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?

Dark Night Poetry Slam

* * *

On the night before your wedding I asked you, “what is the geography of love?” 

It’s a land I’m afraid of becauseI’ve heard they’re all nudists because you have to strip yourself bare to be vulnerable. I prefer layers.  I’ve been folding myself into sharp creases telling myself I’ll shape a paper crane someday.  

You asked: Do you remember what our love tasted like?

I remembered the rain beading a necklace on the nape of your neck and the cold stone on my spine in the graveyard the day I was too afraid to tell you. But I said no. 

  I’ve wrapped words around my windpipe till the sound is clogged and sometimes it the things you want most you have to let silence enfold.

     Love doesn’t possess things because it is the child of a treasure hunter and a miner. It unlocks the birdcages, it winds up courage like a jack-in-the-box and whites out the periods at the ends of sentences so the stories keep going. 

Love is a song we played on a saw, between the teeth, and the whine of our ghosts always haunted the melody, but we cut each other into before and after. And you can’t ask for love back. Love shatters our bodies but we keep collecting the pieces to make kaleidoscopes. And that damage is beauty, waiting to turn. 

I said, tell me your love story. 

You said I have so many.  

You sent me a letter that was just a blank page, and it said everything. I carry it in my wallet; I let it change owners, because love only makes us wider, it’s like splitting the darkness open like a loaf and swallowing that density.  

You said love is a land full of beggars, who will tap you on the shoulder and hold their hands empty waiting for your offer. Love will ask you for all your glances cast backward, for your nervous laughter, for the times you run up your basement stairs. It will ask for all your fears. And it will scare the hell out of you. So what will you carry in your pockets?  

I said what is the weather like there? And you said, it isn’t mild. The climate is tropic. There are typhoons, like the time we made love after his hands shook holding the letter that said he was HIV+ and we wept, entwined in each other.

    And the typhoons make swamps like the time it was halfway to morning and our shoes were drowning in the rainwater and you said “God’s not crying, he’s wishing he could annihilate us again.” And I said, I didn’t think so, it’s more like She knew the only thing that would make sense was howling. 

There are cliffs, where a school of jellyfish swims in your stomach when you dangle your feet over the side.  And you know there is nothing  --nothing between you and that freefall. But you jump.  And the water will crack your ribs and restart your heart every time. 

I heard you were happy. And I was happy to know it. 

I never understood physics but this is how I learned the world is round, because there are no corners where someone can stand with their back against a wall.

Because you turned my ear into a seashell when it was pressed to your navel and now it remembers the ocean inside you and recalls it to me across all this distance.  I knew I was beautiful after you loved me, even when we cast ourselves back on the tide, because the hollows are deeper-- and I can only love more. 

I’d spent so much time being afraid that love was a limited resource. That if I gave it away, if you took it away, I would be here with my hands open, empty. But, love keeps on growing like those volcanic eruptions under the ocean building new islands. 

Love is like Strega Nona’s pasta pot, there will be too much, you will be full. 

Love will be leftover. 

Yes.  

Love will be left over.

woman rings

A womanist: Loves music. Loves dance. Loves the moon. Loves the Spiirt. Loves love and food and roundness. Loves struggle. Loves the Folk. Loves herself. Regardless. – Alice Walker

Tree rings result from new growth; they represent the growth speed through the seasons of the year, the ecology: the dryness, the rainfall, the sunfall. Dendrochronology reads the patterns, remembers the past climate.

 “Tree rings speak

of rich years, drought years,

seasons of damage

and of peace.

God reads my soul

and understands.”

In a month I will be twenty-four years old and as this season of travel and education and finding roots in new communities ends, I have decided to celebrate by marking my out my own “woman ring” – a physical representation of where I have come from and am coming from, the ecology of my life.

It represents overall coming into my identity as a woman (or "womyn") and finding the face of Mama God. It represents the wisdom of our lived experiences, of the body’s grace, the womb from which creativity and healing and life force spring forth. It represents being present, being deep awake to this moment-- that “all acutal life is encounter.” It represents resistance. It represents the Spirit of God, the Holy Mystery, the Uncreated One. It represents connection, how my life is interwoven in the lives of the people I belong too, how they have given me a security and love from which to adventure and explore, to continue in this wild journey that is life-because most importantly, I recognize my own fragility, humanity, and need for vulnerability—for stripping off layer after layer of the ways I hide and self-protect. It also represents how I am part of an ecosystem, “eventually one must come to rest, must come home and mix their blood and sweat with the land.”

"My first step from [seeing God as] the old white man was trees. Then air. Then birds. Then other people. But one day when I was sitting quiet…it come to: that feeling of being part of everything, not separate at all. I knew that if I cut a tree, my arm would bleed…. " Alice Walker 

That is all.  

Reflections on the US/Mexican Border

Ah the Southwest, the Sonoran Desert, Nogales, Tucson, Arivaca...  March 5-13th were days that changed my life and have been some of the most difficult, impactful days. This week solidified a course that is probably going to be unfolding, hauntingly, for years. Right now, I am vacillating between desiring to speak to everyone I see and not wanting anything but silence... my heart and my mind are in the desert. 

Dorthea Soelle wrote, "If one finally understands what is really going on, one cannot live with a clear conscious in this bourgeois world, pursuing one's career and entertainment. Other priorities arise in one's life. These priorities are encompassed in the comprehensive word, 'resistance.'" 

For those of you who didn't hear, I spent my spring break on the US/Mexican border volunteering with No Mas Muertes, a humanitarian aid organization that seeks to end migrant deaths in the desert. The situation at the border, the way migrants are being treated is terrifying and a moral failure of us as humans. 

      To explain more: We spent the week at an aid camp and spent the majority of our time on water/food drops, walking migrant trails through these remote regions. "Somos amigos, tenemos aqua y comida." It was so difficult to realize the atrocious, pervasive ignorance between my life and their situation. The economic policies of the US (particularly NAFTA), drive these people from their homes and communities, then criminalizes their struggle for a decent life. Criminalizes their poverty.  Whatever language we use, the reality of the situation is the production of a sentiment... that we (the US) would rather see them die in the desert than cross into our country.   And it amaze/horrifies/frightens me... that we will take lives in the name of this nation, when all of us-- when from time immemorial, people have migrated, people have wandered the earth. So why can I say, I am American-- I took this land from the indigenous people, I took this land from Mexico, and this is mine and no one can come here unless I say so. That is what our government says. And the church sometimes says it. It makes me feel nauseous... As Derek Webb brilliant said, "my first allegiance is not to a flag, a country, or a man, my first allegiance is not to democracy or blood- it's to a king and a kingdom." I thought of Jesus saying, "I was thirsty, and you gave me a drink... whatever you did for the least of these you did for me." (That is Christianity, nationalism is not.) 

I sat beside the grave of a fourteen year old girl, Josseline, who died alone and thirsty in the desert.  Afterwards she walked every trail with me, lingering between the prayers of my footsteps and the whispers of forgiveness for my complicity.  I had the privilege of talking to a man that had lived in the US for fourteen years and was deported and is just trying to make his way back to his life, his wife and family, his kids-- and yet he still sang songs. A girl on our trip got frostbite, layered and in our tent-- and imagine how cold it is for them... how they see this hostile landscape of mountains and cacti and they have to hide, are being hunted... and an unknown grave that was only 6 months old... and the litter on the sides of the trail of shoes, backpacks, sweatshirts.

And the border patrol. I have never been so challenged by seeds of hatred... so many documents of abuse. A migrant man who asked not to be put in the back with the dogs because he was allergic, who at the aid station later had not only allergic symptoms but dog bites. How have we forgotten our humanity? How can we look past a body, to an idea?  Our water drops, if found by the border patrol, were often slashed, the food dumped out-- this shocked me, and it was not a one time occurrence.This is a way we are all guilty of killing. These deaths are not an accident, they are a manifestation of our border policy. And it is mothers, sons, daughters, children, old people, fathers, brothers, sisters. 

I also bore witness at he Streamline Operation (which is this court where they deport 70 immigrants at once having had only 30mins to talk with a lawyer, kept 5-10 days in makeshift facilities where sometimes there is not even room for everyone to lie down. This is a sin.)  I saw a man beg for his life trying to escape gang-life, and he has been denied asylum, so there was nothing the judge could do: It is the law of this land.  I was sitting next to the door they were led out so they'd look at me and I wasn't aloud to speak or tell them I thought it was unjust, all I could hope was that in my tears they would see compassion. Yet, it felt like so little to offer while they were chained ankles, waist, wrists... like animals, like criminals, these young scared men whose only crime is being poor. is being brown. is being born outside our wall.  We have a WALL across our border. It's ridiculous, it costs tax payers 700,000- 7 MILLION DOLLARS PER MILE... and prevents migrants only 5 minutes, but forces them into the most dangerous terrains. ... from CA to Texas 600-700 are caught trying each day... and people are dying... and its so hidden and manipulated by fear and greed.   

I could say so much more. But please, stop. think. become active in changing this catastrophe. 

Being back at school is... hard to say the least. All I want is to be back in the desert giving water, to focus on anything, to write a paper, to not think of Josseline, my friends, the desert, water, trails, the evidence of their passing, of the talks on white privilege, on the banning of ethnic studies, on the discrimination and racism so many people face... I can't focus in classes. I feel overwhelmed. I feel like rocking back and forth and sobbing. I feel more rage then I have ever felt. It's not okay. It's not okay. And, this is being done in my name-- in your name... for us to have this life. And I do not want that. Our policy is unfair, is inhumane, is selfish and ludicrous. 

More:

Josseline's story: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=124046778

Operation Streamline: http://www.immigrationforum.org/images/uploads/OperationStreamlineFactsheet.pdf

No More Deaths: www.nomoredeaths.org

"all actual life is encounter."

I have been reading this book that excites me so much... I borrowed it from my philosopher professor. It's called I and Thou (Martin Buber), it's about encountering other people about relation. The kind of book that's poetic and rambling and entices you in while subtly rearranging you as you read it, or at least reminding you of how full of awe we should be at the Uncreated One and the glorious beings surrounding us.

He talks about how we either relate to people/things in the world as objects or as beings. And only in "I respond to You with my whole being" do we truly not just experience (which is a monologue), but encounter (a dialogue, that is dynamic and evolving and able to reshape us and this is presence and present.) In the whole experience vs. encounter - I started thinking of how little we know how to open ourselves and how to encounter, we rely on formulas that don't breach the surface (sentences, questions we think we must ask or not ask even when we really want to just mingle, meld, collide into another.) We don't know how to breach the surface for true resonance or responding (just like spiritual language has become so co-opted that it's hard to articulate any sort of experience without it sounding cliche or church-y). 

But we all fall back on the formulas that don't allow for spontaneous or new encounters, we don't meet anything in a new or unique way. Our language and rituals and ... I guess the social structure confine us to the same ways of relating- even if that leaves us without genuine human interaction. And those formulas also conceal how we really desire to interact or encounter an other, a "You." There's always such an enormous gap between people, unsure of how to be vulnerable, how to be intimate-- how to give ourselves. But I wonder at that, what language do we need to undo and what questions lead us into people? He says- "try to meet every person, situation, and object in its own way." (But to me that seems so hard) It's a task of extraordinary attentiveness, and I think challenging our nature of trying to categorize and order things, reducing all experiences to routine and repetition vs. encounter. I think there's an aspect of needing to cultivate our capacity for wonder- not just at beauty or scenery, but wonder at the mysteries of another person, developing our desire for exploration. (but how to do that?) It's like the craving of authentic cultures, of some new place to travel, always seeking something new (for the chance of its profoundness)-- but all of that desire can be captured in the desire to travel into another person as well. "Allowing the encounter of another to disturb, disorient, unsettle us" so we continue becoming. Paying attention.

I feel like that is so hard for our culture, because we get so used to entertainment. And so few people appreciate silence and quiet but that's so central to encounter or true relationships, the continual opening and vulnerability and acceptance of unknowns in each other and even to ourselves, and the potential for change and evolution and cycles and growth. And he talks about seeing people as a whole, neighborless, seamless You that fills the firmament (when we are encountering them, that sort of intense focus, being truly present and attentive to encounter-- expanding how we interact, so we do not experience, but stand in relation too.)

I could go on and on... its such simple concept, but it is exactly what I have been wanting to read and dwell on lately... that aching to travel into others, to explore... and allow others to emerge, not trying to order, control, or possess them, but to reach out for that genuine human interaction. I think mainly that is what it means to love others- to appreciate and hear them as who they are. "Nothing else is present but this one, but this one cosmically." Then he ties it into God too. The life of spiritual beings is "wrapped in a cloud but it reveals itself, manifestations, it lacks but creates language. We hear no "You" and yet feel addressed'; we answer- creating, thinking, acting: with our being we speak the basic word unable to say "You" with our mouth." 


(I think this articulates so much our struggle with relation to God, he created language but doesn't use it audibly for us, yet we sense Him, we try to speak back but are stuck in words.) "But how can we incorporate into the world of the basic word what lies outside language? In every sphere, through everything that becomes present to us, we gaze toward the train (the edge, the hem) of the eternal You." (He uses You here as being/ that which we encounter or can be in relation too.) We perceive a breath of it; in every You we address the eternal You." This excites me about God... His permanence, His hidden nature and yet... it beckons to me.  

"It is up to you how much of the immeasurable becomes reality for you... it does not stand outside of you, it touches your ground, and if you say "soul of my soul" you have not said to much."

The Little Red Brick Home

Remember that night, we spoke casually till your limbs began itching for the doorframe, only then did you ask, “Why are you standing on the table?” I couldn’t explain that I needed to. So I said, “I just want to.” But you understood, and threw a tantrum for me so we could laugh instead of cry. I collapsed on the ugly couch. 

We talked about hanging family portraits in the stairwell of people we should belong to, mostly grandpas from National Geographic who are slightly eccentric and sisters from Africa whose bold gaze continually startles me. We don’t have fathers or mothers.

Some days we laugh in two-part harmony.  An atomic high-five skipped down the passage of our eyes when I lead him through the door and passed you in the hallway.  Beneath my barely concealed joy and mildly discreet contentment you knew the interior of my head was pin-balling. 

I externalize my secrets by accident, like the day the dishwasher snowed on the kitchen floor after we’d packed up the entire house to rave music and cursed the bug kingdom from A to Z. I’m still up for inventing the PA system so we can interrupt each other abruptly and she won’t have to use her cell phone to call from downstairs to upstairs. 

We plan anti-party-parties with one-hand-count guest lists.  My mood hop-scotches like scanning the radio, but you don’t mind.  We co-exist in our compulsive movement, talk of foreign lands, of turquoise tiles, of sunflowers on the table till the map falls off the wall. You beg me to write that feminist poem, so we can put it on the fridge. You’d probably even find a sticker for it, like a mother.

Remember the night I locked myself out and came to your door:  and in the morning we felt inebriated by the bullet-like joy that had pierced us, we stayed in bed, basking in the luxury of sabbath sundays, whispering like sisters, finger-puppets and gangster yoga poses in borrowed sweat pants till the laughter tilter-worlded. We ate fig cake for breakfast.

Yellow leaves plastered the ground and we walked till our feet hurt, trying to walk something out of our soles. Sudan is red. I read Nietzsche aloud to you along side the Bible and we break our broken hearts into pieces of laughter and shouts to cough out of our body. I read your palm, your eyes, and write it down in poems and you say, "screw you, Meg Brauckmann, for stealing my soul." 

You scribbled “manual labor” as your dream job, and I knew you were mostly serious—because we need messy hands for our messy hearts, sediment on our fingers to ground us. We turn up the music, so we can say what we want. But the sound beneath the song is always fear and love, fear and love, and every once in awhile: home. 

The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Kundera, that simple phrase convinces me you knew:)

It is not enough to walk below galactic blessing

I thirst to swallow galaxies

feel them slush down my esphogaus

to crack the ice-moon between my teeth

sending shivers down my spine.

The cinnamon sun must melt on my tongue

my limbs grow bark when I embrace the oaks

to rip my hands through air, a current

I thirst to meld, mold, devour

possession, possession 

of this -- Eternal Now.

I wrap my arms so tightly

to take up so little space,

 to take up no space at all,

oh for fusion to exist. 

I am ravenous from wonder,

lusting for deep awakeness

but this want for life 

is a wound awaiting sutures,  

is the death rattle of starved appetities

listen: 

approach each person barefoot,

encountering holy ground.

listen:

 live like making love 

this strongly, urgently

for there is nothing else

Fearless, for you can lose nothing 

you can not be robbed of this

Give your love away

drench the earth with mercy

litter earth with bearable weight.

Speak, bravely:

Here is no fear in loving,

only to be deep, deep awake.