jolene

Some days i can't do anything right except stand in the rain and welcome the wet and welcome the wet. i'm sorry when it stops.

i still don't know what love means.

not alone, remember

When i first got back from Thailand one year ago, i listened to this CD like breathing air, like i had just come within seconds of drowning, and all i could do was breathe and know that i wasn't dead. There is healing in the music because there is God's message in the music.

Today at church was about Joshua: be strong and very courageous, and I will never leave you.

Please believe me when i talk about circles. These things all orbit together: being the same as children--having the deep need for being held, following rebellious streaks, realizing the meanings of stuff; never being alone because of the sorrow and love of our Father--He is with us, he knows, he is watching out the kitchen window; learning lessons over and over--knowing that we have to love our neighbor but struggling so hard; having to die and say Yes to life--giving up our 'rights' to toys, space, food, transportation; seasons and change and newness--moving to a new house, going to a new school, getting a new job; old habits dying hard. You know?

So often i experience the very same emotions that i did when i was a child--i remember--because i'm the same person, except bigger. And i'm learning the same lessons, except connected in different ways.

Love is so glad, but so deep and painful. I think that's what beauty is too.

smiles

Today my mom suprised Lindsey and me by bringing Miss Betty over for lunch (which, for her, was ice cream). Miss Betty said every 5 or 10 minutes, as we sat and ate and smiled and looked at the bird feeder, "Don't you ever wonder why God made birds?" and "Now what do you girls want to study in school?" But she also said once, "Life is always fun. You just have to look at it from an angle. Y'all remember that."

I finished Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf today, and i think i'm going to like it better as i keep thinking about it. For some reason, one of the gladdest bits for me was when she compared a character to a harpy, and i knew what she was talking about from reading Dante in high school. I think Virginia Woolf is one of those authors who Goes There: using words to describe things that are not physically real, just a wild mental state. I feel funny about doing that in this blog, however slight my attempts are; i think i am afraid that you wouldn't be able to relate, and then think i was off my rocker. Woolf does it a lot, unabashedly, it seems, because maybe she was trying to be a relentless artist.

Sitting at the kitchen table today, i was looking up raw-food recipes and information, and i had a Sean Hayes station going on Pandora, and my hair was in pigtail braids, and i felt like a true person.

As i was waiting at a red light today, a car came up next to me with its windows down, blaring Bob Dylan with his piercing harmonica. I didn't look over, but i should have given him at least a thumbs up or something. Whenever i'm loudly listening to something classic with my windows down i always wonder if people recognize it.