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.

Pat Robertson on thrift.

Saint Mark the Evangelist - Felt and plastic printing plate

So Pat Robertson, the ever exciting host of The 700 Club, has joined the thrifting world by encouraging the rebuking of evil spirits from all secondhand sweaters. I can only imagine what horrors I've unknowingly brought home in my hundreds of thrift encounters.

I must leave, and cleanse my home. Peace out :)

I am bad at being patient.

After waiting two years to find these in my size, when they arrived, all I could think was, "Meh"

So I moved into my new office today, and found that in spite of my saying that "yes, that's okay with me", it did not feel okay to have someone else's things in the office. The previous occupant needs a little bit of grace to move her things out. And in that moment (which extended into a school-day long of feeling crappy and anxious), I realized, "Hey Megan, you're not as patient as you thought you were." Shit. I was afraid of that.

I have waited for a lot of things in my life, and for some of them, I am still waiting. Scratch that. I've been waiting for a lot of things for my whole life. I thought that this waiting was making me a patient person, but in fact, it isn't. I've become angry about the waiting. I'm angry with God for the hand I was dealt. I'm angry at God for not plucking me out of my own life, and giving me a similar, but easier, alternate reality. Instead of being an adult about the whole thing, I've allowed my three-year-old self to run the show, and she's constantly asking, "Are we there yet?" And I don't know what to tell her. "No, we're not there yet. I don't know when we're going to be there, or if we'll ever get there, or if I even know where it is we're supposedly going." Is that what I say?

Whatever I end up saying, I want it to be something that helps me to be more patient, that points me in the right direction, instead of where I am at the moment, the decidedly wrong direction. Somehow, I need to learn to be patient for the things I want. But it's so hard. I want it now!

Also, I'm terrible with change, so that might not be helping the situation. Prescription? More cowbell!

Friday morning rant :)

I'm really struck lately by the number of people in the church-at-large, who find complete satisfaction in an individualistic faith that focuses on sin and personal development. Now, don't get me wrong, I am the queen of personal development. Personal development is great! Go get yourself a therapist! But please don't let that be the end. Personal development is for the world, for the needy and the broken. We work towards healing for ourselves so we can pass it on to others.

I'm so tired, just bone-drained tired, of this endless religious craziness in the US. I'm tired of people yelling about "traditional values". The Western church is now completely about my personal relationship with Jesus - my best friend, and how my life was changed, and how great I feel about myself. It's all about what my neighbor is doing wrong, how my neighbor is sinning, or causing me to sin, all about how frightened I am of where my country is going. I just want to scream, "Get a freakin' grip, people!"

I might be single forever (lest you forget that this blog is all about me finding a man), because I'm not willing to put "Jesus is my homeboy" on my eHarmony page. I might be single forever, but I'm not willing to live a life of family devotions and being a submissive invisible wife. I may be single forever, but I'm not going to buy into the idea that women should cover themselves up to keep men from sinning. It's 110 degrees out? Yup, I'm gonna wear shorts. Deal with it. You had a sexual thought about a person other than your spouse? Deal with it, and move on. I want everyone to collectively throw in the "personal sin elimination" card and just accept the fact that they're flawed and are going to do and say and think stupid things. Yup, you are. You're human. Deal with it. You think God agonizes about forgiving you? It's doubtful. There are, after all, seven billion people in the world, and they all need four hugs a day, so...you do the math.

Now go out there and do something that helps people, that doesn't involve a sign. Peace out.

It's all about the afterlife.

Isn't this SO cute?

They always throw around this term "the liberal elite." And I kept thinking to myself about the Christian right. What's more elite than believing that only you will go to heaven?

Jon Stewart, The Daily Show

Online Dating Update #4

Sandra Boynton mug :)

Okay, so I haven't given an online dating update because I suddenly feel very vulnerable writing about what has been going on. Suddenly I'm extra nervous about people reading my blog, and people finding my blog. A few months ago, I found out that a very unpleasant person was reading my blog and then using it to manipulate me. That was enough for me, but now this is different. This is new and scary and should I have a pen name? Should I change the name of my shop and blog so that I do a better job concealing my identity? Yikes. Ack! Anxiety! Waking up at 6:30 every morning with dark circles under my eyes!

Phew, okay. That's all you get.

We are not cylons.

 

I'm starting to hope that somehow, some way, I can overcome the monstrosity of my childhood and manage to eek out a healthy, long-term relationship. Most of the time, it feels hopeless. People who don't really know me assume I'm attached, because for all appearances, I look like someone who has a stable person in her life.

I'm not trying to be coupled to meet anyone else's expectations. I don't even know if I could manage a long-term relationship under one roof. I don't know because I've never done it. I don't know, because in my life, it has not yet proven possible. It is a very difficult thing to hold two things in constant balance: the desire to be with another person along with the need to be comfortable in my own skin and content with my own life, as it is, today.

Somehow, I have to hold on to both of these parts of myself, and continue to move forward. I have to choose to be the person whose life I have lived, whose full life I have lived, and still hope for something different to be created in the future. That person has suffered. That person hurts. But that person is only a person, a human being, if all of those things are true. To be human is to feel pain, and not be able to turn it off, or successfully wish it away. To be human is to be imperfect and my imperfection happens to be highlighted in this one particular area.

We are not cylons (tee-hee -- I am currently hooked on Battlestar Galactica).

"Here we come rejoicing"

There's a small out-of-the-way thrift store downtown that I go to pretty often. I don't know if I've talked about it before. The thrift store supports a deep-seated ministry in the city. I don't quite understand what the ministry itself does, though I've been shopping there for years. There have been signs on the wall saying that some money helps kids go to camp, but I don't think I've seen those signs lately.

It's my secret spot. I always find good stuff. Oftentimes, I have to spend a lot of time cleaning my purchase(s), but it's usually worth it.

Anyhoo, there's a lovely woman who works there, and she enjoys listening to children's bible tapes. A couple months ago, children were singing Old Testament passages from the Torah. Today, they were singing songs about Jesus. I told her how much I enjoyed the music. I bitch and moan about Christian music overkill in thrift stores, but I'm beginning to appreciate the nostagia of it. Today, as those children were singing, I was thinking about my childhood, and this album. I've been trying to find some audio, but have been unsuccessful.

omg — what have I done?

 

All of my insecurities are flying at my face right now, and I'm in pain. I don't know how it happened, and now I'm in this hole where I'm ugly and fat and I can't do anything right. Just typing that was difficult, and now I'm crying.

I was raised to be attuned to everyone's emotions but my own, everyone else's needs to the exclusion of my own. I was raised to believe that I had to be perfect or my parents would get rid of me. Oh my goodness. How horrible is that?

And now, in the midst of this silly business I try to pay the bills with, I keep getting hit with the reminder that no thing and no one is perfect. And to top it all off, I'm the one throwing the punches. I'm the one who loves thrift and recycling, the imperfect things of the world, the things that have been thrown away. I'm the one who decided that somehow this love would define me and my worldview. I'm the one who is somehow made whole through it.

And somehow, I'm the one I keep throwing away.

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.

You need some love :)

 
1. Orphans
2. Widows
3. Aliens
4. Prisoners
5. Prostitutes
6. Homeless people
7. Mistresses
8. Foreigners
9. Prophets
10. Foster kids
11. Divorced women
12. Single people

Don't throw 'em away.

A life of thrift

"You're blessed when you feel you've lost what is most dear to you. Only then can you be embraced by the One most dear to you. You're blessed when you're content with just who you are - no more, no less. That's the moment you find yourselves proud owners of everything that can't be bought."

Matthew 5:4-5 (The Message)

Thrift means never having everything you want, all at the same time. Thrift means sacrificing what you want for the greater good. Thrift means being content with who you are, no more, no less.

 

Living a life of thrift means not selling your soul, the invaluable, intangible part of you.

Well, this sucks

This one goes out to my reselling peeps.

Sometimes, I find the most awesome stuff whilst thrifting. Actually, I am always finding awesome stuff. That's why I buy it, and put it in my store. But when I take it out to list it, I have this pain of longing, wishing I could keep it for myself. I keep finding awesome vintage crewel kits, and I wish I had the time and energy to complete them, but I don't. I found an old family bible in mint condition, and it would be awesome to have a bible like that at home, open to a Psalm or something equally tranquil, but no. I reject hoarding. I reject it!

Of course, eventually, the pain passes. The item goes to someone who will love it as much, or more, than I would, and my soul returns to its previous state of equilibrium.

I think sometimes this happens in other areas of life. We fall in love with someone or something, and for whatever reason, we can't keep it. I have been having to say "No" more often lately. It seems like I'm saying it more than I ever have in my whole life. It is painful every stinkin time, because every time I do it, I feel like I'm letting someone down, or I'm letting myself down. But I always say it because it's for the best. If I did everything, I would die from exhaustion. If I loved everyone the way I want to love them, I would die from a broken heart.

So my list of things I want goes untouched, not because I've stopped wanting those things, but because I'm not ready yet to have everything I want. Someday I will be ready. I hope some lucky dog is ready too.

Just pick something.

 Extreme hopes are born of extreme misery.

Bertrand Russell

In reality, hope is the worst of all evils, because it prolongs the torments of man.

Friedrich Nietzsche

I am a stubborn fool, and believe in things that will never be. But I am also a wise fool, because I believe in the impossible, and maybe, just maybe, hope things into being. I've been told that I would die without hope, because I said I didn't have any. But to live without hope is no life at all. To live without believing, even somewhere deep inside your own unconscious mind, that something better is possible, is to be dead.

Every person alive has some form of drive to live, and I call that hope, I guess, whether or not it really fits (If I tweak the definition a bit, I can claim that I have some and no one will worry about me). Depression can be the realization that there is no reason to hope, and no thing to hope for. So every day, I wake up, and I find something that keeps me going. Sometimes, it's completely delusional. Actually, it's usually delusional; that's why it sticks around. It's the rational hopes that don't last long-they are quickly swept into the "not possible" pile and filed away in the garage.

I believe in the impossible. It has gotten me through decades of life-not-always-worth-living. And to give it up, and hope in a God I cannot see or touch or feel, who may or may not ever return-that seems more delusional than thinking you can time travel to win the lottery, don't you think?

We are never alone

"Jiddu Krishnamurti, one of the most revered spiritual teachers of [the 20th] century, once asked a small group of listeners what they would say to a close friend who is about to die. Their answers dealt with assurances, words about beginning and endings, and various gestures of compassion. Krishnamurti stopped them short. 'There is only one thing you can say to give the deepest comfort,' he said. 'Tell him that in his death a part of you dies and goes with him. Wherever he goes, you go also. He will not be alone.'"

Larry Dossey (The Sun,  Feb. 2006)

The depth of death

So, for probably the first time in my life, I went to an estate sale on a Friday morning, at 8am. Yup. I'm that awesome. There were already people leaving. Meh. Whatever.

The house smelled like urine. It was awful. I seriously thought, "How long was this person dead before they found her?" Then, to top it off, the people running the sale happened to be professionals and relatives, so I got to talking with one of the women about the deceased. She was 97, single all her life. Once, she traveled around the world in 69 days. She loved life. This I learned while going through her books on her living room floor, wonderful art, architecture, and bird books, and of course the full Left Behind series.

I started to think about how my life would look to those closest to me if they went through my belongings right now, like if I died today, and people had to figure out what to do with my stuff. I know I'm a really honest person, but I wouldn't want just anyone going through my things. It's so personal, even if there aren't necessarily things that I want hidden. I still want the deepest parts of myself to only be known by a couple people. I still want to have special intimate relationships where the other person knows me better than anyone else does. I think I sometimes come across as someone who will tell anyone anything, but that isn't true. I think it just looks like that because I'm a complex person. There's a lot to me, so there's a lot of surface material to work with. But there's a whole hell of a lot underneath that I don't bring out every day.

I hope you know that. Because I want people to see me as an open, honest person. But I also want people to see me as I am, as imperfect, flawed, and human.

And again, I fantasized today about having my own estate sale business. Ah, a beautiful thought.