Beet Soup.

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

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

Esta como Elena.

Well.

I quit my job.

I went home to Montana.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

wildflowers

Cassiopeia 

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

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

:

Montana.

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

"T-shirts are not airplanes."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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