I’m reading Sam Harris’s The End of Faith these days–a book I’d like to review here in coming weeks, once I’m through.  It’s very quotable.  He’s more caustic than I’d want to be were I to broach his subject, but I think he has some very important things to say.  He thinks there’s no way to avoid escalating violence in our world except for religion to die.  He thinks religion divides people irreconcilably, and makes rational discourse impossible, since faith, as he sees it defined by the majority in every religious tradition, is belief that things about God and our world are true without needing evidence to prove it.  Without evidence available to discuss the truth or untruth of a claim, and indeed, in a climate where criticizing or critiquing one another’s faith is taboo, how can we navigate life together?  How can we not stay divided if each of us believes deeply something fundamentally different about God (as one example) which isn’t open to rational, evidentiary discourse?

I’m not sure if you got all that, but what I’m wondering a lot these days is whether he’s right.  One of the greatest tragedies I know, and by know I mean experientially, is the way religious beliefs divide people who otherwise have so much in common.  There are so many things that all of us, across the board of religions and cultures, share in being human–fears that we have, hopes, longings, worries about jobs or kids or finances, losses, illnesses, joys, experiences of redemption.  We have a wealth of things in common.  And yet it seems to me that religion becomes a kind of gatekeeper for any of this to get realized.  If I’m not one of your flock, the gateway of meaningful relationship gets swung shut.  And vice versa.  The gate becomes what determines whether or not we can be comfortable together, whether or not we can explore the geographies inside of us to discover common ground.  Indeed, it can become a source of bitterness and condescension and rivalry and distrust.  It causes violence.

Do you think this is true?  Is intimacy and respect, of the kind for which I imagine all of us ultimately long, possible between people when one or both are religiously devoted, but not to the same religion?  Maybe the taboos against critiquing faith are really about trying to keep that gatekeeper sleepy, trying to find ways to slip past an otherwise wall to find ourselves together, at ease, in love.

I know many of you are not involved in a Christian subculture, but those of you who are might appreciate what Bobbie has to say in her latest post, Dirty Little Secrets:  Porn and the Church.  Regardless of how you personally define God and Satan, heaven or hell, I think her theory makes a lot of sense, and gets to some important layers of what’s true of us–maybe particularly of those involved in public forms of ministry or service.  Go check it out.

This week seems like the week for blogging writing things.  I wrote about the tug-of-war between my writing and mothering lives last time.  Jen Zug has been blogging her commitments and feelings around moving toward a book project.  Jen Lemen has written about her writing process, how the non-writing, extroverted stuff of her life is the food that fuels her muse, and how her muse is also wooed to work by music.

I want to write some more on my writing life, and specifically on the weirdness of claiming this vocation before having a resume to stand it on.

Sure I have a resume.  I’ve done some things, worked some great jobs, gotten a few degrees, and really everything I’ve ever done in my life is related to writing (as could be said of anyone’s life, were they to wake up tomorrow as writers).

But my resume has little by way of publications.  That’s what I mean.

What other occupation can a person claim without some sort of institution saying, "This person?  This worker?  We pay her for this job.  She works for us."?  Parenting, sure.  But that’s different.  I could write a book on how that’s different.

I was having dinner last night with some friends, telling them about a website I’m creating (with the help of cleave*design).  It’s an author website, and I want to have a place there to talk about the projects I’m working on.  The bulk of my writing gets poured into a novel, which you won’t see in print for an unknown length of time (I’m working on revisions, but there is much to be done on that front.).  I wrote a short story this summer that, even as I type, is on its cross-country quest for a home.  And an essay I wrote about my early moves away from the faith of my childhood will be run in the OE Journal this fall.  That essay may turn into a book proposal sometime soon.  But…and this was what I was asking my friends… Which one of those projects can any of you see now, hold in your hands, or open on your screens, and say in response to:  "This, now this is the work of a writer."?

Not one.

They aren’t avaiable yet.  And yet I am a writer.  That’s what I do.  It’s a strong soul, no?, that can claim something confidently using evidence the public just has to trust you on.  Ten years from now I hope to refer you to a nice bundle of proof, a nice collection of stories and books and essays on which Almighty Editors have smiled kindly, and that bear that magical, chills-producing phrase, "by Kristin Noelle". 

But this is now, and that bundle is still in its womb-entombed stages.  So ask me what I do–go ahead–and I’ll move through an entire Rocky scene inside before answering.  I’ll set my alarm for 4am and pop up for a high-protein shake and a 10-mile run and do a whole punching bag routine before throwing around some weights and maybe even get sit-ups in before flexing all my muscles and meditating for a long, silent stretch in that position before saying in my calmest, most built-on-a-psyched-up-internal-foundation voice:  "I’m a writer."

And you’ll nod pleasantly and say, "Really?  What do you write?"

And I’ll say, "Fiction, mostly."

And my inner Rocky will be like, YEAH!, and growl a few times while flexing my whole upper body, and then jump around with my fists up, like I’m in a ring, ready to win every single round against that menace that is So You Don’t Actually Have a Real Job Then, Do You.

And you’ll say, "Cool!  I’ve always wanted to write," or some version of that.  And the conversation will move on, and Rocky will realize how exhausted she is, and wonder why in heck she just did that whole routine. I’ll look at her gratefully and say with my eyes, "That was awesome.  You did great," and daydream of the day I won’t feel like I need her. 

I’ll daydream of being like my friends last night, who said, "Why do you need publications to be legitimate?  You’re a writer.  That’s what you do." I’ll forget entirely how much I wanted to kiss them all.

This probably isn’t the right week to write this since I’m on nearly 100% kid-duty while N TA’s an all-week class, and therefore feeling/thinking these things more intensely than I might otherwise (normally I have three afternoons away from home a week to write), but I think they all still stand.

I’m feeling the tug of work-outside-of-home these days–a growing internal momentum for it, a kind of ripeness for all the things I’ve studied and learned and experienced and contemplated to be funnelled into my writing life.  One’s 30s are often a time of intense engagement with work–when careers start to hum and when the gangliness that for many of us is our 20s starts to mature and deepen into something more like full-blown adulthood.  Couples who have young kids in this decade, and no nanny, probably all have to choose which in their pair will run with this outside-of-home momentum, and which will run with the inside stuff–which will work primarily with the kids, and which will "work" primarily with other things.  (intentional, even if not totally serious, use of quotes in that sentence)

But then there are those, like me, who are trying to do both.  And this is what I’m thinking about tonight.  At the same time that I feel the tug of outside-of-home work, I feel a tremendous tug to be home.  Or rather, multiple tugs, quite literally, on my legs all day.  The work of being present to and engaged with Elijah in the ways I want to be and the ways I think he deserves, combined with the work of running a household well–it fills up every hour I’m willing to give it.  And more.  This dance that is running a household and tag-teaming childcare with N and working on my book and maintaining this blog and keeping a percentage of my brain active on dreaming up next projects, well, I have to say it often feels less like a dance and more like a tug-of-war.

Sometimes I daydream about how spacious my life would feel if I just gave up writing–if I devoted myself to home stuff and kid stuff alone.  On one level, the thought feels like utter relief.  It feels like letting waves push me to shore rather than struggling against them, like joining the current rather than fighting my way always upstream.

But every time I have that thought, the very next one is a kind of voice, calling me to not give up.  It sounds like parents do when encouraging infants to walk.  "There you go–YES–nice work!  You can do it!  Yes, keep going.  Alright!"  Unlike them, it’s a lot more subtle, and speaks more with the twinkling of eyes and a beckoning glance than actual words.  But it has the same effect on me:  it keeps me standing up again and again, no matter how incessently gravity pulls me down.  It keeps a kind of hopeful grin on my face, and my banged up (or, as per the tug-of-war, pulled-apart) mind and body ever pressing on to sit down in front of this screen.

I feel like the universe wants me to write, and like something in me is alive and strong and beautiful when I am.  I can’t give this up.  I don’t want to.  I so terribly don’t.

So I keep doing it.  And living in the midst of all these tugs.  I feel weary of it, wanting to say to any one of them, "Fine!  I give up!  You win."  But I’m simultaneously energized by the writing part and the childcare part (no, I will never love spending hours on the phone with insurance companies, nor scouring the tub.  And I’d totally love the next place we live to have a dishwasher.).

But…so…is this just how it’s going to be?  Is living in this tension just the way of life as a dual-career person?  Can tug-of-war, practiced long enough, ever turn into a dance?

This week marks the fifth anniversary of the Towers falling, and hundreds more of waves of effects, rippling out from that day. 

When the Towers fell, I had just finished seminary, was one month into therapy, and about three years into the most paralyzing identity crisis I had known.  It was the second day of a week of testing my blood sugars hourly in attempts at getting them controlled.  The stress of the preceding years had taken it’s toll on my body, and I had developed hypoglycemia.  I was hunkering down by this and other means to be more careful, that is, full of care, for this body that is me, and this psyche that was so in need of attention.

So my reaction to the attacks was different than it would have been at any other time in my life.

At any other time, I would have probably cried a lot that week.  I would have probably focused in on all the images of tears, of horror-stricken faces, of bloodied bodies and terrified eyes, hanging posters of loved ones, hoping them alive.  My soul would have conformed to these images, taking on the feelings I saw there, experiencing them, at least fractionally, as my own.  By the end of that week, I would have been exhausted.

But I already was exhausted at that point, so the energy I had to give new feelings was low.  I was also freshly learning that my tendency to become the suffering around me was more about me suffering what was inside myself, and needing outlets for that, since I wasn’t doing it consciously for me.  It was also about suffering for the people I was close to and cared deeply for, but felt powerless to help.  Displaced care was what it was, at least largely.  And not by choice, I was learning fall of 2001 that the compassion I sloshed over everyone else needed channelling toward me.  If, in fact, I was interested in healing.

And I was.  Desperately.

So my heart sunk like everyone else’s that day, and I stayed shaken from any sense of normalcy.  But I didn’t descend toward despair like was my former style.  I kept checking my blood sugars.  I kept eating snacks.  I went to therapy the next day and talked, after the first number of minutes, about things other than New York.

Surely there are degrees of connection, and were I living anywhere near New York at the time, or had I known anyone injured or killed in that Nightmare, I would have appropriately been consumed for months, if not years, with fear and grief and rage.  So I want to tread carefully here, and say what I really mean.

What I mean is that there are awful, awful things happening in our world every minute.  And not just far from where I am.  They’re next door.  They’re in the next block.  They’re all across our country.  And there are wonderful things, too, and wonderful movements of people to join–people caring about and engaging all the yuck, and with hope and courage and imagination.

But since fall of 2001, only coincidentally starting at the same time as those attacks, I have been working hard to more mindfully listen to myself and tend to my own suffering first, so that the tending I do outwardly might be more true.  By true I mean being less about displaced compassion–less about spinning subconscious wheels to try to get my needs for self-love and attention met, or to try to be helpful in a world where the people I care most for appear so unhelpable–and more about compassion bubbling consciously up from the wounds that I’ve tended inside myself.  And from knowing, because of that tending, who I am and the kind of "tree" that I am–the kinds of yuck that my shade and shelter instinctually move toward.  Those are the things to which I want to give my life.  Those are what I want to be missional about, and do what it takes to engage.  To not become indifferent toward.

Everything else is torches others must carry.  I have only two hands and one heart, and not just any hands and heart, but mine, which are wonderfully fashioned for a certain kind of engagement with our world–with its ugliness and it’s breathtaking beauty.  They’re poorly made for other kinds, and the more I learn to recognize which is which, the less money I’ll need to spend on therapy.  And the more all of us benefit. 

Or so I’m thinking.

So I live in this post 9/11 world.  I live under a president whose decisions I’m ashamed of and angered by.  I live in a region where poverty gets shuffled to the other side of the tracks and keeping up with the Joneses is considered high moral ground.  I live where people know more about work than they do about their families, and where they have to, because it costs that much to live.

But I’m not giving a lot of energy to these things.  And not because I don’t think they need lots of people, pouring lots of energy into addressing them.  I’m not because my energy for doing what seems like good in the world is being spent elsewhere, being nurtured for other things.  I’m pouring it into trying to stay awake to the souls around me, to inner change, to possibilities for healing.  To what it means to heal after being hurt by religion and by being silenced and by feeling shame.  To talking about beauty and calling attention to it.  To honoring what often goes unnoticed.

I’m trying to find that space where care for the layers of suffering in our world is neither narrowed by tunnel vision on these things that I’m about, nor made bland by getting spread too thin.  Where I own my own suffering, and tend to it, so that what I end up spilling inadvertantly around me is hope, of the realest, most authentic kind.  Is shade from my branches, reaching naturally toward sun.

It’s a dark day here, where sunshine usually warms the pavement well before noon.  Misty and cold.  Elijah got his shots last week and hasn’t been sleeping well since.  My dreams last night were scattered with his noises.

I want to write about what was happening in my life five years ago when the Twin Towers fell, reflect on what that event and the dominos it’s pushed over since have meant to me.  What kind of outlook I have as I think about the world and its powers now, as I continue being me, but a me in this world, under this administration.

I want to, but my bigger drive to be a patient mommy wins out.  E has just gone down for his nap, and I need to too.  I’m so tired, and he only takes this one nap now, and the day is so young.  It’s a choice between the inner peace of getting thoughts on a page, and the body peace of getting some rest.  With E’s sleep so hit and miss, and consequently his mood, I think I’ll choose the latter.  I think we’ll both be glad I did.

Blessings on you this day.

I’m wondering if one of our greatest desires and greatest fears as humans is to be seen.  We desire it because ultimately we don’t want to feel alone–to feel like the contours of us, the little and big things that make us us, in mind and body and spirit, won’t be loved or appreciated.  Noticed.  But it’s our greatest fear, too, I think, because what if the seer doesn’t like what they see?  What if I don’t like it, and the image I want you to have of me can’t match what you’ll see if you really see me?

I wonder if this is what feels so amazing about meeting soul friends–people cut from your same cloth.  They see you so much more instinctually than average, with so much less work, because seeing you is partly like seeing their own selves.  You don’t need so many words to explain yourself.  Fear comes in because you feel so exposed to them–so unable to hide–and maybe you’re both trying to avoid the same inner darknesses so you get all uptight and lash out (even if just inside) when one of theirs rears its head.  But in so many ways you feel safe with them, like they can be tender with what’s vulnerable in you, because the same things are vulnerable in them, too. 

Is it possible to be soul friends with the universe?

Sometimes I feel so connected with everything that it hurts.  Sometimes I feel like I’m in love as I walk under an enormous tree, as I look up at the sky when the sun is just rising, or sit in a crowd of people.  I want to make love to it all, and not in some twisted, literal way.  It’s the longing to express how much I appreciate it all, how beautiful and amazing I find it, or even how ghastly or terrible.  So my connection isn’t about feeling like everything is lovely.  It’s about feeling like everything is so rich, so shockingly textured and colored and sounded and smelled.  So there.  So true.  I want to honor it all deeply.  To say how much I see.

So I write.  I do other things, too, like try not to rush too much of the time, like turn the radio off, or point things out to the person I’m with.  But my writing is my most intentioned way of saying to what’s true around me:  I see you.  I honor you.  I won’t blindly pass you by.

But as any soul relationship goes, I feel the universe sometimes avoiding me.  Is it afraid of being so seen?  Is it shy?  Does it have some major thing to hide?  I yearn to connect with It, to study, to write, to paint, to take pictures, to somehow make sure the richness of It all gets seen and remembered, but in so many ways I feel thwarted.  The work of running a household and sustaining life becomes a decoy–all the toilets that must be scoured and dishes that must get washed and mouths that must be fed and money that must get earned and health insurance companies that must be talked with for hours at a time, repeatedly.  The cars that have to be serviced and doctor’s appointments that have to be gone to and clothes that must be bought and of course laundered, repeatedly.  The doing doesn’t end.  And then there’s the cultural myths that degrees and production and power and fame are what’s truly important anyway, so all the stuff of sustainance is only a baseline that must be far exceeded for any worth at all to be achieved.

These things distract me.

Or so it feels.  They feel like the universe veiling itself, dodging me, dodging the best intentions of all of us who feel so alive to it, so eager to be awake to it and in deeper communion.

Must we settle for crumbs of connection?  Is the universe so cagey, or is there another way to see it–this situation, this living in urban America (or wherever else you happen to be) in 2006?

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve a baby to get up from a nap.  And a house to clean.  And an empty fridge to fill. 

Sigh. 

Universe?  I love you.

Jen Lemen, writing partner and co-conspirer of an ever more lovely world, has just launched a beautiful new site.  She writes, she makes art, she doulas, she tells a knock-out in-person story.  And I’m guessing she’ll give glimpses of all of that on her blog.  Yay, Jen!!!  Go see what she’s done!

It’s Saturday, and I’m sitting on a bench on Stanford’s campus, surrounded by palm trees and ivy and massive stone buildings.  Memorial chapel is to my right and I hear the bell tower bong in the distance, water from a fountain cascading endlessly nearby.  Jet black squirrels bound across pavement; birds flit through morning routines.  What does this do to me, in me?

Since Robin sent me this link I’ve been thinking about land and space, about the ways these get inside of you, providing threads for the weave that is how you think about life and self and God, how you see yourself in relation to them.  The link is to a sermon that deals, in part, with the ways the natural world shaped its writer’s life.

I grew up in a desert in California, in the heart of the San Joaquin Valley.  We had two seasons there:  hot, and gray.  The grayness was fog that was a lid on our valley through winter.  Often it descended to the ground, making visibility no farther than the tullip tree on our front lawn.  While other regions have snow days, we had fog days–school delayed or cancelled because of the challenge fog posed for safe travel.  Seriously.

But summer was nearly the opposite.  From May through most of October temperatures hovered in the upper 90s, often staying near or surpassing 100 for long stretches.  It was dry heat, and fierce.  Bare feet were only for grass.  There were no clouds in the sky, save the accumulation of dust and exhaust and pollen and the various sprays the farmers used to work their fields. 

Which is one of the ironies, I think, of my early desert home: it was shockingly furtile.  One of the hugest exporters of produce in the world.  Nectarines, peaches, plums, apricots, apples, almonds, pistachios, walnuts, grapes, cherries, tomatoes, melons, oranges, lemons, grapefruit, tangerines.  The list really does go on.  And it was furtile not because these things could grow on their own, could just spring up and stay there, happy.  This was a desert, after all.  It was because people worked night and day to make it so.  The irrigation system there alone inspires awe.  The human power it takes to plant and pick and prune that list is breathtaking, no matter how many machines are involved.  And the machines!  I went with some friends to a county fair one time and felt like I had been transplanted to another universe, walking through rows of metal giants engineered for every kind of farm need imaginable–a show for farmers, apparently, to elicit the lust unique to that trade.

So this rhythm, this hot and gray cycle with the relentless backdrop of turning desert into food:  this was the natural world that joined the shaping of me.

I think about all of this as I ponder my spirituality, and my early thoughts about God.  I think about how hot it felt to be under God’s gaze.  How wide open my life seemed to Him (my early God was male)–no mountains or hills or forests in which to hide.

I think about how hard I understood the Christian life to be.  How much work it took to learn about God and to nurture the fruits of God’s spirit. How His fruits didn’t come naturally, and required constant planfulness and attention, including practices that weren’t spontaneous to body or soul’s terrain.  But how diligence usually paid off.  How satisfying the rows of tended thoughts and prayers and plans and relationships could feel.  Mine was not an untamed heart.

And I think about the quietness I loved about the fog, the way I felt hugged by it.  How I liked to feel hidden inside of it, even as I worried about its effects on my bangs.  There is safety in fog, even with its danger.  Safety in feeling a cushion between oneself and the directness of an exacting God.  People get killed in the stuff–huge pile-ups along Highway 99–but there are trade offs, too.  Sometimes danger is worth a little quiet anonymity.

My heart has had seasons of growth since then, seasons of new lands and new threads added from those lands.  I lived in Oregon and now near San Francisco’s bay, and my heart is learning what it means to grow a little more wild.  To have flora and fauna natural to it flourish.  To think of God with the subtlety of gentle sunshine, like we have a lot of here; with the playfulness of our on and off breeze.  I don’t think early threads ever get unwoven, though, so I carry in me desert, too.  Always.  The promise of much fruit and the understanding that a lot of work may be involved in cultivating it.  I carry in me stark, open land that is a kind of inescapable honesty, and a yearning to be wrapped up in the danger-comfort of something soft and accepting and mysterious and quiet.

God isn’t my desert-God anymore, though, and I’m not sure how that happened, how the threads that were my early God became a garment that lays on the ground now, God clothed in other things, or sometimes all the way bare.  God seems a kind of mystery that resists the clothes I offer, that seems to be taking of my desert threads, and my wet, green Oregon threads, and the threads of my current space and weaving from them something I can’t yet recognize, and don’t feel in much of a hurry to be able to.

So I sit here wondering.  Or filled with wonder, maybe.  Breathing in these granite stones, this wide courtyard of interwoven brick, the expanse of air and sky above my head.  It’s getting inside of me.  It’s doing something.