I no longer wait for Jesus to come back. And that is different than how I lived the first 30 years of my life, wondering if we were measurably closer, listening to the certainty that so many people had. And I wonder why it is so much sexier to try to guess if this war is part of the plan, if that earthquake was a sign than to look at my neighbor and say, "what needs do you have that I could meet?"

I no longer worry and fret that someone I love is going to hell. Who was it who said that, "hell is empty and all the devils are here?" Probably Shakespeare. I don't mean to be flippant. Instead, I mean to be so incredibly serious about the weight of the world's suffering and how far back into history much of it stretches and also, also, also the way we are taught not to dig too deeply or look too long at how the pattern repeats, is disrupted and then repeats. 

These are tied together. The present and eternity. And while Kant once convinced me of an afterlife by pointing out the way the present lacks justice, the way so many Christians won't lift a finger in pursuit of justice convinces me that there is something deeply wrong with putting all of your hope in the next life. A cosmic escapism that does not keep step with the call to love your neighbor and for God's will to be done on Earth as though it were heaven. 

I have never felt more helpless in my entire life for the people I love. 

I text my friends and tell them to stay safe. But we all know that safety is just a wish we blow out of our lungs and hope that the wind carries to our loved ones. My dandelion wishes don't stop men with guns and handcuffs and rage from handling the people I love like disposable parts. 

If I could spread my body out like a cloak and cover them, I would hide them in the folds of myself. I would tuck them into a secret pocket like the precious treasure they are. I would if I could. 

I don't know who could support this. And I know even less about how people call this love or law or order. The people I know try not to call it anything at all, scared that a whisper in the wrong direction will bring an extra serving of wrath. 

Today, I let the fear in. I let it all the way in until it is settled between my lungs and my spine. I do not know what happens next. Only that I have joined so many others in feeling helpless while we blow wishes for safety at people across this country. And we wait for news that disaster has passed them by. And we feel the weight of the selfishness of that hope, that we know it is coming and it will take *someone* but we still desperately hope that it won't be someone we love. 

Love

For years now, I have had a complicated relationship with the faith that raised me. As time continues, I keep wondering if we were even reading the same book. It has also been years since I have opened my Bible. But years spent studying and memorizing mean that it is inside me and it comes to mind unbidden often. Today, the question on my lips is this: 

Is this how we love our neighbor? Most of my Christian friends and family supported an administration that is not quiet about who it hates and who it considers less than human. And somewhere along the last 6 years many of them have stepped quietly back to being some kind of vaguely apolitical. Some kind of spiritual bypassing that only cares about the next life and is really just coasting through this one. 

Is this how we love our neighbor? Tax dollars fund a cold civil war that is erupting into violence in Minnesota and I'm sure will come to my city any day now. Why? Because somehow, someway all of the people allegedly gifted with God's discernment have become convinced that what makes us unsafe are immigrants. 

And I think of the Good Samaritan. The political outcast Samaritan. The way Jesus led his audience to say with their mouths that the unpopular political group is the neighbor, the protagonist demonstrating how we follow the second greatest commandment to love our neighbor as ourselves. Today, Jesus might have made the protagonist an undocumented immigrant or a trans person. Because that is the point. The man Jesus is telling the story of the Good Samaritan to wants to quantify who his neighbor is. Who does he have to love as himself? And Jesus tells the story of a Samaritan who finds a man bleeding in a ditch after all the righteous and powerful have already chose not to help. Jesus says, "be like the Samaritan". If you find a man bleeding in the ditch, even if he is your political opposite and might wish you harm if he were well and able, help him. Work for his health and happiness. Invest your time and your money. Loving your neighbor is going to cost you. It will not happen on a day when you have no other obligations or stress. That person might not even thank you or repay you. 

And I look at the church folks I know today with that story burning in my heart, and I think, "Is this how we love our neighbor?" Have they not become the priest who pretends not to see, who chooses not to inconvenience themselves? Do they not shrink back from anything that seems too unclean?

So many Christians act like Jesus told you to make sure folks get to heaven. Did you know that love the sinner, hate the sin is not in fact in the Bible? If you go back and read things carefully, you will find verse upon verse that tells you to make Earth like heaven followed by verses about caring for people's physical needs. From the Lord's prayer to the book of James calling out that faith without deeds (deeds that feed the hungry, clothe the poor, and take care of the orphan and widow) is dead. Paul says that he could have every spiritual gift but they would all be nothing if he doesn't have love. 

I have had people close to me tell me that my heart is so soft and I am too compassionate. But I think I just took the life of Jesus from the Sermon on the Mount to the cleansing of the temple at face value. These words raised me and now they haunt me.

Is this how we love our neighbor? Is this how we love our neighbor? Is this? 

At some point I realized that I do not have any use for a religion that only benefits me. I wanted the community that had been outlined by Jesus and other biblical writers where we love our neighbor as ourself and my neighborhood included a lot of people facing challeges that I was protected from. But my own comfort was not the goal. Some privilege cannot be shared. I could not take the privileges of my whiteness or my cis genderness and wrap them around my friends to keep them safe when I wasnt around. Loving them meant understanding and believing in the realities that they faced. Loving them meant supporting policies that would let them live healthy and safe lives. 

There are a lot of scriptures about love. Maybe even more scriptures about love than any other single topic in the bible. So it amazes me that more Christians do not pursue love as a spiritual discipline. As I was leaving the church, one of the things that cut the ties I still felt was listening to Christians disparage compassion as just an emotion that is commendable but which lives somewhere below logic and reason. I thought it was a fruit of the spirit and a key component in the second greatest commandment. I thought we were supposed to imitate the compassion of Christ. And I was tired. I was so tired of telling people what should be obvious. If your love does not have you wishing, hoping, and working towards the health and safety of those around you, you don't really love them. If your love has you talking over the person you are trying to help and telling them what they really need instead of listening, you dont really love them. 

But I realized at some point, maybe even with my mom's voice coming through the telephone, that love wasn't a spiritual discipline for them. I had to choose. Could I abandon my most honest, authenthic understanding of the first and second greatest commandments to keep the peace? Was there a point to a religion that espoused a love that conquers death but which coined the phrase "toxic compassion"? Truthfully no. If I believed the words I had read and studied, being faithful meant following the law of love even if that took me out of the church. I am not the best biblical or theological scholar. I am probably not even in the top 40%. But I choose to believe Jesus when he says "by your love people will know you." And also, "if you love only those who love you, what reward will you get?"

Another step on this journey was the day I heard a coworker talking about someone in their family harassing them which they summarized as, "there's no hate like Christian love." Oh how I grieved to hear that. It had been years since I had introduced myself as a Christian and I knew exactly what they meant by the phrase, a dozen scenarios I had witnessed flashed through my mind, but I grieved because of a truth that shouldn't be true. What would Jesus think to know that that's how so many people view their Christian neighbors--"these people say they love me, but if this is love, I wish they'd hate me." What is the point of a religion like that?

Am I a Christian? Am I not? I don't know. I still talk to God and my imagination of God is built almost entirely of the Christian workdview. But I don't think most churches or most American Christians want me. I am well aware of how much I don't measure up. For one, I have rage and grief where "good Christians" have temperance and long suffering. And I wish to God that I knew what to do with the rage and grief. But if He wont take them away, I ask that he send companions who understand that these too are gifts, albeit not the gifts I wanted.

I want to say that I don't recognize the religion that I was raised on. I want to say that this fanatical nationalism, this disregard for the fruit a person bears, this victim complex whenever Christianity isn't supreme... that it is something I never saw coming. But the reality is that I just clung to few folks devoted radically to love and ignored all of the rest. However, the more people you meet and the more people you love, the harder it gets to ignore things that are happening to someone else. Yes, you could walk by, but that's your friend lying facedown in the ditch and you love your friend. And no matter how many times a Christian Nationalist invites you to define love as holding people accountable to your understanding of morality, that isn't it. And it's not even what was modeled in the Bible. Jesus was hard on folks who were traditionally successful and viewed as worthy. But he was unnecessarily kind to the people on the margin who could do nothing for him. I say that to contrast with the people who claim his name the loudest now. 

I think often of the Good Samaritan. I think more about the Good Samaritan now than I ever did when I went to church regularly. I think about how Jesus is surrounded by people and a rich young man comes and asks him how to get into the kingdom of heaven. And he tells him in front of everyone to sell all of his things and give them to the poor. And I think about Jesus eating with tax collectors. And talking with divorcees and prostitutes. And I think about how politics is really just how we organize people, organize society. I think about how political every single one of the stories of Jesus is. And I think about how gutted those stories often are in their re-telling. How many times did Jesus say the first will be last and the last will be first, and how many times does the New Testament says that God does not show favoritism? And how should those things inform how we organize people, how we politic? I think about James telling us that pure religion is looking after the foreigner, orphan, and widow and how those were all of the most vulnerable people in that time and place. 

I think about how the trans people that I have known in real life have gone out of their way to be kind because they know just how hard life can be. And I think about the immigrants in my life, especially the brown ones, have given me so much more than they have ever taken, especially in hospitality. And I think about what happens when you believe the stories people pass around instead of your own lived experience, but that you still have to be aware of what a drop in the bucket your lived experience is. And I think about the Good Samaritan who is the hero of the story. And I think about Jesus telling a gathering of Jewish people at odds with their Samaritan neighbors that they should be like the Samaritan in the story if they want to follow the greatest commandment. And how Jesus asks the crowd if the priest, Levite or Samaritan was the good neighbor and the expert in the law did not say "the Samaritan" but said "the one who had mercy" as though "Samaritan" was a loaded word.

And I wonder if the American Church will ever be associated with mercy. 

Especially now that there are phrases like "toxic compassion" coming out of the mouths of preachers. And how the best that any of the church folks I grew up with can do, is distance themselves from politics and strive to be "a political". But Jesus didn't shrink from politics. He turned down the offer of political leadership and power, but he outlined in every story how we care for our neighbors, our enemies, and our oppressors. There actually isn't anyone anywhere that Jesus said it was ok to leave them in the ditch. And I know everyone is stuck in fight, flight, freeze, and fawn. But I keep wondering if the reason Jesus had to use a Samaritan as his example of following the two greatest commandments is the same reason I had to leave the church to find people who cared about the same things I cared about. 

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. 

I've been doing a couple of months of life coaching from someone who specializes on anti-racism, embodiment, and enneagram work. It's a really specific venn diagram and it's not for everyone. But I have loved it. I struggle to find "my people" and to feel understood even in circles and relationships where I have been known for a long time. I carry a lot of anger from the ways that being misunderstood has hurt me. 

Right now, I'm feeling my way through a lot of the embodiment pieces. They are hard. I don't live in my body. I live in my thoughts. My body is where I shove all of the emotions and thoughts that I don't know how to confront. The process of listening to and valuing my body, is a homecoming that I've long heard other people talk about. It never seemed for me. And I think there was a tiny sliver like belief that I was too fractured to come any more home than I already was. 

I've been thinking about this in the context of my own family. The way my parents did or didn't talk about their bodies. The ways they worshipped or condemned pleasure or suffering. And while my parents are wildly different, I realized that my young mind was trying to synthesize all of the messages about existing that I was getting. There was a clear hierarchy of being. 

Soul.

Mind. 

Emotions.

Body. 

But the soul and the mind were so important that they received 80% of the time, energy, attention and love. The emotions and the body had to make do with what remained. And if your body wasn't "healthy" (read: able and thin), then that last bit of energy and time was saved for fixing your body. Loving it much less thanking it was never part of the equation. Moreover, I learned a kind of loving that demanded constant improvement. There was no love in stillness and quiet and just being, especially for the body. What was a body for anyway? Just a temporary shell. Something that really spiritual people quickly outgrew. And yet, it's the only home I've ever known. Isn't that something? The home in which all these multitude of thoughts come together to find action and rest. The table at which all of the emotions dine and find their voice. 

Even within Christian theology it is unclear if there will ever be incorporeal life. The end times prophecies speak so much of a new heave and a new earth and the second coming of Jesus. For centuries, Christian tradition was to bury the body as respectfully as possible so that we could make use of them when everything is made new. So, truthfully, this body may be the only home I ever know in both this life and the next. Why does it get so little time and attention? How come the best kind of love many of our bodies will ever know is pride in their fitness and acceptability? A fragile love that will surely waver as youth slips away. 

31 years I have been with this body and it holds a memory of everything that has ever happened to me. Sometimes, it remembers even better than my mind. I am trying to take more time to stop and say "thank you". For the bodily knowledge that comes as intuition when I need to know something that the mind cannot grasp. For the care my body shows me when it let's me know that I am pushing too hard. For the endurance. For the room to hold both joy and sorrow. For the capacity to experience pleasure and suffering in their turns. These wild extremes held in this small home. 

Bodies are so fragile and so resilient. Prick them and the bleed so easily. Sleep a little funny, they'll let you know. But they don't give up very easily. It's a home that keeps healing as best as it can for way longer than my mind thinks is rational in the grand scheme of human history. 

Which brings me to liberation theology. Mainstream theologians criticize liberation theology as being to fixated on the suffering of Christ, of making his suffering mean more about our suffering than it really does, of not giving the resurrection the center stage that it is due, and finally of not emphasizing the forgiveness of sins nearly enough. And yet, this is what keeps me coming back to liberation theology. That mystery for me is that somehow Christ's body was necessary to his victory. It does not make sense to take a literal reading of the resurrection but to take a metaphorical reading of the importance of the bodily suffering and resurrection. It was his body that was broken for us. And in the last days of Jesus we see him crushed in all ways. Abandoned by his closest friends. God himself looks away. His body crushed. Stripped of every emotional and mental comfort. The resurrection is total restoration, and something most of us who have been betrayed and crushed can only dream of. 

Spiritualized suffering is worshipped. If I said that I was tired of my step dad's emotional abuse, my church would have been only crickets. So I learned to tell the spiritual story. You aren't' abused by your stepfather because his trauma keeps him from emotionally regulating and caring for himself, you're fighting a spiritual battle for his soul. If you say the former, the church would hush and stare and stumble over their words. But if you say the latter, they will clap and say hallelujah. But both were true. But liberation theology looks at the abuse and says words like "patriarchy" and "generational trauma" and so on until you know that it isn't your fault, you aren't alone, and there are solutions besides praying and hoping that some outside force intervenes before you break totally apart. In such a context, resurrection feels more hopeful and less likely to be more spiritualized nonsense. A real experience for both the body and soul. 

And isn't the body the battle ground for so many of us? I know the places that my body has tucked specific traumas and stresses. I know which years of silently suffering affected which muscles. So when Jesus comes to someone like me, I want him to touch those places in my body and bring healing there. When we are resurrected, I want this body to have a second chance not to swallow all of that bitterness. I feel the need quite often these days to apologize to my body for the ways I asked it to carry more than we could, for the ways I ignored it's messages that I was past my limits and hurting myself. 

What a long, long year. September is one of my "new year anchors". I kind of ignore January. Seasonal Affective Disorder means that I never feel like doing anything more or new or extra or healthy in January. And then there's my old friend February. But March and September are my weigh points. March starts with my birthday and ends with spring. A perfect time for new habits and reflection. 

September closes out the heat of the summer and has some of the most beautiful mornings and evenings. It also has both my wedding anniversary and my work anniversary at my current company (7 years for one and 6 for the other if anyone is counting). Lots of things to check in on and think about. Plus, autumn is like a second spring in the gardening world. Lots of plants need their seeds to experience the cold and damp of winter before they are ready to sprout in the spring. Lots of plants benefit from growing roots over the winter so they can really be ready for spring foliage and summer fruit. 

Today was the first day in long, long string of days that have been wrapped into a long string of weeks that I woke up clear headed and feeling like myself. Can you believe that I had actually forgotten that it used to be normal for me to pop out of bed with curiosity and chaos in my brain? Chronic pain is weird. It manages to both feel more and less terrible than I let on to other people. 

Most of my TMJ pain doesn't feel worth mentioning because most people just want you to tell them when you're better. But it's been 10 months and some days are better but a lot of days are just...the same. Most of the pain isn't very acute. And I sleep through a lot. It's not good sleep and I've been feeling worn down now for so long. On the pain scale where 10 is so bad, all you can do is try to count how many bones there are in your face that are throbbing but you don't have the attention span to finish counting so you just count and get interrupted by the pain, count and get interrupted over and over again, I live at a 2 or a 3. 

Spending 10 months at a 2.5 feels like being a car with the headlights left on. It's not a big problem, but then the battery gets drained and the car isn't as reliable as it used to be. How many times can you leave the lights on and drain the battery before other problems start to arise? Every night for a week? Four out of seven nights for how many months?

It's hard to call myself a morning person anymore. Mornings used to be my best time. And I loved mornings alone best. A secret hour or two before the world breaks in, speeds up, and has you running. But not anymore. There are no secret hours. Just ibuprofen and trying to nurse my way into functioning. I miss the way I used to be. 

I also miss just feeling alright without effort. Do you know how hard I work just to keep my pain at a 2 or 3? I stretch, take magnesium, get jaw massages, wear my night guard, am vigilant about unresolved conflicts that might leave stress hanging out in my jaw, neck, and shoulder. I devote hours each week to basic upkeep (or down keep) of all of the known triggers of TMJ. And I'm grateful that these things help, but I grieve the body I used to have and the time I used to spend on other things. 

I don't really feel like myself lately and I have definitely had less capacity for all of the relationships that require me to do any "heavy lifting". "I'm sorry that you need me to guess what you're feeling and comfort you, my emotional intelligence is at a record low because I haven't slept in 10 months." This has also made me significantly less empathetic. I don't mean to. It's just that the battery is dead. Trust me, I wish I could swim through your emotions with the ease that I used to and help you make sense of them, but I can't. I'll drown because I lack the stamina these days. May we all ask for what we need directly and with kindness. 

Oriah

I've started a coaching program and I think it's the best decision that I've made in a long, long time. Never have I had a group of people hold all of my pain and hopes so gently and so firmly. This week, we met to talk about the book "The Invitation" by Oriah which is an exposition of her poem by the same name. It's staying with me, coming back in parts and pieces. Today, the piece that comes back is this: 

"It doesn't interest me
if the story you are telling me
is true.
I want to know if you can
disappoint another
to be true to yourself.
If you can bear
the accusation of betrayal
and not betray your own soul.
If you can be faithless
and therefore trustworthy."

I think a lot about that last line: if you can be faithless and therefore trustworthy. I think about the people I have disappointed, the ways I have changed that they have not liked, the ways I have refused to change and so on. I think about my family, my relationship to religion, my career and so on. There is a sea of people's expectations and I am floating on this verse, holding my head up to catch a breath. 

I have this ache to be understood. And it is deep as well as old. As a kid who was often coached and coerced into understanding and extending sympathy to irresponsibly adults in my life without that call for understanding and compassion being reciprocated, I feel this like a wound I am afraid will never close. And I think I'm afraid that it will never get better. Maybe it won't. There are a number of family members who show little interest in understanding me rather than trying to change or educate me into something more palatable. Maybe we will always have this chasm between us. And I think I'm just trying to live my way through the question, "what then?" The answer is, "I will go on."

The Invitation
It doesn't interest me
what you do for a living.
I want to know
what you ache for
and if you dare to dream
of meeting your heart's longing.

It doesn't interest me
how old you are.
I want to know
if you will risk
looking like a fool
for love
for your dream
for the adventure of being alive.

It doesn’t interest me
what planets are
squaring your moon...
I want to know
if you have touched
the centre of your own sorrow
if you have been opened
by life's betrayals
or have become shrivelled and closed
from fear of further pain.

I want to know
if you can sit with pain
mine or your own
without moving to hide it
or fade it
or fix it.

I want to know
if you can be with joy
mine or your own
if you can dance with wildness
and let the ecstasy fill you
to the tips of your fingers and toes
without cautioning us
to be careful
to be realistic
to remember the limitations
of being human.

It doesn't interest me
if the story you are telling me
is true.
I want to know if you can
disappoint another
to be true to yourself.
If you can bear
the accusation of betrayal
and not betray your own soul.
If you can be faithless
and therefore trustworthy.

I want to know if you can see Beauty
even when it is not pretty
every day.
And if you can source your own life
from its presence.

I want to know
if you can live with failure
yours and mine
and still stand at the edge of the lake
and shout to the silver of the full moon,
"Yes."

It doesn't interest me
to know where you live
or how much money you have.
I want to know if you can get up
after the night of grief and despair
weary and bruised to the bone
and do what needs to be done
to feed the children.

It doesn't interest me
who you know
or how you came to be here.
I want to know if you will stand
in the centre of the fire
with me
and not shrink back.

It doesn't interest me
where or what or with whom
you have studied.
I want to know
what sustains you
from the inside
when all else falls away.

I want to know
if you can be alone
with yourself
and if you truly like
the company you keep
in the empty moments.

A Prophecy for the Privileged and Uncompassionate

There will be a day when you lose something--your health or comfort, your wealth or a person important to you. You will wonder if God has turned away. You will be crushed as all people are at one point or another, but it will not feel like an experience common to people. It will feel unique as though no one else could possibly grasp your personal suffering much less stand up under it. 

Everyone in your life familiar with suffering will be tempted to turn away. Many will. Everyone in your life unfamiliar with suffering will definitely pull away and distance themselves, cutting you twice. Those who help the most will be the people you have previously looked down on. It is an old story and it will someday be your story. 

Signed, 

a former pentecostal who still senses things from time to time

My anxiety is so thick and abundant today that I could pack it into jars. It's been like this since the Texas school shooting. I am tired of hearing about how willing people are to sacrifice our students and teachers, my husband, on the alter of their personal brand of freedom. Would my freedom mean anything to me if I have to spend it without him?

Lately, I've  been struggling to not imagine exactly how it would happen. I know that it would have to be in the parking lot or entry way since they have a metal detector at the doorway. I imagine that wherever I am, I will know. I will collapse as if I'm the one shot. Or I won't and it will be a phone call that sends me hurtling to the ground. I don't know how I will get up afterwards. But I've experienced just enough terrible things in my life to know that I will get up. I will enter the empty house. It will stay empty because I will be empty and we will be empty together. 

That's when I'll learn who my real friends and family are. Left to myself, I will probably not leave the house. I will shut the doors against everyone talking about freedom and guns and death and policy and prayers. I will shut the doors on all of the people who are not grieving and I will sit with all of the pieces of the life that we were building stuck at whatever stage he was last there with me for. I will pick up the pieces and sort them, carefully, swollenly, dimly. The only visitors I'll accept are the ones who know better than to tell me what to do or how to be. All advisors will be shown the door. Everyone with an opinion to sell will have to wait until I die too. Because I won't give a damn.

This world will break your heart. 

Over and over again, if you are paying attention, if you are showing up authentically, if you have any amount of hope or faith or love for this planet and its people, you will break. You will not always be fully healed before it starts again. You will not always be healed at all. Because it is big and hurting and so full of pain. 

I am amazed at the human capacity to digest suffering without disintegrating. I am amazed at the ability to disintegrate and then rebuild. But I don't want to be amazed. I want my loved ones to be safe. I want all of their loved ones to be safe. Everyone, everywhere is someone's loved one. And I want better for all of us.

Being alive is harder some seasons than others. For example, this season has felt like one marked by the constant feedback that while I have lots of people that love me, not very many of them are satisfying relationships that actually meet my needs. In so many ways, I did this to myself. I was born a mediator by both nature and nurture, but while I'm trying to help so many people get along and be heard, very few people return the favor. I have a whole list of friends who I no longer go to for advice because I just don't like their methods. 

I was raised in a "speak the truth in love" environment so everyone from my growing up feels like they can comment on how you're living. I had a friend not that long ago try to hold me accountable about a job and a dream that I didn't think they had any business having an opinion about because they weren't around for the critical years and didn't help me pick up the pieces afterwards. They spoke the truth in love, but it felt like taking instead of giving. They took me back to a traumatic place and left me with a heap of their own intellectualism. After that conversation, I resolved to stop talking about that experience with anyone who wasn't THERE. Because I have never met someone who understood that experience from a distance and I am tired of being bulldozed by people's loving truths on the matter.

Another thought that was pervasive in my growing up is that everyone should get an equal say on all topics. And I just don't think that way anymore. For example, if you don't know the difference between race and ethnicity, I don't want to listen to you pontificate on race issues from a false position of authority. It's a waste of both of our time. And that's an unpopular opinion. But not everyone's knowledge is equal and not everyone's experience is relevant all of the time. We'll all take turns sitting down. 

Most of my life, I took turns sitting, listening when I was told to, when I had to, when I had exhausted all of my other options. It's only now in the 3rd decade that I think about what it means to sit down because you want to. I think we are told that we should have something to say so it can be hard to admit when we don't. But I have less and less to say about how other people live their lives and I have become less and less patient with people who mean well be don't do well when trying to build our friendship.

January and February are over. Now the real year can begin. March being my birthday month and the month where my SAD lessens its grip coalesce in such a way that it feels like my own personal New Year. So here I am.

Each year, I learn a little bit more about what depression means to me and become a little more committed to simply saying "no I can't do that because I'm depressed" when it's a bit more than I can handle. There are a lot of things that I have done out of obligation. And sometimes obligation is love. Sometimes it is guilt. Sometimes it is both or neither. Since I like to think of myself as a sincere person, I am trying harder to examine "why am I doing this" and "if I can really give that". 

I do a lot of things to appear normal which is to say to appear not anxious or depressed. Sometimes my only motivation for saying yes to a social engagement is because it sounds like something that someone not suffering from SAD would do. 

Lately, I've been feeling like the worst parts of my parents sometimes take over my thought process. And it's been hard to face those things essentially alone. It's been humbling and not in the quiet dignified sort of way. I feel small and so incapable of giving people the love they deserve. And I wonder if this means that I will never be as known and loved as I want to be and if it's ok to worry about myself like that when I'm so clearly failing people important to me.