So easy to say

Garden detritus from last year

When I think about what I was told as a little girl, I was sold such a bill of goods. We all are, with the princesses and the frogs and the pumpkins and the stagecoaches and frilly dresses. I remember learning to read with Cinderella, the old-fashioned version of the story where she gets to go to three different balls in three different dresses. I loved that song: “So this is love, nah-nah-nah,” when she dances by the fountain in the Disney version.

And it’s all a crock. There aren’t any princes or fairy-tale endings. I mean this in a good way. It’s a good thing there aren’t fairy-tale endings. Who wants that? What does Cinderella actually do in her boring old castle? Wasn’t life a lot cooler when she had little rat friends who helped her sew dresses?

Someone made the point recently that that marriage wouldn’t have had a happy ending anyway. Do you think that the prince’s fuzzed-over mother and father, the King and Queen, would have been oh-so-jumping-for-joy that their precious baby boy was marrying a girl from the other side of the tracks? Anyone think there might have been some in-law issues there? Heck, yeah. Not to mention the evil stepmother, who doesn’t just disappear into the ether. Don’t you bet she and her hellacious daughters would have been sticking their nose in at the palace every second day, spying for cute cousins or aging earls?

It’s just funny. We think at some point there’s going to be this shiny, glorious moment, where all of a sudden we’re in this gorgeous gown, and then we ride off into the sunset, and everything’s beautiful and perfect forever. But it’s just not true. Instead we age. We change. We learn that love is something entirely different than what we thought it was at first. We learn that we have to talk to our partners and that they can’t read our minds, and that fairy godmothers don’t always show up and give us brand new cars made of garden vegetables. We learn that life requires almost endless repetition and hard work. That most of life is about establishing good habits, not those glorious moments of bliss.

Till the next episode

Bradford pear begins to open

I've been posting a lot about money lately because money has been a lot on my mind. It's one of those things that gets stuck in your mind and stays there. For one thing, I've been thinking about this quote from Julia Cameron:

"For many of us, raised to believe that money is the real source of security, a dependence on God feels foolhardy, suicidal, even laughable. When we consider the lilies of the fields, we think they are quaint, too out of it for the modern world. We're the ones who keep clothes on our backs. We're the ones who buy the groceries. And we will pursue our art, we tell ourselves when we have enough money to do it easily.

And when will that be?

We want a God that feels like a fat paycheck and a license to spend as we please....

'Seek ye first the kingdom of heaven and all things will be added to it,' we have been told, often since childhood, by people quoting from the Bible. We don't believe this. And we certainly don't believe it about art. Maybe God would feed and clothe us, in a pinch, but painting supplies? A museum tour of Europe, art classes? God's not about to spring for those."

It reminds me vaguely of that oh-so-tempting prosperity gospel, doesn't it?

In Thailand, there weren't always a lot of books in English for me to get my hands on. I wasn't one of the lucky members of the Commonwealth Club (bloody Aussies, Brits, and Canadians). They had a lush wood-paneled English-language library, just off from their Olympic-sized pool, with a concession stand that sold real Dr. Pepper, sold by white-gloved Thais.

So I read missionary biographies: David Livingstone, Mary Slessor, Hudson Taylor. They're all great stories. David Livingstone goes trekking across Africa... Mary Slessor gets rowed down a green river into the innermost heart of the jungle... Hudson Taylor grows a braid to fit in with the nineteenth-century Chinese. When I think back now, I realize that they were all just adventurers, and maybe that's what I loved about their stories.

George Mueller had the most compelling spiritual story. He used to have food just show up at his door. Just show up. He ran orphanages, and when the kids ran out of food, a bread van broke down in front of his front door. When they needed a rent payment, the exact amount, down to the penny, was shoved in an envelope under his door.

At least that's how the legend goes. I believe the legend a little less whole-heartedly now. But I still believe in the idea behind it, or at least try to. I still believe that if I actually step out in faith, even in some nebulous non-Christian way, that somehow, I'll be financially able to do it. I used to have a friend who believed that if he closed his eyes and ran full-throttle into the woods, at full speed, and really believed, believed, that he'd be able to miss all of the trees. Sometimes I have that kind of belief about money. It's the belief part I have the hard time with.

What has happened down here?

You can't grow houseplants without a house.

What an amazing post, Erica. It is all about the what-ifs, and then finding that balance between stability and mobility. I thought I'd find that on a sailboat--I could sleep in the same place every night, even if the boat itself moved. That stability was okay if where I lived moved, as long as I could have familiar things around me. That didn't work out so well.

I was thinking tonight how I refuse to call anything home. Like, even: “I’ll pick up some groceries on the way home.” That word is the worst word for me. I hate it. I hate when someone asks me: “Where are you from?” It’s like: “Who are you and why do you want to know?” Or: “Nowhere. And you?”

The fox has his hole and the bird has his nest and all that crap. So, Jesus didn’t have a home. That doesn’t mean I can’t have a home. This is what I want my home to look like. (That website, Eating Alabama, has a lot of really great things to say about locavorism and vegetarian stuff, too.)

I’m still having a hard time with it, though. I still struggle against putting down the roots into the ground, and I can only imagine the pull of the ground is all the more strong when you have children. Not in a bad way, in a good way. Like that old saw: “Give your kids roots so they can grow wings.” We were rootless children. And I see the advantages of that, too. Being rootless gives you a whole different perspective on life.

I used to have this whole theory about communities, about how the idea of community always looks amazing, and it is amazing, but after a time you dig into the dirt beneath the surface of the community and you discover all of this ugliness. Not that communities are ugly, it’s just that people have ugliness and beauty mixed, just like people.

Then I thought that this quote from Paul Simon was my life motto:
“A man gets tied up to the ground
He gives the world its saddest sound.”

Maybe I was wrong about all of it, though. Maybe it'll mean something if I can say: “I’m going home.”

We're your sons and your daughters

Stack of unread magazines

I don't have much of anything to say today. But with all my talk of white blazes and putting one step in front of another, I suppose I need to post, even if it's only one word: hi. I work on Sundays, and when I look back at my history of the blog so far during Lent, it's Sunday and Monday that I've skipped. This part of the week is the most stressful for me, and it's harder because it's nothing that I particularly believe in. It's just for the paycheck.

So what does that mean? I get distracted from the things I really believe in, from the things I really want to do, and for what? A little bit of money? How many of us are like that in this country? In the world? There's a reason they call it the daily grind.

As Yeats said:
"It's certain there is no fine thing
Since Adam's fall but needs much laboring..."

I keep saying that I'm going to just drop out, and then I do, but I always get pulled back in. Just when I thought I was out... It's rough to feel like my real life is always pushed to the corners, and I feel like that about every job I've had since I graduated. Some are worse, some are better, but what it boils down to is that I'm not being paid to do the things I believe I'm meant to be doing. What it boils down to is money.

I've said all of this a hundred times before. A thousand times before. I'm sick of moaning about it, but what else do I have to talk about? The life of sunsets over water every night is gone. Now I have sunsets over parking lots if I have them at all.

Summer days are gone

Another one of my brother's excellent photographs

It's really late. I think today I'm just going to post a link to a video, the video from the trail I mentioned yesterday. I went back and watched some of the videos I posted during last year's Lent today. Although I felt like I was totally wimping out posting them at the time, now I'm really happy, because I have a link to them. This is what experience means now. What we post on the internet.

If nothing else, they are where I was last year at this time. So here's to you, thirteen-month-from-now, Melissa.

The Spirit of the Appalachian Trail

And here's quotes from the video:

"You get on the trail and whether you're with a dog or another person, all you got is a backpack on your back, you really get to to learn what's important, what's not, what's necessary, what's dead weight... you really get to know you and your personal world, nothing else, just you." --Bonzo

"It's hard not to think of it as a pilgrimage. For it to be as meaningful and as grave of an experience as it is for people, and it definitely is, it has to be more than just a hike. By the time people are done with it, they're changed." --Brice

Lie lie lie

All sunsets, all the time.

I taught my first yoga class today. I've been working on a certification and finally passed the written test. Today I just had one student, a guinea pig. It made me realize how much I had to work on, and how difficult it is to explain body movements with language. The experience also brought me to tears, just because it was so amazing to have given someone else the gift that has meant so much to me these last few years. Even just an hour

Yoga is one of those things I have difficulty being honest about. I'm not sure if it's because of the body-image issues that still haunt me, obsessively, like little over-my-shoulder demons. Or because it feels so profoundly intimate, in a way that little else does--this union of body and spirit.

I'm not really sure what I'm doing here, sometimes. Not in this life, but on this site. I am blogging for Lent, which is really weird. Someone said: so you gave up not blogging? I know it's weird. It's weird being so public with my dreams, desires, goals, thoughts. What's the point? A lot of bloggers say that maybe random posts will somehow help other people. Maybe. Or maybe I'm just full of hot air I like to blow around.

I'm not quitting. I watched a mini-documentary about the Appalachian Trail last night, and it reminded me of all of those hiking feelings. What's beautiful about the trail is the commitment you make to it, to moving one foot in front of the other, to traveling through time and space to a certain destination. The trail is just a promise you make to yourself. You say: I am choosing to follow these white blazes to where they end.

So I follow these posts towards Easter. I'm not sure what the point is. But I take one step, and then another. Today it's yoga--yesterday, childhood. I'll follow the blazes.

Well fine

Flower from a spider plant

Erica and I have been talking about using our blogs as an out and out dialog, as if we were actually talking to each other. That’s what all you young ‘uns do on Twitter, right? It drives me crazy: everyone bashing around at each other like little birds. Like we were regressing into dinosaurs.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the issues that she raises here. Basically how to have a happy life. How to live with contentment. Isn’t that what life is all about?

I feel like her blog is so much better than mine, sometimes. Having kids makes her life so much more experiential than mine. She gets to go out and play in the grass with her children. Maybe she would do that with or without children, and maybe I should applaud her for that and not her progeny. But me? I did take some flower pictures today. House plants, from indoors. They’re still beautiful, their flowers at least. They need their moment in the sun.

Post-feminists are right, I think. Feminists argued that women deserved the same rights and opportunities as men, and post-feminists argued that traditional female roles were just as important as traditional male roles. Experiencing things like motherhood and cooking and cleaning and the creative aspects of housekeeping (cheese-making, butchering, quilt-making, gardening) are just as deep and profound and meaningful even if they are not as remembered by history. Because men, not women are historians. Maybe history doesn’t matter as much as experience. Who knows. Maybe one kind of life isn’t better than another kind.

I want to learn to make cheese. And raise chickens. And grow lettuce. Those are things I want to do.

I read an amazing short story by T. Coraghessan Boyle today, from the New Yorker. I can’t describe it. Just read it.

Here’s a line: “She knows that it will all be lost, everything we make, everything we love, everything we are.”

I remember when we used to sing

I’ve been thinking about another proverb today: “a fool and his money are soon parted.” Money is a hard thing. Maybe the hardest thing. I say that every single day, about something new. Whatev. There are lots of hard things, but even Jesus said that money is the hardest thing: “The love of money is the root of all evil.” “It is harder for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.” “Sell all you have and give it to the poor.”

So, money. How do we get it? That’s the central problem. Money is freedom. But money isn’t freedom if you don’t allow yourself to spend it. Money is also power. And time is money. So money=freedom, time, and power. Great.

Certain branches of the Christian church espouse something called a prosperity gospel, which claims that it’s just lack of belief that keeps us poor. If we believe enough, just believe, God will bless us, and the proof of that blessing will be in the cars, houses, and jewels he showers us with. You may be familiar with this school of thought from late-night televangelists.

I, of course, am skeptical. I’m with Janis--it’d be great to get a Mercedes Benz. My friends all have Porsches, after all. I must make amends. But do I think that God is a great big piggy bank up in the sky? Of course not. For one thing, there just isn’t evidence. The people I know who have the greatest faith are not the ones who sport the bling.

Then again, Christ did say: “Ask, and it shall be given to you.” That’s one of those crazy verses where I always ask myself: did he really mean that? Could he have really meant that? And: “if we seek first the kingdom of heaven, all of these things will be added to us as well.” What does that mean?

What I try to believe, when I can find faith enough, is that if I really seek the path laid out for me, the path that leads to the kingdom of heaven, if I really seek the will of God, then my needs will be met. If I had to claim a life verse, it’d be that one about the lilies of the field. They neither toil nor spin, but God takes care of them. My goal is to live like the lilies, and trust that God will take care of the money.

The key in that belief is understanding that I can’t put any boundaries on the gifts that God gives me. I can trust that I won’t die of exposure, but I can’t trust that I’ll have indoor plumbing. I can trust that I won’t die of starvation, but not that I’ll dine on beluga caviar. That’s where people get in trouble with the prosperity gospel. God will meet my needs, but never in the way I expect.

Back to the earth

I'm jumping the gun. From the garden last year.

It’s coming on spring, folks. Isn’t it amazing? It blows my mind how quickly I can shift my attitude towards the weather--yesterday I was outside journaling in a tank top with my pant legs pulled up to expose my calves to the sun. Immediately I forget about the relentless winter. My psyche transitions effortlessly to the world of the outdoors. I can’t even quite remember how it feels to be cold.

We’ve got some days of chilly rain still coming, but summer is in sight, too. Hallelujah. There’s even a small patch of daffodils by the road in a neighbor’s lawn, although I’m afraid that my daffodils were slaughtered by the snow. Spring means I have to begin to dig in the dirt, in addition to doing yoga and writing and research on land.

I’ve been trying to work on assembling all of the sections of my novel into something that resembles a finished product, but I’m not being very successful. It’s so hard to come home from my absolutely draining job that forces me to be extroverted and deal with people and all of their drama and idiocy and everything they ask of me and then be creative. Wait. Strike that. It’s almost impossible to come home and be creative. That’s why I don’t do it. That’s why I’ve never been successful at working full-time and accomplishing any creative goals. That’s why I only work part-time now, but some days I’m not even sure that’s good enough.

Especially on beautiful days like today. It’s hard to come to my desk in winter, when there’s a fire going upstairs and I can see my breath in the basement, but it’s hard to come to my desk in the summer, too, when there’s a bright yellow sun shining outside and it’s dark and lonely in here. That’s the other thing I hated about working full-time--getting to work before the sun came up and leaving after it went down, sitting in front of a computer screen for eight hours a day. The thing is that I still want to sit in front of a computer eight hours a day, at least theoretically. I just want to do it in pursuit of something I passionately believe in. It doesn’t make it any easier to corral myself at my desk.

I think about other writers sometimes. Wallace Stevens, namely. He spent forty years working as an insurance agent. Insurance. Is there a less poetic craft? But he still managed to come home and create. I think about William Faulkner, who wrote As I Lay Dying on his knees in the boiler room when he was working as a night watchman. Not all writers are sexy bull-fighting mountain-climbing womanizers like Ernest Hemingway. Then again, maybe he could do all of his sexy bull-fighting and mountain-climbing because he was a womanizer. It helps a lot in not needing to work if you marry a succession of nubile heiresses.

That’s actually the solution proposed by John Gardner in On Becoming a Novelist: marry into money. Great one, huh? Real practical.

We used to fight for building blocks

What about this one for the masthead?

I’m sitting at my desk, with cold feet and the heater on, even though it’s a beautiful day outside. (Yes, I do my part to keep up US consumption of fossil fuels.) These are days when it’s hard to be cooped up in the basement. Even the squirrels have spring fever, evidently. One has spent all morning tearing a part an old piece of cardboard right outside my French door. Occasionally he stops and puts his hands to the glass, probably wondering where that Jay-Z is coming from. A cardinal perched on the clothesline is also appreciating the music.

I’ve been distracted today by other people’s blogs, which, I suppose, is putting my money where my mouth is. I read several regularly, including this one: The New Girl in Town

Love that Tavi self-identifies as a feminist. We may have the lost the 18-to-24-year-old women, but we have thirteen-year-old fashion bloggers!

And: More Than 95 Theses

Both of them led me on wild-goose trails today, though, to good places that disturbed me at the same time. The good thing is that I found out there’s lots more wildly intelligent feminist bloggers there than I had given credit for. This post is about Edward Cullen, and I can’t say anything better than what she said (in fact, I’ve been trying to give voice to her sentiment exactly for a year now, so I’m just going to link): http://tigerbeatdown.com/?p=579

I ended up at a blog called The Sexist, which is absolutely wonderful. I’ve been thinking a lot about this “Walking in a Bad Neighborhood” Theory a lot. Mainly because I had to live it--I had to make the choice. Was I going to walk in the bad neighborhood, or not? I had the choice to make. Many women don’t.

Rape is always rape. Period. End of story. And no one is to blame except the rapist himself. (And, maybe, in a larger generic sense, our culture.) If I go walking through a bad neighborhood in a skirt that’s barely more than a belt, I do not deserve rape. If I am raped, I am never to be blamed for that rape. That rape was the rapist’s decision, and no one else’s.

But here’s the thing: I still have to make the decision about what to do. That doesn’t justify the rapist’s choice, it just distinguishes my choice from the rapist’s.

Should I go walking in a bad neighborhood in a skirt that’s barely more than a belt? It begs the question: am I more likely to be raped if I go walking in a bad neighborhood? Statistics on that differ significantly, based on what I’ve read today. I’ve engaged in some fairly risky behavior. I used to run a block from the worst neighborhood in Chicago at three in the morning. I was never assaulted. Except once, verbally, in the middle of the day, by a group of teenagers who yelled insults as I passed.

In my case: should I become a solo female sailor in a crippled boat that would require many months to repair, knowing I would be required to ask or pay for help, in a country that has the highest per capita rates of rape in the world? I still don’t think I have the answer that question. I haven’t justified it to myself. I wanted to follow that path. My decision not to was motivated primarily out of fear. Fear that what I was doing wasn’t safe, number one. But also fear that I did not have the abilities I needed to be successful.

There’s a place for courage, but there’s also a place for wisdom. Whenever I floated the idea of returning to Secret, my friends and family would always say--didn’t we decide that wasn’t safe?

I hate that reality. If a woman chooses to wear a short skirt, why shouldn’t she be able to? If that makes her happy, makes her feel beautiful, makes her proud? What harm is done to anyone by that choice?

The same for me with my boat: it would have made me happy and proud to be able to sail back to Florida by myself. But could I do it without endangering myself? No.

That’s my point about equal human rights. Until I am equally able to wear whatever I want, sail wherever I want, without having to think about my safety from sexual assault, I don’t have equal human rights.

Fingers of smooth mastery

Snow-covered oaks. No, there's not still snow. Did I mention that my camera ate my best pictures?

Yesterday I feel like maybe I wasn't clear enough, at least when I spoke about dominant western culture. I was trying to explore the complex concept of collective guilt. I don't own slaves, I've never owned slaves, but I still believe my race bears responsibility in the larger context of history.

I feel the same way as an American. I don't agree with Osama bin Laden, but I see his point. I always have. If he believes that our empire is not just corrupt, but truly evil, then his war against us is just. We are all equally culpable. There are no innocent bystanders. As the Apostle Paul said, "There is no one righteous. No, not one."

The United States still uses 25% of the world's fossil fuels, for 5% of the world's population. How is that right by anyone's standards? And why? Why is it like that? I don't see how even the most ardent of American capitalist libertarians can justify it. They can say, "life isn't fair," which while true, doesn't answer the larger question. The reason why is because of generation upon generation of injustice. We may be all born equal, but we are not all born with equal opportunities.

Which brings up one of the many things I don't get about the whole health-care debate. What the Republicans are saying is that people who are born into poverty don't deserve the same treatment options as people who are born into wealth. If that's what they really believe, then fine. I just wish they would say it out loud.

And I understand the rage that people of the underclasses feel at that kind of injustice. I can't understand it really, not how it feels from inside, but I've seen horrible, horrible things in the cities of Manila, Calcutta, Bangkok, Dhaka, and in the outlying provinces of their countries. I feel occasional despair at the lack of options for someone of my nationality, education, social class, and with my career goals. I can only imagine how it must feel for someone without my advantages, but with a wife and hungry children.

I can understand how that rage can manifest itself as theft, violence, and even rape. Especially if we accept that rape is an act of violence, an act of war, as it’s being used in Congo, and not a sexual act at all. At a certain point, if people feel powerless enough, they will find any way they can to take violent action against the people they believe are perpetrators. My point being that crime, especially in developing countries, often isn't aimed at the victims of the crime. It's aimed at us, white Americans, imperialists and post-imperialists, colonialists and post-colonialists. It's impotent rage aimed at the climate that continues to shift in such a way as to imperil even further the livelihood of the poorest countries. All while it enriches the richest countries, making their land and crops more fertile as they warm.

I felt it in the Bahamas. Bahamians make their living from tourism, and especially in the islands closer to Florida, I could feel anger simmering under the surface. Americans come over and spend their money, fill their million-dollar boats with hundreds of gallons of gas, stock their freezers with conch and lobster and fifty-year-old grouper. We heard stories of the harbors that had been completely emptied by scuba-tank-wearing American divers, harbors that before had kept their population-bearing stock because of the natural limitations of unassisted diving. That’s just a quick snapshot of our attitude towards one neighboring country, but that's what we're systematically doing worldwide. As Bono said, "See the tuna fleets clearing the seas out..."

I'm not saying violence is a valid, or even an effective, response. Reading my book about the French Revolution certainly proved that point. Almost every step of the French Revolution was initiated by poor women who couldn't afford bread for their children, and were furious about the ridiculous wealth flaunted in their faces. But what happened every step of the way? A new group of rich people took power, and the poor continued to starve.

We're the aristocrats now, with our SUVs and our 2000-square-foot houses, and our continued cycle of consumption and waste. We've just distanced ourselves from our underclass, so they can't rise up among us and cut off our heads. We still keep slaves--they're just on the other side of the world. In some ways, our current economic crisis is just an indicator of the larger global problem of inequity. What have we been living on all these years? Other people’s money.

If our underclass united against us, if they channeled their rage into something other than random violence, they'd be able to bring down our tottering empire, no problem. Things could get a lot more apocalyptic than they are already.

Rock ‘n roll suicide

This picture would be a lot better if my camera hadn't decided to eat all of my ones in good light.

My feminism is rearing its beautiful head again, so if that bothers you, you may want to get off the train now. But maybe you shouldn’t. Feminism is one of those things that’s difficult to talk about because people are so passionate in response to it. What’s funny is that feminism’s central tenet is that women are deserving of full and equal human rights. How is that controversial?

It drives me crazy that women in their twenties don’t even bother to use the title. Their subtext is: “Haven’t we outgrown that yet?” Do women have full and equal human rights? No? Then no.

Feminists are criticized for being two-trick ponies, so to speak, focusing on only two issues: wife beating and abortion. It used to bother even me that feminist organizations seem to focus exclusively on those two issues. I still wish NOW would find a way to be more relevant to today’s young women, but more and more I believe that violence against women and reproductive rights are, in fact, the most crucial issues for today’s women.

They say (they being NPR last week) that the number one thing that reduces poverty worldwide is the education of women. When women are educated, birth rates go down, and so too do infant mortality rates, population, and any number of other social ills. Reproductive rights are, of course, what make religious fundamentalists of all stripes apoplectic. We’re endangering family values!! Family values, of course, meaning a subservient and submissive female population.

And we’re all sick to death of hearing about violence against women. Why is that? Maybe because of its ubiquity? The book that I cannot recommend enough is The Beauty Myth, by Naomi Wolf. An impeccably researched sociological treatise about the challenges of women in today’s culture, its central theme is that as the power of women in society increases, images of violence towards them increase. Don’t ask me for proof--check out her twenty-page bibliography.

One day last month, I began with breakfast over the New Yorker, reading an interesting short story by Ian McEwen, called “The Use of Poetry.” A quote:

“She confronted the blatant fact of patriarchy and her husband’s role in a network of oppression that extended from the institutions that sustained him as a man, even though he could not acknowledge... how the system that worked in his favor in both trivial and important ways always worked against her. One example was this: he could go to the village pub for a pleasant pint on his own, while she could not do so without being stared at by the locals and made to feel like a whore.”

That’s what I read over breakfast. I did laundry later in the afternoon, and I always flip on the television when I’m folding clothes. The classic movie channel was showing the closing sequence of a movie entitled “The Born Losers” that I had never heard of. In it, the spunky female heroine is beaten until bloody, stripped, humiliated, raped, and ultimately rescued by a big, strong man.

Then, on the way to the airport, I listened to a recording of Janet Evanovich’s One for the Money, in which a sado-masochistic boxer-murderer rapes one woman with a broken beer bottle and uses intimidation, threats, and physical violence to subdue yet another spunky heroine. Before bed, I read a couple of chapters from Liberty, a history text about how women during the French Revolution attempted to gain their freedom and failed, all the while being held up as the bare-breasted symbol of Liberty itself.

That was just one day. It made me want to laugh and cry at the same time.

I’m not going to claim innocence here. I like a good episode of Law and Order: SVU as much as the next person. Often guiltily. But I realize there’s something profoundly wrong with images of increasingly disturbing sexual violence overlaid with beaten and dead, often bikini-clad, bodies of women. Just watch the opening sequence of any episode of CSI. On the one hand, these books (Evanovich, Patterson) and shows (Law & Order, Criminal Minds) say that they’re fighting violence against women by “raising our consciousness” and telling their stories from the perspectives of strong women. On the other hand, they’re flooding our minds with the same images over and over. Our subconscious accepts them and files them away under normal.

The concept of rape is the hardest thing for any woman to reconcile with her inborn desire for equality. The idea that her autonomy could be taken away so swiftly, just because of someone else’s superior muscle mass, makes it hard not to live in fear. I choose to believe that rape is not a sexual act at all. It’s an act of violence, pure and simple. It can be an act of violence of a man against the idea of women, or what that woman stands for.

Sometimes I believe that act of violence isn’t aimed at a specific woman at all, but against dominant western culture, against the images of zaftig blondes saturating the world’s air waves. I’ve heard of rapes like that in Thailand, in the Middle East, in the Bahamas. Although no one can be blamed except the rapist himself, I do feel like our larger culture of permissiveness towards sexual violence has to bear some responsibility.

My favorite professor in college claimed that the twentieth century, starting with Freud, united the concepts of eros and thanatos, sex and death, and here, in the 21st, we’re still unable to disentangle them.

If only men could recognize the truth. “Acknowledge the system that worked in his favor in both trivial and important ways,” as McEwan puts it. But men can’t, and most women can’t, either. The male attitude is consistently: “Buck up, li’l camper. It’s not so bad. Aren’t you lucky? You get to be rescued! And you’re so pretty! It doesn’t really bother you, does it?”

Come on. How can it not bother a person to be not fully free? It’s slavery by another name. Until I can go down to the corner pub--Spec-Taters, in my case, the sports bar at the corner--for a pleasant glass of chardonnay without being made to feel like a whore, or without my life being endangered, I am not truly free. As long as there are barriers to the actions which I am capable of taking by myself, I am not truly free.

How do I confront those barriers? I have to storm the barricades. With a pen. With this pen. It’s my only weapon that counts.

Wishful sinful

Books at my bedside

When I was watching the Olympics the other day, I was talking about how sick I get of hearing the American anthem played again and again and again. They only play the medal ceremonies if an American wins, and never when anyone else wins. Why don’t they play another country’s anthem every once in a while? Just to fool us into believing that we’re the best at everything? A friend said, “Maybe because the point of the Olympics is cheering on your country.”

I responded, without hesitation, “And if Thailand was on the stand, I’d be pretty excited.”

I’m not Thai, and I never will be, as much as I hope--but it’s crazy how deeply ingrained that identity still is in my psyche. It just makes me think about myself as a child, and all of us missionary kids, and how confused we all must be, and how amazing it is and how much it sucks at the same time. I had my country taken away from me. Twice. And not just my country, but everything that comes along with a country. An identity. The food that speaks to me of home. A whole language.

Lately, when I’m hungry, I’ve been trying to think about what I’m really hungry for, and if I think hard I’m almost always craving a bowl of Thai street noodles, guiteaw nam. Something I absolutely can’t buy in this country, at any price. I can find approximations, but the food that comforts me the most is forever distant. Twelve time zones and $1000 away.

The same thing with certain words. I find myself reaching for concepts that aren’t available in English but still resonate with my core. Phrases like maipenlai, or sanuk, or pai teaw, concepts that explain the fundamental Thai attitude towards life, that it’s something to be enjoyed and not taken too seriously. Or a word like reaproy, that conveys so much more than neatness, but the sense that everything is in its right place, exactly where it’s supposed to be, utterly lacking in chaos. Or lumbak, a word that I didn’t even know wasn’t English for a long time, but means difficult, strenuous, requiring the absolute best of a person.

Thai also has a fantastic concept called jai, which is closest to the English idea of heart. It’s also more than heart, closer to the soul, or the idea of heart center we use in yoga. I find myself associating the ancient Sanskrit yogi words with Thai words, often. In Thai, you don’t say you’re happy. You say deejai, which means, literally, “good heart.” In Thailand, I was forever discovering new conjunctions of adjectives with jai that conveyed different ideas that explained how the heart worked, the different ways hearts and people can be.

I’m doing a horrible job of interpreting the concept. I don’t know how. My point comes back to that passage from Solomon. More and more his wellspring of life becomes something closer to jai. Because the jai is my life’s wellspring, the source from which everything else flows. The more I think about that verse, the more I think that a more accurate translation would be: Protect your jai, for it is the source of your prana.

Now there’s a life philosophy I can get on board with.

There’s so much to do before you die

Snow on the poor daffodils. Three seasons at once!

I almost wrote Tuesday as Turdsday. Ha ha. I read the John Mayer profile in Rolling Stone the other day, and although I can’t quite get behind his music, he did have some interesting things to say about media and life in the public arena. Specifically, his fondness for poop jokes. He finds that a well-placed humorous reference to bodily functions is a good way to diffuse paparazzi hysteria. My sister is also a huge fan of coprophiliac humor, and I’ve always known I could make her happy my entire life by telling any kind of fart joke.

That’s an auspicious beginning for a post, isn’t it? Hey, even James Joyce had a soft spot for tales from the privy. I have certainly decided that plumbing will be my first priority if I become a landowner. I’m happy living in a teepee almost indefinitely, as long as I don’t have to smell my own crap. This is something I learned about a million times over on the boat.

Maybe it’s the drugs talking. I’m still cracked out on cold medicine, and my nose feel like someone took a belt sander to it. I feel like common colds every spring and fall are one of those things that didn’t happen in the tropics. We did have to deal with roundworms and malaria and tuberculosis, but hey! No runny noses!

Or maybe it’s the fifth snowfall of the year happening outside. In Chattanooga? Craziness! It seems prettier to me, today, somehow. Maybe it’s because it’s March, and I know this is winter’s last-ditch effort. It’ll be gone tomorrow, and then, maybe, finally, we can start on spring. The snow does have the unfortunate side effect of making the folks at Fox News (which I am forced to watch, in perpetuity, at work) place into further question the reality of global warming. They have yet to grasp the difference between “weather” and “climate.” Science? What science? Who cares?

Get ready

For boring posts, I'm going to steal my brother's pictures.

“There are two ways of writing novels. One is mine, making a sort of musical comedy without music and ignoring real life altogether; the other is going right deep down into life and not caring a damn.” --PG Wodehouse

Or to echo my quote from last week: I want to know if I’m worth your time. I’ve had a very bad cold the last couple of days, which is just a bad excuse for not writing, but it is one of those times where you just want to curl up in bed and have someone bring you chicken soup on a tray. I’m having a hard time convincing myself that my life is interesting enough to write about every day. It certainly doesn’t seem interesting enough to me.

Blogging is an odd thing to do for Lent. The whole idea is to make me think about my faith every day, but I end up thinking, instead, about how much I’m boring the whole world at large. I had an easy time writing about my life every day when I was living on the boat, or hiking, or traveling--doing something interesting with my life. I know there are plenty of people with ordinary-life sites, many of which I read voraciously, but my life itself just feels so mind-numbing.

The problem with writing about it every day is that it makes me want to take off to parts unknown. An Afghanistan blog--that’d be worth reading, wouldn’t it? A girl building a house with her own hands--you’d want to read that, right? Someone who decided to pick cotton with her teeth for an entire year, while weaving her own clothes from flowers? Wouldn’t that be the best blog ever??

No. It makes me feel bored with my life, which doesn’t make me all that happy. I guess everyone feels bored with their lives sometimes. Maybe I’ll finish with a quote, too. When in doubt, use other people’s wordds to make myself seem more interesting. This guy was the first person to walk solo to the South Pole. Now, there’s something worth writing about.

“Inspiration comes from doing the work, not as a catalyst to do the work.”
--Todd Carmichael

We like the boys with the bulletproof vests

Can you see the grackles?

Here’s the thing: I don’t really believe in God. I mean, I do, of course I do, but I don’t all the time. Like today, when everything I do, including this stupid pointless blog that really doesn’t help anyone else’s life just seems so worthless. Okay, so maybe I sounds like I’m writing one of those depressed posts, but not really. I swear.

I saw the exquisite movie “A Single Man” yesterday, alone--apt, right?--and the movie was all about lost love, and whether or not life is worth living in spite of grief, despite all of the awful things that happen. It makes the case that the simple beauty of the world is enough to counterbalance pain, and each shot was suffused with iridescence, populated with beautiful men, some of the most gorgeous faces and bodies I’ve ever seen on film. God made those transcendent bodies, those incandescent faces. But is that enough? Is the simple fact of another human being’s body beautiful enough to make me believe in God’s goodness?

I ask myself this same question again and again and again, only because it’s the only question worth asking. There are two ways of looking at life--like any other story, life is either a comedy or a tragedy. It either has a happy ending or no ending at all.

When I got home, the grackles were in the trees, making their awful holy noise, flooding the blue sky and the bare ground. The grackles coming mean that spring is almost here, and sometimes I feel a pagan who believes in the dying of the god every winter and his rebirth in spring. That’s where Lent and Easter come from, after all.

I’m not ashamed to admit that every time I hear the beating of their wings, flooding the trees like angels, I cry. But are grackles enough? God gives us these gifts, and I’m never sure if they’re enough.

I could simply choose to believe. Yes. God made the grackles. God gives us human beings these beautiful powerful bodies and minds with which we can break and recreate the world. I’d probably be a lot happier if I forced myself to believe despite all of my doubt. Having a cohesive mental structure with which to hold the world together makes for a lot more contentment. I could choose to believe that simply because I have them, my ideas are brilliant and not only does the whole world need to hear them, but the whole world needs to pay me for them. Preferably a lot of money.

Does believing something make it true? To a large degree it does, but does that mean that it’s worth believing? I could believe that unicorns were going to fly in from Pluto in the year 2050 to rescue us all, and believing that might make my life a lot better. A lot happier. It would at least cause me to believe in some kind of eschatology, that there was going to be and end to all the meandering crap we do with our lives.

Or I can choose to believe what I believe on bad days, that we’re all just monkeys with a little too much self-awareness. To a large degree we are. We’re just trying to convince ourselves that all of the sex and digging in the dirt and eating leaves and carrying babies around actually means something.

I’m blogging for February, but why? Why bother? I know I’ve quoted Beckett before, but his line continues to haunt me. “Every word is an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness.” To a large extent I agree with him. So why do I persist in staining silence?

I’m not good at entertaining people. What I want to be good at is telling the truth. But I don’t always know what the truth is. I only have the vaguest grasp on what the truth is for me, and I shade between both beliefs: the belief in a God who cares about us, and the belief in mechanistic determinism. My mind is like one of those bass-boat paint jobs that changes colors depending on your angle.

I know

I'm thinking of making this picture my new masthead.

I was supposed to write about subversive hormones and Solomon and the wellspring of life and the Thai concept of jai today but I got distracted by women’s figure skating. So: take that, Solomon.

I’m taking a cue from my sister, who is blogging every day, if only one sentence. Her blog is here (vegetablesforlent.wordpress.com), and I highly recommend it. After I read her beautiful posts about everyday life, I feel sheepish for getting all pie in the sky all the time. My best posts on the boat were about the toilet.

Well, I still have to clean the toilet here on land, indoor plumbing and all. It’s on the agenda for the weekend, as are multiple yoga classes, taking my yoga test, tutoring two students, and somehow managing to find time to diagram my main character’s “arc”. Watching those figure skaters, though--man. They’re something else. My moral of the story (or excuse for slacking off and sitting on the couch) is how much hard work it must take just to be in that company. How many hours and hours and hours they must spend on the ice.

It’s so much more fun watching the results of other people’s hard work than it is doing it yourself.

Which means: get to your desk, Melissa. I know that’s the answer. That’s always the answer. Argh. I hate it, though. Hence the inexorable pull of the couch.

Listen to the loons

Bulletin board (lots of juicy dirt in there for the close reader)

“Above all else, guard your heart, for it is the wellspring of life.” --Proverbs 4:23

When I was in high school, this verse was a favorite to throw at us adolescent girls. I’ve written about it before, but it’s one of those pieces of Scripture that get under your skin and wiggle around in there. It’s a verse that continues to drive me crazy. Especially because it was written by Solomon, the author of the world’s greatest erotic love poem, and the husband to 1000 wives. Maybe that’s why he could guard his heart. You don’t have to give it to anyone when you have a grand to pick from.

I have this feeling that when the youth pastor or the guest speaker of the week said, “guard your hearts, girls,” what they really meant was, “guard your vaginas.” (Oops. Am I allowed to use the V-word on a blog with a Bible verse in the masthead? Too late now.)

I wish they had spent more time focused on the second part of that verse, which raises so many more interesting questions, questions that can only be answered by Hebrew exegesis. My grandfather did vast amounts of Greek exegesis, but Christians never seem to mess with Hebrew. In my linguistic mind it resembles Thai, an utterly alien language without a whole lot of pronouns or prepositions, a language that requires vastly more interpretation in its translation. What did Solomon mean by heart? By wellspring? By life? What did those words mean in ancient Israel? I barely know what they mean now.

It’s interesting, too, how the verse was aimed at women rather than men when I was growing up. The implication was that women needed to guard their hearts more because they were more in danger of giving them away. What’s ironic is that the verse comes in the explicit context of a son receiving advice from his father, in a book of the Bible where the only female characters are the personification of wisdom (chapter 3), the idealized wife (chapter 31) and a whore (chapter 2). Solomon may have been a man who didn’t put a whole lot of stock in the female perspective.

Nonetheless, it’s in the canon. That means I have to take it seriously, right? Even a verse written by someone who celebrated the joys of extramarital sex? I’m glad to think seriously about it because it details so clearly the peril and confusion of relationships in the modern evangelical church. We’re taught by Jesus to hold our hearts open, to love our neighbors as ourselves. But we’re told by Solomon to guard our hearts, to close them down. The way it plays out in most denominations is that we’re supposed to close our hearts to the wrong ideas, and open our hearts to the right ones--namely, the ones from our denomination. Close our hearts to the wrong people, open our hearts to the right ones--namely, the ones from our church, our youth group, our cultural background.

That closed, guarded heart carries over when it comes to things like yoga or tai chi--Eastern mystical traditions that seem to tap into something larger and more beautiful than ourselves, but that Christians continue to insist must be demonic, occultish. I was explicitly taught in middle school that yoga was Satanic, an ingrained attitude that continues to obstruct my yogic progress. I keep wondering: what if they’re right? What if I’m going to hell? What if I should be guarding my heart?

When what that little voice inside of me keeps suggesting (and I know I’m going to lose a bunch of Christian readers here) is that the chi, the prana, and the Holy Spirit are all the same thing. Paul says: “For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen.” (Romans 1:23) Even Heraclitus spoke of the “ever-living fire.” It makes simple sense that others created in God’s image would have found ways to seek out His Spirit. I happen to believe that the only reason we have access to the chi is because of the person of Jesus Christ, and that’s because I am a Christian. But I’m not going to call the spirit of God that others have connected to a demon. Especially when those others (I’m looking at you, Gandhi) seem to bear evidence in their very being of a connection to God, of a real and present love, when the Western church continues to be mired in greed and gluttony and violence.

It comes back to the question of love. The question of how I’m supposed to love everyone, fully and completely, while I guard my heart. How can I love if I’m keeping my heart guarded?

I keep finding Christian girls in bad relationships, Christian women in bad marriages, because they still haven’t asked themselves this question. They’re busy keeping their hearts guarded against anything that might spank of bad theology (say, that God believes that men and women are equal in His eyes), while they’re loving the ever-living fire out of their husbands to the point where they have nothing left of themselves. They’ve dissolved the integrity of their beings into this concept of love without having ever thought about what it means.

I haven’t even got back to Solomon’s wellspring of life, which is where I actually think things get interesting, but this post has gone on long enough. Maybe tomorrow. Today I’ve managed to successfully anger (or at least bore) every single person reading. Believe it or not, these are things I think about every single day. So I may as well write about them. Isn’t honesty a part of love, too?

Run thru

Maybe there is hope of spring.

I wish they would sell short stories at iTunes for 99 cents a piece. Why don’t they? Why can’t fiction get the same consideration as music, or cinema, or television? I know--because no one reads anymore.

Today on the radio (something else no one listens to anymore) they announced that the price for episodes of new television shows was going to be reduced on iTunes from $1.99 to 99 cents. Which seems fine to me. It’s hard for me to imagine that the studio that makes Heroes really can’t make it on 99 cents from everyone that downloads their episodes. Then again, I don’t make a television show, or work on one, or write for one. Another recent piece on NPR said that payment for actors and production staff on television has gone down by at least half in the last ten years.

Which brings me to something that’s been bothering me for a long time: how does anyone make a living as an artist these days? It’s always been tough, but it seems tougher than ever in the internet age. If you get discovered as a musician, you don’t make any money from your records. No one buys albums anymore. Not even me. If you get a regular paying gig on television, you can’t make a living wage. If you find the budget to make an independent film, no one will release it.

Two paths of success used to be recommended for writers, the academy or the press. I’ve made attempts to be hired or a newspaper or be published by a magazine, with some success, but not a whole lot. It’s tough to feel heartened when every day I read about another newspaper or magazine biting the dust. As for academia, I was actually told by a writing professor that most MFA programs function as “cash cows” for their universities. Which makes sense, considering that the degree costs about $60,000 and prepares one for--what else?--an unguaranteed career in academia, where the average adjunct professor gets paid $2500 per class.

Most of the good writing these days is published on the internet. I speak not of myself (of course), but most of the writers I regularly follow are online. Bloggers are brilliantly blogging there guts out. But how can any of them make a living?

I do it by working part-time at a minimum wage job, by tutoring, by selling an article here or there. By eating beans and rice and wearing seven-year-old running shoes. I imagine most other writers out there are a lot like me. More and more, our society has become one that doesn’t reward creativity in any form. Despite all of the talk about the American dream, our culture doesn’t even reward ingenuity anymore. We reward homogeneity, consumerism, stasis. We don’t even believe that the starving artist, the struggling entrepreneur, the self-employed innovator deserves health care, let alone respect.

Sorry for the rant. I just get so frustrated watching day by day, hour by hour, my time bleed by in pursuit of an almighty paycheck. Does everyone feel the same way about their work? I feel so drained when I get home that it’s all I can do to flip on the television. Forget creating something beautiful, something that will sustain my spirit and the spirits of others. Forget being able to come to my desk, to face the blank page.

Hence no post yesterday. Hence a barely coherent one tonight. I want to spend my priceless time in the pursuit of beauty, of truth, of that pearl of great price. There have to be people who believe in the work they do, who love the work they do, who are rewarded financially for following their path. Right? It’s an old cliche: find a job you love and you’ll never work a day in your life. What do you do, though, when no one will pay to do the work you love?

Yippee-kai-yay

Alabama sunset

On the continued theme of gender politics, I wanted to post a link to a fantastic song by Dar Williams, my favorite modern folk singer. She’s a little too folk-y for some, but I can’t recommend her songwriting highly enough, especially the album Mortal City. The title track alone is makes her worth a listen. I was lucky enough to see her live in Chicago, a night that blew away my preconceptions about solo female music acts.

Often I find, after struggling to wrestle my ideas down in type, that other artists have managed to pin down my precise thought elegantly and effortlessly. So it is with this song. Even though I wasn’t a tomboy, I too was a girl who daydreamed about growing up to be president and refused to wear pink. There’s more than one way to be a boy.

When I Was a Boy - Dar William...

The greatest thing about the song, though, is that it doesn’t neglect the male experience. As much as I get on my feminist high horse, I realize that men in our culture are systematically stripped of their ability to express their feelings. We've ended up with emotionally stunted men and women who are forced to carry double their emotional weight. I remember when a friend broke that news to me, after another of my diatribes. “It’s just as hard for men, Melissa,” he said. “Watch any action movie. That’s our model--silent, stoic, explosive. You try living up to that.”

I’m not sure I believe that it’s just as hard, but I acknowledge that it’s harder for men than I’m able to understand. Which returns me to that verse: “in Christ, there is neither male nor female...” The gender knife cuts both ways.

In my yoga book, I’ve been studying nadis, or the ayurvedic energy channels that flow through the pranic sheath. The three most important are the sushumna, the pingala, and the ida. The pingala and ida are the masculine and feminine energy channels that spiral upward from the base of the spine. They intersect each other and the sushumna, which flows upward along the spinal cord, at seven points: the chakras. Interesting that the locations of the chakras correspond closely to the lymph nodes.

Whatever you believe about science and medicine, it’s hard for me to discount entirely a system that’s been effective for thousands of years. So I choose to take what I can from ayurveda, and from qi gong, which I’ve also been studying. One of things I take is that all of us have channels of both masculine and feminine energy. In certain meditative poses, women and men are taught to sit differently in order to cultivate the opposing energy.

Maybe that’s an obvious truth, already explained by science. Men have estrogen, women have testosterone. What’s useful is to think about reaching towards that other side of yourself, to find strength from it. I am not just one thing, but many things. As another, even greater poet said, far better than I could: “I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.”

Our way to fall

Erica and I, pre-bloggers.

If you hadn't figured it out already, I'm blogging for Lent again this year. Last year I made my goal to blog about faith--this year I don't particularly care what I write about. I think a lot about faith, though, so that will figure prominently. As will the central question: what next? My sister is also writing for Lent, and I had intended to include a link to her site, but I suppose I should ask her first.

Today I feel the need to write a post about my niece, whom I love so much. My sister and her husband have struggled a lot with Sophia’s idiosyncracies. For one, she never wants to the be princess when playing make-believe. She always wants to be the prince. Which is great, as far as I’m concerned. Who the heck wants to be the voiceless, passive princess, lying around, waiting for someone to “kiss the girl”? No. Who wouldn’t want to wield swords and slay dragons? She doesn’t want to be the prince because of gender-netural parenting. She wants to be the prince because she’s awesome.

Maybe the way this ties into my faith is that I have such issues--maybe my biggest issues--with the church’s perspective on gender. What’s ironic about that is that Jesus’s teaching about women continues to be more progressive than any other religion. “There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female.” I cling to that promise. In ancient Hinduism, women weren’t even allowed to do yoga. I grew up knowing that girls weren’t allowed to even touch Buddhist priests. And Islam? Forget about it.

Being the wonderful parents that Erica and Jordan are, they threw Sophia a fourth birthday party, a knight birthday party. Everyone had tinfoil swords and shields, with which they whacked at a dragon pinata. I’d like to think that Sophia was able to celebrate without worrying about any limitations the world might throw at her. She loves Star Wars, and I pray that she’ll be able to continue to use that force--the force of knowing she can do anything.

Sometimes she makes me want to cry with her beauty. Sometimes I believe that all of us as four-year-olds are at the pinnacle of our humanity, and it’s all downhill from there.

Here’s a quote from a New Yorker short story for the day, one that seemed to capture that feeling better than I ever could.

He stood on the balcony and watched his son crawl back onto the bed, pull himself into a fetal position, close his eyes for a moment, then open them. Meeting his gaze, Loomis felt something break inside him. The boy had the same dazed, disoriented expression he’d had on his face just after his long, difficult birth, when the nurses had put him into an incubator to rush him to intensive care. Loomis had knelt, then, his face up close to the incubator’s glass wall, and he’d known that the baby could see him, and that was enough.
--Brad Watson

And here, pictures of niece’s birthday party.

You never give me your money

Alabama land

Today I’ve been thinking a lot about anger. I’ve been thinking that I feel angry a lot more than I acknowledge even to myself. I’m very good at convincing myself that what I’m feeling is not in fact anger, but something else entirely. I’ve also been thinking about love--I’m even more confused about it. I’ve been mystified about what love actually means since high school, at least, to the point where I checked out a bunch of theology texts the summer after I graduated to figure it out once and for all.

I didn’t. No one has.

It’s the greatest commandment: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind, and love your neighbor as yourself.”

But nowhere does Jesus actually tell you how.

I understand the concept generally. Allow the Holy Spirit to flow through you. Act nice. I even went and reread 1 Corinthians 13 today. “Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast. It is not arrogant, it does not act unbecomingly, it does not seek its own, it is not provoked. It keeps no record of wrongs. It does not rejoice in unrighteousness, but rejoices with the truth.” Here’s where it gets hard: “It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.”

Really? All things? Bears all things? I recognize some abstract concept of ultimate love in there, and that I can’t even begin to touch its hem, but should I even aim to try? Should I try to bear all things? Here’s where the central doctrines of Christianity run smack-dab into modern psychology, and I’m not sure Christianity comes out on top. I’m not sure I should bear all things. Some things shouldn’t be borne. (The abused wife trying to “love” her husband into salvation comes quickly to mind.) The question is: which things?

A family member, nameless to avoid incrimination, has been reading widely in different religious traditions. He said: Christianity tells you to love. But Buddhism teaches you how to love.

His answer is the best I’ve found--the doctrine of mindfulness, as expounded by Thich Nhat Hanh. The way we love is by being fully mindful in the presence of others. Aware of who they are, what they are saying, what they are doing. Of being fully present in each moment with another person. Fully present with God when alone.

That’s just as hard. And it still doesn’t confront the self-sacrificial elements of Christianity. Should the abused woman just be mindful as she’s beaten senseless?

“Greater love has no one than this: to lay down a life for a friend,” said Jesus. Obviously that’s the greatest love. But is it realistic? Is my own heart the problem? Is it not big enough? The Christian would argue if I would allow the love of Christ to flow through me, I could bear all things. I just don’t see it working.

Ash Wednesday

At sea, Secret.

My Episcopal church service was amazing this morning, as usual, as it always is on Ash Wednesdays. It’s always awkward wandering around the rest of the day with ashes on my forehead. I feel simultaneously proud and insecure. Then I feel guilty for feeling proud.

Lent, though, is one of my favorite parts of the traditional church calendar. Any tradition that has a whole section devoted to acceptance of my own death is one I can get on board with.

There’s a similar tradition in yoga, actually. Maybe it’s weird to talk about yoga on Ash Wednesday, but I’m not sure if I care. The Episcopal liturgy brings me closer to God, and yoga does too. In shavasana, or corpse pose, yogis focus their attention on death, by releasing control of their bodies, their breath, their minds.

I do the same thing during Lent. Release control of my own life, and surrender it again.

As I recited today:

As a father cares for his children,
so does the Lord care for those who fear him.
For he himself knows whereof we are made;
he remembers that we are but dust.

I am dust, and to dust I shall return. That’s why I carried ashes around on my head today. The cross that I felt imprinted on my forehead all day is a larger metaphor for me. To me, the upstroke reminds me of my relationship with God. The cross-stroke reminds me of my relationships with others, with the surrounding world. Today I remind myself that all that matters is my love for God and love for the people God brings into my life.

Today is also as good a day as any for me to give my news, the real news that has been slowly dawning on me this last month: Secret is sold. I’ve had a buyer since December, but haven’t wanted to broach the news until I was sure. Absolutely sure. My buyer, a wonderful Norwegian sailor, went down to visit Secret in January, and returned a couple of weeks ago. She belongs to him now, and my heart belongs to my next adventure. Secret will always hold a place in my history, but she’s in the past. In my past. Now comes the future.

That’s why I surrender myself. Secret broke my heart more than once, which is probably exactly what she was there for. I believed that God had a plan for her, and for me. And He did. Now my only job is to figure out the next step.

You don’t want me around

Can it be home?

When I worked for the Christian Century, I worked on an article about Beck. It was actually a review of an evangelical book that called him an “apocalyptic” artist--one whose work points to the brokenness of our times. I’ve been listening to a lot of Beck lately. I don’t know why. His albums, “Midnite Vultures” especially, skewer the politics and sexual ethos of our culture in a way that breaks my heart.

It begs the question: can art be Christian if all it does is shine a spotlight on our busted culture?

I’m having the same problem with my own work. The feedback I’m getting is that no one likes my characters. I admit, they’re not likable people. It’s a struggle to write the Great American Novel today and not include the repellent Americans that surround us. Maybe we don’t like to hear those stories because we don’t like to have a mirror held up to our own faces.

It’s immensely interesting for me to dive into the psyche of unappealing people. To find out what makes them tick. What could possibly be their motivation for doing the things they do? What’s wrong with our culture isn’t that we’re all a bunch of Hitlers, running around saying: we will crush the Haitians under our thumbs! No. We like to buy coffee at gas stations, drive across town for our yoga classes, eat beef burritos at Taco Bell. It’s those things that keep systemic oppression, structural violence, in place.

We want hope in our fiction, even if there isn’t any. We want characters to be likable, optimistic, heroic, even if the people we’re surrounded by aren’t. Without courageous protagonists as our proxy, what’s the point of art? Picasso had the same problem with representational visual art. Two-dimensional art is, by definition, unrealistic. It can’t represent the three-dimensional world we perceive. In a fraction of a second, we see both the rim of our coffee mug and its contents. Hence, cubism, and, thence, abstract expressionism.

Maybe we’ve outgrown heroes. A truly realistic novel would be immensely boring. People sitting in their cubicles tapping on keyboards. Curled up on their couches at night. Watching flashing screens ninety percent of their lives. Chapters would drag on and on endlessly. We don’t want realism. We want fantasy. We want characters who triumph over our own sordid circumstances.

I feel the same way about Beck’s music, sometimes. His lyrics are obscure, his music difficult. Sometimes I don’t want to hear about garbage trees or leprous faces. Even if I’m all alone in the new pollution, I don’t want to be.

At the depth of my depression last year, I told my brother I was listening to Beck. “Mutations,” mainly. (“Tell me that it’s nobody’s fault, nobody’s fault, nobody’s fault but my own...”) He said: “That’s the last thing you want to do! You are absolutely forbidden from listening to him!” I relented, went with John Prine and Steve Earle instead. It’s pretty bad when country music is a step up on the happiness scale.

Maybe I have to relent as far as my characters are concerned, too. Maybe the only way in which a work can be Christian is finding the image of God in people. That’s the only way they can be redeemed. Even Beck agrees: “True love will find you in the end.”

We keep waiting for your footsteps

Lonely tent in morning light

It’s January and I’m camping alone, at Bucks Pocket State Park. I’ve done this once before, a solo overnight in January, as preparation for the Appalachian Trail. This time it’s just a lark. The advantage of camping in Alabama when it’s below forty degrees, and there are isolated patches of snow on the ground, is that I have the campground entirely to myself.

What’s incredible is how easy it actually is to do. I just threw my gear in the trunk, hopped in the car, and drove. I didn’t even know where I was going to end up. I followed road signs and GPS to a likely-sounding spot. Now I hear a rush of water to my right. My little fire holds back the darkness. The stars burn bright. I’m writing on actual paper, not keys, and the whole experience makes me feel like did on my boat, when I was actually living, not just putting in time.

It’s amazing how many more experiences fit into the same 24-hour day when I choose to live and not just exist. I haven’t been this alone, truly alone, in a long time. I haven’t proved to myself that I can do things alone. Things like pitch a tent in the dark, a tent that I stuffed in its sack and forgot five years ago. Things like build a kick-ass fire in under five minutes. Like survive outdoors in the winter.

I’m here because I’m hunting a piece of land. I want to see if I can find a home here, a real home somewhere in the middle of nowhere. On my drive today, the radio played me Roseanne Cash’s new version of “500 Miles.” I don’t want to be 500 miles away from home anymore. I don’t want home to feel forever out of reach, just beyond the next bend in the trail, across the next swell, over the next ridge. Home can be here, if I let it be.

Or can it? This state is notoriously hostile to outsiders, and I have exactly the wrong accent. Here I claim Maine, as it seems the closest state in ethos if not in voice, and no one down here has the least idea how a Mainiac sounds. In Maine, I was told I had a Southern accent. If that’s not irony, I don’t know what is.

Why is it so hard for any of us, me included, to do this? To jump in a car and cut ties with the known world? Because once I do it, it’s not hard at all. All it requires is a pair of figurative cojones and a good sleeping bag. But it’s still so, so hard. I fought against my own plan for days. I’m not sure if I was more afraid of wandering through the backwoods alone, or of allowing myself to find a place to put down roots.

I know, you’ve heard it from me before. And you’ll hear it again, I’m sure. My quest for home, unlike that of Ulysses, may be one that doesn’t have an end.

It’ll drop below freezing tonight. It may rain. I have twelve acres on a dirt road to survey tomorrow, and six acres outside Tuscaloosa on Saturday. Tomorrow I do the hunt for a campsite all again.

I can do it. I know I can--both the hunt for a home and for the road less traveled. Once I set out, the easiest thing in the world is doing exactly what I should do. If I believe and don’t doubt. If I allow myself to make mistakes. If I refuse to allow other people’s opinions of me to matter. It’s the hardest thing in the world, too.