A Life Update in Two Poems

City Made of Sky / Westward Dream

Part 1: Goodbye

City Made of Sky

oh city made of sky
you teeter top-heavy
like the ancient tower,
careening toward catastrophe,
clutching your baubles and bangles,
bleating that you didn’t know better,
that you did your best,
as if we don’t all smell the urine,
as if we don’t all dwell among the trash.

and yet falling in love 
with you is like 
falling upward,
the way you twist gravity
around your little finger.
i could drown in your 
seas of glass, in your rivers of steel
that snare and save the setting sun.
but why should i be surprised? after all,
i believe in an upside-kingdom.

tell me, are you scratching your fingernails 
on divinity’s dome,
or are your lightning rods the hand of God
reaching down, scaffolding us
behind and before
with incandescent glory? 
maybe the truth is this:
as much as you strain for heaven,
heaven is descending to you,
oh city made of sky.

---

I’m leaving New York.

More on why below, but really, it’s an insane decision. Not just because of the logistics of overhauling my life but because my life here is so good. I’ve lived here for six years, which is the longest I’ve ever lived in one place consecutively and is tied with Virginia for longest cumulatively. I lived through the pandemic, arguably the most formative event of my generation, here. I experienced all my college years and my first job here. These streets are strewn with memories of so many versions of myself. They are the graveyards of some dreams I held for decades and the garden beds of new dreams that I’d watered with tears before they bloomed.

If I had to sum up my time here in one sentence, it would be this: New York taught me what love looks like.

I grew up moving every few years, and while that has made me less rooted in a particular place than many people (a genuine loss, I believe), it has also given me a great appreciation for place. I have felt keenly how places shape you, how they color your memories and reappear in certain smells and tastes, how some places fit you like a key in a lock and others challenge you like metal in a forge. I have found things to love in every place I’ve lived: the deep snows of upstate New York, the serenity of Indiana, the sense of purpose and history of northern Virginia, the quaint bike paths and cobblestone roads of Germany, the big skies of Kansas.

But I never really fell in love with a place until New York. As much as I chose it, it has always felt like it chose me. I look back through books I read and movies I watched growing up and find it everywhere, the setting of some of my most treasured stories, like I was following an invisible map. It was love at first sight, and I’ve never been more certain of anything in my life than I was that I needed to live here. The love I have for this place is irrational enough for me to say that it’s divine, a little sliver of how God feels about every coordinate on this earth. (I think He loves when we love particular places.)

The point is: I love this place, and I’m leaving it. I love walking down my street to the corner bodega at 11 p.m. to get ice cream. I love passing by a company celebrating going public on Nasdaq on my way to work. I love hearing four different languages on one sidewalk. I love rolling my eyes at a fellow subway traveler at yet another delay and the way everyone accepts “the subway” as a valid excuse for being an hour late. I love stumbling upon a little garden or historic jazz bar or brick-oven pizzeria on a street I’ve walked down a hundred times. I love the Mets vs. Yankees rivalry and the free art and the Wall Street exec standing next to a pregnant mom and young artist on a corner, all timing their jaywalking just right. I love peeking jealously through the windows of Brooklyn brownstones or staring at fifty-story apartment buildings and wondering about the stories of everyone inside. I love the endless energy as well as the surprising pockets of peace that you find and learn to treasure. I love cresting a hill while driving in New Jersey and seeing the skyline—it really does look like it’s made of sky; it’s all the same color at a distance, all misty blues and grays, the way the old poets described Mount Olympus. I love the walkability and the diversity and the novelty.

And I love the familiarity, the ease with which I move here. I love, as Annie F. Downs has beautifully articulated, the way my body feels here.

And of course I can’t talk about loving the city without talking about the people that make it home. I’ve found community that I didn’t think was possible, thick relationships from school, church, work, and more, so that this city of 8 million more often feels like a small town. I’ve bumped into friends and acquaintances on the subway or on random street corners more times than I can count. I’ve mentioned a name to someone at a party and found that we know each other’s whole networks. When I imagine the map of the city in my head, I picture dots of light in every neighborhood where I know there’s an apartment that would welcome me in if I ever needed it, a web of open doors and lit windows that turn this concrete metropolis into a haven.

New York taught me I can handle more than I thought and that I need to honor what I can’t. It taught me to be vulnerable and it taught me to be brave. It taught me to embrace whimsy and to pursue intentionality. I’ve given my heart to it and I would do it again and again.

But (you knew there would be a but) …

---

Part 2: Hello

Westward Dream

i have started dreaming
of a strait
sapphire set in glass
the sea, opening to the west
an unnatural feeling
like breathing on my right side
the wrong side 
while skimming the water in freestyle
i dream 
of lonely beach walks
rain piping off my scrunched hood
and new muscles that move like freedom

---

I’m moving. In eight days. Across the continent. To another country.

Yes.

This fall I’m starting grad school at Regent College in Vancouver, Canada—the opposite-side-of-the-continent Canada. My East Coast heart is shored up against the “West-coast-best-coast” comments but I’m also terribly excited. I’ve traveled to and lived in a decent number of places, but I’ve only been to the West Coast once and the Pacific Northwest not at all. I’ve never been to Asia or moved in Asian-influenced spaces. I love not only learning about other cultures and places but making them a part of me, living among them long enough to absorb them into my skin rather than wearing them like a costume. I love that while I know no city will feel like New York, I’ll still be in a large city. And I don’t want to sound like I’m cheating on NYC (I love you), but, well, New York doesn’t have mountains.

Regent is the reason I’m making this move, however, more than Vancouver. After my undergrad degree in Religious and Theological Studies, I felt like I had just started conversations that were fascinating, were all I wanted to think about, and were very much not finished yet. I ran aground on the tip of the iceberg of theology and wanted to keep exploring. If anyone is curious, I’m happy to explain more why Regent in particular felt like a good fit, but for now I’ll say that this is the place I’ve chosen to continue those conversations. I’m going for a Master’s of Theological Studies with a Biblical languages concentration (it’s a mouthful). And I’m so excited.

I’m going because I can say “yes” to the two questions posed by Brad East in this essay “So you want to get a PhD in theology” (I think it fits for a master’s too):

Ask yourself why you’re drawn to it. A sweet job? Love for God? Like being a pastor, but for brainy types? Because you like to read? Because you feel called to it, as in, this is why God put you on planet earth? Let me tell you now: The first four answers aren’t good enough.

Here are two related questions that can help in discerning an answer to the larger question. (a) Would you be happy that you spent 6-10 years of your life earning multiple graduate degrees in theology even if you never became a professor? Alternatively: (b) Even if you never pursued graduate studies in theology, would you nonetheless find ways to “be a theologian” (read theology, write it, teach it, talk about it with others) in your spare time, outside of your civilian day job? If your answer is an unqualified and emotional Yes! to both questions, then a PhD might be for you. If a No to either, much less both, then don’t do it.

I spend hours copying quotes and writing reviews of books I read for fun, many of them theological or philosophical. My conversations with friends are usually dominated by theological ideas. I feel lit like a firefly when I attend lectures on theological topics. I could cry thinking about learning Hebrew (I’m sure I’ll be crying about that for a different reason in a few months). It’s not just that I have intellection and learning and input in my top five StrengthsFinders … but those are certainly good clues about what’s life-giving for me.

People ask me all the time what I’m going to “do” with this degree. When I told one friend that I don’t know, that it’s really primarily to enrich me as a person for now (with the hope and expectation that God will show me practical ways to use it to love others along the way, whether as part of a paid job, ministry position, or added depth to another pursuit), he said that it was so refreshing to meet someone who just wanted to learn for knowledge’s sake. I think the lack of a clear utilitarian “purpose” is rare, especially in New York, but I didn’t attend a liberal arts school for nothing.

Of course, not everyone can—or certainly should—do this. As much as I long to, I don’t have a family of my own right now. I have a freedom and flexibility many do not. I’m grateful to be in the financial place for this to be feasible (though certainly not easy or without sacrifice and cost). Your twenties are a strange time as all the conventional paths unravel and your friends’ lives diverge and you’re left with a dizzying array of options (ah, the blessing and curse of being in the top 1% of the world in the twenty-first century). This is the life God has given me, and this is my next right step.

In the glorious song “My Petersburg” in Anastasia, Dimitry sings a line I always thought I’d quote when leaving New York:

Funny how a city tells you when it's time to go

But now that I’ve come to it, it’s not like that. The city isn’t telling me go to. In some ways I feel it calling to me like a siren—stay stay stay. I’m leaving not because this place has become a no but because I’ve been given a greater (for now) yes. I’m so grateful for that.

I hope that this substack can be a place where I update you on this next adventure. I make no promises, knowing how intense full-time school can be and how unknown my new schedule and habits are currently. I have many poems in the dock, ready to set sail to your inbox. My reflections on them may have to be shorter or more infrequent, and maybe my life updates will be semesterly rather than semi-monthly. But I’m committed to this space and am, as always, incredibly grateful that you’re here for the ride. The fact that anyone takes the time and attention—your most precious assets—to read through my words continues to floor me. It’s motivating and encouraging and no small part of why I want to take this next step. So thank you.

to staying awake—

Aberdeen