hush.

the end of things, in some ways. i'm back home in Santa Rosa now and that's always something like the end of things. or the beginning. but life's a circle, really, so i guess that makes sense.

there's a lot to write about here, so i'm just going to put it down as it comes. i've been away from this for awhile. i would have liked to write, but in the midst of finals and the end of the year and our strange cultural conviction that every group of more than 4 people must have a Christmas party, i have missed opportunities to really find anything worth writing for other people to read. i've been journalling a lot more lately and seeking for some silence. silence. the little snatches of silences that we are able to grab in between everything else have been the characteristic of my life lately. it seems the past month has consisted of various activities of mine which i consider more or less worthwhile punctuated by the search for silence. i wake up early for the sake of a half hour of silence before everything starts going. just me and my prayer book and Bible, and sometimes God shows up in a very tangible way and speaks encouragement to me and sometimes not. actually, God usually doesn't appear in any way that i can physically or emotionally feel. its as if i'm talking to God from the living room while s/he decides the kitchen or sometimes the garden is the appropriate place for the morning devotions. hmm. its not that God isn't there, its just that God isn't here. i feel like that more and more these days. God isn't here, like here here. you know what i mean? God is...around. i talk about a God that animates all that we do, that gives our being and existing and doing meaning but that doesn't mean that i sense God in my depths, in the atoms and ligaments of my existence. just because i know that God is the energy that keeps the universe from imploding into nihilism doesn't mean that i feel that all the time like i used to. God is, well, there. faithful, loving me and hopefully appreciating the fact that i continue to pray between 4 and 6 mornings a week despite the fact that i can't put my finger on anything specific that prayer does. its just a sort of sifting process. and i believe that prayer has power, but not in the way that comes to mean that we can manipulate God into believing that we are the power behind God's power.

i used to feel new ideas about God so deeply. they would resonate, these new ideas, but they were so fundamentalist. "God is a pacifist" is a good example. but they were all examples of fitting God into categories that i knew, limiting God to my ideas. but by limiting God's freedom, i kept myself so locked up into those categories that I couldn't be free. so nothingness set in. when even your God is lost in the mess of your own chains and limitations, nihilism is inevitable. God must be free. fortunately (oh to grace how great a debtor...), one of those ideas i stumbled upon was the importance of the Church's traditions and silence is clearly one of those. so i began experimenting in these still waters and slowly but surely, i am freeing God from myself, and in the process being freed.

like i said, its a sifting process. i was listening to a radio program in LA on the drive up here last night and i heard an artist talking about her time at an artist colony in New Hampshire. She said that she found that her mind was like a dryer going around and around only it wasn't full of clothes or bedsheets or anything worthwhile like that. instead, it was full of garbage. that's what silence does. it makes us realize what is inside our head and allows us to really hear what's going on outside our heads. it lets us hear sounds that aren't ours. people, i'm sure, think that monks and other hermits and silent people go to the desert or the monasteries or the prayer closets in order to get away from people and be close to themselves or God or whatever. but that's not true. i mean, maybe for some, but that's not true. solitude is the only thing that lets us really be with people. i heard this before but never even began to understand it until just recently. Silence is the reason that we can even be close to anyone. if you want to be with people, you need to be able to hear sounds that are outside of your head, whether that is your boots crunching on the path, a bird, a deer's footsteps, a crying friend or nothing at all--the kind of nothing that leaves me totally amazed every time and every second of every time (infinity in all directions) that this sort of thing even exists.

i went to the desert on thursday. it was beyond compare. i could only wish for a few more hours. sitting silently for almost 3 hours with one walk and all i could ask for was a few more hours. i'm becoming more of a hermit every day. i long for these moments of blank space. i long to fill them with my prayers and write my stories there, sing my songs there and spin around them. but in the end, i want to realize that all my efforts have not contributed. i want to find out that i've been writing with a white crayon all the while and the page is as i found it. i'm not trying to change everything or break the quiet as a way of reducing my anxiety. i just want to be quiet with the page. in the desert, we (Josh Seligman went with me) weren't so far from the road and there were maybe 3 cars that went by during the course of the 14 or 15 hours that we were there. you could here them coming for about a mile each way. they come like a ufo or a jet in that land. it really is a sort of roaring that slowly builds and you want to stand up and think them away because the deep, ringing-in-the-ear-producing silence has been trod upon. we humans are so foreign in places like this. but i just want to be quiet like the page, like the cactus, like the black ant that crawls and is now significant because i've seen no living animal but Josh and a single bird all day. empty and sifted and slowed down, like a dryer on low with just a few pieces of clothes in it.