being alone

These days, I have been spending a good deal of my time alone.  If not alone completely, I am often alone in crowds or in rooms.  And a large part of me knows how sad that sounds.  But it isn't sad until being alone turns into a creeping loneliness that begins to hollow the heart and dim the eyes. And that? That is sad. I mean, did you know that loneliness contributes to disease and sickness?



Because I am finding myself alone, I have the time to think about how I am living this life. I think about how I want to spend my time, and how did people centuries ago spend their's.  And then my thinking makes turns, and I think about how I used to perceive life as my own frontier upon which I had the sole responsibility of marking it out on my own, for me and only me. 

So when I am alone, I am often confronted with my loneliness, which gives voice to all my longings. It can be easy to bring my hands to my ears. Lain Thomas, a modern poet, wrote, '"And every day, the world will drag you by the hand, yelling, "This is important! And this is important! And this is important! You need to worry about this! And this! And this!" And each day, it's up to you to yank your hand back, put it on your heart and say, "No. This is what's important."' There's a lot of noise in the daily grind, but Loneliness is a room that leads you to your most honest desires and disappointments.  And this is a room that shouldn't be ignored. So I do cry. And there is something about being your own honest friend, because honesty frees the soul to actually see, and feel, and gives way to actual listening.  I let myself feel my weakness, and let myself feel what it feels. Today, on my home from work, I thought back to earlier in the day when a coworker nonchalantly said, "I can't wait for you to have children." And it was a pang to my yearning heart. Yes. I want a home, and a family, so their voices fill each room. But I do not have that, and no prospect of it either. So I tear at the disappointment.

But then in that room called Loneliness, the sadness becomes a revelation.  I may be weak, only then to be strong, and brave, and to tell myself that you can do this, by yourself, and its going to be okay, and it's only one day, and this season will not always be.  And then I begun to think about my beautiful 93-year-old grandma, who has seen years gone by, who has watched her children's children's children grow up, who has traveled across oceans and continents, who has done some serious living, and I remember the look in her eyes, and I recall the certainty in her voice, and I can't help but but fall to my knees in deep gratitude over this woman. Its there that I begin to realize my life is not my own. It never should be.  I am reminded that life goes in any way, and I am thankful I am alive and hopeful.

It's funny how gratitude turns everything into enough. 

when we no longer know what to do

almost always, whenever i am going through the throes of life, i begin the task of letting words fall on me. not words to say or to write, but words to listen to.



so while a mr. paul holds his hand in the space between us, amid sink and stove, and says, “you know what happy is? happy is this little finger. happy is using my hands,” i take his words in like bread and butter. and when i saw the stretch of his pinky, i found a bit of happy in my own.



and at the burger joint on the corner of walnut and oakland, a lucky boy tells me about an old man, who after walking out of a restaurant, comes back and says he forgot his cane. lucky boy says, “well if you forgot your cane, you don’t need it.” you. don’t. need. it. the phrase echoed liberation. that is to say, freedom from the crutch. i recall the moment i heard his story, and knew this was somehow for me. it came as a moment of revelation over the strength of my own two feet. 

and then when in the dark of the plaza, from the lips of a perfect stranger, a series of poignant remarks fell over me. this man, who i now know as a fifty-something year old mr. michael, says, “The world, it belongs to you.”  the declaration in his voice told me how true it was for him, and how true he thought it was for me. he traced his life from age twenty-three and told me, "Be strong," and then added, "I don't know you, but I can tell you've got wisdom beyond your years." and whether i believe the veracity of his statement, it’s there, in those first words, where i am making sense of the world and all its possibilities.



i am a romantic. sometimes i feel that makes me naive. and other times i feel that makes me more brave.  i want happy to be found in the work of my hands. i want to feel ease in the distance between what i want and what i have. because what i want is most often not what i have... but hell, i have got to be more damn persistent in committing myself to what i want. Of the same token, i want a contentment for what i do have, because i realize what i have is still the gift and beauty i do not deserve. but to continue in the list of what i want... i want to find the intention of my being lived out in every essence, in mind, body, soul, work, and place.  i want an art and craft that marks my existence, a community of people to bear witness to and upon, and the liturgy of daily rhythms to pronounce a life that died well. i want to lead a romantic life. 

and i want it all to happen not in the shadow of a man, or a woman. not in the shadow of a family, nor in the shadow of society. because i find the shadow of all of these to be too small. if in any shadow, may it be in the shadow of God, because She is much bigger and much more gracious than the whole of humanity.

“It may be when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work, and that when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey.” | Wendell Berry

It's happening again. That welling up inside that calls me to put pen to paper. Soon friends, expect a post on the things I am processing-- or rather the way in which I hope I am becoming.
 

the up and down and over

Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall. | F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby



The view from my bedroom window overlooks a city, and when I start on my routine bike ride down the mountain from my house, I can see the steepness of the pavement dropping beneath me. And then at the end of the day, I feel the breadth and heaves of the mountain as I take my bike up. Morning and night, I am confronted by my smallness.  It is good.

This is the way I have been starting and ending my days, with my smallness in mind. Though there are days when it feels painstakingly hard to pedal against the rise of the mountain, I can't help but feel much gratitude in the stop of this reality.


Being surrounded by a cityscape and living in a technology infested world, there is the assumption that all westerners are born into believing, and that is our own mightiness, and from our own flats we like to say this is mine. We attempt to mirror the night sky with electric lights strewn about the city streets and mimic the silhouette of the ever changing horizon; like the plunge of plateaus or the curve of hillsides, we exact its likeness by building skyscrapers to create our own skylines. We easily forget our frailty, but this halting mountain, saves me from this forgetfulness. And watching its ascent toward the heavens makes me human again. 



The movement of this thought peaked when, months ago, I sat down in class, and feeling overwhelmed by the list of things I needed to do, my professor began his lecture by giving a few words on similar sentiments (on forgetfulness, and our humanness). He talked about our thoughts, and shared openly the one thought he turns to so frequently, which now has become instinctual, and prayerful.  The thought came in a question, the way the Father of Lights asked it: Adam, where are you? The question feels the echoes of our genesis story as in the garden when Adam sinned, and ashamed, he hid. But it's less about the act of sinning, and more about the loss of something. The question breathes a sigh of longing, begging, where are you, you have lost what it is to be truly human.

I think part of what Adam lost was the awe of things more mighty and majestic than he. And it was at that thought, all my anxieties were diminished. I am small, but oh my God, those mountains? Those stars? This world? Do they feel the weight of my worries? I don't know, but I feel the gravity of their existence ground me back into the dust and dirt that I am.

Oh let my eyes be set on goodly things. To the Father of lights, Amen.

on such things as courage. failure. words. and silence.

I think it's tremendously important to develop a powerful relationship with failure. If you're a coward and stopped by failure, there's no way to develop. My teacher used to say you can't play great music unless your heart has been broken. So maybe the answer is to have more broken hearts and get on with it.

BENJAMIN ZANDER | International conductor, composer

courage. |ˈkərij; ˈkə-rij|

When it first came into the English language, it's derivative was latin, from the latin word, cor, which means heart.  Brene Brown, a research professor at the University of Houston, expounds on the original definition of courage in a TED talk. She says, "[courage meant] to tell the story of who you are, with your whole heart.

This, my friends, is my starting place.

There was a brief moment in time when I let myself go completely public, when I declared to the world my own nakedness. It was a kind of toast to failure, and in the second I let the world be told of this toast, this vow, I felt an insurmountable beauty, whose depths could not span the breadth of the oceans, empty into me, and then well up. All at once while driving home from work, on a less than ordinary day, at some stoplight, in perfect time, and feeling the swell of something revelatory breaking over me: I am beautiful.  Though misfortune, and heartbreak, and loss had befallen  me, I was still beautiful, maybe even more. And yes, I am that woman. The kind of woman who every woman hopes to be, not because I have measured myself, but because I realize that I cannot be anyone else, just me. just me. and that is enough.

And I don't mean to diminish the aches that made me a mess of a woman in that time, but I think the mess made me beautiful... Truth be told, something did die in me at the end of that season, absolutely; but then also, life was boundless and willing. Willing in the sense that heaven's hands were palms up, opened, and for the first time in the entirety of my life, I was made aware of all the possibilities (and impossibilities) of life. As a certain Mr. Dan put it, "Life can go any way."

  

It is said that when bravery |ˈbrāv(ə)rē| was first introduced into spoken language, before it entered into Middle French and became synonymous with valiant, it was a word suggestive of adornment, as in the way one adorns themselves with fine clothing. It was something one possessed, set aside for your finest moment.

Divine Providence had drawn a cloak of bravery to hang about me. In exchange for my misfortunes, and in exchange for a realized flawed relationship with guilt, I began a relationship with failure. This was bravery, at least to me. And it was good. I was having this relationship with failure that enabled me to live more deliberately, more freely. It was this sort of bond that led me on several excursions to the post office in which I submitted application after application, in hopes to get into a graduate school of my choice.  I made efforts to attend to my dreams and ideals. Things like attempting to establish a life centered around creativity and imagination, which looked like giving attention to my love for craft as in gardening, sewing, and eating well among other things (and yes, those are crafts in a way that they involve art. and process. and thought. and production). Many of these things I failed at... nonetheless, I was living. 

But when making such commitments to failure, no one tells you what emotions one is put through after really failing. and i mean failing bad. failing horribly and terribly. You can expect it, but you're never ready. Shame and guilt are always anomalies to the human soul, we react to it as if we've never known it, even though we have.

So I failed, and in the last month or two, I have been in process. I have realized though, when treading the valley, sometimes we ought to set ourselves in healing places. When words, from thin air, become thick with sentiments that leave us feeling a bit more whole.  So I'm giving myself a little medicine, letting myself heal a little by reclaiming lost words. Like, for example, when caught in mid-eagle, my birkham yoga instructor utters the words, "Outside events happen, not to create chaos, but to grow us... and to reveal our magnificence." reveal my magnificence. oh please oh please, reveal it. reveal my resilience too. Or I'll lean into the lick of lyrics sung through the car stereo as it goes, "I'll give you the mountains, I'll give you the seas; I'll give you wisdom, but I won't give you safety..." I'll recall the words of a man who, whiskey in hand, said, "You can't will it, but you can test yourself."  Or, on a paper bag, I'll read over and over again a letter written by the most beautiful man I have come to know, sprawled in black ink, I'll take in every bit of good writing and good revelation, and then, somewhere at the close of its contents, to read, "May God pursue you until you cannot deny it." until i cannot deny it.

So I've been filling myself with words. and also silence. because I am processing. and when processing, sometimes the only thing left to do is to love well, live fully, and let go deeply. And by letting go, I mean re-understanding the words, "It is finished," as my Jesus even said it. The way he let silence fill the air. the exhale of letting go. the exchange of wills. And so now, I too say, "It is finished," letting all that quiet at the end of that breath be a tribute to the imprint of a Divine Being at work in my life, recognizing also that it is not my will, but his will be done.

So I begin anew, with a grace to follow me, and a bravery that anoints me, and whatever foolish ambition I might follow, may it be for a greater glory than my own.

[Silence] permits us, in short, to be who we are and could be if only we had the openness and trust. A chapel is where we hear something and nothing, ourselves and everyone else, a silence that is not the absence of noise but the presence of something much deeper: the depth beneath our thoughts . . . They are the one place we can reliably go to find who we are and what we should be doing with our lives — usually by finding all we aren't, and what is much greater than us, to which we can only give ourselves up.

PICO IYER | Chapels

images via here.
and here.