Dying Season: Quieting Down

I love the rust quiet that climbs into autumn. I love sinking into that atmosphere, feet taking to it first, going slower. The sidewalks are clean, the air seems wrung out, rubbed down. Everything becomes pleasantly raw.

Fall reminds me to quiet down, to just sit in the buzz of other people's laughter, private talks in the cafe, hoops and shouts on the street. I am learning that in new places I become paranoid. I feel desperate for validation, for someone to say, "WOW, I am so glad you stepped into this corner of the world." I find that I am more doubtful, that if someone seems happy to see me, I get very squinty eyed in my deep self. I am chock full of disbelief.

I noticed yesterday that I try to close the gap I create with my paranoia and doubts through speech. I talk a lot. In class I am half dying to answer a question (I am becoming THAT girl). In all honesty, I feel like I have to prove myself. I'm sure just about everyone feels this way in new situations, but I'm becoming exhausted by the desperation of it--the worries.

Yesterday I tried to quiet down. I let myself sit back, I let myself listen. I thought to myself, Is it really such an emergency that you be known, heard, loved? It felt so good, just listening. Just letting myself feel okay about not contributing constantly. I felt more myself, more composed. Immediately I felt that I didn't need to speak. I could if I wanted, but I didn't neeeeed to.

The road from Blacksburg to Roanoke is sometimes unpleasantly long and car-sickness inducing. I plug my ears with so much sound to try to pull me out of the twist-bounce-headache of it. But yesterday afternoon, winding up and down through the mountains in the high-up bus had me looking out at dozens of birds hovering high above the valleys between mountains almost sweatered in pine. I felt the word height press down into my bones. I began to value their distance; the boundaries of birds. They could touch down on a tree top or rise. They could walk in the shadowy woods or cast cloudward. They let themselves mingle, speak, and hover in softest silence.

I remembered times with very dear friends. Andrew and I sitting on a hill side smoking cigars, watching deer, and riding our bikes through town to the fireworks. We were twenty-something-year-old-kids playing, flying kites. Chase and I walking the Hope College campus at 3 a.m. baring our souls, sharing pain. I remembered sitting at Noshville reading Lewis and working through difficult theology till 6 a.m. Paula bringing me Thanksgiving left-overs after I got out of work, walking every subdivision sidewalk, and waiting for meteor showers under dozens of blankets. I remember porch nights with Alicia and our endless conversations.

I felt so lucky, so buoyant. I remembered that by some miracle I met these people and they met me and we prize each other and our memories as some of the best that ever happen. I have my value. Everyday spent with them and other friends and my family and David have just pressed it into me. I forget it. I wake up empty, unfamiliar even to myself.

And I can't wait to grow new friendships here, to still this new space for a moment with a kindred spirit. And I'm excited for that exchange of value, and humanity. But I don't need to prove myself. That is not how friendship, how validation, ever works. You don't work for it. You just let it.

One of the two things I have learned (over and over again...and again this weekend) are to quiet down, listen, and just be. Stop proving. Hold back the need. Listen. Speak words that are true and aren't asking for anything. Secondly, I need belief. I need to start opening up to the possibility that it is okay; that I am okay now.

Here's to a new place and the way a new place pulls at your limbs, opens you up and sifts through you looking for ways to grow you everywhere. I am glad I am here, glad I am surrounded by such cool people I can't wait to continue getting to know, and glad to be inside a courageously dying season here.

A Very Good Place

I am afraid to write posts lately. I used to do it all the time, and then the wimpish side of me got bigger and I began to get to know lots of different people who might be critical about lots of different aspects of myself. I still haven't gotten over that adolescent stage where you think you are the center of the world and there are eyes of all sorts along your cupboards and walls sizing you up every moment of your life (even when you're alone).

The adolescent still punching around in my veins gets hurt awfully easily. I'm working on that backbone, but I've noticed that in effort to work on my backbone, I've tried to tape up the mouth that is genuinely afraid and worried and doesn't feel quite up to par in most circles.

In effort to approach my growth holistically, I want to take the tape off, and let that mouth speak a little more. So at long last, I have steadied myself in a desk chair by my best window overlooking my festively green and lush backyard and turned my fan to its softest setting to write a post about a few of the feelings Virginia and graduate school have brought me.

This transition has been difficult for me. I feel smaller here than I did in Grand Rapids. I used to enjoy hiding in colorful cafes, smiling brightly over all the new art on the walls and the shops and people walking the messy blooming streets. I used to feel invisible, but in this really important way. Like I had some secret, and lots of joy. I think the secret has to do with possibility. I was in Grand Rapids wondering and wishing and hoping and dreaming and fantasizing about all that might happen in a few months. I wasn't living in reality. I walked around Grand Rapids in dream goggles. Everything smelled sweet because I was expecting sweet just around the corner. And Grand Rapids is beautiful, and the art is luscious, and the cafes are such fun places to hide in journals and books and still be near enough to lots of other people doing the same things.

But the point is that I felt possibility. Now, possibility has arrived. A big fat chunk of it. I mean, I have to fulfill this chunk. I have to write and publish and grow and learn and all of that. But the opportunity came. I am in the place. And the surprising thing is that when I arrived, color seemed to fall out of the atmosphere. Not entirely. My little cottage-y apartment is color-full and feels like home. But my life in general feels a bit more on the gray spectrum.

David told me one night that he thinks this is because my self-worth doesn't come from myself. It comes from the situations or people in my life. The hope of the future gave me a strong feeling of self-worth, but I didn't have any plan for keeping my bright composure after attaining that hope.

A friend of mine commented on me when we were in our early teenage years that I was always bent on growing, on re-inventing myself, on starting fresh toward some new me. A part of me whispers that it is wrong to locate myself in my own possibilities. And perhaps that's true. I cannot define my own worth, I cannot let color drown when I attain or lose a hope or possibility for my life. My worth cannot be dependent upon that.

I need to work on defining my own worth. I need to learn how to cover up the eyes all over my apartment, in the clouds as I walk, and say, "Nobody's watching. Just do as you please." I need to take some joy in my own way of living. I need to take joy in my quirks. I need to press guilt back into it's stoney throat and let myself just be thrilled about watching a Murder Mystery when I could be chugging away at accomplishing this or that.

I love Anne Lamott's words, "Rest and laughter are the most spiritual and subversive acts of all. Laugh, rest, slow down. I recommend that you all take a long deep breath, and stop. Just be where your butts are, and breathe. Take some time. Refuse to cooperate with anyone who is trying to shame you into hopping right back up onto that rat exercise wheel."

I love how spirituality rests on this tenant that there is more to you than what you do and what your skin and swank says about you. I think the big huge sacrifice of living a spiritual life is taking on that lightness and emptying the stones from your pockets.

I think this is the way I'm going to tackle the gray in my life. I'm going to try and live into a new possibility. That I can take joy in myself. That I can sit and paint and write and that no one even needs to know or approve or give me pointers or anything. I can be myself and revel in that. Perhaps that sounds childish, but to me, today, in this new place, it sounds like taking a forkful of chocolate desert. It sounds succulent.

And I need to see this place as a possibility I am still moving into. My writing has possibility. There's this whole shadow over my writing since I got here, as well. I just don't care about it. And I think it's because I don't know where it's going. Now is the time to revise it, to work it out, to strengthen it. And I've never been there with my poems before. It's always just been my own pair of squinty eyes working over the page. Now I've got dozens of others, and they're so smart, and I just don't know what my writing will become, and that unknown stage I'm in is scary and repels me.

The thing is, something will become of it. I'm in this process, now. No getting out. And I will enjoy it. I just need to be vulnerable to it and enjoy it because there is possibility there. There is hope there. My creations are inside an important process. They are not finished, but they have come from a very good place.

To Savor: My Resolution

There is so much (too much) that needs to be written. There's so much that needs mulling, that needs a quiet Saturday afternoon alone in my little city apartment, half lit with afternoon sun, the heat turned temporarily up. I need distance from my life so I can see it clearly, so I can bring it all into focus, and perhaps learn something. I want to be a bird on a branch above my life, watching me work, watching me become so stressed out my stomach twists and turns, my back bones grip and lock. I want to be the bird seeing me so afraid of what people think, of wishing they think I'm pretty, of wishing to be something special in their eyes. I want to gain that distance and sing back to myself some new song that eases my stomach muscles and pulls my shoulders tenderly back into place.

There's a me I've lost lately. When I think of myself, of the person I have been and want to be, I think of something fresh, like the faint citrus scent you catch if you press an orange up to your mouth, the peel still cloaking the fruit. I am vibrant, and never wear dress clothes. I wear skirts, and overalls, and capris, and tank tops and t-shirts. I never smile when I don't mean it, and my eyes have lights that switch on when paint hits the canvas, or a new poetic line catches on the synapses of my brain, or my boyfriend practices guitar and the sound of him working over frets and strings tucks the moment in day blue.

I want the me who relishes in the sound of onions simmering in olive oil, who creates and creates and goes for walks and delights and thinks and reads C.S. Lewis until her brain throbs with thoughts deep and wide as the Mystery that breeds them. I want the me who savors.

Something I've realized recently is that I am not refreshed or truly relaxed by doing nothing. I like to believe that watching marathons of crime television dramas is truly cathartic. I like to believe that television and movies and general provide relaxing entertainment. My weekends are home to these sorts of experiences. And though I love them, they don't provide me with any real rest. I will not be sustained by those moments when I'm back in the grind, dealing with an inconsistent work environment, painstakingly completing graduate school applications, and occasionally allowing the big worries inside to make an even bigger mess in my head.

What does sustain me, what moments I still remember (simple as they were at the time), are moments when I savored something. I remember sitting by myself out on my back porch at my old apartment with all the lights off so I could see the stars, talking to God about the pains and feeling somehow secure in the big dark world with its miniscule glowing markers and tree shadows. I remember dicing peppers, tossing spices, entirely focused on the art of creation.

I savor laying out my tapestry, making a big mess of all my paints and charcoal pencils, ripping up designed paper to collage and paint over. I savor checking up on blogs and websites of those who inspire me to be as tender and loving and hopeful and creative and helpful as possible in this world (lately, maganda.org...who's actually moved...but she has a link you can click to find her new site...I have to do it every time :)). I savor going for walks, writing poems on the walls of my mind as I cross the street, breath deep into every well as I enter the bookstore, heading straight for the poetry section first, celebrating story and the ability to dream up and give words to the sights only you have held.

I savor journaling. I savor blogging. I savor this walk over what my mind has been turning and forgetting and stomping under all the stress and clutching and gripping. I savor thinking about my boyfriend and what we are beginning together. I savor the image of him, shaggy hair, jeans with giant holes in the knees. I love coming back to the realization that I have never felt so lucky as I do now.

So, here's to 2011. May it be a year of savoring. And it will be some work, as odd as that sounds. It is most difficult for me to take time to enjoy. And there is time--not much--but there is. There are long enough moments for taking in sights, for going slower, for returning to being a simple human being with one life that is going, moving, now. I'm starting now, writing what I love to write, here, for whoever reads it. May you find time to savor, and be filled and refreshed and sustained.

The Tugging and The Vision

I am watching fall blue out the faces of houses and cement sidewalk slabs, rain clinging to the air, my own eyes hoping it will just let go, fall just beyond the coffee shop windows, make the world slick with shine. For the first time in a while I'm enjoying my music, particularly Ellery/ Dividing the Plunder. Tasha and Justin Golden (the band members) have always sung a story so like the one walking the often puddly floor of my heart.

There's always this deep longing in the lyrics, something stretching out the emptiness in me, helping me explore all the rooms that feel stark and gray.

I feel so unsatisfied lately, and I worry that I'll never go where I want to. That I'll never write or help other people acheive their creative goals. I want to feel meaningful, like the hours of my life contribute to the vivacity of fellow human beings. I want to pull all the people who feel meaningless out of hiding and help them make their lives, and make things, make art or journals or poems or paintings that give them hope, some sense of originality, of, "I can do something and it has never been done the same way."

I want to help re-invent what makes a person valuable. There are such superficial criteria out there for people to measure themselves up to. It's absolutely ridiculous. I hear people talking about how a man isn't clean shaven and I think, "What if he spent the past three days concocting the most brilliant screen play, if he couldn't sleep, could barely eat because characters were on his brain, jumping new dialogue, movement into his every thought? What if he was helping someone, or organizing his books, or making music, or learning something new?" Why does a clean shaven face mean a damn thing?

I wonder if it's possible to escape such talk. If we can jump first to conclusions of gradeur. If instead of assuming the old homeless man is a mere deadbeat, considering him to have done great things, and met such horrible circumstances that he really does need society's help.

I know that we're taken advantage of, and that so often the book's cover actually says something about the book, but that doesn't justify superficiality becoming the rule. Too often, we apply the most convenient of our explanations because it makes us feel superior, as if we're justified in our plastic-sour talk, our choice to turn away smugly.

So yes, these days my desire to be a part of something colorful, supportive, substantial is immense. I feel tugged deep in the soft wells of my organs. I feel a cloud of dream swelling at the tip-top of my skull.

And I start to compose a vision. A workspace. A schedule. A plan. I found this wonderful wonderful book on amazon called, Creating a Life Worth Living by Carol Lloyd, and though the title is a tad bit cheesy, the book is written very well and provides a lot of insight and practical guidance for the creative individual who longs to make a creative professional life for herself.

The book has me attmepting to come up with a clear, concrete vision for my future career. I am holding onto all of my ideas, idyllic as some might be, in order that I might acheive as much of that vision as possible. I know life and God and relationships and children intervene, but I'm just trying for the best, clearest picture I can get of what I want, and working toward that, so that maybe, someday, I might come close.

What's interesting is that the ideal so often is not to sit at home and do nothing...to watch television and eat as many potato chips as their are channels and commercials and talk show fights. Tyically, after about a week of that, we're ready to do something, to create a life for ourselves. Armed with a bit of the vision already--that I want to write--mostly poetry--and help others actualize their creative/emotional selves--I am attempting to clean it up and put together the stepping stones of the path.

While I'm here, the biggest struggle is satisfaction. It is so hard for me to rest where I am. It's easy for me to do nothing, to stare off into space ninety-percent of the day, but while I'm staring I'm spinning wheels behind my eyes, doing the maddening work of worry. I need to be able to sit for five minutes and be okay where I'm at. Breathing. Catching up with a friend. Allowing myself to be hugged while I'm being hugged.

Sometimes there's so much to undertake. Satisfaction. A vision. Vivacity despite the emptiness I find inside myself when I am without a definite plan. I'm working on it, and working on getting quiet for a small space in the day, finding out that I'm worth something even when I'm not making it all work perfectly, when I'm undisciplined, when I'm alone without anyone to say whether I'm good or not.

Reason to Write

Tonight I find myself in the thick shadow of dismay, raking the grey-blue for possibilities, links to some shiny hope of happiness without a huge-impossible effort. So much of the happiness I never thought existed, and most definitely never thought would fall straight into a chair across from me at a coffee shop, has come in such richness. But now that I am steady in that one great happiness, I begin to search around noting depressing matters of money, impossible dreams, non-existent satisfying jobs, and my heart sinks.

I consider how this country is owned by other countries, and how everything seems to be worse and worse every hour. How the earth suffers and the poor suffer and the abused suffer. How so many of the people I know are worried sick and have no security blanket. All of reality keeps building and building and soon it seems almost naive to allow myself to live into any lightness with all this loss and decay and sufferring around.

I think of writing poetry, and how the whole dream or desire seems like such a joke in the face of all the needs doing in this big crazy world. Nobody reads poetry, anyway. I once read something by Kathleen Norris about following a calling because it's a calling, and trusting that somewhere, there's reason.

Perhaps it's not what you do that changes the world, or brings any hope to anyone. Perhaps it's how you do what you do, and who you are because of what you do. If I became some sort of disciplined writer, who urged other people to write and write truthfully, who attempted to inspire to any degree, then maybe it's worth it. Maybe the point is becoming the sort of person I want to be, and that writing helps me be that person.

Perhaps it is not that I need to be a sort of person to write, but that in order to be the person I really love to be around, to be the sort of person that feels light and airy and hopeful and spiritual and deep and thoughtful, I need to write. I need to go into that place, spend time, pay attention, and record.

Tonight, in the midst of this darkness, I've also had the realization that perhaps thinking about life--the hugeness of it and the seeming impossibilities--is harder than actually living. That perhaps our dreams are not so difficult to pursue as they are to think about pursuing. Thinking about anything too long can give it such terrifying shape, wings as black as night and immense lungs blowing a big storm of depression and pessimism. But doing the work of the dream, opening the notebook, going outdoors, calling words from the edges of fields, trash caught on the breeze, bird feathers falling slow, is a better way to go about things.

May you go into your work and not think so much that your dreams become too much, gaining a more nightmarish resemblance, losing all their light and compelling power.

My World

The rain has started spooling through the air, falling down strands of light and other heavy, near-bursting molecules. I am treating myself to coffee at a nearby shop, listening to Katie Herzig and Neko Case, hoping there will be enough time to immerse myself in the life I want to be living, the world in my head that begs for real space and becomes so rainy and blue when I'm living outside of it, on everyone else's terms, pleasing, climbing ladders.

I know it's childish, selfish, and it has nothing to do with the "real-world." But it's simple enough to be, perhaps someday, feasible. It has to do with color, silence, the sorts of songs made to fill rooms and still allow space for thought--for reading--for a kiss. It has to do with writing without judgement, and reading without feeling as if I have to somehow match or learn from the story--the plot structure--the diction and syntax. It has to do with treating people as real dignified, feeling, worthy human beings.

Lately I get home from work around six from a job which hardly allows my brain to excercise any of its creative components, and usually has me so strung out I talk about it for another hour, talk in my head about it for another, watch a movie to escape the conversation, and end up dreaming and talking in my sleep about it all night long. It's not a bad job. I'm so lucky to have it, and it has been a blessing. But at the same time, it is forcing me to realize that if I'm going to have the life I deeply desire, if I'm going to have peace and time for creativity, and lingering dates, I'm going to have to make some changes.

For REAL this time, I'm going to have to try discipline. I'm going to have to get up early if I want time for myself--time for yoga--prayer--going into the deep and hopefully keeping some remnants of that place inside me for the rest of the day. I'm going to have to stop worrying about what people think. I won't see people as much as I'd like to...because I'm going to have to start making time for myself, on my terms.

I know I'm without so many responsibilities at this point in my life...namely children...but I still need this. I need this if I'm going to keep growing. And that's something that's always been important to me. I want to stay vibrant. I want to become more vibrant. And I want to continue cultivating a balanced center. I want to learn emotional boundaries and start using them. Start protecting myself from becoming a twisted up wreck.

I don't want to waste time being unhappy, feeling disappointed that the world I want to live in and the world I live in don't seem to be working out together. Here's to making a way, and the discipline and work that takes.

Here's to building my truest self into the fabric of my world.

Day's End

With work consuming the majority of my time, lately, I have a tendency to begin to feel rather purposeless. My creative life falls to the wayside, and I have little time to rest in the sun and read and clean up after my morning rush. But, as I've worked at the coffee shop today, I've thought about whether I would feel satisfied if I was doing my creative work all the time. If my life was different, more free, would it be enough?

Sometimes I wonder if anything is really enough. I notice that I don't often feel satisfied. Part of this could be my ever-analyzing mind resisting any sort of rest or letting go. Part of it may be the fantasies of living a very gleaming, sun-lit, successful, romance adorned life.

And though I have my moments, even in my moments of bliss, I begin to roam the familiar passages of my brain, trying to draw conclusions from the bliss, and most often using up energy I could be spending enjoying, determining whether the bliss is warranted, whether I should start worrying, and usually the answer to that question is a resounding (truly unwarranted) yes.

What I've been thinking about tonight is how I can be content, what grounds I can authentically say, at the end of the day, that I've done what I've needed to, and it is okay to rest. First off, work isn't much of a choice, and while I'm there, if I can cultivate any positivity, any connection, perhaps any food for thought or eventual creative works, then work is not a waste. And, it financially sustains my other endeavors. After work, if I can go into my own work, and perhaps even for a half hour give over to the spinning wheels of color and words, I am fulfilling the part of myself that has always desired to make, to inspire, to tell stories, to breathe some sort of life that is not necessary to life, but to moving into the vibrant swells life offers.

If I can be close to someone...hug or laugh or spill or simply exist together for some amount of time, I have made connection, and connection is perhaps the most essential aspect of my happiness, of my finding meaning in life at all.

I don't think God hates me for not running running running all the time. Actually, I do think that, but I know, deep inside, that this is not the case. I know I also see myself in an incredibly negative light all the time because I have not accomplished. And, as mentioned earlier, I don't know if any accomplishment would actually make me feel worthwhile, as if I deserve to take in air, food, go into worry-less rest.

But, I am choosing, for my own sanity and potential happiness, to learn satisfaction. To, when sitting on my bed, seconds from lying down, know that I am human. That some wasted time is good. That if I have loved at all, been honest, done the best I could in my art and work (the best I can given any constraints and my humanity--not perfect), if I have striven at all to connect and know God (for me, this is important), than I am okay.

I can't afford to heap guilt over my head anymore. I need to know that rest is okay. That sometimes our expectations really are unreasonable, and in one day, unreachable. We need to learn the process, which is slow, and requires breaks and lots of time out cuddling, putting our feet up, breathing deep.