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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.
Moments of magic somehow aren’t doing it for me today. It’s been one of those days that’s filled with nonsense, with me being very sad and not interested in distracting myself. So I just end up existing as a sad person. Which has its beauties and runs so deep in my person that I meet it like I meet the first days of winter, the last days of fall: seasons swing through and I can’t skip any of them. They have to be lived.
I wish I had a digital camera, because then you could see the aviator’s map lampshade shining with pin-pricks, the long branches of spring touching the curtains and the corner of the window. I made a cupped hand once at a contemplative retreat at a monastery in Cullman and had it fired … it is one of the symbols of the length of my life, passing seasons, always this open hand. I often put a candle in the palm and that always gives me something to say to God. I’ve been saying lots of things to God, today, things having to do with what it means that Franz Wright wrote in The Only Animal “though your own heart condemn you / I do not condemn you” and that’s an echo or repetition of Paul’s words, I mean God’s. For some reason it means everything in the world to try and believe today that I’m alright in the world. With God. That it’s possible I may be a delight to the creator of the universe.
The room I’ve moved into has water pipes part-way over one wall and I hear the running of water when the sink or toilet drains … I fit in this little blue garrett like a mouse in its nest … I’ve hung things, typed things, set things, arranged things, brought in things. But mostly I now have windows, can now see green things growing, hedges growing with birds inside them. Right now I’m realizing with some very real awkwardness that it never has to take a whole day for me to meet God.
It’s so weird to be this complex sort of person, the sort who lives by words – lives with them or on them or somehow almost because of them — but is forever in a strange world that resists description, to the final moment, the last degree. How incredible that we can’t know ourselves, that I can be wet with crying and not know why, except that the world is wrong. This is why I’ll never get married, I think, because poor guy who would have to deal with this every day. I’m trying to deal the weight of my universe out into sentences or at least phrases or at least words, mostly totally failing, and this is confusing enough for one person, let alone two. Although I will say that I’ve had (and have) women friends who shock me with their ability to put up with me. (You know who you are.) Emily talks some real sense & sanity to me about men, sometimes, how it could be an ok idea for me to just give it a try, but mostly I’m not sure it wouldn’t turn into an unravellable knot. And I’m a coward where the heart is concerned.
The big blue paper bag of Tetley from the small store in Belfast is almost gone, and this makes me think of the small store in Belfast, of the cafes, of the bookstores, of my current paralysis as far as travel goes. I wish I could go again, somewhere, like Belfast or Montellano, I wish I would inherit a million jillion and could wander here and there, carrying my books with me, my camera. I love my garrett but … or, maybe what I’m really wanting is Jesus Christ, “the blazing reality,” the tallest of my perceptions and most real of all realities, most bright of all lights. I believe He’s the Son of God, Messiah, and that the dead will be raised and sick healed at the last day. I used to SCORN poor Martha, because I’d never had my body broken or future stolen. Now I understand. And I believe the dead are being raised now … all I have to do is walk there in my long black dress with long white slip, ring I found on the floor (saying “Series IV Kodak Skylight Filter Made in U.S.A.”) on my finger (Natalie? yours?) (can I have it??), mirrors in my head draped with densely-woven fabric, ears to hear to hear, eyes to see to see.
Today Kayla and Irena came down from Nashville to visit, and I rolled out of bed at 10am to shower (become fragrant — important) and then run around downstairs putting dishes up and wiping off counters and stovetops and tables. Lighting candles, putting on Billie Holiday. Everything was ready when they came; then they came. How I’ve missed and love their faces, Kayla’s perfect slenderness and her precise words, surprising laugh, and Irena’s eyes, how serious they are about joy and profound significance, how they just take me in, serenely. Taking all this downtown for lunch, taking it all back for tea and fudge in our cold, lovely little kitchen, taking our time, taking the day. I do love those girls.
After this I laid down because I was starting to feel achy and extremely tired. I put on the Granados cd and have been listening to the cars drive past and those melodies like evening walks. I remember once in Sosua I was walking down a sideroad with Matt, late afternoon sun slanting and everyone’s trees growing over their wrought iron fences, hibiscus, mimosas and flame trees (my favorite I think), and he said, “I could walk down this road forever.” I thought, yes; I could walk down this road forever. I could too. Some of these songs are like that, closer to walking down a road (evening, flame trees, wrought iron) forever than most anything could be. And now, as always happens, my loneliness begins to cure and I keep imagining that I’m throwing off a sticky black net. Beginning to be free.
What WILL life be like when I’m 25? I was wondering this with Emily, who is a year past that, and feels old (how strange to feel old at 26!), and I almost wanted to go somewhere far and sit with my knees at my chest and look out over a great height. Finding wooded hills, leafmeal two feet deep, and a perch: I’ve always thought of everything best in that place. In the woods, you have trees a hundred feet tall at your back, stolid, safe as grandfathers, and covering you over from as far as you can see behind to as far as you can see ahead, running down and up in waves (like the most terrible storm at sea’s waves, frozen and furred with the growth of trees, miscellaneous shrubs, and others, like squirrels). Something about distance is so easy on my eyes. I do long for that. The clarity of those thoughts, the sacredness of them. (And the woods are so sacred.)
But about being 25: what? How? I want (more than I realized, in the hospital and during that initial week at home) to be loved and later have a baby. Having an ovary out and worrying about the other one makes one very aware. It’s depressingly predictable, unoriginal, but I do want these things only just less than I want to do whatever God asks me to do. If He were to ask me to love an incredible man, incredible: almost not credible, almost not to be believed, and then were to ask me to go ahead and be pregnant, well, I wouldn’t know what to do with my realization of that goodness. (I want these maybe [shockingly] more than I want to write mammoth and magnificent things. And I do want that, too.)
Somehow, in light of God speaking directly to my caught heart, bills almost wither in importance. Jobseeking and interpersonal conflict with friends, also. It’s surreal, in quality, His words in my ear. Chris W is in town and showed me a calendar he made of graph paper, photos, and type. It ends with a poem by Hafiz, a Persian poet who speaks of God as I speak of God, and I almost wept, reading it. It would only be fair to find it and post it here; I’ll see if I can’t find it. Finding God’s inexplicable words and almost voice at this difficult turn of my life is weighty, heavy, and unbearably light. Today I’m almost sure God promised me fecundity, that’s what I’m talking about, here. Difficult to put into words the weight of that moment on the couch, listening to Granados, like pulling aside a curtain so I should immediately notice that I was listening to a lullaby that I would play as a lullaby, sometime, in the future.
for some reason I feel unsafe again, as if this room could be adrift in the middle of some uncharted sea or some charted ocean. in which latter case the charts would not matter. twice in the same conversation a friend referred coolly to “complete psychotic breakdown”s, as if every thinking woman probably had hers before the age of 35, or else maybe she was not so impressive a personage, after all. or, maybe I agree with this. but there are other things.
have you ever been drawn, dripping with sleep, back into the waking world? I felt your touch. I fell asleep to Gregorian chant–probably some psalm–a gradual ill unconsciousness until suddenly at the scruff of my neck and there I was blinking and listening feebly, hearing sharply, Hosanna filio David, the most beautiful. as if my brain knew what to do, considering. and I consider this line of words, this line of song, like the pattern of a beating heart.
and mine is. beating. when I remember why I shouldn’t follow it beating its beat into the ground, I veer off another way. this leaves underbrush and I’m in the sun, realizing that I’m sweating and seeing vapor dancing on the horizon. water, vapor. if you ever plan on springing one on me, do it now. I feel like a letter, being written (to one very dear and very far away).
