Heaven is Now

At every moment, something sacred is at stake. 

— Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel

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 Heima 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. Heima means home. 

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. 

Afterlife, oh my God, what an awful word*
After all the breath and the dirt
And the fires that burn
And after all this time
And after all the ambulances go
And after all the hangers-on are done
Hanging on to the dead lights
Of the afterglow

I've gotta know
Can we work it out?
We scream and shout 'till we work it out
Can we just work it out?

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.

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:

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. 

— Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation

At least in her pain over her family, she is united in the love that heals us all.

Afterlife, I think I saw what happens next
It was just a glimpse of you
Like looking through a window
Or a shallow sea
Could you see me?
And after all this time
It's like nothing else we used to know
After all the hangers-on are done
Hanging on to the dead lights
Of the afterglow

I've gotta know

Can we work it out?

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.

But you say
Oh, when love is gone
Where does it go?
And you say
Oh, when love is gone
Where does it go?
And where do we go?
Where do we go?

…And after this
Can it last another night?
After all the bad advice
Had nothing at all to do with life

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?

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. 

We can let the eternity transform this present moment. Heaven is now.

Is this the afterlife?
It's just an afterlife, with you

*Afterlife from Reflektor by Arcade Fire

When I'm too close to start to fade

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.

Pretty little thing did you feel something*

Did you always want me to be something

To mend a broken a heart

From a Devil of shallow nonsense

Turned your world upside down

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.

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.

Whatever said that it'd mean something

Whatever said that it'd mean nothing

And did I look the part

When it's all said and done

When it's all said and done

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.

But I'm

No good next to Diamonds

When I'm too close to start to fade

Are you angry with me now

Are you angry cause I'm to blame

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.

Never wanna hide the truth from you

Just hang my head what I put you through

I wasn't good enough

When what's done is done love

When it's all said and done

Cause I fall away

Further than I ever was

Further than I ever was

Further than I ever was

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. 

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.

*The Boxer Rebellion - Diamonds

Move like smoke in my eyes

"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." — Brian Doyle

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. 

© Michael Christy

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.

I was also captivated by the source of the bees as this is a damaged city 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.

I have been attempting to live a better story 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 The Newyorker that appears like a miracle in our mailbox. I let my story become obscured in the home to flower goings-on of my life. 

Callin' it quits
You think this is easy
I swear I heard you callin' the jury
Call it a catch
Without any strings attached…*

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. 

I call it an ace
You've gotta believe me
But you're callin' me names not to my face
But you're calling my spade a bluff
Callin' it love

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?

Well I'm lookin' for a soft place to land
The forest floor
The palms of your hands
I'm lookin' for a soft place to land

I had a driveway moment this summer during a story 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. "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."

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.

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.

Call me in the night
I don't mind, I don't care, I can't sleep,
Call me in the day, in my car, on my way
Call me by name, all I want is to hear you say

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.

Well I'm lookin' for a soft place to land
The forest floor
The palms of your hands

I'm lookin' for a soft place to land
The forest floor
The palms of your hands, palms of your hands 

* A Soft Place To Land by Kathleen Edwards

See our love turn to rust

We can't fix what's broken so let's leave it here and walk on, 


I'll be right behind you

Love changes everything

I'm not sorry we loved,
but I hope I didn’t keep you too long

We're not experts

We are believers, ministers of silence

Let no man pull us under doubt

I'll always open my hands to you

I'll be right behind you

— Sam Phillips, Love Changes Everything

Sometime last summer I was in the car traveling to my hometown with my husband. 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 Sunday Bloody Sunday, my first brushes with social justice re-awaken. Pride (In the Name of Love) taught me that I should be vocal about spiritual heroes in defiance of those leaders that embarrassed me when it came to my faith. Bad was a song that taught me yes, there are some things that are too difficult to talk or do anything about. And 40 was the first time I had heard a Psalm sung proudly outside of the church.

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.

I want to run

I want to hide

I want to tear down the walls

That hold me inside

I want to reach out

And touch the flame

Where the streets have no name*

The moment I had in the car that day was one of deep listening. A rather long song, Where the Streets Have No Name, 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.

I want to feel sunlight on my face

I see the dust cloud disappear

Without a trace

I want to take shelter from the poison rain

Where the streets have no name

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.

Where the streets have no name

Where the streets have no name

We're still building

Then burning down love

Burning down love

And when I go there

I go there with you

It's all I can do

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.

The city's aflood

And our love turns to rust

We're beaten and blown by the wind

Trampled in dust

I'll show you a place

High on a desert plain

Where the streets have no name

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.

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.

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.

Where the streets have no name

Where the streets have no name

We're still building

Then burning down love

Burning down love

And when I go there

I go there with you

It's all I can do

Our love turns to rust

We're beaten and blown by the wind

Blown by the wind

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

Oh, and I see love

See our love turn to rust

We're beaten and blown by the wind

Blown by the wind

Oh, when I go there

I go there with you

It's all I can do

*Where the streets have no name by U2

Skimming and sinking

My 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.

You listen to the waves
you listen to the throw away
All you think I had
all we ever had
Watch me soon pray
the cheap wine takes my fear way
I pick up stones and throw them out to sea*

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.

Lower the wooden boats
liar comes and liar goes
Just watch as I throw all I have vowed to the sea
Will you meet me?
Will you meet me?

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.

So why?
So why is their heart dead
as we skim stones and we sink boats instead

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.

So why?
So why is their heart dead
as we skim stones and we sink boats instead

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?

Will you have a go?
Will you have a go?
Just take a look at me
is it the same world you see?
Is it the same world you see?

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.

I look them in the eye
They shout in my ear
they shout in my ear
they shout in my ear

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?

So why?
So why is their heart dead
as we skim stones and we sink boats instead

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."

Skin and stones just
skin and stones
we're sinking boats and
we're sinking boats

*‪Sinking Boats by Iain Morrison‬ (click to listen)

Sun, Shadows and Facebook Forgiveness

I picture you in the sun wondering what went wrong
And falling down on your knees asking for sympathy
And being caught in between all you wish for and all you seen
And trying to find anything you can feel that you can believe in*

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.

May gods love be with you
Always
May gods love be with you

I instigated the first one. I had seen this person's tiny electronic pop around on Facebook, 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 un-returned 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.

I know I would apologize if
I could see your eyes cause when you showed me myself
I became someone else
But I was caught in between all you wish for and all you need
I picture you fast asleep
A nightmare comes
You cant keep awake

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.

May gods love be with you
Always
May gods love be with you

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, "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." And I pressed 'send'.

'Cause if i find
If i find my own way
How much will i find
If i find
If i find my own way
How much will i find
You

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.

I don't know anymore
What it's for
I'm not even sure
If there is anyone who is in the sun
Will you help me to understand
'Cause i been caught in between all I wish for and all I need
Maybe you're not even sure what it's for
Any more than me

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, I thank you for transferring your grace. For those whom are still feeling my stinging ways, I hope our story is yet undone.

May God's love be with you
Always
May God's love be with you


* In the Sun by Joseph Arthur (click to listen)

Black Metals and Pearls

Come on children
You're acting like children
Every generation thinks
its the end of the world

And all ya fat followers
Get fit fast
Every generation thinks it's the last
thinks its the end of the world*

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.

Yes dream down a well
There's a lone heavy hell
I don't care anymore
I don't care anymore
It's a feeling we transcend
We're here at the end
I don't care anymore
I don't care anymore
You never know

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.

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.

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 Esquire magazine, he told the story of how he did something terrible to his father out of love.

"...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."

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.

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 "My Sweet Lord" in my heart that it is not the end of the world because, well, you never know.

Come on kids
You're acting like children
Act your age
Put back the black metals and pearls
All ya sword-swallowers pull yourselves together
Every generation thinks its the worst
Thinks it's the end of the world

It's a secret I can't tell
There's a wish down a well
I don't care anymore
I don't care anymore
It's a long heavy hell
Super-size it by 10
I don't care anymore
I don't care anymore
You never know
You never know

::END::

* You Never Know by Wilco (click to listen)