Rake

by Jason Pipkin

i couldn't find a rake in beijing.
Even if lawns existed
you'd be hard pressed to find a tree that's not
gray.
Where is Johnny Appleseed when you need him?
Or at least a tree-hugging liberal...
Never thought I'd miss the liberals.
I think they've all sworn allegiance to
the Dalai Lama-
he whose name must not be spoken in these parts.
A peaceful man
who probably likes trees,
but is not welcome here.
If he were,
maybe he'd join the foreign environmentalist group-
Green Drinks. They meet on the
Second Tuesday of every month
at the Stone Boat Cafe.
Or is it Wednesday?
I've never been, but my friend Paul used to go.
He's into that sort of thing.
One time he met a nice girl there who really dug him
but I think he was oblivious or uninterested.
He's not gay, just really, really cool.
He's Lebanese.
What a guy.
But I don't think the Dalai Lama would have dug her either.
Too much karma.
And what they don't tell you,
the big gnosis,
like aliens in Scientology,
is that true nirvana is the cessation of all karma,
good and bad alike.
It's true.
Maybe you can become a bodhisattva by doing good deeds
but never a buddha.
Take that, Richard Gere (who,
incidentally,
is also banned from entering this nation).
I wonder if he rakes his own leaves.
I'd guess "no", but celebrities
are full of surprises.

Diving In

I only saw Forrest Gump once. I liked it well enough but wouldn't call it especially formative, save for Jenny's prayer which lodged itself in my memory with her winsome Southern innocence:

"Dear God, make me a bird, so I can fly far. Far far away from here."

When I am weary and desperate, sometimes Jenny's prayer reflexively becomes my own, and I feel ashamed. At first I thought it was just because using a movie quote as a prayer seemed lame. But it turns out to be much bigger than that; it is actually the antithesis to the prayer that my more Reformed theology asks that I pray. Before I tell you what that is though, I want to show you a little bit of scripture and what I recently learned about it.

It's at the end of Luke 14, and Jesus lays down quite the non sequitur: "Salt is good, but if it loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again? It is fit neither for the soil nor for the manure pile; it is thrown out."

Questions swim in my head after reading this. Can salt really lose its saltiness? Doesn't salt kill grass? Why would you ever put it in soil? And manure? Huh?

A few weeks ago, I heard a theologian named Anthony Bradley speak on this passage, and it was really helpful. He asked if we had previously heard that being the salt of the earth meant we were to act as a preservative in the world. Nods all around, and the absurdity of that finally hit me. Preserving the world when we are called to participate in the redemption of it? Really?

Bradley went on to explain that this salt probably wasn't sodium chloride--regular table salt. It was one of many other salts--magnesium fluoride, for example--and it didn't kill grass. In fact, it was used as a fertilizer. As for manure, the salt was thrown on it in order to break it down quicker, so that it could be used to--again--fertilize.

"You are the salt of the earth."
You are to bring life to barren places.
Even when it gets really, really messy.

So my new prayer in response:

May my eyes be opened to see barren soil and piles of shit, and may I be willing to dive straight into those piles and with God's help, make growth possible. And so that I do not fly away (because I will surely want to), may my wings be clipped.

-- Margaret

120 mph, straight down.

At a little over two and half miles up, the air is cold, the wind is deafening, and my heart is pounding. The safety glasses pinch my nose and I shift uncomfortably on the aluminum bench. The small plane rattles and bumps and suddenly a door is opened. And men are willfully jumping out. This all seems dreadfully wrong. I am tightly strapped to a care-free instructor (my back to his chest) who chuckles at my obviously and genuinely terrified comments. “Oh shit.” I nervously recite to myself what I was told in the preparatory class. "Wait... um... when do I do the... um... what's the altitude when... er..." My friends have disappeared out of the door which is just ahead of me. "Don't worry about it!" he haphazardly hollers. Suddenly we're scooting forward. Now on the lip of the open doorway, looking down at the distant ground and a few strangely-near wisps of cloud, my mind is blank. My body has gone limp as my animal survival-instincts are suddenly overcome with a numbing I've-gone-too-far-to-go-back realization and the whipping of a cold wind that my body knows was meant to support birds, not men in flimsy straps and buckles. Yet from somewhere deep inside begins to erupt a whoop of exultation.


Skydiving in Orange County, Virginia. August 20, 2005.


Cheers,


Noah

Wings

“'We are plain quiet folk and have no use for adventures. Nasty disturbing uncomfortable things! Make you late for dinner!”--Bilbo Baggins, The Hobbit

During the summer, that hot, confusing summer, that summer that wound like an uncertain snake through the dust of Jibou, Oradea, Sarajevo, Krk, Zagreb, Budapest, Sibiu and Iasi--only a mouthful of the world my heart wanted to swallow--during that summer, I sometimes imagined that my overloaded, back-moistening traveler’s pack was, in reality, a pair of wings. This absurd image would flit through my consciousness as I shifted the enormous thing and complained while walking down a highway with my girlfriend, two removes from nowhere, thumbing for a hitch with a paper sign.

The bag was stupidly heavy. That had been my fault. I’d thought it necessary, besides clothes, to pack several books, a sketchpad (unused to this day), a computer, light-up fake ice cubes, and other nonessentials. Socks. My name is Christopher and I’m a pack-rat; for me, annoyance at having left something behind is always a sharper pain than whatever tome is wedging itself into my back as we trudge up an impressive concrete hill just outside of Zalau, arguing all the while.

It’s true; the idea of traveling, beforehand, is a lot more like flying than the reality. When you get there, there are beautiful, cool days, magic and strange languages. But there is also heat sickness, cranky self-hatred, difficult relationships (or loneliness), and, more than anything else, there is the pack on your back that you’ve been silly enough to fill with books you won’t feel like reading even when you have time. Instead, you’ll be staring out a stranger’s window pretending to be Romanian so they won’t ask for more money, while your girlfriend does all the talking.

Yet afterwards, it’s strange how we really do enjoy the inconveniences. Like the grandfather who is forever telling his materialistic grandchildren about playing with tin and dirt during the Depression, we bask in them after the fact--those nasty, uncomfortable things. When they find out about my previous travels, Czechs often ask me what country I like better--the Czech Republic, Romania or Croatia. It’s honestly difficult to say. There is no question that I’d rather live in Prague, where I can (for the most part) get what I want, where I have friends, where the architectural marvels glimpsed during an ordinary tram ride really can take one’s breath away.

Yet the further East you go, the more texture there is. There’s something to crunch there; something to write home about, not just send a pretty postcard. It’s no expatriate paradise. The bones of that old ancient and exotic dragon, Communism, obviously protrude from the ground, among gypsies in covered wagons and land mines from a not-too-distant and all-too-brutal war. You have to go around these things. Even in terms of career. How many people have I told about the first English class in I taught in Osijek, when a Macedonian man about ten years older than me started screaming at me for daring to suggest that they speak English in English class? By contrast, can I even remember my first day of teaching here in Prague?

Perhaps, in the end, all the things I see weighing me down, even now, are raw material for wings. I speak naively, I realize--as though the difficulties of others, or even of myself later in life (Disease? Debt? Bereavement? Homelessness? Divorce? Apostasy? God protect us from them, but even if he does, we must all face Death, at least.). And yet, I know a man who carried a beam on his back, up a hill, then carried the grave up, up, to the place where Grief itself is overwhelmed by Glory.