Criminals and Kingdoms

A word woke me up this morning; so fresh and strong it almost sprung off my tongue.

I woke up with the word ‘Kingdom’ on my mind. On my heart.

“Your Kingdom come, thy will be done, on Earth as it is in Heaven.”

Words repeated, over and over again, said until the meaning’s sucked dry and stowed down below in the basement.

“Your Kingdom come, thy will be done, on Earth as it is in Heaven.”

Everywhere I look, I see examples of Man trying to establish his kingdom. Millions devote their entire lives to building their own personal Babel. Someone selling drugs on the corner is exactly the same as someone trying to add followers to a Twitter feed or a blog roll.

So long as the both of us pursue what satisfies and propagates ourselves, I’m no different than a man societal law would consider a criminal.

By said standard, I’m committing a transgression in His Kingdom.

I’m a Criminal in the Kingdom.

And it would be easy for me to stop there. I could call myself a criminal and resign myself to exile. In the meantime, I could construct a myriad of excuses as to why I would never gain entrance to the Kingdom.

All the while, the only reason no relationship exists is because of me. Because I’m so terrified of what the words of an honest prayer would do to me, I never start speaking. Instead, I allow the words to pile high in front of my heart. Over time, the words harden and form a wall.

And it would be easy for me to let the wall stand. I could call myself a prisoner and resign myself to tracking my days of solitude.

But perhaps I could be honest. Perhaps I could start praying and let the infant words tumble out before me. Red-faced, I could continue and kick out the cobwebs, all the stock phrases and rote memorizations so often used in prayers.

And after a while, after what could be minutes, after what could be several hand-written pages of prayer, I find myself at an honest point, shot forth from the depth of my heart onto the page and the edges of my mouth.

To acknowledge a Kingdom other than yours, and to submit to that Kingdom…to pray a Will into existence that’s not your own…

It is an acknowledgement of my discomfort with the way things are, and a belief in the way things could be. It accepts my inability to fix everything, and quiets my soul.

“Your Kingdom come, thy will be done, on Earth as it is in Heaven.”

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Love Me Tender

Someone offered me a lift to where I was headed. I responded with a curt, “I’m walking, thanks.”

And left.

I wanted to walk because I felt nothing but hate in my heart.

Felt the same way as it did in Colorado, when I ran for miles and miles around the CU campus at 10:30 PM. Angry at the world, angry at my co-workers, angry at Colorado for being so damn hot so late at night.

So I ran.

I had hate in my heart, but I didn’t want to admit it to anyone. I didn’t want to talk to anyone about it, and I didn’t want to show it to anyone. Nothing about my hate made me want to reach out to any friend or family member. Any extension of myself I’d make would be Violence, not Tenderness.

This is why I took up drumming.

But when I can’t drum, as I often can’t nowadays, I run.

(This seems like one of the lone Bitters in my life; knowing how much I love drumming, I put myself in a place where I can’t drum. Idiot.)

One moment, I felt love and sunshine. The next, I could sense hate growing beneath the soil. I could feel my hate spreading out from the deepest parts of my heart, and I could feel it infecting every relationship in my life. I could feel it wind itself around every connection and root, like some fucking intrepid bunch of ivy, like a legion of boa constrictors choking the life out of all my singular and collective loves.

I walked home through an area where some people might feel unsafe. Truth be told, I don’t feel entirely safe either. But today, I was too angry to feel unsafe. All I felt was a great desire to lash out at something.

Or someone.

Five children stood out on the sidewalk. They’d tied a rope to the bottom of the railing of their front porch, and they were soon to begin playing jump-rope.

I passed the children, and I smiled, but it must not have ben convincing, because they didn’t smile back at me. The youngest, a little boy, burped.

My eyes returned facing forward, and I saw, for the first time, my shadow stretched out before me. Long, striding right to left, right to left. I looked back to see the children playing jump-rope, surrounded by a golden sunset. To the sunset’s immediate left, an abandoned electric company building, six stories high. Glass windows blown out, floors stripped bare, save for the pillars which made up its skeleton. Some old monument to days that don’t matter anymore.

But here, far enough down and to the right, just for a few moments, were five kids playing jump rope in the sunset.

Bu still, I had hate in my heart. Still, my heart resembled more the abandoned building than the children.

I passed a stoop, its leprous green paint peeling back and falling off like old scales. Nothing but exposed concrete beneath. Nothing which would be deemed Beautiful by great group of people, and yet the sun still dug deep beneath each peeled-back portion, shining its indiscriminate light on every single step.

Though I saw no beauty, His sunset sought to blot out all darkness.

But still, hate had my heart. His shining light scarred the new layers of my peeling heart. I felt the burning, and I wished His light gone. I ducked the eyes of others walking down the same street, in the same Sunset, over the same cracked pieces of concrete and the weeds spilling out like puss from a wound.

I hated the broken glass shards that lay there day after day, week after week, and the trash obscuring the ground. Us and our substances, our concrete and our paint and our glass and trash, making His Green and Growth appear obscene, distorting the Natural into Vulgarity.

Further still, a young girl sat on her stoop, tracing the Victorian “S” in the black rod-iron railing. Up and down, up and down again. Her hair fashioned into dozens of small braids, each punctuated with small plastic flowers at the end, a light purple. Maybe a faded purple.

She reminds me of the trees which grew outside my house as a child, their branches floating in the wind.

She stands in opposition to Medusa; not a woman with a braid of snakes for hair, but a young girl with a bouquet of flowers. I wave.

“Hello,” she says. Smiling.

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Chameleon Heart

Some guy won a golf tournament this past weekend. He didn’t expect to win and he hit a shot I could never hit, not in a million years. When he rolled in his winning putt, he cried tears on the shoulder of his caddie. Someone put a green jacket on him, because when you win this tournament, you get a green jacket.

And then I realized I’m never going to win the Masters.

Not my path. Not my road. Not my destiny.

I grew up playing golf because I found my dad’s golf clubs in the garage and started hacking up the front yard in an attempt to hit a wiffle ball, because I saw Tiger Woods win the same golf tournament this other guy won, and I saw someone else put a green jacket on Tiger. I played because I was going to be the man of the hour on the 72nd hole at Augusta, and I was going to shed the tears on my caddie’s shoulder.

Not my path. Not my road. Not my destiny.

A dear friend of mine recently lost his mother. The funeral was held on Saturday. I spent some time with him today, and he’s doing better. Grief’s a process, and some days are going to be better than others. What he knows is how much he loves his mother. What he doesn’t know, and maybe what he doesn’t want to admit, is how he’s going to keep living life, and his life’s going to change, and she’s not going to be here to see it.

So much has changed in my life since my grandfather’s passing, and at times, I’m frustrated he didn’t see more of it. He didn’t see the birth of my niece in the summer of 2010, and he doesn’t know how much of a goofball I am when I see her. He didn’t see me spend the summer of 2011 in Colorado, one of the most transformational times in my life. He didn’t hear how I was moving to Philadelphia, and he doesn’t know what I’m doing now.

Yesterday, in the late afternoon, one of my roommates was practicing a song with his bandmate. Another roommate and I stood in the stairway, stretching in preparation for a run down by the river. My mind couldn’t sit still, not for two seconds. All colors and shades of panic streaked and stained the avenues, all variants of anxiety pulsed in my heart.

But there, in the hallway, the music reached me. It swept clear all the panic and anxiety. I closed my eyes and rested in the intimacy of that moment, the holiness of that silent space. Every moment could be consecrated if we wanted it to, but too often we’re moving too fast. My roommate and I stood as still as Redwoods, listening to my roommate’s voice resound above us. And then we went running.

My heart’s been broken, made whole, broken again, changed in its shape and made whole again. It’s changed colors and Loves and Hates.

I’m not the man I thought I’d be, and perhaps I’m not the man I wanted to be in a fast enough time, but I’m a man on a road.

I’m not going to win the Masters, and my grandfather’s not going to be there to see the next chapter in my life, but I’ve given it to God, whatever breaking or building He chooses for me.

My path. My road. My destiny.

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Paradiddles and the Puzzle Who Never Ends

Little by little, day by day, all the in service of a belief in something bigger than you and blue sky, bigger than Veterans Stadium and the Schuylkill River.

Because this…could be that, one day.

On warmer days, I’ll sit out on the stoop and run through drum exercises. I’ll play four bars of eighth notes, four bars of triplets, and four bars of sixteenth notes. Throughout each sequence of four, I alternate hands.

Right-Left-Right-Left. R-L-R-L.

From there, I’ll move on to paradiddles, a variation of the exercise. You continue to play eighth notes, but you change the sticking; from R-L-R-L-R-L-R-L to R-L-R-R-L-R-L-L.

You play the pattern over and over again. And when you mess up, you start anew.

I’ll play until I feel it in my hands, until the stress wrapped ‘round my spine recoils and releases its grip. I’ll play the pattern until the worries in my mind melt from my crown like ice cream off the ridge of its cone. I’ll play and listen to the Block Rhythm, the cars streaking through and the groups of friends walking past my door.

I’ll sit and enjoy the sun because, praise God, it’s getting warmer. It’s not warm yet, and it’s certainly not hot, and I’m sure I’ll wish it were cooler when it turns muggy, but for now I wish for the warmth of a mid-summer sun.

A friend of mine has always enjoyed playing music. But now, in his mid-twenties, is the first time he’s able to reconcile his love of music with the amount of work it’ll take to even allow for the possibility that his music will reach new ears.

Creativity is damned hard work, although operating a camera wouldn’t necessarily always be considered ‘hard labor.’

But sometimes, without a doubt, it is. We’ve got all these set-ups and all these shots we believe serve to construct a larger picture and tell a more engaging story.

But sometimes, all you can do is show up and shoot what’s in front of you. There’s a great deal of creativity having to do with planning, and there’s a great deal of creativity having to do with learning to let go of all the planning and embrace the moment in front of you.

But it’s the planning beforehand that prepared you for the letting go; to give you the confidence you needed to take a new step off the well-worn path.

Because this, a small step, a willingness to move and be taken, can be that…

And what ‘that’ is, I’m still discovering. But it’s turning into something larger than I imagined, something too much, at times, for my heart to handle.

So I pray for a bigger heart, I suppose; so my eyes can take in the story unfolding before me, so I won’t lose the Spirit that brought me to this fight. Me and my paradiddles, me and my acts of littleness, in service of the Puzzle Who Never Ends.

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Ready the Mind

Bubble-bubble-hiss, goes the machine.

I wish, deep down in my heart, for the machine to work faster.

I wish, deep down in my heart, it wasn’t so dark outside.

Somewhere in the time of college, my father gave me a book of prayers written by a French priest. He’d read the same book when in college.

The book’s called Prayers.

Bubble-bubble-hiss, goes the machine.

I wish, deep down in my heart, for my staring at the machine to make it work faster.

I wish, deep down in my heart, it wasn’t so early in the day.

And then I look down at the book of prayers in my hand.

“Mind God,” my mind tells me, “and ignore the coffee maker.”

I glance back at the coffee-maker.

“After all,” my mind continues, “the coffee maker’s the more dependable one.”

Bubble-bubble-hiss, goes the machine.

And I smile.

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First Snow

Two weeks into Philly-living, I’m editing. The desk slams into a window overlooking the alley. It’d been cloudy most days, and this was the first day where I felt like I did a good job of layering my clothes. I’d thought ahead to wear wool socks, a beanie, a sweater, and a jacket. I knew it’d be cold, so I dressed accordingly.

Anyways.

I’m editing, looking at some clips I’ve been looking at for quite some time, trying to find something fresh amid the hours and hours of footage. I look once, and I look again. I look again, and I look again. Still nothing.

And then, someone tells me it’s snowing.

Aside from a few times in the mountains, in the winter, at a time/place where it was near-designed for snow, I’d never seen it snow.

I looked outside, and I saw white flakes descending against a background of brick. Something about it…I don’t know. Something about the snow and the brick, all the thoughts racing through my head about snow and brick, all the comparisons you could do, all the compare/contrast lines you could write…and yet, my mind is still.

For some reason, all I could think about was the end of the world. It seems that’s when something so tender as snowfall would make me change the way I see a brick wall.

All I thought about was the end. Me and my beginning ways.

Me and the bricks and the falling snow.

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Wanderer

For some reason, my head feels tightly wound. I should feel more settled than I do. It’s been a month. I should feel more ‘at home’ after a month of living on the East Coast.

Or should I? I don’t know. I feel like I ought to know how to get to the nearest grocery store, and though I’ve been there several times, I don’t have the route memorized.

I feel like I should’ve bought another jacket or two. I feel like I should’ve diversified my winter wardrobe. Bought another pair of jeans.

Took me a while to do my first load of laundry. On one hand, the dryer was broken. On the other hand, I didn’t want to. If I didn’t do laundry, I could still pretend I was visiting.

II

For the past six years, I lived in Southern California. Azusa, Glendale, Pasadena. And for most of the last two years, I felt like I wasn’t supposed to be there. But I didn’t know where else to go. As a filmmaker, as someone who loved story, Southern California was not only where I should be, it was where I needed to be. You couldn’t make it anywhere else. Not according to the paradigm I constructed in college and never, ever changed.

But from early 2010 onward, that paradigm broke down, piece by piece. I wanted to be a storyteller, but I didn’t enjoy living in Southern California. I wanted to be somewhere else, doing something fundamentally different. Yes, I wanted to tell stories. But the stories had to point to something beyond me. They had to say something other than,

“Wow, isn’t that Dominic something else?”

Journal entries from that time will show that I told myself to move. And then, future entries found me in efforts to convince myself otherwise. As if the thought of moving had come from someone else at an entirely different time.

As if it wasn’t me at all.

III

In 2011, I flew to New Orleans for two weeks. I took the trip because I’d finished a big project, because there was relief work to be done and friends to see.

Also, because I love the place, and I wanted to imagine what it’d be like to live there.

Four months later, I traveled to Boulder, Colorado. I spent the entire summer in that place, and I had an incredible, life-altering experience. The trip sprang out of work reasons, but ultimately transformed into character-building, a personal transformation.

At the end of the summer, I felt like I could move to Boulder.

I drove up through Wyoming, across Montana and into British Columbia with my Dad. Somewhere in Canada, a buddy calls me. He lives in Philadelphia and called to see if I would be interested in coming out for a few weeks for some work.

I told him ‘yes,’ without question. The gig falls through though, leaving me all of September and October to stew and wonder just what the hell is happening with me.

In October, he calls a second time. There’s another gig, and this one is definitely going to happen. I fly out in November, and I spend the majority of my time making a time-lapse video alongside a man who never made a video in his life. He’d made drug deals and had served time in prison, but he’d never operated camera on a time-lapse video.

Until those two weeks in November.

The video wasn’t the life-changing element; it was the relationship. There were stories to be told everywhere you turned to; people to be listened to and respected. Everywhere you turned was a broken heart. Everywhere you turned, there was the chance that something could change and make the whole world new.

And God help me, it felt like home.

IV

So now I’ve been here a month. Working for the Neighborhood Film Company. A week ago, I was out in Santa Monica for the StartingBloc Institute; an experience that deserves its own blog post (and it will get one, rest assured). I managed to spend a few days up in Pasadena. At that time, it’d been just over three weeks since I moved.

In truth, it felt like three months.

Sitting in LAX, waiting to board my east-bound plane, I couldn’t help but be excited. I never thought I’d be so thrilled to be heading East, but there I was, eagerly waiting to come on board and fly toward the Atlantic.

Two of my roommates picked me up at midnight. I tossed my bag in the trunk, hopped in the back seat, and smiled.

“I miss you guys.”

And now, I can relax.

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Peacock Feathers

Good thing the music’s loud, because I’m screaming at the top of my lungs.

“IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII wanna DANCE with somebody!
I wanna feel the HEAT with somebody!
IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII wanna DANCE with somebody!
With somebody who LOVES ME!”

I’m dancing, and I’m locking eyes with people who’re shouting as loud as myself. They’re shaking and spinning and kicking and swaying and raising their hands high.

Now, this girl and I, this girl I locked eyes with for the duration of the chorus, the part of my life where I shouted the above the lyrics with all of the current breath in my body, this girl and I, we’d never met

Complete strangers, her and I.

But not really.

II

You’re gonna hear it in pop songs, and you’re gonna read about it in articles both online and print. You’re gonna see it at the movies and you’ll read about it in books.

People like to be near each other. They want to express themselves and know their expression’s been heard by someone else.

Everyone, and I believe everyone, has a bit of them that’s an odd duck.

Or, better put, say we’re all pigeons. Wire-sitting, precision-shitting pigeons.

Now imagine every pigeon has at least one peacock feather somewhere on their body.

Now imagine the pigeon spends every waking moment of their life trying to mask the peacock feather. Perhaps they sneak into a Home Depot and find some gray paint. Maybe they roll around in the mud and hope no one notices the vibrant ocean blue, royal purple and emerald purple behind the dried earth.

III

Her and I, this woman and myself, we’d happened to find a moment where we could show off our peacock feathers and feel totally free. We could flaunt what the Good Lord gave us and not worry about outside criticism. No one was going to tell us we were crazy and no one was going to tell us to put some mud on the feather, slick our hair back, clean up our beaks, press our wings and get back to sitting on the wire.

To hell with sitting on the wire.

And the moment you stop sitting on the wire, that’s when you have no choice but to dance. And in dancing, you feel heat (I accidentally typed ‘heart‘ my first go-round…which applies as well). And, last but not least, hope of hopes, Love.

My friend and I weren’t strangers singing a song to avoid interaction.

We believed every single shared word.

And in that way, we knew each other.

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Bridges, Nets and PARACHUTES

13,000 feet in the air, my best friend falls out the side of the airplane. With nothing more than a “one, two, whoosh…” she’s hurtling to the earth with a complete stranger strapped to her back.

And I’m ten seconds away from doing the same thing.

Before we jump, the instructor tells us, “when you’re up that high, you can see Mexico.”

I can’t remember if he tells us before or after telling us, briefly, how to arch our backs when we’re falling, and following it up with “we’ll go over the landing in the air.”
Perhaps he told us about Mexico after I signed approximately 15 separate pieces of paper, releasing the company of any potential liability in the event my chute didn’t open and I crashed to the surface with an emphatic THUD.

We walk toward the front of the plane, but we have to face the tail of the plane in order for a safe jump. Executing a one-hundred and eighty degree turn at 13,000 feet when someone’s strapped to your back has never been a strength of mine, but here’s to trying new things.

I remember looking out into the Great Sky, and feeling all my organs disappear. I’m nothing more than a head falling out into space.

The instructor’s right. From where we jumped, you can, in fact, see Mexico. You can also see all your stutters and every birthday candle you ever blew out, all the times someone gave you a hug and all the words you never said to the ones you loved.

Mostly, you tell yourself to breathe.

My eyes don’t register much detail. Blue, and brown. Blue and brown meeting at some unstable horizon, pitching and rolling as gravity takes a hold of me.

We free-fall for sixty seconds. After sixty seconds, the instructor pulls the rip cord. Air rushes back into my lungs, and we float.

“I’m alive.” This is the first time the thought enters my mind during this trip.

My instructor taps me on the shoulder. “You okay?” “I’M GREAT!” My heart’s pinball-bouncing around my ribs, mallets on the marimba. “THIS IS INCREDIBLE!”

“Okay,” he says. “When we land, we’ll either walk it in, or we’ll slide.”

The ground breaks into a full-sprint and rushes toward us. “Alright! Slide!”

We raise our legs and slide on our butts. I stand to my feet and give the instructor a high-five. I haven’t been this excited since I was nine and the Forty-Niners won the Super Bowl.

It’s another minute before I realize I don’t see my friend standing off to the side, greeting me with open arms.

Instead, I see a crowd gathering. Someone’s hurt. Hurt bad. In a few minutes there’s going to be an ambulance. An hour later, there’s going to be hospital. Hours after the hospital, there’s going to be a broken femur.

There are no “mild successes” when it comes to skydiving. When you leave a perfectly good airplane at 13,000 feet, you make damn sure you’ll never be the same.

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Three Stories

Three stories.

Our house stretches up and up, three stories into the sky. Most of the houses on the block total two stories, but ours is A-B-C, easy as 1-2-3.

It’s more narrow than any house I’ve lived in, but they don’t call ‘em ‘row homes’ for nothing. We’ve got furnishing to do, and plenty of it. As I unload more and more stuff from my boxes, my room decomposes into more and more of a complete mess.

My mind can’t settles because my eyes can’t find a space of bare floor. I’m flat on my bed and my heart won’t rest. My eyes open in the morning and I don’t feel like I ever fell asleep in the first place.

II

“You wanna sit on the stoop and read with me?” Says Ricky. He’s going through a book by Denis Johnson, the author of Jesus’ Son. Ricky’s reading Train Dreams. I’m reading a manuscript of a friend; ‘bout two-thirds of the way through it.

Temperature ‘round here’s been comfortable the first few days, so why not, right?

Turns out, sittin’ on the stoop’s a great way to meet neighbors.

In-between pages and asides to Ricky, we’d say “hello” to the passing neighbors. Sadly, not everyone says “hello” back to you, but most would respond. Some would look at the two white guys reading on the stoop and chalk it up as some strange anomaly, saying “hello” out of the pure humor of the moment.

Humor’s the way through most dark alleys. That, and silent prayers which, in your head, sound like howling.

III

My first full day of work left me wanting. I’m working on a short video about someone connected through Project H.O.M.E., and it’s tough material. I’m trying hard, but I can’t find the story. I’m being too cute, too fancy. After a while, you learn you have to edit ruthlessly, at least at first, in order to find the story.

These are “Edison Days,” days where you figure out all the ways it doesn’t work. I didn’t like those days when they first started showing up, and I still don’t. I never will. But they’re necessary. It’s rare when you stick the landing on the first jump, and my first day was one of those moments where you learn to live with bumping into the walls.

You tell yourself, “Not every day’s going to be like this one. There’re gonna be better days. There’ll be days where you nail it and where everything comes together.” And you believe yourself.

Most of the time.

IV

I came back from a night run with Ricky, feeling good and fresh. Stephen, one of the roommates, had made a sweet potato-black bean-kale-onion extravaganza, and he had extra. I scooped out a plate and sat at the table. Stephen plays banjo, and he had the instrument at the table there with him.

He played for a while as I ate, and when I finished I walked upstairs, grabbed him drum and came downstairs. I love jamming where both the musicians work to find each other, listening to any eccentricities, keeping an eye on chord changes and accents, trying to find that pocket.

I watched Stephen’s chord changes, his rhythm, his phrasing. Not to mention, a lot of banjo music is of the “Boom-chuck-boom-chuck” variety, so that helps.

We played together for a bit, and the music brought the roommates down to the pirate table, one at a time. It was casual, right in the flow of everything happening at that moment in the house.

V

My back’s flat on the bed, and I feel my heart slow. My eyes close. When I wake, I am well-rested and excited for the day.

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