Gather. Discover. Cultivate.
Desire, heartbreak. A headline shrieks the momentary drift back to bloodshot vigilance.
She gazes back to now and says
Hold those eyes open. Ears too. Skin. Throat. You will find the break in thorn and bramble, the place your body fits though.
Then and this. Now and here.
A pause.
Cool air shivers skin. The bus engine grumbles below plastic seats molded to cup a human’s soft places. Thighs of meat padding bone. Outside, women in a pack bustle down the sidewalk in jeans stretched taut.
The days grow shorter.
Even so, I forget. Forget to stop and touch the zinnia with its five shades of orange tethered to a center like chocolate. Forget to let the crepe myrtle dip across my cheek. Barely notice a fat bee chugging past me towards what bursts from the hedges. A body that should be too weighty for the tissue of wings somehow stays airborne.
I forget that eventually, everything falls. I forget to catch drift.
The Sun will rise and set regardless. What we choose to do with the light while it’s here is up to us.
Barely a month has passed since the Board of Directors at my UU church welcomed me into my new role as the Lay Minister for Membership and Outreach. I could just as easily say they approved or endorsed or just plain voted. Yet none of those words capture the experience of stepping into this world of Unitarian Universalist leadership as much as “welcome.”
My family only began attending the local church in July 2015. Many of my fellow congregants carry much more history and knowledge about the workings of the community. I have to admit, when the Reverend suggested I consider lay ministry, I laughed out loud. Little old me? Newcomer? Someone who should rightfully still use a green mug during coffee hour?
To see is to love.
To love is to see.
Images: Andrew Wyeth’s Christina Olson and Wind from the Sea.
Delete her number from your phone, hide/unsubscribe/unfriend her social media feeds, lick your wounds, grieve for what might have been, and throw yourself wholeheartedly into other connections and interests. Read books by women. Let time do its healing work (It will, I promise). Be a person who takes “no” for an answer.
I finally understood that his no meant no. Really, truly no. It took me nearly six months. I’m not the quickest learner, but I found my way there.
I didn’t like it one little bit. Couldn’t there be a different answer? A way to keep the door open? We’d been standing there at the threshold for so long — open, shut, open, shut. . . Open? Shut? — that I couldn’t quite believe he’d lodged the bolt for good.
What would change his mind? What might convince him to try again?
My disregard for his choice is glaring. I only see it now. My longing for him drowned out every other consideration. It didn’t help that memory laced geography. Every block, a block we walked. The path through the woods behind the library. The restaurant, the park, the gym. Memory turned to curiosity; curiosity to yearning. I was lugging around a Sears catalogue of questions never asked, not in the entirety of our four years. The questions dazzled. The desire to know him again, or perhaps know him anew, consumed me.
I wanted him.
I’d turned into every lovelorn sucker in every country song.
We are allowed to love ourselves.
We are allowed to show up. We are allowed to take the compliment even when we fall short of our own standards.
We are allowed to determine the standards.
We are allowed to talk about how hard it is to love ourselves. We are allowed to enjoy our own simple company. We are allowed to release our grip. To revel in the small days. To have just one or two good friends.
We are allowed to think of our family, whatever its shape, as worthy of a crest.
This can still happen anywhere. Not everything is lost.
– Naomi Shihab Nye, “Gate A-4“
Someone vandalizes a church and a Jewish community center in Northern Virginia. They paint swastikas on buildings and dark words over a sign supporting Muslims. This happens on the first night of Passover, at the start of the Christian holy week. The story is here.
Then the police track down a suspect. Dylan Mahone is a 20-year-old man who has found his way into white supremacist and neo-Nazi circles. A student at the community college. A neighbor who lives just blocks from the house my former partner shares with his two kids. A young man whose Facebook page drips with racism and hate and noxious fantasies of violence.
White. Christian. Educated. Male.
One of ours. One of us.
Two months, no tears.
Drought or deluge?
Touch the earth.
Watch the sky.
Image: Yoel Tordjman, “i will go by fire and water”
The friend says the pressure to love her body is too much. “Isn’t it enough to not hate it?” This is what we are supposed to do as women. It’s yet another thing to add to the list. Love ourselves. Love our bodies exactly as they are.
That word, love. It covered my notebooks in junior high, markers and hearts. As a teenager, those four letters grew far too big for crushes. They became like currents sweeping the earth in a gusting flourish, ecstasy and aspiration with a peace sign woven into the O.
The tropospheric ribbon of script I tattooed across my days was a declaration of protest. It was a way to give voice, unformed as it was, to an infant movement. A confederacy of truth was gathering, and it was growing skeptical, maybe downright mutinous, of the dogma that ordered my inner life.
We ink our wishes into night’s unfurling wing.
Shannon E. Williams 