no walls

I was standing on the second floor of a restaurant with no walls in Loiza. The ocean was dark; rolling white-noise oscilloscopes emerging from the silence of night, faint and gray, palpably fawning over the beach. The warmth of the sand complimented the warmth of the water. They danced, moving this way and that, in and out, together, apart, holding invisible hands.

I missed my children. I called my wife on our cell phone. The moon did a bad job of hiding behind a palm tree whose trunk was in arms length but whose palms were in space above the ocean. I thought of Christmas, St. Nicolas' Day in Lawrence, Kansas. White snow on a brown earth. I was a little drunk.

Memory is heavy like El Morro, perched on the edge of the world, the precipice of what I've learned up to this point. The implications of such memory are heavy and dark like El Morro's shadows. People I know and people I don't know pass through them, are heavy like shadow and then light, like air. It is a golden sun with a jealous blue sky. A vast battlefield separates us from the past.

an achronologous chronology

[situated in the so-called simple-present tense, a daily memoir that disregards any sense of chronology]

The children make messes peacefully, whispering amongst themselves. I prop the baby against myself and become absorbed in a book.

My blog is a repugnant mirror that shows me some part of myself I don’t want to see and can’t comprehend. My revulsion for the previous post - and somehow myself - grows every time I log on. I sense this thing, this blog, this despised new media/ literary phenomenon that I’ve bought into for some obscure and ridiculous reason, has some important role to play.

I’m on the plane. The book I will finish in two weeks I can’t touch, because white-hot rusty switchblades are being pressed into my brainpan via my inner ear. My eyes feel like they’re squeeking. The lady next to me doesn’t speak English, I try to act like I don’t feel like I’m dying, but I feel like I’m dying so I’m not sure if I care. Just then the ocean returns to me, first pulling me, then pushing me, gently. The waves come one after another but they’re the same waves, like the leaves, year after year. They don’t force me, they filter through me, spreading the different “me”s over a palate, a spectrum. On the plane I can feel the ocean, it’s too big, too powerful; too many countless grains of sand flow in too many directions. I’m not seasick. There is a halo around my memory, from the sun setting beyond the rocks.

The sun is setting over the neighborhood where our church and my daughter’s soon-to-be preschool is located, and the air is cool for the first time in a week. The deep green of the trees imposes a sense of the deep south, though we’re in the midwest. My son slobbers on my shoulder while attempting to consume his hand, pausing to watch the birds or the electric lines, both a stark black against a constant blue. The moon is lucid and half-illumined, the August evening gives me a sense of space between myself and it, and the moon becomes a very real cosmic presence to me; I sense its enormity and the miracle of its suspension, but also that I might reach up and pluck it from my vision if I wanted.

The clock says 6:59. I've woken with a start for some reason. The house is quiet.

In the park my wife and children and friends’ children are playing and resting in the shade on a park bench. My daughter approaches me with a request to swing. The hour-long walk hasn’t seemed to wear me out so I agree to it. Before I know it, the whole gang wants to swing. So I help them out and then join them. I haven’t done it in ages, due to an instant nausea trigger, but today for some reason I’ve managed to sidestep it. I pump my legs, lean back and forth, and force myself into an upside-down pendulum arch. The children are impressed. I turn upside down to look behind me, like when I was one of them, and I see the basketball court, its players walking on it like a ceiling, jumping but never falling, the trees and shrubs growing and shrinking, undulating like the ocean.

Walking with my son in the August evening a hymn to the Holy Spirit comes to mind, so I sing it:

You are most blessed, Oh Christ our God. For when you had made the fishermen most wise by sending down upon them the Holy Spirit, by them you drew the whole world into your net - lover of humankind glory to you.

My son cries.

I walk up the hill towards campus for the first time in awhile. That subtle sense of autumn approaching underlines everything, like a general, sustained prelude to a flashback or deja vu. Many of the houses will have different people living in them, since I began walking this way on a regular basis almost two years ago. I imagine passing glances out the window at me as I trudge up the hill, in sunshine, snow, rain, and that massive space in between all of those things.

The coffee carafe knocks against the sink and the unwashed dishes, the coffee pot itself, and the counter at regular intervals, the way it does every morning.

Today life is hard.

I'm sick, and I'm worried about it. I need to see a doctor and a dentist. I'm worried about my wife, who is tired from having taken care of the kids for a week while I vacationed. The car we've been using is in need of repair, and our other car hasn't worked for a year now, and we've not the funds to fix either of them right now. Because of my new student income schedule we're low on funds of course. In August, when the funds do come in, much will be used to pay back borrowed monies for the summer.

I've got a presentation on Friday. For this I need a powerpoint, for that I need to walk to campus for a good chunk of each day. This would be okay if I wasn't deathly (and I do mean deathly. I'm so sick I'm scared!) sick, and I didn't feel guilty about leaving Rachel home with the kids, and the reality of her having to deal with them while I'm on campus. Besides this my paper is due a week following, and requires much attention that between my family and my sickness and work will be hard for me to give.

In old San Juan the bricks were blue and over one hundred years old. On the coast by the old fort there were thousands of graves. Over the front gate here was a faded tile picture of John the Baptist in the wilderness. Up the hill from there stood a church, it's doors open, electric fans plugged in everywhere for the faithful. It was comforting to see a Catholic church after all the Pentecostal churches. It was like an oven inside the walls of Old San Juan. Hand bells from vendors peddling their wares rang at random intervals. I couldn't smell the salt water breeze from the ocean, but I could feel it.

I feel like a failure. Like I haven't done too well at this whole "life" thing. I don't think I'm alone in feeling like this, and I don't feel hopeless. I know I'm moving forward. I'm scared, but hopeful. More than that I can't go back on placing my trust in God now, then I would be a hypocrite. How could I with all the blessings I have?

The end.

Love Righteousness

The other night I discovered that I had within me a certain love for righteousness. I was getting ready to go for a run when it hit me: first a sensation not unlike being smitten by a high-school sweetheart, then the implications of harboring such an emotion. I'd never felt that way before.

Years ago, before I converted to Orthodoxy, I had the realization that the spiritual life wasn't merely comprised of NOT doing some things, but in actually DOING other things. The idea was that an upward or forward motion was needed, movement, a drawing closer at all times to God, and not merely a moral obedience. A moral obedience is virutally impossible without this forward movement, or growth, regardless of whether we perceive this.

After leaving my Protestant faith - I'm getting to the point I promise - I disavowed, or attempted to disavow, any semblance of what I called "emotionalism" from my understanding of truth. People tampering with my emotions, basing "worship" on feelings and finely crafted ad campaigns had all taken their toll - I was unable to make sound judgments from within this hyper-emotional context.

Fast-forward to the present day: me with my struggles to harvest the virtues and destroy the passions, to grow closer to God, just like I was then, only equipped with the teachings of the Church (and the language to understand what I'm doing). Now what do I find? I find what I once might have once referred to as a carrot on a stick: this sensation within me that desires righteousness. I feel as though I am and have been such a sinner, that if I could go one day or one hour thinking on or doing something righteous I would feel great!

Granted, righteousness is far from its own end. I've always hated the reward/ effort model of motivation for good works. I've felt that love of God was its own reason, motivation and motivator.

Perhaps Orthodoxy has shown me the connection between righteousness and God, the essence of righteousness which I won't define here (I don't think I could). I know now that I can love righteousness out of my love for God, my desire to please Him.

I used to try and remind myself of the hardness called of me in order to undertake the simplest asceticism of the spiritual life: now when faced with temptation I remind myself to "love righteousness." And right now, thank God, this isn't hard to do. I pray that it stays that way!

Destroying Binaries

When I say "my spiritual life", there are certainly two ways to read it. The first, I suppose, being an indicator that this blog is about a compartment of my life that I give the title "spiritual". This is entirely incorrect. Serious faith, or serious belief, must insist on a lack of disparity between one life with the other. The chief agency of sin is to separate, dispel, dissolve. The duality felt in life between the real and the potential is part of this. Therefore my life, it should be read, is spiritual. Everyone's is. St. John of the Ladder says in "The Ladder of Divine Ascent" that

"God is the life of all free beings. He is the salvation of all, of believers and unbelievers, of the just or the unjust, of the pious or the impious, of those freed from the passions or caught up in them, of monks or those living in the world, of the educated or the illiterate, of the healthy or the sick, of the young or the very old. He is like the outpouring of light, the glimpse of the sun, or the changes of the weather, which are the same for everyone without exception."

Therefore one of the first steps in the spiritual life is destroying the frail barriers we erect in order to understand the world and ourselves. The modern paradigm is one of compartmentalizing: we are comprised of many disparate systems: "emotional", "intellectual", "physical", "spiritual", "financial", etc. that all battle within us. Modern pop-psychology has to do with synchronizing them to the end of fulfilling their various needs, with disastrous ends. This compartmentalization of life is at once our attempt to understand it and the product of our inability to understand it with our fallen logic alone. Bringing the self to one, the aim of the spiritual life, is a matter of pulling these fractured spheres of our self into a harmony with God's will, putting an end to discord, through the harvesting of the virtues and the destruction of the passions.

Holy Father John of the Ladder, pray to God for us!

Everything is a Text

Associations are odd things.

Association is an odd thing. Avoiding it seems to be an act not unlike slipping between the raindrops in a downpour. Is this really how we establish what we know, or think we know?

When you look at me you look at what I'm wearing, my hair, my glasses, my skin color, my gate, etc. All of these thing help you to form an embryonic opinion of me. What follows, if we interact, is either a series of predictable outputs or a litany of surprises, depending on the accuracy of your initial assessment.

When you come to my blog, you look at the colors, the words, the quotes, the links, the titles, my spelling, the topics, the length of posts. A similar assessment is made concerning your opinion (maybe opinion isn't the right word) of me and/or my blog - either my blog, myself via the blog, or the blog's message, or me personally via the blogs message, and whether or not said message is related with skill or not.

That being said, by this point, you've probably stopped reading and clicked "back" on your browser, though not before at least some of this had taken place.

Perhaps I haven't satisfied you. Perhaps the requisite photo and caption weren't present. An obsession with these associations can lead to the habit of either attempting to fulfill all of these expectations or circumventing them altogether, neither of which being completely possible.

If I place a cross, or an icon of the crucifixion on my blog, you know exactly what I am, what my blog is about, what "I am about". So I'm reticent to do it. What if I told you that I believed the crucifixion was the profound center of the earth, of reality, of time, the cosmos? Or that I believed that "the greatest and most perfect thing a human being can ever desire to achieve is to come near to God and dwell in union with Him"?

What does that do? To us?

Words are a strange thing. I spend my time writing them, and I believe that they spring from this mysterious center of the cosmos, but I hardly ever turn to this thing as a subject of my writing. But everything is a text.

Readership

So this is familial bliss. He thought.

The sun shone off the newly swept wood floors (in the morning it reflected off the birdbath through the window and onto the ceiling, but this was the evening). The old mismatched sofa, love-seat and chair were clear of the usual clutter - laundry and/or toys and library books - the dining room table was cleaned off. His eldest was already in bed, tired out from a day of exploring, swinging and going down the big slide. On the back porch there were a number of containers with soil, surely dead by now earthworms, an eggshell or two, a dead cockroach and a couple of tiny maple trees that had miraculously forced their way out of their respective helicopters. The back porch was swept and the recycling was in its' bins. Mother was on the phone with her mother, and baby boy's thoughtful almond eyes were smiling at the window or the ceiling light; the icons or his papa. He punched and kicked profusely and babbled, the drool bubbling and cascading over an assortment of rolls that belonged to his face, chin and/or torso. His diaper was dry and that was bliss.

Later, walking down a dark alleyway, relaxed and lucid, he remembered all of this with clarity, and returned home again to it, though the shades were drawn and the windows dark. A warm lamp that used to belong to an old friend glowed in the dining room, waiting for him to return. He brushed his teeth, washed his hands, ate a piece of bread and drank a glass of water. All of these things he did within the context of his family. The whole house breathed with them as they slept.

Who were his readers? He had thought that earlier. He had no photo of the fun to share, no fashion tips or celebrity sitings. And now his glass was empty. It was time to sleep.