Sweetness Follows

It is good to have a theme for a year.

My friends who live in the big blue barn have dubbed it "2010: The Year of Men" which is quite catchy; another friend is calling it "2010: Balls to the Wall". She decided this was going to be the year she said and did what she meant, social norms be damned. I respect her for that.

My theme for the year is Sweetness. I believe that 2010 is the year that brings sweetness; that after the soaring highs and storms and heartbreaks of 2009, 2010 will be the spring breeze. I hold to the confidant expectation that sweetness will follow this.

Sweet is one of the four basic tastes, the others being bitterness, salt and sour. I love the imagery of using those senses to describe our seasons; how every experience has a taste, as if life is on our tongues.

I don’t necessarily have any specific reasons to believe this sweetness will come, I just hope so. Maybe I’m just getting better at owning my hopes and expectations. It isn't here yet, but I know it is on its way.

I have I’ve found my attitude about things changing; I find I’m looking forward more than before. I’ve had to change some habits (people and actions) which is never easy, but those changes have slowly distilled, have begun to take out the salt, the bitter, the sour. And so I go toward the taste of this season.

“Life goes on; I forget just why.” --E.St.V.M.

Funhouse Mirror of Your Fears

During Christmas break of my freshman year of college, 10 of us from SU drove 28 hours to Florida to canoe close to 90 miles of the Everglades. It was a trip of a lifetime (and with gas being only 99 cents a gallon, it was a cheap trip too), an adventure I still learn things from almost ten years later.
We were out on the water for 12 days total and during that time we didn't have a mirror, didn't get to shower, didn't even step onto land (we stayed on platforms).
It was so freeing. Not being able to stare at my image was freeing. I stopped caring. I got ok with not worrying how I looked on the outside but how I looked on the inside and I could be honest.
It's like if you stare at yourself too long in a mirror you don't become more beautiful, your blemishes become bigger. It becomes a funhouse mirror of sorts. You spend too much time looking at yourself you are bound to hate what you see.
Me spending too much time looking at me does no good. That is where I need a witness; need someone who helps see the truth and see the lies; who loves me well enough to call out the blemishes,the bullshit and the beauty. Reminds me to stop looking so long at myself that I forget the world around me and those I love.
I had a long conversation with someone today about shame and I'm realizing more and more that the death of shame is honesty and voluntary exposure...bringing it to light to those who are your accountability, your witness, who love enough to not let you live in it. Shame is mold that grows in dark places. It forces secrets, lies, corners, covers, darkness, deceit more than anything else I personally struggle with. Not to say you shouldn't get yourself out of your own damn mess, but support is vital.
This is sorta jumpy, sorry. It's still stewing.

Expectation

I'm always stuck when I come up disappointed and short, when I let the volatile mixture of imagination and expectation plan out events whose simple existence is a stretch. And so I beg. I plead, I haggle, I bargain to try to get what I want, when I want, how I want, in my terms, to satisfy that expectation that really is just an outlet of my deep seeded fears. I treat God like he runs a marketplace and I'm both a petulant child and a savvy businesswoman. I'm needing to curb the loftiness of my expectations. Cling to hope and not live each day in a perpetual letdown. Because it has been a constant tripping over letdowns these past few months and I can't handle it. I need to lower my expectations to something realistic instead of the stratosphere fiction sells as fact and I believe.

The Splits

Last week I had the chance to have dinner with two old friends I haven't seen in almost 6 years. They are both artists, and their house is full of creation, beauty, uniqueness and life. I didn't realize how much I missed creativity until I was around it again. It is what I think life looks like.

These past few years the decisions I've made have all been directed toward the stable, rather than life. Let me put it less dramatically: it is possible to have confidence in that which isn't life-giving, just as it is possible to be talented in a field in which confidence is lacking. Currently I feel torn between the two. My confidence is misaligned. Maybe it's just my two worlds smacking me in the face with a big cold fish. Being very Type-A and creative hasn't ever been a conducive mix to either school of thought—I want to create, but get so caught up in getting all the details right that very often I never get past the good idea stage; my need to be organized kills my need to create. Similar in my desire to serve and yet to live my own damn life. I've loved this time of serving others as a vocation, but am done at this point (Burned out? Maybe), I'm wanting my schedule and my tasks to be less tedious and more meaningful and, well, a bit more about me. I need more discussion and thinking and conversations more weighty in their width and breadth. I miss being with people passionate about the same things as me. I feel like I've let that part of me suffer for the “greater good” of my social life. As if I have to shut up about what I truly prioritize in order to fit in with the people around me, and there is something tragically wrong about that.

And that feeds into this tsunami of doubt that has thrown me to the sands and pebbles these past few weeks. My science background reminds me constantly how ridiculous it all is, while my faith (however feeble) reminds me to stay focused on the heart of the matter, rather than the delivery of it. But then the science side says, “So you are telling me to ignore the messenger but trust the message? What?” and I'm thrown for the loop again. Like today in worship time my boss was reading from Genesis where Eve was talking to the serpent and the whole time I was trying to find a way to rationalize such a fable from the lesson.

Maybe my Gemini birth has more of an affect on me than I've ever thought. But this being of two minds predicament has me exhausted at all this damned straddling I've been doing, between the social and the political, the real and the easy, the faith and the science, the servitude and the ambition. I've got decisions to make. 2007 is already shaping up to be one of those years...