Uhhhhh

This is the number of times the lecturer said "uh" in humanities this
morning.

570. In 50 minutes. Uh.

every war has an end

Boundless begins: one month to 3,000 miles of america, sore butts, lotta country, pretty stellar calf muscles, and a newfound community

This summer, my brother and I, along with two friends from home, and David's roommate at Duke, will be riding our bicycles across the USA to raise money for and awareness about Falling Whistles, a campaign for peace in Congo.

Be watching for the link to a facebook group about the trip, and for a link to the group blog. Journey with us.

In the last few days, in reading what I will post below, I have realized that the only thing better than the passion and excitement and movement and "spiders and broken glass, and decay and rage and fur and feathers, and dirt and shit and the love of God" found in being a part of a community who seek to reconstitute the world daily--people moving away from the profane toward a deep sense of connectedness with the living world, that so desperately needs all of us to fight for it, and each other, daily...

The only thing better than that, is doing it standing next to your brother.

Artist: Chris Gracey (roomie love)

So this is what David wrote, about this summer, to the four other guys who are going on the trip:

"Strive to be what only you can be. Strive to want what everyone else may have as well."

-Lanza del Vasta

Will Watson, Justin Zhao, Andrew Childress, Connor Myers, David Watson.

This summer, the five of us are going to write a really big story.

It’s funny how this story starts- in my journal, the entry for November 24, 2009 simply reads, “Read A Million Miles in a Thousand Years by Donald Miller.”

Nothing in there at all about a cross-country bike trip. Not a word about looking out the window of an airplane hurtling through the air several miles above the ground and realizing I was about to be living my life completely differently. Yet that was the day when something really big started moving, something that has moved me to reimagine everything I thought I knew about myself.

I’ve always wanted to be a doctor, and about a year and a half ago, I realized I was going to work in places where there aren't doctors, places most people really don’t want to get any closer to than the occasional uncomfortable news bulletin splashing across the screen just long enough to fill the time between the mashed potatoes and pork chops, sandwiched somewhere between sports and weather. Call me naïve, but for a seventeen year old, I had a pretty good idea of what that decision was going to mean and what kind of life I was looking forward to, and that conviction turned out to be pretty powerful. I rode the strength of that passion into Duke University, a kid with a big dream who had been living on a farm in North Texas a few months before.

For pre-med freshmen studying global health, at this point in Duke University life, most people go and do global health projects during the summer- Africa, South America, Southeastern Asia. And I always thought that's what I would be doing too- never even gave a thought to doing anything else.

But as my first semester of college wore on, I found myself less and less sure a global health project was what I should be doing this summer. I'm just a college student- I don't have any medical skills. I don't speak any languages besides English. And it might cost more than I can afford- duke has plenty of funding available, but there was no guarantee I would get any, and Duke’s tuition is more than enough strain on any family without adding expensive plane tickets to the total.

Increasingly dissatisfied, I began to think, what can I do with the skills I have now? How can I, a teenager who really has nothing to offer, best serve other people, the people who are the poorest, most destitute? How can I serve the people the world has forgotten, ignored, turned away from? And to be honest, I had no idea. No clue whatsoever.

And then I read a book. (If you’re also trying to find out where to begin your story, I recommend you try this out; it’s a pretty good place to start). At the beginning of Thanksgiving break, on my flight back home, I finally picked up Donald Miller’s newest book. Things had been pretty rough for me for a few months and I had lost sight of where I was going, and he hit me right in the chest. Part of the book was about a cross-country bike trip the author had been a part of for Blood:Water Mission that raised $200,000 in a single summer. And I remember thinking as I looked out the window, eyes wandering across a particularly stunning sunset of gold and red, hmm. I could do that.

But for a few months, it was really just an idea. You have to understand, I don't ride bikes- don't even own one. But I started talking about it, and people responded. Students, bike shop workers, and people I barely knew told me they had always wanted to do a trip like this someday- especially my roommate Justin. That's what really made me sure I wanted to do this- I knew my brother Will would be totally on board, but having someone else who was absolutely sure they were willing to commit was a huge mental step. And that's also what started the idea of creating a group that would help college students plan and carry out advocacy/fundraising trips like this. So this will be Boundless at Duke's first summer adventure, a project I hope will grow into something much bigger in the future.

I think I also knew right from the beginning, from the moment I read that book on the airplane, that I wanted this trip to be about Falling Whistles. I'm probably going to spend a good bit of my life in that part of the world, and through Will, I knew the whistleblowers’ story. I knew this was the sort of project Falling Whistles would support, and that as a relatively young organization, the results of our trip would mean more to FW than it would to another, larger NGO. There are a thousand organizations who do great work and who I would have loved to support, but I believe in Falling Whistles' story and cause. When Sean's life collided with those five kids in Titu, something big happened. The war in Congo destroys everything, everyone that it touches. I really don't have words for this part of the story. Maybe Sean said it best: "But when these boys told me of the whistleblowers, the horror grew feet and walked within me." I have read, heard, seen, so, so many stories- and not with the eyes of someone who has seen excruciating poverty and devastating violence, but all too often with detachment, cynicism. But I knew this one was real, that this cause meant something. The war in Congo is incredibly, intensely complex and complicated- not something a few hundred activists can hope to end. But for me, that's what Falling Whistles is about- not just the war in Congo, but learning to face huge, unsolvable problems together, as a community. And Falling Whistles’ message is about exactly what we're doing this summer-

What can we do with who we are?

The world probably won't change colors and stop spinning when we get to the west coast this summer, but we will have told a story to thousands of people all across the country, and many of them will be different than they were before. After all, that's how we heard the story- someone told Will, and Will told me and Connor and Andrew, and I told Justin. Maybe we'll raise some money too.

Excited doesn't really capture how I feel about this trip- I know it's going to be awful at times and I'm going to want to quit on day two when I wake up and can't move, and I'm going to want to buy a plane ticket when we hit the Rockies. I'm going to want to quit when my old wrist injury gets worse again and is so sore I can't move it anymore. I've already wanted to give up plenty of times. But I know this is going to be something that will define some part of who we are. Biking 3,000 miles makes an impression on more than just your ass. I'm going to get to spend a month and a half with four people who are some of my best friends in the world, and I'm going to get to watch all of them change and grow as the trip goes on. We're going to tell great stories after this summer.

So I suppose I'll end with something I want everyone else to share as well. Me and Justin have talked a bit about a memory we want to have of the trip. Think about one thing, one moment that you're going to look back on, we told each other.

For me, that's the moment when we're riding down towards the coast, the last few minutes of our trip. We're yelling and screaming, probably racing to see who can get there first. The sun's setting as we ride out onto the beach. Falling Whistles HQ and maybe some of our parents and friends are there, ready to celebrate with us. When we hit the beach, we either ditch our bikes and run into the ocean or just ride straight into the water; I haven't decided yet. We're all going nuts as the totality of the trip, the immensity of what we've just done hits us. We'll be screaming and laughing as we tackle each other into the ocean and hug our friends and family. Depending on how sore my butt is, I might pick up my bike and sling it as far into the water as I can; I don't care if it rusts. Maybe I'll just start swimming towards the sun. And the whole time, the Falling Whistles crew and whoever's there on the beach will be taking pictures and laughing and celebrating with us.

Then maybe we'll start crying when we think about how hard it was to climb the Rockies, how deeply we had to search for the strength to get back on our bikes every day those first two weeks, how much it hurt when we fell off our bikes and didn’t want to get back up. How pissed we were when someone didn't cook dinner or help set up the tent. How beautiful the stars were in the desert, how peaceful it was in the middle of nowhere. What it was like to be away from the constant grind of technology and modern haste that so wears on me here at Duke. How awesome it was to sit around the fire and play guitar and sing and tell stories. We'll think about all the people we talked to; all the whistles we sold, all the people we met and who helped us. We'll remember what it felt like, a month and a half ago, to fall asleep listening to the Atlantic Ocean knowing we'd wake up the next morning and ride all day, and the day after that, and the day after that. We'll remember how beautiful the trees in North Carolina and Tennessee were. We'll see again the endless fields in Kansas, the beauty of the mountains in Colorado. And we'll look at each other and think about how close we've grown over the past month and a half, how proud we are of each other for finishing the trip. They’re already like family to me, but I don't think you can put into words what it'll be like after sharing something like this.

And when I look at all the pictures of us on the beach, that's what I want to see; I want to remember everything all at once.

That's what I want to remember. It's a long, long ways between there and here. But I think that’s what being a whistleblower is about- seeing the endless stretch of hills and plains and mountains and deserts between where the world is and where it could be, and having the strength to imagine a world changed, where Congo is free from the brutality and horror of endless war, where children no longer carry guns, where rape as a weapon of war is a distant memory. And with that imagination comes the resolve to put both feet on the pedals, even when it seems like the mountains aren’t coming any closer, when the wind is blowing harder than ever, when the temperature in the desert hits 115 degrees. Because in a few weeks we will reach the mountains that once seemed so far off, and a few weeks after that, we will find ourselves staring at the ocean, utterly blown away by the realization of what once seemed impossible.

Live your protest.

-David Watson

Photo by: Abby Ross

“Vocation is the place where your deep gladness meets the world’s deep need.”

-Fredrick Buechner

“Remember this: do the thing that most enlivens you; yield to the call.”

-Dr. Paul Farmer

“Everybody can be great because anybody can serve. You only need a heart full of grace and a soul generated by love.”

-Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

When we saw people dying on the other side of the frontiers, we asked ourselves, ‘what is this border? It doesn’t mean anything to us.” Raymond Borel

“A great adventurer, a passionate lover of life, a free spirit with a questioning mind, an insatiable curiosity, an extraordinary resilience, and an indomitable spirit.”

-Erwin McManus

lost cove

"in these bodies we will live, in these bodies we will die--
where you invest your love, you invest your life.

awake my soul..."

-mumford and sons- "awake my soul"

mumford and sons

And there will come a time, you'll see, with no more tears.
And love will not break your heart, but dismiss your fears.
Get over your hill and see what you find there,
With grace in your heart and flowers in your hair.

-after the storm

Love that will not betray you, dismay or enslave you,
It will set you free
Be more like the man you were made to be.
There is a design,
An alignment to cry,
At my heart you see,
The beauty of love as it was made to be

-sigh no more

the cure for feeling old and alone in a place so full of youth...

is riding your bike on wet roads in cold rain to lake cheston and jumping in the still-winter water and screaming, "FREEDOM" at the top of your lungs.

it'll cure anything, it will.

at sewanee, it's spring party weekend, which is either a weekend to hide in the woods, get lots of homework done, have a lot of fun at fraternity band parties, or be drunk from thursday afternoon to whenever the hangover wears off sunday morning. depends on your perspective, i suppose.

the deans called it spring festival weekend, which is a convenient way to avoid using the word party. festival sounds less debaucherous and more sophisticated i guess.

life, sometimes, is the most confusing thing. how am i supposed to know what is good and true and life-giving, and also what is the antithesis of all those things? death-bringing. because the opposite of life-giving is death-bringing, and i often think that there is little in between, or that what is in between doesn't matter much (for why be seeking after anything that is not ALIVE?) because it's inconsequential.

and to decide which is which? what have i but what has already been sung within my soul, what has already been painted on the walls of the inside of my heart, what has already been written in my mind?

i left the amphitheater tonight to a field of beer cans and the flickering lights of the stage somewhat disconcerted and confused about what to make of all this. i have "gone out" some this weekend, because in my head i've said that i wanted to be with people, and i've wanted to connect and make relationships with a side of sewanee with which i don't often interact. to some extent unfortunately, i know that my presence allows people to relate to me that normally wouldn't, and i hope that people can see that you can be at a party and have fun, but not have to be wasted to do so, and that you can spend time with friends at a party and enjoy yourself, but also still be a part of the reconstitution of the world away from the profane into a living world, the world for which the mountains and the rocks and the trees are groaning. but does my presence legitimize the destructive things that do happen? i'm not sure what to make of a lot of things.

last month, while in ecuador, i spent a lot of time thinking about sewanee, and my place in it, and what i would hope for it. what is sewanee's legacy now, and what could it be? what should it be? i realized that i often judge the people and not the systems. i abhor that tendency within myself. yes, there are destructive, death-bringing systems and cycles here, as there are everywhere, and it's easy to associate the people caught up in those systems and cycles with the negative aspects themselves. yet they are just people, (just as i am just a person) caught and held in a systemic destruction, one that many of us will spend the rest of our lives seeking freedom from.

so i began the walk home feeling old and alone in a place so full of youth. i wanted to reach out and love and touch and heal the brokenness i saw all around me, disguised as fun in the fulfillment of a temporal desire (am i only trying to legitimize the awkwardness i feel in these places, a product of my conservative upbringing?). friends there, friends there, some crying, some about to. some to cry in weekends to come, in the moments of hurt and emptiness. take courage, my friend, and seek life! and yet, there are things that must be let go, and i walked.

it began to rain, and my linen shirt was soaked quickly and the long walk became cold and longer. there was daybreak to be found in the deepest night, but for a while, only the darkness, and the sounds of a college night surrounded me. there are the feelings of insecurity always. like why can't i figure this out and get over myself and go drink and have sex and fun and enjoy it all again and again... but then there is the feeling that i am just alone and i am too old for this place. it's not a feeling of superiority, but a lament.

but there was grace tonight. daybreak. and nothing triggered it. i wonder if it was something spiritual that came around me and warmed me up. as i walked over the final stretch of the dam back to my dorm, i realized that i had grown warm, and that my tongue was out to catch the rain and that this place, my heart and my body was being cleaned by this cool, spring rain.

rain has always done that for me. sometimes it takes a while.

and i wanted that feeling of being alive that i wrote about in "if these mountains had eyes, they would wake." antsy with anticipation, i changed, and intended to go swimming at lake cheston in the rain in the cold water. though i often think it a weakness of my independence, i still think that happiness is more real, and definitely better when it's shared, so elizabeth received a crazy call from a wet boy, saying "come now. cheston. swim."

so we swam in the rain and shivered ourselves into warmth of life in that cold water. and i yelled freedom and felt so alive again.

"for one splendid fleeting moment something mellow floated through my deadly tired body. i said to her, 'open this window, from these last days onward i can fly.'"

-werner herzog

from these last days onward i can fly.

if the stars came out once every thousand years...

“If the stars should appear but one night every thousand years how man would marvel and stare."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

Monday, April 12, 2010
Green's View, Sewanee, TN
10:34 PM

Here I am, at Green's View for another night. I'm not sure how many nights outside this is, but... things are changing in me in the subtleties of nature... stillness, breath, wind, quiet.

[...]

Why is this view not crowded every night? It should be, and people are missing out. Everyone should be on this grassy knoll, dancing in the wind, singing songs of joy and gratitude.

I once read a quote that was something along the lines of, "If the stars came out once every thousand years, we would form new religions overnight, and everyone would be out here dancing all night." That's how I feel most of the time: How could I sleep under a ceiling when the stars could be my ceiling? And the earth my bed?

Next morning: Tuesday, April 13, 2010
Green's View, Sewanee, TN
8:13AM

I can't even explain how strong the temptation is to skip class and stay here all day. There is much more to learn here, in these woods, than in a classroom about human rights.

The Journey

The Journey

By Mary Oliver

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice—
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
“Mend my life!”
each voice cried.
But you didn’t stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do—
determined to save
the only life you could save.

daybreak in you

I'm going to steal a line from a friend...

"I pray for the daybreak in you to last,
against habit."

And I do.

But you see, it's in all of you, this daybreak, and I do pray for it to last through all the nights you let o'er take you, just as I let the night o'er take me when the daybreak feels far away.

I know it, this daybreak, but
I also know the night.
But lately, I realized that
You can look for the
Daybreak in the
Night.

"Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either -- but right through every human heart -- and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains ... an unuprooted small corner of evil."

-Alexandr I. Solzhenitsyn

If These Mountains Had Eyes

If These Mountains Had Eyes

William B. Watson

“And if these mountains had eyes, they would wake to find two strangers in their fences, standing in admiration as a breathing red pours its tinge upon earth's shore. These mountains, which have seen untold sunrises, long to thunder praise but stand reverent, silent so that man's weak praise should be given God's attention.”

(Miller)

“The search may begin with a restless feeling, as if one were being watched. One turns in all directions and sees nothing. Yet one senses that there is a source for this deep restlessness; and the path that leads there is not a path to a strange place, but the path home. (‘But you are home,’ cries the Witch of the North. ‘All you have to do is wake up!’) The journey is hard, for the secret place where we have always been is overgrown with thorns and thickets of ‘ideas,’ of fears and defenses, prejudices and repressions.” (Matthiessen 43)

“It is always lurking there, this emptiness, at the threshold of a journey that will start something. […] Most certainly of all, it obliterates your ambitions, cancels the very reasons for your journey. You know that before long you will once more feel and understand and hope. But at the time there is only emptiness.” (Fletcher 15)

I sit down to write, and finally it comes along with the recollection—the recollection of that first sunrise at the fire tower on Jump Off Road. “I do not mean just that I remembered specific details. I knew once more, in a flood tide of certainty that invaded all my senses, the forgotten essence—the whole clean, open, sunlit, primitive freedom of it” (Fletcher 23). The seeking of that essence is what awakened me that morning, and the desire of it what started that journey, a journey in a series of larger journeys making up this journey we call life.

This then, is the story of that sunrise, of that essence, and of journey. And so we begin.

“This is at bottom the only courage that is demanded of us: to have courage for the most strange, the most singular and the most inexplicable that we may encounter. That mankind has in this sense been cowardly has done life endless harm; the experiences that are called ‘visions,’ the whole so-called ‘spirit-world,’ death, all those things that are so closely akin to us, have by daily parrying been so crowded out of life that the senses with which we could have grasped them are atrophied. To say nothing of God.”

-Rainer Maria Rilke,

(the opening quote of The Snow Leopard)

In the beginning of the journey is the first awakening. 5:30AM. I awoke to the white ceiling, threw off the blankets, and rolled off the top bunk. Pants. Shirt. Jacket. Grab keys. Stumble out the door to the air. Then eyes open to the predawn air that is fresh, clear, and full of an anticipation of morning, an anticipation shared by myself as I walked, groggily, across the parking lot to my car, but paused to note the graying in the east, and the stars above.

That’s how the journey begins, isn’t it? An awakening of sorts. Thoreau said “the morning, which is the most memorable season of the day, is the awakening hour,” and, with that, awakening is much more than a physical awakening from sleep, for “to be awake is to be alive” (Thoreau 133-134). And that is what I wanted on that morning, to be alive—that’s why I was going to the firetower with Jane to find the sunrise. Later that day, I would write, “Lately, the daylight has wanted me, so I chased it this morning,” and that was about being alive, the same sort of life that Thoreau sought when he left for the woods (Watson 2009.II, 25 October 2009):

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life…” (Thoreau 135)

That desire for life, for feeling alive, is something I have been after for a long time, a quest of sorts that is overwhelming at times, because of the gravity of that desire. To some that desire is an inconsequential and frivolous one, for why seek to be alive when you are alive? Biologically, yes, my cells are reproducing constantly and my body is alive, but what I wanted was to LIVE, which seemed like something so far beyond a biological definition of life.

I had felt alive before, and in waking on that October morning, I remembered those times of feeling alive that had driven me out of bed that morning, for this journey to the firetower to chase the daylight was but a chasing of that feeling of being ALIVE that I had felt before. There was the night in Canada when the sun set over a moose and her baby as they swam across the lake in front of me as the Canadian sunset gave way to the million points of light that characterize the night sky of the deep north woods. There were the northern lights outside of Calgary. There was the night when I watched the lights of the Massachusetts coastline give way to the blackness of the Atlantic on the day I left home for Kenya. There were the sunset piki (dirt bike) rides in the Great Rift Valley among herds of zebra and impala with the wind on my face and the cool air filling my lungs. There was the bus ride across the plains of Tanzania at the foot of Kilimanjaro and that first view of Congo from across Lake Tanganyika. There were the lights of Kigali at night and the feeling of the Rwandan air rushing through our hair on the motorcycles ridden just because we could. There were the stories told and the love exchanged and the songs played to orphans. And then there was Lake Bunyonyi, where I think I truly felt the wind for the first time and stood and watched as the darkness of the storm clouds gathered and came across the mountains and the rain pelted our faces and we sang and prayed and believed that we could be, that we were, ALIVE. I had felt it before, and I was seeking it again in a semester filled with clutter and noise, that awful noise that drives out all true life. The same noise Wendell Berry writes of when he says, “We must turn back into the peopled dark/ Of our unraveling century, the grief/ Of waste, the agony of haste and noise” (Berry, 1979.VII, 14). On that morning, I sought to leave the noise to find life again, and I awoke, and began the journey to look for it in the sunrise.

“The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to LIVE, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars...”

-Jack Kerouac (emphasis added)

Sewanee, in all its goodness, had become jaded for me. Again, there was a moment of awakening in the journey. No longer only an onlooker in the community, I had become a member of that community, and I was no longer able to turn a blind eye or run away from the darkness I felt and saw. Berry wrestles with this in his essay, “A Native Hill,” as he describes his move from New York City back to his family farm in Kentucky:

“In this awakening there has been a good deal of pain. When I lived in other places I looked on their evils with the curious eye of a traveler; I was not responsible for them; it cost me nothing to be a critic, for I had not been there long, and I did not feel that I would stay. But here, now that I am both native and citizen, there is no immunity to what is wrong. It is impossible to escape the sense that I am involved in history.” (Berry, 178)

A first semester sophomore, I had realized that I was here to stay, that Sewanee was now becoming as much a part of me as my other homes have been. On the one hand, I wanted to run and hide in the woods amongst the coves and hollows and ignore the suffering of my classmates and the systemic destructive cycles that are as much a part of the traditions of the place as are those of the Order of the Gownsmen and the Sewanee Angels. I understood and felt in my heart what William Wilberforce said in the awakening that began his journey to end the slave trade in the British Empire:

“I have 10,000 engagements of state today but I would prefer to spend the day out here getting a wet ass, studying dandelions and marveling at… bloody spider’s webs. […] I think God found me. You have any idea how inconvenient that is? How idiotic it will sound? I have a political career glittering ahead of me, and in my heart I want spider’s webs.” (Wilberforce, Amazing Grace).

I felt this tension, and I remember feeling trapped in between the two desires: to look at spiderwebs and to work to effect change with as much love as possible. Berry felt the same tension after returning to live and work in Kentucky, saying, “And so here, in the place I love more than any other and where I have chosen among all other places to live my life, I am more painfully divided within myself than I could be in any other place” (Berry 179). In this tension, I had filled my life with doing, and had forgotten the necessity of being in the place in which I was seeking to be a part of effecting change. Thus, there was the noise, the clutter, and the suffocating feeling that I was losing that life which I had so tirelessly sought.

So we sought the sunrise. I picked Jane up at her dorm, and we drove to the firetower. Later, I wrote about the drive, “This morning the mists hovered above the ground, making the roadway a tunnel as we drove to the firetower for the sunrise” (Watson, I, 19 January 2010). Oftentimes, the awakening, and thereafter the beginning of the journey must be accompanied by the sort of courage that Rilke depicts in the opening quote of The Snow Leopard, courage to re-embrace the senses that have atrophied because of the noise of life—the senses that are necessary to love, to know God, to be ALIVE.

In Walden, Thoreau proposes that the problem with humankind—the problem choking out life—is that “men lead lives of quiet desperation,” and I see that this life of quiet desperation in pursuit of security, comfort, and wealth atrophies the senses so much so that the true “marrow of life” can no longer be seen (Thoreau 50). In order to find the “truth” that he wants more “than love, than money, than fame,” one must live a life of simplicity (Thoreau 379). “In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness” (Thoreau 372). Simplicity then, is necessary to get outside the noise and the clutter to see that which is real and good.

And simplicity is what we sought—the simplicity of that first beam of light that pierces the subtle pre-dawn light with the force of a thousand sunrises, infinitely happening every instant around the world, continuously chasing away the shadows with light. Jane and I reached the firetower in the pre-dawn light, and began to climb. The climb, too, is just as much a part of the journey as the awakening, and in the climb is found all the “thorns and thickets of ‘ideas,’ of fears and defenses, prejudices and repressions” that prevent us from reaching “the secret place where we have always been”—home (Matthiessen 41).

So we climbed the 10 stories to the top of the firetower, and in the climb between the awakenings at the start and at the end of the journey, before the unbearable beauty at the end of the journey, there is much toil and pain.

“You can feel the muscle knots tightening in your legs

And now and then you reach down to test the hard lumpiness.

The passes get easier and finally you’re just laughing over them.

Every step and every strain and hard breath and heart pump is an investment in tomorrow morning’s strength.”

-Terry Russell in On the Loose

Silently, we completed the climb, and came to the top of the stairs, to the little observation post, where the wind resides as it whistles through the empty panes that were once filled with windows. Breathlessly, we looked out across that expanse of land, the coves, the forest, the ridges in the distance, and the carpet of clouds filling the valley below. We, above all of it, were alone in that space between the earth below and the heavens above waiting in anticipation of the advent of day.

That waiting is also a part of the journey, the waiting between the awakening that made one go, leave, get up and move out to seek life; and the next awakening, when the leaving and the journey come to their realization at the end of the one journey and the start of the other, in the grand journey we’ve called life. Sometimes brief, sometimes maddeningly long, this waiting is those moments in the stillness before the sun peeks over the horizon, in the interims between the awakenings, when the road is long and the traveler cannot be sure why he left home in the first place, or where he is going.

And then: LIGHT.

“My Guide and I crossed over and began to mount that little known and lightless road to ascend into the shining world again.

He first, I second, without thought of rest we climbed the dark until we reached the point where a round opening brought in sight the blest and beauteous shining of the Heavenly cars.

And we walked out once more beneath the Stars.”

-(Dante’s Inferno, Canto XXXIV.136-143)

The final moments of anticipation silenced us, as the rays of light came from behind the wall of clouds behind the ridge in the distance, and the coming sun painted that wall of clouds a deep red. Intuitively, we grew silent as we felt the moment of sunrise coming quickly. We felt something coming; we knew it would happen soon. “Why do we stare at beautiful things? […] We seem to be looking intently, stargazing at something further off and yet more kindred than the stars, but we are not using our physical eyes. […] We are listening. Nature is trying to tell us something; she is speaking to us on a long-distance wave” (Graham 210-211). All around us, within the entire earth there seemed to be a tension in the waiting for the sun which brings light and life and another day, and we felt it.

And then it happened. A pinpoint of white light, that seemed to pierce my soul, moving straight through me and silencing all the noise in that single instant. I, silent in wonder and breathless in this moment that made the hair stand up on the back of my neck heard Jane cry out across the expanse of trees in front of us—a cry of thanks filled with joy and hope. And as the cry echoed across the ridges, it seemed as if the earth was screaming back at us, “You’re welcome!”

There is an unbearable pain in those moments of unbridled beauty. It hurts to see and then feel that sort of beauty, the piercing kind, right through our center. And it hurts because we hear Nature screaming with all her might that there is goodness and light and it is coming, but I think we know it is not here yet, and that we must be a part of its coming. We know that we have yet to find what we feel could be inside of us, that for which we are looking. And these moments of that sort of pain often come with awakenings, when there is a remembrance, or a moment of newfound awareness that will set a new course, or reaffirm an old one—the beginnings of a new journey, or a reminder to return to ones left unfinished.

Later, I would write:

“Love wins. Death and darkness are conquered again. Another day begins as the sun rises.

The sun rises in the east. Beautiful. Clear sky everywhere except the sun rising, and clouds turning all colors. There are so many metaphors in the sunrise, all hopeful. This morning, I thought about the fact that there are infinite sunrises; the sun is always rising somewhere, and I know someone is always watching it somewhere. And it’s a like a reminder that God put here for us to be reminded that there is always light coming somewhere—always good somewhere.

But it’s interesting that it’s key that in order for the sun to always be rising, the sun has to be still, and the earth has to be moving around it. With the metaphor of there always being a sunrise, we can’t be the center. The earth can’t be the center. We are moving around, and there is always light coming somewhere.” (Watson I, April 4, 2010)

Thus, the journey around that sun is where I find myself, in constant flux, always trying, as Matthiessen says, to find my way home. In that sunrise, the search had begun again, the one with “the restless feeling” where “one senses that there is a source for this deep restlessness; and the path that leads there is not a path to a strange place, but the path home” (Matthiessen 41). It is as Graham states at the end of The Gentle Art of Tramping:

“Even if in small measure the tramp is a pilgrim. His adventure is a spiritual adventure or it is nothing. […] The rude pencilings are erased and the main curve remains, and the curve of your adventure is a broken arc. […] But given the arc the center can be found. We revolve about the sun, but there are planets revolving around a sun invisible to us. Our souls, I suppose, revolve about some invisible spiritual sun which we are always thinking about—a center called God.” (Graham 214, emphasis added)

“But given the arc the center can be found.” The arc, then, allows the center to be seen, and then found; in the journey is the way home to be found. Einstein said “the pursuit of truth is more important than the possession of it,” and I am finding that the process found in the journey is indeed much more important than the ends and the beginnings. This process, however, has often been painful in the confusion of changing ideas, beliefs, and practices. There has always been the emptiness at the beginning of the journey. But the process requires both those changes and that emptiness. In Book VII of The Republic, Socrates says, “The process, I said, is not the turning over of an oyster shell, but the turning round of a soul passing from a day which is little better than night to the true day of being, that is, the ascent from below.” And that process of changing, continuously moving away from that with which I was brought up has been painful, burning me at times. But in the same process of moving away, I have found that I am, at the same time, moving always backward to those things at the heart of that tradition—things such as love and grace and peace. Just as the forest must burn for new life to begin, so also must things in ourselves be burned away for new life to form.

“Everything had changed suddenly—the tone, the moral climate: you didn’t know what to think, whom to listen to. As if all of your life you had been led by the hand by a small child and suddenly you were on your own, you had to learn to walk by yourself. There was no one around, neither family nor people whose judgment you respected. At such a time you felt the need of committing yourself to something absolute—life or truth or beauty—of being ruled by it in place of the man-made rules that had been discarded. You needed to surrender to some such ultimate purpose more fully, more unreservedly than you had ever done in the old familiar, peaceful days, in the old life that was now abolished and was gone for good.”

-Boris Pasternak in Doctor Zhivago

That center, where we may see “life or truth or beauty” stays with us. “It is a little stardust caught, a segment of the rainbow which I have clutched” (Thoreau 264). It has stayed with me, an impression burned into my heart from each of those times I have glimpsed it, those times I have felt ALIVE. And, “the truth, once glimpsed, is always there, gnawing away” (Fletcher 26). The truth that I have seen, time and again, is the truth that in order for the old things in our hearts to be burned away, in order for us to “suck the marrow out of life,” in order for us to glimpse truth and beauty and hope and love, in order for us to be able to feel ALIVE, there must be FREEDOM. And therein lies the center of these broken arcs, and the arcs remain broken, because for so many, there is no FREEDOM, and thus I am not FREE to be fully ALIVE. As Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said so boldly, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly” (Letter from a Birmingham Jail). This truth that has been glimpsed stays, gnawing away.

“I believe in the kingdom come/ When all the colors will bleed into one/ Bleed into one, but yes I’m still running.”

-U2 in “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For”

We stayed on that firetower until the last possible second, only allowing enough time to return to school and go straight to class. The drive home was one of exultation, excitement, the burning that comes after an awakening that serves to challenge one to begin anew, or remember the old truths that may have been forgotten in all the noise. For me it was a reminder of the truth in the quote that has led me for the past two years, an Australian aboriginal quote that says, “If you came to help me, you are wasting your time; but if you came because you believe your liberation bound to mine, then let us walk together.” That sunrise, away from all the noise—that sunrise of painful beauty and clarity was a gift from that firetower and the earth to us, for “when you give yourself to places, they give yourself back” (Solnit 13).

So, after giving ourselves to that sunrise, and being given ourselves back in return, we drove away from the rising sun, back to the noise and clutter which we would now approach differently. With the awakenings in our minds we listened as the singer sang, “The shadows prove the sunshine,” and we felt the truth of that deep within our souls. Return, and be ALIVE. FIGHT for the FREEDOM of those who have none, so that we all may be FREE to LIVE.

That then, was the first firetower sunrise.

Alighieri, Dante. The Divine Comedy. Trans. Ciardi, John. New York: New American Library, 2003.

Amazing Grace. Dir. Michael Apted. Perfs. Ioan Gruffudd, Romola Garai. Samuel Goldwyn Films, 2006.

Berry, Wendell. “A Native Hill.” The Long-Legged House.

Berry, Wendell. A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems, 1979-1997. Berkeley: Counterpoint, 1998.

Fletcher, Colin. The Man Who Walked Through Time. New York: Vintage, 1989.

Graham, Stephen. The Gentle Art of Tramping. New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1926.

Mattheissen, Peter. The Snow Leopard. New York: Penguin, 2008.

Miller, Donald. Through Painted Deserts: Life, God, and Beauty on the Open Road. Colorado Springs: Nelson, 2005.

Russell, Renny and Russell, Terry. On The Loose. New York: Sierra Club and Ballantine, 1971.

Solnit, Rebecca. Wanderlust: A History of Walking. New York: Penguin, 2000.

Thoreau, Henry David. Walden. New York: Penguin, 1986.

Watson, William B. I. Personal Journal. Easter Semester 2010.

Photographs

Watson, William B. Firetower Sunrise. October 25, 2009.