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.

I’m still thinking about sexuality and would love to talk more with anyone likewise interested. Specifically, I’d love to talk more about the “about sex” part of it. I was raised as an evangelical Christian, and formed my early views on sex in family and faith communities deeply shaped by that tradition. As a child and adolescent and young adult, I trusted that sex was a special thing that God invented for husbands and wives to share – for procreation, of course, but also for pleasure. Glue was the metaphor used for sex a lot in my childhood – a special kind of glue that keeps marriages together. Having sex outside of marriage makes the stickiness of sex inside marriage less so.

Sex was also compared with the relationship between God and humanity, a gift God has given us to more tangibly experience the ecstasy of union with God’s very self. And as such, something to be protected in the same way relationship with God was to be protected. Sharing sex with multiple partners would be like two-timing (or three or four-timing) God. Shameful and hurtful to God.

I no longer live in religious or evangelical Christian contexts, and so would like to work more consciously through what I think about sex today, as the me of this context. My intuition and experience say it is AND isn’t magic glue. But beyond that, things get fuzzy. How does sex affect relationships? What changes between people when they make love? What are arguments for saving sex for committed relationships and, conversely, for being more sexually free? My hunch is that more clarity on such things could benefit all of us, whether or not we’re religious or sexually active or monogamous or have children with whom we want to talk about such things.

Just popping in to say hello.  My week has been full, and every attempt at putting to (virtual) paper the thoughts I’m eager to explore here has been met with interruption.  So…soon.  In the meantime, I will continue, with the help of equally sleep-deprived N, to try to help dear Elijah stay in his crib when it’s time for sleep.  I think the contraption I sunk $69 on this morning might help.

One of the high and low points of my month away from blogging was a trip N (my husband) took to Memphis for a conference. It was a high because normally N and I spend a lot of time talking in the evenings, but with him gone, I was able to get a ton of writing done. I cranked into productivity mode and just glued myself evenings and naptimes to this screen. The result was an enormous boost of momentum and morale on my book.

The trip was a low point of the month because, well, who wants their sweetheart gone for 5 days? And to be 100% ON for childcare for that long? Please don’t pick me.

The first day N was away I looked at the days of his absence stretching off toward the horizon and got a little woozy. Our son is 17 months old. That’s old enough to know how to climb and reach and object vociferously to whatever he finds objectionable, but young enough to not have words to explain himself, or reason with which to navigate the many decisions with which he finds himself confronted. Will I eat any of the ten things offered me at dinnertime, or will I rub them into my forehead? Will I unroll the entire roll of toilet paper while mom is grabbing something from the bathroom, or will I bolt into her bedroom and try to wedge myself between the wall and the weight bench? These are the types of dilemmas the average 17-month-old is bound to face.

So you can imagine how necessary it could feel to me to have physical and moral support around the house every day. At least a portion of every day.

So like I said, I looked ahead and felt woozy, and then looked down at my son, whose forehead wound from where a seed pod punctured it is almost healed. He patted my knee sweetly and smiled like I was the best thing since the watering can he discovered last week. And I thought to myself: this is a really sweet moment. Just a sweet, sweet moment.

Things went remarkable smoothly as that day progressed, and a couple of hours later another moment happened. I was sitting on the living room floor, eating an apple, and Elijah came and straddled my knees, which were extended out in front of me. He waited for a bite of the apple and quietly nibbled until it was time for another, when he opened his mouth like a bird. He was so sweet, and so happy to be sitting there, that I could not help laughing. “This is another moment,” I thought.

And would you know it? but moments kept happening all over the place, and before I knew it I had a sack full. I did this every day of N’s absense, and discovered that the more moments I recognized, the more they began bleeding into each other, so that by late afternoon of even day four, I wasn’t thinking to myself, “Wow, that’s 7 moments today,” but rather, “This is turning out to be a really great day.”

Isn’t this magic? How you don’t have to have grandiose hopes for the best day ever, or even the best hour, but can just keep your eyes open for moments, and maybe discover that all those tiny insignificances–often only seconds or milliseconds long, maybe just the way the sunlight catches a tree, or that lady’s bright red laces–actually turn into something you’d only ever dreamed of: a way more than tolerable day?

I think parents and caregivers need magic like this, but I think everyone else does too. I think moments are what can make lifetimes beautiful.

It’s cold outside today, and windy. The sky is the royalist of blues. Last night this same wind blew a storm away until all that was left was the kind of sunset that bursts my heart wide open. There were just enough clouds, half of them streaked with blacks and grays, to bounce back all the color–pinks and tangerines, yellows and white. And the moon watched with me. She was huge. I came out of the library just as it was all happening, just as the wind and sinking sun and sky were in mid-stride, and felt this rush of gratitude and gladness. I smiled and wrapped my coat tighter and said thanks for the chance to be alive. I pictured the vast universe around it all, and me on this tiny rock, orbiting the sun, getting to take such a moment in. I felt small in the best way, and unfathomably lucky.

I’m on a kind of role with my novel this week, yesterday’s pre-sunset session not excluded, and am hungry to give myself the added boost of more progress than I can make during my few afternoon sessions alone. So I’m knitting time together from other places in my days, and have decided to take a short break from blogging as a way of putting time and focus more directly on my book. I have months to go before this project is through, and I don’t want to step away from this space for that long (I love it here, and would miss it here too much), so let’s start with a month of sabbatical and see what kind of progress I can make on the book in that time.

Much love to all of you, and a wish for winds to blow into the distant sky what you most need cleared away right now, to bring the kind of beauty and perspective your heart most needs to take in.

Kristin

What a week. Last Tuesday, when I wrote that first post about dark wonder, I felt remarkably energized. I felt a “standing-up” inside of me–a thrill at the thought of thinking creatively with others about how to stay more awake in this world. And doing it.

Then something happened on Thursday.

I think it was a combination of things, pushed further off the edge by that second threat to AJS, but by the time I sat down to work on my book, I felt like my bones had turned to jello. I put my head down and instantly got this picture in my mind of a beautiful tree in the middle of a vast field. It was full of fruit, and a low wooden fence ran along one side of it, off into the distance both ways. It was wonderful. I wanted to sit there gazing at all that quiet glory.

Then a dragon came in, stage left, and torched the whole thing. Torched all the fruit, and then turned its back to the tree, waiting for anyone to try to do anything about it.

Needless to say I was a bit shaken. I sat straight up and shook my head.

I don’t know how best to interpret that scene, but I do know that’s exactly how I was feeling–like the powers of yuck in our world had come to remind me that any fruit I have to bear just can’t be given away. Sorry honey. That’s just the way it’s gonna be.

I don’t consider myself a quitter, and I have my own “sorry honey” to say to all that yuck–like yeah, you can knock the wind out of me, but my Lights? You can’t knock those out ever. Tenacious is what those things are, as is my spirit.

I will admit, though, that this has been a week, for me, of remarkably little wind.

While I continue to recover, maybe I’ll consider these days a mirror of what Christians around the globe are doing: waiting in darkness to see a Great Light. Honoring this human experience of yearning, of wanting hope to get kindled again. Of watching to see with our own eyes that we aren’t, in fact, in utter darkness, and those powers of yuck won’t have the last say.

I’ve been thinking about how to answer Lori’s question from the comments last time. Just now before sitting down to type a response, I got an email from N, forwarding the update I added to the last post. If you haven’t read the update, it says the president of the board of AJS got a text message today saying, “You are next.”

I’m caught right now in a very dissonant chord. Finding it hard to write. I feel helpless and angry. And incredulous. Who kills people? What events brought them to this? Were they not loved very well? Is it kill or be killed for them? Are resources so scarce as to push entire regions of our globe into survival-of-the-ones-with-the-biggest-guns? It appears to be so.

I’m sitting in the library right now of one of our world’s most wealthy institutions of higher education. The temperature is just right. Sun shines through the window next to me. My stomach is full. The biggest threat I can imagine to my life is an earthquake.

God, what a world.

I want to push this chord I’m sitting in clear off the table, onto the floor, back into a dark corner where I don’t even pass it by. I want to pull the blubber close around my neck, around my head, where the brows are so furrowed, and my shoulders, with their knots. I want to go home tonight and eat a warm meal and play with my baby, and then make Christmas cards with the new stamp I bought at the stationary store, with the red pen I got for the addresses, and the Mary and Jesus postage.

I want to forget.

While I’m sitting in all this dissonance, I think I’ll have to postpone answering your question, Lori. Apparently awakening, like getting up in the morning, can lead to wonderful possibilities, but can also include those moments when the very last thing you want to do is open your eyes.