The Walker

There is a ripe, peach-colored aura that heralds each dawn and every dark. It sits between the mountains and divides my life on slopes and into bars.

Here is something on the walker bridges that works to slow my late-for-work gait. Here is something so bouyant in the whispering smokestacks, frozen in the glow.

The same path, same faded colors in the sky. And it's nice to take a breath, knowing full well the days go by too fast in these winter months, and that the sun is just over the horizon.

The Mortal

Death is all around me. The apex of rotund lives, day always withers into night. Things end. It's in my newspaper, on my podcast, and it's back home. Sometimes I just want to disagree with the whole setup, but then it's there and everywhere but here. One moment the wifi is good, and the next you are thousands of miles, or even more kilometers, away. It gives the distance meaning I guess, makes it palpable. And then sometimes, you are two beers in and supreme, skiing a closed black run in Germany with the volume on high.

The days start to take on similarities. "Stay forward!" and "Edges uphill!" Then I go down the mountain, up the stairs, and order my first beer. The days are short, the nights are long, and the people carve grooves.

While death is presumable, life is never how you expect it. While I desperately try and grab hold of the reigns to the lives I still live, they just seem to march on uninhibited anywhichway. It's the busy weeks after all, and at least there is solace in the metronome of going to work and immersing yourself in teaching people a love you know.

And honestly, it is the life she inevitably taught me; a life overwhelmed in love. It is a life and a love I will always try to emulate, and perhaps the most important of all the lives I live.

The Gardener

I have been sleeping in the same bed lately. It is, of course, a bed in a room in a complex. It is a bed loaned to me for now, which when you think about it, isn't that different from the couches and floors I had been becoming so accustomed to.

I have been moving so much. By foot, car, planes and trains. Well sometimes, especially when you've been moving too fast, you need a day off. You can't seize every day, and I am reminded of what it is like to build a home.

When I look at this picture from the farm I worked on last summer, I am back in the field; I am back in Fort Collins, Colorado. I feel the biting aimlessness, the feeling of submitting to settle. And I feel the sun; I smell the daisies. As I rested then, the world drew me in. From the morning bike ride to work, to reading in the park to the sun's last evening rays. It was a peace that trumped a stagnant heart.

And for a moment, everything I could ever want is among the daisies.

It has been just six weeks since I left, with no plans yet to stop. I didn't stay among the flowers, who were picked and vased and inevitably shriveled, just as they would have on the stem. I did not stay in the field, who frosted, and now sleeps under snow. The seasons charge on ever changing, and before we know it we are three thousand miles along in an airport among all the others waiting to go mercilessly forward and on.

But inevitably through all of that, there are days like these when I hang my thrift-store picture frames and wash my sheets. When all I can think about is where I will finally plant my garden.

The Architect

In Munich, you cannot help but feel the grandeur of things. One day in this city is enough to be humbled (and I mean this both spiritually and financially).

This is the in first church of three we visited. I have been in some fiercely grand churches, and each one, construed in a different era all but completely unfamiliar to my own, is a gleaming icon of what is capable at the bequest of something greater. This particular one however, destroyed and restored at least once, is just meters from Odeonplatz, a stunning square guarded by timeless Bayern lions. And a square where Hitler staged his first grasp for power.

And honestly, what is our promise? Our endeavors, so fruitful in the eyes of God? Here in Germany, potential just seems that much closer at hand. The little stuff seems to filter into place; bakers own bakeries, the butchers pride their meats behind clean glass cases, and the second-hand man (who I'm not sure has ever begrudged anyone a bargain) has promised to find me the functional and cost-effective backpack I've been looking for when I come back next week. You don't tip. Not really, and though I do anyway, I am starting to wonder if it's insulting.

I wonder if American mega-churches will they one day evoke the same sense of greatness. Will endless cities converge around them, and when time tears at them, will they too be maintained to capture so much glorious light? Who will serve them drinks? And will they only be doing it to pay for college?

Munich sprawls out and away from the aged monoliths down the cobblestone paths. It is full of endeavor yet timeless achievement. I've seen just one drunken touristy drop, but it helps me dream of greater things.

The Indefinite

Just one week, filled with weißbier, alp skiing, and wurst, one week book-ended by the cheap döner kebab place around the corner. How do you begin to measure such a week? I wouldn't know where to begin, but certainly we can't measure in beer or euros because that might be a little too real for me. I suppose if we factored it by the month I spent traveling here and the year of hair I sacrificed to stay, this week might just have been as immaculate and immeasurable as it now seems in hindsight.

At the moment life here feels improbable. Though, that was precisely the ambition I fostered to find myself here at all: to wake up each day a resident in a country so far from what I've known. With each grocery store purchase, endeavoring to guess which yogurts are yogurts and why there are so many gross smelling detergents, I settle a little closer to home. As surreal as the last week has surely been, nothing is nearly so as the thought of existing here indefinitely. Either way, word has it the Christmas rush might sink my floating feel awful quick.

The Ami

When you join the army, they cut your hair. I imagine the razor takes more than just your looks, perhaps something closer to your individuality sheered off and into homogeny. I'm so far from the worlds I've lived, and yet freedom comes in different lengths.

Next to us Amis, the punctual Deutsche live in accommodated vivaciousness. Logically, I reckon Bavaria likes to keep the rough edges orderly. You can see it before the rooster crows and between the tongs of those employed to cull the close-cut cobbles for litter. It is along "Scheiße-Straße", where cows moo us along to work; that somehow a town can exist with a building full of cows half a block from a military compound full of wanderlust-ers, and a block in the other direction from a stumble-friendly main-street where you can buy Glühwein at any corner. This is how I've come to know Garmisch. The life of this town flows down from the mountains and the street follows the fish-laden stream. It is rather lovely, even if my ears are cold.

The Visitor

(originally written on a bus to Garmisch, December 2nd, 2013)

I staunchly believe that there may be too many places to go. There is very certainly the great possibility of too many cities with too many unique nooks, cultures, and bakeries.

I'll always remember Atlanta by the curve of its thruway. Which, may be more than I can honestly say for the monotonous cross of Texas. Maybe I should warn you early, I may not be that sort of writer. New Orleans for instance was hazy; the humidity condensed into too many daiquiris.

Though what I am sure I will remember of November most is the feeling of looking out the train's window. I will remember the 16oz in my left hand, playing someone else's skee-ball machine with the right. I will remember the love of others' lives in places I have not paid rent.

As jetlag sets in, my reality is the memory: the sad feeling of gracing each earth for just moments, hardly aware what each goodbye could possibly mean, and then, almost suddenly despite that horrid callous sad, finding each pleasant morning created in a new vitality, entirely my own.

The Villian

(originally written in a plane over Newfoundland, December 1st, 2013) 

How many goodbyes can you fit in a month? If you try, if you drive; bring each one to the doorstep. Say hello, knowing full well you'll regret it in turn.

And if we're honest, I cannot begin to understand myself alone, and hardly should I want that. But to know the same places forever? I think each life holds us back. If my loneliness is in the soles of my shoes, with each step I'll leave some tread.

But surely, travel is delusion, right? That if one can string enough lives together he might find himself whole. Inevitably, I'll find it new in each pause, as if I had never forgotten what it was to sit alone with thought.

And just like how this plane races the spin of all that lives and breathes and dies, there might I be too, racing the love and hope I'd sewn. Arbitor of soul. Lover of life. Swallower of destiny. And a filthy scoundrel, surely, a villain to those who matter most.