tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14483886399073470082024-03-05T16:31:58.973-05:00Letters to the Epiphany ClubDiscovery...the miracles in ordinary time.Unknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger22125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1448388639907347008.post-69420730026758947952014-01-28T06:56:00.001-05:002014-01-28T06:56:39.456-05:00Heaven is Now<br />
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<i>At every moment, something sacred is at stake.</i> </div>
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— Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel</div>
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On Christmas Day, my husband and I sat down with coffee and Christmas quiche to watch a foreign film. It is our annual tradition. This year's movie selection was the film <i><a href="http://www.sigur-ros.co.uk/band/disco/heima.php" target="_blank">Heima</a></i> by Sigur Ros, given to me by my spiritual little brother, Chad. In the film, there is an urgency throughout to celebrate the origin and locale of a people with moments of intimacy through hope-filled song. Lush Icelandic landscapes are mixed with the stark beauty of its untouched nature while the band plays small concerts for their people in town halls, homes, backyards, fields and even an abandoned cavernous factory in their homeland. The soul soaring melodies interplay with faces, villages, vegetation, water and stone— the heavenliness of navigating the ordinary. <i>Heima</i> means home. </div>
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I grew up with a option of home that was in stark contrast to my own. The notion comprised of one day having my own mansion where Jesus and I would live forever listening to heavenly choirs sing. It was supposed to be my goal, my reward for this life. I don't believe in this kind of afterlife anymore. The end goal is no longer the end for me. </div>
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<i>Afterlife, oh my God, what an awful word*<span style="font-family: 'Lucida Grande';"><br />
</span>After all the breath and the dirt<span style="font-family: 'Lucida Grande';"><br />
</span>And the fires that burn<span style="font-family: 'Lucida Grande';"><br />
</span>And after all this time<span style="font-family: 'Lucida Grande';"><br />
</span>And after all the ambulances go<span style="font-family: 'Lucida Grande';"><br />
</span>And after all the hangers-on are done<span style="font-family: 'Lucida Grande';"><br />
</span>Hanging on to the dead lights<span style="font-family: 'Lucida Grande';"><br />
</span>Of the afterglow</i></div>
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<i>I've gotta know<span style="font-family: 'Lucida Grande';"><br />
</span>Can we work it out?<span style="font-family: 'Lucida Grande';"><br />
</span>We scream and shout 'till we work it out<span style="font-family: 'Lucida Grande';"><br />
</span>Can we just work it out?</i></div>
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Recently a friend of mine told me of the difficulty she was having with her family. Pulling away from her charismatic, pentecostal background, she has found a new home and a new calling in mainline, reformed denomination. She has also found the liberty think deeply about her faith. She has recovered the freedom to sip the forbidden fruit of wine that Jesus himself gave to his disciples. She is once again enamored with the elasticity of love and her devotion to God. Her immediate family has difficulty with this abandon. Some members have been quick in pinpointing flaws in her doctrine and trouble with what she allows to drink at her table, hanging onto their dogma and American Christian culture at the expense of scarce moments of family love. My heart went out to her. This happens too frequently within the Body of Christ. One person finds liberation and identity while others press love back into an inferior place by gripping tightly to passing bits of broken light.</div>
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Thomas Merton says that divisions tear at the union of the Body of Christ, and that this egotism dismembers His Body. They remain hidden from their unity in Him through this choice of the ego and this unity remains imprisoned until their love has been refined. My friend needed to hear what Merton said next:</div>
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<i>As long as we are on earth, the love that unites us will bring us suffering by our very contact with another, because this love is the resetting of the Body of broken bones. Even saints cannot live with saints on this earth without some anguish, without some pain at the differences that come between them…But love by its acceptance of the pain of reunion, begins to heal all wounds</i>. </div>
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— Thomas Merton, <i><u>New Seeds of Contemplation</u></i></div>
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At least in her pain over her family, she is united in the love that heals us all.</div>
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<i>Afterlife, I think I saw what happens next<span style="font-family: 'Lucida Grande';"><br />
</span>It was just a glimpse of you<span style="font-family: 'Lucida Grande';"><br />
</span>Like looking through a window<span style="font-family: 'Lucida Grande';"><br />
</span>Or a shallow sea<span style="font-family: 'Lucida Grande';"><br />
</span>Could you see me?<span style="font-family: 'Lucida Grande';"><br />
</span>And after all this time<span style="font-family: 'Lucida Grande';"><br />
</span>It's like nothing else we used to know<span style="font-family: 'Lucida Grande';"><br />
</span>After all the hangers-on are done<span style="font-family: 'Lucida Grande';"><br />
</span>Hanging on to the dead lights<span style="font-family: 'Lucida Grande';"><br />
</span>Of the afterglow</i></div>
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<i>I've gotta know</i></div>
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<i>Can we work it out?</i></div>
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There are so many things I don't believe anymore. My view of heaven has changed since I was a child. When I was a child, I spoke and ate like a child. I can't tolerate the milk of my American Christian culture anymore. The dogma is too fear-filled to to swallow. Something more substantial is required of me now. To me, heaven is the perpetuation of the moment of being truly present, and the expanse we will feel inside forever because of so much love. This will go on and on and on and because of this life, there will never be such a thing as afterlife. If I am truly present, present with the love that brought Christ to the cross, I can pull heaven into this moment and live in eternity now.</div>
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<i>But you say<span style="font-family: 'Lucida Grande';"><br />
</span>Oh, when love is gone<span style="font-family: 'Lucida Grande';"><br />
</span>Where does it go?<span style="font-family: 'Lucida Grande';"><br />
</span>And you say<span style="font-family: 'Lucida Grande';"><br />
</span>Oh, when love is gone<span style="font-family: 'Lucida Grande';"><br />
</span>Where does it go?<span style="font-family: 'Lucida Grande';"><br />
</span>And where do we go?<span style="font-family: 'Lucida Grande';"><br />
</span>Where do we go?</i></div>
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<i>…And after this<span style="font-family: 'Lucida Grande';"><br />
</span>Can it last another night?<span style="font-family: 'Lucida Grande';"><br />
</span>After all the bad advice<span style="font-family: 'Lucida Grande';"><br />
</span>Had nothing at all to do with life</i></div>
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Through our holding to dogma, language that perpetuates separation and contortions of doctrine through nationalism, Heaven begs the question, "Where are we with one another?" If all of the elasticity the love of heaven has for us is available to us now, why do we chose to give each other Hell? Why do we paint each other into dark corners of exegesis and apostasy? Why do we keep love captive?</div>
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There always has been life. There will be no end to it. This is the afterlife right now. We can stretch love to wrap around our the brokenness and disconnection of our Body. </div>
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We can let the eternity transform this present moment. Heaven is now.</div>
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<i>Is this the afterlife?<span style="font-family: 'Lucida Grande';"><br />
</span>It's just an afterlife, with you</i></div>
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<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EcKinnMXuKg" target="_blank">*<i>Afterlife</i> from <i>Reflektor</i> by Arcade Fire</a></div>
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1448388639907347008.post-37059417172822438772013-11-12T07:12:00.003-05:002013-11-19T10:53:31.350-05:00When I'm too close to start to fade<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: 12px;">My dad was always one to do things without regard for consequences. I can probably think of at least a dozen things off the top of my head. But he is gone now. What's the good of that.</span><br />
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<i><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Pretty little thing did you feel something*</span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Did you always want me to be something</span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">To mend a broken a heart</span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">From a Devil of shallow nonsense</span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Turned your world upside down</span></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">I believe that anger is the longest stage of loss as it bobs and weaves its way through the traffic of days, always on your tail, appearing a inside or rearview mirror. The week I took myself up north for space and healing, I had been reading how anger has a ripple effect and that one should do what they could to work through it.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">The trips I had been taking north in the weeks prior felt like time travel. I had ridden back into a nostalgia that felt like a bad dream. Everyone had high emotions, from the tiny vulnerable niece who lost her Grandfather, to the one we have not seen since she was a baby and never really knew him, to the one in the middle whose acquaintance with loss began at age five. No one knew exactly what to do and I felt my role thicken in the middle of it all. Family can be a heavy thing that one has to learn to wear lightly. All of your personal history is tied into their stories: the good, the bad and what your thought you were over a long time ago.</span></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Whatever said that it'd mean something</span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Whatever said that it'd mean nothing</span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">And did I look the part</span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">When it's all said and done</span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">When it's all said and done</span></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">The trauma of losing my dad hit me with questions. Why did he recede into the background of life? Why couldn't he have stuck around for me? Or for the grandchildren I haven't given him yet? One of the last times I spoke to him about this he told me that all of this would take too much time.</span></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">But I'm</span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">No good next to Diamonds</span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">When I'm too close to start to fade</span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Are you angry with me now</span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Are you angry cause I'm to blame</span></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">The pain was invasive. In a yoga class I had taken that week, I felt an excruciating tightness around my sternum. It seemed that no matter what I did to open that space, the narrowness was felt, causing tears to mingle with sweat in the steamy room. I quieted myself in child's pose and began to sob, breathing my way through ache inside. There was enough of talking. There was enough of seething and tears and feeling abandoned.</span></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Never wanna hide the truth from you</span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Just hang my head what I put you through</span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">I wasn't good enough</span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">When what's done is done love</span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">When it's all said and done</span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Cause I fall away</span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Further than I ever was</span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Further than I ever was</span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Further than I ever was</span></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">I had arrived in the bay town just before sundown, driving behind the grocery store to the lookout point. Climbing down the steep incline towards the water, I notice there was a jetty made of thousands of rocks, each gray and smooth. They had a tactile dissonance as walked over them, like handfuls of crushed chalk. Each spoke to me, saying that there will always be reasons to be angry at my father, yet it is important for them to be in my path. Let them be heard and observed, for me to pass over them and not linger picking the heavy things, to let them lead me to water. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">When I arrived at the water's edge, I put a cold handful of the ebbing lake Michigan into mouth. It was clean and sweet and pure. I looked up to see the evening sun cresting into it, orange and broad, witnessing the mystical, enveloping light. I felt its heat, a light-filled embrace from beyond.</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFc0bud7oF2u2a2ayGQnJAj3XwumH12PLRqO5uDUJJeSptKi6sY3HwQap6LNz6Q8T3OkZ1WswhqHfhT_BmedHTv56ni0F-6H0GHa_fcvwluwTCiyLvLHHO12vevsX1Sbz5GEyJz2880mY/s1600/2013-09-14+19.59.46.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFc0bud7oF2u2a2ayGQnJAj3XwumH12PLRqO5uDUJJeSptKi6sY3HwQap6LNz6Q8T3OkZ1WswhqHfhT_BmedHTv56ni0F-6H0GHa_fcvwluwTCiyLvLHHO12vevsX1Sbz5GEyJz2880mY/s1600/2013-09-14+19.59.46.jpg" width="320" /></span></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">*<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKTAXkpGceQ" target="_blank">The Boxer Rebellion - Diamonds</a></span></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1448388639907347008.post-25438119664162579022012-10-11T13:32:00.004-04:002012-10-12T07:09:26.232-04:00Move like smoke in my eyes<i><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">"We are utterly open with no one in the end — not mother and father, not wife or husband, not lover, not child, not friend. We open windows to each other but we live alone in the house of the heart. Perhaps we must." </span></i><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">— Brian Doyle</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">A few summers ago I planted two types of lavender in the front yard. I did not know they were two different varieties but they have some definite differences. One is hardy, with a wood-like stem, gray-green leaves and indigo flowers. The other is more delicate, the flowers are light blue with a trace of mauve and the branches are a light blue-green. This summer we packed the front porch bench up for Habitat and replaced it with adirondack chairs and a small table where we could have the occasional meal and escape from the heat of the house. Despite the harassment of our city blue bottle flies, we enjoyed some lovely, quiet evening suppers by sunset out on the porch. We tasted the honey-licorice, dewdrop-sized flavor of basil blossoms. The sage's downey leaves grew longer than our hands. We let the overgrown lemongrass tickle our arms and legs and watched our newly-planted Cary Grant rosebush blossom into handfuls of flame. We became transfixed by the obsession of the bees with the fragrant lavender. </span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJ6d2QD9ekBCQfP3lzTN7XBtmgXmiGfRzgkRR4Vq3zuKCaaT8pWBmqX2JiQh50ioeZ9rgz3IvT4gLmafq07bgnRrXYjdq2KQ7-XMq6znG7R9tVhqcBEtwj4E7zUD-RZH3FLVhhsKO6pfw/s1600/beeblog.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="156" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJ6d2QD9ekBCQfP3lzTN7XBtmgXmiGfRzgkRR4Vq3zuKCaaT8pWBmqX2JiQh50ioeZ9rgz3IvT4gLmafq07bgnRrXYjdq2KQ7-XMq6znG7R9tVhqcBEtwj4E7zUD-RZH3FLVhhsKO6pfw/s200/beeblog.jpg" width="200" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i><span style="font-size: xx-small;">© Michael Christy</span></i></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">The bees were meticulous with their attention to every tiny bloom, going over each two or three times, possibly more. It was not just a preoccupation with not just fragrance but an affection for the color purple. We found them doting over the irises we inherited from a couple at church and navigating the piney centers of our purple cone flowers. My husband tried to capture this, yet all lens speed was lost to the brisk movement of their wings.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">I was also captivated by the source of the bees as this is a damaged <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detroit" target="_blank"><b>city</b></a> encased in secrets bigger than bees. I imagined clandestine bee-keepers with make-shift netted hats and smokers made from oil cans embedded with incense embers harvesting cloudy, evening sun-colored jars of liquid gold. And yet my mind new that it was more likely these bees had found the slats behind crumbling plaster in a wall of a decomposing domicile in which to dwell and do their business. Nevertheless, each bee was engaging in a solitary life and journey, no matter how humble from flower to hive in this broken-hearted city that would be.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">I have been attempting to live a better <a href="http://mysubplot.com/user/YeshuYogini/" target="_blank"><b>story</b></a> lately. I feel as if I have been misplacing this story all year along the way like the laying down of keys or a wallet or the most recent issue of <i>The Newyorker</i> that appears like a miracle in our mailbox. I let my story become obscured in the home to flower goings-on of my life. </span><br />
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<i><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Callin' it quits</span></i><br />
<i><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">You think this is easy</span></i><br />
<i><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">I swear I heard you callin' the jury</span></i><br />
<i><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Call it a catch</span></i><br />
<i><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Without any strings attached…*</span></i><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">I've done it to myself, I know it is true. The capacity to self destruct is within us all. I marked the days with have-to-do's and television numbing. I awoke for several weeks in a row making myself go through the motions while still attempting to eek out the meaning of it all. Perhaps I was waiting on a sign that things were changing. I didn't see the way out of work situations, friendships gone stale or sour, a new shyness in social interactions nor the introspection of inexpressible grief and felt terribly alone. </span><br />
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<i><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">I call it an ace</span></i><br />
<i><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">You've gotta believe me</span></i><br />
<i><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">But you're callin' me names not to my face</span></i><br />
<i><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">But you're calling my spade a bluff</span></i><br />
<i><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Callin' it love</span></i><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Someone once said that we do not create change, true change, in our lives until we are scared enough to do it. What convinces us we can handle so much fear and call it by another name? Why does memory wound us when we let it? What does the re-mechanization of interal forces require? How do humanize the most broken bits of ourselves?</span><br />
<div style="min-height: 16px;">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></div>
<i><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Well I'm lookin' for a soft place to land</span></i><br />
<i><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">The forest floor</span></i><br />
<i><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">The palms of your hands</span></i><br />
<i><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">I'm lookin' for a soft place to land</span></i><br />
<br />
I had a driveway moment this summer during a <a href="http://www.prx.org/pieces/81047-the-vinyl-cafe-august-12th-2012-honey" target="_blank"><b>story</b></a> about an old Italian man, hallowed rosemary bushes, two young boys and a hive of bees. The old man, enchanted by the rich, clean taste of rosemary honey that brought him back to his dusty hometown an ocean away, charged the two boys with tracking the bees in his rosemary back to their hive so they could share the bounty of honey. He instructed the boys in their investigation and taught them how to use his great-grandfather's smoker to quell the bees. <i>"Back and forth, back and forth," he said as they snuck up on the shed.... "Slowly... slower... move like the priest with the thurible... let the smoke do the work."</i><br />
<br />
If you have ever been in a church where incense is used, you have felt as if something profoundly ancient is settling over you. There is also a sense of danger as the censer is swung, the possibility of hot ash and ember spilling from the end of a chain. Yet you settle in, let smoke fill your eyes and the spaces between your clothes and hair, feeling overtaken by this expression of the Holy Spirit, breathing it in. I vaguely remember the last time this happened to me, yet last autumn I let the sage and sweetgrass smolder of a smudge pass over me at a family member's funeral and felt the Spirit soothe me.<br />
<br />
I have so many questions for which I need the Spirit's soothing. This summer I spent a great deal of time at my make-shift church on Lake Michigan wandering along tide and Petoskey stones, seeking the rebirth of an inner life. Within I am like the bee, following the scented wind from hive to flower, yet feeling vulnerable to myself in this solitude. I long to please the calling wind and am eased by the smoke that overtakes me.<br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><i>Call me in the night</i></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><i>I don't mind, I don't care, I can't sleep,</i></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><i>Call me in the day, in my car, on my way</i></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><i>Call me by name, all I want is to hear you say</i></span><br />
<br />
A teacher of mine once told me that my vulnerability is my strength. I am learning how my story is a story of vulnerability. I am looking for a soft place to land. I believe the Spirit is too.<br />
<div style="min-height: 16px;">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><i><br /></i></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><i>Well I'm lookin' for a soft place to land</i></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><i>The forest floor</i></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><i>The palms of your hands</i></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><i><br /></i></span>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><i>I'm lookin' for a soft place to land</i></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><i>The forest floor</i></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><i>The palms of your hands, palms of your hands </i></span><br />
<div style="min-height: 16px;">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 10px;">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><b>* </b><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3vV1J3cQnj0" style="font-weight: bold;" target="_blank">A Soft Place To Land</a><b> </b>by </span><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Kathleen Edwards</span></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1448388639907347008.post-44663239105796114692011-12-30T07:40:00.000-05:002012-01-06T07:05:07.277-05:00See our love turn to rust<style>@font-face { font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 10pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }table.MsoNormalTable { font-size: 10pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; </style><span style=";font-family:Times;font-size:85%;" ><i>We can't fix what's broken so let's leave it here and walk on, </i></span>
<span style="font-size:85%;"><br /></span><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 20pt; line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"> <i>I'll be right behind you</i></span><span style="font-size:85%;">
<br /><i>Love changes everything</i></span><span style="font-size:85%;">
<br /><i>I'm not sorry we loved,<br />but I hope I didn’t keep you too long<br /></i></span><span style="font-size:85%;">
<i>We're not experts</i></span><span style="font-size:85%;">
<br /><i>We are believers, ministers of silence<br /></i></span><span style="font-size:85%;">
<i>Let no man pull us under doubt<br /></i></span><span style="font-size:85%;">
<i>I'll always open my hands to you<br /></i></span><span style="font-size:85%;">
<i>I'll be right behind you</i></span><span style="font-size:85%;">
<br />— <a href="http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1595512395"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 236);">Sam Phillips</span></a>, Love Changes Everything</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;">Sometime last summer I was in the car traveling to my hometown with my husband.<span style=""> </span>It was one of those moments when you witness the symmetry of things. Calling this serendipity or coincidence does not describe it. Earlier that day I had a hankering to listen to one of the bands that created my musical identity both artistically and spiritually. The days of self-discovery and my first brushes with spiritual intimacy surround the early work of U2. There are others who would like to deny they had the same encounter with the band considering the confusion of their overwhelming popularity. Yet when Larry begins the first cadence on <span style="font-style: italic;">Sunday Bloody Sunday</span>, my first brushes with social justice re-awaken. <span style="font-style: italic;">Pride (In the Name of Love)</span> taught me that I should be vocal about spiritual heroes in defiance of those leaders that embarrassed me when it came to my faith. <span style="font-style: italic;">Bad</span> was a song that taught me yes, there are some things that are too difficult to talk or do anything about. And <span style="font-style: italic;">40</span> was the first time I had heard a Psalm sung proudly outside of the church.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><br /></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;">My own spiritual landscape is such a varied place. Love was as pure as the thin air on mountain tops that seem so far behind me, never to be approached again. There are lush forests I tucked into out of fascination with the green then became horribly lost in the darkness there. There are lakes where I have sat near to ebbs and flows and into which I was lured to play. There are overwhelming fields of harvest so terribly mangled by religion where I do not know where to begin and sometimes turn away from. Streets and streets of grit and despair are there, where I have to keep remembrance of those the mountain tops.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><br /></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><i>I want to run </i></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><i>I want to hide </i></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><i>I want to tear down the walls </i></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><i>That hold me inside </i></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><i>I want to reach out </i></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><i>And touch the flame </i></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><i>Where the streets have no name*</i></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><i><br /></i></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;">The moment I had in the car that day was one of deep listening. A rather long song, <span style="font-style: italic;">Where the Streets Have No Name</span>, was playing as I was reading a short biography on St. John of the Cross. The connection I had with the music and the difficult story of St. John's desire to create heaven on earth grabbed my attention.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><br /></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><i>I want to feel sunlight on my face </i></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><i>I see the dust cloud disappear </i></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><i>Without a trace </i></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><i>I want to take shelter from the poison rain </i></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><i>Where the streets have no name<br /></i></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><i><br /></i></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;">St. John was a reformer when reformation was not cool in 16th century Spain. He tried desperately to reform the Carmelite Order, and made a female friend with whom he shared the spiritual practices of solitude and silence, St. Teresa de Avila. Together they founded many ministries and monasteries, making themselves active in the political and religious busyness of the time. They ended up being the first barefoot Jesus people and created the Discalced (shoeless) Carmelite order.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><br /></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><i> </i></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><i>Where the streets have no name </i></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><i>Where the streets have no name </i></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><i>We're still building </i></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><i>Then burning down love </i></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><i>Burning down love </i></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><i>And when I go there </i></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><i>I go there with you </i></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><i>It's all I can do</i></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><i><br /></i></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;">John was captured by the shoed Carmelites, beaten and imprisoned. They had launched a counter-reformation against his values and the shoeless ones. Being it Spain in the 16th century, John was also tortured. He spent nine months in a cell not much larger than his body. A friar had been slipping paper into his cell, and during this time of humiliating confinement he wrote the poetry that became his Spiritual Canticle. After months of muscle atrophy, malnutrition and darkness, he escaped by pulling the hinges of his cell door. He returned to his friend and spiritual sister Teresa to continue their ministry of shoelessness and reformation.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><br /></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><i>The city's aflood </i></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><i>And our love turns to rust </i></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><i>We're beaten and blown by the wind </i></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><i>Trampled in dust </i></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><i>I'll show you a place </i></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><i>High on a desert plain </i></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><i>Where the streets have no name</i></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><i><br /></i></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;">St. John was known to have taken his young monk brothers on walks along the Spanish plains to tell them about wonders of nature and the glories of heaven. He frequently related the beauty of the earth to glories of heaven to his charges, walking barefoot through the fields with his charges. He had a deep desire for heaven.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><br /></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;">He also had a habit of silence. He would spend long periods of time in deep silence to point where he would dive into the darkest parts of the unknown places of God. He dared to confront the silence and found rapturous joy there. It is from these experiences with the most silent darkest place of where his treatise on the dark night of the soul was born.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><br /></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;">He was arrested again a few years later and severely beaten, to the point where he was disabled from injury and sent to a far off monastery where the abbott was told to let him die. Although John's brothers begged the abbott to have mercy on him and get him a doctor, the abbot refused to disobey his authority. John's condition worsened, yet he remained placid, anticipating his place of heavenly splendor. As John was dying, the abbott asked for forgiveness. John forgave him and let go of the place that held him from being with his Divine love.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><br /></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><i>Where the streets have no name </i></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><i>Where the streets have no name </i></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><i>We're still building </i></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><i>Then burning down love </i></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><i>Burning down love </i></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><i>And when I go there </i></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><i>I go there with you </i></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><i>It's all I can do </i></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><i>Our love turns to rust </i></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><i>We're beaten and blown by the wind </i></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><i>Blown by the wind<br /></i></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><i><br /></i></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;">The music and St. John's story married in deep, intricate way within me that day on the road home. It was as if the song was written about him, about a friend who had suffered and passed on. I grieved for him. I knew more about what my faith was worth threw his eyes; those eyes that saw in the silent moments of meditation our resplendent heaven. I felt a little of what his sister-friend Teresa may have felt felt, participating and seeing all of her brother's history making.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><br /></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;">In my life, I admit I have no been able to be St. Teresa to my biological brothers. I have failed, as well as the conflicting voices of godliness that surrounded their upbringing, to help them know the love God has for them. There have been a few friends, male friends, with which I have felt I've been the St. Teresa co-conspirator on their long spiritual journey. We have made many stops along the way. A bookstore in a rusty title city called Flint, a pentecostal church choir, a farm in the middle of a cornfield in Illinois called Cornerstone, a queenly, European city called Cincinnati and a small town with a chapel on a hill in the town square called Tyldesly.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;">This band of brothers has seen relationships that have come and gone, marriages, children and more children. A brother just toured Venice. One is an artist, his dream. Another is a music minister. Another just had his heart pulled wide open by love. And another I found along the roadside, walking alone.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;">This last brother came back to me via a dream I had (about Chinese food in which my husband's cousin Amanda made a cameo) and the search button on Facebook. It has been over a dozen years since we communicated, yet it feels like we are picking up straight from the time when we wrote each other packets of letters that drifted for weeks over the ocean.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><br /></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;">I was impacted not just by the fact that he has produced four children over the years but also deeply affected by that he has lost touch with his faith and left the church. He found himself an absence of hearing from God within, depressed and no longer believing what he was brought up to believe. He bravely walked away not wanting to be a hypocrite, knowing it would affect his family. He couldn't find anyone to help him get past the point<span style=""> </span>in his faith when he want the big MORE. The ones surrounding him by just didn't have the capacity educationally, spiritually or psychologically to facilitate MORE. They were caught up in agendas, prognosis and politics. I feel it is no big wonder that he took the long walk....AWAY. His wings crashed around the cage he was in until he figured out it was easier just not to fly, and not flying fits.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><br /></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;">My brother has grown mentally, as he says, and feels a strong confidence about his life plans. He hopes to find his place again amongst the folds but waits. I find him courageous for taking up the challenge of finding his faith beyond the definition of others, even his own ideals of what that means. Yet I feel as helpless to bring him to any conclusion as I feel in the reawakening of my own biological brothers' faith. I just want to listen and walk along side of my friend as St. Teresa did with John.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><br /></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><i>Oh, and I see love </i></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><i>See our love turn to rust </i></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><i>We're beaten and blown by the wind </i></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><i>Blown by the wind </i></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><i>Oh, when I go there </i></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><i>I go there with you </i></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><i>It's all I can do</i></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><i><br /></i></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><i> </i></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><i>*Where the streets have no name<span style=""> </span>by U2</i></span></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1448388639907347008.post-29629814402669173012011-09-29T07:24:00.000-04:002011-09-30T07:31:03.285-04:00Skimming and sinkingMy fifth anniversary weekend I stood on the shore of Lake Michigan skipping stones into the gray-blue water, feeling the urging and release of small stones lodged in my heart. There were dozens of nameless stones with almosts, mistakes, incomplete and deep burdens etched onto them; formless intentions until joined with rock and water in my letting go.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">You listen to the waves</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">you listen to the throw away</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">All you think I had </span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">all we ever had</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Watch me soon pray</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">the cheap wine takes my fear way</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">I pick up stones and throw them out to sea*</span><br /><br />I was feeling a gentle dip in equanimity that produced a desire for peace, a peace not just for myself to be a better me but also for those who had left the shadow of the Wing I stand under. Was I feeling the loss of their place in my community? Perhaps. Did I believe that they now held a destiny different than mine? No. Yet the loss was there along with a longing with love to please come back.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Lower the wooden boats</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">liar comes and liar goes</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Just watch as I throw all I have vowed to the sea</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Will you meet me?</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Will you meet me?</span><br /><br />There has been this warning rising up within for a long time, tangled and un-articulated. The current modalities of faith have chosen logic over wisdom and politics over potential. Self-inflicted victims of the effects of the Enlightenment and influence of Dante and the American Dream, the kingdom has become a misappropriated place of militancy and strict conformity instead of simply just being a place of dwelling within.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">So why?</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">So why is their heart dead</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">as we skim stones and we sink boats instead</span><br /><br />And those who see this misappropriation feel the hypocrisy can't get past it. Why wouldn't they feel the sinking of their faith? Those who rail against the mainstream find the energy it takes to do so crippling, until waves of cynicism crush what precious left they have. Others float to the surface of grief and stagnation called acedia and just remain there.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">So why?</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">So why is their heart dead</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">as we skim stones and we sink boats instead</span><br /><br />I have never known a time when I did not have faith. I've always been able to intuit the Spirit's leading, not letting the way I feel keep me from the Spirit's undoing me. It is enough for me and I can't imagine it not being enough for anyone else. I have survived the church. I still believe in Mystery. Is that evidence enough for anyone?<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Will you have a go?</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Will you have a go?</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Just take a look at me</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">is it the same world you see?</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Is it the same world you see?</span><br /><br />It is painful to see friends walk away. The language and alchemy of the relationship shifts as they break up with God. The Mystery becomes someone else's mechanics. It is worse than a parting for me because I listen to see its affects happen on disparate levels.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">I look them in the eye</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">They shout in my ear </span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">they shout in my ear</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">they shout in my ear</span><br /><br />Who have we become as a people of faith? In this day of sensitive identities can we draw such vaguely constructed lines to separate sheep from goat? Skin from skin? Bone from bone? Why would we ever want to take on the only job for which God is employed? How can we spew words love and enforce such separation between our brothers?<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">So why?</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">So why is their heart dead</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">as we skim stones and we sink boats instead</span><br /><br />My thrown stones created ripples as they skipped along the Sunday sunset water. The Spirit and I were the only witnesses, who knew what they meant in our kingdom within. The longing remains. Even now my heart whispers, "Come back to me, my kin with tender skin and heart of stone."<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Skin and stones just</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">skin and stones</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">we're sinking boats and </span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">we're sinking boats</span><br /><br />*<a href="http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=you%20tube%20music%20sinking%20boats%20by%20iain%20morrison%E2%80%AC&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CBoQtwIwAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DuAaAt6fDDO8&ei=-FWETqfVO8X20gG53eTbDw&usg=AFQjCNGU76QUC4xKfLJ6P4xqLpQy-xWxZw&cad=rja">Sinking Boats by Iain Morrison <span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">(click to listen)</span></span><br /></a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1448388639907347008.post-84142575768423806752009-08-06T12:48:00.000-04:002011-09-30T07:34:20.249-04:00Sun, Shadows and Facebook Forgiveness<span style="font-style: italic;"><br /><br />I picture you in the sun wondering what went wrong</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">And falling down on your knees asking for sympathy</span> <span style="font-style: italic;"><br />And being caught in between all you wish for and all you seen</span> <span style="font-style: italic;"><br />And trying to find anything you can feel that you can believe in</span>*<br /><br />There are many things that don't work themselves out. For me it at times has been friendships. There is that finality from being dumped by a "boyfriend" which is on one level. On a deeper level for me there is having someone who fills in the shadows punctuating them with humor, love and possessing a personalized platonic soothing no longer speak to you over years. There have been, without making this sound like an autobiographical eulogy, many rays of light in my life that play against one another, infusing me validation and attaching this light to my soul. When one beam drops away, I feel their cold, empty shadow inside sometimes for years.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">May gods love be with you</span> <span style="font-style: italic;"><br />Always</span> <span style="font-style: italic;"><br />May gods love be with you</span><br /><br />I instigated the first one. I had seen this person's tiny electronic pop around on <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0">Facebook</span>, feeling a fuzzy, achy static electricity inside. It had been over two years since I had spoken to the person and I still felt the humiliation of being stood up in a crowded breakfast place downtown, waiting and waiting as I occupied one of two coveted seats—one for me and one for her. I sat. I called. I sat there for over an hour until my mind began to piece together the <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_1">un-returned</span> phone calls and unanswered notes. A week later, giving this person time to call me back, I left an angry, questioning phone message. I didn't understand and the situation became painful to think about. My wedding came and went with no other contact. So after I pressed send on a message of forgiveness to to ease the static inside and give the grief rest, it was a day or two before a custom written apology appeared. And there it was, a wedding invitation to her own.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">I know I would apologize if<br />I could see your eyes</span> <span style="font-style: italic;">cause when you showed me myself<br />I became someone else</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">But I was caught in between all you wish for and all you need</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">I picture you fast asleep</span> <span style="font-style: italic;"><br />A nightmare comes</span> <span style="font-style: italic;"><br />You cant keep awake</span><br /><br />The second apology came out of the blue via a dream. A former co-worker I had been close to in a needs-to-be-forgotten professional life send me a message saying she had a dream about me. She saw us laughing and talking intimately once again and this is how she knew she needed to say she was sorry for abandoning or friendship. Back then we had fallen into a professional spiral of silences and the distance made me not know where I stood with her. There the apology was in my inbox, and I was delighted at her request for forgiveness. All I could do was feel grateful that I was valued and deserving of the request. I had surmised that in the great before I was professionally unfashionable to be friends with and she had shed me in an act of self-preservation. But all that was gone as we exchanged written accounts of how our life is right now.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">May gods love be with you</span> <span style="font-style: italic;"><br />Always</span> <span style="font-style: italic;"><br />May gods love be with you</span><br /><br />I do have one friend that I don't know if things will ever return to that quality of closeness. She penned a breezy note to me inquiring about my family over the message inbox. I was still pained by the past, and although I passed on the events of the past dozen years I ended the return message with an attached honesty that likely did not settle well with her. I have yet to receive a reply but minutes ago I penned this, <span style="font-style: italic;">"I did not expect to feel that emotional in my last message about something that happened so long ago. It appears I still may have some letting go to do. I regret that I may have offended you. I know that the situation was not your fault and that you may have feelings about it, too."</span> And I pressed 'send'.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">'Cause if i find</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"> If i find my own way</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"> How much will i find</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"> If i find</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"> If i find my own way</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"> How much will i find</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"> You </span><br /><br />I miss my friends: the college friend, the best friend from high school, the painter friend in Nashville. There are times I feel the shadows, especially when these friendships are lost in the train wreck before apology meets forgiveness. Perhaps Christ meant that when you forgive someone 77 times, you help them not to experience the place where His spirit has lived mending the hollow spaces and painful wreckage, and help them to experience the joy and peace of letting go.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"> I don't know anymore</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"> What it's for</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"> I'm not even sure</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"> If there is anyone who is in the sun</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"> Will you help me to understand</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"> 'Cause i been caught in between all I wish for and all I need</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"> Maybe you're not even sure what it's for</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"> Any more than me </span><br /><br />I talked to an old friend recently. I told him how embarrassed I was of my own self in the past, when I had lacked the listening skills and lost in my own fearful dealings with control in my life and dolled out advice or direction with my own spin of empathy. I think many people may only view me in one way because of this and that way is that I am harsh, bossy and a bit of a know-it-all. The truth is more like that Bob Dylan lyric,"...I was so much older then." I regret my own potential for mistakes, my own noisy way of elbowing my way into self worth and how it may have distanced me from those I truly value. For those who love me, <span style="font-style: italic;">I thank you for transferring your grace</span>. For those whom are still feeling my stinging ways, I hope our story is yet undone.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">May God's love be with you</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"> Always</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"> May God's love be with you </span><br /><br /><br />* <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uNF2cbW37mo"><span style="font-style: italic;">In the Sun</span> by Joseph Arthur <span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">(click to listen)</span></span><br /></a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1448388639907347008.post-91519841547662443552009-07-10T15:53:00.000-04:002011-09-30T07:36:33.272-04:00Black Metals and Pearls<span style="font-style: italic;"><br />Come on children</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"> You're acting like children</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"> Every generation thinks</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"> its the end of the world</span><br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"> And all ya fat followers</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"> Get fit fast</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"> Every generation thinks it's the last</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"> thinks its the end of the world*</span><br /><br /><style> .hmmessage P {margin:0px;padding:0px;} body.hmmessage {font-size:10pt;font-family:Verdana;} </style> Certainly the hard times have been magnified and our politicians have blackened our eyes here in the Magic Mitten. I can't figure out if this outstretched hand we live in is a "Come take advantage of us some more, we can't help being suckers." or a "Please help us, we are desperate." My husband, as did many others, lost his dream job last year and our 5-7 year plan has grown to a 7-10 year plan. Recently on the road to Chicago, using up the very last of his travel bonus points, we dug into our Wilco CDs, anticipating a new kindle from Tweedy. When I heard the lyrics to the bands newest release, I could not help but think of where my husband is in his career.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Yes dream down a well</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"> There's a lone heavy hell</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"> I don't care anymore</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"> I don't care anymore</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"> It's a feeling we transcend</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"> We're here at the end</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"> I don't care anymore</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"> I don't care anymore</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"> You never know</span><br /><br />You can pretty much track his career by the transitions in advertising media technology. He began his career as a keyliner and then came desktop publishing. He became a producer as a result and now even that has been digitized by job tracking systems on the client and vendor side. He's not sure what to do next, and his realism transitions like the lyrics of the song. The childhood dream of living The Dick Van Dyke Show is just a worn-out, jaded fantasy. Looking for meaning in the second half of his life, he wants someone to believe in him, to give him a message that there is something to do and have the faith in him to complete this unknown vocation.<br /><br />Many women have been in my position over the past year or so: bringing home the bacon, frying it in a pan and not being able to let your spouse forget he's a man. At times, the stress ends up thick around your middle in more cortysol and less portion control. It is not all that fun and freeing for yourself nor the man sitting at home. That Laura Petrie character from the show is a fascinating artifact that should be documented in a museum. I want to tell her that her fancy of women's liberation will only end in this year of 2009 in a screwed up economy of women holding on to jobs for the sheer fact that corporations have gotten away for decades with paying them less and that men like Rob will be left behind. Men need this architypal sense of vocation for the sake of their masculinity, and I respect this need. I really want my husband to feel like the world needs him again.<br /><br />Francis Ford Coppola used to work as a youngster at a Western Union office in Italy. He would paste the telegraphed messages to cardboard and deliver them on his bicycle. In a recent issue of <span style="font-style: italic;">Esquire</span> <a href="http://www.esquire.com/features/what-ive-learned/francis-ford-coppola-interview-0809#ixzz0KsyBr3Uj&D">magazine</a>, he told the story of how he did something terrible to his father out of love.<br /><br /><blockquote>"...I knew the name of the head of Paramount Pictures' music department — Louis Lipstone. So I wrote, "Dear Mr. Coppola: We have selected you to write a score. Please return to L. A. immediately to begin the assignment. Sincerely, Louis Lipstone." And I glued it and I delivered it. And my father was so happy. And then I had to tell him that it was fake. He was totally furious... I know why I did it: I wanted him to get that telegram. We do things for good reasons that are bad."</blockquote><br />I want my husband to get a communication like that message, that someone to believes in him and has faith in him to complete this unknown vocation. I want him to get that message so badly that it came up physically in my yoga practice, as tension that had built up in my body, which I let go as prayer. Yet I know that message can only be un-buried from within himself. We all have to at the end of all of this ruination to find the God-given strength to believe in ourselves more than we believe in the American Dream.<br /><br />I had stopped by the book store before my yoga class to pick up a book for my husband. It was a manual to get him started on something new that I hope will keep him a few steps ahead. I want to let him know with strains of George Harrison's <span style="font-style: italic;">"My Sweet Lord"</span> in my heart that it is not the end of the world because, well, you never know.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Come on kids</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"> You're acting like children</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"> Act your age</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"> Put back the black metals and pearls </span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"> All ya sword-swallowers pull yourselves together</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"> Every generation thinks its the worst </span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"> Thinks it's the end of the world</span><br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"> It's a secret I can't tell</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"> There's a wish down a well</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"> I don't care anymore</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"> I don't care anymore</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"> It's a long heavy hell</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"> Super-size it by 10</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"> I don't care anymore</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"> I don't care anymore</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"> You never know</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"> You never know</span><br /><br />::END::<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">* <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PmHvdtaOEZo">You Never Know</a></span><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PmHvdtaOEZo"> by Wilco <span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">(click to listen)</span></span><br /></a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1448388639907347008.post-59745548907179634992009-01-28T14:47:00.000-05:002011-09-30T07:38:17.902-04:00The Gag Reflex<span style="font-style: italic;"><br />legs scream at bikes<br />and bikes scream at trucks</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">and motorists curse their lousy luck</span> <span style="font-style: italic;"><br />crossing guard's not doing his job</span> <span style="font-style: italic;"><br />and traffic's not about to stop</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">for the first casualty of thought</span><br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">it's the rules </span> <span style="font-style: italic;">it's the rules</span>*<br /><br />“He can do that for hours,” Linda described the focus her 2 year old son, Cooper, maintained as he roared his toy car round and around the edges and over the lumps of fabric of the family love seat. His concentration was immense for someone so small.<br /><br />I was sitting with her daughter Audrey with Audrey’s feet on me, waiting for tiny blue toenails to dry. It was our little ritual that happened each time I was over. Audrey gets her nails done while mom and the rest of the girlfriends get caught up. Audrey was joyously eating a chocolate chip cherry oatmeal cookie one of us had brought. Then her face tautened with alarm, the way that major tragedies do with almost 4-year-olds.<br /><br />“I don’t like it.” Audrey pulled a half chewed cherry out of her mouth. I took it from her hand and placed it on the towel on my lap.<br /><br />“Sorry, she inherited her father’s gag reflex with certain things,” Linda apologized. I didn’t mind it, I was glad it was out and not working itself back up. I thought briefly of what the girlfriend/maker of the gourmet cookies spent on the cherries: time, money and talent. When Audrey was done, four shiny, mangled, leathery cherries gathered on my lap.<br /><br />Lately we’ve reached out from under all of this snow to spend time with friends over wine and good food under kitchen candlelight. Having people over or going to their home feels like Christmas and a vacation all at the same time. The reach has felt good, like a long yawn and stretch following a long afternoon nap.<br /><br />A few Saturdays ago a couple that stood up in our wedding came by for paella and garnacha. We ate and ate, watched obscure Roxy Music footage and played Scrabble. Over the evening they revealed their doubts about their faith, how they were in the process of figuring out who Christ was and is for them: difficulty with the red letter words of Jesus and the council of Nicea was what I heard. Raised in the church and after a long absence during their marriage they had reentered a faith community only to exit it and seemingly regretting the awkwardness this created in their friendships there. As my husband and I listened, the quote from <span style="font-style: italic;">Say Anything</span> played through my head where Lloyd Dobler talks about what he wants to do in his life.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">"I don't want to sell anything, buy anything, or process anything as a career. I don't want to sell anything bought or processed, or buy anything sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought, or processed, or repair anything sold, bought, or processed. You know, as a career, I don't want to do that.</span>"<br /><br />I told my dear girlfriend that I was glad she was in the process of rediscovering her faith. I, too, was secretly tired of being oversold by the religious right because it had become in the public eye exactly what the movie described: <span style="font-weight: bold;">not love</span>.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">superfarmer's bent on the cover of time</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">the moralist screams he's all mine</span> <span style="font-style: italic;"><br />so the bard isn't doing her job</span> <span style="font-style: italic;"><br />the vacuum night</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">the darkest rites</span> <span style="font-style: italic;"><br />the small quarantined thoughts</span> <span style="font-style: italic;"><br /><br />it's the rules it's the rules</span><br /><br />People have kidnapped portions of our culture and very little has been done to supply a ransom let alone a rescue mission scheduled. It's difficult to express anything about this time in history without feeling a general sense of disappointment. Disappointment has become the rule of the day, expressed as the simplest of personal actions. For those of us who lived by the rules before, the rules have shifted to a more astringent form and it almost feels as we are being punished for others and their living off the rails for a long time. At what time do you speak up? To whom? Will they listen?<br /><br />I had recently stumbled across a blog of someone condemning the practice of yoga and thus the moniker Christian yoga. I was baffled by the superiority of someone so little acquainted with my own reality. It was an old post, and I doubt the individual even read my response. Yet I was not stopped. I wrote the following:<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">"First, yoga cannot be called "Christian" any more than an apple, a collection of music or a calendar can. Only people can be Christian, and to say that the product of their efforts is "Christian" is to lessen the objectivity of being called by the name of Christ. Secondly, Yoga was developed by Hindus, yes, yet there are other practices to which people who are Christians devote their efforts, and the religion of the creator is not called into question. Football. Baseball. Basketball. Soccer. Lacrosse. If you research the origins of these games, some of them have primitive, dark, ritualistic roots based in what can be termed "paganism". And should we dump psychoanalysis because it was developed by scientists with no devotion to religion of any kind? Lastly, as a Christian and a yoga (little "y") teacher, the foundation of the practice is religion-less, seeker oriented and essentially healthy as well as morally challenging. Please take the time to research the yamas and niyamas as well as the rest of the 8 limbs of ashtanga before committing an opinion. Often Christians make too many assumptions without effective research to develop an observation due to fear of contamination. It is with respect I write this post.</span>"<br /><br />So many people have taken a piece of Christ over past and present history that his image has become like the bloodied corpse that was taken from the cross. It felt like and continues to feel like that moment. I don't blame my dear friends for harboring doubt. We stand outside little Cooper's circular, certain, childlike intensity, the same effort we see in those that are content to move in seeming effortlessness through the mainstreams of faith. For many of us, like Audrey, the sweet delicacy of life has become an un-chewable, over-sweet, meaty mess that just won't go down. Discontent breeds disinterest in mainstream thought and deep longing for truth. For many like my dear friends and me the nights are lengthy and we crave a dose of empathy as well as honesty.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">salesman says this vacuum's guaranteed</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">it could suck an ancient virus from the sea</span> <span style="font-style: italic;"><br />it could put the dog out of a job</span> <span style="font-style: italic;"><br />could make the traffic stop<br />so little thoughts<br />can safely get across</span> <span style="font-style: italic;"><br /><br />it's the rules it's the rules</span> <span style="font-style: italic;">guaranteed or not it's the rules</span><br /><br />I think back to the character, that young hero Lloyd Dobler, and his simple, well thought out request of life and how that was tested. He also said to his Joe obsessed friend in a moment of doubt:<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">You probably got it all figured out, Corey. If you start out depressed everything's kind of a pleasant surprise.</span><br /><br />I don't want life to be what it is now. I don't think any of us do. After all, what comes after the choking sensation driven by irresponsibility and assumption? Gord Downie's tongue-in-cheek, lyrical sarcasm from the song above calls into question how this has been steadily filtered into our lives and grown roots of compromise. I am not going to be oversold by something that guarantees my unseen language of feelings and thought and, yes, doubt gets verbalized and communicated. I don't want life to exist in a haze so that the small miracles I encounter become just a "Huh!" and a smile. I can't let the mediocrity of those who un-fruitedly claim to be experts or self-righteously deem themselves (religious or not) knowledgeable enough to deliver some interpretation of history or implant some idea to pass off as truth influence my heart's honest reality or my quest for principle. I don't want my faith in Christ to be something served to me and un-digestable, casting dark shadows over others who do not believe as I do when truly all I and those who genuinely feel called by His name want to do is <span style="font-weight: bold;">love</span>.<br /><br />It's time to re-write the rules.<br /><br />Board the plane. Be seated. Clasp hands. Lift off.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Love</span>.<br /><br />::END::<br /><br /><br />*from <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DSpcE55Uxu4"><span style="font-style: italic;">The Rules</span></a><http: com="" albums="" albumid="8&FlickrID="><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DSpcE55Uxu4"> by The Tragically Hip <span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-style: italic;">(click to listen)</span></span></a><br /></http:>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1448388639907347008.post-1623633400318896222008-11-18T13:09:00.000-05:002008-11-19T17:27:19.745-05:00Sing Inside Like a Radio<span style="font-style: italic;"><br />‘Be careful, that edge is sharp,’ ‘You’re going to drive your father to the edge,’ ‘Don’t get close to the edge,’</span> our parents caution us.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">‘I was at the edge of my seat,’ ‘That was cutting edge,’ ‘She’s got the edge,’</span> we hear as adults in the world.<br /><br />Talking about the edge causes a swirl of emotions. On one hand you have all of the warning information from your youth—-harm, provocation, danger. On the other you have for what people as adults often strive--excitement innovation,adeptness. I was recently asked what my own personal edge was, this edge being very different, how my personal equanimity is received. I have waited for the moment I could say this. God plays me love songs on the radio.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Oh, Oh Deep water<br />Black, and cold like the night<br />I've stand with my arms wide open<br />I've run a twisted line<br />I'm a stranger<br />in the eyes of the maker*</span><br /><br />I was pulling into work the other day thinking about what the next entry in my blog would say when Bob Dylan’s <span style="font-style: italic;">“Broken”</span> came on the radio. I mentioned this song on one of my last blogs. Daniel Lanois produced this song, the DJ mentioned. Daniel’s name has been popping up quite a bit. I heard a bio on him on Saturday. I downloaded a podcast on him yesterday. He plays Toronto’s Massey Hall tonight and the DJ after interviewing him played the song <span style="font-style: italic;">“The Maker”</span>. I hadn’t heard this song in years, and thought, <span style="font-style: italic;">‘That’s it. This is what resonates with what I have to write.'</span><br /><br />He’s done it countless times. You’ve come here and if you’ve read here, you already know. It shows up mentally most prominently in my writing. Writing keeps my pendulum sinking deeper between erudition and apathy, between listlessness and driveness.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">I could not see<br />for the fog in my eyes<br />I could not feel<br />for the fear in my life<br />From across the great divide<br />In the distance I saw a light<br />Jean baptiste<br />walking to me with the maker</span><br /><br />Mentally, like anyone else, I have had something preventing me from seeing the truth of myself and others, and it’s a constant noticing that lifts the haze from my life, affirming that I don’t have to be like anyone else and the uniqueness of each being. I can choose not to be haunted by fear. My faith in God can unfold like the intriguing lives in His Word, filled with individuality and a deep desire for me to know how much He loves me. I have small books and scraps of paper throughout my life demonstrating this.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">My body is bent and broken<br />by long and dangerous sleep<br />I can't work the fields of Abraham<br />and turn my head away<br />I'm not a stranger<br />in the hands of the maker</span><br /><br />This deep listening happens on the physical level for me with the practice of yoga. Many friends have questioned me doing this, dismissing it as it being something that would lead me into spiritual darkness or heresy in my faith. Saying this would be the equivalent of their child becoming a Buddhist from the practice of hapkido or karate. It is so far from the truth. This psychological science of mind, body, spirit relationship has at its core a non-judgemental, non-directive devoutness, any person of any religious fidelity would be at gain to practice. And it is not without the support of my pastor and spiritual director that I do practice.<br /><br />Through the mystical union of spirit and breath, yoga has brought my body and mind deep healing in areas I could not describe to a physician or psychiatrist. This ritualistic repetion of the asanas of has guided me through some obscure, cold places and made me more aware of the Light I attempt to live out. It has helped me to be more calm and merciful to myself, opening me to love others more. Yoga has done all of these things so very profoundly, I have decided to share it with others and become a teacher of this ancient healing art.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Brother John<br />Have you seen the homeless daughters<br />standing there<br />with broken wings<br />I have seen the flaming swords<br />there over east of Eden<br />burning in the eyes of the maker</span><br /><br />Spiritually, listening for the intertwining themes and harmonies erupting happens through an openness of mind, heart and spirit. I can't describe how this happens, but I have a sense of awe about it. It is like God playing love songs on the radio, but I am the radio constantly tuning in to everything that enters my life. I live in the city and there is a rawness about it, a grit that enters your soul and creates a sensitivity to the human condition. I belong to a church that is dedicated to their relationship with the city and fortifies me for service with words and music. There are other sudden bursts of connection--books, lectures, nature. It settles into the spaces of my solitude.<br /><br />Why do I tune in? Simply because they are all eternal activities. I am one small radio that can transmit the eternal interconnectedness of what I experience. This is were I feel equanimous, at home and free.<br /><br /><a style="font-style: italic;" class="EC_text" target="_blank"> oh river rise from your sleep....<br /><br /></a><a class="EC_text" target="_blank">~END~</a><a style="font-style: italic;" class="EC_text" target="_blank"><br /><br />* "The Maker" from the album Acedie by Daniel Lanois<br /></a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1448388639907347008.post-40008674548641164192008-09-04T23:46:00.000-04:002008-09-05T08:01:15.208-04:00Fractures of Forgiveness“I was able to go to her yesterday,” my eldest cousin said today. “I am not sure if you knew this but it had been five years since we had spoken. We were able to make peace. I was able to make peace with her before she passed and know all of that has gone away.”<br /><br />To tell the truth, I had no idea. I don’t know much about my family here in the US. Let me rephrase that. I do know too much about them. But I know not to try to know too much about them. <br /><br />My mother, filled with tears, grace and light, had called me earlier that day. She told me that my cousin passed away that morning. I knew this cousin had been suffering from pancreatic cancer and my husband and I had prayed for her often. She was nearly ten years older than myself. My mother asked me to call the eldest cousin to ask for more information about the showing and funeral. I obeyed.<br /><br />I didn’t how to say anything but the polite thing. “I’m am very sorry for your loss. I am glad you were able to make peace with her. What are the arrangements for her?” I asked.<br /><br />My mother taught me that if you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all. (It is one of the only sayings she can’t get right without mixing in some other metaphor.) It’s not that she wants me not to disclose our family’s locked hidden secrets, I just think she is asking for respect without trouble. The truth is that for the past ten years or so having the older friends that I do, my brain has become a repository for many secrets. I dare not open my mouth for fear of creating some concoction that will inadvertently sever me from them. I love my mother. She deserves for me to behave graciously and tight-lipped. She’s put up with all of this mess for over 70 years. So I tend to focus on the truth. It’s sometimes the only thing that can keep the pain that unforgiveness generates on a leash.<br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">She is trapped inside a month of gray,<br />and they take a little every day.<br />She is a victim of her own responses,<br />shackled to a heart that wants to settle, and then runs away.<br /><br />It’s a sin to be fading endlessly.<br />Yeah, but she’s all right with me.*</span><br /><br />The mayor took a plea today. I suppose in a city like Chicago one is too enchanted with proper city amenities and culture to become too disenfranchised with city leaders. There may even be accountability involved, who knows. In Detroit, things are too small to even know what all of that looks like. We just take it. It is painful. It’s like a chemical reactor that makes small children look at you strangely because you appear to be white and living in their neighborhood. It closes the Catholic school down the street and reopens it as a charter school while the public school on the next block closes. It causes the dark person in their late model car to cut you off at the light. You have use up gas to haul all of your smelly recycling with your car into the plant instead of having it picked up at your home. There is a sewage treatment facility with money in their pocket while the city’s workers are jobless with picket signs in front of it. You can’t scream to the little child that your husband has lived in this neighborhood all of his life. You can’t re-shufffle institutional changes within education. You can’t honk at the car that cuts you off without fear of repercussions. You can’t demand city officials reexamine how recycling could revive their budgets. You can’t point a finger at who’s palm in city government was greased to get the sewage treatment contract.<br /><br />You deal. Day after day.<br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">She is leaving on a walkaway.<br />She is leaving me in disarray.<br />In the absence of a place to be,<br />she stands there looking back at me,<br />hesitates, and then turns away.<br /><br />She’ll change so suddenly-- she’s just like mercury.<br />Yeah, but she’s all right with me.</span><br /><br />I opened my Bible and read twice of wisdom this week. The first time on how David felt it wise to abdicate to Solomon. David was forgiven by God of adultery and murdering Solomon’s mother’s first husband. And yet from that mess he received a son who would become king. The second was of what Solomon, who as king could have any given good thing from God, when asked of God what he desired most, Solomon requested wisdom to lead God’s children. My husband spoke specifically about forgiveness today. And this is wisdom. He said we could not as a family and as a people who live in this city mock the situation further by emphasizing it. We had to forgive and move on. This had to be demonstrated in our subtlest actions. And this is from a Caucasian man who has been at the brunt of the “dealing with it” for all of his life.<br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;"><br />Keep some sorrow in your hearts and minds<br />for the things that die before their time:<br />for the restlessly abandoned homes,<br />the tired and weary rambler’s bones.<br />And stay beside me where I lie.</span><br /><br />I am too relieved to hold onto anything about the mayoral situation. I feel released inside now that it is over. I feel empathy for the prices paid yet at the same time feel confident that the beginning of accountability has come. Yet this is what I feel today. I can only intend to continue to feel this hope.<br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">She’s entwined in me-- crazy as can be.<br />Yeah, but she’s all right with me.<br />She’s all right-- she’s all right with me.</span><br /><br />I will go see the cousin that passed at the funeral home. I will see all of the family that did not come to my wedding and hope they love my merciful mother a little more. I will vote this November with my fears reverberating from the lack of connection in every direction as well as the quake of the country’s collective unconscious sullenly stirring. I will look ahead the future instead of back at scandal. I will try to be my mother, my husband, King David and his son King Solomon. Yet mostly my mother.<br /><br />*<span style="font-style:italic;">Mercury</span> by The Counting Crows (Yes, Adam, I know it is not a song about love but a song about addiction. Humor me on this fractures of forgiveness line.)Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1448388639907347008.post-43700687397647279922008-05-05T13:18:00.000-04:002008-05-05T15:52:25.711-04:00There was a time that I might have surrendered but not nowBob Dylan stabbed my optimism this morning with his voice. <br /><br /><em>Broken, broken,<br />everything is broken</em><br /><br />His words are a comfort sometimes...connecting realism with the beautiful mess of chaos and the grit that gives it traction. How did it all get so tangled, so disconnected?<br /><br />I was at a new/old friend's home the other night. New friend because I met her a little over a year ago, old because I identify with her in a way that it would take years to develop. She is also my pastor. It was a lazy evening of food, music, cards and fending off affection from her Don Juan cat who would sneak nuzzles from me and leap onto the couch to be close to this new female in his domain. My friend and I talked about how all of the familiar had fallen away from us when we started our new lives in Detroit... friends, methods of transportation, approaches to our faith. With no certainties, we had found the gift of one another's comfort and friendship, and we so grateful for it. <br /><br />We had been listening to her ipod and when a newly dressed song from my past began to play, I was transported.<br /><br /><em>I had big idea<br />I had a crazy eye<br />I broke the sacred seal<br />I told a lazy lie<br />I've had my conscience bent<br />I've had my patience tried<br />I've been up in the desert<br />And down by the riverside</em>*<br /><br />I remembered the lazy lies and crazy eye from nearly 20 years ago, feeling emptied in the desert and growing up by the Riverside.<br /><br /><em>Will the eagle fly<br />If the sky's untrue?<br />Do the faithful sigh<br />Because they are so few?<br />Remember when I cried?<br />Remember when you knew?<br />Remember that look in your eyes?<br />I know I do</em><br /><br />I recollected my feelings of being crushed by others' actions in what was supposed to be a safe, holy place. Lives truly shaken and futures forgotten in moments of oblique knowledge. Heavy, heavy experiences for someone not even through the first year of college. <br /><br />I think this time in my life trained my psyche to expect the worst from people, that I was a victim no matter what I tried create of the chaos. The recovery from being this person has been a long road. A long road of learning and relearning hope.<br /><br /><em>And count the stars to measure time<br />The earth is hard, the treasure fine<br />To the sea I'll crawl on my knees</em><br /><br />The grit of memories the years leave behind can stay with you and you have to remember not to re-live the hurt when those memories surface. Every time they surface. You begin to feel the curative waters and tuck into the healing that surrounds you.<br /><br /><em>Feel it coming in<br />Feel it going out<br />Water covers sand<br />Blood covers doubt<br />So I begin again<br />Again, the healing bow<br />There was a time that I might have surrendered<br />But not now</em><br /><br />And then you begin the response to difficulty and pain by immediately waiting on your knees and letting the waters wash over you. Your eyes use mercy to see and your hands reach out with grace. <br /><br />My friend preached yesterday. She talked about the lame beggar that everyday was lifted by his friends to a place at the Beautiful Gate to seek alms. Peter saw him there, took him to Solomon's Portico and he was healed. Excitedly, he announced his healing, not in the streets, but to those who were there in the temple. It seems that they needed to be reminded of the miracle of healing. My friend also reminded her congregation of healing and other miracles we should expect, letting us know that they might not be picture perfect landscapes of experiences, but to keep our hands open for what will land there. In her personal life, she had been surprised by a miracle just days before.<br /><br />Her life and my life may be mightily different from what we anticipated would happen to it. There is still a sense of things not being quite what we'd like them to be. Yet we maintain our faith in miracles. We found friendship in each other.<br /><br /><em>Consult the cards to measure mine<br />The earth is hard, but the treasure fine<br />At the sea, I'll wait on my knees</em><br /><br />*<em>Dig </em>by Adam AgainUnknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1448388639907347008.post-13782651455551279022008-01-10T14:23:00.000-05:002008-01-10T16:30:22.819-05:00Drinking and SinkingI have been stirring for a while now this fermenting mixture of words like a homemade brandy hidden in the dark of my basement. I won't know how they taste yet, and the same mystery surrounds me as I breathe in the physical smell of money while my heels echo in the hollowed halls of the place where I work. Where is that smell coming from? What mildews and bacteria combine to create it? And why has it landed here?<br /><br />I first noticed it on Monday as I sat in my chair and logged in. I searched by pockets and desk for cash I had left laying out. I had none on me. None to be found. I can no longer pretend that this titanic terrarium hasn't gotten to me. <br /><br />Nearly a year ago on a bleak January morning over 3,000 people lost their jobs here. I had done this before. I had transitioned from out of a ship destined for the scrapyard for reinvention or the hidden deep below-- where ever the Dow Jones decided it must go. I could not feel bad for myself when I was surrounded by people who had devoted their vocations in one form or another to making people better. Major discoveries happened the rooms by which I was surrounded. I can make something temporal from anywhere with a pen or software, these people had altered the health of the world permanently.<br /><br />Yet I cannot pretend this hasn't effected me. Seventeen buildings were closing and the people within were leaving. I attended eight of numerous holiday/farewell parties in December. How many times can you say goodbye? Before the parties I would go days and days without interacting with people face to face. Closed in a room to work left me enjoying absence and strangely feeling absent. I was asked, "How can you do this? It must be hard to go to work with all of that desolation going on, huh?" I thought mournfully about the science, verbalized homage to the scientists and the people that make them go, and soothed with the words, "Plus, I have done this before."<br /><br /><em>Her greatgrandfather saw the future<br />didn't know nothing bout panic,<br />he certainly probably thought<br />that it was unthinkable.*</em><br /><br />I sit locked in a storage area right now, glad to to be soaking in the semi-permanence of the art stored withing it. It will go on to fill other conference rooms, nooks, cafeterias and hallways. The building is vacant aside from these elements. I hear the heating vents hiss and the pipes banging themselves from the sleeping walls knowing that dreams have died in this scrapped ship. I, too, have had dreams die, not unlike the ghosts trapped in the walls.<br /><br /><em>Growin up in a biosphere<br />with no respect for bad weather<br />there's still roaches and ants in here<br />so resourceful and clever.</em><br /><br />I grew up in Flint, a town where the people were tough but life so delicate that one accident, misspent dollar or business closure could manifest a spiralling destiny. Everyone there has issues and everyone's spiral was intertwined with another.<br /><br /><em>an accident's sometimes the only way<br />to worm our way back to bad decisions...</em><br /><br />My family had a thriving home improvement business. My mom ended up a cook at the rescue mission and my dad took a job in Syracuse, NY selling water softeners and later driving a Flint MTA bus. My brothers were cute, pudgy, hyperactive kids who dreamed of buying their mom a yellow caddy and rode their dirt bikes in our three acre wilderness. They were ridiculed by other kids for being fat and different, got into drugs and alcohol, didn't graduate and spent time in jail. I myself dreamed too big for that small city. Although I managed to get through college, all of those great things college moved me to do and be were crushed by oppressive, bullying bosses and work conditions which left me broken and escaping for survival in Detroit where things were only slightly better.<br /><br />If I could press the ears of people I have worked with in this place of science to my chest, what would they hear my heart say? I can only hope the faintest voice of Christ would be heard whispering, "I know, I know." I feel the brokenness of it all. Loss, mistrust, unrootedness, disbelief, bewilderment, unwillingness, that sinking feeling that nothing is real and nothing tangible will last. An atmosphere so thick in this terrarium it takes nearly a year to verbalize. And I can hope my actions say, <em>I know, I know, </em> while in my nose stings the dirty smell of money.<br /><br />So, I have brought the brandy out from obscurity and drank the ever changing concoction of dying fruit begging for harmonies. I feel an intoxicating relief that the words are out of the recesses and perhaps a numbness, as well.<br /><br /><em>We stay inside and try to conjure the fathers of<br />injured and faking<br />if there's glory in miracles<br />it's that they're reversible</em><br /><br />- END -<br /><br />*<em>Titanic Terrarium </em>from <em>Day by Night</em> by The Tragically HipUnknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1448388639907347008.post-31650448577227585042007-04-05T15:09:00.000-04:002007-04-05T16:21:02.546-04:00We Shed Our Certainties Like Clothes*<em><br />"I never meant to return to the scene of my great disaster. But one day after a weekend among alcohol and adulterers, I took a wrong turn on the motorway and saw the sign to Starbridge. Immediately I tried to escape…1988 dissolved into 1963. I glimpsed again my Garden of Eden, and as I hesitated at the wheel of my car, the rope of memory yanked me forward into the past… I drove to the city but it was not as I had known it."</em><br /><em><br /></em>-Venetia Hoffenberg<br />From <em>“Scandalous Risks”</em> by Susan Howatch<br /><br />I have a coterie of friends who are currently rediscovering their healthy boundaries. There is also a singer friend of mine (of whom I am very proud) getting accolades for a current single that is at the top of the charts with a song that propels us to reach out. It is a paradox. We are all truly enmeshed—identities, loves, enmities and acquaintances.<br /><br />I am currently reading a book about a young, socially inept woman who embarks on a path of self discovery through the entanglements of love, spirituality and adultery. Sadly, I know the forlorn ending of her character yet only because I read the series of the Church of England books out of order. In this particular book, a man who perceives too much tells her not to go out onto the moonlight soaked roof of the cathedral one night. She tipsily defies him and spends her days after 1963 in the drunken defecation of her life.<br /><br />If I would have known how my life is today, would I have embraced my life fully as it was? I reference this question frequently. If my friend the singer would have known she would one day have a song reaching the top of the charts, would she have counted the years between her childhood dreams and now differently? Would my boundary-rediscovering friends have couched their relationships at the start if they knew they would become driven so witless by their interpersonal relationships?<br /><br />So many of my own life’s circumstances have been driven by hope, interfered with by human potential, broken down and restarted. I think that I can’t take any more way too often yet it is only because my mind goes into fright or flight and I look for the nearest exit door. I see the budding of spring on a crab apple tree down the block yet the snow falls on this Maundy Thursday.<br /><br /><em>"We got the news, Ithaca got snow<br />It was just that kind of day<br />All I know is that you've gone and left us here below<br />All I wish is that you'd stay<br />We leave this cursed city in the same way we come in<br />We trace the roads<br />On the way out, we shed our certainties like clothes<br />We thought this was our sacrifice<br />But the world knew otherwise<br />And took you from us<br />Before your time, right before our eyes"</em><br />—<strong><em>Ithaca</em></strong>* by Peter Mulvey<br />from the album <em><strong>Glencree</strong></em><br /><br />I read the story of the crushing situation the disciples carried within the week of the passion today. They had this amazing miracle of a man casting his golden presence around them—living and laughing with them, loving them and reconciling them to God. At the last supper, he disrobes. He creates an awkward scene—especially with Peter—and asks them to preserve the solemnity of the moment by letting him wash their feet. What was going on in the disciples’ minds? He then inserts himself into the traditional Passover meal in such a macabre way by asking them to remember him, remember his flesh and blood. They must have trusted him enough to let him say what he needed to say and do what he needed him to do. Yet what could they have possibly been feeling inside?<br /><br /><em>"We think we're walking home<br />But you can't go there unless it wants you<br />You can stand on the streets<br />But still the destination haunts you<br />Is that where you are now?"</em><br /><br />I may have felt like Peter, desperately trying to lead and assert a sense of control of the situation yet being rebuked and molded to form a better leader. I may have felt like one of the others who just knew Judas was up to something by the weight of his purse and the look of coolly managed guilt in his eyes, yet had been unable to say anything and confounded by guilt. I may have stood back to see the strange unraveling of community and felt powerlessness in the midst of all the destruction. Yet I can easily find the exit door and step back into my current reality.<br /><br />How can we assert our proper selves into situations? How can we truly feel the history and growth of our gifts? If I knew what was in store would my heart be quieter or would it rear up in dissatisfaction and choose decay? Just how can we ever know?<br /><br />Tomorrow we observe the cross. It gets bloody worse. Tomorrow we remember that he died. And knowing that death is the biggest unknown for us all, we embrace his. It doesn’t end it here. It just can’t end here. Our process, our pain, our love for him begs an ending to our stories, begs the unseen resolution of our past.<br /><em><br />"To have believed, that's truest love<br />Ain't it clever now that we have love and we don't have you<br />It took this much to make me see<br />Still I barely understand<br />Love will always, always be larger and different than our plans<br />Love will never listen to us<br />And why should it?<br />Love knows the score<br />It builds better songs than we do<br />It sings a better metaphor"</em><br /><br />- END -Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1448388639907347008.post-66576858351746977982007-03-13T08:59:00.000-04:002007-03-13T16:40:00.098-04:00Consequences Under Pressure*<em>03/12/07</em><br /><br /><br /><em>"past <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0">screamin</span>' from the rooftops</em><br /><em>we live to survive our paradoxes"</em><br /><br />-<a class="Text-BodyLarge" href="http://www.thehip.com/Discography-Songs.html?CheckIT=6_59&SearchAction=viewResults&detail=basic&SongID=59&AlbumID=6&LyricID=59#6_59"><em>Springtime in Vienna</em></a> by The Tragically Hip<br /><br /><br />We sat with our CPA today to go over our taxes. He explained the state of the state--that being it filled with companies who are dumping and leaving for other states, the brain drain of young people who can only find jobs outside of it, and the harbinger of woe that the real estate market has slowly become. He said that we, being at the start of a marriage, should buckle down. Get things cleaned up. Put something away.<br /><br /><em>"<a class="Text-BodyLarge" href="http://www.thehip.com/Discography-Songs.html?CheckIT=3_21&SearchAction=viewResults&detail=basic&SongID=21&AlbumID=3&LyricID=21#3_21">Twist My Arm</a>"</em> is filling my ears via the <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_1">nano</span> right now. Each phrase paints the vivid picture our past and present life in the city in which we live, from <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_2">Jacques</span> Cousteau's boat once being once parked on the river, to the <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_3">ominous</span> knuckles from union and corporate sides, to the shots of tear gas flares into rioting crowds, and the hounds of the Dow Jones. I sit writing under the protection of the Presbyterian church I attend. It has endured 154 years of the flux of it all. Wars and riots. Wounded times and closures. The gutting by the mob of community relations because they just could not get enough from <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_4">every one's</span> pocket. The bleeding out of lost dreams.<br /><br /><em>"Men here of the secret</em><br /><em>the pass in upholstered silence</em><br /><em>they only exist in crisis</em><br /><em>they only exist in silence"</em><br /><br />And the manufacturing of dissent. Michael Moore is from my home town. I used to have one of his old jobs of showing movies at the local university. He is sometimes seen as a <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_5">hero</span> but more often as a devil. A schmuck. Wasn't he supposed to have done something a while ago with those two movies? Was it <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_6">GM's</span> inaction that made Flint seem a pathetic, undone wasteland? Or was it the shifting of the sand in the <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_7">litter box</span> of <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_8">GM's</span> fat cat ways to reveal exactly where the crap happened. I don't understand. It was so long ago. I exchanged that beautiful, tender, broken town for another one.<br /><br />I can sense the worry of the governor quite strongly. The look on her face when the big <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_9">pharmaceutical</span> pulled out. She is in Germany courting business now. My CPA is right. Things are getting bleaker here. Outsiders shake their heads. Denizens can't wrap their minds around it either, yet it is because we are so accustomed to it.<br /><br /><em>"Instructions from the manual</em><br /><em>could not have been more plain</em><br /><em>the blues are still required</em><br /><em>the blues are still required again"</em><br /><br />We push into this bleakness, so depressed we can't recognize a remedy. So confused by remedies we can't <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_10">foresee</span> a resolution. We hear the <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_11">inglorious</span> stories of Coleman Young. We witness gruesome <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_12">unfoldings</span> of marital bliss leading to murder. Our friends seek ending careers as industry packs up and moves to other states and countries. <em>It won't hurt if you don't move.</em> Are we moving? Because it still hurts.<br /><br />The grit settles in. The sludge takes over. The flood overwhelms. The sun bakes everything nearly dry. We emerge defiant as thorns, lost as <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_13">Israelites</span> in the desert, bereft as the young M<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_14">oabite</span> widow in a new land, crazy as a profit soaking wood for a sacrifice. Just desperate enough to believe that we can create good and a future from nothing but dirt and feces and seed. <em>We are only 60 seconds on the dial and that takes a while, </em>says Gordy.<br /><br />I can see out from the stone and glass of this old church. This <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_15">edifice</span> covers me in hope. It holds me still when I don't want to listen. It moves deeply when my heart is numbed and resistant. It plants its message deep withing me. I can only go outside when I know I am accompanied by this great force of comrades. After all,<em> there is no simple explanations for anything any of us do*</em>, says Gordy.<br /><br />* from <a class="Text-BodyLarge" href="http://www.thehip.com/Discography-Songs.html?CheckIT=21_2050&SearchAction=viewResults&detail=basic&SongID=2050&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;AlbumID=21&LyricID=2050#21_2050">Courage</a> by The Tragically Hip<br /><br />- END -Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1448388639907347008.post-13511649622227041012007-03-07T13:42:00.000-05:002007-03-07T15:19:53.630-05:00Dusting the Shelf<em>03/06/07</em><br /><br />I am marinating in these writings. Feeling a bit of satisfaction again.<br /><br />For such a long time my words felt like names and faces I couldn't connect. I had gotten used to them being there to call on for support, comfort and expression for so long. Then a wonderful shift in my life happened. I was being with someone new and not hanging around them so much. Yeah, once in a while I'd scratch something out when I needed them, yet for long periods of time they waited so patiently in the dark.<br /><br />I recently Googled myself. (There was a stranger with the same name that wrote alternate episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer...they weren't so wonderful, so there is no mystery as to whom they belong. If they were <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0">palatable</span>, I'd leave it a mystery.) I was <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_1">surprised</span> with what my <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_2">curiosity</span> found. There were reviews and titles I recognized, yet did not remember writing. Odd, because they rattled off so easily in my second story apartment on Court Street not to long ago.<br /><br />I had a hero of mine find a poem in one of these reviews. It was years ago and I have the poem packed away with other important papers. It was such a rush <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_3">receive</span> token of literary affinity. I also remember seeing the moon rise as a translucent tangerine slice over the mountains in <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_4">Acapulco</span> Bay. I'<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_5">ve</span> caught those simple, golden threads twining the divine, artistic expression and my own reality. I felt I was holding a mystical secret.<br /><br /><em>"As artists, we do not often marinate in self-satisfaction. We do not often say to ourselves,</em> 'This is the greatest'<em> --although it might be.</em><br />- Julia Cameron<br /><br />I know that somewhere in the shadows there are words and more words. I will find that poem so I can post it where I can see it often. I will feel the moonlight juice from that tangerine drip down my chin again. I will hold tight to those secret, golden threads. They are my accolades, my trophies and my ribbons.<br /><br />- END -Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1448388639907347008.post-72462726371482050132007-03-07T09:45:00.000-05:002007-03-07T09:47:35.730-05:00The Dragon Princess from The Mexico Diaries<em>06/27/03</em><br /><br />I have often asked myself <em>"What am I doing here?"</em> Somehow, I have created a bit of a solitary existence during my time here. Most days I sit studying and writing. On others I head into town for exploration. I haven't met many more americans. I don't think they trust people here. They often resemble elephants in packs--large, oblivious and clearing a path for themselves whereever they go. And the mexicans, well, let's just say I am still in culture shock. They have the same human habits that we americans do--they mumble, have slang and use speech patterns all their own. (Don't worry, I am trying.)<br /><br />Today I took an excursion. About a 35 minute walk outside of the center of town is one of four places like itself in the world--<em>"El Salto de San Anton". </em>This 36m cascade of water has deeply cut itself into a gorge. The white water falls in the company of exotic greenery and birds that find lodgings in hollow rocks. The only thinks that make it not look like a postcard are the playful dinner-plate size white butterflies and the sad amount of trash at the bottom of the gorge. The sound of the water has a tranquilizing effect on me. I want to curl up onto on of the rock benches and fall asleep for hours.<br /><br />I packed a small suitcase full of friends for the trip and the one I brought with me today is Mr. Rilke. He's bee teaching me about love and the solitariness of humanity. Today he told me,<br /><br /><em>"We have no reason to mistrust our world, for it is not against us. Has it terrors, they are our terrors; has it abysses, those abysses belong to us; are dangers at hand, we must try to love them. And if we only we arrange our life according to that which counsels us that we must always hold to the difficult, then that which now still seems to us will become what we most trust and find most faithful."</em><br /><br />I am going to go to the botanical garden, <em>"El Jardin Borda"</em> on Sunday. Apparently many people, foriegners and nationals, crowd there and walk. Don't worry. I'll keep trying.<br /><br />Yours truly,<br /><br />The Dragon-PrincessUnknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1448388639907347008.post-88949963965556400912007-03-07T09:38:00.000-05:002007-03-07T09:41:31.954-05:00Tangerine Moon from The Mexico Diaries<em>07/14/03</em><br /><br />Last night I saw the moon rise over Acapulco Bay within minutes. It was huge and hung like a transluscent orange slice over the water and making the water shine like fresh mango.<br /><br />I am not sure what I was expecting when I came here. It’s all so busy here and there is nothing relaxing about it at all. My <em>Tia Modesta</em> and I are staying on the 14th floor of a hotel overlooking nearly the entire bay, with a palm tree laden boulevard of big city traffic separating us from the beach. Don’t get me wrong. I have enjoyed the crashing waves, large jumping fish and pelicans. It all just reminds me that I have tiny, freshwater seas at home that are more placid and in their humble, Michigan way more of a tropical paradise. They only thing that makes it worth being here is that I am with my aunt and enjoying her.<br /><br />I wonder sometimes what this trip means.<br /><br />The traffic has me missing Detroit. Yet there are things I will miss about here, too. The dark, shiny, laughing eyes of my cousins. The way that volcanic ashes, knowing the secret language of snow, float into my room and onto my arms when I open the window in the morning.The elegant shapes of primary-colored birds. How the green velvet mountains stand firm around you like guarding soldiers. Seeing lime, grapefruit, and mango trees with heavy hanging bows of fruit. I have a little over a week left here in Mexico.<br /><br />I feel as if I will wake up in a few days and find myself at work. I want to preserve of this restfulness I feel so I can remind myself with these images not to take things so seriously. Maybe that is why I am here.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1448388639907347008.post-9921630436868673302007-03-06T17:34:00.000-05:002007-03-07T09:58:00.977-05:00Eterne Primavera from The Mexico Diaries<em>Wednesday, June 25, 2003</em><br /><br />When you get to Mexico City and the polution sears your nose, take a long, deep breath and let it cut into your lungs a little. Don't worry. The acres of roses will come later. Careful to watch for cowpies on the way.<br /><br />Greetings from Cuenavaca, Morelos, Mexico.<br /><br /><strong>Last night:</strong><br />Here I sit watching a fabulous storm with thunder, lightning and buckets of rain, wind whipping itself through the great palms as if they were dandylions. What else would I be doing at home, anyway? Pining for things just out of my reach and frustrated, that's what.<br /><br />Today I got so frustrated with my spanish skills that I quietly thought that everything my mother, high school teachers and college professors taught me was a lie. HUGE lie. People don't speak as they do down here. And my mother intuits what I say anyway. There are so many colloquialisms I had no idea of, that I have been taking notes from the subtitles of Dawson´s Creek and not-so-new Brendan Frasier movies (both of which are strangely abundant on cable down here).<br /><br />I woke up feeling like a <em>viejita</em> (little old woman) today. Yesterday I explored Cuernavaca by myself just to get oriented and on the long bus ride home (I had taken the wrong one) I think I put my hip out.The pain woke me in the early morning hours and was to the point where I didn't think I could do anything today. When something like that happens, you have to get up and move. Endure the pain. Let it work itself out. At the end of the day, it might nag a little, but at least you did something. I washed my clothes and wrote.<br /><br />So far I've met four americans and two english people. I met an american couple with a blanched, mid-western look shopping in the cathedral plaza. Minnesota or Wisconsin, I'd say. I helped the english couple negotiate a deal for an alabaster carved mejican god, which ticked of the sales lady, because they didn't buy it because it was chipped. The other americans I met on that long busride-Patrick and Leah from Ohio. Schoolmates at one of the spanish schools here. They invited me to go to where the americans hang, but I didn't catch the name. <em>Alcabres?</em> Too bad, too. Patrick was easy on they eyes. He had nice glasses, too.<br /><br />Cowpies.<br /><br />I stayed for a few days at the ranch my aunt and uncle oprate for a few days. <em>No fue mi tazo de te.</em> For sure. Many goats. A few horses. Chickens, ducks, and a turkey. Three mean bulls and the cows they are separated from (hence why they are so mean). Sheep, too. Not many cowpies but lots of goat and sheep tarts. Talk about hoscotch. The back forty where we rode the horse smelled like freshly burned mesquite.<br /><br />So on the way to Curenavaca I realized why they call it the <em>'lugar de eterne primavera'</em> or 'place of eternal spring'. Just past the cornfields I saw them-fields of green dotted in red and white. As the bus drew closer, I saw acres and acres of roses. They might sit in a vase on your table someday.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1448388639907347008.post-50793656339711604752007-03-05T16:09:00.000-05:002007-03-05T16:17:53.757-05:00Indigo Kings06/11/06<br /><br />I’ve been meditating on King David lately.<br /><br /><em>King of Israel or manic depressive?</em><br /><br />I think both.<br /><br />And I also think there may have been so many other men in the Bible like him. Elijah, Saul, Moses and Jonah. Maybe more.<br /><br />David showed the signs of a repressed artist. It seems he was never so happy as when he was tending sheep. In between shepherding and protecting them, he explored songwriting and his skills on the lyre. He had been focusing on the meditative quality of his work with his sheep and developing his level of performance before Saul. He had had a soul mate in Jonathan, someone with which he could honestly relate.<br /><br />Jonathan died. Saul, King of Israel, was his adversary. It must have been an abrupt change for him. He was pulled out of his solitude and called to be king because of those leadership and warrior-like qualities. His only outlet thereafter, after all of this change occurred to his identity, seemed to be the Psalms.<br /><br />The mantle of his king-calling must have put him on edge. Not having his solitude must have compressed him. No wonder he danced naked. He just wanted to be free. No wonder he took Bathsheeba. He had been stricken with grief…someone had been taken from him. His acquaintance with despair was very real. He acted out—not able to process fully the power he held as king. He made mistakes. He succumbed to his chemistry, his broken humanity, his irreconcilable differences with truth.<br /><br />Who was this David? I see him in the men around me. All kings of great callings.<br /><br />- END -Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1448388639907347008.post-56623616017677040132007-03-05T10:02:00.000-05:002007-03-05T16:13:39.923-05:00Adjustments09/22/04<br /><br /><em>“And God said to me, Write,<br />Leave the cruelty to kings.<br />Without that angel barring the way to love<br />There would be no bridge for me into time….”</em><br />- Rainer Maria Rilke<br /><br />I have been taking the time still my soul in these last glories of summer days. They are filled with balmy, ripe-fruit, blue skies where the trees only slightly tire into autumn. The sun caramelizes my skin while the breeze gives the breath of coolness. The grass is there to put my feet into.<br /><br />The contemplative is an investment, I must remember as I conjure the dividends. The bank is a study of the ordinary. I long to continually be of quiet notice. No more ringing of hands and desperate want. The taking on of something quite deeper. A trust in the King of time. More days in stillness.<br /><br />10/24/04, 11/03/04<br /><br /><em>“…incorporate the Eucharist into your own life.<br />In this we can connect others to Christ.”</em><br /><br />Everybody seems to be searching for a hero. The English have the Royals and we in America have our celebrities. Both sets of exalted persons symbolize what is really desired in life. English: tradition; wealth; history; controversy. American: money; material gain; fame; sex. The truth is that all of these groups are just people. People have insecurities, bathe, make mistakes, eat, are selfish, dress themselves, and try to do good, yet mostly just end up being selfish. It taints every action. Should we not have examples? No. Should we commit apoplexy because they fail us? No. To look at it a different way, does someone fire the potter because the vessel is broken? No. Conditions of brokenness vary. Someone may have just simply dropped the vessel. Sin is a condition where pedestals aren’t allowed.<br /><br />- END -Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1448388639907347008.post-90603211365299485012007-02-28T17:11:00.000-05:002007-03-02T14:57:32.461-05:00Birds without Wings(from 2002)<br /><br /><em>“Wishing something would happen<br />A change in this place<br />‘Cos I’m tearing of the fancy wrapping<br />find an empty package”</em><br /><em></em><br />- ‘<em>Birds without Wings’</em> David Gray, The EP’s ‘92-94<br /><br />At the end of 2001, I stopped writing in my journal for about six months. I was tired. Tired of myself. I had this way of turning everything into some sort of whine and cheese party, and I was sick of being sick of everything. It wasn’t supplication I had been writing before then, it wasn’t anything but dribble. I don’t even want to look back at it to quote any of it to illustrate how bad it was. I even promised myself I wouldn’t write anymore things that resembled my cocktail pity party. And what do you do after feeling like that? I did mostly nothing about it. I waited for that voice to die, trying to let things work themselves forward and push that selfish ache away. Yet at the back of my mind I was constantly finding things to do, thinking if I did a little more of this or that great thing my life would get better. What I found out about myself was that I was mostly doing these things to fill time, and this compulsion edged me into anger.<br /><br />Most of us burn out from being good or turn out to be completely selfish. <em>“...if you are really going to try to meet all the demands made on the natural self, it will not have enough left over to live on. The more you obey your conscience, the more it will demand of you,”</em> C.S. Lewis says in a book that has recently haunted me. <em>“And your natural self which is thus being starved and hampered and worried at every turn, will get angrier and angrier.”</em> I would be the first to admit that I put myself on an an anger management program years ago and have backslidden frequently. The guys at work call me crabby and I am glad it is just grouchy that I seem to them. It doesn’t take long for my parents to goad me into a lather. Even a few members of clergy have received “the glare” and my personal threat of intended dental harm. I sat Kaldi’s on Main Street in Cincinnati recently, and instead of enjoying one of my favorite spots in the world, a cup of the best joe and a musty book, I found myself doing what I promised myself I would no longer do – angry about a life that wouldn’t work itself out the way with which I felt comfortable and writing about it in my journal. Choosing to do what was right over and over again was the worst way I could humble myself. My anger management program had consisted for the most part of stuffing things all back inside where I had chose to be outwardly silent. I was burnt out, angry, and wishing I had been more selfish.<br /><br />This Lewisian literature onto which I had stumbled caused me to come to a complete pause. It asked of me this: What are some of the reasons I fear giving my life completely to God? I can’t remember not knowing Him, and yet can find many reasons. So I asked myself the seemingly easy question. The fears, word for word, were something like this.<br /><br /><em>1. I will do so and be left with nothing but wait. Empty, frustrating, unbelievable wait.</em><br /><br /><em>2. All of the things I have worked so hard on about myself would become nothing. Complete crap. All the really great parts of my soul that I have come to like and the others I have learned to live with in peace would no longer mean anything to me, and I will ultimately have to relearn to like myself all over again.</em><br /><br /><em>3. I would end up having to be thrown into a duty of a “holy emptiness,” and not experience anything I desire, and these desires would mean nothing to anyone, not even me anymore.</em><br /><br /><em>4. I fear my natural self is my real self. I don’t know who I’d be without it.</em><br /><br /><em>5. I don’t really know who I am in God. I have an idea, and beliefs, but often can’t find the faith to actually know.</em><br /><br />In reflection of what Lewis stated, I asked myself yet another question, which dealt with pointing out areas of my life am I reluctant to give over. These, though few like rooms in a house yet in which to be lived, were such large places in my soul.<br /><br /><em>1. Being a wife and mother.</em><br />I hold onto this dream so tightly. I work at my inward and outward beauty with self-criticism and little benefit thinking I might be noticed by someone. And it’s a horrible and unhealthy cycle. A cycle with which I am completely done.<br /><br /><em>2. The direction of my life.</em><br />I’ve planned. I’ve projected and worked hard. I’ve said I would do things I haven’t even started because I’ve I managed to find myself lost in the day-to-day shuffle, and over time this doesn’t match up with my plans and dreams. I have spent too much time at the hand of my own expectations, and I am done with this frustration, too.<br /><br /><em>3. My anger.<br /></em>I work too hard. I try to be good. Yet find I am only an unpleasant shadow of myself. With this, I am done as well. What I had also found here in answering with these three confessions were the reasons why God wants to kill my natural self. Like him, I wanted to kill these reasons. My own “doing” had created nothing but burden.<br /><br /><em>“But across the fractured landscape<br />I find the same things </em><br /><em>Tired ideas<br />Birds without wings”</em><br /><br />I have been guilty, as I think we all might be, of pouring myself out only to present Him an empty package. When I look, I see more than one devoted mother/insomniac/people-fixer, including my own, taking pills to keep themselves together. I see men without fathers, again like my own, in a quest for fatherhood yet losing themselves in the abstract of dealing with who they are. Day after day, my friends, as I have done, press themselves through the meat grinder of their dreams at jobs they detest believing they would merit something back. I see other individuals I love choose to stay alone because of their fear of love. All of us “do.” We scrape the bows of trees for twigs and bark to gird the fragile nest of our own making. We give him only the part of that tries dealing with the whirlwind of confusions that snap at us like wild animals in this nest of our minds.<br /><br /><em>“Angry sun burn down<br />Judging us all<br />Guilty of neglect and disrespect<br />And thinking small”</em><br /><em></em><br />I went back to that disturbing piece of Lewisian literature that struck me so, and I have started to care a bit less. What I have found is the opposite end of being and its bearable lightness. As birds without wings we don’t need nests. We shouldn’t begin to care about the feathers on our back. “Love God and do whatever you wish,” as Martin Luther says. As I wake in the morning, I have found that my only job, when I find those wild animals bounding at me, is to push them back, to welcome the slow concentration of presence, and to let His voice come through. And while I let my dreams and desires fall from the nest of our own making, tumble from my tree to be taken on the wings of eagles. Maybe I am that much closer to insanity, but I am not sure what my fears mean about me now.<br /><br /><em>“Take for a while<br />The trumpet from your lips<br />Loosen your hold, loosen your grip<br />On your old ways<br />That have fallen out of step<br />In a changing time<br />Hoist a new flag”</em><br /><em></em><br />- E N D -Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1448388639907347008.post-17609352947091968362007-02-28T17:05:00.000-05:002007-03-05T17:29:34.297-05:00Deconstruction<em>(from 2002)</em><br /><em></em><br /><em>“We are poised by the superstition of our ego.”<br /></em>-Ellsworth Toohey, from Ayn Rand’s ‘The Fountainhead’<br /><br />I drive to Port Huron often. The long drives pull me through pasture and rolling farmland to the shore another country, a place were no one knows who I am. For the past year or so on these steady, streaming flights I’ve been listening to the soft, fluttering voices of the Cocteau Twins and letting their ethereal melodies lift the air beneath me, bringing me to a high that can only be compared to feeling of being in love. Yet when I return, I approach home through the mudslide of the declining sun, restless soul pressed into the melancholic spindling of the Counting Crows, barely moving at full throttle with Adam Duritz’s voice as the gravity. I run away in search of some sort of wonder-filled peace only because I have found the still small voice of God there before, yet many times I return feeling shaken from a deep sleep, my subconscious bare and my emotions irresolute.<br /><br />I did this today. After making the trip more worthwhile by spending a few hours with a college friend and her sires, I drove to a park near the Blue Water bridge, sat my chair in the grass and watched the white caps wrestle with the tiny boats in the St. Clair River. I opened Ayn Rand’s ‘The Fountainhead,’ and became consumed with the justification of dynamics within it. Lawsuits about the misappropriation of ideas. People marrying people for which they never cared in order to serve other people. Others losing jobs because the expendability of artistic reason. The selfcentered anguish of life decisions gone wrong. My blood pressure went up, and I got anxious. I realized that I was escaping back into reality. Yet I stopped only to pick up my own pen. Something was circling. Something was moving.<br /><br />There is a small section in the book where Ellsworth Toohey’s niece, Katie, comes to him in a tearful crisis, wanting to know why all of her noble choices have turned into the unfulfilled efforts and the hatred of others. He listens paternally to her rants of self-centered anguish. When she is finished, her uncle he told her to forget who she was, her name, her soul. He told her to do anything to kill the stubborn roots of the ego. And then only when she had let go of everything she ever knew, the spiritual gates of grandeur would swing open before her. She asked innocently who she would be when that happened. He told her that she actually would not have lost her identity, and at that time if she didn’t think too hard she would truly believe. Then she would be part of something beyond herself. She understood. I picked up my journal and scribbled hurriedly as Adam sang:<br /><br />“<em>Fading everything to black and blue/you look a lot like you could shatter in the blink of an eye/you keep sailing right on through....you’ve been waiting a long time/you’ve been waiting a long time/to fall down/on your knees/cut your hands/cut yourself until you bleed/and fall asleep next to me.”</em><br /><em></em><br />I have a friend who can’t understand my masochism, takes a hit of Zanax when things are out of control, yet has this amazing grasp of reality. She doesn’t understand why those of us who have grown up together, desperately endeavoring not to be the one in the every four crazies of our disheveled, fundamentalist beginnings, try so hard to do something which should be so easy. I see both sides of the manic-ness, only to remember the look in Jesus’ eye in the film ‘The Last Temptation of Christ’ when the angel came to him and said he could get down from the cross. That filmmaker’s Jesus knew too much. That Jesus made a decision to get down. I am glad my Jesus didn’t. He stuck it out, struck through by metal and wood, suffering with wet lungs and nakedness. He traveled to hell and back, a place were we often flippantly claim to go, to obtain a life beyond what we could offer ourselves as well as procure communion with the living God.<br /><br />I sat beneath a concert tent a week ago with a friend who is not unlike a unique vintage from God’s secret wine cellar. My friend ferments, bettering with age, and at least once each year I try to pull a bottle of him off the shelf for a tip up. And he thinks that I am cool. As we talked in our lawn chairs, I told him I had noticed a change in him, that his sharp edges were worn down and he was smoother. He said that he was more comfortable in his own skin, and he knew the depths of his pridefulness. He was happy with who he was and was contented in the surrender to his current life status. I spilled my dissatisfaction with the chaotic circumstances that surround my peaceful innerworkings. He smiled as he remarked about how interesting it would be to see where my life would be a year from that night. We grew quiet about how much more there would be to say.<br /><br />The following is what I wrote in my journal today. “I think my vintage friend has found a secret most ignore or are never brave enough to experience. Eggs must break to have the finest of pastries. Old bricks and small stones become concrete. Self-deconstruction must happen not just to know the compass of your pompousness but to know the “I” before you say “I love you.” Post-adolescent angst, pain, and suffering must happen. The deconstruction of unlearning must happen to everything in order to bring not just a grasp on who you are in your own skin, but the realization of belief in the truth. Being the truth.”<br /><br />- END -Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2