Tomasino Blog

A morbid haze drifted vapidly through the park impregnating the space below the old oaks. Spanish moss stretched its fingers forth trying to grasp at the wet earth below like some bygone lover just out of reach. Lamplight moiled and mashed its way futilely against the mists, giving each small spark the eerie quality of melting into darkness, serving only to heighten awareness of the deepness of the night.

Somewhere nearby a heart beat steadily with the silent rhythm of the night. Each percussive throb felt infinitesimally through the deep currents of air that linked them by blood, its sweet cadence calling to him.

Blood, vilely profane and alluring in its concupiscent vivacity. Blood, tantalizing, forbidden, safeguarded beneath lusciously corpulent flesh. But no, not a delicacy cured in spices, the salty taste is just diaphoretic nervousness, human and natural. A nervousness deserved. A nervousness earned by nights like this.

In the mists light doesn’t touch the flesh, doesn’t reflect off turgid irises or the enamel of teeth. The light knows to keep to itself and haunt its own corner of the world. The mists belong to something else.

The palpitations grew stronger as passing zephyrs carried with them the hint of iron and danger. Disgust filled his throat with bile even while the temptation grew hot in his eyes. Covet, want, need, thirst; and the seductiveness was everything. Understanding fell away and with it the revulsion. At last, minacity had met moment in lustful surrender.

Somewhere in the mists, lips parted for a lovers embrace while far overhead, a full moon smoldered.

In the canoe, the Indian smiled. Once he paused in a stroke, and rested his blade. For that instant he looked like his own Paddle. There was a song in his heart. It crept to his lips, but only the water and the wind could hear.

‘You, Little Traveler! You made the journey, the Long Journey. You now know the things I have yet to know. You, Little Traveler! You were given a name, a true name in my father’s lodge. Good Medicine, Little Traveler! You are truly a Paddle Person, a Paddle-to-the-Sea!’
    - Holling Clancy Holling – Paddle-To-The-Sea (1941)

Thomas Merton’s great work, Thoughts in Solitude, begins with the powerfully direct assertion that, “[t]here is no greater disaster in the spiritual life than to be immersed in unreality, for life is maintained and nourished in us by our vital relation with realities outside and above us.” His concept of reality is quite different than many of ours, though. It is the type of hyper-reality, the super-reality, or magical realism, that fills up our spiritual cups in a way that no mere materialism can manifest. Merton’s reality is God.

Reality and unreality, the Sacred and the Profane, these dichotomies are revealed to me relentlessly as I philosophize and study my nights away, but that’s nothing new. The unassuming children’s classic, Paddle-To-The-Sea, may be my earliest memory–my earliest glimpse of understanding–of this natural dualism. It was in the words of the little Indian boy, at last grown to take his father’s role in life that pinned the understanding into my heart.

‘I made you, Paddle Person, because I had a dream. A little wooden man smiled at me. He sat in a canoe on a snowbank on this hill. Now the dream has begun to come true. The Sun Spirit will look down at the snow. The snow will melt and the water will run down-hill to the river, on down to the Great Lakes, down again and on at last to the sea. You will go with the water and you will have adventures that I would like to have. But I cannot go with you because I have to help my father with the traps.
    - Ibid.

The child and the old man, they understood the role the Spirit played in the journey of the Paddle Person, and they let me understand it too, even as young as I was. His father’s traps waited for him, just as the day-to-day things in my life wait for me as I go to sleep each night and wake again. The true path, the one he wanted to live, the one with the adventures, began with the Sun Spirit melting the snow on that bank. That was his reality and he never forgot it.

When I read the story as a boy I carved my own wooden boat. My dad helped me write the familiar words on the bottom. “Please put me back in the water.” I don’t recall if we ever set the boat in a stream; that wasn’t the point. Even at that age, before I could fully understand what it all meant, I felt a call to float down stream and have my own adventures with nothing to guide me but “a tin rudder to keep it headed forward, and a lump of lead for ballast.”

Not everyone finds themselves called to set out on the rivers and streams. Some are called to help, to keep an eye out for those travelling along. There are as many callings as there are people. For some of us, all we can hope to do is build our toys and keep them in our memory. I never identified with the little boy in the story, though. I was always the Paddle Person.

‘Ho!’ he called. ‘You have started on your journey! Good-by, Paddle-to-the-Sea!’
    - Ibid.

He had already understood that he would never leave that room, for it was foreseen that the city of mirrors would be wiped out by the wind and exiled from the memory of men at the precise moment when Aureliano Babilonia would finish deciphering the parchments, and that everything written on them was unrepeatable since time immemorial and forever more, because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth.
    - Gabriel Garcia Marquez – One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967)

There is an insatiable restlessness that slowly creeps up my spine as a change nears. Like the flight or fight response that evolutionists tout as the basic behavior of fear, my nerves tense in anticipation of something soon to come. They are ready, even if the rest of me isn’t, for that unknowable future that will befall at any moment. Yet I have to wonder about this unease and its usefulness. Is it helpful to me? Does it provide some security to be on guard, excited, or otherwise energized?

The important things are done. My life is tidy, the various threads in order. There is nothing to provoke this nervousness, but still it comes. It forces my mind to parallels and analogies, of times, in particular, that I wasn’t so prepared for the same.

Things take the shape of a great cloud of doom that approaches from the West, and I, fatigued, broken, struggle to run away on legs too short and insufficient. Foliage tears at my feet, grasping my ankles, pulling me to the ground again and again; all the while I know that the running is hopeless. Even if there were a destination, that cloud will overtake me long before I make my way anywhere important.

And it is at times like these of fearful clarity that I recognize what it is that terrifies me so much as to drive all logic and planning away and leave me shaking, unable to concentrate or breathe deeply. I fear that small spark of mortality to which I cling with endless pride and selfishness. It is a fear not of letting go, but of being unable to do so. What if I cannot surrender myself to this? What if the temptations of flesh or food, of rest and rain, of any and everything, of this world cannot be broken? There I see condemnation, failure.

So I run, careful to cut the ties with my planning and organization, careful to avoid the connections that might bind me immutably to this place or these people. After-all, wasn’t it St. Augustine who said, “Complete abstinence is easier than perfect moderation.” Let me be away from all things and let my time here be short, for I am not strong enough to keep there long.

I’d always hoped for better
Thought maybe together you and me would find it
I got no plans I ain’t going nowhere
So take your fast car and keep on driving
…
You got a fast car
But is it fast enough so you can fly away
You gotta make a decision
You leave tonight or live and die this way
    - Tracy Chapman – Fast Car (1988)

Of course, the panic settles after a few deep breaths and I remember that I’m not alone. There’s no fear in being too weak to go through this alone. God is with me, hand-in-hand. I can grasp for His strength and it is always there ready to lift me up and past these fears. It is a battle won in His service, not with guns and swords, but with an open and steady heart that gives itself over rather than being its own keeper.

The fear remains, but I don’t shake now. My hands are held steady and I am ready again to take a step forward, and another, until my time does come. Sometimes the simplest decisions are the most important, and the most difficult. The decision to wake up each day and say to Him, “Yes, I still believe,” is sometimes all I can bear to give, and it has to be enough.

Get busy living, or get busy dying.
    - Frank Darabont (Screenplay) – The Shawshank Redemption (1994)

When I lived in Indiana, one semester at IUPUI I had a four hour break between classes on Tuesdays. Back then, the Indianapolis Museum of Art was free, so I would spend my afternoons there with a pencil and a Moleskine. I would sit for a few hours in front of one of the paintings and let my mind wander in it for a while. Then I would take my notebook and write a quick story, scene, narrative, or stream-of-consciousness from deep inside. This is one of those journals.

Childe Hassam – Cliff Rock – Appledore, 1903

There was no landing here. The river was wild and the rocks sharp. To leave the safety of the captain’s narrow path would mean death for all of them. It wasn’t the cliffs jutting up high into the air on either side that they were watching with such fearful vigilance. No, the river ran wide with plenty of room to maneuver. The real worry was the shallow rocks lurking just below, invisible, like diamonds in a pool; they were scattered pins dropped in a carpet, threatening to prick from the quiet, murky depths.

When I lived in Indiana, one semester at IUPUI I had a four hour break between classes on Tuesdays. Back then, the Indianapolis Museum of Art was free, so I would spend my afternoons there with a pencil and a Moleskine. I would sit for a few hours in front of one of the paintings and let my mind wander in it for a while. Then I would take my notebook and write a quick story, scene, narrative, or stream-of-consciousness from deep inside. This is one of those journals.

Mary Shepard Greene Blumenschein – Louisa Fletcher, 1912

She stepped back against the curtained wall for added support. Her hands were trembling slightly still from the excitement of it all. He was handsome, yes, but he was something more. He engaged her. He was direct. She was an equal.

His eyes spoke of a hidden power, like a wild lion buried under his gentlemen demure. She wanted him, that was no doubt, but she wanted more. She wanted him to release that power on her, to be controlled or uncontrolled, to be an animal.

Thoughts came rushing in such a torrent of feeling that her breath began to tremble. She beamed wild eyes across the room at the back of his head, begging in her mind that he would turn around and acknowledge her once again. Her hand slid along the curtain behind her and a sensual smile crept to her lips. She would catch him. It was one predator to another.

As he slowly turned to look once more in her direction, her heart sighed through her eyes with romance and suspense. She would have him.

I think the sun is a flower,
That blooms for just one hour.
    - Ray Bradbury – All Summer in a Day

We sneaked up to the roof to share a cigarette. I didn’t smoke–or hadn’t tried it before–but I wanted to be with her. She took a long drag off a Virginia Slim, its delicate form a manufactured homage to her fingers, her lips, her eyes, which closed sweetly to shut out the world as they savored the flavor of the moment before parting again only to let her treasure lift away on her breath, soft as the touch of a ghost and twice as chilling. She breathed for both of us while I stood motionless, afraid to disturb the air. Her eyes flashed up at me standing astride the doorway. They were hungry.

My first taste of cigarette smoke was filtered by her lungs and drawn through her lips, sweet and ashen, evoking images of vampires and other morbid, sexual beings; a clear contrast against the brilliant summer sun cutting in through the rooftop doorway. Instead, I thought to myself, I should think her a spirit. The mist climbed its way around her head and through her hair–still damp from the pool and ruffled from my hands–where it all became lost again in the haze of too much or too little light. I thought that if I looked away she might fade completely and leave me only the taste on my lips by which to remember her.

The waves softly rolled down the shore some distance below us, but all we could see was the brilliant sun, a few feet of stony roof and an endless sea beckoning in the hypnotic way of great distances and heights. My stomach pined with the urge to let go and step into the abyss, wondering if I might be caught in that vapor as well and become like her, only half real and magical.

We took too long to meet, she said. We’d wasted all our time with flirting and wondering, daydreaming about what might be. Now that we were together, it was already over; too much to say, to much to be done, and neither of us had the stomach for it. We kissed.

The next day I sat the long drive home in silence. I let the sun wash over me as I stared at it as directly as I could manage. Vision slowly burned away and I was blind again and with her once more. She was the ghost of light and dust, and I was still so as to not disturb. With a deep breath I breathed her in, and for a moment tasted sweet ash before it turned to salt and spread to my eyes.

Too much time wasted; too much dreaming and not enough living? Was it all just time locked away in a closet, staring at the summer through a crack in the door locked by my own hand? That day it seemed that way and more. After all, it was the end of something beautiful before it had begun, but distance cultures wisdom and perspective gathers peace. She is a ghost, part of the past, with no purpose but to haunt. The other, the one with the real lips that press gently and smile at children, drove away that same day dealing with her own ghosts.

There is beauty there, and love of a sort. For all of that I am thankful.

So the people shouted, and priests blew the trumpets; and when the people heard the sound of the trumpet, the people shouted with a great shout and the wall fell down flat, so that the people went up into the city, every man straight ahead, and they took the city. They utterly destroyed everything in the city, both man and woman, young and old, and ox and sheep and donkey, with the edge of the sword. Joshua said to the two men who had spied out the land, “Go into the harlot’s house and bring the woman and all she has out of there, as you have sworn to her.” So the young men who were spies went in and brought out Rahab and her father and her mother and her brothers and all she had; they also brought out all her relatives and placed them outside the camp of Israel. They burned the city with fire, and all that was in it. Only the silver and gold, and articles of bronze and iron, they put into the treasury of the house of the LORD. However, Rahab the harlot and her father’s household and all she had, Joshua spared; and she has lived in the midst of Israel to this day, for she hid the messengers whom Joshua sent to spy out Jericho.
    - Joshua 6:20-24

Today is the Feast of Saint Barnabas, Apostle, Martyr, and all around good guy. In the Office for his feast day, I read a familiar passage of the Book of Joshua that details the conquest of the city of Jericho. On the one hand, it’s a story that’s very much in the style of Joshua; Israel swoops in and with the assistance of God and lead by the arc of the covenant, succeeds in battle and takes the land. On the other hand, this particular passage also serves a great purpose in the metaphor of both conversion and Armageddon.

The conversion metaphor was most interesting to me as I spent time with the reading. After-all, it has the most direct relationship to my own life. You see, the first thing the Israelites did when they approached Jericho was to send in spies. These men found their way to Rahab’s home, as it was connected to the outer walls of the city and gave them access inside. When the guards came around looking for them, Rahab hid them and misled the guards. She knew what was coming and chose to help the Israelites in exchange for her life and her family’s. In this way, she acted like the spark of grace inside each of us which opens our back door and allows the Holy Spirit to sneak inside (One might say, “Like a thief in the night”).

The seeds were planted, then, and the conquest was only a matter of time. When Joshua was instructed by the captain of the Lord’s host as to how to attack, it wasn’t by storming the walls or starving them out by a siege. After seven days of marching his men around the city, blowing their rams horns (Another reference to the trumpets of Revelation to come?), his men let out a yell. At the sound, the walls of Jericho fell and every creature inside was killed. Only Rahab and her relatives were spared. This part more than any other fits my personal experience.

For years I’d closed myself off to Christianity and sought answers anywhere else. Through all that time, though, the Spirit was at work inside me, preparing for the day. When it finally came, it was with trumpet blares and screaming, at least in metaphor. In an instant all my walls against faith were gone, crumbled to dust, and in a wave I watched as all those useless, misguided thoughts and searching were destroyed. All that was left was that single spark of faith that couldn’t be doused. Suddenly, my faith was alone in me and there was no denying it. Catholicism set the old me ablaze and a new nation was formed.

I think it’s for this reason that the reading was chosen for Barnabas’ feast. He was, after all, a great missionary and along with St. Paul, was probably most responsible for bringing Christianity to the gentiles. St. Luke, normally quiet on his personal opinions of others, said of Barnabas “he was a good man, full of the Holy Ghost and of Faith”. That “good” quality, his immutable accepting of people and hope for their inclusion in the faith led him to not only sponsor Saul of Tarsis (St. Paul) into the Church when others were wary of him for how intensely he had persecuted them previously, but also to defend and include his cousin John Mark (later the Evangelist) when Paul would accuse him of desertion.

The story of Jericho is certainly an interesting reading, and there’s so much more that could be said about it. That’s the way of scripture, though.

A few weeks ago I posted about my new alarm clock, Zeo. Well, it seems that the rest of the world has finally caught on.

When I first tried it out, I had the inflated hopes of a child with a new fancy toy. I signed up for the interactive Sleep Coaching, monitored and scrutinized every line on all my various charts, and was generally annoying to all my friends. Things were new and cool and I couldn’t get enough of them.

So what about now? It’s been about a month since I started using my Zeo, how are things going these days? Well, I’ll be honest. Things are pretty great. I’m not obsessing about every little curve anymore, but I do make sure to note my ZQ (that’s Sleep Quality, folks) each morning, and every few days I take some time to review my time in each stage of sleep, how many full cycles I get in the night, and make sure to properly punish the cat for waking me up so much during the night.

I don’t fill out my sleep journal every day, but even without all the data it provides, I have still learned a lot. Stephan Fabregas says, “If you can measure it, you can manage it,” and he’s really hit the nail on the head. I thought the most valuable feature of my Zeo was going to be the SmartWake feature when I first started using it, and don’t get me wrong, it’s fantastic. Perhaps more importantly, though, I’ve learned about some depressing trends in how I treat my body and my sleep during the work week. I see ZQ scores in the 40s and 50s all week long, and then bask in the glory of a 130 on Saturday. It just isn’t healthy in the long run.

I’ve already begun changing some things. Zeo makes me more accountable to myself, and that’s a good thing.

On a side note, just yesterday morning I found myself starting to wake up and cursing in my half-conscious state. I knew I was going to trigger the SmartWake if I woke up any further, and then my glorious night of sleep would end. Lo and behold, my pretty little alarm jingle started a moment later. Curse you, Zeo. You’re just too smart.

As for me, the silence and the emptiness is so great, that I look and do not see, — Listen and do not hear — the tongue moves but does not speak … I want you to pray for me — that I let Him have free hand.
    - Mother Teresa, Letter to Rev. Michael van der Peet (1979)

I was just reading a wonderful post from Jennifer over at The Conversion Diary, and it got me thinking about my own journey back to a Christian spiritual life. Her post was in reference to the abundance of press surrounding the book Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light, and the Time magazine article that followed it. The book and article talk in depth about the 50 year “spiritual crisis” that coursed through the life of the famous nun.

Teresa’s “dark night of the soul”, a term for the time of spiritual loneliness and desolation as coined by St. John of the Cross, is a very common thing for people of faith. Pope Benedict XVI calls this time the “monotonous desert path” that each of us is called to walk at some time or another (more on that here).

For Jennifer, she faced one of these deserts almost as soon as she came to the church. My conversion (return to the church might be a better term) went much the same way. There came a point when I believed with my mind, but couldn’t feel it in my heart. I threw myself into everything I could to try and force that feeling but it didn’t come. In fact, I’ll admit to being quite thankful that I went through that process while I was away in the Navy. It saved me a lot of embarrassment with old friends who would have surely rolled their eyes to see me trying to be so “holy”. Luckily, the phase came to an end as I was forced to face what I was really doing.

I was approaching faith in the wrong way. In fact, I was approaching it in several wrong ways all at once.

First, I was trying to force God into my life through “right living”. If I lived the right way, I thought that would bring him into the light and get me a good look at him. The argument for and against justification has a long history in the church, but I was still too green to even be aware of it. All I knew in my infancy was that I wanted to feel faith in my bones, and the fastest path I could think of was to emulate the people I saw as being the most holy. I still think there’s elements of a good idea in there somewhere, but I was still a long way from “getting it”.

Second, I was trying to win at faith. I think this is a really common problem with converts to any faith. Its frightening being new in a faith, even one you’ve been raised in. There’s a tendency for people in that position to overreach, to try to be the best and take it all on at once. Maybe they’re trying to prove that they belong, or maybe they’re trying to play catch up to all those others who have lived with their faith for so long. I think that many, like me, were jumping into religion by clinging to the oldest of the deadly sins, pride. I was prideful in my old life, so I didn’t even think about it in this new one. I wanted to be the best Christian, the best Catholic. It seems pretty silly now.

Third, and finally, I wanted my faith to fit my life, not the other way around. I thought that I could own it, and control it, by choosing these things that I did and the people I spent time with. I could make my life strong in faith by my own will. It was another failing to pride, but a more subtle one that the other. This particular hang-up of mine hasn’t gone away completely. I still keep a constant vigil in my prayer life to make sure I’m not falling prey to the temptations of being my own voice of God.

Obviously, my first crack at being religious was totally unsuccessful. God didn’t appear in my prayers or speak to me in those long nights of Eucharistic adoration. I didn’t win the award for “best Catholic” or manage to wrangle church life into my already packed schedule. In fact, I failed in just about every respect possible.

I think that is part of the blessing of faith, though. God knows better than to come to us on our terms. It would teach us the wrong lessons about faith and about what it means to believe. I needed to learn that I wasn’t the center of the universe, and that I couldn’t make God come to me any more than I can make the stars move. When I stopped talking and started listening, things became a lot easier, but that’s another story.

In a way, I think coming to my own faith through that long dry desert (of my own making) taught me a fundamental lesson. There are blessings in all the ways we try to find God. Even banging my head against a wall, as it were, was an important step in my formation. I had to make those mistakes.

Therefore they said to Him, “What shall we do, so that we may work the works of God?” Jesus answered and said to them, “This is the work of God, that you believe in Him whom He has sent.”
    - John 6:28-29

I was putting way too much effort in all the wrong places. My focus was on going and doing when it needed to be on being and believing. That was Jesus’ instruction and the simplicity with which he left us. Though there will be times when our spirit may be dry and lonely, though we might face our own dark crises where God seems miles away, though some days our prayers may seem empty, these are just temporary exhaustions. We have the instruction to make our way back. All it takes is a strength of faith to continue believing.

Be content simply with a loving and peaceful attentiveness to God.
    - Saint John of the Cross – Dark Night I

Even St. John of the Cross, the man who coined the familiar term, knew that just because we might find ourselves in darkness on occasion, that was no reason to give up or listen to our doubts. They are, perhaps, a good time to reflect and make sure we haven’t let our lives run ahead of our faith. God knows that even Mother Theresa needed those times.

When I was in the Navy I had problems waking up at 0400 to study before class like I needed. So, I went out to the NEX (Naval Exchange) and picked up the loudest, most obnoxious piece of machinery I could get my hands on.

The Westclox Model #22651 is a powerhouse in a tiny box. I’m fairly certain the alarm can banish demons. It certainly did the trick of waking me up in the morning.

I kept that alarm clock by my side for the next nine years. Very slowly over that time I have found myself becoming a little less startled in the morning and more willing to risk the snooze button. Still, it has remained an incredibly effective device, that is, until I dropped it eight feet onto my hardwood floors.

The alarm still sounded, but the clock itself was only visible from one small angle when you tilt the clock back 80 degrees. It made a nice audible crunchy sound when you click the buttons, too. It was pretty obvious. I needed a new clock.

So after all these years I found myself searching around for a new alarm clock online. I figured, if my last one lasted almost a decade, I should spend the time and pick one that is worth having around for a while. I researched different alarm types, clock radios, water proof ones, traditional bells, clocks that work with your computer, and a few crazy ones that wake you up with bright lights instead of sound. Then I found Zeo.

The Zeo is a different class of alarm clock altogether. With a sporty fabric headband, this device monitors you brain activity while you sleep and gives you detailed readouts about your night of rest. It distinguishes between REM, light, and deep sleep, and even tells you how many times you woke up in the night, and for how long. It gives you extra information too, like how long it took you to fall asleep, the total time you spent sawing logs, and tracks trends over time. Most importantly is has an amazing feature called Smart-Wake that wakes you up at the optimal time in your sleep cycle so that you feel the most rested in the morning. You give the clock a range of times in the morning and if it detects you entering a lighter sleep phase, the alarm will go off quietly and slowly increase volume to ease you awake. It’s amazing.

In the morning, you can pop the SD card out of the clock and sync it up to their website and track all of your sleep data online. They’ve got a sleep coach e-mail program that I haven’t tried yet and a really cool interactive sleep journal so you can make notes of environmental distractions (I’m looking at you, Sniffles), reasons for waking up during the night, or other sleep information.

The website and device are wonderfully designed and relatively simple to use. Their sleep tracker website uses an Adobe Flex site with wonderful, pretty charting tools. And the alarm sounds are soothing, but unique enough to wake you up rather than put you to sleep.

The downside is the price. It’s a $399 alarm clock, when you get right down to it, but if you’re like me and you love unique tech gadgets, or you’re like me and have a horrible sleep schedule and can use a little more information, it might be worth the investment. If I can make this clock last for the next ten years, I won’t be complaining. In the meantime, I’ve only used it the one night so far, so there isn’t much data to review yet. I’ll tell you one thing, though. The chart above is my actual sleep results from last night. That little bit of "wake" time on the right was when my cat jumped on my head. This Zeo thing definitely does its job. Oh, and click the image for a screenshot of the full web application.

Sleep well!