Well, it’s way past when I should be sleeping, and my eyes are all bloodshot from too much computer screen today, but I just feel like posting something that’s been antsily waiting for a while to get shared…

I’M PREGNANT!

Thank you.  That felt good to get out.

Seriously though…my husband and I are thrilled, and these are days of much wonder at the miracle of life.

This morning I saw my husband off at the train station, wishing him well on his travels to a conference halfway across the country.  I’ll miss him a lot while he’s gone.

Last week we enjoyed an evening meal to the sounds of Van Morrison’s Philosopher’s Stone, an album, among many of his, that holds sacred space for us.  Through one of the most difficult seasons of our lives and marriage, Van Morrison was our companion, calming and soothing us by putting the sadness and confusion and frustration and disillusionment we were feeling into poignant, gently hopeful verse and song.

“Wonderful Remark” came on while we were eating last week, and we reminisced about dancing to it, years ago.  It was a night like many others that year, maybe right at the apex of the challenges we were facing.  Tectonic plates were shifting everywhere – in our individual identities, in the power balance of our marriage, in the foundations of our religious worldviews and vocational pursuits.  It was a painful and disorienting season, filled with so much difficult conversation that we found ourselves speechless, sometimes, clear at the end of any sense for what to say.

That’s where we were that years-ago night:  speechless, eating in heavy silence.  And “Wonderful Remark” came on.

To this day, I’m not sure what the song exactly means.  And I guess I don’t care.  All I know is it lifted us from our seats, and drew us into the living room where we began one of the most beautiful expressions of the tenacity and survival of the human spirit I’ve known.  With all that awfulness swirling around us, all that pain that made words turn meaningless and us hardly know how to laugh or cry, we danced.  We danced and danced and danced, our spirits, almost in spite of ourselves, refusing to be snuffed out. If there had been bad guys celebrating victory over us before that point, our dance would have shooshed them dejectedly away.  “We will live,” our dancing said.  “We will love.  We will dance on despair until hope can revive.”

I can’t help but believe that was a turning point for both us, one of those cosmic events that plays quietly out in the everyday.  One of those moments that cleanses and heals and changes everything, despite issues remaining, and pieces of us needing still to be put back together.

We survived, my love.  And well.  There’s no one else I’d rather do life with than you.

One of the biggest tragedies I know is the way people get divided from each other.  Physical separation, yes, but I’m thinking more here about other kinds of separation – separation of souls, I guess.  Though by nature of being human we all have terribly much in common, it’s the differences that often keep us from knowing this, and from living connected, meaningful relationships.  Our differences become walls, disallowing us from even having access to all the other stuff, the common stuff, that exists between us. 

I can’t tell you how frustrating it is to be talking with someone about religion or politics or even sports for that matter, and be able to see that there are deeper things going on than the topics being discussed – maybe deeper joys or griefs being expressed, deeper wounds, or questions about what life really means, or what, when it all shakes down, really matters; maybe insecurities about the way we look or talk, or fears that we might reveal how little or much we actually know on the topic – and be helpless to actually engage overtly at that level.  Instead, conversation must often stay up on stilts, away from the level of soulful connection, away from all the stuff that seems, to me, to really matter.  We pretend, and maybe actually convince ourselves we believe, that this particular theological point or this particular argument for who should be president or who should have been traded instead of this or that guy are really what matter, are really what we pressingly need to get to the bottom of.

I don’t know.  Maybe they are.  Maybe this isn’t a black-and-white issue where surface-level conversation can be separated from the deeper, soulful stuff happening between people (surely I’m overstating a point here, too, since there are plenty of occasions where surfacy talk is just what feels right and good).  I guess I just tire of having differences, in my life particularly religious and theological differences, become such enormous barriers to authentic relationships with people.  Try sharing what you really think or question or feel with a lot of people, and things get terribly awkward, terribly tense, terribly charged, sometimes, with one or the other party feeling urged to evangelize the other, or set the other straight.  I don’t want to treat others as projects, and I don’t want to become one myself.  I don’t want to feel like people I’m talking with are working really hard to gently, imperceptibly even, push me toward their way of knowing God, their way of knowing what’s real and trustworthy, their way of understanding life.

I just want to be humans together, connecting around our real joys and pains, acknowledging the things we’re afraid of, the things that make us angry, the things that make our souls happy and sing.  I want to take all those walls, all those differences, all those surface-level things (maybe religion included?), and set them aside for once.  We could even look over at them together and laugh or cry about what they do to us…what they’ve done…and all the havoc they raise at all levels of public and private life.

But I’m thinking most of us aren’t that self-aware most of the time.  We don’t know ourselves well enough to sense what’s really going on when we get riled up about this or that topic, or scandalized that someone else isn’t.  We bang away at life unaware that there’s any other way to live.

So here’s something that makes my soul sing:  those moments, sometimes fleeting, sometimes lasting a little longer, when souls deeply meet.  When the veils between us get thin, and we catch glimpses of each other as we truly are: naked, raw, beautiful.  When all the walls that will always exist between us lose substance somehow, and it’s as though they don’t exist at all.

That’s what I love.  That’s the treasure I seek.  That’s the gold, for me, that makes life so worth living.

The spiritual crisis I flailed through a few years ago upturned any clarity I thought I had about my future, a future that had long been set on some sort of Christian vocation.  My future still looks fuzzy, and I’m still trying to put the pieces together of a life that remains orbited around soulful things, but that, as of yet, does not fit comfortably into any one tradition. 

So this is a season of waiting for me.  I’m waiting for the Life that I know is in me to get shaped and formed into something I can actually recognize, and hold, and do things with – vocationally, and otherwise.  I have so many convictions inside, so many observations about life and the holy, so much love I want to share with people, healing and relationships in which I want to participate…

But it all – no, I should rather say a lot of it – feels not quite ripe for happening.  So I wait.  I write my book, and pour into its characters pieces of what I want so much to pour into non-fiction life, once the ripening happens.

At times I feel content.  But at others I’m filled with such a restless longing, such a restless yearning to fly with all I am, fly with all the potentials that are in me for…for what?  This is the question.  This is the baby I’m waiting for.  The thing or things that need to form in me, and can’t be known or predicted quite yet…at least with any accuracy.

“I want to fly,” I told a friend recently.  “I’m tired of flopping around on the ground.”

Jazz pianist Billy Taylor wrote a song years ago that, though surely written for a different context, from a different set of longings and life experiences, speaks well to this yearning I carry around in me, this restlessness I feel to finally fly freely.

I wish I knew how it would feel to be free

I wish I knew how it would feel to be free

I wish I could break all these chains holding me

I wish I could say all the things I should say

Say ‘em loud, say ‘em clear, for the whole world to hear

I wish I could share all the love in my heart

Remove all the bars that still keep us apart

I wish you could know what it means to be me

Then you’d see and agree every man should be free

I wish I could give all I’m longing to give

I wish I could live all I’m longing to live

I wish I could do all the things I can do

Though I’m way overdue I’d be starting anew

I wish I could be like a bird in the sky

How sweet it would be if I found I could fly

I’d soar to the sun and look down at the seas

Then I’d sing cause I’d know how it feels to be free

Along my jogging route is a yard with a statue in it. Of a mermaid.

It’s a naked mermaid. She’s sitting on a rock with an arm stretched skyward, and in her upstretched hand is an enormous shell. The look in her eyes is gladness and victory, but also thoughtfulness, like she’s contemplating all her shell-treasure means.

I know very little about mermaids. For all I know there’s a well-known story attached to this one. But in my ignorance, this is what I think when I see her:

I want to be like that mermaid. I want her combination of utter un-selfconsciousness and delight in the treasure she’s found. I want my treasure to be a shell that’s made up of hope and grief and joy and that sparkly feeling that life is far more than it sometimes seems. I want it to be self-understanding and self-acceptance and forgiveness and a sense for the gifts and observations I can uniquely offer the world. I want it to be all the people and experiences that have shaped my life and taught me how to love and be loved back…who have helped open cracks in my self-protective walls so that love can even have a chance to get in.

I want my treasure to be all of these things. I want to hold it high up in the air, announcing by my stance thoughtful, grateful victory into rain and wind and frost and warming sun. I want to ponder daily what my treasure means. My vulnerabilities, like her nakedness, would be strong and sure and unafraid, an embodied paradox of strength in weakness, glory rising out of shame.

The mermaid reminds me daily who I want to be. When I pass her I smile, and carry her home in my heart.

I’m coming to love the associations I have with deserts.  They’re so vast and silent and dangerous and barren, and yet paradoxically filled with so much possibility, so much life where you least expect it.  Some of the periods of my life that I associate with deserts are:

-     periods when old frameworks for understanding life/God/people haven’t worked anymore, and reality has become increasingly difficult to interpret or make sense of.

-     periods of vast unknowns

-     periods that, at least on the surfaces, have lacked the kind of community or “shelter” or security I’ve wished for

-     periods of going more deeply inward, trying to (re)connect with my soul and with a sense of the Holy.

I came across a passage in a book last night that made such a strong impression on me, I spent some time this morning meditating on it, contemplating it as an allegory of the path I’m currently on – not deep in a desert, but moving along the edges of one.  I think I’ll write the passage out fully, here, and then share a bit of what it sparked in me:

(more…)

Since last I wrote, I have indeed found space to renew.  Here are some of the thoughts that have gotten born in the process:

1. Some of the blogs that I read regularly are actually becoming roadblocks to the kind of growth I want to pursue right now.  I want to learn to honor and love and write about the songs that my soul can’t help but sing.  There are certain kinds of writings and debates on the web that make me 1) feel afraid to do this, or 2) unable to hear my own song over top of louder voices, or 3) lose the wind in my sails, due to comparing myself to others who I wish I could be more like, or whose voices or accomplishments look far more impressive than my own.  I have decided to stop reading these things for now.  Maybe this decision sounds like a no-brainer to many of you, but gosh, it’s a hard one to make.  What is this strange drive to hover around places that actually shrink my confidence and my soul?…places I hear Lady Wisdom lovingly calling me away from…
2. I am one who finds quite a lot about life fascinating.  I usually have a number of books and magazines going at once on a variety of topics.  I like to go to lectures and symposiums at the nearby university.  I ask a lot of questions in most conversations.  Because of this part of my nature, I am troubled when my fascination with life vanishes on occasion.  Like what has happened lately.  I’ve realized this week that this torpor is a predictable state of being for me.  It happens whenever I’ve been neglecting my inner self for a while – not taking time for journaling, not listening to or reflecting on my dreams, not being still.  I’ve decided to try to set up a daily schedule for myself that has time for inner work and meditation in it.  This seems to be the paradox:  the more I care for myself, the more I genuinely care about everything beyond myself – glorious and tragic, beautiful and ugly alike.
3. I’m afraid to look too closely at the devastation of these recent tsunamis.  It’s just too awful.  Too horribly awful.  I’ve spent a lot of my life taking in the suffering around me, carrying it deeply and heavily inside myself.  Weeping often.  Worrying.  Growing ulcers.  I can’t do that anymore.  I haven’t for a few years now.  I want to find a path of compassion that doesn’t pull me toward despair.  I’ve found quite a few, but so far none that can handle the immensity of this kind of awfulness, this kind of suffering.  So I turn my head from it.  Or at least the parts of me that feel.  I engage the information with my intellect.  I don’t know what else to do.  Healthy, un-killable path of compassion?  Please be found.  I don’t want to be numb.  I don’t want to turn away from the darkness that is part of Life’s whole.

Good night all.  Time for me to sleep.