Treasure Chest

The Geography of Love

2013-10-10T13:35:00.000-07:00

My newest posts are at my new blog: The Geography of Love

lexicography of my inbox. (draft)

2011-01-22T15:50:00.000-08:00

A tiny box,
that doesn't really exist,
but somehow exists, but
not anywhere, and
invisibly. You explained
this to me once, but,
you don't know: it's magic.

And there are eight worlds
here, six seperately, three
continents. She speaks with
the wisdom of one-hundred-forty-four
years-- "exclusive devotion", (but I get
lost on nightingale, imagining
statutes that shed their
snow-cold marble tombs,
winged-souls fly,
naked and unashamed.)

He describes blow after blow,
bruises conjured to the surface,
lines bent into angles,
"life is fantastically strange"
and broken down, he finds his
bearings in our blood (life is glorious)
and we love. who can know that,
without knowing, what it is to hurt?

She says "tentatively"
but I feel the way she leans into it,
aching, wanting,
"when the circle is smaller"
the strip you cut into the earth thinner,
the purple buds, the red clay,
she is saying: home.

and this one patiently, enduring love
(you will know if you know)
windows open to fields and flowers
and the sun coming in
(as it will, every morning)
space. and quietness. and you.
terrarium dreams. always, our lives
imagined old together.

"There is so much possibility....."

"Appelsbosch."
she speacks of shuttle to ship,
the dockyard (the seagulls cry,
my cold feet warm on the sand, )
Durban,
... another home that sleeps
inside this tiny body
(How can anywhere be small enough,
for the miniscule intimacy I can offer,
I want to absorb a place, inch by inch,
but where could be small enough for I?)
Top deck. Scrubbed walls. Mercy
climbing over waters, set to sail.

This name scrawls i-miss across
my heart as I read,
this one, a galaxy alone,
memory "silver and shimmery"
Inshaallah.

I echo...
who are you, Lord? who are
you, Lord?
"life is fantastically strange."
How is it that I traveled these
eight worlds. That they wait
for me, await repsonse.
The smallness of me falls
like rain, singular and whole,
drop by drop, immersion. or,
baptism. The chorus repeats:
"and love was left over. and
love was left over."

you may think so.

2010-11-14T22:43:00.000-08:00

Bitterroot is also Lewisia Rediva. Oh the metaphors you created, my Poet.

"When Lewis’ pressed and dried specimen was examined months after picking, it still showed signs of life and upon planting, it grew – hence the scientific name rediviva meaning “restored to life” (Parish et al 1996)."

Perfect. Even she exclaimed, "It's us! It's us."
But, The Sparrow whispered a sentence for you I will not soon forget, either as memory or premonition or prophecy. I am sorry, that I don't speak your language yet. or have forgotten it, or you've moved and I have to come after. It's okay. I know it is. I want my heart to bleed you, like it used too. I want to cry at what I feel now, even joy and hope pierce with beauty-ache. But that doesn't change how it feels, how incapable of articulation I am... the ground of it, flying up to crash into a wild sparrow. It becomes another inhale, another silence held inside like that continent. I am weary of trying to pass the stillness of silence off into air, to send it over my vocal chords into vibrations for other ears, I am too weary... always lost in translation. We stood in the kitchen and laughed (a merciless laugh, the laugh of ice and fear)
: if you returned and spoke your language, there'd still be no one to translate.

How does one find the word? "Not all who wander are lost." Remember.

Remember when I was standing on the table and you talked casually until your legs began to migrate to the doorframe only then did you turn to ask me "why?" and I could only collapse into that laughter.
Remember, that you do not know how I want to hold, how I am breaking, you can not feel my bird bones snapping, the hollow crunch I taste in my mouth when I step on leaves, the aching. And I can not tell you how.

"It seems that all my bridges have been burned,
But you say that’s exactly how this grace thing works
It’s not the long walk home that will change this heart,
But the welcome I receive with the restart."

Comparisons and Liberation

2010-09-29T10:35:00.000-07:00

I hate how I descend into this, energy turned inward, my stakes to identity threatened by comparison, and I feel transparent and flat as Kansas, though I shouldn't compare. I feel vacuous, vapid, suffering from my own self-absorption and psychology when I want to touch physicality. Story of my life. I am never filled enough with vision or meaning. How else ot move past this, not only biting into the apple skin of the present but also turning my eyes toward the lives of people around me, toward the Uncreated one. Listening, asking more questions: understanding the way they see is a new world, every relationship is a way out of my one-dimensionality. In philosophy i was realizing how I would rather have reality/encounter (even if it were humiliating or hard) than entertainment, idealism, unreality. I fear inertia. I am compelled to impuslive self-disclosure because I need something to happen. I linger in cg, I write letters, I stretch out my tentacles, seekers, hoping that one more interaction would change anything. I want to be more that I am. Is it the pressure to do more? create more meaning? hyperactivity? What is bad about slow? do I really fit more (and more what) into my day by facebook, by constant go, by constant music, by constant purpose? I am essentially reducing meaning to consumption. To consuming doing. How would life open up if i only used my computer one hour a day? What would i loose by that? What am I "saving" time for so urgently anyway? I want to spend it. When does advancement over do it? Life feels concrete, essential among the under-privledged tin ways the suburban hub-bub can't reproduce. They aren't less happy (unless as a result of injustices or lack of access to being, to their hopes.) What if I did things slower? Less hyper efficently? Patiently. If I forced my boredom into using my body, sustaining my life in non-alienated ways. Could that possibly make me less happy? I can't imagine so. Repetition is not an evil- kneading bread, watching a thoughts sunsets, tasting any flavor. And presence helps me to have solidarity, to lip-laced listening, not Saviour-status.

I have incredible laziness and a dose of apathy to fight, and I think its most realistic to do so by gardening, writing letters, collecting objects and collaging, collecting impressions and writing, reading, looking for ways to serve my housemates and community (to love them, to lay deep roots), to stop whining about my emotions and invest in joy, in love. To stop feelign disconnected from my body and start dwelling in it. With less. Becoming rooted in reality. More dependent.

[Reflections from Borgman and http://www.geezmagazine.org/blogs/filter/amishmash/]

I just want to know the meaning of life, no big deal.

2010-09-18T08:46:00.000-07:00

This morning when the ten faces of my room woke up-- glaring horrid faces of light, I did not want to get up. Sometimes my ache for purpose is counter-productive to my desire to live deep awake. I have been talking to God a lot lately, because we're brawling, and I am not ready to let him come sauntering back in with his silences, so I am holding him at arms length and leveling every accusation against him-- this time the fight will be out in the open, down and dirty, and I will not let go until there is some resolution. But, He prefers this, he is inclined towards those who never shut up or sit down with their hopeful doubt.

And this morning I recalled: "all actual life is encounter." And that struck me, as certainty and determinism are lost to my vocabulary-- the glory of every day is this: to encounter, to search, to "purpose" of right now is this- to indwell the moment, to encounter an Other. To live as if it were my purpose to pour all of myself into the present, to hear others, to love others, to love God.

Since I am not nearly as stubborn as God, this morning He managed to wrangle his way back in, sneaky Being. I chose to just move moment by moment, with joy. I spent an hour doing yoga, then drank coffee and ate pastries with my housemates in the kitchen. I search for meaning to much when meaning may be as simple as being witness to this moment, cherishing it, filling it with love and allowing myself to be filled with it... "Most of the time, there is only this moment, and the imperfect love of people."

I feel peace, not because of resolutions, but because God is more ornery than I am.

"the way will descend into my

soul as the dew, inescapable,

I adore the distance as a

worshiper of wandering

of the thousand lives indwelling one

and this storm shuffles down the valley,

a steady unhurried approach,

where time is only a servant to emergence

an arrival that can never be late

all i have left is this

is this and only this

(and this is more than enough)"

how to lay the mind to rest?

2010-09-10T21:29:00.000-07:00

Another chilly night, and I feel restless, sleepless again: searching for an activity that satisfies my exhausted mind. Non-verbal ways to process (yet here I am, scribbling.)

Thia and I sat on the porch talking of how endlessly we return to this navigation of identities, the struggle of margins (blurry lines we barely fall across, and yet, are torn by still.)

These words from the summer resound:

The coyote howls, mangy gray, on the horizon I sit and simmer, I simmer like steam leaving tea, simmer, like a low turned burner, like less heat rising, the emotions simmer, they do not cook up or boil, slowly they turn into something more steady, more concrete, steam leaves, exhaling, I breathe in the vision of a dawn I breathe in the vision of...

I feel the jagged edges of my soul, like these broken mountains. Befriended, I want to reach my hand out and press it into another's, amiably, comforted by the physicality. To know how to feel my way into another's existence… in the cracks, to climb the crevice, pressing what can reach into a hole and pulling myself up, invitation, not invasion.

The wind is singing, slowly, a lullaby for waking, a lullaby for stirring, she calls forth from our hearts the tune of movement, the lust for touching (dancing) moving air around our forms, occupy this space, occupy this territory of myself so that others can move into it, the settlement of hospitality even while we emerge, this is the story, this is the tale she has to tell: “I will be a human like a tree is a tree.”

another day.

2010-09-08T18:55:00.000-07:00

(from woolgathering)

messy room, troubles sleeping, blank pages in my journal, heavy boots for one reason or another.

tonight I made myself resurrect the stillness of desire, of the summer and sit, and sit, and sit... under a black sky, gleaming lights, backlit leaves.

doubts. wonders.

so many things I silence inside myself.

// we'll find a cathedral so you can convince me I'm pretty //

Lipogram...

2010-09-05T15:48:00.000-07:00

I am in an 80-works poetry class (which is inducing a feeling of sub-par-ness)... but, in response to Emily's glorious one, here is mine: (a poem without the letter e)

Upon Waking

Luminous glow, pursuit of my soul

Through nightly fancy and whimsical vagary,

I follow your hand, a landmark to waking.

Light strands amiably conducting in flourish

Draw from my lips a salutatory murmur,

an animal purring, lapping up morning.

Dawn’s pallor lights crimson by

sun’s arching digits, and yogic arms waving

I cast from my body night’s rigor mortis.

Baptizing day’s hours with a nod to St. Francis,

Crown to the floor, limbs pointing skyward,

throw in a cobra, a locust, a willow.

In this sanctuary of body and of spirit,

I anoint God, as glory of ordinary.

Day 7

2010-09-02T14:25:00.000-07:00

The first strand reaches me like the thin tendrils of underwater plants entwining around your ankle as you swim, or the incessant beeping suddenly morphing from an element in your dream into the piercing alarm of reality. Internally Displaced People, sisters, brothers, listen gently, I have occupied the same fate. It tugs. The forgotten is always remembered right past convenience. Those movies you were going to drop off-- at the front door, that reluctant memory of a grocery item-- as you pull unto your street, the word you were searching for all day-- just as you drift to sleep. '

What is the strand this day? A feeling passing through you like a scent hanging low in the branches of the trees you stoop under, catches unto you. It isn't as clear as it was last fall, the hunger for possession, for resting, but it is still familiar. You've carried armfuls of shadows into daylight and cleansed them in the river of acknowledgment, you've "come to terms" with. But, count them again as they gather for darkness, there are always lingering ones. This time though its faint. A certain distrust of the delicate peace settled inside you. Can it be trusted? Can you put weight on it? This feeling of tender happiness, of softly spoken home.

You spoke for an hour of feeling a close to the time of drudging up those memories, you've milked them of their emotional worth, you've gleamed their lessons-- and now the present smiles, enticing you to finally rest and to awaken into this deep living. Stopping the planning - the incessant need for actions to fall upon utilitarian lines, for everything to be a mechanical answer. To realize the worth of breathing, of gazing at a sunset, or stopping to honestly listen to someone, however flawed our ability to do so remains.

Day 4 or 5 or something

2010-09-01T20:04:00.000-07:00

"Maria, are you studying?"
"Yes... why?"
"Want to play wild-african-princess-study-break-dress-up with me?"
"Whaa...hahahaha."
"Go change! And put purple eyeliner on your face!"

And thus commenced the epic adventures of an already satisfying day.

Day 2

2010-08-29T19:15:00.000-07:00

Endless summer withers under the ripening school year. But, she goes proudly to her end, no shrinking back-- a morning run, walking to church- bright colored dresses like wildflowers punctuating the concrete cracks of warehouse lots and train tracks, barefoot and muddy-fingered planting broccoli, rock-jumping swimming holes- cool sinking through the layers of your skin into your chest with deep, refreshed breaths, and an a cappella concert- harmony twitching into your fingers and toes, up and down go your feet. Expresso in a new friends apartment, hearing new histories, the million arrivals that lead us to here. Dumpster diving- kitten giveaway and hiding from chinese takeout cars, find of the night: 14.99$ decorative skeleton, missing lower leg segment... cause of death: below the knee blow in a bar fight. name: to be determined.

Last night, Thia, Rebekah, and I attended The Last 5 Years, which was beautifully performed but unsettling... a restatement of my most common fears, the kind that prompted this:

But you are everywhere, tripping over our dance,
intimately woven into the language
as a part of all our names
a weed entwined to a stalk
were we not our own?
Not -he --man, --male.
what do we have that is our own?
you take our bodies.
you take our laughter.
we bear you in our bodies,
but you forget, forsake us still,
not content until your feet tread
the ridges of our backs,
crunch over the hills of our chest
what is ours?

Day 1

2010-08-28T16:02:00.000-07:00

If today were scented it'd be dryer lint, black tea, freshly cut grass, and yeast. The move into the little brick house is magic, home for a year feels like a luxury. The weekend has been full of thrifting, baking bread, gardening, and meeting neighbors. Delightful neighbor/friends who, while lacking a rolling pin, have introduced us to the garden plot and given us fresh vegetables, milk, and eggs. My room is a converted porch with ten windows, sunlight-joy, strawberry-blond sun strands.

It's just such a hands-in-the-dirt-heart-in-the-sky way of being here. Maybe I'm country-souled after all. I feel whole.

This semester some of the things I want to be intentional about are remembering the sacred in my life... living simply, living spiritually, living presently. I really want to explore the depths of tradition and freedom, rhythms ... discover what it looks like for me to follow Jesus in sincerity to the revelation of God and who I am. Jesus is radical, and I want to embody that within myself... not even necessarily outwardly but "abiding in Christ"... I don't know- this is on my thoughts a lot and I am still trying to parse out what it means.

Yes, I did listen everywhere.

2010-02-08T19:16:00.000-08:00

The snow is falling so silently it could make me deaf.

There is that greedy, ravenous awakening inside me, the desire to colonize the heart of another, no, to be a guest, to inhabit another's heart as a sought after presence and allow their impression to weigh on the vacancies of my own. More, to pull my heart into the eternal, into wholeness. Yes, to sit in silence. Transcendence. Immanence.

Blood freckles on my forearm from the stressful snapping of my hair-band, unconscious habits that leave us marked.

God in

tumbling white branch tangles

tearing at some chamber

deep below water

purple green blackness

my head bent against the separation

a pane, cold living, breathing

on the other side

God in
my neutrons firing
down woven corridors, seeking

something hidden, something

sliding around corners

chasing

God, God...

crooked shoulder blades

shh, shouted, whispered into

the cracks inside me

into the surrounding waves

swarming over me

disguised cravings

cloud dust spilling off your shelves

unto our terra madre

snowfalls so loudly, blaring against noise,
snow falls bellowing
disassembling, dislodging

"this" inside me

shaking lose, loss, lost what exactly?

God, this hunger is so great

the edge-teetering, teeth gritted desperation

collapsing inward in concentric circles

tinier, tinier, till nothing

"this" something, sliding out

my head pressed against the pane

I can not float into the night

to fall, so loudly, so noticeably

my soul pressed against

the immense isolation of me

unbreachable

if i could reach into the cold, these atoms would slow enough to pass through gaps of material, break apart, chip, chip, chip

one day slowly I will decay

and the drenched, impenetratable I

will dissolve, but I will have gone before seeing

these atoms

that once were my mother's blood
(from where else did I come?)

and now my sole possession

I can not reach through

one day, it will be too late

so lay I in a field of snow

the naked soul, and discarding

all hope I am not another

but a collage of every moment's impression

and here the snow, You, I, become

the pane, the borders

the barriers, the old-sames.

he will be gone soon, (there are no uppercase people), merely humans breathing, bleeding, being. I watch his eyelashes blink- a collector of observance, nothing will ever happen there to bond our atoms, only our brains will touch over similar frames, over words, the conjuring of a perception related to name. he will be gone soon, and I will continue stretching toward freedom. He is a brushing sensation, a moment's impression, inflection, forming me somehow without, ever, touching.

[there is so much to say about things that matter, but words for another day.]

preoccupation

2010-01-26T23:01:00.000-08:00

today was strange.

I read Chocolat for an hour, while it snowed out the library window and ended on a passage about death, which added to ruminating thoughts. While I am rarely preoccupied with death, today the subject was unshakeable from my mind.

and so, I sat in a class about just war theory, forced to think about the over 1 million non-combatants that have died as results of was in the past century. (maybe more?) and thinking about death. death. death. and the way I can't actually grasp it. death. and so many faces... the graceful old, the robbed youth, the innocent slaughtered, in Cambodia on the killing fields the bodies were dumped then this swamp-like ground flooded, but they lay there, just below the surface... sometimes a bit of cloth is sticking out from the wetland grass, and you don't know-- it could be disguising a full corpse, a bag of bones... they built a memorial, glass walls full of skulls. death. and we become so desensitized. it is so personal, terrifying, sad, sacred to the individual, but at the scale of war, we lose the humanity-- the hearts behind deaths. the loss. the overwhelming grief of Cambodians, Sudanese, Haitian, American, Iraqi families-- the survivors of death, the humanness of mothers who will mourn, of orphans who will weep, of fathers, parents-- who will wrestle with the goodness of God. and it turns over and over- the sacrifice of them for us, the sorrow into hatred, life for life, death for death...

: The faces... to some it comes as a grace, to others a terror, a waste, an injustice (so young), a loss. And more than death it is the unnameable, deeper than black darkness of loss, the separation from a being we were intimate with. It is the soul ebbing away from us to an unknown, unreachable destination more than the withering body, the decaying decency, senility's creeping thievery of the mind's daylight, the unseeable disease feasting on the body beneath the flesh even as all around life continues. Death, the inauguration of the reign of memory. And is faith an unwavering acceptance, to bow gracefully or is it a life-lust battle, flung against it. We envy those who can grasp its hand with contentment, with calendar pages stacked days full behind them. To die with dignity... is it cowardly to blink back tears, to mourn an ending, we perceive unfinished-- but death is finality.

This mystery. galaxy black velvet deep... but there are no words past dark, black, to describe the darkness my heart conjures, an impression somehow beyond, incomprehensible, because it is unexperienced-- an inexhaustible yawning lack of answer. And how do we cower at this death, but feel so free to vanquish "the other" and their families into loss, grieving. How do we mourn, bereft-- our sons and daughters of war, and not feel our conscience straying, fingers spread to clasp the mourning other. How do we shut our eyes to stare into the back of our eyelids less we see and comprehend the reflection of us, of them, in the eyes of each "other." ... Emily's friend died over spring break and she said, "I'll never get to encounter her "otherness" again, we'll never mingle, interact." The experience of her is gone (for now.)

Death is never singular, it evolves inside of us- searing pain, an eruption in the form of absence, void, stark bleaching negation. Memory is a cold, stone object-- it can not touch, can not be warmth or movement or encounter-- merely form and specter. Death begins a process, begins an altered living, changing.

Spirits... do they linger? Don't they whisper in the tall grass, in the rain, don't they coo, and sing, and laugh.... and chastise, warn, yell, weep. Memory, lingering impression, last mental ligaments of life, beyond death.

death. end. finality. the absence of presence, the startling screeching silence. screaming, wide open, empty silence. scorching, shell-shock silence.

faith. is it leaping into living? is it blushing, grasping, clinging, and is it shuddering, weeping, loving ligaments of living memory, are the unforgotten able to die?

death. is like tall unsighted trees bleached white by rain, birch trees maybe, unbending, reaching in unheard noise, echoing out sound-waves from the hearth of darkness, the center of some colossal hidden forrest.

I do not possess the spirit within me, I own no life to argue, grasp, yet... I would not complacently let it go... I am troubled by the unfulfilled pages, the mid-sentence stops of beautiful, strange, magnificent, odd, brothers and sisters. people who were. people who were and are not. faith... is it to trust the heart of Goodness, of Love, when the face looks like painful, colorless, monstrous loss?

death. What is darker, deeper than blackness, darkness, my mind can not reach there, life can not reach there, to the experience, but it is the survivors who know death, not the dead, who live. Yet... sky, space stretching outward, past starlights end, into infinite, eternal, lightless depth... back turned from the sun, into shadow, into wet damp chill emptiness of a cavern piercing to the center of our madre terra. full absorbing quiet, these thoughts swallowing my usual preoccupation with living. death, lighting the embers, cozing up to my internal fires, casting tricks of transparent people, opacity only developed by being living, "deep awake"... spirits in the streets, temporal, eternal.

yes.

2010-01-24T08:19:00.001-08:00

Today I started listening to political hip-hop (or underground hip-hop) and discovered I really enjoy it. "Prophetic hip hop." It hardly seems possible that this semester is only two weeks old. But at least the doomsday clock was moved back a minute.

And besides 18 credits, I find myself interwoven into the ideas and actions of these "clubs":

Intercollegiate Peace Fellowship,

Earthkeepers,

Sustainable Food Intiative,

Rich Young Rulers,

Safespaces,

and MRI.

(too much) and yet, this is life. Not busyness but being engaged in the things that stir my soul, that wake me up, in the interactions of late night conversations, the questions of eight-year old children (brilliance, to quickly forgotten), brainstorming, reading and studying tea parties on my friends' floors, lectures that send my mind wandering and stumbling toward truth-telling and understanding mysteries, winter lanes, cooking food and sharing meals, laughter and confessions of self that require humility and vulnerability.

This year has been pervaded with a sense of hope, anticipation. The acknowledgment that God is still speaking.

"and happy"

2010-01-01T21:27:00.000-08:00

bursting at the seams.

100 things.

I don't have New Years Resolutions, I'm not concerned with what I do, but with who I am becoming. I don't have resolutions, but compass points, directions I want to trudge onward in.

"and this is the soul, and the body."

100 thoughts.

I finally, after so many changes am taking: Creative Writing, Ceramics, NT Gospels, Globalization & Justice, a history tutorial, and Conflict, Violence, & Terrorism ... and sitting in on Comparative Monotheism (and possibly Conceptions of the Common Good) ... (because that'd only be 3 hours of class on MWF- and as my Uncle says, "You are not in college to be taught, but to learn."

Thoughts for the New Year: Intentional communities (always), art and month projects like my color diary, food justice and health-- being present in my body, the Scriptures (reading them with RYR specifically), articulation, OCP, loving people I don't like or relate too, letter-writing and less computer time (only weekly facebook)... MRI, "a staying adventure"... documentaries.

oh, the world is too full of wonder and the Uncreated One.

Color & Diary

2009-12-25T20:34:00.000-08:00

One day in October a newly befriended noble spirit and I were discussing ways to live "deep awake" and one of my projects was to record the weather patterns of my internal landscape in "the color of the day" every night for a month. So, I'm going to begin posting reflections from that project.

color & diary
#3 Golden Yellow- Interrupted by glory.
"blue balloons swimming out to the stars, uncatchable. Violets sprouting in my terrarium, a hopeful day. paint splotches on my skin underneath a sky pregnant with the wish of rain and the wind sung like the stirring of birds. [My noble-spirited friend] is so full of freedom, the Spirit, it echoed through the long hallways of my sometimes lonely heart like a spring breeze stirring petals. I felt the first sense of belonging here, new heart ties, because love is limitless."

#4 Winter Sky Blue- Serene.
"right now I am inside a small glitch in the universe allowing perfection. On the ride here I felt certain that if I could remain in a place like this I could be happy forever-- with the wind setting the leaves shaking as hushed tambourines, birds chirping their last northern choruses, and the sun still warm enough for afternoon naps. Every part of my mind grinning wildly at this galactic blessing with color punctuating sight and a lulling quiet that is contentment's hymn. Today I went to church and my heart didn't feel so resentful or clamped in, I was thankful to be there, relieved even. Led. I don't have answers for all the questions and haunts in my head, but today You are near and it is enough for quiet.

A Series of Fortunate Events

2009-12-25T19:33:00.000-08:00

Christmas- the celebration of The Gift, the incarnation, Emmanuel- God with us.

There is so much to say and where to begin, where do these thoughts really begin, when? As another year of my glorious interlude upon this earth winds down, I am amazed to find that what looks like a wild goose chase is actually forming into a series of fortunate events that are leading me where I'm meant to go. Although, that destination is a distant, elusive beacon.

While I was in Africa at the beginning of this year I read The Poisonwood Bible and while I knew it had effected me, I wasn't, and maybe still am not, fully aware of the shaking inside me. "The loss of certainty makes space for faith, like negative space." Ah, my faith has had room for growing this year. I am constantly reminded that the cost of discipleship, the gospel, is more challenging, more daring, more demanding of fearlessness, then anything I could imagine. Jesus is beautiful and terrifying. I was reminded again today that I am excited by the Way, my imagination and heart are re-baptized by His word.

Despite my internal weather patterns, the black days, the euphoric days and the crashing abysses, there were moments of this semester that were ordinary and subtly life-changing-- moments that made me think, I am galactic-ly blessed. (To name a few: Tea-time, "studying" in the lounge, the Den of Secrets, letters in my mailbox, bike rides, phone call rambles, reading the Bible aloud, night walks to the hill, meteor-watching, bike rides, MRI & Rich Young Rulers, the Indian summer and afternoons on Amanda's circle blanket, all the conversations in Common Grounds, collaging and all the times of wordless companionship, Thia hugs, growing in my understanding of non-violence, health, justice, loving people, and that first time I felt: I belong, and the RYR time of confession.)

The upside-down world, the kingdom of God. Today I was reminded of the Christ I was drawn too and the lifestyle I am called to renounce. I was reminded that it the life of God inside of me invades everything. Terrifying and beautiful.

self-diagnosis

2009-12-11T22:18:00.000-08:00

I've determined there is a CID disorder (Compulsive Impulsive Behavioral Disorder), and I have it. When I get stressed out I have an impulsive (often irrational idea), then I become fixated on it and talk myself into it, until I am compelled to do them, even though I can reasonably think of why I shouldn't. So, clearly, I'm on my way to full-scale pathology.

or, perhaps, I'm subconsciously bored and this is the way it surfaces. But, disorders are more handy.

freeze frame

2009-12-10T21:02:00.000-08:00

I cut my hair like a crazy person today, thank God I was distracted or it would've become drastic. Would probably still snip at it if I hadn't put the scissors back. It just happens that way. They sit there tempting me with all the raging of thoughts and questions inside and I have to act out on something, and my poor hair.

I don't know why it takes so long / I cut my hair, I grow it back / First the thought and then the act /

I finally had a revelation that foolishly took me all semester long. Ah me and hindsight, at least feelings have context. The seed began when the South African cross-cultural team arrived back "home"... their presentations made me miss for Africa, and then I talked to some friends about cross-cultural experiences and the forced, quick intimacy-- how you have to figure out how to sustain friendships built in that context in normal life. I didn't realize, in a sense, I've been expecting my relationships here to be like cross-cultural friendships.

I'd gotten used to the cycle of making friends in forced intimate situations (situations where we had to become vulnerable, dependent, and open quickly-- where adventures and bonding were moments of the day... because we were out of our country, out of our contexts, out of our comfort zone.) And, I've felt lonesome here, much harder to break into friends groups. I don't know why I didn't think of it before, why this time was so different. But, the distance in relationships... Not all, thank goodness for the few complimentary heart shades and the Orange Tree Spirit who adopted me instantly, seeing past the girl who takes time to unravel, to be myself... to be other than "quiet." The distance- is the normal approach.

Leave it to me to take so long to see what the average person is used to experiencing. I've been socialized differently-- I refuse to label it awkwardly, but they'll call it what they will. I realize for me, day to day life is supposed to be made up of intimacy, of deep questioning, of walks... I need genuine human interaction each day. I don't feel alive unless that happens- those moments of connecting.

Maybe its the culture here, but in some ways its harder to figure out, to fit in, especially this business of not saying hi or goodbye to people who are "friends," so strange. I feel, for the present, I have to mask my appreciation and enjoyment of people. My reluctance to say I someone's friend because I'm not sure what they consider me. Maybe its just re-entering a "cold climate" culture. The sense that I'm not really being accepted or "in" or whatever, is because people aren't used to making intimate friendships in a few weeks (or months), they're used to building them... where I'm used to being thrown in with whatever lot I get and scavenging out of that friendships that later form my heart.

so, this is real life now... slow, steady relationships. Relationships that are defined... by context, I suppose. Interesting. I don't really know what this means, but I feel like it's significant.

Food & Justice

2009-12-05T18:10:00.000-08:00

Justice. Economic Justice. Social Justice. Food Justice. Sustainability. "Justice by health."

I've been thinking about the way life has happened, how without knowing it I've been led (as Wendell Berry said)-- and the journey continues. There is so much to learn, and whole systems of lifestyle and thought that have been wrong and need to change, and those processes will take time. Time is something I'm not good at appreciating, slow, steady, consistent change lacks the luster and appeal of dramatic radical revolution.

I feel like my life is that game where you draw all the dots on the page, then start drawing in lines one at a time, till eventually you're connecting boxes. At the end you fill your initial into the box and it's completed. It's wonderful when those lines of connection are drawn, when the shape begins to emerge. In my life however, most of the lines are still floating waiting for life and time to draw out the way they go together.

The most recent etching is local food, sustainability, and the way it plays into justice. "400 gallons of oil a year per citizen" are used in the agriculture industry, second only to the use of energy in vehicles-- and the ecological processes are often overlooked as well. We've master corn and soy (or have they mastered us?), we now produce such an excess of them that we feed it to our food, use it in meat & other products, ship it out in US AID, we dump it in foreign markets making it impossible for small-scale farmers (especially in the developing world) to compete with corporate prices. If Americans replaced one meal a day with local grown foods, oil consumption would be cut by 1.1 Million barrels of oil a week. It takes 2,460 gallons of water to produce 1 lb. of beef. If you went beef-free just one day each week you would save 34,000 gallons of water a year.

And the food we eat is hurting us. This is the first generation to be predicted to have a shorter life span than our parents. The highest amount of child diabetes and obesity, and most diseases in the US are preventable with a healthy diet/exercise. "We're overfed and under-nourished." Re-imaging how we eat. There's so many books (that I haven't read yet)-- so much to learn. But I'm excited about beginning this- and the nearby lines it connects to of justice, community, simplicity, peace, health, freedom, sustainability. And, of course... "once we move away from toxic foods we rediscover our taste buds."

"It's actually our farmers who grow our medicine." - Beth Ingram

Everything can feel like a fight, like things we don't want to do. "Gardening can be a way of resisting/divesting from the dominant destructive system. It's a constructive, positive approach toward making change." - Tom Beniveto.

The subversiveness of eating local, eating healthy... revolution by planting... it makes you have to smile.

we mingle in the dust

2009-12-02T21:04:00.001-08:00

I've been taking walks every night lately, that movement, the rhythm of my feet on pavement, it's almost involuntary-- a need really. Moonlight, mist, chill, droplets off the ends of branches, the conviction that everything matters.

I am struggling, to know what direction to go in. I know what classes I chose next semester, who I chose to be around, what I'm involved in... all of it matters so much-- all of it shapes me and determines where my life goes. All of it has eternal weight. And that builds this ever present stress in me-- what am I choosing, how do I know what to choose, how do I know where God is... how do I piece together the contrary thoughts in my life and the recognition of my past-- thoughts that have changed so much when I once would have sworn they were RIGHT. TRUTH.

This semester has been good in so many ways-- becoming who I want to be and pursuing things I want to do... but, I feel this pressure, not to know the future- but to make right decisions in the present, to define where I am, what I value, and what it is that my heart is needing... to know how to follow Jesus and the gospel. Yet I am so sick of all the jargon and rituals and superficiality of church and the way it's practiced. I want to do, not think... I have longed all my life to be deep awake, to be alive. And, I feel like the only choice is, in a sense, to be radical ... or not to believe. "lukewarm spitting." And to be radical I mean, if I believe it- it is a lifestyle, ... the gospel, the sermon on the mount, the pursuit of God, the denial of myself, actually loving and serving others, actually prioritizing my time around living the incarnation... and maybe this inner stress is really just the confrontation of my heart's laziness. It's been good to read the Bible with RYR lately. And to send out deep sea soundings to distant friends and hear their hearts echoed back. [Thank you.]

red dust on my suitcase, roots dangling in hand

I've made friends and once again some of those friends are heading off with pieces of my heart embedded. Life must have been much simpler before airplanes and trains and all the machines that carry friends afar. I don't understand why there is this constant uprooting (even when I settle myself to be settled) but it's alright.

"Life is a journey from the house of fear to the house of love."

2009-12-01T21:49:00.001-08:00

Tonight I was having one of those times where you want to throw a tantrum at life. The pressure of thoughts building up, of knowing that things matter, but not knowing how to make those decisions.

home

2009-11-25T19:30:00.000-08:00

you think you will remember, you think you could not forget.

Pet

2009-11-24T21:23:00.000-08:00

[a short story]

I stand at the window, wringing my hands. Out in the yard the dog is stalking a bird along the fence line. It always fascinated me, the way his body tensed, every muscle poised for the aim of possession. He’s a machine, ready to spring, to strike and yet so patient watching—as if time could lie down and beg at his paws. The power in that stance, it was the way I first saw you. I wanted to be absorbed by a power like that.

Your desire was intoxicating. I tattooed my skin with that want; the strength it feed into my veins was a drug. The way your glance owned me, controlled me, dictated the way I flicked my hair, moved my eyes to meet yours. I wanted that want, which was a weakness you uncovered. And the more I loved, the more it fueled your power over me. I didn’t understand then, couldn’t have—or so I naively attempt to justify my youth, to transmit bravery where there was only ignorance and blindness. I didn’t know, that freedom was not losing myself in you, to you. That freedom was not possession anymore than drowning in a sea is freedom.

The dog lurches into the bush, I see the fluttering wings, the desperate attempts at freedom. And I can imagine the teeth piercing through her breast, the crunching of hollow bones, the popping gush of warm, damp blood. I cannot imagine the rush of that domination, the Godlike power of taking life, of deciding fate. I know why you crave it. I don’t blame you.

I stand at the window and examine the dish in my hands. How many times have my hands cradled this fragile glass and my mind raced to its destruction? The ability to shatter it, to lift it and hurl it across the room builds in me with adrenaline. It’s a hysteric, chaotic force—power. But I reined it in, perhaps that was my weakness. You conjured the colors to the surface of my skin with your hands, called my voice out of my mouth. And instead of hating you I loved you the more for your possession of the courage I lacked. But no, that wasn’t love; it was something else, a blurry line between admiration and horror. Fear. Like my Sunday schoolteacher talked about trusting in God. I swallowed that lesson too easily. Love and fear… she was so wrong.

The plate is cracked anyway. For all the days I stood grasping it so tightly, straining it. It began as a fracture, a tiny crack in the surface. But with each increasing pressure it breaks into little fissures, spreading like spider webs underneath, invisible lines of breaking. I am sure one day I will hold it and it will dissolve in my hands. But that is not the finale I would like, there is less satisfaction in slow decay then the hurling. Is that why you always pushed harder? Where you trying to prove your strength, your superiority, or was it that you too were taught the wrong lessons?

The dog is running to the back door, scratching to be let in. Eyes warm and brown and endless, and there are pale soft feathers curled in his gum, blood crusted on the hairs near his mouth. Why didn’t I see that, the first time I looked at you? I push him away angrily. A few months ago I would not have wept over the death of a bird, but I feel the liquid rolling into my eyes like the flash floods in this valley. He does not understand the disdain towards his accomplishment, his nature. He sulks.

The melody of that bird used to greet me in the strawberry blonde strands of sunrise, snuffed out. It is too much, too close to home. I set the plate down and saunter across the linoleum, my jaw set in determination.

I pull out my suitcase. But those eyes bore into me, pleading, infinitely melancholy and apologetic. It’s only his nature. I sink to the cool tile floor and he muzzles my shoulder, drops his head into my lap, my hand involuntarily moves to stroke him. Forgiveness of the unrepentant, another lesson I swallowed to easily, learned wrongly. Again I find myself waiting for you.