gratitude

Scenes From Gulf Shores, Alabama

04/06/2018 by John Leave a Comment

I walk down the beach in Gulf Shores, Alabama and I see black boys and white boys playing football together.

Further down the shore, a man is taking pictures of a woman in a sari, the colors of her clothing as vibrant as the light of the setting sun.

The next morning as I stroll the sands I watch women wearing hijabs and capris playing with their children in the sand and I see interracial couples walking hand in hand.

These are things I never saw when I came here in my youth. Back then there was only a sea of people who looked like me. The news shows me scenes of darkness and hatred, but when I walk down the beach in the state where a governor once stood blocking a school room door from those he deemed different, I see something else: hope.

Accepting All of It

03/09/2018 by John Leave a Comment

I was running up Greybeard Mountain when I reached a state of total acceptance. I accepted the pain and fatigue in my legs along with the beauty of the snow and ice-covered trail. I accepted the thoughts that questioned why I was doing this and the lessons of humility and perseverance that running teaches me. I accepted the difficult conditions of the day: the steepness of the trail, the slippery surfaces that caused each footfall to slide a little bit backward, and the growing fatigue in my body as I neared the top of my second ascent of the mountain. To try and fight these things would be futile. Acceptance was the only answer.

With acceptance comes gratitude. I was filled with a sense of gratitude towards the mountain that had stood there for eons and would remain there long after I have left this world. It had no malice towards me, merely indifference. It was not there to be conquered, only experienced, accepted as it was.

Acceptance is not easy. Sometimes it takes moments of physical or emotional stress to force us to let down our guard and reach that state where we can fully experience all that is happening around and inside us and to just say yes to all of it.

We spend so much of our time battling the things we find difficult or unpleasant, trying with all our might to push them away, to pretend that they don’t exist. But those dark spaces remain in our periphery, tainting everything else we see until we come to the point of accepting them. We have trouble accepting even the good things in life. We wish that they were somehow better or that there were more of them instead of accepting and being grateful for what already is. In the end, we waste our time either pushing things away or pulling things towards us instead of merely accepting what is already right in front of us.

A funny thing happens when we allow ourselves to accept everything: we get a glimpse of completeness. At last, after feeling so torn and tattered we can feel whole again. If we could just accept everything as it is, how differently would we view our lives?

Based on a journal entry from 2.23.15

Road Weary

01/12/2018 by John 2 Comments

View of Manhattan from Long Island City, Queens

View of Manhattan from a friend’s apartment

It’s been nearly a month since we left Portland and we’ve laid our heads down to sleep in a different spot almost every night. I grow weary. I’m weary of the movement, weary of the chatter, and weary of the packing and unpacking of bags. We have one more day of this vagabond life before we get to settle like falling leaves in an apartment in Chattanooga, but what will be left of me by then?

Calling this a vagabond life makes it sound romantic, but right now it doesn’t feel that way. It’s not the motion and the living out of a backpack that is getting to me; it’s the constant flow of hellos and goodbyes, the what have you been up to’s, and a schedule that has us jumping between these interactions at a rapid-fire pace. It seems that there has hardly been an hour or more since we left Portland that the room I’m in hasn’t been filled with chatter, or barking dogs, or the drone of a television screen. It wears on me. It wearies me.

But I remind myself that our life is good. We are lucky to have the freedom to take so much time to visit and catch up with the people we love. We are fortunate that we can go such long stretches without needing to work. We are blessed to have family and friends that don’t mind having a few stray humans rooting around in their refrigerators and curling up on their floors to rest their weary heads.