Last few days and Donald Miller’s thoughts on changing seasons

 

It is fall here now, my favorite of the four seasons. We get all four here, and they come at us under the doors, in
through the windows. One morning you wake and need blankets; you take
the fan out of the window to see clouds that mist out by midmorning,
only to reveal a naked blue coolness like God yawning.

September is perfect Oregon. The blocks line up like postcards and the
rosebuds bloom into themselves like children at bedtime. And in
Portland we are proud of our roses; year after year, we are proud of
them. When they are done, we sit in the parks and read stories into the
air, whispering the gardens to sleep.

I come here, to Palio Coffee, for the big windows. If I sit outside,
the sun gets on my computer screen, so I come inside, to this same
table, and sit alongside the giant panes of glass. And it is like a
movie out there, like a big screen of green, and today there is a man
in shepherd’s clothes, a hippie, all dirty, with a downed bike in the
circle lawn across the street. He is eating bread from the bakery and
drinking from a metal camp cup. He is tapping the cup against his leg,
sitting like a monk, all striped in fabric. I wonder if he is happy,
his blanket strapped to the rack on his bike, his no home, his no job.
I wonder if he has left it all because he hated it or because it hated
him. It is true some do not do well with conventional life. They think
outside things and can’t make sense of following a line. They see no
walls, only doors from open space to open space, and from open space,
supposedly, to the mind of God, or at least this is what we hope for
them, and what they hope for themselves.

I remember the sweet sensation of leaving, years ago, some ten now,
leaving Texas for who knows where. I could not have known about this
beautiful place, the Oregon I have come to love, this city of great
people, this smell of coffee and these evergreens reaching up into a
mist of sky, these sunsets spilling over the west hills to slide a red
glow down the streets of my town.

And I could not have known then that if I had been born here, I would
have left here, gone someplace south to deal with horses, to get on
some open land where you can see tomorrow’s storm brewing over a high
desert. I could not have known then that everybody, every person, has
to leave, has to change like seasons; they have to or they die. The
seasons remind me that I must keep changing, and I want to change
because it is God’s way. All my life I have been changing. I changed
from a baby to a child, from soft toys to play daggers. I changed into
a teenager to drive a car, into a worker to spend some money. I will
change into a husband to love a woman, into a father to love a child,
change houses so we are near water, and again so we are near mountains,
and again so we are near friends, keep changing with my wife, getting
our love so it dies and gets born again and again, like a garden, fed
by four seasons, a cycle of change. Everybody has to change, or they
expire. Everybody has to leave, everybody has to leave their home and
come back so they can love it again for all new reasons.

I want to keep my soul fertile for the changes, so things keep getting
born in me, so things keep dying when it is time for things to die. I
want to keep walking away from the person I was a moment ago, because a
mind was made to figure things out, not to read the same page
recurrently.

Only the good stories have the characters different at the end than
they were at the beginning. And the closest thing I can liken life to
is a book, the way it stretches out on paper, page after page, as if to
trick the mind into thinking it isn’t all happening at once.

Time has pressed you and me into a book, too, this tiny chapter we
share together, this vapor of a scene, pulling our seconds into minutes
and minutes into hours. Everything we were is no more, and what we will
become, will become what was. This is from where story stems, the stuff
of its construction lying at our feet like cut strips of philosophy. I
sometimes look into the endless heavens, the cosmos of which we can’t
find the edge, and ask God what it means. Did You really do all of this
to dazzle us? Do You really keep it shifting, rolling round the pinions
to stave off boredom? God forbid Your glory would be our distraction.
And God forbid we would ignore Your glory.

HERE IS SOMETHING I FOUND TO BE TRUE: YOU DON’T start processing death
until you turn thirty. I live in visions, for instance, and they are
cast out some fifty years, and just now, just last year I realized my
visions were cast too far, they were out beyond my life span. It
frightened me to think of it, that I passed up an early marriage or
children to write these silly books, that I bought the lie that the
academic life had to be separate from relational experience, as though
God only wanted us to learn cognitive ideas, as if the heart of a man
were only created to resonate with movies. No, life cannot be
understood flat on a page. It has to be lived; a person has to get out
of his head, has to fall in love, has to memorize poems, has to jump
off bridges into rivers, has to stand in an empty desert and whisper
sonnets under his breath:

I’ll tell you how the sun rose
A ribbon at a time…

It’s a living book, this life; it folds out in a million settings, cast
with a billion beautiful characters, and it is almost over for you. It
doesn’t matter how old you are; it is coming to a close quickly, and
soon the credits will roll and all your friends will fold out of your
funeral and drive back to their homes in cold and still and silence.
And they will make a fire and pour some wine and think about how you
once were . . . and feel a kind of sickness at the idea you never again
will be.

So soon you will be in that part of the book where you are holding the
bulk of the pages in your left hand, and only a thin wisp of the story
in your right. You will know by the page count, not by the narrative,
that the Author is wrapping things up. You begin to mourn its ending,
and want to pace yourself slowly toward its closure, knowing the last
lines will speak of something beautiful, of the end of something long
and earned, and you hope the thing closes out like last breaths, like
whispers about how much and who the characters have come to love, and
how authentic the sentiments feel when they have earned a hundred pages
of qualification.

And so my prayer is that your story will have involved some leaving and
some coming home, some summer and some winter, some roses blooming out
like children in a play. My hope is your story will be about changing,
about getting something beautiful born inside of you, about learning to
love a woman or a man, about learning to love a child, about moving
yourself around water, around mountains, around friends, about learning
to love others more than we love ourselves, about learning oneness as a
way of understanding God. We get one story, you and I, and one story
alone. God has established the elements, the setting and the climax and
the resolution. It would be a crime not to venture out, wouldn’t it?

It might be time for you to go. It might be time to change, to shine out.

I want to repeat one word for you:

Leave.

Roll the word around on your tongue for a bit. It is a beautiful word,
isn’t it? So strong and forceful, the way you have always wanted to be.
And you will not be alone. You have never been alone. Don’t worry.
Everything will still be here when you get back. It is you who will
have changed.