porches

this is one of those nights where I feel further away from the words I mean than I want to be. have you ever noticed how you can be in the same room with someone and miss them like crazy? i don't mean that you feel detached from them, I mean that you feel like they have to be as close as they can be to you before you can settle down some. that's how i feel about my words tonight. they are across the room talking with someone else and even though I catch their eye they don't leave that conversation for mine. 

i don't think much about death, because death, no matter how close i've come to it, which is close, has always seemed across the party from me, not out of the room but out of reach. one thing that I just thought about is how we are in a relationship with death, and some people go through the motions of courtship with it and then engagement and then finally marrying it, except that when you marry death, you don't find out hardly anything about it until after you've said your I-dos. Weird huh? some people, though, have shotgun weddings with death and don't go through any of the motions. the reason I bring that up is that death sometimes scares me, because i don't really know what happens afterwards. I'm not scared of death, I'm scared of what happens afterwards, which is a line from a song that I love. we all avoid talking about it except when we have to because something terrible has happened, and we sit around rooms with hearts that are wide eyed and try to remember the times when we didn't have to have times to remember. 

this might sound bad, but sometimes when someone talks about dying for their country I think that they've seen to many movies. I don't mean the people that have died for their country, i mean the people that talk loudly at parties about dying for a country. I'm not saying I wouldn't, but I'm not saying I would either because shit dude, you're dead and you don't get to come back after you're dead and if I'm going to die for something I want it to be something that's on my mind all of the time. I'm really grateful for the country I've been able to live in, and the people who have died to make it that way, but still, dying for things is deep water and my heart can't swim so well in those waters these days. Call me whatever you want. 

I used to always wonder if, when I died, Jesus would look me in the eye or just look the other way for a second so I could sneak in. If anyone should be sneaking into heaven instead of walking through the front gate it's me, and I don't care if you know it. Back when I was more in love with sorrow than I am now, I used to think of how dramatic and grand it would be to be pounding on heaven's gates asking for entrance and be unjustly cast out into Hell before the whole host of horrified, outraged humanity. Then I remembered that at a time like that everyone is too worried about their own problems to watch and be horrified by anything and anyways it doesn't work like that because there's no way to be misunderstood by God, only by yourself and other people, which scared me a lot for awhile until I read something from Peter Hitchens where he said that whether his standing with God is right or not will be up for someone who knows his heart far better than himself to decide. If Peter and I both are as genuine as we would like to be, I'm going to thank him for that.

In the end, I suppose that death is just the beginning of the real thing, whatever that ends up being. The ache that I feel for her or for finding a place or for whatever it is that we ache for that we can't describe is perhaps just the beginnings of the birthpangs and maybe death is the birth. who knows. i guess someone does but they said it in a way that made it seem unimportant, which makes sense when i'm sitting with friends or i'm with her but it doesn't seem so unimportant when i'm on my porch by myself every night. maybe what happens isn't important, it's who's waiting on the other side that's important. 

i get my best thinking done on porches. i swear, there's nothing like them. i don't know why, but the combination of the world slipping sideways into dark and either the loud quiet of your own mind or the pull of friend's conversation and laughter is one of the only things I make an effort to include every day. i've come to regret some things, but porches aren't ever one of them. she and i have spent time on porches, and it was the kind of time that you let soak into you and through you.

i hear from the Lord in churches sometimes, but I hardly ever talk with Him there. There was a time when I did I suppose, but that was before I was interested in knowing something about Him. these days, you can find He and I on my porch under the evening weight that pulls so much out of your mind and heart that you can hardly bear it. 

she's so far away right now that it hurts.

in my head, heaven is more like a porch than a church.

constant faucet

my heart is caught under the constant faucet of the depth of things these days, always filling and overflowing.

when you write words, you try to choose the ones that most mean what you mean, like how when you care for someone you aren't concerned about the kinds of expressions that you're using to show them how you care for them, you only care about them understanding your care for them. there are these people that are like diamonds, not because they are expensive or sharp, but because they have a million subtle windows and each one presents a different angle or view or piece of them, except that with people you might keep on turning them over in your heart's hand forever and never run out of new things to see or know or want to know. I know someone like that.

did you know that there is a kind of grasshopper (scientists reading this just turned a bit in their future graves because the right word is Caelifera, which is a part of the Orthoptera order. i'm sorry, i'm interested in scientific things but i like to talk about it in my own way) that has evolved pink eyes and pink nodules all over its body because the fungi that grows on the plants in its habitat is bright colors like pink and purple? that wasn't related, but it was on my mind because i like learning things like that. 

when you think about the kinds of things that stop you in your tracks, you realize that those are the types of things to spend your time with. words stop me in my tracks, or rather the way people use words. i'm not a big dictionary guy myself, although i will browse it from time to time. i'm more interested in words in peoples' hands and mouths and lungs. there are some words, though, that you shouldn't say very often, even if you think them, because it would steal something from their meaning to be said too often. the same can be said about people. there is someone that i ought not talk about much for now, because it's too much for me. i don't break down so easily, but these days that's a different story, and i mean that in the turn of phrase kind of way and because it means what i want it to mean, which is that poetry, whether it's made of words or actions or a person, breaks in on you in ways you couldn't ever expect, or hope to expect. if you've ever known the kind of silence that settles over mountains and forests and fields under snow, the kind that is so loud and heavy that you would leave if you could but you can't because you need that kind of silence, you love that kind of silence, then you know something of desire and the feeling that slips in between you and the rest of the world because of someone, and the way they are. there is an elegance to desire that is hardly ever noticed, because we spend so much time wanting someone else to take off our clothes that we forget that the really important part, the real substance of the thing, is finding someone who can take off our heart's clothes, because that's something that hardly anyone can do. 

i don't know much about hardly anything, but one thing that is true is that my heart has it's knees pulled up to its chest and is rocking the to's and fro's of desire, biting its lip and keeping it in for now, as much as one is able to keep such things in.

there are few things more inescapable and painful than joy when the gift of constant expression has been removed. 

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.

ours

i don't have much to write today, because this weekend was the kind of weekend you spend with the kind of person you used to lie awake wondering where they were, if they were even out there, or if, since you knew where they were and why they left, they were coming back. i don't usually spare you any details, but this is an exception because there are things, even if you write about everything, that you don't write about because they are only yours and hers and that's all.

i haven't done hardly anything right in my whole life, but this hasn't been a question of who deserves what or who gets whom because they have or haven't jumped through all the right hoops, and i don't think it's ever been about that for anyone. 

this is about how grace drops into the middle of everything and ripples in every direction, and doesn't leave anything the same, or feeling the same. 

this isn't about what we thought would happen, this is about what did happen. 

this is about us. 

I ache so bad that I can't type anymore.

thanks.

One time, awhile ago, I was in a church in Slovakia, I don't remember where, and I had one of those experiences that slip in between you and the rest of the world. What I mean is, one of those experiences that reminds you of the weight of everything, that remind you that no matter what else happens afterwards, you were close to something that you'll spend a long time trying to figure out. The power of human voices resonating off of cold church-stone is something I won't forget, even if I forget everything. That feeling, that lover-caught-mid-laugh, that ache-rising-to-the-surface, that music-off-cold-stones, is something that I can't find  much to say about, but I feel it. I feel it all.

Sometimes I wonder if all we are is simile and metaphor. I read Genesis sometimes, but not as often as other parts of the Bible, and I don't leave my reading of it knowing much more than I did when I started reading it. I do, however, leave understanding more. That's a real distinction, the one between knowing and understanding, because I don't leave early Genesis knowing much about how this whole existence thing got started, but I do leave understanding more deeply that there are some things that are incommunicable. I don't care how the world was made. I care that God understands the weight of everything. He is content to be mysterious, to leave parts of Himself to metaphor and simile. Most of Himself, actually. He is only clear about a couple really important things, and what flows out of those important things are word-picture explanations of other facts about Him. He's ok with that, and now so am I.

It's not surprising that I'm as taffy-stuck and tongue-tied in other areas too. I try to tell someone what I'm feeling, and she tries to tell me, but really all we are saying is "it's like this" or "it's as if you were" or "you are a...and i'm a" or "i miss you". My heart stumbles over things it knows, but doesn't know how to say. Maybe that's how it always is, and we just get closer and closer to saying what we mean, to saying what we feel.

It seems that these days everyone feels a need to know everything about everything. We are afraid of mystery. C.S. Lewis said one time, I don't know when exactly he said it, that love is the enemy of lust. I remember that I went through a phase, not so long ago, where I would have liked very much to be an atheist, or at least an agnostic. I had some ok arguments I guess, but I wasn't going to embark on a showy "tell everyone everywhere how I've changed" campaign where I would have laughed at all the narrow minded Christians who still "believed that shit", like lots of people my age who become atheist or agnostic do. I was just going to be one. The really unfortunate thing for my aspirations, and the fortunate thing for me, in all of this, was that God came down and whispered in my ear that the only reason I was considering such things was because I was angry about some things and because I wanted to have sex with whomever I wanted, whenever I wanted. He also said that those weren't very good reasons. It took a couple months for Him to get all of that out, and for me to hear it, but He did, and I did. The most important thing He told me, though, was that I needed to become more comfortable with His mystery. I wasn't to go stamping about because He wouldn't be what I wanted Him to be when I wanted Him to be it. What I mean is, I needed to let Him be who He is, to let Him be mysterious in the ways He wants to be.

The thing is, C.S. Lewis was right, lust is so damn boring. x+y=z. So predictable. Love is something altogether different, something wilder, crazier, slower, deeper, more mysterious, and more real. God's love for us isn't predictable, but it's trustworthy. It isn't controlling, but it is invasive. It isn't passive, but it is patient.

When whatever happens after we die happens, and I come before the Lord, I won't have much to say except "thanks for your patience".

I don't know much about love, hardly anything really, but maybe when we tell someone that we love them, when it is true, one of the things we mean is that we are thankful for their patience.