Unrefined

It feels like a long time since I had written last. How can I tell you about the in between times in a succinct way?  Life is full of in between times. Long successions of moments about which you don't have much to say.  Which isn't to say they aren't rich in meaning, or eventful, just that you haven't found the words to talk about those moments yet.

They are still resting in a nebulous glob of experience, unprocessed, unrefined into coherent thoughts.  Sometimes things are better appreciated when left unrefined. Sometimes moments feels dishonored by the words they get reduced down to. Sometimes silence is just right.  But it doesn't translate well into a blog.

I suppose it reads like apathy or abandonment or what ever silence signifies to an anonymous reader who takes some pleasure (i hope) in reading. I wonder who is reading.  Often this just feels like I am skipping stones over a vast lake. Frequently the stones don't feel like they skip very far, and they don't make very much of an impact on anything. And even more frequently I'd have you know, the stones never leave my hand.  In this span of time I have written and deleted so many posts.  It has been a study in what I want the world to know about me.  How willing I am to be vulnerable, or less than brilliant.  As it turns out, I am not very willing to be either, at least not in this medium. One never knows who is reading. And as a human being in the world, not a minister or a woman or whatever else, but just as a human, I am still experimenting with the idea of trust. As I write, I feel the gentle hope that where ever my words land, they will find a soft place to rest.

So what can I tell you about the space between those words and these. The last post and this one.  I can tell you about those moments when you feel like you are riding something bigger than you, like something big is leading, and your willingness and lightness allows you to just float with it. I can tell you about the scary and beautiful places that willingness takes you. I can tell you how it always seems to take you back into yourself, into your own yearnings and fears, and that I just lately discovered the amazing division between what life is and what I experience it as, and I am just starting to learn about the life outside of my experience. The life so big that it accommodates all experience.  And I am just starting to get in a choosing way about my experience of life. Like a lucid dream. I get to choose.  I have learned the power of intentions and how just being clear with myself about the experience I hope to have will help me to have it. I have learned how amazing my work is. I have learned that frequently my work takes place at moments outside of time and space, at thresholds, and my work is to build the doorway and offer people the opportunity to walk through. And when they choose to, it is enough to bring me to my knees with joy, with excitement. When a couple really shows up on their wedding day, looks into each others eyes and says "I do" it is a moment outside of time. It is a moment during which something unquestionable has changed and everyone in the room is different for having experienced it.  And by the end, we have all walked through together, and we are somewhere else now. I help make doorways, but I can't make anyone walk through. And many times, people aren't ready to walk through. The door stays closed.

But reader I wish you were there the moment that a little baby, during her baby blessing finds the doorway I have made for her and slips right in.  She may not know how to walk but children know how to navigate passages. They know how to chase the light until they see still brighter light. They haven't learned to be afraid of growing or feeling or living, and with such ease they move right through, into a deeper experience of life, into the blessing someone has made, into the crescent arms of whoever is nurturing and near. They know trust like I can't remember having.

I know how to make doorways, and I know how to hold the roofbeams high enough to support them and make the room wide enough and the time slow enough to let you walk through in your time. But I know well, from experience, it isn't always your time. There are many doorways I have passed by myself. Not ready and not willing is its own gift and its own blessing, especially when you just allow yourself to be that.

But lately, I have been more willing than I remember. And for a while I felt like my whole life felt like a series of doors opening to more doors never leading me to any room. Now I have found a room and from here I write to you to tell you where I have been, and unfortunately I only have these vague words to tell you.

I can tell you I have faced so many little fears, and come through to find the leash I have made for myself has become a little longer than before,  I have allowed myself to experience more of the world, farther away from the range I have known.

Do you remember the last time you were in the ocean? Do you remember feeling like you were at the mercy of it, like by its grace you lived or died? Did you feel reverence for it, and did you feel blessed when you felt the waves move gently over you, knowing they could just as easily knock you over?  Did you ever feel like the whole ocean was watching out for you, like the whole universe was making a way for you, like there was something like love in the little grains of sand that chose to stick to your legs and feet and then hide in your rolled pant legs just so they could take the ride back home with you? Did you ever feel in relationship with the world? With a pigeon as it crosses before you as you stop for its crossing, with the rain when it comes at the moment when your spirit just needs the rain to come and make everything outside moist and quiet? The whole sky makes rain for the grass to drink. The sky makes rain for my spirit to feel safe, for the sound it makes that makes me feel at home, for the gratitude I feel for being warm and dry when so much is wet and cold. Cared for by the world. What an experience. And maybe not everything is cared for, and that feels complicated and dreadful, but I know well enough to appreciate when I feel cared for and to take it in the way the roots do rain.

What else can I tell you? I can tell you how hard it is to write after not writing. I can tell you how hard it is to keep writing when I don't feel like I am saying much at all. I wonder if I have said anything that gives you pleasure. I am thinking of you now reader, reading this at the hour and minute that you are reading it, I am thinking of you and considering you and considering what we might have in common.  If I had told you these experiences? Could you have told me similar ones? I wonder, are we aligned in some way? Do I make sense to you? What do we share between us? What is at the core, what is the skeleton of our spirit that we can agree upon and then continue on to shape our meat around? What can be said that no one can deny? What unites us? Does anything reader? Tell me, where can I reach out from my self and find you reaching out from yourself?

Maybe through these simple rambling insecure notes. Maybe you have written ones like these and left them out for someone else to read and makes sense of. What is the meaning of all of this? What does it mean to seek for meaning? What is it your hoping to define? In my teenage years I had the urge to title everything I wrote "untitled" like "damn the man!, I won't have your descriptions." But I am older now and my descriptions feed and clothe and shelter me. What am I if I am not a minister? I am unemployed, and some of my biggest commitments and passions have no outlet and I am lost. I am blissfully defined. But self defined. And maybe that was what I intended from the beginning, what all my angsty poems tended toward, self definition. With me at the center of my experience, as an authority on myself. Brilliant. To think that all that angst held a deep lesson in it... the value of self creation, definition, and ultimately self acceptance.

So now I am being asked to accept my muddled self expression here, in this blog. I've no idea what I have been going on about and maybe I am ok with not knowing. Maybe I am ok with being incoherent. Maybe I am still acceptable and good, even when I can't offer precise words on a clear topic. Maybe I am still worth reading and hearing and maybe I am still valuable and worthy as I am. And if I am, then you must be too. Let's have that in common. Allow me to accept my ramblings and lay them out like dirty raw gold and I'll let you love yours, and present them to me in their jagged dirty fashion. And we can just be that unrefined thing together. A thing just fresh out of silence. Still searching for the meaning and purpose of words. Looking for a way to connect.