more love and rain

Writing out of freedom and not bondage is kind of like perfection.

Springtime rains do not make me miserable. Water falls from the sky in little drops, lots, all over, and it touches everything. There is nothing it does not find. Sometimes you can trick the rain by making it fall on something else before it gets to you, and you stay dry. But it takes so much effort to be completely not wet when it rains. It takes a lot of staying and covering. There is something beautiful about being the same person whether the rain has full access to you or not.

The ice storm ravaged us. It took limb from tree and dashed it to the ground. It thrashed the weak and bent the strong. It was grievous and tragic. Little did it know that life and love are stronger than death--the rain falls on everything, and there is so much green. Green is everywhere; new hope springs from the scars of the ruined.

It seems that being a person is a full-time job until others depend on you full-time. Then you work overflowing-time, and there is no way to do it unless lives are the same, twine together, love together, abide in the same Vine. There is no choosing your family, past nor future, but there is choosing to bend and live with them. There is no choosing whom, but there is choosing how. It takes so much dying to self, so much cutting off of those directions of self-will that try to sprout and grow--and it would be admirable and glittery to allow them and follow them, but so, so lonely. (Not killing those dreams of your heart that are true and right and divine, but trusting that they will come about in due time.) That is why love is so earthy and organic and gardeny. It hurts so good.

Sometimes the birds get at the strawberries even though you made chicken-wire covers for your pots. i know from experience. There is a lot that i write that i don't know from experience, i just look and see, and then think i have known. i hope there is some truth in it somewhere--how else am i to live? Living takes faith, i suppose. And writing does.

Where are you, voice?

human things: love and rain

Love is a real-life kind of thing. It's messy and difficult and involved and embarrassing and indescribably wonderful. It goes back to our roots, our trueness, our real selves, before there was any wrong or hurt in the world. It is the spiritual power of life--from organelles to ecosystems, from birth until death, we move by its currents. It is like many things in our conscious human world: not what we imagine, not the ideal, but better--natural, rough-edged, real-life. It's like finding an umbrella that was lost.

Rain falls on the just and the unjust. The best-laid sidewalks and landscaped beds and sculptures and picnic tables of men lie open-faced to the same deluge that untouched rocks and trees and woodland burrows know so well. A human-thing mystery. No man is not subject to the elements, even those who remain inside. The whole reason we have buildings is because of weather.

Anyone want to go puddle-splashing?

human things: creation

Some projects just pull from their hiding place, way back behind the extra dimension of canvas, screaming and longing and pining and wailing to come out, and you're the only one who knows. Those end up being the not-so-great ones because it is rare that they can come out with justice. (Lots of things are like that, i think, but here we are as fallen Man, right?)

Others come together like an impromptu meal, with the perfect herbs complementing the vibrant vegetable-colors and the little bit of unexpected extra that just makes it whole. These are usually more satisfying--it's easier to stop working and be done than it is on the childbirth kind.

Honesty is as important in art as it is in life. No matter how uncomfortable it is to admit that there is a shadow that shapes that particular contour, no matter what irrational force is keeping the brush from the deeper value, it is not True unless it is done--there is no condemnation if you make a mistake. Similarly, nobody is going to judge anyone for being a person; it's True, who you are, and the Master knew every piece and particle and smudge of you before He called you out of the canvas.

Painting and cooking and other creative things are using energy to synthesize matter, but really we're just using pieces that have already been created. Cool, huh?

Human Things addition:
-the need to create.

human things

A long time ago i started making a list of things that are common to all humans (and not animals)--trans-culture, -gender, -time, -geography--because i wanted to embrace the things that are integral to my being human, and de-priortitize things that are not. With the design to include every possible item, i started with the obvious:

• family/friends
• language
• relationships in general
• food preparation
• education
• rites of passage
• dwellings
• going to work and coming back
• caring for children
• exploring one's environs
• technology and the improvement thereof

Then i sort of stopped because i thought it was a little too obvious.
But i want to think about it more. Things that i truly love, and feel that i was created to do, or that i feel are innate (sometimes wrong things), bring me back to this list--i see that they come from my being a person.

• desire to know the weather
• reluctance to submit to authority
• desire to know the source of right and wrong (and many other things)
• dancing and singing
• love and suffering
  
• paradox: longing for freedom but continuing in (sometimes subconscious) self-repression; and many others
• philosophizing about life, no matter one's education or "right" to do so
  

Some days it's harder to be a person than others.

Oo, here's a thought: what if the only reason that humans have language and other creatures don't is because we were created for deep relationship? Animals have purely physical, selfish relationships because they have no way of communicating their deeper thoughts (if they have any, which i doubt). Complex language for them would be pointless because all they would say (as they do now, in their own utterances) would be stuff like "FOOD!" and "Oh no!" and "Get away from my ____". But we, agonizingly and ecstatically, have so much complexity and depth that language, as wonderful and useful as it is, doesn't come close to portraying all that we are. I think that is because there is a spiritual part of us that is inexpressible with words--and animals don't have that.

In light of that, i wonder which of the things on the list are there because they are also characteristics of God, the Spirit, the Creator? Or at least because they are spiritual things. I don't think God struggles with stuff like selfishness. Maybe that is a direct result of our having spirits AND bodies--the spirit gets corrupted. Hmm, that sounds like something Paul would say.
...
Um, so, go do a BibleGateway search for "flesh and spirit" and start thinking. It will blow you away. I don't have time for expository on all of that right now. Here are a few relevant ones to what i've been discussing here:

1. John 3:6
   Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the Spirit gives birth to spirit.
   
2. John 6:63
   The Spirit gives life; the flesh counts for nothing. The words I have spoken to you are spirit and they are life.
3. Mark 14:38
   Watch and pray so that you will not fall into temptation. The spirit is willing, but the body is weak."
4. Romans 8:10
   But if Christ is in you, your body is dead because of sin, yet your spirit is alive because of righteousness.
5. Romans 8:13
   For if you live according to the sinful nature, you will die; but if by the Spirit you put to death the misdeeds of the body, you will live,
6. 1 Corinthians 6:19
   Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own;
   

Yay! Who knew that a simple philosophizing bog post would turn into a Bible study? "Not i," said the fly. Nor i, to be sure. That was a lot more fun than starting on my 10-page paper that is due in 3 days.

So help me add to the list!

it's so easy

One of my favorite parts about being away from home was writing back. A captive audience made it so enjoyable. And now i don't write as often as i should because i "don't have time."

This time that i'm using right now i actually don't have. It's like spending money--it's literally in the account, but it will literally be needed next month--but it's there, it's easy to spend. This time is here now, and it won't be tomorrow, but it's easy to waste because there is no urgency. It's got to be budgeted and sorted and packaged and saved and used as promised.. but it's so easy to live in free blindness rather than safe diligence.

I love the Fayetteville Public Library and its story-windows. You can see so much of the sky through the library windows. I think that's important to everything that libraries represent.

A bad habit that i've gotten into is waiting a very long time when i'm thirsty before i drink water.

My daddy can look at an airplane flying overhead and say what it is. I wish i could do that, too. i know sort of generally C1-30s and F-15 and 16s, and B-17s, and that those mean Cargo and Fighter and Bomber, but they don't fly over Fayetteville very often. I'd also like to know more about meteorology.

Pointless rambling, anyone? Why do i post this on the World Wide Web for all to see?

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.

cold without Christmas

i know i should be slapped for saying this, but there's something about being at the end of our ropes that is so hopeful. Once we lose our death-grip on the last fibers, and slip off the end into oblivion, we're Free: Someone has been there the whole time, patient, waiting to envelop us in the sweet Mama-sling of rest and humility and peace and drool.

On Friday we had a Christmas-cookie-and-Elf-movie party because it's been too cold to not be Christmastime, but i think the discomfort goes deeper than that. Remember in the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, it was always winter and never Christmas when the evil witch was queen? There's something sinister about it, like death. Ropes get really short. Pressure, disease, crisis, hopelessness--unless we become reconciled to the idea of falling for miles and being smashed into smithereens like glass, because that idea might be the same as trust.

The moments that His strength flows make it easy. i'm not denying that there are also the dark moments of turning off the light and waking up in the cold morning and being late and forgetting something and letting someone down, and there's the rope mocking in your face. i don't know how to live in joy there. but i know that falling isn't miles into a canyon of sharp boulders, it is inches into His plush embrace.

The good news is that Spring comes like clockwork, like the Earth turning, like the axis staying 23.44 degrees while we whiz off to another familiar side of our orbit!

and i kazoo'd the national anthem last week but forgot today.

10:32 pm EDIT: i actually did have the opportunity to musically serve my country today: Lindi just got an earful of kazoo over the phone.

there is a great, noble life outside this window in the snow

I like that they call snow flurries snow flurries. Because that's what they do. And i'm really glad that i am sitting at this upstairs library table, right where the gnarly, angley, reachy tree can see me and tell me it's snowing. If it wasn't there i would have no distinction between the snow-motes and their mothering panel of cloud. I love that tree from very inside me, and i know that if i were snuggled in its hug i would still be cold because i would be outside and it's snowing. And there is a little sugaring on its branches already.

Moments like this have to be taken as they come, no matter what deadlines have me in their nooses, no matter how close the countdown is to zero. Life is worth living when i can take minutes to blog about my tree and the snow. But i also have to get to work. And so shall i.

I will call upon the LORD, who is worthy to be praised: so shall i be saved from mine enemies.
Psalm 18:3

celestial tea-saucer

every culture has had religion. there is evidence, always, of some thought of the afterlife or spirits or something intangibly real. flowers in graves. doesn't mean there is a spiritual realm, Dr. Atheist, it just means that it bears investigation. just like if everyone agreed that there was a saucer of tea up in the sky between the moon and the sun. it would be weird. but if Every Person thought so, i'd think we should check it out.

Those are my thoughts on the topic of Tuesday's discussion in my World Civilization class. My thoughts right now are that i should be less "Laconic" in my writing. I don't take enough time to wrestle sentences out of my mind when just words will do--correct but not excellent. And i don't write until i don't have time.

Do you have that one piece of clothing that always gets stained? My Thai pants have had way too many interactions with liquids that do not make them clean.

It's a beautiful day; i'm going to do laundry, study, and write a letter before making actual food for dinner and then studying some more. I would rather go on a photo-walk, or paint, or plant a garden, or ride my bike to Kingdom Come to see who's waiting for me there.

circles

Today i was struck by the wonder of the gift of literacy. Reading and writing really are not necessary to life and breath; but they enrich them to the nth degree. Besides all the uses for written communication, it is just downright pleasurable to look at marks on a page (or screen nowadays) and know what they mean. Thanks, God. (Maybe i should be thinking about Gilgamesh in World Lit, but it's more fun for me to think about words.)

I think that a lot of life happens in circles, and this is reflected by some different things. In certain kinds of Psalms, the organization is not centrally based on line or meter or rhyme, but on meaning. The writer takes you down a path, but at the end you find you're back at the beginning. Here's an example. And in Dante, everything is or is related to a circle. Scientifically, matter organizes itself into spheres and circles. Seasons cycle. And when i look at my life and its seasons, the various and sundry states that my heart has found itself, and the lessons that i've had to learn "the hard way," it is very evident that i am on a road that goes in circles. I get older every time, but i have to learn similar lessons ridiculously often. Daily routines are circles. What this means, i don't know, but i think it has something to do with we're all here, circling. There is significance to being and doing.

Peace!

essential extras

I shouldn't be on here writing this right now, i should be asleep. But i'm wanting some of that gratification that comes from the blind assumption that you are reading this and can relate. (Empathy can be addictive, especially when so easily accessible by Internet, don't you think?) (And you must admit that that vowel alliteration was supremely superb.) (Is it prideful to point out my own literary feats?) (It's DEFINITELY time to stop parenthesizing.) See?

All i wanted to do, reader, was somehow explain a phenomenon that i've recently noticed, mainly through a sweet new friend. She is so exuberantly encouraging that i don't know how i ever could deserve someone like that, but i also don't know what i would do without it. You know? It's SO extra, icing-on-the-cake-and-eat-it-too-with-a-cherry-AND-sugar-on-top, and overflowing and abundant, but at the same time.. necessary?

I think God is like that, except really really fundamental.

Good night.

"humility" should really be called "life"

HUMILITY is a big word; not because i just wrote it in all caps. Nor because of its eight letters. It's a big word because of all of its connotations and false definitions and misinterpretations that are poisonous to our thinking. Instead of bringing up all sorts of ideas of freedom and fulfilled life, the word tends to throw clouds over our minds, and weigh heavy on our brain areas that deal with compulsion. It doesn't make sense to our physical-world-immersed selves.

What a clever trick! Humility really is the most freeing and wonderfully joyful thing that one could possibly embody. It is really counter-intuitive, but when you let go of that, and close your eyes and fall backwards into it, you find that it is the strongest support you'll ever find because it is the Father's Rest. Too bad i don't live there. What does it take? How do we get out from underneath the layers of stacks of worry and care, and just be? What if we're too weak to cast them off?

I think the answer is really close to "Just forget." It's sort of like C.S. Lewis's discussion of Contemplation vs. Enjoyment--they're mutually exclusive, but also codependent.

All this philosophizing...

Note: the 'discussion' link isn't to an exhaustive explanation of the idea, but rather an article mentioning Lewis's thoughts and making an entirely different point at the end. I could have done more research to provide you with a better link, and i may do so in the future. Sorry.

the friendship continuum

"We can be friends if you want to
There's a friendship waiting to be..."
--Jason Upton, "Beautiful People"

We, as humans, were created for community. The evidence is everywhere, including Scripture. God, as a triune being, is community (i suppose i'm equating it to love); and this sweet fellowship, this sharing in life together, is probably the greatest gift He has given to mankind. Friendship can be difficult, too. One has to work, to invest, to pursue and put effort into friendships, or they peter out. Quality of life is determined by the quality of connection with others.

Every once in a while, however, it is extremely obvious that something is different. Have you ever met someone for the first time, asked them about their heart, or their thoughts, and every word they say could have come out of your own mouth? You may not have much else in common, but processes of mind and heart. It's almost impossible to express in words the deep connection and utter excitement that you feel. Your mind races to find ways to make them understand, "ME TOO! Same same!" Sometimes it feels awkward, because you don't want them to think you're just trying to be cool and relate to them by saying "Me too" to everything they say (point brought up by Evan King).When i met Jessie Elledge in the summer of 2004, it was the first time i had experienced this incredibly immediate bond, and it set my philosophizing wheels a-turning. I labeled it the Dear Friend Phenomenon.

Well, there must be an opposite sort of friend, i thought, and so there is. It's the sort of friend that you share experiences with, and that you grow closer with over time. It is true that the Lord knits your hearts together, but it takes time; perhaps you have more in common. This sort of friend i call a Close Friend. I also realized that there were varying degrees; that it was more of a continuum, Dear at one end and Close at the other. There are definitely those in between; you feel quickly connected with them, but as time goes on you discover this more and more (example for me: Lindi Phillips).

As i shared my hypothesis with Jessie, and as we have become closer (if possible), we have been able to add more evidence to the case. When she went away to Bible school for a year, she remarked to me that her dearest friends were her closest friends there. The people she felt immediatly connected with were the people she spent time with. I experienced this, too, when i did my DTS. We decided that this was a result of such close, intense community, and perhaps did not apply to our continuum.

Friends are wonderful, on or off such a scientific scale. I'd love to be a better one. In any event, community is life. I'm thankful for that.