Echo, For I Do Not Know

Sometimes

I look at myself

And

Wonder

Where did I go?

Kitschy & Banal, Our Beloved Modern World

Jeff Koons is an artist in which I’ve wanted to hurl small, edgy pebbles at him during my undergrad education. I know slightly aggressive, however look at his infamous art and then watch an interview. Gah.

He is, well, arrogant first of all, but I suppose one must be in order to create his excessively banal works underscoring our modern world. He’s a kinda sorta cousin of the Coen Brothers (who I love), I believe. Regardless, I’ve recently arrived at a new place of appreciation for his provocations and quite obnoxious approach to the process of art-making. Thank you, I do have a rather judging heart. Heart. Smile!!!!!

Oh and yes, my pebbles are still in my now sagging pockets, quiet and sad. Maybe I will donate them to Thomas Kinkade for future usage in his depictions of cobblestone fantasies.

Elbow elbow, wink wink. Gag. Sigh and look pleasant? Then ask, “Is Thomas even an actual person?”

Moor This Vessel

my fictitiously non-descript cavity

emits

confusing tales 

void of compasses and skylines

the more told,

the more my cavity fills up

with dried and wilted

reveries and dreamscapes

describing what once 

pulsated

inside this null space

will the anchor tie itself to me?

pulling me downward

onto the dry, dusty, brightly definitive

land, vast and comprehensible

by the human eye

torrid and palpable

to my expanding pores

the dense anchor 

keeps this body

still

the enormous star

ignites the harsh contrasts

I see my veins 

through the skin

that hides my dark cavity

pulsating pools of blood

surge

through and through

I begin to speak

small locutions

and I begin to merge

with the anchor

once far from me

gripping me to the earth

now gently invades

giving me density and 

I discern 

the crooked heart saying “yes, oh yes”

the arteries indefinitely feeding my fingertips

with chronicles of touch

the tariffed tongue tasting words unknown

and the pupils empowering my retinae with staggering light 

thus, images are pouring forth

details are painted

life is given

anchor, where do you go?

how strenuous is this process

otherworldy and crude

as I land over and over in the

dry, dusty, brightly definitive

land

Loss

My newly post-teen brother on Loss, written for Wheaton College’s newspaper:

 

Mortality came as a shock to me this summer. I had returned home from the Wheaton in the Holy Land Trip that took me all the way from Israel to Rome. On my trip, I experienced people groups I had never experienced before, new foods I had never tasted before, and new languages I had never heard before. In short, it was a larger and more vibrant world than I knew before. There were many memories of life and goodness, of learning and loving, from dancing in the streets of the new city of Jerusalem to tasting Italian pasta in Rome. That was how my summer began, a beginning characterized by life, largeness and opportunity, of hope and a future.

It was after this trip that I started to experience change. First, my eldest sister got married. It was a source of joy, but also of transition as I saw the sister who I used to fight over the remote control with move off to Seattle with her husband, leaving her life in Naperville behind.

Then the transitions turned into deeper losses: A phone call from a friend a week after my sister’s wedding letting me know a close friend, Alex Heidengren, had just died at Honey Rock. I was outside in the sunlight and in the middle of a summer that was expanding my world when I got the call. I was completely shocked. I think many of us at a fundamental level don’t believe we or anyone close to us are going to die.

Then, three days later, my mom is getting rushed off to the hospital in an ambulance as the defibrillator in her heart meant to keep her alive began splintering, becoming a source of death. The doctors caught the break in time, and there was surgery to protect the heart, but it was yet another glimpse of the fragility of life around me.

At home, as my mom recovered from surgery, I would watch from our kitchen window at my dad outside working on business. It’s been a year since he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease, and I watch him fight to keep income in the house and fight not to give up hope for his body. I simply can’t imagine what it is like to live your days knowing there is an active disease living inside of you slowly causing your nervous system to break down.

All of this leads me back to Alex Heidengren, a friend who was a source of life for me last year. He was dark haired and had a contagious smile and laugh. I honestly can say that he was one of easiest persons to laugh with on campus for me. It was natural and always left me grateful for his creative personality. I am reminded of C.S. Lewis’ reflection on the results of the loss of his friend Charles Williams. Lewis says that “in each of my friends there is something that only some other friend can fully bring out. By myself I am not large enough to call the whole man into activity; I want other lights than my own to show all his facets.”

In the same way, there were parts of me last year that only Alex could call forth out of me. There was a certain humor and joy; there were certain kinds of conversations about God and life that only came out when I was with Alex. I know other friends of mine who will be missing the Alex-part of their personality because it was only in the brilliance of Alex’s personality that they were able to bloom and blossom in front of me.

I look at the world around me: my mom with her arm in the sling, my dad eating more vegetables than usual to fight against the disease working below his skin, my eldest sister’s Facebook pictures with her new life in Seattle. I look at my mom, my dad and my sister in a light that is aware of their beauty and their brilliance in being able to uniquely bring forth life and newness out of me and out of the world all around them, something that Alex without a doubt was doing to his world. 

I end with a quote from Mark Twain that captures the loss I feel for Alex and the continual loss that I will continue to realize: “When somebody you love dies, it is like when your house burns down; it isn’t for years that you realize the full extent of your loss.” I know I have only begun to feel the beginning of the loss of Alex in my life.

The Duncan Phyfe Sofa: Guilt’s Rest Spot

As a lass, with a Scottish name and maternally Scottish heritage, I became quickly aquainted with an heirloom from my mother’s mother. 

The Duncan Phyfe sofa. She is a He and He is a She. I see this long upholstered seat with a back and arms, for two or more people, as bearing both qualities of male and female. She has long, ornate, mahogany lines and eases deep and close to the ground. He wears royal blue velvet with intricately tight cording that runs up and down his back and front, giving an appearance of coolness, yet thoughtful and thorough. She holds one’s rear end with strength and tenderness (a slow wink to MHGS) and he meets your back ever so angled and plumply–ready to rest comfortably with you. 

This is turning into a love affair. 

A love affair with this couch, as silly and innocent as it could be, induced the very emotion that caused me to sit on it endlessly, as I remained still and silent. The inner world of this lass seated was tumultuous. I felt imprisoned by “what I’ve done” and doomed by “what could not be undone”. 

Once I saw a man in elastically taut cycling shorts walking by my father’s baseball game. I peered down from the metallic stands that painfully imprinted one’s bottom with lines, denoting the endless sitting due to one inning after another. I wriggled a bit and then, I gandered at his groin region. The spandex skillfully framed it for him, and now for me. I knew it was “wrong” to examine his manly bulge, but the authoritarian wrongness of what I’ve been taught practically caught my eyesight. 

Consequently, this became the framework for my slow, lonely walk to the middle of my living room, which was the middle of our tri-level house, with large windows in the middle of 2 walls. Truly, it was not a hidden place to nurture the ensuing and covert emotion of “what I’ve done,” rather it was the Smith family metropolis with the Duncan Phyfe sofa as centerstage.

Placement, location is always key in understanding one’s narrative.

As I collectively placed myself onto the Duncan Phyfe sofa in the middle of the day, in the middle of my abode, I would be unwaveringly attacked with Guilt. 

“Help, oh please?” Words never muttered aloud nor articulated inside my mind.  I was in the midst of a deeply constricting dilemma that wanted me to stay still, silent, and seated. 

“Alone, oh please.” A constant state of being, for which I loved and hated. I could only understand myself in this mess as Alone and was often crippled by the Guilt to ever think past the aloneness. 

This is where the love affair begins. No one was able to see this debilitating dimension of my world, in which death seemed most relieving as Guilt pursued me recklessly. And, in turn, I pursued it shamefully. The sofa was seemingly the only object close enough to embrace me during those airless moments. It did not swaddle me, but it did hold me.

Yet it could not give me what I really needed. A holding pen of pseudo-comfort was only fostering the Big Bad Wolf of Guilt  for this entrapped, little girl. I needed the guilt insofar as I needed the Duncan Phyfe sofa without anyone else. Just sofa and me–him, her, and me with the myriad of personal stories that supposedly were so bad that I wanted to evaporate and be done with this living.

That which we hate about ourselves or that which we want to be different, often are distracting illusions. Those things–our loathings or our self-ideals–keep us from embracing, with mercy, what we are (or actually might be), need, desire; where we have been disappointed, wounded, and rejected.

Thus, Guilt was my exasperating blanket to cover me from feeling desire or curiosity when I saw the elastically framed man. And, desire or curiosity was, indeed, punitive- merited badness–at least in the world I lived in.

I learned recently that Duncan, the furniture designer changed his name from Fife to Phyfe once he came to America from Scotland. I also remember my lovely grandma explaining her hastiness, as a small lass, to disown her Scottish accent once  she arrived in America due to her classmates’ teasing. Noncey became Nancy as she passed to her daughter a pattern of forgetting for the sake of not feeling. 

And now this meaning ladened sofa has been passed to me. It sits in my Seattle home awaiting redemption and remembrance, I suppose. 

I sit on it as present help for the long gone lass. I feel. I try and remember all the stories internally experienced there, leading me to today with patterns of guilt still catching me and thrusting me elsewhere.

But, I shall see Duncan Fife, Nancy Reid Mathieson, and Heather Marie Smith Stringer as people needing someone who can see a smidge of our internal worlds that are imploring abortion from who we are and what we are experiencing. Don’t alleviate or give us solutions to the dilemma, but step into it with us. Feel with us and, in faith, ask the questions in which we have been too distracted to ask ourselves.

Foolishly Smart

Bon Iver found Sarah Siskind’s Lovin’s For Fools and now they perform it together, occasionally. Together with Bon Iver’s magical harmonies and arrangement and Sarah’s hearty voice, they make ecstasy…I can’t contain my tears, the ducts get too full for this song…

Extraordinary Beauty

While in a common reaction to seeing a thing of beauty is to want to buy it, our real desire may be not so much to own what we find beautiful as to lay permanent claim to the inner qualities it embodies…What we seek, at the deepest level, is inwardly to resemble, rather than physically to possess, the objects and places that touch us through beauty

Alain de Botton from The Architecture of Happiness

Blustering White Flags

If,

I

Listen to your letters

Which form small, slightly insufficient words

That take up linear space,

describing bits of me

Then,

I

Will have to cast off

the whole of her

Letting loose all the glimmering

Shards

of which I held

in my protective bag with my hands clasped

Tightly around it

And now my soul is

Littered with,

Splintered driftwood

And I can embrace only

That which calls for

Gnashing teeth

Angels

The angels are either,

Buried or Hiding from me

Thus,

don’t articulate the truths that you

See

My infantile receptacle for

Your poignant sentences

Cause me to

Vanish

To a physical place,

into damnation

Yet,

the ghostly “I”  will invoke the gnashing of

Teeth

As I tumble upward

To befall upon us

Nonsense

This nonsense pours out of my skin

If,

Only

it keeps you

From touching

Understanding

Holding

The bits of me

that seemingly deserve

brimstones

that seemingly define

the whole of me

Then,

I am free

Free to roam

One inch to the left

One inch to the right

As the fetters

Feel like slippers

Warming my safe facade

The abuse of

Finality has threatened,

my breathing

my beating

my becoming

Despair is then the undercurrent

Of my vitality

The sounds of

Withering

occur deep within

The noises of

Immunity

protect the outskirts of me

(silence)

The crackling of porcelain

Echoes

Throughout my terrain

Then,

“No”

The slightly insufficient word

Is birthed from my mouth

As fatigue

pulls me to the ground

No

to the illusions

of safety from humanity

No

to the fears

of being vaporous

No

to the vacuous hole

of going to the borders of others

in pursuit of me

Yes

to the quietly merciful reality

of evolution

Yes

to my fallibility

in which I can rest

with you and him and her

The No’s and Yes’s

surface

transpire

grow

break through the dusty ground

And, I am

I am

I am

Dreams of Sugar Plums and Eucharist

Moi: (sleepily rubbing my eyes while trying to get my knees to bend and feet to flatten as I walk over to the bathroom. aaaawkward) Jay, I dreamt about the Eucharist last night.

Jay: Huh.

Moi: Yeah, I couldn’t get it anywhere and I was desperately looking for the wine and bread. No one offered it to me. I was bewildered.

Jay: You’d think I would be the first one to dream about the Eucharist…

Moi: (Spoken inside my brain) I care more about Jesus than you. (Spoken outside my brain) Yes, dear. Twat was my mind thinking allowing me to have the first dreams of Holy Communion?

(Untitled)

The wide open spaces

of my femininity are

impinging upon my

Emptiness

There, deep beyond sight and language

they will mingle, 

Leaving me with only

salt on my lips

I lay wandering 

as the expression of love

drains from my hips

This is it, in part, 

The dreadfully explosive sunset, 

is it, in part, 

The wrenching birth of a future child, 

is it, in part

The eventual aged cup of wine and stale bread crumbs

are it, in part

Yet, I still lay wandering in the wake

Salt on my lips

Sand under my fingertips 

Legs quaking in what was

and my taste buds anxiously awaiting

As the delayed collision of my femininity at its vastest

With the deep throes of my emptiness at its farthest 

Meet

There is no overlap or domination between the two

the ease in which one meets the other

is akin to fog inhabiting the earth

Slow, obscuring, heavily insubstantial

as it cloaks the innerworkings of Me, 

of Woman, of Life

Mercy is not far ahead, nor is collapsing far behind

The grooves for my life are being chisled 

To the specificity of my decisions

Thus, the silent war makes way

to the forefront

Rather than the background

Prostrate

Broken

Distanced from sight and language

As I lay wandering for answers

Alleviation

Deviation

Anything but to feel the earth

beneath my feet as I 

Amble through the haze of Me

of Woman, of Life