"Everything is made of one hidden stuff." - R. W. Emerson

I just saw the DisneyNature preview for Earth for the third time.  I am getting so excited for that movie.  I’ll never forget the first time I saw the BBC Planet Earth films – I don’t really know why they’re so much different from every other nature film ever made, but they brought me to tears.  Now Disney is coming in with music and storytelling to give the images a purpose – I think it will be wonderful.

A few months ago I was at dinner with some professors and administrators from Pepperdine and Cambridge, and the topic of the spiritual significance of nature came up.  Pepperdine’s provost Darryl Tippens proposed a theory that estrangement from nature and the fading of religion/spirituality among young people might be linked.  He observed that each time he has the chance to speak to students about powerful spiritual experiences in their lives, they almost always recall a moment at a retreat in the mountains, a time of solitude on the beach, or another quiet moment away from the city and suburbs.  Perhaps if more people spent more time in nature, its mystical ability to encourage reflection and introspection would produce a generation more inclined toward the spiritual.

The other night my mom was talking about an interview she saw online with a man (I wish I knew who this was) who reexamined the sentiment that we are a group of evil humans destroying a self-sacrificing and benevolent planet as we plunder its resources for our own dark purposes.  I strongly believe that the earth is worth protecting and must be respected, but man’s charter to exercise dominion over the earth and its creatures should not be forgotten.  The earth is not a weak and submissive bleeding albatross – it is dangerous and volatile, and we seem to do all we can to cling to its surface in flimsy shelters to survive.  It is a difficult task to try to subdue the earth, and a joy to be able to use its materials to carve out our little civilizations.  As far as the earth is concerned, we and our empires are just a flash in the pan.

There is one little three-second clip on the Disney Earth preview that shows three or four dolphins peeking out through the surface of glassy, still water with an enormous blue-white iceberg in the background.  It is crushingly beautiful.  It strikes me that the amazing thing about this film is that it involves no sets, no actors, and no special effects.  It’s all real.  It all already exists, and scenes like this one occur every few seconds, completely unnoticed, all over the world.  This film looks at the family relationships between animals, how they care for each other, experience distress on one another’s behalf, and, it would seem, even love each other.  It is beauty that moves us and changes us, although it is just the everyday world of the critters on screen.

So now: does this mean that our distant, authoritative relationship with the animals we’re watching translates to the far away, higher beings who watch us?  If we lived in some other realm and got to see shots of footage of the human world, would we still be moved and changed by the beauty we beheld?  I think so.  This perfectly describes the root of my desire to make movies.  Movies enable us to look at our own world from a “distance” – when it’s projected onto a screen, somehow the mundane things we look at every single day of our lives become captivating and powerful.  This is the special gift all artists give the world; they extract, package, and present scenes from our own world to remind us of the beauty that surrounds us every time we draw a breath.  

Springtime in Los Angeles

There are people who tell you they don't like Los Angeles because they "miss the seasons."

There are other people who have known the bliss of a mid-March drive down Sunset when everything is in bloom; a demonstration of spring at its very finest. There's a magic and mystery in the way it happens here. It's hidden and discreet, subtle and effortless. The air in the entire city siddenly changes. It is sweet and heavy, filled with the scent of the sticky and burgeoning blossoms that promise

 the damp warmness of summer. Each time I exhale, I feel the same guilt for being wasteful I feel when I throw a SmartWater bottle into a trash can instead of recycling it. The jasmine and orange blossoms dominate, but even the new growth of greenery makes the air smell fresh and verdant. Different parts of the city host different aromas, but there isn't an inch of it that doesn't beg me to widen my chest cavity to make room for deep breaths that fill my body from shoudler to shoulder to stomach.

Tonight I had the pleasure of dining at the home of one of my oldest and best friends who lives in Will Rogers, my fantasy neighborhood. As soon as I got in my car, I cranked up the heat on my feet and slid the windows down so the air could rush through the stale air of my MINI. The hillside smelled strongly of the sagebrush that grows in the chaparral, with the blossoms in perfectly manicured front yards laced harmoniously within it. Down the winding road to Sunset, the floral scent overwhelmed the space so strongly that even the orange glow from the street lights seemed to refract differently upon the dime-sized molecules of perfume hanging in the intersection. West on Sunset to Chitauqua, the breeze moved more rapidly through my car windows, more fresh and dewy but still full of life and growing, scented with the dirt smell of the walls of ivy and bougainvillea along the winding descent. As I approached the beach, the thick salty air mingled with the above. This is the smell that reminds me of the first nights I spent in west LA in high school; I was in love and enamoured of everything, and the air I pulled through my nose seemed made to fit. This combination of smells transports me. It is rich, pleasant, and full of nostalgia that promises the secrets of the future are good.

I made the scary left turn in between the dual traffic barricades onto PCH and headed up to the 10 East, the salt, dirt, and flowers subsiding with the cold rush of cool asphalt, cars, and concrete. On nights like these even the freeway smells are crowned with sweetness. As the drive picked up, these smells all alternated as I switched to the 405 and on to the 101 North. I love this drive. I love to pass the roads that eminate from the busy freeway like ribs from a spine. Each is dotted with things I love - stores, restaurants, houses, businesses. People full of hope and trying hard, people resting on wilting laurels, people empty, and people overflowing. I think of the Jewish delis with bagel chips and matzah ball soup and pickles, the tired and noisy clientelle. I think of trendy sushi places. I see the valley spread out before me as I crest the hill just past Mulholland Drive. It's a field of dreams as far as I'm concerned. In my own mind it's easy to stick my left arm out the open window as a wing and fly out over it, loving it and making my plans for it.

As I transfer to the 101 I think about Hollywood glittering behind my tail lights as I head up north to my parents' house. I think

 about my dreams for it. And I am so full of joy to skate across this asphalt red capet that unrolls for me as I coast upon it. At 73 miles per hour, this freeway is my oyster.

And this makes me reflect on my dreams. I am living them. They are already realized. Perhaps I draw as much joy from dreaming about my life and future as I will from living it. The substance of the dreams themselves may be just as important as their realization. I don't think the air will smell sweeter at some future point. Years ago I dreamt about living the way I do now, about being the person I am now, and here I am. I hope others see the days they spend 'climbing the ladder' as the full and complete realization of their dreams. Why wait? Why not live your fantasies every day? Mine certainly do not consist of a tireless sprint to an eventual, barely-attainable goal. What worse thing could there be in life than an end point? My dreams are of possibility, potential, energy, and inspiration. These things fill my soul on spring nights in Los Angeles just like this one. And as long as I breathe, I am living my dreams.

Presence

What hope there is in finding someone who reaffirms your most private convictions, your deepest unspoken passions, who has the courage and opportunity and freedom to stand on the rooftops and holler out your personal treatise.  Emerson says, "The young man reveres men of genius because, to speak truly, they are more himself than he is."  They're called mentors, heroes.  People who stand up for the things we long to find the courage to stand up for, too.  

            It brings me to that heartbreaking presence/absence binary.  What we humans do is ache for Edenic presence.  We spend our lives trying to find a place where the presence of God is with us again.  We want kinetic communion with Holiness and Divinity.  I think we all know that there is something terribly strange about this condition of ours; the placement of an immortal soul inside of a perishable container – I don’t think we get it.  I know that I don’t. 

            In asking why it is that we are all here, I know that it has to be something we experience in the transcendent moments. Are they enough to justify the whole thing?  And how could an entire existence be created around a few fractions of seconds of “getting it”?  And are there people who never will get it?  Are there people who never will transcend, through fault of their own or not?  I know I have before, and I know I will again.  But what do I do with the rest of my life?  I understand why people renounce the world and become mystics.  I want to be a mystic.  And yet I love the world, and I feel so connected to it.  It is a part of me. 

            Mom was explaining a most basic concept of string theory to me last night.  Scientists can tell that there are particles even smaller than the nuclei of atoms.  There is something that we cannot see that strings together little bits of matter, tiny yet inextricably bonded ropes of energy that flow and move together – connected. 

            There is something basic and abstract in me that understands this synaptic chord.  I get it.  The strings in my molecular makeup are somehow able to communicate to me their perfection.  I hear a song they make that regulates the beat I move to.  Because all things, in all their mass and weight, rest on these tiny threads – wrongness doesn’t really register with me.  For this, I do not recoil from cruelty when I walk with it, nor am I confounded by injustice.  We are all certainly woundable, but only when the world’s conflict with the strings surpasses my own understanding of them.  

There is a hero in my life who sees the world just like this.  In a way, I see this person as my own potential fully realized.  It makes me worry that I will never be like him - that I'll get in my own way and throw stumbling blocks in my own path.  This is why I tremble with frustration that I do not know which career to pursue.  I wonder if it will ever take a linear form.  Will it be chaotic?  I hope not.  I am not a chaotic person.  I want to meet with success but so much more than that I want to be fulfilled.  I want to do something with my life that involves presence.  I want to move one step closer to the center, to do something new and different that has never been done before.  And I am slowly freeing myself from obsession with magnitude – it can be small.  Nobody else even has to know about it.  I ache for presence.  

Being Young and Doing the Right Thing

How troubling it is to look at my youth and question whether I am using it to its fullest advantage.  People often pacify my frustrations by telling me that I’m yet a young pup, and therefore needn’t expect too much of myself right now.  Just be twenty-two – it’s okay.   

But I ask, if I am not performing to my utmost potential right now, when will I start to?  I find out time after time that the writers I admire most made their splash when they were in their twenties, and so many were dead in their forties.  Perhaps mediocre people are fine being mediocre in their twenties, because so shall they remain for the rest of their lives.  But then again who is mediocre?  I have yet to meet anyone.  And thus my point is moot.

I badly want to be someone who produces.  I want to be creative.  Prolific.  I want to know what I think.  I often question the relationship between my thoughts and my emotions.  When am I thinking and when am I feeling?  There is something that I cannot entirely support that thinks emotions are vastly inferior.  I don’t know why I think that, but I do.  I never want to be someone who acts on emotions and unfailingly “follows my heart,” but I don’t know why I want that.  I want to be a devotee of logic and mindfulness.

Kierkegaard says that faith is absurd and uncanny, and that its binary couple is doubt, associated with the rational side.

Some ethicists say that ethics are morals born of rational thought instead of emotions, which do more to point TO faith in God than away from it (as Kierkegaard would argue).  But what is rational about ethics?  I think this argument depends on where you want to place ethics – I agree that ethics do point to God, but I also think that they are absurd, so I would put them in the same camp with faith (and then they cannot be disconnected from emotions).  Our rational side does not point us to love and sacrifice and to do the right thing, the “ethical” thing.  The rational is not the ethical.  At least mine isn’t.  I think the soul trained to act in love and self-sacrifice defines “rational” completely differently than the soul who thinks being rational means trying to survive.  How do you define that?

I think this explains why I go crazy when I look at the course catalogue at the beginning of every semester.  There are countless course titles that jump out at me because I know they would change my life.  And because I am not able to take them, I am turning away from that change that might happen, for the knowledge, for that which would make me that much more of a mindful, thoughtful, careful person.  There is goodness and rightness in the lectures those professors would give, in the papers I would write for those classes.  And it kills me that I have to turn away from them because my schedule is too full. 

That’s why I think I could get bachelor’s degrees forever.  I want to learn a broad spectrum of everything.  But then, also, I am only scratching the surface of the truths I’d learn.  And I might not even remember them.  My memory is my worst enemy – I encounter something beautiful and good and then it leaves me.  And I see something horrible and evil, and I forget that, too, which is often even more detrimental.

  

"There are nights when the wolves are silent and only the moon howls." - George Carlin

How fitting a time to begin this blog.  How strange it feels to write for an audience and not omit my own cerebral meanderings.  I like the progressive nature of this exercise; it's not a published piece I worked on and perfected, but rather something organic that waxes and wanes with my own fluxuating vulnerability.  

Vulnerability.  How like are we to the moon that reveals itself in various stages - at times an intriguing and anticipatory sliver and at others the bare-faced and cathartic full sphere.  It's strange to remember each night that the light we see is nothing of the moon's but a reflection of the sun.  How entranced we are when the celestial bodies align in a way that allows the sun's light to illuminate that entire bald surface.  I'm sure we can each remember a time when a full moon was bright enough to reveal an entirely new noctural world in blue coolness.  I remember a few times when the moonlight was bright enough to keep me awake, and I felt like it was an appointment I was obligated to keep.  

How similarly we ourselves are designed.  Whatever small portion of our faces we turn toward Christ is luminous, in our own perception and in that of others; how glorious are the moments when we turn our gaze directly toward our Light and see a world, cool and serene, as we have never seen it before.  How t

hat reflection can bless others, showing how we have been blessed to reflect a portion of the light of God when the source is invisible.  

I think also of how the dark side of the moon is always dark, meaning that even as it orbits our moon never turns its back on the sun.  It is we who only see in portions the illuminated part.  Might I be reminded that the fullness of light always shines directly upon me, whether I can see it or not.  

This observation convicts me to make my nose the needle on my compass and turn my face always into the warming light of God.  I flip through my journals (which is probably unnecessary because these moments are unforgettable) and find my delight as I read about the time another person's gaze was so steadfastly fixed on Jesus that I saw my world anew in the reflection.  I hope I have let you know it.  May we all take our turns at this post.  

I am reminded of a gorgeous idea I heard at a C.S.Lewis conference at Oxford from an Eastern Orthodox priest named Kalistos Ware.  He spoke about the human component that bears the Imago Dei, the image of God.  He said that we bear the image all along, and through our journey come to attain a likeness.  He alters the speech we use to describe our Christian walk: instead of saying "I am saved," he urges us to believe, "I trust that by God's grace I am being saved."  We do not claim to know God, but instead rejoice in the gift that we might devote our breath and life to getting to know Him.  

It was he who gifted me with the title I gave this blog - he closed his talk with J.R.R. Tolkein's concluding words in The Hobbit, "Roads go ever on."  The universe continues to expand outward from the Big Bang.  The grace of God only abounds.  And so do these roads go on, and shall continue to do as we find our bliss in their exploration.