It’s Saturday. I’m sitting in my new little writing cove, tucked in a corner of our bedroom. Sun is streaming through the window to my right, and the house is quiet. I got about 5 hours of sleep last night and N and Eli both have colds. I’m probably coming down with one too. The house is a mess, toys and burp rags, dust, dirty dishes, laundry, kitchen utensils (E plays with those endlessly), sealed and unsealed mail littering every surface.

But I’ve such a swell of hope inside, such gladness to be alive. I’m coming out of the hardest adjustment phase of a second child - we all are. I’m excited to get back to this computer, however meager and chopped up my hours here are (N’s out with the kids for a little while) - to resume baby steps toward finishing my novel, expanding non-fiction endeavors, dusting off short stories and getting them off to find homes.

And I heard geese today (I think that’s what they were). Their calls came through the bathroom window, cracked to release steam from our un-ventilation into the outside stillness. The world outside was sleeping, blanketed in layers of frost. My sick boy was up on the other side of the door, husband dealing with his varied frustrations, but I heard them. I heard them speak into the sunrise. My bleary eyes and weary bones were caught up in a rush of hope at the sound. That hope flew out the window and joined their brisk formation, coming back happy and cold.

While all of these contrasts swirl around me, every reason to want to get up in the morning and a thousand more to want to stay in bed, I’ll leave you with a quote I read last night, one hand holding a book, the other a baby. It’s from David James Duncan’s book of essays titled My Story as Told By Water:

Our eyes, it has been said, are the windows of our souls. Since the soul is not a literal object but a spiritual one, eyes cannot be the soul’s literal windows. But they are, literally, openings into and out of living human beings. When our eyes are open, they become not one of our many walls but one of our very few doors. The mouth is another such door. Through it we inhale air that is not ownable, air that we share with every being on Earth. And out of our mouths we send words - our personal reshaping of that same communal air.

Seeing, I have come to feel, is the same kind of process as speaking. Through our eyes we inhale light and images we cannot own - light and images shared with every being on earth. And out of our eyes we exhale a light or a darkness that is the spirit in which we perceive. This visual exhalation, this personal energizing and aiming of perception, is the eyes’ speech. It is a shaping, it is something we make, as surely as words are a shaping of air. I feel responsible for my vision. My eye-speech changes the world. Seeing is a blood sport. (p 46)

With unhelpable bouts of negativity along the way, I’d like to try to see my seeing as something I can shape, to let my eye-speech smith a world, among so many other options, where hope peaks out from unexpected places. Where alongside whining toddlers and whining selves there are moments for writing, sun-streaked writing coves, geese in frigid skies, sounding their clumsy-elegant call: See the sun rise. Come: see.

Wow, the spam at this here site is out of control! Can I just say about Wordpress: “not as user-friendly as Typepad when it comes to dealing with this stuff”? My deep apologies for the grossness of it, and I’ll do what I can to get it taken care of today. As my time in front of this computer is *extremely* limited these days, “today” might need a few sets of quotes around it. We’ll see…

UPDATE:  Okay, I’m pretty sure I got the problem taken care of in terms of new spam coming in, but I still have to figure out how to mass delete all the old stuff that got through.  The support forum suggests that Spam Karma 2 pluggin will delete old spam, but so far it doesn’t seem to be doing so.  Suggestions welcome!

This is quite the liminal time for me, a season of transition and finding my bearings after losing them to a difficult pregnancy. As happened after Elijah’s birth, I’m shot with a surge of hope and creativity, a longing to get my hands and feet and face a mess in art and music, poetry, prose.

This time, however, I have a toddler besides the baby, with needs and frustrations and a keen sense for knowing what boundaries to push. And when. And though baby sleeps huge chunks of each day, Eli sleeps but a fraction.  All my creative energy is funneling into daydreams and lists of things I only want to do, scrawled quickly in my journal. My outsides, and the tasks of my days, are not aligned just yet with the yearnings that innerly spin.

Superficially, I yearn for new clothes. Clothes that actually fit, and that bear witness to the me of today. Part of me feels silly for hating my wardrobe; it’s mostly in good shape, and provides the warmth and covering I need. Other parts, though – my inner artist and psychologist and sociologist – know that clothes that fit well and that express outwardly what one feels inwardly (freedom, rather than stodginess, for example, or confidence instead of fear) are actually part of creating reality. They matter. Balance has to be made between wanton consumption and joyless, pious, under-consumption, but given my history with the latter, I’d like some newer clothes. And I’d like to make a plea to stores everywhere to stock clothing for very tall women. Consider that shouted from rooftops.

Less superficially, I long for contemplation. Meditation. Spiritual practice. I’ve constructed and discovered the outlines of a lifestyle that enlivens my soul and questions that spur growth and connect me more deeply with others and God. It feels, though, as if such outlines don’t exist if existence implies experience of them. There’s hypocrisy in all my lofty ideals, as the me of my actual life is far more consumed with doing than being, with trying to squeeze in sleep instead of prayer, with wiping bottoms a thousand times oftener than examining life or soul.

And somewhere in between my surface and my depths, I feel like I’ve outgrown this site. I want a new design, a new focus, a different story to tell. Which layers of me do I reveal here? Which thoughts do I explore? Do I lean more toward ups and de-emphasize downs? Portray myself far more serenely than this tattered, visceral me?

Time will have to tell. Or not, as the case may be. In the meantime I’ll live the gangliness of mis-matched me’s, outers and inners askew. I’ll keep snatching moments for daydreams. Keep scrawling out my lists. Keep hoping things into glimmers of existence, and consider that prayer.

And honestly, those booties, they’ve got to be wiped.

It’s evening and Elijah’s asleep. The dishes are done, and the air outside is cold enough to warrant closed windows. So it’s quiet. Much more than usually so.

I came here to check my email quickly, to browse a few blogs, to put some music on an iPod I’ve never used, which N won in a raffle, with the aim of tackling, to music, more things on my list. The time it just took to figure out the iPod makes me feel old and a generation removed from cool. And then this, a Ben Harper ballad from a CD my dear friend made me, starts playing in my ears:

Beloved One

I’m feeling vulnerable these days, daydreaming, often more subconsciously than consciously I think, of being loved and rocked and tended like a child. Elijah’s been teething this week, waking often before dawn, needing to be rocked and sung back to sleep. And I have often been awake already, tossing and turning in this body that won’t sleep. I want a mama to help me to sleep, too. I want to be sung to. I want to be smiled on, throughout my days, and have meals prepared for me and activities chosen. I want to know viscerally that this body, with its burgeoning belly and veins, its racing heart, its squished up lungs and the aches that make me feel 80, is beautiful. Miraculous. A thing of awe. All things other than what I now feel.

I want to be able to sing Beloved One to myself.

Christine wrote a beautiful post today at her Abbey of the Arts, about bathtime. Its womb images, so poignant to me in this “season of expansion”, sooth me. Vicariously I feel the love I want to be given, the love I want to give myself, and feel myself surrounded by.

I press repeat on Beloved One, offering it as a prayer. Receiving it as an answer.

There’s a place inside of me I miss. A place where wonder pulses like a heartbeat - now quick with in-loveness for everything - a word, a sight, a sound, a person - now slowing with the lull of the crickets outside, or the fans that make these summer nights bearable. It’s a place that’s full with beyond-mere-survival, or rather, that knows survival as integrally related with music and contemplation, good books, deep thoughts, conversations with friends. It’s where words and the unworded stuff of experience mingle, tickling each other with the joy and utter frustration of remaining mostly, but never altogether, “other” from each other. The place from which my writing springs.

I’m in it tonight, though, miraculously. My body creaks and groans still with this pregnancy, a wooden ship made better for the wiry frame of a single captain and few supplies than for barrel upon barrel of rations: blood, fluid, tissue, fat. And this not even mentioning my second passenger. I love her already, and know it a privilege to navigate her passage.

But I creak. I groan. I bail water (four? five times a night?). And rarely get to that part of the ship I so treasure.

But.

Here I am tonight. I have no idea when I’ll return again, and even less what tomorrow’s winds or seas might bring (fortune? pirates? peace?). But for now, I’ll light a candle. Dip pen in ink. Open a scroll. Try to forget the fatigue that makes my heart beat strangely, the stomach that doesn’t want to hold my meager offerings.

The sun sinks well below the western sky. The pines that guard this strip of dwellings blacken. I hear crickets, fans, a distant plane’s propeller. The click of N’s keyboard.

Past place and surroundings, I hear groanings of people I love - strong people whose strength is pressed to breaking with sufferings they don’t deserve. I hold them in the Light of this flickering wick, this quickening heart. I pray the womb of this Ship, this Mother that’s bigger than all of us, this Sea that we all of us sail, will give them safe passage. Will take them through their night. Will birth them and rebirth them as the tender, beautiful, honest, beloved creatures I know them to be.

And I hear joy. The paradox of it! Joy and suffering both on this Ship. And my own little vessel. Just now joy’s un-words resist being worded, though. Fair enough.

I try to move on, but the winds upstairs have shifted and I need to check my sails. More stores must be unpacked. A belly needs filling.

I give my candle an earnest stare, my quill, my surroundings. Be well, dear room. I love you.

Hi everyone! Just checking in to say hello.

I’m now half way done with a challenging pregnancy, which is both wonderful and also unnerving, considering I still have 4 1/2 months of challenge yet to face. The nausea of the first trimester subsided wonderfully at about the 3 month mark, but was replaced by a heart problem that handicapped me until we could do the many tests and appointments necessary to discover its remedy. I am on medication now to slow down an over-active heart. The risks of NOT taking this, to me and the baby, far surpass the risks of taking it, so…pills I will take.

Our mid-pregnancy ultrasound also revealed what looks like the development of something called placenta accreta, which means the placenta may have imbedded too deeply into the wall of my uterus. If this is the case, it is very likely that the uterus will have to be removed at delivery, in order to avoid life-threatening bleeding that could happen if the placenta and uterus are attempted to be separated. We go back in a couple of months for another ultrasound to determine whether this condition continues to be present, and if it does, to more concretely plan for what we’ll do about it.

So…I have been a little preoccupied lately.

In between sleep and doctor’s appointments and novel-writing and trying to keep up with a lively toddler, I’ve enjoyed a few books that I’d love to tell you about sometime soon. Paulo Coelho’s Veronika Decides to Die (an exploration of sanity and insanity) and his Eleven Minutes (an exploration of love and sex) are two of them. I’m mid-way through Reza Aslan’s No god but God: the origins, evolution and future of Islam as well, which has been a wonderful read for this mostly Islam-ignorant girl. I’m amazed and intrigued by the similarities between Islam and Christianity, or more specifically, between the people who identify with these traditions. Humans look and act like humans no matter what, I think.

But that’s for another review…

Mainly just saying hello. Hope you’re all enjoying a summer rich with the things you love!

Five years ago, after a five-year period of great internal upheaval - a season of intense questioning of every assumption I had held to that point, theological and otherwise…a season of constant internal and external dialogue, of reading, journalling, crying, raging, praying, thinking - oh, the ceaseless thinking! - I finally went quiet inside. If you’ve never gotten to the other side of an intense kind of struggle, I’m not sure the nature of the quietness I’m talking about can be known through description alone. I think it has to be experienced. It isn’t despair. It isn’t bitterness. It isn’t apathy. It’s a strange kind of coming-to-the-end-of-a-road. You get there and you realize you’ve been running or flailing or crying or self-pitying or raging or crawling or thinking yourself down a path, a path you probably didn’t choose and also couldn’t help yourself traveling once you found yourself on it, and here you are now, at the end. And the end isn’t some grand finale, some palace of gold or terrible awful hell, or a guru waiting to clear up all your confusion. It isn’t a cushy place set up for renewal or a therapist’s chair or a breathtaking view. It doesn’t even have a sign of any kind, no lable, no lentil to walk through to make the end official. The path just sort of peters out, and you find yourself in the middle of unmanicured landscape. Maybe there’s a few trees around, some grass, a couple butterflies. There’s the click of a grasshopper, a breeze. But there you are, and all the things that made you lose your mind along that ordeal, all the things that made the rage and fear and hopelessless and grief and have-to-make-sense-of-things-now so all-consuming don’t seem so pressing anymore. In fact the thought of intentionally pressing into them again only makes your mind stop, and the place where feelings come from close its doors. While for so many years your internal chatter hasn’t ceased, you’re left now with only the sounds of trees.

I think it takes a long time to get to a place like this. Probably the petering out of a path happens gradually, too. And in all honesty, wandering off the end of a path, at least for me, has often wound me up entering it again at some point, or many, thinking to myself, “Wasn’t I through with this one? Huh…”

But these endings. They’re real. I remember sitting with N in that initial quiet season, eating dinners silently. We still loved each other tons, and were glad to be in one another’s company, but very little came to mind to say. Our silence was the end of that road. The buzz of locusts. A faint hint of looking back along what we had just traversed, thinking wordlessly, “What in the world just happened??”

I feel like I’m in a similar kind of quiet these days. It’s different in that I haven’t just been through a painful ordeal. I’ve been writing my book and raising my boy and being a wife and friend and sister and daughter. I’ve been thinking and reading and blogging and paying attention to the worlds inside and around me. But something about everything altogether, about the energy I have to learn and understand, to engage people and ideas meaningfully, to try to be the best me I can be - something about all of it has taken me to one of these endings, and I find myself so quiet. I find myself needing rest. Nourishing food (of the literal variety). Needing not to think.

Can any of you relate? What do you do when you’re in this kind of place?

While I don’t want to admit it very often, I spend a lot of energy wondering whether I’m enough. Is this just a human thing? Are there folks out there who don’t spend energy this way?

I keep thinking to myself that the moment all of us just know that we’re fine is the moment gazillion tons of energy will be freed up for far more life-giving things.

There’s a radio station in our area that I used to listen to while driving. One day last month its rag-tag mix of 80s, 90s and current music got replaced with country. And not just country, but no-commercials-at-all country. When all the other stations are droning with hours of business jingles, this one is playing actual music. So nearly in spite of myself, I have been listening to country.

What has struck me more than anything in this new endeavor, beyond the worldview that’s felt more entrenched in traditional gender roles than most I currently observe, is the enoughness that permeates so much of it. People are singing about simple things, often very basic things, things that have little to do with money or education and a lot to do with friends. With love. With faith. And they’re belting it all out like it’d never occur to them that there are people who would be embarrassed to admit liking these things. That there are people who would never in a million years admit that their greatest dream is not to be famous or well-respected in fast-track circles or to be rich and beautiful or to travel the world on every holiday, but rather to live in a humble home, not even near a big city, to drive an old car, and to be rich only with food enough to eat and people to love and laugh and be neighborly with. To be rich with smelling earth smells, with growing things, with seeing the sun rise and set over mountains, rather than row upon row of buildings.

I live in the Silicon Valley, where money and multi-million dollar homes and ingenious intellectual and business pursuits are as common as air. I live where “enough” feels like a word from another planet, or if not that, spoken only to waiters about pepper or parmesan cheese.

So it has been with delight and a small sense of subversion that I have kept my radio tuned to the same station it’s always been, feeling my afraid-I’m-not-enough soul being nourished and healed in this most unlikely way. I come home from writing and from errands fretting less about what I don’t have or haven’t yet accomplished, content a lot more with what I actually *have* done and *do* have. The latter being foremost food, shelter, and wonderful people to love.

“Hell yeah, you’re enough!” I hear this music say. Or in Alan Jackson’s words,

“…it’s alright to be little bitty
Little hometown or a big ol’ city
Might as well share, might as well smile
life goes on for a little bitty while”

After that flurry of posts and conversations about sex and sexuality, my mood has shifted into a quieter one.  I’m not sure what to attribute this to, but for now it feels fine.

The highlight of my week was a trip I took to a shoe store on a rainy day.  I needed to return some sandals we had bought for Elijah, and after doing so, Elijah insisted on being put down.  He had noticed a girl - maybe 10 years old? - who he desperately wanted to follow.

Around the corner she and he went, and to his great delight, the girl had a brother AND a sister, both younger than she.  The youngest was a girl about 2, and when Elijah saw her, and she him, they embraced.  They held on for a very long time.

Without batting an eye, the brother, maybe 5 years old, looked me in the eyes, pointed at them with a hitch hiker’s thumb, and explained in his most adult, let-me-explain-this-clearly-to-you voice, “They’re in love.”

Yep, buddy.  I think they might be.

The lovely Sage has tagged me for a meme, so here goes:  5 things you may not know about me:

1. Any project that requires a trip to a hardware store makes me very happy.  I daydream about owning a home someday and building an add-on studio where I have places for writing, drawing, painting, collaging and recording music (!).  I would love a woodshop.  Perusing and learning about other people’s tools energizes me.
2. My first and most sustained career plan was to become a concert pianist.  I think I gave the plan up when high school started.
3. My closest brush with death (to my knowledge) was a cross-country ski trip I took with my sister and dad on my 13th birthday.  The trail we thought we were following never looped back to the parking lot, and by the time we realized this, it was getting dark, and in our t-shirts and sopping gloves and pants, we were freezing.  Literally.  We retraced our entire treck, the whole while begging my dad to let us lay down and sleep.  Luckily he didn’t (thanks Dad!).
4. At age 15 I spent a summer in Kenya, building a small dormatory for a little school on the edge of Lake Nakuru.  I went with an organization called Teen Missions, which I do not recommend.  Kenya, however, I do.
5. I am drawn to weather pages like moths to light.  Especially the ones in real live newspapers.  Like with colors showing all the different regions of temperature.  I like anything that gives me a big-scheme picture, come to think of it.  Maps.  Theories that cover huges swaths of history or geography.  Anything that makes the lived terrain feel less random or confusing.  Which is funny, given Sage’s #5. :)

Okay, I’d love to know what unknown things Gail and Heather and Fran and Gypsy Girl might divulge.  And anyone else, too!  If you’re not those four and you feel like it, leave a comment here that says something about you that many don’t know.