The Future scurries
As mice evade a calculated reaching-
Her dimly lit horizon folds itself -
A Gauzy haze.
No scrambling, clutching ever yielded
Sweetness to my sight,
Nor curved arc provided
Vision to some breathless soul.

Penetrations- a sideways glance-
Over-the-shoulder musings-
Afford a better view.

humble pie

I can be really stupid and immature sometimes and this was one of those weeks...gah. I am learning from the experience though, so hopefully it won't happen again...humble pie is good for the soul. Hopefully, I haven't completely messed everything up and if I did, oh well.

Other than that, not much to say except I'm rereading Mere Christianity and its really convicting me to do some things differently. So with God's help, this week (and hopefully continually) I am trying to be less lazy (i.e. facebook,tv time) and spend more of it helping my parents and friends. I also want to try harder in school...even though my grades are fine right now, I just haven't been giving school my all and I want to do better at that too.

On another note, random though it may be, I need to cook more often. I haven't cooked a real meal in a long time. Who knows when I will have time to do this, but I would like to.

And finally, I really miss the sun. Normally, I can do just fine with our over-cast weather in the PNW, but this year its really getting to me. I just need some sun and a warm beach somewhere to rejuvenate myself.

Severe Mercy continued...

This is one of the countless poems about grieving and loss that Emily has written. Its one of my favorites of hers and gives words to my heart. I think one of the reasons I have loved this cultural grieving class is that I'm a rather emo person by nature. When I tried to recall my first loss it felt exactly as the first stanza of this poem describes. I've always felt this strange sadness, it wasn't depression, but was more a general sense of sorrow for myself and the people of our world. Of course i wouldn't have used those words, I didn't really know this was how I thought until recently, but its been there. I've always been searching for the Kingdom of God, as I would argue we all are in our own ways, and I find myself closest to it, to JOY, when I am sorrowing... its the upside down gospel! (thanks,bob). Like I said before, this idea infuses all of life with meaning and beauty for me. The kingdom of God has found me! Gah! I could talk about this for the rest of my life and probably will.



A loss of something ever felt I—
The first that I could recollect
Bereft I was—of what I knew not
Too young that any should suspect

A Mourner walked among the children
I notwithstanding went about
As one bemoaning a Dominion
Itself the only Prince cast out—

Elder, Today, a session wiser
And fainter, too, as Wiseness is—
I find myself still softly searching
For my Delinguent Palaces—

And a Suspicion, like a Finger
Touches my Forehead now and then
That I am looking oppositely
For the site of the Kingdom of Heaven—

Severe Mercy

I am currently taking a class on cultural grieving and at the same time happened to be reading a book called A Severe Mercy, which deals with an essentially christian way of grieving. I am finding out how natural and beautiful and even desirable (at least for me) grieving and loss experiences can be. I'm not sure the author of A Severe Mercy would say that he desired his wife's death from cancer. In fact, if you read the book, it was the last thing he wanted, but I do believe he would say it was necessary. The final chapters of his book deal with this concept: the idea that what hurts us most is and can be for our good. Hence, the title.

If there is any idea that compells me more, that motivatives me in my christian walk, it is this. The paradox of sorrow and joy. A mercy that is so severe that only Love Himself could give it. Somehow this idea makes all of life worth living.

Death Cab: What Sarah Said

Got an ipod for Christmas and have been listening to this song over and over:

I've heard it countless times before, but never really listened


And it came to me then
That every plan is a tiny prayer to Father Time
As I stared at my shoes in the ICU
That reeked of piss and 409
And I rationed my breaths as I said to myself
That I'd already taken too much today
As each descending peak on the LCD
Took you a little farther away from me
Away from me

Amongst the vending machines and year-old magazines
In a place where we only say goodbye
It stung like a violent wind that our memories depend
On a faulty camera in our minds
But I knew that you were a truth
I would rather lose than to have never lain beside at all
And I looked around at all the eyes on the ground
As the TV entertained itself

'Cause there's no comfort in the waiting room
Just nervous paces bracing for bad news
Then the nurse comes around and everyone lifts their head
But I'm thinking of what Sarah said
That love is watching someone die

So who's going to watch you die?
So who's going to watch you die?
So who's going to watch you die?

All for love's sake

I've been trying to wrap my mind around the Christmas story, Christ coming to earth, God incarnate and yet man. I always thought I understood how much he gave up, how low he really stooped, at least to some degree. I was reminded once again of how little I actually know. My pastor preached a sermon about the humiliation of Christ, which is easy to assume starts in the garden of Gethsemane, but he argued, begins from his conception in Mary's womb. God literally became nothing. He grew up in a town called Nazareth, a place noone would think the Messiah could come from. His earthly father was a carpenter, and he was born in a stable, probably not the nicest one either. How to understand this: that the eternal God became a nobody for us. As the great hymn goes:

Thou who was rich beyond all splendour,
All for love's sake becamest poor,
Thrones for a manger didst surrender,
Sapphire-paved courts for stable floor.
Thou who was rich beyond all splendour,
All for love's sake becamest poor...

Perhaps the reason why this really hit me this Sunday as I sat in church is that I have a fear of being nobody, of dying and nobody thinking my life was important in any way, of being forgotten by the course of history. This fear has been unusually strong recently and I've been battling it for a few months now. To think that Jesus became nothing and yet the temptation to be somebody was with him everyday. He was God after all, and people said of him, "what good can come from Nazareth?" I cannot imagine how difficult it must have been to continually humble yourself, to orient yourself to the Father without fail, to deny yourself an innate human desire to be the king he was.

And this is my calling...to be "content to fill a little space, if thou be glorified." There is contentment in knowing your place, and hope knowing that the Almighty God confined himself to his when he became a man. This Christmas I rejoice in Christ's willing humiliation for my sake.

running towards an end

Do you ever want to change but have no idea how to go about it?

That's how I feel in quite a few areas of my life right now. What's ironic is social workers are supposed to help other people do this. We're kind of like social architexts. We get to create plans, help to lay foundations, and hopefully, see a beautiful building at the end. But I'm beginning to wonder if this is even possible.

Sure, we can help people in little ways, but only if they're willing to recieve the services and act on them. However, actually helping them precludes us knowing how to help them. This is very scary to me. I am not a person that by nature knows how to solve problems. When I see people I don't instantly catalog all the things I could fix in my mind and know exactly how to go about that. It takes me a long, and I mean long, time before I begin to feel comfortable expressing or even thinking about how I would change another person. Sometimes I never get that far. I can usually come up with some shortcomings that a person has, but I don't usually find those shortcomings offensive or that they necessarily need to be corrected instantly. Those people that I do want to change significantly I tend to chalk up to personality difference and will assume it is my fault for not liking them.

None of these things are, I think, what the experts in my field would say are good to do, but the issue of solutions or resolutions to a problem is an important part of being a good social worker (at least it seems to me so far). I have absolutely no idea how to help with this. From what I know of myself I am a person that likes to be involved with the journey, to provide support, to listen and understand, but feedback is not necessarily my forte, nor is having a specific goal and achieving it. I can do it, but its usually pretty strained. A part of me doesn't want to emphasize the goal setting at all...not exactly sure why though.

So how to practice this...i guess that means that you will all be my guinea pigs... or should i be practicing it? THis middle of the road girl might need to train herself to not only run while balancing two different sides of an issue, but also to effectively run towards an end.