I am finding that where community is concerned, having one foot in and one foot out builds nothing.  Community requires a word much like itself: commitment.  To those I have committed my life and energy towards, I am the closest.  To those I have committed the least amount of time, I am the most most distant.  All of these observations now sound like trivial and obvious “discoveries” to me as I write them down, but I will continue to contemplate their meaning and the impact it has had on my existence in this bitterness filled town.  Seattle is home to countless injured souls.  We are stiff, selfish, quick to anger, and distrustful.  To my own detriment I have been a participant in this snarky discourtesy masquerading as aloof superiority of mind.  I often times do not like who I am in my own home town.

We have something in common these days, here in Seattle; a topic which is as innocuous as the weather yet far more exciting.  American style football has been my favorite sport to watch since around the time of Super Bowl 22, but I was aware of it beginning with the 1985 Bears team.  I used to have a Refrigerator Perry action figure from G.I. Joe.  There are still boxes of football cards in my parents’ basement.  This year my sister bought my father and I tickets to the Cardinals game on December 22nd.  The Seahawks’ fan base is reminiscent of our Mariners fans in the 90’s.  Our city is benefiting from this current run in ways we can not even discern.

After tomorrow, I will continue to put on courtesy like I put on socks.  People are all the stamp of the few, earliest humans who have had the fortune to pass their genetics along thus far.  And those people must have appreciated eye contact, recognition, a word, and the kindness of simple gestures of deference.  We are Seattle, and we dictate the culture moving forward, even when there is nothing innocuous to speak of. 

There is a dense fog around our house, this being the third day of it.  The air keeps out much of the sun, but I grew up here, and I love it.  Foggy days bring a romance and a mystery to the place you live.  The fog forces one to look at what is close at hand, and forget that off in the distance is a beautiful mountain, a catholic church, a football field or a city skyline.  Fog makes you drive slow, and consider staying home altogether; two very good ideas.

This week found a turning point for me.  I had not recognized how difficult coming back to Seattle has been on my psyche.  Seattle feels like a place of no place, a city of mercenary minds prepared to mobilize their families to new cities whenever the opportunity comes.  In Albania the opposite is true.  The country is only larger than the state of Hawaii by some 200 square miles.  The people are, for the most part held there due to strict immigration policies from their neighbors due to the fact that they don’t belong to the EU.  The resulting community is quite remarkable.  Family members remain in the cities of their birth often times with grandmothers living in the same homes as their grandchildren.  Land stays in the family even if it has been abandoned for decades, the people are tied to it, it is their birthright, their heritage, and a point of prestige.  In one of the cities I visited, Peshkopi, on a family plot of land was an old house with a caved in roof.  That was the oldest son’s house, and when he returned from his work in Tirana, he would repair it and make it his dwelling.  In Albania the expectation is that you will stay, in Seattle the expectation is that you will go.

My anchors here have always been my parents, my grandmother, my aunt and uncle and their family, and for ten years now All Saints Church.  There is an unsettled feeling here, like we are all building on foundations made hastily, temporarily, of inexpensive materials.  I want to be part of a life monumental; to participate in the creation of the lasting, enduring, timeless works of humankind.  I am frustrated when I make attempts to do this on my own, which is one of the reasons I need community around me.  It is both a reason to plant, and a reason to uproot; the myth of fertile foreign soils is a relentless siren in the fog.

I have always lived a life of privilege.  I was privileged to be born in the United States of America, privileged to be of the dominant race, the dominant religion, and the more power holding sex.  The only fears I’ve had are common fears like the fear of the dark, or of falling, or of drowning.  I have never feared of starvation or homelessness.  Even when my family was scraping by at a subsistence level I was an overfed, chubby, white kid.  I do not fully understand how privilege has shaped me, nor how it has aided me in my successes in life.  I think only historians can look at something long dead to truly give appropriate criticism to the form it took.  I will be dead soon.  Soon enough a critique of who I was can begin in earnest, if anyone takes the time.

My transition home after living abroad for a year has been effortless and at times leaves me utterly listless.  I do not mean to take anything away from those who have had the traumatic experience of a broken neck, but the endlessness of looking forward to a time again out of a wheelchair must be something like what I’m feeling now.  Here I sit, in my hoveround, steering myself around WalMart with a joystick held between my teeth.  Am I ever going to get anywhere?  O, sweet!  Nutter Butters are on sale!  In truth my life is nothing less than extraordinary, I need only count my blessings to know this.  I need only to remember that the Earth is round, no matter how flat this part may seem.  

My friend Stacey paid Seattle a surprise visit two weekends ago.  She’s got a feather-soft dusting of reddish-brown hair on her head and all of the color in her cheeks back.  She looks to be thriving, not just surviving, and her energy was much higher than the last time I saw her.  What must this time for her be like; going from a cancer scared state of question filled days and nights to a time when health has all but returned, a time of restfull celebration?  Kilimanjaro this year pretty lady?  Are you finally up to see Africa like we talked about?  I’ll make it to Africa this year.  Let’s go together, and stand at the horizon of our world.

About two years ago I strained something high in my traps, around the area of my seventh cervical vertebrae.  At the time I assumed that health would follow injury of its own accord as so often it has in the past.  Out of frustration, of late I’ve been dropping backward onto the ground trying to get whatever needs popping in there to pop.  Alas, I succumbed to the embarrassing fact that I needed a person trained in these matters to have a look at it.  I had a number of chiropractors recommended to me, but the other day at breakfast I finally heard details on a specialist who would suit me.  

Since going to see Dan Nelson, I feel like my old 100% was my true 85%.  I could not conceive of how grossly I was tipping, stiffening, and short-stroking my movements in order to compensate for the discomfort I hoped to avoid.  Nelson sold me a kettlebell and showed me how to start using it.  My body works like a machine now.  My uncle, who is also a carpenter, recently turned 65.  Because of him I know its possible to perform this work for 30 more years with the same body.  Perhaps our family will have two men in its history to meet this mark.

It is cold in Seattle, but the chill brings a clarity to the air, the lungs and eyes.  A few, tender, spring-time miracles hang on to delight in the shadows.  For the most part the grounds are sad, muddy, brown or bare.  But the city always shines.

When I was living abroad, I would make posts to this blog about 6 days a week.  Now that I am home I only make posts once every two weeks or so.  I isn’t that I lack a routine here in Seattle, its that my routine doesn’t allot time for this form of creative expression.  When I lived in Albania I was supported by a dozen-or-so people from my life in the States and I felt accountable to them in a way that compelled me to explain my days and the journey that God had me on.  Since arriving back home that journey feels less directed and more haphazard.  There are signs, however, that the direction has always been there.

Today is Sunday, church day.  Today will be the fourth day that my small group and I are meeting at The Garage on Capitol Hill to simply have guy time.  Yesterday at the All Saints Church work day our group comprised roughly half of the volunteers who gave their time away to improve the church facility.  It was the first time that Alex, a man I met in Marseilles, came to our church.  He has been a friend to me from our first introduction and I felt really honored to have him volunteer with us.  Also there from our group was Cody, Sam and Sam’s wife Dana.  

And so, now, while I am not on a mission trip, I am being directed and called by God to serve and to celebrate community and service with the people I love for the people He loves. 

Take care, it is said, has been said, will be said, that you ask not for that which you are unwilling or unprepared to receive.  I have asked for blessing in the form of work, and it has been given me.  I sometimes feel like a house cat who has, once again, found that familiar, dry, soft lavender and pink-sweet rose smelling nest of its littered youth.  For where is there like home to remind oneself of cold air without, the damp shoes, the growling, fat stealing gut?  And I am becoming fat.  I am becoming soft, I feel it.

This morning I tried to explain this to my friends Andy and Kristy.  They know, of course they do, being of a spirit like mine own.  They too, however, are Americans; and are trapped like a wild thistle painted on a bone or mother of pearl, sticky-backed wall-sheet.  What flower would from there wish to be plucked?  For where might it be thrown next?  To the trash can, the land-fill, or worse?  And if into the flame, would it not for sometime float like suspended Fall leaves on the winter bringing winds before disappearing altogether into the river, common road, or Heaven? 

The timing of my life has never been mine to dictate.  Whether or not we believe that time is real or imagined, this discourse will continue under the assumption that the word “time” is the best and most universally understood metaphor we’ve found to talk about the changes which occur over the course of lifetimes in succession.  Time is a marker for the stages of the evolution of things and it helps us talk about the past, but in the United States time too often becomes a God in and of itself.  Time is an idol and I am constantly catching myself kneeling before her altar.  It takes vigilance to ignore the sweet calling of her distracting song.  If time is real, then God is the creator of it, and I therefor can never be early or late.

I recently completed a deck in the Crown Hill neighborhood of Seattle.  I estimated that the project would take a total of 11 working days to complete.  I started the project on September 17th, and then finally finished on October 19th.  A few pieces of work had been added along the way, and I was in New York for 10 of those days, but I still was very aware that things were not progressing as I had predicted.  Yet, now that the job is over, I find that I miss it.  I enjoyed the creative outlet, and working outside.  At the end of every work day Robert, the homeowner, would offer me a beer.  He would bring his daughter and his dog to the back yard to have a look at the day’s progress.  Robert’s wife Erica would also make visits to the back every-other day to say how much she liked the way things looked and how excited she was.  “We’ve already got a bunch of friends eyeing it for a barbecue,” she’d say.

I had time to finish well.  Some of the projects I had prepared estimates for, I did not win, and I was given a break from some of the ongoing projects I’ve been working on since getting home from Europe.  Robert and Erica were very patient and gracious throughout the process.  In the end what I had the time to build is one of the finest decks I have seen; a beautiful place for gatherings, relaxation, reading, playing, or nothing.  In the end I had a hand in making someone’s house a home, and is there anything better than that?

I have been to a few cities where, after arriving, I realized that my stay would be too long.  Four days in Dublin felt like a cold to the bones month, three days in Athens felt like a restless, comfortless week inside a cage.  On the other hand were cities like Split, Lubljana, Istanbul, Warsaw, and especially Barcelona; places a traveler might wish they were from just so they could call home a place where time feels like an illusion, an invention of one’s unspoken eye.

Ten days in New York City is longer than I’ve stayed most places.  I thought I understood why people loved it here before, but now New York seems more like a really generous, interesting family that it pays to stay in the good graces of.  The family home is always open to those who show the proper respect, and there are treasure packed catacombs beneath the main house, catacombs more extensive than the imagined halls of George R. R. Martin’s King’s Landing.

I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for Stacey, and I know that time with her is the very best that New York has to offer me.  Yesterday I saw some of the greatest known treasures of this world, and I got to see first hand some of the opulence that princes would kill their fathers for.  At The Cloisters they have the salvaged remnants of the fortunes of hundreds, perhaps thousands of successful people on display; people who had names and titles once.  And I hope, for their sake, that they had true friends aswell.

A number of things came into my mind while deciding which Broadway show to patronize.  I have always enjoyed Shakespeare and have been listening to two of his plays on my ipod while I work; the fact that my mother loves Orlando Bloom was a bonus.  Having gotten my ticket at the TKTS booth two hours before the show, I had no idea what to expect as far as seating was concerned.  My seat was three rows off the stage, center isle.  I was so close I could feel the heat from the on stage fires and see the spittle as it escaped the mouths of the actors in speech.

The performances were all very good, but I especially enjoyed the men portraying Mercutio and Tybalt, Christian Camargo and Corey Hawkins respectively.  Other delightful notables were Condola Rashad, Chuck Cooper and Roslyn Ruff.  I found the stage props to be quite impressive as well.  There was a giant mural of saints painted on a wall which looked to be 16 feet tall and 40 feet wide.  The top half could be raised or lowered independently and the bottom half could also split in two and be divided, offering space between for the actors to walk.  The stage was once a street, and then a house, now a crypt, and then a garden.

For a few hours the audience witnessed the entrancing tradition of the play.  For a few hours we allowed ourselves once again to hope for undying love.