(un)Veilings

Birds of many feathers Part II: As long as the birds can get high enough to see beyond the crevasse

Thank you everyone for such a great discussion!  I hope those whose perspectives differ from the ones offered so far feel free to join in.

Here is some of what I've heard us saying:

• Devoutness comes in many forms--both religious and not, evangelical and not.  And we're all devoted to something...many things.
• This begins a list of ways that people are alike:
  • Early formation probably has a lot to do with our epistemology--the stories we internalize about how to know what's true.  Some epistemologies have more wiggle room than others, and therefore lend themselves more naturally to a variety of ways of finding truth.
  • Regardless of our epistemology, respect and tolerance are challenges for all of us, inside and outside of religion.
  • Seeking security/self-protection is a natural instinct, and making sense of the world/self/God is part of how we protect ourselves.  Establishing a shared reality around this sense furthers our protection; camaraderie makes us feel (and actually be more) secure, and feel more like the sense that we've made is right.
  • When the sense we've made gets challenged, we instinctually move to protect ourselves more, by protecting what's being challenged.  This is normal.  There's nothing wrong with this.
  • Unlike many other types of animals, we can more easily (I say more easily because I think this doesn't come easily for everyone) self-reflect and recognize we're feeling challenged, feeling self-protective, and make decisions about how we want to respond to such feelings.  We can consider the ramifications of our responses for our relationships.
• Religious devotion (and possibly any devotion at all) that includes vulnerability and insecurity may be and open up the possibility for non-violence in ways that other types of devotion cannot.
• Religious devotion (and any kind of devotion at all) that requires assent to a set of assertions--assent, specifically, that claims security and invulnerability--may be and open up the possibility for violence in ways the alternatives do not.

In light of all of this, I've been thinking more about that list that began the last post.  I'm wondering whether all of it needs to be changed.  I have this image in my mind of what it means to differ from another person about some fundamental thing--whether God exists, for example, or what God is actually like, or what in our heart of hearts, we're like.  It's the image of a chasm, opened wide between you two.  I suppose the wideness of the chasm depends on how different your views actually are from each another's.  But still, I think the chasm's there.

And I think it's possible to live one's entire life feeling, and therefore believing, that that chasm defines, entirely, relationship with that other person (or group.  I think we often see people as members of groups, rather than as individuals--Jews/non-Jews, Christians/non-Christians, theists/athiests, gays/straights, men/women).  Sometimes that chasm is so deep, and so wide, that it's nearly impossible to ever, even with the best of luck, see anything beyond it.

But this is the other thing I'm becoming convinced of:  these chasms aren't all there is.  In any dyad, and a dyad can be two people, or two groups, or one person and a group, whatever--in any dyad I think there are multiple chasms, as well as multiple stretches where the ground between the two parts comes completely together.  And I think that even in the case of chasms, there are often also bridges, where abysses can actually be crossed, albeit sometimes only skillfully, and sometimes at great peril...or great cost.

But the terrain is varied, is what I'm saying.  Between all of us.  Try living with someone--even someone you're madly in love with--for any length of time, and any dream of only solid, crackless ground will dissipate into all the little and big things that drive you nuts about them (God bless their soul), or, and this may be more pertinent to this conversation, all the ways you realize you don't see things as similarly as you thought.  You'll realize that for the sake of love, and of peace, and of sane cohabitation, both of you must work to find ways around those chasms.  Or through them.  Both of you must believe that they aren't the only thing there is.

I think this is true of relationships across any religious or devotional divide.

So.  In the case of that list from last time, maybe people from different sides of religious divides can actually talk honestly about religion--even openly about thinking the other person is wrong--and remain genuinely respectful of one another if, and this is an enormous if, I think--they can also include in their active awareness the knowledge that the terrain between them is varied, and includes long stretches of connection.  Long stretches of ground that's in common, and passed easily between.  Sometimes it's probably even necessary--not optional, but necessary--for the two to explore together where those places of connection are.  Not doing so can mean the chasm (or chasms) defining the whole relationship, and consequently coloring completely both party's feelings about one another.  Feelings for people across chasms, at least as far as I can see, aren't generally pretty.

This "if" is a big one, though, and one that's hard to find in many circles.

So the question then begs asking:  is it really worth finding places of connection and common ground when a) the chasms between two people or two groups are immense, and/or b) one half of the dyad in question isn't interested in searching for them?

I think in many cases it's not.

I think there are cases where all this kind of searching does is leave one or both parties constantly scraped and bruised, constantly hopeless and frustrated, constantly yearning for some kind of home, some kind of place to relax and be at ease.  I think there are times in certain lives when peace is what's needed most--needed to heal, needed to discover oneself actually normal, rather than whatever alternate labels keep getting lobbed across those voids.

Maybe there are times for unpeace, too, though.  Times for unrest.  Times when getting bruised constantly is a kind of gift a person gives to those who come after.  Examples paint history, where people of color and homosexuals and women and youth and elderly--where people of all kinds have participated in the very groups that would exclude them and call them evil or less than or stupid.  Those who have stayed active in such groups, doggedly proclaiming, even if by their silent presence alone, that chasms aren't all there is:  I could weep in gratitude.  Thank you.  What a silly, tinny phrase to give to such world-changing work.

I'm thinking that that work isn't everyone's though, and that each of us must decide which relationships, or potential relationships, we need to walk away from, and which ones we must navigate the chasms of.  Because chasms, it seems to me, mark them all.

What do you think, though?  Am I wrong in some of this?  And in which cases are the BIGGIES, the canyons that can make the Grand one look small, worth working around for the sake of relationship?

Birds of many feathers (as long as we don't talk about feathers)

I'm really interested in this whole discussion (from the last post).  It sounds like we all agree that meaningful relationship across the religious divide is possible, but only if:

a) we don't talk about religion, or
b) we're open to the other person being right (about their religious beliefs) or both of us being wrong or
c) we think we're right, but we nevertheless don't see other people as projects, in need of conversion.

Here's the problem I see:  none of these seem like options for the deeply devout.  Am I wrong in this?  When I was an evangelical Christian, I took my faith very seriously.  My feelings, on one level, so confirmed for me the rightness of my spiritual path, and the teachings of my holy book seemed to so clearly say mine was the only True way, that the thought of another religion being more true than mine was nearly inconceivable.  Furthermore, my understanding of hell, and my conviction that many would end up there if they didn't turn to Jesus:  these made it nearly impossible for me NOT to see anyone not so turned as a mission field.  I didn't use in-your-face conversion tactics, but I was very aware of trying to be a good witness for the Truth, of watching for chances to speak of Jesus, of feeling a warm gladness if conversation turned to religious things.  My heart was good; I genuinely wanted non-Christians to know the Truth, and to spend eternity with God.  But the effect of this good-heartedness was to make people into projects.  My relationships were colored by this conversion agenda, and when things stayed "light" (i.e. I just had fun with non-Christians and didn't think or talk about anything goddish) I felt by the end of the time a little disappointed, and a little bit guilty.

Is is possible to not be like this, and also be deeply devout?  I'd love to hear what it would look like if it is.

Taking steps away from religion, I think it's entirely possible to have conversion agendas about things other than God.  We all have them--desires for friends to try the beer we like, or join the neighborhood watch, or be convinced of global warming, or that we need to do something about Darfur, Congo, AIDS, cancer research, etc.  The difference, though--and this is part of Harris's point I think--is that all of these other agendas can be discussed in terms of observable evidence, while the finer points of religious belief cannot.  At the end of the day, a "leap of faith" must be made when it comes to trusting that God has revealed God's ultimate plan for the world in the Bible, or Allah dictated the Quran, or a man named Noah existed, and all of us--black, brown, white, yellow, red--are his descendants.

So the agendas on the plates of the religiously devout have a different sort of charge to them I think, and a really challenging combination of having everything at stake (i.e. eternal location), and no luxury of observable evidence, beyond our subjective feelings of our religion being true, of God being one way versus another, etc., to use for the convincing.  How can we as humans NOT get a little dogmatic, even if just in our hearts, when we're up against this sort of challenge, and needing to psyche ourselves up for the work we feel God's given us to do?

I'm still back to wondering whether it's possible for the religously devout to come to relationship with people of other faiths, or no faith, and have the kind of intimacy with them, or just merely the respect, that seems built on seeing each other as equals.  I'm thinking that it's not.

Only birds of a feather?

I'm reading Sam Harris's The End of Faith these days--a book I'd like to review here in coming weeks, once I'm through.  It's very quotable.  He's more caustic than I'd want to be were I to broach his subject, but I think he has some very important things to say.  He thinks there's no way to avoid escalating violence in our world except for religion to die.  He thinks religion divides people irreconcilably, and makes rational discourse impossible, since faith, as he sees it defined by the majority in every religious tradition, is belief that things about God and our world are true without needing evidence to prove it.  Without evidence available to discuss the truth or untruth of a claim, and indeed, in a climate where criticizing or critiquing one another's faith is taboo, how can we navigate life together?  How can we not stay divided if each of us believes deeply something fundamentally different about God (as one example) which isn't open to rational, evidentiary discourse?

I'm not sure if you got all that, but what I'm wondering a lot these days is whether he's right.  One of the greatest tragedies I know, and by know I mean experientially, is the way religious beliefs divide people who otherwise have so much in common.  There are so many things that all of us, across the board of religions and cultures, share in being human--fears that we have, hopes, longings, worries about jobs or kids or finances, losses, illnesses, joys, experiences of redemption.  We have a wealth of things in common.  And yet it seems to me that religion becomes a kind of gatekeeper for any of this to get realized.  If I'm not one of your flock, the gateway of meaningful relationship gets swung shut.  And vice versa.  The gate becomes what determines whether or not we can be comfortable together, whether or not we can explore the geographies inside of us to discover common ground.  Indeed, it can become a source of bitterness and condescension and rivalry and distrust.  It causes violence.

Do you think this is true?  Is intimacy and respect, of the kind for which I imagine all of us ultimately long, possible between people when one or both are religiously devoted, but not to the same religion?  Maybe the taboos against critiquing faith are really about trying to keep that gatekeeper sleepy, trying to find ways to slip past an otherwise wall to find ourselves together, at ease, in love.

Inside the divided self

I know many of you are not involved in a Christian subculture, but those of you who are might appreciate what Bobbie has to say in her latest post, Dirty Little Secrets:  Porn and the Church.  Regardless of how you personally define God and Satan, heaven or hell, I think her theory makes a lot of sense, and gets to some important layers of what's true of us--maybe particularly of those involved in public forms of ministry or service.  Go check it out.

The things on which we writers stand

This week seems like the week for blogging writing things.  I wrote about the tug-of-war between my writing and mothering lives last time.  Jen Zug has been blogging her commitments and feelings around moving toward a book project.  Jen Lemen has written about her writing process, how the non-writing, extroverted stuff of her life is the food that fuels her muse, and how her muse is also wooed to work by music.

I want to write some more on my writing life, and specifically on the weirdness of claiming this vocation before having a resume to stand it on.

Sure I have a resume.  I've done some things, worked some great jobs, gotten a few degrees, and really everything I've ever done in my life is related to writing (as could be said of anyone's life, were they to wake up tomorrow as writers).

But my resume has little by way of publications.  That's what I mean.

What other occupation can a person claim without some sort of institution saying, "This person?  This worker?  We pay her for this job.  She works for us."?  Parenting, sure.  But that's different.  I could write a book on how that's different.

I was having dinner last night with some friends, telling them about a website I'm creating (with the help of cleave*design).  It's an author website, and I want to have a place there to talk about the projects I'm working on.  The bulk of my writing gets poured into a novel, which you won't see in print for an unknown length of time (I'm working on revisions, but there is much to be done on that front.).  I wrote a short story this summer that, even as I type, is on its cross-country quest for a home.  And an essay I wrote about my early moves away from the faith of my childhood will be run in the OE Journal this fall.  That essay may turn into a book proposal sometime soon.  But...and this was what I was asking my friends... Which one of those projects can any of you see now, hold in your hands, or open on your screens, and say in response to:  "This, now this is the work of a writer."?

Not one.

They aren't avaiable yet.  And yet I am a writer.  That's what I do.  It's a strong soul, no?, that can claim something confidently using evidence the public just has to trust you on.  Ten years from now I hope to refer you to a nice bundle of proof, a nice collection of stories and books and essays on which Almighty Editors have smiled kindly, and that bear that magical, chills-producing phrase, "by Kristin Noelle". 

But this is now, and that bundle is still in its womb-entombed stages.  So ask me what I do--go ahead--and I'll move through an entire Rocky scene inside before answering.  I'll set my alarm for 4am and pop up for a high-protein shake and a 10-mile run and do a whole punching bag routine before throwing around some weights and maybe even get sit-ups in before flexing all my muscles and meditating for a long, silent stretch in that position before saying in my calmest, most built-on-a-psyched-up-internal-foundation voice:  "I'm a writer."

And you'll nod pleasantly and say, "Really?  What do you write?"

And I'll say, "Fiction, mostly."

And my inner Rocky will be like, YEAH!, and growl a few times while flexing my whole upper body, and then jump around with my fists up, like I'm in a ring, ready to win every single round against that menace that is So You Don't Actually Have a Real Job Then, Do You.

And you'll say, "Cool!  I've always wanted to write," or some version of that.  And the conversation will move on, and Rocky will realize how exhausted she is, and wonder why in heck she just did that whole routine. I'll look at her gratefully and say with my eyes, "That was awesome.  You did great," and daydream of the day I won't feel like I need her. 

I'll daydream of being like my friends last night, who said, "Why do you need publications to be legitimate?  You're a writer.  That's what you do." I'll forget entirely how much I wanted to kiss them all.

On being a me kind of tree

This week marks the fifth anniversary of the Towers falling, and hundreds more of waves of effects, rippling out from that day. 

When the Towers fell, I had just finished seminary, was one month into therapy, and about three years into the most paralyzing identity crisis I had known.  It was the second day of a week of testing my blood sugars hourly in attempts at getting them controlled.  The stress of the preceding years had taken it's toll on my body, and I had developed hypoglycemia.  I was hunkering down by this and other means to be more careful, that is, full of care, for this body that is me, and this psyche that was so in need of attention.

So my reaction to the attacks was different than it would have been at any other time in my life.

At any other time, I would have probably cried a lot that week.  I would have probably focused in on all the images of tears, of horror-stricken faces, of bloodied bodies and terrified eyes, hanging posters of loved ones, hoping them alive.  My soul would have conformed to these images, taking on the feelings I saw there, experiencing them, at least fractionally, as my own.  By the end of that week, I would have been exhausted.

But I already was exhausted at that point, so the energy I had to give new feelings was low.  I was also freshly learning that my tendency to become the suffering around me was more about me suffering what was inside myself, and needing outlets for that, since I wasn't doing it consciously for me.  It was also about suffering for the people I was close to and cared deeply for, but felt powerless to help.  Displaced care was what it was, at least largely.  And not by choice, I was learning fall of 2001 that the compassion I sloshed over everyone else needed channelling toward me.  If, in fact, I was interested in healing.

And I was.  Desperately.

So my heart sunk like everyone else's that day, and I stayed shaken from any sense of normalcy.  But I didn't descend toward despair like was my former style.  I kept checking my blood sugars.  I kept eating snacks.  I went to therapy the next day and talked, after the first number of minutes, about things other than New York.

Surely there are degrees of connection, and were I living anywhere near New York at the time, or had I known anyone injured or killed in that Nightmare, I would have appropriately been consumed for months, if not years, with fear and grief and rage.  So I want to tread carefully here, and say what I really mean.

What I mean is that there are awful, awful things happening in our world every minute.  And not just far from where I am.  They're next door.  They're in the next block.  They're all across our country.  And there are wonderful things, too, and wonderful movements of people to join--people caring about and engaging all the yuck, and with hope and courage and imagination.

But since fall of 2001, only coincidentally starting at the same time as those attacks, I have been working hard to more mindfully listen to myself and tend to my own suffering first, so that the tending I do outwardly might be more true.  By true I mean being less about displaced compassion--less about spinning subconscious wheels to try to get my needs for self-love and attention met, or to try to be helpful in a world where the people I care most for appear so unhelpable--and more about compassion bubbling consciously up from the wounds that I've tended inside myself.  And from knowing, because of that tending, who I am and the kind of "tree" that I am--the kinds of yuck that my shade and shelter instinctually move toward.  Those are the things to which I want to give my life.  Those are what I want to be missional about, and do what it takes to engage.  To not become indifferent toward.

Everything else is torches others must carry.  I have only two hands and one heart, and not just any hands and heart, but mine, which are wonderfully fashioned for a certain kind of engagement with our world--with its ugliness and it's breathtaking beauty.  They're poorly made for other kinds, and the more I learn to recognize which is which, the less money I'll need to spend on therapy.  And the more all of us benefit. 

Or so I'm thinking.

So I live in this post 9/11 world.  I live under a president whose decisions I'm ashamed of and angered by.  I live in a region where poverty gets shuffled to the other side of the tracks and keeping up with the Joneses is considered high moral ground.  I live where people know more about work than they do about their families, and where they have to, because it costs that much to live.

But I'm not giving a lot of energy to these things.  And not because I don't think they need lots of people, pouring lots of energy into addressing them.  I'm not because my energy for doing what seems like good in the world is being spent elsewhere, being nurtured for other things.  I'm pouring it into trying to stay awake to the souls around me, to inner change, to possibilities for healing.  To what it means to heal after being hurt by religion and by being silenced and by feeling shame.  To talking about beauty and calling attention to it.  To honoring what often goes unnoticed.

I'm trying to find that space where care for the layers of suffering in our world is neither narrowed by tunnel vision on these things that I'm about, nor made bland by getting spread too thin.  Where I own my own suffering, and tend to it, so that what I end up spilling inadvertantly around me is hope, of the realest, most authentic kind.  Is shade from my branches, reaching naturally toward sun.

The push and pull of being seen

I'm wondering if one of our greatest desires and greatest fears as humans is to be seen.  We desire it because ultimately we don't want to feel alone--to feel like the contours of us, the little and big things that make us us, in mind and body and spirit, won't be loved or appreciated.  Noticed.  But it's our greatest fear, too, I think, because what if the seer doesn't like what they see?  What if I don't like it, and the image I want you to have of me can't match what you'll see if you really see me?

I wonder if this is what feels so amazing about meeting soul friends--people cut from your same cloth.  They see you so much more instinctually than average, with so much less work, because seeing you is partly like seeing their own selves.  You don't need so many words to explain yourself.  Fear comes in because you feel so exposed to them--so unable to hide--and maybe you're both trying to avoid the same inner darknesses so you get all uptight and lash out (even if just inside) when one of theirs rears its head.  But in so many ways you feel safe with them, like they can be tender with what's vulnerable in you, because the same things are vulnerable in them, too. 

Is it possible to be soul friends with the universe?

Sometimes I feel so connected with everything that it hurts.  Sometimes I feel like I'm in love as I walk under an enormous tree, as I look up at the sky when the sun is just rising, or sit in a crowd of people.  I want to make love to it all, and not in some twisted, literal way.  It's the longing to express how much I appreciate it all, how beautiful and amazing I find it, or even how ghastly or terrible.  So my connection isn't about feeling like everything is lovely.  It's about feeling like everything is so rich, so shockingly textured and colored and sounded and smelled.  So there.  So true.  I want to honor it all deeply.  To say how much I see.

So I write.  I do other things, too, like try not to rush too much of the time, like turn the radio off, or point things out to the person I'm with.  But my writing is my most intentioned way of saying to what's true around me:  I see you.  I honor you.  I won't blindly pass you by.

But as any soul relationship goes, I feel the universe sometimes avoiding me.  Is it afraid of being so seen?  Is it shy?  Does it have some major thing to hide?  I yearn to connect with It, to study, to write, to paint, to take pictures, to somehow make sure the richness of It all gets seen and remembered, but in so many ways I feel thwarted.  The work of running a household and sustaining life becomes a decoy--all the toilets that must be scoured and dishes that must get washed and mouths that must be fed and money that must get earned and health insurance companies that must be talked with for hours at a time, repeatedly.  The cars that have to be serviced and doctor's appointments that have to be gone to and clothes that must be bought and of course laundered, repeatedly.  The doing doesn't end.  And then there's the cultural myths that degrees and production and power and fame are what's truly important anyway, so all the stuff of sustainance is only a baseline that must be far exceeded for any worth at all to be achieved.

These things distract me.

Or so it feels.  They feel like the universe veiling itself, dodging me, dodging the best intentions of all of us who feel so alive to it, so eager to be awake to it and in deeper communion.

Must we settle for crumbs of connection?  Is the universe so cagey, or is there another way to see it--this situation, this living in urban America (or wherever else you happen to be) in 2006?

Now if you'll excuse me, I've a baby to get up from a nap.  And a house to clean.  And an empty fridge to fill. 

Sigh. 

Universe?  I love you.

A grounded weave

It's Saturday, and I'm sitting on a bench on Stanford's campus, surrounded by palm trees and ivy and massive stone buildings.  Memorial chapel is to my right and I hear the bell tower bong in the distance, water from a fountain cascading endlessly nearby.  Jet black squirrels bound across pavement; birds flit through morning routines.  What does this do to me, in me?

Since Robin sent me this link I've been thinking about land and space, about the ways these get inside of you, providing threads for the weave that is how you think about life and self and God, how you see yourself in relation to them.  The link is to a sermon that deals, in part, with the ways the natural world shaped its writer's life.

I grew up in a desert in California, in the heart of the San Joaquin Valley.  We had two seasons there:  hot, and gray.  The grayness was fog that was a lid on our valley through winter.  Often it descended to the ground, making visibility no farther than the tullip tree on our front lawn.  While other regions have snow days, we had fog days--school delayed or cancelled because of the challenge fog posed for safe travel.  Seriously.

But summer was nearly the opposite.  From May through most of October temperatures hovered in the upper 90s, often staying near or surpassing 100 for long stretches.  It was dry heat, and fierce.  Bare feet were only for grass.  There were no clouds in the sky, save the accumulation of dust and exhaust and pollen and the various sprays the farmers used to work their fields. 

Which is one of the ironies, I think, of my early desert home: it was shockingly furtile.  One of the hugest exporters of produce in the world.  Nectarines, peaches, plums, apricots, apples, almonds, pistachios, walnuts, grapes, cherries, tomatoes, melons, oranges, lemons, grapefruit, tangerines.  The list really does go on.  And it was furtile not because these things could grow on their own, could just spring up and stay there, happy.  This was a desert, after all.  It was because people worked night and day to make it so.  The irrigation system there alone inspires awe.  The human power it takes to plant and pick and prune that list is breathtaking, no matter how many machines are involved.  And the machines!  I went with some friends to a county fair one time and felt like I had been transplanted to another universe, walking through rows of metal giants engineered for every kind of farm need imaginable--a show for farmers, apparently, to elicit the lust unique to that trade.

So this rhythm, this hot and gray cycle with the relentless backdrop of turning desert into food:  this was the natural world that joined the shaping of me.

I think about all of this as I ponder my spirituality, and my early thoughts about God.  I think about how hot it felt to be under God's gaze.  How wide open my life seemed to Him (my early God was male)--no mountains or hills or forests in which to hide.

I think about how hard I understood the Christian life to be.  How much work it took to learn about God and to nurture the fruits of God's spirit. How His fruits didn't come naturally, and required constant planfulness and attention, including practices that weren't spontaneous to body or soul's terrain.  But how diligence usually paid off.  How satisfying the rows of tended thoughts and prayers and plans and relationships could feel.  Mine was not an untamed heart.

And I think about the quietness I loved about the fog, the way I felt hugged by it.  How I liked to feel hidden inside of it, even as I worried about its effects on my bangs.  There is safety in fog, even with its danger.  Safety in feeling a cushion between oneself and the directness of an exacting God.  People get killed in the stuff--huge pile-ups along Highway 99--but there are trade offs, too.  Sometimes danger is worth a little quiet anonymity.

My heart has had seasons of growth since then, seasons of new lands and new threads added from those lands.  I lived in Oregon and now near San Francisco's bay, and my heart is learning what it means to grow a little more wild.  To have flora and fauna natural to it flourish.  To think of God with the subtlety of gentle sunshine, like we have a lot of here; with the playfulness of our on and off breeze.  I don't think early threads ever get unwoven, though, so I carry in me desert, too.  Always.  The promise of much fruit and the understanding that a lot of work may be involved in cultivating it.  I carry in me stark, open land that is a kind of inescapable honesty, and a yearning to be wrapped up in the danger-comfort of something soft and accepting and mysterious and quiet.

God isn't my desert-God anymore, though, and I'm not sure how that happened, how the threads that were my early God became a garment that lays on the ground now, God clothed in other things, or sometimes all the way bare.  God seems a kind of mystery that resists the clothes I offer, that seems to be taking of my desert threads, and my wet, green Oregon threads, and the threads of my current space and weaving from them something I can't yet recognize, and don't feel in much of a hurry to be able to.

So I sit here wondering.  Or filled with wonder, maybe.  Breathing in these granite stones, this wide courtyard of interwoven brick, the expanse of air and sky above my head.  It's getting inside of me.  It's doing something.

On forms and beasts and real life tales

I'm thinking about Plato today.  I know just enough to pretend I have a working knowledge of his thought, so that's what I aim to do.  You can't say I didn't warn you.

I'm thinking of Plato because of what I wrote here about love.  And Love.  It looks like I'm Platonic, no?  That I think there's this universal form called Love, and that all the human things we call by that name are just shadows of it.  Imitations, and at that, only varying levels of partial.

I think that does describe what I think.  I'm pretty sure I have yet to experience or offer Love fully.  This doesn't mean I think love with a lower case 'l' is bad or stupid.  I'm not zoroastrian, or whatever you call someone who thinks what we have in the flesh is evil.  I'm just saying I don't think any of us loves completely, without at least a good dose of other-than-Love mixed in.  How's that for a specific recipe?

What I'm not so comfortable with is equating that form of Love, that ideal that we can talk more about sometime, because I'd love to try to understand it better, with God.  Since we're talking recipes, I think this is one for something bad.  Maybe even poisonous.

But before I get into that, I want to talk about the reason why I think this matters at all, or a lot, rather, which has everything to do with growing up.  It has to do with a process in which I think we're all participating, more and less willingly, and with varying levels of success, which is coming to terms with life being not what we expect it to be.  Those who appear most deeply at peace, I mean far deeper than surfaces, seem to be those who have faced some pretty major challenges.  They seem to be those who have not skipped past their challenges, either, or been stoic or a forced kind of optimistic in the face of them, but rather have let themselves feel the confusion their challenges have naturally invoked, the consternation, the rage, the depression, the despair.  They're people who have confronted the beast that is Life Isn't What I Thought or Expected It To Be, and sat with it long enough to realize it doesn't have to do them in.  That, in fact, they can make a sort of truce with this animal, which...might even move toward friendship.

It seems like in these kinds of people an ironic sort of lightness starts to grow--in spite of, but really also because of all they've been through--where bitterness and clenched-upness and mental and emotional fatigue begin to fade into something more like hope, and not a hope that has to be worked at, or conjured up, or willed and prayed into being.  It's one that comes of its own accord.  Usually very quietly.  Even imperceptively, especially at the start.  And it doesn't depend on everything going right from then on, either.  It doesn't depend on people always coming through, or even God existing and being good, but rather on a deep down conviction that it's okay.  That somehow, some important thing lives on.  Maybe a person--you, even, because God knows some of life's challenges can make that look unlikely, or someone else you care about--but maybe something broader than that, like love in the world.  Like babies getting born and fed and raised.  Like sunlight being soft sometimes, and plants somehow knowing how to grow.  Like the cycle of water moving up into clouds and back down to earth and streaming to the places where it evaporates again.  Maybe it's just inexplicable, an inexplicable sense that things will be okay, that what needs to happen somehow is.  Or will.

Whatever it is, whatever comprises this hope, I think these people have it.  And I think this thing that gives them hope is rarely something glorious or triumphant.  Their challenges have made that pretty impossible.  I think it's edges are rusty, and there's chips in its paint.  I think its hair is a little greasy and maybe it hasn't brushed its teeth for a while.  And maybe it never had cool clothes to begin with, and especially not the right color socks. 

But it exists--it, this hope, this sense that something important lives on, and somehow, because of that, things are okay.  It exists in an earthy, un-plastic way, and can't fall out of pockets or disappear if you look at it too directly.  It can't get stolen by someone who says it's stupid, or whose "it" is much bigger, or looks like something taken from a magazine cover.

It can't get lost because it already has been, and was found again.  It already died, so it can't get killed.  It's already all dinged up, so there's just no worry that it might get scratched.

But back to Plato.  And Love.  And God.

I think this same process of growing up in relation to life needs to also happen in relation to God.  I think there's danger when it doesn't, because an idealized version of God can't stand on its own.  It has to be protected.  Fiercely.  The same things we do to people or circumstances that threaten the Life We Thought We Should Be Able To Live, we have to do to people who challenge our notion of God.  Ignore them.  Belittle them.  Berate them.  Talk bad about them, or people like them, behind their backs.  Patronize them.  Turn them into projects to try to make them see things our way.  Or work on some serious efforts at denial.

I wonder what would happen if we set God free in our minds to be whoever or whatever God is (and isn't).  I wonder what would happen if religious people let their true feelings about God surface, their true questions and frustrations, and stepped out from under any obligation to believe God is any certain way, out from any work to have faith in God's love, for example, or God's power or personal presence.  I wonder what would happen if all the stuff we equate with our being good and faithful and making sure we have some reason left to hope or know among so many options how to live well got turned completely upside down, and the opposite of all of our definitions for such things got unveiled as being the real deal.

The God that would show up in such an upset, the God that would be left, I think would be a lot more like the hope that Peaceful people have.  A lot more like that Volvo that keeps driving 300,000 miles strong, and just doesn't matter if someone opens a door into.  A lot more like something that needs little protection, and therefore is cause (or justification) for very few wars.

If you want to call that an ideal, a form, to use Plato-speak, so be it.  I think I'd prefer calling it lived, experienceable reality.

I think the process of growing up well involves coming to terms with things being far less perfect than we thought they should be, far less ideal, and learning to be okay with that, and to find beauty and wonder and that sparkly feeling in your chest and your fingertips that used to come from reading fairy tales not by imagining an ideal that exists outside of us, apart from us and this banged up thing that is our world, but by looking at what we've actually got, in and around us.  By looking at it deeply, being as honest as we can about what we see, and feel, and know.

I think the same is true of growing up in relation to God.

Pull of the moon

For the longest time I've had a picture of a sunrise as the background on my computer.  Orange and gold pouring over choppy sea.  I put that up about the time I had a surge of things to write--on my blog, and in the fiction I'm working on this summer.  I felt bold and full of words.  Active and free.  A healthy dose of yang, you might say.

Just after finishing up that series on bodies, I had a dream.  I was in a building with a group of some kind, and I thought we all were leaving.  A swarm of crows was attacking us, and I knew it would only get worse outside.  Feeling like Harry Potter, or some other child-on-a-mission, I quickly ran ahead to distract that swarm with some sweets I had made.  To save the group.

But when I got outside, there were no crows.  In fact, the group that I was with wasn't there either.  Turning back inside, disappointed that my grand aspirations weren't required, I discovered another group of folks rehearsing for some play.  They were dancing.  And it was beautiful.  I recognized dear friends among them, and after a moment of feeling way out of place, way underdressed, I realized I fit perfectly in.  The dream ended with some shady, unkind characters telling me I had bad breath and me determining I wouldn't say one more word until I could brush my teeth.

My therapist would be all over this one.

But here's the thing:  I think she would be right if she said it was calling me back inside, back to the dance.  And by dance, I think I mean something archetypal, something about expressing the self--not because one has to, or because one is trying to set anything right or look good in anyone's eyes, but because one can.  Or must.  I think the dream is calling me back away from taking my external life too seriously, back from trying to address my own demons everywhere else but where they actually reside:  inside.

So I had this dream, and I slowly grew more quiet.  Not because I'm afraid my breath stinks, because I think the characters who said that were "demons", and precisely the kind of crows I must confront inside.  But because I feel drawn inward, to listen again, to wait.  And to practice the dance.  I wonder how many of us on an inner path of healing get right to the point where we're learninig our authentic dance, right to the point where things are coming together inside, clicking, falling into place, and then move outward.  Move quickly on to extrovert the things we've learned, not realizing we haven't yet mastered our dance, and that all our outside doing might actually make us forget the few steps that we've learned. 

I have a night scene on my computer screen now.  A hillside watched by the moon.  As I drifted to sleep last night I pictured myself dancing on it, moonlight soft against my skin.  I pictured dancing long and gracefully, round and round, arms up and down.  And I finally rested on that hilltop, alone, my heart calm and also full with the memory of the dance.  Full with knowing I'm here, and, here is good, and there is day and there is night on this day of creation.