"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.

I have two conflicting images of my father which I carry around inside and which are only now beginning to merge and meld into the patterns of muscle and indignation that I recognize as him. On the one hand, I see him climbing everything from the sides of buildings to trees and from mountains to railroad cars. In this image, he is always smiling and laughing and teaching. He likes to teach even though he doesn’t know it. On the other hand, I see and feel this emotional vaccuousity that stands like a shadow that we are always running from. In this image, he is withdrawn and unstable.

The shadow chases him but it also lives inside of him. He has done so many hurtful things trying to get free from this shadow. It is only now that I am in my twenties that I am beginning to really understand that these two men are one and the same. When I was younger, I knew them both to be the man that is indeed my father…but I really only called one my dad and I tried my best to forget and elude the other. That and I tried often to console and heal and force the one to become the other.

Much of my young life was spent trying to stay one step ahead of the shadow and its effects on my family. It was then that I learned that I am no healer. Much to my surprise, I am learning to love that shadow because it is as much my father as the Spiderman-come-to-life chimpanzee of a man who was so much fun. And I am learning to love them equally because I can see that my father’s own struggle against the shadow, the pain, the seeming manic emptiness, and the guilt and shame will end in total defeat and the loss of the spiderman I have always loved if he does not learn how to love and accept the darkness that lives in him. Some of us learn to love the darkness quite early on, others much later, and some never at all. I am where I am because of wonderful people who have loved my darkness and my light all mixed together without trying to separate them or even make them make sense. And so, as I grow up, I try to love the darker parts of a man that has so much power to hurt me…and doesn’t know it.

It is a strange thing to know that the father that you love, the dad that you idolized as a 6 year old, never wanted you. It is especially strange to hold that truth beside the years of growing up that you enjoyed. He was so good at pretending for so long. But now, you realize, this was more because he was trying not to be his father. He never tried to be your father though. He was and always will be just a man running from the shadow of his father and all of the trauma that lived in that shadow.

Not wanted is different from not being loved though. That may seem illogical, impossible, or conflicting. Such has been much of my life. I think that is what makes this so hard for my mind to wrap around. I am 23 years old and for 23 years my father has not wanted me. He did not want to be a father like his father. He did not want to be a father. And I am the oldest of three daughters that force him to be a father. I was the first. I was the one who changed him into a father. He has loved me both fiercely and feebly in seasons since; but never wanted me. Never wanted to be the man I force him to be.

He thought he would just stick it out until I was 18. As it turns out, I will be his daughter for the rest of my life…and he my father. I think he resents me for this. He imagines that I will not release him or let him go as if fatherhood is a prison sentence that I execute with injustice in my eyes. As if I have a choice at all who my father is. As if I chose to exist. He has tried to make me angry. He has hurt me on purpose trying to make me run. He has chased me with hard truths with the hope that I will not want him. All of this, he has admitted to.  Often, I do not know why I hold on. I do not hope for change. I do not believe he will ever want me. I think I hope for understanding to come and maybe a little bit of healing with it. I think I am waiting for him to believe that he is both wanted and loved. 

Jessie J Pie and Tracy Chapman Chocolate Mousse.

I made blackberry pie and listened to this song. Then I made chocolate mousse while I listened to this song. My food always tastes how I feel and how I feel is directly connected to what I'm listening to. Also, I am reading Unclean by Richard Beck because Tyler left in my room thinking I would like it. Take the time to read the introduction on Amazon. I find it fascinating.

Still Trying.

Every 17 seconds the hydraulics of the machine to my right hiss; and I pretend that I am part of that machine, folding t-shirts, putting them into the box right in time for the HISSSSSSS. In those 17 seconds, I measure my movements and focus my energy as if I were just an extension of the unfeeling metal that sends me clothes to count and box. Waste one second, fall behind, interrupt the machine. Here, we are all organic extensions of a steal heart pumping one HISS at a time.

My coworker says that he and I are too educated for this kind of work. It is degrading. I will blame his 3 unfinished degrees for why he does not see the purpose in education drenched in sweat. This is, after all, the “real world” outside of the classroom. In many ways, it is the most real world. Here are the people upon whose backs society stays afloat. Here are the people who do the work that no one else wants to do and they do it for loved ones, for sick ones, for family near and far because it is all that they can find to do for now. Here is our foundation and our backbone. We will only ever be as strong as such as these.

I was taught that St. Francis once said, “ the glory of God is man fully alive.” I was taught that he was right. And I wonder what that means for us in this place as we mirror our machines, as we indeed become machines in order to build our lives. Moreover, what does it mean for our cousins in other countries where the rules are different? The work we do is hard, but the work our cousins do is unfathomable to me. We print on t-shirts that arrive to us from every corner of the enslaved globe. Egypt. Mexico. China. Haiti. Every t-shirt is a reminder that someone else has it so much worse than me. It is a reminder that my work is not degrading. I am still human.

I think to all of my growing up in which friends and family were always “searching out God’s call for their lives”. It seems odd to me that “God” never seems to call the people around me to work in the factory. I suspect that is born more out of concern for our own glory than it is God’s. My education tells me that there is no biblical or theological reason preventing the work we do here from being glorious. There is no particular aspect of printing t-shirts that in and of itself prevents men and women from being fully alive. On the contrary, Ecclesiastes tells us that we are to find enjoyment in our work and obey God’s commands. It does not say “find work you enjoy.” That is not an option for every person. That is not an option for most people on this planet. Can we who work in the warehouses find enjoyment and partake in the glory of God?

And now I only begin to grasp the Scriptures that tell us that God uses the humble, the simple, and the lowly to shame the proud, the educated, and the elite.

My struggle is to remember that I am not all machine if for no other reason than because I feel. I have compassion. Compassion will safeguard my humanity as I conform to the search for efficiency and the drive of my employers for profits. Yes, I have been sent here to learn though I do not know what I am looking for or how long I will be learning. I do know though that we need education and sweat mingled in more places.

Flying has never felt further away than it has these last couple of days. I have been reduced. I am no longer the artist-mechanic-girl who cannot possibly learn fast enough to know what she needs to. I am just…a girl who folds t-shirts and who looks up at the sky always. I work in a warehouse where I count t-shirts, fold them, distribute them, pack them, stack and unstack them. When everyone goes out to smoke, I look up to the space between the giant concrete walls of one warehouse and another and I wonder why I am not up there. How do I get closer to the stars? How do I make a home among the clouds? That old yearning turns anew inside me. And I ache.

I ache the way I did in high school…so much so in fact that I feel as if I am back in that place, making plans and realizing that flight school was at least 5 years away. I do not know if you have ever waited 5 or more years for something, but it is a long time. And then to reach the end and feel no closer than when you started…well, it is a little disappointing. Besides, it is not just that I feel no closer than when I started, but rather that I have reached the end of the plans that I know anything about (and if you have seen the plans that I did know something about, you know how truly lost I am).

Historically, I have been gifted with an inordinate amount of faith and a total disregard for descriptors like impossible. And on the days where I have faltered, there has always been a reminder. I once spoke with a college recruiter who asked me what I wanted to do. I told him I wanted to fly but that I didn’t like telling people that because it seemed ridiculous, like becoming an astronaut. He scolded me soundly, apologized that his school had no flight program, and then immediately turned to a cafeteria full of people and announced what I wanted to do. Then, he told me I was committed. I have had friends arrange flights and dentists give me children’s books titled Violet the Pilot. I have had professors pay for mechanic exams and homeless people tell me that all I have to do is keep the faith because I will get where I am going. I have had all manner of unexpected persons pour encouragement into this silly little dream. They have helped to build a wall against the tidal wave of voices who doubt that I will ever make it, who need me to convince them constantly that this is where I am going and that I have not given up yet. They have given me rest from my constant defense of a dream when I was too worn out to convince both myself and other people.

Most recently, I met a man named Jeffrey Jackson in the unemployment office. We met to discuss my re-employment options as a mechanic. I told him that what I really wanted was to fly. He looked at me and said in his almost-northernized-southern-drawl, “Darlin, we all want to fly. The question is, how fast do you want to go?” We talked about his time in Vietnam and his flights over Montana. He told me that his wife won’t let him fly anymore because she knows that one day, he will just keep going and not come back because he’s crazy. “She’s right.” he told me. And as he talked about flying, that ache crept back. I had kept it busy with track and balance flights and promises to go to flight school when I had paid off my student loans etc.  But, talking with Jeffrey, I felt my bones and my heart begin to hurt. I felt the air in my lungs get heavy with desperation. Yes, I know this ache. Ten years I have carried it, ignored it, and been driven by it all at the same time. In eighth grade, I told a friend that I knew I would go fly because a good God would never give someone a longing like this and then ignore it.

And yet, flight school has never seemed more impossible. The sky has never seemed further away. Now, I simply do not know what to do. I pack t-shirts. I have come to the end of all of the obstacles that I thought were between me and flight school, but I feel as though nothing has changed. It is still out of reach. It is hard not to wonder if I did life wrong. By faith, I know how patiently I should wait. By faith, I know that God has brought me this far and He will bring me the rest of the way. By faith, I know that if I rest in His grace, I have enough and I can be content.

The last few months have been a ton of being removed from a bad situation. I hated living in Tigard, mostly because it was lonely and nobody had time for me. I needed encouragement and Tigard had none of that. Emotionally, I starved. My attempts to reach out to people usually ended in the realization that you cannot force people to trust you and that I cannot trust people who do not trust me. I hated working at HAI, except for the aircraft. The drama and the constantly having to watch your back and keep up appearances was maddening…and exhausting. I cried out to God for months asking Him to change the situation. I had meant that He should give me encouraging friends and teach my coworkers to be better people. Instead, I got fired and evicted…and I have never been so relieved in my entire life. I have never had such a large amount of stress evaporate so quickly that I can wake up one day and feel the difference from waking up the day before. God brought me out of Egypt His way.

But now I am in the desert.  I understand now why the Israelites got into the desert and then rebelled. The desert was not what they expected. They had been filled with visions of a fertile and gentle Promise Land. They had left the beautiful land of Goshen on the Nile Delta. They were not equipped for the desert. Sure they had been slaves before, but they knew how to do that. It is easy to work hard and cry out to God to change things. But when He answers by taking you into the unkind and harsh desert, you begin to wonder if everything you believe about Him is accurate. You wonder what else you were wrong about. And in the thirst there, the rivers of the Promise Land could not possibly feel further away. They decided to make their own way.

And I? I am being given a lot of advice that feels like making my own way. I want to do it. I would call it “good stewardship” or some other NIV-extricated word like “being faithful with what I have been given”. But really, it would be the golden calf of my own desire to control my life. It would be fear and selfishness. I know that I am here to wait and to learn. There are things you can only learn in the desert. I just wish I knew how long I will be here. I need something to tell the ache inside me so it does not consume me. I am afraid that it will. The desperation keeps building as I try a new solution, a new direction and God says, “No not that way.” Again and again and again…and again. I am lost in the desert with a mysterious God. I am not really sure of anything, only that I cannot help but be jealous of the wind.