Joke's on me...this lonesome day

"I stood stone-like at midnight
suspended in my masquerade
I combed my hair till it was just right
and commanded the night brigade
I was open to pain and crossed by the rain
and I walked on a crooked crutch
I strolled all alone through a fallout zone
came out with my soul untouched
I hid in the clouded wrath of the crowd
when they said "Sit down" I stood up-ooh, growin' up...
I took month-long vacations in the stratosphere
and you know it's really hard to hold your breath?
I swear I lost everything I ever loved or feared,
I was the cosmic kid in full costume dress
Well, my feet they finally took root in the earth
but I got me a nice little place in the stars
And I swear I found the key to the universe
in the engine of an old parked car..." - Bruce Springsteen

Back from a great little visit to Austin, Texas - with a side trip to San Antonio ... so, love love LOVE that place and had a great trip. Plus I got to share the road for a few moments with a Bondmobile :D (yep, an Aston Martin)! But, once I got out of Houston, towards Beaumont, and headed toward home ... got to all kinda heavy thinking.

Bad/Sad part first. At least for today, I am so frakking DONE with trying and trying - time for someone else to "man up" and make the effort to be with me. Reason for that Cliff's notes version of the rant? Ok. So here's the thing ... I have long approached life, love, and faith in much the same way as one another - whichever way, I consider it a daily decision. I wake up every morning and, whether consciously or not, I make the choice - will I live as best I can a life that speaks for itself today? Will I love ________ (insert individual's name here) today? (Whether I am capable of so doing is hardly ever a matter of question for me) Will I choose to move forward in the path before me as best as I can recognize it, trusting that it is a path G-d is leading me along for my good, for the good of those around me, etc - today?

Well, I keep making that faith and life decision every day, and it keeps frakking up. For today, while I still affirm that life decision (if for no other reason than that I refuse to abide in denial of it) ... Today that faith decision is just, flat-out, NOT happening. Can't, or won't, believe it today. Every step I've tried to make to move forward in that frakking "path" or whatever, for YEARS, I get knocked back on my butt and I am sick of it. Sick of trying, of losing, of where I end up - feeling abandoned and forgotten even by the people I once could believe had been brought into my life for a reason. I don't like the feeling that I've been fighting with today that I just regret having involved several people at various times, for whom I've felt a great deal of warmth and respect, in what still - for today - feels like a wasted, failed life.

Now before anybody flips out and hits the panic button, please don't. As the Springsteen song this post's title came from puts it, "This too shall pass, I'm gonna pray - Right now all I got's this lonesome day - it's all right, it's all right, it's all right ... let kingdom come, I'm gonna find my way." This is part of what differentiates me from the average chick with a certain personality disorder - I can, and hereby do, acknowledge that all this is a feeling. No more, no less. I will feel different, perhaps not tonight, perhaps not first thing tomorrow morning, maybe not till Monday - but I will feel different, and I've felt differently recently enough to remember what it was like. Ya homegirl can hang tight till then.

But - all that said, back to that third "decision" - love. For quite some time now, whether there has been anyone specifically to make that decision to love, as best as I am able, or not, I have seen myself as capable of affirming that decision in principle every day. That too, has bitten me on the butt way too damn many times. For today, then - no. Time for someone ELSE to make that decision about me, someone else to decide that in their almighty frakking opinion ya homegirl here is worthy of that daily decision, and of the sort of words, actions, behaviors that flesh out that decision. If that sounds selfish? Oh well. Nobody can honestly say that I made the decision not to love in their case until and unless sorely provoked - until *their* words, actions, and behaviors for a LONG time made it clear that my decision was meaningless to them. So I can put this out there to "God, fate, time, the universe, or whatever" (Quantum Leap shout-out there) - if somebody "mans up," makes that decision to love me, speaks, behaves, and acts accordingly, that will not go unnoticed or unrewarded. But until then? Forget it. "God, fate, time, the universe, or whatever" - for today - has something to prove to me. Again, tomorrow or the next day or the day after that I may feel differently and get this burr out from under my saddle - but yeah. Just sayin'.

However, on the good side ... I have joined the ranks of the so-called "cycling culture" - notice I did not say bicycling :D ... Got a recumbent tricycle, rode it around Town Lake in Austin a little tiny bit, and planning to ride around home and/or work as the opportunity presents itself. The interesting thing about this, to me, is that I'm already noticing a barely perceptible shift in my thinking because of it. Ok yeah some of this is probably because this daggone trike cost a boatload :D! But - I catch myself suddenly thinking a lot more carefully about where I choose to go, what my reasons are for going there, what I will or won't spend money on ... It used to be almost a matter of course that if I was passing anywhere near Houston, I was *going* to spend an hour - or two or three - wandering around the Galleria, daring myself to find something I could rationalize paying some crazy price for. But today, on my way back from Austin? Didn't even pass myself by the Galleria. Went down the road to the Houston outpost of Central Market for a last hurrah with my new favorite grocery though ... and was fairly picky there too. No dash to the candy aisle - instead, stuck to a very few items that I know I can't get at home, healthy sorts of things that I want to put to use proving to myself that healthy food can be tasty as all get-out. Same sort of principle kept being the background of my thinking in the past couple days - more practical, more interested in not just that little frisson of the pleasure of acquisition, but rather the potential for longer-term improvement of my life.

Then again, I've talked off my a** long enough here, right? But yeah ... interesting bit of different ways of thinking.

late night musings

So. I have a job, to be starting on November 1st. The place at which this will be makes me pause, sit up and take notice on several levels. One of those levels is that, although I will not be working with the same program, I will be working on the grounds of the Hansen's Disease Center in Carville, Louisiana - where Dr. Paul Brand once worked, where he continued his work and experiences that led to some really powerful books (Fearfully and Wonderfully Made, The Gift of Pain, In His Image) where he connected his faith (having grown up as a missionary kid) and medicine. There's "incarnational tradition" in religion, and then there's incarnational faith that is felt in gut and bone and sinew. The latter would definitely be Paul Brand's.

I've been hand-stitching a shorter hem into a new pair of dress pants - nice active way of preparing myself for this new job :) - but having finished one leg, took a break and browsed around online a little about Dr. Brand ... found this gem in the Hansen's Disease Center newsletter, The STAR, in his 2003 obituary.

"Dr. Paul Brand was a servant of God, called to serve the less fortunate, the sick and the disenfranchised, which he faithfully did with all his heart, mind and spirit."

We can but hope to be given the grace to do likewise. The heart of a servant and the mind of a healer, taken together, are strong medicine indeed.

The work I will be doing is with the Youth Challenge Program - so I am not called upon to heal the body, as Dr. Brand did ... but who knows what pain, what vulnerability, the young people attending this program may carry with them. And they are there but a few months. No do-overs, just that "dangerous opportunity" of Chinese character fame.

You may call me an idealist ... I'm just out to meet the grace of this new experience with authenticity, and with a grace that I cannot conjure.

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.

lonely days, lonely nights

i am tired. "...tired of disparagement, criticism, of nihilism in short" (Albert Camus). tired of the recalcitrance of nature, of our human failures of action or vision or attention. tired of waking up every day to a world that seems not to want me. tired of being surrounded by so much noise yet at the end of it all alone. but still here i am, after 1am, typing this lament. i know...still i have much to be thankful for, and at least some of these things i lament will not be the way they are now interminably. some day i will "wake up in the morning to find i have somewhere exciting to go" (A Chorus Line), some day someone will choose to simply be, here, with me, for that day and the day after and the day after that...but this is not that day. this is just, tonight. "this is radio nowhere, is there anybody alive out there?" (Bruce Springsteen)

Flash Lightning and the narrative

Someone I work with ... is the superhero Flash Lightning. In this once-upon-a-time, I am CloverGirl. Guess I'm supposed to be a kind of talisman, bringing luck, life, growth ... all while driving a souped-up New VW Beetle ... I can't help but smile. Yeah, maybe I'm just playing into someone's delusion - but then again, just maybe this is that person's narrative therapy. Good time for me to think hard about transferences and countertransference I suppose. But meanwhile ... Flash wants to protect everyone - including CloverGirl - but his one tool is lightning. Powerful yes, but all too ephemeral. I'm watching the lightning in the clouds to the north tonight, the vanguard of a midnight storm bringing fresh, cool air southward. The beauty of it stops me in my tracks, but it remains in the clouds far above where neither you nor I nor anyone else can stop it. Probably none but the very fastest camera could even capture the pale ghost of an impression of it, while a long exposure would capture the glow but none of that here-and-now, of the moment zing of it.

How like this psychotherapy work. I know I'm reading a lot more into that "narrative" than "Flash" does - or at least more than "Flash" is aware of. But it's there in the narrative. There are those who constantly verbalize the belief that these are patients of Sisyphus, that they will never get better, that they will never gain any "real" insight, that they are too far gone to the voices in their own heads and the weird fantastical invisible visions of their minds to grasp concepts in therapy. Plenty of times, I'll admit it, those people are probably right. But for all the moments that's all true, there are these moments - lightning arcs across the horizon, one or two or a handful of the people in the group "get it" - sometimes they can even see one another humanly past the misunderstanding and paranoia and distraction, just for a split second. They can't name it, but then again it's seldom I can even name that fluttering, shimmering, ephemeral butterfly's wing that starts to unfold when this caterpillar (my self) thinks the world might be coming to an end.

what is it with me and my blog...

Good: LSU and the Saints both won. The Saints even won handily!

Bad: Apparently I just cannot get it in gear to be where I know I need to be on Sunday mornings. I think this will change eventually ... but right now I'm feeling both really guilty about not being there, and really good about the fact that I'm making use of my Sundays to get laundry done.

Indifferent: I'm not sure, but I think maybe I should try cultivating the feeling that I just don't care about work, about what gets accomplished or not, who appreciates anything I say or do ... Yep. Picked a great time to pick up this book about how "Evil is boring. Cynicism is stupid. Despair is lazy. The truth is that the universe is inherently friendly. Life is a sublime game created for our amusement and illumination, and it always gives us exactly what we need, exactly when we need it." (Rob Brezsny, Pronoia Is The Antidote For Paranoia)

Soooo ... um, I guess I don't need affirmation or companionship or self-sufficiency right now *confused look* ...? Something will work out. I think. Kinda has to, right?

Wake me up when September ends...

So here we are again in the middle of September. Why is it that so much has happened in September? I try and fail ... remember, and forget ... forgive, yet still rage ... I am insightful but still just as much an idiot as I was last year, four years ago, ten years ago ... just please don't back away just yet. Somebody's still not finished - I think ... ?

Summer has come and passed
The innocent can never last
wake me up when September ends

like my father's come to pass
seven years has gone so fast
wake me up when September ends

here comes the rain again
falling from the stars
drenched in my pain again
becoming who we are

as my memory rests
but never forgets what I lost
wake me up when September ends
-Green Day, 2005