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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.
Natalie and Carla are moving out and I think all the change is hard on everyone. I know it’s hard on me, who often prefers that things stay the same, always, ever. I have to be shaken up a little to remember the rush of excitement and fresh air, newness, that comes with a large change, like losing my roommates to other parts of the world, having to re-make my house, having to find money and new roommates and always forever more courage for life. It’s times like this that I remember that courage happens, it doesn’t just exist. Alone. By itself, in you, or in me. Being forced to rearrange the furniture so I won’t feel so much the huge hole and being forced to post my house on Craig’s List and interview all these girls who come to look at the room means that I am doing courageously (by my standards), means that I am courageous. I’ve been hoping that all the coils forced into each other from the impact of all the life changes of the past year or so will rebound, and finding myself reluctantly opening small windows is a huge deal. If you can imagine me, standing at the window on the fortieth floor, drawing back and then throwing a paper plane out there, watching where it flies, whether it falls. But that it’s leaving my room, small plane, just one.
I took the recycling today and found another Mt. Olive pickle jar, and a set of lovely old encyclopaedias. I had to lean almost all the way into this huge green recycling tube/box/metal house, and ended up getting inside because I thought I saw another volume of the encyclopaedias way back there… Nope. It’s amazing, the person I am, amazing that I live so smally and am contracting unless I’m expanding, unless I’m being lived-in by God. If I didn’t have contrary reasons, I would be one of these hermits, wall my garden, lock my doors, go dumpster-diving at night. Kids would hit their baseballs into my yard and go buy a new ball. This is the person I would be / am going to be, unless I push open these doors and ask God in, since I’ve known from far back that He brings a kind of joy with Him that invests even haemorrhage with beauty, even chronic aching with a secret hope. All this about a “secret singing,” this is stuff I know. So, buck up, buck the hell up, find joy, soul.
I met with Anne today, tall thin interesting girl who reminds me of my mother’s sisters’ kids, and showed her the house. She’s from Nashville, and has a cat who fell out of the top story of her current apartment building. I had We Walked in Song playing, a candle burning, a cup of tea in my hand and I now am closing the showing-the-house door and opening the simmering-down door, because I now have a new journal, a new journal, with blue-grey great northerns winging southward and two thousand pages, which will surely last me another while.
I’m going to cut open the watermelon in one hour, in half and half again and eat it with a spoon. I have a lot of hope, today, about my ability to be resilient and learn from things that knock me over. I have hope that being in a relationship is more like following a stream than pouring a sidewalk, and this is a great hope of mine, I hope I’m right. I hope that Natalie will not fail to get me a huge bag of Tetley while she’s gone, that somehow rent money will come, that somehow a job will come, and that my new roommates will quickly become People I Know, even People I Like, and that I won’t be too awkward and saying the wrong thing at the wrong time.
I’m inspired by Lauren to talk about hope and optimism, about the Grandness of Life, but I’m not doing the amazing things she is, and I can only make this small and half-formed thought: I hope. and that’s about it for now. at 3 p.m. I will go and make salsa with my mom but until then I am here, speaking to my soul and listening, and this is a big enough deal.
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.
it’s changing something in me, to see my garden growing outside the kitchen window. or I’m changing, enough to see the garden growing outside the kitchen window. it’s strange to have become a person who’s kind of afraid to talk to her own blog. but I will say here that I bought a “Shiner Family Reunion” at Food City last night, and I would do it again. also that God is saying psalm 139 in my ear. also that Marshall is a good one, and I’m making art, and my back porch is a place where God is and a place where God is is a place I love to be. and also, you know how my antigen count was 238.5 back in the day? well, I got the results back from the lab today and my six-month CA-125 is 7.9. just so we can all know. and be amazed, and feel like today is another day that God thought we should live in.
the minute decades of the morning: you are up and washing
your face, you are putting on clothes, you are putting the
kettle on to boil and filling up glass jugs to take out
to water your garden. first the peppers, then the basil,
marigolds (who are making it, even though they got
almost all their leaves eaten down to the spines
the day after I planted them), tomatoes, one after another,
the rosemary. I’ve needed gardens in my life,
I need them, their order from chaos, their sanity
like “the sanity of hedgerows,” everything
in its place or almost in its place, all the different
uses and personalities living together in a small
city of leaves & flowers. because there are roses, too.
and I am the one, I’m the gardener, I take care.
the sun’s coming through every once in a while. the
clouds remind me of my work, first painting in
Fountain City, then looking over grant stuff either here
or at Coffee & Chocolate … or Java … not Remedy, I think.
now Knoxville has so many coffee shops! but I’m thinking
about how I need the nearness of God, how we’re asking Joel
to leave, now, and I’m thinking about where he will go. I’m
thinking about my appointment yesterday with Dr. McDonald,
how I waited for forty minutes and then he came in and was
glad to see me and chatted it up. he talked about Kierkegaard
and how two of his sons are English majors, how he’s
written some. he charged me $20 and didn’t make me get
a pap or CA-125 or ultrasound … this is fabulous … he likes me.
but this is all a mess, and I haven’t even included a hundred
other things, like all I have to do today, like all I have to do in
my life, like I was expecting to get it done today. or tonight while
I’m sleeping, in my dreams. I have such a hard time living
in the present, but God is here in the present moment, “all lit up
in eternal rays,” and I am going to only try to live here,
now. in this moment. with tea, lightly sugared, creamed w/ whole
milk, with the ripest and sweetest and tangiest peach
I’ve ever had in my stomach and not
on that square green plate anymore. it was the best
peach. Jesus, I need.
my branches like those, lifted up on string, the shade reached.
today is a day of decision. today is different than
yesterday, different than tomorrow, and I can be reached
in my unknownnesses. I can be reached by Christ,
and I have to carry with me where I go the knowledge
that He was the one who had the idea to compare me
to the branch of a vine, which needed
lifting up, pruning. which I do. today
is a day of decision, also because I’m finishing
Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing, and there’s no
mistaking this, no mistaking K’s grabbing your shoulders
and making you look him in the eye: what are you
going to do, NOW? today? where is He, where is
Christ, except here?
Today I met my mom at Pete’s for two eggs, bacon & coffee and conversation. Every time I do this I end up talking with her for at least three hours, or sometimes three and a half (like this morning), and doing things like walking around downtown and ending up at a table in Market Square, talking for a hundred hours. I wish I was making money so I could take her somewhere awesome for breakfast, or dinner, and do it more often. This mom that I have is really great, and is still a spring chicken. She is amazing, and I am lucky to know her.
Then I came back home and drove to paint at one of Jordan’s houses and cut in the bathroom, reaching into the narrowest gaps and acutest angles, breathing too (many?) fumes and making dust tracks all over the newly refinished floors, gorgeous dark wood. I listened to Sullivan Street on repeat and am still listening to it, now as I’m down from the shower and up from my teal armchair where I’ve been writing a small letter to someone. I was listening to it the other day, too, in my car, and Luke came up and said something about it being enough to make you melancholy for the whole day. I’m not melancholy, though. The rhythm is driving me forward and I’m thinking about joy, how it can be like a boat coming into harbor.
My hair is getting long … I noticed it for the first time in the shower, because it was falling down all wet over my shoulder and I don’t really wear it down very often. My hair getting long is in the same category as the clouds today as I saw them through the upper-story windows at the duplex — they were blurry at the edges and lying in long swathes, blues and purples. I wanted to take a picture and be like the person who runs the LitttleBeats blog … and realized that it’s unusual that I can see that kind of beauty. This kind of beauty doesn’t break mirrors or really get photographed all that often, but it’s my favorite kind, and it makes me feel better about not being classically beautiful, because I can be like this: noon clouds or sunrises or the light coming in low over fields.
I have to say here something about how Crystal and Britta prayed for me last night, and I guess that would be: they did. I want this all my life long, to pray and be prayed for. We went up to their apartment above Pasta Trio in the Old City and looked out over the city, watched them make pasta, talked about ulcers and debt and church, and then interceded. This is powerful living, and I want it.
Now it’s evening … I can’t make more biscotti because I don’t have eggs, and I can’t have any milk because I don’t have any. And there’s no way I can have anything else, because everything else is rice and Ramen noodles and cans of black beans, and who wants THAT. Lucky I’m not hungry … lucky I got a letter on my car windshield today … lucky I’m awake and saying yes … lucky I’m taken care of by God and am learning the sound of His voice.
1.
Day 113 of My Life as an Unemployed Person dawned lovely (I only know this because it was clear and piercing when I woke up, late, to the nice but repetitive song of a bird in one of the many trees overshadowing our backyard), it dawned lovely and I didn’t get out of the house and on my way till noon, after conferring at length with myself, my closet (which is a cupboard, currently), and my mirror (in that order) on proper attire, unlocked my bike, and was off! to Coffee & Chocolate.
Coffee & Chocolate may be my favorite Knoxville coffee shop, partly because its windows look out on monstrous Bradford pears, maples and dogwoods (which several trees are collectively called “Krutch Park”), partly because I don’t see anyone I know (or have met) here and that reminds me of some of my most intensely good hours, at coffee shops in Nashville. I grew up, to a certain extent, in Nashville, where I lived solitary much of the time, and would jump on my bike when I needed to get away and be alone and go to a coffee shop. Whether Fido or J-J’s, I opened the door flushed and flustered from the ride, stepped in and became ensconced in a private garden of thoughts and wonderings. Once they even played The Innocence Mission for an hour at J-J’s.
As a child, I would go lose myself in the woods, or take a walk down silent country streets, sky tall and branches, always everywhere, like personal ambulatories. When I was in Nashville for school, I didn’t venture into unknown country … or rarely, at least. So Fido, Bongo Java, J-J’s — each came home in me and I knew them and their different personalities. Since moving back to Knoxville I’ve ignorantly despaired of finding coffee places to come home to and then actually had the guts to call them and see what they were doing, and now we hang out and this one, Coffee & Chocolate, on the corner of Market Square, far enough away from both it and Gay Street, glass cases of enormous haystacks, truffles, gourmet s’mores, Nipples of Venus, I love. Even the baristas here seem a safe distance from Gay Street, Market Square, even the Old City, which I’m more thankful for all the time.
So here I am, a cool spring day, with so much to think about, so much to process. The wind is ruffling everyone so rowdily, but they’re all so full of light they don’t mind. Spring is here, and if we don’t hope for rebirths and resurrections, then what on earth? So we do. And besides, the trees are throwing petals at our feet.
2.
Day 113 is unfolding almost without creases, hour by hour. As I read Behind the Scenes at the Museum (which I left at Marshall’s last night and am absolutely wroth that I’m not reading the last twenty pages of right now) I see something coming through the shadowy back of yet another page of my palimpsest heart. Which is the point, and I feel very conflicted at times about finding myself coming round to an author’s point (thank you Foucault), but I can’t argue with this. This book has to do with wit, of course, but also memory, or what may happen when the complex and badly-repaired soul is shown an actual event, when the memory and thousand intricate adjustments of the years have written a subjective history over it. And the subjective histories are so important, no matter how different from the Actual Events of our living (which are…?) … how shocking, how dizzying to see blooming from behind the outlines of a lost memory. Why is there so much grief, there? Are all lost memories waiting to be called, are all lost moments, lost people? This idea in Behind the Scenes of a metaphysical Lost-and-Found at the back of eternity is compelling for the same reason Hopkins’ promise in the Leaden & Golden Echo is (“kept far with fonder a care”). And I don’t need to explain that, to anyone.
Somehow I’ve lost memories of my childhood, and high school is losing itself like days, except by bunches, months at a time. All the time my sister and I could have had together, stolen or lost and my pages of Nashville memories with her are being inexorably written over, letter by letter, I can’t stop it. Where are the years I missed of little sisters, growing up? Why are memories of grandparents only coming through at edges, indecipherable, incapable of being made into words? Where is Grace Hoomes?
And I say the words in my head, “Why does life have to be about loss,” but then I know that it’s not about loss—it is loss; it’s about recovery. I believe this so firmly I feel like Nike of Samothrace (plus head and arms) for the blink of an eye. The drawing of a breath, beating of the heart. If there’s something that’s about food, it’s hunger, and I’m compelled.
3.
Now I’m reading Mark Jarman’s Epistles again. What is my writing style? I read Atkinson (Mitford, etc.) and write with a terse British clip … Jarman and I lengthen sentences with commas and saturated nouns … Woolf and I try to make long swathes of silk that change into water and back into silk.
“…and the one who comes to Me I will by no means cast out.” John 6
Three months out from my surgery and I’m still picking up pieces that were not lost. This, to me, is a sign of God’s incredible care. (“Not the least lash lost,” you know, everything that is beautiful is washing away but still being washed over us. “Kept with a far greater care.” Etc.) I should cite those properly but as you know I am not in school, ha. (Sigh! Wist!) These wonderful notes from you, Franz, and you, Nat and Austin and everyone are just … well, my living is soaked in these thoughts, and I’m getting on. God is taking far greater a care. I wrote this last night:
I remember things in the hospital cloudily, the first few hours in the room there at the end of the hall cutting in and out of memory with wide blanks and only half-recalled moments. It’s strange how others’ memories are awkwardly fitted into the sequence of my own, how I imagine Samantha crying but can only remember her and Nick’s faces when they first came in, such profoundly troubled eyes, such a weight of care that I had to remember and remember now with something beyond wonder or gratitude. How strange, that I had to lie in that bed in such a ridiculous gown and with such a preposterous amount of drugs washing through my heart, through fingertips, heart again, fingertips. That I hate it when I have to be gotten out of bed by someone already up, hate to be blotchy and frumpy when everyone is put-together, and yet I was watched in that bed by parents, siblings, aunts, uncles, pastor, old friends, new friends. And I wanted it, somehow, I could have kissed them all. Even though I could hardly change my knees over from one side to the other.
That series of moments, from getting into the blue gown to getting up for my first walk down the hall and back to the first night or second or third sleeping at home, these moments, so strange (my eyes filling over and again), like one of those old window panes that’s washed with blemishes and irregularities and distorts the view. Because I felt underwater, then, grown gills somehow, somehow able to open my eyes underwater like I’ve never been able to do since a child. Breaking the surface or backing up from the window—mixing metaphors–sorry–terrible—I just want to somehow be able to say before these moments become indistinct, and unwritten, lost, that the glass or water with waves in my vision in those days recedes, and I can take a minute to cry for something I didn’t know to grieve, then.
The weight of our existence has to be measured to us, I think, Emily Dickinson thinks, and Kierkegaard (yes! what an incredible quote! ”Suffering is the characteristic of God’s love”), by piece. It opens up my brain like a door, to know that the pressure of the real things of the universe are keeping our shape, keeping our guts in, but they live another life outside this that could crush us inside the seed of a second. Christ, the one outside the press of time, the one himself the press of the real, who holds off; weighs; measures; precise in his amounts as the builder of bombs or clocks, he’s the one who measures to me what I can balance and no more. Oh my scales are crazy. God I want the time and mercy (I drink it like water) to make the balance, reach equilibrium again not with jerks and upsets but with the slender crossings of legs, the hearing of birdsong in the early morning, the word in my ear, word in my mouth.
This is the word, then, weighed and whispered in my mouth, enough until the next one, that who I am right now is enough. I shade toward something right since the press of the real, the press of Christ, one grain at a time, Jesus Christ, he’s building me a building, calling me, and I’m called, am being called. Today, even though I have a terrible cold and am aching from top to toe, I believe in the care of God so much I could be shot for it.
Also, I miss blogging! Hell! Look what happens when I’m away! New power cord maybe next week, shipped perhaps from Hong Kong.
I’m broke and unemployed but have spoken with God, have
brought the water to a boil, Tetley in a thick black restaurant-
style coffee cup. I have remembered the word sehnsucht,
word of my life which I sung in a song I had to learn for my
vocal jury last year (Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt — ah!)
and forgot forgot until now, now. what a day this has been.
if you could only see this late afternoon sunlight
strolling leisurely by.
As everything that’s been bent & broken in the past few years
is reformed and I begin to speak of myself to myself with meta
phors of flowers opening again, after, and of gardens, of the
turning of the year, the coming of spring, as all of this is happen
ing, I’m reformed. what if God was exactly who we thought?
what then? we would indeed be fucked. because (I can say
this because) of the particular sort of my damage, of my
own brand of evil, the color of my own self before re-
formation … and because this distance between pre- and
post-reformation is the real thing, it’s real, I’m able to be
changed and I am changed. (and more, please, God.)
Whatever I said about wounds closing on bullets, I say again.
I want to commit my life to honesty about these. I want to
commit to the effort-mamout of love, real love, which I still
suck at, so I guess I mean the learning of the effort-mamout of
love. I’ve been asking for a symbol for this part of my life,
because I need encarnation, I need embodiment of abstraction
(did I say this already, too? sorry) if I’m going to make good
sense and good poems from all this stuff. and the symbols are
coming, and I’m probably getting one tattooed on my side or
back or at the scar. Jesus
is for real. I’ve been going over some of the miracles again
about healing, and am arrested by Jairus’ daughter and the
woman who had been bleeding for twelve years, both the
servant sent from Jairus’ house to say, She’s dead, don’t bother
the Teacher anymore (because Jairus had been on the ground
in front of Him), and the woman who’d spent her living on
doctors and caught in her fingers the hem of Jesus’ overjacket
as He went by, and then came forward when He said, Who was
that? because He had noticed, and she was healed. can you
see this? how she had spent her living for twelve years on
healers and still knew with a weight of certainty that she needed
to catch for a second His jacket, the hem, for a second, as He
went by her?
And Chloe’s dad is doing “gloriously” and I finally wrote Richard
a letter and the sunlight is still whistling and switching the neigh
bors’ monkey grass and weeds in general with a walking-stick.
I took Shiloh and Jaden on a walk around the North Knox green
way this morning, and we stopped on all the bridges, talked
of tractors, of fear, of what the dogs were saying to us as we
went by. I’m going to make an apple pie tonight to rival Erin’s,
and read more of a book I love. I’m not going to look for jobs
today. I’m going to piece together my quilt, think about this
line I remembered during Mark’s talk yesterday: cummings of
course: thy fingers make early flowers of all things.
