I swear I'm not a Jesus freak.

I don't talk about religion a whole lot with certain friends that aren't or haven't come to it yet. I know it's sensitive, maybe uncomfortable for some. It tends to stir up fears of death and all those lonely existential questions, but that's okay. Being human, I think we all share in that. So, why not explore these beliefs and fears together. I certainly don't claim to have any answers, this is merely connecting the countless dots and attempting to enlighten myself.


My bible study is requiring that we journal along with the book/workbook. I enjoy writing, but the physical act of pen-to-paper hampers me creatively, because I get lazy with my words, so I'll attempt to blog along instead.


The first four chapters of our book, Restless,  focuses on the writer's restlessness in her soul. God's tugging at her spirit to do something. I'm also reading a Reflection on a Course in Miracles right now, and it looks at the same type of soulful restlessness, God's nudging at us to be our essence. God has already made us into exactly who we are supposed to be; He knows this because he created you. He made you for a reason, and even gave you the Holy Spirit as a wonderful, loving lifeline between your heart and God, himself. There's goodness there, always, in the beginning. In our essence, in our childlike purity, holiness lives there. Where there is holiness, there is also a sense of peace. Spiritual peace produces the physical feeling of rest. Now, rest may sometimes look passive, but it's not. It's considered an "active nonresistance." A surrender to God. A surrender of all our control to God.


Sometimes we learn by direct experience. This often results in mistakes, thankfully and hopefully we can learn from those too. Another way to learn is to sit back and observe first, to rest and then seek out knowledge by asking questions, then processing the answers received (because we don't have to accept those answers as truth; they are simply one person's answer).


The Zen Buddhist advises to create a life that's like an empty rice bowl, waiting to be filled. As long as we are empty, we can be filled. You must empty out though, so rest is imperative to experience. Similarly, only a person who is hurt can be healed. A person who understands pain has experienced pain and can then help others with pain. And in helping others, that person heals from his or her pain. Life can be beautiful in this way, this perpetual healing cycle of sharing and openness. However, always first, we must seek out and find rest with ourselves.


Christianity speaks in a similar way as the Buddhist, saying "go to God like the child." Children know what they do not know. They greet life like empty vessels, waiting to be filled with knowledge and experience. They are persistent in asking questions. They want to know everything. This is wisdom! Children are such wise souls!


A fool pretends to know something. A wise person asks (meaningful) questions. Unpretending, accepting of the knowledge he/she has or doesn't have.

whines

Wow. Life teaches us so much. It's remarkable. As my favorite song, a song I once wanted in my wedding, plays in my earphones, I contemplate what lessons I've learned through this relationship. It's all we can hope to do from our sorrows. After we've accepted the fate of things, we take the time, moving an appropriate distance from the distress, to simply learn.

It happened only Saturday. A question and the silence of a grave. My heart stopped. Then, it swelled with hope for a few remaining beats, until the truth finally gushed to life's surface. It landed like a dead hawk between us. Everything dashed away.

I didn't think it could happen to me. I saw myself as invincible to a cheating partner. I'm wonderful and desirable and worthy of truth and love. I've made mistakes, of course, y'all know that and I would never deny the fact. However, I'm intuitive, making smart judgements, based around the strength and authenticity of a connection between two independent souls. It was all present; it was there for us. So present, it practically thumped between us. I'd never experienced a person understanding me so well, considering me so important, beautiful, worthy, and wanted, wanted, wanted, so much of the time. Every day, I felt wanted for all the pieces of me, even the brokenness, shining a white light onto my darkness. At night, the wanting slept beside of each us, one wanting the other beyond space, beyond time, beyond even understanding. The goodnights were gentle poetry, "Rest softly." He called me a fawn.

Still, this is not real to me. Those three hours felt like a nightmare. I expected at any moment to wake up, turn my face to his, and see him sleeping there, with the calm of a boy. I want to walk over to his house right this very moment. I left my heart there. Betrayal exists in its own hell. I apologize if my posts are fragmented. My thoughts aren't in complete sentences. I'm not eating much. And I've been smoking again.

new fall

It's another, brand new fall. Unlike Spring, Fall is when the world truly comes alive for me. And I'm alone this Fall, for the first time in a long while. By alone, I don't mean completely alone: I am surrounded by life, nature, memories, imagination, art, and the Spirit. It's time to reconnect myself with these beautiful tangibles. Redefine who I am. This self that I've constructed of these things. Who is the person that I am? I've so long identified my life in according to someone else. And yes, it's a special Bond. There's no denying how love can enliven a person, filling her soul up and brimming it over, like a warm bath. It can be irrevocably wonderful. However, it can be consuming and ugly, as well. It can constrict you and all who you are, if you allow it. And I've been allowing this into my life. Although love exists between us, in us, and of us, it is treacherous.

KENYA

In a little over a month, I'll be in Kenya. Africa. For two weeks. I feel a mixture of shell-shock, from this decision that I've made, and gratitude that this decision came to me. I feel undeservedly fortunate to be going. The group is a model UN. I'm awestruck by the discussions today, and can't wait to meet again next week and learn more about this diverse group. Yet we are setting out with the same purpose. I feel good. And inspired. And good. I feel human again. What does it mean to be grateful. To have gratitude. Where does it entwine with my own spirituality. I've read that "the only way to welcome anything is with gratitude." That does include suffering. I'll allow myself to be vulnerable to change, beginning now. Open my heart to feeling gratitude for every story, for every person, every struggle and hardship. A woman today was so grateful for her pain; so proud to have gone through it, fought through it, really. She fought for her faith. She fought for herself. And in that battle, no matter what, she won. Having a reason to fight for something, in itself, that's something to be grateful for. Did something tear you up inside this week? Did you struggle through a hardship? Did you fight for a value, a religion, a loved one, a feeling? Did you feel fear and defeat it? If the response was yes, to any of these, you've lived. And be grateful for that.

AA

AA drives the addict. The challenge and visiblity of the steps, taking it one day at a time, is the only way to achieve acceptance (and then achieve serenity)of this new life without their best friend. Admitting powerlessness and saying that life is now unmanageable, that first step, is a surrender. My client right now is conflicted with the idea of surrender; she sees it as defeat, and she will not be defeated. However, I believe that surrender is part of acceptance. It's strong. It's action. It's saying, "My addiction HAS defeated me." She's not defeated, she says. I could absolutely challenge her on this. What to her is true defeat? Is it death? Because she isn't dead yet. However, she's been in prison, she's lived in a meth-fueled hell, she's lost her loved ones, and her only child. A judge doesn't want her in that county anymore! I'd say that her addiction has defeated her. Yet, she still won't surrender. This could become a problem. The truest way to a final and lasting recovery is accepting this surrender, accepting your powerlessness. Her life is UNMANAGEABLE and everyone sees the drugs at war with her body and mind, yet she keeps fighting and losing, time and again. Four rehabs in one year, each time she's planning her relapse. That addiction is winning. When will she finally say, "I give in," and come to God, not rolling over on her side in bed at night, while saying her prayers-- come to God, down on her knees, begging and finally making amends with Him. The Steps have an order. First, you find God. Next, you find yourself, and then you go to others, in Him. Many addicts have not had the chance to ever know who they are. So many, appear in front of you, asking, "Who am I?" They've either been the Care-Takers or the perpetually Taken-Care-Of. Either way, what escapes, flies right out the window and into the night, is their idenity, a sense of themselves,...even the simplest question: What do you like to do? It's baffling. "What do you like to do for fun?" They answer: Get high. They know no other way to be. One gentlemen at the AA meeting talked about the idea of "wanting what you have" instead of "always wanting what you can't have." He has reached a point in his life where he has everything he could really want. His family, his job, his life is good. There may not be alcohol, but he wants everything he has. Every item, every person, every interaction--he's content in this. He wants his life. He values everything in it.

I don't know if this post will actually "post." But here goes. Firsts are hard. And they are terrifying, but they are also absolutely wonderful. I'm extremely lucky that my life has become a progression of starling events. I get to become something of myself, to myself, for myself. Every day offers brightness to me. I see hope. I experience concern, passion, confusion every day. I meet a new client tomorrow. I feel nervousness, fear, compassion, and excitement. This is me living. The idea of a new day that offers me more than a television show, more than a glass of wine, or a hit, or a trick. Yes, more than what a relationship can (sometimes) offer me. I get all of these emotions to feel me up each day, fully and truthfully. I feel undeserving sometimes, to even sit and listen, to be amoungst the sagacious storytellers of A.A., to be just a rock along the path of their journey. In a month, I've learned more about PEOPLE, than I have in a long, long time. Maybe since my freshmen year of college, when I was bombarded with girls, girls, girls, girls, and girls. On Wednesday, I sat in an A.A. meeting, looking at these people. I wondered if I gather the life experience that floats around in this room, around every person, taking it and compressing it in my arms. Would it look like a dark, gloomy cloud, that's heavy as a boulder? They are so marvelously insightful and honest, so in rhythem with themselves and their urges and their disease. They know. They understand. They've achieved therapy's main aims: change and self-understanding (though the two are almost entirely interconnected). They heed the 12 steps like the 10 commandments, reciting and living right up alongside them. The steps are ingrained their thoughts, and in turn, their emotions and then actions and actual life changes(I quite believe in that beautiful CBT triangle). During the meeting (and during most groups), I'm dazzled by the honesty. I'm enraptured by the story-telling, and yet, at the same time, I feel a little left out of the community. I'm not an alcoholic, so I don't get to fully experience this culture; I'll never be embraced by AA or have a sponsor of my very own. I don't even have time to enjoy a quiet glass of wine. During happy-hour, I'm usually taking a nap. It was beautiful day. A day to take a walk with a friend. To an alcoholic, it's a day to drink. It's a little precious (and yet entirely dangerous) how the alcoholic romances the drink. They paint a slendid picture of a warm, sunny day, with a cool alcoholic drink in their hand, and that light, airy feeling of drunkenness that covers them up like a soft blanket. The question must be asked: why is that drink in this picture? Boredom? Escape? Ritual? Enhances the fun? Liquid courage? Socializing? Boosts confidence? When this "want" appears, the want for a beer, hit, pill, etc,...what need is being unmet? What character defect (in AA language) is making its appearance?

A nagging dissatisfaction afflicted her as it afflicted most young women of her education and class. She wanted love, and a good man, eventually children, but more, more. Not to grow old surrounded by housework. To be something, herself, not Guy's wife, but herself. Life made into a progression of startling events, so that each day there might be a party or a new friend, something to offer brightness and interest. There was Guy, drunk, his impotence becoming more fixed by the week. Bunny began to misread his prose, to softly criticize it, so that he seethed and snapped at her. She wasn't helping him, and she felt old, at twenty-five. There were girl with whom she had gone to school whose lives were dazzling in their excitement and fun. On the surface, in any event. What to do with these women? What is it that has made them so dissatisfied with themselves? Why do they marry either erratic neurotics like Guy, or young lawyers and doctors who send them off to Long Island all summer? Our of commercials, they walk on the beach, slim, tanned, lovely, their children playing in the sand, they swing their beach bags cutely, they die in front of your eyes as they guzzle their Pepsi.

Why, oh why, are we presented with this immovable life? Desperately normal, and filled with the most incredibly uninteresting phenomena. A leader of cheers, a beautiful girl, the belle of her high school. North Shore High, well-integrated, a good football team, an Arista, which Bunny made in her sophomore year. Political science was her chief interest. One day she fell down and scraped her knee. One day she had her period and her mother told her she was growing up. One day she read The Sound and the Fury and cried. She did a lot of things, every day. Said a lot of things, conversation, they call it. You put it into quote marks and demonstrate your ear. She was a very nice girl, a good human being, and she met Guy Lewis. Guy took her to galleries and showed her how the painters did it. This was later in her career, when she was going to Barnard, majoring in psych. She wore a silver friendship ring that her first lover had given her. Guy wasn't curious in the least about it, and they had their first argument. Bunny wanted him to be jealous, she waited to see flakes scale off him. But Guy was wasting inside, into his third novel now, and writing film criticism.

She wanted to help Guy, oh, not in any corny way, but be his Wife, be his Mate. She believed in his stories, his novels, and his criticism.