For some reason I’m always surprised when it re-occurs to me just how simple it is to live out of a suitcase.  The fact that everything you need for your day/night/life fits inside a space one foot-by-two feet wide seems bizarre as soon as you walk into your house and see walls sporting photographs and shelves and books and candles and, well, stuff.  You get the picture.  Each time I arrive back to my small collection of belongings, I know I’m back to reality.  Reality: coming home to memories on the same walls every day.

As fantastic as it is so be in Glastonbury or London or Oxford or Cambridge, being on the precipice of the return journey somehow always sneaks up on me.  It’s simple to switch into the Travel Mindset, where you hit your stride and are on constant alert for exploring a new place.  Traveling is much simpler than people make it out to be.  It’s not like football or flying a helicopter or handling Charlie Sheen’s PR.

You go, you see and do, you listen and ask questions and get your mindset rebooted, and you get a large dose of humble pie along the way; but exploring is quite simple once you make up your mind to do it.  And best of all, you don’t have to go far to explore.  Think of how little you know your neighborhood, let alone the hills around your city.

Really traveling is like really falling in love: when it starts you think of nothing else, when you’re in the middle of it you cannot fathom it ever ending, and when it does end, re-entering your real life is so surreal it’s difficult to keep a grip on reality.

The hardest part is leaving.  Especially when a bit of you has suctioned onto a particular town, a remarkable hidden inn, or a handful of keenly kindred souls. Especially when you’re staring down the barrel of a long, twisty bus ride, the insanity of London and Heathrow, bus stations and train stations, seventeen hours of recycled airport air and greasy food and greasy people… well, I will be missing England all the while.

Now if someone could only explain to me how I got stopped not one, not two, not three, but four times for “random” security checks, that would be great.  Even after intentionally wearing nothing with metal, even purposely plucking my eyebrow so as not to look like my freedom fighter middle-eastern heritage, even after leaving my deodorant behind in hopes of making it through security (in hindsight, not the greatest plan) – even then, four different tiny British folks patted me down, felt me up, interrogated me about where I had been (not kidding) and finally rubbed my bags down to check for explosives residue.  Sorry, Heathrow Airport.  I left my tank back in Texas.

But all joshing aside, my mindset has been refurbished.  Total overhaul.  Shot to the heart, and travel’s to blame. (What has England done to me when I start quoting Bon Jovi?)

We need to be shot every now and again. It keeps us from falling into complacency and satisfaction with sub-par life situations.  I cannot wait to explore, to really know the Texas countryside again.  It’s been a while since I went vagabonding at home.  How simple! All the stresses of travel become moot when you explore your native land: you automatically speak the language, you know the culture and won’t inadvertently tell someone to F off, there’s no need to change over currency, transportation (usually) is not so much an issue, and if the stuff hits the fan there will always be someone relatively close by to bail you out. Perfect.

SO GOOD–

Post Script: Somehow I managed to be pretty slack on postings over the last few weeks; therefore there will be residual photos and tales popping up every now and again.

With this realization, we can face the most difficult, nail-biting, neck-breaking hours in the day and see that, yes, if we just keep breathing, it will all pass away. The very nature of time is on our side.

A strong draught of humility and gratitude come along with this temporal hopefulness. Humility whispers to us that in wondrous moments we see that we are not the masters of our stars, and that the good comes along as easily as the bad, greeting us as an unexpected, much anticipated visitor. Gratitude bursts forth from the happy, healthy heart. Gratitude that Spring follows every Winter, gratitude that we have these wonderful moments at all, gratitude that every morning we breathe again and come into the world new.

Rumi writes how every morning is a decided new beginning in relationship with God. And thank God we have new moments, each moment. This Maori woman told me once that her tribe’s view of time and days and nights changed her perception of everything that screams at us to stay busy and stressed. Whereas we perceive the start of the day when we awake each morning (hopefully with the sun already in the sky, or at the very least on its way up) the coastal Maoris see the beginning of the day as the moment they lay down to sleep. She says that each day begins with hours of recharging, and each night closes with the activity of the day. You start the new day the moment you drift off to sleep.


When you look at it that way, I thought, somehow things seem less daunting. By the time you wake up, you’ve already succeeded at the first several hours of the day. You can awake to the light, enter into the day that has already been moving along without your fretting.


The last several days have been, well let’s just say, less than my best travel times. The spontaneity has been wonderful thus far; opportunities presented themselves, and opportunities were taken.  But somehow the End of the Trip snuck up on me, and I found myself scrounging for how to finish the research I came here to do, write up everything before it passed beyond the reach of my memory, and see those whom I love dearly for the last smidgen of time I have on this overgrown island. Whew.

But the beauty of this stage is that my work can travel with me, if only I give it the space and time it needs to breathe. Like a good wine.


And so Cambridge became the last destination, though this time no libraries were to be had, nor C.S. Lewis trails to be followed. A fair bit of work was birthed out of Auntie’s Tea Shop, and out of this coffee shop run by a bunch of Turkish guys (they were not so happy about the Persian genes floating around in my genetic makeup.)  Talk about culture shock: one moment I’m watching a student revolution take place in front of King’s College, listening to a gaggle of old British ladies chatter on about weddings and appointments and aching knees – the next hour I’m listening to the room full of Turkish men (all related, I’m sure) laugh heartily and talk in very un-English loud volumes and blather on in their foreign tongues. Ah yes, the perfect background noise for writing dozens of pages.

But amidst the hubbub of the English broads and the Turkish family reunion, the sneaking about Colleges closed to the public (you can go anywhere so long as you walk with purpose and don’t look about too much), the attempts at filling as many waking hours as possible with productivity, the endless long walks (largely due to never knowing where I was going), and the general increase of my stress levels… I read a snippet from good ol’ George MacDonald.

One character, a young and unsure minister, is speaking with a wise old man:
“‘However unlikely it may seem to you, Mr. Polwarth, I really do share the common weakness of wanting to be taken for exactly what I am, neither more nor less.’
‘It is a noble weakness, and far enough from common, I am sorry to say,’ returned Polwarth.”

The want of being taken for exactly what I am. How novel.

With this very simple statement, Mr. MacDonald called me back to the very simple, straightforward joy of living: namely that we, in our tendencies to fill time with Things to Do, are free to be who we are created to be without any worry of how others’ interpret us when there is a Heavenly Father cheering us onward.  We no longer must be goaded by the stress of success, or the pressure of productivity, or the overwhelming weight of checking everything off the To Do list when everything remains in perspective:

Love God.
Love people.
Love yourself.

When this is our view, we go from looking at the world through the cracks in our fingers to seeing every day in panoramic.

I am nearing the end of today’s hours, and thanking God for merciful passages.

Many more to come…

SO GOOD—

P.S. Cannot wait to be attacked by these goons. Best motivation for leaving England ever.

But then you get to the Place, realize that what you had in mind won’t possibly work, and what you planned on doing is subsequently… rubbish.  The adventure, you tell yourself, is a sham.  That job you thought would be wonderful falls to pieces, the place you live has somehow dissolved, and you cannot for the life of you recall why you thought this plan was a good one.

Se la vie.

But then sometimes, just sometimes, if you shut your pie hole long enough, and listen well, and genuinely command your brain “Be silent!”… well, sometimes the Heart of the world can finally get a word in edgewise.

I’ve been learning a thing or two about intuition.  (Don’t worry, I am well aware of how tempting it may be to categorize me as a ‘mystic’ or some transcendental occultist, but really how else do you describe the New Testament? At least my head isn’t consumed in tongues of fire…) (Definitionally here, intuition: where the Holy Spirit grabs hold of natural instinct and brings them in line.)

Call it whatever you like (the leading of the Spirit) but the more keenly I listen to whatever this Inner Voice is, the more I realize that the Naturalists are wrong: we are more than just physical bodies.  People get out of the way just before a car crashes.  Women know the instant they meet their husbands.  Children ask just the right question about something they have no way of knowing.  It’s those moments when we obey ‘a feeling’ we had when we know this is all true.  It’s the periods when we can’t see the forest for the trees when Intuition becomes a wive’s tale.

Someone I used to know had this gift of weaving the most picturesque stories of places he loved best.  My favorite tales revolved around where I am currently, now, just this second, sitting:  here along the Thames outside Oxford, an area I visited only once when I was young.  He spoke so reverently of the fields and towering trees that I knew the moment he spoke this was one of those places that called to my heart, to my words.

And so, early this morning after porridge and coffee, I made my way to a tiny town just north of Oxford.  The Trout, who’s claim to fame is being the location C.S. Lewis penned many a novel, sat riverside.  Attractive and pleasing and delightfully old-fashioned, it hunkers down between the road and an old stone bridge arching away from the Inn.  Across the water lies a ruin of an old church, dowsed in shadow from the neighboring tree line. Geese and ducks and the occasional peacock honked and grackled their early morning welcomes to each other, bathing in the river Thames and chomping at what grasses they could reach.  A woman and her sporting dog came briskly along the road, taking turns with a tennis ball.  Yet another sunny day in England in March; I had to laugh at the ridiculous perfection of it all.  “Who am I, Lord,” I mused, “that you would smile so brightly upon one day in this little life of mine?”

The plan had been to hunker down in The Trout and write all day long, paying homage to the man himself who first awoke imagination in me.  Taking a deep breath, I grabbed the door handle and pulled… no budge.  Nothing.  I tried a bit harder.  Nope, that was a locked door.

It then struck me: of course, it is not even nine in the morning yet.  Nothing is open around here for ages.

Like I said, sometimes adventures go awry.

God is nothing if not hospitable.  With that one literally closed door, He opened up the far and away, hands down most wonderful walk (and day) of my young, vagabonding life.

With written directions in hand (of the sort: “when standing on the bridge which crosses the thames just west of the trout… well, keep walking west and you’ll see an island…keep going a little further and you’ll see a wooden gate on your left off the road that lets you down into a pasture where a series of old ruins stand on your right…” you get the idea) I crossed over to the far side and began The Walk.

I crossed into the open field only to be faced with a childhood nemesis: the goose.  Many of them, actually.  Hundreds of them, actually.  Have you ever been attacked by a goose? By a very large duck, at least? Well, if not, then you have no room to scoff at how I handled facing two hundred of them at once.  The little blighters stuck strictly to the path, to the semi-dry dirt road made for people.  Instead of repeating a horrid childhood (and adult) experience (don’t make me relive the danger by telling you) I shamelessly tied up my boots and made my way across the gloopy, early-morning-frosted field. Around the birds on the dry path, I preferred to keep my calves intact and get sopping wet in the procedure.

Shut up. You would have too.

But the sun was out in full and inviting.  (The wet boots still aren’t dry, but I don’t have any gashes on my legs from goose-bites.  Worth it.)  I ambled, yes, ambled, along my merry trek.  Not a soul accompanied me on my side of the river.  But across the bank there lay a field, a wide expansive plot which hugs the outside of Oxford, buffering her.  This green shimmered as frost gave way to warmth; and then I saw them… my heart leapt out of my chest.  There, in this field, stood a bevy of horses.  A community spot for all the equine!  Ah, England.  You gladden my heart.

Walking along, I spotted a horse, a Shire by the look of him, and followed him for a time.  The sloped Roman-esque nose, the wooly winter coat hanging down, the heavy hoofs slowly plodding the bank.  Two terriers appeared from the path behind him, yapping and dancing about the Shire’s feet.  He withstood the taunting as long as anyone could expect before turning on the two imps and nosing them away, stomping lightly behind the pair, ears pinned back.

And then he saw me.  We looked, this horse and I, across the Thames’ glassy sheen, each intent upon the other.  His woolen ears relaxed, his weight shifted comfortably to his back haunches.  There we remained, though for how long I will never know.  Everything left my brain as I gazed at this magical old character.  Worry and doubt of the future, insecurities from the past… all evaporated and the English sun shone and the chippering birds persisted and the Thames drifted, and this Shire horse blinked knowingly at me.

As he turned towards the greenery behind, I saw him favor a limp in one of his back legs.  An old injury, by how natural his damaged movements appeared, as though he long ago forgot how to walk without a limp.

I have no grand conclusions to pull for now, no ah-ha moments aside from this: to live at all is a gift, but to enjoy living is the only task worth attempting.  Whether it’s the man fishing for his lunch while his boy tends the farm, or the young woman working the pub and laughing heartily at all the horrible puns she hears, or the old lady who keeps planning walking trips across the country she’s lived in for over seventy years… I have heard a thing or two that would leave me bettered by hearing them.

Se la vie.

Grace and peace to you today, wherever you may be.

SO GOOD–

My earliest memories always involve a book.  The cream of these remembrances  feature my mother, my guide through the Land of Fiction, my usher down lanes of stories, my hostess amidst bands of thieves, hoards of goblins, and worlds of giants.  We would sit up in my bed and she seamlessly pieced together the pages in front of us.  Never once did it occur to me that she herself was not the author of my favorite part of the day.  Rather, my mother was the introduction into the world I still love most: the world of Make Believe.

The most frequent of our repeats, written by C.S. Lewis and George MacDonald (respectively), were the Chronicles of Narnia and the Princess and the Goblin series. We came back and back again to these tales, maybe because they were Mom’s favorites or maybe because I pestered her to do so.  Regardless, I always thought these two worlds somehow belonged to one another.  Little did I know, but they do.

You see, George MacDonald was the under-appreciated contemporary of C.S. Lewis.  Even if his writing style was, well, muddled at times, G.M.D. awoke imagination from the sleepy hills of Scotland and England and Wales through the stories he penned.  He always said that the greatest metaphor we have of God is that of the loving Father, because true fatherhood is at the core of all the universe, of all relationships.

Keanu Reeves, that bearer of truth in the late 1980s, has one of the most poignant lines on our situation in this life about dads: “You know, you need a license to buy a dog, to drive a car – you even need a license to catch a fish. But they’ll let any asshole be a father.”  And such is the world’s perspective on fatherhood at large. So what does it mean to read tales in which the father figure is what we always dreamed of – is it, alas, just make believe? Or can it be an achievable and always sought after goal?  Men who raise their children in faith and understanding love, and women who urge their husbands on to be the men they were created to be.

George MacDonald knew what it was to father children (he had eleven of them) and so as he wrote, he penned the kinds of characters you wish you were around or were yourself. In doing so, G.M.D. became one of those authors who I quickly thought I knew, even at age six.

The way I feel about C.S. Lewis is the same he felt about George.  Lewis said, “What I learned to love in [MacDonald’s writing] was goodness… What it actually did to me was to convert, even to baptize my imagination.” The legends MacDonald created set seeds in C.S.; any man who influenced my all-time favorite author so heavily is high on my list.

So. Good ol’ Clive Staples Lewis. I had heard before that he was heavily influenced by the countrysides in which he lived, but it never really struck me until I peaked a hilltop and saw stretching in front of me what surely was the Stone Table from Narnia.  The Stone Table on which Aslan the great Lion sacrificed himself for the traitor, the Stone Table around which the kings and queens of old rallied the remnant before going into battle against wicked Miraz.  Funnily enough, you’ve seen it dozens of times yourself, in photos and postcards and books.  Nowadays there’s a certain mystique surrounding the place.

Stonehenge.

Don’t let these photos fool you. It appears sunny and deliciously warm, when in reality a biting wind consumed my ears and fingers. Rob the Britt didn’t even notice the Arctic blast, of course, despite the fact that a Yeti from the Himalayas would have been miserable.  But enough of my Texan-whining.

The archeological explanations of Stonehenge vary, as you would expect, but at the very least “they” know roughly how it was built and how it looked hundreds and hundreds of years ago.  I won’t go into the nitty-gritty (if you are nerd enough, just look up Stonehenge Architecture.)

Most experts agree on a few main points, namely the general double-horseshoe configuration of the stones.  Before it was a major tourist attraction, I imagine it would be an ideal location to let your mind wander and envision all sorts of creatures and mythical stars.  We slowly circled the enclave in the wind.  And then it hit me: there is some form of this place in just about all of C.S.L.’s worlds.

(For Lewis lovers: Stone Table, Ramandu’s Island, and Cair Paravel in Narnia; the meeting place of Oyarsa in Out of the Silent Planet, the sending-off point for Ransom in Perelandra, the discovery of Merlin in the woods in That Hideous Strength.  Just to name a few.)

For the last four years, I’ve carried at least one C.S. Lewis book with me at all times.  At this point, it feels like I know him, or maybe I knew him. But now, walking the same hills he did and sitting in the same pubs and watching the same sunrises…. it is bizarre.  It’s as though I had this other father figure, or maybe grandfather figure, growing up who I never knew, but am getting to know by following around the wisps of his ghost.  To see what he loved, to smell and hear what inspired him to create these other worlds so many people love… I tend to dearly love individuals who also love Lewis. There’s a common thread of Humanity there that forms an easy camaraderie.

But that’s just what the Gospels are, aren’t they? A calling together of people who love the same things, the same Person. Wisps of the ghost of the One who loved and still loves us best.  Echoing whispers of a father/brother figure who you genuinely like so much, it’s hard not to become obsessed with and follow around like a child. I love this game of tracking a lost loved one like Lewis and somehow feeling the distance of time and unknowing-ness close to a manageable gap.

Hopefully this business of following the trail of writers who inspire me to live well is a practice run for the rest of my life.  Hopefully the rest of my life, and the rest of your’s, will be a constant chase after the bits of God that are obvious enough for me to find.

Looking for hidden places and bushels of blackberries-

SO GOOD–

noun
a hill or rocky peak

ORIGIN Old English torr, perhaps of Celtic origin and related to Welsh tor ‘belly’ and Scottish Gaelic tòrr ‘bulging hill.’

Welcome to Glastonbury Tor, place of mystery, enchantment, and legend.  The tower on the hill, solemnly watching over centuries of destruction and turmoil.  The sarcophagus of epic folklore. The treasury of ancient secrets.

Intrigued yet?

It all started, oh, we’ll say 1500 years ago, give or take a century or two. A child with golden locks was born to the ruler of the area.  This child, our lady Guinevere, grew in strength of will and poignancy of beauty to become the beloved of the great King Arthur himself.  Story has it that in his fervent dedication to discovering the Lord’s Cup, Arthur, son of Uther Pendragon, returned again and again to this gleaming hillside.

Why this hill?, you may ask.  The King was led by a legend of his people: the legend of Joseph of Arimathea. As I’ve explained earlier, Joseph settled in this area after the death and resurrection of his great nephew, Jesus.  Two miracles happened here in this fertile land that surrounded the tin trader.

The first was the planting of his staff which soon grew and blossomed into a thorn tree native to the Middle East, in honor of Jesus’s mocking crown of thorns. We’ll return to this a bit later.  But the second miracle was the burial of the Holy Grail.  Joseph of Arimathea brought the cup used at the Last Supper with him, holding two drops of the blood of Jesus.  He buried it in the belly of the Tor where, for centuries, it lay either undiscovered or forgotten.

Generations later, a well was dug at the base of this hill.  The story sprung back to life as the townspeople saw that the water of Glastonbury Tor ran red, tinged with the blood of Jesus.

King Arthur and his Knights, legend holds, based themselves from this very spot.  So dedicated was he, that the mortality of King Arthur and Lady Guinevere eventually buried them, too, near the source of his lifelong search.

Remember those Benedictine monks I mentioned yesterday? Hundreds of years after the death of King Arthur, the impoverished monks of Glastonbury Abbey dug near the chapel, removing old graves which they could replace (for a price) with the bodies of the newly deceased.  When suddenly…. CLANG. The shovel head hit against something sturdy and metallic.  The skinny monks struggled from the earth a tin casket.  As he opened the lid, one monk later told, he saw a skeleton with flowing blonde hair.  The moment the air kissed the human frame, all within the tin box disintegrated to dust.  The last of Lady Guinevere was gone.

Below this grave was yet another, more heavily embellished casket.  Carved into the outside was the inscription: “Here lies Arthur, King.”  Well, from this moment on, Glastonbury was back on the map.  Pilgrims the world over made their way into the tiny town, all paying their dues to the once great protector of their country.

Many believe these truly were the bones of Arthur.  By all accounts, he was buried at the Isle of Avalon.  And though today Glastonbury sits comfortably amongst the land, geology proves that the water levels around this area before modern day drainage was utilized had Glastonbury Tor cut off from solid ground. Glastonbury. Avalon. Could it be?…

As for the other miracle of Joseph of Arimathea, that of the thorn tree, well, as I wrote you all earlier, the tree still (barely) lives. And a tenacious little guy it is at that! Over the heads of the township, this hilltop thorn tree struggles for life.  Hooligans, ruffians, whatever you’d like to call them, have recently taken a chainsaw to this miraculous tree.  And yet somehow it still carries on.

When we walked up on the deposed stump, all fell eerily silent.  I looked at what remained of this ancient plant, girded by the faithful’s offerings of bright ribbons, and it seemed to be looking off into the distance toward the Tor as if to say, “Ah yes, now I understand.” As if some ancient truth finally settled between the two hilltop vigils.

“Yes, but it’s just a tree after all,” the skeptics say.  Just a tree it may be, but even the skeptics cannot deny the beautiful symbolism of a misplaced tree’s bloom at Christmas and Easter.  The sister tree, housed inside the walls of the Abbey, remains a yearly offerer to the Queen of England.  Every year on Christmas morning, the Queen has a cutting of the Holy Tree in full bloom placed on her breakfast table, a reminder that this land is still steeped in legend.

So there you have it. The two bulging hills of Glastonbury.  One, a striking fortress of obvious strength, the other a displaced and dethroned holy tree.  The watchmen of history stand vigilantly over the scuttle of humanness down below, and therein lies the mystery.

SO GOOD–

The inheritance of the Abbey here, centuries of leaders either rebuilding and redecorating or else defacing and ripping at the seams, has left in its wake an equally odd blend of townspeople. When you think “Glastonbury Abbey” (although surely you’ve never thought of it before) the last mental image to pop into your head would be shop after shop of crystal merchants, palm readers and diviners, and new-age book shops.

But here, tucked away amidst the ruins of a once faithful monastery, lay the remnants of images left to act as an ebenezer. I heard a history professor say once that hope hides in the darkest parts of history, if for no other reason than we can see those dark days as warnings and avoid the wreckage. Its hard to remember that with the story of Glastonbury.

As the story goes, Glastonbury Abbey was originally built and founded by Joseph of Arimathea, Jesus’s great uncle, after he fled to his estate in England. Because of its prime location in the center of the metal trade, this tin merchant began the first little faithful gathering of the Church in England. Twelve of them quickly grew into a community of believers of the resurrected Jesus.

Centuries after this First Church faded into memory, the woodwork of the church burned to the ground. Ashes gave way to a larger, stone-built abbey. It seems as though this is where much of the tumult began. Pilgrims and peasants living in their dank hovels would come to worship and pray in the glories of this high-aspiring architecture. Stained glass, beveled stones, blue lye, carved and un-repeating masonry would put anyone in the mindset of humbled adoration, let alone the poor of Glastonbury.

Our guide, we’ll call him Paul, spoke with a fascinated tenderness towards what happened next in Glastonbury (and the Church’s) history. As the extermination of Muslims became the priority of state and church alike, the Abbey at Glastonbury was stripped of its adornments. Carved into the side of the Lady’s Chapel is an engraving which reads, “JESU MARIA.” Bullet holes pock the surrounding area; JESU MARIA had been target practice in the revolution.

Paul showed us the crumbling walls of the sanctuary. Their shoddy construction led to their own demise, just as the shaking foundation of state-run-church eventually led to the abandonment of the abbey. After the base materials of the walls were laid, rubble was piled higher and higher, encompassed in the smoothed, stylized stones visible from the outside. You look at these walls dozens of feet high, forming smooth archways and graceful lines, and yet, truthfully, they are total garbage. Inside these walls, water seeped through, breaking apart the rubbish and dirt and already broken stones. The original desired effect of the construction of this Abbey was one of showmanship and not of quality and character. The desired effect was accomplished. But at what price?

Destruction continued. The Puritans defaced story-telling carvings. Oliver Cromwell had a go at the Abbey’s demolition. Even in the Victorian era, the locals placed explosives amidst the stonework of what was left of the once enormous compound (larger than St. Peter’s!)  and blew it to bits to give it a more “dignified” ruin-look. The manor built around that time directly next door was constructed from bits removed from the Abbey. In a 1906 ad for the manor, it listed a “large house with a ruin in the backyard” for sale.  The first church in England, the largest Abbey, a once great destination for pilgrims the world over was now a forgotten heap of ruined glory.

In its hay day, believers the world over traveled to pay respects to the birthplace of the first English church.  The Benedictine monks therein discovered a tomb, a very special tomb indeed, nearly a thousand years ago. But that is a story for next time, as the legends descend further into your short time reading this ridiculous website.

For now, Glastonbury hosts some of the more bizarre festivals of the country.  I kept thinking of Austin’s motto of “Keep Austin Weird” as I saw more dreadlocks and belly-dancing costumes than I ever have and hopefully ever will again. The faith is gone, rubble in the earth.

But hope overlooks the heap from a nearby hill…

Until then-

SO GOOD–

Well, after years of brain-growing elsewhere, I am back. And nothing has changed.

The moment I rounded the street that opens onto the main drag of the campus, that same swooping, ancient nudge creeped inside; the magic of the place began its work again.

But get this– Oxford doesn’t want to share with me.  A dear friend of mine is playing hostess for me with the libraries, and all the books I need from the library are, of course,  either in the Rare Books section or else not check-out-able. Super.  One student explained to me how I could get someone to “temporarily steal” some of these books, but something tells me that as much fun as a high speed chase through Oxford on foot would be with a bag runneth-ing over with books and Bobbies on my tail… let’s just say Plan B starts tomorrow.

Without being fully deterred by this set back, let me give you a taste of what has been discovered today.  (Ah, the joys of research…) :

Shortly after the crucifixion of Christ, his great-uncle Joseph of Arimathea fled to his property in an area of southern England.  It was here in his home-away-from-home that good ol’ uncle Joe began a church (supposedly the first church of England) which later became an abbey.  Still in existence today, the legacy of this town has been one beautiful symbol: the Glastonbury Tree of Thorns.

Joseph of Arimathea, having founded a home for believers in Christ to meet together, planted his “staff” in the front yard.  This took root, becoming the Tree of Thorns in honor of Jesus the Christ.  Now here’s the truly beautiful imagery, as if that was not enough… this tree which is found only in the Middle East blooms twice a year: once at Christmas, and once at Easter.  A two thousand year old root has survived the Puritans and Oliver Cromwell attempts at chopping it down.  That is one hearty arboreal creature.

Two months ago, some ignoramus and his chump cronies chopped down the Tree of Thorns. The township is heartbroken.

I stared at the photos of this beautifully gnarled, ancient tree as it was for hundreds and hundreds of years.  Just below, the article included a shot of it hacked across the middle, a scrawling stump jutting into the air while the life of its limbs and leaves lay helpless beside. Life sat next to death, both of them only half naked, both of them legacies.

And so I got to thinking about this business of legacy. How is it we can see clearly the heritage of what has been left to others, but when it is our own history, our own past, we hack our inheritance in two?

An elderly Southern gentleman from Georgia, Jack, shared a bit of his life with me the other day over a beer and the Spurs game.  Jack said he had been traveling to Las Vegas multiple times a year since his mother died over twenty years ago.

I asked him if he was a good luck charm, if he won frequently enough to even desire returning to Vegas so frequently.  His throaty laugh betrayed a smoking habit.  “That’s not why you go to Vegas, sweetheart,” Jack said.  The fine lines on his forehead crinkled amusedly.

“I go to Vegas ‘cause that’s exactly the kinda thing my mother always hated.  The moment she was gone, I packed up and headed for the slots.  Gamblin’, drinkin’,” he raised his glass of amber, “smokin’ and cursin’.  She hated ‘em all, and now that’s all I’ve got left of life.”  He coughed a bit while he laughed this time.  We didn’t talk much after that.

I don’t know what Jack’s mother was like, whether she was sweet or overbearing, tender or self-righteous.  But the one legacy he could see her leaving him was the one thing he wanted to snap in two as quick as he could pack.

It’s tempting to think places like Oxford have it all figured out.  The long line of learning has set up an expectation for those who live in this town.  People are courteous, if not kind, they’re not in a terrible hurry, and on the whole generous.  It would appear as though this is one legacy that carries on.  Perhaps this is what calls the old soul out of me most, these old sensibilities, these very basic human principles.

With any luck, we are left a legacy filled with character and divine love.  With any luck, we recognize the Tree of Thorns in our own backyards. And with any luck, we have someone around who won’t let us board that first plane to Las Vegas.

SO GOOD–

A wise man once told me, “You want to change your life?  Learn the art of asking good questions.”  He didn’t mean those surface inquiries, the ones that slip off your tongue before you even realize you asked a question.  A good question is one that elicits something from beneath the surface.  The bubbling query, the gentle prod of subtle interrogation.

So despite the last two or three days of sleeplessness, several self-haranguings at my lack of preparation for a cross-Atlantic trek, and a few body parts sitting sharply in positions they should never be in… somehow this nugget of wisdom is all I can think of, this challenge of asking good questions.

One of my favorite living authors writes that he rarely regrets the moments he chose silence over the things he could have said.  I would add to this that, moreover, I do regret the questions that itched the tip of my tongue but never made it into spoke word.  Because, how can you know if you don’t ask?

After a year since my last travel writings, here I am again: your humble vagabond offering up my oeuvre.  Offering and, hopefully, asking.

For the next three weeks, I will be sleuthing around England, traipsing behind my three favorite (and deceased) writers from this island.  Since I was a kid (and thanks to my book-worm mother’s influence) I’ve had a soft spot for a good mystery.  I mean, what kid finishes all the Nancy Drew mysteries by age 8 and then moves directly into Agatha Christy’s Hercule Poirot?  The kind of kid that likes clues and intrigue, daring and fear, signposts that could lead somewhere or nowhere.  This is now my own mystery to see where the lives and compositions of three men will lead.

So pray for the grey matter in my brain, that it will expand and effervesce with good questions for every sort I meet along the way.  The beginning of the unknown is supposed to be terrifying, yet this new journey is by grace alone and to grace alone.

“Grace,” Anne Lamott writes, “means you’re in a different universe from where you had been stuck, when you had absolutely no way to get there on your own.”  Well, I’ve been stuck for a while now.  But thanks to a lot of lovin’ from a lot of people, and the healing that always comes with time and travel…

SO GOOD—

This newest section concludes For The Price Of A Burrito travels (for now at least). So please, read on and keep clicking away through the pages of photos until you either run out of things to look at or are bored senseless. There are quite a few new photos for your pleasure. In the next few days, a video will pop up. Consider it my Christmas present to you (how cheap am I?).

Merry Christmas all.

SO GOOD–
Em