The Name I Call Myself: On Race (Pt. 1)

How I Celebrated Black History Month
I first realized that I was treacherously unsatisfied with Black History Month about 4 years ago. I have worked in education for the past 12 years, in special education for the last 8. In this time, I have been one of only a handful of black students and coworkers, which has meant, no matter how "diverse" my workplaces have been, that I have continued to exist as a minority among minorities.

When black history month is celebrated in a school, it usually looks something like this:

• Plaster grainy, black&white photographs of famous African-Americans on the walls. Always draw from a pool of the same 20 people. Descriptions of what these people are known for may or may not be included. 
• Talk about segregation in the 1960's and the civil rights movement A LOT. Make it clear to the students that segregation WAS. Use more black&white photos (this time from the 1960's). Talk a lot about buses and water fountains (use my presence in the room as an example that segregation is totally over, if convenient). Talk about how hard it was to be a black person. Invite white students to shake their heads sorrowfully at the reality of former injustices. Do not leave room for me to comment on the lesson. 
• Talk extensively about Martin Luther King, Jr. and how, because of him, black and white people, nay all peoples in America, can be friends. Talk about how great it is that no one is racist now. Emphasize that the president is black.

In my classroom, I have a cultural awareness poster that I change every month to go along with our monthly assemblies. For February in years past, I have done what is expected: I printed out various photos of famous African-Americans and put them up on the poster, along with a poem by Langston Hughes and a map of Africa filled with titles of various careers and occupations that have been held by blacks. I spice things up by intentionally using photos of famous black Americans both in color and black&white, both dead and alive, both male and female. I always feel that I have gone the extra mile, hopefully providing visual proof that not all good black people are dead.

This year, I started asking questions. What is the point of Black History Month? Why do I cringe at the thought of it? What, if anything, can be accomplished in the 28 days we have been given to combat hundreds of years worth of disrespect and dehumanization? Then, it struck me. I find it atrocious that we have to put up, during Black History Month, pictures of African-Americans that are "worthy." It feels like the whole month is spent saying that black people are not all good-for-nothing. It feels like a display of exceptions. And, the worst part of all, it means a month of sitting through classes, staff meetings, and assemblies where people who are not black describe to other people who are not black, in my presence, with an air of unquestionable authority, what blackness is. This gave me an idea.

I returned to my poster. On a 3x5 card in bright red marker I wrote: "BLACK PEOPLE ARE. . ." Then, on more 3x5 cards, in the same red ink I wrote adjectives that corresponded with the photographs I'd chosen. Under a picture of Jesse Owens leaping over a hurdle I wrote "FAST." Under a picture of Harriet Tubman I wrote "BRAVE." Under a picture of Maya Angelou I wrote "CREATIVE." Under a picture of George Washington Carver I wrote "INTELLIGENT." I felt shocked at myself for my boldness: how dare I affirm explicitly and without permission what I know to be true? How dare I not qualify my assertion with the word "some." This is not how Black History Month is supposed to be celebrated.

I think black history month ought to be about creating new language, forming new assumptions, and letting 1,000 positive adjectives fall from our mouths, all about what it means to be black. I just want someone to run around Los Angeles, covering billboards with the phrase "Black people are. . . " and then writing in one hundred thousand good words. Why? Because the other 337 days of the year society is saying "Black people are. . ." and ending that statement in 1,000,000,000 ugly ways. The best thing we can do during Black History Month is to say that it is good to be black, and then to hush and let the words sink in, uncontested.

So I spent this Black History Month entrenched in blackness. I intentionally spent the time celebrating the work of black musicians, artists, authors, and filmmakers. I read books by black authors talking about blackness, I listened to spoken word artists talking about how to love themselves when everyone around them is calling them unlovable. I engaged in discussions with my white friends about their experiences and how they were different from my own; I had long talks with my mother about her experience of blackness in Jamaica and then during the civil rights movement in America as an immigrant. I visited a black, Episcopalian church, I listened to a lot of Nina Simone. I thought about lies I have been told my whole life. I looked for, and found, living black role models, because it is important that we know that not all good black people are dead. And I worked on explicit self-definition, remembering that most of the problems we have with race in America come from us naming each other to make ourselves look better-than, which is an act of destruction.

My Back History Month Bibliography (to date):

• Z.Z. Packer Drinking Coffee Elsewhere
• Tracy K. Smith Ordinary Light
• Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Americanah
• Toni Morrison Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination 
• Toni Morrison God Help the Child
• Helen Oyeyemi Boy, Snow, Bird
• Zora Neale Hurston Mules and Men
• Tamara Winfrey Harris The Sisters Are Alright: Changing the Broken Narrative of Black Women in America 
• Issa Rae The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl
• Fran Ross Oreo
• Essence Magazine
• New African Woman Magazine 

The Principle of Self-Determination 
The point: freedom is me naming myself, narrating my own experience, and describing the scope of my own strengths and limitations. It does not matter how kind one's words or intentions are, they are judgments, limits, restrictions, invasions, and impositions. It simply isn't anyone else's job to tell me who or what I am. No one should attempt to tell me that I am worthy or that I am unworthy. Being black is what I say it is. And I say that it is good.


I'm just warming up, really.

Grace: A Beautiful Punch in the Face

My word of the year is grace. I’m living this year trying to understand what it means when we say that God is gracious, that we are transformed and renewed by grace, that grace is free and present and abundant all of the time. One thing I’ve been learning is that sometimes the working of grace in my life looks like a punch in the face—it shocks me, hurts me, makes me take a look around and reconsider my expectations. But other times, grace is like a warm hug, a spicy samosa shared with a friend, a cup of Earl Grey, laughing in the midst of a field of poppies, an infant’s little fingers wrapped around my pinky, breathing.

God gives us grace, in the packaging and dosage we most need, at the times when we most need it. I’m learning to recognize the presence of God in the everyday. I eat a strawberry: its sweet redness, its heart-shaped perfection, reminds me that God is good.

And then there are those other moments. The moments when what I most want is to just walk out of the room, out of the door, into nothingness, because existence feels futile, and frustrating, and impossible to bear. Then I think grace is like a sharp slap across my face, because it makes me remember that I have been created for something more: for something good, and true, and lovely. The me who was satisfied wandering around in circles pretending to live is more desperate than the me who is sitting on the ground, rubbing my sore jaw and wondering what just happened.

Grace is supernatural. That means that grace intervenes in nature—in the ordinary, the mundane, the status quo, the expected. Grace is wholly unexpected, wholly undeserved, and dearly needed. My natural self cannot get anywhere without God’s cosmic karate chop. I need God’s power not just to make all of my dreams come true, but to shatter the dreams that are built on false and shaky hopes, and to build new dreams on substantial foundations.

Grace meets me where I am, and then, like a whirlwind, it picks me up and whirls me around until I lose my bearings—leaving me somewhere else. The land may look barren—broken rocking chairs strewn about the desert, someone’s dazed cat stalking by on wobbly feet, but it is here, in this place, that I can meet God, because there is nothing else I expect to see. I have been taken out of myself to meet him. To meet God on his own terms, in his own timing, on his own fruitful soil.

To find one’s self in the economy of grace is to find that you do not have enough money for the journey. In fact, you are a thief and a stowaway and you have been found out. But instead of being tossed off the train, with your raggedy carpet bag tossed behind you, you find that you are invited to dine in the first class coach, provided you admit to the other passengers that your fashionable clothes are borrowed, and that your fare has been donated, not earned. It is in grace that we learn how poor we are. Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. This means, blessed are you when you can’t pretend anymore that you have anything to give, anything left to bargain with, anything to cover the fact that left to yourself you are only naked and mean and ugly.

Grace takes this ugly unkindness and dresses you up, beautifully, generously. Suddenly, you are the belle of the ball, and you remain here—in twinkling crystal slippers and a blue gown—until you forget that your carriage is really only a winter squash and that rodents alone will befriend you. Then, here comes grace, like a clock chiming twelve, to remind you that all you can claim for yourself are rags and woes and a bed made of ash.

Thank you, God, for the punch in the face that reminds us of how good you are, and of our poverty without you.

As Anne Lamott says,

“Remember, God loves you exactly the way you are, and he loves you too much to let you stay like this.”

A Vocation of One's Own

Sometimes I hate my job because it means that I am the only non-specialist in a world full of experts. I was not made to function as a maid of all work. I'm not a generalist by nature. I want to throw myself into some highly-specialized, creative and desperately needed, utterly meaningful work of my own. 

I've said it before and I've said it again: I want to be George MacDonald and Amy Carmichael smushed together into one person. This is who I am. You figure it out. 

She sees the realities of this world and alleviates human suffering with a sacrificial love. 

He sees the realities of the world to come and communicates them to others with the creative power of his soul. 

I need a vocation. 


This thought that is getting me through the desert of now:

"His Kingdom is Upside Down and in Him your part is large and lovely and needed and art."

Surely, I was created to be more than a Teacher's Assistant.

Holy Nativity: Bright Paint and Sweet Anger

God in three persons, Holy Trinity.

Well, it's Christmas Eve, and as usual, I've failed to keep this blog abreast of the progress of my Nativity Fast. I'm feeling really glad that Lent is coming up in a few months. I think, maybe, I'm getting used to the rhythm of fasting and feasting. I failed several times during this fast, and abandoned my reading plan half way through. But still, being in the general mindset of fasting was invaluable during this frenzied, noisy holiday season. I'm shockingly calm. Calm and prepared are the two words that best describe my mood this year.  I think this is due entirely to my experience of God in this fast. One day I will be good at fasting, I tell you! One day. In the meantime, I am going to learn to fight legalism and slovenly habits as I align my life to the Christian calendar.  

I'm learning things about myself this fall. Mostly, I've been learning a lot about what I picture when I use the word "home", and how far my actual home falls short of this image. I think, sometimes, I feel guilty about wanting to be comfortable. I have the personal tastes of Marie Antoinette, but I try to live like John the Baptist. This is maybe irrelevant to this post, but for me to feel at home, the walls have to be painted in bright colors. Or at least, I have to be surrounded by lots of brightly colored, beautiful things. No, the walls really, actually have to be painted in bright colors. I have tried several times in my adult life to live without this, and each time, the experiment has failed. It's always the same. I buy a few things: a colorful bedspread, a whimsical piece of artwork, and feel like I have accomplished the goal of setting up a nest for myself. But it always fails. White walls make me crazy. The earth is not my home, this is sure, but it is a place to practice living real, eternal life. I must do that in a place that feels like home. I should have painted my apartment. I should've painted, and I should've bought a lot of furniture. I am not a nomad, I am not a desert father, I am an Ayodele. And Ayodeles need their houses to be decorated like Anthropologie stores.

Also, I've learned about my general lack of assertiveness. Again, this is not a new lesson. Why must I learn everything 85 times? I hate being angry; I gravitate towards tranquility. But, as I'm human, I cannot escape human emotions. I spent a lot of time this fall, during this Nativity Fast, incensed. I wonder what the etymology of the word incensed is. Anyway, I'm learning again that it is OK to be mad, that when I am angry I cannot make myself otherwise, and that the swiftest path to righteousness is speaking the truth in love. "I feel mad when you. . ." At the moment, it is nearly impossible for me to communicate anger to another person. I fear conflict, and I fear my own ability to handle anger appropriately. But I must work on this.

What does any of this have to do with the Incarnation? Well, both of these things, colored paint and assertive language, affect my ability to feel at home in my own flesh. Since I am incarnate, I cannot live peacefully if I'm always trying to just endure ugly, glaring white paint or situations that make me angry. Sometimes you just have to work to make things better, instead of trying to survive them. This is the truth.

I think this fast has made it easier to hear God when he speaks. Maybe that is what fasting is about, telling God that you're listening. Fasting is living in a posture of listening.

Speaking of my natural inclination toward extravagance, I may at least congratulate myself on the way I observed Christmas this year. Christmas is so important to me. And I love all of it. I love the shopping, and the brass bands playing "O Come, O Come, Emmanuel" on the street corners, and the trees, and the lights, and the office holiday parties, and the presents. I cannot cut corners on Christmas. Lucky for me, I planned ahead this year. I put up my tree 2 days after Thanksgiving, ordered and sent out Christmas cards, and used an Advent Wreath. This is my first year using an Advent Wreath. I made it myself and everything. I will do it every year. I think lighting the Advent candles helped me to get a handle on the time. Isn't that what fasting is about? Getting a handle on the time? I knew exactly how many days it was until Christmas, and I was able to focus on the right things, like Love, Hope, and Joy--at least on Sundays. So, some part of my brain chose to act according to common sense this year. Hooray! I love the Advent season.

Now I need to go complete another Christmas tradition, and finish reading On the Incarnation.

Merry Christmas!

Hail, Autumnal Equinox!

October is Poetry Appreciation Month, Says I

Beginning October 1st, I will imbibe one poem a day, and post it here. I shall read it, memorize it, lectio it, talk about, let it steep into my soul. It's the only proper way to hail the Autumnal Equinox. After all, Christmas is coming, and my 1st annual Advent fast will not be very meaningful if I don't slow down and steady myself before it begins.

Here is some Hopkins, as appropriate, to begin.

Hurrahing in Harvest

SUMMER ends now; now, barbarous in beauty, the stooks arise
Around; up above, what wind-walks! what lovely behaviour
Of silk-sack clouds! has wilder, wilful-wavier
Meal-drift moulded ever and melted across skies?
I walk, I lift up, I lift up heart, eyes,	5
Down all that glory in the heavens to glean our Saviour;
And, éyes, heárt, what looks, what lips yet gave you a
Rapturous love’s greeting of realer, of rounder replies?
And the azurous hung hills are his world-wielding shoulder
Majestic—as a stallion stalwart, very-violet-sweet!—	10
These things, these things were here and but the beholder
Wanting; which two when they once meet,
The heart rears wings bold and bolder
And hurls for him, O half hurls earth for him off under his feet.

 Divert my eyes from toys and trinkets, invigorate me on the pilgrim way.

The Giving Tree

Listening to the Pride & Prejudice soundtrack at the day's end with my hairpins removed makes me feel so spiritual. I'm sitting here, trying to write honestly. Right now,  I feel the lack of God's presence in my life. This week I've felt so. . .heavy laden. My soul feels as though it has been tied up in knots, twisted and gnarled, my psyche is suffering from Indian burn.

In moments like these, days like these, I see how hard it is for me to be even superficially pleasant. I don't know what makes me feel so badly, and I am aware, almost every moment, of my own inability to live a life of love. At work, one of the instructors read the book "The Giving Tree" by Shel Silverstein. She asked all of the students, and some of the staff, to choose one thing they would like to give others throughout the school year. I decided that I would give love, because that is the best gift I could think of, and the most costly. That gift mocks me every day, as I sit in my classroom looking at the Mother Theresa prayer for those serving the sick pinned to the bottom left corner of my bulletin board. It's hard to love, I tell you! But sometimes it's hard merely to want to love.

Today I feel full of despair again. It's so hard, sometimes, to believe that righteousness is possible. It's very easy to believe that the road to happiness is getting my own way, or the removal of every difficulty: it isn't though. When I pray, it feels like I'm begging an indifferent passerby on the street for sacks of gems. I don't expect anything, because I feel like a) I don't deserve it, and b) giving is not in the nature of the one I am beseeching. This is a lie of course, well, not the first part. I don't deserve anything beautiful, true, or good, but I'm expected to expect these things anyway. It's so hard to pray for joy when I feel like it never comes. It's so hard to pray for faith when you don't believe anything. It's impossible to believe that God is happy when I am so miserable. Or is it?

I need to be re-taught that God is a giving tree, that he hears us, hears me, when we pray, that he gives benevolently out of the overflowing goodness of his own excellent nature. But I doubt it; I doubt.

God is a giving tree. He gives conditionally, in that he gives us what is good even when this is not what we have desired. He gives conditionally, in that he gives when he ask according to his will. Is God deaf to my prayers? Have I sinned against him in a way that would cause him to stop-up his ears? Oh, God, grant what you command, and command what you will.

I have been thinking a lot about St. Augustine, Dante, George MacDonald, John Donne, Plato--everyone who writes about ordinate love and the beatific vision. It is so easy to love inordinately. 

"If ever any beauty I did see, Which I desired, and got, 'twas but a dream of thee." 

It's hard to be good. Part of the difficulty of being good is believing that God will make you good when you ask.

But God is a giving tree, he loves to give, to bless. He gives pain and he gives great joy.

Oh, I wanted to relate this back to George MacDonald. I'm re-reading At the Back of the North Wind, and I'm re-remembering (again) all that MacDonald says about being at the still point. Do you remember the still point? The still point harkens back to Boethius, to Dante, to lots of people. The point is this: at the center of the universe is God, a Being supremely perfect and happy. Evil happens around him, and he uses the good and the bad to shape human events while he himself remains wholly uncontaminated and unchanged. If I keep myself at the still point, where God is, I will not be shaken by the things in this life, small or great, that threaten to tie knots in my soul. I need to understand this because it is so easy to tie a knot in my soul. I am derailed by weather changes.

But God is a giving tree. He is a giving tree, and he loves us. He loves us. O! How he loves us!




Turn my eyes from looking at worthless things, and give me life in your ways.

Tea Time in the Interior Castle

Sometimes it's hard to write. I've been meaning to come back to this stupid blog, again and again, with book reviews or spiritual musings, but it's hard. The hardest thing about living life--real, deep, pure life--is stopping still--standing still--long enough to do so. I know that if I don't write I'll die, I know that for me writing is a form of prayer.

Sometimes life is difficult. Sometimes just doing the bare minimum takes all of my strength. What do I have to say tonight? I'm not sure I know. I've been mulling over the will of God, thinking about what it means to live as God means me to live. Sometimes, it seems simple. Sometimes, I know what I'm called to do. Sometimes, I can tell somehow that God is calling me, leading me deeper into him, and that deep inside his love I will be moved to live a wild and beautiful life.

O, how I want to be pulled into the deep, deep love of God! It's much easier, much safer, much more comfortable to live in the shallows--but I can't stay here forever, because I'll die of thirst. Today I read George Mueller's words about knowing God, about how increasing in the knowledge of God is synonymous with increasing in personal happiness. To the degree that I know God I am happy. To the degree that I doubt God, I am misery personified.

I want to know God. I want to live with him in his life and die with him in his death. But sometimes this feels impossible.

Last week, as I was contemplating life, happiness, and the love of God with a dear friend, she told me that I needed to get my act together because I was supposed to be her "spiritual and wise" friend. I know that I'm supposed to be spiritual and wise. I also know that I rarely live up to this calling. It's hard to live a life of being.

I ought to live deeply. My soul was made for depth, and not breadth, stillness, and not movement. I should dwell inside the sonnet, I should hear the breathy wailing of the wind, I should see every star. My heart would keep well in a cloister.

I'm sitting here, imbibing honeydew green tea and listening to music, because, tonight, this is the closest I can bring myself to stillness, to real life.

As I look around my bedroom, I see the proof, the evidence, of who God is calling me to be. Quotations from St. Julian of Norwich, Emily Dickinson, Brennan Manning, Rumi, Mahmoud Darwish, the Psalms, Sadhu Sundar Singh, and many others line my walls. Icon valentines of St. Brigid of Ireland and Mary the Mother of God are on my mantel. A watercolor portrait of my own face, encompassed by golden halo and wings of inspiration, hangs above a bookshelf.

Looking at all of these things--congregation of word & image, delicate, brightly bound, palm-sized volumes of The Imitation of Christ and The Book of Common Prayer--I see clearly that I am meant to live the life of a contemplative. God, help me to live this life. Imbued with your spirit, sensitive to your voice, obedient and faithful, keep me aware of mystery and beauty wherever it exists. Keep me close to Love, where you are, on the other side of silence.

"Heaven-Haven"

“I have desired to go
Where springs not fail,
To fields where flies no sharp and sided hail
And a few lilies blow.
And I have asked to be
Where no storms come,
Where the green swell is in the havens dumb,
And out of the swing of the sea.”

A Living, Rushing Wind: On Creativity

Even in California, it's springtime. Birds are singing from the depths of their quick-beating, tiny bird hearts.

I'm re-reading Madeleine L'Engle's Walking on Water, and I'm discovering reality again. Why do I, a creative person, produce so little? Why isn't all of my free time given to writing diligently, like I ought to do? It's because I often choose to consume rather than to create.

Every day, every moment, I have to choose between consumption and creativity. I rarely choose creativity. In this materialistic world, it's really, really easy to waste your life consuming things instead of creating them.

When a person creates they are giving life, adding cosmos/truth/beauty to the world. When a person consumes they are using up resources--killing and destroying--ushering in a state of chaos. Cooking, reading, writing, loving, praying, worshiping--these create. Shopping, eating, Facebook, watching The Office, hating--these consume.

 Facebook and shopping are not evil, but they take away from the world. I am a consumer of life. Most of my existence has been spent taking.

Perhaps it's a question of balance. Consuming is all right, some forms of it are all right, if most of my life is spent creating. 

I think creativity is a way--a quite natural and simple way--to give to the world. The problem is that creativity is often difficult, exhausting, and frustrating, while consumption is easy and entertaining.

But, I would be a life-giver.

Creating is life giving, and holy, because it is an aspect of God's own Self. God benevolently gives. He lives. He creates life. If we are to reflect his nature, we too must create generously. Creation is an act of worship because to create is to imitate God's nature, and what is more worshipful than living in imitation of the One you adore?

It is much, much easier to consume when I come home tired at the end of a long day. To create I must be ready and attentive. It's hard to push past all of the noise and movement until I reach that still place, the still point, where creativity comes like a rushing wind.


Turn my eyes from looking at worthless things, and give me life in your ways.

My Tender Pioneer: On Work and Leisure

Life—is what we make of it—
Death—we do not know—
Christ's acquaintance with Him
Justify Him—though—

He—would trust no stranger—
Other—could betray—
Just His own endorsement—
That—sufficeth Me—

All the other Distance
He hath traversed first—
No New Mile remaineth—
Far as Paradise—

His sure foot preceding—
Tender Pioneer—
Base must be the Coward
Dare not venture—now— 

Emily Dickinson

What is life, but to be near you?

 Do you think Jesus ever sought entertainment for himself when he was bored? Was he ever bored?

 I am a base coward.

Thoughts. I'm sure I have them. This week I've been wallowing in worldliness. Instead of attending to pain and emptiness, letting those things bring me to a better place, closer to the heart of God, I watched a couple seasons of The Office. Yes, that's what I did. During college, when every Christian I knew was watching the Office, I saw only two episodes of that show. Once, the British version during my study abroad in Oxford, and the second time, the American version, the following summer. When things are cool I do not care for them. That being said, why is it that the sight of the first 4 seasons of the Office sitting on my roommate's bookcase became the opiate for the masses of my weariness? When I don't even like television? In college, there were some memorable discussions about the nature of rest, work, and leisure. It makes sense now, these talks we had. I'm harkening back to one class session on the Autobiography of Frederick Douglass and one class lecture on Josef Pieper's Leisure, The Basis Of Culture, specifically. I have not yet read Pieper's work, though I ought to.

The general idea is this. Work and leisure are both times of productive, abundant activity. Leisure is a time for creativity and culture. According to both Douglass and Pieper, at no time should one's soul be deadened or one's intellect dulled. Life--rushing, brilliant life--should happen all the time. Leisure is not idleness: no more is it debauchery, no more is it dissipation. Leisure is contemplative, creative work.

Douglass' narrative describes the slaves' holidays: the slave masters offered up their slaves to drunken tomfoolery, knowing that just as backbreaking labor could not be sustained indefinitely, neither could Bacchic celebration. These kinds of tactics made the slaves happy to go back to their slavery, deceived into believing that leisure, or freedom, was not a good to be desired.

We talked in class about how Western culture follows this exact principle. Work too hard in your 9-5, give up all of yourself--too much of yourself--to your career, but then, the weekend comes. On the weekend, or even the day's end, pushed past healthy limits of productiveness, you seek drunkenness, sex, noise: any manner of over-the-top "leisure" to bring you back to balance. "Leisure" exists to make you forget that the rest of the week you have lived as a slave.

This, sometimes, is how I live. I don't really drink and I don't sleep around--I truly hate noise--but this is America: there are lots of opportunities for dissipation. This week, I chose to bludgeon my senses with the Office and too much Panang curry, instead of drowning my heart and soaking my spirit in a couple yellow mango margaritas and a one-night stand.

I need to live differently. Please understand, I love my job. I love my job as much as I could love a "for the time being until I figure out where I'm going to go to grad school and how to make a living not being a computer programmer/engineer/doctor/lawyer/physicist". It could just be that I'm too tired for the work that I do, that I'm not really up to it, or that this week was especially difficult. Or, it could be that I approach my job with the wrong attitude, that while I enjoy it, what I'm really waiting for is the weekend, or the end of the day, so I can "really" live. The problem with this is that when I get home I'm too spent (this is exactly the right word) to live according to my creative, child-of-God nature. I ought to be writing. I ought to be preparing papers to present at conferences, I ought to have friends over to cook or bake, and I ought to be baking and cooking whether or not anyone else is here. I ought to be reading poetry, trudging through French short stories, and cultivating my awareness of God's presence and favor. I ought to be building community with my roommate. I ought to be working on low-stress craft projects.

But this isn't what happens, or it is not what happened this week, when I come home.

When I come home I need to throw off the world, peel it off like a soiled skin, throw it outside to be burned, locking the door tight. I need to let my soul expand, and then feed it nourishing food. Steve Carrell cannot do this for me. Only Jesus can. There is something about satire, about watching other people live and work and worry, that is comforting (in a bad way) to my soul on a weekday evening. But what if I had instead written more on this blog? What would I have discovered? What if, in a week spent reading Lauren Winner's latest book about embracing life in the middle, I had actually been brave enough to live in the middle of my own twenty-something angst?

Sometimes I worry about the things I miss.

 I did read my Bible everyday. That's something. And I liked it. That's something else.

I want to be like St. Therese of Lisieux. I want to like only what God likes.

I need to do work-work and leisure-work more joyfully.

For next time. . .on bearing fruit and needing to be buried in the earth before you do.

Turn my eyes from looking at worthless things (turn my heart from wanting to watch the Office) and give me life in your ways.

TULIP: Total Depravity

These days, I'm not much of a Calvinist. I can see the doctrine of predestination in the Bible, so I believe in it. But there are other aspects of Calvinism that do not stand out as clearly to me. One of them is the doctrine of total depravity. I've been thinking about it for years. I can't believe that human beings are worthless. But, please hear me, I do believe--yes and amen--that human beings are all sinful and deserving of the wrath of God. I do not believe that people deserve the grace of Christ. That being said, I want to talk about redemption.

For God to redeem something, for God to restore humanity, it seems to me that something in humanity needed to be reclaimed and salvaged. If fallen mankind is completely and totally wicked/vile/worthless, then what is God saving? It seems he's starting all over again, which isn't exactly what he does. He redeems people who already exist, he didn't destroy the human race and start all over. Also, or more importantly, if human beings are created in God's image, then the essentially good image of God rests in them, is part of them somehow.

All being is derived from God, because God is the only being who truly exists completely of himself, by himself, and in himself. That being said, human beings are borrowers of existence. Existence, being an attribute of God, is good in itself. God is the manifold of all perfections. He is perfect holiness, perfect love, perfect power, perfect existence. God is also perfectly good. Everything about him is good. His love is good, his holiness is good, his power is good, his existence is good. God created the world, and the people in it, and called it good. To be a created thing, to be a creature, is to have been made good by a perfectly good being. Wickedness, sin, evil, is a corruption of the good. Someone being sinful perhaps doesn't mean that they are totally depraved without one spark of good in them at all. Why? Because they exist still, and in existence is goodness. Where is the good in humanity? Well, there isn't much, but there is some, and it is all derived. It comes from being created, from being given existence, from being created to reflect the divine likeness. If humans are, by definition, created in God's image, then to lose that image is to lose one's very existence. Thus, when man fell, he didn't lose God's image, he tarnished it. Dragged it through the dirt, dishonored it. So why do I believe there is goodness in man? Because to be human is to borrow God's very image. And God's image is good.


Here is an image that may help explain my ideas. It's from St. Athanasius' On the Incarnation.

Athanasius says:

You know what happens when a portrait that has been painted on a panel becomes obliterated through external stains. The artist does not throw away the panel, but the subject of the portrait has to come and sit for it again, and then the likeness is re-drawn on the same material. Even so was it with the All-holy Son of God. He, the Image of the Father, came and dwelt in our midst, in order that He might renew mankind made after Himself, and seek out His lost sheep, even as He says in the Gospel: "I came to seek and to save that which was lost. This also explains His saying to the Jews: "Except a man be born anew . . ." He was not referring to a man's natural birth from his mother, as they thought, but to the re-birth and re-creation of the soul in the Image of God.

Think about that for a while.

Here is something I wrote out 3 years ago, while studying fairy tale literature in Oxford:

MY CURRENT THOUGHTS ON THE DOCTRINE OF TOTAL DEPRAVITY, courtesy of George MacDonald
DOES GOD REDEEM men of a certain mettle? Something in them is worthy already (I think this works for The Lost Princess too). How could someone redeem a slag heap, if there were no diamonds buried in it? To make a slag heap beautiful is to recreate it utterly. To find and brighten the gold specks in a slag heap is to redeem what is worthy and destroy what is unbeautiful. But this thought must make men proud. Calvinism is good at making men humble, because otherwise the slag heap can say, "How fine my gold must really be, for God to dig for me!" Forgetting immediately how a clean, holy, and beautiful God must put his pure fingers into putrid dung to find us. Instead, the slagheap must feel the weight of the awesome love of God, who counts us valuable enough to be worth getting his hands dirty and his heart--and body--broken. The response can only ever be gratitude, humble wonder, and praise. It is this counting us worth the trouble, that renders us with any value at all. We have worth because God says so, and because the light shining in us is one of His borrowed rays.

Perhaps this pokes holes in my own argument, but. . .

*logical conclusion: the devil and demons must have good in them somewhere, since they are created beings.
***BUT: the devil and fallen angels are not create in God's image, perhaps this makes a difference? Also, I'm not a dualist. So, the devil can't be "perfectly" evil, or he would be an opposing equal power to God, which isn't the case. God is the sole divine power and creator, who is blessed forever, amen.

*I think a lot of this might hinge on the idea that evil has no existence, that evil is, instead, a loss of existence.

What do you think?

Lent: Bad at it

To know you only
my soul disappears.
I tire of glimpsing you
in dusty mirrors.
The beauty in the world I know
is only ugliness to me
if you I cannot see.
pregnant with your love,
I climb.
But on this narrow stair,
I recall how fair,
the vanities of this world are.
And I find the path too steep,
the pain too deep—
to keep on looking for you.
I tear my hands—clutching
at blossoms—truly,
only—thorns in my side.
My pride
woos me to stay,
while fears
—heavy iron spurs—
slacken my steps,
protecting me from truth,
making my cup—a pulsing star—
overflowing with your joys,
bitter and black,
—gall and tar.
Drop!
Drop!
Your blood in my cup.
Shine
Shine
(your light in my eyes).
The water of life rushing
in my ears
the currents rise,
and carry me along,
so strong your rivers are.
Your song now
palatable—I float
my ascent, swallowing
mouthfuls of your words.
As the earth revolves
so I spin, turned by you
the One who moves.
Sugar and sadness in
my hymn, I begin to tune
my lips to your unchanging
symphony.
Clutching to the drifting sun,
I wash up on your
golden shore—
and I can't remember anymore
anything brighter than your face.

Lent: Oh! The Sweetness of Reality!

I am moved to blog about Lent. Though I didn't attend an official Ash Wednesday service, I had my own little inaugural ceremony a few nights ago. I'm trying to spend Lent understanding its purpose, and what it means to be in the desert. But, today, I realized that I've recently left my own wilderness. The last seven months were spent wandering through my own wasteland.

Now, with a new apartment, a new job, and a life that matches my own wishes with startling exactness, I find the terrain wooded and green. This has forced me to rethink my Lenten practices. I've decided to keep the fast by giving up things that distract or deaden; I'm taking a break from movies, TV (no Downton Abbey), and fictional narrative. I've given up these things because sometimes I use them as an opiate; I use them when I want to be removed from the Real, and in those moments I lose awareness. I'm resisting the urge to curl up with a good book and shut out the obvious.

I'm trying to learn to focus and to notice: primarily with poetry and the Bible. Poetry is important to this process because I can't read it in a hurry, and though I do get lost in a poem, it's not an inattentive absence.

This week, I've been reading Mary Oliver's The Leaf and the Cloud. I'm going to read it over and over again, though it's a 55 page poem, until I absorb it wholly. It's a helpful piece, so far, because in it Oliver roves through the glories of existence.

This Lent I'm working on two things: 1) Thankfulness, and 2) An awareness of the Real. Sometimes I forget how beautiful the world is. The Leaf and the Cloud has been helpful because it reminds me that there are things like swans, grass, and foxes. Oliver reminds me that there are, even on this broken planet, wonders like the "first egg with a tapping from inside."

A Lenten devotional I recently read said that after desert wandering comes thanksgiving. Therefore, one should either be holding on to God in the desert, or bursting with praise for being brought safely to the oasis on the other side. It's time for me to say thank you.

When I think of reality, I think of sad, prosaic things. No one ever says, "you need to face reality, come and look at this sweet little bird chirping on this branch." We use the word reality to represent the harshness of life. All is bitter, acerbic, acidity. But do you know what? Today I waited for the bus underneath a beautiful tree. It had a smooth trunk, curvy branches, and bunches of pink blossoms. Huge, black bumblebees were drinking its nectar, and the sky above it was so blue. That's reality.

Most importantly, if God is the Fount of Existence, and he is, then I need to be most aware of him. Most of my consciousness is spent on things that are not real, things that do not matter, things that don't push me to abide in God. Work, and public transportation, and grocery shopping, and checking my email, and filing my taxes, and getting up early every morning, and taking out the trash is not real. Clothes shopping, and grading papers and, balancing my checkbook, and reading Charles Dickens is not real. God is real. I don't think it's wrong to escape into film or literature, but the Beautiful is always in the room. What if, sometimes, I was more hospitable?

“Then the devil left him, and behold, angels came and were ministering to him.”

This is where I am, I choose Lent because I want to see ministering angels and birds newly hatched. I want to be familiar with the vigorous habits of bumblebees. I want to see it all and say thank you.

THANKS
W.S. Merwin
Listen
with the night falling we are saying thank you
we are stopping on the bridges to bow for the railings
we are running out of the glass rooms
with our mouths full of food to look at the sky
and say thank you
we are standing by the water looking out
in different directions.

back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging
after funerals we are saying thank you
after the news of the dead
whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you
looking up from tables we are saying thank you
in a culture up to its chin in shame
living in the stench it has chosen we are saying thank you
over telephones we are saying thank you
in doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators
remembering wars and the police at the back door
and the beatings on stairs we are saying thank you
in the banks that use us we are saying thank you
with the crooks in office with the rich and fashionable
unchanged we go on saying thank you thank you

with the animals dying around us
our lost feelings we are saying thank you
with the forests falling faster than the minutes
of our lives we are saying thank you
with the words going out like cells of a brain
with the cities growing over us like the earth
we are saying thank you faster and faster
with nobody listening we are saying thank you
we are saying thank you and waving
dark though it is

Turn my eyes from looking at worthless things, and give me life in your ways.

Lenten Preparations

I'm trying to decide what I should give up for Lent. This will be my second year actually observing all forty days. It's so strange to consider giving up something I'd rather keep. It's also strange because I remember how very endless Lent felt last year, and how the best part of that experience, was growing in an awareness of my own wickedness. It's terrible to contemplate one's faults. But, this is the point I think. I want to give up an unnecessary thing that I have come to believe is necessary. Something I turn to for comfort, entertainment, or solace instead of turning to God, or simply sitting in the presence of my own emptiness. There are some options spinning around in my head right now, but I sometimes find it hard to choose wise self-denial over masochism. I also learned last year that fasts really reconfigure human relationships. If I give up, say, going to the movies, or eating out, then I'm denying pleasures for other human beings besides myself. Lent is great, I tell you, because it also made me aware that my actions happen in community. Maybe I should just decide to do everything more slowly. I want this year to be about slowing down in meaningful ways. I want to calmly savor life, instead of swallowing it whole and running for the door.

Turn my eyes from looking at worthless things, and give me life in your ways.

My Dream Job

Vision of The Grotesque & The Beautiful

I hate ugliness. I hate ugliness so much that I try not to see it, to hear it, to smell it, or to conceive of it in any way that reveals its presence to me. I look at the world through a lens that denies the presence of what is ugly. No, not a vision of denial, but a vision of discontent. I look at things only to wish them more beautiful. I see wilting roses and picture them whole, full, devoid of brownish edges or insect perforations. It extends to all my senses. I attempt to keep out of my ears the noises of the world--television, radio stations, muzak in grocery stores--noise being its own kind of ugliness. There is a large medical building in my city painted a tawdry muddy-orange color. It makes me angry, it might have been prettier.

This vision of discontent, of continual demand for perfection from an imperfect world, may be a gift. Otherwise, it is my own ugliness. An ugliness that wants always to deny the imperfections of real things. It's not a blindness, it's a judging vision. It's been said that prophets are afflicted with divine discontent, and I like to believe that it is this affliction I bear. This kind of affliction made people like Amy Carmichael and George Mueller take in hundreds of street children, it's the kind that fuels abolition movements and unreasonable demands for justice--because these people were dissatisfied with what is. Lately though, I am in doubt.

This week I finished Mystery and Manners, a posthumous collection of prose by Flannery O' Connor. I love St. Flannery for so many reasons. First, because she is an excellent writer. Second, because she is right about everything. Third, because her own spiritual and artistic vision is so perfectly shaped and presented. She has left nothing out. This being said, it is disconcerting to be at odds with Flannery in my own way of looking at the world. But then, maybe I am not. Flannery is all about observation: she is concerned with looking at and recognizing what is present in the natural world in order to faithfully reveal its link to supernature. Nature pairs with grace & mystery with manners, Flannery tells us. Thus, her vision of the world involves judgment, because she sees the ultimate reality of the Triune God making himself known to us. And, along with this, she sees the rebellion and misery of humanity in fighting against this, its own perfect end. But what strikes me most is that Flannery concerns herself so much with seeing what is there and presenting exactly this to the reader. Her characters are often people who are physically ugly, as well as being spiritually so. Perhaps this is where our vision differs. I see what is there and in my own mind's eye strive to correct, to improve, to soften it's garishness. Flannery even extols the benefits of drawing classes for young novelists, drawing being an activity that helps you to see what is there. Flannery's thorough perception recognizes what is there and serves it to you raw and unedited--grotesque humanity on a silver platter of truth.

Do I shun the grotesque? Or do I, like Flannery, see the world and human nature in it's impoverished state and yearn for what it ought to be? For what it may be? In my view of the world do I miss something? Am I ignoring the downtrodden? The broken-hearted? The least of these?

The smelly, filthy, homeless, disabled man on the bus is grotesque. I sit with him in a vehicle with large, glassy windows that let in the light. Together we travel, our lives drowned out under the roar of the engine. But I sit there because I can't escape. I politely breathe through my mouth instead of covering my nose so that he will not realize the smell of him makes me afraid. I look at him and think detached, philosophical thoughts about humanity and its depravity. Is that the way to look at the grotesque? I sit there with him and think about other things, with my nose stuck in a book, ignoring the present scents of disaster and decay to picture clean skin, beds of lavender, rain-washed air.

To see the grotesque do I have to love it? Or merely embrace its presence? Are loving and embracing one act?

Am I looking for the good beneath the ugliness? Or am I simply trying to recognize and greet the presence of the ugly?

I know it is wrong to only love what is beautiful. Or rather, is it wrong to love what only appears beautiful? Love is not concerned, perhaps, with the goodness of the thing loved; but with willing and bringing good to the object of the love.

And what am I to think of my own grotesqueness? God does not love me because I am beautiful. He loves me even though I am ugly. And in this love his beauty is communicated to me. If the call is merely to love, then my response ought to be constant, loving, attentiveness.

Yes! This is it, attention well paid, a certain homage performed. A recognition of presence. The presence of the grotesque.


and the real always trumps the imagined
as the invisible transcends the perceived


Are perfection, beauty, & goodness the result of that loving attentiveness? Do I look at what is and love it because it ought to be higher? Love it for what it could be? Love it to make it rise?

I am on a quest to use my imaginative faculty for good. I want to know how to see what is there, but not in a dull complacency that makes me wring my hands. Nor in a zeal for perfection that makes me sweep over any good concealed. Rather, I want to cultivate a welcoming attentiveness that helps me to see the good that is present--for what is good is better than what is beautiful. I think.


Turn my eyes from looking at worthless things and give me life in your ways.

Portrait of a. . .?

Don't read Henry James. There are better things to do with one's time. However, I'm reading Henry James' Portrait of a Lady just now, and his writing style does begin to grow on one. This is still not an excuse for you to read Henry James. It isn't that I don't love to picture sun-warmed stone benches and tangled rose vines in Florence, don't misunderstand me. I'd just rather fill in the details for myself and skip the pages where he tries to bend my imaginative faculty to his too-vigorous descriptions.

I'm thinking, as usual, about my life. I'm bored. I find that in trying to carefully keep the balance between prudential living and passionate adventurism I continually manage to do nothing at all. This is a problem because, like I said, I'm bored. I always admire the friends who pursue what sounds good to them--the ones who seem to discredit all the reasons against adventure. I apparently ought to marry the reasons against adventure because I love them so much. Sometimes I ask myself what I'd do if I could do whatever my heart desired. The answer doesn't seem to be so different than what I'm preparing to do: go to grad school, become fluent in French, and live abroad. But, I'd do it more carelessly perhaps. With a truer zest for life, with more expectation of goodness.

The future has almost ceased to interest me. That is, except for those moments when I'm still curious about how I'll "turn out". At 25, am I finally nearing the point when I can no longer ask such questions? At which point, exactly, will I be turned? At 30? I feel that the older I get, the more my possibilities diminish, yet I don't know what the possibilities have been or are currently. But I am getting sidetracked.

I do not like regret. I do not like it, because I believe it has no cure. In college, I denied myself many pleasures for the greater pleasure of being a good student. Do not ask me what it means to be a good student. I have asked myself that question so many times I couldn't make you a decent answer. However, the point remains. I pursued (and I'm glad of it still) academic rigor at the expense of having a good time. Well, now my academic rigors have subsided, at least for a while, and I am still not having a good time. I'm working full-time again, as I do every summer, and finding it delightful in many ways. The great difference between this year and last is that I'm not frantically reading ahead--or generally angsty about the duration of my degree.I'm finished now. This is a glorious truth which I frequently turn to ponder in my soul. It maketh the heart glad.

But, the point. I expected greater responsibilities after college. I expected to have to act like a grown-up. Although, as I've been paying for most of the costs of my maintenance for years not much has changed there.

The thing I also expected, which has turned out to be a grave disappointment, was to find waiting for me the pleasures I disdained to get all of those books read.

It isn't here. Here is a 40-hour work week and aimless free time after hours. Here are friends who live too far away or who are too busy with their marriages or careers to indulge in the pleasures of the life I've so long postponed.

Here, now, with wings finally unfurled, I find that I've not escaped the cage. It was a different place, with my wings submissively folded in, but now they are open and restless for wind. They scrape the prison bars and a few feathers are torn loose and drift to the floor.

I made a rule before graduating against parenthetical living. Parenthetical living being, of course, my only skill and glory. So I ask myself, am I waiting in vain for a time when life will be more accessible? I hope not, because that time will not come, I'm certain of this now.

A friend of mine once remarked, after spontaneously piercing her eyebrow at 25, that if you miss youthful folly when you're young, you mayn't make up for it later. It's too late then. Is it too late now?

I so want to enjoy myself. I have known keen intellectual pleasures over the past seven years, yes, but other avenues of existence have been wanting. It is time to turn down other lanes if I have not lost the way.

I want to fly.

In search of some water that isn't so smeary

One of the worst things about living with 7 women in a cramped house is never having space to reflect. Even when I have room in my schedule for being time, which is not very often, I must war against the forces of chaos in my own home. There is no place in my home where I can hide from the world. Living in the midst of so many people is a little like living in a bus terminal. It isn't a place to dwell, but rather an in-between-place. It's a shooting-off point for going or coming, never for being. I love all the women I live with, but, there are really, very, many of them. This means that contemplative time becomes media time. Instead of reading or writing or merely sitting in silence, I watch Gilmore Girls or crack jokes about our Landlord and The Poolboy . I enjoy these things, but when they are over, and I take myself to bed, I find that I am missing something. I'm missing peace. In order to find peace and rhythm and balance in the midst of a hectic life, I need time to be. I used to run away to coffee shops for this, because it is possible to shut out the world if you don't know the world by name and it isn't asking you to have in-depth conversations about racism or tell you a funny anecdote from its day.
I want peace. I can do the busy, crazy, hectic, frantic chaos that is daily life only if I stop in-between-times to be and to create cosmos for myself. So I'm taking this moment, the few brief minutes between class and work, to stop and reflect on my internal state. I feel crowded. Not merely hedged in on every side by living partners, but also crowded with things, with noise, with bustle. I think I'd like to spend some time on top of a mountain, just for the sake of sitting in open air and silence--not surrounded by possessions, not distracted by disorder, just given the chance to be.
It's Lent, and I'm hardly aware of it because the chaos that is around me is entering my soul. I can't hear the voice of God over the screechings of audible and visible clutter. I often wonder what it would be like to live with all of my possessions on my back. Like a fairy tale character, my kerchief tied to a stick, holding within it every thing on this earth I call mine. It sounds so sweet and free sometimes, to live this way. I would often like to have no blanket but the stars, no pillow but the earth, no lullaby but the dance of the planets. I've been thinking so much about eternity and the weight of the world. I don't believe the body is bad, as Plato does, but the body is so prone to gathering things about itself, things that weigh it down and prevent it from glimpsing what is meant foremost to be seen.
Lent, when I remember it's Lent because someone offers me a cookie--reminds me of the cumbersome nature of possessions. Giving up "pleasure foods" in some ways isn't even hard, because I'm still surrounded by so much real, natural, healthy food. Abundance is with us still. I think it's the abundance that bothers me, that hinders my being, because it's of the wrong sort. It isn't the abundance of charity, of peace, or of beauty; it's the abundance of worthless items crowding the vision of my heart, body, and brain.

Turn my eyes from looking at worthless things; and give me life in your ways.

"You're glumping the pond where the Humming-Fish hummed!
No more can they hum, for their gills are all gummed.
So I'm sending them off. Oh, their future is dreary.
They'll walk on their fins and get woefully weary
in search of some water that isn't so smeary."

Today

Today I'm sitting in an armchair listening to the wind blow through the weeds in the driveway. It's nice, sitting here, momentarily believing that nothing I do matters. Right now I don't want anything but to be here, in this room, in this house, wearing these clothes, and enjoying this weather. I am content just now; but in about five minutes I will be grumpy again.

Sometimes I wish I could be free of all desire. Sometimes I think living would be better if I didn't have any vested interest in my own existence. I've been thinking about the verse that says "and this is eternal life, that they may know you the only true God and Jesus Christ who you have sent". It's hard to think about life in terms of relationship with a person, especially with the Poet of the Cosmos. I want to pursue real life and seek after real love, and live with a full awareness of the glorious inheritance that is mine in Jesus. I want to enjoy what is temporal and tangible, but I want to love and recognize with my whole self what is eternal and invisible.

I learned to pray in French class two days ago. I'm realizing that what's important for me in language learning is developing early on a spiritual/emotive/religious vocabulary. It's all well and good to memorize the words to "La Vie en Rose", but it's better to be able to speak to God straight from the heart in another tongue. The most beautiful thing I learned about speaking to God in French is that when we pray we use the informal second person "tu" as opposed to the more respectful but distant "vous". This is lovely because it means that when I speak with God, I speak with him as someone close beside me, not far away.

Notre Père Céleste,

Nous te remercions
pour ta grâce,
pour ta bonté, et
pour ta fidélité.

Nous prions,
pour la joie
et la paix dans le monde

Nous prions ceci au nom de Jésus.
Amen!



O Lord, open thou our lips
and our mouths shall show forth thy praise.

Autumn's Waif

Update.

My life is the same. As you may have already noticed, this is a post for the post's sake. The last month has been full of back to school things, 7 new roommates, a new house, grad school plans, a new job, and of course the loveliest weather change of the year. Today I am wearing a sundress, cardigan, and tights. Because the sky is that tranquil grey-blue---the kind that makes me want to listen to jazz and drink chai green tea and cuddle and eat squash and bake pies. I love fall. What am I thinking about just now? I wish I knew. I've been feeling so overwhelmed lately, life is really full this year, and I don't like fullness. I do college by living like a desert hermit, and so having things like a house and roommates who are kindred spirits transforms all of my academic fervor into more of a feverish hallucination. Right now, I'm mostly just tired of having to study things I don't care about. I don't want to read Cicero, and think about rhetoric. I want to write a play, and bake a pie, and wear cute sweaters and crazy tights and tramp about in wellingtons and mind my own business and step on crimson leaves and be glad. Just that deep, simple merriment that comes from the comforts of the material world in the year's grey-beard time. I want to take communion from a golden chalice at an Anglican church, I want to turn into the spirit of autumn, and participate in a glorious Bacchic frenzy.

Oh, to be the spirit of an autumn wind!

I want to read poetry, and write poetry, and hear poetry, and snap my fingers. I want to waltz across my wooden floor. I want to paint with gold and red and blue! Fall is full of surprises and secrets. Perhaps because Christmas is at the end of it. Autumn, the season of promise--what a fullness of life is fall! Fall is not the decay and corruption of old age, it is the maturity, the fullness of a life well lived. It is a red rose fully bloomed, just before the petals start to wilt. And if death is what comes after, then death itself is a beautiful gift, because it's all wrapped up in a smoky, cloudy haze of awful mystery, and I love it.

Everything is richer now; truer, bolder. Not happy, but joyful. Not pretty, but beautiful. Not well brought up, but well preserved. Regal. Mature. Real.

How full is fall!