Tuesday, June 30, 2009

I went back to the porch today, and it was a little bit of heaven. Porches are interesting. They teach you fascinating things. I once heard, I think on the radio somewhere, that neighborhoods with front porches on their houses tend to be safer than ones without. At least statistically speaking.

Porches are where stories are told and where stories are made. Today, I practiced on my guitar, an instrument I’ve owned for enough years now that I should know how to play it, but lack of discipline has made it so I still don’t. But in the midst of playing instruments and reading books and magazines, we take moments, maybe even minutes or hours, to look up and lazily observe the view from the porch, and this is how we learn about the places we live.

Though the college is a school just the same as the seminary is, it is not mine, not in any sense of the word, so I see it differently than I do my own campus. I watch it as I watch the street and the sidewalks and the pieces of town that happen within view of that porch. I watch the students on the maintenance crew diligently keeping up the grounds. I see the townspeople with their children and their pets and maybe just each other. I watched a young man with quite the extensive spiked Mohawk skateboard down the sidewalk and disappear between two of the buildings on the seminary campus. I can see the mail arrive at the seminary, the employees walking to and from their offices to their vehicles or maybe to lunch. I see visitors and townsfolk come and rest under the shade of the great oak trees in the front courtyard of the college campus. I can see the calm tranquility of Wilmore moseying through its daily course and I’m learning sometimes it’s good to observe what’s yours from a place that’s not.

It doesn’t seem that big of a jump to spend time at the college campus across to the street as opposed to the front steps of my own campus, and yet it feels like a world of difference. I don’t think it is my imagination that the college campus has a much more positive energy. It is true that my lack of ownership and responsibility to anything on that campus may have a roll in that, but it cannot be denied that there is a happiness and a hopefulness there that I do not feel on the seminary campus. Not my happiness, but certainly a happiness that has an effect on mine. There is a hesitancy at the seminary, a strong one. A hesitancy to trust with reckless abandon and believe in the impossible. There is fear which is tied to the past, the recent past and a sense of hurt that needs healing. All of this affects the spirit of the campus, and simply by walking across the street, I feel as if my load is lighter, as if my dreams reclaim their vividness, as if my eyesight regains perspective. I feel like myself.

When the school year comes around and the students come back, I won’t be spending time on that porch. It is theirs to have and theirs to enjoy, but it’s nearly two months before that happens and I will enjoy the time I have to consider life differently from one side of the street to the other.

Life can happen from the view of the front porch and life can happen on the front porch. May many stories be made and told in these chairs on this porch at this dorm.

For now, I will meander on over throughout the next days and see what more this porch has to teach me, because there’s a lot more I’d like to learn.