Idle and Blessed

I was never, not even once, the cool kid. My house was never the place to be. In elementary school, the other neighborhood kids had pools and trampolines, so we spent our afternoons making up games and eating watermelon in their backyards, our sweaty faces glistening as we ran inside for plastic cups of cold water. In middle school, sleepovers happened at the other girls’ houses, because they had big dens or basements, and tv’s in their bedrooms, and brand name Lays potato chips. We never had Lays potato chips at my house. In high school, I was usually at Tori’s, where her parents stayed up late and didn’t care if we made noise, and we had the whole upstairs to ourselves. We watched TV or talked all night and slept in so late the sun beat down on us through the windows, and we kicked off the covers and went back to sleep. The rest of my high school friends lived in Brentwood. They had big, beautiful houses, absent parents, and cars of their own with stereo systems. W...

Over the first 8 months of this year, I spent 50 hours observing doctors in hospitals. With no authority beyond my little blue badge, whose magic logo opened to me closed exam room doors and secured units, I pushed aside literal and metaphorical curtains to reveal moments of frailty and fear and peace and humor, moments at the threshold of life and the threshold of death. I was a silent observer of the wild jungle of medicine, in which strangers in white coats hold the keys to hope and life, and in which everyday people look up high at the looming white coats with glimmers of salvific expectation in their eyes. But the wild jungle of medicine is more than a controlled environment in which white coats administer pills of cure and tests of omniscience to fragile mortal beings. {It is more than a power differential} It is a technocracy, a machine, which is self-perpetuating and which can swallow us whole if we do not pay attention, or if we allow it to be for us the truest site of heali...

I'm in a long term relationship with running, and like any long term relationship, there are seasons of ease and struggle. I've always been fairly certain the key to success in maintaining a long term relationship with running is simple discipline: the grit of a daily grind, where you show up to the work regardless of how interested you feel. I run on the days it feels awful, the days it's hot or I didn't sleep, the days my legs feel like lead, the less than ideal days (which is something like 75% of them), so that I experience the occasional days of bliss. And this is indeed the key; there is no bigger secret to "being a runner," I don't care what anyone says. But what I often don't acknowledge is that grit isn't intrinsically rewarding; for every athlete or artist or doer of hard things there is actually something deeper, something more like: I feel proud of myself when I run every day, and I feel validated as a human when I accomplish something ...

Can it be that in this body lies the image of God? In this body, which churns and stirs and rages and pours Out like spilled water onto the pages of the life I write. Can it be that my hands, which also pour sweat onto the nervously string-bound books Full of dreams I've created in the quiet, Could ever do the work I've seen to do, and fearfully welcomed, like Christ? Can it possibly be that this heart, tripping over itself as it runs toward its last beat, Could be called something resembling the magnificent heart of God? I don't know what it means to incarnate the image of God With blurry eyes and tight hamstrings, The faulty valves in my brain, and the panic that sets in at night. Surely the splitting of my head, the metallic taste of my mouth, the pulsing static visionary-auditory-hallucinatory aura of a migraine Is not what is meant by it. The virus-catching, numb-feeling, tingling, pain Pounding heart, panic attack, escalating dread of what's...

Our experiences teach us how to be in the world, for better or worse. Memories form the stories that we tell, not just to each other but to ourselves and about ourselves and about the world, our place within it. Remembered stories come together to form increasingly complex narratives, the intricate and messy and contradictory narratives our lives are made of. In this way our memories form the stuff of our lives, stored up inside our physical bodies and in our brain cells and neurons, reinforcing our identities through the manipulation of our actual material selves. Memories are...us.   Memories can be anchors at the bottom of the winter sea, holding us to the truth of better things when all around is barren and frigid and churning. Memories can hold out hope for us that what we see is only one inch deep, and below are living roots that sprouted once and will sprout again. Memories can keep us fed through the winter. But the thing about being remembering creatu...

I can smell in the air fall is coming. It smells like the color the leaves will be soon, which is also the color of the light coming in my window, slanting deeper and more golden than yesterday. I have a feeling I'll look up tomorrow and see it's winter, or even spring 2020. It makes me squirm, this pace of life that leaves me breathless, this whirling machine of life churning at breakneck speed for efficiency no matter the season. Fall and winter say "slow down," which is a problem because I don't think we are prepared to accept something so arcane. We are going to have to make our choice soon: fight it and work in the dark, or fall a little behind. But for now it's hot outside still.  September 15th. I don't want to hurry. I want to savor the last drops of summer like an upside down maple syrup bottle drip, dripping onto my tongue. Sweet summer, with its late nights and bright days and blooming gardens and pollen trees. Backyard stri...

What will happen when I mess this up? When I’m at the front of the room, and my hands are sweating, voice is shaking, messing up? What will happen when they find out I don’t belong here, that anyone else would be better, because anyone else would at least be able to stand up here and speak, as normal humans do, without the shaking, tenseness, tasting of fear? What might happen is I might be humiliated. Embarrassed. Unable to show my face again. Which means I directed my entire adult life toward something at which I’m an utter failure.  I think people will be disappointed in me. I will surely be found an imposter. People will realize I’m not worthy of their time, and they will ask me to leave, or they will leave me behind. They will see the redness on my face, the stiffness of my body, the shaking of my arms, and realize: this person is not capable of being here. They will sit quietly as the sides of their mouths curl up into a polite smile and they'll think, "poor gir...