i listen and give shape to what i hear

The way I move through a day still feels strange. Three months of them have been filled with the cloudy murk of things I can’t put into neat 8-hour chunks of time I used to spend in the box of a cubicle. Where my office supplies were tucked into rectangle drawers and word documents dragged and disappeared into tan-colored folder icons on the square screen in front of me. When I friend asks, how was your week? I pause and wonder if I am being asked to recount the things I did in it, if that is the measure of how my week was, because there is no such list and even if there were, it would surely come up shorter than my waking hours.

There is the work of sustaining a life in transition, which isn’t given the job title it deserves. One potential employer asked what I did during the two months between leaving my old job and arriving in Nairobi, and the most true answer I could have given her was move my life to a different continent. Even that isn’t the best answer, because there was also the work of preserving my life here for when I returned. I think now of all those films depicting Victorian-era England and the furniture that was covered in white cloths, the silverware and china locked up, the fields laid to rest. It takes time to arrange a life that will welcome you back.

And now, the coming back. The hours I sleep, willing my body to catch up with my heart that has been racing from the thrill of it all. (Just yesterday, a nurse-friend told me that for infants, breast-feeding is as taxing on the heart as running a marathon. No wonder they sleep so much, and so deeply.) The excavating of memories and words that went underground in the aftershocks of returning, this in conversations with friends whose patience goes deep, and whose eyes are trained to spot the glimmering of gold underneath all that dirt and rubble. The steps forward, by which I mean resumes and interviews and thank you notes and wondering and discerning, along with the careful threading of the old with the new. When it is finished, I want it to speak a story of love and faithfulness, and I want it to be beautiful. 

If life before was a race, as many people describe what we Americans do, living now is more like a dance. There is no beginning or end, only moving from one position to another. Some are drawn out more slowly, others repeated over and over, all of them coordinated to some beautiful song that plays from somewhere. I listen and give shape to what I hear.

***

(photo: petals carried by water)

the only way through is through

I lived with a small family for a few years. These were friends of mine who were a newly-married couple when we all moved in together, and a family of four when I moved out four years later. She, the wife, was pregnant twice. During the early months, she stayed in her room during most dinners to avoid strange smells, and when we watched Project Runway together she’d get up to spit into the bathroom sink at every commercial break. Her body changed slowly at first, then fast, from what I could see, anyway. Her belly stretched, her body tired, her breathing become more strained. Inside of her, a new life took form.

One evening partway through her second pregnancy, she sat across from me in the living room. It was quiet, dark outside. The first child was asleep, our other housemates doing other things. She and I were likely both reading. I remember pausing what I was doing and looking over at her. Her legs were tucked under her, her breathing a little louder than normal from the weight of her belly. She would have been at least six months along at this point.

Are you afraid of labor? I asked her.

She looked up from whatever she was doing and, without much thought, responded something like, No, not really. That was how she was about most things – calm, deliberate, un-phased.

I don’t remember if she asked me why I asked or if I told her or how long our conversation lasted. What I remember is thinking that, for her, the only way forward was through such great pain.

I’ve often wondered at my impulse to shut things down partway through. I get scared and turn around. When I was five or six, I went to the town carnival with my family and followed my sisters into a haunted house, the kind where you enter and are guided through until you reach the end, exiting through a different door. Once in, I got scared and backed up and went out the front door, probably crying and looking for my mom.

Transition can feel a lot like pregnancy (and maybe a little like that haunted house, too). When you enter into it, the thing at the end is what you’re thinking of: the baby, the delight, the new life. But halfway in, when the only way through is through, can feel frightful. I think of pregnancy and how the only way to prevent the pain of labor is to cause death to what’s inside, and even then, it still needs to come out. I’m sorry if that’s graphic. But maybe I’m not sorry because it’s true, of babies and of the things being birthed in us. 

Jesus uses this illustration to tell those following him that they would experience great sorrow, like a woman in labor. But, he said, you will also have great joy, like that of a women in her new baby, so great that the pain of what you went through will be forgotten. And no one will be able to take this joy from you, he says.

She had her baby, this housemate of mine. The girl is three years old now, with big, sparkling eyes, a laugh that comes quickly and a stubbornness that befits a younger sister. She was given the name Naomi, meaning beautiful, delightful, pleasant, and I am touched knowing what lively delight and deep, abiding love such pain as labor can bring.

***

(photo: three-year birthday date with Naomi)

(uh, guys, I fell off the nablopomo wagon. Oops.)

what's happening inside and how to like it

If I were to be honest with you, I’d tell you it started even before I went to Kenya. But I keep using my trip as the before and after, the reason, the tipping point. The start of a season of transition. Because it was after I came that I found myself strolling into work later than usual, forgetting about important things and not really caring about others, wanting to eat more sugar than I have been lately (and not exercising much restraint). It was difficult to muster up much energy do things I don’t like doing or have much discipline. I cried at odd things, including in front of my boss. Strange things were happening.

I felt unfamiliar to myself, which is a scary place to be in, at least for someone like me who thrives on control and structure. So I searched for a metaphor to give me a picture or framework for what was happening. Unable to understand it myself, I asked the Spirit and the thought that came to mind was those early stages of pregnancy, when a woman’s tastes change so dramatically. I once worked with a woman who could only stomach McDonald's in those first few months. Another friend had craved only Swedish Fish. I get it, I thought. I knew that not all my behavior was helpful or healthy, but I had so little energy to redirect myself. They both told me they ate what they could to just keep going. I understood that what they were saying is this: You might think that living with respect to the thing growing in you means eating healthy, but sometimes it means, at least at first, just hanging on. Because that thing growing in you is going to change everything.

This morning, when I was turning some of these ideas around in my head, I kept confusing the word transition for transformation. Maybe that word is more fitting anyway. It’s not so much a moving from one thing to another but instead, being changed inwardly, taking on a new form. The metaphor is overused: a caterpillar transforming into a butterfly. But I can’t get away from that idea of being able to ride the wind.

I’d like to tell you that this transition/transformation is the result of circumstances around me. There are changes at work, new friendships, some after-happenings from Kenya that have me busy and excited. But I go back to that metaphor I was given and remember that pregnancy speaks of something new inside. It is the inner shifting and growing that I want to follow and allow to shape the circumstances, not the other way around.

I started this post thinking I’d put together some kind of fun or smart list of things to do in transition. Good habits to keep, things to consume, things like that. I’d share the podcasts I’m listening to or the dietary habits I’m (failing at) keeping. But I’ll be honest with you – I’m still in that McDonald’s-Swedish Fish stage where I’m keeping down what I can, not sure when I’ll feel as if I’m being tossed around on a boat in the middle of a storm. This thing growing in me, it’s hungry with desire, and I’m following it, trusting that it knows what it needs. 

***

(photo: pennsylania farm, taken a few days before Kenya)

knowing grace in my sleep

Nearly a decade ago, it felt as if my body was starting to fall apart. My knees would swell mysteriously for two weeks at a time, so stiff and painful that I wouldn't be able to walk for a few days. Then it was my stomach, then bruised and swollen ankles and feet so sore when I woke up that I couldn't walk. By that time, I had a diagnosis and medication, but even with those concrete signposts on a path toward healing, I couldn't be sure I would get there. My body felt foreign to me and I didn't know how to make peace with it.

Just as troubling was the heavy boulder of tiredness that I felt I was always carrying around. Turns out that trying to be well is exhausting. Added to that, blood had been seeping out through sores in my digestive tract, making me anemic. I remember days waking up in a haze, wishing I could just go back to sleep. I remember evenings taking naps after work, then falling asleep before the summer sun had set. I remember being afraid I wouldn't be wakeful enough to do the things I hungered for: making day trips to the beach, working a meaningful job, mothering a baby.

As with most trauma in our lives (at least the minor, boundaried kind), the daily fear of navigating chronic disease faded as I got well. Now I remember that I am sick only because of daily medication and doctor's forms that prompt me to recall the disease by name. Symptoms are minor and no longer grip me in the same way.

But there's still the tiredness. Every month or so the wave of it will come, that boulder placed on my back, that heavy layer of clouds dimming my mind and energy. My life is mostly normal, except that I can't help but feel the loss of these hours every month, when I go to bed early or sleep in later or take long naps on weekends. I wish I'd spent them writing or at a concert or hiking. Instead, I am in bed, semi-conscious. I don't even have dreams to account for the time. I have written in my journal under goals for the month or year, or as questions for my doctor: "energy issues." That's what I call this need for my bed.

But here's the thing: being tired helps me know grace. I ask for words to form in me during my sleep that I couldn't have thought of sitting at my computer. Maybe I dreamed of that concert, even if I don't remember it on waking. The music might still be in my head somewhere. And my legs, they are made strong in the lying still and resting. The Lord gives sleep to His beloved, the psalmist once said, and I wonder if he gives it not only as a relief to those who lie awake anxious, but also to those who might know something true of life in the body that others miss as they run around in this crazed sunlit world. I want to know this beloved-ness.

(In celebration of National Nap Day, purely by coincidence.)

open letter to Ta-Nehisi Coates after reading between the world and me

Dear Mr. Coates,

I read Between the World and Me in just a few sittings, over the course of a few days. Most of it I read last Saturday evening, alone in my apartment, my body stretched out on my couch, back supported by pillows and legs warmed by a heavy blanket my mother knit. My stomach was full, my pulse was resting, the only strain that of holding the book, turning its pages. I read fast, wanting more of your words and images. They made me want to text my sister, who is also reading your book, to say something to someone about what I was learning. But I knew her body would be lying in her soft bed under the peaceful blanket of night dreams.

Two days later, at work, I approached the subject of your book with my coworker. My black coworker, the one who has published books and spoken in front of audiences about her writing, the one is often the only black woman - the only black person - in the room, the one who was told that she is too pretty to be a writer, the one whose body has survived the violence of cancer and the chemical weapons used to fight it, which continue to tear apart her insides, the one who grew up in the L.A. Jungle and now drives a Benz, the one who tells us stories about her one daughter and paints herself as a fierce mama bear, the one who has worked here longer than me and bled on my papers to teach me much of what I know and who remained when I was promoted to supervise her, the one with whom I have talked about the complexities of this new arrangement but not the part about being black and white. When I brought up your book, she confirmed that yes, she's reading it too. "Slowly," she said. "It hurts." And I wondered how it hurt, what the pain feels like for her, where it touches her, how she carries it in her body. And I felt the slightest bit of shame in telling her I was nearly finished. I was reading fast. I have far less pain to deal with.

On some level, though, I do understand why she would need to read it slowly. Your language about the body is physical. One page I earmarked talks of "fruits secured through bashing children with stovewood, through hot iron peeling skin away like husk from corn." When I read this, I feel some of the discomfort and violence conjured by these images. But my mind quickly takes over and observes with what skill you write, deconstructs the specificity of image, the choice of words. As a writer, I am changed, but what about as a human? I can't say.

But there is this: during college and for a number of years after, I spent time with kids living in cities. To some people I called them "at risk urban youth." To others, I called them my neighbors, because they were. They all had skin that was some shade of brown or black. The contexts in which I knew them were connected to my belief in Jesus and his exhortation that to truly love God, we must love those whom the world calls "poor." With these kids I led bible studies, formed mentoring groups, met in clubs in which we had fun and talked about God. I remember becoming acquainted with street culture through the stories they told me. I also remember my very noble-feeling ideas about how to change their ways of responding to the people around them. I thought about scriptures in which Jesus tells us to turn the other cheek, pray for our enemies, wait for God to contend with those who contend with us. I still believe that these are not just sentiments or good life principles, but that they hold great power. And yet I knew I was missing something. There was something I didn't get.

You unapolagetically assert that "spirit and soul are body and brain." You don't believe in God, and you acknowledge this shapes how you understand the body to be destructable, the violence done against it to be destroying what is most holy about us. I appreciate that you admire others who do even while admitting your inability to make this faith your own. While my faith and the stories we tell gives me a different way of looking at these things, I needed to understand how brown and black bodies endure violence, have for generations, and the kind of fear this instills. Though I still believe scripture speaks into these wordless places, knowing what I understand just a measure more deeply now, after reading your book, I might respond to the kids I hung out with differently. Or maybe I wouldn't. I don't know. I wonder if anything I ever said to them stuck. I hope that something did. The gift of seeing something now that I was blinded to years ago - this is grace, and I wanted you to know that your book helped to bring this, to me and, I hope, to those kids who are adults now, some of them parents raising their own black or brown kids. I hope they knew, or know now, that I was still figuring things out alongside them. Even when my best intentions failed, I hope they felt loved, body and soul.

There is so much more I wanted to say, about bodies and Dreams and your writing. Part of me also wants to say "thank you," but those words feel trite. I don't think you are wanting thanks or praise, but a willingness to be uncomfortable, to struggle alongside you, to try to understand. I'd like to say I am trying.

-B.

straighter legs and sustained postures of discomfort

My body doesn't do that. This is what I think when the instructor calls out my name after she says, "Legs straight!" One of mine is on the ground, the other I lift behind me, over and over. I am bent over, back parallel to the floor, arms holding the ballet bar.

My body feels like a bunch of leftover pieces slapped together. My knees ache, my hips are tight, my shoulders broad and arms gangly. My big eyes bulge out of my round face. I hide my long forehead with bangs. My legs, which are slightly different lengths, are always tight, so they never really straighten.

When I sit on the floor at the end of barre class and try to spread my legs to stretch, mine make a tight V while others stretch theirs into nearly a straight line. Others bend over and hug the floor. I hunch over to touch my toes. My hip sockets won't let my legs turn out any wider. I think someone used the wrong kind of glue when they put me together. My joints are stuck.

I wonder if this is something I can change. Can I make my hips more flexible? I google this with my niece and we practice poses named after animals: pigeon, frog, butterfly. All I can think is, I'm not an animal, and this doesn't feel good.

When the instructor comes around to help me with my legs, she pulls the lifted one so that my muscle contracts and my leg lengthens. Suddenly, it is even straighter. I think about how my body might slowly change if I can hold my leg this straight every time. I think about strength, I think about flexibility and bending and molding. I think about sustained postures of discomfort and how quickly I try to escape them. I think about being content with my body, fearfully and wonderfully made, yada yada yada. I think about the process of being made, how it is past present and future, it is how straight I hold my leg, the discomfort I can bear. How being made is still happening.