Just Faith, Everyday

I’m covering myself up with this beautiful plaid Pendleton-like blanket I inherited from this old couple who’d lived across the street from us in the 70s and 80s, named Bill and Margaret. They took a shine to me and my sister, making us ice cream sodas and showering love. It’s obvious I’m wrapping myself in that comfort, covering up with this woolen blanket, fringe falling off, a woven memory. The chill of early Spring brings on the physical need to cover up, but the emotional toil of what’s happening equally brings on a need. For many the blanket comes in prayer and spiritual communion; for some yoga, meditation, creativity. Of course, our comfort can come in all these things, and we’ve been given a unique opportunity to practice even more, in a way we would never have before. Tangled up in life’s busyness, in our self-importance, we’d not see the beauty of taking significant time with our selves. I think in some cases there are those who struggle with the quiet and with who they’re...

Lately life has been about anxiety, and scheduling everything to within an inch of its life, about trying to keep up with all of the humans in my life, about trying to make time for the human in me, the soul in me, and I am striving, striving toward that goal. Then we have the problems of the world looming in on us as a community: illness and strife in many forms. Incompetence at all levels where we would normally trust our experience and our well-being. The kinds of things that make anyone want to fundamentally question their experience and existence and purpose. It’s exhausting. Having said that, it’s also life-molding and life-changing. Something is happening to our synapses and our souls when we engage fully in our experience, when we learn how to draw boundaries and consider how to communicate and share in life’s great pageant. And I am learning to pray not merely over these moments but through them, to become fully aware of God’s presence in even the more difficult moments of lif...

Seems like whenever I go and visit the place I called home for 24 years, some kind of song from my youth gets lodged in my head as a part of the experience. It’s not every time, but happens more often, maybe because now I’ve been in this place I have made into a home 23 years. Something is happening in the balance of my mind about place—calling for music and beauty to fill it in. When my uncle died suddenly in 2008, the song that wouldn’t leave my ears was Pink Floyd’s “On the Turning Away.” It made sense to me almost immediately at the time, and stayed with me through the wake and funeral, through the long delayed train ride back to Georgia. Other times I’d link onto a song just to accompany the moments—beach, park, family visits. This year for Christmas it was The Cure’s “Pictures of You,” and like “On the Turning Away,” it made immediate sense to me. It came in strains and solidified itself on the plane back, when one of the in-flight offerings was a 40th anniversary Cure concert in...

Being in the presence of deep and abiding pain side by side with utter joy and openness is a disconcerting experience. Or perhaps it’s awakening, sobering. On a trip to Little Five Points and the Variety Theatre I witnessed both, and felt a bit like I was a traveler moving from the depths of hell into a kind of heavenly door, just witnessing what was before me, attuning myself to my experience. We’d gone into Atlanta to see Foy Vance, and had to our surprise gotten there early enough to have a pre-concert drink and a quick bite. Anyone from Georgia who’s been to Little Five, as most lovingly call it, know the atmosphere is like a pumped up Athens, and the bar/coffee shop we dipped into was a perfect example of that: Java Lords, connected to the side of the theatre. Dark and cozy and strange in its decor, there was something about being in the space that felt both like a circle of hell and a party all at once. A couple of older gentlemen were overtly aiming to get full on drunk for the ...

Sometimes goodbyes just suck. There, I said it. I do know I learn something which each of the many, many goodbyes I have said in my life: the ephemeral of it all, the desperate need we should all have to cherish, the deeps of the darks and the brights of the lights—all of a piece. When I think of all the goodbyes my family alone has said, across ocean and continents, I still feel humbled, even as I feel my farewells with the pain of a thousand needles. That saudade , that old friend I want to kick out the door when she comes ringing. Sometimes I wish I didn’t know what I know when it hurts as it does. Still, every mile, every encounter, every sharing, every gift, every holiday and illness, every loss and gain—all of it—matters. Molds me in ways I have yet to understand. And that will have to be enough. Is enough. Is the best and worst gift, awe-inspiring.

I find myself in a cacophony of ideas stemming from so much newness in my life, and I’m pausing to consider it. By the end of my reflection I hope to get to this: that life is not about fixing but about serving. But we’ll get there. First, my littlest has gone to school—willingly, excitedly, and wholeheartedly, the way I wish I could be with all things. She’s become an example to me in this endeavor, and a surprise. I love surprises. So I relish it, and I take pictures of them walking into school, big and little sister; they will only cross paths these two years of their little lives. It’s precious, in more ways than one. And I get to witness this. I get to be thankful for this, too, and that gratitude is washing over me right now in a way that allows me to open my eyes to other things less beautiful, dark. My deepest misgivings about children who have been orphaned lay side by side with these images of my children entering their school with teachers who care about them in a place they...

There’s honestly too much to share, too much breathless heartbreak in the world today, so I won’t pretend to be able to address even half. Where I find myself today is in a space to recognize the notion, if not the reality, of miscommunication, something so central to our daily ills I feel like I have to address it. It’s been my year to sit up and pay attention to this problem especially, because it’s multifaceted, and not what it looks like on the outside so often, it’s a wonder we’re all not disowning each other on a  daily basis. I know that my pitfall comes with the expectations I was brought up to have, something ingrained in me even after years of being a full-on adult, and I find this tension in the way I parent. It’s forced me to come to terms with seeing others—my children, my students—as they really are. To meet them and accept them as they are, where they are, instead of as I wish them to be. When I don’t do this, and see in my mind only my sense of who they should be, t...