Prayer

Concerts are spiritual experiences, U2, Beethoven's 9th, Brandi carlile.
I read and listen to music because I can't put myself into words.
I sing along, I scream, I dance - I have to be a part of it - It's better if I can touch someone who feels it too - connecting, Sometimes I just stop and put my head back, close my eyes and let it flow through me. It's kind of like chelation - the music flows through my mental veins attracting all the bad shit and carrying it out. The next day, my feet hurt, my legs hurt, I'm shaking, I'm exhausted... but I feel clean and renewed.

I pray best when smoking.
I know that sounds like a smoker's excuse. I don't want to smoke. Everytime I smoke lately, I get a sore throat and get sick, but really, it helps me pray.
When I was in college, I used to go out in the back 40 where there was dim yellow light and no one could see me. I would find a stump to sit on and smoke and pray. The smoke was like Old Testament incense, carrying my prayers to God. The yellow light was enough to keep me safe, leaving enough darkness to hide me. The wind in the trees tells me that the Holy Spirit is real, present, listening, comforting, moving, making music, a soft chime.

Even now, I stand on my steps in sight of the soft yellow light, listen to the wind, slowly inhale and exhale my prayers to God. The Holy Spirit carries them away and leaves me peaceful, relaxed, comforted. The Comforter. A Happy Place, much like the others - muted light, breath, warmth, comfort.

Even in high school, the night, in sight of the light, held peace, hushed conversations about important things that would fade in the daylight.

Daylight is for being strong, fighting the good fight. Nighttime is when God moves, things too important to be spoken in the daylight expose themselves in hushed tones, quiet tears and my prayers float to God as smoke in the wind.

back to the grind

I really am more ok than everyone thinks. Or am I lying to myself? I feel ok, until something happens and I burst into tears spontaneously and uncontrollably. But, then, I stop. and everything is ok again. Coping skills, denial, or maybe I just am really ok. Or not.
The Brandi Carlile concert might mean a lot of tears - I better warn my friends.

It's nice to be back in school... but I hate that sick feeling of dread when I think of all the things I need to do in not enough time. I am who I am, can do what I can. My job is to just do it.

Thanks to all my friends - I feel like someone on a tightrope who has a great safety net. Thanks, safety net.

Sometimes, though, I just want to leave and not look back. Move to Seattle,Portland, Boise, Albuquerque, Helena... be whoever I feel like being - fade into the background. Just fade away. If she succeeds, it will be hard not to.

Ramble Ramble

Humanity

A beautiful soul I know said to me in the midst of the valley of the shadow of death that hard times made us feel humanity more keenly and enabled us to reach greater depths of compassion. (or something like that, because i can't quite remember).

Times like these I often wonder what God is doing, because I don't believe in coincidences.
i have learned deeply personal things about many people in the last couple weeks and learned some things about myself. I forget my version of my story sometimes and get caught up in drama and how normal people would react in a situation. i don't feel my own emotions sometimes - if I did, I would probably be better off.
What does it mean to know something about someone, to have had someone be vulnerable with you? If it has been personally entrusted, I suppose it is like a treasure, to be held close to the heart and cherished.If it was put in the public domain, I think it should still be treasured.
How do you look someone in the eye when you know something so personal about them and they know similar things about you, but you don't know them so personally? To treat it lightly seems to make the treasures lighter when perhaps they shouldn't be.
At the end of all this - because this weekend is marking an end, of something - I come back to what I have always known. Open up your heart - Love, knowingly, with gravity, but without getting caught up in the drama. Love unconditionally. Love in spite of the vulnerability/because of the vulnerability. Be safe for others to deposit their treasures with.
I want it to mean something. That is my emotional hang-up. The grief comes when I think it didn't mean anything. But, it always means something. This is why it's hard to look them in the eye - I don't want to see that it didn't mean anything - I don't want to see what it really did mean.
Perfect love casts out fear.
Transparency means letting your love hang out... and your faults too.
Enough.

observation

My mom is becoming a Black Baptist Preacher.
I said the Apostle's Creed in the shower like a Black baptist preacher once. It gave it much more power and strength.

numb

I am out of outlets. i am tired of journaling - trying to be cautious of Facebook posts. So, here we go - angry rants out to who knows who.

I feel numb. I feel used. I feel like I have been lied to. I feel like I have been betrayed. I feel like everything in the world that I used to hold as true is hollow. I feel hollow - like the person I think I am is no longer who I am.
I have no one to be angry with except myself. Well, I have a right to be angry with him. My father - no. not my father. My daddy - the one who is supposed to be my knight in shining honor - a Gollum, a coward, who doesn't have the courage or respect to be honest with me. Kind of like someone else in my life. But I deserved the latter, it is about me. The former isn't. The former is about a series of tragedies that I was sucked into - like the pirate ship into the whirlpool. The latter is like Jack Sparrow into the Krakon's mouth. I should have asked, I should have known, I am so naive sometimes in spite of my best efforts to the contrary. Ironic. Yesterday, my happy place, the one person who had given me what I needed today is the one who I feel most betrayed by, sickened by.
The book was supposed to be cathartic, but I am so angry - it just annoys me.

I am not myself. My music does not soothe me - Brandi and Ani fail me now - I'm not in that deep spirit, deep mellow depression. I am ready for action, i am frustrated and angry and annoyed - I need movement, I need to not be me anymore. I need to be that person who I always thought I was now. Leave my bullshit behind. Leave my childish desires and fantasies behind. They were the movie - this is the reality. A harder colder lonelier less romantic reality. Thankfully. I can't stand the romantic, yellow light, warm fuzziness, encompassing as the warmth of blankets darkness, sadness anymore. Give me cold clean powerful anger - let it flow through me like raw power - like wizards fire and let it consume everyone in my path who can't withstand it.
i always regret it. I always hurt people when I'm like this. That makes me madder - why can't they stand it? why can't they love me anyway? because they are human... just like me. Because they are weak, just like me. Because they aren't made of steel - they are made of softer silver and gold.
I'm sorry.
I have no one to blame but me, the one person I can never manage to forgive.
She was trying to convince me to be transparent. I was on this honesty kick for a while - wizards fire. Then I realized that people can't withstand transparency and wizard's fire. It causes them to see themselves - it isn't grace. It doesn't love in spite of faults - it reveals truth.
Conditional honesty. She says that is arrogant. No, it is acknowledging that when someone loves you, you have a duty not to hurt them needlessly.
Confession is supposed to make you feel clean. Confession has led to discomfort, and opened the door to unmentionables, it has created a community, but created peer pressure.
I am what I am - my life is not my own - my humanity and god's divinity have created in me a walking contradiction.
I'm sorry. Thanks for your advice, but you don't understand.
Each of you has a piece of me. Your advice is based on the piece you know and love. But there are other pieces which weigh against me. Maybe someday I will choose a single path and follow it to the exclusion of these other paths, to the exclusion of some of you. Maybe God will let you exclude me, so I don't have to suffer the guilt.
Or, he will teach me to forgive myself. I have a funny feeling he's going to make me do it the hard way.
Alas, 2 am, still nothing done. But I have expressed myself - funny, before last week I couldn't write... .didn't have anything to say. Now I am saying lots of things, without speaking anything worthwhile.
No, it won't ever be over. Learn to cope, to deal, to live with this. Get it out of your head the best you can, then move on.

What did the dear cousin put on my wall today? "In three words, i can sum up everything I have learned in life: It Goes On."

God is good, Beer is great, People are crazy.
Fear God and Keep his commandments for this is the end of man.
Do Justice, Love Mercy, Walk humbly with thy god.
Be Strong and of good courage, for I am the Lord Thy God who brought you out of Egypt.
Love the Lord thy God with thy heart, soul, and mind and love thy neighbor as thyself.
Paul and Silas praised God around midnight and their prison was broken.
Dear God, This sucks, it's my fault - I'm sorry, Help Me. thank you.

Here god, this is what I want and I'm going there unless you tell me otherwise. Guide my steps.
Dear God, Thank you for another day. May your will be done. In Jesus name, Amen.

I discovered the day after Christmas that I am capable of feeling emotions strong enough to make me physically sick to my stomach. that's never really happened before.
Well, that's not true. It hasn't happened in a really long time.
Someone told me that your parents splitting up is a life-defining moment. You know, that period of time that you measure all other time against. That was before, or after. Right now, I can think of three, well, four defining moments in my life. My grandma dying, the two year period I was in a relationship, opening my birth certificate and the ensuing process of searching for and finding my bio. parents, and this. There have been a lot of other things that have been hard and have changed me, but these four moments are at the top.
I have felt sick to my stomach due to emotional distress before... That and a shitty gall bladder.
She couldn't give us presents - too much money in a time when money is a potential issue. She felt really bad - they had discussed giving us each a camera, but she didn't think we'd want them anymore.
He didn't get it.
We got our cameras.
It made me feel ill. Receiving it from him made me hate him, made me cry, made me wish he were dead so I could move on.
It felt like pay-off, a buy-out, a "see, I'm a better parent" moment that I never thought I would have to endure.
And yet, maybe he just was following through with the former plan because he knew she couldn't.
Either way, I'm keeping it. I just might not be able to use it for a while.

Insanity

"lately, I've been wondering if we are all destined to go crazy at some point in our lives and be totally irrational and obsessive and nuts.
I don't want to go insane."
but then, I'm afraid that I already am and its inevitable and I can't stop it.

"why not just stop worrying about it and deal with it if it starts to happen?
otherwise you will become obsessive about whether you are becoming obsessive?"

"do you know when it starts to happen?
or is it one of those things that everyone else sees, but no one says anything
people tell me that I'm nuts, and that I'm crazy all the time
what if its true?
and I dont even know it?"

"then why does it matter?"
" because its not ok."

I just had this conversation. Really.