In the midst of the storm... Joplin is.

I hate the the reason I will awake my writing from a solemn slumber is the scream of a storm that decimated my college town, a place I called home until Saturday afternoon. Joplin has never been a place I was fond of and now my mind will think of nowhere else. It is this storm that opened my eyes to her beauty. I stand humbled at the feet of this town of people that I know and love.

Saturday afternoon was sunny and humid. I walked outside of the gym at Ozark Christian College in my graduation robe to look for my boyfriend and my dad. Smiles. Smiles that lasted until that night when I left Joplin for the last time to move up to Kansas City until I leave for Arizona. Smiles that lasted until Sunday night when my best friend called me in tears. Her words will forever haunt me as I sat in Kansas City trying to picture what she was seeing. She didn't know where she was, it was unrecognizable. She sat in her car a block away from where the tornado ripped through the middle of town. I slept only a few hours and then drove the 2 hours back down to town. About 5 miles outside the city, debris began to appear on the side of the highway. Pieces of metal and insulation.... shoes, plastic bags, rubble. I dropped off medical supplies, water and some dry food at the local university that is currently functioning as a Red Cross shelter and went to my old church where I was dispatched with a group of volunteers that I knew from town. We went to the middle of the damaged area to check on a family. As we got closer to the middle of it all, cars littered the roads, sheets of metal were wrapped around trees, plywood and pieces of homes were by the side of the road where only businesses had stood. The hospital looked as though a bomb had exploded, no windows were left. The busiest road in town had been flattened, and signs from the stores could be found wrapped around trees in adjacent neighborhoods.

We stood in the rain on the top of the hill of 17th street looking out over Rangeline. All of us were residents of Joplin at one time or another, and we said very little. Repeated over and over was that we couldn't believe that we didn't recognize our own city. We had to count the streets to know which numbered road we were standing on. Orange X's were painted on every house to decode that the Fire Department had excavated this area- letting people know if anyone was found in the house. We walked silent through the street, smelling the gas lines. I watched a little boy step and jump across a pile of broken boards and pipes that used to be his house. He picked up a book too water damaged to read, and set it back in the rubble. His parents limped across the debris, looking for salvageable pieces of their lives. I sat in the car as my friend received word that his friend had been confirmed dead. His heart broke, as did mine. The city itself shook with sobs for people who had gone missing. Story after story emerged of parents searching for their children, finding only a shoe and a rumor that perhaps he was at one of 50 area hospitals.

Yet, amidst the horror, I began to see life. As we approached where Walmart used to stand, a disheveled woman offered us water. It's unlikely she owned anything anymore, but she provided for us. I watched neighbors of people who had lost everything help them dig through rubble. They too had lost their homes. Every church we passed that was still standing had opened its doors as a shelter or a volunteer dispatch center. Locals took teams to check on every person they knew and family members dug out their own from the piles of what used to be their lives. For all of the years my friends have begged me to say something nice of Joplin, here it is. I have never seen a city disregard its own needs for the needs of the people around them like this. Never before have I seen such vibrant humanity emerge from the grave of destruction. I wondered if Joplin would ever recover. How do you stand back up from something like this? The answer:

Joplin never fell. 

She staggered, she stumbled, she was bruised and beaten, but Joplin stands. Joplin stands because the people of this place are leaning on each other. People with nothing are rescuing people with nothing. No one abandoned anyone. News anchors with no homes to return to worked late into the night broadcasting the story of their wounded town. Radio announcers with not even a change of clothes sat in the studios all day to do anything they could to re-connect families and direct bewildered listeners to help. Electrical repair teams came parading into town from Kansas City. Police cars from counties I had never heard of flooded into the city to help organize, search, rescue and maintain order. The National Guard brought order to our chaos. I watched as cars of people passing by on the highway stopped when they heard of the damage and began to transport injured residents to emergency triage centers. On scene weather announcers pulled people and pets from piles of rubble, staying out for hours in the rain. As I organized supplies in a distribution center in south Joplin I watched truck after truck of blue collar good ole' boys show up to help. Everyone found their voice on Sunday, May 22. Joplin in her tears has outshone the rubble in her town.

My brave little city, despite the death and the disaster, she has opened her heart. If there is a place where we will see the love of Jesus, it is in this little southwest Missouri town. The community of the Trinity lives here. The church has risen to meet the challenge of pain, and as panic returns to residents this evening as another storm rolls in, I am sick to my stomach. But the hope that Joplin has given to me I will give back to Joplin. You will stand. There will be a day when you will drive down the streets and snapped power lines will no longer lay across the road. Your schools will be mended, and textbooks removed from the grass outside. You will have a place to lay your head, and though your heart will still bleed for loved ones lost, you will learn to love again. So, do not give up dear Joplin, you are stronger than anyone thought. You have rebuked me with your courage and taken my bitter words away with your selflessness. I ask forgiveness at your dirty and bruised feet for the things I have spoken against you- in your hour of darkness, you have brought light by resurrecting your humanity. One day Joplin, I hope to be as brave and selfless as you have been.

Motherhood: Respect.

This view is so familiar. The drab corner of the Kansas City airport feels just as much like home as my personalized dorm room. You know, frustration and detours always seem to make people a little more human. Delayed flights, for example. As I stood, staring out the window, (as if my eyes would make our plane come down from the sky) racked with anticipation at the incoming news of whether or not our flight was going to land, a woman sat behind me. I saw her wipe her eyes. She was crying… attempted to pass it off as a yawn during the late hours. But I knew better. I asked her if she was going home, and she just launched into a story about her life.

            At work this week, I asked question after question of my coworker, just digging for stories about his life, a picture of who he is. He then overheard me do the same to someone else working the same shift. He cocked his head and said in a monotone voice, “Kaitlin, you really love to hear stories about people’s lives, don’t you?” Absolutely. These are the essence of our existence! They deserve to be told! Back in the airport, I asked the woman, as she described that she flies just as much as I do, what it is she does. She replied, “Oh… I’m just a housewife. I mean, I’m not just a housewife…. I’m a stay at home mom.” I looked at her and in character I said, “Say it with pride!” “Okay! I’m a stay at home mom! Well my baby’s gone and grown up, but…” Me: “You’re still a mom. Always a mom.” She nodded happily and went on to tell me about her witty granddaughter.

            I’ve had these conversations before. And I have been the one to degrade the unpaid, at times unglamorous, tread upon position of the woman who puts her family above her career. I’ve thought so deeply about these issues, and now I stand on the outside and wonder why… not why I came to the conclusions that I have come to, but why I had to analyze the idea of motherhood so much. What was I missing?

            If so many women internationally give up their own careers for the lives of their children without thinking twice, why am I still thinking about how my independence is actually a hindrance to being able to do so? My mind, longing so deeply to understand what it means to be a woman, cannot stop asking questions, trying to understand who a mother is. Mothers are most often the primary face in the life of their children. It is through the mother that many children will learn their first word. Without my own mother, where would I be? Certainly not able to write any of the words that are typed here. She spent hours upon hours with me, kneeling on the yellow carpet of our New England basement, while I sat in a little wooden desk, pencil in hand, scratching out the alphabet. She poured into me my first two years of school. How could I ever possibly say that it was degrading for her to do that? To give up her own noble career of nursing to care for me? How could there have been another choice? Even if there was, she would never have thought of it. She was with me. She was a mother.

            And so, my heart breaks at my own former opinions, and at the voice of downtrodden housewives who feel ast though they are inferior to the career women of our world. This is tragic. There is nothing more detrimental to a society than removing or destroying the identity of a person. Why are there so many children without mothers? We have taken away the value of motherhood. If we told mothers who they are, we would not have to take them to court to tell them what to do. So, women: stand with pride. You are mothers, whether or not you have your own children. It is apart of your lovely spirit to nurture those around you in your own beautiful way. And men: help her to understand who she is. If you are man, she can be the woman. A graceful dance of union and balance. Children: I know you will not understand for years what she has done, but love your mothers, in the best way you know how.

            Let us stand and repair society, repair people, repair families, one identity at a time. 

Type for Change

Today is World Water Day.
Probably, that means nothing to you.
It means a lot to someone though.
Actually, it means a lot to a lot of someones... about 1 billion people.
You have all heard the rundown from all the speakers at your schools, and the videos you've been sent.
But do you get it?
Let's paint a scenario here:

You wake up in the morning on the floor of your small home in India.

Today, you wanted to go to school, girls. 

But you can't.

The well in the village is broken again, you have to go somewhere else to find water.

There's not water to drink. Again. 

You can feel the scratchiness in your throat, and the ever invading thirst that has become reality. 

The baby is crying. 

Dehydrated. Again. 

You haven't showered in weeks. It's not even a thought that crosses your mind anymore.

You look outside to see the neighboring child pass by.

Naked. Dirty. 

Stomach protruding.

NO water. 

There is a well. 

It's just broken. No one knows how to fix it because someone from the outside built it. 

No one should have to live like this.

4000 children will die like this.

Today. 

But... someone does get it. The Adventure Project has begun a campaign to train women and men in their own villages to repair broken wells. Because 1/3 of all the drinking wells that we have built in the last 2 decades are broken. Hear that? We ARE doing something. We ARE building wells. And they are broken- probably a simple fix, like tightening a pump. But no one is equipped to do it... yet. Do you know how much money it takes to train these people to fix their wells?

$10,000. 

That's about a semester in American university to equip people to turn water back on for 300 people each month. That's 3600 a year. We are making progress... 

Help if you can. To take the Toms approach: one for one. Save one today. That's all. Save one naked, dirty, dehydrated, beautiful, valuable, incredible child from death by giving. www.TheAdventureProject.causevox.com

and the Beat goes on...

Hello from 30,000 feet. I look down over my spanning country and see an emerald green, creeping lake dug into the land of Kansas. It trails off at the end into the tail of a river that feeds the brown land just enough to get by until the next spring rain. I should be relaxed right? Up here there’s not a deadline. Up here there’s no traffic (at least for the eye of the passenger), there’s nowhere to be, there’s only endless sky. Above the line of horizon there’s no start or finish to where I’m going. And, to be honest, holistically I am relaxed, but through the hassle of security and the rush of trying to stay organized through pulling things out of my bags and getting them through the x-ray, my ID fell out somewhere. I guess I’m no one now… at least until they find it somewhere in the terminal after the barefeet of thousands of green Americans traipse through to catch their spring break flights to somewhere not Kansas anymore.

One small thing like that can cause an entire change in the atmosphere of my day. We’re so small and fragile, humans. And I’m completely uninspired to elaborate on that loaded statement because I feel so scattered. But, the reason I feel scattered is futile. I want everything in my life to follow on a nice straight line, even my insane adventures. I don’t want them to be monotonous. My idea of a “put-together” life is made of spontaneous leaves-of-absence that cause me no trouble in leaving, and are never a little on the uneventful side. Should those things happen, I’m suddenly spinning out of control. On my way to being the kind of “out of control” I long to be, I need my life to remain structured or I cannot get there. An interruption like losing my ID causes me to be stuck in the world of structure longer, looking for a way to replace or find it in the chaos of business and organization so I can be free from the concrete walls of the airport.

The airport is the no-man’s land between two border checks. It’s here that I wait to make my break, all of the inspiration in front of me, and all of the heaviness behind me. A slip-up in paper work leaves me stranded here in no-man’s land… but here I am on the plane. So I brought a little bit of the concrete world with me to LA with the loss of my license. You see people boarding planes in suits, with family, with kids, with spouses, lovers and friends. I’m always by myself, and I wonder not so much where their final destination is, because that’s entirely missing the point. But, why are they leaving? I have to escape the world of responsibility that I live in most weeks of the year. Class, class, class, break, class, break, run, clean-up, work, study, sleep, repeat. On a lucky day that word “work” is replaced with study. Even luckier “seeing my friends and pretending to be human.” I’d never be able to get on this big bird without those things though. I’m not foolish enough to think that I could just jump from town to town and expect that I’d be able to accomplish the other dreams I have in my life living as a nomad. No. And, so there’s a sacrifice made. But that sacrifice of time into understanding life more, into developing my responsible side and supporting myself financially breaks the chains of that cycle itself and grants me an open door to get as many kicks on the road as I want.

gentlemen of the Generation

Even the Beats had that side. Some had PhD’s, some full-time jobs, some various manual labor, some were authors, scholars or even shiphands. And from these spurred an understanding of the two worlds, the in-between of the no-man’s land, the mad break at the border, and a lifestyle of straddling reigned responsibility and reckless passion.  

Chapters, Seasons and Santa Clarita

First thing that comes to your mind when you see this word:

Chapter

Okay good, hold that thought. Next word:

Season

Alright, now take those two thoughts and put them side by side. What’s the difference in the two of them? My train of thoughts in a glance resemble something like this…

Chapter

Staccato

Short

Precise

Distinct

Followed

Series

Individual

Precedes

Proceeds

Part 

Frustrating

Relieving

Lonely

Season

Flows

Ebbs

Connects

Changes

Colors

Transcends

Supercedes

Supernatural

Romantic

Hopeful

Growthful

Painful

Moving

Jordan, my lovely soul-friend, and I have been talking about seasons… It’s undeniable that our lives, like our world, moves in seasons. As I began to move nomadically on my own, I experienced anxiety I had never before felt in relocating. I found that even more than seasons, my subconscious was very aware of the chapters created in my life. No one in the childhood chapter of my New Hampshire life knows those who were influential in my adolescent years in the sleepy Midwest. Not a person in time in Joplin knows those in the traveling days of Scotland (save the Canadian hero Jon Lyon, who himself was present for a cross-country adventure). And not an American who knows me knows the dark-skinned friends from my time in El Salvador. Me, God, and my running are the only constants in my life… the only ones who continue through each chapter. My spirit is startled by how segmented my story is, it struggles in my sleep to grapple with the idea of being a person so separated by chapters, and my dreams are filled with trippy visions of all times in my life blurred in confusion; an effort to resolve the restless feeling I live with.

But the constants- me, God, and running (I say the latter in jest but in all honesty it has been a friend to my weary soul, reflecting in the physical world my longing to move… redeeming the action of running away into running to peace)- experience these seasons. Well, not God so much as an experience-er of these seasons but as the wind of change. How do I see these seasons? Each one is not like seeing fall every autumn and summer every solstice. These seasons are like experiencing spring for the first time. Can you imagine the first time seeing green buds on a bare tree or colorful stems shooting from a ground whose grass you have never before touched? Or, to feel the nakedness of winter with virgin eyes, seeing that her only decency is maintained by the layers of snow? New. Each season. And so we do not really see what season we are in until we are in it. I am in a season of restoration. I went from a season of misunderstanding, criticism, raggedness and fragility and awoke one morning to find my hands full of blessings I have never imagined coming to me. I can take no credit for something that I never foresaw let alone have ever experienced. Seasons become a continuously changing hymn that speak to the limitless creativity and provision of the I Am. He doesn’t change with each season. When I am angry, He is still peace. When I am sad, He is still joy. When I am happy, He is still holy. When I am content, He is still just. Each change of the living weather lets me see the Creator in a new way, to experience His truth in a new time.

And a prayer for the changing of seasons… May we never forget with the changing of the leaves, with the changing in the tides, with the changing of the heat, who is Life. May I dare to never rest my hand upon my chest and say “I am so glad I have made it to this season, that I have prepared for myself in my own efforts.” And if my feeble soul should reach such depths of arrogance may I be blown away by the whisper of Jehovah whose reminder is that He is the God who gives me even the breath to realize in what season I am existing, gives me the heartbeat to pass through. May I be dealt with ever so harshly if another chapter of my life ends with “He is not enough.” And may I daily fall to my knees in a greater understanding of the LOVE that is constant through each season, connecting each chapter, making my human story entwined with the living Divine.   

Soap

I feel manufactured. I feel like I smell like the soap of a thousand public bathrooms. I feel like I’m wearing the clothes a thousand women my age have cluttering their closets. My fingers are no different. The ink of my tattoo is not unique. I am a product. A by product of an overworked and under-dreamed society. So can the passion I have be attributed to anything more than a side effect? Am I really a rebel if I am simply another reaction against the movements that are unstoppable?

nihilism calls

absurdity beckons

i answer

i fade

And in the fading I find that i am. And I find I AM. Because the material world will fade, but something will keep going. If spiritual can outlast material, and ideas are larger than the buildings we construct, then I have something to live for because my life is more than an end in itself.

romanticism calls

beauty beckons

i answer

i thrive

Why write? Why imagine? Why do anything? My nihilist mind wept non-existent tears in a mourning without grieving for a beauty that was never seen…. Until I understood. Why do I write to please my soul? Because I too was written as a pleasure to the soul of the Author. And my pragmatic behavior rebels. What good does it do to revel in beauty when it saves no one? Because it is saving me. In beauty, in creating, I am experiencing the heart of my Creator. In beauty, in running, I am experiencing the physicality of the Incarnation. In beauty, in singing, I am experiencing the music of the heart of God, the creator of unknown notes. In beauty, in hiking, in travel, in exploring, I am with the heart of the Living One, the Mighty One, Adonai.

He calls

Beauty beckons

I answer

I live 

Status Detour

As if I was unaware of it before, I don’t belong. Pardon me if it is offensive or strange that I begin most everything I write with something about myself. My subjective experience is all that I have to explain the way I see life, it’s such an important thing to me because it’s my story. I suppose that is what made me start thinking as I stood on the jet way, about all the stories around me. Or, why I sat in my seat on the plane feeling both invisible and unique simultaneously, as I observed the other people. As I fell in love with The Beat Reader, I constructed, rather deconstructed,  what I would write here. Bear with me as I let the picture I have in my mind struggle to find its form through words.

What is a person?

Not a human, no I don’t need to know the elements that make man man.

But what is a person?

 I of course sit here upon this plane, the only person wearing  color, and  blazing red at that, interrupting the gray and black mass around me, thinking that a person is not their job, that a person is their dreams. A person is made of their aspirations. A person is…  I imagine peeling back the receding hairlines and wire rimmed glasses, knocking Blackberries from passengers hands, de-threading the Gucci jackets, and throwing Armani pumps out the window, to find the pictures of his childhood, the princess play from her earlier times. But, who says that I am right? Am I wrong? I presuppose that this business class and premier executive flight is full of people who have forgotten how to be persons and have succumbed to the identity of a salary and a suit. I could be wrong. I mean, I really could… right? I overhear their conversations and I don’t think that I am. I wonder when we started caring about things that have no tangible frame of reference in the world.

[what is the real world?... too philosophical.. I refrain for your sake.]

But to be honest I find myself ripping apart the world we have created these days, wondering where it all began? Perhaps I have without realizing it placed myself at the top of a hierarchy, of an anti-society that I don’t belong at the top of, that has no reason to exist.  Maybe it’s simply my rebellion against the man who tells me he is worth more because his bank account has more than $30 in it… because I don’t think that’s what makes me valuable. Am I wrong? Is it true that it only matters that I am aware of the condition of the stock market and the deal that Geico struck that fell through? Does that mean that the knowledge I have that someone else does not have makes me more valuable?

I wish to take it all apart

To begin again looking through a new frame

All the ideas that clutter my mind fall like dust

Dust that you can see in the window on a sunny afternoon

And I want to understand what it is that makes ideas sparkle

Like a child reaching for the particles

Sinking into a faded floral sofa

But why is this child so frail?

For lack of ideas and knowledge?

Are they worth so much less than the counterparts of their parents

Without the ability or opportunity

Or want

To receive a degree from Harvard or Yale?

Perhaps there is something to the subjective reality of individuals

But I cannot help but think we really are still entwined

I cannot be left to think that my own story stands alone

It cannot

It does not

so where do I begin?

Where does the essence of a person begin?

Creation