I've been thinking about writing something really intelligent here for approximately 3 days, 5 days, 7 days. I've been thinking about deleting this entire thing for a few months now. Why do I keep coming back? What is this black elixir that seems to have addicted these flying fingers. why why why? I started the habit at 17 and now here I am, submitting these white words to the black abyss again. reasons I still can't name except the opium of its secret thrill. a strange literary endorphin.

I've been thinking about writing something intelligent about truth and hunger and seeking and all sorts of things like that. Really good ideas that might make you change your mind about things that you thought before.

But I think that I might be lying if I follow through. I mean, not by saying words that aren't true, but laying down bricks to keep me from putting down my heart. Keeping secrets. A tactic of control rather than an act of truth and vulnerability. fake fake fake. why bother pretending to have answers when I really just want to let some air out through the sides of my questions.

I sat here three weeks ago. Wrote a few things in purple ink over my lunch break. that was the word in fact,
break break break break break.
Written over and over and over again. Its all I could think of. break. broke. broken. lost.

I write it again here and I wonder how many different ways I'll be misunderstood, misinterpreted. I'm already anticipating your probing questions that I'm sure I'll find a way to evade out of frustration or maybe just disdain. I probably shouldn't be saying that either. ohwell. now you know. save your questions for the next witness, I guess.

anyhow-- the writing was on the wall. or was it? I'm not sure. But nevertheless, I mixed a little more magenta into the bottle and wrote it anyway.

have you ever been squeezed so tight you thought at any moment you might loose the whites already floating in fluid in your sockets? A pending explosion of all the tension that's been held in by your held in breath. How long until the flood gates burst and destruction ensues?

I imagine Aladin in Jafar's transformed serpent clutches, his little legs sticking out of those white balloon pants. He was a liar too, full of false-pretense, used fake words to avoid the real ones. A whole new world. I suppose, it was, of sorts.

But that's not the point. Well, actually, it is sort of the point. A whole new world.

Its been 31 days plus 28. The whole world seems to be flipped on its head and all I can seem to account for it is age. Happy birthday. or something like that.

Maybe I'm just tired, worn out from this unexpected intermission in my life. Spending the day sorting out who is the wrong-est when I had nothing to do with it-- I was just trying to pass Comp 101 and find a part-time job.

But the truth is, I'm tired. Exhausted. Wondering how much longer I'll be Aladin and he'll be Jafar. I'm tired of putting on a good face, projecting an illusion of strength when I think I'm just doing what I can to hold it together until enough time passes for the truth to become clear to someone.

It's June. I sat there, green plastic lawn chair dug into the pebbles, two and half hours from home, rain getting ready to pour down all around the shelter of our tent: You are lifting weights, she said. I already knew that.

How long is it again that someone can train before their body just stops? I'd like the excuse of muscle atrophy.

I was reading about Jesus and the four thousand. He had compassion on them for they had come a long way and were hungry. He feared they might collapse on the way back. And I think I saw my face in the group photo taken at the picnic.

It seems as though I've been keeping a thousand secrets. I wonder if Mary felt like that, treasuring up all of those things in her heart. Did she hold them all inside for 33 years? or was there something else to it?

I feel like a precious vessel that's been dropped on the floor, and through some internal energy, I've been holding all the shattered pieces together on my own. What I'd really like is to let go and let all the shards fall to the floor. Sit in a relaxed position and do what I want to do. Close this two and a half inch gap between us.

I wonder how long before you'll allow the truth to set me free.

Because I need to say outloud that, as hard as I try to keep it a secret, I've never done anything so hard in my life. As much as I'd like to hide behind unmet goals and less significant hurts, the truth is that it simply takes everything I have to hold it together in the midst of the one thousand things that I can't understand. The world's greatest discrepancy.

I've started to work on trying not to hide the truth from myself so much. And part of that is admitting the things that I want, another part resisting the urge to kill everything, a third part putting a stop to the thought that I could actually control the uncontrollable. Just accepting a thing or two and letting it be true, regardless of the repercussions.

And if I write here the truth rather than the masks and lies that tempt, I have to write the truth that it is all so hard. I want to make it simple and straight-forward, but the honest thing is that most days it feels like my insides are pulled apart, shred upon shred. And I can't do much more than hope that someday these small loaves will be turned into basketfulls of leftovers and that, by some miracle, there will be something more for me on the road home than an inevitable collapse.

I was perusing the Reader tonight and was struck by some really essential thoughts from my friend Jessica. I couldn't have said it better:

Do you remember that Jennifer Garner movie...13 Going on 30? I do. And unlike the beautiful Jennifer Garner, my age progression does not seem to be going forward.

I was reminded last night, in a frustratingly and beautifully honest voice, that I am still a work in progress. Every time I think I've found solid ground, something shifts, or changes, and I come to realize that no matter how hard I work, or how far I've come, I'm not done growing up.

In some ways, I'm glad for that. I don't want to be static, or stagnant, or stunted before my time. I want to be pushed and challenged, I want to grow and explore. And more often than not, I don't have the time or energy, and more often than I'd like to admit, the courage, to push myself in more than a few ways. I've spent the last few years pushing my body. It's far from perfect. But it is by far better than it has been. The mental challenge that this requires has changed me too. And while I appreciate my new found physical and much quieter emotional strength, there is still work to do.

The person that pointed out this not quite fatal but still detrimental flaw is someone I have not known long. But nonetheless, someone that has become important to me very quickly. I hate the double edge sword that relationships sometimes seem. In order for you to know them and them you, you must open yourself. Unfold the layers of guilt and hurt, of memories and experiences, and try to share them. Not explicitly, by telling story after story of your life up until the point you met, though some of that does inevitably happen. But rather in your actions and person, through who you are and HOW you are. And it's sometimes ugly. Really ugly. How do you know if sharing what you are and how you got that way won't make them turn heel and run? You don't. How do you know you won't peel away the layers, hoping to replace those with fonder memories and lovelier things, and they won't be bandaged but instead scrapped away. We don't. And I guess that's the risk we take when we love. It takes a strong person to love, and a stronger person to let themselves be loved.

And also from her blog, this gem that I find quite poignant:

"One does not fall in love. One grows in love, and love in him." Karl A. Menninger

Thanks, Jae. Right on.

• How Deep The Father's Love For Us by Owl City

More Owl City music on iLike

I Deny the Resurrection from Peter Rollins on Vimeo.

I think that perhaps the greatest gift of love we can give is to simply allow ourselves to be the beloved.

How long I've been peering down this dark hole, I don't know. But for days now, I keep circling back to this line from the movie, Magnolia, spoken by the character Donnie Smith. At what seems to be his last moment of desperation, as the rain pours outside, he cries out, eyes aflame, desolate: "I have a lot of love to give; I just don't know where to put it! I just don't know where to put it..."

I think often about what an old friend wrote as her only interest on her Facebook profile: I love people more than anything.

I have a deep and poignant memory sitting in Rembrandts', four good years ago now, light streaming in, colored by the stained glass, looking across the substantial table, doing everything I could to keep from standing up, bolting out the door, avoiding the tears that pressed hard against the banks of my lashes. "You have a lot of love to give, Heidi," he said. The thought had never crossed my mind, let alone my heart. Who, me? Lovely and lover?

Fast forward to October 2008. I got in my car, parking lot empty, all the parents come for their children, sun setting above the mountains. My heart was so full-- I was swimming in the reality of all this love pouring out of my old, fragile heart. I was making friends with a self long buried under the rubble of rejection, confusion, and hurt. A self left behind on some Christmas morning or under the kitchen table early in the morning.

I had long forgotten what it felt like to love and in its place was a habit of shameful begging.

Last spring, my eyes began to focus on a few clouds that have been set upon the retina for a while now: I was aware of a presence of a deep love for people that I fear can never be properly received. It is there, soft and red, but held back behind elephantiasis skin. The connections are somehow always broken. And so I keep it to myself.

I've been wondering about needs. What are needs, what are things that we just want, and what are the things that are absolutely essential to our deepest being? I have a hard time intertwining the things that bring the deepest, most brilliant doses of joy with those things that are also my deepest needs. It takes a lot of work to open my heart to the thought that this kind of abundant-life sort of goodness is also essential to my existence. Goodness as a non-negotiable in our experience of actually living? Could it be that joy and a goodness beyond comprehension is actually built into the way we were supposed to live?

I am wondering how long I've been living out of the belief that to give love is an imposition. Something beautiful and good that was placed in me before the beginning of everything got twisted somewhere along the way. This longing to love, to give myself, to know and be known, to share all the beauty I see in the world with someone else, got relabeled as some sort of inappropriate demand upon those I ought not assume any connection. Something got mixed up in this broken heart of mine and I began to believe that this deep and good desire for companionship was an unworthy gift that is not mine to assume. The little lies began to sneak in, how selfish of you to demand the time and attention of others. Who do you think you are to ask for any commitment or attachment? Your desire for friendship, for community, has little to do with your giving and all to do with your taking.

But the eyes set upon my heart are changing these past weeks. How foolish, how misguided to believe these things. The love got buried. The joy in giving and serving and simply being with those the Father has given got trampled by the million rejections, the broken pieces that no longer know how to connect. The truth has gotten lost.

And so, I am wondering about a way of loving that is not often spoken of. Could it be that the best way of loving one another, the most valuable gift we can give, is to simply allow ourselves to be the beloved. Is it possible that we need to turn everything back around and stop pretending like we have to take care of all of our needs alone, in isolation, and begin to allow ourselves to need the love of others. Because I think we have an innate need to give love-- and when we close off our hearts and stop receiving it from one another-- even in the frail and broken and shadowy forms in which it often must be given-- we kill something in one another.

I wonder if community, if connection, if intimacy is a sort of reciprocal operation, a literal dance of give and take in which both the giver and receiver is simultaneously brought to life.

Perhaps the deep ache of our hearts today is not a matter of too little love given, but too little love received. I don't pretend to imply that either position is easily taken. To take the posture of the receiver is to put ourselves at the risk of loss. As C.S. Lewis so eloquently says, "To love anything at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken..." I think this is equally true of allowing ourselves to be loved. It is a precarious bridge we walk and must somehow trust, even when the construction so deeply resembles our own inadequacy, that to allow our raw and bleeding hearts to touch another is worth the pain and risk of separation and failure.

And how long can we continue to hold out our loves before our arms tire and our ears bleed of rejection. How many thousands of time must we hear the words, "It's not enough," or "I don't have time," or "I can't pay you back," before we stop offering, tired and frustrated? How do we resist the lie that living a life of love is just to good to be true-- not for me. I must muddle through without expectation. A lone reed.

Truth be said, I don't have the real answers to any of these things. How does it all get fleshed out, I don't know. But perhaps the first step is asking for eyes to see and a courageous, softened heart. Maybe it is a matter of realizing that if I follow my need for love deep enough I will more accurately discover a need to give love without fear of the hardened hearts upon which it so often shatters. Perhaps we need to stop preaching demeaning sermons to ourselves about the need to muster up more of this love and begin simply to ask for soft hearts to receive it.

Maybe this is what John meant when he said "We love because he first loved us." We can stop thinking of love as something we have to do to balance out the equation in our needy relationships and come to terms with the reality that we are worthy of a life defined by a very deep love. Maybe then our relationships will escape this rigid economy of equal payment and enter into the reality of a more fluid abundance. We can enter the reality of a simultaneous flow of love where we are both the giver and receiver.

And I realize so much of this sounds so lovely and simple and logical and easy in writing. But the truth is that my heart is still deeply broken. I do not know how to enter this reality. I don't know if I can handle another round of the disappointment that comes from a door shut in my face out of fear. I'm not sure how many more walls of your heart I can hit before this cut begins to bleed.

But I do know this-- the thing I need is a place to put all of my love and that may mean that I must find the strength to keep trying, to keep knocking. I need you, not for what you can give, but what I need you to receive. And you need me too-- not because I can fill your empty places and patch up your voids, but because my smallness, my weakness, and my mere presence is the ground upon which your need to stretch your legs and run the race of love that keeps us all alive is met.

Untitled (cardigan lonely)

Glasses Family

Missed Encounters