Clenching Mercy

Pivoting in short, choppy--often, incomplete motions.

Back and forth.

Left and right.

Can't forget this and that.

All of it matters.

Whatever you do, don't stop.

These snap shots have been my life for the better part of several weeks.

Some of it is has been expected and is a remembered part of this season, but a good chunk of it is new.

Managing deadlines both at home and work.  Looking down to see that both my belly and my ass have grown a little too comfortable making my jeans a little uncomfortable.  Realizing that my kid has a project due that isn't just his but involves three others and supplies and it's Sunday night.  Watching my five-year old daughter count down the days until Christmas, swearing that I'll order that thing this afternoon or carve out time to really decide what in the hell Santa is going to put under the tree.  Wondering why I took on that volunteer "opportunity" and how it is that I will have all three children in different spots at the same time? Trying to plan a meaningful graduate course terrified that the students will call me out as a fraud.

While I was doing the dishes and editing the grocery list and grabbing the towels...I heard the extraordinary writer, Mark Nepo define poetry as the unexpected utterance of the soul and the frailty of the human condition as:

And I was reminded, yet again that this deal we do is hard.  Let's not mince words.  From time to time, it fucking sucks.  A good chunk of it is spent enduring instead of standing open to the possibility of what the day brings.

So in that moment, I just stood

still.

And breathed, a sigh of relief.

A really, really big breath.

And I closed my eyes and un-closed my fists and tried to receive whatever it is that the world had for me.

And while in the moment, I had to grin thinking that I extrapolate ad nauseam about the power of possibility and standing open to the availability of the extraordinary in the daily mundane....until it comes to me....and my life slowly turns into..."well, everything will be better once I make it to Thursday night or Sunday morning."  Meanwhile, a million moments go by and my teeth are clenched, my stomach is in knots, my mental to-do lists are cycled through repetitively and I'm just making it.  Most of the time, it's not a bad making it...it's just a dulled engagement of what could be.

Mercy is trusting that you don't have to know.

It's the indomitable fact that you can't possibly be in control all of the time and that surrendering to what could be is the greatest form of inhabiting the moment as imperfectly and beautifully as one can.

And so this morning on my run, I released. little by little...unsure but hopeful...which I think is my mantra for the new year.

I'm done with knowing.

I'm in need of mercy and grace and the divine and the blessed possibility that comes with the great unknown.

Equal Parts Passion and the Sacred

I'm re-reading Elizabeth Gilbert's "Eat, Pray, Love," mostly because I feel like a different woman coming at it today than I was four years ago when I first picked it up.

If you're not familiar with Gilbert's memoir, it's an account of the year that she spent in Italy, India, and Indonesia finding balance between her passion for the worldly, her investigation into the spiritual and the perfect blend she strikes between the two.

Since I studied briefly in Greece and Turkey in undergrad, I've dreamed (for what seems like an eternity) about living in Tuscany.  Italy symbolizes indulging in the guiltiest and most beautiful of pleasures...food, wine, gondola riding under the moonlight and dancing in villas far into the hills.

Post undergraduate school and a really bad break up, I came face to face with my own personal relationship with God.  Lost, abandoned, stranded in a life that didn't look like what I crafted on paper, I became intimately and forever gratefully acquainted with the sacred.

And since that time in my mid-twenties, I've always struggled with how to marry the two.

We are both human and divine.  We desire the flesh, but we also are called to sacrifice our desires.  We yearn to indulge, but we're also taught to repent. 

Gilbert's forging of her own personal relationship with God and coming into the divine is beautiful for it gives the reader hope that faith is personal.  And it isn't righteous.  God knows us.  He knows our desires.  And He doesn't love us in spite of them.  He loves us because of them.  He made us.

Indulging in the worldly...the flesh, the food, the blood, the tears, the passion that is before us seems wholly natural.  But recognizing that we're from the divine gives us room for grace, for forgiveness, for starting anew, for unconditional love.

Maybe someday, I'll find myself on the streets of Italy and if I do, I'll be saying a prayer of thanks.