kindred

my favorite part is that this is the best word I can find.

Double Happy Honesty Cup

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listen to me, you Islands;
hear this, you distant nations:
Before I was born, the Lord called me;
From birth he has made mention of my name
He made my mouth like a polished arrow
and concealed me in his quiver
He said to me, "You are my servant,
Israel, in whom I will display my splendor."
But I said, "I have labored to no purpose;
I have spent my strength in vain for nothin
Yet what is due me is in the Lord's hand,
and my reward is with God

And now the Lord says--
He who formed me in the woed to be his servant
to bring Jacob back to him
and gather Israel back to himself
For I am honored in the eyes of the Lord
and God has been my strength
He says:
"It is too small a thing for you to be my servant
To restore the tribes of Jacob
and bring back those of Israel I have kept
I will also make yo a light for the gentiels
that you may bring my salvation to the ends of the earth
this is what the Lord says--
the redeemer and Holy One of Israel--
to him who was despised and abhored by the nation
to be the servant of rulers:
"Kings will see you and rise up
princes will see and bow down
because of the Lord, who is faithful
The Holy One of Isreal, who has chosen you

This is what the Lord says:
"in the time of my favor I will answer you
And in the day of salvation I will help you
I will keep you and will make you
to be a covenant for the people
to restore the Land
and to reassign its desolate inheritances

To say to the captives: "Come out"
and to those in darkness, "Be Free!"

Isaiah 61

A few things:

I don't think I need this space very much anymore. Did I write this before? I can't remember. It is still true though. I don't. I started it because I wanted someone to see me. To hear me. To know me. I don't really know how much it met that need over the last six and a half years, but what I do know now is that there are other ways. And they are better.

I was driving the curve this morning and reached something of an epiphany:: There are just a lot of other things I want to do more. And that doesn't make me a failure and it doesn't make me a bad person. It just means... well, I haven't gotten that far.

I came here to do the thing that I always find ways to put off. And now I am putting it off. Because I have other things on my mind and I am too tired to care that much. I suppose it becomes a problem when the things I want to do more include the simple act of thinking about something else.

I was practicing a Quaker prayer of receiving and releasing several weeks ago and I felt the weight of a teaching job placed in my had-- easy as that. But it seems too good to be true and so I don't really want to believe it. That attachment and disappointment thing again. But I suppose He loves us enough and it is possible. And he doesn't seem to be browbeating me nearly as much as... well... me.

There are certain coping mechanisms that I used to find quite comforting that I now find repulsive to consider. I sit and there is the red hot burn of vulnerability and ache and I try to cover it all up again, but it doesn't seem to cover anymore. My new heart doesn't seem to fit the pieces of the old one. He promised that he would replace the thornbush with the pine. And apparently He wasn't lying about that either.

But that also means that I am carrying around all of this gentle, new skin. You know the kind, like when you totally burn all the layers off and then it begins to grow back softer in that little spot. And there are a thousand things, sensitive to the touch-- feeling with nerves I never knew I had. Like sunlight to the dilated eye of the yesterday blind. It feels like hurt and fear, but maybe its just poignant, real. The walls are down and the callouses have taken flight.

"Every package has somewhere to go and the contents remain a mystery. Occasionally, I'll find a box where the address has been written by a child. I used to put these boxes to the side until the end of my shift so I could study the penmanship and compare it to Leo's. In a child's handwriting, language is exposed as the pained and crooked medium it really is. Since loosing Leo these packages are like shards of glass."

"I miss autumn-- the sason when summer takes on the memory of its own mortality. And then winter. And the the miracle seaosn, when everything begins again fearlessly."

-- Simon Van Booy, "Distant Ships," (from "The Secret Lives of People in Love")

My new journal has been christened by the first splash of clumsily spiled coffee. I caught the edge of the saucer, tipped the cup and sent the creamy lifeblood to distant reaches. The man at the next table responded instantly to the unmistakable clink by turning to the opposite side and somehow I knew he was going to hand me a napkin soon. It seems often I drop a pencil, spill a notebook full of paper, dump my coffee and everyone else wants to clean it up while I find little reason to jump up and clean it. The mess is okay for me.

I waited a few minutes and forgot about the man's search in his packpack until he produced a single white napkin-- a kind gesture, but inadequate for the spill. I set the napkin upon the saucer and turned back to my book, unconcerned. I found the passage, copied it out, replaced the bookmark and glanced at the cup, saucer, and napkin, surprised. The lily white object residing somewhere between paper and cloth now took on hue, value, and saturation of the still considerably-full cup and the saucer now mirrored the past purity of the gifted napkin. Strange how, bit by bit, all is changed.

I've been fighting in the trenches of children without enough time with their parents for one year and thirteen days now-- approximately speaking. People ask me that question of questions: "What do you do?" and immediately I feel the gigantic pocket of airlessness in this gap. The What I Do-ness seems 80% irrelevant to the real question, which is: How does your daily activity encapsulate who you really are? I feel guilty or empty or something, so I don't say what I am really thinking, which is "I am waiting for my life to begin," because this seems like a stupid, shallow, disconnected, discontent, un-spiritual, and faithless thing to say-- I feel immature in thinking that . {And actually, I do say this sometimes, but I still feel all of these things, so I immediately try to take it all back, stuffing it back into my pack, and walk away in true accordance with the failure that I feel in its truth}

But I am working on a bit of a personal project, which is the endeavor to stop hiding from things that are actually true. That is, stopping the urge to pretend that I don't feel the things I really feel deeply, quitting giving into the temptation of guilt for wanting the things that I really want, putting an end to pretending like I don't think things that I do. I've decided that even the unmet desires are better acknowledged for what they are than the excoriating pain of killing every good thing from the inside out.

So I'm not doing the things that I really want to do. My day job gets in the way of my real life. I hope for things that I've been trying to deny myself for a million years. I'm giving in to the urge to stop doing things that my mind screams I must do at the expense of listening to my need for sleep and beauty and relationship.

I'm doing what I want to do when I want to do it, despite the condemnation that comes pouring in the form of "what if's" and "your faults."

I keep having dreams that people give me new cars-- totally undeserved and unrepayable gifts.

I've started expecting men to hold open doors for me and I've started walking through them like I deserve it.

I used to be really good at pushing down my heart and convincing myself that I am not only okay with, but "really enjoy doing things by myself." I'm not good at this anymore and I have legitimately stopped telling myself that I like it. I've started admitting that I have chosen not to do particular things because I simply didn't want to to it alone. I've started to choose not to do things because I don't want to do them alone. I've given in to the temptation to simply grieve it instead.

I've started telling the truth: I don't like being alone. I hate it in fact.

Which leads me, inevitably, to the thought that perhaps, I don't have to keep telling myself that I'm alone and that's the way it has to be. I've started to accept the reality that I am worthy of being known and that I don't have to sit through the pain of running from the fear that I may yet be found unworthy.

I was falling asleep in Old Chicago at midnight when I had a bit of a personal epiphany. I spent the evening caught between the disconnect of my exhaustion and need to be refilled. Too tired to speak, but deeply needing to be heard.

"I spend the day making sure everyone is feeling loved and cared for," I said-- mostly for my own hearing. I realized in that moment that all I wanted was to be seen, but free of demand. And then, the thought went through my head, or maybe it emanated from my heart, I'm not sure which: Is there really anyone to make sure I am feeling loved and cared for? Sometimes it is so hard in this parched desert to hold the small droplets of water given. I hope for the day when the famine gives way to feast. Refreshment.

But, I realize, like my now-brown napkin, that so much is given-- the desires of our parched heart-throats-- through small processes of osmosis, the permeable membranes crossed slowly by ongoing contact. And, before we know it, the fibers are filled to the brim and the mess of our spilled-upon saucers are restored to their pure whites. Neighbors pull napkins from backpacks and men hold doors for women. College graduates endure hourly jobs until hopes are met in opened positions and people who recognize the worth in our faithfulness-- even when there are wrenches thrown in our plans, even when the coffeee spills, and we find ourselves in that gap between hope and dream and there are only crocked letters scrawled by children-- we find a way to hold our purple, wounded hearts open and He comes in.

foreign languages

"Attachments occur when we take the risk to allow someone else to matter enough to us to hurt us if they choose to."

Attachment, or boundedness, is our deepest need. This is because it is also the deepest part of the character of God.

The Bible goes so far as to identify the very nature of God with love: 'God is Love' (1 John 4:8). Love, which comprises the deepest part of who God is, determines what he does: 'For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten son.'

God is pro-relationship and anti-isolation.

The existence of emotional attachments in our lives is not an option; it is not a luxury. It is a spiritual and emotional necessity. We are designed for it....

It's a sad fact that Christians who have ever been able to be vulnerable with their needs for connection sometimes are then drawn to fellowships where true bonds were trivialized-- or, even worse, dismissed as 'trusting man too much,' The fact is that having relationships with God and other persons is not an either-or proposition. It's a both-and necessity. The heart has a deep need for God, who placed eternity there. The same heart yearns for the satisfying and safe human attachments in which we can be truly known and truly loves, that we may all be one."

"As soon as Jesus was baptized, he went up out of the water. At that moment, heaven was opened and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and lighting on him. And a voice from heaven said, 'This is my son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased."

"This is my son, chosen and marked by my love, delight of my life."



And now, for a personal conversation {taking place in my head}:


"What are you doing?" he asked.

"Hurting," she said.

"Why?"

"Because that is what I do."


It's gut wrenching, I am pretty sure. I ask myself why the year is passed and I look up from my lunch and see failure written without color on the whiteboard across from me. Who wrote that? I ask myself and then immediately wonder how many times I've read it over and over and over again. Now that I've looked at each letter and it's stabbed me in the heart, I think I might be ready to erase it.

It's depressing, I know. My finger reaches for the backspace.

But I think about why I feel this way and begin to consider whether or not I've been trying to look through a thick sheet of pain for approximately one hundred years, wondering if it isn't as easy as I thought it should be because I've stopped burying the hurt and started bearing my heart.

Sort of like when they say, "I'll make your headache go away by kicking you in the shin." Something like that.

"Let the people of Sela
sing for joy;
Let them shout from the mountaintops
Let them give glory to the Lord
and proclaim his praise in the islands
The Lord will march out like
a mighty man
like a warrior he will stir up his zeal
With a shout he will raise
the battle cry
And triumph over his enemies

For a long time I have kept silent
I have been quiet and held
myself back
But now, like a woman in childbirth
I cry out, I gasp and pant
I will lay waste to the
mountains and hills
And dry up all their vegetation
I will turn rivers into islands
and dry up the pools

I will lead the blind
by ways they have not known
Along unfamiliar paths I will guide them
I will turn the darkness
into light before them
and make the rough places smooth
These are the things I will do
I will not forsake them"
Is 42


"For the father loves the son and shows him all he does. Yes, to your amazement he wil show him even greater things than these.
For just as the Father raises the dead and gives them life, even so the Son gives life to whom he is pleased to give it."
Jn 5

"However, it is written:
'No eye has seen,
no ear has heard,
No mind has conceived
what God has prepared for
those who love him---'
But God has revealed it to us by His Spirit.

The Spirit searches all things, even the deep things of God. for who among men knows the thoughts of man except the man's spirit within him? In the same way no one knows the thoughts of God except the spirit of God. We have not received the Spirit of the World, but the Spirit of God, that we may understand what God has freely given us...

... Don't you know that you yourselves are God's temple and that God's spirit lives in you? Do not deceive yourselves. If any one of you thinks he is wise by the standards of this age, he should become a fool so that he may become wise... So then, no more boasting about men. All things are yours, whether Paul or Apollos of Cephas or the world, or life of death or the present or the future-- all are yours and you are of Christ and Christ is of God."
1 Cor 2&3

"There came a time when the risk to remain tight in the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom."
-- Anais Nin

"somewhere i have never traveled, gladly beyond
any experience, your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gestures are things which enclose me
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me,
though i have closed myself as fingers
you open always petal by petal myself as spring opened
(touching skillfully, mysteriously) her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility: whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens; only something in my understand
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands."

-- E.E. Cummings


"Love one another, but make not a bond of love. Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls."
-- Kahlil Gibran