Last night, I raced out at the last minute to catch the final screening of the movie ‘Once’ at our local art house theater here in Nashville–the Belcourt. Man, some movies are just dripping with inspiration, this movie was the kind of film that causes me to leave the theater with the passion to get out there and tell stories. A short while before the film started, I bumped into my friend Stephen Lamb, who was at the same screening, and he mentioned he planned on going to see Katie Herzig with Steven Delopoulos, Sandra McCracken at the Basement. Several days before, I had placed a mental note in my head that Katie was playing that night, but like most things in my brain, the memory faded long before its usefulness had expired. Taking the reminder as a divine suggestion, I set my mind on enjoying a great evening of music.
Katie was headlining the night and went on sometime around 11PM. About three quarters of the way through her set, she announced that she was going to play her song Fools Gold, a tune from her album that will be featured next week on an episode of Grey’s Anatomy. After the introduction, she explained that she had written the song with two other talented Nashville musicians, Kate York and Jeremy Lister and that Kate had planned to be at the show that night to sing the song with her, but that she stayed at home because of local tornado warnings.
It wasn’t but moments after this announcement that a slamming of a side door at the club announced to those nearby the onset of a storm. Soon, people began to peek outside as torrents of rain sprayed like heavy ocean waves crashing head first into the bow of a ship. Joining the waves were angry swirls of wind that tossed the tops of large trees in circular motions. I’m sure that there were some folks at the show who, after seeing the odd weather, began to think that Kate had made the correct choice by staying home. This notion would have been strengthened if, like me, they had been spying the small television on the opposite side of the club, near the bar, that displayed the scrolling weather alert and had a local weather guy pointing out flashing red areas on the radar heading directly toward Nashville. Some folks bailed from the show and other stepped out on the patio to observe Mother Nature and discuss random stories of tornadoes. I, on the other hand, returned my attention to Katie and enjoyed the rest of her set–after all the club was named The Basement, and isn’t the basement the safest place to be in a tornado?
The storm never produced a tornado in Nashville, and like the Big Bad Wolf at the door a brick constructed domicile, it turned out to be just a whole lot of huffing and puffing. One of those huffs of puffs happened to blow a chair off my front porch into my yard, upset some trash cans and littered the streets with leaves and branches. I returned home to a dog who was a little edgy, but otherwise in good spirits, despite her dislike for strange noises and cracks of thunder. I sat down on the couch and watched a show on the History Channel about some pending planetary doom via stored methane in the oceans and I faded off to sleep in an upright position. Sometime during the night, I awoke with a crick in my neck and shuffled off to bed.
I woke this morning with the expectation of cooler weather–it seems that storms often precede a cold front and I have been eagerly awaiting the final arrival of Fall weather. I popped out of bed fairly early this morning and after checking emails and reading some Myspace messages, clipped my dog to her leash and headed out for our morning ritual. The storm had brought everything I had hoped. The air was fresh and clean and the sun had begun to shine as it climbed higher into the bight blue sky. The air was crisp and cool, just the way I love it.
After walking back into the house, I quickly realized how stale and stuffy it was inside, in comparison with the fresh air outside. That was a situation that needed to be rectified–so, for the first time since I have owned my house, I moved from room to room lifting the blinds, throwing the open the latches and raising the windows. As I type, my house is wide open, the sunlight is pouring in and a fresh cool breeze is displacing the stale air. This is good stuff.
I don’t understand why I don’t do this more often… but I have a clue. As I started the process of opening my windows, I began to feel some anxiety. There is something about opening the blinds and giving the world a view into your life that makes someone, like myself, uneasy. Being open in this way causes me to lose some control. As people walk past my home, they might look in at me sitting on my couch typing on my computer. Even worse, the men working next door might hear me having conversations with my dog, as I expound on the reasons why she should not be barking at the small birds in the bushes or my neighbor Napoleon, across the street, as he heads out for his morning walk in the neighborhood to pick up trash.
It seems so much easier to keep the windows and the blinds closed–to keep the world at arms length and to control what others see and hear. Perhaps by hiding from them, I grant myself permission to ignore my problems and indulge my eccentricities. But certainly, it is much better to throw open the windows and displace the stale air. Open windows not only bring the newness in, but can remind you that there is a world out there that isn’t defined by four walls, a world of new experiences that is expansive and yearning to be explored. As I sit here this morning, I can’t help but feel a calling to escape what is familiar and set out on a journey of adventure and discovery, something I can’t have, tethered to this couch, to this computer, to this house–stepping out into a world that is beyond my control, where I am vulnerable and at risk in the hands of uncertainty.
There is something almost Abrahamic about the feeling I have at this moment–called by Jehovah into a life of uncertainly, resting only in one fact, that Jehovah is the I AM. Leaving the comfort of the land of my birth, being called into a new lands full of unknown enemies and unimagined dangers, a place where I cannot rely on myself and cannot control my circumstances. I can’t predict how long this feeling will last or how long it will be before I button myself back into my four walls and breathe stale air again, but for this moment, I stand wide open.
