But actually, as threatening as death might seem, at least we know what it looks like. Resurrection is a little unnerving, unsettling, because it basically goes against what we know, contradicts everything we take to be absolute about the nature of history and the reality in which we live. It’s a toppling of earthly order, overthrowing familiarity. It doesn’t play according to the rules we accept as necessary. If the dead can come back to life, if that rule is broken,what does that mean about all the other realities, rules, that order our lives, that we take for granted?

Debbie Blue, Sensual Orthodoxy

W–>F–>Vita

Currently I’m reading or recently finished: Committed by Elizabeth Gilbert, Sex, Art, and American Culture by Camille Paglia, A Very Easy Death and Second Sex both by Simone de Beauvoir, Appetites by Caroline Knapp, and poems by Sharon Olds.

All of these women naturally, very naturally descended onto my lap with cheeky and ostensibly inconsequential plops.

I must first remind you my sister was/is the self-proclaimed feminist in the family. I on the other hand seemingly dodged the flaming arrows of patriarchy or rather, I wobbly disguised or sometimes utilized my highly sensitive mind, vigorous breasts and highly active ovaries (alongside other feminine products both manufactured and organic) through joining the forces.

Twat does joining the forces mean, you might inquire? Yes, well joining the forces signified supreme sarcasm, perfunctory engagements, crucifixions for uncool statements, humor at the expense of someone else, supplying the current demand for the right body image and stylized flirtation, and many other awkward configurations that I learned to adapt to with quite rigorous and concerted efforts. Essentially it was joining the energetic current, despite the beckoning undertow.

Now I first need to disclaim that taking the proverbial arrow in the heart is not the champion criterion for deeming oneself as “feminist” in my mind, however the sting of shafts does critically shape and alert a woman’s viscera about the woes of inequality and invisibility–yet, is not dogmatically attached.

I was often told feminism is an impulsive, angered reaction to what is not grieved in a woman’s soul. It’s an unthoughtful emotion being corralled into a tangible entity, category, theory to be practiced.

A bad emotion formulating a bad theory, which then trickles down to produce bad praxis. I did little cross-examination of what I was told and adhered to much of what was majority and dominant within the Christian realm.

I learned this tactical move of conformation most apparently in Jr. High. I joyfully and frantically crushed my parts to reassemble them in a form more pleasing and acceptable to my popular peers. I wanted a blessing from those with assumed positions of power and I wanted my own power. I say this with full responsibility of my actions since no one was threatening my life if I didn’t conform, yet there was also a powerful sway from the mainstream that seductively deceived me. Still,  I made a choice and I vividly recall the conversations and the ensuing developed schemes for fitting in. Thus, creating in some sense a false self.

I prematurely molted.

Consequently, one might say, “hello there, anxious one.” “Hi. Hi?”

“Where are your feathers?”

And, I’ve begrudgingly fought with these confused identities–both handmade and innate for far too long. The magnetic pull toward popular thought and manners of being in the world have kept me from ever entering into my narrative with a gritting desire to understand who I am.

I’d prefer to understand myself through the voices of dominant thought, approving me. Yet there is this other side or undertow that still travels with the other Heathers. I find her through music, dance, art, poetry, good fiction in which I am not primarily exercising my male archetype, which I’m inclined to do since I was a wee babe, but tapping into the feminine.

The feminine seems to be a fluid, instinctual, sensual, cosmic force often veiling herself from being seen or rather parts of me are shrouding her for fear of the cost, the threshold of ‘uncontrollable’ desire, the potentially wrecked homeostasis of all things in the world, and the staggering responsibility of my actions.

Who are you? Why did you do that? Are you crazy? Stop it. You’re so wrong. You did this.

I loathe and scamper from ever being caught by this verb, Blame. I seemingly cannot tolerate it, yet it’s an integral piece to the landscape of the feminine self arising (I don’t just mean this as a biological feminine, by the way, I see both male and female archetypes needing to be reconciled, understood and embraced by both men and women). The rational, self-preserving, fear-driven self will always, most likely, attack anything that is counter-intuitive, free, restful, sensual, and lovely. It’s akin to an auto-immune disease, fighting against the good, assuming it’s the bad.

All this to say, I felt fairly numb or distant to what my sister was/is struggling through as a woman in a man’s world. Gender was not my issue, my issues were about having power and being recognized by power. Male, female, don’t matter.

But, as it turns out, it does.

Ergo, the undertow is taking me and oh so naturally. I have my ladies teaching me and it feels so good to really plumb some depth on this issue, not merely due to authority asking me, popular thought seducing me, or my reactions taunting me, but out of a sincere desire to understand with boldness, not only my Woman-ness, but my Feminine-ness. This task, this voice is quietly, yet firmly telling me that this is important work.

So, dear, Onward.

(Untitled Is a Title)

My attempt for this post is to recapitulate scenes and remind myself what my 7 weeks of performance art revolving around Lent signified.

I remember arriving at Baylor University my freshman year determined to retrieve a Business/Entrepreneurial degree with a minor in Studio Art for the sole purpose of following my high school art teachers’ wisdom. Never listen to high school art teachers for post 12th grade work. They’re typically, not always, stuck and a wee bit resentful. And thus, I hilariously and spontaneously began my education in Waco, TX.

Again, never listen to high school art teachers.

When mid February came around and business classes were meshing with art classes, I remember  stopping suddenly one morning at the sight I was beholding. The mark of the beast on many many foreheads. It was eery. It caused post-traumatic stress to rise up within me as I involuntarily began singing, “I wish we’d all been ready…”

Snap out of it. I finally asked, “What in Jesus’ name is going on? Is Pope John truly the anti-christ? Is this his doing?” (My father attempted to persuade his children early on that Pope Johnny boy was the ole European Anti-Christo)

No, silly girl. Lent. Ash Wednesday.

Vuhaaaat? Vat is that?

Well, 9 years later and a complete change of undergrad majors and school locales, I was invited to consider Lent on a very personal level for the very first time in my life. I know people who give up chocolate and coffee and other vices, but I never liked that idea. The giving up of these things, typically perishable items, seemed ridden with guilt and partially void of real meaning in regards to the beauty and sweatiness of Lent.

If I’m going to give up something, I’d rather indulge in it all the more because I rarely indulge with reckless abandon.

Consequently, this season began my reckless abandonment of normalcy–anything misfittedly honest crept into existence.

And so, my flesh and blood filled Lent with many restless weeks of invoking the divine for revelation, only to be continuously asked to move inside my being, my viscera rather than leaving and forgetting it.

This task is one of the hardest for me to obey. I would much rather seek in an external, outer body answer than roll around with myself in the mud with no exact answers.

Ergo, I had to be attuned to my body, my spirit in order to create performative pieces, which felt true–true to my life as it sat in the desert of Lent. Each week I listened. Sometimes there was a deafening city within me and other times only a mere droplet of water plummeting down into my stomach, reminiscent of Alice when she falls into Wonderland.

I began with a temporary installation in which I suspended a bucket wrapped in yarn, akin to a mother embracing her child. The mothered bucket held water every week. There was a hole that sporadically permitted water to escape onto many different tea bags, also suspended, but from the bucket. The used tea bags had writing on them, whereby each word on the bag pertained to humanness.

Sweat, odor, skin, vagina, hair, nails, tongue, saliva, penis, eyelashes…

Water would splatter onto the tiny bags of mortality and at times, soak them and other times a gentle, pregnant bead would gingerly and possibly agonizngly fall once or twice.

The bucket with water alluded to the primary passage that Sacred Space choose for the school during this season, which was Woman at the Well.

Thirst. Sexuality. Defiance. Mercy. Acceptance. Confusion. Femaleness. Alien.

Realities of you and me…

Also, the other themes I entertained and mulled over pertained to the greater scope of Lent: solitude, testing, self-emptying, encounter, transfiguration of sorts.

(All photography by the lovely and strong Katy Leet)

The first Wednesday, Ash Wednesday, of Lent I embarked on my weekly performance pieces.

This piece truly dealt with my body, holding complexity, and the kindness of God and myself. Thus, I kneeled over ash and water and spoke hard truths about me. After each one, I anointed my forehead with ash and then washed my face off with water from a bucket. For 15 minutes I performed this ritual in front of people. Ash went into my ears, nose, eyes, pores and stained my skin. It was incredibly agitating as well as glorious to walk around school and town with my beaming, somewhat self-conscious face.

At one point during the piece I glanced at my sister. I saw tears rise up in her beautiful eyes like waves as she sat there symbiotically connected to me in which no one else was able to. Sisters know stories and have seen all of those truths expressed, embodied, and encumbered upon.

She was there every Wednesday. Supporting me and loving me and knowing me and wrestling with me. I am so grateful for her presence and belief in who I am.

The following Wednesday became the passage into suffering. The weight we carry as answers are nowhere to be found and God seems to be quite silent and removed.

I gathered rocks from a coast off of Puget Sound during sunset and watched as they morphed inside my bag as mere stones–ones for killing, carrying, and burying.

I then bought dozens of wine glasses.

During the performance I asked people, if they felt comfortable, to place a rock on my belly as a signifier of their current suffering. Meanwhile, I laid on my back and prayed for areas of suffering–from my life, to requests students had made to me, personally. Each prayer I added a rock.

The slow heaviness felt good as it pressed my abdomen slightly into the ground, covering the part of me that feels cyclically vulnerable as this is the area where blood is released as well as the potential for miraculous life. This belly holds anxious stress and surging vitality–a shroud of stones, to hold it down, felt comforting.

At one point the splendid and truly beautiful KJ Swanson came over to my metaphorical bedside and tended to my sickness–she brushed the rocks off my stomach and re-placed 2 or 3 rocks. Bearable. Solidarity. Defiance. I valued her bold gesture.

After a certain moment I sat up and repeated these words as I placed each rock into the wine glass, “Father, mother, sister, brother if you are willing, take this cup.” Again and again until the glasses were filled. And then we, the audience, toasted, strangely, to suffering.

Afterwards, I harshly battled the whole day. Impending death followed me. Literally, I felt like I was about to die. The whole damn day. It was close to self-contempt, though something wasn’t as smoothly situated in my soul as self-contempt typically finds itself within me. I underwent something with much intensity and confusion.

The following day it dawned on me. I was repeatedly praying the prayer of Jesus the evening before his gruesome death and I didn’t finish the prayer…”Not my will, but yours be done.” It wasn’t time to finish, it would have been glossy and cheap rhetoric.

How does one faithfully, boldly undergo suffering to which no answer or relief is near?

The next piece was an interesting one to work through. I felt done. The idea of doing another performance that bore much of me, seemed too much.

So I went in another direction.

I sat on the ground at school with 2 pounds of Hershey Kisses and just gorged for 15 minutes. Occasionally I offered some to others, but mainly I ate the kisses, like an only child demanding the moon.

It felt good to be indulgent to the point of nausea. Additionally, it was a personal commentary on what I think Lent is not and I paraded the ‘not’ in my mouth, belly, and…

What have we done with Lent anyways? More rules to follow for 40 days? More puritanical restraint to forcefully face God?

After my chocolate permissiveness, I moved onto confession.

I had written things down about myself, which defiled social norms. In my undergrad days, this is what I pushed more than anything else. Normalcy, social propriety, and hidden realities that we all exercise one way or the other.

So, I haphazardly put red lipstick all over my mouth and held my notebook of confessions that was then held in Henri Nouwen’s Inner Voice of Love: A Journey from Anguish to Freedom (a book that has walked with me into love, when I was tempted to hate with voracity) and approached people. I asked if I could first, confess something and second, take a photograph.

“Sometimes I can’t pronounce really simple words and when I fail, everything in me fears that those who heard, think I’m stupid.”

“I’m deathly and anxiously afraid that I’m boring.”

“Sometimes I pick my nose and if anyone I knew saw me, I would be perpetually humiliated anytime I saw her or him.”

“I’m really self-conscious about giving men frontal hugs. All I can think about are my breasts.”

‘I feel so much discomfort over stirring desire and attraction in older, married men.”

“There are times where I have to pluck my own chin hairs.”

“I fluctuate between liking my body and completely disliking it.”

“I have had suicidal thoughts, induced by my self-contempt.”

“I think people like me if I’m funny, smart, and creative–when I’m none of these things, I worry about being forgotten.”

“I compete with girls my age on style, looks, and personality. I fight with this all the time.”

There were more. This is to give the essence of what I was after.

It’s rather humorous to say these surprising things to therapists-in-training and watch as they, we,  search to find the right thing to say, right facial expression to make, regulating the feeling of discomfort to allow the client, me, to be well received. When all I needed was honest ears, an honest reaction and response to my admittance.

The polaroids were collected and then strung onto the yarn hanging from the bucket, above the newly placed congregation of stone-filled wine glasses.

Performance piece #5–This one is one of my favorites and I hope to recreate it on a much grander scale.

After confessing, what does one endure? Disbelief, unbelief, wanting to believe that Love is breaking in, sacrificing, and holding our broken selves.

To verbally say, “I want to believe. Help me in my disbelief, unbelief. Now I believe” is far too easily said by the Church. I, too, have expressed my quickness in belief without undergoing the heartache and painfully beautiful experience of waiting, requesting help, and suffering while treading the waters of faith.

Thus, I thought writing my words with my mouth gave me the opportunity to fully sense the meaning of needing help, of waning in energy to believe, and sorely revealing my disbelief, unbelief…

I was in one sense self-imposing disability and in another sense desperately wanting to feel the weight of these words. Do I really mean them?

Speech is often highly esteemed in our culture. It reveals status, personhood, education, geography, respectability, dogma, etc. It allows for one to assess and qualify and deem this or that. Consequently, I veered from speaking, whereas writing left some ambiguity, halted the hastiness of easy critique and is where I currently feel comfortable and in tune to my being.

But, then what does it mean to see compulsive, childish, naïve writing of wavering faith? Does judgment occur as well? Or is curiosity aroused? Will one wonder the journey of expressing these words? It appears simple and dismissible, however if one saw how it got to the paper, grueling and tiresomely–one might re-think or re-evaluate her or his judgments.

So I wrote for about 20 minutes with my mouth. Over and over. Saliva slipped out. My breathing was more audible. My knees pained me.

I wondered if this was faith–grotesque, bold, passionate, honest, and bodily?

My last performance piece was one of prayer and offering. During the 7 weeks, I became incredibly connected to the space, Mars Hill and her people. I was filled with such gratitude and sorrow. Grateful for this place as it has offered me acute and severe freedom, compassion, boldness, and a continual request for my voice and my presence. The people here are unlike any group I have ever encountered before. This place is Church as it needs to be–healing, complex, painstakingly honest, sensual, invitational, and honoring to and belief in all voices.

Sorrow for my near departure. Graduating is two-fold–both thrilling and tragic. To leave a place, whereby your being is mirrored, beckoned, and acknowledged, is a divine beseeching to believe on my own accord that I have much to offer and trust in.

That belief is hard to do.

To see my brokenness and dignity with mercy and great expectation is not easily done.

Moreover, this time of Lent helped me connect, remember, and meditate on my time here at MHGS with these people and the cost it was to embark on this journey of yes, becoming a therapist, but just as importantly becoming a full, embodied, strong woman with a desire for God that I don’t think I’ve ever experienced before.

Well, this is what I sent out to my graduating class as an explanation of my last piece:

To my fellow graduating class of 2010,

Some of you may or may not know of my 6 week endeavor in creating performance art pieces revolving around Lenten themes. Regardless, this last one, which is today, will symbolize and culminate my time with Lent and ultimately my time at Mars Hill–in part signifying you. As I consider the encroaching end, your faces come to mind. Even if I barely know you, I can look at the list of names and confidently believe that somehow, some way you have directly affected my life and I will deeply miss you and the place we were held, taught, and given away.

Thus, I will look at each name, remember your face and pray for your departure and ability to leave here well and place  a rock around the installation that is currently on the main floor stage. The rocks have been gathered from a Puget Sound beach and have been already used in an earlier performance piece. This piece is two-fold: the first part I asked people and myself to place rocks on belly…………My hope is to symbolically bring all of our long-sufferings (in the form of rocks) to the place representing death in anticipation of life continually emerging after our end at MHGS. So, I want to ask you to pick up 1 rock after this week (post Easter Sunday) as a small reminder of our time here, however good, ugly, or difficult, and belief that really good things are coming toward us, have been coming toward us, especially in light of our departure  from this place…much care and respect, Heather Stringer

I did this. I said all 77 names and repeated, “Nevertheless, not my will, but yours be done.” I walked around in a square, gazing at each rock and praying for their futures as well as mine. I cried when I got to my name and deeply invited the will of God to pervade my life in new ways, new and creative ways. I haven’t done this type of praying in awhile, though there was a different understanding of God’s will. It is full of desire, merciful brokenness, and costly, risky freedom. It is not externally found, but internally grown, overflowing onto the earth…

There is so much more to write about, so much surfaced and tugs on my mind and heart, but I leave that for another moment…

Thank you for reading this.

Thank you Mars Hill Graduate School for providing me with a unique education, profoundly personal transformation, a beautiful husband : ), and love for myself and others that I could not find prior to Seattle.

Thank you Morgan for dropping seeds into my lap about this school, you single-handedly propelled me here. Thank you for my enduringly beautiful family who also connected me to this education through their personal work and belief in my gifting. For my friendships in Chicago that have endured ebbs and flows, staggering conversations, and hope that redemptive repairs are at hand.

Lastly, thank you God for filling this earth with yourself, with good, noble, grotesque, and beautiful things. I can finally see you unreservedly everywhere, not confined to my categories, lines in the sand, and language.

Sigh. That was a long post.

The End.

Powerful Projective Identification, Inextricably Ours

…how aggression, sexuality, criminality, exploitiveness are often disowned by people of relatively high social status and projected onto, or into, those of lower social status. People of lower social status may disown intelligence and ambition and project these qualities onto those of higher social status, in another version of the hidden injuries of class…West shows how the demonized “other,” the black “underclass,” can be seen as showing us the disowned face of our own selves, the face of the culture in which we are all embedded.

Neil Altman, The Analyst In the Inner City: Race, Class, and Culture Through a Psychoanalytic Lens

(such an imperative read for most people, but especially therapists)

PeaWARce

You must have been taught–and I was taught–that peace is the opposite of war. But is it? In India, peace is a daily battle for food and shelter and dignity. We need much more to understand what’s wrong with peace than to understand why we go to war.     -Arundhati Roy

My Reasons for Putting off the Uniform

Another article by my winsome and thoughtful brother on his route from ROTC to pacifism:

I watched a movie not too long ago. It was called “To End All Wars,” a true story about four Allied POWs during WWII who endure harsh treatment from their captors without fighting back. The forgiveness and grace offered by the POWs in the midst of persecution so shocks the captors that a camp-wide revival begins to take place. The film touches on themes about self-sacrificing heroism, the power of forgiveness over hatred, the futile tragedy of war, and God’s way of peace in the midst of it. After watching the movie, I couldn’t help but be reminded of the radical teachings of Jesus and why I decided to get out of the Army: “You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I say to you, do not resist one who is evil. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also; and if anyone would sue you and take your coat, let him have your cloak as well; and if any one forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles” (Matthew 5:38-41, Revised Standard Version)

So, I suppose, the cat is back in the bag. I’m one of those: One of your classmates with long hair and facial hair worthy of 20 pushups, a lap around the campus, and a stern haircut; One of your classmates who sleeps in until 8, sometimes 9, and wears clothes from H & M and Banana Republic throughout the week. I am an ex-Army ROTC cadet and on my way to becoming a pacifist. There is a certain stigma to being a “quitter” from the Army and definitely for being a pacifist. “Unrealistic”, “naïve,” or “impractical” are terms thrown around to describe pacifists. And there’s no doubt that people look down on me for not staying with the Army and question my motives for doing it for only a year. I joined ROTC at Wheaton because I saw the Army as a way of bringing peace to the conflicted parts of the world by resisting evil. I began to see, however, that there were non-violent ways to do this, and I began to explore what creative resistance to evil looked like. Referring back to Matthew 5. In his article, “Doing Justice to Jesus” preeminent New Testament scholar N.T. Wright has this to say: “Turning the other cheek, going the second mile, and so forth, were not a summons to ‘be a doormat for Jesus’, but were themselves a call to non-violent resistance, not just non-violence”.

The Jewish community at the time when Jesus was saying this had embraced a tradition of holy war, and was seeking vigorously to promote it. Wright also states in his book that, “Jesus in his teaching, and his challenge to Israel, aimed precisely at telling Israel to repent of her militaristic nationalism. Jesus was offering a different way of liberation, a way which affirmed the humanness of the national enemy as well as the destiny of Israel.” Pacifists argue that there are ways to protect others without violence. Action does not have to equivocate to violent action. The Biblical mandate to defend the poor, the orphan, the widow, and the ethnic outcast is not inherently connected to some sort of violence.

The question about war and pacifism is clearly a very emotional and controversial issue. I have wrestled and struggled through it, in theory and in practice. I saw my future go from a potential 4-year commitment fighting in Afghanistan to now, a potential commitment to serving with a church in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia fighting to bring food to famine-stricken land.

I began engaging with this issue with pacifists on campus who I deeply respected. They wanted to completely reject war as an option for bringing peace based on the teachings of Jesus. With their help, I began to see war as an uncreative option, and that there is always a third way, that suffering in the name of Christ is better than taking on violence in the face of conflict. It seems to be a very deep part of the Christian tradition. Indeed, Church Father Tertullian said in his Apologeticus that, “the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church”.

I continue to grapple with the fallenness of our world, that there are sinful systems and dictators that must be called to account not only in the next life, but in this life as well. I do not want to be naïve of our world’s brokenness, and I do want to be harshly realistic. But I see people like Jesus, Ghandi, and MLK who used non-violence, and I cannot help but be moved, shaped, inspired to be radically engaged in the volatile parts of the world without a gun in my hand. I continue to pray and study through this profound question and continue to hear Jesus’ prayer ring out in my head: “Your Kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven” (Matthew 6:10).

Homes

Grandstanding: Dainty and Dexterous Displays of Principal Bareback Equitation

“Dear Jesus I pray for the ______ family. The mother passed away and it was right before ____’s sweet sixteen birthday. Be with their family Jesus. Amen.”

Sixth grade, Mr. Bosman’s class, my prayer said aloud. 

Mr. Bosman introduced the literature of CS Lewis to my world and helped form my songwriting skills as I attempted to write 100 hundred songs the summer after my year of “sincere prayers for others”. 

During this year, however, I began to grow an acute awareness of being “in” and being “out”. I tended and tilled to the observations and disparities between them and me. 

Prayers with phrases “sweet sixteen” and “dear Jesus” were not exactly extending their hands to the cool kids for friendship and acceptance.

Thus, I tapped into an intense craving within my soul to be located on the top tier of the Timothy Christian pyramid and until I was, life would seem terribly insecure. 

And it was. 

I would look, gawk, and become obsessed with the fittest of the pack and nightly put on imaginary dioramas of a life where I would be the nucleus of THEE group.

As these private peephole dreams  became part of my ritual to attain popularity, I also compromised, for the purpose of adapting, many sweet and endearingly honest things about myself.

My overly stimulated and multi-layered outfits from Marshall’s molted  into bland Stüssy shirts and stuffy sweaters from Abercrombie.

I tried Sketcher’s and got called a “poser” of the skaters.

I tried revealing some cleavage and got called a “poser” of the hot gals.

I tried being hilarious and got called a “blonde” or “clutz”.

Nevertheless I continued to mimic and configure my image into what would be revered as ‘oh so desireable and enviable’ by my class.

Slowly I cast away genuine expressions and sentiments about loving literature, God, and people…and, sadly I flippantly tossed aside wearing floral body suits that provided me with eye-popping wedgies as my baggy jeans hid it all.

These are the beautiful things that I gave up.

Yet.

Yet I still absolutely loved my live-in aunt who had Downs Syndrome and art that dangerously befriended  me and writing music which unearthed the secrets of “me”. Those facets were nearly inextricable from my personhood and unworthy of any type of degradation.

These pockets of tense-filled dilemmas of either abandoning self for the sake of being herded into a safe arena or choosing self with the ensuing emotions of emptiness and loneliness are inevitable and pivotal.

Walking into a crowded room with no one to call your name or being singled out with something shameful to bear or not being deemed as beautiful by those that somehow were given the ultimate criteria are painfully quiet moments that ring with reverberating dissonances of poorly used synthesizers and erratic cymbals, clashing.

The internal circus nightmare.

To silence the lion tamer and the ludicrous trapeze artists we must disown self for the preservation of normalcy, seeming solitude.

But it is not enough. We are haunted by our undealt with pasts.

Remember because,

there is mercy and great reasoning for what we have allowed ourselves to lose. There is strength to gain as we see how desperately willing we were to lose those parts of us, because now we can truly hope to become fuller–brave and unabashed by the quirks and glories of you and me.  Though, one has to recognize the other.

We cannot forget from whence we came.

No, we remember with kindness and understanding and from there we are emboldened, free, and unhindered by the stories that once asked us our lives.

Sometimes I still feel developmentally arrested in those middle school years. I can even hear my bra being snapped and feeling slightly disgusted, but more importantly happy that some nitwit went for my  double-hooked brassiere instead. 

Slowly, though, I realize the cost. At various moments that cost remains more than worth it and I cling to the cost like my identity was the cost and then, a disarmament of sorts invokes within me a puddle of adolescent tears, grieving loss.

And, I remember what was and what is and what could be–not just being “in” somewhere with some people, but being “near” to self and others, others and self and there we experience life abundantly.

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.

Aurora Means Dawn: Sex and Life Are Beautiful

Read: http://auroraseattle.com/

Aurora is the notorious highway that stretches, with longevity, north and south of Seattle. It burrows its way through the heart of the city and subsequently ventures into the forgotten fringes of South and North Seattle. 

I can only speak of Northbound 99, in which motels are sprinkled, splattered, and swamped upon this leg of one’s trek out of this particular area and into something better, lets say the town of Shoreline? Insert a dramatic wink.

Well, Aurora is…just read the blog that I posted above, it will fill you in on the incredibly harrowing and comedic stories. Essentially, humanity is actualized on this broken road, though it is far easier to speed during this part of the stretch with a protocol of: remain cloaked by the air conditioning blasting through the car vents with spellbinding smells of leather and coolants fumigating your senses and music, selected from iTunes, grooves seductively into your ears.

Meanwhile sweet kids are playing “No More Monkeys Jumping on the Motel Bed” with daddy and mommy furiously trying to make ends meet. Meanwhile, more pregnancies are conceived (limited healthcare, insurance, and counseling to provide contraceptives/prevention plans, or wisdom) into fragmented family systems, thus demanding new ways to make money are birthed or old ways to end life are bridged.

Sex (the corners) and Suicide (the Aurora bridge) have labeled 99 well. Both bear physical connections (intercourse, obviously and a structure that connects one end to the other, safely) with unsettling, but mercifully understandable consequences. And yet, there is also so much more to this area generating beautiful physical, emotional, dynamic connections other than just merely, flatly making ends meet or die. 

Aurora means dawn and may we awaken ourselves to this Northbound leg of our trek and dance a little with the kids that fall off the motel’s beds in giggles, pleading for more monkey tunes…