Come alive!

Dear everyone,

I am giving birth.

There will be complications, pain, heavy breathing.  I am confident I won't die in the process, but I guess theoretically it could happen.  While there are doctors and doulas and whole schools of midwifery designed for the help of some like me, this is also the oldest and most natural transformation the world has seen...I am in good company.

Are you also giving birth? Or perhaps raising the toddler or teenager of your dreams/goals/hopes/life?

I recommend keeping these words, arranged by Howard Thurman, tucked in your heart for reference:

Don't ask what the world needs.  Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it.  Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.

Bon voyage today and tomorrow, friends.  Travel well. :)

excerpts on grief

I found the following quotations via Neverperfect.Alwaysreal.  I can't resist sharing them here.

 

"Lament isn't an animal wail, an inarticulate howl.  Lament notices and attends, savors and delights--details, images, relationships.  Pain entered into, accepted, and owned can become poetry.  It's no less pain, but it's no longer ugly.  Poetry is our most personal use of words; it's our way of entering experience, not just watching it happen to us, and inhabiting it as our home."

~Eugene Peterson

"I am convinced that we should solve many things if we all went out into the streets and uncovered our griefs, which perhaps would prove to be but one sole common grief, and joined together in beweeping them and crying aloud to the heavens and calling upon God.  And this, even though God should hear us not; but He would hear us.  The chiefest sanctity of a temple is that it is a place to which men go to weep in common.... It is not enough to cure the plague: we must learn to weep for it."

~Miguel de Unamuno

"I have lately received such distressing news from the personal lives of almost all of my dearest friends that it would have shaken my whole being, if I did not know that we must all fail, be cheated, die.  You must fail some more, Harvey Bates, so that you can see the futility of all personal striving.  When I thought the other day of the real tragedies that have hit two other of my friends, I wondered how we could get any feeling of dignity, meaning, justification, out of our poor lives.  And I thought we could do it if we could all stand together somewhere in a cool glade, lowering one of those loved ones into a grave, and standing and weeping together like men over our miserable destiny.  And then we would experience the heaviness of it--and this would be the bond that ties us together and to the source of all things.  We would be justified in our weeping and our trembling.  This is true religion for me, and I think at the same time the surest testimony that it is absent in our world today: we cannot weep and tremble together but only pretend that everything is all right."

~Ernest Becker

 

 

That we cannot weep and tremble together but only pretend that everything is all right...while I am sure there are many millions of people who have not lost their ability to 'weep and tremble together', it is certainly something that is difficult for me.  Much of the time I just don't let myself tiptoe close enough to the edge of that vulnerable emotional precipice, so it seems easy to pretend that things are all right, or that they will be.  But that is one reason I love poetry - poetry can say what I cannot express.  Poetry can speak when I feel I cannot weep.  And weeping, itself - that is poetry.  Grief lived, experienced.  One of my favorite verses from the New Testament is from the Gospel according to John, chapter 11 verse 35:  "Jesus wept."  There's a lot of beautiful language in the Bible, and more than enough words to make a reasonable person cringe.  But that sentence is so simple, so human.  Jesus wept.   

If it was good enough for Jesus, then I suppose I can summon the courage to weep as well.

 

 

Truth Serum

Truth Serum

by Naomi Shihab Nye

We made it from the ground-up corn in the old back pasture.
Pinched a scent of night jasmine billowing off the fence,
popped it right in.
That frog song wanting nothing but echo?
We used that.
Stirred it widely.  Noticed the clouds while stirring.
Called upon our ancient great aunts and their long slow eyes
of summer.  Dropped in their names.
Added a mint leaf now and then
to hearten the broth.  Added a note of cheer and worry.
Orange butterfly between the claps of thunder?
Perfect.  And once we had it, 
had smelled and tasted the fragrant syrup,
placing the pan on a back burner for keeping,
the sorrow lifted in small ways.
We boiled down the lies in another pan till they disappeared.
We washed that pan.



This poem found me on the internet two summers ago, when I'd just learned that a colleague in North Dakota had been diagnosed with stage four stomach cancer.  He died within two weeks of his diagnosis.  I barely knew the man, but his abrupt death hit me hard nonetheless.

If nothing else, I hope these words from Naomi Shihab Nye help me (us) remember that often we must actively focus on the truth and beauty of the world, and work to wash away the lies that creep up on us.  For me, those lies tend to include the shame of failed perfectionism, fears of disappointing myself and others, and the notion that if I don't know it, have it, feel it, see it now, I never will.  Lies, lies, damn lies.

What lies do you find yourself having to boil down and wash away?

What pieces and parts of your life do you use as 'truth serum'?


...the adventure continues...
 

Revamp!

Hello internet friends and relatives,

As you might have perhaps noticed, I have begun renovating this blog.  I like having my own little space to express, and I've decided to work on my writing, in addition to some other long-term goals.  I think this blog could serve me well as a platform for writing, though I have not yet decided how frequently I will post.  I also want to post some of my goals publicly to give myself that much more incentive to keep working on them.  So, I've created a separate page with a rough outline of those goals which I can review easily.  For the time being, this is very much still a work in progress. 

Cheers!
Suzanne

It is a beautiful one, isn't it?

My, my. It has been a while. :)

Well, a great deal of life has been going on since last I posted here. Heartache and grief at a friend lost to the cruel coldness of depression. Lots and lots of laughter and hilarity. Finding freedom I never imagined in saying true things out loud. Spending more of my 'days at the office' on some of America's gorgeous reservoirs! Using my science writing and statistical muscles for good and not evil (or at least, for the government). Saying goodbye to a mentor and hello again to the exhausting frustration that volunteering in a church can induce. Oh - and I went to Jamaica! With those awesome high schoolers. That was fun and a half (1.5 FUNs).

In the most recent news available, I am on sabbatical from employment and re-evaluating my direction in life. I have been angsting over this evaluation process from Day One post-graduation (and let's face it, the angst has been a practice of mine since at least junior year of high school), and I can say with a lovely sort of calm that right now, I am feeling "ready." Ready for what, you may ask; ready for anything. Ready to make decisions. Ready to own my life. Ready to continue letting go of my angst. Ready to keep making tracks. :)

It surely is a beautiful one, this life. And God I am lucky to be living it.
I just have this beautiful open feeling inside of me right now, like I am standing in an open doorway looking out on the vast fullness and color of the rest of my life.

It's a nice change from the claustrophobic shithole of depression. Hot damn!

And, I took the GRE finally this morning, and it felt GREat! :)

Welcome to the Uncomfortable Junction!

December 8 – Beautifully Different.

Think about what makes you different and what you do that lights people up. Reflect on all the things that make you different – you’ll find they’re what make you beautiful.

So there's some kind of 'meme' or twitterized writing prompt series going on through December that a few of the blogs I read have been working through. And this one (above) is the #reverb10 prompt for today. Hot damn, that is fitting. Pull up a chair, and I'll endeavor to explain why.

In the process that is my life, the last couple months have been rather foggy. I remember September by the mad dash to the first annual hoedown at Calvary and my final trip to North Dakota, and I'm sure lots of other exciting things happened but I was pretty whipped and don't remember them. October...let's see, there was the women's retreat, then the Ascent fall camp, both wonderful but also exhausting, and then the exhausting sadness of the end of the month, when my dear friend's dad died. And then I moved in to other people's houses for 5 weeks. House sitting is fun, but I think that was a bit much for me. So the past few months have been pretty full of life, but I moved through them in a haze, a fog. What is that? Depression is its name. If not exactly depression, then certainly something like it.

Depression, loneliness, fear, avoidance - these have been a consistent theme in my life for the last 5 or 6 years. I have lived with these gray companions, a gray sort of undercurrent running through most of my time at Olaf and beyond, punctuated by the many wondrous and absolutely blessed moments of happiness, joy, challenge, victory, learning, growing, being...

But this year, this fall, this winter, this moment, NOW - things are changing. I am seeing more and more each day what is different and new and ever so beautiful about where and who I am right now. And WOW, you know what? THAT IS PRICELESS. I cannot tell you how good it feels just to know that I am alive. Really, I'm alive. You know what that means? That means that I am IN this WORLD and I'm wading into the wet and muddy things, I am not running away, I am HERE. Here is really a very big, wylde and woolly place to be - full of mystery, excitement, adventure, love, pain, and joy. Generally speaking, I don't really know what is going on big-picture-wise. But I get to look closely at the details, at the little corners of life I float around in, and the details of that big picture are just as beautiful and shot through with light as the whole shebang is.

So where I was going with this was...ah, yes. Beautifully different. What is different about me? Well, I've been finding words for me, and here are a few of them:

+ I'm a celebrant. Life is so beautiful and good, and I feel compelled to celebrate it. Truly - celebration as reverence, as thanksgiving, as acknowledgment, as prayer.

+ I'm spending a lot of time these days (and frankly, it appears that I'm to spend a lot of my time through my whole life here) in what has been named The Uncomfortable Junction. Sounds unpleasant, or even somehow inappropriate (if that is where your mind goes) - but here is what I mean. I love a good challenge, and I am finding myself drawn over and over to the challenge of meeting someone else where I am not comfortable. Of leaping into situations I don't understand and maybe even fear. I'm not talking common sense fear here, but fear of the unknown, fear of what looks different from this angle. How will I ever get to know the other side(s) if I don't look at them closely, talk to them, build a relationship with them...commit to them. I guess I feel this as a sort of calling - called to put myself in the uncomfortable junction and see what is going on and learn how to build a house there and welcome all travelers. I have to say, I am excited about this. Living in the uncomfortable junction is frequently frustrating, exhausting, and confusing. But also, life-giving. Amen. A-freaking-MEN.

+ I'm unfinished. Jean Q Jacques, the mysterious and wise transmogrified ascended being (or whatever) who wrote letters and made wacky collages for angsty-stressed-whacked out college kids at dear ol' Rolvaag Library [The Bored] responded once to a letter I had written about being unwilling or unable to bust out of my cocoon. And JJ, dear JJ, responded with a beautiful treatise on the goodness of being unfinished, of letting go of that idol of being DONE.

These are just a few of the things that I guess are 'different' about me, or at least the things that I am claiming for myself in this time of my life. And they are good, and they make me beautiful. And I hope and pray that these aspects of who I am will bring some kind of light into the lives of others, whether it be my joy in terribly cheesy puns (because we have to celebrate the cheesy as well as the boringly beautiful!) or my drive to try to make friendships with people I really don't have much in common with. Let my life be a testament to the goodness of it all.

Thanks be to God.

;)

Also, happy birthday me. :)

Nerd Call

Well, paint me pathetic.

I closed the Mines library tonight studying for the GRE Saturday. And you know what? Call me silly, call me sad, but I am right at home in a university library late at night - traipsing across a campus, late at night. I never thought I'd miss that feeling...I never thought I could possibly feel nostalgic about nerd call. Well. I do. Maybe just an eensy bit. If nothing else, the late nights are something that I practiced often, a familiar space for my mind. And damn, but I still like my student garb.

Also - all those amazing people out there who work, and raise families, AND go to school to study their asses off? - my hat's off to them. God knows where they find the strength to do all that.