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.
Sunday, February 27, 2011
Monday, February 21, 2011
I Liked You
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.
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.
Sunday, February 20, 2011
The Speed of Faith
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.
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.
Sunday, February 13, 2011
Short & Sweet
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.
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.
Sunday, February 06, 2011
Blood & Tears
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/
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/
Sunday, January 30, 2011
Will the Real Me Please Stand Up
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.
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.
Sunday, January 23, 2011
Cast & Seek
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.
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.
Thursday, November 25, 2010
Knowing: Day 1
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.
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.
Sunday, February 28, 2010
Centered
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
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
Sunday, February 21, 2010
Ketchup
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
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
Sunday, November 29, 2009
New Divide
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
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
Sunday, November 22, 2009
Caught in the Act
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."
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."
Sunday, November 08, 2009
We're All Damaged
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.
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.
Sunday, November 01, 2009
Represent
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
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
Sunday, October 25, 2009
Lightning Rod
[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.
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.
Sunday, October 18, 2009
Stressed is Just Desserts
Spelled Backwards
“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.
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.
Sunday, October 11, 2009
Praying in 140 Characters
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
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
Sunday, October 04, 2009
Fifty-five Words
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.
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.
Sunday, September 27, 2009
Your Great Big Ruler
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.
"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.
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.
Sunday, September 20, 2009
One Patch of Earth, One Grain of Sand
“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
“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
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