Beyond

"You know who you are." -from the film Moana, lyrics by Opetaia Foa'i and Lin-Manuel Miranda

You told me not to post any pictures, because it would make you upset.  I should have realized then, that you were not my friend.  And I wish I'd known later, when you said as much out loud, that it didn't make me any less yours.  Fidelity is the invisible sister to betrayal.

I think I understand now what horizons tell you and why the image is haunting.  They whisper a secret you long to hear but have never stepped out of the boat to discover.  There's too much space and not enough boundaries.

I know the feeling.  When I was a little girl, I used to be frightened by photos of stars taken from outside the earth.  It was as if the atmosphere of my heart was uncovered and I didn't know if I would survive without the pressure.  These weightless glimpses offered euphoria borderline to fear and I couldn't decipher which to believe.

It is odd, one needs a unknown strength to hold infinite space where there is not even breath between us.  What happened is, but might not, matter as we witness the light of the other piercing a void of darkness.

Nothing can separate us; it does, and yet revolution continues in an empyreal system.  Another time around the sun may allow enough breaking of the dawn to crack stone; making belief where there is room.  Here is more space at a broken table than the one you continue to clear and set.  It is not the people that you believe are unhealthy, but what you're consuming.  Making rules to guard eventualities of heartache or harm all the while denying your desire to live.  You said you'd grown up, but don't you know an aging star eventually collapses inward?  The light you're so desperate to give will eventually swallow you whole, as you stay in a place of security where even the photograph of a dream is too much to look upon.  

What if I told you I found what you didn't know you were looking for, beyond the laws of nature we so diligently lived by?

To begin, speak your fears.  Tell the truth.  To the mirror, to your friends, to your lover, to your sisters and brothers, to your husband and your wife, perhaps even to the stranger in the street.

Some will accept.  Another will question.  Most choose unbelief and a few will receive you.  The one you least expect may reject you.  It is in that moment, as your soul falls unsupported, you will hit the ground.  Hard.  On hands and knees like a woman about to give birth.  You will push and the earth will push back.

When you collapse through the scaffolding of a tower of safety you never wanted to build, and find in the dust that it is you.  The real you is still there and the only thing that mattered and was truly alive.  Well.  Then, you let go.  And get up.  Feeling a love so big and wide your heart must keep breathing open to hold it all.  In this space your dance becomes one that is not of survival but with the others you told your self to reject.  We have learned to go barefoot amongst all the shoes that dropped and kick them off the edge of a world constructed without permission.

There's an open invitation to a place beyond belief.

"And the funny thing was that when all three finally lay together panting in the sun the girls no longer felt in the least tired or hungry or thirsty." -CS Lewis, from The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe

Belief

"I believe; help my unbelief." Mark 9:24

We sat at a coffee shop.  She didn’t believe me, but I didn’t know that as I confided what as yet is one of the most traumatic events I’ve experienced to date.  For the next several years in one another’s homes, or over another latte, she would check in on my recovery.  It was nice of her, but not kind.  Nice has no weight and needs no truth.  Kind is brave and takes courage.  I wish she knew it was safe to be ambivalent or afraid, and even more to say so.

I brought her coffee.  It was on an impulse.  We sat in her living room and I confessed what as yet is one of the hardest apologies I’ve offered to date.  For several years in one another’s homes or over a latte with someone else, I was not kind.  I wasn’t even nice.  Each word had weight and showed forth the ugly truth.  She was brave and forgave me with so much courage.  I was learning it was ok to be ambivalent and even better to say so.

In between these moments in time, I learned my heart wasn’t well.  It skips beats and adds extras to make up for gaps.  I was due any minute with my third child when the doctor gave ominous predictions, and back in the lobby I called the first friend in tears for reassurance that everything was going to be alright.  From places I’ve known in her story, this was a space of acceptance where I was held.  It was only until a few months postpartum that things began to unravel.  We are creatures of belief and unbelief desperately trying to evade the conflict.

Almost a year passed bringing me to the coffee and apology, where soon after I was weighed down with the pregnancy of my fourth.  The arrhythmia still beat like a dissonant melody testifying to the abnormalities my life was beginning to take.  Without giving too much away of a story that deserves its own song, I found myself on a hot day being driven to the hospital by none other than the second friend whom I denied.  The scenario was an exact match to one she had experienced herself where I didn’t believe her.  I had showed up, helped out, made myself available and present to all but empathy.  Amidst contractions, blacking out, and attempts at breath, she reached over to put her hand on mine.  And I wept.  It was only a few short months since I had begun a rewrite in a time of repentance and here was a space where I was loved.  We are creatures in need of belief with unhindered potential, while desperately trying to hold a grasp on reality.  

The other day husband said that empathy is the something that you must sell everything to find and in these places I was halfway through the necessary loss of possession by way of betrayal and instinctive confessions.  It is the pearl of greatest price and like the treasure hidden in a field, you must unearth and lose all to find.  A campaign against sexual assault at one of the schools we attend bears a simple message: I believe you.  That says it well.

It is a terrifying union to enter the dark space of a soul without consuming or being consumed by the other.  The places we’d rather not see are usually the ones we dismiss as specks in another because it resembles a piece from our own tree of life that fell to the ground somewhere in a garden we burned to escape long ago.

Lent is an invitation to this wilderness.  The 40 days in the desert are prerequisite to atonement and testify in the broken bread of sacrament.  Temptation is not language for enticement to indulgence; human desire to satiate pain is secondary trauma.  It is much harder to accept wounds than fallibility.  Did God actually say, ‘do you want to be healed’?

The labor of new life is not one easily endured by faint hearts.  So when I knew the day had come in a new home and a new state with friends no longer there nor close I tried not to let the cavernous presence of absence swallow me up in grief.  It has taken me four children, like Leah, to admit what this body has known all along and through the beginning waves of active contractions I finally let her cry, kneeling on white tiles in a bathroom alone.  This road to belief is so narrow.  

She told me to get out and push, I still didn’t trust her judgment or my own strength.  I was spent in every possible way and as much I wanted this day to be over, didn’t think it was time.  I felt the transition unbearable and yet somehow not powerful enough to deliver this baby into my arms, but my heart kept beating.  This memory of eternity passed between ready to push and wanting to die, over and over.  With the others I had always willed myself to stay and somehow this time I slept.  Feeling her descend, inch by inch, but retract with every effort I held awareness through fire I’d not known before.  
Push.
Forward. Back.
True. False.
Woven.  Undone.
Let it be.
I believe.  Help my unbelief.

Today I sit by myself, at home with a latte and the kind company of being human.  I am healing and ambivalent.  I even believe it to be, dare I say, beautiful.  

"Do not fear, only believe." Mark 5:36

Ashes

"Anything dead coming back to life hurts." -Toni Morrison, Beloved

   It was the first big gift to arrive.  I had registered for a blue kitchen aid on a wish list.  The $300 price tag made it an item unlikely to be fulfilled.  But one day a package showed up and I was curious, what family member had sent such extravagance?  Many people were generous and it was humbling to watch shelves fill with the everyday items ready for a newlywed life.  I reached into the box with wonder but cut my hand on an unseen protrusion.  Looking, I realized it could have been much worse.  The entire left side of the appliance was raised up in a mangled edge.  I called Macy’s again (this was the third damaged item), resealed the box and placed it back outside the door.  Although a replacement would arrive soon, I felt a sting of disappointment, muffling the frustration of receiving broken things with a joke that I had been sent a lethal weapon instead of a cookie maker.  It was Miss Scarlet with the mixer in the library!

   The item was picked up before I remembered to look at the tag and I checked my email later for a copy of the note.  To my surprise it was not sent by family, the liberal gift was from an acquaintance with no more than kindness to motivate. 

I realize now how much love I knew in obligation.

   Soon the new item arrived and I was married at home making food like I was supposed to.  The replacement never quite worked.  It spun off kilter and the lever popped off within the first few months so the speed would never slow enough to just stir, but I managed.  Made cakes and meatloafs, whipped cream and beat eggs, and created memories—I always hoped.  Family, friends, and strangers sat at the table, lent a hand, washed the bowl, and ate.  Home service in high demand.  While serotonin releases in offering help to others, there’s more ingredients to a life of the mind and beating heart than self-sacrifice.

  I’ve been making breakfast, lunch, dinner, and (sometimes) dessert everyday for a dozen years now.  I’m 27 nearing 28 so the midlife crisis came early.  Last year after the move and the fourth baby, I found a chip off the beater in the dough and stopped, looked at my hands doing work my heart was not in with half the ingredients my family can’t stomach and laid the machine to rest. 

   Even writing that sentence draws my fingers and lungs to take a deep breath.  I make everything by hand now, with film and paint and words and sometimes chocolate.

   Late February and early Lent last year a letter arrived in the mail.  Nonetheless hopeful about mail contents than I was at 19, I opened the envelope.  (By coincidence it was dated the anniversary of the day I made the hardest and best decision of my life.)  Four typed pages, double spaced, back to back, so maybe two depending on how you look at it. 

   When you learn about a food allergy, you learn to read labels.  It’s nice that a manufacturer is required to put them there.  I often do wish we all knew what came inside us and were candid enough to believe in grace and be honest.  A little leaven leavens the whole lump and it might make the difference between heaven and hell depending on which parable you get.

   Here was a nice ingredient list.  A summation of unfiltered thoughts from another made to interpret me.  Of course, since we all tell the truth no matter what we do, it said a lot more about the sender.  Yet I was grateful.  This was evidence of the consumption I’d suffered for over seven years.  Not to mention a few one liners meant to be condemnatory were actually a pat on the back.  Isn’t perception funny that way?

   But I had reached in and it slashed more than my hand.  Oddly enough though, I didn’t send it back.  The return policy is too strict.  So I kept it, like a Gollum, hidden in my garage.  When the environments meant to offer you unconditional love don’t, you live like an addict.  Cycling through the vulnerability of hope, reaching out towards acceptance only to recognize, again, the shame for ever living like you were worthy of something more than what they wanted to create.

   Finally one night, unceremoniously, I pulled the papers out again.  Re-reading each word with a hollowness I’ve come to ache that I’m capable of.  While every sentence was justifying of a professed love I knew was false all along, I made a decision to sacrifice this shred of evidentiary vindication in hopes (there it is again) for a reality that may never come.

   I tore it lengthwise and then crosswise in strips.  Found my husband and asked what we could burn it in, as we gave away our fire pit in the move, went into the kitchen to grab a lighter where he met me in the backyard with the dented bowl from the kitchen aid mixer.

  Lighting the scraps in two places we both held our breath.  Paper doesn’t like to burn completely and whatever god is up there, in myth, fable, or bible, fire lives as decider of what will and will not survive.  Husband shook the container to disperse the flame and I spoke release into the smoke for their soul and mine.

   Later on, relaying this story to confidential friends, they said that what we did next was incredibly brave.  The gift of this admonition still bewilders me.

   With the silent prayer of “please god, let it all have burned up,” we water down and sift through the ashes.

Only a small block of text survived.  The tearing and fire altered vowels and tense to read:

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doesn't matter
forgive
continue to do
His truth

A final recipe from an appliance of my internment.  It sits framed on my desk where I put my hands to this keyboard now.

As we begin Lent, we remember.  Being but dust, you must be born again from ashes.  This is a glimpse of my Cinderella. 

And writer, should you read this here is my reply: 

As I leave captivity, oh how I love you well now
   in acknowledging the not at all.
I forgive you. 
Would that you had known me,
   I never knew you.
Take this courage and be kind to yourself
I welcome you to print and burn this letter.

"They gave me the heartache and in return I gave a song. It goes on and on."
-Ed Sheeran, Save Myself
from the album, Divide