We were created to create. In Genesis, after forming the universe and everything in it, God said, “Let us make mankind in our image” and so composed our ancestors. When they stumbled forth from the fresh dust of the Earth, bearing that sacred and holy image, the Creator told them to carry it on through the lineage of humanity and history. In other words: The creation was designed to create. To create! That everything made by our hearts, minds, and hands— everything that flowed out of the movements of their creative spirits would bear the magnetic pull of their Maker’s image as a compass needle ever-fixed on its true destination.

But things changed. Something happened soon after the dawn of our history when God set us next to him before the orchestra and invited us to compose celestial symphonies with him. We became dissatisfied. Rather than being content with creativity, we were hungry for power. We sought to compete with the Maker; to erase his image from us and our creations and replace it with our own- to wrench the conducting baton from his hand and wield it for ourselves. And the Creator, preserving justice and our individuality, allowed us to break his heart with these red-eyed, froth-mouthed graspings, knowing they were the rabid convulsions of a free-will that, though intended to fuel our creative outpourings in the midst of his present companionship and friendship, now choked on the poison of a pride that turned us away into the darkness.

We were lost. The compass deep within our souls spun wildly to find its source again and we scorned that it would not fix upon ourselves or upon our proud works.

So we tried to destroy it.

To its Heavenward lens, we heaved the boulders of this earth that our toils upon it had wrought and thus taught each other to keep our heads out of those clouds. To the finely tuned gears of its orientation, we aimed our spears, swords, and cannons to lacerate its intricate ties to our hearts while we waged war for dominance and enslaved one another. To its diligent needle, every movement to find its Maker casting tangible ripples through the core of men and women, young and old alike, we we heaped the smothering weight and noise of our machines until we could no longer feel the quivering of a soul that longs for its home. These efforts achieved their aim, yielding one of the greatest and far-reaching tragedies our species has ever committed. We succeeded so well in burying this part of ourselves that we forgot it was ever there.

And here we are today: Occupying that same universe, commissioned by the same charter for creation as our predecessors. But something is missing. In one sense, we have carried out our task to “go forth and multiply” yet what we have multiplied is our shadows. Man’s mind and devices rule the earth, scorching the skies and all life beneath them with the smog of our industries, enslaving those whose very hands built them. Divorced from the Creator and his apprenticeship, the heart and soul remain as forgotten relics of a once-thriving civilization, now abandoned to its crumbling ruins.

But then came one who knew. One who remembered what lay buried beneath the ashes of our history. One who knew the sacred intimacy with which those organs were fashioned and affixed to our design when we were yet unframed in the womb of the earth. This was he who knew no lust for power, for all was his since the beginning. This was he who knew the beginning and end of all things for he himself was both.

He came dressed in the simple things of the world as we understood it; an ocean confining itself to a single raindrop. He came with authority; his hands overturned tables of corruption and his words toppled rulers. He came with peace; singing children danced in his footsteps, his whispers soothed the grieving mother. His presence caused a forgotten stirring; subterranean rumblings within the human essence, things once buried coming to the surface. It was both beautiful and painful. We saw it when he turned water to wine, healed the lame, and raised the dead to life. We heard it when he told us stories, when he recited the words of God as though they were his own, and when he passed crowds of the wealthy and influential to talk with the sick and the poor. We felt it when he was close. We felt it when he was close.

And yet we hated him. We hated him and those movements he caused within us. They rattled our machines and our methods. They disrupted our logic and our predictability. We wanted to murder him for it and we did. We tied those same hands that held the child and broke the bread and spilled the wine and we put holes in them to kill the havoc that they wrought and cease this divine and fleshly cardiac arrest and silence its escalating cacophony of millions and millions of machines falling apart and chains shattering and human cages being torn to open!

When it was over, blood was on our hands. It covered our heads and stained our clothes. It soaked our clothes and seeped into our skin. It pass through our bones and marrow. It ran rivers through us, into deep, unknown parts of our anatomy and washed, washed, washed away the piles of things we buried within us. It swept away filth, grime, toil, philosophies, pride, and all else that we did not know we were hiding behind.

What had we done? What had he done? There was nothing left to do but to marvel at the mass undoing that was all of humanity. The trailing debris behind us drawing the map of our lineage on the plane of history in all of our fallen glory. And when the last line that marked our trajectory ended, it found only the emaciated remnants of our soul, bare and uncovered, fixed unswervingly like a compass needle at the hill where we had laid the victim, the sacrifice, and the redeemer of our sin.

But he was no longer there. He had gone from our sight, but it was then that we saw. He had not gone from life. How could he? We knew all along, hadn’t we? Those stirrings deep within and the fire in our chests. Mankind had known those tremors since its beginnings but had long forgotten. It was him. This thing in our souls that pivoted toward some hitherto unknown destination- it was him. He was life itself. Creation flowed from those hands- those hands we had pierced and who now turned the dial of our compass toward a destination we could not see but could feel with the whole of our being; as though every atom being drawn toward to the music of the very celestial symphony that set the pace for their twirling ballet.

We still get bound by our devices. We still fall into the mires of our past, burying the ancient yearnings within. But the Creator’s footsteps still linger, beckoning us onward, forward, and upward. But like those singing children that followed him when he walked the earth, we sometimes stumble into one of his footprints and feel the jump of the dancing needle within and the fire that fills the chest of one who has caught the trail.

I was created to create. After years of piecing together the map of my past, I discovered this truth about my design. Reflection, crafted words, poetry, and art are the tools with which I peel back the layers of the temporal to catch a glimpse of the wonderful, the deep, the mysterious, vast subterranean ocean of the spiritual that flows just beneath the surface.

I am a creative creation. You are a creative creation.

Your craft, your gift, is your Creator’s compass. Spin the dial to align your bearings with the homeward needle when it comes alive. Envision! Imagine! Dream! Create! This is the image in which we were made. Turn the water of this world into wine! Raise life where it has died! Be the light unto its darkness! Let us set our bearings upon the path that those pierced hands have lain and those pierced feet have trod, to bring ourselves nearer to him. Let us sing to the world of the home where we are headed and let them hear of it that they may know, that they may follow. For we are going home. We can feel it when he is close.

We feel it when he is close.

I began a 10-day experiment on October 30th. For 10 days, I am:

1. Setting a timer for 15 minutes
2. Writing what I can during that time
3. Stopping when the time is up
4. Posting what is written without any final editing

For additional context, check out the first post in this series by clicking here.

START

(Shhhick - Shhhick - Shhhick)(Shhhick - Shhhick - Shhhick)(Dee-alee-aling!)

"Good morning!"(Shhhick - Shhhick...Thud)

"Good morning, how are you?""Fair as the weather, I'd say."

"That bad, eh?"

"Well not as bad as it could be but 'fraid not as good either. Landlord and I are having some 'mis-agreements'."

Four thick fingers shot higher than necessary above his head in vigorous air quotations.

"About what?""Eh the usual: rent, standards o' cleanliness."

He's the shopkeeper across the street. He stopped by every morning for a chat. Recently, most chats have involved some rehashed 'mis-agreement' with his landlord.

"I thought you two came to some sort of understanding last week?"

"Well we-ah...heh"

A coarsely-haired tree-limb of an arm swung suddenly upward, placing a stout hand on top of a glistening scalp. It remained there while its owner

STOP

This is another one I'd like to come back to at some point. I knew more detail about these characters than I was able to squeeze into a 15-minute write. The main character is a carpenter who works across the street from his shopkeeper friend. They have this unbalanced relationship in which the shopkeeper tends to show up unannounced and unload some issues onto the readily listening ear of the carpenter. In the long range of the story, the developing troubles of the shopkeeper would be indicative of some larger scale issues affecting the entire community. The carpenter would undergo some sort of transition from helpless bystander to fated activist.

I've recently been fascinated by the stories of ordinary people who are thrown into the midst of extraordinary circumstances. Martin Luther King Jr. is one such figure. Sure he probably doesn't seem like a 'ordinary' person knowing what we know now. He wasn't a politician or a legislator. He was a preacher who wanted the nation and its people to live harmoniously. Nothing special there; most people share that desire and can relate in some way. But the gospel he preached compelled him to do no less than the extraordinary things we now know him for. I wanted to write about a Martin Luther King Jr. Those are real characters. Things happen in our world and our lives that act as turning points where we have to either continue being a bystander or roll-up our sleeves and do something, whether we know entirely what that something is or not.

There were a few experiments in this free-write as well. First is the sounds. I like the use of sounds words (officially known as onomatopoeias but that's a mouthful to say and type) and tried using a few here.

Shhhick - Shhhick = The carpenter planing a piece of wood

Dee-alee-aling = The bell above door of the carpenter's shop

The other experiment was the dialogue. I don't have much experience writing dialogue between two or more characters (this is the first free-write that includes it). It's fun though. Aside from the descriptions and actions of a character, I think the things they say and the way in which they say it can express a lot of detail about who they are and their general demeanor.

I began a 10-day experiment on October 30th. For 10 days, I am:

1. Setting a timer for 15 minutes
2. Writing what I can during that time
3. Stopping when the time is up
4. Posting what is written without any final editing

For additional context, check out the first post in this series by clicking here.

START

The hair on its back bristled with the sound of approach.

Is it one or many? The sound of swift feet obscures their number.

The cherry-colored sentinel broke its stillness by ducking its head under a twig. The subtle motion was like that of an oiled mechanism; precise, silent, intentional, programmatic. Through its black mask, its muzzle pointed like a rifle barrel through a lattice of foliage. There was no recognizable scent.

A sudden breeze threw the surrounding trees into life, the silence exploding into the excited applause of fir needles and a small tornado of fallen leaves, thoroughly cloaking the approacher's sounds. The muzzle swerved not from its steady survey of the land from left to right, despite the amber and gold now obscuring its vision.

The

STOP

This is a continuation of fragment 1/10. As I've mentioned before, I'm a big fan of animal stories and I've enjoyed writing these small bits. I expect that I'll be coming back to this plot during the rest of the fragment series or as a separate story altogether.

The thing about animal stories is that they are not obligated to follow the same rules as humans are, but you can add or subtract almost any of those same rules to animals and get away with it. In Watership Down by Richard Adams, the rabbits can communicate with english and their own native language (adding a human rule) but they communicate with humans, operate machinery, or understand many concepts that are familiar to humans (subtracting a human rule). On the other hand, C.S. Lewis' The Chronicles of Narnia feature many animal characters that have all of the same intelligence and capacities of the human characters with whom they regularly interact (adding multiple human rules). As readers, we hardly bat an eye at such rule-breaking.

For these fragments, I've been wanting to convey an animal story and use very few human rules. Although I haven't yet gotten to the point where this would be relevant, I'm interested in having the characters interact without any sort of verbal dialogue. Also, notice that I haven't written any monologues or thoughts for the character. I haven't even revealed what kind of animal it is (although you may know by now). I'm trying to strip away the human-bound rules and introduce the reader to the world and its characters the way an animal would be introduced if suddenly immersed in a new environment. The narration doesn't tell you anything other than what you would see, hear, touch, and taste with your eyes, ears, muzzle, and paws. My hope is that the reader will understand just enough of the plot to follow the flow of events but just barely not enough so that they can have the same curious, mysterious, and uninformed experience as any other animal in the forest.

I began a 10-day experiment on October 30th. For 10 days, I am:

1. Setting a timer for 15 minutes
2. Writing what I can during that time
3. Stopping when the time is up
4. Posting what is written without any final editing

For additional context, check out the first post in this series by clicking here.

START

There were lights in the sky. There were lights on the ground. It was the fourth of July and my 6 year old mind had hit 'record' on this campfire moment in which sparklers were lit and laughter drifted through the breeze. I remember little about the experience, only one moment, actually. My Uncle Jon stood over the fire holding a sparkler high over the campfire while someone made a remark comparing him to the statue of liberty. I remember the glowing yellow of the fire that lit up his face and the pulsating white glare of the sparkler in his hand that threw tiny comets in all directions. Flying from their source, they left trails of vibrant bands that lingered in my vision long after they curled into wisps of gray smoke.

There are some emotions attached, like roots, to this visual. Surrounded by people I love, outside in the woods, celebrating together, lighting sparklers. Though the snapshot is brief, it is as warm as the fire we gathered around.

My mind is speckled with many such memories.

STOP

I'm pretty happy with this one. It seems to be the most complete fragment so far. The timer rang as soon as I typed the last word. I had to pause the timer a few times to take care of some other things while writing this but I tried not to do any mental writing in between.

This is a true memory and I found that the words came fairly naturally because I was working with something I knew. My family has always done summer campouts around the 4th of July in New Hampshire and Vermont and this is an early memory from one of those trips.

If given more time, I would have tried to make a descriptive connection between the fading 'comets' from the sparkler and memories themselves. In their own way ,they both have a bright head (the actual moments/events we remember), a blazing tail (our memories that follow the event), and the wisps of smoke they leave behind (the lingering emotions and sensations the extend beyond the visual images we recall).

I began a 10-day experiment on October 30th. For 10 days, I am:

1. Setting a timer for 15 minutes
2. Writing what I can during that time
3. Stopping when the time is up
4. Posting what is written without any final editing

For additional context, check out the first post in this series by clicking here.

START

He climbed to the top of the hill, trying to gain a vantage point.

He was enveloped in overgrowth. Plants and trees crushed in on all sides, canopies of leaves and vines stretched overhead. The forest was trying to suffocate him. The air was still and thick like a wet towel, smearing his skin with sweat and grime. Even the insects, unseen but heard and felt, seemed to be harboring a lazy resentment towards him.

As he turned to head down the hill, he noticed the tree branches: well within reach and surprisingly ladder-like. Reaching for the nearest one, he began to pull himself up. This was slippery work; the lichen was moist as though it had soaked in a light rain. The tree wore a thick coat of it, rendering the bark uneven and spongy. As he hoisted himself upwards he brought his feet to rest vertically on the trunk while he clung to the underside of a stout branch. Arching his head back, it was only now that he saw the white cords dangling below him, anchored to his back at one end while the other end terminated in a tattered, mar

STOP

This was a tough one. There were no magic moments here where the story really started flowing. I set the timer before I felt 'ready' to write so I just started with the first image that popped into my head: a guy in the middle of a forest. Sometimes these free-writes are fun and filled with spontaneous creativity but not this one. This felt like pure exercise where every word and sentence was being forced out like a series of push-ups.

In case you're curious, the last sentence is describing a parachute. He had forgotten to take it off prior to climbing the tree. Why was he in the forest? How did he get there? What plane did he jump/fall out of? I don't know. This likely would have developed into a wilderness survival story where the character is trying to figure out where he is and how to get in contact with his crew or some other branch of civilization.

This wasn't a smooth writing experience but it comes with the territory of the activity. A free-write is supposed to be unrehearsed and on-the-spot. Sometimes this spontaneous labor is fruitful and sometimes its just labor. Either way its good practice.

I began a 10-day experiment on October 30th. For 10 days, I am:

1. Setting a timer for 15 minutes
2. Writing what I can during that time
3. Stopping when the time is up
4. Posting what is written without any final editing

For additional context, check out the first post in this series by clicking here.

START

The cupboard creaked open as a faint curtain of dust wafted down to the counter top. There were empty soup cans and the shriveled remnants of a fruit arrangement scattered across the wooden surface, marked with age-old lines where a hosts' carving knife nicked the boards amid preparations of long-ago family dinner.

There was little light to speak of in the kitchen. Broken beams of twilight fragmented through the leaves, the vines, and the crooked window shutters they held in place. All else was cloaked in the graying hue of a forgotten cabin.

Forgotten to most, that is. To the resident of this particular cupboard, it made little difference if anyone remembered the structure or not. Better if they didn't, in fact. All the more for this one to enjoy for himself. He wasn't selfish, really. But whether one is selfish or selfless can only be seen when one has another outside of themselves

STOP

It was hard to stop this time. It usually is but this one was hard because I was trying to redeem the last sentence which seems to be rambling in its unfinished state. I had a vague idea of what I wanted it to say and was just starting to find the words to do so.

Also, I was starting to introduce a character that I was going to enjoy. The character I had in mind was a mouse. Yesterday I had this image in my head of an mouse wearing a maroon vest and a modest-looking crown. Almost a cross between Reepicheep from C.S. Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia and a character from the movie The Secret of Nimh (originally a book by Robert C. O'Brien). This is born out of my great love for animal stories (Watership Down by Richard Adams is one of my favorite books of all time).

I thought this mouse would be a noble prince of sorts but he was turning out to be a Bilbo Baggins; a loner, comically meticulous about his material things and his privacy, and a disdain for wandering too far from home. I wasn't planning for that. What prompted the change was the description of the cabin as being 'forgotten' and its general state of decay. A princely mouse wouldn't live in a place like that. They would live in a place that is perhaps uninhabited by humans but well populated with fellow critters; an animal kingdom. What kind of creature would live in a place forgotten and abandoned by both man and animal? One that preferred peace and quiet.

For 10 days (starting October 30th), I am:

1. Setting a timer for 15 minutes
2. Writing what I can during that time
3. Stopping when the time is up
4. Posting what is written without editing

For additional context, check out the first post in this series by clicking here.

START

The roar invaded from all directions. Tossed and thrown, upside down, rightside up. Salt on the tongue and in the nostrils. Limbs flailing and kicking, trying to find some solid surface; suddenly weighted by the sog of wet clothes and boots. A sudden plunge and muffling of all sound while pockets of air rippled past the ears. Eyes clenched tight like a submarine hatch.

Everything was still in that moment. It felt like hours. A damp blue hue pierced the black void of my eyelids. Above me, a wrinkled blue sheet quivered as the waves rolled over head. Long, black lines that stretched from east to west (or was it north to south?) advanced in fast succession towards some unknown shore. Gray figures moved according to the rhythm of these lines. Like marionettes dangling from unseen strings, they were lifted upwards as the line rolled by, becoming small specks at their peak, crashing back down and bouncing slowly to a

STOP

I'm not too sure where this was going. At the beginning, I was thinking of the opening scene from the movie "Saving Private Ryan" with its brutal depiction of the troops storming the beach at Normandy. Some shots alternate above and below the water line, giving an eerie, audible contrast between the roaring chaos just above the surface and the muffled stillness beneath.

While writing, I was undecided on the actual scenario that was happening. However, if I had more time this might have become an imagination/reality contrast of sorts. At first glance, the story might seem pretty dark, as though the character (whoever they are) is stranded at sea. But maybe this account is simply the imagination of a child swimming in a wave pool at a water park? What if the first paragraph describes the moment they got knocked off of their inner tube and in the second paragraph, they're simply floating underwater, imagining they've been shipwrecked and that the people bobbing with the waves above are fellow shipmates? The physical surface of the water would serve as a convenient transition between reality and imagination; when the character resurfaces, we as readers would be transported with them back to the reality of a colorful, loud waterpark. And in the manner of children, who know how to do such things so well and so naturally, we would leave the shipwreck and the vast, infinite emptiness of the sea just beneath the rippling surface of a 5-foot-deep swimming pool.

I'm going to try an experiment. For the next ten days, I'm going to:

1. Set a timer for 15 minutes
2. Write whatever I can during those 15 minutes
3. Stop when the time is up
4. Post whatever I've written without editing it

Steps 1-3 are similar to an assignment I had back in college. The professor told us to do a free-write as soon as we woke up in the morning, stopping whenever the time ran out. The idea was to get into a writing 'groove' and then stop. This was really hard to do when a good idea was starting to form but that was the point: to inspire a hunger for creativity.

Step 4 is my addition. A blog sometimes feels like an art gallery: everything is a final draft, on display, polished and dusted. There's nothing wrong with that. I enjoy presenting a finished product.

But too often I've blocked my own creative process because I didn't think I had the time, skill, or even the desire to nurture the seed of a big idea into fruition. Step 4 aims to undo all of that and establish the practice of consistent productivity.

The creative process is incredibly messy; there are cross-outs, the smell of burnt erasers, pulled hair, chewed fingernails, and the ominous, yawning expanse of an eternal blank page. But this is the dirt you must dig through if you want to find gold. For the next ten days, I'm going digging and I'm

starting right now. Care to join me?

START

The leaves bristled in the wind. Crowds of sentinel oaks canopied the sky, catching all the sunlight they could in their many-fingered hands while the rest dripped like jeweled water droplets to a bed of maple leaves below. With the occasional swoosh of a tail, small dirt clouds rose and dissipated in a lazy rhythm. The breeze blanketed the sound of licked fur and the scratching of an ear with a hind-paw.

The masked animal was sunning itself in the study of nature's inner chambers. It's tail, a cherry-handled paintbrush dipped in eggshell-white, betrayed the at-ease of its parent-body as it seemed bent on painting something on the ground canvas.

As the wind began to sharpen its pitch to a whisper, two black-tipped ears snapped to attention and the paintbrush recoiled to the side of a muscular haunch.

STOP

Let's talk about pogo and Jesus. No, not the Pogo Stick craze that rocked the socks off of your childhood and no, I'm not talking about Jesus jumping on one either...although that image is pretty funny.

The pogo I'm talking about haunted my pre-adolescent waking life like a canker sore for a long time. A very long time. At-least-a-year long time (which, to a 12 year-old, is about 8-16% of their entire life-span).

Pogo was a "game" that was really a form of sociological torture, likely invented by an alpha-dog monarch who used it to stealthily sift his like-minded allies from the clueless peasantry. I was first introduced to pogo as a wee-lad in Boy Scouts where said sifting was enacted on a frequent basis. We met on Tuesday nights in a church hall that, for two-hours, became an independent nation in which we lowly younger Scouts were subjugated to the authoritarian elder Scouts and their bidding.

Such bidding sometimes involved keeping them entertained. Keeping them entertained sometimes involved pogo. And pogo always involved anguish and madness.

Here's why: Pogo was a "repeat-after-me" game in which the initiating player would draw in the dirt with a stick while saying the phrase, "Do you know pogo like I know pogo?" The observing player would then have to mimic their sequence. What made the game "fun" was that there was a secret action included in their sequence that the observing player would have to repeat in their performance in order to win. As far as I know, the gesture was always the same in every game. In my experience, gameplay typically went as follows:

Pogo Guy:

"Do you know pogo like I know pogo?"

<rhythmically chanted while drawing patterns in the dirt with a stick...hands stick to me>

Me:

<takes the stick>

"Do you know pogo like I know pogo?"

<said in the same rhythmic speech while drawing the same patterns I observed>

Pogo Guy:

<smirking>

"Nope"

<turns to another guy>

<ahem>

"Do you know pogo like I know pogo?

Another Guy:

<ahem>

"Do you know pogo like I know pogo?"

<said while sort of mimicking the patterns, but not entirely accurate>

Pogo Guy:

"You got it dude!"

Both Guys:

<hi-fives, chest bumps, and hoots of celebration>

Me:

<a year of wallowing in despair for want of forsaken knowledge>

Do you get the point? There was a secret society and I was not in it. And, technically speaking, that was really lame. On two accounts. One was the secret; the fact the I couldn't figure out the answer to the puzzle and it stuck in my head like a bad riddle. Second was the society; the feeling of exclusion from the in-crowd who was having a grand old time with their warm and cozy "in-the-know" status while I was shivering outside in the cold.

I wanted to solve the riddle and join the party. I meticulously studied the way they played the game, perfectly repeated every lilt in their voice as they spoke the words, and precisely reproduced the minutiae of every dot, dash, and swoop of the patterns they drew with the stick. I would always be crushed because I just "didn't get it." I begged them to tell me the secret. In one impassioned moment, I even shed tears while imploring for the answer. My pleas succeeded only in causing the pogo-knower before me to repeat the game louder and slower. Needless to say, that's not what I wanted.

The torment ended one day when my friend Ben decided to tell me the answer. I have no idea why he did or how he found out. Ben and I were the same age so he had no need to establish age-based dominance over me. Perhaps he was let in on the secret and wanted to share it with me in the same way a prisoner shares rumors of coming rescue with his inmates. We were on a campout and I suddenly found myself in conversation about the game with him. He happily told me the secret and when I heard it, it was as though a river of living water was poured into the parched mouth of my soul.

What was the secret? It was simple: To clear your throat.

That's right. The secret that kept me in bondage for all that miserable time was the little that preceded "Do you know pogo like I know pogo?" In the arena of pogo, once you got that little cough out into the air, you've won the game.

Everything that follows, hinged on that one little gesture.

Just like Jesus.

Uh...what?

Let me explain.

In high school, I wanted to get to know Jesus. I started reading about him, thinking about what he's like, trying to be like him, asking myself things like "what would Jesus do in this situation?" and then trying to do it. Yet I still had a hard time wrapping my mind around the concept of trying to get to know someone that I couldn't physically hang out with in the same way that I could with my friends. I could call a friend of mine on the phone, go over their house, hi-five them, hear the inflections in their voice, see what color shirt they were wearing, see their facial expressions in reaction to what they were feeling. I couldn't do the same thing with Jesus.

High school saw me changing in terms of personality, behavior, and beliefs. Yet at the same time, problems arose from a combination of confusing elements: some long-held struggles with obsessive compulsive disorder, guilt and fear over my recent understanding about sin and hell, and an apparent inability to call Jesus on the phone and talk to him directly about my worries.

Things got more confusing in college when I would find myself with people that spoke a different spiritual dialect than what I was used to. I would hear things like, "I was talking to God yesterday and he said that ____ (insert deep spiritual truth here)" or "I don't know about you, but when I ____ (insert regular spiritual practice here)." It is certainly not wrong to express one's experience this way and I'm certain that the impact those folks had on me was unintentional. But, due to the personal complications I mentioned earlier, this was the beginning of a long and difficult journey.

And this has what to do with pogo?

Alright, alright.

I felt like I was on the outside. It seemed I was perpetually on the losing side of a spiritual pogo game. Whether this was their intention or not, it seemed as though someone had just scribbled some cryptic script into the sand and chanted, "Do you know Jesus like I know Jesus?" and was now offering the stick to me. But I couldn't do it. I didn't know the secret trick. I wasn't at a point where I could confidently affirm to other people, "God told me ___" or claim to have unshakeable confidence in areas where I still had doubt. I didn't know what that meant. But I was trying. I really wanted what they had. I really wanted to talk to God, tell him how insecure I was, and have a back-and-forth dialogue serve as evidence of the fact that he cared about me and loved me. Something must be so terribly wrong with me that my time with God doesn't resemble theirs.

The more I began to feel excluded by those around me, the more I began to feel excluded by God. I started to feel like God himself was now handing me the stick, after writing the complexities of the bible and life itself into the sand, and was now expecting me to figure it out. In my mind, God became the frightening leader of a confidential club and I didn't know the secret hand-shake to be admitted. Initially, things like reading the bible, going to church, and praying were the natural result of a blossoming and relational faith. However, they were quickly becoming forced attempts to learn the trick and gain acceptance.

Eventually, this all began to change. Whereas pogo changed for me in an instant, my poisoned thoughts detoxified over time with steady doses of truth.

It's a long story and I'm sure you'll hear more about it in later posts. For now, I'll summarize:

The contrast between the God I claimed to believe in and the God that I actually believed in became increasingly obvious. Jesus said he was the one and only necessary ingredient for our sin records to be wiped out. I, however, lived as though it were up to me to clean that slate and that the single ingredient of Jesus was too simple, too elementary to apply in my case. There must be something else, like praying more, being more devoted, or helping every old lady within a 10-mile radius cross the street. Jesus blew the cover off of religious secret societies who treated God's acceptance like a trophy to be won or bought by the rich, strong, popular, and morally impeccable. He freely offered it to the poor, the weak, the nobody's, the disgraced. Yet I was living as though God was an untouchable celebrity who would never in a billion years even know who I was until I had somehow worked my way into his circle of influence.

I think Jesus came to simplify and broaden the accessibility of God to people, not to complicate and constrain it. Sure, there are spiritual complexities that are not easily clarified and there are practices like church-going and praying that are helpful. But if Jesus is only the subtle <ahem> that is quickly forgotten in the grand display of our devotion, then we're going to miss the point of it all.

And so will the watching world around us.

No games. No tricks.

Simple.

I met Mr. Hopkins in my senior year of high school. He was my english teacher. He worked in a small town, lived a big life, and taught me how to do the same.

I attended a small high school in the suburbs of south shore Massachusetts. I remember reading a student record of mine that gave statistics at the top of the page, in humble typewriter print, indicating my academic ranking within a graduating class of 149 students. In college, when friends from Texas told me they attended schools with multiple thousands of students (and theirs being one of several equally-sized schools in their district), they may as well have told me that they graduated from Disney World.

Growing up in a small town without anyone from the outside telling you its a small town can weird-en and romanticize your perception of what a big town is like. I thought living in a city must be exactly like living on the set of Sesame Street; every street corner filled with colorful characters who are ready to drop whatever they are doing and burst into song, teach a math or grammar lesson, or go on a scavenger hunt for items that begin with the letter "M". I wanted to move to Boston (conveniently close to where we already lived) or Tokyo (inconveniently on the other side of the world but hopefully just as whimsical as all the anime cartoons I used to watch made it seem). I wanted to revel in big-town, city magic on a daily basis. Seeing that I was oblivious to the logistical and financial complexities of such a feat, my parents tried to reason with me.

Needless to say, my family did not uproot itself from the familiarity of careers, neighbors, and ways of living to be transplanted into the urban unknown just so I could live on Sesame Street. I was forlorn. When my brother moved to Boston for college, it was as though a former inmate were walking into the horizon as a free man while I watched from behind the bars of my cell window. I resigned to what felt like a life-time of small town labor, riding the same old bus down the same old streets to the same old schools I had known, and where I had been known for so long. As I grew older, I would acquire a yearning to go where I had not yet been, meet people who did not yet know me, and to let the prologue to my adulthood be written on a fresh page, a full page-turn away from the chapters of childhood, before a brand new audience.

Don't get me wrong, my hometown was a great place to grow up. It was a loving, supportive community and I love going back there to visit. But the leaf of many a teenage soul often feels periods of resentment for the stabilizing stem that keeps it from flying away in the tantalizing winds of change. It wasn't until my senior year of high school, when one, long, eternal year stood between me and my freedom, that a seed would be planted that had the power to enliven whatever landscape I found myself treading in the future, big or small.

Mr. Hopkins initially strikes the observer as an unassuming, scholarly gentleman. His bespectacled, bright-eyed countenance, complete with a button-down shirt and the occasional bow-tie betray the comedically styled, zestfully proclaimed, dramatized lessons that often characterized his classes.

"I would give my right-arm to write a line like that!" he blurted to the class after analyzing a passage from a poem written in olde-english form about a rather uneventful winter sled ride through the woods. He stood wide-eyed with his right arm turned upright, fist clenched, and left-index finger quiveringly pointing to his elbow joint, as if eagerly showing a prepping surgeon the generous length of arm he was willing to have amputated in exchange for the poetic finesse in reference.

His small teacher's podium was often quite inadequate to contain him. He gripped its sides, reeling his tall upper-frame around to look every single one of us directly in the eyes when making a philosophical point, paced to and fro well beyond its borders, arms flailing in excited exclamations over rich texts, and slapped its weary surface when bursting into laughter over a veiled, scholarly joke from a reading that sailed over the heads of his students.

Although Mr. Hopkins could put on quite a show by himself, it was impossible to remain an observer for long. This man had a way of galvanizing his students with irresistible opportunities to take leaps of faith and face one's demons. Said faith-leaping assumed many forms: class-readings in which the reader was required to use an accent, personal poetry delivered standing, not sitting, behind the ragged podium in front of everyone (tears were shed at times), and being graded on our ability to not only recite Hamlet's soliloquy from memory but to dramatically portray it with whatever acting ability we could muster. Ordinary classroom life became extraordinary.

If those examples leave you unconvinced, consider the context: a roomful of teenagers who are trying to play it cool in front of each other all the time doing things that could shatter that self-projection into billions of pieces in a single instant. He was a master of chiseling holes through the walls that so many teenagers use to conceal their authentic selves and inviting them to come out of hiding. Often in the moment, I couldn't stand the intrusion. I was a quiet, timid kid in high school. Although I am naturally introverted, my timidity was a mask I learned to wear in my early days in order to stay out of trouble with teachers for whom I had a reverent yet irrational fear. Later in life the timidity morphed into neutral, observational silence. I thought it made me seem like the smart, thoughtful, "mysterious" type of guy that you either wanted to be buddies with or wanted to leave alone because he might know kung fu.

Mr. Hopkins confused my internal programming like a computer glitch, making me uncomfortably aware of just how suffocating that mask was. No longer would I be able to get by in class by playing hide-and-don't-seek. On certain days, an otherwise routine class activity would turn into the opportunity to stand out, be unique, and lift the veil that shrouded our authentic selves. But sometimes I just wanted to stay in my seat, take notes, curl into a ball behind my walls, and tighten the straps on my mask, thank you very much.

One day I cinched those straps so tight that they burst.

It was mid-winter and I had a busy day ahead of me. I was a member of the school band and had an off-site audition later that day for a music festival. I would be dismissed early from English class. That morning I ran down the hall to Mr. Hopkins room, my snare drum strapped to my back and the tapping of my black dress shoes echoing down the hallways lined with navy blue lockers. I came into the room as my classmates were still settling into their desks and pulled Mr. Hopkins aside. He looked down at me unflinchingly, as he always did, with a gaze that seemed to pierce through veneer, mortar, and brick. I dared to make eye-contact every few words as I mumbled:

"I have an audition today...I'll have to leave early...at about 10:45."

Immediately his hand thumped on my shoulder and he spoke in the determined, hurried tones of one who was about to remove his balancing hands from a child learning to ride a bike:

"Ok, now here's what I'll want you to do: I want you to get up in a huff. I want you to get mad, tell me that you can't take it anymore, and then storm out of the room."

Somewhere in the depths of my torso someone had lit a fire and was pouring gasoline in ever-widening circles around it. Right before the smoke came billowing out of every orifice on my mortified face, I clamped down the mask, gave a crooked smile, and chuckled "Heh! OK."

With a final nod and clap on the back he dismissed me to my seat.

Although I only had 30-minutes until my dismissal, the fabric of time itself must have been in the wash because those minutes stretched, pulled, lingered, and faded into hours. The clock pounded out every one of the 1,800 second-hand ticks like a canon in slow-motion, heralding the coming of my fight-or-flight performance, inviting every one of my inner critics to take a front-row seat.

The time-warp ended at 10:44. All senses came piercing into my consciousness like shards of glass. A multitude of voices were muttering frantically in each ear as they flew through cost-benefit analyses, risk assessments, and weighed the scales of my choices.

Should I do it or not? Will I overdo it and offend him? Will people think I'm cool? What am I supposed to do after I storm out? Do I come back and tell everyone its a joke? I sort of want to do this but I'm not used to being the kind of guy that does this sort of thing. Maybe I can just let it slide and leave. WHAT DO I DO?!

My eyeballs bounced back and forth in their sockets as the voices screamed for my attention. They were yelling over each other.

When a space-time anomaly leaves you with only one minute to diffuse a bomb strapped to your socially protective shell, you might end up snipping both wires at once in your haste to choose only one.

It was 10:45.

"MR. HOPKINS!"

It stumbled out of my mouth like an unexpected belch.

The buzz of the classroom screeched to a halt and he, hunched in conversation with a classmate, turned to me with the wide-eyes of an actor awaiting his cue. My monotone drone was discordantly accompanied by my nervous bursts of volume and meek quavers of uncertainty:

"I...HAVE TO...go"

He didn't move. I was running late now for the audition. I had to finish it. The rest of my script drifted cautiously into the air like a balloon fizzing out of helium:

"I can't take it anymore Mr. Hopkins"

Snip.

Boom.

A shrill and questioning chuckle darted through the class. He breathed a heavy sigh, his shoulders falling, then rising as he lifted his weary head. Masterfully working the whole charade into part of an act that accommodated my faltered offering and kept the show going, he played along. Tiredly proclaiming my status as an incorrigible and out-of-control student before the class, he dismissed me to the audition with a smile.

I will never know what would have happened had I gone for the act with all my might. But I am glad for what did happen: Before I knew it I was walking down the hallway, red-faced and out of breath. The heavy wooden door closed behind me. Internally, I pulled at the straps of my mask in anguish. I tied them in knots and with every step pulled them tighter and tighter. By the time I was out of the building and on the bus, the knot had burst from the strain. The mask hung in tatters. The bus pulled out of the driveway. A refreshing breeze billowed in through the now gaping hole in my brick wall. Through it, I stared back at the classroom window on the second story as it faded into the distance.

____________________

That was not the end. It wasn't even the beginning. I had been given the chance to sink or swim before I was a student in Mr. Hopkins' class. Sometimes I sank. Sometimes I swam. There were many more opportunities to come in that class and beyond as well where those results were repeated.

But the unique thing that Mr. Hopkins did for me is that he made those opportunities so exciting. He could present you with a challenge that seemed at once so frightening and yet so within your reach that you knew you would be cheating yourself if you didn't go for it with all that you've got. He also made you know, beyond any doubt, that he was in your corner cheering you on as you made the ordinary hum-drum of life extraordinary and explored the limits of what you were capable of.

Whenever life seems to lose some color and I'm tempted to put my mask back on and fade into the background of routine, the lessons I've learned from people like Mr. Hopkins come back to haunt me.

Do something. Be you. Seize this ordinary moment and make it extraordinary.

What will happen if you don't? Nothing.

What will happen if you do? There's only one way to find out.

The trail danced through shrubs and tree groves in a path that seemed to be modeled after the flight pattern of a butterfly. Broad palettes of colorful flowers were spread over the terrain while cloud shadows slowly marched over the terrain like lofty guardians patrolling their territory. I produced my map and began jotting the trail curves as I went, lest I forget the playful turns I had been rounding.

After a half-mile, the soft grass and vibrant flowers faded to a rocky and muddy terrain, as if the grand paintbrush that enlivened the land had streaked out of color at the end of a long stroke. The trail gave a few more mischievous twists around some boulders before becoming soberly straight as it brought me down into a small valley. Clouds were gathering in the sky as though they found something of interest down below and had called to some friends to bear witness. Though it was midday, the daylight dimmed as I entered a canopy of leaves and branches. Seizing the light that remained, I looked down to sketch the latest developments in the trail on the map; the scratching of my pencil and the windblown leaves whispering to each other as I worked.

Taking a glance over the top of the paper, I froze as my gaze followed the trail for a few more paces before colliding with a wall of rock interrupted by a round void of darkness: A cave swallowed the trail and its mouth waited in hunger for me. I looked back at the map and saw former portions of my path that were drawn straight for a length and then suddenly diverted, sometimes for miles, in wide arcs to avoid passing through previous caves and features of this kind.

However, something was different this time. I wanted to follow this trail. I wanted to draw a straight line on my map.

I pocketed the map and approached the cave. The wind, whispering moments before, was amplified into a low, damp breath as it heaved out of the mouth. I stooped to peer into the cavern and saw a pinprick of daylight at the end; a solitary star in a void of space. The invisible fist gripping my chest loosed a little and I took one last look about me; around me all was cold and gray, before me was darkness, ahead of me was life. I took a breath, entered the cave, and pursued it.

____________________

I slept with the hall-light on until I was in middle school. My door and one eye were always wide-open while the 3,000 candle-power hallway light cast its all-protecting lumens in a circle bright enough to give a mole cataracts. I don't know what age I was when this stopped but I was old enough to feel self-conscious about it and question if I was breaking some unspoken rule regarding age-mandated sleeping environments.

I received a response to this question by a classmate in computer class. We sitting side by side on old computers that were cutting edge at the time and are probably now used only by non-conformist grandparents who need email and IT personnel who need an over-sized doorstop. The program we were using was a "get-better-at-typing" game that displayed a computer keyboard and a pair of beautiful translucent hands that were purple and poised perfectly over the keys like the fingers of a master pianist. My hands were not purple and resembled chickens sifting through the keyboard for grain, pecking each key sporadically with gangly index-finger necks that protruded from my fists.

Amid the uncoordinated tic-tac sound of 7th graders learning how to type for the first time, I contemplated my plight. Half of me was tethered to the nightlight with cords of fear while the other half was being pulled into darkness by chains of shame. I wanted neither. Despite the years of protection I had received under the nightlight, I began to resent it and the need I felt for it. I also resented the notion of sleeping in the dark. Whose idea was it anyway to create a culture of fairy tales, nursery rhymes, and movie trailers on daytime television that are rife with images of horrors that lurk in the dark, feed them into the sponge-like minds of society's children, and then shame them for finding it difficult to sleep comfortably in the shapeless void where terror and madness lie in wait around every unseen corner? I felt as though I was expected to justify myself before a jury for breathing oxygen. My nightlight was not only rational, it was a basic living essential. If I had the proper legal authority at the time, I would have written an 11th Amendment declaring it illegal for anyone to question, criticize, or cock their eyebrows at one's use of a nightlight.

Surely I was not the only level-headed thinker around. I decided to take this question to the authorities; to have them examine the illogical case being brought against me and boldly declare before the watching world that I was firmly in the right and should be spared any judgment or critique under penalty of being poked in the ribs.

I conveniently had access to such an authority in the 12-year old classmate next to me who was picking his ear with the pinky finger of one hand while limply swatting his keyboard with the other.

This was my big chance. I was ready. I was going to accomplish two things in the ensuing conversation:

• First thing: Shuffle off the burden of hiding my nightlight dependency, thus kicking that nagging shame in the mouth.
• Second thing: Receive validation from a trusted source regarding how difficult it is to overcome said dependency...and maybe even permission to stop trying to overcome it because nobody else was bothering to try either.

My mission was clear and my arguments were sound. I chuckled to myself as I imagined how I would strut out of the classroom with victory under my belt. Maybe I would purse my lips to one side, throwing my shoulders with each exaggerated step, winking and pointing at the cool kids with both index fingers.

I assessed the tools I had available to me with which I would build the discussion. The conversational orbit between pre-teen boys is a selectively small one and tends to gravitate around the following:

• Video games
• Pokémon
• Video games about Pokémon
• Things pre-teen boys think are stupid

This last category is by far the most frequented subject of choice among conversing youngsters. It's content is updated almost by the minute, ensuring that all participants can contribute something to the discussion. Entire friendships have been forged and broken on its grounds. Aware of this risk, I threw caution to the stuffy classroom wind and offered a cordial invitation to discourse:

"Dude, you know what's stupid?"

His response dripped with the enthusiasm of an eager participant:

"Uh?"

Without even trying, I was able to conjure up a list of items to discuss and I was sure my classmate would agree. I would build his approval from the ground up, starting with the small things like lockers and algebra while masterfully building a rapport that could handle the nightlight issue. I could do it. I would do it. The time was now:

Me: "Whaddya think about those lockers?"

Dude: "Man, I can never open mine! Like, do I turn the dial left, right, left, left? Or left, right left, right?"

Me: "Seriously! And what about algebra? Like, whose idea was it to mix-up numbers and the

alphabet like that?"

Dude: "I know right?! If you ask me, I think whoever thought of that should sit on a porcupine!"

Me: "Yeah! And you know what else is a pain in the butt? Still not bein' able to sleep with the

light off at 12 years old!"

Dude: "I hear you brother! With a blanky and teddy bear to boot!"

Me: "You know it!"

Both: <chest bumps>

This is the script that was playing on repeat in my head while we were talking. It came to a startling halt like a needle being jerked off of a spinning record right about the time when I realized my classmate and I weren't on the same page about how confusing algebra was at its core:

Dude: "Algebra's not hard at all man. I think pretty easy."

Me: ...

Dude: "You don't?

Something was wrong. That wasn't on the script. In my brain, there were red lights flashing and sirens wailing while little versions of me scrambled around looking for a response, rifling through filing cabinets, and frantically flipping through databases to find a response that would get us back on track.

Me: "So uh...I've always slept...with the hallway light on and...I um...still haven't gotten used to

sleeping with it off"

Dude: <blinking confoundedly>

Me: "Um..." "Stinks, right?"

Dude: ...

Me: "...know what I'm talkin' 'bout?"

He kept staring at me while the purple hands on his computer screen were frozen in sharp contortions, as though they too had heard my secret and were in shock. After what felt like three-and-a-half days of silence, the corners of his lips began to curl and his eyes narrowed at their edges. I saw the tips of his teeth emerge in a cursive smile. He seemed to be assessing my situation as a lion casually considers the parts of a trapped gazelle he should like to nibble on first. All at the same time, the classroom slowly became a courtroom; either side of me surrounded by a jury of fellow students who tic-tac'd away on court-logs that were recording every detail of my depraved lack of coolness. His eyes flashed and I knew that he, as the judge, had come to his conclusion and was ready to pronounce his judgment. The lion was ready to pounce. The guillotine was about to drop. My pupils shrunk to pin-pricks; I could see nothing and was left only with ears that would not cease to hear both my pounding heart and the sentence heaved at me with a mocking, "poor baby" tone of voice:

"Aw poor Andy, can't sleep without a nightlight?"

The courtroom disappeared. The judge and jury disappeared. The purple hands disappeared. Everything evaporated in an instant and I was in a black, formless vacuum. It was as though I had been preserved during a split-second rupture in the space-time continuum that sucked away the earth, the stars, the universe itself, and left me in its wake.

There is no air in space but apparently there is sound. Every inch of the expanse around me echoed with "can't sleep without a nightlight" in haunting, mock voices that were speaking, singing, chanting, whispering, and wailing like a crazed choir of inmates. The sinister song reverberated over and over like an eternal record on loop.

Back in reality, my classmates had filed out of the room and it was time to go to lunch. I drifted out behind them like a wide-eyed toad on a lily pad being dragged about by a lazy current, carelessly bumping into things without flinching. The existential void of never-ending woe has a way of making you impervious to outside stimuli.

The darkness and the voices eventually faded away but I probably spent the rest of the day in a distant fog with a drooping jaw and a billion-mile gaze: cemented in the cafeteria, oblivious to the chaos-jungle of middle school behind me; glued to the bus seat like a dashboard bobble-head; frozen at the dinner table while my family gently placed french fries and chicken nuggets in my mouth, smearing in mashed potatoes as an adhesive if they fell out.

This isn't exactly the picture I want to leave you with. You might say that this day was not my day. I wasn't exactly on my A-game so-to-speak. Good grief, out of the vast encyclopedia of awesomeness I've been the cause of why in the world would I share this excerpt with you? The truth is, things changed that day. They didn't end then but they changed. That's what this is all about. Sometimes I think God withholds the eraser on "bad" days in our life chapters because they change us. Remember how my fear of the dark dictated so much of my sleeping and waking life? Remember how desperately I sought my classmate's validation? That pillar of anxiety lost a chip in its foundation that day. It took a while for the next chip to fall but it fell more easily than the first. Each one after that came more easily and more quickly than those before. As the years went by it shrunk, crumbled, and lost its power. The debris left-over from its destruction still clutters my life at times but its slowly being blown away in the breeze.

That night, I climbed the stairs while the hall-light watched. It's electric glow and hum always seemed so warm, inviting, trustworthy. This time it buzzed and turned angry shades in a way I never noticed before, like a jilted bully whose target has become deaf to their taunts. I reached the top of the stairs and stared back. I smiled, dragged the dimmer switch to reduce the raging light to a dull glow, and got ready for bed.

I rounded a large boulder with heavy steps that propelled small clouds of dust from under my feet. I came to a small stream, water curling gently over the stones that paved its course. Kneeling for a drink and a brisk face-rinse, I caught my reflection in the rippling surface. Matted hair, sweat and water carving trails through a thin layer of dirt on my chin. Rising slowly to stand, I pulled out the map and jotted a few details of the surrounding terrain and the serpentine stream that coiled its way through the landscape. Pausing to give the map a final, satisfied glance, I spied more twisting, incomplete lines in a lower corner of the page: More rivers. Maybe, even, the same one. Smiling at the thought, I folded the map, brushed the dust from my arms, and carefully crossed the stream using the protruding rocks and logs as a bridge. A large incline rose from the earth ahead, a steep hill of boulders and trees that wore hanging moss like old women draped with elegant shawls. The trail carved a switchback formation that wound its way to the top in ever-tightening coils like a wound spring. Half-way to the top, a sing-song melody naturally whistled its way through my lips; a tune that came from the dusty yet cherished archives of memory. Rounding each switchback, the tune reverberated off of the hills and boulders in the distance. Nearing the top, the music seemed to ring with a boldness that was perhaps an amplified echo of nature. I suddenly became aware that the 'echo' was another whistler, harmonizing with me from somewhere nearby. The song seemed to be drifting down from the top of the hill. The tune was being finished with all of its familiar melodic twists and decorations as I began jogging, then bounding up the last length of the incline. Climbing over the protruding ridge of roots and rocks, my accompanist was finally in full view as the concluding notes were carried away on the breeze. I stood silent at an apparent crossing of two trails where a figure stood in the middle. As we faced one another, a smile crept across both of our grimy faces like the morning sun breaking the night horizon. The hills that once echoed with an old tune now rang with the renewed laughter of two companions, reunited at last.

____________________

I have a brother named Nathan. He is five years older than me and I have always marveled when some people, after telling them as much, would exclaim, "Wow, so he's a lot older than you!" I never considered the distance one that was very wide or out of my reach. I don't know how he did it but no matter how hard I tried and how fast I grew, he has, and still does, maintain his status as being five years my senior. This had its benefits. Let me explain.

Growing up in the same house with the same set of parents gave us shared experiences that were interpreted differently between us. Take chores for example: On summer afternoons, Nathan would tramp over to the shed, clamber over rusted, pointed metal things, and start up a cantankerous red tractor that lived in our shed next to a behemoth green lawn mower. My father would handle the mower while Nathan would follow behind with the tractor, tugging a wooden trailer, and collect the grass clippings for disposal in the woods. The tractor had a humble size but an arrogant attitude. It could buck, cough, and toss like a bull at a rodeo. This was a problem. A rider that could be thrown in the presence of a roaring mower that only allowed everyone in the neighborhood to remain living on the condition that its blood-thirst was abated weekly with a feeding of grass and overgrowth was also a problem. As far as a I know, Nathan and Dad never needed to see a prosthetist. Miracles do happen.

So those were Nathan's duties and mine was to make my bed.

My respect of lawnmowers was a lesson that I conveniently learned from a distance. In retrospect, watching my brother was like watching someone maneuver through an obstacle course while waiting for my turn to jump through those same hoops. As I observed his maneuvers through the obstacles that would come my way in five years, I made subconscious notes that informed how I would handle those same challenges. Some of my notes included:

• When old enough to use a lawnmower, don't.
• When given the opportunity to spend money on car maintenance, new shoes, or anything in general, don't.
• When given the opportunity to sleep, do.

The amnesty granted to me by my birth-order ranking by which I was to be an audience member, rather than the subject, to various life lessons and and experiments was not always enforced. I'm sure Nathan was aware of this, but there are those times where nothing but cold, factual, bruise-inducing personal experience will prepare you for. You see, being the older sibling has its benefits too yet also a terrible responsibility. The benefit is that the elder can, at times, pause from his leaps through the obstacle course, turn, and watch the oft-amusing performance of the younger fumbling his way through certain maneuvers that the elder has long since overcome. The responsibility, however, is akin to that of a hall monitor who must occasionally attest to the fact that you were present in class when life was to teach a particular lesson and not off in some corner inspecting the inner workings of your nose with your finger.

Such a lesson came on a summer afternoon in the mid 1990s.

Mind you, I have no recollection of the ensuing. Just as I had taken meticulous notes as I watched Nathan swing through life's grand obstacle course, he apparently took full advantage of his elder-child benefit as he turned and watched my performance. The following is an except from his notes which, I imagine, are scribed in the pages of his memory with hi-lighted segments, minutely detailed bullet points, and statements like "See Figure 1.A," with arrows directing the reader to a sketched drawing of the detail in reference.

There was an old exercise trampoline at our house for quite some time. It was personal-sized and quite small. I believe it came to us from a pile of used items at the town transfer station where things like appliances and furniture were both orphaned and adopted, often within the same day. Such was the case with this small, blue trampoline when it arrived to us. There were no overt signs of wear, save for a slight pinking of the blue foam-padded vinyl skirt that ran around its circumference and some rusting on the stout, metal legs.

I had always wanted a trampoline as a child. The first time I jumped on one that was full-size, tumbling through the air, flipping and twirling, I was taken. Visiting a friend's house for the first time could be quite a gamble if they had a trampoline. If I spied, through a kitchen window overlooking the backyard, a corner of that vast, black, polypropylene launch-pad, beckoning me to explore the heavens, the world stopped. My mouth would freeze mid-sentence, whatever my hands were holding dropped (be it a backpack, priceless vase, or puppy), and my feet carried me directly towards the trampoline (I often had to be pushed sideways towards an open door for my feet would not stop walking even if a wall barred my path). Soon I would be lost in rapturous laughter as I took flight, my friend watching from a safe distance. Bounding higher and higher with every leap brought new levels of joy that I did not know were possible. I saw a world of possibility and exploration opening up around me. Being alive was art and I would not, could not put the paintbrush down.

Our trampoline was not like that. Jumping straight up-and-down on it was like trying to achieve lift from new pavement. Needless to say it was rarely used. However, Nathan and I found that if you took a running start and flying leap to it, you could gain a few inches of air. We incorporated this discovery into our past-time of playing catch. There is a sloping hill in the front yard of my parent's house that has two distinct inclines with a slight plateau in between. The hill was nicknamed "Mount Larson" by my cousins and other kids from the neighborhood who carved criss-crossing sled trails in its snow-blanketed surface in the winter. This particular summer afternoon, Nathan and I were taking turns being thrower and catcher. The thrower stood at the bottom of the hill and heaved the football up-hill towards the catcher at the top who would dash toward the trampoline, bounce off of it, and catch the ball in mid-air. Requiring accuracy of aim for the thrower and timing for both, it was a fun game and adequately challenging.

It was my turn to be the catcher. I readied myself at the top of the hill in the kind of hunched, forward slant that runners position themselves into when awaiting the starting bell of an Olympic sprint. I had strategically aligned Nathan and the trampoline in my sight. The trampoline was a black-and-blue badge against the sloping green grass and Nathan, a small blur of color in the distance, was poised at the ready with the football. I licked my finger and put it to the air to test the wind. Doing so carried no particular purpose that I was aware of and no data that could be gained from the experiment would have altered my strategy one iota. But to the seven year-old who had seen big people do things like that in movies, it was absolutely crucial to success.

As my finger dried, I heard Nathan's voice carried on the breeze like a trumpet: "Three! Two! One! GO!"

I took off. My velcro-strapped shoes drove into the ground hard, leaving divots in my wake, clumps of fresh grass flinging into the air behind me. I saw the distant blur of Nathan's arm winding back for the throw as the trampoline approached my feet. Though adrenaline was pumping through my system at break-neck speed, the following progression of events seemed to occur in slow motion: My hands were pumping alternately in my peripheral vision, my heartbeat and exerted breathing the only audible sounds in my ears.

As I leapt for the trampoline I could see waves of grass bending slowly in the breeze like a stadium crowd craning their heads in-sync as a jet flies overhead. The football left Nathan's hand in the distance and began spinning toward me like a torpedo, casting translucent ripples of sound-barrier disturbances as it travelled. Then, all was silent as I glided through the air and prepared my feet to press against the canvas. This was the stillness before the storm, the choked breath before the plunge, the silence of a world that watches from the wings as greatness is born.

A strange sensation ripped my focus off of the football. Where I should have felt trampoline fabric conforming to my shoes and lifting me upward, I felt a the hard-rounded surface of a metal bar wrapped in padded vinyl. I had over-shot my leap and landed on the far edge of the trampoline.

Allow me a brief pause here: Remember the great and terrible responsibility that comes to all older siblings that I had mentioned earlier? This is the very moment where that mantle had been thrust upon Nathan. You see, in a different dimension of sorts, I had just entered a classroom, sat down in an upright posture, and folded my hands across the desk. I was embarking on a lesson in physics that could not be taught with all the words, formulas, and textbooks the world had to offer. Nathan's duty at this moment was to bear witness to the fact that I would learn this lesson at the hands of a very experiential teacher. He fulfilled his task that day and still, on occasion, recounts it with the pride of a war veteran.

The slow-motion effect came to an abrupt halt and the rest of the scene progressed in the ungraceful tempo of real-time. The force of my false-landing on the bar propelled the opposite end of the trampoline upward. The back of the trampoline came to rest upright on its edge after cracking against the back of my head with a metallic CHINK. In immediate succession, the football, well-aimed and timed, delivered itself to my face with a leathery FWHAP where my ready-to-catch hands should have been. My arms dutifully wrapped themselves around my head (though a bit late) and I, miraculously conscious, fell to the ground and began tumbling down the hill like a misshapen log. Through my bewildered yelps that jolted in pitch as I rolled and thudded against the ground, I began to understand the lesson being taught to me and why I was not, at this very moment, being paraded through the neighborhood; football firmly in hand, ribbons and confetti being thrown at my feet.

I finally came to a flopping stop at the bottom of the hill and lay on my stomach. My vision was blurry but slowly came into focus. I could see Nathan's figure at the bottom of the driveway coming towards me, his arms waving and pointing. He was shouting something but my ears seemed to be waking up from a dream and could only pick-up the muffled timbre of his voice. The lesson seemed to be over and I resolved to get up, dust myself off, and walk away a changed and knowledgeable young boy. As I prepared to do so, I turned just in time to see the blue disc of the of the trampoline that, after uprighting itself against my head, had apparently chased me down the hill after courteously granting me a head-start. It had been speeding relentlessly after me, rolled over my head with a CRUNCH that pressed my face into the grass, and fell onto its flat upside with the finality of a thick, closed textbook at the end of a cold and unforgiving lesson.

____________________

In the moment, scenarios like this are exceedingly embarrassing, which is possibly part of the reason I could not recall it. The suave dude in my brain conveniently decided to sweep it under the rug of forgetfulness while combing his hair with a squinty-eyed, James Dean-esque gaze in the opposite direction. Or maybe when the trampoline rolled over my head, it mashed the "delete" key on my mental keyboard. Regardless, I am glad that Nathan was there to record it for me. I cherish the story and the fact that it is a shared one between my brother and I.

The fact that I wouldn't have remembered this story is it were not for him is one matter. But the even greater matter is the fact that it wouldn't have happened without him at all. Nathan is a natural leader whose ideas are so contagious that you can't help but climb aboard. It was his idea for us to play football and it was his idea to incorporate that accursed trampoline. I would not have naturally picked up a football and wandered around until I found someone to play catch with. I probably would have sat around in my PJs all day playing Mario and never making it past the first few levels (don't judge, video games were hard back then). Nathan and I have a wealth of memories; full of laughter, some tears, and always those sheepish, remember-that-time-when kind of grins.

In my opinion a rich life is one that is full of experiences and people. Often those two go hand-in-hand. Rich is the key word that brings me to the title of this post, "Get rich off of the people who love you." I must apologize for promoting such a myopic and narrow-minded focus. You should get rich off of everyone else too. It is not just the people closest to us that help us line the pockets of our memory and fatten our life-wallet with meaning; sometimes it is the strangers and the people we'll never see again that add to our lives. You never know what your life would be like if you didn't experience the cruelty and rejection of the "in" crowd, if you didn't receive a refreshing smile from a fellow pedestrian on the street on that one, awful day, or if you didn't find yourself challenged to stand up for right when a wrong was being done in front of you.

I don't think we'll get to the end of this journey and say things like, "Man I wish I had isolated myself just a little bit more." It is the people that join us on the trail, briefly or for the long-haul, that are often the best at reminding you just how beautiful this whole journey is:

"Whoa, look at that valley! Let's go over there and check it out"

"Remember when we had to sleep in that cave and didn't think we'd survive? Good times right?"

"I'm so glad there's a river here, I'm thirsty..."

In our own words, we hear and say things like this to memorialize and raise awareness of the things in our lives that matter, both past and present. These are the quotes we scribble into the margins of our maps, with arrows pointing to their respective points along the trail. Often, we compare our maps with our fellow companions, pointing and remarking about how similar our trails have been in some places and how different in others.

I have a brother and I love him dearly. He enriches my life. Nathan is hiking a different trail than mine but they are connected. They weave in and out of each other like vines stretching from the same patch of soil. My map would not be what it is today without him. Or without you. Thank you.

The trail stretched on ahead, between trees, around towering boulders, and alongside a crystalline river. It laced its way up a rock-laden hill where a clearing in the branches hinted at a rich view of the mountain range in the distance. Before making the short climb, I reached into my backpack and removed a folded piece of paper and a pencil. Gently opening the folds of the paper revealed the nearly-blank surface of a map staring back at me like a waiting child. I turned around and faced the direction I had come from, sketching the last few details of former surroundings into place and drawing the dotted-line of trail thus far. After a silent breath with closed eyes, as if to say "Thank you", I turned once more to the hill ahead and slowly, deliberately made my way to the top. There, the trees parted to form a frame around the rich landscape of valleys, peaks, and mystery ahead. The mountains created a outline against the sea-blue sky that was proudly pointed here and softly sloping there. Drawing its outline had the effect of tracing a heart-rate monitor, the pulse of life itself. I jotted a few brief details and sketches onto the map, carefully folded it back into the bag, and cinched the straps around my shoulders. From where I stood, tracking the trail into the mountains proved a short task for it quickly dashed behind a legion of ancient trees, while a mass choir of leaves exhaled with the wind-whispered laughter of hide-and-seek. But it was there somewhere. I knew where I had come from and I was resolved to find that trail again. After all, I had a map.

____________________

In high school, I had a history teacher named Mr. Perry. Being a student of his was like watching Robin Williams teach history. Most classes were characterized by impersonations of historical figures (Winston Churchill was my favorite), stories about his dog, and students collectively trying to keep him off-topic. He even incentivized our in-class efforts with a Mick Jagger song and dance routine at the end of the school year. He made good on his promise and it was worth the wait.

My greatest take-away from his class has less to do with history and more to do with writing and living (more on that later). "You should make an outline of your essays before you write them", he told us regarding an upcoming exam that would contain an essay question. The outline was a Roman-numeral and bullet-point list containing the bare essential thoughts the essay should communicate, like a map for constructing complete thoughts. It was a tool to help the writer create a meaningful essay by keeping the central theme in focus and prevent drifting into non-essential content. Each numeral represented a section of the essay and each bullet-point was a summary of the supporting details or paragraphs that would convey the idea for that section. For example:

I. Intro

- Should you become a career kazooist?

II. Basic Knowledge

- Practicing scales

- Playing melodies

III. Advanced Knowledge

- Improvised solos

- Getting gigs

- The creative-writing process (and other synonyms for "insanity")

IV. Making the money!

- ...

V. Conclusion

- Don't...just don't...

"You won't get any extra points for putting a summary on your exam, but I'll just make a note that you did it", Mr. Perry said as we moved on to the next lesson. My inner-punk must have been asleep that day because, rather than crumpling-up this seemingly reward-less concept and tossing it into the mental trash can labeled "THINGS TEACHERS SAY" in my all-knowing teenage mind, I decided to give it a try.

And it worked...

Test day arrived and as I came to the essay portion of the exam, the usual shoulder-slump, heavy-sigh routine began as my thoughts lumbered through whatever bits of history and A-list verbiage it could find that were even remotely related to the question. I had played this game before and knew it tended to be a losing one. Then I remembered the outline strategy as a dusty lightbulb sparked and coughed somewhere over my head. Angularly slumped into the back of my chair, I half-heartedly twiddled the pencil between my fingers and doodled "I. Intro" onto the top corner of my page. The lightbulb flickered again and a steady stream of light shone from its core.

"Hey," said a small voice, "that's good stuff!"

"Yeah," I thought, feeling a tingle in my hand, "it's genius."

Another Roman numeral was etched onto my page with a short title. Bullet-points were soon to follow. Something strange began to happen: I could sense that my memories of what I had learned, previously disconnected, were now peeking their heads out of distant neurons like family of prairie dogs, calling out to each other, recognizing familiar voices, and scurrying to reunite at the part of my brain that controls my hand-writing. More succinct notes appeared on my page and they made sense. My eyelids and lips began to peel back, bearing my teeth as I wrote with increasing intensity. Soon the corner of my page began to resemble a Sparknotes legal document. In my head, I began to see a fully-formed essay rising from the fog and fanning it away in grand strokes as it stretched its limbs for the first time and pulled itself onto its own two feet, yearning to live, walk, and be.

As I neared the end of my outline, I became aware of how quickly I was writing and how heavily I was breathing. I tried to calm myself and savor the moment. Setting down my pencil, I closed my eyes and exhaled slowly, shaking my head slightly from side-to-side as though my tastebuds were gradually being awakened by a piece of perfectly seasoned filet mignon. After a moment, my eyelids glided open. I wiped a bead of sweat from my forehead, grabbed my pencil, and gently wrote, no, painted the following onto my paper "V. Conclusion."

I sat staring at the authoritative edict etched into my page, absorbing the fullness of the moment. I looked straight ahead of me as the classroom began to fade and a burst of light shone directly upon me. The previously small voice in my head was overtaken by a thunderous, reverberating tone that began proclaiming the essay soon to rain down from Heaven upon my tattered test paper:

"BE IT HENCEFORTH KNOWN: THIS PARCHMENT, HITHERTO DEVOID OF MEANING AND LANGUAGE, SHALL FORTHWITH BE ENGRAVED MIGHTILY WITH THE SUBSTANTIVE FORM OF THE HISTORICAL SUMMARY THAT FOLLOWS THUSLY:

I. AN INTRODUCTORY SURVEY OF THE BURLY SIR LEWIS AND THE MULTIPLY BICEPPED SIR CLARK

II. THE JOURNEY OF AFOREMENTIONED SIRS AND THEIR CHEST-HAIR INDUCING ADVENTU--"

It took me a while to notice that Mr. Perry had been staring at me. He was frozen in a thin-lipped, ruffled-brow glare that suggested he could hear the faintly muffled voice of my internal monologue and its accompanying blasts of trumpet fanfare. Coming to the sudden realization that my experience had me fixedly gazing in his direction with parted, quivering lips and tears of awe pooling in my far-too-widely-opened eyes, I collided back into reality as though awakening from a falling dream. In doing so, I succeeded in breaking both our staring contest and my pencil as my fist hammered into my desk in an explosive convulsion.

After closing his eyes and rubbing his temples, Mr. Perry graciously returned his computer, though his brow was all the more ruffled. The glares of my classmates replaced his in a strangely elegant fashion, each pair of eyes turning slowly and in-sync, their collective aim coming to a direct fix on me like a parliament of owls watching a helpless mouse. For a moment, the only movement in the room was that of my eyeballs darting back and forth from one unintended audience member to another, the pencil shard still protruding from my clenched fist. Then, careful not to make anymore sudden movements, I carefully retrieved another pencil from my bag, muttering something about the Louisiana Purchase as I went. This seemed to pacify the class as they turned, just as slowly and synchronously as before, to their exams.

The embarrassment soon faded as I took one more look at my paper. The glow returned and I smiled, feeling accomplished, victory swimming freely through my veins as my outline gleamed like a polished trophy. Then I noticed all of the blank space underneath it: I still had an entire essay to write. But this time it was different. That blank void normally would have been a fog-capped mountain of slippery-sloped ideas, blind academic leaps, and pitfalls into endless ramblings. This time, it was a soaring range of peaks and valleys that I wanted to explore. I could do this. I had the tools. I had a map to guide me.

____________________

I cannot remember what I scored on that essay. I can't even tell you much about Lewis and Clark. But that isn't the point. Essays did become more manageable for me after that, but that's not the point either. The point is this: Life's little things, the Roman numerals and supporting details, make all the sense in the world when you take even a few moments to reflect on the bigger picture. Seriously. And that is why we are here. That's why I'm writing and you are (hopefully) reading. And maybe you're even doing some reflection of your own. Writing a story, a poem, or even a simple journal entry along the lines of "here's what happened to me and what I learned from it" is a great way to prevent life from slipping through your fingers unnoticed. If life is the essay, then all the stories, characters, and details we encounter and experience compose its outline. If I never take the time to reflect on the various pieces of the puzzle and where and how they fit in, then life will seem uncoordinated and dull, like flipping through every TV channel without actually wanting to watch anything.

But life isn't like that. The life we have been given is a big one, grand and rich with hidden meaning. This is not to say that everything we experience in life can be condensed and made sensible. No. No matter how thorough your outline is, no matter how accurate your map is drawn, you will still get lost at times. At the end of this life, you may still be grasping for words, images, feelings, anything to associate with certain chapters you've experienced. That is OK. We're not expected to make sense of everything. My hope is that, when I come to the last chapter, I'll have less guesswork to do about what I had just gone through. At this stage of the journey, this is the best way I know to save myself the hassle. There's a great journey ahead and I'm still drawing the map. Won't you join me?