Locked Rooms

Rainer Maria Rilke once wrote, "You are so young. You stand before beginnings. I would like to beg of you, dear Friend, as well as I can, to have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms, like books written in a foreign language."

I am standing before many many locked doors, at present. And yes, it is terrifying. My hands run along the handles, how many times? I think of rooms in my old house, my parents' house, the house I grew up in. I think of rooms I rarely entered. I think of the front hall with the oak chest, and the pictures my mother had setting up on top. The pictures of her mother who died before any of us could know her at all. I think of the pictures of the family that has since abandoned us, and the family that is still firm at our sides. I remember my mother's bookshelf to the side, and a dresser full of random odds and ends. I rarely entered the room, and so it seemed to me this magical place. There was an old hat rack in there with my grandfather's hats that sometimes we would try on. The room was full of antiquity, and yet, with all mysteries so near to our hearts, the real intrigue is how these old objects, these photos, and more importantly the records of these people, enhance and change and hold meaning in our lives.

The locked rooms, the rooms rarely entered, or not at all, might speak the most into our lives, might tell us the stories of our pasts, our presents, or futures. I run my finger along the doors I look at now: careers, future artistic projects, future friendships, a current spirit lifting crush, and I feel all this energy coursing. And at the same time, immense dread.

What will happen? Which doors do I open, and which doors can I? How long until someone comes to the other side and pops the lock, pulls the chain, removes the chair wedged firmly under the knob. And is there a way to speak to that someone, to change the course of things. And who holds the big wand. Who is at the controls?

I want, I want, so many things. I want mind crushing kisses. I want to lay deep into another human being and not feel like I'm wrong, not have to try and keep my eyes from darting for escape. I want to know what my hands will make. I want to know where I'll be so I can orchestrate the rest of it.

Rainer Maria Rilke goes on to write, "Do not now look for the answers. They could not be given to you, because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything...You need to live the questions. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer some distant day."

I'm glad there are doors at all. Questions. Big mysteries hanging around in our lives, waiting to surprise us. There are doors we HAVE to open. Only our touch will do the trick. There are choices WE must make, which no one can make for us, and steps only our feet can take if we are to move at all, move anywhere.

The doors say to me, Sweetheart, there is a story. There are rooms you have not seen, but will see. You are walking through new rooms already, and Wow, the windows cast so much light.

Here it is. Cheers. We're standing on so many threshholds, and one day we will pass into new spaces, and we will find at least a few of our answers there.

Back to Myself

It's amazing how far I can get from me. I can spend so much time jumping into other peoples' heads, playing all the guessing games that get you no where, that keep you lost and losing.

Today has been wonderful. Truly. I am me. Yes, again, I have fallen back into this body, and I can feel the weight of it. I know the weight of it. It is familiar to me, and it is good. It is a good body. I am not ashamed of myself, today. I have no eyes watching, but for the two professors I met with today, and though one of them always tends to make me feel a bit intimidated--a bit lost and unprepared like I need to start winding up for the big race--the other was so kind and encouraging. I felt very warm leaving her office.

I spent some time at Grand Valley's library, while I was on campus, and found my favorite spot on the third floor. Whenever I have set foot in that library, even while I went to school there, I always would go straight for this very old tattered Carl Sandburg collection. I love it. I love it with my whole heart. His poems have touched me, deep. I run my finger over them and I feel him writing them, I feel him looking out on waves, women, his wife. I feel his words, homey, like the one he uses to refer to his wife, his Pal. Because I can't paste them here, for some reason, look up, "Clean Hands," and "Let Love Go On," and "Mag."

I feel quiet today. Quiet and warm and at home. I am at Lemonjello's in Holland, headphones full of Melody Gardot, Carla Bruni, Great Lake Swimmers. I like to go slow. I was made for slow. I have needed to have this time. To be.

I'm wondering if another factor in me feeling very much myself, very comfortable and real, as if my edges have rounded over and I am less jumping into heads, but resting in my own, seeing out my eyes, enjoying the atmosphere in a calm, organic sort of way, is that I've just finished writing twelve pages in my jouranl. Yes, I wrote everything. Every detail. I did my overanalyzing and wrote about my new feeling that overanalyzing is a big waste of my time and energy, and has lost me some good moments in exchange for wild eyed crazy-brain activity.

I wrote about losing myself by feeling insecure, by being adamant that I am no good. I feel like in my crazy-brainedness lately, I kept jumping between trying to feel worthy, and falling incredibly short of that. As all people seem to do, I wish I could go back. I wish I could go back to that brain and say, "Hey Sweetheart. It's alright. You're good, right now. Let yourself."

I'm glad to be back, and still feel a little foolish about my foolishness. But still, I came back. And I feel good now. I'm worrying about things. I'm researching jobs, internships, graduate school programs. I've been spending hours with my eyes wide as fear, working the computer screen up and down, reminding myself to breathe, reminding myself that this is not the end, that there are years ahead, and big chances ahead, and that hope is still here, and maybe some things are attainable. Maybe I haven't missed the boat. And if I have, it'll be back around in time.

Sometimes I feel like God is after me. I called about some jobs I'd applied for, and I had connections, and the positions apparently had been filled just as I turned in my application. I looked up any job possibilities online and nothing seems remotely promising, or even legitimate. I'm looking at graduate schools, thinking about the people I know who've gotten in and how they were so much more involved with things on campus, and I was always so busy working multiple jobs. Sometimes I feel screwed.

Truth be told, I may not have really tried yet. I know I'm scared. I'm really scared of taking a path, and missing out on a bunch of other paths; missing out on the other landscapes, cities, people, friends, lovers. I don't want to take the wrong path.

But I was thinking about this on my drive out to Holland. Is it possible, if we believe in any sort of diety, the Christian God perhaps, that we could take the wrong path? And what is predestination after all--how far does it extend? Are God's hands at my shoulders always, when I'm meeting my friends by accident at a coffee shop, when some stranger and I click, when my poem finally works, when I make the big mistake of losing myself in worry and fear and insecurity? Where is God? And what is he doing? I've asked these questions before. I've gotten answers.

I just don't want to choose wrong, you know. I don't want to miss out. I really don't want to miss out.

Amidst the questions, the deep swelling worried hope that I will take some course that will meet me with some sort of good life, maybe not perfect, maybe not bright and cheery, but organically beautiful, smelling of earth, smelling like morning breath and nasty cars, and good, like morning bodies, open as broken seeds, vibrant as the first stem of grass lifting her forefinger to the air.

For the Weaklings Like Me

I'm once again inside my coffee shop, playing Ingrid Michaelson, trying not to be bogged by my instinct to jump into other people's business. I want to shine a big spotlight and say, "You are okay." To say, "Yes, I see that and that, those sickly sour scars and how far you've fallen. But who cares? Somehow you were woven; there's a strand that came winding up through all of those things, all of the rips and tears and sweet soft stretches of fabric, and they have made you. And wow, the totality, the complete project, the whole of you is worthy. It is good."

I know too many people who need to hear this. Every five seconds, they need to know this. And they need to know this in the real, in the deep, in the dirt and earthy guts of themselves. They need to know not that they are OH MY GOD SO AMAZING. They don't need worship. And that is what they will feel when they are complimented, and they will shrug it off, and it will be meaningless. But, what if it is real, and meant, and true, and leaves room for deep screwy faults?

I am pained by people who cannot accept love. Who prepare not to accept it. I'm one of them.

I'm reading this book my psychologist insisted I read for two years called, Surrender to Love. It seems incredibly cheesy, and it is incredibly cheesy. It is too nice. It is too sweet. But, sometimes I wonder if what we most deeply desire is easily discarded in our minds as, "too cheesy. Too nice." I wonder if it is our deep shame, our rich knowledge of our own shortcomings, that makes us discard these things; that makes us cringe and quit reading. We don't allow the words to burrow. We don't allow them to balloon into sizeable shapes in our lives, our souls.

And we do this with people. And we do this with God. We do this with anything that might get too close to the wound, and expose us for what we are: repulsive and marred, disgusting and torn and weak and cowardly.

It's amazing that some people do this. That they eventually lay open, and allow themselves to be seen. It's even more amazing to know that other people love us, that perhaps some kind of divinity is constantly and consistently reaching in, pressing on the walls of the wound, attempting entrance, despite the ugliness, despite what is. It's amazing that we can be loved for our wounds, not despite them. That what we have found repulsive for ages, is what intrigues another, draws another in.

I pray that all of us who ride in this boat develop a knowledge that we are accepted now, and that we can live in this: in this body, this screwed up mind, this low and sagging and broken heart. We can do things. We can go places. We can make mistakes, and take risks, and be, and live and live and live. We can live in our wounds, until they don't matter. Until they are a part of us, but do not inhibit us.

Maybe our strength does not come from ridding ourselves of weakness, but our strength is born in allowing our weakness to exist, and simply ridding ourselves of our incredible shame, that has so long kept us from jumping into our lives, singing loud, saying the words we have pressed so far down our throats.

Love Poem

I have always written love poems, and often keep them hidden, only to be revealed to a few individuals who will not think me oldschool and unsophisticated for writing them. I'm deciding not to hide this one, as I just put it together (within the last ten minutes or so), and it has really captured something I have felt. I'm hoping that some of you can relate to it, or feel it in some way. I also hope that when I wake up tomorrow morning and re-read it, I'm not embarrassed for having posted it, as I often am with my own work.

A Joining

I do not need to touch you--
but near you my ribs open and stretch like tree
hands, lobed fingers walking for sky--
not to take, no, but to comb the clouds to say:
Here, my leaf, here, your pilling white.
I run my finger down your nose
like a slow sliding capsule of rain and watch
your eyes draw down like distant thunder,
your mouth the burnt, parting earth.
It is a sharing, yes, a swollen lung
bonding us, of which we someday say
delicate and trembling: we.
And this is the word for it always--
not the taking or giving or even knowing.
The word makes its breath in the slow of one
motion--a joining, my finger now homed
in the valley of your neck.

Over the Moon

Autumn is raw, a short stretch of skin rubbed until it burnt up. I don't want the cold. Desperately. I am looking out th window and it has begun to rain, and unless I get to find your hands and take you out in it, go nuts in it, feel full and risen in it, I'd rather it just go away.

I could use the sun right now. I could use it ripping right through me. I could use that burn. I could sit on the beach with my friends waiting for the sun to split on water, bust open. We would trip over ourselves with glee. Skirts and dresses and no-sleeves and bathing suits and water bouying our hair into mushrooms of brown and red and blonde. Spinny-wild-open summer. God, I miss you already.

But, I have found things now, in autumn, November having stuck its fingers through the open doorway, my birthday on its way, possibilities with the most frighteningly beautiful palms lying wide for me.

I was thinking on my drive today about how I always feel unallowed. I feel like I need to ask permission. I see an open hand and I say in my stomach, "Can I? Please?" And it's not needy. It's not weird. It's the question, "What do you want?" And the answer, "Yes."

I'm really tired of staying behind the door, waiting for someone else to open it. I feel like so much of my childhood was so out of my hands. I was taught to be polite, and I took that lesson to heart. I never asked for anything. Not ever. And if I did, I felt terrible for that. In a lot of senses, I was made to feel terrible for that. I was made to feel childish, stupid, ashamed.

Even now, I imagine reaching out and though my reaching might seem welcomed, I'm waiting for the grimace, the, "I didn't think you'd actually do it."

At the same time, I have so often become the person who reaches and reaches and reaches and wants to give and help and help and nothing. No mutuality. That terrifies me. That terrifies me deep. That dives into my stomach with the yearning and the two mix and a paralysis ensues and what do I do?

I am thankful for the question, "What do you want?"

What an important question. What a way to live. Asking people and asking ourselves, "What do we want? Where shall we go, and what shall we do, and what will be our first big or small or teensy tiny step?"

Perhaps someday, muscles aching, emotions stretched, courage swollen and bright, spirit broken and mended, we will make our way over the moon.