Idle and Blessed

You are the future, the red sky before sunrise over the fields of time. You are the cock's crow when the night is done, you are the dew and the bells of matins, maiden, stranger, mother, death. You create yourself in ever-changing shapes that rise from the stuff of our days -- unsung, unmourned, undescribed, like a forest we never knew. You are the deep innerness of all things, the last word that can never be spoken. To each of us you reveal yourself differently: to the ship as the coastline, to the shore as a ship. -Rilke

Method for coping with Atlanta summers as a runner: Start in the shade Follow all shady sidewalks Dodge sunny spots When you hit half your mileage goal, turn around Follow shady sidewalks back home If all else fails, escape to a shady oasis of trails. The drive is worth it. The shade-chasing method must be followed from April through October. It’s a rough 7 months. I’ve heard some people actually enjoy the feeling of scorching heat on their skin; I don’t understand. The persistence and intensity of southern summer heat never gets easier for me to manage. I remember growing up as a kid in Tennessee laying on the living room floor under the ceiling fan asking myself how I did this last year. These days in Atlanta I feel like I may be suffocating. The heat is so harsh. It’s incompatible with life. Inhospitable to flourishing. My entire exile in Atlanta, so far 3 years, has been one long summer. It has been a time of heat, a draining of my resources,...

what i am sometimes doing instead of going to church Yesterday I went to church. It's been a while. I often need (want) to stay in bed on Sundays, drink coffee, think my thoughts. Quiet mornings are rare and beautiful, like diamonds, or true love. Other times I'm traveling, especially this summer - to weddings or mountains or canyons and rivers. All days in the mountains are the Lord's Day. At least, that's my sense of it. Yesterday I went to church. St. Bede's Episcopal Church. A tiny home for a few members, a little group who's been doing the Sunday thing for enough years to get old together. They know the prayers, and I do too - repetition is a friend to the spiritual - and that makes me feel like I belong even if it's one Sunday per month. That and my plastic name tag available at the front. But my favorite parts of the service are always the blessings. "May the blessing of the God of Abraham and Sarah, and of Jesus Christ bo...

I am sometimes a ball of worry, often tangled up in knots, rarely the person I want to be. There's something about pain -- not the good kind, like core work, but the long kind, like migraines, uncontrollable -- and something about silence -- the long kind too, like a week at home alone -- that point to my vulnerability and fragility and fear. The soft space at my center that can be so easily wounded and broken, and can so easily lash out and wound others or act without integrity -- without integrating what I truly believe into my life. I don't want this soft center of mine to go away, or to harden or deny its own existence. Instead I think I want to feel it more, reaching out from around its protective coating of Ego, helping me live aware of it. Aware of my soft humanity, the countless ways it is hurt every day by people or words or busyness or those magazines that make me feel ugly. I want to live in such a way that I feel my pain, instead of analyzing my way out of it al...

Today at the yoga studio someone asked me what I did besides this. A moment or two of blank staring later, I replied with considerable stammering: "Uh, besides yoga? Besides working here? I, uh, well, I just graduated. I have my Masters. Just, kinda, doing this for now. You know." *Inner mental face palm* "Oh, wow! What'd you study?" "Divinity. I have a Masters of Divinity. Um, it's a theology degree." "You can study divinity?? I imagine it's kinda hard to make that lucrative, unless you want to be a holy person?" "...right. Yeah. Basically...or like work in a church." At this point I give myself a mental high five for being the dumbest MDiv ever to graduate and have this conversation. It occurs to me I could have said something about being an admin in the Center for Theology and Public Life at Mercer, but my mouth was still slightly agape at the holy person suggestion, and I haven't started the aforementioned job ...

I've been tired for so long. Grad school is over. The wedding is over. Moving is over. This month is the liminal space between the hurry of the Spring and the settled routine of the Fall, and yet it doesn't feel restful; it feels like the same old exhausting. It feels like tired. There are no ultra marathons, no big events to plan, no challenging projects, no hard jobs. There's just time with my husband, a few hours of work, cooking and baking, cleaning, resting. Running, not too far. Reading, mostly poetry. Doing yoga. But I'm tired. I don't understand the cycles of my energy. I don't know why some summers I feel like going to Russia again and others feel like this. I don't understand the delicate balance between work and rest, people and solitude, noise and quiet, or how sometimes past seasons, when not intentionally processed and prayed through, can drain me like a low-grade fever underneath the surface. But my energy is precious to me, because I ...