Waking Up

I have been especially grumpy lately.  Mad at myself for not being and doing what I think I should be being and doing.  Cutting myself off from all the beautiful people I share my life with.  How dumb is that?  The more stressed I get about being stressed, the uglier I become.  So this weekend, I took time to "take care of business," as my friend, Lynn, says.  It felt very good.  It felt very God.  And because I did things to address, to face, what needed dealing with, I was able to live this weekend - to truly feel, to truly be present, to truly listen, to begin a painting for someone's birthday, to show appreciation for a beautiful man who gives love so freely I am dumbfounded by it, especially because he wants to give it to me...  Sometimes it takes shutting up and dealing with it to get to a point where life makes sense again.  And I realize again that I don't know anything, really.  I cannot say there is anything more out there better than what I've got right now.  I can't even appreciate what I've got, which is a lot.  And I have a lot to learn.  I don't understand why I've been given the chance to do it, but I don't want to waste it.  I've grown tired of swimming around in the same place.  I'm ready to move on, but I know I have to finish dealing with what's here before that will happen.  I need help to see the beauty in right now.  Don't we all?  

Consumerism

Portia is gently purring at my feet, a strange ray of golden light is playing on the wall beside my desk, fluttering lines and leaves and blind slats throwing random, vibrating shadows before me, and my head is full of what I heard and thought today about our way of life.

As The Story of Stuff website (see attached link) describes, we are slaves to the businesses who generate stuff because they have learned how to undermine our contentment so thoroughly that we are insatiable, trying to fix ourselves with whatever it is "they" suggest might work.  But then that idea is contradicted with another, making undesirable the stuff we thought would fix us and we spent so much money on.  The most profound thing for me in this message is that it is now more important to consume and to be seen as a consumer than it is to be a good parent, a good kid, a loyal spouse, a decent person, a (fill in the blank with some worthwhile human calling).  Consumerism has consumed us.  As Todd put it, materialism has spread to our relationships, making them as disposable and upgrade-able as anything else we can buy on credit.  A musician friend said something like that as well, about the irony in many love songs that most people don't even catch - they aren't about love at all, they are commentaries on the way we work through one relationship after another, using that person until "perceived obsolescence" sets in and we decide it is unworkable.  Until a newer, better model comes along.

I feel kind of dirty after all that.  I have fallen for it.  I encourage it by being part of the problem.  So I have to figure out the balance between management of my vanity and understanding what I really need.  That will take a lot more digging than I can comprehend right now.  And I don't really want to do the work.  But I'm convicted, so I can no longer claim ignorance.

Throughout the service today, David Gentiles was asking us to clench our fists, imagining our grip on all kinds of things.  Especially consumer things.  Worry.  Control.  And he asked us to slowly open our hands, imagining letting those things go.  When I do that in my own mind, I imagine putting the issue or the person in a boat and sending it sailing away from me.  If it comes back, I have to be careful not to take it back out of the boat.  I think I need to practice this open-handedness some more.  I'm pretty grabby as a rule...so I better pick up something constructive with that hand before I try to control something or someone else with it.

Revealing

So.  I spent most of today listening to the experiences and postulations and musings of someone who reached me, who changed my point of view, who made the top come off my head.  About how people believe in the written word, how it not only allows them to put aside their problems because it requires attention when they read, but that it might grant one the opportunity to sort, to reconcile, to heal when they write.  How lovers emerge from prose, incubated in the complex, delicate strands of a sentence.  How treaties and constitutions have been wrought, families broken and mended, lives exalted and deprecated.  How a boy with hair in his eyes sits in a ray of sunlight in my classroom, making sense of the world with his poetic torch lit and held aloft before him, simultaneously illumining the depths and creating shadows that creep after him relentlessly.  His sentence is unfinished...but I know he has no need to seek the villains outside himself, because it always comes down to man vs. himself.  To quote Joni Mitchell, in the end, "it all comes down to you."

And then the keyhole that is language - a metaphor the wise man (Dr. Randy Bomer) imparted to us - through which all of you must press yourselves if you wish to be clear, to be very clear and understood and significant, the pursuit of all who admire celebrity because they'd like it (but at what cost?).  All the vast ocean of ideas and worries and potential and reality must be funneled through it.  A tight fit.  Things get stuck.  And my friend, Jantzen, asked me how to make the keyhole bigger.  And that was the perfect question.  I don't know the answer, but I can make some stabs at it: I can listen.  Really listen.  Be present.  Be a soul mirror.  Be open.  And other things I don't know now.  And remind them (and myself) that the shitty things that come out when you have a larger keyhole (which Anne Lamott thought of before me) are not permanent; like a relationship, they are meant to be borne, to be sorted through and understood and perfected.  Then we can have a conversation about whether or not what is there is what they meant to say.  And we begin again.  Praise God for revision.