changing on the inside

My neighbor across the way moved out a few weeks ago, and now the apartment is being readied for its next inhabitant. The outside remains the same, at least for now. But there is evidence of change happening inside – the old bathtub that laid in pieces until it was picked up for the trash, the men who pull into the parking lot each morning and begin unloading equipment, the thwack of staple guns and the loud buzzing of drills and electric saws that makes my thin windows tremble. This morning as I pulled out of the driveway I saw doors and drawers, re-painted and drying in the sun and wished for my own dingy apartment to undergo such a transformation. It’s aging, and old to me. The sink old and stained, grout between tiles is browned, the hardwood floors are scratched and stained. It is home, and comfortable, yes, but I feel the ways it is growing stale.

My friend, a homeowner, just finished a renovation on her kitchen. I saw its progress in quick visits: the preparation (a port-a-potty installed on their property), the excavation (walls came down), the slow build in all its dirt and raw wood (new foundation, bare wooden frames), and then, finally, the new surfaces, the finished space. She toured me when it was done. As I pulled open new drawers and cabinets and ran my hand over the cool, smooth black counter top, we recalled where the old pieces of the kitchen once stood – the sink was here, the wall there. The old room was difficult to remember now, with this new space so concrete and beautiful.

Soon after the renovation began, we mused together on the obvious metaphor of it: old becoming new, destruction and rebuilding. We both have felt it in our lives in one way or another. I remember her saying something about the nature of renovation and how it might have been so much easier to move somewhere new, undergo a complete change, leave the old behind. Who of us hasn’t been tempted to escape and start over? But then there’s the process of owning all of the aged parts of the life we’ve been given and invest in their re-making. This process is more difficult, in some ways – if we think about the renovations in our own hearts, it’s painful to excavate all of the dusty and dingy places we hide away in unknowable depths (how is it that our finite hearts never seem to run out of infinite pathways and places to store what we would rather forget?).

I have known this instinct. When I settled back into my old life after a few months in what felt like a new one, I very much wanted to buy that new house instead of renovating the old one. But then the old one embraced me – the old apartment, the old family, the old job, everything the same – and I have been receiving, slowly, the renovation of those deep places in my heart. I’m about to rebuild you is what the Spirit said to me in those early days, speaking from the book of Isaiah, even when I hadn’t yet experienced the worst of the battering storms that would un-do me on the inside.

I may not get to see what's changed inside the apartment across the way. Someone will. My new neighbor will know its newness under his feet and as he hangs old photos on its smooth white walls. 

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)

abundance is what grows wild and free

I wanted flowers to fill the empty vase on the counter. This felt especially important since my move from a small, updated guest room to the back cottage. The space feels empty and impersonal, furnished with a few old, mismatched pieces. Hooks and nails jut from the wall wear past inhabitants might have hung a painting or a framed photograph -- but I had none of these to add. My first day, I opened all the cabinets to take stock of what was available and what I might need. In one of them was that vase, which I pulled out and set on the counter. I would find flowers.

The green grocer I sometimes visit sells bouquets, and there are stands I've seen with buckets of flowers for sale. But I live in a literal garden. Surely I could cut something from what's already here? Tom is the gardener, and a self-appointed Swahili coach. I approached him as he re-potted a red stalky thing and bumbled through our typical greetings. Then I asked, can I cut flowers to fill my vase? He laughed, not understanding at first why I was asking. I told him I didn't want to ruin any of the plants or cut at something I shouldn't take.

He laughed again. They are all wild, he said. You take what you want. To him, I realized, nobody owns what grows freely. His job is only to cultivate what's here.

I went for my scissors and the vase, looking around for something that would fit. Only a few cuts and it was filled with green leaves and a few purple flowers. I once thought abundance meant knowing I could spend money on things like flowers, and perhaps that lesson is an important one to understanding the concept. You can buy and not be afraid. And yet now, having been invited to find all that I needed from what's around me, for free, and so simply, I realized there's more to abundance than buying. There's also recognizing what you have around you and seeing that it's more than enough.

what it was about

But when the words mean even more than the writer knew they meant, then the writer has been listening. And sometimes when we listen, we are led into places we do not expect, into adventures we do not always understand. 

Mary did not always understand.  But one does not have to understand to be obedient. Instead of understanding -- that intellectual understanding, which we are so fond of -- there is a feeling of rightness, of knowing, knowing things which we are not yet able to understand. 

A young woman said to me, during the question-and-answer period after a lecture, "I read A Wrinkle in Time when I was eight or nine. I didn't understand it, but I knew what it was about." 

As long as we know what it's about, then we can have the courage to go wherever we are asked to go, even if we fear that the road may take us through danger and pain.

-Madeleine L'Engle, Walking on Water

like a new dance that stirs old feet

Nairobi requires a new set of skills. I have been training at killing the mosquitoes buzzing around my cramped room before I go to bed each night, which requires quick reflexes as well as an ability to spot them, and patience. I am also learning how to tuck my mosquito net and position myself just right under it so that any remaining buzzing pests will not be able to bite my skin. Any failure shows itself in the morning, red dots pocking skin left exposed or (I didn't know this was a liability) touching the net. 

I am learning how to walk. Most roads are wide enough for only two cars. The edges are torn and cracked, like the smoldered edge of a paper set to fire. Pedestrians walk on these craggly edges, but then side step onto the dusty paths when cars hoot their horns and speed past. From what I can tell, there is no right or wrong side, wherever there is room is where you might walk. My feet and shoes are covered in a thin film of brown dust, which I wash off only for it to be replaces by another on my next walk.

I walk to the bus stage and learn to ask the names of the places where I go, learn to crouch down so I can see out the window and discern where I am by the landmarks that are becoming more and more familiar, learn to signal when I need to get off, sense the rhythm of when the conductor (is that what you call him?) will reach over and tap my shoulder to ask for 20, 30, 50 bob (shillings) for the ride.

I walk to the duka and learn to ask for fruit that will be ripe one or two or three days out. I walk past people calling out mzungu on streets where I am still unfamiliar (always in the informal settlements) and learn to look friendly but keep walking. I learn to push past men who try to touch my skin. I learn to give my passport to the policeman asking why I am here, to smile and tell him I'm enjoying my stay in his country.

I am learning that rains come when I am sleeping, that the sun is hot but the shade always offers its relief, that rocks are preferred to mud, mud to the dust that gets stirred up and settles on everything around it. I learn to put more minutes on my phone, to cross a highway of traffic, to bite mango from its skin and let the juice cover my hands as a child would.

When I woke this morning, the sun was shining, bright and glad. I agreed with it. Though learning can be wearisome, I think of all that I didn't know and now I do, like a new dance that stirs old feet, like a candle re-lit on the table of a couple long married.

only rumbling over potholes

I sit in the taxi with Peter. I sit in the passenger's seat on the left side of the car, which still mixes me up. Peter has driven me before, and he has a kind smile, and a lazy eye, which makes him seem more friendly somehow. I try to carry on a conversation, but I run out of things to ask, and I know that in this culture, taxi drivers are not accustomed to being friendly with their customers (even if we are regulars). In the silence, I think about how I wish I had more words -- more things to say to people, more Swahili words to say it in a way that expresses a deeper commitment to their culture. I also think about how I want to write more, but the words are just not there yet. All I hear is rumbling like this van over the potholes in the road we are driving. And then I remember a writer's advice, how the lack (of details or information or whatever) is sometimes what you build the story around.  

***

We had an hour training on language acquisition. It's about culture learning and relationship building, too, not just memorizing a list of words and stringing them together to make sentences. You start by listening and pointing, not even saying a word. The idea is that listening in context, paying attention, finding language in its home and making that home more and more yours will be what shifts your thinking and fire new neurons until you produce new words. This means you will be quiet at first, and maybe for a long while. But when the words come, they may flow.

***

I am making lists of words I learn in their context, which stick more easily that the ones on my flashcards. Mtoto, child, who were invited up for prayer during church. Bwana asifiwe, praise the Lord, a refrain in worship songs. Hatari, danger, the name of the security company whose name is posted on all of the surrounding compounds. Lipa, pay, on my M Pesa account. I brainstorm ways to be around Swahili more just to hear it and put life to words and words to life. I am not ready to speak yet. When the staff speak to me to help me learn, I look back at them blankly, and then we laugh.

I'm hoping the language acquisition training was right, that the words will soon flow.

more than lists

I am in Nairobi now, living at a guest house. Travelers lodge here for one or two nights, or for weeks scattered among travel around the region. The place has a rhythm I am slowly learning. I introduce myself to people but rarely say goodbye. If I see them before they leave, I wish them safe travels or blessings on their work.

I am also acquainting myself with staff, who I hope will be my friends. There are some cultural norms to navigate there, since I am seen as an authority figure of some sort to most of them, and friendship wouldn't typically be appropriate. Still, I want to know about their lives and understand what it is they do when they're not working here.

I have started the habit of writing names in my journal, along with a list of at least three details that help to identify them. These short lists of words create a sort of image of the person by which I can remember and pray for them in what are becoming daily habits of prayer (morning and evening).

Last evening, as I was waiting for my dinner, I spoke with Joshua, a server at the guest house. From our conversation, I have a long list of facts: Mombasa, coal carrier, married, 9 months, 2 buses and about an hour (he worked in Mombasa carrying coal, he is recently married, he has worked at Amani for nine months, it takes him an hour and two bus rides to get home).

These lists give me something to hold on to. But what I realized this morning is that more than lists, I want stories. So far, most of my interactions with guests and staff have been fairly brief and have consisted of introductions and some questions. List-making. Stories take longer and require different questions as well as a bit more trust.

Yesterday, I met Abby at breakfast. She is a white American woman, around my age, single, working overseas on a small island. I felt an easy connection with her, probably at least in part because of these things we have in common. After I met her, I walked to the store, and I regretted not thinking to ask if she wanted to join (she had mentioned possibly making the same trip). Then, this morning, after praying for her before breakfast, I had the opportunity to hear her story (or part of it): how she got to that island and what it's been like to live on it. A story that's changed her, and impacted many people.

There's fire under there! She told me that was how she'd responded the first time she hiked around steam vents on the active volcanoes on the island where she lives. The steam could warm your hands, and it can also melt a bottle meant to capture some of it. As soon as she said it, I knew there was some metaphor there, and maybe that's one. What's inside these people, just below the surface, is a substance that can bring warm, comfort, change the state of things. It's beyond the lists, it's in the stories.

***
(photo: outside my window)

action that has ripened in our hearts

When I was young, my best friend once told me she wished I'd have more words for her. She wanted a verbal response when she shared things with me to demonstrate that I was really listening. We'd been friends more than ten years at the point, since we were five. I tried to explain to her that I did hear her, but just didn't have anything to say in response. What I didn't know how to communicate is that I was learning to hold what she shared -- whether it was the new alternative rock song she played for me on her tape player, the recent conversation with her crush that she analyzed, her dreams for the future. I heard it all. I just didn't have words, not yet anyway.

I've been thinking about this exchange a lot lately. It was a passing interaction, a conversation I remember having only once, and yet it marked our friendship because of what we were expressing to each other: the desire to be heard, loved, understood and supported. I've been thinking about it because of how I'm feeling about the world right now and what the events of each new day demand of me. People want words. Many others have words, or feel the need to have them, and share them on social media or in seemingly never-ending conversations at coffee shops and over text messages. Just today, my sister and I went to a coffee shop where we shared a table with two other women. As they scooched their things to offer space for us, they warned us that we'd be subjected to their political conversation. We laughed but also knew they were very earnest, because how can we not talk about what's going on?

I had the same feeling over the summer. It was the weekend after a few more black people were killed at the hands of white police officers, and just before I was to leave for two weeks in Kenya. I didn't know how to respond in my own heart, let alone on social media, where likes and comments might judge how well I was doing at this whole responding thing. As I scrolled through Facebook, feeling my lack of words, one friend shared a response from one of his friends, introducing it as "the perfect response" to what was happening. And that's when I began to wonder, are all these responses coming from our hearts, or are we putting on a show, all trying to have what someone else will call "the prefect response"?

Prayer yesterday morning led me to Isaiah 30, where a disobedient people are told that strength will come in their learning to be quiet. And again, in Psalm 46, where I have been stationing myself with hope and prayer, we are told to be still. Pay attention is what it says in another version of that psalm, know that God is God. And now I can't get away from wondering if the first response isn't a reactionary declaration or a search for who we can align ourselves with on social media, but is rather stillness. Quietness. Holding the pain, listening to our friends, and searching our hearts for what we are called to do or say.

Henri Nouwen says it this way:

It is not so difficult to see how "reactionary" we tend to be: that is, how often our lives become a series of nervous and often anxious reactions to the stimuli of our surroundings... we should ask ourselves how much of our reading and talking, visiting and lobbying, lecturing and writing, is more part of an impulsive reaction to the changing demands of our surroundings than an action that was born out of our own center. ... It seems of great importance to know with an experiential knowledge the difference between an action that is triggered by a change in the surrounding scene and an action that has ripened in our hearts through careful listening to the world in which we live.

And so I am content to pray and trust that meaningful sentiments, compassionate actions and deepened relationships will be nurtured in my heart through knowing that God is still God.

our own inner mystery

When we do not protect with great care our own inner mystery, we will never be able to form community. It is this inner mystery that attracts us to each other and allows us to establish friendship and develop lasting relationships of love. An intimate relationship between people not only asks for mutual openness but also for mutual respectful protection of each other’s uniqueness.

-Henri Nouwen, Reaching Out 

***
(photo: reflection at st. james episcopal, lancaster, pa)

there i am free

It's difficult to put this week into words. Though I've wanted to. Every evening I have opened my computer, but my fingers lay still against the keys. The words are stuck somewhere between my throat and my heart. Or somewhere deeper still, where they are the unformed substance that makes blood flow through veins, where they blow on the delicate wings of butterflies in bellies.

Now, I write from the room I've been staying in this week. Across the hall, a college student. Downstairs, a family with two young children, one of whom knows my name and keeps asking how long I'll stay. Outside, about a mile to the south, the university I attended more than a decade ago, and further on, miles of farms and trees and open land. The bed in this room has borrowed sheets and an unzipped green nylon sleeping bag for a comforter, which keeps me warm enough. I have a key to the house, and a living room and kitchen at my disposal at the big house next door, which houses international students. No car, and a half mile walk to a grocery store if I need anything.

After our first day, I watched out the window as one of our trainers -- a woman my age -- drove away. Done with work, headed home to her husband and her normal evening routine. I started crying because I wanted my car and my apartment and my normal evening routine. I did not want the dinner of chicken thighs and peas and salad that had been prepared for me to eat with the international college students. I did not want to feel so lost and limited to this room and the company of the students in the big house.

The next morning, I walked over to the big house at 7am. Inside, a young man was playing piano loudly (I had been hoping for some quiet), and I drank Folger's coffee and ate a banana. It is moments like these that I am not too sure what I've gotten myself into.

We drove twenty minutes in an old van with the interior falling apart to a small office building to start our second day of training. As Christians do, we started with worship. I held a second cup of coffee in one hand and closed my eyes and opened my heart. Where you are, there I am free, we sang. Free -- I wanted that. I paid more attention.

That's what I needed, that freedom that comes wherever I am. Or, wherever Jesus is. At a house in the middle of farmland with no car and a bed covered in a green nylon sleeping bag. In Nairobi, where it will take me some time to learn how to get around and who my friends will be. At my sisters', where I will be tomorrow when this training ends, and where kids are waiting for me to play Star Wars with them. In Pasadena, where my car and apartment are waiting for me to establish normal evening routines again (though who knows...).

those who know they thirst

You see, I want a lot.
Maybe I want it all:
the darkness of each endless fall,
the shimmering light of each ascent.

So many are alive who don't seem to care.
Casual, easy, the move in the world
as though untouched.

But you take pleasure in the faces
of those who know they thirst.
You cherish those
who grip you for survival.

You are not dead yet, it's not too late
to open your depths by plunging into them
and drink in the life
that reveals itself quietly there.

Rilke, from Book of Hours

... a favorite, always

***
(photo: niece, who teaches me to want, new years eve)

preparing the day

I walked down the steps in the quiet house this morning. All the other bedroom doors were still closed. With the faint light of the Christmas tree in the living room, I made coffee and settled under a heated blanket, willing my mind and heart to wake up to these few minutes alone before the other bedroom doors opened and feet and legs carried more people downstairs.

My sister was the first of them to come down. Her husband followed soon after. We said good morning, and then they left me to my reading and praying in the dim light. In the next room, the kitchen lit up the day brighter than the hidden sun outside could, and I heard drawers and the fridge and little lunch bags opening and closing and filling and emptying. The two little ones upstairs slept until their dad went to stir them awake.

As I prayed, I wondered about how my Father had been preparing the day before me even while I still slept.

***

Years ago, during my first year out of college, this happened one night: I needed my dad, but he was asleep and wouldn't be wakened. I had called home, hoping he would listen and give me the advice I needed. My mother had answered and relayed that he wouldn't come to the phone. I hung up, feeling overwhelmed and afraid and, though becoming an adult, very much in need of a father. That night, I notched another disappointment on the long tally regarding my father I had started long ago.

And then this happened: I heard a voice remind me he who keeps you will neither slumber nor sleep. 

Somehow, this other Father I was still becoming acquainted with was so very different from my earthly one. Awake when I needed him, attentive to my cry, able to meet my needs.

***

I will not leave you orphaned. I read this in the morning as I pray by the dim light of the Christmas tree and think of it as little feet pad down the steps, eyes still heavy with deep sleep. They pull cereal from the shelf and load their arms with milk, bowl, spoon. They pour and eat as their mother sits next to them -- awake and ready -- her presence and questions meant to convey love and protection and preparation for this new day.

***
(photo: sunlight in a coffee shop)

these winter rains

Today, the temperature is cold enough to chill, just warm enough to keep things from freezing. It is raining. From where I sit in my parents' den, I can hear car tires sloshing water aside as they drive by, drops dancing on the box air conditioner that chills this room in the summer. Out the window behind me, everything is shades of gray and brown. Tree branches are silhouettes against the barely-lit sky. It is the kind of day that makes you want to hide under a heavy blanket.

They say home is where the heart is, and I guess they are right. I am always looking for ways to get back here, to the place where the roads swerve between old farm houses and trees sprouted up long ago beside tiny creeks. Like veins in the hand, these roads could tell you about my life: how I got from there to here, the places I traveled, they way my life was formed. And yet, once here, I find my heart is still restless. My heart isn't really here; this isn't really home anymore. Or, it is home, but this isn't what I'm really searching for. Because it is also where my heart grew around hurt. I imagine the roots of those same trees, thirsty for water, cut short when the roads were paved years ago. Necessary to keep life moving, but without regard for some of the precious growth still happening beneath the surface.

Still, the trees are rooted. Their trunks grow thick. They shoot leaves and bear their fruit. Grace.

I have been trying to figure this out, the way my heart yearns for family. Then, once I am here, I remember, even in my body, the old ways we all learned to accommodate or ignore or just get by. I slip into these old moves we learned together and feel unfamiliar to myself. Not that I have turned every old leaf into something new, but there is a dullness that comes over me, a decision to just let things be. That is how we learn to survive, and maybe that is fitting for some seasons. And yet. I am learning to ask, seek and knock, still learning to turn and live, so this settling feels unnatural. This, too, is grace. 

Spring is a long way off still, but the nights are getting shorter. These winter rains are watering the ready ground and making way for what has died to feed new life. May it be so.

***
(photo: childhood home backyard, old maple tree in a season without its leaves)

thoughts on writing as one being re-made

I heard a writer, speaking of the transition from being a writer who wrote for herself to one who was read by many people, say that she understood the experience of putting her thoughts and heart in words for people to read as being a living sacrifice. I know the passage of scripture where that phrase - living sacrifice - is mentioned. It is one that's been popularized by Christian culture, put on t-shirts and greeting cards and wall hangings. And yet when she said that, it was like I understood in a new way what the words mean. What she meant is that her writing is a way she gives her life back to God. It feels like sacrifice - letting go, surrender, maybe even being burned. A living sacrifice, though, isn't burned up to ashes but has a heart that still beats, limbs that move and eyes that continue to see. It is in the living, in the writing, in the figuring things out and then allowing my mind and heart to be re-made, that I sacrifice. That I live as one given over to another.

***

We don't need to make the gospel new; the gospel makes us new.

I heard this a few months ago and thought, yes. There are so many Christian books out there that try to give a new spin to the gospel. A catchy phrase and a trendy cover design, a format that reflects the kind of thing that people read now. I read a lot of these when I was in high school and working at a Christian bookstore, but at some point realized the authors weren't able to tell me anything new. I've come back to these kinds of books now, curious about what's being written and how my writing fits (or doesn't) and find that, once again, a lot of the same kinds of things are being said over and over again, and yet not much is really being said.

But then there are times when I hear a word and, even though it's a word I've heard many times before, it's like new, because it's making me new. How is it that the Word that was written so many centuries ago is like new each time I come to it? It must be something of the life of God in it, is all I can conclude, the same life that makes the day new, gives mercies that are new, renews me from the inside to re-make my heart, my sight, my love.

I wonder, then, how being made new then drives me to speak or write the gospel in a way that does, indeed, make it new for others. This is how it starts: a seed of a word that grows and makes a shady place for others to find rest for their souls, makes branches that birds can find a home in. The kind of work that lays foundations for many generations and brings peace to places that have been ruined.

***

So I opened my mouth, and he fed me the scroll. Fill your stomach with this, he said. And when I ate it, it tasted as sweet as honey in my mouth.  

- Ezekiel 3:2-3

***

(photo: flowers and concrete, griffith park, los angeles)

as a means to communion

We  are hungry. We eat. We are filled... and emptied. 

And still, we look at the fruit and see only the material means to fill our emptiness. We don't see the material world for what it is meant to be: as a means to communion with God.

- Ann Voskamp, One Thousand Gifts, emphasis hers

(reminds me of some things I've been thinking about...)

***
(photo: the material world, in Atwater Village to be exact)

yes, and

.... Love for the earth
and love for you are having such a long
conversation in my heart.

from Thirst by Mary Oliver

This is a line from one of my favorite poems. The first time I read it, I sat on the floor between shelves of books in Borders, probably looking through a stack of magazines I piled in my arms and lugged with me. The title of the book, which is the title of this poem, stuck out to me from the binding of the thin paperback where it sat on cart of books to be shelved. I picked it up, thumbed through, read a few short poems, and cried when I read this one, stuck in at the very end of the collection. And, when I first read it, and for years after, this line seemed to me to describe a battle. An either/or. You choose the earth or "you" (God) and the author, trying to choose God, gives away a lot of things (we read in the next lines of the poem). 

The poem appealed to something in me, but I struggled with this line because, I realized, I really like the earth. Not just like the geese and ponds that Mary Oliver usually writes about (though sometimtes I like those, too). But I'm talking the way I feel after a run, sweaty and satisfied. Feeding my people with brunch or a really good salad. Tears that are happy or cathartic. Rhythm and dancing. Holding a book in my hand. Finding a piece of clothing or jewelry that I love or that are flattering on me. I like being carnal - of the body, of the earth. But am I supposed to not like these things? What does it feel like to like God more? To let him dominate the conversation? Win the battle?

But the word she uses isn't "battle," but "conversation."

My friend is a comedian and has taken improv classes. She's hosted groups of creatives at her apartment, and as a warm up activity, she leads us in "Yes, And." Two of us sit across from each other, are given a premise, and make a story by affirming what the other says and building on it. "Yes, and." 

The last time I read the poem, that word "conversation" stuck out to me and I realized that  it was this kind of conversation that these loves may want to have in my heart.

Yes, and. The things we love about being in a body, being on an earth, holding and smelling and feeling and being with - all this in conversation, affirming and building on the things we love about being God's, of the spirit, able to sense and intuit mystery and be filled with grace and see how one plus one can equal some crazy number we didn't think possible. 

***

(photo: lights in trees, pasadena nights)

happy hour with coworkers usually goes like this

Happy hour with coworkers usually goes like this: We sip our first drinks, share anecdotes about our co-workers and dating lives, laugh. I stop after one, they keep going, and halfway through the second drink and throughout the third, words become a little more harsh and stories of boyfriends a little more raw.

Here is how it went last night: The coworker sitting next to me shares about her live-in boyfriend. She is considering leaving him, and by her description, for good reasons. She draws a picture for us of what life is like with him with a story about him bailing on a dinner in West Hollywood with friends, and later, with a text he just sent her. Eventually my sadness and shock show on my face, perhaps read as naiveté. And maybe it is true that these women have more experience in certain areas of life. But what I am really wondering about is why women would let men treat them like this, and what is so bad about being alone that these women seem to be avoiding it with a relationship that’s not really a relationship, and (I am trying to resist this one) are all men like this? I think of what to say to her that has more substance than the trite feminist sentiment, girl, you deserve so much more. But that’s what’s true. She is beautiful and smart and funny and engaging and she is a child of the living God.

Happy hour with coworkers usually goes like this: I come away with the headache that whiskey always gives me and feeling overfull from the greasy food and wondering how so many people think this is life.

***

Today my sister will give her blood to understand her genes. Specifically, she will find out whether certain mutations that are believed to have caused disease in our dad’s sisters are present in her, and as a result, put her at risk for the same sickness. This has been a conversation my sisters and I have been having for at least a few years now. Do we get tested? What will we do with the information? Better to live not knowing than to live with the information? Which is better, the fear of the unknown, or the fear of the little-bit-more known? What do we do with the possibility of death?

When I woke up this morning, I texted my sister to let her know that I’m praying for her. We exchanged messages back and forth, and what I began thinking about as we texted and as I prayed is the force of life. I’m not talking about life like, these daily happenings all combined make up my life. I’m talking about the breath of God sort of life, the light that appeared when He spoke into darkness and chaos. I think about what that first man and woman might have experienced of life before things like tiredness and depression and disease and un-forgiveness entered the picture. Did they wake up and need coffee? I’m guessing not.

***

One definition of life: the capacity for growth, reproduction, functional activity, and continual change preceding death. But what kind of change? I want to ask.

***

I drive to work this morning, drinking my coffee. The sun is in my eyes, but I try to be thankful for it all the same. Life is buzzing all around, in the traffic of people heading to work and school, in the sun climbing the sky and the leaves still clinging to trees. I go over our happy hour conversation even as I mean to be praying for my sister. I am a little embarrassed that I showed my shock and disappointment at my coworkers stories. But then I think about how much I want to know what true life is, that kind of change that’s the process of being made new each day, and how I want to be a bearer of it in the lives of others, and I’m no longer ashamed but glad. And I keep driving into the sun, that never-dying bearer of such bright day light.

***

(photo: morning light)

what love longs to be

In the end, this is what love longs to be: capable of meaningful action in the life of the beloved, so committed to the beloved that everything is at risk. If we want flourishing, this is what we will have to learn.

-Andy Crouch, Strong and Weak

***
(photo: late afternoon light in pittsburgh)

pack nothing, except the prayers

...Who knows what
will finally happen or where I will be sent,
yet already I have given a great many things
away, expecting to be told to pack nothing,
except the prayers which, with this thirst,
I am slowly learning.

-from the poem Thirst by Mary Oliver (a fav)

***
(photo: pasadena, ca)

pay attention to what makes you cry

Nearly a decade ago I interviewed for a job. I sorta wanted it; more, I wanted to escape the one I was in. I remember being confused and exhausted by my seeming loss of direction. Instead of becoming more of who I was, my twenties felt mostly like I was being asked to let go of important parts of myself.

After the interview, I sat in my car and cried, the built up emotions flowing out through tears.

That weekend, over the phone, I told my mom about the interview and the post-interview tears. She said, you always were a cry-er, to which I took offense at first. I didn't cry that much, I probably said back to her, not wanting to be known as whiney or weak. But underneath, it felt reassuring to know that my mother saw my emotions, even when I might have thought I did a good job at hiding them. And I started to think of times I remembered crying: from the discomfort of hearing my sisters fight about wearing each other's clothes to school. The shame of my best friend telling me my wrists were fat. (Wrists can't be fat, my mom had assured me.) The loneliness and uncertainty of my senior year of high school.

***

Pay attention to what makes you cry, I heard someone say recently. Here is what has made me cry this week: finding that a new friend I was connecting with over email with a new friend went to the same college and majored in the same course of study as I did. The desire to write. Trying to fit something in my car all by myself and it not working. Entering my church around 5:30pm, the light slanted through the windows and the cool stillness and the way I always feel God's presence there, always. Disappointment, shame, frustration, thankfulness, hope, exhaustion. Pay attention because there is information there, is what she was saying. Crying tells us about our hearts, what state they're in and what they want.

Tears can drain us, but they can also lead us to springs, a psalmist says.

***

Tears can take me two ways: further into the problem - whether that be by obsession or avoidance - or closer to God. I remember how Jesus himself (image of the invisible God) cried with a crowd sobbing over the death of their friend. And I remember a woman who, it is said, stood behind Jesus and, weeping, wet Jesus' feet with her tears. Maybe she was already known for her shameful public demonstrations (she was a prostitute), so that makes me wonder what the scene was like and how I would have responded if I'd been there. Likely, I would have been repulsed by her tears, like most other guests. But Jesus calls her weeping faith - the way she let the tears fall, didn't hold back, allowed her feelings to be what they were and lead her to Jesus.

Your faith has saved you; go in peace.