Over the Rhine Tour Diary
Linford Detweiler
Day Four: December 2, 2000
Chicago, Illinois.
There is no life like the life you are meant to find. The life you are meant to find will wring your heart to the point of breaking and then douse you with buckets of joy when you're not looking. It will exhaust you (you will fall into bed bone-weary), but find yourself somehow rejuvenated and nourished, your world opening wider, your eyes looking beyond what is right in front of them, discovering what is hidden. Suddenly all the characters that wonder into your world are teachers. You find fresh desire to increasingly open yourself and not miss fleeting opportunities to dream outloud with even perfect strangers at times.
To tour is to enter a new dimension. Down the rabbit hole. Into the wardrobe, parting the fur coats. Time continues to move in a straight line, the past dead (sown into the ground), the future a mystery, the present substantial. But we have been somehow lifted out and away. While the rest of the world continues with its established rhythms, we go underground, traveling at night, waking up in a new city every morning. The dreams and triumphs and losses of so many people are being absorbed into the bloodstream at an accelerated rate, and suddenly you find yourself needing to sleep less, walking streets alone breathing new morning air, seeing all you're seeing for the first time. Home is a distant memory, becomes something that you take with you, a wild card. You are the joker in a vast deck of images being shuffled and dealt whimsically and recklessly. Grace is being tossed at the world slip shod: shouldn't God be more discerning and reserved?
I don't know. It feels like this day has been hard won. I think of the many mile markers along the way. Countless signposts that suggested or dictated we lay this music aside in exchange for something more reasonable. But there were signposts, often more subtle, sometimes obscure, which urged us somehow onward and we heeded those, and it has brought us to this place, infinite distances removed from where we would have been otherwise.
But then again, it feels like this was all somehow given, not taken, not earned. It feels untamed. If someone asked me what the formula was, would it be like asking me to prove Fermat's Theorem? Would I even begin to have the tools, the words, the know how? Would I know where to begin?
It's intuitive. All I know is that I am grateful to be where I am, and I have only a rough idea of how I got here.
. . .