Blue Smoke

Up in the Great Smoky Mountains I read a plaque that said the Cherokees called the area “Shaconage,” which means “the place of blue smoke.” Scientists have said that the reason we see blue is because plants giving off gases interact with the gases in the air and create aerosols, which cause short rays of light at the blue end of the spectrum. There is a wonder in knowing, and the more I know the more I feel complete. When you stare at something huge and beautiful, it stirs the soul and makes the skin tingle, and for an instant we’re neither here nor there. And for that instant all of life seems manageable, all goals seem attainable, and all wounds wind themselves up and fly away, and we’re left with nothing but pure existence.

My wife and I were hesitant to make the trip to Gatlinburg at first, because we had already decided we weren’t going to drive up to Illinois to spend Thanksgiving with our family. The drive from Nashville to there is about 8 hours, but with our son Jackson it can usually stretch out to a lot longer than that. So when our friends Erin and Spencer invited us up to their cabin in Gatlinburg, which was a far shorter drive than Illinois, we at first said yes, then said no, then said yes, as we mulled over getting the horde of stuff that you need to travel with a 13 month old. At the end of the day we spent Thanksgiving at home and decided to drive to Gatlinburg the next day. And I’m glad we did. Sometimes I’ve found when you’re a parent, you’re usually exhausted at the end of the day and if an opportunity comes up all you want to do is sit down and chill out. But like many things in life, when you put in the work sometimes you get the treasure at the end.

Our friends Spencer and Erin are wonderful people on their own, and as a couple they accentuate their uniqueness. Spencer is one of a kind. He is eccentric, but in a warm inviting way once you get to know him, seemingly guarded but full of not your run of the mill opinions that I’m always curious to hear. Erin is equally unique, but in an outwardly different way than Spencer. She is kind and tender hearted, and has a fire that burns in her for the things she loves. Me and my wife enjoyed every second of being able to hang out with them, and watch our son Jackson crawl around and open and close cabinet doors a million times.

We spent a day in Gatlinburg, took a gondola up a mountainside, visited one of the coolest candy stores I’ve been to in awhile, and even got a taste of moonshine. Of course Jackson couldn’t taste any, even though the latter part of the day he kept reaching for all of the moonshine on the walls. He’s gonna be a wild kid. I wonder where he gets it from.

That night me and Spencer tried to make a fire with one match, but failed so we used a fire starter instead. I blamed it on the damp conditions. We sat around the fire and watched it burn, and I marveled at what happens when wood gets hot enough to create magical looking wisps of flame.

The next day we drove through The Great Smoky Mountains National Park, and looked out over the Cherokee’s blue smoke. I couldn’t help thinking about their lives, and how different they would have been from ours. The Cherokees would have had little to worry about in terms of what we worry about now. I’m sure they would have spent a lot of time just surviving, hunting and gathering food and making sure they had made the appropriate preparations for the coming winter. Sometimes I think that life would have been extremely rewarding. In this day and age are minds tend to get the better of us, and of course the reasons are plain to see. Even at our busiest, we have so much space in which to fret and worry, and let our thoughts run this way and that all the while holding on to that invisible rope that sticks up into the bluish clouds of our own convoluted minds. Wouldn’t it be easier to wake up underneath one of the most diverse canopies in the world, breath in the pines, and live? It would be harder in a lot of respects, sure, but would we notice as much?

These are the questions I was thinking when we made our trip to the mountains, and out of them came a feeling of deep gratitude. How cool is it that I live so close to one of the most diverse rainforests in the world? There are over a 100 species of trees in the Great Smokies, and a vast display of plant and animal life. I’m thankful. And above all, I’m thankful for my family. Life with a little one can be hard, and can stretch your patience and character like nothing else can. And it’s not always comfortable. In fact, a lot of the times it isn’t. But when I look out over the mountains I feel like I’m playing my part in the continuation of what we call life. I get the chance to raise my beautiful son with my beautiful wife, who is as strong and sturdy as those trees sticking up from the mountainside. I was glad they were there by my side, facing a vast landscape like many others have faced before me in many different contexts. I felt sturdy. I felt sure. I felt surrounded by wonder.

Ice Cream with Whipped Cream

The girl behind the counter at Baskin Robbins asked “You want whipping cream on top right?” To which I responded, “Hell Yeah.”

I haven’t written in awhile and am going to try to do it more often. It’s a way to regulate the spleen, and it also makes all the rooms upstairs a little less cluttered and confusing. One of the reasons I haven’t written is because I started writing a novel, which at first was just going to be a short story and then got out of control. I also picked the absolute worst time to start writing my first novel, but when my son Jackson was first born there were a lot of late nights and feedings where I had nothing to do but think. So, I started thinking about stories and then one thing led to another. I’ll tell you more about that later.

I can’t remember where I left off and how many things have happened since last I wrote, but I imagine it’s too much stuff to write about in one post and will have to let it creep out here and there. It’s like trying to remember your childhood in one sitting, which for me is always impossible. And then when you’re least expecting it, thought and blurry moments in the past just rush to the surface like mysteries from the void…

PS I don’t really know why I started this blog with the ice cream bit.

Moving Somewhere

We’re headed to the Quad Cities today. By we I mean me, my wife and our four month old son Jackson. He’s sitting in his car seat to the left of me, in and out of sleep. In between his napping he looks over at me and smiles. Making sure the vibe is to his liking, and when he’s in the car he seems to be on a little high alert. I can see him saying “We’re moving, somewhere. Just wanna make sure y’all are still here.”

My brother and I have two shows in the QC this weekend, which is where we grew up. The one this Saturday is sold out, and it looks like the one on Friday might follow suit. Playing a show that you know is sold out is a lot of fun. Makes you feel accomplished, and of course it’s always fun playing to a packed room.

The rain is just now clearing up and it looks like the rest of the way to Illinois will be through dry skies. Pending Jackson’s mood, this might be an uneventful drive. We can only hope. By we maybe I mean you too? Hope is probably more of a real force the more people are practicing it.

I see a church nestled in the hills a distance off from the road. It’s majestic sitting there in the trees, but also small and lonely. A good friend of mine visited from Los Angeles the last couple days and he gave a glaring statistic on how people at younger ages are leaving their faith in large numbers. I asked him what he thought Christianity might look like in the next 100 years? We talked about it for awhile. I have no doubt it will continue, strong and resilient.

There’s a tendency to think that as we know more about our universe, about ourselves and our place and origin in the world that we will shed the shackles of religion. Ha, I laugh at that. I think it’s the opposite. The more we learn about ourselves, the more we’ll realize we need God more than anything.

The universe is big, and we’re but a small fraction of it. My small family in this tiny car traveling up a road, a small part of the entirety of people who have traveled all these roads before me. And then all of human history but a small part of the cosmos. And so on it goes, and we think we’ll continue searching this vast expanse of star dust and whatever else is out there and will find no need for the religion of the so-called past?

Belief is the future, always has been. Always will be.

Thoughts

I sang my infant son Jackson to sleep today, and it melted my heart.

Awhile back, on our way to Florida this last Christmas for a family vacation, an old man in a hotel lobby said the trick is putting his head close to your chest so he could feel the vibrations… Not only could my son hear the music, but he could feel it flowing through his body.

How alike we are to the animals in the forest, the ones that protect their young, keep them close. There is a part of me that feels animalistic, when I’m singing to my son, when he’s clinging to me. And I don’t mind at all. It’s not just love he needs, but protection, food. He needs life.

But of course my connection with him goes beyond the physical. It transcends into something other than, a spiritual sphere, a metaphysical one… I don’t know how it works itself out, and how the connection is something you can only sense with feeling, but it is most certainly there.

How amazing is it that we have have evolved into these living souls, these spiritual creatures, where as long ago during the age of the dinosaurs the world was different. We didn’t inhabit the world, with our love, our hate, our passion and our madness. Now we sit in quiet rooms and sing our young to sleep. And we love them, and we feel for them, and it opens up something in us that reaches farther than our blue dot in space. Our spirit reaches father than the light emanating from the farthest star, and probes deeper into our own bodies than electrons and quarks.

And then we experience God, and we write it on our hearts, and we argue about it. We make judgements, we say who is right and who is wrong. We mold our gods and our experience, chisel it down to fit to size. We interpret old books, we say this and we do that.

The older I get the more I realize that the thoughts I think I have and the understanding I think I’ve come to about God are probably not altogether correct. If the gospels are still in fact teaching me, and the written records of a man named Jesus Christ are still speaking, that’s what they’re saying to me.

But, some things I’m catching hold of. My son challenges me every day. Challenges my ego, challenges what it means to be me and occupy space and have a free flowing mind that wants and directs itself this way or that. Maybe God is like this. If you’re sure about the personality of God, then keep searching. God’s thoughts are higher than our thoughts, his depth deeper than our oceans, his mind more expansive than our theoretical multiverse.

Worldly Thoughts

There’s a sad truth in the world that I’ve focused on more as an adult than I ever did in my youth. That truth goes something like this: There’s not enough room in the world. I’ll explain. It’s straight from Darwin’s playbook. When Darwin looked at nature he didn’t see something uniform and cohesive. He saw certain aspects of nature that didn’t make sense. A certain type of bird with a beak too long to really get a one up in its environment, or the webbed feet on another animal that was no longer needed to walk on the forest floor. In that same sense, the world is simply not big enough to fit everybody’s ideas, and to see to light ever single persons grandiose dreams. What brings a dream to life?

The older I get the more I feel like us humans aren’t that different from the animals in my backyard. Our wilderness is different, but the struggle is still all too real. A lot of people living in America have a mental struggle, that can be just as crippling as a physical struggle against a physical environment. We’re crippled by stress, anxiety, and for anyone reading this that thinks that these fights are not much of anything compared to surviving in the woods with no shelter, well just look at our last world war. And no, I’m not implying WWII was fought because of stress and anxiety.

I’m a singer and a songwriter, and just an overall very creative person. But I’ve realized that not everyone is going to get a shot. And well, not everyone should. Not everyone who wants to stand on a stage and sing to people is going to get that chance, not everyone who thinks they have a great idea for a couple of songs does. The world is just not big enough. And this is sad, but life is life. And life is hard. Anything worth doing is a struggle.

Darwin also said that the species who don’t survive aren’t the weakest, but are the ones who can’t adapt to change. This is great news for me. Because I feel weak so many times in my life. I feel like I’m barely holding on at certain moments. But I’d like to hope I’m willing to change, I’m willing to fight, and I’m not willing to lay down. I had a son at a time in my life that was an insane time to have a son. And I’m changing for the better, and I’m not gonna throw in the towel or stop writing songs or stop singing. The world might be too small to hold everybody’s weight, but I’m working on a long wing span that can soar above the muck. So, wherever you are in your life, you can do the same. Change, adapt, and carve out a space to hold your ideas, even if it makes your hands bloody. Do it for your children, do it for the ones you love, do if for yourself, do it for the world.

The New Year

I used to think New Years was stupid when I was younger, in my teenage years to be more specific. At that age I felt invincible and was pretty sure I knew everything, and I wrote songs and walked around my high school’s halls with a sense of absolute certainty about these things. I thought New Years celebrations were an excuse for everyone to get together, drink too much, and dance in folly while the world crumbled… blah blah blah… I think there was a self-righteous sentiment and a more concrete religiosity to my thoughts back then. I was this judge sitting high up in his seat, looking down on the minuscule, feeble thoughts of society at large. I’m embarrassed to admit it. Because now I see things differently.

Now I want to be part of the celebration, and I understand and see what I could never see before. I think New Years is a wonderful thing to celebrate, and I think it’s healthy for us individually, and also as a society to look upon a new year with resolutions, goals, and an inspiration to do better. Even if we don’t follow through with any of those resolutions.

I’m watching Anderson Cooper on CNN freezing his ass off, keeping a smile on his face and doing his job. And that’s how you feel after a hard year. You put a smile on your face, even if it’s cold, and you put on the best attitude you can muster, and you move on. You shed that old skin, that skin I had as a teenager. You shed your ideas about God and what you thought He was, and you reinvent yourself. You give yourself another chance, because life is life and needs rejuvenation. You do what humans do. You survive against all the odds. You look into the uncertainty of the future with solid bones and a beating heart, and you hold hands with the assurance that there is always hope, and you join in the song that everyone sings. You drink the drink, you believe the lie that there is a promise of something better. And that lie becomes truth.

My wife and I just shared a kiss right when the clock struck midnight. And then I said “Well that was pretty fun.” We’re sitting in bed with the TV on a low volume and Jackson sleeping in his cradle beside the bed. We giggled to ourselves, thinking the whole notion of New Years was funny. We’re such funny creatures, us humans. Celebrating our new year. Standing out in Times Square in the freezing cold waiting for midnight. But it matters. It really does. I’m glad we do it. We need to keep doing it. Keep celebrating, keep making this year better than the next.

The Lee Shore

Glimpses do ye seem to see of that mortally intolerable truth; that all deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea; while the wildest winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore?

When I was young, and my teenage mind first read this passage in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick it was one of the most powerful moments I’d ever experienced. It convicted me that the restless spirit that always creaked and groaned like a ship out at sea to keep pressing on was indeed real, that other people had it to. I had a love affair with this Ishmael, who dove head first into his sea voyage, who became obsessed with whales, and became wrapped up in Ahab’s mad quest to find and kill the white whale. Even as I sit behind a pane of glass, I can hear the crashing waves and the expansive hum of the sea, the cosmic microwave background come to sit atop the water, the primordial soup from which all life comes, and from which it still does.

When you grow older you feel different, and parts of your mind change, but other parts stay the same. When you trudge through the harder moments of life, the realization that you might not be that special, that it might not happen for you, start to brew at the bow. You lose sight of this earnestness, this motivation to step out in the waters. For me it was never a fear that I had grown the older I got, but a depleted heart. Sometimes you can lose the will to dare, to dare the world that you still hold galaxies of possibilities inside yourself. But I looked out at the ocean today, and I thought of this moment in Moby Dick and realized that I still have that same churning in me just as I did when I was young. And I bet you do too. Don’t lose your sensation to fly, and don’t be deceived by the wrinkles around your eyes or the heaviness you hear in your voice.

The world awaits, the sea moves, the winds howl and your soul is just as young as it was years ago. For our skin grows old, and our bones get sore, but our spirit grows wise, but it does not tire! Fill it with goodness, fill it with want, let it run wild and swim out to that distant horizon, and keep swimming until you fall off the edge of the world and fly through the stars!

But as in landlessness alone resides highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as God- so better is it to perish in that howling infinite, than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee, even if that were safety! For worm-like, then, oh! who would craven crawl to land! Terrors of the terrible! is all this agony so vain? Take heart, take heart, O Bulkington! Bear thee grimly, demigod! Up from the spray of thy ocean-perishing- straight up, leaps thy apotheosis!

Invisible Christmas

Yesterday was Christmas, and I spent the first part of the morning dealing with a situation at the house my family and me are staying at for the holidays. If you read my previous blog post, you would know that many of the toilets stopped working and the septic tanks were brimming with shit. We couldn’t get someone out on Christmas Eve, so we had to wait until the next morning.

So a guy wearing wranglers and an orange shirt with the logo for the septic pumping company shows up with his big truck where he’ll pump all the shit into. It’s Christmas Day mind you, and this guy gets straight to work. He opens up the top of the tank, which the night before was inundated with a ton of cockroach friends skirting about. In the daytime they seem to have disappeared. He unrolls his pump from his truck and sticks that thing down in the tank. He’s head deep in the big concrete box filled with muck and working like a dog. I’m thinking to myself how I don’t really feel inconvenienced after all. Then again my bathroom wasn’t one of the malfunctioning ones. My brother’s girlfriend Cady had to deal with some black muck bubbling up from the shower, to which the owner of the house replied “Well why are using that shower!?” To which I say, “What the fuck???” I guess take a shower in the Atlantic Ocean.

So our friend come help us siphon out all the sewage is on to the next septic tank farther out in the yard. He says it’s full too so he gets to work. As he’s crouching down with the pipe in a hole in the ground I tell him what job he’s got on Christmas Day. He says he’s been doing this work for seventeen years! I’ve been depressed about the sludge of the music industry and trying to make a living writing songs, and this guy spends his days with his head in a shit tank, and he’s acting like “This is what I do man, it’s cool.” My mind was massaged open. There are people around us who are invisible. We look down a narrow beam of light shining through a wide tunnel, and there are so many faces lingering in the dark. We fail to notice them, and even when they’re in front of us we fail to notice them. And then I’m thinking about how this all ties together, and it occurs to me that this unassuming man who came out to this house on Christmas Day to get the septic tanks working again might have been akin to Jesus Christ himself passing through my life without me even noticing. How many times does an angel of God pass by us or look us right in the face and we don’t even see them?

So this Christmas I’m gonna try to take notice of the people around me, the people who are working harder than I am, the people who are struggling, the people who are down in the dirt doing a job I’m glad I don’t have to do at the moment. I’m gonna try better to see the immediate people around me, like my wife who tirelessly works for our son and never becomes impatient with him. How she does it I have no idea. There are wonders around us all, as majestic as the rolling waves and the wind pushing them this way and that. Stand out in the wind and feel the whip on your skin, and know there is a whole world moving about you that you can’t see.

My Family Is Loud And Full Of Love And Passion

My family is loud and full of love and passion, and the kitchen is always filled with laughter and people on the verge of yelling. I wouldn’t want it any other way. I like the idea that this all seems normal to me, but an outsider might cringe and hold their ears and stick up their noises and think the cacophony is too much. The first time I realized my family was the way they were was when I got married. Before then I hadn’t really experienced anyone else’s family. To be honest I never really thought about it. But now I know. I had a friend in college who could name the sounding pitch of any note just as easily as identifying that a fire truck was red and the ocean is blue. And he used to tell me that for the longest time he thought everyone could do the same thing. I assured him that wasn’t the case.

I think I’m a little infatuated that the family I grew up in painted the way I see everything. And who has a different story? Nobody that I’ve ever met. If you grew up in confusion and chaos maybe you’re more apt to see things through that lense, or maybe you’re more apt to see everything but that. Regardless of where you end up, your family shapes your thoughts and your attitudes. I grew up thinking that my family was the best, that the way they did things was the best. And maybe the older I get I realize that isn’t always true, but I don’t really care, because it feels right.

The other night we’re sitting at dinner and I’m having a political discussion about healthcare in the United States vs. healthcare in Spain with my grandparents on my mother’s side. They are Spanish and speak a little English, but not enough to keep up with the subject matter. No more than I can keep up at all speaking Spanish. So my aunt Beatriz, my mother’s sister, is translating the whole conversation. And in the midst of all this people are blurting out other things, some that have to do with the conversation and some that don’t. It’s not uncommon for my family to be having three way conversations all at once. And while it’s probably not the best way to communicate and can be a little chaotic, it feels right at home and it feels like love.

This Christmas my family is staying at a house on the beach in Florida, and tonight on Christmas Eve three of the toilets on the house stopped working and black muck started rising through one of the shower drains. I’m on the phone with the owner and doing my own research on local 24/7 plumbers, while Fallon is in the kitchen making her very tasty spaghetti sauce, while my mom is holding Jackson, while the rest of the fam is outside having happy hour. The plumber comes and the owner is beckoned to the house, and we lift the lid on one of the septic tanks and voila it’s all full. So now the task was trying to get someone to pump out the septic on Christmas Eve. Didn’t happen. And you know what? Everyone went with it and we still had such a fun night. Not to mention my sister isn’t even here, because she broke her ankle and her and my dad stayed home in Illinois, where it snowed tonight. Even with the septic tank fiasco, and them not being here the night felt complete. Because my family is loud and full of love and passion, and that’s what feels right to me. That’s what feels like love. And no matter what happens, no matter if shit is coming up through the drains or the ice machine is breaking, or there is sand in your bed, if the kitchen smells like spaghetti sauce and the air is filled with laughter and three conversations at once, happiness is alive and blooming.

Blue Dot

I’m pondering the big questions. I’m pondering the questions I always think about but am never able to answer. Where did we come from? Why are we here? Even for someone who believes in God, it was never enough for me to say “God made us.” The question still remains just as ominous and mysterious as it was before… How? Why? For the person who doesn’t believe in any deity, in any sort of phenomenal force above our heads, the question is still there, maybe even more forceful. How? Why? We are like ants on a blue dot hung in space, surrounded by the magnitude of the stars, the expanding universe and everything that ever was and will be.

Today was a tough day. Sometimes in the midst of life, the older I get the more I gravitate towards nihilism. For some reason I want to embrace this crazy chaotic notion of meaninglessness, of my mind being the only arbiter of what is and what isn’t. In the midst of that gravitational force I’m starting to realize that being a father means being a father. To say your life changes when you have a son is to miss the reality entirely. It’s not so much that your life changes, it’s more that you have changed into something different. When you see things differently, when the very mold of your heart has shifted from a square to a circle, you are in a true sense a different person. Maybe you’re more of yourself than you ever were. This identity gives shape to the meaning of the cosmos, and in some way I can’t specifically call out, skims the edge of the how and why. It’s not the pebble itself that has caused the ripple, but the ripple being the place where you have to start. Raising a future, not just your future but directing the path of another human being seems to direct the questions that haunt me tonight.

The stars are glowing, shimmering out in the dark. I’m looking up toward the sky with the ocean screaming in a dull ache, filling up the world and reaching for some realization. I’m thinking of being a father and what that means on our blue dot hung in space we call home. I’m thinking about every song I’ve wrote, and every time I’ve held my son and tried to comfort him when he cries and I really can’t know what he’s feeling. I’m content to know that there is something, not nothing. There is love that fills this emptiness, and it gives shape to the sky, to the stars, to the chaos of space. It gives color to galaxies and burning stars and black holes. I don’t know how or why, but maybe I know because this, then that. Because I was loved, or because there is love, I love. Because there are stars to look at I look, and because I have a mind that can think, I think.

Soon the sun will come up and a new day will begin, like any other day. The same questions, the same answers that fall through your hands like sand. And I’ll look at my son, in his newborn eyes, and see a magnitude of stars and the depth of space, and a beating heart the world has never seen. And the earth will spin and he will grow, and remind me of the purpose that is so fleeting, so hard to miss, but so worth every atom that makes up our bodies to keep searching out.