I have nothing to say

My feet take me places and my fingers forget to follow: it's as if life, in all it's vacuous chaos, has drained the words right from me with nothing left to put down in black and white. A writer's life has seasons as any artist's does: sometimes life inspires you and you record your perceptions in your own unique voice; then, too, the magnitude of the visual expanse of our world stops us up with it's enormity and no words are adequate to describe it.

My camera is dusty, too. A recent thrift store acquisition of a Yashica medium format SLR camera with a ground glass lens, and an original Canon Super8 video camera have left digital media far behind. I stood in a St. Louis hotel suite a few weeks ago stopped up by the chair they had left for me, the symmetry of it in the lance of light through the crack in the drapes, but more so the fact that I had four days alone in the anonymity of a fancy hotel, with THIS chair to sit in and look out on the urban landscape.

There were other moments of happiness captured: green grass in March under shiny new gray oxfords. An Ethiopian restaurant where I ate mounds of spicy lamb curry with hot from the oven injera. I was on my way to get a new tattoo: something I do when the pain of the past threatens to swallow me whole. I call it alternate rebellion. My brain is sending me on impulsive journeys to places I no longer want to visit, and pain is what stops me in my tracks. No longing wielding weapons against my own body, ironically it is healthier to hand a stranger a hundred and sit for an hour while they stab my skin with a high speed needle and paint.

I rented a car and when my mind began to wander to the sadness and stress of my everyday life, I hopped in and drove fast on the highways to a totally different part of the city. I travel to old St. Louis, which everyone tells me to avoid. I'm not very good at listening to warnings when I'm on an adventure. Especially by myself. So I take pictures of the boarded up old French row houses in the slums; I find a huge stone column, some remnant of a majestic building from the French period - now standing testament to a long-gone era, right in the middle of a road with a round-about built to avoid it. I drink espresso and eat beignets at a bakery advertising "hot and fresh". The windows boast iron bars to deter break-ins, and the inside is dingy and old with cracked linoleum underfoot and wobbly oak tables and chairs. There is a dusting of sugar on everything I touch. The beignets are roasting hot, the sugar melting into the crust. They're the best I've ever eaten. The "espresso" is Southern style - made from fine ground chicory and coffee.

Flowers are just beginning to bloom and I pick a magnolia blossom and set it on my dash. All this beauty in a four day business trip. I breathe deep and think I am lucky - for that is what it is, not a blessing or some experience designed to delight me, but just luck. The worst days of my life have occurred over these same weeks of silence, and it is only by building happy moments into bitterly difficult days that I thrive in no-man's land in a battle I stumbled upon.

The tattoo is my largest yet. I choose my left leg, I choose symbols carefully for their meanings in this season. The top is an enso, a mark that symbolizes an unfinished volume or chapter: it is for strength and for the void that coexists with our universe. Below it, I ask for a colorful eban, a West African symbol that is painted on the fences of small towns vulnerable to pillaging, attack, and other unspeakable violence. It represents the strong fence protecting the village: security and safety for all within it's walls. The diamonds are homes, and the colors all mean something that speaks peace into my situation: black is for warriors; green is for the ability to provide; red is for the deep attachment between the community or family members; and yellow means the space is precious and beautiful to it's inhabitants. The two "e" symbols mean something to me as well. It is a bold move for a bold time, marking a new step in my transformation, a step toward maturity, self-sufficiency, and - perhaps most important - my newly brave and powerful voice.

I return to winter and to adventures with my kidlets. We go to the American Girl store and I am surprised to enjoy it, such a girly place. In just the past year, femininity has been both something I can ignore or choose depending on how I feel, and also it is no longer dangerous. Instead it feels peaceful and joyful and expressive. Watching my girls and niece dance around the store in giddy delight over all the dolls reminds me of the countless hours I spent playing with my baby dolls all alone, dreaming of babies and a home to call my own someday. That desire seemed antithetical to my tomboy nature and my fear of marriage. Things work out differently than we imagine in our heads.

As I write here less, I have sometimes felt a twinge of guilt. But this blog is simply my story. Some seasons have required many lines typed to cipher through all the thoughts in my head. I have less to interpret these days, living authentically instead of in a cage of expectations. So the blog rests for weeks on end while I am busy living.

Which is the best possible development on a blog that has chronicled cancer and illness and loss and grief and shame. Join me in quietly celebrating by simply living the life you were designed to live.

A living memory

The tragedy of life is not death but what we let die inside us while we live. (Norman Cousins)

Do you remember those hazy humid dreams of childhood summers? Have you forgotten the schemes and dreams you plotted along life's timeline when you were 7? Do you remember pinky promises and cross your heart and hope to die, all those pacts we made with other little people to become something, do something, before we got old.

My childhood dreams come alive with the smell of horse hair and the huff of a mare's breath on a hot summer day; the prickle of hay on skin and how it smelled like warm sunshine bottled up. My dreams at night were bareback riding and flying through murky skies and falling out of flaming buildings. My dreams by day were all about love: I was desperate to have it, to keep it, to always remember the important things. My knuckles went white with the gripping of love as hard and as tight to my chest as possible.

Life does not feel permanent when you're a child. Everything flits by and is gone on the wind before you've hardly consumed it, long before you can commit it to memory. Each new experience brushes against your skin like the allure of tall grass wet with dew, hands winding through the wheat tops shaking drops onto the brown tumbled up earth below. We don't know how to make connections yet, as children, and so life flies by free-form. It just is. We aren't hunters of explanations and we aren't gatherers of puzzles yet. We are hunters of daylight - craving it down to it's last black shadow on summer nights on damp cut grass of Olly Olly Oxen Free and Annie Annie I Over. We are gatherers of pretty rocks and feathers, beads and old cans from the woods.

I dreamed of falling in love. It seemed uncomplicated and wonderful in an Anne of Green Gables sort of way, as though I would be so magnetically drawn to that one person and he to me and we would be happy once we discovered the love we cloaked under sarcasm and friendship. I didn't know there would be stops and starts along the way. I didn't know I really would dislike my lover as much as Anne ever disliked Gilbert. And I had no idea how compelling and awesome the magnetism of true love is.

I dreamed of seeing things - amazing things, wild things, beautiful things - as many as I could possibly see before I die. To be born creative is also to be born with this inexplicable and undeniable draw toward the creativity of others, the beauty they create. I devoured an entire art history library looking for beauty, and developed my favorites - the spareness of Wyeth and the raw power of Michelangelo's sketches.  I listened to all kinds of music: to this day, my playlist includes songs from my grandparents and parents' generations, as well as songs from almost every genre of modern music.

Life tumbles on, and with every moment it becomes more complicated. Yet, too, as the earth spins, parts and people fly off into history and you travel on into the future down-sized. And there are places and smells and sounds that will always connect us to our core, where we can remember who we truly are, bask in the naked beauty of the soul.

For me, it is hay, and grass cut in summer, and the smell of sun on barn boards and animal flesh. It is the harumphs of happy horses and the whinny on the wind. It is the countryside on a sunny day, lying on your back picking out shapes from the clouds in the azure sky. It is friend's voices and each of their own special laughs.

Where do you go to remember who you are? Are you familiar with that core place within you that holds your essence and your dreams? How do you access it?

Look what's peeking through

It is piling up again out there, the blanket of white stretching it's arms far into April, and we tough Midwesterners are beginning to truly say "Uncle". If there is one more gray day, we say. If it doesn't start to warm up soon...

I silently wonder if winter's expanse hasn't lingered just for me. The gray days match my mood (or do they cause it?) and snow keeps scars under wraps. Summer is not so kind.

I am cutting cords, this wintery spring. Trying to be willing to change. It's a big leap for me. After all, I've kept myself relatively safe with this way of coping and I'm scared that the new ways won't give me the armor I need.

Happiness creeps in with the study of a list of Scriptures with my mama. This list tallies all the ways healthy coping is straight from the good Book. And I breathe - let myself believe, again - that this might work. I feel happy and say so, and then touch my chest in shock that those words just slipped easily from my lips again.

It's a little like the blades of bright green grass sticking up through the snow, the crocus leaves catching flakes in the diffused light of the snowstorm. It has grown in silent and the secrets of my heart these last weeks, this tiny fragile piece of happiness, and it is birthed, even through snow. There it is. I think that it might be hope. He is saying

I have swept away your offenses like a cloud, your sins like the morning mist. Return to me, for I have redeemed you. (Isaiah 44:22)

"Jump"

Holding embers

She says that people like me are living in hell on earth. The searing pain of our situation has us grasping at any means possible to escape the torment. Including deciding to climb up the hot aluminum ladder leading up, even though that is sure to cause more pain with each step. Problem is, she says, I've climbed the ladder before, seemingly "out" of my personal hell, but I've done it on willpower alone. I slog through my disappointment and discontent; I pull up and up into happy and unhappy cohabiting. Beyond that, I keep looking, straining upward, so sure there is something more. Most people are happy just to live in the quiet of this space, and they never glance upward. But I do, and I see a light that leads to another level - joy and despair. To hold on to the emotion and solution at once is like a hot coal in each hand. 

Up here, on my way to radical acceptance of both joy and despair, is where I either fall off the ladder or the level, if I make it that far. Just like that, back in hell.

To be inflated is as certain as to be crushed...extremely good and extremely bad dancing in the neverlands. To be here is to be vulnerable, to risk everything every time. No wonder I fall back in.

How will this next climb ever be different? Have I any say in recovery at all? The hopelessness of it all weighs me down when I would take flight to escape the burn inside.

Is counting joys safe? I guess not. I keep counting for today - my gesture of radical acceptance of all of this to the universe.
#2052 Bits of joy ARE beginning to creep back in for the cracks
#2057 ice cream on the weekend!
#2061 phone call from a friend at a crucial moment
#2063 husband's cooking
#2068 little hands reaching in the night

Happiness and Joy are Different

I don't want to be here again. But life doesn't usually go the way you want it to. One of the main difficulties I have with depression is that I can't figure out if it's the Potter's chosen way of shaping me right now, or if it is because of my inability to stay focused on Him.

But here we are. There's no denying that. Slowly, old coping skills are coming back, and for the majority of the day, I can ignore the rain cloud hovering over my head. One of the most successful ways for me to dig out of depression, get up out of my bed, and live normally in these seasons is something called Opposite Action. All you have to do is figure out something to throw yourself into 100% that will provide positive reinforcement rather than negative. I'm a mother first, and I carry a huge load of mother guilt, so Opposite Action for me often entails doing something crazy with my kids.

I grabbed a pack of suncatchers and paint at Walmart on the way home from work. Just after breakfast yesterday, I stayed out of bed, and we opened paint pots and set to work. The table was a mess. The children were in heaven. And for an hour, I forgot to be depressed.

After we finished, we packed up, got lunch in town, and went to the Y. We spent four hours, swimming, rock climbing, zip lining, playing basketball, running on the track. Once again, depression and it's invasive thoughts had no room to take foothold as we ran around the Y. We emerged, hair steaming in the sub-zero gray day.

My day wasn't gray at all. I believe this is the difference between happiness and joy. Happiness is a passing emotion dependent on all kinds of external factors. But joy is stored within, and for those of us who have placed our faith in Christ, there is a constant wellspring of joy despite external factors. Ever since Amelia's illness in 2009, I Peter 1 has been the passage that has helped me hang on to joy even when happiness is entirely absent.

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! According to his great mercy, he has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, to an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you, who by God's power are being guarded through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time. In this you rejoice, though now for a little while, if necessary, you have been grieved by various trials, so that the tested genuineness of your faith—more precious than gold that perishes though it is tested by fire—may be found to result in praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ. (1 Peter 1:3-7 ESV)

Opposite Action is, in essence, what Christians have been practicing since the beginning of time. Moses was a man with a temper problem, a murderer, and someone who took flight at the first sign of danger, but he stood up to Pharoah through all the plagues and led the Israelites toward Canaan although he often felt like giving up and told God so on the mountaintops. Noah had never seen rain, but he built an ark out of obedience. Sarah had no hope left of bearing a child and her sadness over this fact is evident in her response to God's promise when she is an old woman, yet she continued to be with her husband, and a child was born from whose genetic line Jesus would eventually be born. Even Jesus, who begged His father for mercy in Gethsemane, walked out into the garden to meet the soldiers when they came to arrest Him, and endured the cross even though He could have easily saved Himself.

Why did all these people go forward despite their misgivings, their pain, their fear? Because their joy was not predicated on their circumstances, but on the salvation they knew was coming. I see it too, on the horizon of every season of depression - rescue. Someday He will wipe away every tear. And meanwhile, I can REJOICE because, despite all appearances of this life, there is an inheritance imperishable, undefiled and unfading kept in heaven for me.

Pocket full of sunshine

No matter how deep you bury joy, it bubbles up like an underground spring and overflows on days when the sun is shining. 

I got a pocket, got a pocketful of sunshine

I got a love and I know that it's all mine,

Do what you want but you're never gonna break me

Sticks and stones are never gonna shake me,

Wish that you could but you ain't gonna own me

Do anything you want you can't slow me down,

Take me away, a secret place

A sweet escape, take me away

Take me away to better days

Take me away, a hiding place

There's a place that I go that nobody knows

Where the rivers flow and I call it home

And there's no more lies in the darkness there's light

And nobody cries, there's only butterflies

The sun is on my side and takes me for a ride

I smile up to the sky, I know I'll be alright

~Pocket Full of Sunshine, Natasha Bedingfield~

Take hold of something real

The spring mud has sprung. And with it, rainboots, and shovels, and lots of laundry. But the grins on those snowpant, mitten-less kiddos as they come in from their mud pies and explorations...

As an adult, have you forgotten how to play? Do you remember the squish of mud between your toes, the sucking sounds as your boot is swallowed in the wallow and you come up bootless and stranded on one leg like a pink flamingo?

Do you recall the joy of the wheels sputtering along with the flying mud painting your back a caked brown? The glory of the driveway emerging from white and a whole new vista of play to be discovered all over again in spring?

Revelry. We lose it as adults. And so often twist it to mean something different...drinking, long late nights with friends, things that leave us spent and de-energized instead of re-energized.

I go out every day, to a prayer spot in the woods. Near the grave of my son, a short homemade bench made of a scrap 2x4 and a couple of logs. Up in Echo Woods, where our pets and our baby are buried under rock cairns the children add to with each agate find from the driveway. I sit there for 10 minutes, the sun warming my face a rosy red, breathe deep, and pray. Pray for people going home to God, people dying on the vine, people bickering, and wondering, and confused and distraught. I pray for my children, each by name, for their needs for the day. And as those 10 minutes pass by in the blink of an eye, and I sludge back through the muddy grass back to the house, I remember spring. In my gut. The way spring used to be. Slinging mud at my brothers and building tunnels for the rivers of snow run-off in the yard.

Yesterday I sat, in my 1950's steel chair, painted a happily rusting white, and watched my children revel as children do. How do I reclaim that? Is it in the French hip-hop dance-off we hold in our living room after lunch? In the quiet moments spent typing when my mind goes free and poetry flows and photos fly up to match the words I write? Is it the dance at night with my husband, the play together with the man I know every inch of? Is it the thrill of a new friend, or the kitten up on my shoulder begging to have her ears rubbed, or the blues that blare from the speakers while I cook dinner?

You come out of a hard season hungry. Hungry for hope. Hungry for healthiness. Hungry for happiness. I watch the children in the mud and realize that children never lose that - hope, healthiness, happiness. Left to their own devices, they mine it for themselves in something as simple as a mud puddle in the drive-way. 

The people brought children to Jesus, hoping he might touch them. The disciples shooed them off. But Jesus was irate and let them know it: "Don't push these children away. Don't ever get between them and me. These children are at the very center of life in the kingdom. Mark this: Unless you accept God's kingdom in the simplicity of a child, you'll never get in." Then, gathering the children up in his arms, he laid his hands of blessing on them. (Mark 10:15 The Message)

I held on so dearly

To the wrong things in my life

But now I see so clearly

I was walking into my own knife

You've got to get up off that street

Stop looking at your feet

And take a hold of something real

And this old man, took my hand

He looked at me and said, little girl, I understand
He said, I know your song, I know your name,
and there was a time when I felt the same

That it's a low low road

You've gotta roll down

Before you find your way, my friend

And it's a high, high hill

You've gotta climb up

Before you get to the top again

And there was a time that I thought that I knew it all

And there was a place that I thought I could call my own

But it all came crashing down and I looked around

And I knew that things would never be the same

~ Grace Potter, Low Road ~