The Written Condition

When I was in Kenya my friend, Brenda, told me that I had too many emotions. That phrase has stuck with me for quite some time. I never paid much mind to my inability to harness my emotions till of late when I realized that my adolescence is over. Really, I’m no longer a teenager but my emotions, like rapid fire, are constantly changing faster than any mood ring could signify. So, as luck would have it, in finding out what it is to be an adult I’m discovering that I am way too emotional! And I’m finding that to live in this world as a student, as a young professional, as a social being, and as a writer, I have to be a bit schizo to enjoy the normality’s of life with which a person who has been averagely endowed with emotions would live. This means putting a preconditioned block on the depths with which my soul tries to understand each and every situation I encounter during the day. Simultaneously, I need to feed the flame of my dream like state to relieve the emotions that roar within me. I’m forming a split between the life I live every day and my dream world of writing. Both personalities are within me, feeding off of the same stream of Self. In a complicated way, both my natural self and my logical self are being cut in two, like a log hammered through by the wedge of an axe. In this split, I have not one conscious but two conscious’. I’m not living one life but two lives—life in the real and life intangible.

on love

We young adults are creeping up on the climax of life, aren’t we? We are peeling off our layer of adolescence to the new, soft skins of adulthood. We are filled with the wonder of what marriage will be like, of what having sex with the same person who helps to pay bills will feel like. Our eyes are wide open to life beyond college. And honestly, the view from this ethereal climate has got my heart sinking faster than I can graduate.
But God has given us a scapegoat on even this. All the evils of this world, the lost siblings, the violence on the news, the shallow moral standards our society seems to support, can all be blocked out by viewing the world in the same naïve perspective as a child.
As children we were, in simple terms, stupid with the spoon fed reality painted for us by our parents, cartoons, and teachers. The world was crisp and fresh, like an unopened Christmas present. It’s just too bad that once we hit our twenties, the whole brilliance of the shiny new world we had set out to conquer after high school turned out to be a piece of coal rather than a shiny new bicycle. Our parents made it look so easy, so wonderful. Now, here I sit, months before my college graduation and I wonder what this “shiny new” world has to offer me. Bush has gone and run the whole of the economy through the mud. How am I as an artist, a writer, a musician, going to fit into this trash can of a mess? When thinking of my future I get the image of me walking up to strangers with a tin can asking, “do you wanna hear me sing?” Pathetic really….
Regardless how dire the situation may appear, I think God made an escape clause even for those of us budding into adult hood. Because really, how could a child want to grow up into anything if it really new what this world had to offer? And there is no denying that God wants us to be like children. In asking us to believe like children God made love to be this infamous clause—the clause that can pull the wool over our eyes. The clause that can make my college debt look manageable instead of setting me off on a suicidal rampage immediately after I’ve taken off my cap and gown.
Falling in love is what got my parents through the first years of post college poverty. They had kids, they had debts, they were fighting cancer and saving the orphans in Africa, all the while they had each other. Love… not just love, but romantic love, has the capability to allow us to feel and think and know the world as innocent children do. With romantic love we are willing to walk into the greedy jungle that is this earth, every day of our lives, and mine a bit of its goodness and bring it back home. Because home is where the heart is. Home is where the love is.
And I ask, “God, where is my romantic love, now that the naïve veil with which I held this world in so much affection has now fallen from my eyes? Ecclesiastes 4:9 says, “Two are better than one, because they have a good return for their labor: if they fall down, they can help each other up. But pity those who fall and have no one to help them up!”
Usually I would take the matter into my own hands, go out and find me a man. But I’m trying this thing where I pray and ask for guidance before I make any irrational and emotion based decisions. Solomon says about three or four times in the Song of Songs, “do not arouse or awaken love until it desires.” Melissa Otto sings a song with the same lyrics, “don’t awaken love till it desires, God’s more than enough.” And so I trust, that if God can put all of those road signs in my life telling me to wait it out and that the good stuff is yet to come, well then heck, I’m going to have faith and hold him to his promise! He’s going to come through for me in a mighty way.

bicycle high

Last semester I went through a huge burnout. Coming back to AU after a long summer of healing I thought that I had wiped away all residue of my burnout. But when I got back to school anxiety still nestled tightly between my shoulder blades, the loneliness, and self deprecating thoughts came back to me in my afternoons. But I couldn't forget all of the good I had been taught over the summer. For one, I had learned that depression and loneliness were part of the deception of sin. I had to remember what dire straights God had pulled me out of over the summer. It was only then that I could depend on the assurance that I wouldn't fall back into the pits that had caused me to stumble before. Because I had stopped driving my life and I had given the wheel to God. So, knowing that God was in control and that life was full of unexpected happenings, I stopped worrying about the future. It was amazing the turn around I experienced. I can honestly say that this afternoon, while riding my bike in the early fall weather, that I felt completely free from all the pain and confusion that desiccated my life last semester. I was flying high on Christ, on life, and knowing that He is in control of everything. An unparalleled bliss.

Grill Igloo Cheatham

Oh GoSH! If you want something interesting to read. Read THIS. Especially since I've only just learned of Anne Lamott from my Approaches to Writing class. I've fallen in love with the assigned reading she wrote called "Bird by Bird." Anyway, read the article. It's a good one.

the climax of life

We young adults are creeping up on the climax of life, aren’t we? We are peeling off our layer of adolescence to the new, soft skins of adulthood. We are filled with the wonder of what marriage will be like, of what having sex with the same person who helps to pay bills will feel like. Our eyes are wide open to life beyond college.
But after the climax, after we have settled into our grandly large or horribly small yearly incomes—after we’ve had a kid or two and managed to finally pay off our college debts—life will be a warm fall day instead of a bursting spring one. Because it is at the climax of our lives—when the hill we’ve been climbing our entire academic lives finally starts to level out—that the terrain of life is altered in a non expected way.
We will have conversations with friends who are dying from this or that. We will watch as our siblings who have somehow righted themselves from the waywardness of their youths fill up with one disease or one debt or one spouses horrible accident. And we will lament for them, for their crashing and burning world… but we will keep on. Because strangely enough life is summed up in these small grievances, but at the same time turns out to be much more impressive and worthy of our hope even after these mishaps. We will see worlds in other people, other things, in our children and the familiarity of how our houses squeak when we pad down the hall to the restroom. We will cradle the frailty of life in the crooks of our arms and shoulder burdens far too large for our backs and sometimes our wallets, just as they were too large for our parents’. And strangely enough, we will keep on keeping on.
And when we have turned over the graves of our parents, when we have become the elder in the lives of those around us, there will be no stopping the snowball effect of life. Life will push through our sickness, our age, our broken hips. Life will push through our rebellious children and dusty offices. Life will consume our resources and weedle into our joints to slow us down. Life will and will and will. And one day we simply won’t. How do we counteract something with so much absolution?
My bright conclusion is that the way to conquer the depression in the things we will discover about tomorrow is to simply love more of what we can’t control today.

shine light

Marianne Williamson said, "Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure." That's only a snippet of her famously quoted text called, "You Are a Child of God." But the depth of that statement grabbed me by the heart strings when I first read it. I remember when I was a youngster in private school. There were always career days in grade school. Most innocently we all thought that we could be Buzz Lightyear or Symba from the Lion King. We picked those guys because they did remarkable things. I remember wanting to be a super hero. I kind of still do, but unlike back then I don't really have a hero. We live in a day age where everyone has the power to be whoever they want to be. We can be published writers and show the world our opinions but signing up for blogs. Where have all the hero's gone? Like MLK and Langston Hughes. Like CS Lewis and JF Kennedy? This is a day and age where we can truly shine, where we can live our dreams, we just have to go out and get them. Maybe someday we can be the heros that we lack today. Maybe if we try hard enough our kids will have heros."It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be: You are a child of God." I took that quote by Marianne Williamson and pinned it to my night stand. I want to remember to to shine.