those impulsive winter blues

Mama House. Mooncats. A week of avoiding saying goodbye while drinking tea and coffee with people I've grown to love. Shenandoah Valley... a place that more than any where else in the world (which is saying a lot) has become: home. The last thing I wrote on mine and Addie's prayer wall was: Oh God, I'm scared, a fitting beginning.


Thia left a note in my suitcase that says:
Keep being afraid.
Keep being brave.
Keep trusting.
Love, love, love.


I have been thinking about this Simone Weil quote Addie remembered me reading last Spring, "For it seemed to me certain, and I still think so today, that one can never wrestle enough with God if one does so out of pure regard for the truth. Christ likes us to prefer the truth to him because, before being Christ, he is truth. If one turns aside from him to go toward the truth, one will not go far before falling into his arms." (pg. 16)

language.

I should've been born in a small mountain town. I might've been able to remain there.

My hair is growing long again. I want to write about woman's studies, Nietzsche and our prayer wall, Raising Abel, the circles I burn into the middle of pages in my journal, to explain the pages of the mixtapes Em and I made, all the conversations and questions that repeat in my head as I try to sleep ... but, maybe its all this, one of the best words in the English language: (Addie's favorite.)

in·ef·fa·ble/inˈefəbəl/

Adjective:

Too great or extreme to be expressed or described in words: "ineffable beauty". Too sacred to be uttered. Defined by Claire:  1. the wheaty hilltop sunset in West Virginia or the amber-gold blackening the trees up in the hill pasture, or that paragraph about memory and loss

these gray mornings

Grey windows tease with the idea of snow. Addie and I stayed in bed till 11:11a.m., I am going to miss conversations drifting into sleep and waking to tell our night dreams. This week realizing I am leaving, and not certain of any returning to this little town that has been so much, I feel like a gatherer of details trying to memorize the light rods hovering just above the grass, the crunch of my shoes in the mulch of Parkwoods, the intricacy of the branches outside my Shenandoah St. window.

We have torn through each
others veils with our talons,
birds of prey seeking the
meaty flesh of living. We
shredded each others
defenses-- we have tousled,
swooped, destroyed the separations.
      We share our earth-bodies
bit by bit-- a touch, a tare, a
sigh, a silence.We mingle elements
dying and reborn in shared language,
a linking of the eyes.
            Our living has been a
collision, a wounded leaping
the art of molting has been our
soaring. We have given to life
our bodies, our entire existence
shedding our deathstyles.
Sucking the bone, feasting
on  the gristle, the muscle, the meat
and patiently spitting out
what could not be swallowed,
what could not give sustenance.
We have devoured our living
with a ferocious will to loving, to
sacrifice everything to the terrible
beauty of a communion which bears all.

madness

"If you want to write, if you want to create, you must be the most sublime fool that God ever turned out and sent rambling. You must write every single day of your life. You must read dreadful dumb books and glorious books, and let them wrestle in beautiful fights inside your head, vulgar one moment, brilliant the next. You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads. I wish you a wrestling match with your Creative Muse that will last a lifetime. I wish craziness and foolishness and madness upon you. May you live with hysteria, and out of it make fine stories — science fiction or otherwise. Which finally means, may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world."

Winter Bones

Who knows where a beginning begins? Did it layer over me like a film of dust filtering through sunlight on the train ride between Oregon and California? I didn't image this summer that the West Coast would be coming back to me so soon. Here I am, returning, departing. I thought graduation would be the consummation of my wandering, but it's always different then you think. Roots can be tattooed around your arm, planted down into the soil of your heart-- and transient as ever.  Maybe what I was chasing these past six years was to come to rest internally. So much has healed, and in the healing life branches out, evolving, emerging. I am always, and never, home.

Advent

"Come, Lord Jesus," the Advent mantra, means that all of Christian history has to live out of a kind of deliberate emptiness, a kind of chosen non-fulfillment.  Perfect fullness is always to come, and we do not need to demand it now.  This keeps the field of life wide open and especially open to grace and to a future created by God rather than ourselves.  This is exactly what it means to be "awake," as the Gospel urges us!  We can also use other a words for Advent: aware, alive, attentive, alert, awake are all appropriate!  Advent is, above all else, a call to full consciousness and a forewarning about the high price of consciousness.

When we demand satisfaction of one another, when we demand any completion to history on our terms, when we demand that our anxiety or any dissatisfaction be taken away, saying as it were, "Why weren't you this for me?  Why didn't life do that for me?" we are refusing to say, "Come, Lord Jesus."  We are refusing to hold out for the full picture that is always given by God.

"Come, Lord Jesus" is a leap into the kind of freedom and surrender that is rightly called the virtue of hope.  The theological virtue of hope is the patient and trustful willingness to live without closure, without resolution, and still be content and even happy because our Satisfaction is now at another level, and our Source is beyond ourselves.  We are able to trust that he will come again, just as Jesus has come into our past, into our private dilemmas and into our suffering world.  Our Christian past then becomes our Christian prologue, and "Come, Lord Jesus" is not a cry of desperation but an assured shout of cosmic hope.  

Richard Rohr