Faith is a fact.

I have a friend in another country who goes to church every day after work, sits in a silent old church in some old European country, and contemplates God or something especially cool. It seemed extreme to me when I first heard it, but I understand so much more now. We need ritual in our lives, sameness, things that do not change. This ritualizing of behaviors creates solidity in our souls, plants us into the ground, makes us feel safe in our own skin. Weird and definitely spiritual, but true. Take it or leave it.

In the wake of school shootings and marathon bombings, I hear stories of people reaching out in new and different ways. Today, while driving the freeway in between meetings across town from one another, I wondered if people are looking for God somehow in this reaching-out, and I thought about lighting a candle. I have another friend who lights candles regularly, also an awesome person. I so appreciate that she has created some kind of place for that. I don't think I have the room. Maybe I could put a shelf up or something.

Who knew I'd become more Catholic as I got older. It's strange and wonderful, and I'm glad my faith allows me to change over time, to go in and out of faith phases, just as I move in and out of food phases. I am still going to the panaderia every morning, and tonight I realized after my evening walk down the boulevard, that I could not go the rest of the day without eating ice cream.

So yeah, phases are good. Or okay, at least. Also ritual is good. I don't know if they are connected. Whatever. I won't figure everything out before I die, but I might figure out some things. Hopefully bread/ice cream phase won't put me in the grave sooner over later.

So yeah, this is me.

Vintage Crewel Embroidery Kit :)

I feel alone right now. I feel alone in a way that is new, not terribly painful, but strange nonetheless. I have, for the past twenty-some odd years, sought to demand love from other people. I have done this in a variety of ways, and have failed, miserably, time and time again. I have wanted desperately to fill holes in my heart that were never filled, holes that make me feel weak and vulnerable, scared and crazy. I have tried to get other people to fill them for me. Let me be perfectly clear: this does not work.

Now, all that "love yourself first" and "self-love" bullshit is true. I believe it. I call it bullshit because I think people use it to avoid pain sometimes, to mask a carnal dependency we all have as human beings. We all need other people. We all need relationships. But we cannot make other people love us if they don't. We just can't. I can't. I want to, but I can't. I want the people who I love to love me back, to feel as deeply as I do, to cross that relational barrier that divides us all. But this doesn't always happen. It actually happens very rarely, and that's okay.

The answer to that is not to turn inward and avoid befriending, coffee time-ing, and generally reaching out to other people. It may be appropriate to take a moment to deconstruct the reasons why a relationship didn't work out. It may help to make stronger decisions in the future. But it doesn't mean that we quit loving others, ever, or that we avoid the intimacy that got us tangled up in the first place. I've fallen down so many times now in romantic relationships that I don't want to get back up again. I don't want to bother. I'm a big fat failure, and I want to turn in my "coupling" card. I want to stop pouring my heart out to people who don't love me. I want to stop loving people who can't love me back. I want to stop obsessing over things I have no control over.

I think loving yourself means filling up your own damn holes, and then reaching out again to find someone who honors them.

What are you recycling?

There's a woman on Etsy that makes envelopes from old containers (think cereal boxes and the like). It got me to thinking-why can't I do that? Why don't I do that? So I am, right after I finish writing this post. I have an empty cereal box in my recycling basket just waiting to be cut up and reused.

Last week's unpleasant feedback re. shipping made me question myself, and that's never good. Questioning myself leads inevitably to self-hatred, and that's a dangerous road for me. So I have to work incredibly hard to allow criticism in without it affecting how I see myself. Bleh.

But I took it to heart. I am more committed now to presentation and aesthetic. It's obviously not going to change overnight, and I'm not going to change who I am, but it is a movement towards allowing other people's feeling to impact my life in healthy ways. I haven't always done that. I was raised to swallow other people's feelings and make them my own. I don't do that anymore. It's difficult to protect myself and love other people at the same time. It's a constant process. It means not denying pain when I hurt. It means letting myself be truly angry, and then figuring out why I'm angry and how I can act on that anger in a productive and meaningful way.

For me, I always come back to recycling. It's the core of who I am.

It's how I see God.

Love one another.

 

Be the kind of person who is never silent about evil.

Me.

Discerning the truth is a difficult thing. Religion often gets in the way, makes us hate eachother instead of loving one another. We use religion to hurt people, instead of help them. We use religion to do harm instead of good. We use religion to avoid people instead of embrace them.

Hate is evil. When you wish harm on another person, for any reason, you perpetrate evil. When you silence another person, you perpetrate evil.

When something goes horribly, horribly wrong, it did not happen overnight. There were signs. People saw them. Some people chose to be silent. Others were silencers.

And we are all complicit.

25 hour work-week?

I had a thought this week, now that I'm considering my future post-graduation. I've been supporting myself in unique ways over the past several years, and I may soon have the opportunity to put that aside in the interest of something more stable, higher-paying, and let's face it, more demanding. And I'm thinking that I don't want to, not because I'm lazy (I work constantly as it is), but because I don't want to contribute to a society that claims that work is life.

When I consider my life, and the lives of others, I see that the strain work places on us as human beings causes us to treat ourselves with less care, in the interest of our jobs. We give our jobs all we have, whether we realize it or not. Then all that is left at the end of the day is the dregs. How is that life? Let's face it-who among us, with a full-time job, really spends every minute working? The answer is not zero. I understand that there are plenty of people who work hard, and then others for a number of reasons are limited by their own abilities and work harder than most. I grant you that.

What if you only had to be productive half the time? Or even less? What if everyone were salaried, and could leave when their work was done? What if we began to look at eachother more as human beings and less as mindless, all-powerful, drones? What if we were all honest about our needs? What if we were vulnerable, and committed to change?

Utopia is a dream, but being fully human is something worth striving for.

Ack! Lent is coming!

I haven't given anything up for Lent in years. My life is already about deprivation. Not a day goes by that I don't willingly live without something I want. The only reason I'm considering going to weekly Lenten prayers at my church is because everyone goes out for bagels afterwards. I'm tired of living through Lent, listening to people detail their wonderful deprivation skills, their ability to go without. Am I being judgmental? Definitely.

I am often judgmental. As long as this depraved habit doesn't affect my life in too negative a way, I usually just forgive myself and move on. Except then I miss out on what Lent offers for me (ah, perhaps individualism could benefit me in some way in this instance). Maybe Lent offers me a reason to spend less time on the computer. Maybe Lent offers me outside time for gardening, or more yoga and less ice cream, or vice versa. I don't know.

A while back there was a significant other in my life, in that he was significant because he'd seen me naked, and an other, because he wasn't a lady from my gym locker room. He was always looking to be more spiritual. He tried and tried to be monk-like without actually being celibate. We listened to monks-chanting-psalms on tape in the car. We lit candles and read the bible. When he was upset, I read to him from my favorite book of sermons.

This all felt like an act, like a play with meaningful lines, but with actors playing parts, not real people living their real lives. It all felt false, and I felt empty. On the surface, for me, it looked like I was making good decisions-I'd chosen a good Christian man, hadn't I? But being in this relationship made it feel like someone stuck a maple tap into my heart, and blood just dripped out day by day. I needed an infusion, and I was lost.

Sometimes spirituality is empty because it's only on the surface. We can't make something happen in our souls. We can try, but there has to be a response from the other side. Even Mother Theresa felt like God didn't speak to her. Being "spiritual" doesn't always mean what we think it means.

Maybe take some time this Lenten season for your spirit, in whatever way feeds your soul. I will continue to contemplate the ritual, as I do every year.

Lots of backbends

Yoga tonight was so intense for me. Backbends, backbends, backbends. A couple hours later, and I'm still kinda shaky. But I look forward to going every week. It's good, and calming, and all of the crap in my body is gone at the end of the class-it's all left on the mat.

I was sweating like crazy (it was hot and the room was packed). I was slipping all over the place, and my clothes weren't spongy enough to soak it up. I had to go to town on my mat when I got home-clean it up, get all the yuck off of it. Then I ate a lot to fill up my empty muscles.

Now I'm watching The Bachelor. My body feels great; sore, but great. I am full of rosemary focaccia, and chocolate, and soy milk. I am content and tired.

Until we are called to rise...

We never know how high we are
Till we are called to rise;
And then, if we are true to plan,
Our statures touch the skies--

The heroism we recite
Would be a daily thing,
Did not ourselves the cubits warp
For fear to be a king--

Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)