Abril 2009 Archives

trouble--cold play

Oh no, I see,
A spiderweb, it's tangled up with me,
And I lost my head,
The thought of all the stupid things I said,
Oh no what's this?
A spider web, and I'm caught in the middle,
So I turned to run,
The thought of all the stupid things I've done,
I never meant to cause you trouble,
And I never meant to do you wrong,
And I, well if I ever caused you trouble,
O no, I never meant to do you harm.
Oh no I see,
A spider web and it's me in the middle,
So I twist and turn,
Here I am in my little bubble,
Singing, I never meant to cause you trouble,
I never meant to do you wrong,
And I, well if I ever caused you trouble,
Although I never meant to do you harm.
They spun a web for me,
They spun a web for me,
They spun a web for me.

i admit public school teachers can be so self-righteous

and today i am glad i am not among them because sometimes
they hurt my feelings so much when they complain and judge everyone
from the government to the parents of their students.
i just don't remember complaining so much when i taught in public schools, i remember avoiding the teachers' lounge because people were complaining so much. and i remember being angry about things but i didn't try to boss other teachers around, especially via email, dear God!

sometimes email is so ambiguous.
i just end up working so hard to decode it in a way that isn't violent against myself.
i think i just need someone to send email that says right away in the subject line: "if the world stops spinning it won't be your fault; i know that and hope you do too,"
and then they could go on with the rest of the email about how i was forgetful or unclear or my other email address isn't working exactly how and when they thought it should, or they themselves were forgetful and could i please pick up the slack for them because if i don't all will be lost.

but evenso, if they could just include a really gracious subject line, it would be there reminding both of us that we are neither of us so important that our mistakes reverberate throughout the universe destroying all that is holy.
and sure, people don't ever intend to send a message like that in an email; no one is actually trying to tell me that exactly--i don't get such blunt email--i'm not in high school anymore.

but sometimes the kind i do get is about someone's dire concern for how i am about to ruin lives, that i haven't yet, but that i could
because even if they aren't trying to tell me i am Gozer the destructor (of Ghostbusters fame), they are not trying not to tell me that.

so here is the life lesson i am learning and it sucks to have to learn it but that is just what it is--no more and no less:
the onus is always on me to remember that any and all accusations do not account for all the good i am capable of and all the righteous risk i am willing to take,
and all the ways that even the best work can hurt or cost us and that
pain is pain and also prevalent
and though i may participate it is less and less likely,
as i become an increasingly compassionate person, that i am the cause of that pain or that i can't work with that pain when i do cause it (because i undoubtedly will),
to deepen relationship through reconciliation.

and it might come across like i am well adjusted, with lots of good ideas but i just have to tell you, today, a thursday of very little consequence,
i just don't know what to do about all that but i'm telling you because i think you will understand and that makes me feel a lot better. because even if i'm not actually a better person, i am at least not feeling awful about the person i am and i think that is
really important.

we had a slide show of childhood photos and played this song to it. it seems really important today.

why I am so distracted on the bus

I asked myself to put this one on the skinny tree when I first wrote it and I didn't want to then but I do now.

01.20.09

On the first day of your unassigned involvement in the appointed disappointment,
No one new, no one knew, how could they?
Every flub, you felt, the rhetoric like an axe against the bark of your wary wooden heart.

Nothing razed, like a post-modern patriot paling, frozen
Against a cold cloud gathering around my brown eyes and muddled skin and you
Think of all it hides. And I, hearing the remix of a once familiar love song cloying:
Holding (back) my hand, flinch, fear clawing: the spring thaw and break up,
Against Hope's brother Love.
Nationality rings boldly over the din of tiny freedoms fore born.

Untie the half-dark, blindfold of injustice, pledge allegiance to both sides of my story:
Never, everafter (at the end of my fairy tale rope) prayed aloud, hand over heart,
Demanding observance, as anger and shame rise against forever like holy days.
Everyday tears, like a seed among rain, drops subversive in the half-light, where hope
Rents a room and I refused its roots, the color of its skin seemed too true.

Give each impulse its own place
On your face: on this day when a brown hand is raised,
Drown me in the tears, the muddled oath overwhelms mine, not yours.

working for the CIA would be a real chore... and getting the job would be even worse.
But now I think it is probably a lot like getting ordained PCUSA.
I didn't realize how funny it would be (and by funny I mean ironic) for me to live this life i live now:
to fly down to cali just for a meeting with my committee, wow them with my honesty and self-aware self-expressive answers to their very normal questions, then fly home that evening to my charmed life in Seattle, wake up the next morning, present a poetry series on Pneumatology to my Systematics C class and then give a two hour reading for an intimate little group of fans at the little local coffee shop where I am a serious regular.

but that is what happened. and if I told you the whole story there would be an interlude about a good friend explaining that she slept with this really cute boy twice in one week because she just really didn't want it to be a one night stand.

and I would tell that I just couldn't sit by and watch the performance art presentation of one of my Theology classmates as she attempted to toss back 250 single serve, communion-to-go shots of grape juice and wafers to prove a point to herself and to us about how lonely Holy Communion can be. So I conspired with my neighbor, and as I rose from my chair to help her eat all that Jesus, I was so nervous about participating I missed the look of overwhelming gratitude on her face but my co-conspirator did not.

Thursday I met with the Committee that will authorize my candidacy for ordination in the PCUSA. I felt nervous and afraid of them. I thought that they would take one look at me and decide to ask harsh questions. I was afraid they would assume I had an inverted reading practice and ignore the larger context and conversation of my life.
I told myself to give them the benefit of the doubt and sat in shock as they gently probed, asking very normal questions about the story that had brought me to their table. They were putting together the puzzle of facts and their feelings, tying up the loose ends in their minds and I think I saw wonder and admiration in their faces as they did so.
It was not the normal intake interview--I have that on good authority. They asked questions they have asked of others who have hoped to come under their care but I could tell by their reactions that I was not giving the answers they expected. I was accidentally asking them to reorder even their kindest perceptions of me and it was causing them to make note that what is important to me might differ from what is important to them, if only slightly, but in impactful ways.
The best explanation I have for the way the interview went was written down weeks ago in the notes from my Reading Practices class: "When we begin to create meaning around the biblical text we say, "these are the things that matter." As they listened to the story of my call to seek ordination, the committee seemed to follow all the rules we set out for treating any text with dignity and curiosity.
They wondered if their reading of my story took context into consideration: theirs, mine, and ours. They acknowledged the breadth and depth of my impact on and interaction with the larger community. They let my story disarm other stories they had heard. They found a way for my, very particular story to fit within the broader framework of the text of professional ministry. They saw me as human and speaking of the human experience and as I worked to explain the inner coherence of my story, they graciously sifted together the anecdotes and short answers, matching large answers to small questions. I am not sure if their understanding of God's person was enlarged but only because I think they were working with a pretty big God and assuming that even though the process seemed like law, they were ready to show grace wherever possible.

There would also be a part in the story of this week about the impromptu dance party after the reading at the coffee shop, and the break dance lessons and the lecture I got from a friend who just couldn't believe I didn't warn him about a zit on the side of his nose because I just didn't care about the zit on his lovely face because it didn't make it less kind, less fuzzy, less laughing or less helpful, in fact it made it a lot more human. Brenda used to say that when you really love someone you look at his face and say, "woah, what a cool zit!" and she won the Guggenheim Fellowship and everything.
watch this and listen for the second piece about custody battles... it will explain so much about me.

that was how she looked when she had just finished running my life for a couple years.
I have that book, you know, you can look at it, if you want but you can't borrow it because i can't really bear to part with it. i bought it for one of her classes and didn't have the nerve to ask her to sign it even though i love it very much and she probably saved my life once or twice i never told her that. she explains how she was working out a feminist geography right after reading the custody battle poem and how she named her car caliban, like the character from shakespeare... how could you not lover her annoying little voice?

tonight we go to see Swan Lake, and the 32 fouettes and I am feeling really a lot like all the deciduous and ornamental fruit trees, with all their new leaves just peeking out from between certain blossoms, looking a little awkward, the way I do, when Spring is happening inside me but I am not sure it is time to let it show.

I used to think I had to ask for respect for my tiny accomplished life, now I think I have to ask for presence and the respect will follow; if I invite you in, there is a chance you will come respectfully
and I have to
take that
chance.

The following is a series on Pneumatology. Some of the pieces are parts of other postings found elsewhere on the skinnytree but i think they will mean something else when you read them as a part of this series.
Also, the poems don't show up properly here because the enjambment is off due to the programming on my blog. but the words are here... do with them what you will and one day, when i am finally issued a giant publishing opportunity by Viking Press or Penguin or Doubleday they will be properly published and you will see them as God intended them.
thanks,

Circumincessio

Incessant like the trouble we are always away in

The Way
in
like
the weigh in
down and deep
out there but never
out

Finding
Our way
home
The way
I am teaching you to come
Back
To me

**
Flood lights on the cathedral:
a call to repentance

You are too much at times like the shakes I get when you are close enough to take space that once was mine
Feeling the ground beneath me Sure of the rock I lean against and yet
The silence tosses my insides, tumbling one though against another the way a wave throws a stone ashore.
I said I don't know what to do
You said
You don't have to do anything

Belief filled the silence and then blew away on the breath
I used to steady the self I had left

I used to steady the self I had left
Against a body, anybody
Now I use the space a whisper leaves,
the whisp and puffing like cotton around the Word
the air bereft of tone lands soft
the way things ought
on the fragile skin around my ear
the word like the far off flap of a wing
taking flight

making me want the truth, but I look at you, overwhelmed and know, if only I could
turn

**
provis(ohshit)ation, I(')m

a continuous (say yes) to a constraint
of negotiating the hairpin turns, switch
backing negotiation dependant on a particular player working

chaos

(out of)

form
only ever once
after
even with expectations set

still

fall

apart

**
us

I
(don't have to)
disappear
(for you)
to show up.

**
its true:
(a letter to a good friend about the trinity, and other hopelessly hopeful untriangulated relationships, which is full of the sorts of things half-hearted kenotic relationships make people, persons, entities, whathaveyou say to each other
or A Confession In Favor of A Perichoretic Trinity)

we have been moping around too much lately, so you are right.
i probably shouldn't have thrown that book at you when you said that you want me to stop being so mad at myself.
because i borrowed it from the library--not myself, the book.
and because it is about pneumatology.
and it wasn't a shitty thing to say, even though i said it was,
you are right about that too.
it was the appropriate thing to say and it made me feel shitty,
i was confused about what exactly was shitty in that moment.
not you, not the thing you said, but how i was feeling.

most people who don't know me don't know what they are missing.
most people who do know me don't know what they are missing.
and when they are too busy to worry about it
it becomes easier for me to pretend i have disappeared, that i don't matter.
so in the moment when i should just look at the dearly departed and now returning
and say to him/her (mother, father, brother, sister, lover, friend) loud enough for even my self to hear:

"you should have missed me (i missed you, which should signify to you that i am someone who wants you and if you go away, you are lucky enough--and ought to be grateful-- to have someone hoping you will come back and all the while you are gone you should be thinking about how happy i will be to see you and that should make you hopeful and hungry for me to be hungry for you. that should be enough...
at the very least you needn't be worried that i will lock you out of the house or be cold or be mean so there is no justifying detaching yourself from the possibility and mystery of my love for you. you should be very curious about who i will be when you come home to me, what i have learned in your absence, begging me to tell you why i am so glad you are home, but exactly
and
prying open the story of how the days unraveled in your absence because you happen to know that i want to tell you, if only you would extend a tiny invitation) because
i am
the only place you get loved like this; i'm the only one who can do it this way, tell you these things, i'm the only one offering and don't kid yourself into thinking you don't need what i have to offer: all that i have to say about who you are to me and who you are to the world around you."

i don't say any of that. instead i keep hoping you will lie and tell me you missed me because in that i hear that i exist in your world, which sets the bar pretty low with regard to what i need from you and perpetuates the cycle of my limping along toward self-awareness, using your ideas about me as crutches rather than the flashy accessories they ought to be.

you can see, it is entirely fucked up.

i am always afraid of departure, it is true. it may be my worst fear.
i am terrible at hanging up the phone, walking away, falling asleep, watching you go.
i don't even like to see the back of your head. of course, when it comes to men, there are times i think about the curve of his ass or the lovely way his shoulder blades push against his tee shirt, and like it a little and i wonder if this is what old ladies mean when they say they could watch that boy walk away all day.
i just keep pushing you away because i am so afraid you will leave, and i had better take some preemptive action or get blindsided. and since i am then super red ass pissed off that you would leave, of course i am broken in half, tired, weak and needy when you return.
which is a shitty way to treat anyone but also is a pretty impossible way to live in relationship. and i told you i can't help it and you said i can and i looked at you and in your eyes and i remembered how vulnerable you are most of the time and how i've often hoped, when you couldn't hope for yourself i took it up and hoped for you, that you could do something you never thought you could and that it actually felt good to hope for you and i wasn't going to punish you if you didn't deliver because you just don't deserve to be treated so badly. so who would i be to deny you that same pleasure by dashing your hopes for me against the rocks of my need to be angry at myself?

but that is just it: i've always needed to be angry at myself, it was the only way i knew to respond to myself in any meaningful way. you know this firsthand: in an atmosphere devoid of anger the child of a mother like yours and mine is like a fish out of water.
and though i didn't mean to make you angry, i probably had to a little or else i would never have listened to you. and it was beautiful to see you angry but not so angry you couldn't still access the words you have to tell me that you see me, hope for me, need me to grow, be, become, learn this.
you sat there, a good foot away and facing the screen of your computer so i could tell myself that you weren't even aware of me and said
i feel you.
you didn't say the things i was afraid you would say. even though i was desperate to make you.
you didn't say i should get over it, or that i had to grow up.
i read your exhaustion as a way to slough me off but maybe everything about you was working, grinding, striving, climbing over boulders and jumping hurdles trying so hard to find the way to press past my defenses.

it just might be true.
in fact i am beginning to hope it is true because i am growing tired of playing the game the old way with my friends, neighbors, spouse, coworkers, classmates.
it is a fuck off game and i've really got to quit it. i know, so thank you for hoping i will even when i try to tell you not to.

i think your hope is your best feature.

**
To a Triune God:
(excerpted from a letter to a friend)
...and as the memories of crashed bicycles,
bloodied lips,
childhood lost, stolen
innocence and bittersweet independence shine
like sunlight stealing through the trees in the thick forest of my reserve

**
you are

God
who weeps over
little birds showing up
early in spring,

God
Who hopes in the promise
Of milk
And honey,

God
Who can't look down
Only over or across and laughs with me
Not at me,

God
Who tears up, warms up, looks up
Tears down, turns down, lies down
God beside me

God with big hands
God Crafting tiny hands,
Amid flowering trees' blossom petals and
God holding on tenderly
Before it all turns loose

God making
time enough for betrayal and reconciliation,
of learning from growing pains and hunger pangs,
Redeeming forgotten freedoms and half-assed apologies.

Because that is what the earth has offered me,
it is all
(I see for myself)
who the
I am
is

**
Juniper bury:: my planting s pot, where hallelujah s top

By the blade s of t his forevery grass you hedged in and the creek swollen with pride
For having grown so near your thin and peeling
arborized trunk and begging that you drink in all that black water rippling s lowly
dig a place for me beneath the prickling points of your healthy, steely points
Nourish yourself with my brining sweet turning down edge s lapping
At your root s wear you never thought of her s heaving those very same edges
After running s cared for you to s heared limp s
Lopped a s way
Like s winging angelic toward a cloud over hea(r)d

What I want to say is this:

Build a house of the lumber from the dismantled bridge
We walked across
So much
many times
reaping like willows weeping with our heads down
because I miss you
so
when you are
so away
busy
growing

**
Unreadable
safeelingeniouservitudeploymentaltercationusurprisedificellophaneverradica
teacheellopenalmostarguableafterrainsultimatumbrellabialtruistic
kletterraticklishapetaliverticaliforniambiceyestrangeograp
hymentalertediousurythmicalleducatelephonearticleffectoplasmart.

today i begin the collection of things that make me want to be kind and patient and all that sort of behavior that has always cost me so dearly

so here is this:

"Delicate"
damien rice

We might kiss when we are alone
When nobody's watching
We might take it home
We might make out when nobody's there
It's not that we're scared
It's just that it's delicate

So why do you fill my sorrow
With the words you've borrowed
From the only place you've known
And why do you sing Hallelujah
If it means nothing to you
Why do you sing with me at all?

We might live like never before
When there's nothing to give
Well how can we ask for more
We might make love in some sacred place
The look on your face is delicate

So why do you fill my sorrow
With the words you've borrowed
From the only place you've known
And why do you sing Hallelujah
If it means nothing to you
Why do you sing with me at all?

there are so many masturbatory things we do around here:
undemocratic award ceremonies, self-flagellating relationships, bitch sessions, being right, being wrong, irrational fear...
you know, that kind of stuff

i find though that getting the writing done occupies my mind and re reading the finished product, as self-gratifying as it can be, is just curiosity inducing enough to keep me from giving in to the dangerous fantasy, the selfish climax, and especially the last part, the guilt that seems to arrest the planet mid spin.

this, the most recent sermon i wrote really bothers me because it just goes on and on, i will never preach it again unless i can make it somehow less redundant and, well, shorter. as it is, i only preached it to the four men in my homiletics class preaching group yesterday. i couldn't look up from the reading, i couldn't face them and in fact the famous and talented Phil Nellis (who, in a moment of prophecy and brilliance, named his children after the Spanish words for lion and eagle which is just as good as naming them after st. Mark and st. John) pointed out the truth that had i looked up and seen him, surely he would have been undone, to which i replied that i would have as well...

so don't look up as you read and i promise i won't either.

sometimes graduate school makes me feel like a piece of meat

the president of the graduate school sends us audio files of his comments on certain papers for certain classes he teaches. soon he will not be the president anymore--he was never really into that job anyway, he will just be a prof come May.

I scheduled office hours with him for today and, now I can't sleep.
it is 2:42 in the morning, the time i usually wake up, freak out about the economy, children's word or my class load, then say the Jesus prayer until I go back to sleep.

I am sitting in my kitchen, listening to his comments, to prepare myself for his cadence and vocabulary. I think if I can be at least a little prepared I won't just sit down on the leather couch in his disheveled office, and stare silently at the fly fishing art until I can't help but cry.
in the commentary he says, "does anyone take you seriously?--I am trying to... yet we don't have permission. ...there's a whole lot more being said than you have chosen to write and I don't fault that... I just want it to be engaged with someone, sometime."

which, of course is where you come in, as my practice audience, the one I don't really have to interact with, the reader I can try to tell the truth to. so hang in there...
because

What I really want is to plop down on his couch, meet his penetrating gaze and ask him what he knows about me. I want to ask him something like, do you know who I am, or maybe, do you know which one I am? (in fact, this is what I want to do to lots of people in my life.)
I have been at this for almost three years, I have put stock in his reputation and theory, (I have literally invested thousands!) I have listened to his lectures on heart stopping topics, and read his books. I have contributed, in my way to the school community--I have not tried to hide this time. Even the paper he commented on was, as he said, "a courageous paper" and quite revealing per the assignment's requirements. I have shown up and only had a very one sided relationship to him: listening to his comments and lectures, frustrated by his busyness and absence and importance, and so tomorrow I will make one more move toward him
and I am scared shitless.
there is a good chance it won't matter to him, that there are too many students, too many papers, too many stories for mine to matter. to that I know I might just say
phooey
but I am still out of my mind with fear that I will not matter and rather than just keeping my mouth shut and pulling away I will have put myself in the mix, been overexposed and needlessly courageous and he will get away absolutely unencumbered by my feeling as though I don't matter at all, in spite of my best attempts, I am just a piece of meat.

And then there is this: perhaps I am using him, and I ought to confess. maybe I want to show up and just tell him that I have completely objectified him. he is no more than a lecture, an audio file, a comment, a face, a name and I have not needed him to be more than that, thank you very much.

probably, it is a little of both and then some. and I will most definitely feel like rotten meat, if not shit when I leave his office and head to staff meeting. I will not know what to tell myself to preserve my dignity, I will not know whether I shared too much or held back, whether he understood or didn't. And it will feel awful, but because the only framework I have for relationships like this is built from experiences of confusing all my relationships with each other:

I mean, for someone like me, if there is such a person, there is very little difference between dissociated office hour conferences and bad breakups, insincere lectures and angry love letters, gradebooks and gradeschool crushes. In my mind it is all the acceptance/rejection game. As awful as it sounds I am willing to accept it, if only in hope that I will one day move past it, and I am willing to confess it, if only in hope you will find it helpful to you, and I am even willing to type it out, if only in hope that I can finally get it all out or down or something and get some sleep.

"Aries (March 21-April 19): Don't you think its time you toned down your manic aspirations? Aren't you curious about the sweet, sensitive success that could be yours if only you got really calm and peaceful? Wouldn't it be interesting to explore the more manageable opportunities that might become available by accepting your limitations with humble equanimity? APRIL FOOL! Don't you dare do any of those things, Aries. Your spiritual duty for the foreseeable future is to be a brave initiator of ingenious experiments... a high-powered self-starter who competes primarily with yourself... a pioneering warrior who's in quest of transcendent exploits that make it unnecessary to go to war."

here is why i read my horoscope:
it serves as proof that, sometimes, maybe just once a week, someone with entirely questionable credentials can say something really helpful, if not absolutely true.
so, ha.
fuck normal, peaceful, serenity style bullshit.
i have wars to stop, bitches to expose, assholes to undermine and experiments to get back to.

oh, and here is a little help for the scrabble lovers hoping the titular "foo" is a word and that i know how and when to use it--please note the military overtones and mr t undertones and what they are capable of doing to the way we measure a pasture or abstract (perhaps FUBAR) computer science concepts--
Definitions of foo on the Web:

* An artillery observer is a soldier responsible for directing artillery fire and close air support (ground attack by aircraft) onto enemy positions ...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOO

* Foo is a metasyntactic variable used heavily in computer science to represent concepts abstractly and can be used to represent any part of a ...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foo

* Also foo'. Representation of fool (foolish person), in a Mr. T accent
en.wiktionary.org/wiki/foo

* Forward Observation Officer. Artillery officers attached to battalions and companies to control and coordinate artillery fire.
www.51hd.co.uk/glossary

* Major concepts in CML, usually mapped directly onto XMLElements (to be discussed later).
wwmm.ch.cam.ac.uk/blogs/cml/

* or foobarFoobar Foobar is a common placeholder name used in computer programming.... (Used primarily in the computer industry)
www.absoluteastronomy.com/topics/Placeholder_name

* Measurement of the total quantity of pasture in a paddock, expressed in kilograms of pasture dry matter per hectare (kg DM/ha)
www.lifetimewool.com.au/glossary.aspx