Value

Profanity

"Every human being is a puzzle of need. You must become the missing piece and they will tell you anything" -from the film, Red Sparrow

“All the four letter words.”  I threw my hand in the air for effect.  The phrase was offered in conclusion to a painful story, veiled for younger ears in the room.
“Are four letter words bad, Mom?” my old soul of an eight-year-old asks in response.
It's Hallmark material as he continues.
“Isn’t love a four letter word?”
One chokes up at this moment, the interjection is so poignant: from the mouths of babes they say.

He comes over to sit with me in the chair and I wonder out loud what other quadruplets we can dream up.  Together we make a mental list.  I’m grateful to be drawn back to the present.  He knows my attention is undivided and we continue an eager search.

Love, hope, safe, good, home, name, know, seen, give, gift, true, eyes, nose, toes, hand, neck, bike, walk, food, stay.

We call them out slowly as they come to mind (there’s a few more here) and then he says,
“Want”
I’m proud of this, knowing desire is a tender thing to name. 
“Yes, want is a good word,” I reply.  
He quips back,

“need”

This stops me in my tracks and now the tears that any parent might have felt at the first injunction are behind the doors of my eyes.  My throat constricts and my heart beats with fear.

“Need?  Yeah, you’re right… need is a good word.  I wouldn’t have thought of that.”

He lingers a moment, attuned to the truth he has brought my thoughts, then with a quick side hug bounces off to go play.  His prophetic voice is dialed in, swift and piercing, and he knows it.  I can’t help but enjoy the glimpse of a hidden smirk as he walks away.

I have work to do.  Need is a good word.  Need is a good word?  Tears are so common on my face they’re like condensation.  The heat of my heart’s shame sweats and I am easily undone.

I know I’ve got needs, but often felt the terror of not being able to hold in the crazy and watched it puddle or ooze around me like a plutonium leak at worst or incontinence at best.  I learned very early on needs were not things I was allowed or supposed to have and at six weeks of age woke up with dry diapers, earning the champion title at four of ‘iron bladder’ for being able to last an eight-hour car ride with no pit stops.  Winning the endurance race of self-restraint was key to my acceptance.

As I’ve grown older, my defenses worn down, I’ve witnessed moments outside my body where I lose cover.  I’m exposed on accident, the sound and scent ripples across the room and I see faces watch like I just dropped an f-bomb or turd on the floor.  No one knows what to do with me, but they all want to do something, straightening up to their polished adult selves to reach down with pity or contempt on my fluid state.  Ready with their ideas of condescension, mop buckets, or quarantine.  Often saying, “these are the things you need:”

Jesus, discipline, advice, guidance, repentance, forgiveness, guilt, and supervision

This has made it very difficult for me to discern the relationship between what belongs to me and what doesn’t.  I’m used to receiving things I don’t need, and not even possessing the name of what I do.  It makes living tricky.  I have long worried what I will eat, wear, and what’s happening tomorrow because my real needs have been buried beneath piles of someone else’s wants.

Now this isn’t saying my needs are paramount.  They just need names and life and air and occasionally, words.  They need to know which people should remain strangers to certain parts of them, and who to be introduced as friends.  They need to know they are good.

Here’s the deal.  I’ve done a lot of work.  I’m comfortable with sensations of loss and desire, close cousins of younger needier counterparts.  If you cut me, I will bleed, just like anybody else.  But unlike most, I know, and love, the parts of my story and body that live with permanent loss and longing, including my needs.  I have even gone so far as to call them friends.

Because, I have learned what I need, where I should not look, if I should look at all, and what should be expected of others and myself, which is often not what can be expected of myself and others.

My neediness tends the space in between as a question, keeping it open and curious.

I’ve learned to meet needs with my face.  Sometimes with my words (knowing I would very much like to meet them with my words), accepting that silence and eyes are often best.  Learning my silence and eyes need to find words elsewhere to say, see, or read, so that I can continue to know what my face needs to bring.

I have named my needs and chosen to let them be needed right now.  They have met me.  We have met each other.

There are things I need, people I need, space I need, money I need, love I need, rest I need.

Many things I need, that I do not have.

I am aware of all of it.  They have voices and places that live in my body and soul and mind.

It is a sixth sense I did not choose.  Need is a four letter word.  Something that comes from nothing.  It can survive without hope and lead you to beauty or terror.  It came from a place that survived without hope and found both beauty and terror.

A lot of needs have only one answer.  Hunger, food.  Thirst, drink.  Tired, rest.

Some have complex answers.  Starvation, Dehydration, Burnout, Trauma.  Answer too much too quickly and it could kill you.

Needs easily beget confusion.  Need and chaos often share a home.  So we flush the toilet, wash dishes, change diapers, and take out the trash.  Or pick up for company and actually fold the laundry.  It gets overwhelming, and somewhere in the midst of life it’s easy to think that once we understand needs versus wants we begin to think we must find the answer to what we know we need.  Without it, we can think we won’t (and we might not) survive.

But, becoming a person aware of your need without seeking resolution is actually a place of immense power.

It is also deeply painful. 

Need is awareness, Need is sight, Need is power, Need is embodiment, Need is hope.  Need is welcome.   Need is connection.

It is like the ocean tides, a saltwater conductor of movement, ever meeting and never met.

This baby needs a name, this story needs a home, this heart needs love, this question needs space, this person needs silence, they only need a face.

My needs know things.  They lead me to places and take tender care of curiosity better than fulfillment or answers ever will.

Need is a good word.

"It's a beautiful day" -Beautiful Day, U2

Important

    Where can you trace stories back to hope?  What can you make endings of?

I played by the graveside.

Mildly hushed for being a distraction to the service.  I didn’t mind, but I was bored.  So I picked pieces of grass and laid them on the stones nearby by and traced lots of names with my fingers.

Now I know.

All those little children, in the chained off section of the cemetery...they’d like that best.  A four year old making a pile of grass on the headstones.  Finding a way to play through a funeral service and wondering why nobody was paying attention to me.  It makes me smile.  If there is life after death I think they smiled too.  At having their names touched by the hands of a child baptizing ashes with torn bits of the world around them.  The sun was too hot and at some point I moved to the shade of the lone tree outside the perimeter of the infant section. 

I wonder now.

Why were the headstones smaller?  Why I dreamed the night before he died of all the things that happened.  When I woke up in the red tent instead of the green one and knew it was true.  The night before I had called my father by his name, because he hadn’t yet heard my mother.  It sounds almost the same as “dad”.  Mildly chided for the disrespect but I didn’t mind.  We were yelling, my mother and I, and it was important.

I know now.

24 years forward, I’ve a child the age of this memory.  We’re going camping today.  He calls me and his dad by our names sometimes and plays thoughtfully in the dirt.  Still often mildly chided for various things as four year olds are.  He loves to capture attention and tell us about his dreams.  I’m older and wiser and tired and I’ve changed my name.  I know death comes in more than a grave and always wish I dreamed the night before to make waking up the next day easier.  Sometimes I wonder if my whole life is just something born too early.  Sensitivity like pale skin where anybody can see my insides.

So much is muddy between then and now.  So much is senseless, inexplicable, meaningless, and heartbreaking.  And you ought to be silenced if you think otherwise.  As Richard Rohr says, “Higher stages of consciousness always empathetically include the lower, or they are not higher stages!”  Stop trying to make sense of things for a bit. It’s better for us all that way. 

But, this very little brother of mine gave me something I do not think I ever knew until just this moment that I have needed to stay.

Grief.

The way (gift?) of it, that comes back around, that never goes away, that you awaken to, that you lay to rest.  A name on a stone in the grass.  Pain in the wilderness, a flight for life, birth, 90 minutes of a beating heart, and waking up the next day.  It is a part of living in this world, the saltwater pool of memory.  A language we all learn without words and then find a way to speak.

I have to finish packing now.  We’ve got a red trailer and we’re going to set up a green tent.  The top is open to the stars and we’ll be far enough out into the dark that light pollution won’t block the view.  And as we look up I think we’ll all listen for stories of when we were younger, though the endings we dreamed may be farther off than the mourning.

We will be imagining, my children and I.

And that is important.