more thankfulness

Today, I celebrated Thanksgiving in Lincoln, Oregon with people I love. We just finished our contemplative week, in which my main spiritual practices were: copying down the poetry of others in my own pencil-scrawled hand, hugging, kissing, reading poetry in bed, crying out of gratefulness, holding clay pots in my hands, lighting candles, and noticing the footsteps, the sighs, the stomach-noises of people I miss before they're even gone, and saying thank you. 

an exercise in optimism

I am thankful for the ocean, thankful for all the little life forms swimming in it, thankful for bonfires and their ability to warm cold feet. I am thankful for little girls who call sparks "crumbs of fire" and the ocean "a big puddle." I'm thankful for the human ability to form community so quickly. I'm thankful for breakfast and for bad coffee at small diners. I'm thankful for laughter. I'm thankful for sadness, the way it cracks you open so wide that everything beautiful falls right in. I'm thankful to have eyes to see and ears to hear. 

an excerpt from this week's memo:

I own a single bottle of nail polish. I bought it after years of never painting my toenails, never considering my feet something worthy of adornment. It was just such a beautiful color. Brilliant Bordeaux, it’s called, a deep bodily red. The color of heartstrings. I identified strongly with that color. I began painting my toenails all the time, using just that one bottle. I fell in love with my feet, often looking down at them as I walked or propping them up on coffee tables to wiggle my painted toes in the lamplight and watch the dance of tendons beneath skin.

            My bottle of nail polish enjoys a high place of honor amongst my possessions. Like my poster of elephants silhouetted against a backdrop of mountains, my custom-painted lamp dripping with beadwork, my Birkenstocks, my hiking boots; my nail polish evokes my identity.  I keep it on the bookshelf, right next to my favorite novels. I like to see my intelligence and my physicality side by side. I can be intellectual and sexual; I am a mind and I am a body. 

 

I camped in the Three Sister's Wilderness Monday through Friday. Here are few things that I learned:

1. Those little stacks of rocks people set out to mark off mountain trails are called cairns.

2. To get up a mountain, it really helps to have a mantra to chant in your head to keep your feet moving.

3. Canadian Jays  like to eat raisins.

4. The best way to keep warm in a sleeping bag is to sleep naked except for a hat and socks. Plus it's just really attractive.

So, I turned 21 this week.

I drank a bottle of organic ale with a Bison burger at Grilla Bites, a great organic cafe here in Ashland. 

This next  week I'll be backpacking and camping in the Three Sisters Wilderness with some of my new favorite people in the world. 

Life is good.

The weird thing is, 

the best thing about The Oregon Extension is the dance parties. 

Ashley and I started, thinking not many people would be into it, but slowly slowly one by one they all started busting flyyyy moves. 

Sunday night we danced in the cookhouse for three and a half hours STRAIGHT! We danced to M.I.A. We danced to MGMT. (Oregon Extensioners have good taste in music. And everything). I was covered in sweat. I had little to no awareness of what my body was doing. We were so free.

A lot of us here are sort of disenchanted, cynical types. But when we get happy, we get REALLY happy.  

I feel my feelings more here.

Suffering and joy are two sides of the same coin. 

And now, a random and simple poem (related in no way whatsoever to any of the above content):

over waves of mountain

volcanic rock, meadow

           

God takes her shears to the darkness

 

cuts a perfect circle

from the fabric of night

pricks it with her careful needle

 

and waits on the other side

holding up a pearl-backed mirror.

I only get wireless on weekends here, so I will update once a week. Here's a reflection (or a memo, as we call them) written for discussion group today:

Circles

           There was a labyrinth cut into the lawn of my childhood church. Open Circle Church, it was called, a loosely-affiliated Brethren congregation in Burnsville, Minnesota chock full of gays, lesbians, and the kind of people who have collections of gemstones dangling from their living room ceilings and rearview mirrors.

            I don’t recall ever walking that labyrinth. Maybe I was too young to have a real understanding of why it was there. None of my friends’ churches had labyrinths, and like so many other aspects of Open Circle, I eventually found it embarrassingly left-of-center and woo-woo.

            Outside of textbooks, I never saw another labyrinth until I came here and walked this one. I’m not trying to draw any sort of comparison between Open Circle Church and the Oregon Extension, but I’ve got to say that after spending the majority of my teen years running around with the Assemblies of God and then skipping off to a Baptist university, finding myself out here in the mountains, smack dab in the middle of a labyrinth, fumbling a piece of rose quartz in my hands, made me feel like I had come just a little bit full-circle.

            Arriving in the center of that labyrinth came as a bit of a shock. I had been meandering around that thing holding this chunk of rock, kind of praying, kind of daydreaming, kind of breathing in through my nose and out through my mouth, when all the sudden it opened up into this perfect circle, this higher ground. It seemed to rise up like a wave and catch me. My heart skipped a few beats. I was in the Middle.

            The feeling of being there was like looking out over the ocean after years of being landlocked. A feeling, oddly enough, that I’ve been experiencing quite often lately. It’s the feeling of wandering around having no idea what you’re after, and then, without even trying, arriving. It’s the feeling of looking deep into your own eyes and seeing somebody familiar. 

            Our discussion of Memoirs of a Boy Soldier on Wednesday led to a wealth of interesting commentary about childhood. Ishmael Beah ends his book with an answer to an unanswerable riddle, an answer he held inside since he was only seven.

            Jesus says to be like the little children. Maybe, in their world of imagination, in their “blunt-as-hell” confrontation of reality, children set the best example of how to relate to the Divine.

            The Sunday after we all arrived, a few of us sat on the Franks’ porch, watching Simone spinning in circles. “I think that’s a highly meditative activity,” I said to those around me. “I remember doing that as a kid and feeling like I’d flown away.”

            Maybe I need to acknowledge that child that’s still inside of me: the little girl who spun in circles to center herself and knew no reason to be ashamed of things like labyrinths and gemstones.

            How beautifully ironic that coming out here to Lincoln, such a significant step in my independence and adulthood, has demanded of me a return to childhood.

            I don’t have to become a new woman. I don’t have to transcend. I just have to go sufficiently deep into that which I’ve been meddling around in all along. Maybe, as in the labyrinth, the center will rise up and take me by surprise.

            

the Oregon Excuse

I have a very strong need to feel rebellious. And very weak capacity for actual rebellion. That being said, I have fully embraced this idea of running away, and since about December have used my impending semester in Oregon as a method by which to rationalize every strange decision I make. "Oh well," I say to myself, "I get to run away."

Even with the Excuse in full swing, I find every attempted rebellion essentially thwarted. If it's not my noisy conscience, it's the sense that I'm doing fine and should stop trying to rationalize normalcy. And if it's not that, it's old Greek Guys with Dolce and Gabbana glasses stopping me on Grand Avenue to ask whether I believe in God and Jesus. To which I must answer, enthusuastically, yes.

And so the rebellion is not the point. The point is I have a new rain jacket which I've taken for two test drives. Once for a night run around the block in the pouring rain and once for a barefoot puddly wander with Lelia and Kevin. I have a new rain jacket, and a new sleeping bag, and a new place to go filled with new people to love.

I get to go to this New Place in 5 days. 5 more days of failed rebellion to go. Or 5 more days to love This Place and These People before I take off to love That Place and Those People.

Excuses are so stupid.

a note about the title

I took the title of my blog from Allen Ginsberg's poem America. The original line reads: "America how can I write a holy litany in your silly mood?" 

This poem speaks to the odd experience of standing simultaneously in complete identification with and in complete contrast to a place or an idea. Ginsberg addresses his country, establishes his disassociation with it, realizes that he actually is America, then reflects on the paradox of this epiphany. (If you haven't read the poem, please do. Really.)

The way Ginsberg feels about America is the same way I feel about pretty much everything. In order to love something I have to kind of hate it. It looks like I'm going backward when I'm really going foreward. I run from God, I end up running into God. Make sense?

The question "how can I write a holy litany in your silly mood?" is rhetorical. It answers itself. America is a holy litany in a silly mood. My life is a holy litany in a silly mood. I want my writing to be the same. I think that's honest. 

a returning

I've moved back to my hometown of Rosemount, Minnesota for the first time in over two years. I had to get out of Bethel housing for the month of August so facilities could prepare the apartment buildings for incoming students. Great. The good news is, I now get free groceries and don't have to pay rent. While Carolynn, as coffee shop Billy predicts, gets knocked up. (She'll be at her boyfriend's.) "But wouldn't it be hilarious if it ended up being the other way around?" he said. I told him we'd keep him posted. DISCLAIMER: We're both good girls. Really. Nobody's getting knocked up. But I digress.

The move was, of course, grueling. I sustained minor injuries while moving the couch and then lost my phone while taking out the trash. Luckily, my dad came up to help cart stuff back to Rosemount, so after dialing my number several times and hearing it ring from deep inside a big recycling bin, he dove right in there and rescued it like the Superman he is. 

And my scraped-up wrist is covered in triple antibiotic ointment which I didn't have to buy.

Returning to Rosemount gives me the urge to sort of re-vamp my life, so one of the first things I did was to go to Target and get a new wallet. Only if you've seen my old wallet will you understand what a significant life change this is. I inherited it from my mom. It was bulky and black and ugly. Because I'm kind of frugal, I kept it for three years even though I hated it.

The new one is a classy blue clutch, still a bit oversized, but a huge improvement overall. This is a really, really big deal for me. Others are not so excited (ahem, Katie Terhune.)

I just love all my friends.

Starting this blog is another big step in the re-vamping of my life. It's main purpose is probably so people can keep track of me as I venture out to Oregon this fall, but for  now I can entertain my readers with tales of recycling bins, coffee shops, and blue wallets. Peace.