everybody has to leave.

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 pages recurrently.
[Donald Miller, Through Painted Deserts]



I meant to being this beginning yesterday. And the day before. And the day before that. I wanted to write the night before I left, but alas, I did not. And it is now Wednesday. Day four in the epic journey that is summer 2009.

We hit the road early Sunday morning. Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, and Iowa-"Fields of Opportunity". Council Bluffs, Iowa for the night-thanks to Scotty and his discount. I think everyone should get a friend who works for Marriott. After visiting the "home of the black squirrel", we trudged through Nebraska-"The Good Life" and crawled through the beginning of Colorado. You'd think arriving in CO would mean mountains. Nope. Open fields. Nothing. A few green fuzzy blobs in the distance and a white spec once in a great while. For miles. Not until we drove into Denver did we witness the finer features of CO, a few of them snow covered but most green and brown in the distance.

I will probably write about more of our adventures. Even back track and catch up on the last four days. But I've been beginning to feel like this whole writing thing is silly. It's very cool. Everyone has a blog and everyone is a writer. Especially the slightly indie twenty-something, who only drinks micro-brews and loves to hang out in coffee shops, as long as they are not part of the evil empire, and who loves love, and peace, and especially loves pretending that they aren't fitting any stereotypes or groups. I know writing is good for me. Journaling brings me back to earth. I realize that I really do have friends that actually like me and that I'm probably not going to be a big embarrassing failure when I organize my thoughts with a pen on paper. But maybe that's all it needs to be. Just kept on the white pages, between the black covers, held in by the elastic strap. Just to keep me from losing my mind.

So perhaps I'll get over this stage, wanting to be all creative and profound. But for the remainder of the summer I'm going to keep writing. Because I told people I would. And because I want to remember. And because it truly does bring me joy.

I'm going to steal someone else's material for now though. Donald Miller's Through Painted Deserts. A typical choice for a road trip but for good reason. It's phenominal. He had me at the author's note. You had me at the author's note Don.

I want to change because it is God's way...Everybody has to change, or they expire.

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 the time...

It's a living book, this life; it folds out in a million settings, cast with a billion beautiful characters...

And so my prayer is that your story will have involved some leaving and some coming home, some summers and some winter, some roses blooming out like children in a play. My hope is that your story will be about changing, about getting someting beautiful born inside of you, about learning how 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 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.

...Don't worry. Everything will still be here when you get back. It is you who will have changed.

[Donald Miller, Through Painted Deserts]