A – Abstraction

ab·strac·tion
noun
1. an abstract or general idea or term.
2. the act of considering something as a general quality or characteristic, apart from concrete realities, specific objects, or actual instances.
3. an impractical idea; something visionary and unrealistic.
4. the act of taking away or separating; withdrawal: The sensation of cold is due to the abstraction of heat from our bodies.
5. secret removal, especially theft.
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/abstraction

It is the new societal norm as old as history – take away the characteristics, the feeling states, the experiences that don’t resonate with the guidelines in any given society and you can arrive at the abstraction of what it means to be an acceptable member of that society. Slated, By Teri Terry, is a book for youth that takes that concept to its cutting edge.

It is a society where the ability to alter the personality of an individual has reached its highest level passing an edge of ethical practice. Those younger than 16 that are deemed as deviants in society are “slated”, thoughts and memories within the upper cortexes of her brain have been, supposedly, wiped clean. For a number of weeks and months they are held in the hospital where they are retrained from infancy up. They progress at a rate faster than in the early years but often are still far below their peers in skills and knowledge when reintroduced to society. Given a monitoring system to help them stay in accepted parameters of emotions these young people are permanently marked as different even as they are being trained to fit a norm.

The story is viewed through the experiences of Kyla. With no real experiential memories, she has been re-nurtured to an age where she can now be adopted into her new family – a mother, a father, and another sister, clearly not their natural offspring. A microchip in her brain wired a bracelet on her arm helps record and alert her to levels of stimulus outside of the accepted parameters. If her levels of sadness or anger cause the number to drop too low she is expected to first go unconscious and even reach a point of death. Part of the training she receives is methods to stabilize her “happiness” level into the acceptable parameters. The changes in this status are recorded in the chip to help others monitor her adjustments to society.

It is soon shown that Kyla is different from most of the slated. An artist, she finds her motor memory in one hand is inconsistent to what she has been told is true about herself. She also finds inconsistencies in her emotions and the reading on her Levo. Within the novel we walk with her as she faces these new questions. We are drawn in to a relationship with a three dimensional character. We are caused to care for her and yet question the past that could have brought her to this state. We are led to question the morals of the society which has the power to subjugate difference into non-existence.

As I read this story I could not help but compare the society to some of the favored inspirational quotes in the social media. Are there ways that we, as a society, are already adopting some of those beliefs that label and ostracize those who don’t fit our social norms? Are we perpetuating conditions that drive those whose level of pain is outside of our accepted levels into hiding by shaming them simply through a regurgitation of clichés about what it means to be positive people? Do we drive those whose stories might help others underground by distancing ourselves from their “negativity” if they dare to question those systems that we treat as sacred icons of rightness?

I see the posts and stories where people ask the why after a tragedy comes to light. What would happen if we dared open up those places of our own brokenness not as topics in books but as parts of real conversations as real people? Is there a chance we might alleviate one more tragedy by helping one more person feel less alone?

Yes, there are those who have been taught to be dependent, and so drain those who try to be present for them. I know that siren’s call. I am a person who struggles and the reality is, I find that being willing to seek help for myself but having struggles is not a popular position to take. By choosing not to be dependent, I choose to not be of interest to those who get their validation by reaching down to the needy. However, by choosing to be open about the reality of my struggle to heal, I also close myself off from those who have the positive people view of relationships.

Like Kyla, I find myself searching faces and conversations for those who will simply walk alongside me in this journey as we encourage each other to find wholeness. Like Kyla, something inside me is not willing to just fade into external expectations. At the end of the book, I find myself willing to journey further with her.

*Terry, Teri; Slated; Scholastic Inc.; 2012

http://www.a-to-zchallenge.com/

What if?

For those who read my last post or the one’s before where I shared the journey to that point, you would understand this thought:  What if I had resisted that desire to turn on the tape recorder that night? Would my children have their mom today? I was that close. What created the urge for a song in just that moment. Why was it that very song, that very chorus that played in that moment? The world is full of What If’s and many of them turn on our response to the urgings and longings that we experience without fully understanding them.

The greatest What If for the person who is suicidal is the one of “What If I Wasn’t Here?”. Let me tell you one of the answers from my own journey.

After a month in the mental ward fighting for enough strength to battle the suicidal leanings of my depression I had come back home to my little town. My husband was at work, my children would be coming home from the place they were staying in just a few hours and so I decided to take a nap. Too tired to do more than pull off my shoes I sprawled across the top of the covers.

I have no idea how long I slept before an odd high pitched keening drove me into consciousness. The sound had something close to sadness but with a strange edge to it. The people around me had always tried to teach me to keep my nose out of other people’s business but I had never gained the earplugs that could stop me from hearing cries like this one so I went to my window.

A heavy set boy of about 8 or 9 was sprawled in the middle of a driveway across the street right along the edge of the road with his backpack tossed slightly away from him. I watched a moment, saw him try to stand and fall again. Had he been hit by a car? Not bothering with shoes or locking my door, I raced across the road.

“Are you hurt? Are you all right?’ My questions were scattered as I knelt down to check on him. His hands pushed me away as he stood, still keening and began winding in unsteady steps down the road. I grabbed his backpack and followed, trying to talk to him, to get him to talk all the way.

Thankfully, I have within me a stubborn cuss because he kept taking his hands and pushing me away. “Listen!” I challenged him, “something is wrong. If you want me to go away you are going to have to say it in words. Otherwise, you are stuck with me.”

I knew the police station was only a little over a block down the road. I would just try to steer him close enough that I could run in and get some help. Or better yet, there wass my neighbor standing in her window watching us. I waved to her, mimicking the use of a phone. She shook her head at me and turned away. The next neighbor simply pulled the blinds.

When we came to the corner where the road turned toward the shallow creek winding near our places, there was no way I was going to let him go that way so I ran around to that side of him. The keening grew as it did each time he saw me close and he pushed away from me turning his steps back to the road that led to the station.

Would no one help? What was wrong with this picture? There was something wrong with this boy! Was he just fooling with me? Why would people turn away like that? But I was stubborn and I knew kids well enough to know that this was not right. I kept talking, not in a sweet voice but in one challenging him to talk to me if he wanted me to leave.

It was then I noticed the cars parked in front of the Baptist church. Finally, someone who might help! I knew some people there and so took the risk of running to the front door and banging as I kept my eyes on him stumbling down the street still in the direction of the police station.

A woman I knew answered the door with a couple others I knew behind her. ”

There is a boy over there and something is wrong with him but he won’t tell me what it is. Can somebody call for help? I need to get back to him.”

“You’re right!” exclaimed the first woman looking past me. “He just fell again!”

As I took off running back to the boy I heard one of the women behind say, “I’ll get my keys and we can drive him to the clinic. The emergency room ….”

I lifted the boy without a thought even though he must have been two thirds my size and carried him back to the car. I held him as we drove and noticed someone had taken the time to pick up his backpack as well.

When we got to the clinic and carried him in, all hell broke loose as the receptionist ran to the back calling his mother’s name. They knew this child. His mother worked there and he was in insulin shock, something I didn’t even know about. They had him on a gurney and had given him the sugar he needed before 3 minutes had passed. They wheeled him off to the back with his mother beside him holding his hand and crying. No one asked my name.

I had the wisdom of the past month to recognize that I was collapsing after the event so I asked the women if they could wait for me because I was in a high anxiety state with the shock of what had just come to light. I would need something to help me calm down enough to go home. It was the cost of the depression and anxiety that had held me in the hospital for that month.

But What If? What if I had given in to the urge, to the belief that my life had so little value that I would be doing a favour to die? Later my neighbours explained their turning away. They knew the boy, he was always causing problems in the community. They were sure he was just pulling one over on me and wanted no part of him. The woman in the church were in a meeting in the back room. There were empty fileds between that church and the back lot of the police station. What if I hadn’t answered that cry?

We never know when it will be our presence that will matter in someone’s life. What if I had not been there that day with all the stubborn cussedness that gets me in trouble so often in my life? What if?

To those who read this I would ask the following:

What if moments like these are in our everyday and we just don’t experience them because we let the scripts from our past tell us thingsthat are hearsay not reality? What if we chose to live life with the belief it matters? What if those words you were so ashamed of so didn’t share are the very ones someone needed to hear? What if the difference is right there if we only lift our eyes or open our ears or speak the words feel a prodding for in some still small place in us we have learned to devalue because others have devalued it before? What if we lived like our lives mattered? What if?

Giving up

Say Something”

…..
Say something, I’m giving up on you

And I am feeling so small
It was over my head
I know nothing at all

And I will stumble and fall
I’m still learning to love
Just starting to crawl

Say something, I’m giving up on you
…

(A Great Big World and Christine Aguilera)

Knowing I enjoy the Pentatonix I turn on the YouTube ready for the beauty in their voices. This song plays into my ears and my heart is torn with waves of grief and I remember. I remember a night when I had given up until just one more word was said.

The pen held firmly in my hands I wrote my words, the last I would say, that I loved my children, that I was so sorry I couldn’t be what they needed me to be. Less than a page was all I would leave. I had given up on me. I was going to say goodbye.

It had been over 6 months since I began my fight with suicidal thought, the darkest night of depression. I had tried to hang on, finally taking my month at the mental hospital and following through with weeks of group therapy and one-on-one appointments with my psychiatrist. I had stayed a week with my children at a shelter, always coming back believing that within me I could find what I needed to be the mother, the wife, the friend, the Christian I longed to be but the darkness wasn’t lifting.

The road ahead seemed so long and the well-meaning gift of a book on depression had shown me a way to not be without my action being a cry for help. I could do this and my children were still young enough to not remember (so thought my twisted logic) and my husband could marry again and she would be good enough to give them all what I couldn’t give. She would know how to be the person who others expected me to be. If I was gone, he could try again and everyone would have a happy ending.

I didn’t want to be cruel, I wanted to be there for my children but he had told me he would make sure I looked like an unfit mother if I tried to leave. If he couldn’t have the children, then I wouldn’t have them either. I had failed being able to keep my cool when the things that were said got louder and more hurtful. I had struck out at him to stop them and then he would laugh and stop. I had proved I was bad and he could go back to pretending that he could mold me into what he needed me to be.

There were good moments. Moments of laughter. There were even times I could say I was sorry for something and he would forgive me …. Until I needed to ask him for something, then it would all come back. He was as trapped in the scripts he had been raised to follow as I was by the ones of my past and attempts to talk about what was between us would crumble into a defense of myself against the accusations that it wasn’t an us problem, it was a me problem. But I would end up striking back and so I held myself accountable for my actions and hated myself for my failure to live up to what I believed.

Now meetings were being called on the days he knew I had therapy sessions. I needed to miss again and again. Even when we got support, he would fail to pick up the kids if my session went late and that fell through. Finally, I had to believe I was as well as I could be but my heart was still so torn.

There had been a short time of relief after I returned from the shelter but things were spiraling down to the bottom. Fearing as always that I would become the mother of my childhood example, I could not let things reach that stage and so this night had come.

He was at one more meeting and the kids had been bathed and read to and were safely asleep. I had an hour or two before he came home and knew my children would not wake. And so I began the action that would let me say goodbye to the world. One step by another I moved myself closer to the place where choice would end, where thought would end and I could just go to sleep and not wake up again.

I walked around my home, focus dimming, touching all the things I had tried to do for my family, empty things that could not fill the hole of the pain I felt I was to everyone whose lives I touched. How I had believed I could make it was beyond me in those moments. Now I just felt the grief that I would not be the ones to raise my children. I had once felt so sure that I could do this. I had such dreams of the mother I would be. But I knew I couldn’t be that mother with him and if I tried to leave he had said he would do whatever it took. But the children needed a good mother, maybe if I was gone and he could find the right person, he wouldn’t be so unhappy. Maybe she could keep from striking back and then everything would be okay.

And so I entered my children’s rooms, brushed back their hair and kissed them one last time.

I was close. I could feel it when I reentered the living room. Was there one last thing before I couldn’t remember anymore? My eyes spied the small tape deck sitting on the table. I had bought some tapes the last time I was in the town where I went for treatment. One of them was in the machine and so I flipped the on switch. The voice of Chris Christian filled the room:

“Don’t give up, Don’t give in, Give it all to Him
‘cause he cares so much more than you know.
If you think that the person you want to be is the person you’ll never become
then look how far you’ve come.”

Rage filled me as I slammed the recorder off. No! Not those words! How could God be so cruel as to give me words of hope when I had almost finished my goodbye? I had looked so hard to find a quiet way, a way without chance of failure. With the words of a song, my plan was ruined. I threw the thing I was using across the room sending fragments everywhere. I was shaking at what God had done. Of all the words I had been given words of hope. I cleaned up the mess I had made once I stopped shaking, hid all the evidence knowing that I was at an edge of maybe and went to bed.

“Okay, God,” I challenged, “Either I wake up in the morning or I don’t. It’s up to you.” And  I closed my eyes and went to sleep.

I woke in the morning. It took almost three days to fully feel the fogginess lift and over a week before I told my psych, the first I told of what had happened that night.

_________________________________________________________

A month or so later a song I heard inspired the lyrics of two songs, on singing how Jesus totally gets what we deal with and one offering God this life that for some reason God believed still had value. Having written my songs and feeling my prayers were said, I began to walk toward my room and sleep.

“Aren’t you going to listen?” The words stopped me in the hall as if they had been spoken into the room. Only two other times had I heard a voice that clear.

“What am I supposed to listen to/” I asked this voice of One who I could not see but heard as if he stood in that hall with me.

“You will be as a fruitful field.”

Okay, and what was that supposed to mean?  Being married to a religious man had one perk, there were lots of commentaries in the house. The words were in the King James version, the one I had grown up with but the message given me that day almost 27 years ago became a promise that has walked with me through the years.

I will write it here from the Bible I read it in all those years ago. The servant who planted the field …. The enemy who planted the weeds …. The cry for the right to clean the field …… the admonish to wait and let the harvester who knew the grain make that discernment …. The cry in the car that with all the weeds I saw in my life there would be no room for any good grain …. the inner images of a barren filed with a few spindly stalks …. The gentle reminder that when all this was done there would be wheat in the field ….. the grieving in me that the harvest would be so sparse …..  and now, this voice in the field that led me here:

“till the Spirit is pour upon us from on high,
And the desert becomes a fertile field,
And the fertile field will seem like a forest.
Justice will dwell in the desert
And righteousness in the fertile field
The fruit of righteousness will be peace
The effect of righteousness will be
Quietness and confidence forever.

Isaiah 32:16 & 17

God was not through with me yet.

Don’t Give Up – Chris Christian

Pentatonix cover of “Say Something”

She has Chosen the Better Part

I mentioned lectio divina, about a way of reading scripture where you let God illumine what God wants to say through a verse or even phrase that catches you as you read. I want to share this because of a posted conversation with a writing friend. Melinda, this is shared for you.

July 12, 2010

This next entry is rather uncomfortable to share but need to be to show the progress of spirit. It goes back to the impact that I had from a Madeleine L’Engle book in which by naming someone she had rejected, the girl is able to save her brother’s life. Healing came from acceptance. These images are characterizations of feelings and imagery that I have learned to use when confronted with emotions that I am not able to rationalize away. Perhaps it is the writer in me….

I worked at a time in shelters for children and the girls who would cut themselves to get a numb haze of physical pain to silence their inner pain were called slashers. This part of me that reacts to anger and fear by suggestions in my right arm of physical pain has been named for them, and does not relate to an actual action I have taken.

July 12 ( have just returned home from a week up north where I stayed with a friend and had time with a daughter and her family)

“Home – the part of me that hates being alone is protesting – where the Slasher gives feelings of cutting, this part feels like an inner rampage….. She feels like I would imagine a caged, frightened animal would feel. The Slasher part will allow herself to be held. This part growls at me, accusing me of being her captive, launches herself at the bars. But I AM her captor, maybe not intentionally but I am….

“Lord, I feel like I have to ask you to save me by layers. Here are two pieces of me, one that love is beginning to reach, and one that is so wary of love that I don’t feel like I can touch her at all. She is right though. She is part of the fabrique of me and deserves acceptance if I am to become truly whole. Acknowledging her stops the rampage but she retreats to the far corner muttering all the labels I fear in myself like a litany of condemnation.

“But she does not feel like an alien “other” to be exorcized. This is the part that has been my whipping boy all my life so I could stay whole. I have spent my life writing the memories in a book so I could forget – so I could forget her.

“Lord, she is full of so much poison pain – but she is not poison. Help her, Lord. Help this lonely, hurting part of me that is wary of you because I have used you as an excuse for her being caged.

Lord, each time a part gets assimilated, there is another. God, this part is so cruel and self-defeating. I really need your help with this one.

Luke 10:42b “Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken from her.”

“…I understand Martha. …… The story of the 70 seems to focus on Christ, the Messiah. If Jamie is right, the story of the Samaritan focuses on Christ as the needy.

“So is this the Christ of devotion? – Christ, the light on the tree, Christ , the light of love on his face? This Christ show me the way to reach that rampaging part of myself as he enters her cage, walks toward her but doesn’t reach toward her. Instead, he sits down beside her, wraps his arms around his knees like hers, but relaxed, looks toward her, and is simply quiet.

“There are times the “best” part is quiet listening.

“I ask the slasher if she would be willing to sit with that part. She says she will but only if I take away the bars. I say there are no bars, no locked doors. She asks me to take them away. I react with protest fearing what this part would do to my life if the world saw her.

“The Slasher –I am going to rename her “Mary” – does not let me overlook the reaction of fear to this part being free, but calls me on the inner lie about the cage. I acknowledge it. When I begin to move the walls of bars, the image of Jesus takes the other end and helps me move the wall. The bars are thrown over the edge into a nothingness to be no more.

“The voice of my Mary commands that I finish it. It is time for contemplation now as bars are removed.

“But she does not sit with her in that opened space. She walks her to a door and lets her “out”. I don’t think of her as not being there but now there is only an empty room with three walls. An to this the Lord simply says, “Mary has chosen the better part.”

“The bars are cast into the sea where they are dissipated into the waves and become victory. She is loosed through a door that I had not seen before. On the other side of the door are “people”. She moves into their stream and fades from sight into the crowd.

“There is a dizzying empty, calm feeling in my head. She is gone. Just gone. She is not assimilated. She is released. There are things you hold on to and others you let go.

Consuming darkness

(Please note. This is written in response to a writing prompt for the writing challenge. I would give this a TW.)

Consuming darkness

Black. Inky, cloying nothingness. I reach my hands into the void, unseen extensions of the unseen me. The loneliness is enhanced by the breathing of others. We dare not speak. We dare not ignite the fiery red in the pit below. Each time it rises one other is consumed. It is never the one who spoke. Such kindness would be too merciful.

 I know them all. I KNEW them all. We were comrades in the battle for life beyond the chains of the present regime. Walking down the street with proper down turned faces a whisk of wind would blow something at us, startling us to look up and we would see each other’s eyes. We would see the despair pleading to be heard before careful wariness quickly lowered our heads once more. Had they seen? Had they known our eyes met in that instance?

 For some of us, the gusts of wind themselves became an excuse to look up. Slowly, we began to find each other, souls rebelling at the loneliness, seeking the solace in another’s eyes. Our steps began to change. We walked with the briskness of hope again. We dared stand side by side closer than regulations allowed. We began to take more risks — a nod of recognition, a dropped pen allowing hands to meet as we picked it up together. We were as subtle as we could be knowing that there were others watching, others we didn’t want to see this bloom of together that was slowly trickling across the city.

 Where conversation was allowed, we began to find cadences and phrases interspersed in the acceptable topics, small indistinct changes to those who did not know this changing landscape of gathering. Certain others began passing on set routes, breaking routines as secretly as possible, knowing that should they be called up an explanation must sound mundane in describing this change.

Our first real mistakes were undetected so we became bolder. We found those uninhabited moment on our routes where lips could mold a smiling hello. We did not speak. We knew that everything we said could be heard. We didn’t realize it when the tuneless humming became a part of our unmonitored thinking. Music was awakening in our spirits and would not be silenced. It was those wordless songs that became our undoing.

When familiar faces stopped appearing one by one there was concern and questions in the familiar eyes we met but we couldn’t ask. We could only hope that they had been called to a new place. The disappearances were slow enough to keep us from being alerted to the danger until the day came that I joined the others here in this nothingness, chained to this flattened pinnacle so that I could not even choose the relief of dying. I could only watch while some defiant soul would try to break the silence and then scream as their words caused the death of another.

The breathing in the room was all that could be heard until a simple humming broke the stillness. We understood. As one we joined the song until the room was filled with the fiery light of mercy for all.

I’m Telling On You

I haven’t asked for critique on my work yet and there is a reason. It’s not that I don’t think I need it nor is it because I don’t want it. I just have a child to put to sleep first. I need to wait until she is quiet because she remembers. She remembers and I am afraid.

Grades. The bane of my teacher’s heart. Each year, three times a year I send them home, words and comments needing honesty and encouragement for the gifts of each child. Each time my child awakes reminding me what I don’t need to be told. How I say what I say matters. The honesty and yet mercy in the way I evaluate my students matter. Yet, with all the grace I use I can never know how my words will affect the person who reads them. She quakes remembering what she will not let me forget.

Mr. Walker must have known something was not right as the little girl buried her booklet in the arm wrapped around it to try to hide it from view. Small letter c, small letter c, small letter c, read a question, small letter c, self-check work, finally the stems are added to make the a’s and the b’s and the d’s, over and over, test by test. The little girl tried but the words flashed across the screen disappeared before she could read them. Yet she couldn’t fail. Her grades were all she had to prove her worth with when she went home at night. Her parents believed her report card. It was the one thing that proved she was good.

Why he didn’t confront her earlier never entered the little girl’s mind when the final grade was given. A large red F glared as her from the top of the page. Only then did she learn that she hadn’t hidden anything at all. All the weeks or days of the speed reading program, Mr. Walker knew what she was doing. The little girl’s tears trembled inside her, defiant rage gripped her. Grades were survival. She was afraid.

You would not have known the fear from the outside. When the punishments begin young enough a child doesn’t know that there is anything wrong with them. A child loves her family, needs her family especially when, in grade 4 she is attending her fourth school in four years and living in the eighth house and town in nine years. Her family is the core of her life. The strangers who enter and spend time for a day to teach her she is special will fade into the distance of miles travelled. Her family will be the only truth that follows her in life.

The truth had been something she had lost long ago. Punishment and fault correlated based on accusation not actuality. Her sisters said it was her fault. She was spanked. Her sister cried about a lost toy that was later found in the little girl’s drawer, the sister gloated behind her father’s back as the little girl was spanked. At five, the little girl laughed as the belt struck her and tears rolled down her face. She had already learned her truth about bad. Bad was what somebody else said you were.

Hitting and teasing were norms in the little girl’s life. It is hard to fight back when no one believes what you say. Her sisters decided she had done something, she was threatened, once even laid up on the table, shirt pulled up with a butcher knife held to her belly. If she didn’t confess that she had taken them, they would cut her open. Her little heart clung to her mother as loving when a phone call from work “saved” her that time. Mom had taken the sunflower seeds to work. She hadn’t eaten them after all. What in adult life the sisters would call simple sibling pranks and teasing would leave the girl unstable in a home where truth and goodness could not be achieved because she was not able to get them to believe the words she said.

Only at school was she safe. At school she was smart and capable. She could read and do math and even out jump the boys in high jump. Her actions, concrete and measurable gave her worth. Having that worth was so important that she would do anything to keep it. The stability had already begun to crumble when childhood rivalry had enlisted the competitive spirit of her classmates into a class row that had separated her from her best friend. Now with one red letter, her one safe place to believe in herself was gone.

The little girl could not hold on to the fear and anger inside. Her clothespins which had been being used to create dolls became missiles of hate as “I hate Mr. Walker” were scrawled across them in Black and Red and left where he could see. The same words were written in soap on the bathroom mirrors. The little girl closed inside defiantly refusing to ask him for anything nor to write anything on any of her papers. She sat at her desk through the days closing herself off from those who had once been her friends. She would not even ask to go to the bathroom. Her patterns of defiance escalated in textbook ways. In the crisis of her life, she had nowhere to turn.

Mr. Walker did what he could and the big red F did not find its way to her report card. Telling her parent’s she needed psychiatric help did make it into her parent-teacher conference that term. She knew because her parent’s anger at him for saying such a thing gave the little girl some relief as they sided with her against him in those moments.

She began to turn in her work at school. Life began having a semblance of calm around the parameters of her life. Life went on in what she had come to know as normal at home. At school, the little girl never found her way back to the child she once had known.

Each time I write a grade, it is with a prayer for the child and the family, knowing that what I say can matter. My little girl inside won’t let me forget. Bad is what they say you are.

Sleep little one, I will treat the children with the loving care I wish I could have given to you. I will tell the truth though. If only the truth had been told then …. But no. You have no real understanding of what truth is. I will just rock you to sleep and pray.

Why I Write

The pages held the truth
I could not hold
Moments too painful
To remember and do
Those things I believed
Were mine to do
The words buried
On the page were hidden
By the writer knowing
The day would come
I would need to read
The why that crushed
Belief in the woman I was

I write to remember.

The young woman raged
Against herself
If only the hopes and dreams
Would fade if only
She would stop longing
To do the things
That had always been a part
Of who she was
If only she could be
What she was expected to be
She had to live for her children
The box of youthful writings
Fell victim to her longing to die

I write to be.

Unable to place the mask
Tightly enough on my face
The truth leaked out
In moments of vulnerable
Sharing from others
Struggling to live
With the pain of unacceptance
Of not measuring up to
The expectations of others
Stories shared would
Gather in my brain
Others needing to be heard
But having lost their speech

I write to be speak.

Words spilled like blood
Upon the page
Resonate with others
Letters secret memories
Shared behind the scenes
Confirm I am not alone
The story I write is shared
By some still too fearful
To speak I write
Knowing that many will
Condemn my words
But knowing that others
Would find in them relief

I write to stand beside.

Tears flowing down my face
In the silence of my room
My heart grieves the child
The woman I was
And all I don’t yet
Know how to be
I release my hands to dance
With child’s abandon
On the keys in joyful banter
Words played against words
Rollicking from the soul
That still needs joy
Even as I face the sorrow

I write to laugh.

The hunger to touch others
Rumbles in me
I see the world in pictures
That form in patterns
Upon the page
Beauty feeding my soul
In images of delight
And wonder too great
To hold inside
My words rush out in rivers
Of knowing the depth
Of the spirit within me
And the love I have for the world

I write to live.

Cadet Teaching

By grade 12, I knew I wanted to be a teacher so signed up for the cadet teaching course – one afternoon a week in a grade 2 classroom. For me, this was as close to heaven as I could get at that time. I have forgotten the name of the teacher over the years and can’t name the students in respect to the student’s privacy, but a couple of stories from that year stand out in my mind.

I will call the first boy Mike. Mike refused to do most of his work in class. The teacher was unsure where to go with him since he wouldn’t show any work. One day, as I passed his desk I noticed him drawing a car. The detail and perspective would have done many a junior high student proud. “O, Mike!” I exclaimed. “That is so good. You should take it home and show your parents.”

His flat answer and lifeless eyes raised to look at me still break my heart when I think of them. “Why?” he replied. “They will just throw it away.” To this day, I find a way to hand every picture children give me. I don’t get many Christmas or end of the year gifts from kids because they know these pictures are what I cherish best. Thank you, Mike, for teaching me this. I only hope you found someone who could show you the value in your art.

The second boy I will call Scott. Scott was always losing his temper at school. The kids knew to watch for the tension in his shoulders and hands. He had so little control of his emotions, especially when frustrated with the work he needed to do. When his moods would escalate, you could almost here the catching of breath and feel the lack of air in the room. Action would stop as the kids did what they could to stay out of his attention while the teacher helped him calm down.

One day, in spring, the teacher decided to make use of my presence to take the kids on a walk. The children enjoyed the fresh air and sun after being cooped up in the classroom for so much of the day. The children chattered happily. John even stopped to ask the two elderly ladies who were watering their gardens if they were going to have a water fight. It was a sunny, peaceful change of peace.

That is, it was peaceful until Scott saw a big branch on the grass by the sidewalk. Picking it up, he began swinging it around. All movement stopped as the teacher commanded, “Scott! Put that down!”

Scott looked at the teacher, looked at the branch and began breaking it over his knee into pieces throwing each out into the road. At that point, the teacher and I were just making sure all the kids stayed safe while watching Scott to make sure he wasn’t in danger either.

As the last piece flew out into the road, one of the children let out an audible rush of air. “Whew!” he breathed out. “I thought he was going to hit somebody.”

At that Scott dashed over to the stick closest to the side of the road and picked it up. A small child was riding a tricycle across the road. Scott swung the stick over his head yelling, “Hey, kid! Want me to bash your head in?”

We all gasped as the teacher exclaimed, “Scott!” with all the authority her voice could carry.

Scott’s looked at the teacher, looked at the stick and tossed it back into the street. “Just asking,” he said nonchalantly and got back into line with the other kids.

The teacher had a compassion for Scott that taught me. She understood that he needed to feel a sense of belonging in that class so did not penalize him for what happened, at least not in front of me. Instead, she allowed me to include him in games with the other children. I can still remember the game where Scott came tentatively over to join, feeling concerned because of how often he was not able to understand so many of the rules. The other children in the game didn’t treat him as a pariah or put him down, instead a spirit of camaraderie bloomed as they encouraged him. I watched Scott’s scowl lines smooth out around his mouth as he excitedly played.

Thank you, dear teacher, Scott and the others for teaching me that children can help each other through inclusion. You helped me learn that the answer to anger problems isn’t exclusion or distancing.
Thank you to those children who are now adults in their 40’s. You helped me on the journey toward becoming the teacher I am today.

Dismantling Walls

 

Repurposing
 12 February 2014

Sometimes going forward
means going backward
slowly dismantling the walls
you have built up
memory by memory
hidden in the past

sometimes living in the today
starts with going back
to repurpose the sticks
and stones of your life
from prison walls
into monuments of hope

The image first presented itself in a dream, or better a serious of nights waking at 4:00 in the morning. That became my witching hour, unrest bubbling up from the cauldron within. Each waking met blankness as images of the dreams eluded me. I only knew that there were dreams trying to speak because of the troubled spirit I had on waking that did not directly correlate to anything in the day before.

So I sat in wait hiding behind my spirit trees, watching for glimpses of waking images to help me find out what was going on within.

The night came when I saw her, the little girl back against the wall, defiant fear a neon sign of “Go Away!” flashing in her eyes. I couldn’t have reached her if I tried. A huge wall of debris mounded between us unstable and significant enough to make approach in that moment impossible.

In another dream, I chose to walk toward that wall. The little girl ran to the wall and began throwing things sharp and hard until my dream-self retreated again.

This went on for several nights, each time I tried to approach her she would drive me away. I needed to do something new.

The next night when 4:00 neared and my dream-self entered that dream, she chose a new approach. She had noticed something earlier. With each thing thrown, the wall of debris was shrinking a little bit more and the girl was at the side of the mound instead of back plastered to the wall behind her.

This time, my dream self chose not to duck or retreat. She chose to stand and catch the things that were thrown. Each was an icon of memories, old scripts and events that the little girl had collected to say she was a pariah, a misfit, a leper. She had pushed them into that pile keeping others away that might have added one more word to that pile. In doing so, this hurting inner child had made a space where she could live untouched, a fortress of protection. Having been there so long, she did not recognize it as a prison.

The early morning hour came when my dream-self knew what to do. I think she knew as well, that it would be time before the little girl could be truly reached. So she called up a friend, a character in a story, who she had written as distant from herself in an island outside of this dimension. I didn’t know it, at first as the dream image began, but my dream-self was ready.

This time, as she approached, the little girl began hurling more objects and my dream-self caught them. I didn’t wake though, this time. Instead, my dream-self stopped and looked at what was in her hands. The memory held in the icon flooded into her. It hurt deeply but she paused before jerking me into wakefulness. Was this something that was worth keeping? Was it a wound worth revisiting? With the fluidity of dreams she tossed it aside into a bottomless garbage bin.

The next was hurled, this too went into the bin.

The third had a different appearance and a warmth. Looking closely she saw one of the happy memories that had been indiscrimanantly pushed away to form the mounding façade of protection. This she placed to the other side in the pile of things to keep.

It is then she called out to Shahara, the keeper of the island arising from story. “Shahara! I can’t reach you either. Are you on that side of the wall with her. Can you help her, please? She is so lonely, so lost and I have pushed her away so long. Please, Shahara, help her. The silhouette of my story’s protagonist stood in the new doorway on her side of the wall as I awoke.

There was one more dream in this series of nights. I saw Shahara holding and rocking a baby and I knew the baby was the little girl. She was being given the nurturing that my distancing had kept from her for so long. It began a new leg in the journey of my life, one in which the place of story became the center of a personal mythology teaching me to welcome and love those parts of me that I had shunned for their brokenness. I was learning to love myself in a new way – a way I hoped would someday teach me how to love others in a healthier more accepting way.

morning ghost
15 November 2008

 You haunt me hurling memories
to hide your face I wake
troubled until I remember You
don’t want me to see the pain
You hide I catch each memory
red and sore from too many
years of letting it hurt
I look at it acknowledge
the pain reject
the shame reject the blame
and throw away one more barrier
between You and me I move
one step closer and feel
You quaking step back
give You room
to catch your breath because
I know with each new memory
You hurl at me there is one less
barrier between us and I
am that much closer to
knowing You to set You free
it is too much for me
alone and so I call the One
who teaches me love to stand
with me as I find and free
the part of me holding what You
hold in your little hands curled
protectively in the fortress of
lesser pains that have protected
me from knowing You
from accepting You
for so long.

At your feet

An incident Friday and sharing with a person interested in the creative arts as a part of worship has set my thoughts on a certain path today. Instead of denying it or hiding it, I am going to go with it and share on here.

Here is the post I put on FB yesterday. The heart cry in it is not for me but for all of those like me who have felt chastised instead of supported by people of faith along the way.

“Okay, so I have been dealing with some anxiety lately that is slipping down toward depression. I am working on my job, writing, laughing with friends on here, doing all the things I know from past bouts will help me move forward. The weight of physical symptoms inside don’t seem to listen to all my positive vibes I am trying to surround that place of hurting with and there are days it is beginning to affect my ability to go to work even though I am fine in the class with the kids.

You don’t really trust your physical feelings at times like this so the smart thing to do is go to a doctor. Only when I mention the anxiety to the doctor I see because my own in out of town she asks me questions about my stressors and relationships …. all well and good, but when I begin to tell her the symptoms that I am experiencing, she stops me to give me a lecture on how I would just have the proper “attitude of gratitude” and praise God instead of focusing on what is getting me down I would have all the proper chemicals kicking around in my system and everything would be hunky dorie. Not her exact words but that was the gest of what she had to say.

Thankfully my past experiences have taught me about the laments and the reality that sometimes the end of a cry to God and an acknowledgement of why we can trust God in times like this is not instant praise but the knowledge that praise will come. I told her that and she backed down some.

She asked me what I needed from her. I did not feel safe in telling her any more about what was going on with me. I told her what I knew had helped me as a crutch until I could stabilize and asked for a referral to a person who had been part of my helping team in the past. I didn’t get to talk about this headache that is like a vise around my head at intervals and even caused me to feel dizzy while teaching on Thursday. The tight stomach and rapid fire skin suit of nerve endings are familiar. This is something new. I expect it is probably just a part of the anxiety but it would have been nice to feel I could at least mention it to the doctor to see if it could be something in my sinuses or the like.

I am not going to name the doctor because I am not telling this to put her down. Nor am I wanting sympathy because she made those choices. I have the strength to find other answers. Though shocked, talking about it in a put down way toward her is not helpful. She is just regurgitating something she has been taught.

I just want to say that as the body of Christ we are asked to both rejoice and mourn with each other. It is the natural reaction of the body. The danger of leprosy, from what I can understand, is that it cut off our senses so that parts of the body can get damaged and infected and the person with leprosy can’t feel it.

Have we bought so much into a gospel of praise that we have stopped being a honestly feeling body of believers? How can we become more sensitive to the needs of those parts that are hurting in the church so that we don’t lose parts of what would make us strong if only we had the sense (the spelling is meant to be that way) to develop the strength of those parts at the same time that we are comforts in their pain?”

The Christian thinking of writing about creative arts in worship led me back to paintings that one pastor had the grace to use as part of the worship service there. The one I am going to show you was one he welcomed into the time of lent because it represented the brokenness that was in my life at that time. I will never be able to explain how it felt looking up each service and seeing the image of my brokenness at the foot of the cross. I wrote the story to that writer, but here I am going to share the painting and the poem that it inspired in me today:

When all our masks have broken

We lay them at your feet

When dreams  seem tossed and shattered

We lay them at your feet

 

There is no hopelessness in us

That you won’t understand

You felt the spikes go through your feet

Had nailprints in your hands

 

I come to you with all I am

And lay it at your feet

It is the only place I know

Where hopes and visions meet

 

You know the agony of all

The darkness life can bring

You cried into the heavens

“God, how could you do this thing?’

 

Forsaken by the father,

You felt it in your bones

Those moments when you hung there

On the cross you felt alone

 

Yet you rose victorious

Sit by your father’s side

Having gone through all the things

I try so hard to hide.

 

I fall before you on my knees

Trusting you’ll understand

You feel the nailprints in my soul

Throbbing in your hands

 

Your spike marked feet will walk with me

As I traverse this road

And you will be there with me

Helping with the load

 

Until the light of resurrected

Life blows through my veins

I trust you God, I always will

You’ll help me stand again.

All images in this post are from stages of creating the piece “At his Feet”, L. J. A. December 2011