Road Trippin' With River, Days 1 & 2: We are a Crazy Breed.

Tonight the moon over Atlanta is a silver sliver, a Cheshire cat grin. A winking luminous celestial portal cradling its dead dark mass. 

The temperature tonight is half of what it was when I left Haiti Saturday afternoon. My body is out of tune. I have been gone for two months, the longest I have ever been away from my son. I flew in from Port Au-Prince late Saturday and picked River up early yesterday. Starbucks for coffee and we headed North East on an 8 day road trip. First stop Birmingham, AL. 


Being back in the states after a month and a half in India and 2 months in Haiti with only a week in between has left me a bit disoriented. I am not as anxious as I normally would be as I will return to Haiti by the 2nd week in May, but I feel so disconnected. Although I am so very thankful for espresso on every corner and smooth roads. 


Birmingham is very familiar to me. In the 5 years I had my vintage clothing and record/book store I came here once a month on buying trips. I'd hit all the big thrift stores and most of the small ones. This morning River and I went to a few. Our best finds today were 25 cent paperbacks. Harriet Jacobs Incident in the Life of a Slave Girl for me and Asimov's The Robots of Dawn for River.

Fitting I suppose that I should be looking so far back and my son so far ahead. Who sees farther I wonder as we pull out of the thrift store parking lot. Will men be slaves to machines before we stop making slaves of each other. Only God knows. We leave Birmingham a little after ten and head to Atlanta to hike Stone Mountain.

Being on the road with my son is amazing. Conversation is sheer wonder. He spontaneously quotes Tom Stoppard as the Georgia state line slips by unobserved. He monologues from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.

"We're more of the love, blood, and rhetoric school. Well, we can do you blood and love without the rhetoric, and we can do you blood and rhetoric without the love, and we can do you all three concurrent or consecutive. But we can't give you love and rhetoric without the blood. Blood is compulsory. They're all blood, you see."


He then goes into a heartfelt and affected rant about a store we had went into called Earthbound Traders. They had paraphernalia and other mystical and pagan implements. He says "Dad, that place really bothered me. Even the name. It was like.." 


"Self-fulfilling prophecy?", I say.


"Exactly" he says and then with a sigh repeats, "earthbound." He turns to look out the truck window and thoughtfully quotes part of Isaiah 51:6 "[T]he heavens will vanish like smoke, the earth will wear out like a garment..."


We are listening to the soundtrack from the movie Into The Wild. Eddie Vedder at his intimate best. The song "Society" resonates with me in a way very few songs ever have. I have listened to it 5 times today already. I sing it like a prayer.

Oh, it's a mystery to me

We have a greed with which we have agreed

And you think you have to want more than you need

Until you have it all you won't be free

Society, you're a crazy breed

Hope you're not lonely without me

When you want more than you have

You think you need

And when you think more than you want

Your thoughts begin to bleed

I think I need to find a bigger place

Because when you have more than you think

You need more space

Society, you're a crazy breed

Hope you're not lonely without me

Society, crazy indeed

Hope you're not lonely without me......

(Pretty please watch the video below and listen to this song!!!)

We get to Stone Mountain around 3 and it is gorgeous weather that touches upon Grace itself. If I had a dollar for every time River said "wow" this afternoon I'd be a rich man. But I am richer still being paid instead with the candid, spontaneous exclamations of my son's worshipful awe.

River stands silent and wonder-filled atop Stone Mountain.

Half way back down the mountain a sight so out of sorts stops us in our tracks. We are both so disgusted by the human stain. This particular monument to human laziness and disrespect seems a perfect summation of that.

On the power poles that feed the Skylift atop Stone Mountain hikers have stuck gum from the ground up to as high as they can reach. There are three poles that are covered. We walk on in silent disgust. I am thinking of all the things that come out of people's mouths that soil so much. The lasting stains of ill spoken words, the denigration and character assassination of lies. We are a crazy breed.

Back at the hotel we are making plans for tomorrow. That is I am making plans and River is playing samples from otherworldly instruments, both archaic and futuristic. Some stand alone as art without even sounding their utterly fantastic music. Do yourself a favor and spend an hour looking and listening to Bart Hopkin's amazing creations. 

Tomorrow we are visiting the birthplace, the grave-site, and the church of Martin Luther King Jr. before heading North to Chattanooga. MLK is one of my heroes and I am so eager to make these connections with him, and to share them with my son. Hope you'll come along.

It's almost eleven here now. River is settling in. His nightly ritual of sci-fi has begun with an old episode of Stargate SG-1. The couple in the hotel room next to us are hurling epithets and accusations at each other. Unscrupulous observations of each other's maternal pedigrees. We truly are a crazy breed. But I am far away. I am thinking of Haiti, her sea, and her soul-mending sunsets. Thanks Bob and Darin for the picture of tonight's sunset in L'acul.

Til tomorrow then...

People Who Just Wouldn't Shut Up....

....have always been my heroes.



Harriet Tubman spoke out against a system that bought and sold people, her people, even her own family. And her fearlessness gave force to her words. She didn't desire her own freedom so much as to leave others behind. They put a bounty on her head to scare her into silence and submission. But no one ever got to collect.

Rosa Parks sat in the wrong section of the bus. The white section. She was told to get up. She didn't. She was tired from working all day, tired of being a second class citizen. Her actions were louder than words. She went to jail. For sitting on a public bus. In America. But America heard her loud and clear. They tried to marginalize her and they failed. Her civil disobedience led to the Montgomery Bus Boycott that made her an international symbol of resistance.


The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr had a dream. And he let the whole world know from whom it came and who would make it come true. And they shot him 'cause he wouldn't back down. Because he kept showing up places and talking about equality and justice.

John the Baptist took on the world. When the world slept in houses. He slept in caves. When they were clothed in soft linens, he wore camel skin. When the most respected religious men of the day came out to the Jordan, he called them a brood of vipers. He also told a king to repent. They had to cut off his head to silence his tongue.


And then there's my Savior. Whom even death could not silence. Nor the hordes of hell.

Let's me and you be these kind of people. The kind that don't shut up. Let's “Speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves, for the rights of all who are destitute. Speak up and judge fairly; defend the rights of the poor and needy.” Proverbs 31:7-8

Let's be voices for the voiceless.

Deal?

Out Of The Mouth Of Babes.

This past April my friend Sam and I traveled to D.C. for an IJM conference. We spent time in and around the capitol, stood where MLK gave his "I have a dream" speech, walked the solemn, heart rending halls of the Holocaust Memorial, and criss-crossed the city on subways and shuttle buses. On the walls of the public transit vehicles were PSAs and other messages on every subject from littering to child abuse. One campaign had quotes from school children and one particular quote from a fifth grader named Carolyn Keshap broke my heart as well as blowing my mind. She said:

"I stare at the fire. It is dimming. Now it is nothing. I light it again. I wish it were that easy for me to restart my life. Considering how many people I have hurt."

Wow......

I do not know what "hurt" this little girl thinks she has perpetrated on others, only that the perfect poetry and the emotional immensity of her words left me breathless.

Today as I sat far from D.C, far removed from the fifth grade, and on the other side of the gender divide, I conjured Miss Keshap's words, tried to wrap my clumsy mind around the colossal significance of them. And I was reminded that children often blame themselves for the crimes of others. That abused children will many times assume that they are being repaid for their own disobedience or failures or even that they should expect the abuse because of their lack of worth. I know these syndromes have been documented in enough books to fill a small library, but those words, on a bus, written by a fifth grader, said more in that small space, then a thousand libraries full of textbooks written by PhDs. And not just that, but her words articulated the cry of so many devastated hearts of people of every age, the need for approval, acceptance and love.

Not sure what to say but that I hope Carolyn has somebody to tell her she's beautiful and full of worth and wonder. And I hope she has gotten over her self-loathing and will believe them when they tell her. But more than anything I hope she does get to start again, born anew, into the family of God by the sacrifice of the Son, adopted by the Spirit and sealed for all time.