instructions on beating a summer headcold: 1. drink tea 2. lay very still after work 3. blog

i've been listening to anais mitchell a lot, recently - often the child ballads, but i have her album The Brightness in my car and i've been doing a bit more driving than usual, recently.

there's a few lines in the last song on that album that always punch me in the gut a little when i hear it:

you can hold her hand
you can kiss her face
go slow if you can
cause the world is a very sad place
and when she leaves she'll leave no trace
and the world will still be there

 -

i've fallen victim to one of those horrid summer headcolds, so i know i'm already prone to be in a down mood anyway. but: the world feels a very sad place, right now.

-

people on my facebook keep talking about a girl from L-S who was killed in a car wreck this week. she was just a month or so out from graduating high school, all ready to go away to college. and now she's not, and that's that.

-

sometimes i see headlines about syria, or israel, or the west bank, or the gaza strip, and i just can't open the articles. i can't make myself read them. other times i read them and just feel very heavy and tired.

i happened to see pictures, this week, of the crowds teetering on the edge of riots in east jerusalem; streets i could have walked on, maybe, the jerusalem stone familiar in the photos; streets now full of anger and bitterness and the stench of hate. israeli teens: murdered. palestinian teens: murdered in retaliation. stones thrown.

i happened to see pictures, this week, of parents running with small children in their arms down the streets of gaza city, smoke billowing up in the background.

the spirit groans.

-

a couple from my university is traveling - soon, very soon, in their orientation even now - to iraq, for three years. it is hard not to be afraid.

-

and yet the world is still there, somehow, despite it all.

like: holding two very small humans this past weekend; twin baby girls born into a home fairly shimmering with love for the created earth.

like: getting letters in the mail from old friends.

like: a weekend with my family, camped out in the backyard.

and like this:

To love is to feel your death
given to you like a sentence,
to meet the judge's eyes
as if there were a judge,
as if he had eyes,
and love.

and like this:

To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.

and like this:

 Surely I will be with you always, even to the end of the age.

-

the world is a very sad place. but headed, i hope - i believe (help me with my unbelief) - for redemption. 

what I think about during my day

today at work i had the skeleton of a story visit me. magical realism + the ghost of anna akhmatova + teenage sisters who think they know everything.


... if only i had, like, four more hours in my day ... i would totally write it. 

poem for a weekend evening

You Reading This, Be Ready
by William Stafford

Starting here, what do you want to remember?
How sunlight creeps along a shining floor?
What scent of old wood hovers, what softened
sound from outside fills the air?

Will you ever bring a better gift for the world
than the breathing respect that you carry
wherever you go right now? Are you waiting
for time to show you some better thoughts?

When you turn around, starting here, lift this
new glimpse that you found; carry into evening
all that you want from this day. The interval you spent
reading or hearing this, keep it for life—

What can anyone give you greater than now,
starting here, right in this room, when you turn around?

i survived!

my pod meeting was this morning, which involved talking about my research project in front of all the people from my pod at work (7+ labs invited). so scary - my heart was pounding, and I felt very sweaty and gross. fear has a good way of reminding me of my body, of how I am not just a brain. anyway. I did it, and it was fine, and afterwards one of my mentors said to me: you should be very proud of yourself.

I'll take that, & call it a success. :)


--

in other news, the thunderstorm tonight was nice to listen to from the peacefulness of my apartment. 

sunday evening contentedness

is there anything better than a thoroughly cleaned room?

evening light through many windows?

in-tune guitars?

...yeah, I'd say it's a pretty good life.

the Mennonite bubble

breakfast today with a not-even-that-close friend from EMU was reminding me about how it felt to spend four years tucked securely inside the "Mennonite bubble."

it's been somewhat surprising to me that over the past year I haven't felt all that nostalgic for being in college. I do miss how intense everything felt, all the time; how alive and awake my brain felt, jumping from organic chemistry to a close reading of Paradise Lost, from human physiology to investigating the links between language and religion. but when I graduated from EMU, I knew even then that I had taken all that I could from my four years there. I had grown and changed and been set on a path, and the only thing to do was keep walking. like I wrote at the time, I was ready to do, to try, to see if I could make it, out in the real world, outside of the boundaries of my tiny, safe school.

"This field is getting too small," she said.
"Don't you know anyone else
To fall in love with?"

 -Robert Bly, "Conversations With The Soul"

that's kind of how it was, I guess - EMU felt large & spacious when I was 18 years old, and in the course of four years it grew smaller and smaller as I grew larger. maybe the simple way to say it is just this: I outgrew being a student.

that being said, though - I am missing being part of a community that speaks the same language, that cares about the same things I care about, that understands the identity that I have been growing into. I did not outgrow my church- and friend- and intellectual-communities in the same way that I outgrew the institution of EMU, and I think that is why I miss Harrisonburg so much.

and so. breakfast, this morning. a tiny ache in the heart: all the people I miss, all the conversations I haven't been having. I miss how easy the art of conversation was with people at EMU, how quickly we could jump between things like: young-adult Mennonite identity, work with MCC & what it means, the theology of different churches we've attended, professors we all know, places we've all been.

I want to belong to a community again, one that speaks this language. I don't know how long it will be until I end up in such a place, but I am going to do my best to steer myself in that direction.

thoughts after the weekend's 16-mile bike ride

On This Earth

To love my own, my body,
to know without saying, legs, you are good legs,
and feet and stomach and arms, good, and the spaces
under my arms, and the brown pigments
splashed across my back like tea leaves.
To love my body the way
I sometimes love a stranger's: a woman
on the subway, tired, holding her two bags,
a child slumped against her like another sack
as the train stops and starts and the child says something
so quietly no one else can hear it,
but she leans down, and whispers back,
and the child curls closer. I would love my body
the way a mother can love her child, or the way
a child will love anyone
who gives it a home on this earth, a place
without which it would be nothing, a dry branch
at the window of a lit room.

-Juanita Brunk