Recently in help yourself Category

yesterday was the falling slowly day.
I got in the car to come to work and Glen Hansard was singing with all his might about how much I have suffered--enough.

I don't know you
But I want you
All the more for that
Words fall through me
And always fool me
And I can't react
And games that never amount
To more than they're meant
Will play themselves out

Take this sinking boat and point it home
We've still got time
Raise your hopeful voice you have a choice
You'll make it now

Falling slowly, eyes that know me
And I can't go back
Moods that take me and erase me
And I'm painted black
You have suffered enough
And warred with yourself
It's time that you won

Take this sinking boat and point it home
We've still got time
Raise your hopeful voice you had a choice
You've made it now
Falling slowly sing your melody
I'll sing along

Last night on the phone abuelita told me she doesn't want me to suffer. She wants to buy me a coat, some rain boots, anything to protect me from the weather, but only because she doesn't trust her voice to be like a windbreaker against the storms in my heart (even though I do). I told her I'd call if I find the coat I need.

preachers really only ever preach one or two sermons, we just change the words every week.
some of us fight the same fight over and over again, we just change the words...

PHoff gave me a copy of this article. The Konica Bizhub messed up the back page and it was so dark I could barely read it toward the end... but it wouldn't have made it any easier to read had it copied well...

Till Disrespect Do Us Part

Couples therapist John Gottman predicts marriage futures.

By Kathryn Robinson
MY HUSBAND TOM and I fought most of the way to the Dr. John Gottman lecture.

I don't recall what the argument was about. I vaguely remember he was annoyed that I hadn't gotten the Subaru's headlight replaced, which I guess I must've agreed to do. I was annoyed that he expected me, a car dope, to accomplish something even remotely automotive. He carped that I wasn't parking in the best lot. I carped that he was checking his BlackBerry for email instead of talking to his wife. And he'd forgotten something in his office, dammit, so we were going to be late to the "Making Marriage Work" lecture.

As it turned out, we weren't late: A knot of people clogged the Town Hall entrance, waiting to pay $50 a couple--during a recession--to hear the nation's pioneer in relationship science dispense the marriage secrets he'd spent a career uncovering. Thirty some years ago, as a young clinical psychologist, he set out to study the relationship dynamics and concurrent physiological responses of married couples. One newlywed pair at a time would spend a full 24 hours in a lushly appointed apartment with a placid view of the Montlake Cut, discussing matters of both agreement and conflict, while Gottman wired them for heart rate and brain function and numerous other physical variables.

Over months and years Gottman and his grad students tested and retested these same couples, gradually amassing a pile of data on the behaviors that make marriages work--and those that make them weak. As the study ripened and some couples divorced, the scientist began to see that certain behaviors could reliably predict a split. Upon this data, Dr. John Gottman built a research institute, a self-help book empire, a thriving therapeutic practice, and an esteemed academic name. His therapeutic superhero skill? Divorce Predictor.

"Is that like horse whisperer?" Tom asked as we found seats. We looked around, suddenly self-conscious. Our marriage seemed pretty healthy to me, aside from a short list of ongoing differences--we call them Fight A, Fight B, and Fight C--and the occasional argument about nothing, as in the car ride over. Generally we dwell in a playful, enriching, and loving union.

But just being at a "Making Marriage Work" lecture felt like wearing a name tag that said, "Hello! We're Circling the Drain!" Of course the one couple we knew in the huge hall happened to be sitting just across the aisle, and looked equally busted when we said hi. "Dragged here, too, were you?" Tom joshed, socking the husband manfully on the shoulder. We all smiled, admitting it was the wives' idea, but that both husbands were genuinely interested in what this Gottman had to say. Plus, the man told us, they had just received jarring news from the marriage front. "You remember our neighbors, the Smiths?" (Not really "the Smiths," you understand.) We did--great people, very solid, together forever. "He had an affair. The marriage is done."

The lights flickered and we stumbled back to our seats. The Smiths? I read my own thoughts in Tom's expression: If it can happen to them, is anyone's marriage safe? Could the Divorce Predictor have seen that one coming?

Couples once aired resentments--with foam baseball bats.

The good doctor spent the next two hours establishing that yeah...he probably could have. Gottman told his audience that four neon signs herald marital doom: criticism ("There is no such thing as constructive criticism"), defensiveness, the "shutting-out" Gottman calls stonewalling, and contempt. Of these, contempt--the act of relating to one's partner from a position of superiority, whether by calling him an idiot or correcting her grammar--is the most destructive and the number-one predictor of divorce. Not only does contempt eat like sulfuric acid through a marriage, it's physically destructive. Emerging research reveals that contempt among intimates measurably corrodes the recipient's immune system. Couples who practice these sorts of marriages Gottman calls the Disasters.

At the other end of the spectrum are the Masters, who through a thousand positive moments build a culture within their marriage of appreciation and respect. They look for things to praise in their partner. They say, "Thanks for doing the dishes tonight," and "You look so sexy in that color."

It's no great mystery how the Masters do this, Gottman explains; it's Friendship 101. They ask their partner questions about their desires and dreams, then remember the answers. They learn to identify their partner's bids for emotional connection, then respond in kind. Unlike the therapeutic modalities in vogue when Gottman started his research, where couples were urged to air their resentments with each other--sometimes employing foam baseball bats for emphasis--Gottman found that what makes marriage work is precisely the opposite. Relationships work to the extent that partners are gentle with each other.

Gottman spoke with candor and wit--the wise elder statesman in a city unusually crowded with relationship experts, sociologist Pepper Schwartz to sex columnist Dan Savage. Make no mistake, Gottman declared: Crappy interactions happen in all marriages, good and bad. Successful marriages are not bastions of romantic bliss; they're pretty good partnerships peppered with regrettable moments. Indeed, 69 percent of the married couples he studied wrestled with the same problems the entire life of their marriage. Fight A, Fight B, and Fight C. The only difference was that the Masters dealt with them functionally and respectfully.

At the end Gottman opened the floor, and a man asked if there was a variable to predict good marriages. "There is," Gottman said. "Men who are willing to accept influence from women." From across the aisle my friend caught my eye. He means men who work up interest in a marriage lecture because they know it means something to their wives, I heard her thinking. Tom looked at me and dramatically rolled his eyes.

And took my hand.

or at least a little validation
because it is not easy to tell someone how you really feel, you can sing along.

these days, when i hear the songs that were written in the language of love i am suddenly able to understand them. the trees so boldly in love with the wind in their leaves, the spiders at home in their webs, the dogs willing to run, fetch and always return, the way diamonds reflect light and sun shines through a window all make a little more sense now because they are all confessions of love,
a message meant to concede that love shows up in the oddest places and tiniest spaces, between all the living, moving parts of the hopeful machinations of a God whose first creation is love.

love is such a complicated confession. i tell you about the scent of a redwood tree in autumn and i am confessing that i love that tree, and i love to tell you about the tree, because i love you. these confessions are a wading into the waters of repentance, i take your hand and tell you i am turning toward you, away from the days when i was afraid to tell you about the smell of a tree. i am asking you to trust me, knowing full well that this is a drastic change in the way i have used these words before, that trust is always a risk and i am asking you to endure nightmares about betrayal, fend off the monstrous absence of proof, and you may at any moment climb to the top of the very tree that started all this trouble just to make sure heaven doesn't exist because i am not there...
because
sometimes the words are just so deep down
at the bottom of my shipwrecked heart, in a tiny box, that is impossible to pry open. and if the words were to surface, if you or i could raise the titanic vocabulary of the way i had hoped things would be, well, that would change everything--i know because Hope tells me this is true.
but the pressure is so great and the fear so strong the words crumble on the way to the surface, they cringe in the light of sunset as we stand on the on the sandy beach holding onto mere fragments oxidated, disintegrated, and my hands shake and i can't breathe because on the way up i was moving too fast and breathing too much and i got the bends... it is undeniably overwhelming.
it takes a certain strong kind of man to look at me and my too many little pieces of broken lines, rusty thoughts, salty, barnacled inarticulate hopes and dreams and appreciate

that this is the best thing that has ever happened to him, that i am the best thing that has ever happened to him, because it is an offering, a confession, priceless, irreplaceable, proof of the serious weight of my story, and it is enough to change how he feels his own.

those Avetts, they know how this happens and they are very helpful.

when you can't say love to each other anymore, you have to leave the place you called home because you were just calling it that, even though it wasn't. the real words for it, the strong words like hate and anger, were buried under an ocean of denial, along with the words

I and love and you

Three words that became hard to say.
I and Love and You.
I and Love and You.
I and Love and You.

October is Domestic Violence Awareness Month...
so there is this:
NATIONAL DECLARATION BY RELIGIOUS AND SPIRITUAL LEADERS

TO ADDRESS VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN

We proclaim with one voice as national spiritual and religious leaders that violence against women exists in all communities, including our own, and is morally, spiritually and universally intolerable.

We acknowledge that our sacred texts, traditions and values have too often been misused to perpetuate and condone abuse.

We commit ourselves to working toward the day when
all women will be safe and abuse will be no more.

We draw upon our healing texts and practices to
help make our families and societies whole.

Our religious and spiritual traditions compel us to work for justice and the eradication of violence against women."

* * *

then there is also this thought I'm working on, a part of my self, my story, haunting me, like a ghost of an idea about falling and failing in love, jumpers, flight and fight and all these other ways we move into love and out again.

there was a moment yesterday, crossing the aurora bridge, the one famous for all the jumping from its trestles, and I thought of flying instead of falling.

I thought of the birds, like swallows, moving wings once or twice and then stealing through the air without moving a muscle. Chins up, wings folded, toes curled, feeling the power of the one thrust propelling them toward the next tree.
I straightened my back, closed my arms straight down my sides, and stretched my neck toward the sky, blue and filled with the cold of autumn against my face. I had pulled back against the wind of fear, and it lifted me up higher than it ever has so I could rest against it for a moment and slide myself between clouds like bed sheets or warm water.

I thought of all the times and places to fall in love.
The truth is that these days I am better than I've been in years. Old friends tell me they see me again, the ways I used to be and new friends say it is nice to hear me sing along, to see me play along, bounce down the sidewalk, smile honestly, weep it out, and hold on to myself.

But there are moments, when I feel so alone.
In those moments I think of all the missed opportunities: the chances we didn't take.

if you stop taking advantage of the chances to fall in love, they begin to disappear, they are replaced by anger, dead ends, silence, yelling, screaming, hating... you begin taking risks to fall in love. I began to let myself fall for hurtful things because that was all I knew and all that was offered and so the falling in love became more like suicide jumping. I was falling for anything, everything and not just falling but jumping and hurling, hurtling, hurting,
like a kamikaze fighter pilot, heading straight into death, fearlessly, gracefully and powerfully into the pain (to cause it, to feel it)... but not honestly, or hopefully and not in a healthy way--only silently, secretly, furtively, dangerously, thinking only of saving my marriage, not myself.

then there was one night
i sat on a park bench, smoked two cigarettes, drank a can of simpler times lager
and then

i called a friend who said haven't you been through enough?
i called my dad who said you can feel guilty if you want to but you didn't do anything wrong.
i called my sister who said it sounds just awful.
i called my mother...
and by the grace of God she said
don't ever give up hope
but i heard her say
Love can happen to anyone, anywhere, it can happen over and over again. The way birds migrate toward warmer weather, or return for a break from the heat of things with full bellies and nearly grown babies. think of love following you, waiting for you, wanting you, even when you are moving from one warm place to another, trading trees for oceans, not life for death.
you needn't go about love like you're on a suicide mission. that is not hopeful, not helpful.
so
here is a list of things to look out for, excerpted from a pamphlet published by planned parenthood:
"Does your partner...
Threaten to harm you, pets, or himself?
Blame you for everything that goes wrong?
Lie or break promises to you a lot?
Ever say, "you make me get this angry," or "I can't help being so mad with you around."?
Expect you to do everything he says?
Ignore or dismiss your ideas or the things you want to do?
Get jealous when you spend time with family or friends?
Seem very overprotective or ask other people to watch over you?
Call you all the time?
Accuse you of flirting or getting romantically involved with someone else?
Keep you from having money of your own?
Force you to have sex when you're asleep?
Get angry and threaten you when you don't want to have sex?
Force you to have sex without protection against pregnancy
Hurt your genitals or any part of your body during sex?
Criticize your sexual performance or use sex as a way to punish you?
Only care about his own sexual pleasure?
Refuse to take full responsibility for the abuse?
Refuse to get professional help?
Become more and more abusive?

if you answer yes to any of the above, you are in an unsafe relationship."

Don't rush forward. Get some space, take a deep breath, that might be all you can do for now. But the day will come when someone will offer you help, hope...

because there is more out there and you have not missed your chance to be loved, you just aren't loved by that person, and that doesn't mean you are unlovable altogether.

one day
there will be a different yes because there will be a different set of questions...

"Do you talk openly about your feelings and tell the truth without fear?
Do you listen to each other's ideas?
Do you solve problems and disagreements together?
Do you each have friends, interests and activities of your own, and ones that you share?
Do you respect each other's privacy?
Are you proud of each other's talents and accomplishments?
Do you talk openly about your sexual needs and desires?
Do you protect each other from unintended pregnancy?
Do you always have each other's consent for sex?
Do you help take care of each other?
Do you have disagreements without becoming violent?
Do you respect each other's belongings?
Do you feel closer to your partner as times goes on?
Do you feel happy when you think about staying together?
Do you solve problems together more and more?"

Well, do you? Do you want to? Do you know you could, would, will?

Don't ever give up hope. Look for the next chance, take the next chance to be loved but if you feel yourself falling too far, too fast, don't forget
hope is a set of wings, a warm updraft, a curl in your toes and a lift in your chin, hope does not search the horizon for an enemy, watch the ground for signs of life that must be snuffed out, hope does not increase the speed of disaster, hope turns falling around and failure takes flight...

i wrote this for a selected readings course on local theology, which is a very interesting concept and quite post-modern if you will... but it is a nice little piece of which i am rather proud, even if it is a little stilted by the academic suppositions...

But why here?
I'm going to plant a tree here. I live here, I work here and though I know the soil in California better than I know the soil here, though I respect the California native Banana slugs, though I have delighted in Californian riparian woodlands encroaching or shading over Bouganveillias in my home town, though I was willing to fight back the blackberries and Vinca Minor there in ways I have been unwilling to do so here, I am beginning to trust the way the rain will come when Seattle grass begins to brown and cedars go to seed. This is where I am right now, and I know trees will grow here.
So I'm going to plant a tree. Here.
The theology that is just a branch, just the beginning of an idea, I clipped from another time and another place is ready to put down roots. My ideas about God and God's people are ready to be grounded in this location. My theology is daily changing and being changed by the people and problems of this time and place. It seems to me that my little branch of theology needs the nourishment offered by questions posed here and now.
I will have to dig a hole for my little tree, the way they dig for a building's foundation: find a spot and dig deeper than anyone expected. Maybe even put up a temporary barrier to protect the hole, and those who come around to look down in it. On the friendlier days we have talked to each other. They usually ask, "why are you doing this in Seattle? What was wrong with California--you know people there."
And I respond as transparently as I can, "I just fit in better here. I am more readily accepted here. They understand my love of children and are more community oriented. They are like a city but also like a small town. I think it is a good place to try new things. It is good for me to be rained on and greyed in and I am learning to appreciate sun, the water and the trees in new ways. I think I could be here a good long time. Besides, it wasn't until I got here that I decided to stop wandering around and put down roots and there is no way of knowing exactly when and where to start digging--sometimes you just have to start."
"How long do you think you will be in Seattle? Would you ever go back to California?"
"Sure, I would. But I want to put down roots so badly and this is where I am right now. I want to invest here, to reach down and grab up and give back in this place and the only way to do that is to be here now, fearlessly and graciously. I want to contribute, to say something meaningful and that won't happen unless I discover the local currency. I don't worry about getting out or back to Cali, this is good soil."
So I resume digging. I dig a deep hole and sort out the rocks of hardened hearts from the fertile soil, dark with nourishing elements like curiosity and mystery. I never had to do that in California; I wasn't ready to do the work of local theology there. Now I look down, bow down, to the differences, respect them enough to sort them, carefully and with love. I will have to or my theology will never put roots down deep enough. I decide which of the hard parts and hardened hearts to deal with now or leave in place knowing that the roots of my local theology will navigate around them.
I get down on my hands and knees, not with a shovel, but with my fingers and tenderly grapple with the hard parts of the people close to me. I know some of the fears and habits of the local people: the way they are afraid to tell their children "no", wonder what will happen if they don't recycle every can and bottle. I see the way their hearts and money are spent on their dogs and boats and second homes in Island County. These, the stony bits mixed in with the fertile soil, are not a loss, but neither are they to be ignored. They must be turned over and looked under. I will have to make judgments about those hard hearts and stony faces I am sorting through, I will have to take them into consideration as I plan to set a theology into this place. I will mourn, surely, if I can't find their beauty. Sometimes it seems there are more rocks than soil but those times are so far few and far between.

The question of water and wind
This place and these people affect the growth of my theology. This place invites me to relinquish all that I know about God to the holy water and spirit wind here. I set it down and let weather, neighbors, dogs, babies and music come close to what I have hoarded so boldly. When it is time, I search out the right tree and get it in the soil. I know a lot about trees, and yet, it will never be enough because it is impossible for me to understand all the ways each branch interacts with the elements in this location. There is no formula to determine how the leaf buds shudder in the ruach of the local wind, or roots will soak in the waters from the local font.
I recently heard a story of a church that unearthed a giant baptismal font during renovation. The day of their first post-renovation worship service they baptized babies in that antique font but because it wouldn't fit in the newly renovated sanctuary, they lugged it out onto the sidewalk and did the liturgy there. I want to ask the pastor of this Capitol Hill congregation how this reveals his theology of baptism that allows for naked babies to be dipped in a giant font on a busy sidewalk.
As for the congregation I serve, we have a small bowl-like font, a smallish metal trough and a giant, coffin-sized trough. They are all three employed with equal fervor and regularity. We exchange stories of our interactions with the font on a pretty regular basis. I like to tell a story of the night I tripped and nearly fell face first into the small, waist-high bowl. I heard one recently about two sixth graders washing their faces in it. The font is central to our theology, but also to our daily lives.
We all have stories about it interrupting our routines and tempting our children, calling them to dip a finger in and then lick it off, just to see if baptism tastes like they remember. The taller kids walk by and put a whole hand in, just to check if it might be good for swimming in, and then wipe the water all over their best dresses, their hair, or their baby brother. Parents hold their four year olds over it so they can stare down into it, hoping to glimpse fish or pennies or God. I have never seen any of these behaviors in other churches. I have never before seen theology worked out like this, around a font so tempting and present because of its location, its place, its central role among us.
Recently, I asked my pastor if I could use the giant font for a Vacation Bible School game. We both considered how this would affect the adults and children in our care. The children are ever increasingly familiar with the font. They have played in it before--during baptismal liturgies younger siblings often spend so much time enjoying the water that the whole family ends up soaked. But do they see an affirmation of baptism in the precious asperges as a soaked big sister runs to embrace a grandfather who flew in from Florida to attend? What would happen to their idea of baptismal sacrament were the font carried carefully onto the front lawn and filled with fully dressed children soaking, wiggling and cheering for their friends to run to the waters, and jump in? What kind of water is in this trough, in this place, that calls theology to be informed or adapted by a scene like this?

A sort of arborist
If we understand that theology comes to us locked in a seed, only to peek out after a blazing wildfire, we understand what growth will cost, how much energy it takes to respond to a harsh environment in constructive ways, what we must do to harden the outer bark just enough to protect xylem and phloem, veins and structures. I have landed in this place, these fonts, these winds, which will beat against my theology and I must let it happen.
Theology grows stronger if I let the voices I know, both near and far ask questions about the varied fonts and Spirit they know personally. I become a sort of arborist, reading the details of the lives in my care, watching how the differing theologies grow near to each other or far apart and why. I look for signs of health, growth, disease or decay.
Theology grows, moves and gathers strength from the winds of change. It either shelters kindly or crashes down through the roof of the house if the roots are too shallow. Theology has branches and little bits at the tips that fall away at the end of the growing season. Theology bears sexy little blossoms, which wait patiently for the breeze and bees to disseminate its tiny totality.
If we learn to appreciate the variety of theologies like we appreciate the power of the seasons in a forest ecosystem, we will be better prepared to acknowledge substantial theological hardship as it comes and goes. We will see that certain trees suffocate in certain climates and dominate in others because of wind and water. Theology is the same way and happens according to the smallest components connecting, gathering fodder, and gaining strength by standing against indeterminate forces.
The problem with trees, is the same problem with theology: transplanting is difficult and not always in everyone's best interest. Of course seeds transport well, with or without a human to carry them, seeds are fragile and hopeful but they are not the whole. The whole tree, the whole theology will not do well if it is dug up and moved too far and left alone. So it is best to prepare realistically and imaginatively, or come humbly with the seeds of a local theology and hold them loosely knowing that they are to be scattered and may not survive.
One part tree hugger and one part theologian, I am predisposed to the task of planting in the best of conditions, and nourishing the seedlings of theology, all the while knowing that I don't have any say really in how well a thing will grow. Trinitarian theology grows best in conditions of heightened community. Rupture, and repair are to theology, as they are to the bark of a tree, evidence of growth. They are evidence that we are in the presence of salvific community, that we are gaining, changing, responding to outside forces like water and wind, that call us to be more ourselves, to put down deeper roots (reaching into the dark and unknown) and risk putting forth tender leaves and blossoms. There are choices to be made and freedoms to be exercised in order to grow a local theology. Doing local theology means extending roots and branches fully into the spaces we perceive between our location and God's. It is in this reaching that we find how close God is.

One tree or one branch
I know that in the process of doing local theology there will be erosion of the soil, bending of the trunk, pruning of branches and grief when an old growth theology falls hard. It is hard to determine if local theology is just one tree in a forest of theologies: biblical, covenantal, feminist, reformed, Muslim, etc. Perhaps these are just branches of one system. Either way, they work together, live together, move in the same wind and grow in the same sun, from the same soil.
There are certain things I do, as a budding theologian, that are part of formulating and living a theology that is self-aware, taking into consideration my locatedness, vocation, gifts and struggles. My coworkers help me to see how my style of relating informs the relationships that affect my theology most. Recently, a coworker's wife shared with me her husband reports back to her when our pastor/boss and I occasionally experience mismeeting. He tells her these stories because it is in my struggle to be understood by other theologians that he recognizes his own.
For example, I have both loved and hated our weekly staff meetings because I am often invited to share my perspective. My perspective on ministry is colored by my expectations that I will work against oppression; that others will work against oppression; to hear and to use inclusive language; to be hopeful rather than condemning of the mistakes coworkers make; to think creatively about the future of what happens in the church building, and in this particular neighborhood, with an eye for those who are not already a part of our community; to deepen relationships, in order to deepen faith; and to take risks in order to create a safe place for other risk-takers to land should they be in danger--that is what I think it is to lead. Though these are not so different from my coworkers' expectations, they have been formed by my very personal experiences of particular oppressors, my own mistakes, certain neighborhoods and specific relationships that my coworkers will never fully understand.
The Parish Administrator, our minister of outreach and lead Pastor are all highly sensitive to concerns like mine and I am learning from the way they voice their own concerns. They seem to have a relational style very different from my own, if not a theology that differs significantly. And yet, week after week, I am able to exegete, both the text and the congregation, in light of our locatedness, and explain myself in a way that builds bridges. The strategy here is to tell the truth as I see it, to listen humbly and be honest when I am too angry to do so.
When I offer the children's word I try to tell the truth as I see it. I offer a thorough exegesis in a non-threatening tone. In age-appropriate language I offer them a taste of prayer-infused preaching so that rather than sum up the week's lesson, which I am very much afraid to do, I simply choose to lead them in bowing heads and offering a question to a loving God. When I write Sunday school curriculum, I think first of the questions the students have already asked, problems they already face. Then, when we are together for the lesson, we begin the work of integrating their experience of God, what they have been taught about God, and what they hope to find out about God from me. As we work out our theologies, we ask a lot of questions and are intentional about leaving space for more.

The mini(s)tree
It is my hope that we will do the work of local theology together for the duration of my ministry. I plan to be ordained so that as the lives of my parishioners intersect with sacrament and struggles, I will be allowed by the larger church to preside and participate. But I am also aware that the ordination journey is as important to the local theology as is the ordination itself.
The ordination process is a process that affects the theology of all participants. Committee, candidate, sponsoring church, the candidate's family and friends are all called to be honest and even angry at times but to always tell the truth in love, and ask difficult questions that will change the way we live theologically together. My call to be a ordained as a female minister of word and sacrament (whose particular interest is in the faith formation of children and families) is a call to action for those in my sphere of influence. Sometimes it elicits anger and highlights doctrinal differences. At other times it unites and validates those who have been othered over against hegemony.
I have chosen to move far from the Presbyterian congregation that is sponsoring my ordination. This geographical distance has called my home congregation to wonder how I will repay them for their support and how the distance between us will be bridged. How many and which trees will have to die in order that we may build a bridge of solid timbers? They have been curious about my motives and discernment processes. One woman in particular feels a heavy burden to be especially available by phone for me in ways she has never offered other candidates and admits that this very particular kind of connection to me has changed the way she is in relationship with me, with our church, and with God. The members of my sponsoring congregation are those who stand over the hole I am digging, the tree I am planting wondering what will come of all this digging, planting, questioning and hoping. They watch my theology change as a result of my surroundings and warn against certain influences and celebrate others.
Not only has my home congregation been called to the struggle but also those who write me a pay check every month. My position in the Lutheran Church has called into question the ecumenical motives of the church as it employs someone who maintains a theology very different from theirs. They love me deeply and each one of them has adopted a different way of working out the meaning of our theological differences.
Both churches have ecumenically informed theologies with deep roots. Though these roots may mean that transplanting is impossible, it also means that these old trees will bear new leaves, if not heirloom fruit, faithfully and in turn. These theologies, though locally informed and reformed by my very participation, are reaching deeply down into the fertile soil of tradition. Those roots reach down deeper than their most recent political agendas and even deeper through the habits that have yet to stand the test of time. As a result, we are learning to form a theology that works for us and against us in different seasons, like wind and water against a tree, according to what we need. And we see that even a local theology will speak of God: the God we experience, the God that is One in the here and now and forever.

a friend recently began to adhere to a strict running schedule and then asked me to make up a feeling schedule along those lines.

so here it is:

Today

Wake up
Stare at the ceiling
Refuse to get out of bed
Think of the things that make you feel
overwhelmed, angry, hateful, sad, depressive
count to ten, slowly
Roll over, yes you have to.
Think of all that you don't have and feel pretty shitty, count to ten, or maybe twenty
But you can't stay there
There are birds learning to fly just outside

Push away the mattress, slide out from between a blanket or sheet, stand up as tall as
you can
Lift your head, yes you have to.
Think of the people that make you feel
Loved, angry, loved, angry, loved...

Eat breakfast, watch television, pull on some clothes, socks, a hat maybe, yes you have to
Feel the soft clothes against you
Don't worry about what it smells like, looks like or
the way they mock the shape of you and the shape the day will take.

The day is hot and wet, give in to the sweat and feel the knot in your stomach, or throat
Think of all that grows here: trees, boys, and clouds that refuse to gather and
Tell yourself that is good

And when the anxiety comes
When the hatred and fear swell like a tsunami
When the nausea and sickness threaten to engulf you

Try them on,
think of wind and rainstorms inside your body,
thunder and lightening in your veins
Think of boys racing down the slight sloped hill on skateboards
girls hoping you will call and lots of lost love
Try to think of mothers screaming in the throes of birthing pains and
Little boys with fat tears falling on scraped knees
Think of bandaids generous enough to cover new wounds
And scars covering old wounds
&
when you are alone again,
Hiding in a public bathroom stall, against the wall holding you vertical
Or in the car, put on your seat belt and let it press into your chest
Like the hand of God pressing against your lungs
so all you can do is
Stay right there
Slump down, against a wall or window and
put your hand On your head,
cover your face and cry. Let the sadness and frustration and grief
shake your shoulders, shake itself out.

The hot tears are sticky and ooze out and you have to let them out
Let them out, spit them off your lips, blow them out your nose,
Push them out, not in
Wipe them on your shirtsleeve like snail trails,
So you can see the tracks of slow moving sadness

Breathe in and out
Breathe in and out like a dog panting in the heat of your emotions
Open your mouth and lungs
and the ache will either get worse
or dissipate

If it gets worse, stay a little (one) longer, wipe away a few more tears

If it goes away, and trust me, that ache will go away eventually,
If you respect it,
Then you can go on.
&
At the end of the day when you crawl back into the bed
Just lie still
Scrunch up your nose at the stench of wrongdoing all around you
Clench your jaw and steel yourself against the nightmare you are living.
Think back on the day, the downward spiral you are riding
Jokes and drunks and all
And imagine what you would tell the one person you want to talk to most

That this is bad
this is not good
That you are so lonely and you don't know what you are doing here and
Why did your mother fail and your father get you into this mess?

Imagine the face of a friend, tearing up, eye lashes sticking together and nose running
For you
All for you, over you, all around you

Wrap the blankets around you tight and think of the warm bodies of close friends
Next to you
On a porch, on a bench, on a beach, on the hood of a car, on a diner booth bench,
on a bar stool, on a couch,
on a hopeful day
&
think of how hard it is
to loose your innocence over again, just when you thought
you didn't have any more innocence left to lose

think of a carpenters' roof beams raised high above your head and let your soul lay across

think of the ancient Egyptian pylons and let self and body stand tall between them

think of Grecian columns, slant 6 engines, old growth redwoods, and tug boats
because you are stronger now and you are taking your place among them
whenever you feel this way
whenever you feel
whenever
you feel
this way
everyday.

I want to tell you so many things and it is so hard to find time.
And the words are all confused.

So here is what I really think about her, myself and you (really the pronouns are pretty exchangeable because this is as much a confession as it is a description) I have observed and participated and so this is what I tell myself about the women in my life, and yours:

When I say I wish I could just like her, it is easy to assume that I am saying
I don't like her because I have decided she is empirically
unlikable.
What I am actually thinking is a thought about my failure to
believe the reasons
and trust the logic
around your admiration or need (or love?) for her.

I want to understand how you choose your friends, how you commit in the ways you do; I want to know what works and what doesn't because I am tired of making the same old mistakes over and over again.
And I want you to see that you do commit, in unconventional ways, in your ways, which are wonderful ways that fail sometimes because relationships are wonky.
You do make promises and keep them.
You do love, and you love well.

Her accusations sound so true because she is seeing you clearly, from her perspective, which is just as valuable to you as any other.

You are not giving as much as you could:
if your father hadn't been so broken hearted, you would be a different person--last month, this month, every month, in your last relationship, in this relationship, in future relationships.
If your mother hadn't overworked your own breaking heart, well, you know how different things would be...

You have made promises you haven't been able to keep:
you are human and you failed.

You have not shown her the love you should have:
You intended to love her well, you started out really appreciating her and then things sort of fall apart on your end
You abandoned her, you stopped feeling the same desire for her, you just didn't have the energy to sustain the excitement you first felt for her.

I know you know all of that but I also know that sometimes you like for someone else (me) to confess that I know it too
When I say it, in my voice
the voice that usually tells you lovely things, hopeful things, funny things, even painful things you hear the sad parts in a way that remembers the love I feel for you, the hope I have for you, the fun I have with you, and the pain that we have borne together. When you hear my voice you are conditioned to think of soft places to land when
everything falls apart,
future and longevity and trust and light.
And that is why I think sometimes you like to hear me tell you things you already know

Not that we are blaming your father's failing heart and your mother's unhealthy habits;
you are a grown up who can take responsibility for your choices
but I just want us to be clear about what you are taking responsibility for
we are not excusing your failing or boredom with her
instead I think I just want to point to your faults in a way that
makes room for them to stand,
for them to be real and holy ground.
I want to connect them to the best of you, so that you can be integrated, so you can see that your greatest failures are the fertile soil for your greatest triumphs.

Your commitment to your father took you away from the promises you made to her
And your fervent avoidance of your mother exhausted your ability to be present with her.
But relationship with your parents will always come to bear in a big way on your most intimate relationships. Those intimate relationships need to account for the father factor, to absorb the shock of it and allow graciously for you to experiment, risk and be angry about it. Also, those relationships need to respond with love to the degree that you share your life, as your mother's child, the degree to which you are willing to reveal or submit your story to query at any given time. Those relationships will also, if they are open to it, reap the benefits of the love lessons you learn from being the person you are.

Your old patterns of behavior around making promises and loving well in--fits and starts, the rhythm of your desires, are not yet elongated enough to carry you through the exhaustion and rejection you have experienced recently.
so your wise and burning desire for deeper companionship,
the fundamental desire that kept things going as long as they have,
is abandoned in the heat of the moment because
the one who cares so much for you
suddenly comes up short, and bold with a machine gun mouth spitting out
truthful accusations in rapid succession
and the rejection at hand (coupled as it was with an accurate description of your greatest faults) displaces your tiny hope that this care was
the deep and lasting care you longed for.

Of course you are guilty, but what good are the feelings of guilt if you don't learn from them, if you don't separate out what you are guilty of and what she is guilty of?

The guilty feelings should not lead you to punish yourself, but to discipline yourself and the first thing you should disallow yourself is to fall into the masturbatory nature of narcissistic guilt that says
This is ALL your fault. Because really, you are not that powerful around here, you are probably not the biggest thread in the tapestry of your community, and you are most definitely not the biggest snag in it--let's leave that descriptor for really awful stuff like sin, depravity, mental illness, rather than one single person, its easier to work with if its bigger like that.

I know you know about that.
Whether you believe it or not, you will be careful when you point to her faults and failures, because you have trained yourself all along to be compassionate toward her.
But I'm not convinced you know yourself or care enough about yourself to recognize what she did that triggered your boredom, anger, frustration and ended in your behaving in ways you regret.
Nor am I convinced that you know enough about yourself to know admit that
You must have shown her a lot of care.
You
encouraged her
to search for healing,
to tell the truth,
to see clearly,
to love passionately,
to ask for more of you
or else she wouldn't have done any of that and you wouldn't be so ambivalent about the brokenness of the relationship right now.
Something about you was so strong, maybe even stronger than ever before because you made the best of this opportunity to be so:
you made space for her,
whether she used that space lovingly or not, she moved into it, toward you. For that movement and all that encouraged it, we should be grateful to both of you, but not naïve. We should mourn the loss of a relationship that fostered that kind of behavior, but not in a way that wishes idly to change the past.
Things have been said that have hurt so much,
there has been a brisk trade in shame and
sloughing off of responsibility.
There are profound weaknesses and
wounds that need time to heal, to shrink, to forgive.

Talking about it may not be the answer, just yet. Exposing a wound to the light will not necessarily slow the healing process but it often makes the scarring worse. Maybe a few protective measures will help, a certain retreating to safer territory,
humility and a season for mourning are in order.
The truth is, these wounds may never heal because no one knows what will heal them or what will reopen them. The trick is to live boldly, honestly, hopefully, knowing that when they do reopen the pain will send its message that it is time to find a safe place to cry over how badly this hurts. And to remember that pain is pain: it always leaves a mark, and healing,
well, as for healing
that is the greatest miracle.

the old link for this was taken down, but someone else, crazy for it like i am put another one here
ha!
or you can watch Larsandtherealgirl... apparently i am not the only one who likes to dance to it...

Home is where I want to be
Pick me up and turn me round
I feel numb - born with a weak heart
I guess I must be having fun
The less we say about it the better
Make it up as we go along
Feet on the ground
Head in the sky
It's ok I know nothing's wrong . . nothing

Hi yo I got plenty of time
Hi yo you got light in your eyes
And you're standing here beside me
I love the passing of time
Never for money
Always for love
Cover up and say goodnight . . . say goodnight

Home - is where I want to be
But I guess I'm already there
I come home - she lifted up her wings
Guess that this must be the place
I can't tell one from another
Did I find you, or you find me?
There was a time Before we were born
If someone asks, this is where I'll be . . . where I'll be

Hi yo We drift in and out
Hi yo sing into my mouth
Out of all those kinds of people
You got a face with a view
I'm just an animal looking for a home
Share the same space for a minute or two
And you love me till my heart stops
Love me till I'm dead
Eyes that light up, eyes look through you
Cover up the blank spots
Hit me on the head Ah ooh

you should always be cautious when you read these things because i am not necessarily cautious when i write them.
if you need to tell me about it, well, that is what the comment field is for...

Where I am coming from

i want the people in the class to see how much it hurts that they can take a class, write a paper and get to choose whether or not to forget it afterward. But I will always and have always see things, brown things versus white things, culture things, popping out at me, threatening to out me to my chicana friends or students, threatening to out me to my white friends, threatening to make me more and more undesirable, abandonable, destroy me, hurt me and I have always had to choose what was realest, what about me was going to help or hurt and always for another person.

The choice to straddle the cultures has been made for me, it was made for me the day my eyes turned from blue to brown, and many other days: the day they realized my hair wouldn't lie down because it was thick and dark, the day they heard my first word in English, the day we decided to have a sweet 16 instead of a quinceanera because none of my friends would know what was going on, the days I wore sleek sailor dresses rather than white lace to the family reunions, the day my mother lost the culture war because she didn't know who she was, or who she married because my father never had words to tell her, the day my mother remarried a man she affectionately referred to as blue eyes, the day she hyphenated my name so Perez wouldn't stand alone, the day she told my sister and I not to speak Spanish, the day my grandparents decided it was cute, rather than necessary that we learn to speak their native tongue in order to communicate with them, the day my grandmother was surprised I wanted her to teach me to make tortillas or albondigas or cocido... there were so many times I was told to turn toward white experiences as though they were all that was necessary for me to define myself and so many other days those white experiences didn't make sense. The tacos my step dad made were not anything like the tacos my grandmother made, nor was the chili. I learned to eat beans or juevos with tortillas, rather than forks and knives and then became nervous if I went to a friends' house and tortillas weren't there. I quieted the little voice in my head that asked, Who doesn't keep tortillas in the house? That is crazy! What do you eat? Because my mother decided they were optional.
Martin is Mexican, what are you, what was your maiden name?

That class is so good for white people, Dr. Hollins will hate you the first day....

Do you feel more Mexican because you married one?

Why don't you speak Spanish then?

Why don't you talk about yourself?

Oh, so you're not really Mexican.

Have you ever been to Mexico, I have, to Cabo, aside from the poverty it was great!

What is Basque?

That is such a racist thing to say, you're not Mexican, you shouldn't talk like that!

Well, if you're Latina then you...

So you're only half.

Only half?! If only I were only half! If only the Hispanic culture didn't poison the nasty sweet glory in all my successful attempts to be white, if only I felt half white as much as half the time, if only it hurt just half of me, just one part of me when you are surprised by my values, allegiances, biases or snobbery of your so-called Mexican food, if only you were only half intimidated by the half intimidating half exotic half of me suddenly yelling at you with the emphasis on the wrong syllable, if only you saw me as only half white. If only there had been white friends ready to take me in when my brown friends laughed me out of the room, if only there had been brown friends around to tell the white girls they were offensive beyond belief with their smells and foods and wide eyes. If only I were bouncing back and forth like a tennis ball rather than always muddled and angry at myself for not picking a side, a culture, a color, a perspective on race relations, and neighborhood regentrification turf wars.
They will make of me whatever they make of me, if that is what it costs me to stay true to whom I am, confused as I may be. And I will gladly apologize if I turn out to be sorry but I will not apologize for the feelings they will have to bear on their own. I will no longer bury my color because I am afraid of their suspicion, I will no longer shy away from their questions or let my voice fade off into a whisper when they push for answers just because they want me to relieve their confusion because I am a confusing person, and being with me will cost you clarity. They have no right to judge me, they don't even know me. It will cost them their categories and stereotypes. even if they can't understand how well, how fully, how carefully i have learned to straddle the fence between their experiences and mine so well that they never knew i was doing it, i value the truth, maybe not their truth, but mine, and i have to figure out a way to say so or stay lonely and mean for another two weeks, maybe longer. I'm done doing you all favors and making things simple so you can understand.
and when i explain that things are complex with me, it will be in my own voice.

about love and the million tiny risks, like papercuts on the sides of fingers.

so can I tell you now about the waking dreams I've been having?
I dreamed a tree fell down and there was a nest with eggs that needed saving.
I dreamed you wrote me a letter and your girlfriend signed it.
I dreamed I had a nightmare I couldn't remember because I was always in it, right now.

I dreamed I wrote a letter to punish some women who have recently hurt me.

~

I have been treated badly because of the race question my whole life. and so if you want to imagine the color of my skin, imagine instead that I am more like a burn victim. The blisters and bubbling flesh breaking and bleeding. Imagine that I have no fingerprints by which you could identify my limp body, imagine the hairs on my arms are coarse and my lips are swollen, without the lovely lines of a pucker.

Imagine that I have begun recently to warn others not to touch me unless they can do so gently, that I have spoken of my vulnerability with those I thought I could trust. And then imagine that in some cases, it was for naught.

I was angry, hurting so badly. I was weeping and crumpled and hoping those who had been so careless with me would hurt as much as I am.

So when I woke yesterday I composed the letter in my mind and wrote it out in my own blood. The problem was that I had to pick a scab to do so. If you know me well, you know that I am not a scab picker. I don't like to pick at chipped paint or scotch tape. I don't like to bite off hangnails or pull the strips of skin around my nail beds. I realized that this scab-picking simply was not me, not who I have ever been, not who I am, not who I want to be and probably not who I ever will be, if I can help it.

I lay in bed and heard one bird sing.

There was a small whistle and a sort of chipping away at the silence. The sound was high and sweet and I thought of stitches. I thought of new skin, quilted into place, like a patchwork quilt of my grandmother's aged and scarred and wrinkled whitish skin, my mother's cold and freckled skin, my father's acne and stubble, my grandfather's shiny and lined, calloused, and ashy skin, my sister's pale reddening cheeks, my beloved stepmother's crow's feet, my own skin, so different even from theirs, that smooths and dries out, and pales in the cold weather, then shines and darkens like stained oak in the summer.
I thought of a cousin's cafe con leche skin, another cousin's milky white arms holding her tiny white baby. I thought of my niece, the one we call Peach because she is just the right color, and the one we call Peanut because her lovely soft shell crushes easily and under it we find the salty roasted wisdom she holds close to her heart. I remembered the yellow skin on the one we call AH-gee, how we gave her to the light and it healed her, and the perfect curves of the skin that stretches not too tightly over their older sister Em's dexterous digits when she eats a whole peach without making any mess at all.

That little bird chirped away at the silence and her friends joined in because the sun was rising and warming their cedar tree. I thought of the way thread slips through the hole in the fabric, thought of a needle and string in the beak of a bird, like it belongs there. I thought of birds working, of their song tying my skin down over my bare soul and I knew that there was beauty enough to cover my exposed bones and heart.
I thought of birds building nests from pampas grass, from down and feathers, from dog fir and twigs and thought I might yet be healed, piece by piece, the way birds know best.

I thought of tree bark and surface tension, all the things that cover all the other things and began to be glad for all these thoughts and the skin over my pinkish lips that speak them, my pale neck skin stretched over the larynx that screams at the moon, my pink fingertips the color of raw-chicken meat that type them, my cheeks that redden when you read them. I was glad for myself. and for you. and I thought of all the pain I had wanted, only an hour before, to inflict on those who have hurt me so badly.

And I knew I didn't want them to hurt because of me.
Though I have heard it so many times I began to believe it for the first. Maybe it was because I was ready to hear it, or maybe because I was telling myself, or maybe because I just didn't need to bleed over this anymore and wanted to heal.
I knew they were hurting enough. There was no doubt in my mind that they would be lonely without me in their lives, at their dinner tables and I felt compassion growing in me.

I leaned into my husband lying next to me and felt the heavily furred skin on his hand, thought of the callous from his wedding ring, just above the life-line on his palm and how hard he works to be married to me, how proudly he wears the marks of our life together, then I thought of the skin on the backs of his hands, already turning brown and sweet like caramel in the first sunny days of Seattle summer, turning colors the way California foothills turn, the way skin turns colors, turns toward, turns.

Do they have skin like this? Do they know they do? Do they lean into the skin of loved ones, they have chosen not to think of mine, or to feel what it is like to wear it, but do they feel the skin of loved ones? Do they feel loved?

To be sure, I doubted and worried for them, for their beautiful faces and thought they must have wounds I will never know, never wear and skin that I may never touch, never wear, never appreciate.

Even now as I write, I am more and more willing to hope to cry for them. I feel my heart turning or softening, and as the wound closes I begin to think of opening it up again, all by myself so that I may stay in the pain, to be with them in theirs. I begin to wonder if the tears I cried for myself, the weeping into a friend's blood-red tee shirt, or wiped away with my own soft hands, will be replaced with tears for them. I wondered if what was initially a sadness for myself and my feelings about being rejected would turn into an even deeper sadness over the fact that we do not have each other in this moment. And I imagined, instead of their faces set against me, their smiles, or their tears falling down their faces.

Though I am so very afraid to move my body or my mouth in a way that will bring all this about, at least my heart will go there and that feels like a little healing and it will be enough for now.

This month has been brought to you by
the letter of love, a little beauty, and a whole lot of anger.

don't worry, we are all always between who we are and who we could be and that is just fine all the time...
and here is the paper to prove it, written for a class about multicultural issues and though not all of us will take it, all of us have them. try not to get bogged down in the evidence of my research, just watch for story, that is the good part.

What is a past status you clearly remember being in?

I can tell you a small story that sums up my many days in disintegration status perfectly, according to Helms' model: I was suppressing and ambivalent. I was afraid but unaware of alternatives. I was also, in the moment I will describe, according to A.S. Ruiz, in the cognitive stage of identity development: I was working from negative/distorted messages, believing that poverty and prejudice were the only alternative to assimilation and that assimilation was my only means of avoiding the confusion I was responsible for bringing when I entered a room.

I remember sitting at a table in the library of the first high school I went to. It was called El Molino, after a conquistador's mill that once stood in its place. I was 14 years old, fresh from a small junior high with one half black student, two Mexican students, me the latent hispanic and an otherwise hippie-flavored, rebellious white population--teachers, students, aids--they were all white faces (just like mine).

My mother was there to help me register and another mother, the mother of a white girl I had envied for years. Her name was Cindy, her daughter's name was Shelby. My mother slid my copy of the form toward me and sat silently and smiling. I knew she was happy that we were together. She had probably taken the day off work to come down to the high school and that meant she was being an extra good mother today, the kind of mother that takes the day off work for her daughter's education. She knew I would get into the difficult classes, the highest level courses because I was smart. She also knew that if my registration was done improperly she could just march into the principal's office and set the record straight because she was a powerful mother, and advocate. She had seen my sister do well at that school and registered her for her senior year earlier that week.

I heard the other mother complaining to my mother as Shelby and I both, like good girls, set about writing in our names and birthdates--I, in the graffiti style hand my friends from the city had taught me in our correspondence and her in bubbly rounded letters with hearts over the little i's. I wrote in my last name, two last names really, "Abigail unpronouncable white blah-Mexico's version of Smith" and longed for the day I would marry a man whose last name was Smith.

I hated having both last names. I had been told so many times already that I wasn't really a Mexican version of Smith, I was only half MexiSmith and half unpronouncable white blah mutt. I was an inconvenience to the dentist's receptionist and an enigma to the phone tree mothers. It seemed I was inconsiderate to punctuate my surname, especially with a hyphen. I knew what a hyphen was when I was seven and I remember explaining it to people over the phone. To this day I have no idea why someone so little was on the phone explaining my last name but I know I did and it speaks to the neglect I experienced and the exposure I suffered. It also evinces to my need to please my mother by insisting on both names at all times, at all costs.

I hoped to marry a nice, normal man with a nice, normal, white last name but with black, curly hair. See if he had dark hair, my children would come out with brown hair like mine, not dirty blonde hair, that was wavy or curly rather than mixed up, confused hair. I was working on a strategy even at 14 that would give my children everything I never had: straight, predictable, manageable, if not dred-lock prone genes.

I came out of my thoughts for a moment when I heard Shelby ask her mother which race box to check. Cindy was quick to answer, she told her daughter, "just check next to other, it isn't any of the government's business what your race is. Neglect the question in protest; if all of us check other, they'll stop asking that question and working things out according to race." She spoke over my head and told my mother she was glad Shelby wasn't there alone because questions like this always arise and they take advantage of children--they want to expose children.

My pulse began to race. I looked at my mother's face. She was knee deep in Cindy's complaints and seemed to agree with her. I looked at the box next to the word, white and thought, let's be honest, my skin is white. But if I check the box next to Latino or Hispanic they might reconcile my grades with my blood and see that we are not stupid and lazy like they think we are. They will see that we don't all have brown skin and straight dark hair, they will learn from me. I thought to myself, I will teach them about all the millions of people just like me who are brilliant and Hispanic. And then I remembered my grandfather had told us not to answer to the label "Latina". He said we might answer to Chicana, or Hispanic or better yet, to Mexican or Basque! But Latino was a term from white men, to oppress us, it was Napoleonic and old and why wouldn't anyone just ask me to my face so I could proudly tell them who I really am? So I thought, about checking the Other box in hopes that they would have to come speak to me about myself.

Then I had another memory. Once, in fifth grade, a mysterious letter was sent home. I carried it home and when she read it my mother began laughing. She was shocked that they would put my in an ESL class based on my last name. She said, "Do they not know who you are? You have been at that school for six years! You just go back to your teacher and tell her that she can take your name off the list of Spanish speaking kids." And I thought of all the confusion it would cause if I were sorted into that group again.

I couldn't ask my mother what to do; she would have to agree with Cindy, the white woman just across the library table or suffer looking the fool in front of this rich, white, popular and powerful woman. I knew that if I asked, my mother would tell me to do whatever I wanted. She wouldn't dare say, in front of Cindy, or anyone else that I could go ahead and check the Hispanic box. That would mean admitting, and then, perhaps, explaining that I was conceived, that she had had sex, with a Mexican man. The story would conjure images of dark-skinned, cowboy booted drunks waiting on the street corners for work. She would blush if she had to tell the story that she was married to my father and that there were interracial tensions that eventually led to the shame of divorce and nothing to show for all her shame except two white-looking, but dangerously ambiguous daughters who browned up in the summer and returned home with Spanish accents, and craving food she could never cook from weekend visits to their grandparents house.

Essentially, I knew she wouldn't be of any help. She wouldn't understand all the thoughts I couldn't explain to her, she wouldn't know what to do and wouldn't do what would be needed even if she did understand because she couldn't empathize with me. I looked over at Shelby's form, nearly complete. If I didn't hurry up and make a decision I would be left holding my form longer than everyone else, as if I were too dumb to write my own name, and check one or two boxes.

Needless to say, I was in a panic. I wanted so badly to be like Shelby, for Cindy to be my mother. She was an artist: expressive and creative and never too busy to boss Shelby around... So I put a big X over the box next to the word Other and I felt more lost than ever. I knew, against all hope, that that would be the end of the conversation. I knew I wanted to choose Hispanic and for years afterward I would choose Hispanic, with a giant X, as if I could somehow undo that day I chose Cindy over my mother, the day I chose not to be counted.

What state of ethnic identity development are you currently in/working through? Why do you see yourself in that particular status? What experiences led up to your being in that stage?

I am currently in the "Working Through" stage of Ruiz' model. I am "unable to cope with the psychological distress of ethnic identity conflict." I can no longer pretend or pass. And I am also working through a stage of resistance and immersion according to Sue and Sue's R/CID model. I am finally appreciative of those like me but also conflicted about others of a different minority and definitely group depreciating of the dominant group.

When I hear white people tell about their problems, all the Chicana in my lineage, as well as the Basque in my blood, the gun-toting, bomb planting women I come from, who blow up bridges and train tracks and then go home to make rabbit stew, rise up and I want to stand over them and let them have it.

I'm just so angry these last few days and I'm falling back into my anorexic patterns and yelling at my husband and I keep hearing people say 'this is what the multicultural issues class does' but I don't believe that. I think everyone deals with the class differently, that this isn't what the class does. The way I feel, the patterns I am falling into are what I do to myself to tell myself I need to ask for help.

I have been in this stage for quite some time. It began in 2003, when I began working toward my Cultural and Linguistic Academic Diversity Credential at San Francisco State University. Dr. Deborah Luna was piloting a class that was very much like Multicultural Issues at MHGS. She encouraged me to lean hard into my biracial identity. She valued my perspective and when I wrote a letter (I never intended to send) to the author of the book Uprooting Racism she encouraged me to send it to him. I had only written the paper as part of an assignment and she had found in me a burgeoning ability to ask for help, to correct or rebuke, to gently enter the confusion that I see in the faces of my colleagues when I bring myself just as I am. But I didn't feel there was a place for my anger in her class.

I took jobs working in San Francisco's Mission District. I taught English at two different Spanish/English bilingual schools. I began to see how the children suffered because of the public education system. In my position, was loved or hated, there was no in-between response to me.

The white teachers were either appreciative or suspecting, but they didn't attempt to get to know me. The teachers of color were the same. I took their abuse and accolades in turn then went home and cried. I used my angry energy to stay up late working on credential class work. I couldn't sleep when I went to bed so I rose early, wide awake with fury, to write lesson plans for teaching math to English Language Learners. Early on it became clear to me that in spite of the adults' ambivalence toward me, the children offered me grace. We listened well to one another and I knew that my anger would be redeemed if I were to use it to work for them and no amount of grown-up confusion was going to stop that.

Explain in detail what your future status would be and what you believe it will take for you to move on to the next status? What steps will you need to take in your life? What ill that look like for you professionally and personally? How will you be different from who you are today? What will be most difficult for you in transitioning? What barriers might you experience in moving forward?

Listening to the people of color in our class has taught me that their experience matches my own because I am a woman of color.
I am a powerful woman of color. I come from a place where houses are painted turquoise, where tissue paper flags shine in red and pink and yellow,
where murals of civil wars share space with gang war graffiti,
posters for protest marches form a mosaic for airplane passengers to see upon arrival, bottle caps stuck in the tar of the street shine like sequins in the cross walks,
lemons and limes hang like earrings in the sweet green ears of the plaza trees, where the subway schedule speaks in pictures of canons, shrimp and snakes,
where the trees are greener and the ocean is bluer,
the meat is fresher, pinker, browner,
and the faces are more ornate
and the blood that runs in the streets after the daily murders is red
and the anger that moves in the veins is black and blue
from having dealt with all these issues.

"Of color" doesn't mean "of dark skin" all the time. It means the moving pictures of my memory are bright and different from the pictures we see on television in the US. When I say I am of color I mean I know how to tell you stories about myself, in technicolor, because the black and white version of my story is not enough for you to understand my story so different from yours. My color is brighter and stronger than the red, white and blue of the American flag. It is a vivid experience of the red of hate, the white of seemingly innocent lies and oppression and the blue of intense sadness, it is the brown of the dirt my father digs, now that he chooses to do so, even while his cousins work the same fields he escaped, the green of envy that I move freely when I so choose between cultures. My story of my color is bold with the emotion I feel about all the places I belong and don't belong; it is ripe with tales I tell that refuse to be matched with the dominant stories.

I see that Sue and Sue are right to back Roots' manifesto. Finding my voice means making my own vocabulary for my situation and I know I am up to that task. God has gifted me with a large self to discover and a way with language that will serve me well on the journey. It will continue to be difficult, and I am not sure where to start, which is why I am so hesitant and afraid but I know much of it will happen accidentally on purpose as I unwrap the bandages around my hurting heart.

Today is Pentecost and I work for a white man in a white church but he preached this morning a sermon about languages. He said not to focus on the occurrence of each man speaking in his own language--of course, given the opportunity we all speak in our own languages, and rightly so! What is special about Pentecost was that each one was understood. There was no need to assimilate, no need to deny the beauty of a native tongue and yet all those present at the miracle were assured of God's presence in a word that reached down through their ears and into their hearts.

It was under his guidance that I confidently gave the Pentecost children's word. I told the congregation that it wasn't until I was seven, eight or nine (I don't remember) that I realized my grandmother was speaking to me in Spanish. It was all one language until then. Aunt was just another word for Tia and both were usable, even at once or interchangably, if need be. Adios was another way to say goodbye, we all understand that and the way you and I say no, though one sounds longer than the other, they mean the same thing, and isn't that funny? Heart was just another word for Corazon and I had a piece of hers in mine.

Pentecost, I told them, is a day to remember that God is like that too, that God knows our heart. That when God tells us that we are loved it may not sound the way it sounds when our friends or mothers say it. But we know it just the same because we aren't hearing with our ears, we are listening with our hearts. And then we all bowed our heads to pray and I spoke Spanish into a microphone for the first time. I prayed in Spanish, Dios Santo, conoces bien el Corazon de tu gente y todos los dias les di, <> y por eso queremos decir gracias. I prayed a translation too, though it was not exact.

My husband told me after that he was proud of me. He said that all the white people in our gospel choir held their breath and many of them whispered that they had goose bumps as their minds made the shift into the mystery of my prayer. Three women afterward were crying and held my hands in theirs, grateful for giving them a new understanding. I saw genuine gratitude in their blue eyes and I think that if they could teach me more gratitude I could learn grace.

Today I took off one of the wrong-colored band-aids over my battered heart and let the wound breathe, let the fear of repeated injury, of salty tears burning the sore, I let the fear stand alone, I chose not to feed it when I chose not to cover over the ambiguity of my identity, not to deny it or explain it away. I had given them a gift and they said thank you and they had not asked me for clarification or excuses and that felt like growth.
I think I have been angry for a long time, confused even longer. When I finally move into an integrative awareness, marked by appreciation--even selective appreciation I think it will be after a long-lived, hard-earned sabbatical from denial. I will exercise a right to be scared, but also to be fearless, I will exercise my right to be myself, but also to move freely around in all that that means, in all that I am and will discover about myself.

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.

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?

per the Mistress Matisse column in the Seattle Stranger (I have altered the text:: I have substituted the word "church" for the word "sex", and taken liberties with the last few lines about her life as a dominatrix...so look out, and let your imagination run wild--this is not a metaphor:
"Let's (not) go crazy"
"Saying this is not going to endear me to my sisters in the industry, but there are a lot of crazy chicks doing church work. After much observation, I've formed a hypothesis about why some church workers become crazy and some don't. Some of them were unstable before they got into the game, but some of them had their lives go off the rails because they made one big mistake: They had no exoskeleton.
What does that mean? It means that in the amorphous world of church work, you do not have the social guidance of the dominant culture telling you how to structure the hours and days of your life. And that's fine--if you can create and adhere to your own framework, regulating for yourself how you spend your time. If there are no schedules or deadlines, then often the dull duties that make life run smoothly get blown off. It's hard to maintain emotional equilibrium when your power gets shut off because you forgot to pay the bill, mice infest the garbage you didn't take out, and the toilet overflows. The more stressed you get, the less able to deal with responsibilities you become, and pretty soon you're living in a motel on Aurora Avenue. That's the extreme end of things, of course. But it happens.
Church work is also a world that rewards highly stylized, artificial behavior. It can be fun to play the church kitten. But you need time as your everyday self, too, or you get off-balance and forget how to interact with people when you're not wearing high heels.
Thus, your exoskeleton is something outside the flexible-to-a-fault underbelly of church work. It's something you're emotionally invested in that requires you to keep order in your world, and something where you are your truest self. It can be another job you're passionate about, or school, or a serious and active commitment to an art. (Note the keywords on that last one: serious and active. As in: You're accountable to other people for making something happen on a schedule. Sitting in bars talking about the masterpiece you're going to create won't keep you sane.)
Sometimes a partner can be an anchor, if he/she has a well-structured life and you're committed to matching him/her. And sometimes the responsibility of parenthood keeps people focused in a blurry world--but don't count on it. Too often, I have seen parents take kids with them into la vida loca. You're supposed to provide stability for your child, not vice versa.
I've used all these systems to define my days, and I've seen other successful church workers do likewise. Over time, I've learned to create my own stand-alone structures in an unstructured world. I have my little routines I'm very firm about, and sometimes people kid me about them. They think it's because I'm a church worker that I'm so wedded to my ways. They don't realize that me discipl(in)ing myself is what enables me to play at discipl(in)ing others."

It is coming up on my 29th birthday (3-2-1!) and i recently read in a book by Dita Von Teese that the best way to feel good about yourself is to like yourself and secondary to that are red nailpolish and red lipstick. Then Molly the chocohotti recommended that I figure out my best feature and emphasize accordingly. so I when my sister and I were in California, to visit my grandfather in the hospital, I bought mascara, some giant earrings and am trying to use the letter I appropriately. I have also decided, although I may change my mind, that tattoos are a good idea because there are some things so deeply written in your skin that you may need to write over them or add to them so that you will remember where you have been and where you are going. There is this funny thing about Hagar in Genesis: she is preggers in the wilderness having run away from her abusive, albeit misunderstood, mistress. The Holy Spirit finds her out there and asks her
exactly that
where are you coming from and where are you going?
and she is just organized enough, which is to say sane enough, to tell the truth.

so today when I thought about using a good friend as my therapist, and then chemicals began running through my veins and I began to shake and clench my fists around the steering wheel and hate on both of us. In the end, I told him I was just agitated, and not to take it personally because I didn't really mean it about him... I think I just needed to get organized enough to tell the truth. And I think I am now, organized enough, and I think it would be helpful for you to know it too:

Sometimes I just need to look at you for a little longer, to take in your face because it grounds me. And not just yours, not just his face, but any and every face willing to really look back at my own and maybe wonder why I still have acne at 29, or why I'm turning red when I explain lex orendi, lex credendi to a fellow seminarian. Your face is part of my routine now, your face, his face, her face. I love to see your face, I lurv it, I luff it... in fact it is even better when you shave your goddam beard and I can put my face right on yours--that shit is the chronic! I can't get enough of it, I'm high on it and I need it, like hookers need a day off, like pastors need a sabbatical, like baristas need a shot or two everyday
and don't tell me you don't understand because I think you get it or are getting it, because I am getting it. Even though Freud would say we were supposed to learn this as infants or Lewis would say we will never learn it, I am getting it the fuck down and you are too and it makes my skin crawl and I itch for it when I am deprived.

Even right now, there is a tiny person, this small girl with brown curly hair having a cookie with her daddy at the other end of the cafe and she is staring at me, reading my face and I know she is and her daddy isn't even trying to stop her because he thinks I am obliviously just typing away.

He thinks all I can see is that his daughter dropped her cookie on the floor, and he turned beet red, and somehow it was supposed to be his fault that it happened.

But it wasn't. It was just gravity and distraction and lilliputian elbows and a grimy cafe floor and nobody's fault so I turned my face toward her worried eyes as he walked away to buy another cookie. And she caught me smiling right at her, right at her. And she seemed to perk right up because she knew, even though he didn't, that its nobody's fault.
because my face was just organized enough to tell her so.

i love your story
i mean that i feel things about you that
bring me to my knees because
i know what you have been through and
how it explains
what you do to me.

i'm talking about the scenes from your childhood:
a father refusing to raise his voice but scaring the shit out of you with the look in his eye
a mother walking in on you, the floor strewn with building blocks and you
wielding a pocket knife
a brother so small and helpless you were afraid to leave but you knew you had to
christmas presents splayed beneath the christmas tree like a scene from a movie about a perfect childhood
or maybe there were no gifts at all, they were just bait or bribery in beautiful wrapping
a sister and her friends taking you in as their own, loving you, admiring you, hoping you will come visit again and again because you alone show her the reciprocity she craves.
a crazy extended family laying it on thick, their expectations and disappointments, the bearded uncles telling of grand adventures only the violently irresponsible
would have ever gone on.
your friends from school or church holding you at bay, pushing you into the lime light and then faulting you for having a fan or two
or maybe you were loved but somehow learned to give it up and start over again because their love was no match for the hate your family poured out on you while you were still living close enough for them to have access.
the day you refused to smoke out, the nausea you felt after your first cigarette, the depression, the circumstances of your first kiss.
they are all clues to what it means when you tell me you love me, or don't
and i need them.
i don't like all of them, but they are not nightmarish and i don't need to run away.
in fact i search them out, i search you out with every breath.

maybe these are not the traumas you thought would warrant my sympathies but they are the hand you were dealt,
the hand i was dealt when i promised to be your friend for a very long time.

and you try to tell me to quit
which i understand because i tell you that more than i tell you anything else.

leave me alone, i say, i'll handle this, i'll get my shit together and reemerge when everything is a little less wigged out.
but it just doesn't work like that
i never handle it, i never get my shit together.
and neither do you.
because the story wasn't written with a tidy moral at the end,
believe me when i say that i wouldn't want that anyway, that i don't want you to try to tell me your story isn't really that sad
because i know i don't want you to tell me my story isn't that bad
because you might still be able to lie to yourself and say it will all work out just fine in the end. i mean, it isn't that it won't work out, it is just that you saying that makes this, the most awful time seem like something we should just skip over even though hearts are breaking and lonely.
and what is more
you simply can't rewrite the past by reinventing yourself as a less shitty person starting over with a less shitty story--that would make all of us ill for sure.
so just be who you are, given the story you have and from you i will learn to do the same.

i'm giving up bullshit for lent.
*****
when i was in grammar school we lived in a tiny house. four very angry people in a house that was built in 1906 as a summer home for a wealthy family from san francisco. the glass in the windows was watery and the walls were very thin. the house itself was near the top of a steep hill that froze in the winter so we slipped down it on the way to the bus stop every morning, often bruising our butts. if we were lucky there would be time to trudge back up the hill and change into clean clothes.

the hill street was a thin snake of paving, black top, one lane cutting a line up the hill. the trees were thick and if we took the paths they were sure to be muddy and brambled, rambling toward our single stop sign town through the thick of the riparian redwood forest. it took about half an hour through the woods to walk to school and you remembered to take a friend in case you met a drunk sleeping on the trail.

there was no hallway in that house, no central heating, just a few small spaces linked awkwardly by skinny doorways and anchored by a wood burning stove right in the middle of everything. we were literally living on top of each other and constantly falling onto the hot black stove. once i burned my palm so badly, trying to save the rest of my body from falling against it, i couldn't write for days.

you can imagine the clutter. books everywhere, bark from firewood carried haphazardly in, papers stacked, dust collecting, walls and ceilings always looking as though a new coat of paint was in order and i: the disorganized, chaos driven and agile, fragile member of the family.
i don't remember it well but my mother remembers what i have come to question.

i remember myself laden with jacket, sweater, rain boots, backpack, lunch box and umbrella fumbling in the cold or rain for the hidden key, unlocking the door, stumbling in and she remembers the trail of my belongings. she was rarely there when i arrived home; she only remembers my stuff strewn, like breadcrumbs, leading her from my point of entry to where i sat when she found me: on the bedroom floor, peanut butter spoon in one hand pencil in the other, math book in my lap, fisher-price record player spinning the lady and the tramp record--i was in love with peggy lee when she sang 'you're a tramp'. i was lonely and worried even then that she would discover me busy and make demands regardless.

i think now that what she calls the little trail of belongings bothered her because it encroached on her space. it was a reminder that i was out of control, taking up space, that i had a large presence in a small house.
think what you will. i haven't made her out to be a monster, but it wasn't pleasant to be treated as though i ought to be contained... or else.
i was always sort of in trouble, that's all, for taking up too much space, or being too strong, or not strong enough, i still don't know for sure.

i'm not sure when i began thinking seriously about what it would be like to be a very large person. i was tallest in my seventh grade class, i played center on the basketball team that year. but when we arrived for our first day of ninth grade all the other girls were taller than i was, their hair was longer, like their legs and even though they wore men's clothing i could see their curves were worthy of envy. it was probably around then that i knew i would have to learn to live as a smallish person in a world of impressive peers and huge family members.
i was painstakingly ambivalent, i dated a senior who must have weighed at least 160 pounds to my 100. i began greeting the boys of my posse by running and jumping into their arms, wrapping my legs around their torsos and arms around their necks trying to bowl them over, but knowing i wouldn't. eventually we all relished my ability to curl up and sleep on the bench seat of the gmc suburban or the seats in the bowling alley we went to every monday night. but i knew they would win when we wrestled and they knew to protect me at the punk rock shows we attended weekly.

of course i was strong. i lifted full cans of yard waste onto my shoulders and lugged gatorade coolers and canoes onto the banks of the russian river as well as anyone else.

and i was funny as hell.

so here i am, ten years later, still getting used to my real size, strength, presence.

this year for lent i've been celebrating fat tuesday: i had a huge breakfast at a fundraiser, four cups of decaf, half a brownie, a square of homemade caramel, hot chocolate, extra cheese on the quesadilla i had for lunch, and i haven't eaten dinner yet. i'm hoping amy will call and i'll eat at least half the nachos when we go out tonight. i think right now i'll go for a run and run farther than i have before, in the spirit of overdoing things before i batten down the hatches for lent.
because
it isn't that i want to be fat, it is just that i want to need to eat, i want to need fuel, to require complex carbohydrates and complete proteins, to take up space, not too much, but just enough to make a dent in the space between us, to move toward you without moving but by growing into you, toward you. not to take up your space but to take up the space you left for me that was just waiting for me to arrive, and fill it with my stuff, my crumbs and books and mess.

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.

when i taught the kids about confession i told them
confession happens when we tell the truth.
i drew a diagram, well, several really just yesterday morning in sparkly red gel pen ink, on a cocktail napkin.
they are pie graphs.
they are divided into large portions and tiny slivers according to how much her opinion really matters, which is as much to say, how much her truth takes over wherever it fails to match up with what you know to be true about yourself, how much power you give her truth.
in the first circle her opinion is huge, yours is just a tiny slice, only a thin line toward the center of the circle.
in the next the circle is divided right in half but her opinion isn't there: it is just you and God alone in the opinion ring.
in the last circle your opinion is huge and hers is tiny--just the reverse of the first.
that first one is called too heavy because you have asked her to decide how much you matter, and abandoned her to her opinion about you, you disappear.
the third is called disrespect because you have somehow managed to nearly dismiss her altogether, not totally excused her from dealing with the mess, but not given her opinion any consequence at all.
the second is called feeling lonely because you can't see her at all, and really it is funny that your opinion seems to be at war with God's rather than at war with hers and you seem all alone over there on your half, as if your opinion doesn't have any room for God's opinion of you. And neither of you seems to know what is really going on... or have any real power over the situation.

the only reason i know to draw it out like this is because i have this little problem with fielding compliments.
i never know what they mean, how much they mean or what to do about them. I never know if they are true because I am unwilling to give them any chance when they seem to contradict how I feel or what I know about myself.
i smile and say thank you because i am grateful for the confession, for someone taking the time to tell the truth, and tell it to me. i figure that they really believe what they are saying and so it must be the truth--even if they are saying something nice about me.

but what if i disagree? what if i think i didn't do such a great job or worse

what if i agree that something about me is helpful or maybe that
i am talented or special or worth their while?

then i have to argue with my past.

i look back at the scene of a little girl and her stepfather, him jostling for authority, her, assured that he is afraid of something but not sure what.
and i tell both of them: one of you is more powerful, who's it going to be today?

i want them to figure it out between them and give me a call when they decide. i want so badly for him to man up, be strong, kind and take charge of the situation. even gently cajole her into trusting him just this one more time. Not that that would be good for either of us today, but for some reason that is what I want him to do now because that is what I wanted him to do then. i want him to smile kindly and mean it and tell her that she needn't worry, he will take care of everything.
but i am more sure that when i turn my back he will slap her or worse threaten to, though he never would, just to keep her afraid he might one day if she crosses the line, yell at her, tell her she had better behave herself because he knows what she did.

(Sometimes I think it would have been better if he had let fly with his calloused hand because being afraid of the back of his hand, assuming I wouldn't survive it, wondering if it would be worse than anything else I could have ever imagined or experienced, is more terrifying than the thought of him raging, stiking out and just getting it over with. I think the tension, the wondering and fear was worse than the event would have been.)

whatever. right? i mean, he never laid a hand on her, he never knew he was hurting her. he did the best he could; he had been treated far worse.

i'm not sure where i learned how to treat a child, how to care for one or hope for one but my intuition tells me i don't dare turn my back, leave the two of them alone together.

here is what i want to say to him:
you really ought to leave it alone. she is smaller, fragile, but she is a strong little girl and she will survive you and your broken down power play. make no mistake, the one thing you did wrong was the most important thing--there is no minimizing or justifying your behavior. if you really want to win this fight you are going to have to realize how precious this little girl is, how much hope she bears, how her future will determine yours. you will have to face her independence from you and the fact that you have no right to speak one word to her, no right to make a face at her or even look in her direction until you learn that she is and always will be more than you: more important, more beautiful, she will have more potential and more love. until your dreams for her exceed her God-given potential you should just steer clear, you may observe from the sidelines but that is all and if i ever catch the two of you in a deadlock deathmatch for attention, power or even the last can of soda in the fridge you will pay dearly, she will be excused and you will be sorry you ever met her.
you just remember that, you big baby.

because little girls are a precious gift and ought to be loved endlessly, appreciated honestly and sent on their way into the world with a knowledge that should they ever need help you will offer all you have, without questioning or trepidation.

but we are not often treated that way and so you ought not burden us, even when we are grown women, with solving your self-esteem issues; we have our own to deal with.
and you ought to keep in mind that if you disrespect us by foregoing our opinion altogether you will miss out on all we might be.
find a balance, put yourself in the game, but don't pretend you are the only one on the field and by all means:
tell the truth until you are blue in the face
tell us what you want, what you like, especially if it costs you dearly to do so.
tell us you are lonely and hungry for the way we taste and aching for the memory of our laughter in your ear.
tell us you intend to kiss us and buy us dinner.
tell us you need our permission or approval and get down on your knees to beg, with confidence that when we are ready to love you, we will.
when we are ready to matter, we will show up and do whatever it takes to matter to you.
And that is the truth.

it has been brought to my attention that housing values have taken a dive, that the new president is not, as we would have thought, everyone's favorite person--Etta James is pissed at 'Bama and Beyonce for the at last not-tribute sung by the latter at the inaugural ball--and if you took all the folks who have been recently laid off in the Northwest region, and dropped them off in the forest of Sonoma County California you could populate and repopulate the town i grew up in, twice... and all this in spite of a new administration that can, as i read in The Stranger's Last Days column, address us in complete sentences.

all this seems like just the thing to keep me up nights, or at least one night... maybe next week.
instead i have been experiencing a sort of rallying in my personal affairs and perspective on things: our house was never worth the median value, which has yet to drop below what we paid for our little fixer upper condo with a yard, i am still celebrating the president's skin color, cadence and nicotine addiction, rather than his disappointing policy, and i am living on student loans which means i know exactly when i will be the victim of my financial hardship 2.5 years from now, unlike the 70,000 Americans who were silly enough to think they could borrow as much as i have, for far less worthy reasons and then put off repayment indefinitely.

moreover
i have received much encouragement over the past six months or so, more than i ever have in my life. not in monetary form, but in personal contact.
so when i started feeling really guilty this week for celebrating my success in life i started asking around and got this:

Jen explained it to me this way: there are three kinds of business in this world
your business
my business
God's business

though this kind of thinking usually makes me feel nauseous,
and though it is nearly impossible to know who's is what and what is whose, i think she was just trying to tell me to get some effing boundaries, which is not a new idea.

if the global economy is tanking i should look around, reprioritize according to what really matters: love, family, hope, and focus on people, instead of stuff. to laugh when it is funny and cry when it is sad, to keep my friends close enough to hug them, smell them, look into their eyes and tell them that we were never promised anything but love and even that doesn't usually show up in the ways we want it to because it isn't something we can control.

if global warming is causing the weather to freak out, animals to die and homeless men too, i should take a deep breath, remember i can do my part to quit shitting on the planet and move ahead, rather than sit around in a cesspool of worry.

the people who love me most in the world grew up in subpar housing, eating rice and beans they picked in the fields. They didn't speak the right language, or know the right people. They didn't have half the education I have. They survived abusive alcoholic fathers, busy mothers and endless sibling rivalry. They married too young, too poor and raised brave, if mildly dysfunctional children, who got over it for the most part well enough to guide Sarai and i through to this point in our lives and guess what:

we have never had it better than we have it today.

whenever i am most worried i think of 1928 and remember that it was a great year in spite of the crash:
it was the year there was a man dumb enough to build our little solid house so well that the foundation still hasn't cracked 80 years later (sure it is kind of a run down little place but the bones are good)

and mostly

it was the year my grandfather was born... why, you ask, would anyone have brought a child into this world, that world, that barrio, en el campo, at such a dark time in our country's history? because.
because they could.

because they could.
not because they planned it out and figured it would end well, not because they wanted to or had to or even because of some God-given mandate to multiply and subdue.
just because sometimes the mortality rate cuts a girl a break or mother nature forgets to misbehave or any number of the wrong things went right
which could happen at any time, for any reason to any one.
accidentally.

worrying about it isn't going to help, that is for damn sure and hoping seems kind of played out. but some of us are just dumb enough to pretend we're bucking the system.
we're listening to the sad songs and the dance songs and drinking hot drinks and telling dirty jokes
in spite of it all.

and we're calling it "doing our part" or something like that.
we'll keep you posted if it stops working, if we realize that this is not a good way to stave off the worries, we'll let you know, but for now we're sticking with this plan.

when i preached my first sermon day before yesterday:

Mark 1
22The people were amazed at his teaching, because he taught them as one who had authority, not as the teachers of the law.

And I tell you the truth because I wouldn't make this up: we returned from the dump that first sunny day in January and looked out on our backyard filled with all kinds of little birds we had never seen before in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

and it went quite well.

John Updike passed away.
and it makes me feel ready to apologize profusely.

i am pretty smart
except when it comes to
being afraid of what you must think of me.
For a while I was trying to pretend that I can't guess what you are thinking and it was a good experiment but I stopped
now I think I will begin the experiment again because whenever I think I know what you are thinking I think you are thinking bad things about me. And that is what I am sorry for, for quitting when the wondering-instead-of-guessing experiment had only begun to work, for thinking you hate me.

there is a band called idlewild, i like that band.

but the name reminds me of how things are going around here.
vacation is a break from the routine; some of us don't exactly thrive without a routine.

we are a little wonky, a little trying to hold still with wild fervor, or to idle in the wilderness between terms. it is shocking really.
people ask how Christmas was, what it was like to be home.
i realized two things on our recent trip to california.

first: people wanted me to talk about myself, in a way they could quickly and easily process, but it seemed to make every conversation awkwardly one-sided, in a terrifying sort of way. but they were really just trying to figure some things out--i wish it hadn't been so difficult for me.
second: you can do all the changing and growing and maturing you want but when you step out into the landscape you used to call home--the air, the hills, the insects and rotten wood, the concrete and clouds--your growth, your self, is suddenly accosted by the invisible forces that made you the way you were and all this atmosphere calls to the old ways, attracts them, they rise to the surface of your coping skill soup like fat separating from the broth. and they sit there, on the surface.
and then, rather than pop like bubbles in a soda, they cool and congeal and condense.

i was wearing all these around, like little weak spots in the surface of myself for a good eight days. at one point i called nathan and asked why all this bothers me so much and he said that i'm going to have to grieve the fact that those old skills don't serve me anymore, that i will grieve the friendships that used to buoy me and those i love. i began to cry and asked, how can this be? i tried so hard, i worked so hard for these relationships and they just disappeared. i accidentally changed, or maybe changed on purpose and now everything else is different and it would be bad enough if things were different because i hate change, but it is especially bad because i feel so lost and confused because faces, places, smells and tastes that used to comfort me have lost their effect.
he said i'm going to have to grieve but for now i should just go have a beer and get through it.
* * * *

the extended entry is a copy of a recent post on nathan's blog, he took it down but i think it is really important.

even though we are sleeping in our own beds, we are no longer their guests, just talking to folks from the places we grew up has become even more dangerous now that we are even more aware of ourselves and our pain.

I woke this morning at 3am and began worrying about Christmas.
I've been drinking too much lately, hoping another thimble of spiced rum would warm my frozen ebenezer heart, hoping the bubbles from another beer would slake my thirst for an honest pine scented clean cut utterance of ocomeocomeimmanuel.
I stumbled out to the kitchen, took out a pen and accounted for all the money I've spent on drinking out this week.
It really wasn't so much money, but it still had me a little worried.

I might have needed someone to hold me, but I've taught my loved ones to keep their distance, or else. When I asked Martin to cuddle me, he graciously refused. He knew that wasn't what I really wanted, whether I needed it or not. Thank God.

Instead he put the relationship into first gear and despite being bleary eyed and exhausted, he expertly managed the icy streets of my despair.

He asked all the usual questions but in a way that made me think like a sagacious five year old, instead of like a jaded 28 year old.
What is bothering you about Christmas?
Did you say the Jesus Prayer?
Do you need a Kleenex?
I stumbled through a few sentences and then cried for a while. When he told me I should probably take some deep breaths and get some sleep, I asked if I could just cry a little longer. And he said yes, a little longer.

I know too much about how disappointment feels to ever know how to deal with it.

Christmas leaves so little room for disappointment.

There is a house on my street with snowmen and Santa and a blown up Grinch. They strung lights in a triangle shape on the side of a very large Cedar, and wound more around a funny primordial looking tree in the parking strip. All those little lights poke holes in my January through October coping mechanisms and I feel drunk with fury. I want to drive my car through the fence strung with multicolored c7 bulbs. It would feel so good,
so true to destroy it.
Because all of it is a lie. Snowmen don't really look like that.
The Grinch is a flimsy, desperate metaphor for breaking down a capitalist Christmas. He has become a sort of mockery of what he was supposed to signify because you are supposed to look past him to what the holiday is really about, rather than what he is about and how can you do that when all you really want to do is gape at the giant blown up effigy?
And the funny plastic Santa Claus is a warped version of something that was true once, but for all the tradition he dictated, we have still managed to mangle it all beyond recognition.

It all screams fantasy, that Christmas is about fantasy--Hope's lost cause, broken down, hypocritical, jailbait uncle.

Uncle Fantasy arrives earlier every year. His overbearing presence fills the room with the stink of his fears like foot fungus and in his presence there is no room for simple, honest disappointment.
He laughs in your face and sounds his barbaric yawp: forget what matters to you the rest of the year, what is real, forget what you know and get by with what you can grab today, today is all that matters--tomorrow you may be dead anyway. Cling to instant gratification because there is nothing beyond this little tree dropping its needles, and this big box full of air mostly.

Uncle Fantasy's Christmas story says there is nothing real about two parents who will yell at one another in spite of all they have done to keep the illusion of family alive,
a man who hopes his vegetarian stepdaughter will thrill at a stocking full of smoky dried beef,
and since you learned early to deny yourself a moment to honor your hard earned disappointment you
say thank you for the wrong colored baby doll,
you say thank you
for the clothes that don't fit,
and fold your hands for a sort of weak tea grace over the bloody leg of lamb you will throw up later,
and do your best to let the shame wash over you when you are forced to hug the once-a-year relatives who don't know you would rather not.

And the worst of Christmas day was the reality of divorce: the Christmas morning with dad always outdone, in dysfunction and longevity, by mom's attempts to erase it: her face when we arrive "late" and then, oh God help us, she sees the bags and boxes stuffed in the trunk of his car--she feels like her daughters are moving back in (when we dress for school next week she won't recognize us in the clothes she never would have bought us) she wonders are we strangers or houseguests? And we begin to believe we have allowed Christmas to afford him another opportunity to buy our affections. How long has Christmas whored me out to my father and cracked the ice under my life with my mother?

Resentment looms so large: any sign of disappointment reads as a complete lack of gratitude. Why buy them gifts anyway? Why buy them anything? Why feed and clothe those little brats? Next time they go away they should stay away. And little me, I imagined they would find a way to make me disappear all together: next Christmas I might spend in heaven, wouldn't that be nice--for all of us?

You can see I have plenty to grieve, plenty to sort through, plenty of memories to mourn and many I want to throw out. But it is difficult to imagine and harder to work for a new way to do Christmas. Christmas is about new beginnings afterall.

I don't like the presents and the songs about Santa and Reindeer.
I like the star over the stable and hot drinks.
I don't like spending money on you because I feel like I have to.
I like spending time with you because I want to.
I don't like the confusion over whether you are going "home" or staying here.
I like staying home, which sometimes means just staying put, holding still.

and if I was trying to win an argument over what Christmas is really about I think I might win, don't you?

And maybe all the anger will change soon, I'll learn how to do what is important to be in relationship with those who care most about me who also happen to find meaning in the things I don't like about Christmas.
Maybe I won't be so distracted by the difficulty of hoping or the prevalence of fantasizing. Maybe I'll be capable of generosity and peace, of creating a holy day despite the holiday bustle.

But to put the kind of pressure that this requires this year would be too much. To tell myself to hurry up, and get over it creates a new kind of bustling denial, a turning of my head and heart away from the stories of Christmas past and there is so much to learn from the past that I really don't want to do that.

Redemption redemption redemption. That is what I want for Christmas, and not just for myself, but for you too. If I could give that to you, if I could restore your hope in your family, in the feasts of your childhood and the tearing off of wrapping papers, in the ugly sweaters and itchy dresses, in the recitals and plane trips, I would, you know I would.
But I just can't put that kind of pressure on you. Or on myself.
Instead I want to tell you that
your discomfort this month is trying to tell you something about who you are (I know this because mine is trying to tell me something about who I am).
That
Your anger and frustration has roots that will have to be dug up, pulled apart, you will have to prune and burn the fruitless branches of Christmas and that is going to hurt like hell, for you and for those who thought they were doing right by you.
So just go at it slowly and as gingerly as possible.
Take a good long look and a box of tissue to share.
And know that when you return, when January comes around you might think it was all for naught.

But it wasn't because, thank God, seasons cycle back around and we'll have another chance to do it all over next year.
When you wake up at 3am and you are frightened of Reindeer hooves on the rooftop, scared of fattened intruders and your burgeoning ingratitude remember that this is the pain that comes with awareness and it is a start, not a finish, it probably won't not end you because it is a start. look up at the ceiling and tell God, in your most jilted old ladyish voice, 'coming in like this, breaking and entering the way you do, you sure gave me a start.'

And then call me, because I will be awake too, cursing Immanuel, who comes close to listen well, not just at Christmas but whenever I do. It feels like this is going to take a little longer than I expected...
if you want to cry you can cry,
in the words of my dear husband,
yes, a little longer.

i rsvp'd for the christmas party at school and then realized that it was not a very abigail thing to do to actually participate in the whole christmas thing, especially a student leadership led christmas thing... and during advent... it isn't even christmas yet, wtf?

but then i thought maybe this is a sign of something changing in me and i wrote to the abbot and told him, maybe just maybe student leadership offered me an opportunity for growth and he asked if he could share this news with them, to encourage them.

but i am not ready for that so i went to the party and then i wrote back:

i'm flattered that you think my words would be so encouraging but,
i think i'm hoping that they'll read my participation as a show of gratitude and leave it at that. i just can't risk more than that right now.
tell them thank you, but not from me, from you, from us, from the future struggling stragglers but please not from me because i am still trying to figure out who i am that i, Abigail, would be grateful for student leadership and it would piss me off if they figured out that part of me before i do.
i promise to think more about this and, before i graduate, in 2011, i hope to have a different answer to this kind of question.
i know you'll find a way to encourage them, you'll probably just smile at them or hug them even haphazardly and they'll know that something happened that made you remember why you are, are crazy enough to stay with us in the mess. maybe it was me, or something, or someone i made you remember, i just don't know because i just don't want it to be me.
not today, maybe tomorrow.
maybe tomorrow will tell me.
but i had a great time, i really liked how stinky the classroom became, it was a sensory experience, i'm not being facetious, the room was thick with the sweat of our depravity and craze and it soaked into our clothes and our hopes and steamed our stressors flat. it was totally worth ten dollars.
hooray!
Abigail

it has been, in the past, very embarrassing to participate: i always lost at capture the flag, i tripped over my partner when we square danced, i was sent to my room for yelling back at my mother, or getting caught up in the family drama and even now, even though class discussion usually goes well enough when i say something, i would just as soon keep my voice out of the mix because speaking up opens me up, gives others a chance to disagree.

so i'm wiggling around in the shallow grave i dug for my most standoffish, hiding parts, trying to make room for more of me to die but not all of me will fit and maybe that is the worst part.
not that i want to die, but that it would be nice to be rid of the parts that are really selfish and abhorrent and that is quite a lot of me, i think.
or if i could just find a way to participate without those parts participating.

i think i've just been insulted lately, too many times, and i am beginning to believe that it is really that difficult to accept me entirely: to be compassionate with me, to reward my misconceptions with truth, to carefully, gently lead me away from the parts of me that throw temper tantrums, to turn my face to the sun because i am really unwilling to be loved like that in the first place. perhaps unwilling to be loved at all.

like when a bird really just wants to get out of your grip but not out of your line of sight. just let me be, she seems to say, don't touch me, don't kiss me, don't even want to, but also don't move away from me, or shut me out, don't put me down, don't forget to feed me, spread a few crumbs of cornbread, because i need you for that at least. when i sing my little cry it is probably just from loneliness and fear that you will forget me because i never let you show me, i never noticed, how easy you find it to remember.

obviously i am fucked. obviously.

came in and smiled and i missed you really a lot.

i've been thinking a lot about the Annunciation, and Mary and some other virgins, or notvirgins, which is a more accurate telling.

so when Michael Erik Dyson started in on power and justice and all that, i couldn't really listen very well. i took a few notes:
"i want to see my race and my identity legitimated"
"justice is what love sounds like when it speaks in public"
"...so it (power, justice, whathaveyou) can be concretely realized for all people"
"ambition is realized when we treat people fairly"
"freedom to and freedom from"
"i wasn't supposed to be able to..."

and then i was astounded when my good friend wrote this little poem on my notes, please note the care he took with the lines, they are perfectly enjambed, and the punctuation is flawless, if you know what i mean:

"if my dad
were
here
he'd probably say something
like, "I'm sweating
like a whore in church."
then
laugh
at his own irony
i'd roll my eyes, embarrassed
but laugh inside"

i've stopped taking notes on lectures and started writing down my own thoughts about what it might mean to be friends with the other people in the room.

so here is a little poem about annunciation (when someone tells you
the truth is, you're not a virgin and you wonder how long that has been true because, really, the truth is the sexiest thing about you) and The Annunciation, as i imagine it, given my limited experience with these kinds of big T truths.

it is called,
Dear Truth, for the first time

You did it! you came but how i can still say
congratulations, and goodbye in the same hopeful tone, I just don't know.
and now the smell of you and heartache and the truth of
first things, sweet and salty, all things tight and dutiful,
fill the space, thin and ripe with condensation
between my skin and yours.
between your first chance to save me, to tell the others
to step aside.
What does ready look like, taste like?
Am I when you are here?
How and how well will you know me?
Will I know you when you're done with me?
This has to be wrong--it feels too good, I feel too much of you
to think about you if you dare to come close
to die a little death. O Truth,
the skin of your fingers, the little lines of your fingerprint
vibrations, small scale like the horsetail
bow against the violin strings,
the way something seeming so smooth can
rub out such a penetrating frequency.
You watched and felt me dance, I moved to the rhythm of your heartbeat hovering low over my own, quickening.
Your clutching my throat, as if to murder me or own me from the inside out.
You, Truth, move gently but quickly and finish both of us off.
I always hope
you'll leave when if I see you coming close.
And if you sneak up behind me or look down on me,
put your cheek against the space between my shoulder blades
and I sink my face into the pillow
like I do when I'm keeping sadness a secret
and stay close long enough--until
I tried to tell you
no
just this morning.
But my voice, not the words, was warm and inviting
in your face,
in your mouth,
in your eyes
and you read between the lines
of my desire
not able to talk to me, only to come to me but
not to belong to me
as long as I will love you
or need
and the rest
of the day
the sound of you approaches and recedes, comes and goes, and I know I've loved you,
so long.

i have a theory about addictions, i've told you before that i am confident that it has something to do with chemicals, and that stands still, i guess, and also, today i think, maybe, and i don't want to hurt your feelings but i want to tell you, to confess:
you thought you were addicted to porn
i thought you were addicted to the truth.

feel all the things there are to feel,
you would feel so awful you wouldn't want to put yourself in a position to love unless you knew it was really valuable, and this would be honoring of the pain of your previous experiences. you would value how awful you're going to feel after all is said and done in love and sex, you would figure that the worst pain is much more important than the simple disappointment you are setting yourself up for in this fun sexy time you've got going on right now. you would turn and face the searing, burning anger and frustration and the real love that caused it because the love, and the feelings are valuable. but for now you are satisfied trading in the feelings you fear for the sort of yucky (but not that bad) feelings you are setting yourself up for by messing about in the shallow end.
i'm just saying is all.

and the worst part is that you may have to wait a few days, or even years until you are ready for all this... so the monastery life starts to seem inevitable to a degree.

I've just come back from the war.
I'm angry and tired and bored.
Scarred by the things that I saw --
Still don't feel like I'm home.
Don't want to go back, don't want to stay.
I'm still waiting for the big parade.

I'd write every night, just before bed.
For a while there I stopped.
Did you think I was dead?
The truth of it is, I was afraid.
Scared to come back, I wanted to stay.
I'm still waiting for the big parade.
--jonah's onelinedrawing wrote it, its a lovely little song called, the big parade.

but i like it.

free form is coming around again.
please come. i'll read something i wrote all by myself.

There will be an open mic and our feature performer is one of Seattle's premier Spoken Word Voices Roberto Ascalon.

$1 suggested donation at the door and coffee and pastries sold throughout the show. All proceeds this month will go back the Green Bean Coffee House, our non-profit, coffee with a conscience host.

Friday Nov. 21 8:00pm. Come early to get a good seat.

i have dreamed i could rescue you.
but maybe not rescue you, more like distract you.
or maybe not even distract you, but own you: tell you what to do, where to go and when to come home.
but when i woke up, i woke up knowing that
you have to rescue yourself.

my abuelita always tells me: 'we'll be here for [insert holiday], you can always come. stop off and get a movie for your grampa when you get into town... unless you get a better offer.'

there is always 'unless you get a better offer'. and she means it too. she wants me to be happy. it is the most incredible thing. and she has wanted it for so long but it was only recently that i was able to imagine it as a kindness. i could just never figure out why she wanted me to be happy when no one else cared either way.

my stepmother told me, around the time i was married, that these were my years. she said that the years between my childhood and parenthood are the years i am a free agent. she said that when we were young we were dependent on the parents and when we are older, our parents will depend on us. but for now, the time in between, we have to do what we have to do.

she told me again when i was 24, after i finished student teaching. i was working at the barnes and noble, nannying for triplets, teaching reading and was about to take over teaching at my jazzercise class until i went to the doctor and she said my stomach hurt all the time because i was working on an ulcer. when my stepmother found out, she became very serious and told me she was responsible. she said she and my dad had taught me that working was all that mattered, that you could and should just keep working until all you could do when your kids came for a visit was lay on the couch and watch sleeping beauty with them. she said it was what they had to do because they didn't get an education. she said it was finish school or sort shorts in the prison and she had chosen the latter but i had opted out and ought to quit living her decision so i could live my own.
she told me she had done me a grave disservice, she was sorry and wanted me to quit at least one of my jobs, if i thought i could do that.
and just not worry so much about it. and once she even said that her favorite thing about me is that i don't have kids of my own... yet.
she is a genius all the time and i love her. she has an immaculate sense of humor--she laughs at all my jokes.
last time we were together we drank two tumblers of a little cocktail we affectionately call the dirty [step]mother and she told me that i am a grown up and i make my own decisions so if i want to bum a cancer stick off her that is okay because she remembers the time i told her i blame her that all my best memories are set to cigarette smoke and George Michael. she told me, she won't even stand up and wave at the motion sensor on the porch light, and i knew in my heart, we could just sit on the back porch, in the dark of the redwood forest encroaching on their backyard, and send smoke signals into the night...
it was her way of saying,
you are grown, you are good, you have to rescue yourself
or better:
you get to rescue yourself.

if some of this seems familiar it is because of the entry titled rcl. but i'm finding that things have changed quite a bit since then.

on the prodigal son:

It isn't that I hate this parable. I just think it is really messy because it is about a family, and the texts we read around it were about families too which just makes things even messier.
Don't take this the wrong way but I can't shake the feeling that the father in the story told himself his son was dead because that was what he really wanted.
I am like that. I think movement away from me is about death.
I tell myself the man I loved so much is dead because I don't know what to do with his absence. I guess I'm just not afraid enough of death to avoid really pretending hard. I assume the mourning is easier if I assume his departure will be final.
But I want him back almost every day. Every day I want to go back to the places we loved. Everyday I put my head to the chest of God and listen for the sound of his feet thumping, coming closer to me, so I won't have to move my own feet closer to his.
At one point it seemed he was returning. One morning I turned toward the horizon and a grey figure in the distance finally moved a little closer. The waves of heat obscured the vertical line and I saw, as he moved closer, that he was on his knees the way ancient pilgrims approach a sacred place.
And I, like a fool, was hopinghopinghoping. Like a drunkard, I was stumbling in my excitement, I was slurring and ultimately misunderstood over and over again as I called his name. I was wrong; I just don't know what I was wrong about. I don't know if it was him who came home, or if it was a shattered version, a broken, shoeless, torn apart . When my questions met his ears, they landed. But when I asked, "what do you do with what happened to us? He answered, "I don't know" over and over again. And it was beautiful to me, I had waited so long to hear his voice. But perhaps he was disappointed that I had ignored his apology in favor of festivities. Perhaps he was all too aware that home would never be home again no matter how he repented, how he turned, how close he came to me. Perhaps I thwarted his repentance by silencing him, by hoping or settling for this lovely ghost of him. The celebration was bittersweet.
I don't know that I was ever close enough to him to call his homecoming a return. Was this ever his home? I never made it a home for him; I gave him the little I had and told him it was all I had to give. I made him believe that there was a portion for him but kept the largest share for myself. I know I let him go.
And while he was gone I kept quiet, kept my distance and waited because that is all I could do. It seemed possible to turn toward from far away, to let him fly and hope he would return, to repent secretly. But the place where I waited wasn't home. It wasn't home to him when he was here, it wasn't home to me when he was gone, and it isn't home now that I can lie and tell myself he came back.

It is a maddening dance around the characters in this parable, but not for the usual reasons. I never come close enough to trample toes, I never come close enough to understand the way we (the parable, the runaways and I) have been choreographed like this.

So how do I know I want him and all his mess back here? Why do I think I want him back? And in the moments when I am running to him, why do I want to throw my arms around him so badly?
I can't get it out of my head that Nouwen says there are "invitations to come higher up and closer by." And I issue them, but only haphazardly. From emotional light years away, I poke and prod the distant man I once loved, hoping he will wake with a start and reach for me.
They say keep your friends close and your enemies closer. They say you don't get to choose your enemies. In the studio where I learned combination after combination at the barre and on the floor, I rarely chose my dance partner--I learned how to connect time, connect steps, how to extend and stretch my limbs or turn my head properly toward my partners. I learned to present openly, from the heart, from the center, toward the audience. But to really connect with the partner was a leap toward expression, drama and emotional connectivity reserved for those who, appropriately, were prepared to bleed to be en pointe or even simply en releve, but to turn into their partner nonetheless higher than the rest of us.
Those were the dancers who had learned to spot: to focus their eyes on one small thing while the rest of their body turned again and again in a beautiful flurry of repentance. And their partners stood behind them almost the whole time, head high, not quite touching but not so distant. Proudly making the angles with his body, like arrows directing the gaze of the audience to his partner's show of strength and beauty. And when it was his turn to spin, he did so with a righteous anger, kicking higher than she might and leaping so his core, his proud chest seemed to be thrown about from the force of his heart beating. He could force all his weight to rise as he spun on one straight supporting leg, the other leg twisted in anguish, en dedans but cutting the air between himself and her, madly, lovingly. Finally he would land silently, leather to wood, chest heaving under the strain and present himself to her. Not like a ghost but like a dream.

The father Nouwen wants to be hopes to dance like this but the Mac (from The Shack)-like father simply cannot do this step. He kept his hatred so close; he forgot to focus on the spot of grief for his daughter, lost his balance, never completed the turn, and instead found himself hoping for the opportunity to shoot the murderer, his only partner in this bloody dance, right between the eyes. I understand. I often take a loaded gun when I make the trek home or wherever God hoped we'd meet.
That is the way of the worst fathers I know--the enemies I keep closest. Skip over the relationship you were unable to maintain and aim high enough so the bullet, all your hopes and fears will hit hard and maim, possibly kill what it is you hate. Focus on what you hate, rather than the reason you hate it.
It is so complex because this way it is infinitely easy to accidentally punish those who stay close. You make those closest to you into slaves, you forget to show them love enough, to celebrate their loyalty, and they will never learn to enjoy your presence.
These kinds of fathers are like Mac: expecting God will be whoever is needed in the moment the relationships falter, in the moment the car crashes, in the minute you take the first step off the marked trail, in the time it takes for the gun to fire. They never rise into the dance. God becomes like a first responder. It is as if God is about the business of blotting the blood from our mother's lips, cleaning up the messes made by rage, instead of interrupting greed, addiction and self-hatred.
I guess I don't think the father in the parable is much like God at all. I think the father in the parable is just like me. I think Mac's Poppa is not enough like my papa and yet too much like Nouwen's fatherly inclinations in his last chapters.
I think I want the parable father to take a good look around his home and wonder why his son ran away. I want him to stand in the middle of the house falling down around his ears. I want him to feel like Mac upon returning to the scene of his daughter's death.
I want Nouwen to understand that I want him to father me but I know he won't--
not perfectly. I want him to imagine I am dead because he let me go, because fathers always let go and I want him to foolishly chase the ghost of me each day because even when I do return it won't be anything like it was, it won't be better and it might be worse. It may not be like I returned at all because I didn't want to come back--I had no other choice. And I don't think the kingdom of God is like a family forced to reconcile or starve to death.
When I unravel the riddle this way I want Nouwen to use the jealousy and self-hatred conjured by his reading of the elder son. I want him to see the father in the painting repenting and, the way Mac (simpleton that he was) turned out in the end, wise to the fact that we can never go home again, that our loved ones will never come home again, not really, and maybe the father in the parable was doing right to hope his son might never return.
I know the parable is probably about hopeful reunion and joyful repentance, about unconditional acceptance and other good stuff but tonight I just can't read it that way and though I feel guilty about all this self-indulgent mess I've made of it, I think that is just going to have to be okay for now. God knows what it means even if I don't.

they call it coming under care when you fill out all the paperwork and attend all the interviews and meetings so that one day you can be ordained in the PCUSA.

here is what i wrote to them.
i call this piece
form one:

Questions for reflection

Describe yourself as a person.
I am at my best in relationship. My relationship with my husband and his constant love encourage me to be creative and take risks. My relationship with my church family is built on grace and mutual respect. My friendships are based on compassion and loyalty.

Describe briefly your understanding of what it means to you to be an inquirer. Please include the most important events, experiences, and persons that have prompted you to become an inquirer.
When it came time for me to choose a field for graduate study I wanted, more than to study my other loves (poetry and public education) to study divinity. I chose a seminary that offered a Christian Studies program informed by psychotherapy. I was hoping to finish school in two years with a better understanding of the hearts and minds of post-modern Christians and then write or teach with them in mind. During my first year I met Dr. Patricia Brown who encouraged my husband and I to seriously consider ordination. She explained that ordination enhances the relationship between ministers and church members, and teaches us to be mutually committed to one another in lasting ways.
In January of 2007, I took a part time job as Children and Family Minister. Very early in the interview process I observed how specific pastoral tasks informed my pastors' faiths. Their joy over administering the sacraments of marriage and baptism was (and still is) contagious. The way they struggle over the sermons in text study each week, the way they offer pastoral care, it all seemed mysterious and familiar at the same time.
I wouldn't say that there was one day I woke up and thought, "hey, I could do that!" about sermonizing 300 people. I would say that there are days I show up and feel like I am the luckiest woman in the world because I get to be in church for four hours and I take that notion to be a kind of sign from on high that I was formed to love what most people would loathe about Sunday mornings.
During the first year as Children and Family Minister I came to see my pastoral role as an opportunity to invest in the long-term goals of my young parishioners' families. I came under Dr. Brown's tutelage in order to earn a Certificate in Spiritual Direction. As I learned more about the history of Christian spirituality and my calling to Spiritual Direction I saw that there was a place for my voice to inform the way we go about faith formation in the very youngest members of the church.
Having already extended my time at Seminary an additional year, I figured one more wouldn't hurt, especially if it would run concurrent to my time of discerning a call to ordination. So I signed up to delve into the Biblical languages and take on the task of homiletics. Each day I feel myself growing into the idea that I might one day wear clerics or offer last rites at a hospital bedside. Each day I learn more about the "I" who will do these things and come face to face with another spark of talent, ability, or strength. The more I lean into the call as it takes shape, the more I see it taking on the shape of my self.

Write a brief statement of your personal faith describing what you believe about God, Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit and your relationship to them.
I am beginning to see the Trinity as three distinct notes in a triad chord. Each member on a distinct frequency vibrating, moving everything at once, and yet moving together and bending toward one another, always one, always three. The Triune God is inseparable. God is in relationship, the members of the trinity enable each other to be one, to be what they are as one, but also as three persons with differences, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. But this is still very difficult to articulate.
My personal faith, my personhood, is developed in relationship to the One Creator God. And I am, in relationship to God, intended to bear God's glory by participating in the brokenness of creation.

What does it mean to you to be Presbyterian?
I imagine a Presbyterian church that honors tradition, maintains a balance of power between ordained leaders and lay ministers, and has hope for an established polity adapting to the needs of the globalizing, economically, geographically decentralized Body of Christ.
I see the pews of my youth filled with new kinds of families, passing peace and relying in the weekly liturgy to form the faith of their children and inform their daily struggle.
I see the faces of the ordained women and men who hugged me close to their black clerics shirts when I was a little girl, and their robes opened, welcoming like wings behind the communion table.
I see myself at table, praying to thank God for another meal with my church family.
I see the hands of men and women raised in praise or protest votes.
I see the broken tiles and leaky roofs of the buildings that housed the faith of my childhood and mourn that they fall into disrepair because we have forgotten how to fill them with love and grace.
I see myself at session meetings struggling with my elders to look for a new solution to the old misunderstandings that threaten to rend our community.

Describe your current spiritual practices and disciplines.
My week has two high points: Sunday Morning Liturgy and Wednesday evening midweek gathering for classes and choir practices. In preparation for these wonderful and draining hours I rely on long, spiritually refreshing walks with the dog, The Jesus Prayer and The Prayer of Examen. I also meet monthly with a Spiritual Director who challenges me to stop struggling against my visceral responses to the gospel and listen carefully to the children I intend to serve.

Who/what is your ideal role model for ministry? What do you expect in your ministry? What aspect of ministry do you find least interesting?
There are very few children's ministers I would call ideal role models. I find it easier to borrow strength from my seminary community. They struggle alongside me to juggle best practice and disappointment. They build a shelter for my failures, which is, in turn, what Children and Family Ministries should be about. The more time I spend learning from my learning community, the better I am able to hold the failures of my parishioners.
I expect my life of professional ministry to be rich with the kind of joy that breaks the heart. I expect crying babies and sobbing mothers and weeping fathers, and sadness I can do nothing for. I assume I will say or do the right thing sometimes and the wrong thing often but God's grace will meet me in both. I expect a challenge and hope for strength to rise to love whatever God loves and hate only what God would hate.
The list of least interesting parts of my vocation might include seemingly unchangeable, hopeless personalities or budget meetings. But I am painstakingly optimistic that I will manage to treat both with dignity and respect their importance in the life of the church.

What are you doing to maintain your physical and emotional health?
I surround myself with friends who remind me to enjoy myself and my relationship with my heroic husband. Long Vacations are not an option. Instead, I maintain a rhythm of short recesses at coffee shops and always keep up with the weeknight Sienfeld reruns, which offer a reprieve from the stressors that would otherwise engulf me in faithless worrying. And of course: the aforementioned dog walking.

Comment on what have been (are) some of your more meaningful interests and hobbies.
For as long as I can remember I have had what we call in writer's circles "writerly tendencies." The boxes of journals pile up in the basement, the pens and pencils accumulate in the backpack--I'm afraid to be without one. My hunger for books and even academic articles is coupled with an unforgiving drive to fiddle with sentences until the language can't bear the weight of my meaning. There are often bits of paper with scraps of ideas stuck in odd cracks around the house, short stories written in two words or less in the back of my mind and, especially before I learned to type, thick calluses on my writing hand where I gripped the pen too hard for too long. My writing life keeps me company, comforts me when I am upset and deepens my most important relationships. It is the most meaningful of all my talents and interests and, more often than not, enriches my ministry.

How do you plan to finance your education?
I have completed two years of seminary so far by taking out student loans and will continue to do so for another three. I have supplemented the student loan income with my part time job as Children and Family Minister.

this morning at chocolati there is a man sharing the velvet comma shaped chair next to mine, with his dog and they both seem pretty okay.
and also, there is a puppy wrestling match going on between the two little dog brothers (cappy and apollo creed murderface mclovin) who hang out here now. so i keep thinking that it is a good enough day to lay it on the line.
here goes.
i thought i might make a list of all the people who probably read this but then thought better of it. instead i will just explain that there are others out there, who are just like you and me and you don't need to know what they look like (this ins't facebook) and you don't need to know all their favorite shit (this isn't myspace) you just need to know that they are there, or here, rather and that they keep coming back for more.

see, the things i write here are not just for one of you. i think i know you pretty well, Readers, and i only tell you about the things that will be helpful for the plural you. so if you think i wrote this for you, i did, but i also wrote it for at least one other person and the fact that you are reading it on the internet means i put it here so you two or three or 20 could read it at the same time and know that you are with each other.
if i had something to say just to one of you i would write you a letter or send an email or call you up and be with you like that.

while i'm at it, i should explain one more thing:
the skinnytree started as a place to sort of carve my initials above yours. it is a way to tell you all the things i wanted you to know, the nice things and the mean things. it is my way of cutting you and me, who we are, our names and feelings, into something that will eventually grow and change and perhaps hold onto us in spite of ourselves.
i hoped you wouldn't argue when i made a personal dig.
i hoped, suspending my deepest fears of turning in to the narcissist, you would know i wanted you to see it even when i wrote it about someone else. but mostly i knew this would be helpful for me and so i divided the selfish parts into three categories:
help yourself, which is less an invitation and more a command.
helpful, which is the nicest way i can point you in the right direction.
and just in case, which is where i put things i really want you to know even if they are not helpful, kind of just in case you were wondering or just in case i was too mad to articulate
in a helpful way.
and then there is this, which factors in every damn time:
i am becoming more and more resigned to the fact that i have this sort of maddening sensitivity. it is like a sweet tooth that loves to tear up over sour candy, or a wild hair that threatens to ruin all the family photos, or or or...
and so the only way to let you know that you are, regrettably paying dearly to be my friend is to be honest with you.

my feelings are so inconvenient and i know people who can't change, which makes me very afraid that i can't change, and so i should just be honest. if i'm honest with you, you know ahead of time you will have to pay the tax: if you love my sensitivity and brilliance, you will have to sit and cry with me sometimes. and i am quite ashamed when it happens but this is the price we pay.
i must take it or leave it about myself. and i have it on a good authority that i have to live with myself more often than you have to live with me--it might be hardest on me--so spare me your judgmental fears, i have plenty of my own. i have to take a risk and want to be honest enough to tell you i'll be crying under the stairs, take it or leave it, join in or don't, pay the fare or walk.

when you stop trying so goddamn hard to be normal you strike a bargain with others and force yourself to hope, which is where i am today... knowing you are probably there too.
and with those who are unwilling to uphold their end of the bargain you just put up boundaries because you will hurt worse than they will should the fences fail or the walls crumble. but hurt is just hurt and there is God in the hurt.
in her next life my good sensitive friend Donna is going to come back as a thick-skinned, unfeeling jock mindlessly loyal to the home team and drinking in the bleachers.
but for now she says that crying under the stairs is high class, enlightened behavior and we all should be crying under the stairs. she says that buying a home is buying a safe place to cry.
she says that normal is to hide behind the game face which means you will die behind the mask. and that is how you become exhibit a: the failed suicide attempt, bomb building, gun toting, narcissist too much in love with the reflection because you can't see yourself anywhere else and neither can anyone else.
of course, no one has the right to judge madness, i'm not attempting to do that. i'm trying instead to avoid it for myself and to show you who you are to me.

just think of all the things we really ought to feel
sad about
grieve,
mourn:
wouldn't it be understandable if your best friend with all his hangups and traumas went under the stairs and stood there naked, yelling and crying, just for a little while? just imagine how appropriate it would be in light of all the terrible things that we have done to each other? imagine your best friend stripped and bleeding, crying out on behalf of all the worst things we have done, even the things we have left undone. imagine him thirsty and angry but refusing to dry his tears and suck it up.
who am i to say all the crying is finished?
what of the people i love who can't cry for themselves? would it be wrong to consider me a hired hand to mourn? i mean, if i'm going to go cry anyway, you might as well get in on it.

it is who i am:
i prefer passing out halloween candy to buying christmas gifts
i like lots of church on sunday mornings and wiping noses all day long.
i'm into brussel sprouts and beer milkshakes,
for the record i quit smoking pot when i was 20 and yet i can't deny my slight lifelong secondhand and firsthand nicotine addiction.
i am proud to say i fell in through the ice on sarah palin's lake wasilla one time but didn't drown and when i was 13 i kissed a really beautiful boy and then he hid from my mother, in her shower, for half an hour.
i believe in rocktober and autumn leaves, God killed God and
i am working on crying every chance i get because i think it will actually minimize the drama.
i am a poet and pastor: i won't tell you which way to vote but i will tell you i will be with you when democracy fails you.
i like to tickle and
i would take the ocean over greenlake, and stars over snowflakes
i find your accent to be a miraculous wrapping around the gift of your voice.
i admit dance saved my life, fiction is a good vacation and television probably won't kill you.
i maintain that addictions are chemical reactions, psychotherapy works if you show up and running away is a fantasy--it is never going to work the way you thought it might.
in my opinion loving her makes her more beautiful
truth is what happens when you close your eyes and jump
creeks dry up sometimes but not all the time
childhood sticks with you
and grown up is when you are finally able to tell your step parents what is really going on, whether you really love them or don't.

my new friend told me yesterday that her daughter had a great time with me, carving pumpkins at a youth group event, even though i gave her a real knife and she cut so deeply into her middle finger that us leaders were afraid she would need stitches. and it is possible that she had said wonderful time because (what pastor in her right/normal mind would do this?): i figured we needed to blast Green Day's dookie and sing along as i rushed her back to her father so he could assess the damage to the precious mid digit. honestly, nobody needs a middle finger more than a junior higher.
i recommended that the patient watch all the episodes of Joan of Arcadia because it is a show about a girl who gets to talk to God.
lizzle looked at me and said, 'abigail, what would i do without you?'
i immediately fired off a snide comment in response but when i woke up this morning it sunk in.
the gratitude in her face and the honesty in her voice were written on the bedroom ceiling this morning when i opened my eyes.
normal people don't get their friends' daughters sliced open and then recommend canceled television shows.
normal people don't listen when someone asks what they would do without you.
this kind of behavior is reserved for painters, poets, and other crazies, hand picked to help with the sorrow and point out the lovely shitty shit all around:

molly made me my double decaf americano in a 12 oz paper cup: room, no sleeve. she warned me it was really hot and then said, 'you look like you're wearing tight clothes today, you're all sexy, what a hot little figure, who knew?'
the world series was rained out for the first time in history
and i voted for a black president last night.

see, there is a lot going on and it isn't that you have to feel about it all, but i do and even though each day i grow up a little more i will never outgrow feeling, as much as i dislike it as much as you dislike it.

good luck trying to get over getting over it.

if you need help crying over it, i can do that, i think.

fill in the list of blanks:
(no peeking)
Something really bad

someone you love

a place you like

a place you don't like

a place you feel safe

Something you are sorry for

something you forgot to do

Body part

Someone you don't like

someone you do like

Good verb

Someone you know well

someone you don't know well

good verb

something good about God

verb

Most merciful God,
We confess that we keep __________ing and cannot free ____________. We have

sinned against you in __________, _______________, and ____________,

by _______________________________ and by forgetting to _____________________.

We have not loved you with our whole __________;

we have not loved ___________________ as much as ___________________.

For the sake of your Son, Jesus Christ, _______________ us.

Forgive ______________, Renew ___________________, and __________ us, so that

we may delight in your ________________ and __________________ in your ways,

to the glory of your holy name.
Amen.

Most merciful God,
We confess that we are captive to sin and cannot free ourselves. We have sinned against you in thought, word, and deed, by what we have done and by what we have left undone. We have not loved you with our whole heart; we have not loved our neighbors as ourselves. For the sake of your Son, Jesus Christ, have mercy on us. Forgive us, Renew us, and lead us, so that we may delight in your will and walk in your ways, to the glory of your holy name.
Amen.

good luck.

but i'm not.
it was pretty late last night so i don't fault him for telling me that my problem with intimacy would still be with me in the morning and that i should lie down and try to get some sleep, if it was at all possible, which was a very gentle way to say what sounded at the time like such a horrific possibility.
so here is another one, a really big one, because he was right (that has been happening a lot lately), the problem is still with me:
What if intimacy is more about not knowing the other person, the way wisdom is sometimes about the task of discovering what we don't know?

What if
if you want to be closer to someone you have to stop thinking you know about her, know what is best for her or what she will say or do? Stop imagining she doesn't love you or wants to leave you. Stop assuming she is crazy and an emotional wreck. And see what happens. You probably get a lot more than information about her favorite color or sex position.
what if
You probably get your life back, you probably get to wake up in the morning and touch her because she doesn't prickle and she doesn't try to escape from the slide of your hand. And when you can really feel her skin, even while she trembles nervously giving over to you, that would be the nice part, the reward for all the constraint it took to stop second guessing her motives or predicting her departure based on the diluted superhuman parts of her that she let you see in the first place.
and it wasn't a betrayal that she didn't show you, it was just the way gravity held her inside herself, not down, feet flat on the earth the way we so often imagine it, but like the very earth itself pressing into its core with such force, turning inward.
what if
she is only spinning so fast inward because she is so accustomed to turning and turning, repenting of herself over and over.
what if
you can, what if you will give her a reason to stop spinning. your eyes, your face, your tears will bring hers out. your gravity, your center will pull her toward you and
what if
you won't be able to get it down, on paper. you won't be making a list of your favorite things about her or the things about her that are driving you crazy . of course you will know them but you will also know all the blank pages and pages are out there, and you want those more than you have ever wanted anything before because that is where you imagine hope will write itself down, in your own handwriting. that is where love goes to grow, the blank pages.
what if
that is what God was trying to tell us about when the prophet wrote that even at the beginning, when it was just dry land and wet water, emptyish as it was, it was good.
what if
God said it was good even before it was all done
what if
God said it so it must be true.
what if
it must be true.

when Kj aksed me to write for vespers, and address the incoming students as well as the usual suspects, i went home (shocking, i know), poured about 20 fingers of some 2buckchuckred in a juice glass and wrote this.

it helps if you know that i kept thinking about the sunny day real estate called 'what it feels to be something on'... its called

what it feels to return/arrive

like the feel in your throat when the tone is perfect and only clear and matches the sound of my heart or when the strings in the bow vibrate just right up through the tendons and soft muscle in your arm or when an old word makes a new sound in your ear because you understand it for the first time
or the first time you kissed and it is just like that
like the first time you heard a baby cry out just to cry
or the way her heartbeat fills in your empty places without even trying.
or his sweatshirt under your hand when you hold on too long to his body hugging you.

and you remember the journey so suddenly when you do
the moment when the road opens up and 75 is as good as flying and the yellow bands in the road and the rows of corn finally tick past faster than you can count the blank spaces dark with fertility

the way you knew as you packed up
you know when you closed the door on the old ways
you broke someone's heart and you had to--
in order to escape.
and their disappointment in you is drifting off
like clouds move across the sun

you had to come see
you had to go where they can't follow
you had to follow the sound of the siren because it was your own heart seducing you.

of course it sounds like a stupid old love song
because it is
the song that says i'll love you for the rest of my life and i'll be here when you need me and i'm not ashamed of you.

i like you.
(which means a lot coming from someone who is really good at hate)

i like-like you.
which means that all the things you are about to say are like the little dreams i never dreamt
(i wait for the night to come, i wait with all my being wrapped around the first star coming out so i can close my eyes and see what comes in the colors you invent).

because when you are here i am here and
little by little
we will both be very soon indeed
drunk with the possibility that
God arrives
God returns
for another sigh another hurricane of grief
for another tear another storming hope
another knock knock joke from your favorite six-year-old.

knockknock
who's there
God
God who?
God who do you think you are to make every day such a trial and such a triumph?

so when you collapse against the sofa in the field abbot's office like a withering vine against the augustine heat of theology
and describe the way
your heart is breaking

just remember
me.

remember those who never intend to master divinity
or those who used to hate you
until i learned how
you can turn rotten carrots into friendship and make the pages of a theological text feel like home.

i hope i will stop imagining your hatred for me because it is not as deathly as i think.

i've always wanted to go home, i've been so homesick.
that is what led me here. to you, who i try everyday to hate.
but you prove me wrong everyday
you tell me i've let you in and i think
hell no
i think i don't change that quickly
but i do. because when i can't hate you like
i want to
it breaks me open.
it breaks my heart
when i see you take communion
when i see you carry your children
when i see you hug each other
or hold hands
when you argue, when you lie
when you cry over deciduous tree leaves falling the same way i do.
and i see your lovely swollen eyes and
runny nose
i break open and see your shame
like a little spark and you hold it out
cupped in your hands like water to drink and you tell me
this is all that is left of Fantasia
one tear
we are so sad
you must invent more
we have so much sadness yet to come
take room for our tears
make a room
make it in the house of your hearts because, and i know it isn't good for your broken down hopes to say it: 'you can't go home you can't go home'

yeah, i like the one about space a little better too, but i really edited that one for hours. this one, what you see is what you get. and i'm practicing being less ashamed of things for now, if i start to shake and cough i'll just return and edit. that way you can watch how it changes too. won't that be fun? sigh.

and it isn't just because i hate everything. it is just because i really hate practicum.
hatehatehatehatehatehatehatehatehatehatehatehatehatehatehatehatehatehatehatehatehatehatehatehatehatehatehatehatehatehatehatehatehatehatehatehatehatehatehatehatehatehatehatehatehatehatehatehate it

i never know who to hug or what to do with my arms or hands. i don't know when to stop or what to do after.
if i went with my preferences i would shake a lot of hands and give a lot of high fives and be done with it.
but i never go with my preferences. and i never know why. so for the past 28 years i have racked up quite a few problems with all the seemingly required hugs i have had to give or take.
and then this happened:

Ames and i were out for our tuesdaynight pre-studyhour pints and i think i had one too many because on the walk back to the car i saw a pack of parlaiments on a streetside table, the kind of parlaiments matteye turned me onto before he cleaned up his act and went premed
and i really wanted one of those nic sticks.
i didn't really register whether the owner of the pack was creepy or not but we were in belltown so as soon as i stopped long enough to address the guy Ames was sure something was going to get messy.
i asked for what i wanted and he answered, 'i'll trade you one for a hug'
images of all the greasy men i've ever known or seen or who have ever tried to give me the eye flashed through my mind. and then i thought of the way i must look in my hippie jacket and pilling sweater and couldn't figure out why anyone would want to hug me. i hesitated but Ames was two steps ahead of me. and the next thing i know Ames is hugging this guy like he is her lost frat brother.
just so you can imagine this scene a little better, the seattle governance requires that restaurants fence off the outside eating area so Ames was leaning in over the waist high fence, hugging away and she looked so happy and glowey and she even said something like, 'hugging is fun!' which sounded crazy but i really wanted the cig so i leaned over and wrapped my arms around sigma chi alpha or whoever he was and then proceeded to chat him up as he tapped out the cancer stick in question.
he lit it, not in his own mouth thank gawd, and i may have exhaled right in his face for all i know, (but probably not) and then we said our goodbyes like gentile acquaintances are wont to do.
as the nicotine kicked in i felt snug enough to ask Ames, who really does honestly love hugging, which is why i love her, 'why do people like hugging?'
she saw right through it.
'who wouldn't want to hug you? you're so cute and sweet.'

the next few hugging incidents are not as creepy but they contribute to my growth and development as well as any potentially traumatic cure for the soul.
for one:
recently i tried to sneak out the back of the cafe after open mic, and my new friend, nathan (the south carolinean carrot muncher), sweating like the tardy cyclist he often is, made a face or a gesture and it seemed like i was suppposed to hug him and i did and it wasn't awkward... and then justin was there and i figured it wouldn't hurt to hug him either, and it didn't.
and then i had a little bit of a vacation from this new not-problem until i realized that people at church really like hugging too so last week at the passing of the peace i started going in for hugs even when they extended their arms to shake hands... and that didn't kill me the way i thought it would. in fact, they seemed to really like it, it seemed really human and kind of fun like how Ames describes it.

so i told nathan
and now he is in on the experiment. i told him that there were people in my youth who criticized the way i just stood there, i think they were trying to tell me that it was hard to eff up hugging but i had managed to do so. and he seemed to understand why i don't really know what to do about all the hugging that comes with the life of a seminarian.
i figured that if i told him about all this he would let it lie, i think i hoped he would get nervous about whether or not i wanted a hug and then he would just give up. and it wouldn't be wierd if he did because there is, in my limited brokendown experience, a sort of statute of limitations on hugging and i thought, until now that everyone sort of knows not only how long to hug once its happening but also how long into the relationship the greeting or parting hugs are abated. and so he had an out, or maybe lots of outs.
but he didn't let it lie.

he didn't let me sneak out of Makeda this morning, he didn't follow the rules so i could slink away thinking thoughts like 'why in the hell do we have to do the whole, 'i'm so glad to see you hug' the first few times we meet if we're just going to quit as soon as i get the hang of it next month?', damnit.

so now there are three of them (people i really like to hug)
jenfox: the one who will just stand there and let me hug her. i tell her 'do the thing' and she brings her arms to her sides and lets me put my face on her shoulder and wrap her up and that has never bothered me, in fact i really really like it.
and Ames: who seems to know that i am in charge of the hugging and can't help myself when she is in the building, i just have to go hug her. and that is like crack cocaine, it is so good.
and nathan, who i could deny, if i really wanted to. but i am becoming more convinced that each time i hug him, at his gentle prodding, of course, it unties some knot in my heart, or head (he says feelings come from our brains, not our hearts) and then i want to hug other people because it is finally making sense why people do this sort of thing.

and you're probably wondering about where martin falls in all this: i don't hug him because i am in lurv with him--get it? good. because that is the best i can do to explain all that today.

here is the eucharist reading from vespers, thanksgiving 2007

It was Passover. The time for thinking about the blood of the lamb on the doorposts telling the angel of death to pass by, Passover.
13 men huddled, perhaps hiding away together. As the sun set they looked over the food before them. Each dish a familiar symbol.
But that night Jesus refused to give them the tradition they had hoped would comfort them.
He stood up and they thought of their fathers reciting the traditional Passover blessings, telling them to remember their past.
He took the bread in his hands and asked God to bless it, he broke it, the way his earthly father had done so many times, but this time he said
"when you eat this bread, don't remember running from Egypt, don't remember fear or death. Remember me. I will nourish you."
And they ate. They probably spoke carefully to each other. Perhaps Peter told a weak joke or two, he was always embarrassing himself.
As they felt their bellies full and leaned away from the table Jesus stopped them,
"I want you to remember me. I want you to think of me when you pour wine. Today is a day to think of blood when you see the deep red that you so freely pour on holy days like today." He asked God's blessing on the wine in his cup and said "Don't think about the blood of lambs anymore, think of my blood. Think of the days I taught you that you must shed blood for your brothers. Think of the good that comes from pain, from sacrifice. Think of my blood, the human blood that runs in me now. It is just like yours and it hurts me to bleed for you but I love you; I would do anything for you--remember that!"

As we eat this meal together remember there is redemption in this food. Come to this table with your hunger pangs and heartache, bring your sadness and anger with you. Fill up your angry spots with the blessing of Broken Bread and the sweetness of the Bitter Cup.

The table is set, the bread is broken, the wine is poured out. The blood has been shed from arms, legs, a heart that felt real human pain. Remember that God has experienced our pain. God knows how to nourish us.

Feel and feed the painful places, eat, drink and be satisfied, in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

once you serve communion, really serve communion, you're ruined forever. it drives you. the service, the community, it drives you to want it more, to live it more.
he says that you have to work out the ordination stuff in your context, rather than allow preparation for ordination to force you away from where you are called to serve right now. he said that when you are ready to move into more responsibility in your ministry you will know, even if you know because your boss is goading you. he said that there is a reason why a pastor should bring the sacraments and why i might not feel it yet, but that one day i will and i'd better be ready to say yes. and that that is what all this is about, knowing when and how exactly i am ready to say yes.

something you should know: CityArts is a new free arts mag in seattle and i like it.
here is why:
How to Write Right
Advice from our Copyeditor

Had a long day? Feel like laying down? Wait a moment. "Lay" needs a direct object (a person or thing that is the object of the verb's action). So you don't lay down, you lay something down: you might lay your firstborn child down in her crib but you lie down if you're doing yourself. We call verbs like "lay" that need direct objects transitive verbs, while verbs like "lie," which don't take a direct object, are intransitive verbs. So next time you're tired, take a deep breath, lay down whatever you are holding, and lie down.

a good friend once tried to explain this to me in the middle of a very embarrassing activity in which i told him to lay down, and he profoundly objected. but it was such chaos that i have often wondered if our entire friendship would have been different, easier, less painful had i understood just a little more, about lots of things. so there's that
(nothing like a good eight years or so to clear a few things up). but, and i'm not making excuses for bad grammar, if none of it had gone down, i would not be writing any of this. and that is what it means to have a found a true bosom friend, i suppose.

i think anyone who tells you you should find your soul mate is crazy because if you're soul is anything like mine, it probably won't end well, if it ends at all, and how long can you really deal with someone who knows so goddamn much about you?
find someone who's soul doesn't reach out across the country to touch yours. find someone who can't possibly imagine what it must be like to know all the things your heart will say.
find someone who knows only tiny little things about you; so that you are a sort of a universe, a whole system of tiny sparklers that might burn him up if he gets too close because the mystery of it will draw him close, he will get close, regardless of the danger. and he will get burned, and then he will come into the bathroom while you're crying in the shower and say something very helpful like: do you want me to come hang out in there with you?
and it will be good for him to have to ask
and it will be good for you to have to answer

but whatever you do, don't date a writer, unless, of course, you like your love life to be splayed across the page. i'll never live any of this down, my only consolation is that it will be well written, perfect grammar, every comma accounted for.

Dear Darfur,
I wrote you a letter and then remembered you couldn't read it.
I sent you money and you used the paper to wrap your wounds

Where does your hope come from? Why is hope the uncommon commodity here? We hoard it and bury it, like treasure in the sand.
How easy it is for me. I assume you have no hope but what I might accidentally send
I think I have it all
At 27 I bought a house and knit a scarf. That same year you buried a child and worshipped in a desert. I took a class on global constraints, you took up a sword and walked ten miles to use it.
One day when I know enough to help you it will be too late and so I try to sit still and listen for your voice on the wind. For the cries of the newborn before he knows hunger and anger, before he has to stand on his own feet and shake his own fist.
And so Selfishly, I take the time to think my way through the territory of your problems, your future, because mine is wrapped up in it.
I am not the refugee and yet
I am wrapped in the sogging blankets of your story, huddled close and very afraid because I have so much to lose.
I have no need to be the refugee but I run from your story because, even in a desert time,
You rain on my parade, the way hurricanes seem to swarm and swallow all that we possess over night,
the way a monsoon season requires a pointed preparation or leaves room for none at all.
I am not the refugee
I am not the refugee and yet
I know you and use your story to escape the pain of my own past. Images of you fill my mind and displace the nightmare knives come down to slay my slumbering innocence or the drivers of my so-called destiny wildly maneuvering toward the last crash.

I have you, in pictures, as real as possible. In the silken glossed desserts of the National Geographic you are smiling at your brother, squatting over a family meal. Once, I wanted so badly to keep you with me
I tore at the black and white photos of the dentist office Smithsonian. I swore out loud when I nearly ripped your ear off. The hygenist looked up from her chart in shock. What could possibly be so upsetting
in the kind pink florescence of the waiting room, your toothless face?
Three squares of you: in the first you greet a friend, in the next your son dies and in the last you smell a rotting pig corpse. I think it was some kind of experiment: when do you grin, when do you chagrin? And I, barely able
to rip you from the text,
(the lines and circles surrounding you, trying so hard to explain you)
without destroying you.
You,. You are upsetting. Your face tells the truth I thought I wanted to see.
I lie to myself, I tell myself that
Everyday I nearly destroy You And it terrifies me to think that you may have already been starved or murdered before the photo was even color-corrected by some lackey, working to earn his own cubicle, or the next telephoto lens with which he can hold you at a distance.
He sits,
hunched and maligned over a computer screen, having given up even a modest dream of changing the world through the whining pathos of stills.
I am not a refugee,
I could send a thank you note to you, for your suffering. I may one day learn how to compose such a thing, because you teach me what pain is, what the end of my road looks like, even as you come to me, pixilated and two dimensional.
But I won't send the thank you just yet, because tonight I may fall into one final sleep and wake up to the oasis for your thirsty soldier sons and the end of the road no longer dragging out beyond the strength of your sisters, because tonight, like many nights, I am still terrified by my mother in the grip of her angry husband, by my father's stoic absence still boring a hole in my heart and I may meet you there, to deliver my thanks
myself.
Sincerely,
...

Dear America,
First I will say that I was asked not to swear so you will have to insert the four letter words as you imagine them. I trust you to be insecure enough to imagine more than I would have anyway.
I am angry with you. You betray and cheat.
I am ashamed of you. You lie and complain. I am afraid of you. You hoard and yell. I know you can't face yourself because you can't answer me, you can't look me in the face and hope I will forgive you
Which of us calls you father anymore?
you are the angry step-father, claiming me as your own only so you can exploit me, disregard my first fathers. Every night you drink yourself into an oblivion just to dull the pain. Even though your beer is mediocre, your cars are slow and your philanthropy is laughable compared to your reality television and football team expenditures.
My real father is the son of immigrants who ate beans and rice through the depression, bending tenderly over lettuce in the fields of your San Fernando valley, my grandfather noticed the blonde children waiting for meat and milk until they starved to death. My real father was a guard at the prison where you sent Charles Manson to be punished by a lifetime supply of toilet paper and snickers bars.
And just like that wrinkled old murderer,
You lead with a limp and pretend you will recover.
Recover what? A memory drives you to strive for super-hero global status. But the memory was always just a memory. When did you ever have your you-know-what together? When did you ever take care of me, my family or the other?
There is something sparkly about you, but even as we have added more stars to the flag, the unlucky 13 stripes, the legacy of divide and conquer, the blind hoping to subdue and fill, the pilgrimage to the holy land of consume and develop haunts us.
But how could I leave you?
I remember when we were young together and I heard stories scrubbed clean of prejudice and poverty. I was told you were kind and broad, that you had a thrilling geography and enough buffalo
the endless plains their thriving bivouac.
It wasn't a lie, but it wasn't true. There was blood on the cotton gin and now there is talk of more fencing at the border.
How can you wrap barbed wire around your heartland? How can you claim to care about the deserted peoples? I know you, you sneak:
you hope you won't have to take care of them unless, against all odds, we all vote for love
i stay because I can't leave you. I feel something like Stockholm syndrome when I think of your clear cutting and smog. You haven't killed me yet, why would I leave? As long as I stay there is a chance I might see you repent.
I would say I wander your streets looking for signs of hope but I am too smart to risk the knife fight and too scared I might meet your rapists. It isn't safe to look for hope here.
I don't know how to live with you or without you. If I could choose a new problem, a new country, I don't think I would.
So I vote angry and often, I write hard and hope to die free. I wash my hands of this overworked soil and then dig another flower bed in what is left. Like an idiot, like an asylum escapee, like a former prozac addict I paint my pain on your walls even though you call it graffiti and threaten to arrest me. I bake cakes for my neighbors and invest in your shaken, not stirred mutual funds. I watch your movies and laugh when I see myself there, behaving recklessly, well-dressed and eating out--seeking pleasure in your sterile, emotional art forms.
American community is held together by one bobby pin for the flyaways and a strip of scotch tape for the campaign posters but held together nonetheless and I guess that will have to do, for the endless now.
God knows how you suffer, how you hide it and why. I would rather not.
And so I remain, affectionately, ambivalently yours,
...

you'll watch this and then, with renewed vigor, search out and watch the seinfeld hour every weeknight for as long as we can keep it on air by silent faithful petitionary watching.
no, it doesn't matter if petitionary is a real word; it has all the form and function of a real word.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gBWPf1BWtkw
be forewarned: you might like bill gates a little after watching him do the robot. i'm a sucker for the robot.

martin keeps playing that song over and over again. he pulls the car over to the side of the street, leans over and not only unlocks the door,
but pushes it hard so it swings open
like the door is an extension of his arms flung open to welcome me in one wild gesture

he picks me up from church history class (which is messing with my heart and my head in the way that sexual disorders messes with the counseling students--they should just call the class church disorders, but ATS won't go for that) and "I wish you would" is playing in the background like cathedral bells marking the noon hour. the bells beg me to look backward, look forward. faith, hope, ding, dong, faith, hope, past, future, dong, dong, dong, and then do it again.

when they ask me what i'm taking this, my third year at seminary i should say Church Disorders, How Not to Hate and Integrating Responsible Parties... Theology One hasn't begun yet so i'm not sure what to call that (mhgs calls it "Theological Mosaic" but somehow i'm already wondering if it should have another name based on the syllabus alone) this year begins with lessons about hate, integrated pastoral personalities, and sharing responsibilities. i think i can explain:

the new vicar asked if i have days off. i said i think of the day off as a day when its ok to accidentally swear (insert canned laughter from other staff members present) or show a bra strap, or wear my painting pants.
she asked about book club. i said that is technically off because i tend to swear there.
it has come to my attention, though, that some (most?) pastors--especially children's ministers--have two personalities. and i don't think i could handle that.
here is how it works: we start out thinking that we should behave a certain way. then one day we don't like it anymore so we address some close friends, who may be parishioners. we ask them to stop thinking of us as pastors in certain context. so they attempt to do so.
here is where it gets interesting:
sometimes, as a pastor, I think that this system breaks down because these parishioners who are also good friends, are incapable of seeing beyond the clerics and it is their fault. as if the parishioners are two dimensional people who simply can't imagine their pastor as other than preacher, communicant, marrier, burrier (barrier--hmmm), baptizer. but what if its the pastor, what if we can't stop acting like their idea of pastor? it is just as much about how the pastor acts as how they perceive her.
if you trick your parishioners into thinking you simply gave up swearing, drinking, smoking, brutal honesty, arguing, overeating, burning the toast or any other vice the day you were ordained then of course they will either see through you and mistrust you. or they will think you betrayed them when they come over and see that case of pbr in the fridge.
let's be honest: i took this job because there was swearing in the narthex on my second visit, and i wasn't the one doing it!

so then i started thinking about perfectionism, especially because i received marks that would make any olympian proud
in old testament and philosophy but practically failed my exegesis paper.
there is this person i stopped hating, no, it isn't mccain (i still hate him). it is this person, let's call him rico, even my husband has a man crush on--martin reads Details now because it is delivered to the seminary free (chalk one up for the gay infiltrators). and i thought maybe it was the bucket of Sessions or the end of the week of intensive classes with dr. craig barnes, a man who could accidentally turn anyone into a nicer person. but i'm thinking maybe all this time i hated rico because he was always trying so hard to be perfect, to be all things to all people, and that afternoon i stopped hating him so much because he seemed a little less interested, if even for a moment, in being mr. right. maybe it was the way he was leaning, or the words he said or the way he said them... i don't know.
i thought, at first that i was becoming nicer (as unlikely as that is). now i think it was just as much about his behavior as mine.

maybe this next part should be another entry entirely but i just don't have that kind of compartmentalization going just yet so it is here:

at text study we read matt 9.9-13. nevermind all the normal exegesis--the lead pastor remarked that the part he can't get over is that matthew just takes off after Jesus. in response i waited for a lull in the conversation and then i spouted off my own theory which was mostly like this:
"what if (it may be poor exegetical method but, honestly, i always start that way)
jesus was walking by matt's office one day, and frustrated by a lack of sleep or whatever, he walks into the office and tells matt something like, hey, come outside with me, i have to show you something, and then once they get outside jesus says follow me, and matt's interest is piqued because jesus takes off in the direction of matt's own house. so matt starts thinking one of his kids is suddenly ill, or the house is on fire. when they arrive at matt's house jesus says something like, hey do you have anything to eat? and matt looks at his watch and realizes he isn't going to make it back to the office today, or maybe ever. so they sit down and have a few beers and chat. and come on, even matthew would probably be disinterested in collecting taxes after a few beers with jesus, right?"

so by this time all the pastors sitting around are howling with laughter and one shrieks about what they must be teaching me at that crazy mars hill. and i admit to just barely passing my first exegesis, class and avoiding theology classes like the plague. but then the laughter dies down a bit and the lead pastor, who is one of my favorite people in the whole world--through no fault of his own-- says "well, that is probably more accurate than the way i imagined it."
don't get me wrong, he is a complex man. hopefully, by now you know that i tend to represent people in my stories as boobs at times, even if they aren't.
but, all i really mean to say is that that felt pretty damn good.

yes, it felt pretty damn good.

screw all my friends, they're all full of shit.
i wish you would...
i wish i could.

so i'm that much closer to the commencement,
i have big plans to
cower in fear
in my favorite sweater
all the old love letters fresh in my mind.
with the windows clear

you know you could
i wish you would.

i recently registered for the third consecutive year at one institution. i haven't transferred in transcripts or planned an escape. i haven't applied to another school, i haven't even snubbed the second annual flag football game--even though by this point, had i stuck to the original plan to get an MACS, i shoulda been long gone. this is a real breakthrough for me, given that the last time i went to the same school for three years in a row was 3,4,5 grade.
to commemorate my achievement(s?) i've transcribed the following for your perusal. let's just say it came just in time to remind me why i keep doing what i do and how i couldn't really stop now, even if i tried.

Sent: Sunday, August 17, 2008 8:47 PM
Subject: about the paper

hi J, hope the vakay went well.
i am a little nervous about the paper. i'm close to finished but would like to ask you a few questions just to make sure i actually did the assignment and not some other sort of random research paper. i'm hoping i can describe to you a sort of outline of what i did and you can point to holes i should fill in or tell me it is probably an just a fine paper and i should get over my grade... or both.
i have monday and tuesday (afternoons) open.

thanks,
A

Date: Sun, 17 Aug 2008 22:32:00 -0700
Subject: RE: about the paper

Can you send me the outline via e-mail? Or, if you want to meet face to face, will it be okay to leave it until Tuesday right after lunch? Let me know. J

Sent: Monday, August 18, 2008 12:25 PM
Subject: RE: about the paper

this is an overview of each section of the essay:
Why Romans is special (to the Canon)
Paul's motivation
Jews vs. ethne
Paul's departure from the Hellenistic letter structure
Difficulty with 1:16-25
16-25 as foundational
Paul's thesis: new relationship to the law through Christ
Judaism's anti-idolatry stance
Paul's rhetorical strategy in 16-25
Paul's (post)modern readership's bias
the verses, in turn
16More on Paul's motivation, why he is unashamed
17God is God
ek pisteos eis pistin
this may set the tone for the rest of the book of Romans
Paul addresses Judaism again
18wrath and righteousness
19,20 without excuse
21,22, 23 Paul addresses pagan hearts
24, 25 Paul addresses homosexuality
ethics and strategy throughout 16-25
Why Romans is special (to us)
relevance of Romans

in a previous email i asked you to find the holes but now i'm reflecting and i'm concerned because i sat down to write the paper and felt really inadequate.
maybe it wouldn't be possible to do the assignment wrong because exegesis is kind of a random research paper project. Maybe it would be harder for me to do not do the assignment than i thought--you gave rather broad perameters.
but i hope you can help with the more personal side of the problem:
it all started because i didn't know how much to rely on the original language, given my lack of skill there. i ended up reliant on commentaries and making several important leaps on intuition. (which, i know can lead to trouble) for example: i defended the idea that the gospel was "news" because it seemed important as i was writing, then reread Johnson only to find that he thought the same thing and i had simply missed it before. and while it seems that Johnson and i are probably ok to assume that the gospel is news, what if i made a serious error on another point? what if in the context of all these commentaries, my voice is just the voice of another whiny, ignorant seminarian repeating all the same mistakes?
in a way i'm reinventing the wheel when i don't rely on commentaries and not trusting the commentaries when i do rely on them. Moreover, the more i read, the more difficult it is to imagine that i have anything to contribute to the conversation.
Also, i'm concerned that each paragraph might be hiding something that, further down the road, would lead to a terrifying heresy. i mean, i didn't write anything really insane but i have a tendency to try to say too much, without proper defense or clarity--and that is something that could affect my grade and/or career, if i can't get it under control.
its like a catch 22: either i'm not contributing because i'm inadequate or i'm not contributing because i'm unintelligible. if the assignment was to exegete my experiences, i could do that. Maybe that is what i have learned in two year of mhgs. but when it comes to Romans i don't know where i fit in the conversation. i feel like exegesis is an invitation to a really important dinner party, but on the way through the door, they tell you not to say anything stupid, which just makes me more nervous.
i know you're a docter; are there any pills i can pop for this? good grief.
so that is the rant.

i could come tuesday after lunch to chat, unless you think i'm just overreacting.
A.

[THIS IS WHERE IT GETS GOOD:]

Abigail,

I doubt if you can do the assignment entirely wrong. Your analogy about being invited to an important dinner party is a good one. However, when you get to the door, they only ask you to be respectful of others' opinions when you come into the room. And at the end of the party they are asking you to summarize where you think you fit into the conversation. So you will inevitably use the opinions of others (only the modern period thinks originality is a bonus), and anyway I do not expect unique contributions to the discussion about Romans 1 from MDiv students. Just be coherent and document well.

Your nervousness about using Greek is understandable, but the point of the program here at MHGS is to be able to use the commentaries/resources intelligently, not to work in the original text with publishable results.

I agree this is not a typical MHGS assignment, but it is because there is a longer, broader conversation about Romans than about Freud. And it is possible to produce heresy, but it is not the unforgivable sin.

Can you give me a one or two sentence summary of what Paul says in Romans 1:16-25 that is important for anyone these days? The outline looks fine ... but I don't know what your thesis is.

As far as meeting tomorrow, I can come in. It is really your call whether the conversation is necessary. There are no pills. Sorry. But don't put such high expectations on yourself that you end up a basket case. It really isn't worth it.

Let me know what you want me to do.
J.

end of transmission
and by way of footnote i would like to add that one time i made an appointment with this prof and the good dr responded with an email, all it said was "it is written."
just thought you should know.

[i wish there were a more concise answer to the question, "how is school?" but there isn't. so here is how it really is: high drama, high expectations, and lots of email to put the problem into perspective. it is not a rhythm we can maintain for long but it has been ok for the past three year and it will have to do for the next three, whee.]
and now i'm off to walk the dog before it rains again.

search youtube for
tight bro's [sic] from way back when
and put your nose in the corner.

please note the use of the maracas at the end of the song.
thank you.

in order to distract myself from the apophatic and the problem of gelassenheit i googled myself (my name). Derrida says there is much in naming, or giving a name (to him they are two different things).
it turns out i am lost.
there are people out there looking for me. or the old, hyphenated version of me, which i'd rather not discuss anyway... and that is actually pretty fitting.
i think, given the option, i'll stay lost for a while.
why not?
maybe they know more about me by knowing less.

i woke up this morning feeling all crumply and weird.
and when i opened the fridge to think about milk what i really wanted was a beer. it was 8:30am.
so i didn't have beer.
i think mostly i wanted comfort food.
cheese, probably. or just to lick the salt off the salt shaker.
so here is a recipe my dad used to make me when i was little (he is probably making it right now but he only cooks on the barbecue so you could try that, i however, only cook in the toaster oven so that is what i'm recommending):

first you go to the farmers market and buy a tomato that looks like it is about to go bad; they usually have a bin in the truck or wherever with these half price tomatoes that are just splitting at the seams and they tell you you should choose for yourself because they don't want to be held responsible if you get a moldy one.

but though they are right on the edge they are just right.

it is sort of like a cure for the common crumply feeling.
let me know if you like it but don't say anything if you don't because that would be sort of a nasty surprise.

newspapers
cnn

so i didn't hear the speech; i read about it in the Stranger's Last Days column, which, you might be thinking qualifies as a newspaper but, trust me, it doesn't. Nobody knows news better than a photojournalist's wife and i'm here to tell you that the Last Days is NOT news--its much better!

so here is the Obama quote:
"The real problem is not that someone who doesn't look like you might take your job--its that the corporation you work for will ship it overseas for nothing more than a profit. I believe deeply that we cannot solve the challenges of our time unless we solve them together--unless we perfect our union by understanding that we may have different stories, but we hold common hopes; that we may not look the same and we may not have come from the same place, but we all want to move in the same direction--towards a better future for our children and our grandchildren."
and here is what Last Days said about that:
"In a testament to Obama's conviction and/or acting chops [and/or speech writers--hooray writers!], none of this made Last Days want to throw up. Obama '08!"
then something about a man building a robot and programming it to kill him and they're calling it suicide..

then there is a bit about a pigeon running around 3rd and Union with a thyringe thtuck through ith head like an arrow (keep that in mind for Halloween costume next year).
"This week continues with one of the more pathos-rich scenarios to unfold on a Seattle street since LD watched that saltine dissolve in a shallow puddle...[i remember that!] ...Once LD posted Melyssa's report on the Slog, not one but 2 Slog commenters revealed they too had seen the syringe pigeon. 'I saw that pigeon in about the same place a week or two ago, 'wrote Andrew. 'For what it's worth, it appears to be a chronic condition for this pigeon rather than a fatal one.' 'I, too, saw that same bird, or another one with the same affliction, a week or so ago at the ... bus stop,'wrote DJ Girth [haha]. '2 junkies were laughing at it. It sort of felt like they had something to do with it.' These reminiscences brought a bracing rant from Greendyke: 'Jesus fuck--this pigeon has been walking around like this for 3 weeks and at least 3 sloggers have seen it and NO ONE in Seattle has helped it? I am ashamed to be a human being.' Finally, key perspective was provided by Comte: 'You ever try to catch a pigeon? I personally wouldn't feel all that comfortable trying to wrap my hands around a squirming bird with th business end of somebody's works sticking out of it. And while it may seem callous and inhumane, I would point out that the poor bird is apparently surviving, so that says something for the resiliency of Columba livia.'"

then, on my birthday: "Nothing happened today, unless you count the AP revelation that the 2-year-old [sic] boy in La Joya Texas, who was found dead with a fatally fractured skull was most likely accidentally crushed by a morbidly obese relative. Good one, God."

and then i got this email from our minister of outreach (who is one of the few people who understands my ministry most of the time):

Monday, March 24, 2008 - 10:05 AM PDT
State shuts down another North Seattle motel
Puget Sound Business Journal (Seattle)

For the second time in less than a week, the Washington Department of Health has shut down a motel in the 12000 block of North Aurora Avenue in North Seattle.

This time, the state shut down the Seattle Motor Inn at 12245 N. Aurora Ave., with an inspector saying "members of the public who may choose to stay there are at risk of serious injury and/or illness because of the motel's unsanitary and unsafe condition."

Last week, the state shut down the Orion Motel at 12045 N. Aurora Ave. in North Seattle, citing "mold and other unsanitary conditions."

State officials said they're responding to complaints from the city of Seattle when inspecting and revoking the licenses of the North Seattle motels.

The Seattle Motor Inn, according to the state's inspection, revealed in one unit that "a five-gallon bucket filled with dark brown, fetid water from a leaking fixture was being stored under the vanity next to the bathroom."

In another unit, "sharp metal wire stuck out from the edge of the mattress ... and the walls were grimy and in poor condition with thick runny gobs of dried-on liquids found throughout."

In a third unit, "mold was found growing on the wall behind the toilet."

The pool at the motel "is one-third full of fetid, contaminated water" and the pool area "is littered with debris and discarded items." And the inspector noted that "nearly all of the smoke detectors tested at the property were not operable."

The owner of the Seattle Motor Inn, listed by the state as Dean and Jill Inman of Bothell, have 20 days to request a hearing and contest the charges. The motel's license was revoked on March 22.

sure, i like when government officials are as poetic as to use the phrase "runny gobs" in a report but i was there every Monday afternoon for a good many months and the fetid, gobby nast was real moreover, the children who played and lived and tried to do homework in those rooms were real. and they loved their moms and dads and that was real too. and i consider myself lucky not to have contracted a serious disease despite my very real dis-ease.

No wonder i felt so wild and weirded out last week.
i can't believe people worry about PMS when all this kind of roller coastering hopeful and otherwise shitty shit is really going on all around us; maybe we should all be moody and bitchy EVERYDAY.

did i mention i love you more than i love tomwaits, which is a lot?

"...in order to treat children ethically we need to be able to hear what it is they value and to be able to see how they make sense of the social world.[...] Children have standpoints which are not the same as adult standpoints; moreover they know a great deal about parenting and its consequences"(Smart, Neale, Wade, 2001).
they know.
you know.
i know.
we know.
more than anyone expected we would.

this is what it feels like to make sure your heart broke before,
by breaking my heart over and over.
when grandma celia died i really wanted to see the body.
this is sort of like that.
i will always want more.
always.
from you.
from me.
it feels like i'm losing it.
but not really.

there is something about reading
what i wrote
when it is
written all over your face.

i never knew my own strength
i never knew how much power i had
or didn't have.
a kind of power without any power
like magic, all tricks and turning
but it really mattered,
didn't it?
yeah.
every shining time.

i may have scandazilized my spiritual director.
but, as my good friends used to say, "I'm payin' for it!"
she may call and cancel the rest of the meetings we have scheduled.
but what can you do?
not a wholedamnlot.
but i'm taking suggestions anyway.

sometimes my thoughts are so loud i put on the headphones and then forget to push play, and i don't even realize i've forgotten.

wow lent came early this year.
happy valentine's day.

and my birthday will be on good friday this year. maybe we won't have cake.

my 3,4,5 class and i are working our way through the voyage of the dawn treader.
they keep asking really good questions like
"what EXACTLY is going on?!"
they crack me up.
and i got a little lost when prince caspian was retelling the entire journey (that pissed me off, i really didn't get that part) and i told them and they said they were lost too and "could we draw a map?" and "what if i draw a picture of the ship that is actually helpful, could i do that?"
i said, in all honesty, "that would be amazing."

and, not to brag, or anything, but they also built models of church buildings and told us all about them and all the problems their parishioners were having, or not having, because the roof caved in or the walls were too high or there wasn't a wall where one might have been. i sat there with my mouth hanging open the whole time because they understand more about church buildings than most people do and especially because they kept bringing their explanations back to what would be best for the people inside or outside the church buildings because that is what really matters--the people.

in other news
my new year's resolution may have been about not trying to carry in too much stuff from the car so i won't drop things in the snow or mud. that is the way this year is turning out anyway.

so i gave up straining my eyes for lent. which is as much to say that i finally went to the eye doctor
he said this will only sting a little. and then when i complained he said he couldn't very well tell me that it was going to hurt like hell.
he said i am farsighted which means i've been fooling myself by compensating, and that if i would just relax i'd realize that i can't really read the words without a little help.
ouch.
happy valentine's day again.
lurv.

like some mythic creature, angry, disheartened and volatile
like a stirred pot that bubbles, boils, toils-
trouble
that is how i am these days.
conversation on race and i speak about my hard won white skin, hardened, burning itching, aching, tingling like a sun burn, all the time.
skin is meant to protect us but it is so fragile, even the dull knives are dangerous (even if it is overcast you still get burned). i've hated my skin just like you have hated yours, but let's not compare heartache for once. damnit.
skin can't really protect us. nothing can.
i can't possibly take care of you, why would you think anyone can take care of anyone? are you that hopeful still? why don't you just be hopeful and i'll be, well, not as hopeful as you and that will just have to do for now.

usually honesty is a really lonely, dark place.
and though you come to me afterward and let me hug you and you thank me for being inarticulate with you
i just don't know what to do next.

all the things i thought would kill me are not killing me. the disagreements and yelling matches and embarrassing thoughts and holes in the floor that i thought i'd fall through, that i feared you would look through, are just sort of happening and i can't stop them and i'm still here.

the self i have is a brightly colored self with a large dangerous beak for cracking tough nuts and
it is rapidly wildly going up in flames. which is not bad but quite a spectacle in my humble opinion.
and the wings we always wanted, what of those? well, ouch.

somewhere there is a god who sees all this happening and laughs gently, i have just enough faith to believe: God laughs.

perhaps God is loyal, i don't know.
but lets not kid ourselves, i've become pretty damn ballsy lately and if i can make it through another turn of the planet, that will be good.
i always thought superman was kind of stupid, i mean just going out in the sun, is that all it takes? just go out in the light and everything will be fine? seems like its too easy and yet it wasn't always easy enough. that is stupid.
it isn't easy. it is never easy. you know what happens to people who go too close to the sun.
what a bitch.
seminary can be a real bitch some, er, most of the time.

and that is OK.

where i'm supposed to be.
and that doesn't happen very often.
and i know this because i am somehow finally able to write essays again. and it really (and i'm being honest now so proceed cautiously)
it really doesn't matter to me if the professors like the essays because i am getting to the bottom of things and feeling satisfied by the way the paragraphs end. the titles make me hopeful and the last paragraphs make me stop and then i want to read the whole thing over again even though i just spent two weeks writing it.
i am finally getting the writing done.

and the good grades might be nice but i think it was better than an A today when we got into the church van to leave the motel ministry and PHoff raised both fists triumphantly in the air and proclaimed, "I love my job!" and i felt partially responsible because i was the one who told him it was his turn to read a story and when he asked if he was in charge of singing i said, "yes, yes you are."
and i'll be damned if we didn't sing every single Christmas song he could think of, plus away in a manger because he looked at me like i ought to have more singing to do.

so, remember bitchbitchbitch and i was sure i would never finish? well i did it. you can read it in the extended entry.

vent:
it has been a terrible week. the kind of week that comes so close to Christmas.
things are so much worse in December: it is colder and people are trying so hard to buy the right thing, send the right card, not eat too many cookies, not burn down the house, feed and clothe the homeless.

so you lost your advent calendar? perfect. here is what you do: just go into the kitchen and each night before bed open up a different cabinet door, or open up a different box (cereal crackers cookies). your life is an advent calendar; open another door today and peek inside at who is hiding behind it. wake up and open your eyes. who is there today? day seven is about to end, what did you find behind another door day?

advent is my favorite part of this whole Christmessy time.

i have very little sympathy for myself, so i am abusing the internet.

here is today's impossible assignment:
Final Essay: Living Faithfully in a Postmodern Cultural Context
After reading Bauman’s Liquid Modernity, students select one the book’s five main themes (Emancipation, Individuality, Time/Space, Work, or Community) and write an 800-1,200 word essay. The essay will help readers appreciate the implication of the postmodern turn and gain a fresh vision for faithful Christian living in this cultural context. The essay should be aimed at the readership of Christianity Today/Relevant Magazine. Students will each have approximately 10 minutes to present their essay.
Due: December 4, 2007

it begins to seem like a problem poetry cannot solve.

i could just drop out, and do something important like pregnancy.

and then i hear a friend's voice:
"quit being such a baby; you're in graduate school"(insert footnote)

(chalk one up for all my favorite mistakes and the lessons we learned along the way.)

will i one day tell myself:
"quit being such a baby; the baby needs you"?

that is what i am afraid of

and they wonder why i don't have kids of my own...

this goddamn paperwritingbullshit, its making me crazy.

oh, and just for the record: remember second grade when i punched Matt in the face? well, i think he might be a doctor one day and that makes him a either smarter or stupider than i am... but what i'm trying to tell you is that i sort of feel the same way now that i did then: just really stupid
and i'm not really sure that this is all happening because i'm not really capable of something like that or like this, am i?

awhell.

I'm at my favorite place in greenwood, Chocolati. it is the chocolate place, not a coffee place. Molly, the chocohottie (that is what it says on her business card under manager) just told one of her customers that she is next to use the bathroom because she is "here working and he is here just sitting around being Jewish."
somebody shouted out, "he has to work pretty hard to be Jewish, you know."

Friends from Cali visited on Sunday, it was so good to see them and get all the gossip from their glock-shooting combat boot wearing department of corrections YAHOO! using nine computer household dashboard satellite navigation system perspective.

Yes, i have friends like that. they help me stay connected to my CCPOA roots. Not to say, everyone should have to feel the way it felt when Neal brought a gun into my apartment and I actually thought about my mortality for a split second when Martin pointed it at the kitchen cabinets where we keep the breakfast cereal (how often have I wanted to do that!?), even though I usually try to get very drunk in order to avoid thinking about a quick death by bullet to the brain.

So last night we pulled into our parking lot and the headlights pointed right at a huge pile of garbage. I think the garbage man avoided our building last week. And Martin says to me: "I hope we don't move back to Morgan Hill."

Talk about ambivalence! We miss our friends so much, but we just couldn't ever move back there. This is the strangest feeling.
I decided last night, with the help of Trader Joe's, that I can in fact make a skanksgibbing dinner even though I hate the holidays--that Target commercial with the Advent calendar doors opening on toy trains and table settings makes me really really upset.
We will invite our friends in the tradition of the MoHill Orphan Thanksgiving. But in the true Divinitybiblethumper spirit we will call it the Orphan widow stranger Skanksgibbing and play the Dune board game over and over until I win for once.

Just know that if you're reading this and you want some not-family company on 11/22 come to our new house and be ready for The Spice and maybe a gom jabbar in the jugular, if you're unlucky. Fear is the little mind killer.

I set my mind in motion.

In closing I will just say Molly is telling somebody about her birth control and everything, I love it here.

every week we visit the kids whose parents are forced to use a local motel (named after a steak house: the black angus) for transitional housing.
And because we don't want to call it something boring like "motel ministry" we call it "Good News!" (exclamation mark mandatory).

And every week i love it (exclamation mark optional).

There is this one kid who can't be more than 6 years old and I swear he is God's little brother. But none of us can say his name right because we can't get past his speach impediment, so we don't really know what is going on...

We carved pumpkins last week and they had what some people would call "a wonderful time".

Pastor Hoffman said, "how did you show them Jesus?" or some other question that sounded like that but also more like something he would actually say.

And I told him that we just did what we thought would be fun. We just showed up and tried (granted, it wasn't very hard trying) to have a good time.

And I know Jesus was there, damn it. But I didn't say it just like that. And PHoff was pleased. I could tell by the look on his face. It was sort of this smiley, wiley, quiet wondering exactly how we all got on staff.

Martin started calling him that, PHoff, and I thought for sure he would put a gentle stop to that but instead he let me borrow a book called Don't Make Me Stop Now (underlining of title will have to remain implied). And before he let me run off with it he borrowed my orange highlighter (seminarian style) and wrote "PHoff" really big on the title page.
after he just read me this: "He looked at her hair streaming out of the window and congratulated himself on learning to love not who she was when he first met her but the woman she had become to him as he navigated all sorts of treacherous currrents in his own psyche, and he had told anyone who would listen to him that this was what real love was, a frequent and vigilant guaging of your own reality, constant calibrations to include your lover in th eworld that would surely overwhelm you if you let it remain yours alone."

In other news,
we bought a house and it is a fine little house. The original owners, who only recently moved out, hung little rocks from the limbs of a small tree in the backyard. They are like Christmas tree decorations, only different. Most of all, it has a white picket fence, just a little bit of one, along the neighbors' driveway. I think I will just leave it alone until one day it falls over onto our neighbors' car and that will be that, I suppose.

so the bees are dying. but one huge one just came in the apartment (did you know I don't believe in shutting the screen door? well, I don't.)
and even though martin doesn't believe in karma, he keeps talking about it... like when something really fair happens it is as though he has just sighted a rare species of rat.
all i'm saying is that i have been stung so many times by bees that i think next time i may have a highly allergic reaction or just swat it away like a mosquito. no one can say.
so it is slightly nice to hear that they are not doing well... but of course here i am mired in ambivalence.
violent ambivalence:
i want the bees should all go to hell, damn them.
but also, that their furry little asses would hold still and just be OK for once.

i don't know. i don't know. is there karma for bees?
they probably have their own saint, it is probably francis, so you know it is a good one.
what do you have to do to get a saint, is there a weight requirement?

what is worse, I have finally figured out that there is one person on the earth that i hate more than all the others.

there, i said it.

pastor hoffman asked me how my swear jar is coming along.
he is a man full of great questions. i really admire him.
sometimes i think i should have a mean thoughts jar... and i ought to put in a coin every time i have a really mean thought and then i could anonymously send the money to the person i hate and i could tell myself, "If they only knew what all that money really means..!" because it would be nice to quantify my hatred and then package up the data and enclose a note that says: this is exactly what i owe you, this is exactly how much you are worth, this is exactly how heavy you ought to be, this is exactly, but exactly how very much i hate you, no more, no less. maybe we would all be very much relieved to have it finally documented and out there in an understandable tangible communicable form.
and do you think it would be enough to pay off the house? nah, because i don't even have that much to begin with so it really puts all that hate into perspective... i mean, i don't think i have enough to really buy the farm or anything like that, but man oh, man i sure do have enough to make it worth while.

as for you and your house: i love you,
whoever you are who reads this and sometimes pretends not to because i know i can tell you whatever i want and you won't write back about bad grammar.

if i get a small box of pennies in the mail because you think i am abusing the internet and my privileges as an english speaker and you hate me for it, i'll just suppose it isn't that bad, because it could have been enough to buy a house but in the end it was just a box of pennies.

"this is what it is really like" (or "this is why we make good drunks"):

i am, at this very moment, sitting in class listening, watching the group presentations from our mission projects.
i feel impatient because we are all very busy listening to each other. and congratulating each other and its all painful.
how can all these people working for good grades and heartfelt thanks be so uncomfortable for me?
what if i don't "like" the presentation? then i am the outcast.
what if i don't offer gratitude and clap loudly? then i am missing all the wonderful work done all around me.
how can my opinion be wrong? why is this happening?
i feel mean and rude and closed off
am i just immature? because i don't want to do this anymore?
it is sort like a room full of bad poems... and they are not bad to the people who wrote them but they just don't say anything to me.
and that is OK, you know, in the anne lamott sense of OKness. but it doesn't FEEL OK.
i feel like i'm taking crazy pills.
so i went to feed the meter and get a drink of water. i will survive.

went to see anne lamott and she looks as beautiful as ever.
someone stood up at the microphone amidst the huge crown of anne-fans and said i have a problem with death and crucifixion at easter, can you talk a little about that?

and she did.
she said that we need to understand our spiritual identities.

all i know is:
i don't think i should go to the tulip festival because i would just want to lie on the tulips and that would crush them.
especially a yellow tulip with one red petal.
so much depends on one red petal.
it is all quite frustrating.

and now a (wholenother) confession:
i was supposed to anoint people at the easter vigil by wiping oil liberally across and down their faces.
i didn't, i stood there with my whole head dripping oil, it was getting in my eyes and i couldn't see very well. i crossed their foreheads liberally rather than slathering them up and down with the sign of Christ.
i was supposed to tell them
"in remembrance of your babtism ... you bear the sign and seal for the kingdom of God."
but instead i said "you are signed and sealed..." so
that night i was lying in bed wondering why it had sounded a little off and i realized
the answer to that question just happened to be
stevie wonder.
and how he has permeated the vernacular

i made it sound like they were entering the kingdom of motown as if they will meet st. peter and tell him "here i am baby, signed sealed delivered."

Father forgive me, i don't know what the hell i'm doing.

so if you are keeping up with the blog you might already know:
i find myself attaching to people now.

i used to be able to avoid this but now i can't help it.

attachment is like a new wilderness to me and instead of disposing with people, i find myself hugging them, like a bafoon, wrapping my arms around over their shoulders or placing my hands on their shoulder blades (where the wings would go) and pulling them close to me.

today is my niece's fifth birthday. i bought her a pink wimple with silk flowers around the edge and asked her to tell me how many she thinks i love her. she said 14. i told her she was wrong and held her close and rocked her on the kitchen floor until she laughed and said "100!"

i don't know what that means but i'll bet she does.

then her little sister came in with the fuzzy pajamas on and we shouted good night to each other until their mother kicked me out of the house (as politely as she could manage) i don't blame her.

it is just that when we truly connect it is sort of wild and unstoppable.

i don't think i like this new abigail who was definitely not functioning properly when i heard on thursday that the parish administrator (one of my new favorite people) had been sent to the hospital to get staples in his head. when i saw him today i think we were both surprised that i was touching him, actually HUGging him (i'm not the type to hug, you see). i stopped hugging him and then martin hugged him and i thought O. God, who are we hugging all over this poor man?

why am i so attached to my friend darren? of course he is an amazing person: fun, helpful, graceful, wise, loving, gentle... all the good things. but that is not enough reason, or so i tell myself.

there is something in me that cares more now. my mother in law said that she saw me nurturing this weekend, she never knew how nurturing i could be. this is probably because i have never been as nurturing as i could be.

i think i need one of those name tags with the blue edges that says "Hello, I'm"
and i will write: "not prone to caring or connecting or attachment but you never really know." in the white space, as if it is my identity and you never knew before... because we haven't yet met.

and i will wear it when i look in the mirror, to remind myself that i am capable of new things like hugging and attachment and (gasp) nurturing.

it is a good thing i gave up swearing for lent... otherwise i wouldn't have said any of this... the entire entry would have been two words
one of them holy and the other not.

stands for revised common lectionary.
which will probably be the end of abigail as you know her.
i have also taken on certain ministerial responsibilities (checking up on my kids) that require(s) attending two holy communion services every sunday (I will have the liturgy memorized shortly; i am getting my fill of the body of christ-lemmetellya).
but strange things happen to me in church now. i am actually listening!

so i thought i would confess.

i have an idea that death is about movement away from me. my abuelito keeps telling me he is going to die. i told him to stop worrying about my faith and just get home to jesus...

but sometimes i tell myself someone is dead because i don't know what to do with their absence. i guess i'm just not afraid enough of death to avoid really pretending hard. the mourning is easier if i assume it will be final.

of course i have only done this with two people so far (i'm still young, you see).
and they both came back... and it has taken me two and half years to know what to do
enter rcl

i was wondering why i would want them to come back, why i would let them come back, why i wouldn't try harder to keep them, er... gone.

i am an idiot. that is why, that is the whole reason.
a complete *&$%ing numbskull.

most of you have heard the story about jesus being a sucker so i won't explain all that here. but i think i am closest to my call when i am at my most dumbest.

anyway, if you have been following the rcl, you know that last week was all about the prodigal son. and i realized

my friend who was lost has been found.

and i wished he was dead and i wanted it to be final but i kept my ear to the ground and my eye to the horizon and a figure finally moved a little closer than usual, the waves of heat obscured the vertical line on the horizon and i saw, as he moved closer, that he was on his knees the way ancient pilgrims approached a sacred place.

and i like a fool was hopinghopinghoping. like a drunkard, i was stumbling and slurring and misunderstood over and over again.

today is my birthday, of course, so i have annuals on my mind... three years from now we will be back to the week after the return of prodigal son and i will be back to singing happy birthday to myself (really quietly the way my abuelito likes to do--i was singing "they say its your birthday! nananananana!" alone, while i put away laundry last night and martin caught me... it was sort of funny, but altogether ridiculous and perhaps to be avoided in the future, when i am older and wiser.)
as i chalk up the lectionary passages the epiphanies come with punctuated equilibrium... like the good times, the births and deaths, the birthdays and holy days and bad days.
and i thought you should know, just so you know

i'm just saying is all.

so i will just tell you and you will have to work it out and get worked up on your own.
it will be my birthday soon.
we are going to see the bodies exhibit (real human bodies!).
http://www.bodiestheexhibition.com/
the best part of this event is that my husband (a man who is heroic in all ways, if you ask me) told his parents that going to said exhibit, with them, would be my birthday wish.
if you had asked me what i wanted for my birthday i might have thought it was too crazy to say "bodieeeez!" out loud... i would have said 'oh, lets just go out to dinner' and then i would have suggested a restaurant where i could try to get a lettuce wedge (lettuce being my current favorite food). but cadavers and in-laws seem like the perfect way to spend a day, especially my birthday, don't you think?

i am serious.

think about the poetic quality of the whole thing...
it is going to be a(*&^%ing)mazing

the nomadic homeless shelter is leaving a week earlier than expected. they have been on the front lawn of our church for almost 2 months and i think i'm really going to miss them. they are so sad and perfect and i think i learned more from them than i did from dan allender last semester... if you can believe that.

i'm going through a van morrison stage. it is like a bob dylan stage or a neil young phase, or a led zeppelin stage, only different.

somehow i am getting junkemail that is really really poetic. the subject lines seem to be the first lines of poems but i am too afraid that if i open it up it will just be an advertisement for a penis enlarger... so i just stick with the first line.

and that is a good metaphor.

a dear friend of mine is opting out of the class called prayer, discernment and listening (or something like that) to take a class on transferring photos to glass, which makes them a little easier to get at... talk about discern...

ha! another truly poetic moment.

it is pretty much raining poems here, like the way rumi claims that blessings fall all around us.

and when something is really true, i begin to wonder if the planes won't be able to land because the cloud cover is so thick with serendipity.
can you tell i am writing this from the cupcake place, where everything is usually at least sort of OK... at least you can get a damn good decaf americano and a sticker that suggests we rock out with our cupcake out or maybe: legalize frostitution.
(i love a good switcheroo of p with f, you know i do)

but for an update on my life as a lutheran:
they feed me almost every day, sometimes twice. i haven't been grocery shopping in quite a while. i suggest you all become lutherans and you can stop eating just beans for dinner...

a man from the ministry of funny walks just bought more cupcakes than he can carry and nearly stumbled over the man with the handcart carrying buckets of yellow sloshy egg stuff.

oh cupcake, cupcake, if you were a homeless man you would camp out on the front lawn and right now i would be like nina simone when she sings about loss and suffering because someone left you out in the rain.

oh, and happy valentine's day.

thought you might want to see what we do at the so-called postmodern mars hill graduate school.
i'm posting it because i know it is awkward but it is good for me to give in to my faults. unfinished is better than not started when it comes to a book review.
i know for a fact that at least one of you, dear readers, has a well edited blog... and so you will have to bear the burden of upholding the language this time. my apologies and utmost respect go out to you.

this is what is bad:
a paper good enough to turn in for a grade (all i really want is to pass)
is far from good enough to submit for publication (all i really want is to avoid embarassing myself).
and since i have to do the former but don't have to do the latter, i am not really ever going to publish anything i would stand behind 100%. but that was never the point, was it? you don't wait until you believe yourself to start writing. you don't wait until you believe yourself to finish a piece. some things are just true whether we believe in them or not. typos are true, grammatical errors are true, spliced commas (God bless them) are true. you really get a pretty accurate picture of how afraid someone is, how shy and ignorant and in need of grace someone is when they don't value their voice enough to at least word toward flow in an essay.
damnit.
you know exactly what i am talking about, don't just think to yourself that you should tell me i am being too hard on myself.

there will always be a part of me that thinks i can do better, or i should have done better.
all writing is an attempt to link the chain fence, tie the words together. but each sentence, each word can quickly turn into a failure. a 250 word essay assignment becomes a real test of courage.

what is the cure for perfectionism? one beer or two?

but the truth is that for all my courage, i didn't really pass my practicum class.

i graduated cum laude from undergrad and then with a 4.0 from my credential program despite moving around from school to school.
but i have not been promoted to my second practicum because i don't understand the weight of my words.

i get a pass, rather than a fail, for the class. but i'm not to take my second practicum until i figure out a way to understand that what i say matters.
i have to stop thinking that i am always talking shit if i want to finish this degree.
to perfect or not to perfect, that is the question.
why does each word function more like one of those pointy steak knives? in a perfect world they would strike like daggars and drama would reign... it would all be like for whom the bell tolls, we could use the formal and use the literal translations for the swears.
at least the drama feigns serious, which is better than the constant accidental comic relief i've been providing all semester.
...except for that one time dr. friesen cried (the jury is still out on whether or not it was my fault.)
there is a very thin line between taking myself too seriously (which assumes that i ought to be taken seriously) and not taking myself seriously enough (which assumes that no one else takes me seriously)
one minute i say something funny and the room explodes with the laughter of 75 overwrought seminarians, the next minute the professor is asking for a moment because my comment conjured up images of irrational violence against the Text.
how was i to know my comment would be taken so seriously? i was just confessing my confusion, i didn't expect anyone to enter in with me, and be so upset by what confuses me.
i guess i want to be taken seriously... i guess i want to be serious.

serious is a funky concept.
is it a face? a tone? a posture?
something that comes with age or experience? something behind the words that i can't control anyway? should i try to harness the ethereal serious, so it doesn't get out of control, just out of courtesy to others?
does lack of self-awareness make me (gasp) socially malfunctional?
[is malfunctional a word?]

when i think of the times i was supposed to be serious, they are times i just took a real gamble and said what i thought needed to be said--as if serious and important were the same thing. but i probably should have kept my mouth shut because usually what i thought really needed to be said came out sounding really funny. it can be quite comical when i get serious, i don't do it very well.
damn it.

its like the geico commercial: the lady describes a serious problem with serious face and tone... but then burt bacharach starts singing... and the song sounds kind of funny and serious but the words are so unexpected and yet so true... and that is why it is just so funny. so so so funny... i suggest you look it up on you tube...
http://youtube.com/watch?v=ERRzKNtRAfg

ok
president ford (yeah, well, he avoided it at least twice... had a good run and all that)
james brown (jump back)
saddam hussein (but damn)
it has been a long week.

i have a window that looks out on the city of baghdad tonight, or (because my husband likes to channel surf during commercials) across the street to eric cartman's house... or sometimes i watch cars crash into each other on the highway. all in the same hour i can watch prostitutes arrested, babies born, buildings explode, or bundt cake batter in a standing mixer in martha stewart's kitchen studio.

i know i'm not the only person allowing these images to tell me what to feel, or even how to feel it.

the question now is how to feel about this murder in particular.

i want to feel okay about punishment, sort of, i suppose...
but
i imagine a moment of silence... and then we all begin to hug each other. its over its over we're all supposed murmer, clutching, burying our faces in, the pin stripe shoulders which bear the burden of evening news. turn to the left and hug anderson cooper... and then just as quickly as anderson goes to commercial, i'm supposed to turn and gather the little starving sudanese boy into my arms. tell him its over its over, as if killing bad men, or at least this one, could solve all the world's problems.

makes you wish there was an all scrubs all the time channel. scrubs week on comedy central is really helping... maybe we should petition to get ... oh, nevermind...
how long did it take YOU to make the elliot-roseanne connetion?

may have put me over the edge:
maybe i should get my mdiv.
my sister, the one who doesn't believe in the ordination of women told me i should just get it... so that is wierd.
i don't know though...
i have a year to decide.
should we take a vote?

damn cold here
(insert dipthongs at will)

hoping my fellow seminarians weren't assholes.
actually, i have been referring to them all as my bitches, even to their faces and i think they like it (i am from cali + they are from indiana = everycrazything i say = laughable), because they are not really assholes, they seem more capable of caring about what i say than flipping me off at any moment... but if i told them to flip me off... you can see where this is going.

oh and remember that night at labri that one guy woke up and played the piano at 2 in the morning?
i think i saw him at the seminary my sister wanted me to go to, so i guess that is where the assholes go to seminary in the great northwest.
moreover we have decided to make tee shirts that say things like

i was hermeneutered at mars hill

and

dr. dwight friesen: bringing the nude back to hermeneutics.

and all this just to try to keep the interest of our spouses... because when you get home at 6pm from your work as an eisegesis superpower the spouse is more likely to be interested in dinner than who you rescued today and that just feels downright awful. but if someone was naked... patrick (hatrick) and i just figured it might help.

but something completely expected did happen: there is a person who really doesn't want to be my friend anymore. she was part of the crew in morgan hill and now she says i owe her $81 because her dog bit me and well, according to her the friendship is off...
but i don't care if your dog bites me
can you believe the people i know? now you see why i am so jaded and i figure even having friends is ironic, much less "The Incarnational Relationship"
i am not mad at her, just really very confused (redundancy intended). if you want to read all about it you can go on her myspace and check it out: her name is brenna, she shouldn't be too hard to find (she wants to be found i imagine) but if you find it (hinthint juliana) feel free to post a link in the comments. i am the abagail of which she speaks--the names have been spelled incorrectly to protect the innocent, (or else maybe she just doesn't care about spelling... which may lead you to wonder exactly how we became friends) and some of the facts have been changed, i can only imagine why.
but for the record this is the second time i have been, as beyonce says, dissed on the internet, and the last time this happened it was cleared up with a couple phone calls and the offending party is now happily--as much as God intended anyone to be happy in marriage (did you read that book by gary thomas?)-- married and we are friends again. so if you really want to hate me go ahead but i don't hate you, because, well if you know the song, i'm a survivor: "my mama taught me better than that."

of myself, then this is a good place to start.
for the "mixed nuts fans": "No, Felix, a plan goes like this: first we do this, and then we do this, then we do this."
for the rest of you: you are just going to have to see the movie to really understand how important it is that you don't criticize the plan or ask too many questions because that whole criticism thing won't get you too far with me.
(I have, in the space of the last 30 days, yelled at the children's and families ministries committee at our church, told my boss that "there is a lot of work to be done and i am not doing any of it" and taken on the ticket scalpers in front of the San Francisco Giants ball park. So please note: i am not to be trifled with right now.)
i fly out on August (what a good name for a month, eh?) first and find a place to live.
then i come back and then we drive up and then we come back. then we pack the truck and drive up again, and stay there for at least three years. Please come and visit, it will be very nice to have you!
somehow in that time i will, hopefully, be magically transformed, in my sleep, perhaps, into someone who is brave enough to either make babies, teach school again or send work in for publication.
Martin, because he is so brilliant, can work for the newspaper or go to seminary that is yet to be decided. he does not feel obligated to explain it all and when i get to be as smart as he is, maybe i won't explain myself either - explaining gets me in a lot of trouble.

this is mostly all the information i have
please remember: i am a teacher; i am not in the business of answering questions, not really anyway, rather i am highly trained in doing just the opposite.
(what is that, confounded?)

here is a list:
Saturday morning
last week

here is something i have been thinking about
the town where i work is very strange to me.
the word got out that there is this great new teacher at Little Sonshine Preschool, (the school that comes most highly recommended by St. Catherine's which is, in turn, the school i have chosen as a sworn enemy because of its robbing parents and traumatizing my students and then sending them back to me)
one mother came in to my boss and very gravely stated, "Bradley must have Mrs. Jimenez next year."
but then the story takes a turn:
Later that day...
I was informed that a certain little bird, we will call her P.K.C., (aren't those amazing initials? her name is even more poetic but we must protect it... you can't just have it because you like it) has informed her mother that she is "gonna get my nose pierced too." She meant "too" as in conjuction with her recent ear piercing, not as an act of solidarity with her highly recommended teacher.

Something funny:
if you start to call Ella The Ella Bird, and Kayla The Kayla Bird, and Payton the Payton bird... soon the other students, like Hayden Spiderman, will call them that and they are no longer students, but now these wondrous creatures flying past and landing to eat out of your hand... So Hayden Spiderman has decided that is what they are... and you know you have to give him credence because he can draw the most amazing trains and he knows how to have a good time, too.

Something Good:
Miss Jessica, yes she is a bird but more like a miss at three years old, was screaming (again). But there is a trick that works on her so watch carefully. you sit down and say to her "tell me who loves you." and it stops, the screaming just stops. and there you have your miracle for the day.

I think we will start to answer the phone by saying, "yes, I'm very busy and important, what do you want?" even if that movie is going out of style... and Hugh Grant is a womanizer, we like the idea.

At worship practice we were singing something and the words came out "that jew" instead of "that you" and I made the annie hall joke ("I don't know, jew eat, not did you, but jew, jew eat?") and Daniel Dupre, our minister most sinister, looked me square in the face and said, "you are mean." At last! we have touched down to reality. On the weeks that I sing for them the congregation comes to tell me nice things, and I think, for a moment, they have forgotten how mean I am. That is all I can figure out about that. It stuns me to hear them say, "you have such a sweet spirit" and "that was so beautiful" or one dad said to me "that was awful, just awful, I nearly cried, don't do that again." Have you heard the song Babe in the Straw? That is the one that made him nearly cry. But it was Christmastime and I hate Christmastime... not Christ mass, per se, but Christmastime makes me feel very very mean. The real lyrics are "Prince of the Universe," but I nearly sang Prince of the early birds, just because I was feeling like I knew better--Jesus is just as much Prince of the early birds, isn't He? And anyway the children's minister and church secretary had goaded me on.
and the truth is that i am not trying to be nice or sweet. and when i was supposed to give my testimony to the elders so i could join the church i sat there and told them that i didn't want to be a member at all, i wanted to get a little closer to figuring out why this whole membership thing doesn't really work and i certainly wouldn't want to try to fix things or get all involved in a congregation with problems but it is more like signing on to a family and making a commitment because it is good for my spiritual development to commit to something, God damn it.

So you see i am not pretending to be some nice person. or any of that hooey.

i just don't know. do people like someone so brutally straightforward?

oh, stay tuned for news of the continuation of the graduate school education... the letter arrived, pretty soon i'll get the courage to open it up.

there is no such thing as normalcy, not on any philisophical or practical scale, nor is there a place for this kind of mess in the English language. It is, to use another word widely (wildly?) misused supposed to be right but it is not correct. The truth is you can't run around changing the way words are used when it isn't for any good reason.

Sure, if it was funny sounding or clever or there was some double meaning... but not, especially not, if you are otherwise attempting to impress.
I don't claim to know it all. In fact I should confess that I am still not sure when to use laying and lying, or lay and lie... and it is disconcerting
but nobody paid me and my editor large sums of money to get it right-at least not yet. And when they do, you just better tell them not to pay me by the hour.

merciful heavens.

I am hacking my way through A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and I wanted to stab myself in the leg with a salad fork when I found the aforementioned mistake. The book depends, absolutely, on his... well, to loosely quote Captain Amazing: "knowing that you know I knew you knew."
but it all falls apart: the theme that he is smart enough to write a brilliant book despite dropping out of college, the clever relationship he spent so much time building in the first funny few pages... it is what the book is about. (Sorry if you thought the book was a story of two brothers... I am just not buying that.)
It all comes crashing down with a simple editing foible.

So excuuuse me if I have lost respect so early in the book, but if you are out there Dave Eggers, and you care about the language, you will send me a little comment promising
"it won't happen again." Copy and paste it if you'd like, maybe you are one of those writers who secretly wants to take it all back but you pretend not to care. In any case, don't even apologize, just promise.

did they mean to break the applicants in half, or to see if we could take the torque?
of course I might get in. of course it is the school I want to go to. but the interview didn't make me cry and now I want to know if it was supposed to. or maybe they are just playing the odds that if I don't cry at the interview, they can just wait until I get the rejection letter. either way it seems pretty cruel.
after it was all over, and I couldn't do anything more to win over admissions, there was mary.
after I drove my old friend to her house in the U district. there she was, this tiny warrior sitting in the car, face bent toward her hands and I know she was smiling when she told me "oh abigail you have so much to learnasdoI."

I went to the interview thinking it was for graduate school, but maybe it was for Mary...

just to hear her wisened little voice lilt across the words to answer the question.

mary oliver read her poem: "wild geese" on city arts and lectures
and i like the part about "soft animal body".
that was good and i thought
poetry poetry poetry poetry poetry poetry poetry
what a crazy tree

and then i walked to my front door. the dog downstairs is named karma, and she barks, but only if you deserve it.

i think maybe i will tell the admissions people that i am really going back to grad school because the cat who lives here likes to eat my essays fresh from the bubble jet printer and i think it is God's way of explaining things.

on the topic of whether to laugh or cry over blood and skin, wine and bread turning into gin and birthday cake: this is what we call a not problem. At preschool we laugh raucously until our giant heads cause us to fall off our chairs, hit a body part on the table and then we "cry real hard." It is all very well choreographed.
there are a few answers that usually work;
try these on:
(first one)
"Hey teacher, what are panthers made of?"
"Tell me what you think."
"MMMlegs and claws and whiskers and stuff, huh teacher?"
(second one)
"Teacher, Uyen is crying."
"I know, did you ask her why?"
They always know why the one is crying. And I mean always. I never know what the hell is going on but everytime I ask them about each other the answers pop up, and they are undeniably correct answers. It took me a few months to test this theory but now that I am faced with two weeks away from them I am really at a loss.
Hanging out at the local ChuckECheese's, hoping a few might pop in on dates with dads may have worked but Mr. Cheese won't have any beers for me so I think I might be better off at Mr. Jimenez' house.

otherwise Christmas and the missyou issue usually go hand in hand and I am getting used to this. And anyway, even preschoolers know laughing and crying can take turns.

definition of resplendent
Resplendent Quetzal
Pharomachrus mocinno costaricensis
Photography © Mason Fischer, All Rights Reserved
Courtesy International Expeditions, Inc.

"Quetzal is derived from the Aztec words for birds feathers, precious and beautiful. The size of a small, pigeon-like bird, the male owns an amazing meter-long tail along with a short head crest, and red breast. Although the female is duller in color and with no tail plumes, both sexes head, back and wings are emerald green. This allows the bird to blend with the foliage of the cloud forest where it lives.

... Its diet consists mainly of wild figs, avocados, insects, small frogs and lizards. Drinking water is obtained from the base of bromeliads. When the bird detects an intruder, it will sit motionless for long periods of time. When further threatened, it will let out an alarm cry, that is a harsh weec-weec sound accompanied by quickly flicking its tail feathers like a fan every second."

During courtship, the males will perform spiraling skyward flights, then dive back to the canopy. Between March and June, paired quetzals use rotten tree stumps for nests, in the lower part of the forest canopy but never on or near the ground; favoring those stumps with holes made by other birds or animals. They usually produce two eggs that are light blue in color. The work of nest building, incubation and care of the young are shared by the pair. The area around the nest tree is protected by the male sounding a two-toned whistle which he repeats every 8 to 10 minutes in the morning and again at dusk."

http://www.costaricaexpeditions.com/gallery/wildlifegalle/quetzal.html?1
Salinger was right, you can't just turn your back on poetry, as if it isn't everywhere.

we arrived at Brenda's book party just as Lynn (Hejinian? it was hard to tell, she had a pair of big brown glasses on) was asking some very difficult questions and I thought of some of you defending theses.
and yet the answers came easily to B.
She said it took six months just to order them and still she thinks of them as marbled, that you can read them in any order. She said each line stands alone (which you will appreciate more when you see how much black and white is on each page.)
When she was done answering all the questions Bob told everyone that we ought to rearrange ourselves so that more people could hear better which was my cue to stand up and step over some very annoying people who thought they had to laugh out loud at every one of B's poetry jokes. And then I realized only natural thing for me to do was sit down under the table with the veggie platters. This is what it is to be a very small poet: you sit under the table among the clearance books and laugh silently, to yourself.
She said the seamstress is knitting together the clouds, a seamstress: a maker against war. A maker against the war, as if, well, a certain other maker is otherwise occupied. (no real pun intended.)
I should tell you that B memorized the 23rd psalm as a child but rewrote it more recently-it is on page 14 and right before she read it she said "The Bible needs a little rewriting as an epic." I congratulated myself for not taking offense when she insists each time I talk to her that I need my MFA, if only so I can rewrite my poems. she wears a cross and a Figa on one chain around her neck, she said the Figa "is kind of a fuck you to the devil."
But the favorite poem today, before I go stand in a long line for Communion Sundaes intinction, is the poem called "White Fir Description" because I usually hate white fir trees but I have heard God's forgiveness is for everyone.

I lived in the forest a long time now I miss it... the trees: the forest for the trees.
The Oaks that twist, pinching bits of skin on the yellowing hillsides, do not offer to hold in the clouds like Redwood trees can.
And it feels as if you have to try harder to stay on the ground, there is so much sky trying to get at you.
The nice thing is that the moon isn't quite so often ducking behind the branches, only once or twice behind the hill as it rises and Martin says: ah ha, we are gaining on it... It is as if he is slowly remembering a good dream.

say anything nice, then you are probably Basque like me. I boycotted the Passion of the Christ because I don't need that.
The Savior, in my imagination, sweats like bleeding and when I am at my angriest shaking and wild from eye to eye I can figure most of this out, on my own.
In all honesty, I should confess: I am not yet sick of The Last Temptation of Christ because I like to hear Harvey Keitel frustrated with Willen Dafoe: "I'm not like them." I have already been reprimanded for really liking this movie, so if you were headed down that path consider it well worn, and keep in mind I come from good sheep-herding/ Pyreneese stock.
Don't mind me, you know I nearly ruined my copy of Sayers' Creed or Chaos? from overuse; I'm not afraid of drama. But if we were supposed to be working it out with fear and trembling this whole time, why were we surprised by the impact of the violence? I am particularly proud of a certain Children's Minister who is notorious for crying at church staff meetings. She admitted to me today that she fell asleep while the subtitles flashed across the passion, and it isn't due to lack of interest or lack of emotional involvement. In fact she blames a glass of wine.
And speaking of chaos...I don't have children of my own and I'm not sure I ever will. I do have 40 four year olds who bring me their broken expectations and their untied shoelaces and their faces angry and knotted by injustice. It is my reminder of even the tiniest scrapes on the back of the man who made it clear that these expectations and this faith are our way to an understanding of our place in His kingdom.
So I pull out a pink kleenex and smear around some salty tears while we wait for the clumpy eyelashes to dry and sing "deep and wide, there's a fountain flowing deep and wide." And I'll be damned if we don't all throw ourselves into it with wide arms and wide eyes everytime.

There is this new show: Weeds.

An ironically accurate Showtime comedy about the suburbs of California. I know we can't all live here, that is okay, I was born in Alaska... you never know where you will end up.

Every town I live in has one favorite road.
Vallejo: Arkansas St.
Occidental: Bohemian Hwy.
Lake Forest Park: Lake City Way
Edmonds: Hwy 99
Santa Cruz: Mission St.
Moraga: Let's be serious, there was only one road out of there.
San Francisco: Mission St.
San Martin: New Ave.
Gilroy: Watsonville Rd.

I drive Watsonville Rd. everyday to work. It ties you around a few hills and runs up in the valley curved like the hand of God. And everyday I am reminded
I have one thing to learn today: I can't run away; Untie myself and just hold still.
You know how children can be, they run to you and it is like a gosling flying into your face. I love to watch my students run away from me. The motion of it rocks me to sleep, the rhythm of it throbs against my chest. I wait for them to disappear around the corner of the building and I wonder what God is doing whenever I spin on one heel and sprint. He must be as sure as I am that in another moment I will stop.
No matter what road I am on, at the end of the night I will stop where the two hills cleave together to make the creek lie down and listen for His crickets also throbbing, slowly but loudly, to keep me sure of Him.

My wedding ring is designed to minimize spin on the finger.

Last night Martin told me "I've got the girl who pulls her earlobe." I usually get around to that point, you know.

Joel asked me if I still get the spins when I drink. I asked him if he checks to see if his teeth go numb- that is my favorite way to tell. Earlier he bet me three dollars that Zephaniah is not a book in the Bible, but it wasn't fair because I didn't tell him that one of my favorite verses is in that particular book. Staying with Boo and Joel is good because they don't really wake up until I arrive and then we have champagne and beer and whiskey and pizza, in that order. And when it is time to get to work there is a great deal of cleaning and organizing and putting tiny little things where she thinks they should go and then maybe more beer and finally MeeKrab (should I worry about spelling it in English?) and then back to champagne. It is a sort of cycle I need every once in a while to keep myself sane so it is good that they are back where I need them. Joel is right, you have to find communion where you can.

Exactly how much can you prepare for? Rings spinning, heads spinning, signals for I want to go home, tapping your teeth when you are sober just so you know what it ought to feel like, marrying an MDiv doesn't mean you will win every bet about prophets.
I got a new student today. His mom told me that if I find any pookas she would be glad to fill in. It means if there are holes in the snack calendar I should call her. Her little boy, just turned four, told me to be careful, a centipede had crawled into the grass near my feet. I told him I'd keep my eyes open. He told me: don't even blink.
Does a cycle always have a pooka? Does it always spin?

i'm having a book party on sept 27 at 5 30 in berkeley-- university press books on bancroft and telegraph-- please come! yay for poetry-- xobrenda

and also this whole long thing for all of you in California:
dear friends, this is from real brenda, not a form letter; but please forgive the group mail and the bcc addresses-- some people don't want their addresses out there.

i have been involved in an effort on behalf of codepink (and all of california) to try to lobby our state assemblypersons to author or co-author a resolution to bring home the national guard from iraq (i am attaching a copy of the proposed resolution and one of several letters i'm sending as follow up-- yours will be different).

a few weeks ago, some of us went to sacramento and spoke to our state assembly person, senators or staff. we took the information about the national guard to them, and we took copies of the resolution. we were encouraged to continue.

we have just learned that assemblyperson loni hancock has agreed to co-author a resolution if (and only if) we can find 15 other assemblypersons to help her. we/ code pinkists know of five assemblymembers who look like they are willing, but they could use some phone calls and letters to encourage them. and others need to be contacted from 'scratch.'

i am hoping that you will become ''instant activists'' even if you are busy or shy and make that phone call or two. or even more... send some letters, priority mail, soon!.

i hope some of you who live in the following areas, or who **know** people in the following areas, will please pick up the phone and make one phone call (or more) to your assemblyperson who might co-author this resolution. it's a bit scary, but if i can do it, you can do it! (pasted from code pink:)
keep reading, California birds.

I have been dipping down into quite a loneliness lately and you can ask my students if you want to verify, but this is despite the large amounts of pretend ice cream I have been eating.
I think it is change that does this to me. It is getting to be obvious too, which really embarrasses me, so I thought I ought to confess. I tell myself that four year olds offer everybody pretend ice cream, it is only if you are crying right next to them that they put their arms around you and tell you not to be scared.
I was thinking about Sarah Chambliss briefly using her blog like a Christmas list (I usually hate Christmas lists on principal and in practice) but Julie actually bought her the plush toy models of Staphylococcus that she had hinted about. And then threw them at her in the breezeway at church.
Imagine Juliana throwing toys at the librarian's daughter, the one who dressed up as Jeremiahtheweepingprophet for Halloween last year, in the hallway on a Friday afternoon.
Why in hell would I be lonely with people like that around?
I'm going to call my voicemail and leave a message for myself to quit being such a baby. Feel free to call my phone anytime between 815 and 315, PST, M-F. I won't answer, I'll be teaching, so you can leave any kind of "Abigail, knockitoff, sovereignty of God, Jeremiah 29:11" message you can think of.
I am also wondering if it has anything to do with 25.
I'm a teacher so I think to myself that maybe it is something I will outgrow; it could be developmental. In high school we think we will die if we don't get the hell out of here. In college we tell ourselves that we aren't going to get anywhere this way. In graduate school we ask ourselves what the hell am I doing here, do I even belong here? And at 25 the question is how the hell did I get here and can't I undo this somehow? Just consider yourself lucky if you finished grad school before turning 25, right? I can just hear Emile whispering don't fall fat squirrel. I missed her birthday again. They say confession is good for the soul...
I'm not going to complain about this anymore. I am sitting next to my husband who is throwing grapes from his parent's backyard to the cat. What do I have to complain about?
I just have to figure out a way to stop thinking, did I do this wrong? How long will I miss my old life? Why is it hard for me to believe we have been wearing the same clothes for the past five years? help.

sometimes...people be sayin' I like to know what happened to Lamarcus.
I'mjustsayin'isall.