Strength is a heavy thing. If you have held onto it all of your life, you probably don’t know just how heavy it is. There are those who carry strength for so long that their grasp is stuck. I am not one of those people. Today, I have to pick up my strength up off of the floor. I have to massage it gently into my limbs and legs and chest. I hope that I can rub it deep enough to penetrate the bones, the joints, and my heart. All of these things have been aching with weakness, creaking as if to break.

Strength is such a heavy thing. And it is not as necessary as we have been taught. You think that the opposite of strength is weakness and then draw lines around strength and surviving such that weakness equals death. But it doesn’t. And this is one of the deadliest lies. You think that to embrace weakness is to invite death. But weakness is only weakness, the crying out for rest. Without that cry, rest is slow in coming. Without that cry, without that rest, strength begins to consume weakness.

My strength is trying to consume my weakness. If it does, I will never separate them back out again.

Weakness is a gentle thing that stands guard in the passage between strength and death. It utters warnings and cautions that you have found your limit. You can do no more. Indeed, you do not need to do more. Weakness is a thing that the universe understands. It is a limit which God himself respects.

Weakness is such a gentle thing. And that is different than being fragile. Weakness is what invites me to slough off my strength at the end of the day, let it lay beside the night stand, and rest. Weakness is the respite that makes sure that there is strength enough to finish tomorrow. 

My quest has never been for beauty. Beauty is something people have intrinsically because they are people. Male or female. It is something you let yourself not something you seek out or develop.

My search has always been for strength. Why? Because it is not enough to be beautiful. Pretty things break. Not all breaking is bad. Not all breaking is good. I want to be strong enough but not too strong. That is something I can seek and develop.

I have been told all of my life that this is a man's pursuit. Women should be beautiful and men should be strong. Women should want to be beautiful. Is it possible that so many women want to be beautiful because they were treated as slightly lesser humans than men? I could never prove that. I have known that I am beautiful and it has brought as many problems as it ever has blessings. I want to be strong. More than that, I need to be strong. I have places that I want to get to and a lot of people telling me it cannot be done. Good places. Peaceful places. Far away places that lie across the valley of the shadow of death. And I am going (and have been going) because that is where I have been led and I cannot wait for other people to be strong for me.

Also, I cannot help but think that the world needs more beautiful men and less men who are only trying to prove that they are strong.

What if we were all beautiful and strong?

I think we know this. I think this is why we write books and have Bible studies about "real strength" and "real beauty". In every women's Bible study that has ever tried to teach me to be feminine and beautiful, we talk about real beauty not being fleeting, not being on the surface, not being how we look but how we think and act and... it all sounds like 'strong beauty' after awhile. Real beauty has to be rooted and lasting and loving. Have you ever trusted weak love? But if I say that I have been searching out strength... well, apparently I have forgotten that I am female rather than male. So I will use other words. I will say "patience" or "discipline" or "self-control" because those are gender neutral words and I am allowed those even if I am denied strength.

9 of 10

I learned how to build home on the topography of my father’s emotions between wandering the woods and chocolate chip cookie making. He was a man still working through the rubble of his own upbringing and so he brought me up in the crowded space between his own tears. I learned to read him the way sailor’s read the stars, the clouds, and the sea. I learned to sail him like he was the only ocean I could ever love. I tried to learn the words that could bring us both home.

He taught me everything I know about emotions and feeling. “Don’t bottle them up and stuff them in.” he’d say, “They’ll always find you because they are not the sort of things that fade unless you face them.” So while he told me not to keep them in, I resolved to be better than that. I chose, instead, to keep them always out.

It took years for me to figure out  that short cuts are just longer ways to the same place for those who want to put off confrontation until it hits you from behind, knocks the wind out of you, and demands your silent attention. It may be the shortest distance between two places; but there are no places or paths for lessons like love, forgiveness, and getting over yourself. Those are long roads you have to walk yourself. Do not skip a step or you may miss it altogether.

It took me even longer to realize that sometimes the act of sorrow is all you have to give. There are no wrong ways to feel, just wrong ways to cope with the feeling. Still I forget and so I say again, there are no wrong ways to feel.

I have now been brought up as far as anyone else can bring me. I do not always feel the things I know. And I do not always understand the things I feel. And yet, the longer I spend trying to feel truth and questioning the why’s and the how’s of feeling, the more I stand by that statement. There are no wrong ways to feel... but my emotions are often malnourished, ignorant, and a little disconnected.

The struggle is to bring all of me into agreement. The struggle is to learn my own coastlines, correct my compass, and learn to sail a new sea. The struggle is to connect and educate all of my emotions in the hope that the daughter I do not yet know if I will have will never have to try so hard to ride my waves, weather my storms, and bring me home.

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.

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.

so many thoughts and no sifter large enough to fit them into

I want to hide myself in pictures, but only words come.

I want refuge in the expressed yet unexplained.

I want to lose myself to complexities of color and depth.

But everything has been laid bare:

too vulnerable,

too certain,

too easily ascertained;

but not the least bit understood.

So I am left saying what I try to mean

And not meaning very much.

If I could but bite and swallow and win and smile--

all at the same time,

in the space of half a breath.

...If I could just command obedience,

and cooperation from my insides

to my fingers...

then maybe you, they, I would see

what it is that I keep inside of me.

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Your body of suffering now brings pain where once I sought release. It is not supposed to be this way, I think. But here it is in my body condemned to death. And it is fitting, though unexpected. You are the only one I could accept this from. But that does not mean that I want to. Forgive me?

I want to be strong enough to give you my weakness. Perhaps, tomorrow. Or perhaps a miracle instead. If only I could be strong enough, but weakness is my marrow, my blood, my DNA, my name. No, not my name. It is in my weakness that I find those quiet moments.

In these moments I am finding out who I am. And who I am is Pain.

Your body, broken for me, has never meant so much... but it has never felt so far away. Our symbols break down and I feel the weight of the debris. Silly contradicting vanities open wide their questions and load them on my shoulders. Too strong, but not strong enough to be weak. Not weak enough to surrender them to you.

I do not think I am doing this right; but I am not yet ready to stop, only ready to be taught again.

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I can feel you leaving.

Bit by desperately-needing-to-be-untangled-bit.

I do not have the power to stop you--

Only this bit of broken will.

But you say nothing to draw attention,

(you had that a long time ago.)

You do nothing to be remembered,

(It doesn't matter. I have tallied the smallest details of expressions.)

You try your best to fade out.

(I am disappointed by your lack of originality.)

Friend, stay?

And that is all I have to offer.

But things are changing like a city in its last hour of day light.

Soon nothing will be the way it was.