A Boat Tour in Bowling Green

My soul wants for housing up in some wounded healer’s cabin... reclamation of the way their hull fell apart once (twice, seventy times seven times), too.

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I don’t really know where I met

Scott Erickson

, to be honest. I remember standing with him in a green room at a Humble Beast conference years ago. I remember him coming to a (not great) show that Corey Kilgannon and I played at a bar in Portland. I remember driving from Detroit to Grand Rapids one night on a chopped-up phone call (T-Mobile was was a bad choice back then, but I could afford it), talking about how to set up a projector for Say Yes before Say Yes was a thing.

But I don’t really know what order all that happened in.

He picked up me up at my apartment yesterday, and we drove to Mammoth Cave National Park — the longest cave system in the world — in south central Kentucky. We took a boat tour in Bowling Green, and learned about fake stories of Jesse James, and burnt-down distilleries, and did you know that grass grows in caves where it otherwise wouldn’t just because of the presence of light (bulbs that the tour guides install) in the darkness?

There’s a library system staffed by saints in that town. They all floated on air with a palpable kind of joy that reminded me of what open dispositions look like. They were kind and they smiled and they were present and they bought us Cabernet and a New Fashioned with infused ice and button mushrooms.

Ashley told me about children’s poetry.

I’ve seen Scott’s show four or fives times now. Last night’s was truncated and included a short video titled The Light of Failure¹ that isn’t a part of the full act.

I couldn’t help but feel like all those shipwrecks. I know I’ve been a home for other people’s beached sails before, too, but God I feel like I’ve been in the middle of a long, slow crash. My soul wants for housing up in some shaman’s cabin — prefereably aglow with candlelight and a cigarette and someone humming icaros — reclamation of the way their hull fell apart once (twice, seventy times seven times), too. The performance, itelf, is one piece of driftwood on the wall of a house I feel like I can rest in. So is Scott, and I’m thankful for his friendship.

Say Yes is alchemical in me. I long. I grieve. I see. I wrestle. I do what I can to say yes to the Mystery the liturgy facilitates. To Notice & Take Note — to cultivate nepsis.²

I am inspired to keep going. I don’t want to give up on myself. And someday, I want my life to be someone’s safe harbor again, even if it requires me to face the ways in which I haven’t been. What a resurrection that could be.

There’s a moment in Scott’s show when he speaks of desire and discernment. And how to choose? How to choose? Choice — to me — has always felt like a thing that is hard to come by. “This is how you have to choose to be,” dominates my inner monologue (insisting that it is God), second-guessing the Quiet Whisper that otherwise permits me tender transformation.

When you can start pulling apart the assumptions that lead to an argument? It will open up a world of possibility.

Scott Ericksen, Say Yes

Pull the thread. “Is this really what Love is?” “Are they really out and am I really in?” “Do in and out exist?”

Sometimes — when I have been brave (or am trying to be) — when I am pole-vaulting over walls that seem impossible to scale, I can feel my dad with me. I know when he’s near. I’ve seen him since he left. Call it a ghost or call me crazy or call it the cloud of witnesses. I don’t care. But I know this: when he’s around, I get the sense that he’s proud of me. He’s softer than he used to be. And he’s cheering. It’s a quiet support and he’s an embrace I can’t explain. He sees me saying yes to something new, or trying to. Trying to. Can anyone possibly understand how much that means? But I do.

He’s pointing to the walls and saying, “Those are cracks in the sidewalk, Levi, and I didn’t know that I could step over them. You can. Listen, there’s more than I knew and there’s more than you do. Let every barrier burn. Kick the dust from your heels. Forgive everyone, everything, and live, kid.

Live.”

So I guess even death is no limitation to Wounded Healers. (I’ve heard about that being the case, before.)

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I suppose I didn’t know that writing about my day spelunking caves in Kentucky was going to turn into this. But I suppose that’s one of the things I love the most about writing. It’s like Forrest’s box of chocolates: you never know what you’re going to get. But if you let it, it’ll excavate you.

One of the things we talked a bit about yesterday was the word “deconstruction.” I have never been a hashtag-that writer, nor did I want to be (and actually, to the point of not loving bringing it up right here, at all, but like Pete Holmes says in his new special, “Have you ever offended someone and that someone is you?”) despite how many people have told me about the ways that my writing helped them through their own evolutions throughout the years. [I was surprised when my therapist told me that I was deconstructing before it became a brand, back when I first stepped through his door in 2017. I guess that means I’m as hipster as Sam Penner always said I was (and just as oblivious).]

Sometimes, when people tell me about how they “went through their deconstruction journey” I think: already? Then again, I wonder the same thing alongside

David Dark

when anyone talks about how they’re a Christian.

I’ve also had a sneaking suspicion that deconstruction is (or at least: can be) just another word for being alive, if alive is what you really want to be. And if Paula D’Arcy is right when she says that “God comes to you disguised as your life,” then it is (or: can be) as Spirit-led as anything.

I am not the same as I once was, nor do I want to be.

God, what a deep and wonderfully grief-filled relief: to say it.

Thank you (to both of us).

1. You’re gonna have to watch this to get what comes next.

2. Nepsis means “wakefulness” or “watchfulness.” St. Hesychios the Priest defines nepsis as "a continual fixing and halting of thought at the entrance to the heart."