Cycles...

A little tipsy and a little tired, but the moment must be marked somehow. We have reached the four year mark (on the eighth day of the eighth month of the eighth year by the way) and it has been an interesting few years to say the least. We gave ourselves a year and then decided that extended separations in the form of military service might just be a good idea. Which, of course, they certainly were not. The whole first year of training was basically a giant crisis followed by another year of crisis as I dealt with the fact that there was still no way out of the hell I had signed up for. There have been times when the easiest way was most certainly to part ways and make the best of differences created and differences found. But, the best by far would have been lost. The times when I realize that no one in the world travels the same channel quite so well as him. Or the times daily that we finish each other's sentences. The fact that we both consider the grotesque and the risque completely useful devices in conversation, and that our humors are pulled from the same muse. Crazy though she is. Until lately, we have even had our downswings and upswings in just such a way that one of us can pull the other one up from whatever mire they have stumbled upon. Recently has been harder than perhaps even the year virtually apart what with the feeling of forever with the army and the addition of prescribed nonsense for Tom. But we have made it. We have made it through the horrors of mothers that should have been...but weren't. We have made it through the dismay of family and friends. In fact, we have more than made it. We have discovered what it means to be of one flesh and one mind. We have become a fused person, and we are infinitely weaker apart. I have seen over and over what unconditional love means and what it costs to offer it and to receive. I have cried and laughed and felt like dying and received the same enough to know that neither one of us will ever ever leave by choice. There is the pattern of eternity budding in our graft now and only death will show what waits for us beyond the life that we will so gladly spend on each other.

fate

Things do not carry on as they are supposed to. Plans are derailed and lives are lost and regained at alarming rates. I was to be a devout the rest of my life. To music; to God. I sit on the brink of paganism and complete burnout with one quavering thread holding me to any sense of reality. My poor love. My only love. Monogamy is not supposed to mean the only relationship of any kind. It means you don't sleep with other people. But such is the lot dealt to us in this meagre period of our lives. Old friends are changing their faces so quickly I find myself casting about for what was just there. For the old comforts and reassurances. It is all empty though, and we can only pray that it will be filled again. Only to be lost? There is no faith left in me, although there is grand reverence being born continually. I meet God in the animals thronging this place and the grasses for miles and miles. This is supposed to be idolatry, but who can care when it is breath to starved lungs? God has left the halls of churches and the minds of his son's followers. And these bastard children of such a thoughtless legacy are confused and bitter. We want the old rhythms and the comfortable liturgies. We want to know that our deaths are sealed with the stamp of His Blood. We want to despise this earth and our bodies with the rest of the believers who know that this is passing like the grass of the fields. But then, we look around and realize that this is all we have. And that it is beautiful. And that God has been waiting for so long to look us in the face with grandeur beyond imagination.

The longer lenten season

The cycles of my life continue to refuse the specificities of strict calendar time and wander into more of a timeless frenzy. I can see at last the conclusion of this rather nasty and painful cycle of my life, and, as with all others, it brings to mind where I have been and where in god's name I might be going. The ever provocative idea of "community" remains aloof as I find myself once again either estranged or out of touch with past friends and not imagining much long term contact with the aquaintances I've made in the past few years. Dan is so much gone that I don't get responses to e-mails, and Mary is my last hopeful beacon...although I talk to her less than some of the people I despise at work. I guess I always was a beast of convenience. As far as plans go, I feel about the same now as I did when I was sixteen: clueless, anxious for the stage of today to be done and over with, and ready to do the most extreme and probably foolish things possible. I seem hell bent on throwing my life into one demanding institution after another and then chafing under the promises I more than willingly made. So what's up next? Well, I am looking towards possibly being homeless and jobless and penniless just to make sure that I don't make the same mistake again. To hell with accolades and accomplishment. Give me freedom and ambiguity. And I am mostly serious. Except for the nagging tick in my brain that keeps pulling me back to the ideas of making something useful out of myself. Maybe I don't believe in benefiting humanity any longer, but that doesn't change the nature of being part of humanity and not knowing what else to do really. True freedom does not after all exist. It could be that this realization is quite simply all that can be found in the essence of community. We're all in this mess together, and maybe some among us can find a few candles to light up the muck.

Eternity...

Is it too much to ask for? I wonder many times. It hinges on a succession of "ifs" that can have no answer, but it is the summation of whatever I could call my aspirations. To experience every moment and every aspect of existence on this planet from the inception to the firey end. To be honest, I would be happy to have the experience of the universe, but I can only hope that some limitation might increase the possibilities in my favor. Doubtful, but it is undoubtedly the one question I would ask of the God I still believe in: what has all this been? For everyone and everything. I would want to be the animals and the grass and the stones. The water and the sky and the stars. I would want to be the first cells that split and the first creatures that chose land. Where humans came from, of course, but also the even yet undiscovered worlds of the sea and of space. I want to see the world from every creature's eyes. It certainly is not that I want the omniscience of God. I ask only for the small corner of this one planet. Granted, we have many stories about the troubles that deities have taken over our little rock, but it is still a minute part of a theoretically infinite universe. So is it really so much to ask to know absolutely everything about our small existence? To have the sentience granted me bathed in every moment and every particle. To know if the magic I feel in the unutterable beauty around me is felt by all. To know if it is even greater than I could imagine. I suppose I can guess at the substance behind all that I feel; but I ache to know. To feel it through something beyond myself. To have hope that when my body withers away so quickly and so soon that there is something I long for after my infinitesimal part. I want to see the birth of the planet in its violent chaos or its sudden completion. I want to feel the drama of odds choosing this or that species and this or that combination of elements. It is a story that no one has the pages to and it is the one story I crave. Not alone I am sure. But maybe if I am specific with the deity of power, I might have some chance once my single heart stops beating to find resurrection in the small history of our planet. If there is an after. If there is a God. And if He listens to the inconsequential yearnings of His creation. This is my request.

Exponentials...

It is hard not to feel invaded. To find privacy stripped away and respectful distance a mirage of the past. Two girls raised under entirely different auspices shoved into our laps. Not unwelcome, but difficult. And a mother who needed harboring but remembers too well her dream of always being the harbourer. Never ceasing crises nip at each other's tails with Tom and I caught in the vortex. Domestic trifles are the summation of days and hours of conversation. And my thoughts are turned to concrete matters of moving boxes and diet regimens (ignored by children raised on hot dogs and macaroni and cheese). We are all scattered haphazardly on different paths struggling to stumble along together.

Family: what is it good for

I have had more opportunities than I would have liked to ask for these past couple weeks to observe my newer family's dynamics. A family that comes together to lavish approval on the unwed mother, pretending they have not damned her behind her back. A family that brings the behind doors aggression into the light of day at seemingly random occasions. Throwing around accusations of attempted murder because of hurt pride, and telling the firstborn his life is over without the military. No matter that he's the only one that has even tried for something like a dream. Fuck dreams, something even remotely like stability. This is what the patriarch of the family claims to hold above all else, and yet he disowns one at the slightest provocation and then turns around with beaming face to the name of "grandpa". Ah well, it is a story too old and too overtold to dwell on for long here.

Because there is the matter of how this all began. How a man like Tom's father has not just one accidental child, but keeps having them and pawning them off on women made permanent babysitters. I watched him last weekend looking around with so much pride with the obvious thought in his head, "well, it all worked out in the end didn't it?" Now let me say, being happily married to one of his products, it is hard for me not to agree with him on many fronts. I am incredibly grateful that he was so incredibly dumb and selfish. Not only a great partner for me, but two unbelievable women for mothers in law. Not too bad. That said, I have also been watching the three sons in our house this past week and I wonder how great it all did work out. He has left deep gashes on these psyches that have distorted and contorted the personalities of these three in very different, yet very heartbreaking ways. Dalton is the simplest example, bearing nearly perfect imprints of his father's personality. Exploding almost randomly and assuming that what feels like embarrassment is actually just righteous rage. He demeans those around him (I am currently exempt, though I have no doubt my time will run out one of these days) one moment, and then is the most likeable kid the next. Jordan, on the other hand, has a bizarre mixture of spoiled laziness and remnants of harsh mistreatment. He is both neglected and abused while somehow given so many of the objects he wants that he gets the worst of all worlds. I have yet to see him finding balance within himself. He doesn't have the heart to finish a task or get himself out of his various pits for reasons that have both to do with his ridiculous father and for the lack of a strong mentor and guide. He is alone and he is too stimulated by the video games and cartoons that are left to raise him for him to even notice. Tom is almost crippled by incessant self-questioning ("am I my father", "have I fucked my life up", "am I worth it..." etc.). He was raised to be the ultimate progeny but was also made to feel utterly worthless wherever he deviated. He has internalized the faults of his father and the screams of his father. The bruises of his childhood are still visible on his inscape that is beautified despite the ravaging. Almost because of the scars.

But who can separate these complexities? Who can say what these children would be without their father? All I can say for sure is whatever there is to be proud of in these three (and there is so much), their father cannot attribute to himself. The look of pride I saw on his face was devastation to me. How dare such a fool allow himself to take claim of what these children have made of themselves. The fact that they have escaped utter self-destruction (some better than others) has only to do with their ability to take the ash of mistaken parentage and form for themselves what they could to survive. May they continue and may he wipe the smug satisfaction from his undeserving face.

babies...

Having just ruined my husband's day off with a nice little hormonal spew, I thought it might be a good idea to coalesce the rumblings in my distraught brain with the comfort of words. I can only hope that this is slightly less naive than the pro/con lists I used to make as a young girl (okay, I was making them all the way through college), but what really could be more naive than thinking that getting pregnant on a whim to be a good idea? Tom and I are looking at about a year apart regardless, and I'm sitting here thinking a baby makes sense? Sure, I find myself getting jealous (sometimes insanely so) of Megan and her love child. Okay, let's take a moment with that one shall we, in the security of this never being read. So, I find myself in a relationship that is both secure and loving. We work. I am jealous of our years ahead and want only to keep living with him and learning from him and loving him. And we are so careful about planning when and where a child should fit into this; not wanting to wait too long, but trying to make sure we are ready (if that is even possible). Now add the damned biological clock to this mix, then watch me watching Megan fuck some fling (her vows that she was in love with him are slightly tarnished by the fact that she was pregnant within a couple weeks...wouldn't you claim love in such a situation) without protection and act surprised when she comes up pregnant. Surprised but oh so happy. With this "love of her life" who she's going to grow old with and her family ready to go. It doesn't matter that they have no career options, are going to have to move in with her mother, are so young...nothing. The deed is done, so she is allowed, even encouraged to feel happy about the situation. While I sit spiteful and jealous as hell in my barren corner. Relatively we have money enough and a wonderful relationship to share with a child, but we wait. And we probably should. Look at me, I can't even give real remorse for hating my sister-in-law because she has what I want. If that is not the definition of immaturity, I'm not sure what is. I even gave my excuses and reasoning for hating her before I offered this lame apology.

Returning...

I was raised in a structure that included the timespan of Old Testament to Christ to the returning of Christ and the Rapture. All tidy and structured and very linear. But how easy would it be for us to have mistaken our savior when he returned to us. Could he not have come or perhaps never really left? What the disciples called the Holy Spirit could have been Christ returning not two days after he left them right? After all, we can't really say that there is any difference between Christ or the Holy Ghost, assuming Christ was God (not the safest, but it's my argument dammit). When Jesus said he would return one day, maybe his followers were not acute enough to recognize spirit and fire as the flesh and blood they had walked with. These thousands of years (and how many millinia to come) have been the rapture. We are currently being taken into God, but we didn't notice and remain oblivious to the paradise around us.

Tis the Season

I checked my e-mail before going to work and found one from a friend telling me that a young woman at her husband's work had been raped and murdered last night. Chased down by one of the client's at Peter's work and stabbed to death. All day, fleeting visions of a nameless and faceless woman lying in her blood, a shadow of a man making a trail of this blood back to his apartment there at the halfway house. I did not know her or him but it is enough to know the story and have the small connection of my friends in this terror's wake. Peter works with people even more violent than the man that did this and he is working there at this very moment. So the woman without a face lying in the snow becomes a man with Peter's face and eyes glazing over. Mary screaming in the background. Then the scene shifts entirely, Tom drives away to class and it is twisted metal and him trapped in a burning wreckage, face disfigured and empty. It is children unborn taken away from my care and help and spitted on some piece of the world's cruelty. And, of course, it is myself.

We are all afraid of death, and there is certain reason for it to my eyes. I have only seen death once: an eighty year old man, heart disease, had lived a long and relatively happy life...and it was still horrifying. It seemed wrong and unfair and it fed my nightmares for some months after that. There is nothing to be known about it except the mutilations given to us as evidence. It is the only evidence that is plain and the rest is left to philosophy and religion.

Trojan horse...

We've been married almost three years now, and still keep each other awake talking into the night. About our day, philosophy, theology, psychology, and any other ology we can think of. The conversations I enjoy the most though are the ones that we try to catch each other up on our different pasts. I love imagining him as the knobby-kneed pre-adolescent he tells me about, smarting off to the bullies and invariably getting knocked around. By the kids. By his dad. And I love introducing him to the neurotic, long-haired little girl I was and imagine our two remembered selves meeting and becoming friends.

I began one of my stories not imagining it to be anything terribly important. Or, I should be honest and say that I couldn't imagine anything to be more important; it was my story of course. But relative to that grand delusion it did not seem particularly monumental. I was telling him about me being ten and at summer camp with my best friend of the time, Courtney. My years kept at home had already started to show as I found myself in complete bewilderment at the general hormonal upheaval rampant in that place. Courtney was quickly snatched up by some scraggly kid, but, not only was I not snatched, I had no idea how to get snatched. There was even the obligatory end-of-camp banquet, but I watched baffled as every guy I could imagine interest for was paired naturally with every girl I could acknowledge as cute. Where did that put me, I began to think with growing unease. What if no one even asked me? Even the unpaired remnants would be better than being the only person deemed unaskable. To my relief, a prematurely pot-bellied hick from the backwoods finally asked me the night before the banquet. He asked from a distance of about twenty feet; had never talked to me before that moment. In fact, he didn't talk to me after that moment either. As he ignored me over the meal in favor of his friends and talk about hunting and cowtipping, I saw the realization grow that I did not have whatever it was these people were looking for. I was either ugly, or stupid, or too weird to be around. Or something.

That night, being the last night of camp, there was a huge water balloon fight. Now this was something I knew how to do. The water wars we had had on my block growing up were legendary, complete with mercenary bazooka launchers and subversions and betrayals. I remember running into the frey with the first real excitement I had had all week. And I saw Courtney and her boyfriend, so I went launching towards them with my little bombs, laughing with loud bursts. I was going for Courtney, so I did not notice her boyfriend flanking me with his own bombs in hand. I did not notice until I felt the burst on my face and then a raging burning blinding my eyes. Rubbing them, I felt the soapy mess covering my whole face and realized that this boy had filled his balloons with shampoo and that he had found me and he had aimed at my eyes.

I spent the rest of the night in the bathroom, washing my eyes out with sinkwater and tears. And as I was telling this long time ago story to Tom, I felt a tightness in my throat and the moistness growing in my eyes.

"So what could you expect except to be either ignored or hurt by boys?"

And quite simply, there it was. How could I have not realized how significant and fundamental that one event became as I entered adolescence. I had so few experiences to draw generalizations from in my homeschooled seclusion, so each one was given unmerited weight in my mind. I avoided and mistrusted males for very long with the split assumptions that there was nothing attractive about me and, even if there was, there was nothing to be gained except pain and embarrassment from such a relationship. Friends would betray you for a guy and defend their boyfriends no matter how unjust. This small story suddenly synthesized one of the major issues I have struggled with even into adulthood, and yet remained relatively unexamined and small for so long. A whispering giant in my developing self.

Trajectory

Every time I run into an old friend (which has been happening disturbingly often in the artificial realm of myspace), I have an existential crisis. I imagine myself through their judgement and see myself as a too young for her age, confused, doesn't know what she wants to be when she grows up kind of girl. I see someone who hasn't figured out even how to manage her hair or settle into some sort of style of clothing. Someone who's house is as messy as her room was when she was eight. It is a hard thing seeing through these people's eyes. Especially considering the view I get examining them after all these years. For the most part, I am finding that the path has remained straight for these pals of old. What they imagined themselves to be when they were young is precisely what they have become. They went straight to college, never changing major (especially not changing it three or four times), and became proper professionals upon graduation. They married when they found the person that they knew they would meet and they will continue on to children and houses and everything that is necessary for the good life.

And I have no response for them. If I were to try to justify myself and my decisions, it would by definition be laughable because most of my decisions are indefensible. The one decision I have been sure of has linked me to another wanderer and therefore also has no creedance for these surefooted friends of mine. I also had no idea who he would be until I met him and the quickness and sureness of my decision with him would only point to recklessness as far as most people are concerned. But it must be said: we don't happen to be most people. There is something very peculiar and uncomfortable about Tom and I, and I don't think even the boxes of society would bring order to our dishelvement. I also could never explain that this is just how I would have it and that I hope to have the courage to continue my life with such recklessness. That I hope to feel this frightening expansiveness when looking towards not only the future but also the past. To be constantly re-examining what I have known and letting it fundamentally influence what I would like to know and be.

No, I don't know what I want to be (which means I don't know what profession I would like to have) but my own trajectory has been straight in its own undefinable way: I want only to learn to love and to be loved. According to this criteria, I have been wildly successful thus far (well, on my good days anyway, but let's not be picky). Marrying Tom is probably the most obvious. Living with someone I am so wild about but that can drive me as crazy as I drive him, and letting the chaos form itself into the many faces of beauty and wonder. Terrifying, and sometimes I remember with fondness the perfect safety of my onetime dream of just being a nun. But day by day we crawl inside each other's skin and let the awkwardness of shared lives blend with the joy of knowing love and being love to one another.

Even this job I now hold, this job that I hate, even this is teaching me something about love. Loving people that irritate my sensibilities more than they have ever been irritated. People that share nothing but time and space with me, but whom I am given the opportunity to learn to care for. This I have not been so successful with yet, but a few have moved from the hated status to the tolerated and from the tolerated to the liked. The very fact that they are so different from myself has allowed me to watch them in pure curiosity, wondering how they have been formed and what motivates them. A few have proved my preconceptions of the evilness of this insitution, seeking only power and recognition and abusing that power once it's in their hands. But most seem to be trapped by one thing or another. One is putting in his twenty so that he can afford to go back to his ranch in Utah and be with the animals and space that he loves. His longterm separation from this identity and dream makes him behave bitterly and spitefully, but just imagining him on wide open plains with a hat shading his eyes from the blaze of sun and too green grass...There are the mothers working to support their babies, doing everything for their children, yet hatefully separated from raising them essentially by the work they are required to do in this profession. Deployments being the extreme of a job that is taxing even without that hardship. There is also a man that seems only to want to sell tires and see his wife get her doctorate instead of waiting around for him duty station after duty station. With very few exceptions, I have discovered that everybody has a secret identity that fuels their work and their bitterness. Making my own bitterness somehow easier to deal with (again on my good days).

It is the only path I can see clearly, although not in detail. There is no way to define love except by forcing yourself to remain in each moment and wait for her to show herself. And she always does, it's just a matter of wanting to look and wanting to find. Which is the hard part, because she always demands another piece of yourself as if the supply was infinite. So I either hope that she is right or that I will have the courage to look forward to the end of myself in her pursuit.

Bygones

In my sophomore year of college, I worked a night job watching the front desk in my dorm. It was what all the cool kids were doing my freshman year, and I very much wanted to be cool. This came at such cost as working eleven until six in the morning and then trying to stay awake during Ancient History at eight-thirty. Then again, there was Ross. We had become friends the semester before as he tried to counsel me out of the fairly damaging relationship I was in at the time. We would discuss the evils of this boyfriend over shotglasses of coke and cold pizza and then I would blithely return to the boyfriend and ignore Ross until the next venting situation. It was quite possibly the healthiest friendship I had during college.

Counter to all reason, we took up the habit of staying up with each other on both of our shifts (even though previously mentioned boyfriend was very much ex-boyfriend and not cause for fervent conversation). At first, we bantered in our sophomoric prime, passing the night hours with tritisms and witty reparte. But we had history and...we were both single. Ross, I remember, had been single for quite some time. I had accused him over the summer as we e-mailed back and forth of him trying to begin something with me. And how dare he, me so freshly out of my first traumatic dating relationship? How could he possibly think I was ready?? Then I started giving him back massages during our shifts. The delights of him shivering and shimmying under my fingers as I feathered his neck and creeped my probing around his sensitive ribs. We brought gifts of caffeine and reading material to each other and the conversation became slightly more serious while remaining awkwardly distant. Occasionally I tried to force him to put a name to the laying on each other's laps and taking long walks even after the interminable night hours. Whenever I approached the topic, however, he became taciturn and would cut me off for hours or days. Still, the walks became more frequent and the cuddling in far away parks in the predawn of our lives that semester. And the friction of forced emotional distance chafed more and more.

We had made plans for him to visit my home over New Year's, but when we left school for break, we barely even had a comfort level for civil conversation. But he came anyway, and we went to the Grand Canyon with my brother and a couple friends. New Year's Eve, the tension reached a climax as we talked alone in the tent. He said he wanted his body closer to me and could not figure out why, and I stifled the urge to raise up and slap his stupid red face. Was I such a bad person to be attracted to? Had I been so utterly tainted by the clutching paws of my previous boyfriend that Ross could not justify touching the same flesh? Then we were back at school, and the relationship was entirely over. I had quit the deskjob, having developed mono from the extreme lack of sleep, and I did not share his shift with him anymore. Two months later, we had dinner together over which he told me he had decided to marry a girl the year below us. I smiled and choked down my food, and we made plans to meet again for another horrid farce of friendliness.

We only continued these wretched social events that spring, and I did not see him again regularly until I shared an apartment with his fiancee in one of the most ill-advised and ill-fated twists of irony I have experienced to this day. The friends of mine from freshman year, whom I had been hoping to live with since meeting them, knew her and wanted her as our necessary fourth. Pride could not allow me to admit the vileness of this idea, and so I smiled Christianly and said, "of course!" All I will say about that year in passing is that the horror of it put two of us in the hospital (and not the sew-you-up-make-you-better ward either) and a third one of us that probably should have been admitted as well. Ross was a mere pimple on the cancerous growth of that year. And that is what I am left with. A friendship of impotency and vagueries that leaves me even now in bafflement. So little said yet hinted at and expressed in every way except words. Ended so violently yet never even properly begun.

Graveyards...

At a ceremony I played today, a young captain berated the troops and audience with the memories of September eleventh, calling for the remembrance to justify warrior's fervor. The objective of the deploying troops he spoke to was Iraq, yet this would not even register as relevant for the most part. Something terrible happened within our borders, and now we must bring justice for the heroes that died that day. Let me say that that day was the beginning of a long, shattering year for me and was crippling in its gruesomeness. But there are many of us that realized that our country was experiencing something that the rest of the world has known for centuries and millinia: desperation, horror, cowering fear. On that day, I remember thinking with something approaching excitement that this country might become unified and simplified and engage in the sympathy that the world offered us and that we could possibly offer the world. What devastated me in the months, and now years, to follow was the blind rage the nation pitched itself into, claiming vengeance wherever convenience led. Yes, we should have gone to Afghanistan, assuming Bin Laden was even there after the full months lead we gave him after the event (and I'm sure he was gone well before it even happened), but how did we justify bombs when the search was for one man. Civilians in a barren wasteland of war-wracked desert were subjected to the mass executions that American weapons are designed for. And that's right folks: no Bin Laden. Yet the fear and the rage had transformed and gripped this country so deeply that there were very few questions asked when the same tragedy of 9/11 was used to justify deposing Sadam Hussein. Weapons of mass destruction and human rights (oh wait, that was only mentioned later) were piled on top, but basically it has been the replaying of buildings collapsing on our compatriots, friends, family, lovers; a horrific wrong turned into propoganda justifying wrongs on a much larger scale. When will we properly mourn for our loss rather than remaining in the enraged stage of grief, making the world feel our pain exponentially? When will the people who burned and fell and suffocated in those towers be given the silence and peace that their deaths deserve? How many other monuments to death will we justify while ignoring the solemn emptiness in our own country that waits for wisdom and rest? When will this feud end?

Savior

Porcelain perfect beauty
Still your loveliness
Hold your locket in
My fist

Sing for me my child
Tender thougths of the wickedless
Muse of all my dreams
child of all my years

Be mine
Be mine
Alone
Sweet innocence
Sweet mine

Save me with your
perfect hands
Lift me from the water
Dancing around your feet

Rain untouched
Wind beautifying
Spirit of my desire
Chastening my will

Rose blood blossoms on
your lips
Fingers unfolding like petals
I want to pull you under
You want to fill me up

To the top of the ocean

And so I fall
I fall
I fall at
your feet

My little
My own
My sweet
My tender

Turn your face
And my breath becomes ice
Close your eyes
And my life drifts away
Away
Clutch of air and gasp
of nothingness

Can never be mine
Perfect never
alone

Out of Context

Last weekend, Tom and I visited my hometown, where we met. While there, we spent an evening with two very good friends discussing whatever seemed important with mugs of coffee to egg us on. Only one of us outright claims to be non-Christian, but the rest of us have become uncomfortable with the term and the connotations of being "born-again". Our opinions over most matters were quite varied, but the variance was one of the more stimulating experiences I have had in a while. The respect and fondness between the four of us made differences thought-provoking and challenging rather than irritating and demeaning. And I began to think, "Is this not what I have been looking for? Is this not what church might be if there is such a thing?" The institution of church has outgrown itself, has become a monolith of commercialism and legalism. But the idea of church - a gathering of people that are seeking - seems to be alive in the shadows of confusion in my generation. We do not know what to call ourselves except friends and we do not know what we are looking for except the thing that connects us all.

Context

I have not "belonged" to a church since college. The last time I went daily was during basic training, and you would frankly have to be insane not to take the opportunity of a full hour away from drill sergeants once a week. Furthermore, I do not even feel a desire to return to what I have known as church. The political wrangling and greedy moneylust that show their prettied up faces all too often in the "house of God" have become too much for me to stomach. I am tired of one man being given the authority to translate the words and intentions of Jesus to an audience all too generously named a "congregation". I have never been to a service where the offering plates have not been passed around at least once; must sustain the temperature regulation in the grand loftiness of the place of course. Even in England, I was appalled by the great care and wealth invested into the stony cathedrals that held so little spirit in them, becoming mere tourist traps with their cold resilient beauty.

All this, and yet I still feel compelled by something that I approached in certain of these buildings and institutions. Or rather, something that approached me it seems at times. The church gave me a name to call certain experiences: vision, Christ, a still smallness that could consume everything. I have seen in the cute Bible stories of my childhood visions of horror, and then again the horror revealing itself as shattering beauty. What was handed to me as lists to be memorized and obeyed and pray to god it's the right ticket has become a chimera of ever-changing wonder at the edge of sight. I rarely think of the commandments that I knew at one time and my behavior is guided by the single (yet evasive) principle of Love, yet the certain damnation I was warned of should I behave in such and such a way (as I certainly have behaved) has not happened. Instead I feel a fierce and violent Love following me and surrounding me and consuming me. There is nothing more that I want, yet I do not know where to find it. The church has become empty to me, yet nothing has filled the comforting position it held in my life for so long. Now, I am left to the wind and cry to this great terror and great love to catch me.

Ash Wednesday

It is strange that not eating would be so comforting. With the distraction of food gone for a mere twenty-four hours, such clarity (or maybe just mild hallucinations). Suddenly, empathy is easy. Love is easy. Irritation is impossible. The pettiness of my preoccupations lately is astounding. I worry about my reputation at work; with people that may be gone in a matter of months. People I'll never see again and people I have nothing (besides my job) in common with. While at the same time I am virtually ignoring Tom, and when I'm not doing that I am belittling him, antogonizing him, blaming him for minor annoyances. And how could I forget how beautiful he is in all ways. How could I forget the attention he gifts me with and a love that creates greater capacity in me than should be possible.

We cannot prove what is real. Dreams provide as much evidence to our senses as "waking", and it is nearly impossible to remember either one while in the experience of the other. Although one of the two tends to be more consistent than the other of course. Still, there is nothing to tell us for sure that this is here and this is now. I begin to think there is actually no here and now. Time always feels wrong and things that appear solid constantly change. I remember sitting on the side of a stream carved mountain in the middle of the Black Hills; cold, waterworn rock beneath my body and hands. It was as if I could feel a story and a persona seeping through the apparent silence and steadfastness of the stone. What is to say that all things are not just as sentient as everything else but in different frames of time and with different modes of communication and development. And what is to say that life and death exist even. Perhaps we are simply cut off from the consciousness that is us and is everything already. The distractions of our body and our senses and our acceptance of the rules of gravity and sequence and cause and effect keep us from the wholeness that waits for us already. Glimpses come to us in our sleep or when we are lost in ecstasy or pain or are simply hungry. We know that we are held captive by some trick of our own consciousness but it is too comforting. We know the rules of this "reality"; Truth holds no promises. Fairy tales and monstors could very well live there. Time may flow backward and forward like an ocean; rhythm in its essence, but sequence impossible and forgotten. It is terrifying, and no one beyond the age of five can even conceive of it properly. There is little nostalgia when I remember being a child; it was impossibly difficult to be in a world of people who knew the rules and didn't understand such a little one that swore dinosaurs wandered her suburban neighborhood. But if Christ did not mean such "naivety" when he instructed us to become like children, I don't know what he could possibly mean. I have heard it explained that we are to be innocent and unquestioning, but I have yet to meet a child that meets that description and I certainly don't remember being one. No, I think He meant that we are to question everything, even the fundamental assumptions of our tidy little universe. Always ask why and always imagine. After all, there is no proof that anything other than our imaginations exist, so why restrict ourselves to the rules that the majority of grown humans has agreed to. Why not imagine that love is possible, life is forever, and playing pretend was more real than the banalities we convince ourselves to live for.