Crutches

I was raised to hate the saints.

Okay, okay, maybe hate is too strong a word. In fact, it is almost certainly too strong a word. But it does make a catchy opener, right? Really it is more accurate to say that I was never taught to love the saints, I was taught to think of them as a distraction, something that weak people used because they weren't really committed to God. Saints were idolatrous, I mean, just look at all that art connected with them. So many pictures. Man's futile attempt (gendered language being part and parcel of the diatribe) to bring the infinite down to a knowable level. Which is wrong! And wicked! And really, really naughty!

The same thing, in essence, was said about all non-spontaneous prayer. If it wasn't "from the heart," the immediate, extempore outflow of that moment's emotions and response to God, it was phony, insincere. Rote. The product of Dead Faith. This would include, in practice at least, if not in theology, even the Lord's Prayer and the Creeds. The most important thing, in both of these cases, is my personal, direct connection with the divine, my individual response, my emotional engagement.

But what happens when the connection is severed? When emotions are deadened? When I can't bring myself to have any response at all? I think a part of the culture which produced devotion to saints and reliance on liturgical prayer was perhaps one of greater humility than our own. It was a culture of largely unlettered people, more farmers than poets. Perhaps they felt incapable of barging in on the Most High, unannounced and without decorum. Perhaps it wasn't (isn't?) wrong to feel that way. While we recognize God-drawn-near in the incarnation of Christ, we must also keep in mind God-mysterious, God-beyond-speaking, Holy-Holy-Holy God. When we view God in this way, doesn't it seem right that spontaneous words should seem to rough? That we ourselves should feel somewhat inadequate to approach, knowing ourselves as we do and knowing only the thousandth part of what the incandescence of God requires.

But this is not really my point. I was often taught to think of saints and liturgy as something for weak people, for those not brave enough to face God, not faithful enough to speak their own thoughts to Her.

But now, I know, I am weak.

Not only not brave enough to face God, but often caught running in the opposite direction. I imagine burly brothers and sisters, both living and passed, catching hold of me as I try to scoot out the back-door of faith and turning me, pressing me back in the proper direction, and then pushing me even further with their prayers when my stubborn, terrified feet refuse to go even one step farther. When my own faith is weak or dormant, the prayers of the saints keep drawing me toward the dread throne. They lower me like a dying invalid through a roof, knowing intimately the nature of my disease and its cure.

They are mentors, wise voices still speaking to the Bride, urging her to remember old lessons. Francis chatters amiably to birds and wolves and speaks a very current message about the urgent need for creation care. Thomas unwillingly goes to India and challenges us with the intrepid faithfulness of a doubter. Mary quietly sings her song about a God who fills the hungry with good things and calls us to have compassion on the poor who have always looked to her for aid.

These days, I find myself having a similar reliance on liturgical prayers. Too often, I have nothing to say to God or I am too unbalanced, only complaining or thinking exclusively of my own little problems to the neglect of my local and global community. When the spontaneous outflow is stopped through hardness of heart, the words are a gift. The kyrie reminds me of my constant need for mercy. The Lord's prayer humbles me with every pounding phrase, to be brought to ask for another kingdom besides mine, to ask for pardon, to be put on the same level as my enemies. The prayers from the Book are beautiful, from liturgies are beautiful, and I am attracted to beauty when nothing else moves me. To say, I am angry, I am in pain, I am confused, but here are these words, and I can say them because of their sound, their feel in my mouth, their look on the page. They comfort me. To say, there is so much I cannot do, so much to this life of faith of which I feel incapable, but, these words. I can say them. Even without feeling, even without belief, I can bring myself to say these words and to believe, in this moment, that saying is enough.

I am profoundly grateful for saints and I am profoundly grateful for prayers and I am profoundly grateful for the renewal of mind that allows me to embrace them both.

At Last

Okay, so a little later than I anticipated, and a little rougher than I would have liked to put before my public, but here is another poem. Not terribly representative of where I am right now, as I wrote it back in early June, but as I look over my notebook, by far the best piece of recent work. So, that's that.

Where You Find Me

What if you were the old apple tree
the high grass
the moon in summer
the rocking chair
rain on the roof?

What would I be then?
Surely not the same old seagull
that child lost in the mall
a broken egg on the kitchen floor
the battered woman with broken teeth.

If we could get there,
to that place where
you were the stained glass picture
and I was the stub of a summertime candle
lighting you up from behind--
O, I know it!
There, everything would change.

Beauty Goes Underground

Today, I come bearing gifts. And because this is not the sort of area where one can give actual gifts, I come bearing virtual gifts. First of all, in my continued waste of my existence trolling around the web, I have discovered what I think could be my new gem. It's godspy.com, a very promising looking Catholic site that I have enjoyed poking around on for the last couple lunch hours. And in so doing, I stumbled across this article.

Restless

Hmmmm...it was brought to my attention recently that it has been a while since I last posted on here. I was a little dubious, but then I logged on and I think my eyes bugged out when I saw the date of my last post. Not that I have a spotless record for communications of any sort. I think the thing was that it just seemed like it had been no time at all. Things have really picked up and filled up since I started working, not surprisingly. The days pass so quickly.

Mostly these days, I must confess, I am tired. I am tired at every level. My body feels disconnected from my spirit. My mind is hiding from itself. This is not a new theme for me. But, it is nonetheless true. I think that I may be in the midst of another little slump; again, not a new theme for me. What is new is trying not to be shocked and appalled that I cannot constantly be Little Mary Sunshine, to accept this as part of the journey that is chronic, rather than episodic, depression. I want to be able to commit to take care of myself in all the ways that I can: to get enough sleep, to eat well, to exercise, to be quiet and journal and spend lots of time dancing (my free therapy). It's just hard. It's hard to be disciplined when your spirit feels unwell. It's hard to be accountable to people when you have a hard time trusting. It's hard to keep reaching out through the dark and to keep believing that, eventually, something will be there, reaching back to you.

Next time, I'd like to try to leave you with another poem. The last one is still in revision. It's a good goal to set.

Be well, readers. Be good to yourselves. Care for your souls.

S.

Trust Your Art

I am quite tickled by how well this post follows from the one which preceded it. That doesn't usually happen. But one of the things I am thinking about lately is how difficult it is, for me at least, to trust myself as an artist.

An artist? *shudder* I don't even like to use the word. How pretentious! How could I possibly be a for real life artist. I'm not actually good at anything. Look at Caravaggio. Look at Martha Graham. Look at Billy Collins. Now those people are artists. They are talented.

But what can I do? I love to paint. I live to dance. And I love to write as well. This problem came crashing down on me recently when A. and I decided to spend an afternoon painting out in the sun in our backyard. It was lovely. She chose watercolors and I chose tempera (not my medium of choice, but all we had in the house)and a huge sheet of paper. I wanted to experiment with trying to stay within one color family. I used mostly greens and blues with a little indigo and one shot of strategically placed red. I painted for maybe an hour. It was great fun. I enjoyed mixing the colors. I used ferns and leaves to make prints. But at the end of the day, I still looked at my painting and said to myself, "Wow, that really sucks." It is so hard, at the end of the day, not to judge success by the outcome and not to judge the outcome by comparing it to the greatest masters of art that ever lived. Why do I do this to myself? It is critical for me to remeber that the point of my painting is not to be Caravaggio or Picasso or Turner. The point of my painting is to have painted. To express myself. To do something that I love.

And I have to believe this even more than most because this is a message I want to bring to other people, as I was talking about in my last post. I want other people to be empowered to express themselves through art without fear of judgement or threat of comparison, even if they're doing it to themselves. How can I preach what I'm not practicing?

Now, it is important for me to note here that I in no way mean to say that I am equal to Caravaggio. I am not going to say that I am a good painter, no matter how much I enjoy it. I still believe that there are standards, no matter how fluid their definitions may be and that something can show technical skill or the lack of it. All I am saying is that lack of skill shouldn't keep you from doing something for your own pleasure and taking some pride in what you do.

The reason that I am thinking of this today is that I have had the delight of getting to go to my new dance space, the parish hall at Westminster Presbyterian. It is the most wonderful thing that has happened to me in the past two months. Maybe longer. It is huge and has great accoustics and feels very private. Getting to go there is like a trip to Disneyworld for me every time because that is where I really get to dance.

Now, most of my friends, and even some of the people who barely know me, understand that I like to dance. But what I don't think anyone really understands is the degree to which I love dancing. I think about dancing or actually do a little dancing probably every hour of the day. I make up choreographies in my head when I'm day dreaming. I listen to all music in terms of its dance potential. Dancing is all that I want to talk about with other people. You people have no idea how much babble I spare you from. And right now is an incredibly exciting time for me in my dance journey. I've just recently discovered amazing new music. And then there's floorwork, something that I've been wanting for weeks to explore, which is finally starting to click for me. By this I mean, changing levels, going from standing straight to crouching to kneeling to lying on the floor, all kinds of stuff that's really hard to transition into and out of smoothly. And thanks to an incredibly low-brow, incredibly wonderful dance show on TV, I've recently discovered the entirely new-to-me genres of lyrical hip hop and contemporary dance. I don't even have words to tell you how exciting that is. It's like...not like learning a new language, but like learning for the first time that there are words for your emotions, which you'd never been able to express to anyone before. Or like learning how, instead of just saying "I'm sad," you could say, "I'm mourning" or "I'm heartbroken" and it would mean two different things. It's like discovering that besides just being beautiful and fun, I can speak with dance, I can tell stories, I can express and process emotions, even if I'm all by myself. Sigh. It's unspeakably wonderful.

But today, after being in my happy place doing one of the things I love most in the world, I left feeling kind of blue. Why? Because my popping isn't crisp enough, my lines are in shambles, my balance is a joke, and if I don't have a partner to do the foxtrot with, am I really doing a foxtrot? Now I should mention at this juncture that I have been dancing for approximately thirteen years but I have taken approximately three classes in my life, two when I was six and one when I was sixteen. All I've ever really done is start dancing to a Steven Curtis Chapman song in my living room one day when I was 11 and I haven't stopped since (which is actually its own great story, but one for another day). But the upshot of this is that I have no idea where I fall on the spectrum of technical "goodness." And it doesn't help that I've never seen myself dance, primarily due to the fact that I've never had a space with mirrors. So I don't even know if my lines are a mess because I've never seen my lines. Part of me knows that this is due largely to the fact that I really have never sought such spaces because I have certain illusions about myself as a dancer that I don't want to shatter. But at the same time, I think I can recognize that I dance much better than I paint. It's tricky here because I'm just good enough to know that I could be better, whereas with painting I doubt how much better I could possibly get.

So what does it all mean? Do I suck, or am I an undiscovered genius? But at the end of the day, maybe those are the wrong questions to ask. Must everything be polarized into stardom or shame? Here is what I'm going to do. I'm going to recognize that I fall somewhere in the middle and keep dancing and keep loving dance. And recognize that I fall somewhere towards the bottom and still keep painting. And, who knows? maybe I'll even recognize that I've hit a wall in my own ability to coach myself as a dancer and go out and get some of that technical skill from somebody who really knows what they're doing. Not that I'll ever be Martha Graham or anything...

S.

On Work and the Future

You probably won't believe me when I say this, but I have been racking my brains for days trying to think of what I wanted to say next on here. I have many thought-trains that I am currently interested in, but as I was saying to some friends the other day, that is not sufficient qualification for them to be forever enshrined in print (even if it is more like the far more transitory html). What I realized, though, is that those of you who actively follow the chronicle of my life are overdue for a here-is-the-very-mundane-details-that-form-the-context-of-my-life-and-stories sort of update. Not the most thrilling or thought-provoking, but the people have a right to know.

So here's the skinny on the job sitch: I am working for a non-profit organization that serves runaway and homeless youth. What my job is mostly about is establishing different sites in the city where youth in crisis (defined as anything from being locked out or lost to being molested, abused, or homeless) can go and make a call and get picked up by a volunteer and taken to the shelter. My job is to fit the pieces together. So I am in charge of scheduling tabling events at festivals and school visits so that youth know about the availability of these services. I am responsible (at least partially) for recruiting and training sites so that employees know the protocol when someone comes in. And I am in charge of recruiting and training the volunteers to know how to respond to and transport youth in crisis. So, that's at least the next year of my life.

How is the job itself? It's very hard to say, considering I've only worked there for a grand total of five days. I think a lot of the trouble right now is the inevitable bumps and troubles that come along with being in a new place, like the fact that I feel absurd for never knowing where stuff is or who needs to sign what or who has the authorization to do what. But, overall, I'm excited about the prospects, most of all about the prospects of working for an organization that I can believe in, doing something that's going to use my gifts. It's super-cool, what I've been looking for for years now. Inevitably I can lose sight of the opportunity I have and what the impact of what I'm doing will be, say around 3:30 in the afternoon when times seems to slow down to a crawl. But that would be true, at least as far as I can tell, no matter where I ended up working. And besides, it's nothing half a Snickers bar couldn't fix.

So that's the bread and butter of my days. I have to say, the one thing that takes some getting used to is not having essentially unlimited free time, except on the weekends, of course. Now I wonder why I'm in the middle of two theology books, a novel, and about 3 different volumes of poetry and wondering why I'm not getting anywhere in any of them and the reason is that all of a sudden, most of my time is being spent at work, doing things that other people want me to do. It's very strange. You can laugh all you want, as my mom did, and say "Welcome to my world, kid." But it's just different. I don't even think it's bad yet.

All this has given me plenty of food for thought regarding what I ultimately want to end up doing. I think the new American dream is work that is so enjoyable it doesn't even feel like we're working, but is still lucrative enough to pay all the bills and buy a nice steak every Sunday. Maybe that's just me. I feel, tho, that I need some kind of ultimate goal in terms of Career I Really Want to Have Someday to help guide my present actions, because otherwise I feel so lost in the wide world that all of my actions seem without intent, lost in an unguided universe.

So here it is, kids, the Grand Plan, or at least the Grand Plan as I formulated it while I was taking a shower yesterday. Ultimately, I want to buy a very old, very beautiful church building that is up for sale because its congregation is too small to support it. I want to renovate it and turn it into a Spirituality and Arts Center where people from all sorts of faith traditions can come and connect with God through the arts. And I mean all of them: drama, painting, ceramics, mixed media and the whole kaboodle of visual arts, music, writing, and of course dancing. I want there to also be a heavy focus on community formation, a group of people with whom to ask questions that are really tough, a group of people to trust. I am trying to figure out right now if this all would require me to take some sort of pastoral role, which could be weird, depending on how you define pastoral. Also, I think I will need some sort of degree in theology and arts and counseling...cause those sorts of degrees pretty much grow on trees nowadays. So, to work, I say! to earn exorbitant amounts of money with which to pay for all of these degrees so I can do what it is that I really want to do...maybe. Unless this isn't it at all. Sheesh, I need to start taking longer showers.

S.

Poet Emerging

So, here I am, still in Buffalo, still enjoying life. But still not working. I'm a little bit miffed, but I'm pretty sure that it's at least partially my fault, so I must not rail against the universe, but quietly accept my fate. I'm frustrated because after a YEAR of what was essentially unemployment, tho a busy unemployment, I am SO ready to start contributing to the world again. To have full days, even fuller than they currently are.

But, in the interim, I have been making this place with my lovelies into my home too, which is harder than it sounds. Carving out little corners for myself is very necessary for me, because I find that if I'm not being careful, it is easy to think of this as their place in which I am simply a guest with no right to shelf space or closet space or anything else. This is not actually the case, so as I shove my way into nooks and crannies, I am asserting the fact that I pay rent too and I belong here! Not to give the impression in any sense that I feel unwanted. They want me to do this too, it's just a process of changing my thinking.

In addition to this, I have been spending lots of time discovering new passions (like opera and gardening), or rediscovering those things which I have always been passionate about, but had let go of while at home, like dancing and most notably poetry. Suddenly, it seems to be everywhere, whether it's in the greater amount of time I have to spend with Mary Oliver and Glenn Freeman and this beautiful post by one of my most favoritest bloggers. So, as a consequence, I've been writing more poetry than I have since graduation. I think this is a good thing.

Thankfully, it's been more about remembering the rhythms and disciplines that I was taught in college than starting over from scratch. The recollection of daily discipline, the blank page which has never terrified me, cups of coffee and words, unruly words that dare me to master them. Pushing myself beyond the first thing that I could say, the obvious, beyond that to the second thing, and the third until I am startled by the sense that I am making with fresh words. The production of massive amounts of shitty first drafts and cobbled together verses which will never see the light if I can help it. But feeling capable, for the first time in a long time. Feeling worthy of the craft in a way that I never felt at home. Remembering that even when the work is profoundly unworthy, there is something beyond it, something that needs to be written towards instead of just arrived at in one fell swoop. And remembering the teeth-grinding, painstaking, eye-jabbing, endless process of editing. Yes, whether or not that one comma goes in really will make all the difference.

It is good. It is profoundly good to be pushing myself to rediscover my voice, to allow myself to admit to an aptitude. I AM a writer, dammit!!! Maybe an inconstant and poor one, but that is a real part of who I am!!! In that spirit, I end by repeating this gorgeous snippet of verse from Hafiz, and then offer one of my own recent pieces. I almost hate to put them beside each other because there is absolutely no comparison, but then, I guess that's part of the daring that I am trying to own.

"A poet is someone
who can pour light
into a cup
then raise it to nourish
your beautiful, parched, holy mouth."

-Hafiz

* * *

Visitation

When the Holy Spirit comes in a South Texas summer,
She takes the form of a tall, white egret
standing, watching, waiting in the Baptizing River
her yellow eyes at once warning you away and
daring you to come wash.

The water here could be fire again,
if the bird wills it to be.
The slimy rocks, the muddy ripples,
she sings a croaking song over them
to let you know—-these are for you.

No sparkling fountains, no golden dust.
Just a sun-cracked mud bank,
the skimming, benediction hands of
the willow tree
and the harsh, holy eye of the egret,
piercing your hands and side,
turning the water red as you go under
and rise a saint.