Lots of Adventures

After being in kind of an adventure slump over the fall and winter, we've been out exploring again.

Marriage Retreat in Costa Mesa (April 3-5)
Our very last Talbot marriage retreat. They are held at the Ayres Hotel in Costa Mesa (ayreshotel.com). If you visit the website, you can see these are some pretty upscale accomdations. Obviously these retreats are heavily subsidized for which we are incredibly grateful. These have made for fabulous weekend getaways.

Disney Hall (April 10)
Our dear California relation, Don & Connie gave me tickets to see Esa-Pekka Salonen conduct the LA Philharmonic at Disney Hall for my graduation present. Of course, I invited Brandon to go with me. It was an outstanding experience all the way around. The building itself is an architectural gem and the music was captivating (well except for the super modern opening piece, which was a bit hard to engage with). It was also a celebration of Esa-Pekka and his career with the LA Phil as he was soon retiring to compose full time. After the concert, we enjoyed strolling through downtown, had lunch, and returned home on the commuter train. It was a lovely day!







San Diego (April 11)



Our friends Tim and Ali are both University of California, San Diego alumni, so they were happy to show us around their old stomping grounds. We started with breakfast at Pipes (www.pipescafe.com) where you can get a heap of tasty breakfast delight for cheap. The portions are so big that we had to share and were still full. We also had our first mexican mochas, which are mochas with some bonus spices in them--tasty! Then we hiked around on the cliffs that afforded some of the best views in San Diego. Somebody had apparently written me a message. They also showed us around to several other sites/sights including Balboa Park, a wall that need climbing, and this place where the seals like to sun themselves:









Santa Barbara (April 25)
We had big plans for this trip. We thought we would start off at the Botanical Gardens then go to the Mission and finish up at the Art Museum. Oh yeah, and have a nice seafood dinner on the pier. Well we got to the Botanical Garden and decided we wanted to spend the day there. It was beautiful. It had a small redwood grove that smelled heavenly, a stream, meadows of wildflowers, strange and interesting cacti, among many other natural, flowery type treasures. Living in the dense city this kind of place seems so mythical and far away, so different than our daily reality. We eventually made it down to the pier and enjoyed a cornicopia of seafood while enjoying our oceanview.













Dana Point: Capistrano Surfside Inn May 1-3
Don and Connie blessed us again with the opportunity to spend the weekend in their timeshare since they were only staying during the week. We were right across the street from the ocean. There happened to be a convenient walk over right in front of our place, so we didn't even have to fight traffic to get to the beach. On saturday we borrowed the Inn's bikes and tooled around the wharf in Dana Point. I'm pretty sure that was Brandon's favorite part. I enjoyed it too, but I also loved reading beachside. It was so good to relax together before the end of school craziness began. Sunday we took PCH up the coast and had lunch at one of our favorite places the Beachcomber. After that it was on to our friend Ali's birthday party at Huntington Beach. I don't know if you were counting, but that was three beaches in one day: Capistrano, Crystal Cove, and Huntington. This is one of the really cool part about living in SoCal.

Our Honeymoon Slideshow

Here at last are our honeymoon pictures. We've added little captions to them all to walk you through our adventures. Enjoy.



Here's a link to the pictures themselves:

Honeymoon Cruise Winter 2007

Reflections: Year One

Here's a snapshot of the last year: getting married, moving across the country while simultaneously separating from my family for the first time (with parents who were not yet prepared to release me); a desperate job search and it's subsequent victory; adjusting to a new and foriegn culture; emotionally supporting a wife in a very intensive grad program; trying to connect with a whole new set of friends and find a support network while trying to maintain at least some ties from the old; dealing with some health issues that are fairly intrusive into not only my quality of life but now also my wife's...Here's a cartoon I found that pretty much sums up a lot of life over the past year.



Things are starting to settle down though.

I'm currently working at the Doheny Eye Institute. I'm currently helping to develop algorithms to help interpret retinal images. The job can be pretty fun, and if we're successful, we will end up helping to save quite a lot of people from losing their vision.

Married life can also be pretty fun. We've gone on a number of adventures around LA. There is so much to do here. This weekend we went to see "The Taming of the Shrew" in park. We had a picnic while we watched the performance. It was peaceful and grand. We are starting to have a lot of fun at the beach. We've tried surfing on longboards, and bodysurfing--both of which are a blast. We have a lot of fun together. I like being married to Desiree. We are a good match, and life is so promising together. I am a better person for it.

When we were dating we took a "pre-marriage" class our church offered. We had extensive pre-marriage counseling. We read books and talked to others so we were not unprepared when our marriage was strained with our rather intense number of substantial transitions. Calling marriage hard seems cliche and not exactly accurate. More to the point, transitions are hard. Poor health is hard. Actually seeing someone, and being in a state to see them when they need to be seen, is hard. Asking for what you want is hard. Confrontation is hard. Being present to someone is hard. The articulation of feelings and the "deep waters" of my heart is hard. Looking at the painful things I am so much better at hiding and ignoring is hard. Looking at the painful things in my wife's life is hard. But in the end, it was our ability to see and connect with one another on such a deep level that led us together, so there is a certain joy in all this hardness, which makes married life so good.

Dez's program has really helped make sense of a lot of the messy stuff that has been in our lives for quite some time. Her program is "Spiritual Formation & Soul Care", which, on the outset, sounds perhaps a little fluffy. The program was developed by a guy named John Coe, who spent 18 some years in graduate education, and earned numerous degrees in philosophy and theology, and then spent a number of years teaching at a school of psychology. All this is to say, he's created a very fascinating program that seems very historically and theologically grounded in a topic all but forgotten by the evangelical world I was birthed from.

This idea of spiritual formation, then, is taking a closer look at how exactly a believer grows and develops over time. At First Free, my old church, this was a very simple model...You are saved...you learn the staples of reading your bible, worship and prayer...you learn a lot of theology...you serve the church. And that, really, is the end of the line. Anything after is either more service or more theology. The "deer panting for water" and the subsequent "living streams" are just sort of circumstantially magical feelings we are to embrace when present and stoically endure when absent. The result of such--what I'll call isolated spirituality--is the unfortunate stereotypical Christian that has so much knowledge yet remains so immature--not only in a spiritual sense but in a holistic sense. One of the talks I've heard Coe give is entitled "Why do we sin when we know so much?", and it is a fascinating look at the mechanisms that cause us to behave in certain ways despite our best efforts. These mechanisms live in what Coe calls the "hidden heart", and his basic premise is that the extent to which we don't know our hidden hearts is the extent to which we have no control over our undesired behaviors.

Spiritual formation, then, looks more carefully at this process, with the aim of helping people open up to the way the Spirit would grow and mature us--not in theology or service alone, but as whole people--as messy as we can be. And, not unlike many things in nature, there are certain growth patterns that can be observed and studied. But perhaps the most fundamental concept is a very old idea summed up by John Calvin..."There is no knowledge of God without knowledge of self...there is no knowledge of self without knowledge of God". The basic journey then is the Holy Spirit leading us into the parts of ourselves we'd rather not see--and yet when we are able to look, God is there, waiting for us.

We talk a lot about having "a relationship with Jesus", but I feel I am only now discovering just what exactly relationship is. Marriage is a good teacher. Having found safety in my wife, it is easier to accept the safety offered by God. Having begun to accept the truths about myself reflected back to me by my wife (who serves so often as a mirror), I have allowed God to enter parts of my soul previously dormant. The program has given us both language to describe some of the process, which has been especially helpful for me since I am so fearful of it.

The largest realization I have had since moving out here is perhaps the awe of how dreadfully small my world has been, at every edge and corner. There is a certain directionless though substantial anger at this felt imprisonment, along with a certain lostness at the size of my new world. But there is life, too, as the long oppressed explorer is unshackled. Like the Israelites upon their release from Egypt, a part of me wishes to return to the old world I know so well--it is perhaps easier than standing straight when my back is so used to my defeated slouch. One of the larger questions on my mind is how to relate to that old world. Then, perhaps it was never the world that changed at all...only me. And perhaps when I say world I mean the old shoes I used to wear, as opposed to the new shoes I wear as man, husband, and lover. Maybe I mean both. I do not know yet.

Another big development in life lately is my health. Some of you may recall my difficulties sleeping. It has put a large burden on our marriage. My wife was a very good sleeper till I came around. Once we had health insurance I went to see a doctor about it, who referred me to a specialist. The saga has gone on all summer, but at last it seems to have come to a point--I have been diagnosed with obstructive sleep apnea. The current solution is very effective I'm told, and involves sleeping with a mask over my face connected to a CPAP machine. Like, perhaps, Darth Vader. I'm not terribly excited about that. Then again--the thought of sleeping through the night is profoundly joyous.

The time I have to myself I spend writing and drawing in my sketchbook. I journal. I am designing and building a somewhat elaborate board game to humor projectless hands. Poetry visits from time to time as I try to articulate various irrationalities and feelings. (Sample my latest below.) But it is difficult to think I have something to offer at this junction in the way of art or writing. When one's world is small it is easy to become master of it, and once a master it is easy enough to write about it. But now...I feel as if I know nothing. And if I wrote about anything it would surely be obsolete in a months time. Rest assured the urge is there and ever present for large grandious projects, but currently such fruit is awaiting thicker branches to grow upon. My immediate plan is to write and create as needed to grow into this new and larger world.


Voyage's Dawn
by Brandon Weaver
7.7.07

Songs and tales and gestured faces
Ships and swords and preparations

Sails and seas and unseen shores
Sun and stars and sturdy oars

Storms and waves and splintered wood
Snakes and squids and siren's 'hood

Spears and knives and wounded breast
Sweat and blood and hunger's test

Gold and gems and journey's quest
Life and death and questions wrest

Seed and hull and shedding skin
Soul and sprout and to begin

A Wedding and John Wayne

This weekend, Brandon and I went the wedding of Melissa, one of my friends from school, to Raphael, one of our neighbors here in grad housing. I am excited to have Melissa be my neighbor, but that means we're not the newest newlyweds on the block anymore. Oh well!

It feels good to have some time and distance between us and all the drama proceeding our own wedding back in August. As I watched Melissa get ready for her big day this last week, I couldn't help but relive the days prior to my own stint as a bride. Those days are so full of people and preparations and parties. And that is the perfect recipe for drama of all kinds--I know all you once-brides are nodding your head in agreement right now.

It feels good to be down to the business of living our lives together. Don't get me wrong, we enjoyed our wedding, especially the ceremony, but it is so nice to settle into couplehood. We've had a unique opportunity to do that out here in LA, away from the pressures and expectations of family and friends (not that we don't miss them terribly). Here we are free to discover our own path, to figure out what it means for us to be one. It reminds me of one of my favorite scenes from the movie McClintock, a John Wayne classic and a Wohlert family favorite. In the scene John Wayne's character is sharing a fatherly moment with his daughter trying to explain one of life's beautiful mysteries:

"There's something I ought to tell you, I guess now's as good a time
as any. You're gonna have every young buck West of the Missouri around
here trying to marry you. Mostly because you're a handsome filly, but
partly cause I own everything in this country from here to there. And
they'll think your gonna inherit it. Well, your not. I'm going to
leave most of it, well, to the nation, really, for a park, where no
lumber mill, can cut down all the trees for houses with leaky roofs.
Nobody will kill all the beaver for hats for dudes. Or murder the
buffalo for robes.

"What I'm gonna give you is a 500 cow spread on the upper Green River.
While that might not seem like much, that's more than we had, your
mother and I. Some folks are gonna say I'm doing all this so I can sit
up in the hereafter and look down on a park named after me. Or that I
was disappointed in you, didn't want you to get all that money. But
the real reason, Becky, is because I love you, and I want you and some
young man to have what I had. Because all the gold in the United
States Treasury and all the harp music in heaven can't equal what
happens between a man and a woman, with all that growing together. I
can't explain it any better than that."

Our Story: Summery

For those of you who know either myself (Brandon Weaver) or Desiree (formally Desiree Wohlert), let me begin by saying that this has been a very busy year for us. We have been running the gauntlet since January.

In summery, we realized we had a rare friendship, the soul level kind—the kind that great marriages are based on. So this past January we started "officially" dating. Neither of us is the type to take things lightly so about March we took the premarriage class at our church and began the counseling to really consider if we should take the next step toward marriage. In June Dez received a letter saying she had been accepted to the Masters of Spiritual Formation and Soul Care program at the Institute for Spiritual Formation at Biola University in Los Angeles.

We were faced with some very big decisions. We weighed our options and got a lot of counsel from many different people, and after much prayer and seeking of God we decided to get married and move to Los Angeles. Even harder than the decision was the execution, however, as we faced many trials along the way, not the least of which was the short amount of time between our decision and our wedding and the immediate cross-country move afterwards.

August was "crunch" month: we got married on the 13th, left for L.A. on the 17th, arrived on the 20th, and Dez started classes on the 24th. September was pretty much "crash" month. I accepted a job in October, and will start in November. In the meantime, I've been working on some freelance gigs I've picked up from Craig's List and else where.

We've spent a lot of time connecting with each other, with ourselves, and with God. We've spent some time exploring this massive city we now live in, and a lot of time just recovering from a very busy year.