How long is a season? Traditionally, in terms of weather, perhaps three months. Winter feels longer, like it might never end, but if you've been around the sun a few times, you recognize that feeling and know that it is but a season. The good parts of summer always seem to fade too soon for my taste. We also talk about seasons of life, and it seems to me that "a season" usually refers to a less than pleasant circumstance. It also occurs to me that we don't really know when these seasons will end, or how long they will be, no matter how many sun revolutions we've weathered.
Since I last wrote to you, a small lifetime has elapsed. My grandma passed away after a short illness, I got two new jobs, our nephew died horrifically and we may not recover, we visited New York and I decided I want to be a career artist after all, we're moving within our city and moving into official ministry with that physical move, one of our children is in a particularly difficult phase, several of my soul sisters have been bobbing for apples in buckets of heaven and hell, and I am splashed in joy in pain. Last we talked, I was having an existential crisis (before all of that other stuff), but sometimes big questions get railroaded by careening situations and I don't know if that makes questions go away, or if they'll just visit again on a rainy day.
My heart started out slow burning, became engulfed in flames in a giant crush of sleepless nights and crying on the phone, expanded again with unforseen strength and lightness, grasping oxygen from the air in an unchaperoned effort to stay alight. I felt invincible, but it gave way to feeling fogged in.
I want to write out each event for my own processing, but I have not found the time or felt enough urgency to do them each justice. Some things are too fresh, besides. I have been thinking about how when I can return to writing more regularly, I will have grown a great deal. I think this makes me a better writer, but I also have less to say sometimes because I might be growing out of trying to control my own narrative. I think my spirit is both more resilient and more exhausted. My words evaporate into the atmosphere before they can be solidified, like perspiration into humidity.
It struck me with curiosity - at what point does one's life become a tragedy? Sometimes, after someone has died, we might refer to their life as a tragic one, but I don't usually think of lives as tragedies. In a narrative sense though, what amount of sadness tips a story from being a story with sad elements to being fundamentally tragic? Remember in the movie Stranger than Fiction when Harold Crick is trying to find out what kind of story he's in? Maybe it's foolishness or maybe it's faith or maybe it's story telling, but it seems to me that a tragedy is only a plot twist away from hope. That no story need remain a tragedy.
I recently met a young man who is working in the ER as a trauma surgeon at age seventeen. He washes dishes at the restaurant I work at for extra cash since the ER is too intense for them to allow him to work very many hours. He was telling me that he recently stuck his finger into someone's aortal bullet wound on the sidewalk in our city. With his finger in a heart in shock, the team discussed what they had 30 seconds to do to hopefully save this person. He pulled his finger out, they did their thing, and.... .... .... a heartbeat.
The hardest thing with bullet wounds, literal and otherwise, is whether there's an exit wound. If it's a clean break, you're good to go, but if the bullet gets stuck inside, it can put pressure on your vital organs and kill you. I'm no surgeon, but sometimes I think I'd take the literal bullet and my chances with a clean exit over these conceptual bullets that seem to lodge against the organs.
I mourn the end of summer every year because it's my favorite season. I am at my best in the warm air, the freedom from a fuller schedule, fewer clothes, the abundance of produce. But I don't hate fall as much as I used to, because back-to-school is a new kind of release from what invariably becomes a chaotic lack of routine. I was trying to prepare the boys for the possibility of switching schools away from friends, and I was reminding them that although they might leave some good things in an old place, there would be things in a new place that they will love, just like they've grown to love things in the past. Of course, I was talking to myself too. All I did as a kid was say goodbyes and hellos, and choosing goodbyes, even with the hope of new hellos, is something like open heart surgery to me.
I am not an easy crier, and when I see people who do process externally, I think the way I handle grief is just so clunky. I am confident in so many ways, many of which are purposefully a departure from the norm, but I've spent a lot of time believing that other people's inner lives are more "right" than mine - others seem to ask fewer questions that result in ripping up the concrete of your own life every few years, others cry through their pain instead of being like a teakettle that heats all the water but then only sputters and scalds when it boils, others seem to have this spiritual life that is more intimate, more personal, more calming. My grief is so stubborn. But after aspiring to what appears to be a clearer path in others for so long and trying to bend myself into that shape (or not trying, but just feeling like it's out of reach for me), I'm starting to believe that the contortions of my heart are by design. Isn't that intense and frustrating? I mean, it's life-giving too, but it means that I was made in a shape that I don't yet understand, and maybe won't ever be comfortable with. Certainly some of the things we struggle with are the result of trauma or decisions, but things that are broken can be mended, if not fully restored. And the things that aren't broken are actually on purpose. Maybe I was meant to knock down the pillars of the temple I'm standing in, even if it crushes me.
God does not fail.
Nothing he does is by mistake.
I think about myself, I think about the ones I love, near and far. I think about the ones I don't know at all, but that I read about and see pictures of and I think this season is so long.
Since I last wrote to you, a small lifetime has elapsed. My grandma passed away after a short illness, I got two new jobs, our nephew died horrifically and we may not recover, we visited New York and I decided I want to be a career artist after all, we're moving within our city and moving into official ministry with that physical move, one of our children is in a particularly difficult phase, several of my soul sisters have been bobbing for apples in buckets of heaven and hell, and I am splashed in joy in pain. Last we talked, I was having an existential crisis (before all of that other stuff), but sometimes big questions get railroaded by careening situations and I don't know if that makes questions go away, or if they'll just visit again on a rainy day.
My heart started out slow burning, became engulfed in flames in a giant crush of sleepless nights and crying on the phone, expanded again with unforseen strength and lightness, grasping oxygen from the air in an unchaperoned effort to stay alight. I felt invincible, but it gave way to feeling fogged in.
I want to write out each event for my own processing, but I have not found the time or felt enough urgency to do them each justice. Some things are too fresh, besides. I have been thinking about how when I can return to writing more regularly, I will have grown a great deal. I think this makes me a better writer, but I also have less to say sometimes because I might be growing out of trying to control my own narrative. I think my spirit is both more resilient and more exhausted. My words evaporate into the atmosphere before they can be solidified, like perspiration into humidity.
It struck me with curiosity - at what point does one's life become a tragedy? Sometimes, after someone has died, we might refer to their life as a tragic one, but I don't usually think of lives as tragedies. In a narrative sense though, what amount of sadness tips a story from being a story with sad elements to being fundamentally tragic? Remember in the movie Stranger than Fiction when Harold Crick is trying to find out what kind of story he's in? Maybe it's foolishness or maybe it's faith or maybe it's story telling, but it seems to me that a tragedy is only a plot twist away from hope. That no story need remain a tragedy.
I recently met a young man who is working in the ER as a trauma surgeon at age seventeen. He washes dishes at the restaurant I work at for extra cash since the ER is too intense for them to allow him to work very many hours. He was telling me that he recently stuck his finger into someone's aortal bullet wound on the sidewalk in our city. With his finger in a heart in shock, the team discussed what they had 30 seconds to do to hopefully save this person. He pulled his finger out, they did their thing, and.... .... .... a heartbeat.
The hardest thing with bullet wounds, literal and otherwise, is whether there's an exit wound. If it's a clean break, you're good to go, but if the bullet gets stuck inside, it can put pressure on your vital organs and kill you. I'm no surgeon, but sometimes I think I'd take the literal bullet and my chances with a clean exit over these conceptual bullets that seem to lodge against the organs.
I mourn the end of summer every year because it's my favorite season. I am at my best in the warm air, the freedom from a fuller schedule, fewer clothes, the abundance of produce. But I don't hate fall as much as I used to, because back-to-school is a new kind of release from what invariably becomes a chaotic lack of routine. I was trying to prepare the boys for the possibility of switching schools away from friends, and I was reminding them that although they might leave some good things in an old place, there would be things in a new place that they will love, just like they've grown to love things in the past. Of course, I was talking to myself too. All I did as a kid was say goodbyes and hellos, and choosing goodbyes, even with the hope of new hellos, is something like open heart surgery to me.
(painting by Gail Potocki)
I am not an easy crier, and when I see people who do process externally, I think the way I handle grief is just so clunky. I am confident in so many ways, many of which are purposefully a departure from the norm, but I've spent a lot of time believing that other people's inner lives are more "right" than mine - others seem to ask fewer questions that result in ripping up the concrete of your own life every few years, others cry through their pain instead of being like a teakettle that heats all the water but then only sputters and scalds when it boils, others seem to have this spiritual life that is more intimate, more personal, more calming. My grief is so stubborn. But after aspiring to what appears to be a clearer path in others for so long and trying to bend myself into that shape (or not trying, but just feeling like it's out of reach for me), I'm starting to believe that the contortions of my heart are by design. Isn't that intense and frustrating? I mean, it's life-giving too, but it means that I was made in a shape that I don't yet understand, and maybe won't ever be comfortable with. Certainly some of the things we struggle with are the result of trauma or decisions, but things that are broken can be mended, if not fully restored. And the things that aren't broken are actually on purpose. Maybe I was meant to knock down the pillars of the temple I'm standing in, even if it crushes me.
God does not fail.
Nothing he does is by mistake.
I think about myself, I think about the ones I love, near and far. I think about the ones I don't know at all, but that I read about and see pictures of and I think this season is so long.
No comments:
Post a Comment