This evening is unbearably beautiful. All full of cicadas and the very best weather that Kansas could ever offer after too many days of hot humidity. And I am a wreck. Or maybe I am the storm with wreckage floating about in me.

I am hopeful and angry and afraid.

And the sun is silently sinking behind the trees where it will play at peeking until it finds the firm horizon. I want to let that beauty pool on my skin and soak deep into my wounded heart, but I am not ready. I am not done hurting yet.

I am impatient and frustrated and a little hungry.

The squirrels keep sneaking around the porch and making me jump. Evil, playful creatures. The birds sing out their warning but I am deaf to their language. For all I know they are laughing at me.

I am distracted and lazy and scattered.

This is my fourth day in this temporary house in a brand new state. I leave tomorrow but it now feels like home. I think I could live here forever if my husband wasn't so far away. I wonder if everyone adapts so quickly.

I don't know what I am. Tired? Still angry.

I am firmly planted in a rocking chair on the porch. Hope flits around inside of me, from my chest to my limbs and back again. It surveys the damage and tries to do what it can; but I won't let it help yet. I try to ready it for the long, cautious watch. I find the pickax, the blanket, the work boots; and I wonder over whatever it is that keeps hope alive.

What is it that keeps hope alive?

Don't look in the mirror.

I am struggling--have been struggling--don't expect to stop struggling any time soon.

I think the Christian way to say this is that "God is refining me". But I do not often think in the Christian way and all I feel is disgust and dread and a little bit of fatalism. I am learning about myself...the trap doors and movable walls and booby traps. Here we go. They were made for someone else; but, once made aware of such things inside of me and how they affect those around me, I begin to fall into one after the other in rapid succession. I am not allowed out. The hallways are long. There are stairs missing. I have already made mention of the moving walls and alluded to the sharp things that find you in the dark.

But worst of all is the feeling that I am responsible for this even though I have no immediate knowledge or secrets that could ever help me to safety. It is, after all, the inner workings of my emotions and intellect and that damned tongue that keep this fun house dangerous and make a haunt out of what should be a home.

I think the Christian solution is to pray more. But I rather feel like hermitting in the woods. Besides, I am certain that improvement will be slow, dangerous, and always a little too late to save those whom I would spare the razors and mazes if I could.

life and living

My thoughts are sticky mess. I keep trying to take one out to examine it, but it will not leave its kin. A lot of life has happened in the last few days. And yet, it is just life. Nothing I am not used to. I have been practicing living for awhile now. Somehow, however, I round a corner and everything feels foreign again. Like the laws of physics have changed and gravity has a different tug and the science of living is not what it once was. None of my equipment and formulas and expectations are relevant anymore. Or maybe the laws of metaphysics.

But there's hope. I do not know what I am hoping for, but I think that it is enough to know that hope is alive. It is not certain or else it would be fact and well past hope. I am through the meat of my mechanic's certification, which is a milestone I have long been looking at with uncertainty. I know I am ready for something new. I do not do well with the formulaic life anyhow. A life I could transcribe from a textbook would never be big enough, rich enough, or otherwise worthwhile. So here we go. Onward.

5 of 10 *Note: I did not know who this metaphor was for or where it would be used, until today.

The bottles clatter outside in the trash can.
I know you are home and what you are doing
Before I ever see your face.
I feel the plates of our world buckle and bend.
I hear the rumbling of tectonics,
The shifting of the way things are.
When you finally stumble in, fall up the stairs,
Everything I already know is confirmed.

And I smile like nothing is different
Because, in a way, nothing really is.
You must feel like a Greek god
When you move the Richter scale.
At least, that is what I figure.
I know, much more than you realize,
How hard a man has to fight for control
And what it feels like to have the world against you.

But that will never make you right.
You are sorry every single time
And that helps.
That helps until the next.
There always is a next time.
More bottles. More words. More shame.
Yet, it only takes one good night's sleep
In the arms of forgiveness to forget.

I should probably thank you though;
But I think that you would assume
That I was making fun of you.
I mean it though.
Your earthquakes have taught me
So many things like what disaster really is,
How to pray, where exactly I stand,
And the deceitfulness of ideas like security.

It has taken years of growing up,
But I have finally learned
How to be more than a survivor.
That, also, is something I am thankful for.
Getting by was never enough for living.
However, I am not fool enough to thank you.
You, sir, cannot take all the credit.
May I remind you, that things do not have to be this way?

Things do not have to be the way they are.
God forgive me, then remind me,
If I ever, ever let go of that.
And the way they are is wrong.
This constant shifting but never changing
Will not be forever.
You may be the Greek god of plate-tectonics
But no one worships the pantheon anymore.

And then it was June.

Life has a new rhythm.

It is a good one too, despite the apprehensions that try to persuade me otherwise. Leaving my apartment was more... emotional(?) than I thought it would be.

It was my first apartment all unsupervised and pretending to be grown up. My first time not living with a stranger in some capacity in over a decade or so. It was the healthiest living situation I have ever had. I guess it makes sense that I would be attached, but the depth of that surprised me.

For nine months, I built life and living and home with my roommates and they are family. We did not just live together and occupy the same space. We shared our dreaming, our loving, and our growing. It is weird to me to think of that apartment as it was after they left and I was moving

out...devoid of all the fondness I had attached to it. And I knew I did not belong there anymore. I could look out the windows and see the same things I always did, but it was not my home anymore.

It is exceedingly strange to me that we should spend so much time pouring hope into a place. (I swear the walls and carpet are saturated with it.) Hope for where we would go and who we would be and what we would do. And then we outgrow it.

We leave to build new hope. To be those people that we hoped we would be or even those people we did not quite dare to be while in that former place or possibly those people we always hoped

to escape.

Whatever it is that we do after, we are forced to build or rebuild hope, because you cannot keep old hope alive in the face of change. At least, not as it was. Hope has to grow with you. Or else, it begins to stifle your own growth. By its very nature, it must elude your present abilities.

Perhaps that is what it means when Romans says that "hope that is seen is no hope at all". This frustrates me because it seems to negate any idea of rest or peace. Is that really life? To always be running and never arriving? I think so.

The more I think about it, the more I realize that it is not without its triumphs. My discomfort comes from my continual battle to appreciate and respect things (especially myself) in process. Just because I know where I should be does not mean that I am yet equipped to be there. It is often far more acceptable to take time in transit than I make it seem.

Yep, still learning how to be a balanced, holistic person which apparently means moving slower than I think is reasonable and going about things the long way. It is a good thing. It makes hope less harsh though the striving and elusiveness continue.

Rosa

She is a woman people have stopped expecting anything from, but whatever they want to take. She is a woman who has been around the block--and worn deep ruts from her passing. She is a woman who has learned brokenness on a cellular level.

Her face shows signs of abuse, internal and external, though perhaps-we hope- passed. She is small in nearly every way. Not threatening. Unassuming. Just, there.

And I do not believe I have ever met someone so overwhelmingly beautiful.

I have met her three times now as I volunteer, and this most recent time will be the last. She is leaving the program. She is recovered enough to move south to her two little girls and her family and hopefully to success. The way she talks about the future is breathtaking... the way it can only be coming from someone who has lost hope for a future and life and living... and then one day refused to accept that.

I wish I knew more of her story. There are a few telltale signs on which to build some generalizations. ...but I want to hear her tell it. Because her joy and her honesty are contagious, infectious, and so many other things. I do not know why. Or maybe I do. I think I feel hope rising and being fueled. I think my eyes are being lifted up past the pain and brokenness and curse of this world. I think weight is being given to the promise that the way things are is wrong, but it wont stay this way. Sometimes, after a good long fight, people come out stronger, better, triumphant. (I don't think she knows it yet.)

See I can be an idealist. Just not on a macro scale. Call me a micro-idealist. People. Individuals. Little steps on otherwise unimportant days.

I wanted to hug her and tell her she was strong. That she was beautiful. I wanted to invent new words so that she knew the worth and the value I wanted her to feel attached to what I wanted to say. But I'm just that quiet stranger being trained to do maintenance in the home that she is leaving. She does not know how much my prayers race my heart beat. I am so excited for her.

If we believe these stories...

I was sitting in church the first time I followed that thought: "If we believe these stories..." And my black pen met my black book because I liked the sound of those words and I wanted to inspect their truth later. It has been a month or two or three since (not more than three though) and I still like them.

The sermon was on Psalm 105 and it asked us "why do we focus on the one thing that God has not done and ignore all that he has done?" Verse 14 talks about how God has moved kings for his small group of sojourners. It was good to be sure, but I think the most I got out of it was this phrase that would follow me..."if we believe these stories..."

I look at my Bible and I tell the world that I believe the words written in it. I promise to live by them and, perhaps, to die by them. But I forget.

Tonight is heavy. It doesn't have to be, but there are forces and people beyond my control making decisions, and they do not care that I am wrapped up in their story. They do not grasp the depth of their own significance, especially when one names them family...and that is ok. It is not good; but, quite simply, it is not the point. It is a symptom, not the problem itself. And so, tonight is heavy because I am waiting and hurting and trying to guess at the end. And because I am human. A woman living on a planet under a curse.

And I want to know what to do. I want to know how long this will last. I want to catalog all of my complaints and deliver them to heaven with a final request of answers in the same orderly fashion. Most of all, I want a promise that life wont always be this way, because, quite honestly, it has been just this for such a long time.

So I am sitting again, this time, weeks later, in my room. And just like that, I am holding that black book and looking at my Bible and hearing those words, "if we believe these stories..." Then what? At the time, the first time, I wrote: "If believe these stories...we should realize that we do not stand upon the shoulders of giants only, as the saying goes. But we stand and fall by the breath of God. A God of ancient goodness. We should have fallen a long time ago; but we forget our frailness and think ourselves invincible."

I wont get all of my answers delivered to me in bullet point form--that's hardly a way to live. But I get what I most want. It's truth. And it's a promise that life wont always be this. I forget what has been done and I get so afraid of something I know is not true. "There is a time for everything, for every activity under the sun." "Hope that is seen is not hope at all. Who hopes for what he already has?"

If I believe these stories, it changes everything. There are hundreds of people in that book who have fought their way through living. It is not a plan in black and white with diagrams, but it takes care of the bigger issues. It makes itself useful to all people in all places at all times...and it answers my fear and my humanity. It gives me just enough.