love only makes us wider

I have never liked change, which is perhaps why I fling myself into it-- drastically, sometimes impulsively, other times reluctantly-- as if I could lessen its power and constancy if I throw myself into it enough times hoping to change Change into a constant familiarity that doesn't unsettle me.

Americorps is racing towards an end (with still a month of summer peace camp to come and anti-oppression lessons to plan and endless paperwork and, and, and) and I am grateful for all that I didn't imagine would be part of my life that Notre Dame Americorps and the nuns vision has drawn me into... like the life of this city, the sense of home here and that this city's struggles are mine. "My liberation is bound up with yours." The interwovenness of community work and life... running into families I know while wandering the neighborhoods of the Southeast, being invited birthday parties and graduations, seeing kids from one program with their siblings at another-- running into them in the park, the library, even protests, Cameron running off the school playground to hug me on the sidewalk, of my co-teacher telling me to call her if I'm in the streets-- this is the way I have wanted to become part of a community.  Harrisonburg and Salinas and Baltimore-- the smallness of being known in a place.

Yesterday, I had an unexpected evening off and sat in my kitchen with the windows open drinking cold coffee while my jasmine trees fragile stalk swayed at the lightest stirring of the hot breeze. I have been thinking about "chosen family," about platonic love, about transience.  The past two years in Baltimore have been some of my happiest and busiest, full of connection and spaces of constructing and deconstructing my ideas. I'm grateful for the radical spaces here.

I felt the conviction of this yesterday:
Late Fragment

And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.

:  the sense that no matter, I can accept love as a condition of my existence.  In accepting this condition, I can be freed from trying to get others to affirm/prove to me my value, worth, favorite status.  I can love without demand or insecurity, can appreciate and seek deep connection, affection, and intimacy without fear.

We exist, therefore we are wanted and needed in the universe and this is what it means that we live immersed in love, this is how a God who is a radical love that erases boundaries shows up in the world-- through relationships, through poetry, through struggle, through sorrow, through living.