For Sanity

I left St. John a week ago. At the time, I had no idea how I felt about that. I spent that travel day sad and stressed, trying to sort through the tangles in my head and figure out if leaving was really the right thing to do. For what it's worth, I am still not totally sure and I am prepared to regret the decision at least a little for most of forever. I don't suppose that leaving a beautiful place is ever easy. But as I left Maho, my friend and (sadly) former roommate, Megan, slipped me a little square envelope. She said, "Reading material. For when you have some time." That little envelope is the only thing that kept me inside my own skin the day I left. I know a few people who would probably feel the same way about what was inside...



From, "Through Painted Deserts: Light, God and Beauty on the Open Road," by Donald Miller.



*Author's Note:



I remember the sweet sensation of leaving, years ago, some ten now, leaving Texas for who knows where. I could not have known where, I could not have known about this beautiful place, the Oregon I have come to love, this city of great people, this smell of coffee and these evergreens reaching up into a mist of sky, these sunsets spilling over the West hills to slide a red glow down the streets of my town.

And I could not have known then that if I had been born here, I would have left here, gone someplace South to deal with horses, to get on some open land where you can see tomorrow's storm brewing over a high desert. I could not have known then that everybody, every person, has to leave, has to change like seasons; They have to or they die. The seasons remind me that I must keep changing, and I want to change... All my life I have been changing. I changed from a baby to a child, from soft toys to play daggers. I changed into a teenager to drive a car, into a worker to spend some money. I will change into a husband to love a woman, into a father to love a child, change houses so we are near water, and again so we are near mountains, and again so we are near friends, keep changing with my wife, getting our love so it dies and gets born again and again, like a garden, fed by four seasons, a cycle of change. Everybody has to change, or they expire. Everybody has to leave, everybody has to leave their home and come back so they can love it again for all new reasons.

I want to keep my soul fertile for the changes, so things keep getting born in me, so things keep dying when it is time for things to die. I want to keep walking away from the person I was a moment ago, because a mind was made to figure things out, not to read the same page recurrently.

Only the good stories have the characters different at the end than they were at the beginning. And the closest thing I can liken life to is a book, the way it stretches out on paper, page after page, as if to trick the mind into thinking it isn't all happening at once.

Everything we were is no more, and what we will become, will become what was.