Notes

This is an epistolary piece for the third week of advent.

Take a few slow breaths.
Allow your soul a minute to catch up to your body.

There’s a vulnerability to your face.  It matches the exhaustion of your life.  Have you ever wondered if those dark circles are there because you never stop seeing?  Even your dreams prevent respite from an awareness that has cost so much.
Your heart beats to a rhythm of not enough, not enough, not enough, and you’re searching for a new song.
Mostly it’s confusing, oftentimes frustrating.  To be told you just have to choose when you never had a choice.
That it’s a fight, when you can’t conflict.
It’s there all along and your eyes just don’t notice or your mind won’t stop.

How can you miss something you’ve lost everything to find?
Let me tell you what’s true, about me.
You know my sister, sorrow, well.  Everyone meets her first.  She’s not a secretary granting access to presence, she is a shield to the sacrament of hope.
Too many people with glasses half full want to water me down.  I like the empty ones.  The deep wells with tall orders; willing to risk the fragility of desire.
The ones who will walk by a thousand shrubs in scorched places and not pretend they’re aflame.  Who wait for the spontaneity of the senses and don’t fake a climax.
My sister walks with them through the waves of grief and longing.
Sometimes they stay, she is more familiar than I; I push the expectant into deliverance.
This is going to be a transition.

Take another slow breath.

I am not a possession.  You will never have me.
I can be noticed in mundane places, but I think that perception arose from the fear of too much—it pulses like a bass line that calls out the primal: too much, too much, too much.
You know only the deep breaths make love and bring you into the cadence of passion.
These empowered glimpses whisper eternity's secret, with visions that invite a long, slow dance in the desert.  I am not a mirage.
I’m ready to tell you today what you’ve waited a lifetime to hear.
These wild beliefs, expansive hopes, and great expectations are real.
I do exist.
I’m in those places you have never been, but known before.
I will always call you by your real name.
And you know something.
You don’t ever need to see, have, hold, fight, choose, present, conform, or offer anything to experience me.  Otherwise I wouldn’t be free.
And I am free.

There’s only one thing you need to know.  It’s the melody I sing through time into your measures of not enough and too muchness.

I see you.  I see you.  I see you.

Always.

~Joy

"You can feel it in the air," -Of The Night, Bastille

The Way

"See the line where the sky meets the sea? It calls me." -How far I'll go
(Song by Lin-Manuel Miranda, from the film Moana)

There I was, face down on the carpet.  They say that when your heart breaks, it shatters into a million pieces and that’s the start of grief.

I say it feels more like drowning.  Held down by a force where you can’t get up but you can move.  Submerged with the weight of feeling.  Your mind will fragment and each piece, big or small, creates a new surface area for the aching to press in and swallow you whole. 

It also feels like fire.  Every nerve of your skin ablaze, and while the parts of you that broke are still inside, you want more than anything to unzip your body and step out.  To get away from the intensity and steal the oxygen back from the torch that is now your soul.

See, if you are fragile, like any human is, even if they don’t know it.  Falling apart means you can put things back together.  You might have to hunt around for a few shards, or you could call it good and mend with some gaps, wounds for safekeeping. 

Fire and water give no options.  Ashes don’t reassemble and liquid never fully leaves the lungs.

There’s a drop, a sensation of falling, but would that I knew the mercy of ruins.  Instead of all my strength and substance suffocated and disintegrated.

That’s what grief is like to me.  It is a guest that stays too long and leaves only when it has worn you down.  Allowing you to live petrified of its unexpected return.  It doesn’t respect boundaries and thanks will never make it stop.

I remember every fiber of that carpet on my bedroom floor.  The moments after a message sparked by a question I was curious enough to ask.  The letters told me I was unwanted, unworthy, and marked rejection on my back. 

As I sit here, I actually can’t remember how many years ago it was.  Because that’s what grief does.  All of a sudden there is no longer a before and after.  Every memory suffices as confirmation or mockery of reality.  You will wake up countless mornings praying it was just a bad dream, only to get up and face the heat fully aware that it will win by crushing your heart a little bit more, again.

There are so many forms of pathways created by the sorrow we bear.  Sometimes I feel ashamed of voicing my pain.  It is of a different kind.  I have not known death of a loved one, loss of a baby, or physical sickness.  But all of our heart breakings connect us to each other, and while some may be deeper and fiercer than any we have seen, each loss informs the shape of a peace we are looking for.  This is the way.  I call it: The Empath.  And even if restoration awaits me within the span of this life, I will not leave.  I interpret it as calling to stay.  I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness.

I’ve been imagining a road as I wander and try to find my way home.  In all the shapes grief may take, we seek the care of a thoroughfare; but the way is so narrow and for some, the journey will last until eternity. 

In the story of the prodigal, the elder brother stays home and the younger one leaves.  When the wanderer decides to return, his father runs to meet him.  It sticks in my throat when I try to say I’m lost and need a welcome because in my identifiers, the father is not good, my older efforts were not enough and the youngest was cast out in their pursuit of life, desire, adventure, beyond.  This will get you into trouble and death will have its way.

Until Sunday, and Advent changes course.

I hear words from a mother of faith with a brilliant imagination. 

She invites me into the role of the father. The one by the road, watching, waiting.  I go home and still mourn the lonely prodigal on a very long route alone, how can it be good father when the lost are out there?  Even if I choose to stay.

I wait.  Sister comes the next day.  We know many different griefs together.  At least I won’t walk alone this week.

We go see the latest Disney film, Moana.  There is a magic deeper still and I remember the beginning of my story.

The empath is not a road.  It is the ocean.  Where the breakers push you out past isolated foundations and margins of grief the inhabitants are afraid to recall.  There is the drowning and fire, but then you surface in a world without borders made of sun and water.  Darkness comes but the flames within you are flung across the night sky.  A spangled record of the wonders of your heart to show you where you have come from and guide you to where you wish to be.  With only naming for craft you walk on the waves and know this brokenness is more than enough of a vessel to carry you home.  The daughter becomes what the father could not.  When she is the rescuer and not the rescued, evil is not destroyed; it is brought to peace.  She is restorer of hearts and healer of worlds.  In this wild, where waters collide with the presence of the sun, you know your way only by dead reckoning.  Following a horizon that speaks to the freedom your insatiable heart longs for; life without boundaries, desire without shame, love without fear.   

This is the empath.  You know it.  You must trust your deaths to pregnant stars to find it.

Oceans don’t have roads.

"We know the way" (Song by Lin-Manuel Miranda, from the film Moana)

Advent

The first candle symbolizes the light of the hope of the prophets.

Advent is finally here, and I know this year will be significant but not yet in what way.  As I contemplate another foray into hope I name the longings of my heart alongside my fear of disappointment. 

I’ve got big and beautiful plans that need to start in small and subtle ways.  I’m content with waiting for the momentum to build.  Or so I think.

I’m unafraid of evil.  But naïve to my terror of good.

We go to get our Christmas tree earlier this year than any other year.  We decorated the house before Thanksgiving, realizing too late that all the contents of our boxes were filled with savage memories.  I could not deck the halls with this. 

We put most things away, shifted others, and bought (for the first time) decorations that reflected our place in life.  The kids chose items and after the new was raised in place of the old I noticed that it was white instead of red.  Isaiah 1:18 becomes more playful than admonitory.

The outline of the mountains takes my breath away, as ever.  We witness it for half a mile before turning to the farm where we will find our tree.  Winter is so beautiful here.  I love that I live in a place where the harshest, darkest season of the year will stun you with awe.  The advent is palpable.  When will it snow, where will it spring?

The tree we find is noble and the deepest hue of green.  We drive away into darkness and I feel droplets falling hot on my hand and cold strands on my cheeks.  I will weep this advent season.  I have decided to welcome it.  There is nothing lukewarm in my world.  This is our second Christmas here following the three hardest years of our lives.  The inkling of hope returns and I feel the haunt of peace creep onto my shoulders.  Despite my best intentions not to be fooled by goodness again, it permeates the stress and I am defenseless.  To conceive by the Holy Spirit demands an awareness that is terrible to beheld.

            full of grace,

What I long for more than ever this advent is incarnation.  Would that my mind and spirit would inhabit my body.  So far hope has only signified the awareness of the disconnect.  The powerlessness of my desire feels more reality than falsehood and I’m tired of waiting for my own arrival.

What faith does it take for word to become flesh and spirit to enter body?  This candle will burn out before the others are lit.

            pray for us sinners,

Sometimes I think I’ve given up.  Trinkets and remnants of broken company I kept in my closet as tokens of hope were removed.  Several necklaces, a blanket, books, and dishes.  Carefully I place them in a box to give away.  Loss upon loss.  Foolish enough to think I could sanctify talismans of rejection.

Advent has to surprise me.

            Hail Mary,

Friend, knowing and unaware, made a rosary and hands it to me next day.  “I know what it is to know God and not prayer.  May this be your road out of the wilderness.” 

So I climb beads searching for home.  Surprised that letting go of hope brought recompense.

            Jesus.

I decide to learn the joyful mysteries first.  I think I’ll be here awhile.  The series of Our Father’s and Hail Mary’s have given my orphaned soul, parents; my exiled heart, companions.

            Holy Mary, Mother of God.

We bring the tree home and set it up with only lights.  They dim and fade in cadence with the newfangled gadget husband found.  Could there be more magic?

            Blessed art thou among women,

The four children snuggle close.  We decide it is time.  There is a song on an album reserved for Christmas eve, but the moment is now.

            and blessed is the fruit of thy womb,

The familiar and sacred carol fills the room.  Yet I am startled.  The lyrics are that of the only prayer I have offered in a year over the past weeks.  It is the Ave where I am learning to walk the lonely journey both as mother and child.

Our Lord is with thee.

I close my eyes and the twinkling form of the tree seals itself for a moment inside the dark of my lids.  The sound of only voices crescendo in the melody that I have yet to determine is the manifestation of a sunrise or set; were we to hear instead of see.

            now and at the hour of our death.

My baby squirms in my lap.  Hot and cold mingle together on my face again and I look to her standing, eyes level.  The chorus has mounted to utter the last word and I surrender to its ascent.  Littlest sees me with knowing and leans in.  She waits.  Kissing my lips on the final Amen.

Who knew resurrection would begin with the caress of tears?

Hail Mary, full of grace.  Our Lord is with thee.  Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.  Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death.  Amen.