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.