It is raining where you are. Where both of you are. Where all three of you are. My goodness. Tonight... this silent night... there are *eight* of you there in that house. Nestled in the woods, in the most beautiful temperate rain forest in the world. Under a roof I helped shingle. Surrounded by trees I have pruned. Bordered by roses I have cupped in my hands.
I am a world away; Los Angeles is practically another dimension, my friends, my love. I am dreaming. In bed alone with my hand on your pillow, with my ole one-eyed cat snoring loudly. I’m dreaming:
Bare feet against golden white sand. The pale blue-green waves around my ankles are like something carbonated, tiny warm bubbles in clean, popping foam. There are occasional stones in the sand but they are flat and smooth and completely clear. Skip them, angel, and they’ll vanish into the depths like cosmic fish. But they’ll also grant your every wish; Let me instead?
You are walking beside me. You hold my hand. Your hair falls to your waist. The white ties of your shirt are undone. Your white skirt is brushed cotton. You whisper into the wind, “I love you like moonlight, your heart like the tide.”
A gentle wave washes red rose petals around our feet and I wake to find you beside me.
“EJ,” said Jessica on the phone, her new-mom voice exhausted with joy. “Tell me again, Angel. Tell me again.”
Jess? Here, again:
At the end of my days I walk the shore of eternity with my Lord. And He has all the time in the world for me and all the time in forever. He is never rushed. He is never distracted. He is my own and I am His. I want for nothing and no one because everything I have ever loved is in His eyes. I looked all my life for a man to complete me... and only one could.
I look back over my shoulder. I see our footprints in the sand. I see where we ran hard. I see where we sank to our knees together. I see where we stumbled, fell, stood back up – oh, Jess... Brianne... Tricia... Cris... *stood back up!* -- and marched on. I see those places where there is only one set of footprints.
Shyly I look up at Him. I smile. I whisper, “I like it when you carried me.”
It's raining in Port Orchard, Washington. You are sleeping somewhere where you can hear it. It sounds like words from God against the roof. The thrumming carries His words down to you. Listen very carefully and His voice blooms in your mind and heart, no longer hidden away by the filter of the world. He is always insistent. He is always fair. And He always knows us far better than we know ourselves. His rain says:
“Oh, my soul, sometimes we don't know what to do.
We work so hard being tough on our own
But now it's me and you.
Let's give it up, these sad bones
'Cause we are following hard times.
But you don't have to stand up all alone
Just put your hand in mine.”
Climb on a back that’s strong. We are never alone. I am with you... Christ said that, too, you know. And:
I want to help you with everything. I want to comfort you when you're scared. Come to you, hold you when you are lonely. I want to make you laugh when you want to cry, to make you shout praises to God when you want to scream in despair. I want to be what you need. Do what you need. I want this like I've never wanted anything else. I feel it in my heart -- my immortal heart! -- like a physical ache. I want to be your everything. Because you are my everything. I love you this much.
Sweet Lord...
You whisper to me like this and I unravel into stardust and ribbons. I sink forward, my
brow in my hands, my fingers in my hair, my eyes closed, and I am praying without even thinking about it. I am so passionately in love. So completely in love. So willing to walk this path, your path, Lord. If this is the definition of enraptured, then, Christ? I am *so* there. I believe your every word. I follow you anywhere. I trust you. I believe you. I accept you into my heart like light, into my lungs like air.
“How can you love like that, EJ? How can you... *give it up* like that?”
Because it feels so good to give it up. It feels so right. I respond to the whispers of divinity. I embrace the silver moonlight. Drown me, Lord. You are all that I want... not to mention all that I need. My everything.
Divinely inspired? Hm. The blush across my cheeks says, “Yes... and hallelujah.”
I would give up anything for you. I would do anything for you. I would carry the world. I would let it fall at my feet. Crumbled or conquered, I willingly turn to you as my guiding light, my eternal love. Christ, break my heart. I can take it. Break my heart and remake it into the shape you want. Teach me a lesson. Make me feel it. I will learn like never before. Hand me this love, silver in the hours of the night, and I swear to you, I will stand so strong – apart or together, forever – you will see in me a soldier of divinity.
“You have saved me a place in heaven
With a clean well-lighted room.
So I muscle up to Armageddon
And wave, ‘Come on, love, we’ll be home soon!’”
I am more yours in this moment than I was yesterday, though not yet quite as much as I will be tomorrow when I wake.
We never stand alone. We always stand with Him. Whether or not we choose to see Him is our choice. But He walks with us nonetheless. His hand is not always in ours... because sometimes, yes, He carries us.
E.J.
I am so proud of all of you. Bless you for enriching my life like rain fall.
Sunday, May 25, 2008
Sunday, May 18, 2008
The Transcendent Power of Art
...or The Transformation from Art to Divinity:
The Other “Sweet Science”
I woke up this morning and had already lived the day. I knew exactly what to do. A certainty that has everything to do with you in my life and with the breath of the Sabbath when dawn comes.
My blog, of course, is personal revelations and realizations and musings and so on. But it is also far more private thoughts (despite being in the public arena) than I have ever shared with anyone before, let own with several thousand subscribers. Is this the comfortable anonymity of the Internet? Of course it is. But it is also the decades-long metamorphosis of the human condition, of ministering, and of the art of communication.
Welcome to the new day. Same as the old day. Nothing like the old day at all. Welcome to the beginning of the End (of) Times when everything will emerge and adapt. It is no longer the time for go-along-to-get-along, coasting by with the comfortable traditions of church and community. Now is the time for change. Organized religion likes to think that it corners the market on divinity. But there are too many yet to step into the living light. Too many to reach with the passive (-aggressive) modes of yesteryear. Now is the time for action.
How do we do it? Here’s how we do it:
You be where it is. You wade in. You go to the people. You learn the language, immersive study, without personal compromise. “Until you are of one man’s doctrine, you will never know it.” And you know exactly where I’m at, don’t you?
I am a visual thinker. I believe in the power of the written word. I do not believe that it takes a physical touch to fall in love. I do not believe that salvation comes from a pulpit. I believe in baptism by rain.
A friend writes to me: “Lovers, admirers, imitators, wanna-bes, will all come and go over the course of our lives, but the one relationship that remains constant is our relationship to our own art.”
Because our art lives inside us. It is the seed planted by God’s own hand and left to grow in that place where Christ resides. It is a place that can feel empty until we open our eyes to His living light but, in truth, it is never empty. He is always there and so is our art. Writing black words on paper or a white screen. Touching brush to wet paint to canvas. Holding you in the wee hours that mark the start of a new day with young bird song and poetry. Oh, snap ;) That’s the place where art has breath. That’s when we realize that art is the universal language.
Because art is transcendent and transformative. Art is what lifts us above the animals. Art is you walking across the room to stand in my arms, to gaze intently, to whisper hello and say nothing else for five minutes or ten until you know I’m breathing again, having climbed out onto the fire escape to stand in the cold midnight beneath the celestial eyes of Christ. Because if He can see the flush across my cheeks and chest, if He can hear my pounding heart, if He can experience the joyous tears that spill down my face... than I know that you can too.
Two dozen strangers in my inbox:
“I read your blog. I had to write to you because you’re the first to understand my:
passion
sadness
earning
desire
searching
wanting
life
The first to be like me, speak to me, walk with me, tell me I have never walked alone... and for the first time, I believe it.”
To be a New Testament Christian is to be without the stain glass windows that inspire and awe. Without the intelligent pastors that guide and shape. Without the help of concrete, tangible, undeniables. It is called “organized religion” for a reason. God is chaos theory and fractal geometry, limitless, nonlinear, noncorporeal, and immortal. We are limited, linear, corporeal and mortal! It isn’t easy to grasp God. The lesson taught by forty-two pages of churches in the Yellow Pages is that it takes at least thirty-eight pews of people to grasp God. I like to grasp God by *letting go.* By letting Him speak to me. Direct. One-on-one. He’s got my number on speed dial. Got every number on speed dial. Just let go, and let God. Just do it!
Another friend sips coffee while chatting with me online. She talks about the first time she ever sat in an art class. The first time she ever worked with a nude model. She remembers looking at him. He had a textbook perfect body. A gentle demeanor. A quiet presence. She remembers thinking, “If I saw him on the street -- fully clothed, of course -- he would turn my head. If I had him in my bed, he would turn me on. Yet, there in that class, staring at him for three hours, I felt only respect for him. Absolute respect.” Because art is transcendent.
And what is transcendent is transformative.
I’m talking about ministry by way of painting, dancing, music, writing. I’m talking about ministry by way of comment box poetry and VR environments that bring disparate people together. I’m talking about falling in love to prove that anything is possible. Because with Him the impossible becomes commonplace. And if you don’t truly believe that, without conditions, without justifications, without applying man’s filter... then I suggest you ditch your pocket scripture and go sit on a mountaintop for a while because God needs to have words with you. Don’t be surprised if shrubbery bursts into flames.
“While general culture contains a great deal of material that demeans the human body, you may wish to help your student understand that since before the time of ancient Greece and Rome, many outstanding artists have tried, in a variety of works, both secular and religious, to show the beauty, strength, and dignity of the unclothed human form.”
Art is the human heart laid bare. When I paint you, I am speaking to you, and to everyone else who sees that canvas. Cherry blossoms (did you get the connection?) fall from slim new branches. You are looking up and out. You are, of course, gazing at angels.
Anyone who dislikes the arguably overexposed “La Gioconda” (The Mona Lisa) has never heard the story of Leonardo in love with the composed Lisa Gherardini that he took sixteen years to paint. The one painting he carried with him from Italy to France and never sold. His love was endless, nonphysical, transcendent and divine. He loved her like endless summer skies. Full of possibilities.
Rock ‘n’ roll is dangerous. The Internet is dangerous. Sexuality? *Really* dangerous. The living force of human desire as it fuels art...? Oh, that’s the worst. That’s like super duper dangerous! Anything that they can’t wrap their minds around, is devious, deceptive and, oh yes, very dangerous. But you know what? So is a spork.
In the right hands – in the hands of someone who is no one who is only what Christ demands – the medium of art becomes that thing that can travel anywhere. That judges no one. That brings people to Christ.
Go back with me to that street corner in Seattle and ask again:
How many lives have you saved today?
Comic books, genre novels, websites, flash fiction, forums, 3D environs... how many lives have you saved, baby? Dozens. How many hearts have you opened? Far more. How many times do you reach out, reach up, and reach a breaking point? Every day. How many times must someone repeat, “You have value. You have worth. You will *not* call yourself an idiot.” The world is full of idiots who strip away the self-esteem of young people on mission. Who tear away our assurance in Christ with their abject inability to comprehend what is outside their tunnel vision. Who will not accept that their means are ineffectual.
(And it took me forty minutes to take your name out of that paragraph.)
I called a third friend today. I was feeling a blue sadness in my heart. She answered (I’d prayed she would) and I said without preamble: “Lift my spirits.” She silently put the telephone on the window sill.
Music is an art. Fine harp plays from my iPod today. It is flawed and original music made on Mother’s Day. It is mesmerizing and personal as all art is personal. It makes me cry with memories. It makes me feel something. It brings me closer to God.
You said, “Stop giving me so many outs. Stop saying anything is okay. Stop telling me that tomorrow I may change everything and that’s fine with you. Start making it hard for me to leave.”
The sound of birds and frogs and three children playing, drift up and over that window sill and fill the receiver with a beautiful spring day in the Pacific Northwest. There is something, I think that weird flowering holly thing, brushing against the window screen with a scritch-scritch sound and so I know there must be breeze.
There is the voice of a man and a woman, and someone I know. There is the sound of tension, of worlds colliding. There is the sound of angels. There is the sound of joy. There is the sound of your voice which breaks my heart and lifts it up simultaneously.
And that symphony of sound was art. Because it closed my eyes and touched my heart and filled that space where my seed of creation and Christ reside. It was real. It was meaningful.
Because art is always meaningful.
Take everything else, Lord. In times of cold terror, in panic and depression, in an age of unknowns and things unknowable, the two things that never leave us are Christ and art. And, in the end of our moments and at the beginning of this love for you, those two things are all that matter.
Ever forward. Despite the odds. Past the barriers. This ministry is shared.
E.J.
The Other “Sweet Science”
I woke up this morning and had already lived the day. I knew exactly what to do. A certainty that has everything to do with you in my life and with the breath of the Sabbath when dawn comes.
My blog, of course, is personal revelations and realizations and musings and so on. But it is also far more private thoughts (despite being in the public arena) than I have ever shared with anyone before, let own with several thousand subscribers. Is this the comfortable anonymity of the Internet? Of course it is. But it is also the decades-long metamorphosis of the human condition, of ministering, and of the art of communication.
Welcome to the new day. Same as the old day. Nothing like the old day at all. Welcome to the beginning of the End (of) Times when everything will emerge and adapt. It is no longer the time for go-along-to-get-along, coasting by with the comfortable traditions of church and community. Now is the time for change. Organized religion likes to think that it corners the market on divinity. But there are too many yet to step into the living light. Too many to reach with the passive (-aggressive) modes of yesteryear. Now is the time for action.
How do we do it? Here’s how we do it:
You be where it is. You wade in. You go to the people. You learn the language, immersive study, without personal compromise. “Until you are of one man’s doctrine, you will never know it.” And you know exactly where I’m at, don’t you?
I am a visual thinker. I believe in the power of the written word. I do not believe that it takes a physical touch to fall in love. I do not believe that salvation comes from a pulpit. I believe in baptism by rain.
A friend writes to me: “Lovers, admirers, imitators, wanna-bes, will all come and go over the course of our lives, but the one relationship that remains constant is our relationship to our own art.”
Because our art lives inside us. It is the seed planted by God’s own hand and left to grow in that place where Christ resides. It is a place that can feel empty until we open our eyes to His living light but, in truth, it is never empty. He is always there and so is our art. Writing black words on paper or a white screen. Touching brush to wet paint to canvas. Holding you in the wee hours that mark the start of a new day with young bird song and poetry. Oh, snap ;) That’s the place where art has breath. That’s when we realize that art is the universal language.
Because art is transcendent and transformative. Art is what lifts us above the animals. Art is you walking across the room to stand in my arms, to gaze intently, to whisper hello and say nothing else for five minutes or ten until you know I’m breathing again, having climbed out onto the fire escape to stand in the cold midnight beneath the celestial eyes of Christ. Because if He can see the flush across my cheeks and chest, if He can hear my pounding heart, if He can experience the joyous tears that spill down my face... than I know that you can too.
Two dozen strangers in my inbox:
“I read your blog. I had to write to you because you’re the first to understand my:
passion
sadness
earning
desire
searching
wanting
life
The first to be like me, speak to me, walk with me, tell me I have never walked alone... and for the first time, I believe it.”
To be a New Testament Christian is to be without the stain glass windows that inspire and awe. Without the intelligent pastors that guide and shape. Without the help of concrete, tangible, undeniables. It is called “organized religion” for a reason. God is chaos theory and fractal geometry, limitless, nonlinear, noncorporeal, and immortal. We are limited, linear, corporeal and mortal! It isn’t easy to grasp God. The lesson taught by forty-two pages of churches in the Yellow Pages is that it takes at least thirty-eight pews of people to grasp God. I like to grasp God by *letting go.* By letting Him speak to me. Direct. One-on-one. He’s got my number on speed dial. Got every number on speed dial. Just let go, and let God. Just do it!
Another friend sips coffee while chatting with me online. She talks about the first time she ever sat in an art class. The first time she ever worked with a nude model. She remembers looking at him. He had a textbook perfect body. A gentle demeanor. A quiet presence. She remembers thinking, “If I saw him on the street -- fully clothed, of course -- he would turn my head. If I had him in my bed, he would turn me on. Yet, there in that class, staring at him for three hours, I felt only respect for him. Absolute respect.” Because art is transcendent.
And what is transcendent is transformative.
I’m talking about ministry by way of painting, dancing, music, writing. I’m talking about ministry by way of comment box poetry and VR environments that bring disparate people together. I’m talking about falling in love to prove that anything is possible. Because with Him the impossible becomes commonplace. And if you don’t truly believe that, without conditions, without justifications, without applying man’s filter... then I suggest you ditch your pocket scripture and go sit on a mountaintop for a while because God needs to have words with you. Don’t be surprised if shrubbery bursts into flames.
“While general culture contains a great deal of material that demeans the human body, you may wish to help your student understand that since before the time of ancient Greece and Rome, many outstanding artists have tried, in a variety of works, both secular and religious, to show the beauty, strength, and dignity of the unclothed human form.”
Art is the human heart laid bare. When I paint you, I am speaking to you, and to everyone else who sees that canvas. Cherry blossoms (did you get the connection?) fall from slim new branches. You are looking up and out. You are, of course, gazing at angels.
Anyone who dislikes the arguably overexposed “La Gioconda” (The Mona Lisa) has never heard the story of Leonardo in love with the composed Lisa Gherardini that he took sixteen years to paint. The one painting he carried with him from Italy to France and never sold. His love was endless, nonphysical, transcendent and divine. He loved her like endless summer skies. Full of possibilities.
Rock ‘n’ roll is dangerous. The Internet is dangerous. Sexuality? *Really* dangerous. The living force of human desire as it fuels art...? Oh, that’s the worst. That’s like super duper dangerous! Anything that they can’t wrap their minds around, is devious, deceptive and, oh yes, very dangerous. But you know what? So is a spork.
In the right hands – in the hands of someone who is no one who is only what Christ demands – the medium of art becomes that thing that can travel anywhere. That judges no one. That brings people to Christ.
Go back with me to that street corner in Seattle and ask again:
How many lives have you saved today?
Comic books, genre novels, websites, flash fiction, forums, 3D environs... how many lives have you saved, baby? Dozens. How many hearts have you opened? Far more. How many times do you reach out, reach up, and reach a breaking point? Every day. How many times must someone repeat, “You have value. You have worth. You will *not* call yourself an idiot.” The world is full of idiots who strip away the self-esteem of young people on mission. Who tear away our assurance in Christ with their abject inability to comprehend what is outside their tunnel vision. Who will not accept that their means are ineffectual.
(And it took me forty minutes to take your name out of that paragraph.)
I called a third friend today. I was feeling a blue sadness in my heart. She answered (I’d prayed she would) and I said without preamble: “Lift my spirits.” She silently put the telephone on the window sill.
Music is an art. Fine harp plays from my iPod today. It is flawed and original music made on Mother’s Day. It is mesmerizing and personal as all art is personal. It makes me cry with memories. It makes me feel something. It brings me closer to God.
You said, “Stop giving me so many outs. Stop saying anything is okay. Stop telling me that tomorrow I may change everything and that’s fine with you. Start making it hard for me to leave.”
The sound of birds and frogs and three children playing, drift up and over that window sill and fill the receiver with a beautiful spring day in the Pacific Northwest. There is something, I think that weird flowering holly thing, brushing against the window screen with a scritch-scritch sound and so I know there must be breeze.
There is the voice of a man and a woman, and someone I know. There is the sound of tension, of worlds colliding. There is the sound of angels. There is the sound of joy. There is the sound of your voice which breaks my heart and lifts it up simultaneously.
And that symphony of sound was art. Because it closed my eyes and touched my heart and filled that space where my seed of creation and Christ reside. It was real. It was meaningful.
Because art is always meaningful.
Take everything else, Lord. In times of cold terror, in panic and depression, in an age of unknowns and things unknowable, the two things that never leave us are Christ and art. And, in the end of our moments and at the beginning of this love for you, those two things are all that matter.
Ever forward. Despite the odds. Past the barriers. This ministry is shared.
E.J.
Friday, May 16, 2008
This Passion for You
The air is filthy. I watch it shimmer on the horizon. I see text messages scroll across the distant haze. “You might be a thirteen year old boy” ...blending into... “Cut! @!#$%, E.J., what's wrong with you today? Can’t you even *look* aroused? You’re supposed to *want* him!” ...turning inside out... “I want you; I don’t know what that means.” ...the LED display blinks across God’s own sky. Christ is bouncing messages off satellites. I need an intervention. Direct revelation. Baby... lift me up, life my spirits. Take me down in your arms. Make me forget those golden gates at work that are nothing like heaven and everything about check-point, take my badge, you’re ours now, lock and key. Oh, what did I sign? Where was the dotted line that pointed my way to hell?
Every day, speed delivers me the way only three words from you can.
“How can you see into my eyes like open doors
leading you down into my core.
My spirit sleeping somewhere cold
until you find it there and lead it back home.”
The music rips through my skull loud enough to hear outside my helmet. The Cali dude next to me at the last red light before the ocean is all pose and bravado in his swank convertible. He is looking at me. I’m looking (not quite) straight ahead. A blue Honda Civic and a white Impala collide in the intersection. No one is hurt but there is glass everywhere. It shines in the pale, dirty light. We turn off our engines. I take off my helmet. Dude smiles at me. My eyes are on the wreck. My boots crunch. Everyone is okay.
I am not okay.
“Wake me up inside.
Call my name and save me from the dark.
Bid my blood to run
before I come undone...”
Two hours spent in the middle of the street. Strangers who stare at my riding chaps and my street jewelry cross and one, Jimmy, who finally asks if I’m a Unitarian minister. Asks me to pray for him... he has no money for repairs. He’s going to lose his job for being late. The world is crashing down around him. He sinks down before me. There is shame and failure on his face and he is crying loudly, unable to stop it, wanting on so many levels to be heard. There is a buzz in my ears. There is a low, roiling anger in my chest. There is this need everywhere I go.
Above us the sky is darkening with flash-rain clouds. I want it so bad. That rain. I want it to drench me. Christ’s natural baptism. Bring the second Great Flood, Lord. Wash this away. Remake this world in your image, Lord. ... I want to feel you in my arms. I want the quiet night around us. I want you standing beside me right now. Seeing the difference we can make. Feeling that difference. Because it is a *difference.* Other people don’t find themselves here so often. It is different, not traditional, not rote and mundane. I want to see the moment in your eyes when you arrive with me, when you stand in this place that I stand and feel the way I feel for you. I want us as one person, one path, one passion, God take the rest of it!
Mr. Convertible is staring at me as I sink to my knees in the glass with the boy who can’t be much out of his teens. And I’m taking his hands which are cold and stiff, rough like his work jeans covered in plaster. And you know what I say:
“I don’t need to pray for you, Jimmy. He’s waiting to hear from *you.*”
And he breaks. He breaks to be found. The shell that this world casts around its young men, shaping them into hard things that can’t tremble in the new rain. And I’m holding him without thinking about it and he cries something about his sister or a lover or a mom. I’m not sure exactly because I realize that my headphones are still in.
“Now that I know what I’m without
you can't just leave me.
Breathe into me and make me real.
Bring me to life...”
My heart is a wreck in the middle of the road. Strangers are crying in my inbox. Bobbing on tears I am buoyed back to you time and time again. Washed up on your shore, exhausted and wanting. I am the child gazing up at you with eyes of hope and trust, and you are the manifestation of that love that Christ promised me when I wanted nothing else but to die. Do you wonder how I can survive a thousand miles away? Watch how patient I can be with this miracle. It has been eternity (and back again) that I’ve waited for you.
“Frozen inside without your love, darling.
Only you are the life among the dead.
...Bring me to life.”
There is a rumbling of the coming tow trucks. There is a rumbling across the muddied sky. There is a rumbling in my chest, a thrumming realization that the struggle has just begun. I crush the lanky boy and glare at the officer who suggests we get out of the road.
“He can’t move right now,” I snarl. “Make them go around.”
Make them all go around! Make the twisted filter of man’s own doctrine – the church, the corporate line, the politicos and saints – make it change for us, for once. For twice. For now on! I am so angry! And the anger is pure and clean and lifts me up above the smog and into the clear stratosphere. Shine on me, celestial light. Remind me of divinity the way you whispering my name reminds me, transports me. There. Christ is standing right there.
5:42: What is he telling you, EJ?
5:43: *He
5:44: That God gave us these bodies as vessels of celebration. As sacred things that we share only with the one person who completes us. So take your time. And choose carefully. Because forever means forever.
He is saying: Why are you wasting your precious mortal time, the second greatest gift I have given you, not laughing? Not shouting for joy? Why are you – alone and together -- buying into man’s filter that I have given you the intelligence and the strength and the *courage* to see through? Rip away the veil! There is no veil in living Christianity.
“All this time I can't believe I couldn't see.
Kept in the dark but you were there in front of me.
I’ve been sleeping a thousand years it seems.
Got to open my eyes to everything.”
And finally the rain stops and the cars are dragging away the sounds of metal and ruin. Mr. Convertible got bored and left. He has his story to tell the guys. The story to take home to his girl. He will be the hero in his retelling even though all he did was cruise my skinny ***. Jimmy is standing on the street corner, looking up at the sky, then looking at me. He squints his eyes and raises his chin. There are tears and rain on his face. He looks all of sixteen. He is probably twenty-one. “You look familiar to me. Do I know you?”
I smile at him. The song continues on repeat. The sky has cleared. My anger has washed off my leather jacket and run down the gutter to swirl away. My faith remains as does my desire for you.
“Yeah,” I tell him, my eyes drifting to some point in the distance, around the corner of the buildings and the palm trees. “You know us Christian biker chicks. We all look the same.”
And I get on my bike and I turn her around. I return to the city and away from the ocean. No need to travel to that rocky shore today. Christ met me half way.
At home, I reach into my pocket and take out the fist full of broken glass. I let it fall through my fingers, scattering like frozen rain in the blue glass candy dish on the table. Usually I bring home a pocket full of sand and pebbles. Today is so much more apropos.
Break it open, baby. We will make our own way.
E.J.
Every day, speed delivers me the way only three words from you can.
“How can you see into my eyes like open doors
leading you down into my core.
My spirit sleeping somewhere cold
until you find it there and lead it back home.”
The music rips through my skull loud enough to hear outside my helmet. The Cali dude next to me at the last red light before the ocean is all pose and bravado in his swank convertible. He is looking at me. I’m looking (not quite) straight ahead. A blue Honda Civic and a white Impala collide in the intersection. No one is hurt but there is glass everywhere. It shines in the pale, dirty light. We turn off our engines. I take off my helmet. Dude smiles at me. My eyes are on the wreck. My boots crunch. Everyone is okay.
I am not okay.
“Wake me up inside.
Call my name and save me from the dark.
Bid my blood to run
before I come undone...”
Two hours spent in the middle of the street. Strangers who stare at my riding chaps and my street jewelry cross and one, Jimmy, who finally asks if I’m a Unitarian minister. Asks me to pray for him... he has no money for repairs. He’s going to lose his job for being late. The world is crashing down around him. He sinks down before me. There is shame and failure on his face and he is crying loudly, unable to stop it, wanting on so many levels to be heard. There is a buzz in my ears. There is a low, roiling anger in my chest. There is this need everywhere I go.
Above us the sky is darkening with flash-rain clouds. I want it so bad. That rain. I want it to drench me. Christ’s natural baptism. Bring the second Great Flood, Lord. Wash this away. Remake this world in your image, Lord. ... I want to feel you in my arms. I want the quiet night around us. I want you standing beside me right now. Seeing the difference we can make. Feeling that difference. Because it is a *difference.* Other people don’t find themselves here so often. It is different, not traditional, not rote and mundane. I want to see the moment in your eyes when you arrive with me, when you stand in this place that I stand and feel the way I feel for you. I want us as one person, one path, one passion, God take the rest of it!
Mr. Convertible is staring at me as I sink to my knees in the glass with the boy who can’t be much out of his teens. And I’m taking his hands which are cold and stiff, rough like his work jeans covered in plaster. And you know what I say:
“I don’t need to pray for you, Jimmy. He’s waiting to hear from *you.*”
And he breaks. He breaks to be found. The shell that this world casts around its young men, shaping them into hard things that can’t tremble in the new rain. And I’m holding him without thinking about it and he cries something about his sister or a lover or a mom. I’m not sure exactly because I realize that my headphones are still in.
“Now that I know what I’m without
you can't just leave me.
Breathe into me and make me real.
Bring me to life...”
My heart is a wreck in the middle of the road. Strangers are crying in my inbox. Bobbing on tears I am buoyed back to you time and time again. Washed up on your shore, exhausted and wanting. I am the child gazing up at you with eyes of hope and trust, and you are the manifestation of that love that Christ promised me when I wanted nothing else but to die. Do you wonder how I can survive a thousand miles away? Watch how patient I can be with this miracle. It has been eternity (and back again) that I’ve waited for you.
“Frozen inside without your love, darling.
Only you are the life among the dead.
...Bring me to life.”
There is a rumbling of the coming tow trucks. There is a rumbling across the muddied sky. There is a rumbling in my chest, a thrumming realization that the struggle has just begun. I crush the lanky boy and glare at the officer who suggests we get out of the road.
“He can’t move right now,” I snarl. “Make them go around.”
Make them all go around! Make the twisted filter of man’s own doctrine – the church, the corporate line, the politicos and saints – make it change for us, for once. For twice. For now on! I am so angry! And the anger is pure and clean and lifts me up above the smog and into the clear stratosphere. Shine on me, celestial light. Remind me of divinity the way you whispering my name reminds me, transports me. There. Christ is standing right there.
5:42: What is he telling you, EJ?
5:43: *He
5:44: That God gave us these bodies as vessels of celebration. As sacred things that we share only with the one person who completes us. So take your time. And choose carefully. Because forever means forever.
He is saying: Why are you wasting your precious mortal time, the second greatest gift I have given you, not laughing? Not shouting for joy? Why are you – alone and together -- buying into man’s filter that I have given you the intelligence and the strength and the *courage* to see through? Rip away the veil! There is no veil in living Christianity.
“All this time I can't believe I couldn't see.
Kept in the dark but you were there in front of me.
I’ve been sleeping a thousand years it seems.
Got to open my eyes to everything.”
And finally the rain stops and the cars are dragging away the sounds of metal and ruin. Mr. Convertible got bored and left. He has his story to tell the guys. The story to take home to his girl. He will be the hero in his retelling even though all he did was cruise my skinny ***. Jimmy is standing on the street corner, looking up at the sky, then looking at me. He squints his eyes and raises his chin. There are tears and rain on his face. He looks all of sixteen. He is probably twenty-one. “You look familiar to me. Do I know you?”
I smile at him. The song continues on repeat. The sky has cleared. My anger has washed off my leather jacket and run down the gutter to swirl away. My faith remains as does my desire for you.
“Yeah,” I tell him, my eyes drifting to some point in the distance, around the corner of the buildings and the palm trees. “You know us Christian biker chicks. We all look the same.”
And I get on my bike and I turn her around. I return to the city and away from the ocean. No need to travel to that rocky shore today. Christ met me half way.
At home, I reach into my pocket and take out the fist full of broken glass. I let it fall through my fingers, scattering like frozen rain in the blue glass candy dish on the table. Usually I bring home a pocket full of sand and pebbles. Today is so much more apropos.
Break it open, baby. We will make our own way.
E.J.
Sunday, May 11, 2008
She Drives Me Crazy
...a Mother’s Day Blog
In 1994, I was fourteen years old and my mother had pretty much given up on rock ‘n’ roll. That’s not to say that once a month she didn’t disappear for the weekend into the midnight, all-night, wee-morning clubs of NYC, taking the train from Boston without a word, just an unspoken desire in her bottomless brown-gold eyes, to be lifted (or was it a lateral move?) from her life as mother and wife and dropped into the anonymity of the rave scene (before it was called raving). She was tall and lean, with long legs and full lips, a former model with an “exotic Mediterranean look” (because apparently geography is a dying art) who could play tomboy as easily as high femme. And she hated ’90s rock.
“...Love is like a bomb, baby, c'mon get it on
Livin' like a lover with a radar phone
Lookin' like a tramp, like a video vamp
Demolition woman, can I be your man?
Razzle 'n' a dazzle 'n' a flash a little light
Television lover, baby, go all night
Sometime, anytime, sugar me sweet
Little miss innocent sugar me, yeah!”
They talk in parenting magazines about the dangers of nicotine, alcohol, caffeine, and rhubarb on unborn babies. My mama, I’m afraid, passed her wild on to me in utero. Her love of clubbing to dance. Her desire for music in her blood. Her late-night eyes watching a crowd while she owns a room. There is something so fine... something that closes my eyes just to think about it. That deep warmth that starts in the pit of my stomach, that radiates out through my limbs, that stomps through my boots and raises my hands above my head. Who’s watching? Who cares, baby?! This is about movement in the darkness. This is about beat I can taste. This is about the crush of strobes and making love with that sacred thing called music. Mix it. Turn it on. Kick it up. I’m there. Right there. Realizing that there’s this power that God gave women. And with great power...
"You don’t have to read my mind,
to know what I have in mind.
Honey, you oughta know...
Now you move so fine,
let me lay it on the line.
...I wanna know, what you're doin’ after the show.
Come on, baby, do you do more than dance?"
I may not abide much with written scripture, with chapters of begot and begetted, when God is willing to whisper/shout/converse with us today and now about nuclear disarmament and green energy if we just ask Him, but you can’t argue that verse for verse we’re told that our children are our responsibility. It’s not man’s place to raise our children. It's not society’s place to educate, illuminate and elevate our off-spring. Public school may work for creating the perfect socialized, socialist community of pseudo-capitalist competitors (isn’t alliteration fun?) but it sure don’t teach our white grrls how to dance.
What my mama taught me, with her weekends away, was a lesson that stayed with me undeniably -- the way my parents stayed together, to the day my father died, and foreseeably beyond that. Her lesson, of course, was that being a mother didn’t make her not a woman. Being a wife didn’t make her not a person. She was forever alive with a spirit all her own -- all Christ’s own! She was fully realized. First thing in the morning or sick with the flu, agonizing over bills or devastated by the death of her parents, nothing – nothing! – stole away her presence... her *Presence.* Life did not pass by her kitchen window sill draped in herbs and aloe vera. Life was tucked in her pocket.
“If it feels all right,
maybe you should stay all night.
Shall I leave you my key?
But you’ve got to give me a sign,
Come on, girl!
Some kind of sign.
Are you old enough?
Will you be ready when I call you bluff?”
I wrote to two friends recently, to paraphrase/combine: “Is he all about you, babe? Do you believe that you deserve poetry, and roses and all-night conversations? Where’s the romance? Where’s the courting?! It ain’t all over just because there’s a license from the State. Your man needs to be *all* about you. Trust me, sweetheart, my mother is the most aggravating woman on the planet but my father was always – always! -- about her. No excuses. Always the sugar. Even when it got hard. Now. Tomorrow. Forever.”
Because, come those weekends when Mama went away, my father always got that little smile on his face. And he tied his hair back, and we’d put power tools on the dining room table, and eat tv dinners and way too much ice cream, and he’d kick his feet up with a sweet sigh. Because Dad knew... Mama *always* brought it home. She was out exercising that wild, exerting her force in the world, but she never crossed that line, and come Sunday night, she was tucking me in, checking the messages, planning for PTA... and quietly closing the door down the hall. Come Sunday night, there were always roses in the master bedroom.
"I can't stop
The way I feel
Things you do
Just seem unreal.
I can't get any rest.
People say I'm obsessed
Everything that's serious lasts
What we have, I knew was true.
Tell you what I got in mind...
She drives me crazy.
Like no one else.
She drives me crazy.
And I can't help myself."
Globe-trotting Mama, that’s my mother today. It has been some time since my father’s death. She stands alone like a willow, always drinking deeply from life, bending, dancing, but never falling. She is the epitome of elegance and ferocity. She is like fire and ice in the same body – still tall, still lean, still tomboy/femme... and still, of course, a mother, and a person and a woman. I asked her: “What should I write about for Mother’s Day?” She made that sound of impatience that I know so well – that hmph sound from the back of her throat, then, always accented, always black velvet smooth, “Well, most certainly don’t write about me, darling. I’ve already been saved. Don’t waste a blog.”
“She drives me crazy... ooh, ooh! Like no one else... ooh, ooh!” Oh, Roland, you have no idea. But she also gave me the strength and fortitude to demand the best from everyone and everything around me, including myself. She gave me the courage to look at myself in the mirror. To ask myself the hard questions... the *really* hard ones. Not the “Should I take this job?” or “Do these chaps make me look fat?” but the “Is this love?” and “Do I deserve more?” The questions that we can only ask ourselves and Christ in the quiet midnights of our discontent. In the still silence when we are alone.... Because of her, because of all that she is and isn’t, was and wasn’t, I can know that in those moments that stretch into hours, I am pleased with -- no, I am *proud* of -- who I am, what I am, and the life I keep in my pocket.
Yeah, Mom. This blog is for you and about you and all because of you. I believe in Mother’s Day because I believed in Mother’s Weekend. I believe in dancing until I can barely drive home. I believe in leather and silk. I believe in weight-lifting and motorcycling and grrls that box. I believe in Christ. I believe in pure love. I believe in angels. I believe in beat-pounding, head-banging raves peppered with tall, cold glasses of Coke and cream. I believe in ’70s and ’80s rock. And yes, I believe in you.
Now... where’s that mix tape?
E.J.
“Now it’s up to you,
can we make a secret rendezvous?
I’m a little bit high,
and you’re a little bit shy.”
Def Leppard, Pour Some Sugar On Me, 1987
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8QWHSWPgi90
Fine Young Cannibals, She Drives Me Crazy, 1988
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q7jG8EWr63k
Foreigner, Hot Blooded, 1978
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=byKdSVYEjj4
In 1994, I was fourteen years old and my mother had pretty much given up on rock ‘n’ roll. That’s not to say that once a month she didn’t disappear for the weekend into the midnight, all-night, wee-morning clubs of NYC, taking the train from Boston without a word, just an unspoken desire in her bottomless brown-gold eyes, to be lifted (or was it a lateral move?) from her life as mother and wife and dropped into the anonymity of the rave scene (before it was called raving). She was tall and lean, with long legs and full lips, a former model with an “exotic Mediterranean look” (because apparently geography is a dying art) who could play tomboy as easily as high femme. And she hated ’90s rock.
“...Love is like a bomb, baby, c'mon get it on
Livin' like a lover with a radar phone
Lookin' like a tramp, like a video vamp
Demolition woman, can I be your man?
Razzle 'n' a dazzle 'n' a flash a little light
Television lover, baby, go all night
Sometime, anytime, sugar me sweet
Little miss innocent sugar me, yeah!”
They talk in parenting magazines about the dangers of nicotine, alcohol, caffeine, and rhubarb on unborn babies. My mama, I’m afraid, passed her wild on to me in utero. Her love of clubbing to dance. Her desire for music in her blood. Her late-night eyes watching a crowd while she owns a room. There is something so fine... something that closes my eyes just to think about it. That deep warmth that starts in the pit of my stomach, that radiates out through my limbs, that stomps through my boots and raises my hands above my head. Who’s watching? Who cares, baby?! This is about movement in the darkness. This is about beat I can taste. This is about the crush of strobes and making love with that sacred thing called music. Mix it. Turn it on. Kick it up. I’m there. Right there. Realizing that there’s this power that God gave women. And with great power...
"You don’t have to read my mind,
to know what I have in mind.
Honey, you oughta know...
Now you move so fine,
let me lay it on the line.
...I wanna know, what you're doin’ after the show.
Come on, baby, do you do more than dance?"
I may not abide much with written scripture, with chapters of begot and begetted, when God is willing to whisper/shout/converse with us today and now about nuclear disarmament and green energy if we just ask Him, but you can’t argue that verse for verse we’re told that our children are our responsibility. It’s not man’s place to raise our children. It's not society’s place to educate, illuminate and elevate our off-spring. Public school may work for creating the perfect socialized, socialist community of pseudo-capitalist competitors (isn’t alliteration fun?) but it sure don’t teach our white grrls how to dance.
What my mama taught me, with her weekends away, was a lesson that stayed with me undeniably -- the way my parents stayed together, to the day my father died, and foreseeably beyond that. Her lesson, of course, was that being a mother didn’t make her not a woman. Being a wife didn’t make her not a person. She was forever alive with a spirit all her own -- all Christ’s own! She was fully realized. First thing in the morning or sick with the flu, agonizing over bills or devastated by the death of her parents, nothing – nothing! – stole away her presence... her *Presence.* Life did not pass by her kitchen window sill draped in herbs and aloe vera. Life was tucked in her pocket.
“If it feels all right,
maybe you should stay all night.
Shall I leave you my key?
But you’ve got to give me a sign,
Come on, girl!
Some kind of sign.
Are you old enough?
Will you be ready when I call you bluff?”
I wrote to two friends recently, to paraphrase/combine: “Is he all about you, babe? Do you believe that you deserve poetry, and roses and all-night conversations? Where’s the romance? Where’s the courting?! It ain’t all over just because there’s a license from the State. Your man needs to be *all* about you. Trust me, sweetheart, my mother is the most aggravating woman on the planet but my father was always – always! -- about her. No excuses. Always the sugar. Even when it got hard. Now. Tomorrow. Forever.”
Because, come those weekends when Mama went away, my father always got that little smile on his face. And he tied his hair back, and we’d put power tools on the dining room table, and eat tv dinners and way too much ice cream, and he’d kick his feet up with a sweet sigh. Because Dad knew... Mama *always* brought it home. She was out exercising that wild, exerting her force in the world, but she never crossed that line, and come Sunday night, she was tucking me in, checking the messages, planning for PTA... and quietly closing the door down the hall. Come Sunday night, there were always roses in the master bedroom.
"I can't stop
The way I feel
Things you do
Just seem unreal.
I can't get any rest.
People say I'm obsessed
Everything that's serious lasts
What we have, I knew was true.
Tell you what I got in mind...
She drives me crazy.
Like no one else.
She drives me crazy.
And I can't help myself."
Globe-trotting Mama, that’s my mother today. It has been some time since my father’s death. She stands alone like a willow, always drinking deeply from life, bending, dancing, but never falling. She is the epitome of elegance and ferocity. She is like fire and ice in the same body – still tall, still lean, still tomboy/femme... and still, of course, a mother, and a person and a woman. I asked her: “What should I write about for Mother’s Day?” She made that sound of impatience that I know so well – that hmph sound from the back of her throat, then, always accented, always black velvet smooth, “Well, most certainly don’t write about me, darling. I’ve already been saved. Don’t waste a blog.”
“She drives me crazy... ooh, ooh! Like no one else... ooh, ooh!” Oh, Roland, you have no idea. But she also gave me the strength and fortitude to demand the best from everyone and everything around me, including myself. She gave me the courage to look at myself in the mirror. To ask myself the hard questions... the *really* hard ones. Not the “Should I take this job?” or “Do these chaps make me look fat?” but the “Is this love?” and “Do I deserve more?” The questions that we can only ask ourselves and Christ in the quiet midnights of our discontent. In the still silence when we are alone.... Because of her, because of all that she is and isn’t, was and wasn’t, I can know that in those moments that stretch into hours, I am pleased with -- no, I am *proud* of -- who I am, what I am, and the life I keep in my pocket.
Yeah, Mom. This blog is for you and about you and all because of you. I believe in Mother’s Day because I believed in Mother’s Weekend. I believe in dancing until I can barely drive home. I believe in leather and silk. I believe in weight-lifting and motorcycling and grrls that box. I believe in Christ. I believe in pure love. I believe in angels. I believe in beat-pounding, head-banging raves peppered with tall, cold glasses of Coke and cream. I believe in ’70s and ’80s rock. And yes, I believe in you.
Now... where’s that mix tape?
E.J.
“Now it’s up to you,
can we make a secret rendezvous?
I’m a little bit high,
and you’re a little bit shy.”
Def Leppard, Pour Some Sugar On Me, 1987
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8QWHSWPgi90
Fine Young Cannibals, She Drives Me Crazy, 1988
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q7jG8EWr63k
Foreigner, Hot Blooded, 1978
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=byKdSVYEjj4
Sunday, May 04, 2008
A Whole Lot of Nothing
“Think you can't pray in VR? Try again. Christ in everything – in rain, in wind, in kisses and sighs, in harp music and children's gazes – means in pixels too. Catch up, baby. It's the post-modern, post-high tech revolution. Forget milk. Got quad processors?”
It was the summer I was eighteen but let's say I was twenty-two because that's better for my demographic. I had completed my first year in a fine institute of higher learning and had traded Boston night clubs for NYC's (as well as the fake ID that got me in – never to drink but always to dance and often to woo a handsome raver home for a little acrylic... or henna tat... practice) with an amused shrug, my first bike, and a murmur of, “Yeah, I'm game.”
Yeah. Sure was. The zero-sum playa.
Much to my parents' chagrin, my grandmother – ex-military, so not American, short-haired, and globe-trotting – requested/required/demanded I accompany her for the summer instead of going home. It would become the only summer I didn't take courses and the last summer I would ever have with her. But I didn't know that then and neither did she. She was ripped and dashing, carded at sixty-two (perhaps a pick up line used by our waiter? perhaps not), a no nonsense, no bluster kind of woman who rarely raised her voice unless she had already won the argument. She would survive front lines, a dangerous penchant for photographing militarized zones, and an uncanny sense of where trouble was going to happen, only to prove mortality a force with a red light that a London stranger claimed he “never saw” at 80 miles an hour.
Special circle, Keith. Christ forgives. The granddaughter? Not so much.
We seemed to go everywhere those ten weeks. It wasn't my first time aboard with her but my first time with just the two of us. I saw a side of her that was lyrical and joyous. Flirtatious and glowing. The sharp, wily, brilliant woman I had known all my life – who seemed to go out of her way to clash with my sharp, opinionated, brilliant mother – took a back seat to the woman who wanted to show me the midnight side of dancing in Spain with a man twice my age, and reading books of scripture on crackling parchment while she murmured in whispers with monks who called her still by her military rank. I was entranced with the world. With a world I had never seen before even as we revisited by favorite locales.
Grandma had always been the holder of my passport. My proud parents struggled with bills and property tax. They refused help. So Grandma would let herself in and make sirloin and brussel sprouts, and red potatoes with dill and garlic. They couldn't argue when dinner was already on the table. Car broke down? Simple replacement appeared. She co-signed on my first loan for a bike... and helped pull strings and pull together patrons for scholarships and loans for school. Canvas? Brushes? I worked for those. I paid her in originals... many of which she resold to galleries and fine hotels just so she could take me to lunch and there it would be on the wall. “Fancy that, my angel,” she would say, and raise one sculpted eyebrow in mock surprise while she sipped her dark espresso and thrummed her short nails on the mahogany table.
“This is unreal, Grandma!” I laughed one night, the streets full of dancing and masks and the scent of perfume and heat and spices.
She straightened the clasp that held my hair then decided against it and took it out, throwing it to a passing boy wrapped in green silk and stain leafs, his body almost bare. He called something to her but my French wouldn't be good enough for four more years to understand him or her husky response.
“What is real, my angel?” she asked me, so seriously. “What is unreal? If you feel it,” and she tapped my heart, the ribbons across my chest almost all undone from dancing. “Then it is real.” Ten years before I first found VR.
And then someone, small, wiry, with flashing eyes, a sly smile, and small hands, caught her wrist and danced away with her, laughing into the crowd. Leaving me to think, for a moment, that she was a celestial body, surrounded by a swirl of white and gold silk and lace and taffeta.
You wrote to me tonight, my friend, “Make my faith stronger.”
I wrote to you yesterday, “I am no one. I am best invisible.”
When I was four I was terrified of death. It would be better for my demographic to say when I was fourteen but I was four. So there. I would have these panic attacks... they came out of no where and nothing. Daytime, night time, lunchtime at school. I'd see shadows on sunny days and was certain they were death, tangible and hungry.
One night I panicked and locked my bedroom door and crawled under my bed and screamed. And screamed. And kept screaming. And the doctor on the phone said, “Let her scream herself to sleep.” But after an hour my parents called my Grandma instead.
The door knob opened in her hands. Of course. She closed it behind her with a click. She walked across the wood floor and I remember the feeling of her boots. Then she reached under the bed with one strong hand and my little bunny pj top bunched in her fist and she slide me out in one smooth motion like someone might drag a cat out from under the couch. She gathered me in her arms, there on the floor, me still screaming no word nonsense in unexplainable fear.
She had been speaking, the same prayer, over and over and over again, for quite some time by the recitation that I heard... but I did finally hear her:
“Imagine stepping on shore
and finding it Heaven...
Taking hold of a hand
and finding it God's hand.
Imagine breathing new air
and finding it celestial air...
Feeling invigorated
and finding it immortality.
Imagine passing from tempest and pain
into unbroken calm...
Waking up
and finding yourself home.”
Shadows became shadows. Panic didn't occur. Not in daytime or night time or even in the lunch line. I was never afraid again. (Not even at 100 mph along the California shore.)
I told Grandma years later, “You made my faith stronger.”
She said with a smile, “I am no one. I did nothing.”
We ended the summer, our summer together, on shores draped in fog and emerald earth, on silver-green seas so cold it took my breath from my lungs but still I came and swam. That sea turned this brown grrl blue so many times I think tears froze on my cheeks and fell among the round pebbles that made the shore.
And one morning there you stood. I had seen you once before, I think, when we hiked an hour for fresh meat and eggs. I think Grandma knew your name and you spoke English with an accent that I could have listened to for hours... okay, weeks. You invited us to service on Sunday, talking to her while you looked at me, while I looked at a deep barrel of pickled something (beets? potatoes?) that I seemed to have dropped my bravado in.
One morning there you stood. “You swim?” you asked. I was certain you weren't real. We were leaving in two days. No one had been here for fourteen. I was starting to believe that the universe was me, Grandma, and Christ. I walked past you without speaking because you were obviously a hallucination.
“Did you see any selkie, E.J.?” But you didn't say E.J., which everyone calls me, you said my birth name which no one does.
I turn around and look at you. Really look for the first time. I realize that I had mistaken your gender in town. I realize that you are breath-taking. I realize I never want to leave Ireland. “Did any selkie see me?”
Duh. Wow. My way with words came late, didn't it, babygrrl?
I am 98% frozen to death by this point. And let's not talk about what I'm (not) wearing. You gave me your coat. It was brown. It was soft leather. It was not made of seal skin. We walked back to the house. Grandma had two hot cups of coffee and two hot plates of breakfast sitting on the table for us. She took her Bible, hand-written, and left us.
Across the table from each other I realized that your eyes were two different colors.
You whispered to me, “Make my faith stronger.”
I shook my head, “I'm no one. I'm just her granddaughter.”
And it wasn't until ten more years that I realized:
The paths of our lives are lined with trees of no ones, are laid with cobblestones of no ones. Our personal revelations, that unfold (or fold?) like origami boxes, other dimensions with each step we choose to take along our impassioned way, are lit internal and eternal with no ones. There are no “I am someone!” along the impassioned path. There are no “I am the one!” that truly help you. Because, He said to us, quietly, with His deep brown eyes and deep brown skin, “I am the one. I am the only one. And I am with you. Always.”
So everyone else is no one.
And I feel so blessed to be of them.
With all my love, on this sweet Sabbath,
E.J.
It was the summer I was eighteen but let's say I was twenty-two because that's better for my demographic. I had completed my first year in a fine institute of higher learning and had traded Boston night clubs for NYC's (as well as the fake ID that got me in – never to drink but always to dance and often to woo a handsome raver home for a little acrylic... or henna tat... practice) with an amused shrug, my first bike, and a murmur of, “Yeah, I'm game.”
Yeah. Sure was. The zero-sum playa.
Much to my parents' chagrin, my grandmother – ex-military, so not American, short-haired, and globe-trotting – requested/required/demanded I accompany her for the summer instead of going home. It would become the only summer I didn't take courses and the last summer I would ever have with her. But I didn't know that then and neither did she. She was ripped and dashing, carded at sixty-two (perhaps a pick up line used by our waiter? perhaps not), a no nonsense, no bluster kind of woman who rarely raised her voice unless she had already won the argument. She would survive front lines, a dangerous penchant for photographing militarized zones, and an uncanny sense of where trouble was going to happen, only to prove mortality a force with a red light that a London stranger claimed he “never saw” at 80 miles an hour.
Special circle, Keith. Christ forgives. The granddaughter? Not so much.
We seemed to go everywhere those ten weeks. It wasn't my first time aboard with her but my first time with just the two of us. I saw a side of her that was lyrical and joyous. Flirtatious and glowing. The sharp, wily, brilliant woman I had known all my life – who seemed to go out of her way to clash with my sharp, opinionated, brilliant mother – took a back seat to the woman who wanted to show me the midnight side of dancing in Spain with a man twice my age, and reading books of scripture on crackling parchment while she murmured in whispers with monks who called her still by her military rank. I was entranced with the world. With a world I had never seen before even as we revisited by favorite locales.
Grandma had always been the holder of my passport. My proud parents struggled with bills and property tax. They refused help. So Grandma would let herself in and make sirloin and brussel sprouts, and red potatoes with dill and garlic. They couldn't argue when dinner was already on the table. Car broke down? Simple replacement appeared. She co-signed on my first loan for a bike... and helped pull strings and pull together patrons for scholarships and loans for school. Canvas? Brushes? I worked for those. I paid her in originals... many of which she resold to galleries and fine hotels just so she could take me to lunch and there it would be on the wall. “Fancy that, my angel,” she would say, and raise one sculpted eyebrow in mock surprise while she sipped her dark espresso and thrummed her short nails on the mahogany table.
“This is unreal, Grandma!” I laughed one night, the streets full of dancing and masks and the scent of perfume and heat and spices.
She straightened the clasp that held my hair then decided against it and took it out, throwing it to a passing boy wrapped in green silk and stain leafs, his body almost bare. He called something to her but my French wouldn't be good enough for four more years to understand him or her husky response.
“What is real, my angel?” she asked me, so seriously. “What is unreal? If you feel it,” and she tapped my heart, the ribbons across my chest almost all undone from dancing. “Then it is real.” Ten years before I first found VR.
And then someone, small, wiry, with flashing eyes, a sly smile, and small hands, caught her wrist and danced away with her, laughing into the crowd. Leaving me to think, for a moment, that she was a celestial body, surrounded by a swirl of white and gold silk and lace and taffeta.
You wrote to me tonight, my friend, “Make my faith stronger.”
I wrote to you yesterday, “I am no one. I am best invisible.”
When I was four I was terrified of death. It would be better for my demographic to say when I was fourteen but I was four. So there. I would have these panic attacks... they came out of no where and nothing. Daytime, night time, lunchtime at school. I'd see shadows on sunny days and was certain they were death, tangible and hungry.
One night I panicked and locked my bedroom door and crawled under my bed and screamed. And screamed. And kept screaming. And the doctor on the phone said, “Let her scream herself to sleep.” But after an hour my parents called my Grandma instead.
The door knob opened in her hands. Of course. She closed it behind her with a click. She walked across the wood floor and I remember the feeling of her boots. Then she reached under the bed with one strong hand and my little bunny pj top bunched in her fist and she slide me out in one smooth motion like someone might drag a cat out from under the couch. She gathered me in her arms, there on the floor, me still screaming no word nonsense in unexplainable fear.
She had been speaking, the same prayer, over and over and over again, for quite some time by the recitation that I heard... but I did finally hear her:
“Imagine stepping on shore
and finding it Heaven...
Taking hold of a hand
and finding it God's hand.
Imagine breathing new air
and finding it celestial air...
Feeling invigorated
and finding it immortality.
Imagine passing from tempest and pain
into unbroken calm...
Waking up
and finding yourself home.”
Shadows became shadows. Panic didn't occur. Not in daytime or night time or even in the lunch line. I was never afraid again. (Not even at 100 mph along the California shore.)
I told Grandma years later, “You made my faith stronger.”
She said with a smile, “I am no one. I did nothing.”
We ended the summer, our summer together, on shores draped in fog and emerald earth, on silver-green seas so cold it took my breath from my lungs but still I came and swam. That sea turned this brown grrl blue so many times I think tears froze on my cheeks and fell among the round pebbles that made the shore.
And one morning there you stood. I had seen you once before, I think, when we hiked an hour for fresh meat and eggs. I think Grandma knew your name and you spoke English with an accent that I could have listened to for hours... okay, weeks. You invited us to service on Sunday, talking to her while you looked at me, while I looked at a deep barrel of pickled something (beets? potatoes?) that I seemed to have dropped my bravado in.
One morning there you stood. “You swim?” you asked. I was certain you weren't real. We were leaving in two days. No one had been here for fourteen. I was starting to believe that the universe was me, Grandma, and Christ. I walked past you without speaking because you were obviously a hallucination.
“Did you see any selkie, E.J.?” But you didn't say E.J., which everyone calls me, you said my birth name which no one does.
I turn around and look at you. Really look for the first time. I realize that I had mistaken your gender in town. I realize that you are breath-taking. I realize I never want to leave Ireland. “Did any selkie see me?”
Duh. Wow. My way with words came late, didn't it, babygrrl?
I am 98% frozen to death by this point. And let's not talk about what I'm (not) wearing. You gave me your coat. It was brown. It was soft leather. It was not made of seal skin. We walked back to the house. Grandma had two hot cups of coffee and two hot plates of breakfast sitting on the table for us. She took her Bible, hand-written, and left us.
Across the table from each other I realized that your eyes were two different colors.
You whispered to me, “Make my faith stronger.”
I shook my head, “I'm no one. I'm just her granddaughter.”
And it wasn't until ten more years that I realized:
The paths of our lives are lined with trees of no ones, are laid with cobblestones of no ones. Our personal revelations, that unfold (or fold?) like origami boxes, other dimensions with each step we choose to take along our impassioned way, are lit internal and eternal with no ones. There are no “I am someone!” along the impassioned path. There are no “I am the one!” that truly help you. Because, He said to us, quietly, with His deep brown eyes and deep brown skin, “I am the one. I am the only one. And I am with you. Always.”
So everyone else is no one.
And I feel so blessed to be of them.
With all my love, on this sweet Sabbath,
E.J.
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