Let Them Eat Cake

Lately I’ve been wishing I was more philosophical; more intellectual. I’ve been thumbing through books that I hope will make me smarter; grasping at strands of abstract thought that I hope will give me answers so that I may give them to others. So that I may use them to be more sure of myself. I’ve been both drawn to and intimidated by those more intelligent than myself, hoping wide-eyed that I might steal in on the heels of one of them to become something of a shadow in their world. I listen furiously to what they say, even the things I don’t understand, trying at least to tuck some bit of information into a wrinkle in my brain. Surely I will absorb through osmosis whatever I immerse myself in? I can only hope.

Because sometimes I feel like I have exhausted every good thing in myself. Like I have nothing left to give the world, nothing left with which to impress. When I am out of creativity and light, I can only hope that the Creator will help me make something beautiful, help me to draw beauty to myself and reflect it back into the world like the glint of a broken mirror in the sun.

An eternal effort can be exhausting, but when I turn it over to the rhythm that the Master drums within me, the experience is rich and it is called life and I eat it up like chocolate cake. That isn’t to say it is easy, even after the letting-go bit is done. Chocolate cake isn’t just all the tasty stuff put together, you know. It’s mostly bland flour, really. There’s sour baking soda, there’s bitter cocoa, and the oven gets so miserably hot. It’s not all sugar and vanilla and comfort. As a child I was mortified to learn that there was salt in the cookies, but Mom said they made the cookies taste better so then I was ok with it, but it was still strange to me that not all the components in something so tasty were tasty by themselves. A five-year-old’s first lesson in “The whole is greater than the sum of it’s parts.”

But altogether cookies and cakes are delicious; I find that even the bad ones have some redeeming qualities. They’re being served at the party in the Now suite on the eighteenth floor of Mortality, and they’re for me; they’re for everyone. For all the would-be magicians and the planners of plans, dreamers of impractical dreams and the artists under the bridges with their cans of spray paint; spray-on anger, spray-on angst. You Picassos, you; you Michelangelos and you don’t even know you’ve made the overpass your Sistine Chapel. For the used-car salesmen and the sk8r punks; calling all the thumb-suckers and the overbearing mothers. Come you pseudo-scientists who love to experiment with the boundaries of life, calling all time-wasters and procrastinators. Calling all attention-addicts and all you nerds from your basements; calling all thrill-seekers and adrenaline junkies, all you hippies with unwashed hair. All the intellectuals and philosophers, creators and consumers, criminals and congressmen, ladies and gentlemen, tramps and gypsies. Calling everything I’ve ever wanted to be, everything I have ever been and everything I have tried desperately to avoid becoming, everything it has never occurred to me to be. There’s cake for you and cake for me, because every day is Eternity’s birthday and we’re invited.
Just so you know.

Metaphorical Metamorphosis: A Story in Photographs

For an introduction to media class a couple of years ago, I was assigned the task of putting together a series of images that was autobiographical. A series of pictures that could tell a story, independent of words. This is that meticulously-composed series of original images, briefly illustrating my diagnosis with lupus in 2005 and a metaphorical representation of my journey over the following two years. My photography skills have somewhat developed since this was originally created and I would like to refine it someday, but you get the idea.

God-Songs

Sometimes I find God in places where no one intended Him to be. Many times, those instances occur for me in music. I thought I would share my playlist of God-Songs, specifically ones that were not originally intended to be about God. Some of these I imagine coming from God, some of them as prayers to Him, some of them just about Him in general. Or all three of those, intermixed. I love that, when God speaks through art regardless of the artist's intentions. I have more of those types of songs on my God-Songs playlist than I do songs purposefully written about Him. Maybe not all of them on this list will make sense to you, but (if you end up taking the time to follow the links and listen)I hope a couple of them do. If you listen, listen with a mind open to hidden--and sometimes unconventional--connections. Maybe you'll find one or two that connect you to Him, too. And if you have any song suggestions, I would absolutely love to hear them.

Make a Plan to Love Me by Bright Eyes
Lila by Bright Eyes
Easy/Lucky/Free by Bright Eyes
First Day of My Life by Bright Eyes
Yellow by Coldplay
I Have Never Loved Someone by My Brightest Diamond
I Want to Know Your Plans by Say Anything
I Will Follow You into the Dark by Death Cab for Cutie
Jesus the Mexican Boy by Iron and Wine
For the Widows in Paradise, for the Fatherless in Ypsilanti by Sufjan Stevens
Heirloom by Sufjan Stevens

Some Challenges of the Spoken Word

People say things, right? Isn’t that how people are supposed to interact, by speaking mouth-words? That’s the impression I get, anyway. And apparently one is expected to respond relatively quickly, without taking too much time to process. Conversations should be slower things, I think. Is it alright to say things that don’t necessarily need saying?

When I’m quiet, I do have things in my mind. Things I could say, I suppose; things I could make into words and push off of my tongue for other people to hear. But I ask certain questions of myself before saying things. Like Who Cares? Is what I am about to say genuinely relevant to the conversation and its participants? Will it make someone think? Will it make someone laugh? If the answer to all of those questions is “no”, my lips often refuse to move. But I’m never quite sure if that is the right decision, because I tend to experience many awkward silences and I can’t help but think that it’s my fault for not filling up the space with words.

On lugubrious days
I get the impression
That others may notice
My verbal recession.

Sometimes on desperate impulse I will regurgitate some vaguely-related phrase from my mind, whatever is floating closest to my mouth. How very spastic I must seem, stretches of silence awkwardly punctuated with puzzling interjections and broken responses. Then sometimes there is nothing floating nearby and I feel a solid white space behind my eyes, a catch in my throat.

I need to make
More words with my mouth,
Build them on my tongue
And then push them out.

I suppose it doesn’t matter very much anyway; everything I have to say has been said before, if not by me then by someone else. Any concept my little brain could possibly conceive has surely already been thoroughly wrung out by minds brighter than my own. Why bother saying what has been heard before? I’m only twenty-three; I don’t think I’ve lived long enough to say new things, or even to know very much about old things. Why bother saying something that is not new, or that is essentially unproductive?

Sometimes I feel like a ineffectual robot: inexpressive due to lack of data, then randomly activating in sudden bursts of short-circuiting gibberish. Hell-o. Would. You. Like. To. Con-verse? Yest-er-day. I. Ate. Straw-berr-ies. Do. You. Like. Straw-berr-ies? Data: Straw-berr-ies. Carry. Their. Seeds. On. The. Out-side. This. Has. Been. A. Pleas-ant. Con-ver-sat-ion. That. Ful-filled. Social. Re-quire-ments. Good. Bye.

I think I am better at the letter-format of communication, when I am able to contemplate my words. To edit them, to see them somewhere other than my head-space before they are announced. I make more sense that way.
Why do you think I write so much?

I pronounce to the world
Some stuttering sounds.
They look at me strangely;
I’ll just write it down.


.

The Classic Question has No Answer

Sometimes I see people living their lives and I think, “Wait a minute, that was the life I was supposed to live. I was supposed to do that. That was my thing.” I watch people have the strength and energy, the supple joints and clear mind to do the things that I’ve dreamed of doing my whole life. Things that I am too tired for these days. I watch the world go by me, many people them with their strings of accomplishments that I had hoped to achieve; their experiences I’d dreamed of having. As I am left behind I think about wormholes, and alternate realities. A universe where things went the way I planned. Because, if those theories are true and the alternate universes are infinite, surely there is one where things unfolded the way I would have chosen.

Maybe there’s one where things are even better, but there’s probably one where things are much worse. I wouldn’t gamble for a different life, but at times pesky lupus things make me lose count of my blessings. And there are so many of them—blessings, that is—in spite of the negatives.

I have been to Kenya and visited one of the largest slums in the world, walking in the midst of some of the deepest poverty imaginable. Right here in Kansas I’ve carried an abused child on my hip, and played Pokemon cards and dinosaurs with another. I’ve been friends with people forced to bury their parents far too young, and with people who were raised in a world of drugs and violence.

Relatively my life is oh so very, very good.

Yet, sometimes...What if I were healthy…?

If I were a rich man, deedle-deedle-didle-deedle-deedle-dum…Would it spoil some vast eternal plan?

Would it? Of course in the midst of my own pain I have asked the classic question, “why?”. I have asked it all the more desperately on behalf of those I’ve met whose suffering is far beyond my own.

Of course we all wish we could look into the future, to see “why” we have had to endure particular things. Except, I don’t really believe in that “why”.

I don’t mean that it’s just hard to believe; I mean I really don’t believe there is always a reason for things. Sometimes there is, maybe. But in most cases, I think, bad things just happen. I believe that God will indeed work everything out for ultimate good, but He is working with a world that is already broken, and full of broken people. I don’t believe that He broke us for some divine “reason”. I don’t believe He inflicts suffering on us based on His own agenda. I believe He is in the Emergency Room of Souls, working tirelessly to heal us as the hurts come. We stumble in bleeding pain and loss from some sudden blow, and He gives us the stitches that keep us from falling apart. Then He connects us to communities with people to help and support us, and helps design our lives for their greatest possible capacity of joy while we wait for eternity.

I don’t know; I’m no expert on God or theology. I’m not even a ministry major in college. But I have had a lot of time and several reasons to dig for answers, scratching desperately at the questions until blood seeps from under my fingernails. I have thought, and I have reached a few conclusions in my own mind. And one of them is this: The Classic Question has no definitive Answer; only a Healer.

A Flower in the Desert

Many of us have experienced events that have turned the world upside-down and crushed the idea of life as we knew it. Maybe it was like a tornado: you were picked up, swirled around, slammed down, and when you rose back to your feet everything around you was destroyed. You were picked up from a thriving habitat and set back down in a wasteland. A never-ending wasteland. At least that’s how it was for me at the time of my lupus diagnosis. For quite a while, it was all wasteland, all the time, broken up only by mirages on the horizon that melted upon my approach. Then finally, after weeks of going to bed every night not knowing how on earth I’d get through the next day, I found a hint of a true oasis somewhere. Call it a flower in the desert. It was beautiful. It was hope. It was fresh and alive where I was dead and withered.

That flower was several chapters of the book of Hosea. I had not picked up my Bible in a long time. It had seemed so heavy to me, so heavy with things I couldn’t ever get right and knowledge too lofty for my understanding. I was tired. I was done. But for some reason—I don’t remember why—I began Hosea. After a few chapters, I found myself relating to the people in it, whose cities had been ravaged by famine and destruction. I felt just like them; I felt like the nation of Israel personified. But after the chaos and pain there was a promise from God for hope and restoration tenfold, but this promise could only be accessed if the people left the life they tried so desperately to control, and began to trust God. I know this is not the main storyline of Hosea; this instance was plucked out from a chapter or two by my fried and frazzled brain.

I sat with that flower and touched its petals tentatively; I explored where the stem went into the ground and imagined the roots there, and the water that fed them, and knew the water had to come from somewhere. I sat with that flower in awe of it’s beauty and baffled by its hints of hope.

I sat with that book and read, and meditated. As I pondered what I’d found, I prayed, asking God what this meant for me. Asking God, “Does this promise apply to me too, or is that just wishful thinking?” Drop by drop, the fresh water of certain words fell into my thirsty mind. They were from the perspective of God, to me. I took out my journal and began to write them down as quickly as they came to me.

I don’t know if God inspired it. Maybe so, along with just the creative part of my brain working up the hypothetical situation of, “how might God respond to me?” I’m not saying God “spoke” to me or I had some big “encounter”. Just some thoughts, that’s all. Some musing on what God might have said to me—or anyone—after life fell apart; the old life that must be destroyed so that a new and better one may have room to grow. This was what I wrote down:

“Yes, I burned your cities to the ground; yes, your enemies took everything from you and I let them. I know you’re left with nothing and I know I took it all. I wept as I watched; I felt every stab of your pain. But I had hope for you, even if you didn’t, because I knew what could now come next. I will give back grander cities and greater wealth than was stolen from you. You’re squatting in a run-down shed left over from your sacked and ruined city, and you’ve diluted yourself into thinking it’s a palace. It’s full of mold that’s making you sick, the roof leaks water on your face at night, vermin infect your food after taking their share. Yet you refuse to come out. If you don’t come out, you’ll never see what else there is for you. You are slowly dying in there. I told you that; I knocked and shouted it through the cracks in the door you locked, so steadfast against Me. You didn’t listen. So, I have to destroy that dangerous dwelling you built for yourself; that house that could fall on you at any second. I need to get you out of there. What else can I do? I begin at the opposite side so you have time to flee the wrecking ball. You stumble onto the grass outside just in time to realize that your “grand palace” is gone, and everything you ever had. Destroyed. You curse Me for destroying it and grieve your losses. I wait for you to stop for a moment and I say, “But now, you can have this.” And now your eyes could gaze in wonder at the true palace before you—the kind of marble and gold and velvet and silver that had grown so dim in your memory that you replaced those things with tin walls and rotten wood and stained fabric scraps and aluminum. With trash you reconstructed it the best you could by yourself, then locked yourself inside while marvelous kingdoms grew around you. I knocked on your door every day, to show you the progress the builders made on your very own palace. But you wouldn’t come out. Finally your palace was all done and I was so excited to show you true glory, but you wanted your patchwork delusions. You loved that thing in an unhealthy way; you were too attached to something dirty and dangerous. It was going to fall and crush you slowly, painfully. It may have seemed like chaos to you as the roof crashed down and the toxic dust caught in your throat, but the way I broke it down really was controlled, and all for love of you. It had to be destroyed so that you could come outside and see the real thing, the thing you were trying so hard to rebuild yourself. See? Now you don’t have to settle for moth-eaten blankets and rat-tattered bread. Now you can feel the softest silks and velvets on the skin of your soul, and you can feast on the richest, most flavorful delicacies that I made for you Myself. I understand you’re hurting still; now come inside so I may give you rest.”

My desert flower, promising an oasis to come if only I would stop wallowing in the grime and sitting stubbornly in the oppressive, blistering heat that was my circumstance. Wandering, I had found this flower. Hoping and trusting in God, living with some purpose, I knew that someday I would find a true oasis.

Mechanics v. Atmosphere

I need to do more things. Someone far smarter than myself told me that experiences are most critical in changing thought processes, and I have some thought processes I need to change. I’m getting better at just trying things, even if they might not work out, and just seeing what sticks. Cause sometimes things do, though not often. Still, you never know. And so I want to try an experiment. I’m not sure what kind yet; some kind of experience. An experimental experience. Maybe I will try to go days at a time without speaking. I have always been so curious about what that might be like, but I know it would make no sense to those around me who would expect me to communicate efficiently.

That would definitely be an experience, not using my voice for days. Maybe that would help change my faulty logic. It makes sense to me—my logic does—but it doesn’t make me “happy”, and, apparently, it is not true.

For example, I feel as if one shouldn’t feel especially good about oneself just for doing things that are generally expected, such as graduating high school, being independently capable of basic functioning, not breaking the law, or not being hateful to other people. My thought has been, “you don’t get brownie points for achieving the mediocre”. If you do something at an above-average level, you deserve to feel sort of good about it. If you do something at an average level, you are allowed to feel neutral or—at best—vaguely satisfied. If your performance is below-average, well…you see where I am going with this.

But, apparently, that sort of thinking isn’t necessarily true. And it is certainly a discouraging way to live. Because I often fail to do things that are “generally expected”, or just barely do them by the skin of my teeth, following my own logic I have no right to feel anything but disappointed with myself. In theory, I know this isn’t right. One should be able to feel good about the good choices one makes: the choice to study instead of not, to make an effort socially, to put some effort into functioning independently, to exercise, to stop and think, to make use of gifts and talents, to finally take a shower even though you’re not even going anywhere today. People should feel good about that sort of thing, about just not totally failing at life. And I know that, in my head. In that part of my mind that actually controls my thoughts and emotions, though, not so much.

If you’ve ever opened up one of those self-help books, perhaps you’ve encountered the conundrum of being told that “you are not your feelings” and “your feelings don’t have to control you” while at the same time being pelted with all sorts of information on how to redirect your thought processes purely so that you can have better feelings. The bits of my mind that I trust are all cranks and levers and gears, and to those bits that seems like a dry sort of joke. But the bits of my mind that puzzle me—the bits that are all ebbs and flows and unpredictable weather—want to understand it very badly because maybe somewhere in that riddle is the key to…something. Something that the gears and levers think I shouldn’t need, but that the snow in summertime thinks is essential to my survival.

I am a psychology major and sometimes all of it just makes me want to gag and bang my head against a wall simultaneously.
But on the other hand I know that it is all true and that it has helped millions of people.
My right and left brain are constantly clashing and I am very, very tired of thinking so much but what else is there to do in this little town? I do love to think; thinking is my favorite. But some things cannot be thought out and my brain crashes.

For all of that, though, the concept has made me feel more peaceful in certain ways. It is nice knowing in at least part of my mind that my worth need not be dependent on my productivity.
I'll put it this way: The gears are still churning, but the weather is a bit calmer.