There's a very different vibe going on when God is the Author and you really, for a lot of days and weeks and hours, relinquish the beginning and the end and stay present. This week I have remembered again that I believe that God is in my heartbeat and my breath and my words. When you mean it and don't just say you believe it, and the minute to minute continues to feel like middle ground, things change. It's kind of thrilling...all avenues open when that kind of thinking is paramount. This is where I see God's sense of humor, the importance of people, that the world is beautiful, etc. etc.
But it's also very uncomfortable.
I am finding that to be in progress, in the middle, the character of your own story...whatever you want to call it..means that you really do agree with the idea that God seems to be doing an artful and creative work right in front of you and YOU might not get to see what is really going on until later.
I decided to focus on God being a storyteller and see what emerged in the week, and it's been very interesting to me and the world has become curious and heart wrenching and 'all at once' once again, and that's the only way I can think to say it.
Simultaneously, I've also been allowing myself to really stop and recognize that everything in the world to me that stands out first comes through the written word or the things people say. What zings me and makes me laugh most are the things my colleagues say that play up certain words - and not JUST puns, thank you, but wit as well. I love to think about the definition of words. There's no WAY I can only hear the beat of a song. The lyrics always come first. I will carve out time in a busy week to reconnect with girls I knew from college when I was their RA, even if it means hardly sleeping and sitting at my kitchen table over tea cups at very late hours on Wednesday nights. Words keep me going, and make me feel alive.
I would prefer to talk and think and write than sleep. And at THAT point I have to shut myself down. There's a good reason for sleep, and we all know that if you don't do that, you are more likely to become one of those women who talks to herself out loud every day (instead of just once in a while).
Is this like when scientists are enamored with the idea of God being precise and articulate in all areas of nature and pattern and structure? I think so.
Do you want to know what sounds like middle music tonight? This does.
It's the song from a movie I've not even seen. This song, 'The Winner Is' from "Little Miss Sunshine" feels like music that you listen to while you are waiting. And so I resonate with it tonight.
While listening to this, I have read again the quotes that I compiled over the weekend when I didn't know what the heck I wanted to say about life but knew I needed to speak to something rattling around inside of me. That's the downside, by the way, of being fascinated by words. They have to go somewhere or it feels like poison. I realize this is a dramatic thing to say, but as an external processor (good, bad, or ugly) this is always true.
So!
Here are some stepping stones for the middle ground. I'm sure there is some way to psychoanalyze this mix of words, but I am only putting them here to give voice and thought to what is currently interesting and teaching me....in the middle.
"What I say is, patience,
and shuffle the cards." - Cervantes
"A woman's life is the history of affections."
- Washington Irving (Do I like this? Not always. But I think it might be true.)
"Every artist dips his brush into his own soul and paints his own nature into his pictures." - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
"The chief danger is that you may take too many precautions."
- Alfred Adler
"Conform and be dull."
- J. Frank Dobie
"Still achieving, still pursuing, learn to labor and to wait."
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
"God is the brave man's hope and the coward's excuse."
- Plutarch
"In the face of men and women, I see God."
- Walt Whitman
"The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson (Does this mean that if you have to say it, it's not true? I say yes.)
"No man prayed heartily without learning something."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Where there is much pretension, much has been borrowed.
Nature never pretends."
- Johann Kaspar Lavitan
"Resolve and thou art free."
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
"Too many people are thinking of security instead of opportunity."
- James Byrnes
"Earth has no sorrow that Heaven cannot heal."
- Thomas Moore
"The soul of God is poured into the world through the thoughts of men."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Something we were withholding made us weak,
Until we found it was ourselves."
- Robert Frost
"Nothing, of course, begins at the time you think it did."
- Lillian Hellman
"He speaketh not and yet there lies a conversation in his eyes."
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
"Maturity is not 'I am stronger and stronger', but it is the increasing recognition of human weakness and utter reliability on the Spirit of God."
"On life's vast ocean diversely we sail;
Reason's the card, but passion the gale."
- Alexander Pope
"Thoughts that breathe,
Words that burn."
- Thomas Gray
"There are times when life surprises, and anything may happen, even what one hoped for."
- Ellen Glasgow
"Perfume is like a parentheses. Perfume follows you, it chase you and lingers behind you. It's a reference mark. Perfume makes talk."
- Sonia Rykiel
"The real thing makes its own poetry."
-Anna Yeziroka
Something whimsical...
P.S. I think that I lived on the East coast in the 1800s, Ralph Waldo Emerson and I would have found a way to be friends.
Something weighty...
P.P.S. I miss my friend Kari. I always do, but today I did more than usual. I wished for a conversation with her. I thought about everyone else who misses her too. I remembered that the NOOMA video from Rob Bell called 'Matthew' helped. I thought about quotes by Anna Quindlen and C.S. Lewis and Robert Frost that have done something for me as I've thought about her life.
And, just now as I typed, I thought about her when I got to the quote about perfume. I used to buy perfume from her through Mary Kay, and I decided that it feels better to leave it to a memory....what I used to do when she was alive and we could be friends. This year before school started I went to the mall and got something new. I asked the perfume lady (??) for advice and made a new connection to what she said. When people comment on it after I give them hugs or walk by them in the classroom, I make sure to say something lighthearted about the lady who helped me, but inside I'm thinking about Kari.
It is once again one of the many threads that connect my thoughts to her life. It's amazing to me what people notice when they grieve. I just talked with my friend at school about this today. Not perfume or even Kari for too long, but what grief does and how it finds its way into your life. And how it can be ok. And that helped too.
In the end, I just miss her. This stays the strongest....she is really someone lovely and I loved being her friend.
No comments:
Post a Comment