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Flowers are pretty.

Another poem today, this one by Czeslaw Milosz, the Polish national treasure. (I should add that I'm also not the author of the previous poem, as some seem to have assumed. That was John Updike, who died last year.)

The history of my stupidity would fill many volumes.

Some would be devoted to acting against consciousness,
Like the flight of a moth which, had it known,
Would have tended nevertheless toward the candle’s flame.

Others would deal with ways to silence anxiety,
The little whisper which, though it is a warning, is ignored.

I would deal separately with satisfaction and pride,
The time when I was among their adherents
Who strut victoriously, unsuspecting.

But all of them would have one subject, desire,
If only my own—but no, not at all; alas,
I was driven because I wanted to be like others.
I was afraid of what was wild and indecent in me.

The history of my stupidity will not be written.
For one thing, it’s late. And the truth is laborious.

How'd I end up here?

1932-2009

Fine Point
December 22, 2008

Why go to Sunday school, though surlily,
and not believe a bit of what was taught?
The desert shepherds in their scratchy robes
undoubtedly existed, and Israel's defeats--
the Temple in its sacredness destroyed
by Babylon and Rome. Yet Jews kept faith
and passed the prayers, the crabbed rites,
from table to table as Christians mocked.

We mocked, but took. The timbrel creed of praise
gives spirit to the daily; blood tinges lips.
The tongue reposes in papyrus pleas,
saying, Surely--magnificent, that "surely"--
goodness and mercy shall follow me all
the days of my life, my life, forever.

He’ll stop the next war

Sophia looks to heaven

My current source of stress is an article I’m writing about American perceptions of poverty. I’m having a really hard time with it. I don’t know how much I have to say about poverty. I do believe that after growing up in the vast, dirty necropolises of Bangkok and Manila that I have a better conception of what global poverty really means than the average American. I believe that much of my angst and uncertainty and depression, and that of my brother and sister and fellow missionary kids, is due to having experienced the reality of suffering around the world. I also believe that almost all Americans don’t want to hear about it.

We learn this lesson young, as missionary kids. We learn to stifle our knowledge, to stuff it down, to become chameleons, able to adapt to the culture we’re surrounded by and ignore all of our previous knowledge. We learn that American kids don’t want to hear about Thai kids. We learn that Thai kids don’t want to know what America is like, don’t want to hear us brag about all of the fancy stuff we’ve seen. We learn that the lines that separate the poor from the rich are very distinct, and we learn that we’re on one side of the line in one country and another in the other.

I didn’t choose this topic. It was chosen for me, by an editor. I’m realizing why many writers have problems being given assignments. While the subject is close to my heart, it’s almost too close--so close that I have a tough time writing objective sentences. Poverty IS suffering. Poverty is what’s wrong with the world. And poverty is our fault. Poverty is MY fault. I also know those are not helpful ways to think about it, and that, in order to deal with poverty, I have to put those facts out of my mind.

The fact is: no one wants to hear about it. No one wants to hear about those whose suffering is worse than their own. No one wants to hear about things that they can do nothing about. What does it help to feel the pain of the poor more deeply? I don’t know.

High on the hill

I watched this clip today, sent to me by a friend. I completely believe this, 100 percent. So why do I feel embarrassed saying so?



Maybe it’s because so many other artists and writers are skeptical of this kind of romantic, spiritual creative process. Primitive cultures aren’t, for sure. They believe that art taps into divinity. Generally, the artists and the shamans are the exact same people. So what place does art have in a world of scientific rationalism? I don’t know. Maybe that is why all artists go crazy and shoot themselves with shotguns in cabins in Montana.

Then again, all artists don’t. A companion piece, a point-counterpoint to the Gilbert speech, is the recent article about Ian McEwen in the New Yorker. Here is a writer who has abandoned all hope of the mystical, who has completely embraced the dominance of science in all areas of life. I, too, believe in science. But what, specifically, do I believe about science? That science always leads back to the mystical, even when everything is completely explained.

Current scientific theory holds that the universe curves back in on itself at the outer edges of time. The human brain remains an almost completely unexplored phenomenon. We’ve been unable to replicate even the most basic scientific process--photosynthesis--manually. I always think of the Mandelbrot Sequence, the exquistely beautiful graph of numbers that delves into infinity, explored in one of Arthur C. Clarke’s obscure books (I don’t even remember its title). That is science, that is art, that is God.

That doesn’t mean that I believe in a god of the gaps. I believe that God IS the gaps, that God IS science, that the creative process is as scientific as anything else, and that being able to explain something scientifically doesn’t take away its mystery.

The McEwan article reminds me of my favorite quote from Maus, where the lead character quotes Samuel Beckett as saying, “Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness.”

“Yes,” responds his mouse-masked therapist.

A beat.

“On the other hand, he SAID it,” says Maus.

“He was right,” says the therapist. “Maybe you can include it in your book.”

Don’t cry

One of my life's great loves

So I decided to take myself seriously, and listen to my own advice. If I’m going to have faith, then I have to have faith that Secret will find herself a new owner, with as much love for her as I have, and that she’ll go on to have many wonderful adventures. I enumerated things I was procrastinating yesterday, and seriously listing Secret for sale is at the top of the list. Yesterday I put together a listing on eBay. I already have bidders! Exciting, but also nerve-wracking.

The real reason I hadn’t listed her up to this point is that I didn’t want to. I’m having profound difficulty abandoning the sailing dream, giving up on all of the memories that Secret holds. I know all adventures come to an end, but I really believed this one had a future. I had hope, even now, that I’d get back to her, and I have deep, deep guilt for letting go.

I have to let that dream go. God has plans for me, and if sailing is again in my future, I’ll find another boat. In the meantime, I can use the boat to move forward, instead of having an additional chain tied to my ankles.

So, any takers? You have a week!

Cradle and all

This tornado loves you

How you parents avoid posting endless cute pictures of your children I'll never understand.

What will make you believe me? I love unspoken and unexpected synchronicities in life. They are things, maybe the only things, that give me real faith. I believe completely in the power of divine coincidence. My father says, when things like that happen, that they are “of the Lord.” My vocabulary is different, but our thought is the same. I’ve had friends call me a fatalist, and maybe that is true religion. I should have been an ancient Roman. The fates weave the threads of my existence together, and if I can begin to listen for their echoes, I find myself believing that there is a plan. That someone up there is looking out for me.

My cousin used to believe that every time she found a penny God was telling her he loved her. It was a reasoned belief, a choice, the truth she was choosing to accept from the universe, but once she made that choice there were pennies everywhere. So many pennies; too many pennies. Too many pennies to not believe that there was a divine purpose behind them, that God knew what she had decided and that he was consciously telling her something. That behind the seemingly random patterns, there was, in fact, a personal intelligence.

Buddhists believe something similar. Because the universe is ruled by karma, the infinite intricate belief in cause and effect, nothing is random. “The environment mirrors the inner lives of the people who live there,” says Nichiren Buddhism. “You make your world.” Jung is the one who named the principle synchronicity, and defined it as the fortuitous inter-meshing of events. He said, “When coincidences pile up in this way, one cannot help being impressed by them -- for the greater the number of terms in such a series, or the more unusual its character, the more improbable it becomes.”

Of course, science has a rational explanation, calling the occurrence a “delusion of reference,” where one interprets all new data in such a way as to confirm previous beliefs.

Indeed. Is all faith, then, a delusion of reference? I don’t know. I chose a line from a random song I was listening to as my subject line for a blog post about Papou--I had never heard the song before, didn’t know it. Pandora, my newest favorite music site, was playing it to me as I wrote. A week later, my sister had the sudden urge to buy a song she had heard only once--at midnight, on the radio, stopped at a stoplight. The song evoked for her that single moment in time, in a way that only music can do. I looked up the lyrics and found my single line, from the song I had not heard before or since.

Today, while beginning this blog, I was listening to the playlist from a friend’s blog, and it played the same Neko Case song that brought me to tears yesterday, on the radio, as I drove through an exquisite spring day that seemed to mean nothing, a day so much like that beautiful day when my brother almost died.

What will make me believe? Evidence. Proof. I don’t know if synchronicity is enough for everyone, but some days, the good days, it’s good enough for me. At least good enough to play my music library on shuffle.

My dad’s gone crazy

He hasn’t, actually. But he may if he ever reads my blog. I’m afraid to check my comments today, afraid to even check the blog, so I’m writing off-line, in a safe text document. Does everyone hate me now? I feel a little like I’ve come out of the closet. I seem to be an equal-opportunity offender--capable of offending the nonbelievers in the crowd with the primacy of my faith, and offending the believers with my counterintuitive politics.

Oh well. Can’t please all the people all the time, can I? Didn’t Abraham Lincoln or Bob Dylan or someone say that? In reality, I feel much better today, freer, as telling the truth does. Jesus wasn’t kidding when he said “the truth will set you free.” Truth, though, is a difficult concept, another one that theologians spend their lives writing incomprehensible juried journal articles about, thus elucidating the concept not at all. Pilate asked “what is truth?” and no one seems to have been able to answer him.

I like Emily Dickinson’s answer: “Tell the truth, but tell it slant.” Jesus didn’t even answer Pilate with erudite theology (he saved that for the Apostle Paul). Jesus answered with a slant-y story, first a series of difficult parables that he refused to explain, and then the ultimate parable of his own death. Tell the truth but tell it slant. “For this people’s heart has grown dull, and their ears are hard of hearing, and they have shut their eyes; so that they might not look with their eyes, and listen with their ears, and understand with their heart and turn--and I would heal them.” In short--tell stories.

My dad and I did have a good conversation this morning about art. I made the point, as I always do, that one of the first elements of all of the world’s cultures is story-telling, that story-tellers always have a place of honor in primitive cultures, often the highest place of honor. Human beings have a need for art, a need for explaining their experience through the language of pictures, the language of music, the language of story. We even need to tell ourselves stories, paint ourselves pictures, in order to stay sane, every night as we sleep.

It’s the Puritans who took that from us Americans, with their black clothes and their work ethic and their suspicion of anything that smacked of papist Roman froofiness. Architecture? Paintings? Stories? Gasp. What we need are good sermons, and, if we’re feeling particularly soft, a nice stern a capella hymn in 4/4 time. We’re still suffering under their curse. No wonder all our writers flee to France.

I recently took a trip back to western Michigan, my dad’s homeland, where I braced myself for the continuing onslaught of questions. Yup, still no husband or children. Still no nice career that can be handily summed up in one word, like “teacher,” or “accountant,” or “engineer.” Still no mortgage and house in the suburbs. The only way my art will earn legitimacy with that set is by earning a lot of money, and even then it will remain suspect. If I make a million dollars from a novel, what have I done, really? Only string a bunch of pretty words together. Nothing that puts meat and potatoes on the table.

These are tough demons to fight. They are legion, and they rise up in my consciousness every time I hesitantly touch the nib of my pen to paper. The war is ongoing, and I take arms now for my next, new battl

I am doll parts

After I wrote yesterday’s post, I found myself thinking a lot about humility. Humility may have been the reason I decided to return to my faith. I decided I didn’t need certainty, that I didn’t need systematic theology--that what I needed to have was humility, and that its lack was exactly what was so wrong with most evangelicals. Micah 6:8, one of my favorite verses, reads: “What does the Lord require of you but to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?”

I can think of very few better prescriptions for life, very few other verses that some up the whole of the Christian life. But so many Christians forget about it, especially the “humbly” part. My grandmother insists that everyone who voted for Obama is going to hell, solely because he is pro-choice. By voting for him, you are voting for the death of babies, and thus deserve to burn. I see so many problems with that logic I don’t know where to start, but I know that that is not a humble position. When I decided to return to faith I realized that there were many things I couldn’t know. I can’t even believe fully in the existence of heaven and hell. I see little evidence for those doctrines biblically, certainly not as they’re commonly understood. I’m not sure why I have to believe in the trinity. I certainly don’t think there’s much proof in the Bible that voting pro-choice is a damnable sin.

So I am a Christian, but I believe in gay rights and same-sex marriage. I am pro-choice. I am an environmentalist and a feminist and a socialist, more or less. I believe in art and literature, and that beauty changes people’s lives. I believe in science, and evolution, and global warming. I believe that all truth is God’s truth, no matter where it’s found. I don’t believe in the after-life, at least not in any way I’ve heard it explained. I believe that all of us were created in God’s image, and that Christ came to earth to call all people to himself.

But you know what else? I don’t insist that everyone else believe all these thing. Because you know what? I might be wrong. I have made a great effort to believe everything I believe with humility, to accept that my grandmother might be right. For that matter, Osama bin Laden might be right. I don’t believe he is, just like I don’t believe I’ll be damned for voting for Obama. I believe what I believe, and I’ll explain to you why, but I also can’t insist that I’m right. All I can do is live justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with my God.

Never my love

I read this poem today and it recalled to me, somehow, the problems I used to have with faith, problems that still haunt me now although not with such immediacy. My fundamental problem with faith of any kind used to be the nature of evil. I know, easy, right? Only the biggest problem anyone’s ever dealt with in the entire history of humanity.

It struck me for the first time my senior year of college. I was taking Systematic Theology, like every good Christian girl with an unfailing instinct for self-torture, and we were discussing this exact problem at the same time that my teenage brother fell unexpectedly ill, into a violent and terrifying coma. We later learned that it was a rare form of mosquito-borne encephalitis, but at the time, no one even knew what was wrong with him. I may have been reading Toni Morrison’s Beloved for my African-American literature class, a book that does not do much for one’s perceptions of the goodness of humankind. Or God for that matter.

So we prayed. We prayed like crazy. I had the president pray in chapel. I was stranded outside Chicago, desperate to hop on a plane to Chattanooga, but it all happened so fast, and they didn’t even tell me how serious it was until it was really, really serious, and no one still knew what it was.

I remember one cloudless, exquisite day, walking down from the chapel where everyone prayed for my sick brother, looking at the flawless blue sky and the sun that seemed to have been storing up all its light for exactly this moment in spring, across Blanchard Lawn to the Billy Graham Center for my theology class. And I thought: all this beauty for what? All this beauty, and my brilliant, funny, breath-taking brother could be dying? What does it matter? What does it mean?

It may have been that very day, or these events may just have coalesced in my memory, when my professor passed around a current copy of Time magazine. It was opened to a picture of a young boy, barely over ten, with his throat slit, being pulled up from the bottom of a well. He had been killed in some nameless African war, the result of ethnic conflict, natch--a boy, younger than my brother, his life worth no more than a rat curled up in a hole somewhere.

My brother got better, miraculously. No one knew why, or how. It was luck, or grace, or fate. Everyone praised God. But instead of proof of God’s goodness to me it seemed merely evidence of the randomness that controlled our lives. For every one like my brother, how many young boys died in hospitals or on battlefields or with guns to their own temples? Did it mean any more that he lived rather than that he died?

I’ve come round since then, after the senseless nihilism and agnosticism that invaded my life after that year. I don’t know what made me turn the corner. Some people probably believe that I still haven’t turned the corner, that my faith isn’t real enough, or Christian enough, or biblical enough. But unlike that day, I now believe that there is a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how they will. I believe in Jesus Christ, who died to take away that evil. I can’t say any more than that.

Slice paper wrists

The young philosopher

Wow, this has been harder than I expected. Seriously. Any Lenten discipline is hard, I know, but it’s a tall order to be completely honest about my faith every day. So hard that I’m not even doing it, even though I’ve had a remarkable quantity of positive feedback. Why is it so hard? Sometimes I feel like I’m trying to push two magnets together at their opposite poles, trying to force them to stick, just to ask myself these questions, just to look at what I believe full in the face.

When I was in Chicago, Sophia decided to watch Spiderman, her favorite movie, on the computer before she went to bed. Spiderman is her favorite character to pretend to be, and she’s seen the second and third movies, but not the first one. Erica and I were chatting, talking, and completely forgetting how scary the Green Goblin character is. She eventually crept into the living room, slowly, and said, “it’s scary.” We felt immense qualms, and I went in with her to watch the rest of the movie with her, and we discussed it all in depth--how it wasn’t the Green Goblin who was bad, just his costume, why he went to try to hurt Aunt Em, why Spiderman had to kill him in the end.

I could see her processing all of this information, and maybe some people would say that’s too young for a superhero movie, but Erica and I have a firm belief that what’s withheld from people when they’re young become forbidden fruit, forever irresistible. I didn’t have any television available to me until after I graduated from college, and to this day I have to hold myself distant from it or I glut myself. It’s an ongoing war. Besides, we had it brought about a great philosophical conversation. What made her feel afraid at first eventually made her feel safe, as we discussed all of the people capable of defeating the Green Goblin.

“You know who’s stronger than the Green Goblin?” she said.

“Who?” I said.

“Baby Iris. You know who’s better than Baby Iris?”

“No, who?”

“Daddy. You know who’s better than Baby Iris?”

“Me.” Etc.

When he died, she said simply, “He went to be with Jesus.” No qualms, no questions. He wasn’t judged because he was a bad guy, because he hurt Aunt Em, because he was Spiderman’s enemy. He was forgiven.

There’s a reason Jesus himself tells us to have the faith of a child. If I have to say one thing about my faith today, that’s what I can say. I want to have that humble, simple faith, and if I spend the rest of my life returning to it, it won’t be long enough.

Reaction

Iris

My sister, her children, and I spent twelve hours in the car yesterday on a fantastic road trip that included two Starbucks stops (tea for me, Americanos for her, chocolate milk for Sophia) and one hourlong McDonald’s playland stop in southern Indiana. Items of note: all female children under the age of ten in southern Indiana wear pink head to toe and the playing of Christian radio in public places is encouraged. Also, I did not see a single non-American-made car during the entire stop, except for our lone Camry. At least southern Indiana is doing its part for the American economy.

My sister and I also had amazing conversations about our faith, our dreams, our last couple of years of life, our friends, our relationships, for the entire trip, with one conversation or story tripping up the other as we tried intensely to catch up. The great thing was knowing we had hours of talking as the babies snoozed, so we didn’t mind being interrupted or interrupting with story atop story atop story, knowing we’d get back to our original point eventually, and learning more about ourselves on the way. We talked a lot about the struggles we both have had with our Christianity in the past few years. I love that this blogging process is making me think seriously about my faith, and making me think is making me talk, and talking is causing me to clarify what I really believe, succinctly, in ways that I haven’t done in years. This is what Lent is really for, I imagine.

One of the things I’m realizing about faith is that the problems I have with it are not with the Bible itself, or with Christianity as a faith, or Jesus. My fundamental problem with my faith is the church, and other Christians. Hypocrisy is a harsh word, but so much of what I see in the contemporary American church is hypocritical. So much of what I was taught growing up let me astray. So little of what is taught do I actually see in the Bible.

I know these are not excuses. The worst thing is when people use other people as excuses to keep them away from other things that are important. I can’t react against other people’s mistakes, allow them to drive me away from truth. Some of the things are difficult for me to overlook, but if I can’t overlook them, then I become a hypocrite myself.

Always be waiting for you

Mom's hands, as seen by Sophia

So early in Lent do I stumble. Oh well. Mistakes are not the point. The point is to keep going, and to not use the mistakes as excuses. Maybe I’m stumbling because I’m not sure I have much to say, or maybe it’s because I’m trying to purge the negativity from my life. Trying to not let it affect me.

Maybe I should just blog about that. One of my big problems with the Christian community is not faith itself, not doctrine, but peer pressure. Didn’t Gandhi say something about loving Christianity except for the Christians? I know, as all of evangelicals did growing up, that no one could choose their faith based on their companions, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t talk about just how difficult it is to maintain one’s independence..

Dogmatism is never good. Ever. Most churches I’ve attended are the kinds of places where a person can’t even express a divergent view, let alone have it honestly discussed and debated. One of my favorite quotes from college was that “the church is the only hospital that kills its wounded.” There’s this internal pressure to believe everything that everyone else believes, even if it doesn’t quite make sense, to not express doubt, to not rock the boat.

In high school, I remember my endless torment during Faith Fellowship, our on-campus Sunday morning service. Should I raise my hands during the praise choruses? What did it mean if I did? What did it mean if I didn’t? Was I doing it honestly because I was praising God? Or because I wanted people to think I was more spiritual than I actually was? Even if I was doing it to truly praise God, was raising hands something that people should do at all?

What the debate did was draw me completely away from any sense of worship, from any connection with God. It made me angry and frustrated. It still does, when I go to raising-hands kinds of churches. Didn’t Jesus say to hide in a closet when we prayed? I had the same feeling, the same utterly angst-ridden and crippling self-doubt, whenever we would pray as a group in our dorm. We were supposed to pray out loud “as the Spirit led,” but what did that mean? If the Spirit was leading me by making me completely uncomfortable while we all sat in silence, or if the Spirit was leading me by making me feel guilty because I hadn’t prayed out loud in two weeks, then maybe the Spirit was leading me. If not, then maybe our praying out loud had a lot more to do with showing off than it had to do with communicating with God.

I still worry about what Christians think, and I worry about what everyone else thinks, too. I worry about what you think reading this. I worry about what atheists think and what fundamentalists think. I wouldn’t go to church in ripped jeans and a dirty sweatshirt, with greasy hair, not because I don’t believe God would accept me, but because I don’t believe my fellow Christians would In the last year, I’ve spent more money on clothes so that I can feel comfortable in church than I have on any other apparel. Is that right? Of course not! It’s exactly the people in the stinky sweats who should be welcomed at church with open arms. Jesus made that perfectly clear. We all know it, and we all know that they aren’t.

So what does this mean for my faith? I didn’t go to church this morning, even though I desperately wanted and needed to, because I have a morbid terror of coffee hour. I want to meet God. I don’t want to justify my existence to a bunch of strangers.

I know that’s harsh. I know a lot of it has to do with my resistance to participating in any kind of intimate community, and maybe with having been forced into too many strange Sunday schools as a child. Ultimately, it’s irrelevant. But other Christians are still a huge obstacle for me. An obstacle I have to acknowledge and move through.

Tame

Papou and Sophia

Yesterday, Papou moved back to his assisted-living facility. He’s doing better, much better, as he promised my mom, but it still feels scary and rushed. They’re continuing hospice care for him, and at any moment he could disappear. My sister and I talked about it, how it reinforces our feeling of immortality. All of our four grandparents still live. All eight of Sophia’s eight great-grandparents live. I know death was close this time, but it still feels like we can’t be touched by it. It hovers in the corner, still distant.

It feels miraculous, too. He decided he would get better, and he did. He wasn’t ready to die. I wonder why. A pastor friend from Pennsylvania came down to visit him while he was in the hospital, and we asked him how he prayed for parishioners in this situation. His answer was wise--he prayed that everything a person needed to accomplish be accomplished before they pass on. Papou must have something more to accomplish on this earth. I hope it’s sharing more of the memories from his childhood with me.

We were speaking of Papou’s past today, of how he spent his whole life in pursuit of the intellectual life. Does he regret that now? I think not. He was always a person utterly certain of his ideas. When I was a girl, I remember asking him questions about the Bible, while he wrote. Once I asked him about the role of women in Scripture, specifically the passage in First Timothy: “Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor. Yet she will be saved through childbearing, provided they continue in faith and love and holiness, with modesty.”

“Men were created first, then women,” he answered. That was it. End of story. Their role is less, because they came second. Incidentally, this is the very passage that caused me to cease believing in biblical inerrancy. I can’t believe that I will be saved by childbearing. There’s nothing wrong with having children, but my salvation does not lie in my ovaries and cervix. I cannot believe that that’s the Holy Creator God’s infallible word, his logos, for my life.

That’s what Papou believed, though. That’s what many evangelical Christians continue to believe. No wonder I have so much anger when it comes to biblical gender roles, to the prejudice that underlies so much of contemporary Christianity. That is not my faith. I draw my hermeneutical circle away from those lies. I believe the Apostle Paul when he says, “there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female.” I am not a woman in the eyes of my God. I am a precious, saved child.

So Papou and I disagree on theology. It doesn’t make me love him any less. That’s the thing about beliefs. One believes them. It doesn’t help to have someone else tell you you shouldn’t, or that you’re wrong. A belief is too central, too close to the core of your being. Maybe Papou’s right, or maybe I am. Maybe both of us are wrong. But what I believe matters is that, as Jesus said, I love God with my whole heart, and love my neighbor as myself. That’s hard enough.

Ready to unload

It’s the first day of Lent, and I’ve decided this year, instead of giving up something, I’m going to take on something. I’m going to spend these forty days thinking and writing about my faith. It’s a gauntlet my sister threw down, and I have some ambivalence about taking it up, but what can it hurt? I want to become a person of stronger faith, to allow my faith to take control of my life.

As with so many of those Christian cliches, though, I mean exactly those words, but I don’t mean what is commonly understood by those words. I want my faith to be real, to be the guiding force behind my life, but by that I mean faith in its largest possible sense: the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. All of us live by faith. All of us shape our lives based on things unseen.

I’m more than a little afraid of the challenge. I’m afraid that I don’t have that much to say about my faith. I’m more afraid of putting what I believe in public, of what everyone will think. I’m not sure how many of my readers are Christians, and how many are atheists, and what kind of spectrum lies in between. Deep inside, I know it doesn’t matter. My faith is the most important thing in my life, and if I can’t be honest about it in public, what does that say about me?

My parents are missionaries, which means that they spend their lives actively living according to the dictates of their faith. More than that, they spend their lives trying to convince others of the truth of their faith. I don’t believe, anymore, in converting people to the truth of my faith, but that’s because that’s not what my faith encompasses. One thing I do believe, though, whole-heartedly, is in talking about faith. In talking about the things that lie under the surface of our everyday lives, the things around which we orient ourselves without even realizing it.

A subtle kiss that no one sees

Last November

My grandfather, my Papou, is dying. I suppose, in retrospect, we all knew it was inevitable. Maybe it’s why I’ve been blogging about him so frequently, maybe it’s why his history has been so much on my mind, why I keep trying to take and post feeble pictures of him. He’s in hospice right now, his 86-year-old kidneys failing.

I’m not sure he’s ready to go yet. My mother broke down crying by his bedside the other morning, and he looked up at her and asked her why she was crying. “Daddy, you’re really sick,” she said.

“I’ll get better,” he said, and patted her hand.

My other favorite story from these days is one from my grandmother. He sleeps all the time, waking up only when one of his kisses him. He recognizes us and smiles up, but he then his eyes close again. My grandmother asked him, “Do you dream when you sleep so much?”

He nodded.

“What do you dream about?”

“Salvation,” he said.

What a beautiful dream. I wonder what it looks like. This morning I knelt before a priest and had ashes spread on my forehead. “You are dust,” he said, “and to dust you shall return.” That’s a beautiful dream, too, on Ash Wednesday. All I am, all he is, is frail human flesh, imbued with the spark of the divine. I don’t know what salvation looks like. I definitely don’t believe that heaven is something out there, something that he’s going to go to, in the sense of a departure. Then again, I’m sure he has nothing to be afraid of. Wherever he’s going, it’s going to be home.

It’s the end of the world as we know it

Walking through the door

After a three-week visit in the north country, I’m heading back south. I’m at Boston Logan right now, the late-afternoon sun slanting across my shoulders, with a three-hour wait for my flight. I definitely overestimated the time I needed to get through Boston on my bus. Still, one of the things I’ve always loved about travel is the waiting time in airports and train stations, the time that allows you to collect your thoughts, the waiting with no place to be other than here. That goes to show that I am a true traveler, not one of these dilettantes, and that long-distance travel is my true vocation. I’m never happier than when moving from one place to another.

The light here is different than in the south. Already, since seven o’clock this morning, I’ve traversed many lines of latitude and the sun is noticeably higher in the sky, even later in the afternoon. One forgets about these things in the south, how the light feels different farther north. It always cuts low, across the shoulders, unless it's July. My subconscious is continually aware of the angle of the sun, how my proximity to it is lessened.

There are other things one forgets. Like the preponderance of Subarus. I’ve been looking for a new car on eBay, and in Chattanooga there are an overwhelming quantity of crappy, American-made eight-cylinder SUVs. When everyone knows that the only car that’s worth anything is an AWD Subaru. In Maine you realize immediately how useless those god-awful vehicles are.

I miss the snow. It’s gone from the ground here, even as far north as Boston. I had forgotten that, too, the continual ice barrier that surrounds every road in Maine, the sheen and glisten of all of that whiteness. Yesterday, I went on my longest snowshoe yet--an hour and a half for almost two miles, with probably a half-mile of fresh path-cutting. I begin to understand how one could have 200 words for the stuff, as the Inuits are alleged to. Yesterday it was perfect for snowshoes, crispy on the top, but with enough heft underneath that I didn’t sink below my knees.

Shadow, the wolf-dog, and I had a long talk last night, but I’m not sure he understands my departure. How can he? I disappear and reappear in his life like a dream. Or a nightmare. Would he choose to have me in his life if he could? Even if he never sees me again? I don’t know. Maybe I need a dog of my own. One that can handle the tropics. Maybe I just need a direction in which to travel, someplace to go that when I get there I’ll know I’ve arrived. Maybe then I’d stop being only happy in waiting rooms.

Working for the next day

Snow drifts

I’m back in Aroostook County, Maine, at least temporarily. It still feels like home up here, although, unfortunately not mine. Four feet of snow lies on the ground and I’ve been snowshoeing every day for at least a mile with the wolf-dog who is about half-mine. There’s something about the snow that is both hopeful and melancholy, especially when one is floundering about in chest-deep drifts.

Still, snowshoeing may be my winter sport, I have discovered. It is exhilarating, and brutal, and hard enough work that I stay warm even when it’s eight degrees out. My broken trail is an arrow straight toward belonging, the crunchy snow like movie-set styrofoam. The worst part is that my wolf, after my all-too-many disappearances from the County, no longer trusts me. He keeps disappearing into the forest to chase moose. No amount of bologna brings him back to my side.

I’m sitting before the wood stove on the unfinished steps, my circa-seventies pot atop the rusted burner. It’s a remnant of my long-lost Chicago life, filled with a leftover combination of Thai curry and minestrone. The menu was not my choosing, but my chef insists on the delicacy of fusion cuisine. My butt is cold, but the rest of me is toasty. The sky is the palest blue, and water drips off the eaves. It’s been warm today, above freezing.

Jesus feels distant, even on Sunday. I have begun to resolve to accept God’s help unflindg my life, even as agnostic as my faith in God has become. I do accept His help, if He has any help to give, but my faith remains hesitant, nebulous. The hymn goes “turn your eyes upon Jesus,” but how? It all seems overly metaphorical. How can I turn my eyes towards something that’s not even there?

Feeling no remorse

Papou does battle with the spirit of Robert Johnson

As I write, a little striped chipmunk that lives in a hole outside of my French doors is perched on the stacked firewood. Like all of the fish that wandered around on the ocean floor in the Bahamas, he knows who I am and what I mean. His little pink hands look remarkably human. I’m trying to make friends with the gray neighborhood cat, but I’m worried if I get too friendly he’ll find my friend the chipmunk.

The picture’s a shot I took at a post-Christmas barbecue lunch at the local Sticky Fingers. I find Robert Johnson brooding over our shoulders amusing. He’s the blues guitarist, as I’m sure you all know, who traded his soul to the devil at the crossroads for the ability to play. His eyes seem to mimic those of my Papou, whose life seems to get harder as he gets older. I’ve been thinking about Papou a lot lately, and about aging, and about God and the devil. Papou (or Dr. Spiros Zodhiates, Th.D.) was a writer, too, a Greek exegete and theologian. Maybe he’s the reason that I considered being a professional writer as a legitimate career choice. Now he relies on puffy Chattanooga CNAs to bathe and shave him.

So, hi, everyone. Sorry about my little descent into chaos the other day. I’ve considered posting a retraction, or just deleting the dang thing altogether, but it doesn’t quite feel honest. I’ve always believed that once I write things they belong to someone else, to whoever I wrote them for, and, in this case, I wrote for the whole wide world. So it’s yours now. Not mine.

Maybe that is the point of a blog--it’s catharsis, in its truest, Greek sense. A way for me to purge myself of my own grief and pass it on to the unfeeling World Wide Web.

I admit that it has been a rough month. I received some bad news about an opportunity that I had real hope for, and have had other difficult things going on personally. Maybe the most real outcome from being brutally honest is to realize how real my descent into the bottomless pit of depression can be, and that I need to find better ways to fight it. It’s an ongoing battle, and I have more sympathy for those who struggle with it. I’ve been dealing with it since high school.

So I begin a new year now, with more optimism, more hope. Doors are opening again. Maybe some will stay open this time. Maybe I’ll finally see a path laid clear to the horizon. But in the meantime, I’ll take the next step in front of me. Thanks to all of you who responded with concern and kindness, and I pray the darkness doesn’t close in again.

Out of the dark

It's a bad day for me today. I know it's a bad time of year, and a bad time of month, but it's still really bad. I turn 31 a week from today, and I fear this is turning into one of those depressed blogs. There are all kinds of blogs--bread blogs, and knitting blogs, and weight-loss blogs, and entertainment blogs, and etsy blogs. It's ridiculous. I only feel really justified posting when I'm actually doing something.

But there are depressed blogs, too. So maybe that's what this one is now.

My light has gone out. I've been living like a zombie the last however many months. I've been trying to fight the despair with feeble flickers of hope, but I've started to feel like someone keeping a fire lit in the middle of a hurricane. No matter how hard I try, horrible incapacitating sadness reaches up from my belly and grabs my by the throat. I know what Janis Joplin says: "Try. Just a little bit harder." I know what Jesus says: "Be perfect as my Father is perfect." And then in the biggest, fattest lie of the entire Bible: "Your yoke is easy and your burden is light."

I have no choices. I'm being neatly dovetailed into that cultural hellhole that is a nine-to-five job, debt, meaninglessness. Everyone who claims to love me seems to think it'd be good for me. "It'll give you something to do, Melissa. It'll get you out of the house. You'll meet people." They just don't know that all I want is to not feel hurt anymore. To not hate myself exactly as much as I do.

It's ironic, isn't it? Blurting out my deepest secrets to the entire internet, things I won't even tell my closest friends or family, things I won't even tell myself.

I can do it, I know. Get another job like those I've had in the past, lock myself away from the sun during the day, get the certainty of instant cash from the ATM, a little square carpeted cage to house myself in, a little metal cage to take me in between the two. I can find an addiction (maybe even a culturally approved of one!) to dull the pain.

We're all vampires, every single last one of us. I'm just trying to fight it, and failing. I'm not strong enough. I never have been. I'm sorry.

That’s the anthem

My grandfather, born in Turkish-occupied Cyprus, raised in Khartoum. Would he, a Greek exegete, be a "Muslim" to the neo-con email juggernaut?

I’m sitting in my lovely office, with chilled feet, trying to resist the anti-environment desire to crank the electric space heater. Even in Chattanooga it gets cold eventually. The colors are beautiful here, and every day, as I drive up my favorite twisting hill to Haven Crest I’m glad I live in a place where God deigns to turn the leaves gold once a year. The light pouring through the leaves turns the whole world yellow. Then I remember that I’m probably just conditioned by evolution to think that orange and gold and red leaves are beautiful, rather than there being any objective standard of beauty. Then I come home and listen to Bob Dylan and bake and try not to think too much about anything.

Although I can’t help thinking and talking about this historic election, as so many Americans and bloggers seem to be doing these days. No matter one’s politics, one has to be delighted by this triumph of the American dream, the fulfillment of what feels like an eternal battle against racial inequity. I, for one, am thrilled that there will be an American like me in the White House. By “like me,” I mean an American who was raised internationally, with a global citizen’s perspective. That was one of many things that convinced me this time around, that Obama spent many of his formative years in other countries. Maybe I’m prejudiced in favor of third-culture kids (okay, yes, I am), but we have unique perspective on world politics and this country’s responsibility for leadership. I suspect it’s why Obama has proposed diplomatic rather than violent solutions to the world’s crises, and why so much of the world is thrilled with his election.

I admire John McCain as a great American, and I’ve never been more impressed by him than during his concession speech. He deserved better than the boos he received. I’ve admired him for years, but he lost my vote when he, a victim of torture, backed down on his anti-Guantanamo Bay stance, the very same day he received President Bush’s endorsement as the Republican candidate for president. Maybe he makes a better Senator than President, and I believe both him and Obama that they’ll work together for bipartisan solutions to the nation’s problems.

And the nation’s problems are great, especially here in the south. On Monday evening, in a suburb of Chattanooga, each neighborhood mailbox was stuffed with a note that read, “Get your dogs and get your guns, because a c**n is going to the White House.” I was stunned when I heard that. Stunned to hear that that brand of existential racism still exists anywhere, and particularly here, in an ordinary mid-sized southern city, where people buy organic groceries and ride their bikes to work. Great wounds exist in this nation. I pray that President Obama will be able to heal some of them.

I have fear, especially as someone who has occasional anarchist tendencies. I have doubt, about the abilities of bureaucracy and government to solve any problems. But I also have hope. Isn’t that more important than anything else?

The only thing a gambler needs

Autumn cheesecake, with late-summer southern strawberries

Yesterday was Keatsmas, the anniversary of the birth of my favorite poet, John Keats. I generally celebrate by a recitation of this, his autumn poem. Today I celebrate by retyping it in its entirety.

To Autumn
1
Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run;
To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.

2
Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep,
Drows’d with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cider-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

3
Where are the songs of spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.


Merry autumn everyone.

Song cry

Late-blooming roses

My prospects are looking up, in ways that I can’t talk about for fear of jinxes. My last post may have appeared more depressing than it was intended. Yes, those are all things I’m thinking, but I have good days, too, like yesterday when I was driving down the twisting hill into the city, surrounded by oaks, the sun beating down. It makes me happy to be in Chattanooga in October. The weather is beautiful, seventy degrees in the day, sunny. It’s getting chilly at night, but no so cold it’s uncomfortable. I can still wander around in shirtsleeves.

I can’t recommend highly enough this article in the New Yorker. Reading it made me feel like God had reached down from heaven and touched me. At sixteen, in the Philippines, I was berating myself already for not having written the Great American Novel. I was certain that in order to be truly great, I had to be young when I achieved success. Not true, according to Gladwell. How thrilling is that?

My other epiphanious moment this week was reading this interview by Andre Dubus III. I haven’t read any of his fiction, so I can’t vouch for it, but I can vouch for his advice:

I tell this to my students — that they are here because they want to try and create art. Something beautiful in and of itself, that lives on its own. That will affect someone that will never love them. And let's try and work and find what those tools are. Good luck. I hope wonderful things happen. But you may as well get into the lesson now that the real prize is just doing it. Everything else is gravy. Even then it's not such gravy. Now you get reviewed. Anyone can say whatever they want. It's not all good. They have this idea, I probably had it, too, that when you have this hard-covered book all a sudden you've arrived. No, now you just have another level of difficulty. Which is the nature of mature living. It's the nature of adulthood. Reach this, and now bigger obstacles. Now I can climb a bigger mountain. Well, good here's the biggest mountain I've ever seen, right in front of me. You climb that. There's another mountain. And this one's got lightning at the top and lava. And there's a big hole...

Wow. After reading that the world was a much more beautiful place. Of course, it doesn’t sound beautiful, with all the back-breaking climbs and volcanoes, but that’s not the point. The point is that I need to be reminded sometimes, often, daily, hourly, that living itself is the destination, as cliched as that is. This week I’ve been struggling, and procrastinating, and debating internally the process of editing the novel I wrote last year and the short story I wrote this semester, or, heck, anything I’ve written, and it seems this insurmountable process, an unclimbable mountain, an impenetrable jungle. My prose already exists, on the page. How can I change it?

That sounds ridiculous. Of course I need to change it. But I see it there (I’m looking at a manuscript lying on my desk right now, staring at me with malice in its eyes) and I don’t know how to begin. How is this word better than that word? Do I need more words? Fewer words? Better words? Different words? I’m stymied, until I give up and go watch Saturday Night Live. Or a Keanu Reeves movie from the eighties, my latest favorite Netflix choice.

Realizing this about myself, though, is helping me accept that I am the second kind of experimental artist that Gladwell speaks of, and reading what Dubus says means that I just have to keep climbing the mountains. Writing is exactly like hiking. Specifically, like the Appalachian Trail. When I arrived at the Pennsylvania border, dreading the infamous rocks, I didn’t realize that the entire trail, state by state, got worse from that point. Every state was harder, more brutal, more impossible. It didn’t matter. I just had to keep walking, putting one foot in front of the other.

For writing, walking is simply spending time in front of the page. I sit here and stare at my manuscript until I take a pencil to it, or scissors, or until I rip it apart and rearrange it. Until I find an entry point. I haven’t done it successfully yet, but once I do, there’ll just be another mountain to climb.

I say this with hope. Knowing that there’s another mountain beyond this mountain makes this mountain feel so much more climbable. It doesn’t matter. Some days, on the trail, knowing the climbs were going to get worse depressed me more than I could bear. Other days, it filled me with hope. I was getting better, and there was more beauty around the bend.

Don’t panic

The Prodigal Son

On the boat, if I were on the boat right now, I’d probably be complaining about something. I’d be complaining about the heat, or mosquitoes, or my rolly anchorage, or the smell from the head. Here I have nothing to complain about but myself, my own indolence--there are no mosquitoes, no movement, no awful stink. I find myself wondering often, if it’s true what I’ve been accused of. Am I a person incapable of happiness? Incapable of contentment with myself? Was I even ever happy at my happiest, which I know remember as my halcyon days on Secret?

In some small, circumscribed ways, all my dreams have come true here. I have a basement turned into an exquisite office. Although I have a part-time job, I have almost limitless time to pursue my genuine career goals. I should be ripping off and chewing huge chunks of world-changing prose. Instead, I find myself thinking of all of the things I want instead of this. A bungalow on the beach. A cabin in the woods. A high-rise in the city. Limitless time. Not just enough time, but limitless time. What I want is nothing less than eternity. Nothing less than perfection, of myself and others.

Jesus said it: “Be perfect, therefore, as your Heavenly Father is perfect.”

It’s another of those passages that used to disturb me immensely as a child, not so much in what it stated, but that no one took it seriously. Yes, it says that, everyone said. But it doesn’t actually mean that. Everyone was always saying that about the Bible. I could read it. I read it beginning to end. I knew what it said, but everyone said it didn’t say what it said. I knew it did.

The thing that rankles the most, like a constant toothache, is the thought of my boat. That’s the most imperfect thing of all. I’ve had a couple of buyers nibble at the bait, but I’m not committed enough to selling to reel them in. When I’m lying awake at night, staring at glow-in-the-dark stars, I contemplate options for returning on my own, the one-way ticket that always pops up in my dreams as the solution to all of my problems.

The problems remain, though. The recalcitrant diesel. The headstay. Solo sailing. Transportation. My dad has the same look in his eyes as I do when he remembers the boat, when we see the pictures pop up on the computer screensaver--a pained expression of loss and longing.

And failure. That’s what it boils down to for me. I didn’t have the expertise the task demanded, and I still don’t, and I failed. How can I have any faith that the rest of my life won’t end up the same way?

Went to see the gypsy

I just finished a great book called The Thirteenth Tale, a pulpy gothic novel in the tradition of Jane Eyre, but really fantastic. It’s a very hard thing to do, write a book in an older tradition, and to do it successfully in this day and age. And then to get it published. My dad, who works for a Christian publisher, keeps going on and on about how it only publishes thirty of the 1500 manuscripts it receives a year, and only prints 2500 copies of each book. In order to be a success, the book has to sell out of its first printing and go on to a second, and only twenty percent of the books they publish do that. Only twenty percent of the books even make any money for the publisher. Those are sobering statistics.

Not encouraging news for the nubile young writer. Has there ever been? Meanwhile, all the news is how Americans are reading less and less, and how all of us might as well just give up and go work at convenience stores. So what does one do? I don’t know.

The Thirteenth Tale succeeds because it has a built-in audience: the bibliophile. By consciously echoing all of a book reader’s favorite books, it’s evidently been a success. According to a friend of mine, there was a three-month wait for the book at her local library. So that’s the secret--write a book about books. Who wants to do that?

I've decided to try to make the best of being here, which means making full use of the local library, even if I’m forever placing books on hold and then forgetting to go pick them up, thereby wasting all of the local library’s precious financial resources. I've also invested the $8 a month in Netflix, which I still have a hard time believing is not a waste of money, as much as I love rating movies for hours on end and updating my queue with crazy old Cannes Film Festival winners and Scorsese's early films. My most recent conquest was an Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu film festival (meaning me in front of a DVD player until two o’clock in the morning).

It makes me wonder whether books are being left behind and movies aren’t really the media for our time. Should I switch to screenplays? Or, better yet, writing for television? I’m certainly not brave enough for Hollywood yet.

I’ve also ended up with a small job at the local YMCA, which at least allows me free yoga. Only it’s not exactly free if it costs me hours of my life. I have yet to find any employment I actually enjoy. All I do is keep crossing things off my list--nope, don’t like that. Nope, not that either.

Still, I'm chugging along. One day at a time, right? Each day has enough trouble of its own, as someone once said. I try not to think about Secret too much, although every time I visit my little web page, with its sailboat floating up in the blue, it makes me wish I could make a living as a mariner. How do people find work they like? Or do all of us, as Thoreau says, merely live lives of quiet desperation?

Enforcers

I've posted a bunch of pictures, going all the way back to June, on Flickr. Knock yourselves out.

Chattanooga, Tennessee

Pelicans in North Carolina

Or maybe not. How many times have I thought I’ve found a home, only to be abandoned by it or have it abandoned by me? More times than I can count. It’s almost a compulsion. I’m a plant that forever pulls itself up by its own roots. A mangrove, maybe. Sending out shoots in one direction or another, then yanking up the old plant as soon as the dirt begins to feel comfortable.

So I’m back in Chattanooga, a town that knows its own, its own of which I am definitely not one. Chattanooga’s the kind of place where there are obituaries that read Ralph Pickett, 99, native of Alabama, lived in Chattanooga 98 years. The kind of place where there’s actual society, with balls and coming-out parties (for marriageable young women, not alternative-lifestyle aficionadoes), like something out of Austen. The kind of place where one must fake a southern accent to avoid discrimination, where yankees are always damn yankees, and mothers shudder to think their children could marry one.

Nothing against the south. I love the south. Its weather, for one thing, is the best in the nation, as is its literature. One could also make a very good case for its food.

Doors are opening for me down here. The one very good piece of news is that I finished a piece on the Appalachian Trail for a Lonely Planet guidebook, and I’m now completing a second so that I can be considered for one of their contracted freelance authors. A dream job for me, to be sure. I’ve enrolled in a graduate-level course down here, my first return to the ivory tower since my departure from it ten years ago, and I’m beginning to seriously consider a Master’s degree. Argh. I know, right? Members of my family can’t seem to escape the magnetic pull of higher education, even though I swore I would always resists.

More good news, as I’m sure everyone is curious to know, is that Secret survived Hurricane Ike unscathed. Nearly unbelievable. It makes me more confident than ever that I left her in the right place. It’s hard for me to imagine a better hurricane hole than French Wells. I have several buyers interested, but we’ll see if they’re able to negotiate me down to a price that I can live with.

I still long for the sunny tropics, especially as summer draws to a close. But life’s not so bad when people shiver as it drops below seventy degrees, I can watch black-tufted titmice (those are birds) out my window, and I spend my days doing yoga and writing fiction. Things could be much, much worse.

Torrington, Connecticut

Melissa is happy, even though she missed her Jeopardy audition.

Connecticut scenery

Our Connecticut friends rescue us from our Subaru nightmare

The end has no end

The view out my window in July

I read a great book on the boat, called Coming Up for Air, by Margaret Becker, about a woman who takes a month off from her life just to be by herself in a cabin by the water. It recalled to me Thoreau, and his time by Walden Pond, and how necessary it is for all of us to take time to withdraw and be by ourselves for a while. In it, she makes a commitment to herself to watch every sunrise and sunset for a month. I wish I could discipline myself to do that here, to spend that time of focused meditation with the world around me.

Maine connects me to the earth. The seasons breathe here. They have pith and substance. I can feel each distinct season as a personality--the jolly sunny face of Bacchus in summer, the hard drawn face of Old Man Winter. Each month has its own flora and fauna: the black flies and dandelions of early May, the deer flies and strawberries of July, the long orange light and potatoes in September. It’s a different life up here, the life of 100 years ago, a life that allows me to withdraw from the maniacal speed of the rest of the world.

Even the relief from the burden of television in Aroostook County is a blessing. We get four channels on a good day: two Canadian, CBS, and PBS. It’s great. I find my time releasing from the electronic world and being deposited in my lap again. Here I pick up books, old classics from college, and read them through in two days. Right now I’m reading the Encantadas, Melville’s travel writing from sailing through the Galapagos Islands. Where else, aside from here, and the boat, could I find time to do that?

I took Shadow the wolf-dog on another walk long last night. I’ve been avoiding the walks, partly because I’ve been avoiding him--I’m trying to do a better job at training him, and it’s hard work. I found a fantastic book at the library called The Loved Dog, by a tiny woman, a former member of the Israeli special forces, who now trains dogs for a living. She explains that the way to a dog’s heart is through its stomach. I’ve always known that, I suppose, but it seemed like far too big of a splurge to give a dog things like chicken and cheese puffs in order to get him to sit. But then I began to think: isn’t chicken cheaper than dog food these days? And don’t even the trainers at the Westminster Dog Show use treats to get their dogs to trot obediently behind them? Maybe she’s onto something. So I’ve begun taking a little baggie of treats with us, and I’ve successfully trained Shadow to go swim in the beaver pond and come back to me and his leash when he’s done. I have an overwhelming feeling of accomplishment.

When I went last night it was like the release of a tautly-pulled arrow. Shadow and I all but ran the three miles. When I walk with him, we are pure beast together--united in the run. I am one with my body. He is one with me. Together we hear the gunshots through the forest, the rustle of a bear or a deer in the bushes, an unknown bird song. Maybe, sometimes, I can even hear the sound of the word home, whispered through the pines.

Bridgewater, Maine

What Karl wants to do next

I’ve been attempting to retain my equanimity. I should be ecstatic--we arrived safely in Bridgewater, after more peripatetic travels. Since leaving Alna, we have visited, in Maine: Newry, Mexico, Rumford, and Bar Harbor. We kicked it trail-style for a little while, even sleeping in the truck one night. It’s one of those ideas that seems great in theory, and works out much less than great in actuality. We were so exhausted and grumpy the day afterwards, that we ended up forking over the big bucks for a motel room, meaning that we would have been better off buying a gigantic car-camping tent for half of what we paid for the motel room and we would have been in the black. We could have even been much happier staying for the entirety of rally race, the stated reason for driving all over the state this past weekend.

We had a great time, though. We attended the New England Forest Rally, the largest race of its kind in North America, carried out entirely on dirt western Maine logging roads, at speeds averaging 117 miles an hour. This sport is Karl’s new dream, his new vision for future adventure: build Subarus at the farm in Maine, turn them over for a profit, and meanwhile put together an award-winning rally car. Actually, I’m not sure he cares at all about awards. What he likes is going fast, just like Ricky Bobby, and since he has 120 acres of dirt road to ride around on, riding around on dirt is what he’s going to do.

That’s all well and good. I’m completely supportive (except for, perhaps, when it comes to $5000 struts), but I don’t see how this adventure can be fully mine. He wants me to train as co-driver, the navigator who sits beside the driver and is the brains of the operation, and that sounds fun to me, but I’m not going to get all sold on this adventure like I was on the last one. I’m not having my heart broken again.

So here we are. The turnip greens look fabulous, as do the burgeoning jalapeno peppers. We have a new possibility for an online business, and this house should feel like home. Maybe it will begin to. I’m supposed to be posting my Secret ad today, online, though, and I keep procrastinating it. I don’t want to take that step. I’m not quite ready, even though I need to be, because I’m already broke.

I just keep thinking of that stupid, stupid engine, not starting, and how naive of me it was to expect it to. My boat sat for eight months and I just feel like such an idiot, with all my talk of faith and destiny and hope and a calling. All I am is a stupid, stupid girl, who left her boat for too long, and now it’s useless and virtually worthless.

Alna, Maine

Karl with Puck, the baby Nigerian dwarf goat

In the earth, nestled right in front of me, is a giant thirty-foot yurt, that our friends from the Appalachian Trail have just put up as their new home. Karl’s inside with Cheers, as he was known on the trail, working on the plumbing system. It’s amazing to me how talented Karl is when it comes to this kind of stuff--he’s already fixed the engine on their rototiller this morning. His dad was a mechanic, his brother a plumber, his specialty is electronics, and with those three skill sets there’s not much he can’t do. Plumbing is his least favorite, but it’s always the one everyone needs help with. This is about the third impromptu plumbing job he’s participated in during the last month.

So I’m sitting in the sun at their picnic table. We drove up from Marion yesterday, stopping at Trader Joe’s for the requisite case of unsweetened soy milk before heading up to Maine. We’ve decided to go to a rally-cross race in western Maine this weekend, which gave us the perfect amount of time to visit the friends we’ve been meaning to visit for four years. It’s astonishing to me, and syncronous, somehow, that the week we had available is the same week they’re moving into their brand new yurt, and that we actually managed to get through to all of our trail friends who live in Maine, even though I haven’t emailed them in years.

I met them, Cheers and Grace, the first week I was hiking. They’re another trail couple, who are now married with two kids. They’re going off the grid, using propane heat and refrigeration and cooking, supplementing with a wood stove, and building a privy instead of putting in a septic system. They cleared this land themselves, cut their own boards with a mill they rented, built the whole platform for the yurt themselves.

We got to sleep in the yurt last night, even though they haven’t moved in themselves, after a delicious dinner of burgers made from a steer Cheers himself named and then slaughtered, with speckled leaf lettuce grown at the local organic farm. Karl has wanted a yurt for years, and his eyes widened when he saw it. Being with them is reawakening our dreams, our trail dreams, of sustainable living and agriculture, of being self-supporting and settled. They’re the right people at the right time. I just have to continue to have faith, as we move through time, that the right path will meet us as we take the next step.

Marion, Massachusetts

Silvershell Beach, in Marion

I’m sitting on the deck here in Marion. It’s 72 degrees, but it feels cold to me. I can’t believe I adjusted that fast to the tropical weather, but I guess I did. I thought it was in the low sixties until Karl just looked at me and scoffed.

There are mosquitoes out here, lazier than the Bahamian Type-A-personality mosquitoes, but buzzing around me nonetheless, so I lit on of the mosquito coils I brought back from Crooked. The smell reminds me of home, wherever that is, even though I’m sure they’re giving me about eight kinds of horrible cancer. It’s worth it. Maybe I can order them online when I run out. Until then, I have to hoard them like gold.

Karl and I have just finished a very intense and tear-filled conversation about our future goals. He’s convinced he wants to live in Maine for a while. I’m not as convinced, but I’m willing to give it a try. I wrote my first Secret ad today, to post in the local want ad. I offered to deliver it, so maybe I’ll still have sailing adventures, if I’m lucky. If anyone reading this post wants to buy the world’s best boat, I know where she’s moored. I’ll post a link to my online ad as soon as I have it up.

The stars are out tonight. Not as bright as at French Wells, but still shining above the corner of the house. I can see the first four stars of the Big Dipper, and it makes me forlorn to think of them shining over Secret in her corner of the world. At least I can see them here. The world is not too much with us that we can’t still see stars.

Nassau, Bahamas, to Marion, Massachusetts

The view out my window this morning

Tonight I go to sleep back in Marion. I’m cold. That’s always my first impression upon arriving, even in July. It’s in the eighties during the day, allegedly, but it’s got to be in the sixties now, colder than it was the whole time I was in the Bahamas. I’m joking that with my tan I at least have my Vitamin D allotment for the winter, but fat chance. At least I can count on some sun here, for two more months. I can go to the beach if I need to, and actually wear a bathing suit! (Although this theory is not one that has been actively tested.) July has got to be my favorite American month. Any month where it heads close to the nineties. In Thailand? May. When the monsoon comes.

Maybe my blog’s new name, post-boat, should be Seasonal Affective Disorderers Anonymous. SADA. Has a nice ring, no? Or maybe I’ll convince Karl to let me trade Secret for a winter home on Long Cay. Then I can have a winter cabin in the Bahamas. Just like Johnny Depp.

I had the craziest experience yesterday on the plane flight back from Fort Lauderdale to Newark--I met an amazing woman, an Irish vegan who leads a meditation group in Florida. We had a brilliant, instantaneous connection, like a light coming on. The last time I remember that happening was with Karl. We had similar bags, and she complimented me on mine, and then we began talking. For those of you who don’t know me in person, let me tell you that I am a deep introvert, although I do a very convincing impression of an extrovert when I need to. I hate talking on the phone. I never talk to people on the plane. But she asked me where I grew up, and I answered Bangkok. I never tell people that when I first meet them. Then she told me she was a Buddhist, and she never tells people that, either.

We ended up talking like long-lost old friends for the full three-hour flight. Then we hung out at the airport for a while longer until we lost each other. I feel like I’ve made my first real friend in so long, probably since Chicago. That’s not true--I’ve made amazing friends cruising. But this was a connection of a different order.

Then back to Karl. We had an awful drive back to Marion, through a two-hour construction delay in brutal Boston traffic complicated by a bad accident, and I wished to heaven I had taken the train. Driving in Boston is miserable, no matter how long it’s been or how in love you are. Here we are again, though. back together. Trying to figure out the next step, the next white blaze on the path up the mountain. It feels bittersweet. The end of one journey and the beginning of another.