2012 Gratitude

Highlights of 2012 (5): What are you most grateful for this year?

I'll put down the top five things in my life/year that I'm most grateful for, in order of importance:

1. Improved communication and communion with O., particularly for the breakthrough conversations we had in mid-October than changed so much.
2. New friends and old--who would be higher on this list if it weren't for the fact that I am equally grateful for them every year. 
3. Our house, which is so much better than our 2011 dwelling and which is now occupied by only us and the bunnies.
4. Bunnies, babysitting, the other part-time job, and grad school applications: things that keep me occupied and give me a sense of purpose or accomplishment.
5. Health.

In which I give thanks and remember

For basil plants growing on my windowsills despite the cold outside;
for a well-stocked and orderly bookshelf;
for the amarillys on my counter, with four glorious red blossoms open:

I give thanks.

For summer at Berkeley four years ago,
sleeping on my friend K.'s tile floor and baking peach & plum pie;
for a midnight walk and a young stag that bounded across the sidewalk and the street,
into another garden--

For the Linguistics Institute, three weeks of glutting myself on ideas;
for dozens of papers read and learned from,
for classrooms full of linguists (students and professors)
from all over the country, gathered in one place--

For naps on the lush green lawn in the golden sun, between classes:

I give thanks.

That I can remember so clearly, that I can remember at all--

I give thanks.

For pumpkin pie and knowing how to make it, confidently;
for my mother's expertise in the kitchen
and her persistence in passing it on to me:

I give thanks.

For my own kitchen, and a house to myself,
shared with O. and the bunnies and no one else;
for O.,
for rabbits--

For friends we shared the house with
and for friendship surviving ten weeks of sharing
one bathroom and one refrigerator--

For a marriage that is so much easier and happier this Thanksgiving
than it was a year ago:

I give thanks.

For two casserole dishes of borscht in the refrigerator, and a huge pot of turkey juk,
so that I won't have to cook for days;

For Pastor T. who invited us to his Thanksgiving,
and for all the church friends there (especially the vibrant single people),
and for the scrumptious turkey and potatoes and carrots and even parsnip we ate;
for the turkey skin and bones and scraps of meat that T. did not want,
which I brought home and boiled into juk;

For the telephone that let me call my father and mother to ask for the juk recipe;
for my mother, for my father:

I give thanks.

* * *

I feel the abundance in my life today, and felt it yesterday, and will feel it tomorrow. The season is turning. It will be a strange season, but it is familiar this year. I remember the leaves changing last year, I remember the furnace we struggled to ignite. I remember learning to sleep in the same bed as O., how to regulate my body temperature so I wouldn't wake up drenched in sweat as I first did when I wore the warm pajamas I depended on during all the winters before. I remember Thanksgiving on the east coast, far from my old friends and the places I called home. Now I call this place home, too, though in my dreams I am always in California.

I remember, not so long ago, when I organized my own life without consulting anyone about my schedule. I remember feeling my life was my own. I remember watching my money carefully because there wasn't any coming in. That season has come back. Wednesday was O.'s last day of work and now we are living off of savings and my small income. Suddenly the money I bring in babysitting and working for the church really counts, and suddenly I feel so much more confident of my place in the household economy, more entitled to my opinion and my decisions. The season of confidence and independence is returning, and I am grateful (though I know something is off in my emotional logic).

Also I remember, not long ago at all, writing essays, emailing professors, impressing people. I remember understanding, teaching, explaining, leading. That season is coming back, too. I am writing my statement of purpose and remembering I've done lots of awesome things and I really am qualified, and I'm scanning and uploading my transcript and noticing with pleasure how monotonously perfect the grades are (marred only by one A-, the semester I started dating O.). I'm corresponding with my favorite professors and feeling their love. This is strange and it is familiar, and it is a promise of things to come. I do want to go to grad school. Learning is what I was made for.

The leaves have changed and they are beautiful. Soon they will fall, but when they do, I will be grateful for that beauty, too, and I will remember that the season will change again, and spring will come. It is already on its way.

For K.

Phone fragments       (135/160)

form our friendship     now
Words so freighted     a decades memories
hang from                   a bright screen
small as my palm       A pocket stone 
sings                          days gone by

Embitterment

What do you do when you're sick at home but certainly not so sick that you can't stand up and open the door, and you want to be getting things done but they aren't actually so pressing that you can't take some time off from them, and then you hear a knock on the door?

And then what do you do when, peering through the peephole, you see that the person on the other side of the door is a friend that you've heard did some terrible things this summer, which he has concealed from you and which you do not intend to bring up? What do you do when you look at your friend, and you see him through a cloud, a shifting fog, a cold mist? and when you hear his name, and the sound in your ears is accusing voices and the weeping that follows betrayal? and when he reaches out to hug you, because you are sick, and his touch feels cold because he has become a frozen wasteland to you--because of one story, because of a few minutes' telling?

But it's not because of a few minutes, not because of one story. The wasteland was revealed in that rapid parting of the clouds, in those lightning flashes that lit the barren landscape. But the transformation came day by day, in the accumulation of decisions: conscious decisions, clear decisions, irreversible decisions. The deceptions fell on the land like a million, billion snowflakes. Each lie is different, but each lie freezes in the same way.

What do you do when the friend is not the person you believed him to be? What do you do when a head-cold intersects with a cold heart? How do you thaw the tundra?

Alone

Across the miles of snow, your pain stretches out to me. You are floating in the night sky with the drifting snow, and you send out a tendril through the cold. It touches me. I wake from my slumber, look around, seek your face. But I cannot see you. Here with me is a fragment of who you are, this fragile tender shoot that has grown to transcend the distance, yet again. For we keep moving, keep uprooting ourselves. You especially, you have been replanted so many times I can't count the number of soils you have twined roots into. And how many little pieces of yourself have ripped away each time your growing plant has been transplanted?

Yet the vines connecting us never wither. Across a continent, across an ocean, we are the same. Born together, we are bound together. Now you have replanted yourself again, closer by but still hours away. Our roots don't tangle together these days; we grow in different soils and when the rain is watering me, snow is freezing you. I worry about frostbite for you, and I wish the Sun would thaw the hard ground where you are trying so desperately to grow, and encountering only ice. I don't sing to the Sun for myself anymore, to shine down on me--I sing for you, and send His rays away from myself because they need to hit you instead. I need a mirror, to reflect that warmth across the rivers and farms.

Can I be the moon, at least, to turn the light toward you? to cast pale moonbeams into the dark sky where you hang? The whirling snow will glow where the moonlight illuminates it: a hundred white dancers, stark against the black sky. You are stationary amid all the spinning, green amid all the black and white. In the wind, your leaves flutter gently, and your roots sway, naked in the winter air. Nothing holds you down, but nothing holds you up, either. Where is the Gardener, to plant you in a pot? to wrap your exposed roots in soil to protect them? to fertilizer and water you, to put you in the sun or shade, wherever you would grow best?

I am only a plant myself. I can't give you a pot, or shine on you like the Sun, or rain on you. My leaves don't reflect the light enough to even be the moon. But I will never untangle our twining vines. If a few drops of water flow down my stems to roll down to your roots, that is enough to make me glad.

Star-Gazing [Rough poem]

[There is supposed to be some indentation in this poem, but I am not in the mood to struggle with html and blogger over it. Whatever.]

I need to go out and meet
the placid stares of the frozen stars.
But each time I step into the night,
the streetlamps glare at me.

I cast my eyes earthward, seek safety in shadows,
but there the flickers of fireflies
and the flashes of photographs
and the travelers' swinging lanterns
and the swooping headlights of cars
that zoom across the world (like ungraspable ghosts,
like angels on unknowable missions)

distract me

from those distant, distinct pinpricks,
from those burning worlds whose flames rage
unseen for millions of years before
I begin to distinguish their millenarian gaze.

You, Stars, not the streetlamps, hold
my destiny, my soul's seeds.
Yet the earthly lights shout in my ears
while the heavenly lights only whisper--Why
do the constellations of my own experience
glow so gently, when every other person's lights
dazzle my eyes, blinding me
to the Stars I seek?

Open my eyes, Starlight!

Sing to me, shine on me. Turn me inside-
out, and let your brilliance drown every false flicker.
Then I'll breathe

in

the truth of my existence: Let there be

Light.

Advice [Question of the Day]

Funny how timely this question is...

A lot of people turn to me for advice. Well, they turn to me as a confidante, and they get sympathy and advice packaged together. Occasionally they also get verbally smacked, because I get upset when I think someone I love is going to do something stupid. So who are these lots of people? My sister; my almost twin (who is coming to visit me! yay!), and sometimes the third in that trio; my other self, the boys across the hall (practically brothers), the boyfriend, the gay boy who was and is my first friend here; my accountability/hiking/breakfast/MPPC buddy; and at least a couple other girl friends here at school.

I suppose I don't really know how many of them turn to me for the purpose of getting advice. But if they listen to my advice and thank me for it, I think that counts.

I give advice on boy / girl situations, on what makes a good relationship (or really, on what things I know make for a bad relationship: process of elimination...); on finding peace, on hearing from God; on what classes to take, on what major to choose, or on how to choose a major; on resolving arguments, on getting along with parents; on reading the Bible, on forming habits, on praying; on cooking; on working in a group; on books to read. I give advice about staying sane, about pausing, about looking for perspective, about stepping back. I give advice on living with pain, on letting go of guilt, on looking for joy.

And really, it's not so much advice as it is sharing my experiences. I try to tell people the reactions that I have experienced and observed so they have some more data without conducting the experiments themselves... Of course, the variables are different for everyone, but some of the conditions are invariably the same. We're all human, after all.

Is giving advice part of my job? Depends what you mean by "job." It's not part of being a student (which I suppose is my job, since it's my task right now; technically I'm even being paid for it). It's not part of being a research assistant, that's for sure, since I haven't a clue what I'm doing. Giving advice isn't in the job description for anything I'm getting paid for or graded on.

But I think the most important "job" I can do right now is being a friend. I want to be the kind of friend that you don't just watch movies with, but the kind you exchange ideas and books with. But more than that, I want to be the kind of friend who knows your life and whose life you know. And more than that: I want to be the kind of friend who knows your joys and struggles and hopes and fears... I want to be the kind of friend who can say "I see you" the way they say it in "Avatar": I see into you. I know you.

And so advice is part of my job--my calling? my place in life? my mission?

But it's certainly not the important part. The part that matters isn't the advice I give so much as the relationships that put me in situations where my advice is wanted and (I hope) useful. It's not the view I see from the mountaintop that matters, because I could see pictures of that view or an IMAX rendition of it and get the same images. What matters is the fact that I'm actually on the mountain, the journey and the destination that put me in a place to be able to see the view. It would be good to be there on the mountain even if I were blind, even if the clouds covered the landscape.

M.

Scream to me, wave your hands. Grieve out loud about the injustice of it all. You apologize for being upset and I tell you: No, you should be upset. This is wrong. They are not being fair to you, they are wronging you. This is not the way the world is supposed to be.

Stand up and reach out for me. I'll wrap my arms around your thin body and hold you tight, as you cling to me, collapsing, bent. Your head is heavy on my shoulder. You shake in my arms, in this storm of sobs. I will hold you as long as you need. . . Come, sit with me.

Tell me. Tell me your sorrow, your dreads, the grief that stalks you even in the sunshine, the fury that throws you directions you don't mean to go. You end up on unfamiliar paths, unsure of your footing. I don't know where to turn, you say. I feel so stuck. All I can do is listen, twine my fingers through your hair and hold your hand. Lean on me, cry on me, hide your face in me: I'm here with you.

I want to say I'll always be here for you, but only God can do that.

And God, where are you in this? If your eye is on the sparrow, why does the sparrow fall in the first place? What good is it to be watched by your loving eye, if your hand doesn't reach out?

Dear one, cry, it's all right. Selfish? You? We all are, I suppose, but to rage or grieve over injustice and brokenness, over betrayal of someone you love, over betrayal by the ones who are supposed to keep you safe, that is not selfishness. Grieve. Let it go. . . Release the guilt, please. It's not your fault. You're not in the wrong.

I want to rescue you but only God can do that. But I can hold you and love you and whisper truth to you as God gives it to me, and that is enough. The best I can do is enough. The best you can do is enough, I tell you, and you cry some more. Eternity is in this moment, when we cling to each other. Touch is the most fundamental language, and I am telling you: It will be all right. I am with you. I will not abandon you. You are loved. I love you. (Is this enough?)

There is hope. But how can I make you see it?

I can't. Only God can do that. But I can love you, and that is enough. By the grace of God, we are both doing enough.

Relationships are like Molecules

[because people are like atoms: you shouldn't cut them into pieces. (just kidding, that's not my rationale)]

In chemistry, there's the notion of resonance structures. The Lewis dot diagram can't actually capture a molecule's spirit, because it simplifies too much: flattens, and makes arbitrary decisions about where to put the double bond that has to take up the wandering orphan electron. Sometimes there are two or three equally good (and equally inadequate) dot diagrams of a molecule, and the molecule is said to "resonate" between those structures, because while no single one of them expresses the molecule alone, the real molecule is somewhere between all of them--not quite a sum, not quite an average.

"Resonance" arises as an artifact of having to diagram in two dimensions what lives in three dimensions; it isn't a real phenomenon in the sense that the molecule doesn't actually alternate between those structures. However, the concept that underlies it is real: that realities transcend all representations of them.

And your point is? you may be asking.

My point originated in a comment from my friend O. about being most comfortable switching at will between orthogonal tones (my phrasing, not to be blamed on O.)--from silly to serious, from flippant to enigmatic--which sparked the thought that those spontaneous switches of tone are the thing that characterize a really comfortable relationship.

See, we all have a collection of faces we can present. Reliable, intelligent, well-behaved, adventuresome, empathetic, aloof: A person who embodied one of those characteristic faces could not also wear any of the others. Like the distinct diagrams of resonance structures, they are mutually incompatible. Moreover, no single trait adequately describes a person, just as no single resonance structure accurately describes the behavior of a molecule. Like molecules, our personalities are multidimensional. Our different faces appear and disappear in the context of interactions with other people--the souls we're bonded to, the spirits we're close to.

Moreover, a real relationship has many dimensions to it. You don't just talk about class, you also talk about philosophies. You don't just talk about abstract ideas, you talk about realtime emotions. You don't just know what the other person thinks about the deep structure of life, you know about their day to day experience. All those domains flow into each other, like trees with intertwining branches, not like rooms in a house. You alternate between topics in the verbal representation of your bond (i.e., the conversation), but underlying all the words that code for concepts is the understanding that every layer of meaning is present at the same time. When my friend starts talking about the spiritual significance of Jesus's solitude, I don't assume the idea sprung into existence on its own like Athena sprouting full-grown from Zeus's head. I know there's a good chance that some emotional experience fertilized the blossoming ideas; I know the meaning my friend conveys isn't all in the words or even in the topic. It's embedded in the relationship, in the bond.

And how would I characterize that bond between good friends? It spans the levels of understanding, it resonates between them. Catch the spiritual implications of the mundane, and the concrete implications of the abstract: the conversation doesn't alternate between them as though between discrete states, but rather has all of them present at the same time, because they are all aspects of the relationship. With a friend, I am more fully myself, because together we each resonate through our whole self. And with a friend, I am more than myself, because we each resonate through each other's self. A friendship and a soul, both are more than the sum of their parts.

A relationship is about understanding, having one mind, shared thoughts and energy. It's about functioning together, as a unit. Alone we are atoms; by caring about each other, we join ourselves together into complex structures. These molecules are dynamic, shimmering; they are real, and they transcend the descriptions by which we attempt to portray them.

Dinner

My friend fed me tonight. I dropped by her room, several hours after I normally would have eaten dinner, 30 minutes before she had to leave for a meeting. Within a minute, she handed me a plate piled high with spaghetti and an amazing tomato-garlic-sausage explosion. Needless to say, it was delicious.

She sat next to me on the couch and watched me eat, as though she was doubting whether I liked the food. (I wished she wouldn't watch, though, because I was splattering tomato sauce all around my mouth as the noodles whipped around and tried to slip off the fork.) "Isn't the sausage good?" my friend asked. I told her it was delicious, that everything was delicious. "I thought it was really good sausage. I gave you a lot of it, I don't know if you want it all. But I figured since you don't buy meat,* I should feed you some."

It was a lot of meat, more than I would have served myself. But I ate it very happily, because she had given it to me, thinking of me. It felt lovely to be taken care of. I do enjoy living away from home, cooking for myself, setting my own schedule--but sometimes independence becomes empty. When you share a meal with someone, you commune on a level deeper than words. When someone voluntarily cooks for me, I know in my bones and gut: that person cares about me.

When I finished the pasta, my friend served a scoop of ice cream, swimming in homemade caramel sauce. The sugar sang in my mouth.

Sitting with my friend, letting the conversation slip by, sweetened my soul. A friendship is built on a million moments like that--just living together. Talking is good, too. But conversations are captions; the pictures are the important part.

*I love meat, but I don't buy it because the meat that my conscience finds acceptable (free-range type stuff (though the terms are so fuzzy that it's hard to know)) is not at all acceptable to my pocketbook.