   And I’ve shaved plenty of times, but after every finishing splash of water to the face, I stare at the mirror for a good five or six minutes, not saying a word.  The new places or people don’t intimidate me; there are good soils and seeds everywhere.  But it’s when the gardener changes that the garden becomes new.  Changes aren’t anything to write home about these days.  Our growth spurts happen so frequently that steadiness becomes the chaos.  Perpetual moving drains our energy, but despite our growing desire for maturity, we still fear the standstill.

there’s a soft warm glow in the hard cold snow.

and my dreams, they turn to whispers and float away with the wind

and my lover’s arms remind me there aint no reason to look again

I don’t think the builders at babel ever really thought that they would reach heaven, but who can blame them for trying?

Pittsburgh blizzards remind me of my inconsistency.  I cling to hope like a starfish on the beach, but the thing about hope is that it’s all about the search, the desperate yearning.  Once what you’ve hoped for has arrived, there’s no more hope, only thankfulness.  And I can spend every day of winter inside griping and groaning about the frigid wind and frozen ground, but once spring roles around, a piece of me misses the emptiness.  Despair is more acceptable than apathy, I suppose, and I say all of this to mean that I love someone very deeply, but sometimes I miss wishing for someone deeply.

“Check out my swag’ yo, I walk like a ballplayer
No matter where you go, you are what you are player
And you can try to change but that’s just the top layer
Man, you was who you was ‘fore you got here”

-Shawn Corey Carter

“and when the bridegroom comes,

there will be noise.

there will be glad.”

A year in passing, a year walking slowly and heavily through dark brush and reverent darkness.   I can hear the magnificence, I can feel the jubilant marching, I can smell the rising scent of feasts.  There are families, holding hands in prayer.  There are musicians, laughing and dancing to their own tunes.  There are birds cheering around an ocean of thankfulness swaying in the distance.

We’re growing.  We don’t know how or why, but there is movement.  And I know it’s forward when I can feel less remorse, when my sighs are heavy, not with regret, but with satisfaction, when God speaks in warm handshakes, when I long less to veil my eyes with a deep darkness.

Hope is often proclaimed, but never seen.  There is a certain blindness, that none of us can seem to escape.  Our heightened sense of hearing listens intently to the clang of vibrant tambourines.  They are out there, past the hanging trees and Devil’s walking sticks.  We can find them if we stay close.

drifting, coasting, floating, lingering, meandering, wandering, ambling, flickering arbitrarily, moving without intent, the state of being carried along.

They call it backsliding, but it’s really just sliding aimlessly; the direction is insignificant.

When every page is an incoherent draft, the book becomes blindingly blurry, tugging at the rear of your retinas like nails struggling out of wooden walls.  You know there is hope.  You remember learning your own significance.   You feel the echoes sharing grateful words, but they’re distant whispers, of which you can only hear feeble parts.  The radios cry salvation and children laugh outside.  A glorious revolution of thought and spirit will come, you tell yourself.  But the house is quiet now and the movement is subtle at best.  Our signals fade in and out of frequency, the red light’s blinking, and we’re here for only a few moments.

We’re spinning plates on the hands of a mysterious God.  Peace will come eventually, but we want our purpose now.  We want that gentle wind, and once you’ve breathed it in, you really know when it’s gone.

I do not say this with deep regret, but with outrageous optimism and fierce hope.

Today, for the first time in my life, I will gladly say that I am proud to be an american.

Here’s to the white chocolate raspberry truffle, the thin pink blanket separating my trembling body from the frost, and the cornucopia hidden ever so carefully.  When I sit on the bus, my thoughts settle on Kofi Annan and the UN’s “greater Magna Carta.”  As I exhale fleeting warmth onto my knuckles, my mind wanders towards my relatively secret spot near the Breeches, where I learned how to feign independence.  We’re all scatter-brained, I know, but I’ve never fully appreciated my mind’s elasticity and until recently, I’ve never known how clarity could be so gracefully disjointed.