God is Love they say
But I have felt love at their hands. 
I have heard love fall from their lips. 

It twisted and turned. 
It slid right off of me when they looked away.
And none of it was strong enough to save me. 

It turns out that a lot of what I had learned about love
Was how to be quiet enough, flexible enough,
how to be small enough to be convenient.

Because the most important thing about Christian love
Is how it makes the giver feel. 

And they will redefine every word in the dictionary 
Before they make room for my sharp edges,
My burnt and frayed ends that hang like question marks.

I have always known the exact details of how I am
not quite what people want me to be. And that
I am not trying to be who they want. 

I think that last part offends them the most.
But I come by it as honestly as a person can. 
That is to say, I struggled to meet the expectations for as long as I could. 

But you can only tread water for so long.

All any of us can do is try to love others
the way we would like to be loved
until they tell us what love means to them.

That is where I find God these days.
In the people brave enough to say, 
"I want to love you better. Show me how." 
And, of course, among those who say, 
"I would like to be loved better, can I teach you?"

The trust it takes to ask for something different is the holiest thing I've ever known.

Winter Wind

Winter has a different kind of wind.
It rips and strips everything soft.
Golden leaves
silver seed tufts,
runaway wrappers.
They all split and scatter
until all that remains are
trembling branches,
a sidewalk scrubbed raw,
and the cold. 

gentle

I take out my phone and write in the notes, "be gentle with yourself." Not even 12 hours later, my phone rings and I hear that my cousin has been murdered by someone she loves. 

My mind shatters. 

My spirit splinters. 

Every metaphor for grief and loss and death that I've ever heard or read finds me over the next few days. I cannot hold the truth of reality without crumbling. I open my notes to try to write and put order to the experience. The phone app blinks open where I had left off, "be gentle with yourself". I close my phone. Those words are too hot to touch. 

I don't even know if I have a self to be gentle with. There is only pain. And my pain is a socket connecting me to all of the pain in the world. I am electrocuting and I cannot let go. I stop looking at the news because I can no longer separate myself from anyone else. The war in Gaza in particular breaks me open again and again. The bombings are in my living room. The wails of the survivors all sound like my cousin leaving. 

I don't know what has happened to me or why I can't even make a pot of rice without crying into it. I only know that I feel as though my skin is missing and all the heartbreak in the world is a howling wind against what is left of me, exposed nerves and all. I struggle against the words 'be gentle to yourself' and can only make sense of them applied to others. 

Be gentle with the coworker caring for their hospitalized family. 

Be gentle with your mother. 

Be gentle with those grieving near and far. 

That first week after my cousin passed, I have never felt more connected to world's gaping loneliness. And I guess if we are making morals, the greatest grief is that we are all each other have and we fail to treat each other that way.

I am far from home today. So far. A 6 hour flight to be exact. On the opposite side of this giant country. This bully of a country. And I am watching the news come in. Palestinians herded and corralled into the most densely populated corner of the globe and then bombed. And some folks think this is what God wants. They think it deeply with their whole being. And I have never felt further away from God in my life. Not just because church going politicians are signing bombs with hearts, though that has my stomach churning. But because so many people in my life are so very quiet. And it feels like God is quiet. Or sleeping. Or on vacation. As Rafah burns there are so many quiet people. From George Floyd until now, I feel like I have watched the faith I grew up with be choked and burned as the people who claim to be the hands and feet of God say and do so little. I think of the whole concept of Jesus on Earth. I think of the life depicted in the gospels where he constantly walks into politically charged situations with such a clarity of purpose. I think about Jesus in the homes of centurions, prostitutes, and tax collectors - calm while people accuse him of this or that kind of ideological misstep. I think of Jesus angry, whip in hand, turning over tables in the temple while people try to get him to be calm. He was not what they had prepared for. I think to myself, THAT version of Jesus would know what to do while Rafah is on fire. I wish I could find him. 

A Writing Assignment

I come from Big Sky country.

A place where the sky rolls out like a map with no edges, and you can't help but watch the clouds go about their day. 

I come from an unbroken line of partially broken women who hold up the sky with their bare hands and broad shoulders. 

Women who go to church to spill all the secrets that don't fit inside and don't want to be hidden. 

Women who go to their kitchens like they are going to stop (or start) a war. Casseroles for the grieving. Meat and potatoes for the overwhelmed and alone. Meringues and pies for celebration. Every dish a prayer. Every crock pot a loaded weapon.

I come from don't talk it about unless you can do something about it. 

I come from so many things you can't do nothing about. 

I also come from long grass and pine needles baking in the sun. From short autumns and long winters. From the inkiest of nights with the brightest of stars. From untamed rivers and a once small town that swells against the boundaries made by mountains and water and sky. 

I come from the longing that builds and builds and builds when you have to hold so many impossibly beautiful, fragile things in the same hands that have had to hold up a sky with no edges.

There's been a lot of change in my life in the last 2 months. It's mostly in my job but that change has been constant and total. And through it all there are so many people asking me what I want. I am never any more ready for this question than I was the first time someone asked. It's not like I don't want things. I want lots of things. Things that feel both too huge and too fragile to bother putting on the list. 

The last time I had career ambitions, I lost too much of myself. Nearly 9 years later, I still feel that loss in a way that I can't explain to folks. But the last time I wanted something badly, I felt like I made a bad wish and I have spent nearly a decade cleaning up that mess. So I don't want anything. I don't care how much money I make compared to other people or other options, I just want to make enough to take care of my community. I don't care if the job is prestigious or worth talking about at the holiday dinner. I'm neither ambitious nor competitive. I don't need work to keep me entertained or make me feel interesting to others. I am a naturally curious and collaborative person. I want to solve problems, answer questions, and help other people. Give me a career that lets me do those things. There are so many jobs that I can do while doing that. Or there are none. I haven't figured it out totally. 

But everyone keeps asking "what do I want". Can you imagine? My supervisor asks, "where do you see yourself in 5-10 years? What do you want?" And these are all I can think of:

I want to be understood and accepted by my family. 

I want my husband's family to make an effort to understand him and express how much they value him in all of his neurodivergent glory. 

I want to make enough money for T and I to be able to spend more time creating things -- stories, art, woodworking projects, and huge, unimaginable quantities of jam. 

I want to be able to travel to my far away friends every so often. 

I want to be able to be healthy in all of the ways that there are to be healthy. And I want to help my friends and family do the same. 

I want to do work that I'm good at and I want the folks I work with to do what they're good at and all of us to celebrate the strengths we each bring. I want my coworkers not to be threatened by my competency or looking for the times when I will screw up. 

Sure, this list might be able to be used to make a plan to bring me from where I am to some place closer. A career is a tool after all. And these abstract, subjective things can be broken into more bite sized pieces. But I lack the faith in the system. I have seen that you can spend years working hard and find out that you've been had. Your employer can take your labor and run. They don't have to recognize you, promote you, or pay you fairly. I don't even think that my current employer plans to do any of that and they are the least terrible employer that I've had so far. 

So what is the point of wanting such ridiculous, impossible things? What's the point of agonizing over the perfect pieces to break these desires into so that you can fill out the goal sheet a little more decisively? 

Truthfully, I want to work at a place that sees me as a whole person and wants to support my whole person. I do my best to show up as a whole person as an invitation for other people to do the same. Some months, it can really feel like I'm the only one being vulnerable even when I know that's not true. In my earlier church life, I was taught that showing up with authenticity would be rewarded and that's also not true. Reality is somewhere in between. And I'm struggling to want to show up vulnerably and authentically in spaces where it doesn't feel reciprocated. Why should I admit to what I really want? Are you going to help me get there? Or are you going to join the dozens of other voices that immediately start trying to haggle the price of my happiness down to something cheaper and more manageable?

I can feel the Seasonal Affective Disorder playing in my peripheral. Not quite here but also not, not here. 

It is strange how familiar the transition from summer brain to winter brain has become. First, it is just the ghost of a thought, a blurred image in the corner of my eye, a heaviness somewhere between my lungs and heart. Not quite making it hard to breathe or beat -- just making it hard. The pin prick of emotion with no cause clouding the space behind my eyes. 

I think I would call the first stage of SAD, "the desire to feel melancholy.". Because that is what happens. I, ridiculous human that I am, will begin to gather and harvest sadness in all the places that I can find it. Music and books. Real life and fiction. Past and future. It's not hard. There's a lot of sadness in the world. And that's the tricky bit. How do you lean into the melancholy without being swallowed by the abyss?

Accepting my depression helps me locate this pull towards melancholy early and often. When I pretend that I am perfectly capable and healthy, I drown under the weight of misplaced emotion - both melancholy and frustration. Winter never makes any sense when I try to act like I have the same brain that I had in the summer time. The other side of accepting my depression is knowing that I have survived 30+ winters with their season of melancholy and the abyss has yet to swallow me. I visit but I don't stay. 

I say that even though I have known enough people who did not come back out of the abyss to know survival is not a given. Hope is such a fickle thing.