the up and down and over

Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall. | F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby



The view from my bedroom window overlooks a city, and when I start on my routine bike ride down the mountain from my house, I can see the steepness of the pavement dropping beneath me. And then at the end of the day, I feel the breadth and heaves of the mountain as I take my bike up. Morning and night, I am confronted by my smallness.  It is good.

This is the way I have been starting and ending my days, with my smallness in mind. Though there are days when it feels painstakingly hard to pedal against the rise of the mountain, I can't help but feel much gratitude in the stop of this reality.


Being surrounded by a cityscape and living in a technology infested world, there is the assumption that all westerners are born into believing, and that is our own mightiness, and from our own flats we like to say this is mine. We attempt to mirror the night sky with electric lights strewn about the city streets and mimic the silhouette of the ever changing horizon; like the plunge of plateaus or the curve of hillsides, we exact its likeness by building skyscrapers to create our own skylines. We easily forget our frailty, but this halting mountain, saves me from this forgetfulness. And watching its ascent toward the heavens makes me human again. 



The movement of this thought peaked when, months ago, I sat down in class, and feeling overwhelmed by the list of things I needed to do, my professor began his lecture by giving a few words on similar sentiments (on forgetfulness, and our humanness). He talked about our thoughts, and shared openly the one thought he turns to so frequently, which now has become instinctual, and prayerful.  The thought came in a question, the way the Father of Lights asked it: Adam, where are you? The question feels the echoes of our genesis story as in the garden when Adam sinned, and ashamed, he hid. But it's less about the act of sinning, and more about the loss of something. The question breathes a sigh of longing, begging, where are you, you have lost what it is to be truly human.

I think part of what Adam lost was the awe of things more mighty and majestic than he. And it was at that thought, all my anxieties were diminished. I am small, but oh my God, those mountains? Those stars? This world? Do they feel the weight of my worries? I don't know, but I feel the gravity of their existence ground me back into the dust and dirt that I am.

Oh let my eyes be set on goodly things. To the Father of lights, Amen.