That journey feeling...

There is something about the transitory nature of life that is so deeply unsettling.

We live a life of motion.  Life itself is adamantly un-still.

Planet whirling, spinning as it orbits.  Seasons turning.  Days flying.  Everything moving.

Walk here.  Drive there.  Working and busy.  Celebrations.  Mournings.   Visits.  Conversations.  House to be cleaned.  Car to maintain.  Body to care for.  Meals to prepare.  Kitchen in shambles.  More cleaning to do.  Task list times infinity.  No end in doing.  Everything moving.  And relentless dreams calling.

We live a life in motion.  And life itself is adamantly un-still.

And today, there is something about the transitory nature of life that is so deeply unsettling.

Like the moment, a few weeks in to a months-long journey when a restlessness for the peace of home overtakes you.  And so you endeavor to self-comfort: recount the joys of the journey thus far and the promised highs of the weeks to come, scattered like jewels in your imagination.  Consider all the things you do not want to miss on the journey until you become persuaded by them and your heart demands that the journey continues, insistent upon missing nothing.  Yes, let the voyage continue!

Yet even still that aching for home doesn't quite subside and so you find yourself in that journey-place.

That drinking in of here, wishing for more time to savor the experience, while simultaneously missing and longing for the steadiness of the un-journey.  It certainly takes a while to get there.  The excitement and the adrenaline of the whirling first days of the adventure must subside.  But it is bound to come: that unsettled half-place - the thrill of the voyage and the yearning for home.  Polar opposites of enormous yet proportional strength that leave you feeling torn between desires.

Life is like that.  Transitory like that middle section of a long journey.  There is thrill in the voyage - you certainly don't want the journey abbreviated.  And yet, in quiet moments, when there is that rare, brief pause there comes the longing.  The longing to be still, the longing to be steady, the longing for a completed page and weariness in the waiting.

Life is that dichotomy.  The deep hunger for here so often stifled by the busyness of here.  But there nonetheless - the urgency to taste everything this town has to offer before that voyage across the sea that separates me from this place not knowing if I shall return again to these shores.  That trip-like hunger laced all through this thing we call life.

And then that other hunger - that other place, other town longing.  There is more than this.  There is a quiet, a steady, a place I belong and am at rest.  And I hunger for that place like I miss my mother's cooking when I am a month away.  That taste of a homeland we have never yet seen that somehow lingers on our lips and beckons our souls when we still the motion long enough to feel its pull.

A sharp divide between two strong desires: indeed unsettling.

Like the journey feeling: split in two.  Deep, irreconcilable longings that consume you.  Such is life.

And so in those moments when I am journey-swept wanting to run full speed into the next, voracious for all of life and yet feel weary of all the moving my heart settles into that familiar divide and finds a space to wonder.  And so in the wondering: one simple thought.

Whether at the moment the desire to continue moving, travelling, voyaging through life wins out - or that other that longs for that distant homeland shore; whichever desire may prevail at the moment - neither can stop the moving.  Either involves a journey of a kind.  And certainly whichever desire may overtake, it is not my desire that dictates the shape of my days, the length of my voyage or that final return home.

And so while I am overwhelmed by the unwinding, the spinning, the twirling, as the world circles faster around me and I am dizzied by the motion - it is to the motion that I am given today.  I have been delivered over to it, to be shaped by the journey, to find God in the dance.

And so whether tomorrow will bring me to a next hello or a next goodbye, I am bound there nonetheless.  I am a pilgrim and a vagabond - just passing through.

We live ever in the tension of the journey place.  Heaven beckons.  And so does life here on earth.

And our gypsy souls find a way to answer the calls.  We learn to live the journey.

On wanting to write...

I want to write.

I want to put ink to page.  Commit thought to word.  Leave a trail; a trail in stories told and ideas shared.  A path that will perhaps ease another's journey.

I want to write.

In case the miracle of this may be lost upon us, let me make it plain: I haven't.  I haven't written and I haven't wanted to write in such a long time.

I once said that ink was my favorite word.

For one who always bites their tongue, speaks with thought and rehearses conversations both before and after they occur, I suppose the appeal of ink has always been its honesty.

Without a face to gaze into at the moment, the opportunity to simply say what needs to be said.

There's an honesty to ink.

I love ink for that.

But life has turned a new shade for the eternal optimist in me.  I haven't been able to reconcile the soaring faith in my heart, growing stronger through the fire, with the fire itself or the ash left in its wake.

A distance between the good He works and the brokenness, not His own, that nonetheless becomes a tool in the working.  A distance I cannot bridge.  A forever gap that takes up residence on the landscape of my faith.

A good God.  And all of the un-good we have seen.

And the fact that His power is mighty enough to turn everything back toward good, no matter how un-good at the start.  And the wonderings about why that power didn't choose to stop the un-good before it happened.

There are theological answers, certainly.

But the truest ink answers for me find their chance to live and breathe in the things we do and feel each day.

And these theological answers I know don't lend to life and breath.  It's the distance I find there - in the land of life and breath.  The un-answer the one which actually brings some comfort.  The embracing of the distance.  The fact of this world not being what He had in mind; the fact of a different homeland ahead.  The distance between the two.  The un-answer that has become home for this heart.

And so, my friends, I want to write.

Finally.

Finally.

I want to write.

It has taken some time and I cannot say with any confidence that said wanting will remain.

But for the time being, my soul has settled enough and my heart has rested enough that ink has again become a dear companion.  For so long its honesty made it a feared adversary.  Something I should have predicted in a time when it was so hard to face in bold terms the realities we saw.

But life is beautiful.  And I see beauty breathing in these days again.  And so, dear ink, a happy reunion.

I want to write.

And for that I am utterly grateful.