Bridgewater, Maine

Only in Maine do we have pink moss

Today is the first full day of my true solitude. K. has left, drifted away with the wind for a stint on the Maine Appalachian Trail. He claims he's getting to the New Hampshire border and turning around, but I know the wiles of the trail. She's an alluring mistress. I know if I was hiking Maine, I'd hear the siren song of Springer, calling from Georgia.

So I'm here alone, here with photographs to nail to the walls, seedlings to start and plants to set, beds to build and compost to stir, fires to stoke and dishes to wash. I do a good impression of a female alone in the wilderness most days, but for the next few weeks it'll be true.

Aroostook County, Maine

Sky above the clouds

My first seeds are in the ground, although not the real ground, the fake ground that I put into plastic six-packs and keep in the sun in the glass room. Although K.'s been hard at work here, and in the real ground, his real ground—we already have garlic peeping up, planted last fall, and beets and spinach and chard—and a pea sprouting. And one hardy lettuce, the one I used to think was a speckled romaine, wintered over in the cold frame. Believe it or not.

These things are so enjoyable to me, and I always hesitate to speak of them because it feels like bragging but I'm beginning to believe that maybe I'm somewhat good at this. Not really, because even just a generic search of farm and garden blogs makes me realize that I'm way down on the totem pole. There are people out there, in Maine, already eating garden greens. It took us till June last year, and maybe it'll take us that long again.

I called Johnny Seed today and they are out of asparagus and blueberry plants. They run out in January. Who knew? And my never-ending war with the herbs goes on. I persist, but I can't get them to turn into the provencal herb garden of my dreams.

It feels good here, workmanlike. The snow has passed. I forget how much I miss the green earth, the green world, the green tunnel that closes me in on my long walks to the back of the land. It's black and white for six months, and then the green comes back. I battle with place, but this place is drawing me in, claiming me.

En route from Chicago, Illinois, to Aroostook County, Maine

1385 statute miles
44°F
SW winds 5mph

At the gate now, heading back to the place that's the closest thing to home, I sit beside blonde college students in a purple headband and skinny jeans, reading George RR Martin, across from a middle-aged man in an orange baseball cap, reading The Economist, catty-corner from a younger man with Bose headphones and a Columbia fleece reading on his iPad. On the plane from O'Hare to Hartsfield-Jackson, on my way back from the airplane's head, I counted fully twenty people reading books on paper or LCD, no matter which. Methinks the death of prose has been greatly exaggerated. It's good to reminded of such things after filling my cup to overflowing at the font of literature, good to be reminded that all we do who write is not in vain.

Back to the earth I go now, back to plant lettuce and chard and broccoli, to dig my hands in the soil and walk while I watch the sky. I learned a couple of important things that have stayed with me after the festival, and I want to put them into words before I or anyone else forget them. First: the subconscious. I became aware that writers, in writing, are painting on the cave walls of the subconscious mind of the audience, which is why it's so crucial that writers pay attention to their own subconscious. All art, and I include in this category adventuring, and farming, is not about creation as much as allowing the spirit to flow free. It's about “getting out of the way of the story,” as Marilynne Robinson put it.

Second: specificity. Unexpectedly, this word came from the two essayists of the bunch, writers exploring the quotidiana of their lives. But Robinson spoke of that, too, of “creation being continually addressed to us.” That's a quote from Calvin himself, who believed that all of reality is a gift, each moment of reality a part of a slate wiped clean by God. And only in seeing reality as a gift can we see it as it really is.

Third: stories can only be told after the trauma of experiencing the story is over. This lesson I learned from Kate Braestrup, the only Maine writer at the conference, and the chaplain for the Game Warden Service here. It's a smaller lesson, perhaps, but just as important, and I feel that the link between all three is an emphasis on allowing one's art to flow within the larger flow of the river. “We step into the river. We are and we are not,” says Herodotus. “Time goes slowly when you're lost in a dream,” says Dylan.

It's all cinched together by the homily preached by Marilynne Robinson. Perfect love casts out all fear, says the Bible. Is it really that simple? Don't be afraid, and do what you love. Jesus says our burden is light. It's possible that's all he meant.

Grand Rapids, Michigan

Underlying themes thread their way in golden type through these days of feasting, of literary inspiration and intellectual challenge—one, of course, my newly acute awareness of the subconscious. Larry Woiwode, in his proem masquerading as a lecture, spoke of the mirroring pool of metaphor all artists draw from, how drawing detail from that well allows something new to be created between the mind of the writer and the reader. Jonathan Safran Foer said that when he writes the word “tree,” the reader conjures a tree. The writer writes, the tree appears, like magic, on the blank screen of the imagination.

This morning, Brian Doyle and Patrick Madden (yes, I realize all of them are men. Shall I diatribe? No) explored the genre of essay, and I finally realized what I've been doing here all of this time—betwixt all of the food writing and travel writing and spiritual writing and sports writing--I've been writing short, unworked, mostly bad essays. Patrick Madden's website is called quotidiana, and he uses it as an overarching metaphor for his work, the idea that in the essay we draw from the ordinariness of our quotidian lives, finding in them the realization that there is nothing ordinary. We need to sharpen our attentiveness to the daily holiness in each moment. I was given permission, the permission I didn't know I craved, to follow my trail of associations down the rabbit holes they lead me, as they always do.

Yesterday morning, in a bad mood after a panel in which my questions were not answered, intimidated by the participants and fearing my journey might be wasted, I dawdled by an entranceway, waiting for my sister. I heard a girl on her cell phone, her closer shoulder pointing in towards the wall, grinning, face bright with joy, blonde hair curled. She ducked away from me so I couldn't hear, so I couldn't steal her secret. Still, I heard: “I better go. I love you,” she said. I walked away. When I came back, she was still talking, still transcendent with love, maybe first love, newborn. It's been a long time since I've seen it.

New love is a sharp thing, with edges unworn by time and lethargy. I'm still very much in love, but a love aged, by life, experience, pain.

Then, today, a different girl, hair slicked back against her head, intent, focused, her knees knocked together, sitting on the steps outside the student union, a phone clutched to her ear. (Is it any wonder we name these things after a prisoner's cage?) I only caught a fragment--”yes, I know, but when you yell at me, I...” and then the sentence carried away by the rain. How long between those two eternities? How long?

Brian Doyle says I don't need to close here, to tie up my daily meanderings with some hard-won wisdom. I don't need to, in short, preach. I can let those two images hang together in time, drawing up story from the collective pool that rests below all of us.

Border five miles from here

Yesterday morning I awoke at 5:30 a.m. to pull on jeans and sweatshirt and drive the four-and-a-half hours to Portland, where I left my car in long-term parking and took two planes and another four-hour car ride to arrive here. I'm in Grand Rapids, home of Calvin College and its Festival of Faith and Writing, and today I heard: Larry Woiwode, Kathryn Erskine, Jonathan Safroen Foer, Amy Frykholm, Gary D. Schmidt, Bethany Pierce and half a dozen more. I heard from Christian writers and Jewish writers and Muslim writers and people who write about sex and the Sabbath and blind typists and eating disorders and from a panel of four—count them, four—Dutch-Canadians.

The night before I left, I dreamed of giving my grandmother's intricate glazed ceramic tea cups away. I gave them away to careless students who broke them as together we drank tea. Breaking my grandmother's tea cups—my subconscious came up with a better metaphor than I ever could have for squandering her inheritance.

But am I, in fact? No. At the end of the first of three thirteen-hour days I am full, replete, overflowing. “Anything worth saying is unsayable,” said Kevin Moffett, quoted in a lecture today, “that's why we tell stories.” I'm in my communitas, people who believe in the power of words skillfully strung to together, who believe on building word atop stubborn word, who believe that all art carries meaning.

This prayer, from another writer, whose name blew away from me as ephemeral as wind: “God, although You needed no help from us, you named us to be namers.”
That's the calling.

Aroostook County, Maine

Seraffyn

Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum
Are throwing knives into the tree
Two big bags of dead man's bones
Got their noses to the grindstone.

The first lines from Bob Dylan's “Love & Theft” seem to be a jab at violent, capitalistic America and how ridiculous it is. I recently saw for the first time Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland, and although the film fell into some narrative cliches, it reopened to me the world of Lewis Carroll, one of the original magical realists. I don't know if Carroll meant to poke fun at capitalists with his doddering Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum, but Dylan certainly does. What good do they do echoing the words of someone else, parroting each other?

What good does it do them to keep their noses to the grindstone? What good does it do us?

These are questions I've been asking myself as I return to my triune vocation: adventurer, writer, and now farmer. Money is an idea that I return to repeatedly as I explore how to survive in that vocation. I keep thinking about money itself, what it is but slips of paper representing obscure and possibly irrelevant concepts. It represents nothing but calcified energy.

In my mailbox when I arrived here was a brochure from a retreat center in the Berkshires, the Rowe Camp, and I noticed that they accept the possibility of barter. The vegetables I grew last season, now briny and spiced in mason jars, are also preserved labor. Why does the work I put into those not have the same value as dollar bills?

These thoughts come to mind especially as I spend my inheritance, the prodigal daughter, on another conference, for the chance at finding an agent for my unpublished book. It's just money, I tell myself, just dollars in the bank. I have to follow these leads if I'm going to believe that I'll achieve success in this field. I want to believe that it's God guiding my steps, that the people I admire most are the ones, like Lin and Larry of Seraffyn (see above), who followed their dreams and didn't let any ostensible obstacles stop them.

But my heart quails.

En route from Marion, Massachusetts, to Aroostook County, Maine

The day of our departure, we were able to visit a wooden boat yard and see Seraffyn of Victoria herself, an amazing privilege. More photographs later. It certainly wasn't the best thing for a person trying to convince herself to stay put aground.

436 statute miles
38° F
Winds calm
Arrival time: 6:30 am

In the car last night, driving from Buzzards Bay north, around Boston, through the bright lights of the big dig, across the highways that bridge New Hampshire and again into Maine, I kept thinking how I was going home. It felt alien, the feeling foreign to the point of being uncomfortable. But there's part of me that feels that way, even now that I'm here, nesting my knees beneath my desk, my fingers on the keys. Home is merely something I convince myself of.

We towed the new boat behind the Volvo, the new boat whose coat of green paint is bringing out a host of possible names: Pickled. Pistachio. Pequod. Brillig, which has nothing to do with green, but is my personal favorite.

Today, after a five-hour morning nap, I pulled the first couple of rows of rocks from the ground, rocks cleared last fall that frost has heaved up to meet my fingers. Fifty mile-an-hour gusts during one storm while we were away broke a sheet of glass from the cold frame, and now hairline-fractured plate glass paves half of the garden. It's already past time to plant peas and spinach, past time to start beet seedlings. The earth is calling.

And so are the words. After this journey, this conference ostensibly undertaken for other people, I decided to pursue a trip this summer just for me, for the sake of my own art, and now a multitude of possibilities are heaped upon me, and I don't know which I should choose. I've been gone too long. Part of me just wants to hole up, with my desk, my words, to spend mornings with the blank page and afternoons with my fingers in the soil. Is that just fear calling? Or is it home?

There she goes

The new boat, at Meadow Island

When Easter rolled around on Sunday, I wanted to write a post about Ishtar, and Isis, and how the Christian year mimics that of the pagans, but how that doesn't make the celebration of Easter, and the blood of the Lamb, the dying God become the risen Lord, any less legitimate. Now it's Wednesday, and my Lenten discipline is over, meaning that I can watch English premiere league soccer (Queens Park versus Swansea) and eat popcorn to my heart's content, without having to worry about posting links to global warming articles or quotes from Moby Dick before midnight. (Actually, it's Moby-Dick. There's a hyphen.)

I didn't do so badly this Lent, other than my failure, most days, to post before midnight. Do these Lenten disciplines make any difference? Make anything better? That's the larger question. If I had to answer it, I'd say Lent is about that cycle of death and rebirth, the eternal circle that all of us celebrate every year, whether we acknowledge it or not.

Because that's what the season of darkness is about, the season of darkness and now the season of light that begins. It's about death and rebirth, and how the green fuse drives the flower back up from the ground, and how we remind ourselves of that by taking things away from ourselves and then giving them back. My sister posted her Thailand pictures today, though, and I'm reminded how I hate the seasons, how I want it to be 95 degrees year-round. Everyone, at least in Maine, uses that as a selling point: we have all four seasons!

But what if I just want one? Endless, never-ending, unchanging summer?

So God dies and is reborn, and crops die and our reborn, and the sun goes away and comes back, and we celebrate that now, during spring, celebrate our own return from the darkness and depression. The passage of the seasons, the cycle of the church calendar, they remind me of the passage of time, how every day that changes is different, and new. Maybe that's why we want to drift from those reminders, into a world separated from the earth, and plants, and the cycle of growing things, how we want to dissolve into a digital world of pixels, of fictional equatorial sun, a place that only exists in the imagination, and, perhaps, at the actual equator. No matter how we separate ourselves from them, the seasons still pass.

Now Lent is over, and spring begins in truth. Nothing for it but to roll on, into the cruelest month.

A Christian Republican

Cops to global warming. Read this:

Shawn Lawrence Otto

There is one knows not what sweet mystery about this sea, whose gently awful stirrings seem to speak of some hidden soul beneath; like those fabled undulations of the Ephesian sod over the buried evangelist, St. John. And meet it is, that over these sea-pastures, wide-rolling, watery prairies and Potters' Fields of all four continents, the waves should rise and fall, and ebb and flow unceasingly; for here, millions of mixed shades and shadows, drowned dreams, somnambulisms, reveries; all that we call lives and souls, lie dreaming, dreaming, still; tossing like slubmerers in their beds; the ever-rolling waves but made so by their restlessness.
--Herman Melville, Moby Dick

Sorry to keep quoting our American master, but he strings words together with such aching beauty, such melodious sorrow, enough to sing me to sleep--it seems a tragedy that he spent the last nineteen years of his working life as a customs inspector. I'm glad I didn't read him on the boat, for to read such words of the sea--the ineffable put into words--would have made me despair forever. Heck, it almost makes me despair now. Some writers are just too good. It makes one think the well has dried up.

Read this book: Why Read Moby Dick.

And this one:

Gotta start feeding our souls

Pavement shadow (not my photograph)

Why are we always cruelest to those we love the most? I know at this point it's almost a cliche, or at least a truism, but it remains true. Maybe we take those closest to us for granted, or maybe we're trying to drive them away. Maybe it's a way to avoid looking at ourselves too closely, to avoid being present in each moment as we love. It's a Christian cliche that love is not a feeling, but an action, but whichever it is we--or at least I--fail to love actively, consistently, kindly.

I made it to a yoga class this evening, for the first time since I've been in Massachusetts, and I was reminded of the first limb of yoga, ahimsa, the principle of non-violence. It's a fundamental tenet that no practice should involve violence to yourself or another, hence no pain, and no competition. Because all competition is a form of violence, the desire to defeat the other, a desire to be better.

It's that ahimsa that perhaps is lacking in our closest relationships as we compete with each other for attention, for regard, over who's working harder or doing things better. We even compete about who's right and who's wrong, who folds tee-shirts or steams vegetables correctly.

Coming back from yoga I glow with the attention I've given myself for the past 75 minutes, the mindfulness I've gained of my own core strength, the power of my own breath, my ability to overcome challenge and discomfort. But only by not competing with myself, by not harming myself, by not causing myself pain. And as long as I beat myself up, I beat up others around me. I've been reviewing by Julia Cameron, and I found this reminder last night:

"If I had more time, I'd have more fun," we like to tell ourselves, but this is seldom the truth. To test the validity of the assertion, ask yourself how much time you allot each week to fun: pure, unadulterated, nonproductive fun?

For most blocked creatives, fun is something they avoid almost as assiduously as their creativity. Why? Fun leads to creativity. It leads to rebellion. It leads to feeling our own power, and that is scary.

It may seen a non sequitur, but it's not. Fun is the opposite of cruelty. Fun is the food of love and creativity both. Yoga felt like nonproductive play tonight, with no violence, no competition. It's a good reminder to carry that joy around with me, as a weapon against the toxic sludge I can allow to steal my mindfulness.

"Only when he no longer knows what he is doing does the painter do good things." --Edgar Degas

The new adventure

Sanding the interior

Adventure is another of the things that the designers of capitalism didn't particularly value, along with the arts. Maybe I'm beating a dead horse here, by speaking of the things, endlessly, that capitalism doesn't value. Which are, mainly, all of the things that I value. Nature. Beautiful, nourishing food grown by real people that tastes of the earth. Connections among communities. Communities themselves. Art.

Consider the cave painting of Lascaux. No one knows, or remembers, or cares, who were the richest and most powerful individuals in central France during the Stone Age. But everyone knows those cave paintings. Everyone knows the shape of those fertility goddesses. Were those cave painters like me? Like us?

Maybe their parents, too, told them they should be better hunters, better gatherers, better providers for their families. They shouldn't waste all of that precious red ochre dabbing it inside cave walls. What were they doing in there all day anyway? How did such foolishness help them or their village?

Or maybe those cave painters and sculptors were celebrated in their villages. Maybe they were the heroes, the shamans, the high priestesses, the mystical magicians. Maybe it's only cultures that support the artists among them that achieve anything truly lasting. There's no way to know, at least not for millennia. But I have a good guess.

My sister's introduced a new phrase into my vocabulary, the "poverty mentality." I still have a hard time with it. We grew up in a family that lived by the motto: use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without, even though I just heard it put in those words recently. My grandparents didn't have garbage pickup for fifty years, not out of a moral stance, but because they didn't want to pay for it. They burned everything in their furnace (including old tires) that didn't go into the compost (including leftover meat scraps). My grandfather spread old carpet in his garden and used old electrical wire for twine. My other grandmother drilled a hole in an old margarine container to put inside of her coffeemaker so that less of the ground coffee would be sullied by water and would be able to be reused. My mother still hoards plastic water bottles and bags. My father won't get rid of anything, not even broken electronics, which clutter his basement and my mom has to sneak out of the house when he hasn't touched them in years.

I have my quirks, too, things I compulsively hoard. I shore things up against the cold. Against future want. As my ancestors did before. Waste not, want not, I think.

So this whole idea of a poverty mentality? That it could just be me believing that I'm poor? When really my God owns the cattle on a thousand hills, and all of the wealth in the universe is accessible to me if only I believe? It sounds dangerously close to a prosperity gospel.

Have you heard of that one, too? Sometimes I make offhand references to things that are evangelical shorthand. A prosperity gospel is what some Pentecostals believe, that all you have to do is go into your local Mercedes dealer and "name it and claim it." I can't buy that. Not the Mercedes, either. I just can't convince myself that if I were to believe hard enough that that $540 million Powerball jackpot could be mine.

What I can accept is a more internal truth about what it means to be rich and what it means to be poor. The truly rich are those who are not parsimonious with themselves or with those whom they love. They believe that God will provide their needs--not their wants, but their needs--and they can rest in that surety. Then they can believe that God also delights in giving them the desires of their hearts. The true desires of their true hearts.

How many rich people do you know who are desperately poor? The Mr. Potters of the world who hoard their wealth and won't throw away a packet of lemon juice? The truly rich are those who don't let their love for money or their fear of its loss be the thing that limits them, their prospects, their future, their hope, their love. God has not given us a spirit of fear. And at the core of my stinginess I find a bitter seed of fear. I'm afraid of ending up poor, starving, in a gutter. Of being at the mercy of friends and strangers. Worst of all, of hearing all of those who believed it couldn't be done say: I told you so.

Through the lacings of the leaves, the great sun seemed a flying shuttle weaving the unwearied verdure. Oh, busy weaver! unseen weaver! --pause!--one word!--whither flows the fabric? what palace may it deck wherefore all these ceaseless toilings? Speak, weaver! Stay thy hand! --but one word with thee! Nay--the shuttle flies--the figures float from forth the loom; the freshet-running carpet for ever slides away. The weaver-god, he weaves; and by that weaving is he deafened, that he hears no mortal voice; and by that humming, we too, who look on the loom are deafened, and only when we escape it shall we hear the thousand voices that speak through it.
--Moby Dick

Wigwam

In keeping with my ongoing theme of synchronicity, this piece popped on my car radio in the five minutes I was driving to the store yesterday, a precise examination of exactly the dilemma most people like me—artists, homemakers, homesteaders, activists—have to deal with. Yesterday, in the car, burning my fossil fuels, it felt like an answer from God. There are people out there, even if they're in New Zealand, who are struggling to redefine the paradigms of contemporary culture. Listen to the whole thing, if you can.

It's all brilliant. I may have to transcribe more, later, but here's a snippet:

If success means embodying and exemplifying the traits that the economic system values--selfishness, cold rationality, efficiency--then I'm not sure how valuable it is to succeed within it. I don't want to try to fit into the parameters of the market. The market is a human construction. Its parameters should include humanity, all, all of us, everybody. I don't want women's success in a man's world, you know.

I want a new world, which is for everybody. I'll just make explicit what I mean by the system being partial to the construct of white male. And it doesn't mean that because you happen to be a white man you're a sexist racist. It does mean that you benefit from a system which favors the constructs with which you identify.

It makes complete sense that it would be partial to white men, as it is a system designed exclusively by white men, particular men who thought of the population as being comprised primarily of white men as a social class. That's just a historical fact. The way the thought patterns of those designers of capitalism manifest is things like the use of GDP as an overall measure of a country's health.... as much of the economically productive work the market does register is performed by men, while most of the productive work the market does not measure is performed by women. And it extends further to the general social privileging of paid labor over unpaid labor.

Even now, in this current new strong-mandate national government, they would rather have anybody on the DPB or benefits of any kind—they would rather have them off the benefit and working a minimum-wage job, no matter what kind of job it is. Any paid labor is preferable to any volunteer labor. It doesn't matter what you're doing. Like, for example, it's a constant source of struggle for people like me who primarily are focused on things like the arts and activism and social criticism and stuff like that.

Those things are not considered valuable. I always have to have some kind of crappy, minimum-wage service job, which is wasteful and exploitative, and somehow that is considered more valuable than me doing things that I'm actually good at and passionate about. And, of course, millions of people have this same story, and it's not always about being an artist. Sometimes it's about raising your children.

That, to me, is the biggest one, that it is less valuable in this current economic climate to raise your children than it is to have a minimum-wage job—I don't know, pumping gas--and spend most of your paycheck on daycare. It's so backwards, but it is a manifestation of the idea that any paid labor is preferable to unpaid labor of any kind. And in terms of work and income, the neglect is sizable. Over fifty percent of the labor done in the world is unpaid labor.

Dr. Prue Hyman, who I spoke to in August, argues that the distinction between work that is paid and work that is not paid is largely arbitrary, that many jobs which are paid have a counterpart in the unpaid sector, things like agriculture, child care, education, health care, elderly care, management. More than that, quite often, the paid and unpaid performances happen simultaneously, next to each other, in the same place. Parents volunteering in schools, for example. So, how absurd, then, that the paid work has become the basis for our estimations of prestige and status, when half of all the work that's done in the world is unpaid.

Furthermore, an emphasis on paid employment puts a great deal of pressure on single parents to be seeking only paid work. The unpaid work of raising children carries with it fewer and fewer social benefits, and those few that are available are always couched in the rhetoric of a handout, a free ride, rather than as a communal investment in a future of well-raised adults contributing productively to society. I mean, this is simple economics to me. You don't have to take any kind of ideological stance on it. It doesn't have to be from a feminist perspective. It can be pure utilitarian economics.

So I've been talking about reclaiming work done in the home for feminism and feminist discussion. And this ties in closely to what feminist economists are trying to do, which ties into the fact that GDP and the market in general don't take all productive activity into account, and GDP is used to extrapolate the health of nation, and policies are made based on partial information. And the people who are excluded from that information are primarily women, particularly poor women, and women of color. Now, I'm very much against the simple sort of assignations of market value to the tasks performed in the home. I wouldn't want to just see women being paid for their housework. Because most of those jobs, in the paid sector, earn minimum wage or less, depending on where you live....

We have to reassess the fundamental structure of the modern market, rather than trying to fit all unpaid and informal labor into the existing market parameters. Now the process of reassessing those structures should seek to move the conversation away from classical economic examinations of selfishness, scarcity, competition, and efficiency, and towards examinations of necessity, surplus, consumption, and community. --Ana Martino

At the border

Talking on the phone today with my bank, I realized, as usual, that the situation is much less dire than it appeared at 2:30 in the morning. They're already disputing the charges, I should get the money back, globalized economy and massive banking leverage and adjudicated insurance claims and credit-card fraud etc. etc. So then I begin thinking about what it means to have my banking information stolen three times in three years, begin to pay attention to synchronicity, begin to believe that perhaps someone in the universe is trying to tell me something. About money.

Do what you love and you'll never work a day in your life, goes the saying. But what if you can't earn a living doing what you love? What if pursuing a dream means living consistently below the poverty level, as I have for the past eight years? More questions without answers. Sorry.

I've tried to claim the title of poor. After all, the people I most aspire to be like are poor. I wrote an entire essay about how if we take the call to live like Christ seriously, then we should actively renounce wealth, become poor ourselves, in order to be like Him. “The fox has his hole, and the bird his next, but the son of man has no place to lay his head.” All of the Christians I most respect actively took on poverty—Saint Francis, Mother Teresa, the monks and nuns who vows to be poor forever, pulling the name over their heads like a mantle. Saint Francis even gave all of his family's wealth to the poor and went to live in a cave with birds.

But there's a culture of shame that surrounds the word poor in our culture, as if the poor aren't working as hard as everyone else, or aren't as worthy. We're all equal in America, after all. Just some are more equal than others. If nothing else, these ordeals are teaching me how it feels to live on the edge of security, where one little hiccup in my financial life can send me into a place of doubt and fear, not knowing how I'll pay my bills or how many penalties or how much judgment I'll incur.

Of course, I have an education and a middle-class family and sufficient talent to pursue a six-figure job with benefits and a retirement account and perquisites if I wanted one. Does it make me somehow less of a person that I don't? I argue that it brings me closer to my calling, closer to the noumenal realm of the Spirit. Yet Jesus, when he needed funding, could call up a fish from the ocean with gold in its mouth. But can't I, too? That's the promise—you can tell the mountain to uproot itself with only the faith of a mustard seed. All that's lacking is my own faith.

She's weeping

I'm up at 2:30 in the morning, tapping on my computer keys in a darkened room while my dog snores beside me. I found out today (or yesterday, if you're counting) that the credit cards I had stolen from my wallet in DC, and which I immediately cancelled, were used to clear out my checking account. If you're reading this, you bastard, I hope you know how much your actions have the power to hurt other people. I traveled to this conference to learn how to help people, how to bring money and education and health care to the vulnerable ones who need it most, and I'm repaid with scorn.

It's not a lot of money to most people, maybe. But two months' salary for me, and now I'm again left scrabbling, bootless, on a graveled cliff leading down to a ravine. Yes, I know generally these things get worked out. I hope and believe it will be--but in the meantime, how much time? How many hours spent on hold? How many calls to faceless bureaucrats? How much anxiety and stress and dependence on the kindness of strangers?

Another season, another disaster. I've canceled my last two bank accounts for fraud of exactly this sort--an online database hacked, a credit-card number stolen. It feels like life is this endless wrestle for simple boredom, for peace--for the storms to calm and for clear sailing across a pleasant patch of sea. There's always a sense of blaming the victim. Could I have done more? Of course. I could have backed up my hard drive in triplicate. I could have kept my purse closer. I could have set up a third bank account exclusively for this trip and only carried that card with me, in a money pocket hugging my skin.

But in truth, my only crime was eating lunch at a crowded tourist destination, for flashing my fancy computer in public and making someone believe I had more money than I do. I'm supposed to be blogging with answers to questions, rather than with questions themselves. But sometimes I don't have answers. Maybe never.

This, too, is a part of travel, if this is meant to be a travel blog. All travel involves risk. And not just literal travel but figurative--we're all journeying through life. It'd be easier, sure, to barricade ourselves inside of our houses and never step outdoors. Is the reward worth the risk? Often I believe yes. Some days I believe no.

Tonight, Mr. Rochester lost his eyesight. But he gets his Jane Eyre back. There's a time for weeping and a time for laughing. It'll cycle back around, I know, the meek shall inherit the earth, and it's just money, after all. But it feels like an endless battle, when the yoke is supposedly easy, and the burden allegedly light.

Quote of the day

"Where there is energy to command well enough, obedience never fails." --Jane Eyre

The rainbow is the answer

I've been distant the last couple of days, going through the exhausting whirlwind of meetings and travel to finally end up here, where I get a blessed week of peace and rest with family, time to regroup and recuperate. This event was definitely the bravest thing I've done alone in a while, and while it was vastly rewarding, I'm realizing that the reason I want a career locked alone in a castle turret at a desk is because I'm so self-conscious in the presence of strangers. It can almost become crippling, the insecurity I feel about my appearance, my body, my clothing. No more so than in a strange city, as I was this last week.

I remember days in Chicago when I'd wear a pair of ambitious shoes, how I'd become convinced that everyone on the el was staring at me, as conscious of my wardrobe as I was. But I wanted to wear the ambitious shoes. I wanted to be the cute girl in leopard-print stilettos that all the guys were making eyes at. It's a simultaneous desire to be brave in appearance, to dress in such a way that everyone notices, and then a desperate fear of that same desire, a desperate fear of standing out.

Does everyone feel that insecurity, or is it just me? I notice how much easier men have it, in their comfortable generic loafers, matching their identical suits. They don't have to worry about those decisions. Or maybe they do--maybe I'm selling them short. Then again, maybe it is something completely different for women. Who knows. Teiresias, the only one with experience, said he'd choose to be a woman. So maybe it doesn't matter.

Does it come from being made fun of as a child? Being a dork in middle school and high school? Does it come from switching climates in college, having no clue as to how one dresses for winter, either over-dressing in massive ski jackets bought at Bangkok import sales, or under-dressing, in thin Chinese-print thrift-store shirts, on dreary early rainy gray days in fall, when everyone else had figured out it was time to wear a coat? Or does it just come from being one of these people who's always been more comfortable in the world of ideas, the world of words, and still has absolutely no idea how to move a body through space?

Another DC photograph

Because I'm too exhausted for anything else. I was planning to give a detailed blow-by-blow of the eighteen-hour day of travel, but some cherry blossoms will have to suffice to assuage my guilt and meet my obligation.