Letter to Young Writers

As outrageously vain as it may be for me to write this when I'm barely published myself, I'd like to share a few things I've learned as someone who's been trying to be a writer for several years now.

In order to have the best shot of being a successful writer, I've found that people need three things:

1. An interesting life

I can't stress this enough. Henry Thoreau put it best: "How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live." If you want to be a craftsman rather than an artist, by all means to go to journalism school or a creative writing program, and be satisfied with what you learn there. No disrespect -- there's a place for craftsmen in the writing world. But if your work is to be truly original rather than derivative, you'll have to go out in the world and take a few on the chin. Some people can have deep experiences sitting in a cave. Others, like me, only learn the hard way. But the best art requires a certain depth of experience, and it is often born of genuine struggle. This is, perhaps, why I enjoy Mozart but adore Beethoven. Mozart may be a genius, but Beethoven is a force of nature.

2. Humility

A writer needs a rare combination of confidence and humility in order to do well. If you do it right, confidence and humility are two sides of the same coin -- a realization that you are fundamentally no better than anyone else, but also no worse -- that you deserve the same respect as a child who's genuinely trying his or her best at something hard. You'll never see me disrespect a child who'd genuinely trying, so why should I tolerate myself or anyone else disrespecting me?

3. Doggedness

An anthropology professor told a class during my freshman year, "Every profession has its potsherds." Every serious profession, whether it's scientist, anthropologist, doctor, or writer, has aspects that are tedious and ego-destroying. But this is part of the fire that forges you into a more genuine person. Those incredibly rare prodigies who can sit down and dash out deathless prose are missing out on the hard work the rest of us have to do. For most of us, it's like any other difficult endeavor. No one expects anyone to come out and win a gold medal or play a concerto without hours and years of often tedious and humbling practice and, more often than not, failure. But if you love it, you know, and you keep on, confident, humble, dogged, and interesting.

Two poems

Diamond Emerald

The whole reason
we love jewels
is because
they remind us
dimly
of sunlight
through trees.

(Jan? 2009)


What I've Learned

I don’t believe in hate.
I don’t believe in hell.
There’s only love,
and fear of loss,
And that works just as well.

(20 Feb 2009)

Leonard Cohen Song for Palestine

Songs that are too political tend to have a deadening effect on me somehow. This song is just about everything. Including Gaza, though that couldn't have been the intent. It made me feel just a little bit luminous, just for a little while.


Anthem

by Leonard Cohen

The birds they sang
at the break of day
Start again
I heard them say
Don't dwell on what
has passed away
or what is yet to be.
Ah the wars they will
be fought again
The holy dove
She will be caught again
bought and sold
and bought again
the dove is never free.

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.

We asked for signs
the signs were sent:
the birth betrayed
the marriage spent
Yeah the widowhood
of every government --
signs for all to see.

I can't run no more
with that lawless crowd
while the killers in high places
say their prayers out loud.
But they've summoned,
they've summoned up
a thundercloud
and they're going to hear from me.

Ring the bells that still can ring ...

You can add up the parts
but you won't have the sum
You can strike up the march,
there is no drum
Every heart, every heart
to love will come
but like a refugee.

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.

When I was 22

Here's an email I wrote to my mother on October 21, 2002, shortly after I graduated from college:

Right now what's making me feel good is being here in California with my friends and community and mentors and worldview-bending conversations with wildly diverse people that are helping shape my life and my choices more than any institutionalized class ever could. Of course I have the potential to be led astray or get freaked out or join a cult or waste all my money or get into bad substances or do stupid things, but you just have to have faith that I am a free agent, a relatively intelligent and motivated one who loves life and tries to think freely and live healthfully, and I'll make decent decisions. Maybe not the best, maybe not the ones you would have chosen, and maybe you won't see the rhyme or reason to the path that my heart follows. But no one ever promised me or you that things would make sense right away.

Mr. Thoreau dabbled in pencil manufacturing for years before he found his path and sat down by a lake and "frittered his life away" writing silly little stories that would later profoundly influence Gandhi and his subcontinent. Thomas Paine worked as a corset-maker for years before he sailed to new lands and wrote books that fomented the revolution that formed the country we now live in. Roald Dahl hiked aimlessly around Newfoundland and then took a post in humid, malaria-infested Africa before he joined the Royal Air Force and later wrote children's books that we all grew up on. I admire these people far more, and their lives make my eyes shine brighter, than whoever was the richest or most powerful man in Concord while Thoreau was eating lunch with his mom by a lake. That's just how I am. I value freedom and adventure more than security and institutional validation. And not everyone who's like that ends up as a miserable failure, and I'm lucky enough and educated enough and have a degree to fall back on, so I can follow a non-traditional path and probably not crash and burn. Why not? Who am I hurting, living this way?

My eyes are finally shining for something, I feel less lonely and repressed. And in any case, if it doesn't work out in the next few years, then I'll be only, what, 26 years old? Not too late to start over, wiser and humbler and full of stories.

I'm probably not going to influence nearly as many people as any of these men, but nonetheless, I want to forge a life less ordinary, a life off the beaten track, a life with heart if not with loads of cash and real estate. And I have enough friends all over the world that I'll never starve. And I live healthy enough that I'm not making myself sick all the time. Insurance is not going to do a lot of good if the shit really hits the fan, but a huge network of friends will. That's my insurance. And it's a lot more fun than selling my time to someone I don't care about and giving it to someone else I don't care about in the name of "security." And it's partly because I have all these friends who live more "secure" lives that I can afford to live like I do. But many of them seem to enjoy my stories and my presence enough for me to be worth having around and occasionally helping out. I'm young and naive and glib, and it may catch up with me, and I may have to start over years in the future when it's not so easy. But that's what I choose for now, the uncertainty and the adventure.

I only have this one life. It's just the way I am, and I'm not exhorting anyone to live like I do. I'm not even asking for permission or acceptance or respect. Just... give me a chance, and let me fail and succeed gracefully, as a human being as cognizant and imperfect as any other.

I'm 22 years old. I'm a freshman in the world, and I'm going to make mistakes. But that's the only way I'll learn. I think it was you who introduced me to the Tallulah Bankhead quote: "If I had my life to do over, I'd make all the same mistakes, only I'd make them a lot sooner."

So here I go.

Six Random Things

 









Here are six random things you probably didn't know about me. (Thanks to Grace, whose blog is listed on the right, for initiating this):

1. I like to line things up. I like to see the sun through a tree, or see the crescent moon balanced on top of the Washington Monument. I love it even more when the planets and moon line up in some kind of neat pattern without my intervention.

2. If I step on too many of one kind of thing with one foot (cracks, shadows, red tiles) and not the other, I start feeling edgy and off-balance. With a little effort, I can ignore it, though.

3. I compulsively flip pens around my thumb even when I'm typing on a computer. (I pause my typing every now and then to twirl it, or twirl it while I'm thinking.)

4. I tried to write a book when I was about thirteen called The Creek, about two boys who escaped a bizarre murder attempt by their uncle while their parents were away and had to live by a creek all summer. I wasn't trying to be macabre. I was just trying to find a credible reason to have two boys living on a creek all summer. But the whole attempted murder scene was bumming me out, so I stopped writing it.

5. I have something like 4,000 pages worth of journals lying around in my room in Stigler, Oklahoma.

6. I'm grateful for the pain I've experienced in some of my relationships. Pain is an amazing catalyst and teacher if handled carefully and correctly. Sometimes, though, it really is just an unnecessary pain in the ass.

Favorite Thing

It occurred to me the other day that my favorite thing to do is just to exist in the same world as the people I love and admire. And I get to do that every day.

Gorgeous Nightmare

Ramallah, Summer 2004. Soon the crescent moon shone faintly in a sky all the pale shades of a child’s dream of heaven, the hills and their white houses turning pale, pretty colors as the sun sank into the horizon, space all around, valleys drifting by, everything tiny and toy-like and immense. I was like a child-idiot, I couldn’t get over it, and I resisted the urge to be self-conscious. Still, who looks at the moon like that at this age, full of fancies and dreams? And I used to be a physicist! I’m glad, though. I wouldn’t trade moonlove for any kind of silly respectability. I do want to live life in reality, but society is full of dark fancies and superstitions as well, and the natural world is, simply is a fancy dream. A gorgeous nightmare, a horrible blessed vision. Drifters like me, who have nothing immediate to occupy ourselves with, we can become part of the dream. Well, we’re all part of it, but we’re not always aware of it beyond our immediate life and needs. And I don’t blame Palestinians, e.g., for being focused on the immediate! If they don’t focus, they as a people and culture will perish, and no more olive-picking dreamers will inhabit this land any longer.

Anyway, on this day, for the first time, I felt really glad to be here, really content and excited and wise in my choice to do what I was doing. I wasn’t looking forward or back, I was just here, now, and happy. Exercise, competition, physical social interaction, these things mean so much to my well-being. Strange. I really am an animal, and thinking only does so much good, and then I must satisfy my body to let my mind relax and smile. I’m so boyish in some ways, and then today I was Arabic dancing half-naked in the mirror, looking admiringly at my pretty girl’s body, my slender, tanned wrists and my white, strong abs, and I wore the gorgeous silver necklace with the three panels covered with silver shapes and stones of muted colors that I got for 2 JD in Amman, and I feel like life, friendly life, blessed me in every way it could, gave me everything I needed, even the hardships and imperfections, to be who and what she whispered to me to try to be. So what if I’m her pawn? I get to be me, and somehow she also allowed me to be happy to be who I am, even proud sometimes, even though I can claim no credit. There’s no one I envy, no one I’d rather be. Almost nothing in my life I’d change. Aren’t I silly? Best of all possible worlds. Nature allowed me this strange little window of contentment. Blind contentment, maybe. The best kind.

In other ways I want nothing more than to have my last illusion shattered, my last veil lifted. Every one shattered so far has been painful, horrible, and exhilarating and left me stronger and calmer and happier. Imagine if this process can keep going? To what end I don’t know, but stronger and calmer and happier is end enough, and the means have been star-studded cruel beauty as well. Like Goldmund, I have nothing to show for it, nothing concrete to offer, but now and then someone recognizes the Masters degree in life I’ve picked up, the aimless, naïve striving towards a PhD in being human in my own specialized field, which I haven’t figured out yet. I’m a fool, but I’ve been given a gorgeous quest, a gorgeous path, in a sad, wilting, magnificent world. I get to live many lives, be many people, love many people, superficially sometimes perhaps, but always genuinely. I’d be a great spy. I pass, incognito, harmless-looking, through the world with shifting outer identity and restless but confident waiting center. Waiting to come into harmony with its surroundings.

Universal Health Care = Freedom

One argument no one seems to be making is how universal healthcare will unlock tremendous potential in thinkers and entrepreneurs. So many brilliant people are locked into boring, unfulfilling jobs simply because they are terrified to be without health care. How many Bill Gates-es are sitting around in offices unable to pursue their dreams because if they quit and decided to bartend instead, or live on savings or squat in their parents' garage, while they put their inventions and ideas together, they would be utterly exposed either to the predatory pricing of insurance companies or the possibility that one misstep, one mutated cell, could put them in debt for life?

Universal health care = freedom. Isn't that what America is supposed to be all about?

What is neither Law nor Chaos?

For 'Dynamic Quality' you can substitute the word 'Tao' or whatever you want -- basically the thing that organizes the universe, that 'decides' which state an electron assumes and informs the universe of which configurations are 'better' than some more chaotic or more rigid alternative. No bets on whether it is 'intelligent' or 'conscious' or whatever other human-centric word we want to use to try to describe it...

Another excerpt from Robert Pirsig's Lila:

“It seems clear that no mechanistic pattern exists toward which life is heading, but has the question been taken up of whether life is heading away from mechanistic patterns?”

He guessed that the question had not been taken up at all. The concepts necessary for taking it up were not at hand. In a metaphysics in which static universal laws are considered fundamental, the idea that life is evolving away from any law just draws a baffled question mark. It doesn’t make any sense. It seems to say that all life is headed toward chaos, since chaos is the only alternative to structural patterns that a law-bound metaphysics can conceive.

But Dynamic Quality is not structured and yet it is not chaotic. It is value that cannot be contained by any static patterns. What the substance-centered evolutionists were showing with their absence of final “mechanisms” or “programs” was not an air-tight case for the biological goallessness of life. What they were unintentionally showing was a superb example of how values create reality.

Science values static patterns. Its business is to search for them. When non-conformity appears it is considered an interruption of the normal rather than the presence of the normal. A deviation from a normal static pattern is something to be explained and if possible controlled. The reality science explains is that “reality” which follows from mechanisms and programs. The other worthless stuff which doesn’t follow mechanisms and programs we don’t pay any attention to.

See how this works? A thing doesn’t exist because we have never observed it. The reason we have never observed it is because we have never looked for it. And the reason we have never looked for it is that it is unimportant, it has no value and we have better things to do.

Because of his different metaphysical orientation Phaedrus saw instantly that those seemingly trivial, unimportant, “spur of the moment” decisions that Mayr was talking about [“No program controlled or directed evolution. It was result of spur of the moment decisions of natural selection.”], the decisions that directed the progress of evolution are, in fact, Dynamic Quality itself. Dynamic Quality, the source of all things, the pre-intellectual cutting edge of reality, always appears as “spur of the moment.” Where else could it appear?

~ Pirsig, Lila, 142

Freedom and Order

Excerpt from Robert Pirsig's Lila.

Freedom. That was the topic that would drive home this whole understanding of Indians… Of all the contributions America has made to the history of the world, the idea of freedom from a social hierarchy has been the greatest. It was fought for in the American Revolution and confirmed in the Civil War. To this day it’s still the most powerful, compelling ideal holding the whole nation together.

And yet, although Jefferson called this doctrine of social equality “self-evident,” it is not at all self-evident… There is no “self-evidence” in European history that all men are created equal. There’s no nation in Europe that doesn’t trace its history to a time when it was “self-evident” that all men are created unequal. Jean Jacques Rousseau, who is sometimes given credit for this doctrine, certainly didn’t get it from the history of Europe or Asia or Africa. He got it from the impact of the New World upon Europe and from contemplation of one particular kind of individual who lived in the New World, the person he called the “Noble Savage.”

The idea that “all men are created equal” is a gift to the world from the American Indian. Europeans who settled here only transmitted it as a doctrine that they sometimes followed and sometimes did not. The real source was someone for whom social equality was no mere doctrine, who had equality built into his bones. To him it was inconceivable that the world could be any other way…

The Indians haven’t yet lost this one. They haven’t yet won it either… the fight isn’t over. It’s still the central internal conflict in America today. It’s a fault line, a discontinuity that runs through the center of the American cultural personality. It’s dominated American history from the beginning and continues to be a source of both national strength and weakness today… this conflict between European and Indian values, between freedom and order…

...

A depression always came over him when he came East like this… He was a Midwesterner and he shared the prejudices of many Midwesterners against this region of the country. He didn’t like the way everything gets more stratified here. The rich start looking richer and the poor start looking poorer. What was worse, they looked as though they thought this was the way thing ought to be. There was no sign it was going to change.

In a state like Minnesota or Wisconsin, you can be poor and still feel some sense of dignity if you work hard and live fairly cleanly and keep your eye on the future. But here in New York it seemed as if when you’re poor you’re just poor. And that means you’re nobody. Really nobody. And if you’re rich you’re really somebody. And that fact seemed to explain ninety-five percent of everything else that went on in this region.

Maybe he was just noticing it more because he’d been thinking about Indians. Some of these difference are just urban-rural differences, and the East is more urban. But some of these differences reflected European values too. Every time he came this way he could feel the people getting more formal and impersonal and… crafty. Exploitative. European. And petty, too, and ungenerous.

Out West among the Indians it’s a standing joke that the chief is the poorest man in the tribe. Every time somebody needs something he’s the one they go to, and by the Indian code, “the generosity of the frontier,” he has to help them. Phaedrus didn’t think you’d see much of that along this river. He could just imagine some strange riverboat man pulling up at Astor’s mansion and saying, “I just saw a light on and thought I’d stop in and say ‘hello.’” He wouldn’t get past the butler. They’d be horrified at his impertinence. Yet in the West [or in most areas of Palestine, I found] they’d probably feel obliged to invite him in.

It just got worse and worse around here. The rich got glitzier and glitzier and the poor got scuzzier and scuzzier until you finally got to New York City. Homeless crazies hovering over ventilator grates while billionaires are escorted past them to their limousines. With each somehow accepting this as natural.

Milk Cow

August 22, 2008. It’s clear that the universe is ‘amoral,’ in the same sense that Pakistan doesn’t care about the Stigler Panthers women’s softball team. Morality is a local little human invention designed to temper the worst expressions of ego to the ultimate benefit even of the egotistical—because we simply wouldn’t last long as a species without some kind of check on the insanity of ego. Morality is a tiny little sign of a certain level of self-preservational maturity, and it can even reach a certain level of ‘truth’ when it is applied universally and intelligently. But something higher than our self-preservation is clearly at play. Concepts like ‘good’ and ‘bad’ only have meaning at some fuzzy local level. The things we see as ‘good’ can be broken into two categories: the lower category, which feeds our ego, and the higher category, which feeds our true joy of consciousness.

But I worry sometimes that even my true joy of consciousness feeds something I might not, in the end, agree with—something sinister or foolish. That the universe is just using me as a milk cow.

But how ludicrous is that? Concepts like ‘sinister’ and ‘foolish’ probably don’t even have any meaning outside of our tiny human context. And so what if I’m a milk cow? How can I complain when I’m built to love my pasture and love giving milk? It’s control I’m really worried about giving up—as if I could somehow exert any control over the destiny of the universe! No organized committee of dinosaurs could have dug in their heels and refused to go extinct. The universe had other ideas.

The universe gave me the capacity to be happy and useful right where and when I am. Honestly—do I have anything better to do? Straying from my own heart’s path would be like insisting on breathing bottled helium because I don’t want the outside world to control me by choosing which air I should breathe, when in fact all the outside world ever did was provide a limitless supply of exactly what my body needs.

Love Palestine

October 2004. I’m starting to figure out why Palestine grabs me and won’t let me go. Nature is generous, content, unsuspecting. Yielding and conciliatory, disorganized but fairly stable. If something new manages to take hold, it’s given the benefit of the doubt. Nature spreads a wide blanket and then culls itself until there’s about enough to go around. It seeks overall balance and stability. As a child of this system, I crave it.

It’s strong enough to withstand anything but the profit motive. The profit motive unbalances. It hoards and concentrates, it asks for guarantees in a world of chaos. Anything that yields is destroyed by it. Anything that fights it and doesn’t become it is destroyed by it. I’m not asking for feudalism or to become hunter-gatherers, but just the mindset that we’re all human, the world is generous, we’ll all die some day so we might as well enjoy the time and the abundance we have, that the very last thing we should do in a cruel and beautiful world is to accentuate and dwell on and worry about and increase the cruelty, create our own human-born cruelty and try to dominate each other, fight each other for control when control is a great illusion.

When I sit in a coffee house with Westerners, there’s always an undercurrent of worry, of self-consciousness, of judgment. When I sit with Palestinians, every little funny thing we or anyone else does, it’s just that—funny. Delightful. Just people. Masha’Allah. No judgment unless actual harm is intended. And why would harm be intended? People who intend harm are considered surprising and kind of pitiful. Crazy a little bit, and sad. Something to avoid, something dangerous and incomprehensible and not worth our good time. Not something to fight—something to walk away from, like a sick person who’s contagious and refuses to seek treatment or even cover their mouth when they cough. Like some poor kid with a flame thrower attached to his arm that burns himself and anyone who comes near, and who can see a reason to walk up to them and risk being burned? It’s sad that they have isolated themselves, but life is too short to walk into sickness and fire and get nothing but sick and burned. And of course whenever they get well and cool down, they are welcome back.

This mentality, to me, is so relaxing. It fits. It feels like home. I feel at ease, I feel warm and perfect and unworried. The point is not that we’re perfect; the point is, we don’t stress about being perfect. We’re doing our best. We’re here. We’re fine. It’s quite enough. So it’s perfect.

Oh, but the profit motive comes, the drive for control and domination, and we can’t walk away when there’s a bulldozer on our lawn and a boot on our neck and a bullet in a child’s brain. If we do nothing we lose. If we fight fire with fire we lose spectacularly and become what we hate in the process. How in the end can we fight without fighting when they are treating us so violently and brutally? How can everything strong and yielding just get mown down with steel blades? How did this happen? Am I just a reactionary? But to what end all this brutally precise machinery? What the hell are we doing?

The ones who seek domination at the expense of all else live in perpetual fear and eventually fall. The ones who yield and smile and trust, they would last longer, endure and be stronger and happier and live more genuinely, but the cowboys have to come and take it all in a swipe. Take a strong, graceful citadel and cram it into an ugly, ill-fated house of cards. For what? Even the vaunted middle classes are popping pills. We can do better.

Class Warfare?

It just occurred to me that when I first watched the cartoon version of Robin Hood as a young kid, I was so ignorant I didn’t understand the concept of class. I didn’t realize that Maid Marion was anything but a girl Robin liked, and I couldn’t understand why there was any problem with them being together. The clothes they wore didn’t send the right signals to my brain because I was unaware of their context. And even if they had, back then I was so ignorant I would have thought it was foolish and childish to separate people based on such petty, meaningless things.

How nice if we could raise all kids like this!

Booby Trap

One time in April of 2007, my friend Liz was visiting me in DC (her plane to Beijing out of Dulles was delayed by a day), and we walked down U St. to find a place to have dinner. At one point she was looking around and saw a mysteriously abandoned set of golf clubs in a tattered golf bag leaning against a column in the shade of a street lamp.

She pointed it out to me, and just being a smart-ass, I said, "Don't touch it, it may be a roadside bomb."

She started laughing helplessly, maniacally, far out of proportion to whatever amount of wit my comment may have had. I waited for her to calm down and tell me what was so funny. Finally, still gasping, she said, "It's like a booby trap for politicians!"

Yes! The perfect bait. We both started laughing then, imagining Carl Rove walking by, noticing the golf clubs out of the corner of his eye, stopping in his tracks, looking around surreptitiously to make sure no one was watching, creeping slowly toward the loot, and then...

Words

January 25, 2004. I was thinking today how I write in my journal partly to try to capture, crystallize, remember beautiful moments that would otherwise just pass by like a fart in the wind. And I thought how that was impossible. I can't capture anything, and I don't need to, because if I keep playing my cards right, life will be an almost ceaseless stream of exquisite moments. I mean, it will be, but if I play my cards right, I'll notice it. And I thought of all the other billions of people and their countless peak moments, their numberless teas drunk in the clear morning light, finding a new friend squatting in the turnip patch, moments that don't yet have a place in my imagination they're so far from my experience. And they're all there, stuck in the timeline, all at the same "moment," and that's tremendous power. Tremendous to imagine inhaling into your head for a moment all the clear, peaceful, pure, gorgeous, calm, quietly blissful moments from a billion lives lived (at least sometimes) well. The potential we have for that, it could quietly shake the world.

People are so amazing. All our private, disjointed, unique, compartmentalized moments that words would shatter, cheapen, diminish... The Tao that can be spoken is not the real Tao. The most reliable way we have to communicate is through words (there are probably better ways that we haven't developed yet), and sometimes they can't touch, can't fit the feelings we have. I find different feelings and find myself using the same words to describe them. Yes, calm, yes, bliss, yes, exquisite. But so much more that I have no words for. Words tire and grow pale, but the feeling is always new and never hackneyed or tired. It can become that way if you try to box it in. Why do we keep doing that? How can we tap a power we're so bad at expressing, sharing, communicating? So often we have trouble even feeling it. But it's there. I guess we have to believe in it.

The Moony Mile

July 19, 2005. I've been in kind of an exalted, subdued state of mind today. I've been reading Stephen King's The Green Mile, and I know it's not the deepest drink of literature out there, but something in it, so mundane and human as death and stars, kind of breaks your heart down a little. To think of the sprawling night sky we never see anymore because we're in big cities watching TVs, to think of the joy it gives to a simple man sprung from death row for the night...

I want more than anything on earth to go to that Bedouin camp on the Sinai with Patrick in September when there's a new moon, I want to show him the galaxy over the Gulf. I want to show him the starfields in the water and those mountains changing color and God himself hanging back in awe of his own creation, of the life it's taken on so dazzling and exquisite and intense and vast even he can't really believe it. For us... All we can do is be knocked back on our butts and worship in drunken awe and gratitude. We're wholly unworthy... And yet we're every bit as much a part of it, every bit as gorgeous and intricate as the clear crescent moon itself. How empty the sky is over the Sinai! There's nothing between you and heaven when you're there. It's a terrifying, humbling, awesome place. So naked and raw and unspeakable.

Of course there are always Percys and Brads to stomp on every sacred thing and make you feel foolish for your starry-eyed worship of simple, everyday things. I even chide myself sometimes, but I don't care. Jesus said to be like the little children, and so did Khalil Gibran, and I think they had the right idea.

I called Patrick after I finished the book at 11:15. I couldn't bear to go to sleep utterly alone after that. He was sweet and smart and insightful as usual. He's living in the Old City of Nablus now, seems to like it. I just want him to go to the Sinai with me, that's all I want. I promise I won't steal him from his girl back home. I'm just tired of worshiping alone.

So cheap and mundane the exalted thrills of the human heart. We mock ourselves out of self-defense. We're terrified of being helpless children on death row. But that's exactly what we are. Hoping some kind of grace comes our way. Doing our pathetic, valiant best.

Pat said it was good to hear from me. I waited a week to call. He's got his own life, and I'm sure he thinks about his girl. I wonder if he thinks of me. It doesn't matter. Love is an absolute good, and we spoil it worrying all the time about whether it comes out even. When love becomes obsessive and possessive, it becomes a kind of madness, a kind of evil. I'm just glad I got to love Patrick for a bit. He's not my first or last or best or only love, but I do love him and love the times we shared together. And that's also as sacred as the clear crescent moon.

Choke Hold

May 1, 2003. Ross, one of the older black belt instructors, attacked me pretty hard the other day, was choking me from behind to prove a point, and I panicked a little, couldn't think clearly or escape, and I felt I'd black out before I could break the hold. He let me go, told me to grab the arm that was choking me and loosen that grip first, then he told me how to put my weight on him and throw him better. He attacked me again and I escaped.

But that feeling the first time, of surprise and helplessness, fear and confusion, it made me think of all the people in Iraq and elsewhere who are being and have been and will be overpowered and killed or disappeared, that helplessness and sadness and fear and rage, it seemed more immediate to me, and it made my stomach hurt. That is so many people's reality, and many don't make it to learn from their mistakes.

Rum Night

October 2003

I took a deep breath, peeled myself off the Sinai, and caught the ferry up through the Gulf of Aqaba to Jordan. The first box to check on my guidebook-driven itinerary was Wadi Rum, the spectacular desert valley where Lawrence of Arabia was filmed. The valley was punctuated by ancient stone mountains that had been sculpted into grotesquely beautiful shapes by the erosive currents of ancient seas and a billion years of wind. Some of them looked like slightly melted gothic cathedrals with flying buttresses and everything. I took a Jeep tour to see some natural bridges, ancient rock carvings, and watering holes where Bedouins served tea and sold five-minute camel rides to shirtless Hungarian tourists.

At night our guide set up camp against a sheer rock cliff and rustled up some burnt, undercooked chicken and delicious roasted tomatoes and onions. After dinner we had tea and fruit next to the cliff while a friend of our guide played his lute. The moon lit up the sand and mountains to the west and south while we were still in the moon-shade of the wall, and it was otherworldly beautiful. The border of the moon-shadow advanced on us until midnight, when the full moon cleared the cliff above us.

I wandered away to find a nice dune to sit on and take it all in. The moon had a bright ring around it about twenty moon-diameters across, which made it look like the dome of the great cathedral. The jagged stone mountains were like pillars conjured by God, and the surrounding sea of silken sand softly refracted the moonlight’s radiance. The stars, subtly colored, brilliant, three-dimensional, embedded in the silvery ink of unlikely existence, took my breath away. The breeze, neither warm nor cool, seemed to blow through me. And then—

A sudden crescendo, and I was overcome. My cup wasn’t just running over—it was being made a sheer mockery of, like a wine glass placed under a thousand-foot waterfall; I was battered utterly senseless by warm, weightless bliss and wonder. It was as clear as a diamond that there was nothing to fear and nothing to hope for; the universe was already more perfect than my wildest reckoning. Even the air shimmered, and the universe appeared as a thrillingly brimming void, a perfect sanctuary, crystalline in perfection yet warm and inviting in its carefree chaos. There was no meaningful distance between me and the stars. The only distraction from perfect happiness was a sweet, desperate longing to be a bigger vessel so that I could feel more of this vast surging current of benevolence within me all at once. Gratitude exuded from me like a scent...

Alas, alas. My reverie was punctured by my Bedouin guide ambling up the side of my dune to investigate whether the romance of the setting might incline me toward romance with him. I couldn’t bear to desecrate this setting with anything as banal as his foolish hopes or my irritation. Claiming exhaustion, I walked back to camp and lay down next to the fire, sighing as my head descended slowly out of orbit and back toward the shared reality of the everyday.

Money, cars, hotels... That was my incomprehensible tomorrow. For appearance’s sake, I knew that I would have to pretend, to convince myself, that it was all more real and more important than that moment on the dune.

Somehow, by the very next morning, I managed to.

But while I was on the dune, in my mind I wrote a poem to try to capture it, although no poem should be mistaken for the reality it tries clumsily to point toward.

A barren moon
reflects
a barren earth.

The silvery sky
mocks my best attempts
at reverence.

Elsewhere life rages.

Here it is subtle,
hushed,
as if in the presence
of divinity.

The mountains
may once have been
high as the Himalayas;
after a billion years
of seas and wind,
they are sculpted
down to unfathomable
stone hearts -
cathedral islands
in a sea of silken sand.

Reflections echo
each other
in the brimming void
of nature's holy sanctuary.
Silent gratitude
is drawn from my soul;
the night needs me
like I need it.

The breeze
- neither warm nor cool -
makes me feel
like I'm not here
on this impossible planet
whose atmosphere
I suddenly
fail to see
and fail to feel.

There is nothing
between me
and the stars.

Meaningful Casual

April 16, 2005. I have very warm feelings for Sean. I miss him viscerally right now. Thursday night we stayed up late talking, it was so nice, and then he kissed me good-night. It's confusing to act like lovers even though we're not in love. Mentally I understand what we're doing. I understand we're both at points in our lives that favor freedom over stability and commitment, and yet we can't get by without a good snog now and then, and a regular snog partner is even better.

But physically and emotionally I get attached. Not super-attached or long-term attached, and I can detach when I have to, no big problem. But I like being attached, even if it's short-term. I like a warm kiss good-night. I want to hug him right now and be warm for a boy who feels bad over his wrecked car and hates living alone in his echoing aparment in Jerusalem. It doesn't matter if he's as attached or not, and I'd much rather he be not one bit more attached to me than I am to him. Of course I love to love, and I'd love to be loved, even if it's understood that that love is subordinate to my love of freedom right now. It's still love. Love is grand, and it's so possible to kiss it as it flies. I hope.

Shelling Peas

Great Moments in Small Town Eastern Oklahoma History

The other day my mom and I were having lunch with one of the high school English teachers at the Eaton Hole, a fine establishment whose decor includes at least four dead animals, a cardboard cutout of the Ten Commandments, and enough camouflage to outfit the Viet Cong, and whose preferred sandwich bread is as white and tasteless as its clientele.

The English teacher was talking about shelling peas all day on her porch and how long it took, how annoying it was, and how few peas she actually got out of all that work.

She leaned in close to us and whispered earnestly, "You know, now I understand why people had slaves. If I had one, I'd definitely not be shelling all those peas."

This has been Great Moments in Small Town Eastern Oklahoma History. Stay tuned for our next installment...

Tumblin' in the Seaweed

One time in late 2002 or early 2003, a little boy looked at me and said, “Tumblin’ in the seaweed,” when I was tumblin’ in the seaweed while trying to surf in Santa Cruz. He said it just like that. Just looked at me and told me what I was doing, as if he or I might not have noticed it otherwise, as if the words brought the action from abstraction to reality, and then to far deeper abstraction. Just a kid! Tumblin’ in the seaweed. Just making note of something beautiful and interesting and curious. Something banal and uninspired on the one hand—the mechanics of waves, my lack of skills, the nuisance of slimy seaweed. Another Santa Cruz beach day. But the kid said the words, and I’ll never forget it. Suddenly it was cosmic, magical. What would possess a kid, of these soulless times, to say a thing like that? I still wonder.