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The Story from American Public Media interviewed Betty Brown, an eighty-five year old woman from California, on their June 2007 show that aired the day the movie Amelia came out. The search for Earhart was still ongoing, and someone involved with it got wind of a shortwave radio transcription Betty had made when she was 15 and Amelia Earhart had just gone down. She was listening to the radio with pencil and paper (she copied down the words to the songs so she could sing them later) when she started getting piecy in-and-out voices, Amelia and her navigator, calling for help and cursing, reading coordinates out of the log, even sending some instructions about private papers Amelia apparently didn’t want to survive her. Can you imagine. Betty wrote down nonsensical / insane rants of the navigator and when Amelia was crying. They broadcasted for three hours before the signal cut out.
Betty was home alone, but when her father got home she showed it to him and he took it immediately to the coast guard, who told him curtly that they had everything under control. When the real search began, he didn’t go back — hurt pride — but Betty kept this transcript for sixty years without anyone really being interested. I can’t really imagine hearing something this important and having it repulsed by whatever authorities.
Apparently several people have come forward saying they heard Amelia on the shortwave, too, and I guess a lot of them have been discredited, but this, we understand, was legitimate. Betty said in the interview that it was such a horrible feeling of powerlessness. Girl-child in the thirties home alone, listening to people dying on the radio, as if she was in one of those dreams where you hear something bad in the next room but there aren’t any doors, aren’t any windows. Amelia, a celebrity on such a large scale, a person of such strength and courage, was saying “son of a bitch, son of a bitch” and crying on the radio. Betty said that she decided that she wanted to become a pilot at that point, since it felt like something she could do for Amelia, like all she could do. And she did.
Now Betty’s transcript is in the hands of a non-moron and the search is perhaps over, or practically over.
Stories of vindication, redemption or some kind of restitution that have gone the long way of an entire life mean so much, to me. The familiar raw tragedy of Amelia’s story is balance in my soul with the story of Betty, who could do nothing but only sit and write down the words. Even after high school, even getting her pilot’s license, making a family, growing old, she waited and finally the time came. It came such that she’s internationally recognized (in certain circles of course), that her own voice is speaking on our radios. That she avoided any bitterness is a surprise to me, who can be full of bitternesses at my own lack of…petty vindications, little redemptions.
As I have heard from the beginning, as I hear all the time, patience is the thing. Something about patience must smooth the way for the correct thing, the accurate acknowledgment, the offered apology. Something about this must be true, if not everything.
Josh, thanks for sending this!
“Being an artist means, not reckoning and counting, but ripening like the tree which does not force its sap and stands confident in the storms of spring without the fear that after them may come no summer. It does come. But it comes only to the patient, who are there as though eternity lay before them, so unconcernedly still and wide. I learn it daily, learn it with pain to which I am grateful: patience is everything!” (28).
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“You are so young, so before all beginning, and I want to beg you, as much as I can, dear sir, to be patient towards all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, that cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them” (33-34).
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“Sex is difficult; yes. But they are difficult things that were laid upon us; almost everything serious is difficult, and everything is serious. … Men have made even eating into something else: want on the one hand, excess upon the other have obscured the distinctness of this necessity, and all the deep, simple urgencies in which life renews itself have become similarly obscured. But the individual…can remind himself that all beauty in animals and plants is a quiet enduring form of love and desire, and he can see animals, as he sees plants, patiently and willingly uniting and increasing and growing not out of physical delight, not out of physical suffering, [but] bending to necessities that are greater than pleasure and pain and more powerful than will and withstanding” (34-36).
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.
There are more roses in this week’s flush than any other in months. The pink ones, crammed with petals, the ones with the most complex scent, are fairly burgeoning. I have plans for my day. It’ll be a day in which I’m looking for beauty, and if you look for beauty you will always find it. If you look for God you will always find him and today’s going to be a day like that. Weird that my life seems so pointless sometimes, and all I can do is go out and pick some tomatoes, send my resume to more people, listen to music, and think about people who are not here. There are so many people who are not here. But there’s beauty in this day and I will find it I swear to God.
I am lying in a field between 6th Ave and Grainger, watching Marshall juggle his soccer ball and all the swallows dipping and diving, rushing the evening bugs with banks and barrel rolls. the sky is so huge that the sunset is only a little of it, and Marshall’s kicks and bounces are small on the horizon. he’s not like those young guys, always looking to see if you’re looking. I’m not like those girls, being all cheer-leading and all. I’m just here, very small, so very small and trying to figure out what place anxiety and despair has in a field like this. since the school of swallows are meeting and then breaking up, chattering. since the moon is rising and we already knew we were small, so small.
what difficulty is it to feed me, being small, then? what sort of paperwork and red tape has to be got through before the Almighty can open His hand, what words of mine have to be printed and signed and notarized before He will scan it first for minimum requirements and then for any sign of brilliance? any shining qualification?
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the past few weeks have sped by, filled with the jingling of coins in pockets. my particular sort of fear, that the God of the universe is tending to the universe and not to me, spells itself onto my walls and mirrors and on the window-panes and I begin again to live from the edge of my heart, not the center.
“if you abide in Me, and My words abide in you, you will ask what you desire, and it shall be done for you.” I have known long enough that the words of Christ have permeated the impermeable heart and saturated its center, however small a pin-prick of a center. I guess it’s just hard to not be able to imagine what deliverance will come — I’m used to helping my faith along with possible scenarios of rescue, coming up with several, knowing they are all probable. but if there’s anything that characterizes His continual rescues of me, it’s that the improbable is in His right hand. so the likelier it is that everything will fall through and I’m on the street with a suitcase full of cameras and dresses, the likelier it is that no application of mine will impress and no references can say much of my brilliance to God, who is the one who’s been ordering my steps anyway.
I imagine that that my prayer is formatted incorrectly, or some such nonsense. I imagine I don’t have a roommate or a job because I didn’t take that one opportunity, that one time. but the birds. you can see their joy, wtf, all this joy, how God buries them when they die in secret places, you can see the whole sky open to them and all their food waits for them. if; then, surely.
up late last night, watching The Curious Case of Benjamin Button; up late this morning, sleeping in till 9:50 a.m., the first time in weeks and weeks. after checking email and facebooking Barbara about flea medicine for Patrick I am drinking tea on the back porch, watching the vines climbing the pillars, thinking about how loving someone teaches you the peculiar language of their beauty, and also about my life, how I woke this morning feeling guilt and dread and asked the LORD to give me hope and purpose and he did. how I didn’t even remember that I’d asked for these until I finally got to the back porch with tea and John and read “whatever you ask in my name, that I will do,” and “if you ask anything in my name, I will do it” and “if you abide in me, and my words abide in you, you will ask what you desire, and it shall be done for you” (ch.s 14, 15). I wasn’t through-reading; I just stopped there and my eye fell on these like a skipping rock. I think I understand, and I have started asking for things.
if you could ask for whatever you desired (not “wanted,” this is a profound longing we’re discussing, here), and it was promised, what would you ask for? I discover that what I desire is not a job but a fulfilling work, and the ability to pay what I owe. I want my vocation to become my occupation, if not really bringing in money at least sitting in a place of honor at the table of my soul, at least brought out of the chimney it lives in and made a queen like it ought to be, like it will be someday. I want the room in my heart for flourishing new loves. I want forgiveness to clear away scar tissue and all my fear and other adhesions. I want to be able to close all the windows that are letting the wind blow through, scattering papers in eddies and curtains in tangled piles of curtains.
last night at Josh’s house, after hot dogs, beer and watermelon, post-prandial cigarettes, someone said that the sunset we were watching was the same sunset that’s been happening for five thousand years. this in an emotionless tone… this person could look at the mid-morning sky, huge blown cumulus islands with sharpened white edges and the sun crowning, and say the same, but this is new because this day has never existed before, never in five thousand years or ten billion has this day been seen before. never before has anyone lived this day.
you and I, we here, we’re meeting this day with as much honor as we care to give it, it having been given to us to honor us as little gods, walking around feeling defeated and like everything we have ever thought or felt has been thought and felt as many times as a baby has been born on this planet. this morning, having been called by the risen LORD to ask, having been given a day that no-one had seen before 12 a.m. this morning, I’m meeting my desires, meeting the day, meeting the LORD, where I am. which is an unimpressive place, except that it’s in today, which I have not seen before. I think it’s also possible / probable / certain that the woman I am today is a woman I have never been, before. as easily as I imagine that I’ve lived this day fifteen-hundred times already and will live it three thousand more times, I imagine I am the same person as I was last year. and that my habits, the hamster wheel of my disobedience & destructive coping mechanisms, is the same as it’s always been and will always be. not to be histrionic, but not only have I not lived this day before; I have not lived this day before. can I even understand what that means. well, I mean to try.
final thought from Kierkegaard: “So then, go with God to God, continually take that one step more, that single step that even you, who cannot move a limb, are still able to take; that single step, that even the prisoner, who has lost his freedom, even the one in chains, whose feet are not free, is still able to take: and you are committed to the Good. Nobody, not even the greatest that has ever lived, can do more than you” (Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing, 154).
I’m getting stuff together to go out of town tonight, to go in-town, to my old town, Nashville, city I have loved. Lauren and Katie Bo-Peep are leaving, one on a Fulbright to Colombia in case there’s ANYONE I haven’t told yet, and one to Teach for America in the Mississippi delta, I’m pretty sure, and Marshall and I are heading to Nashville for their going-away party. I’ve made some small presents for them (have been frantically sewing and gluing last night and this morning), and now all I have to get together is a couple of mixes for them. Lauren: more Innocence Mission. Katie: more Innocence Mission. everyone: more Innocence Mission.
I’m going to make aNOTHER lemon icebox pie for the camping trip in the South Cumberland State Park tomorrow night. Katie wanted to camp before she left for Sudamerica, so she and Kayla, me and Marshall, Lindsey and Andrew (dearest of dear, all of them, life is so merciful and inexorable at the same time, how I live far away from them now, but am camping with them tomorrow) are going to. Andrew and Marshall, lovers of Good Music, are bringing guitars and Katie and Kayla are bringing their badminton set. I think we’ll see some waterfalls, and I’ll feel bittersweet the whole time, surely. people leaving, people coming together. I’m actually praying about this trip, that God will be very much with us. at dinner with turkey dogs, grilled vegetables, pie, and at breakfast with eggs, bacon, coffee. in the evening with everyone winding down and sitting at the fire, thinking of the deeper things, in the morning with yawning and stretching and jokes.
so, I knew I was going to make this pie, but I was thinking about how poor I am and how overdue I am for some bread, so I’m also making Genovese Basil bread, which is on its second rise and almost ready to go in the oven. I sauteed two (2) cups of chopped fresh basil and a clove of garlic and shaped the loaves long and narrow, baguette-like, and am hoping I can find a razorblade to slash them down the middle… they’re beautiful, and smell beautiful. I am proud. why do I need a job when I can do incredible things like this? make two cloth-covered journals, a pie and baguettes all in the same day and a half? but I need a job. it’s looking grim again: the only way I can cover August rent is if the LORD intervenes.
after all this, I still have some restlessness in my soul that I wonder what is…? Wed. night at “small group” we prayed for Crystal’s hip and it was apparently time for it to be healed. I’m ready for something like this, in myself, and for the first time it seems possible, like something God wants to do. I feel like I’m walking toward something, something good. I have patience for it. because apparently I am searched and known, my thoughts are seen afar off, my ways are winnowed. I can’t get enough of this thought, that my ways are winnowed. I need the proximity of the LORD like nothing I’ve ever needed before. I say this every three months, mean it in new ways and for new reasons every time.
last of all, Hannah Lee is having surgery on her spine today. it’s going on right now, and here’s a link to the blog if you want it. they’re updating people on Facebook currently, too, via Twitter.
what if God knew what He was doing, me not doing a hundred things I thought I would be doing, doing a hundred things a didn’t think I would do? anyway the day is leaving the foyer, it’s walking down the hall, turning the lights off on its way. I want to be somewhere else, like in this picture I found on one of those Tumblr blogs, of a girl who is extraordinary like I want to be, of a field of desire. I watched Big Fish and remembered eternity in the last scenes, when the old father is carried through a crowd of everyone he ever loved, everyone who ever loved him, and is coming to know that everything he did mattered, every word he said and gesture of his eyes or hand in a conversation.
Calvin (of Bill Watterson) said once that he didn’t know which would be more terrifying, to find out that everything mattered, or that nothing did. the thought that there’s a possibility that nothing matters terrifies me, but the thought that all the things I lost or left or couldn’t defend are waiting somewhere … it’s the thought of space, an expansion that includes, it pulls the lungs down with the force of something greater than gravity and draws the air in. and it’s only when I’m stuck in rooms with no windows that I realize the windows are in my mind, that I can remember eternity without that help. I need something beautiful, today. I need to someway catch the day, walk with the day down the hall and turn off the lights myself.
there is a speed that is only imaginary; life is not running away from me if I start the evening with it and keep it close to me, on purpose. life is not something you wanted, or the printed page of all your conflicting desires … it’s encased in your body, and you bring it where you are. I will bring my life with me where I go now and it will assume my colors, not the other way round, and this is something God is saying. just to say.
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.
A man in an electric wheelchair pauses outside the window to let a couple of girls go by on the sidewalk. He looks very old and tired, like gravity is winning its battles one by one, and when he looks in the window for a second his face draws its sags up into a small smile at me. Everyone sings these songs about 16 year old girls’ smiles being like the sun, but this smile was like the sun, not those, this one came out on a cloudy day and spoke of a country afar off.
I went last night to hear a Singaporean (?) pastor speak at a church a few miles away, and was upset by what I heard, and then upset because I couldn’t really find the words to communicate why it upset me. Not as well as I wanted. I’ve made more sense of it in my head since then, and the heart of the issue has turned out to be that I thought God was misrepresented. When I feel like God is misrepresented, I care so much, I feel the adrenaline coming, I often have to either take a walk or have an earnest discussion with someone about it. I took a walk, mostly, this time, and am still taking it. I parked in the Old City under the bridge and walked up to Union with M’s laptop (ostensibly to work on the baby book I’m finishing up today), my box of paper, and a thousand, thousand thoughts. I’m writing emails, drinking water and coffee, watching the people walk up and down the sidewalk, thinking about God and how everything in my life touches him, how my life has been saved so many times, my green spaces conserved by his words and movements.
This is such a strange time of life, for me. Spring is upon us, here, and I have a new dear friend that I’m getting to share life with, old dear friends who have finished a first year of school, lost a close relationship, are trying to live in a workable way. I’m trying to do this, too, and everything in my life can change, leaving me almost insane, but not insane (or dead). I love the Cat Power song that goes “it’s the colors and the kids that keep me alive,” because the colors and the kids are like the first flags of dawn or the last lights of evening, they also speak of a far-off country, but somehow something in me is hungriest and they’re not enough for me, I need something deeper than they are, and somehow Christ found me there. It amazes me, that my desires have lived in me for so long … I’d have thought they’d have broken out of me by now, sent up flames fifty times my size, plumes of smoke a hundred times, they seem so much greater than me, so much more huge and made of more valuable stuff. They are why I have read poetry since I was a child, and why I write it, now. They are why I cry all the time, even sometimes at a word, a single word, and why I need to run or whatever when I hear something I think is untrue about God. Who is the only one who can contain my desire, and who has contained it, and given it a name, or a hundred names, each one he knows and keeps track of.
I can’t keep my thoughts in “the real world,” today, the newsboy and the No. 73 bus, lunch, the library (reading Screwtape again). Even the barista holding her phone to her ear and staring out the window is calling to me and I think of her, what she may do when she gets home tonight, whether she’ll open her window and fly the flag of her desire out of it, its tips touching the ground and then kiting off beyond, reaching for a far country. Maybe not. She may keep that flag in the top of her closet, back of her sock drawer, buried in her backyard. I wonder about the man in the wheelchair, where he keeps his. I can’t believe it doesn’t break me, but I sew new words on mine on nights like last night, in threads that burn me.
The clouds overhead are sheeting, like low waters, and I know we won’t see any more sun today than just the glow that’s casting slight shadows on the ground. This is ok. I imagine getting on a plane, which is something I want to do more than anything in the world, right now, I imagine the roar of the engine at the end of the runway, the hard shove into the back of my seat and the release of the wheels and the pavement, the jump into the air. I imagine the houses and swimming-pools falling away behind and nosing into this sheet of greyness and then emerging, lifting into the blue sky that is always there, above the clouds, suddenly sharp shadows cutting color onto our arms and hands.
