Dear my faithful readers:
Please accept my apologies for my lengthening absence from the blogosphere: Life, in its many interesting turns, keeps taking me away from the computer.
But let this brief post serve as my humble promise to resume my happy place at the keyboard and monitor as soon as circumstances allow. I have Stories.
Love to all!
Wednesday, October 29, 2008
Friday, October 24, 2008
andante molto
Last night I put myself in considerable peril shifting around the ginormous cardboard boxes stacked in the garage, hunting for my old piano books. Lord knows why I took them with me when I left; I think I had wild hopes of finding someone with a piano in the Midwest. Thanks to my parents' generosity and my steadfast pleading, the piano on which I learned to play -- an old upright displaying no brand name, but whose keys stay stubbornly in tune and whose damper and pianoforte pedals work beautifully -- still presides over the activities of the dining room. Walking back into the house of my childhood the other week, I touched the piano lightly on my way past with my luggage, happy to see an old friend.
My parents enrolled my sister and me in piano lessons when I was nine and she was six. I loved the piano instantly; my sister didn't. But we both biked across town every week for the next five years or so to the dark house where our piano teacher, Mrs. K., lived and taught. I never liked the house; the lovely antique cupboards and buffets in her dining room, where my sister or I waited for our lesson, groaned under the weight of cheap creepy cookie jars painted garishly into barely recognizable animals, and the whole place smelled like old lady's breath. But Mrs. K. kept plenty of coloring books on the dining room table -- a pretty piece of craftsmanship rendered sticky and mildly vile by its coat of grayish paint.
One of my favorite sister-stories comes from this era. As our lessons progressed, it became clear that Mrs. K.'s personality had not softened into grandmotherly kindness like a plate of warming butter about to go into cookie dough; under all her stickers and squeaky chuckling lay a rather vicious temper. By the time Laura and I began under her tutelage, she had stopped punishing her students' mistakes by cracking their knuckles with a stick; an older boy in our church had been the one over whose knuckles the stick broke, and his parents raised hell when they found out; but she still used that stick -- you could see the worn place at the tip where it had broken -- to count out time, tapping on the page from which we read with a sort of wistful violence.
Mrs. K. taught music theory splendidly; every week we took home our music homework and returned more educated in musical mathematics, chords and chord families and transposition and tempo. Her greatest emphases lay on tempo, sight reading and memorization. The first two caused me to falter -- Laura had a fabulous internal metronome, but I was born without one; I liked expression, and hated playing the sonatas Mrs. K. picked out; Laura also possessed an almost faultless gift for sight reading, which meant she rarely practiced if she could get away with it, while I tended to clam up nervously, torn between my fear of hitting the wrong note and my fear of ruining the tempo under Mrs. K.'s gimlet eye.
But nothing could touch me in memorization. After the right amount of practice, I could play songs with my eyes closed: The music drew my fingers to the right keys like the meeting hands of lovers, and when I closed my eyes to feel what the song was trying to say, I felt the keyboard shiver, I felt my body electrified, and then I could play. When I let go and lived in the music, it came to life, and I lost myself for a wonderful little while.
Mrs. K.'s nitpicking criticism tended to subdue that rapture, but even she had complimentary things to say about my memorization. But oh, my sight reading. She hated my sight reading. And since she felt that a student's weak points should be emphasized more than his or her strengths, to work them out like bubbles in a batch of bread dough, I found myself sight reading a lot, and I hated going for lessons. Laura hated lessons because she hated being made to do anything, and she hated Mrs. K. But where I cowered under Mrs. K.'s disapproval, Laura closed in on herself and stared fixedly at nothing like someone trying to withstand the urge to do something evil.
The summer I was twelve and Laura nine, we biked over for our usual Tuesday lesson, and it was my week to go first. I left Laura in the dining room working on a coloring book that told the story of Thumbellina and walked through the doorway into the dark muted room with the piano.
It was a terrible lesson. I was tired that day, and she wanted to do almost nothing but work on my sight reading. I couldn't concentrate, but I tried, to please her, and all I managed to do was frustrate her. She bit her lip and savagely tapped out the tempo with her broken stick while I stumbled through the music like someone trying to dance ballet in shackles on a boulder field.
Finally she threw her stick down. "It's hopeless," she snarled, and when my face crumpled and the silent tears started tracking down my cheeks, she tried to soften her words with her insincere giggle, and decided we'd had enough for today. I picked up my books without looking at her and walked blindly to the door, trying to smother the sobs I wouldn't let out in the open by holding the books to my chest.
When I stepped into the dining room its chandelier fired the tears in my eyes to a painful brightness, and I stopped to blink them away. That was when Laura looked up.
She took one look at my face and her whole body snapped still; her eyes narrowed and her jaw tightened. Grimly she snatched up her books and stalked into the music room. Her eyes as she passed me were bloodthirsty.
While I sat at the dining room table and buried my head in my arms and puckered the pages of Thumbellina with tears, Laura proceeded, coolly and deliberately, to deliver to Mrs. K. the worst lesson of her life. She struck every note wrong. She repeated her mistakes with absolute precision when ordered to correct them. She played with one finger. And when Mrs. K. threw sarcasm to the winds and yelled, my sister cast her watch an exaggerated glance of boredom and yawned.
Her half hour, too, was cut short, and as Mrs. K. rushed past me to the bathroom wiping her eyes, Laura emerged from the dining room with a little smile of satisfaction sitting at the corner of her mouth.
"Come on, Sarah," she said loftily, "let's go home."
Mrs. K. never really bothered with my sight reading after that; but she really hated my sister, and a little while later, Mom, sensing something wrong, accompanied Laura to a lesson while I spent a week away on a youth missions trip; and when I returned hopeful and excited with the name of a piano teacher handed to me by one of the youth group boys, Mom told me curtly that she was glad, because we were never going back to Mrs. K. again.
Our new lessons required a forty-five minute drive into New York, so Mom began taking us to our lessons again, and I watched the swamps and sleepy pasture rivers flash by outside the window with a sort of hopeful despair.
Kerry was a mug of hot soup and a hand-knitted afghan and a fireside after walking home in subzero weather. I have never in my life met a man so gentle, so patient. He learned to keep a box of tissues handy for my lessons, because his kindness usually made me cry out of gratitude and disbelief. He never raised his voice. He never criticized. He never mocked. His judgments were always fair, and he praised the good before moving to needed improvements. His black cat, Gepetto, a grizzled and war-roughened old soul, liked to sit next to me on the bench while I played.
As the months went on, he started to unravel, bit by bit, the reasons why I was so tense and nervous, and my sister so belligerently indifferent, around the piano. He never said much, but sometimes the horror on his face didn't hide fast enough. He watched me play, and saw something of what I held in check, and encouraged me to be more expressive. He introduced me to Debussy, who required no metronome.
And I learned to loosen up, learned not to sit, as Kerry said, "like a person trained to the harpsicord" -- wooden and straightbacked as a Shaker chair. Practicing on the old upright at home became a daily joy, for its own sake, and to show off my improvements at lessons. My memories of the lessons, and of the time spent with my mom and Kerry's wife Marian and their children while Laura had her lesson, are soft-lensed and glowing; a Hallmark commercial couldn't compete. Lessons were a safe place, a quiet place, a peaceful place, a chance to escape from everything else and bask in the love of music. In that home, it always felt like Christmas.
Long after I stopped taking lessons and went to college, I would hunt all over campus for a vacant piano and keep playing. I would channel every stress, frustration, fury, hurt, joy, love, and hope into my favorite songs, which never quite left me.
But in my four years away from home, and away from pianos, I've grown quite rusty. I still harbor hopes of one day taking up lessons again somewhere; I was never a brilliant pianist, never a great technician, but I was expressive, and I'd like a little of my skill back. In the meantime, there's keeping up what I remember, and now I finally have my old friend, my childhood piano, all to myself again.
So last night, I slowly opened the cover over the keys and ran my fingers over their opaquely gleaming white, I sat down and tested out the pedals, I started to smile. It was dark, I had the house to myself, the air felt chilly and smelled of winter, and as I set down my glass of cabernet and reached for the soul of Grieg in the andante movement of his Opus No. 7, as the notes crystallized and sank away and surged back reborn for the first time in years in that dining room, with the light making the sheet music glow, it felt like Christmas.
My parents enrolled my sister and me in piano lessons when I was nine and she was six. I loved the piano instantly; my sister didn't. But we both biked across town every week for the next five years or so to the dark house where our piano teacher, Mrs. K., lived and taught. I never liked the house; the lovely antique cupboards and buffets in her dining room, where my sister or I waited for our lesson, groaned under the weight of cheap creepy cookie jars painted garishly into barely recognizable animals, and the whole place smelled like old lady's breath. But Mrs. K. kept plenty of coloring books on the dining room table -- a pretty piece of craftsmanship rendered sticky and mildly vile by its coat of grayish paint.
One of my favorite sister-stories comes from this era. As our lessons progressed, it became clear that Mrs. K.'s personality had not softened into grandmotherly kindness like a plate of warming butter about to go into cookie dough; under all her stickers and squeaky chuckling lay a rather vicious temper. By the time Laura and I began under her tutelage, she had stopped punishing her students' mistakes by cracking their knuckles with a stick; an older boy in our church had been the one over whose knuckles the stick broke, and his parents raised hell when they found out; but she still used that stick -- you could see the worn place at the tip where it had broken -- to count out time, tapping on the page from which we read with a sort of wistful violence.
Mrs. K. taught music theory splendidly; every week we took home our music homework and returned more educated in musical mathematics, chords and chord families and transposition and tempo. Her greatest emphases lay on tempo, sight reading and memorization. The first two caused me to falter -- Laura had a fabulous internal metronome, but I was born without one; I liked expression, and hated playing the sonatas Mrs. K. picked out; Laura also possessed an almost faultless gift for sight reading, which meant she rarely practiced if she could get away with it, while I tended to clam up nervously, torn between my fear of hitting the wrong note and my fear of ruining the tempo under Mrs. K.'s gimlet eye.
But nothing could touch me in memorization. After the right amount of practice, I could play songs with my eyes closed: The music drew my fingers to the right keys like the meeting hands of lovers, and when I closed my eyes to feel what the song was trying to say, I felt the keyboard shiver, I felt my body electrified, and then I could play. When I let go and lived in the music, it came to life, and I lost myself for a wonderful little while.
Mrs. K.'s nitpicking criticism tended to subdue that rapture, but even she had complimentary things to say about my memorization. But oh, my sight reading. She hated my sight reading. And since she felt that a student's weak points should be emphasized more than his or her strengths, to work them out like bubbles in a batch of bread dough, I found myself sight reading a lot, and I hated going for lessons. Laura hated lessons because she hated being made to do anything, and she hated Mrs. K. But where I cowered under Mrs. K.'s disapproval, Laura closed in on herself and stared fixedly at nothing like someone trying to withstand the urge to do something evil.
The summer I was twelve and Laura nine, we biked over for our usual Tuesday lesson, and it was my week to go first. I left Laura in the dining room working on a coloring book that told the story of Thumbellina and walked through the doorway into the dark muted room with the piano.
It was a terrible lesson. I was tired that day, and she wanted to do almost nothing but work on my sight reading. I couldn't concentrate, but I tried, to please her, and all I managed to do was frustrate her. She bit her lip and savagely tapped out the tempo with her broken stick while I stumbled through the music like someone trying to dance ballet in shackles on a boulder field.
Finally she threw her stick down. "It's hopeless," she snarled, and when my face crumpled and the silent tears started tracking down my cheeks, she tried to soften her words with her insincere giggle, and decided we'd had enough for today. I picked up my books without looking at her and walked blindly to the door, trying to smother the sobs I wouldn't let out in the open by holding the books to my chest.
When I stepped into the dining room its chandelier fired the tears in my eyes to a painful brightness, and I stopped to blink them away. That was when Laura looked up.
She took one look at my face and her whole body snapped still; her eyes narrowed and her jaw tightened. Grimly she snatched up her books and stalked into the music room. Her eyes as she passed me were bloodthirsty.
While I sat at the dining room table and buried my head in my arms and puckered the pages of Thumbellina with tears, Laura proceeded, coolly and deliberately, to deliver to Mrs. K. the worst lesson of her life. She struck every note wrong. She repeated her mistakes with absolute precision when ordered to correct them. She played with one finger. And when Mrs. K. threw sarcasm to the winds and yelled, my sister cast her watch an exaggerated glance of boredom and yawned.
Her half hour, too, was cut short, and as Mrs. K. rushed past me to the bathroom wiping her eyes, Laura emerged from the dining room with a little smile of satisfaction sitting at the corner of her mouth.
"Come on, Sarah," she said loftily, "let's go home."
Mrs. K. never really bothered with my sight reading after that; but she really hated my sister, and a little while later, Mom, sensing something wrong, accompanied Laura to a lesson while I spent a week away on a youth missions trip; and when I returned hopeful and excited with the name of a piano teacher handed to me by one of the youth group boys, Mom told me curtly that she was glad, because we were never going back to Mrs. K. again.
Our new lessons required a forty-five minute drive into New York, so Mom began taking us to our lessons again, and I watched the swamps and sleepy pasture rivers flash by outside the window with a sort of hopeful despair.
Kerry was a mug of hot soup and a hand-knitted afghan and a fireside after walking home in subzero weather. I have never in my life met a man so gentle, so patient. He learned to keep a box of tissues handy for my lessons, because his kindness usually made me cry out of gratitude and disbelief. He never raised his voice. He never criticized. He never mocked. His judgments were always fair, and he praised the good before moving to needed improvements. His black cat, Gepetto, a grizzled and war-roughened old soul, liked to sit next to me on the bench while I played.
As the months went on, he started to unravel, bit by bit, the reasons why I was so tense and nervous, and my sister so belligerently indifferent, around the piano. He never said much, but sometimes the horror on his face didn't hide fast enough. He watched me play, and saw something of what I held in check, and encouraged me to be more expressive. He introduced me to Debussy, who required no metronome.
And I learned to loosen up, learned not to sit, as Kerry said, "like a person trained to the harpsicord" -- wooden and straightbacked as a Shaker chair. Practicing on the old upright at home became a daily joy, for its own sake, and to show off my improvements at lessons. My memories of the lessons, and of the time spent with my mom and Kerry's wife Marian and their children while Laura had her lesson, are soft-lensed and glowing; a Hallmark commercial couldn't compete. Lessons were a safe place, a quiet place, a peaceful place, a chance to escape from everything else and bask in the love of music. In that home, it always felt like Christmas.
Long after I stopped taking lessons and went to college, I would hunt all over campus for a vacant piano and keep playing. I would channel every stress, frustration, fury, hurt, joy, love, and hope into my favorite songs, which never quite left me.
But in my four years away from home, and away from pianos, I've grown quite rusty. I still harbor hopes of one day taking up lessons again somewhere; I was never a brilliant pianist, never a great technician, but I was expressive, and I'd like a little of my skill back. In the meantime, there's keeping up what I remember, and now I finally have my old friend, my childhood piano, all to myself again.
So last night, I slowly opened the cover over the keys and ran my fingers over their opaquely gleaming white, I sat down and tested out the pedals, I started to smile. It was dark, I had the house to myself, the air felt chilly and smelled of winter, and as I set down my glass of cabernet and reached for the soul of Grieg in the andante movement of his Opus No. 7, as the notes crystallized and sank away and surged back reborn for the first time in years in that dining room, with the light making the sheet music glow, it felt like Christmas.
Thursday, October 23, 2008
The Shack
J. mentioned this book to me at lunch last week, and yesterday had her husband B. drop a copy off for me to read. Since part of her recommendation included a testimony as to how it helped her recover from our youth group's Reign of Terror, I opened it with interest...and a little reluctance.
I tend to take a dim view of books purporting to revolutionize the way the reader will view God. Really, I think. So nothing I've learned along the way matters, and wouldn't matter, until I read THIS BOOK. Riiiight.
But as I read past the frame story and into the meat and bones of The Shack, I found myself trying not to cry so obviously that Mom, sitting across the room, would notice. (She did, anyway. I'm a sniffler.)
The following post is kind of my second-hand gut reaction to the book (the real gut reaction being contained in the pages of my journal), and may or may not follow any of the sequential rules of writing to which I ordinarily adhere; and I won't quote the book much, or say exactly what it said, because I don't want to spoil it for anyone who has yet to read it. And, as I'm still in the process of trying to unravel all the realizations and sudden understandings and lightning bolts that bowled me over the last twenty-four hours, I don't expect all of it to be coherent.
My childhood and adolescence were not especially traumatic; but they were full of a great deal of pain. As a little girl I had to grow up quickly and look after the needs of others, and internalized an idea that I don't matter as much as everyone else does; and so I kept to myself, and learned emotional independence at the age of eleven. From there I learned, to an unconscious extent, not to trust God. I also learned to live in fear, particularly the fear of abandonment; and so I trusted people even less.
In my adolescence I heard, over and over, the repeated message that I am disgusting to God, taxing, a burden on his grace, a wretched, repulsive sinner in the hand of an angry God who might at any moment unleash his wrath upon me for my failures to live up to his expectations and demands. I blog about this over and over and over, I know, but it's been the hardest lie to shake, the lesson I must keep relearning: that God is love, and his love isn't torturous or judgmental.
I've had moments of clarity, and through college came to understand that God does love me...but always, underlying my relationships with people, there has been a terrible fear. I hate depending on people: I think once they really know me, they'll turn away in pitying revulsion at how badly I long for human connection, which I lost at such a young age.
I was thinking about this on the way to my parents' this afternoon, mulling over the source of my fear and mistrust of human relationships, and thought, slowly: ...fear drives and characterizes my relationships with others because I think I will be disgusting to them...taxing to them...a burden. And then I started to cry all over again because if that's how I characterize my relationships with people, it's still how I characterize my relationship with God. And I realized that what I had thought of as God's love, the idea I have developed since those nightmare years, wasn't so much love as a benevolent indifference, a distant kindliness, which is better than frowning hatred and disappointment, but hardly a source of security.
All those things I learned about God are lies. It's going to take time to unlearn them, to reject them fully, but what I can trust God with, I will; and it will continue to grow. It's not about rules or how I measure up -- and therefore in my interactions and relationships with people it's also not about rules or how I, or they, measure up. It's about love, mutual enjoyment, a selfless awareness of the other.
Loving unconditionally means loving without agenda -- without expectations. I have never understood how God can want to love me when I can do nothing to benefit him, when I have nothing to offer him, when he doesn't need me. I realized, reading this book, that he loves me, not because of what I have to offer, but because of who I am. Because of my being, in which he delights -- the being he created to be loved.
As this pertains to my interactions with people: I have always harbored a terrible fear that people won't love me. But if I derive all my identity, security, love and comfort from an all-loving God whose every act is goodness and an expression of that love, and who knows all about me and loves me, not in spite of, but because of my being, then it doesn't matter whether people will love me or not; plenty of people won't. And that understanding frees me to enjoy the people who do, without expectation or demand, only the expectancy of enjoying them for who they are, and what they draw from me. And so my deep-seated need for connection is fully satisfied in God, and my God-given need for human interaction fulfilled exactly because I'm not desperate for, and therefore clutching at it, and rending the whole thing impossible by that desperate clutching.
See, often in the past, I have mentally and silently structured my interactions with people around rigid expectations for them, the fulfillment or unfulfillment of which I used as a barometer to determine how close they were to leaving me -- and if I deemed that barometric reading too close to their leaving, I often opted for a preemptive strike and cut ties with them first, to spare myself what I saw as an inevitable hurt -- which only hurt me more (especially because I have no way of knowing if they would have left me or not). It wasn't a constant; I held out for plenty of people, but my expectation was always that they would, after a time, disappear. I've been learning to shake off that conviction, but it's been long, and difficult, and slow in the process -- fortunately God has been very patient, very deeply knowing of just what I need.
For a long time I've been living, and loving, in a constricted way. But I hadn't thought about there being another way until these last few hours. I have centered most of my way of life around a need for routine, for structure, for security -- but I can't create that for myself; life is unpredictable and uncertain. But the love of God is never uncertain. I can't predict the patterns of my life, can't predict the outcomes of my relationships with people -- and I don't have to be afraid of my inability to predict; if the source of all my everything is the love of God, if I'm living present moment by present moment with and in and through him (in all three of his persons), I can enjoy the freefall. I can have fun.
Life has rarely been fun for me. It's been satisfying, contented at times, full of a deep thrumming joy (come on, let's be honest, it hasn't all been bad -- not nearly! but it has been limited in some striking ways), but seldom fun. I spend a lot of time worrying about things that I can't control or change -- but if I let go the need for control, because all I really need -- the unreserved, tender, complete love of God -- is already within me, and learn to be loved, and thereby to fly...
It's kind of a boundless prospect. I've been on the right track, I think; this book just provided an enormous push to get the swing fully in motion. Now I can begin, consciously, to direct my effort to loosening my grip on, and eventually letting go of, the things I have clutched and clung to for a long time in an effort to build some security for myself (which would mean letting go of having my feet on the ground -- not letting go of the swing, unless the time comes for me to jump off it). I really kind of suck at making my own security. I'm a poor judge of which circumstances are "good" and which are "evil," limited in perspective as I am; and the things I build for myself tend to melt into the oncoming tide. Sandcastles are meant to be played with, not lived in; enjoyed for their very temporality, while what really matters is the beauty of the wind and sand and timeless water.
So yeah...for the first time, I hunger to live in freedom, which comes, ironically, from total dependence on God (I love that this book characterizes independence from God as the sin of Eden, from which all evil flows). I'm excited to see how this begins to change my relationship with God, and my relationship with people, particularly the people I love best. I'm excited to see how this affects my attitude, my perspective, my outlook regarding every circumstance in my life -- how this brings a new ability to live in, and love, the present. I'm excited to break down my own self-constructed walls of my self-constructed prison, and come into a place where I can breathe, laugh, love, respond, forgive...
Yeah. It's a little dizzying, and I have a bit of a headache. But I'm so excited. And I recommend this book.
I tend to take a dim view of books purporting to revolutionize the way the reader will view God. Really, I think. So nothing I've learned along the way matters, and wouldn't matter, until I read THIS BOOK. Riiiight.
But as I read past the frame story and into the meat and bones of The Shack, I found myself trying not to cry so obviously that Mom, sitting across the room, would notice. (She did, anyway. I'm a sniffler.)
The following post is kind of my second-hand gut reaction to the book (the real gut reaction being contained in the pages of my journal), and may or may not follow any of the sequential rules of writing to which I ordinarily adhere; and I won't quote the book much, or say exactly what it said, because I don't want to spoil it for anyone who has yet to read it. And, as I'm still in the process of trying to unravel all the realizations and sudden understandings and lightning bolts that bowled me over the last twenty-four hours, I don't expect all of it to be coherent.
My childhood and adolescence were not especially traumatic; but they were full of a great deal of pain. As a little girl I had to grow up quickly and look after the needs of others, and internalized an idea that I don't matter as much as everyone else does; and so I kept to myself, and learned emotional independence at the age of eleven. From there I learned, to an unconscious extent, not to trust God. I also learned to live in fear, particularly the fear of abandonment; and so I trusted people even less.
In my adolescence I heard, over and over, the repeated message that I am disgusting to God, taxing, a burden on his grace, a wretched, repulsive sinner in the hand of an angry God who might at any moment unleash his wrath upon me for my failures to live up to his expectations and demands. I blog about this over and over and over, I know, but it's been the hardest lie to shake, the lesson I must keep relearning: that God is love, and his love isn't torturous or judgmental.
I've had moments of clarity, and through college came to understand that God does love me...but always, underlying my relationships with people, there has been a terrible fear. I hate depending on people: I think once they really know me, they'll turn away in pitying revulsion at how badly I long for human connection, which I lost at such a young age.
I was thinking about this on the way to my parents' this afternoon, mulling over the source of my fear and mistrust of human relationships, and thought, slowly: ...fear drives and characterizes my relationships with others because I think I will be disgusting to them...taxing to them...a burden. And then I started to cry all over again because if that's how I characterize my relationships with people, it's still how I characterize my relationship with God. And I realized that what I had thought of as God's love, the idea I have developed since those nightmare years, wasn't so much love as a benevolent indifference, a distant kindliness, which is better than frowning hatred and disappointment, but hardly a source of security.
All those things I learned about God are lies. It's going to take time to unlearn them, to reject them fully, but what I can trust God with, I will; and it will continue to grow. It's not about rules or how I measure up -- and therefore in my interactions and relationships with people it's also not about rules or how I, or they, measure up. It's about love, mutual enjoyment, a selfless awareness of the other.
Loving unconditionally means loving without agenda -- without expectations. I have never understood how God can want to love me when I can do nothing to benefit him, when I have nothing to offer him, when he doesn't need me. I realized, reading this book, that he loves me, not because of what I have to offer, but because of who I am. Because of my being, in which he delights -- the being he created to be loved.
As this pertains to my interactions with people: I have always harbored a terrible fear that people won't love me. But if I derive all my identity, security, love and comfort from an all-loving God whose every act is goodness and an expression of that love, and who knows all about me and loves me, not in spite of, but because of my being, then it doesn't matter whether people will love me or not; plenty of people won't. And that understanding frees me to enjoy the people who do, without expectation or demand, only the expectancy of enjoying them for who they are, and what they draw from me. And so my deep-seated need for connection is fully satisfied in God, and my God-given need for human interaction fulfilled exactly because I'm not desperate for, and therefore clutching at it, and rending the whole thing impossible by that desperate clutching.
See, often in the past, I have mentally and silently structured my interactions with people around rigid expectations for them, the fulfillment or unfulfillment of which I used as a barometer to determine how close they were to leaving me -- and if I deemed that barometric reading too close to their leaving, I often opted for a preemptive strike and cut ties with them first, to spare myself what I saw as an inevitable hurt -- which only hurt me more (especially because I have no way of knowing if they would have left me or not). It wasn't a constant; I held out for plenty of people, but my expectation was always that they would, after a time, disappear. I've been learning to shake off that conviction, but it's been long, and difficult, and slow in the process -- fortunately God has been very patient, very deeply knowing of just what I need.
For a long time I've been living, and loving, in a constricted way. But I hadn't thought about there being another way until these last few hours. I have centered most of my way of life around a need for routine, for structure, for security -- but I can't create that for myself; life is unpredictable and uncertain. But the love of God is never uncertain. I can't predict the patterns of my life, can't predict the outcomes of my relationships with people -- and I don't have to be afraid of my inability to predict; if the source of all my everything is the love of God, if I'm living present moment by present moment with and in and through him (in all three of his persons), I can enjoy the freefall. I can have fun.
Life has rarely been fun for me. It's been satisfying, contented at times, full of a deep thrumming joy (come on, let's be honest, it hasn't all been bad -- not nearly! but it has been limited in some striking ways), but seldom fun. I spend a lot of time worrying about things that I can't control or change -- but if I let go the need for control, because all I really need -- the unreserved, tender, complete love of God -- is already within me, and learn to be loved, and thereby to fly...
It's kind of a boundless prospect. I've been on the right track, I think; this book just provided an enormous push to get the swing fully in motion. Now I can begin, consciously, to direct my effort to loosening my grip on, and eventually letting go of, the things I have clutched and clung to for a long time in an effort to build some security for myself (which would mean letting go of having my feet on the ground -- not letting go of the swing, unless the time comes for me to jump off it). I really kind of suck at making my own security. I'm a poor judge of which circumstances are "good" and which are "evil," limited in perspective as I am; and the things I build for myself tend to melt into the oncoming tide. Sandcastles are meant to be played with, not lived in; enjoyed for their very temporality, while what really matters is the beauty of the wind and sand and timeless water.
So yeah...for the first time, I hunger to live in freedom, which comes, ironically, from total dependence on God (I love that this book characterizes independence from God as the sin of Eden, from which all evil flows). I'm excited to see how this begins to change my relationship with God, and my relationship with people, particularly the people I love best. I'm excited to see how this affects my attitude, my perspective, my outlook regarding every circumstance in my life -- how this brings a new ability to live in, and love, the present. I'm excited to break down my own self-constructed walls of my self-constructed prison, and come into a place where I can breathe, laugh, love, respond, forgive...
Yeah. It's a little dizzying, and I have a bit of a headache. But I'm so excited. And I recommend this book.
Monday, October 20, 2008
with scattered showers
...Annnd the potential buyers are still trying to get the financing for the mobile home.
I am bound and determined to sleep there anyway (my bed is already set up and made), until it sells, because if I do not get my own space I will implode.
I am bound and determined to sleep there anyway (my bed is already set up and made), until it sells, because if I do not get my own space I will implode.
partly cloudy
Today the will to write opposes the compulsion to write; the compulsion wins, but with compromises.
I had a great time at Homecoming -- it was bizarre to drive only an hour and a half to reach Grove City -- reconnection with old friends gladdened my aching little heart, and today my abs hurt pleasantly from laughter, and I feel slightly more energized to tackle what appears on my post-moving must-do list.
Mostly I'm tired; I keep reminding myself that moving is an objectively enormous stressor, and trying not to be hard on myself for feeling generally exhausted and reluctant to do anything but read and take naps.
But it looks as if I can safely take up residence in the mobile home, temporarily, at least, so I will soon have my own quiet space, and today I plan to fill with unpacking -- which I always find fun, because I have a tendency to forget about things until they emerge from boxes like Christmas. And then there's the joy of feeling out just where everything should belong.
I had a great time at Homecoming -- it was bizarre to drive only an hour and a half to reach Grove City -- reconnection with old friends gladdened my aching little heart, and today my abs hurt pleasantly from laughter, and I feel slightly more energized to tackle what appears on my post-moving must-do list.
Mostly I'm tired; I keep reminding myself that moving is an objectively enormous stressor, and trying not to be hard on myself for feeling generally exhausted and reluctant to do anything but read and take naps.
But it looks as if I can safely take up residence in the mobile home, temporarily, at least, so I will soon have my own quiet space, and today I plan to fill with unpacking -- which I always find fun, because I have a tendency to forget about things until they emerge from boxes like Christmas. And then there's the joy of feeling out just where everything should belong.
Friday, October 17, 2008
top cat
Two of my parents' three cats hate Simon.
I knew the transition would be a bit of a sticky wicket: Cats don't live together in the wild; only under the dominion of humans do they coexist peaceably in the same household, and the introduction of another feline triggers a certain irruption of the natural proclivities of the species.
I worry about my boy; he's not much of a fighter, and rather shy, though intensely curious, and when he lived with my parents before becoming well and truly my cat, he spent most of his time hiding in the basement. As I didn't want him reverting to old patterns, I fixed him up in my room with his food, water and litterbox, telling him, as I carried him upstairs, "This is your new safe place."
And it has worked. He doesn't much like being shut up in my room, so I started letting him out, a little bit at a time, worried that too much stress would cause his bladder to back up like a clogged drain and put him back in the hospital -- with me jobless. So he'd make little excursions downstairs, scout out the scene, and head back to the safety of his mommy's room when he'd had his fill.
The only trouble is that those excursions tended to end in stonewalls of hissing, growling and spitting from the other cats. I'd watch his bewildered expression and feel horrible for him -- here he just wants to get along, mind his own business, and sit in windowsills in the same room as I, and the other cats were having none of it.
At first I thought it was just Maggie. She's little and black-and-white and cute, but she turns into this huge ball of growling fluff whenever Simon pokes his face around a corner. But no; it's Greubie (a/k/a Alex) too. He's old and decrepit, and even though he and Simon used to get along, ever since I came home he's been hissing and spitting every time Simon walks into the room.
My poor kitty, I thought, over and over...until I witnessed a few things that reminded me what I'd forgotten about my Sweet Boy: He's a complete and utter brat. After his first puzzled reaction, and after several more trips downstairs amongst the other felines resulted in the same hostility, his ears tipped forward at a devilish angle, and he started deliberately pissing the other cats off. Maggie's tail would shrink a little and she'd turn away, and instantly Simon was pouncing on her, causing the tail to balloon out again; Greubie would stalk past, having finished his hiss, and Simon would bowl him sideways. And the more upset the others grew, the more I could see Simon's whiskers standing straight out in what amounts to a cat laughing his head off in glee.
I know the feeling -- I've had people dislike me for no discernable reason in the past, and once I gave up on amicable relations, I started antagonizing for the sheer puckish delight of seeing them madder. If Simon could talk, I'd hear him say, You don't want to like me? Okay; I'll have fun making you HATE me.
He also flaunts my favor. Yesterday I walked into the middle of a wall of puffy tails growling Simon to a standstill in the dining room when he wanted past them into the kitchen, and I bent down and petted Simon and shooed the others away. He looked up at me, then toward the others, and then, kitty hips swinging saucily, he sauntered around them with his tail waving. I could practically see him sticking out his tongue at them: What are you gonna do now, suckahs? My mom's got my back.
I watched him in the pure gut-warming delight of a person recognizing something even more kindred in a loved one than theretofore realized, and said, fondly, "You are such a punk."
So in this baiting, devil-may-care way, Simon has therefore begun winning himself a place closer to the top of the household hierarchy than he possessed before; the other cats don't know what to do with him, and have started cautiously leaving him alone.
Then this morning I heard the horrible coughing strangled snarls of a cat fight taking place in my room, and I tore up the stairs in a panic (Alex has all his claws; Simon doesn't) to find Greubie squeezed into a corner raising hell while Simon held him at bay. "You guys stop it," I shouted, and Greubie scooted under the dresser where Simon followed, clawless paws boxing Greubie in the face. More terrible gutteral squalls followed, and, outraged (what the hell was Alex doing invading Simon's territory?), I reached underneath, dragged Greubie out, set him in the hall, and shut the door.
But aside from a few tufts of missing hair, Simon looked fine. I guess he's more of a fighter than I realized. Ever since he's been jaunting all over the house as he pleases, terrorizing the others with ambushes and launched assaults from the tops of cabinets, then bouncing over to brush against my shins.
My baby is King Pin of the party. He's a beautiful, sleek, bedeviling snot. (Whose urinary tract seems to be in working order.)
I couldn't be prouder.
I knew the transition would be a bit of a sticky wicket: Cats don't live together in the wild; only under the dominion of humans do they coexist peaceably in the same household, and the introduction of another feline triggers a certain irruption of the natural proclivities of the species.
I worry about my boy; he's not much of a fighter, and rather shy, though intensely curious, and when he lived with my parents before becoming well and truly my cat, he spent most of his time hiding in the basement. As I didn't want him reverting to old patterns, I fixed him up in my room with his food, water and litterbox, telling him, as I carried him upstairs, "This is your new safe place."
And it has worked. He doesn't much like being shut up in my room, so I started letting him out, a little bit at a time, worried that too much stress would cause his bladder to back up like a clogged drain and put him back in the hospital -- with me jobless. So he'd make little excursions downstairs, scout out the scene, and head back to the safety of his mommy's room when he'd had his fill.
The only trouble is that those excursions tended to end in stonewalls of hissing, growling and spitting from the other cats. I'd watch his bewildered expression and feel horrible for him -- here he just wants to get along, mind his own business, and sit in windowsills in the same room as I, and the other cats were having none of it.
At first I thought it was just Maggie. She's little and black-and-white and cute, but she turns into this huge ball of growling fluff whenever Simon pokes his face around a corner. But no; it's Greubie (a/k/a Alex) too. He's old and decrepit, and even though he and Simon used to get along, ever since I came home he's been hissing and spitting every time Simon walks into the room.
My poor kitty, I thought, over and over...until I witnessed a few things that reminded me what I'd forgotten about my Sweet Boy: He's a complete and utter brat. After his first puzzled reaction, and after several more trips downstairs amongst the other felines resulted in the same hostility, his ears tipped forward at a devilish angle, and he started deliberately pissing the other cats off. Maggie's tail would shrink a little and she'd turn away, and instantly Simon was pouncing on her, causing the tail to balloon out again; Greubie would stalk past, having finished his hiss, and Simon would bowl him sideways. And the more upset the others grew, the more I could see Simon's whiskers standing straight out in what amounts to a cat laughing his head off in glee.
I know the feeling -- I've had people dislike me for no discernable reason in the past, and once I gave up on amicable relations, I started antagonizing for the sheer puckish delight of seeing them madder. If Simon could talk, I'd hear him say, You don't want to like me? Okay; I'll have fun making you HATE me.
He also flaunts my favor. Yesterday I walked into the middle of a wall of puffy tails growling Simon to a standstill in the dining room when he wanted past them into the kitchen, and I bent down and petted Simon and shooed the others away. He looked up at me, then toward the others, and then, kitty hips swinging saucily, he sauntered around them with his tail waving. I could practically see him sticking out his tongue at them: What are you gonna do now, suckahs? My mom's got my back.
I watched him in the pure gut-warming delight of a person recognizing something even more kindred in a loved one than theretofore realized, and said, fondly, "You are such a punk."
So in this baiting, devil-may-care way, Simon has therefore begun winning himself a place closer to the top of the household hierarchy than he possessed before; the other cats don't know what to do with him, and have started cautiously leaving him alone.
Then this morning I heard the horrible coughing strangled snarls of a cat fight taking place in my room, and I tore up the stairs in a panic (Alex has all his claws; Simon doesn't) to find Greubie squeezed into a corner raising hell while Simon held him at bay. "You guys stop it," I shouted, and Greubie scooted under the dresser where Simon followed, clawless paws boxing Greubie in the face. More terrible gutteral squalls followed, and, outraged (what the hell was Alex doing invading Simon's territory?), I reached underneath, dragged Greubie out, set him in the hall, and shut the door.
But aside from a few tufts of missing hair, Simon looked fine. I guess he's more of a fighter than I realized. Ever since he's been jaunting all over the house as he pleases, terrorizing the others with ambushes and launched assaults from the tops of cabinets, then bouncing over to brush against my shins.
My baby is King Pin of the party. He's a beautiful, sleek, bedeviling snot. (Whose urinary tract seems to be in working order.)
I couldn't be prouder.
Thursday, October 16, 2008
survivor
Today I had lunch with the gal who served as Assistant Youth Pastor of my high school Youth Group, and who has, in the years since I graduated high school, taken occupation as the head Youth Pastor.
My Youth Group experience was exceedingly difficult -- not just for me but for everyone involved with it; I've posted extensively on the subject on my Hint Half Guessed blog (which, incidentally, fell by the wayside as I stopped caring to delineate between matters of faith and matters "secular" on this blog; everything, from the way I see things, relates to faith, even if, or especially when, not specifically identified; it's all one). J., the Assistant Youth Pastor, was our only buffer in those years. The lot of us who grew up under the legalistic and tyrannical reign of the then-head Youth Pastor have had a lot of recovering to do in the years since. Some of us have kept the faith, but made it different; some of us have continued to cling to the ideas handed down to us from an ill and therefore extraordinarily unstable man; some of us have stopped believing in God altogether. A lot of damage was done in those years to the church's children, in the most impressionable stages of their lives; Eigh Ann and I call ourselves, and the rest of us who passed through that fire, in whatever state of scathed in which we emerged, the Survivors.
But in the intervening years between then and now, the only person with whom I've kept in regular contact is Eigh Ann; I only heard about the others through the grapevine, or saw them briefly on Christmas visits home, and I've had no chance really to take the pulse of the other Survivors, to compare and contrast our experiences then and since.
Talking with J. at lunch today was marvelous. We sat at the Chinese buffet in town and recalled those days under The Regime...and we howled with laughter. We remembered this scene, and that scene, and she told me about a few I didn't know, as things worsened after my graduating class left. And we laughed till the other customers didn't pretend they weren't staring at us.
War stories.
But here's the amazing thing. A lot of us, those who have kept the faith, have come to believe in similar new ways. This shouldn't surprise me, I expect; we grew up in the same unnourishing soil, and it only stands to reason that our healing should be similar as our wounding was similar. We were taught to believe, among other things, that human beings are innately and thoroughly evil; that instead of boasting in grace, a good Christian wallows (pridefully) in his shame as the most wretched of sinners; that we are a burden on God's grace; that salvation comes through works (this would have been denied if spelled out as such, but salvation became identifiable, not by faith or the fruits of the Spirit or a life of love and hope, but by what you did and did not do); that women have no value and are, by their very femaleness, bad, subordinate, weak, sinful, and prone to causing men to sin; that any appreciation for R-rated movies, dancing and alcohol endangered one's standing with God; and that judgmentality, not love, was the rule for relating to the world, to each other, and to ourselves.
But it seems that a number of us, in confronting the profound errors in those teachings, have come to similar conclusions -- that there's something good in almost everyone, however much we might tend toward error and evil; that nothing can change God's loving and intimate regard for us; that grace is always available to us because of that love; that life is freedom, and it's not how we follow or break the rules that matters, but how we live as a whole, in goodness, faith and joy; that everyone, however marginalized and/or outcast, has inherent value; that a full life is to be enjoyed, not rejected; and that love is the password, the truth, the reality underlying all things.
I returned home dizzy with the realization: a number of us are being redeemed, saved and healed from the bitterness of our spiritual abuse in similar ways. I came to a sort of peace with what happened awhile ago (though it took me years to arrive there); but, as I have lived those years in isolated self-sufficiency and island-like independence, I hadn't realized the power of a healing community -- the deep joy of people who are coming, and have come, out of similar traumas, and find their freedom together -- find, too, that their freedom, like their suffering, is almost identical in its form and appearance. And it dizzies, it boggles my mind, to think on the vast hugeness of God's mercy, God's kindness, that we should be able to be consoled and find consolation in each other's healing.
I think this is one of the reasons God has brought me home for a season -- I came as far as I could alone in my recovery, but the time for aloneness has gone, and now is the time for me to go even further, shoulder to shoulder with others. To find true catharsis, real healing, in the love and support and tears and laughter of a group.
It's an elementary concept, the communality of healing. (Hello, support groups.) But for me, schooled and rigidly discplined since early childhood to solitude, solidarity comes like a giddying lungful of pure oxygen, this enormous Eureka! discovery.
And I am excited. A couple of the Survivors are getting together next week at J.'s home, and I'm cooking dinner. (They even drink wine.) Whether we talk about any of that or not doesn't matter to me; the experience, the similarity is still there. For the first time in a long while, I have hope...hope in wholeness, hope in fullness, hope in shedding the scarred skin of long despair to emerge supple and new and full of joy.
Yup. This is The Year. And I am so thankful.
My Youth Group experience was exceedingly difficult -- not just for me but for everyone involved with it; I've posted extensively on the subject on my Hint Half Guessed blog (which, incidentally, fell by the wayside as I stopped caring to delineate between matters of faith and matters "secular" on this blog; everything, from the way I see things, relates to faith, even if, or especially when, not specifically identified; it's all one). J., the Assistant Youth Pastor, was our only buffer in those years. The lot of us who grew up under the legalistic and tyrannical reign of the then-head Youth Pastor have had a lot of recovering to do in the years since. Some of us have kept the faith, but made it different; some of us have continued to cling to the ideas handed down to us from an ill and therefore extraordinarily unstable man; some of us have stopped believing in God altogether. A lot of damage was done in those years to the church's children, in the most impressionable stages of their lives; Eigh Ann and I call ourselves, and the rest of us who passed through that fire, in whatever state of scathed in which we emerged, the Survivors.
But in the intervening years between then and now, the only person with whom I've kept in regular contact is Eigh Ann; I only heard about the others through the grapevine, or saw them briefly on Christmas visits home, and I've had no chance really to take the pulse of the other Survivors, to compare and contrast our experiences then and since.
Talking with J. at lunch today was marvelous. We sat at the Chinese buffet in town and recalled those days under The Regime...and we howled with laughter. We remembered this scene, and that scene, and she told me about a few I didn't know, as things worsened after my graduating class left. And we laughed till the other customers didn't pretend they weren't staring at us.
War stories.
But here's the amazing thing. A lot of us, those who have kept the faith, have come to believe in similar new ways. This shouldn't surprise me, I expect; we grew up in the same unnourishing soil, and it only stands to reason that our healing should be similar as our wounding was similar. We were taught to believe, among other things, that human beings are innately and thoroughly evil; that instead of boasting in grace, a good Christian wallows (pridefully) in his shame as the most wretched of sinners; that we are a burden on God's grace; that salvation comes through works (this would have been denied if spelled out as such, but salvation became identifiable, not by faith or the fruits of the Spirit or a life of love and hope, but by what you did and did not do); that women have no value and are, by their very femaleness, bad, subordinate, weak, sinful, and prone to causing men to sin; that any appreciation for R-rated movies, dancing and alcohol endangered one's standing with God; and that judgmentality, not love, was the rule for relating to the world, to each other, and to ourselves.
But it seems that a number of us, in confronting the profound errors in those teachings, have come to similar conclusions -- that there's something good in almost everyone, however much we might tend toward error and evil; that nothing can change God's loving and intimate regard for us; that grace is always available to us because of that love; that life is freedom, and it's not how we follow or break the rules that matters, but how we live as a whole, in goodness, faith and joy; that everyone, however marginalized and/or outcast, has inherent value; that a full life is to be enjoyed, not rejected; and that love is the password, the truth, the reality underlying all things.
I returned home dizzy with the realization: a number of us are being redeemed, saved and healed from the bitterness of our spiritual abuse in similar ways. I came to a sort of peace with what happened awhile ago (though it took me years to arrive there); but, as I have lived those years in isolated self-sufficiency and island-like independence, I hadn't realized the power of a healing community -- the deep joy of people who are coming, and have come, out of similar traumas, and find their freedom together -- find, too, that their freedom, like their suffering, is almost identical in its form and appearance. And it dizzies, it boggles my mind, to think on the vast hugeness of God's mercy, God's kindness, that we should be able to be consoled and find consolation in each other's healing.
I think this is one of the reasons God has brought me home for a season -- I came as far as I could alone in my recovery, but the time for aloneness has gone, and now is the time for me to go even further, shoulder to shoulder with others. To find true catharsis, real healing, in the love and support and tears and laughter of a group.
It's an elementary concept, the communality of healing. (Hello, support groups.) But for me, schooled and rigidly discplined since early childhood to solitude, solidarity comes like a giddying lungful of pure oxygen, this enormous Eureka! discovery.
And I am excited. A couple of the Survivors are getting together next week at J.'s home, and I'm cooking dinner. (They even drink wine.) Whether we talk about any of that or not doesn't matter to me; the experience, the similarity is still there. For the first time in a long while, I have hope...hope in wholeness, hope in fullness, hope in shedding the scarred skin of long despair to emerge supple and new and full of joy.
Yup. This is The Year. And I am so thankful.
Wednesday, October 15, 2008
meditation one
Since I'm totally mooching off my parental units for a couple of weeks (which has already started to bug me -- I had thought to take a week off and relax and rest and recuperate and all that, but I'm already getting restless; I hate being useless, and I hate even more being dependent), I've tried to make myself useful the last couple of days in turning my hand to cooking.
Dad's on second shift this month, which means that he's not home for dinner, but Mom is; so yesterday I hied myself off to Wegmans, the snootiest supermarket in Erie which boasts good Mexican ingredients and more Indian staples than I could have wildly dreamed, to purchase what I needed to make my good yummy Italian pasta sauce which, as yet, has no name. When Mom arrived home from work, I had fried a pound of bacon and was beginning to chop the onion. So we enjoyed a nice sit-down meal (it's still weird for me to listen to conversation in which I'm participating, instead of sitting down opposite, say, Malcolm Reynolds, Buffy, Seeley Booth, Veronica Mars, Michael Scott or GOB Bluth).
On my return trip from the grocery store, I took all my favorite back roads home -- Depot Road, which rolls steadily down from the Hill (the ridge of the original lakeshore rimming the valley of my hometown) to the valley, and which, if you have no traffic in front of you, allows you to throw the car in neutral and coast most of the three miles or so to Route 20. Unfortunately, I had a student driver learning the fine art of steering ahead of me, who appeared to be afraid of the gas pedal, so I took it upon myself to teach said student how to handle having his tail ridden by an impatient driver behind him -- hey, I wasn't really mad; he might as well learn it from someone who doesn't wish him ill -- but I got around him on Route 20 and from there took Highmeyer down to Route 5, which parallels the lake. Route 5 is annoying to drive if you're going anywhere in a hurry, as it's only a two-lane highway with a lot of curves, but it's certainly one of the most scenic highways in the area, and on a nice overcast cool day like yesterday it was perfect to drive East and see the slate stretch of water on the left, and the smoky bluish green of the Hill brooding in the distance on the right.
I took Route 5 to Freeport Beach, which I had visited the day before; but that was Columbus Day, and sunny, and therefore the beach sported more people than I wanted; I couldn't think freely, and I had wished for a rainy or cloudy day on which to return. God answered that one rather quickly, and so I perched on a driftwood log and stared out over the water.
It was windy, and the usually flat water foamed with whitecaps like the streaming manes of swimming horses, breaking on the beach with the sort of rhythmic roar that draws the mind into stillness. The wind off the water was freezing, and I zipped up my jacket and felt my hair blowing around me and looked off to the west, where the land wades out in a stretch of wooded cliffs and the waves surge on a razor-thin beach of crumbling shale. The trees leaning over the cliff had started their autumnal turning, and in the gray hanging air they shone dimly like coals in mist; above my head the wind had pushed the clouds into ripples that mirrored the waves mirroring the sky below them.
In front of me the lakewater bobbed in strips of brown by the shore and green a little further out before it was swallowed up by the deep solemn blue that ran out to meet the pale horizon; it was too cloudy to see Canada twenty-six miles away. In the foreground, several feet from my log, a gang of seagulls foraged for floating half-rotten foodstuffs dragged to shore by the surf.
I love watching seagulls. For about twenty minutes I sat and looked at them as they beat their wings hard against the eastbound wind to hover staring over the waves; occasionally a gull would grow tired of holding position and bank his wings and let the wind blow him back thirty feet before swooping sharply around. Over and over and over they plummeted against the surface of the water and missed and climbed the air again to wait for the next disgusting piece of debris.
Tirelessly they expended more energy than it seemed they would ever gain by anything they might find; I noticed that the ones who managed to score some slimy dripping thing ate it on the wing. This puzzled me until I saw a bird come up from the whitecaps bearing something a little larger than a minnow. Instantly the gulls surrounding him went on the attack. As the hardworking guy beat feet weaving in and out among the whitecaps flanked by his fellows who would rather reap the benefits of his labor than their own, I sat laughing like a maniac. It reminded me of the time my sister and I were watching a similar tableau and MST3-K-ing the scene, and she squawked, "It's mine, goddammit!"
As the slimy dripping thing changed beaks and the original catcher became an enraged pursuer with a slightly manic air to his wingbeats, I sat up with a start and wondered why I felt strange -- light, empty, quietly hollow; and I realized that I'd passed about fifteen minutes not thinking.
This almost never happens. I went to a Buddhist meditation once and, though I enjoyed it, I left with a headache -- the effort of not thinking cost a great deal. My brain is always busy. My conscious mind never shuts up. I'm usually thinking half a dozen things at once, my trains of thought saskatchewanning around like a heap of spaghetti or the overpasses in Pittsburgh, and to try to make all of that be still...well, then I have to think so hard about not thinking that I wind up thinking all the more.
Of course once I realized I hadn't been thinking I started thinking about not thinking and the train wreck of racing thoughts was off and running, and I found myself reflecting that Freeport Beach is one of the only places, besides that handbuilt bridge in the Alleghenies of New York over the pine-strewn creek I visited on Youth Group retreats twice a year, where not thinking happens naturally. Where the elemental nature of water meeting earth, and water meeting wind, and water meeting sky, brings my frantic mind to a natural stillness, absorbed in watching the union that has taken place in that valley for tens of thousands of years. Where the change is unceasing, and therefore unchanging; where all things cease symbolic meaning and just are, and where past and future only exist in the immutable, the present now.
At the same time I was also thinking that for communal creatures, seagulls are mean little buggers who terrorize, steal from and eat each other, and that it largely seems to be the nature of created things to have no peace.
But my peace had its partial source in their lack of it, and I drew a deep beath of air that felt, for the first time in months, free -- free and laced with that lake smell which I never remember until I smell it again, the smell of churned freshwater and algae and stones and fish. Farther down the western shore a woman threw sticks to her Boston bull terriers, trained, when they brought the sticks back, to give their little twisting leap in the air and put them in her hand; and a scruffy-looking young man stood at the water's edge, staring out over the waves. Down the eastern shore a small knot of elderly folks shuffled over the sand taking pictures of the place where the dark gray of the cloud curtain lifted suddenly over a bright shell-colored haze that did nothing to obscure the water's blue. Watching them, these few people out, like me, on a stormy day to be a part of the rugged, the raw, I thought how different all of them looked, from me and from each other, and how the pull of the lake holds the people, like the land and sky, together.
Dad's on second shift this month, which means that he's not home for dinner, but Mom is; so yesterday I hied myself off to Wegmans, the snootiest supermarket in Erie which boasts good Mexican ingredients and more Indian staples than I could have wildly dreamed, to purchase what I needed to make my good yummy Italian pasta sauce which, as yet, has no name. When Mom arrived home from work, I had fried a pound of bacon and was beginning to chop the onion. So we enjoyed a nice sit-down meal (it's still weird for me to listen to conversation in which I'm participating, instead of sitting down opposite, say, Malcolm Reynolds, Buffy, Seeley Booth, Veronica Mars, Michael Scott or GOB Bluth).
On my return trip from the grocery store, I took all my favorite back roads home -- Depot Road, which rolls steadily down from the Hill (the ridge of the original lakeshore rimming the valley of my hometown) to the valley, and which, if you have no traffic in front of you, allows you to throw the car in neutral and coast most of the three miles or so to Route 20. Unfortunately, I had a student driver learning the fine art of steering ahead of me, who appeared to be afraid of the gas pedal, so I took it upon myself to teach said student how to handle having his tail ridden by an impatient driver behind him -- hey, I wasn't really mad; he might as well learn it from someone who doesn't wish him ill -- but I got around him on Route 20 and from there took Highmeyer down to Route 5, which parallels the lake. Route 5 is annoying to drive if you're going anywhere in a hurry, as it's only a two-lane highway with a lot of curves, but it's certainly one of the most scenic highways in the area, and on a nice overcast cool day like yesterday it was perfect to drive East and see the slate stretch of water on the left, and the smoky bluish green of the Hill brooding in the distance on the right.
I took Route 5 to Freeport Beach, which I had visited the day before; but that was Columbus Day, and sunny, and therefore the beach sported more people than I wanted; I couldn't think freely, and I had wished for a rainy or cloudy day on which to return. God answered that one rather quickly, and so I perched on a driftwood log and stared out over the water.
It was windy, and the usually flat water foamed with whitecaps like the streaming manes of swimming horses, breaking on the beach with the sort of rhythmic roar that draws the mind into stillness. The wind off the water was freezing, and I zipped up my jacket and felt my hair blowing around me and looked off to the west, where the land wades out in a stretch of wooded cliffs and the waves surge on a razor-thin beach of crumbling shale. The trees leaning over the cliff had started their autumnal turning, and in the gray hanging air they shone dimly like coals in mist; above my head the wind had pushed the clouds into ripples that mirrored the waves mirroring the sky below them.
In front of me the lakewater bobbed in strips of brown by the shore and green a little further out before it was swallowed up by the deep solemn blue that ran out to meet the pale horizon; it was too cloudy to see Canada twenty-six miles away. In the foreground, several feet from my log, a gang of seagulls foraged for floating half-rotten foodstuffs dragged to shore by the surf.
I love watching seagulls. For about twenty minutes I sat and looked at them as they beat their wings hard against the eastbound wind to hover staring over the waves; occasionally a gull would grow tired of holding position and bank his wings and let the wind blow him back thirty feet before swooping sharply around. Over and over and over they plummeted against the surface of the water and missed and climbed the air again to wait for the next disgusting piece of debris.
Tirelessly they expended more energy than it seemed they would ever gain by anything they might find; I noticed that the ones who managed to score some slimy dripping thing ate it on the wing. This puzzled me until I saw a bird come up from the whitecaps bearing something a little larger than a minnow. Instantly the gulls surrounding him went on the attack. As the hardworking guy beat feet weaving in and out among the whitecaps flanked by his fellows who would rather reap the benefits of his labor than their own, I sat laughing like a maniac. It reminded me of the time my sister and I were watching a similar tableau and MST3-K-ing the scene, and she squawked, "It's mine, goddammit!"
As the slimy dripping thing changed beaks and the original catcher became an enraged pursuer with a slightly manic air to his wingbeats, I sat up with a start and wondered why I felt strange -- light, empty, quietly hollow; and I realized that I'd passed about fifteen minutes not thinking.
This almost never happens. I went to a Buddhist meditation once and, though I enjoyed it, I left with a headache -- the effort of not thinking cost a great deal. My brain is always busy. My conscious mind never shuts up. I'm usually thinking half a dozen things at once, my trains of thought saskatchewanning around like a heap of spaghetti or the overpasses in Pittsburgh, and to try to make all of that be still...well, then I have to think so hard about not thinking that I wind up thinking all the more.
Of course once I realized I hadn't been thinking I started thinking about not thinking and the train wreck of racing thoughts was off and running, and I found myself reflecting that Freeport Beach is one of the only places, besides that handbuilt bridge in the Alleghenies of New York over the pine-strewn creek I visited on Youth Group retreats twice a year, where not thinking happens naturally. Where the elemental nature of water meeting earth, and water meeting wind, and water meeting sky, brings my frantic mind to a natural stillness, absorbed in watching the union that has taken place in that valley for tens of thousands of years. Where the change is unceasing, and therefore unchanging; where all things cease symbolic meaning and just are, and where past and future only exist in the immutable, the present now.
At the same time I was also thinking that for communal creatures, seagulls are mean little buggers who terrorize, steal from and eat each other, and that it largely seems to be the nature of created things to have no peace.
But my peace had its partial source in their lack of it, and I drew a deep beath of air that felt, for the first time in months, free -- free and laced with that lake smell which I never remember until I smell it again, the smell of churned freshwater and algae and stones and fish. Farther down the western shore a woman threw sticks to her Boston bull terriers, trained, when they brought the sticks back, to give their little twisting leap in the air and put them in her hand; and a scruffy-looking young man stood at the water's edge, staring out over the waves. Down the eastern shore a small knot of elderly folks shuffled over the sand taking pictures of the place where the dark gray of the cloud curtain lifted suddenly over a bright shell-colored haze that did nothing to obscure the water's blue. Watching them, these few people out, like me, on a stormy day to be a part of the rugged, the raw, I thought how different all of them looked, from me and from each other, and how the pull of the lake holds the people, like the land and sky, together.
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
I see the morning moving over the hills
Home.
I still haven't had time to process everything from the last few days -- Friday, Saturday and Sunday consisted of whirls and winds of constant motion, and yesterday I spent in recovery. A lot of it still seems surreal -- it'll take a few days to absorb the reality that this is no temporary visit, but a longer stay.
The worst part of leaving was saying goodbye to Meg and Phillip and Josie. We had a good time on Friday night, hanging out and making fun of each other like usual, and when the time came for farewells, we all held it together pretty well...in my case, until the second I walked out the door, where I broke down and drove back to The State of Denmark weeping. (Fortunately I seem to have garnered a lot of experience crying and driving at the same time. I don't know when exactly I developed this skill, but it does come in handy periodically.)
So the last few days have been an internal turmoil of sadness, joy and physical exhaustion.
Where I'll live remains somewhat up in the air. I had initially planned to stay in my grandmother's mobile home for awhile: She has just taken up residence in an assisted living facility, and my parents are in the process of trying to sell the mobile home, particularly as the park does not allow subletting, but would concede for me to stay as long as the home remained up for sale. Now, however, it looks as though it's going to sell out from under me; so, for the time being, I'm bunking with my folks. Plan B is to find a job and an apartment within two weeks so that I can start unpacking and vacate the parental homestead before we all get horribly sick of each other. So far so good; but I've swallowed a great deal of my fiercely independent pride in returning to Erie, and I want to preserve what little is left.
Really, however, this was the only choice. Carting all of my stuff out of The State of Denmark showed me how awful it really was there; I've suffered about a thousand dollars' worth of clothing damage thanks to the mold I didn't even know existed until this past week. Considering my considerable allergy to mold, I have no idea how I didn't wind up deathly ill; chalk it up to the power of Zyrtec and the provisions of God, I suppose. I surveyed the ruined clothing spread out on the porch railing and thought, Michigan, haven't you taken enough from me?
But I'm gone, it's done, I'm finished. Choosing what I chose constituted a life-or-death decision; I couldn't have lasted much longer where I was. And nothing -- not pride, not determination, not stubbornness, not prejudice nor long-held goals -- is worth yielding to death: death of the mind, the heart, the will, the body. Nothing.
So here I am, still catching my breath, still recovering from the long slow horror of the last year. It has certainly had its shining brilliant spots of wonder and its steady pulsings of joy, but mostly those spots and pulses shone and beat from some kind of distance, and the immediacy of my situation was difficult. And I'm tired of the immediacy of my situation being difficult for no good reason. It's time for a change.
Already my social calendar is blossoming with people happy to have me home. Every new invitation makes me smile. I haven't even been back four days.
I'm happy to be back -- yesterday I purloined a bunch or two of grapes from an obliging vineyard and drove down to the beach where I spent hours in my teenage years staring over the water, staring north, wondering what my future held. I took off my sandals and walked on sand that doesn't pretend to be anything but rocks ground down to grit, I felt the chill October water plunging toward my ankles, and I stared north over the water and wondered what my future holds. And then, with no answers and a spreading peace, I turned and faced the hills, the fire of turning leaves flaming up in the afternoon sun, and I drove home.
I still haven't had time to process everything from the last few days -- Friday, Saturday and Sunday consisted of whirls and winds of constant motion, and yesterday I spent in recovery. A lot of it still seems surreal -- it'll take a few days to absorb the reality that this is no temporary visit, but a longer stay.
The worst part of leaving was saying goodbye to Meg and Phillip and Josie. We had a good time on Friday night, hanging out and making fun of each other like usual, and when the time came for farewells, we all held it together pretty well...in my case, until the second I walked out the door, where I broke down and drove back to The State of Denmark weeping. (Fortunately I seem to have garnered a lot of experience crying and driving at the same time. I don't know when exactly I developed this skill, but it does come in handy periodically.)
So the last few days have been an internal turmoil of sadness, joy and physical exhaustion.
Where I'll live remains somewhat up in the air. I had initially planned to stay in my grandmother's mobile home for awhile: She has just taken up residence in an assisted living facility, and my parents are in the process of trying to sell the mobile home, particularly as the park does not allow subletting, but would concede for me to stay as long as the home remained up for sale. Now, however, it looks as though it's going to sell out from under me; so, for the time being, I'm bunking with my folks. Plan B is to find a job and an apartment within two weeks so that I can start unpacking and vacate the parental homestead before we all get horribly sick of each other. So far so good; but I've swallowed a great deal of my fiercely independent pride in returning to Erie, and I want to preserve what little is left.
Really, however, this was the only choice. Carting all of my stuff out of The State of Denmark showed me how awful it really was there; I've suffered about a thousand dollars' worth of clothing damage thanks to the mold I didn't even know existed until this past week. Considering my considerable allergy to mold, I have no idea how I didn't wind up deathly ill; chalk it up to the power of Zyrtec and the provisions of God, I suppose. I surveyed the ruined clothing spread out on the porch railing and thought, Michigan, haven't you taken enough from me?
But I'm gone, it's done, I'm finished. Choosing what I chose constituted a life-or-death decision; I couldn't have lasted much longer where I was. And nothing -- not pride, not determination, not stubbornness, not prejudice nor long-held goals -- is worth yielding to death: death of the mind, the heart, the will, the body. Nothing.
So here I am, still catching my breath, still recovering from the long slow horror of the last year. It has certainly had its shining brilliant spots of wonder and its steady pulsings of joy, but mostly those spots and pulses shone and beat from some kind of distance, and the immediacy of my situation was difficult. And I'm tired of the immediacy of my situation being difficult for no good reason. It's time for a change.
Already my social calendar is blossoming with people happy to have me home. Every new invitation makes me smile. I haven't even been back four days.
I'm happy to be back -- yesterday I purloined a bunch or two of grapes from an obliging vineyard and drove down to the beach where I spent hours in my teenage years staring over the water, staring north, wondering what my future held. I took off my sandals and walked on sand that doesn't pretend to be anything but rocks ground down to grit, I felt the chill October water plunging toward my ankles, and I stared north over the water and wondered what my future holds. And then, with no answers and a spreading peace, I turned and faced the hills, the fire of turning leaves flaming up in the afternoon sun, and I drove home.
Thursday, October 09, 2008
if I stand
I am officially unemployed.
Yesterday marked my last day of work. It felt a little surreal -- I've worked there for two years, the longest I've ever held one job, and I had planned on staying for many more -- but aside from one blinding bolt of seizing panic as I collected my things and walked down the hall for the last time, thinking that now I must face the stress of job hunting -- a bolt of panic quickly quelled; I've become a lot more stoic in some respects over the last four years, a lot more confident in myself and the provisions of my God, and I can't wait for the next adventure -- everything felt, not sad, but fabulous. I'm leaving the office in good hands; because of my organizational system my successor should have no trouble finding anything whatsoever; and I realized that I had planned that last moment for a long time -- back in May.
I never expected to go home. I have known since my adolescence that I hold a deep love (rrgh -- I wish "love" in English had more expressive and meaningful forms as it does in Greek) for my native soil, for the dreamy glacial valley, violently ripped from the land thousands of years ago and now still and at rest, of which I will always think as home. I knew I loved it -- the miles of vineyards, the union of sky and water, the hazy smudge of Canada on Lake Erie's northern shore, the mosaic play of greens on vines and trees and hills, the sweet dozing quiet of a land settled for hundreds of years, come to peace with the descendants of its settlers, holding the tang of stories and half-forgotten legends, the deep sharp throb of the ancient on the shale lakeshore where the long-vanished Eriez tribe thrived before their obliteration by the Iroquois.
But I never thought I could return to it. A matter of pride, in large measure -- I equated returning with failure, prodigality with shame. I had set my face far from my birthplace to make my own way, to carve my own life from the sky and land of a new place, to assert my independence.
And yet, the unhappier I grew in my isolation in Michigan, the more I longed, for just one year, to be home. To spend the Christmas season baking cookies with my mother, toasting my dad with his latest whisky discovery, caroling with longtime friends. To bike to Freeport Beach on summer mornings and cut my feet on the rocks; to whip down through Papermill Hollow at breakneck speed, hoping the momentum would carry me halfway back up the opposite hill; to wander along Sixteen Mile Creek slapping at mosquitoes; to clamber up orchard ladders hunting for the perfect peach, the unblemished cluster of cherries; to duck under spicy leaves grabbing at the ripest blueberries while the silver strands of modern scarecrows move lazily in a breeze suffocated by the rattle of cicadas. Just one more year. A vacation to my roots. A brief and lovely sojourn while I collect my ideas and forge my plans for the future -- a future from which, Jonah-like, I seem to have been running for far too long.
So here I stand, poised at the "mouth and the reunion of the known and the unknown," looking eagerly to the simultaneous past and future merged into an exciting present. I have no idea what awaits me -- and, for the first time in three years, that thought brings, not fear and uncertainty, but anticipation and elation. I'm crossing over into a new chapter, emerging from shadow to brilliant clarity, moving on.
This is joy.
I couldn't be happier. In eight hours my parents will arrive to load up all of my belongings and retrace the trail I blazed four years ago. In just over twenty-four I will be welcoming the open highway -- America's greatest metaphor for freedom, journey, independence and change -- on my way to someplace old, to greet something new. This is adventure. I'm finally heading toward the destination to which my internal compass has called me for years -- and, after having everything stripped down and away this past year, I think I finally have the beginnings of the vision to see -- the path, if not the final arrival -- and to follow.
Something inarticulable is surging in my pulse, something golden and electric and fiery and raw. I have thought, sometimes, these last couple of weeks, that if I were to get up in the dark in the middle of the night and look in the mirror, I would see light like sunshine in my eyes, radiating from my skin, searing the moldy air around me, burning off anything leftover that I need to leave behind. I have thought, sometimes, that were I to turn my head quickly enough, I might catch a transparent wisp of feathers. It doesn't seem that I will be merely traveling to my new stopover on my way to a brillant destiny. I feel like I'll be flying. The fire so long shut up in my bones can't be contained under my skin, by the limits of my body -- it's breaking free, splitting me open, and I glory in the ferocity of its eruption.
Yesterday marked my last day of work. It felt a little surreal -- I've worked there for two years, the longest I've ever held one job, and I had planned on staying for many more -- but aside from one blinding bolt of seizing panic as I collected my things and walked down the hall for the last time, thinking that now I must face the stress of job hunting -- a bolt of panic quickly quelled; I've become a lot more stoic in some respects over the last four years, a lot more confident in myself and the provisions of my God, and I can't wait for the next adventure -- everything felt, not sad, but fabulous. I'm leaving the office in good hands; because of my organizational system my successor should have no trouble finding anything whatsoever; and I realized that I had planned that last moment for a long time -- back in May.
I never expected to go home. I have known since my adolescence that I hold a deep love (rrgh -- I wish "love" in English had more expressive and meaningful forms as it does in Greek) for my native soil, for the dreamy glacial valley, violently ripped from the land thousands of years ago and now still and at rest, of which I will always think as home. I knew I loved it -- the miles of vineyards, the union of sky and water, the hazy smudge of Canada on Lake Erie's northern shore, the mosaic play of greens on vines and trees and hills, the sweet dozing quiet of a land settled for hundreds of years, come to peace with the descendants of its settlers, holding the tang of stories and half-forgotten legends, the deep sharp throb of the ancient on the shale lakeshore where the long-vanished Eriez tribe thrived before their obliteration by the Iroquois.
But I never thought I could return to it. A matter of pride, in large measure -- I equated returning with failure, prodigality with shame. I had set my face far from my birthplace to make my own way, to carve my own life from the sky and land of a new place, to assert my independence.
And yet, the unhappier I grew in my isolation in Michigan, the more I longed, for just one year, to be home. To spend the Christmas season baking cookies with my mother, toasting my dad with his latest whisky discovery, caroling with longtime friends. To bike to Freeport Beach on summer mornings and cut my feet on the rocks; to whip down through Papermill Hollow at breakneck speed, hoping the momentum would carry me halfway back up the opposite hill; to wander along Sixteen Mile Creek slapping at mosquitoes; to clamber up orchard ladders hunting for the perfect peach, the unblemished cluster of cherries; to duck under spicy leaves grabbing at the ripest blueberries while the silver strands of modern scarecrows move lazily in a breeze suffocated by the rattle of cicadas. Just one more year. A vacation to my roots. A brief and lovely sojourn while I collect my ideas and forge my plans for the future -- a future from which, Jonah-like, I seem to have been running for far too long.
So here I stand, poised at the "mouth and the reunion of the known and the unknown," looking eagerly to the simultaneous past and future merged into an exciting present. I have no idea what awaits me -- and, for the first time in three years, that thought brings, not fear and uncertainty, but anticipation and elation. I'm crossing over into a new chapter, emerging from shadow to brilliant clarity, moving on.
This is joy.
I couldn't be happier. In eight hours my parents will arrive to load up all of my belongings and retrace the trail I blazed four years ago. In just over twenty-four I will be welcoming the open highway -- America's greatest metaphor for freedom, journey, independence and change -- on my way to someplace old, to greet something new. This is adventure. I'm finally heading toward the destination to which my internal compass has called me for years -- and, after having everything stripped down and away this past year, I think I finally have the beginnings of the vision to see -- the path, if not the final arrival -- and to follow.
Something inarticulable is surging in my pulse, something golden and electric and fiery and raw. I have thought, sometimes, these last couple of weeks, that if I were to get up in the dark in the middle of the night and look in the mirror, I would see light like sunshine in my eyes, radiating from my skin, searing the moldy air around me, burning off anything leftover that I need to leave behind. I have thought, sometimes, that were I to turn my head quickly enough, I might catch a transparent wisp of feathers. It doesn't seem that I will be merely traveling to my new stopover on my way to a brillant destiny. I feel like I'll be flying. The fire so long shut up in my bones can't be contained under my skin, by the limits of my body -- it's breaking free, splitting me open, and I glory in the ferocity of its eruption.
Tuesday, October 07, 2008
little house of horrors
Words cannot express.
There are simply times when, true to the legacy founded at Babel, expounded upon by Derrida and poeticized by Eliot, words fail in their enterprise. Language in all its power, in all its beauty, in all its subtle connotations, cannot always signify what the subject intends.
And words cannot capture, cannot render, the combination of horror, disgust, repugnance, anguish, and rage that clench in the gut when a girl, going innocently through her closet in the morning to find a clean dress, finds instead a dress blue and fuzzy with mold.
This has been the pattern, though, the last few days in The State of Denmark (wherein the rot was supposed to be metaphorical). As I've torn into cupboards and drawers, as I've drawn my belongings from their niches to pack them away in their boxes and bags, I have, more often than not, found those belongings in a state of confounding, fuzzy, blue-mold decay. The leather dog leash I was saving for no good reason other than someday I'd like a dog. My favorite, least fashionable, ugliest barn coat. My red dress. My Ann Taylor suit pants. My UNDERWEAR.
And ladies and gentlemen, these things were not lying on the floor in a state of neglect. These things were not positioned where any moldering would be justifiable, and for which I might be found culpable. They were in cupboards. They were hanging in my closet. They were neatly folded up IN DRESSER DRAWERS.
I am now livid, wrathful, toward the house. I have NEVER seen anything this disgusting in my LIFE. Not on my own territory. Not for no reason whatsoever, with things folded, picked up and put away, except that my house habors an unreasonable hatred toward me. (After all, I've taken care of it better than any tenants have recently.) Stupid house.
This really puts an edge into "going out with a bang." I've been joyful, excited, euphoric, about my return to my (natal) state and my (natal) soil, and now I'm also viciously anticipating abandoning that horrible moldering hole of a house.
In five days I will celebrate the victory of survival. Meanwhile I'll be doing a lot of laundry in hot water, and drying it on high heat, at the despised local laundromat to stave off any future sartorial decay.
DisGUSTing.
There are simply times when, true to the legacy founded at Babel, expounded upon by Derrida and poeticized by Eliot, words fail in their enterprise. Language in all its power, in all its beauty, in all its subtle connotations, cannot always signify what the subject intends.
And words cannot capture, cannot render, the combination of horror, disgust, repugnance, anguish, and rage that clench in the gut when a girl, going innocently through her closet in the morning to find a clean dress, finds instead a dress blue and fuzzy with mold.
This has been the pattern, though, the last few days in The State of Denmark (wherein the rot was supposed to be metaphorical). As I've torn into cupboards and drawers, as I've drawn my belongings from their niches to pack them away in their boxes and bags, I have, more often than not, found those belongings in a state of confounding, fuzzy, blue-mold decay. The leather dog leash I was saving for no good reason other than someday I'd like a dog. My favorite, least fashionable, ugliest barn coat. My red dress. My Ann Taylor suit pants. My UNDERWEAR.
And ladies and gentlemen, these things were not lying on the floor in a state of neglect. These things were not positioned where any moldering would be justifiable, and for which I might be found culpable. They were in cupboards. They were hanging in my closet. They were neatly folded up IN DRESSER DRAWERS.
I am now livid, wrathful, toward the house. I have NEVER seen anything this disgusting in my LIFE. Not on my own territory. Not for no reason whatsoever, with things folded, picked up and put away, except that my house habors an unreasonable hatred toward me. (After all, I've taken care of it better than any tenants have recently.) Stupid house.
This really puts an edge into "going out with a bang." I've been joyful, excited, euphoric, about my return to my (natal) state and my (natal) soil, and now I'm also viciously anticipating abandoning that horrible moldering hole of a house.
In five days I will celebrate the victory of survival. Meanwhile I'll be doing a lot of laundry in hot water, and drying it on high heat, at the despised local laundromat to stave off any future sartorial decay.
DisGUSTing.
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