pressing

This has been a week full of work, meetings, good conversations, visiting friends who are sick, and wonderful weather.

I woke up this morning an hour before my alarm clock, with my To Do list pressing onto my chest, my neck, my forehead.

Thoughts on lamentations, on exile, on remembrance, on Sabbath, have been beginning to form in my moments of reflection this week past. While great writing may eventually flow from these thoughts, for now, I have found a new aspiration of sorts: to live my life in such a way that my souls is happy.

Yes this seems like a terrible cliché.

But I know people, and perhaps you do too, who very simply glow. The ways they have found and chosen to work, to rest, to challenge themselves and engage in the world, are true. They are alive.

I am not there yet. To wake up with anxiety. To feel overwhelmed by the trivialities of the day. To want to apologize for all that is wrong in the world, without being ready to take action to change it. To see the beauty of the sunrise, and yet still spend the day inside. To want so much and yet still feel so stuck. This is where I still am.

Last week I started my Saturday with a poetry post. It felt good, true, alive. And so this week I present you with two of my favorites.

medium

It begins with my chin, my belly and my upper arms.

That which did not used to be there.

I go to the mall to try on clothes for work. First size 10. Then 12, and sometimes 14.

In college it was a 6, sometimes an 8 for comfort.

In high school it was 4 and 6.

In junior high I would write my twice daily weight in the margins of journal. 98 lbs., 96, 94, 92, 90, 89 ½, 88, 88 ½ (I want to die) 88 lbs. I was, very simply, anorexic. Bulimic. An alcoholic. Depressed.

And now I am medium.

I am not well, I am not in crisis.

I took double dessert Monday night and no dessert tonight, I woke up yesterday morning and sat in meditation; I woke up this morning and simply sat.

This is what I did not every want to be. Mediocre. Ordinary. Medium. Bothered by the concrete.

And yet. I am alive, I am learning, I am growing. Today I walked to a park and stared at the ocean, surrounded by three beautiful women who are medium like me.

On age, wine, a nun’s cell, and what is it to leave

I am writing this post from a nun’s cell at the Mary and Joseph Retreat center just south of Los Angeles. There is a bed, a desk, a wardrobe, a sink, a night table and a lamp. I have also had several glasses of wine, from various bottles, all of them an unchilled white.

I have spent the last hour or so in conversation with four ministers, all of who are under 40, perhaps even under 35. This is an anomaly for me as a professional. In my Tuesday morning staff meetings I am joined by a woman in her late 40’s, two women in their 50’s, another in her 60’s and one in her 80’s. I am 24 and a Director of Religious Education.

After discussing veganism and radical culture and the pros and cons of having a pulpit to literally preach form (as well as the elephant in the room), I found myself discussing age, and how I make it a problem. Initially I thought the church would accuse me of my youth, and while that has happened from time to time, it is more a problem of me thinking I am not capable, with my shield of incompetence being my age.

What is it that makes us feel fraudulent?

Is it our age, our experience, our chosen path, our peers, our profession, our dreams – as we have lived or denied them?

I haven’t smoked a cigarette since Sunday evening, I haven’t watched TV since Sunday night. I have been eating yogurt and ice cream but not eggs or meat. For two days I have awaken to clouds and a light rain. I have used the internet once since Monday morning (today is Wednesday night) and I will not use it again until tomorrow night. Those around me remind me of my uncle, my mother, my middle school crush. The clock on my computer is stuck in a time zone that keeps this reality in the past.

What is it to leave the world in which we live?

What is it to tomorrow, leave here?

On my way to…

Later this morning I head off to Palos Verdes, California for the Winter Retreat of the Unitarian Universalist Ministers Association (UUMA) and the Liberal Religious Educators Association (LREDA) of the Pacific Southwest District (PSWD). (I included all those lengthy titles and their acronyms to give you a flavor of the world I work in.)

The program topic for the retreat is trauma response, an area where I am always glad to gain more resources and knowledge. And while it will be nice to have the opportunity to process this topic within the space of a retreat center and its gardens, I find myself wondering – trauma response? What kind of a retreat does that make for?

Leading up to this trip I have been thinking some about work, and how we care for ourselves during times of rest. I work in a church and am strongly considering entering the ministry some years down the road. Several years ago a good friends mother described the ministry as something you do when only after you have tried to answer every other calling since in ministry those you serve will devour your soul. While this may be an extreme way of framing the work of ministry, it highlights the reality that those working in helping professions run the risk of burn out.

For me the tendency for my job to come home from work with me, the possibility of getting late night phone calls from families, or urgent emails from volunteers, is compounded by own tendency to form an addictive, or at least dangerously habituated, relationship to nearly everything I do. Over the last eleven years or so this has manifested in my relationship to food, drugs and alcohol, pain, zombie esque TV watching, reading and rereading mediocre historical fiction novels, and yes, work. (And J. just pointed out that I am blogging when I am supposed to be getting on a plane, so perhaps we should add that to the list.)

Okay, so I have to stop blogging, pack, pay my rent and go to the airport so I can restore my spirit and learn about trauma. Monday is my day off. Usually I sleep in, waste time and go on a hike, so this rushing to work to relax feels a little odd in the rhythm of my week.

I don’t have easy answers about work, over work, burnout, rest and rejuvenation. But I think it is something we should all think about – as part of living fully, authentically, and sustainably. My minister told me earlier this month that ministry isn’t being successful, it is being faithful. I wonder what I and those around me are being faithful to in the work that we chose to do, the people we chose to serve, and through the ways that we learn to minister to our own needs, dreams, desires and ambitions.

In Melting Snow

Last night it snowed. I live in Tucson, Arizona, so snow is a bit of phenomenon. While walking to a restaurant yesterday you could hear people laughing with delight, and see children writing their names in the snow on the ground, next to saguaros and prickly pears sleeping under this most unusual blanket.

Today, of course the snow has been cleared away in a bath of sunlight. Mondays are my day off, and I thought, why not take this most beautiful day to start a blog.

I have been toying with the idea of starting a blog for a while, partly inspired by the writings of an old friend, petitpoussin. My ambivalence about a blog has been much like my ambivalence about a tattoo. What will I get, where will it go, what will it mean?

Like many people I have an old relationship with writing. As a teenager with mental illness writing was in many ways my salvation. And I was good, though of course with that lovely disclaimer of, “for her age.” As I grew up and learned to live with my depression I stopped writing. I didn’t know what to say when the genre of confessional no longer seemed to be my only identity. I became a bit of an intellectual, a bit of an activist, and a bit scared to try to know myself in that intimate fashion that comes from being a writer.

But here I am, starting a blog. There will of course be the requisite posts on my life, politics, feminism, poetry, and that which makes me incredibly angry. I hope to also link to and post about what is new in progressive religion. In my work as a Director of Religious Education with children and youth I see how central spirituality is to the human experience, how important it is for us to explore our faith development, and how hard it is for us to articulate where we are on our own paths, and where those paths fall in relationship to religious tradtion.

And thus my blog title – Ranting and Rejoicing. Cause while there is so much that is painful, hurtful, and just plain wrong in our world, there is also, beauty, love, and those moments of wonder that help us truly feel alive.