One year ago today N and I walked out our front door, nervous, camera-clad, heading from the life we knew toward one we could only dimly imagine.  Elijah was born late that morning.

From that point on, our hearts and lives have been woven with a new thread, one that’s stronger and more vulnerable than anything I’ve ever known.  It smells like milk and soap and crackers and poo.  It makes us laugh every day.  It warms us and softens us and makes all the things we think so important elsewhere get cast in a different light.  It will be part of us forever.

We love you, Lijah Boy.  It is an honor to be your keepers.

I’m thinking about Plato today.  I know just enough to pretend I have a working knowledge of his thought, so that’s what I aim to do.  You can’t say I didn’t warn you.

I’m thinking of Plato because of what I wrote here about love.  And Love.  It looks like I’m Platonic, no?  That I think there’s this universal form called Love, and that all the human things we call by that name are just shadows of it.  Imitations, and at that, only varying levels of partial.

I think that does describe what I think.  I’m pretty sure I have yet to experience or offer Love fully.  This doesn’t mean I think love with a lower case ‘l’ is bad or stupid.  I’m not zoroastrian, or whatever you call someone who thinks what we have in the flesh is evil.  I’m just saying I don’t think any of us loves completely, without at least a good dose of other-than-Love mixed in.  How’s that for a specific recipe?

What I’m not so comfortable with is equating that form of Love, that ideal that we can talk more about sometime, because I’d love to try to understand it better, with God.  Since we’re talking recipes, I think this is one for something bad.  Maybe even poisonous.

But before I get into that, I want to talk about the reason why I think this matters at all, or a lot, rather, which has everything to do with growing up.  It has to do with a process in which I think we’re all participating, more and less willingly, and with varying levels of success, which is coming to terms with life being not what we expect it to be.  Those who appear most deeply at peace, I mean far deeper than surfaces, seem to be those who have faced some pretty major challenges.  They seem to be those who have not skipped past their challenges, either, or been stoic or a forced kind of optimistic in the face of them, but rather have let themselves feel the confusion their challenges have naturally invoked, the consternation, the rage, the depression, the despair.  They’re people who have confronted the beast that is Life Isn’t What I Thought or Expected It To Be, and sat with it long enough to realize it doesn’t have to do them in.  That, in fact, they can make a sort of truce with this animal, which…might even move toward friendship.

It seems like in these kinds of people an ironic sort of lightness starts to grow–in spite of, but really also because of all they’ve been through–where bitterness and clenched-upness and mental and emotional fatigue begin to fade into something more like hope, and not a hope that has to be worked at, or conjured up, or willed and prayed into being.  It’s one that comes of its own accord.  Usually very quietly.  Even imperceptively, especially at the start.  And it doesn’t depend on everything going right from then on, either.  It doesn’t depend on people always coming through, or even God existing and being good, but rather on a deep down conviction that it’s okay.  That somehow, some important thing lives on.  Maybe a person–you, even, because God knows some of life’s challenges can make that look unlikely, or someone else you care about–but maybe something broader than that, like love in the world.  Like babies getting born and fed and raised.  Like sunlight being soft sometimes, and plants somehow knowing how to grow.  Like the cycle of water moving up into clouds and back down to earth and streaming to the places where it evaporates again.  Maybe it’s just inexplicable, an inexplicable sense that things will be okay, that what needs to happen somehow is.  Or will.

Whatever it is, whatever comprises this hope, I think these people have it.  And I think this thing that gives them hope is rarely something glorious or triumphant.  Their challenges have made that pretty impossible.  I think it’s edges are rusty, and there’s chips in its paint.  I think its hair is a little greasy and maybe it hasn’t brushed its teeth for a while.  And maybe it never had cool clothes to begin with, and especially not the right color socks. 

But it exists–it, this hope, this sense that something important lives on, and somehow, because of that, things are okay.  It exists in an earthy, un-plastic way, and can’t fall out of pockets or disappear if you look at it too directly.  It can’t get stolen by someone who says it’s stupid, or whose "it" is much bigger, or looks like something taken from a magazine cover.

It can’t get lost because it already has been, and was found again.  It already died, so it can’t get killed.  It’s already all dinged up, so there’s just no worry that it might get scratched.

But back to Plato.  And Love.  And God.

I think this same process of growing up in relation to life needs to also happen in relation to God.  I think there’s danger when it doesn’t, because an idealized version of God can’t stand on its own.  It has to be protected.  Fiercely.  The same things we do to people or circumstances that threaten the Life We Thought We Should Be Able To Live, we have to do to people who challenge our notion of God.  Ignore them.  Belittle them.  Berate them.  Talk bad about them, or people like them, behind their backs.  Patronize them.  Turn them into projects to try to make them see things our way.  Or work on some serious efforts at denial.

I wonder what would happen if we set God free in our minds to be whoever or whatever God is (and isn’t).  I wonder what would happen if religious people let their true feelings about God surface, their true questions and frustrations, and stepped out from under any obligation to believe God is any certain way, out from any work to have faith in God’s love, for example, or God’s power or personal presence.  I wonder what would happen if all the stuff we equate with our being good and faithful and making sure we have some reason left to hope or know among so many options how to live well got turned completely upside down, and the opposite of all of our definitions for such things got unveiled as being the real deal.

The God that would show up in such an upset, the God that would be left, I think would be a lot more like the hope that Peaceful people have.  A lot more like that Volvo that keeps driving 300,000 miles strong, and just doesn’t matter if someone opens a door into.  A lot more like something that needs little protection, and therefore is cause (or justification) for very few wars.

If you want to call that an ideal, a form, to use Plato-speak, so be it.  I think I’d prefer calling it lived, experienceable reality.

I think the process of growing up well involves coming to terms with things being far less perfect than we thought they should be, far less ideal, and learning to be okay with that, and to find beauty and wonder and that sparkly feeling in your chest and your fingertips that used to come from reading fairy tales not by imagining an ideal that exists outside of us, apart from us and this banged up thing that is our world, but by looking at what we’ve actually got, in and around us.  By looking at it deeply, being as honest as we can about what we see, and feel, and know.

I think the same is true of growing up in relation to God.

Got tagged by Bob.  This is a hard one, as I feel like I’m snubbing about a zillion books by putting any single title down.  Hello, books?  All the ones I’ve read and that could just as easily be listed here?  I’m sorry.  Maybe I’ll remember you for next time.

1. One book that changed my life:  Faith Beyond Resentment, by James Alison
2. One book I’ve read more than once:  The Alchemist, by Paulo Ceulho
3. One book I’d want on a desert island:  It’s a toss up between a how-to book on raft making, and one about surviving on a desert island.
4. One book that made me laugh:  Traveling Mercies, by Anne Lamott
5. One book that made me cry:  A Severe Mercy, by Sheldon Vanauken
6. One book I wish had been written:  Something else with mercy in the title.  No.  Um…  Something about what it would be like to be me between the ages of 20 and 30.  I think I would have freaked out a hundred times less if I would have known that things wouldn’t be so bad forever.
7. One book I wish had never been written:  Where the Wild Things Are, by Maurice Sendak (another hypothetical example of how to freak me out far less)
8. One book I’m currently reading:  The Golden Compass, by Philip Pullman
9. One book I’ve been meaning to read:  The End of Faith, by Sam Harris
10. One book I’d like to write:  You mean publish?  Because that’s really what I want to happen with this thing.  It’s a novel about two teenagers losing their religion while trying to save their souls.

And for tagging…hmm….how about Seeker and Cindy?

For the longest time I’ve had a picture of a sunrise as the background on my computer.  Orange and gold pouring over choppy sea.  I put that up about the time I had a surge of things to write–on my blog, and in the fiction I’m working on this summer.  I felt bold and full of words.  Active and free.  A healthy dose of yang, you might say.

Just after finishing up that series on bodies, I had a dream.  I was in a building with a group of some kind, and I thought we all were leaving.  A swarm of crows was attacking us, and I knew it would only get worse outside.  Feeling like Harry Potter, or some other child-on-a-mission, I quickly ran ahead to distract that swarm with some sweets I had made.  To save the group.

But when I got outside, there were no crows.  In fact, the group that I was with wasn’t there either.  Turning back inside, disappointed that my grand aspirations weren’t required, I discovered another group of folks rehearsing for some play.  They were dancing.  And it was beautiful.  I recognized dear friends among them, and after a moment of feeling way out of place, way underdressed, I realized I fit perfectly in.  The dream ended with some shady, unkind characters telling me I had bad breath and me determining I wouldn’t say one more word until I could brush my teeth.

My therapist would be all over this one.

But here’s the thing:  I think she would be right if she said it was calling me back inside, back to the dance.  And by dance, I think I mean something archetypal, something about expressing the self–not because one has to, or because one is trying to set anything right or look good in anyone’s eyes, but because one can.  Or must.  I think the dream is calling me back away from taking my external life too seriously, back from trying to address my own demons everywhere else but where they actually reside:  inside.

So I had this dream, and I slowly grew more quiet.  Not because I’m afraid my breath stinks, because I think the characters who said that were "demons", and precisely the kind of crows I must confront inside.  But because I feel drawn inward, to listen again, to wait.  And to practice the dance.  I wonder how many of us on an inner path of healing get right to the point where we’re learninig our authentic dance, right to the point where things are coming together inside, clicking, falling into place, and then move outward.  Move quickly on to extrovert the things we’ve learned, not realizing we haven’t yet mastered our dance, and that all our outside doing might actually make us forget the few steps that we’ve learned. 

I have a night scene on my computer screen now.  A hillside watched by the moon.  As I drifted to sleep last night I pictured myself dancing on it, moonlight soft against my skin.  I pictured dancing long and gracefully, round and round, arms up and down.  And I finally rested on that hilltop, alone, my heart calm and also full with the memory of the dance.  Full with knowing I’m here, and, here is good, and there is day and there is night on this day of creation.

I’ve been feeling quiet blog-wise lately.  Lots has been going on in my off-line life, but I think there’s more to it than that, and I’m trying to understand what.  I think it has to do with that last series on bodies. 

For one, I need time for what I wrote to sink more deeply into me, to not rush too quickly on to something new.  I’ve learned that I’m not a skim-tons-of-ideas-briefly sort of person, let alone writer, so I’m comfortable sitting long with a limited number of things.

But there’s more than that going on here, too, I think.

I think I’m craving feedback.  I feel like I imagine public speakers often feel, where they launch their words into a crowd, knowing that ears are listening (my site meter tells me that), but then afterwards not hearing how those ideas were recieved, and so having no idea whether people agreed, disagreed, had other important insight on the matter, etc.

I would love to know who you are, and what you think of what I write.  I’d love to hear when you disagree or when you have something to add, or recognize an angle I’m leaving out.  Or what it is that resonates with you.  I want the chance to grow through this type of exchange.  I’m guessing that my writing style doesn’t always communicate this wish, so I want the chance to say it outright.  And please feel free to email me privately if public commenting isn’t your thing.  You’re always welcome to communicate that way.

And for now, I’ll go practice what I preach…

It’s been a busy week, with visitors on each end and sickness in between, and I’m finally getting back to naptime blogging. I’ve been wanting to say more about this conference I attended last weekend–Blogher, in San Jose.

Blogher is a national (well, mostly. There are other countries represented, too.) network of female (well, mostly. There are other genders represented, too. :) bloggers who, among other things, gather yearly to learn more together about blogging and each other. The first day of this year’s gathering dealt mostly with blogging technology, and the second with the personal and communal aspects of the trade. Lots of networking and discussion and question-asking filled both days.

In preparation for this event, I wrote out a list of things that I am (writer, friend, wife, mother, blogger, etc.), anticipating an atmosphere where I might unwittingly lose myself, where the powers of high school cliques turned adult-bloggers could make me wonder who it is I am, anyway, and why it was I thought I was okay. I consider myself confident, in many ways, but there I was, earnestly reading my list on the drive there. I approached the registration table like jumping into cold water: nose plugged, here I go.

What unfolded couldn’t have been farther from my expectations. At numerous points I found myself tearing up, moved by the hearts and minds of these hundreds of women bloggers, changing our world one post at a time–organizing relief efforts, pooling resources, unveiling injustices, working through inner pain and outer conflict, helping people laugh, helping people feel less crazy and alone.

I felt honored to be an observer of and participant in these conversations, honored to be surrounded by so many people engaged so meaningfully with life, eager to learn and grow and cultivate and contribute. I met Erica Rios who works with Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology and talked with her about her work of bringing together women of technology and women who don’t identify at all with technology to engage both sides in conversation and sharing of ideas. I met Jen, who loves to write, and uses her blog as a place to practice her art, as well as a place to explore what it means to be a woman with complicated interests and feelings and experiences and relationships; in short, to be human. I met Leah, who converted to Judaism in her 20s, and is writing what sounds like a fascinating book about that, Kety Esquivel, who is passionate about justice and giving an alternative voice to Christian activism, Tish who studies religion in the media and breaks all stereotypes of what it means to be a Catholic scholar. And can’t forget Erika of HadashiWorld, whose bare feet have been sign and symbol of living authentically (read her about page; it’s beautiful), nor Sage Cohen, poet, essayist, truth teller. I felt instant kindship with Sage. And of course Jen Lemen, whose companionship as my writing group partner this last year and half has been invaluable, despite never having actually met in person!

I could go on.

What I really want to say, though, is how struck I was, in being in this crowd, by the beauty of each person that made it up. By the beauty there was in each person doing their thing. No two people had or have the same voice, the same words to give to their interests or observations. The same sort of peace that’s grown in me as I’ve written about bodies these last weeks grew there in relation to other aspects of being human. None of us is exactly like anybody else. Why not run with that, and be the most “me” any of us can be?

A very nice essay on shame, written by a gifted writer I met just recently, here.