Oh.

Before I left Addie sent me these words of wisdom, "I don't know if they re-invent us as much as they re-arrange us. And breathe new things in to us. I worry (that using re-invent) might make you view all that is inside of you, all that has happened to you, your past, your history, your memory, your love and life... might make you miss how solid and true all of that will be forever. ... Those versions will only re-arrange, shift, transform, grow deeper and more honest."

That was a much truer picture I think. Now to be here, after so much time, I am overwhelmed (in a non-negative way) at all of the newness, the sensory overload of sorts. It will take me time to begin to explain in this blog but some beginning thoughts I've been processing.

What does it mean to treat someone with dignity? What does it look like to accompany others toward empowerment? How can we create an environment that helps give people agency, helps them search for meaning, and space to express themselves?

I am humbled by the beauty of the people I've been interacting with, both guests to Dorothy's Place & Kitchen, other volunteers, other companions, the board. This is a community that is dwelling in both brokeness and beauty. One board member said, "working with the poor is a unique way to experience our humanity." There is a quote on the wall of my home, "as long as we are in the world the love that unites us will bring us suffering by our very contact with one another, because love is the resetting of a body of broken bones."

word.

"It is not easy to hang out on the street with Christ, but the consolation is you get to hang out on the street with Christ."

love/hate

I have an exhausting relationship to church.

spirit animals

I'm moving in a week and I feel kind of terrified. Moving is a form of reienvention, a way of recreating myself with less and more of the things that shape me. I wonder at how much of who I've become in mennoland will remain with me, and I want it too. I miss my home already, MAMA house, and living with a fox, cheetah, and meadow lark.

My mad for life list so far...
1. be less abstract
2. don't oversleep
3. take public transit adventures
4. wear heels every now and then
5. try a new athletic pursuit/extreme sport

2012

Bless constellations.
Bless the blackness of the river at night, railways, and silhouettes of the blanket-capped.
Bless face paint.
Bless the smoke-like rapids, tumbling and dissipating endlessly.
Bless shapeshifting waters.
"Bless strength that does not exclude softness."

And curse fear-- its root in all our self-destructiveness,
our selfishness, and the games we play with others.

And appreciate others more.
Appreciate this moment more.
Appreciate our fragility more.

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

Moments of Splendor

Today I feel filled with awe at the generosity of God and the convergence of my life in strange ways... Dorothy's Place. I have been reading Reverend Rick (The Zen Priest's blog) and filled with joy that this man occasionally refers to himself as "a perpetually relapsing Jesus Freak", reads Martin Buber, and wrestles with what it means to have a "mystical relationship with" Jesus and practice Zen Buddhism. I look forward to asking him questions and exploring my own love of Thich Knat Hahn, mediation, and Jesus. Does faith need a label? 

Oskar

"I think you could fall in love with anyone if you saw the parts of them that no one else gets to see. Like if you followed them around invisibly for a day and you saw them crying in their bed at night or singing to themselves as they make a sandwich or even just walking along the street and even if they were really weird and had no friends at school, I think after seeing them at their most vulnerable you wouldn’t be able to help falling in love with them."

It's Official.

“The world will be saved by beauty.” – Dostoevsky

My grandma says I must’ve inherited gypsy blood so I guess I shouldn’t be surprised by now at my unexpected migrations.  This summer after my Women Studies course, I took the Starlight Coastal to visit Aaron in California. I would’ve never imagined then that in less than six months I’d be moving to Salinas, though scribbled in all my journals from Sr. year is the sentiment that the West coast was calling me back.  Salinas. John Steinbeck’s backyard. 

I’ll be joining the Franciscan workers of Junipero Serra in January and working at Dorothy’s Place Hospitality Center (its roots are in the Catholic Worker houses.)  "It is the mission of Dorothy's Place Hospitality Center to live, to love, and to work in harmony; to serve the marginalized, to create partnerships that are mutually liberating, and to pursue social justice with respect and dignity for all, in the spirit of St. Francis and Dorothy Day." 

Their work includes: a community kitchen, day room, health clinic, a Women's emergency shelter, silk screening/food service micro-enterprises, an art studio and gallery,  after-school programs for farm worker youth, the House of Peace, and outreach &  advocacy for the marginalized and powerless.

I’ll be living in an interfaith intentional community called Companions of the Way that is dedicated to simple living, non-violence, presence, the “sacrament of conversation,” social and environmental justice.  

Needless to say, I'm very excited. 

Occupying Wall Street

[a blurb from an email to Larisa and Jess]

I am back from Occupy Wall Street now... (though I really want to return there.) Goodness... the whole time I was there I was just imagining how awesome it would be to be camping there with you and Larisa.  When I first arrived at Zuccotti park it didn't seem like much more than masses of people camped out in tarps- it was a really cold morning and people were still curled around each other, dreaded-locks like medusa's snakes tangled over their heads, hats pulled over faces. Then suddenly Julia ran into someone she'd met before and the whole places sort of unlocked and unfolded, sleepers began cleaning up their mats and I realized there was an entire little community enclosed within this small space-- there's a people's library, food station/kitchen, prayer tree, art section, media, info, info in Spanish, a comfort station handing out blankets, an empathy table! And the structure keeps improving and responding to the needs of the people and the protest. They were even composting! and I met this guy wandering around at breakfast time saying, "Hey, if you're glutten free and can't eat what they're serving I'm buying you breakfast." It was incredible to witness such diverse people (black, white, brown, immigrants, visitors, business men, old, young, hippies, anarchists, straight-laced middle class folks) with different agendas actually listening to each other, dialoguing, trying to figure out what America could be. 

 OWS gave me a lot of hope-- not that the system will change easily or quickly or at all... but that people are remembering their humanity and compassion and want something different. I kept tearing up just for the possibilities. Something is happening. Resistance is happening. It's powerful-- the intersection of lives. And the consensus and general assemblies and refusal to be framed by media or demands, the process of how to hear and respond that is emerging... it's all such an embodiment of what we studied. I went to a ton of workshops--- one that Eve Ensler was at! 

   

 One of the best things was the human mic (since megaphones were banned) the process is one person speaks in short sentences and then their words are repeated by the nearest crowd so they are amplified and carried-- and how beautiful that these words become our own, participating in the listening and internalize and speak out the others words, responding in unison and echoing the voices to make others heard... the "others" story becomes part of me-- creating space inside my own body and repeating in my own voice (and even when there was disagreement, you were forced to chew and recognize the human desire and thought, to hold the difference inside you... and the speaker had time to reflect and be articulate- I was so impressed)... It was so powerful. There is a process of step up/step back where people who are traditionally privlidged are asked to give room for people whose voices aren't heard so there were so many people of low economic status and non-white sharing their experiences. It made me believe American can be different, the occupy movement is a womb, a place where new ways of seeing, of being together, of wrestling with the difficulty of so many different needs is being born. I went to a BDS workshop led by some Israeli women (ugh, I miss you guys so much.)

I could go on forever but in summary: 

Percy Bysche Shelley's Mask of Anarchy...

// Rise like lions after slumber

in unvanquishable number!

Shake your chains to earth like dew

which in sleep had fallen on you--

Ye are many, they are few//

of course it has its flaws and there are so many issues that people are concerned about... It's exciting.

the end of summer

If she planted a mustard seed

somewhere in the dampness

between her liver and kidneys 

she wonders if it would

expand to the edges of her

fingers, if faith could fill her

but she imagines those secret

places squishy, like the history 

of a creek bed, composted 

seasons rotting into fine brown 

silt (the sort of thing life 

might spring from.)

She wonders if there is light

inside the body. Does it slide in 

on a yawn? Disappear slowly on the 

other end of the ear canal, dimming 

as it travels? Does it sift 

through layers of skin losing

strength in shades of blue, 

then purple, before the finality 

of utter blackness—the way

light floats on the surface of the sea,

dives, but never can hold its 

breath to the bottom.

If she pressed the tiny dark kernel

into her own organic material,

waited patiently, through 

dry dust and the sloshing

of rain, would it ever emerge

like the redwood trees

broke the surface of the earth

one summer, generations ago 

and never stopped yearning

for the lightness. 

eternity.

"One of the strange things about living in the world is that it is only now and then one is quite sure one is going to live forever and ever and ever. One knows it sometimes when one gets up at the tender solemn dawn-time and goes out and stands out and throws one’s head far back and looks up and up and watches the pale sky slowly changing and flushing and marvelous unknown things happening until the East almost makes one cry out and one’s heart stands still at the strange unchanging majesty of the rising of the sun—which has been happening every morning for thousands and thousands and thousands of years. One knows it then for a moment or so. And one knows it sometimes when one stands by oneself in a wood at sunset and the mysterious deep gold stillness slanting through and under the branches seems to be saying slowly again and again something one cannot quite hear, however much one tries. Then sometimes the immense quiet of the dark blue at night with the millions of stars waiting and watching makes one sure; and sometimes a sound of far-off music makes it true; and sometimes a look in someone’s eyes." 

trying to figure out

:Feminist:  How do I define a feminist? A woman who realizes her own authorship and sees herself as equal to all human beings (her experiences, feelings, thoughts as valid, worthwhile.) A woman who believes her voice and experience carries the same weight as a man’s because we are all human beings, a woman who will knock on doors till they open, who will fight to enter the gentleman’s club only to announce she is building her own treefort. It is a woman who learns (or is learning) that she possesses her own life, who is engaged in the struggle of birthing… who is awake. A woman who believes there is no second  sex and will live her way into the birthright men and other women have trampled down. A feminist is someone who is gaining self-determination (of what it means to a woman, of what it means to be herself), or struggling for it, or even dreaming it may be possible. A feminist is  a woman who listens to herself and hears the Uncreated One whisper, yes. It is not: a man-hater, a reversve-the-dominance, it is a woman who will resist cages, or enter them to sing her own song (subervision of the way things have been handed down, or acceptance by their own merit, defying patriarchy.)

while I was packing I thought you said

Always this, slowly this

a sigh, ten minutes pass,

I am trying to tell you something...

    ...I know

but you don't, you don't and I don't

know how to tell you

beginning

      another beginning surrounded by

good intentions, intentions

piled so high, crumbled all around me

with the sincerity of origami folds

this will be, this is, this was

pounding relentlessly in my head till I

...oh nevermind

no, what, what were you saying?

always this

surrounded by another beginning

and hedged, hemmed in by

papers, the past, the fragments

always, writing fragments 

I...

beginning

straight-faced we stare into

the illusion of historicity

and embrace translations,

illegible and illiterate

with religious fervor

the static whisper of the conscience

beneath the hum, hiss-rush of

soundwave masses is too faint to grasp...

but I search, stethoscope to heartbeat

do you know what I mean? but, oh, how could you?

this conversation is so old,

so old it might disintegrate were we to press it

we await our animal tongues

to stir, to seek the prey of

undsicovered, to devour the unknown

and speak and ask 

            words

what is the depth of the sound of the sky

I hear only an echo

though she swallows our cries

while

fingertips encrusted with the dust of nature

hold flecks of memory that freckle our skin

the way will descend into my

soul as the dew, inescapable,

I adore the distance as a

worshiper of wandering

of the thousand lives indwelling one 

and this storm shuffles down the valley,

a steady unhurried approach, 

where time is only a servant to emergence

an arrival that can never be late

all i have left is this

is this and only this

(and this is more than enough)

do you understand?

but oh, how could you?