I love this.

I live almost exclusively in the future. That is, in plans and dreams. In possibilities and abstractions.  At least, I did until last March. That set a course of alternate wandering and waiting, running and resting. I still try to live in the future. It is still where I derive meaning from. The only difference is lately, I have been rather unsuccessful. Still, I try.

And I wonder if that is as it should be. At the same time, I wonder if I can change that. My curiosity pulls me forward. I want to prove myself. Prove myself what? To whom? I am beginning to recognize that in this place, this desert I am being given a mirror that could show me what particles and pieces make and govern me. In this desert, it is becoming more difficult to divide what I want, what I fear, and what I believe God has for me. I find myself stopping puzzled, trying to remember, "did he really say that?" ...or was that some treacherous, false hope? Was it confidence or pride that led me to the decisions I have made?

I think I want to prove to myself that I can be happy, that I can find contentment. I think it terrifies me to give up on being a mechanic because it feels like putting myself further away from flight school. And flight school has been the goal for so long now that I can no longer imagine a future without it. I think I would like to teach flight lessons. 

I think I want to prove to myself that I can contribute to society, can take care of myself, and can be content all at the same time. Content. I want to know that I won't always be looking for something more, that my identity is not in the movement, the striving, the success, or the forward momentum. 

I want to prove to myself that I am capable. Capable of what? Of recognizing when I have enough. Of stabilizing in some way. Of success without greed. Of achievement without selfish ambition. 

And I think I want to know that it was not a waste, the path I chose. I want to know that I chose it for sound reasons, even if I could not always explain them. 

Most of all, I want to solve my paradox. That is this: that I am awed by and indeed ache for adventure yet I was born feeling already old and desiring a small life. How does one pair adventure with a small life? Do I want adventure because I am irresponsible, young, or foolish? Do I think about it to distract myself from monotony? (Why do monotony and routine seem as evil tyrants to me?) Conversely, do I desire a small life because I lack confidence? (I do lack confidence you know, except for very brief moments of boldness.) Do I want something small because I can control it? Ah, control! Is that what this is all about? Am I at war with myself seeking both to be in control and to lose all control at once? 

Possibly. 

Probably. 

I would do that to myself. 

It may seem easy enough to chide me with the advice to give control over to God. But really, what does that mean? What does that look like? And what if I have misunderstood God all of this time?

Yes, I am at war with myself but with the best intentions. 

I have begun to pray for solid ground to find my frantic feet.

On a totally unrelated note:

One day at a time. One. Without worry or an unrestful eye on all the rest of the days that are likely to follow today.

This is not the first time I have been taught this lesson. This is, however, the first time I have felt the least bit successful in learning. I know what it is like to suffer because I am holding all of my days like hot water in hands that were never made for such a thing. I have often recognized this scalding even as I persist because I did not know what it was to let go.

Success feels different than I would think. There is no victory celebration, but there is also no feeling of exhaustion from having arrived too late. It may sound simplistic but all I have felt is ease. To be sure, the ease is largely due to the previous struggles, the wrestling of my will, the learning of foreign movements. And yet, I am surprised. There is a lightness to living…and I cannot help but greet it with just a little confusion.

I do not trust things that do not test me. At least, not usually. But this? This is breathing. How could I stop or protest without punishing myself? There is something stronger than relief here. It is rest or peace or something else. I wonder if this is just a season or if that is my distrust talking. I often make life so much harder than it has to be just by trying too hard. It’s kind of funny. I am sure that I will find myself back in that place, but I think I will spend most of the rest of my life trying to figure out how to make this ease flow into the working, planning, and sweating parts of life.

It has been a long journey and I am only just now beginning to feel like I have come home to myself. 

In between boredom and busydom

These days it is harder than ever to get out of bed. My apartment is a great first apartment. It holds myself and my materials just perfectly. It allows me to breathe and I almost always look forward to coming home. But it is not without its quirks anymore than I am. Some of them are endearing, like its will to grow a forest of tomatoes. With the change in the season, I have discovered that my apartment is a bit drafty--though not the draftiest I have known. Moreover, the pilot light in the heater has no desire to stay light. Inside my house is just as warm as outside. And while I am glad that this is true of my apartment in Portland rather than in Montana, I still find it difficult to want to leave my bed. Compounding this feeling is my lack of job, school, or really anything that could motivate me past the initial discomfort.

I am in grave danger of becoming bored. and yet, my body automatically wakes up at 7:30 am with nothing to do. This is a strange time of life. I want to leave and stay at the same time. I am both resting and wearying. My body is restless. It is hard to do manual labor everyday and then just stop for a month. Balance is such an elusive thing. My mind and my body are forever leaving each other behind. Are they supposed to be in step? Sometimes. In the very quiet in between places, I feel as though I have snuck up on myself to be wholly present. It is always a gift when I recognize it. 

It is hard, though, to remember that it is healthy not to be busy but just as healthy not to be bored. In this space before the panic of a new job, I am relearning how to take one day at a time--not because I can't handle planning the future or looking ahead. Rather, because the future is not here yet, is not mine yet. It is hard not to look for change so I can adapt myself around it and plan accordingly. It is hard for me to be truly present. I am so much more gifted with the future. Yet, I am coming to see that the maturity of such gifts comes in being able to stand in the moment. And know when to plan and adapt. For now, I am in the long in between. But soon, I will leave. My task is not to mentally leave before the rest of me is allowed to.

In Search

I love the drive from Portland to Montana and back. The topography changes every 100 miles or so. The gorge. The endless plains and farms. The forest. The mountains. The valley in the hills.


I took too many of these photos while driving.


It is good thinking space though. The way the land stretches before you as if there are no more limits. I wonder at the ease of my vehicle and think back to the days when crossing 600 miles would have taken more than a month rather than a portion of my day. The last two times I have driven to Montana, I have been outrunning the rain. The first time, the lightning and thunder came in a few hours after I did. This last time, the rain took a few extra days on the trip. But it was the same rain. I am sure of it.

When I drive to Montana, I often leave the windows up. That is, until I reach the state line and cross from Idaho to Montana. When the window rolls down, there is an intense blast of pine and cedar. You are in the mountain pass. It is full of spruce and ponderosa. As you descend to the valley and meet the river, cottonwood trees greet you on the wind. I smell them always before I see them. Nothing smells more like home than river and cottonwood. Add the whistle of a train and the rush of water, and I am either profoundly homesick or already home.

Montana feels like home in a way that Portland never will. To start, all of Montana is home, even the places that I have never been to. Yet, Portland is an island inside of Oregon. Moreover, the topography of Montana calls out in the secret language of familiarity. In Portland, there are only places where I have lived and worked and spent my free time. Storefronts, book stores, parks, hiking trails, even grocery stores, but never the ground or sky by themselves. As I leave the Interstate for lesser roads headed to my house, I greet meadows and marshes that have always been empty, cliffs that have lost only a little weight, and lakes and rivers that tell me how much snowfall there was last winter by their wax and wane.

On this trip, I also smell the familiar smell of fire smoke. It reminds me of the summer that so much of the state burned that my uncle came from Arizona with his team of firefighters to help quench the blaze. The weekend that he came to visit our house, he looked so tired. He had aged 20 years in the course of a few weeks. He had hardly slept. It was the first time that I was aware that my uncles were mortal. I was so surprised to see him a few years later and see that he had reclaimed much of the youth that had left him while fighting those fires. That was the summer that the sun turned red from the thick layer of fire smoke--red all day long.

Where I stopped to take these pictures has no name. Only a mile marker on a highway between two small towns. It exists in what you call deafening silence. An orchestra of crickets pulses with such intensity as to cover the sound of approaching cars until they are upon you.

This post is far from finished but I am releasing it. I have fallen behind and it may take many more weeks before I have organized all of the thoughts that are attached to these photos. So, here you go. An abrupt end to my road tripping. One of several sagas in my chosen unemployment.

P.S. This is where my sister first learned to walk.

This woman. This woman is power. I have spent the morning listening to all of her poetry. It only gets better. There is part of me that wants to be her. To have something to say and the fire to get up and say it. But I am quiet and adaptable. I change myself to the situation before I even ask myself if that is what I wanted to do. I often guess what is expected of me wrong but that only makes me change faster the next time. Forming a solid identity is a slow thing. A clumsy thing. A graceless thing. It is so hard to keep trying.

Beet Soup.

Today is beet soup with red pepper and pear. Maybe I will like it. Maybe I won't. We will see. Also, Gregory Porter. 

The week has been a good exercise in the balance of desire and duty. Someday I will get the hang of living in the desert with a mysterious God. A God who desires good so deeply and is just as deeply committed to keeping alive my own ability to desire, even as he trains me to want honest but good things. How to be both unselfish and true to myself? Clumsily at first, that's how. 

Esta como Elena.

Well.

I quit my job.

I went home to Montana.

If you asked me why, I am not sure that I could put all of it into words. If 15 different people asked me why, I would likely give them all very different reasons--and I think they would all be true. My last day was bittersweet. I had hated night shift. It made me crazy and lonely. I was always switching from nights to mornings and back again. But I loved the community that was morning shift, even though I was the only white woman and I usually had very little idea what was going on. I had chosen to love the people there even though I knew I would leave quite soon. I invested a lot. Actually, I invested a lot more than I realized. I cannot think of a word to describe how I feel in thinking about the way they took care of me other than "blessed".

Elaine is a difficult name to pronounce in Spanish. It has too many vowels. But when I told my Hispanic co-workers that it is "como Elena", it stuck. After 4+ years of Spanish class, if you call me by my Spanish equivalent, there is 90% chance that I will answer in Spanish. My confused 3 year old efforts in their language pleased them and I learned a new kind of humility. I lived on heavy servings of their grace and patience.

Sharing that vulnerability only made me feel that much closer to people with whom I could only talk with about my family, food, t-shirts and boxes, and (if my vocabulary held out) maybe a sentence or two about what I did on the weekends. On the days that were very Spanish heavy and I was overly tired, I would come home unable to sort the languages because, in the warehouse, I did not have to. We made our own language based around what they knew in English and what I knew in Spanish and how available one of the bilingual people would be. I did not always transition out of that so easily. But I am not Elena anymore. 6:00am does not bring me Spanish love ballads and it has been a full week since I have been greeted in Spanish. Leaving was quite possibly the hardest decision that I have ever made. Not the hardest thing I have ever endured or survived, but the most difficult act I have ever committed independent of provocation.

I hope it was the right thing. I hope it was, at least, a good or healthful thing.

I realize now, that I have left behind my main community and support. As frustrating as it was to be unable to communicate so much of what was important to me, these were the people who gave me their time. They taught me Spanish and spoke with their hands and their eyes. And they kept talking slower and slower the more exhausted I was until I finally got whatever obvious thing I was overlooking. And if I had asked for anything, they would have given it. With joy.

I would like to think that that is true of all of my spheres of community past and present, but I am not convinced. So often, people are busy and distracted and they act like you are going to break through their thick wall of self-sufficiency and scheduling in order to tell them that you are vulnerable and needy. As if you have that kind of energy by the time you are damaged and drained. They act like you are going to chase them down to ask them to take care of you. Because that feels healthy and not at all codependent...right. And dignified. Turns out, human beings cling to a sense of human dignity long after the size of their need tells them it is not the most efficient way of filling needs. At the core of being human is a profound lack of efficiency that makes me wonder a little.

Anyway, I am going to miss that community. It would have been soooo much easier to let go if I knew at all what was coming next. If I had somewhere to go after I left. But I do not. I mean, I am here in Montana, but that is to stave off the loneliness...not to actually choose a direction. Unless I come back here permanently. That is an option I guess. Everything is an option and I am as of yet committed to no thing and no place.

All I know is that Elena is no more and that carries a heavy sense of loss. I will miss that community, but I have no words to tell them why or how much. Just as I had no words to answer the constant porque Elena? Porque?

I come back to my Israelite metaphor that I began living in after I got fired from HAI. I am still in the desert. At different times in the last couple of months, I have thought that I had left the desert. Every time I was surprised to learn that I was truly in the desert with a God that I am well aware could, and possibly should, abandon me here forever. He already got me out of Egypt and I have been so ungrateful. Besides, the Angel of Death leaves a particular impression on a person. And the desert. It just keeps going. The topography is always vaguely familiar and vaguely foreign.

Just a preview. And a warning.
Warning: musings about home and community ahead. Not guaranteed to make sense or to have tact. Product may contain unprocessed honesty and raw confusion.

wildflowers

Cassiopeia 

These plants have been my project for the summer. It's funny. I didn't plant tomatoes, but they grew. Seriously. I didn't plant tomatoes. I planted strawberry plants and chilis. The chilis were eaten by slugs and the strawberries survived. ...then the tomato plants sprouted up from the ground like a time capsule left to me by the last tenant. One of the tomato plants gives me softball sized fruit and has a trunk thicker than my wrist. They have a will to live that is admirable. So I have agreed to take care of them. Besides my most faithful bamboo plant, I also have a eucalyptus bush, a citrus mint plant, a lenten rose named Alexandria, and two pots of flowers that live outside next to the wildflowers. The potted plants are named Cassiopeia and Molari. There are about 5 homeless bees that sleep in my flowers. And I have a mouse that lives in my tomatoes and strawberries that I have named Demeter. This is my house. These are my favorite facts of life that stand between me and the loneliness. 

I had a lonely day last week though. So I went and I took these photos where the sidewalk ends

:

Montana.

 I wish I could say that I took these photos. I did not; my boyfriend took them on my camera. But I like sharing.

"T-shirts are not airplanes."

This has been my answer to many people wondering how the new job is, how life is, what I'm up to, etc. And they laugh. They laugh like this is the most obvious thing in the whole world. I guess it is. They laugh as though they understand. And while they may, I doubt they understand the landscape of emotion that I pretend to veil with those words. I am not sure anyone really understands because everyone, including myself, has just taken this all in stride as if my years of working to get to airplanes are satisfied by folding t-shirts and, on really interesting days, cutting the tags out of shirts so we can iron on tagless labels.

Mostly, I miss doing something interesting. I am beginning to feel forgotten in this warehouse on the edge of town. I do not know how long I will be here or what turn this road may take next, but I can tell you one thing: depression is not far away. I will accept this as calmly as I accepted getting fired and finding myself in a warehouse full of marathon shirts. I will take it because it is the next season and I know it will not last long. And I do not mean to be melodramatic. I mean to be perfectly matter-of-fact. What I can see of the future, seems to bring loss and loneliness. My prayer is that I will remember to fall back on the coping skills that have kept me whole before, that bitterness will be replaced with contentment. Can one be content in depression? I think so. I think it reads much like "blessed are the poor in spirit".

I am sure that someday, I will be full of nostalgia for my very early mornings and late nights spent drenched in sweat and counting to 12 while Spanish love ballads play on the radio. It is a peculiar place and it has shown me much that I am thankful for. There are so many people who bless me and take care of me through broken English and complex Spanish. These people who are showing me how to again be human are some whom I will never forget. And yet...t-shirts are not airplanes.

Today is hot and windy. Perfect weather for working in the almost sweatshop of a warehouse. Or a road trip. Your choice. Mine has already been made with not just a few regrets. Alas, we live in a world where it is just not 'responsible' to go road tripping merely because the weather demands it. A world in which 'responsible' is one of the highest goals.

To make myself feel better, I went and visited my garden. It's a wild and neglected garden but the sunflowers. Oh the sunflowers! They are now taller than me with stalks thicker than my wrists and leaves larger than my face. I like to sit next to them and listen to their leaves rustle in this wind. I didn't bring my camera or else you would also get to see them. Today, you must use your imagination.

Something funny has happened as I have begun planting plants everywhere...inside my house, in my yard, and in this garden plot near a friends house. My roots are growing with their roots. Like my strawberries, I am sending out runners and connecting with new people from new places. Like so many of my plants, I am having to prune back the things that I send energy into so I do not wear myself out. It is hard to make those decisions though. It hurts. You cut limbs and boughs that you hoped would bear fruit and provide shelter when it was your turn to need it. There is grief in that. I have been a long time in grieving those things. I have been alternately sad and angry...and they never really mention any other stages of grief after that. I hear acceptance comes eventually. I am looking forward to that one.

Roots are funny. I did not choose to put them here...they just started. As I loved and tried my best not to be selfish, I grew. And in growing, I got roots. Weird. Some of those roots were connected to people who left and it was sad to let go. It is hard to start over. It is hard to decide to keep loving new things and letting those roots find new soil. But I have seen that a plant only ever gets as big as its roots. A person is only as kind and good as the amount of love they choose to release into all of the relationships they find. At some point I realized that all of the pruning and transplanting and watering was only worthwhile to endure if I grew from it, turned it into love, and kept letting myself put out roots and runners again and again and again. At some point, I think I decided I want to be a sunflower. That sounds kind of cheesy, but  at least it gives the pain a purpose.

I have two conflicting images of my father which I carry around inside and which are only now beginning to merge and meld into the patterns of muscle and indignation that I recognize as him. On the one hand, I see him climbing everything from the sides of buildings to trees and from mountains to railroad cars. In this image, he is always smiling and laughing and teaching. He likes to teach even though he doesn’t know it. On the other hand, I see and feel this emotional vaccuousity that stands like a shadow that we are always running from. In this image, he is withdrawn and unstable.

The shadow chases him but it also lives inside of him. He has done so many hurtful things trying to get free from this shadow. It is only now that I am in my twenties that I am beginning to really understand that these two men are one and the same. When I was younger, I knew them both to be the man that is indeed my father…but I really only called one my dad and I tried my best to forget and elude the other. That and I tried often to console and heal and force the one to become the other.

Much of my young life was spent trying to stay one step ahead of the shadow and its effects on my family. It was then that I learned that I am no healer. Much to my surprise, I am learning to love that shadow because it is as much my father as the Spiderman-come-to-life chimpanzee of a man who was so much fun. And I am learning to love them equally because I can see that my father’s own struggle against the shadow, the pain, the seeming manic emptiness, and the guilt and shame will end in total defeat and the loss of the spiderman I have always loved if he does not learn how to love and accept the darkness that lives in him. Some of us learn to love the darkness quite early on, others much later, and some never at all. I am where I am because of wonderful people who have loved my darkness and my light all mixed together without trying to separate them or even make them make sense. And so, as I grow up, I try to love the darker parts of a man that has so much power to hurt me…and doesn’t know it.

It is a strange thing to know that the father that you love, the dad that you idolized as a 6 year old, never wanted you. It is especially strange to hold that truth beside the years of growing up that you enjoyed. He was so good at pretending for so long. But now, you realize, this was more because he was trying not to be his father. He never tried to be your father though. He was and always will be just a man running from the shadow of his father and all of the trauma that lived in that shadow.

Not wanted is different from not being loved though. That may seem illogical, impossible, or conflicting. Such has been much of my life. I think that is what makes this so hard for my mind to wrap around. I am 23 years old and for 23 years my father has not wanted me. He did not want to be a father like his father. He did not want to be a father. And I am the oldest of three daughters that force him to be a father. I was the first. I was the one who changed him into a father. He has loved me both fiercely and feebly in seasons since; but never wanted me. Never wanted to be the man I force him to be.

He thought he would just stick it out until I was 18. As it turns out, I will be his daughter for the rest of my life…and he my father. I think he resents me for this. He imagines that I will not release him or let him go as if fatherhood is a prison sentence that I execute with injustice in my eyes. As if I have a choice at all who my father is. As if I chose to exist. He has tried to make me angry. He has hurt me on purpose trying to make me run. He has chased me with hard truths with the hope that I will not want him. All of this, he has admitted to.  Often, I do not know why I hold on. I do not hope for change. I do not believe he will ever want me. I think I hope for understanding to come and maybe a little bit of healing with it. I think I am waiting for him to believe that he is both wanted and loved. 

Jessie J Pie and Tracy Chapman Chocolate Mousse.

I made blackberry pie and listened to this song. Then I made chocolate mousse while I listened to this song. My food always tastes how I feel and how I feel is directly connected to what I'm listening to. Also, I am reading Unclean by Richard Beck because Tyler left in my room thinking I would like it. Take the time to read the introduction on Amazon. I find it fascinating.

Still Trying.

Every 17 seconds the hydraulics of the machine to my right hiss; and I pretend that I am part of that machine, folding t-shirts, putting them into the box right in time for the HISSSSSSS. In those 17 seconds, I measure my movements and focus my energy as if I were just an extension of the unfeeling metal that sends me clothes to count and box. Waste one second, fall behind, interrupt the machine. Here, we are all organic extensions of a steal heart pumping one HISS at a time.

My coworker says that he and I are too educated for this kind of work. It is degrading. I will blame his 3 unfinished degrees for why he does not see the purpose in education drenched in sweat. This is, after all, the “real world” outside of the classroom. In many ways, it is the most real world. Here are the people upon whose backs society stays afloat. Here are the people who do the work that no one else wants to do and they do it for loved ones, for sick ones, for family near and far because it is all that they can find to do for now. Here is our foundation and our backbone. We will only ever be as strong as such as these.

I was taught that St. Francis once said, “ the glory of God is man fully alive.” I was taught that he was right. And I wonder what that means for us in this place as we mirror our machines, as we indeed become machines in order to build our lives. Moreover, what does it mean for our cousins in other countries where the rules are different? The work we do is hard, but the work our cousins do is unfathomable to me. We print on t-shirts that arrive to us from every corner of the enslaved globe. Egypt. Mexico. China. Haiti. Every t-shirt is a reminder that someone else has it so much worse than me. It is a reminder that my work is not degrading. I am still human.

I think to all of my growing up in which friends and family were always “searching out God’s call for their lives”. It seems odd to me that “God” never seems to call the people around me to work in the factory. I suspect that is born more out of concern for our own glory than it is God’s. My education tells me that there is no biblical or theological reason preventing the work we do here from being glorious. There is no particular aspect of printing t-shirts that in and of itself prevents men and women from being fully alive. On the contrary, Ecclesiastes tells us that we are to find enjoyment in our work and obey God’s commands. It does not say “find work you enjoy.” That is not an option for every person. That is not an option for most people on this planet. Can we who work in the warehouses find enjoyment and partake in the glory of God?

And now I only begin to grasp the Scriptures that tell us that God uses the humble, the simple, and the lowly to shame the proud, the educated, and the elite.

My struggle is to remember that I am not all machine if for no other reason than because I feel. I have compassion. Compassion will safeguard my humanity as I conform to the search for efficiency and the drive of my employers for profits. Yes, I have been sent here to learn though I do not know what I am looking for or how long I will be learning. I do know though that we need education and sweat mingled in more places.

Flying has never felt further away than it has these last couple of days. I have been reduced. I am no longer the artist-mechanic-girl who cannot possibly learn fast enough to know what she needs to. I am just…a girl who folds t-shirts and who looks up at the sky always. I work in a warehouse where I count t-shirts, fold them, distribute them, pack them, stack and unstack them. When everyone goes out to smoke, I look up to the space between the giant concrete walls of one warehouse and another and I wonder why I am not up there. How do I get closer to the stars? How do I make a home among the clouds? That old yearning turns anew inside me. And I ache.

I ache the way I did in high school…so much so in fact that I feel as if I am back in that place, making plans and realizing that flight school was at least 5 years away. I do not know if you have ever waited 5 or more years for something, but it is a long time. And then to reach the end and feel no closer than when you started…well, it is a little disappointing. Besides, it is not just that I feel no closer than when I started, but rather that I have reached the end of the plans that I know anything about (and if you have seen the plans that I did know something about, you know how truly lost I am).

Historically, I have been gifted with an inordinate amount of faith and a total disregard for descriptors like impossible. And on the days where I have faltered, there has always been a reminder. I once spoke with a college recruiter who asked me what I wanted to do. I told him I wanted to fly but that I didn’t like telling people that because it seemed ridiculous, like becoming an astronaut. He scolded me soundly, apologized that his school had no flight program, and then immediately turned to a cafeteria full of people and announced what I wanted to do. Then, he told me I was committed. I have had friends arrange flights and dentists give me children’s books titled Violet the Pilot. I have had professors pay for mechanic exams and homeless people tell me that all I have to do is keep the faith because I will get where I am going. I have had all manner of unexpected persons pour encouragement into this silly little dream. They have helped to build a wall against the tidal wave of voices who doubt that I will ever make it, who need me to convince them constantly that this is where I am going and that I have not given up yet. They have given me rest from my constant defense of a dream when I was too worn out to convince both myself and other people.

Most recently, I met a man named Jeffrey Jackson in the unemployment office. We met to discuss my re-employment options as a mechanic. I told him that what I really wanted was to fly. He looked at me and said in his almost-northernized-southern-drawl, “Darlin, we all want to fly. The question is, how fast do you want to go?” We talked about his time in Vietnam and his flights over Montana. He told me that his wife won’t let him fly anymore because she knows that one day, he will just keep going and not come back because he’s crazy. “She’s right.” he told me. And as he talked about flying, that ache crept back. I had kept it busy with track and balance flights and promises to go to flight school when I had paid off my student loans etc.  But, talking with Jeffrey, I felt my bones and my heart begin to hurt. I felt the air in my lungs get heavy with desperation. Yes, I know this ache. Ten years I have carried it, ignored it, and been driven by it all at the same time. In eighth grade, I told a friend that I knew I would go fly because a good God would never give someone a longing like this and then ignore it.

And yet, flight school has never seemed more impossible. The sky has never seemed further away. Now, I simply do not know what to do. I pack t-shirts. I have come to the end of all of the obstacles that I thought were between me and flight school, but I feel as though nothing has changed. It is still out of reach. It is hard not to wonder if I did life wrong. By faith, I know how patiently I should wait. By faith, I know that God has brought me this far and He will bring me the rest of the way. By faith, I know that if I rest in His grace, I have enough and I can be content.

The last few months have been a ton of being removed from a bad situation. I hated living in Tigard, mostly because it was lonely and nobody had time for me. I needed encouragement and Tigard had none of that. Emotionally, I starved. My attempts to reach out to people usually ended in the realization that you cannot force people to trust you and that I cannot trust people who do not trust me. I hated working at HAI, except for the aircraft. The drama and the constantly having to watch your back and keep up appearances was maddening…and exhausting. I cried out to God for months asking Him to change the situation. I had meant that He should give me encouraging friends and teach my coworkers to be better people. Instead, I got fired and evicted…and I have never been so relieved in my entire life. I have never had such a large amount of stress evaporate so quickly that I can wake up one day and feel the difference from waking up the day before. God brought me out of Egypt His way.

But now I am in the desert.  I understand now why the Israelites got into the desert and then rebelled. The desert was not what they expected. They had been filled with visions of a fertile and gentle Promise Land. They had left the beautiful land of Goshen on the Nile Delta. They were not equipped for the desert. Sure they had been slaves before, but they knew how to do that. It is easy to work hard and cry out to God to change things. But when He answers by taking you into the unkind and harsh desert, you begin to wonder if everything you believe about Him is accurate. You wonder what else you were wrong about. And in the thirst there, the rivers of the Promise Land could not possibly feel further away. They decided to make their own way.

And I? I am being given a lot of advice that feels like making my own way. I want to do it. I would call it “good stewardship” or some other NIV-extricated word like “being faithful with what I have been given”. But really, it would be the golden calf of my own desire to control my life. It would be fear and selfishness. I know that I am here to wait and to learn. There are things you can only learn in the desert. I just wish I knew how long I will be here. I need something to tell the ache inside me so it does not consume me. I am afraid that it will. The desperation keeps building as I try a new solution, a new direction and God says, “No not that way.” Again and again and again…and again. I am lost in the desert with a mysterious God. I am not really sure of anything, only that I cannot help but be jealous of the wind. 

I miss camping. A lot. I miss it not as one misses a hobby or a skill that you just did not manage to keep up with or hold onto as you passed through life. It miss it with an intense ... nostalgia.

I miss it the way some of my friends miss airports, another state, or another country. I miss the forest as you would a good friend or a grandparent.

It has been...too many years since I was last camping. Years? How did it ever get to years? What have I been doing that I have not slept in the woods for so long? I actually do not know how long it has been, but I know that I have at least failed for the entirety of college.  The fact that I do not actually know when I last went camping is astounding to me.

You see, the forest, especially at night, is home in a way that very few places ever will be. When my family moved to Montana, we lived in a tent for awhile at the KOA. When my parents divorced, my dad moved to the rafting guide campground and I spent every weekend of the summer stretched out, looking at the stars hung between tall pine trees. The rules of the city are not like the rules of the woods. Freeways make poor substitutes for wild rivers. All of the open spaces are so full. Every minute passes with a roar.

When you are camping, the only limits are those that protect your own mortality. If it does not draw blood or give you hypothermia, why shouldn't you do it? The forest is about ability. The city comes with so many expectations. The city wants you to ask permission. I am not good at asking for permission, much less accepting limitations arbitrarily assigned.

All of that to say, it is summer time and the dirt roads are telling me that it is time to go; but the city asks so many questions. How long will you be gone? What will it cost to leave? Who will take care of....? When will you be back? Where will you go? How will you get there? How will you get back? 

People seem to think that these questions mean something to me. To an extent, they do. But only in the same sense as a second language that you can only speak with bad grammar. At some point, I need to stop having any sort of conversation and just leave. I will never be understood by concrete and traffic. I need moss and rivers. I want to listen to the advice of wind in the trees.

The morning after I no longer had a job, I went and took these photos.

A brief recap is in order. I think I said it best when I was on the phone with a friend. In February, I got evicted. In March, I was fired. Now it’s April and I am making cookies. Sometimes life takes you to different places than you expected to see much less live and make a home in.

On the way to work a couple of weeks before I was let go, I wrote (in very illegible handwriting since I was indeed driving while writing):

"The fog has turned the bare tree on the hill into a black and white photograph that I am living next to. All I want to do is drive into it. Their wild arms are stretched out and back-lit by a sun that has not yet overtaken the morning to chase away the fog. There are roads that I have only just noticed and suddenly a yearning turns inside me as if those roads are the home that I am always looking for. I curse my job in that moment and resent all of the things that I perceive keep me from driving down those picturesque roads awash in an ephemeral beauty that I will probably never see again. My own unpreparedness is more to blame than anything. I left my camera at home. Still, I am caused to question once again if it was worth it…the years in college trying to learn a new way of thinking, trying to unlearn my abstract patterns and artist ambitions in exchange for airplanes and helicopters (but not yet the sky). It has not been the adventure I imagined. At seven in the morning, that road looks like the adventure I promised myself that I would be ready for when it found me."

Needless to say, I am ready for a change. I am developing a very fluid identity. People try to tell me that getting fired does not change who I am…but I disagree. It changes the role I play in life. That may not be my very core, but it changes the way I express that core and I just cannot bring myself to draw a line and divide with finality my identity and the expression of it. It seems a matter of syntax. Changing my role in life changes my experience of who I am. And so, I am different.  But if you asked exactly in what ways, I would only have a lot of half thought out philosophies on how being truly hated by people changes you much like being truly loved by people does…except it’s different.

Now, I live alone. I live with my art. I am trying to teach myself how to make time for that again, trying to build a home, trying to learn new skills like baking cookies. I have never baked cookies alone before. But I have never done a lot of things before.

Here we are again.

I have a lot on my mind right now. There are lots of pieces threatening to come together, to resolve. The suspense is killing me, but the next 2 years are going to determine so much of the course of my life. And there are lots of questions that refuse to be answered. Mostly, I want a lot of conflicting things that God has little interest in helping me sort out. Instead, I am processing things that I thought I had long since finished the grief process for. But it turns out that you can start the whole process over in a moment's notice...and that has been a hallmark of my life.

I get angry when I realize that I am back in this familiar place. I have a lot of bad poetry from the first few times. I am not here to contribute anymore of that tonight. Mostly, I am here to write until I understand myself.

See, I loved my growing up. My running through the woods of Montana under the watch of mountains and sky. My making candy in mom's kitchen. My long ago friends with our silly adventures. These are all precious pieces with specific pictures of people and places.

And yet there is this haunting feeling of loss. I don't know how to explain it except that in psychology it is often referred to as abstract loss. It is the loss where you know that things as they are do not quite qualify as normal, something is missing...even if you don't know quite what the name of that thing is. It is not that something physical was taken away or stolen. For me, it is that I grew up so fast. I went from 7 years old to 18 and from there to 30 years old. Or something like that. From child to adult and from adult to parent before I ever turned 10. More or less. It is not an exact science. I cannot say that I was paying much attention to the details of the experience when it was all happening.

And now I am trying to explain what it means to have lost so much of your childhood, to grow up so early. It is not as though I can try to be 8 years old again. The best I can do is be the age I am. I get flack for that sometimes, for really holding onto being just my age and no older. Our society is so good at praising those who mature quickly. I loved being 19. It was horrible year of life filled with abandonment, but it was the first year that I got to deal with my problems as a 19 year old, my actual age. And I will never be 19 again because I grew up. But there are ages that fell into the chasm of survival. I never was those and it wouldn't be healthy to try to reclaim them now, ten or more years later. How do I explain the loss I feel in knowing that? There is no good comparison because I do not know what I missed except by the quiet envy I experience from time to time.

Looking back, I think I made the best of a bad situation. I think I chose well. I think it was all that could be asked of me and I would give it all again. The anger and hurt rise though when some secret wind whispers, it didn't have to be that way. The game was set and the odds were stacked before I ever had a chance. It is then that I remember that I live in a world under a curse. Most days, I am fine and grown up and unaware of the damage done. But then something small happens and all of the walls of the rooms that I have built inside myself crumble under a torrent of emotion that I wish I could control. Then the feeling of loss overwhelms and I wonder if healing is possible, if it ever really stays. And I think it does. It is just slower than I am patient.

But then that whispering wind hands me more discontentment as it howls around the ruins inside me.

You may heal but you will never be restored.
You will always be just a little bit

broken.

 It helps when I remember that we all have lost something in this curse, that we are survivors of a heavenly war that we chose the wrong side in. It is best not to compare pain and loss. No one wins that way.

Mostly, tonight I hope that healing is still possible. That restoration is a bigger miracle than I can imagine. And that eternity can provide things that are impossible amongst the mortal, cursed, and dying.

And that all of this grieving really will be turned to a celebration that is not forced or false in anyway.

I have been playing with an idea for awhile now. It is kind of silly in that I have been slow to accept it even though its truth is apparent and obvious to probably everyone but me. Ready?

I will be misunderstood and that is ok.

I have treated that fact with an inordinate amount of contempt. I have dedicated my entire growing up to knowing myself as best as I can with severe honesty so that I can explain myself plainly to others and escape miscalculation. I have not yet succeeded.

There are a lot of factors that have robbed me of my success. First, there are the sciences which teach that people are liars above all in their self-perception so you must disregard what people tell you about themselves. Second, there is the plain fact that many people are liars and so experience also teaches a wariness of other's opinions with a high value set upon the observer's limited view. Thirdly, people are human. They will see what they want to see, what they are afraid of seeing, and they will draw judgments when they should draw up a chair and ask more questions. We are busy creatures who contract business with misinformation as our currency.

And I am learning that all of this is ok. I thought that I needed to be understood; and I have benefitted greatly from that belief in what I learned from myself in order to correct the generalizations that I was saddled with but never fit.

The truth is, for the rest of my life I will fit the average American's definition of a man more than that of a woman. I will have the psyche of a oldest child crossed with a middle child and I will be a little bit culturally confused because of my growing up and it will defy the definitions people try to dress me in. I will always be confused about my socioeconomic classification. The truth is, I will always disappoint those who live their life under the rule and reign of stereotypes and generalizations. Part of me will always answer to a name that is not actually mine. And I am aware that that is just fine.

I am not the first to have to learn to survive in a world that is not built for people like me. I will not be the last. It is a lot to expect the world to drop their presumptuous habits, their hurtful ways of speaking about what is obviously true for "people like us" as I look over my should and realize that "us" means me and I don't identify that way. I often wonder what happens when they realize that, if it is either "us" or "them", I live in a different camp than them. The truth is, I do not suffer the worst of this assumption and presumption. In many cases, the identity I am handed is one of a privilege that I barely understand much less know how to use. Therefore my grievance does not cause me the suffering that it could if I was assigned a different descriptor.

I am still misunderstood, but I am learning that this is the rule not the exception. I am learning that people live and build their identities in the cracks between the names that cultures and societies give us. When you do not expect to be understood, the sting lessens and the disappointment fades. And those who do understand you and who take the time to know your real name become that much more valuable. It is then that you realize the gift they have given you and stop taking it for granted.