The Rain Gets Dirty in Parking Lots

I just finished reading all but the epilogue of Cadillac Desert (by Marc Reisner) today, and I'm caught in a moment of reflection.

The problem presented by Reisner summed up desert reclamation (building dams and pipes to make otherwise "barren" land habitable ...or profitable) as being akin to a boy building a sand castle at low tide. Having built and beheld the fall of my own actual low-tide sand castle on the beach, the word picture is overwhelmingly looming and I don't feel capable of even beginning to wrap my arms around the challenge facing "reclaimed" land.

While less pressing in Portland than say, Klamath Falls, I feel sick at the cost, study, argumentation and innovation required to safely rebalance the ecology we live in- especially with such profit-driven elements behind what people consider "feasible design". I feel like I must let my career and profitability suffer in order to stand by the principles learned in this book-- and even still make little difference after a lifetime of that sorry work.

In a quest for context and the latest conversations, last year I had the chance to attend an ASCE/EWRG Sustainable Stormwater Symposium, where I met incredible advocates for watershed health in policy, design, and development. I also attended River Restoration Northwest's Annual Stream Restoration Symposium, where the opening presentation offered a hard-statistical-evaluation of the overwhelming doom of "wild salmon" driven by our population growth and lifestyle. The room had a hard look. Wild salmon recovery has been significantly influencing legal requirements for development that affects rivers. To hear it is all generally pointless was so generally disheartening. Still, the symposium went on to discuss new research and successful efforts, projects, successes, and stories. Continuing in the hopeful way of conservationism.

The angst from considering magnitude of rebalancing the earth as a professional makes me think of what someone at one of the conferences said- that they knew an ecologist who defected from scientific study and ran towards a career in design because in design there is inherent hope for the future, otherwise why design anything at all? I'm glad to be working in design, and to know what precious little I know about ecology. I'm glad for all the stories that were gathered in Cadillac Desert, and the perspective I get to carry with me in that work I do.

I am a [young] PROFESSIONAL whose first duty is to the health, welfare, and safety of the public.
To be a professional, I know I personally must be part of a peer group that TALKS ABOUT THE PROBLEMS I FACE INTO. I want to read. I want to practice. I want to discuss. To process. To present and critique and evolve in different contexts, from different audiences. Then take off another bite and do it again. Having graduated college, I learned that I affirm my knowledge by speaking about what I learn. So I need and will seek community.

I hope what little knowledge and learning and listening I encounter will help disperse some unique perspective that may affect an unwieldy, but life-giving decision somewhere down the line. (I'm also hoping to write a musical about the whole wicked dance one day. I've got an outline written already.)

On maintaining messes and nurturing careers

I have a friend who's been studying French and linguistics.

On the occasion we meet to talk, she tells me the words she's learned in her new language.
I don't understand her because it's all excited-sounding French, or obscure analytical-English vocabulary, but it is lovely to listen. Just the song of her canter and dance of her gesture makes me want to join in.

I feel like a child repeating the words.
I struggle to keep up with her, but am excited to repeat, repeat, repeat.
Between our visits,  I do not practice or study, I forget our lessons.

There is a language I hope to speak in my newfound adult life, a language to fluently speak as a citizen, words of comfort and strength to share with a friend. Practicing alone has been so slow, and very difficult to sustain. I hope to repeat small and simple words on front porches with friends until I am met with those critical moments where all I've heard and practiced makes the very small and very important differences for which critical moments are made.


STILL, BEING A BACHELOR IN THE CITY IS LONESOME INDEED.

I've been wrestling an inward anxiety stemming from the unknowable future clouding my plans to die an accomplished and fulfilled human being:
To be a loving neighbor,
knowledgeable, inquisitive, engaged, and accomplished professional,
a mentor and a student,
a role-model for my someday children,
An old man, teller-of-stories! Of beautiful mountains and streams!
I want to have learned the hard way, each time, and earn the texture of old hardwood floors,
To have grabbed history by the scruff and have saved it myself!

Still, after a year of bachelorhood, I continue to be disappointed at having missed those marks.
My most frequent company remains to be my harshest critic.



I USE CLUTTER AS A TO-DO LIST.



I create my own obstacles:

Arranging my environment to make my goals and health the path of least resistance.
Never motivated to work-out-run, I refused a parking pass, and now biking is my easiest choice in the morning.
I hide the remote to inconvenience my television, leaving books sprawled instead to tempt my eyes.

And clutter! I clutter my space with all of my to-do.
The only way to put something out of sight, then, is to finish it.

But
Once my table is too full for too long, I just clean up anyway.

MEANWHILE I CONTINUE TO BE AFRAID.
I HAVE BEEN ALONE.

In my heart are fists, white-knuckling to beliefs I refuse to admit.
I am afraid to speak them because I fear they are wrong,
or worse
they are right, and I must practice them.
I am afraid to be wrong again in choosing a new doctrine, too.
Perhaps my stubborn refusal protects me from charismatic silvertongues who stand to benefit from new membership. Still, I know that having been so stubbornly wrong, I am the very problem that so sickens me:

Refusal to relinquish belief long enough to consider other truth.

There must be truth outside the limits of any belief!
We are so small, and the only way to understand anything must the admission of humus!
Of being totally temporary, miniscule, small and insignificant!

I concede, instead to fearfully hide from new salespeople. I concede also to hide from my own belief-system, and refuse to be its owner. There are enough stories about sure-minded people who were wrong, so I, too, must be wrong. Acting will only cause everyone pain!

So also will people suffer from my own terrible stillness!


[You see my frustration.]


WHAT WILL COME OF ME AND MY EFFORTS?

I am not old.
Living long enough, I will become old.
Being old long enough, and I will die.
Everything comes to an end,
Oh, this spiral!
[saying so only reminds me
I still don't understand death,
but I can still die, anyways!]

My precious wick has been burning all the while.
And much as I hope to die having lived right, to die having been kind, I want to be someone lovely to meet. I approach life slower than I think I should, still convinced that listening, study, and prudence will best aid in achieving such dreadful standards of practicing empathy, neighborly love, vulnerability, and the like...
(WHICH I AGAIN AND AGAIN REFUSE)

SO I LOOK. SO I LISTEN. SO I SPEAK LIKE A CHILD WHEN I CAN.


For inspiration, for joyfulness,
To experience some spontaneous combustion.
I am biding my time for the ideas that will release me into Nirvana!
To suddenly recognize all the worthy risks with which I, myself, will joyfully upset my stability!

I believe the neighborly love I aspire to live and die by is not a pretty love.
It is not a safe love. It is vulnerable and soft and it sweats and bleeds.
I know how weak I am, and that I am hiding,

But

Until I find some wonderful unlocked state of mind,
(Or it finds me on my more cowardly days),
I will try my best to keep listening.
To process and understand this neighborhood around me.
To repeat, repeat, repeat until suddenly the lyric of humanity and everything in us brings me to my knees.

Listening [Winter '16]

I want to digest everything I've heard, thought, and listened to over the last several months.

[Portland] is gradually becoming more home than it has been.
I have to eat my burrito before we talk.

----------

Now that I have a burrito in me, it is time to write.

The clouds have me feeling sedated. Spending time in the past brings relief. It gets me high. I could roll around in the past for a long time. Sometimes I want to go back so badly I forget about the present.

Writing for the neighborhood paper (Concordia News) has given me the most traction in being a part of my neighborhood, of course.
concordianewspdx.org

There will come a day I will think I understand everything better than I do now. I will consider myself well-read and stop listening because I will know better, and that scares me, dear reader.

My concerns, my aspirations:

Work.
I am in the business of developing land. Of knowing it, tearing it apart, and leaving something new.
My aspiration is to be a steward of the environment, to be proud and committed to the decisions we make as people who live here.

Politics.
I am a listener. I am a child. I realize the faults of this.
My aspiration is to hear the right stories, all of them, and so share right words at the precise right moments.
[Remind each other to keep listening. Everything begins with listening.]

God.
I am looking for God everywhere, but always forget to listen.

I always forget to listen.

Tonight, I'm having potatoes and my sink is full of dirty dishes. Now out of college and in my first apartment, food preparation takes up the majority of my free time, which I like, because there's not too much else to do.


Right now, at least.

Keeping my hands busy on dishes is a rhythm of patient values I hope to adopt all the way down to how I breathe. That said, I should finish the dishes right now, but I haven't written for a while.

These are some of the first days of living here out on my own, a pursuit of mine that's been in the making since day one, and it is wonderful. Not knowing anyone, however, this newfound independence is a strange, lonely landscape.

Most of this lonliness becomes energy for this purpose-seeking I do, and these are the best words for it I have yet found:

+I am a civil engineer in training with a special interest in water.

My passion is restoring watershed health, and I currently pursue that in the context of urban development.

My immediate work has been more or less the meticulous repositioning of lines for big digital construction drawings.
I liken it, thus far, to:
-editing a word document
-while playing the a game of "find the differences between these two pictures" from highlights magazine
-only everything's in French, and you took Spanish, so learn that, too

(I've been trying to keep global professional goals and continued studying in mind to stay motivated--- studying, reading, all the skills I developed as an academic...)

((I've also had more exciting days than that, so don't let me sell you on my cheap pity-grabbing; everyone has bad days and great days))

Most excitingly, being on the other side of a degree, I've stopped  "just getting through this" and have been taking every day as best I can to leave humanity with my genuine contribution.

Pursuant to achieving this, I've given up wifi to "find myself" and save a few bucks- my first phone data plan is much more versatile and gets me the text- and audio-based information I need. Still, I struggle to fill the micro-chasms of loneliness or boredom left in the wake of reducing internet. Unattended, my head swims and wrings all my immediate thoughts and surroundings into dreadfully unoriginal prose. Regularly sanitizing my restful hours with hypnotic glowy Netflix, however, leaves me feeling cheated of this creative brain-sap. Though I will be more tired tomorrow, I will have captured from a regular domicile brain rot into an unwilling and beautiful amber, my writing.

(however bug-filled it may be)
(#Jurassicpark)

In the meantime, I'm developing "homework" for myself to become more like who I want to be. Understanding finances, filling out paperwork for living, keeping track of the news, engaging creative pursuits, and continuing outside the classroom as an educated and learning and voting member of the public, and ever-struggling disciple of Christ.

Turning then to these whimsical and reflective practices betwixt the act of procrastinating chores, my full sink has certainly made this writing business more thrilling. As my kitchen cries out for eviction of its sloppy tenants, I depart.

And so it is so.
I'm here now.

Springful

Today is the first day I am drawn to write in a long time.
The occasion is also marked by an uncanny freshness that I also likely will not experience for a long time. The end of a hard term followed by the last song of a Spring break that both broke and healed.

Such is an inspiration to write.

Though Spring began a week ago, I had an unexpectedly difficult Spring Break that only just now made me realize Spring. Awkward and difficult as it was, Florida stood to be a delightful opportunity to practice what little grace I have learned, and teach me what still I am struggling with.
Idolatry and pride still loom, I apologize. They were woven into my more "matured understanding of God" and I forgot. I grew complacent, and faced the fallible willpower of me against what real love might teach.

What happened? A season of my life ended, and I mourned it far from home and far from familiar comforts. My faith was shaken, and I realized that as much as I thought I had progressed in understanding Christ, I felt all the way through my heart that much of the faith was being put into another person, and I fell.

What got me through was not my will to be a better person. If anything, trying to be the bigger man in the matter was the worst of it. My willpower had already failed me when I refused to release my expectations of the visit. Those expectations are what spiraled me away from really listening. I would have been lying to say that I was under control. I was not under control.
I was carried away, and given time to be quiet. To talk. To drink. To think. To write.

I am a torn blanket again, cleaning out the bad stitching, hot metal, and broken spiritual bones primed to be set, hit, knit a second time, much in the way I encountered in Ireland, far from home.

Walking away from God, I dwelled in Netflix, round words, and finally trekked through an old high school story written only through old love letters.
One that I hadn't really healed from.
Or moved on.
One that I kind of held to.
I was reminded of how I was, where I had come from. The old love letters from my past relationship spoke to my ego, sure, but it inspired my passion and imagination. I remembered what it was like to be throat-deep in romance and youthful grandeur. I remembered the struggle of disillusionment. I remembered what it was like to think there was nobody else but her.
I saw myself through the lens of someone I connected with and made a commitment to a long time ago. Writing, words, letters, anxieties, joys, lows, highs all were suddenly fresh. So unfamiliar.
So I wrote twelve-something pages of old romantic words mixed with my newly adopted Christian mantras that I so cling to, in hopes to keep to the road God means for me, to shed these old skins in pursuit of new cells.
I wrote to shed, I wrote to grow, to forgive, to move on, but to move forward. I wrote to heal, to finish a clean break, to drill the cavity, to fill it again.
I wrote.

So I'm back in my room again, finally just with God.
I remembered a book my grandma gave me for Christmas:

On the Shoulders of Hobbits

It's an explorative study of God and virtue in the epics set in Middle Earth and Narnia.
I read a few chapters.
The book isn't of high merit or particularly scholarly. I'd spent time reading other speculative or academic books that offer a more personal perspective on scripture and been satisfied and not satisfied.
What was different about the author of Hobbits, what brought me to a fresh spring-feeling about God, is the author's love for both novelists, stories, narratives, characters, and worlds, and how he finds God's love there, deep in the imagination of wizards and talking trees and mountains.

What touched me was his wonder at the worlds.
I'd forgotten what it was like to wonder about fantastic places and stories and good characters.
I've existed outside of such things, between maintaining relationships and reading scripture,
I'd forgotten the value of wonder.

And now, uniquely hot from heartbreak,
[which I celebrate! Grief shed is my stamp of the genuine love we swam in over letters and phones]
I find myself delightfully vulnerable in welding my old joy (grown tired, hurt, and dismayed in the past week) in the pursuit and love of God deep into this rediscovery of stories.
The rediscovery of stories.
Of fantasy.
Of imagination.
Of narrative.
Of wonder and whimsy and joy beyond our bounds!

At the top of a new term, my skin warm from the lingering of spring break's last sunset,
I find peace in remembering stories, this medium by which to discover and share God's love amidst studies, apartments, cars, keys, and yaw.

An answered prayer.

I'm going to protect and grow my imagination again.
This time, with a greater understanding of its purpose in understanding life better through my pursuit of love, these things greater than me.
As I find peace, and I offer it to you.

To a younger Riley

Not by much, but I saw you saying this about something you said once,
I wrote the first part like four months ago.
Then the rest would've been sixteen months ago.
and I wanted to share it with everyone...


"So, I wrote this bit a year ago, probably on a sleepless-distracted night much like this one. Reading it over, I find that even though a lot has changed over the last year, pretty much all of it still rings true.

'See, I'm spread between a newspaper job, friends, writing letters, calling home, passing classes, sleeping enough, eating well (enough), editing videos, filming videos, documenting my life (this?), and pursuing a relationship with my spiritual life. It's a lot. Most days, I don't feel like I'm focusing on any one thing. It's as if I'm just piddling about in the pursuit of a college degree so I have my sea legs once I shove off for the new land (ah, the mysteries of the future).

The catch then becomes, in my piddling, I feel unfounded in the pursuit of any one of those aspects of my life. Because I am unfounded in any one of those pursuits, I cannot make significant growth towards any one of my pursuits, and as such, have nothing in-depth to write about besides the aforementioned piddle practice that I'm becoming so proficient with."

To this, Riley, I say, 
It will become clear.
You will
Make your decision and be willing to commit.
Yes, commitment is the death of possibility,
I know that's what you're afraid of. 
I heard you say it every night.
And you know what's coming next.

What is the value of money if you never spend it?
What is the value of all those choices if you never choose anything?
You're worrying that they'll all slip away,
or worse yet, you'll choose the wrong one.
And that worry is just making more noise
You're afraid of regret just as much as life passing you by.

But you're missing the point.
You can grow even from the wrong choices.
They can make you stronger.
Be thoughtful
But this worrying
(that still hasn't gone all the way away)
Will quiet 
with focus.

You will find hope for peace once your piddling brings you to God.
At least for as long as you allow.
That's the cool thing about choices.
You don't HAVE to do anything.
Except die. And pay taxes.
But
God will bring you all those things you're really looking for.
He's started to already.
Even amidst all of the changes.
And He'll let you DO all of those things you want, in addition to giving you that satisfaction.
Only without your pride.
Your pride.
Is awful.

Keep forgetting it.
Focus on love.

The ideas surrounding this God person will give you hope in finding 
something lasting long enough to matter
In filling yourself with
Love
for everyone around you
Bringing all the love you were given back to the world.
And it won't be for you, either,
It won't be some proud march,
Conquest,
Mission,
Goal,
No, it will be God's.

This will give you purpose
Focus

Your values will become clearer,
You'll learn how to stand on a desk.

Old Romance

Today, I wrote four letters.

So I leave an open letter here
on my desk
for you.

+Riley


___________________________________________________

I leave for Ireland soon.

The feeling is akin to dreams and dawn paralleling. First, I see small coincidences, then stitches together and on the day I leave, a release of webbing and knots into the day when I wake up there.

I am not packed yet. I am home, and I’m full of slipping fingers. This premature longing for the past has me anxious in my clicking skin.

How will I grow beyond tourism and local pubs? How will I live? What will I take home? What worries and fears are waiting for me?

I hear the tapping of tomorrow. Excitement, impatience, all in spite of today’s air in my lungs. My heart goes. I keep filling it with noise. I’m drowning my tight throat in Netflix. Eyes open, hands cupped at the sides of my head and the glass is dark, still, quiet, beating.

The trip has kept my cards close to my chest. I’ve come away with what I need to keep upright, by the counting that my worry did in the thick of semesters and grades. Those efforts must now be worth what energy they were given.

There is joy here, and it is warm. Do not watch my joy, in envy. Do not let me be proud of my works. They are not mine. This was given to me, just as everything has been. Allow me to love you and bring you kindling for your own fires while I am here, as I try to understand how to bring the same for myself.

I bring you these, my prayers for you. My whispers of joy and little reminders, victories, hopes. Let my heart be generous because of such blessings among us.

Dearest perfect shine.