Shalom

I spent most of Saturday with an old(ish), dear friend. If there's one person besides my spouse with whom I can be genuinely, authentically me, it's she. Her children are textbook adorable. Her back yard is a vast (to my eye) organic garden, a picnic area, and a quiet lake. She doesn't have a microwave, and her children think that plain yoghurt is delicious. She finds it perfectly ordinary that I bake my own bread, drink wine, read Greek, believe the Bible, and don't consider myself to be subordinate to any male. Ahhhhhh.

We cooked and ate dinner together: grilled hamburgers with homemade rolls, roasted yams, grilled zucchini, tomatoes, onions, chianti, blueberry pie. At a different time and in a different place, a shared meal was an intimate circumstance. For me, in some ways, it is this. As a teenager, living with various families who didn't care for or understand me, I snatched every opportunity to skip the family meal and eat alone. I thought I was afraid or aloof, but now I understand that I was simply defending my private self, the self reserved for the inner circle. Today, I consider cooking for someone to be a gesture of love, an offering of my self in the form of bread, tomato sauce, fruit tarts, grilled meat, soup, and green salad. I won't offer up a meal that does not nourish: love is nourishing. I want to be nourishing to others. 

Part of the meal that I shared with Jeannie and her family was a gift from two other friends: a box of vegetables. To me, there is nothing common about a box of vegetables—food that nurtures the bodies of friends who feed the soul. Nothing can bring shalom to a day marked by sharing like a gift of health and fullness. The lake serenaded us while the baby nursed, and it was very good.

Now I remember why I'm so cynical.

This is how my work day ended.

Crunch-crinkle-skid, I cross the gravel parking lot of my office.

Zoooom, I traverse the adjacent strip-mall parking lot, merging onto King's Highway, the busy-street part of my daily commute. 

Woosh, woosh, woosh, the cars kindly pass me in the left lane. 

Up ahead, a man of about 25 is riding a smallish, red mountain bike on the shoulder of the road. I, cruising at my top speed in the traffic lane, will easily overtake him in 3. 2. 1. . . . 

"On your leeeft!" I call out, in my most cheerful voice, intended to alert him to my approach and avoid accidental intimacy. I'm glad to have remembered to be safe and courteous. I merge onto the bike path quite a distance ahead of him and begin my ritual enjoyment of its proximity to the lake. "Crooooak," a friendly frog greets me.

Whrrr-whrrr-whrrr. I look behind. It's red-bike man, straining to catch up! Zzzzzz, he buzzes past me, with inches to spare. 

"On your LEFT, you BITCH!"

Huh? Um—huh???

"That was a polite gesture, you know, not an insult!" 

"FUCK YOU!" and he flips me the bird. I doubt the redundancy occurred to him.

Wrong

So I have this new friend. I don't get to say that very often. Hmmm. Actually, it's been several years. There is so little change in this place, so little news, and so a new friend is terribly exciting to me. I "click" with so few people nowadays.

A new friend is a delectable, fresh draft through my soul. But the wind whips through the cobwebs, and they wave, reminding me of their presence. My new friend reminds me so, so much of a soul sister I used to have. This is a compliment to her but not to me.

One of the grandest tragedies of my life is the loss of the only person who ever saw me lying at the feet of my persecutors, gashed and bleeding, naked and detestable, and still dared to love me. She taught me to be something that someone else might love someday. She taught me about Beatles and hobbits and purple walruses and haiku and chocolate pudding pie at 4 in the morning. She was truly amazing.

Then one day ten years ago, I told her I thought she would go to Hell if she died. 

I'm sorry! Really, I'm so sorry! I was so, so very, very wrong. If only she could hear me.

I've learned to be okay with being wrong. If wrong is what it means to make amends to Katie, even though she'll never know, then wrong is what I'll be. I can blame the teachers of the lame-ass theology that I embraced and that led me to be so cruel. But really, I was just arrogant and ignorant and immature and, well, wrong. 

And this is what is trembling in my soul today, as I eat blueberries and yogurt with cream for breakfast, spend my day reading about humankind's desperate scramble for another crumb of knowledge about the divine, take a gift to some beautiful people who are trying to heal the world, play with my cat, chat with my husband, listen to the trees and the children outside my window as I settle in for the night.

I want so much to love without conditions this time around. 

Good night.

 

When no one is watching I am whole and full of peace. I like myself, and I can accept love from the people who populate my thoughts and my desires.  When no one is watching, I am beautiful, alive, and free.

I decided to start a blog so that I can be at home. I don't know whether anyone will read my blog, and I suppose it's okay if no one does. I may not say anything that's worth reading.

This is an experiment. I wonder what will happen if I begin to think publicly. I wonder what will happen if others know the colors and textures of my thoughts, the sensual, screaming, silent universe that I carry and conceal.

I wonder what I will learn about myself. I wonder if I will ever write another post. I wonder if you're still reading. 

I am your friend if you will have me. I am lover to only one person. I am cherished by a few and hated by many fewer that I imagine.

I serve a crucified, resurrected King of kings, and I prefer to leave labels aside. Someday I will meet him, and, losing myself in his gaze, I will know. But for now, I do believe. I long to be with his children.

Sometimes I am ashes and woodscraps within. Sometimes my heart is full and warm. Sometimes I am grateful, sometimes greedy, sometimes chilled, sometimes ashamed.

I am a little more and a little less each day. I am clumsy; I always need forgiveness. I am messy, and my skin does not fit. 

I love smallness, weakness, infirmity, uncertainty, and unbalance—I love being human. 

This afternoon I was thinking about love. I was wondering what it meant to be loved. I was thinking about how much I want it and want to give it but how closed my heart is, closed tightly enough to choke. I've opened it before, and I've let wasps in. I've opened it before and waited and waited. The wasps sting, and the waiting starves. My heart has a face that not even my mother can love. What is love?

Does all this make me rotten? Do I need to prove myself?

Today is grey and cold. No one is watching, and I am full of peace.