no word(s)

if you've ever been to the county fair, you know something of boredom. i've always felt detached at fairs, and i think it's because a fair is the kind of place where everything that ever happens is happening all at once. i don't mean that people are killing other people (although i'm sure that's happened at a fair) or that people are having sex at a fair (although, if Revenge of the Nerds was right, then people are somewhere), I mean that fairs usually have some form of every possible human emotion on display. fairs always make me think of radiohead's song Idioteque, and if you haven't listened to that song you ought to, for your own sake. the point is, fairs are difficult places for me because it's hard to process the human condition when you see it all at once, and even harder when you see everyone trying to make the best of it all at once.

i've never been too worried about things. that sentence talks about something that people think has always been true of me, and in a way i suppose they are right. things is a huge umbrella of a word and all sorts of people huddle underneath it to avoid the unpleasant rain of descriptive precision. at least that's how it seems to me when people say the word things. i have, however, spent an uncomfortable amount of time living under the weight of what i've taken to be the realities of the human condition. my head hurts when i think about all of the people that love other people and aren't loved back by those people, or when i think about all of the people who just had someone they love die, or all of the people who came home from the fields to find the civil war passing through their village and their families raped and/or killed. our world is broken as hell, and if my heart were a backpack, my mind and books and paintings and stories used to put a lot of heavy rocks in my backpack. so many rocks that i always felt like this:

and then after awhile, like this:

 and then, right before the end, like this:

she told me once, in her usual way of saying things that crash through my ceiling, that it was ok to let the weight of all of those things go because that was just the way the world was, and that i didn't have a heart or a mind big enough to process and handle all of the hurt that everyone everywhere was feeling. that might seem like an obvious thing to say, because like so many other insightful things it is obvious, but it wasn't obvious to me.

i think that when things happen like tsunamis or car wrecks or the whole history of pain, we just have hearts that aren't big enough to handle waters that deep and they end up flooding everything and drowning us. i think God knows that, and that that's why he decided to tell people who were in the midst of deep waters like that that He is there with them, and He's grieving too. He's not avoiding the question, He just knows that the most important thing for us to know is that His heart is big enough.

my point is, i think there are things that are incommunicable. even if you got a million tries and a million words, you couldn't think of the thing to say that would help ease the pain of things like that, but if there were a way to peel back your skin and ribs and show people your heart then you wouldn't need any words and neither would they, and that's what God did.