Beyond Malibu guides and summer staff returning from their summers in the Canadian mountains are notoriously melodramatic when it comes to transitioning home. In stark contrast to the strong, capable leadership they demonstrate on the mountain and basecamp, the behaviors of Beyond staff in post-season are more in line with a person having a bad drug experience or the quirks of a nervous dog: refusing to sleep or pee indoors, ears perking at sudden noises or passing cars, being overwhelmed in large public spaces, failure to accept the basic principles of money as a commodity of trade and exchange. Not to mention the persistent, guttural whining noises.
As much as I’d like to be, I am not immune from the shock of transition. To my credit, I have been sleeping indoors and I’ve only peed in my backyard once. But upon arriving home, I found myself almost instantly returning to The Hole, a routine of irresponsibility and passivity that I find somewhat inescapable whenever I don’t “have” to be doing something, like guiding backpacking trips.
In the face of a mountain of things to do (fun things, necessary things, and tedious things alike), I’ve resorted to the classic behaviors of The Hole, with the usual berating from The Tenant: social isolation, staying up late doing nothing, drinking beer with heightened inclination, scrolling endlessly through social media, and then sleeping in because I stayed up late. All this occurs in spite of strong desires to get up early and be a productive, active human being with goals to achieve and stuff to move and bills to pay and marathons to train for and vehicle registrations to renew (I learned the importance of that last one the hard way).
On a hazy, hot Spokane afternoon in the clutch of The Hole, I am sorting through my stack of mail from the summer. 70% of it is credit card crap because I mistyped payment information while setting up online autopay in the spring, and my payments were declined all summer. Wifi bills, wedding announcements, credit card offers, an REI catalogue with expired 4th of July sales. Racked with the demands of life on earth and a fear of the all-consuming nature of The Hole, I open the big yellow envelope from my parents, which I’ve saved for last, and in it are several signifiers of the grace of God: a ladder out of The Hole. It’s contents:
Some money: a cash gift from the group to help me resettle, and to me, a reminder of God’s promise to take care of us as he sees fit. It’s manna in the desert—just enough to get us through the present, and never more.
A reminder of who I am: My mom wrote, “Dad and I kept pinching ourselves to think that you are our amazing son!” The Father rejoices in the Son. And through the Son, we become coheirs of the Father’s riches. My family’s pride is the real and metaphorical extension of the Father’s pride for his Son, Jesus, and through him, his pride for me—uniquely and exclusively for me. I’m prone to forget my true identity.
Photos from the trip: In these photos, a reminder of the greater picture of community, history and tradition. I do not journey alone to create meaning out of nothing. Rather, I am an inheritor of a family legacy. The Strain Family–the faithful, dorky, courageous figures posing in those photos–is one strand of this legacy. Greater still is the story that our history of faith has been witnessing, telling, and co-creating together since the beginning of time. I’m reminded that nothing depends on me, that this pressure on myself to be, do, or produce in a certain way is not only misguided, but selfish.
And yet, while nothing depends on what I do or don’t do, I am given the opportunity to weave my thread into that story’s tapestry. The stories and ideas I hope to convey through this little project will be simple in their foundation: I hope to tell of the cycles of birth, death, and new life in creation’s onward journey toward some kind of finality. Through the spiritual and physical topography of Beyond Malibu, I will explore these cycles in the journey of my own life, in the life of community, the life of creation, and in the life of the cosmos (and not just their lives, but their ensuing deaths and dramatic re-imaginings as well).
That is a rough sketch–we’ll see what actually emerges when I dive in more fully. I hope to get creative, and in my naive youthful optimism, I’m biting off way more than I can chew. So here we go!
***If you want a copy of the finished product, just enter your contact information here:
***If you’d like to learn more about the project or support it financially, visit my gofundme page here.
Cheers!
–Jonathan
jonathanstrain 