Omer. Day 41 (give or take)

This is my favorite question: what do you carry with you, and what do you leave behind? Sometimes I change up the verbs, just a little, to bringing and taking away, respectively. A subtle shift, to be sure, but all part of the grand scheme just who the hell am I,  and just who the hell to I want to become?

I am the sum of all my baggage - carried, dragged, dropped. left behind and taken back.

Sometimes the weight of it all is crushing. And sometimes, when the wind is just right, and the scent of green is in the air, and I am feeling brave and grateful daring and fierce and bold (or any combination thereof; you get the point), there's no weight at all. I freely offer much of my baggage, all the weighted measures of stuff and ideas and hurts and pains; lost loves and lost jobs, missed opportunities and failed connections - all of the stuff that binds me, tethers me to a present I can only see through the funhouse mirror of my past (so not really a present at all) - and I let it all go, leaving it lie in a muddled heap.

This is my altar. I'm pretty sure, when I drop it all in that heap, and I set it on fire, it makes a pleasing odor to God. I'm just as sure, when it's time to move on, every single thing that went up in smoke, that released me from the bondage of my self, and my past, it's all there, ready for me to pick up again, just as bright and shiny and unscathed as it was before my metaphorical sacrifice.

It's mine, to carry it all again until the next holy bonfire.

Of course, there's a whole bunch of other stuff I can choose to pick up and carry away - things like faith, or courage, or joy. And yes, there are infinite variations of despair and anger and sundry slings and arrows of cruel misfortune that can be distracting and enticing. And yes, I have gone that route more often than I care to admit. There are times I swear I didn't do the picking, that these nasty little packages leaped up and stuck themselves to me of their own accord, really they did.

If I'm honest - and now's a good time to cop to honesty - I did the picking and the plucking and the sticking, all by myself. Ugh.

Still, there are times I go against type, and I choose the weightlessness of joy!

Things is - this carrying and leaving and taking away - this is a thing I can do every single day. It knows no season. It is unbounded by time. In every moment, I can choose, again and again and again. These days, the counting-of-the-omer days, it is a mindful trudge, a careful inspection and collection of the junk I lug around with me. I am grateful for the mindfulness. Messy as I am, I like frames, and this is a particularly good one.

So. What is it that I carry with me? What will I leave behind? What will I carry with me as I walk to the next altar, the next mountain? Today - just for this moment, this breath, I will sit for a moment, my treasures laid out before me, a sky of pewter and pearl above me, casting dull shadows on the lot. I will sit, and rest, and hope - hope that when I move on from here, I remember to let slip the boxes of pain and fear, so that I have room for a bit of joy, a bit of beauty, a bit of grace.


PS - I've written a couple of poems in the past, that relate to this post. You may want to check them out here:

What I Brought: https://staceyzrobinson.blogspot.com/2013/05/what-i-brought_13.html
And Fly:L https://staceyzrobinson.blogspot.com/2015/04/and-fly.html
To This Moment: https://staceyzrobinson.blogspot.com/2015/03/to-this-moment.html
Hineini: https://staceyzrobinson.blogspot.com/2014/04/hineini.html

A Cry in the Wilderness

Author's note: 
I originally posted this essay in January, 2012. A day after I began to write this, my friend’s husband lost his battle with cancer.  Today is his yahrzeit - the anniversary of his death. It has been four years. 

My apologies that the first line is no longer strictly true. Every other word remains unchanged and painfully true.  His memory will be a blessing, his life was a prayer.  His family will grieve and find comfort in their wilderness. Together they will find healing and learn to be whole again. And let us say: Amen.

My friend's husband is dying. His death is imminent, a matter of days at best.

From the time he was diagnosed, they've had kids to raise, a house to run, meals to cook, carpools to drive. They've helped with homework and changed diapers and created a patchwork quilt made of comfort and stitched with hope. They've experienced great kindness and felt the soul-sucking aloneness of despair. Their family has grown by a glorious one. They've lived their lives, cursed their private hell, leaned on friends and been surrounded by love. They have seen their children grow and grieve, and have been helpless in the face of that grief.

It has been less than a year.

Not enough time. Never enough time to love and hope and grow and be, to live the life that suddenly seems too crowded with everything that makes up a life.

Not enough, but surely more than enough time to curse at God, raise holy hell. Enough time, enough bewilderment to demand to know just where the hell God is in all of this.

"Fuck you, God," we cry out into the wilderness of our pain. Who, in the face of such cruel and capricious reality has not railed against it? We are taught the laws of cause and effect from the time we can begin to comprehend the magnitude of this seemingly immutable law. It is a cosmic law, this if/then equation, a calculus of horrible consequences.

I know that place, that cursing, angry, defiant and terrified place. I have wept and wondered at the why of this despair. I have demanded answers from a silent God. I am good - mostly. And kind - mostly. I follow the rules and color inside the lines - mostly. Where’s the reward for my (mostly) decent and very human life? Why am I being punished? Was I not good enough? Did my life not measure up?

Answer, dammit. Tell me. Nothing? Silence, still? Well then, God: fuck you. Go to hell.

And there, in the darkness of my despair and pain, my grieving, wanting, painful and honest prayer: Fuck you, God. I am convinced that this, too, can be the healing grace of God. Blessing and curse.  I have been blessed; I have been cursed. It depended less upon God and more upon my perspective.  I believe that God needs to hear our raw, unvarnished anguish.  I believe that God needs to hear our pure and unadulterated joy.  I believe they are one and the same thing.

It is not what we pray that matters.  It is, ever and always, that we pray. 

How could we not?  Underneath our cursing, do we not find the unspoken prayer do not forsake me, God; do not abandon me to my pain!  The Psalmist had it right: we cry out to God and we are healed.  He didn't say  what we cried, or how.  He didn't tell us "God only hears the pretty words.  Speak only of love and praise. That is all that God will hear." No, it's pretty clear: we find healing because we cry out in our anger and our fear. 

Blessing and curse.  God does not fuck with us.  We are neither abandoned nor forgotten nor ignored. Neither does God bestow wishes: we do not get parking places or jobs, nor do we win games or wars as a result of our prayers.  What we get, simply, is grace.  What we get is strength and courage to face what life has placed in front of us in that moment.  My faith will not guarantee that I will never know fear again, or that only good things will happen.  My faith, my prayer, my continued conversation with God allows me to put one foot in front of the other, and know that I will be carried through.

And God.  Where is God in all of this?  God is there, on the sidelines, waiting, with infinite patience, infinite compassion, for me to remember to cry out.  God waits, to give me grace, to turn my mourning into dancing.  God waits to dance with me.

For Alyce, my friend: may your mourning turn to dancing; may you dance soon with God.

Happily Ever After - the Aftermath

Happily-Ever-After: Day Minus One:

The dragons are swooping. The town is a mass of carnage: a swath of destruction and messy wreckage from one end to the next. 

The countryside is pockmarked with smoking remains. The princess is holed up in the tower, waiting, for her knight to show up. He is late, possibly too late. The vultures are making lazy circles in the sky, not too far behind the flock of dragons, who were still eyeing the ground, looking for lunch. 

Food is scarce, given the dragons' penchant for fire and well-done everything. They give the notion of "blackened" cuisine a whole new meaning. Also, they don't seem to understand the concept of sharing. Selfish flying bastards, if you ask me. 

Where the hell is the cavalry when you need it?

Happily-Ever-After, Day Zero 

Parades, confetti and tickertape galore! The Knight showed up at High Noon, and he was smart enough to not come alone. The dragons are dead, the Princess rescued and the town restored. God's in His heavens; all is right with the world. Finally. Not much to say here; happy endings abhor a wordy explanation. We can settle down to some serious and well-deserved happily-ever-aftering at last.

It's all a paradise from there on out, once the dragon is vanquished and order is restored, isn't it? And really, who actually cares about the day after? All the hard work has been done. Hasn't it?

When 2014 dawned cold and (probably) snowy, I stood at the very center of Happily Ever After. While I may not have needed the services of a Knight (or even a passing stranger), most of the difficult stuff that had been plaguing me for a while had been put to rest, and all but conquered: finances were finally under control. So much so, I knew that, if anything broke, I could fix it. Or at least, afford to have someone else do so. Cars. Refrigerators. Bones. Feelings. You name it - everything was covered.

As for relationships - Big R and little r alike - I had 'em: real and rich and meaningful. There was the long-distance boyfriend (the Big R) as well as the local friends, men and women who fell easily and comfortably in the little r camp. I loved them all. More important - they all loved me. And while even I can recognize how selfish that particular sentiment may sound, I still revel in its truth. They were all quite present in my life, if not physically, then at least only as far away as the nearest pixel. It's not that my life was suddenly crowded with people, but it was certainly full, with more than enough room to breathe and grow and just be.

And my son, my beautiful, glorious, amazing boy, he was becoming so himself. He was growing, mostly gracefully,  into his own - his ideas, his beliefs, his understandings. I may have helped to plant the seeds, but he was becoming a master gardener, and I was so enjoying watching his patch bloom. I watched him play video games and he gave me space to write. We argued, we laughed, we went about the serious business of living our lives and being a family of two.

Life was all falling into place. If none of it was exactly easy, then at least it wasn't a struggle. There was no need for constant vigilance. Every so often, I took stock, checked the appropriate boxes and went on with the rest of my life.

Happily ever after.

Happily-Ever-After, Day Plus a Few More

The dragon are beginning to rot. And there are flies. And other disgusting insects doing a little conga line in and around the carcasses. Ugh. The Knight took an early train outta here, before dawn - and way before the clean up crews were even organized. And the princess wants to go off on an adventure of her own. Or college. Or backpacking around Europe. She definitely has no interest in ruling the mass of people milling aimlessly about, staring in shocked amazement at the sheer magnitude of what needs to be done next. 

Maybe this is why we never get the stories of what happens after the Happily-Ever-After ending. The day after is the part nobody tells you about, all the life that happens after the happy ending. It's a pale postscript, that aftermath.

Except it isn't.

Oh, sure - you get some awesomeness there in that chalky, hopscotched outline of Sky Blue. You can finally put both feet down, and rest. Breathe a little. Survey the kingdom of your Happy. But it's not as if life suddenly stops. There's no pause button you can press that lets you to stay in some attenuated state of perfection for the rest of time. The rescued princess cannot stay on the balcony, waving to her adoring subjects forever. Think how tired her arms would get.

What happens in the aftermath of Happily Ever After? Life. And please - life is not all neat and tidy, a karmic lesson in gravity: what goes up may just float around for a while, kissing the stratosphere before playing tag with passing comets. Or whatever went up could just as easily come plummeting back to earth in a fiery, cataclysmic burst of light, not equal or opposite. Or it may just inhabit a wobbly, tentative orbit with no rhyme or reason. Or some mixture of it all.  It's life, in all its messy, glory.

Life is not all ups and downs. Rather, it is an ebb and flow. Like water, it moves and surges and changes from brilliant turquoise to soul-sucking black in an instant, and then back again. It flows and sustains and fills in ever changing motion. It's beautiful and dangerous and filled with wild magic and refracted color. It bends and cuts and leaves scars without regard to pattern or desire.

Welcome to 2014. 

It's not as if I was waiting for the other shoe to drop. I was far too busy hopping through the chalked-in board and tossing pebbles at the next square to notice much. Life was grand. Then it wasn't. Then it was all fruit basket upset, a roiling, rollicking, ceaselessly moving, breathtaking wonderment,

There was no tit-for tat, no account ledger where the losses and gains neatly lined up and zeroed out at the end of the year. I lost my job in the almost-spring. I got published - and not just published because I submitted a piece to an unsuspecting publisher. No, I was sought out, asked to contribute a piece to a new and important anthology. I cashed in the 401K and collected unemployment. I launched a new business, a Poet in Residence program, and have been marketing and growing it with some noticeable success, getting a few gigs along the way; Built a website. Kept writing, every day. Had a few health issues, some scarier than others.

Things started breaking. The refrigerator, after threatening to do so for a few tense years, finally gave up the ghost. At the height of summer. More things were in the various states of disrepair. I squeaked and scrimped and borrowed and begged and found money to repair things in order of their importance. I learned to ask for help. More, I learned to accept it - grudgingly, shame-facedly, but I did it anyway. More things broke. I learned to either get creative or do without.

I lost the boyfriend to distance and mourned an uncle who died. I made new friends and explored new relationships. My son began to fray around the edges, showing too-obvious signs of stress fractures threatening to widen into bottomless fissures somewhere along the way. I learned a whole new vocabulary as a result, revising my understanding of words like "powerless" and "pain." I took care of myself occasionally, and punished myself a few times as well. 

You get the point. Every crystalline sphere of heaven, every darkly dangerous ring of hell: each one explored in intimate, sometimes excruciating detail. I lingered in some, raced through others (and not always in iterations you would expect). You learn some, and cry some, and get scared some and survive some. You find Sky Blue a time or two more, in between moments of guilt and shame and triumph.

It's life. It's not always easy. It's not always struggle, no matter how often you start to believe that it is. There are no rewards handed out for a life well-lived. Neither are we punished for our mistakes or petty cruelties.

Sometimes, it was all I could do to crawl outside the safety of my bed and face the day ahead of me. There were days where I was brought to my knees in the face of desperate need and pain. Sometimes that need was my own. Sometimes, I was able to find grace enough to be present, to offer love, to find healing.


Happily-Ever-After, Day Plus Infinity

Once again I stand in the shadow of another Happily Ever After, surveying the vast landscape that surrounds me, here at the brink of 2015. It's nothing at all like that  of last year. There is much more uncertainty. The safety net is in tatters and my steps much more tentative these days. But I stand here, nonetheless, ready - perhaps to merely skim the surfaces of my life or maybe even dive deep into all those secret and hidden places that are bruised and broken and scabbed over. Or maybe to just stand  motionless for a minute or two more, to catch my breath before I leap.

I will leap. I will stumble a hell of a lot more often than leap. I will fall, and if I'm lucky, I'll be caught in a net of gentle hands and feel the comfort of strong shoulders. And even if I don't find that net, I'm pretty sure I'll get back up again. I will sing and pray and doubt and question and laugh and fuck up and soar and cry and live. I will live a life in 2015, out to it's very edges - mostly. Sometimes I will huddle in the corners, waiting for a bit of bravery or some small act of kindness.

I will find an infinite array of Happily Ever Afters. And for every one of them, I will revel in the days that come after, the days of clean up and celebration and mess.

And when I remember, when I am lucky beyond belief, I will give thanks for every single one.

Soft Landing

Somewhere in my first year of sobriety, I went through a rough patch. It may be more accurate to say that "somewhere in my first year of sobriety, I found a few seconds of joy and breathless freedom." Those seconds were very few and very far between. The rough and stumbly, broken and prickly moments stretched into days, into weeks, into months. I (still) feel so much more at home in those spaces. I understand the rules there. There may be more pain in that place, but I get its ebb and flow, understand its motion and oddly circuitous paths. 

This time, of all those myriad times, was really pretty rough. Trust me: I know rough.

Now, what they don't tell you, those omnipotent and aloof They who haunt the smoky rooms and dingy halls of recovery, what They don't tell you is just how raw, just how naked, just how vulnerable you can feel when you finally start feeling, and there's nothing standing between you and the rest of the world except you. 

It's just you. And the pain. And the fear.  And the fire that burns inside your head because you just can't stop thinking and you can't stop feeling and the world keeps spinning and you just want to yell "Stop!" or maybe "Wait!" or maybe just hide. Just crawl under the covers and lie in the cool and shadowy dark for a few thousand years, until It's all gone, until you can't even remember what It was to begin with.

I was consumed by that fire. Those flames licked up one side and down the other, dancing along every inch of my skin without cease. Scorched earth policy (or whatever equivalent fits). I held my breath, held it all in, waiting for it to end, for the burning to stop, for the manicky, panicky beating of my heart to quiet. I held myself breathlessly still, hopelessly folded in on myself. 

It was right about then that a friend gave me a card. It was not your typical Hallmark card, replete with hearts and flowers and ooey-gooey sentiment. Nor did it highlight wise, sarcastic characters who made pithy little  remarks that you thought were amusing and yet couldn't recall thirty-seven seconds later. In fact, this card had a cartoon-like (think Keith Harrington-esque rather than Boynton-y) picture of a big city skyline, a suspension bridge in the foreground, and a sunshine yellow taxi clearly falling (at breakneck speed, I imagine) off the edge of the bridge to the depths of whatever it was below, flames shooting out the taxi's windows, and some person, some stick-figure of a person, waited inside, clearly obeying the laws of gravity and motion, clearly at a loss.

The future did not look bright for the taxi or its rider.

On the inside, to the left, were words. Many, many words. Great gobs of words that told the story of how the taxi, and the person inside of it came to be flying off that particular bridge at that particular time. Or maybe, the words told the story of the thoughts and feelings pf that lone and lonely inhabitant as he (or she) plummeted to some cataclysmic crash. Might have been some spiritual allegory. I don't remember. Frankly, I don't really care.

What I remember was the echo I felt of  that figure's resignation and absolute acceptance of the act of free falling in an endless and elegant arc that could only end in-- not death; that would be too clean, too neat-- but more pain. That certainty that this would not end in a bottom but with a trap door.

That was the left-hand side. The right side held a wish. Bold black letters on a blanket of bright white:

I wish for you a soft landing

And at that exact moment, everything started up again. Until that very instant, everything about me had been held in suspended animation, frozen in some weird danse macabre, or a game of statues-- nothing moved, nothing changed, except the fire in my head and the freely-falling bottoming out that I could only watch from 30,000 feet and feel with intimate agony.

A wish. A hope. A prayer that buckled my knees and filled me with breathless wonder. A desperately needed lesson in compassion and love from a friend who knew my heart and cherished my soul (even when I could only find tattered bits (when I bothered to look at all)). She understood that compassion has nothing to do with healing me or changing me. It was not advice or wisdom. Comfort didn't really fit either. I was falling, and nothing she could do would stop the descent.

She didn't watch from a great and safe distance, shielding herself from the the certain wreckage I was about to cause. She didn't demand that I stop and pull myself together, nor did she coddle me and feed me the casual niceties so easily said (and so blithely become merely pleasant noise). 

All she could do was love me and wish for me a soft landing.

These days, my rough patches are not so rough. What seemed so bleak and attenuated now has softly blurred edges and rounded corners. I don't seem to cut myself on my life too often anymore. My head catches fire with stories and words rather than panic and paralysis. Still, I have my moments, and get caught off guard, not by the rawness and the nakedness, but more by despair or grief. Life changes. God, does life change! Thank God that it does, and me along with it.

But for all that it changes, for all that I have been changed, still, one of the dearest prayers I know remains: I wish for you-- for me-- for us all-- a soft landing. No matter our strength or faith or goodness or grace; for all our mended brokenness and razor-edged faults, we all fall sometimes. We all sit in the back of a taxi, hurtling off the bridge at a million miles an hour, falling into forever. 

And as we fall, as we plummet to the surety of a trap door bottom, we can still wish for a soft place to land. And in that landing, that soft and gentle landing, may we find a place to breathe, a spot of rest in the palm of God's hand.

To my dearest Kaelyn-- wishing for you the softest of places to land. xoxo

23 Elul 5773: Love

This is the part where I write some lyrical, transcendent passage about love, from the depths of my soul, the flame of my heart. This is the part where I quote some sage or poet-- some really cool and together person who has Figured It All Out and Has The Answers for the eternal and redemptive power of love. This is the part where I write soppy love songs and sonnets, make rhymes with swoon and June and moon.

This is the part where I talk about feelings.

Ugh.

Let's face it: love is hard.  It can be conditional. It is rarely eternal. It is always a risk. It is vulnerability and the chance for pain-- yours and mine both.It's not just hard; it's scary. So much so that, at some point, after enough pain, enough hurt, enough tears in the name of love, I decided I would never do that again, thank you very much. I closed myself off, sheathed myself in ice and watched.

My heart, such as it was, became a mountain of glass-- hard and smooth, with nary a foothold or crack. Nothing was getting in. Nothing was getting out. I was captive and captor both: safe, protected, inviolate.

I was lonely. Desperately lonely. I couldn't imagine being loved. Not ever. And why would anyone, when I pushed away anyone who ventured to breach my heart of glass? How could anyone, when I was so clearly unlovable and broken?

When I got sober, the people in the rooms gave me the greatest gift I'd ever been given: they loved me. Not because of, not in spite of. They just did. And they didn't want anything in return. Free and unconditional. Love. No matter how much I pushed back, they smiled, they nodded (they remembered) and told me to keep coming back. They said "We'll love you until you learn to love yourself." 

And they did. They held out their arms to shelter me and ease my pain. They let me stumble around while I learned to find my way in the dark. They showed me how to face fear and still walk forward. They taught me that I was not broken beyond repair, and that I-- even I -- could find redemption. 

Love is a gift. It can make me giddy and breathless. It can bring comfort and offer hope. It is shelter and strength and redeeming. It is holy-- the holiest act of all: it is me, standing before you, giving you the power to hurt me (and doing it anyway). 

I've been going around and around, trying to come up with that quintessential something-or-other that will tie this all up in a perfect and pretty bow. I can't. As much as love is a holy gift, a sacred act, it is also messy and uneven, a rocky path that twists and turns and veers into unknown waters. There ain't no guarantees. 

And yet-- you do it anyway. 

You love. And with that simple and brave and holy act, you find healing and grace.

Once more, with feeling

There was a time, not so long ago (and forever ago, both at once), that I swore I could not feel. Did not feel.  

There was a time, not so long ago (and forever ago, both at once) that my feelings ran in a straight line between "fine" and "tired."

There was a time, not so long ago (and forever ago, both at once) that I believed my emotions were so powerful, if I acknowledged them, if I allowed them expression, they would be so powerful they would destroy me. I saw them as Leviathan, a maelstrom of churning, burning energy, an endless and infinite whirlpool that would suck me down and swallow me whole. I invested in them all the power and capriciousness of an avenging god, who only waited in the shadows to strike me down and smite me dead.

Talk about shut down! It took me years to admit that "tired" is not an emotion. It took me even more time to admit that I might have to actually learn how to feel something. Anything. As numb as I was, that gaping hole inside-- the one that tried to keep God and the world out, and me trapped in a tiny universe of one, the one that housed my self-loathing and self doubt, the one that kept me enraptured with self-destruction and addiction to more, that blanketed me with isolation and whispered, from under rocks and dark corners that I might as well drink, because alcohol smudged the lines of pain and left in its wake the slow burn of abject surrender-- that hole was leaking my stiff control into the real world and I hust couldn't do it anymore. I couldn't even stay numb.

I had had glimpses of real love, even amidst the pain. I had allowed myself a few moments to hope that it could be-- would be-- better. And in my hope, the gods did not strike me down for my presumption. And thus began my quest: to learn how to feel, how to be present and sit comfortably in my own skin. I approached this much like I approach a still pond on a hot summer day: toe outstretched, barely skimming the surface, delicately testing the waters. I splashed in the shallow end for a while, water to my ankles, getting acclimated, getting wet, venturing out in a widening circle, slowly, hesitantly, depending upon my level of bravery on at any given moment.

And so I learned. Slowly. Hesitantly. I learned. Mostly. I get happy and sad and mad and glad-- the basics, so I've discovered. And I get wistful and frustrated and bored and joyful and distracted and a thousand other things. Sometimes singly, sometimes in weird pastiches that cycle a hundred feelings in an instant, leaving me breathless. I get to feel all that stuff, every day. I stuck my toe in that dark and murky pool, eyes screwed shut, until I could bear to leap. And I leaped. And I was not devoured.

So why is it, so many years later, that just when I think my head Is just above water, that my toes have finally found something solid upon which to stand, everything seems to have shifted, and that solid ground Is nothing more than quicksand, sucking me under?

When the hell did that happen?

I swear to God—I am a strong and capable woman. I am successful, frighteningly intelligent, witty as hell. Why do I suddenly feel as if I’m mired in a bog? The worst part—I can see myself, holding the compass, and the road map,  clearly outlined with “Here lie dragons marked in glitter paint and arrows. I am holding the damned instruction manual in my hands. I know I have all the tools, right there at my fingertips, and yet I seem so incapable of navigating my way through my life.

I know a lot of things, actually. I know that this, too, shall pass. I know that God is with me, always. That my only job, really, is to love my son and help him find his own path. I know that I have been whole, and sometimes feel broken. I know that I have been caught, redeemed, loved and now feel lost. I know I still stutter and stumble and avoid the phrases “I don’t know” and “I need help.”

I know that the longest journey I’ve ever had to make is the one from my head to my heart. It seems like an endless journey through a trackless and lonely desert.

I’ve been here before, In a thousand different iterations, I have stood in this spot, lost and lonely and afraid. And I am tired of this introspection. Tired of this interminable quest to figure out what the hell is going on in my life, how I can feel happy in my life, where is God in my life, on and on, ad nauseum. At some point, it becomes self-indulgent and I come off as a pampered prima dona (feel free tp protest at this point, that nothing I say could be further from the truth). I am so tired of feeling like a tightly wound spring. I don’t know how to change this, so I avoid it and go numb. I disconnect: one more piece of pain that I have to confront, and I just can’t do it. Not today. I can only pretend to be brave for so long.

I hate having to admit this. I am to old to dance with these ghosts again, too old for this bout of existential angst and self-doubt. I want to do it differently, to fix it, and it feels as if I have slammed into a mountain of glass. I can’t find a handhold, my feet slip and slide out from under me, leaving me prostrate and bruised.

But here’s the difference, all impotence aside, all that quivery, fearful drowning-while-immobile, breathless and clueless and broken-- I know one more thing: in the face of all this, act.

And so I do. In fits and starts, sometimes with feet dragging, I act. I move. And then, I dive. Dive inward , to find God and grace. Leap upward, light the torch, search for a hand to hold in the darkness. I ask for help to find a soft spot upon which to land. How much more miraculous, more holy can it get? How astounding, that in the space between breaths, I find peace and the world changes. This is all holy ground. It is measured in the space between you and me. It’s all there: the sacred, the holy, surrounding us, connecting us, keeping us whole, Keeping me whole.

If I can just commit, just trust, just forgive, just love, then I would know I was in the presence of God.

Life is not what I expected. Life is. That’s the deal. It’s bumpy and messy and scary and happy and joyous and perplexing, in infinite variety and subtlety. And most of all: changing. I get to participate in that. I get to do it well and fuck it up, find moments of grace and spar with demons of my own devising. In the midst of pain or doubt or joy or hope, it is not so dark: I am not so alone, as long as I put one foot in front of the other. I get to find God, every day. I can be made whole, every day. I can be healed, every day. None of this comes naturally to me. It is still easier, at times, to disconnect than to willingly open up my heart. But I have known God’s grace, and I have felt joy and love, and so I struggle gladly to be human, every day.

God is here, in this place, with me, and I---

Today I know it.