Jason Tatum.

Author’s Note to “Through Painted Deserts”, by Donald Miller

There is no other short essay written in the past several years that inspires me so much.  Whenever I want to challenge myself to be a better writer, or remind myself of what kind of writer I will never be, I go to this passage.  I have read it out loud to friends in so many places.. bookshops, coffee shops, bars, and in cars. At any opportunity, I’ll read this aloud to you.  Hopefully, I will one day have it memorized. If you like this, then I highly suggest Miller’s other works. He is one of my favorite writers alive today. 

IT IS FALL HERE NOW, MY FAVORITE OF THE FOUR seasons. We get all four here, and they come at us under the doors, in through the windows. One morning you wake and need blankets; you take the fan out of the window to see clouds that mist out by midmorning, only to reveal a naked blue coolness like God yawning.

September is perfect Oregon. The blocks line up like postcards and the rosebuds bloom into themselves like children at bedtime. And in Portland we are proud of our roses; year after year, we are proud of them. When they are done, we sit in the parks and read stories into the air, whispering the gardens to sleep.

I come here, to Palio Coffee, for the big windows. If I sit outside, the sun gets on my computer screen, so I come inside, to this same table, and sit alongside the giant panes of glass. And it is like a movie out there, like a big screen of green, and today there is a man in shepherd’s clothes, a hippie, 
all dirty, with a downed bike in the circle lawn across the street. He is eating bread from the bakery and drinking from a metal camp cup. He is tapping the cup against his leg, sitting like a monk, all striped in fabric. I wonder if he is happy, 
his blanket strapped to the rack on his bike, his no home, his no job. I wonder if he has left it all because he hated it or because it hated him. It is true some do not do well with conventional life. They think outside things and can’t make sense of following a line. They see no walls, only doors from open

space to open space, and from open space, supposedly, to the mind of God, or at least this is what we hope for them, and what they hope for themselves.

I remember the sweet sensation of leaving, years ago, some ten now, leaving Texas for who knows where. I could not have known about this beautiful place, the Oregon I have come to love, this city of great people, this smell of coffee and these evergreens reaching up into a mist of sky, these sunsets spilling over the west hills to slide a red glow down the streets of my town.

And I could not have known then that if I had been born here, I would have left here, gone someplace south to deal with horses, to get on some open land where you can see tomorrow’s storm brewing over a high desert. I could not have known then that everybody, every person, has to leave, 
has to change like seasons; they have to or they die. The seasons remind me that I must keep changing, and I want to change because it is God’s way. All my life I have been changing. I changed from a baby to a child, from soft toys to play daggers. I changed into a teenager to drive a car, into a worker to spend some money. I will change into a husband to love a woman, into a father to love a child, change houses so we are near water, and again so we are near mountains, 
and again so we are near friends, keep changing with my wife, getting our love so it dies and gets born again and again, like a garden, fed by four seasons, a cycle of change. 
Everybody has to change, or they expire. Everybody has to leave, everybody has to leave their home and come back so they can love it again for all new reasons.

I want to keep my soul fertile for the changes, so things keep getting born in me, so things keep dying when it is time for things to die. I want to keep walking away from the person I was a moment ago, because a mind was made to figure things out, not to read the same page recurrently.

Only the good stories have the characters different at the end than they were at the beginning. And the closest thing I can liken life to is a book, the way it stretches out on paper, 
page after page, as if to trick the mind into thinking it isn’t all happening at once.

Time has pressed you and me into a book, too, this tiny chapter we share together, this vapor of a scene, pulling our seconds into minutes and minutes into hours. Everything we were is no more, and what we will become, will become what was. This is from where story stems, the stuff of its construction lying at our feet like cut strips of philosophy. I sometimes look into the endless heavens, the cosmos of which we can’t find the edge, and ask God what it means. Did You really do all of this to dazzle us? Do You really keep it shifting, rolling round the pinions to stave off boredom? God forbid Your glory would be our distraction. And God forbid we would ignore Your glory.

HERE IS SOMETHING I FOUND TO BE TRUE: YOU DON’T start processing death until you turn thirty. I live in visions, for instance, and they are cast out some fifty years, and just now, 
just last year I realized my visions were cast too far, they were out beyond my life span. It frightened me to think of it, that I passed up an early marriage or children to write these silly books, that I bought the lie that the academic life had to be separate from relational experience, as though God only wanted us to learn cognitive ideas, as if the heart of a man were only created to resonate with movies. No, life cannot be understood flat on a page. It has to be lived; a person has to get out of his head, has to fall in love, has to memorize poems, 
has to jump off bridges into rivers, has to stand in an empty desert and whisper sonnets under his breath:

I’ll tell you how the sun rose

A ribbon at a time…

It’s a living book, this life; it folds out in a million settings, 
cast with a billion beautiful characters, and it is almost over for you. It doesn’t matter how old you are; it is coming to a close quickly, and soon the credits will roll and all your friends will fold out of your funeral and drive back to their homes in cold and still and silence. And they will make a fire and pour some wine and think about how you once were … and feel a kind of sickness at the idea you never again will be.

So soon you will be in that part of the book where you are holding the bulk of the pages in your left hand, and only a thin wisp of the story in your right. You will know by the page count, not by the narrative, that the Author is wrapping things up. You begin to mourn its ending, and want to pace yourself slowly toward its closure, knowing the last lines will speak of something beautiful, of the end of something long and earned, 
and you hope the thing closes out like last breaths, like whispers about how much and who the characters have come to love, and how authentic the sentiments feel when they have earned a hundred pages of qualification.

And so my prayer is that your story will have involved some leaving and some coming home, some summer and some winter, 
some roses blooming out like children in a play. My hope is your story will be about changing, about getting something beautiful born inside of you, about learning to love a woman or a man, about learning to love a child, about moving yourself around water, around mountains, around friends, about learning to love others more than we love ourselves, about learning oneness as a way of understanding God. We get one story, you and I, and one story alone. God has established the elements, the setting and the climax and the resolution. It would be a crime not to venture out, wouldn’t it?

It might be time for you to go. It might be time to change, 
to shine out.

I want to repeat one word for you:

Leave.

Roll the word around on your tongue for a bit. It is a beautiful word, isn’t it? So strong and forceful, the way you have always wanted to be. And you will not be alone. You have never been alone. Don’t worry. Everything will still be here when you get back. It is you who will have changed.

Shaving

I really enjoy it when some old memory comes to you when it hasn’t graced you for more than a decade or two.  
Last night I was talking with Andrew about facial hair and it tapped the spring of memory from being a child. I would do what so many others did, I am sure.  I would stand in the bathroom and watch my grandfather shave his face with the greatest fascination.  The cream, the blade, the long, sweeping movements of the steel across the skin.  It was a mystery and a beauty, the smell of aftershave lingering throughout the morning.  The best part was, in an act of generosity and love, when my grandfather would hold the can of shaving cream out and I would bend my hands into a cup, taking the dollop of white foam and carefully applying it to my face to perfectly match him.  I would then be handed a yellow, plastic, disposal razor with the clear guard still attached. I would mimic those long sweeps across my small face next to my grandfather with the water, the tapping of the razor against the porcelain edge of the sink, the step that I had to climb onto to see myself peering back with a white beard in the mirror.  
I guess I miss that. 

Weekend in London.

I really like London.  I have been through on several occasions, but not for 3 years have I had the time to explore through the streets and see the sights that feature in films and postcards.  I booked a ticket and a hostel so I could spend some time with alumni, but also, I just wanted to stretch my legs for a few days.  All of the museums in London are free, so anyone can pass in for a moment and see Magna Carta at the British Library.  You can see a dinosaur at the Natural History Museum and move north to the British Museum for a moment with the Rosetta Stone or the ancient marbles of the Parthenon. 
London is the only town that I have ever been to that feels as much like New York.  Chicago is close.  I love to be out in nature, to be on trails and by streams.  I love to be by the ocean, all sand and salt and SPF.  I love it all. And I love big cities.  I love how each neighborhood gracefully gives way to the next, a theater here and a bookshop there. I love the vast parks that make you forget where you are, the largest city in Europe. I love how everywhere you turn is another testament to an old empire.  It is the grandeur of New York, but subdued, old world.  Its more imperial, less investment banking. 
I awoke on Sunday morning and headed out the doors of my hostel in Kensington.  Hyde Park was a few minutes away, a place that was featured on the various walls of places that I have lived over the past several years: this old photographic of a man hopping over a puddle in the black and white of 1937.  I sat down for coffee at a cafe by the lake in the early morning and a swam came up beside me to give himself a ten minute cleaning.  His long neck worked ever feather without shame, his method perfect.  Did you know that all swans in the United Kingdom are property of the Queen?  I was transfixed. 
Anyway. I would walk for a few hours and then stop by a coffee shop.  I’d order it and sit and read for awhile, eventually gathering my things and heading out the door for another couple of hours.  Oxford Street is a river of people all in a hurry and the side streets were as quiet as the summer morning.  Church was a few minutes at Speaker’s Corner of Hyde Park, where men and women say what’s on their mind, or whatever is left of them. People look on at them as they stammer on about freedom and truth and lies and there are these smirks on everyone’s faces.  But you know, Chesterton said that the maniac is the one who believes himself to be sane.  
There is a peace felt in ancient streets, in museums, in coffee, in books, in stretching your legs as far as you can go on foot in a city of 14,000,000. You would think it would wear you out, but what travel does is make you feel something that you cannot find sitting in your living room, and that’s why I’ll have to resist the urge to check the fares to Prague and Istanbul after I press send. 

Dreams of Eternal Return

I would assume that at times throughout the writing of this email that I would have mentioned the myth of the eternal return.  I can’t think of any examples of it, off the top of my head, but it is one of those thoughts that is always in the background of the things that I think about.  The eternal return, to put very simply, is an idea that all of humanity is essentially returning back to where it once was.  This is a very simple explanation, but it is evident in most forms of philosophy and theology, taking on as many forms and streams as  you could possibly imagine.  It is about restoration, redemption, the return to Eden, the New Earth, whatever you want to call it- it is the concept of “home” in her most pure and pleasant form.  Home is the center of creation, the place where the divine and his creation intersect.  It is everywhere and it is pre-Christian, paralleling ancient Judaism as well as classical philosophy. I really like the eternal return.  We always end up back where we started, and deep down, that’s what we all want. 
I had these dreams last night, a mind skipping from one location to the next, as vividly as these things can get, I suppose.  In one moment I was back at my aunt’s farm, a place that I spent so much of my time before my aunt and uncle divorced in the early nineties.  In a flash of light I was there in the backyard, the horses and the swimming pool and the back porch were all there, just the way I left them so many years ago in my memory.  I wondered why I was there again, and then in another flash I found myself in the backyard of my grandparent’s house in Douglasville, the place I lived between the ages of about 6 and 12.  These were such memorable and formative years, the memories are etched in my mind, cataloged like a library.  So many memories from that place are easily recalled at a moment’s notice: Christmas, baseball cards, woods, tree houses, my grandfather’s death, our loneliness afterwards, the thrill and the heartbreak of my first girlfriend.. they’re all there, ready to be viewed at any time that I allow my mind to settle long enough to be reminded of the past.  
And I was there again in this dream. I don’t go there often, but I found myself in the backyard and I saw a figure there working on something, and I was sure that it was my grandfather, a person who I have interacted with in dreams before, but only once or twice, and each time it is sharp and remembered now as if it were a conversation that I had in my living room yesterday.  In the dream I was sure that I had found him again and so I ran to him- the blue jeans and the red flannel shirt in the distant and finally, as if magically, I was in front of him, but it wasn’t my grandfather this time.  It was my great-uncle Johnny- who is also gone- and he was telling me that he was preparing the house for later- as if this old place that I haven’t seen years would be my home again. And I wish you could have been there with me in this dream at that moment, because it wasn’t just a dream. I was there, I tell you. I felt it the way you can only feel reality. 
It’s amazing how our dreams can carry us back to the beginnings, to the places before your heart was broken, before you failed, before you risked everything, before you moved away from a place.  Its like there is something in us that wants to return. 
I was talking to a friend late at night the other day, and we were talking about how vivid a memory can be.  One of my memories that keeps returning is in the clouds.  Give me a particularly pleasant day and hang a few puffy white clouds in a perfect blue sky and I will instantly go back to being about 5 years old, laying in the grass with my neighbor, staring up into the large dome and trying to guess at what shapes these clouds were taking in that moment, the faces, the animals, the western states and cartoon characters, ever shifting from one to the next.  I can close my eyes in that moment and smell the grass of 25 years ago, I can anticipate the ice cream truck turing the corner of the street, I can feel the time slipping away from that perfect moment when I will have to go inside and wash up for dinner.  It is one of those memories that you can completely feel, not just remember. You have one too, I bet?  We all do. It’s the traces of the eternal return in all of us. 
I was running this evening through the park, the weather warm and breezing as I traced a line through the fields and trails of the park.  I would come out into a large open field and the sun would cast down a long shadow. I could feel the freshly cut grass kick up the back of my leg, and I could see my grandfather pushing our lawnmower.  I would take down the trails in the woods and I would taste the dust of my aunt’s farm, the mysterious trails that I would discover for the very first time, just a child, a whole word unfolding at every turn right there in front of me.  
We’re returning somewhere.  It’s in the art of all of humanity because it is true, it is a part of who we are.  The eternal return points to something bigger than just the grass in the front yard, more real than the dust of the trail and the shadow cast by the sun.  I know its there, but I can’t tell you exactly what it means or what it is.  I just know it.  If you closed your eyes for a moment on a clear day when the sun is in just the right position, hanging up there in the sky the way he always does, you’ll get the sense of what I’m talking about.  That’s the eternal return, or a taste of it, at least.