Five years ago

if anybody actually reads this, and reads my Facebook, you just saw me post these song lyrics. but personally i doubt anybody's reading either one ... but i also have run out of places to go with this, so i'm gonna open a vein here where it ain't blood, it ain't even printer's ink anymore, it's just aether.

"I sit on a piano stool, and I make up songs for these men
Who come in with dust on their faces and mud on their boots
From these places that I'll never go.
I sleep in a rented bed, with a man who gives me
What little I get of the love that we'd like to imagine
Is left of the love that we never did know.
I slip out and scribble a note that reads like a million bucks.
It's a four cent nickel from a dime store thief
But it sure reads good

And If I could make it work in life
Like it works on paper.
If the love that I describe
Could be anything but words
Then I would wipe my eyes,
I'd dry this ink,
I'd trade my pen in on a pair of wings.
And I would - I would fly
If I could only make it work in life...

And at the end of every night, I add up the tips
That account for what might not come down to a thing
That amounts to a life, and the sum of it all
I'm afraid is less than what I know
I need to slip beneath the surface of my forgeries
Where I buried my hopes with sometimes my dreams
Still stir me and steal me away.
And I can still hear Dineh Bikeyah call
Just like when we were kids.
And I could tell you all about it in a song.
But Lord, I wish that
I could make it work in life
Like it works on paper.
If the love that I describe
Could be anything but words
Then I would wipe my eyes,
I'd dry this ink,
I'd trade my pen in on a pair of wings.
And I would fly!
If I could only make it work in life."
From Canticle of The Plains by Rich Mullins, Mitch McVicker, and Beaker, 1996
*"Dineh Bikeyah": the place of the people, a holy place, what Celtic spirituality would call a "thin place"

New Orleans is my Dineh Bikeyah. She was calling for me this night five years ago, seeking me, but could not find me because I was deep down. I submerged myself somewhere far away, so much that I was living out of boxes and a suitcase, half out of my car, and the other half in that "rented bed" with a man "who [gave] me what little I get of the love that we'd like to imagine is left of the love that we never did know." I'm fighting tears of shame again, that I was not there. That my Dineh Bikeyah had to be submerged deep down in that dirty water for me to finally come back.

But even now that I'm back ... "the sum of it all, I'm afraid, is less than what I know I would need to slip beneath the surface of my forgeries, where I buried my hopes, where sometimes my dreams still stir me and steal me away." I thought being a social worker was the one thing I could DO about it all, the way to work out a certain sort of redemption. But the past eight months, it's no redemption at all. Just another goddamned forgery. What kind of jackass idiot am I to think that there is so much as one single goddamned thing I could possibly do, myself? I left the real work to people like a certain young man who is the strongest, the most brave and true, that I know ... and the work wounded him, and any gentleness and warmth I could try to embrace him with, simply...becomes aether. What have I done?!? Is there anything left?

Can I overcome this shame, grief, hopelessness? Vanquish the sin of comparison of which I am so guilty? Return to the Dineh Bikeyah to help work out the WHOLE community's redemption? And oh yeah, also quit being so goddamned stuck on where I'm at in all of it? Only the Shadow knows.