Observations

I’m stiff from days of plans and plans changing and a hundred unplanned things threatening to jump straight from nonbeing into damage control.  I’m stiff from living inside and not looking out; or, rather, living outside and not looking in.

I made hot chocolate and am drinking it, all of it.  The air is thin and kind of painful, and yellowy light and sweet hot sugar drink are driving up to me in a limousine, the door opens in slow motion and I’m stepping in like I know a thing or two about the universe.

UVA is impossible, almost, Sarah Lawrence is impossible, almost, will I end up at a place I don’t want to be?  Will I wake up tomorrow, or in an hour, and discover that poetry has turned back into a room in my head, imaginary gardens and imaginary frogs?

Imaginary mountains, imaginary mansions, the household of God is whimsical or capricious in the vocabulary of my other self, the entitled and disappointed one.  Members of the household of God are divergent, I walk away to become one.

you can do anything you want

you can do anything you want, but not everything,
and you’re the kind who can’t do anything
if you can’t do everything, because every one of
those things has the weight of the entire earth and losing
one thing is like losing them all.  you feel like things
are so inextricable, so interwoven that to pull one string
is invariably to unravel and to kill one bird is to kill
the entire row, roosting in the house like dreaming
children.  when is the question, not whether,
of course, but you can get tired of asking
it even so.  when will my time of recovery begin
to make sense, begin to pull into the distance,
begin to merge into a single profound point or
epiphany that I can wind up in threads and
finally understand when I hold it, when it is self-
contained and has pulled its fibers out of everything
else and wrapped them around itself on purpose.
this must have something to do with God.  who
is either to do the work, or me, or maybe the work
will do itself as I’m getting up in the morning
and thinking about wisdom and what it would mean
to be wise, what it would mean to know how
to do all this.  I guess I don’t believe that.  I
guess all my chaos and all the blind intention
of the natural order are held together
by something, I guess Julian is right about
the hazelnut and about love and I guess
I’m being held together by something like that.

None of This is Ridiculous

I’m sitting in a creaky black office chair in the foyer of Tracy Jackson Smith’s office, finding myself in black clothes and unusually smooth hair, stretching the tape across the walls of my heart to see how much space this has brought.  I have not brought a hundred things here, I can only stilly sit, answer the phone when it rings, check my email.  This means I can think and I am, thinking about all the lines I’ve let cross and crisscross, trying to follow one through the knot to untangle.

1) I will leave the office in an hour and a half to buy
some floss and let Cooper out.
2) I will work today alone on my new journal and on
a grant proposal.
3) I will rediscover the prayers I wrote that I used
to say for matins, vespers, and compline.

The phone here in the office keeps track of all the calls received, even if they’re answered mid-ring, and I don’t know how to clear it.  It says “36 NEW CALLS.”  My hand says “COOPER” and “GET FLOSS.”  Can we all stop shouting for a minute, can I stop shouting and feeling so strongly about everything?  The answer is yes, and I can feel a strand pulling looser as I decide this, I decide to build structure into my days which includes:

4) When I get home I’m cleaning my room and
sweeping the house, taking the recycling.
5) When I get home I’m going to find somewhere to
sit still and think … I’m so behind on thinking.
6) When I get home I’m going to find myself and ask
myself where I’ve been and where I’m headed.

I developed two rolls of film, rolls that are months & months old and came out grainy and bad.  This is pretty disheartening, and makes me want to throw the other three rolls away.  There can’t be anything extremely worth saving, there.  I wish I had new shoes so I could throw away a couple of pairs that are becoming largely holes.  I have new pants, though, and I love them.  I have a new novel to read (new to me), a new title for myself (significant other), and new understanding of my limits and need for boundaries.

7) I have to be still every morning this week, every
night before sleep.
8 ) I have to start a new journal and tell it how I am,
on purpose, so I will know.
9) I have to take care of myself, rebuild fences where
the old fences have gotten lost, or where I unhinged
them myself.

Soon I will be leaving the 21st floor of the First Tennessee building and will be walking.  Standing up alone and being independent and deciding what to do next.  Something is extremely crazy about being too involved and I need a few moments to hear myself speak, some small voice that I’ve not been catching because there’s been a lot of wind and music.  I wish I was older and had more years of experience on me.  What is the point of being 23.  This is ridiculous and I’m tired of knowing nothing and being wrong.  Well, I needed to say that because when I re-read it I almost cried, but now I will say something else: The point of being 23 is that I have to be 23 before I can be 39.  I have to know nothing before I can know something, and none of this is ridiculous.

10) I should celebrate something…
11) I should find something beautiful and say it’s
beautiful.
12) I should find again how I’m searched & known,
find that beautiful, find myself beautiful.

Keeping Awake

I ought to put on The Innocence Mission’s Glow now, because I’ve been reading my friends’ blogs, Jordan’s, Kayla’s, Travis’s, and have gotten shaken awake.  These past few weeks have been so full of things that I’ve been thrown back on a reactionary sort of mode … which is how I play games, how I hike, and often how I do conversations; I wait till a situation presents itself, and figure out what to do in that moment.  Lately so many things have been shifted and switched that I have to wait until I absolutely have to make a decision, and then make it.  I haven’t been planning.  I apply for jobs, find temp work, worry, stay up with friends till 2 and then get up in a hurry and start over the next day.  This makes me crazy, this puts my soul to sleep, and I start to lose my precious clarity and peaceful sanity because this comes primarily from stillness, alone-time, the voice of God.

So reading these blogs, all fraught with longing, all full of a tumult of purpose and energy and thought and desire … wakes me.  Every song of the Peris’s (am I doing these apostrophes wrong?  where’s my Harbrace?) is nearly perfect in its phrasing, and Karen sings “I am near to sleeping; I am keeping awake” because we are so near to sleeping, our hearts / souls are.  I’m reading these stories Travis is telling about lions and healings and prisons and tempted to go kill myself because “my life doesn’t matter,” but if I’m not going from one sleep to another, if I’m going to be awake today, I have to understand that things are moving in me & my life, I’m not lost, I’m found, and being led … somewhere.  Kayla’s references to The Eternal Yes has to echo in me, yesses, the yes that God has put on my life, the freedom I have to imagine that fullness of life can happen to me.  And Jordan’s fear is mine, and I have to come awake to the answering of it, be still, be alone, be desperate again like I was several days ago when I had to fast.

I don’t know why I’m saying all this … something about it feels a little too confessional, too uncut / unedited for the eyes of the Public, but I know very well that being awake (for me) has everything to do with recognizing that style is so extremely secondary, so extremely not-as-important to cognizance as honesty.  Natalie and I were talking this morning about Facebook, how crushingly & mind-blowingly superficial it is, how its voyeurism ought to be as apparent as the grass and the trees, … and I remember again again again for the last time please? how interested I can be in the skin, how uninterested in the heart.  So, if I’m going to be walking toward humility, which seems so heart-breakingly drab when other people are listening to lions outside their tents and going to music festivals in Wales, then I need to do smally humble things like be confessional on my blog.

Jesus Christ, I need this, to be awake & aware.  The longer I’m alive, the more I’m convinced that God has a secret life, a secret kingdom of things where the weakest are the most powerful and the most powerful are the weakest.  I can believe the Beatitudes are statements of deeper truth than we’re able to understand except that we see it when we hear stories of small people nearly tearing the fabric of culture.  I need more stories to remind me of this, stories like Romero and Chariots of Fire and such.  I feel like I’m hanging on by a wire, today, but being aware of hanging by a wire is miles ahead of not being aware that I’m falling asleep and letting my soul deaden.  I want this empty heart to hold echoes of rocks hitting its water, ricocheting back and forth, hey hey awake awake because my life matters.  If that’s all I can believe, that’s ok, because it’s actually a huge huge thing to believe, and as my dear prof Dana said once, it’s better to bite off more than you can chew than not to bite off enough.  If I can make it through the day believing that my life matters: another miracle of Jesus Christ; if I can’t: another opportunity for another miracle of Jesus Christ.

Draft Saved at 10:36:10 am.

my recent fear of spontaneous combustion
or the simultaneous cytolysis of all
my cells is probably what is keeping me
in my room with closed doors and drawn
curtains.  Crystal Wagner’s work at
the Emporium and Leslie Hatten’s
at The Birdhouse for First Friday had
several things to say about this
when I told them telepathically or somehow
by osmosis, and they said things not in words
but in shapes and forms and structures
of the mind, centers of complexity
like messy-petaled flowers
or spiraled galaxies, or rows
of colored strips of canvas
like uneven xylophones, flinging their
particularity out onto the walls.
the blasted designs of cut paper
and deeply-involved color,
to me, somehow, osmotically.
I want to be able to weave myself
back into living, because I have these
intricate worlds and colors
all fretted, innerly.  and I know
that it could potentially be v. v. good.
Christ’s work, then, because all He does
is v. v. good, and He did me.  sometime
soon I will be v. v. ok again.