I think somewhere inside each of us lives a tender, sparkling soul – a kind of Christ child pulsing to grow into all the Wisdom and Power and Love and Purpose that are actually its nature to become.  But like the infant Jesus, it can’t get there right off.  Its path is an unfolding one, beginning with much dependency, much need of gentle food, deep rest, attentiveness, nurture.  A vulnerable god, in need of our protection.

I don’t think a soul can ever fully die, but I do think it can get lost inside of us.  It can be ignored or beaten down or scolded for its strangeness or inefficiency so long it learns to be silent when it most needs to speak.  For years my soul felt too afraid to tell me things it urgently wanted to say. I’m sure some fear remains.

But in those golden moments of freedom, as I learn to listen, to wait, to honor, to encourage it toward Becoming – watch out!  I feel a source of Wisdom and Love and Power that makes me shake.  Or smile.  Or laugh.  Or sit silently reverent.  From its cracks seep hope and confidence and humility and courage.  Its roots drink Purpose, and in its presence I feel more deeply happy with who I uniquely am and with all the ways I’m just like everyone else.  My darkness and light become less adversaries than companions, each respecting the necessary role the other plays.  My fears become less hurdles, less roadblocks to thriving, and more like folks to whom I tip my hat as I move along my way.

Last night I had the most wonderful dream.  As a child I had a parakeet named Buddy, with whom I spent a lot of time.  Often he’d sit on my books or the tip of my pencil as I did homework, or sing from the ceiling fan in my room.  In the tenth grade I guiltily sold him at a yard sale, bearing the burden of abandoning, for convenience’s sake, my trusting companion.

Since then Buddy has become a persisting figure in my dreams, popping up particularly when I’m not taking care of myself…when I’m consciously or unconsciously ignoring my soul.  He represents my soul.

In many dreams I’ve forgotten to feed him.  I haven’t given him water.  His feathers are bent and unpreened.  His cage is filth.  In one, his eyes were even plucked out.

But last night – last night I dreamt I came to where his cage has always been, and the cage was gone.  Buddy sat serenely on a free-standing perch, the essence of youth and beauty.  His feathers were soft and more colorful than they’ve ever been, the look in his eyes all life and health.  I went immediately to him, exclaiming how beautiful he was, and how delighted I was to see him.  I woke up smiling.

My prayer to all of our souls:  may we love and honor you into becoming what you pulse to become.  May all your wounds and silencings be transformed into beauty, flight and song, and the resulting chorus become a contagious balm to a world in which there is much darkness, and the need for thriving souls is great.

It’s been a good few days since the yuck of that last post (a hearty thanks for the prayers and good wishes!). I spent all day Saturday and Sunday commuting back and forth to a writers conference in San Francisco, and, despite having a slow start to the day today (pregnancy and too much stimulation, I’m discovering, are not the greatest mix for sitting healthfully upright when it’s all over), come away very much encouraged and inspired in my life as a writer. Met and listened to a whole array of interesting folks, and just ate up being in the presence of so many people who relate with what I’m doing – for whom the particular joys and challenges that I experience are altogether normal. Verrry nice.

So here’s to sunshine coming out again after rain, and to buoys of connection and belonging!

I’m not sure how much of how I feel today can be pinned on hormones, and how much is just bona fide funk, but I’m not doing so well.  Last night at a writing class I got teared up a few times listening to classmates talk about the real-life stuff they’ve written into their fiction – physical abuse, sexual abuse, the trauma of immigrating and trying to learn a new culture while simultaneously being discriminated against.  The already-published stories we were assigned were equally tragic.  Actually all the ones I’ve read since this class began have been so.

I came home last night and just cried.  Cried and cried and cried.  We’re all such dear, dear people, plopped into this world by no choice of our own.  Who deserves being beaten up – learning to feel like it’s their own fault? – learning to stutter, to hide, to be ashamed?  Who deserves being violated in any way?  Who should go hungry, or be hated for having dark skin, for speaking with an accent, for not having the luxury of learning a new language at all?

I don’t know who God is right now, but if I could imagine a God aware of all that happens on our planet, in addition to that God being delighted by the glory of it all, I would definitely imagine him or her crying.  Just crying and crying and crying over all of us.  The ways we perpetuate the junk are so largely just ways of coping with the junk that got heaped on us in the first place.  Dear souls!  Dear people, trying to live and survive.

There are times when I wish I had a teddy bear God again, against whom I could cuddle up and feel safe and warm and protected.  A God I could believe would make everything right somehow, someday.  But I can’t find that God anymore.  At least not in any conscious way.  And when made aware of so much darkness – well, the void feels dark indeed.

I need to find a way to reconnect with the light that I know exists alongside all this darkness.  I need to listen to voices of hope and joy and healing and overcoming.  If any of you are so inspired, I would gladly welcome prayers or vibes like these being sent in my direction.

I’ve been thinking…many who read this blog most devotedly are friends and family whose exposure to the world of blogs is really the vast expanse of…this.  Shy about posting publicly, many of you like to talk only in person about what’s here, or email privately.  And that’s completely fine with me!

But I’ve been thinking…maybe you’d enjoy an introduction to blog worlds and cultures beyond this one.  The worlds are vast, each one a network of folks orbiting around overlapping people, topics and/or geographies.  I’m still surfing to find networks of bloggers resembling close to the kind of creature that I am. 

Anyway, here is a sampling of sites that I enjoy reading with some regularity.  I could list more, but I’ll have to leave that for another day.

·        Jen Lemen:  Jen is an extroverted thirty-something with a real gift for talking engagingly, inspiringly, wittily and eloquently about life and faith and family and community.  Her posts are the whole spectrum of heavy to light, and come often – sometimes more than once a day.  My more pensive, quiet self is always amazed by this.

·        Dry Bones Dance:  Christy, the writer of this site, is a woman who’s been around the block a few times – seen corners of our country that many don’t have occasion to see.  She’s worked a lot in urban settings and has a lot to say about issues related to poverty, education, politics and faith.  She’s on a journey of self-discovery, and writes honestly about the struggles associated with that.

·        Real Live Preacher:  Gordon is a part-time pastor and full-time writer.  Many of his posts are full-length essays, some of which come as links to Christian Century, where his stuff is becoming more regularly published.  He has an interesting life story (you can read it by clicking on a link in his sidebar), and is a delightful mix of faith and doubt, gentleness and roughness, patience and impatience, shadow and light.

·        Midtone Blue:  Blue is an anonymous blogger, writing from an open perspective of faith.  In the last many months he has posted only sporadically.  But his archives are well worth browsing through.  Light and hope shine brightly through his work.

Anyway, enjoy!  Welcome to this much more of the blogging world!

Well, I’m less than 2 weeks away from being done with my first trimester, and am crossing my fingers that the me I’m much more used to living with will return sometime around then. Between nausea and fatigue, I haven’t been myself – haven’t felt creative or had energy to think or write or even read deep thoughts. Sleep is what I’ve craved. This is fine for a season, but I must admit I’m ready for new winds to blow. If they do, I’m sure this blog will be affected too. For the better. So maybe we can all cross our fingers…

Today I’ve taken a step back from my work (fiction writing) to reflect on why I’m doing it.  Every so often I need this – a “taking stock” that refocuses my energy and helps me determine whether there’s things I want/need to do differently from week to week to better move toward my goals.  I came across another passage in Rollo May’s Courage to Create that has sparked some helpful reflection toward this end.  May writes:

“If you wish to understand the psychological and spiritual temper of any historical period, you can do no better than to look long and searchingly at its art.  For in the art the underlying spiritual meaning of the period is expressed directly in symbols.  This is not because artists are didactic or set out to teach or to make propaganda; to the extent that they do, their power of expression is broken; their direct relation to the inarticulate, or, if you will, “unconscious” levels of the culture is destroyed.  They have the power to reveal the underlying meaning of any period precisely because the essence of art is the powerful and alive encounter between the artist and his or her world.”

This immediately made me think about all the short stories I’ve been reading.  These are art.  And the more I reflect on them “long and searchingly,” the more I see in them a reflection of the “spiritual meaning” of our age.  As far as I can tell, they portray homelessness in its deepest sense – that lack of rootedness, of place, of purpose, of meaning that has little to do with whether or not you have a permanent address.  I leave these stories lonely and cold, wishing for buoys of hope or warmth or relationship, doubting they’re there to be found.  I leave feeling like life has little sparkle, and day-to-dayness is a lot of that raw feeling you get when you haven’t slept enough, or you’re about to get sick, or everything you wished life could be just really isn’t happening.

Thinking about these stories this way makes me admire their writers for being such incisive namers, naming our age and the state of so many of our souls.  I want to be a namer, too.  I want to help raise consciousness about what it is we’re feeling and living through, what we’re hoping for and despairing about.

But in all my “taking stock,” I realize I don’t want to stop there.  I want to do more than hold up mirrors.  I want to point toward windows, and begin imagining what might be seen through them.  I want to stand at the edge of our age, quite personally in touch with the fear and frustration and meaningless that accompany disillusionment and the crumbling of foundations (in science, religion, politics, etc.), and look past that edge to participate in the creation of something more.  Something beyond.  Something hopeful, even if realistic and not disconnected from despair.  May writes, “[The courage to live into the future] will not be the opposite of despair.  We shall often be faced with despair, as indeed every sensitive person has been during the last several decades in this country.  Hence Kierkegaard and Nietzsche and Camus and Sartre have proclaimed that courage is not the absence of despair; it is, rather, the capacity to move ahead in spite of despair.”

I want to be a namer, yes, but also a creator, courageously creating from the stuff of life that which enlivens, and sustains, and shines light on hopeful paths toward all that makes up “home.”

Rollo May has some pretty profound things to say about courage and creativity and the ways that artists (defined broadly) are actually a type of rebel.  Some pieces from Courage to Create:

“When I use the word rebel for the artist, I do not refer to revolutionary or to such things as taking over the dean’s office; that is a different matter.  Artists are generally soft-spoken persons who are concerned with their inner visions and images.  But that is precisely what makes them feared by any coercive society.  For they are the bearers of the human beings’ age-old capacity to be insurgent.  They love to immerse themselves in chaos in order to put it into form, just as God created form out of chaos in Genesis.  Forever unsatisfied with the mundane, the apathetic, the conventional, they always push on to newer worlds.”

And later,

“Recall how often in human history the saint and the rebel have been the same person.  Socrates was a rebel, and he was sentenced to drink hemlock.  Jesus was a rebel, and he was crucified for it.  Joan of Arc was a rebel, and she was burned at the stake.

“Yet each of these figures and hundreds like them, though ostracized by their contemporaries, were recognized and worshiped by the following ages as having made the most significant creative contributions in ethics and religion to civilization.

“Those we call saints rebelled against an outmoded and inadequate form of God on the basis of their new insights into divinity.  The teachings that led to their deaths raised the ethical and spiritual levels of their societies…They rebelled, as Paul Tillich has so beautifully stated, against God in the name of the God beyond God.  The continuous emergence of the God beyond God is the mark of creative courage in the religious sphere.”

So I’m thinking about these things today.  All of them were written in the context of describing and defining courage, and particularly the courage required of artists, of creators. In many ways I feel like the last years of my life have been filled with courage – the courage that it takes to say no to ways of understanding life and self and God that, though destructive for me, nevertheless hemmed me comfortably in with structure and approval and knownness and acceptability in many of my life’s arenas.  It takes excruciating courage to step away from things like that.

But stepping-away courage is only one kind, I’m thinking.  Stepping-toward courage is a whole nother beast.  And living-into courage as well – the kind it takes to solidly embody who one is, not just in the privacy of one’s home, or in the safety of a handful of people who see things the way you do, but in ever-widening spheres of life.

I want to foster these latter kinds of courage.  I want to be more than a clandestine rebel.  I want my rebellion to participate openly in the creation of a more compassionate, more alive, more whole society than the one I currently inhabit.

As many of you know, I’m working almost full-time these days on a novel.  Part of my fiction-writing learning curve this year has been to introduce myself to the genre of short story.  For beginning fiction-writers, short stories are a good place to develop an eye and ear for what works and what doesn’t in the rhythms of story-telling.

But here’s my problem:  learning to write good short stories, like learning to write novels or anything else, requires that I do a lot of reading in that genre.  And…I have yet to find published short stories that I like.  (I feel like I should whisper that, and hope past and present writing teachers don’t hear.)  Is it me, or does anyone else feel frustrated by them?

My frustration is partly to do with feeling like they’re too short to not leave me hanging by the end, but partly to do with the fact that the majority of the ones I’ve read leave me feeling dark and heavy by the end, as though the movement in the people’s complicated lives is minuscule at best, and often not at all.  I’m the last one to want to sugarcoat life’s yuck.  Seriously.  But I guess I’m looking, in fiction, to be given a little light in the midst of that yuck.  Doesn’t have to be glorious or accompanied by crashing symbols or anything.  Just a quiet little light is fine.

Anyhow, all of this to say:  if anyone has short story recommendations to send my way – maybe collections that have more of the flavor I seem to be looking for – I would be oh so grateful to receive them.