Gamer Grrl in Small Doses

Sharing Faith

2011-02-27T23:51:00.000-08:00

I think, in the end, it all comes down to this: Do you believe in the Word?

Last week, four American Bible missionaries were killed by pirates off the coast of Somali. Yes, modern-day missionaries, as well as modern-day pirates do exist. Strangely, half the people I mention this incident to at work didn't know that either one of these "archetypes" were anything more than players from history.

So let's say you read a book. It isn't perfect (and no, I'm not going to hell for saying that) but it has some action, some passion, some epic twists, and a great universe mythology. Plus, in the last third, there's this amazing hero -- strong, gentle, unwavering, so real -- that just opens everything up. You want to share that book, don't you? You want to buy fifty copies and give them as gifts to all your friends and family.

But wait! If you act now, there's more...

What if, when you were reading this book, it wound up answering a whole bunch of questions for you. Little lingering worries and concerns. What if, while reading this book, you found a kind of peace, felt a kind of connection. What if... just what if... while reading this book, and contemplating the whys and whens and whats of it all, you started to hear whispers. Whispers not in your head but directly from your heart.

You would buy fifty billion copies and give them to the whole wide world.

Some people preach to convert. They believe in the power of their own words, or at least, they believe in the skill they have in conveying the Word. Others simply smile, nod, and gently hand over a Bible. They trust, that if given the right tool, if handed the words on paper, that the Word will find its way into the reader.

Do you recruit? What risk would you take to save a life? To introduce someone to Christ? To just hand over a Bible?

I had a friend who wanted to spread the Word but not the word. Meaning, he wanted to give non-Christians a more uncensored view of the scriptures. He printed many of the "lost books" and apocrypha and other texts found at the same and in the same region as the books of the Bible that we all know. He bound it all together (at no small personal expense) and just handed them out on street corners. Then he designed grunge and tribal and abstract and even sensual covers. He bound his editions and handed more of them out. Was his work successful? He had to get a second mortgage on his house. He was twice mugged and once badly enough that he wound up in the hospital. But the email that he printed small on the back cover? More than two thousand messages. None of them were spam.

I think that missionaries have a bad rep to non-Christians. This image of Great White Man dragging his modest white wife and skinny yet devout white children traveling into the bug-invested, steamy jungles of some "third world country" and converting all the brown heathens, turning them away from their strange and furry gods, and white-washing (pun-intended) their culture and social rituals... well, I don't know any missionaries like that any more.

Today's missionaries travel everywhere -- Brazil, England, Japan -- to towns, villages, jungles, metropolis cities, and they open community centers, build houses, feed the elderly, open schools, teach English, teach kindness. As a matter of fact, of the four missionaries that I support (financially, I mean), only one of them is in a country where they can be "out." The others are risking their lives in countries that don't have freedom of religion. They're teaching English or math or science in secondary schools. They can neither say they are Christians nor hand out Bibles. Publicly, that is. Of course, as Christians, as missionaries, they do both those things... but quietly, carefully, and at great personal risk.

You all know that I am not so big on the compiled scripture that we call the Bible. I think it has been greatly edited by men (meaning humans) over the years and "modernized" and "clarified" to create something more akin to the line those in power what us to toe. But Christians (meaning followers of Christ), if following strictly in the foot steps of Christ, never toe the line. Did Christ toe the line when He stopped the stoning? Did Christ toe the line when He toppled tables of offerings?

But I am big on the Word. Those whispers that we hear when we hear Him. And I do believe that the scripture can open the door (or turn up the volume) on those whispers. Is there a risk that the reader will find only the word and not the Word?

Yes, of course. But there's risk in standing on a street corner, teaching in a classroom, or even sailing on the sea with a hold full of Bibles. Risk is part of being a Christian.

A blogger I found on Google said with some (very dark) sarcasm, "Four missionaries were killed by pirates. Distributing Bibles. See where that got them?" Yeah. Christ spoke the truth. See where that got Him?

And see where He got us?

Amen.

I Liked You

2011-02-21T23:03:00.000-08:00

I liked you best when you were angry. With him, with her, with them, with the world. With me. I liked watching you fight it, watching you lose, watching the mask fall away to reveal a woman not all together kind, gentle, courteous, fair. You went from a mama to a real mother and that's when I wanted you.

I liked you best when your wit and intelligence were replaced by something dangerous and primal. Caution wasn't thrown to the wind. Caution was burned down, slashed open, rent to ribbons. That easy smile cracked and showed me a sneer. I knew then I was in the wrong place at the right time.

I was convenient. I was willing. You never raised your voice to me. If anything, you only growled.

I liked you best when you were angry at yourself.

Sometimes I'm not sure you knew I was there. Or rather, long moments when your dialogue was so internal. I could have been anyone. I was glad to be me, so glad, but you weren't really standing there with me. You were only really aware of the war you waged and I was never sure whether I was the punishment or the reward. I think it depended on whether or not I could walk straight in the morning. Were you defeated or victorious when you just let go and I screamed?

Who was it that told you to bottle that up? Lord, grrl, I wish I could bottle and sell it! You mad is you hooked into the ether. The air crackled, the walls, floor, counters cracked. Your snarl against my ear always read my mind. You were three dimensions reaching into Flatland. I unspoolled, raven glossimer, just as quickly as I un- everything else.

I never knew what to say. I just stood back, stood up, offered myself into the fray of whatever force you fought. I just... I thought it was love. I knew it wasn't mutual but I thought it was love.

But it wasn't.

It was addiction. Like my penchant for speed and stunts and roof jumping. I wanted... I *needed*... to see something, someone that wasn't as shallow and banal as everyone so often seemed. I wanted to see someone, know someone, who could transform so completely. Not a chameleon, a changling. Knowable, safe... but only to a point... and then unpredictable, wild. True.

But was that truth?

Primal is foundation. But foundation is not always truth. One part of us is not the sum total of who we are. Now I know.

And I regret that I must admit that I know you not at all.

I only know, that I liked you best when you were angry.

The Speed of Faith

2011-02-20T07:32:00.000-08:00

The idea that molecules have different speeds has always fascinated me. The idea that in water, vapor, air, vacuum, we'll find not only base changes and chemical reactions but different resting states and different responses is mysterious and wondrous. Some of the unexplainable sensations that are bodies gift us must have something to do with this and I like to pause sometimes and consider myself in the world, in the universe.

A teacher asks his teen students: Of the five senses, which do you derive the most pleasure from? Write me a 500-word essay. Go!

There is tittering and shifting at desks. You would think, maybe, that everyone would now be writing about touch. Touch is often thought of to be a sense that takes two. Either two people or one person and another object. Our bodies are all chock full of nerves and receptors so touch can give us a lot of information. In addition, one could argue that touch occurs when two entities make contact and so two sets of molecules collide. Are they resonating at the same note or different notes? Are they the same speed? Maybe this reflects when we connect and we miss each other.

And though touch is vital, and often admired and adored among the senses, the other sensory inputs are just as complex, intricate and enjoyable.

Think of the taste buds of a trained and talented chef. The incredible, even miraculous way they can taste a dish and tell you twenty ingredients, subtle and hidden. Think of a perfumer. They can do the same with a scent. Imagine that! A musician can pick out not just instruments but notes and changes, variants in music. The trained eye of anyone from a birder to an art critic to a crime scene investigator or blood pattern analyzer can locate the smallest details and derive volumes of information from elements many of us would never see.

I imagine God to be a master of all the senses and I even take that next step and say (as Father as Son) that Christ on Earth was also exactly such a master. Christ walked among us but He saw, heard, tasted, smelled, and touched like a master. He worked miracles (well, because He was God, but also) because He saw the fabric of everything in perfect detail. He saw molecules.

Suddenly He seems less like a repeated myth retold in a hundred cultures and languages, sustained by ancient time and the passing of years, and more like a very possible (divine) man who could very well appear right now in the middle of any modern city and make just the same impact as He once did.

But there's that other sense that can't be ignored. And it's this sense, the sixth sense, that I believe most of our most divine inspirations and sensation originate from. Not thought, or some arcane ability, or even instinctual insight. This sixth sense is faith.

The faith moves our molecules like none other.

We see a happy baby, a beautiful bouquet, a handsome preacher, and we have a reaction. We kiss our partner, we taste rich chocolate, we hear an aria for the first time, and we have a reaction. These feelings can be deep and incredible, weaving more banal moments of life together into something we actually want to live, but moments of faith, sensations of faith almost over-shadow life in their grandeur. They are moments that catch us completely. Our molecules move as they do at no other time.

We become incandescent with Christ.

In these rare and private moments (which can indeed happen anywhere, anytime, and, I think, are best appreciated and most sincere when *not* induced by a sermon) we resonate at a speed closer to God. We thrum with a beat closer to the fine details of all the senses. A glimpse behind the curtain of everyday life into something connected, something universal, something divine.

This is the essay that came to me in the mail from a fifteen year old I have never met. Which sense, the teacher asked, do you derive the most pleasure from? The answer was: I derive the most rewarding and the deepest pleasure from my sense of faith. Though I find pleasure more often in my other senses and I value these gifts from the world, I have found that if I look past these, or something even inside these gifts, that I find something more. A gift of faith. Clues left behind, by God, to guide me, to encourage me, and to remind me that I am made of the same stuff as the universe. I am made by God, of God, with God.

Where do you derive your pleasure? Are you seeing the divinity He leaves for us like seeds?

I think the speed of faith is so fast -- light speed fast -- that to our eyes it can actually appear to be standing still. If we just stop to look, it's easy to reach out and see it, taste it, hear it, smell it, and hold it in our hands.

Short & Sweet

2011-02-13T09:05:00.000-08:00

This week Lady Gaga dropped "Born This Way" and I found myself wondering if Daniel surviving the lions was the last time that a Christian laid bare their faith and risked their life for what they believe.

Now, I'm not stupid. I know that there are, today in our modern, war-torn, corrupt world, a great many missionaries that travel to dangerous places and risk their lives (and often the lives of their children) to spread the Word. But that isn't the type of life risking I'm talking about. I mean the type of risk when we dare to actually question the word (see the little w?) we're fed opposed to the Word (great big W) we *feel.*

The Word we *know* to be truth.

The Word not found in the selective books of our modern Bible but in the darker origin places of our primeval hearts.

Contrary to what the (yes, liberal) media seems to be feeding us, there has not been a rise in gay teen suicides or bashings. There are not (suddenly!) more bigots pushing our kids over the edge. There have always been gay kids dying. It was an Epidemic even before AIDS was an Epidemic. The only thing that's changed (other than having a Black, pro-gay, pro-family, decent, truly American "all men are created equal and deserve certain rights" president for once) is that right now, in our current culture primed by Ellen and Rosie and Adam and Elton, it's actually okay to *care.*

Right now, it's okay to see a gay teen dying as a horrible, disgusting, horrendous waste of life. A needless waste of life. Does it shock you that it hasn't always been okay to see that? (I don't remember any major media talking about the *four* all-grown-up lesbians shot to death in the good ole US of A in the '80s. Do you? Guess gay wasn't okay enough in the '80s.)

It seems that every time I turn on the radio, every (woman) pop/rock/alt star is pimping that different is okay. This theme has been repackaged and coined so much in the last few months that it's practically its own genre: Anthem Rock. And don't worry if kissing a girl wasn't supportive enough, you can always set off fireworks. And if you're too cool to be too school? No prob. You're still f-ing perfect. Eventually we'll have an entire CD worth of up-beat, up-tempo anthems that some savvy entrepreneur (like Simon Cowell or NOW) will compile and fling out at Pride Marches.

Don't read me wrong. I really like a lot of these songs and I think the singers really mean what their preaching. I am actually proud that liberal, relatively far-left musicians have stepped up the visibility game and brought the message to the people. I know more folks who have made an It Gets Better video than who haven't.

My issue is this: Where is the right?

(oh, did you see that little r?)

And I don't just mean the far-right. I mean the middling-right and the gently-right, and the leaning-right. Where are the preachers and the conservatives and the pastors and the Sunday School teachers? What are they doing to make sure that those steady numbers of gay teen suicides actually drop for once? Where is *their* out-reach?

Hypocrisy is a hard thing. We all fall into its trap once or twice or fifty-seven times, but there's a certain type of hypocrisy that's special. Kind of chocolate coated and really sticky. Can a pastor reach out to a (suspected) gay youth without slipping in little bon mots about "right" and "wrong" and turning away from "sin"? Is it okay to save the kid if he still grows up to be a queer? Will you believe God made him that way, even when science proves he's gay in utero? Will you protect the rights of an unborn gay kid?

And if you've told them all that they're going to go to hell, what do you care if they're dead? It's just a great big prediction come true, right? Or was their hell actually living in a world with literal-minded zealots like you? My you enjoy the rest of your names not wearing mixed fibers and staying away from your wife on her period (or any other time you're not making babies).

I like how devout Christians love to gloss over that great little turn in the Bible that talks about how much rejoicing occurs when a lost soul finds God. While the lil patent leathers stand on their holy pedestals singing their own praise, Christ has His back turned because He's trying to wave a heavenly sign at a bunch of boys trading vogue moves. The sign reads: FACT: GOD MADE YOU. FICTION: THEY DON'T KNOW GOD.

Maybe fire and brimstone Christians are just scared that heaven will be too crowded. Personally, I think it will be a lot more fun (and fashionable) with all the gays.

Blood & Tears

2011-02-06T08:15:00.000-08:00

A gasp and then... it was only a dream. My hands curled into each other, up over my heart, almost tucked beneath my chin. I'm five years old again in the darkness of a strange room. I am the only person I know here. I sit up.

From the balcony, the bay is a depth of night pooled and peppered with pins of white light. I wonder in this moment why I dreamt of crying. The banister is so cold it stings my palms. I lift my hands. Blood.

When I think about salvation, I don't think about His blood. I don't envision or contemplate or weep over His sacrifice, His terror, His pain. No, not because it's easier to turn away from any story that starts in betrayal and includes torture and (temporary or not) death. I don't dwell on those physical things because they don't touch me. They don't grab my heart in tight fingers. I guess I've bled on too many roads for anyone's blood to impress me.

Callus? Blasphemous? Or just truth?

Truth.

When I think of Christ on the cross, I think of tears. I think He cried, yes. I think He was devastated by the betrayal of His discipline. I think He was horrified that mankind could do this to any criminal let alone a political one. But I don't think it is humanly possible (and, in my eyes at least, He was human in those moments) for a person to cry for themselves as much as a mother cries for her child.

We have all heard the cliche. No parent is meant to outlive their children. It is a biological error. And I don't believe any time or timing can lesson that unnatural blow. We are never peers with our parents. We may come to speak with them in that comfortable way that adults have but we cannot change this fact: They made us. We may have shaped and influenced them, but they made us.

I wonder if Mary thought about that. About the unique twist of fact that she alone was experiencing. That she grew this baby, raised this little boy, loved this young man... and yet, He made her. If the Father and Son are one, than the son made the mother. Did she think about that as He hung bleeding on the cross? As the sky tore open and He screamed?

I think He was crying. I think He may even have thought once or twice, How can man do this to one another? And why must she endure this moment with me?

But Mary and Christ is far from the first or last Freudian dichotomy. The question of who is the father and who is the son, who is parent and who is child, plays out over and over again in many of life's arenas. Power dynamics are just the beginning. Behavioral mimicry, over-protective/over-possessive attitudes, passive aggressive cycles... our partners, our bosses, the manager at the QuikyMart.

Especially here in America, we seem to have very limited choices in appropriate relationships. Without a spoken class system we have, nonetheless, created a caste system as strict as India or China. In some ways, more strict because our tiers are unspoken and unclaimed. They change by region. They differ with state of the union, with the mentality of the masses, with the grand perspective of the mob mentality.

Whether or not we like it, our country, so fond of saying we do not persecute each other for religious differences, does exactly that every single day. We have created classes, hordes of second-rate citizens -- and if you think I'm *only* talking about immigration, you're not paying attention. Right now, all Americans are *not* treated equally nor do they have equal rights. You toe the Christian line or monied America is not going to stand behind you.

When was the last time, in America, that a Black man was beaten bloody and left dead just because he was Black?

When was the last time, in America, that a gay man was beaten bloody and left dead just because he was gay?

When was the last time, in American, that a Christian boy was beaten bloody and left dead just because he was a Christian?

What? You don't have a date for that third one?

Sadly, the cycle is broken. The ruling class tries to parent the rest of us, but they have forgotten who their Father is. And I don't mean the gentleman in the White House, his advisers, or our senate when I talk about ruling. I'm not that stupid. That would be like saying that the media is never sensationalist. Or that reality shows are candid. (Nowadays, I'm shocked when I'm *not* on camera, aren't you?)

The ruling, monied class -- the class that can campaign and spend millions, and organize with military precision their well-funded causes with the sweat, cash and heavily-mascaraed tears of the tithing, mandatory-Sunday-meeting seething masses who have nothing else to do to blow off steam except bludgeon us with their morals as if the Melting Pot of our ancestors exists only to boil us down and reshape us all into the puritanical separatists that (so few of them actually) came from -- is a class far from without public corruption, and as pure-intentioned as a gas-price hike when they turn off Internet in Egypt.

Why can't everyone see that we're all just crazy little heathens in the eyes of God? Even those of us actively trying to read His lips. Mary is crying for her son and Christ is crying for her. She gets pain and horror and injustice... but He gets something so much bigger, so much sadder. He has to leave her here while he returns to paradise. His own mother has to stay in a world that has no problem nailing its pundits to timbers... or telling its little boys they'll burn in hell if they think Finn Hudson is cute.

No wonder I dreamt of crying.

http://www.noh8campaign.com/

Will the Real Me Please Stand Up

2011-01-30T07:39:00.000-08:00

I ran twelve months and four time zones. Trying to out-run the turning of the Earth, the passing of time, the number of heart beats against the shield of my breastbone. I wanted to cheat time, cheat destiny, cheat myself of everything I was owed, raised for, deserved, feared. I wanted to escape from being me, wanted to feel me falling away like clothes, like jeans and jacket slipping to the cold wood floor, until I could stand bare and alive and just be… oh.

Right.

All the roles we play for others, for ourselves. As time passes and we grow (more complicated or) older, we tend to create more and more of these personas, these suits of armor, these veneers. Finally we have a wardrobe full of shades and variants of ourselves. None of them wholly us. None of them wholly not. A button from one shirt, a zipper from a boot, a pocket from favorite jeans -- little bits and pieces from each disguise is real, selected off that creature that is true. The real you, the real me.

The only us we really are.

An old friend said to me, “I realized I was agnostic when I was play-acting for God.” Meaning: When he prayed, he put on a persona.

I looked over at him, summer grass between us doing nothing to fill the hollow in his eyes, and said, “If He doesn’t exist than why would you hide from Him?”

Who am I?

I step into my closet and slide the slender straight-edge from my left boot. I work without speaking. Just the sound of thread and cloth slicing and coming free. A button from here. A sleeve there. A leather wristlet. A skirt. A pair of gloves, a silk scarf. I am taking the real pieces off all the costumes. I am taking back the real pieces and weaving them -- with spider webs, with moonlight, with the thin breads of your golden hair -- back into me.

When I wore a disguise, there was no chance anyone could hurt all of me. Only that one tiny part that I wore that day.

No more. Enough.

I want to wear myself when you look at me.

I want you to know me.

I don’t play-act for God.

Cast & Seek

2011-01-23T14:26:00.000-08:00

How often have you asked Christ to illuminate a path or provide an answer to guide you? I've found I do this so often it becomes subconscious, a kind of quiet interior dialogue. And I don't mean the clear and panicked, "Christ, help me, guide me, walk with me." Or even the plea for help that sometimes can rise up from where we stand at rock bottom. I mean that voice in your head, in your heart, in somewhere deeper, that whispers and asks and answers, to. The small and serious, "Should I? Can I? What's the first step?" Or even sometimes, "Dear Christ, why did I?!"

I have never been a passive Christian. When I preach, I preach in the middle of the established hypocrisy, in the face of the street-corner barker, in the places where I am most likely to be ridiculed, misunderstood, and disputed. I have no interest in being a martyr; I just I want the challenge, I want the adversity, I want to feel the world pushing back; I like to move things, shake things, and yes, be shaken.

Because if you rock my world? It just proves the strength of my foundation.

And when I running away? I'm not passive there either. Not even when I'm hiding from my faith, from my spiritual responsibilities, from everything else under Christ's open sky. If I'm hiding? I hide actively. I make a real go of it. I don't just step behind a rock, I dig a hole, crawl into it, and drop the rock over my own head. I make my eyes so blind that I don't see angels even when they're trying to slap some sense into me.

And trust me, it takes one heck of a slap to get me out of my hole.

Being active, living an active life -- or maybe I should say, an Active Life -- has a feeling that lives in my bones and muscles and informs the way that interior voice speaks to me. Whether I'm running into the light, running with the light,or running away from the light, I thrum with the act of doing, choosing, being aware of and active in every choice-and-response.

So when I ask my questions, like we all ask of Christ, I'm not passive. I don't wait. I don't sit back. I don't seek-and-find. I cast.

Mark shares Christ saying, "I will make you fishers of men." Every great fisherman knows the importance of casting. Are you aggressive, are you in or against the wind, the current, the tide? Are you patient? Are you passive or are you active? I like to cast out my question with hard work as my bait. I don't want to cast an empty hook and expect Christ to flip my answer up on my deck, already cleaned, cooked, and seasoned.

I'm willing to fight for my answer even when I have to fight myself.

I cast my question and then seek to find my catch. I don't cast and sit back. Fishing for answers is not a relaxing, soothed by the waves experience for me. If I ask, if I cast, I want Christ to know I'm willing to wrestle and land any marlin He gives me.

Even if I have no idea what I'll do with an answer that big.

I only know I can't meet that type of size with passive faith. Passive faith never did anything for anyone except put butts in pews... and there are no pews in my active life.

Knowing: Day 1

2010-11-25T04:37:00.000-08:00

I turned thirty. It didn’t rain. I didn’t bleed or die. The sky was clear. The same old stars. I walked not rode. It was cold but not freezing. It felt… anti-climatic.

Then I met you.

My mind was a blank, washed clean and waiting to be filled with something. I didn’t want to think anymore. But no hunger pulled me. I drifted. I was one feather on the breeze, not a wing.

The beat. The thump-thump-boom of a club I don’t know. Can’t remember the name. Can’t remember the street. Thought today, tonight, would be full of rethinking, remembering, reliving, regretting but there’s nothing inside. Wish there were something inside.

Red light, yellow-white, blue-purple flash. My ID. Scorpion hand-stamp. The bouncer has gauged ears and his belt buckle is a Colt.

Dance floor trance, free-mixing live DJ makes me close my eyes. Good. This is sweet, this is blood and speed and power racing. This is filling up. I don’t want the music to stop. Not ever.

I am being rewired.

I just don’t know it yet.

One… two… a third hour weaves around my body. I am three hours old. I am aware of no bodies, not even my own. I am as I’ve never been. Not moving for movement’s sake but just a note, just a melody line in the background, just a bassline in my veins. I am filled with liquid sound. I am music not flesh.

My eyes open. I blink away teardrops of sweat. My lips are salty, my throat is dry. Have I been singing, screaming, crying? Maybe just dancing. I move off the floor toward the bar. A Coke would be good, I think. Mundane. Simple. Me.

I am waiting for my turn. My elbows on the chrome. My thoughts in the bliss of the music, my bones still buzzing with reverb. Then a whisper across my ear, “Happy birthday,” and my name like I’ve never heard it. Accented and slow and deep and completely unknown to me as if my name were some endearment in another language, a language both ancient, sacred and erotic like a Psalm or a sunrise.

Turning in slow motion. Suddenly, unreasonably, illogically, skin is threatening to catch fire. I think I hear you breathing, fanning the flames. The hollow of your throat, the caramel curve of your nape. The delicate links of a triple gold chain studded with garnets like drops of blood. Your pulse.

“Do I know you?”
“Now you do.”

A few blonde curls have escaped the dozen golden braids that create a frame around your face. Four dozen more are pulled back with a black silk scarf, each braid tipped with a red glass bead.

“What do I know?”
“My name.”
“Which is?”
“Julianna.”

You push hair off my face with your palm and thumb, making sure we have as much contact as one hand and one cheek will allow. I am staring at the defined muscles in your bare arms. They move like something molten under your skin. You have an Aztec glyph on your right forearm, the tat is jet black. I am certain I have never seen you before in my life.

“Anything else?”
“Capricorn. Forty. Army Reserve.”
“Christian?”
“Agnostic.”

And you’re smiling at me with this crooked, half-smile. Like you know everything about me -- every secret, every play, every recipe in my genome. Your eyes are blue-green above sculpted cheekbones. I have never seen a deeper gaze. You are reciting silent volumes in a language I thought I knew but I’d obviously only learned the vowels. You are so… *certain.* I shake my head. I try to breathe.

…a, e, i, o, u and... oh y not…

“Look, I’ve never--”
“I can’t imagine.”
A beat. I laugh.
“You’re blushing.”
“I’m blushing.”

You kiss me.

And I realize that I do know you after all.

You’re the woman I’ve been waiting for.

Centered

2010-02-28T07:49:00.000-08:00

Will our children remember us by the toy we couldn’t afford to buy them or by the one we repaired? Will our friends remember the expensive birthday gift or the drunken insult? Will our partners remember the first lie or the last embrace?

I was recently in a position to speak to a group of forty-five teens on the topic of self-esteem. The idea, quite logically, was: When we love ourselves, we can love others. But strangely, as the words slipped over my lips and out into the warmth of the quiet, carpeted conference room, the idea turned and became: When we love others, we can love ourselves.

“How do you feel when someone gives you flowers for no particular reason?” I asked a girl in the front row. She was brown-haired and mousey. Shy, eyes shifting, deep blush that told me no one ever had, except maybe her grandma or parents.

“I feel amazing,” she answered, her voice a murmur of the expected but so deep with sincerity no one snickered.

“If someone bought you flowers just for being you, could you still feel bad about yourself?” I opened my hands, palms up, offering the question to the room, careful not to put anyone too much on the spot.

Another girl answers, “All the time.” Then, with raw honesty, “Sometimes it makes me feel worse.”

I’m nodding and I’m not the only one. I lift my hands higher, I shrug, I let my incredulous uncertainty flood my face. “How messed up is that, huh?” There’s laughter.

Someone buys us flowers, or picks us flowers, hand-chosen and perfect in their imperfections. They care about us. There is no reason for this offering. It isn’t our birthday. It isn’t a holiday. They’ve done us no harm, caused no slight. But here they are. Flowers. For us.

We stare at the bunch, the colors, shapes and textures. The scents are awesome. But with no self-esteem, with guilt and anger and uncertainty and doubt instead of self-esteem, we look at the gift and say: “I don’t deserve this. I’m not worthy of this. What does this person want from me? They’re just trying to deceive me. They’re just trying to get something from me.” We don’t believe we’ve earned the gift. We actually come to twist everything around until we don’t even believe it *is* a gift but rather the flowers are a trick... to make us feel not better but even worse.

“How do you feel when you give someone flowers for no reason at all, just because?” I ask the question of a broad-shouldered young man with a high and tight hair cut and very green eyes. He raises his prominent, very square chin and says in a voice deeper than his peers, “I feel *great.*” And it’s obvious from the smile that softens his features that he’s speaking from experience.

I ask the room, “Can you feel bad about yourself when you give someone else flower for no reason at all?”

There are many answers tumbling over each other and for a while everyone agrees. There is laughter and wide smiles. The audience makes those collective leaps that audiences do. Learning en mass, the masses are learning.

“If you want to feel good about yourself, do something for someone else,” one kiddo intones, spreading his hands wide like mine then screwing up his face and rolling his eyes with the simplicity of it all. “Duh!” There’s more laughter, including mine, then a brave young woman poses this:

“Sometimes, though, it makes me mad. I wish the other person would do something nice for me just because.”

This quiets then silences the room. Eyes drifts from her to me, back and forth with expectation, surprise, respect.

I look up a little, like I’m thinking. I brush my hair back away from my face. “Then you really aren’t giving the gift just because, are you?” I meet her eyes, half-hidden by blonde hair. “You’re not giving the gift just because. You’re giving to teach a lesson... or make an example... or make someone guilty.”

She is very quiet. I don’t need her to say more because she’s far from the only one in those room to have felt that way.

How do you treat your friends? How do you speak to them? How do you ask them for things? How do you praise them? How do you treat your family? How often do you raise your voice in anger or displeasure? When people you love are angry or hurting, when they’re disappointed by small things or big things, how do you react? Are you impatient when a child needs help? Are you resentful when you aren’t the leader of the pack?

Do you step up and protect the ones you love or do you stand back and praise them for standing alone?

Do you quietly work behind the scenes to protect them from pain without expecting kudos in return or is every action in expectation of a reward?

Do you love for who someone else is or for what loving will get you?

I say to the room, “I always hear it said, ‘Love yourself and you will be able to love others.’ I don’t think I can love myself if I’m not spending my hours loving someone else first.

“I was taught to try to live like Christ. He didn’t gain anything by preaching the word and the way. He wasn’t universally adored. He wasn’t rich. He wasn’t given a position of power. His every moment was spent loving us. Loving for nothing in return. Loving even when He was hated in return.

“It seems a very simple thing but it’s only simple on the surface: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Treat others as you would want them to treat you. And stepping further onto Christ’s path: Treat others as He would treat them. Do unto others as love dictates.”

I look at the faces turned toward me. I smile a little. They are mostly thinkers. Natural leaders. Hand-picked by their peers and teachers to be here today. How interesting that a group like this would be determined to need a talk about self-esteem.

I finish with a shrug and deeper smile, “It is very hard to hate yourself when you’re rejoicing for someone else.”

From the back of the room, a young person’s voice, “My cup runneth over.”

EJ

Ketchup

2010-02-21T15:58:00.000-08:00

She says: Want to know what keeping a promise feels like? I’ll be available to you every night for one hour. I won’t make small talk. I won’t socialize. Don’t expect me to be charming. I will be supportive. I will answer any questions. I will supply any facts. I will hear any ramble. Every night you pay me for my time with a blog. For that one hour, every night, I’ll be your beck and call grrl.

And that was my incentive to catch up on my blog. It wasn’t pretty. It wasn’t very impassioned or intelligent or even very Christian. There were several threads of hypocrisy. But it was real and it was proof that I’m only human. I have never given in to a bully but I gave in quite easily to this bribe.

So I’m playing catch up. Ketchup. With faith as small as a mustard seed. But Christ assures me, while I blush and run my hands through my hair and relearn to type in txtspk, that even that seed is enough.

You’ve got to start somewhere when you’re starting all over again.

The world can be... no... let’s start again. The world *is* ripped out from under our feet not only when we least expect it but by forces we never expect. The photo of an orphaned child on the front of the discarded paper in the coffee shop. The way the baristta tosses her curls. The clouds broken like san skit glyphs across the sky. A pale blue rose dying in the vase at the local bookstore.

I never saw the train coming. My earbuds were in and my feet were dancing, my hands were raised skyward and my voice was raised in halleluiahs. I never saw the train coming even as I danced down the tracks.

The world is ripped away by the casual glance of a friend, eyes filled with tears that drown everything into bleak perspective. The world crumbles and falls inward, spins outward and away and we find ourselves standing in a void so impossibly dark, black hole dark, that not even our own words can escape the event horizon even as insults, fears, and other jagged things come spiraling in almost out of control.

You are a bad leader.
You’re an ineffectual father.
You haven’t been a good friend.
You were never what I wanted.

It is sometimes so stunning to hear what one person will say to another. I am sitting here listening to strangers. My earbuds are in but the music is off. The blue rubber-coated thread of the wire weaves into my pocket but attaches to nothing. I gaze out the café window. I sip my hot Earl Grey. I listen to strangers. I listen to the things they say not in anger or tones of attack, but rather the things they say with a grin or a nod or a knowing crease of their brows.

You think you know everything but you don’t.
You’re really not right for that job.
I could solve all your problems if only you’d listen.
You choose to shoulder it all; no one asked you to.

Our mustard seed of faith is buried under the onslaught of careless compost that our loved ones can dump on us in the spirit of honesty. This isn’t to mention the truck loads of garbage that strangers and the opposition and our competitors will haul in and pour on our heads. These are just the well-meaning comments.

It’s your favorite color, but not really your best.
I like you a little over-weight.
You’re trying to hide it, but you really don’t look well.
You can’t continue to push yourself. You’ll break.

Maybe I want to break. Maybe I want to push. Maybe I want to fill every moment of my life to its rim and then jump in and swim. Maybe I’ve found my balance walking on fire and my only problem is that you don’t want to walk with me. Maybe my faith is so much bigger than a mustard seed. Maybe my faith is a crisp fall apple. Maybe my faith is my deep red heart. Maybe my faith is a boulder, my laughter in a room, my tears when you hurt me, my voice when I scream.

Maybe my faith is the moon... or every constellation.

Let go, let God. You are holding on so tightly that you’re crushing me. You are making it impossible for me to give it up to Him. Aurora borealis couldn’t escape your grip. Don’t make Him work a miracle just to hear you pray: Lord, take this off me. Show me the way.

In His time. Only and always in His time. He makes us wait not because He can and not because it teaches us some lesson. He makes us wait because He has a reason. Christ is not chaos theory. His father is not cause-and-effect. All things for a reason and all things in His time. We need only to trust... with our mustard seed.

Do you see the cycle that emerges? How we make miracles impossible for one another. How we press down the seed too far, bury faith beneath life and piles of bills and bundles of problems. The cliché that we find it so easy to fix everyone else’s lives but our own. But as mortals full up of flaws, we don’t fix other people’s lives. Only Christ fixes lives. We all too easily mistake criticism, ego and control for help. We will just as easily crush the seed of hope as we will nurture it, and worst of all: Many of us don’t even know it.

I ask myself this before I open my mouth:

Will any good come of it?

Those who cannot do, teach. I have never believed that. But I do believe, those who cannot hope, crush everyone around them.

Many of my friends have argued this point with me for hours and evenings on end. The idea that sometimes the saying is wrong: If you have nothing good to say, say nothing at all. I disagree and I will always disagree. I may not always be able to shut my trap but I have found every time that voicing criticism and negativity only breeds more of the same. It is a mold, a virulent strain of dis-ease that spreads and sprouts crops of doubt, of distrust, of discontent.

I wish we all could have that seed as big as the night time sky. I wish we all were warriors like Athena, like Hercules, like Virgo. I wish we all could take everything the world dumps on us and survive gracefully every time it crumbles from beneath our feet.

I think that will be my prayer tonight. To give the rest of us bigger seeds. Bigger hope. Faith as bright as dawn.

EJ

New Divide

2009-11-29T18:58:00.000-08:00

Today I stood in the pouring rain and watched you seduce another woman. The lot lights had come on four hours early, in response to the dark sky, and the gold-white illumination caught torrents like beaded strands of gemstones making molten the liquid storm coursing over her hair, then her jacket, her shirt, then her bare skin.

I knew this was the last time I would be here.

"I'd rather hate you
for everything you are
than ever love you
for something you're not."

I miss riding. But it seems that trashing three bikes in one year is enough of a message from God. When my last Kawi went down and over the edge, tumbling more than a hundred feet to her final rest, I spent long minutes, face to asphalt, rethinking my last forty thousand choices. Sometimes it stuns me that I don't drink or drug. Seems a grrl so sober shouldn't wind up eating the yellow line quite as often as I do. I knew there was a Lesson somewhere between my face and the road.

I also knew this was the last time I would be here.

"I'd rather you hate me
for everything I am
than have you love me
for something I can't be."

She is a beautiful woman and, apparently, impervious to rain and cold. Which is impressive. Speaking of perv, I suppose I shouldn't be standing here, leaning back against your truck, watching you like this. The long, slender, strong lines of your body are becoming more obvious as additional layers of clothing are striped away and the storm soaks you through. The angles of your bodies sliding into place and together into one is artwork, sculpture to me. The eroticism isn't lost but it doesn't hold my gaze. I'm detached from the reality and watch as if your images are splashed on the screen -- where I've certainly seen you both before -- technique and technical merit casting you in perfect light, the sound of the rain artfully concealing each gasp, the wind stealing away the scent of cologne and perfume.

I find myself thinking that the garden like this, the heart of the lot and home to so much quiet memorizing and quiet contemplations both joyful and desperate, is actually the perfect place to make love.

The sky loses all light and there is a rumble of thunder.

"I remembered black skies, the lightning all around me.
I remembered each flash as time began to blur.
Like a startling sign that fate had finally found me.
And your voice was all I heard that I get what I deserve."

There had been a pull-jerk-yank. Some unseen and strong hand. Something, some force, someone, God. To rip me off my bike like a drag line, throw me into the road while my bike laid herself down of her own accord, still at ninety miles an hour, and went parallel to the street for a count of one... two... three... and then through the curve in the guard rail and over edge, dropping instantly out of sight and leaving me with my yellow-line, center line view of sky and ocean meeting as a horizon's horizon.

My atheist friend tells me that it was momentum and centrifugal force that tore me off my bike and threw me onto solid road instead of into cold thin air. I tell him he doesn't know squat about physics.

It is two months and several million revelations about life, about truth, about being tested, later that I finally look away from you and your long-time lover. I am sure she knows everything about you and loves you just as you are without judgment or pause. I am sure she has several billion scathing words for me that she is too elegant to share but that are expressed with startling eloquence every time she looks at me and smiles.

We're all damaged and casting the first stone just makes it bounce around in my head. I find myself staring at the asphalt of the parking lot when the storm shifts and I hear your voices tossed together, cried promises both wild and tender at once.

I sink down to the curb, my palms to the cold road once again.

This soldier travels.
Wrists bound in the yellow center line.
The song of storm raging at her back.
This soldier travels.
Pan pipes play from steel forests
all neon and chrome.
The soldier travels
armed with scripture
armed with mistakes
armed with the reality
that she is always
only
forever
a practicing Christian.

I am still sitting there when you drive away. I am still sitting there when the storm surrenders to clear, starry night. I am still sitting there when I look up and find her watching me. Her eyes speak volumes that all begin with disappointment. But then I blink my eyes, I shiver, and she is gone.

A friend wrote to me with her heart in a panic. She said, "I have spoken thoughtlessly and destroyed someone's chance to come closer to Christ." She knows and I know that it isn't true but the regret and sorrow she feels in the pit of her stomach, welling in her chest, is very, very real. I assure her, "No mortal hand can keep a soul away from Christ." They have certainly tried over the ages, and none of them have succeeded. Only we can distance ourselves from God. And even then He fights for our return. My friend writes, "I'm going to make this right. It eats at me. I *want* to make it right. I must." And I pray for her and I tell her, "Do it. No hubris. Be brave. Do it." And she does.

And less than a week later I find myself in the same situation. But still I click Publish Post.

Like a petulant child who will not learn from the mistakes of her parents, sometimes one soldier will throw herself into the mine field in the heat of battle, in her furor to reach and purge the enemy, even as she sees her fellows scattered around her.

Only to find that the enemy, when faced, is not roaring, but weeping.

"So give me reason to prove me wrong, to wash this memory clean.
Let the floods cross the distance in your eyes.
Give me reason to fill this hole, connect the space between.
Let it be enough to reach the truth that lies across this new divide."

Because from the depths of my heart, I'm sorry.

EJ

Caught in the Act

2009-11-22T18:57:00.000-08:00

Winter light is pale and sharp, adding a definitive edge to the profile of a stranger. The light is tinted with time and emotion even though to some it might just be the color of the stain glass sunset (sunrise?) hung in the window of the coffeehouse. The stranger is the son of my favorite professor. She and I spoke once or twice every month since I graduated. A lot of years to stay in touch. I was expecting to hear from her again, having already had a early-month exchange... instead I hear from him. She never told me she had cancer. She never told me her estate would pay off my school loans. And now her son has flown three thousand miles to tell me he hates me.

Richard (let's call him Richard) is all pressed linens, polished buttons, expensive shoes. He is a hard worker in the sense of hours and stress and mergers. His hands are long and tapered and groomed and graceless. He does not have his father's hands. Those large, open, welcome hands that met mine only once. They were callused and paint-speckled, his fingerprints always in relief from acrylics, from charcoals, from life. Nor does Richard have his mother's hands -- expressive, expansive, ethereal. He is a hybrid from both but of neither.

"When my father died, I thought my mother and I would finally connect. He always took up so much room in her life."

Richard's coffee is cold now, crude oil in his mug, but still it is warmer than his eyes as they pin me to my chair. I imagine that everyone in coffeehouse is wondering and watching to see if and when he'll leap across the table and kill me.

"We... she... would finally see our shared love of business. Our common ground."

I feel physical pain in my chest that a person -- an only child, an only son -- might know his own mother so little. Professor Montgomery cared more about pocket lint than about commerce of any kind. She believed in barter and trade and art being free. She taught and ran a gallery because of pure passion. Her all-consuming love of painting, raw, wild, explosive, just like she was. Richard is angry I was named in his mother's will. Richard is angry because he was only twenty-four when my only New York gallery show opened in his mother's gallery and the central piece was a woman he wanted to own but obviously did not even know.

"But she was just as gone... distant... absent. Maybe more then, than ever before. I tried to engage her in my graduate work but her... interest... was obviously held elsewhere."

I look past Richard's face. It is most likely a handsome face -- both Mr. and Professor Montgomery were handsome -- but not today. He cannot seem to uncurl his lips to cover his bared teeth. His snarl is almost stage dramatic. He seems incapable of stilling the vein throbbing between eyes so narrowed, only the pupils, wide and black, glint with malice.

He knows, of course. And he knows I know he knows.

I wonder, fleetingly, why Richard is so angry. Is it because of who and what I am? Who and what I was? Or is it that she wasn't in love with him instead? Why was it me -- right place, right time, right canvas, right colors -- instead of him? Doesn't Freud and Shakespeare argue that with the father dead, the son is rightful heir to his mother's heart?

"I've come here to give you this chance," Richard tells me. It is not an offer. "This is your chance to make so many wrongs right."

Richard leans back in his chair. His expression is neither hopeful or grateful. It is entitled. It is spiteful. It is resentful.

I think of Professor Montgomery. I think of how she looked in class and out on the town at a gallery not her own. I think of her standing in front of a piece she has never seen before. Her first emotions and responses and reactions bursting. I think of her face, lips parted, cheeks flushed, brows knit with the beauty of it all, with the beauty of each stroke so extreme they were almost too much for her to bear.

I painted only 5x5 back then. Wide and high. She was barely an inch taller than the canvas. She would look at my works in progress and trail the strokes in the thick paint, barely a quarter inch between her fingertips and the work. "It breathes," she would say. "Here is the pulse." Her reviews were like poetry of detail and technique. She could deconstruct three hundred hours of work in thirty minutes and I was a better artist because of it. Because of her.

I lean forward. Richard leans forward.

I read everything in his eyes. I realize that as much as he knew nothing of her in life, he knows no more of her in death. I wonder what happened to her journals. In his eyes I see a million things. In the pacing of his breath. His choice of cologne. He is consumed with his own thoughts.

"The most powerful thing one person can say to another..." I murmur, almost a whisper. His eyes burn cold. I continue, "More powerful than I love you... or I'll wait for you... or I'll never forget you...."

His left eye twitches.

"Even more powerful than I'm sorry...." And I stand up. Abruptly. Reined in. I look down at him without pity and without remorse. I am done wasting this day that God gave me. This day that started with his phone call. With the drive to the airport where I shook his hand, not understanding, and without letting go he told me so bluntly, 'My mother died Monday.' I am done sitting in shock and pain. I want to be walking in a sculpture garden. I want to be in a quiet gallery. I want to be somewhere remembering my friend. Anywhere but here worshiping at the alter of this monument of self-importance. I tell him, "I forgive you."

Richard jerks, startled. But not nearly as startled as when I add, "And so does Katrina."

I am almost to the door when he shakes off his shock and barks, "My mother's name was Kathrine!"

I don't bother to look back. "That's what you think."

We're All Damaged

2009-11-08T18:57:00.000-08:00

I have nothing to say. That t-shirt floats here. A cataract of reason if not good-taste. "Actions speak louder than blogs." I couldn't agree more. Felt so good to hurl that laptop off the roof. Sounded so right to hear it splinter, shatter, scatter like the fatal collision that proceeded it.

I find that I prefer it when I don't speak.

I've basked in and endured a myriad of responses to essays here (in writing or life) and I can honestly say that I try of myself sometimes. I feel it coming. My own dismay at my own spin, my own happy-happy-joy-joy crap. When the truth be told I can't always find the positive learning lesson behind every slap in the face, smack on the ass, turn-me-inside-out-why-don't-you golden moment brought to me today by the letters F and O-Lord and at least a triple X. Before my dismay turns to disgust, I try to forget my password.

If I were self-righteous and always right, would you still be with me?

I think the most honest relationship I've ever had is with Christ and strange as it sounds He doesn't seem to give a fuck whether or not I use a swear or slang or ancient Greek with bad pronunciation. Strangely, He doesn't seem to care as long as I'm honest with Him. More honest than I am with myself. He doesn't get hung up on the lexicon of this urban grrl just trying to vent, just trying to keep it real,just trying to really *talk* to Him.

I still dream myself there. Though not always with you.

I really do have nothing to say. No more, at least, for now. The maze of blame is always concentric circles and mob mentality blends so nicely with popular belief for a little salt in the wound. We will always believe what preserves ourselves. The proof is not in the pudding, which so many of us will eat double-helpings of, but in which one of us bends first.

You will allow the baby to be torn in two.

She will offer you an olive branch three times... before you betray her again.

Represent

2009-11-01T00:36:00.000-07:00

Tonight I will stand witness. Tonight I will not look away. Tonight I will know the truth.

The music is loud and booming. It does not crash with sharp brights, it rocks, vibrates the floor, the columns, the bones of the dancers. The bones of me. Of you. This is the first time you have invited me dancing with your friends. I never knew this side of you. It has been several months of living together but no one here has known you for less than ten years. I am the outsider. And the you that you are with them is not the you that you are with me.

A voice is shouting in my ear. Just loud enough to be heard. The cologne already familiar. "'Lizagrrl, wazup u don hang it wit us bafore?" Marx spreads his hands, palms up, his hip cocked, his head tilted. His hips bump-rock into mine. He is a spit heavier than a twig. Great big eyes and sweet dreads. His belly shirt is Bedazzled to spell a three-letter F word. I'm nervous for a minute that our belly button rings will get tangled. I blink. I have never had anyone call me 'Liza, let alone 'Lizagrrl.

The strobes flash. Blue purple green blue blue red white. Alvaro thumps down behind me, one combat boot steps the beat between my ankles. Shouts to Marx, "E her fuzz, not her grrl! You know the rulz wit Sun!"

And the sound of my jaw dropping and the sound of my head whipping 'round is surely louder than the music. I pin you to the bar with my eyes, which are huge and brown with shock. You turn suddenly, do a double-take because I am staring at you. Like you know my thoughts. But not my thoughts at all as your surprise fades into appraisal and you turn all the way slowly, your butt to the bar, a Coke in your hand, your braids and beads glinting, you take me in like... well, like some fuzz, some grrl you'd shag but not date and never marry. It is clear that you like the sight of me sandwiched snug between your friends. I think I'm hearing the music for the first time. "It's so good to meet you all," I shout to Marx and Alvaro, my eyes never leaving you. One-handed, I unsnap my leather vest and throw it to Tonka back at our table. I turn my back to you as I continue to dance.

In 1983, a woman was raped by two men in the pool room of a bar. A group of eight other men circled and chanted encouragement. The rapists were convicted. The spectators were acquitted.

"It is not a crime to watch a rape. But it is a crime to command, induce, entreat or otherwise persuade another person to commit a rape."

Apparently not.

On October 24, 2009, ten young men and boys raped a fifteen year old girl while another twenty looked on.

Are the spectators responsible? The spectators who stood and watched (that's what spectators do). The spectators who did not step forward. The spectators who did not call the police. The spectators who let it all sink in, right down to their stomachs, right down to the souls, for two and a half freaking hours.

Four hours later, we sit in Alvaro's condo with the breath-taking view and the swank wood floors and giant balcony and windows showing off the glimmer gloss of Los Angeles at night. Everyone is still buzzy from the club and I am made to feel very welcome, though I am constantly a step behind the conversation. You all speak in the short-hand code of long-time friends. Alvaro appears to be madly in love with you, the way he hangs on your every word. But by the end of the night I'll know that isn't true. I wish it were. Lord... I wish it were.

There are variations on this theme:

"I have always feared being violently raped. (beat) That's why I walk alone at night."
What?
"It's good for her to get out every day and walk. (beat) She can't let fear rule her life."
What?! Am I the only one who can spell "self-fulfilling prophesy"? Perhaps being a victim of violent rape would give her an excuse to be a lesbian? For the first time in my life, I feel the urge to slap Jennifer. Who should know better.

Ten years old. Abducted. Violently raped daily for two months. Sixty two days in July and August. Ten years old. Followed by ten years of prostitution. I think people would add that up to ten years and two months of abuse, wouldn't you? I know Cris would. I know I do.

"We were kissing." (I chose to touch the rabid dog.)
"He reached to open my jeans." (The dog snapped at me.)
"I told him no." (I told him no.)
"He urged me on and moved over me, pinning me." (He growled and cornered me.)
"I continued to tell him I didn't think we should. I was scared. I said no. I said stop. I was... it was... he was..."
And this is called acquaintance rape or date rape. Which we are supposed to classify differently from violent rape. But every human with a brain calls it all what it is: Misogyny.

There is laughter here in this swank residence. The walls are hung with original paintings. There is an abstract sculpture of a male dancer in the foyer. You and Tonka make a spread of nachos and Spanish rice. You turn sometimes and catch my eye through the kitchen pass-through. You like me here. Surrounded by your friends. You have allowed me into your inner circle.

This one at least.

Marx is telling stories about clubs you all used to frequent. Marx is telling about your long line of conquests. They were creative. Wild. Often very public. I like the professor from UCLA best. The one you talked up for three hours about Margaret Atwood, Joanna Russ, Camille Paglia, and Marge Piercy, matching her wit for wit, scathing observations followed by political observations, sprinkled with economic repercussions. Your friends were so dang bored they drifted away, leaving you two alone at the booth in the corner of the crowded club.

"Then it was, like you know, four in the morning and time to go grab some meats, so I goes back to the booth and nobody is home, 'Lizagrrl! 'Cept," Marx laughs hard. "Sun is home. She going home on this professor and the only things I see 'bove the table top is a black high heel digging into Sun's yin yang ink on her shoulder!"

I find myself blinking a lot tonight. I catch Alvaro looking at you. He seems nervous, excited to be in your presence. It is odd to see a grown man like this, especially one as classically handsome as Alvaro. On his right ring finger, a thick silver band imprinted in black: Five Years Sober

"Food," you announce as you smile at me and you and Tonka drench the coffee table with noms for all. Your dark hair falls away from your shoulders. In your white skin-tight tank I can watch your muscles tight from the gym and from dancing every weekend. There is no yin yang ink.

Do you think I'm that innocent? Or am I not allowed to bear witness for your truth?

We eat. None of you drink. It's all Coke and Dr. Pepper. You know how much I like that. You wink at me. You wipe cheese off my bottom lip with your thumb. Your arm around my shoulders, your thigh against mine, I am trying to listen to Marx's new stories as Tonka adds in street-slang sound effects and commentary ("Dats da truth!" "Fersure, boy!" "Hm-hm!") but my gaze keeps slipping back to you.

"Not too wild for you, E?" Alvaro asks and I tear my eyes away from studying you. Alvaro is reaching for a Coke. Tattooed inside his wrist: Never Forget and a date.
My mouth is dry.
"Nothing too wild for my Angel," you say and I can taste the possession in your tone. It is sweet and bitter at once.

Marx is not telling stories about you now that you're here. Like he knows not to. You are the group leader. The only gamer grrl in a posse of gamer boys. You have inadvertently over-shared tonight. Not over-share for me. I have soaked up your truths like a sponge, dry and empty before. But I am sure there is nothing I've learned tonight that you actually wanted me to know.

"Oooh! Boi!" Tonka slaps his leg. "Marx, tells da one 'bout the Underground rave! Dat one grrl gettin' wit both--"
"Nuf." You stand. Alvaro stands. The two of you look at each other so intently. Alvaro's eyes are huge wide. Your jaw jumps.
Marx kicks Tonka, "You weren't there, man. Shutup!"
Looking up at you, I slide my hand up your leg. You look down at me with a snap. I say softly, "I'm ready to go, Sunshine."
One. Two. Three. Silence passes. Then you smile. "Of course, baby."
You bud-hug everyone good-bye. You hold Alvaro a moment longer than the others. He looks at you with a silent question while I pretend to look down at my (not really) stuck zipper. You shake your head no. Barely a movement.
"Good to meet you, E." Alvaro extends his hand to me. His smile is like a little boy's. I have a crazy feeling. It grips me, cold and sharp. I don't want to take his--
I see you looking at me. Your lips are parted, jaw juts, one eye squinted, your eyebrows twitch.
I take Alvaro's hand tight then pull him into a quick hug. "Yeah. Good. Thanks."
You smile at me. Whatever it was pissing you off, it's gone now. You think it was an imagined slight. But it wasn't. It was an instinctual one.

Good thing I can ignore my instincts.

G, Liquid X, Liquid E, Scoop, Soap, Gook, Grievous Bodily Harm, Georgia Home Boy, Natural Sleep-500, Easy Lay, Gamma 10. GHB. Gamma-Hydroxybutyerate.

You toss your keys on the kitchen table. I have rarely been so happy to be home. You shrug out of your jacket. I watch you. You never turn on the lights. The whole room is in shadow. You see perfectly even in the pitch black. I never realized before that all your tight friends are men. I never realized before that your mannerisms are so masculine. I never realized before how very little I know about you.

You turn to me. The distance between us seems full of something present and tangible. A beast wrapped in static electricity and incendiary charge. You smile at me, light and sexy and gentle, your eyes already sliding over all the places your hands and mouth have explored before. You say, "I'm going to shower." Already you've dropped the urban edge. The slang, street lilt. You linger for a second (I remain so still I am not breathing) then you're gone into the darkness of the house cloaked in more than the low tock of the grandfather clock. It is not even a minute before I hear you lock the bathroom door. As always.

I am breathing. That is all. I am not thinking. I wet my lips. I am sweating more than I did at the club. I take the skeleton key from the fob.

I unlock the bathroom door.

The mirror glass is already steamed over. How long did it take me to move from my planted place in the kitchen? You have lit a candle. It's red. Cinnamon. The only light in the room. The textured glass of the shower door makes your body a mosaic of smaller images.

I am very still.

You turn off the water. You step out, looking down. You reach for the bath towel, turning away from me. Yin yang ink. And three others I have never seen. And a scar, long an arching, jagged and ugly, down your side and across your abdomen, curling around your hip.

You see me. You drop your towel.

The ink along the scar reads: Never Forget. Same date as Alvaro. It repeats along the length of the thick, still-raised trail.

I cannot breathe.

loy.al.ty

1. the state or quality of being loyal; faithfulness to commitments or obligations.

2. fealty, devotion, constancy. Loyalty, allegiance, fidelity all imply a sense of duty or of devoted attachment to something or someone. Loyalty connotes sentiment and the feeling of devotion that one holds for one's country, creed, family, friends, etc. Allegiance applies particularly to a citizen's duty to his or her country, or, by extension, one's obligation to support a party, cause, leader, etc. Fidelity implies unwavering devotion and allegiance to a person, principle, etc.

I know these definitions. But I don't know the definition of what I feel beneath my fingertips. The truth is never pretty and some truths are so jagged they can still wound after years and years.

There are no words. There were no words. But the truth is still there. I have witnessed it.

And I do not believe that spectators are ever innocent of the crime.

Stand up. Intervene. Represent.

EJ

Lightning Rod

2009-10-25T07:46:00.000-07:00

[But nothing worth doing is easy. A dream like this demands all of you. A dream like this demands you risk everything. A dream like this takes you down the the darkest pit of despair that you can possibly imagine and asks, "Are you ready to give up yet?" And when you say No, it it takes you down one level further. "How about now?"]
Coffee & Chocolate

Lord, I want to be lightning
streaking wild and crackling
across your open expanse of night
the stars above me watching
unable to outshine me
cold and uncaring
while I set fire
to the world.

And the pens are all here. The set of highlighters and colored Sharpies and the ballpoints with the special grippy dots and metallic pastels that you bought with rolled pennies three months ago and mailed them to me on the sly. The graph paper comp books are here. Four of them. Black, green, red, blue. The 1:4 ratio you love. The scent of another woman's perfume. The taste of coffee on my tongue. The beating of my heart.

The grandfather clock is ticking.

The rulers are here. Two lengths. The pencils are here. Purple erasers. My hands are on the table top, palms flat against the cool wood. There is bread in the oven. There are fat lilies floating in a bowl of scented water. My Bible is open. A deck of cards from the game I've built -- the game with the Fallen Angels and the quantum mechanics -- are fanned like a rainbow. There is a silver thumb ring resting in the white margin at the top of the page.

The grandfather clock is ticking.

I sit there for four hours. I straighten the rows of supplies. In the silence of the room (silence because no one else is here) all the little inanimate sounds become elaborate distractions and launch flights of fancy completely unrelated to any reality in or out of work. I sharpen a pencil. I click a ballpoint. I pop a Coke. I tell myself, "If you were here..." I tell myself, "What is the point?" I tell myself, "You are afraid to succeed."

You are afraid to try.

My housemate comes home. She has known of me for years but only known me half of one. She hangs her keys. I hear her smile because the bread is done and sitting out to cool. She unzip her jacket. Comments on the cold. I hear the snap of her clasp popping open as always. Her hair tumbling free. And then the sound of her heels on the hardwood floor.

"Eliza..."

Then there is true silence. It seems, as the wave of her anger rises, there is a moment when all sound -- even the inanimate sounds of the radiators and the clock and the house in the cold wind -- is swallowed. I am holding my breath and perhaps more than anything else I have ever wanted, perhaps more than anything else I have ever needed, I pray for her to yell at me.

She doesn't.

Her heels. The sound of them. Her slacks. The swift brush. Her sharp, short intake of breath as she steps up behind me and sees the table... exactly... *exactly* as she left it... eight and a half hours ago.

As if on cue, the clock chimes 2:00. In the morning.

I look up at her. I want the lecture. I want the indignant speech. I want the confusion, betrayal, hurt. I want the litany that will rain down on me like stones and batter me back into the warrior I know I am. I want to be dragged, kicking and screaming, back to the table of the last supper and be forced to eat, to drink, to listen.

I look up at her. I turn my face up like a child. But I am not a child. The failure of a child is a learning experience. The failure of an adult is poor planning, laziness, sickness, no excuse and no lesson learned. Failure enables more failure. Until finally, even small successes don't feel like victories any more. Failure casts a very large shadow.

Her face is hidden from me. Her hair is beautiful and dark and full. It falls in waves like chocolate. She has been on her feet, literally, all day long. The "break" she got eight and a half hours ago wasn't anything more than her racing in to pick up a change of clothes and a different PDA, another set of keys, and three ounces of peach yogurt. She could be thinking that I escaped stress and doubt by watching tv or playing BioShock or even falling asleep on the couch in front of the fire. She could be hating me. She could be forgiving me. She could be thinking about the stack of bills -- all opened and dated and categorized by payment plan and due date -- and how I have never touched one of them. Maybe she's thinking I am weak. Maybe she's thinking I am fragile. Maybe she's just so consumed with jealously that she's been working all day and I've had the balls (or lack thereof) to sit here, at her table, doing *nothing*....

"Get out."

Her voice might be conversational. It is neither loud nor soft. It is simply strong.

She walks from the room. There is a new sound. A blue vase I adore (but which is not mine) shatters. I can't see her but I know she's picked it up by the mouth and slammed it against the cream stucco wall. With the pottery there is the sound of coins across the hallway floor. The household piggy bank is empty now.

She come back into the room and throws a wad of cash into my lap. There is maybe four hundred dollars. I stare down at it. This was toward the month's mortgage. I had contributed maybe one tenth of it.

"Get out."

She turns and leaves again. I see a mane of hair as I catch a glimpse of her face. It is as though she is carved from stone.

I stand. I stare at the door way into the house. I dare not collect my things. I can't think to do anything else but turn away and go to the door. I don't need to get my keys. I trashed my bike almost a month ago driving way too fast when it was way to dark and all I knew was rain and that hard, cold jerk of some hand yanking me off my baby before she went over the rail and I went under.

My hand on the knob. I can't say if I'm afraid. I can't tell you if this is rock bottom. I feel nothing. I am past numb. I am somewhere on this side of done. Somewhere on that side of terrified. I look back at the table.

She is standing there. Her fist is clenched over my open notebook with the blank page. My ring is gone. Her eyes burn like I have never seen eyes burn. She dares me silently to speak.

She lifts her chin. Her jaw twitches. Her breath is broken for a moment and then, "Come back when you grow up."

And she stares at me hard... until I turn and leave. Because there is nothing to say. There is no excuse. There are no words.

But everything more she could have said and everything I want to sob, flooded me over and over again in waves all the way down the coastline, all the way across the border. Words unspoken and embraces not given, haunted me for three days and three nights and filled my body with so much truth I had no room for food and forced myself to sleep only when I could no longer see.

I made my confessions:

The fearless one is afraid.
The resourceful one is out of ideas.
The inspired one is unmoved.

There would be no resolutions. There would be no second chance. This was the first offense. It was hell. A second failure would not be so bloodless.

When I returned, the posters on the wall were gone replaced with a white board, markers and eraser. With a yard stick she had graphed it all out in permanent marker. I had a new desk. It faced a window. A new laptop. It faced the room. There were cards on the wall -- Alpha and Beta Deck -- slipped into protective sheets and tacked in order. There was a color-coded schedule of chores, of work, of project tasks, all broken out with little flags and arrows and instructions and slide time and firm lines. It was posted in the hall where the vase had once been.

I heard her step up behind me. I smelled her perfume. One hand on my hip as she leaned against me, her cheek to my shoulder.

I covered her hand with my own. I reached back without looking and touched a lock of her hair. I looked at the schedule, the meticulous hours of work. "I like," I told her. "'Dinner out with Sunshine' on Saturday nights."

"Only if every prior task is marked complete," she told me, and she reached past me with her free hand and tapped the small white boxes next to every colored task.

I nodded quietly, unable to speak, the warmth of her so obvious after being so absent. Her fingers traced the lines of days, the open spaces of slide time that would surely fill with contingencies and shifting hours. She stopped when she reached the empty bars that represented this hour, this moment, now. I blinked. "What should we do?" I asked very quietly, my voice almost a whisper beneath the pounding of my blood in my ears.

Her voice against my shoulder, "I think we should pray."

Lord, I need to be grounded
fighting hard and impassioned
through all these burning days
your dawn above me watching
doing everything to lift me
the ones you send help me
to find the truth right here
my faith, my lightning rod.

Stressed is Just Desserts Spelled Backwards

2009-10-18T18:23:00.000-07:00

“We try a new drug, a new combination
of drugs, and suddenly
I fall into my life again

like a vole picked up by a storm
then dropped three valleys
and two mountains away from home."

Since thirty-four *million* Americans will be told they suffer from depression at some point in their lives, we *all* know or are someone who has dealt with this mood, mind and life altering state. However, that means absolutely nothing to that much, much smaller number of Americans who fight, daily, hourly, heartbeat to heartbeat, with the physical, chemical imbalance of clinical depression. This is not that thing that grips you after Bobbi Sue leaves you at the alter (even though, dude, that did suck). This isn't even that terror, helplessness, immobilization that happened after your third baby when postpartum hit you like a hurricane and you thought that Brooke Shields was the only voice of reason in the world (and you were probably right, grrl). This is every day. This is like demon possession or a contorted stranger who rides around on your back, maybe letting you have one or two or ten "good days" before you haul off and slap your son or tell your wife she's useless and fat. This is the stuff that robs hard-working, brilliant artists from being able to create. This is the hardcore sniper who takes out the most articulate word warrior and leave her speechless when she most needs to fight.

This is depression you can't pray away.

Or... can you?

I am not, by many definitions, a Jesus Freak. And yet that's exactly what I was called today by a very near and dear friend. We were just talking and she said, as an aside, "I know you think you can just pray anything away, little Jesus Freak that you are, grrl..." and then she ate a jelly donut.

I blinked. I cocked my head. I took the last bite of her donut and said, "I don't believe that, actually." But by the time I got home, I decided that I do.

"I know you're out there.
I can feel you now.
I know that you're afraid.
You're afraid of change.
I don't know the future.
I didn't come here to tell you
how this is going to end.
I came here to tell you
how it's going to begin.
I'm going to show you a you
not ruled by this thing.
A you without without
borders or boundaries.
A you who makes anything
and everything possible."

The bigger the problem the harder it is to fix. Um, yeah. That makes logical sense. And yet billions of dollars a year are spent by people trying to do the hard thing (no, it isn't easy... shoving your face full of garbage food is easy) of losing major weight by some easy method. And, stunner of all stunners, it doesn't work. Like my jelly donut friend likes to say: Epic fail.

What's more, we all have different *God-given* abilities. Strengths and weaknesses that are different, unique from one another. What we have seen is easy for one person might be colossally difficult for us. But who are we to question the divinity and reasoning of God? Yeah, I don't think so. Kinda like a ten-step plan with fewer steps, let's just:

1. Accept life is hard.
2. Accept life is struggle.
3. Accept life is worth it.

I've been told before that my attitude (encompassed in these three points) is way too "willing martyr" or even far too "accepting of the unacceptable" for most everyday Americans. I'm sorry. I wasn't aware that many of my fellow Americans were so delusional. I don't feel like either a martyr or at all accepting of the unacceptable. I simply believe, with all my heart, that if life were easy, if the physical, chemical framework of our bodies were simple, we'd all be running around singing "Man in the Mirror" and making that change. But life is actually all about the complexities that make us made in His image and not made in the image of tapeworms.

Another adage kept coming into my mind on the drive home. That hiking saying: Walk lightly. Carry what you need and leave nothing behind.

Of course, that is not a good adage for life. It would actually be a really, really crummy life philosophy. But often, someone who suffers from major or "explosive" depression, feels like they are stomping through life leaving behind them a path of destruction and damaged that cannot be undone. These individuals are damaging themselves as they crash through the thickets and brambles of life, and they are damaging every loved one traveling with them. Because, far more often than not, these individuals are not alone, but rather surrounded by partners, husbands, wives, and children. Everyone is hurt. And no one is left the same.

I think the best approach would be to add a step to our not-quite-ten-step list:

4. Leave the moment better than it was.

Stop and think about that. Now, you might say, with depression, wouldn't it just be enough to leave the moment? Or leave your family? Or shut up, tune out, plead the Fifth? Um, yeah, if you want depression to win. I know that sounded simplistic but what I mean is: For every moment that you just try to stay quiet and get by, not engage, you are thinking of nothing but your depression. Your entire focus is on that. But what if, instead of wallowing, drowning in your own chemical bloodbath of doubt and despair, you made it your personal freaking mission to make every time you walked into a room actually *better* for someone else?

You step into the room and kiss your baby.
You step into a room and hand someone a cookie from the jar.
You step into the room and tell a joke (not a sarcastic or biting one).
You step into a room and hand a love note to someone you love.

You start to leave positive marks on your landscape. You leave behind the best of who you are. Even if depression has stolen your tongue and you can't find the words, you will not be without a voice. A good friend of mine has a sock drawer full of colored papered hearts. Every day she puts one in her coat pocket. When her depression spins out of control and drags her down, she gives the hearts that have gathered in her pocket to the people around her. Because they've stayed. They've stayed even though, sometimes, she's hurting them as badly as the depression hurts her. She just walks into the room and leave behind her hearts. Instead of screaming or fighting or throwing a vase, she leaves behind hearts. Her seventeen year old daughter told me, "I have a treasure chest. It's handmade and sits in the corner of my room. In it I have a shard of glass from my graduation photo that Mom threw across the kitchen once when she was raging. I also have three hundred and seventy-eight paper hearts. That piece of glass always reminds me how ugly she can be when she gets low. But I don't see it very often buried beneath all those paper hearts."

5.Pray constantly.

Ah, the Jesus Freak is in the house. I mean, could just as well say, "Sing constantly" or "Talk constantly." but I thin "Pray constantly." just has a certain freaky perfect to it, don't you? Let;s practice:

"Lord, I'm about to see Joss. He will say something with double-meaning. He will act like he owns me. It isn't my imagination. It isn't depression. Others have substantiated my feelings about him. He will be an ass. Help me smile at him, speak clearly and say only what is needed, not engage, and think of naked mole rats and how his wanker must look just like one."

You think that's too irreverent? Guess your Christ and my Christ aren't the same one. Go ahead and click to another website. Come back when you actually bring someone to God instead of terrify them into submission.

Let's keep praying:

"Lord, I'm feeling scared and low. I'm going into a stressful place filled with stressful people. Give me the strength to just wade into that stress and tell the really funny joke about the priest, the hamster, and the IMVU credit."

"Christ, allow me to swing my daughter into my arms and make her whole evening."

"Christ, it's me again. I just want to cry. Let's listen to music instead and then watch 'Glee' on Hulu."

"God, the chemicals surging through me are like a cancer. They eat away at me. Wearing me down to nothing, to worse than nothing, to a cancer in the lives of the people who love me. Because God? They have proven their love. Because they are still here. It would be the easy thing for them to go. But they stay because I fight to stay, too. Fight with me, God. Help me lift them up even as you lift me."

The moment, the second, the heartbeat you lift someone else, you will be lifted. The moment you reach out, you will be touched. No, not because turnabout is fair play, or because you're keeping tabs, or expect anything in return. But rather because thinking about something other than yourself and your situation and your own spinning wheels to nowhere, will *free* you to sing.

So maybe we should rewrite our steps. Maybe they should just become:

Accept it.
Face it.
Pray about it.
Rejoice in it.
Live it.

What's it? Life.

Or maybe the paper hearts line the path and the approach is only:

Love

"I looked at the sky
and remembered that
you’re always there.
Reminding me that all
I really have to do
is breathe."

For you are already loved in return.

EJ

Alex shares.

Krizia shares.

Praying in 140 Characters

2009-10-11T09:14:00.000-07:00

I found it's possible, when it rains like this, to remember the face of Christ without being a fanatic or insane. Though sometimes I'm both.

How can intelligent people vomit ignorant bigotry all over their children? The whispered answer is simple: I overestimate their intelligence

Christ in raindrops, in pixels, in metalwork. My Lord in words, not scripture, but backbeats. Holy Spirit in speed, the wind, dark freeways.

I must call you my community because our bedroom politics are the same? You are raising your child blind to God. How can you possibly see me?

So hard to be the moral ruling class. Zipping up the chasm between church and State the way they zip up the body bags of all their gay kids.

Hypocrites are not only two-faced to their enemies. They barter in lies, make trades with stolen trust. Not a fortune cookie. Your mother.

Finding inspiration in salty sea spray, fresh sweet rain, and the cold brilliant night that is just between my Christ and me and all of you.

Dawn arrives without trumpets. Even arrives on time. Every songbird had faith. Every flower turned her face in anticipation. Suspended there

Christ is unchanged, always changing. Rain falling down glass, the waves of the sea, the clouds in the sky. Gamer grrls change too. S(t)weet

It amazes me how much can be said (and left unsaid most artfully) with only 140 characters. And certainly Christ doesn't care whether you spend forty hours a day on your knees or fifteen seconds praising His name. After all, He's got billions of us already. He's not really looking for quantity. He's looking for meat. And amazingly, that sustenance can be found in ever fewer than 140 characters. It can be found in:

Please help me.

I trust you.

Walk with me.

I love you.

Like the child who asked his grandfather, "I only know one prayer. Do you think that's enough?" The grandfather answered, "Christ doesn't hear the words, child, He only hears your voice."

Spreading the word in every medium, because every gamer grrl knows the value of good exposure,
EJ

Fifty-five Words

2009-10-04T18:56:00.000-07:00

I never intended to be reborn
as someone other than
the grrl I’ve always been.

If I ever walked on water
it was only to reach you.

It was always more about
self-preservation than
self-sacrifice. (I wasn’t
coded to be a martyr
this time around.)

Yes, I pushed you.

And you let go
and jumped.

Your Great Big Ruler

2009-09-27T18:56:00.000-07:00

I watch you measuring me up. In your three-piece and your shiny shoes. Your glasses make your eyes look small and rat-like. You twitch your nose in distaste at my ACT UP tee and only intensify the rodentia impression. I am only numbers to you -- some too little, some too big. I am a collection of converse and concave angles, curves and lines. I am BOP and Q Score. I watch your eyes scan me, taking in as much information as is packed into a barcode. Yeah, you don't just think you have my number, you think you have my price.

But I don't even know my price.

I'm laying in your arms and I know you're somewhere else. Got some other browser window open in your brain. Your breathing, I know it so well, and it's not right. You're only pretending to me asleep. As my breath fills the hollows of your back, your hair black satin in the night, I cannot see your face but I imagine that your eyes are open. You are thinking about...

"What are you thinking?"

She always wanted to know. It was the only time I saw real fear on her face. Not fight, just fear. I think she really expected that one day I'd say, "Not of you." And because I knew that's what she thought, every response of any sincerity choked me and stuck half way up my throat. I couldn't get the truth past that lump. I couldn't shake the feeling that somehow, even if I was solving world hunger while she went down on me, or composing sonnets about the way her hands lifted my hips, her wedding ring catching on the satin sheet, even if I confessed to all of that, she'd know I was lying. She'd see in my eyes I was thinking of... nothing.

You were my oblivion.

Going cold-turkey sucked.

So here I am and you're sizing me up and dressing me down with eyes as judgmental as hers never were, and you're already undressing me so you can attach all the labels that you can fit because of my nipple rings and my Christian tats and my d6 pendant and my ankh ear cuff. You have made every decision about me that you will ever make and it stuns me that you don't think I believe in God. I don't just believe in God. I have living proof that He exists and looks out for me. Because if He didn't, than two hours ago, when you first stepped into my trailer, when you first straightened your tie and began to talk, when you first measured my worth with you great big (probably three inch) ruler, when you first did all that... well... if there wasn't a God?

If God hadn't been looking out for me, I would have leaned forward in the first thirty seconds and told you that your wife tastes like honey and nutmeg, and your side of the bed has a great view of the ocean.

(And I would have lost my job.)

God rocks.

One Patch of Earth, One Grain of Sand

2009-09-20T18:56:00.000-07:00

“The temptation of Christ refers to the trails of Jesus by the devil as detailed in the Synoptic Gospels, Matthew, Mark and Luke. According to these texts, after being baptized by his cousin John, Jesus fasted for forty days and forty nights in the desert. During this time, the devil appeared to Jesus and tempted him to demonstrate his supernatural powers as proof of his divinity, each temptation being refused by Jesus with a quote of scripture. The Gospels state that having failed, the devil departed and angels came and brought nourishment to Jesus.

“Mark's account is very brief, merely noting the aforementioned events, but giving no details about them, not even how many there were. Matthew and Luke on the other hand, describe the temptations by recounting the details of the conversations between Jesus and the devil. Since the elements of the narrative that are in Matthew and Luke but not in Mark are mostly pairs of quotations, rather than detailed narrative, many scholars believe that these extra details originate in the Q Document.”

It is just a patch of Earth. There has been no stone rolled away here. There has been no murder. Likewise there has been no rousing call to arms preached from this spot. No child conceived on a warm spring day, picnic blanket spread here beneath the surrounding privacy of the trees. It is just a patch of Earth. That is how some see it. And that is truth. Not *the* truth. *A* truth.

Just like I highly doubt that those forty days of fasting were the first or last time that Christ was tempted.

I’ve written before about the glass being half-empty, or half-full, or, as I like to see it, all the way full -- water and air working as one to fill every empty space. But our individual perspective doesn’t begin or end with glasses of water. We are constantly, each of us, living in our own reality. Our own OS. My Reality, version 1.5.

Why the version? Because sometimes we are shaken by quakes of realization or enlightenment that our reality shifts. Not reality itself. *Our* reality. But still that is monumentous because *our* reality is the only reality we have.

Matthew 4:1
Then was Jesus led up of the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted of the devil.

I am standing in the dead of winter staring any where but at the patch of dirt. Because, you know, it’s dirt so why would I look at it? I am entranced by the sky and the feather brush of the evergreens as they stroke the low clouds. But my friend is staring down. Staring at the dirt.

“In summertime, bronze and orange irises sprout here. They push up from that spot right there and their stems, their stalks are thick and strong. The colors are almost masculine. They look metal. Steampunk even. I can’t look at this patch of dirt and not see them. I feel an ache... and anticipation for them here--” he touches his chest. “I know this is their place of slumber. Sacred. They’re waiting... and I’m waiting with them.”

I look at the ground. The grass is pale and weak. The soil is dun and dull. It is not lush and loamy. It is not dark and pungent. It is actually what you think of when I say the word dirt. It is nondescript. Littered with small pebbles, leaf remnants, bits of twigs and pine needles. It’s just... dirt.

“You see the potential of what this patch could be, will be,” I offer, trying to mesh our realities because human nature drives me to do so.

My friend, who is also my father, shakes his head, “No. I see what it is. Now then forever.”

Mark 1:12
And immediately the spirit drove Him into the wilderness.

I slip the photographed out of my grandmothers New Testament. It has as many blank pages filled with hand-written scripture as it has printed pages. The cover is blood red leather, almost black. The pages are like sheets of rice papers. The photograph is borrowed... stolen... treasured.

Here is that patch of dirt. Just that dirt as it was years before my father and I ever stood and stared at it and not. There is actually no dirt to be seen in this picture. No ground at all. The space is over-flowing with dense clusters of forest green leaves studded with brilliant robin egg blue gumdrop shaped flowers. Tiny petals are visible if I stare hard enough.

My eyes are drawn to the dark-skinned woman in the picture. She is kneeling by the tiny gemstones of blue, one hand reaching out not to touch them but as if to feel their color and vibrancy in the air like heat or vibration. It is obvious that she sees something I do not. My eyes are on her. The lines of her body that are as familiar as my own. Her posture and unspoken language that says so much without words. My eyes are not on the dirt. They are not even on the flowers and leaves and colors. I see only the person and everything my mother is telling me about herself, about myself, about that one patch of dirt.

Luke 4:1
And Jesus, being full of the Holy Ghost, returned from Jordan, and was led by the Spirit into the wilderness.

That one space is unable to grow a tree, we learned. Though no one could establish why. It is unable to grow roses of any variety and sedge grass loves it. It receives mid-day an late-afternoon sun but some morning sun as well though the shadows of transition still rest there at dawn.

A person could choose to ignore the space. The study it for hours and days. To write a book about it. To photograph it. To explore it. To turn it. To cement over it. You could nurture it or burn it. Replant or experiment. Wire a street lamp. Lay a patio. The choices for that patch of dirt -- for any and every patch of dirt (or moment, or sentence, or praise, or insult, or strike, or dream) -- are endless and countless, different in all of our realities. What is a temple for me may be invisible to you. Your joy may look like my slavery.

We can never change our reality to another’s. We are simply not made that way. The closest we come is to stop ourselves and lift from our own lives for a moment. To ask ourselves, “How must that feel?” and truly and thoroughly slide into another’s shoes. I think very few people can do this well. I think many don’t take the time to learn how.

After all, even if you can understand or glimpse another person’s reality in perfect detail, impossibly unbiased by our own, it still does not change your own world. You will still have your reality and they will have theirs. The best we can hope for is that, by changing places, by considering the insular realities of others, we might some day come upon that divine moment of realization and enlightenment. That moment when our own reality shifts up a version and finds itself renewed.

Matthew, Mark, and Luke seem to think that Christ’s forty days was something extraordinary for Him. A great Temptation. A poetic and dramatic event that surely served as enlightenment. A unique and power set of trails.

Yet, interestingly, the story of the temptation is one of the notable omissions from the gospel of John the Beloved. Perhaps John, arguably nearest and dearest to Christ, knew that He would suffer so much more, that in other instances (perhaps ones not noted in the written scripture) Christ had faced much worse. Maybe what Matthew, Mark, and Luke saw as a great temptation, was just yet another bout with that same old satan, that same force of malice that dogged Him every where He spoke.

Maybe John knew that Christ would see the temptations as something else. As just a patch of dirt, an expanse of sand in the desert. Just one temptation, one trail among countless others in the life of our Lord.

EJ

Impulse Control

2009-09-13T07:45:00.000-07:00

There are certain words that get overused (actually, there are a *lot* of words that get overused -- like "lite" and "free" and “forever”) and used incorrectly and so they begin to lose their meaning, lose their power, and this worries me.

No. Wait. It doesn't worry me. It infuriates me.

Let's talk about these words. Let's actually talk about them as they were conceived, not as they have been conveniently co-opted by lazy thinkers who have nothing better than to approach life as gluttons for momentary pleasure, living so much in the hererightnow that their lack of reflection on what might come after (if anything) doesn’t bother them in the least because, not unlike trans fat, if heaven and hell exist, if reward and consequence are real, than we’ll only know for sure when it’s too late.

What? You'd like to know what these words are, specifically, before investing in the time to scroll down, read (skim), engage (or not) on this topic with a grrl you've likely never met or will meet but who seems to think that actions don't always speak louder than blogs? (Because why else would I? Blog, that is.) Of course, that is another conversation and not the one for today, so I’ll give in and give it up... but just this once, and just because you’re special.

Addiction. Empowerment. Sin.

Still with me? Most of you, I think no. Right about “addiction” is when the zoning out began and right about “empower” is when tiny minds who think I mean men when I say man are rolling their eyes skyward in chagrin in the face of the touchy-feely wonder of it all. Then we hit “sin” and I peak a little interest in the apparent paradox offer, the contrast/compare of gamer and grrl, but quash a bunch more interest because, heck, hererightnow who needs to worry about sin and since when did I start believing in sin anyhow? Like everyone in the whole wide English speaking world knowing the name Stephen Hawking or Albert Einstein but only half those knowing who they are and only a tenth of those having ever actually read anything written or composed by either of them.

Now that there are only four or six of us left reading, let’s jump in. Because if I can’t live an examined life, than I’m just wallowing in slop and the last time I looked in the mirrored wall of my favorite dance club I was a taut and sexy thang, not no swine, baby. So let’s go play with pearls.

Addiction is a buzz word. It is hollow cheeks and dark circles and blood shot eyes. It is ultra skinny nothing but bones, covered in bruises, dirty and raw. It is destructive. It is illogical. It is not what anyone wants. It is a call, a pull, an inanimate thing that gets what *it* wants, without thought to host, to effect, to consequence.

I’m sure you can imagine the posters now. The faces. The taglines. The stark colors. You know the substances. The behaviors. The guilt, pain, sorrow, disappointment.

But what if I want to look deeper. What if I want to say: Addiction is an ache that cannot be filled until fed its desire. A constant yearning. A distraction. Elation beyond reason when satisfied. Defying logic to rejoice in consummation.

What if I defined addiction as: That which drives us beyond reason, to the edge sanity and logic, to the utter destruction of everything we were before and everything we could be with it. To yearn, to weep, to ache, to reach. To desire more than breath. To be willing to pay any price, any time, over and over again.

The pearl of great price. The wisdom of His stand: Do not as you have done. Change everything. Change everyone. Change yourself.

His words were more radical than email to carrier pigeon. His actions were more radical than covered wagon to space shuttle. I can code prayers in binary into the backgrounds of the newsletter I publish and that’s still tame compared to turn the other cheek, judge not your fellow man, and ask me for forgiveness... for anything, for everything... and it is yours.

Speak to me, from your lips to my ears, and I will hear even the unspoken that hides in the shadows and folds of your heart.

I will hear you. And what is more... I will understand.

“I fall to my knees
when I hear my angel’s voice.
Oh night divine, this night
when this love was born.”

It is addiction if it hurts someone else. Whether it’s drug-use, hatred, anger, compulsion, sex. It is impassioned if it drives us closer to God... when as it drives us mad.

Empowerment is a raised fist, a rousing speech, a grant, a trust, a parade, a law. Empowerment is pride in the lift of a chin, the direct line of a gaze. It is hoping and dreaming and building pillars beneath every castle in the air.

Empowerment is so close to enabling that the line is draw in dry sand. The winds of popular opinion shift and suddenly the division is gone and so are our good intentions.

I sit in a basement room with checkerboard lino and a cool comfort that encourages talk and chipped, second-hand mugs of hot cocoa and cheap tea, drip coffee that somehow emerges from the keg-shaped tank at the end of a green folding table. The bargain table cookies are gone and the crumbled napkins and crumbs are abandoned and forgotten. It will be my job to clean up the mess.

For a generation, this new generation, after Gen X, sometimes called Gen Y, the words have been shouted: Be proud! Stand up! Stand Out! FTW! (Forget the World.) Embrace the moment. And the statistics that had fallen are rising again. The rousing cry of, “Don’t let them beat you down!” became a growl of, “Nothing can take me down!” and there is no truth in that that isn’t misguided and twisted.

And every time you take him back in, you enable him to keep drinking and smoking pot.

And every time she weeps sorry and you murmur itsallright, you enable her to keep killing you.

And every time you let him fight alone, you enable him to be a rock, an island, an untouchable thing.

Every time you offer best wishes instead of time, every time you let confessions of hurt hang in the air, every time you flood her inbox and her ears with hypocrisy, you are enabling the very behaviors you pray would cease.

We empower because there is a darkness that must be risen above. But all that black still exists, swirling in eddies, maelstroms. We need to educate, not empower. We need to illuminate and examine, not empower.

We need to face the midnight storms, stand within the event horizons, and shatter them, disperse them, destroy them. It is easy to lift up. It is harder to dig down. But solid foundations are always stronger than pillars.

It really seems a sin to ignore the problem and throw bouquets of empowerment. Whether or not the soldiers are empowered, the darkness will still eventually kill them.

Sin is everything you have been taught it to be. Some of us have been taught the same actions, thoughts, behaviors. Others have never even heard of them. It floored me to hear that one doctrine claims masturbation will keep you out of heaven but resisting could eventually make you deity, when just down the street and around the corner, another congregation was teaching humility and out-right martyrdom to its youth, with masturbation as a way to rid yourself of sexual urges and desires and keep your body pure toward others.

Perhaps “sin” cannot be so easily defined? Unless “sin” is a convention of man (by which I mean humans, mankind, not everyone with a penis) and so is concocted by the ruling class, the rule-making, the money-holders, the power players. Is it a sin to step on an ant on accident? How about on purpose? Is it a sin to let a child cry unattended? How about to slap your wife? How about to cheat on your husband? What if you just *think* about slapping your wife when she accidentally looks at another man’s butt? Oh, how tangled a definition of sin we weave when we practice to deceive.

Who is drafting the definition of sin? Certainly not God. Deception is not in the genetic makeup of our Lord or when they told Him, “Dude, just *say* you’re not the son of God, and we’ll get you out of here, ‘kay?” and yet there He stayed. Bleeding. Dying.

But man and deception goes all the way back to Eden:

“Did you eat the fruit?”
“Oh no, no, no!”
“Than why are you buck naked?”
“Cuz we got shy!”
“Who told you to be shy?”
“The armadillos!”

The art of war and survival (not to mention those holy scripts) tells us we need to be fruitful. Just makes sense that anything that doesn’t make babies should be a sin. Common sense! (Oops! Guess none of the prophets foresaw gross overpopulation! Dang it!) The very same arts -- war and survival -- say safety in numbers, safety in homogeny. So suddenly conversion makes sense... holy wars... terror and bombs and ourgodistheoneandonly mantras that are justified even as we vilify each other.

Who decides what is sin?

God decides.

But the masses cry, “What about *until* God intervenes?! What about *before* we slip our mortal coils? What about others who sin and them needing to be punished? What about a prophet or helper or preacher or someone to facilitate the recognition and ramifications of sin and sinners *now*?”

You know what I say to all that? I say, “What a bunch of impatient, self-important, greedy, voyeuristic frakkers.” That’s what I say.

Sin is when Christ whispers into your heart and you pretend not to hear Him.

Sin is when He lights your path but you find it too rocky to walk.

Sin is when you damage or destroy that which is precious to Him.

Sin is hubris, jealousy, hatred, possession. Destruction, disregard, disrespect.

Sin is not dictated from the pulpit. It is a knowledge in ourselves, placed there by His hand, and it is as unique as our finger prints, sewn to fit our soul alone. Where cowardice may be the sin of one man, fury might be the sin of another. Only Christ and our hearts know the truth.

And that is why no man can judge another.

There is power in words. Great hurts can be healed or hidden by simple phrases. So when I see t-shirts with slogans (therein lies a delight) that shout for action instead of words, I pause and muse on longevity and remembrance, on meaning and definition. I think about all the actions -- of addiction, of empowerment, of sin -- that make us all who we are, that make our world what it is, ad I can’t help but wish that a few of us (a few hundred thousand of us) would sit down and stop taking action for a moment.

Just sit down, reflect, shut up... and blog.

EJ

Suspicion

2009-09-06T09:20:00.000-07:00

"You start walking your way
and I'll start walking mine.
We'll meet in the middle..."

"Too right for left, too left for right.
You can't get me, I can't get you.
From my spot on the fence
what a wonderful view."

I do this sometimes. Well, I do a lot of things sometimes. Not a very stable grrl, I suppose. But I can't remember ever reading about an artist who was stable. Most of them are down-right nuts and nuggets, as a matter of fact *shrug* I suppose I'm doing all right.

"Walk on down to the corner grocery store.
Bought myself some groceries and a little bit more.
Now I'm flying, flying higher than a kite.
And I'm doing all right, doing all right."

There is a stranger and you all know how I never learned not to talk to strangers. I figure that ever stranger is just an experience I haven't had yet. And as a gamer grrl I gotta get that EXP or I'll never level up, baby. I mean, What's your story? Right? This is Hollywood. Land of Dreams. Everybody gots a story.

So I'm slumming it because I've been working for twenty-three days straight and they've been those killer ten and twelve hour days and it's just shy of midnight and I look like slop. I'm in jeans all torn up and combat boots I bought off the back of a truck that have claw marks from some cat (I hope) along one side and a new-to-me ratty-ole brown leather jacket with Airforce patches and... oh yeah... that's about it.

'Cept, you know, my cross.

Now sometimes I don't wear one. I mean, I have ink. My shoulder. So I'm always wearing one. But sometimes I do stumble on my own belly button lint and I start to spinning about that whole concentric circle game of we're-gonna-be-different-because-we've-so-enlightened, "Why the cross?! What an icky symbol! Why celebrate His death?" And so I wear my Ichthys. You know. The little Christian fish symbol. But tonight I just so happen to be wearing my cross.

And my lefthand thumb ring.

And my left back-pocket purple bandanna.

And my attitude. And your cologne. (Not that I put it on... per say.)

So when I smile (way) up at the stranger in line before me at the corner store -- me a great big cornucopia of patches and symbols and code words and statements -- I'm not really surprised when he starts in. I was only surprised that he wasted no time.

"How do you know who you are?" He motions me up and down (mostly down because dude is like a big brickhouse and I'm his pool boy... or the tool shed).

I tilt my head and shrug a bit. "Cuz my Bible tells me so?"

He smiles, showing perfect LA teeth. I wonder, Do I know him? He says, "Society tells you who you are. The media."

My grin deepens. "I am the media, baby."

He laughs and he has a nice laugh and I look down and he steps outta line and I follow him. he leans against a concrete pillar next to the ice cream freezer and I notice he wears a wedding ring and the numbers tattooed across his knuckles might be scripture or they might be California penal code. Hard to tell. His skin is a two shades darker than mine, as chocolate as mine is cinnamon.

"You aren't suspicious?" He's looking down my half-zipped jacket. Not much to write home about ('cept the wearing no shirt part) but I know he's looking at my cross. "You're all covered in tags."

Oh, hon. If you only knew.

"It takes too much energy to be suspicious," I answer and my sincerity is so obvious in my voice it startles me a little. I guess... you know... I have something to say about suspicions. "I gotta look at it like this: If I work my skinny butt off to prove all my suspicions, I'll do it. Every one. I'll find liars and cheats and people who hate me who I thought were my friends. I'll find money exchanging hands in the parking lot of every church and blood in the confessionals and bribes on the offering plate. I'll find good people where I don't want to find them and bad people holding me tight when I cry. I think I'd rather spend my energy doing something else. Doing something... for Him. Not for me."

The stranger looks at me. The clock on the wall behind him says that, according to man's time, it's the Sabbath. Saturday and turned to Sunday by the power of man's great big black-on-white numbers. The power of the tick tock. It doesn't feel like the Sabbath to me until the horizon is painted with color. Or... does it?

"Do I make you suspicious?" What on Earth made me blurt that I don't know. Maybe not on Earth at all but rather in Heaven.

He smiles at me, the glib response ready to tumble on my deserving head but then he stops. He holds out his hand. We shake, just one pump, then hold, nothing wrong, mutual understanding. His hand is the length of my forearm.

"If I asked you, what should I do today, what would you say?" He means Sunday morning. What should he do Sunday morning.

"Ask me."

His smile widens. He even shakes his head in amusement. I don't wait for him to ask again.

"Stay home," I tell him as I realize our eyes are almost exactly the same color. "Stay home and make love with your lady and laugh with your kids. Go walking alone. Go walking with them. Plant something. Pray aloud together. Pray aloud alone. Realize that every congregation you need already hold dominion in your heart, in your home. You. Your family. God. The rest..." I look away. I shake my own head. I drop his hand and smile back at him. "The rest, man, is all suspicious."

And I turn and get back in line to pay for my gum, my Coke, and a pack of Beef Jerky.

I'll take my communion without the smoke, without the mirrors, without the closed curtains, pre-determined ballots, political pay-offs, and absolutely without the media.

The church of my heart is like my favorite dance clubs. Media Free.

EJ

403. Every person who, without authority of law, willfully disturbs or breaks up any assembly or meeting that is not unlawful in its character (only in its spirit), other than an assembly or meeting is guilty of a misdemeanor.

404. Any use of force, disturbing the public peace, or any threat to use force, if accompanied by immediate power of execution, by two or more persons acting together, and without authority of law, is a riot.

405. (a) Every person who with the intent to cause a riot does an act or engages in conduct that urges a riot, or urges others to commit acts of force and power, or the burning or destroying of lies, and at a time and place and under circumstances that produce a clear and present and immediate danger of acts of force, is guilty of incitement to riot.... (b) The existence of any fact that would bring a person under this definition of subversion shall be alleged in the complaint, information, or indictment and either admitted by the defendant in open court, or found to be true by the jury trying the issue of guilt, by the court where guilt is established by a plea of guilty or nolo contendere, or by trial by the court sitting without a jury.

406. Every person who participates in any riot is punishable by a fine not exceeding one thousand dollars, or by imprisonment in a county jail not exceeding one year, or by both such fine and imprisonment.

407. The taking by means of a riot of any person from the lawful custody of any peace officer or lawful institution which confines any person is considered a lynching.

408. Every person who participates in any lynching is punishable by imprisonment in the state prison for two, three or four years.

409. Whenever two or more persons, assembled and acting together, make any attempt or advance toward the commission of an act which would be a riot if actually committed, such assembly is a rout.

410. Whenever two or more persons assemble together to do an unlawful act, or do a lawful act in a forceful, boisterous, or tumultuous manner, such assembly is an unlawful assembly.

Yeah... well... nolo contendere, baby. Nolo contendere.

Relevance

2009-08-30T08:14:00.000-07:00

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[I am sitting in the sunshine, pale and sweet with autumn, in the public park in town. I am reading from my Bible and lost in thoughts private between me and my God. A woman comes suddenly to stand so close I see her feet first... and then the feet of her little children. "And if you bigots won't let me marry my partner, their other mother, the only family they have or know, what will happen to my children when I die?!" And she does not wait for a response. She is so angry. There is no time. There is no time because the effects of chemotherapy are obvious and universal. You come up behind me and only then do I realize I am standing. You saw and heard it all. You wrap your arms around me from behind. You whisper, "She doesn't know. She didn't see." But I look down at my Bible and I respond, "She saw enough." And I start to cry.]

I find the people I want around me are the ones who write a good press release. Better yet, the ones who can take a book, song, product, movie and boil it down into two sentences of why and if it's relevant.

Relevant. That means it means something. To us. Now. That means it reaches us, touches us, finds and discover us. And the "it" doesn't have to be inanimate. It can be he, she, them, even us.

Are we relevant?

I felt lost and alone. Oh, look. I'm unstable. I asked, "When you are struggling, when you're ill and hurting, is this... all of this... even relevant?"

You were silent for a long time. The distance between us clicked and hummed on the phone lines. I imagined I could count the beat of your pulse. "I'm sorry," you said, your voice low and smooth. "When did salvation become irrelevant?"

The partner you always wanted is right there.

And there. And there.

Have you ever done something, dreamed some dream (you know, a Dream), and thought it was big, it was wide, it would teach and preach and reach and touch, find and discover and no one, no one at all, would ever resistant it, ever close their hearts to it, because it was right (you know, Right)? Have you ever felt that feeling? Maybe even seen the proof in the pudding and in the reality of the reason for believing.

But you can't change a heart. You can cause a heart to open or close. You can coax or condemn a heart. But what it is, who it is, at its core, it will remain, now then forever. The scripture of the heart, wisemen like to say, is written in blood and muscle long before we are grown men. The scripture of the heart is what we have come to believe -- not the words we have memorized or the parts we have played -- but the truth behind it all. Arrogant, self-important, doomed, dreamer, useless, soldier -- the core truth is there, imprinted if not by the hand of God, than by the acts and reactions of our parents, our peers, our reality, our nonreality. The truth remains, lingering, whispering, carrying on into immortality, even after our bones (and heart) are less than dust.

I have witnessed and known -- blessed to know -- fighters who have risen from darkness and struggle and hopelessness. They are bright and they blaze trails for others to follow (or fall behind if they can't keep up). But even there, deep inside these burning hearts, there are whispers from the seed they grew from.

No. I am not saying "once poor, always poor." No. I am not saying we cannot change our station or that our lives are pre-written and we can't break away from cycles of abusive, of nature, of nurture. I am saying simply: The whispers will always be there.

So... I'll surround myself -- arm myself! -- with seeds who are:

Humble in speech
Proud by right
Relentless in desire
Driven by faith
Strong in community
Brazen in spirit
Unshaken by adversity
Deserving of respect

"No one *deserves* my respect," she told the group of teens. "They earn my respect." She looked at them each, slowly. It took time. Everyone waited their turn. "My parents. My teachers. My peers. Any and every authority. All of you. My loyalty is legendary. If you earn my respect." (Gee... think she grew up on the streets? What does her heart seed whisper?)

Earning respect. I would think, to do so, you'd have to be pretty dang relevant. You'd have to be active and push. Not passive and pull. You'd have to be a fighter. You have to read the signs.

"Push Communication is where the offer of information is initiated by the speaker. It is contrasted with Pull Communication, where the request of information is initiated by the listener."

They cannot read the signs. Because the trappings of comfortable religion (which have never fit the amorphous, limitless possibilities of faith) are just that, traps. The lightning is not Zeus. The rain is not tears. But neither is science the devil. Neither is desire the enemy.

They are lonely and lost. They are arrogant and meek. They stumble and ask questions that those who have trampled before us cannot answer. They are seeing in nature what is killed inside their churches. They are looking for truth before the faith in them dies.

"There is tranquility in ignorance, but servitude is its partner."

The New Hampshire license plate once read (still does?): Live Free or Die

Who am I serving? Who are you serving?

"You cannot escape the responsibility of tomorrow by evading it today." --Abraham Lincoln

The whispers in my heart are wild, untamed. They turn tables. They do not waver. If I drift from the path, they call me back. If I look to the sky, they bring me dawn.

"Give us your poor, your tired, your huddled masses longing to be free..." The ones you don't want anymore, the one who are beginning to want something and it isn't you, we will take them in. And we won't all get along. And we won't all look alike. And we won't all agree. But welcome is what happens when people listen. Welcome is what happens when people speak. Community is what happens when you earn each other's respect. Christ is just a natural consequence of all that truth.

Mark Twain said once, "Principles have no real force except when one is well-fed." Especially when the diet is hollow but convincing. Tasty and neat. No clean up afterwards. Drop your tithe in the plate and continue on. The country songs croon, "Here's a twenty for last night, and another for what I'll do tonight." Now ain't that American?

Rally forces and step in time. One person made a difference, you know His name, but now He asks us to repeat His cycle. He turned the tables, turned everything upside down. No more original sin. No more sacrifices. No more anything but a direct line to Him. Times have changed. They had changed then. The old ways fall away. They were crumbling then. To be a real Christian is not to hate. It is not to oppress. It is not to deny certain inalienable rights.

It is to bring change. It is to rise up and embrace thy neighbor.

Those of us who have broken free of denomination's pasture to find the Shepherd have one journey and one alone:

To keep Christianity relevant.

EJ

Surfacing

2009-08-23T04:10:00.000-07:00

No matter what you say about life
I learn every time I bleed.
That truth is not a stranger to me.

I admit that I'm wrong
and then I change my mind.
I realize nothing is broken.

No need to worry about everything I've done.
Live every second like it was my last one.
This is my path and I walk it.

You tell me, it's not you, it's me.
And, baby, I would have to agree.

The radio is playing, running off batteries the way my bossman ran off at the mouth today, keeping us four hours long on no extra pay to give us notes (you know, Notes) on performances phoned-in by walk-ons who weren't even there. I'm told I'm supposed to be joyful that I have work at all. And I do have it. Work. Lots of it. Work. But not sure where the money goes after rent and food and utilities. Seems like there's never enough left for anything more. Not gas, not 'net, not a movie out. Seems like we're drowning in all this work... with nothing floating on the surface.

But I take a deep breath of the cold city air and I am thankful. God bless America, I am more thankful than I can find words to express as I exhale a free woman with access to free press and a heart that loves who she pleases and how. I am aware and awake to the truth that what I take from my job is less stress than the world hands some of my friends -- where rent or food or utilities are not paid. Where kind words cease to be helpful at all if they aren't accompanied with cold, hard cash to buy shoes and winter jackets at Goodwill.

The day, my day, falls away to the pavement and I walk the last two blocks home. I stood on that street corner for half an hour coming to terms with the fact that I was so far from drowning I was laying in the sun, on the sand, drink in hand, compared to some of those I love.

No sooner do I arrive home that you take off. Take your jacket. Take your keys. You're gone. I sink down on the couch, tug at yesterday's paper. I watch you leave. I hear the lock snap. Your face, just a glimpse, was tight, angry, your teeth bared while you breathed through parted lips. I close my eyes. I think it was only for a moment.

When I open then again, you are standing in the threshold. The only light is behind you, indirect and diffuse. You are cast in shadows heavier than night. You are holding a rose, deep red, long-stemmed. You stand there forever.

A drowning man doesn't worry about pride. A drowning man will fling out a hand to any soul, friend or enemy. A drowning man who believes... who Believes in himself, in his own worth, in his own place, in his own value on the face of a world of billions, will fight fiercely until no breath remains, until oblivion swallows him whole.

He does not fight only when it is easy. He does not fight just until it gets hard. He does not fight only when there is a chance. He fights even in the maw of the lions. He fights when there is no reason or logic or peace from fighting.

Christ did not suffer... for hours... pain and humiliation, degeneration and betrayal... just so we can give up on His ticket. Just so we can step off His watch. Lay it down. Hand it over. "Let go, let God." doesn't mean give up. It means: Open up! He doesn't have a queue. He's not backed up, baby. You scream, when you bob to the surface, "Lord! Lift me up! Lord! Fill me with your fight!" And He does. He just... does.

Because that's what a Christian is. A live wire. An open conduit for Christ.

I am not understanding the reason why the Far Right pounded their chests whenever liberals (dear Lord, what does that even mean any more?!) "disrespected" the president. And yet... every right-bent blog I visit, opens with, "Hey, *I* didn't vote for him..." or "I'm conservative. That means I didn't vote for Obama." Oh. Okay. Hi! *waving* Hi there, *minority.* Hi there, loser! Hi there, person calling attention to the fact that you don't agree with most of your own country. United we stand, people. Before you blog, "Obama just won the Nobel Peace Prize for doing nothing." How about you try typing, "Obama just won the Nobel Peace Prize for proving to a world of 6,485,614,626 non-Americans that if they just wait four years, the heavy-handed, bigoted, Republican, double-dealing, intolerant white men will, by and large, be cast aside by the free thinkers who understand what the words 'freedom of religion' and 'division of church and state' mean and elect a new president... one that might *finally* be a decent man... instead of a creature owned by the institution of lies that is Man's Church." (MLA or APA Citations for these statements have been removed to encourage readers to GO READ history themselves... and perhaps the Bible, too.)

I am surfacing. I rise from the couch.

The drowning man does not have time for oratory. The drowning man does not have time for clever twists of words, barbed and stinging. The dying *man* does not strike out in his last, but rather fights on with it. It is only the dying *beast* (so close, sadly, to some men that one is the same and indistinguishable) that strikes out even as it falls. Where is the victory in pity, in pain, in energy and heartbeats spent toward two defeats?

I was nine. I was angry. In the way that only children can get angry. My mother tired to reason with me. I mother never reasoned well. She called, throwing up her hands, to my father. He lowered his paper slowly. He tipped his head and looked at me.

"You think this is righteous anger, Eliza?"
"I do, Papa."
"You think it brings glory to God?"
I am silent. He is not:
"You are the scorpion in the desert drowning in quick sand. With your last strength you strike and kill the owl. If instead you had wrapped your tail around his foot, he would have lifted you from the sand."

The thing that haunted me, stayed with me, for years afterwards, is that my father, gentle, conservative, traditional, joyful, open-minded, intellectual, had given me the blue prints for life. With that one fable -- a flash fable, like flash fiction -- he had left enough unsaid that I could carry on as pacifist or fighter. I could move forward in silence or with shrewd retort.

I learned:

To let a bigot talk himself out... and then use his own grandiose flight against him.
To find my footing, and then strike.
To call for help, and value help, but still know forever who my enemies are.
To struggle. Always. Until I get it right.
To see my attackers for what they are: A chance to stretch, to reach, to grow.
To trust that God will always send the owl.

And that the owl will try to eat me.

And that sometimes I will have to sting the owl when we are still in flight.

But falling through a sky of Christ's own stars is the best kind of drowning I can imagine.

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.

It is not morbid or emo to admit, to announce, to confess and to confer that we are all drowning men. In sadness, in regret, in anger, in inaction. We are all drowning in some small or large way because we are not perfect, we are not divine, we are men, we are human, we are mortal. We can wash ourselves with thankfulness that we are not another man, who no longer can break the glassy surface of the stormy sea, but thankfulness alone doesn't buoy us for long. We can stop the weeds of wallowing self-pity from tugging us down, but eventually, even thankfulness will fail if we are surrounded by other drowning men.

But what happens if instead of dying together, we cross the fathoms and give to each other everything we have? Do we drown faster? If we are all struggling together, if we all unify to struggle toward one goal -- to host an art show, to hold an open mic, to launch a book... a shuttle... a dream -- aren't our chances for survival a thousand times magnified? Aren't we stronger in numbers, as a community, as a people?

Abraham Lincoln, before his election, said to a prominent preacher, a man who could bring about or bring down Lincoln's nomination to the party, "I will join a church when they ask me to subscribe not to man's word, but to the words of Christ: To love one's neighbor as oneself. To see all men as equal in the eyes of the Lord."

Standing before you, the scent of roses from one rose, the ceiling disappears and I am beneath a billion stars. I could stand here forever, tracing angel constellations, wishing that someone would defend me.

But I would rather stand here and shout, sing, pray. And defend someone else.

Just think if we all saved a drowning man today, how clear the sea would look tomorrow.

EJ

Think It Through

2009-08-16T13:09:00.000-07:00

The simplest solution is often the best solution. Think of the almost incomprehensible number of creatures and objects and rules of physics that God had to craft with creation. Try to grasp that and you’ll see quickly what logical sense it made that He wove everything – everything! – from fractals that repeat and flip and turn and slide into place. Genesis made simple... only for God, of course, but you get my idea.

In teen out-reach (“RL Bible Study”) tonight one teen asked me point blank, “Why did God make sex feel good?”

An older grrl across the circle muttered, “It does?”

But I gave in. I played along. “You’re really asking, why did God make sex feel good if we have to wait until we’re married... or until we’re trying to conceive?”

The teen flipped her hair and shook her head, popping her gum and adjusting the belt on her jeans. “No. Not *that* kind of sex. The other kind.”

And my sharp retort of pleased/amused laughter rang off the church basement floor. I looked up at my co-teacher with great big eyes full up of joyful opportunity. He looked back at me with klaxons of alarm sounding. Oh... I looked away. Right. As Christians... we’re not supposed to *like* our bodies.

*shrug*

Too bad. I do.

And so I said:

I stood on the beach with the waves around my bare feet and cresting around my calves and she was running, laughing, her hair wet with the spray, leaving a trail of clothes behind her until she threw herself into my arms, tackling me into the waves and locking our mouths, our hips, our hearts... and it all felt so good. Why? Because I was alive. And she was alive. And we had the entire ocean to discover and each other.

And it was all a gift from God.

I danced hard in the darkness and the strobes were blue green red. The beat was heavy, unrelenting, power and sex (same thing), pleasure and passion (ditto) shaking me down and turning my marrow molten bronze and my skin into rose petals. I felt free from every care, every worry, every Suit telling me what to do, how to walk, who to kiss, how to live. I was me: Endurance. Beat. Strength. Firm, slick with sweat, wild with the night. And nobody was taking me home but me. I belonged to only me.

And it was all a gift from God.

The desert was like nothing I had ever seen. And we made love in the cool blue shade of ancient stones. His tongue traced the lines of my tats and the warm metal of every piercing and I felt my body like scripture, telling truths and stories unfiltered by politics or fear. All the fighting, all the sacrifice, all the compromise and standing ground was all right there to be tasted, to be read like Braille. My hands on his shoulders then tangled in his hair, I shouted at the endless sky.

And it was all a gift from God.

Holding you while you cried hard because he could no longer meet your eyes....

Holding my father while he passed from this world....

Holding my breath the first time you looked at me....

Holding on even when the world tells me to let go.

The only letting go I ever do is to let go, let God.

And that, too, is a gift.

“I hope that answers your question,” I say with a steady gaze and a gentle smile.

She squints her eyes at me than swivels in her plastic chair and fixes her youth pastor with an incredulous stare. “Where'd you find this chick?!”

There is laughter. Mine included. And I meet your eyes across the room.

When we are given a gift, we are thankful. We are gracious. We are respectful. When we are given a gift, a gift grant to us by our Lord and woven into our bodies in a hundred million fractal parts, we should not be ashamed. We should not second guess.

We must celebrate.

EJ

God Whispers: Down. Stay. Good Grrl.

2009-08-09T06:42:00.000-07:00

...or The Importance of Inaction

I am sitting alone with you (is that an oxymoron?) above the sea. I used to ride out here, the speed easing me half way to the healing that the sea would complete, and then sit on the bluff at the side of the road. But that isn't how you roll. You have a little... a lot... more class than I do. You are elegant and refined, cultured and measured. I think this is why you have had so many lovers. I don't think many creatures like you exist any more. Especially not in GenX.

You whisper: I don't want my angel on the side of the road.

I like it when you call me your angel.

"No playing games.
You're watching me.
All those simple things you do.
They draw me in."

And so I am alone (with you) perched on the balcony railing of a five star hotel, the sea crashing three storeys below me. My bare feet dangling to the drop, my back to your chest, your hands slipping forward to open eight buttons. I find myself counting them come undone... as I come undone... all in time with the waves cresting, crashing, cascading, creating a new shoreline with every slip, slide, seduction of you. Your fingertips brush my hem, open cloth like you open by heart. Thumbs stroke down abs recently tightened for work. I shudder. They continue down then alight, with no other fingers, on my heavy Kawasaki belt buckle.

You whisper: I'm listening.

I like it when you're listening.

"The places you touch
you mark with a kiss.
No one knows your secret
but sometimes you let me in."

I try to open my mouth but my lungs fill with sea spray and salt. Suddenly I want the sand at my back, you above me, those freezing cold curtains of mist and wave washing up and away around us. I want you inside me, filling me up in a way that only the Holy Spirit can. I want to *do.* Not talk about doing. I want *action.* Not planning. I want to shut up and take you against me. I want to scream your name like the time the neighbors came knocking to make sure we were okay. I don't want to talk. I want to do. You open my belt. I'm waiting, you tell me, without words. I push against you but you won't be persuaded. I stare at the sea and imagine drowning sweet and wild in you. Come on, grrl, you're coaxing, tracing the lines of my muscles and bones. Then, roughly, without pretense, you turn me into your arms. Kiss me hard. I feel my hands let go of the railing and I'm flailing, trying to find a purchase in your clothes, your hair, your... but you are holding me so tightly that I do not need to hold on. And anyway, I've already fallen. Oh God, you know how hard I've fallen for you.

You whisper: You will talk to me.

I like it when you insist.

"I can't wait to begin.
I can't breathe while I wait."

I tell you everything. Everything. Everything that no one else knows. Everything that I never admitted to even myself. The fears, the dreams, the hopes, the broken heart. I tell you everything. I even tell you the truth. My own quiet truth, soft and tender. And so much of what I say starts and ends with, "They said..." and "...they say." So much of my reality shaped by how other people see me -- and the labels of culture, tradition, society, religion and politics that they glue all over me. Five times... I see your eyes counting... ten times... I watch your smile keeping track... twelve times is the charm and you stop me. Your finger tips against my lips is like an electric shock crackling through my body. You are fire and ice and I want you so much it's almost unbearable. I moan. You step away, leaving me in the plush hotel room chair.

You step back... but not too far. I can still smell your perfume. You unzip your bomber jacket and it falls over your shoulders as you shrug it back. It slides down your arms and back and pools, chocolate-and-nutmeg brown, at your boots. You hold my gaze. You tilt your chin. Your hands travel your body. You shudder. I lean forward in my chair, tensing. You hold up one hand, one finger poised. You shake your head with a faint smile. I lean back. I will stay. I will do anything you command.

You whisper: Are you watching?

I like watching you.

"Every time that I look
you're more inviting."

Shirt... button by button. Skirt... button and zipper. Boots... the arch of your back, the rise of your ass, as you bend over, the swell of each breast threatening to do exactly what you do for them a moment later. You are standing in nothing but a tasteful swatch of black silk and purple lace. Now you raise your hand again. But this time, you beckon me forward. I come obediently, willingly. You have never before allowed me... you have never beckoned me to you with this look on your face, so open, so honest, so obvious what you are saying. But then, you say it.

You whisper: Touch me.

I like...

Words and music fail me. I never thought you would say those two words. Never. I do as told. Gently, shuddering myself now. Slowly, unwilling to rush this moment so rare and precious. I explore and discover your hidden places, your secrets tucked beneath your waves of hair, aside the curve of your ribs, the taut rise of your shoulder blade. I take my time because in dreams (which surely this is) you can take all the time in the world. I am certain there are more than twenty-four hours in this day to touch you. We are the same height exactly so when I run my hands down your sides, cradle your hips and lean into your nape, your lips nestle against my ear.

You whisper: ...

And my eyes fly wide with surprise and pleasure. I cannot stop the gasp that escapes me. I cannot breathe, think, speak. I simply hear your two-word command and sink to my knees.

The sun sets. The balcony doors have remained open and I hear the waves even as I taste your heartbeat and feel my own pounding in my blush. Your hands tight in my hair, some minutes... hours? ...later, and then you ask the question: *They* say what you had wasn't real. *They* say it wasn't valid with only words. You have lived with me for months. I have taken your body countless times. And now you have taken mine. So, tell me, little angel: Which one of us do you know better, him or me?

I blink. I blink again.

You know who I know best.

Sometimes the truth can only be found in inaction. Sometimes action does nothing to show us the way. Sometimes it changes nothing. Sometimes all we need is the ability to be still and listen.

EJ

Give Me Five (Days)

2009-08-02T14:10:00.000-07:00

If I whisper it, if I gasp it, if I murmur and coax with words and touch, will you walk with me and me alone, not now then forever, but more than just this night, will you stand at my side, will you be my beloved, for just five days. Will you give me all of you, will you trust and support me, will you try me on for size, will you hear my yes and hand me yours, will you guide my heart, my body and my life... for just five days?

A friend of mine said powerfully once, "I do not believe what the pulpit tells me. The pulpit is made of wood. If my church ceased to preach what I believe inside myself than I would cease to be a Baptist." She refused to be a label. She was stating, simply, that should her church change their mind tomorrow -- receive divinity retold -- she would walk away to worship one-on-one, just her, just Christ, just the truth. A new holy trinity.

Denomination is broken. Oh? Are you clicking away, closing the browser, muttering to yourself, "Here she goes again!" But here I go again is exactly where I'm going:

Mob mentality. If enough people, or the "right" people say it, repeat it, phrase it or shape it, we believe it. Not our logical mind. Not our heart. Not the voice of God in our own ears. We are egotistical, I suppose, if we have the strength, the confidence to say: I understand that you believe that, mother (father, pastor), but that is not what I believe."

Because in order to say that -- loudly, proudly -- we must know what we believe and know who we are. We must be, if not doubt free (though the strongest people I know are) than on the path to that shining destination.

How can you know that I am not the one who will love and cherish you, fight for you and hold you? How can you know when you will not look at me, look in the mirror, look into the surface of the baptismal pool and see our faces, side by side, every Sunday? You have seen me awash with desire for you. You have seen me fight with words and fists for you. But you resist, you insist, you desist any activity that might allow you to glimpse me as more than just a creature passing through your life when you need it. To you I am first a miracle and second transitory, short-lived. You leave me notes that thank me for reports and charts and chocolate chip cookies and unspoken, unexplained evenings of passion, and you compare me to falling stars, comets, bright, brilliant, burning away.

And Christ says just the same. Why are you mine only on Sundays? Why am I yours only when ministry fills your ears? Why won't you carry me with you always? Why don't you hear me when I urge you, "Kiss him..." Why do you allow secular doubt to fill the sacred, holy places I made hollow only so you could fill yourself with me?

Does doubt help you? Decide. Move. Looking back doesn't teach any lesson. If you must look back for the lesson, it wasn't yours to learn.

Does fret buoy you? Or does it sink you into mire and muck and shadowlands of twisted paths cobbled with more of the above (doubt)? Throw out fret because it kills you and kills your light, and reach out for faith.

Does that sound overly simple? Do you crease your brow and cry, "How?"

Just try it. Replace every single act or thought of doubt or fret with action. With decision and with faith. That means doing the work. Going the extra step. Do it for five minutes. Than five hours. Then, finally, five days. When you doubt, decide. Sometimes you will be wrong. But do it anyway. When you fret, turn to faith. Turn to the light, to the sky, to a child's embrace, to a friend's laughter, to a favorite verse in poetry, in song, in scripture. Instead of leaving your place of worry filled with dread and inaction, go forward from your place of light. Open yourself up to inspiration... and then leap.

Leap right in.

Five days. Be mine. Look at me and see that I will love you forever. That my promises are absolute. That my mind is my own, but my heart is already yours. For five days look at me... and see yourself in my eyes. You will know everything inside me if you only take the time to see. Just five days. In the eyes of our Lord. Just five days.

It will change your life.

EJ

Difference of Opinion

2009-07-26T18:05:00.000-07:00

There is so much about you that means so much to me. The song says it, doesn't it? There isn't anything about you that doesn't do something for me. I'm not interested in fifteen minutes of fame, but you were my closest brush with divinity... and that's saying something. I have witnessed divinity standing in my kitchen. I have heard divinity in rain song. I have read divinity in ancient texts all but lost, all but censored and burned. But you were divinity in sensation, in heartbeat, in fingerprints left on my skin that I can never forget. Of all that we have shared, all the moments, all the crossroads and catalysts, fears and flashpoints, all the inspiration, discovery, and victory, everything we have held between us, sacred and alive, the hours I hold most reverent are the hours when there was nothing between us at all.

But you do not agree.

The hours you hold most holy is the long evening into night, twelve hours, maybe fourteen, when there was a polished cherry wood table, twenty d6, four number two pencils, a hole-punch and one graph paper notebook between us.

That difference in opinion has only stopped bothering me in the last two hundred and fifty-six days. But it was today, at first light, when I realized that acceptance was wrapped in a golden hallelujah.

“I look into your eyes
as you are saying goodbye
and I see for the first time
what I see for the last time
all the scars that I laid
all the price that you paid
but I swear I never saw it
until now...”

The sunlight is oppressive outside the arboretum greenhouse. Somewhere above and outside the thirty foot ceiling, the sharp blue sky is cloudless with summer heat. Perched forbidden in the tropical crook of a hardy, split trunk palm, I feel my spine and the tree become one thing, two separate entities blending seamlessly into one, and I close my eyes and muse on the vast variety of human experience... the myriad of ways the exact same event can be seen, felt, lived by a myriad of people.

I remember...

You undress slowly, by candlelight. You have dressed carefully, in perfect layers of emotion, only hours before, before we went to dinner. You stay just out of arm's reach. You will not allow my touch only my gaze and it will stay that way all night. My mind is drifting. That happens sometimes. You say it fascinates you that I'm always thinking something. I finally murmur to you as you lift silk over your head, “How do you feel right now? Be honest.” You smile at me. Honest is the only way you know how to be. “Powerful. In control. Pleased with myself,” you tell me, impressing me once again with your pure sense of self. “How do you feel?” you ask, not surprisingly. I smile back at you. “Powerless. Without control...” my smile changes. “Pleased with you.”

The smells of the flowers – sweet, elusive -- and the green, rare growing things – spicy, lingering, thick -- that fill this glass palace wash over me not unlike the sea spray at the oceanside. I hear children laughing and the low, comfortable voices of a man and woman. They are discussing the behavior of an older child, a teenager, who is not with them but is clearly their own. The way she's dressing is the topic of conversation. Mother says, “It's empowering.” Father says, “She looks like a whore.”

I remember...

Making a checklist of attributes my perfect partner would be required to have. It was an exercise more for myself than for anyone else (so said Cosmo) so that my mind was clear. You met my every desire – physical as well as behavioral – except for one. It seemed small. Maybe even something that could have changed, and I was so willing to overlook it. Not be too picky. Because you had a child. I would be walking into a ready-made family. A little family that needed my support – financially and spiritually and emotionally. It was like walking into a dream come true. And I was a dream-walker, deliriously happy even when I was huddled, crying, shaking, afraid, humiliated... telling myself over and over again that this was everything I wanted. The first and last time we had a friend over for dinner, she threw back her chair when you ridiculed my attempt to pray in your home, and she snarled with bared teeth, “I have never witnessed such abject cruelty.” But I had been so sure I was happy... so happy... perfectly happy.

Here I am. Sitting here now. There was perhaps twenty people in the massive greenhouse. Some walk the paths alone. Others are together. But either way, they each experience this place in their own way, on their own terms.

We want so badly to not be alone, to connect, to find those bonds that bind. And we believe so deeply, so fundamentally that to fit together we must have more common denominators than uncommon ones. We must share opinions, politics, skin color, religion, and more and more.

But what is interesting (what is *fascinating*) than if another is exactly as you are? Where is the wonder and discovery and spark of new possibilities and broader horizons then?

No where. If we surround ourselves with what is easy to get along with, with those who are so like us they almost cease to be individuals outside us, than there are only the possibilities that exist when we are alone. Our view of the horizon (of everything) is narrow.

Humanity can survive with an insular, isolationist approach, but it cannot grow. It cannot evolve and transform. Do we really want to stay *here*? Is this really as high as we think we can reach? God did not place us here, on this only green world, to wallow in petty, base animal instincts – eat, sleep, screw, fight. We are animals, yes, of course. We mirror nature just as our world mythologies mirror themselves and ourselves crossing all political borders. But we are the animal that God named steward of all others and the Earth itself. Connecting with one another beyond the primal needs for food, shelter and reproduction and is what God expects, demands and requires of us.

I tucked my hands behind my head. I imagine that no one will find me here ever. That I can exist indefinitely perched here in this cultivated garden of Eden. I imagine the faces of my comrades. Those men and women who are walking with me on a path I once walked alone. They are all... so different. Even those who, on the surface (their armor perhaps) appear so like me, experience life so very, very differently. Intrinsically different. We are not one race, religion, orientation, generation, political party. We do not all call each friends, call each other reliable, call each other at all. But we are together. We are, as a team, standing, fighting, working, all to create something beautiful, something with depth and breath and beating heart. Our differing experiences, even with the same event, the same facts, the same words and moments, combine and spill into our ideas forming a singular experience that becomes greater than any of us could create alone.

I am talking, of course, about Mardi Gras 3000.

This blog has become a place for me to bare my heart and talk to my friends, strangers searching, other fighters hoping. But I have to stop and remind myself that this blog would not be here if it weren't for MG3K. If it weren't for the encouragement, the focus, the support, I have found in that community. That community of dynamically different people.

There are people in my life – forces in my life – outside that network of comrades, who are trying their hardest to tear me down. Some say they love me. Some say they hate me. Some just insist I need them. They say: Look to your own. Look to those like you. Look to us. But they don't understand or know me. They herald the end times (little end times) because their own experience is failure. Their shared experiences are focused on their own losses and so that is all they have to project, to offer. They are little minds that surround themselves with little minds and they cannot understand that we celebrate that we are each different, with and without blame in every situation, above and beyond and beneath the work we must do, choose to do, avoid doing. We are realists and we dance in the face of our own imperfections.

“There is no way you'll make it. And when you fail, when you flame out in false glory, you'll come back to me because I know how to treat you.”

No, I won't.

And no, you don't.

But don't take my world on it. Because that's only my experience.

Just keep watching us reach.

EJ

So Sayth the Lord

2009-07-19T09:41:00.000-07:00

Mass is over but I do not rise to leave. I sit for long moments while the crowded pews empty leaving me, eyes closed, in contemplation. This is not my denomination. I am not a joiner, a team-player, a follower... except of Christ... but we made a deal: You would go if it was alien to me, too.

The sounds of Sunday catch up and gossip and small talk take a long time to melt away until finally there is just this:

The sound of a place made holy by human faith.
The sound of stillness.
The beating of my heart.
The beating of your own.

If stain glass windows and rose oil on wood and impossibly high and arched ceilings had a sound, there would be that sound as well but I will have to settle for the sound of candles flickering at the stations of the cross. The whispers of saints and shuffle of prayers floating among the rafters.

You speak into my quiet space:

"Once, when I was younger, I had every hope and every faith in everyone and everything and every where I saw God. I knew with certainty that if I prayed and married and lived my life as He commands, that I would arrive at my Destination which shares the same root as Destiny. Not heaven. Something before heaven. A place I could touch and taste while still my body was flesh and my tongue hungered. This place was called Happiness."

I open my eyes. They, my eyes, are brown and black and gold. They are the same hues as the worn wood of the pew, the leather of the hymnal, the gold of my father's wedding ring that I have come to wear. I stare at one of my hands, gripping the edge of the pew. My brown knuckles are white but still the pew seems insubstantial. I am falling through space... or maybe rising. It is impossible to tell until... unless... I arrive.

You continue:

"It did not happen gradually. It happened all at once. Not at dawn as revelation is rumored to come, but at the soft fall of darkling. I was not alone -- the city street was crowded -- nor was I introspective. But I may as well have been on a mountain top deep in faithful meditation. The truth was like sharp, cold rain, pure and undeniable: All my life had been shaped by other hands. Not God's hands but man's. Culture and society and expectation. I had never once struck out on my own for wilds unknown with myself and my God alone to guide and comfort me. Never had I allowed Him to be my only companion so that He could show me, in running river and still pond, in morning dew and misty sky, a reflection that showed me myself as He sees me. Not once had I come near that place called Happiness... because that place is not a destination but rather the journey to heaven itself and it is the journey that is the location. It is the journey that is Happiness."

I raise my bowed head. I look to my right. You are there, composed and proud. Today you attended service in a black knee length skirt with a gold link belt and a purple silk blouse. Your buckle-up boots are intact with their angel charm dangling. You blink once, slowly. You are looking past me. You have not spoken since before Mass.

I turn almost against my will. I look to my left. The woman who sits beside me was not there during the service. She is not looking at me. Her profile is austere, regal, dignified. She turns to me so suddenly that I jump.

"Do not stray from your location."

And she is gone. Moving soundlessly away through the aisle. Moving gracefully out of the church and into the day.

I stare after her.

You lay a hand on mine. I do not look at you. You ask, "Who was that?"

I answer with the truth, "My mother."

EJ

Clockwork Letters

2009-07-12T06:58:00.000-07:00

I close my eyes and my truest desire shapes and reshapes my reality. You are standing beside me. There is nothing but the rain. It is warm and the night is springtime on your tongue as you whisper my favorite prayer that begins and ends with yes.

Lately, I find myself remembering the night we made love. The connection afterward that was almost without words, quiet and still but tangible. I thought I would never have that again but I have found it just as strong in conversation, over coffee, over email, and even over time. I once thought I could only find that spark of connection -- blue fire in the night -- during love making or prayer but I realize now that I just wasn't looking hard enough.

The clock in the hallway has stopped working. The key lays on the antique table beside the sixty year old grandfather clock. I cross the wood floor in silence, without any sound at all, and I caress the lines of the key. I think of my friend Abbie spending time, joyous, as she selects just the right Tupperware organizers for her kitchen. I trace the hallows of the key and think about my friend Cris, joyous, cutting lawn greens for her herd of livestock rabbits. I pick up the key and let it slide down my fingers into my palm, the weight of it solid and real, as no time really is. I stare down at it... and then up at the still face of the clock.

I know that even if I allow it to remain asleep, the time it tracks will still pass. The cat is just as much alive as it is dead, and the possibilities of what may happen between this dawn and Christ's next are as endless as the concentric curls of the key pressed into my hand.

I hear the cab rumble to the curb. You are always standing outside waiting for it. You can't abide being late and obsess about missing your ride. In my half awake, half sleeping state, it seems we have made love every night for several weeks, but I know that can't be true. An expanse of time like that hasn't existed for either of us for years. I hear a child singing. You have left a CD of choir hymns in the stereo. A young boy's heart is poured into "The Little Drummer Boy" and I do not try to stop the tears that roll down my face.

I sink down against the wall. My eyes are still on the clock. My hand still grips the key.

I dream about harnessing the Grail in a Cathedral.

I dream that the face of the clock peals open like a Christmas orange and the clockworks, the gears and springs and tiny wires and weights, spill out slowly, slipping like something liquid, like blood or tears, down the front of the elegant case and pooling, spreading out over the floor, drowning my bare feet with time.

I didn't really understand anything then. Past present and to be tumbling into one another the way we tumble into each other's arms. No reason except truth. That one is the other and we are, like they are, much the same. I hadn't really been listening. I heard you, though. You spoke to me from the darkness of the road that night. You reached me and made me see how important it all was. How real. But I was frustrated and afraid about so many things. Afraid of failing. Afraid of success.

Time washed all that away.

Just not man's time.

At the ocean, I feel you beside me. In the cold evening waiting for dusk. In the heady breeze off the water, in the salt spray and the movement of the waves against the sand. I came home wanting to let go. To stop trying to hold on so tightly. I am tired of holding on. I'm not afraid of failing any more. Or of success. Either way, what will come, will come.

It doesn't matter if we fail or if we succeed. It doesn't matter if the journey is the entire destination. It is this fight that is my path. Not what might come of it.

As long as we stand together, what are we afraid of really? What can we lose that we truly love? No object, no place. Those things cannot command love as the feeling of your hand in mine, the whisper of your heart, audible or digital, the perfection of every small victory.

It has already been enough.

We have already changed the world.

Let the clock stay still. The Lord's time is now then forever. And everything in His time is as it should be, when it should be, and why. Dawn will come. Dusk will come. Day and night and joy and sorrow. I cannot effect these forces nor stop the earth from turning. I think I should stop trying.

After all, I need all my energy for better things.

EJ

Pride Day Sabbath

2009-07-05T08:35:00.000-07:00

Won a tiny little radio bud as a door prize at my favorite club. I think it was rigged but I didn't complain. In the accompanying tiny headphones, Jack FM plays it so well. The song reaches me and becomes the soundtrack as you walk across the lot. Your Raybans. Your classic LBD paired with six-buckle combat boots. Your hair wild and laced with peak-a-boo braids strung up with blood red ribbons. I can already smell your spicy perfume. Already taste your chapstick on my fingertips.

The song plays. It seems, impossibly, like you hear it too because you're stepping in time with the simple back beat, bobbing your head almost imperceptibly.

"I don't mind you coming here
and wasting all my time.
'Cause when you're standing oh so near
I kinda lose my mind.
It's not the perfume that you wear.
It's not the ribbons in your hair..."

They've given us permission to use an empty studio. The billowing whites and bright, bright lights cast you in perfect tones. I stand behind the camera (what a new change) and forget to take the lens cap off. I am watching you watch me. Forget the fan, the window is open. God's wind fills the room, creating ripples in the backdrop and sending your hair flying like a mane. We took the stairs up four floors to get here. You told me to stop staring at my feet, to take my hands out of my pockets. I wasn't staring at my feet. My eyes were closed. My hands stayed in my pockets. This grrl knows the limits of her self-control.

"I don't mind you hanging out
and talking in your sleep.
It doesn't matter where you've been
As long as it was deep, yeah.
You always knew to wear it well and
you look so fancy I can tell..."

You turn your back to me and lift your hair. You look over your shoulder at me. You know what you need, you ask me. I think the question is rhetorical or maybe not a question at all. You don't expect an answer but you neither do you look away. Bottomless eyes all full up with confident experience (Lord, where have I seen *that before? Heaven help me LOL!) give me all the answer I could ever muster. I can almost read the words, your careful cursive script. Then you say, You need a fighter. And you undress.

I wonder how in the world you hid your wings beneath such a tiny dress... and then I set the timer on the camera and step to your side.

"I guess you're just what I needed.
I needed someone who's free.
I guess you're just what I needed.
I needed someone willing to bleed."

* * *

My stomach tumbles
in anticipation
I fidget, shift my weight
shrug deeper into my leather jacket
straighten my cotton shirt
and feel my breath fast over parted lips
and I wonder what your name is

tonight.

There is a crackling between us
that lights the lantern in my chest
guides me, illuminates me
fills my hollow places
with a molten bronze and copper
glow of darkling dusk dawn
when you whisper to me
Christ be with you
and I answer
He certainly is

tonight.

Somewhere someone is playing
music like harp or violin and
I realize that my tie is crooked
as is your grin but it somehow
suits you when you wear the
little black dress
with the rich embroidered collar
that you're wearing

tonight.

You tuck your legs up under you
and the six buckles on your calf-high boots
are pressed against my thigh
through my pressed slacks and
I glimpse
(because I'm staring)
a tiny angel charm dangling
from one buckle is
laying still and serene on the pew
between us at Mass

tonight.

The pastor's voice is filled with hope
and his own faith to call to arms
all of us drawn here tonight
to hear the words of men like him
and women like him too
who have stepped outside the pens
of their shallow denominations
to offer their prayers and thoughts and
anger and all their pulpit votes
to show that we
(the we that includes you and me)
are actually, in truth, in the end
(like these end times most certainly are)
human beings
with rights
(imagine that)
and that we have a place
in their churches
in their cities
in their heaven
not just tonight
not just today
not just tomorrow
but now
then

forever.

EJ

Personal Revolution

2009-06-28T10:11:00.000-07:00

Dawn arrives. We have been talking for so many hours I am startled by the transition into the Sabbath. It seems to manifest, to take shape around me like a living presence. Something told you to look at my recent photo and you didn't like what you saw. I could never fool you. Why would I want to? Dawn washes over the roof top and the world is white light reflected between white adobe and white clouds. I blink for a moment, transfixed by beginning again.

"Sometimes I find that I don't need to sleep." I think this is odd for you to say because you have Chronic Fatigue and you aren't supposed to be able to go two or three days with out sleep.

"Sometimes I find that I don't want to wake." I regret the words the moment I say them but equally so I know that lately they are the truth.

You let me get away with nothing.

"You're either awake or you're dead, grrl. Make up your mind."

Tough love mama pushes me off the roof.

Which is exactly what I needed.

Message subject: Re: ...
From: Angel
Sent: Fri Jun 26, 2009 1:15 pm
To: Wings

I feel disjointed, disconnected. The world around me is raging, moving. I march with my cause but I do not hear the drums. My heart beats; The sound is hollow even to me. Reach me?

Opening my eyes (as I fall from the roof) I reach out my hand. A dove alights in my palm like a slow, warm kiss. She spills silk ribbon between my fingers embroidered with your message.

Message subject: Re: ...
From: Wings
Sent: Sat Jun 27, 2009 2:53 am
To: Angel

I remake my reality. I reshape my world. I place you in it.

We're walking down the beach. The clouds are overcast, the wind seems to come from every direction. I am listening to 'Diamond in the Rough.' I have one earphone. You have the other. We walk along the solid, wet sand and rocks, towards the cliff. We don't speak. We don't need to.

We reach the edge of the beach and the tide is still out enough for us to sit on the smooth four and a half foot rock past the driftwood. My mp3 player changes. 'Cobblestone Walking' begins, the original harp music by our mutual friend. The perfect mix of harp and wave combines to form something closer to divinity and forever and heaven, far away from the finite and momentary.

Here is where we find our peace.

Minutes pass. They are counted by the changing of songs if nothing else. Softly I begin to tell you of the ideas I have for a novel we will share. It is complex and complicated and I know it will speak to you because I was inspired by one of your favorite authors who I am reading for the first time. I am discovering fine literature and am startled that I spent twenty years without it.

To the right, the sun is beginning to set. The sky is, however, still lit by the day that remains. I find myself silent. I am anxious to return to the cabin. I am anxious to stay here with you.

You see my face and you calm my worries with only a few words that somehow always say so much. You help me find driftwood for our friend to create harps. You walk back with me to the cabin, your hand in mine. You settle my fears with your presence.

If you were not there in body, you were there in mind, in spirit.

I think they are one in the same.

And I think, just perhaps, you had no idea how much I needed all of your words but more than anything that one last sentence. For to me, to any true Christian, the word is the Word, and word and deed are one and the same. Word and touch. Word and song. Word and oath, benediction, passion, struggle. I watched a tv show recently where a young man wore a t-shirt emblazoned with the slogan, "Actions speak louder than blogs." I would have to agree which is why I do march, whether or not I hear the drum, and especially in June. However, I am also very aware that blogging is an action.

Message subject: Re: ...
From: Angel
Sent: Sat Jun 27, 2009 5:18 am
To: Wings

On the other side of the world, in Iran, more than a million young people are fighting, dying, disappearing, standing up for the first time... it is a revolution that the world is watching.

And right here, crying, tears running between the keyboards keys, I read your words and I recognize that right here, with no one watching, there is a revolution. You are waking up. You are standing up. It is just as powerful because, in the eyes of Christ, one and many are the same.

It is easier to stand behind a national or global cause then to change the personal corruption in our own private, intimate lives. I have grown weary of talking about green politics with people who blame genetics for their drug addiction. I am tired of arguing morals with men who have made the mythology of denomination out of God's word.

Heal thyself. Revolution begins at home.

Actually... it begins in the heart.

Every Iranian fighting for a voice understands what I'm saying. Their movement is (globally) millions strong in support but every single person marching began the revolution alone, in their hearts, in the blood pounding through their own individual bodies.

No matter whether we sleep or wake, whether we are walking in friendship or struggling in conflict, we have the power within ourselves to overthrow the corruption that threatens us. We know what it is. We know the truth of what it is doing. No one knows ourselves as well as we do... with the exception of the Lord.

Perhaps it would be just a correct to say: Every personal revolution begins with Christ.

After all, He did away with the idea of being born with original sin, away with spare the rod spoil the child, away with women as dirty objects. He turned the tables and turned over the tables. No more blood sacrifices. No more mediation. Now then forever, He rose up made His revolution of salvation. Our revolution began in His heart and is carried in each of ours now.

Christ as brother, father, lover. Christ as revolutionist.

Air Running

2009-06-21T13:29:00.000-07:00

“Eliza Jean,

You do not sound like yourself. Your message to our mutual friend is alive with humor and healing. But to me you write brief and sad lines that linger with the cadences a young woman who has Christ but nothing else. And so, with the post-midnight sky my quiet state of mind, I'm writing you back with this message:

The trees are shadows
holding up my personal sky
asleep with low clouds
velvet black on black.
Stars are memories
like flowers and sunshine
and white clouds on
blue sky canvas.
Tonight
night is night.
And in this peace
in this place that is
my own and home
the children are running.
They call it air walking.
With no city lights
to show the way
they find their own
by running into the darkness
at full speed laughing
arms wide like flying
marveled by the truth
that this night is
their night
their world
their everything.

Somewhere, in this reality that embraces and lifts them, there is my love for them, there is Christ, and there is you. The influence you have on their lives is mysterious. They know your words, your creations, your bravery. They will grow up knowing their impassioned path because even now, in the absolute blackness, they are walking, running, flying on it.”

And I wake up to your words. I wake up.

Leap. You know what you do well. Now leap. Take your gift to the next level, to the next place. Don't look. Leap.

I am so tired of everyone doing the bare minimum. If there is a word count, it is met with none to spare. If there is a deadline, there is the hustle at the eleventh hour. I am interested in air runners.

There is a extreme nature to this path of mine. It attracts an interesting following. But everyone who *fantasizes* about being an immortal or a missionary (or a big rock star) doesn't necessarily want to *be* any of those. And even more so, very, very few of them want to *work* to become anything.

The whole idea of bleeding for your path is argued as anti-Christian.

Denominations preaching permission to be lazy: If it's hard, it's not from God. Unless it makes you happy happy joy joy all the freaking time, it's not from God. If you have to fight for it, work for it, bleed, cry and reach for it.. leap into the blackness with your arms outstretched for it... be crucified....

I pick up the newspaper. You subscribe. You believe that labels and politics are part of why we're on this planet. You have a t-shirt that reads: If you aren't angry, you aren't paying attention. I am tired of, “What good does it do me to get angry.” I am tired of, “Well, I see their point of view.” Only an idiot couldn't see their point of view! That's not the point! A lot of life-changing, world-changing ideas have come from being angry. And trust me, baby, ideas from anger are far better than the ideas that come from fear.

Get angry now and you won't have to be afraid later on.

You have circled a personal ad in cherry chapstick. The scent of it lingers and the sheen still catches the pale dawn light. The ad reads:

Saw U dancing @ The Jinx. RU Angel?

The ad below it reads:

Me, you, zipties, daddy's car. Text me.

You slap a carton of orange juice down on the table, prop your elbow on your bare knee and don't bother to straighten down your (my!) black and white boxers. “They know you've arrived, Angel.”

And I stand up. And I go to the window of this new home and throw it open wide. I walk out onto the patio and breathe deep and slow in the brightening light.

Yeah, it's time. Time for them to know I...

Time for the world to know that we have arrived.

EJ

Listening

2009-06-14T13:42:00.000-07:00

Here we are. The very same table. The checkered floor. The quiet music playing. The standard cafe din. You are not the same person who sat across from me all those months ago and told me it wasn't love but you are here because, in your own life, it wasn't.

It should be raining.

Beneath the table, my hand slips to the floor to ceiling glass. It is still cool beneath my fingertips which rest as soft as whispers, barely touching, hesitant and shy. It should be raining, I think again. My thoughts, it seems, are wandering.

"I miss her and she knows it. She's outed me at church, on the boards, at work. She says she just wanted to see me, hold me a moment... but she wrecks havoc every time she touches me. She holds him -- they'll be married in two months, the date is set -- too tightly and stares at me over his shoulder."

I watch you, my eyes still and intent. You are drinking decaf chai because you're trying to prove some point to her. She ceased to be a human being some weeks ago. Now she is a force in your life, a symbol. You think she is your test. You think this will make you stronger. The thick, hot steam from my tall double hides my sleepless eyes. Make up (for the first time outside of work) disguises the rest.

If that which does not kill us makes us stronger... why am I not invincible yet?

"I'm praying so hard. I know I can reach her. She wants me to reach her. She's destroying me but I can't give in, give up. She wants me to show her, save her."

I hear every single word you say. I could even repeat them (or write them verbatim in this blog). But I will not lie to you, friend, I am not listening. I am *hearing* but that is simply not the same. Listening happens with more than just the ears.

We are a hundred miles from the ocean and four hours away from that beach, but suddenly I hear the waves. My heart is pounding, racing... my blood is roaring thunder in my ears. But then the stranger at the counter turns around, tossing full, wild curls, and I do not know her. Our gazes meet. Her eyes are green. I look back at you.

"Why would God have brought me here to this place, to this church, if not for her? How can I walk away from something He so clearly is asking of me? It would be so easier to hate her. To forget her... fine, not forget her, but still, walk away. But every Sunday comes and I find myself there again... and again and again."

The sky was deepest black and so crisp and cold and full of milky way stars like cream and diamonds. I dreamt of children running and playing and laughing. I dreamt of waking every morning alive with passion and rejoicing impassioned. I poured your coffee and couldn't meet your eyes. I don't think I ever met your eyes again.

"I write to her every single night before I sleep. Even when we work killer twenty-hour days. I just want her to know everything in my heart. She never writes back but she always returns the read receipt. That's enough for me. It... it has to be enough."

A conversation returns to me:

What are you writing?
A treatise.
A what?
Words.
About?
No idea. And you?
Painting the sky.
With?
Clouds.
Which kind?
That kind.
Nice.
They remind me of you.
I don't see the resemblance.
They're cool.
Cold?
No.
Out of reach?
They're right here.
On your canvas.
Right here.
...and I kissed you.

"She doesn't understand. I never explained enough. Discretion, respect, boundaries. Where I've been, what I've felt, why I came to her with my everything. I never explained enough. She didn't know. She can't know how I feel."

And I am staring at you. Unblinking. I am disconnected from this place, this (one-sided) conversation. I don't think I was ready. I thought I was. I thought we were variations on the same theme, you and I. Like Sister Light, Sister Dark experiencing like events. When I find my voice suddenly I think I cut you off because all at once the only thing I was hearing... the only thing I was listening to... was my own voice:

"She may have heard you but she wasn't listening. We hear with our ears but we listen with our hearts. We hear for ourselves and what we need. We listen for someone else. We learn when we hear. We love when we listen. Real listening is like touching your lover with no thought of her touching you. You are there entirely for that other person.

"This is how we know whether or not we are hearing Christ or listening to Christ. If what we hear is about us than we are hearing. If we are listening than we receiving Christ. We are receiving Him. He speaks truth, we listen. Later, we apply those truths to our lives.

"Even when we ask questions of Him, we can choose to either hear the response or listen for the response. Hearing it is like picking an option off a multiple choice list. We always knew the possible outcomes. But listening for the answer will always be unexpected. Because man cannot know the heart of God. We can't know His depth, His complexity, His possibilities.

"When we listen, we are open to anything... to everything... to all discoveries, rediscoveries, and salvations."

And you stare at me. A hundred million events flood my senses. My (unexpected) tears fall over my jaw and splash like the rain I wished for on my one clenched fist. I realize that if I had listened to the sound of the waves and the stars and your eyes, I would have understood so much more about myself. But I wasn't listening; I was only hearing.

"I'm leaving," you tell me. But you don't get up. I know you aren't talking about the cafe. "I'm letting go."

And I think, in the silence that follows, I am listening to the voice of Christ.

EJ

Faith Under This Sky

2009-06-07T15:02:00.000-07:00

It seems tonight that the midnight (post-midnight, my friends?) sky is my personal sky. That the stars, like gemstones on a fortune teller's cloth, only pretend to be randomly scattered but in truth are arranged very deliberately to tell me the events to come and the secrets in my heart.

I remember the stories as a child remembers – in bright snaps of emotion or image, never the more perfect memory of adulthood but always sharper, more alive with wonder. My grandmother and my mother and my father. All were story-tellers but each was so different in style and approach. The same mythology (personal mythology, family mythology... which was history and fact and faith and miracle all in one) could be woven for me by each of them until, at last, I would have every dimension of every event. They made it possible for me to step into stories fifty years old and older. To shrug into them like a favorite jacket, to recite and reenact them as if they had been my own life. Which, genetically, of course, they were.

...the pass in the mountains, bitter cold and ragged with craggy rocks. The regiment cut down by snipers – half dead, then half again. The final climb by the moon's sliver of light. The narrow cave. The explosives. Trapped in darkness devoid of breath...

I was raised with truths that were quiet and steady. That were woven into everyone around me. My grandmother was so mortified when a career counselor at my school ran down my financial prospects. “She will do the Lord's work,” grandmother snarled, her hair, even decades later and an ocean away, still shorn military short. And she drew me away.

It didn't surprise me when she fought with my parents, and then called in favors and opened a dozen doors so that I'd be trained as a painter. She wanted my hands busy with art so that my heart would be filled with prayer. “Our family are artists or soldiers, Eliza Jean, and there are no good wars to be fought.” It was the '80s and she always made it very clear, “Either way, you will be a missionary. You were born to Speak.”

...the hours of the night extend. Consciousness is lost or fading for all the soldiers who are left. The highest in rank, she struggles to rouse them but she knows that hope is thin. When day breaks, the enemy will either dig them out and shoot them or set further explosives and crush them where they are. The air is thin. It cannot sustain them. She slumps against the floor, her cheek to the cold stone...

I am neither speaker nor writer (in our tradition, “Speak” could just as well mean “Write”). I have said it here before and I'm sure I will again. What I mean, of course, is that I do not write every day. I do not feel the need, in my soul, in my heart, to express myself in words on paper or screen. I cannot sit down with an assignment and a deadline and create. Though “I need inspiration,” seems, even to me, like a cop-out. For more than a year I certainly had just that (inspiration) and was able to post my Sunday sermon on time every Sunday without fail. Am I less touched now? Am I less worthy? Have I (*gasp*) wandered from that path that my grandmother saw so clearly for me? That she paved with her own blood and bones? After all, my weekly blogs are no longer posted right on time.

...and in that state, that state neither living nor dying, the stone beneath her cheek hummed, vibrated. A stone river, at once solid and liquid. She opened her eyes. There, running the current, were skeleton fish, swimming across the floor and out of the cave, out a crevice in the wall and into the mountain. Did they disappear there? Did the crevice open up and then end abruptly miles beneath the earth? Was it worse to die here, at the hands of the enemy, than to die in a space so small a soldier would have to crawl on his belly, face turned to the stone? But then she heard a voice...

I am no less interested, inspired, impassioned or enthralled. I do not crave the drama, the newness, the sparkle, glitter and gloss. I am simply more introspective. More realistic. More willing to take deeper risks. More able to Speak.

I have more to say now that I am no longer distracted. I have learned that all that glitters is not gold.

...and the voice, of course, was His voice and He said, “And these loaves and fish will be enough.” And she woke. And she roused her comrades. She commanded them to eat what little they had left. Then she lit the last fire kit and showed them all the fossilized fish in the floor of the cave. They followed the trail of bones to the crevice, all but hidden in the far corner. Following her with faith, each solider squeezed into the gap...

Sometimes the leap of faith one must take into the darkness is more literal than figurative. Sometimes we must walk a dark path because the street that leads home is not lined with street lights. Sometimes we have to plunge ahead because otherwise we are simply standing in the darkness screaming. What awaits outside and beyond that blackness may be something far more horrendous than staying, standing there in the dark, but it is *something* and Christ tells us again and again that doing *something* is forever better than doing *nothing.* Failure will occur sometimes... but the attempt itself will always be a successful try.

...the passage was almost impossibly low and tight and blacker than any hell and she sang to them and recited scripture to ease their moaning terror. Dawn came and went without them knowing. Day came and went. Onward they crawled. The next night was almost spent when fresh air and starry sky appeared above them and they clawed their way to the surface... so far from their enemies that together they could stand and embrace each other and weep and shout in praise to the Lord.

I am not interested in anything but the truth:

Christ exists. He is a force in our personal lives. He is brilliant and joyous and always asks us to do the right thing which is never the easy thing.

Christ is not man. The rules and interpretations and exploitations of Christ's Word by man's church is sin. It is sin because it is giving in to fear. This only green world, with its fractal perfection, is the only true church.

Now then forever, Christ walks with us, died for us, rose for us, created us, speaks to us, and shows us both the tiny spark that is our lives and our personal path, and the cosmic bang which is the grandest big picture. We are part of everything around us, all things connected, because Christ's hand guides it all.

And Christ is the Alpha and the Omega. There came and has come and will come no other.

Great big statements. Tiny, personal truths.

It is very hard to despair when all filled up with Christ.

EJ

Cry Sanctuary

2009-05-31T13:42:00.000-07:00

...and I will hear you, so says our Lord.

Come down here. Take me. Take me in the ways we always write about but have never done. Take me in your arms. Take me against your body. Take me dancing. Take me riding. Take me to the ocean where I first knew her eyes molten. Take me away from this starry sky beside this abandoned dove house, high above the wrought iron, rusty metal acidic fire escape where I first realized that she loved me, she loved me not, she didn't know me at all.

The words haunt me. They come again and again like they burn in my blood. Every time they cycle again through my heart it beats and they come like the edge of the knife a dream told me to send.

I am speechless. I am also not who you just called me.

And the fast tumble of sorry meant so much less than I thought it would.

I was not raised to forgive this.

“I wanted you.
I wanted no one else.
I thought it through.
I got you to myself...”

Your words haunt me. “She gave me sanctuary. Her home was my safe house. I would do anything... even deny everything I am, everything I was, to have one place that was stable and sane.”

I am nodding my head. Yes. I wanted that. A safe place. A home I could count on to return to. A haven, a heaven, a heart... oh Lord. I can't believe I ever said yes. I walk my laptop to the edge of the roof and let it drop. I can't burn the letters if they're all digital. But the sound of silicon and plastic and steel splintering through the alley is the sound I'm making when I open my mouth and scream.

You have no idea, my dear friend, my sister, how alike we are. How I avoid (shunned even) the labels for so long. I am above them, I insisted. I am woman, hear me (not even close to) roar. It was so much easier. I played both sides against the middle. I danced the lines between this and that, light and dark, wrong and right. I walked the fence. I rode the centerline.

Why did I finally? Why did I finally come to yes? Was it my mind or my body that betrayed me? Was it hope... because it certainty wasn't faith.

I am crying now. But not in mourning. You, my companion, my comrade, have cried enough of those tears for both of us. Six months? Six months you have mourned? My voice bounces back at me. I rip my jacket off and throw it after my computer. My t-shirt: Silence = Death. How apropos. Tear it off, grrl. Tear off your mourning veil. Throw it down. Let it catch fire and turn to ash. Channel all that burning into making love with *your* woman. What Christ has granted you, cannot be taken away. Pull her close and her choice will be obvious between every gasp, every sigh, every time she cries your name against your heart.

Throw it down, baby. Throw it down.

“You got off
every time you got onto me.
Was it wrong
to go along with insanity?”

You will never find safety with man. My father used to say that. I thought sometimes he was telling me something nonlinear and literal. I am a rape survivor. I am a lesbian. Was he telling me something I didn't know about myself then? Something that hadn't happened yet? Other times I thought he meant it as a comment on denomination. The vice grip that holds and twists and mutilates decent souls into not knowing right from wrong. The factories that encase their children in shells of fear so thick they finally combust and burn down everyone around them. Today... today I think he just meant that in Christ we find safety. Not in the mortal coil but rather in the Holy Ghost.

Yes. There it is. The trinity returns to recast herself as a reality in my life, in my heart. The three made one. Father, Son and the Being that lives in my heart and in yours. They are talking now. They know we have laid on the bed when it was already on fire. We bared our everything and worked our hours and bled and sweat and cried and did The Right Thing. Again and again and again. But our reward is Christ. Not a world of man that hands us what we have handed them.

Cry sanctuary, and I will hear you. Let me be your safe place. Build this house with me. Dance this beat with me. Watch me show the world how dedicated I can be. And they thought they'd seen me before. Christ has stripped everything else away and showed me the essentials. Do you see the same? Everyone who robbed you of your confidence has been removed from your life, shown for what they are. They have reared up and you have stood up.

You stood up, baby.

“I guess it wasn't really right.
Guess it wasn't meant to be.
It didn't matter what they said
cuz we were good in bed.”

A shooting star. There are fighters and lovers and teachers and preachers. The best partner is all of those. The waves. That night. The paint brushes scattered on the floor. The growl crack shout of my body waking up for the first time. The knowledge of Christ in the room. The realization of no. We, you and I, share so much – not just wings. I feel we are soldiers together at war. We work the system, run the lines, and know how to dance around the mines.

She tells me your personal myth. She has woven you into the tapestry of her muscles. She says in words, white on black: She is incorruptible. She is bronze and forest eyes, still and quiet and sure. She is passion like flame across my skin. Yes was never a question. When was the question. I cannot exist without her. She was angel and threw herself down for me. I was... so hurt... and she had seen enough. She wanted it done. The damage was done. But the certainty was I would find salvation in her arms. It would take almost forever, it seemed, but the first time... in blood, and tears... breathless... salvation.

She says that you snuck up on her. She didn't know until your feathers tumbled over her body, bare in the blue light of post-midnight. She didn't know until you wouldn't take no for an answer. She cried sanctuary. You provided one without tearing apart her world.

Step outside under these stars with me. The celestial dome is perfection, flawless, effortless in the singular purpose: To give the trees something to hold up. Christ said: I am here because you will never love each other as I will love you. You will never understand each other as I will understand you. You will never hold each other as I will hold you.

There are no lies, no deceptions, nothing but Christ when you hold each other. Keep each other in that truth.

“Guess I stuck around for
all the wrong reasons...”

I am, once again, laying here, renaming constellations. Without my connection to the digital world. Without my armor. Even my steed is far away. My feet, my hands, my muscles and bones brought me here. I am alone. But you are here. I knew you would be. You want nothing from me. You are in my world one day and the next and five months from then. You are not daily, weekly, monthly, scheduled or neat. You are not conditional. You are constant. Now then forever. I name my North Star after you. My fingertips trace lines and curves. I discover hosts of angels in the sky.

How will this story be retold to strangers I will never know?

I cannot deny the smile that slides across my face. Shh. Come closer. Lay down beside me. I have found the Southern Cross above the streets of LA. I have found something, someone, so good for me. All this was worth my discovery of you.

“Singing amen, amen.
I'm alive.”

EJ

The Holy Trinity

2009-05-24T04:19:00.000-07:00

Father. Son. Holy Ghost. The Holy Trinity as we have come to know it, including the words Holy Trinity, do not actually appear in the recognized scriptures, which I have always thought fascinating since the Roman Catholic church has held huge sway over what verse and laws were laid down and officiated. It would seem in their best interest that concepts like sainthood and tri-aspect divinity would be better covered.

I am enjoy very much sitting and talking about comparative religion. This is when, often, people like to argue about who did what first. Like, the church co-opted all the pagan rituals and holy days to better woo the people. And the pagans were just co-opting the seasons (ahem *cough* made my God) and so the natural order of things (*cough* also laid down by God). I like to talk about all the different religions that have their own Great Flood, or Virgin Birth, or Risen Savior. Some of my co-workers like to think they can unravel my faith if they just read enough ancient history and human mythology. What they fail to comprehend (in all their textbook comprehension) is that my Lord is as nonlinear and universal (literally) as their lord (facts) is black, white, and all straight lines.

And you all know how I feel about straight lines.

The true Trinity, of course, is God, Christ and us. God, our Lord of Lords, the force that created the universe as His own divine Bang. Christ, as the physical, mortal manifestation of that force who walked on Earth and taught us before returning to that force (without ever leaving it, nonlinear awesomeness and all that). And us, the thinking, feeling, mortal, physical, limited, loving, scared and sacred by-products of that before mentioned Bang and so creations of God and Christ and pretty much awesome... *just as we are made.* (Yes, I went there. You know what I'm talking about... or do you? We'll see May 26.)

Is God in all of us? Of course! He made the whole universe! He's everywhere! Are we all God? Of course not! We are creations of Him. We are part of His masterpiece that is this existence. Just as my paintings are a reflection of me, are a mirror to my heart, my hopes, but they are not me, so are we the reflections and hopes of God without being Him.

And yet... my paintings mean so much to me. Didn't He say, we mean *everything* to Him?

Yes. He did. And so did He.

EJ

Pocket Jesus

2009-05-17T03:09:00.000-07:00

Sensing in me doubt, not of a spiritual kind but still doubt all the same, a pastor friend said to me two weeks ago, "I think, perhaps, you are trying to do too much. What you need is a Pocket Jesus." And indeed from his pocket he withdrew a baby Jesus, arms out-stretched above snug swaddling clothes, all carved from olive wood and no bigger than a quarter.

"How many of these do you have in there?" I grin at his deep suit jacket pocket but I am only answered with a matching grin and the little wooden figurine being pressed gently into my palm. My fingers curl around the strange little effigy and I wonder to myself, "Isn't this a graven image?" I bury my hand in the pocket of my leather jacket and silently let the gift drop into the depths. It is almost a week before I take it out again.

And realize that it is a carving of an angel, wings out-stretched, not the baby Jesus at all.

But for five days, I didn't know that.

There was something so strange about it. That little boy Jesus riding in the soft dark silk of my jacket pocket. Something so odd. I thought about it before anything else every morning. I remembered it every time I shrugged into or out of my jacket. I started to brush the hem of that pocket when I passed the jacket hanging on the coat tree at home or the hook at work. I started to close my eyes and dream of that peaceful place that nestled my talisman, my compass, my safety.

"Why should I need you?" I finally said, somewhat indignant, near the end of day four. "I do not need you." I was standing, arms crossed, feet planted wide, staring across the room at a pocket in a motorcycle jacket. I was quite honestly miffed... hurt... fuming a little even. Over-reacting? No. I had actually come to rely on that little Pocket Jesus... and it was seriously bothering me.

"I have Christ with me. I don't need you," I continued aloud. "I don't need the trappings and the rituals and the tokens of faith. I feel it here, in my chest, in my heart, in my muscles and blood and bones. I hear you... Him!... clear and strong and brave and tough. I don't need the weight of you tangible. Why do you try so hard to remind me that I am only human? That I have physical desires like touch and sight? Why do you worry away at my faith when it is all that I have?!"

And finally the moment came. The moment that had been so long in the coming -- four days had never been longer. My own epiphany. As that fourth day rolled over into the fifth and the light of dawn crept into my studio and restored color and life to the canvases and palettes around me, it became very clear.

It's okay.

We are all only human. And sometimes the rituals and the easy comforts and the tangible, factual knowledge is what we need to carry us over or past a rough emotional sea. Sometimes we just need it to be simple.

And I crossed the room and reached into the pocket and withdrew an angel. I lifted her to the dawn light and she was actually an olive tree. Then brought her closer to my eyes and saw a cross... and a dove... and a woman praying.

Just keep it simple. And divinity tumbles home.

EJ

Bearing Witness

2009-05-10T05:48:00.000-07:00

"...may you bear witness for Christ in His glory, showing all who cross your path how the wonder of Him lives in all things, more than any man can comprehend, and with a plan that only He discerns. If His desire was for all of us to be the same, He would not have formed us so differently."

And so it came to pass that she found herself alone on the path and with child and she was not certain how it was that she came to walk upon this way and she was not certain how it was that she was without companion or champion, but she was quite certain why it was that she was unafraid. She was unafraid because with every step she was bearing witness for Christ.

It is nothing short of miracle, I think, that critics and market analysts place "Juno" and "The Passion of the Christ" in the same category. They both, it seems, spoke to the Christian population who responded by putting their money on the counter at cineplexes coast to coast. The brutal, perhaps over-dramatized life of Christ and the young, hip, abortion-isn't-right-for-me teen grrl, spoke to the modern Christian... as did the controversy that surrounded (to different extents) both films. The "Christian Dollar" is an elusive one, and the Church (as all denominations are called by the industry) is not easily courted. Which makes sense. I would suppose that Father isn't keen on dating studios (all of which are from the other side of the tracks).

We (as Christians) seem to like movies where we see our ethics come out on top. "See, Juno? Pre-martial sex was a complicated no-no, huh?" We like to see mirrors held up that we can see bits of ourselves reflected in and so justified. "See what my Christ went through? How can you not believe?!" But I find it endlessly fascinating that we tend to flock (pun intended) to the extremes. We want "Left Behind" and images of pious, pure and perfect Christians. You know... the kind that don't really exist.

There is an on-going movement by Dove (and others) to show little grrls that even rare and fabulously beautiful models and actors require an enormous amount of air-brushing. I think someone... um, maybe me, maybe you... should launch a campaign to show people, to show even other Christians, what *real* Christians look like.

Because being a Christian is being a believer in the teachings and the heart of Jesus Christ. It is being gentle. It is knowing forgiveness -- given and received. It is righteous anger. It is riotous laughter. It is freedom and confidence in our hearts. It is pushing ourselves to our full possible potential because anything less would be to fall short of what God hard-wired into our genome. Being a Christian is celebrating the temples of our body, granted by Christ, His gift to us. Elevation of music. Redemption in kisses. Hallelujah in every whispered I love you. Prayer in every moment.

The on-going conversation with Christ that includes the price of gas, the taste of bubblegum, the sound of children on the playground, the scent of new dawn, the realization when we meet the gaze of a friend that more awaits us in those quiet depths than we ever saw before.

Bear witness. Stand up for your Christ as He stood up, lay down, and rose again for you. Come out of the closet. Tell one person who didn't know that you are a Christian. But don't invite them to church. Don't spout man's scripture to them. Do it like this:

I am a raver, a biker chick, a gamer grrl, and a Christian. So yeah, that new movie does appeal to me on all sorts of levels.

...or...

That last time I had a solid KO in MMA was when this great big guy started giving me trouble because I wear a cross, cuz I'm a Christian, you know? But I've got short hair, and a grrlfriend, and I'm a chick... and he thought that didn't mesh. Like he's all into my business. That's between me and Christ.

...or...

I am not pro-choice because I believe that there are lots of choices but killing a living baby isn't one of them. However, I don't believe that candidates should be decided on one issue. I will place my vote for the person who will best guide this entire country, not just the Christian part. I am a Christian but I will not allow the pulpit to cast my vote. God gave me a brain of my own.

...or, simply...

I am a Christian. I am not a stereotype.

Real life is not about evangelic speeches. Real life is about showing, not telling. Make it real. Make it your own. Bear witness for Christ as you. Because whatever and whoever you are, if He walks with you, than you are a Christian.

EJ

And Suddenly, I Knew...

2009-05-03T23:49:00.000-07:00

"How do you manage?"
"I just do."
"How do you do it?"
"You might as well ask me how I breathe."

I was raised to fight this hard.

I do not believe in raised Christians. Meaning, I do not believe that someone can be raised a Christian. They can be raised in a Christian household... but standing in a garage doesn't make you a car. I believe that Christians are grown. They evolve naturally, the way a plant is first a bloom, and then a seed, and finally a living thing.

I think we all, as human beings, grow and change over the course of our lives. We are influenced by how much sun and how much rain and how many rocks and how many weeds but most of us do manage to transform from one thing to another and another all through our years. And I think that more of us grow to be Christians than know it.

You are sitting on the rooftop at my side and you are renaming constellations, making up new mythology for them. All of your myths involve young heroes forced again and again to prove themselves to the even the people who love them. Most of your heroes are plain-looking, by your descriptions "unremarkable" or even "odd." All of your heroes are men.

As I sit silently and listen to you, just talking softly while I type with the FlipStart on my knees, I think to myself that you are a Christian and you don't even know it. This voice of guidance and solace that whispers to you in the night and in your dreams and when you lean in pointedly, is so obviously the voice of Christ. But you insist you believe nothing. When our soul leaves our body (and you do admit that the soul is part of our anatomy) it simply does something, goes somewhere but this life is all there is.

You think that makes you not a Christian.

I think that makes you content. You are unafraid to spend your days -- two or twenty thousand -- living fully in your body.

A friend says to me:

"If her touch is the height of sensation I will ever feel... if the most divine moments of my existence are beneath her hands, her mouth... than I walk willingly into any den of lions, into any fire. Christ has placed her in my life and I rejoice with every fiber of my being. I know eternity in her arms."

This is what Terrapyres are. Those children of Fallen Angels and man who are half of the Mardi Gras 3000 brand. They are my messengers. They present a type of Christianity that is alive and untamed, untethered to church or pulpit. They crackle with passion, with seize the moment, with joy. They tumble into oceans of emotion, of possibilities, of experiences and emerge, surface, better people. They cast aside the question of cultural, popular ethics and ethos and embrace transcendent living that is painful, that is brilliant, that is everything beating in their racing hearts.

I think a Christian has to be that alive. There is no such thing as an "arm chair believer."

It seems simple, but I will say it again and again:

I love your loud laughter. I love your bawdy humor. I love your harsh critique and your selfless nature. You are a small woman who takes big risks. You are a fighter, a lover, a charmer, a mother... a Christian. With leather jacket and right wristlet, in dancing, beaded braids and burning eyes, you are everything Christ demanded of us.

We need more warriors to wake up and realize that they have been Christians all along. We need more gamers to wake up and realize that they can change the world because they form their own mythos. We need to wake up and see dawn and accept it as the miracle it is.

My friend writes to me:

"Like the rain when it isn't falling across my face, like the sun on snowy nights, like the sight of the sea beyond the porch, and the crash of the waves throughout the night... I miss you. I think of you. I am not alone but I feel something is missing and it lies in the miles between us. That something is you. Sister. Soldier. Please know I am with you."

And every day when I wake, I realize I am more Awake than ever before. I am not interested in spending my days simply existing, but rather I want to be fully alive. Seize the day is too simple. I want to seize my own potential. Not do everything I want, but to do everything I do to the best of my ability -- beyond my best.

I want the rain on my face. I want the sun. I want the snowy nights. The sea. Your kiss. Your hands in my hair. The heat of our bodies. The cold of the starlight. The speed of my bike, the beat of the music. If I miss you (and I do) than I want to feel it, a tangible ache in my chest. I would rather yearn for you, my sister, my soldier, my friend, than feel nothing.

I don't think a real Christian can feel nothing.

And I have never felt more real.

EJ

In His Time

2009-04-26T14:45:00.000-07:00

My friends like to tease me when I post my Sunday blog past midnight on Sunday. I am running on "God's Time" instead of "man's time" because I see a day from dawn to dawn, slipping from one to the next according to the cycle of the Earth in His own cosmos. This has always seemed right to me, natural and real, whereas clocks and other timepieces (though, I admit, they hold a fascination and a beauty for me) seem pretense and even hubris. *Man* can understand Time? *snort* How ludicrous.

Of course... what man can understand is his own time, not Time but time, because he invented time. His time is simply a mathematical equation for mortality. It is a way to seem important in a universe that exists so much longer than us that we seem each a single matchstick burning before the light of a sun or super nova. We are small and short-lived. But man's time assigns us numbers -- seconds, minutes, hours, days, years -- and we seem somehow more substantial.

But then... by the grace of divinity, we disprove our invention...

I lay at your side. We are saying good-bye without words. The watch, abandoned on the bedside table, tells me that four minutes pass. But those minutes take longer than any years of my life combined. Those minutes make more of an impression on me, than any decades that have passed, filled with minutes. Those. Four. Short. Minutes. Then you were gone.

You stand before me. You hold up your hands and I lift you into my arms. You whisper, inexplicably, strangely calm, "I will miss you when you're gone." But I have just arrived. You are testing the definition of mortality because your pet frog has died this morning and the sadness of the truth of man's time -- that it is far from eternal -- is a burden too heavy for shoulders so small.

I am standing at a make-shift easel. The room is all glass but your eyes are the picture windows that show me more. I have always known how you feel but never have you showed me this gaze, this face, open desire painted on your features without attitude or aggression. It is a raw emotion both tender and wild. The Georgia sun is painting us with setting colors and as I lose the natural light I find that every movement of the second hand on the clock in this rented cottage is taking... forever.

Man's time is a construct. It is a schedule. A honey-do list. A way to keep us all in sync. Could it be I have found, after passing that quarter century mark which meant absolutely nothing to me, that I am, at my heart, a Christian anarchist? That I yearn so deeply for God's Time, freeform and beating, pulsing like the living thing it is, that there are moments... days... weeks... that I slip out of sync completely?

But I have also found that the more I let go of my honey-do list, the more I realize what honey needs to do. And off my schedule, outside my planner, I am actually able to get everything done.

No longer the child in the garden, I partake of the apple... but this apple is not one that God warns me against. It is simply fruit from His table.

Let go. Let God.

In His Time.

EJ

Tangible Dreaming

2009-04-19T20:21:00.000-07:00

...and I realize when I touch your wings and they don't disappear that I must be dreaming.

The feathers are borrowed from autumn's palette: gold, bronze, ivory. My fingertips brush as gently as I can when you are trembling like this beneath my touch. I know very well that divine messengers are not the stereotype found in cathedral paintings and man's scripture. Rarely do you want me gentle, my muse, my inspiration, my angel.

I turn my wrist, slide the pads of my fingers over the variegated tips of you. Silken strands, stiff with desire, fan against my skin; sensation begins there, where our bodies meet, and travels through nerves and blood and bone to pool in my palms like hot stones. I find I cannot breathe. When I manage a gasp, the air drawn between my parted lips, that floods over my tongue, is the scent of you, richer than any holy wine, complex like autumn itself, your theme, your element, your midnight gaze that speaks volumes in the silence.

I reach down and take your hand. Hold it up, palm to palm against my own. We are so different. We are so the same. I bow my head, turn your hand to my cheek. Turn my head to kiss the lines of your fingers and thumb. I cannot stop myself. My tongue passes, soft, light, the barest taste of you stolen in this moment, our moment.

And I receive my communion.

Divine inspiration...

Emotions. Chicks love to talk about them. Guys love to roll their eyes and claim they don't have them. Words like “deconstruction” and “processing” leave the domain of engineers and ballet dance their way across a much more touchy-feely stage. You may love them, dread them, wallow in them, rejoice with them, but no matter our attitude (or Attitude) we all live with them – ours and others. To me, emotions are the double fudge icing on the creamy but vanilla cupcake.

...and there is moonlight. Pale like the word “cool” and glancing over everything including your bare skin which is cream and roses and imperfect and so I know you are real and not mythology. My eyes drink. My hands sing. My heart pounds so loud in my ears I cannot hear the prayer that tumbles from my lips as I sink to my knees before you, tears streaming down my cheeks...

If I stand in the snow at the top of a long mountain trail, I will feel cold. If I open my arms and turn my face upwards beneath the hot summer sun, I will feel the warmth burn welcome across me. If I take speed, wrap her around me as I wrap myself around my bike, and blaze trails like so many pioneers before me, I will feel the wind, the bite, the slice of molecules and distance; I will feel free.

Ah, but that last is not a physical sensation. That last is emotion. Physical sensation is mundane, hard-wired into our genome. Not boring, not unwelcome, certainly not to be ignored but most often expected. The body is made to feel (touch and be touched) but also to *feel.* I have experienced physical sensation that was transcendent, literally lifting my sense of self out of my body only to linger in that space just beyond it... but I have felt this divinity more often in response to that mysterious other location, my own State of Emotion.

...there is the feeling of your hips in my hands. There is the feeling of my cheek against your thigh. There is the perfection in the knowledge that since the beginning of poets and writers there have been lover muses. The Greeks and Romans did not corner the market, nor close the market, on other-worldly creatures guiding prose, guiding soldiers, guiding light in an otherwise darkened and darkening world. Stars spin overhead, twilight sky like its own cosmos, and I cease to know where you begin and I end. I ended the moment we became this touch...

This is how we hear our Christ. My friend asks me often, “How do I hear Him?” Then she teases, “I don't hear Him as clearly as you do. You have a direct line or something.” She makes me smile. Makes me laugh. But I don't have a direct line; not unless we all do. I am no special anything; I just have a secret.

Christ is not a physical sensation any more than making love is purely a physical sensation, and there is more a connection between Christ and love making than any of man's denominations want us to recognize. Christ, like the best lover, makes His appeals to our emotional state. He writes His messages on our emotional slate. He is that first time we look across the room at the person we will love forever and something... wonderment, discovery... blooms in our chests, spills down our limbs. Emotion becomes physical, tangible, real. Christ walks with us, talks to us, becomes physical, tangible, real.

...and I am holding you. The wind is strong and cold but neither of us feel it. Your wings enfold me, protect me. The clouds roll in low with menace in the night. They open suddenly, violently. Rainfall. Rainstorm. You whisper words into my hair and the rain becomes warm, baptism, rebirth in your arms.

The dawn is coming. I know you will leave. You have given me your gift and I accepted on my knees. Offerings have been exchanged. Inspiration sweet on my lips. But I cannot let go. I whisper, “Stay.”

You look at me. Your eyes are ten thousand colors of autumn and sea and sky and heaven. You tilt your head to one side. You say without speaking, “No one has ever asked me to stay.”

I look at you openly. I hand you my everything. I bare my heart. “Than let me be the first.”

And the emotion between us is real, is physical, is Christ.

EJ

And in the Garden

2009-04-12T19:02:00.000-07:00

There is no brighter day than this, silver morning shot with clouds white and thin, brilliant birth, His, mine and ours. I close my eyes and see the curves of you by moonlight, the hollows of mysteries, the definition of muscles. I open my eyes and see your eyes across the cafe from me, worn by a stranger. They are, as always, cold bright sharp and I know forever that I will always find blue eyes as Woman, green eyes as Friend, and every brown eye as Savior. My world is untamed wilds with a single path paved with these crystal absolutes.

Thank you, Christ, for opening my eyes. You're right. She is beautiful. This only green world.

“I will walk along these hillsides
in the summer, 'neath the sunshine.
I am feathered by the moonlight,
falling down on me, I said...”

And yes, the lyrics tumble and roll into each other and I do like that. I had forgotten how much I love that feeling of unending music. I think of the waves, of course, the shore, the horizon endless, stretching to infinity, and I think of deep, dark trails into ageless forests bent and bowed by wind over those self same waves, and I look all the way through existence to the face of my Lord and I know He understands intimately the complexity of this life, this heart, this gamer grrl who rarely seems to be given anything in small doses.

“Do you still wear it?”
"Every day.”
“If you never saw me again?”
“Still.”
“If I never...”
“Still.”
“Because?”
“Of what we had.”
“That night?”
“...”
“Not that night then.”
“Creation. Birth."
“Rebirth.”
“That truth is always there.”

And His mortal body hung on that cross. It was a symbol like we no longer have universally. A sign of death most cruel and base. Painful and tearing. The woman who loved Him more than any other catching His tears and His blood in a chalice that would inspire and romanticize these horrors. It may not have even existed. But her pain, as helpless witness to His pain, was... is... most certainly undeniable. Mother of my Lord, on her knees, *not* begging Him to lie and deny the truth of His divinity. Her tears like the tears of no other.

Because she carried Him.

“Through this womb cometh the Lord, our Christ. My Beginning and my End. Transforming me forever from woman to Mother. Transforming this world, now then forever, from empty to overflowing. He will walk this only green world, be loved and hated, laugh and cry, exist among us, touch our hands, our eyes, our hearts, and we will know the truth and see it everywhere.”

The children selling street jewelry outside the Catholic church look no different today. I could lift these children from this place and place them in almost every city I have ever visited. They could be on any continent. They could be any color or age or speaking any language. I have been walking for six miles. I have passed fifteen churches. I have passed eighteen children. Three sold oranges. Five sold jewelry. Some of the others sold wares they knew I would not buy. But for all of them I push back my headphones and meet their eyes. Blue... green... brown. Some of them were minors, most of them were not. Some of them wore crosses, most of them did not.

“I am not worthy of this, my Lord.”
“You are.”
“You do not need to be washed in the water, Lord.”
“Wash me then in the blood.”

And the dove appeared.

And the Lord spoke.

And the stone was rolled away.

And the women knew that He was risen.

“Go tell it on the mountain,
over the hills and everywhere.
Go tell it on the mountain,
that Jesus Christ is born.”

“I wanted to bring them something. It is traditional, yes. But more. I wanted to leave a talisman there with you. Oh, how it grows harder to have you away from my embrace, from within the reach of my fingertips...

“An Easter Lily. The trumpet of it heralds birth and triumph. They could not fell Him. They brutally killed Him but He neither bent nor broke. He did not crumble to the will of man. He did not step into their denomination. He did not shape Himself to their desire. He was, is, will always be desire.

“The white petals are firm, thick, textured and fine. Life, purity, hope, spirit. First brought to America by a World War I soldier from their native Ryukyu Islands. Only available commercially for two weeks. The fourth largest potted crop. They are the traditional flower of Easter. I would have settled... I could have settled... so many times... but I didn't. I wouldn't. I waited. For you. Should I have worn a Promise Ring all these years?”

After they stopped the mortal heart in His chest, but before He rose again as savior and End Time soldier, there came to be found, in the Garden of Gethsemane, lilies as white and pure as moonlit snow. They were glorious in the morning sun. They were blinding beneath starlight. Some remembered then Christ's Sermon on the Mount, "Consider the lilies of the field...”

“Consider what I have left for you. Not the verse man will write upon dying parchment. But rather this undying world that evolves and transforms for you, revealing every mystery that I ever shall need of you to know.”

And those men who followed Him, who would later write His (and their) words and stamp them divine, did not believe that He stood before them. They were, they thought, the perfect examples of mankind. Doubting. Unable to believe without proof.

Some of us do not need the words.

We have here *tapping my heart* the Word.

“Easter lilies are called, sometimes, the White-Robed Apostles of Hope. Mercy, compassion, kindness and unconditional love. Beloved? I do not have a 'hope' for this, our love. I have a *knowing.* And though it is an unconditional love, and love laid with kindness, and love gentle with compassion, even when I ask for it, you rarely show me mercy. You meet my gaze and every pretense falls away. I am stripped bare before our Christ. The growl that rises in my throat, the muscles that jump across shoulders and neck and arms and belly, have nothing to do with mercy. This is a primal divinity. Christianity untamed and burning. I worship on my knees.”

When leaving Eden, Eve cried repentant tears and those tears became lilies. Her repentance was true and pure, and lilies have since been always associated with women.

“Why do you weep?”
“They have taken the body of our Lord.”
“He is not here.”
“He has risen!”

There is one child selling lilies. I see the cardboard sign before I see his small, single-bloom plants with roots wrapped in Dollar Store tissue paper. I turn the corner to him. I stop. These are far from Easter Lilies. There is no white-washing here. And brown boy meets eyes with brown grrl and I realize we are probably the same age. And not so very different.

“But then I see them. The brilliant burning orange. The dusting of chocolate brown. The petals open like palms, the stems deep and strong. These are the flowers of my Christ. Not white-robed and scrubbed clean. These are the fire of passion, the untamed wild, the survivors after brutal winters, the lovers tussling together among lush green leaves. These tiger lilies draw my gaze and my touch and my devotion. Here is our love. Here is true Easter.”

I wear a cross not because I worship death. I wear a cross (from my neck and inked on my body) because even this could not bring down my Lord. Even this could not tame His wild. No weapon of man could silence His voice.

And today? On this fine silver-skied Easter, rain falling like baptism, I sit in a room surrounded by thirty tiger lilies, their roots wrapped in Dollar Store tissue paper. And today, I hear His voice clearer than ever.

EJ

My Prayer

2009-04-05T13:40:00.000-07:00

Sometimes things seem so clear. The voice in my mind that murmurs thoughts centered by myself, is my own voice. No matter how righteous it seems, it is only my own counsel. The voice in my heart that whispers of path, and world, and right and wrong, is the voice of Christ. I do not think He has ever whispered to me of me, not directly, not specifically. It is always other, always outside, always bigger than the smallness of “me.”

I am no one and nothing. I am anonymous and honored to be so. I am atoms, cumbersome, compared to the elegance and grace of demiquark and boson. Just when I think I understand, just when I think I can claim a knowing, there appears something, some untheorized particulate that challenges everything – physically -- that I know -- my own personal Y(4140). Only my faith remains unscorched. Only my heart in the hands of my Christ stays the same, now then forever.

It is like this:

I stand in the knowledge that human beings have the capacity to twist the truth and deny logic. They bend reality to suit their personal desires. They justify their behavior by pointing fingers at anyone but themselves. I have, perhaps, known only two people who do not use this self-comfort/self-defense mechanism – my grandmother, Rae'sol, and my friend and publisher, Jennifer. They are (or were, in my grandmother's case) brutal with themselves and with everyone around them. They slice through pretense with truth like Christ's own sword. When someone else might say, “You can't get blood from a stone.” They say, “This stone has bled enough.”

My grandmother lived and fought during an ethic/religious cleansing that tried to eradicate her. My friend exists in a world that hates businesswomen and finds it easy to blame them for everyone else's creative and economic failures. Both of them have been obsessively loved. Both of them have been vehemently hated – even by those who once professed to love them.

The truth, the brutal, unyielding truth, is only valued when it tells us what we want to hear. After that it becomes the enemy and the messenger must be destroyed.

I think of these two women now and I think of one other person. My father. He often twisted reality to deny truth. His glass was always full no matter whether it stood before him or lay shattered across the table. His eyes always turned to the light. He turned his back to any shadows. The world was not black and white. It was blinding gold. It was forever the divine reflected in a hundred thousand drops of dawn dew. There was no silver-lined cloud. There was no cloud. There was only gold.

What kind of soldier do I want to be? What kind of Christian? Can I function – no... can I rejoice and fight and dance and laugh and march forward, ever forward – if I am always faced with the truth? If I always must carry the truth? The truth weighs so much. So much more than the mist of lies or the thin veils of justifications. Passing the buck, after all, means you don't carry it any more.

I speak calmly. The two people before me – live, not in email or on the phone – are littering me, tag-team style, with profanities like I have never heard. They are tearing apart everything I hold sacred. They are as certain of their truths as I am of mine. So... are they right? Have they found cracks in me and mine? Do they actually know when I do not? Should I question everything because they are so... damned... *loud*?

It is so easy to get angry at someone who is helpless to hurt you back. It must feel so good to throw punches when someone else's hands are tied. It must make someone feel so powerful and justified. Personally, I wouldn't know. Christ didn't raise me that way. Shame on you who know better. Wake up those of you who don't.

If you cannot get what you want, you'll take your payment in blood. I don't believe in hell... but still I think a special circle awaits people who play that way.

I am starting to hate that word. Justification. I would much rather dance. It seems a bit of a joke among my friends. “Where is Angel tonight? Dancing, of course.” They smile because they might as well be saying, “Where is Angel tonight? Praying, of course.”

It seems sometimes that this world is full of people who act in ways that stun me. I stand and blink my eyes in the flames of their disregard for each other. I am horrified by their inability to recognize a decent person. What hope can I have for the human race if they do not even know an angel (no, not me) in their midst? What hope?

Night falls and I am standing at the coastal bluff that I love. Am I unstable? Yes. I am rocked by this world. My eyes rest on the ocean. The water is on fire with sunset. The wind... she smells like salt and sea and everything wild and dangerous. I like it here. Alone with my Christ and my bike and my music in my ears. “Now that we're alone, can I make a request? Will you make me number one on your playlist?” Here, standing here, I can let go of everything that awaits me in my inbox and my mail and my day-job minutes.

Christ? Can you bring this – this peace, this sacred place – to everyone who hurts the people I love? Can you give them this moment in their tomorrow? Let them know this untamed love. Let them cry out in revelation. Let them see the face of you.

It is easier...

It is easier to hire a lawyer than it is to offer a helping hand.

It is easier to throw a rock... or a profanity... than it is to throw in the towel or accept responsibility.

It is easier to blame someone else, doubt someone else, hate someone else than it is to do almost anything else.

I do not know these things to be true from personal experience. But from what I witness in the world, they must be.

A Godless country? A country of people unable to create community with its lack of homogeneity? Are we? I hear this said so often. But this is too easy, as well. We are not Godless... how can we be? God is standing right here, and there, and everywhere. But I think sometimes we are so busy screaming, or shouting, or searching for blame, or searching for justification (there it is again), that we cannot hear anything or anyone divine. I have never known divinity to shout.

Christ? Shout for me.

There is a bass line and rough beat that rocks up through my boots and shakes my hips and spine and shoulders and throws my head back like a strike. I have never danced here. This club by the sea. It is the Sabbath and I am looking for my release, my fix, my Christ who lifts me, moves me, explains the world to me, just His own simple gamer grrl who wants to change the world but can barely understand it. He has given me comrades to march with me; I see their faces. My heart pounds as if lifting from chest. He has given me adversaries that are tangible and complex to challenge me. He has given me this beat. He has made me clear.

“Well, you know Eliza Jean... she's not the sharpest spoon in the drawer.” Laughter cut short by the sound of a crack – a fist meeting a face. I turn the corner. You are standing at his chair. He is holding his face. There is blood. You are fiery and alive. The muscles in your arms and neck stand out. I cry your name in anger. Your head snaps to look at me and your lips are drawn back from your teeth. You are beyond words.

Why was I mad at you? Because Christ says turn the other cheek and instead you turned his cheek? (Claude's, not Christ's.)

The cliche: “Geesh, does she need to get laid.” Meaning, a person is way too tense. But really what we mean to say is:

I wish for you, in this moment, when you are beating me, my loved ones, my everything into an unrecognizable mess... in this moment, while you tear me, and mine, apart and down, and to pieces... I pray that you will someday... will right now... find some peace in something, anything, other than making someone else bleed.

It is easier to pray for friends than for enemies. If every enemy is just ignorant to the truth you offer in your hands, it would be so simple to just educate them. Not so simple when they choose to be deaf and blind.

Before you strip me of my rights and steal everything holy from me and mine, would you like to stop and read 1500 words? There are several blogs here to choose from. Or perhaps just these four words?

I don't hate you.

...

But my Christ has never asked me to just lay down and take it.

EJ

How Will They Know?

2009-03-29T13:19:00.000-07:00

"In Germany, they came first for the Communists, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew. Then they came for me. And there was no one left to speak up."

Pastor Martin Niemoller inspired these words with his speeches in 1946. My grandmother sat across the table from me in 1991 and spoke with quiet force, her eyes on me but her words in response to a conversation between my parents who sat with us:

“They came first for the Christians, and I did nothing because I am not a Christian. Then they came for the Blacks, and I did nothing because I am not a Black. Then they came for the women, and I did nothing because I am not a woman. When they finally came for me, there was no one left to do anything.”

I was eleven. My cheeks burned. I shook so hard I spilled my glass. I couldn't take my eyes off my grandmother. Of course, she was a Christian, and brown-skinned, and a woman. But that was not the point. The point was it means one thing to fight for someone just like us. Someone easy to love. And it means something completely different to fight for someone nothing like us at all.

Would you die for the person you despise the most?

Would you defend the person who makes your life the hardest?

It is so easy... so very easy... to bolster ourselves and attack those we hate and those who make our life harder. It is simple to hate the enemy. It is easier to rescue a friend than it is to rescue an enemy. It is simple to garner pity. It is easy to rally forces against someone who is Other Than you. We all do it. Complain about the boss with family. Nitpick a husband with friends. Gripe about the world and laws and conventions of culture at an anonymous forum. We are never at fault. We are often comforted and supported and "justified."

But it is not Christian. Nor is it excusable.

The sociological phrase is political apathy. When we only take up arms to defend those like us. The homogenized culture that will we never have in America. And PTL for that, baby, or this brown grrl wouldn't be here. Political apathy is the refusal to see community outside likeness and commonality. It is also the inability to claim identity. It is a seed for spiritual apathy.

I am...

I am...

I am not...

Socio-political labels exist so that we understand on what foundation we stand. They are not necessarily who we are. Five days after my grandmother ended that argument at the dinner table both of my parents marched in the Boston Gay Pride Parade. They were happily married all my father's life. I do not believe either of them ever thought of themselves personally as gay or lesbian. But they did consider themselves members of the GLBT community and the numerous organizations and helplines and centers they gave time and money to would certainty agree with that membership.

When we are feeling alone in the world we turn, most often, to those who are like us. Maybe they have the same skin color. Maybe the same economic status. Maybe gender, sexuality, religion. Whatever. But when we are feeling the most lost, we rarely turn to those truly alien and different. We don't want to learn and take risks. We want to be coddled and stroked. We do not turn to those who are the briers or wolves that hinder and hunt us.

But who did Christ turn to?

In the desert, in His life, in the years He walked and taught and fought on this, His own green world, did He turn again and again to those loyal and true to Him? Did He find Himself enriched by constant isolation with His inner circle of common men? Or did He turn to the thieves, the prostitutes, the lost men?

You are lost. You tear through briers to ask the wolf, “Do you know where we are?” Do you truly think the wolf would eat you when you have asked him a question?

I have not been afraid of wolves since that dinnertime with my grandmother. And though I have found that sometimes when I speak to the wolf, he still bites me, he has never taken me down. Maybe this is because I know so very strongly who I am that I am not shaken by anything anyone else might say. The bricks that make up my foundation have nice, clear, strong labels engraved on them. They are society's labels but not what society thinks they are (Christian. Grrl. Raver.). Rather they are words with my own definitions (Lover. Woman. Fighter.) that do not waiver in the quakes that life rocks me with.

Often the wolf sheds his skin to become my closest ally.

He rarely looks like me -- in or out of his hide.

I said to a friend recently, “Does your lover mind that you blog so explicitly about him?” It is beautiful, sexy, powerful, earth-shaking writing, but despite the fact that the names and places are striped away, it is *very* explicit. Hauntingly so.

My friend takes a long time to answer me. Finally he says, “The poet Minnie Bruce Pratt once asked her partner, transgendered writer and activist Leslie Feinberg, if it was alright with Leslie that Minnie wrote about them explicitly. Leslie answered, 'If you do not write of us, how will anyone know we existed?'”

We lived and loved and existed on this only green world. But we said nothing. We wrote nothing. We did nothing.

And then... none of us were left to tell our story.

I am writing on the digital cave walls.

For me. For you. For them.

Now then forever.

EJ

You Will Hear From Me Today

2009-03-22T23:26:00.000-07:00

Lord? Walk me away from everything. Walk me closer to you.

I drive for twenty-three hours to find Christ. I could have found Him in three minutes on my roof top, or in no time at all just by closing my eyes. But I wanted to be here. This place untouched and almost unreal.

I stop for hot coffee before the final five miles to the trail head where I'll stash my bike in the brush and hope I can still find my way. The cook/owner/waiter asks me where I'm headed then cocks his head and an eyebrow. "The McAllen place. Waves rose up and took them both. Washed everything but the house out to sea."

I pay for coffee and tip. I buy two bottles of water. The door chime shows me out and, "It was two nights after Eve McAllen died. So heartbroken, Georg called up the sea."

And thirty minutes past the trail head, thunder rolls low and tumbling with danger and I think about the first time we made love.

The forest is close and unkempt. I think of my Lord in the wilderness. I remember His voice when I have been afraid or have felt lost; He has always said the same thing. "You will hear from me tonight." And I wait. And I always do.

I wonder over the nature of temptation and I write this sermon in my head, all in time, poetry, prose, beat, fall, beat with the cadence of my boots on the path more impassioned and far less traveled. I think about slam poetry and open mics and why I insist the sky is best silver, blue, black, orange, and not green on green on green like it is right now, here in the depths of wood. It is not long before darkness takes my way out from under my feet and washes color from this only green world. But it is then that I realize that I know my journey even blind. I am not afraid. I am not alone.

This knowledge in the world is more important to me than breathing.

I woke Saturday morning to another body in my bed, warm and bare and without pretense or complication. Still half in dreams, I murmur a name that is familiar to neither this audience nor this room. I blink. I stand. I realize I need to drive. This was, almost, too easy because it was an effortless fit.

"Do you think Christ put us on this Earth to have it easy?"
"I have fought so hard for so long... I want to lay it down."
"Go ahead. Lay it down."
"Yeah?"
"When you die."

The thousand plus miles between us shrink. I am racing toward the speed of sound. The sadness, secrets, sleepless notes of a hidden struggle. We must push away to push up, to grow... closer to God... to grow... stronger on our own. Christ gave us these bodies to discover range of emotion. Not repetitious but naturally cyclical, ever widening concentric circles. You channel it into music that no one else will ever truly hear. Your prayers whispered between strums of steel and brass and copper, wrapped within the reverb in some ancient tongue. Do you really think anyone understands? If they are fully alive they come close. You will know them when they look away, when they cannot meet your eyes for the tears that well there, in happiness or in sorrow. To anyone else, it is only noise. From your hands to Christ's ear.

Then one day, drifting, echoing past so many deaf ears, one single note will plant itself in the loamy, rich, fertile soil and by Christ's hand you will wake that dawn to a wild rose, blooming riotous blood red. And when you hold that blossom in your hand, you will know who hears you. Go to her.

By the time I hear the waves on rock and sand and shore, I am ensconced in thoughts of ageless prophesy and the eternal nature of art and the art of eternity. I consider stars, peeking through tree tops, as fires, as creatures, as living things with souls and dreams and every fine masquerade of life. I consider the way your words, your voice, your hands, move across me like Christ's own wind pushing, pulling and caressing the tide. I break from the forest and onto the coast, open and bare to this wind, to the world, to the waves and I wonder what difference is it that instead of standing here with me, you are found instead in the written verse tucked in my pocket. I believe I have found the truth, beside this sea, beneath this sky... tonight.

My memories and my desires mix and meld effortlessly into one existence and time slipstreams:

The moment I understood what "Come here..." meant. Tomorrow night, our hips (not our hips), locked into hard beat on the dance floor. The morning I realized that your "no" meant you didn't trust me. Strobes, raver glow, your eyes closed, your head cocked, you keep rhythm at the base of your spine, 2-2-3 when everyone else pounds 1-1-2. I want to stand in the open rain...

I didn't know this would all be so hard. No one told me this would be so damn hard.

And the thunder keeps her promise and shares her release, torrents of rain, fresh water passion throwing back salt water desire. Reciprocity, indeed, I scream. I throw my head back -- I see like in a photograph, like in a memory, like in the here-and-now, your wrist tucked against the small of your back, your other hand skyward, hallelujah -- and I scream.

The ocean, the thunder, the rain is louder. The whole world is louder than I am. But still Christ hears me. I play my notes, my voice bouncing off cresting waves and standing stones, and lone house filled with ghosts, and Christ hears them all. Who knows what other ears will hear. Right now, I need only for His.

As the storm realigns me, I know that this is Him. I knew I'd hear from Him even as He hears me. How can this compare to the feel-good bubble cast by mortal man's pulpit? I am aware, alive and on fire with His word, His voice. How can I be sustained, reset, lifted up by pews and politics and platitudes? I cannot. I need Him raw, real and eternal. I need Him to grab me, shake me, open my eyes. Christ is feast in famine, vaccine in plague, salvation in hell, this hell -- the only one that exists. He said, "Change it. Do it. Feel it."

Who am I not to listen?

EJ

Someone Else's Touchstone

2009-03-15T23:03:00.000-07:00

“I'm standing here until you make me move.”

I'm waiting. I'm waiting for your words. You don't know. You have no idea how much I crave the bread crumbs you sprinkle. I know they are actually stardust. You have not hidden your divinity from me. You can't. The first time I saw you cry, your tears washed away the mask. The first time I heard you scream, your anger burned down the facade. I used to pray you'd write for me. I never thought it would be like this.

I am waiting. Word of God speak.

...the music explodes in my headphones. The day seems like it took months to end. Oh dear God, I want only to hold you. Why did this Sabbath feel like so much work? The music is so loud that everyone is speaking like soundless mimes. I cannot take my eyes off you. I want to know baptism again. I choose it of my own free will, baby, as I chose it the first time...

“I'm closer to where I started
chasing after you.”

...can you read my thoughts as you read my heart? Can you recast this day for me in the eight hours before dawn? Can your touch reshape me into someone alive with joy, with passion, with strength? Will you open my eyes when you close my eyes? Will you read my desire across the scripture of my body...

“I'm falling even more in love with you.
Letting go of all I've held onto.
I'm standing here until you make me move.”

...I want to walk in the forest of your gaze. Bronze and emerald, you are tempered wild, fine sculpture in untamed domain. Sprinkle kisses along the path, little one. I will follow your lead. I will call-and-response to your gasp, your sigh, your breathless song...

“There's nothing else to lose.
There's nothing else to find.
There's nothing in the world
that can change my mind.”

And suddenly I know where I am. South by southwest, I have my North Star and she shines so blue, so cold, so sharp. I have seen the Southern Cross for the first time and since that night, tide rising, wind slicing, I have known why I came this way.

“I'm living for the only thing I know.”

There is a stone in my pocket. There has been a stone in my pocket since I was four years old. Not this stone. But a stone. Touchstone. Charged stone. Old world Christianity. “When the world gives us more than we can bare, love, we place it here,” and Grandmother tapped the small, river-rounded stone in my hand. She wiped my tears. She looked at the sky. She reached into her own pocket. She held up a single black stone. It was worn down in the middle. Like the power of rain drops, she had worn away the stone with her soft tapping, persistent touch. “Let go,” she told me and she turned and left me there. I was alone. I stared at the white stone. I tapped out my trouble like divine Morris Code. And I let go as I dropped it into my pocket.

Are we elevated from animals? Are we rulers and not ruled simply because scripture paints us that way? Or are we actually slaves to the power of the viral colony that awaits us around every unwashed public door handle? I think our lives are exactly as we make them. I think we are rulers of nothing but ourselves and guardians of everything else.

Action, reaction, chain-reaction. I am only the sum of what I hold. I am only the interwoven fingers of the hand I'm holding.

“What are you writing?”
“My Sunday sermon.”
“Do you have something to say?”
“I always have something to say, Summer.”

And the windows are open. The doves are making sounds. It is raining. There is rain on the tile floor. There is rain on my skin. Still hot from the shower. All the windows stand open. All the windows... there is no difference. Inside or outside. Night sky, skylights. I am just standing here, as seen and as hidden as anywhere else.

“Do you have anything to say?”
“I always have something to say, Lord.”

And we walked at dawn. The street was ugly. The concrete cracked from a long winter and a bad thaw. You handed me a stone from your pocket. The tears on your face were the silent kind I used to watch my father cry. You didn't need to tell me it was a touchstone. I took it and a shock ran up my arm and down my spine. “I can't carry it any longer,” you thought but I heard the words as clearly as I saw the fast moving clouds, white strands of eternity, across that pale morning sky. I slipped the stone into my pocket. It was heavy. It was beautiful. It was horrible. It now was mine.

We must surround ourselves with companions willing to recast our day for us over and over again. To reset the line of truth. To recharge the heart. We must do the same for them.

“What's new?”
“I hate the word 'actually.'”
“Hm.”

I am confident enough to be silent. I am sure enough to enjoy listening to another person talk. I do not have to weigh in. I like watching the way a mouth moves to form words only a moment after the brain has formed them. I have no desire to correct someone. I open my mouth when I am able to say, “Oh! That is something new. Thank you.” I have no interest in using my voice to prove to the world how great I am.

Whose life are you recasting? Who do you sprinkle stardust for?

“She has a lock of hair in her pocket
and a cross around her neck.
The hair is from a little boy
and the cross from someone she hasn't met yet.
She says she talks to angels
and they call her by her name.”

Christ, sometimes I cannot carry it all. Sometimes I cannot see my personal sky. Sometimes I am afraid to ask you because I am scared of what you will tell me. I am not ashamed not to have all the answers... I would be ashamed if I didn't fight and bleed to find them.

*whispering* Lord? Here I am...

Sometimes it is so much better to shut my mouth, open my ears and nod my head. Sometimes it is so much easier to carry the stone for someone else. I grow more when I listen than when I talk. I make a difference when I accomplish the impossible and tell no one but my God.

*whispering* ...covered in your rain...

Take a step. Keep stepping until it is no longer easy. Draw your own map and then make it real. Take a hand. Keep holding until it is no longer easy. Draw another's heart and then recharge it.

*whispering* ...it feels so right to remake my world.

When we reach out to the person least likely... when we see with another person's eyes... when we truly come to know our opposition... we finally see through the mirror clearly. We become full. We grasp the touchstone and shock runs through our body. We see for the first time.

We grow up.

When life becomes difficult, we become Christian.

EJ

Grandmother? I would have carried your stone. I wish, so often, that you had burdened me.

Making a Difference

2009-03-08T22:09:00.000-07:00

Like with love, it begins with yourself.

And the music carries me. Cresting, crashing, falling down. Your hands are in my back pockets. Our belt buckles click together. Yours is a wolf. Mine is a star. You murmur, not a whisper, something more certain, like the confidence in your eyes: “I know where we can go.”

The hall is long and dark and narrow. Rebirth. Reborn as someone else. Someone no one here knows. An eight hour flight was never so worth it. You turn and smooth down my Silence = Death t-shirt. “It suits you,” you say somewhere left of my ear. You push my hair over my shoulder. I just look at you. You know my answer.

We turn onto the dance floor. Blackness in the middle of the Sabbath day. Shot in time with the beat with red, blue, green, gold. So many have come to worship this way. Someone... several someones are shouting call and response to the live DJ. I count a few rosaries but mostly the accessories of the faith glow neon or glint gold. Hm. Grrl... you sure know how to find a club. And you know it. You walk backwards, away from me, melting into the crowd, disappearing. You mouth, “Told ya... *Angel*....” Your dark hair braided into three dozen braids on the flight here falls forward, hiding eyes that burn.

We are not here together.

I am alone. I am perfect. I am with my Lord. I move into the crowd, arms up, boots stomping, already dancing.

Tokyo. Not today. Not NYC like now. It was Tokyo and I was running away from myself. Oh, dear Lord. *So* not like now. I just wanted to get away from LA. From the looks I found myself getting and receiving. From the words that all my “friends” were squinting and shaking their heads at me about. It was the first and last time I joined a Bible study group. Oh Christ... I had no idea how much damage it would do, it did, until years after the fact. Those tiny minds undid years of truths. Just reached into my heart....

Tokyo. It was cold. The club was hot. The cover was high. The floor was packed. The music was hard techno pop, raging beat, shotgun lyrics. I was there fifteen minutes when a dancer (boy? grrl?) offered me a tab and I considered it for the first time in my life. I was running so hard, so far, so fast. I wanted to lose myself... this waking up self. I said no. Thank you, God.

I danced. I danced and cried and prayed. At some point there was a pair of deep brown eyes, short spiked black hair frosted neon blue. There were hands unbuttoning my crisp white button up. The white tails fluttered at my hips, spun out behind me, brushing black leather pants. Angel wings. “Angel...” a whisper. I danced.

Lord...
I didn't ask for this.
I didn't look for this.
Slumbering in my chest.
It kills me to deny it.
It closes me down.
It spins me inward.
I want to open my arms.
Give me the courage.
Open my eyes.
Touch me.
I am alone.
Just you.
Just me.
Touch me.
Take me.

“You talk about Christ like a lover.”
“He is.”
“You talk about making love like prayer.”
“It is.”
“You see Him differently than I do.”
“Absolutely... PTL.”

Freezing Rain. Cherry Blossoms. On the Speedway. Move. Blast My Desire. Around the World. World's End. My Sweetest Nightmare. Dogfight. Hard dance songs. Techno crash. I imagine on a global stage, Terrapyres dance to music like this. Maybe they had their origins that night. That idea of angels finding Christ on the dance floor, or swimming in beat and bass line and searing vocals. Music is my blood and baptism. I find Christ beneath, behind, inside the music far more often than I find Him in the hollow words of any man. Here is primal and my Christ is primal.

Tokyo. I cried, “Show me!” Take me. Touch me. I will do the work. I will do the work. I. Will. Do. The. Work.

And He did. He reached down and touched me. Took my heart, that sheltered little grrl who was welding steel around herself, and with the strength of only my Lord, He shattered the armor and opened my heart to myself. I was alone. On that dance floor, in the world, I was alone. Just Him. Just me.

I don't need anyone else to know who I am.

And I did the work. First the body and then the mind. I gained fifteen pounds of muscle (which I needed). I gained an inch of height (by standing up straight). I walked five miles five times a week. I planted a garden, my hands in rich soil like life. I boxed three times a week, forty-five minutes hard.

I changed me. I celebrated Christ in me. I would not waste this gift, not this body, not one heartbeat, not one day. No motivator but my faith. I need no guide other than my Lord in my heart, in my ear, walking at my side.

And I did the work. Second the mind. I read a new book every week. Nonfiction. Theory. Fiction. Raw. Real. I opened my eyes to my world, to my politics, to my reality. I broke open everything I thought I knew. I wrote. Journaling first because that's what chicks do, and then blogging, cuz that's what everyone does, and then I pushed and Christ pushed back and I was writing to touch hearts and save souls. And Mardi Gras 3000 crested like a dream.

The music is in my bones now. Nothing quite like NYC clubs on the Sabbath. I am sure of myself when I walk out of man's world and into God's world. I could have gone mountain climbing. I could have scaled a rock. I could have chartered a boat and gone diving. I could have walked into any bar and picked a fight LOL! But the view here is so much nicer.

It was Tokyo and the rain was cold. It was Tokyo and I had certainly gone to the ends of the Earth to escape something that I carried within me. I felt branded...

...and now I feel branded. Marked forever. Touched by the flame of God. This brand is His mark. I accept my nature. I embrace who I am and what that means and what I must do. Word of God has spoken. And this angel dances. Sweet Christ, I'm dancing.

Remind me, Lord.
Of who I am.
Don't allow me
to run to hide
to waste the breath
you have given me.
Knock me down
so that I remember
how to stand back up.
I found myself
so as not to be lost.
You are my shepherd.
No one else.
I am
standing
dancing.

Warrior, heal thy self.

Less than 21,000 genomes make up every single living creature on this only green world. The same 21,000 genomes. Human beings do not have a single unique genome. Period. As in nature so in man. As in nature so in God. Stop just reading it, over and over again, and start believing it. Start feeling it. Start breathing it.

Start preaching it.

We are all the same 21,000 words written into just less than seven billion books. We are all the same words... each telling a different story.

Are you sharing your story?

EJ

Black Sky, Red Silk

2009-03-07T00:45:00.000-08:00

You think, in the cold and the dark, the wind that bites -- winter fighting back -- the clouds that spin, that I perhaps do not think of you. That I am lost to the concrete forest. My love, my friend, my angel, guardian, lady. You drift, ebbing with the tides, and when others deconstruct and turn their lives upside down and inside out to change like origami birds, to take flight, to soar, you ride the swells and gaze at the sky.

Or perhaps, beloved, you do not gaze at the sky enough. For if you did, if you were, if your eyes were on the sky as much as mine are than you would know:

I love you like sunlight on the sea. Like swift white clouds, thin and spread like feathers. I love you like the wet stones of the shore at Second Beach, cast there to tell my fortune.

I want you like candle flame, the heavy egg-shaped votive burning in my palm. I want you to tell me yes as you have never before. I am done writing stories; I want you on fire for me as I am for you. Want to dance these flames together. Amen.

I miss you as if I am dead. I am controlled and working hard, throwing myself into everything like there is nothing else. Showing half-a-hundred strangers around me that I can meet every demand. I miss you because I miss us and so I miss myself. I walk unknown here -- for my passion for you is not a label for me. It is part of who I am. The heart of me.

Will you recognize me in this new-found militance?

I read between the lines when you write for me. I buy a red silk scarf and tie it snug, a right wristband, caressed for hours beneath my fingertips. I think perhaps we match now, yes? No, not a scarf there, I know... but something else, something more fitting... but this love, this passion, this heart... it is the same.

Look up, my lady. Look up.

Do you see how much you are loved?

If You Aren't Rejoicing...

2009-03-01T23:55:00.000-08:00

...you don't know what's going on.

Shh. Quiet now. Let me bring you there.

I once promised you that I wouldn't publish poetry on Sunday. This was a day to sermonize. To guide and council. This was my day to be an angel.

But I am not interested in Puritanical angels. They bore me and rarely leave evidence of their passing. Plus, if the stain glass windows are right, they're all very, very white, and baby, last time I checked, I was more cinnamon than driven snow.

Tonight, stars spinning above me, clouds fast across this open desert so bracing cold... tonight, surrounded by brush and cactus and night time creatures that can find me so much easier than my human handlers... tonight, with my player shuffling the same five songs... tonight, I am caught, captured and held by you. I am alone with my Christ and whispers of divinity, falling like stardust.

The roaring riffs
of sweet salvation
in cascading
tumble-tight lyrics
that carry me to
another place and
wash over me like
baptism, like
rain showers like
storms in the air
around me
inside me
lifting me up
taking me down
... oh dear God
I just described
how I feel
when you touch me.

Christ Almighty, you placed us here. You laid us here in the double helix of who we are and what we can be to each other. What cell holds gentleness? They have mapped the one that holds song. Where in my muscles does this desire for you slumber then jump, alert, alive, aching when I look into your eyes? Sweet Christ, this is how you have made us. This is how you have spun still matter into flesh, bone and thought all wrapped around twenty-one grams of soul. You have made us able to write words erotic, romantic, touching, inciting. You have made us able to touch so softly we trace fingerprints, or to possess so fully we are shaken and left shaking.

In my celebration of you, I celebrate this body. In my honoring of you, I honor this body. To deny my heart is to deny you and I will never deny you. Lord? I am shouting from mountain tops. I rejoice to find you... find myself... find us together.

You are born
of sound, my
music made flesh
of beat and bass
the bright
sharp brilliant
edge of you
beneath my
praying tongue.

You are born
of the ocean
the cresting
waves calling
whispering
shouting my
name throughout
the cold night
meeting
the cool dawn
burning in
your arms.

I promised you only poetry on Thursdays. Sermons on Sunday. But there are some messages that can only be given in verse. There are some promises that can only be exchanged in touch. Sometimes we must embrace the truth that there is a time and a medium and a reason for everything. It is written into our genetic scripture. It is coded and expressed, activated and mutated just for me, just for you, just for this love that beats between us, Christ. There are times when the educated sentence fails us. It only confines. Free form, freefall, is the only way.

Christ coded our genome. Christ coded this universe. If you think you know, you don't. If you think you're right, you're wrong. It is all a mystery. It is all a hundred times more than our wildest discovery.

There are at least ten thousand ways to love somebody.

And I
have never
loved you more.
For your strength
for your fire
for your constance.
And I
sometimes
know so very
little, but only
that I love you.
That I would do
anything for you.
That I could be
that I will be
that I am
anything that
you need.

EJ

Are You Afraid of the Dark?

2009-02-22T23:44:00.000-08:00

I like to turn all the lights off and wait to see what happens. The cold dread, the spectral fingers on the back of my neck, the sense of a presence in the room -- these things have not happened since I was nine years old. Like the wonder and mystery of deja vu being shattered by the simple truth that it is a chemical loop in the brain, I sometimes miss those very early nights when I was certain that something dangerous lurked in waiting for me.

It should surprise no one (certainly not my parents) that I grew up to be a danger addict with more bones broken than years lived and a complete willingness to do any physical feat that excites me as long as it doesn't put another person at risk. And as for what excites me? Hm. That would make this blog very, very long... and require me to climb down from this roof top, jump over to the next one, shimmy off the side and slink back around to my new bike for jelly beans. Cuz, baby? I'm gonna need a snack if I'm gonna be here that long.

The darkness of a room or the night doesn't scare me any more. The idea of being stabbed or raped or robbed on a city street doesn't amuse me much but I'm not talking about that darkness. I'm talking about the darkness of a room or our homes where we know very well we are safe and sound, the door locked and the windows too. I'm talking about the darkness of a bedroom, quilt over our heads, nervous to turn off the reading light and make every draped shirt a creature reaching through the shadows.

Memory of You... I come downstairs. My bare feet soundless. I am listening to you wash dishes in the light of a full moon. You leave every light off. The whole house is silent except for the water running and the sound of my heartbeat in my ears. I turn into the kitchen. I stand in the doorway. I watch you from behind and I wonder how many women have stood and watched you across a room in the dark. I feel something just shy of predatory...

Are we afraid of those monsters and unknowns because we know *something* must exist other than we? Something must exist, surely, beyond this reality of work and money and petty tones of voice. Something... oh... anything, please! Or are we afraid that *nothing* else is there? Nothing at all. This is it. Seize it. You didn't? Too bad. That was it. Right... there. Gone.

We rush from darken rooms. We turn on lights at night. We carry flashlights. We stumble up stairs wondering what is behind us. We cling to beliefs that grant us epic fantasies and call them religion. We pray to an entity we call God as if He is corporeal and we are able to comprehend Him. But the truth is so much more complicated. The truth is not fairytales for children to soothe them into sweet dreams.

When will we wake up from childhood? When are we ready for the truth?

Memory of Me... I am thirsty. Not like I have ever felt before. I dreamt of music. I dreamt of lights. I am nine years old. My white and red pjs were soaked with sweat and I strip them off in the darkness. My night light has burned out. The moon is black and new. I am so thirsty. I don't want water. But it will have to do because I do not know the name of what I desire. I am a child. No one has told me the words yet. I walk out of my room and into the silent house...

What if the twenty-one grams we lose at death are just returning to whence they came? What if we are all possessed with twenty-one grams of electrical, biological, sentient life and, when this clay dies, we snap back to being with God... to being that force that supports and enables God... to dancing with bosons and demi quarks... stretching thin together like solar sails to glide across this fine cosmos. What if...?

I don't believe in heaven. Nor do I believe in hell. I have never believed that Thor makes lightning or that Athena lept, fully formed, from the head of her father. I do believe that Christ changed the world. I do believe that He hears my prayers. That He answers. That He speaks. I know that the human race did not begin with Adam and Eve. That Mary had never lain with a man in order to be with child. I know that my Christ died a mortal death, bloody and in tears on a cross and that He rose again, unable or unwilling to let go of His twenty-one grams until He finished the circle on the greatest story to ever be told.

Memory of You... You turn off the water. You are pulling off rubber gloves. Looking into the steel basin, now empty. I step into the room. The wood floor is cold. I don't blink. I come close enough to take in musky, rich scent of your hair. The sound of your breathing. My lips part to say your name and you look up. My intent to speak has alerted you to my presence. You meet the gaze of my reflection in the window in front of you. You do not turn to face me. Instead of your name I say, "Did I startle you?" You are silent. There is a long passage of time. You turn. The hem of your sweater jacket brushes my arm. Your eyes, blue-black... undo me. You turn your hands palm up at your hips. You tilt your head to the side in slow motion. You set your jaw, say, "Did I startle you?"

Tucked into easy categories and wrapped in careful mythologies, we want to sing hymns and know that this isn't everything. We want to live right and be rewarded. And just like some little children are happy with a hug and others want candy and still another demands expensive electronics, each of us look for the reward that fits our temperament. Even those of us who walk away from or pretend not to seek religion still search for the reward of living. Look up which religions are the fastest growing. One is even so fast that its founder said he rivaled even Christ. How's that for diverse choices?

In the darkness, what are we afraid waits for us? The truth?

"…For those who saw the signs of hatred as our cars drove in tonight, I think that it is a good time for those who voted for the ban against gay marriage to sit and reflect, and anticipate their great shame, and the shame in their grandchildren’s eyes if they continue that way of support. We’ve got to have equal rights for everyone." (Sean Penn, accepting the Best Actor Oscar for his portrayal of equal rights activist Harvey Milk.)

In the darkness, where our hands become our eyes, where my touch across your skin is sacred and burns sweet as rebirth, what are we afraid of? That with hands, fingertips, mouth and tongue we will discover the lies in the doctrine? That we will find the cracks in the logic of these human mythologies? If you come for me, like God's own shooting star, like comets that cycle and return, do you think you will wake up somewhere else completely without a road map... or perhaps without a torch to show your way? Is this love not truth enough?

"When I was thirteen years old, my beautiful mother and my father moved me from a conservative Mormon home in San Antonio, Texas, to California, and I heard the story of Harvey Milk. And it gave me hope. It gave me the hope to live my life; it gave me the hope that one day I could live my life openly as who I am and that maybe even I could fall in love and one day get married… Most of all, if Harvey had not been taken from us thirty years ago, I think he’d want me to say to all of the gay and lesbian kids out there tonight who have been told they are less than by their churches, or by the government, or by their families, that you are beautiful, wonderful creatures of value. And that no matter what everyone tells you, God does love you, and that very soon, I promise you, you will have equal rights federally across this great nation of ours." (Dustin Lance Black, accepting the Best Original Screenplay Oscar for "Milk")

Memory of Me... The house was full of shadows. Was I sleeping still? Was I walking through the cold house nude and skinny and afraid? Every corner, every plant and picture and side table I had known all my life was a creature or presence waiting to touch me with unworldly hands. I was alone on the planet. I was driven to keep moving but only because it was so essential to drink. I knew I would surely die if I could not drink. Through the living room, the carpet beneath my feet... the big windows, tall and showing only night... He stood right there. Between me and the kitchen. Just... stood. He could have been a friend of my parents, dark skin, dark eyes, crisp hair. He could have been my brother. Deja vu. I stood and looked up at Him. Deja vu. I stood. He was so normal. So natural. He just... stood.

And I got it.

And I wasn't afraid any more.

Now, turn off the lights.

EJ

If you're not angry, you're not paying attention.

Christ didn't turn tables in the temple because He wasn't a proponent of activism.

"There are a multitude of reasons why marriage equality lost in November. The one I keep coming back to is a failure to cast the role of the villain in the battle against Prop 8. Unlike Prop 6 in 1978, there was no John Briggs to debate, and no Anita Bryant to galvanize our base. Instead in 2008 we had the Catholic and Mormon church, two amorphous beasts that were nearly impossible to vilify in the minds of the public." (www.inlookout.com)

Personal Mythology: Light and Dark

2009-02-15T18:02:00.000-08:00

“Human life began in flight and fear. Religion rose from rituals of propitiation, spells to lull the punishing elements.” --Camille Paglia

“The person has put himself off center. He has aligned himself with a programmatic life and it's not the one the body's interested in at all. And the world's full of people who have stopped listening to themselves.” --Joseph Campbell

Light, dawn light, creeps across my sky, and I think about great thinkers. To listen to the lectures or read the books of Joseph Campbell is to remember that before modern man there was still man. Our rich existence as a species did not begin with the qwerty keyboard nor was it spiritually enriched by the invention of the itty bitty cell phone. Modern playthings are just our current accessories, replacing the beads and bones that once adorned our hair and clothes, replacing runes and smoke signals. Our lives are neither richer nor poorer because of these changes; Our lives have simply continued.

The ebb and flow of time seems to disappear when you listen to Campbell discuss the inherent differences between men and women. Their different needs and responses, their psychological and psychosexual baselines. I do believe in equal pay (for equal work) but I do not agree in different standards for the same task. If a man can do the job better because of muscle mass, aggressive approach or what have you, than a man should be given the job, quotas or not. God did not make men and women the same. He made them equal – just as He made every male and female in every other species equally important – but not the same. To ignore these differences – to not celebrate them – is a crime not just against each other but against the beauty of God.

To grossly simplify Camille Paglia: I want my women passionate, sexy and straight, and I want my men possessive, aggressive and erect. Disgustingly blunt? Not entirely correct? Of course to both. Because in God's natural order for man, as mirrored in nature, His divine map laid here for us, there is room for gentle, quiet, sensitive men, and there is room for protective, assertive, viciously brilliant women. The point is, there is room for all kinds of vibrant differences.

“I do not believe that Christ, our Lord, our Lion and Lamb, placed us on this world alone and without guidance. And you will know your guides because they will refuse to call themselves divine and may not even call themselves Christian. They will be humble. They will hide nothing, for Christ hid nothing. And not everyone will follow them but all will hear them and agree with what they say. Because the truth can be ignored but it cannot be denied.”

I want to paint. Instead I am sitting outside on the closed dome of the private observatory of a friend. I have realized, strangely, that I like to look at the stars with my naked eyes more than I like to view them through the telescope. I do not want to see them so explained and scientific. I want to view them through the lens of my personal mythology. I want to connect their points to form my own constellations. I want to remember them attached to my own memories and the histories of my family. I don't want to *know* what I see. I want to believe what I see.

“Religion is a construct of man. Even if you subscribe to a denomination, you know this as truth. It is a construct of man which stands *between* man and God. It is meant to better facilitate the understanding of God by man. But religion must be transparent. It must be open like air and sky. If it is not transparent, than God cannot be seen through it.”

Why do so many of us flock like sheep to the constructs of man? Why does denomination soothe and call to us? Because it is comfort, ritual, structure and pattern. Because it is tangible belonging. I met once a man who said to me that his faith was strong as steel, that it was everything to him, his life and breath and thought and reality. Walk away from your church then, I answered. Walk away for one year and walk your path, just you and your God. And it was obvious from the blanch of his face and the panic in his eyes that he was sincere when he responded, I would lose my center if I lost my church.

The loss of mythology is indeed the loss of our center. Without mythology we lose the knowledge of who we were and lose touch with the primal forces that still exist within us, sometimes slumbering, other times roiling. Mythology is the key code or directions on our road map to a life lived not in fear but in rejoicing. A life lived fulfilled and rich, a depth of experience that nourishes and sustains us.

Of course, how we build that mythology, where we turn to for that mythology, is entirely our decision and there are as many personal mythologies as there are people on this only green world. Of course, my answer was: Fill that center with Christ.

“The power of Jesus Christ is that He does not need to have been a god to have changed everything.”

“I live my life as if there is no heaven that awaits me, but that Christ was still the son of God. Now then forever, He is my teacher, guide and maker. There is no incentive. There is no after life. There is only what my Lord has commanded of me, and that is enough.”

Society crumbles when one of two things happen. When we either destroy our mythology or our mythology destroys us. Both are equally possible and equally horrible.

“Babylon Syndrome is man as God. Man proposes now or in a far future to be as God. God is not now and was never a mortal man. We are and will be until we return to that which we came from. We are not now nor will we ever be gods. To strive for this – to strive to be as our Lord – is not just blasphemous but a disease that infests through the wound of hubris and spreads like the most virulent of contagions. These are mythologies for small, fearful minds and they are addictive.”

“When we topple our gods, we topple our survival as a unified people. God surrounds us and classifies us as natural unto Him, as He planned for us. We are embraced by Him. Once we fell God, once we lift ourselves out of His natural center and place ourselves outside with Him, we are no longer a people of one heart, one mind, one path. We are no longer concentric circles, but rather opposed and opposer. Elevated and descended. More than and lessor than. Right and wrong. The table, my friends, is no longer round.”

I am witness to a small group of brave young people choking on tradition and struggling against real odds to find themselves in a heritage that has no room for them. I think of the human rights activist Harvey Milk talking about there being no time or luxury for hiding. If everyone was aware that they knew a gay person, he argued, they would see us as human. Not abnormalities or even just the extremes they may glimpse in public. They would see us as part of the pattern. One of the concentric circles of human life.

But instead many people see the world, and raise their children, entrenched in personal mythologies that are outdated, outmoded or simply wrong, founded in hubris or otherwise out of control. It is terrifying how recently many major religions still proclaimed racial segregation a holy mandate and equally disgusting how many denominations do the same today for orientation. Both diverse attributes are positively displayed in abundance in nature and seem to make only logical sense – vivid difference in species allows for the adaption to multiple environments; homosexuality allows for birth control on a planet with limited capacity (gay couples, if they have children at all, have far fewer, on average).

By propagating mythologies that are contrary to our natural truth, we are allowing discord. We are moving against the grain that is God's plan. His map for us is so very beautiful and we are ignoring it when we try to build religions out of smoke and mirrors, denominations that do not stand up under close scrutiny and that fight for traditions that only benefit the further spread of ignorance. The blind are so more easily led. The collection of souls at the thrones of men naming lightning in the dark.

EJ

Are Angels Dancing? G2G

2009-02-08T23:01:00.000-08:00

"And so, on the Sabbath, do His work."

The question becomes, now (in our post-modern times), then (when He walked a mortal man) and forever (into our future as a species): What is worthy?

I have a friend who never emails me more than twelve words at a time. She never asks a question without providing multiple choice answers and she rarely expects a response. Lately, her subject headings have all been: Mustard Seed

Christ said all we need... the only thing... is faith as large as a mustard seed. Barely twice the head of a pin. It may seem absurd until you remember how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. Perhaps those of us with even just that faintest whisper of faith have enough space to have angels dancing "Swan Lake" in five dimensions.

The simplest answer, of course, and the one that begins to answer that now then forever question is: We are all worthy.

Now, stepping forward, none of us left behind, the next part of the question: *What* is worthy? *What* are we supposed to do on the Sabbath?

My friend Gille does not really believe in God. But she cannot explain to her satisfaction why incredible people like Gandhi and Gurumayi Chidvilasananda and Mother Teresa and Jesus Christ have come to walk on this only green world if there isn't a God. She feels that people like these would never be born if mankind were left here to our own devices alone. Gille believes that goodness -- change -- as ministered by these individuals can simply not be produced from the human animal without divine intervention.

I went to spend the day with Gille today. She is expecting her third child joyfully. She and her partner and their toddler son live together in a classic alpine cabin slash seaside cottage hybrid that is, in fact, sitting on the seashore. It was the first time I'd had Internet in three days. I was most def shaking with cyber withdrawal when I arrived. But the moment I walked in, my busted laptop under my arm, I knew the last thing I would be spending my Sabbath doing was answering email and surfing the web. Every horizontal surface in Gille's house was covered with beta cards of Mardi Gras 3000.

"I'm not sure what I believe, Angel," Gille told me. "But I know that what you're doing with MG3K speaks to people. It lifts them up. And when they look closer, they find God in the details."

And so Gille spends every Sabbath immersed in the brand. I do not have words for what that meant and means to me.

What does God intend for us to do on the Sabbath? His work.

I remember being in elementary school and arguing passionately with a student a few years older than me. Funny how when I look back on "conversations" like these they never seem childish. My religion was far more a point of ridicule than my skin color or (early on) my accent. I don't remember what denomination the seventh grader was but I remember the constant use of, "My teacher told me..." with the teacher in question being a Sunday School teacher. The idea was: The Sabbath is for rest and I was a sinner because I'd spent my Sabbath with my parents on a Habitat for Humanity homesite. It seems building a home for a family in need was a grievous evil.

Less dramatically, I've heard it argued that if something makes you money, it should not be done on Sunday. (For this very reason, I waived all royalties to the MG3K brand and even this blog book -- the printed and bound edition -- will be given away free and sold at cost.) I have no problem with this definition though I do not find an issue with parents who choose to work on the Sabbath in order to support their families. I only hope that they give another day to God. Not for God. He doesn't require our worship to survive nor to love us (it isn't a trade). But in order for us to thrive, we must throw ourselves into *worthy* work at least one day a week.

The celebration of family is a celebration of God. I have always followed that as a good guideline for what should or shouldn't be engaged in on God's Day. Family being defined as partner, spouse, child, sibling, heart-friend. Those that by blood, oath or love are our family in the eyes of our Lord. Sometimes this means making love. Sometimes it means playing tag. Often it manifests as hard work -- working together in the home or yard.

The Sabbath is not a day of rest. God rested on the seventh day after He created the universe. I didn't create the universe this week, did you? The Sabbath is our day to show how grateful we are that He worked so hard to give us what we all take for granted just by not spending our lives on our knees kissing every flower petal, blade of grass or bumblebee. Every breath, every dawn, every windstorm, every kiss, every heartbeat we stand beneath His blue sky or beside His blue-green sea, we have reason to do His work, and do it to the best of our abilities until we are ready to drop into deep dreams, every single Sabbath.

Through the crimbly speaker on the old wireless phone, I hear a mutual friend talking to Gille:

"I just wanted to work today. To lose myself in good work. But I knew they needed something. It was the last cash I had from selling that furniture on Craig's List. I just wanted to show them that even when we have nothing, there is something if we think first of each other, and not of ourselves. Not my money. Our money. We'll do fine if we stay together, if we're grateful, if we stay on the path. I can do the work tonight when they're all asleep. God made me able to push myself. It would be wrong not to. And I saw their smiles... they all knew this was the very best I could do and it was barely anything. But... oh Gille... they were so thankful. It was worth doing."

What is worth doing?

1) Does it change you for the better?
2) Does it change someone else?
3) Does it share the word of God and celebrate Christ?
4) Does it open up your world?
5) Does it fill your heart with light?
6) Does it hold up your impassioned sky?
7) Is it living prayer?

If it is effortless... if it requires no thought... if it doesn't energize and lift you up... if it isn't good, hard work... than it is not intended for the Sabbath.

Christ? Today felt right because I gave myself to you. You rested on the seventh day. I create in your honor on my seventh. Today. Forever.

EJ

This blog entry is dedicated to Ginny and Jennifer in honor of their joint venture, "G2G," a graphic novel/anthology of stories by grrls, for grrls, that center around the theme of bringing glory to God. My pledge is my first paycheck from my "day job." I couldn't be prouder.

Leave Me Breathless

2009-02-01T01:29:00.000-08:00

“Because it seemed like a good idea at the time...”

[...was achieved, 26% of study participants reported one, or various combinations, of the following involuntary responses: brief loss of sight; a sensation of falling; loss of fine motor skills; trembling in extremities, and/or involuntary vocalizations. If... was achieved by a combination of... instance of involuntary responses as listed above rose to 92% with a high occurrence (more than 72%) of an inability to breathe...]

I decide to turn over a new leaf and so I say yes (for once) and go to Mass with Lillian. After all, these are dark times and all that yadda and maybe my heart needs a little stain glass light stations of the cross contemplation down on my knees God be with you and also with you inspiration.

I wake with little grrl eyes when Lillian turns off my alarm and strokes my hair. Over her arm is an eggshell white dress in layers of silk and soft lace. I blink up at her. She lays the dress down and moves soundlessly from my room. The smells of dark coffee and fresh sourdough with clover honey fill the space around me. I lay there on my back, staring at the ceiling, my fingers moving over the line between silk and lace.

“...like silk to brushed lace, satin to fine corduroy, you changed under my fingertips in a tangible expression of desire. You whispered something to me. But I found I was breathless and could not respond...”

I think to myself, “In for a dime, in for a dollar.” and I pull myself out of bed as well as out of my d6 boxers. I know I have grrl's underwear somewhere... and I think it's in my size.

Lillian French braids my dark hair with white ribbons. She smiles down at my grandmother's prayer beads, double looped dark olive wood spilled over the high-necked opaque front of the dress. It is surprising comfortable... I feel sheathed in... hm. I draw my mind back to the kitchen. I have not been able to speak to Lillian yet. There is something more perfect in this unspoken time.

She tips my head up with two fingers under my chin. She contemplates my unadorned face. I am three shades darker than the headshot attached to my resume. After an indeterminable moment, dawn's clean light slipping across the tile counters and floor, slipping into my empty coffee mug, across the honey toast crumbs, Lillian nods once and gives me a hint of a smile. Her perfume is exotic. Her suit is Italian. She nods once more and I rise as if commanded in my heels and stockinged legs. I follow her from the house; I am a different woman with very little effort... but with a universe of awareness.

“...were going to be late, the evening almost certainly ruined, and she made a small sound. It may have been a sound of apology had she glimpsed my angry glance at the grandfather clock in the foyer. I looked up. At the top of the stairs she was poured into low waisted black leather pants and a white silk shirt cast with ruffles, waves of softness, across her small breasts. I drew sharp breath. My heart pounded. I felt faint. I had to look away.”

I am presentable. The little white purse and black hymnal work so well as accessories to my good grrl outfit. I keep my eyes on Lillian's face or on the ground. The incredible marble of the cathedral floor is peach and rose and white. My mind is bright and blank, as if willed that way so that my thoughts won't offend this structured holy place with its traditions and rituals of human comfort. I bob my head. Smile without showing my teeth. Avert my eyes. Fold my hands. Lillian introduces me as Angel.

I take in textures through osmosis. As the priest murmurs in a tone patterned to soothe, I absorb the cold of the marble floors and stone columns. The oak and velvet of the pews. The leatherette of the pad beneath my knees. The ricepaper thin pages of the mass-produced Bibles. I breathe slowly and deeply and draw the scents of this place into my body, allow them to become part of me.

“...I remember... I remember your perfume. Still so far away. In my parents' house. Your bandanna. Your perfume. Wild roses. I slept with it under my pillow. Buried my face in it. Closed my eyes. Wanted to breathe nothing else...”

“And I can still smell you on my fingers, and taste you on my breath...”

Half way through the service I think about the light coming in the highest stain glass panes and I look up to see the molten lead lines that stitch together angels... but my gaze never rises that far.

Her red hair braided modestly, her deep green blouse ripples down her narrow torso and tucked into pleated black slacks, is the Horseman of the Apocalypse I danced with not so long ago... when I was, of course, that other Angel. A totally different woman. My mouth opens. Did I think she went forth on her steel horse to seek the other riders and discover the seventh seal? I am about to blink and look away... when she looks up from prayer, and then back at me. Over a sea of bowed heads I am discovered.

“...Christ... there is what I want and what others want to give me. There is what I am content to receive and what others desire to grant. Allow me the wisdom to bring these two extremes into alignment. Guide my decisions and show me the way to the path I must walk and I will walk it. Lord... just point me in the right direction. I will discover the trail.”

The prayer continues and her eyes walk over my body like I have been gift wrapped and delivered to her doorstep. Which, in some ways, I can certainly see how my garb and this circumstance appears to fit that bill. I am unable to look away from the appraisal because I find myself thinking. I am so lost in thought, actually, that my surroundings fall away and my head tips a little to one side in realization.

Feeling helpless. When I was ill, you said to the friend who was caring for me, “I feel so helpless.” And when life, in general, takes us and spins us 'round, we feel out of control. But there is always something to do. There is no scripture or memory I have ever heard that speaks of Christ doing nothing. There is always something to do... it simply may not be what we desire to do. It is easy, for instance, when someone is ill, to be the one to wrap them in blankets and make them soup. Not so easy to pray for them hard and heart-felt at a great distance, to send them a story, a picture, a funny I-Can-Haz. To impress them with poetry or by cleaning their house. To care for their children (who are wild things) or paint their deck.

I think about how we all seem to like feeling breathless... but none of us like to feel helpless. But isn't it when we feel helpless that we are most likely to turn to Christ? Isn't it when we feel helpless that are are most likely to open up to a new friend and realize how much we are loved? When we are most likely to discover peace?

“'...someday you will leave because my life is complicated and entangled. Someday you will go, but until then I will love you.' And I looked at her and I shook my head. Soundlessly at first, but then, 'You're worth it. I'm not going to make a mistake and pass you up because you aren't simple.'”

When are we most likely to unlock strengths we never knew were there... even though they had been whispering to us all along? When our feet stand on bedrock, when we have reached that rock bottom, that is when Christ equips us with our wings. And I have always been partial to wings.

When we feel helpless, it is the perfect time to sit with Christ and make a list of all the things we could do. The grail is always full and there will never be enough hours in a mortal day to fulfill our every prayer. Helpless simply means, undecided. Undecided simply means you have the opportunity to make a decision. And every decision you make builds your emotional muscle. That vital system that allows you to claim your own faith. To carry your own armor. To see the truth in everything.

“Hello, Angel. I didn't know you were Catholic.”
“I'm not.”
“I see. Another faith then?”
“Yes. I'm a Christian.”
(laughter)
“No offense intended.”
“None taken.” (pause) “Would you like to...?”
“I'm sure I would.”
(smiling)
“But, I don't need to. So no thank you.”

And I leave St. Peter's with Lillian and we eat small sandwiches with brie and drink coffee with cinnamon under a heavy, silver sky. We talk briefly about the rise of the church in pagan England and the structure of redemption and the lack of faith in the self that it all represents. And as we walk back to her car and she stops suddenly and the color drains from her face even as I am watching her... as she grips her chest near her shoulder in two hands and crumbles into my arms even as I am reaching for her... as she calls me Pablo and I answer to his name... as I feel the *helplessness* welling in my chest and spilling from my eyes, down my cheeks, across my eggshell white dress... I know I have a hundred million decisions to make and I make them all. I know I will not lose her now. I decide that I will not lose her. And because of that decision, every other choice falls into place to support that first. I am everything she needs (fast, resourceful, him) and nothing that I want (to scream, to shout, to crumble to the sidewalk with her) and I am utterly *there.*

These are the moments that define us. The helpless ones.

Lord? I'm here.

Baptized in your words, I am breathless.

At my best, I am helpless.

These are our moments.

EJ

Remind Me Remember You

2009-01-25T23:14:00.000-08:00

...what comes from asking fourteen friends when they are most themselves

And they try to break us. Because they think we are powerless when we are broken. They nailed Him to a cross. They crowned His head with thorns. They beat Him. They tore Him down with words. He knew betrayal and fear. He walked this land, this land I have seen with my own eyes, have touched with my own hands.

They try to break us. And they do. And when we are pieces scattered at the feet of their emptied eyed soldiers... they will find that we rise remade more powerful than we were before. For even in my destruction, another sister, brother, child, lover stands. For my Christ is now, then, forever. Never absent, always present. He walked here once but walks here, my heart, your heart, this kiss, this midnight prayer, now.

I’m finding myself at a loss for words... but the last thing I need is to be heard. I need only to hear what you have to say. Christ. My Lord. In your light, in your arms, beneath your hands, I am remade. Renewed. Reborn every dawn. Teach me. Guide me. Lift me to skies adorned with constellations that only you know their names. Place your mark upon my brow. I am ready to stand up.

“Word of God speak!
Would You pour down like rain?
Washing my eyes to see
Your majesty.
To be still and know
that You're in this place.
Please let me stay and rest
in Your holiness.
Word of God speak...”

In the quiet I hear your voice. In the midst of you I find release from this coil. Foil to faith, this culture of breaking, tearing. All I need to find myself is the knowledge that you already know who I am. I am unafraid then. I do not need to blush in shame or hide my eyes from what I know stands within me. Because my Lord, my Christ, you already know and you love me. Show me then? I’m looking. Draw me close. Whisper. Don’t let anyone else hear. It’s just you and me. Like when I was a child. Show me... please.

Musing, wondering
how it is
that you can inspire such
confidence
in me.

Once, I thought
that only my
Christ could continuously
break and remake
me.

But, now
it's as if I've
transformed into another woman
nearly unrecognizable
to myself.

And I muse. In your light. In your velvet dark. Beneath your sky. I hear the sleeping sounds of doves. I hear the movement of the universe. I realize that I am not interested in being stable. Even if it loses me the one I love more than any other. I am not interested in being anything other than the angel I have always been for you, Lord. I am finding myself, again, in the midst of you. And all that I need is to be with you. In this quiet... I hear your voice.

Divinity rises white-light before me and I lose my connection to this thing called consciousness. I prefer the place I visit. You are there. And you. And you.

Who is this woman
before me? I don't
recognize myself
in the mirror.

What is this
feeling? Primal.
Almost dangerous.
Confidant.

Christ?
What have you done?
This intensity.
What has she shown me?

Walk into my life, Lord. Walk into my room as lover, child, friend. I will recognize you. I will know you instantly even hidden behind roses-and-cream skin or eyes cerulean blue. I will know you if you are listening to rock ‘n’ roll. If you swear like a sailor. If you wail like a toddler. If you sip coffee, if you ask me for change, if you cut in line. I will feel you like a cascade of kisses. I will feel you like the caress of poetry. I will blush. I will cry silently, tears hot on heated cheeks. I will know joy as a golden welling in my chest. I will know you. I know me. I will know you. Test me. I will not fail.

I find myself
I find my Christ
when I dance with her
the woman
who completes me
as no one ever has.

And the beat
carries us through
these dark times
forever times
beginning times
the children laugh
she is crying
and I love her
endlessly.

I feel Him to the core of me. I feel Him at the core of me. He is my bones, holding me here. He is my muscles, moving me through. He is my heart, beating in my love for you. A seed of perfection in a mortal woman who is far from perfect. But not so far from Him.

He had his reasons.
He had his lies.
Saying he loved
but he didn’t.
If you could only see
the way she loves me.
Then maybe
you would understand.
Why I feel this way
about our love.
And what I must do.
If you could only see
how blue her eyes can be
when she says she loves me.

My hands
on her face.
Her hair falls
over my fingers.
My eyes are closed.
But still I see her.
Her breath
on my cheek.
I find myself.

And I rise and walk into the night. The sound of the waves is beneath the fog that’s rolling in. I recite aloud. I think my voice sounds like my own. I know your scriptures better than my parents think. Those words that may or not may be your own. I know your scripture.

Where is that sound
you make only for me?
Let me trace the shape
of your mouth
with my fingertips.
My own lips pressed
close to my own hand.
To feel and taste you
at once.
Make that sound for me
again so that I
can know you.

Can we serve Him before we know ourselves? Do little children serve Him? Do those still in the harbor of their parents, moored and bobbing? I want to know who I am in this world of His so to know exactly what I can do. I don’t want to find myself in the heat of battle. I want to know my armory.

“I can make you feel yourself again.”
“You certainly can. No one makes me more *myself* than you do.”

Lord? Speak to me. I am right here. Find me. I call to you... unbidden. Oh sweet Christ. Your touch like none other. Lover, father, teacher. I recognize you. Shh. I’m listening. Shout for me. I’ll find you. Help me... recognize myself.

Christ...
You placed me here.
Divinely inspired.
To protect and defend.
Impassioned.
Absolute fire.
Days, weeks, months...
years. I am
yours.
I am
me.

Place me in your
moment. I will
see seize be
in that moment.
I will live
cry bleed shout
in that struggle.
I will fight.
I will fight
for you in your
name until
the calm comes.

Finding myself, finding my God. Finding you, finding my God. Opening my eyes, opening yours. Name it. Name me. Name us. Claim me. Take me. I have taken you into my heart, into my body, into my blood stream. My heart breaks against my chest. And it wasn’t until He showed them the wounds at His side and in His hands that they believed it was Him. And these are the men I’m supposed to trust for my scripture?

Hm. Baby? I don’t think so.

For in my heart
I love and cherish you.
Forever.
This feeling will not calm.
Walking my divine path
to make this love
with you.
You make me
the most myself
every moment
of every day
because I am yours
and you are mine.
Being yours
is sacred.
And I find myself.

Toss my hair. The wind like birth. Cold here. I strip my jacket away. There is something to remember. Broken bones. Something. Not sure. Father? Watch me. This is called... running.

“Rivers flow into the sea
yet even the sea is not so full as me.
I’m not blind so I can see:
That a circle can’t fit
where a square should be.
This hole in my heart?
Can only be filled by you.”

In the hospital, I dream of the night we went dancing. You were the symbol of everything I desired (and could not have). You were the symbol of my Christ (which I could and did have). My back against the bar, the blonde from Bellevue draped off my neck, I watched you while she whispered Saccharine nothings. My gaze was not exactly friendly but exactly Christian. There was a passion for you I could not contain. You danced with your hands above your hand, your shoulders rocked back. I watched the arch of your neck and your spine. I saw Christ. And I know that every New Testament Christian who has ever laid eyes on you will know exactly what I’m talking about. Owl wise eyes so closed, you were living music. I re-found my Christ. Finalized Mardi Gras 3000 that dawn.

Wanted to wake up with you. Wanted to roll into you arms after making love and flutter my eyes open against your cheek. Knew I would feel the most myself in that moment. Instead I woke up praying. It was the same. I woke up myself.

“I’m not ashamed
to be the person that I am today.
These are my words
that I’ve never said before.
I think I’m doing okay...”

I was born this way. In love with my Christ. I was born this way. To celebrate this body. I was born this way. A woman unwilling to compromise for the finite mortal phase. I’ve been wrong. I’ve been blind. I refused to be myself while my Lord danced for me. I’ve covered my ears. I’ve turned to His world instead of to Him.

But I’m done. Being undone by you, I am finally done.

Lord...

“This is how you remind me
of what I really am.
It's not like you to say sorry.
I was waiting on a different story.
It's not like you didn't know that.
I said I love you and I swear I still do.”

And I asked, “When do you feel the most yourself?” And you answered:

Who am I? That first is the question. I would like to be many things. I have dreamed of being many things. But I *know* only that I am one thing. I am Christ’s. I belong to Him as I have belonged and will belong to no other. I am without the empathy that I think my fellows were born with. I recognized it early enough to not know to shut up about it. I will break anything and anyone and not wonder why. I will make someone, fight for them with words and fists and savvy and not question their worth. I will pray for deliverance and not expect it. I know only that He whispers it, and so I do it. By His light I have walked and will walk these dark streets. I am not afraid. My shepherd in dark alleys and the back’s of cars and cheap hotel rooms and expensive condos that over-look the water. This is who I am. This is what I am made of. He put me here. This is what I’m good at. I am myself when my head is bowed. I am myself when on my knees. I am myself... when I celebrate everything He is, when the fire of prayer burns over my hands, fills my mouth, rocks my body like thunder. When I feel the force of Him, I am myself. The force of Him that has allowed me to survive.

This force.

Lord?

Beneath your night time sky. Shooting stars. This force. You. I am found.

EJ

Diligent

2009-01-22T03:48:00.000-08:00

I'm waiting for you only... you alone. But not so easy when I get in my own way. Amazing how I can compose and even murmur entire conversations to you which always end in my breathless yes... at least once a day... twice on Sundays... and yet it seems that Christ will return before I can muster a yes for you live.

What exactly is my issue again? What does it say about my character if I'll drop to my knees but won't drop my pants?

Oh. Too candid? My publisher tells me I should consider an anonymous blog for writing essays like this. But isn't every part of me -- aren't all my thoughts Christian thoughts? And aren't all of my musings, gamer musings? And so, they all belong here, do they not? I think someone, somewhere may need to hear me.

Wow. Aren't bloggers full of themselves?

I think... *I* may need to hear me.

"Go on, come on leave me breathless.
Tempt me, tease me until I can't deny this.
Make me long for your kiss.
All we have is here and now.
And I'm happy just to have you."

I want to be diligent. I want to be a hard-working angel with great big white wings that lift my brown body and dark eyes into star-filled night skies that are wide and warm and impossible to tame. I want to throw away laughter, trade it in for a serious gaze and taut-lipped expression. I want to be serious and respectable. To enter into that quiet place with the marble pillars and tile floors; that place called Accomplishment.

But guess what? I only seem to apply myself in one arena. And right now it's covered in jelly beans... and an emerald-colored silk sheet.

I am so tired from not shouting from mountain tops that my throat is sore from holding back cries.

"But if my lady

soft as night before dawn
and sweet as new cream
and ready as summer peaches
pressed beneath my tongue

were ever to find herself
satisfied and satiated
by my touch

laying tucked at my side
or straddling my lap
or breathing steady under me
her body languid from pleasure

what then, I ask
what then does my Christ
intend for me to do
with my hands?"

I find joy in poetry and passion. I look to lyrics and prayers. I surround myself with people in love. I walk with others on their impassioned paths. I find myself in love with you in this world in everything. I feel part of something bigger than this heart that pounds unrelenting in my chest... I feel part of something small and private and holy.

"The soft blue of the tiny dangling lights appears every time I close my eyes. At work at the dining room table, I cover my face with my hands in thought... and stifle my gasp. My fingers and palms carry your scent. Behind my hands, I pass my tongue over my lips, taste you there. You are everywhere. Stress falls away... but I continue to pass my hands over my face, through my hair. I want to bathe in you."

Baptize me, indeed.

EJ

Untempered

2009-01-18T23:57:00.000-08:00

“Cuddle up, angel.
Cuddle up, my little dove.
It's just the three of us:
You, me and all that stuff we're so scared of.”

My coffee is hot and sweet and rich sitting on my tongue as I read an article about addiction. I walked away from this particular one several months ago and have just recently jumped off the wagon with a glorious reverse somersault and a perfect landing. It won't wake me up (only one thing does that, babygrrl) but I find it strangely calming. Like an old friend. A tradition unchanged since I started school in NYC at sixteen. There were so many cold mornings and always that hot cup of coffee, dark as the nights I loved, to mark another day begun.

You are awake. I can tell because there is a thrumming in my chest and a warmth in my belly that has nothing to do with the coffee. It is almost dawn. I have fought my desire for you all night. I am somewhat more than unwilling to have you see me like this: so willing to throw away stress and demands and the whole rest of the world to fall to my knees before you. I am not yet ready for you to see the desire on my face like scripture. This living divinity that breaks and remakes me: my passion for you.

“Save tonight
and fight the break of dawn.
... burns like me for you.”

I return constantly to these late nights, so still and sleepless. Here I can quiet my thoughts if not my pounding heart. Here I can become myself, feel every inch of the woman I have grown to be, and be content and strong in that knowledge. But as my parts fall into place I find that I want you even more. We compliment each other. We...

Why do I try to make this into something so complicated and complex? It isn't. This love I feel for you is simple and bright and burning like my love for Christ. I love you because you are you. Not perfect. Not refined. You are untamed and untempered and more than anything else unbroken. I may be able to lay you down, lay you back, but I could never bend you to my will any more than anything in man's world could bend you. You are that perfect balance of elements and reactions and responses and stillness. I want you because you are wild and beautiful and bold. I need you... simply because my heart beats.

My heart beats. I raise my hand, touch my skin with my fingertips. Slide my hand up to linger at my pulse. There is a knock on the door. Isn't it dawn? Oh. Yes. But my work day begins at dawn. My day begins:

Ginny doesn't care if I use her real name because she quit two days ago and this is her last day on set. She thinks Hollywood pretty much bites but she loves it anyway. She just couldn't wake up any more and go to work and be part of a system “screwing so many women.” So Ginny doesn't care about anything right now other than watching me eat pancake sandwiches with sausages and eggs. Ginny is concerned that work requires I stay ten pounds below the optimal weight for someone 5'2” and I'm 5'5”. Ginny doesn't really understand that skipping meals stopped bothering me ten years ago when I started this.

Over breakfast, Ginny stares out the window. She is twenty-one and four days. She looks twice that in a bad way. She looks worn down by a system she's just starting to grasp. Not just the entertainment industry, but all of it. Life. Ginny says:

“It ought to be easy, ought to be simple enough.
Man meets woman and they fall in love.
But the house is haunted and the ride gets rough.
And you've got to learn to live with what you can't rise above.”

And the waitress asks for my autograph and Ginny frowns and we leave and I wonder if any young woman, any young person at all, ever enters the world to find it as they expected. I think I know of only one person who would claim that knowledge and she grew up in a way none of us would exchange for that premature education. I think that life is easy (even when rough) when we're children; Our choices are simpler. The world is the black and white of our parents' beliefs. The surface of everything is reflective. We see ourselves in everything. Life is as simple as looking in the mirror. Then we grow up... some of us at eighteen, some of us when we're first without a boyfriend, some of us when we have our first child... sometimes when we realize our children won't swallow the simple answers we're given them. No man knows another man's destiny. And though there are certainly universal truths, fact is stranger than fiction, and each of us billions have fingerprints all our own. Perhaps reality isn't one-size fits-all after all. So eventually we all grow up into us... and that new us is not the same as the old us.

Ginny wants to know where is the world that she thought was out there. Ginny wants to know when it gets easy and if Christ will make it clear. Ginny wants me to tell her it'll be okay and pat her hand and smile convincingly... just so she can shrug it all off for another day... but what Ginny doesn't realize is that by walking away from her lover and her job and the shelter of family name, she has already traveled beyond the place of easy comforts and convincing platitudes. Though she is not consciously aware of it yet, she has already begun her journey, all of it uphill and none of it easy. Despite Winterson's retelling, Atlas never shrugged and neither will Ginny.

Instead I say to Ginny: I'll get the bill.

T meets us outside. Motions us over to coffee. Tells us quietly that trouble is brewing without being explicit. He exchanges a few more words with Ginny, code worded to speak in front of me, about me, without me really knowing it. T speaks to Ginny like an equal because he is a decent man and doesn't see the difference between cast and crew but more than that, in this moment, when they are speaking about me, they are peers. They are both my friends.

“Somebody did.”
“Or didn't... you know?”
“More copies. Yellow highlights.”
“Unreal...”
“Tabbed even...”
“Somebody counting their lines?”
“Or not.”

T is not a small man. He likes to speak in short sentences and has a vocabulary that includes silences that are heavy and rich. To say his eyes speak volumes would be somewhat overly dramatic but the phrase works for me. I have always had this thing for eyes that speak. For men and women who say more with silence than with words. Not to say that I don't like words... I do. Very much. But T has a gentleness in his gaze that cannot be condensed into words. The way Wings has a confidence in her gaze that cannot be encompassed in a sentence or phrase. Some people just say more when they are silent.

“I can't believe they're making this something dirty,” Ginny says.
T just tilts his head to one side, purses his lips, blinks once, slowly. Ginny nods. She shakes her head. Looks away. “Yeah...” she says. “Yeah.”

By the end of the day, forty bound copies of my entire blog are circulating throughout the set. Seems my two worlds have collided. I call my lawyer at 7 and my publisher's lawyer at 8:45.

“If this is where memories are made
I'm gonna like what I see.
And everything and nothing is
as sacred as we want it to be.
And this time, this time
is fine just as it is.”

I am unshaken. The nonreality of reality strikes me as humorous today. I want to go dancing. I think clubbing on the Sabbath is why there's no cover on Sundays at my favorite spots. I'm simply meant to remember my body, this tangible gift from Christ, more than ever, on this day. I think about a friend singing: “Let's give them something to talk about... a little mystery to figure out...” She laughed to me about humming it for three days straight. The flip attitude, the joy in stress, the “oh, get a life, people” murmur behind the words. I found myself fixated on:

“Give me your sweet forgiveness
sweeter than honey.
Give me your sweet forgiveness
sweeter than wine.”

And I wasn't sure what I wanted to be forgiven for but I sure did know that sweeter than honey is exactly what you are to me, so I hummed that one all day while the strangers in my friends muttered about expectations and persona and responsibility.

I walked off set when a grip mumbled that four-lettered word while I sat eating my side salad. Funny... but I'm starting to think of it as a badge of honor.

“These people 'round here
wear beaten down eyes
sunk in smoke dried faces.
They're so resigned to what their fate is.
But not us, no, not us.
We are far too young and clever.
Ah come on...”

In the Catholic church, Cecilia is the patron saint of musicians. A muse of sorts bringing inspiration, watching over music makers. But if I ever had a patron saint it was Joan of Arc and the inspiration she brought me was historical proof that the more faithful one is, the higher the chance that she will be called a lunatic. I was equally inspired by Galileo and moved to smiles instead of tears when I walked into the Spot to hear:

“Cecilia, you're breakin' my heart.
You're shakin' my confidence daily.
Whoa, Cecilia, I'm down on my knees.
I'm beggin' you please to come home.
Come on home...”

And that's when it hits. I have my muse. I have my inspiration. That is why the dark drama at work is unable to strip me or burn me at the stake. I have my armor and sword, yes, yes, always... but they are often not enough. As in war and football, not always in life. A good offense is not always a good defense. Sometimes we need something *bright* not just something *sharp.* Sometimes we need something funny, sexy, challenging... responsive, irresponsible, wild and, of course, untempered, to remind us why we continue to fight.

And as I come to this realization, I know at last that sleep will stop eluding me. The night after night of dropping into exhaustion for two hours and then waking for the rest will be gone. I tore myself apart looking for why... *why* wasn't I *worried*? Why wasn't I hurt by that nonreality that was my very personal collision of worlds? Why, why, why?

Because I have you.

“You flash your bedroom eyes like a jumpin' jack.
You drive the pretty boys outta their heads.
Then play it pretty with a pat on the back.
You know you got it... so come and get it.”

I laugh myself through three hours of music. My laughter appears to be contagious. The energy on the floor is light, bright, sweet and fluffy like cotton candy. Like the Monster Bag I loved at the Puyallup Fair... both of them *blush* At one point, a lanky leather-and-neon raver I've seen before sizes me up. She grins crooked and cocky. “Well,” she's all-knowing, this punk. “*Somebody* got laid.”

And I laughed harder. Much harder. Because she was right. *Somebody* did get laid all right. But it wasn't me.

“Who's that casting devious stares
in my direction.
Oh baby, this surely is a dream.
Yeah baby, this must be my dream...”

There was tension -- exquisite and torturous and pounding through my bones and muscles and veins. There was stress and danger and betrayal and deceit all outside my control. And then...

And then it was just gone.

I have been called many things, some of them four-lettered and others much longer. But Polly Anna is not one of them. And so... I worried. I fretted. What insanity had taken my mind that I was so content? So settled? So pleasantly resigned to my fate? Why was everything, suddenly, so good to go? Who had harvested my emotional state?

But now I know...

“She don't like losing,
to her it's still a game.
And though she will mess up your life,
you'll want her just the same,
and now I know:
She has a built-in ability
to take everything she sees.
And now it seems, I'm falling,
I'm falling for her!”

And I was still laughing as I tumbled into dreams, beneath skylights of scattered stars and wispy clouds, and a three-legged cat snoring loudly and announcing, most certainly, the beginning of the End Times. But hey *shrug* I'm down with that *grin*

EJ

You look at me and I fall into the forest of your eyes. I am enchanted and lost and found and saved and damned. I would walk through fire to live this life, to love you. Dear Lord, sometimes, I think I do. Do you think me a fool? I look at you -- a treasure, an angel, a warrior -- and I see you quiet and fierce. Talk to me. Tell me anything. Let me read your internal state in the cadence of your words over the still night quiet. Tell me you walk with me. Tell me that nothing is left unsaid. Tell me you love me.

Working on the Sabbath

2009-01-12T03:28:00.000-08:00

Christmas morning. I open an alarm clock from Santa. It wakes me with my mp3 player. Santa doesn’t need to give me the receipt. I already paid off the card.

Hard beat. Heart beat. I bolt up sweating. Blood on my pillow. I’ve bitten my lip. Hand shakes as I thumb the volume up. My CK Playlist.

“Why do we crucify ourselves?
Everyday... I crucify myself.
Nothing I do is good enough for you...
and my heart is sick of being in chains.”

They wake me at 5 a.m. to tell me they’ve replaced me with a white grrl. They go out of their way to tell me the name of her live-in boy-toy lover. They use newly hyphenated words like financial-risk and quantifiable-liability and loss-and-win-ratio. They use saccharine words like pay-off and flat-fee.

Because I couldn’t conjure a lie and look like I wanted a guy between my legs.

“Where’s the chemistry, EJ?” I wasn’t aware this was AP Science. Do I have to retake the lab or can I get by with just the multiple choice? Can someone text me the answers? I was too busy not going down on my grrl to study.

Chemistry. Snap. You’re looking at the camera. Strawberry curls. Snap. You’re looking at her. Pupils wide. Snap. She didn’t mean to send me the photo. Not that photo. Oh baby. That’s chemistry. Catch-my-breath crackle. *shaking my head* No, I can’t fake that. They’re right.

So take back the Emmy and I’ll stop phoning it in.

“Every finger in the room is pointing at me.
I wanna spit in their faces
then I get afraid of what that could bring.
Figures that my courage would choose to sell out now.”

They call back at 6:15 to tell me they’ve changed their minds. The trades have printed a good review of an earlier version (one with me) and pulled me out as the heart-and-soul. They’d need an exorcist to replace me now. They’d need a voodoo high priest, poppet. Tammy is the only female EVP. They are standing around her, no doubt, clustered like vulture-slash-voyeurs while she croons to me. A lover’s voice. Intimate and immediate. Like asking me to stay in bed and touch her one more time. Tammy says, “I want things between us to be like they were.” I have never slept with Tammy. “Why do you put us through this, Angel?” I have never clubbed with Tammy. “Why do you make us do this?” Rape me? “Why can’t you just enjoy this?” Oh... Lord... I scramble out of bed and vomit before I reach the bathroom.

“Why do we crucify ourselves?
Everyday... I crucify myself.
Got enough guilt to start my own religion.
Where are those angels when you need them?”

And I yank the player off the alarm clock connector cord and grab my keys with my other hand. My jacket is somewhere, there, now here, over my shoulders, heavy like armor, like anger. The door slams behind me. A baby wakes. I don’t... can’t stop. “Not my baby...” Means so many things. New bike roars in the crisp morning. Rock her forward and throw my helmet into the corner of the garage. Bolt her out and flash on straddling you, my head thrown back, crying your name over and over and over again.

Some stand and some crumble. Some shout and some weep. The lions roar differently for every ear. “Do you hear your lions?” Grandmother used to say. “Is that why there is fire in your eyes?”

I don’t wait well. The den is cold. I step out of the darkness. Never wait for the angels. Christ is always right here... and my heart beats. If my heart beats, I want to be fighting. I don’t lay it down until He knocks me down. And He has certainly had to before.

“Not very stable... is she?” Hm. Make believe? Misheard? Rumor and innuendo? Lucky I don’t need someone to sign post my path. The white-washing of faith should be a sin... if it already is, someone should send out a letter.

Five things I'm dying to confess... but never will:

1) Leave me.

“Don't know if I could stand
another hand upon you.
All I know is that I should.”

And every moment I have spent with you comes into clarity as the truly dangerous and destructive force that it is. How you have torn my life apart and I have fallen to pieces like a scattered jigsaw puzzle on the floor. Your hands made me tremble while you remade me yourself, and I caught my breath at the picture of me, no reflection in the mirror, a magical creature. Creation and destruction, my Shiva. Your demolition of my life was more welcome than wind on the ocean and lightning over the waves. Your danger is sweeter than spring air and burns brighter than any dawn. Wreck me, take me apart, and hand me to Him.

“Give me life. Give me pain.
Give me my self again.
Oh these little earthquakes...
Here we go again.
Doesn't take much to rip us into pieces.”

Zero to seventy-five.

Forgot my wallet at home. Forgot the city limits behind me. Travelling north I’m moving toward everyone I love. I’m running after the rain.

Today is the Sabbath. I close my eyes.

Eighty. Eighty-five.

2) I have forgotten his voice.

More than a thousand miles away, my family is sweating. Hard work on the Sabbath clears the mind for Christ. They are hauling, hammering, cleaning, scrubbing. They are caring for animals and children. They are loving one another. They are whispering names in the quiet of the night. They are one heart even when shattered. They are a flock of angels, in all states of grace. They are alone, together, their own, and mine. All at once. All now.

Ringed by trees. Evergreens in every green holding up the sky. Strong bodies move across their earth, that region of Christ, living the Word. Only there does the Sabbath exist for me. While strangers pack churches and hum hymns and mutter morals, I know truly only those souls walking there on this day. Every Sabbath I know. She is true as rain on my face. She is passion, unbridled beneath steady hands and eyes. She is still as night sky. My patron saint. I pray at the stations of the cross. I contemplate Him when I imagine that sacred place.

Sixty. Fifty-five.

Want your arms around me. Telling me it’ll be okay.

Want your hands on my shoulders. Your gaze lit from within.

Want your attention. Your outside-the-box solutions.

Want your lips on mine. Silencing my no.

“But we unleashed a lion.
Gnashed his teeth.
And the boy was something
mommy wouldn't wear.
Jeremy spoke in class today.
Try to forget this...
Try to erase this....”

3) I would never let him yell at her. He’d be on the floor before her eyes formed tears.

And there’s no way I’ll reach the ocean because I’m travelling in the wrong direction. And there’s no way I’ll reach my holy land because I’ve no money for gasoline. I spot the high and dry median, pull the U-y across four and take myself home hovering at the speed limit. I feel myself coming down off the adrenaline high. I want waffles with strawberries and bacon. I want dark, strong coffee with raw sugar. I want you.

“There's a fear in me, but it's not showing.
I look ahead too all the plans we made
and the dreams that we had.
I'm in a world that tries to take them away...
but I'm taking them back.”

I park the bike and go inside. The house is empty. But it is never quiet. A radio is on somewhere spouting an en mass mass. The tv is on low with no one to watch it. A child’s toy is reciting the alphabet. I strip in the hall. Pull on old jeans and a tank. I go next door. Lillian is only in her late sixties but she is a woman of society and she never learned how to clean a gutter.

4) The Clozaril took away the nightmares... but it also stole my ability to paint.

Ten hours. Ten hours I bend over her roof line, mend fencing and tie up brambles. Three storeys up, I rip the butt off my jeans and lose both pockets to the uneven composition roofing. The slop from the gutters is just one season’s worth; she paid someone last year. I fill buckets, up and down I shimmy because she doesn’t have a ladder. I turn it into her flower beds, the shovel growing impossibly heavy after the first five hours. There is a dead crow in the attic eaves. There are nests of doves tucked into the observatory dome. There is a view of unbroken sky from the highest peak.

I sing “Oh Holy Night” horribly off-tune and burn away everything in me by sweating until I want to strip nude and every muscle in my body aches with the tension of not breaking my neck by falling off the roof. Ten hours. This is a Sabbath. The highest peak is my pew. My God asks that I worship under His roof, this sky. In His world. In His way. My worship is never easy. It sweats and bleeds and aches and *works.*

Ten hours I celebrate this body that Christ made me.

Lillian invites me inside when it gets too dark to see. She hands me a plate of hot scones with blackberry preserves. She hands me a gold-rimmed cup of steaming espresso. I drink it like wine, like salvation, like poison, like choice. I drink it and count the days in my head until it will be out of my system. I drink it with my eyes closed and tell myself it will strengthen my will. The bottle said, “Drink Me” and so I did.

“Cause when push comes to shove
you taste what you're made of.
On your knees you look up...
You get mad. You get strong.
Then you stand.
One more small piece of you
falls into place.”

Lillian plays harp music. It pipes through the house. I recognize it. But how can I recognize it? I am too tired to ask. She does not speak because women of class do not make idle chatter. She gazes at me quietly, appraisingly. I feel my body humming with strength and purpose and faith. I sip my espresso, roll it over my tongue. I eat my scone with a fork. Spread the blackberries sparingly. I am sweaty and I stink. But the scent is like wild roses and maple leaves and green moss and growing things almost ready to wake. In the high-backed cherry wood chair with the very white upholstery, I am out of place... and more in my place than I have ever been before.

“You’re a very beautiful young woman,” Lillian says. And she means it just as it lays. There is nothing more behind her words. She says it like she’s telling me my eyes are brown or my skin is cinnamon or my hair is raven. She is just telling me a fact because she knows I don’t believe it and she’s disagreeing with me.

I look up at her. Her eyes are slate grey. Her hair is silver and white. Her skin is like honey oak parchment. I say softly, “I’m a lot of things.” and my voice is so much smaller than I intend it to be... but it has been said and the truth is steady.

I am steady.

EJ

5) Sometimes, I want them to be right. Thirty is long enough.

Scattered

2009-01-04T23:14:00.000-08:00

"Oh holy night
The stars are brightly shining
A thrill of hope the weary world rejoices
For yonder breaks a new and glorious morn."

Can't stop myself. From wanting you. From shaking for you. Can't ease the throbbing that grips me, the desire that surges in waves, unrelenting. I think your name, your face and my body responds; you may as well be here, right here. I pace here in the darkness of the cottage, all expensive ceramic white tile and warm honey oak. My boots make steady sounds across the floor until they seem too much and I kick them off. The cold tile does nothing to cool me down. I light two candles. The bloom, flowers, speaking in tongues. I need to write my blog... but I can barely think. You strip away reason and logic and responsibility. My passion for you leaves me bare in the universe, here beneath this ceiling full of sky lights scattered with Christ's own stars. I close my eyes. I think, ‘I want you.’ That isn't enough. I cast, ‘I need you.’ There is no power there. I sink to my knees, my head back, my face to the sky. “Take me. Dear Lord, take me.” And that is the nearest I can come without you here to hear my cries.

Two months ago:

I’m gritting my teeth. Been gritting them all day. This day started with me wanting you, and stayed that way. I need the media boy in front of me to *shut up* and give me an opening to thank him profusely, squeeze his hand a moment too long, and escape the lot – *this* world – to lose myself to speed. After all... it’s Friday night.

Straddling my bike at last at 11:48 p.m., I zip my jacket, catch the scent of the steel zipper, snaps and buckles set in earthy black leather. I remember the first time you wore leather pants for me. It wasn’t in your nature then... but it is now. I tug on my gloves and remember my hand slide along your thigh as the glove caresses my palm. I leave through the golden gate, my helmet making me anonymous.

The street is populated by steel and fiberglass beasts. Here is the only place I’m not color blind. I take in the rainbow of the automobile industry. I think of Skittles. I think of gumdrops. I think of sprinkling gemstones through my fingers. I think of touching you, taut beneath my fingertips, under my tongue. I exhale, sharp and loud. My muscles twitch across my shoulder blades. I pull over and close my eyes. The freeway traffic buzzes. My head spins. Gotta think about a different kind of merging if I want to get home safely.

“You spin me up so tight, baby... no wonder you can play me like a stringed instrument, every word you whisper a single strum across twenty-two strings. I tremble for you, your music in my blood, brisk storm winds that crash suddenly across the landscape of my body. My hands shake. This addiction... is so sweet.”

I am praying:

“I fall on my knees
I hear an angel's voice
Oh night divine
Oh night, this love was born”

I think of you and the world dissolves. FlipStart, laptop, whatever. It doesn't matter the delivery device. I want you. Now. Any way, every way I can have you. I read your words and you might as well be whispering them in my ear, your hands playing across the little cream-colored buttons on my shirt. I can close my eyes... or heck, leave them open... and I can feel my body fall out of sync with everything around me. I go to that place where we are together, were we cross the distance to stand in one another's arms. It is enough. I thank my Christ for every heartbeat. It is enough. I am blessed with you here, in this realm of desire of that no man can find, and will take you here if I cannot have you elsewhere. I am thankful. I praise His name for this gift.

I remember my grandmother speaking of transcendent love. I never knew who she meant until recently. And I never knew what that might feel like until I came to know you. You have brought me closer to my own blood which, for me, brings me closer to my Christ and I can never do or say enough to thank you.

“But sometimes I wonder how I'll even get through the night . . . through an hour . . . a minute, a second . . . without you. Without you beside me. Without your cerulean eyes locked on mine . . . But you are here, in so many ways. The scent of your perfume is still on my skin. I know it well. The taste of you is on my lips, though, it is so hard to narrow down . . . cinnamon and nutmeg sometimes . . . other times you are somewhere north of curry but west of cumin . . .”

Two months ago:

I make it home, though I’m not sure how. I realize that I really should stop driving under the influence (of you)... but then... when would I be able to drive? I push my helmet across the counter, feel my hair spill over my collar, lean back against the door, closed and relocked behind me. I

close

my eyes. One. Inhale. Two. Exhale. Three...

I unzip my jacket slowly, a tooth at a time, liking the sound of the thick-cut steel popping down my chest and stomach. Slide the quarter inch hide off my shoulders, which are taut and tense, let it drop around my boots. Gloves next. Then cotton polo, red with three black stripes, single button already undone.

“I button the bottom two buttons. Right now . . . I want one thing, only. You. I want to hold you so tight that we become one being. I want our mouths crashing together, lips, tongue, and teeth. I want my hands along every inch of your skin. I want to hear you gasp, me inside you, as I hold you, as you come for me. I wonder how long these two buttons will last . . . because, baby? I'm already undone.”

I cross my arms and lift my shirt off in one easy move that I’ve never utilized for my work on-camera but a thousand times alone like these. Boot buckles loosen with a nudge and I kick them off... walk in tank, jeans and chaps, into my room. I am led, of course, by you. Your hand in mine is bold, firm... but your eyes, your gaze is shy.

The radio plays:

“You're my only reason
You're my only truth...
I need you like water
Like breath, like rain...
There's a freedom in your arms
That carries me through
I need you”

I go to a poetry slam. Spoken word has made me a believer in more things than I can count. I nod and close my eyes. I smile and my brown cheeks get darker with my blush of understanding.

“I'm starting to think that Christ is more involved in my love life than I'm entirely comfortable with. That perhaps His hand formed you and me and lays down this love for us to pick like miniature daisies. I imagine you weaving garlands, delicate summer crowns of white petals and tiny sunshine yellow eyes. For some reason, in this fantasy, you are always grinning. Perhaps because in your long walks with our Christ, He has whispered to you His plans? I certainly know that someone divine is whispering to you. Because, baby, the way you touch me? Your fingertips, your lips. Your force, pace, certainty. Your strength, your patience. The way you reassure me. The way you never give in. I say no, no. But you pay attention. My social conditioning is not who I am even when, sometimes, it carries me away. You feel my trembling and know my heart. You lift me – hallelujah! You lift me – and as I no, no, shaking my head, you pull me tighter. You don't hesitate to tell me, firmly, oh yes. But doesn't Christ have better things to do? Oh wait. Is there anything more holy than two people in love?”

A picture of a cream-pink rose from a friend appears in my inbox. I blink. I smile. I blush. I wonder if she knows.

“Another thing I absolutely love . . . is when I'm looking for a scripture passage that I remember . . . and it's not there. And I realize that it was not something I read, but something that Christ whispered to me in those times that I was asking.”

“...so possessed by you, laying so still they think I’m napping...” But this is not sleep. This is prayer. This is discovering scripture that has not yet been written down.

Three months ago:

I want you like that. Shy gaze, bold hands. Seeing you see me... knowing that the face I turn to you is full of desire. Knowing you see what you do to me. All that and yet you meet my gaze with shy. You stand, confident and open. You wear society’s grin. You are an elixir that sparks my passion, the perfect potion, an alchemy of desire. I wanna play along, whisper, “Come here, baby. Come here...” You can play shy. I can play bold. We’ll both know the truth. Shh. *whispering against your ear... your head tips back* It’s our little secret, lover....

These politics of desire. The changing times that change not at all. The States that still make it illegal to proclaim a woman’s right for desire. Brown paper wrapper packages can be mailed only north of their borders. I think about these things sometimes. When I talk to intelligent women and passionate men who long to be something other than what culture demands of them. The Paglia approach to male prowess and female worth... do we really need to go there? She and I may agree on a great number of things... but we’re in the grips of another generation of young people coming of age without knowing what an orgasm is or how to define sex or why any of it is important to the spiritual completeness of their bodies. So... perhaps we should drop the pretenses and the brain-washing and turn the lights off and the music on and when the rave strobes catch nothing but commitment rings, let’s keep our eyes on our partner (and off the clock, Wings) and remember why Christ gave us bodies in the first place.

Because these sacred clockworks were not meant to be wound up... they were meant to let go.

"...at the point of orgasm he
becomes vulnerable.
Truly my own.
I wait for that moment.
It is what I live for.
When the ceiling of my apartment
disappears and there we are,
he and me, sitting
on the cold, steel bench,
on the playground,
not chosen for the team
that all the other boys are on.
Our elbows are touching. And
above us, the clouds roll by
like elephant kings."

“He taught us to love one another
His law is love and His gospel is peace
Chains shall He break for the slave is our brother
And in His name all oppression shall cease
Sweet hymns of joy in grateful chorus raise we,
Let all within us praise His holy name.”

EJ

Unwrap Me

2008-12-28T09:13:00.000-08:00

The sun rises and I wake on the bench that wraps around the floor to ceiling windows of my new studio... where I have never painted. The world wakes with the dawn and I slide down off the bench pillow, patterned with little roses, and kneel and pray. I think of fractal snowflakes. I think of origami hamsters. I wish for change but I pray for solace.

*aside begins* Today I have been asked by my friend Amel to speak at his church. It is a Mormon church. He tells me there will be forty-two young women in attendance. The gist of the talk will be a play on the idea that "Life Happens While We're Making Other Plans." The twist, of course is, "While You're Waiting to Find Your Impassioned Path, You're Standing On It Not Doing Anything." Amel offered me an honorarium. I stared at him until he looked away from me. In a horrible moment, he was not my friend. He was a cog in a machine that is as corrupt and fallible as any of man's machines. I found my voice. I told him, gently, that his money would be put to better use elsewhere. There was a moment. And then he held me. I did not cry. But even closer than we have ever stood, his body so near mine and so familiar to me because Amel is built like my father was... even standing in his arms, I felt a distance between us that was new and unrepairable. His understanding and defense of an organized action I consider heinous has placed us in separate realities. This tightens my heart in my chest. I enjoyed having Amel in my reality while it lasted. *aside ends*

The concept of presents is pretty universal. Many of us got a refresher course a few days ago. The idea of bright or elegant paper (mystery) wrapped around an unknown gift (pleasure) is ageless and exciting. Even virtual reality environments like IMVU (the Mardi Gras 3000 official chat client) offer gifting between members, going so far as supplying a large variety of wrapping paper. In person or in pixels, unwrapping a mystery and making a discovery speaks to a primal part of us that is delighted and untamed. Our inner child... more like our inner Wild Thing.

Just this last week, I thought two friends were punking me. They said the exact same things to me about each other and about themselves at the exact same time (one was in live-chat with me, the other was in my forum inbox). I blinked at the words -- black on white and white on black. I blushed, which annoyed me. I thought about how I had crafted this beautiful metaphor about oceans and sail boats and cresting waves to explain just a few days ago how they were very different and that was just darn okay.

And now here they were saying... the exact... same... things.

*sigh*

Women.

But this moment got me thinking. It got me thinking about how you can know someone for years, formative years even, but truly not see what is inside their shiny wrapping. Sometimes? You don't even have a glimpse or have a clue. It just isn't... what? You want to know what my two friends were saying? You want me to live up to my kiss-and-tell, little-gamer-over-share reputation? Well, duh. Yeah, I'll tell you, but I'll get there in my time, so deal ;)

*aside begins* I am talking to a spicy gal pal of mine who thinks about sex about as much as a seventeen year old boy, which, statistics show, is an impressive amount. She is not seventeen (add ten years) but she is gorgeous and, statistic show, that gorgeous women do actually tend to have brains and so my buddy has something to say about her favorite subject every day. Sometimes twice a day. Today she is bent about Alabama, Colorado, Georgia, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas and Virginia. Her cousin is having a boring time with her new husband. She's starting to get frustrated with her lack of... err... fun. So my friend decides to send her an itty bitty, adorable personal and private, small and sculpted fingertip massager from the most trusted name in bedroom items, Trojan. Their website is very professional with articles about sexual health and the importance of release for both mental clarity, energy and just general happy happy joy joy. Unfortunately, the itty bitty helper is illegal to ship into AL, CO, GA, KS, LA, MS, TX or VA. Because, my pal can only assume, women are not allow to come in a Red State. Yes, I went there. *aside ends*

And I am certain they are punking me and I'm searching for the humor in the situation. They are both coddling the other one. They are both avoiding all labels (identity is so confining). They are both protecting each other from the truths of life which are 1) not PG-13, 2) not always easy, 3) usually sexually charged, 4) all full up of power dynamics that aren't easily defined, and, most importantly, 5) are truths which are identical for both of them.

Because the awesome thing about life is that people can be in very different places and living very different lives, but be feeling many of the exact same things. This is all universal issues. Often, novels and films and good tv shows tackles these undeniable elements of life. Other times, we deal with them by saying aloud, to our dearest friend, in the middle of the night:

"I don't want you to judge me. But I can't talk to anyone else. I want you back. I need you back. I miss you. But you won't find me the same grrl you did before. I have changed... or I have discovered the woman, person, lover that has been inside me all along. I want you to meet her and like her but she doesn't like the assumption that she is anything like I used to be. And, by the way, I have *got* to tell you about what happened two nights ago on the hood of his car!"

Sometimes we unwrap ourselves like an onion or a pomegranate. Other times, we are discovered by another. Send almost always, we want our closet friend to be there when that final layer of glossimer paper is pulled away.

Because a wrapped gift is beautiful... but it is never as interesting as the intricate puzzle art that awaits inside.

*aside begins* I play the Secret Word Game with some friends at Christmas. There are four of us (three are mothers). We each have four pieces of paper. We describe each other and ourselves with ten words each. Then we get all four lists about us. We get to see how many of the words are the same. There is no losing. It is an interesting way to pass the time while the coffee is brewing and the donuts are cooling from the fryer and the XBox is cooling down after an epic frag match. We are laughing and blushing and snorting and chuckling. My friend Gille describes herself with ten words that none of us see her as. She loves this and so do I. Her partner says, "I guess I have another gift to unwrap for Christmas." I don't think I've ever heard a sexier statement. *aside ends*

Wrapping paper is sometimes not so pretty -- or, at least, the pretty parts are all covered up. Sometimes all there is to see are those ugly things called labels (as opposed to that truths called identity). The labels are stuck there by us and by the world and they cover even the outer wrapping that hides our heart away.

Oh... I'm thinking about caterpillars again. They spin as a wooly guy. They *dissolve* into goo and cells and biomatter. And from that primordial ooze emerges the mothy buttery new guy. The new creature, not so much the same as the old creature. If you liked the caterpillar, you may miss all that fur. But you may also find the mothra just as much fun. Give change a chance. Transformation can be family fun for everyone!

It seems easy to say that we should always show our true colors. It is actually as easy to say this as it is to laugh it off and say we must be prudent and protective. After all, we could change again. Why reveal who we are *now* if we may very well change, transform, tomorrow? Why live honestly if your opinions are always shifting? Because living in another way -- in a way that does not show who we are, that stifles our voice and unique thoughts and ideas -- is not living. It's acting. And acting never pays as well as they say it does.

EJ

Everything to Me

2008-12-21T12:08:00.001-08:00

A photo of blue icicle lights nestled among the low angles of a honey-oak attic room. It's tucked in my wallet. The photo, not the room... though... I have opened my black leather billfold so often now to glimpse the soft focus of those lights and the romantic coaxing of those artistic angles like a personal cathedral... so often now that I have wished, so hard, that, that photo was a portal, a gateway I could step through and be *there.* Right... there... oh.

I think I need to go dancing.

And so...

The fourth club is the charm. I've driven more than a hundred miles. I've never danced here before. The music is haunting and dark, something between alt-techno and goth. I'd be laughing if the DJ weren't live and laying down beats unique and raw, danceable, entrancing. And my eyes close and my body moves, arms up, hands open, hips rolling, and you slide into place behind me.

Imagine it. Deep breath. Let go. Imagine if everything you knew was suddenly different. Not just everything you'd been taught. Not just everything you'd been told. What if everything you knew as certainty in your heart was suspect?

Wait. The music changes. You lean tight against me. I don't know you. But I saw you across the tables when I first walked in. You are wearing perfume, light, that smells like oranges and cloves. Your hair is long and straight. Your skin is moonlight beneath the pearl shimmer of a button up. You are here alone.

What if only half of what you knew changed? But the changes were random and unexpected and followed no pattern, rhyme or reason. What if you discovered lies? What if you discovered flaws? What if you discovered jewels that were connected to your ability to breathe, that you could not live without? What if you grew up, slow and easy, all along beneath a brilliant blue sky... and then you woke up one morning, and the city streets were gone, the bustle had vanished, and the sky was black. Jet black... scattered with five million stars.

You are very careful not to lay hands on me. Your hands stay above your head, which is a head and a half above mine. My shoulders to your ribs and chest, my hips against your thighs, you toss your hair and I feel strands like ribbons of satin, neither blonde nor brunette but somewhere in-between, fall between my fingers and then slide away. My palms tingle. You are wearing a bracelet of small bells and I catch my breath.

Raised within the safety of convention and tradition and denomination and culture. It is easier to live and wake without the fruit from the tree of knowledge. The snake's strange whispering is rarely black and white, good and evil, but rather mixed messages like, “I knew this would be a trial for you.” and “We've always known.” The snake murmurs dissent and false discovery. But in the end, he knows nothing and no one. He is not Christ. When we reach past the snake, not to pluck the fruit, but to pull ourselves into the Godtree, it is then that we understand. We need not eat for Christ is our fruit.

The lights are blue. They arrived in my inbox via PhotoBucket and were accompanied by snow and machines and gentle things that make a young woman a woman like armor-clad fairies hanging among solar system models and family portraits of smiling parents. The blue lights hang in slender strands from the ceiling which is only six feet at its highest point and three feet at its lowest. They glow with an aura both warm and cool, suspended somewhere between temperatures when sensation wipes away the need for yes or no, day or night, hot or cold. The portal to my blue room is in my wallet. My wallet is tucked into the outside pocket of my soft, loose leather pants. A chain, silver with charms (a key, a lock, a motorcycle, a heart, a dove), snakes up out of the deep pocket and latches onto the belt loop on my right hip. The chain and charms make urban jiggle bells. I like the sound mixed with your bracelet brass.

We are raised with what works for our parents for we are part of their world. We are not yet making our own world. The reality we see, no matter how much we accept and embrace it, is their reality. It is not our own. If we attend public school we start to glimpse foreshadowing of our own reality, we start to witness the overlapping realities of others. But still, we belong to the path of our parents. When finally we come through the fabric of their universe and cross over into our own (sometimes violently, sometimes without barely noticing) it can be easy or hard but it is always intrinsically different. Even if the surface and patterns are the same, at the core, our reality is different. This is because we are not our parents. It is only when we stop craving their approval, dreading their disappointment, and living for their eyes, that our reality will at long last be revealed.

I turn to face you. I tip my head back to look in your eyes. Your features are bird-like, chiseled, elegant. Your eyes are brown, gold and green. Just beneath my focused vision I make out a small cross hanging between your collar bones. It is gold. Two more of the tiny brass bells hang on either side it. I don't look down directly. Your shirt is unbuttoned three of six. You wear nothing under it. The music pulses now in time with the lights in time with my body in time with the chorus of miniature brass bells. You are wearing jet black CK jeans. I decide you are a herald of the End Times... one of the riders perhaps... and I wonder where you left your horse.

Of course, when everything is suspect we doubt even ourselves and what our own senses tell us. The comfortable certainty that comes from living in someone else's reality is like hard candy or chocolate – sweet and soothing and addictive. Nice when someone else carries the burdens. Nice when someone else makes the rules and takes the blame and builds the truth. Safer that way. But one reality does not fit all. Reality is not wash and wear. It is customized and tailored and fit to our bodies and our hearts and our souls in a way that will feel so right and so perfect – like armor and evening gown/tux with tails all in one – that we'll realize we're knowing and feeling and living for the first time, for never before were we fully alive.

I am aware in these moments lost in music that everything about my reality falls away except for passion. Desire is my companion when I dance. She stomps, rocks, sways, slides, rolls her way between lights and strobes and backbeat rhythms until she fills my body. She is light and heat and clarity of thought and balance of action. She is ache and burning, taut and pulsing, muscle, bone, heartbeat. She carries over. She fuels me. She never leaves me. She is my celebration of being alive.

Christ carries over. Christ moves with us between realities. Not Christ as we are told He is, but the voice of Christ that speaks, privately, to each of us. The whispers of divinity. This is the only truth. Rules, dictates, man's guidelines... these alter and adapt between realities. Even morals can change. Even your favorite food, color, pass-time. But that internal voice of Christ – that voice from outside yourself that lights that place in your heart... that voice from within yourself that sends a beacon into the heavens with every prayer – will remain your own. Once you discover Him, you can never leave Him behind.

I am straddling my Kawa in the parking lot. I am looking at the photo again, illuminated by the single distant street lamp... illuminated by the aura of small blue lights. An engine kick starts. I want to fall into that portal of blue and wake up looking up at those strands of stars. I look up. You ride a black and white steel stallion that makes my T1000 look like a sleek toy. I watch you pull out of the parking lot. Your hair streams like a short cloak beneath your helmet. I look up. The sky is black. It is scattered with thirteen million stars. I was taught the names of the constellations.

Tonight I rename all of them.

EJ

With This Ring

2008-12-14T16:31:00.000-08:00

“We’re not a vendor. We're not your partner. We’re your gateway to this industry. If you think you run the show, you’re wrong. We’re the only game in town, kiddo. Everybody plays by our rules and so will you.”

And, for the first time in a long time, I am speechless not with delighted surprise or wonderment or laughter, but rather with cold, drowning shock.

I almost drop the phone.

* * *

Dictionary.com boasts thirty-three definitions of "ring." Some are nouns. Some are verbs. Two are idioms. If you a New Testament Christian, however, a ring is a noun and means only one thing: Now then and forever.

So you best be careful when you grant one.

In the lexicon of my faith there are English words that are commonly used in America (and elsewhere) that have slightly different meanings. “Offer” and “grant” leap immediately to mind, as do “pray” and “worship.” If I’m making a promise from the depths of my soul, I’m granting myself to another. If I’m bowing my head in prayer, I may as well be murmuring in conversation to Christ as I may be making love. But as a symbol, a ring, I think, is one of the most misused and misunderstood elements.

A NTC would rarely buy herself a fine ring. Street jewelry, sure, but rarely a quality piece of jewelry. A ring is a tangible symbol of a pledge or promise offered to you. Someone else has made a grant of themselves, in some way, by placing a ring in your palm. If you place it on your finger, you accept this grant for the duration never only intended but always specified at offering.

A traditional NTC wedding set is three rings which fit together or not, but which will always be worn. Though it is perhaps simpler in contemporary society to say these rings symbolize commitment, engagement and marriage, most correct would be to say that they are all rings offered and granted between two people who intend to spend the rest of their lives together. The first marks their time as lovers, private intimate partners without children, their focus on each other. The second ring marks a public acknowledgement of the relationship, a time of reaching out to friends and family and usually includes cohabitation and commitment ceremony beneath Christ’s own sky. The third ring celebrates the creation of a family, the adoption or birth of children.

And though wedding sets and love are often the first things people think of when rings are discussed, tonight my mind and heart keeps taking me to a different kind. A promise ring. A grant made and accepted. A simple silver ring with small block letters: MIND BODY SPIRIT. A ring whose twin has never left my finger outside of work in all these years. A promise that says: We will make the impossible possible.

* * *

“This friend of yours? The one with the *independent* CCG?” *scoff*

There is no friend but that’s not why with the scoffing. The scoffing is about the abject failure of every collectible card game launched by an independent company in the history of world since WoC invented the genre.

“They’ve chosen the hardest possible path and we’re not going to make it any easier for them.”

No duh.

“We’ll make sure their failure effects us as little as possible but refusing to list any product until we have stock in holding and proof of stock in their warehouse. We want their marketing plan, we want their exit plan, we want the insurance policy that pays for us to ship back stock when they go bankrupt.”

The sun is rising into my LA sky, burning away late morning clouds. On the East Coast, it is already noon and I feel like I’m playing catch up.

* * *

Cecil Adams over at www.straightdope.com answers questions, debunks myths and otherwise does witty, smarty stuff for people all over the world. He is research god of the universe and has a way of sharing information that is accessible and intelligent at once.

I had always thought it an urban myth that the Chinese word for “crisis” is made up of two characters signifying “opportunity” and “danger,” thus forming a kind of zen metaphor for life and business. And it is bunk, on the surface, seriously over simplified, but Cecil makes a bright and shiny argument for the connection between the three words that would entertain any linguist and intrigued this gamer grrl.

“We have to catch up!” one friend said to another.
“We’re *always* catching up!” snapped the response.

We’re always in crisis.

Well... yes. The Big Boys have been doing this – publishing books and games – since before our grandparents came to this country. They have massive revolving lines of credit and subsidiary sales that fuel small countries, let alone allow them to publish flops for four or five years without much more than a changing of the scapegoated guard.

As independent voices with independent presses – like Woolfe and Whitman – we should pray for a constant state of crisis. Because only in crisis are we driven to our best. Only in crisis do we find the chance for brilliant opportunities.

If it were easy... everyone would be doing it.

If it were easy... everyone would succeed.

I choose to do this, not because it is easy, but rather, specifically, because it is hard ;) I choose to do this because the struggle is sharp and painful and real and alive. I choose to do this for the same reason that women wake up in poverty and labor in factories and embrace their children.

If we waited until it were easy... if we waited until we were ready... no one important would ever be born and nothing worth doing would ever be done.

* * *

My cat has three legs and one eye, half a tail and one-point-five ears. I tried to PhotoShop him a second eye and a fourth leg and half-again more ear etc. I thought, “He’s a handsome beast. I could sell snaps of him at Dreamstime.” I tweaked and digital botoxed. I uploaded. He’s sold not a copy. And now he likes to bite me.

I learned my lesson.

“They’d have to have crazy store support.” The stranger, the corporate suit with the salaried position and the fat Christmas bonus, is still talking. I can tell he likes words like verbiage and lexicon and mind-share. I’d like to smack him up side the head with a piece of my mind-share. “Standing displays to be filled with their product right from our catalog. Banners. Posters. In-store experts. Decks in employee’s hands *months* before launch... and that’s just the beginning.”

“Just...?”

“I’d want to see care packages with gadgets and gizmos and crowd pleasers and tourney packs and a trophy. Incentive to learn the OS. Sex appeal, geek appeal, lock in the prime demo. This is the kind of finer details that independent companies have no idea how to lay down. Their idea of buzz is working the cons.”

My head is spinning. I wish you... I wish all of you... were with me.

* * *

Remember when I talked about my cup? My personal grail? Not half empty. Not half full. All full, all the time... just not all full of air. This is not a Polly Anna life approach. Because when a grail is all full up, all the time, you have to dance pretty dang well not to spill any of it.

And, baby, I am always dancing someone’s line. Sometimes man’s. Sometimes Christ’s. Almost never my own. But I’d rather be dancing than standing still.

Crisis averted = missed opportunity.

Don’t breath a sigh of relief that we have more time. Push harder now and then celebrate in the new quiet you earned at the end. Bring crisis. Bring it on, pour it down on me. Christ said, “How can you miss me when you hear my voice in your mind, in your heart, throughout your body like breath? My whisper is eternal and my body is only momentary, so why then would you desire my body rather than my word written or heard in your soul?”

How can I turn away from crisis? How can I rest and walk away? It is impossible for me to miss divinity.

“Later you said, ‘I cannot miss you when you're right here with me.’ I blink at you. I ache for you, miss you constantly. I miss you with every breath and every heartbeat and every impossible moment of time that I don't hear your voice. That, your voice, is my reality. Not your touch. Your voice. If you are speaking I can truly know you. I can taste the nuances of you, your emotional state of being. Your words are spoken with economy. You are not flashy. I have to stop myself, gregarious as I am, from talking over you because I come alive and awake when you speak with me. I overflow with joy, with living, when you express your inner thoughts, your interior process. We could be kissing, dancing, making love, and I would miss you if you were not speaking..."

Christ said, “You will hear me always for I will speak to you directly.”

I cannot miss this. This right now, right here. This moment. Seize the day? Seize the words we share. Claim the path. Know it better every day because it is hard to find the time.

Every day.

* * *

“Is there any way you would take on an independent line?” I finally ask. I cannot stop my voice from wavering. I’ve already pulled so many strings just to get this thirty minute conversation. This one question seems too much to ask. I don’t feel worthy. I am not in this league.

“No. The liability is too high.”

And I am about to hang up, to mutter thank you and good day and all the other things that spill from our slack mouths when our world has been crushed, dismantled and destroyed and we can’t let anyone know. And then:

“Except a brand like the Mardi Gras 3000 line. You know them? They have the elements. Built like a corporate property. But they have someone else handling them, maybe InCracker, because a brand that massive, that complex? You’d need a year of setup with us to really guarantee bank.”

And the niceties that spill from my lips are still all platitudes and my mind is still racing elsewhere and I still can’t let this stranger know how I am truly feeling... but Christ has whispered:

“He who makes a grant of himself to his fellow, in my light, in my name, and with faith, shall know that I walk now, then and forever, at his side to ensure the promise of that offering.”

Christ has, once again, broken my heart only to remake it. Crushed my world, only to rebuild it.

* * *

INTERNAL MEMO

The official launch of the Mardi Gras 3000 brand, collectible card game, novels, comics and role-playing game, has been moved to February 16, 2010.

Rejoice. Come walk the impassioned path with me.

Rally the troops.

EJ

The Secret Identity of Jackalopes

2008-12-07T23:57:00.000-08:00

"For someone who fights labels so hard, you sure do care about what they say."

My friend Jess is teasing me. We're snooping around a leather and oddities boutique she likes and I'm checking brands. I laugh but I still won't buy Harley Davidson chaps. They never wear right and I hate the way they pinch my rear without even knowing my name.

As we drive home, I start to think hard about how some labels actually are important. They actually mean something. They tell the world something. Hm. And you know what, baby? I sure do hate feeling like a hypocrite.

"It seemed so easy to just use a label. But guess what? In the end, the label was as one dimensional as the word of man. And what I am, what *all* of us are is as far from one dimensional as divinity can take us. Christ did not mean for us to condense ourselves into MySpace Q&As or even eHarmony personality profiles. I want fewer labels and more faith. I want to be defined by my actions and my beliefs. I want to be hard to compartmentalize. I want to play hard to get.”

I am talking with Jess again but on another day, at Thanksgiving dinner with a house full of friends who either love us or hate us. What a day in H-E-Double Lizards. That day, I was thankful for a great many things but I was most thankful that it finally ended.

We are talking about a mutual friend we've known for years and known about (as a public figure) for far longer. He's dating someone fifteen years his junior. Dating for the first time in thirteen years after being a bit of a renowned playa. I mean, boy had fangrrl websites dedicated to him. The one with the pic of a red Corvette and a little hand-drawn arrow pointing to the slightly dented hood was my favorite. They used to line up (word of mouth, you know *snort*) and he was just alpha enough to oblige. Until he woke up one day and realized he was bored. So he up and became a happy daddy.

Jess says, "They're gonna hit a rocky place when they start to sleep together." (Jess is kinda blunt, btw.) "Because Gen Y grrls have this aversion to roles and, you know, labels. She'll expect him to be all top all the time." Jess took another bite of stuffing. She weighs 115 pounds and has the metabolism of a hummingbird. Jess builds mythological jackalopes in CAD for fun and has a career that some think is summed up by her body. (And did I already mention Jess is blunt?)

I thought about this statement of Jess'. I thought about it quite a bit. Maybe this because I once had a killer crush on this certain alpha wolf with wild hair, piercing eyes and a real-man, rock-my-world physique. *clearing throat* Yeah... maybe. But also possible is that I was thinking about this because I felt horribly *responsible.*

I know this young woman he is dating. I know she even reads my blog occasionally. By spouting off about labels and their inherit evils, did I just make my older friend's life kinda... well... awkward? Does this younger grrl expect him to be one way all the time? To be the label he wears most publically and nothing else? Will she be flexible? *crooked grin*

I mulled. I mused. I even kicked myself. They were swift kicks. Then my friend Cris wrote to me out of the blue:

"Hey, EJ. I've been reading your blog, of course, and something stuck out. Just wanted to share my thoughts.

"There is a difference between a label and an identity. A label is what others put on you; an identity is what you claim for yourself. There can be many labels and many parts to an identity. Labels and identities can change. They may have overlapping elements. As I watch the young women and the young men in my life struggle against labels, I wonder: Do they understand that an identity is something there for the taking? That they can take those labels that apply and claim them as their own? That claiming an identity, growing an identity, is empowering?"

This was the key I was looking for. This was a beautiful inspiration. And suddenly everything, all the little pieces, came together. Because labels can be claimed... and they can also be redefined. What it means for me to be a Christian... a grrl... a gamer... a biker... a lover... a raver... I have rewritten these labels to fit me. And more and more, as I feel life try to strip me of my strength and rob me of choices, I find myself proudly claiming these labels (and others) as something like armor and sword and shield. Something others might just call identity.

La-bel (ley buh l) noun, meaning 3: A short word or phrase descriptive of or defining the properties of a person or group, to indicate nature, ownership, etc.

I-den-ti-ty (ahy den ti tee) noun, meaning 2: The condition of being oneself or itself, and not another; a condition or character as to who a person is; the state or fact of being.

I-den-ti-ty (ahy den ti tee) noun, meaning 9: In mathematics, an equation that is valid for all values of its variables.

There is another reason to claim your own identity. A reason that not only helps us clarify who we are in the world and in our hearts, but that makes sure we live an examined life. Sometimes we have to add weaknesses to our armor... or, if not weaknesses, than cautions. What are the negative labels that you have assigned yourself or that the world has assigned you? Liar? Drama Queen? Quitter? Ask yourself: Is there any part of these labels that are valid? If you claim these labels as your own, you can (not so) jokingly warn others... and by claiming them, by accepting responsibility for them, you can begin to change them. Because possession is nine tenths of the law, baby, and if you own it, you have the control.

And with great control comes great responsibility. We may denounce the world and all the labels that it tries to paste on us. But we still have to find our identity. Yes, in the end, we are us. I am EJ. You are you. But who *am* I? Who *are* you? Just a name doesn't help us live in the world. With Christ, we need nothing but a name. In prayer, Christ needs no labels or even an identity plastered to us. But that is because we must come naked as new babies when we kneel before our Lord. We do not come dressed in armor and sword and shield.

But would Christ send us into the fray as babies? Does He intend us to fight without weapon, defense or protection? You know the answer. Our faith makes our identity glow in the dark. Soldiers of divinity.

There is yet another avenue to explore in this discussion of how we survive in this, the world of man. There is yet another reason to build our identity, that armor where every custom-made iridescent scale is carved from a redefined and tailored label.

When we claim a label, make it part of our identity, we claim a past. A history. A community. A heritage that often crosses race and gender and nationality. It is a past that can be good and bad, dark and light, but it connects us to the world and to the events of this world in a way that allows us to become educated and fully-realized citizens. We, in effect, grow up.

"When our supper plates
brim full of nightingales
and the gentle wren lays
dead but singing
it is then we stop, beloved.
Do not weep but rather realize
that those who have marched before
who have beaten back the thorns
that you do not see
back behind the thorns that remain
realize that because of them
you need not weep
for they have wept enough for you."

EJ