The Elders

Hope for the world.

http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/EXERES/59C0C017-4A63-4F97-9D91-D1A336A2B83A.htm

divisadero

Michael Ondaatje has a new novel out, which I discovered by chance through Wikipedia yesterday at work. It must have been orchestrated by the stars because this novel is really brand new (as in The Stranger reviewed it this week). My heart is pounding, and this morning I am craving and savoring the possibility of buying this book and losing myself in it. It's lust in the truest sense: is that wrong? Possibly.

July

I feel restless – alert when I need to be tired and tired when I need to be alert. I am ready to go to bed at 7:30 only to feel wide awake at 10. I wake up at 5:30 clear-headed and by 7:00 AM I’m stumbling through the day. I can hardly drink coffee.

I spent the last two weekends at home and just felt weary but also pleasantly surprised by an ache in my side. Gazing at the great arched backs of gentle warrior mountains, I no longer felt tied to the sweet air and the blistering sun. I felt ready to leave and finally to say: this is not my home and this is not my family. This is something else, once removed.

My family is growing from my limbs, from the soft tissue of my side, from somewhere deep in my heart – I think. Love, now, is thicker than skin. Even if we decided we didn’t want it, it would still choose us. Love is like breath. It slides between our angry gazes and our sharp words and keeps us close.

I like you close. Sometimes you are the only person in the world that I can tolerate. The only person who keeps me sane or keeps me calm. And sometimes you are the one I cannot tolerate, the one who makes me crazy, makes me angry. But that’s ok. I still want you near

christian sex cult

As a former member of the Christian Sex Cult, I highly recommend reading and reflecting on this article: http://www.theotherjournal.com/article.php?id=226.

Leonard Cohen

Leonard Cohen seems like a good soundtrack for today. It is rainy and sad in Seattle, and yet, I'm murmuring still...

If it be your will
if there is a choice
let the rivers fill
let the hills rejoice
Let your mercy spill
On all these burning hearts in hell,
if it be your will
to make us well.

In times like these, all we can do is ask for mercy to draw us close and bind us tight so that we can stand - somehow - in these rags of light.



I recommend Leonard Cohen's Famous Blue Raincoat and, of course, If It Be Your Will - haunting, beautiful, rich.

empty

As we celebrate comings and goings, death finds us in a courageous dance like embers in a subsiding flame suddenly breathed to life. I want to dance. I don’t want to miss this. Yet, there is a sudden sense that the stage is shifting beneath my feet until almost unrecognizable. I never knew this could be so lonely.

In six weeks I will be married. At the moment, though, the more monumental shift seems to be that in six weeks I’ll be moving. Marriage feels natural. Moving feels terrifying – like a violent birthing – and yet it is also exciting as I know that my move into the unknown is preceded and motivated out of love, faith, hope and joy.

Perhaps I am less terrified as I am sad. It hurts to leave what is known, and yet rapidly feels foreign and fading: the people, the places, the tall mountains and dark soil. It will never be the same again, and the call – always – is to keep moving, further up and further in, to travel deeper and wider than I ever thought possible. But how this transience aches. Nothing lasts forever.

Still, I have to get on with the business of life. It is heart wrenching work: surrendering to this ebb and flow.