Tuesday thoughts

Crocus in our yard. Also, what is the plural of “crocus”? Crocuses? Croci?

I have been thinking about:

Divinity and distance

Lately, I feel like God is very far away from me. Or that I am far away from God. I can’t quite tell which it is. I don’t like feeling this way, but I am not sure how to find a way out of it. Instead, I keep telling myself, “God does not want to let go of you.” This is actually something that Jonathan once told me.

Nonfiction

Since finishing Infinite Jest, I’ve felt a little “broken,” reading-wise, and suddenly, I only have an appetite for nonfiction. I am reading photo-filled, potentially frivolous books about fashion, personal style, and a history of the (demise of the) luxury goods industry; another dog book; and a how-to guide on copperplate calligraphy (a birthday gift from my excellent in-laws). I have never felt this way before — utterly uninterested in fiction. It makes me nervous. But I am planning on re-reading Anna Karenina* soon, so I am hoping that will reinvigorate me.

*Side note: Grace, Guion, Sam, and I watched Joe Wright’s Anna Karenina on Saturday night. Tom Stoppard’s hand in the screenplay and in the overall creative direction (filmed almost entirely within a theater or on a stage) was appreciated, but I finished the film feeling that a.) my dislike of Keira Knightley will never die, and b.) this is not a novel that should ever, ever be made into a movie. I know it’s been done before (like five or six times, all terribly), but really. Leave Anna alone. Read the novel.

Ballet

I continue to be terrible at ballet. I am now taking a second ballet class, the follow-up intermediate level, and I am taking it with Celeste. Yes, the I-took-ballet-for-18-years Celeste. She is beautiful to watch in class, and I had hopes that she would distract everyone else on how plainly terrible I am. This class is about 10 times harder than the prior one, and I do not seem to have improved at all. When we all filed out after our first session, our instructor was congratulating everyone, telling them how impressed she was, etc. And then she looked at me, and said, with a sweet and sympathetic smile, “Don’t give up! You’re so close. I just hope you don’t quit the class.”

And here I was naïvely thinking that no one noticed how terrible I am.

No matter. It’s fun, and I like it. It’s been a nice exercise in subtle humiliation, to stick with something that I have so little natural aptitude for.

Small Wire

(c) Grace Farson Photography.

SMALL WIRE
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 forth a Coke.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

This is a funny and strange poem, but I will always recall these lines: “So if you have only a thin wire,/God does not mind.”

(And isn’t that photo by Grace wonderful? Taken somewhere in New Zealand, I think.)

Headed to my parents’ house this weekend for a family reunion, to celebrate Easter, my birthday, and the fact that Laszlo went on trial with an adopter this weekend!

Why I don’t write much about my faith

Here’s the thing.

I used to write more about Christianity on this blog and on my previous blogs. I think my mom wishes I wrote more about it (and less about women’s rights in the context of the church, probably). I understand where she’s coming from. You write about what you care about, so if I’m not writing about God, it may lead one to the conclusion that I don’t care much about God.

This is not true. I’ve just made the decision not to write much about Christianity in this space. Here are a few reasons why.

• As my readership has gradually expanded beyond my blood relatives, I am not writing to a homogenous Christian audience anymore.
• Expressing opinions about God is a sure-fire way to attract conflict. I am really, really weary of people arguing about Christianity on the Internet. I’d prefer that that didn’t happen here, as much as it lies within my control.
• I’d rather have an in-person conversation with you about God than read comments about my poorly expressed beliefs on my blog.

Rest assured, I am not done with Jesus. I still talk about and to him on a regular basis. I’d just prefer not to do it here. That’s all.

You have a thousand prayers but God has one

NOT SO. NOT SO.

Anne Sexton

I cannot walk an inch
without trying to walk to God.
I cannot move a finger
without trying to touch God.
Perhaps it is this way:
He is in the graves of the horses.
He is in the swarm, the frenzy of the bees,
He is in the tailor mending my pantsuit.
He is in Boston, raised up by the skyscrapers.
He is in the bird, that shameless flyer.
He is in the potter who makes clay into a kiss.

Heaven replies:
Not so! Not so!

I say thus and thus
and heaven smashes my words.

Is not God in the hiss of the river?

Not so! Not so!

Is not God in the ant heap,
stepping, clutching, dying, being born?

Not so! Not so!

Where then?
I cannot move an inch.

Look to your heart
that flutters in and out like a moth.
God is not indifferent to your need.
You have a thousand prayers
but God has one.

Wednesday thoughts

Piecemeal thoughts on a Wednesday:

“Like” and “like” and “like”—but what is the thing that lies beneath the semblance of the thing?

— Virginia Woolf, The Waves

♦

It is easy for me to forget that God cares about little things. I’m a little thing, after all.

♦

Even though I very much hope one of the candidates loses, if I am really being honest with myself, I don’t think much will change at all, regardless of the victor. Such is the nature of the American political machine. It has made me an unapologetic cynic with regard to all politicians everywhere. Machiavelli was the one to convince me not to become a political science major during my freshman year and I still think of him when I watch the debates or muddle through social media posts; it’s all a farce, all a dirty game.

♦

I miss my family.

♦

I need to read some lighthearted, dreamy fiction. Flannery O’Connor and Jesmyn Ward and Samuel Beckett all back-to-back = Violent, dark times. I need some fluttering, social web-spinning, 19th-century British ladywriters, STAT.

♦

Lately, I have been so thankful for my job and for the work that I do. I am grateful for my coworkers, for the camaraderie that we have, for the rarity of our very happy workplace coexistence. I love being an editor. I’m so glad I found this profession.

♦

New Life Goal: Read 100 books a year for the rest of my life.

A cathedral and a physics lab

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“What have we been doing all these centuries but trying to call God back to the mountain, or, failing that, raise a peep out of anything that isn’t us? What is the difference between a cathedral and a physics lab? Are not they both saying: Hello? We spy on whales and on interstellar radio objects; we starve ourselves and pray till we’re blue.”

– Teaching a Stone to Talk, Annie Dillard.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Annie Dillard knows all the things.

Who’s really ready for this election to be over?? I am! I am! I don’t think I’ve ever been more exhausted by politics and its relentless charade. Someone on NPR referred to the Republican National Convention as “theater,” and I thought, Yes, that is what all of it is, regardless of your party. One big performance, predicated on fear.

I am going to the mountains this weekend to celebrate at Kelsey’s bachelorette retreat! Hard to believe lil sis is getting married so soon. Can’t wait to see her and spend some time in the Blue Ridge, hanging out and teaching her how lingerie works.

Talk to you later.

Wish I could have stayed

Pyrrha, prowling Juju and TT’s kitchen.

Our weekend away was a happy, full one. The family women accomplished lots for Kelsey and Alex’s wedding; Pyrrha acted like a normal, stable dog and became fast friends with Dublin; we missed Sam; Dad found a new method of receiving basic channels; we spent most of our free time walking the dogs; I nagged Grace to give me some of her clothes; she said she’d sell me her camera instead. At dinner on Saturday, I announced that I would stay for a month. If only I could.

I don’t particularly enjoy driving and nearly five hours in the car by myself (with a sleeping wolf in the back) was plenty. However, after you pass Lynchburg, the landscape suddenly becomes beautiful. The sky clears. The light is purer, the hills are greener and higher. I feel close to God when I’m driving back home in the mountains. “Virginia is God’s country,” my grandmother, raised on a farm near Amherst, has always said. I wholeheartedly agree.

My hair has reached that long, unmanageable point, but I’m too lazy to make an appointment at the salon. “I think I’m just going to keep it at this length for a while, and then I’ll cut it short,” I told Guion the other night, while I was looking at it in the mirror. “I don’t think that’s how hair works,” he replied.

Your uncertainty is God’s will

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Your cold mornings are filled with the heartache about the fact that although we are not at ease in this world, it is all we have, that it is ours but that it is full of strife, so that all we can call our own is strife; but even that is better than nothing at all, isn’t it? And as you split frost-laced wood with numb hands, rejoice that your uncertainty is God’s will and His grace toward you and that that is beautiful, and part of a greater certainty, as your own father always said in his sermons and to you at home. And as the ax bites into the wood, be comforted in the fact that the ache in your heart and the confusion in your soul means that you are still alive, still human, and still open to the beauty of the world, even though you have done nothing to deserve it. And when you resent the ache in your heart, remember: You will be dead and buried soon enough.

– Tinkers, Paul Harding

. . . . . . . . . . . . . .

A long quote, but a very good one: How uncertainty can be God’s grace to us. (I saw so much of Marilynne Robinson, Harding’s former professor, in that book.)

I haven’t been around here much lately, and my postings will probably be more than usually sporadic, since the month of May is pure madness for us. But everything in May will be good and new and exciting, even if just looking at my calendar makes me break out in a cold sweat.

I am trying to read many things, even though I feel like all of it is skimming over my head. I am spending a lot of time with Eudora Welty, one of my all-time favorites, in preparation for next month’s book club. I have missed you, Eudora. When I was about 14 and said I wanted to be a writer, Dave gave me a copy of her collected short stories and told me to read them closely. It was very, very good advice. I am so happy to return to her.

I also just started Susan Sontag’s On Photography, which is powerful and mind-opening. I think Guion would like it a lot. And Grace. Most people, for that matter. Anyone who’s ever looked at photographs before.

Talk to you soon.

It wasn’t human nature

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Matins
Louise Glück

Unreachable father, when we were first
exiled from heaven, you made
a replica, a place in one sense
different from heaven, being
designed to teach a lesson: otherwise
the same–beauty on either side, beauty
without alternative– Except
we didn’t know what was the lesson. Left alone,
we exhausted each other. Years
of darkness followed; we took turns
working the garden, the first tears
filling our eyes as earth
misted with petals, some
dark red, some flesh colored–
We never thought of you
whom we were learning to worship.
We merely knew it wasn’t human nature to love
only what returns love.

. . . . . . . . . . . . .

Get it, Louise Glück. Happy weekend, y’all. I’ll be spending mine clinging to Guion, begging him not to leave me for 10 whole days, since he’s taking off with Nettles and The Hill and Wood and Camp Christopher (hint: all the same people) to play SXSW! I’m SUPER excited for them, but I’d like to raise this point: Wouldn’t this absence be easier to bear if I had a dog to keep me company? Wouldn’t it?? Le sigh. These days, I feel like June is a year away and I am going to die dog-less.

Lenten aspirations

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After tonight’s Ash Wednesday service, Lent begins. It is a season I look forward to, even though it is one of somberness and reflection. I look forward to it for several reasons: Learning the beauty of the liturgical calendar as a recovering non-denominational, cultivating a spirit of anticipation alongside nature, and recognizing our daily need for God, even in the most mundane things.

For Lent last year, I resolved to not eat any synthetic sugar, to pray and meditate daily, and to memorize a poem and a psalm with Guion. The last two didn’t really happen and the first one should just be a life resolution, but I did focus more on that one.

This year, these are my Lenten aspirations:

1. Per my previously announced desire to commune more with nature, I am going to spend at least 20 minutes a day outside. That sounds like a pitifully small amount, but I believe that it will actually be hard on weeknights. That’s my goal, though. I feel closest to God when I am outside and yet I don’t spend a lot of time outdoors. This is something I seriously want to change and Lent is the ideal season in which to start. I’ll be watching and waiting along with the earth.
2. Memorize Psalm 16. For REAL this time.
3. Stop my bad conversational habits: Gossiping and interrupting people. These ought to be year-round aspirations, but I like the boundaries of Lent for its focus on these specific surrenders.
4. Stop reading snarky/mean-spirited blogs.
5. We are establishing a mutual goal of not being online when we’re home together. I’m also very excited about this.

These aren’t ambitious goals; in fact, they are things that I should be doing constantly. As Liz E. reminded me, though, we’re not seeking Lent surrenders to brag or to highlight how spiritually ambitious we are. Rather, we observe Lent to say: Here I am, waiting. Make me more like you.