How it Feels to Be a Gift

My dearfriend’s parents gave me a birthday present today, which is a gift card to go buy myself an oil-filled radiator, because he told them that I’m poor, and often cold.  The gift card has too much money on it, though, and they said to spend the rest on whatever … the world is alive with possibilities, and I am all warm already, thinking about having a heater of my own, and something else too.  Like, maybe I could go see a movie, or buy some pants, or some coffee.  This is the kind of generous gesture that breaks, again, the resurgent poverty mentality that I unconsciously use to help my financial poverty make more sense.  In fact, it ruins my life.

I feel both like I know a secret and like I knew a secret but keep forgetting it, because of gifts like this that are so wholly unexpected, so wholly undeserved.

I hardly worry anymore about where the money will come from, because it always comes.  I look … and it is there.  I get back home at night and there are onions and apples and lentils, with a sign that says “ANNA LAURA” in black sharpie on the back of  a box of disposal insulin syringes.  Something in me stands up very sharp without taking a breath, I feel the orange light from the sunset flickering behind, I wonder how it feels to be a gift, if you feel very proud or if you are shy.  Both, I think.

I Just Heard This Story

The Story from American Public Media interviewed Betty Brown, an eighty-five year old woman from California, on their June 2007 show that aired the day the movie Amelia came out.  The search for Earhart was still ongoing, and someone involved with it got wind of a shortwave radio transcription Betty had made when she was 15 and Amelia Earhart had just gone down.  She was listening to the radio with pencil and paper (she copied down the words to the songs so she could sing them later) when she started getting piecy in-and-out voices, Amelia and her navigator, calling for help and cursing, reading coordinates out of the log, even sending some instructions about private papers Amelia apparently didn’t want to survive her.  Can you imagine.  Betty wrote down nonsensical / insane rants of the navigator and when Amelia was crying.  They broadcasted for three hours before the signal cut out.

Betty was home alone, but when her father got home she showed it to him and he took it immediately to the coast guard, who told him curtly that they had everything under control.  When the real search began, he didn’t go back — hurt pride — but Betty kept this transcript for sixty years without anyone really being interested.  I can’t really imagine hearing something this important and having it repulsed by whatever authorities.

Apparently several people have come forward saying they heard Amelia on the shortwave, too, and I guess a lot of them have been discredited, but this, we understand, was legitimate.  Betty said in the interview that it was such a horrible feeling of powerlessness.  Girl-child in the thirties home alone, listening to people dying on the radio, as if she was in one of those dreams where you hear something bad in the next room but there aren’t any doors, aren’t any windows.  Amelia, a celebrity on such a large scale, a person of such strength and courage, was saying “son of a bitch, son of a bitch” and crying on the radio.  Betty said that she decided that she wanted to become a pilot at that point, since it felt like something she could do for Amelia, like all she could do.  And she did.

Now Betty’s transcript is in the hands of a non-moron and the search is perhaps over, or practically over.

Stories of vindication, redemption or some kind of restitution that have gone the long way of an entire life mean so much, to me.  The familiar raw tragedy of Amelia’s story is balance in my soul with the story of Betty, who could do nothing but only sit and write down the words.  Even after high school, even getting her pilot’s license, making a family, growing old, she waited and finally the time came.  It came such that she’s internationally recognized (in certain circles of course), that her own voice is speaking on our radios.  That she avoided any bitterness is a surprise to me, who can be full of bitternesses at my own lack of…petty vindications, little redemptions.

As I have heard from the beginning, as I hear all the time, patience is the thing.  Something about patience must smooth the way for the correct thing, the accurate acknowledgment, the offered apology.  Something about this must be true, if not everything.

Josh, thanks for sending this!

The GRE

I think I did damn well.  I feel so good.  I will make pita bread, and then take a nap.  The world, she is full of surprises and I will just keep living, just to see what I’m surprised by next.  Proper blog coming soon.

While

It’s raining.  I just looked through someone’s Tumblr blog and am a little in love with her style: terse, succinct.  It’s ill-fated, this love.  I love it because I’m amazed that someone can write so little, so well.  I must write much.  I can’t reconcile this love with my love for Virginia Woolf, though, Eudora Welty or Faulkner, or Samantha Farmer’s photographs of the Berlin Natural History Museum, the cases and cases of rocks and Darwin’s bird collection, and her shots of a flea market.  Piles of metal tools and instruments tangling the eye, a hundred things complacently messy, fascinating also in their statement of life.  Big, huge sigh.

The album.

What Rilke Says About Solitude

Tonight, though, after all.

This morning I freaked out on M and had to go take a walk, at first I thought I was going to where the big trees grow, next to the Federal building, but I kept going and was turning around the corner of St. John’s Episcopal.  Of course.  A church; and, just like Christ the King, a courtyard.

Christ the King is a church and school that I used to pass all the time, walking or riding my bike down Belmont Boulevard in Nashville.  I took Belmont to get downtown and to get groceries at a little neighborhood grocery store across the street from Christ the King’s sports field.  One of the first secret places of beauty I discovered in Nashville — still a freshman — I walked up and there was a walkway going back into a memorial garden, with maples surrounding and flowers filling.  A fountain had a Thomas Merton quote inscribed on it, if I remember correctly, and I would go and sit there for an hour to regain sanity.  A weather-stained statue of Mary and child Jesus stood under a huge, half-dying oak.

I feel as if I’m betraying a secret, talking about these places in such a public place.  Secret places are necessary, for me, even if I rarely see them and they are preserved in inaccurate memory.  So I think St. John’s courtyard steps into my life in a time when I needed another secret place so much, a still place in the city, with a labyrinth (which I walked, oh it stills the soul) and great bushes of myrtles and bleeding hearts and rosemary.

What Rilke says about solitude is true, that a great function of friendships is to guard each others’ solitude, since solitude is such a powerful place for God to speak.  Which brings Kierkegaard to mind, and what he says about the individual having to stand alone before God.  Tonight is growing slowly into tomorrow and I had to write these down.  Just some thoughts.

Than I Can Stand

I’ve probably overdrafted three times since I’ve been banking, and it’s always been a horrifying realization; I’m financially unstable, therefore incompetent in all areas of life, and obviously so.  Perpetually so.  Desperately so.  This time I’m still feeling sick about it, counting up all possible sources of income and knowing I can’t do anything until Thursday, but I’m ok.  God met me today on my back porch, after a day of very dim thoughts, occluded inner passageways, some giving-up, and that means that I must still be living in eternity.  Somehow, and so undeservedly.

I wish I knew something.  I wish I had control over something.  I’ve spent days drifting back to the place I tend toward, over and over, of all this sadness.  Cave-living of a kind, forgetting the Eternal Yes.  Ironic that I put that Lewis quote up there, not even realizing I needed to absorb fully its force … oh I need that force.  Some days are so poverty-stricken.  Sometimes I want so, so much to know that something I’m doing matters, or that I am helping in some way.  But the porch, see how I drift, I went out on the porch after the long, long afternoon and

there was a mackerel sky spread out overhead, forward from where the sun was setting back behind the trees all lacy with their tiny final leaves.  Marshall walked up with a guitar in his arms,  stood under those clouds and leaves and played “Naked As We Came,” Iron and Wine.  Patterns of intricacy, delicate things alive and being almost more beautiful than I could stand.  I had a moment of knowing how the Lord lives with us: secretly, with more forgiveness than we can understand.  But now I’m poor again and very lonely.  Oh the desires of the heart.  How could anything but God fill this hugest of vacancies, honeycombed and stinging with every echo of the thousands of echoes.

From C. S. Lewis

“Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak.”

C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory

Poetry

I’m going through old poems (& choking on the dust & remembering what it used to be like, in those past days) so I can send a missile of about fifteen of the best to some dear friends who will tell me which ones they think are the strongest.  I guess the above parenthetical statement is what I really wanted to say, in this post.  There are so many, so many awful ones about Ye Olde Unrequited Love, so many And Here I Quote From Ye Olde Holy Scriptures, and so many that are maturing in the Dominican, in Nashville, in grief, in rebirths of consciousness, in paradigm shifts.  Several have made me cry.  I’m finding my voice, and finding my way through life.

There’s nothing like looking back and seeing that you’ve come so far.  Sometimes it is so clear that living is freighted with eternity.

Rilke Letter Excerpts

“Being an artist means, not reckoning and counting, but ripening like the tree which does not force its sap and stands confident in the storms of spring without the fear that after them may come no summer.  It does come.  But it comes only to the patient, who are there as though eternity lay before them, so unconcernedly still and wide.  I learn it daily, learn it with pain to which I am grateful: patience is everything!” (28).

…

“You are so young, so before all beginning, and I want to beg you, as much as I can, dear sir, to be patient towards all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books written in a very foreign tongue.  Do not now seek the answers, that cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them” (33-34).

…

“Sex is difficult; yes.  But they are difficult things that were laid upon us; almost everything serious is difficult, and everything is serious.   …   Men have made even eating into something else: want on the one hand, excess upon the other have obscured the distinctness of this necessity, and all the deep, simple urgencies in which life renews itself have become similarly obscured.  But the individual…can remind himself that all beauty in animals and plants is a quiet enduring form of love and desire, and he can see animals, as he sees plants, patiently and willingly uniting and increasing and growing not out of physical delight, not out of physical suffering, [but] bending to necessities that are greater than pleasure and pain and more powerful than will and withstanding” (34-36).

This is a Great Day

What a gorgeous day.  Dawning so bright, so bright.  Today I pulled the curtains, took a shower, cut my hair, made biscuits, peered at Brittany’s lustrous ring, finally vanquished the confused tomatoes, tore up the nasty old vines next to my back porch, and planted my birthday-present bulbs (Alpine Bells, Dainty Dutch irises and Angelique tulips) (thanks, Mom and Dad) in the tomato beds and in the bed next to the Dear Spot.  THEN!  I studied for the GRE, making lists of important points and vocabulary words, and feeling the chills of excitement.  I like taking standardized tests, not because I’m a minion of the machine, but just because I’ve learned how to do it.  And I feel like I just want to take the practice test NOW.

By the way, does anyone know which phrase refers to the act of pulling a curtain aside to let in light: “pull the curtain” or “draw the curtain”?  I’ve always been confused about this, and now that I’m taking the GRE — well!

I’ve been thinking a lot about the future, of course.  As I always do.  Sometimes I think it is terrible, contains monsters, or death and decay, sometimes I think it is full of warmth and light.  The latter lived mostly in high school … the former is living mostly these days.  I drove to Marshall’s parents’ house with him last night, as his grandmother was in from Phoenix and all the Knoxville family was coming over for dinner, and felt like I was hurtling into space.  I wasn’t sure anything was going to be ok.  I know this is normal for people in my position, but even normal things are sometimes horrible.  I’m coming back to a kind of equilibrium today, today all full of a kind of peace I didn’t even think to ask for.  The kind I ought to have gotten up in the middle of the night to pray for, before I got.

I’m getting further and further from the fear of love, too.  I was thinking about this this morning, how it’s not dangerous to love, it’s just dangerous to live more with yourself than with God.  Everything that happens when you love someone has the potential to become beautiful, if you’re patient.  I want to put a Rilke quote up here about patience and love and living.  I would someday like to have become a patient person.

I’m getting ready to put together a portfolio of poems.  If anybody wants to help me sift & proofread, let me know.