Montage with And Today

I've started a couple different posts over the last few weeks, but haven't finished any of them.

So rather than starting another that I likely won't finish, I'm posting all the scraps together.

Snippets of my brain all weaved in patchwork and sad melody. La dee da.

First, listen to a sad song while you read through the first few posts. The song in the link, Manchester Orchestra's "Sleeper 1972" has been a backdrop for the last two months of my life. It's beautiful and heartbreaking.

3/27/11

On Silence

We had a moment at chapel last week when they had us all quiet down and pray in silence.

But I didn't think it felt the way it should... the creaking of bleachers and rustling of paper.

I think if we really heard silence, we'd be terrified.
We are caught in the noise of our lives.
Wadsworth hums outside my window.
My laptop purrs on my bed.

My breathing tenses and flows.

My roommate closes, opens doors.

My mind jumps on drums and thoughts and clatters.
Words dance over highways in our brains and if you concentrate, sometimes you can feel them between your ears: which synapses are firing, which cortex is acting.

And they pop and fly and fuse and all at once we get going in a dozen directions and suddenly the peace we were trying to find in the quiet is a race inside us--to find conclusions and to really feel the contentment we try to believe in.

But I don't believe it at all.

4/11/11

Yessing

I'm sad about some things, and it's making it hard to write. I fall into these cycles of pushing everybody away for little spurts of time, and I'm approaching one. And the rough thing is that there are people I don't want to leave me, to get past me.
I worry that I say all the same things over and over and that these rambling thoughts start to all sound repetitious and shallow.
I think I repeat myself---I say the same things and live the same patterns and make the same choices and give in to the same fears.
I think I'm unprepared for happiness--that I'm afraid of it. I freak out about the future so I'll feel like I'm preparing, but really, I'm circling.
Commitment makes me shudder. Saying yes to anything means saying no to everything else. So I worry so much about missing anything that I hardly let myself ever really experience anything.
And life is about to become a bit bigger. City and family and choices and saying no, so I can say yes. I've been afraid of yessing anything for a long time, and sure, there have been exceptions, but for the most part I've stopped at cliff edges and backed away with apologies and insecurities: I bailed on China, I can't choose what September should be, or where my life will feel at home. I want the future to fall into my lap, fully stocked with adventure and love.

4/17/11

Choosing, further thoughts on 'Yessing'

Life, at its barest, demands little of us. But the breathing and moving and living of every day requires that we make decisions. We have to choose.
There's a flooding phenomenon in my generation for a dislike of decision-making. I'm certainly guilty of this; I've told friends recently that choosing what to do after graduating from university is like marrying something. Picking one avenue to pursue, and leaving the rest to fall to the wind. And I'm not talking about leaving paths for other days; Frost covered that business, and it isn't what I'm addressing here.
Decision making. Choosing.
It takes saying no: prioritizing, and letting go of the other options.
So settling into some role, some thing for the next year of my life is commitment, but it isn't marriage. It isn't exclusive and picking an opportunity doesn't mean saying no to all others; in fact, chances are, one will lead to another.
But I worry. I get scared. Jobs, connections, relationships, everything. Terrified.
It takes responsibility and courage just to live, to function and sleep and commit to being ourselves and doing the best we can.
Then there's risk. We have to ask ourselves what we want, and we have to answer--stand to make a choice.
I'm asking myself--and ask yourself--'What do I want?'
And how big and how much and where? And how much am I willing to say no to, to get those things? What am I willing to sacrifice to be able to grasp the things that are yet out of my reach? And why, to all of these inquiries?
How do I answer, and what do I say to the questions I have to ask?
Do I want places or people or opportunities or experiences---or all of them?
What am I willing to risk?

5/8/11

In Chaos

Today's soundtrack. Aqualung: "Broken Bones"

Another sad sort of song. Sing sing sing.

Simultaneously graduating and grieving, I've found, makes for uncomfortable handshakes and repetition of all the same things: No, I'm not quite sure when I'm leaving; Oh I haven't quite figured out what comes next; Yeah, it was a great time at CCU; I've been friends with your son for years and he's one of my favorites here; She's a wonderful woman; Yes, I'll miss them.

I miss you. I already do.

The thing is, I miss everybody when they're not there. I cry when listen through Transatlanticism. And I miss Dr. Woodruff every time I write or read a poem. I miss the relationships I had with all my crazy friends from high school and the early days of college. I miss Uncle Rich when the Bears play and when it snows. I miss the dynamics that used to characterize my life because at some point along the way I started with this grieving and I haven't stopped.

And now I'm grieving all the moments I won't have with my grandfather in the future. My children will never meet him, and he won't see his grandchildren marry. The sons- and daughters-in-law won't understand who he was.

That was why I loved Salinger's Holden the first time I read Catcher.

"Don't ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody."

I do; I do miss everybody all the time because I can't stop talking about the people in my life, and because I love hard. It's exhausting, wanting to be everywhere, to be everything to anyone who might need anything. And it's exhausting to fail.

I want to see heaven, and know what it's like, if my grandfather is sitting with his mother, catching up and playing cards. If Dr. Woodruff has been having lunch dates with T.S. Eliot or anybody like that up there.

I want more time. To finish, to smile, to breathe. I'm always in such a hurry, getting from one thing to the next and trying to do and solve and fix and save and salvage.

5/28/11

Saturdays: Plans

Plans fall apart on a Saturday night, so I finally post on my blog. [Clearly, this didn't actually happen.]
A lot has happened lately, and I thought that at the end of all of it, I'd sit back and feel some deep relief and profound change. An "I just grew up so much in the last two months I can't even believe it" kind of thing, you know?
But instead, yesterday, I was sitting at the pool with a friend and I thought to myself, I haven't really changed at all from last summer. I'm still lusting for the sun and burying myself in novels. I'm wishing I was younger and things felt easier, or that I could fast forward to a point in time where these things all begin to make sense.

I've been obsessing over plans for months now, yet I still don't feel like I've made much progress. I said a big "No" in a case that was incredibly difficult, and I've realized home isn't what it used to be, but it never is.

And today...

In rereading all these posts and pasting them together, I think the main reason I've had such trouble finishing them is that they're all just about me and getting inside my head. That's not what I set out to do here. It is not what I want.

The problem then, as a result, is that I don't know what I do want. Always the problem, really.

Relationships? I'm utterly lost these days. The major shut out I predicted in the scrap of "Yessing" absolutely came true. (That said, if I haven't responded to Facebook messages or texts or phone calls, I'll call this my reason; apologies.)

One thing I know: I want to get back to bigger things, the bigger things at work. The abstract and undefined.

So I'll try to do that more in the coming posts while I'm sorting things out here and getting my head back on straight. It seems that I'm finally managing that after a couple months of being pretty scattered.

I said goodbyes and found some peace... now just to find a place to live.

I appreciate your patience, and as always, thank you for reading.

This Is A Grace: The Chemistry of Resilience

This one's important: Open up the link and listen. And read.

Where are we standing? What is our foundation?

Do we believe the words we say, the psalms we sing?

Because the answers to these things matter, so we begin here:

Breathe.

Let's see

if we

can work.

Futile was meant to acknowledge that there are times when words do nothing for us. What do you say when a mother dies or when a baby is sick? And grandparents--how do you reconcile the aging and disappearance--however gradual or sudden--of the matriarchs and patriarchs of our births and breakfasts and parents. So words teach nothing, change nothing, but things happen.

Life moves and bends to its own will--no, a higher will--nothing within our grasp, and only marginally within our ability to comprehend.

How do you console the people you love when your desires say "Ache, only aching"?

You breathe. Count your blessings, title your stories, and serialize your library.

You say goodbyes and place low shaking hands on shoulders and spines.

It is not healing, but it is something.

I'm grasping for mercy, shreds of redemption to neutralize the sadness of all these unstitched stories.

You've got me in your sea,

Braced until the end.

We are tattered; we are salvaged.

We find something in our pain.

This is a grace.

We find in our pain the ability to heal: the chemistry of resilience. It is a chaotic enigma that is birthed in our bones and matured in our bending years of immunizations and practical imbalance.

We pull the staples from our hearts and lay them to rest with the dead, no grudge to be held at the absence of miracle.

Perhaps we call this acceptance. Others will say denial or surrender. Titles are yet irrelevant: futile words.

Benign or malignant. Terminal, stable, recovering. In remission.

Superfluous.

All meaningless in the grace we find: we were given the ability to bend without breaking, to wither without fading, to feel without dying. But we die every day to the staples and strings that hold our fringes to the tucked edges of composure.

We are master needleworkers. We just never knew.

It's hard to believe that one year ago.

One year ago we were hurting, and we still are.

We demand healing with expectation and remorse, laden with color and tragedy.

One year ago, I was finding out I had missed the last class I ever should've had with my greatest mentor. I was melting under Spring sunlight while the diagnosis was sprinkled over enameled tables and patterned carpet in a white walled room.

I still wonder what the breathing sounded like after she said it, but I wasn't there, and never saw her again.

And as the months came to us, we lost her. At least, those are the words we use.

But I don't think she was anymore lost than she ever was; she was only leaving.

It's not so easy in other stories. Not that grieving her is easy.

We do lose people in death some times, but more in age: the way in creeps into their heads--sneaky small and limber--and cuts the wiring, leaving them short-circuited.

The years do things to us, to the people we have always loved, that we don't understand.

We're something in sight of everything all our hopes had in mind.

Years make Grandma forget which of her children went to which colleges. And what their friends names were.

Years make Grandpa say things to me that I can't accept or comprehend. The time turns him into someone else, who doesn't see me as an eight year old who wants to tell him that she took her nap for the day. The time brings his cancer back, and the decade nuzzles into his spine and rests there.

Years bury our secrets, and age our children.

Years make us love more and less and strangely.

Years break our kitchen tables and fade our scars-from trees and men and scalpels.

And years teach us, not words.

It's hard to believe that one year ago...

was only that, a year ago.

This--the quick passing of time over our sorrows and memories and sleep--this is a grace.

And the words that we use in the moments between are indeed futile at the end of things. It is something more profound than what the term loss can communicate. It is absence. And the impossibility of the presence of what we had planned is more than grief, more than aching. It is numbness and vulnerability and anger and so many things we cannot name.

The chemistry of resilience: a science we learn as a result of the biology of man.

And I'll hold you now, forever I know.

We are not breaking; we bend. And heal.
We stitch and save.

So we begin: breathe.

I have no words to heal, only thread and time.

Song "Let's See If We Can" by the fantastical musicians, Green or Blue. I write to their music pretty often and am glad they're making it. Check them out on Facebook or Youtube and listen to their stuff.

And as always, thanks for reading.

Futile.

You get Sufjan, and he's a treat, so listen.

We have stories that are secrets in their own regards--silence in their tellings.

There are words we never want to say or hear or feel.

And these are such: Cancer. Love. Death. Distance. Time.

They are harmful and breaking and painful and I fear them. I do not feel safe or happy or comforted. Right now, not even by love. But that's for another day.

I'm surrounded by cancer, in the women we've lost, the men we're losing, the places we're going.

And I feel useless. I can do nothing. I can pray. I can cry.

I've done those things, and I retire in curious March sunsets with nothing, feeling nothing, feeling scared.

I do-love you-I do.

I can change the way I feel, and the way I experience what happens around me, but I cannot prevent the spinning of the earth, or dark empty breath and its stopping, or the growing of tumors.

I cannot force life to function under the realm of my whims.

To try is futile.

So I do nothing and cry and pray.

I see the astounding simplicity of who people are---

In strings and salads, running shoes, tobacco pipes, haircuts, hubcabs, VHS tapes, nail polish, name tags and needles--for creating and destroying-- and in crossword puzzles, veils, backpacks, sandwich bags, and text books.

I see truth in picnic tables and Midwestern Oaks and the conversations we've never had with the people who have always needed them most.

We see truth and we keep quiet.

And I would say I love you, but saying it out loud is hard.

So I won't say it at all and I won't stay very long.

There are things we ought to say, and love we ought to give.

But we are frightened and foolish.

And words are futile devices.

More from Sufjan. Listen. We can do much more together.

Today, I Believe It

I've just started, and I'm already pretty encouraged. So thanks, everybody, for reading, following, commenting, and so on.

I had a great day with the roommates today. We went shopping up at Flatirons and I got a dress for Leigh's wedding. It didn't feel all that special, really, when we were standing at the service desk in juniors with a crazy woman named Sandra who had the glitteriest (made that one up) nails I've ever seen in my life, along with at least eight rings on her hands. She was crazy.

But as we walked out to the car, I had a moment--one of those, when did I grow up? And how? thoughts. My best friend is getting married. I'm an aunt. I'm deciding what city is the best place to plant roots in for my next move, which has potential to be the last for a long time.

And I'm finally getting my ears pierced. (No, never got to that before, but we're going in a little bit.)

I'm a person who pauses to think about life pretty often, but I'm still pretty shocked at how much of it has happened. Every time. Seasons, moments, songs, births, photos...

It just gets me.

But it's exciting: the scary kind.

Leigh will get married and slide right into the next phase of her life--newlywed-student-teaching-dom. And Concha's going on a date, a double date. And Kris is working and Chip is graduating. Annie's in college. And all the CCU freshman year friends are around, or not. Dating or single or getting engaged or whatever it is they're doing.

It's all still happening. And I'm here in the scary exciting part, watching them, waiting with and for them. Waiting on love that might someday come, or not. A career, or an opportunity, or a chance at some way to impact a world outside my own. Scary exciting. And beautiful.

My sister said something to me today that meant more than she probably realized: "You're not the kind of person someone can just drop without a thought."

I take a healthy pride in the fact that someone would even say that. I'm worth investing in, worthy of love. I forget that sometimes.

There's been cuts in these years--in my skin, at my pride, of my teammates--but I realize that I'm not a part of what's been left behind. I'm here, right here, in these places: my room, my senior year, Colorado, about to start a second job, writing, finishing. I've made the cut in a lot of people's lives, even if I got cut from the eighth grade soccer team. And I'm more beautiful for it.

I love my sister. And my mom, who made us the way we are. And the rest of my family. And my roommates. And my best friends. And everybody I've ever met really, even the ones I wouldn't say I even liked.

That's cheesey, I know. Dr. Woodruff would have a fit and write "TRITE" -- just like that, but bigger, if I had ever handed those words in for an assignment in her class. Maybe even with an explanation point. But I can laugh at it, and this: Life is trite. We live in cycles and make choices day in and out that put us where we are, and a lot of times, we repeat the same mistakes, but eventually, we learn and look at ourselves in special moments when we say, "I'm beautiful, and today, I believe it too."

----

A new poem coming shortly too! Thanks for loving me, each of you.

And as always, thanks for reading.