being religious

Lately it seems the only thing to do is be wrapped up in my thoughts. They haven't been the kind of thoughts to share, or maybe they're just becoming harder to put into words. In spite of that, because of that, I have to try.

Autumn is just beginning and the leaves are starting to fall and for some reason it feels more like something is being born than dying. Something I thought did die. Last year I found myself heading towards the thing I'd feared for a long time--the loss of any kind of belief in God, and the numbness of no longer caring. By the time I walked down the aisle at graduation, I was convinced it was gone, the only thing left was to get used to the fact, and feeling nothing about it was both a relief and the biggest disappointment of my life. That was the part that saddened me. I couldn't pick up a book on theology, couldn't stand to read the words. They wouldn't sink in. They didn't mean anything, didn't make any sense. Ending my college career was a relief. No longer would I have to strain to write papers that would have some kind of integrity without really giving away the full truth. And what even was the full truth? I didn't believe, and I didn't not believe. I was tired of wrestling with my questions, and with the conception people had of me, and how it didn't match what I knew of myself. The only thing I knew was that I didn't know anything. I couldn't prove God, even to myself. I couldn't be certain. I was tired of trying.

And still I couldn't leave. Still I was drawn to church, and sat in stillness, and wrote prayers to whoever was or wasn't listening. And knew that church was the only place I was fully honest. My feet carried me to communion, and I took my questions in hand and ate. It wasn't a choice. It was a realization that there was nothing else for me to do. And when I couldn't read Christian theology, I read Hindu scriptures and the Tao te Ching and Life of Pi and realized that I was still thinking about God, about Ultimate Reality and what it means to be human, all the time, all the time, and I didn't want to do anything else.

I'm not sure if I can call myself a Christian. But can I really call myself anything else? Two days ago I sat on a pew and listened to a liturgy and knew that my present is the sum of my past, and Christianity is the only religion I have known. It is my native tongue, and however I seek God now, I can't turn my back on the thing that has taught me to think about God at all, has given me what small experiences I have had that I have dared to call sacred. It is hard to stand on the inside of something, to have known it for so long, to see its faults and the things you wish you could change or erase. It is hard to finally admit that the tradition you have known didn't fall out of the sky, that it was made by human beings who didn't know much more than you and who all had deep and regrettable faults and sometimes did unimaginably cruel things. It is hard to accept that we are really just groping in the dark and the darkness itself is inside of us. And yet. I find myself flummoxed by the mystery that surrounds me and the human desire to express what we cannot explain, and I have to give it my attention. I have to take it seriously, look at it fully, knowing I don't know. And I need the community of people trying to do the same. I believe in the thing I have no adequate words for and no rational understanding of. I can't stop myself, can't beat it out of myself, and the only thing to do is be grateful that I am not the only one.

"After mystery comes suspense. After suspense, comes romance."

Today was my first day as the new shopgirl at Epilogue books, People's Pick for the Best Independent Bookstore in Seattle. They offered me the job on Monday, but I was pretty sure I had it in the bag right after my interview on Thursday, and I thought long and hard about it until Tuesday, then impulsively called and said yes.
Because, really, chances like this are limited to a very short period of your life. By which I mean, when I'm thirty, there's no way I could take a 30-hour job at 8.50 an hour with the blithe thought that if worse comes to worst, my parents could help me pay rent. Part of me thinks I should feel more ashamed of refusing to join the real world, now that I have four-years of private college under my belt. But, hey, I still don't have a degree, so what's the problem?

I think what pushed me over the edge, to say yes, to jump into the future of being as poor as ever, was the interview I had yesterday for an "Executive Assistant" position. During the two minutes I waited in the reception area, three different people asked if I wanted coffee, and one even said, "Are you sure?" In the interview, they started pulling out those questions, that we all hate, that even interviewers probably hate, that come straight out of a circle of hell, I'm pretty sure. "Describe a time when a challenging situation arose and you implemented a solution." That's actually the only one I can remember, they were so boring. The kicker was when they asked what my restaurant manager would say about me if they called him, and after an awkward pause I decided to just come out and say it: "Well, actually, he died." More awkward pausing. But however well and badly the interview went, and in this case I really couldn't say which it was, I realized something. Even if it was a "gateway" job at a well-known and well-to-do company, I couldn't respect it at all. It would be the kind of place where I would look around me and think, "Why are all my coworkers throwing themselves into careers here, spending even their Saturdays doing things that just, well, things that the world might be better off without?" And on top of that, putting so much effort into projecting the image of "professional" - wearing uncomfortable and boring clothes, making forced chit-chat, never using profanity, never showing personality. I don't know how to explain this fully, but there was an absence of...reality, somehow. It just bothers me when things seem forced. It seemed like the kind of place where nothing spontaneous ever happens.

And something spontaneous did happen, the second I walked into the bookstore. It felt like the right place to be. The suspense of not being employed is over. Let the romance, of having the job every Seattleite wants, begin.

in gratitude to my failure

It's 3:44 in the morning.

It's hard to believe that it's been over four months since I Fell Apart, since every plan I made fell through and I found myself incapable of doing what I had told everyone I would do. I came to the point of letting go. I was going to leave Seattle. I didn't. I was going to start a life in the Real World, with a job and responsibilities. I couldn't.

I stayed. I stopped. I lay still.

And now, all I can do is remember all the times in these past few months where I have been flabbergasted by the people who surround me, sometimes people I've known since the beginning of college, but I'm just now starting to know them. Or people I'm just starting to befriend now, and I should have done so years ago.
And why has it taken me so damn long?

Something happened when I graduated. I stopped fearing being honest. I gave up on maintaining appearances. And mostly, I've had to learn to be honest and to give up image-control with...myself.
In high school, I used to make lists of things I wanted to do. In college, I started making lists of what I wanted to be.
Now, I've stopped writing lists at all.

Because there's no one to impress anymore. There's nothing to distract me from facing myself. There's no place to run. There's nothing to chase.

In the stillness and the darkness, when all things cease and there is nothing urgent to do, when there is only time and no restrictions on how to use it, Truth starts seeping up from the ground. If you just stay still, low to the earth, it fills your hand.

"in dreams emotions are overwhelming."

Alright, so my mind is still abuzz.

This morning, while unpacking a box, I found a mixed tape, made for me for my thirteenth birthday by my friend and her uber-cool 15-year-old sister. I put it in my car's tape deck while I was driving to work, and the weirdest feeling overtook me. I had a flash of what it felt like to be me then, and all the things that filled my life then. It felt so...intense. Like I was absolutely head-over-heels in love with life. I know, of course, that those unspeakable highs were mixed with some very low lows, but still, I miss that intensity. I've become so even-keel. What happened? Should it have happened? Does it happen to everyone?

Maybe we all get to the point where we decide that the proper things to worry about are paying bills and tuition and getting to work on time and getting laundry done before we run out of underwear, and we stop putting so much metaphysical importance on whether our parents understand us or whether our friends are really our friends or what our identities should be and whether other people are getting the message of what our identities are. I used to spend so much time trying to figure myself out and what I wanted to do with my life. And I still think about these things, but not in the same way. I spend so much time thinking about practicalities, and it takes so much energy. On a typical evening, if there's enough in the fridge to make some kind of dinner and I haven't run out of shampoo, I figure life is going pretty well. I still think about what I want for my future, but at the same time I have to think about whether it will pay the bills and the student loans. I've met so very many people lately who work for money doing really what are pretty boring careers, who have settled in to some kind of contentment with having disposable income and a decent-looking social life. And it's so very easy to have "friends" who are really just acquaintances, to keep up the polite chatter without having a real conversation, to work without feeling passionate about it, to date without falling in love. To get by.

Part of me wonders if I could really return to my quasi-mystical adolescent way of thinking about life. Would I want to deal with such turbulence and uncertainty, and the risk of pain, when you believe something is important and you want it so much, and if it doesn't work out you are crushed and must ask the hard question of why and never be satisfied by the answer. But then, if it does... To believe something is big, big enough to change your life. To attach importance to seemingly small things, for no other reason than they ARE important, to you, and no other explanation is needed. To drink in an experience without rationalizing about it at all, to love what you love and hate what you hate, and KNOW what you love or hate. Now, I mostly just accept what is and deal with it in whatever way seems reasonable. And there are a lot of situations where that is wise. But still, I wonder if there is room somewhere for the vaulted emotions that I've folded up and tucked away, that maybe I can bring them back out and get to know them again. They were so vivid, even in remembering.

don't go.

My life has been so tame lately. What happened? Probably just the thing that I felt in the breeze last night, and the thing that is filling the girl I nanny and all of her friends with a sudden case of ennui. Summer is ending. Summer is winding down.
And summer always brings a little extra wildness and restlessness out in me.
So what will happen now? Will I become domesticated in the way I do every fall, and start wearing skirts with tall boots, and make tea three times a day, and generally start acting like an English professor? I always associate fall with school, but this is the first time that I won't have any school to go to. So, maybe things will be different. But I've spent a whole summer reading Eastern philosophy in the shade of trees, and how do you follow that?
Fall is when I always become very busy with Important Things, and this one will probably be no different. Even if I don't have classes, I still have moving and job-hunting and otherwise re-adjusting to do. But the thing is, I always become so absorbed in all these things for about three weeks, convinced of their vitalness, and then one weekend morning I'll wake up and think, "Why is my life so boring? What, exactly, did I do this week, other than write lists in my planner?" It's routine that gets me, every time. Routine is universally boring.
Sweet summer, don't leave me. You have been so wonderfully unpredictable. Please at least leave a little of your free spirit behind.

preaching to the choir?

“On the one hand, the development of environmental problems…is accelerating exponentially. On the other hand, the development of public environmental concern, and of private and governmental countermeasures, is also accelerating exponentially. Which horse will win the race? Many readers of this book are young enough, and will live long enough, to see the outcome.”
-Jared Diamond, Collapse

These words chilled me to the bone when I read them. And I ask myself the question I have asked so many times: What kind of world am I inheriting? I do not feel that I am watching a horse race, passively, but rather running a footrace, and I feel myself facing a very real risk of failure. I feel we are all facing it, even if we prefer not to think about it.
The question of sustainability on a human level has been on my mind a long time. Can we provide real human needs, including the need for satisfying work, in a way that uses only Earth’s annual interest, and not her long-stored capital? In a way that doesn’t destroy Earth’s very ability to produce what sustains human life?
The time is upon us to dismantle the Tower and get back to the Garden. With the same energy and focus with which we tried to build to the heavens and make a name for ourselves, we need now to cultivate the earth and protect it. I can foresee the end of the modern First World, centered so much of the availability of fossil fuels and mineral deposits, production and consumption at ever-increasing rates. I know it cannot last, though I don’t know exactly when its end will come. But the earth cannot support this kind of life, though the earth has supported Life for millions of years. And if we want the earth to be a place where humans can continue to live, we must first and foremost not destroy all the conditions that made human life possible in the first place – such as stable climate and complex ecosystems, particularly forests.
What I have come to believe is that we cannot destroy the forest for the sake of the field (or for the sake of the mine, oil derrick, or factory, for that matter), but we may destroy it anyway, without even realizing what we are doing. The foundation of human survival rests on whether we can feed ourselves, and thus on agriculture, and our ability to practice agriculture depends on the health of the broader ecosystem. We must develop agricultural practices that sustain the life of that system. We must tread lightly on these fragile soils.

blink

Look at it, straight on,
and remind yourself it will not last
Through gradual change or sudden end,
it will not be what it is now.
So do not be afraid to see what is,
for soon it will not be there to be seen.
And do not fear what you cannot avoid
do not resist what you cannot hold off
Hush, be still.
God moves.