Well, after 24 hours of antibiotics, my fever is gone and I feel almost back to normal.  I was in bed most of the day yesterday (N tending to the baby), and that helped so much.  I feel like a new woman.

So I’m going to try to put into words some of the rumblings I’ve been feeling inside.  Apologies for any lack of coherence.

In the last couple of weeks I’ve watched two really great documentaries:  The Corporation (about the sicknesses inherent to corporate America and beyond), and You Can’t Be Neutral On a Moving Train (about Howard Zinn and the social causes with which he’s been involved).  I left both so energized.  Like someone had nudged me awake, and I was seeing life anew.

I’ve long self-identified as one concerned with social justice.  Before moving to the Bay, my husband’s line of work (community organizing) and the neighborhood in which we lived were daily reminders of racial/social/educational/economic inequities.  These were ever in my face.

But here we are in a different season.  My husband is in school, and I’m writing.  We’re both caring for our son.  And we live in an area where it costs boatloads of money to live.  (Can anyone say “enormous student debt”?)  The streets are all clean and in good repair.  The grocery stores don’t have guards.  Very few cars were made before the year 2000.  Really, the economic diversity in the area has mainly two categories:  a) students and b) millionaires.

So it’s easy for society’s inequities to fade into distant memory.  It’s easy to feel the gentle sunlight and afternoon breeze (it’s sunny and between 60 and 80 degrees here nearly year-round) and feel as though all is well with the world.  To feel that all is well, and, frankly, a little boring.

But these movies…they woke me up again.  They gave me permission to do something other than focus on my little life in my little household.  They gave different images and role models than much in the media today, all of which inspire engagement with a world where all is not well.  So very not.

So I’ve once again been dreaming of what I can do with who I am and the kinds of things that stir my soul, to lead a more spicy life.  A life of greater engagement with the world’s unwellness. 

But here’s what happens in my dreams.  I get tripped up on the fact that most social causes a person can participate in involve demonizing someone.  An individual.  A group.  A stratum of society.  And all I’ve learned and contemplated of the human psyche, and the social and environmental factors involved in any social ill, makes me unable to comfortably do that.  As far as I can tell, we’re all of us caught up in systems.  Systems that make some of us mean and some of us nice.  Some of us conscientious and some self-absorbed.  Some bitter, some arrogant, some fearful or ashamed.  It’s systems that form our politicians, systems that make rich people rich and poor people poor, systems that cause some from each category to move up or down that ladder.  Who isn’t shaped by their environment?  By their joys and wounds…by the joys and wounds of others?

I can’t comfortably point at any group or individual and say, “You!  The crap is all your fault.  You’re completely to blame.”

Can I join with others to address society’s ills when such others might be saying these very things?

And this leads me to my next thought:  I think I’m too principled.  I think I care too much about being genuine.  Is that possible?  I care too much about never participating in things that I can’t fully, consistently back.  I’m wondering these days whether there isn’t a healthy place for lowering one’s principles.  Lowering them for the sake of doing things in the world.  Working for social change.  Connecting with others.  Participating in religion, even.

What would it look like for me to not fear the wrath of the authenticity police, those boogie men who crouch and watch for me to say or do anything contrary to my convictions?  I’m sure there are some who could really use a dose of that wrath.  But there are those of us on the opposite extreme, who need to stop fearing it.  Whose fear of it, oh so ironically, actually keeps us from doing much at all about all our “authentic convictions.”

I’m not about a guilt-based life, but I am about a spicy one, where I’m not asleep to the spectrum of light and dark in our world…where I’m satisfyingly involved in the spreading of the light, and containment of the dark.  As tempting as it is to let my environment lull me back to sleep, I want to shake that.  I want to be awake and alive in the best sense of that word, and, though getting a little dirty in the process, try to care a little less about being 100% principled all the time.

What do you think?

Okay Bobbie.  You’ve made comments about being wasted in the weeks after giving birth, and I’m so finally there with you.  I’m so exhausted.  I have all these thoughts rumbling around that I want to think and read and write about, as well as physical tasks I’d love to accomplish, but I’m just so tired.  It’s all I can do to keep the baby fed and happy today.  And me.  Last night I participated in a panel discussion on blogging and spirituality (Karen, Chris and Sarah were fellow panelists) – a really great-hearted group around the table – and it so reminded me how much I love discussing things with people.  But wow, being involved in such things is such a bigger ordeal now than before (husband needing to be available for childcare, trying to time feeding the baby right before I leave [let alone showering], pumping afterwards, etc.).  I feel my hunger for intellectual stimulation and engagement with adults, my love for my baby and mothering, and exhaustion almost in equal measures today.

When do babies start sleeping through the night?  Or maybe a better question:  When will this baby?  When he does, a whole new day will dawn for me I think.  Right now, though, night – or the fatigue most of us associate with it – stretches all around the clock. 

Last night we were asked if blogging, for us, is at all like prayer. I said yes.

Amen.

You know that feeling you have when you recover after being sick for a while?  That sense of giddiness at actually being well, at being able to do more than obsess about when you can next crawl into bed, or find a bathroom, or how in the world you’re going to get through the work day?

That’s how I’m feeling these days.  There is definitely a physical component to it – great relief at having my lungs at full capacity again and my stomach unsquished from within and my heart not doing double time.  It’s glorious to do so much with ease!  Tie my shoes, for example.  Stand up.  Roll over.  Walk.  Glorious!

But the feeling is much more than physical.

Those of you who’ve gone to seminary or studied semitic writings probably learned at some point about chiasms – literary devices used to order texts and, in many cases, give emphasis to central themes.  Chiasms are mirror-like arrangements of the pieces of a text or story.

Here’s an example:

(a) I got up to feed the baby.

     (b) I noticed baby’s diaper was really heavy.

          (c) I took his diaper off to change it, confident his insides were completely emptied out.

               (*) HE PROCEEDED TO PEE IN MY FACE.

          (C) I realized his insides were only now emptied out.

     (B) I cleaned us both up and put on a clean diaper.

(A) I fed the baby and went back to bed.

It’s the statements or stories in the middle of chiasms that writers are typically trying to emphasize.  To those trained to recognize them, the mirrored elements become arrows, pointing ever at that core.

Anyway, I’m saying all of this because I feel like my life of late is working on a chiasm.  A real-life one.  A chiasm whose final parts are a wellness beyond any physical state.  And I’m newly pondering the lessons planted at its core.

Here’s the basic layout:

(a) Much of my life I lived feeling tremendously responsible for the world around me.  Who knows how much our religious devotion dictates our compulsions, and how much our compulsions dictate the nature of our religious devotion, but pretty early on the two became one inside of me.  My drive to be superstar savior best friend best daughter best girlfriend best wife best leader of this and that club and this and that committee and this and that initiative to solve world suffering completely, forever – well, let’s just say it all got colored by who I thought God was.  By what I thought God wanted from me.  I earnestly, conscientiously tried making God proud.

(b) The more I worked to live out my faith, and the more deeply I sought spiritual understanding, the more my faith’s foundations gave way.  Truth got very wobbly.  I proceeded to enter into spiritual crisis, which turned into identity crisis, which ultimately ripped away my reasons for getting up in the morning.  For doing anything, really.  I was profoundly disillusioned.  Depressed. Nihilistic.  What’s the point of anything?

(*) I pulled almost completely out of the public arena.  I started therapy.  I read widely.  I began to write.  I stopped trying to save anyone but myself.  And peace descended.

(B) So here I am today, at this point in the chiasm.  Here I am feeling newly alive, newly awake…and a new kind of nudge to become more mindful of where I’m at spiritually.  What do I believe?  I’ve had a wonderful break from any need to define this – a necessary break, and one integral to my healing.  But I want to understand this part of me better now.  Or rather, understand this part of me at a more mindful, conscious level (there are more ways of understanding than just these).  Not in a frantic, grasping way like before.  Not because I fear that if I don’t, my world will grind to a terrifying halt. 

No, this is the flip side of that.  It’s about freedom now.  Freedom enough from my demons to be able to imagine a spiritual life that nourishes and heals and affirms what I trust needs affirming.  Freedom to say no to what deadens and silences and sucks away life without my “no” itself sucking me into bitterness and defensiveness and cynicism.  It’s about discovering in these years of dormancy all kinds of nourishment for colorful, fragrant fruit.

And here’s why I want to do this work:  I have a sense that a big part of my personal legend (to use Coelho’s language) – a big part of my place in the world, and the things my soul most aches to be and do – continues to connect deeply with spirituality.  Mindfully understanding my spiritual self, at least in a provisioinal, un-petrified way, feels like an important part of my pursuit of this legend.  It feels like an important step in helping me know what kinds of actions I want to take, and the quality and purpose with which I want to infuse my actions.  For example, in this season, my primary task (apart from being a wife and mother) is novel writing.  But even this can be infused, or not, with a sense of purpose, a mindful knowing of why I’m doing it, and how the task connects with what I sense I’m on this earth to do.

(A) I’ve a hunch that as I do some of this work, this naming of who I am and what I want to be about, the me of my past that was so involved in public life might find herself alive again.  Not in the same way as before, thank heaven.  Not with the same fears and compulsions and drives to please some tyrannical God.  But alive.  Truly.  In the best sense of that word.  I’m itching for her resurrection.

As I write all of this out, two thoughts come to mind.  1) Don’t rush through these last two parts of the pattern.  Done well, they’ll be a wonderful coming home, a spiraling back to old parts of myself, but in new ways, with new health and wholeness.  Rush through them too quickly, and roots from that central core – that piece the chiasm asks me to pay most attention to – won’t have the time they need to burrow sufficiently down and in.  To become the tremendous and foundational source of nourishment they pulse to be.  2) YIPPEE!!!

I’ve just begun Paulo Coelho’s Pilgrimage, the non-fiction tale of Coelho’s spiritual journey.  Much of the journey is quite literal - a walking path taken across Spain when Coelho was 30.  So far I can hardly put it down.

Monumental current events have a way of worming their way into much that I read, so it isn’t much wonder that Katrina came to mind as I read the following passage:

Everything in our surroundings [along his path in Spain] reflected an uneasy peace, the peace of a world that was still in the process of growing and being created - a world that seemed to know that, in order to grow, it had to continue moving along, always moving along.  Great earthquakes and killer storms might make nature seem cruel, but I could see that these were just the vicissitudes of being on the road.  Nature itself journeyed, seeking illumination. (36)

Do you think this could be true?…a way, maybe, of depersonalizing the devastation that nature inflicts on itself?  Or, rather, personalizing it in a different way than we often do?  Rather than nature being cruel, maybe nature is traveling its own path, doing its best, like many of us are, to balance and counterbalance its own self out.  When too much pressure builds up here, an earthquake or volcano gets released.  When too much moisture or heat builds up there, a huricane spins and dumps the access where it wasn’t before.

I don’t know.  A journeying nature is somehow easier for me to respect and relate with, easier for me to swallow than one that’s malevolent or randomly unfair.  It doesn’t diminish the suffering so many bear because of that journey, but it puts the suffering, for me, into a different light.  It also begs we ask the tough questions of why, when nature does its thing, the poor are so often those that suffer most.  That’s a different set of questions than the ones around why nature is so mean.

I’ve also been reading Mary Oliver this week.  Two of her poems have been echoing again and again in my mind as prayers…prayers in response, again, to Katrina.  Prayers for hope that light follows darkness.

The Lily

Night after night
darkness
enters the face
of the lily

which, lightly,
closes its five walls
around itself,
and its purse

of honey,
and its fragrance,
and is content
to stand there

in the garden,
not quite sleeping,
and, maybe,
saying in lily language

some small words
we can’t hear
even when there is no wind
anywhere,

its lips
are so secret,
its tongue
is so hidden–

or, maybe,
it says nothing at all
but just stands there
with the patience

of vegetables
and saints
until the whole earth has turned around
and the silver moon

becomes the golden sun–
as the lily absolutely knew it would,
which is itself, isn’t it,
the perfect prayer?

At Black River

All day
its dark, slick bronze soaks
in a mossy place,
its teeth,

a multitude
set
for the comedy
that never comes–

its tail
knobbed and shiny,
and with a heavyweight’s punch
packed around the bone.

In beautiful Florida [or the Gulf region…]
he is king
of his own part
of the black river,

and from his nap
he will wake […or she, Katrina]
into the warm darkness
to boom, and thrust forward,

paralyzing
the swift, thin-waisted fish,
or the bird
in its frilled, white gown,

that has dipped down
from the heaven of leaves
one last time
to drink.

Don’t think
I’m not afraid.
There is such an unleashing
of horror.

Then I remember:
death comes before
the rolling away
of the stone.

I read this and am dumbfounded.  Absolutely dumbfounded.  Shocked and outraged and speechless, really.  THIS IS NOT OKAY.

There are two of me.

One is the me of mornings and days. 

She’s grown a deep sense of peace with the world, with her place in it, with letting life be what it is.  People what they are. 

She’s patient.  She doesn’t need to understand everything.  She sits in soft sunlight and watches insects crawl, feeling wind against her face and warmth seeping through her clothes toward skin.  She calls this prayer.

She lives gently.  Her hands are mostly open, receiving life, giving back gratitude.  When they’re closed they’re wrapped around skillets, scrubbers, steering wheel, friends, husband, baby, keyboard.  The day-to-day.  But none of it’s a grasping.

The other me is the me of nighttime.  She’s the me of twilight, of late afternoon when the sun turns everything orange.  Her soul’s untamed.

It’s the me of firelight and candlelight.  Of moonlight.  Of visions and dreams and knowings.  To her the world’s a love affair. 

The same ache for sexual union is the ache she feels to live, to experience life ever more deeply, to eat it slowly or ravenously up, tasting it the whole way down.  She aches with the beauty of nature, of people, of the presence of Mystery.  She sees tragedy and comedy as necessary counterparts, and wants to run toward both, dive headlong into both, participate in the making and unmaking of them.

And she wants to write about all of it, the beauty and the horror.  All the things that make us crazy and sane.  She wants to put words to it all, though she knows she can’t, and that trying only fans her ache into sparking flame.

When words don’t work, she tastes things like chocolate, wine, deviled eggs, ice cream; she tastes them, and, eyes closed, says, “This.  This.”  Drums beating, too.  Many kinds of music.  Wind through pine-dense forests.  Majestic skies.  “This,” she says.  The feeling that God is dead.  The sense that S/he’s not.  Dark nights that last forever.  New Orleans.

“This.”

During the night last night – two?  maybe three o’clock? – I sat with my nursing baby, aching in this second me.  The world outside was still, but my soul was reaching out and in, yearning for something.  For what?  For God?  For Mystery?  I wanted to take something in, do something more, write something beautiful, feel, speak, organize.  But what?  My soul stood naked on a moonlit hilltop, arms outstretched, head tilted starward, mouth wide open to a wind that whipped at every goosebumped limb. The energy was intoxicating, but filled, apart from wind, with so much silence, so much stillness, so much gentle, moon-defused light.  Hardly satisfying, given my yearning.  I’m at a point in life when my ache, the ache of this second me, is far stronger than my action.  I hope that’s soon to change.

And then I slept and the sun came up and I sat again in my rocker, the other me, the living-gently one, fully back.  She watched light streaming through windows and bounced the burpy baby and felt, even in the knowledge of so much yuck in the world, nearly perfectly at peace.  She shook her head at that nighttime soul, and nestled calmly into a new day.

A couple of posts that nourish and speak to me:

This at Midtone Blue   

This and this at Sacred Ordinary

Thank you, Blue and Fran.

For the last week my world has had a homebound orbit, circling almost entirely around our newborn son.  I’ve felt such joy and gratitude, such gladness to be right where I am, right who I am, nestled deep into this life that I’m living.  Whispers of the greater world have trickled in, but not until yesterday did I actually take time to read more deeply of the tragedy gripping our nation’s south.

And now I’m floored.  Or rather filled with a profound kind of dissonance.  While I’ve been basking in what feels like the benevolence of our world, thousands have been doing the exact opposite.  The exact opposite.  They’re living in hell.  Right now.  Right freaking now.  How can this be?

One of the hugest challenges of my 20s has been learning to come to terms with suffering, to grow so absolutely exhausted from kicking and screaming in the face of it, from personally flailing around in cesspools of it, and all the questions it raises for me and in me, that I’ve finally fallen limp with my fists newly open.  “I accept you,” I’ve finally learned to say.  “I accept that you’re in our world, that sometimes nights are endless, that pits are bottomless, that no amount of wishing or praying will make you go away.”

But now I’m confronted with an entirely new challenge.  An entirely different beast.  It’s joy.  Joy and peace.  How in the world, given suffering’s Reality, does a person come to terms with such things?  At many points in the last decade I’ve wanted to slap optimistic people.  Or shake them into actually seeing the world for what it is.  Only eyes closed or averted, I’ve thought, could go on registering “good place” when looking at our world.

But that’s not how I’m seeing things at all anymore.  I’ll never ever say this world is only good.  I’ll never look at things like New Orleans and think they’re just a blip on an otherwise glassy sea.  I weep as I learn about what’s happening there.  I weep and mourn and donate and pray.  But I can say, in addition to that, that I am genuinely happy.  And I do think kindness and gentleness exist in our world.  And that sometimes they even wrap us up and fill us up and make us glow in a kind of heaven.

And this is what’s confusing me today, what’s being impossible to get my mind around as I look into my baby’s eyes, guzzling warmly at my breast, and then the eyes of hungry babies half a country away.  God, what a world.

In the Darkness, in the Light, it just keeps on.