1. I’m at Coffee & Chocolate in the freezing icebox of this room, open almost 20 feet up roofward, the top six feet or so painted brick red and the rest a smooth blond-coffee brown.
2. I came here in a dress that Katie Gray sent from New York in a huge cardboard box that weighed 31 pounds. She and Emily cleaned out their closet and now I have these small shirts and shirt-dresses and little thin cotton dresses and sweaters that are hardly worn at all … it’s like … incredible, and reminds me of the years I was Not Buying Clothes, how great a gift a shirt was, a dress, a pair of gloves. I love that girl, that KG, and miss her today. She is fabulous. I love her.
3. I’m not sure if this dress is too thin. It’s perfect for summer, rose with tiny brown and grey dots, not fitted at all, and it feels like wearing a sheet or a handkerchief or a whisper. I was wondering whether it was decent, and then remembered Michigan by the Red House Painters and walked out the door. Today, I’m wearing what I want to wear. This is about my soul.
4. I’m seeing two girls walking down the road holding hands and wishing I was walking down the road with someone holding hands.
5. I mean, after I’ve got some things accomplished. Today I’ve already: watered the garden; made a lemon icebox pie; asked God fervently for a lot of grace for this long day stretching into the mist of the future & anxiety; listened to a bit of the new Mars Hill audio journal; and made the v. v. correct clothing choice of this thin cotton dress. I mean! Yeah!
6. Making lists like this sometimes feels necessary, as if I didn’t know how to organize my thoughts and needed this superficial grid to make me feel the comfort of a little structure. But God is bringing real structure back to me, I think, and I guess I need to call Britta, who offered to do some healing prayer with me.
7. The idea that God would ask me to remember pain & feel it & forgive is terrifying … but the pull of that connectedness is overwhelming all my resistance. I know that I’m disconnected in dramatic ways from memories and pain in my past, pieces disparate and sharp like shards of glass that I’ve forgotten and tried to disown, and if I want to be a whole person I need these lines drawn, dots connected, I need the ropes and nerves and ligaments to find each other and grow back together. I can only talk about it in physiological terms, because there’s still so much I have to learn about emotional healing … and because I watched my own body heal, in a way, from trauma. I see that happen. And if that can happen in a body, it surely must must right? happen in the spirit. Including mine.
8. Now they’re playing I Will Follow … ! … I used to listen to these songs, I used to remind myself of eternity via U2’s music and hearing this song is like another window opening. It’s almost unbelievable to watch how God is changing my life, how God has never left and never stopped with His perfect and precise thoughts over me.
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July 10, 2009 at 2:04 pm
jdctrucking
If a man wrote an eight minute long song about it, it’s probably not decent. But hey, so long as you’re not leading any children astray, I say yes to thin clothing for the soul, pie, KG, wanting to hold hands, connected dots, and U2.