A year older and I look in the mirror and the lines across my forehead and between my eyes get deeper, the smile lines at the end of my eyes more defined, and everyone's way more excited that I came into the world almost three decades ago than I am, and I'm able to distract myself long enough that it lifts the cloud of melancholia for a few hours before it settles in again.
There are feelings so strong that I feel paralyzed, even if I know they're not completely grounded in reality, that heavy sense of failure, of mediocrity, of trappedness, of being alone and unloved. I know it's not due to a lack of anything. I have everything I need and enough to share, and I lived with six roommates and dated people and felt the same as I do coming home to an empty apartment,looking at other places to live and feeling the economic constraint of underemployment, of wondering if life will always be like this, fighting off the loneliness, despairing over the creative arts in search of catharsis, the endless dark nights of the soul. I've done everything I can, and I don't know what else to do.
Showing posts with label depression. Show all posts
Showing posts with label depression. Show all posts
Friday, November 25, 2011
Sunday, October 16, 2011
it won't begin until you make it end...
As rusty as the city as I call home, as rainy as the water on my windshield, blackclad and bluemooded, thankful for the empathy and the hugs of those in my world who understand who've been there too, yet hoping that the spell of sadness passes soon. So familiar, but it's getting old.
Friday, August 26, 2011
the soul is tired and I want to go home
Surrounded by piles of paper, of misdeeds done and handshakes by men who play dirty and remain in power though dirty tricks and apathy. Rather than the stained glass and soaring spires that visually sooth my aching soul, instead it's clippings and sterile city records, a mounting pile of evidence blatant. Men in suits with big smiles and a way with looking like they care about us.
And you wonder why I've been more surly recently. Both parties steal from the poor to feed the rich who are we kidding, but go on, put your hopes on some mere mortal or another, play your partisan cards, they'll work great at that new casino that'll save the city, those platitudes that will save the country, we're all losers in one way or another.
And you ask what I think not knowing the can of worms you've just opened. You really don't want to know. I don't believe that any of us can save the world, we're unable to save ourselves, we don't want to be saved, and we're fooling ourselves to think we can truly save others.
And you wonder why I've been more surly recently. Both parties steal from the poor to feed the rich who are we kidding, but go on, put your hopes on some mere mortal or another, play your partisan cards, they'll work great at that new casino that'll save the city, those platitudes that will save the country, we're all losers in one way or another.
And you ask what I think not knowing the can of worms you've just opened. You really don't want to know. I don't believe that any of us can save the world, we're unable to save ourselves, we don't want to be saved, and we're fooling ourselves to think we can truly save others.
Monday, March 28, 2011
flood my eyes with light
"What is a poet? An unhappy man who hides deep anguish in his heart, but whose lips are so formed that when the sigh and cry pass through them, it sounds like lovely music.... And people flock around the poet and say: 'Sing again soon' - that is, 'May new sufferings torment your soul but your lips be fashioned as before, for the cry would only frighten us, but the music, that is blissful." - kierkegaard
The trees are still dead, the brown grass flattened and matted like tangled hair by the flooded riverbed, and the cloudless azure sky more suited to a place like Arizona seems like an irony with its clearness. We don't get skies like that here. But there is green coming up through the dead wood and the broken reeds, heart-shaped violet leaves.
"Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature; but he is a thinking reed." - pascal
I walked in the valley alone with God and my questions, drove home listening to Pearl Jam watched the light fade from golden to blue. I am thankful that this sea of emotions, this inarticulate ache, a sense of wonder at the strange beauty of creation even in its least sentimental seasons, a sense of things being so wrong and in need of righting, this cathartic sadness that shocks me out of a complacent existence, has precedence as the agony and ecstasy of the psalms resonates, the despair of human existence in Ecclesiastes, the anger and questioning and wonder of Job, the visions of medieval monastics, and of course, my favorite poet ever.
The dove descending breaks the air
With flame of incandescent terror
Of which the tongues declare
The one discharge from sin and error.
The only hope, or else despair
Lies in the choice of pyre of pyre—
To be redeemed from fire by fire.
Who then devised the torment? Love.
Love is the unfamiliar Name
Behind the hands that wove
The intolerable shirt of flame
Which human power cannot remove.
We only live, only suspire
Consumed by either fire or fireV
What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make and end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from. And every phrase
And sentence that is right (where every word is at home,
Taking its place to support the others,
The word neither diffident nor ostentatious,
An easy commerce of the old and the new,
The common word exact without vulgarity,
The formal word precise but not pedantic,
The complete consort dancing together)
Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning,
Every poem an epitaph. And any action
Is a step to the block, to the fire, down the sea's throat
Or to an illegible stone: and that is where we start.
We die with the dying:
See, they depart, and we go with them.
We are born with the dead:
See, they return, and bring us with them.
The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew-tree
Are of equal duration. A people without history
Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern
Of timeless moments. So, while the light fails
On a winter's afternoon, in a secluded chapel
History is now and England.
With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this
Calling
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always—
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.
The trees are still dead, the brown grass flattened and matted like tangled hair by the flooded riverbed, and the cloudless azure sky more suited to a place like Arizona seems like an irony with its clearness. We don't get skies like that here. But there is green coming up through the dead wood and the broken reeds, heart-shaped violet leaves.
"Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature; but he is a thinking reed." - pascal
I walked in the valley alone with God and my questions, drove home listening to Pearl Jam watched the light fade from golden to blue. I am thankful that this sea of emotions, this inarticulate ache, a sense of wonder at the strange beauty of creation even in its least sentimental seasons, a sense of things being so wrong and in need of righting, this cathartic sadness that shocks me out of a complacent existence, has precedence as the agony and ecstasy of the psalms resonates, the despair of human existence in Ecclesiastes, the anger and questioning and wonder of Job, the visions of medieval monastics, and of course, my favorite poet ever.
The dove descending breaks the air
With flame of incandescent terror
Of which the tongues declare
The one discharge from sin and error.
The only hope, or else despair
Lies in the choice of pyre of pyre—
To be redeemed from fire by fire.
Who then devised the torment? Love.
Love is the unfamiliar Name
Behind the hands that wove
The intolerable shirt of flame
Which human power cannot remove.
We only live, only suspire
Consumed by either fire or fireV
What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make and end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from. And every phrase
And sentence that is right (where every word is at home,
Taking its place to support the others,
The word neither diffident nor ostentatious,
An easy commerce of the old and the new,
The common word exact without vulgarity,
The formal word precise but not pedantic,
The complete consort dancing together)
Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning,
Every poem an epitaph. And any action
Is a step to the block, to the fire, down the sea's throat
Or to an illegible stone: and that is where we start.
We die with the dying:
See, they depart, and we go with them.
We are born with the dead:
See, they return, and bring us with them.
The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew-tree
Are of equal duration. A people without history
Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern
Of timeless moments. So, while the light fails
On a winter's afternoon, in a secluded chapel
History is now and England.
With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this
Calling
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always—
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.
Saturday, March 19, 2011
ennui
A day that started with the yuppie looking at the condo across the street asking me about the hood, let to assorted radio station-ing, hanging out at the West Side Market, coffeeshop and other kinds of slacking of the good kind. And now after all that I have a sore throat (apologies to those with whom I've shared the fruit of the market), I'm out of it and not much fun, with a serious case of the writer's block and a sinkful of dishes needing to be washed, but fatigue makes cowards of us all, so to sleep perchance to dream it is...
Wednesday, March 9, 2011
it's like Ohio, but even moreso...
Last night, over injera and fruity non-alky Lebanese beer, we spread out maps and plotted out train lines and potential destinations in between talking politics and work absurdity. I can't complain about public transit here nearly so much as it costs twice as much out there, but since we both like to walk and are adventurous improvisational souls, I'm sure we'll keep it interesting.
If any of you Boston-ish people know of cheap food and good places to go for two Ohio chicas whose current plans include general turista-ness with potential excursions to Chinatown and Salem, I'd be much obliged.
Being on probation last summer was frustrating as anything because even though I never go anywhere, knowing that if I got caught leaving the state, I'd be
Also, I was alerted to this place which sounds totally amazing on the level of PedroLand. Much of it got burned down, but I totally want a t-shirt with this on there.
From the good people at Coilhouse:
The exploits of George Daynor read like the synopsis of a Coen Brothers flick. As the story goes, Daynor was a former gold prospector who’d lost his fortune in the Wall Street crash of 1929. Hitchhiking through Alaska, he was visited by an angel who told him to make his way to New Jersey without further delay. Divine providence had dictated that Daynor was to wait out the Great Depression there, building a castle with his bare hands.
Daynor had only four dollars in his pocket when he arrived in Vineland, NJ. He used the money to buy three swampy acres of land that had once been a car junkyard. For years he slept in an abandoned car on the mosquito-infested property, living off a steady diet of frogs, fish and squirrels while he built his elaborate eighteen-spired, pastel-hued Palace of Depression out of auto parts and mud. His primary objective? To encourage his downtrodden countrymen to hold onto their hope and stay resourceful, no matter what. Daynor opened his homemade castle to the public on Christmas Day, 1932, free of charge (he started charging an entrance fee after someone made fun of his beard), and proved an enthusiastic, albeit eccentric tour guide...
Daynor held back his wild red hair with bobby pins, wore lipstick and rouge, and enjoyed dressing alternately as a prospector or a Victorian dandy. Legend has it he kept his common-law wife, Florence Daynor, locked up in one of the Palace’s subterranean chambers during visiting hours. He offered his “living brain” to the Smithsonian for experiments (they declined). His Palace of Depression, a.k.a The Strangest House In the World, quickly became a popular tourist destination for folks on their way to Atlantic City.
I have a geographic crush on the state with the most toxic waste dumps in the nation, due to childhood memories of being at the Shore, which had less to do with Snooki and everything to do with spending mornings walking with my mom and watching the sunrise, swimming and building sandcastles, ice cream every night, riding bikes to the library for Nancy Drew novels, and watching the dolphins from the balcony, running down the beach in the darkness with my cousins.
It didn't occur to me that we were looked on with some degree of condescending pity by our hosts, who felt sorry for my mom losing a baby and wanted to give us underprivileged kids a holiday by the sea. My other NJ memories mostly involve driving to Trenton and noticing that if there weren't fields, there were porno stores everywhere and sometimes cars next to us would see our out of state plates and would turn up their car stereos so the subwoofers would make our car shake to see if they could weird out these Ohio crackers.
But anyway, I want to pay a visit to the remains of the Palace of Depression, and was recommended several other sites by sundry people whose suggestions are usually good, as this state also includes Asbury Park, Jay and Silent Bob's Secret Stash and Ocean Grove.
In the meantime, if I don't get out of Ohio this year, I need to make good on my road trip plans with my usual partner in random adventures and get to some weirdness in my own home state like the Prehistoric Village, the fake "Indian Caverns," and Loveland Castle.
If any of you Boston-ish people know of cheap food and good places to go for two Ohio chicas whose current plans include general turista-ness with potential excursions to Chinatown and Salem, I'd be much obliged.
Being on probation last summer was frustrating as anything because even though I never go anywhere, knowing that if I got caught leaving the state, I'd be
Also, I was alerted to this place which sounds totally amazing on the level of PedroLand. Much of it got burned down, but I totally want a t-shirt with this on there.
From the good people at Coilhouse:
The exploits of George Daynor read like the synopsis of a Coen Brothers flick. As the story goes, Daynor was a former gold prospector who’d lost his fortune in the Wall Street crash of 1929. Hitchhiking through Alaska, he was visited by an angel who told him to make his way to New Jersey without further delay. Divine providence had dictated that Daynor was to wait out the Great Depression there, building a castle with his bare hands.
Daynor had only four dollars in his pocket when he arrived in Vineland, NJ. He used the money to buy three swampy acres of land that had once been a car junkyard. For years he slept in an abandoned car on the mosquito-infested property, living off a steady diet of frogs, fish and squirrels while he built his elaborate eighteen-spired, pastel-hued Palace of Depression out of auto parts and mud. His primary objective? To encourage his downtrodden countrymen to hold onto their hope and stay resourceful, no matter what. Daynor opened his homemade castle to the public on Christmas Day, 1932, free of charge (he started charging an entrance fee after someone made fun of his beard), and proved an enthusiastic, albeit eccentric tour guide...
Daynor held back his wild red hair with bobby pins, wore lipstick and rouge, and enjoyed dressing alternately as a prospector or a Victorian dandy. Legend has it he kept his common-law wife, Florence Daynor, locked up in one of the Palace’s subterranean chambers during visiting hours. He offered his “living brain” to the Smithsonian for experiments (they declined). His Palace of Depression, a.k.a The Strangest House In the World, quickly became a popular tourist destination for folks on their way to Atlantic City.
I have a geographic crush on the state with the most toxic waste dumps in the nation, due to childhood memories of being at the Shore, which had less to do with Snooki and everything to do with spending mornings walking with my mom and watching the sunrise, swimming and building sandcastles, ice cream every night, riding bikes to the library for Nancy Drew novels, and watching the dolphins from the balcony, running down the beach in the darkness with my cousins.
It didn't occur to me that we were looked on with some degree of condescending pity by our hosts, who felt sorry for my mom losing a baby and wanted to give us underprivileged kids a holiday by the sea. My other NJ memories mostly involve driving to Trenton and noticing that if there weren't fields, there were porno stores everywhere and sometimes cars next to us would see our out of state plates and would turn up their car stereos so the subwoofers would make our car shake to see if they could weird out these Ohio crackers.
But anyway, I want to pay a visit to the remains of the Palace of Depression, and was recommended several other sites by sundry people whose suggestions are usually good, as this state also includes Asbury Park, Jay and Silent Bob's Secret Stash and Ocean Grove.
In the meantime, if I don't get out of Ohio this year, I need to make good on my road trip plans with my usual partner in random adventures and get to some weirdness in my own home state like the Prehistoric Village, the fake "Indian Caverns," and Loveland Castle.
Tuesday, November 23, 2010
it could always be worse...
Something about the impending winter, the holiday season, and having another birthday depresses the hell out of me every year. It's not because I stress about getting old the way others do but there's this sense of what have I done, what have I lost, I wish I could start over.
I've moved three times in the last year, struggled through the legal system, saw some relationships I valued deeply disintegrate, found out at the dentist that my mouth is all messed with a combination of genetics, not flossing the right way, and the stress... and I guess I'll get through like I always do, but I just get so tired and don't feel like I'm much good for anyone when I don't have it in me to pick up the phone and I come back and just end up sleeping because even though it's beautiful outside, I can't walk down there myself and I don't want to call anyone up because I'm just too out of it.
When I think about vacations and just getting away, it just seems like an illusion because you're still who you are anywhere, and you just have to come back eventually.
It's not surprising that the law of entropy makes a whole lot of sense. Sometimes it just feels like life is all about more or less falling apart but staying together enough to function on a basic level.
And my problems are nothing compared with those of others... I have to keep reminding myself of this because the people who want to compete in the Suffering Olympics are really no fun.
I've moved three times in the last year, struggled through the legal system, saw some relationships I valued deeply disintegrate, found out at the dentist that my mouth is all messed with a combination of genetics, not flossing the right way, and the stress... and I guess I'll get through like I always do, but I just get so tired and don't feel like I'm much good for anyone when I don't have it in me to pick up the phone and I come back and just end up sleeping because even though it's beautiful outside, I can't walk down there myself and I don't want to call anyone up because I'm just too out of it.
When I think about vacations and just getting away, it just seems like an illusion because you're still who you are anywhere, and you just have to come back eventually.
It's not surprising that the law of entropy makes a whole lot of sense. Sometimes it just feels like life is all about more or less falling apart but staying together enough to function on a basic level.
And my problems are nothing compared with those of others... I have to keep reminding myself of this because the people who want to compete in the Suffering Olympics are really no fun.
Wednesday, July 7, 2010
lay my burden down...
Right now life is feeling like a trainwreck and I'm wondering what else will go wrong, considering that the week hasn't even finished yet and already I'm facing some seriously frayed relationships, somewhat serious and frustrating legal troubles (more on that another time), and all the stress has just gotten to me so badly and I've been a strung out wreck of tangled emotions.
All the things I love most being messed with and it's hard as anything, to see dreams constantly deferred to the point that I wonder if anything will change, to find myself trying to get through things I don't understand and never thought I'd deal with, to make sense of the messed-upness of everything, the way that we hurt each other, the way that power is abused, the nastiness of racism and the corruption that is rotting away the city, the way that the world functions regardless of what I do in the face of it.
There were some flashes of hope, with a random phone call from a good friend today who's been through all this and more, a late night pancake session at IHOP with two of my favorite people, and roomie being back home and her awesome self listening to me panic and showing me how she got through.
I keep on living and trying to learn to love and survive even as I just want to give up and check out, even as I know that God carries me even at my most broken and lost.
All the things I love most being messed with and it's hard as anything, to see dreams constantly deferred to the point that I wonder if anything will change, to find myself trying to get through things I don't understand and never thought I'd deal with, to make sense of the messed-upness of everything, the way that we hurt each other, the way that power is abused, the nastiness of racism and the corruption that is rotting away the city, the way that the world functions regardless of what I do in the face of it.
There were some flashes of hope, with a random phone call from a good friend today who's been through all this and more, a late night pancake session at IHOP with two of my favorite people, and roomie being back home and her awesome self listening to me panic and showing me how she got through.
I keep on living and trying to learn to love and survive even as I just want to give up and check out, even as I know that God carries me even at my most broken and lost.
Monday, July 5, 2010
I don't believe in painted roses or bleeding hearts...
I've been moody this weekend and not that much fun, with the heat and disappointment and a good night's sleep eluding me.
my neighbors set off fabulous fireworks. everyone's blowing off some serious pyrotechnics and I walked to the corner where the ice cream stand is and there was a few of us hanging out in front throwing firecrackers, watching the fireworks from downtown coming over the trees and the people on 44th sending up one after another. It was so beautiful out and it made me feel a little less lonely because it sucks watching fireworks by yourself.
And it sounds like heavy rain, thunderstorms, the third world war with the flashing lights and the smell of burnt chemicals and the way that it echoes like it's striking twice. And I think about how these explosions are fun here, but that this is what people fall asleep to every night but it's sounds that could kill you.
I dug out my copy of "The Joshua Tree" for the first time in awhile and wondered why I was listening to all these songs about sad eyes and crooked crosses and how every day the dreamers die.
But that's where I'm at, trying to figure out what to do now that I'm no longer full of youthful idealism yet still want to have a meaningful life, not expecting fulfillment in another person but finding extended periods of solitude unbearable, trying not to think about the future, wondering how to get that sad feeling out of my insides.
and I can't sleep, with all the car stereos and the noise so I'm listening to music and hoping that sleep comes like a drug...
my neighbors set off fabulous fireworks. everyone's blowing off some serious pyrotechnics and I walked to the corner where the ice cream stand is and there was a few of us hanging out in front throwing firecrackers, watching the fireworks from downtown coming over the trees and the people on 44th sending up one after another. It was so beautiful out and it made me feel a little less lonely because it sucks watching fireworks by yourself.
And it sounds like heavy rain, thunderstorms, the third world war with the flashing lights and the smell of burnt chemicals and the way that it echoes like it's striking twice. And I think about how these explosions are fun here, but that this is what people fall asleep to every night but it's sounds that could kill you.
I dug out my copy of "The Joshua Tree" for the first time in awhile and wondered why I was listening to all these songs about sad eyes and crooked crosses and how every day the dreamers die.
But that's where I'm at, trying to figure out what to do now that I'm no longer full of youthful idealism yet still want to have a meaningful life, not expecting fulfillment in another person but finding extended periods of solitude unbearable, trying not to think about the future, wondering how to get that sad feeling out of my insides.
and I can't sleep, with all the car stereos and the noise so I'm listening to music and hoping that sleep comes like a drug...
Monday, May 3, 2010
a father to the fatherless
This weekend started out quiet... catching up on my sleep, bike riding at sunset, house party on the east side, dancing at Native Tongues Night at the b-side with some good people (I don't tend to do the clubby scene but I love me some early 90's hip-hop goodness) and staying out way too late.
And then I get a phone call Sunday morning while I'm at church.
The father of one of the families of refugees I worked with beat up his wife horribly and then committed suicide. Children's Services took the kids and now they'll be in the foster care system, which scares me to think of them being separated and having do deal with a whole new level of stress.
It's been about six months since I quit volunteering and working with the kids on Saturdays and tutoring them three nights a week during the school year. It was an incredible year of my life that opened up a world to me and I learned a lot about a culture very different from my own and hopefully did some good.
But being immersed in their lives and culture also meant that I had gotten in way over my head, found that in typical Western world fashion I'd become someone that enables rather than someone that empowers and life got crazy for me personally and I got burned out.
This news didn't come as a surprise to me because this was one of the families that was struggling the most in so many ways. The kids were having a hard time in school and last summer I had to get a social worker involved last summer because of a slumlord they were renting from. 9 people in the top of a single turned into a double, with a foot of water in the basement that smelled horrible.
I think about this woman with a broken body who's been to hell and back countless times and wondering what will happen to these kids and wishing I could do something that would make everything ok but all I think I'll be able to do is go and visit her at the hospital tonight, try to stumble through my Swahili and just be there. I've been able to find out that she'll survive this, though she isn't speaking at all right now, and that the kids are in Columbus. I hope they're not separated from each other, there's 7 of them aged 3 to about 15.
It seems like we have this skewed way of looking at those who live among us as strangers and refugees, speaking different languages and doing things differently than how we do. Either it's a fear or a distance because they are "other" or some of the more socially conscious can sometimes be guilty of looking on with pity or elevating them to some level of sainthood for being born in the wrong place or the wrong time.
Or we think that the struggle ends when they get here, but here also means unemployment, discrimination, cultural clashes, isolation, and often heavy alcoholism in a profoundly economically depressed city in dangerous neighborhoods where they're especially vulnerable. It's hard to learn a new language when you've never been in school and can't read in your own language.
I was reading through the Psalms last night and marveling at how God cares about those who are strangers, those who are fatherless, those who have lost. I hope that Mari and the kids get a sense of that.
"You hear, O LORD, the desire of the afflicted;
you encourage them, and you listen to their cry,
defending the fatherless and the oppressed,
in order that man, who is of the earth, may terrify no more."
And then I get a phone call Sunday morning while I'm at church.
The father of one of the families of refugees I worked with beat up his wife horribly and then committed suicide. Children's Services took the kids and now they'll be in the foster care system, which scares me to think of them being separated and having do deal with a whole new level of stress.
It's been about six months since I quit volunteering and working with the kids on Saturdays and tutoring them three nights a week during the school year. It was an incredible year of my life that opened up a world to me and I learned a lot about a culture very different from my own and hopefully did some good.
But being immersed in their lives and culture also meant that I had gotten in way over my head, found that in typical Western world fashion I'd become someone that enables rather than someone that empowers and life got crazy for me personally and I got burned out.
This news didn't come as a surprise to me because this was one of the families that was struggling the most in so many ways. The kids were having a hard time in school and last summer I had to get a social worker involved last summer because of a slumlord they were renting from. 9 people in the top of a single turned into a double, with a foot of water in the basement that smelled horrible.
I think about this woman with a broken body who's been to hell and back countless times and wondering what will happen to these kids and wishing I could do something that would make everything ok but all I think I'll be able to do is go and visit her at the hospital tonight, try to stumble through my Swahili and just be there. I've been able to find out that she'll survive this, though she isn't speaking at all right now, and that the kids are in Columbus. I hope they're not separated from each other, there's 7 of them aged 3 to about 15.
 |
It seems like we have this skewed way of looking at those who live among us as strangers and refugees, speaking different languages and doing things differently than how we do. Either it's a fear or a distance because they are "other" or some of the more socially conscious can sometimes be guilty of looking on with pity or elevating them to some level of sainthood for being born in the wrong place or the wrong time.
Or we think that the struggle ends when they get here, but here also means unemployment, discrimination, cultural clashes, isolation, and often heavy alcoholism in a profoundly economically depressed city in dangerous neighborhoods where they're especially vulnerable. It's hard to learn a new language when you've never been in school and can't read in your own language.
I was reading through the Psalms last night and marveling at how God cares about those who are strangers, those who are fatherless, those who have lost. I hope that Mari and the kids get a sense of that.
"You hear, O LORD, the desire of the afflicted;
you encourage them, and you listen to their cry,
defending the fatherless and the oppressed,
in order that man, who is of the earth, may terrify no more."
Monday, April 12, 2010
the words of the prophets
So I spent the last week hovering between total depression and moments of bliss, not for any real good reason except that I'm human and there's constant equal doses of amazing moments and conversely the continual shortcomings.
Some have told me that feelings of melancholy are indicative of spiritual problems, that I need to claim in the name of Jesus that yes I can be happy all the time. Others have let me make excuses for my emotions, disregarding the way that they've maybe not been so fun for the others around me. Some say I'm too busy and others that I need to be doing more. I get to the point where I feel like they're all wrong more or less. there were a lot of chronically depressed people who God spoke to, and if the book of Ecclesiastes and Dylan taught us anything, there is a time and purpose for everything, including sorrow.
I was able to force myself out of the blue funk, and I've always found that venturing to the east side does wonders, with its change of scenery and the chillness of some good people that always make me laugh. I made three sojourns out there in the past 5 days, one for Apples to Apples at a friend of a friend's apartment, Friday night cups of tea and scrabble at Algebra
where we were immensely amused by the sketchbooks in the back:
"
followed by pizza and gelato and then late night donut shop coffee-drinking, and then yesterday at Jerusha's apartment that was spontaneous and good times, discussions on theology, the history of India, eastern religion made palatable for the west...
Because as bad as things get in this city, there's enough to keep me here and keep me hopeful.
![](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhg7_1TqdA7UevJEBjcZ5Mh8r933gOsaIfgEGaEle07DELV-8wnhbY-lAcUIzMjrOvD2X0niW_OeOqNXFjUVY_LYzCRv0yBS8ys_rDrMwARdPxMl4MRwnU8k_5pO1VFTkJ_gPtk3mif5UuH/s576/IMG_1109.JPG"/)
Some have told me that feelings of melancholy are indicative of spiritual problems, that I need to claim in the name of Jesus that yes I can be happy all the time. Others have let me make excuses for my emotions, disregarding the way that they've maybe not been so fun for the others around me. Some say I'm too busy and others that I need to be doing more. I get to the point where I feel like they're all wrong more or less. there were a lot of chronically depressed people who God spoke to, and if the book of Ecclesiastes and Dylan taught us anything, there is a time and purpose for everything, including sorrow.
I was able to force myself out of the blue funk, and I've always found that venturing to the east side does wonders, with its change of scenery and the chillness of some good people that always make me laugh. I made three sojourns out there in the past 5 days, one for Apples to Apples at a friend of a friend's apartment, Friday night cups of tea and scrabble at Algebra
where we were immensely amused by the sketchbooks in the back:
" |
followed by pizza and gelato and then late night donut shop coffee-drinking, and then yesterday at Jerusha's apartment that was spontaneous and good times, discussions on theology, the history of India, eastern religion made palatable for the west...
Because as bad as things get in this city, there's enough to keep me here and keep me hopeful.
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