Listen:
There is a man named Jay Edleman, and for about thirty years he has made his living convincing enormous and temperamental machines to do useful things. This is harder than it sounds. Computers are like the weather and the government and the human heart — vast, indifferent systems that mostly do what they want. He spends his days coaxing them toward order anyway. He is a project manager, which means he is professionally responsible for outcomes he cannot personally command. If that strikes you as a decent working definition of being alive — well. He noticed that too.
Here are some other true things about him.
He is a photographer. He walks around cities with a small camera and keeps pictures of strangers and light and ordinary passing moments that nobody else thought were worth saving. He does this under the name The Lyrical Wanderer, which is a fancy way of saying: a man paying attention.
He is a drummer. He sits in the dark part of the theater, down below the stage, where the audience never looks, and he keeps time so that other people can sing. You can learn a great deal from a man who chooses the pit.
He is a writer, which is the most foolish of his occupations and probably the most honest one. For a while he wrote only about God — or rather, about the enormous God-shaped silence where an answer is supposed to be. He comes at it sideways, in the old apophatic manner, which is a ten-dollar word meaning he describes the thing by admitting what it isn't. He does his believing, when he can manage it, in the neighborhood of the Quakers and the old mystics, alongside a stubborn hope called Process Theology — the idea that even God might not be finished yet. It is a good thing to hope.
For a long time this website was only that: the quiet, unanswerable questions. But a person is not one department. A person is a whole confusing bundle, and pretending otherwise is a small daily lie that gets tiring to keep telling.
So The Rope has gotten bigger. Now it holds all of him — the work and the wandering and the drumming and the doubt, and the essays that come from living in the middle of all of it at once. The profession and the questions turn out not to be separate rooms. They never were.
The Rope is named for what a rope is for. You throw it to somebody who has drifted out a little too far. You hold onto it when the ground stops being sure. This place is for the quietly unmoored, and Jay would be the first to admit he is one of them.
He lives in Ohio with a wife who understands him and two dogs who do not. That is more than most people get.
Welcome. Grab hold.