Since I’ve Printed the Application and Resume

and still have fifty-one minutes before I’m timed out of this computer on the main floor of the Lawson-McGee Library, I will write.  today has been almost only false starts, so far, and they include: driving to Fountain City…where the library was closed and where I discovered I’d left my debit card at home after parking at Advance Auto Parts to buy oil.  So no oil.  Then I get home and give up on autos and decide to ride my bike to the downtown library, then realize my bike is still locked up on Samantha’s porch.  I walk to Samantha’s porch in shoes that only gave me blisters in the last half-mile or so.  I have a theory about all this.  a theory about how things going wrong is mostly only things going right.  I’m not exploding, I’m here, I’m cognizant.  I’m sensing some grace.

if some grace were to come, I would want to be able to recognize it, so I want nothing but to have all eyes and ears open to see it when it comes.  so far: three tomatoes were suddenly red this morning.  I have a job to apply for, and which I may be qualified to get.  this morning Mom emailed me photos of British libraries, which pulled on my soul a bit.  I had surgery a long time ago and only the scar and the bills remind me of that, what could potentially have happened. 

and then there are the graces that don’t have anything to do with me, that just are, that live independently of me and all my ideas of them, like the grey, stooped librarians who are bustling around all busines-like, and like the world of books.  after I do other things today, I’m going to read more Moby-Dick, which is only alright so far, but which is accelerating.  I find myself thinking of Nantucket, of Lowell, and of whales, twisting with the silence of space, spattered with the miscellany of the sea and the sun somehow piercing the surface and falling like gauze curtains in the breeze.  whales, I think sometimes, might be my secret muses.  I never dream about them but always wanted to, and I have never understood why a person can see a whale (drawing of, film of, photo of, outline of) and not be suddenly stilled because this is something we don’t understand.  or, I don’t understand.  how an animal the size of a building can be suspended in the sea, how we can see fish and say they’re swimming, not flying, because they’re obviously flying; the medium is only denser.  the whales are flying, maybe that’s why I don’t understand them.

but now I’m going to fill out the application and resume, since I’ve printed them just now and feel like I should go to a quiet corner to write in things like my expected salary ($0/hr), my college and degree, my references, whether I’ve been convicted of a felony.  and then, I shall saunter over to Union Street, where a hundred years ago the ladies walked in bustles and parasols underneath the clouds of smog, wondering what their lives meant.  I could do with a parasol, I think, on my way to the coffee shop, where I will do important things, like wonder what my life means.  on paper.  because I’ve suddenly got back all my desire to write and I have been writing like my house is on fire & a word will hoist out the window what it names and set it on the ground, unburned.  guh.  I wish I was better at everything.

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.

No Sense of Entitlement, At All

I moved from the big upstairs room to the little blue closet, and now have my own door to the backyard, absolute necessity for a bookshelf, windows toward the grass, trees, and sun, and romance.  This is the room we made for Chloe, and I feel like some of the care that went into it is soaked into the walls and still kind of curling in puffs on the air.  I love it here.  And I think Carla is going to move into my old room, and I love her.  Moreover, I love my orchids now more than ever, and they’re slowly dropping their blooms.  What am I going to do.  Plant flowers in the backyard, I guess.  I need flowers in my life.

I’m as confused as I can be about several things in my life right now, and when I went to St. James’ for the Ash Wednesday service, some pieces fell together … this Lent I’m reflecting with the tenacity of Narcissus, but never mind I shouldn’t use that simile, since I’m really not thrilled with what I’m seeing and will for sure not fall in love with it, reflecting on relationships, who I must be, who I am, things like this.  Commas, sigh.  and it’s incredible to be honest with oneself, honest enough to metaphorically tie myself to my chair and forbid myself to go play until I’ve thought about what I’m about.  I need to have written down in so many words the answers to questions like: what is my relationship with my closest friend?  with estranged friends?  with my family?  with my sisters?  with my body?  with my art?  with my physical place?  with food?  with Jesus?  these are things that zip in and out of consciousness all the time, but I again feel a really urgent need for incarnation, embodiment.  I need to write my relationship, and have it written.  This is a piece of honesty I will not love, but will love me.  Well…I say that, but really when I think about it I get all excited.  maybe I’ve needed contemplation much more than I thought…

um, next, I still have no job, but have been getting small work, small jobs.  I think I will make rent.  I also got my first Baptist hospital bill in the mail today, and a letter from Veronica Blaha, and grabbed the letter so fast so it wouldn’t be too tainted by its proximity to the odious bill.  wretched bill!  I won’t take it out of the mailbox tomorrow; or Saturday, day of Clint & Jill’s wedding; or Sunday, day of Carla going to awesome concert without me.  Monday, which is a sad day anyway, will see the inside of that sad envelope.  but today is the day for the letter from Veronica, and it even had a poem inside.  Today is the day of salvation; not tomorrow, or Monday. 

Christ is alive.  I just thought you might be wondering and want to know.  And my handsome brother is back from the West and I missed him, Chris Watson is in town, Katie J bought my most recent and most awesome Peony Refillable, and … and … I’m making bread tomorrow and my ands burgeon incredibly, invincibly.  our garden plots are staked, sod is getting turned over, somehow my very small but somehow seeming the size of the planet heart is still voyaging, still alive, still sending its evangelists into the four corners of my body.

I Rescind

My griping!  I can’t delete that last post like I said I was going to, because it would make this apology (almost mostly to myself and God) incomprehensible, and I want it to be comprehended: that I should be complaining is, well, incomprehensible.  I’ve just come from the MedHelp.com (or org.?) ovarian cancer support site, and am completely humbled.  As anyone would probably guess, the main things being discussed are not how lame it is to have to lay around after surgery or how annoying the pain is (really stings, you know?).  Of course, the main topic of conversation is chemotherapy. 

I read a lot of threads in the discussion boards…and then looked around at people’s profiles and blogs and things…   Well, I just feel like I need to say here that I have so little to whine about.  For whatever reason, I don’t need more surgery, a partial hysterectomy, a full hysterectomy, chemo.  So many of these women are dying, and are talking to each other about it, and praying for each other.  It’s beautiful, and I don’t know why I was spared that sort of beauty, but I was, and I’m grateful.  So.