"Musings in the Wilderness"-posted earlier this month and taken down for a bit. Now i'm reposting it as it was originally written. More thoughts to come soon.
Over the course of the past 10-11 months, my life has felt like a roller-coaster. In August of 2009, I moved to Charlottesville, Virginia, in hopes of finding a deeper sense of rootedness. I came here looking for that-longing to be rooted in a place, in a people, in a community. After nearly two years of reading the works of Wendell Berry, I longed to plant myself in a place that I could call home, maybe even building or buying a home, starting a life there, and cultivating rich ties to a place and a people.
Soon after moving here, I realized that moving alone is dangerous, particularly when one has no community from which to draw support. And slowly I also realized that not all people are made for every place. There are communities here, some of which that are doing quite well, but everywhere I turn it feels like i'm a square peg trying to fit into a round hole. Where I lived before, Washington, DC, I would often lament the transience of city life, particularly amongst my generation. However, in the process of wailing over its vices, I rarely stopped to think that I might be part of the change that I wanted so deeply to see in my own city. DC for me was usually transitory, a place that I was merely passing through that would help me get to the place that I wanted to go, perhaps-I told myself-even needed to go.
Now, as I look back on my time in the city in yet another place of transience, a college town with few folks my age who have plans to spend their lives here, I am faced with the consequences of my shortsighted approach to urban life. Had I stayed in DC, I wonder if things couldn't have been different-if i'd moved into the city, against all odds making the place that seemed so cause-focused but remained so disconnected my home. If I had chosen to love the brokenness and hardship that is urban life because I believed that the city had the ability to change, and to change me, maybe life would look differently.
At its roots, though, this is no "I wish I had done the past differently" tale, although at times I do wish I had done the past differently. The decisions I made have helped shape my character and my understanding into what they are today, and had I not gone through some of the hardships of the past year i'd never have the hopes and longings that I do now. The road has been tough, incredibly tough, and lonely but it does not end here. To the city I will one day return. In the meantime, I am a pilgrim who is roaming the prairie in search of the Western pass that will take me through the mountains and into the new land of plenty. The wilderness has been exhausting, and it has felt like years since I had a good meal, but the hint of purple on the horizon tells me there is something beyond its setting that I cannot quite see.
At this point, there is no glimmer of a radiant Pacific Ocean and truly no sense of when the trail will stop winding through the thorny brush. What remains instead is the almost foolish hope against hope that one day things will be different and that one day the sun-parched ground that I have been tilling will be soaked in a glorious rain. Until then, I long for what is not yet revealed but craved from deep within.
Soon after moving here, I realized that moving alone is dangerous, particularly when one has no community from which to draw support. And slowly I also realized that not all people are made for every place. There are communities here, some of which that are doing quite well, but everywhere I turn it feels like i'm a square peg trying to fit into a round hole. Where I lived before, Washington, DC, I would often lament the transience of city life, particularly amongst my generation. However, in the process of wailing over its vices, I rarely stopped to think that I might be part of the change that I wanted so deeply to see in my own city. DC for me was usually transitory, a place that I was merely passing through that would help me get to the place that I wanted to go, perhaps-I told myself-even needed to go.
Now, as I look back on my time in the city in yet another place of transience, a college town with few folks my age who have plans to spend their lives here, I am faced with the consequences of my shortsighted approach to urban life. Had I stayed in DC, I wonder if things couldn't have been different-if i'd moved into the city, against all odds making the place that seemed so cause-focused but remained so disconnected my home. If I had chosen to love the brokenness and hardship that is urban life because I believed that the city had the ability to change, and to change me, maybe life would look differently.
At its roots, though, this is no "I wish I had done the past differently" tale, although at times I do wish I had done the past differently. The decisions I made have helped shape my character and my understanding into what they are today, and had I not gone through some of the hardships of the past year i'd never have the hopes and longings that I do now. The road has been tough, incredibly tough, and lonely but it does not end here. To the city I will one day return. In the meantime, I am a pilgrim who is roaming the prairie in search of the Western pass that will take me through the mountains and into the new land of plenty. The wilderness has been exhausting, and it has felt like years since I had a good meal, but the hint of purple on the horizon tells me there is something beyond its setting that I cannot quite see.
At this point, there is no glimmer of a radiant Pacific Ocean and truly no sense of when the trail will stop winding through the thorny brush. What remains instead is the almost foolish hope against hope that one day things will be different and that one day the sun-parched ground that I have been tilling will be soaked in a glorious rain. Until then, I long for what is not yet revealed but craved from deep within.
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