full of running

of the many virtues you can have, I think one of the more important ones is understanding when something is beginning and when something is coming to an end. we each have our seasons and, in the midst of those seasons, our moments and hours and days; and this blog, if nothing else, has been a moderately brief account of a rather long season of mine that has come to an end in the last few months. I began writing on here a number of years ago on the night that my grandfather died and have used it as a way of finding understanding in some of the heavier things that have come along since then such as the end of college, living in new cities relatively alone, and the ins and outs of (separate) failed relationships with two admirable but silly girls. I’ve needed a place to wrestle more overtly with my own immaturity, the zoo that my mind can be at times, and trying to grow up without losing anything important, and this blog has been helpful to me. I’ve heard from a few of you that reading the things I’ve written here have been helpful to you as well, and I’m thankful that that was the case. Most of you who read this blog (whom I’m aware of) have contributed a great deal of benefit and happiness to my life and I am deeply grateful to each of you for that. Please see any help or entertainment that my writing here has given you as a small sign of my gratitude if not also of my penchant for self-disclosure.

As I mentioned before, I’m shutting down Full of Running because I’m not full of running anymore in the way that I was. Or rather, it’s a different kind of running now. Historically I’ve been quite caught up in the past and its implications much in the same way, I think, that some find it very difficult to throw out old things because of the sentiment they have. What I mean is, we all have a way of packing up the past and bringing it into our new homes and relationships and places thinking that those things, those memories and experiences and wounds, are the things that will make the new places feel more like home. That isn’t the case, though. My writing here has focused on running away from things, on being uncaptured, and this new running I have is a running towards. A chasing after.

I would like to get as many of my dreams out of my head and into the world as I can, and someday love a girl deeply and have her love me back roughly the same amount (it isn’t an exact science after all), and have a family, and eat the maximum number of sandwiches possible, and do thousands of other things, and I don’t know what will happen or how my attempts at those things will play out, but I suspect it will be a combination of exciting times and difficult times just like everyone else’s life (strange how often we feel set apart from the natural order, and for no particular reason). Whatever happens, I plan on spending the rest of my time with people and pursuits that give me life back and trying to live the best story I can (to steal Donald Miller and Bob Goff’s life plans), and that’s what my next writing spot/blog will be focused on. Immersing in life rather than reflecting on it.

The place I’d like to house my next blog(Medium) is still under construction so it may be awhile until it’s up, but I’ll post a link to it on here once it’s live and such.

Like many of the conversations you all have had with me, this has dragged on far too long. My only encouragement is to build your life around the things that give you life back, and to go after the things you want with everything you have in you and a bit more, and, for all of our sakes, to write all the stories down so we can come along with you.

Cheers,

- Tyler

mornings are an orchard. branches heavy with everything left unsaid from the night before, and such a fool for the evening and everything between. it’s something, I think, to be a walker of streets then, and to talk about the city the way others have talked about the sea. to feel the pull. to live what will later become story and then drift into myth.

the better part of everything is getting out our dreams. is writing it all out, and down. and after the grief in getting there it seems that the present, each moment, isn’t a permanence as much as it is a glory. the ivy piling up against the porch. the blackbird mothering about in her cupboard of a branch. the sound of the mountains.

not on the river but near there, and not near almost anything else. it’s no more or less than itself, which is a way of saying humble, and like so many things there is a beauty there that ought to go mostly unspoken. the days there are on the steps or under the branches and patient, always beginning again, and the nights are lying far down the driveway if it’s that and not a road and listening to the heaven in everything. the way the wind runs there is the way horses run, which is until they forget themselves, which is the way our hearts run too. and always toward.

maybe the fool on the sand, maybe not, but I swear that no matter how quiet you may stay, no matter how still,
these days it’s a flash of color amongst colors and a patch of fur clinging to what it found in the under-brush, or what found it,
teaching us to hold on to the things that have always held us, or wanted to.

I scribbled on a note once “the wise and the unwise alike” and haven’t gotten any further.

one thing though is that being away from home you’re never empty-handed, and never not,
and it seems right to say while I’m still young (if I still am) that the mountains of Virginia, like its vowels, will never leave me unmoved.

it’s when the wind wills one thing around you like God, and everything else is away except the sound pavement makes against your shoes and a car alarm parlor-gossiping an alley over, that it slips in that we’ve all been a dreamer of someone at one point or another, like I was, and will be again sometime. Whenever I can I walk down to the water near where I live to watch the tiny band parade their way from stone to stone up and down the shore, all trumpets and feathers and hat-throwing like they’ve won the war, which I think they have, and to wear in that casual, unspoken hope that comes from a deeper understanding than your own. it’s quiet there and the moments become whole, like a circle slowly being drawn, and watching their triumph always unfolding like each of ours is reminds me that our wealth is our days, and the people we spend them with.

coyote is one of the ugliest words I know of and I hate writing it only a little bit less than I hate saying it. it’s true though that there are different kinds of sadness, and the kind that’s always been nearish to me has been all light-reflecting-off-eyes-in-the-dark, all roaming and noise and always on the edge of everything. so at some point you realize it’s made enough racket and you get out of bed in the middle of the night and throw on your heavy coat and yawn on your way to the shed where you half-wave your arms around looking for the bit of string for the light and find it and then find your gun up on the shelf behind the paint for the new siding and you hop the fence and head up to the ridge and shoot the damn thing.

and on your way back to the house, you pause under the light and look back out into the quieter dark and wonder what the hell all of that stuff before was about and why that took so long and you can’t help but laugh quietly at yourself and shake your head and head back inside.

some time later you’re on a train up north and through the window everything is in such a rush and they’re both in rare form and your laugh finds its way back into your chest and then your stomach in that what-the-hell-ever kind of way, and the wires along the tops of the buildings are just like they are in that Aumen painting you asked for but couldn’t have because it’s his wife’s favorite, and you remember that there were times years and years ago, before any of this, when it was all empty bottles and cigarettes and Kid A on the porch or in the parking lot and it reminds you that after everything else we’re all really just on the wild hunt for something we can’t quite pronounce yet.

and over time you learn that repentance and forgiveness are about the same in that they’re not so much explanations as they are opening the blinds and letting the light back in.

you do lose track for a moment at times and you’re back in the woods outside the chateau hanging lights in the trees and discussing the servants and then further back by the ocean sitting near the boats for hours and out over the roads and their farms and the way a horse malnourishes and then further back to rounding the corner of the station and the bags dropping and then you’re back in your meeting being asked something

Absalom, Absalom! is a book I read one time. Another thing too is that it’s weird how there aren’t any people who go up to the edge who don’t go over it. Well, maybe that’s not the weird part. Maybe the weird part is how all the artists we love who say things the truest are the ones who never come back from wherever it is you have to go or get pushed to or get sent so you can see things for what they are, and we sit around wishing we could be like them or write like them or paint like them while they spend their sitting around time wondering what the hell is going on or wishing they could be someone else. What I mean is, there’s no way to be tastefully lost or to respectfully drown. You just are, or you do.

Anyway, who knows. Also, Anne Lamott one time had to write a really long essay about birds and didn’t know how to even start much less finish and her dad told her to calm down and write it bird by bird and that’s best way I know of to write or live anything. Still though, it’s all a wide a river and I’m already up to my neck and no one is writing any of this down.

no matter what I say I’ve learned, some nights For Emma Forever Ago sinks me with no land in sight. These are the dregs I drink dry.

but one thing is that people are really jacked up no matter who you are and we all have some heavy things to carry around with us and some things we like to do and some things we’d like to do someday, and we all realize that at some point or rather we all should. That’s about all there is to people as far as I can tell and I don’t know much more than that other than that you ought to take the hits you deserve and forgive the ones you don’t. what I mean is, the things we can’t explain too well pile up pretty quickly and the only way not to drown in them is to forgive them and I only know that now because I spent forever trying to explain them and that just makes it worse, or me worse, or something.

what I’m trying to say is that everything in sight is buried under a pile of words and they probably won’t get any less loud but I’m too tired for any of that anymore. I have an orchard to work til I’m sore now like the helplessness blues with my new job and who knows about the rest.