|
bloodred_bird
|
read my profile
sign my guestbook
Interests: God, Christ, women & theology, intelligence, diligence, challenges, children, big hugs, silliness, solitude, thinking, working outside in my garden, playing my guitar, writing, road trips, running at night, archery, baking bread from scratch, birds, good conversation, open arms, emotional health & stability, learning to love in a Corinthians kind of way, gaining inspiration from human beings who are disturbingly deformed and/or disabled yet far more faithful than so many cynical people.
Expertise: self-improvement.
Message: message me
Member Since:
1/24/2005
|
|
| i couldn't find God in the morning. i was ripping out weeds, and scared... everywhere, my favorite reminders of presence: nature, outsideness... but God seemed so abstract and i, so lonely. sometimes, i don't know how to image God. i don't want God to be abstract, but tangible, coursing through me... but i only feel that sometimes. i only *do* that sometimes. i don't expect i can feel immense love at all moments of all days, but i know a greater peace and awareness is possible... what about monks and nunswho seem filled with it? must i only meditate more? and how much is meditation important, time spent alone with God, and how much is going out and expressing it to others more important? because there's only so much time in the day. and when i do the first, i think of all the lonely people, all the eleanor rigbys, i'm not out loving and learning to know. and when i do the latter, well... sometimes i don't know and i'm afraid i might not be doing it through God enough, just that I'm being nice.
but in the afternoon i found God in the van of painters and cleaning ladies. in their crooked teeth and matronly bosoms and the men with their comb-overs drenched in sweat. we jostled and rode, rode and jostled, to eat pizza and laugh of things. and we passed small front porches struck by sunlight tinted green through our van windows, and she spoke of her husband and babies, twangily. her joy is home after a day of scrubbing floors, although she loves those daytimes, too... barbed wit and pranks between betty and annie, and tossing up dust rags, and their summertime college protegees and the stuffiness of june dormitories. and she may live her whole small life in here,like this, my teenage nightmare. but then i didn't see anything, just want, andthe longing that creates itself from loneliness. now i see it, it can strike me so clearly: she is the one who's got it, the light, you know? and ms. hilton is the one to weep for.
| | |
| i forgot what sadness felt like.
tonight i remember.
| | |
|
why do so many college-age girls want to be disney princesses?
i feel confused because i encounter more young women who are striving to be cute than i do young women who are striving to be full, mature, responsible women. i feel like the "princess complex" is prevalent because it implies an evasion of responsibility.
it is easier to evade that responsibility; maybe we're scared of and maybe we've even gotten to the point where to be a strong woman sounds negative to these girls. what if feminism resulted in such a backlash, such a poisoning of the well, that the next generation is so scared of being painted with that big scarlet letter, they work hard at appearing weak and in need of rescue? maybe they have gotten the message that that is what is attractive to men. (and maybe it is).
so they remain as little girls, princesses, hoping that one day a man, prince
charming, will tend to their emotional baggage, "make it go away," so
they won't have to own it themselves. but is that what men want: to be responsible for the woman's emotional turmoil? why should "feminist" scare men away, when that implies that the woman will share in responsibility ?
when iwas living in northlawn, i felt so out of my age range and own experience that i couldn't even raise the issue; few of the girls seemed to relate to it. instead, i got a big dose of this: girls (who at this point ought to be verging on "woman") want some unreal fairytale where care of them is transferred from parent to prince. and if they get lucky, they can jump immediately from one to the other with no single independent time in-between. is this why females can be the worst enemies of gender equality / equal partnership?
i do love all the girls i know in northlawn, but... wow. life in northlawn was frustrating for me.
and here is a rant on chick flicks.
chick flicks = emotional pornography for women.
they dehumanize men as objects for women's desires, just as pornography does in reverse for the men.
girls get caught up in it as unhealthily, too-- the fantasy that when she finds the right man, he will just do whatever she wants, he will take care of her problems for her.
so why do we let the girls off the hook?
it's laziness and lust and, if you ask me, just downright scary.
unacceptable. 
| | |
| i'm finally brave enough.
(or else i no longer painfully care what people think  ).
three silly pages of older poems;
eventually i'll add more.
| | |
| this, i think, is the verge of a fruitful, insomniac night. do you know those nights when you can't sleep but you get up and do something mentally productive? i hope so. everyone should know them. nights lived by the whir of a fan (why do i associate them with summer?). i have long longed for a typing-up of thoughts. and seeing as i'm computerless at home, i look forward to a thoughftul two a.m. stroll through the streets afterwards.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
life is ODD.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
i am playing with some new ideas about hell. silly head of mine!
they spring from a beautiful book entitled, "The Ironic Christian's Companion." this man, he writes of things which had never even crossed my mind before, and writes of them with agonizing beauty.
once i said, "i don't think i should say i'm 'Saved'... or, not going to end up in hell, even if i love Jesus. because you still can't know. and you shouldn't be so sure of yourself."
(sometimes i say things that, later, i think a crazy person said).
now, as for what hell is or isn't, that's not my issue at the moment, but rather, what determines whether one goes there. i don't think anymore that anyone need be afraid of being damned-- because i think hell is what you suffer when you have no desire for a fellowship with God, and what you suffer inevitably even it hurts God, who perhaps is still trying to reach you and fill you with peace, even then. and i think maybe, just maybe, that longing for fellowship with God makes hell impossible... in other words, if you want it, you shall have it, and God doesn't damn the sincere for messing up. hell is absence of the awareness of Presence. separation from God is your choice. God gives Her love to those who want it, and it is always readily available to those who don't want it, as well. and so if i want it, and i ask Her, then i don't need to fear that terrificly bloodred apocalyptic moon i had nightmares of as a child.
:)
when i started reading this book, it said some things which made me so uncomfortable i suffered a five-minute depression before the peace of Presence swooped in. like a note he makes about the possibility that Christ might not come back for a million more centuries. we don't know that we're living in end times. "no one knows the day or the hour." we might still be the early church.
this, oddly, horrified me. somehow it struck me very real, then, how many people have and will exist- heck, i can't even wrap my brain around how many people live in the world during the *present* time, let alone all of history-- and future!
that made me think, for a flashing and miserable (and intellectually embarassing) five minutes, maybe Jesus is going to have to be really picky, and if he doesn't come for a million more centuries, why ever should i be remembered?
talkings of eternity have long haunted me.
Patrick Henry (yes, that's his name), the author, triggered this horror in me, but also quelled it with his musings. he talks of a book called "Flatland," an early 20th-century novel about a world where everything is 2D. this is all the Flatlanders know, and so when one returns from a 3D dimension and tries to explain it, his language is inadequate and everyone is only depressed and scared about this unfathomable world, not excited as we would imagine they should be! that, then, is an analogy for our language about eternity. we cannot speak of it, and when we try to, it baffles us, scares us... even causes some to decide they cannot believe in anything outside of this known world because, well.... it just don't make no sense.
and now, thinking of this and his Lewis Carroll emphasis, i feel a curious freedom to puzzle & play, and to wonder. what beauty, & what mystery! i've feared because i've been trying to understand it in terms which don't belong to it.
and i remember, at 15, being found awake sitting in the dark of 2:30 a.m. on the living room couch, depressed by what is supposed to be my source of joy.
"either way, eternity is hell, isn't it, mom? if you think about it too hard." (and i did, of course, think of it too hard).
"no end... no end... no end. a limbo, even if it's joy."
i confused "no end" with "no change," and monotony would be hell.
but, if it's perfection, then there wouldn't be change, couldn't be unless it was for the worse. what is existence without the striving for?
and then i feel the stab of it again, all over.
oh, the things i worried my mother with... but as for me, when i am one, maybe the legend of the Flatlanders will help. :)
| | |
|
