little celebration

Today I learned that I might be getting a distribution deal for my CD. If everything goes smoothly If I Fall will be sold along with my devotional in ABC stores nationwide. Can I get an amen? It's as if a little beam of Son grabbed a machete and hacked it's way through those looming storm clouds hovering over my life. All I needed was a little mustard seed sized portion of Son to get me through. *Ah, I will get there.

...etc...

Maybe life is doled out in cycles. When I was a kid about seven or eight years old I used to cry about everything. I got over it because my parents wouldn't take it anymore. But now I'm a grown ass woman and I'm doing it again. I don't know why, but I break down. Sometimes I suck it up. Well most times I suck it up, but today I feel defeated. Life hurts, man. It hurts real bad. Mom says to have hope because nothing lasts forever. *sigh... how long is forever?

Hope is water to the seed of Faith

This semester sucks. Life as an adult sucks. These are strong statements but I need to gripe if just for a moment.
I'm not in school. I lost my job today. I didn't get payed and won't get payed for another 2 weeks. The bank is holding a personal check of mine. I found out my license has been suspended and that I have to mail it in for 20 days at which time they will mail it to Pennsylvania (not Michigan where I am) because Penndot doesn't mail outside of the state. I live off of oatmeal and canned chicken and my church job is going down in flames. *sigh...
But then I read that quote that I put on here by Goethe. Then I read all about the return of my Me. Now I remember why I am here. I feel like an Israelite put in the desert by God. These are all tests and I just have to keep moving forward. I will get to the Promised Land and it will be worth all of the character grooming this shit-hole-adult-life is putting me through.
*Sigh *Woosaw *God is Bigger *God is Bigger *God is Bigger

My me

I'm not in school this semester. I'm graduating in the fall instead of May, which means summer school. That was something I thought I would never do. I thought it was a mistake, that after the dust from kick-start attempt at registration had settled some miraculous something would have kept me in school, pushing my nose back to the grinding stone. But something even more fulfilling has happened in the absence of that miracle. I've found myself again. I found my me. But one might ask, how was my me ever lost?
Well I think it happens to us all. In exchange for higher education, stability, and well... life, we are all asked to trade something in. After all, nothing is free. And some of what we give for education, stability, and life is sometimes very good to give up. But I'm afraid that the giving just doesn't stop there. It's more of a steady stream. While the education and worldly wisdom flows in, parts of ourselves stream out. We become stronger in ways we never thought possible, but are left with that glassy-eyed look. As if we've lost something, or are constantly looking to distant shores for anything that might be more.
Well, I believe that in all of that knowledge and character building I forsook a huge part of myself. In the hustle and bustle of credits, graduation, and well again, life, my me was somehow lost. It was a wayward stone, a jewel by the road side of my own life. And backtracking through the woods I all but forgot that it had fallen from my heart. And then, "Whats's this?" I saw it, sticking out from the bottom of a rock. I picked it up, dusted it off, gave it a shine with the edge of my t-shirt, and fit it back to my heart.
Who would have thought that something so disheartening, like failing to register the final semester of my senior year could turn out to be so perfect. I've gone from the loss of my grinding stone, to the restoration of a precious stone, a relic, my ruby and diamond; my me.
So what has my me done? Well I'm writing again. I'm singing again. I'm imagining, playing, laughing, and loving again. How could I have gone so long without my me? How?

"Hide It Under a Bushel, No"

"Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it. " ~Goethe

Somehow, somewhere I was convinced that I was a fool for dreaming big. Maybe it was because I felt this giant thing in my heart and could not see it in other people's eyes, so I thought it might be wrong or ill placed. That's the way children think and come to know life. It is through the constant grooming and correcting of the adult world around them that forms their minds. But now I see my mistake. Because it is not through my shying away from brilliance that will help open this world to possibilities. It is through my steady pursuit of it.
Through faith, perseverance, and the refusal to compromise our individuality, we can change the world. We can be the light for those who follow.

I'm Hungry!

I'm on a new diet for the new year. Yeah, orignal, I know. But it's become one of those things I just have to do.
(cue music)"dun dun dun, or else."
It's going to be kick ass hard, but I just keep telling myself that I'm an Israelite that needs to get through the dessert to the promised land.
"ah, I will get there."

dreamin of a small wire

Lately I've been writing grad applications. Lately I've been reading Anne Sexton. I'm not a poetry kind of gal, but I like her. And I love her.

They say that when the economy is bad people apply to grad school in the masses. And these words are pointed at me to say in a round about way that my once slim chance of getting in to grad school are even slimmer now. Is it my fault? I stand and I wait to feel my natural reaction come. I dig deep inside and I feel the dirt there and think that maybe I should be ashamed. I also feel the dirt and see that maybe I should back down and change my plans. And I dust that dirt off because I simply can't do those things. There is silver wire buried under those things. I grasp it with the tips of my fingers and then my whole hand. With a tug I feel that it's tied tight to my dream. I feel it strong and whole. It is taught and I pull it up with a spattering of those dirty things and let it lay above the ground. It will lead me to my dream. And as long as the wire is there the masses cannot stop me from completing my journey.

SMALL WIRE by ANNE SEXTON
My faith
is a great weight
hung on a small wire,
as doth the spider
hang her baby on a thin web,
as doth the vine,
twiggy and wooden,
hold up grapes like eyeballs,
as many angels
dance on the head of a pin.

God does not need
too much wire to keep Him there,
just a thin vein,
with blood pushing back and forth in it,
and some love.
As it has been said:
Love and a cough
cannot be concealed.
Even a small cough.
Even a small love.
So if you have only a thin wire,
God does not mind.
He will enter your hands
as easily as ten cents used to
bring for a Coke.

this time it's different

Life is so fluid its hard to notice gradual change. But have you ever felt time slow around you? As if it were to congeal like jello. And your thoughts too, are easier to read and understand. I feel like that. I feel that some omnipotent hand has taken the rat race I've been running and hit the freeze frame button. And now with a finger waving at me I know that times are changing. That the Omnipotent power has told me to change.
In the frozen jello frame I've begun to peal back my layers like petals. He didn't ask me, he told me. And the strangest thing is I knew it was coming. If he had told me to change some three months ago I couldn't have. Because it wasn't possible back then.
And now? The light was flicked on, the power was plugged in, the gun was sounded in the race and once again I'm going through the fluidity of life. But this time in a new and wonderful direction. With his words He's changed me.

A rush of brilliance

"Remember, remember, the fifth of November."
A quote from V for Vendetta, a Hollywood film. But the phrase will ring on in my heart as long as I can look back and remember the day that an African American became president of the United States of America.
It pains me to feel this joy inside and not be able to share it with some of my closest friends. They do not understand the magnitude of this day. Because it is this day that signifies a change in earths history forever. Today we are not blacks and whites united under a flag, we are American's United under a common goal of succeeding
Not only is Obama's most humble place in office the greatest thing to happen to the minority struggle, it is the greatest thing to happen to the moral of the world. Now when people look at American's they will not see the rich, the white, and the privileged. Rather they can look at us and see that we are just like them. We are a nation who CAN overcome our differences and turn to hope. For us it is no longer about our ignorance, it is about our acceptance that if we are to be leaders of the world, we have to do it with our eyes open and our ears alert. And I believe that we as a united force have chosen a leader who will hold us to that standard.
I'm so filled with awe.... This is kind of like a Disney movie. But it's real and it's happened just now in my lifetime. Who would have thought the day would come... I just wish my friends could see it this way.

i'm working on my first book. its a devotional. up until this point i thought i knew how to write. turns out i'm just learning. and the learning is mostly restraining myself from spewing chunks of raw information onto my carefully sculpted masterpiece. taking charge of the swell of writers energy inside of me is like trying to tame and ride a lightning bolt. *sigh. how do those great writers do it? this process makes me appreciate their work so much more. but hey, that said with the faith that i will get there soon as well. ah, i will get there.

move over

is the spell finally broken? are blacks shaking off the dust that makes them more likely to blend in with the terrorists than be considered for high power jobs? i know that racism is considered to be abolished, and i know it will be for my kids. but recently i've seen the the color of the thumb that's clogging the entry way for all minorities. and now, through the footsteps of obama and other black leaders, i think we're finally crawling out from the drain.

grad school? maybe?

i can't believe i'm still in school. actually i can. but why can't i be done already? *sigh... next up, boston u. cross yo' fingers

from the window

I saw two fences flush against each other. A rusted wire, red with age and blue from a time when it was new. And a jagged edged wood, picket and proud as they come.

Life is a texture. Every day I touch it I feel something different.

Twisted

When trees are hit by lightning they are never struck straight down from top to bottom. Rather the lightning wraps itself in a coil around the tree, cutting long rivets right through the bark all up and down its trunk. The tree is stripped bare. If the tree survives, it continues to grow upwards into its lightning made spiral; it’s trunk, frozen in a warped suspension for the rest of its life. Honestly, it looks as if a God-like hand wrung the thing out and stuck it back into the earth to finish its life. Imagine, a whole forest of these warped and twisted trees. What a sight that would be.

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.