Prone to Wander Essay

Here’s a copy of one of my favorite essays I wrote during my studies at Regent College for a class I took on creation, wilderness, and technology.

A Christian Response to Place, Technology, and 10 Days in the Wilderness

I am prone to wander.

As the songbirds I watch out my window, I flitter and flutter my days away. Always looking for the next big adventure. Never content with sitting still for long. Bored easily and often, longing for what is fast-paced and ever changing even while I say I loathe these words.  

I am prone to wander. But these days I’m feeling it more than ever.

Blame it on my parents who dragged my younger self across the ocean on multiple occasions in order to follow God’s Great Commission. Blame it on the travel bug who bit me long ago and whose venom continues affecting the life running through my veins; my blood like a train steady on its track, but always on the move. Blame it on my generation. The crowd of lonely twenty-somethings who still consider the moment something to be seized and the world a place made just for us. Blame it on technology. I carry the Internet daily in my pocket, expecting to be entertained or challenged with the click of a button, all the while acting like it has no control over my distracted mind. Or blame it on me. My sinful nature surely plays into my desire for more, my need to run, and the many significant points I miss when I decide to give in to these.

Whatever is to blame, one thing seems clear: I have difficulty with place. 

About a year ago now I moved to Vancouver, unpacking my bags and settling in, then putting up pictures and a map on my wall. I painted a Jim Elliot quote on it in seafoam-colored paint and called it art. “Wherever you are, be all there.” In bold, block letters it is one of the last things I see before turning out the lights each night and the first when I awake. It is one thing to have these words hanging there, but quite another to try to live them. For I am constantly being tugged away. Constantly being pulled from the here and now in which I have my being. 

Every year millions of salmon fight the current, swimming upstream for a thousand miles just to get back home. They face birds, bears, and boats all for the chance to lay eggs where they themselves were born. Their legacy depends on this. I can’t help but be in awe of these fish. For I don’t even know where my home is, let alone how to fight for it. And why think about my children’s children when I’m not even married? Yet something in me cringes as I type that question. I am, after all, human. Fashioned from dust and longing for roots—I want to dig deep, so that I can spread far. We are branches meant to produce good fruit. Roots are necessary. 

Until a month ago, I felt a lot like Alan Durning, who when asked to describe his homeland didn’t know how to answer. In his words, he lacked a connection to his base and for the first time, it shamed him. Or I felt like the Man on the Thruway in Robert Farrar Capon’s fantasy whose placelessness “grinds into his soul,” wearing him thinner as he steps from “nowhere into nowhere” until he himself is gone. Growing up with a sense of place makes the world seem big and full of potential, but I did not have the childhood of Carl Safina. I was wearing thin and I knew it. 

My own connections have always been to people, my family and close friends who I take with me in some way or another even as I wander from country to country. As Pico Iyer has described, home to me has “less to do with a piece of soil than a piece of soul.” In today’s world, technology is a miracle in these regards. With applications like Skype and social media sites like Facebook, I can hold onto those who have shaped my own soul. I honestly don’t know what I’d do without these amazing tools, as they make my movement possible and also bearable. Relationships are a type of root, no doubt about that, but a sense of place, a connection to land and location, is just as significant. It is an anchor I’ve been missing, only now recognizing this.

When I trekked out to Galiano Island a few Wednesdays past for the Wilderness, Technology, and Creation class I was signed up for, I honestly wasn’t looking forward to it. I had already spent too long away from my garden suite in the Kitsilano area while I travelled to Illinois and Indiana, Ontario and Alaska, all within the course of two months off grad school. I was ready for more stability. What I found when I arrived back, however, was not that. In the time I had been gone, one of my housemates had moved and quickly after my return, circumstances, along with some prodding of the Spirit, led me to the decision to move as well. Regretfully, I informed the friend I live with, then jumped on a ferry for Sturdies Bay. 

My life in the past year has seemed much like a wilderness –completely outside of my control, where I have felt “stripped of guidance, lost, and perplexed.” Questions and frustrations with the now and not yet world we live in have bogged me down, turning me into an emotional wreck on multiple occasions and leaving my heart heavy. Deciding to move was one last straw. A wise and thought-out calculation, but an action I did not want to take. How am I supposed to feel a bond to anywhere, when I am continuously being led elsewhere? 

I was pondering this bitterly when I arrived at Retreat Cove. Feeling desperately the need for a retreat, but not sure if trading one form of wilderness for another was actually going to help. Although I was exchanging difficult conversations and sleepless nights for ocean currents and ageless rocks, they seemed strangely similar. Uncontrollable and unpredictable, both kinds of wild looked harsh in my tired mind’s eye.    

Over the next two weeks, with a group of 11 other students, I learned how to row a boat, watching wind and current on the Pacific Ocean in order to navigate two small wooden vessels through the Gulf Islands. We camped for more days straight than I ever had before and spent a whole 10 days away from computers and cell phones. Disconnected and disoriented, I was tired for the first few days of our trip. 

However, a funny thing begins to happen when you leave the world behind for a bit, when you say goodbye to modern technology and trade thinking for more doing. My muscles quickly grew accustomed to the aches of accomplishment. They learned the strength it takes to get from one place to another and the relief solid ground can offer a weary traveler when nightfall arrives. And surprisingly, while completely out of my element, somewhere between examining tide pools and sailing back to civilization, I found my place in a refreshing, new way.

Sent off on Saturna Island by myself for 24 hours of solitude, I took Kohak’s task of “bracketing” and Capon’s “oblation of things” to heart, wanting to truly see and know so that I could truly love the world around me. Wanting to truly see and know so that I could truly love the One who created the world around me. I found a tree branch arched perfectly to drape my tarp over and knew this would be my spot for the day. Alone and quiet for the first time in way too long, I watched ants crawl busily around me, listened to the waves crash against the shoreline, and began to breathe. As I stayed still, the world moved madly on without me. Watching it was freeing.

Sitting in this place on a boulder, no humans in sight, I was reminded how I myself am a walking wilderness. A desert in need of living water. A chaotic dance of atoms that I don’t even understand. I get so frustrated with the Israelites dragging their feet through the sand, but when I’m honest I know I’m just as bad. I, too, mistake manmade calves for beauty worth worshipping. I grumble at the sight of provision raining down from heaven. I strike rocks when asked to speak to them, thinking I can control creation. But I can’t. Not now, not ever. And I’m upset most of the time, because this doesn’t look much like the Promised Land. I don’t feel the comfort of belonging in the bustle of the city. Or sometimes I do, but am not really comfortable with that either –for if I belong in the sinful world I see around me, what does that make me? 

But sitting here, sitting still, in the wilderness, where I clearly don’t belong, brings me peace. My restless heart beats with ease, finds the pattern of the sea and mimics it. The wind sounds like the voice of God when I take time to listen. It carries with it the melody of God’s creation tale. The tune of the good and very good fashioned with care by the voice, the Word, the One who was in the beginning. As Capon, I can almost hear God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit shouting “Tov! Tov! Tov!” in unison and laughing for ages, saying how great it is for beings to be. 

So, I sit. And be. Marveling at how the Creator puts up with my dustiness. Maybe the dirt I am constantly attempting to clean off me is the same dirt I need to dig into if I want to blossom and flourish. Maybe literally sitting on the ground every once in a while is a way to stay grounded. Without the demands of technopoly or the stresses of my always growing to-do list at home, I can concentrate, allowing my mind to practice meditative thinking. I look for meaning in the world around me and am able to make connections between what I see and what I know, my heart and head working together the way they were meant to work. My left and right brain hemispheres are in right relationship allowing both knowing and believing to take place. The result is an appreciation for creation, an awe of the Creator. And the hours speed by without the help of a watch. 

When it was time to go, I didn’t want to leave. I could have stayed, cross-legged and barefooted for years. I could have told you before my day of solitude that in Christ all things hold together and have their being, but in those hours I actually felt that passage from Colossians 1:15-20 to be true. I could envision His blood like glue filling in the globe’s cracks, the beams of the Cross bridging any gaps that sin has caused. I live because He is. Because He says that I am, I can call Him “I Am.” 

This is the only truth I need. Holding onto this, I can make mountains move. I can walk on waves. I can join in creation’s groaning knowing that hope has already come. And my vagabond soul can rest easy. Lost in the wonder of the world, I came back to the group after those hours alone ready for the only responses fitting –science, art, and worship… but mostly worship. As we sipped wine and broke bread together there was nowhere I’d rather have been.          

 A few nights later, we floated on the stars. I had never heard of bioluminescence before, and even now I have no idea why or how these little sea organisms light the water green the way they do. Rowing in the darkness surrounded by countless stars sprinkled like sugar across the sky above us and green glowing water below us, all I could think was how creation is God’s temple and how happy I am to be a part of it –to bear His image in it. Most of the time, love looks nothing like I expect it to, but on nights like this I’m glad that God thinks bigger than the box I put Him in. The world is indeed “charged with the grandeur of God” and every once in a while we are gifted with the “miracle” it is to recognize it. Lit up and sparkling. Magical in a way no man can capture or replicate.  

Coming home after a trip like this was once again disorienting. I had gone into the wilderness and been restored, but technology has a way of bombarding us. One hour after arriving back to my Vancouver suite and I was already immersed in buzzing phones and flashy screens, lights I could control with the flick of a switch and taps with fresh water I no longer had to boil. The comforts of home make it easy to forget what home really means, where home really is.

A month later and I find my soul wandering again. The trip slowed it down for a bit, but the city makes it race. There are always new people and places to see. Things that need to be done. Movements to be made. But the one great problem with movement is that “it is really hard to get your bearings while you’re in midair… Movement is only as good as the sense of stillness you can bring to it to put it into perspective.”  More than anything I want home to be where my heart is. I want my heart rooted in a place so that when I think of home I don’t have to wonder if I know where that is. As I glimpsed on the trip, stillness is needed for this to be the case.

Thus, in the midst of housing changes and plans for the coming school year, I now see the importance of taking time to be still. God is continuously calling me forward, onward, but that doesn’t mean I can’t be fully alive in the present. Today, right now in the summer of 2013, I live on Macdonald Street in Vancouver, BC. This city is different from any other I’ve ever lived in before. It rains more often than not, but hardly ever storms. When it does rain, Kits beach which is approximately an 18 minute walk from my house is empty besides a few stray locals and their energetic dogs. I love it during these times, because I can walk for miles without interruption, gazing out into a grey abyss of water and sky. There are other days when the sun does shine. These are equally amazing. The shoreline is easy to share when it looks as friendly as it does on summer days like this one. Skateboarders, swimmers, sunbathers all spread out around the sand and saltwater. I’m proud to join them, sitting back to enjoy the view of mountains and city skyline. 

There is still much for me to learn about this Pacific place. The tide drifts in and out and most of the time I don’t think about it. The garbage I generate gets picked up by trucks twice a month and disappears like magic. And I’m ashamed to admit I know next to nothing about my neighbors. But I’m trying. Since coming home I’ve taken more walks without my iPod, reaching up to grab pine needles along my path just so I can feel a little closer to nature. After a few steps I drop them, a sign that I have come and gone. I hope doing this enough will help the truths I learned on Saturna to actually sink in. 

“Man cannot live in nature without changing it.” Yet we are dependent on that very nature we change. As the pine trees I touch on my walks around town, I am dusty, desperately needing roots to ground me. My path goes on and out in so many directions, but if I’m to really get anywhere I need to start somewhere. I am overwhelmed by the options, the questions, the problems, and know that I cannot overcome the curse the world is under. However, I can practice living and doing what God wants of me right now. This starts with remembering the resurrection. This starts with a few small steps. And this starts with having a place to stand. 

Home. 

I am prone to wander. And these days I feel it more than ever. Nevertheless, I have hope that the One who “gathers the waters of the sea into jars” will one day be “exalted among the nations, exalted in the earth.” Until then I will try my best to be still and know that He is God. I will jump up waterfalls like the salmon if I must and turn off screens while others turn them on. “It is I who am absent.” Yet my prayer will continually be that I may dwell in the presence of the Lord, even as He dwells here in His temple, the cosmos. In this place I stand still, ready for whatever is to come. The world moves madly on, but I am beginning to recognize my place.       

Bibliography

Capon, Robert Farrar. The Romance of the Word. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1995. 

Carr, Nicholas. The Shallows. New York: Norton & Company, 2011. 

Durning, Alan. This Place on Earth. Seattle: Sasquatch Books, 1996. 

Eisley, Loren. The Immense Journey. Toronto: Vintage Books, 1957.

Heidegger, Martin. Discourse on Thinking. New York: Harper and Row Publishers, 1966.

Hopkins, Gerard Manley. Selected Poetry. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.

Kohak, Erazim. The Embers and the Stars. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984.

Lewis, C.S. The Magician’s Nephew. London: Fontana Lions, 1980.     

McGilchrist, Iain. The Master and His Emissary. New Haven: Yale University, 2009.

Nash, Roderick. Wilderness and the American Mind. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982.

Postman, Neil. Technopoly. New York: Knopf, 1992.