Journey to the Holy Land: 04/04/08

As many times as I have flown on an airplane, as many times as I have picked up friends and family from the airport, as many times as I heard the loud engines vibrate over my house on Grape street during the year I lived there, I can still sit and watch airplanes take off and land for hours. What is so majestic about it? What is so hypnotizing? As I sat on James’ patio on Wednesday night and watched airplanes line up to find the runway and slowly descend under the horizon of housetops and trees, I kept thinking of the movie, “Radio Flyer”. Even from his younger days, it seems that Tom Hanks’ quotes always affect me. It seems that every movie he has done from “Big” to the failed “Da Vinci Code” has at least one profound quote that blows you away. Let’s start with this one from Radio Flyer:

There are six lost secrets and abilities that you lose in the split second between your 12th and 13th birthday. They are: animals can talk; jumping from any height with the aid of an umbrella is completely safe; nothing is too heavy to lift when wearing a cape; monsters exist, and can both be seen and done battle with; your favorite blanket is woven from a fabric so mighty that once pulled over your head it creates impenetrable force field, and the greatest, most special lost power: the ability to fly.

When we were kids though, I think we had a different understanding of flying. Flying for a 1 year old is when your dad throws you up in the air about two feet and catches you. I remember watching a friend do that to their little baby a while back and the way the kid’s eyes just expanded so huge and he exploded in laughter and his big, toothless smile infected me from the inside out. God, I love kids! To a three year old, flying is your older brother lying on his back, putting his feet on your stomach and lifting you up so that you are balancing in the air over him. For a five year old, it’s jumping off the bed in a superman cape, which captures the very power to fly somewhere between the Velcro that your mom sowed on to strap it around your neck, and the frilled edges that you ripped trying to get it away from your dog. At seven, it’s jumping off of the diving board at the public pool, and at nine, it’s jumping on the trampoline at your best friend’s house. Flying didn’t have to include soaring over downtown for hours, just a few seconds of being airborne was flying. It wasn’t about a broomstick, like witches and wizards use, it was about having nothing holding you up. See, the magic - the power - of flying wasn’t defined by what you were gripping that lifted you up into the air. For us, there was no such thing as “lift” and “draft” (I don’t know if the later is a real aeronautics term, but it sounds good, huh?). Our flight was so exhilarating because there was nothing holding us, and yeah we were really just falling, but it was a great fall, wasn’t it?

I think the point of that quote from Radio Flyer is that we started to be logical as we got into our teens. We started to need things to hold us up. It started with a skateboard, or rollerblades, or for the kids now, wheeleys – those stupid shoes with wheels in them. Seriously, I love kids, but every once in a while I imagine myself clothes-lining a kid in a grocery store who whizzes by me! Somewhere in high school, maybe we got our first car to move us around, and for thrills we began playing sports, or watching TV. Cool things show up. The latest toys like CD players or I-pods now. And we started to even build a ground floor for our lives, then build stairs for where we were going – that is, make the blueprints for what we will do to get through school, then go to college, and get a job, etc. And we become conditioned to being grounded by things and plans. We don’t fly anymore. As I watched those planes landing over the dark night sky, I realized that I wasn’t intrigued by the people in the plane – I didn’t want to be them. I wanted to be the plane itself. Every once in a while we get that still as adults. That memory of flying – of being free of stuff and plans. I love how the Bible says, “You will soar on wings, like eagles. I think that’s God’s promise that it’s ok to fly. I don’t have a Bible on me right now, so I don’t know who it was that wrote that part, but the fact that they chose to relate to eagles is the best part. You know, hummingbirds don’t soar; they flutter. Seagulls are flapping and squawking until they catch a gust of wind and float for a minute, but not too long. Even Hawks seem pre-occupied when flying because they are searching for a carcass. Eagles though, sure they have to look for food, and they have to flap, but most of the time they look so care-free. Their wings are just spread out and they let the wind pick them up- they don’t have to try too hard. I think Eagles must believe in God, because it looks like all they are doing is communing with God, talking to him and taking in the world. They are breathing in the miracle of existence, while breathing out the need to know what existence is.

Another quote I love from that movie was one I remember, but can’t remember exactly how it went, and I can’t find it online anywhere. I think it was Tom Hanks saying something like this:

“There is something about watching planes. Imagining the stories of the planes, where they are coming from, where they are going.”

Maybe it wasn’t even a quote from Radio Flyer, maybe it was another movie, but it’s true. As I watched the airplanes, I was overcome with hope and excitement for what I am doing for the first time since I decided to take off. I don’t know what it was, but I saw myself flying away to the East coast and experiencing a new life. I felt content and everything that is holding me down here- really everything I am holding on to here- lifted away.

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I don’t know what time it was that night that I finally gave up on the idea of sleep. James had gone to bed at 11:30 or so, and by 2:00 I had already written an entire sermon in my head that I was convinced I would preach someday at church, I read about 60 pages in the book I am reading, and I began writing a musical in my head – a parody on Fiddler on the Roof called “A Guitarist on the Balcony”. Ok, I have to give you a taste of it. The musical starts like this:

Lights fade in on a night scene of a New York apartment and you hear an acoustic guitar playing the intro to Fiddler on the Roof. You see a young man on his balcony, upstage left, playing the tune. On another balcony, center stage storms a pissed off New Yorker as he begins:

Tony: A guitarist on the balcony. Seriously, how annoying can neighbors be. But then again, I guess you could say that every New Yorker is a guitarist on a balcony; playing the same old tune over and over and over (his voice escalates) until you just want to say “Shut the Fuck up” (he shouts out the window as the guitarist gives up and storms into his house). I always ask myself, why do we do it? I guess its because its easy. And how do I get through day after day, that’s easy – one word, “Repetition”

The neigborhood bursts into the song, “Repetition” which sounds like “Tradition”.

No, really I think it would be really funny. And “Matchmaker” would stay, only they’d be referring to an actual match maker, because they ran out of matches to light their cigarettes – or bong. I don’t know how I feel about the drug use in my play though. “If I Were a Rich Man” becomes “If I Were a Gay Man” because Tony is struggling with why all his friends have turned out to be gay, so he wonders what it would be like – but he’s not gay. “Do you love me” gets interrupted when it dawns on Tony that he’s singing it to his cat because he’s so lonely. And by the end of the musical, the audience is convinced that these lives of repetition are not what we were intended for.

So anyway, here I am at 2:30 or so and I decide to fall asleep, but my mind looks a little like the window by Space Mountain at Disneyland- where you can see the trains whiz by each direction at a hundred miles an hour, and Disney’s production of shooting stars and whirling galaxies make it next to impossible to keep your eyes focused on one thing for more than a nanosecond. I lie there and write two more sermons in my head, but I couldn’t find a pen and paper, I didn’t have my computer, and James told me earlier that his had died because he didn’t have the power cord, so who knows if we’ll ever get to hear the product of my sleepless senselessness. It reminds me of Mitch Hedberg’s joke:

“When I think of a joke, I have to write it down really fast so I don’t forget it. Or, if the pen is too far away, I have to convince myself that that shit aint funny.”

It must have been about 4:30 or 5 when I finally gave up on sleep. I lied there and looked out the window, where sporadic rain clusters were tickling the trees and playing rhythmic solos on the roof. I lied there paralyzed by my brain, re-structuring the way church should be done, making soccer drills for when I begin coaching the children I dream of having, I think I also came up with a title for my first book I will write someday- but then there was that whole “no pen/computer/James’ computer thing” that I told you about already so, again we’ll never see the product of that one. But I’ll tell you what, when you are sleep deprived, you are a profound thinker, or at least you think you are a profound thinker. I mean I thought up some good shit in those 8 hours. But after trying to recall it all, I’ve convinced myself it wasn’t really that profound.

So then it happened. A moment that bummed me out and stoked me out all at the same time. The clouds out the window were no longer just dark shadows behind the one tall palm tree that I could see. They had a slight pink hue to them, and the birds started their chanting, saying “Hey, stupid humans, you always miss the best part of the day. Don’t you know that you’re supposed to be up at sunrise? Can’t you see how much it stokes us out, it makes us want to sing”. Suddenly I thought, hey I can catch the sunrise. At this point, it looked as if the clouds were scattered, and I haven’t seen many sunrises, but I know that at sunset, scattered clouds become canvasses for the sun to reflect its last whispers of “goodnight” on. So, why shouldn’t it be the other way around? Maybe the sun will whisper “good morning” too. I got up and quietly put my shoes on without socks (which is usually so uncomfortable, but was ok this time). I grabbed my jacket and slowly creaked open the door. I grabbed a folding chair outside and climbed to the top of the roof where I angled myself toward the South. This way I figured I could see the reflection of the sunrise on the West sky as well as watch the sun rise in the East. The clouds began to soak up the pink out of the spectrum that the sun casts through the sky. Just as I begin to think, “this is going to be cool”, the pink fades back to white. I look to the East and see that thick clouds rolled in, creating a paste that the sun could not fight through. Oh well, so there won’t be a spectacular sunrise. But along with the thick clouds came a breeze and a little mist. Not anything freezing cold, and not rain, but a sort of whoosh that, if you’re quick enough to breath it in, fills your lungs with solitude.

As I began to see neighbors walk out their doors to their cars, I could hear their feet shuffle. I momentarily closed my eyes and another whoosh came by. I was quick to breath it in. The moisture kind of caught my nose a little though and with my eyes closed, I heard those shuffling feet of the neighbor and the birds chirping and I was transported to probably the only other times I had ever been up this early in the morning.

As a child, and into teenage years, my family always enjoyed camping and outdoor activities. I remember going to San Elijo beach in Carlsbad, where we would camp. We enjoyed our bikes, football in the narrow paved streets, boogie boarding, bon fires, and lobster that my dad and oldest brother would illegally catch, decked in their scuba gear, swimming out from the shore as I ran back up to camp in pain because I didn’t put any sunscreen on for the last 4 hours before sunset. The memories have faded over the years, as memories so crudely do, but the memory that never left is the memory of each morning when we woke up to the sun. My parents didn’t make us get up with them, but we got up. if it wasn’t the sound of shuffling feet or the cold, moist morning air that woke us up, it was the first morning light that began to knock at our eyelids that we couldn’t ignore. The morning silence was amazing. People whispered, if they felt they needed to speak at all. Even dogs didn’t bother barking yet. We would crawl out of our sleeping bags, un-zip the tent flap (or when we had a trailer, we’d climb down from our upper balcony bed and we’d almost never forget to pinch or elbow each other) then we would shuffle our feet towards the fence by the cliffs.

On Thursday morning, with my eyes closed, this memory becomes vivid in my senses. I smell the ocean, I hear the feet, I feel the breeze, I taste the marshmallow that is still stuck on my lips from the s’mores that I scarfed down the night before, and I see the sunrise in my mind despite the reality that the sun is still smothered by thick cotton. I remember that fence by the cliffs where I would have to stand on a bench and lean onto the wood, that time after time gave me splinters and no matter how many times my dad (Dr. Daddy as we called him in these situations) gently pulled out the tiny shards of wood, I still leaned forward on that fence looking out over the ocean. There’s the sun coming up, casting rays of light onto the horizon of the ocean, and into the sky. The light reflects on the ripples in the water from the horizon to the waves which are below us at the bottom of the cliffs. And the waves are crashing, I can hear them louder now because everything else is silent in the morning. They crash on the sand and slowly roll up, then back down into the ocean. One wave rolls up much farther, almost to where the sand starts getting soft- you know, that sort of line where the water seldom goes past. You have to know where this line is, because anywhere up from here is strictly reserved for chairs and towels and storage of beach toys and boogie boards. But at the right times of the day, from this point down the beach about 20 feet towards the water, it creates the perfect sanctuary for play. The sand is hard enough to run on, to toss a Frisbee over and have enough solid ground to cut to the left and catch it when it curves away from you, and the sand is also just thick and solid enough for the creativity of a beach day. That’s right- the sacred sand castle!

Still picturing this scene on Thursday morning on the roof of a friend’s house, I picture my sand castle that, if I look closely enough over the cliff, I can see the last remnants of after it had a long night of getting beat by the waves. Before we go any farther, if you didn’t read my story, “The Sun is Setting”, go back and read that then come back and read the rest of this.

I begin thinking about that sand castle, looking like a mini version of Pompeii, which I visited 10 years ago. But from this view, I see more of the ocean that I see of the beach. The castles’ remains are so small compared to the waves. I begin listening to the waves and I don’t feel like they caused this destruction in anger, in malice. I am confused. I have a conversation with the ocean:

“I don’t get it, why did you feel you had to do this” I ask the waves

“Oh, that?” they reply. “Yeah that was kind of a cool little castle you built there. I liked the way you built the moat that would fill up with water.

“Yeah, I liked that too. I worked hard on it” I scoff back. “Why did you do that?”

“Man, you say it as if I’m your big brother and I just trampled on it to prove that I am indeed your big brother. Don’t you see that horizon?

“Yes, I see it”

“Do you know how far my existence continues past that?”

“No, not really… pretty far, huh?” I’m curious.

“Yeah, pretty far. All around my edges are beaches, and all along those beaches, people build sand castles and I laugh. I’ve seen some interesting techniques for castles. Different shaped buckets that are used, or the “Drip-castle” technique. Some people have a whole tool set for sand castle building. Since I’ve seen all of this, I have some suggestions for you, how you could maybe build it different next time.”

“Oh yeah, How’s that?” I soften up a little.

“The best suggestion I can give you on building sand castles is… don’t!”

“What?” Now I’m confused.

“Don’t you see where you are standing? Look down, that’s a cliff. I built that. You live 20 minutes away from La Jolla cove, where my waves pound against the rocks and you marvel at night when the moonlight makes my waves glow as they spray 20 feet in the air. Look a little southwest from here, see the Coronado Islands? I built them too. They are my sand castles. And the beaches - I made them each into what they are.” Speaking of which, you might want to check out this beach again. Take a walk down to the San Elijo beach and look again at your sand castle. As you do that, just remember, my sand castles are way better than yours, but I love sharing them with you.”

I silently walk away, still barefoot, and find the wooden staircase that leads to the beach. I count about eight flights of stairs. I make it down three flights and look back down to the beach, but something is wrong. I can’t figure it out yet, but it’s not right. I continue and the waves are still crashing, the sun has completely risen now, but what is it that doesn’t look right out there? I finally reach the bottom and take the step off of the wooden staircase where I expected my feet to sink into the soft sand. Instead, my foot slides along the top of a solid, bumpy surface. I look down where the sand was supposed to be, and – Rocks. Just rocks. This was never a sandy beach. In all my youth, we didn’t build sand castles here.

The realization hits me as it starts sprinkling rain again in the morning on top of this roof. So I get up and scale my way down the roof, back inside and I lie on the couch looking back out at the palm tree standing on the other side of the street, outside the window, which is now more than just a tall shadow in the dark. I struggle for a while. How did I get fooled by my memory? That scene I built up was all wrong. I vividly remembered my sand castle, but as much as I remembered it, it felt strangely unfamiliar. I felt like even if I could get it back, it would not be what I remembered. I began to think about that line, “My sand castles are way better than yours, but I love sharing them with you."

Journey to the Holy Land

When in Rome, Twitter as Romans do

4.04.2008

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