Intern Blog: Artichokes and Me
An esteemed colleague of mine, Mr. David Kenneth Wheeler, has recently had a short fiction piece published in the wanderlust review.
This excites me a lot. Beyond my feelings of pure elation for him having an article published, beyond being ecstatic at the fact that I can feel his creative juices flowing a mere 1/2 kitty corner from my desk space and then watch them manifest in a soft-bound book, I adore the name The Wanderlust Review; as someone who has battled with wanderlust his whole life, the name of the publication speaks to me.
At one point in his short story he likens his characters restlessness in certain familiar towns and regions with the empty husk of an already eaten artichoke:
… we set the spent artichoke leaves aside with the rest of the uneaten vegetable and carry on with our main course. Then, cleaning up, I take the plate- a thistle nearly winnowed to its heart, surrounded by a mess of leaves- see the teeth strokes in the sinewy flesh, and am suddenly uninspired to eat any more. It’s a waste, but it seems like the parts I shed become foreign objects to me, the detritus of experience only partially realized.
As you can see, Dave has an amazing ability to speak through his writing. I feel the narrators anxiety- the anxiety of someone who does not have a lot of ties, who does not have an overwhelming amount of responsibility, and is not in a crisis of identity, yet- at feeling like he wasn’t going anywhere, at least not anywhere good. I can feel him look at a place that had once given him such happiness, and all he can see are his footprints muddying up the sidewalks he used to love to walk.
I’m from New Jersey. I’m also from Saudi Arabia and Sammamish, WA. Although very different geographically, socially, meteorologically, they all have at least one thing in common; my footprints. And each place has been cast aside, pushed to a corner to be cleaned up later; it is such a complete renunciation that I often apologize for where I’m from. It usually goes like this:
“where are you from?”
“I was born in New Jersey.”
“…oh…”
“yeah, but… I wasn’t there for very long…”
or
“where’d you go to high school?”
“Eastlake, in Sammamish”
“…oh…”
“yeah, but… I’m actually pretty cool…”
I think I see the places I’ve been, chewed up and walked on and set aside like a husk (although the detritus of their experience are often only partially realized) to be disposed of later. I think I may be jaded, or that this place isn’t really meant to benefit me anymore. It’s not really fair, for me or that place or the people that still live there, but I do it.
But maybe that’s not the whole story.
I have a tendency to question everything (a habit that coworkers, girlfriends, bosses, and small group members have often found very annoying). I want to see the purpose, the goal, the outcomes, and I want to know that I know the truth. I didn’t realize this until recently, but I think it’s been true my entire life. I think I see the emptiness in places, the shortcomings and the lack. After I’ve intellectually explored a space I end up mourning absence more than I appreciate presence.
In New Jersey I felt the absence of people surrounding me, the scarcity of real culture and real perspective. In Saudi Arabia I felt the absence of people really accepting all people around them regardless of race, gender, class, or nationality. In Sammamish I felt the absence of goodwill, a result of the strongest sense of entitlement that I’ve ever felt. It’s not that I have become jaded to the wonderful things of a community, it is just that I become aware of the things that are missing from it.
In getting to know a place, i peel away the layers until it’s a thistle neatly winnowed to its heart, and if I judge that heart not to be worth my time, I move on.
Bellingham has a heart to which I’ve winnowed. I love this place, because it’s about community; because it’s about making connections and accepting people regardless of beliefs, stage of life, or class. Different people, different classes, different beliefs, but we make up Bellingham and accept each other despite these differences. The INN is the same. We are a community that, at it’s heart, is always seeking to draw people in and share what it has, regardless of differences in belief and class; that’s how love (especially God’s love) works.















