This essay and poems are an adapted sample from Jason C. Inman’s Whatever the Weather: Poetry for paying attention to living and dying. Jason’s collection of essays and poems revolve with the earth around the four seasons as they wonder out loud how exactly to find joy.

At Intersections

Most of the intersections

are roads we cross

before remembering

to look both ways first.

Seasons that come

again and again

while another ends

again and again.

Walking into humble everyday-ness

of going with others,

feet on the ground,

eyes on the sky,

hands open

to every moment,

and hearts here,

now.

It's not that there

isn't more ahead, it's

that right here is

the only place we can

be right now.

Ahead is our home too,

but right now is the only place

that intersects with what's next.

When I was too little to remember my age, I sat on a mustard yellow, long and low 1960s couch where my grandfather asked me who I wanted to be when I grew up.

Predicting who you’ll become is not easy at any age, but being too young to read seems to make it a little bit easier.

Through big blue eyes and a little kid voice that called teeth “teef,” spaghetti “buhsketti,” and Cheerios “chewy oh’s,” I answered his question.

“I want to be a pastor with a zoo.”

Grandpa Roy, a pastor with an orchard, told me he liked that and asked me some more questions about it.

Questions have a way of making me feel like I’ve been invited to your house and just as I walk in I can smell that you’ve made my favorite pie. They help me to know it’s safe to be me even while trying to understand who I am just enough to be able to share me with you.

Questions function as baking soda. Too many can turn a conversation sour, but if you leave them out things don’t really turn out. They prod things, and people, while raising them up at the same time.

Questions contain the built-in condition that the asker is a listener. That’s one reason they can help two unseemly things to somehow fit together. A middle-aged parent and a teenager finding their way through whatever that is, together. A boy and a girl wondering if they’re more than just friends, together. A pastor and a zoo, together.

Summer and winter need a question in between: spring.

My dad was asked to pastor a church toward the end of my first decade, so we moved away from my little Mojave desert to a suburb of the San Francisco Bay area. My new backyard had a fence but not the hill or lizards of my earliest years. This was when I learned how habitats shape their inhabitants.

I didn’t ask for this change, and at first I didn’t like it.

We left feet-melting heat for the 1990s Silicon Valley. The diversity of wildlife was replaced by a diversity of people. My grandparents were closer now. That meant the occasional trek over the Altamont Pass to their orchard for a visit and an opportunity to increase my caught lizards count, but otherwise my daily outdoor activities happened mainly on man-made surfaces.

Unrequested change nearly always brings unexpected life.

A new friend fell in front of me, teeth first into the pavement. We were playing handball on the playground when he took the dive. I looked at his bloody face and asked him a question. “Do you need help?” The dentist gave him two new front teeth and I got a friend.

Why are friends made easier right after they fall?

Another friend offered me pizza and laser tag in exchange for showing up at his birthday. I mean, I’m not sure that’s why we became friends, but it probably didn’t hurt.

Spring helps things to come together and grow up. Growing up creates more questions, ends some friendships, and starts others.

My first year of highschool I said goodbye to my last living grandparent, Opal, the week before I was supposed to help my whole class decorate and plan our Homecoming celebration. I had been elected Freshman Class President. I had already said goodbye to grandparents Max, Marjorie, and Roy.

I only wanted more time with grandparents, not less. People kept saying they were home now. At 15, I was beginning to hate that kind of homecoming. More questions filled the space between where I was and the place people kept calling home.

The Frontier

Some of places your body wants to go

are footpaths back to where it was without you

before you could see what you didn't know.

So as you travel, pay attention.

You may find something you don't have words for

describing some way you've always been.

Driving new places that remember you

Learning how to stay until you're there

Leaving where you're living to go home

It's okay to feel lost right here

The frontier can see you through

Your feet probably remember too

A few years later, I stood in our downstairs bathroom doorway shaking off early onset senioritis and preparing my hair for another day at a highschool with a lot of rules about hair when my dad asked me a great question, “where are you going to go to college, Jason?”

Looking up from the sink I answered, “I don’t know yet, Dad”

“Well, it’s probably about time to apply. What are you interested in?”

“I think I want to work in the government.”

It wasn’t a straight line from zoo-pastor to politician, but it wasn’t that crooked for a lizard-catcher in the Silicon Valley.

“Have you asked your uncle about that? Maybe he knows someone.”

My uncle had this knack for having breakfast with or randomly being friends with a number of world leaders. He’s also one of the better question-askers I’ve met.

I hadn’t talked to my uncle about studying government yet, but I had been paying attention. As far as my teenage brain could tell, it was the government who was expected to help people on the pavement with their teeth broke.

“No, Dad, I haven’t talked to Uncle Dick about it, but when I visited Sam at college I noticed they had a strong government program there.”

My older brother Sam had been going to a University in Missouri for a couple years. When I visited him I noticed they had an impressive cast of Political Science professors.

“Have you applied there yet?”

“Nope.”

“Are you going to?

Before answering I thought about how tuition cost in California was about triple that of Missouri and how I’d become accustomed to trying things that one of my six older brothers had tested out first.

“Yup.”

Finding Here

Where to fly and when to land

How does a bee's wing decide

Amongst flight's long fields and lawns

Every seed it seems a future

Making herself into a home

Staying is always settling

Going inside to find residence

Every lead it seems a surrender

A clover spreads over pristine grass

Dandelions dig tap roots

Succulent success in sun-baked land

Every weed it seems a flower

Go and go to be and be seen

Or just belong between

Seaming together now and then

Every here it seems a home

The thing about being a pastor with a zoo is that it’s mostly caring for people and animals. After learning to read, I became convinced for a while that I had to have a special kind of job, go to a special kind of school, or get paid to do what I wanted to do when I grew up.

But my grandfather had asked me a different kind of question.

Who do you want to be?

Who are you becoming?

These are the questions that invite you to sit down and get to know yourself well enough to offer yourself to someone else. My dad must’ve known college would help with that too.

My dad’s questions helped move me from California’s Bay Area to Missouri for college where I met real BBQ, actual Spring, and a girl named Kristy.

Two years after that, I invited my friend from the playground to help me set up a table on a cliff in Big Sur, California so that I could ask Kristy (the one who now fills this book, and my life full with beauty) the kind of question you can only ask after you have some idea of who you’re becoming.

Little Unfinished Things

You know those days

When you see consistently

Little unfinished things

A tree to grow

A hole to fill

A will to mold

A place to go

A hole to drill

A role to win

A tree to trim

A friend to make

A hand to hold

A child to chase

A place to be

A hand to give

A life to live

A book to read

And other little unfinished things

Spring Keeps Asking This Question: Who Are You Becoming?

Jason Inman

Kristy Inman

Spring Keeps Asking This Question: Who Are You Becoming?

Jason Inman

Kristy Inman

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