Learning to Enjoy The Ride

My desk sits before a four foot window in the basement, looking out at five feet of corrugated iron that makes a window well. Spiders are active spinners this time of year, and have found this protected place perfect for their thin webs, unbothered by a roaming dog or the inevitable Bocce games of a late summer's evening. The breeze still moves through here, stretching each web, pulling its inhabitant back and forth like slow breath.

And so I set about each day, spinning my own stories in this unbothered place, hoping that the thin filaments of my ideas can bear the weight of the words I hope to catch. I sit still here, me and my arachnid companions, each of us vigilant for what we know unexpectedly will arrive.

Two nights ago a thunderstorm hovered above the house, pouring its energies downward, clearing the window well of everything but wetness. The next morning each spider not busy climbing back up a spout was once again spinning, creating a space to catch what might come their way, what they knew they needed to sustain themselves.

Finding poetry is something that happens by intentional chance. And so I continue to spin, learning readiness in the most unlikely of places. I get writer's block. I feel fear and doubt and other things I need, but that overwhelm me. I touch dark places, and places pulsing with light. And when the breeze blows, I hang on tightly as this world breathes on me, learning to enjoy the ride.

My Life in Metaphors

Mother's Day I spent the early afternoon helping my mom to plant her garden, to anchor the seedlings she had bought into the ground: rhubarb, broccoli, various lettuces, chard, peppers, summer squash. The beans we planted as seeds, pushing the oblong pearls into the soil, covering them thoroughly with black dirt. Now there is no evidence of their presence, just flat soil. I know from doing enough of my own planting that this isn't how it will remain, but the row of nothing-but-dirt lies in stark contrast to the inches of green that poke from the ground around it.

The last day of April I flew to Kansas City to begin to close my unexpectedly-short chapter there. I bought 100 yards of rope, rolls of packing tape, plastic tubs, snacks for the long drive back to Colorado. When I arrived, the Oak and Walnut and Dogwood trees had begun to poke out a few leaves; by the beginning of May's first week, the intervals of warmth and rain had unleashed a riot of greens from the trees. Spring seemed to happen all at once, surprising me. And so I drove away from Kansas City last Friday as I had arrived, in a U-Haul, with many boxes of books and some furniture packed in the back, trusting that spring of a different sort might surprise me again.

Last night I lay awake into the early hours of the morning and listened to the coyotes howl. Then I fell asleep and dreamt: a miscarriage that would not stop bleeding; trying to find a place to sleep in a crowded house; driving a car down an icy hill, trying to stop, careening out of control. My life in metaphors. I continue to mourn losses, and find a continued need for rest. I have never experienced so much change, so quickly. Two moves across two state lines in less than a year, a life now stowed in storage, sending tax returns to three different states, a bittersweet freedom to come and go as I please.

Hamlet, in his famous soliloquy: "To sleep, perchance to dream--ay, there's the rub." His thoughts were shaded by the tunnel of ultimate despair. Yet I wonder if Shakespeare also is hinting at the risks of dreaming while still awake, of leaning into the hopes of what might be, and the risks inherent. Hope deferred does make the heart sick. And yet I am learning slowly that there is a difference between hoping in and hoping for. I am learning not to try to steer a destiny which is not mine to control, choosing not to live in fear of what else, or what next. I am coming to understand trust as a choice, and am learning again and again that the One who asks for this trust is worthy of it.

And I am reminded of another stark metaphor, one that would have fit into the sequence of my dreams: Unless a kernel of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed, but if it dies, it brings forth much fruit. No, even in the heaviness of the news this week of Myanmar and China and Zimbabwe and the Middle East, I won't minimize my grief, or refuse to plunge headlong into the uncertainties I face. There can be no resurrection--or redemption--if there has been no death. Touching my own sadness helps me to enter more fully into a world that is not as it should be. I refuse to live cowering in the shade of despair, but to live with the metaphors I have now, believing that there will soon come signs of my own spring.

Deeper than I think

Confession: I trespassed today, all bundled in my snow clothes, crunching along the snow-packed road down to walk along the river. I wasn't looking for the elusive moose that lives in the area. I was looking for the chance to stand beside quiet waters that run in the valley near where I am spending these few days. Like the shepherd-poet David, I have come asking that my soul be restored. It has been a quiet day of writing, reading, drifting off to sleep, dreaming, waking, cloud-watching, praying, writing...and then, trespassing.

I stood for a long time, leaning against the green metal of the bridge, listening to water run over rocks, watching a pair of mallards swim upstream. And I wonder: what brings restoration? How does it come about? How can my soul be an environment hospitable to such change? A thin layer of snow lay like cotton gauze on the bridge's flat parts, melting quickly when I breathed on it. Finally, I moved on, up the hill and back toward the house, past waist-high piles of shoveled snow. I passed the "No Trespassing" sign without seeing anyone, let alone someone with the intent to prosecute.

It is good to get away, and even more, to be alone. In the quiet, I am again aware of how noisy I am inside. It is unsettling that I have not been more aware of this, that it has taken me this long to notice. Perhaps the restoration I long for goes deeper than I think.

Listening Into The Silence

Winter began, according to one solstice expert, at 1:08 AM on 22 December. This Midwest winter had a long prologue, with ice storms and snow scribbling its welcome script onto the thin pages of November, spilling ink into the darkening days of December. The humid cold is slow, like fog over the Thames, settling into the dark morning hours, finding its quiet place in the gray days of winter's welcome.

Weeks ago, as I drove across the border from Missouri into Kansas, a line of geese were flying south. Against the dark orange of sunset they appeared as an errant pencil line scrawled onto the light-burnished clouds. They moved like a ribbon of flight caught in the winter wind, pushing the air beneath their wings toward the icy ground, flying somewhere else. Not here.

I find myself again in a place where I don't know where home is, am pierced sometimes with a longing to return that tumbles me like a storm breaker. But return where? To what? Or to Whom? C.S. Lewis's take, in The Problem of Pain "There have been times when I think we do not desire heaven; but more often I find myself wondering whether, in our heart of hearts, we have ever desired anything else....It is the secret signature of each soul, the incommunicable and unappeasable want, the thing we desired before we met our wives or made our friends or chose our work, and which we shall still desire on our deathbeds."

The fierceness of my longings--both of the having and the not-yet-realized--has brought me to my knees of late. This fierceness catches in my throat when I least expect it, and leaves me exposed in the ache of what is, rather than what might have been. And yet I refuse to retreat to a safer version, one that feeds on Prozac, blunted. I will not be numb. My enemy is not my pain, nor my insatiable hunger. It is something else entirely.

Considering Hafiz, in an untitled poem from his book The Subject Tonight is Love: 60 Wild and Sweet Poems of Hafiz:

Don't surrender your loneliness
So quickly.
Let it cut more deep.

Let it ferment and season you
As few human
Or even divine ingredients can.

Something missing in my heart tonight
Has made my eyes so soft,
My voice so tender,

My need of God
Absolutely
Clear.

***

When I wake up in the middle of the night, my impulse is to look around, to find a way to see. I trust my eyes when they can do nothing for me. An easy metaphor for faith. But how quick my impulse is to reach over and flip the switch on my lamp, to reclaim my vision and therefore to live in a perpetually weakened state of daylight. No, there are things to be discovered when my preferred sense is absent. When home is uncertain. When winter offers days full of tangled branches and short shadows, ice-covered surfaces and sadness. Things are not as they should be. They are as they are.

There's a guy somewhere in Arizona with a tattoo across his chest that reads "Grace grows in the winter." God, I pray he's onto something. In my mind I know that without a winter solstice, there could not be a summer solstice, a day spilling over with sunlight. What feels true and what is, are two different things. Two months have passed since the darkest day of the year, and yet I still find myself living in more shadows than light. The valley of the shadow of death is real. Why do I spend so much time pretending it's not?

From Mary Oliver's poem Wild Geese

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

I will make the choice to reside in the strangeness of today's fresh grief. And I will listen into the silence: to the call of the geese, to my raw longings, to the pulse of an idling train engine, to the words beneath the words spoken by a stranger. There will always be much to be seen. Yes. But even more to find when this sense fails me. There is much I cannot see today, much I do not understand. I will make the choice to let my imagination feast on this new fare; on a world that I welcome in its harshness, find again to be exciting. I will not run from my aching need, or from the God who resides in the places I fear most. And maybe, in the darkness, beneath the snow, grace is growing. Many things are not clear from where I stand. But being here for now will be enough.

Standing On This Seam Of Seasons

The yard is still piled with unraked leaves as autumn and winter collide today, midair. The snow outside is doing less falling and more floating, softening the day's gaze, offering an invitation to any who would watch the change that spins through cold-kissed air. Flakes have begun to gather in the contours of each shingle, dust the naked, upturned branches with their whiteness. It is easy to welcome change like this, to delight in the sudden gust that pushes flakes in a harsh diagonal, the flashes of red as Cardinals begin to play in the dark branches of the wintered Walnut outside my window. I am inside, and bundled against the cold.

The first time I remember seeing snow really fall, I had driven with a bus load of other 12-year-olds to a camp in the Sierra Nevada mountains. We could feel the temperature drop as we pressed our cheeks to the bus windows or traced hearts filled with initials onto breath-steamed glass. Dirty piles of snow began to trace the edges of the road as our leader announced that we were nearly there. When we piled off the bus it was dark except for the streetlights that lit patches of graveled road. And in the orange cast of each light flew snowflakes. I stepped away from the chaotic unloading and stared, as if each floating speck were a fairy, dancing its brief moment in the light before joining the others in the dark, on the trampled ground below. I stood and watched until my friends called loudly from the warm mouth of our cabin, calling me back to my numbing body, to how stepping into this beauty left me shivering-stammering cold.

A moth the color of dead leaves clings to the metal frame of my storm window. It beats its wings like sporadic breaths, its legs clinging fast despite the hard gusts of wind, the eddies of snow that brush against the pane. I leave my seat to stretch and rest my eyes, and when I return he is gone. The beauty of winter is fierce. This wind pushes ruthlessly, shaking windows, seeping in where seams aren't tight enough. The world has turned to cold. Standing on this seam of seasons, a new beauty finds me again, leaves me numb and breathless.

Trains, the Sea & Infinity

Train whistles are as common as squirrels where I now live. They welcome dawn, sound through each morning and afternoon, and punctuate the cold night with the echoes of their passing. They are like a plane's contrails, striping the air with the sound of journey, of restlessness, of partial waking in the night to listen to the rocking clack of wheels spinning across the rails. They move slowly through this city like time, sounding their warning through the spinning wheel of each day.

When I was young, my parents surprised my siblings and me with a trip to the beach on the train, boarding in Fullerton and traveling down to San Clemente. We left fingerprints and nose marks on the windows at first, watching the blur of eucalyptus groves and dry hills give way to a narrow stretch of sand and water that spread out into the corners of my imagination. On the way home I threw my sunburned body into the cushioned seat, not worrying about the dried sand that coated my feet. The train rocked me like the ocean, a steady back-forth that pulled me heavily toward sleep. The train moved from being a novelty to being a rhythm in my afternoon, as I half-watched the landscape blur into early evening.

Trains in Europe and the US tell different stories. One is the story of people traveling back-to-front; reading books, taking naps, texting a friend. It is how most travel, avoiding the crowded byways, saving time by working as someone else moves them. It is people walking through the terminal to the car park or waiting in an arched doorway for a late bus. Another is mostly the story of freight moving east to west, north to south. It is the story of hobos hiding in the corner of open boxcars, moving on, looking for work. The immensity of this country is overwhelming and while the utility of such transportation anymore is sadly doubtful, it leaves me with a longing ache.

I have long held a fantasy of hopping on a train and seeing where it would take me. The closest I came was my sophomore year in college. While out for a run near campus, I came to an intersection that was blocked by a stopped freight train. I jogged in place as I waited, then I stretched, then jogged again. The train stayed stopped. Traffic lights changed, then changed again. It was evening, and the headlights of waiting cars formed a trailing cross at the intersection. I was getting cold, so I decided to stop waiting and climb between cars and jump down. There was adrenaline in my fingers as I pulled myself up the tall steps, forgetting how things always look smaller when they're not in hand. I wanted to hurry, so the train didn't start and leave me to jump while it was moving. It didn't, and yet I scrambled. The ground looked near enough, so I extended my arms and leaped. And dropped. My nonchalant effort toward running through my landing was foiled as I lost my balance and fell to the pavement, directly in the center of the headlights of waiting cars. I picked myself up, gave a little wave, and continued to run. There was some honking and applause that followed me up the hill towards my dorm.

Living in the middle of the country, I miss the ocean. Standing with my jeans cuffed, feeling the waves pull at my ankles, watching diamonds spill across the surface to a gently-moving horizon. The smell of brine and seaweed that weighs the air, tasting the stickiness of salt on my lips, watching small schools of fish and the occasional porpoise dart through the waves. The ocean is a tangible reminder of infinity, as I paddle a surfboard to the crest of a wave and try to harness its momentum, or as I run a handful of sand through my palm.

The pulsing sound of waves, or the repeating call of a train's whistle sparks the awareness that I am anything but infinite, and at 31, I am sometimes caught in the tide of all the good things I have tasted, and all I still long to taste. The romance of a boxcar ride has become offset by the reality of cold metal walls and dirt-stained floors. Perhaps sometimes goodness is found in the longing, or in waiting for what is good, or in the memory of its tasting. For now I sit with a pen and notebook, ocean-less. But I can stand inside the deep night sky, hear the wind blow through stretches of prairie grass, walk through the painted leaves of a deciduous fall, listen to the again-receding train passing through the night. I can acknowledge that I am brushing against new facets of infinity.

Lines & Shadows

When I sat down to write this morning the sky was a deep shade of blue; the oak trees around my house jagged silhouettes against the sky. I watched the sky slide slowly from its blues to gold, and into the almost-white blue of autumn. The outside air is pungent with woodsmoke, the gutters filled with fallen leaves. The morning is quiet; squirrels collect the last acorns for their winter's horde. And yet this earth--my planet--is spinning through black space, saved only by the pull of a burning fireball that would consume us if it weren't for our momentum. This quiet show of color, light and season a result of raw energy that is larger than my mind can wrap around.

On Friday my boyfriend, an artist, taught me to do contour drawings. They are like musical scales for a visual artist. They help focus your eye and free your hand to respond. The only rule is that you may not look at the paper until you're done. So he stood on the bleachers in the afternoon light, and I placed my pen onto the page and began to trace the line of his forehead, his arm, the angle of his leg. The finished product was his silhouette overlapping itself in jumbled angles and lines. I was slow as I drew, focusing too much on the details, letting the big picture get lost in the minutae.

How difficult it is to translate what I think I see into two dimensions, let the reliability of my hand bear the weight of this spinning, quietly changing world around me. And yet bearing witness is what I must do, continuing to pay attention to the lines, light and shadow each day brings, holding them against the larger piece of story each fits into, swimming in the large wonder of it all.

Moths & Light

It is 3:11 am and I am confusing a number of moths with my insomniac light streaming out into the Missouri darkness. I am finding this to be a lonely place, but a good place. It is a good place to write, a good place to watch the tiny unfamiliar things that occur as we go about watching for what we assume will happen, what we think we will see. The moths are beating their fragile wings against the window pane, as if the naked lightbulbs reflecting against the glass were the moon.

Moths: I'm reminded of Annie Dillard's startling metaphor for the artist in Holy the Firm (pp 16-17, 71-72). It's a few paragraphs, but if you're artistically inclined, or given to wholehearted, passionate pursuit, read on. If not, skip to the last paragraph of the excerpt, and of my post.

"One night a moth flew into the candle, was caught, burnt dry, and held. I must have been staring at the candle, or maybe I looked up when a shadow crossed my page; at any rate, I saw it all. A golden female moth, a biggish one with a two-inch wingspan, flapped into the fire, dropped her abdomen into the wet wax, stuck, flamed, frazzled and fried in a second. Her moving wings ignited like tissue paper, enlarging the circle of light in the clearing and creating out of the darkness the sudden blue sleeves of my sweater, the green leaves of jewelweed by my side, the ragged red trunk of a pine. At once the light contracted again and the moth's wings vanished in a fine, foul smoke. At the same time her six legs clawed, curled, blackened, and ceased, disappearing utterly. And her head jerked in spasms, making a spattering noise; her antennae crisped and burned away and her heaving mouth parts crackled like pistol fire. When it was all over, her head was, so far as I could determine, gone, gone the long way of her wings and legs. Had she been new, or old? Had she mated and laid her eggs, had she done her work? All that was left was the glowing horn shell of her abdomen and thorax--a fraying, partially collapsed gold tube jammed upright in the candle's round pool.

"And then this moth-essence, this spectacular skeleton, began to act as a wick. She kept burning. The wax rose in the moth's body from her soaking abdomen to her thorax to the jagged hole where her head should be, and widened into flame, a saffron-yellow flame that robed her to the ground like any immolating monk. That candle had two wicks, two flames of identical height, side by side. The moth's head was fire. She burned for two hours, until I blew her out.

"She burned for two hours without changing, without bending or leaning--only glowing within, like a building fire glimpsed through silhouetted walls....

"How can people think that artists seek a name? A name, like a face, is something you have when you're not alone. There is no such thing as an artist: there is only the world, lit or unlit as the light allows. When the candle is burning, who looks at the wick? When the candle is out, who needs it? But the world without light is wasteland and chaos, and a life without sacrifice is abomination.

"What can any artist set on fire but his world? What can any people bring to the altar but all he has ever owned in the thin towns or over the desolate plains? What can an artist use but materials, such as they are? What can he light but the short string of his gut, and when that's burnt out, any muck ready to hand?

"His face is flame like a seraph's, lighting the kingdom of God for the people to see; his life goes up in the works; his feet are waxen and salt. He is holy and he is firm, spanning all the long gap with the length of his love, in flawed imitation of Christ on the cross stretched both ways unbroken and thorned. So must the work be also, in touch with, in touch with, in touch with; spanning the gap, from here to eternity, home."

I spent yesterday's late afternoon at Children's Mercy Hospital in Kansas City, with my friends Shannon and Caden. Caden is 4, and he has neuroblastoma; he is in the midst of his 5th round of Chemotherapy. Shannon is his mom. Shannon is a painter who is now also acting nurse; mother to Caden, and six-year-old Noel; wife to Darin. We talked about being an artist in the midst of all of the rest of her life, especially now. When she showed me the sketchbook that she hadn't touched this trip to the hospital, she just shrugged. She is holding onto ideas, and trusts that they will remain until she finds time to translate her ideas into lines and curves on the page. And yet she sits on the 4th floor of CMH's Henson tower, a living installation of the irrational hope theme she longs to explore with her paintbrush, her downy-haired son asleep on his hospital bed, throwing pools of stuttering light around her, spanning the long gap with the length her Love.

Night: from the 16th floor of my hotel

A lone car pushes its headlights
through the half-darkness below.
Streetlights scatter across the hill,
a tired imitation of the silent stars,
shining fiercely beneath thick blankets
of cloud. I turn down my bed, draw a bath.

Lights wash the night air
with the colorless pale of sleep.
The parking-lot tarmac shines
with puddles of rain-slicked streetlight.

(Written after a day of teaching & travel, on the eve of the National Writing Project 2006 conference in Nashville, TN)

As I type this, my fingers are stiff; I have just returned from a bike ride that stretched from the main street in Parker to an empty field 10 miles south, then back again. After a morning of reading and writing, I was eager to stretch out and move, to push myself to where people were scarce and the sky was wide open above me. There was no wind, and as I wound down to the Cherry Creek Trail the cottonwoods stood at silent attention, naked branches brittle against the sky.

The trail was mostly empty, and I found my rhythm in the stillness of late afternoon, beginning to trust my new road bike and lean into the curves, remembering to pull-push-scrape each pedal rotation so that my legs would maximize their effort. Rabbits moved in the underbrush, sometimes running parallel to the path, as if pacing me. Snow from Thursday's blizzard streaked the fields and melted into icy pools of water that ran slowly downhill, sometimes crossing the path, splashing my back and legs. As the trail rose and fell the air would grow suddenly colder as I emerged from under a bridge, or would warm as I entered a stand of trees. When I reached my turnaround point, the sun had disappeared, so I tucked my sunglasses into my jersey, took a drink and began my return trip north.

When I was nine, I saved quarters I would find on the sidewalk, my allowance and birthday money to buy a light blue beach cruiser. I had found it at the bike store near my house, like my friend’s that I had borrowed and instantly fallen in love with. When I had trouble falling asleep, I would picture myself riding around the neighborhood, exploring cul-de-sacs, finding clues and solving crimes like my hero, Nancy Drew. I would learn to ride with no hands, casually passing by the older kids on our block, pretending like I wasn’t trying to be as cool as them. They would stop me and want to see my bike, I knew it. Wishing: if only I was old enough to baby sit and save more quickly. It was hard not to be impatient, the money grew so slowly. I would take it out and count it, hoping that I had counted wrong the last time, and that there was more in my savings jar than last time. I got good at forgoing packs of gum and the other luxuries that my money used to buy me, but was pained by the slow crawl of time.

My beach cruiser was a happily-ever-after story, even though when I had saved enough money, my dad wouldn't take me to buy the bike. He was too busy, he said. What he didn't say was that he had bought it the day before, and it was hidden in the garage of Art and Donna, our neighbors. Christmas was three days away. I pouted until Christmas morning, when it appeared in the living room. I rode it that afternoon in the balmy Southern California winter, finally beginning to teach myself how to ride with no hands, not knowing then that I was learning to propel myself through autumn sunsets, into the cold of a Colorado night.

On my return trip tonight, my fingers grew so numb I could barely grip the brakes. My wicking sweatshirt invited evening to breathe onto my sweat-damp torso and I unsuccessfully willed myself not to shiver. Puddles near the narrow path were painted with deep pinks and oranges, reflecting the sky's quick movement toward night. As I pointed my bike off the trail, streetlights began to click on, and TV screens flickered in houses I passed by. Houses flew by me, but time again moved painfully slow. I wasn't watching the sky deepen into this late-October night; I was counting the blocks before I would be out of the cold.

Darkness lit up the sky...

When grading memoirs written by 7th graders who refer to themselves "back then when I was little," it is a discipline as their teacher to remember not to take credit for either the smooth turn of phrase, or the questionables, like how "Darkness lit up the sky."

And then there are nights like these, when I am so tired that I know I must sleep that moment. But I am too tired to brush my teeth and wash my face, so I stay up, and read another memory.

Best Words, Best Order

Today Jaime was spending lunch detention with me for being a stinker in class. After he honestly owned up to his nefarious malfeasances, we began to chat about life. I noticed a pink ink scrawling on his forearm that said Tia twice, both in bold block letters. I asked if that was his girlfriend, and he said no.

"But we do like each other a lot and we're going to a concert together on Friday and every time I get off the phone with her I tell her I love her."

I was puzzled. "And you're not going out? But you are going out Friday and you even say 'I love you.'"

We looked intently at each other, me wondering if he could see that they were doing what they said they weren't, and him wondering if I could really get it at all. I'm not sure who was more baffled at the other.

"Yeah, but her last boyfriend was really mean to her and it's going to take her a while to get over it. Maybe we'll go out sometime this year."

And then it was time for his electives to start and he hurried off to class after apologizing again, and I was left sitting on a wobbly desk to wonder at the gravity of 12 & 13-year-old relationships. Even though it is nearing 20 years ago, I remember how true my feelings were, & how deep my passions ran. In 7th grade I would watch Justin from across Language Arts, the nerves all over my body tingling when we made eye contact. I never even came close to telling him I loved him, but I did dance with him at the dances sometimes. We never went out either. I wonder what would have happened if I could have told him of my undying affection? Would the evolution of my understanding of the word love have been changed? I am grateful for my unintentioned silence. I still don't understand much about love, but am more careful about how I speak it.

Coleridge said that prose is words in their best order; poetry--the best words in their best order. How do I live beyond prose in the way that I love, both in the words that I speak and the silences and white spaces that hover behind & around my words? How do I order the words in my life? Are they surrounded by enough white space for those reading my life to be able to pause, to consider, to breathe?

Left with Questions

This morning I asked my students what it is like to come to school when the news headlines are filled with shootings around the country. Their answers were varied. One of my boys cocked his head sideways and asked me why adults are shooting children, and why children are shooting adults. He was dead serious. I told him that I did not know, and then rephrased my answer a couple of times, as if somehow, as I spoke, an answer would float to the back of my throat, and I could shape it, clothe it with my voice and let it comfort the worried group. Instead, I ended up sounding like a thesaurus.

Our district is now on a heightened security status and we were informed this morning that we will remain there indefinitely. External doors are permanently locked; we have discussed the disaster drill coming Friday; and we go on pretending, forgetting that evil is not confined to the inner city, or places far away from where we are. The question of evil is real. The back of my throat remains empty, and children live afraid.

I looked at my unusually-attentive morning class and told them that whatever the answer is, I am unalterably convinced that evil exists. They nodded and murmured agreement. Some asked questions. Many sat in watchful silence. I was thinking about how the Eskimos are known to have many words for snow. Will this generation attain linguistic renown for having as many ways to say fear?

My Words for Now

On my desk, an addressed, stamped envelope is wedged between a partly-burned candle and my dusty lamp. It has been moved around my desk since late spring, since I received it from a good friend who was going to Japan for the summer and was asking for financial and moral support. I intended to send it containing a note to welcome him back, to tell him how much I enjoyed his email updates, how I was looking forward to surfing together again. But it's still on my desk, and nearly two months has passed since I flew to California to attend his funeral. He drowned while swimming with friends in a place called Pilgrim's bay.

Today I tried to peel the stamp off, and use it for a letter I needed to send. It was stubborn enough for me to have to consider what I was doing. That's not my stamp--it's John's. The letter is eerie in its reminder of how John interrupted me--when I had the best of intentions--leaving before I could say all I wanted to say. I smoothed the curled edge and propped it next to other letters I have to send.

A friend wrote me last week and told me of a sudden death that has left him reeling. He asked how I was doing in my own grief. This was how I replied:

Words are exposed for their inadequacy when things like this slice our lives open. Our wordlessness exposes how little control we have, how little we understand, and how big the darkness really is. What have I learned as I have walked through the darkness of the past months? Live into your grief, into the confusion and sadness, into the anger and throbbing pain, into the darkness we are all so afraid of. In Exodus, as God is preparing to speak to Moses, it is recorded that "Moses went up into the darkness where God was." I have been confronted with the fact that this is not the God I wanted to know. So then, am I an idolator, creating God as I would like him to be, instead of as he really is? What choice will I make as I look to know God--pray to him, worship him, speak of him--and do not find him to be as I had thought?

Let yourself ask hard questions like these--indeed, live inside of them, and let yourself not only deal with the confusion that is outside of yourself, but inside. What kind of God allows these kinds of things to happen, anyway? Is it a God who truly knows our native tongue? How, then, is he speaking now--or what might he be saying in this vast silence that words are inadequate for? And how do I understand words, if Jesus is called Logos, and I am at a loss for words, what is there--in him--to be found and deepened in my understanding of what words are to be? I have found myself returning again and again to the life of Jesus, to the incarnate God who humbled himself to have his diaper changed, learn Aramaic, experience indigestion, hit his thumb with a hammer, have nails driven through his wrists. Have I ever understood any of this at all? Have I ever been willing to?

My questions, my silences, my words and the spaces they echo in--finding a place where they are necessary, where my stories and poems can shape worlds, as my world has been shaped.

I have deliberated for far too long about creating my own blog, waxing like Hamlet in an existential dilemma only I could create--to blog, or not to blog, that is the question. Well, with five minutes of (well-considered) spontaneity, I have answered it, and have joined the millions who use this forum to vent, process, be inane and create. This is an attempt to discipline my writing, to carpe candidus--seize the writing--so that the busy classroom doesn't steal what I know must be more a part of the rhythm of my days. This is part of me learning to be a writer who teaches, not a teacher who writes--who is determined to learn to find and call out the poetry in the ordinary spaces of my days. And it is part of me who holds back my written words too often, waiting until the letter can't be sent. These are my words for now.