It seems as though I've learned quite a few things about life and myself over the past three or four months. Unsurprisingly, however, as so often happens in life, this leads to more questions than answers. There is one thing that I have learned with a good deal of certitude, however, and that is that Wisconsin is my home.
Ever since I can remember I have longed to get out of the land of my birth. The cold weather, the lack of culture and non-camouflaged recreation left me feeling quite bored. I thought that the big city was where I belonged. I've always glorified New York City and imagined myself living there amongst the bustle of streets filled with people shadowed by the giant buildings of steel and brick scraping the sky high above. Indeed, I do still feel a certain affinity with that city which escapes me, but I've been awakened to the true nature of the big city, the coast etc.
Though not NYC, Washington DC was almost as exciting to me before I moved here. Though the city does not allow proper sky-scrapers, it has all the other hallmarks of a large, historical, and cultured town. Taxi cabs fly by. People are out at all hours of the night. Sirens can be heard every 20 minutes from my open apartment windows. There is always something happening and there is never a dull moment. Let me preface what I am about to say with this: I enjoy living here for the time being, if only because it is an experience from which I will hopefully pull some wisdom and growth.
That being said, I have no desire to live here for the rest of my life. I have no desire to live in NYC for the rest of my life. People are cold. Things are too loud. Those sky scrapers become nothing but albatrosses. And there are so few trees.
It has taken only a few months to discover, but I now deeply appreciate the place I had once forsaken. It seems as though the older I get the more I long for a quiet life in a cabin somewhere in the woods of northern Wisconsin. A beard, a few books with which to teach, and a family will allow me to die a happy man surrounded by nothing but the sound of birds and trees growing. (When life gets as quiet as He intended you can hear such things). No place in this world is perfect, but that cabin will do just nicely until Death creeps in under the door to pay me my last and most distinguished visit.
Simplicity, quiet, and kindness are such rare things in the world. They may very well be rare in Wisconsin as well, but not quite as much so as in many other places, as I am coming to see.
Perhaps the growing theme in my reflections here is a distaste, no... a hatred for the world. We want to "live life" and somehow that becomes synonymous with joining the world in revelry and frivolity. Perhaps ironically, it seems that to truly live life one must forsake the world and "hunker down", so to speak, with the few last glimpses of beauty and truth that the canopy of the modern world lets through. The city and contemporary man are convoluted and tangled messes. They have no direction and simply stumble loudly into one another without meaning. It's infectious and I am not surprised to see how it rubs off onto your own soul. It's mass hysteria.
But noise and bright, flashing lights don't make for a life well lived or fully experienced. In fact, they make quite excellent superficial diversions and distractions. They quell instead of quench the desire to truly live. In the quietness we truly experience life. Reflection and meditation are essential to not only experiencing, but pulling wisdom from our days. In the quietness we have room to be what we were meant to be. In the quietness there is freedom to recognize and appreciate those fleeting glimpses of beauty and truth.
There are two good examples that illustrate my point which immediately come to mind. The first is an anecdote told to my class by the great Monsignor Sokolowski. He once spoke with an old priest friend of his (who is now dead) about a visit that this friend had made to Egypt many years ago. This priest trekked out into the deserts of Egypt which are filled with true darkness unstained by the light pollution of modern civilization (especially so many years ago, before tourism and modernity had really struck Egypt). He said that the stars in the night sky absolutely radiate in that darkness and that the spectacle is too beautiful and surreal to allow for any sort of atheism or agnosticism. The ancients were blessed and their mythologies are fueled by this mirror of the Divine in those breathtaking skies. They made the Transcendent apparent. Monsignor Sokolowski extended this experience by saying, "That's why everyone is so crazy in New York. They never see the stars." A brilliant man.
The second thing that comes to mind is another brilliant man, one of my great heroes, Henry David Thoreau. For those unfamiliar, Thoreau wrote one of the greatest nonfiction works of Western literature in Walden which is a collection of essays and journals from his time living on Walden Pond in a small cabin built by himself deep in the Massachusetts woods. He lived as simply as possible, building his own cabin, growing and killing his own food etc. His one modern luxury were books. Walden is a masterpiece (even though Thoreau was a Romantic and quite off in many regards). There are countless quotations in that text which sum up my thoughts about living life quietly, simply, and well. They say more than I ever could. Here are a few of those gems:
A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone.
As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.
I once had a sparrow alight upon my shoulder for a moment, while I was hoeing in a village garden, and I felt that I was more distinguished by that circumstance that I should have been by any epaulet I could have worn.
In what concerns you much, do not think that you have companions: know that you are alone in the world.
In wildness is the preservation of the world.
Men have become the tools of their tools.
Most are engaged in business the greater part of their lives, because the soul abhors a vacuum and they have not discovered any continuous employment for man's nobler faculties.
Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify.
Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.
That man is the richest whose pleasures are the cheapest.
The cost of a thing is the amount of what I call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.
To regret deeply is to live afresh.
Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes.
Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end.
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.
When we are unhurried and wise, we perceive that only great and worthy things have any permanent and absolute existence, that petty fears and petty pleasures are but the shadow of the reality.
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.
Peace and Quiet be with you.
Taylor
taylor,
ReplyDeleteit was nice to see you (at the target cafe) and i'm glad to hear that school in d.c. is going well. i have no doubt that, although you don't desire to remain there permanently, you're right about the growth that this experience is offering you.
i think that leaving and then coming home is perhaps the best way to grow and then reflect on that growth. while i know a great many people who don't embrace this philosophy and are more than content to stay in one place (which is lovely), it has been helpful to my own growth to see and live life in other places. each new person and new experience offers a different lens through which to understand one's self and the world around us. i found, interestingly enough, that my perception of God, and my entire relationship with God, really, was different when i was abroad. not better or worse, but different, and now i am challenged to integrate that experience with the associations that home offers. i think that being in new places and doing new things with new people keeps us alert and aware and alive.
but i don't disagree with your talk of home. things i took for granted and things i was just simply tired of before i left for chile became romanticized while i was gone. suddenly, despite all the newness around me, i longed for the simplest of comforts that only home can offer. and i am able to see things now-- even boring old oshkosh-- with a new appreciation. sounds cheesy, i know, but i think that what you say is true in terms of what "home" is. we may not like to think, sometimes, that we are so inherently linked to wisconsin, but we are, and there's something special about coming back. especially after having had a really different experience and growing in new ways.
i read a good quote once, in the middle of a rather philosophical novel called "the cave" by jose saramago. after mentioning all of the ways that travel and broadening one's horizons is helpful, he writes, "minds, however well-traveled, need to come back home now and then because only there can they achieve and maintain a reasonably satisfactory sense of themselves." there's something about the predictability (cue the "full house" theme song) that is pretty beautiful sometimes. and the consistency of this place is what provides a backdrop for the sometimes dizzying changes everywhere else, including inside of myself. (i write, in fact, from the coziness of my home during winter break.)
i guess home is a bit like God in that way, as a relationship with Christ is that most consistent, centering of things, providing even more than the roof and the roots that our houses and homes give us. a priest was talking about the yeats poem ("second coming")-- the famous line "things fall apart, the centre cannot hold" to be specific. and he talked about it in light of the reading from Romans 8 (i think), referring to the fact that, truly, nothing can separate us from Christ's love. it's that kind of center.
in short: i agree with the going-away-and-coming-back phenomenon and the graces that a journey like that can offer.
i would probably go stir crazy in a cabin all alone forever (though i do think God is in the whispers that we so often drown out); but i do think a little place in the mountains where i could do some serious writing would be lovely. i'd need access to a city as well though, and perhaps this is a conversation topic for next time, because there are so many ways to love and serve God, and while we all need to seek and value silent reflection, i think we're also called to be a part of the body of Christ that is our community. thomas merton tried both, you know, and ended up coming out of the seclusion he so valued because of this inner impetus to be with God's people.
thanks for sharing and making me think, taylor.
peace and quiet and community be with you, then.
:)
amanda