Cheating

For the past week, I have lived a romantic escapade.

I went to Chicago to watch this person participate in a triathlon:

This is what she looks like crossing the Finish Line.  Awesome, right?

After that, I stayed and visited for a week, riding this borrowed bike around the city:

Its frame is made of this:

For those of you who don't speak Bike-Speak (and I'm only a novice), a Carbon Fiber Frame = Really Light!  Literally, I could lift this bike with One Finger. Comfortably.

Riding this bike, I felt like I was flying. I cruised up and down California Avenue with no effort.  "If I had a Carbon Bike," I declared, "I might actually consider racing."  Riding this Bike made me realize how clunky the Silver Bullet is.  No offense, Silver Bullet: you are built to withstand a lot. You are a Touring Bike. You are my beloved Touring Bike, but my quick romance with this Carbon bike made me feel like I was cheating on my relatively heavy bike back home.

Also with great ease, I entered into a daily routine of breakfast, reading in the Patch's library, a walk around the neighborhood, lunch, a nap, conversing with friends, dinner, an evening bike ride, more time with friends, deep talk with my sister, reading, and bed.  An ideal vacation schedule.  No need for hurry but simply a respite from the go-go-go so many of us experience in our daily lives at home.  As usual, my departure was met with tempting invitations to stay longer. This is something I have often contemplated, knowing that if I actually moved my life from here to there, the busyness of daily life would inevitably follow, but even more compelling is the inherent knowledge that Minneapolis is where I am supposed to be.

I returned to Minneapolis yesterday and this was one of few unwelcome sightings of the skyline in my life.  Over drinks last night, I offered a good friend some character sketches from my beloved week in Chicago (yes, I included the bike).  The goodness of my past week and the mild sadness I feel upon returning to this state makes me feel as though I cheated on This Life, too.  It was a romantic escapade I wish hadn't ended.

But when my friend proposed to me that perhaps my Cosmic Path (Montessori-Speak) led me back to Chicago for good, I quickly acknowledged that, regardless my emotion, I feel that "Minneapolis is (my) destiny," as summed up by Friend.

Here I am. Am I happy today? Not really. Do I Love this city? Beyond a doubt.  If I were to leave in pursuit of a More Romantic Idea, I feel I would be cheating myself.  It's okay to be home.

Forgiveness

The fall after I graduated from college, I found myself working a collection of jobs, one of which was "Youth Pastor" for a collection of youths at the church I grew up attending.  Hands down, this was the worst-fitting job I've ever held.  Hard.

One of my responsibilities that year was to lead chapel times for the All-Church Retreat in February.  I scrabbled through my past for replicable experiences.  I resorted to google for ideas.  I settled on some finalists, gathered materials, and packed more than I've ever packed for a camping trip.

Night two of the retreat, I'd set up stations around the chapel and invited people to "walk through" the Lord's Prayer: to read a line or two from the prayer and respond in a particular way.  Thank you, google.

"Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us."

The (downloaded) commentary for this verse commented on the difficulty of this request. In repeating these words, we're actually only asking God to use against us the measure we use against others.  In other words, if we desire forgiveness, we must forgive.  Do you have unforgiveness in your life? the devotion asked.  For this activity, I had assembled a collection of stones and invited participants to choose one, if they so wished, which would symbolize an unforgiveness in their lives.  To hold the stone, pray over it, feel the weight of it and thus the weight of their sin in their life, and, when they felt ready, to drop it into a bucket of water I'd set on the floor.

Despite the fact that I'd left God on the side of the highway as I travelled across Colorado the previous summer, I maintained my facade at the church and participated in my own prepared activities I didn't believe in.  I got to this station that night and without hesitation I knew the unforgiveness bearing down on my life, sending me into the deepest darkest loneliest place I'd ever dwelled.  I held that stone in my hand, recollected the moment I left Colorado simultaneously adopting this great resentment.  I held this stone in my hand and I allowed angry thoughts about broken friendships to fill me.  I knew I should let all of this go, drop the stone in the pail of water and move on.  I refused and sat awhile longer.

Meanwhile, my friend Liam, age 3, approached.  He eyed the piles of rocks, the bucket of water and his eyes lit up. He knew what to do without reading a word or having a word read for him.  He looked at me, his preschool teacher, and noticed the rock in my hands.  He reached over the rocks, instructions, and water, briefly put his hands on my closed fists and with gentle little-kid fingers, took that significant rock from me and plopped it joyfully into the bucket of water, splashing our knees and forearms in the process.  He smiled, picked up another rock from the pile and plopped it into the water, too. Plop, plop, plop. He made it look so easy, joyful even.

A couple years earlier, a sister and I took our inaugural bike trip, which she entitled, "Finding God on the Highways...."

A couple years later, I took a bike trip on my own.  One night in northern Missouri, I found myself sitting on the bank of the Mississippi River in a forest of small stones that immediately reminded me of those I'd collected for that devotion from that job I'd rather forget.

"I should take one of these," I thought.

Pastor Judy Peterson's words, from a marvelous wedding homily, rang in my ears: "Pack light."  

Why would I choose to carry  more weight, dead weight, on my bike?  I picked up a stone, stroked its smooth surface, and replaced it on the ground.

Forgiveness. Finally.

Something from All

This week I'm visiting my sister and friends in Illinois.  After a deep nap on Sunday afternoon, my sister and I walked to the neighborhood coffee shop where our friend Rachel welcomed me to town, took our order, and invited me to this film screening with some other friends that happened last night.  Like many good films, this documentary spoke loudly and subtly to several rooms in my heart. As I contemplate beauty, I wonder at the young minds that participate in the Louder Than A Bomb festival, awed by their brilliance.

These students, uttering universal truths and personal struggles from the depths of their souls, create transcendent experiences for one, for all.  Yet while the art of Spoken Word, made of air, lingers in the air for a fleeting moment, I am sure that none of these artists would allow that they have made something from nothing.  Quite contrarily, these poets have reached deep inside themselves, poured the very essence of their essential souls, their experiences, their visions for the future, out onto the page and then re-inhaled and  reincarnated themselves to create and give life to an audience. The aptly named festival illustrates the resonance of the poets' spoken word, the gift to the world from a person's entirely vulnerable self - an outpouring of all of one's inherited gifts.

Thank you, poets.

Something from Nothing

When I was a child, I read and reread many times the board book Joseph Had a Little Overcoat.  Despite my frequent readings, the book frustrated me.  I simply could not fathom the possibility of a man creating "something" from "nothing."  A trip down the Mississippi River twenty years later finally solved this mystery for me.

Recently, I  rather impulsively hopped on my bicycle and rode it from my home in Minnesota south along the Mississippi through several states.  As the trip progressed, I fell into a rhythm including a mid-morning break during which I refueled with a second breakfast.  One day, in Missouri, I found myself breaking only ten miles into my daily ride.  I'd gotten a late start that morning due to storms, and as I climbed and descended the river bluffs into the town of Clarksville, MO, I spotted lightning flashing once again across the sky.  After a requisite stop at the town's Chamber of Commerce and declination of any form of map, I headed further into town to pursue a cafe for refuge from the storm and to silence the low-battery beeping of my cell phone.  Cool Beans Coffee Shop offered such a refuge for the afternoon.

Sandbags lined the sidewalks in Clarksville, MO

While wiling away my afternoon here, I struck up conversation with two women: a mother and daughter who were intrigued by my bike with panniers leaning against the front window, my spandex outfit and the bike helmet resting on the table in front of me. They asked about me and my trip, I asked about their lives and that of their town.  Reading Wendell Berry's essay "The Long-Legged House" some days later as I passed through the country again, the second time unfortunately by car, offered insight into the origination and increasing frequency of human-induced floods caused by improper farming techniques which deplete the land and leave it barren.  Clarksville seemed resilient among a string of sadly deteriorating towns along the River - many of which I detoured around due to this year's flood waters.  An obituary posted on the window of the storefront next to the coffee shop offered another clue to Clarksville's apparent avoidance of such a fate which the kind ladies whom I met that day confirmed.  The eulogized man, an artist, had been born in Clarksville and left as a young man to study art in New York City, I believe.  When he returned years later, he noticed a different town than the home he once knew.  Like many towns in rural America, it was dying.  The population, while including some young people, consisted mostly of the older residents, whose numbers were decreasing.  This man, saddened over the fate of his beloved hometown nestled beautifully between the grandeur of the River bluffs and the River bank itself, invited several of his artist friends to relocate to this secluded midwestern location and rebirthe the town.  It worked!

Clarksville, still a small town with a population hovering around 300 citizens, now thrives with restaurants, artists' studios shops, an organic farm and several bed and breakfasts.  Most remarkable, however, is the vivacity of the town's citizens: how easily and openly they invited me to participate in their daily life and their willingness to share time and stories with me.  From a town with nothing, with no hope, artists drew inspiration and gave their gifts to create a place in which hope, optimism and beauty flooded storefront studios and the people who inhabit them, affecting even the simple passers-through.