Places: Part II

Places grab onto our minds and don't let go. They stamp themselves into our memories, along with everything that happened there and everyone we were with. Yesterday morning I was enjoying a cup of coffee in the living room, and for some reason this very vivid memory popped into my head. It was from a trip that I took with my dad and brother a few years ago. We did and saw a lot of amazing things on that trip, but this memory was not one of those things. It was just a random moment - something forgettable. But there it was, for one reason or another.

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I remember waking up in the middle of the night. I had to go to the bathroom. We were in the middle of the French Alps. I unzipped the small door of the tent and stretched myself out of a cocoon of body heat and into the darkness. I was there. It was freezing cold. And windy. And I was there in the take-your-breath-away cold with these take-your-breath-away stars above me. We were all there, my brother, my dad, and I. My brother was awake, because it's hard to sleep when someone's rustling around next to you in a tent. Dad was asleep, probably snoring in the other tent not too far away. And we were there, the tall, sharp mountains lifting us into the night sky. Chris, giggling, snapped a picture of me standing there in my thermal shirt and underwear, freezing cold, teeth chattering. I quickly nestled back into my sleeping bag, zipped up the tent door, and fell asleep.

We were there.

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Our brains can remember a billion different things, but for some reason these "waking up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom" moments are often the things that we remember more clearly than any of the others. Maybe they are less ordinary than we think. Maybe there is something more to them. Maybe they are reminders that we are alive, all the time, and that our lives are happening. I'm reminded again of Frederick Beuchner's thought on moments like these in his memoir "The Sacred Journey":

At the very least, they mean this: mean listen. Listen. Your life is happening. You are happening... The music of your life is subtle and elusive and like no other--not a song with words, but a song without words, a singing, clattering music to gladden the heart or turn the heart to stone, to haunt you perhaps with echoes of a vaster, farther music of which it is part.

--dave