Becoming Undammed

A moment of change two decades in the making

Nearly two decades ago I was standing on the roof of a tiny bungalow in East Atlanta, talking to a fellow community member about the black journal clutched in my palm.

It was full of ideas, prayers and esoteric chicken-scratch drawings birthed from my experiences living there with a growing group of “new monastic” Christians.¹ This was an electric, expansive, connected time in my life, and what I had collected in the book reflected the newness I was savoring.

I yearned to share that feeling with others. “I don’t know, maybe one day I’ll publish some of this,” I ventured.

My friend sat balanced on the ridge of the pine-straw dusted old roof. He wore his characteristic expression of distant thought, touched with childlike humor.

“Don’t you think that’s a bit arrogant?” He asked.

My ADHD brain doesn’t hold on to details of conversations, but I remember feelings vividly. I felt a pang in my gut at his blunt, single-stroke assessment of the value and depth of my spiritual experiences, fueled by the charismatic commune and late night cigarette-laden conversations.

The pang was partly a result of his directness—after all, he hadn’t even read any of my work. But it was also the pang of ego-leveling truth.

I was a novice, an infant in my exploration of God, and maybe a little too precious about the beauty of my own experiences to see the layers of immaturity, naïveté—and, yes, arrogance—threaded through those pages.

All these years later, I still like sitting on high places, having conversation, and sometimes even writing.

I’ve traded the roof of an over-crowded house in the middle of the city for a favorite rock in the middle of a suburban creek. The conversations are now with authors, myself and God. The pack a day of cigarettes has been upgraded to a weekly cigar.² And the analogue warmth of the black journal is now an outdated black iPhone.

The ritual has changed, but the spirit is the same. The most salient connection to that season is a deep desire to share something from this mostly invisible life of thought, prayer, searching, learning, making, hurting and healing.

This impulse feels like a river that runs in me—but not out—dammed by a complex of competing concerns, anxieties, and simple cowardice.

One thing I’ve learned in the intervening years between roof and rock is that most people are in the same position as I am, caught between an intimate, secret awareness of the unique value they bring to the world and a competing disbelief in that value. We feel this as a hollow, spiritual infertility.

Though love knocks at the door of our hearts, we fear vulnerability. Though creativity coalesces in our minds, we disassemble it with a barrage of comparisons and critiques before it ever draws first breath.

The threads of our hearts are painfully woven together with the threads of a fame-obsessed culture that reminds us every day that only a few people really matter, really belong in public life in any capacity. Our innate voice of goodness, muffled under layers of disappointment and exhaustion, murmurs to us about a different way of spending time, of being with people, of living life to the full. But through all those layers, it sounds like nothing more than quaint nostalgia.

There are only two ways to cope with the mounting pressure of our inner river: numb it to the point of dormancy or succumb to it and become a true individual expression of creation. I’ve tried some of both.

Another thing I’ve learned is that I need much more than religion to connect to this life. I also need science, nature, relationships, cooking, music, fiction, and the tension of diverse thinkers and diverse doers. These cross-disciplinary interests put living flesh and vibrant color on the spirit of contemplation I was awakening to as a young Christian hippie. It seems it is the connections between these explorations—not any individual point of information or experience—that are creating the strong, flexible safety net of my soul.

On my best days, that net is a hammock stretched between patiently waving trees, bearing me up as I revel in the unlikely gift of still believing God.

On the drive here I had a thought that framed this first post on The Explorium:

Outer inflexibility will eventually stagnate inner change.

I pictured the crunchy cicada shells left on Southern pines by billions of insects obeying the need to leave their old container behind.³

Can I try that? Could we all?

I left that experimental community when it began to reflect back to me a collective expression of the self-congratulatory arrogance I had seen in myself. Thank God it dissolved before anyone could turn it into a cult.

With a confused heart, I took the luminous spark of life I had experienced there and sheltered it as best I could through the thick darkness that followed. That life also did its own stubborn work of persisting in me like a tardigrade in space,⁴ adapting and surviving despite the spiritually inhospitable environment of my world.

I am still a novice.⁵ But I also know more about myself and the world that I live in. I know that I will always be tempted to justify my existence by proving that I am somehow special, that I have unique gifts, and that all my strivings in life have meant something. I also know that all those things are as reliably true for me as they are for everyone else—I am special, I do have a part to play—and this is cause for gratitude and courage, not arrogance.

If there is or ever will be a theme to this project, it is exploration and resulting change. It is about the nature and processes of reality, a record of evolving ideas and curiosities, curated by the mysterious motion of one mind’s spotlight.

A part of me cringes at how arrogant that still sounds. And I know that this self-consciousness is itself a self-protective ego cleverly disguised as humility.

I see you.

I offer this writing transparently: as a source of truth and falsehood, reality and distortion, for you to flow around like this rock I sit on, or take as an opportunity to bend in a new direction.

I have no schedule for posts, no goals, nothing but an effort to let my outside be shaped into a form that more closely fits the contents of my inner life. I have come to believe that this is a process as natural to my life and yours as the process of an apple tree growing apples.

I’m as uncertain as you are where this flows next. But if you decide to float with me, I’ll be glad for the company.

The Basement

1. New Monasticism is a movement within Christianity that emphasizes interdependent community, hospitality, contemplation and engagement with the local community. Our little community was largely influenced by The Irresistible Revolution by Shane Claiborne.

2. The one I’m smoking as I write this is a Gurkha Classic Havana and happens to be aged 20 years—about as long as this post’s story arc.

3. Some species of cicada live under ground for 18 years before they emerge in broods numbering in the millions or billions. Faced with the blinding light of existential shock, they then scream, molt, have sex, and promptly die.

4. Life, uh, finds a way, as Dr. Ian Malcolm famously observed. Tardigrades are micro-animals with an incredible ability to survive the vacuum of space by dehydrating themselves. I feel that.

5. The original meaning of “novice” comes from monastic life and refers to a person who is in a spiritual trial period before donning the robes for good