Enjoying the Scenery

Older people are great. They've had decades or in the case of this 103 year old lady we met recently, more than a century to unlearn inhibitions, gain wisdom and gather experiences to share with those of us just beginning our paths. Our new friend was a great sport about being in group photos too.

I've noticed a trend in my previous blogs – I tend to write mostly about the lessons I've learned in this program and the people, places, or circumstances surrounding those ideas. It's not that I don't notice the scenery, the activities we do, the buildings in the cities or the food I'm eating (I notice the food – my team calls me the human garbage disposal because I'll eat just about anything, and all of it). I do take these things in, but when I sit down to write something that I think is worth sharing, the most impactful ideas, events, and people of the recent days and weeks come to mind.

Truthfully I spend at least as much if not more time thinking about the scenery of life than its deeper undercurrents. I imagine the reverse would probably be exhausting. I believe we're here to do good and improve the world for others to live richer lives, but to somebody else, we are the others. Therefore it must be worth enjoying for ourselves – since we're somebody else's greater good, too. So I must admit as I've gotten better at dealing with the roles I take on the team and honestly in some cases just stopped doing them for a number of reasons, I've spent quite a lot of that new found freedom from responsibility enjoying some of the more beautiful things in life, large and small, enduring and fleeting, tangible and not.

Much like life in general, the AmeriCorps experience can feel sometimes like a brutally challenging endurance race, and finding time to slip away and rest on the journey is a critical component of success. So as I've experienced more prolonged stress and frustration than arguably any other time in life, I've also appreciated taking time to enjoy the simple things around me more deeply than I have before.

If you've been reading this blog with any regularity you probably know by now that as much as I don't like to talk, I do like to write. A particularly beautiful sunset, the winter's first snowfall, or the stars standing silent watch in an open night sky have inspired human beings for thousands of years, and I am no different. So this post is just a collection of a few of the quieter moments I've experienced and recorded in this program, things I feel need have happened for no other purpose than simply being part of the experience of life. ~

Words cannot describe the scent of purity that permeates the high mountain air before a storm, heralding rain. Experience alone can convey the peculiar sensation of being caught in a driving downpour and fixating on a single rain drop rolling off the tender undergrowth. Description cannot truly invoke the enveloping embrace of the wanderer by the fog that forms only on the top of the world, on the arching spines of God’s monumental roosts. Language may inspire some desire for a similar experience in a willing listener, but only those who have actually tromped after the call of their hearts to the raw, peaceful power of the mountains will understand.

-July 2016, Great Smoky Mountains National Park, Tennessee

Last night, the snow billowing through the path of a lone street lamp outside the town's tiny hospital transported me, for a moment, from the dark shuttered room on the third floor of this old chestnut church to another place, another time.

The empty, vast expanse of melancholy came over me like it did all those sleepless nights in Rochester, when I would walk from Brick City, alone, into the storm. After slaving all day and all night in pursuit of a nameless ideal, I felt the ocean of softly falling snow was in that moment, all for me.

-November 2016, Rainelle, West Virginia

The majesty of the mountains in the winter rain on a balmy day, a fluke in mid December. Mist rises from the the river bed and idles among the houses set on the shores. An enormous American flag is visible intermittently between the wisps of cloud as we pass, a proud symbol of patriotism plastered to the sides of a patchwork wooden house.

I love rainy days.

-December 2016, State Highway, West Virginia

-This is a beautiful place . . . The stars in the velvety night sky. The spider patrolling a tiny pile of desiccated excrement. Bullet casings in the console of a new SUV. Full hearts and full smiles, the scent of coffee (Dunkin') mixing with light perfume. Making new friends, feeling real warmth in a handshake and knowing you've returned it. Dancing badly but boldly, and escaping alone to the shadow of a Georgia Pine . . .

-February 2017, Albany Georgia

Why do these insects stay in the air during a storm? Are they the thrill seekers of their kind, dodging monstrous rain drops amid the thunderous crash of the heavens rending? Are they the fearless few who will brave terror for a piece of life no others can claim? Is a romantic adventure of epic proportion playing out above my head in the sparse clusters of tiny motes flitting about the dim, rain-speckled porch light?

-February 2017, Albany, Georgia

Pleasantly odd names so far encountered in the South, running list:

• The French Broad River
• Funck's Restaurant
• The Pleasing Fungus Beetle
• McNutt street, WV
• Big Ugly, WV
• Shartlesville
• Chunky, MS
• Bland, VA
• Chilhowie, TN
• Lick Creek Road, WV
• Big Clear Creek, Rupert WV
• Loudermilk (last name in a WV graveyard. Quitermilk nowhere to be found)
• Beelick Knob, unincorporated WV
• Red Lick, LA

I went with the fireteam to run chainsaws today. My arms are covered in dirt, sawdust, and blood, and I smell like motor oil, sweat and fear. It was a good day.

-February 2017, Albany, Georgia

A breeze winds its way through the little field of wobbly yellow clover flowers. They look so soft, almost like moss, from the balcony. I imagine I could lie there and forget the world, serene and immobile in the warm evening sunshine as the scent of food and laughter wafts from the girls' upstairs apartment.

My body has that elusive contented ache of a job well done in the open air. At last released from its earlier labors my mind slows its pace as exhaustion and exposure heighten my senses. The afterglow of a persistent afternoon sun radiates from my cheeks and the hollows of my eyes as my stomach rumbles. When you're hungry you can pick out all the little details of a scent, pinpointing the presence exactly of each ingredient: zucchini sautéed in olive oil, butter- bronzed white bread. But on days like today you can't tell if the salt you smell is in the air or on your skin. This is a visceral kind of satisfaction, one I imagine earlier, less sedentary and less comfortable peoples felt quite often. It seems so romantic to the mind of one of the most well fed people in history engaging in only a single day fast.

Albany, Georgia

A sunset the color of pink Araucana eggs, deepening over a tawny Georgia plain. The way the vivid, dark pink glow slots through the tree horizon to catch a solitary trunk in the thicket. Feeling like a rabbit might in a young New Jersey pine stand, dwarfed by ancient trees. Chasing the sunset down a long, wide, flat and straight expanse of road, the line broken only by the occasional truck or SUV and accompanying wave.

A drunk neighbor crossing property lines with an old dog flattened joyfully across the back of his ATV. Burning pine needles, the imminent yammering of an approaching coyote pack and the primal fear I felt as they all stopped at once at my approach.

The otherworldly brightness of the stars that begins as day mixes vibrantly with night in an effervescent show of colors, points of white light, and dusky midnight blue-grays. The reflection of the cosmos' daily embrace of opposites on the tiny pond peeking through the twisting oaks and towering pines.

The impossible bigness of the sunset Georgia sky, the dome of atmosphere stretching farther than I thought any eye could see. The vastness of the space punctuated by tiny jet planes, traveling with their inchworm tails every which way, like lone martian explorers lazily touring the plains, or blasting straight up for the stars a thousand miles away. Calvin and Hobbes' Spaceman Spiff comes to mind, the child of Bill Waterson's imagination, and I smile as just for a moment, I too take off for the arid plains of Mars and zip through an alien sky.

These things I would have missed had God not given me feet to run and a joyous heart to sing his praises as I encounter him in glorious creation.

-February 2017, Albany, Georgia

We've got less than a week left in Albany, then Delta 1 will pack up our bags and start on the road to Shiloh Tennessee, where the team will restore fields at Shiloh National Military Park to their historical condition – 5 weeks of chainsaw work. Before they get there they'll be dropping me off in Birmingham Alabama, where I'll be for a couple days before being picked up on the way to Kentucky. Thoroughbred 1, the composite team I joined (and whose name refers to the tradition of horse breeding and racing in the area where we'll be working) will spend 5 weeks building and maintaining trails in Daniel Boone National Forest before heading back to campus in Vicksburg for a final reunion, closure, graduation, and departure.

Thanks for following along! Til next time,

-Dan

O Lord my God, When I in awesome wonder,
Consider all the worlds Thy Hands have made;
I see the stars, I hear the rolling thunder,
Thy power throughout the universe displayed.

Then sings my soul, My Saviour God, to Thee,
How great Thou art, How great Thou art.
Then sings my soul, My Saviour God, to Thee,
How great Thou art, How great Thou art!