a wine glass can break into 57 pieces.
57. shards displaced in blades of grass,
on sidewalk meant for chalk and rainbows.
small, meticulously sharp.
find their way from the confines of communion
to the trenches of brokenness, of depravity, of no hope.
it is a fallen world that put the pieces there;
understanding that quietly picks them up;
and love that takes another glass from the counter-
returning it to the position of wine and bread-
blood and body.
preface.
i am no poet. sometimes i try to make small efforts to say something in a different way. this is one of those efforts:
__________
awake
closets cluttered crowd my head
with the sound of something new
these small rooms are stored
with books of history
with journals of prayer
with scrapbooks of memories
they’re opened by the song of birds who awake
with hunger and together confess their
hope and fear and need
and their longing to know
and though they may be muddled
the voice of God is present, still,
ever-nearer
Monday, August 13, 2007
When I was five-years-old I lost a doll made out of sawdust. My mom had bought it for me in the backwoods of southeast Missouri, down a dusty forgotten road from a woman who was surrounded by her dolls…all made out of sawdust. I didn’t really like the doll much; I didn’t really like dolls much at all at any time in my life. But it was expensive, and I liked it because my mom liked it and because both my sisters had one. Then I lost it. It was the first time in my life I wasn’t just missing something, but losing it: a strange mixture of embarrassment, regret, disappointment, irresponsibility, apathy.
When I was eight I left my beloved Michael Jordan wallet in a hotel room with a $5 bill proudly nestled within. His signature and the number twenty-three were signed in red on the front; a photo of Mike driving to the basket with his signature tongue and sweat resting on the left corner of his mouth was the wallet’s back decoration. A few years later I was leaning over a boardwalk in Biloxi, Mississippi. Because I was cool, a pair of flip sunglasses made popular by Dwayne Wayne on A Different World were a regular addition to my early 90s fashion. However, that day as I was looking for turtles and fish, maybe hermit crabs and jellyfish, my Dwayne Wayne’s cultural influence became a permanent fixture of the Gulf of Mexico.
Along with learning that words can hurt and boys are cute and girls are mean, I saw that things beyond material possessions and iconic paraphernalia could leave your life. One of my oldest friends lost her dad to cancer when we were 12; I lost my 6th grade best friend because I didn’t wear black nail polish, smoke cigarettes, listen to Nirvana, or make out with those cute boys; my coach that had already promised me a #23 jersey cut me from the basketball team. It is heartbreaking when you first realize that people will disappoint you.
But perhaps it’s even more tragic when you first realize that you will disappoint yourself. In the past nine months I have lost composure, integrity, convictions, love, my mind, my grandfather, faith in healing, any sense of direction, a friend, a mother of a friend, trust in my emotions. And just like the sawdust doll, the embarrassment, regret, disappointment, irresponsibility, and apathy reign…a more mature palpability.
Unlike the sawdust doll, however, the sensibility of loss becomes far more complex, sometimes less profound, sometimes more, with more corners, more surprises. The feeling of absence is at times not so permanent. Faith and truth and disappointment wax and wane with only one absolute promise: you will change. You won’t be able to help it. It will come so naturally but feel so unnatural, so uninvited, so desired, so misunderstood.
In the midst of drought, doubt, debt, death, deprivation, you will have moments of hope, comprehension, a revival of faith and trust. It happens when you least expect it, in small seconds most frequently overlooked…in sunflowers twenty feet tall, grins, the silence that comes when you're reading someone's mind, slushies and conversation, remission, a beer, the moment a giggle turns into a cackle, the way cream mixes with coffee, a dead bird no bigger than the size of my palm, twenty flying birds whose wings are too desperate to ever be quelled and swallowed.
I have come to believe that the chest is filled with vignettes of possibility: emotional hallows. We lose heroes to strokes and confidence to self-consciousness. We gain vision from prayer and understanding from humility. Moments of time and life are these small illustrations of joy and pain, loss and apathy, failure and success, love and betrayal. Their sacred and secular natures are threaded together with no definable border, masking muscles, outlining organs, blending in with bones. And these vignettes, these hallows, are the great nine muses for the mind, the heart, the tongue, the eye, ear, pore, breath, touch.
__________________________________________
I am looking forward
Toward the shadows tracing bones
Our faces stitched and sewing
Our houses hemmed into homes
Trying to be thankful
Our stories fit into phones
And our voices lift so easily
A gift given accidentally
When we’re not sure
We’re not alone.
“You Are My Face”
Wilco
Sunday, January 28, 2007
I find myself numb more often than I like. It’s the feeling of taking prescription drugs…except you’re completely aware that you’re not taking prescription drugs. A mental vortex, a spiritual desert…one of those stages where nothing makes complete sense but everything’s a nice distraction. It’s not exactly sad and it’s not really happy…I have cried more these past couple months than I have my entire life. In the past, I would cry once every six months as a mandatory emotional cleansing (usually encouraged by Million Dollar Baby). Now I cry at really beautiful things such as Bob Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” (“So long, honey babe, where I’m bound, I can’t tell. Goodbye’s too good a word, babe, so I just say Faretheewell.”) and six-month-old children that laugh like adults. And then there are the times I cry because I’m scared, I’m lost, cancer has sneaked itself into the families of my friends, my other soul mates are struggling with loneliness, and all I want is to build an orphanage right next door to Many Glacier Hotel with classrooms where my favorite professors can continue their passions of Chaucer, Keats, Welty, Yoder, Bonhoeffer, and Edwards in the hearts and voices of students. I keep telling myself that this new-found emotional treasure chest will make me a better artist, lover of art, writer…and maybe it will. I have only listened to Patty Griffin this past week (ALWAYS a sign it’s been rough) and I’m already finding her more poignant. That’s got to be something.
And if these moments are a desert like I gestured before, I think I’m okay with that. Deserts tend to prove that I’m less profound than I once thought, and that I really don’t know what’s best for me. In my experience deserts also have a tendency to make you slow down, be silent, listen every once and a while, and remind you that everyone needs a dash of humility. Water is provided along the way—sometimes in the short relief of a shot glass and other times given in the abundance of a nalgene. And desert’s never last forever…I know that Edward Abbey was crazy about them, but seriously, they just get a annoying after awhile.
Most of those sips of water are in the form of the aforementioned ‘nice distractions.’ Here in Colorado the past 2 months I’ve found that there really is nothing cuter than an infant swallowed whole by an REI snowsuit. My new-found exploration as a skier has not only taken me down my first black diamonds but has made me realized that Sigur Ros was meant to be heard while the sun turns snowflakes into crystals and skis surf mountaintops. Two weeks ago, the church I’ve been attending played a Martin Luther King, Jr. tribute video with U2’s “In the Name of Love” playing in the background, the preacher used Amos 5 as the point of reflection, each Sunday morning is polished off with a “Shalom Response” to each other, and there is one woman in the choir who looks just like Shirley Maclaine and another who’s the spitting image of Kathy Bates—both sopranos (seriously, people, I’m pretty much a Methodist now). I have become happily obsessed with tea, oranges, and avocadoes…nectar of the gods, really. And nothing has been more surprising then while snowshoeing on top of a deserted lake, the surrounding snow completely traps all sound.
These diversions are welcomed as my life prepares me for new change. Change to go back home in just a few more months, and for the first time in my life I’m ready. Lately, I have found great truth in a section of Donald Miller’s Author’s Note of Through Painted Deserts:
“I could not have known then that everybody, every person, has to leave, has to change like seasons; they have to or they die. The seasons remind me that I must keep changing, and I want to change because it is God’s way. All my life I have been changing. I changed from a baby to a child, from soft toys to play daggers. I changed into a teenager to drive a car, into a worker to spend some money. I will change into a husband to love a woman, into a father to love a child, change houses so we are near water, and again so we are near mountains, and again so we are near friends, keep changing with my wife, getting our love so it dies and gets born again and again, like a garden, fed by four seasons, a cycle of change. Everybody has to change, or they expire. Everybody has to leave, everybody has to leave their home and come back so they can love it again for all new reasons.”
This season of my life is just preparing me for my next. I have changed quite a lot in the past year…some good, some bad…or maybe there is no good and bad, just a constant metamorphosis. In any case, I’m starting to be thankful for the desert, the tears, the avacadoes, the REI infant clothing, the confusion, the awareness of change, and the new reasons.
Sunday, December 10, 2006
I live in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, as of a week and a half ago. After 23 winters in the fickled weather of Tennessee, with 4* ice covered roads one day and 67* tank top weather the next, it’s a beautiful consistency of snow-packed mountainsides and liveable degrees from below zero to the thirties.
I like it here. And talk about a different culture. Steamboat relies on skiers for the winter season to load the free buses, to fill the packed bars, to occupy seats on the lift. The other day as I was sitting in the mountain’s coffee shop, Gondola Joe’s, sipping away at my caffeine and watching person after person awkwardly walk by with their ski boots securely fastened, I realized that skiing/snowboarding is a completely exclusive sport. One can only participate when the weather is dumping snow, where there is a hill or mountain set up for its purpose alone, if they have the money for the equipment and ski lift, etc…so basically, only if the weather, local, and money are right. Different culture, indeed…I grew up running around bases at the neighborhood softball field, shooting a rubber ball into a plastic hoop in heat, snow, or rain, and jumping into anything that contained water to swim about. I don’t think I was made to be a skier. My childhood and a little tree bumpage almost 2 years ago have helped me come to that decision.
But even if I wasn’t made to be a skier, benefits from jobs I have here in Steamboat have given me a free ski pass and free ski rentals for the season…so the weather’s right, the local is perfect, and the price has never been better. With all my fears and understandable insecurities about putting my feet back into skis, it’s hard to say no to this exclusive sport when it seems to be including me quite nicely at the moment. So I skied. It was last Thursday morning, December 7, 2006, when I did something I swore I would never do again. And I did it for 2 ½ hours. My friends here have been nothing but patient, encouraging, understanding, and fantastic teachers. I flipped out on Graham probably 6 times throughout the morning, and he just continued to emphasize breaking, turning, and that falling on your ass is absolutely acceptable, especially when trees are in sight (even if it’s just about impossible for me to hit them). And so the slopes did not beat me down that day…they could sense my fear, saw the light beaming from my scars just as Harry’s does when Voldemort has power, but the slopes respected my fear and scars.
I’m pretty sure this is a milestone. The day, the actions, the going down hill with white stuff surrounding long sticks on my feet was more significant to me than most will realize (but there are definitely some that will grasp its importance).
This past week has allowed me to revisit some of those ugly emotions that resulted from the time I thought I was a badass skier in Indiana: anger, confusion, apathy (that was encouraged by morphine and percaset…not now…then), doubt, etc. God allowed me not to dwell in these feelings in the past couple days, but flooded them by like a bad memory to reemphasize that life is shit at times, but he has overcome. Jesus says it with a little more class in John 16:33 “I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace. In the world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.” These words hit me like a ton of life-giving bricks this morning. In all my fears, my insecurities, my moments when life is shit, Jesus still bids me to come and rest, and to find peace is his victory over fears, insecurities, and moments of shit.
Monday, November 27, 2006
"All this - the river and flowers, running, which was something she rarely did these days, the fine ribbing of the oak trunks, the high-ceilinged room, the geometry of light, the pulse in her ears subsiding in the stillness - all this pleased her as the familiar was transformed into a delicious strangeness."
-ian mcewan from atonement, pg 20
mcewan writes this of cecilia, one of atonement's major characters, as she returns home from recently finishing university. i read this while i was in vienna just two weeks ago...and i thought it was beautiful.
i lived in the same room of the same house for 18 years of my life..i guess you could say that i was used to consistency. i have friends who have been nomads since the womb jumping from one city to the other attending approximately 47 schools - their definition of home tends to be the most interesting. i have come to realize recently that this fact about my childhood is the major reason i have been restless/wanderlusty since i was 18, but also why i've always had this great tension/anxiety about change.
if you know me at all, you probably know that i am guided too often by my emotions..this could be manifested in a sense of adventure, a pursuit for identity, the need for new memories...i think i've become addicted to the collection of interesting experiences; i haven't decided if this is a bad thing or not...yet. in any case, since i left memphis some six years ago, i have somewhat hopped from the familiar to a new familiar, and so on. so whether it was moving to nashville, working at a sports camp in missouri, studying in vienna, living in hong kong, leaving nashville, or being in glacier, i have been given this sweet blessing (and i don't take that word lightly) to experience community, to be anxious, unsure, explore, and suck the marrow out of those homes (and i still partially blame the influence of watching dead poets societyat the age of 13).
i imagine that those friends of mine who moved every 9 months as children were trained to not take so much emotional baggage from one city to the next, and learned in a very healthy way to make friends, leave friends, remember them, and know that they were in their lives for that time and that time only for a reason. like a language, it's much more difficult to learn this as an adult. i can't help but think that i can't live without a place, a group of people, a sense of familiarity when i am in the midst of them.
but then i leave the familiar and life continues to reencarnate community, peace, adventure, knowledge, awareness...and when i have the sweet opportunity to revisit those once familiars, like cecilia, it has been transformed into a delicious strangeness.
and so i ventured to vienna, the greatest period of my life as of yet, to reacquaint myself with one of those places i once thought i couldn't live without and be with a best friend. i spent lazy days in coffee houses, reading about cecilia, strolling past old men that still run the same cafe, sitting in front of klimt, caravaggio and bruegal's work, wrapping scarves around my neck, running up the stairs of hotel t, sneaking a peek at vineyards, sneaking a drink of ottakringer with beautiful company, staring at cute waiters, educating my memory in an old classroom, purchasing kinder chocolates and manner wafers, breathing in the culture from the cobble stoned paths, lighting candles for a prayer remembered...
revisiting old homes to find something less familiar but just as sweet has been like an invited dream - your heart is convinced that it still exists, your mind is a little more doubtful of its consistency and placement, and your emotions are completely content and just a little sad that it's impossible for life to always remain the same.
