The Waiting Room at the Base of Mount Sinai

A couple of days ago, Tyler and I were talking and we reached the conclusion that everyone over-spiritualizes something. You can over-spiritualize anything from purity and following the rules to freedom and open-mindedness. And sure, God is in those things. But God is not nearly as invested in those as most adherents are.

I have been turning that conversation with Tyler over and over in the back of my mind, carrying it with me until I knew what I was looking for. Today, I stumbled on it.

I over-spiritualize learning. It is how I define success in my personal life and success in my religion. Am I still learning? Because learning equals growing and growing equals not dying (or giving up) and not dying equals success. Am I right? That and, at bottom, God doesn't demand that we are perfect in a day so as long as we are moving towards that goal, we are "walking with him" and that is salvation and the very point of Christian existence. Right? I mean, how else do we interpret verses like "continue to work out your salvation" or James's piece about faith being evident by deeds?

Besides, I love learning. I really do. And I think God does too. But maybe he doesn't need me to always be learning the way I need me to always be learning.

Learning for me has become the biggest reassurance that I am on the right track. God is teaching me, therefore where I am is good. As if, God is not also the one who teaches me when I really blow it. As if I am not learning just as much when I am behaving my worst as when I am truly doing my best. See, in reality, learning just means that I am still paying attention to my actions, their consequences, and any other details I observe. But accomplishing observation hardly tells me about the quality of my life and my choices.

Granted, this has been a hard year for measuring success any other way. Moreover, I literally have no idea what success means anymore. Or if I care. Am I successful? feels like the most irrelevant of queries. As if you asked me if I was a bird. Who the hell cares if I am a bird/successful? What matters is that I am trying, I am changing, I am learning. Or so I thought and I mostly still believe.

Except, I have been trapped in this desert for so long now and there is only so much that the wind and the sand can teach you. I do not think I am learning anymore. I do not think God is speaking to me any new truth or even any old truth that I have forgotten.

Throughout high school and most of college, I have loved who I thought I was becoming. I knew it was a gift to be able to accept myself as I became myself. Sure, I really struggled to extend myself grace, but it was largely because I so wanted to be my future self already. All the same, I was excited for where I was going and who I thought I would be.

I am not excited anymore. Why? Because I cannot pretend, imagine, or predict what is coming. I know this may seem quite silly to you. But I am a creature whose main form of survival is adaptation. On a level very near my DNA, I think I can learn fast enough and rearrange myself quick enough to be whoever I need to be on a given day.

Sure, all of you with Bible degrees, more life experience, or just a good dose of realism see the fault in my armor, the Achilles' heal, the base I haven't covered. And I do too. But carrying that burden of learning justifies ever season of life I find myself in. It makes me just the right amount of busy to really feel successful. And, there are so few negative side affects to being passionately over-committed to learning.

That is, until you get stuck. My life literally hasn't changed in 6 months. When I said, I was a creature who adapted for survival, I meant that I adapted as most humans breathe. Not changing feels like suffocation. Sure, I have gotten engaged, had job interviews, traveled etc. etc. etc. But my view of next week always looks the same. It always looks back at me with more questions than I can ask of it. Sure, I fill my time. But I am not convinced that I am going anywhere. Like God got busy and put me on hold and now I just live in the waiting room at the base of Mount Sinai.

Of course this is all horrible theology. But this is what the best of my senses perceive. I am not learning any new big thing about the world or God or myself. I am just here. And God is here. But He only says that He loves me and then moves on to the next person. And I know that if I was a good Christian, it would be enough to be loved by the God the universe. But I want so badly to have a purpose. And that blasted Westminster Catechism just plays in the background "man's purpose is to obey God and enjoy him forever." As if that tells me what to do tomorrow, or next week, or at all.

Though it is the most hypocritical of paradoxes, I am learning how to not always be learning. I am learning not to over-spiritualize or over-emphasize learning. It is one my less graceful lessons. But I challenge you, what do you over-spiritualize? It is not an easy mirror to look into.

There'll be days like this.

"There are good days and there are bad days."

I find things like this scrawled in my sketch books, in the margins of my science notes, and in other much more illogical places. I used to wake up holding crumpled sticky notes with a faint memory of having such an important thought that it could not wait until morning because, well, what if I let go of such a revelation? I used to wake up with nonsense smeared across my hands because I wrote ...something... on my skin, in the dark, in a fit of desperate trying to remember what it feels like to wonder in the dark at a universe so much bigger but not quite threatening.

Always, when I find them later, I am disappointed by my own simplicity. If I do not keep a careful eye upon  myself, I find the most basic ideas to be revolutionary. I am not just easily amused, I am easily motivated... and just as easily lost.

These fragments

These fragments genuinely console me when I find them, before the disappointment and the intellectualism kick in. There are good days and there are bad days.

I have to remember that sometimes.

Those bad days can be so shocking that I forget that I ever had a good day. Those bad days can come in swarms so thick that I forget that they had a beginning. Those bad days can last so long that I forget what it feels like not to be... heavy.

But those good days...

Those good days can end so abruptly that I wonder at their truth. Those good days can get so comfortable that I forget I am being allowed to rest and will be expected to leave. Those good days can restore so much that I forget what I was taught in the dark and broken places.

There are bad days and there are good days and it is no small thing to hold onto both.

Tea with Mr. Wilde and God

I like my life.

It is small and quiet and often times difficult. I can't really afford much, but there is always enough, every time. I have a handful of close friends here and the circle gets smaller every time life changes. There are healthy good byes and less healthy good byes and there are a lot of far away people that I love very much. But my handful of people that I hold here know me and I like to believe that the depth of love and the miles of life we have covered together is more than a fair trade for the small number. I am ever so slowly learning how to be a healthy human being before God and learning enough about myself to figure out where I want to go. The questions are not all answered, but I am sure that I will have them when I need them. I really do like my life, the people in it, and where I am going.

I need to remember that sometimes. It is so easy to forget in the natural process of moving forward and changing and growing and striving. It can be so easy to lose sight of such a quiet feeling while I am reacting to deadlines and people I like and people I don't especially when those two people are actually the same person. But right now, in the Sunday quiet of my house with too many too busy people, before all of the trying to be who I am becoming starts, and before I begin to take on all of the descriptors for the roles I will play today, I want to remember that I really do like where I am at.

I think life would be a lot less stressful if I could hold onto that while I race through my days. I think I would be better at remembering that if I gave myself the time in the mornings that I promised God I would. It's like he knows what I need, like he's on my side trying to help me first, be healthy and second, stay healthy. Weird.

But I am fighting so hard to be so good that I forget that I do not have to fight him. In fact, most of the fighting I do is fighting that he would gladly do for me if I would just stand on the promises he has made and let him fight for me. As long as I am fighting, however, he stands aside so he doesn't hurt me... so that I know he is there after I beat myself up. I do a fine job of that even during this part of my life that I like so well.

Today, I woke up two hours before I needed to be awake after a whole night of dreaming that everything that I need to do in the next three weeks needed to happen and be finished tomorrow. I was so frustrated and anxious that I could not sleep and then I realized that I was probably going about life wrong again. I was probably fighting too hard when there wasn't really a fight to be had. So today here is what I need to remember (and what I will likely need to know again and again for the rest of my life):

I am loved and I am learning how to love. I am loved by God and by the people he places around me and most days, I don't get to know why. But I do get to know that that is enough. "Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known. And now these three remain: faith, hope, and love. But the greatest of these is love."

One final thought for the rest of today, "Who being loved, could be poor?" [Oscar Wilde]

there are no drugs for this

My past is being rewritten for me it seems, and not in the typical 'fell back in time and made different decisions' sense... if that is typical. It is a very different kind of being rewritten. People I know keep remembering things differently. Not anyone I live with in Portland. And not any one particular person. But I have had about three weeks of  people who either do not remember at all or who have totally rewritten a past that I shared with them.

It is a very ambiguous sense of loss, a very certain alone-ness, and very likely steps toward losing my own grip on reality. My past and my reaction to it have made me who I am. Memories are important if fleeting. Count how many times God tells the Israelites to remember, to teach their children, to take care not to forget. I am not unaware of how much my whole life has been built on the breath of God willing me to make it long after I am tired and do not want to try anymore. I do not want to forget a thing, good or bad or even ugly.

However, I am afraid these past few weeks have made me question if I truly remember my own life. There are enough people telling me that what I know is wrong or worthless, I feel I have lost all my anchors in the past. It brings about great existential questions like, "If my remembered past is remembered wrong, am I still who I think I am?" and then "Should I be me or someone else?".

The answers may seem obvious to the reader. I however, have had a heck of a time trying to even match words to the feeling and now that I have perhaps, I hope, the answers will feel obvious and real. But the truth is, I still feel the weight of those questions and others wearing me down inside much more strongly than I feel their counterparts. This wont be forever, I hope; but if I am extra exhausted in these coming days, it is because I am trying so hard to remember history that no one else wants to and I do not always remember the value of.

I have tried to see 
the world through your eyes;
but they are closed.
There is nothing there.
If I could but see the pictures
painted on your sleeping eyelids,
maybe I could understand.


Tell me,
could you wake if you wanted to?
Your sleeper's life must be so beautiful
to have held you asleep for so long.
So much more beautiful 
than your memories of this waking life.


You told me once that you
no longer remembered
anything but your somnambulance 
and I wept.
I cried the tears you could not.
I cried until the clouds above 
were tired of my rain.


I wept because you will never know 
the color of my sky
and I do not quite remember 
the color of your eyes.
I imagine them to be the same though,
your eyes and my sky,
the one forgotten by the other
and yet the same stardust and storm.


I wish I could see the world
and your own sky 
through your eyes,
sleepy as they may be.
But there is one problem.
I am wide awake.

I do not have to grow up
And I know it.
But I cannot keep the world young.

That, I realize, is what I really want.
It is a tragic case of miscommunication
Between cause and effect.

Digging in my heels will only make me
Terribly alone
--and covered in dirt.

Life is not ever one single thing,
That's just how our memory records it,
Editted and glamorized.

Instead, it is the quiet pounding
Of a thousand hearts
Headed hopefully home.

And every one of those hearts
Spins ever onward
At full tilt with our globe

As we race ever and always
Around the only star
That gets to rule and reign time itself.

We can stop all of the clocks
And break all of the alarms
But the world will never stay young.

Brilliant Archimedes wrote,
"Give me a place to stand,
And I will move the Earth."

But that is not the problem, is it?
Try to hold this Earth
Stationary.

Try to keep her still.
Yes, unwind all of the watches
And let us together lose track of time.

But neither you nor I can stop it.
And we will never be free
So long as we spin.

So shake the Earth from orbit,
If you can find a place
To stand so far away from home.

Or better yet,
Let us sail
Straight into the sun.

Let us make it explode
With all of the star light and wonder
Held in our own aging eyes.

There, in the dark of newly emptied space,
We will finally be free of time and change;
But we will also be left with no where to go.

control and oblivion

As of November 1st, I started keeping a journal of pain. I do not know what else to call it. The journal is not for emotional pain or psychological pain. Just physical pain (unless I have reason to believe that they are tied together). It has started to worry me how many of my hours and even days I give away to pain but I hardly keep track.

I am so busy running to the next day hoping to feel ok then, to feel like a functioning individual, to feel human and then trying my hardest to dwell there for as long as possible and forget the grinding of gears, the shorting of circuitry, and the complaining of parts desperately in need of maintenance that I do not know how to give...that I am quite certain that I am missing something.

This is my attempt to take a step back. To live less in survival. To stop swinging from 'things will never get better' to 'I hope this never leaves'. Because things will get better and then the better will leave and life will keep on living.

I need to be careful, though, not to fixate on my pain as I write it down. I need to not make any goals as I study myself. Because I cannot tap into another source of stress. This is more about honesty and remembering things which I have hitherto tried my best to forget because I do not want to have the answers available for myself much less for the people around me. I do not want to feel broken and I do not want anyone else to know that I am. But I do. And I am sure that they do.

And I guess in some way this is my attempt at reclaiming my life. Maybe a journal is progress... and maybe it is just there to make me feel like things are moving forwardly... like I am allowed to move forward... like I am not choosing blindness as I move on. I cannot be bound much longer to the constant stopping and starting of life; and I cannot keep making my life about how well my body is cooperating with my intentions. At some point, I have to stop caring about all of that and get to living.

"To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all." ~Oscar Wilde

So I will let the paper do the caring, let my ink pay attention; but as for my life... it will not be found mapped out on paper and it will not be confined to the days when I feel like it. I have already allowed too much of pain to dictate who I will be on a given day. It is so easy to do.

My pain journal, in a way, is a confession and hopefully my repentance. If I am honest enough about the pain, if I let it in, if I stop ignoring it... I think it will not fight so hard to be heard. In a way, by giving it a voice, I hope to free up more life for actually living. And that really is all I can ask for at the end of the day: I want to be allowed to live. Everything else after that is peripheral. Descriptors and clauses. Commentary and opinion.

under siege

Do you ever have thoughts attack you, waylay you, nearly asphyxiate you with their constant proximity and weight? James 2. That's the one that finds me.


When I travel downtown.


Or to the grocery store.


On the way to school.


In city parks.


If I happen to catch a glimpse of the news.


When I see old photos, tell certain stories, or hold memories above the chasm of forgetfulness.


Words I innocently memorized in middle school to appease a teacher who never could have imagined how I would be tormented for what is turning into the rest of my life come back in torrents to flood a mind that is struggling to be made up.


What good is faith that has no deeds?
And again: If you say "Go, I wish you well; keep warm and well fed," but does nothing about his physical needs, what good is it?


How is one supposed to function with words with weight like that pounding, throbbing... burning inside?


It does not matter how I choose to cope with whatever rhythm that pounding creates because the bottom line remains: I am not doing enough. My well-intended words exit my mouth only for those same phrases that always find me to take up residency in the space left over. What good is it...when you do nothing? 


It does not matter that I do not know what to do because those are hollow excuses and I have been burning with the weight of this challenge long enough now. Long enough to feel the urgency and long enough to be friends with despair as she echoes you aren't big enough and there is no way for you to be big enough.


I feel with sudden but thorough certainty the edges of the rabbit hole I stand above. There is a whole world down there; and, if I let myself fall, I may never come back. I will never be who I am right now and my eyes will never be able to see the world the way they do right now. And it is not a fear of being too small and too weak to handle the change (I am both of those for sure), but the knowledge that the way is shut once I enter. 


Did Alice ever really leave Wonderland entirely behind? Or did she take it with her everyday just behind her eyes like a filter or perhaps a buffer that used to exist between her and the world until everything changed?


It is knowing that I have absolutely no control who this will make me if I keep following my white rabbit. But the change is sure to be real, permanent, and terrifying. Oh yes, and I think good. But it is not the only rabbit hole I could choose to fall down. How do I know *THIS* is the one I want? Do I even get that choice? If I don't like it, can I choose another? All of that to say: how much do I give myself to homeless ministry? 


I already know the answers to all of those questions. Respectively: because it's bigger than me. Yes, but no: I already chose a long time ago. Yes and no again: it wont leave me the same even if I leave it. As much as I am allowed for as long as the season stays.


Somehow, these do not bring the comfort that we always expect of answers we do not yet have.

knots tied in between anger, boredom, and anxiety

Task (1): Meet the world each day somewhere between whatever terms it gives me and whatever terms I give it.

Task (2): Remain stress free.

Task (3): Try not to laugh/cry/scream at the combination of 1 and 2.

I have been mulling over how much of stress is a choice and how much of it just is. --As immovable, unalterable fact. It would seem that my body, and human bodies in general, were not made for stressing. They were not made for worry. They were not made for life to be so... hard. We are such fragile creatures for all of our bluffing and hoping and straining.

But how much of life being hard comes from our making it harder than it has to be?

I had a history teacher once who said that the purpose of history was to remind us that just because this is the way things are, does not mean that this is the way things should be or always have been. And ever since those words left his lips, they have followed me. He continued to explain that we need history to tell us that sometimes we need to fight and sometimes fighting is ugly. More than that, sometimes the way things are is, quite simply, wrong; and when it is wrong, we are not powerless. We are not restrained to a passive watching of the world, our world.

Those words have made me bold on more than one account in the years since. Lately, however, I have been really good at refusing to apply this idea. I am not so much the humanist that I can believe that a man's or woman's destiny is in their own hands entirely; but I do believe that the many of us spend too much time reacting to a life that appears to just happen. We are not as powerless as we often feel. We can take responsibility for more than we realize.

Those are dangerous beliefs. They are heavy and ready to add their own layer of chaos to the pile of things worth stressing about. And up until now, I have "turned a blind eye". Yet, I feel it is time to apply the process to the process itself... if that makes sense.

Because apparently, handling stress well is not merely refusing to let things bother you by forcing them into unsee-ably dark corners of yourself. And it is more than cheap denial or delayed reactions. It is not storing it for later to be dealt with when no one else is around. Apparently. Which sucks because...well, I am so good at those. Or I was.

Until my body rebelled. Treason. I had done the hard work of persuasion. Mutiny from the inside.

Now, it turns out, I am not meant to house and store things for later and 'not now'. I am learning to be more intentional about letting things go. Which is strange, because I swear that that is exactly the opposite of taking responsibility and meeting life on its terms and not just being a victim of passive reaction. Yet, it takes so much more effort to say (in a way that my body actually believes), "This is not worth the pain I will feel if I hold onto this one second more."

It is letting go of my right to feel incensed, annoyed, piteous etc. But it is not denying myself emotions, because that also I feel in this seditious wreck. Instead, it is the highest honesty of feeling everything as it comes without letting it rule me. I have never been so aware of my own thoughts or how little true self-control I have. More often than not, it seems an impossible balance to strike; but I guess it is just a more mature version of choosing to feel. To feel without shutting down or being consumed by emotion. To feel emotions in wisdom, if that is possible (and I do not yet know if I believe it to be).

So here I am. Open window blowing peaceful wind across my typing fingers as I try to figure out why I hurt today. All I can figure is that I am pushing myself too hard this week and  my body is too tired to filter out the stressors. I was not always this fragile. But I did love my strength.




Also, art. I have very much enjoyed this photographer over the last few days.

Pain and beauty, mix and shake well. Add some water now and then.

I don't know if I have anything to say, but I have a lot of things I should be doing elsewhere. So here I am. Besides, it's been a week, or two...or an entire month that feels like it was squished into a week...anyway. I've been holding onto, sifting through, and carrying around this idea for a bit. Even so, it comes a bit unmannered and clumsy.

There is this terrible relationship between beauty and vulnerability. You cannot separate them. Beauty is always in danger...and there are so few champions. Too many pretend to be protectors and use beauty selfishly until it is destroyed or otherwise devalued. Too many just don't recognize it or don't know how to respond.

From a woman's perspective (and that is what I have), it's tricky at best. The extremes are not realizing that you have beauty all your own... or hating it as a weakness. It is more common, or at least, more accepted and addressed, to not realize that you, having beauty, are really beautiful. I am not going to get into the dichotomy of inner and outer beauty because I cannot stand to run the gauntlet of cliches. Suffice it to say that the one causes the other. Enough has already been written past that.

In fact, too many things are being said. There is a trend where guys are finally getting the guts to tell girls that they are pretty, beautiful etc. And it's good. There are so many girls who need to hear that...but actions have got to follow or the same problems will persist, and in many ways worsen. Truth spoken, but not lived is tainted and a most vile poison because it teaches us to mistrust our foundations.

It is imperative that it cost nothing to know the truth, the truth that you are beautiful. And it is true at a depth that lies cannot touch, only cover and blur. It is true the way only a few things are because it is true without exception or effort.

Stop telling me I'm pretty...show me. Because nothing I have seen in this day and age can be trusted and the lies get louder each day. But maybe, if I find myself face to face with it, I can finally know. And it is not as if this is my battle. It is the battle of so many people around me... so it is our battle. And it is not just for women because we will never make it if we are left to ourselves. Nor is it in any way all hanging on the men. We need our women to be women and our men to be men... even if we don't always know what that means or can't quite define it because of the disasters of oversimplification.

Really, what I think I am trying to say is that I am tired of receiving compliments that I cannot feel. And maybe this is arrogance, but I keep hoping that I wont always feel like I have to guard myself because no one else is going to and beauty is inseparable from vulnerability. I'm not sure if I've communicated this idea very well...but I needed to put it out there regardless.