My ability to taste
and connect and feel deeply had been badly compromised. My faith was stilted -- it had become over time yet another way to
try and fail, rather than a respite or healing relationship.
This journey has
been about love, about worth, about God, about what it means to know him and be
loved by him in a way that grounds and reorders everything.
The skills that take
you through the first half of your life are entirely unhelpful for the second
half.
No one ever changes
until the pain level gets high enough.
That seems entirely true. The
inciting incident for life changes is almost always heartbreak -- something
becomes broken beyond repair, too heavy to carry; in the words of the recovery
movement, unmanageable.
You don't have to
damage your body and your soul and the people you love most in order to get
done what you think you have to get done.
A way to get at your
desire or dream is to answer this question: if someone gave you a completely
blank calendar and a bank account as full as you wanted, what would you do?
You can use whatever
term you want: besetting sin, shadow side, strength and weakness. The very thing that makes you you, that makes
you great, that makes you different from everyone else is also the thing that,
unchecked, will ruin you. For me, it's
lust for life. It's energy, curiosity,
hunger.
Part of being an
adult is taking responsibility for resting your body and your soul. And part of being an adult is learning to
meet your own needs, because when it comes down to it, with a few exceptions,
no one else is going to do it for you.
You can make a drug
-- a way to anesthetize yourself -- out of anything: working out,
binge-watching TV, working, having sex, shopping, volunteering, cleaning,
dieting. Any of those things can keep
you from feeling pain for a while -- that's what drugs do. And, used like a drug, over time, shopping or
TV or work or whatever will make you less and less able to connect to the
things that matter…. Most of us have a handful of these drugs, and it's
terrifying to think of living without them.
At some point, good
clean work became something else: an impossible standard to meet, a frantic way
of living, a practice of ignoring my body and my spirit in order to prove
myself as the hardest of hard workers.
When you devote
yourself to being known as the most responsible person anyone knows, more and
more people call on you to be that highly responsible person. That's how it works. So the armload of things I was carrying
became higher and higher, heavier and heavier, more and more precarious.
You can't have yes
without no. Another way to say it: if you're not careful with your yeses, you
start to say no to some very important things without even realizing it.
Over time, when you
rebuild a life that's the right size and dimension and weight, full of the
things you're called to, emptied of the rest, then you do get to live some yes
again. But for a while, no is what gets
you there.
I thought the doing
and the busyness would keep me safe.
They keep me numb. Which is not
the same as safe, which isn't even the greatest thing to aspire to.
Geri said that when
you begin to pray, pour out the vinegar first -- the acid, whatever's troubling
you, whatever hurt you, whatever is harsh and jangling your nerves or
spirit. You pour that out first -- I'm
worried about this child, or I'm hurt from this conversation. I'm lonely, I'm scared. I don't know how this thing will ever get
fixed. Pour out all the vinegar until
it's gone. Then what you find underneath
is the oil, glistening and thick: we're
going to be fine. God is real and good
and present and working.
Silence can't be
avoided if you want to be a truly connected spiritual person.
What I'm learning is
that you have to stop doing a whole lot of things to learn what it is you truly
love, who it is you really are. Many of
us go years and years without even asking these questions, because the lives
we've fallen into have told us exactly who to be and what to love and what to
give ourselves to.
This life you're
building is entirely your creation, fashioned out of your dreams and fears.
Love happens over
years, repetitive motions, staying, staying, staying. Showing up again. Coming clean again, being seen again. That's how love is built.
Present is choosing
to believe that your own life is worth investing deeply in, instead of waiting
for some rare miracle or fairy tale.
Envy can be an
extremely useful tool to demonstrate our desires, especially the ones we
haven't yet allowed ourselves to feel.
Hustle is the
opposite of heart.
What would our lives
be like if our days were studded by tiny, completely unproductive, silly,
nonstrategic, wild and beautiful five-minute breaks, reminders that our days
are for loving and learning and laughing, not for pushing and planning,
reminders that it's all about the heart, not about the hustle?
This is what our
culture wants women to be: skinny and
tired, from relentlessly shrinking and hustling.
I will practice
hospitality to my very own body -- you can rest, you can be nourished, you can
be loved.
