practice

All The Emotions

World is crazier and more of it than we think,
Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion
A tangerine and spit the pips and feel
The drunkenness of things being various.

-Louis MacNeice

i. The Housemate who is no longer My Housemate is getting married on Saturday, and I am Feeling Many Things: happy, and nostalgic, and wistful, and anxious. Happy because that relationship is so good, & that marriage will be too. Nostalgic because E & J were such a huge part of my life at EMU, and it is strange and hard to think of things changing, to think of growing up. Wistful because I want a relationship like that, and I feel impatient. Anxious, because I am reading a poem in their wedding, and -- well. I feel like that is self-explanatory.

ii. A boy from the church I grew up in is dying. It is unfair. It is terrifying. He will be the fourth person I know from my high school to have died of cancer before the age of 23. He is one year older than my brother. It isn't fair. It isn't right.

iii. I had coffee yesterday with one of my wandering kindred spirits who I hadn't seen in months and months. We talked for two and a half hours, walked through the city, sat in a garden, recited poetry; how good it is to be seen, to be known. 

the soul reaches, yearns

for the ungraspable, I

leaning into You. 

~~~

Marriage is like a garden, someone told me once,

years ago, before I knew anything about either one.

I am still learning, but I think it’s true; look,

watch how we take the seeds and plant them

without knowing what the summer will bring.

Maybe rain, maybe sun, maybe long stretches

of drought or even hail, who can say? No one knows

but God, and yet we plant the beans and corn and peas

in straight lines and trust that they will grow.

And each summer, somehow, they do. The green stalks

burst out of the ground as if the very earth wishes

always to be generous. It is mystery and magic.

It is faith. It is faithfulness, for the new growth now

demands work. The work feels endless:

first the weeding, then the watering, now

tying up the squash vines, now back again to weed –

and all this done in hope. We cannot see

the harvest at the start. We work in hope.

It is like this with love. We take our affection,

our desire, our dreams, all our gifts, all our faults,

and plant them in the shared ground of marriage,

trusting that new life will grow; that in some far-off

future day, after all the endless rainstorms, the countless

sunny days, the hard winters, the hot summers, we will find

that we have grown towards each other,

that our roots are entwined, that the harvest

is abundant. That there is more than enough.