Chicago.

Here we are. With you.

The fireplace is attempting to be rageful.

My heart is attempting to be restful.

You remind me, Chicago, of glittery dreams. I dreamt of them. Last night.

My brother is manlier this time o’round. Bearded and more well read than the yester year.

My sister looks the same. Lovely and pretty and smart.

I know this well because I saw her in Seattle almost every week. Hey there.

Chicago,

I don’t actually live inside you. Like an unborn baby.

No. I am not proper.

Only wanting to be.

Outside the city limits live the Smith’s.

Where we are contented by Frank Lloyd Wright’s fainted fingerprints covering our heads.

I love this home.

I sleep in a different room now, with a man, in my parent’s house.

Weird.

But good.

But missing slumber parties with my sister.

But…

Chicago, do you need me? Or my husband?

Do we need your blustering, wretched winters?

The snow has laid its claim here. I want to eat it and swim in it.

While holding my breath and closing my eyes from the snow, I wonder how to connect with those who’ve known me.

Still.

Still.

Wondering,

wondering,

how to be here.

A bear’s life interests me, currently.

Only now though.

Only now.

Boot straps are attempting to flap up, on their own. Slapping me in the shins.

Keep on. Keep on.

Chicago.

Wiggle your toosh. And I’ll wiggle mine.

Dancing with you can smooth all of my itches and angstes.

Sigh.

My back is slowly roasting into some fine meat. From the dancing blue flames.

I write this word and this word                              and that                       word.

Finding solace. For now.

Here outside of the dazzling Chicago.

Chicago.

Drawings by The Blake Wright

As I invited mercy in tonight, I decided to read through The Inner Voice of Love by Henri Nouwen. He has written very short letters to himself about loving himself–small mandates that took him years to write and much agony to embody. When I opened the book a card from my first practicum leader fell out and it all made sense. I was being held in my mess with mercy, without a doubt. Here is what she wrote, 

For moments of unhindered passion as you turn toward us.

And quoted John O’Donohue, 

May you have the wisdom to enter generously into your own unease to discover the new direction your longing wants you to take…….To come home to yourself, may all that is unforgiven in you, be released. May your fears yield their deepest tranquilities, may all that is unlived in you blossom into a future, graced with love. 

amen.

God sometimes you just don’t come through

God sometimes you just don’t come through

Do you need a woman to look after you

God sometimes you just don’t come through

You make pretty daisies pretty daisies

Love I gotta find what you’re doing about things

Here a few witches burning

Gets a little toasty here

I gotta find why you always go when the wind blows

Tell me you’re crazy maybe then I’ll understand

I found myself singing to this song a few days ago by Tori Amos. Ode to the Tori Amos days, where I’d lay on back and pretend to be the composer and singer of her music while pouncing and rolling on the piano keys as dreadful lyrics poured out of my mouth about the silence of all these years, the questioning of our crucifixions, and our mothers–oh the writhing of parental figures sung by her was the medium for identifying my feelings.

Now, as I was singing to this song, a strange undergoing occurred. Worship, veneration.

Yet, the words, hallelooojah, hosanna, or blessed be the name, did not roll off my heretical tongue.

Rather, the words, God sometimes you just don’t come through, fluidly flitted and fluttered around in my car as I steered the vehicle towards West Seattle, smiling. 

Although flitted and fluttered is not denoting the weightiness I felt in this movement as well. It was as though the implied butterflies were unlikely fierce and substantial beings. They were not as vulnerable to wind or as flighty to danger. To further this hackneyed metaphor, they enjoyed their Italian dishes and American potlucks, but also their Sambas and Waltzes. 

So, this was my worship happenstance with Tori Amos’ words over the refusal of nectar for my stomach, ironic indeed.

God just doesn’t come through sometimes though. I do not have to explain anything away or pervert something into goodness due to the absence of God and my anxiety over not knowing.

God is God. God is other than me, yet within me.

So, may God be wild and unexplainable sometimes. May my anxiety of needing a permanently fixed being who is unmoving and one dimensional (for the purpose of defining), giving me constant answers and peace, be rid of my life. Let the anxiety dissipate–to a certain extent, of course. 

While I am freeing God from my confines, I have experienced a newness that Annie Dillard observes in her book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, 

The point of the dragonfly’s terrible lip, the giant water bug, birdsong, or the beautiful dazzle and flash of sunlighted minnows, is not that it all fits together like clockwork- for it doesn’t particularly, not even inside the goldfish bowl- but that it all flows so freely wild, like the creek, that it surges in such a free, fringed tangle. Freedom is the world’s water and weather, the world’s nourishment freely given…

It is absurd to think that God can fit together on my Sunday school felt board, though I try my damnedest. It is inhumane, inducing madness, and erodes all creativity to require humanity to compile God into a soundly pat answer.

There are tangles, messes, asymmetrical compositions, undomestic expressions, madness, and unruliness within and emitting from our God.

There needs to be a divine prison break.

There needs to be a Deity Declaration of Independence. Yes, a DDI of sorts.

There needs to be an embracing of great mystery, in which complexity, ambiguity, and silence can exist without needing to declare war or embody detrimental despair.

But, hear me when I write, there are many faces of God–I am merely accounting for the new face that is granting my life freedom from my own constructs, from my own narrative imperatives that needed disruption.

Yet, while I know there are seaons we undergo in which one face of God is necessary to experience rather than another, I would again venture to say God meets us and then God does not. It is how we will be when God is seemingly unreachable or has questionable actions. How will be when our mental energies cannot conjure up a projection fitting to soothe our anxieties anymore? How will we be when we cannot seem to endure the exhaustive cycles of believing God, devastated by God, renewed faith in God, clinging anxiously to God (or rather dogma, idols, etc), then devastated once again?

Not to demean the process of faith, whereby the ebb and flow can be quite dramatic, however if this drama or God demands of you to be so certain that you too would “stone” a woman or exclude a man for his and her lusts or share the good news with hidden frantic force (since salvation is resting upon your shoulders) then I wonder how God is tethered to your narrative imperatives–are they screaming for something mechanical and predictable and safe?

I write this because I am beginning to understand God from a distance, where I can, in part, surrender to not knowing and find great joy and wonder, but also I can grimace and turn my face away as I feel the loss, the ache of what is. There is freedom for my humanity to doubt, question, and feel rage and confusion without indicting myself as faithless and guilty.

This is the faithful task, allowing the breadth of our humanity to spread across the scope of the earth in authenticity and with trembling belief that God is not demanding mere calculated obedience, nor mechanical trust that is flat and ridden with cheap, glossy rhetoric-absent of creation, of self, of other.

Rather, shatter that bowl with the aimless gold fish awaiting the most disappointing death, watch the intricate cocoon ever so slowly push out new, surprising  life, and peer into the lives that might not appear safe or sane and begin to unravel the unexpected faces of God, however present or absent–and feel how utterly, terribly glorious this Creator is.

For, God was once a fetus, once housed by a woman’s womb, once came through the dark canal of birth, once deemed worthy of the death penalty, a crimnal, yet surprised our imperatives, anxieties, and constructs with such beauty, grotesqueness, strangeness and liberation not one of us can fully grasp…how ok we actually are, how ok it is for us to question openly what we have or have not experienced.

Let God out.

Let me out. And you.

Let us flitt and flutter after a damn good meal and Samba or Waltz or Heep Hop the hell out of life. And worship a God who doesn’t come through sometimes, yet has quite possibly given Love that reaches to the inner and outer most parts of our humanity every time we breathe in.

Yes? 

Why yes, I will try.    

A performance piece I did with my friend Austin revolving around Advent, specifically concerned with waiting and our propensity for cruel religion and lack of creativity when there is delay and unfulfilled expectations.

Honey, we have been married for four months now. Here is my fact sheet on marital blisses:

I am not thorough

Jay is thorough

I pay attention to mail

Jay does not

I play my songs on the piano, repeatedly, incessantly, aggravatingly (my novice self is wearing off quickly for him)

Jay plays the harmonica insanely, beautifully, uninhibitedly (his novice self is trying to break out via noise)

I don’t cook

Jay cooks and concocts all kinds of things and creates the best hot chocolate 

I drink beer with stereotypical manliness and talk about psychology as though my life was ending

Jay drinks hot chocolate with such devotion and talks about medicated America as though she was his kid

I like to blame

Jay likes to remind me of me

I have become anxiously preoccupied

Jay has become anxiously avoidant

(huge attachment style swap)

I am restless

Jay is restlessness

I talk shit in my sleep

Jay jerks his legs wildly in his sleep

I like 2 alarms and then 10 minutes (total of 20 minutes of agony)

Jay usually is a one time and uppsey daisey kind of guy, HOWEVER lately the alarm has gone off 3-4 times, to the point of irritation. For example I will groan, “uhhhh, gaaahhhh, seriousssssly?, Jesus, Mary…gahh. it has gone off like 10 times by now…”

I exaggerate 

Jay is accurate

I love him

He loves me

I stop him to stop time for a moment

He stops me to stop time for a moment

We try to see each other as wholly other than…our mere constructs and images and ideals and demands

Wholly his and wholly mine, yet wholly free

Four months is an accomplishment, I must say. Cheers to my lover and I as we attempt to crazily fulfill this thing called marriage, no no no wait, Love.

Love.

I am humbly apart of the visual art team, facilitating a few us as we learn how to complement this already beautiful movement of music here in Seattle. If you are around, attend, it is rest for the soul.

How I wish Annie was my cousin and Justin was my big brother…but for now they collaborated on the newest album for the Twilight series. I must admit, whaaat? But, since I’m hopelessly in love with them, I respect their decision? Regardless of bad decisions, sweet turkey they did something together! Now that is a fantastic decision, deserving an exclamation  po!nt–musical phenomenon! And, if New Moon is the conduit for such things, then I may go see this film…

here’s what I could find of their song, entitled: Rosyln (not Roslyn)

(loosely in light of Melanie Klein’s work on Envy and Gratitude : )

The milk’s rivulets had gaps and refrains

My stomach had hints of pleasure

But, before my tentacles could slap

onto this sensational feeling

Vanish

A wailing full of reverberating sounds

Bursted into the stark silence of empty spaces

Alarmed by my voice, I frightfully dart 

Comfort

The warmth from her body 

Cradling my impotent frame

was not enough for the 

hunger that bellowed before the gods

Insatiable

And now enters into the looming empty spaces, 

blame

She withheld life

She repudiated the possibility of pleasure 

Ragefully traveling inward,

abstractly constructing my means

for attaining my needs

I am forced, in light of my humanity,

to erect structures, creeds, polarities

to follow and embody

Goddammit

I will be cursed till the day I die

with the flaws of her and, 

the routes of mine

Unto life, yet unto death

without bodily termination

Just the tangled messes

Circling around

Round the impressionable, unguarded rooms

I watch and often help the little people

tie. tie. Tie up the once fertile rooms

And I watch myself turn away

Finished

Her goodness is not nestled inside,

as I am held by my destructive impulses, dangling

over my unconscious pangs for Protection

Love me, protect me, please dear God see me

These being the keys for unlocking

the rooms strewn with passionate vows

Come

But do not, because once you loosen a strand

I will hang you with it

Your goodness will morph before our eyes

Defective

Let me heal me

Let me erect my vivid phantasies,

As lovers, composers, magicians call to life theirs 

But, they are groaning and pushing

their phantasies into ripened, holograms of truth 

for all to feed on

Whereas I, I stay fastened to my frustrated emptiness

Despair

Becomes me, raging haphazardly around the good

Meanwhile, I greedily embrace myself as bad,

sending myself into the forbidden circles of lust

There, the reverberation of echoes answer “yes”

You, are, alone, yes.

Dizzy

I find myself singing

“ring around the rosy pocketful of posies, ring around, ring around

Ashes. Ashes.

We all fall down”

I am down in my remains and without the pockets of posies, I say

while my fingertips gently brush past them,

a hand gently moves my face

Surrounding

Posies, upon posies whispering to me

Love is here

Love is here

Love is here

Ashes, ashes we all fall down

Together

I will be failed and I will lust, I will fail and they will lust

Yet, love is somehow finding me,

filing into the unkept rooms of secrecy and deep pain,

and slowly, very slowly filling them

Life